Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

My sisters and I “amused” ourselves extremely, and certainly I not less than they. It was, so to speak, my début also in society. The first time I was introduced as an engaged girl, and a newly-married woman; and so all admirers had of course held aloof from me; and what is a higher enjoyment in society than the admirers? But, strange to say, however much I was pleased to be surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, none of them made any deep impression on me. There was a bar between them and me which was quite impassable. And this bar was what I had been erecting during my three years of lonely study and thought. All these brilliant young gentlemen, whose interests in life culminated in sport, the ballet, the chatter of the court, or (with those who soared highest) in professional ambition (for most were soldiers), had not the faintest idea of the things which I had looked at from afar in my books, and on which my soul’s life depended. That language, of which I grant I had only as yet learned the elements—but as to which I was assured that it was in it that men of science would debate and ultimately decide the highest questions—that language was to them not Greek merely, but Patagonian.

From this category of young folks I was not going to select a husband; that was quite settled. Besides, I was in no hurry to give up once more my freedom, which was very pleasant to me. I managed to keep my would-be suitors sufficiently at a distance to prevent any from making an offer, and at the same time to prevent anybody in society from putting about concerning me the compromising rumour that I was laying myself out for lovers. My son Rudolf should hereafter be able to feel proud of his mother, no breath of suspicion should sully the pure mirror of her reputation. But if the case should occur that my heart should glow once more with love—and that could only be for one worthy of it—then I was fully disposed to realise the claim which my youth still had to happiness in this world, and enter into a second marriage.

Meanwhile, apart from love or happiness, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The dance, the theatre, dress—I found the liveliest pleasure in all of them. But I did not for them neglect either my little Rudolf or my own education. It was not that I plunged into special studies, but I always kept au courant with the movement of the intellectual world, by procuring all the most prominent new productions in the literature of the age, and regularly reading attentively all the articles, even the most scientific, in the Revue des deux Mondes and similar magazines. These occupations had indeed the result that the bar I have just spoken of, which cut off my inward life from the surrounding world of young men of fashion, became constantly higher—but it was right that it should be so. I would gladly have drawn into my saloons a few persons from the world of literature and scholarship, but that could hardly be done in the society in which I moved. Bourgeois elements could not be mixed with what was called “the circles” of Vienna. Especially at that period—since then this exclusive spirit has somewhat changed, and it has become the fashion to open one’s saloons to individual representatives of art and science. At the time of which I speak this was not the case yet; any one not “Hof-fähig,” i.e., who could not count sixteen ancestors, was excluded thence. Our ordinary society would have been most unpleasantly surprised to have met at my house people not ennobled, and could not have hit on the right tone to converse with them. And these persons themselves would certainly have found my drawing-room, full of countesses and sportsmen, old generals and old canonesses, intolerably dull. What part could men of intellect and science, writers and artists, take in the eternally same conversation—who had given a dance yesterday and who would give one to-morrow—whether Schwarzenberg, or Pallavicini, or the Court—what love affairs Baroness Pacher was causing—which party Countess Palffy was opposing—how many estates Prince Croy possessed—what right the young Lady Almasy possessed to the title of a lady of rank, whether as a Festetics or a Wentheim, and if a Wentheim whether by that Wentheim whose mother became a Khevenhüller, etc.? That was indeed the matter of most of the conversations that went on around me. Even the intellectual and educated people, some of whom were really to be found in our circle, statesmen and so forth, thought themselves bound when they associated with us, the young folks who danced, to adopt the same frivolous and meaningless tone. How gladly would I often have gone to some dinner in a quiet corner at which one or two of our travelled diplomatists or eloquent parliamentarians, or other men of mark might express their opinions on weighty questions!—but that was not feasible. I had to keep along with the other young ladies, and talk of the toilettes that we were getting ready for the next great ball. And even if I had squeezed into such a company the conversations that might have been just begun about the economy of nations, about Byron’s poetry, about the theories of Strauss and Renan, would have been hushed, and the talk would have been: “Ah, Countess Dotzky, how charming you looked yesterday at the ladies’ pic-nic; and are you going to-morrow to the reception at the Russian embassy?”

“Allow me, dear Martha,” said my cousin Conrad Althaus, “to introduce to you Lieutenant-Colonel Baron Tilling.”

I bowed. The introducer went away, and the one introduced did not speak. I took this for an invitation to dance, and rose from my seat with my left arm raised and bent, ready to lay it on Baron Tilling’s shoulder.

“Forgive me, countess,” he said, with a slight smile, which showed his dazzlingly white teeth, “I do not dance.”

“Indeed! so much the better,” I answered, sitting down again. “I had just retreated here to get a little repose.”

“And I had requested the honour of being introduced to you, countess, as I had a communication to make to you.”

I looked up in amazement. The baron put on a very serious face. He was altogether a man who looked very serious, no longer young, somewhere about forty, with a few streaks of grey on the temples—on the whole, a prepossessing sympathetic look. I had accustomed myself to look sharply on each new introduction with the question: “Are you a suitor? and should I take you?” Both questions I answered in this case with a prompt negative. The person before me had not that expression of intimate adoration which all those are in the habit of assuming who approach ladies with “views,” as the saying is, and the other question was resolved in the negative at once by his uniform. I would give my hand to no soldier a second time, that I had absolutely fixed with myself, not alone because I would not be again exposed to the horrible pain of seeing my husband depart to the campaign, but because since that time I had arrived at views about war in which it would be impossible for me to agree with a soldier.

Lieutenant-Colonel v. Tilling did not avail himself of my invitation to sit beside me.