Viennese medley

by Edith O'Shaughnessy

Even over Tante Ilde's gay little brass-bound chest, containing dear but unsalable odds and ends, Anna had thrown a brown cloth cover worked sparsely in white and yellow daisies.

There was something dead about it all and about the two dull women the expression of whose being it was.

To Pauli, gay, sparkling, eager, passionate Pauli, it was as pleasant to visit his home as it would have been to visit the cemetery. In one corner was the table on which, wrapped in a scarlet cloth, was Pauli's zimbalon. It was the only thing in the dwelling that spoke of its master. It was the bright flower on the grave, and too, he visited his home not much oftener than he would have visited Anna had she been lying in the Central Cemetery.

One of those stupid, fatal marriages. Anna had never understood anything about it, either the making or the unmaking of it. But she continued to love him with all the force of her poor being, and accepted, because she had to, his now habitual absence.

Pauli's mother had been a Hungarian and in his bright Magyar way he had long since put the dots on the "ies" of the conjugal situation: "Anna? Dead since years. She ought to wear a bead wreath."

That sombre flame in her eyes that from time to time he was unpleasantly aware of was, indeed, no more attractive to him than the phosphorescence shining about something decayed.

Sometimes he felt a brief pity for Hermine, his daughter, so young, so unattractive, so mirthless. "The poor girl" he would think, and then his thoughts would turn to fairer, brighter maids who might have been called poor for quite other reasons. To be a woman and not have beauty, grace—more or less—was in Pauli Birbach's eyes her one real misfortune. Women's beauty was, indeed, the central point in his world, that artistic, pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving world in which he was at home. He used to think that if he had married any one of Heinrich Bruckner's daughters save Anna he could have managed,—but just Anna. He sometimes thought too, that if he could have explained why he had sighed to possess Anna he could have explained any and all of the puzzles of the Universe. It held indeed all riddles within itself.

But for the last year it had not been any one of Herr Bruckner's handsome daughters. Since a certain day when he had gone with Corinne to Kaethe's ... since that day when the simplest yet mightiest thing had happened....

They had been standing at a window waiting for the rain to stop. They were very near as they looked out. Suddenly Pauli had been aware of a profound commotion in his being ... something hot and sweet and cruel and his own. He was seeing Corinne as he had never before seen any woman. She was deadly pale, her eyes were closed, her dark lashes lying heavily upon her cheeks. When she opened them and looked back at him the hovering magic, descending upon them had worked its purpose.

He was done suddenly and forever with the pluckable maids, perpetually ripe fruit, all seasons being theirs, that abound in Vienna; inaccessible too, to the sentiments that he had periodically experienced for one or another woman who had crossed his susceptible and magnetic orbit, whom he had possessed or not possessed, as the case might have been. It was different from everything else under the sun and was growing, growing. It was hope and image in his brain, greed and hurry in his body. He was mad for Corinne, Corinne earning unnaturally yet competently her daily bread in a bank when she should have been holding court under some oak at the change of the midsummer moon. Corinne placing endless, neat zeroes across broad, white pages when she should have been plucking simples or brewing potions. That elfin brood that crowded her pale heart overpowered his being, held it captive. One would have said he needed something brighter, hotter.... Yet, Corinne ... out of the whole world.... But that none of them knew as yet save Tante Ilde in her shy, sure way. Anna, who never got things straight, had a deep, dull jealousy of Fanny, a sentiment, however, that she had been familiar with since her earliest childhood, and when indirectly she learned that Pauli had seen Fanny, she was miserable for days, after her chill, slow habit, miserable unto death almost. She suspected Fanny of having made that arrangement about Tante Ilde; Fanny, though one never saw her, was always everywhere it seemed to Anna. Two dull fires had burned in Anna's eyes, two sombre red spots had darkened her cheeks, excitement never lighted up her face, when she learned not only that her aunt Ilde was to come and regularly, every Tuesday, but that Pauli himself would cast his bright shadow over his own dark threshold on that day. She and Hermine began straightway to plan as attractive a menu as lack of talent and materials permitted....