The Vienna Melody (27 page)

His left-hand neighbor was constantly erasing, having elected to make his drawing in pencil. Hans was surprised at this choice; a character sketch of the kind called for oils.

The model moved slightly, and the candidate to the left said something impatiently under his breath. His teeth were noticeably bad. He picked up his eraser, examined it, then threw it aside as useless. He turned restless eyes in Hans's direction. “Would you lend me yours?” he whispered. “That idiot! Why doesn't he sit still?”

Hans had been thinking that the old man posed like a statue of marble. He made no comment, however, as he handed over his morsel of rubber.

“Should he be reading that paper?'' grumbled the other, moving his big, pale, round head brusquely.

For a while no sound was heard but that of brushes and pencils. Hans was becoming more and more pleased with his own handiwork. He threw an inquiring glance in the direction of Ebeseder to see if he were having as satisfactory a time with his “Paradise.” A shrug of the shoulders and a wry smile were the only answer.

The moody candidate to his left seemed to be content with his pencil.

After two hours the members of the jury began to make their rounds, going from one candidate to another. They would stand behind the easel or drawing-board, watch for a minute or two, make notes on a sheet of paper, and then pass on. None of them said a word. Even Uncle Drauffer was non-committal in his manner, and Hans found this rather discouraging.

“Swine!” muttered the restless neighbor on his left. The sketch. It was bad, Hans had to admit.

At this point the examiner Levi looked directly at the whisperer.

“Is there anything you wish, Herr”—his eyes skimmed the list of entrants for the right name. “Herr Hitler?”

“No, Professor.” The tone was suddenly respectful. “I took the liberty of asking the loan of an eraser. Thank you very much, Professor.”

Isidor Levi nodded, jotted down a note, and passed on.

“A good enough fellow, that one,” said Hans's neighbor in a low tone. “Do you read his criticisms? He writes well, brilliantly in fact.”

“Quiet!” demanded the professor in charge. It was the first word he had spoken since the test began. “Perhaps you young gentlemen have heard the name of Goethe?” he went on from where he was sitting behind a drawing-board. “Goethe said, ‘Above the trees there is quiet.' Please bear that in mind.”

“Swine!” whispered the pale young man.

When the time allotted to them was up they were told to hand in their drawings and wait out in the corridor for the results of their test.

“Well?” Ebeseder said to Hans.

“I think mine turned out pretty well,” he replied. “And yours?”

“A mess!” exclaimed the other. “I just haven't any talent!”

Then they heard someone in the entry below say, “The candidates are waiting on the first floor. It may be quite a while. Will you be good enough to go on up?”

It was the attendant sending up two ladies and a gentleman. The ladies appeared to be the mothers of two of the candidates. They had brought along ham sandwiches and oranges and asked at once, “Well, what was it like?” The gentleman introduced himself to every one present with the words, “My name is Imperial Councillor Hutterer.” Then he inquired, “Do you think you got through, Heini?”

Then an elderly woman of humble appearance arrived, who gazed about her with an uncertain and apologetic air. When her eyes fell on the pale young man she seemed relieved and hurried over to his side. He saw her coming and, turning his back with a show of embarrassment, looked out of the window. Her steps slowed.

“Did you—did you get through all right?” she whispered.

He gave a quick and sullen response in so low a tone that no one could hear what he said. Immediately afterwards the old woman retraced her steps and went down the stairs again, with a hurt expression on her face.

Before even the oranges had been consumed Uncle Drauffer opened the doors of the examination hall and said laughingly, “Come on in, you bandits!”

Behind the green baize table stood Professor Roller, who announced, “Accepted: Christ, Alois; Ebeseder, Heinrich; Gamillschegg, Kurt; Goldschmied, Emil. The following gentlemen performed their test drawings unsatisfactorily and were rejected: Alt, Hans; Hitler, Adolf; Hutterer, Heinrich.”

Hans thought he must have misheard.

“Let us draw the veil of brotherly love over it,” Uncle Drauffer told him without being overheard by anyone else. “Did I ever in all your life say that you had any talent? In any case, it was never I who told you. And I shall never tell anyone!”

Meanwhile the pale young man with the bad teeth pushed his way through the successful candidates, who were being congratulated in turn by the chairman of the jury. “You wish?” Professor Roller asked him.

“I request an explanation of why I was failed,” said Hitler, Adolf.

“Because of lack of talent,” Professor Roller replied, shaking hands with the next successful candidate.

“And what do you understand that term to mean?” persisted the unsuccessful one. Hans, having suffered the same fate, felt some sympathy with him.

“Absolute lack of talent,” repeated Professor Roller dryly.

The third of the unsuccessful ones—Hutterer, Heinrich—was so upset that he kept muttering to himself, “I never!”

“Sorry I gave you bad advice,” Ebeseder said apologetically as they went down the marble steps of the Academy.

Absolute lack of talent. Now Hans knew.

 
Little Martha Monica was so beautiful that people stopped to look at her when she went walking with Neni in the Stadtpark. She had Henriette's gorgeous hair, only a shade lighter, to her soft, lovely face in corkscrew curls. The same dark sheen was deeply reflected in the large, long-lashed eyes of the child; she even had her mother's strange look. In addition she had a natural grace of motion, an unconsciousness and ease which was reminiscent neither of Henriette's shyness nor even less of Franz. There was nothing coarse-grained about the little girl; her hands in her gloves were slim; her legs were long and slender; her bones were fashioned with absolute delicacy. Only her voice left something to be desired; it was almost shrill, but in time that would wear off.

Everyone spoiled the child. Her mother did it to excess; her brothers and sister, Neni the nurse, even Herr Simmerl. And in chambermaid, who had come into the service of the fourth floor so young and had now been there for seven years, she had a particularly fierce partisan. This chambermaid (Hanni Kern was her name) had from the beginning been on Henriette's side and against Franz. As for the rest of the house, they were all agreed that Martha Monica was charming, but restrained themselves from any expression of affection. However, as that was the rule in Number 10, no one took any notice, least of all the child.

This was changed when the weddings took place which Uncle Drauffer called the “marriage epidemic of Seilerstätte.” Otto Eberhard's son Peter led off. This former member of a duelling fraternity had become an official in the Ministry of the Interior, and although it was difficult for an ordinary middle-class citizen to obtain such a post, it was facilitated for Otto Eberhard's son. The girl he married came from Potsdam, near Berlin; her maiden name was Annemarie von Stumm, and Peter had met her during a holiday on the North Sea. She was a flaxen blonde and wore her hair in round braided coils over her ears. She raved about Vienna, found the house “charming” and its inhabitants “heavenly.”

According to Uncle Drauffer, who hated everything Prussian, this marriage was the cause of the “epidemic.” For not long afterwards his own son Fritz, who had abandoned a legal career to become an unsuccessful composer, had married Liesl Schoenwieser. Liesl was a member of the ballet at the Court Opera House. Number 10, however, expressed its derogatory attitude by saying merely that she was “from the ballet.” On top of that she was not even a “Coriphée” but only a member of the ensemble, and appeared in the background as the eleventh hussar in
Puppenfee
and as a moonbeam in
Sun and Earth
. But in
Coppélia
she was a “carnation” and stood on her toes. For years Fritz had had the kind of ‘affair' with her that decent Viennese burghers' sons had with less decent female beings before they made up their minds to marriage and propriety. “There was probably a reason,” was the opinion of the other twin Otto, who had managed to worm his way into the circle of the all-powerful Burgermeister Lueger and was in the process of becoming a politician. But this spiteful remark proved to be pure malice, for Fräulein Schoenwieser continued to dance as the tightly corseted hussar even after she became Frau Drauffer. Such people, according to Number 10, were not the ones to marry. “After the daughter of a singer, this is a step even lower down!” It was the Widow Paskiewicz who coined that phrase. Her pride over her daughter's holy state had made her, in regard to moral questions, intransigent.

The pendulum of favor at Number 10 swung emphatically in the direction of Peter's young wife, as if to say: “This is what happens when we don't have to force ourselves to take in a new member.” As a natural corollary to this was a retort made by Countess Hegéssy (the very one who at times appeared to have tongue at all) when the ballet dancer made an extravagant remark about Martha Monica's beauty: “That's because she is Count Poldo's child!” Countess Hegéssy had possessed her titled husband only half a year. But since then she had always looked upon herself as belonging to the aristocracy.

The young Frau Drauffer, however, was a typical Viennese, and discretion was not her strong point. She found the remark all the more interesting because it provided grist for her mill against the hypocritical impertinence of her newly acquired relatives; so she repeated it to various and sundry until Cousin Hegéssy's words finaly reached Franz's ears. That his fiercely fought and, in his eyes, chivalrous battle through the years to maintain an appearance in which even he did not believe, should end in this disastrous way, drove him to despair. He had never admitted it. Not even to himself. His passionate love for Henriette had always smothered his disillusion in her. When that passion waned with his years, and his nature gave way to her instinctive reticence, there was still affection enough in him for Henriette. There was even more personal pride to protect her name, and consequently his own, from the blight of scandal.

He called his taciturn cousin to account. But she, with a brutality to Sophie's frankness and yet raised to a more callous degree, said without a flicker, “Don't be absurd! You need only look at the child to see it is of aristocratic blood!”

That evening, when the little girl wanted to kiss him good night usual, he turned his back on her.

“Mono wants to kiss you,” Henriette said.

“She can kiss the photograph on your desk,” blurted out Franz in the presence of his elder son, and left the room. He had tolerated photograph on Henriette's desk. Whenever he saw it he felt a pang, but he let it stay there year in and year out. On the Empress's desk, as all Vienna knew, there stood a photograph of Frau Schratt, and it had choked all scandalous rumors. He had attempted to do same. But without success.

That same night Hans stood by the open window in his study by the court, letting the autumn breeze cool his brow and listening to the familiar sound of the ripe nuts as they fell from Sophie's old tree on the pavement below. The crest of the tree now reached his window and the wind blew a branch stubbornly against it. “I must, mistaken,” the young man said to himself. “It's absolutely finable that anyone should be so brutal.”

He had ceased to be childish for his years. The moustache on his upper lip had not made his face seem much older; he still looked exactly like many others of his kind, nice-looking boys of good families, well dressed, well fed, well cared for, with no reason to worry; no distinguishing mark in all that. Nevertheless (and Henriette noticed it), a decided change had come over him, which was constantly growing more unmistakable. Where others, and even Henriette herself, were unquestioning, he was filled with doubts. Things which as she grew older tended in her to breed distrust and almost misanthropy, in him very early grew into an urgent need of clarity. As a small child, sitting on the floor surrounded by his picture books and toys, he had loved to take apart anything that was not tightly joined. Now he was doing the same with life. Perhaps he should be a doctor, Henriette came to think. He thumped things, looked at them from every angle in order to diagnose them. At least, that is what it seemed to her. That precision was not one of his qualities, and that dissection rather than integration was his forte, she overlooked. She encouraged his attitude, for she felt that her undoing came from having asked too few questions and from taking too much for granted.

Standing at the window, Hans tried to clear his mind about his father. The first opponent to cross his path in life had been his father. The others, Professor Miklau and the natural science captain, were chance opponents. That Papa in contrast was an opponent by destiny, he felt was clear. And not just Papa, for it had been the same in every other family he had been in. The sons of good families were afraid of their fathers, who seemed determined to handle them as ‘black-sheep sons'—a term taken from novels, and one which enraged him because it cast the blame on the sons. The fathers were the ones to blame. They were the ones to make impossible demands on the sons. Yes, one might have been a better student. But could one want to sell pianos? Papa said: “Yes, of course,” and that was the trouble. If he had only said: “Of course, selling pianos cannot be fascinating, but we have the factory and I need your help—get that into your mind,” then things would be different. The intolerable part of it was to stand things upside down and then insist that they were right side up. Or did Papa believe what he said?