V
Rallentando
Rallentando
"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit desDaseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!"
"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit desDaseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!"
"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit desDaseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!"
"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit des
Daseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!"
Frau Stacher had folded up the light brown camel's hair blanket with the dark brown Greek border that she had slept under for years and the sheets with the von B-S monogram and put them, together with the equally familiar pillow on which her head now so uneasily lay, into the divan and shut it down. Then she stood up on it and dusted the flat white and gilt vase under the picture of Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand. Finally she pulled back the curtains of the alcove, which last gesture always seemed to wipe her completely from the room, somewhat as if she had been carried out in the final box. Her movements were brisk, with a businesslike dispatch about them. She looked years younger than when she had stood that afternoon gazing at the trolleys clanging down Mariahilfer Street, and which, striking out their noisy, powerful flashes of light, had seemed like heavenly chariots, conveying certain fortunate ones, strongly, swiftly over immeasurable cobbly and asphalt stretches to their homes, to their alcoves even, out of sight and touch of the damp, cold misery of the streets.
She had put on her oldest suit, with the black and white stripes without once thinking that it had always been a failure. Business—pleasant business was engaging her attention. But she stood at the door a moment too long, holding in one hand her umbrella, in the other a large, brown, string bag. In her worn pocket-book was money to buy wherewith to fill it. Her eyes were bright; in her cheeks was the faintest pink. Irma was irritated in spite of herself at the sight of that brisk fervor. She knew perfectly well the chronically desperate situation of the Eberhardts, yet to see her sister-in-law stepping lightly over the threshold with that bag in her hand, going out to buy food that she, Irma, could well have used for her own children, provoked an unreasoning envy. Frau Stacher had not dallied in face of that sombre look, that terrible look, born of the brooding solicitude about food, food, that seemed to hold but slightly in leash unnamable things. She fled hastily before it. Only Irma's nerves. But she had come to know a lot about Irma's nerves in those few days. Irma was a beast of prey for her children. No one and nothing that came into conflict with their interests had the slightest chance with her. Ferry's cough seemed suddenly from one day to the other to get worse. She had taken him to his Uncle Hermann, and his Uncle Hermann had said to Irma in the back office, while Ferry turned over a sport journal of eight years before in the front room:
"What's the use, Irma, he needs milk, eggs, high air."
Had he said pearls, diamonds, rubies, it would have been the same to Irma. How not to sink to irrecoverable depths with that sinking population of which they were a part, was Irma's one thought. The rent was a small matter. For a long time she hadn't paid anything. At least the "crazy government" prohibited turning families into the streets, even if they didn't pay. All the government really wanted to know was that every room of every apartment was filled to overflowing with samples of the Viennese populace.
In that back office Hermann had further said, tentatively:
"Perhaps ... Fanny would send him away for a while."
Irma had tartly answered: "Fanny, it's always Fanny."
But all the same the suggestion, though annoying, had fallen on fertile soil. She had been turning over certain possibilities, or rather methods of approach for twenty-four hours and she was terribly jumpy, ... if that slender, aging figure had stood a moment longer on the threshold with that string bag, sign and symbol of marketing.... Nerves, nerves. After a moment Irma had gone on with her petit point. She was putting the pale brown background around the delicate moss-roses,—really quite lovely. Mizzi, for all she'd hum and haw, would take it, but at her own price, Irma was reflecting bitterly. She pulled the red shawl closer about her and bit off absent-mindedly a piece of silk on a tooth that needed filling, then miserably, with a groan, she continued her work. Tante Ilde had said something about her own teeth that morning,—she had a loose front one that was beginning to hurt unmercifully every time she took anything hot. But atthatage, Irma had thought disdainfully, what did it matter if they all fell out? Money for a dentist at that age, in such times! Now she was full of Ferry's need, of plans for him. She hadn't yet decided how to go about the matter which presented certain undeniably delicate points. Even Irma, obsessed by mother-love and mother-fear, was aware of their delicacy.
The Eberhardts still lived in the apartment they had taken when they married, on a street in the Alsergrund, near the University. It had once seemed very big, magnificent even for two people,—now their handsome, hungry children overflowed it.
The family had been very proud of Kaethe's distinguished young husband; "a genius" they would always say impressively to less fortunate friends when speaking of him, and dwell delightedly on Kaethe's relations with the University and with certain distinguished people who visited Vienna when the Kaiserstadt was a font of wisdom. Her husband was indeed well-embarked on a brilliant career, any and all honours were possible; Privy Counselor certainly, and later perhaps a "von" to his name. When scientific Congresses met in Vienna, he was always called on to read papers, and colleagues from other cities were eager to confer with him. He often used to bring one or the other home with him for coffee, proud of his smiling, soft-eyed, bright-cheeked wife, of his lovely babies, his comfortable house. When things began to get bad, Kaethe would tell the children what she used to have for the "Jause," that extraordinary, incredible meal that came in the afternoon,betweenother meals,—coffee and chocolate, with thick whipped cream, (the now quite legendary "Schlagobers"), apple tarts with butter dough, the fresh coffee cake, and certain little crescents that would fairly melt in the mouth. The children were in the habit of asking their exact color, shape and taste, they seemed quite unrelated to the War and Peace bread that alone they were acquainted with, and certainly they never could have sprung from the same harvest field. The real difference between milk and cream, too, was an absorbing topic, and they all loved Resl's joke that if it rained milk instead of water she would be out all the time looking up with her mouth open, though Maxy invariably reminded her that it would be better to take a pail and bring a lot home and then everybody could have some. When Lilli learned at school about the milky way, she taught them a game called living at number 1 Milk Street. But lately they hadn't talked much of the "Jause" of the old days, nor made so many little jokes. They were tired when they got home from school and only errands connected with food had any interest.
Though all of Herr Bruckner's family were musical in their easy way, Kaethe had a real talent; she could not only play through by ear the latest operette, but Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, with a sure yet fiery touch. Eberhardt had played the 'cello since his boyhood. Sometimes Kaethe, her fingers tapping out a measure on the table after the piano went, would think with hot longing of certain quartettes to which those walls of hers had once resounded. Poor Amsel who led them ... his songs, written during a protracted period of starvation in a garret, were now being sung everywhere; but he had been killed on the Eastern front that very first month of the war,—he'd scarcely had time to send back a postcard,—and had been buried with his talent and a half a hundred luckless fellows in a huge mound, that had been promptly flattened and all trace of it obliterated by a retreating army. And Koellner, with his Amati violin. Kaethe often hummed a motif of that Mozart trio and thought of herself at the piano, Koellner swaying slimly, his eyes closed and the long black lock falling over his forehead,—they hadn't seen him after the signing of the Peace. As for Rosetti from Triest who played the viola, he hadn't been heard of since the day before the mobilization, certain rumors got around about him....
But all these things were really as distant to the Eberhardts as the Tertiary Period; they themselves had been thrown up by the convulsions of War and Peace into strangely diversified, completely unrelated strata.
For a long time, however, those bright days had left the glow of their setting on the sombre war period. And then wars didn't last forever, and when over, except for mourning mothers, things would doubtless be as they had been. No one foresaw the Peace....
It had lasted four years, that first full, happy life, during which time Kaethe had had three children,—Lilli a pansy-eyed, pale-haired little girl, now grown too beautiful for safe adolescence, another clever, dark child, Resl, and Maxy who had been a "sugar baby" something to eat up, as he lay gurgling and cooing in his mother's arms.
The pendulum of Eberhardt's life had swung unvaryingly between that beloved home and the equally beloved laboratory, where daily he pursued hotly, closely, certain secrets of nature, always enchantingly about to be caught; or with a warm note in his vibrant voice and a light in his grey, speculative eye, communicated to eager students those he had already seized....
On the 28th of June came the news of the assassinations at Sarajevo. Unbelievable news; the Dual Monarchy shaken to its foundations. Its heir, its keystone gone like that, in a foul moment. Still everybody talked of the Emperor's grief, not dreaming that each, in one way or another, would partake of that grief. They counted his many sorrows, scarce one save poverty was missing; the Emperor's sorrows had always been an absorbing theme; it had got so that there weren't enough fingers on both hands to record them. This, and this, and this and still this, had he suffered. Had not his son miserably perished by his own hand—or another's? Had not his lovely Empress been assassinated? Had not his brother been put to death in far off Mexico? Had not his sister-in-law been burned to death in a Charity Bazaar? Had he not been obliged to exile another brother from his court for nameless sins? Had not another heir died of a dread disease? And other, other griefs. Now this last, this fatal blow in his old age, personal, dynastic. Those catastrophic griefs, heaped high with the years, in a way had become a matter of pride to happy Austrians, and the unhappy ones because of them, had a feeling of kinship with their beloved "Franzerl." Who could have foretold that in five years they would seem remoter, less interesting than those of some Roman Emperor?...
For a few weeks things seemingly went on just the same. Suddenly Europe was in flames and from the conflagration no one could flee....
The first two years hadn't been so bad for the Eberhardts. The Professor had been detailed for laboratory work in Vienna, and things went on somewhat as they had been going. Two more children were born. Then unexpectedly, through some tragedy of errors, Eberhardt found himself in a delousing station on the Eastern front. By that time, everybody was talking about hygiene as well as victory. But he was only gone a few months, returning gaunt and white, a startled look in his once thoughtful eye, and evidently quite unfit for further service. He had been side-tracked for days with a dozen others, suffering from dysentery, heaped together in a luggage van. No food, and worst of all, no water. The whole first week after he had tottered in over the threshold of his home he had said nothing, except repeat the word "schrechlich"—terrible. Then, strangely, he got better, even well, and went to the nearly empty University every day, trying to knot the torn threads of learning. Then the terrible peace broke out. The war had been bad enough, but it was war and unless one was killed one knew how to take it. The peace was quite another matter, a starving, freezing matter for women and children in city streets. The civilian population was suddenly plunged into it, up to the neck in it.... That collapse of the winter of 1919, ... that terrible food-blockade over half Europe.... There was nothing to hope for, nothing to fight for except bread, bread, bread, in ever-diminishing quantities. More were going down in that battle in the windy city than before machine guns. Each street was a battle-field, heaped mostly with children's bodies or the bodies of the very old.
The Eberhardt's apartment was far, too, from the Hoher Markt, but not far like the Mariahilfer street, Frau Stacher kept reminding herself as she trudged along, her string bag full and her purse empty, and at the end of the walk there would be darling Kaethe and the lovely, hungry children.
It had not been easy, buying the most usual things, and the thin soup of the night before, and the ersatz coffee of the early breakfast had prepared her but illy for the venture. She had gone into various shops where unholy prices or empty shelves confronted her, for Vienna had mostly done its buying for the day when she started forth. It was late when at last she found herself, quite worn out, hesitating in a certain provision shop, between rice and lentils. One got a lot more of the latter, but what were they unless cooked with a bit of bacon or fat of some kind? And she was further confused by the sudden memory of a certain smoking dish of lentils, with shining bits of pork laid around the edge of the platter, that she had often served in the old Baden days.
There were a good many people in the shop and not much time for hesitating old ladies to make a final choice. Suddenly, tremblingly, she decided to take the rice, while it was there to take, for quite close to her, overtopping her, stood a large, hook-nosed, hard-eyed, befurred woman who was evidently ready to swoop down upon it all. Indeed, she was looking about her with an unmistakable look that could only come from money, a lot of it, in her pocket, as if, indeed, she could buy everybody as well as everything. No eggs, no butter, no fats of any kind were in that shop, but as Frau Stacher was paying for the rice, she suddenly saw on a lower shelf behind the counter an object that, had it been set in gold, could not have been more attractive: a tin of Nestlé's milk. She stammeringly asked for it, but as the man, placing his hand almost affectionately on it named the exorbitant price, and as trembling with excitement she was about to take it, the large, befurred female cried out harshly:
"I'll give you double what the old woman is paying!"
The man,—what decency could be left in that fight for food, for existence?—took it out of Frau Stacher's unresisting hand. A murmur went up from those watching the unseemly operation. But the shop-keeper only shrugged his shoulders, muttered something about the "pig" war, the still piggier peace, and the stout woman, hastily paying for it, departed to unmistakable allusions to "pig profiteers." That was the kind of world gentle Frau Stacher was living in. It would have been a frightening experience for her, but she, too, was armoured in that grim determination to get food. The great city's fight was for food, not against the enemy at the gates, but for the food that was at the gates, and shoulder to shoulder in serried lines, they fought for it against each other. She, Frau Stacher, once "rentier" in Baden, was fighting for it. She was lucky to have got even the rice. Leaving the shop she espied on the street corner a small fruit stand. Some shrivelled apples, so evidently grown in the four winds, were being offered in little piles of five, by a raw-boned peasant woman, whose hands were wrapped under her small, three-cornered grey shawl, while she stamped from foot to foot.
Frau Stacher remembered longingly the beautiful Tirolese fruit that had filled the Vienna markets in the days of plenty. Corinne had lately had a letter from the adopted daughter Jella, married to her tall, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, square-headed Tiroler, now Italian, saying that the fruit that autumn had lain rotting on the ground. There was no way of getting it over the frontiers, those invisible but none-the-less impregnable walls that had been suddenly built up around Vienna, north, south, east and west. Fruit and grain, sugar and fats could not pass over them nor get through them.
Now those little apples, even on that raw day, had a strange fascination for Frau Stacher, out of all proportion to their merits. They certainly resembled in no way the full, rosy-cheeked specimens she had been wont to pass out to visiting nieces and nephews and into which white teeth would promptly, juicily crunch, but they were a reminder, a symbol of them. She longed foolishly once more to see white teeth dig into apples. She bought hesitatingly a little pile, obviously she had lost her nerve about shopping for food since it had become a matter of life or death; in the old days she had been a lavish provider.... Not much more than a mouthful in each apple, and certainly they wouldn't be nourishing, but Frau Stacher was of a sentimental nature, and the pale, innocent eye she turned upon the fruit grew bluer, softer in expression. The woman, saving her crumpled bits of newspaper, dropped the apples into the string bag and quickly put her hands, swollen with chilblains, again under her shawl.
Then Frau Stacher began to think anxiously of little Carli, the next to the last of Kaethe's children, beautiful, smiling, little Carli who had no strength in his legs and whose face was alabaster. Fanny did send condensed milk for Carli, but there was always an urgent reason why one or the other of the children, with a cold or a sore throat or a stomach-ache, should have some of it. She wanted above all things to get a can of milk for Carli. Thinking desperately "Saint Anthonymusthelp me," she found herself outside a small grocery shop. Few of the usual articles for sale in such shops were visible in the dusty window,—varnish, boot-blacking, washing-soda and other inedibles safely showed themselves behind the grimy panes. Somewhat dizzily she went in and asked for the milk. She wanted that can of milk more than she had ever wanted anything, wanted it enough it seemed, to create it out of empty air. The man, to her relief rather than her surprise, reluctantly reached down under the counter and passed it silently out to her, doubtless thinking of his own undernourished children.
"I knew it," said Tante Ilde under her breath, and she suddenly found herself delightfully warm as she exercised a truly à propos gratitude to the Heavenly Powers. She was emboldened too, and almost loftily asked him if he had a can of green peas, she wanted them to put into the rice to make the "risi-bisi" that the children so loved. Of course he didn't have it and scarcely answered her foolish question. But she espied a very small piece of hard cheese under a very large glass,—it was extraordinary how many things there were in the world that you couldn't eat, and how much of them! Then she saw a small package of "feinste Keks", with its picture in blue and red of a child eating one in rapture. She took recklessly both cheese and cakes. She knew she had lost her head, and besides she was feeling quite faint. Buying food in those days, even when one of the Saints visibly stood by, was an exhausting matter. She brightened up, however, as she went out of the shop at the thought that another twenty minutes of putting one foot before the other would inevitably bring her to Kaethe's door and the heavier the bag the better....
Frau Stacher's ring brought a scurry of young feet to the door, she heard welcoming shouts, "Tante Ilde's come! Tante Ilde's come!" even before it was opened with a rush. She was smiling a breathless smile, after the stairs and the blessedly heavy bag, as she went in. It was known that she was coming with the dinner, butwhathad she brought? They surrounded her, they embraced her, they overwhelmed her. They were all there save Maxy whose turn it was to eat his midday meal at the Bellevue Palace, and Lilli not yet back from fetching a few briquets.
Kaethe was nursing that youngest, rosiest of her children who knew, as yet, only the sweet fullness of her mother's breast. Carli was sitting at her feet, his head hanging listlessly against her knee. He hadn't run with the others to meet Tante Ilde because he couldn't even stand. He would laugh, a sweet, somewhat surprised little laugh when he tried to pull himself up by a chair and would fall down; but his mother always wanted to weep when she heard the soft little thud as he slipped to the floor. Carli was an angel. Carli, quite evidently to any but a mother's eye, was not to pass another winter on earth. Even in the week since Tante Ilde had seen him he had become more and more like something made of crystal, so smooth, so shining, so transparent was his little face. But she concealed the sudden fear that came over her as she looked from him to his mother.
"I'm nursing the baby earlier so I can be ready to help with the dinner," Kaethe said as her aunt bent over to kiss her and Anny,—one fat little hand spread out over her mother's breast, and making soft, contented noises,—little Anny, the last, she must be the last of Kaethe's children, Tante Ilde was thinking....
Kaethe wore a frayed but evidently once expensive, wadded, blue silk wrapper. It struck an unexpected note in that denuded room, whose immediate air of indigence was inescapable. Not only was the piano gone, and long since Eberhardt's 'cello, but gone one after the other the pleasant, superfluous tables and the little objects once set out upon them. Even the bookcases.... What remained of the books was piled in a corner and received many a careless kick from romping children.
Whenever Frau Stacher entered that room she was confronted by a quite flashy portrait of her mother in the Winterhalter style. It had been sent to Kaethe's for safe-keeping and now hung frameless on the wall. A dealer at the time she sold her furniture had offered her a surprising and unrefusable price for the frame. The young face that looked out at the aging daughter, though like her in many ways, had a point of competent malice in the wide, blue eyes, that was neither in her daughter's eyes nor in her heart. Sometimes, too, from under that broad, floppy, rose-trimmed hat with the long, pink streamers she seemed to look reproachfully, severely at her daughter,—leaving her elegant prettiness thus unset in so cold a world. Frau Stacher had never felt easy about selling that frame, and she sometimes had useless little night thoughts, or equally useless morning thoughts of getting another. But it had been hanging just like that since she gave up the house in Baden, near an enlarged photograph, (whose pressed wood frame picked out with gilt no one had wanted) of the departed Commercial Advisor. She would gladly have been unfaithful to the memory of her husband, now become exceedingly hazy anyway, and replaced his image by that of her mother. But her mother's portrait was square, and his photograph unprophetically had been taken in oblong form. Things were like that now. Nothing fitted....
Kaethe got up a moment after her aunt had greeted her and laid the sleeping baby in a battered crib in the next room, filled with beds of all sizes and sorts.Thatchild was nourished. She would have felt quite exhausted herself, but for the thought of the dinner Tante Ilde had brought. She was still a handsome woman, in the early thirties,—even treading up that Calvary to which every road she knew now lead her, those seven roads of anguish for her seven children and for Leo whom she adored. Once, not indeed so long before, she had been softly, sweetly alight with a kindly inner warmth, that flamed easily, attractively in her face, in those sparkling eyes, in those bright cheeks, hanging about that wide, red-lipped mouth with its irregular white teeth. And then those quick, generous, outward gestures! Now that soft fire was banked and her movements were often listless. But as she stood by the kitchen table, she became animated even gay, because of that natural gift which neither time, nor wars, nor miseries could quite destroy, and clapped her hands, as her aunt had known she would, and talked about the great feast they were going to have. The water was boiling and bubbling forecasting near, delicious moments and Tante Ilde had begun to grate the cheese which was sending up its sharp, appetizing odor.
Carli had been put on the table in the very beginning, that he might be nearer than anybody else to the goodies, as Tante Ilde took one package after the other out of the string bag and made them guess what was in it. Kaethe opened the can of milk to prepare a drink for him.
"Hungry," he said turning his blue eyes somewhat languidly towards her and shaking his shining curls about his crystal face. They all cried lovingly in one or another way:
"Yes, gold child, yes, angel, yes, little lamb, you'll have some soon!"
"I bought a whole half kilo of rice," said Tante Ilde grandly, "suppose," she went on dashingly, "we cook it all at once? We're seven to eat it and we'll put the cheese on thick!"
Kaethe gave a gasp. But she, too, was no saver.
"Magnificent," she cried. She was faint with hunger herself. Yes, for once ... then she turned to Carli.
"Carli must drink his mimi," she said, as she held the cup tenderly to his lips.
The other children looked on absorbed in the spectacle. Resl cried, drawing her breath in:
"Carli's having such a wonderful drink!" and Hansi with his eyes very big, asked,
"Carli, does it taste good?" and they all hung close about him as he drank in tiny not very hungry sips.
"I'd show Carli how to drink if I had the chance!" continued Hansi, moving his feet up and down in famished impatience.
"I do wish Leo were here to see the children," said Kaethe to her aunt, "but he won't be back till past one o'clock, though he goes as early as he can to the Stephansplatz. It's just wonderful to think they're going to have enough. It's seeing them after they've had their dinner that is sometimes the worst."
A long, impatient ring was heard at the door. Resl ran to open it and Lilli came in with a dash in spite of the broken handle of her basket of briquets. She threw off the disfiguring coat she wore and revealed herself in a very worn, sea-blue dress of some smooth, silky material. It lay beautifully about the white column of her young neck, it repeated the blue of her wide eyes, it heightened the fine pallor of her cheeks, it burnished the pale gold of her hair. There were gleaming bits of embroidery in places meant to accent the curves of a more mature figure. Quite evidently made-over, too, was the elaborate, dark blue cloth dress that Resl wore. Indeed, they all wore garments or parts of garments quite patently not fulfilling their originalraison d'être, that struck a note of gay luxury in the large, shabby room.
Lilli's objective was the kitchen. She was greeted with shouts. The rice was boiling briskly, the odor of the cheese was in the air. The package of "feinste Keks," made of a combination of ersatz substances meant to deceive the palate and annoy the stomach, looked gayly, impudently at them beside the little pile of apples. As Lilli took it all in, a tiny line that sometimes showed itself between those lovely eyes was quite smoothed out.
Then Hansi made a diversion by being discovered with the thin rind of the cheese that his mother had put aside for the seasoning of another day's dish.
"What are you doing, Hansi?" she cried and took it from his chubby, six year old hand.
"But, Mama, I'm so hungry, I can't wait for the rice," and tears rose to his eyes, "I didn't mean anything bad!"
"I know, I know," his mother answered, those stupid tears that were always ready springing to her own eyes, "mother didn't mean anything bad either, but whatever we have is for all of us."
Hansi had dark curls and soft eyes and seemed like the merest baby as he stood looking at her, great round tears rolling down his cheeks. But there was something sturdy about his thinness and pallor, something resistant; Hansi, like Resl, was one who would survive.
Lilli and Resl followed about by Else had put the plates and forks and spoons on the table and drawn up the motley collection of chairs.
"Is everything laid on nice and straight? Tante Ilde has brought us such a good dinner!" their mother called out as she came in with the great smoking platter of rice sending up its maddening odor and placed it heavily on the table. But she turned and kissed her aunt before she began to serve it.
Frau Stacher was conscious of the softest, warmest pleasure. One moment like this and hard things were forgotten. Kaethe's very expansiveness, that could so easily be released, communicated joy. And Kaethe never minded how much noise the children made, so others were undisturbed. Kaethe never fussed though she sometimes wept and often silently despaired. But now that full platter, those clattering spoons! Though mortals were certainly composed of spirit as well as flesh, hot food, even one meal of it, could change everything. Yes, everything. The children got uproariously gay, and Tante Ilde and Kaethe began to feel sure something would soon happen to make things all right again....
Then Tante Ilde heard how Lilli instead of her mother, now went out early every morning, too early for her thirteen years, and stood in the bread-line at the bakery, (her father had tried it but had proved singularly inept at holding his place,) and how you just had to keep your wits about you or you would find that some one had sneaked in ahead, and it was such a trouble getting back your place.
There was a certain protocol observed even at those bread-lines. No one with impunity was caught taking another's place, that is unless there was a stampede by those behind if the news got out that there was very little left. Then what a pushing and hurtling! Something terrible, hard, relentless would suddenly come up out of the crowd that had seemed composed of pale, exhausted men and women and underfed, listless children. That precious loaf that Lilli generally managed to bring home, would, with some of the equally precious cocoa that was in the heavenly package they got from the "Friends" in the Franzensplatz be the backbone, somewhat weak, it is true, of their day. The package and the wonders it contained,—the little tin of lard, the little box of sugar, the little bag of flour, the coffee, though it could not fatten a family of nine people, dulled noticeably the sharpest edge of their hunger and helped to get them through the week. It was really equal to several meals if you counted that way. Then sometimes a raven in the shape of old Maria, tapping, flew in at the door. As for the other meals, the Eberhardts went without them.
It was a mystery to the Professor, surpassing any he had ever before tried to solve, that he could no longer make a living out of his grey matter. Being a "genius" was plainly a misfortune. It was the working classes, fortunate possessors of muscle, that frequented butcher and delicatessen shops, while the intellectuals and their families starved. It made science look like something seen through the big end of a telescope. Biology? Eberhardt got so that he hated the very word. The only science of life that was of any use was knowing how to get something to put into your family's stomach and your own. Naturally mild as summer dew, Eberhardt had been getting bitter.
Those radiant years lay far behind, when a word, a thought would set his brain on fire, startling into instant action those secret springs of his talent; when the imponderable why and whence of man's being was the paramount interest of life. The ponderable things necessary to sustain that life came naturally, undisturbingly in the train of work. Now his gifts were useless; the world in which they had once functioned so easily, so shiningly, was in some chill, shadowy abeyance. Again and again came from his lips nostalgically: "Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit des Daseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!" "Sweet life, sweet, pleasant habit of being and activity! Must I part from thee?"
He went to his classes, but with the laboratory completely run down, sometimes even the electric light didn't work, and that listless, stupid look on the faces of a handful of hungry students, or that wild look, and everywhere the word "revolution," there was certainly little incentive and less chance for successful inquiry into those whys and whences, the indulgence in which was gone with other luxuries. The great thing was to keep out of the cemetery or the streets or worse places of last despair, where the broken but undying went. It all seemed a nightmare from which he must awake, some tight and vicious circle out of which he must soon break. Yet this was the seventh year and all that he was, all that he had, those once sweet furnishings of his mind, those pleasant uses of his faculties were as worthless to himself and his family as diamonds to a man on the rack.
The children got taller and thinner. Lilli was obviously too pretty to be out alone, unwatched. A terrible beast had lately followed her from the Singerstrasse to the Franzensplatz and then all the way home. Lilli hadn't quite known what he meant or wanted, but she had been desperately frightened and had trembled and wept in her mother's arms.
There were, truly, devils prowling about, seeking whom they might devour, and Lilli, bright and beautiful, like a taper in the dull, grey streets, was one to catch their greedy eyes.
Dark tales were whispered too, of hunger-mad mothers who sent their girl-children into the streets where such devils awaited them. Hunger,—dying of it,—made even mothers mad.
Doctor Steier had told him unbelievable things of children in his clinic, things that the bare mention of had enveloped him in a thick, hot, pricking misery. Doctor Steier was not yet forty, but his eyes were deeply sunken and his hair gone white. They had once been colleagues at the University.... Lilli's beauty,—it made her father's heart both sad and glad....
But nobody was thinking of any of these things as Tante Ilde opened the package of "finest cakes." Stripped of its saucy, colored paper, it proved to contain twelve tiny, oblong, dry, sweetish biscuits. She gayly apportioned out two to each child. They were seized upon covetously, the very thought of sweets could awaken, in old and young, mad, selfish, exclusive longings.
But Carli didn't want his and leaned his head heavily against his mother's breast.
"Carli not hungry any more," he whispered. He hadn't eaten his rice either, though his mother had taken him on her knees and tried to coax him with little tricks and stories; the girls and Hansi had finally divided it into the most even portions possible.
His mother made another cup of milk for him and soaked one of his "Keks" in it; he had taken a tiny mouthful, then again leaned his head heavily against her breast and seemed to go to sleep. She got up gently and bearing him into the other room laid him on a cot near the rosebud Anny's crib. So dear he was to her as she laid him down, that her heart seemed to come out of her breast in a great beat of love. The only color in his face was those violet eyes, which now were veiled so thinly by his transparent lids, that standing back from his bed, she thought for an instant they had opened, and that he was looking at her. But he lay so still that in anguish she bent over him to see if the breath were really fluttering from his waxy lips....
When she got back into the living room that look, mask-like, antique, of mother-fear still lay upon her face.
Tante Ilde softly rose from the table and stood by her without a word. "It will be all right in a moment," Kaethe said looking up at her gratefully. "It is silly, of course, to be so frightened," and she kissed the thin hand that hung over her shoulder.
A moment later there was heard the well-loved sound of the latch key, but somewhat slow, uncertain even. Lilli ran quickly to open the door.
Her father was not, as she expected, alone. A miserable little girl of five or six was clinging to his hand, a pale, anxious child that the wintry monster Life had been grimacing at and frightening terribly.
Professor Eberhardt gave his wife one look, but he knew his Kaethe, and it was a look of confidence rather than anxiety that he bent upon her as he stood in the doorway,—a tall, once very handsome man, who had been mangled by the War, then stamped on by the Peace till he had lost all semblance to his former imposing self. His grey eyes were sunken into deep pits on either side of his thin, pinched nose. The blond beard and moustache had had the yellow taken out of them by the early grey of his griefs and anxieties. But as he stood there, his shabby overcoat buttoned up to his chin, some brightness lay about his face; it seemed for the moment quite filled out.
"I met Koellner coming back," he said to his wife, and then he bent gently over the child, "This is his dear, good little girl come to make the children a visit."
Something rose up in Kaethe admonishing her to defend her own. Another child! no, no, no.... But turn that frightened, shivering mite away? It was equally impossible to the elastic kindness of her heart.
It was a situation that in the end beings like the Eberhardts meet in but one way. When that which they have not has been taken from them, they find that they have still something left that they must give.
There was no doubt about its all being a shock to Kaethe, rather than a surprise. She couldn't be surprised by another sight of misery, even though brought up round before it.... Her eyes filled with those weak, ever-ready tears, then she smiled quiveringly. At that smile for which he had waited, entirely trustful, Eberhardt turned to Lilli:
"Take Marichi into the kitchen, darling, and find her a bite of something."
The children suddenly quite still, had been looking at the little girl. Resl thought she wasn't too dirty, and Hansi that she was of a convenient age to order about. Else didn't understand.
Lilli's thoughts were confused, only out of that confusion seemed to come some sudden, new understanding. In that moment, indeed, Lilli grew from childhood into adolescence. She silently reached out her hand and received the little girl from her father. She gave him a long look as she did so. Something quite beyond the scope even of her new understanding, though within reach of her new feelings was happening. Something hard to do, yet in another way fluidly, hotly easy. As she was turning away the child's hand in hers, she hesitated then went back and threw her arms about her father's neck. Eberhardt had a moment almost of ecstasy as he pressed his lovely daughter close to him in some suddenly opened heaven on earth. Then she withdrew herself from his embrace and took the child out of the room.
"It's a desperate case," Eberhardt said to his wife after a moment's silence, "her mother has just died,—consumption—and he's starving himself. He knows a waiter at the Hotel Imperial who gives him some bread every day ... poor fellow, I was all broken up, so talented too; his clothes, only hanging on him, no overcoat, just buttons his jacket up to his neck. I told him about the Stephansplatz. He had a look on his face I didn't like. He was so worried for his little girl. They've lost their rooms, I didn't quite understand how. Anyway they've nowhere to go. Kaethe, I couldn't but say to him, 'Let us take the little one for awhile,' wehavea home," he ended.
Kaethe met his gaze quite clearly now. Those stupid, weak tears were gone. She was thinking, and he knew it as if she had spoken the words: "Every crumb that child eats will be taken from our own children." But Kaethe, inflammable herself, had caught from her husband some of that light that shone about his face and after a second she was saying and warmly:
"But naturally, she can stay here till things get better."
Both Eberhardt and his wife were very beautiful in that moment wrapt in the bright flame of their charity.
Just why he had met his old friend Koellner in the street that noontide was quite clear. It wasn't for anything that he, in his own great need was to get out of it, but rather for what the child whose Father in Heaven knew that she had "need of all these things" was to get—in that hour and in that way.
Then Tante Ilde, who had been both entranced and troubled at the scene, spoke for the first time and very gently:
"She'll bring a blessing into the house, Leo."
At that Eberhardt turned and greeted her affectionately.
"Ah, Tante Ilde, pardon, it's good to see you." And as he embraced her his act of compassion was still so warm about him that she was conscious of some gentle heat, almost corporeal, emanating from him.
Though his now constant preoccupation as to ways and means was added to those temperamental fits of abstraction, suddenly in that moment he saw distinctly the shape and substance of Tante Ilde's hard destiny. That frail figure, in that worn striped gown, Eberhardt who never knew what women wore, was suddenly conscious of its old-fashioned cut, its threadbareness, perhaps it was its symbolic sense working on his imagination that saw at times both more and less than the run of men. He perceived, as under a microscope, in all its magnified significance, not alone that sagging face, that furrowed brow, that thinning hair, those broad, pale, colorless eyes reflecting something immeasurably patient under the double burden of old age and penury, but it was old age itself, in all its component parts that separated, as if under his glass, on his table, resolving themselves sharply into their elements. He was aghast at what he saw—those diminutions, those withdrawals—more horrified than at the accidental tragedy of the Privatdozent Koellner. This was integral, final. She could hope for nothing more from time, that was clear,—time that brings so surely both good and evil, that very time that was his hope had nothing more for her. He repressed a cry....
Then suddenly, or so it seemed, they all got very gay again, with an infectious gayety. The children were tumbling about noisily after their good meal. The little stranger kept looking from one to the other. That desperate apprehension was wiped from her face. This that was happening was clearly good. She hadn't seen anyone smile for a long time, except so sadly that they might as well have wept. She had entirely forgotten about laughing. But all this was good, good, that she knew out of her six years.
Then Hansi climbed up on his father's lap and asked him what he had had for dinner.
"A fine cup of cocoa, so hot it burnt my tongue, and a heaping plate of very good beans, only I didn't feel hungry today," he paused on the familiar phrase, and from his pocket he produced two pieces of zwieback.
Kaethe had been watching him, suspecting his next gesture.
"Eat it yourself, Leo," she interposed quickly, almost sternly, "we've had all we can possibly eat. Tante Ilde broughtsomuch."
But Eberhardt with no hesitation in his hand or heart, or at least none that one could have noticed, said to the strange child, the child of whose existence he had been unaware an hour before:
"Come, dear child, come, Marichi," and handed her the zwieback. That grimy, claw-like little hand closed over it. In spite of her hunger she was too dazed to eat. She looked from her hand up to her protector with the mysterious glance of childhood.
"It's good, eat it," he said. She put it in her mouth, one piece and then, very quickly, the other. Hunger, she knew about it, all about it. This was something different and she was getting warm.
The silence that fell somewhat heavily upon the room, was broken by Hansi recounting to his father, boastfully, stoutly, what they had had for dinner and smacking his lips and showing him the colored picture from the package of "feinste Keks"; then how Carli hadn't wanted his rice and how they had had that too.
"Carli isn't well today," said Kaethe, "he seems so languid, but he's asleep now. He dropped off as soon as he had had his milk."
"I'm coming every Thursday," put in Tante Ilde comfortably at this point. She was feeling quite happy, almost joyous. "Fanny," she added in an aside, "sent word by Maria that I was always to get enough for everybody!"
Eberhardt flushed slightly but made no answer. Lilli and Resl were getting on their coats. As Lilli again put on her mother's old black cloak over her blue dress it was as if a snuffer had been put over a light,—a white, blue and gold light. Her father was content that it was so. About Resl they didn't worry. There was something strong, inevitable about her, even in those young years. She was clearly one who would get through. She was very like her mother, but behind that soft, dark resemblance was something steely that Kaethe had never had.
Things were always happening to Resl,—pleasant things. Those bright-dark eyes of hers, that round, smiling face that somehow kept its roundness through all those terrible winters, had something compelling about it. An American woman on one of the relief committees had seen Resl on a windy day looking into a delicatessen shop, and had taken a fancy to her. She had given her a meal a day for two months, and shoes and other things, often something to take home, then she had passed out of Resl's orbit into new circles of want. Another time coming home from school, Resl had stopped to swell the crowd around a smashed taxicab, and some one had cried, "Do look at that bright-eyed little girl!" and had given her a ten shilling note,—just like that! She hadn't understood what they said, but their smiles that she promptly returned and the money that she dashed home with were perfectly intelligible. Once she had found a gold piece in the street, when she and Lilli were going along together; of course she had been the one to find it. Lilli when she saw Resl pick it up, had hoped that it had been dropped by some very rich person, instead of by some one who hadn't anything else. To Resl, however, such fears were unknown, she would always take unquestioningly whatever goods the gods provided.
Tante Ilde was telling them about the woman who had grabbed the milk out of her very hand, and Hansi was saying with his chest out and his eyes ablaze,
"I'd have beaten her well, Tante Ilde," when they heard a scream from the next room,—a terrible scream, despair and supplication were in it.
Eberhardt and Tante Ilde rushed in followed by the children, Marichi stayed behind, cowering again. That scream had something frighteningly familiar about it.
Kaethe was holding Carli up to the window, where the light shone full on his baby face ... quite gently, quite easily, Carli had slipped from them leaving only his little waxen image.
Throughout that long night Tante Ilde kept miserably repeating to herself: "A child came in, a child went out," finding herself in a confusion of faith and doubt dark as the night that lay about her.
Irma was confirmed in her opinion that charity was dangerous.