The Vienna Melody (54 page)

“
Introibo ad altarem Dei
,” they heard him intone the prayer, surrounded by his assistants. Henriette's eyes wandered. Where the deacon of the archbishopric was standing, holding the hem of the archbishop's vestment, she herself had stood and said “Yes” to the question of whether she was willing to become the wife of Franz Alt. Over there, where Simmerl sat, she had sat, and to the woman who asked her if she had lost someone she had said: “Yes.” The woman had answered: “You mustn't cry; it hurts the dead.”

“Have I hurt you?” she asked the dead man. She knew that he still heard her. Earlier, at the last minute before they left the apartment, she had looked at him through the glass at the head of the coffin, and he had seen her too. “Franz,” she now said, and bowed her head towards him as the cardinal moved to the Host, “when I said ‘Yes' up there to you I was lying. Ask me now, and I shall answer!”

With bated breath she listened and heard his question.

She answered distinctly, in the presence of the cardinal, who had fallen to his knees before the Host, “Yes.”

It was only when she felt that she was now in truth wedded to him that the feverish tension in her relaxed. She could weep.

As often as he had come into the room he had always nodded first. Then he had said, “God greet you.” First the nod, then the greeting. Never otherwise. The unimaginativeness of this sequence was something she could never forgive him, and she had never nodded back. It was only now that she realized this nod was the limit of expression to which anyone in Number 10 was trained. “No play-acting!” As long as there was time in which to do it she wanted to make up for her omission. She nodded to the dead man. Again. Again. “Franzl,” she said as she did it. That caressing name, too, she had never been willing to give him. When the
saecula sceculorum
was heard the pallbearers raised the coffin in which lay the man who only once had turned against her. The burden trembled for a moment, then rested firmly on the four shoulders. Henriette nodded one last time and said a final farewell aloud, “God greet you.”

Otto Eberhard whispered, “Do stop. Acknowledge the condolences!” For as they left, on either side came voices and outstretched hands, “My sympathy! My deepest sympathy!”

While they waited in Augustinerstrasse for the carriages to drive up and take them to the cemetery, an incident occurred which they did not immediately understand. They did not know that during the funeral service the Palace of Justice, only a few blocks away, had been set on fire by some persons acting in revenge for a partisan verdict pronounced against workers. The hearse and the carriages, piled high with the floral tributes, could not move because of the crowds in the streets. Because of them too no one could see the red glow of the fire. Even the sound of the shots fired at the incendiaries was swallowed up by the tolling bells.

Some of the rioters, pushed back into Augustinerstrasse by the police, reached there just in time to see His Eminence, with his exalted entourage, leaving the cathedral, gathering up the skirts of their soutanes to avoid the dust of the streets.

“You'd do better to minister to the innocents being shot down, Cardinal!” yelled someone in the crowd.

The prince of the Church, accustomed to matching his expression to the exigencies of the occasion, raised his hand in benediction. From the Corpus Christi processions he was used to seeing the street mobs sink to their knees on the spot. This time no one kneeled. “You can bring the police to their knees—not us!” came another outcry.

Then someone confronted the man who had shouted. He had sought him out in the crowd and now barred the way to him. It was an aged man in a long black coat, a high hat with a broad mourning band on his head, with black gloves on his hands and the rosette of a commander of the Order of Francis Joseph in his buttonhole. Unconcerned by the threatening attitude of the crowd, he was standing before the rioter, a half-grown youth. “Kneel down!” he commanded with biting contempt.

The youth stared at him. Then he broke into a roar of laughter.

“Leave him alone, Herr Hofrat,” begged His Eminence. “He doesn't know any better.” And as the mob prepared to fall upon the old gentleman, the cardinal himself stepped from the onlookers and personally escorted Otto Eberhard to his carriage; a nun walked on his left side.

“There are no Imperial Councillors any more!” someone bellowed.

An officer in Italian uniform yelled for the police. Hans said, “Thanks, Conte Corbellini. We need neither your protection nor that of the police.”

Before the former Public Prosecutor stepped into the carriage which was to drive him to his younger brother's grave he turned and called in a loud and steady voice, “A people which has forgotten how to kneel is doomed!”

The carriages drove off. The sky had grown redder.

Hans received Conte Corbellini only on Martha Monica's urgent request. According to her, he had returned from a journey and at all costs insisted on speaking to her elder brother. She stressed how much Conte Corbellini regretted having exchanged “unfriendly words” with Hans and how sincerely he desired to restore the friendliest of relationships with him.

Hans was under the impression that the Italian intended to ask him for his sister's hand, looking upon him as the head of the family, a role for which he felt absolutely inadequate. Day and night he was absorbed by cares other than marrying off Martha Monica, especially to a man he distrusted. But he had no proof to offer against him.

That was what plagued him constantly: he had no proof. Not the proof that Signor Corbellini was a swindler. It was something else, and on it depended whether he could ever again trust anyone.

On this other point he finally had to express himself to his younger brother. For it was Hermann who, according to Martha Monica, believed in Mother's guilt, and it was he who one day brought up the subject. Hans, however, wouldn't discuss it. It seemed monstrous to him for two sons to discuss their mother's innocence or guilt. But Hermann had insisted, and the brothers had taken a walk together, the first that Hans could remember.

Just as formerly he had piled up the evidence of guilt, Hans had, in the months that followed, attempted to dissipate it. Without her knowing it, he had watched his mother. For nights on end he had conferred with Dr. Herz. Eventually he had worked out a logical explanation.

On this the first walk together in their lives he had given the explanation to his brother as best he could. But Hermann had answered, with a tone of distress which vouched for his sincerity, “I hadn't dreamed that you still had any doubts and for that reason remained passive! Else I should have felt myself obliged to tell you what I saw with my own eyes long ago. Mother, I'm sorry to say, made your poor wife, who came to her with a headache, drink a solution—prepared out of the glass Martha Monica knows about. I had known that for a time, when Martha Monica shared her suspicions with me. All the more reason for her to be the one to speak to you. If I had come to you first you wouldn't even have listened to me. You never were well-disposed towards me—forgive me, this is no time to bring that up. I only wanted to explain why I didn't tell you.”

“And what would you do if you were in my place?” Hans had asked his brother.

“There would be no question in my mind,” Hermann had answered. As he spoke he leaned over to pick up one of the paper leaflets that for some time had been showered daily on the streets of Vienna and angrily tore it to, bits. “Come to Hitler!” was printed on the slip.

“You never loved Mother,” had been Hans's exasperated rejoinder.

“I never sympathized with her particularly,” Hermann readily admitted. “That's why I thought it was only fair not to exercise any influence over you. I knew that I was prejudiced against her. However, I kept silent.”

“And what makes you break your silence now?”

“Justice.”

“In other words, you would institute a suit against your mother?” Hans had asked him.

“I should speak to Uncle Otto Eberhard,” had been his advice. “By doing so you avoid taking ultimate steps. On the other hand, you could not find anyone more competent to judge. Uncle Otto Eberhard is not just a famous lawyer and a great jurist; he has always—no matter what you may hold against him—held the reputation of the family above everything else.”

“But who has anything to gain from it?” Hans had asked in desperation. “Not Selma; she's dead. Not Mother; she would not survive it. Not the house, which would see its fabulous reputation undermined. I want to keep my silence!”

“I'm surprised,” Hermann had answered. “People have always said you're an idealist. But you argue like a lawyer. Guilt cannot be a question of opportunism! Nor can justice. Do you feel Mother led such an impeccable life? Martha Monica, I think, is the proof to the contrary. Or do you still believe in Mother's fairy tales? She lied to you as to anyone else. She-—

“Thank you,” Hans had cut him short.

Thereupon he had set himself the limit of one week. The week was up this evening. At nine o'clock he had asked for an interview with his uncle.

At four that afternoon the Italian had called on him, and the thought had crossed Hans's mind: At four I give my sister in marriage to a swindler; at nine I denounce my mother to the Public Prosecutor. “I know what brings you to me,” he had said in greeting his visitor.

They were sitting in the office of the head of the piano factory, where a third portrait had been added to the other two; beside the paintings of his great-grandfather and grandfather now hung one of Hans's father in a gold frame, a truly unnerving likeness done by Uncle Drauffer. Whenever the present head of the firm looked at it he had to think of Selma's expression of “baroque angel painting.” If she, that fanatical devotee to the truth, could see this revealingly true portrait she would have had to revise her opinion of Uncle Drauffer as he, in the course of time, had revised his own of his father. In that sober look there was clarity. In that shy, frugal smile on the straight mouth of earlier days there was trustworthiness. In the unobtrusive dress and manner lay an unrelenting self-restraint. It was remarkable how, in this picture, the sum of the insignificant became significant.

“
Lei non mi serba rancore
,
verro
?” asked the Italian, and then acted as if he and Hans had never exchanged an “unfriendly word.” He explained at once that his errand was not bound up with Martha Monica, for as far as he and Signorina Alt were concerned, he would still have to have a brief postponement. Hans had no doubt been informed that for a long time he, Corbellini, had been making unceasing efforts to obtain from the Congregation of Rites the annulment of his first marriage. The Virgin be praised, on his recent visit to Rome he finally was given the assurance that he would receive it in the near future. That visit to Rome, on the other hand, was what brought him to Hans today. He had had the honor of being received by Il Duce.

He said “Il Duce” so melodiously, so reverently, as if he were still standing in his presence. He also looked around the office of the head of the firm to see if any listeners were about. Through the door now covered with green felt—the one change Hans had allowed to be made—came the muted noises from the tuning room.

“We can't be overheard?” inquired the Italian, in order to be doubly sure.

Hans said “No.” He thought of the interview ahead of him that evening.

Va bene
, for the matter to be considered was the anxiety with which Il Duce was following the development of events in Austria. It was a well-known fact that no one was a more cordial friend to Austria and an advocate of her absolute independence than he. Conte Corbellini quoted a note he had made on his conversation with him: “
Può cioè esistere un secondo stato tedesco in Europa
,
tedesco
,
ma padrone del suo proprio destino
.” This independence was now being mortally threatened from the right and from the left. The menace might come from the Socialists, under Otto Bauer, of whom Lenin had made a highly personal remark—this too was jotted down on another slip: “This man, ablest of the Socialist traitors, is nothing more than a hopeless scholarly buffoon—a common example of the pedant and a bourgeois shopkeeper in his outlook.” On the other side was the menace of the Nazis, whose urgent propaganda, sent in from Germany, was all the more dangerous in form because their Führer was—the Italian read from a third slip of paper—a “pathological liar and megalomaniac.”
Benissimo
,
 
the Social Democrats no longer governed; after ruining Austria completely they were now in the opposition. A coalition of Christian Socialists, Peasants, and German Nationalists were running things, but this Government controlled literally one single majority vote in Parliament and therefore could be overthrown at any hour. Moreover, since Monsignor Seipel resigned there had been no real statesman at the head. Consequently there was, in Il Duce's belief, only one alternative: armed self-protection. The Sozis had their “Republican Defence League,” which they mobilized and used to terrorize the public with whenever they saw fit. They wished to overthrow the coalition Government and throw in their lot with democratic Germany, which was daily giving fresh proof of its ineptness. The Nazis, on the other hand, who had only a small following in Austria but who were all the more generous in their distribution of arms and spick-and-span new uniforms, wished to join Austria with a National Socialist Germany which would, according to Il Duce, do away with the ridiculous Weimar republic. There was just one point.

Here the Italian looked carefully around him on all sides and drew from his briefcase, not a slip, but a large sheet, unfolded it, and then read it with such reverence as if he were inwardly bowing before each word. They were Il Duce's words, and he had been allowed on the spot in Palazzo Venezia to commit them to paper. Il Duce had said: “
Io racommanderei
,
e racommanderei persino vivamente
,
l'organizzazione immediata a traverso l'Austria
,
di una milizia armata all'esempio fascista
,
per proteggere la popolazione contro il terrore communista e l'ancor piugrave minaccia del Nazismo
.
Al momento propizio e quando la milizia
,
sarà organizzata
,
le armi e l'appoggio necessario verranno provisti
.” That meant, if Signore Alt did not understand Italian sufficiently well: “I recommend, and recommend urgently, the formation of an armed militia, on the fascist pattern, in Austria, to protect the population from communist terror and the still more dangerous threat of Nazism. Help and arms will be placed in readiness at the right moment as soon as the militia is formed.”