The Vienna Melody (53 page)

“Not particularly well,” she answered. “It's dear of you to come up. You need your sleep yourself, my poor boy.”

“Mother,” he said, and then stopped.

“Do you know, Hans,” she said, noticing that he was deeply moved, “sometimes I think it would be a release for Papa. I know one should not say such things. And to you least of all.”

She had made it easier for him. “It was no release for Selma. She wanted to live,” he replied.

“Who knows what one has been spared? Do you think it's so wonderful to be alive in this world?”

I shall watch her closely, he thought. She has often said not everyone can be an actor. “What did you want to spare her?” he asked.

She sighed. “Unfortunately there was so little I could spare her. I often reproach myself now because of it. I'm glad we have put this into words. I wasn't kind to Selma. I was too jealous of her.”

“That is why you murdered her,” he said.

Guilty!

Her face underwent a terrifying change. He would have given Selma's life if only her face had not had this expression of guilt.

“What are you saying?” she asked tonelessly.

He repeated his words.

She had risen slowly to her feet. From where she stood she looked into his face. Then she screamed, “Hans!” Simmerl rushed in excitedly. She had stretched her hand out towards her son. Although she stood beside him, she pointed to him as though he were far away.

“Madam,” begged Simmerl. “Madam! Master will hear you!”

She no longer screamed. Sobs racked her. After a little her strength was exhausted. Gasping, she sank back into a chair. “Go and see how Herr Alt is,” she stammered. When Simmerl had left the room she said, “I swear to you by your father's life.”

That was the most terrible of all. She swore by the life of a dying man. She swore by the life of someone she had never loved.

“Is that not enough?” The lips which framed the question were bloodless.

Before Hans could reply Simmerl returned. “The master!” he said.

She nodded. As she rose she had to support herself. “Wait here,” she said. “We must talk. I'll come back.” Then she went to the invalid.

“Perhaps the young master will fetch a priest?” Simmerl asked. “The young master is still dressed.”

“Is Papa so ill?” asked the son to whom his father's life had meant so little.

The old servant's eyes had filled with tears.

“I'll go at once,” Hans said, and hurried away.

 

Meanwhile Henriette sat by Franz's deathbed. For her he did not need to write things down on a slip of paper as he did for others; it sufficed to write them in the air with his forefinger. In the course of years she had learned to decipher it. “Why?” he now wrote.

“Why did you scream?” it meant.

She had never spoken the truth to this man. She had married him by mistake. It was only at the end that this mistake had been converted into a kind of truth, if only a half-truth. Once more she kept the truth from him. “I was frightened by something.” She concocted an excuse, as always when obliged to. “I thought there was someone in the room.”

And—as all his life, with one exception long since forgiven—he believed her lie. With a look such as he had so often sought her and which she so often had found unbearable, he now gazed at her. To her alone belonged the spark of life still lingering in him.

“Tell,” wrote his forefinger in the air.

“I'm to tell you something?” she asked.

He pointed to his own breast.

“You want to tell me something?”

His face nodded. His finger wrote: “Forgive.”

“I have nothing to forgive you, Franz.” She made an effort to speak as distinctly as she could through her tears.

Then this man, who had always been against ‘fuss' and for sober objectivity, shook his head. He realized that he must make himself clearly understood once and for all. So he rested a moment, gathered all his remaining strength, and wrote, “For marrying you.”

He wrote it word for word. No letter was missing in his writing in the air, not even the flourishes he used to put on certain letters.

She read it. Stirred to her very depths as she faced a finality beyond which nothing lay, she too made a supreme effort at clarity.

“You were very good to me, and I was unkind to you. I didn't understand things right. Now I do. A love like yours, which trusts even when it suspects, is the best. A love that forgives even when it accuses is a miracle! Forgive me.”

In this chamber of death her words sounded like a confession from the wrong lips. But it was the first complete truth she had ever spoken to him in her life.

A smile hovered around his palsied lips. In his eyes there shone the pride that had always filled them when they fell on this woman. He gazed on her at length. For him time could not alter this face. He did not see the ravages of age. He overlooked the traces of suffering, and even those of despair. For him she was still the embodiment of all beauty, as she was on the first day he saw her.

His finger pointed to his mouth.

Henriette leaned over him. The dying man's lips made a great effort. They succeeded in framing a kiss. He sank back exhausted. Then he knew he had one more thing to do, which had not yet been done, so this man, who had never tolerated arrears in his work, wrote in the air, “Thank you.”

Soon he fell into a kind of doze which alarmed her, and she went to call Simmerl. But the old servant had long been standing outside the door.

“Monsignor will be here directly,” he said.

Henriette thought she caught another smile on Franz's lips. She said to Simmerl, “Call the Public Prosecutor.”

But in the quiet which preceded the end the dying man, fully conscious, made a negative gesture. He did not wish to see his brother. And when she, no longer making any pretence of not knowing he was about to die, asked him openly if he wished to see his children he indicated as plainly that he did not, and pointed to her.

“You are the only one,” that meant.

She no longer saw anything through her tears. The terrible mistake of her life was now cleared away. It was not that she had married this man. It was that she had looked upon it as a mistake.

And once more, in this night which had added years to Henriette's life, something incomprehensible happened. When the priest arrived and asked Herr Franz Alt to relieve his soul by holy confession Herr Franz Alt refused. He pointed first to himself and then to his wife.

“I have already made my confession,” it signified. But as a good Christian he asked for and received the last sacraments.

After the priest had gone he lived on for an hour. During that hour he held Henriette's hand. One last time his hand attempted to write, “Thank you.” He succeeded. Then the man who had always hated anything extravagant and who had possessed so infinitely little imagination was no more.

The dead man's coffin was borne by his sons Hans and Hermann and his nephews Fritz and Otto. They had carried it down from the fourth floor, through the door of the apartment he had built when he married, past the doors where he had lived as a bachelor and where he had been born. It occurred to Fritz, who with his twin brother held the foot of the coffin while the two sons supported the head, that three doors told the story of the dead man's life. Like most of his generation, he had scarcely traveled abroad. He had never moved. In the same house one was born, one lived his life, and died.

On the coffin were laid the wreaths of his widow, his children, and brother, while the untold number of the others were piled high in the two carriages following the hearse, and behind them walked Henriette on Otto Eberhard's arm. Her long widow's veil of black crepe darkened her look. Franz's brother, thirteen years his senior, despite the July day wore the prescribed long black coat, black cravat, and black gloves and carried his high hat, with a broad mourning band, in his left hand. Nothing in his face betrayed his thoughts.

They were followed by the daughters, Franziska and Martha Monica, with Franziska accompanied by her husband, Dr. Baier, and Martha Monica walking alone. There were no grandchildren. The sisters of the deceased joined the others, the elder one, Gretl Paskiewicz, with her daughter, the nun. His younger one, Pauline, followed on the arm of Franz's brother-in-law Drauffer; then came Otto Eberhard's wife Elsa with her son Peter. And Peter's wife, Annemarie, had charge of their three children, Joachim, Adelheid, and Otto Adolf, who walked in a row before her, whereas Fritz's late-born son Raimund, whom his mother Liesl led by the hand, was the last of the family group.

At a slight distance came the servants. Herr Simmerl with his wife, Hanni, and their daughter, sent for from Mariazell, were at the head. Like all the men in the funeral cortege, Herr Simmerl, with his long black coat, black cravat, black gloves, and high hat with a broad mourning band, followed the example of the head of the house. And all the maids were dressed like their mistresses. Even the stationer from the ground floor was in deep mourning.

Everything was as Otto Eberhard had directed, in sequence and appearance. Perhaps, thought Fritz the pallbearer, he looked upon it as a kind of dress rehearsal for the next funeral at Number 10 and wished to see with his own eyes how he himself, in the not too far distant future, would be laid to rest.

At the angel entrance stood the hearse; over its black top rose a knight's head of iron with helmet and open visor; in front of it four black horses were harnessed, and on them sat outriders in black doublets slashed with velvet and high top boots. The pallbearers pushed the casket into the hearse. Then they placed themselves in a row behind the carriages with the flowers. The cortege began to move.

Immediately after the family group there was a space. At the head of the long train of mourners not related to the family came a delegation from the C. Alt piano-maker firm, led by Mr. Foedermayer, foreman Czerny, and metal-caster Bochner.

The muffled bells of St. Anna and St. Augustine were tolling. According to Otto Eberhard's directions, the late Purveyor to the Court had to be buried from St. Augustine's, because the one to whom his title and the prosperity of his forbears was due was accustomed to attend the funerals of reputable citizens there. Since the Hapsburgs had reigned and made distinctions in life and in death, all the members of all good families, though not of the highest rank, which entitled them to burial in the Capuchin crypt, had received their last church blessing here. That these distinctions had been blown away by a revolution was a fact of which the retired Public Prosecutor and Aulic Councillor did not take cognizance. As he had ordained it, it was proper to act; revolutions did not abolish the proprieties for him.

To the droning of the bells Henriette walked by his side. Could she have asked for one favor it would have been to stop those bells. Their muffled tones had accompanied every catastrophe of her life. With a relentlessness against which she was impotent, they now hammered her memories of the past back into her mind. She had not followed the hearse the first time they had tolled so accusingly, the first time she was widowed. Then she had run away, for it was her wedding night. Nor had she followed the coffin of the man to whom she owed that infinitely tiny bit of happiness. She had fled, for it was her shame. Now she walked with head erect, on the arm of a man who had been her lifelong adversary, behind the coffin of a man who was not able to give her either a crown or happiness and who was the cause of so much self-reproach to her. If only the bells would cease!

Two steps behind her walked the one person, perhaps, in all the world on whose account she need not reproach herself. Yet he of all people had made to her the most inhuman reproach and was still making it. She sensed it in his looks. She knew what her enemy, on whose arm she walked, was thinking. An unfaithful, bad, selfish wife! His looks showed it. The bells droned ever louder. Her steps faltered, and she pressed her free hand to her temples.

“Control yourself,” said her companion. “No play-acting!”

She walked on to the merciless and menacing hammering of the bells. In the July heat the perfume of the flowers was suffocating. On the left of the funeral train the Albrecht terrace and the old Imperial castle came into sight. As they drew near St. Augustine's a red glow appeared on the horizon and the shrill sound of the fire engines was added to the tolling. They had reached the cathedral where Henriette and Franz were married.

Inside the cathedral the coolness was a relief. It was only the incense that confused the senses. The four pallbearers had carried the casket to the catafalque below the high altar. The incense grew more acrid and stifling the closer they came to the altar.

Henriette kneeled in the first row. On her right stood Otto Eberhard. On her left, so near that she could have touched it with her outstretched arm, was the coffin, at the head and foot of which were lighted candles in candelabra. One of the two broad lavender silk streamers hanging from the wreath of roses and violets on the middle of the casket bore her name. “I thank you” were the words on the other. When it was still in her apartment Otto Eberhard had looked on it with disparagement. No new styles! On funeral wreaths the inscriptions should read “Rest in peace” or “Until we meet.”

His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna began the mass for the dead. His calm peasant face bore the expression appropriate to the occasion. A well-known patrician had died, one who had contributed to the cultural life of Vienna—not one of the leading figures of the epoch, to be sure, but an upright man and a good Catholic. As to his wife, there had been some unsavoury rumors in the past. But on the other hand his brother, who himself had one foot in the grave, had always enjoyed the confidence of the highest circles because of his outstanding position. This had been duly put to the cardinal, together with the request that he read the mass in person, and for the sake of the elder brother he had acquiesced in manifestly honoring the obsequies of the younger brother.