IV
StaccatoHin ist hin! Verloren ist verloren.
Staccato
Hin ist hin! Verloren ist verloren.
When Doctor Hermann Bruckner was suddenly called from the security of his civil practice to take charge of a field-hospital, so great was the joy of his secret heart that even his wife became aware of it, and in her rustiest and most contentious tone asked him what on earth he was so pleased about, he was going out to the "olly" front where he was certain to be either killed or mutilated, and walking as if on air at the idea of getting there!
Skilful in diagnosis, resourceful in treatment, compassionate concerning the imponderable ailments of his patients as well as those visible, he had, it is true, bestowed a brief anxiety on certain of them left to the care of the diminishing number of proportionately overworked physicians in Vienna; but for himself.... Home where his heart was not, where Mizzi nagged and scolded, was icily disdainful or loudly reproachful, had long been a place in which he was desperately uncomfortable.
The day he left for the front his aunt Ilde had come in from Baden to say goodbye to this much-loved, and as she knew, much-tried nephew. Looking out of the window she had seen him settle back into his seat in the motor, laughing in a gay, new way with the colleagues beside him as he opened his cigarette case.
Hermann had indeed, been delivered by the war from something from which he had thought never to escape. For years, almost his only happy hours had been spent in his office, or hurrying about on his sick calls. He had a particular and personal regard for each patient, and the professional affection they awakened in him had a magnetic, communicable warmth, even the uninteresting old women, the chronic cases, received impartially, glowingly their share. His bedside manners were truly consoling and his warm handclasp, his reassuring pat on the shoulder made a visit to his office something to look forward to. In fact just seeing Doctor Bruckner made his patients feel that with his help they were not in any immediate danger of leaving this vale of tears for a world which, though they had always been assured was a better one, they had a singular distaste to entering. And then his gentle way with suffering children. Doctor Hermann Bruckner, specialist for women and children, was born to do just what he was doing.
But when he got home that flowing, busy life of his would suddenly stop, turn back chokingly upon itself, obstructing his every thought and feeling; for though Mizzi was unspeakably bored by him, she couldn't let him alone. The very sight of his pleasant face, the easy way he had of letting his six feet settle into an armchair, the slow smoking of his Trabuco, in some extraordinary, always unexpected way, would give rise to reproaches; never a moment when he could sit at ease after a hard day's work and talk about pleasant things, little, unimportant things. He never could tell just what would unbind Mizzi's tongue or uncork her temper. He made an easy living and they could have had many pleasures, but Mizzi was always wanting the one thing that the hour had not brought. It was considered by the family that Hermann had a hard time of it, that it was unfortunate that Mizzi was as she was, and Hermann, for reasons in the beginning not at all related to his own being, was now generally called by his relations "poor Manny."
They didn't realize any of them, that Mizzi was a woman of great natural energy which had no outlet, and that that was one of the reasons why the small supply of the milk of human kindness with which her Maker had provided her, had early soured. She got quite stout, but in her smart Austrian way, and each year became more easily annoyed and controlled her irritation less. Even the war which opened out activities to so many women had helped Mizzi not at all. She hated misery, disorder in any form and the sight of blood made her sick. She was inexpressibly bored by the whole thing and always spoke of it as "dumm."
When the War claimed Doctor Bruckner he was a very tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested man. His mobile, smiling face was ennobled by his prominent, but finely-formed nose and his very black beard and moustache gave his whole person a last significant accent. When the War had no further use for him and passed him into the still more pitiless arms of the Peace, he was broken, disabled, derelict, meaningless even. He reminded himself of a train wreck he had seen near Lodz in the beginning, the telescoped cars, the messy, shapeless débris.... That last month at Gorizia a bomb had fallen into his field-hospital. It had solved effectually the problems of his wounded, but it had increased his own. His right arm which had been shattered and hurriedly attended to, now hung nerveless in his sleeve. Mizzi's heart and temper had been briefly softened at the sight of his misfortunes; they were so evidently complete. His helplessness, however, soon induced a new note in her voice; one of condescension and later of hard, unveiled impatience.
Finally neurasthenia, on the track of so many, claimed him for its own. He developed a bad case of agoraphobia—could scarcely ever go through open spaces without a discomfort that amounted at times to agony, and Vienna seemed full of wide, open places. He would creep along walls, close to houses and doors, but when it came to crossing the street, unless, indeed, it were full of vehicles his eyes would sink and darken, his nostrils get blue and pinched. It was but one of various things,—that intolerably stupid going back and touching objects a second even a third time on his bad days, that continual putting on and taking off his coat when he was dressing, sometimes he was hours getting into his clothes, and other equally asinine matters. He still went to his office, across the hall,—but a one-armed, neurasthenic doctor! Half the patients who came needed something done that could only be done with two hands. His clientèle dwindled till mostly the poor alone came. To them he was an angel of mercy. But they made another complication. Mizzie hated the poor in any form, even the new poor, who had once been rich and whom she had envied in the old days, and when the quite thin pity engendered by his futile return had evaporated, she was constantly reproaching him for having a clientèle to whom he couldn't or wouldn't send bills. Hermann's life became a new kind of hell from which there seemed to be no more escape than from the final place of punishment. But for all Mizzi's unpleasant conjugal traits she was, as we have indicated, a woman of ability. She stepped out, on his return, when her practical sense showed her that the family fortunes in Hermann's hand would inevitably go from bad to worse, to retrieve them; and she did.
She boldly opened a lingerie shop, and with her good taste, her industry, her heartlessness and her voice soft as honey to customers, she soon began to do quite well. Fanny had advanced the necessary loan and sent her the first customers who brought others in their train. She developed an unsuspected talent for selling. Naturally impatient she was accommodating to the last degree in her shop. She took back things that had been paid for and returned the money with a smile. She exchanged things, she adjusted things. She could always be counted on to have extra sizes for the dark, stout, often bearded ladies who patronized her in increasing numbers. They generally had the most elemental of underwear, thick, machine-made garments, with machine-made lace and terrible pink bows; some had none at all.
Mizzi initiated them into the pleasant mysteries of transparent "dessous," real lace-trimmed and beribboned in delicate shades. And they had money. "Jesus, Marie, Joseph!" Mizzi would often exclaim, "what money! Great wads of it!"
Mizzi had a way of loosening their thick, high corsets and pulling them down, thereby dropping those shelves of flesh from under their chins, and with her cunningly-made brassières, those famous "Bustenhalter" that reduced the mountains of fat, or at least distributed them towards the back where the owners themselves couldn't see them, she was especially successful. "Taktvoll kaschieren," tactfully conceal, was what she modestly claimed to do with superfluous fat. Being inclined to embonpoint herself, fostered by her love of the truly tempting sweet dishes of her native land, yet having that smart, pleasing figure, she could say confidently to the stoutest:
"I'm a good deal thicker than you are, and look at me!"
They looked at Mizzi in her impeccable loose black dress over her snugly-worn corset and were both delighted and convinced. Mizzi's business was inevitably destined to go from good to still better, just as Hermann's was dwindling to those so begrudged office hours for the very poor, now his only treasure.... His aunt Ilde, thought secretly that Hermann must be greatly loved by his Creator to have been found worthy of so many misfortunes.... He only occasionally took money for his services and except for a few crowns spent in a certain café sitting before his beer or his coffee, reading the newspaper, talking to a chance acquaintance, or oftener just thinking, thinking, he turned what little he did make back again, a pitiful drop, into the river of black and fatal misery that flowed through his office.
Mizzi had something quite ruthless about her. Openly and cordially disliking the poor in general and poor relatives in particular, the last thing she would have thought of was having one of these latter come to her regularly for a meal. But when Fanny sent old Maria to ask if she could have Tante Ilde for dinner on Wednesday, or to choose some other day if that wasn't convenient, though she had thought it a monstrous nuisance, that day being no more convenient than any other of the days of the week, she had said "Yes" in a voice gone quite white from lack of enthusiasm. But, Fanny,—she couldn't afford to offend Fanny....
The establishment once known as "Hermann's" was now known as "Mizzi's." She had suggested his giving up his office and renting out the rooms to Americans who would pay in dollars. They could make a "heathen money" that way. But so strange, so terrifying was the look that had come into his face that Mizzi for once had quailed before it. She hadn't felt safe and anyway Fanny probably wouldn't have stood for it.
Her dream was to have a smart shop at Carlsbad. She had awakened to a brief political interest when she found that almost overnight the Czechs had become, unaccountably, the darlings of those against whom they had so recently fought, and later she discovered that Carlsbad was filled with victorious foreigners who turned their gold joyfully into Czechish crowns and she was forever comparing the rising Czech currency with the descending Austrian, and was visibly impatient at the senseless fact that the war had left her, a perfectly good Czecho-Slovak, high and dry in Vienna as the wife of a crippled Austrian. There wasn't any sense in anything, and Mizzi vented mercilessly her dissatisfaction on Hermann.
She was always thinking to herself and often proclaiming openly that Hermann was "dumm, but dumm," as little of a "Nutznieser" as anyone ever had the bad luck to be married to. With even the slightest sense of values, he ought to have got something out of the war. Privately Mizzi adored profiteers. But Hermann wasn't made that way.
In the end, he got tired of hearing what his father-in-law would have done in this, that or the other case. That canny Czech, Ottokar Maschka, had, unfortunately for Mizzi, died just as he was about to gather in the fruits of his labors, and when Mizzi married the promising young Viennese doctor the only visible goods she brought with her was the furniture with which they furnished their home; large, solid, comfortable pieces of mahogany and maple, and a lot of linen. But all that Mizzi had long since changed. Mizzi was a forward looker and liked to keep up with, when she couldn't run ahead of, the styles. She had a flair about novelties that was to stand her in good stead.
Hermann had ineffectually protested when she got rid, bit by bit, of the furnishings of the parental house. The only good thing about it all was that it kept her busy. But when he found himself sleeping in a narrow grey bed with conventionalized lotus flowers in low relief, one at the head and one at the foot, he felt himself completely and forever a stranger in that house. Then, too, the new chairs were extraordinarily uncomfortable, the tables small, while the pale mauve upholstery gave him a continual sense of being in a warehouse glancing over things he had no intention of buying....
The small shop in the Plankengasse, with the tiniest but smartest of show windows, was near enough the thoroughfares to be accessible and not as expensive as the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse or the Kohlmarkt. Little by little Mizzi was wriggling her way into that world of the new dispensation, peopled by the acquisitive wives, daughters, and "friends" of profiteers,—that full, loud, clanking, overfed world, that world of people mad to possess at last what "the others" had so long possessed. Theirs was the world of plenty. The promised land indeed. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her activities had full scope. She had no heart to bleed over the miseries of the starving city and she felt herself getting a really firm foothold in that "Schieber" world of every tradesman's desire. That "First Society" in whose uprisings and outgoings she had once delighted, in the reflection of whose splendors she, with the rest of the worthy burghers of Vienna, had once proudly shone, was gone, its glory the bare shadow of a shade. For thin, ruined countesses, for economical princesses Mizzi had no use, only in as much as she could say to the wife of one of the new lords of creation:
"That's the very dressing gown the poor Countess Tollenberg was so enchanted with, but not a kreutzer to bless herself with, only such taste! It made me sad not to let her have it, but now I'm consoled, for you, dear, gracious lady, it's just the thing." And the "dear, gracious lady" would fall for it with a golden crash.
Yes, Mizzi was doing well and intended to do better. When she wasn't selling, she was buying, like others in Vienna, who had little or much cash in their pockets, trying to imprison the vanishing value of money into objects that would remain visible, buying anything in fact that wouldn't melt before their eyes. They called all this "Sachwerthe," real value. For the antics of money were extraordinary, no one realized that better than Mizzi. No matter how carefully you guarded it, the next day it was less, was gone. You couldn't store it up any more than you could daylight.
As Tante Ilde that Wednesday noon was about to cross the Revolutionsplatz, once the Mozartplatz, overlooked by the Jockey Club, the Archduke Friedrich's Palace, the Opera and Sacher's Hotel, (the last two alone continuing to fulfill their ancient uses) she caught sight of a tall, familiar form hesitating by a lamp post. It was her nephew Hermann, evidently about to cross the street. He stood so long by the post that she easily caught up with him.
"Manny!" she cried and touched him on the arm, but he turned towards her a face so strange that she was suddenly very frightened. Great beads of perspiration stood on his brow, about his mouth; his eyes were sunken, his nostrils blue and pinched.
"Auntie dear, you've come at the right moment. I can't," he hesitated, a look of agony and shame on his face, "get across alone. Give me your arm. I was waiting till some wagons came along. It's easier then. Don't say anything about it to Mizzi. She doesn't understand," he ended entreatingly. Bending, he passed his hand through her arm and with a tightening of his body, slowly crossed the street, then kept close by the houses, as far away from the curb as possible.
"You see," he said with difficulty, "I'm quite done for," tears stood in his dark, kind eyes. "And I'm not going to die either," he added, "I've seen so many others go just where I'm going."
"Manny, Manny, you'll get better. You must get better. Think of all the good you do!" his aunt cried at last out of her grief for him. She hadn't been able to say a word at first, only pressed more closely against his side.
"All the good I do!" he laughed bitterly and stood quite still in the street and couldn't seem to stop laughing.
What was happening to Manny, dear, kind, loving Manny? He made her even sadder than Kaethe. Where could he get help? Perhaps Fanny ... they'd been such a loving brother and sister. Perhaps if he could take a trip, somewhere, anywhere....
They were proceeding at a snail's pace. Hermann's step had no life in it. Frau Stacher began to be afraid they would be late and tried to hurry him a little, but he continued to move mechanically with that sort of heavy dip, and didn't seem to notice her hurry.
As they reached the house he pointed to his name in black letters on the white porcelain sign, and then looked at her with a trembling of the lips just as he used to do when he was a little boy and had some childish grief.
"When I remember all the happy years ... why, I thought I was going to heal the world," he said slowly, "and now"—then he added, suddenly anxious too, "I hope we're not late."
Tante Ilde gladly quickened her step and they almost ran in at the doorway. It would be a calamity to be late. Mizzi could generate about her a thick, cold, opaque atmosphere when she was displeased that could take away the appetite or impede the digestion of a starving person. They both knew that it wouldn't at all do to be late, and in spite of age and disabilities they made quite a dash up the stairs.
Mizzi kept a servant and kept her busy. No "Faulenzers" in her house. Gretl instantly opened the door, then quickly resumed her occupation of setting the table, putting a pleasant, soft-looking little bread at each place.
Mizzi, sitting up very straight in a mauve arm chair, was measuring with a tape measure lengths of pale shining French ribbons, billowing over a little grey table. She was a woman in the early thirties, with dark eyes inclining to opacity, abundant dark hair and an agreeable, smooth, rather bright complexion, pleasant enough to look at, though her features were negligible. She held herself very erect, even as she sat there was no lolling or relaxing, and when she stood that full, smart figure of hers was impressive, even commanding. Pauli who detested her, said she ought to have been a midwife, though perhaps in that he was unjust to the profession; but it was undeniable that Mizzi had an eye that in a few years would, as he had further remarked, have no more expression than a hard boiled egg confronted with arriving mortality.
The little table was drawn up by the window with its lavender hangings striped yellow by light and years, and held back by faded ribbons. It was all quite different from the smart freshness of the shop where was Mizzi's heart. Between the windows was a picture of the Prague Gate and in rummaging about she had unearthed, for less than a song, a fine old engraving of Wallenstein conspiring at Pilsen. Where could one find a more loyal Czecho-Slovak than Mizzi Bruckner, bound hand and foot to Austria?—Till she got to that little shop in Carlsbad, over how many dead bodies she cared not—that little shop especially designed for easing foreigners of their golden loads, that she was unswervingly headed towards and would inevitably reach.
As they entered aunt and nephew gave each other an involuntary look of relief. They had made it.
"Well, Tante Ilde, how are you?" Mizzi asked amiably enough as she looked up, but there was something steely in her tone. She had no objection to Tante Ilde, except that Tante Ilde was so definitely, and it was easy to prophesy, permanently in the class of poor relations, and to such a certain tone came spontaneously to her voice. No trace of the sugary accents that she used in speaking to the large, dark women who made commerce take its only steps in the paralyzed city. She was polite, but she was cold beyond the power of any thermometer to register. Of her husband, Mizzi took not the slightest notice.
Frau Stacher felt something shrink and shrivel in her. A shameful consciousness of being very poor, of being very old, of being very useless tinted her pale cheeks.
She hadn't wanted to come to Mizzi's. She had known that she would feel just that way if she did. They all knew about Mizzi, hard as a rock, somebody for the old, the feeble, the dependent to steer clear of.
Then a thick, smoking lentil soup was put on the table. Some pleasing suggestion of having been cooked with a ham-bone came from it. In a quite definite way it changed the atmosphere. Good food in Vienna that winter could work miracles. Natural and unnatural antipathies would melt as dew before the morning sun when enemies found themselves seated together at a full table.
Mizzi herself underwent a subtle change and she was nearly smiling as they sat down. Hermann was still pale, but the blue look had gone from his nostrils, the sweat about his brow and mouth had dried. Tante Ilde was permeated by the delightful sensations of the hungry person about to be filled.... The nose, the eyes, then the first mouthful....
The soup quite fulfilled the expectations awakened by its odor. Mizzi never had materials wasted through poor cooking in her house. She always got the best available and this last maid had a light hand. Mizzi had turned one girl after another away till she got the pearl for which she was looking.
The repast, as far as her own feelings went, proved a surprise to Mizzi, though she didn't analyze the increasingly pleasant sensation that animated her as the conversation got easier and easier. Mizzi didn't for an instant, suspect that that despised, poor relation was distilling about her an odor suaver than that of the lentil soup, even with its suggestion of ham-bone.
By the time the herrings, and the potatoes boiled in their skins, and actually served with butter were put on, Mizzi was in full flood of conversation; her tongue was hung easily anyway, quite in the middle. During the soup, she had been distinctly grand with Tante Ilde, the immensely superior lady bountiful dispensing mercies, but Tante Ilde was so greatly and so genuinely interested in the shop and asked such tactful questions, just the sort Mizzi was delighted to answer, that things got pleasanter and pleasanter. She showed signs of irritation, howeven when Hermann, not too successfully, tried with his left hand to separate the meat of his herring from its backbone, and gave an impatient click of her tongue and cried harshly, "give it here." But that passed and when the Apfelstrudel was put on, she fell to telling amusing stories of the unbelievable ways of the various stupid geese, those wives of profiteers who had, all the same, lead her, Mizzi, out of the captivity of hunger and cold. She made fun of their horrible underclothes and told how she changed all that, opening their eyes to a lot of other things to which they'd evidently been born blind. Even Hermann got less pale and from time to time looked affectionately across at his aunt. When they were having their coffee, just as they used to in the good old days, real mocha, that one of those very "Schieberinnen" had given her, Mizzi even said quite gently to Hermann: "Aren't you going to smoke?" Hermann was surprised and grateful beyond measure. Very little would once have made so soft-hearted a man as Hermann unduly and permanently grateful. Mizzi, though she hadn't the slightest idea of it, was continuously responding to the pleasant harmonies struck from the gentle being of her poor old aunt by marriage, and when they had drunk the last drop of coffee and were still enjoying the pleasant memories of the Apfelstrudel, she found herself saying, somewhat to her own surprise:
"Tante Ilde, come with me, I want to show you the shop. It's time for me to get back. The girls don't take a stitch while I'm away!"
Then she stepped into the kitchen to put on a plate, for Gretl's dinner, a head of one of the herrings and two potatoes (the others were to be saved for salad that evening), and to the amazement of Gretl, she added a bit of the Strudel, casting at the same time an appraising eye over what was left and which she certainly expected to find intact on her return.
Tante Ilde longed to stay with Hermann whose plight was more and more engaging her thought and sympathy. She had had time while Mizzi was in the kitchen to press his hand lovingly and to tell him she was going to Kaethe's tomorrow, and to try to get there too, Kaethe was worrying about Carli. He had answered listlessly,
"Yes, if I have a fairly decent day. You've seen how hard it is for me to get about."
Instinctively she had not mentioned the Eberhardts in Mizzi's presence. It would have darkened her brow and salted unduly the repast. People that couldn't get a living somehow! Mizzi had no use at all for them. In some mysterious, but certain way, it was their own fault. Even the Peace was no excuse in Mizzi's eyes.
When she came back from the kitchen saying briskly, and they realized, without appeal:
"Well, are you ready, Tante Ilde?" Frau Stacher hastily put on her coat, that is as hastily as possible. It had tight sleeves and they always stuck on the little white shawl she wore underneath for warmth. Mizzi came to the rescue, gave it a poke down the back, a pull about the shoulders and crossed it over the frail chest with a final energetic punch that left Frau Stacher breathless. Then she slipped easily into her own ample coat and turned up its large beaver collar. But after all Mizzi pleased, Mizzi on the road to success, was not so terrifying. She was safely diverted out of family discontent by the pleasantly exciting difficulties and triumphs of her business. Then, too, those thin, pale girls who sat by the window at the back of the shop, and worked without looking up when Mizzi was there, were continual escape-valves.
Even little Tilly with fingers like a fairy, got her share. No one could tie a bow like Tilly, not even Mizzi herself, and then those diaphanous garments that she turned out, delicate bits of nothing, the very stitches themselves were like trimming. Mizzi knew first class work when she saw it, and she further saw that she got the greatest amount possible done in the day.
Tilly's mother was dying in a back room, reached by a third stairway in the court of an old house, and Tilly never answered Mizzi back, was never "fresh" and it was quite evident that she never dreamed of giving notice but only of giving satisfaction.
In face of Mizzi's pleasant, flowing briskness that could, however, so easily curdle into thick displeasure, Tante Ilde, though she longed to stay, could but say goodbye to Hermann, with a secret pressure of his hand. For a moment she felt the encircling warmth of his great chest and shoulders as he bent down to kiss her. Then he sank heavily back into his chair. She turned at the door for a last sight of him, but already he was plunged in his thoughts and did not look up again. She could have wept for Hermann then and there.
As she followed Mizzi down the stairs, they met two young-old women with pale, head-heavy babies in their arms.
"Manny's patients," said Mizzi who was really a terrible woman, an abysmal contempt in her voice, "I don't know how I put up with it."
"Manny is very ill," answered Tante Ilde gently.
"Nerves," returned Mizzi promptly, finally. "We'd starve if I hadn't started in."
"You are a wonder," said Tante Ilde, and quite honestly she thought it was little short of a miracle, how Mizzi in that dreadful city had not only wooed but won fortune.
Of course, they all knew that Fanny had started her, but even so she was a wonder, making money that way. She would survive. It was beings like Hermann who went under,—gentle, loving, wise, once-strong Hermann.
Her thoughts clung tenaciously to Hermann, slumped down into his chair, Hermann who hadn't looked back at her. She couldn't know that he had, for quite a while, been conscious of her loving touch on his arm, and that he was thinking, "sometime I'll tell Tante Ilde about Marie." Yes, while he was still able to talk clearly of precious things. It was one of his worst days. Often on such days he didn't keep his office hours ... the uselessness of the terrible struggle. In that city of misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. On other days, difficult as it was to get over the open places, he would leave the house quite early in the morning, trying to shake off its devitalizing atmosphere. There was a café off the Opernring, he didn't have to cross the Ring itself to get to it, where they knew him and his little ways; sometimes he would sit for hours at a certain table watching the coming and going.
But that morning he'd got there too early; it was still deserted and he had been witness to certain dismal preparations for the day. A pale woman in damp, thin garments was washing up the floor, ends of burnt-out matches and cigarettes were piled in a corner, in a little heap on a chair were a few carefully collected cigar ends. The pikkolo under the emphatic direction of a waiter was brushing off the billiard table, the Tarok games were being laid out, the newspapers put into their holders. The pikkolo, who put one in upside down, had forthwith received a box on the ear from the waiter, supplemented by a kick on that part of his undersized person where, however, it would be least injurious; but his reaction was not against the donor of these morning favors, but rather induced the consoling thought that if he ever got to be head-waiter he would return it with interest to whatever pikkolo was then about.
The arrival, a bit late, of the buffet Fräulein, with her blond hair too tightly crimped, too thickly puffed, started things at a more lively gait. A pale lavender tint lay over her face—the hair bleach, the rice powder, the long hours in the crowded room. Energetically she proceeded to count out a few lumps of sugar, unlocked noisily from behind the counter; then she looked scrutinizingly at the liqueur and fruit-juice bottles, holding them up to the light, her pale eye appraising the exact condition of their contents.
One by one frequenters of the café began to come in, dissipating more and more the forlornness of the place, wiping their feet on the wire mat, putting their bulging umbrellas into the stand, hanging up their dull hats, sitting down in their overcoats, taking packages of paper money from their pockets and putting them on the table just as if it weren't money. Finally the café was quite full and Hermann sitting before his empty cup, smoking and watching apathetically the familiar sights, became conscious of the passage of time. He remembered that Tante Ilde was coming to dinner that day and he wondered what Fanny could have said to make the arrangement possible, it was so unlike Mizzi. Then he looked at his watch and saw with immense relief that he still had a little time, ... a calamity to be even that short distance from home, ... he hoped he'd get back, ... sometime probably he wouldn't. He had been thinking all that morning with an obsessing, nightmarish horror of something that had happened to him in his own office the day before.... Because a pale, uncertain-yeared woman had had nose-bleed, he had been overcome by a horrible nausea, an intolerable, hitherto unknown feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why, he had seen blood, felt blood, smelt blood, worked swiftly, calmly in blood against time and death—and now a pale woman with a nose-bleed.... He'd had to go into the inner office.... It was unbelievable that justthatcould happen to him. Then after she had gone, after they all had gone, he sat thinking about it and he had laughed terribly, loudly, and then trembled and wept and Mizzi on the other side of the landing knew nothing about it, no one knew, no one must ever know justthat. Yes, he was going very fast. He knew it himself; knew that he was headed for the madhouse, as straight even as towards death. Some day he'd do something of a sort that nobody had any right to do. Often he would awake, icy cold, at the fear of what he might do. He couldn't imagine at all what it would be, but something that people who were dwelling freely among their fellowmen were not allowed to do—and rightly....
Sometimes his thoughts would turn with nostalgic longing to the gay, full years of his student-life; those busy years as intern at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The luck he'd had when old Professor Schulrath but a year before his death, had taken him as assistant.... The eager beginnings of his own private practice; that unforgettable thrill the first time he had seen his shingle hanging outside his own door.... Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met Mizzi,—full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock, as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave....
That whole first year of the war he had been among those detailed for general duty in the great city. Afterwards, the civilian population was left to be born or die as best it could. Every available physician was rushed to the front. The mortality among the wounded had become too great. Poor fellows sent back from one or the other fronts would sometimes have been two or three weeks in their uniforms, still in their first-aid bandages, or not bandaged at all; and when they got to Vienna after the torture of their transport in springless luggage-vans, there was often little to be done for them except bury them in those great mounds that grew and grew as the hospitals eased themselves of their dead. It had to be managed less wastefully. Lives were to be saved that they might be thrown again into the struggle....
He had partaken of the tragic, senseless exaltation that able-bodied men everywhere were experiencing on starting for the front.... Then deliverance from the carping tongue of Mizzi; the simplest things more and more caused her to fly unexpectedly up in the air like a rocket; there would be a sputtering and something would darken and go out. These were among the reasons why Hermann had settled back in the motor that day and with a laugh set out for the front. But there was something else that none of them had known about, that then, that now, was always in his mind, in his heart, in every fibre of his being. Even when he was watching the most indifferent things, such as the buffet Fräulein that very morning,—he didn't need to be alone—suddenlyshewould be with him and fling her lost radiance around him once again, and wrap him up into that magnetic world of longing for the might have been. He wouldn't hear the "wer giebt," "Pagat," "an' dreier" of the Tarok players, or the rustling of newspapers being turned on their sticks, or the "Sie, Ober," or the "Pikkolo, du dummer,"—shewas always more real than anything else, ... even at the café, when he would be holding theNeue Freie Presseand pretending to read. She was everywhere and all. Even as he dropped back in that chair, with Tante Ilde's touch still warm upon his arm and his eyes apparently fixed on the quite uninteresting enlarged and colored photograph of Mizzi's dead father, (Mizzi, year by year was getting to be his very image, with that hint of moustache) he was thinking only of her—Marie.
That January of 1915, one windy, icy twilight, he had had a hurry call from the Elizabethspital and had put off many patients still waiting and closed his office.
Before he got to the gate of the hospital grounds, out in the street even, he found row upon row of stretchers laid down low upon the earth, bearing shattered forms whose silence was more terrible than groans; their grey cloaks were wrapped about them, their poor boots, in which they had marched to destruction at the word of command, were mostly tied to the handles.... Pale faces, bandaged heads, arms crossed on their breasts or inert by their sides, under their capes.... Raised but a foot from the ground where the stretcher bearers had deposited them they looked already like their own graves, as grey, as voiceless. Yet the biting cold of that windy twilight was heavily charged with their unuttered groans.
Within the hospital it was still the same. The corridors were blocked. Outside the douche rooms they waited for their turn. At last clean, sheet-covered, they waited again at the door of the operating room.
He had met Marie von Sternberg that very evening ... so quiet, so deft, her pale blue eyes so compassionate under her heavy, dark brows and lashes, her jaw so nobly strong, her hands so beautiful in spite of the discoloration of acids and disinfectants. He had suddenly noticed her hands as she was passing him a probe.
But he hadn't looked at her face then, it was only some hours after,—not even in a pause, for still the men were being brought in,—when a young, yellow-haired Tirolese had been put on the table. As Doctor Bruckner bent over him, he had cried out in a loud voice "Mother" and had suddenly given up his youthful ghost. Then Doctor Bruckner found that he was looking full into the blue eyes, so heavily lashed, so darkly circled, of the woman at his side. He saw there a spark of the same everlasting pity that flamed in his own. They hadn't said anything even then, for quickly the youth had been carried away and his place had been filled by a swarthy family man from one of the Slavic Crownlands, his wedding ring still hanging about the finger of his mangled hand. Hermann had never forgotten either of those two men, for in between them was set, like a jewel in death and pain, that look that he and Marie von Sternberg had exchanged.
All that winter, that winter of his content, of his happiness, they breathed the same air, did the same work, to the same end. Those afternoon hours had been, quite strangely, enough for happiness. In the early summer she had been sent to the Russian front. When he was mobilized she was still there, and that was the true reason why he was laughing the day he left Vienna. A thousand miles of battle-field and ruined towns might lie between them; then again she, like himself, might be sent where the need was greatest, their roads could easily converge. He hoped blindly, confidently from the war; all his hope was in its vicissitudes.
Then one evening, after the fiery setting of a hard, red sun over a scorched, interminable plain, the dim air thick with odors of blood and death, cut now and then feebly by disinfectants used not too generously, as he stood outside that hospital tent, thinking of her, longing desperately for her, a quick, light step approached, he heard her voice:
"Hermann, it is I."
And all the dust and fatigue, the blood and agony that covered his body and his spirit fell away and turning he had cried out her name in straining passion.
They had embraced in such deep longing that they seemed to be lost out of time and space ... to be together, even for that minute ... even in that way....
The battle-field with its dreadful débris had seemed to Hermann Bruckner like some paradisaical garden.... And those glorified days of September, October that followed, the unit keeping up as best it could with the great army throwing its roads and bridges across the Pripet marshes....
Then one day she had had fever; two degrees only, but suddenly she had sickened terribly, sickened hopelessly, and died immediately of typhus.... Hermann who had hung over her hadn't taken it, but he hadn't been able to live or die since. He'd just gone from bad to worse; he'd done his work, yes, that was what was left; she would have been doing hers if he had died....
But after Gorizia, he had known it was all over with him, as a man that is; as a poor hulk of flesh and blood and bones and nerves, oh, there were perhaps many years waiting for him. Sometimes when he looked at his nerveless arm he remembered how warm and firm his clasp had been in hers, hers in his.... There were so many things to think of before he ceased to remember.... Rarely her spirit visited him in that house of Mizzi's.... But in his office continually he found her, sometimes in each ailing, miserable body he seemed to find her, beautiful and of an endless pity. Oh, he needed her. Even without his arm,thatway it would have been all right. Something could always be done if the will is there.... But without her he no longer willed anything.
Yes, he was very ill, but not in a way to die. Death might not come to him till he had forgotten everything, even Marie....
Mizzi was like a sharp point in his being. She had worn sore spots all over him, and strangely from Mizzi he must receive that which would keep his will-less breath in his useless body....
But Mizzi really knew nothing about her husband, indeed never had known anything about him, beyond his name and age and personal appearance and a few of his habits. Now he weighed a thousand tons upon her life.
When with her aunt in tow she turned into the Plankengasse, she was in the usual pleasingly expectant state with which she was wont to approach her shop. As they neared it they saw a dark, stout, ponderous female dressed in a thick, brown cloth suit, a heavy black hat with waving ostrich plumes, a long sable scarf hung inelegantly about her heavy shoulders, projecting herself cumbersomely from a much bebrassed auto.
"That's one of them," said Mizzi, eagerly, greedily, "it's Frau Fuchs. You'll die laughing, she doesn't know beans about anything, but that big bag of hers is full of banknotes."
In a moment, Mizzi, in velvety accents was greeting Frau Fuchs as if she were a queen. She touched appreciatively the sable scarf, lauded its beauty, saying, "You certainly get the best of everything." Then she turned and presented her aunt, Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. Mizzi laid it on thick, resting some of her 75 kilos on the Kommerzienrath, adding the full weight of the others to the "von." Then she proceeded to show Frau Fuchs a certain red velvet jacket with a little gold border, and Frau Fuchs had gone into raptures over it, and had said she must have it, and then her eye had lighted on a leather hand bag ornamented with Irma's medallion of "petit point." Though Frau Stacher recognized it, she was somehow not surprised to hear Mizzi, as she drew attention to its workmanship, say that it had been made by a certain Archduchess, positively starving, and Frau Fuchs sniffing up the subtle perfume of royalty that Mizzi's words caused to rise from the bag, had taken it eagerly. "No, is it true?" she had cried in ecstasy, and had drawn her glove from her thick, beringed hand and opened her humpy alligator skin bag with its loud green and gilt clasp and counted out a sheaf of banknotes. Mizzi herself had wrapped the bag and the dressing sack up in her finest paper and sent one of the girls (the one who did the least good work) out to put the parcels into Frau Fuchs' Mercedes.
"Isn't she awful?" said Mizzi when they were alone, "but without her and a lot more like her, we'd starve. Her husband is stone-rich, has an Exchange Bureau in the Kärntnerring. How she used to hate to pay out the money! But I changed that, she's a bit afraid of me."
There was indeed something awe-inspiring at moments about Mizzi, something that she could invoke to decide wavering purchasers. Then still under the charm of Tante Ilde's gentle but quiet appreciation, also under that of good business dispatched, Mizzi gave her a little handkerchief. It had a yellow stain on it that they hadn't been able to get out, still it was a handkerchief and a gift, and Tante Ilde gratefully receiving the attention for much more than it was worth, thought perhaps she had misjudged Mizzi.
It hadn't been at all bad going to her for dinner, except for that terrible depression when she thought of Hermann. No, it hadn't been at all bad that first time, and she repulsed certain lurking suspicions that every week might prove too much for Mizzi's longanimity.
Then, too, she had good news to take back to Irma; the bag had been sold, Mizzi had counted out the money that she had promised Irma for the medallion, and though it didn't in the slightest correspond to the price Mizzi had received for the bag, Tante Ilde could be trusted to keep that hidden in her breast. Indeed Mizzi said it had cost her a monstrous amount of money to get the bag mounted, that she didn't know how she could afford to take anything else from Irma, she hadn't made a kreutzer on that bag, she only did it to help Irma, etc., etc. No, Tante Ilde didn't repeat from one to the other. Those little households that day by day were spilling their secrets before her whom they received in charity,—out of their goodness, out of their pity,—were sacred to her.
That night, as she lay awake hearing Ferry's hacking little cough, she was thinking almost entirely of the plight of Manny. Nothing had ever been too much for Manny, when it came to doing something for some one else and now.... If the time did come for Manny to be put somewhere, Mizzi would have money to pay for him, and what she didn't do, why Fanny, there was always Fanny. Down which ever miserable road of their misfortunes they looked, Fanny glitteringly stood, Fanny dispensing benefits generously, easily, not always wisely, after her own special way. Tante Ilde suddenly felt she didn't understand the first thing about life, and she had filled the three-score and ten of the allotted span. When did one begin to understand?