The Eberhardts still lived in the apartment they had taken when they married, on a street in the Alsergrund, near the University. It had once seemed very big, magnificent even for two people,—now their handsome, hungry children overflowed it.
The family had been very proud of Kaethe's distinguished young husband; "a genius" they would always say impressively to less fortunate friends when speaking of him, and dwell delightedly on Kaethe's relations with the University and with certain distinguished people who visited Vienna when the Kaiserstadt was a font of wisdom. Her husband was indeed well-embarked on a brilliant career, any and all honours were possible; Privy Counselor certainly, and later perhaps a "von" to his name. When scientific Congresses met in Vienna, he was always called on to read papers, and colleagues from other cities were eager to confer with him. He often used to bring one or the other home with him for coffee, proud of his smiling, soft-eyed, bright-cheeked wife, of his lovely babies, his comfortable house. When things began to get bad, Kaethe would tell the children what she used to have for the "Jause," that extraordinary, incredible meal that came in the afternoon, between other meals,—coffee and chocolate, with thick whipped cream, (the now quite legendary "Schlagobers"), apple tarts with butter dough, the fresh coffee cake, and certain little crescents that would fairly melt in the mouth. The children were in the habit of asking their exact color, shape and taste, they seemed quite unrelated to the War and Peace bread that alone they were acquainted with, and certainly they never could have sprung from the same harvest field. The real difference between milk and cream, too, was an absorbing topic, and they all loved Resl's joke that if it rained milk instead of water she would be out all the time looking up with her mouth open, though Maxy invariably reminded her that it would be better to take a pail and bring a lot home and then everybody could have some. When Lilli learned at school about the milky way, she taught them a game called living at number 1 Milk Street. But lately they hadn't talked much of the "Jause" of the old days, nor made so many little jokes. They were tired when they got home from school and only errands connected with food had any interest.
Though all of Herr Bruckner's family were musical in their easy way, Kaethe had a real talent; she could not only play through by ear the latest operette, but Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, with a sure yet fiery touch. Eberhardt had played the 'cello since his boyhood. Sometimes Kaethe, her fingers tapping out a measure on the table after the piano went, would think with hot longing of certain quartettes to which those walls of hers had once resounded. Poor Amsel who led them ... his songs, written during a protracted period of starvation in a garret, were now being sung everywhere; but he had been killed on the Eastern front that very first month of the war,—he'd scarcely had time to send back a postcard,—and had been buried with his talent and a half a hundred luckless fellows in a huge mound, that had been promptly flattened and all trace of it obliterated by a retreating army. And Koellner, with his Amati violin. Kaethe often hummed a motif of that Mozart trio and thought of herself at the piano, Koellner swaying slimly, his eyes closed and the long black lock falling over his forehead,—they hadn't seen him after the signing of the Peace. As for Rosetti from Triest who played the viola, he hadn't been heard of since the day before the mobilization, certain rumors got around about him....
But all these things were really as distant to the Eberhardts as the Tertiary Period; they themselves had been thrown up by the convulsions of War and Peace into strangely diversified, completely unrelated strata.
For a long time, however, those bright days had left the glow of their setting on the sombre war period. And then wars didn't last forever, and when over, except for mourning mothers, things would doubtless be as they had been. No one foresaw the Peace....
It had lasted four years, that first full, happy life, during which time Kaethe had had three children,—Lilli a pansy-eyed, pale-haired little girl, now grown too beautiful for safe adolescence, another clever, dark child, Resl, and Maxy who had been a "sugar baby" something to eat up, as he lay gurgling and cooing in his mother's arms.
The pendulum of Eberhardt's life had swung unvaryingly between that beloved home and the equally beloved laboratory, where daily he pursued hotly, closely, certain secrets of nature, always enchantingly about to be caught; or with a warm note in his vibrant voice and a light in his grey, speculative eye, communicated to eager students those he had already seized....
On the 28th of June came the news of the assassinations at Sarajevo. Unbelievable news; the Dual Monarchy shaken to its foundations. Its heir, its keystone gone like that, in a foul moment. Still everybody talked of the Emperor's grief, not dreaming that each, in one way or another, would partake of that grief. They counted his many sorrows, scarce one save poverty was missing; the Emperor's sorrows had always been an absorbing theme; it had got so that there weren't enough fingers on both hands to record them. This, and this, and this and still this, had he suffered. Had not his son miserably perished by his own hand—or another's? Had not his lovely Empress been assassinated? Had not his brother been put to death in far off Mexico? Had not his sister-in-law been burned to death in a Charity Bazaar? Had he not been obliged to exile another brother from his court for nameless sins? Had not another heir died of a dread disease? And other, other griefs. Now this last, this fatal blow in his old age, personal, dynastic. Those catastrophic griefs, heaped high with the years, in a way had become a matter of pride to happy Austrians, and the unhappy ones because of them, had a feeling of kinship with their beloved "Franzerl." Who could have foretold that in five years they would seem remoter, less interesting than those of some Roman Emperor?...
For a few weeks things seemingly went on just the same. Suddenly Europe was in flames and from the conflagration no one could flee....
The first two years hadn't been so bad for the Eberhardts. The Professor had been detailed for laboratory work in Vienna, and things went on somewhat as they had been going. Two more children were born. Then unexpectedly, through some tragedy of errors, Eberhardt found himself in a delousing station on the Eastern front. By that time, everybody was talking about hygiene as well as victory. But he was only gone a few months, returning gaunt and white, a startled look in his once thoughtful eye, and evidently quite unfit for further service. He had been side-tracked for days with a dozen others, suffering from dysentery, heaped together in a luggage van. No food, and worst of all, no water. The whole first week after he had tottered in over the threshold of his home he had said nothing, except repeat the word "schrechlich"—terrible. Then, strangely, he got better, even well, and went to the nearly empty University every day, trying to knot the torn threads of learning. Then the terrible peace broke out. The war had been bad enough, but it was war and unless one was killed one knew how to take it. The peace was quite another matter, a starving, freezing matter for women and children in city streets. The civilian population was suddenly plunged into it, up to the neck in it.... That collapse of the winter of 1919, ... that terrible food-blockade over half Europe.... There was nothing to hope for, nothing to fight for except bread, bread, bread, in ever-diminishing quantities. More were going down in that battle in the windy city than before machine guns. Each street was a battle-field, heaped mostly with children's bodies or the bodies of the very old.