“Ach, Gott!” exclaimed the stranger. “Ein Meister der nicht genug gewurdigt ist!” It happened that Lanny reciprocated this sentiment, so while waiting for the next number they discussed the Abbe Franz Liszt, the sorrows which had dogged him and the dreams which had inspired him. Apparently it was a Liszt program, for the orchestra played a Liebestraum, which proved to be another provocation to tears. Lanny wondered if the gentleman manifested all his musical feelings in this embarrassing way. From his accent, and also from the fact that there was nothing Austrian about his costume, Lanny guessed that he was an Austrian. From the fact that his light summer suit was so clean, he guessed that he was a man of means.
After they had heard and discussed the rest of the program, they were friends according to festival custom, and Lanny invited him to some refreshment. They strolled to the nearest Restauration, and after they had exchanged names, Herr Gensmann broke down, wept into his stein of cold Munchener, and told Lanny that he had the most dreadful of sorrows that could overwhelm a man at a Musikfest—he had brought his wife for a delightful holiday, and she had moved herself into the quarters of an actor who was playing a minor role in Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann! Just leaving him a note, saying that she was no longer happy with him and hoping he would find his Gluck elsewhere.
“And what can I do?” lamented the suffering stranger. “We are no longer in the Middle Ages, and I cannot go and drag her back by the hair of her head—and anyhow, she is a large woman. Alas, she has money of her own, and unless this actor fellow should lose it all at the gaming-table I can have no hope that she will ever return to me. Oh, such a lovely woman, Herr Budd—a cascade of golden hair, limbs like alabaster, eyes as blue as sapphires”—Herr Gensmann was speaking as an expert, being in the jewelry business in Vienna. He went into details concerning the charms of his lost Schatz which left nothing to another married man’s imagination.
VIII
It might have been a relief to Lanny Budd to have said: “A strange coincidence, lieber Freund; auch ich hab’ meine Frau verloren!” But Anglo-Saxon reticence made it impossible—and besides, it would have set the gossips to work. Herr Gensmann might know any or all of those Viennese Hochgeborenen whose art treasures Lanny Budd had purchased. No; lock your own heart tight, and let the foreigner provide the flow of sentimentality! Lanny was graciously sympathetic, and the result was important to him, for his new friend asked where he was staying; learning that he had no room, but was intending to motor back and forth, the economical Austrian soul was shocked, and he said:
“My friend, let me offer you hospitality. My wife and I had each a room, and now—ach leider!—one is empty! Why should you not occupy it?”
“But,” objected Lanny, “suppose your wife should return?”
“I have no hope; she is a woman of dominating passions. But if she should come, you will be no worse off than at present. Let me explain that we are paying guests in the homer of a very fine Salzburg family, Herr Pergler, an official of the city administration. I have engaged room and board for two through the duration of the festival.”
“But would these people be willing to accept an entire stranger?”
“You perhaps do not understand the customs of this event, Herr Budd; everybody makes room for as many Pensionar as possible. You must know that since the dreadful war everybody in our mutilated country is poor, and in Salzburg many families live the other eleven months of the year out of what they receive for taking care of guests during the month of August. You will meet an interesting family, and unless you have been a paying guest in the past you may find it an amusing experience.”
“That is kind of you indeed, Herr Gensmann, and if you will permit me to pay my half of the expenses for the time I am with you, I shall be pleased to accept.”
IX
Certainly Lanny did find the Pergler family interesting. They lived in one of those large apartment buildings which are prominent in the city, having a chimney-pot for every other tier of windows; the streets are narrow, and at night the district buzzed like a beehive. Lanny assumed that the members of the family must be sleeping on the kitchen floor; for the jeweler had the living-room and Lanny the room just behind it, separated by a curtain which it was necessary to push aside on account of the heat. All shared the bathroom, and crowded about the small table in the dining-room. Lanny had never before lived in such close proximity to other human beings; but it was made easy by the charming good humor and naivete of this family.
They were all young, or acted that way. Mutter Pergler was sprightly and gay, with a mass of black hair, sparkling eyes, and well-rouged cheeks. Vater Pergler was small and lively, wearing pince-nez and a sharp little dark mustache. There were two daughters, Julie and Auguste, one sixteen and the other fourteen; they had been named for the months they were born in, but “Gusti” had come first. Also there was little Hansel, the kid brother, who like all such brothers would have told the family secrets, only this family left nothing to tell. They were tremendously thrilled to have an American movie star—for so Lanny seemed to them—walk into their house; they had all been to the movies and were fully informed about that miraculous land where poor workinggirls live in rooms the size of ballrooms and always have their hair perfectly waved. Lanny owned a car, which made him many times over a millionaire, and when he took the family for a ride he conferred delight beyond imagining.
Not only were they getting twenty-five Austrian schillings a day from him, but they were going to get English lessons as well. They made a family compact—nobody was allowed to speak a word of German, and it produced amazing phenomena, because they all wanted to talk, sometimes more than one at a time, and they pronounced English the way it looked to Germans and ordered the words as in German. They didn’t mind if Lanny laughed—the nicest thing about them was that they laughed at themselves as well as at each other and all the rest of the world. They were the oddest combination of sophistication and simplicity; they were certain that they were the world’s most artistic people, but also its most unfortunate. Pretenses were impossible; only art, beauty, and laughter were left to an Austrian.
The third supper that Lanny enjoyed in this home—plain country food, with delicacies embarrassingly served for the guests while all the others pretended they didn’t care for them—Lanny saw tears running down the cheeks of the slender pale lily named Gusti. He thought it was the Schlagobers he was putting on his fruit, and he offered her some, whereupon she burst into tears and fled from the room. “Na, na,” said Mutter Pergler, “don’t give her attentions, bitte, it is just that she has in love with you fallen.”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed the shocked Pensionar.
“Do not yourself trouble,” said the mother, comfortingly. “It is just the age that she comes to.”
“She believes that they are a prince,” added Julie, addressing Lanny in the plural as she would have done in German.
“She is getting a camera—what is it?” put in the kid brother. “To picture, to have for Andacht verrichten—”
“To say her prayers to,” explained the mother, forgetting that Lanny knew German better than he knew the Pergler English. “It will all be well when you are going, Herr Budd. She will love—memories cherish when there is music. Aber, bitte, do not allow that she shall run away with you.”
“Oh, surely not, Frau Pergler!”
“Of course, unless you please would like to marry her,” suggested Julie, politely.
“How could he marry her,” argued the Mutter, “when he already in America a wife has?”
Said the head of the family, who spoke fairly good English: “There is a place called Reno that they can go to.”
He pronounced it as if it were German: Rain-o. “Is it then so wet as we have it here?” inquired Julie, not making a pun, but seeking information.
X
With these family scenes as comedy interludes in the Shakespearean tradition Lanny went from one to another of the great events of the festival. He saw Faust as a Reinha
rdt spectacle, also the morality play called Everyman—giving special attention to that actor who had extended his hospitality to Herr Gensmann’s wife! He heard the Vienna Philharmonic perform Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, also Bruckner’s Fourth. He heard Don Giovanni conducted by Bruno Walter, and Fidelio conducted by Toscanini. In a chamber concert hall he listened to a very fine rendition of the Hammerklavier Sonata, and learned how he might have played the piano if he had ever really had to work. The great adagio movement began with Lanny’s grief because Irma had left him, and ended, as always with the major works of Beethoven, as a lament for all the sorrows which tyranny and greed had inflicted upon the human race.
Sometimes he took his newly made friends with him. They sat in the summer courtyard of the Residenz on a lovely warm evening and listened to a string orchestra playing Mozart’s Serenades. It was dark, except for dim lights at the desks of the musicians; the love-smitten Gusti sat as close to Lanny as it was possible to get and shivered with bliss. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, except to take it as her parents did, a biological phenomenon; girls were that way when they got that way, and all any Mutter or Vater could do was to urge her to eat her meals, so that she wouldn’t fade away entirely. Lanny escorted them all to a cafe and ordered her to eat one cheese and one salami sandwich, and she obeyed, gazing at him with adoring sheep’s eyes in the meantime.
The town was crawling with celebrities, and autograph hunters flitted here and there. The gossip-collectors cocked their ears; so many people were misbehaving in one way or another that it was really delightful. What chuckles when the tempestuous Toscanini was scheduled to open a concert with the overture to Rossini’s Ladder of Silk, but the score and parts had been lost; he had taken them home to mark certain nuances, and they had vanished. He played all the other numbers on the program while a frantic search was made—two separate trips to his villa, and finally the missing papers were found in the bottom of his laundry-basket; his chauffeur had carried them into the kitchen, and the maid had found what she thought was a safe resting-place.
Even upon the shrine of the Muses rude politics forced its way. Salzburg stood for the freedom of art, which meant that without intending it, indeed while terrified by it, the town had come in contact with the Nazi steam-roller. First of all, the Jewish question. This was the twelfth season in which Max Reinhardt had produced those spectacles which had won fame throughout the world and brought visitors by the thousands. One of the favorite conductors, Bruno Walter, was a Jew; also, Toscanini had refused to conduct at Bayreuth as a protest against Nazi interference in the affairs of art. Since the music of Mendelssohn was banned from Germany, the maestro revived a long-neglected symphony, the Reformation, and gave it here several times with eclat. As a result, Hitler had imposed a thousand-mark fee for visas, making it impossible for German artists and tourists to attend the festival. The rest of Europe had responded by making it impossible to find hotel accommodations in the town.
It was war, and the Salzburgers shivered with dread every time they thought about it. Up there in the mountains dwelt the ogre, glaring down upon them. Last summer he had murdered their Chancellor Dollfuss, and what would he do this summer? There had been serious talk of calling off the festival; but, In Gottes Namen, how would the Perglers and thousands of other families have had anything to eat during the winter? And without art, what would they have had to live for? Every time the thunder rumbled they shivered in their beds, wondering if the ogre had hauled guns up the new road he had built and was starting to pound their tiny historic city into rubble and ashes.
An hour’s drive to the north of here, in the valley of the River Inn, lay the town of Braunau, where this ogre had been born, or perhaps hatched; and Papa Pergler interpreted him according to geophysical principles. There were, he insisted, chemical substances in the heavy fogs which arose from the Innviertel which affected its residents with strange forms of madness. A gently rolling and beautiful country, all the more dangerous to its inhabitants and to the outside world because it lulled suspicions by its peaceful appearance. From it had come an immense German epic known as Meier Helmbrecht, which tells about a peasant boy who leaves the home of his fathers and acquires enormous wealth as a brigand knight; he comes back, riding a fine horse and followed by a train of lovely ladies, and astounds the people of his native valley by the splendor of his gifts. “Is that not a direct prophecy of Adi?” asked the Salzburg public servant.
And that was only one of many instances. In that same Innviertel had lived a man who called himself a doctor, and took his patients into a dark chamber, rubbed them with a little electrical stick, and cured them of their diseases. He had prospered so greatly that the government had preferred to collect taxes from him instead of putting him in jail. Also a man who had made gold out of salt water; he had succeeded in interesting the last Kaiser in the enterprise, and had become so rich that he bought the Braunau castle which contained the tomb of Attila. “Get yourself one idea, the crazier the better, and say it a million times,” said Herr Pergler, and added that the coat of arms of the Innviertel portrayed the so-called Stierwascher, the “Bullwashers.” At the fair held in the district a prize had been offered for the best white bull, and one group of growers had no white one, but had taken a fine black one and set out to make it white with soap and water. They had persisted to the very end and had entered the black bull as white. Said Lanny’s host: “You may be certain that at least one of those Stierwascher was named Schicklgruber.”
XI
Lanny had telegraphed his address to “Hansibess,” and in due course received a wire telling him that they were leaving Moscow, and then another stating on what morning they would arrive. He was on hand to meet them, and drove them down into the lovely Salzkammergut, summer playground of Austria. They could talk freely in the car without fear of eavesdroppers; also while sitting on a mossy bed by the side of a tumbling mountain stream. Lanny had had a lunch put up, so they had the whole day undisturbed. They had not met for more than two years, and had no end of things to talk about. To Lanny their arrival was a blessing; they helped to heal the wounds of his spirit, and gave him courage to maintain his own integrity of mind and purpose.
Lanny and Irma had made an agreement that neither would mention Trudi Schultz in connection with their separation. It would inevitably mean a sex-story, for who would believe denials by either of them? They were going to say that they were parting because of “incompatibility”; seven syllables from the Latin which can be made to cover a multitude of sins! Now Lanny thought it enough to say that he had wanted to help the underground movement against Hitler, and Irma had become angry and had decided to go home. Everything her husband believed annoyed her, and it had got so they could no longer talk about the events of the world or tolerate each other’s friends.
Said Bess: “You can’t imagine what a relief that telegram was, Lanny. It had seemed to us that you were disintegrating; submitting yourself to that woman and being dragged around at her apron-strings. An utterly impossible situation, and we both hope it is over for good.”
The granddaughter of the Puritans had matured into a clear-sighted and determined woman. She was twenty-seven, and a decade of continual piano practice had developed a sturdy physique. Her features were regular, though the nose was a trifle long and thin; she greatly resembled her mother, who was shocked by her ideas and the company she kept, but was able to recognize the functioning of the New England conscience. Bess wore her straight brown hair in a bob, and had devised for herself a simple dress for all purposes. It was in one piece, opening at the shoulder and slipping over the head. She had it made of different materials, but always dark brown, with a little gold braid at the shoulders and a belt of the same; no other ornaments. When she came onto the platform, following her husband, she went straight to the piano and seated herself, and her aspect and manner said: “Do not look at me, but listen to the music of great men.” When she finished an accompaniment, she sat still, unless Hans
i came and brought her forward to make a bow.
All her life was lived on the same plane; she labored to perfect her art, and likewise her mind and character. She would tolerate no frivolity or cynicism, and when she heard such sentiments expressed she would rebuke them by silence. She had just been having a great experience and was flushed with enthusiasm concerning it. She had found the Russians to be kindred spirits; seriosniye ludi, that is to say, “serious people,” interested in remaking their world in accordance with rational principles. Corrupt and self-indulgent individuals there were, of course, and self-seeking politicians; but the mass of the young people had grown up with the idea of making a free workers’ commonwealth. All of them were laboring diligently, studying and thinking. They were pioneers, not so different from those forefathers of Bess who had landed on a stern and rockbound coast and had toiled and suffered for the right to follow their own consciences.
The youth whom Lanny had once called the shepherd boy out of ancient Judea was now a man of thirty; tall and slender, with large dark eyes, wavy black hair, and an expression of great sweetness. But not without sternness, for he was a child of the Prophets, and his forefathers had taught those of Bess. It had been with the old Hebrew Testament in their hands that the Puritans had found courage to brave the Stormy ocean and risk starvation and massacre by savages. So these two were one in their faith as in their art, and they had found confirmation of all they believed in that Comintern assembly of four hundred men and women from fifty nations of the earth. What speeches, what parades and celebrations—and, above all, what music! To the Jewish violinist and the American accompanist it had been worth many years of hard work to come out upon a platform and play the Tchaikovsky concerto for audiences so eager and appreciative.
Wide Is the Gate Page 31
