Edith O'Shaughnessy

“ Suddenly Frau Stacher's heart grew so big, so big with a desolate pity that she thought it would burst the thin walls of her aching chest. It was indeed the symbol, the living, cruel symbol of the misery of that wintry, starving city. It was all caught up into that wretched group, to which so soon that other, unwanted and unwanting, would be added, that child still safe in the womb.... She caught her breath stickingly, sharply.
Where did charity begin? She no longer knew. She had meant to take Irma the money Pauli had given her, that she might use it for those children of their own blood. ”

“ In that city of misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. ”

“ Corinne was repeating slowly. Her look was very oblique and distant, and her face was suddenly pale, though quite bright—as if consumed to pale, hot ashes in the look Pauli bent upon her, consumed to last resistance.
Between these two looks Frau Stacher was suddenly crushed; she could scarcely breathe, another intolerable distress came to join that pain in her chest.
Would they hold out, those two who loved each other so, hold out in the dark, grim city that now took heed of little save food? Would they build themselves a house without foundations, in a nameless street, above ruins? ”

“ So great was the majesty clothing the features of "poor, old Tante Ilde," that fear suddenly entered into Liesel's rippling, shallow soul, and she got confused, and afterwards, to her annoyance, she could only remember vaguely that everything was blue and that over the divan was a silken cover picked out in what seemed to be silver rose-buds. Donkey that she was, she hadn't noticed the jeweled elephants either, nor the rabbits of which she had heard so much. Otto couldn't help her out in the slightest,—no more than a blind man. ”

“ But now that love for Corinne had begun to waste him, to crumble his other interests and activities. His strength, his time were mostly spent madly, hotly hoping for something, anything, out of the void whence events come,—the void known to every longing heart. Pauli was temperamentally aware of the fluidity of life—for all except the very old, they were caught like fragile shells in the hard stratum of age. It was one of the reasons for his tenderness towards Tante Ilde, and his farewell had in it much of the love of a son, and the pity of the very strong for the very weak. ”

“ The women, except Tante Ilde, were blotted out. She felt the exhilaration, the immediate electrization of the air and sat up quite straight, her elbows elegantly pressed against her waist and began to smile her fine, sweet smile. Her presence lay about Pauli as a wreathing mist about a mountain on a sunny day. Again he was thankful to find her there.
Dutifully he gave Anna a robust but empty kiss on both cheeks, with a "Well, how goes it?" and the same to Hermine, standing close by her mother. He thought fleetingly for the thousandth time that it was a calamity for women to be ugly. ”

“ There was nothing to hope for, nothing to fight for except bread, bread, bread, in ever-diminishing quantities. More were going down in that battle in the windy city than before machine guns. Each street was a battle-field, heaped mostly with children's bodies or the bodies of the very old.
The Eberhardt's apartment was far, too, from the Hoher Markt, but not far like the Mariahilfer street, Frau Stacher kept reminding herself as she trudged along, her string bag full and her purse empty, and at the end of the walk there would be darling Kaethe and the lovely, hungry children. ”

“ She had large, square-shaped hands, but she held deftly and delicately the diaphanous trifle that Mizzi would sell to some thick lady. Now she laid it down and took off her glasses, showing her eyes very strained. Her face seemed to broaden, her cheek bones to get higher, the spot of color on her cheeks was dyed deeper, harder. Everything was accented about Irma in that minute. Even the red of the little, fringed, three-cornered shawl was like life-blood spilled over her shoulders as she waited for her sister-in-law to answer and there was something increasingly minatory about her. ”

“ It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life, epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.
One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne ”

“ Pauli was standing at the door looking about. In a moment he was beside them and as he sat down in that eager way of his, life seemed to stream from him, more than he needed for himself, something overflowing, always something to give.
He was just as kind to Tante Ilde as to Corinne. She didn't feel a bit in the way ... for once ... like that. She was again in a world where given enough to eat and a warm place to eat it in, human beings still loved and longed for each other, not simply for food and shelter. ”

“ As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert, stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes, Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy even of those not of it. ”

“ Its color for a time has been washed out in the sombre waters of War and Peace; it has been trampled by the slow tread of cripples, its growth suspended in starvation. But another generation that has not seen these things and died of pity or hunger will arise, other "Flowers of Love" will blossom. The sagging portico of that stately pleasure-palace, Vienna, will be again upheld by Caryatides with glowing eyes, with bright cheeks, with thick, shining coils of dark hair, with full, soft figures and tireless, round, white arms. ”

“ Kaethe got up a moment after her aunt had greeted her and laid the sleeping baby in a battered crib in the next room, filled with beds of all sizes and sorts. That child was nourished. She would have felt quite exhausted herself, but for the thought of the dinner Tante Ilde had brought. She was still a handsome woman, in the early thirties,—even treading up that Calvary to which every road she knew now lead her, those seven roads of anguish for her seven children and for Leo whom she adored. ”

“ She loved even Irma. Even Irma who on account of her nerves couldn't bear to see that fine, soft light in her sister-in-law's eyes. An unreasonable, unseasonable light given the fact that one child had been reft away and another might as easily be taken. She should properly have been creeping about with her spirit quenched, instead of looking almost happy. It struck Irma, who was inaccessible to metaphysical changes, even as unseemly, and she proceeded to extinguish it, somewhat as a wet finger on the flame of a candle.
"Corinne today, but who's taking you tomorrow?" ”

“ To be a woman and not have beauty, grace—more or less—was in Pauli Birbach's eyes her one real misfortune. Women's beauty was, indeed, the central point in his world, that artistic, pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving world in which he was at home. He used to think that if he had married any one of Heinrich Bruckner's daughters save Anna he could have managed,—but just Anna. ”

“ Tante Ilde loved those tiny dents. There was often a gentle tinkle as she played with her chain with the hand bearing her wedding ring and a quite inconspicuous one of amethyst and pearls. Just as inconspicuous was Frau Stacher's being, her situation and her works, as that pale stone, those little, lustreless pearls. None save a doubly-blindfolded Fate, striking recklessly about at millions would have found so unimportant a mark.
Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china Auntie." ”

“ She continued staccato:
"Ferry's got to go to the mountains. Fanny can send him if she will. Fanny's rich. Fanny's in the only good business for women in Vienna."
Frau Stacher felt the blood rush to her face. But it was pity for Irma that suddenly reddened her cheeks rather than shame for Fanny. All the pity of her heart for a moment spent itself lavishly on that unloved sister-in-law.
"It's one of the reasons I'm going—for Ferry. I'd thought of it too, and tomorrow you know it is Fanny who is taking us all—with Carli, to the cemetery," she answered finally with an immense gentleness. ”

“ Tante Ilde said finally, a soft radiance spreading over her face, and turned her eyes, suddenly a lovely azure, full upon him. "Corinne is an angel."
Perhaps Tante Ilde shouldn't have said that right there before Anna, in Anna's own house, but Anna created an unendurable vacuum about herself, it made people want to throw something, anything into it to fill the horrible void.
"She thinks you are one," answered Pauli with a sudden deep breath, and there was a note in his voice that his wife, or at least his daughter, standing at the kitchen door, should have noticed. ”

“ The difficulty of getting to Anna's from the Hoher Markt was occupying Frau Stacher's thoughts as she lay awake in the early dawn, watching the day grow stronger, till she could see Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand, and the gilt of the flat, white vase on the bracket underneath began to glisten faintly in the dull light coming in over the top of the curtains. ”

“ She and Hermine went only to the church and cemetery, as likewise did four of Kaethe's children and Irma and her boys. Hermine had been all eyes for her veiled, but still discernibly lovely aunt, whose crisp, deep black stood out cypress-like against the greyer, cheaper hues of the other mourning figures, and she had been pleasantly conscious of a sort of pricking interest in some one in her very own family who, by all accounts, would go straight to Hell when she died. ”

“ Then Irma quite ostentatiously told the children to say good night, though Ferry was already leaning affectionately, after his way, against his aunt and saying that he would help make up the divan, but Irma who suffered terribly from jealousy and could ill endure these signs of love, told him it was late and that she would help Tante Ilde. The three then kissed her resoundingly, but sleepily. When she felt the nearness of those young bodies, their adolescent strength held in leash by that sapping undernourishment, she realized all the more that she was useless, her sands run. ”

“ There was not one single thing about Anna Birbach to cause anyone to suspect that she belonged to a smiling, art-loving, easy-going, fatalistic race, with something of the West and much of the East in its make-up. Indeed the broad highway that leads east from the city is the straight road to the Orient, is already the Orient. Something only vaguely diagnosable, but highly-colored, slips in through that Eastern Gate to tint more deeply the Viennese population, a happy enough mixture when only a tenth of them, not nine-tenths, are starving. ”

“ Tante Ilde was saying slowly after another long pause, and she was gladder than ever that she had added the knife-rests and napkin rings to the spoons when Liesel was married. Then as a sudden thought came to her, she quite brightened up, "I can do the dishes," she cried, "Liesel always used to hate to do anything that would spoil her hands."
"Well, she doesn't seem to mind spoiling her hands for Otto," answered Corinne rather drily.
"They're in love," returned Tante Ilde gently, glimmeringly. ”

“ Humming a new waltz, remodelling a pair of sleeves, getting hold of a bit of fat or sugar for the women; for the men sitting in a warm café drinking beer or black coffee, turning over the Lustige Blätter, smoking a Trabuco or a Virginia,—joy was still as easy as that when momentarily far enough from the abyss not to be dizzy and sick with the fear of falling in. Corinne had had in common with Fanny a North German grandmother and though that explained, in a way, a lot of things, still there remained something about her that the family hadn't been able to label satisfactorily. ”