XXXII
HOME AND FRIENDS
We two · Business troubles · Deaths · Family life at Castle Stockern · Home theater · The twelfth of June · Visit of Prince André Dadiani
These pages have of late been very full of Union reports and “movement” news, and it looks as if we both had been immersed in political life and sadly taken up with league-breeding. But when I look back to those days, there rise in my memory a multitude of other recollections connected with our private life, with the family and social life that we led, and especially with our cloudlessly happy married union. The outside world with its mediæval darkness and its pitiable conditions caused us much annoyance, and we took the field against these as well as we could; we found much satisfaction, too, in the battle itself; but our chief joy, our wealth, our fullest gratification, was each other. We had lost nothing of our gayety, of our frivolous childishness, nothing of our deep, fully confiding love. We swam in it as fishes in the sea; and, whatever made us gasp and suffocate when we ventured out on the beach sands, we could always dive back again into the vivifying currents of our happiness.
A filigrain happiness, a miniature happiness. It did not consist of soaring emotions and boisterous enjoyments. The everyday was its territory; the everyday with the petty sweetnesses of comfort and humor. We were not lost in astonishment, in admiration, in worship of each other; better than anything of that kind, we loved each other,—loved with all our weaknesses and faults. To lay one’s self out to be of assistance, to procure a better existence for our fellow-men now and in the future, is all very fine. Yet the best and first of duties is to give as much joy as possible to one’s partner in life, and at the same time to be joyful one’s self. To what end do we want to free mankind from persecution, from disease, from oppression, from violent killing, if not to provide mankind with the possibility of enjoying life? So that is the chief end. But we ourselves, and those who stand nearest to us, have the same claim; why should this claim be left unrecognized, when it is the easiest of all to satisfy? If in a circle of ten each sacrifices himself for the welfare of the other nine, who of the circle gets the intended welfare? Well, we two did fare “cannibalistically well,” if not wie fünfmalhunderttausend Säuen, “like half a million swine,” as the well-known student song has it, yet like two jolly little pigs.
And it was not all a bed of roses at Harmannsdorf either. The business of the estate would not go right, the quarry least of all. They changed superintendents, changed managers, negotiated with agents for contracts, but there was no improvement. On the contrary, the enterprises planned, ever arousing new hopes, led to risks, and when they ended in smoke we were a bit worse off than before, but ready to come up to the next hope all the more trustfully. And, since a modicum of volatility was characteristic of the whole house of Suttner, we shook off the worry and took from the day whatever of good the day brought.
All these long days had also brought something of sorrow. My Own’s oldest brother Karl was suddenly attacked by pneumonia, which carried him off in a week. My sister-in-law Lotti, the Countess Sizzo by marriage, lost her husband. The bereavement was not very severe. It had not been a wretched marriage, but not a happy one either; the two were incompatible and lived for the most part separated,—he in his home in Southern Tirol, she at Harmannsdorf. Karl’s daughter Mizzi, who was then sixteen, after his death came to live in her grandparents’ house and was always with us thenceforth. Her uncle Artur, whom she genuinely worshiped, had to take her father’s place.
The liveliest intercourse was kept up with the neighboring castle of Stockern. There lived (and still live) my husband’s older brother Richard, nicknamed Igel, “hedgehog”; his wife Pauline, called Das Weib, née Ponz von Engelshofen, châtelaine of Stockern and mother of five children,—one daughter and four sons, the eldest of the sons born in 1871, the youngest in 1886, so that there was much fresh, gay youth; and, in addition, governesses, tutors, aunts, cousins, and other guests. Lively times were always going on there. Very often the whole train would come to Harmannsdorf, especially on occasion of birthdays, patron saints’ days, hunts, vintages, and harvest-homes; still more frequently we drove over to Stockern, or both families would join in excursions to near-by Rosenburg or some other place of resort.
“Das Weib” was the last survivor of several brothers and sisters who in the war year of 1866 had fallen victims to the epidemic of cholera which had broken out in the country. The stories of that time when nine persons in the family and service of Stockern were carried off by the destroying angel in six days served as the basis for the episode “The Cholera Week” in my novel Die Waffen nieder.
Now grass had grown over all that tragedy. Man’s memory is so terribly short. Stockern was now full of happy people, and we two contributed our mite to the gayeties. Uncle Artur was his young nephews’ favorite comrade, and “Tante Boulotte” was no spoil-feast either.
I recall among other things a tragi-comedy entitled “Cleopatra,” which was performed on the domestic stage. My Own had written the text, in gory doggerel, and composed the music for it as well. The rôle of the Egyptian queen was intrusted to my hands. The eldest son of the house, at that time already a lieutenant of dragoons, appeared as a helmeted officer of the Roman Guards; a neighboring proprietor played Antony; the young girls of the family had to enact the part of slaves, and the author of the masterpiece mimicked an old wandering prophet who knew all things in advance, from the Queen’s death of snake-bite up to the latest events in the Vienna city council. The governess at Stockern, a wonderfully pretty young English lady, had to play the part of Cleopatra’s maid, whose most important function it was to groom her mistress’s pet snake. Miss Pratt’s English accent had a monstrously comical effect. As she knew no German, her part had been hammered into her only with the greatest difficulty. In a soliloquy she had to apostrophize the snake intrusted to her care with the words o du elendes Mistvieh—“O you wretched dung-brute” (from that specimen of the text may be got some idea of the loftiness of the poem), but she declaimed it o du ellen Mittwoch! From that day, when people at Stockern wanted to be rude they called each other Mittwoch, “Wednesday.”
To us two the greatest festival of the year was always the twelfth of June, the anniversary of our marriage. But we never cared to celebrate it with more company than ourselves, and so it came to pass that if we were at Harmannsdorf at that date we left for parts unknown early in the morning and were gone at least twenty-four hours. Having run away on our real wedding day, we did so on the anniversaries too. Of all things, no congratulations and toasts on that day; we wanted to be alone—in devotion. We would drive down to the railway, take tickets to any station; arriving there, we would hunt up the local hotel to order a dinner, and then go out into the fields and woods. June, you know, is the happy month when everything is in full bloom, when roses grow rank and the cuckoo calls, when all nature is a wedding celebration. We would wander about for a few hours and then come to our dinner with a glorious appetite; we would have it served under an arbor in the hotel garden. And then out to the woods again. There we would seek out a shady or perchance a sunny place—we were not afraid of the sun, but had a lizard-like predilection for its caressing glow—and there other hours of hallowed dialogue would pass: hours which were prolonged till the setting of the sun, till the rising of the moon, till the blowing of the evening breezes. Then back to the inn, where supper was awaiting us in a neat room. And our material for conversation was still not exhausted—from year to year it grew richer; for what we said to each other on those days was the manifold variation of the now cheerful, now melancholy, but always sweet, theme, “Do you remember?” All that we had experienced together, seen together, learned together, we passed in review, and when we took out and rearranged our memories and conceptions it was as if we were counting treasures,—the joy of wealth obsessed us. Rich we were in remarkable memories that were common to both, rich in accordant ideas, and superlatively rich in intertwining feelings of never-cooling affection, of never-failing confidence.
And on the next day we would go back among men again—as if nothing had happened.
We had kept up a correspondence with our friends in the Caucasus. The Murats were still in Zugdidi; Prince Niko was living for the most part in St. Petersburg. One day there came from Prince André Dadiani a letter postmarked at Vienna, to say that he was passing through the city and ask if he might call. We, too, had to be in Vienna—for a festival meeting of the Peace Union, at which, among other things, Peter Rosegger and the court actor Lewinsky made addresses. Accordingly I wrote the prince to come to the meeting, and he did so. After the addresses the company stayed to supper, and our Caucasian friend stayed with us. All this may possibly have been Greek to the Russian officer who had fought at Kars, but he expressed himself as quite in sympathy with my aims and endeavors; whether from politeness or conviction, I will not undertake to say. On the following day we took him with us to Harmannsdorf, where he remained for some time as our guest.