VII
Allegro con fuocoThe Viennese Waltz.
Allegro con fuoco
The Viennese Waltz.
Fanny had a cosy little apartment just off the Kaerntnerstrasse, a pleasant corner apartment only up one flight of stairs, easy to drop into. Her sitting room had windows looking down two ways, a south window and a west window. Superfluity was its especial note. It had been done up in varying styles at varying times,—French, English, Italian according to the vagaries of its mistress. The spring of 1915 had found it Italian, but when on that soft, May day the Italians declared war, Fanny had cried: "out with it!" and had got rid of all her transalpine furnishings. The room had then settled down permanently to its more logical expression of Viennese "Gemuethlichkeit," that was accented by the miseries of the once gay city that surged blackly about it. On the walls were reproductions of pictures of various well-known beauties, Helleu's etchings of the Duchess of Marlborough and of Madame Letellier, a copy of the Marchesa Casati in pastel by some one else. Fanny being quite sure that they and various others hanging on her walls, had no more than she herself to do with the war, had left them there. Between the two first-mentioned ladies was Ingres' "Source" which Fanny was thought to resemble.
The ill-fated Empress-queen hung over the door leading into Fanny's bedroom,—the picture of her in profile with her heavy coronet of black hair high above her imperial and beautiful brow, while the rest fell, a dark cascade, down her slender back. The Emperor, blue-uniformed, his breast a mass of decorations, smiled pleasantly and paternally from above the entrance door opposite.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenburg, head against head in a medallion, hung between the windows. Above them was a gilt laurel branch tied with crêpe.
On one of the tables was the Empress Zita, sitting with four of her children, the Emperor Karl standing behind her. Fanny was through and through monarchical. The new princelings, not of the blood, had their uses, but in her heart she despised them ... what they were, that is, not what they had.
Fanny's own portrait by a certain renowned Hungarian painter of lovely women, on an easel, showed her in one of the blue gowns for which she was so famous. Her sea-blue eyes looked beautifully, innocently from under her plainly-parted, pale yellow hair; one long curl, falling from the simple knot behind, lay on her white shoulder. Fanny's hair was stranger to hot tongs or curl papers.
The room was full to overflowing with bibelots of every description,—cigarette and cigar boxes, smoking sets, leather and enamel objects from the smart shops in the Graben and the Kohlmarkt.
On the table on which stood the photograph of the Empress Zita, was a collection of elephants in every imaginable precious or semi-precious stone. For a time Fanny let it be known that the elephant brought her luck and it rained elephants; but those animals, mostly with their trunks in the air, had been superseded as mascots by rabbits and on another table was an array of these rodents, also in every possible stone; jade, crystal, lapis lazuli, carnelian, amber, with jeweled eyes of varying sizes according to the pocket and the mood of the donor. The collection of rabbits being nearly completed Fanny had begun one of birds. Two little jade love-birds pecking at each other on a coral branch had lately flown in to join a pale amber canary with diamond eyes.
Fanny was an expert in the matter of getting gifts. There was a pleasant, compelling air of expectancy about her, and a pleasant child-like rejoicing when a gift was offered that induced giving. And then when she was out of temper those animals were an unfailing and resourceful subject of conversation, playing often useful as well as ornamental rôles.
There were deep leather chairs, and between the windows a pale blue silk divan, that symbol of Fanny herself, piled with every conceivable sort of blue cushion, cushions with ribbon motifs, with silver flowers, with lace flouncings, painted, embroidered, of every shape and style. The carpet was blue and thick and soft and covered the floor entirely. In one corner was a large, cream-colored porcelain stove that once lighted in the morning gave throughout the day its soft and genial heat. A comfortable room indeed. No books but some piles of fashion journals on a little table by some piles of the inevitableSalon Blatt. Fanny did like to know what the "Aristokraten" were about, dimmed and attenuated as their doings now were. She quite frankly said that she never read; indeed the book of life took all her time and she had turned some pages that she didn't care to remember.
An old servant from her father's house had followed her along that flowery path that had proved to have its own peculiar and very sharp thorns. She'd been witness to Fanny's wounds and bleedings as well as to her successes. She scolded, flattered and adored. Those watchful eyes were worth their weight in the legendary gold to her mistress. It was old Maria who gathered up the remains when Fanny gave her suppers and took them the next day to the Herr Professor's; it was she who brushed and took stitches in garments before they were given to Kaethe. It was she who said to herself "Kaethe can do so and so with this or that." Nothing was lost really in that seemingly wasteful house. Then, too, Maria had her own relatives, who nearly or quite starved in dark, distant streets. The chain of misery was endless; here and there a little place of plenty, like Fanny's house off the Kaerntner Street.
Fanny's post-war principle was simple: "der Tag bringt's, der Tag nimmt's," the day brings it, the day takes it. Who would be such a donkey as to save money that a week after would have halved or quartered, even if it did not quite lose, its value? No, spend and make others spend. Those were wonderful days for succeeding in a profession like Fanny's. Paper money? Easy. Vienna lived to spend, not only spent to live. That paper money went stale, dead on their hands if they didn't spend it. Jew and Christian alike knew that. Wonderful days, indeed, for Fanny and her kind.
Fanny always went to the Hotel Bristol for her midday meal, sitting at a little table not far from the door. Everybody that came in saw her and she saw everybody. She was one of the hotel's brightest treasures, above Princesses of blood, who now so often had a way of looking like their own maids. She was always smartly, beautifully dressed in her somewhat quiet style. She gave a light, bright touch to the dark, too-heavily decorated room, shone in it gleamingly, reposefully, like a crystal vase.
Foreigners generally beckoned to the head-waiter and asked who the lady was sitting alone at the table near the door. And according to the questioner so was the answer. The head-waiter, profoundly versed in human nature, made no mistakes.
Fanny's manners like her clothes, were impeccable. She spoke to no one and no one spoke to her and she certainly didn't look about her the way the green Americans or the ripe Jews did. She went in and out like a queen, haughtily, gracefully, her round hips swaying gently, her head erect, her beautiful, blue eyes impersonal. But then Fanny was always careful, not only in mien and gesture but in words. She was not accustomed to tell, even at her suppers, the sort of stories which, she heard quite authentically, ladies of the whole world told. It would have taken the distinction from her situation in the half world.
That luncheon at the Bristol was her regular public appearance. She occasionally nodded to a slender, distinguished-looking, dark woman, without her beauty but very chic. She was the friend of a Persian prince who, in pre-war days had ruined himself for her, but was now fast remaking a fortune in rugs. Extraordinary how many people there were in Vienna who wanted to buy expensive rugs! People who had mostly never seen a rug before,—suddenly Vienna was full of them. They came easily to the surface of the dark, troubled waters of the Kaiserstadt, like rats swimming strongly, surely against the current of disaster; and they wanted quickly all the things that "the others" had always had. These two women sometimes joined each other in the ante-chamber and went out together. The dark woman had once been somebody's wife; but Fanny had stood at no altar save the one she served. She would take a couple of hours for her toilette for those luncheons, for her seemingly simple toilette that no woman of the world with less exclusive and wider demands upon her time could hope to rival. She dressed sometimes for the weather, sometimes according to her mood, sometimes in consonance with the national misfortunes. After the Treaty of St. Germain she dressed for two months in black, fine, shining, smooth, silky black, and then because of the Count she dressed again in black after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon. Her face, in those dark days and dark deeds, shone out of her sombre raiment like a rift from black storm heavens. But after all in her blue gowns, blue of every shade, from nearly green to nearly purple, lay her greatest successes. That is why Kaethe and her children were almost entirely robed in blue—and Maria's relatives too.
Fanny's own expenses, as will be guessed, were large. She had to spend money,—a lot of it,—to make money, to keep steady her situation, somewhat inverted, in the social body. Seven years of it and though she was handsomer she was older. She had an extraordinary canniness for all the sweet innocence of her blue eyes and pouting red lips.
Her ways were irregularly regular. In the evening unless she went to the theatre she was always at home. And there had never been any falling off in those evenings. Good business was often done then, other than by the châtelaine. Princes of the old style had there the desired opportunity to meet the new lords of Austria,—men that they would scarcely have saluted on the street in the old days, men that then they only knew in their money-lending capacity, having their habitat in small inner offices; beings with money in safes behind their desks, who gave it out at usurious rates to temporarily or permanently embarrassed scions of noble houses. Then these "Aristokraten" had had the fine steel of birth with which to defend themselves, a shining sword that had made such dealings profitable and pleasant on both sides. Now that sword was gone dull in their hands, or broken at the hilt. Life was a different kind of tilting ground. Gloves were thrown down in counting houses and then promptly picked up and pocketed. Those whose only occupation had once been to lend money now had further pretensions.
It was known that at Fanny's almost any one might be met. The men who came were expected to have an entrance ticket of some kind—money, wit or birth. They didn't get a chance to sit around in those deep chairs, smoking those delicate cigarettes, just because it was so pleasant. Many a poor devil whose birth or wit was his only asset was mercifully splashed by the plenty that surged about Fanny. Though each Schieber really felt, according to the expressive Viennese phrase, that each prince could "ihm gestohlen sein," the aureole, though thin, still hung about the heads of the titled gentlemen who frequented the little flat off the Kaerntner Street.
Fanny was both hard and soft-hearted. In her bargains she was merciless. Her beauty and her arrogance were worth wagon loads of that paper money and she knew it. But then how lavishly she could give! For her family she was as a horn of abundance. Indeed Fanny was a sort of clearing house for the relief of their miseries. When you came right down to it she supported in some sort of a way a good half of the less resourceful and more virtuous relatives with whom Providence had so richly endowed her. Without Fanny they would have succumbed to their miseries. Instead of half starving they would have entirely starved. Fanny who hadn't held out, sometimes wondered what on earth would have happened to the others if she had,—Kaethe and the children, Irma's boys, Tante Ilde and a lot more. She wasn't always thinking of them, it is true. But when she was lonely she did it passionately, extravagantly, and would send expensive, ribbon-tied boxes of sweets to Kaethe's children or to the boys. When Maria would find it out she would scold dreadfully and say that what they needed was flour and a lot of it, and that Fanny herself was headed for the poorhouse and Fanny would go off in a huff leaving a hard word behind her for Maria. But then Fanny was like that. All or nothing. Too much or not enough; beyond the goal or short of it. In her avoidance of the middle course lay Fanny's successes and her mishaps. Maria was more reasonable and more constant; but "we can't do everything, too many of them," she would reflect, and "weiss der kuckuk," the cuckoo knows, her favorite expression when in doubt, where they would have got what they did get, if Fanny hadn't been Fanny.
The reactions of the various members of the family to her methods had been at first purely temperamental, but according as their misfortunes increased, her spasmodic though continuous generosity had modified their sentiments as well as their miseries. Indeed they were, all of them, in one way or another, continually running beneficently into Fanny, though as she was mostly invisible in the flesh, the "bumps" they got were apt to be of the soft and pleasant order.
Fanny, who couldn't bear Irma, a "sour stick," sent the boys their winter boots, their woollen stockings and jerseys. Irma eagerly yet acidly received these reminders of relationship while in her heart condemnatory of the relative. Mizzi, on the contrary, admired Fanny extravagantly and if she had had the necessary "talent" and what she also called "Fanny's luck," would have asked nothing better than to work out her problems along Fanny's lines. She mostly kept her admiration locked in her breast, however, and generally so harsh in her judgments she never uttered a word of reproach where Fanny was concerned. Then, too, it might have got back to her and that wouldn't have done at all. Fanny was too useful. She knew that Hermann sometimes went to see his sister, and she thought it a good thing. He might pick up something there,—which he never did,—but she considered it one of his least useless acts.
As for Liesel, Otto had grandly and early signified that it was no place for an honest woman like his Liesel. But then they didn't need Fanny and could indulge in their virtuous segregation, though the reports Liesel heard of Fanny's clothes were tantalizing in the extreme and she was truly sorry that things "were as they were."
As for Anna she hated Fanny with a cold, terrible hatred, too cold and terrible for the light of day. A sombre jealousy was its chief ingredient, back from their childhood days, but Anna had forgotten that and thought it was detestation of Fanny's ways. She and Hermine could get along without her too. And then, deadliest of sins, she was convinced, though she had no definite way of finding out, that Pauli had a soft place in his heart for her. Fanny here, Fanny there, she was sick of it. Fanny doing what was done for the Eberhardts, Fanny doing what was done for Irma and the three little stepbrothers, Fanny paying, she could bet, for Tante Ilde's alcove. Ah! Bah!
Kaethe loved her sister very much and Eberhardt, from the clouds, was apt to fall as a dew of mercy alike on the just and the unjust. Pauli and Hermann never mentioned her, though 'twas true that Pauli frequented the flat assiduously and Hermann would have gone oftener but for the terror of those open places.
"Virtue, what is virtue?" Fanny had once cried to Pauli when some thorn or other had pressed deeply into her white flesh. And whatwasvirtue in that starving city? Generous giving in the end assumed the supreme mien of virtue, had, indeed, usurped the place of all virtues, theological and human. It was all, to the family, whichever way they looked, confusingly the triumph of Fanny's sins over their own virtues. Fanny was inclined, too, to be pious,—in her way and at her time. She was apt to enter any church she was passing; what the prayers she offered up, who shall say? Not entirely of thanksgiving that in the starving city she had plenty. Perhaps she begged not to reach old age,—to have time on her deathbed. That was what she hated to think of. Old age! Alone! Death! Judgment! Whom the gods love of Fanny's kind they certainly snatch young.
Yet, how gay she could be! What life was in her! Even above her beauty was that sense of flooding life in her veins. 'Tis true her temper easily ran high. Maria knew well the signs of rising choler; blasts of that temper blew about impartially. Indeed she was more apt to administer a box on the ear than to bestow a kiss. It was often said by the recipients of the first-mentioned gift that never was she so handsome as when lightnings were flashing from her deep eyes. It was all part and parcel of poor Fanny. It was extraordinary how the family got used to her in their hearts, though sometimes in words they still condemned her—and ah, if Fanny hadn't beentheirFanny!
However, there she was and apparently as bright as one of those American dollars to be gazed upon in the windows of exchange bureaux, shedding their radiance over the dull waste of paper money.
Obviously they couldn't be seen with her, nor she with them,—in the end no one could have said just which way it was. However, from her all blessings flowed. Pauli called her the family Doxology, and once when he had run into her coming out of St. Stephen's, he had said, with his wide, flashing smile:
"Na, Fanny, thanking the Lord God for his manifold blessings, that you will later pass on to the rest of us?"
And Fanny had called him a "stupid ox," and smiled and blushed and flicked him ever so lightly with the tail of her silver fox.
It was one of Fanny's many gifts, that way of blushing that she still had, would perhaps always have. It was indeed a confusing situation. The yard-sticks of the old days were broken or mislaid and anyway few had the energy to use them.
When Fanny had been very ill with grippe in November, Corinne and Kaethe, summoned by Maria, had gone to see her for the first time; they had let it be known afterwards that it was just like any other place only much nicer, and that Fanny had been saying her rosary. Nothing hung together somehow.
Tante Ilde, whose judgments were innately of the order abounding in mercy had had at first only the most uncomfortably confused sensations at the mention of Fanny,—sensations rather than thoughts. A flush would, at such moments, mantle her cheek. It was when she still lived at Baden and Anna and Irma would come out and tell her of certain things that to them, Anna and Irma, were nothing short of shameful, an honest family, etc. Her father would have turned in his grave, etc., and they, especially Irma, would soon have to think of the boys, etc., etc. Tante Ilde had been wont to listen in a sort of confused silence. She didn't understand things "like that" anyway, was the general opinion. She would think glimmeringly of what happened in the end in novels and on the stage to women of Fanny's ways, and she would feel alarmed for Fanny rather than condemnatory.
But when the races began again at Baden and they heard, necessarily indirectly, that Fanny, in two shades of blue, had been the sensation of the day, they were increasingly puzzled, but a touch of pride crept in to give a new tone to their feelings. So Fanny's scarlet sins, if not washed whiter than snow in the miseries of War and Peace, had undeniably been getting paler and paler in the family eye.
Now poor Tante Ilde shared with the others a certain miscellaneous satisfaction, all sorts of things composed the secret mixture, that came inevitably from the knowledge that Fanny was doing very well. Indeed what would they do if Fanny didn't do well? It was the world upside down. But they were all living in that same upside-down world and the relativity of their misfortunes was so dependent on the absolute of Fanny's fortunes that certain chalky lines and demarcations were fast disappearing. Though none of the women went to Fanny's they all saw Maria, that messenger of hopes and fulfilments, that faithfulofficier de liaisonbetween two worlds.
When, after her habit of recounting everything to Maria, Fanny had told her all about Carli and meeting Tante Ilde at Kaethe's, they had first wept over Carli, mingling their tears as they embraced. Then they had a conversation concerning the proprieties, concerning Tante Ilde's coming to Fanny for dinner on the very next Saturday,—before the funeral. At first the thing had seemed impossible, just couldn't be. Certain things weren't done, and Tante Ilde—so devoted, so genteel, so innocent. Of Tante Ilde's indestructible innocence there were no two opinions. Something to be cherished. It wouldn't be "anstaendig," decent, a word used with more shades of meaning in Viennese than in English. Equally Fanny couldn't take Tante Ilde to the Hotel Bristol. Yet Fanny was suddenly very lonely for Tante Ilde, she had a hunger for her and Fanny generally gave herself the things she wanted.... Tante Ilde, so loving, so unfortunate, the only one left of the older generation. Why if Tante Ilde died, Fanny herself, all of them, would be, dreadful thought, the older generation! She positively boo-hooed, wiping her handsome nose noisily on her filmy handkerchief. But for once Fanny didn't see her way quite clear to gratifying her desire. There were things, a lot of them, that weren't done and this seemed quite definitely one of them.
She had her code and it was rigorous. But Maria had been saying that she noticed, too, how white and thin Tante Ilde looked when she had gone to take Irma the woollen stockings, just as if her life were being pressed out of her, though not a word of complaint, only a smile and just faint and tired, as if she didn't have a place to rest her feet or to lay her head, "and I'll bet she has it hard with Frau Irma," finished Maria shrewdly.
"About like sitting on pins," answered Fanny with conviction, "but Pauli told me Corinne hoped it would do for awhile, on account of the boys, too."
"I could make her comfortable here for once," pursued Maria insinuatingly, "a little table drawn up by the stove and a good oatmeal soup."
Maria, too, had her doubts as to the propriety of the proceeding. She was quite feeling around in the dark where you might run into all sorts of things. In ordinary times there would have been no question of such an arrangement or even during the War, but the Peace had levelled the ranks of the Viennese with the same efficiency as death—what, indeed, was virtue?
"I feel so sorry for the poor, dear old lady," said Maria meditatively, repeating, "I could make her comfortable for once."
"Well, you'll probably have your way, but I'm against it, it just isn't suitable," answered Fanny flatly. Her aunt's life was broken into bits but there was a whiteness about the remaining pieces that they all, according to their natures, felt must not be diminished.
"But, Lord God!" at last cried Maria, whose voice could rise too, "they all take the money!"
"They can't starve, the poor things!" answered Fanny immediately up in arms for the family, her voice rising above Maria's.
Maria familiar with the signs of trouble, lowered her own.
"It's different her coming here," Fanny began after a pause with an unexpected quiver of the lips.
Maria melted instantaneously, this was so painfully, undeniably the fact, and pressed Fanny's head against her ample bosom.
"It's different," Fanny repeated and wished it wasn't different. Suddenly the hunger for Tante Ilde became very insistent, rising up from far out of those happy days when she had been the prettiest girl that any one had ever seen, and had picked daisies in Tante Ilde's garden at Baden and pulled off the petals: "He loves me—loves me not—not."... Andthiswas what Life was.... Maria could do any blessed thing she pleased about Tante Ilde. She, Fanny, washed her hands of the matter.
And even the next morning things weren't any better, and she made her toilet snapping crossly at Maria, with the corners of her mouth drawn down, looking fully her age, which though it wasn't great, she couldn't afford to do ... considering.... And then she had gone out to the Bristol to the tinkle of her bracelets, and the slightest rustle of silk, (just enough to let one know somebody was passing,) her eyes stormily sombre under the drooping plume of her hat, her furs enveloping her softly, odorously—all in a not unfamiliar, black sea of depression. That black sea, with no slightest light, that sometimes threatened to flood up above her red, full mouth, above her small, flat ears, above her wide, blue eyes, till she was drowned, till she was dead.... What was the matter that Tante Ilde couldn't walk right in to her own niece's home? And then, it must be confessed, as she walked slowly along, she used some expressions in regard to life and living that she hadn't learned in her father's house.
Fanny had been likened by a foreign friend to one of her own waltzes,—beautiful and hot, gay and sad, for beneath the passion and beauty they embody is that ever-recurrent note of melancholy, woven through each sparkling melody, to be caught up swiftly into the inevitable coda that for so many of Fanny's kind is the end indeed.
Vienna laughs and weeps to her waltz music, loves and dies to its measures, to a continual "allegro con fuoco." Weber thus annotated one of the glowing movements of "Blumen der Liebe:" "Breast against breast he confesses his love and receives from her the sweet avowal of love returned."... Breast against breast indeed, giving and receiving, myriads of maidens in each generation embody the brief and tragic triumph of passion and beauty over the lengthier security of duty. In that very heart of Europe is a perpetual, warm, fermenting desire for love, an instant sensibility to the arts—to all beauty in its visible forms; but "swiftly with fire" these are forever consuming themselves, for they have little to do with material success or personal continuity.
The Turks left other things there than coffee and ruins. They dropped some seed of Eastern magic into this only half Western soil and a dark flower, like no other dark flower of the earth, sprang up abundantly. Its color for a time has been washed out in the sombre waters of War and Peace; it has been trampled by the slow tread of cripples, its growth suspended in starvation. But another generation that has not seen these things and died of pity or hunger will arise, other "Flowers of Love" will blossom. The sagging portico of that stately pleasure-palace, Vienna, will be again upheld by Caryatides with glowing eyes, with bright cheeks, with thick, shining coils of dark hair, with full, soft figures and tireless, round, white arms. And in through the portico, coming from their dark side streets, will pass "allegro con fuoco," passionate, gifted young men, worshipers of the arts and devotees of the graces, with their Frauenlieb and their Frauenlob apostrophes, their lovely, tragic hymns to Spring and Hope and Love—till the sun and the moon and the stars shall have done with them.
When Frau Stacher got up that Saturday morning she found that her legs were trembling weakly and that only with the greatest effort could she stand. Her chest seemed bound in iron, too, and she was breathing quite noisily.
"I've got a terrible cold after all," she thought appalled at the idea of being ill at Irma's—in the alcove. "It just can't be," she thought desperately. Up and out was the word, though down and all in was what she felt. She was momentarily comforted by the cup of ersatz coffee that Irma always served very hot, but she had a vast repugnance to the piece of hard bread. Gusl, with his sharp eyes out had been watching it as it lay untouched at her plate.
"Tante Ilde, you're not eating your bread," he observed finally.
"No, I don't want it. I'm not hungry," and she pushed it towards him.
"Not hungry!" he exclaimed and his voice was hopeful.
At that Ferry who always noticed things said: "You're not ill, Tante?"
Irma glanced up quickly. But her sister-in-law always looked that way in the morning, pale and spent and a hundred years old, so she turned to the more agreeable consideration of the slice of bread. Being impartial was one of Irma's many virtues and that slice was cut into three bits, the thin end larger than the two thicker pieces. It was a pleasant sight, though no more durable than a flash of lightning, to see the boys eat it, in an instant, one chew, one swallow. Then they began to get ready for school and Irma lingeringly wrapped Ferry's knitted scarf about his neck, she was strangely tender with her sons, and they all clattered down the bare steps.
Frau Stacher always rather dreaded that moment of being alone with Irma, but this morning she was glad of the sudden quiet in the apartment. She would have lain down again but for Irma's inevitable question if she did so. Clearly Irma's wasn't a house to relax in. You got up and went on. So instead of lying down, as usual she helped to wash the cups and saucers and put the room in order.
Then when Irma sat down to her work by the window, she went back to her alcove and in its semi-obscurity, leaned heavily on the yet unmade divan, trying not to cough. She could hear Irma drawing the stitches of her embroidery in and out, and the little click when she picked up or lay down her scissors. She was no more alone than that. It suddenly seemed to her that the most intolerable of all her misfortunes was never, never to be alone. She started up uncomfortably as Irma called out, speaking more gently, however, than was her wont:
"You're going surely to Fanny's today?" and then she heard Irma lay down her work and cross the room. As she pulled the curtain aside Frau Stacher stood up guiltily. Irma even in her preoccupation could not but see that her sister-in-law was ailing. There was no mistaking it. But Irma was determined, more determined than she had ever been about anything that she should go to Fanny's that day, that very day. Virtue or vice, 'twas all the same in Irma's eyes, all run together. Ferry had to be saved, saved that day and not another.
"Hermann says that if Ferry gets over this coming year, he'll be all right."
Something familiarly, sombrely fierce lay in her eyes as impatiently she looked at the frail messenger of her desire.
"Yes, I'm going, Irma, you can count on me, I won't forget," she answered almost humbly. "Don't worry, we'll arrange it," and then her eyes fell on the little figure of the woman bending over waiting to have the two buckets, one filled with apples and the other with pears, put into her hands.
"I'll just take it with me—to show Fanny," she continued.
Irma's eyes filled with tears as she took the little carving from the table and started to wrap it in a piece of newspaper.
"No, give it to me just as it is. I'll carry it in my bag," and she put it into her worn reticule that never stayed clasped and now promptly fell open as she laid it on the divan.
"You won't lose it," questioned Irma anxiously, seeing her put it into the precarious keeping of the bag, but her sister-in-law didn't answer, only pulled the curtains together again. Irma went slowly back to her embroidery, but after a moment or two not hearing any sounds of moving about, she asked in a tone whose irritation was but half-suppressed:
"Don't you think you had better begin to get ready?" This having to push her sister-in-law up and along, out of the house, filled her with a sickening impatience.
"Yes, perhaps I had better," Frau Stacher answered obediently, "though it isn't far."
And then Irma hearing those soft, slow movements of dressing behind the curtain said no more. She was really only thinking of the moment of her sister-in-law's return, with the money in her purse or perhaps enough to be prudently pinned into her dress.
Frau Stacher was thinking of nothing. All the forces of her being were employed in that act of clothing her body. After she was dressed she noticed that she had on the wrong skirt, but she felt she couldn't change—and then shehadput the velvet around her neck. One thing she didn't do that morning, she only remembered it when she got out into the street—she hadn't pulled back the curtains.
But Irma, as she saw her ready to depart, though she noticed that the curtains weren't drawn, only said again:
"You won't lose the little figure?" and Frau Stacher with that formidable submission in her eyes, even Irma got it, answered again:
"No, I'll be very careful." Then she turned and inexplicably to herself embraced Irma and said, "Farewell" just as if she didn't expect to be back in a few hours. Irma heard her steps getting fainter and fainter, as she went down the resounding stairway, until they were lost forever.
Frau Stacher felt very weak, and her feet seemed made of lead, as she turned into the Rotenthurm Street, then that pain between her shoulders. But she was thankful that she had been able to get out and Fanny, mercifully, lived near. A pale, uncertain sun that gave no warmth, lay momentarily over the city.
There was an undeniable excitement about going to Fanny's, something adventurous, like going into exotic lands, that stimulated her momentarily and in that sick confusion of her being she did not try to analyze her varied and commingled sentiments. Bashfulness, timidity, the gentlest curiosity, gratitude, affection, she was conscious of,—together with that increasing pain between her shoulders....
She was admitted by Maria whose small black eyes were snapping pleasantly, whose wide mouth wore the most affectionate of smiles; Maria, part of their lives since twenty-five years, Maria, who had always opened to her ring when she went to see her brother.
"Ach, dear, gracious lady, how good of you to come to us!" she cried warmly and bending kissed Frau Stacher's hand with all the old time reverence and affection.
She felt like a storm-tossed little craft that has at last made port. She hadn't thought it would be that way. It was, indeed, "just like any other place, only much nicer."
"Fanny is making her toilette, I'm just getting her into her things," Maria continued easily.
"I'll be there in a minute, Tante Ilde, dear," called another welcoming voice from the next room, then in quite a different tone:
"You old hag, you've forgotten to take that stitch in my sleeve."
"Coming, coming," called back Maria cheerfully and winked at Frau Stacher, "She doesn't mean a thing. Just her little way," she whispered admiringly; then aloud:
"If the dear lady will lay her things aside," and as Maria spoke she proceeded to help her remove the old coat, peeling off the narrow sleeves and pulling down the little woolen shawl that Frau Stacher wore underneath; she then put her into a comfortable chair, a cushion at her back, and with solicitous inquiries about her health, (Frau Stacher's looks didn't please Maria) "now you just rest while I finish getting Fanny ready," she ended with a pat of her fat hand on the thin shoulder.
"What are you talking about?" called her mistress, "Perhaps I'm not going out."
Maria disappeared through the door and Frau Stacher heard her say something about "stupid caprices."
Before the fine, even warmth of the porcelain stove Frau Stacher forgot how chilly she had been in the street; and the deep armchair with its soft cushion, how it engulfed yet sustained her! She was quite happy and almost comfortable. She felt more at ease, more at home than at any time since leaving Baden.
Over a card-table was spread a white cloth and on it a service for one. She felt unreasonably disappointed;—if Fanny could have stayed. Once in, it certainly was like any other place and truly it was nicer.
Her heart had beat a little thickly as she dragged herself up the stairs with those leaden feet. Certain mysterious things you didn't do the first time without a feeling ... but she saw herself often in future coming quietly up those very steps. She would always let Maria know first, though why she would let Maria know first, instead of just ringing at the door, she didn't try to explain.
Plenty lay again about her, the dear, familiar forms of Fanny and Maria were ready to minister to her. She breathed in, as deeply as the constriction in her chest permitted, the warm comfort of it all, plenty, affection, in a starving world of old, unwanted women in garrets—in alcoves.
From above the door Franz Joseph continued to smile paternally down upon her, opposite him his beautiful and luckless Empress. The banished Zita and her children struck a further absolving note of innocence and misfortune. Frau Stacher returned gratefully the benevolent look her Emperor was bending upon her, remembering that he too, had "had it hard." As she slipped deeper into that comfortable chair she was conscious of being so tired, so spent that she feared she could never again get up. Yet it was almost delicious, the sense of languor—in that deep chair—in that warm room.
An immense gilt basket in which was planted a young fruit tree in full blossom stood near one of the windows. It was tied with bright, blue ribbons, but its flowers were very pale in the hard January light. What was it doing there in mid-winter? She breathed in the faint scent of the forced blossoms hovering about the warm air. Ah, how indeed could she move out of that chair, how close that door behind her on that atmosphere of welcoming abundance?
She was sitting near the little table on which stood Fanny's collection of elephants. One in pink jade with ruby eyes seemed to be looking compassionately at her. Then she wondered, but without impatience, why Fanny didn't come.
Fannywastaking longer than necessary, but suddenly she had found that she could not bear to meet her aunt's eyes. Oh, those eyes! They would gaze at her as children's eyes gaze and she dreaded the feeling she knew she would have when she met them, right out, in daylight, in her own house. Behind that closed door Fanny was in a blue funk, Fanny who would have faced armies without turning a hair, and she fussed nervously with the objects on her dressing table and kept looking quite unnecessarily at her shining, softly-rolled back hair with her hand-glass....
"Why doesn't Fanny come?" her aunt began to ask herself again somewhat anxiously and in her humility feared it was something connected with herself. Just then the front door bell rang and she jumped in her chair, a flush mounting to her face. She couldn't at all have said what it was she feared might be impending but whatever it was, that ring made a genteel old lady start up when she was too tired really to move and blush the bright blush of her long lost youth. Maria ran out of Fanny's room, in what seemed to her an anxious way, to open the door. But she only took in a box, a large, flat, pleasant-looking box, the sort of box Frau Stacher remembered from her own shopping days. She saw the name Zwieback on it as Maria took it in to the other room. Another long wait ensued. She could hear whispers and the rustling of tissue paper.
Then all of a sudden the bedroom door was flung open and Fanny appeared, holding high up, so that it hid her face, a long, black coat. In a flash, before a word could be said, Tante Ilde knew that coat was for her....
Fragrantly, warmly Fanny was bending over her, embracing her; a sudden, flaming color that had come out of no box was in her cheeks.
"Stand up, Auntie," she was saying in her silver voice, more embarrassed than she had ever been in any other of the seemingly more formidable moments of her life.
Tante Ilde turned her wide, soft glance upon her. In a pale, silken wrapper Fanny was looking as fresh as lilies who have neither sowed nor spun. It was the same bright, dawnlike face that Tante Ilde knew so well, there in the cold, grey light of the January day, it recalled somehow early morning clouds in summer....
She got up as her niece spoke and in another minute that warm, soft wool, that smooth, satiny lining were enfolding her. It must have cost a monstrous sum.
"Oh, Fanny," she protested weakly, "to spend all that money on me!"
"Money, what is money?" returned Fanny blithely, her aplomb completely restored. "You can't keep it nowadays. It just rots if you try. No more old stocking!" And then she proceeded to throw that practiced eye of hers over the coat.... Any niece with a beloved aunt.
"Come here," she next cried to Maria and pointed out a button that needed changing, Tante Ilde was even thinner than they thought, "bring some pins."
Down on her silken knees she went and put the pin where the button was to be sewed on again.
Tante Ilde quite forgot that the family instinctively lowered their voices when speaking of Fanny. She was her brother's child again, her own little Fannerl, the sweet, soft, laughing, incredibly, brightly, beautiful maiden of those far away days. Ah, she should have married a prince!
"You are an angel," she said tremulously keeping back with difficulty some tears that lay heavily just behind her eyes.
"'Angel' is going a bit far," answered Fanny modestly, though really delighted in her heart, and she wondered for the thousandth time what on earth they would have done without her.
"I'm not going out," she said crisply to Maria, "the devil can take the Bristol. I'm going to stay with Tante Ilde. Bring another cover, and quick, I'm sure she's hungry,—I'm nearly starved." This last wasn't quite true, for not so very long before Maria had taken in Fanny's tray with coffee and cream and a glossy, buttery gipfel, got, Maria and the cuckoo alone knew from where.
"You look so tired, Auntie dear," said Fanny next.
Her aunt's face was, indeed, quite pinched and very pale in spite of the fresh glow of her heart, near which, between her shoulders was that increasingly unpleasant, stabbing sort of pain. But she was a game old lady. She hadn't yet complained about anything, so she only answered:
"A bit of a cold coming on, that's all."
"I don't think you ought to go to the cemetery with us this afternoon," Fanny pursued somewhat anxiously.
"But going in a carriage, and if I wear my warm, new coat?" she questioned eagerly.
The new coat made the effort seem possible. Not, oh, not at all through vanity, but a new coat, her own,—she enjoyed, too, in anticipation, showing it to Irma, though Irma would be sure to say something about it designed to dim its glory.
Maria was bringing in the oatmeal soup that she had fully intended since the evening before to make for Frau Stacher ... she knew Fanny. It was steaming up pleasantly from its little blue and white tureen and Fanny proceeded to ladle it out generously. She had pushed the card-table close to her Tante Ilde's chair and drawn up a little stool for herself on the other side. Frau Stacher took a few mouthfuls,—delicious, there was certainly some milk in it. Tired as she was she couldn't be mistaken about there being milk in it, but all the same she found she wasn't hungry. She forced it down however, to the last drop; Fanny mustn't think she didn't like it.
Fanny had jumped up restlessly after watching her take the first spoonful and lighted a cigarette and then sat down again, bending forward, her elbows on her knees, and her white hand, with its immense sapphire ring, just one big, square stone, putting the cigarette up to her red mouth, her rosily manicured finger tips flickering the ash from it on to the floor. The pale silken sleeves would ripple back and show Fanny's dimpled elbows. She took a little soup herself, but, like her aunt, showed no enthusiasm when Maria brought in a cutlet and some fried potatoes.
Frau Stacher knew well Maria's fine kitchen hand. So many years she had sat at her brother's table and seen Maria put just such cutlets on with those unrivalled fried potatoes. Frau Stacher was pierced cruelly for a moment by the memories these familiar things evoked; the children sitting around the table, talking and laughing, and her brother Heinie, who had loved them all impartially, looking indulgently from one to another. Indeed it seemed the most natural of things to each of the three women; a thing they'd done a thousand times together.
But after her first mouthful of the cutlet Frau Stacher knew she wasn't going to be able to eat it. Its odor was delicious, the edges of the tender veal were goldly brown, and towards the middle of the piece it could easily be seen how white the meat was.
"I believe you're ill, Tanterl," said Fanny again looking sharply at her. "You rest here while I take Kaethe and Leo."
"But I want to go with you," she returned imploringly, "I don't want to leave you."
Tante Ilde couldn't have told why she was so determined to go with Fanny, but the longing took her out of her usual gently acquiescent ways.... As if Fanny was to do something solemn, important for her, and she mustn't be separated from her. As if she had been warned that by keeping close to Fanny she would avoid some last, some ultimate horror. It was suddenly as clear as that.
"It's only a little cold I've got," she repeated beseechingly, like a child imploring some permission.
"As you will," said Fanny sweetly, "I'm only afraid you'll take more cold at the cemetery."
But Frau Stacher felt again that sudden, almost fierce cleaving to Fanny, to Kaethe ... to little Carli. Where they went, there she wanted to go. It seemed to her, too, that she wasn't feeling quite so ill, but rather afraid to be left alone, even with Maria, nice as that would be; Maria who would come in and talk about the old, the happy days, and show her Fanny's things,—Fanny's jewels and gowns. But even so she wanted to be with her own, her very own. She forced down a morsel of the cutlet and took a bit of the fried potatoes on her fork but it was evident to Fanny, and Maria, watching from the door, that she was eating with difficulty. She had an unbelievable, astonishing repugnance to the meat, to the fatty smell; then too, she was worrying about Ferry, thinking all the time that now she must speak of him. It seemed a mountainous exertion, one she was quite unequal to. But she could never go back to Irma's unless she did and then, too, she wanted to help Ferry. But it seemed beyond her strength. Anything except sitting still and being ministered to was beyond it. Then suddenly as she sat there toying with her cutlet, she knew that her work was done; though whence the assurance had come she could not have told. It came, a sort of glimmering presence, bringing its dim, sweet promise that effort was ended. Her attention was quite engaged by that lovely, unexpected presence, and it was as if from a long distance that she heard Fanny say:
"I think a good, strong cup of coffee, right now, would be the best thing for you," and then she called to Maria to make it quickly and make it strong.
The very suggestion acted as a stimulant on Frau Stacher, and she was able to pull herself together sufficiently to look gratefully at her niece. Then her eyes wandered again and were caught by that flowering tree, so spring-like to her age. It's thin fragrance foretold a true spring that she too old, and it too young, would never see. It was palely, tenderly confused in her mind with that gleaming presence. She felt that she must recognize its beauty by some word—perhaps afterwards she would get around to Ferry. She experienced a slight timidity at mentioning that plant, however, though why it should awaken timidity, with that other sentiment of reverence for its beauty, she could not have told.
"What lovely things grow on the earth!" she ventured finally, indicating it with the slightest of gestures.
"Yes," answered Fanny indifferently, she was thinking how changed her aunt was, "but you should see the donkey that sent it."
Frau Stacher thought no more of the plant.
Fanny herself was only toying with the veal cutlet and potatoes. If the truth be told she was aware of a slight excitement, following on her first embarrassment, just enough to cut her appetite ... having Tante Ilde there ... that way.
A pause ensued. They could hear Maria in the kitchen. On an important occasion like that Maria didn't intend to be alone, behind a closed door, and miss what they were saying. Maria herself was quite worked up. She hoped it would be decided for Frau Stacher not to go to the cemetery and then she would relieve her bosom of a lot of things pleasant and unpleasant, that really Fanny's aunt, when you had a fine aunt like that, should know, and besides she longed to show her Fanny's things. Then she carried in the coffee, an immense cup, its aroma filled the room, drowning the thin, sweet scent of the forced flowers.
"Just what I needed, Fanny," Tante Ilde said in what seemed to be a loud tone, with that hammering in her ears; it was really not much more than a whisper. From the very first swallow she felt herself being renewed, and as she continued to sip it, a delightful feeling of actual strength regained came to her. Not go with her dear ones to lay Carli away? The thought was foolish ... and being driven there and back and wearing her new coat? She was beginning to feel equal to anything.
"It'ssogood," she murmured between her genteel little sips and when Fanny dropped an extra lump of sugar in without asking her, it was still more sustaining to both body and soul and she drank in longer swallows the sweet, dark strength.
Then Maria replaced the cutlet by two pieces of Sacher tart, one for her and one for Fanny. And that, too, was dark and sweet and she was able to eat it. A bite, a sip of coffee and then another bite, another sip. She got on really well with it, though for all its pleasing taste each bite had a way of stopping for a while in her chest.
Then suddenly she knew it was time to speak about Ferry, quite time, before she took the last swallows.
She reached down by her chair where lay her poor bag and picking it up she took out the little wooden statue of the woman bent over waiting for Ferry to put the full pails in her hands.
"Ferry has a lot of talent," she began musingly rather than informingly, as she passed it across the table to Fanny, "and such an old knife too, that he did it with. I'd like to give him a new one."
"But naturally, we'll get him the best, with six or eight blades!" cried Fanny very pleased. Anything they needed except that eternal food and raiment and fuel was a welcome suggestion. Fanny did love to give people things theycouldlive without, not just bread and coal and shoes. It got monotonous to one of her temperament. Even such a little thing as a knife for a boy struck an agreeably releasing note. She kept looking at the delicate figure. It imparted a pleasant sensation to her fingers as she touched it. It was quite evident that Ferry had talent. All was coming around as Tante Ilde had hoped.
"But Ferry is ill," she continued with her gentlest look. "He has night-sweats sometimes, and always a little cough."
"Ach, the poor Buberl!" cried Fanny warmly.
"How easy Fanny makes things," her aunt was thinking, yet somehow she still hesitated.
Fanny was passing her hand again over the little figure which kept inviting the caress of her long, white fingers, of her soft, rosy palm.
"Hermann says he must go to the country,—a bit high,—if he is to be saved and at his age one can't delay."
So it was done—as easy as that after all. That little wooden peasant woman cried out not alone of young talent but of fresh air, the fruits of the field, you couldn't get away from it, not that Fanny was trying to; further more the familiar story of family needs, now one thing now another, chased away the last trace of embarrassment. She was on the firmest of groundsthere, only she was thinking again how old and ill her aunt was looking and did not answer immediately. When she did it was to exclaim warmly again:
"But naturally! Of course we must send him to the country. Manny will tell us where." Then Fanny, who was, indeed, as Pauli said, "a good fellow" and no fool either added, "Don't you want to take the money to Irma yourself?"
So that was all it was—that stone-heavy act! Light as thistledown really—because Fanny was Fanny.
Then suddenly as she sat there looking at her, for she knew not how long, with still unspent treasures of love in her look, she saw that Fanny's eyes were wet, not because of Ferry either, he could be helped, but because of other things, things that she, her poor aunt, didn't know about. She saw that for all Fanny's gayety there were rings around her lovely eyes and that she was pale under that merest touch of rouge. The merest touch was all she ever used. She was too wise as well as too lovely to be the painted woman. Fanny hung out no signs.
Then Frau Stacher found herself saying to her niece who lived just off the Kaerntner Street:
"Fanny, precious one, you too, have some grief."
Frau Stacher was seeing all things from a great but clear distance. Things stood out very sharply now that that feverish blur seemed suddenly to have been wiped from her eyes. It was as if she, Ildefonse Stacher, stood on a mountain and saw the world, a valleyed plain, spread out before her. Mortals dwelt in it, doing their little best or their little worst. Sharp as their figures were it was still too far to see what exactly was their best and what their worst. Legions of them. Hosts of them. She saw Fanny fighting under deep-dyed colors, in an innumerable army of women, drawn up in array against the sons of other women. The look she bent upon her niece as she turned from the contemplation of the armies in the plain became more tender, more grave.
Fanny's eyes flooded with tears under that look; hanging crystal a moment about her dark lashes, they fell slowly leaving smooth, shining, white little roads down her cheeks with just that touch of rouge. Such a little thing as that Frau Stacher could focus her eyes on,—even after the immensity of the plain.
Fanny went over and knelt by her aunt who had always loved her—who loved her now—and put her shining head against that thin breast and wept. Fanny hadn't wept, except in rage, for a long time, and there were many tears to fall.
"I can't bear it, I can't bear it," she whispered, but she didn't say what she couldn't bear and Tante Ilde didn't ask her, only pressed that gleaming head more closely to her. And Fanny should have noticed how strangely her aunt was breathing when she had her head there against her breast. But suddenly she got up and said something about her nerves being "total kaput" and went into her bedroom and closed the door.
Maria crept in from the kitchen.
"It's the Count," she whispered, "I'm afraid we're going to lose him. Fanny adores the ground he walks on. A fine gentleman, a Cavalier," (Maria pronounced it "cawlier" in her soft, thick Viennese) "but not a kreutzer to bless himself with and a South American girl whose Papa has more head of cattle than in all Europe, is crazy about him and wants to marry him. Whatever we'll do, I don't know. She's that jumpy when the bell rings, she's afraid it's bad news coming in at the door. His family is ruined by the Peace and his father commanding and his mother praying him to save them, and four unmarried sisters too. A bad mess we're in and what will be the end? I went to the fortune-teller a week ago,—a wonder,—and she saw cattle, cattle everywhere and told me I was to beware of them, but how can I beware of stupid cattle stamping about in South America?" asked Maria helplessly, resentfully. "I knew all the time what she meant—and saying, too, that she saw a letter coming. Oh, I've been that worried! Naturally I haven't told Fanny, but I've been waiting for that letter ever since. You don't know Fanny," Maria's eyes filled with tears, "one day she says she will kill herself and another that she's going into a convent," she whispered dismally, after a cautious look at the closed door; "and if Fanny ever gets startedthatway, she'll make Maria Magdalena look about like this," and she proceeded to measure a negligible quantity of the surrounding atmosphere between her thumb and forefinger. There was, however, pride in her voice.
Frau Stacher was listening vaguely. For all her deep interest in Fanny, she was finding it difficult to focus her thoughts. Things were getting blurred again.
Maria kept on, a warning note in her voice, "I'll feel sorry for the family if Fanny doesn't hold out," (Maria, it will be seen, was at the other side of "holding out"—the far side.) "She bought the villa at Moedling last year and we put a lot of money in England through a Jew," here Maria was quite contemptuous ... "but," she added in another and fondly indulgent tone, "we had to let the Count, his people were starving, have a lot of that. We still get some income from it, but there are so many of us, and if Fanny should lose her nerve,"—Maria broke off; only she didn't use the ordinary word for "nerve" but the famous Vienna expression "Hamur," which means, beside nerve, a lot of things that are both more and less.
Tears overflowed her small, dark, friendly eyes. There was no nonsense about Maria. She adored Fanny, she was proud of Fanny and to have the revered aunt sitting there made a priceless occasion on which to relieve her feelings. Crossing her arms over her ample bosom she went on:
"She gives everything away, not only to the family and naturally to the Count, but yesterday—will you believe it,—to a shameless hussy, no better than she should be, she gave a heap of money to keep her out of the hospital, where she truly belongs. I told Fanny where I thought she'd end herself if she didn't look out, but Fanny" ... she broke off suddenly as the bedroom door opened.
"What are you gossiping about?" Fanny cried sharply to her, "Didn't you hear the door bell ring?" Then as it rang again a contraction passed over her face and she started to the door herself.
But Maria, in spite of her avoirdupois, was out like lightning. After a moment's parleying in the hall she was back.
"Nothing," she said looking fondly, relievèdly at Fanny, "It's only to say the carriage is there."
Fanny went slowly back into her room followed by Maria who shut the door. Frau Stacher left alone, almost immediately fell into a doze; her eyes closed heavily and she slipped deeply into the big chair. But she couldn't quite lose herself for she had a feeling that it would soon be time to go and kept trying to keep herself awake.
She sat up sharply, with a start, when Fanny reappeared, how long after she could not have told, in a black costume whose long, fur-trimmed cape fell smartly about her form. A tiny black velvet hat from which she had just torn the cunningly, expensively placed blue aigrette, put her eyes in a becoming, melancholy shadow. She had an extra pair of black gloves in her hand and a fine dark leather bag that she had done with, to replace the "horror" as she called it to herself that her aunt was using.
"You've got such dear little hands," she was saying as she held out the gloves, "These ar'n't big enough for me. I paid a heathen price for them, and this bag's a bit handier than yours." But in spite of her pleasant words, her pallor was so extreme as she held out the gloves and bag, that her aunt whose eyes were again very bright and not alone with fever, noted it anxiously.
"Oh, my little, little Fanny," she cried in quite a strong voice, and even held out her arms. She shared, in a way she could not have expressed, Fanny's grief whatever it was. She didn't want Fanny, dear, gold Fanny to suffer. Fannymustn'tsuffer. Fannymustn'tweep. She wanted to live a long, long time, even uncomfortably, denudedly, so that out of the whole careless world, Fanny might always have someone who truly loved her.
Then she became aware, for the first time, of something that intimately concerned herself. The shape and color of her own life.... Loving the children of three other women had beenherlife. Her middle class life, undisturbing and for so long undisturbed. One day, one year, like another, always loving the children of three other women ... looking through the same windows at the same things. And suddenly now Fanny's world, Fanny's strange world.... It had other horizons, red horizons behind dark mountains with their secrets. But of these secrets her aunt was not thinking. She only knew, as she stood close to Fanny, that it was her own flesh and blood that was suffering,—beautiful and suffering.
How Fanny's beauty threw a bright, blinding cloud about everything that concerned her! She said again:
"My darling child, my beautiful child, don't weep," as Fanny pressed against her, and she comforted her as she might have done in the far off years for girlish griefs. Had she reflected she might have changed her old motto into "Beauty stays, Virtue goes."
She was breaking in Fanny's house for a last time her alabaster box of precious spikenard. From it, in the blue room, a strong fragrance came, over-powering the scent of lily of the valley from an expensive shop in the Graben that hung about Fanny's clothes, and the thin perfume of the too-early blossomed plant. She was thinking only of Fanny's generosity and why she could indulge those many generous impulses she thought not at all,—just as if the family didn't lower their voices when speaking of Fanny and look around to see that the children weren't there. She felt, too, intimately joined to Fanny. Deeply beneath consciousness was that feeling that Fanny was yet to give her something essential, had some ultimate gift for her, that she must be there to receive.... That it was to be her deathbed she didn't know. She only felt that something final and priceless would come through Fanny.
And truly 'tis a great thing to give any one. For mostly each one, no matter how he wanders or is denuded, has, in some strange way, his own.
They were driving slowly up over the noisy cobble stones of the Jacquingasse on their way to the cemetery, Kaethe and Fanny and Tante Ilde on the back seat of the big, black mourning coach. Kaethe, wedged between them, was holding on her lap the white wreath. Opposite sat the Professor. On his knees for a last time was Carli; Carli in his little white box; Carli on his first and only journey.
The sable horses struck the cobble stones with their slow, accustomed beat. It seemed to Frau Stacher the loudest sound she had ever heard, and "some day for you, some day for you" seemed cadenced unmistakably....
In the dark Minorite church Fanny had been a model of piety and recollection. She crossed herself so slowly, so devoutly. She buried her face in her hands and knelt long without fidgeting on the hard, uncomfortable stool. She took holy water and held a tip of her finger to Kaethe as they went out and then to Tante Ilde and to Leo. She and Kaethe had always loved each other very much. Fanny after her wont was going through the afternoon without stint or sloppiness. It would be, in her hands, an "entire" matter.
As they drove along Kaethe rested her head on her sister's warm, scented shoulder. Her eyes were dry, but her face was haggard from the night.
No one noticed that Tante Ilde didn't say a word. Kaethe and Leo were with their child a last time and Fanny, who generally selected pleasant things to do, was finding it more wearing than she had thought and was plunged in her own reflections. At one moment she said to herself "I'm not going to be able to stick it out," and forgot their griefs and miserably let her thoughts turn to the man she truly loved, and if everything in the world, every last thing, had been different.... Then suddenly she fell to cursing in her heart a certain predatory gentleman whom she had known in the "beginning," no, before the "beginning," but she pulled herself up round, that carriage was no place for curses, neither was it the moment. Then she caught sight of her face above Eberhardt's right shoulder. It was distinctly mirrored in the reflecting surface of the glass at his back, formed by the heavy black flaps of the driver's coat. It was white, white as the coffin on Eberhardt's lap, and the eyes were deep, dark pits, almost as if the flesh had fallen away from them. She was horribly frightened. What was the warm thing that went out of you and after it went out you were put in a box?... She jerked her head so that it slipped from view. But she got Tante Ilde's instead.... It was just dreadful.... All right as long as you lived, but there came a time when beauty, which had been so helpful, was clearly of no avail.... The activities of family and town were concentrated on getting you into a box and then ... Fanny who believed in hell and damnation, drew in her breath shudderingly. She was thankful to feel Kaethe's warm, living head against her shoulder. She wasn't dead yet—she was suddenly sure, too, that she'd have "time to repent." She quite brightened up, and as she never did anything by halves was apparently entirely herself by the time they got to the cemetery.
Fanny in the bosom of her family, for once taking charge of things in person, not just paying from a distance, was really worth seeing. Fanny at last visibly the source of whatever mercies they received. Fanny, as Pauli so truly called her, the family Doxology ... according to the mysterious permissions of God the source of their only blessings.
Fanny weeping and praying by the little grave, supporting the stricken mother—her sister, and laying on it the big wreath. Fanny taking them to the café near the cemetery and giving them hot coffee after their cold grief....
It was Fanny, too, who, when some extraordinarily stubbly semmels were served with it, bearing not the slightest resemblance to the anciently far-famed Viennese rolls, scolded the shambling, flat-footed waiter and said loudly it was a "shame" and "disgusting," and ended by going over to the desk and saying something in a lower tone to the gaunt woman who sat there. The woman had promptly produced some coffee cake and some crescents kept only for rich grief. She was used to pale, tear-washed faces. Every day, every day, they came in and went out. She had seen many a strange alteration in their looks after that hot coffee, even after ersatz coffee. People kept on living for all they had that momentary feeling that they couldn't. She had sat at that desk for twenty years. Grief, she knew it, all kinds, ... and they kept on living.
Even Kaethe, though her throat was stiff and dry with mother-grief, even Kaethe had taken her coffee.
But Tante Ilde made no pretense at drinking hers, not even a sip. Those little shivers had changed into a continuous trembling. She felt both hot and cold. Her eyes were filmy. The only thing she wanted to do really was to lie down, never to move again, to give way to that over-powering lassitude that she could no longer struggle against. She was only vaguely worried because she'd lost the new bag; dropped it at the grave probably, though when Eberhardt went back to get it, immediately when she noticed its loss, on coming out of the cemetery, it had already vanished from the earth. After her first dismay, she had strangely not cared, and now she was murmuring something about the alcove, not at all what any of the others were thinking or talking of.
Suddenly Kaethe, startled out of her own grief at a trembling motion of her aunt's shoulders, had looked at her in alarm.
"But what is the matter, Tante Ilde?" she asked.
"Why, she's really ill!" cried Fanny sharply, "we've got to get her home."
Her aunt hearing the word home muttered once more something about the alcove. Her face was ashen, but her pale, wide eyes shone strangely through the film that again threatened to veil them.
"We must go right away," Fanny cried and hastily paid for the coffee.
Her aunt didn't even hear her. All her strength was engaged in getting totteringly to the door, the professor's arm about her.
"I'm going to take her with me," Fanny whispered to Kaethe as they followed out to get into the coach.
Kaethe looked at her deeply, there was much love in her glance, but she only said:
"I don't think she likes it at Irma's. Irma's so fierce and she's so gentle."
"Sour stick," said Fanny as usual when referring to her step-mother. "I'll just keep her with me, for a day or two, till she's better," she continued thinking boldly, swiftly, "Maria can look after her."
It seemed suddenly the most natural thing in the world to have Tante Ilde with her for a day or two.
"Fanny, how good you are to us all," Kaethe whispered to her sister.
"Good—nothing!" said Fanny. But virtue was, all the same, its own quite sufficient reward at that moment, though she felt horribly self-reproachful at the thought that sometimes she'd let them go for months ... suppose they had all died!
Tante Ilde kept slipping down between her nieces in the carriage, though they were supporting her as well as they could. Her head was hanging over her breast. She wanted to sleep, even bumping along over those cobble stones. They all watched her anxiously. Once Fanny, her nerves quite on edge, leaned out of the window and screamed to the driver in a horrible voice that the others didn't recognize: "You, sheepshead! Get along!"
Then somewhat restored she drew her head in and after a few minutes, opening her immense gold bag gave Kaethe some money. No, Fanny wasn't doing things by halves that day.
"Get something nice for supper,—for the children," she added with sudden tears that were for the living children—no more for Carli who was really forever safe, though they seemed to have left him alone, in that chill Vienna earth, under that darkening January sky....
Frau Stacher scarcely knew how they got her upstairs. Only as from a great distance she heard Maria's "Jesus, Marie, Josef!" as they went in. She was beyond any more definite impression than that she had ceased to struggle. Fortitude, cruel virtue, were no longer demanded of her.
When she was gently laid on Fanny's bed she was conscious at first of its soft comfort under her aching body. They were taking off her clothes. She wished, but not anxiously, nor even ashamedly, that her chemise had not been so old or so grey from being always washed out in her little basin, but it didn't really matter she knew, and she quite forgot about it when something fresh and silken and scented took its place, lying smoothly against her back with its hot point of pain.
"Alcove," she continued to mutter from time to time between stertorous breathings.
"Why's she talking so much about an alcove?" whispered Fanny to Maria as they sat by the bed waiting for Hermann, whom Eberhardt was to get and send back in the mourning coach.
"It's where she sleeps at Frau Irma's,—a sort of alcove, off the living room. She's got her old brown divan in it, you remember in Baden, but she needs a room of her own. When you get old you need to have a door to close, and then Frau Irma is not always easy."
"Easy? A porcupine," Fanny whispered back and added something about Croatians in general not complimentary to that former Crownland. Then she looked restlessly at her watch.
"Why doesn't he come? Maria, I'm afraid," she ended with a break in her voice.
"Itisgoing badly with her," nervously admitted Maria, who had once been a great one at sick beds and who, when it was not so personal, loved to be in at a death.
Frau Stacher's breathing was indeed very noisy. It whistled through her thin chest, it came in gasps from her blue mouth.