II
EARLY YOUTH
Elvira · Playing “puff” · My mother’s singing · Clairvoyant Aunt Lotti · Roulette and trente-et-quarante · Castles in the air · My first journey · Season in Wiesbaden · Return · Grillparzer and Ebner-Eschenbach at Elvira’s · Radetzky’s death · A schoolgirl romance
When I was nearly twelve years old I was for the first time vouchsafed the good fortune of getting a companion of almost my own age.
A sister of my mother, known to me as Aunt Lotti, came on a visit, accompanied by her only daughter, Elvira. We two girls were fired with friendship for each other. I say “fired,” for our mutual affection was an ardent one, and Elvira in particular showed a real adoration for me.
Aunt Lotti was the widow of a Saxon named Büschel, by occupation a gentleman of leisure and bookworm. Elvira had, so to speak, grown up in her father’s library. Büschel’s favorite department had been philosophy, and he conversed with his little one mainly about Hegel, Fichte, and Kant. For refreshment from such heavy diet he handed her Shakespeare. And for very special sugarplums, Uhland, Körner, Hölderlin. Of course the result of this education was a little bluestocking. Elvira had begun writing at the age of eight,—songs, ballads, and the like,—and when I made her acquaintance she had already composed several dramas in prose and a few tragedies in verse. That she was to become the greatest poetess of the century was a settled thing in her mind, in Aunt Lotti’s, and in mine. Perhaps she would have, if an early death had not snatched her away. She did win the recognition of great connoisseurs—I name only Grillparzer, who read her pieces with admiring amazement and prophesied a great future for her. In our family circle her genius was undisputed. And she had that quality which stands for half of genius, iron-faced industry. Every day she—the child—voluntarily spent three or four consecutive hours at the writing-desk and wrote, wrote, wrote. Often she had several pieces of work on the stocks,—a story, a drama, and various poems in between. I remember the titles of some of the large pieces: one was called “Karl the Sixth,” another “Delascar.” The name of this last hero (I think he was a Moor) particularly pleased me, and seemed to me to be of itself a guaranty of success. Whether these dramas were ever completed I do not remember. I know I made their acquaintance in the form of outlines—it was only individual scenes that were already finished, certain especially effective monologues. Elvira was an indefatigable user of the file. If on one day she had read to us a great speech of Delascar’s, she often let us hear on the next day an entirely new edition of the same speech.
To me her future renown was a tenet of faith. And she did not doubt the fairy-tale fortune that life must bring to me; for, though she conceded my intellectual inferiority (there was not a vestige of literary tendency in me, the lyre was no more my instrument than the French horn), she had unbounded admiration for my physical endowments and social talents—I must become a great lady and take all hearts by storm. As may be seen, we did not fail in mutual appreciation, and this was the soil in which our friendship flourished so luxuriantly.
Elvira did not hope any social successes for herself. She was conscious of her bashfulness and her lack of beauty. Small, with too large a head, a Schiller head, she was certainly not a pretty girl; besides, she was awkward in her movements, helpless in conversation,—no, as a woman she would assuredly never please, while she was convinced (a conviction which I shared) that I as such would achieve all sorts of triumphs. She contented herself with the part destined to her, to become the Sappho of the nineteenth century. A modest little pair of cousins, it must be confessed!
So we were friends and swore lifelong fidelity to each other; we were playmates too. But he who at this word imagines that we played together with dolls or hoops, as would have befitted our age, is mistaken. We played “puff.” That was a game invented by us, named so by ourselves, with which we used to amuse ourselves, for hours at a time.
It consisted in this: we acted a comedy. Elvira took the part of the hero, I of the heroine. The hero kept changing: now it was a French marquis, now a Spanish student, or a rich English lord, or a young navy officer, or a statesman who has come to rather mature years, often a king appearing incognito; but I always represented myself, the heroine was always Bertha Kinsky, mostly sixteen or seventeen years old, but in many combinations already getting elderly—say twenty-two or twenty-three. The comedy usually ended with a marriage; but there were occasions when the hero died—then, naturally, it was a tragedy.
Before the game began, the time and place of the action were specified, the hero’s name and description had to be settled, and a situation prescribed. For example: In the year 1860 Bertha would be staying at a castle near Moscow as the guest of the Russian ambassador’s wife. The lady’s brother, Prince Alexander Alexandrovitch Rassumof, a very gloomy and melancholy misanthrope, tall, elegant, dressed in black, with uncannily gleaming eyes, is among the inmates of the house, but rarely shows himself. He is understood to have been through a great misfortune (a dark story of a false woman, of an opponent shot in a duel—the particulars are not known) and to have withdrawn from the world. The scene represents the garden, on the bank of a pond where a few swans are gliding. I am sitting on a bench under a weeping willow with a book in my hand, and from a side alley comes, buried in deep thought,—Alexander Alexandrovitch. Now, after this was settled, the game could begin, and we said “Puff.” By this magic word we were transformed into the dramatis personæ—I into the seventeen-year-old Bertha, Elvira into the mysterious Russian. And the dialogue began. If we wanted to interrupt the game for a moment, we said “Puff,” and straightway we were again the two little cousins, telling each other something: a scenic remark, such as “This pencil means a pistol,” or perhaps something private that had no connection with the game. And only when “Puff” was pronounced again was the dialogue resumed. To indicate that the one or the other changed color we had special signs: a quick and slight inflation of the cheeks meant a faint blush; vigorous inflation, repeated a few times, meant “suffused with crimson”; a swift, lightning-like drawing down of the corners of the mouth was turning pale; a complete rolling over of the under lip was downright ghostly pallor. The course that the piece was to take was not sketched in advance, but was left to the spontaneous development of the conversations and feelings, for in it we really felt awaking interest in each other, budding affection, and usually, to end with, glowing love that led to union for life. Such a dialogized novel often lasted for days; for we could not go on playing without interruption, since we were called away by other occupations,—lessons, walks, meals, etc. The presence of our mothers did not always disturb us: we sat down in another corner of the room, out of hearing, said “Puff,” and the gloomy Alexander, or whatever was the name of the hero of the day, was there again. To be sure we liked the game better when we were alone, for then the dialogue could be accompanied with telling gestures, and emotion could be expressed by raising our voices. When such a comedy was played through, a new hero and a new situation must be devised. Not always did something suggest itself; if not, we sat or walked together in a state of sober paff, or chatted, till suddenly the one or the other cried Wasatem. (Abbreviation for Ich weiss ein Thema, “I know a topic.”) If the proposed topic seemed good and interesting, then the word was “Puff,” and the transformation was accomplished.
I remember that once, when we were playing in our corner of the room, Aunt Lotti, busy with embroidery at the other end, called out, “There, I don’t like your cough a bit, Elvira! So dry and so obstinate—we shall have to ask the doctor.” Now Elvira had at that time no cough whatever, but we had for several days been engaged in an extraordinarily touching game of puff, in which the lover was a consumptive doomed to death.
I have spoken of my mother’s beautiful singing. This singing played a great and influential part in my childhood and later life. My mother always regarded it as a tragical missing of her vocation that she had not become an opera singer. In her early youth a famous Italian maestro had tested her voice and given her the assurance that no such soprano had been heard since Grisi, Pasta, and Malibran, and to this was to be added her dazzling presence; in short, the loftiest triumphs, the richest harvests of gold, would have lain open to the beautiful girl if she had adopted the theatrical career. Such was the opinion of the maestro, who also undertook to give her singing lessons after the old Italian method, and had, among other things, brought it to pass that she gave Norma’s entrance recitative with full-toned and tragic power, again putting to shame all the Grisis, Pastas, and Malibrans. But neither my grandparents nor “Aunt Claudius,” who had taken charge of my mother and brought her up, would hear a word of the theater, which in those days was still regarded as a sink of iniquity; and mamma’s Norma recitative never rang out on the boards, but very often thereafter in my nursery (where our piano stood), and imprinted itself on my soul as the ne plus ultra of womanly heroism and of operatic art. Druid priestess and mistletoe bough, passion, sublimity,—thus stood in my imagination the gleaming picture of Norma, enveloped in sweetest magic of melody, in unearthly potency of voice.
To her old age my mother felt it as an affront, as a deprivation of all the treasures that nature by her wonderous gifts had destined for her, that she had not been allowed to take a course of training for the theater. Indeed, if I should prove to have inherited this voice, she might perhaps then be able to experience in her daughter the same triumphs that she had missed; but of course the theatrical career would be still more out of place for a Countess Kinsky than it would have been for Fräulein von Körner, and it would not have done even to tell of such an idea to Fritzerl. Nor did any wish for it awake in me myself. I saw my future plainly before me, it was marked out for me in our daily games of puff: to be grown up and introduced into the world, to have hearts and offers of marriage flying to me, to meet the one, the only one, to whom my heart too would fly, because he was the most aristocratic, the most beautiful, the wisest, richest, and noblest of all. What he would offer to me, and I richly pay back to him, would be perfect and lifelong happiness.
It was soon manifest, too, that I had not a phenomenal voice; and only in such a case could my mother have contemplated the project of an artistic career for me, so there was no more talk of that possibility.
Whether my mother really possessed such a splendid voice as that maestro had persuaded her, and talent with it, of course I could not judge, but I took it on trust as a part of my creed; her singing pleased me very much, but what does a child understand? When I now go back to that time in thought, doubts come up in my mind, for her repertory was very dilettantish. Besides that Norma recitative and the immediately following adagio, Casta diva, she sang only the very easiest songs, making such a selection as—in my present judgment—does not itself give reason for inferring an artistic taste. To be sure, at that time there were no songs by Wolff and Brahms, not to say Richard Strauss; but even in those days pieces like Du hast Diamanten und Perlen, “Spanish Serenade,” Blau Äugelein, Gute Nacht du mein herziges Kind, “Oh, tell me, will she come to pray upon my grave,” and the like, belonged in the category of street songs and sentimental trash. She was not a pianist, so she could not accompany herself. Three times a week she sang for an hour accompanied by my piano teacher. If he brought a new song she had him play the voice part with the accompaniment, and the learning was a prolonged and toilsome task for her. From all this I now conclude that she was by no means a musical genius; and it takes that, aside from the strength, volume, and tunefulness of the voice, to be a Pasta, Grisi, Malibran, or a Henriette Sontag. My mother told many stories of the fortunes and victories of these celebrated stars; then with the story there sounded the undertone that she had been deprived of enjoying the like successes, and the feeling fastened itself upon me that a great singer was a marvelous sort of being at whose feet all contemporaries knelt in adoration.
My dear mother’s was altogether a rather enthusiastic, high-keyed temperament. Often she gave expression to her feelings in poems; but she had no ambition or vanity connected with this branch of her talents. She did not think herself a gifted poet; but she never lost the conviction that she could have been in music a star of the first magnitude.
Soon we had still more leisure to carry on our games of puff, Elvira and I. Our two mothers took a trip to the baths in the summer of the year 1855, and we two stayed at home under the charge of a governess. Their destination was Wiesbaden. The two ladies liked it so well there that in the early summer of the next year they went there again, and this time,—oh indescribable ecstasy—they took us with them. The first considerable journey in my life! Up to that time I had only been taken a few times to Vienna for two or three days, and that had been to me each time a festal occasion; but now a real journey to foreign parts, a prospective stay of weeks or perhaps months in a famous resort—it was too heavenly!
Besides, utility was to be combined with pleasure there. For nothing less was intended than to carry off one or two millions from the gaming-table. Aunt Lotti regarded herself as a clairvoyant. She was always having to do with presentiments, dreams, magnetic sleep, and such things. During the epidemic of table-tipping she had also been an extraordinary medium. Under her fingers the tables danced and leaped, and then even cupboards that weighed hundreds of pounds, etc. I often saw it myself; and when I helped form the chain there was such a coruscating “fluid” coming into my finger-tips too, that everything that I touched—the tables, the piano teacher’s tall hat, and the piano itself—began to run around. I remember it clearly, and could therefore come out as a palmary witness for table-tipping if I were not distrustful of the testimony of a child’s perception. It may have been imagination. But Aunt Lotti would not let any doubts be raised as to the whole sphere of the occult in general. Nothing could offend her more than not to acknowledge her gift of second sight.
In other respects she was a very sensible woman, and, as the widow of a scholar who had made her a participant in his intellectual concerns, she was many-sided in her culture and free-thinking in her tendencies; so her vein of occultism could not be taken as childish superstition. There was something else too. She often suffered from convulsions, and readily fell into hypnotic sleep, which in those days was not yet called by that name but by that of magnetic sleep, and the visions of which were rated as clairvoyance. The result was that she regarded these phenomena, which lay beyond the range of her normal waking life, as an especially mysterious power of her own, a power of vision reaching into the future.
During her stay at Wiesbaden the preceding year she had learned that when she went into the roulette room a number came into her mind, and then this number won. She did not play, she only noticed this in silence. My mother preferred to look on at the playing in the trente-et-quarante room, and she thought she perceived in herself too the gift of foreseeing when black won. She too did not play; but when they were back from the journey neither of the two sisters could get rid of the idea that it would really be an easy thing for them to get a colossal fortune out of the German banks.
But such a thing was not to be lightly undertaken; it was essential to test the phenomenon. So Aunt Lotti got a little bag with thirty-six numbers and a zero, my mother six packs of cards, and now a systematic test was carried out. Aunt Lotti threw herself into a sort of trance by fixed staring and concentrated thinking, till a number flashed through her brain; then Elvira put her hand in the bag and drew out a number. To be sure, it was not invariably the foreseen one, but very often an adjoining or similar one. For instance, the seer’s number was 5 and the drawn one was 6 (adjoining) or 25 (similar); so the method was determined to be that the transversals of the number thought of should be bet on. Only those who know roulette will understand me; I consider it superfluous to make myself clearer to others, as I have not the least intention of starting a propaganda for Aunt Lotti’s system of play. Regular accounts were kept of the losses and winnings, and the result was uniformly a large amount of net winnings. Was there self-deception about it? I do not know; but the imaginary ledger always showed immense accumulations of profit. For the start was made with small stakes, and as the capital grew the stake was increased till it reached the maximum, and in this way there was no limit to the gains. Poor gambling-houses! Would we content ourselves with relieving them of one or two millions, or would we ruin them entirely? That was left for further consideration. The latter would certainly be a moral deed, for gaming is an evil passion by which so many are seduced and ruined or at least injured, for it is a vice which—Aunt Lotti despised gaming; it was hateful to her; but when one was furnished with such a miraculous gift would it not have been a downright sin not to lift the treasures to which one needed only to put out a hand?
Aunt Lotti took no stock in my mother’s similar plans, for she was no clairvoyant, no natural wonder, only a sort of imitator. It would soon be seen that nothing was to be realized. But my mother’s tests came out just as brilliantly. I myself dealt the cards and entered the winnings and losses in a little book. The winnings were always so much the greater that the first million was reached in a few weeks. “Chance,” opined Aunt Lotti. Self-deception? I now ask myself in this case also. The figures were there, and now plan-making and air-castle building broke out among us in great style. In the neighborhood of Brünn there is a Liechtenstein domain, Eisgrub, with a marvelous castle and park; we had seen it once when we were on a picnic. We would buy Eisgrub. Perhaps Prince Liechtenstein would not part with it—well, one can have anything if one only pays a price well above the market value. The castle was most beautifully furnished, but yet a good many things would have to be changed; for instance, I was to have a chamber with porcelain walls and porcelain furniture. This porcelain room afforded me such anticipatory joys of possession as few things ever did. The pink diamonds in my future jewel case were a delight to me too. All people have white diamonds—the pink stones would be something special. But our wishes did not turn merely toward ornament and show; we meant also to practice beneficence on a large scale, i. e. build asylums for the blind, hospitals, etc.; and surprise with adequate properties all our kinsfolk and acquaintances who were suffering from any sort of lack. This whole array of dreams of the future, which had consolidated into an assured expectation, represented “the important thing” to me at that time.
Elvira kept aloof from all this plan-making. She set no store by earthly possessions; the only harvest she wanted to reap was poetic fame; her fancy was too thoroughly busied with its own creations to occupy itself with idle air-castle-building into the bargain. Our games of puff had undergone some modifications now: at present the hero no longer needed to be furnished with wealth, but other combinations were devised. A poor but proud lieutenant rejecting the adored millionairess who absolutely throws herself at his head, but moved to relent by the sight of her despair threatening to pass into consumption.
Thus the summer of 1856 came on, and the journey to Wiesbaden was undertaken. Each of the million-huntresses carried in her cartridge box (i. e. portemonnaie) a capital of a few hundred florins set apart for this use; and the game bags too, i. e. two big portfolios with combination locks, were in readiness for the noble quarry.
My guardian Fürstenberg was not taken into confidence: he was the personification of propriety and sober sense; anything queer was hateful to him. He did not approve of the journey itself to begin with. If he had known what crazy ideas (for he would certainly have thought them crazy) were connected with it, he would perhaps have put in a veto. He did try to talk them out of the trip to the foreign watering-place; he was particularly not suited with the fact that I was to be taken along. I ought not to be interrupted in my studies; besides, it struck him that my education in the most important things was very backward. Thus, e. g., I was not at all skillful with the needle. To be sure I regaled him every Christmas, and on the day of his patron saint, with embroidered pillows and slippers that teemed with roses and lilies, if it was not cat-heads or lion-heads for variety; but I was not capable of knitting an honest stocking, he knew, and he disapproved. I did not seem to him pious enough either: I knew the catechism by heart, no doubt, and had taken my first communion, but yet it did not seem to him that I had the right zeal for the faith, took the right pleasure in going to church.
As a counterpart to my guardian, Landgrave Fürstenberg, my cousin had her godfather General Count Huyn. He too had been on terms of close friendship with her father, and continued always anxious about his godchild’s welfare. He was more than conventionally pious, he was exaggeratedly pious. He had carried on long discussions with Elvira’s father; the Protestant scholar’s philosophy accorded but ill with the Catholic aristocrat’s religiousness verging on bigotry, but this divergence had been no detriment to their friendship—it was in the sphere of the most profound speculation that they conducted their theologico-philosophical debates, for Count Huyn’s piety was not that of simplicity but of Scriptural learning, so both of them found intellectual stimulus in these disquisitions.
Elvira had to write to her godfather every week, and usually received answers—friendly admonitions, little sermons. He knew of her poetic activity, but did not approve of it. Literature seemed to him most unbecoming to women. Virtuous and pious, modest and gentle, industrious, submissive, unassuming,—these were to be the qualities that it was for his little goddaughter Karoline (he never called her Elvira) to acquire. My cousin respected her godfather highly, but did not lay his sermons to heart. She, who had already read—I will not say understood—Hegel and Fichte and Kant, was not to be reached by the precepts of the primer. As a philosopher’s daughter and pupil she had come to take a view of the world which went beyond the line of creeds and represented deism on a basis of natural science.
I too, despite my youth, had fed my mind on Kant and Descartes, had studied Plato’s Phaedo and Humboldt’s Kosmos, and along with these the history of the wars of the Inquisition and of religion; and to the question “What religion do you profess?” I should have replied with Schiller, at that time my favorite poet, “None—I am too religious to.”
The first long journey—that brings on an indescribably sweet fever. Traveling was not indeed so comfortable at that time as to-day (though the comfort of to-day does still leave a great deal to be desired); there were then neither dining-cars nor toilet-rooms nor sleeping-cars; there was much of martyrdom connected with the ride; yet this journey seemed to me the sum of all enjoyment—nay, more, of all happiness.
When we arrived, our mothers were totally used up; we two schoolgirls felt nothing but sheer bliss. First a day of rest in the hotel, then house-hunting; then moving to a villa on the street that runs along the Kurort to the Dietenmühle; from our balcony one could hear the tones of the music at the Kur. Visit to the Kursaal. Entrance by a vestibule; then through a great ballroom with marble pillars, then to the right into the suite of gaming-rooms. Children were not admitted there; but we two, Elvira with her fourteen years, I with my thirteen and tall of my age, were regarded as young girls, and the liveried porters made no objections. All four of us wandered through the two roulette parlors, the two trente-et-quarante parlors, and the adjoining reception-rooms. All this was not at that time so gorgeously furnished as are now the gaming-rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo, but was more like the interior of a castle. After we had seen the halls we went back through the ballroom and out on the other side of the building, to the terrace and the park. In the middle of the park lies a large pond, out of which rises a fountain, and on which dazzlingly white swans float. The music—an Austrian military band from Mainz—is playing on the terrace; and below the terrace stand chairs and tables, and there one sees a numerous and elegant assemblage sitting, standing, walking up and down. Many uniforms among them. The Prussian and Austrian garrisons from the fort, and also the Nassau army, are numerously represented there. Our mothers had a few last year’s acquaintances here; among others, a Nassau court dignitary with his wife; and by chance these were present on that first day, so social life was immediately started. That did not at all suit our mothers though: they had come for a far too serious piece of work to give themselves up to sociality. But in the forenoons they would be free, for the patrons of the place did not assemble till the time of the afternoon music; and perhaps it was even better to take the mind off now and then from the harassing exertion of the efforts to foresee.
A very tall youth in cadet uniform came up to our group. He was a nephew of the Court Marshal of Nassau, and begged to be introduced; Baron Friedrich von Hadeln. The young man saluted respectfully first the older ladies, then, with equal respect, us two. We thanked him graciously: we really were, then, already veritable young ladies.
Friedrich von Hadeln—he may have been eighteen years old—had strikingly noble features, a sort of Roman head. He talked very vivaciously, addressing especially us two. Elvira could not overcome her bashfulness, and remained reticent. I reaped the benefit of the conversational practice in our games of puff, and engaged in a lively dialogue.
The main action of the plot began at once on the next day. Aunt Lotti betook herself to the roulette table and won. While she was in the gaming-room we two girls stayed out on the terrace under my mother’s protection. And when my mother then went about her serious task—likewise winning on the first days—Aunt Lotti took up the business of watching over us. My youth fell in a time when a girl of good family must not stay a quarter of an hour unwatched. Ten steps across the street alone—that must not happen; by that one would have been, if not lost, yet irremediably compromised. The chaperon system, from which the young womanhood of to-day has made its escape by the bicycle, by the tennis-racket, and by the total change of standpoint in general, was then in its fullest vogue.
The thriving business of the millions (each had already doubled her working capital) was carried on only in the forenoon; the afternoon was filled out at the Kur music, or in walks to the Dietenmühle or the Greek chapel, and very frequently young Hadeln joined us. In the villa next door to us there lived an English family, Sir and Lady Tancred, with a seventeen-year-old daughter named Lucy. My cousin became violently infatuated with Lucy, but the little Englishwoman preferred me. I remember a call that the Tancred family made upon us, when the mother (who, be it said, was expecting very soon to be again a mother) sat down to the piano and sang an English ballad. The lady, who may have been thirty-four to thirty-five, seemed to us inordinately old, and the recollection of her performance remained in our memory for years as a fearfully comical episode. To be sure, she also sang without any voice, and with that English exaggeration of accented syllables which in itself is so unmusical. To choke down our laughter cost us an unspeakable effort at the time, and for years it continued to be a favorite comic performance in our circle when I sat down to the piano and sang as Lady Tancred “Oh—remembrance will come and remembrance will go—oh!”
Every Wednesday there was a ball in the great ballroom of the Kurhaus, but it was a very mixed company that attended. Every Saturday, on the other hand, there was held in the small halls a “réunion dansante” to which one had to procure cards of invitation, and in which there came together only the élite of the outsiders and the leaders of local society. Lady Tancred meant to take her daughter to one of these. Our mothers were urged to come too, and to bring us. “Ridiculous!” said they; “such children at a grown people’s ball! It’s out of the question.” But the Tancreds kept soliciting them, and we plied them with the most urgent entreaties, till the scruples gave way. Why, were we being treated as children here at all? Were we not taken to the Kursaal, to the music in the park? did not all the people, especially the young gentlemen, behave toward us as if we were grown up? Oh well, then, so be it; these little réunions are not formal balls anyhow, and if it gives the children such very great pleasure....
Meanwhile the great undertaking had fallen off somewhat. The winnings were gone again. Some blunder had been made, against which they would be on their guard in the future—you see it is different here from what it is at home—one gets carried away and plays without regard to the system; such a thing must not happen again. The thing to do now was, first rest a few days, and then begin at the beginning again and adhere strictly to the rules.
The preparations for the réunion were made. We were to wear misty white dresses, and for ornaments—the idea originated with us children—a wreath of cornflowers in our hair, a garland of cornflowers outlining the top of the corsage, and the overskirt caught up with little bunches of cornflowers. In the villa next door lived a florist; the order was given to him. I can still remember how I felt in the greenhouse where the florist took our order: how damp and warm it smelt there, how the red and white and yellow blossoms flamed