O ye who would hinder us from working at the weaving of the band that is to gird all nations together in concord, ye who scoff at us because we would choke out hereditary hate, because we would fan the flame of the love of humanity—“a double woe to you!”
The monthly from which the above extract is taken was published for eight years until the end of the century, when it was replaced by the Friedenswarte. The idea of issuing a periodical did not come from me. After the newspapers had spread the tidings of the founding of a Peace Society in Vienna and the part which it was to take in the approaching Congress, a young publisher in Berlin wrote me an enthusiastic letter in which he suggested the establishment of an organ for the new movement; he would publish it, I was asked to be editor in chief and to put my name on it as such. An eager devotee of the idea of peace since his earliest years, since he had for the first time seen the Vereshchágin pictures, he now desired to dedicate all his powers as a publicist to the cause of peace. His letter was burningly written, and I consented. From that day to this A. H. Fried has been my most zealous fellow-combatant.
So then I stood in the midst of the young movement; I had a new Union to preside over, a review to edit, a regular correspondence to carry on with the colleagues whom I had gained in Rome, and once more my life and activities were filled with something which I recognized as “the one important thing.”
PART SEVEN
1892–1898
XXXII
HOME AND FRIENDS
We two · Business troubles · Deaths · Family life at Castle Stockern · Home theater · The twelfth of June · Visit of Prince André Dadiani
These pages have of late been very full of Union reports and “movement” news, and it looks as if we both had been immersed in political life and sadly taken up with league-breeding. But when I look back to those days, there rise in my memory a multitude of other recollections connected with our private life, with the family and social life that we led, and especially with our cloudlessly happy married union. The outside world with its mediæval darkness and its pitiable conditions caused us much annoyance, and we took the field against these as well as we could; we found much satisfaction, too, in the battle itself; but our chief joy, our wealth, our fullest gratification, was each other. We had lost nothing of our gayety, of our frivolous childishness, nothing of our deep, fully confiding love. We swam in it as fishes in the sea; and, whatever made us gasp and suffocate when we ventured out on the beach sands, we could always dive back again into the vivifying currents of our happiness.
A filigrain happiness, a miniature happiness. It did not consist of soaring emotions and boisterous enjoyments. The everyday was its territory; the everyday with the petty sweetnesses of comfort and humor. We were not lost in astonishment, in admiration, in worship of each other; better than anything of that kind, we loved each other,—loved with all our weaknesses and faults. To lay one’s self out to be of assistance, to procure a better existence for our fellow-men now and in the future, is all very fine. Yet the best and first of duties is to give as much joy as possible to one’s partner in life, and at the same time to be joyful one’s self. To what end do we want to free mankind from persecution, from disease, from oppression, from violent killing, if not to provide mankind with the possibility of enjoying life? So that is the chief end. But we ourselves, and those who stand nearest to us, have the same claim; why should this claim be left unrecognized, when it is the easiest of all to satisfy? If in a circle of ten each sacrifices himself for the welfare of the other nine, who of the circle gets the intended welfare? Well, we two did fare “cannibalistically well,” if not wie fünfmalhunderttausend Säuen, “like half a million swine,” as the well-known student song has it, yet like two jolly little pigs.
And it was not all a bed of roses at Harmannsdorf either. The business of the estate would not go right, the quarry least of all. They changed superintendents, changed managers, negotiated with agents for contracts, but there was no improvement. On the contrary, the enterprises planned, ever arousing new hopes, led to risks, and when they ended in smoke we were a bit worse off than before, but ready to come up to the next hope all the more trustfully. And, since a modicum of volatility was characteristic of the whole house of Suttner, we shook off the worry and took from the day whatever of good the day brought.
All these long days had also brought something of sorrow. My Own’s oldest brother Karl was suddenly attacked by pneumonia, which carried him off in a week. My sister-in-law Lotti, the Countess Sizzo by marriage, lost her husband. The bereavement was not very severe. It had not been a wretched marriage, but not a happy one either; the two were incompatible and lived for the most part separated,—he in his home in Southern Tirol, she at Harmannsdorf. Karl’s daughter Mizzi, who was then sixteen, after his death came to live in her grandparents’ house and was always with us thenceforth. Her uncle Artur, whom she genuinely worshiped, had to take her father’s place.
The liveliest intercourse was kept up with the neighboring castle of Stockern. There lived (and still live) my husband’s older brother Richard, nicknamed Igel, “hedgehog”; his wife Pauline, called Das Weib, née Ponz von Engelshofen, châtelaine of Stockern and mother of five children,—one daughter and four sons, the eldest of the sons born in 1871, the youngest in 1886, so that there was much fresh, gay youth; and, in addition, governesses, tutors, aunts, cousins, and other guests. Lively times were always going on there. Very often the whole train would come to Harmannsdorf, especially on occasion of birthdays, patron saints’ days, hunts, vintages, and harvest-homes; still more frequently we drove over to Stockern, or both families would join in excursions to near-by Rosenburg or some other place of resort.