Part 7

He was a very handsome man of forty in a full-colored, ample way, inclining slightly to embonpoint. His brown eyes were forever flashing and going out as he lifted or let fall his pale, heavy lids. A rosy shade lay upon his cheeks contrasting pleasantly with the clear olive of his skin. A dark moustache did not conceal his white teeth when he laughed, which was often, and they gave an additional accent to the whole, the color scheme becoming even blinding when he wore, as on that day, one of his favorite red neckties.

Immediately he filled the grey room, or perhaps it dissolved about him.... Life, life. He brought the life of his pleasant, easy-going, musical Viennese father; the life of his impetuous, fiery, musical Hungarian mother, that strong, active element which the Magyars infuse so happily into the more "gemuetlich" qualities of the Austrians. Whenever anything happened in Vienna for good or evil in the old days, it was generally traceable to the more dynamic qualities of the Hungarians,--and doubtless will be so again.

There was no hint of war or post-war days on Pauli's face, rather some astounding avoidance of their ills, some unimpaired eagerness for life. His wife and daughter were unacquainted with a pale shadow that of late often dimmed it.

The women, except Tante Ilde, were blotted out. She felt the exhilaration, the immediate electrization of the air and sat up quite straight, her elbows elegantly pressed against her waist and began to smile her fine, sweet smile. Her presence lay about Pauli as a wreathing mist about a mountain on a sunny day. Again he was thankful to find her there.

Dutifully he gave Anna a robust but empty kiss on both cheeks, with a "Well, how goes it?" and the same to Hermine, standing close by her mother. He thought fleetingly for the thousandth time that it was a calamity for women to be ugly.

Then he turned the full blaze of his countenance on Tante Ilde:

"Ach, the dear, lovely Auntie," he cried, "she must also have a Busserl," and he proceeded to kiss each pale cheek and even to press her against his thick, warm breast.

"Not lovely, only loving," she returned, but she smiled, suddenly quite happy and Pauli felt his words had not been in vain. He liked to have happy faces about him and laughter and jokes, and if it were women who were being made happy all the better.

"I smell something good," he next said amiably sniffing in the air, "and I'm quite ready. In the Cafés," he continued, "it's 3,000 crowns for a piece of bread, 10,000 for a glass of beer and 5,000 for a smell of roast pork from the next table!" Again he sniffed gayly. Even when he barked his shins against a hard, low bench that stood unnaturally near the dining table, he gave no sign of the impatience that always possessed him when with Anna. But in spite of his remarks about his hunger, he took very little of the lukewarm soup which Hermine had poured out too soon. And when she dragged her sleeve in the goulash as she put it on the table, he indulgently recounted a joke he had seen in the _Meggendorfer Blätter_. How a certain woman going into a cheesemonger's had skilfully passed her long sleeve through a dish of white cheese, in that way removing an appreciable quantity, and how the cheesemonger in a rage made her come back to pay for it, threatening to have her up for theft.

Sallow Hermine was greatly in awe of her highly-colored father, who expected from her, she uncomfortably felt, something that she could not offer, but now she was giggling girlishly, and even Anna's face seemed less formless.

Yes, Pauli was doing his best to make it pleasant for the quite accidental beings who bore his name. Dispensing smiles that, after all, were so rightly, though so strangely, theirs. Life was truly mysterious; they were human beings too, come out of nothing, hurrying as fast as Time could take them, to the same end. It produced undeniably at moments a feeling of comradeship,--though Pauli intended to avoid Anna in the other world....

Tante Ilde was indeed making things easier, suaver; Tante Ilde was really an alabaster box of precious ointment, broken anew each time she went into one of those homes not hers, diffusing sweet odors about her. They would mostly, (perhaps not Pauli), have thought: "It's poor old Tante Ilde and we've got to do something for her," not dreaming that all the time it was she who was doing something priceless for them.

Now he was in a fever of longing to hear a beloved name. But she told them first about Liesel and Otto, everything she could without making Anna jealous; not, of course, about the sausage. Meat twice a day would have scandalized Anna, and anyway Tante Ilde would never have been guilty of the indelicacy of speaking about that sausage, wrapped up and put away too. The fresh noodles in fresh butter were all that Anna and Hermine could really stand; they would talk about them for days; but she described in detail the package from the "Friends" at which Anna and Hermine pricked up their big ears and cried: "You don't say!" and Hermine ran and got an inch-long pencil and a piece of newspaper and wrote the address on the margin. Then she and her mother nodded their heads significantly at each other. They were both thinking that Irma should have let them know immediately, and that some afternoon late, when it was dark and they wouldn't be seen, they'd go for one of those packages....

As Tante Ilde was talking Pauli noticed the white lace about her neck and how genteel she contrived to look in spite of age and disaster. Then his eyes travelled to his daughter, seeing her really for the first time that day. Hermine had on a chocolate-colored dress with trimmings of an unpleasant blue. Pauli turned his eyes again to Tante Ilde's cameo face, from which the broad eyes seemed to look out more and more bluely as the dinner went on. Pleasure, even a little, was apt to put the color back into her eyes. Then he looked again at his daughter. He was thinking that the devil could take him if he knew what color would be becoming to his only child. Something, anything to emphasize her, to put her on the chart, so he followed out his natural taste as he said:

"I must give you a new dress, Hermine, pink or red or a good bright blue?"

Hermine was delighted at this mark of paternal affection and Anna astonished. When a long time after he saw the hard and vapid blue she chose he was finally and forever discouraged. No, Hermine had no flair, she always went wrong on colors, like Anna. His wife and daughter were beyond Pauli. Just those two women out of all Vienna he could rightfully go home to; Hermine was even named for his mother. "Na, dos ist kein Leben," it's no life, he often thought in his broadest, most expressive Viennese. Pauli who could speak perfectly half a dozen languages, always chose that in which to clothe satisfactorily certain unsatisfactory thoughts.

At last when Hermine was out in the kitchen smearing up with her finger the bit of jam that remained on the platter from the Palatschinken, Tante Ilde spoke the name Pauli had come to hear ... Corinne ... and stupid Anna didn't care. It was the mention of Fanny that she could not have borne. Anna never caught the truth about anything.

"I'm going to have dinner with Corinne on Friday," Tante Ilde said finally, a soft radiance spreading over her face, and turned her eyes, suddenly a lovely azure, full upon him. "Corinne is an angel."

Perhaps Tante Ilde shouldn't have said that right there before Anna, in Anna's own house, but Anna created an unendurable vacuum about herself, it made people want to throw something, anything into it to fill the horrible void.

"She thinks you are one," answered Pauli with a sudden deep breath, and there was a note in his voice that his wife, or at least his daughter, standing at the kitchen door, should have noticed.

Then his eye wandered to the only bit of color in the room,--the scarlet cloth covering his zimbalon.

"Shall I make a bit of music, Tante Ilde?" he suddenly cried with an indecipherable gesture, and laid his cigarette down on his plate, where wastefully in Anna's eyes, it smoked its life away. He pushed his chair back from the table and getting up uncovered the instrument without another word. He was suddenly one vast flame of love for Corinne. He knew the feeling well,--consuming, he was really beside himself ... in an instant ... like that. He began to play a wild Czardas of his mother's land. The light grew brighter in his eyes, the color deepened in his face, but it was of a moonbeam woman, shadow-thin, that he was thinking.

The music beat mercilessly upon the three listeners, with its cruel, splendid life-throb, with its piercing intimation that even a thousand years of love would be all too short for the longing heart. From time to time he emitted a wild cry and his nostrils would dilate; his body swayed rhythmically above the instrument. He was indeed "thirsty in the night and unslaked in the day."...

Anna remembered the short love-madness Pauli had once wrapped her in and pressed her hand against her flat breast.

Tante Ilde thought, too, of things forever gone,--not of love, that was too far off, but of her lost dignity and use, of all that would not, could not be again; she had no time to wait upon events.

Hermine was possessed by vague, youthful expectations of what life could so easily bring her, out of its whole long length, a life wherein someone would surely love her,--for want of another the thin young man she sometimes met on the stairs, who gave violin lessons to keep a passionate soul in a delicate body. Perhaps, sensitive, artistic, he would indeed be goaded on by that lurking, tricking spirit of the will-to-live to take Hermine, dull Hermine for wife, wrapping her for the brief moment necessary for the act in his own passion which would so perfectly conceal her essential poverty....

Suddenly Pauli stopped, the blood had gone from his face, leaving him very pale, but his eyes were full of a dark fire and in his bones was a grinding pain. He was in a mad hurry to be gone from that house of ghosts where he couldn't hold his being together.

"I'm rushed this afternoon, heaps of things to attend to," he cried as he lay down his batons and threw the scarlet cloth over the zimbalon. To his goodbye to Tante Ilde he added the reminder loudly, distinctly:

"It's understood, Tante Ilde, you're coming every Tuesday?" Then suddenly he was gone leaving the room dim and chill.

Anna went over to the window and stood by it, though she couldn't see into the street. Hermine almost immediately began to clear off the table.

But Tante Ilde sat quite still. She was thinking, "poor Anna, poor Anna." There was something very tender in her leave-taking, something that Anna gratefully, dumbly accepted without knowing what it was that was offered her, and then Tante Ilde slipped away to walk those several miles back to the Hoher Markt.

She had vaguely, diffidently hoped that she might go away when Pauli did, be carried along on his momentum. But he had gone so suddenly, there hadn't been time for any little arrangement or suggestion.

It was beginning to rain. The wind blew flat, cold drops against her face. She stood a moment looking at the trolleys clanging up and down the Mariahilfer Street. Why hadn't she walked in the morning?

IV

HERMANN AND MIZZI

_Staccato_

Hin ist hin! Verloren ist verloren.

When Doctor Hermann Bruckner was suddenly called from the security of his civil practice to take charge of a field-hospital, so great was the joy of his secret heart that even his wife became aware of it, and in her rustiest and most contentious tone asked him what on earth he was so pleased about, he was going out to the "olly" front where he was certain to be either killed or mutilated, and walking as if on air at the idea of getting there!

Skilful in diagnosis, resourceful in treatment, compassionate concerning the imponderable ailments of his patients as well as those visible, he had, it is true, bestowed a brief anxiety on certain of them left to the care of the diminishing number of proportionately overworked physicians in Vienna; but for himself.... Home where his heart was not, where Mizzi nagged and scolded, was icily disdainful or loudly reproachful, had long been a place in which he was desperately uncomfortable.

The day he left for the front his aunt Ilde had come in from Baden to say goodbye to this much-loved, and as she knew, much-tried nephew. Looking out of the window she had seen him settle back into his seat in the motor, laughing in a gay, new way with the colleagues beside him as he opened his cigarette case.

Hermann had indeed, been delivered by the war from something from which he had thought never to escape. For years, almost his only happy hours had been spent in his office, or hurrying about on his sick calls. He had a particular and personal regard for each patient, and the professional affection they awakened in him had a magnetic, communicable warmth, even the uninteresting old women, the chronic cases, received impartially, glowingly their share. His bedside manners were truly consoling and his warm handclasp, his reassuring pat on the shoulder made a visit to his office something to look forward to. In fact just seeing Doctor Bruckner made his patients feel that with his help they were not in any immediate danger of leaving this vale of tears for a world which, though they had always been assured was a better one, they had a singular distaste to entering. And then his gentle way with suffering children. Doctor Hermann Bruckner, specialist for women and children, was born to do just what he was doing.

But when he got home that flowing, busy life of his would suddenly stop, turn back chokingly upon itself, obstructing his every thought and feeling; for though Mizzi was unspeakably bored by him, she couldn't let him alone. The very sight of his pleasant face, the easy way he had of letting his six feet settle into an armchair, the slow smoking of his Trabuco, in some extraordinary, always unexpected way, would give rise to reproaches; never a moment when he could sit at ease after a hard day's work and talk about pleasant things, little, unimportant things. He never could tell just what would unbind Mizzi's tongue or uncork her temper. He made an easy living and they could have had many pleasures, but Mizzi was always wanting the one thing that the hour had not brought. It was considered by the family that Hermann had a hard time of it, that it was unfortunate that Mizzi was as she was, and Hermann, for reasons in the beginning not at all related to his own being, was now generally called by his relations "poor Manny."

They didn't realize any of them, that Mizzi was a woman of great natural energy which had no outlet, and that that was one of the reasons why the small supply of the milk of human kindness with which her Maker had provided her, had early soured. She got quite stout, but in her smart Austrian way, and each year became more easily annoyed and controlled her irritation less. Even the war which opened out activities to so many women had helped Mizzi not at all. She hated misery, disorder in any form and the sight of blood made her sick. She was inexpressibly bored by the whole thing and always spoke of it as "dumm."

When the War claimed Doctor Bruckner he was a very tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested man. His mobile, smiling face was ennobled by his prominent, but finely-formed nose and his very black beard and moustache gave his whole person a last significant accent. When the War had no further use for him and passed him into the still more pitiless arms of the Peace, he was broken, disabled, derelict, meaningless even. He reminded himself of a train wreck he had seen near Lodz in the beginning, the telescoped cars, the messy, shapeless débris.... That last month at Gorizia a bomb had fallen into his field-hospital. It had solved effectually the problems of his wounded, but it had increased his own. His right arm which had been shattered and hurriedly attended to, now hung nerveless in his sleeve. Mizzi's heart and temper had been briefly softened at the sight of his misfortunes; they were so evidently complete. His helplessness, however, soon induced a new note in her voice; one of condescension and later of hard, unveiled impatience.

Finally neurasthenia, on the track of so many, claimed him for its own. He developed a bad case of agoraphobia--could scarcely ever go through open spaces without a discomfort that amounted at times to agony, and Vienna seemed full of wide, open places. He would creep along walls, close to houses and doors, but when it came to crossing the street, unless, indeed, it were full of vehicles his eyes would sink and darken, his nostrils get blue and pinched. It was but one of various things,--that intolerably stupid going back and touching objects a second even a third time on his bad days, that continual putting on and taking off his coat when he was dressing, sometimes he was hours getting into his clothes, and other equally asinine matters. He still went to his office, across the hall,--but a one-armed, neurasthenic doctor! Half the patients who came needed something done that could only be done with two hands. His clientèle dwindled till mostly the poor alone came. To them he was an angel of mercy. But they made another complication. Mizzie hated the poor in any form, even the new poor, who had once been rich and whom she had envied in the old days, and when the quite thin pity engendered by his futile return had evaporated, she was constantly reproaching him for having a clientèle to whom he couldn't or wouldn't send bills. Hermann's life became a new kind of hell from which there seemed to be no more escape than from the final place of punishment. But for all Mizzi's unpleasant conjugal traits she was, as we have indicated, a woman of ability. She stepped out, on his return, when her practical sense showed her that the family fortunes in Hermann's hand would inevitably go from bad to worse, to retrieve them; and she did.

She boldly opened a lingerie shop, and with her good taste, her industry, her heartlessness and her voice soft as honey to customers, she soon began to do quite well. Fanny had advanced the necessary loan and sent her the first customers who brought others in their train. She developed an unsuspected talent for selling. Naturally impatient she was accommodating to the last degree in her shop. She took back things that had been paid for and returned the money with a smile. She exchanged things, she adjusted things. She could always be counted on to have extra sizes for the dark, stout, often bearded ladies who patronized her in increasing numbers. They generally had the most elemental of underwear, thick, machine-made garments, with machine-made lace and terrible pink bows; some had none at all.

Mizzi initiated them into the pleasant mysteries of transparent "dessous," real lace-trimmed and beribboned in delicate shades. And they had money. "Jesus, Marie, Joseph!" Mizzi would often exclaim, "what money! Great wads of it!"

Mizzi had a way of loosening their thick, high corsets and pulling them down, thereby dropping those shelves of flesh from under their chins, and with her cunningly-made brassières, those famous "Bustenhalter" that reduced the mountains of fat, or at least distributed them towards the back where the owners themselves couldn't see them, she was especially successful. "Taktvoll kaschieren," tactfully conceal, was what she modestly claimed to do with superfluous fat. Being inclined to embonpoint herself, fostered by her love of the truly tempting sweet dishes of her native land, yet having that smart, pleasing figure, she could say confidently to the stoutest:

"I'm a good deal thicker than you are, and look at me!"

They looked at Mizzi in her impeccable loose black dress over her snugly-worn corset and were both delighted and convinced. Mizzi's business was inevitably destined to go from good to still better, just as Hermann's was dwindling to those so begrudged office hours for the very poor, now his only treasure.... His aunt Ilde, thought secretly that Hermann must be greatly loved by his Creator to have been found worthy of so many misfortunes.... He only occasionally took money for his services and except for a few crowns spent in a certain café sitting before his beer or his coffee, reading the newspaper, talking to a chance acquaintance, or oftener just thinking, thinking, he turned what little he did make back again, a pitiful drop, into the river of black and fatal misery that flowed through his office.

Mizzi had something quite ruthless about her. Openly and cordially disliking the poor in general and poor relatives in particular, the last thing she would have thought of was having one of these latter come to her regularly for a meal. But when Fanny sent old Maria to ask if she could have Tante Ilde for dinner on Wednesday, or to choose some other day if that wasn't convenient, though she had thought it a monstrous nuisance, that day being no more convenient than any other of the days of the week, she had said "Yes" in a voice gone quite white from lack of enthusiasm. But, Fanny,--she couldn't afford to offend Fanny....

The establishment once known as "Hermann's" was now known as "Mizzi's." She had suggested his giving up his office and renting out the rooms to Americans who would pay in dollars. They could make a "heathen money" that way. But so strange, so terrifying was the look that had come into his face that Mizzi for once had quailed before it. She hadn't felt safe and anyway Fanny probably wouldn't have stood for it.

Her dream was to have a smart shop at Carlsbad. She had awakened to a brief political interest when she found that almost overnight the Czechs had become, unaccountably, the darlings of those against whom they had so recently fought, and later she discovered that Carlsbad was filled with victorious foreigners who turned their gold joyfully into Czechish crowns and she was forever comparing the rising Czech currency with the descending Austrian, and was visibly impatient at the senseless fact that the war had left her, a perfectly good Czecho-Slovak, high and dry in Vienna as the wife of a crippled Austrian. There wasn't any sense in anything, and Mizzi vented mercilessly her dissatisfaction on Hermann.

She was always thinking to herself and often proclaiming openly that Hermann was "dumm, but dumm," as little of a "Nutznieser" as anyone ever had the bad luck to be married to. With even the slightest sense of values, he ought to have got something out of the war. Privately Mizzi adored profiteers. But Hermann wasn't made that way.

In the end, he got tired of hearing what his father-in-law would have done in this, that or the other case. That canny Czech, Ottokar Maschka, had, unfortunately for Mizzi, died just as he was about to gather in the fruits of his labors, and when Mizzi married the promising young Viennese doctor the only visible goods she brought with her was the furniture with which they furnished their home; large, solid, comfortable pieces of mahogany and maple, and a lot of linen. But all that Mizzi had long since changed. Mizzi was a forward looker and liked to keep up with, when she couldn't run ahead of, the styles. She had a flair about novelties that was to stand her in good stead.