Viennese Medley

By Edith O'Shaughnessy

Author of "A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," "Diplomatic
Days," "Alsace in Rust and Gold," etc.

"'S giebt nur a Kaiserstadt,

'S giebt nur a Wien."

(There's only one right royal town,

There's only one Vienna.)

New York
B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
Mcmxxiv

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

To
Countess Miton Széchényi
and
Countess Gladys Széchényi
FRIENDS OF THEN AND NOW

CONTENTS

I

THEIR AUNT ILDE

Adagio assai.

"Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier days."

War and Peace had stripped Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, of everything except her physical being, leaving her quite naked in another but certainly not better world.

As the widow of a Viennese Kommerzienrath, dead after thirty years of service in the Finance Ministry, she had enjoyed a comfortable pension. She had been considered rich herself at the time of her marriage for she had had as dowry some shares in a beet-root industry in Bohemia, but when the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia was formed she found herself mysteriously and without appeal separated from those shares, which had been as much a part of her life as her hands and feet, and the separation though swift was to prove fatal, at least to her use and dignity.

During the long, pleasant years of her widowhood she had had a little house at Baden near Vienna, where her only brother, an official in the Northern Railways, and his various wives and many children had been in the habit of spending holidays and convalescences. If any child were ailing it was promptly sent to Tante Ilde, who could always be counted on to receive such gages of affection with open arms.

When her brother, accompanied by one or the other of those quickly succeeding wives, went off on his annual walking tour through the Semmering, as many as could be got into the little house were deposited there for safe-keeping. The family Christmas and New Year's dinners took place at Tante Ilde's, and on the 18th of August, the Emperor's birthday, they were all to be found again sitting about that well-laden table.

She was the first to know their joys and griefs, and "I'm going to tell Tante Ilde about it," was a familiar expression in the family.

A pleasant lady to look at, too, with a bit of lace flung over her shining white hair, a bit of it always about her neck. Her skin had a lustrous smoothness, the many tiny wrinkles no more disfiguring than the fine crackings in old ivory. Her nose was delicately arched and her lips kept long their agreeable red. But it was her eyes, more than all of these, that caught the attention. They were very large and were set quite flatly, shallowly in her face, pale blue lakes of indefectible innocence, and while time had wrought some changes in the areas surrounding them,—a wrinkle, a dent, a falling in or away,—their placidity had gently endured. They opened widely and though sometimes they had been obliged to gaze upon one or the other wicked spectacle of a wicked world, no shadow of its evil remained upon them. That wide, blue, child-like gaze from that aging face was what was first noticed about her and last forgot. The startled expression that appeared upon her countenance at the beginning of her misfortunes, towards the end was changed into one of almost formidable submission.

She had always been slender and graceful with a way of holding herself that verged on elegance and her clothes were put on with a pleasant precision. She had worn a long gold chain around her neck since any of them could remember, holding a little gold watch tucked in at her neat belt; she always wore, too, a pair of round gold bracelets that successive baby nephews and nieces had grasped at, leaving fine marks of little teeth upon them. Tante Ilde loved those tiny dents. There was often a gentle tinkle as she played with her chain with the hand bearing her wedding ring and a quite inconspicuous one of amethyst and pearls. Just as inconspicuous was Frau Stacher's being, her situation and her works, as that pale stone, those little, lustreless pearls. None save a doubly-blindfolded Fate, striking recklessly about at millions would have found so unimportant a mark.

Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china Auntie." There was between them some natural affinity, as well as special affection; though Tante Ilde loved them all, Corinne was the true child of her heart, what the best of daughters might have been. She had never had any children and her life had revolved beneficently about the family of her brother,—only her half-brother to be sure, but then they never thought of that. When he married for the third time, quite superfluously the family considered, the ostensible reason he gave was that it would be a pity to leave no one to enjoy the pension due whoever was fortunate enough to be his widow. His sister had smiled at this, her fine, soft smile, and even Heinie himself had been obliged to laugh though he cared little about jokes concerning his somewhat solemn being; and he had married the bright-cheeked, shining-eyed, full-figured, not over-intelligent young Croatian of his desire, Irma Milanovics, and they had had three sons in the four years he lived to be her husband. It made him the father of eleven children, all living at the time of the outbreak of the war, together with an adopted daughter, the child of a dead friend,—(one more, it couldn't matter where there were so many). He had always enjoyed the patriarchal feeling which would come over him as he sat at that big oval table, serving the most generous of portions, or when out buying objects by the half-dozen or dozen. In many other ways, too, that numerous, good-looking family had flattered his persistent paternity.

Two sons had been lost in the war, one last seen at the fall of the Fortress of Prszmysl, then traced to a prison camp in Siberia. After two years a card came through the Red Cross informing them of his death from typhus. The other had been killed in the last mad scuttle across the Piave. A daughter, too, had died of a wasting malady in the winter of 1915 after the death of her lover at the taking of Schabatz from the Serbs that first August of the war. But there were still eight of them in the thick of the fight for survival in post-war Vienna. Irma's three boys, nine, eleven and twelve years of age were not yet ready for the combat, but all the others were in it for victory or death.

To return to their aunt Ilde. The first two years of the peace had not been so bad. With some difficulty she got through and succeeded in keeping that roof that showed such unmistakable signs of collapse from falling about her head. Still in a small way she received them all on New Year's Day of 1921. For the customary roast pork was substituted a less expensive "Rindfleisch garniert" the classic boiled beef and vegetables, and there had been an Apfelstrudel, delight of all Viennese. Tradition maintained itself in a world now obviously composed of wreckage. But Frau Stacher had had an uneasy feeling as she sat, for what was indeed the last time, at the head of her table surrounded by her nieces and nephews. A week later she found, quite suddenly, that never again would she get anything from those Bohemian investments handed down from her father, the revered von Berg. She made some desperate, useless efforts, but she was always brought up round by the fact, once so pleasant, now disastrous, that she was the widow of an Austrian, and herself an Austrian. That sudden cleaving of things that she had supposed indissoluble, opened a gaping void in front of her, into which she was inevitably to fall. Behind her, far behind her lay the shining, solid, comfortable years, like another person's life, when she was Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. That providential "von" had incredibly embellished her life. There was, indeed, all the difference in the world between being born a "von" or not a "von." She had always regretted that her mother's somewhat hasty second marriage to handsome Heinrich Bruckner, some years her junior, had not had the more sustaining qualities of a "von,"—then all Heinie's children too....

Now it appeared that nothing made any difference. Every landmark was gone. Authority was gone. Gone beauty, reverence, faith. All that warm, imperial lustre in which the middle classes had burnished themselves, proud and content that such things were, had faded into the night with Vienna's setting sun. Sweet things were gone not only out of her life, but out of the nation's, leaving black misery, or a crushing commercialism which, though it lent money, lent neither beauty nor honor.

It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life, epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.

One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne; but the moon had already risen and its silver glimmer had taken the place of the gold of afternoon before she heard a light step on the gravel. That light step carried the heaviest of hearts for Corinne had come out to discuss baldly matters till then not even thinkable....

But whichever way they turned and twisted and tried to avoid it, they were always finding themselves back at a certain dark spot. Finally they very quietly owned to each other, even saying the unthinkable thing aloud, that the Baden house would have to be given up. Then Corinne braced herself to meet those pale eyes, out of which the color had been suddenly washed.

"You can get quite a sum from the sale of the furniture," she ventured after a long silence in which she had looked as through a blur at the familiar appointments of the room. They sat knee to knee holding each other's hand tightly; Corinne felt as if she were watching her aunt drown in the Danube; she wanted to cry "Help," but she only said:

"Of course you must keep enough of your best things for a nice room near us all,—if we can find one."

The housing problem was beginning to loom up blackly, overshadowing quite a number of things already dark enough. She leaned closer and pressed her aunt's head against her loving young heart. There Frau Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg, wept her only tears. She had a fine spirit which even then was not broken, but hurt, bent and vastly astonished. During the long hours that followed they mingled their pity and their love, which bore in the end a thin hope that "something would happen"; but all the same, when early the next morning Corinne went away she knew that the first stone had been cut for the sepulchre of her aunt's existence.

That "nice room near us all" proved indeed unobtainable. In a city that had once offered every imaginable sort of pleasant shelter, there didn't seem to be a single "nice, unfurnished room" to offer a homeless old lady,—and it was said so many had died in or because of the war,—no, Frau Stacher couldn't understand.

A few bits of furniture left from the sale were finally distributed about among the various nieces and Frau Stacher went to board, just as a makeshift—"till things get better" Corinne had assured her, at the house of an acquaintance, who in the palmier days had partaken of her easy bounty. There nights of aching, sleepless homesickness followed days of empty, useless longing for all that had once been hers, for her little situation in life that had enabled her, childless as she was to be a center of pleasure and comfort to the only beings she loved. It was finished, done with, that was quite clear. She sat more and more alone in her room. The clack of Frau Kerzl's tongue and her invectives at Fate, quite justified though they were, got finally and intolerably on her nerves. She thought she could not bear to hear another time that things were as they were because the Hapsburgs had taken all the gold out of Austria when they went, and left the "others" sitting with the paper money.

Frau Stacher was no intellectual and had attempted no mental appraisement of the national calamities. Even in the good days her most enjoyable reading had been the Salon Blatt, where what the Imperial and Royal family and the "Aristokraten" did, said, wore, and where and how they showed themselves was duly recorded for the delectation of an appreciative people. A morning paper had always been brought to the house, it is true, but she would only run quickly over world-events which had never so slightly modified her life, whereas the doings of the First Society lent it both lustre and interest.

She knew that Frau Kerzl, whose grief had dyed her political feelings a deep red, was going on in a stupid, even wicked, manner, when she so unjustly and blasphemously spoke of the Hapsburgs, but she had no satisfactory answer to make, so after her way she was silent, spending the long evenings alone in her room. She couldn't see to sew in it, nor indeed to do anything more complicated than move about. The single light was placed high up in the center of the ceiling and was reflected but dimly from the dark walls, the pieces of heavy furniture and the brown porcelain stove that was never lighted.

Fortitude was, seemingly, the only virtue that Frau Stacher, gentle, easy-going, unheroic, was called upon to practise.

But the thing couldn't last forever. Often she was glad she was seventy. It made the outlook easier. There couldn't be more than twenty years of treading up other people's stairs. The instinct of home was almost as strong in her as the instinct to live. No, there couldn't be more than twenty years of it.... Then, too, in a month, a day, an hour even, it might all be over. But one evening sitting in the shadowy room, her little, white, knitted shawl drawn about her shoulders, her hands crossed under it on her breast, she was suddenly and terrifyingly aware of the beating of her heart,—almost as if for the first time. She found she was as much afraid of death as of life—and that was a great deal....

Sometimes one or the other of "the children" remembered to come to see "poor Tante Ilde" and often Corinne, in her moonbeam way, would slip in and out, still and pale indeed like a ray of reflected light, and every Sunday after dinner she and Corinne would meet at Irma's. She went frequently to Kaethe's, too, that is, whenever she had anything to take to the children. It wasn't a place where one could go empty-handed.

But all, in one way or another, were caught up in the struggle for survival. In a starving, freezing city, not starving, not freezing, took the last flow of everybody's energy, so she was mostly alone. But solitude, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, had no charms for her. She had an almost unbearable longing to be in crowds, in happy, busy crowds, where people jostled each other as they went about little, pleasant errands.

But there was another thing beside being certain—vaguely—that she wouldn't live forever, which had come to make her sojourn at Frau Kerzl's not only endurable but desirable ... a cold, creeping premonition concerning the not distant time when even that measure of independence would be denied her. The money from the sale of the furniture was going, was gone.

One morning in that terrible "little hour before dawn" when anxiety had done its worst, she got up and counted and recounted the thin packet of crowns left in her purse. Then in panic she made a mental survey of her other remaining "values," of those things her nieces were "keeping" for her. The result had sent her shivering back to bed, where frightened by a fear beyond any she had ever known, even in nightmare, she had pulled the bedclothes up over her head. She was afraid, afraid. It was grinning at her....

She dozed finally. But she only knew she had been asleep when she found herself throwing the sheet aside with a start, thinking she heard Corinne's voice calling up the stairs in the house at Baden.... Perhaps something would happen.

But little can happen to women of seventy except more of the same, whatever it is....

When in that chill December twilight she first found her way to the pawnshop, to "Tante Dorothea's," familiar to her all her life as a sure object for humorous sallies, and left there her gold bracelets, that old life dropped finally and forever from her almost as if it had never been, leaving her unticketed, unbilleted, between time and eternity. Truly she found that there is no greater sorrow than in adversity remembering happier days.

She hadn't spoken to any of the children about that fatally impending visit to "Tante Dorothea's," though she had thought of consulting Pauli; Pauli who always gave the impression that nothing human was foreign to him. But he would have given her the money. Humbly she deplored the burden of her existence on that younger generation, that dead wood of her fate among those green trees, bent themselves in the blast of misery that swept over the city. Every day, every hour one had to look out, or one was quite certainly blown over. But Pauli was away. Corinne, dear, lovely Corinne, she couldn't bear to think of her pale light flashing in through the door of that pawn shop in the Spiegelgasse, that fatal "Tante Dorothea's," whom the mention of in the good old days, had always raised that ill-considered laugh. Once or twice her thoughts had played glimmeringly about Fanny instead of "Tante Dorothea,"—to go out in a sudden, chilly little gust blowing from the terra ignota of Fanny's life. In the end it was her business, not another's, that was in question. She realized for the first time the solitariness of her fate, of everybody's fate, so long hidden from her under the pleasant details of her daily existence which had seemed to bind it in a thousand ways to other lives.

When she finally slipped out, looking fearfully and guiltily about her long before she got to her destination, as if her shameful errand had been stamped in red upon her face, she was further intimidated rather than reassured to discover, as she turned into the Spiegelgasse, that she was by no means alone of her kind. All the human scrapings and combings of the Inner Town seemed to have been blown there too. Old women like herself with arched noses and deeply-circled, tearless eyes, thin, wan women, in once-good, now threadbare clothes, whose gentle mien, like her own, recalled unmistakably happier days,—how many of them there were! Pale spectres of that middle class whom the War and then the Peace had stripped of everything save their sorrows. The war loans they had invested in had gone up in the smoke of battle, or down in the bitter waters of Peace; the thousands, the tens of thousands of comfortable little incomes, left them by fathers, by husbands, had soundlessly, untraceably disappeared, and they were learning the way to "Tante Dorothea's."

The Dorotheum, if one's business there is not vital is one of the most interesting buildings of its kind in Europe. Five of its seven stories rise above ground, the other two are in deep subterranean spaces, reaching to the old catacombs, and where household and personal effects of the Viennese middle class are now stored so thickly and so high, once Roman mercenaries of the Xth Legion lay buried....

But Frau Stacher knew nothing of the Dorotheum in its historical aspect and had she known, it would have been of little interest to her.

A motley, miserable throng was pressing in at the doors, for many, like herself, chose the dusk for such an errand. She found herself pressed close to a young mother with an anxious, withered face who had a pallid baby sleeping on one arm, while under the other she carried a small bundle of linen, that last of all possessions to be offered to "Tante Dorothea." Behind her stood a former officer. It was easy to see what he had been. He was still erect, but he was very thin, with deep pits under his cheek bones, his coat was buttoned up to his chin and he kept his hand in his pocket.

The pale baby on the woman's arm waked up as they stood in line, and began a wretched wailing. The mother tried to quiet it as she passed up to the counter, where a being, necessarily without bowels, looked quickly at the poor contents of the bundle, gave her a ticket and a few bits of paper money. Silently she received them and made way for Frau Stacher, who in a distress that moistened her brow and dried her mouth, tremblingly produced her bracelets. She was brusquely pointed to another counter for precious objects, as also was the officer. There she found herself behind a woman selling a worn wedding ring, not much heavier than the money she got in exchange.

The bulging-eyed man, giving Frau Stacher a quick, circular look that further chilled the thin blood in her veins, proceeded to weigh the bracelets in the little scales on the counter. On their last golden gleam was borne in a flash by Frau Stacher those bright, warm years in which she had worn them. The dull ticket she received was the true symbol of her state. The money would soon be gone and she would have neither money nor bracelets, just nothing. As she turned away she saw that the officer was offering a small medallion and a miniature. Again she thought of the foolish jokes about "Tante Dorothea." This stark, final misery was what it really was.... This doomlike end of everything.

Two short weeks after, Frau Kerzl again showed signs of nervousness and talked loudly and significantly, or what Frau Stacher, who had got timid even about leaving her room, thought was loudly and significantly, concerning the price of food; and how money, even an hour over-due, represented in those days of falling currency, a fabulous loss. That afternoon she took out her watch and chain and her amethyst and pearl ring. It was less frightening the second time, but she felt much sadder, and she was unspeakably depressed by the old man just ahead of her who fainted as he stood waiting.

By January Frau Stacher's situation became finally and visibly desperate. She could obviously no longer pay to remain in Frau Kerzl's house and quite as obviously Frau Kerzl could not keep her just for the pleasure of it. The link in their lives got thinner day by day until it broke squarely in two that morning of the sixth of January when Frau Kerzl plainly hinted at the possibility, nay probability of being able to wrest from the black heavens that star of first magnitude,—a foreign lodger. No trouble, out all the time, solid, certain pay. She didn't cease to paint the foreigner in ever brighter colors. He stood out attractively, even flashily against the grey tenuity of her present boarder. Though she had feared that something of the kind was impending, it fell on Frau Stacher like a blow on a bruised spot; indeed she found she was one vast bruise. Anything that touched her nowadays was sure to hurt unspeakably, but being "turned out," as she called it, had about it an ultimate ignominy, not at all befitting the day. She had always loved the sixth of January, that noisy feast of the Three Kings, and though she had been wont to complain that she hadn't been able to sleep a wink because of the tooting of the horns, the blowing of the whistles, the beating of drums and countless other noises announcing their arrival, that racket had really appealed to her sentimental soul, heralding as it did three royal beings bringing gold and myrrh and frankincense. As she lay awake through the cold, dark night, though there had been no noise at all in the streets she suddenly remembered that it was Epiphany; a few thin, salty tears moistened her cheeks as she realized that in a world once seemingly full of gold and myrrh and frankincense she now possessed naught save the breath in her body and the remnants of raiment covering it.

She was clearly, unless "something happened," among the serried ranks of that middle class fated to disappear. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them had disappeared, been absorbed in one or the other appalling manner into something nameless and then lost from the ways of men. The "aristocrats" were vaguely "away" economizing and waiting in their castles, living, as well or as ill as might be, from their lands. The working classes, much in evidence, were not at all badly off. Brawn had still some market value. But the middle classes, upper and lower? They could not all have died, the streets would have been heaped with bodies. There was some painful absorption of them into the life of those persisting, and this is what, for a very little while, happened to Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg; but one variation on the ubiquitous theme of genteel old age and sudden penury in post-war Vienna.

On the wet, black afternoon following the wet, black morning of which we have spoken, Frau Stacher and her niece Corinne might again have been seen, discussing whisperingly in the chilly room at Frau Kerzl's, the evident extremity of the situation. The eye in the ceiling that saw rather than was seen by, revealed them sitting even closer together than usual. Frau Kerzl had developed out of her former friendliness and respect, strange, spying, key-hole ways. She was as well aware of what Frau Stacher had done with her bracelets and her watch and chain and her ring as Frau Stacher herself. She hadn't noticed the disappearance of the bracelets, but when she no longer saw the gold chain and when her boarder incautiously asked her the time of day she knew the Stacher jig was up, and she wanted to know, further, to just what tune she herself was stepping. She had her own troubles,—the son who had gone off to the war, fat Gusl he was then called, so jolly, so full of Wiener quips and quirks, always humming about the house or playing his zither. He had been invalided home that last September of the war and was now coughing his life out in the room that was supposed to be to the South, but that the sun was really unacquainted with. A dark room in a dark, side street, one among hundreds of dark, windy side streets in Vienna where consumption has its breeding ground; the "Viennese malady," it is sometimes called....

The light had found and gleamingly mingled the pale gold of Corinne's hair and the silver of her aunt's; their hands were tightly clasped as they considered ways and means. There seemed to be few of one and none of the other.

"I've lived too long," Frau Stacher said at last, and in her heart was distilled a sudden but final grief that found its stinging way to her so-long untroubled eyes.

Corinne leaned swiftly over and embraced her.

"Why I can't think of life without you!" she cried suddenly and so glowingly that for a fleeting instant her aunt found herself warm in the fire of that love. The salt was even dried momentarily out of that bread and water of charity which was now so evidently to be her only nourishment.

Corinne had come with a scheme of existence, the barest draft of a scheme of existence, she knew it to be, for her precious Tante Ilde. For all she looked elusive, shadowy, with that one light hanging uncertainly above, her hair the brightest thing in the room, she was, in accord with a strangely practical streak in her make-up, considering the matter that engaged them in its true aspect. The sight terrified her, but she was there to give courage, not to get it....

She sat quite motionless in long, slim, graceful lines, (the family liking more substantial contours didn't know how handsome Corinne was, "flat as a pancake" being no recommendation to them). Familiar with those fireless, post-war rooms and their creeping, paralyzing chill she was still wrapt in her sheath-like black coat. Her little grey, fur-trimmed hat had been laid on the bed for Tante Ilde always liked to have her take it off, it made the visits seem less hurried; her dripping umbrella had been placed in the pail near the iron washstand with its diminutive bowl and pitcher; its handkerchief-like towel was folded across the little rack above it. With a disturbing, child-like confidence her aunt's wide, full gaze had followed every movement. Apparently mistress of herself and of the plunging situation, Corinne had been conscious of the most horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach when she finally met it full as she sat down and began to caress that thin hand in the uncertain light which seemed, however, bright enough to reveal the next step in all its horrid indignity.

Corinne was a tall, small-headed, blond woman with a finely-arched nose and shell-like ears lying close to her head. Between her very blue eyes with a recurring oblique look that could veil her thoughts more effectually than dropped lids, was a slanting line that of late had perceptibly deepened. "Very distinguished," was always said of Corinne in the family; always, too, that she was "different," not quite indeed of their own easy-going, somewhat irresponsible Viennese kind which knows so well, in a somewhat unanalytical way, how to get something out of life,—with half a chance, with a quarter of a chance. So little was really needed for happiness with a basis of enough to eat. Humming a new waltz, remodelling a pair of sleeves, getting hold of a bit of fat or sugar for the women; for the men sitting in a warm café drinking beer or black coffee, turning over the Lustige Blätter, smoking a Trabuco or a Virginia,—joy was still as easy as that when momentarily far enough from the abyss not to be dizzy and sick with the fear of falling in. Corinne had had in common with Fanny a North German grandmother and though that explained, in a way, a lot of things, still there remained something about her that the family hadn't been able to label satisfactorily. Sometimes they called it cold, sometimes hard, they had all come up against it in one way or another in those days of elemental issues, but terribly clever, they conceded that. She could generally be counted on to find some little door in the thickest wall.

Since their father's death and the consequent breaking up of the home, Corinne had been safely, solidly and enviably, it seemed to the rest of them, employed in the Depositen Bank, whose personnel even in those uncertain days, was not doing badly; an expanding wage as the times demanded and at a place run by the bank an eatable midday meal at a possible price.

If it had been a matter of her aunt Ilde alone, Corinne could have managed, after a fashion, to keep that existence, so dear to her, from falling to pieces, though what she earned was not yet enough for two; but all whose heads were above water had not one but many drowning persons clinging tightly, stranglingly about their necks. Corinne was conscious of a finally sinking sensation as she proceeded to unfold the plan which appeared to her more and more what it really was—a last monstrous attack on her aunt's existence—pushing it nearer and nearer to the fatal edge. She had no single illusion as to what she was doing, and her voice was very soft in contrast to the hard, stark meaning of her words.

"I've spoken to them all, darling, you don't have to do a thing about it. Tomorrow you are to move to Irma's. It will be a sort of combination arrangement. You'll be paying, of course. It's a way to help Irma and the boys as well."

Now the famous pension on account of which Herr Bruckner had charitably made that third marriage, had shrunk in buying properties to such pigmy-like proportions, that they didn't count it any more when Irma's needs and necessities were being discussed. Yet Irma and the boys had to live, that establishment in one way or another had to be kept up a while longer.

"But I don't see where Irma can put me," Frau Stacher answered after a long silence.

Corinne flushed:

"Dear treasurekin ... the alcove.... It'll only be till I can look about, perhaps something will turn up; it's to get you out of here and remember you'll be paying Irma for it, you'll feel perfectly independent. I've talked it over with her. She's glad enough to be helped out. Don't forget the alcove has got that plush divan of yours that we've all slept on at Baden. It's upholstered, thick and soft, with happy memories. I think you've had a beautiful life," she ended tenderly, desperately.

Her aunt smiled, a ghost of a smile, at the mention of Baden, and the upholstery of the divan, and then her thin, broad lids closed flutteringly over the expanse of her blue eyes to keep the tears from falling, but she made no answer. There wasn't really anything to say.

"I felt of the curtains yesterday when I was there," continued Corinne in a voice that had quite lost its resonance, "they're good and thick and Irma sewed a big hook and eye on right in the middle, and when they're fastened you'll be almost by yourself," she ended but with a sudden quiver of her lips, as her aunt continued to look at her with her soft, wide, pale eyes in which the distaste she felt for the alcove in particular and the arrangement in general was clearly mirrored. She had never cared for Irma. Irma had something hard and strange, almost rough about her, that had never fitted into their own easy, pleasant ways. She did her duty, yes, but they were used to a pleasanter fulfillment of duty. However, it was too true that she was the only one of them having a living room with an alcove.... Life was like that.

"It won't be forever," pursued Corinne, "and I'll be there on Sundays for dinner."

She spoke cheerfully but she felt as if she were pointing her dear treasurekin to the winter road instead of to shelter. Could she but have lodged her really in her heart!

"I've been thinking about you all this week and planning ever since that hateful Kerzl woman" ... here Corinne was pulled up short by the sudden flush on her aunt's face, she couldn't bear to hear of that even from Corinne.... Frau Kerzl who once had been grateful for a smile or even for advice, to whom she'd sent broth a whole long winter.

Corinne continued gently as flowing water—but as inevitably as water seeking its own level:

"Darling,—and this is how I have arranged for your dinner every day," she spoke even more gently and her touch was soft, the softest touch that thin, trembling hand had ever known. A brightness beyond tears was in her eyes. What was she offering really to her precious, her fragile, her Dresden china aunt?

"On Mondays," she proceeded, striking the simplest chord at first, "Liesel wants you to take dinner with her. She said she'd love to have you."

This wasn't quite exact. What her sister Liesel, married since two years to a young official in the Finance Ministry, Liesel who was very happy, had really said was:

"Of course, I don't mind Tante Ilde coming once a week, we certainly ought to do what we can for her, ... but when Otto comes in he does like to find just me. However, we've got to look out for her, poor dear,—she was always so good to us."

Otto was one of some half or three quarters of a million government employees in Vienna and was doing fairly well, that is well enough for two. He was an expert accountant and as prices went up, so mercifully did his salary. They got along very comfortably in the tiny, three-roomed apartment that Liesel in her smiling way had conjured up out of the abyss of the housing crisis. It sufficed amply for their needs. They lived almost in the style that would have been theirs had they lived and loved a decade earlier. Sometimes in the evening they even went to the theatre, or to a moving picture. What use in keeping money when the next day's fall in exchange made it act like ice in hot water? So with many shrugs of her plump, handsome shoulders Liesel continued to wrest an immediate happiness from the miserable city, and with a special sapience born of love pursued her daily and absorbing round of making her Otto and herself comfortable. They cared a great deal for each other, though the family thought Otto rather a stick and wondered how he had come to find such favor in Liesel's soft, dark eyes. As a husband he had turned out to be vigilant and exclusive as well as loving, a sort of little Turk. Having small natural faith in men and still less in women, from the first he had set about guarding his treasure. It somehow suited Liesel. "But jealous!" she would boast, casting her eyes up delightedly, a finger at her red lip. They were so young too, that they could hope that something, in the many years they expected to live, would happen to place their upset world on its proper feet again, and while awaiting that miracle they were very happy.

Otto sometimes remembered Galicia.... When a certain look came into his face it was because he was hearing those terrible machine guns. He limped slightly, his right knee having been smashed by a ricochet bullet, and he had had his feet frozen in an Italian prison camp and lost the toes of the left foot.... Oh, that mountain camp, that terrible cold, that tiny blanket! If he didn't pull it up about his shoulders he shivered and shook with that deadly central cold and if he did pull it up his feet froze. Sometimes he dreamed of it in that warm bed with Liesel and would awake with a start to find her there, and drawing the feather-bed up higher would sink again into a blessed slumber. He knew that he had been lucky.

It was because Liesel was so happy that to her Corinne had first gone with her plan for Tante Ilde. Liesel had spent summer after summer in the house at Baden. Her aunt had always spoiled her. Everybody spoiled Liesel, so evidently made for happiness. As a little girl she was forever rummaging in the attic for bits of silk and lace for her dolls, and would turn out the nattiest things. Now for herself she did the same. She was round-faced, fresh-skinned and smiles played easily about her somewhat wide, very red mouth;—she would have been attractive in rags. But she had that peculiar Viennese talent for wearing clothes, a jaunty manner of pulling her belt in snugly that made the observer conscious of her very small waist under a full bust, above broad hips, a way of pressing her hat down upon her head at the most becoming angle; and her high-heeled shoes were always bright and neatly tied. These and a lot of other details of an extremely feminine sort added undeniably to her natural charms. Pauli said that though her soul was but a centimeter deep, you looked to the bottom through the clearest of waters. If in her happiness she sometimes forgot other people's miseries, it was but natural, and when she was reminded she was all solicitude and self-reproach.

"That will be nice," Tante Ilde was saying slowly after another long pause, and she was gladder than ever that she had added the knife-rests and napkin rings to the spoons when Liesel was married. Then as a sudden thought came to her, she quite brightened up, "I can do the dishes," she cried, "Liesel always used to hate to do anything that would spoil her hands."

"Well, she doesn't seem to mind spoiling her hands for Otto," answered Corinne rather drily.

"They're in love," returned Tante Ilde gently, glimmeringly.

A shadow fell over Corinne's face at the answer as if a ray of light had been interrupted, or as if something had been muted for a moment. Her aunt, who was not one to break into silent places, waited patiently, though she was wondering who and what was coming next.

"Pauli," the shadow was followed by a light in Corinne's face as she spoke the name lingeringly, "Pauli," she repeated, "wants you to go to Anna's on Tuesday. It's one of their meat days—when they can get it."

"Perhaps I better not go there then. It looks," she hesitated and there were sudden tears in her eyes, "so greedy."

"Not at all," cried Corinne. "Pauli wants you to go on Tuesday just because of that. He said he'd try to be there himself, that first time anyway. Anna and Hermine are quite worked up about it and wondering what they can give him to eat."

"Poor Anna," said her aunt very gently.

Corinne flushed. Again they were silent.

Frau Stacher bewildered at her own fate, felt quite incapable in that moment of picking up the threads of any other life, even of Corinne's. But her confidence awakened warmly at mention of Pauli. Pauli had a heart and was always showing it. Pauli understood, she felt sure, anything, everything.... Even poverty-stricken old aunts by marriage who had lived too long. Even to such Pauli was kind.

Pauli Birbach, the husband of her eldest niece Anna, had got through the war without a scratch or an illness,—of an unbelievable luck. When a bomb burst where he and his comrades were sitting or lying, he was certain to be unhurt and soon to be seen carrying the wounded in gently or burying the dead deeply. Typhus and dysentery alike avoided him. He was naturally a debonair and laughing soul, and his easy resourcefulness had endeared him to both officers and men. "As lucky as Pauli Birbach" was a phrase among his comrades. And even in little ways. Wasn't he always turning up with a handful of cigarettes or a bottle of wine or a chicken, got, heaven knew how, in a country picked bare as a bone? An excellent cook, too, he could instruct the warrior presiding over the pot how to make the very most of what little he had. Hot water and an onion under Pauli's direction became a delectable if not nourishing soup.

And the way he played the zimbalon he discovered in a castle they were quartered in during an interminable winter in the Carpathians, the Russians, millions of them it seemed, just opposite,—only half hidden by the snowy hill that some dark morning they must charge....

He had seen terrible things, terrible things to a laughing, soft-hearted man, things that knocked the laughter out of him like a blow on the chest.... The time he went out with a patrol at day break, the thermometer 40 below, and they thought they were coming to a tent or a little hovel in the grey half light.... But it was a dozen Kossacks huddled together, frozen stiff, their heavy boots sticking out....

And other things that had turned his pleasure-loving soul black with horror.... Christian Zimmermann, they'd been at the High School together, ... Christian, his comrade, three days in agony, hanging on that barbed wire and no one able to get at him and when Pauli finally did bring him in ... oh, no, you didn't think of such things.

And the Peace that stuck in his throat and lay on his chest, and the fierce angers it aroused, beyond, far beyond the blood-angers of the War ... Five years to repair the damages of the War—a century those of the Peace.... Still Pauli often laughed, even in that cold, grey Vienna, scarcely recognizable ghost of what had once throbbed and glowed, that funeral urn among cities; for he was naturally a man of hot hope, in spite of the fact that Fate at her most capricious had married him to Herr Bruckner's eldest daughter, a horse-faced, quite inarticulate woman, all of one color, with a solemn, brooding look in her eyes. She was so different from the glowing-eyed, sparkling-faced damsels about him that marriage with Anna Bruckner came to seem like the solving of some deep mystery. What lay behind those heavy, brooding eyes, with their curtain-like closing? She had rather fine broad shoulders, something long and big about her body, built in majestic proportions, or so it seemed to him. He got into a state where he had to know what it all meant—or die. He had been inexplicably mad about her all through his lyric years.... Anna his Sybil. Anna had been conscious of a flattered wonder, and her chill, slow blood had known its only warmth and quickening when she married Pauli Birbach. Then so soon.... Yes, Anna had gone through every hell, and there are many, reserved for stupid, jealous, ugly, virtuous women. She loved him more year by year. She was obsessed by the thought of Pauli, doggedly, uselessly obsessed, for early Pauli had passed to the contemplation of other mysteries.

It was a tribute to his humanity, however, that Tante Ilde felt not the slightest distaste at going to his house ... even in "that way" as she called it to herself. He gave more freely than he received, and he did both easily. Probably for all his good intentions he would not be at dinner on Tuesday, he had an airy, dissolving way with him, akin to atmospheric changes,—brightness into cloud, cloud into sun and you never knew.... But Anna with her joylessness and her one ugly daughter as like her as the eighteen years between them permitted, Anna was her own flesh and blood, and she had been at Baden with her aunt during innumerable infantile illnesses. She was always catching something and when her hair came out after the measles Tante Ilde had faithfully brushed it back to a shining, brown abundance. It was even now Anna's one beauty. They had, after all, so many memories in common—she couldn't have forgotten all, everything.... On Tuesdays then.

"On Wednesdays you're to go to Mizzi's," Corinne was saying.

"To Mizzi's!" exclaimed her aunt in astonishment, throwing back her thin shoulders and sitting up very straight.

"Yes ... Fanny," here Corinne made the habitual pause that followed any mention of Fanny in the family,—"Fanny has arranged it. You know Mizzi's anxious to please her."

Again Frau Stacher showed no especial enthusiasm for the arrangement. It was getting into quite another category. After all Liesel and Anna were her own brother's children, but when you went into houses,—in that way,—kept up by nieces-in-law, it was quite a different matter. Mizzi was the family dragon too. Mizzi with a look or a word could quite ruthlessly devour aged aunts, superfluous children. A monster really, with a mouth and stomach, but no entrails. They all had come to know about Mizzi—in one way or another.

"Perhaps I better go without dinner on Wednesday," Frau Stacher suggested with a slight quiver of her lips, though not because of the food.

"You could perfectly well if you had too much or even enough at other times. But we've got to keep your strength up through the winter. You've just got to live," Corinne repeated sweetly, warmly, "and then think of poor Manny—he'll love having you."

"Oh, Manny," her aunt responded, "poor Manny's got nothing to say," but her voice had a note of loving compassion.

"Poor Manny, dear Manny," repeated Corinne slowly in the same tone, adding, "It isn't any of it forever,—next year I'll be making more money, and perhaps we can get a tiny, tiny apartment somewhere."

Now the "tiny, tiny apartment," even as she spoke, seemed to Corinne the mirage it truly was. People had been known to die of joy on getting a tiny, tiny apartment. That very morning in the newspaper she had read of a man who had fallen dead when he heard he was at last to have a certain apartment he had long needed for himself and his family, and a rich man too. Everybody was talking about it.

"I can't leave Elschen," continued Corinne, "it's a miracle anyway sharing that pleasant room with her while her sister's away."

"It makes me so happy to know you're there," said her aunt warmly, for Corinne was of the race of homeless ones, and her address apt to be uncertain. Then for all her patience, she couldn't help wondering about Thursday.

"On Thursday," continued Corinne, having got to the fourth of her slender fingers, "you're going to dear Kaethe's." Kaethe and Corinne were half sisters by Aunt Ilde's brother's first and second wife.

"To Kaethe's!" she interrupted, "but they're all starving. I couldn't eat a mouthful there."

"It's just because of that, that it's easy. When you go there on Thursday you are to take the whole dinner—for all of them. It'll be quite like old times when you always brought us things."

Though delicacy was an essential attribute of Frau Stacher, she could not, at this point, restrain a slightly inquiring look at her niece Corinne, who answered after the thinnest of pauses:

"It'll be all right ... Fanny's going to see about it. She does everything for them anyway that is done."

Frau Stacher closed her eyes rapidly once or twice, but made no remark. It was, undeniably, Fanny whichever way you looked....

The contemplation of the Thursday arrangement however, induced a long silence. They had a sort of hopeless, trapped feeling when they thought of Kaethe.

Some thirteen years before she had married a brilliant young professor of biology at the University, who now, as he accurately and baldly stated, earned far less than the women who kept the toilets at the Railway stations....

They had seven children,—lovely, white-skinned, pansy-eyed, golden-haired children, or glowing-faced, starry-eyed, brown-haired. Kaethe's was indeed a terrible situation, one that made her relatives sad or angry according to their various temperaments and philosophical reactions to life. Three of those children had been born, illadvisedly, during the War and another since the Peace. Mizzi had soundly aired her opinion of that last arrival, ending with her usual "dumm, but dumm!" and casting her eyes up.

Out of the thick fog of his practical inexperience Professor Eberhardt had gropingly tried various and mostly unsuccessful ways of providing for his family, ways unrelated to his brains and his technical skill, which suddenly seemed not of the slightest value. Time apparently was the only thing he had and he was directly, unpleasantly aware of its useless passage. He'd lived mostly in a blessed, timeless world of theory and experiment. Courses were only intermittently held at the University, in half empty aula reached through dusty, echoing corridors. There was no money to keep up the laboratories and the few students were apt to be as listless from undernourishment as the professors themselves, or fiercely, disturbingly, redly subversive of everything and everybody; and anyway the struggle to keep life in the body was so terrible that it quite chilled any desire to know how it came to be there in the first place. Nature's secrets, except of the harvests, were at an entire discount.

He had duly tried several forms of those manual labors that alone seemed to be worth money. The summer before he had helped with the crops on a farm in Styria that a brother professor of geology, whose case somewhat resembled his own, had told him about. At first he had dreadful backaches and his long, delicate hands that could hold a microscope or a retort so steadily, would shake after the day's work and his thin palms were one great blister. Horrified he would hold them out at evening and watch them tremble and wonder would they ever be steady again for use in the laboratory. He had, however, made what seemed to his inexperience quite a lot of money for that sort of work, and he never knew what the peasants really thought of him. Some of the money unfortunately had been stolen from him that last Sunday when he had been incontinently dreaming about a certain theory that could always, if he didn't look out, captivate his attention.... Still he brought home enough to get them through the autumn ... and with what Fanny would do....

But suddenly, or so it seemed to him, the crown began to fall. He would sit flushing and paling as he read the descending quotations of the national currency and the rising prices of food. In a few weeks that money was gone. The Eberhardts had, relatively, gorged when they saw it shrinking—next week it would be worth only half and the week after only a quarter. They laughed a good deal, too, Kaethe and the children. Kaethe even taught Lilli and Resl to waltz, humming "The beautiful, blue Danube" as they spun around. The professor allowed himself to think again of certain combinations ... once quietly back in the laboratory.... Then came the collapse.

In desperation he tried street-cleaning. A late November morning on looking out of the window he saw that it had snowed heavily during the night. In spite of himself the beauty of the little crystals lying against the panes entranced him. He shook himself free, however, of such luxurious and wasteful thoughts and decided to try for a chance to shovel off snow. He said nothing to Kaethe about it as he went briskly out. But it proved not to be much of an idea after all, for he got a heavy chill late that afternoon waiting in line to be paid, and when he passed by his brother-in-law's office feeling very ill, Hermann had administered a potion to him and told him to go immediately to bed and stay there.

About Christmas time he was put wise by another colleague, a professor of botany, to a certain address near the Stephansplatz where a midday meal of a sort was provided by foreign benevolence for starving university professors. A cup of cocoa, rice and a slice of bread; a cup of cocoa, beans and a piece of zwieback. It was not designed to fatten any of them; it was only meant to keep as many of them as possible above ground ... keeping the sciences alive.... The calories were carefully marked on each menu and the men of learning could take their choice without paying.

Professor Eberhardt went there every day, but with his own physical necessities ever so meagrely provided for, it was pure agony to go back to those rooms where seven hungry children and a pale wife awaited his return. He was always asked what he had had and how it had tasted. He was often able to slip the bread or the zwieback into his pocket, but there was no way of handling the cocoa and beans and rice except to eat them.

Kaethe kept his only suit brushed and darned. Indeed it was getting to be one large darn with areas of the original cloth making patterns. She kept him in clean collars too, for a long time, but even at the last, with his coat collar turned up, he had the unmistakable air of a man of learning and a gentleman.

He loved his wife and children greatly. But it was a terrible life, a cold, damp, undernourished life, the things of the brain and the spirit slipping farther and farther from his sight. Brawn was indeed what was wanted.... Unless one had that strange, mysterious but apparently essential thing called money,—that some had and some hadn't. Professor Eberhardt had never been fanned, even gently, by any breeze of commercialism....

They had all been so proud of Leo and Kaethe in the old days; sometimes Leo's name was mentioned in the newspapers and though they cared little and knew less about the congresses held in Vienna, they would quickly run their eyes over names and subjects, hunting for Leo's and "as proud as dogs with two tails," according to Hermann, when they discovered it.

The plight of Leo and Kaethe and their lovely children kept the two women silent a long time. Just as the thought of Hermann had made them very still.... In fact viewed from any angle, the family fortunes were now apt to engender silence.

"Oh yes ... if Fanny ..." said Tante Ilde at last, picking up the thread where they had somewhat charily dropped it, "if Fanny...."

She had to concede that going to Kaethe's with something of the old familiar gesture of giving to those she loved rather than receiving from them, when obviously, they had none too much, put Thursday in quite a different light.

"What do you think I could get to take them? How much do you think," she paused musingly, "Fanny will send?"

"I don't know, but it will be enough. You can look around and see what you can get the most of for the money. There are so many of them," she ended, the familiar phrase losing itself in a sigh.

Too many of them, doubtless, and yet those lovely children,—each one a treasure, looking at you so confidingly with their big eyes in shades of blue, except Resl's and Hansi's darkly flashing,—which one of them would you not want? Not want Elsa who had a way of snuggling close and seeking your hand as she looked up with those heaven-blue eyes? Not want Carli, that gold and white angel of three summers, who couldn't yet walk, his little legs would crumple up under him when he tried to stand up, but he could smile in a way that went to your heart, and as for the baby, a thing of such sweetness that one wanted to eat her up. She was still at pale Kaethe's breast; rosy and fat, though heaven alone knew how or why; and all the others. Lilli whose beauty made you hold your breath; Resl to whom something nice was always happening, and Maxy with his plans for supporting the family when he grew up. Any one of them would have been the pride and joy of a childless home....

Tante Ilde felt herself pleasantly excited at the thought of Thursday,—relieving want—no matter how—instead of adding to it. Her eyes got quite bright.

Corinne, seeing the change, continued gayly, almost.

"And Friday, now guess," she paused, "Friday you'll have dinner with me. I'll let you know where and we'll talk everything over. What fun it will be! Saturday, I haven't arranged for Saturday yet but I'll tell you in time. Sunday we don't have to plan about. I'll come as usual with the meat for the boys' stew, and we'll have a nice time all together. Perhaps in a few months we can arrange something quite different. It's only to get you over the winter ... and you'll have courage," she ended entreatingly. Courage, that angel, she was thinking miserably to herself, as the unalterableness of her aunt's doom became more and more apparent.

But suddenly it all seemed quite possible, even easy to Tante Ilde. Yes, she would, she could be brave. She had Corinne ... as long as she had Corinne.... Corinne was so clever too, anything might happen when Corinne took the reins in her slim, elfin way, guiding life quickly, lightly along over the roughest spots.

"Now, dearest, don't worry about a single thing," Corinne repeated faintly, the iron very deep in her soul as at last she got up and stood lingeringly by her aunt's chair. She had again that horrible realization of something irreparable being in process. It sharpened her features and muffled her voice. "I'll see Frau Kerzl on the way out and pay her up till tomorrow morning, and you can leave early." For all her glimmering smile and close embrace she was increasingly consternated at the collapse of her aunt's existence, not even slightly concealed behind their words. She loved her more than ever in her final and inevitable rout, for pity was swelling abundantly her love. But the world! It cared little for old ladies in flight before Fate....

That courage momentarily imparted to Frau Stacher by her niece's loving nearness fell heavily with the dragging hours in which more and more miserably she went about the dim, chilly room, emptying the bureau and wardrobe of their scanty contents and laying them in her shabby valises. The very old brown leather one dated from her wedding trip, for Frau Stacher had never been a traveller; it had always been pleasanter to stay at home or go only to very near places for the day. Now strangely she was become a pilgrim, and when she was hungry she was to eat of other people's bread and she must go up other people's stairs for shelter. The realization of the power of those nieces over her life terrified her. It was complete if they chose to exercise it. Withdrawal of their protection, she starved, she froze—just the not having those few thousand crowns a year put her at the world's mercy....

Even Frau Kerzl's quite unctuous attentions at that last supper of cabbage-turnip soup failed to dispel the deepening gloom of her heart. Frau Kerzl was obviously though politely rejoicing. She had indeed through an incredible bit of luck secured that foreigner, an Englishman too, who would pay in shillings, in the magic "Devisen," for that room in which the very next night he was to sleep,—as soon as that,—Frau Kerzl already basked and expanded in the approaching light and heat of those shillings. The long Englishman strangely, hated short, square feather beds and was bringing his own blankets. It appeared, too, that he was in the commissary department of a certain relief society. Anything could grow out of such a situation,—condensed milk, butter, oatmeal.... The arrangement was undeniably of a marvelous fertility.

Though Frau Stacher was truly glad of Frau Kerzl's good luck, it but emphasized her own impending homelessness. She had been quite miserable there, but at least her living-space had been provided with a door, and blessed with a key,—ultimate desirabilities as she now saw, and tomorrow she would move into the uncertain privacy of the alcove. Then, too, in some way that she couldn't define Irma, her young sister-in-law, terrified her.

Yes, homeless, in a new sense, she realized herself to be when she went back into the luxury of her solitude for the last time, and as she closed the door she knew, indeed, that she had "lived too long."...

In that bed, abundantly salted by the tears of her uncertainties, so soon to know the deep slumbers of a care-free Englishman, Frau Stacher lay long awake thinking of those homes, over whose thresholds, day by day, week by week, she was to step.... She would love them so much, she would be so grateful, she would hold so sacred the joys and sorrows which might be disclosed....

But they seemed to her tired body to live, those nieces of hers, at the ultimate points of the Viennese compass. Her feet and back ached at the bare thought of those endless, cobbly streets, windswept, wet by rain and snow. All roads led to Calvary. Those once charming streets of the Imperial City were now but so many ways to the hill of charity, and it was a hill that old age crept up timidly, anxiously. The cross was so surely at the top.... Then she bethought herself how the days of the week came only one at a time, the way after all that life was tempered to mortality, one day, one thing at a time....

But it wasn't only troubles of food and raiment, of shelter; Frau Stacher had grave theological difficulties as well, encrusted confusingly about the admonition: "Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat or for your body what you shall put on ... for your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." No, she had no slightest understanding; and faith was but the dimmest of night-lights, flickering so uncertainly that the dark masses of her difficulties alone were apparent. She seemed to be caught terrifyingly between her needs reduced though they were, really only a bed and enough food to keep her alive, and the Divine withholding of those things. No, she couldn't understand, and all through that last long night at Frau Kerzl's she hung shiveringly over the dim puzzle of her life, which once had fallen so easily into its bright and pleasant pattern....

For the dozenth time she pulled the little, hard, square feather-bed, disdained of the Englishman, about her shoulders and drew her knees up under it. At last out of her chill bewilderment she began to think of Kaethe, of taking her the Thursday dinner, of what she could get, in a world now filled mostly, it seemed, with inedible substances. The thought of giving, even vicariously, lighted in her a glowing eagerness. She found herself suddenly quite warm, even to her ankles and feet, and as the late January light began to filter in through the cracks of the brown rep curtains she fell, mercifully, into a deep slumber.

II

LIESEL AND OTTO

Allegretto amoroso.

Sorgen sind für

Morgen gut.

When belated and hurriedly Frau Stacher finally got away from Frau Kerzl's, it was somewhat as a little war-bark after its time is up, leaves an unpleasant port, but still a port, and puts out to sea in sure signs of rough weather.

The once fat and merry Gusl had had one of his worst nights; spasms of coughing were coming through the open door of the so-called south room as the two women stood together for a last time in the sombre little hallway, sadly stencilled in terra cotta on dark blue. The haggard agony on that mother's face gave Frau Stacher a deep stab accompanied by the first and only realization in her childless heart of the pain mothers know for doomed children. It was something so sudden, so poignant, as she stood saying a somewhat lifeless goodbye, (she hadn't yet pulled herself together after being abruptly awakened out of that timeless, death-like sleep by Frau Kerzl's loud knock,) that had it remained with her an instant longer she would have fallen in a heap. It seemed to her that now she was always running full tilt into griefs she had never even suspected in the veiled and pleasant years.

The ring of the hungry colonel, only incompletely disguised as a porter, who came to get her folding straw basket and her two lean valises, broke in on the distress of the two women. Frau Kerzl forgetting for a moment the blessings that would so surely follow the Englishman into the house, embraced her, suddenly regretful, in a rush of hot tears; Frau Stacher's sympathy was so immediate, so real that it seemed to stand there with them. They hung a moment lip on cheek murmuring to each other "courage" and again and again "auf Wiedersehen;" then turned to their now separate paths, Frau Kerzl running back to her son's room at a faint and gurgling sound and Frau Stacher to continue what she called, (though no one knew it,) her "March among the Ruins," walking close behind the porter, sweating a neurasthenic sweat, in the raw January air under his unaccustomed load. She felt safer quite near him for those once cosy, familiar streets seemed now to converge to the unknown, to infinity even, and the proximity of her valises somewhat steadied her. With genteel, restrained little steps, her elbows pressed to her sides, her hands clasped in front holding her umbrella and her shabby little bag that always came unfastened if she didn't look out and somebody would tell her it was open, she proceeded to the street off the Hoher Markt where Irma, her brother's widow, half starved with her three boys on the famous pension, together with what various members of the family gave her and what she herself made by her beautiful "petit point," dimming every year a little more those once hard, bright eyes.

Irma knowing that hunger stalked just around the corner, yet desiring to live alone with her boys, had been immensely relieved and at the same time almost uncontrollably irritated at the thought of the arrangement by which Tante Ilde was to be given the very relative freedom of the alcove. She had gone about the simple preparations for her taking possession in the best obstructionist manner. The alcove already contained the old brown plush divan, relic of the house in Baden, but Irma had shown an amazing unwillingness to clear out a certain little green and yellow chest of drawers which had "always" been between the windows in her living room and contained an unrelated accumulation of objects.

"But she's got to have something to keep her things in!" Corinne had cried, at the time the fatal arrangement was being made.

This was so obvious that Irma had made no further demur than to say: "I didn't think she had that much left."

"You've never heard about the lilies of the field?" Corinne asked with her most oblique look, but it was lost on Irma who said:

"What?" as she noisily dragged the chest of drawers into the alcove.

"How these little pebbles hurt my feet," murmured Corinne further, and when Irma answered: "What hurts your feet?" she turned aside. Irma was clearly impervious. But she had emptied the drawers—all except the top one—quite ostentatiously. Various blessings flowed from Corinne, who brought their Sunday dinner and who could be counted on to get the often expensive materials for her needlework; she knew, too, that Corinne from time to time gave Mizzi a finely-pointed thrust of truth about what Irma called "jewing her down" in her prices. Corinne could quietly cut to the bone. Irma had been a skillful needlewoman even in the old days, now through Mizzi she kept abreast of the latest styles. That season the rage was for motifs of "petit point" which were being inserted in Suède handbags, making one of the famous Viennese leather novelties. She had once received 80,000 crowns, when 80,000 was something, for a tiny medallion, so fine that she had only been able to work on it on warm summer mornings with the window open, even the glass panes seemed to blur it somewhat, though that north window up those five flights of stairs was certainly as good a place as one could have for working.

Irma being without sensibility, unconnected with her boys, had said further to Corinne on that same occasion:

"Business is business," at which Corinne had ineffectually protested that it was just what it wasn't,—business.

"You know how I am situated with the three boys," Irma had answered, in the same tone she would have used to give new information rather than to discuss a situation already threadbare, "so much for a cup of coffee in the morning and you know what bread costs, then the soup in the evening—a plateful—she won't need the thick part of it," she proceeded baldly, "the boys are growing and so hungry. She'll only need something to warm her up and when you think that she will have eaten well every day at noon, she'll get on all right."

The family had never been able to accustom themselves to the shock of certain unexpected thoughts appearing quite unclothed and without the least shame from Irma's most intimate being. A chill visited Corinne's backbone at the reference to the thin part of the soup, and a white point appeared in her eyes, glacial as an iceberg in blue water, which, however, did not attract Irma's attention nor reduce her temperature. She was, anyway, a woman who easily got red in the face and was always saying how hot she was when others were half frozen.

Having thus delivered herself of her inner thoughts she had proceeded to draw, not uncheerfully, two nails out of the kitchen wall and drive them neatly, loudly, deafeningly into two light-grey roses in the brown wall-paper of the alcove, near the curtain where they wouldn't be seen, and just a little too high to be reached comfortably. She had then duly sewed the hook and eye on the curtains under Corinne's very gaze and zealously, inexpensively flicked away any possible dust from the gilt-framed engraving of Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand, and the flat white and gilt vase on the little bracket underneath, sole embellishments of the alcove. But all the same in order to feel the least bit amiable about it Irma had to keep reminding herself that her sister-in-law would be paying for that same alcove. Indeed, with a second bare, arctic look also lost on Irma, Corinne had put the money for it for a whole month in advance into her hand. She had felt like snatching her treasure up in her arms, conveying her a hundred, a thousand miles and setting her down in some warm and pleasant spot. And this, this was what she had prepared for her, this quite evident place of tribulation. She made no answer to Irma's last words beyond drawing her lips thinly together. They had all learned that they couldn't get at their father's widow except through her sons, but just as soon as she could turn around she'd get another niche for her Dresden china auntie....

No one, not even Corinne was ever to know what Frau Stacher's thoughts or rather feelings were, as soundlessly, in the narrow confines of the alcove, she unpacked her few possessions. When those designed for the lower drawer of the little chest were laid in, it stuck obstinately in a three cornered way as she tried to close it. The upper one had proved to be still full of old letters, postcards and photographs. A faded reminder of Heinie and Irma with knapsacks and alpenstocks off on their honeymoon in the Dolomites, caught her eye, which was further held by a likeness of her unsuspecting self staring at her from under an oak in the Stadtpark at Baden, with Anna's baby, the first-born grandchild on her knee. And this was to what it was all leading up she thought in unaccustomed irritation, as she gave another push to the lower drawer, which went in with a jerk that left her breathless. When she wanted to hang up her coat she found that she had to stand on the divan to reach the nail. Her eyes taking in the details of that very evident tent of a night were at their palest, scarcely a trace of blue left in them. She was quite alone. Irma waiting impatiently to open the door for her sister-in-law's belated arrival had almost immediately departed to engage in the protracted and militant operation of marketing. The three boys were at school. Irma's welcome had been hasty and without warmth. The room itself was cold with the insidious chill of a room in a damp climate that has not had a fire in it since the day before. The white porcelain stove, as Frau Stacher stepped shiveringly over to it possessed not even a reminder of heat, though she put her hands knowingly on certain tiles, hoping possibly to find one still warm from the previous evening. Irma never lighted the fire till the boys got back in the afternoon. She herself would sit at her embroidery frame with a round, grey, stone bottle of hot water, wrapt in a piece of old flannel, in her lap. Frau Stacher tried to think that the place would be warmer in many ways when the boys came home.

Then the cuckoo clock struck eleven hollow strokes and hurriedly she began to lay out her very best things to wear to Liesel's. Liesel adored good clothes and always noticed what people wore. A large part of her conversation was about making over old things or the possibility of getting new ones, and the discussion of what was being worn that season and might be worn the next could induce in her sensations bordering on rapture.

Frau Stacher was still wearing for "best" with a measure of decency, some stancher remnants of the years of plenty. She now proceeded to put on her black cloth suit with the embroidered black and white lapels, the last thing she had bought before her "crac," arranging softly about her neck, which was already encircled by a bit of narrow black velvet, a certain piece of oft-washed and much-mended old lace that she had worn for twenty years, pinning it with an oxydized silver bar pin on which was stamped "Karlsbad," unlosable, valueless relic of a journey in the happier days. She carefully brushed her black hat, with its purple velvet knot faded into grey, giving it a few supplementary pinches and pats before putting it on, instinctively at an angle that was dignified, even becoming; then she rolled tightly her black cotton umbrella and drew on her neatly darned black gloves. She paused on the threshold to give a strange, pale glance about the familiar room become suddenly not only unfamiliar, but odious. The cold north light lay whitely upon it, bringing out every thread in the worn spots of the old rug, by the door, under the table, as you went into the kitchen; she remembered that Heinie's feet had had their part in wearing them threadbare, Heinie now seven years in his grave. There by the window was the unwieldy, red upholstered armchair that he had sat in all through that last winter of his life, with smooth, shining, dark spots on the arms and at the top. She shivered again but this time it was not from the cold of the room. As she passed out, her arms held more closely than ever to her sides, her head very erect, her little pride all indeed that she had left to her out of a whole life full of things, she still looked the Frau Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg. Her gentility was ineffaceable.

Liesel was busy in the tiny kitchen when her aunt rang gently, apologetically. As she opened the door an entrancing smell, unmistakably of fresh noodles in fresh butter, was wafted on the air. It wasn't the sort of scent that hung around Frau Kerzl's apartment nor about Irma's. Frau Stacher found herself sniffing it up eagerly, and certainly Liesel's warm welcome fittingly accompanied it. Where on earth did Liesel get the butter? she was thinking as she felt her niece's bright cheek against hers and her soft breast warmly near. Her spirits began to rise. She was momentarily out of sight and hearing of the combat for food, enveloped sustainingly in that delightful union of scents—above lilies and roses—fresh flour, fresh, warm butter! Her heart was suddenly flooded with an immense gratitude, not alone for the food, as she returned the soft embrace.

It was a comfortable little living room into which she then stepped, crowded with furniture, mostly Biedermayer, that had belonged to Otto's mother and his grandmother before her. Mellow, pale brown furniture decorated here and there with a black motif. A writing desk, with high shelves and glass doors destined for books, now held a mauve and white tea-set in old Vienna ware. A green porcelain stove stood in one corner and was beginning to give forth its gentle heat. Liesel lighted it about an hour before Otto returned and then all day long into the evening it could be depended on to give out generously its pleasant, even warmth. Between it and the window were Otto's armchair and his special stool for his lame leg, near it a little table with a rack for his pipes, his wallet of tobacco and a box of Trabucos. Otto had to have his cigar after supper and when luxuriously he had smoked it he would pull at his pipe and read the Wiener Journal or perhaps get out his flute. They talked of renting a piano when things got better and then Liesel could play his accompaniments. After busy days, pleasant evenings. Liesel's deft fingers were always at work salvaging something old,—her darning was famous in the family, or smartly fashioning something new. She had a way of standing in front of him and asking him if the stripes were more becoming across or up and down, or she would sit in his lap and ask him if his treasure could wear her dress as short as that, only so much stuff, every centimeter counted, that enchanted his uxorious soul. He would pinch her ankles and say that anybody who wore a 35 shoe could do as she liked, or as far up as the police permitted, and Liesel would be delighted and laugh and laugh. After hearing what had happened at the Ministry, she would tell of those even more vitally interesting visits to provision shops, where evidently the tradespeople liked to see her, and as far as was wise she would let him into the secret of her ways of ferreting out the little that was hidden; her ready smile, those two soft dimples and her even softer brown eyes counting for much in such operations. Once, but that was in the very beginning, she had started to tell Otto of the quite fresh remarks of the cheesemonger—a good-looking fellow—but he'd pouted for two days and though secretly Liesel was gratified by these signs of jealousy—once in awhile, like that—in the end she wisely kept the not at all displeasing personal attentions she received while marketing to herself.

Liesel had no books and never dreamed of opening the newspaper,—world-events were nothing to her. After supper as she sewed, Otto would sometimes read her amusing bits under the caption "Around about the Globe": "A dangerous Don Juan," "The most useful tree in the world," "The Adonis of the American film world," "Solemn mourning for a cat," and such like. Liesel adored cats. She wanted a cat, a piano and a baby; otherwise she had really little left to wish for.

Occasionally they followed a case through the criminal courts, especially if it had an amusing side. Liesel loved to laugh and laugh she often did in the weeping city.... And a jewel robbery made her eyes shine. But Liesel's real use for newspapers was to soak them in water, then roll them into tight balls and set them to dry. They made excellent fuel, one or two, put knowingly into the porcelain stove with a couple of briquets. There were always a few drying on the window-ledge in the kitchen.

Otto's own reactions to the problems of the Fatherland as set forth in the Press were not much more vigorous than his wife's. When he read of a new difficulty he would in his mind straightway blame some far-off, unreachable individual or circumstance for the national misfortunes in general and particular. He had then done all that could be required of him; effort was ended and he was quits with the situation. He didn't blame openly the Republic, he got his living and his Liesel's from it as from the Monarchy, and he rarely used the now familiar expression "Dos homma von da Republik," (that's the fault of the Republic) but he thought it. It was, further, a source of evils, that he, Otto Steiner, could not be expected to purify. What, indeed, could he do about the Republic, about the Jews, about the Freemasons, about the Exchange? Nothing, quite evidently nothing, and it let him comfortably out of all responsibility. He just kept on at his work, came home to his Liesel, who in turn pursued her agreeable and busy round of making him happy. So endless were the combinations and strategies involved in this once simple matter that she had her hands and time full.

She felt very sorry for her Tante Ilde, losing her money and being old and alone, for Kaethe and her children, for Irma and the boys, and sometimes she took them things to eat. Quite often she found her way to Mizzie's shop where she was always sure of a warm welcome, for undeniably Liesel understood the niceties of Mizzi's business. She sometimes even thought of going in with her, but she felt that she was, momentarily at least, better employed in using Otto's salary to the fullest advantage, and "with things as they are," (which was Liesel's nearest approach to intellectual participation in the national misfortunes) that took all her time and thought. Standing in those everlasting cues, running as she said, "from Pontius to Pilatus," bringing everything home herself, though the aged porter at the corner of the Kohlmarkt and the Wallnerstrasse always helped when it was a question of coals, glad to serve once more a handsome woman,—handsome in the traditional way he so thoroughly understood. Liesel would listen, quite truly interested, as they walked along to his tales of other days when gentlemen were "cavaliers" and ladies hard to win; of whilom young attachés at the not distant Foreign Office, that imposing Ballplatz, who had been wont to send him with love letters and flowers and bonbons. The telephone had given the first blow to such romantic expressions of love; and as for the War and the Peace, they were equally and finally calamitous....

She could well afford to greet her aunt lovingly, and her "dearest aunties" and her "how sweet you look" and her "I'm so glad to have you," came gushingly out of the abundance of her heart. She was so happy that she could add cheer to her food without the slightest effort.

The table was already spread. Aunt Ilde's involuntary though delicate glance showed her three places set, just the same for all; three wine glasses, three plates, three knives even, (on those knife-rests that she had so fortunately added to the coffee spoons and napkin rings when Liesel was married,) knives meant meat, but she then and there made up her mind not to take any—perhaps a little wine. The carafe stood on the table filled with a Voslauer, a pleasant, light, open wine, gently quite gently warming to the stomach. It grew on those very slopes about Baden.

Then she bethought herself cheerfully of the moment, when she would say to Liesel: "Now you stay with Otto, I'm going to do the dishes, but I must have an apron."

She had taken her things off and hung them up on one of the pegs in the little hallway. She had wished even as she did so that she didn't have to leave them there. They'd be the first things Otto would see and perhaps ... But such misgivings and some others had given way before that delicious odor and Liesel's warm welcome. She looked so pretty, so appetizing, in that big, pink apron. As she went back into the kitchen her aunt could hear her singing an old waltz from the "Graf von Luxenburg," "Bist meine liebe, kleine Frau."

Frau Stacher had for a moment the illusion that she was still living at Baden and that she had only come in for the day. There, too, was her little inlaid worktable that had belonged to her own mother and that Liesel had taken for safe-keeping when the house was given up. She'd always kept her wools and her fine darning in it and Liesel did the same.

"Can't I help?" she asked, as she continued to look at it, rent by a sudden, terrible homesickness, that made her voice quite weak.

"No, you just sit quiet and rest. Everything is ready. It's time for Otto to come, anyway," Liesel answered with a look at her wrist watch. "He's always to the minute. He only has an hour for dinner and must find everything ready."

Indeed as she spoke the rattle of a key was heard at the front door. She flew to it. There were the unmistakable, immemorial sounds of embracing and then a whispered word from Liesel.

"Ach, yes, yes," Tante Ilde heard him answer.

He had hung up his green plush hat with the little grey feather at the back on its own invariable peg, had divested himself of his overcoat, with its rather high, tight belt and hung it up on the next by Tante Ilde's hat and coat, just as she had known he would, but without the inhospitable thoughts her humility had attributed to him. As he entered he was combing his hair and moustache with his little pocket comb and smiling his somewhat fatuous smile.

Otto Steiner was the son of a small government official, the grandson of one. He had gone into the Ministry of Agriculture when he was eighteen, and had been there seven years, when at a certain hour the war found him, in a certain room, at a certain desk, bending over a certain big ledger. And out of that secure and dusty routine, as natural to him as breathing, he had been thrown to the Russian front, then to the French front where he had been wounded. He had been healed and thrown to the Italian front, every nerve in his body making its agonized appeal against going through certain perfectly definite horrors again. He was thankful when his knee, which was supposed to be quite cured, began once more to stiffen and swell, when in a short time quite certainly he wouldn't be able to get about and they'd have to send him home. Then before he could be demobilized he had been taken prisoner and put in that Italian camp where his feet had frozen. Such strange things to happen to one who found his pleasure as well as his daily bread in those dusty ledgers, and whose conversation was largely made up of references to "Das Ministerium." It was one of the first words he remembered from his childhood days, as familiar as "guten Morgen."

Now after all the agonies, the incredible agonies, it had been granted to him, out of so many who had been heaped in nameless graves everywhere in Europe, to be coming into his own home from that very same Ministry, greeted by that delightful odor of food, prepared by a beloved, loving and lovely wife. "I'm certainly lucky," he often said to himself and asked no further grace of heaven than to grow old in the Ministry, moving slowly, as his forbears had moved, up through various rooms, indicative of various grades.

He was pale and wore eye-glasses. His face was the somewhat round-cheeked face of the average Viennese, with rather small nose and rather full lips under a brown moustache. Unmistakably a government employee who would set no river on fire but could be depended on to go his serviceable little way, hour by hour, day by day, year by year ... the traditional "rond de cuir."

There were always rumors of reducing the number of employees, but Steiner's work was so exact, his handwriting and figures so beautifully neat, that he was as safe as anybody in those unsafe days. He could, furthermore, answer any question put to him by any superior, even the strange questions of new men, who, momentarily "protected," came into the Ministry in the upper grades, passing in and then out. The administration was fairly snowed under by employees. It was reckoned often, (not, however, by those employed, they kept such statistics as much as possible to themselves) that 750,000 out of the 2,500,000 lived on and by the different departments of government. But mostly their positions were no more secure than yellowing leaves in Autumn. A gust of zeal on the part of some one high up and they fell in showers from the governmental tree, disappearing into the dark, wet, windy streets of hyemal Vienna. The question with each and every one was how to hang on....

Hydrocephalous Austria, with that terrible will to live! A mangled trunk supported its great head, Vienna. The members through which the blood should have circulated had been lopped off, the head was growing bigger, sicker....

But Otto Steiner wasn't thinking of any of these things as he greeted his aunt Ilde. He saluted her affectionately; some not very urgent realization that she "had had it hard" put an additional cordiality into his voice. He was further melted by the odor of those fresh noodles and hot butter just as she had been.

A sizzling sound, like sweetest music, coming from the kitchen, next fell on their ears. Liesel disappeared anxiously.

"What have you got today?" he cried through the door, "do I really smell noodles and butter? I'm just dying of hunger!"

A moment after, Liesel, divested of her pink apron, in the neatest one-piece dark blue dress, a red leather belt holding it snugly about her waist, appeared rosily bearing a smoking black and white checkered soup tureen. Little tendrils of dark hair lay softly, damply about her brow, her dimples were very deep, her eyes very bright. She was sure of that soup, cunningly made of left-over crusts of black bread, roasted crisply in the oven and then ground up with a bountiful seasoning of onions and various other more discreetly sustaining herbs. On that dark January day it put heart into them all. Their spoons clicked joyously. Then those shining noodles! Liesel had strewn over them the crispest little heaps of fried crumbs. A very, very small golden-brown veal cutlet was put closely, significantly by Otto's plate. Generally he and Liesel halved their small bits of meat, but today she set the example of taking none. It was plainly fitting that the wage-earner, the master should have it all and more especially in those days when nourishment was the first need, the last preoccupation. Above saving one's soul for eternity was that of saving one's body for a span.

When the pale wine was poured out Liesel said sweetly:

"We must drink to Tante Ilde's health!" and Otto cried promptly, "Prosit" looking at her affectionately through his pince-nez, across the brim of his glass.

She began to feel herself a new woman. Food, youth, love, happiness, the taste, the sight, the feeling of it all! Paradise in some way regained. She forgot that she was there as a poor old relative, who for decency's sake, had to have her breath kept yet awhile in her body by the efforts and sacrifices of those of her blood; no, she was again Tante Ilde of Baden who would soon say:

"Well, children, are you coming out to me for dinner on Sunday, and will you have an Apfelstrudel or an apricot tart?"

Then Otto began to tell about the hard case of his friend, Karl Schober, who though a war-cripple had been inexplicably dismissed that very day. There were four cripples in Otto's room, for that is where,—in the rooms of some Ministry, with a little "protection," they mostly and justly landed. After they had called it a shame, and unbelievable, and had given a shudder, (being dismissed in those times was like being condemned to death without the preliminary security of prison) insensibly they fell to talking of other days. Tante Ilde, who had forgotten nothing that had ever happened to any of the children, began to tell the most interesting things about Liesel when she was little. How she had fallen from the apple tree in the garden of the Baden house and broken her wrist, and how Tante Ilde had held her other hand when the doctor was setting the bone and that Liesel had been so brave and hadn't cried, at which Otto leaned over and gave his wife a pat on the arm. And the time she had taken Liesel to the races so conveniently near; Liesel remembered that well, that was the day she had first put her hair up and wore the lovely wine-colored dress with little pleated ruffles and had gone out with her aunt Ilde as Fräulein Bruckner instead of "die Liesel." They had put money on a certain Herr Hafner's four year-old and Liesel had actually won 20 Krones!

Otto listened with his somewhat full lips parted, entranced by these tales of his treasure's earliest youth, and all of a sudden they found they had eaten everything there was on the table and drunk every drop of wine, but they continued to sit for a while longer, pleasantly engaged in picking their teeth and sucking in their tongues. Liesel always did things well and kept the two little blue glass toothpick holders filled. They had been given by Mizzi, who went so far and no further in the matter of presents, even to some one she liked, on the occasion of Liesel's marriage. When shown to the various members of the family they had, one and all, wondered how Mizzi had had the face....

Then when Otto lighted his Trabuco, Tante Ilde found herself saying just as she had planned:

"I'm going to do the dishes. You stay with Otto, but I must have an apron."

Liesel had been very dear and had said:

"But no, Tante Ilde, you mustn't work when you come to us."

Suddenly her aunt's eyes had filled with tears:

"It would make me so truly happy," she entreated. Then Otto had cried:

"But yes, little goose, let Tante Ilde do as she will!"

So Liesel stayed with Otto and as Tante Ilde went in and out she could hear them talking as if they hadn't seen each other for a week, trying to decide if they would go, that very evening, to a cosy little cabaret in the Annagasse, a stone's throw from their house and Liesel wear her new pink dress; or whether they would go to the Circus Busch movie in the Prater Stern, where it didn't matter what you wore and where they were giving a wonderful moral drama in six acts called "Sinful Blood," and where they would hold hands in the dark just as if they weren't going to spend the night together.

Tante Ilde herself even began to hum that waltz tune from the Graf von Luxenburg, though she had long been nobody's "dear little wife."

When she was putting tenderly away in the tiny cupboard the white plates with the gold "S" that Liesel was also "keeping" for her, she got suddenly a quite unexpected whiff of the once familiar salami, proceeding irrepressibly from a tightly-tied up little package.

"Sausage for Otto's supper!" she murmured to herself, and then wondered if she were mistaken, though Liesel was equal to anything ... but all without any envy. She'd had a good meal, flavored with love and happiness, and suddenly a thousand other thoughts and feelings pressed in upon her that she'd forgotten existed. She was increasingly glad of Liesel's youth and love, that out of the starving, mourning city she had grasped her comfortable joy....

Finally Otto saying warmly, "auf Wiedersehen, Auntie," had given her a sounding kiss on both cheeks, and placing several on Liesel's red lips had contentedly limped off to the Ministry.

Then Liesel had proceeded to initiate her into some of the secrets of her wonderful management, but as they were inseparable from her youth and dimples and shining eyes, they were of little practical use to her aged aunt. The fortune-teller whom Liesel had just consulted had assured her that she would have good luck in all her undertakings. One glance at Liesel's open, happy face, framed in that glossy abundance of waving dark hair was enough to start the least gifted of seers off in the right direction. She had, further, informed her that a blond, blue-eyed woman was to be avoided. Liesel had stared at that, but when she told her aunt about it they avoided each other's eyes, though Tante Ilde did murmur something about its being "singular." Liesel was dying to keep the conversation on lines that would inevitably have led to the enthralling and inexhaustible topic of Fanny, but there were certain matters that you just couldn't talk about with Tante Ilde, not when you could see her eyes, so Liesel only said that the fortune-teller had further told her that she had the exclusive love of a man with dark hair and eye-glasses who had been wounded in the war. Well, you had to admit that there was something in it all, when they hit so many nails on the head, (even though, as Tante Ilde couldn't help thinking, those nails were positively sticking up asking to be hit).

Liesel found that having Tante Ilde for dinner wasn't at all bad. On the contrary she had thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end she gave her some macaroni and a few spoonsful of brown sugar to take home to Irma, also a couple of Otto's old shirts; he had to look a certain way at the Ministry and she had darned those till they weren't decent any more, but for the boys.... And Liesel had been so sweet when she kissed her goodbye, saying, "Now, Auntie, don't forget you're to come next Monday and I'll see about getting something extra nice for dinner. What about a Schmarrn?"

Frau Stacher had positively tripped from the Annagasse to the Hoher Markt, in unaccustomed light-heartedness. "Happiness,—it's even more contagious than misery," she thought, grateful to have been exposed to the dear infection, and forgot that she'd been timid about going.

But the extraordinary part about it all was that that good meal, instead of making her less hungry, seemed to engender an intolerable desire for another. She was just wild for more noodles and butter when night came, ready for a whole cutlet for herself. As they sat round the supper-table, the three hungry boys with their eyes on the soup-tureen, and Irma dipping the ladle in so carefully for Tante Ilde's share that the few bubbles of life-giving fat would not slip into it, yet so shallowly that none of the thick part came up, then Tante Ilde was, for once, not faint for food, not at all. She was just wild for food. This, however, she was able to keep hidden in her breast. Indeed she was greatly ashamed of her sudden access of gluttony, and the next time she went to confession....

When under the stimulating effect of the pleasant meal at Liesel's, she had smilingly, but as it proved unwisely told Irma about the noodles and butter, Irma, taking some last stitches by the waning light of her north window, had listened with that intent expression the habitually undernourished have in their faces when food is being talked about, but her only answer had been:

"Well, with a meal like that you certainly won't be able to eat any supper." She had fairly snatched the sugar and macaroni from her sister-in-law's hands, then she had held the shirts, embellished with their lace-like darns, up to the light, which had no difficulty in getting through, saying:

"I should think she would send them! They're on their last legs."

No, Irma couldn't be gracious, she'd always been that way, even when she was young and pretty and sheltered; and since the Peace....

But when Frau Stacher finally dipped her spoon into that watery soup, after having broken into it the thin slice of bread pushed towards her by Irma's careful yet resolute hand, she suddenly found that she didn't really want even that, the boys ought to have every drop, every crumb. She felt old, tired, completely superfluous, and she would have loved above all things, even above food, to have had a room of her own wherein she could hide the shame of her superfluity, shut the door on it, turn the key and drop a few secret tears over it....

After the meal consumed with lightning rapidity by the hungry boys and more slowly cleared away by their mother and aunt, they all placed themselves around the table with its heavy red felt cover, and the boys began to do their lessons for the next day in the light of the swinging lamp pulled down very low. Irma took out those shirts of Otto's, holding them again up to the light and making a clicking sound with her tongue against her teeth as she did so.

Then there was silence except for the rubbing of the boys' feet on the chair rungs and floor, the turning of the pages of their theme books and the ticking of the brown cuckoo clock with its long, swinging pendulum.

Frau Stacher sat just outside the circle of light, in deep shadow; if she had put her hand out she could have touched the curtain of the alcove. She felt increasingly useless and lonely. They would be sitting there just the same if she were dead.

Irma was continually taking off her glasses and wiping them on the piece of old linen she kept by her for that purpose. She knew her eyes were getting worse and sometimes she was very frightened. The light caught her big, capable hands, fell on the heap of white linen in her lap, glowed about the fringe of the little, red, three-cornered shawl crossed over her low, heavy breasts. She had brought it from Agram in those days that as the calendar ran were not so far away, but might have been, for all their resemblance to the present, of another century. Her face was left in deep shadow which did not soften something roughhewn about it. It was broad through the forehead and her cheeks with their deep-dyed spots of color had very prominent bones, her nose alone was the rather formless kind that escapes memory or description. Above her short, full upper lip was a dark duvet, like a thick smudge put on with a careless finger and getting darker every year. Twisted about her head were heavy coils of rather oily black hair that anxiety had neither greyed nor thinned, though her eyes, once so bright under that low, full forehead with those two other wide, black smudges for eyebrows, had got quite dull. It gave her a strange expression at times, all except the eyes keeping its freshness that way. She had good looks, the family had to admit it, in a bright, square, hard way, like a strongly-outlined, heavily-colored poster; like a poster of a peasant woman binding sheaves that one might come across in a Railway station, meant to be looked at from a distance and to encourage travel. But somehow Irma hadn't worked out comfortably in the shorter perspectives of a city. Why Heinie had been mad about her, his sister had never understood. But Heinie had been a marrier. She couldn't think of Heinie not married, though why just Irma, uncomplaisant, worrying Irma strayed into that Viennese world of theirs, familiar and dear to them as their own breath, with its comfortable, care-free ways. There had been so many attractive young women about with easy smiles and pleasant habits who would have flavored his lengthening years. Now the family were, one and all, horribly bored by Irma, left heavily on their hands. They forgot that Pauli had said when his father-in-law married that she reminded him of a late harvest, with vermilion melons and stacks of yellow grain against black earth, and that Heinie knew winter was near.

There in the shadow, her useless hands lying folded in her thin lap, her colorless head bent, her pale lids dropped close over her eyes, Frau Stacher shivered, suddenly remembering that phrase about winter being near. In the warm haze of the protracted Indian summer of her life she hadn't in the least understood what it meant. She fell to thinking of that and of other long past things; of present things she had no thoughts, only confused, painful sensations, which were cutting deeper wrinkles and scars in her face than all the living through of her pleasant three-score years and ten.

Ferry, the eldest boy, thin and tall for his years, with very long black lashes shadowing his blue eyes and falling upon his thin cheeks with their tiny spot of bright color, had closed his books and taken a rattling, illy-jointed knife out of one coat pocket and a little figure in wood that he was working on out of the other. Even with that poor blade he had given it a touch of life,—a woman with her arms hanging at her sides.

"I'm going to make two little buckets to put into her hands, one for apples and one for pears," he whispered to his mother as he held it up,—"see how she's already bending under the weight," he added with his slight but persistent cough.

He had, for all his pale adolescence, a strong resemblance to his aunt Ilde. She had always cared a lot for Ferry; he'd been a snuggling, affectionate baby, something inexpressibly dear and unexpected in her elderly life; they had, in a way, she and her brother, forgotten such things. Now she was aware of a hot yearning to give him a new knife. From somewhere that knife must come.

Gusl, the next, was formed in his mother's image: thick-set, short with a certain roughness in his ways and those same bright, hard eyes under a full brow and shaggy dark hair.... The peasant caught in the city, and what he would do with the city or it with him was still tightly rolled on the lap of the gods. Ferry's future was easier to foretell—he would betake himself and his talent to some garret and starve, after the immemorial way of poverty, youth and genius. Gusl hated desperately his books and he was always hungry. Any meal that his mother set out he could have eaten alone. Calories were nothing to him. He wanted lots, lots. But Ferry was always dreaming, sometimes even over his food.

Little Heinie had almost immediately fallen asleep, leaning against the table, a ring of brown curls and two big ears catching the light as it played about his bent head.

Yes, that was the way they would be sitting if she were not there, if she were dead. She felt thinly miserable, like something that had been and no longer was ... like her own ghost. Irma was wiping her spectacles again.

"Give me the mending," said her sister-in-law, but somewhat timidly, she never quite knew what Irma would do, "I haven't used my eyes today."

Irma passed it over to her silently and changed places with her. She felt a little less useless then; coming into the circle of light with the boys seemed to take her out of that shadowy, unpleasant world where superfluous, dependent old women were waiting uncertainly, wretchedly, to get into the cold grave. No, Irma's ways were not comfortable ways, and it was all a part of the general misfit of things that it was Irma who was the widow and had the alcove and the three sons and needed help.

When from time to time Ferry coughed, just a tiny cough, but quite regular, almost like the slow, sure tick of the clock, his mother's black brows would contract at that spectre of the "Viennese malady" which had found its way into her home. Her sister-in-law wasn't the only ghost there.

Irma was from the Plitvicer Lakes, beyond Agram, now become Serb. There was always that something rough, even fierce about her, not at all like the easy-going Viennese, not like the fiery Hungarians, not like anything Frau Stacher was familiar with. Perhaps it was what had attracted Heinie. But she was vaguely afraid of it.

Irma had at one time tried to go back to her own country, to her people, with her sons—a woman bringing sons would be welcome. Then the extraordinary, the unbelievable thing revealed itself. She found she didn't exist there any more, no more than if she were dead; less than that even, for then she would have had a grave. Austrian papers were of no use to her and Servian papers she could not get. The little town where she was born, on the wild Milanovac Lake was no longer a Crownland. Her people were no longer her people; even her brother was no longer her brother. The white house with the warm brown roof and the vine growing over the door that got so red in the autumn, and the chestnut tree that got so yellow, there in front with the circular seat—all that, their father's legacy to them—she no longer had any share in it. There were, it appeared, many of these spots, these veritable no man's lands, where children had no rights and strange people went over thresholds worn by parental feet and strange people slept in the beds they were born in. If only she could have gone back there with her boys and wrested her living in some way from the wild soil, ... and Ferry in the mountain air! No wonder Irma was sombre, was fierce, and bore her sorrows heavily.

Frau Stacher kept reminding herself of all this, but what could she or anybody do about it? They were all caught in a trap ... simple and terrible as that. As she sat measuring the tuck in a shirt sleeve, she was suddenly aware of being worn to exhaustion with the changes and excitements of the new order of her days. Such desperate exertions just to keep the breath in her body! She wanted to get her clothes off, lie down, shut her eyes, be in darkness with the effortless night before her. But she sat on silently, drawing the thread weakly in and out of the thin stuff and now and then looking up at the boys. They were pale, but they were young. They could—even Ferry—expect more brightly-colored, fuller years. But for herself!... With difficulty she kept the tears from falling over her work, but only when Irma said:

"Now, boys, to bed, you've studied enough," did she feel free to lay it aside.

Then Irma quite ostentatiously told the children to say good night, though Ferry was already leaning affectionately, after his way, against his aunt and saying that he would help make up the divan, but Irma who suffered terribly from jealousy and could ill endure these signs of love, told him it was late and that she would help Tante Ilde. The three then kissed her resoundingly, but sleepily. When she felt the nearness of those young bodies, their adolescent strength held in leash by that sapping undernourishment, she realized all the more that she was useless, her sands run. She forgot that she was paying for the alcove and wondered if this was the way things would always be, as she finally laid herself down on the old brown divan, on that divan that had for years been in the sitting room at Baden, and when all the beds were in use had offered a pleasant night's rest to the last-come child. Now she was sleeping on it herself, but as an intruder, fitfully, unquietly, from time to time hearing Ferry cough and turn in his bed, and always Irma's loud, empty snore.

III

ANNA AND PAULI

Innig, lebhaft.

Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,

Du meine Wonn', O du mein Schmerz.

Pauli Birbach especially disliked the Mariahilferstrasse, an endless street. Here and there a century-old peasant house caught up in the tide of the growing city; here and there some rococo palais in a side street visible from a corner; here and there a great department store. But mostly there were little shops, little businesses connected with little lives, the lives of the middle and lower middle classes that crowded its interminability. The true motive power of every one in that street in those post-war years, and in every one of the side streets, no matter what their condition in life, was the desire for food. Indescribable meannesses were practised, crimes even, were committed for a bit of fat, a little sugar or molasses. Those who weren't actually confronted with starvation had that terrible hunger for fats, for sweets, a hunger that touched the brain, that could arouse in the gentlest soul cruel, predatory thoughts. Now and then the rumor would get about that a certain delicatessen shop had cheese or salami. It would be stormed by those who had money to buy, and the entrance encumbered by those who could only see, or others more fortunate, who could get near enough to smell. Those who had reason to get in were few in comparison to the many who remained outside. Indeed the only peace in Vienna was that which reigned inside certain expensive provision shops.

Pauli's dislike of the Mariahilfer street was profound and temperamental. He liked things diversified and grandiose. Mariahilfer street was neither. Now it was more than ever depressing in that drab, monotonous struggle for survival. Any one of the indwellers knew how near the potter's field was, the hospital, the asylum. A little sagging of endeavor and they would find themselves in one or another of those undesirable places. Anna had stupidly, tactlessly taken that apartment during the war, when her husband was away, and before the housing problem had come to add the difficulty of shelter to that of nourishment. He had said to himself when he learned of the new address: "Now isn't that just like Anna—the one street I hate in Vienna."

She had crowded their furniture, but uncosily, into the restricted space. There were three sofas in the living room and various tables besides the one they used for their meals. No books in Anna's home any more than in Liesel's. A similar glass compartment above a somewhat similar desk held an accumulation of bric-à-brac of purely family interest. Two white and gilt cups bearing the words "dem lieben Vater," "der lieben Mutter" that had been Hermine's first gifts to her parents for their morning coffee; several solemn vases that on various occasions the women had presented to each other, and in whose narrow necks outraged flowers always wilted; a slab of wood with the Castle of Salzburg painted on it against a blue background; a group of carved wooden bears from Innsbruck and other souvenirs of the days when they travelled. Some gay Dresden china figures in minuet postures immediately struck the eye, that Pauli had given Anna when they were first married, now extraordinarily out of keeping with the paralysis of their conjugal life.

The sofa cushions were in dull linen, worked in dull colors and bore the usual mottoes: "Nur ein viertel Stuendchen," "Traeume suess" and the like.

The once too-bright pattern of the Brussels rug had faded into browns and greys. The various chairs carried on their backs and arms their ugly, witless, crocheted doilies.

Even over Tante Ilde's gay little brass-bound chest, containing dear but unsalable odds and ends, Anna had thrown a brown cloth cover worked sparsely in white and yellow daisies.

There was something dead about it all and about the two dull women the expression of whose being it was.

To Pauli, gay, sparkling, eager, passionate Pauli, it was as pleasant to visit his home as it would have been to visit the cemetery. In one corner was the table on which, wrapped in a scarlet cloth, was Pauli's zimbalon. It was the only thing in the dwelling that spoke of its master. It was the bright flower on the grave, and too, he visited his home not much oftener than he would have visited Anna had she been lying in the Central Cemetery.

One of those stupid, fatal marriages. Anna had never understood anything about it, either the making or the unmaking of it. But she continued to love him with all the force of her poor being, and accepted, because she had to, his now habitual absence.

Pauli's mother had been a Hungarian and in his bright Magyar way he had long since put the dots on the "ies" of the conjugal situation: "Anna? Dead since years. She ought to wear a bead wreath."

That sombre flame in her eyes that from time to time he was unpleasantly aware of was, indeed, no more attractive to him than the phosphorescence shining about something decayed.

Sometimes he felt a brief pity for Hermine, his daughter, so young, so unattractive, so mirthless. "The poor girl" he would think, and then his thoughts would turn to fairer, brighter maids who might have been called poor for quite other reasons. To be a woman and not have beauty, grace—more or less—was in Pauli Birbach's eyes her one real misfortune. Women's beauty was, indeed, the central point in his world, that artistic, pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving world in which he was at home. He used to think that if he had married any one of Heinrich Bruckner's daughters save Anna he could have managed,—but just Anna. He sometimes thought too, that if he could have explained why he had sighed to possess Anna he could have explained any and all of the puzzles of the Universe. It held indeed all riddles within itself.

But for the last year it had not been any one of Herr Bruckner's handsome daughters. Since a certain day when he had gone with Corinne to Kaethe's ... since that day when the simplest yet mightiest thing had happened....

They had been standing at a window waiting for the rain to stop. They were very near as they looked out. Suddenly Pauli had been aware of a profound commotion in his being ... something hot and sweet and cruel and his own. He was seeing Corinne as he had never before seen any woman. She was deadly pale, her eyes were closed, her dark lashes lying heavily upon her cheeks. When she opened them and looked back at him the hovering magic, descending upon them had worked its purpose.

He was done suddenly and forever with the pluckable maids, perpetually ripe fruit, all seasons being theirs, that abound in Vienna; inaccessible too, to the sentiments that he had periodically experienced for one or another woman who had crossed his susceptible and magnetic orbit, whom he had possessed or not possessed, as the case might have been. It was different from everything else under the sun and was growing, growing. It was hope and image in his brain, greed and hurry in his body. He was mad for Corinne, Corinne earning unnaturally yet competently her daily bread in a bank when she should have been holding court under some oak at the change of the midsummer moon. Corinne placing endless, neat zeroes across broad, white pages when she should have been plucking simples or brewing potions. That elfin brood that crowded her pale heart overpowered his being, held it captive. One would have said he needed something brighter, hotter.... Yet, Corinne ... out of the whole world.... But that none of them knew as yet save Tante Ilde in her shy, sure way. Anna, who never got things straight, had a deep, dull jealousy of Fanny, a sentiment, however, that she had been familiar with since her earliest childhood, and when indirectly she learned that Pauli had seen Fanny, she was miserable for days, after her chill, slow habit, miserable unto death almost. She suspected Fanny of having made that arrangement about Tante Ilde; Fanny, though one never saw her, was always everywhere it seemed to Anna. Two dull fires had burned in Anna's eyes, two sombre red spots had darkened her cheeks, excitement never lighted up her face, when she learned not only that her aunt Ilde was to come and regularly, every Tuesday, but that Pauli himself would cast his bright shadow over his own dark threshold on that day. She and Hermine began straightway to plan as attractive a menu as lack of talent and materials permitted....

When Corinne had asked Pauli if Anna couldn't take Tante Ilde once a week for her midday meal, he had responded warmly, not simply to give Corinne pleasure, but because he was made that way.

"But of course! The poor, dear Tanterl, I'll tell Anna to get the best she can, you know she's not very clever at it, and I'll try to be there myself."

Pauli was doubtless various kinds of a sinner, but his humanity was always to be counted on. It wasn't because Corinne was looking obliquely at him, with the look that stirred him hotly, madly....

Anna and Hermine talked ceaselessly of the possibilities or rather the impossibilities of the meal. Hermine even went into her mother's bed two successive nights and stayed there late. The various Hungarian dishes he was so fond of presented immense difficulties. Those that didn't need a lot of sugar, milk and eggs, needed a lot of butter, lard or fat of some kind. Even love did not make Anna inventive and people never sold her anything as they did to Liesel because they wanted to see her smile when she got it. They passed in review one by one those tantalizing dishes, pulling up round at a Paprikahuhn, chicken in paprika. It rose up and clucked a ghostly cluck out of happier kitchen days. But where to get that chicken in the flesh? It was no easier than getting a tropical bird of bright plumage and stripping it. He liked sweet things too, Kaiserschmarrn with a lot of powdered sugar on it, or Palatschinken, those traditional pancakes, filled heavily with jam.

During the earlier years of Anna's married life, when Pauli saw how things culinary were going, a young Hungarian servant had been sent him by one of his sisters. She was an excellent cook and had taught Anna in a way, a lot of things, but she had been landed, like all good cooks, in the net of marriage, and was succeeded in the Birbach household by various maids of varying and inferior talents. But Anna really didn't know good food from bad, and she got careless too. Pauli was oftener and longer absent, and then the War came and then the Peace. Pauli by no means let them starve, but he didn't see his way to keeping those two ghosts, who unnaturally bore his name, supplied with the delicacies or, to be more exact, the relative delicacies of post-war Vienna, that oftener than not they would spoil in the cooking.

He had his two sisters, widowed on the same day of the war, and their broods of little children to support. It had not been so difficult to care for them at first for they had taken their children and gone back to the house of their mother near Groswardein, that comfortable Landhaus that they had all three inherited with its acres bearing wine and grain. But when they thought the war was over they suddenly found themselves one dark night fleeing with the rest of the inhabitants before an unexpected army. After days they got into Budapest and when the panic had abated and they wanted to go back, they found to their consternation that though they were still Hungarian their lands had become Roumanian. Some dark, transmuting evil had been worked. Suddenly they had no civil state there where they were born and no longer possessed what their parents had bequeathed them ... as unbelievable as that.... Pauli enabled them to eke out a reduced existence with their many children in some rooms on the outskirts of Pesth.

The comfortable Landhaus with its pink walls, its green shutters, its sloping roof, the grapevine growing up over the door, the great plane tree in the garden, became as a lost paradise to be described to children at the knee,—with hints of recovery when they were old enough to fight for their own.

Though Anna suspected that Pauli supported his sisters and in her heart was bitter about it, she had no courage and less opportunity to reproach him with it.

Pauli loved his sisters very much, especially his sister Mimi, and he had never told her the tale of Geza's death brought back by his comrade. How they were to charge a certain hill in Galicia one chilly autumn dawn in the face of the enemy, waiting millions of them, it seemed, after the Russian way of lavish cannon-food. How Geza naturally a laughing man had been leaden-hearted as they went up side by side; even the schnapps served out to the troops had not put heart into him. He had said, "I'm going up because I must, but it's quite useless—I'll never come down again."... Geza loved life ... and when they got up to the top immediately a great splinter of shell struck him in the chest and he looked a last reproachful look at his comrade as he fell against him.... The end of Geza who loved life.

No, Pauli couldn't bear to think of that. Some day he meant to tell Mimi of those cruel last moments, when Geza knew, knew that his end was near.

... Perhaps he never would, and then again the day might come when it wouldn't hurt Mimi so much. The children would never understand. And it would be as if Geza, heavy with premonition, had never charged that hill and said those last words,—as if he had never been at all. That was the way of life, but Pauli didn't like to think of it ... all that being no more ... as if you had never been; his bright, strong flesh rejected it.

He was, somewhat vaguely to his wife, in business that brought with it frequent mention of the Travel Bureau in the Kaerntnerring and entailed many absences. They had grown accustomed to his travels, and anyway the thoughts of his wife and daughter ran, with that of the rest of the population on what they were going to eat and how they were going to get it, rather than on the coming or going of any non-edible, even husband and father. So, though they were among the relatively well-to-do in the starving city, the two women talked almost entirely of what they had eaten or were going to eat and Hermine was to experience her greatest enthusiasms when scurrying home with a bit of fat or a can of jam.

The difficulty of getting to Anna's from the Hoher Markt was occupying Frau Stacher's thoughts as she lay awake in the early dawn, watching the day grow stronger, till she could see Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand, and the gilt of the flat, white vase on the bracket underneath began to glisten faintly in the dull light coming in over the top of the curtains.

The trolley that she could take at the Opernring was itself far off and the fares had jumped up to prohibitive prices. Foreigners, workmen and Jews alone had the wherewithal. She decided finally as she proceeded, soundlessly as possible, to make the limited toilet the alcove permitted, that she would walk. The hot cup of ersatz coffee with the ersatz sugar and the thin slice of gritty bread seemed somehow quite sufficient. She had entirely lost that wild hunger of the night before, so curiously the result of the tasty meal at Liesel's. She made up her divan, put her things in order and carefully pulled back the curtains of the alcove. She had been made aware, the morning before, that Irma liked to have them drawn back early and tight, and certainly it did give a more spacious aspect to the living room, off which were the two little bed chambers, one occupied by Irma with her youngest boy and the other by Ferry and Gusl. Except for the fading photograph, on the chest of drawers, of the long dead Commercial Advisor in its wooden frame of carved Edelweiss, got when he and his bride had gone to Switzerland, his widow was completely wiped out of that living space. She felt no more at ease there than if she were suspended in mid-air, or pressed into some shadowy yet too-narrow dimension,—in a word horribly uncomfortable....

The boys had had their cocoa, their thick slices of bread so carefully measured and cut, and had gone off to school. Heinie would get a midday meal at a relief station near the seat of learning, which provided for one scholar out of each needy family each day. The three boys took turns, coming home for dinner on alternate days. There was a fierceness about Irma where food for the boys was in question. When they had licked their spoons and looked about at the empty plates on the table, with their eyes a trifle too big, and Ferry with those bright spots on each cheek, Irma's jaw would set and her brow darken. Not long before she had discovered however, a way of adding to their nourishment ... the "Friends" in the Singerstrasse ... you received a ticket there and then you went to the Franzensplatz to get the package. But as the endeavor of the various foreign relief societies was not to fully nourish any one family or quarter at the expense of other families and quarters, but to the best of their limited ability to keep as large a part as possible of the two and one half millions from actually dying of hunger, that relief in any one case was only palliative....

When Tante Ilde set out on that tramp to Anna's dressed again in her best things,—Pauli always noticed what women wore, even old women,—she left Irma planning the midday meal. Irma in an extraordinarily fortunate way had got hold of some chicken legs,—it would never happen again she was sure, being inclined to pessimism. She had scraped and washed them, and was going to cook them with the rice. Furthermore into the rice she was going to put a little of the evaporated milk that had come in the thrice blessed package from the Franzensplatz, it would be nearly equal to meat. Enough for three plates full, two large ones for Gusl and for little Heinie and a smaller one for herself. A box of zwieback had come in the package too, and a piece for each would be dipped into some of the milk. It was a good day and she warmly returned Tante Ilde's farewell and told her she hoped Anna would have something fit to eat. She had a feeling that she couldn't get rid of, that some day Tante Ilde would have a cold or something and wouldn't be able to get out. However sufficient unto the day, and that morning she was almost affectionate.

When Frau Stacher got down into the street a great puff of wind caught her and slapped her dress about her legs, but she disentangled herself and stepped, not unbriskly, into the Rotenthurm Street. The day was cold and overcast, but the rain had not yet begun to fall. She passed St. Stephen's, crossing herself as she did so and got into the Kaerntner Street. In spite of the chill dampness and the great slaps of wind doing full honor to the reputation of the windiest of cities, (the Windobona of the Romans, that name on which generations of windswept inhabitants have made their jokes and puns), she felt more at home than in the alcove. After all the pavement was free to everybody, just as much hers, when you came down to it, as anybody's. Quite unlike the alcove which in some pervasive, though not at all indefinite way, seemed not to be hers. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that she was paying for it, just as Irma decently tried to remember that fact. But Irma clearly wanted to be alone with her children. Irma's nerves, for all her seeming bodily health, were certainly in a bad way....

Passing down the Kaerntner Street Frau Stacher stood a moment looking in at Zwieback's windows, such warm stuffs in such bright colors were displayed, gay knitted Jerseys and scarves,—a purple one that would have lain consolingly against her pale thinness. There were silk stockings too, beribboned underwear and in another window incredible evening dresses. Who on earth wore evening dresses—now? She remembered how she had got her grey silk dress there for Kaethe's wedding. In the old days she had shopped just like anybody else, buying things she didn't need and would soon forget she had....

Then suddenly she found that her heart was beating thickly. She was passing Fanny's corner, timidly looking away from it, magnetically drawn to it; the pavement seemed somehow alive under her feet.... She longed yet feared to meet Fanny; Fanny wrapped to her sea-blue eyes in her scented furs, Fanny young and beautiful, Fanny who knew neither cold nor hunger, nor about being unwanted. Fanny's desirability, though it brought no images with it, sent the blood pounding up darkly to her face....

But she was white again as she passed the Hotel Erzherzog Johann, remembering with a sudden stab how she had always driven there in a drosky when she came to Vienna from Baden for a day's shopping, and how pleasant that great, laughing, singing city had seemed. Now the iridescence had gone out of it. It was drab where once it had gleamed with a thousand vivid tints; beggarly where it had dispensed with a lavish unconcern.

She had been in the habit of taking her dinner at the Erzherzog Johann's, the proprietor had been a friend of her husband's. The old head waiter would always greet her warmly as a friend of the house he had served so long, and he would recommend a quarter of a roast chicken, the wing and breast, of course, and tell her how the noodles had been made fresh in the hotel that very morning, and then wind up by singing the merits of a Linzer or Sacher tart.

She'd leave her bundles there and come back at four o'clock for her coffee with whipped cream, and he'd cut her a slice of the fresh gugelhupf. Such happy days. She hadn't really had the slightest idea how happy they were; she thought how she had often worried about the stupidest things. She became conscious of an increasing sadness as she passed on down the street, realizing miserably how little human beings make of their actual blessings, whatever they may be, and she found herself sending up a prayer to be trusted with a little happiness,—just once more. She thought how never, never again, should they miraculously be hers, would she take as rightful dues her three meals a day, her comfortable bed, her clothes befitting the seasons, but that always, up from her heart would well thanks to the mysterious Giver or Withholder of these things.

She felt a little faint as she hurried past the delicatessen shop on the corner. There wasn't much in the windows; food wasn't kept in windows in those days, but inside there would doubtless be a maddening smell of cheese and sausage.

A one-legged young man, his leg gone to the thigh, in a tattered combination of military and civil coverings, stood always on that corner selling his miserable shoe laces....

But there was another note, quite another, that rang lustily out from the Kaerntner Street, for there the new feudal lords of Vienna, (which inevitably has lords of some kind), walked with ringing tread in the triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life that once great, powerful "First Society."

As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert, stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes, Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy even of those not of it. What the new Lords did and how they lived was a mystery to Frau Stacher that she had no desire to solve. Her fear increased. She felt but a bit of pallid wreckage in the flooding of that active, highly-colored element. It beat against her suffocatingly, frighteningly, that new blood flowing vehemently in Vienna's veins, its only blood indeed. In the familiar street she was both stranger and outcast daughter. She couldn't even look at the Bristol, whither so many of those new lords seemed bent, there where people still crumbled their bread at dinner instead of eating it.... It was Fanny's world. Perhaps even now Fanny would be on her way there with her light, straight, flying step, like a bird in the air. They all knew that walk of Fanny's....

That first comfortable feeling of owning the pavement, of independence had gone. She was increasingly confused by the myriad signs and symbols of money of which she had none. Everywhere "Cambio-Valute," "Devisen" in gilt letters, and banknotes laid out in patterns in the windows ... exchange bureaux, in which unholy rites were performed by those chosen men standing fatly, firmly on gold, while the rest of Vienna tottered and fell on paper. She was exhausted too, by the buffeting of the everlasting wind, and she suddenly and recklessly decided to take the three hundred crowns remaining in her purse and get on the trolley. There was one at the very corner that, mercifully, would take her up the interminability of the Mariahilfer Street. After lunch the wind would perhaps have fallen and she could walk back. She tried not to think how far it would be. She was too spent for thought by her impact with that new world, that world that suddenly had too much, trampling to death the world that almost as suddenly had too little or nothing. Outcast indeed.

The crowd was thickly waiting at the stopping place. In the rush for seats as the trolley slowed down, she was pushed frighteningly but fortunately along and up the high step and in a second found herself sitting, breathless and hidden between a man with a large sack of something that had, to the eager eyes of the other occupants, the interesting appearance of flour, and a pale young woman with a spindle-legged, big-eyed child of four or five in her arms. In her sympathy with the young mother and the doomed child and her relief at being seated Frau Stacher forgot her hunger and her fatigue and delivered herself up to the delightful sensation of being borne clangingly, powerfully along. She descended quite lightly at the crowded stopping place, though she was jostled and jammed again by the crowd fighting to get in. Crossing over she turned into a grey little street and entering a sombre doorway went up to the apartment where Anna was awaiting her husband and her aunt.

There was an air of expectancy about the room as Frau Stacher entered that somewhat relieved its terrible dullness. On the table was a fresh, fine linen cloth, from the days of comfort, and four places were set; a bottle of pale Tokay, like a streak of sunlight caught the eye. There was something sadly festive about it.