Fanny was an expert in the matter of getting gifts. There was a pleasant, compelling air of expectancy about her, and a pleasant child-like rejoicing when a gift was offered that induced giving. And then when she was out of temper those animals were an unfailing and resourceful subject of conversation, playing often useful as well as ornamental rôles.
There were deep leather chairs, and between the windows a pale blue silk divan, that symbol of Fanny herself, piled with every conceivable sort of blue cushion, cushions with ribbon motifs, with silver flowers, with lace flouncings, painted, embroidered, of every shape and style. The carpet was blue and thick and soft and covered the floor entirely. In one corner was a large, cream-colored porcelain stove that once lighted in the morning gave throughout the day its soft and genial heat. A comfortable room indeed. No books but some piles of fashion journals on a little table by some piles of the inevitable Salon Blatt. Fanny did like to know what the "Aristokraten" were about, dimmed and attenuated as their doings now were. She quite frankly said that she never read; indeed the book of life took all her time and she had turned some pages that she didn't care to remember.
An old servant from her father's house had followed her along that flowery path that had proved to have its own peculiar and very sharp thorns. She'd been witness to Fanny's wounds and bleedings as well as to her successes. She scolded, flattered and adored. Those watchful eyes were worth their weight in the legendary gold to her mistress. It was old Maria who gathered up the remains when Fanny gave her suppers and took them the next day to the Herr Professor's; it was she who brushed and took stitches in garments before they were given to Kaethe. It was she who said to herself "Kaethe can do so and so with this or that." Nothing was lost really in that seemingly wasteful house. Then, too, Maria had her own relatives, who nearly or quite starved in dark, distant streets. The chain of misery was endless; here and there a little place of plenty, like Fanny's house off the Kaerntner Street.
Fanny's post-war principle was simple: "der Tag bringt's, der Tag nimmt's," the day brings it, the day takes it. Who would be such a donkey as to save money that a week after would have halved or quartered, even if it did not quite lose, its value? No, spend and make others spend. Those were wonderful days for succeeding in a profession like Fanny's. Paper money? Easy. Vienna lived to spend, not only spent to live. That paper money went stale, dead on their hands if they didn't spend it. Jew and Christian alike knew that. Wonderful days, indeed, for Fanny and her kind.
Fanny always went to the Hotel Bristol for her midday meal, sitting at a little table not far from the door. Everybody that came in saw her and she saw everybody. She was one of the hotel's brightest treasures, above Princesses of blood, who now so often had a way of looking like their own maids. She was always smartly, beautifully dressed in her somewhat quiet style. She gave a light, bright touch to the dark, too-heavily decorated room, shone in it gleamingly, reposefully, like a crystal vase.
Foreigners generally beckoned to the head-waiter and asked who the lady was sitting alone at the table near the door. And according to the questioner so was the answer. The head-waiter, profoundly versed in human nature, made no mistakes.
Fanny's manners like her clothes, were impeccable. She spoke to no one and no one spoke to her and she certainly didn't look about her the way the green Americans or the ripe Jews did. She went in and out like a queen, haughtily, gracefully, her round hips swaying gently, her head erect, her beautiful, blue eyes impersonal. But then Fanny was always careful, not only in mien and gesture but in words. She was not accustomed to tell, even at her suppers, the sort of stories which, she heard quite authentically, ladies of the whole world told. It would have taken the distinction from her situation in the half world.
That luncheon at the Bristol was her regular public appearance. She occasionally nodded to a slender, distinguished-looking, dark woman, without her beauty but very chic. She was the friend of a Persian prince who, in pre-war days had ruined himself for her, but was now fast remaking a fortune in rugs. Extraordinary how many people there were in Vienna who wanted to buy expensive rugs! People who had mostly never seen a rug before,—suddenly Vienna was full of them. They came easily to the surface of the dark, troubled waters of the Kaiserstadt, like rats swimming strongly, surely against the current of disaster; and they wanted quickly all the things that "the others" had always had. These two women sometimes joined each other in the ante-chamber and went out together. The dark woman had once been somebody's wife; but Fanny had stood at no altar save the one she served. She would take a couple of hours for her toilette for those luncheons, for her seemingly simple toilette that no woman of the world with less exclusive and wider demands upon her time could hope to rival. She dressed sometimes for the weather, sometimes according to her mood, sometimes in consonance with the national misfortunes. After the Treaty of St. Germain she dressed for two months in black, fine, shining, smooth, silky black, and then because of the Count she dressed again in black after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon. Her face, in those dark days and dark deeds, shone out of her sombre raiment like a rift from black storm heavens. But after all in her blue gowns, blue of every shade, from nearly green to nearly purple, lay her greatest successes. That is why Kaethe and her children were almost entirely robed in blue—and Maria's relatives too.
Fanny's own expenses, as will be guessed, were large. She had to spend money,—a lot of it,—to make money, to keep steady her situation, somewhat inverted, in the social body. Seven years of it and though she was handsomer she was older. She had an extraordinary canniness for all the sweet innocence of her blue eyes and pouting red lips.
Her ways were irregularly regular. In the evening unless she went to the theatre she was always at home. And there had never been any falling off in those evenings. Good business was often done then, other than by the châtelaine. Princes of the old style had there the desired opportunity to meet the new lords of Austria,—men that they would scarcely have saluted on the street in the old days, men that then they only knew in their money-lending capacity, having their habitat in small inner offices; beings with money in safes behind their desks, who gave it out at usurious rates to temporarily or permanently embarrassed scions of noble houses. Then these "Aristokraten" had had the fine steel of birth with which to defend themselves, a shining sword that had made such dealings profitable and pleasant on both sides. Now that sword was gone dull in their hands, or broken at the hilt. Life was a different kind of tilting ground. Gloves were thrown down in counting houses and then promptly picked up and pocketed. Those whose only occupation had once been to lend money now had further pretensions.