IV
MORE EPISODES OF YOUTH
The War of 1859 · A prank · Elvira’s marriage
So the year 1859 saw us in Wiesbaden again, and there we experienced the episode, so mortifying after our sacrifices made and accepted and after all my puff romances of the past year, of the incomparable Friedrich von Hadeln not wasting on us a word, not a look, beyond the most ceremonial politeness. So far as I now remember, we did not greatly take this mortification to heart: Elvira was perhaps glad that she did not have to witness a rival’s triumph, and I was perhaps relieved at not inflicting such deep suffering on my luckless friend and at the same time making such a bad match into the bargain. Nor did the real Hadeln continue to inspire in me those sensations which his image in memory had inspired. In short, we spent a very enjoyable summer in Wiesbaden.
And yet it was the summer of 1859, i.e. the battles of Magenta and Solferino were being fought. Austria, our country, was suffering defeats. Great bloody fights were heard of. But I know perfectly that at that time the event was as indifferent to me, as little existent, as it would to-day be indifferent to me to learn that a volcano had broken out in a West Indian island whose name I had never heard. An elemental event at a great distance, that is what the war in Italy was to me. I did not read the newspapers much either; to be sure we often went into the reading-room where the papers lay open, but there it was not the political but the literary papers that attracted us; all the more as Elvira had written some novelettes which were accepted by family magazines, and I had in mind the idea of also writing one.—For in the preceding summer, in the white heat of emotion, I had put into rhyme three stanzas to the object of my affections. But in my case the next to the last line did not rhyme with Hadeln (one really must not be so utter an ape), but with Friedrich.
In the illustrated papers pictures of “the theater of the war” did strike my eye from time to time, but I did not pause over them: soldiers and horses lying about, broken cannon, or confused scrimmages, such as I have seen a great many of in history textbooks, do not make pretty pictures. I turned over the leaf quickly.
We did not have in the war anybody nearly connected with us, for whom we might have trembled. My brother, who in the year 1854 had been commissioned as lieutenant, had left the service a year before the war, because he had spit blood and because the service in general was in the highest degree repugnant to him. He was living with us. Mother was jubilant over her only son’s not being still in the army when the war broke out.
So I did not concern myself in the least about events in Italy. There did not arise in me any feeling of horror at the atrocities and misery that were connected with them (why should one be horrified at inevitable deaths that do not concern one?), and of all things there did not arise any feeling of revolt at the waging of war—I was too thoroughly penetrated with the respect and admiration which are generally accorded to this form of historical eventuation. I was not disturbed by any inkling of the shadow of a possibility that one could think of war’s not being in the world at all. As well might one think of leaves not being on the trees, or waves on the sea. Why, war is the form in which human history accomplishes itself: the founding of empires, the settlement of controversies, are seen to by war. Perhaps I did not even reflect on the matter so much as that; I only accepted it as something existent and irreversible, as one accepts the existence of the sun. Many may share this standpoint even to-day; at that time almost all did still share it. Not even Dunant had yet written his little book “Solferino” and thereby given the impulse for the founding of the Red Cross. No one was yet thinking of the possibility of internationalizing the care of the wounded in war; who (except a few men like the Abbé de St. Pierre and Immanuel Kant) would have dared think of endeavoring to obtain an international agreement not to make any such wounded at all?—In the year 1849, to be sure, a Peace Congress had already been held with Victor Hugo in the chair; but who, beside the participants, knew anything about it? Every time, like every man, has for its own a certain field of thought, beyond which nothing is perceived.
When we returned to Austria the war was over. Austria had lost Milan—and our two mothers also had losses to record. All systems, methods, gifts of presentiment and of conjecture, had shown themselves fallacious, and it was solemnly vowed that henceforth and forever the green table was done with. The fee for the lesson had had to be paid, but at least they were now free from the delusion, and at heart glad to be free from it; for gaming is not only reprehensible, it is really also disagreeable, repulsive. Now, thank God, there was no longer any need of tormenting one’s self with the trying duty of utilizing the gift of second sight; for it had been proved once more, and this time definitively, that the faculty of presentiment failed to work at green tables.
The fee for the lesson had not been small. Economy was the word now. My mother gave up her residence in Vienna and rented a little country place near the city, in Klosterneuburg. Here two years were to be spent in the utmost seclusion and frugality. After this period I should be eighteen years old, and a sufficient sum would have been laid by to replace that “fee” and to come back to the world, into which I was then to be introduced. Meanwhile this lonely life in Klosterneuburg was not at all without charms. Aunt Lotti and Elvira were with us, and we two girls again diligently took up our studies and other occupations. Elvira wrote new dramas, corresponded, and industriously wrote letters to all kinds of famous people.[14] I did a good deal of piano-playing and studied languages. For our recreation there was more puff-playing too: Friedrich von Hadeln had nothing more to adeln now; once more the most varied figures were introduced as the heroes of our romances, from American cowboys to European attachés of legation and on again to Indian Maharajahs. Once every week came my dear guardian Fritzerl driving out from Vienna, played his game of tarteln with mother, and told all the happenings at court and in society. There was also an elderly clergyman from the Klosterneuburg convent who was often at our house—a bel esprit, philosopher, and jovial associate. We took long walks in the Danube meadows in Aunt Lotti’s company; my mother was not a good pedestrian and contented herself with taking the air in our little garden. It was quite a wild garden, with a brook running through it. I still remember happy hours spent in dreaming on the banks of that brook; the water dancing over pebbles, the growth of bushes all along the bank, among them a few willows with low-hanging branches, all afforded me a quite peculiar enjoyment that I have never found again in any landscape in the world.
The winter then, to be sure, was rather monotonous in our country nest. So once, for diversion’s sake, I played a prank in all quietness. Without telling anybody anything, I composed an advertisement and sent it to the Vienna Presse, where it appeared; it made a sensation in our circle.
“I’m going to write to those people!” cried Elvira.
The words of the advertisement were:
“From pure caprice on the one hand, and from the mind’s demand for an exchange of ideas on the other, a brother and sister of gentle birth, living in a lonely castle, desire to enter into correspondence with persons who feel warmly and think deeply. The correspondence will be supervised by a stern papa who means to show the young enthusiasts how unpractical they are with their idea of an exchange of souls. Address Cela n’engage à rien, office of this paper.”
“Yes, I’ll write to those people,” repeated Elvira.
“I forbid it,” said Aunt Lotti; “who would answer an advertisement?”
“Oh, let her, aunt,” I pleaded.
My mother fired up: “Perhaps you mean to write too? You’ll do no such thing!”
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t at all care to,—the stuff is too crazy.”
There was a good deal more of talk back and forth about the unconventional advertisement, but I did not betray by the change of a feature that I was the criminal.
In sending in the advertisement I had at the same time written to the editor of the Presse to collect the answers that came in, and, after the lapse of some days, to dispatch them to Klosterneuburg, poste restante, under a certain cipher.
Five days later we were going by the post office on our usual walk.
“Please, aunt,” said I, “let us go in; I want to buy stamps.”
We went in. But at the window, instead of asking for stamps, I inquired, “Is there anything for A—R 25?”
The clerk looked, and handed me a bulky package. My heart leaped into my throat with joy.
“What does that mean?” cried the others.
“You’ll find out at home.”
When we reached home I tore open the envelope and let about sixty or seventy letters fall on the table, all bearing the address Cela n’engage à rien.
“Look, these are the answers to my advertisement—I’m the brother and sister!”
“And there’s my letter too,” cried Elvira, pulling out a missive on which she recognized her own writing, “that’s mean!” and she tore it into little bits.
“So you did answer in spite of my prohibition!” said Aunt Lotti in indignant tones.
“And you send advertisements to the paper behind the backs of us all?” added my mother, not less indignant. “You are a nice pair of children!”
“Well, to pay for it we now have the entertainment of reading all this,” I said soothingly.
And the reading did in fact prove very amusing. Some of the answers were imbecile, but others were witty; and among the witty ones were some so interesting that we decided to reply to them, anonymously of course, and this time with our mothers’ permission.
A letter from a lady, signed “Doris in See,” had especially captivated Elvira. She assumed the rôle of the “brother” in the advertisement, and entered into a correspondence with Doris in See which soon became very lively. I too selected some correspondents, but the letters soon petered out. My cousin, however, wrote Miss Doris longer and longer letters and poems, fuller and fuller of devotion, and whole treatises too on the most various topics; and Doris wrote as assiduously to Mr. “Kurt im Walde”—that was the name that Elvira signed.
A whole year long the manuscripts—they could no longer be called letters—flew back and forth; the two souls had actually gone out to each other in full exchange.
Then conscience awoke in Elvira.
“Doris thinks I am a young man; she will be falling in love with me yet; I must confess to her that her comrade Kurt is a girl.”
And she did. Back came a voice of jubilation:
“Glorious! my best friend, my poet and thinker Kurt, is a young woman, and Doris—I must tell it now—is an officer in his Royal and Imperial Majesty’s navy.”
The end of the story was that soon afterward Elvira married Doris, alias Joseph Tiefenbacher, ensign on a ship of the line in the Austrian navy, and was perfectly happy in her short married life.