Part 12

No, truly she knew one needn't weep for Carli, but she felt so stupidly weak, there in that warm room with an abundant repast about to be served to her; she leaned more heavily against the table, she wanted terribly her soup, but after her way she said nothing and was able to continue, as she broke off a piece of her roll and began to eat it:

"Kaethe's grieving for Carli just as if he were her only child," and both childless women, soft as their hearts were, looked at each other not quite understanding.

"You ought to see the wreath of white roses that Fanny brought and coffee and cake. She was so sweet. She kissed Kaethe, in that way of hers ... you know, and when she knelt by Carli she wept as if her heart was going to break. She was always so fond of children when she was a girl. She would kneel awhile by Carli and then she would come back to Kaethe. She kept saying she should have done more, that she was a wretch, a monster, you know how she is, and it ended by Kaethe's comforting _her_. I made coffee for them all."

"I thought she'd go when she knew," began Corinne slowly, to add suddenly as a child, with a wondering look: "Tante Ilde, I don't understand anything about anything."

Though her aunt returned her gaze there was no answer in it. She didn't understand the least beginning of anything either.

"I'm going to Fanny's for dinner tomorrow," she said at last picking up the thought at its only concrete point. And this time there was no blush in her face. Why always blush about Fanny?

"To Fanny's tomorrow?" Corinne echoed quickly and turned a deep scarlet, the color flooding her face to disappear under the low brim of her hat. Tante Ilde at Fanny's! It was the ultimate disorder in their upset world, the rest of them, yes, any, all of them if need be, but not Tante Ilde. There was something snow-white about Tante Ilde. Three score years and ten in a grimy world had left on her no slightest smirch, and even now in the process of her despoilment she was at times blindingly white. That whiteness was the one ornament she still wore and became her exceedingly.

"You can't, you mustn't," said Corinne slowly after a moment.

"I can, I must," answered Tante Ilde firmly, finding herself suddenly in a new position, far the other side of both good and evil. "She didn't want me to--at first,--but I begged her so. She brought me back from Kaethe's in a taxi last night. Corinne, I _knew_ when I went there again that I was going to be brought back, that I wouldn't have to walk, though I couldn't know it would be Fanny.... She threw her arms around me and wept and said she was miserable herself, that she would be better off dead."

Neither of the two women let themselves wonder what her griefs were ... Fanny's griefs....

"I thought tomorrow you would go to some nice little café or just buy something for yourself and eat it at Irma's," continued Corinne lamely for one so generally adequate.

"Perhaps another time," answered her aunt with an involuntary gesture of putting the chalice from her as Corinne spoke of Irma. It was her nearest approach to complaint, but Corinne quite knew what it meant.

"Except for Carli it hasn't _all_ been too bad?" she questioned entreatingly.

"No, no, indeed, truly. Only I've seen so much, Inny," she answered saying the baby name for Corinne, so long unused, "so much of--of human beings," she ended quite detachèdly and her eyes got very wide and wandered a little.

"Irma is hard, I know," and Corinne put her hand out to find her aunt's, to hold her attention, "but she has that alcove and I thought, too, it would be a way to help the boys. I'm always worrying about the boys, and then it's almost impossible to find a place to lay one's head."

"The foxes of the earth," began Tante Ilde with a still stranger look on her face and then stopped.

Corinne was overcome by a quick anguish. Something was hurting her terribly though she couldn't have said which one of many things, and her aunt was suddenly as someone she had never known.

Tante Ilde had always had her little phrases and mottoes--but not like that. "Time brings roses," she would say consolingly to any child who was unhappy in the old days. "Hard work in youth is sweet rest in old age," when the boys wouldn't study; and she often reminded the girls that "Beauty goes, but virtue stays."

"You're looking so pale, darling, you're not ill, are you?" Corinne asked, after a moment breaking anxiously into that new, disturbing silence.

"No, just a little cold, my shoulders ache a bit,--then all the tears," she answered, "nothing more."

"Are you warmly enough dressed?" pursued Corinne, after another pause during which her eyes had wandered again to the door.

"Oh, yes, I have on two waists," and she smiled weakly.

"I believe you're faint for food," said Corinne at last, with a strange, burning look on her face, "we won't wait for Pauli, we'll have our soup right now," and she called the waiter.

It was still early and few people were in the restaurant, the waiters mostly standing idly around, smoothing their hair or flicking their serving napkins about as they talked, but it seemed to Frau Stacher an eternity before the order was taken and another endless period till the soup was brought and the waiter poured it hotly, appetizingly from the smoking metal cup into her plate. The first spoonful did its blessed work and the palest shade of pink came into her face. It seemed more delicious than anything she had ever tasted and she pitied all poor creatures who felt as she had been feeling and were not, like her, sitting before a steaming plate of bean soup.

"It's the tears and the fatigue, and perhaps a bit of a cold coming on," thought Corinne as she, too, partook gratefully of her soup, quite ready for it after her three hours at the bank, working at those interminable billions that threatened to run into trillions. Life at the bank was now composed of seemingly countless zeros, orgies of zeros, and often a fine headache after.

As they took their soup, with what remained of their rolls, they ceased to mourn for Carli, ... something bright and beautiful that had been and was no more.... They didn't try either, to look into the wherefores and whys of Fanny's existence, neither its splendors nor its miseries, though as Tante Ilde was taking her last spoonful of soup, she leaned across the table and said, a confidential note in her voice, something deprecatory too:

"Last night the boys didn't wake up, but Lilli and Resl kept peeping in at the door while Fanny was there. They followed me into the kitchen when I was making coffee and asked about 'Tante Fanny;' if I'd noticed how sweet her furs smelt and if I'd heard how her bracelets tinkled, she wears a lot of bracelets, broad bands of jewels that jingle and glitter. Lilli wanted to know who her husband was and Resl said, 'Ssh, she hasn't any,'" ended Tante Ilde with a sigh. But Corinne had ceased to listen, inherently fascinating as the theme of Fanny's bracelets was, for behind that pale waiting she was in a turmoil. Suddenly she flushed and then as suddenly grew white.

Pauli was standing at the door looking about. In a moment he was beside them and as he sat down in that eager way of his, life seemed to stream from him, more than he needed for himself, something overflowing, always something to give.

He was just as kind to Tante Ilde as to Corinne. She didn't feel a bit in the way ... for once ... like that. She was again in a world where given enough to eat and a warm place to eat it in, human beings still loved and longed for each other, not simply for food and shelter. A whole cityful of human beings with hearts and brains as well as stomachs thinking solely about what they were going to eat! It suddenly seemed a terrible waste to her ... in a world where there was love, beauty, wisdom, hidden, lost though they might be.

The waiter was standing by them with his pad in his hand waiting for the ladies to decide or for the gentleman to decide for them. Nothing like that had happened to Frau Stacher since the winter before she lost her income. The soup had put new life into her, and if it hadn't been for that vaguely evil thing she felt in her veins, she would have been almost her own gentle, pleasing, easy self again.

"Don't look only at the prices, Tanterl," Pauli was saying with his smile that so easily became a laugh. "How about half a young chicken with rice for each?" he suggested lavishly, surprised to find it there on the otherwise meagre list.

"Oh, Pauli, how reckless! If we're going to have _meat_, boiled beef would be nice." Indeed to Frau Stacher, desperately needing the stimulus of meat--any kind would have done, though the boiled beef she humbly suggested didn't inhabit the Paradise where young chickens abided, eternally cut in two waiting to be cooked and eaten.

"But not at all!" he cried, "we're going to have a feast," and he gave the order for the chicken and asked for the wine-card, selecting an Arleberger, that a friend in Budapest made a specialty of.

Tante Ilde felt vaguely, pleasantly like a woman in a romance, interesting but unreal. It wasn't only the food, but that looking at the menu and ordering right out of the heart of it, without other guide than what was the best. It conjured up the agreeable ghosts of those far-off comfortable years; and then to be carried along on that stream of love and immediate affection. She blessèdly forgot the dark depths of those waters that surged about Pauli and Corinne....

"Next week, if you insist, we can be less grand," Pauli was saying, "boiled beef then, and the week after no meat at all. That's the way it goes in Vienna now," he continued cheerfully. And then Corinne in her pleasant way of alluding to pleasant things said:

"Auntie, you remember the 'marinierter' carp you used to give us at Baden on Friday?"

Frau Stacher flushed at this that was like a blow on memory, but she only said with a retrospective look,

"Yes, Frieda did do it well,--and the Fogosch too," she added. In those days the beautiful blue Danube had seemed to fill one of its natural uses in supplying her table with that, her favorite fish. But it all seemed strangely uninteresting to her. She was trying vainly to keep her thoughts, so unaccountably, so uncomfortably wandering, close within her body, within that pleasant room from which all three of them must too soon depart.

Pauli's love was almost visibly enfolding Corinne, just as his affection was flowing about Tante Ilde. So different the two, as different and distinct as two primary colors, yet blending. She felt wrapt in something warm and many-colored, and what its pattern was she no longer tried to see. Then suddenly and anxiously she was aware that there was still the transparency about Corinne that, as she watched her approach that morning, she thought had come up from the wet, shining streets, but there in the warm, dark restaurant it was the same....

Her likeness to Fanny, too, was very apparent, there were but two years in time between them, ... though so many other things.... She had never noticed it so clearly, not even when they were children. The same blue eyes, with their sudden oblique look; in Corinne it was disturbing, in Fanny devastating. The same pale, shining hair, the same fine nose; only in Fanny all was more accented, more complete. Her eyes were bigger and bluer, her hair yellower and thicker, her complexion more dazzling, the oval of her face more perfect. Yet Corinne ... her face had not indeed the glitter of Fanny's blinding, noonday beauty, but its moonbeam charm was forever working its own pale magic....

Then the half chicken for each with its little round mound of rice was brought on, and though Pauli took out his glass to look at his, and speculated on the evidently not distant hour of its hatching, still it was quite delicious, and that shining gravy over the rice!

"I'm speculating in everything," he continued vigorously, "I've joined the Black Bourse Brigade, it's where you pick up trillions," and with an airy gesture he pulled out a wallet and showed Tante Ilde some magic-working dollars and some potent English pounds, but which last in a subtle way gave place to the noisier charm of the dollars.

"Everybody speculates," he went on, "the lift boys in the hotels, the porters at the stations, the old women selling newspapers. Everybody. It's in the air."

Then as they were finishing the last of the rice and gravy, with little crumbs of bread added so that not a bit should be lost, Corinne gave voice slowly to what she had in mind, looking narrowly, slantingly at Pauli:

"Tante Ilde is going to Fanny's tomorrow for her dinner."

"To Fanny's tomorrow?" he questioned in an astonishment that caused Tante Ilde's face to flush a deep rose. To Pauli's way of thinking though a good many things were done, certain others weren't. Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's clearly fell under the latter head. Saints and sinners were mostly all the same to him. One could rarely tell which was which anyway, but somehow this....

"Fanny is so good to us--I don't think she always has it,--as easy as it seems," she faltered, feeling quite uncomfortable, not because she was going, but because of Pauli's strange look.

"Fanny _is_ a good fellow," he answered slowly, reflectively, but he looked at neither of the women as he spoke. The fact was that for all his experience of men and matters Pauli himself had come to a point where he didn't understand anything anymore than they did. Life was for him, as for them, one great confusion. Except his terrible need for Corinne, clear, urgent, urgent beyond any words.... But now this picture of Tante Ilde at Fanny's! Tante Ilde shining white, Tante Ilde who thought that all wolves were lambs inside and even in process of being devoured scarcely perceived their true nature. Life was, indeed, presenting itself in its most unreasonable and confounding aspect. "Much will be forgiven her because she has loved much," was all right for everything except just this ... or if a daughter had been in question. Then he tried honestly to think, not according to that feeling that had leapt up in him at Corinne's words, but according to his usual way of easy judgment.

"Fanny has a gold heart, I can't tell you not to go," he hesitated, "she deserves it," he finished at last, but evidently against the grain. Pauli was really very ill at ease at that special manifestation of the disorder of their world. _Where_ were your feet and where your head? Tante Ilde at Fanny's! What after all did it mean? All kinds of saints in the world, he knew. Still it was a pity, among a thousand other pities. Indeed Pauli was shocked in a way that neither of the women were. Pauli, to whom nothing human was foreign, was shocked at a little thing like Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's, when everybody, everywhere was up against real death and destruction--a detail like that and he who had seen everything was not only shocked but horrified. Riddle. Riddle. Then suddenly he changed the conversation and pulled out his wallet again, crying, without any noticeable preamble:

"Tante Ilde must have a presentli!"

Uncomfortably he felt that the special problem confronting them had grown out of material ruin; lack of security was, after all, regulating that situation. In a word when you didn't have money you did a lot of things that you didn't do when you had it. It was as plain and as stupid as that.... It put decency on an indecent footing or vice versa. And morality, why morality positively had its legs in the air.

What little he could do for Tante Ilde wouldn't be enough to give her existence a basis. He knew what he could do for her and what not. Life was now a small sheet on a big bed and whichever end was pulled, somebody was left bare.

Corinne gave Pauli one of her palely flashing looks that always left him blinded as he laid those bank notes by Tante Ilde's plate, almost in among the bare bones of the chicken. He had a strange expression on his face, something final that made Tante Ilde suddenly and terribly anxious, as he returned it.

"Oh, Pauli dear, you spoil me," she only said tremulously, glancing from him to Corinne, whose look like some slow-turning beacon was now shining upon her. But still she was anxious with a grim, new anxiety. Corinne's danger was so clearly imminent.

Then that fear too, passed; her existence seemed but a long street, with figures appearing and disappearing, signs and symbols were quickly flashed before her and too quickly gone for understanding. It was the processional of life that she was aware of for the first time. Then again things shifted and passed, and she found she was happy, not because of the money, though that was pleasant enough, but quite simply because she was warm and nourished and loved. She couldn't, in that moment, accept further calamities, nor even look at the shadows they cast before them....

Then with that money on the table, they turned quite inevitably to the everlasting subject of Exchange, which was plunging to unfathomable depths, and the whole population headlong after it.

But Frau Stacher for the moment continued to feel pleasantly distant from the abyss, and as the sounds of those once almost unreckonable sums flowed over her ears, she caught again the agreeable "rentier" feeling of happier days. Corinne could talk in figures, too, from the vantage ground of the Depositen Bank. She was doing well; next year she expected to be doing better. "Then," she looked lovingly at her aunt, "I will hunt for that tiny, tiny apartment."

"Next year!" interrupted Pauli, not included in the heaven Corinne's words evoked, and so deep was the longing in his voice, in his words that Frau Stacher bent her eyes quickly upon her plate.

He put his hand out over Corinne's. She was flushing and paling under his touch; his dark, unexpectedly small hand had, on the little finger, a thick gold ring in which was sunk a turquoise turned very green. That ring was somehow like Pauli. Color, Pauli loved it--and yet in moonbeam Corinne with no more color than the palest opal, than a pearl, lay all his desire.

Frau Stacher had long since forgotten what being in love was like, the love of man for woman, perhaps she had never known, but suddenly it seemed clear, the pulsing mystery of such love, and she was very frightened. Just Pauli's hand over Corinne's made it clear, much clearer than his words, than his tone even, as he cried:

"Oh, Corinne if everything were different, save you and I--and Tante Ilde! If I could only take you and care for you, never let you go to an office again--and always dress you in silver, Corinne, Corinne!"

"Next year," Corinne was repeating slowly. Her look was very oblique and distant, and her face was suddenly pale, though quite bright--as if consumed to pale, hot ashes in the look Pauli bent upon her, consumed to last resistance.

Between these two looks Frau Stacher was suddenly crushed; she could scarcely breathe, another intolerable distress came to join that pain in her chest.

Would they hold out, those two who loved each other so, hold out in the dark, grim city that now took heed of little save food? Would they build themselves a house without foundations, in a nameless street, above ruins? Or would Corinne wander alone till her sunset, homeless as a cloud?...

Then Frau Stacher became aware of a great exhaustion. The life-force had done with her, was slipping from her body, she could feel it retreating, something finally, inexorably destructive taking its place.... But those two in whom it surged so high, so hot?...

It was over. And how is anyone to know that something has happened for the last time until the irrecoverable afterwards? Corinne had, indeed, sweetly said goodby to her aunt, brightly, warmly, visibly leaving her, as always, the gift of her love. But every fibre was straining towards Pauli as she slipped away, a shadow palely-gold about the head, attenuated to last expression in the black sheathe of her coat. Pauli, (how pale, too, as he watched her disappear), was going back to the Travel Bureau he so ably managed, seeing to it that "Protection" and favoritism were practiced to their fullest extent for those travellers who could pay for them.... Pauli who spoke all known languages; Pauli who could conjure up special trains from the void; Pauli who smoothed the way incredibly for foreign millionaires come to see for themselves how things really were in Vienna, or for indigenous exchange lords who knew the time had come to travel; Pauli, to whom almost everything seemed easy.... "Get Birbach to attend to it" was the peace phrase that replaced the references to his luck during the war. Nothing was too good--or too bad--for those that could pay for it. On the other hand Pauli was often impelled to do something for those who couldn't pay. Lately, too, he had been drawn into politics, trying to help leash those dogs of destruction let loose upon his country. He was found to have something hotly convincing in his talk, or he could pierce an adversary with a thin point of ridicule that would make his listeners laugh till their sides ached. It wasn't a meal, but it certainly warmed them and Pauli was always sure of a full house. But now that love for Corinne had begun to waste him, to crumble his other interests and activities. His strength, his time were mostly spent madly, hotly hoping for something, anything, out of the void whence events come,--the void known to every longing heart. Pauli was temperamentally aware of the fluidity of life--for all except the very old, _they_ were caught like fragile shells in the hard stratum of age. It was one of the reasons for his tenderness towards Tante Ilde, and his farewell had in it much of the love of a son, and the pity of the very strong for the very weak. So many out of her little world, in their several ways, had been saying their farewells to her. Of them all, Pauli's alone had it been knowingly the last, could scarcely have been more tender.

* * * * *

Then she found herself once more alone in the Augustinerstrasse. You were always, when you were old, finding yourself alone like that. She went on, suddenly forlorn to desperation. The sun had long since disappeared behind some leaden clouds hanging over the Capuchin Church, the rain was coldly falling and the streets were getting slippery again. The warmth in her veins was gone, the color departed from her face. Those unpleasant, sick shivers were passing thickly up and down her back, and that point of pain stuck between her shoulders. She pressed her umbrella, needing a stitch at one of the points, the cloth had slipped quite far up--when it happened she couldn't think--close down about her head. The damp, hurrying crowds were jostling her unbearably, carelessly poking their umbrellas into hers. She finally turned in at one of the less frequented streets to get back to the Hoher Markt, a little longer, but out of the relentless pressure of the crowd. She kept thinking about Pauli's hand over Corinne's, on the table; the crumpled paper napkins, the few tiny bread crumbs, the wine glasses with their deep, red lees, Pauli's dark hand with the gold and turquoise ring over the slim, unringed whiteness of Corinne's.... She wanted suddenly there in the cold streets to weep for Corinne, for Pauli. She was conscious of some faint, wordless prayer that went up out of her weakness, just frightened supplication rather than thinking, and "Oh, my little, _little_ Inny!"...

Then her eyes were caught and held by the fatal, antique symbol of ultimate, entire misery that was inescapably presenting itself.