One forenoon my husband and I were sitting and chatting together after breakfast, when a card was brought in. On it was written the inquiry whether Mr. Felix Moscheles of London, who had chanced the day before to learn through Sir Austen Henry Layard that the author of Die Waffen nieder was in Venice, might be permitted to present his respects.
I sent down word that it would be a pleasure to me.
My husband went to meet the visitor in the anteroom.
“My wife will be much pleased ...” he began politely.
“What! How is this?” cried the other. “Can you be Baron Suttner? So you are not dead? Why, you were shot in Paris!”
“Excuse me, no....”
Thereupon the two gentlemen came in where I was, and the stranger explained why he had been so surprised to find me in the possession of a living spouse, when he knew from the story of my life, which he had lately read, that I had lost my two husbands, and he had not supposed (somewhat reproachfully) that I was married for the third time.
We laughingly explained to him that the two deceased military men were mere creations of fancy, and all that was taken from reality was the loving and happy wedded intercourse which the book depicts—and this, thank God, had not been sundered by any cruel fate.
Mr. Felix Moscheles, a son of the famous musician, and editor of the correspondence between his father and Mendelssohn, now explained to us that he, together with Hodgson Pratt, Cardinal Manning, Lord Ripon, the Bishop of London, the Duke of Westminster, and others, belonged to the directorate of the London Peace Association. Being a permanent resident of London and a naturalized Englishman, he had set himself the task of carrying on propaganda for his peace association whenever he was traveling. His chief specialty was table-d’hôte conversion; but this, he laughingly acknowledged, was generally a wretched failure, or else brought upon him the counter attempts of old women tract distributers to convert him.
The preceding winter he had spent with his wife in Cairo, where he had made quite a number of Egyptian studies,—Mr. Moscheles is a painter by profession,—and there he had succeeded in winning over sundry beys to his peace theories. A friend from Berlin had sent him my book, and that had awakened in him an eager desire to make the acquaintance of the unfortunate woman who had suffered so much by war and who had expressed in this book so much that he himself had at heart. Now the day before he had learned quite by accident, in a soirée at the house of Sir Austen Henry Layard, the well-known ex-diplomat, that the author was in Venice, and he could not but pay his respects to her: first as a friend of peace, to thank her for the book, and secondly as a man, to express his sympathy for the poor broken-hearted widow ... and—what disillusions life brings—he is received by the husband of a jocund woman!