Viennese medley

by Edith O'Shaughnessy

"Can't I help?" she asked, as she continued to look at it, rent by a sudden, terrible homesickness, that made her voice quite weak.

"No, you just sit quiet and rest. Everything is ready. It's time for Otto to come, anyway," Liesel answered with a look at her wrist watch. "He's always to the minute. He only has an hour for dinner and must find everything ready."

Indeed as she spoke the rattle of a key was heard at the front door. She flew to it. There were the unmistakable, immemorial sounds of embracing and then a whispered word from Liesel.

"Ach, yes, yes," Tante Ilde heard him answer.

He had hung up his green plush hat with the little grey feather at the back on its own invariable peg, had divested himself of his overcoat, with its rather high, tight belt and hung it up on the next by Tante Ilde's hat and coat, just as she had known he would, but without the inhospitable thoughts her humility had attributed to him. As he entered he was combing his hair and moustache with his little pocket comb and smiling his somewhat fatuous smile.

Otto Steiner was the son of a small government official, the grandson of one. He had gone into the Ministry of Agriculture when he was eighteen, and had been there seven years, when at a certain hour the war found him, in a certain room, at a certain desk, bending over a certain big ledger. And out of that secure and dusty routine, as natural to him as breathing, he had been thrown to the Russian front, then to the French front where he had been wounded. He had been healed and thrown to the Italian front, every nerve in his body making its agonized appeal against going through certain perfectly definite horrors again. He was thankful when his knee, which was supposed to be quite cured, began once more to stiffen and swell, when in a short time quite certainly he wouldn't be able to get about and they'd have to send him home. Then before he could be demobilized he had been taken prisoner and put in that Italian camp where his feet had frozen. Such strange things to happen to one who found his pleasure as well as his daily bread in those dusty ledgers, and whose conversation was largely made up of references to "Das Ministerium." It was one of the first words he remembered from his childhood days, as familiar as "guten Morgen."

Now after all the agonies, the incredible agonies, it had been granted to him, out of so many who had been heaped in nameless graves everywhere in Europe, to be coming into his own home from that very same Ministry, greeted by that delightful odor of food, prepared by a beloved, loving and lovely wife. "I'm certainly lucky," he often said to himself and asked no further grace of heaven than to grow old in the Ministry, moving slowly, as his forbears had moved, up through various rooms, indicative of various grades.

He was pale and wore eye-glasses. His face was the somewhat round-cheeked face of the average Viennese, with rather small nose and rather full lips under a brown moustache. Unmistakably a government employee who would set no river on fire but could be depended on to go his serviceable little way, hour by hour, day by day, year by year ... the traditional "rond de cuir."

There were always rumors of reducing the number of employees, but Steiner's work was so exact, his handwriting and figures so beautifully neat, that he was as safe as anybody in those unsafe days. He could, furthermore, answer any question put to him by any superior, even the strange questions of new men, who, momentarily "protected," came into the Ministry in the upper grades, passing in and then out. The administration was fairly snowed under by employees. It was reckoned often, (not, however, by those employed, they kept such statistics as much as possible to themselves) that 750,000 out of the 2,500,000 lived on and by the different departments of government. But mostly their positions were no more secure than yellowing leaves in Autumn. A gust of zeal on the part of some one high up and they fell in showers from the governmental tree, disappearing into the dark, wet, windy streets of hyemal Vienna. The question with each and every one was how to hang on....

Hydrocephalous Austria, with that terrible will to live! A mangled trunk supported its great head, Vienna. The members through which the blood should have circulated had been lopped off, the head was growing bigger, sicker....