Of all the towns of Europe Vienna is the Terpsichorean town. The Viennese are passionately fond of dancing, and the women, distinguished as they are by beauty, charm, and elegance, indulge in its pleasure even at the cost of more solid qualities. And they are dressed! In Paris dressing is a luxury, in London it is a mistake, in Berlin an impoliteness, but in Vienna it is a fine art. Ah, the Viennese women! You must admire them, whether you see the fashionable ladies parading in their carriages on a May day in the principal Avenue of the Prater, or the jolly, boisterous girls whirling about in October in the dancing room of one of the village style inns where the new wine is sold.
And there is always the same swing of the waltz, ever melodious, never monotonous, the same in the large brilliant cafés of the Prater as in the small, modest wine shops.
Oh Vienna! Town of song and dance, where is thy happiness now?
How these gay, pleasure-loving, genial people, so full of bonhomie and so markedly different from the nasty inhabitants of Berlin, could start this horrible war, is the one thing that must astonish anybody who knows Vienna even a little. I will say here, that one of the reasons why I write this book is precisely that I believe I have an explanation for this riddle, which seems nearly incapable of being solved.
These first days of Vienna appear to my memory as a kind of storm of jubilation, as a tempest of laughter and cries of amusement, of shouting and singing, of the frolicking of light feet, of the sweet weeping of violins.
And only the fact that I was living in a very middling first-class hotel spoiled my pleasure. It meant much money and little comfort. It meant, too, service by the worst waiters in the world. I don't know what London has ever found in the German or more correctly Austrian waiter. Happily the war has cleared him away. And even then a mistake, a prejudice was necessary. For we are not rid of him because he was a rotten waiter, but because the Evening News took this creature, the most brainless in the world, for a ... spy.
At least, after a week, remorse came. Here I was, in Vienna, supposed to learn the gentle art of music, and in reality spending the money of Daniel Cooper and Co., Insurance Brokers, London, E.C., on ... No! I am not going to blush over all the details. Besides, you have sufficient imagination to blush for me.
But while I talk of blushing, I may as well tell you that I was not found worthy of entering the conservatoire. This I regretted only because I had heard of an abundant flora of pretty girls which was to be found there. For every other reason private lessons seemed to me the better way to get acquainted with the mysteries of harmony and counter point.
I enquired and my choice fell soon on a man who, as an organist, was a local celebrity, although he had failed to achieve much success as a composer. His name was Robert Hammer, he was a genius and accordingly poor.
When I went to see him, I was really shocked, so great seemed his distress. His apartment on the top floor of a house in the suburbs was composed of one small room. There was a small iron bed, covered with big parcels of manuscripts, and a baby grand piano, also covered with music paper. There was a plain deal table, a kitchen table in fact, again heaped with papers, and two wooden chairs which excluded all idea of taking one's ease. The walls were hung with an old discoloured paper, and quite unadorned, save by a colour print representing the old Emperor Francis Joseph.