The Eberhardt's apartment was far, too, from the Hoher Markt, but not far like the Mariahilfer street, Frau Stacher kept reminding herself as she trudged along, her string bag full and her purse empty, and at the end of the walk there would be darling Kaethe and the lovely, hungry children.
It had not been easy, buying the most usual things, and the thin soup of the night before, and the ersatz coffee of the early breakfast had prepared her but illy for the venture. She had gone into various shops where unholy prices or empty shelves confronted her, for Vienna had mostly done its buying for the day when she started forth. It was late when at last she found herself, quite worn out, hesitating in a certain provision shop, between rice and lentils. One got a lot more of the latter, but what were they unless cooked with a bit of bacon or fat of some kind? And she was further confused by the sudden memory of a certain smoking dish of lentils, with shining bits of pork laid around the edge of the platter, that she had often served in the old Baden days.
There were a good many people in the shop and not much time for hesitating old ladies to make a final choice. Suddenly, tremblingly, she decided to take the rice, while it was there to take, for quite close to her, overtopping her, stood a large, hook-nosed, hard-eyed, befurred woman who was evidently ready to swoop down upon it all. Indeed, she was looking about her with an unmistakable look that could only come from money, a lot of it, in her pocket, as if, indeed, she could buy everybody as well as everything. No eggs, no butter, no fats of any kind were in that shop, but as Frau Stacher was paying for the rice, she suddenly saw on a lower shelf behind the counter an object that, had it been set in gold, could not have been more attractive: a tin of Nestlé's milk. She stammeringly asked for it, but as the man, placing his hand almost affectionately on it named the exorbitant price, and as trembling with excitement she was about to take it, the large, befurred female cried out harshly:
"I'll give you double what the old woman is paying!"
The man,—what decency could be left in that fight for food, for existence?—took it out of Frau Stacher's unresisting hand. A murmur went up from those watching the unseemly operation. But the shop-keeper only shrugged his shoulders, muttered something about the "pig" war, the still piggier peace, and the stout woman, hastily paying for it, departed to unmistakable allusions to "pig profiteers." That was the kind of world gentle Frau Stacher was living in. It would have been a frightening experience for her, but she, too, was armoured in that grim determination to get food. The great city's fight was for food, not against the enemy at the gates, but for the food that was at the gates, and shoulder to shoulder in serried lines, they fought for it against each other. She, Frau Stacher, once "rentier" in Baden, was fighting for it. She was lucky to have got even the rice. Leaving the shop she espied on the street corner a small fruit stand. Some shrivelled apples, so evidently grown in the four winds, were being offered in little piles of five, by a raw-boned peasant woman, whose hands were wrapped under her small, three-cornered grey shawl, while she stamped from foot to foot.
Frau Stacher remembered longingly the beautiful Tirolese fruit that had filled the Vienna markets in the days of plenty. Corinne had lately had a letter from the adopted daughter Jella, married to her tall, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, square-headed Tiroler, now Italian, saying that the fruit that autumn had lain rotting on the ground. There was no way of getting it over the frontiers, those invisible but none-the-less impregnable walls that had been suddenly built up around Vienna, north, south, east and west. Fruit and grain, sugar and fats could not pass over them nor get through them.
Now those little apples, even on that raw day, had a strange fascination for Frau Stacher, out of all proportion to their merits. They certainly resembled in no way the full, rosy-cheeked specimens she had been wont to pass out to visiting nieces and nephews and into which white teeth would promptly, juicily crunch, but they were a reminder, a symbol of them. She longed foolishly once more to see white teeth dig into apples. She bought hesitatingly a little pile, obviously she had lost her nerve about shopping for food since it had become a matter of life or death; in the old days she had been a lavish provider.... Not much more than a mouthful in each apple, and certainly they wouldn't be nourishing, but Frau Stacher was of a sentimental nature, and the pale, innocent eye she turned upon the fruit grew bluer, softer in expression. The woman, saving her crumpled bits of newspaper, dropped the apples into the string bag and quickly put her hands, swollen with chilblains, again under her shawl.
Then Frau Stacher began to think anxiously of little Carli, the next to the last of Kaethe's children, beautiful, smiling, little Carli who had no strength in his legs and whose face was alabaster. Fanny did send condensed milk for Carli, but there was always an urgent reason why one or the other of the children, with a cold or a sore throat or a stomach-ache, should have some of it. She wanted above all things to get a can of milk for Carli. Thinking desperately "Saint Anthony must help me," she found herself outside a small grocery shop. Few of the usual articles for sale in such shops were visible in the dusty window,—varnish, boot-blacking, washing-soda and other inedibles safely showed themselves behind the grimy panes. Somewhat dizzily she went in and asked for the milk. She wanted that can of milk more than she had ever wanted anything, wanted it enough it seemed, to create it out of empty air. The man, to her relief rather than her surprise, reluctantly reached down under the counter and passed it silently out to her, doubtless thinking of his own undernourished children.
"I knew it," said Tante Ilde under her breath, and she suddenly found herself delightfully warm as she exercised a truly à propos gratitude to the Heavenly Powers. She was emboldened too, and almost loftily asked him if he had a can of green peas, she wanted them to put into the rice to make the "risi-bisi" that the children so loved. Of course he didn't have it and scarcely answered her foolish question. But she espied a very small piece of hard cheese under a very large glass,—it was extraordinary how many things there were in the world that you couldn't eat, and how much of them! Then she saw a small package of "feinste Keks", with its picture in blue and red of a child eating one in rapture. She took recklessly both cheese and cakes. She knew she had lost her head, and besides she was feeling quite faint. Buying food in those days, even when one of the Saints visibly stood by, was an exhausting matter. She brightened up, however, as she went out of the shop at the thought that another twenty minutes of putting one foot before the other would inevitably bring her to Kaethe's door and the heavier the bag the better....