A few bits of furniture left from the sale were finally distributed about among the various nieces and Frau Stacher went to board, just as a makeshift—"till things get better" Corinne had assured her, at the house of an acquaintance, who in the palmier days had partaken of her easy bounty. There nights of aching, sleepless homesickness followed days of empty, useless longing for all that had once been hers, for her little situation in life that had enabled her, childless as she was to be a center of pleasure and comfort to the only beings she loved. It was finished, done with, that was quite clear. She sat more and more alone in her room. The clack of Frau Kerzl's tongue and her invectives at Fate, quite justified though they were, got finally and intolerably on her nerves. She thought she could not bear to hear another time that things were as they were because the Hapsburgs had taken all the gold out of Austria when they went, and left the "others" sitting with the paper money.
Frau Stacher was no intellectual and had attempted no mental appraisement of the national calamities. Even in the good days her most enjoyable reading had been the Salon Blatt, where what the Imperial and Royal family and the "Aristokraten" did, said, wore, and where and how they showed themselves was duly recorded for the delectation of an appreciative people. A morning paper had always been brought to the house, it is true, but she would only run quickly over world-events which had never so slightly modified her life, whereas the doings of the First Society lent it both lustre and interest.
She knew that Frau Kerzl, whose grief had dyed her political feelings a deep red, was going on in a stupid, even wicked, manner, when she so unjustly and blasphemously spoke of the Hapsburgs, but she had no satisfactory answer to make, so after her way she was silent, spending the long evenings alone in her room. She couldn't see to sew in it, nor indeed to do anything more complicated than move about. The single light was placed high up in the center of the ceiling and was reflected but dimly from the dark walls, the pieces of heavy furniture and the brown porcelain stove that was never lighted.
Fortitude was, seemingly, the only virtue that Frau Stacher, gentle, easy-going, unheroic, was called upon to practise.
But the thing couldn't last forever. Often she was glad she was seventy. It made the outlook easier. There couldn't be more than twenty years of treading up other people's stairs. The instinct of home was almost as strong in her as the instinct to live. No, there couldn't be more than twenty years of it.... Then, too, in a month, a day, an hour even, it might all be over. But one evening sitting in the shadowy room, her little, white, knitted shawl drawn about her shoulders, her hands crossed under it on her breast, she was suddenly and terrifyingly aware of the beating of her heart,—almost as if for the first time. She found she was as much afraid of death as of life—and that was a great deal....
Sometimes one or the other of "the children" remembered to come to see "poor Tante Ilde" and often Corinne, in her moonbeam way, would slip in and out, still and pale indeed like a ray of reflected light, and every Sunday after dinner she and Corinne would meet at Irma's. She went frequently to Kaethe's, too, that is, whenever she had anything to take to the children. It wasn't a place where one could go empty-handed.
But all, in one way or another, were caught up in the struggle for survival. In a starving, freezing city, not starving, not freezing, took the last flow of everybody's energy, so she was mostly alone. But solitude, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, had no charms for her. She had an almost unbearable longing to be in crowds, in happy, busy crowds, where people jostled each other as they went about little, pleasant errands.
But there was another thing beside being certain—vaguely—that she wouldn't live forever, which had come to make her sojourn at Frau Kerzl's not only endurable but desirable ... a cold, creeping premonition concerning the not distant time when even that measure of independence would be denied her. The money from the sale of the furniture was going, was gone.
One morning in that terrible "little hour before dawn" when anxiety had done its worst, she got up and counted and recounted the thin packet of crowns left in her purse. Then in panic she made a mental survey of her other remaining "values," of those things her nieces were "keeping" for her. The result had sent her shivering back to bed, where frightened by a fear beyond any she had ever known, even in nightmare, she had pulled the bedclothes up over her head. She was afraid, afraid. It was grinning at her....
She dozed finally. But she only knew she had been asleep when she found herself throwing the sheet aside with a start, thinking she heard Corinne's voice calling up the stairs in the house at Baden.... Perhaps something would happen.