The second party in the state then, the first at the present moment, was the Christian Socialist. How they got the name I have not yet learnt. There is no means of proving that they are not Christian; but they are certainly not Socialists! I imagine they came by the name for a certain historic interest in schemes of municipalization, but their chief leaders are big capitalists, and their chief supporters the small shopkeepers of the cities and the peasant farmers of the country. They approximate to the old Liberals of the Manchester school in England. Free trade is an important plank in their programme. Their efforts in 1919 were being directed against the decontrol of food, and Mr. Julius Meinl’s theses on the subject have appeared in English in certain journals devoted to a similar policy. Dr. Redlich, the eminent writer, whose book on the British Constitution is regarded as the authoritative work upon the subject in much the same way as Lord Bryce’s volume on the American Constitution is said to be the last word on that subject, is another gifted leader of this now dominant party. So far the moderation of its course has saved the country from the reaction that a too-swift swing of the pendulum almost invariably produces.
Amongst the women friends I made in Vienna one stands out with peculiar interest. She is the lady to whom I have already referred, Frau Zuckerkandl, the widow of a very eminent Austrian physician, and one of the most delightful women it is possible to meet anywhere. I saw her first in her dainty flat, dressed in a fluttering loose robe of diaphanous silky material, a fairy figure with heaped-up masses of bright hair and rather tired blue eyes. Less than fifteen minutes sufficed to teach each of us that there were intellectual and spiritual bonds between us that made friendship ripe at the first contact. Both of us are devotees of good music. Both passionately admire the drama. Both recognize in art the living spirit of a true and lasting internationalism. Both feel the service of the oppressed to be a glorious privilege. Only twice or thrice in one’s life comes a friendship so rare and precious as I felt and feel this to be.
Frau Zuckerkandl’s father was the editor and proprietor of a great newspaper. She is a writer of merit, and was the musical critic for a Viennese journal. We visited the Opera together several times. This marvellous people, half-famished and almost wholly despairing, crowded the Opera House night by night, to revel at the feast of song which was the only rich banquet left them, and the last table they would willingly leave. “We can live without bread, but not without roses.”
My friend is related by marriage to the great Clemenceau. Her sister is the wife of “The Tiger’s” brother. I think it was she who told me the story that was afloat in Europe at that time of how, when Clemenceau was charged by some of his insatiable fellow-countrymen with having made a peace bad for France, he replied: “But how could I do better, with a fool on one side who thought he was Napoleon, and a damned fool on the other who thought he was Jesus Christ?”
Another good story which was going the round of the Vienna cafés deserves to be repeated. In one of the cafés, years before the war, a young Jew sat sipping his coffee day by day. Nobody was in the least interested in him, and he was distinguished for nothing except a shabby dress and a wild mop of tangled hair. His name was Trotsky.
In those days everybody was talking about the Russian Revolution. Many were fearful of it. The Vienna Foreign Office was constantly being warned about its coming, and worried to death about the consequences upon Vienna of its coming.
Exasperated beyond endurance by the endless fears of his colleagues, and full of contempt for them, one of the higher officials exclaimed: “But what nonsense is this talk of a Russian Revolution; who is to make the revolution? There is nobody. Perhaps”—and here came a gesture of superb contempt—“Mr. Trotsky of the Café Centrale!”