Viennese medley

by Edith O'Shaughnessy

"Manny is very ill," answered Tante Ilde gently.

"Nerves," returned Mizzi promptly, finally. "We'd starve if I hadn't started in."

"You are a wonder," said Tante Ilde, and quite honestly she thought it was little short of a miracle, how Mizzi in that dreadful city had not only wooed but won fortune.

Of course, they all knew that Fanny had started her, but even so she was a wonder, making money that way. She would survive. It was beings like Hermann who went under,—gentle, loving, wise, once-strong Hermann.

Her thoughts clung tenaciously to Hermann, slumped down into his chair, Hermann who hadn't looked back at her. She couldn't know that he had, for quite a while, been conscious of her loving touch on his arm, and that he was thinking, "sometime I'll tell Tante Ilde about Marie." Yes, while he was still able to talk clearly of precious things. It was one of his worst days. Often on such days he didn't keep his office hours ... the uselessness of the terrible struggle. In that city of misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. On other days, difficult as it was to get over the open places, he would leave the house quite early in the morning, trying to shake off its devitalizing atmosphere. There was a café off the Opernring, he didn't have to cross the Ring itself to get to it, where they knew him and his little ways; sometimes he would sit for hours at a certain table watching the coming and going.

But that morning he'd got there too early; it was still deserted and he had been witness to certain dismal preparations for the day. A pale woman in damp, thin garments was washing up the floor, ends of burnt-out matches and cigarettes were piled in a corner, in a little heap on a chair were a few carefully collected cigar ends. The pikkolo under the emphatic direction of a waiter was brushing off the billiard table, the Tarok games were being laid out, the newspapers put into their holders. The pikkolo, who put one in upside down, had forthwith received a box on the ear from the waiter, supplemented by a kick on that part of his undersized person where, however, it would be least injurious; but his reaction was not against the donor of these morning favors, but rather induced the consoling thought that if he ever got to be head-waiter he would return it with interest to whatever pikkolo was then about.

The arrival, a bit late, of the buffet Fräulein, with her blond hair too tightly crimped, too thickly puffed, started things at a more lively gait. A pale lavender tint lay over her face—the hair bleach, the rice powder, the long hours in the crowded room. Energetically she proceeded to count out a few lumps of sugar, unlocked noisily from behind the counter; then she looked scrutinizingly at the liqueur and fruit-juice bottles, holding them up to the light, her pale eye appraising the exact condition of their contents.

One by one frequenters of the café began to come in, dissipating more and more the forlornness of the place, wiping their feet on the wire mat, putting their bulging umbrellas into the stand, hanging up their dull hats, sitting down in their overcoats, taking packages of paper money from their pockets and putting them on the table just as if it weren't money. Finally the café was quite full and Hermann sitting before his empty cup, smoking and watching apathetically the familiar sights, became conscious of the passage of time. He remembered that Tante Ilde was coming to dinner that day and he wondered what Fanny could have said to make the arrangement possible, it was so unlike Mizzi. Then he looked at his watch and saw with immense relief that he still had a little time, ... a calamity to be even that short distance from home, ... he hoped he'd get back, ... sometime probably he wouldn't. He had been thinking all that morning with an obsessing, nightmarish horror of something that had happened to him in his own office the day before.... Because a pale, uncertain-yeared woman had had nose-bleed, he had been overcome by a horrible nausea, an intolerable, hitherto unknown feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why, he had seen blood, felt blood, smelt blood, worked swiftly, calmly in blood against time and death—and now a pale woman with a nose-bleed.... He'd had to go into the inner office.... It was unbelievable that just that could happen to him. Then after she had gone, after they all had gone, he sat thinking about it and he had laughed terribly, loudly, and then trembled and wept and Mizzi on the other side of the landing knew nothing about it, no one knew, no one must ever know just that. Yes, he was going very fast. He knew it himself; knew that he was headed for the madhouse, as straight even as towards death. Some day he'd do something of a sort that nobody had any right to do. Often he would awake, icy cold, at the fear of what he might do. He couldn't imagine at all what it would be, but something that people who were dwelling freely among their fellowmen were not allowed to do—and rightly....

Sometimes his thoughts would turn with nostalgic longing to the gay, full years of his student-life; those busy years as intern at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The luck he'd had when old Professor Schulrath but a year before his death, had taken him as assistant.... The eager beginnings of his own private practice; that unforgettable thrill the first time he had seen his shingle hanging outside his own door.... Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met Mizzi,—full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock, as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave....

That whole first year of the war he had been among those detailed for general duty in the great city. Afterwards, the civilian population was left to be born or die as best it could. Every available physician was rushed to the front. The mortality among the wounded had become too great. Poor fellows sent back from one or the other fronts would sometimes have been two or three weeks in their uniforms, still in their first-aid bandages, or not bandaged at all; and when they got to Vienna after the torture of their transport in springless luggage-vans, there was often little to be done for them except bury them in those great mounds that grew and grew as the hospitals eased themselves of their dead. It had to be managed less wastefully. Lives were to be saved that they might be thrown again into the struggle....