A Time of Gifts (30 page)

The night before, we had been looking at the photograph of the Koshka Brothers when the proprietor had brought the bill. As a great admirer of the Brothers, he had been much struck by the picture. I had made him a present of it, and his delight had found expression in two glasses of Himbeergeist. Now the photograph had been pinned on the wall; and two more tulip-shaped glasses had appeared at the same time as coffee. Sustained by the glow of future hopes, we now ordered two more, and lit the last of the Direktor's cigars. At Konrad's request, we spent the rest of the evening reading aloud from Shakespeare. As more Himbeergeist appeared, my renderings, in the battle-smoke of flourished cigars, became more impassioned and sonorous. “Noble words!” Konrad kept interjecting, “noble words, dear young!” We sang and recited on the long trudge back to the Heilsarmee. Both of us felt a touch of guilt about occupying our two cots there, in the midst of our affluence; it was another prompting towards departure. We were fairly tipsy; Konrad, I noticed, as he bumped into a lamp-post with a faint giggle, a little more so than I was. We both stumbled slightly going upstairs. We were anxious lest our places had been taken, but there they were, side by side at the far end and both empty still.

It was late and all was silent except for the haunting involuntary chorus that spans the watches of the night in these dormitories. As we tiptoed down the long row Konrad bumped into the foot of a bed and a bearded face like a black hedgehog shot out of the other end of a cocoon of blankets and fired off a torrent of abuse. Konrad stood murmuring and rooted to the spot, his hat lifted in a chivalrous posture of apology. The noise woke several sleepers on either side, who launched a rumbling crescendo of blasphemy and anathema at Konrad's protesting victim. I led him by the elbow to our corner, as though on wheels and with his hat still lifted, while the altercation waxed louder until it reached a noisy climax and then very slowly waned into near-silence. Konrad sat down on the edge of his cot, murmuring, as he unlaced his boots: “He was chafed by mishap and choler unsealed their lips.”

* * *

“Let us regain our fardels,” Konrad said next morning. We bade goodbye to the people in the office and to a few fellow-inmates with whom we were on hobnobbing terms, and I hoisted on my rucksack. Konrad's fardel—a wicker creel slung diagonally across his torso on a long baldric of canvas and leather—turned him into a lanky urban fisherman. For the fourth time we set off for the Wallnerstrasse. It was a bright, blowy morning; and we had been right to be optimistic; the moment I entered the Consulate, the clerk held up from afar a registered envelope crossed with blue chalk, and some others. The good news, which would have spread delight four days before, was something of an anti-climax now. We headed for a coffee house in the Kärntnerstrasse called Fenstergucker. Settling at a corner table by the window near a hanging grove of newspapers on wooden rods, we ordered Eier im Glass, then hot Brötchen and butter, and delicious coffee smothered in whipped cream. It was a morning of decisions, separations, departures; and they weighed on us both. Konrad was determined to set off at once and smite while the iron was hot, determination high and the capital still intact. He became gently excited and the Harfleur spirit was beating its wings in the air; but I felt anxious about him and hoped his associates had as gentlemanly a cast of mind as he thought. He, in his turn, was filled with concern about me. It was true that we had been ripping rather fast through the fairy gold; but he built up a headstrong Sir Harry Scattercash kind of picture that I rather liked. “Husband all lucre when you are in squandering vein, dear young,” he said, and “Do not dog
bona robas
.”

I accompanied him to the junction of the Kärntnerstrasse and the Ringstrasse by the Opera House. He was going to catch a tram to the Donaukai Bahnhof and then continue eastwards by rail along the Danube. He was rather arch and secretive about place names; I don't think he wanted to involve me, even remotely, in these illicit doings. He climbed on the tram, sat down, then
immediately gave his seat to an elderly and almost spherical nun with a carpet bag. As it clattered off, I could see him towering head and shoulders above the other passengers, strap-hanging with one hand, holding up his Habig hat between the two long first fingers of the other, smiling and slowly rotating it in valediction, while I waved until the tram clashed across the points and swung left into the Schubertring and out of sight.

I felt very lonely as I wandered back to the café. He had promised to write and tell me how things were going. I got a postcard from him in Budapest soon after Easter, saying that the Future was smiling. But he gave no address, so I had no further news until I got to Constantinople, eleven months later. There I found a fat letter, franked in Norderney, Konrad's home island in the Frisian Archipelago. The first things to emerge from the envelope were several enormous sheets of German postage stamps whose value amounted not only to the pound note that I had thrust on Konrad much against his will—one of the four I had picked up at the Consulate—but the fairy gold as well; and I saw, as I counted up the scores of Bismarck's heads, that he had sent half as much again. The stamps were accompanied by a long, affectionate, and deeply touching letter, which I read in a café above the Golden Horn. The smuggling, to which he guardedly referred as ‘hazardous trading, dear young,' had become ancient history by then. All had gone well; he was back in the islands and teaching English; and there was a coy hint that he might be getting married to a lady teacher.... Apart from everything else, I was overjoyed by the idea that his English idiom might not be wholly lost. Perhaps it would spread among Frisian disciples like the words of St. Wilfred.

But as I walked back to the Fenstergucker, I was troubled by the idea that with only three pounds to last the month, I might be in a fix; especially with a stretch of town life ahead. Of course, in the light of the last days' windfalls, I could get some more.... Yet, with Konrad gone, the zest had vanished too. What had appeared an escapade now seemed, alone and in cold blood, hideously forbidding.

Back at our café table, I took out the rest of my letters. The first, with an Indian stamp and Calcutta postmark, was from my father, the first since I had set out from England, re-forwarded from Munich. It was in answer to a letter of mine from Cologne in which I had broken the news of the
fait accompli
. I opened it with foreboding. But neatly folded inside the letter, was a birthday-cheque for a fiver! I had cast my bread upon the waters and it had returned to me in a quarter of an hour and, so to speak, with knobs on.

* * *

During the days with Konrad, our own preoccupations had selfishly taken precedence over everything else. Intermittently rumbling in the distance like stage thunder, the sounds of strife had gradually diminished and then ceased. Among the flat-dwellers these offstage noises had prompted deprecating clicks of the tongue and deep fatalistic sighs, but not for very long: hard times had induced a stoic attitude to trouble. The revolution vanished from the front pages of the foreign press and the headlines describing it in the café newspapers were less lurid each morning. As everything in the mood of the city conspired to reduce the scale of the events, it was easy to misunderstand them and I bitterly regretted this misappraisal later on: I felt like Fabrice in
La Chartreuse de Parme
, when he was not quite sure whether he had been present at Waterloo.

* * *

Outside the café, meanwhile, I hastened to join a one-way population drift along the Kärntnerstrasse. Everyone was heading for the Ring and I soon found myself jammed in the crowd not far from the point where I had parted from Konrad. All eyes were gazing the same way and in a little while a procession advanced out of the distance: it was to solemnize the end of the emergency. At the
head, on a grey horse and carrying his sabre at the slope, rode the Vice-Chancellor, Mayor Fey, who had commanded the government forces: a grim-looking man with a jutting chin and a stahlhelm. An army contingent followed: then a column of the Heimwehr with Prince Starhemberg marching in front in a képi like a ski-cap and a long grey overcoat of martial cut, mildly waving; his face and his tall figure were immediately recognizable from his photographs. A black-clad group of ministers came next, led by the Chancellor himself. Dressed in a morning coat and carrying a top-hat, Dr. Dollfuss was hurrying to keep up. At the approach of Major Fey, the intermittent ripple of clapping remained unchanged; Starhemberg induced a slight rise in volume; but Dollfuss was hailed with something approaching an ovation. Another column of troops formed the rearguard and the procession was over.

There was something cheerful and engaging about the Chancellor, but in spite of all the anecdotes, his small stature came as a surprise. As the crowd broke up, a fellow-bystander told me yet another. One of the soldiers in the recent siege, pointing to something on the pavement, had exlaimed: “Look! Fancy seeing a tortoise in the streets of Vienna!” “That's not a tortoise,” his companion had said, “that's Doktor Dollfuss in his stahlhelm”; and, for an outsider, that was the last of it.

* * *

I hadn't arrived in Vienna totally unprepared. There were a few inhabitants on whom I could stake a shadowy claim. But, for the sake of morale, prompted by a sort of vagrant's amour-propre, I hadn't wanted to launch myself on them when I was absolutely broke. Now that this problem was solved, I dumped my stuff at the cheapest lodging house I could find and sought out a telephone. If I were asked to a meal it would be best, I felt, to turn up unburdened; a rucksack would have been too broad a hint. Unfounded though they had been, my qualms at the last castle
had implanted the uncharacteristic notion in my mind that the appearance on the doorstep of an affable tramp with all his possessions on his back might possibly be considered a nuisance. (I shudder to think of the scourge I must have been. The idea that they are always welcome is a protective illusion of the young. Dangerously untroubled by doubts, I rejoiced in these changes of fortune with the zest of an Arabian beggar clad and feasted by the Caliph or the crapulous tinker who is picked up snoring and spirited to splendour in the first scene of
The Taming of the Shrew
.)

In Vienna, the brunt fell on compatriots and Austrians almost equally. Robin Forbes-Robertson Hale, the sister-in-law of an old friend, put me up in a large flat which was always teeming with guests. It was perched in a gaunt and fascinating rookery in a street of the Inner City called the Schreyvogelgasse, or Shriekbird Lane. Tall and striking, she was just back, with two Austrian friends, from a wintry stay in Capri: they belonged to a small half-native and half-expatriate Bohemian set which seemed perfect from the first moment I became involved in it. With the end of the political troubles, the last days of Carnival were given over to music and dancing and dressing up. Wildish nights and late mornings set in, and after a last climactic fancy dress party, I woke in an armchair with an exploding head still decked with a pirate's eyepatch and a cut-out skull and crossbones. At the first strokes of noon from the tower of the nearby Schottenkirche, the shuttered penumbra began to stir with groans; a concerted croaking for Alka-Seltzer broke out. A pierrot, a Columbine, a lion and a sleeping lioness with her moulting tail over the back of a sofa were disposed about the drawing-room like damaged but still just articulate toys.

The recollection of the days that followed is blurred by the penitential onslaughts of snow, rain, sleet and hail which scourged the city with all the rigours of February and Shrovetide and Ash Wednesday. It was a wild winter; but the angry skies and the wind make the fires and the lamplight glow all the brighter in retrospect. With the first days of March, the Lenten ferocity flagged a little. I was living in a state of exaltation. I couldn't quite believe I
was there; and as though to put it beyond question, I often repeated ‘I'm in Vienna' to myself when I woke up in the night or as I wandered about the streets.

Some of this small society lived in old houses in the Inner City, others in the gently decaying fragments of subdivided palaces still adorned by swirls of wrought iron and leafy arabesques and moulded ceilings and the shutters and the double doors opened with intricately flourished handles. One of these new friends, Basset Parry-Jones, was a teacher—of English literature, I think—at the Konsularakademie, a sort of extension for older students of the Theresianum, the celebrated school founded by Maria Theresa. (Like students at St. Cyr and Saumur and the grim institution in
Young Törless
, the boys once wore cocked hats and rapiers which turned them into miniature French Academicians. It was the most famous place of its kind in the country and only rivalled by the Jesuit foundation at Kalksburg.) The Konsularakademie used to train candidates for the Diplomatic Service of the old Dual Monarchy and it still trailed some clouds of this k. und k. glory. Basset—half-sardonic half-enthusiastic, always beautifully dressed and a staunch guide and companion for noctambulism—lent me books and got permission for me to consult the Akademie library. Another new friend was an American girl called Lee, who was recuperating from some minor illness under the same roof. Good-looking, solemn and gentle, she was the daughter of the United States military attaché in a neighbouring capital. Surprisingly, or half-inevitably, she was a convinced pacifist. She applauded my reluctance to become a professional soldier but when I told her that I was only shy of peace-time soldiering, this excellent first impression was ruined. We often argued, and once or twice, in spite of her convalescence, until long after dawn. She was as little qualified as I for such debates: emotion and a kind heart were her guides; the arguments grew blurred on either side as the protracted but unacrimonious hours advanced, and ended in concord.

A colleague of Basset's called Baron von der Heydte and known as Einer, was a great friend of everyone, and soon of mine. In his
middle twenties, civilized, quiet, thoughtful and amusing, he belonged to a family of Catholic landowners and soldiers in Bavaria, but his style and manner were far removed from what foreigners consider the German military tradition; and with the Nazi movement he had still less in common. (A few years later, I heard he had returned to Germany. Out of family atavism, and to avoid politics and the party activities which were swallowing up the whole of German civilian life, he had become a regular cavalry officer, rather like
ancien régime
Frenchmen, I think, who followed the profession of arms in spite of their hatred of the government.)