Instinctively, we had taken the direction of the Karlsgasse. I had a very nasty feeling, as if poor, innocent Doblana had suddenly become a criminal, and I his accomplice. I was dazed as if I had had a smack in the face.
We were passing a large café near the Elisabeth Bridge, where Doblana and I sometimes used to meet some friends.
"Let us go in," I said, "and show your self publicly. Make the best out of a bad case. After all you are innocent of the disaster that has befallen you. Go in, there are surely a few journalists inside. Let yourself be interviewed and protest against the manner you have been treated."
You ought to have seen the terror in the poor man's face. He opened his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth and drew backwards his lower jaw as if he had wanted to swallow it. (As a matter of fact, he must have been starving, for he had had no food the whole day.)
"Protest!" he cried at last. "I?—Mr. Cooper, you desire my death. As if my situation was not sufficiently bad! This is not a free country like yours, where you can talk as you like. No! I have but one thing to do, to go home and hide myself. I am done for."
And so we went to the Karlsgasse. The house seemed desolate to me. The servant, Fanny's unworthy successor, believing that we would sup outside and come home late, had gone to bed. So I proceeded into the dreary kitchen (a kitchen without a cook is always dreary, and without fire it can drive you to desperation) and made some tea on the gas-stove, while Doblana who had lit a cigar was walking up and down in the salon.
"It is terrible," said he at last, after he had swallowed a little tea, "how Austria is changing. What happens to me is but an instance of the new spirit that reigns here. Or should I not call it otherwise? This spirit, which comes from Berlin, this Pangermanic spirit is not a new spirit, but a reactionary spirit, a dark, mediæval spirit, a spirit that recognizes no right, but only might. What this Archduke has done to me to-day, in our time of enlightenment, is nothing else than an act of mediæval brutality.
"All evil comes us from Berlin. It spoils our art, it spoils our music. What they call the higher form is simply amorphous. What they call deep ideas is empty commonplace. The motives which are behind it all are vicious, sensual, degenerate, disgusting depravity. What we see in their painting, figures now too long, now too short, with swollen abdomens, with grinning faces, we find in their music, in the grossness of their motives, in the brutality of their orchestrations. This music is a breath from a stinking morass.
"And this is not all. Berlin is so mediæval in its views that they want war, universal war. War which will give the death blow to Austrian music, for music does not live in times of war. Fifty years ago they said: Germany for the Germans! Now they are crying: the world for the Prussians! And as though Austria were a German state, as though there were no Slavs and no Italians in Austria, Berlin wants to drag us into her war schemes. And they will succeed. From our cruel paintings you can see it, from our coarse, frightful music you can hear it: they will succeed!"
Thus spoke Doblana, not a great prophet, no, only a humble musician. Do not believe, incredulous reader, that I make him utter a prophesy after the event. Nay! These words were actually spoken, a long time before anybody, before even he who spoke them, thought of the war, that war in which I am fighting, that war which, as in irony, Austria, gentle, joyous, dancing Austria began.