“I am not English.”
“I’m talking!” shouted Steingruber. “English, Amerikaner, s’ist mir ganz Wurst. Es fehlt euch allen etwas. Why do I speak German?” he screamed. “I know your stupid language.”
“I see.”
“Ja. You understand? Then why waste my time?”
“I didn’t know I was wasting it.” Randall’s face was ashy. He had been biting his lips and keeping his hands clenched under the keyboard. He had to force his voice to make a sound.
“Barmherziger Gott! You don’t feel? You don’t know?”
Randall raised his head and gazed straight at Steingruber. “You think me a fool,” he said, breathing loudly through his nose. “Will it be easier for you if I go on acting like one?”
“For me?” Steingruber shuffled down the room and leaned across the music rack to stare astonished into Randall’s hurt blue eyes. “Mein lieber Kerl, why think about me? This is your life, not mine.” His rough testiness was giving way to bewilderment. “Why care what’s easy for me?”
“Because if it hadn’t been hard you would probably have said this long ago—maybe right in the beginning.”
“But you are supposed to protest! ” said Steingruber, stupidly. “You are supposed to call me a brute or a fool who can’t understand you. Then you rush away to somebody else, to Leipzig or Warsaw—”
“I don’t think you’re a brute. I guess you may be right.” Randall had to make a stern effort to hold his voice from wavering. He sat exchanging with Steingruber the first truthful look that either had ever dared. The pinched bitter lines relaxed around Steingruber’s long nose, and standing there he looked almost kindly.
“Tell me,” he said. “This—is it what you really want?” He thumped the piano with his hand.
Randall did not answer at once. After a time he said, “In—in a way. It wasn’t my idea in the first place. I just never thought about not doing it.”
“Ach, so. Again the mama, ja, old Max Mundt wrote me. First I thought no, ausgeschlossen. We see this very often, you understand. Then he begs me at least to listen. Can I refuse? So I listen.” Steingruber scratched his head again. Dandruff floated down on the piano. “So like I said, talent it is there. You pass the examinations. Aber warum? Für welchen Zweck? I must ask myself, I am an honest man, I cannot help it, I am sorry.” He spread his hands with a flap. “Es tut mir furchtbar Leid.”
“That’s all right,” said Randall faintly. Steingruber leaned forward and peered at him.
“But how? What will you do? What becomes of you?”
“That’s what I was about to ask you.”
“Me?” The teacher’s thick forefinger jabbed his breast. “Um Gottes Willen, why me?”
“Who else?” The good innocent blue eyes looked into his. “I—” Randall swallowed and took a long breath and said with much effort, “I don’t want to go back to New York a total failure. Even if I didn’t mind not being a pianist, it’s the others, you see. They—they’re the ones who care.”
“The mother and—?”
“My brother.”
“He is good? You love him?”
“Oh yes! Very much.”
“He pays for this?”
“No, no. It’s not a question of money.”
Steingruber watched thoughtfully the faint color that mantled the boy’s face and faded again, leaving him paler than before. How could they ever have been such fools; he thought. Soft and timid and so easily hurt, not one gram of the brass necessary for the brutal contests of the concert world. Maybe the mother and the brother could not know any better, but Mundt? Steingruber shook his head.
“So,” he said slowly, “if you don’t make a concert artist, you would prefer trotzdem something by the piano?”
Randall nodded, unconscious that the slow sagging of his shoulders told too clearly his relief, his anxiety, and his burden of shaken pride. Steingruber spoke thoughtfully. “It is true you are a good musician. Clean. Sound. Sehr sympathisch. You read wonderful. You would be a good Begleiter,” he said. “Accompanist.” He watched the boy closely to see whether this would appear a humiliation, a relegation to a subservient, even menial role. Randall gave no sign. Steingruber said hastily, “Some artists are almost made by their accompanists. You know that? Some singers are cattle with a voice until their accompanist, their coach, shows them what to do.”
Randall did not say anything. Steingruber could not guess what he was thinking. Just as the teacher was casting about for some word, however empty, to mitigate the draught he had administered, Randall looked up and said quietly, “I should think there would be so many people like me in Vienna that there couldn’t possibly be room for one more.”
Steingruber nodded heavily. “A good Bursch, bist Du. Not a fool, not at all. You are right, what you said is true. But for those who stay in Wien! Mein Gott, even the good ones starve. You did not mean to stay in Wien, aber?”
“No, oh no. Just to study.”
“So. You work, you get experience, you get authority, by the Court Opera gives much prestige. Then you go to America, you get all the work you can do. Glaube mir, such a life is better than a bad virtuoso. Better than a teacher, too,” he said sourly.
“Oh.”
“Ja, ‘oh’! Look at me,” growled Steingruber, leaning sharply towards Randall and slapping himself on the chest. “You think I expected to be a Professor? You think anybody expects to? Ha! Each one is another Liszt, bigger than Liszt. Me. You. Everybody. Ten thousand Liszts! Wunderbar!”
Randall pushed back his piano stool and stood up slowly. He walked over to the green tile stove and leaned his shoulders against it, comforted by the mild warmth. Steingruber flung himself into an armchair near the piano and began to fill his long-stemmed pipe. Randall had never thought of him, much less seen him, as a natural person. He was known as a terror and students regarded their courses with him as their worst ordeal. Now it appeared one need deal with him on no terms but the simple truth. For the first time in a whole strange distorted year, Randall felt calm and almost happy.
“Herr Professor,” he said, “would you be willing to help me do what you suggest? Go to the right place to learn?”
“Natürlich. Such a way you listened to me, you don’t think I don’t help you? Of course I help you. I will talk to Kippler at the Hofoper, maybe he soon even gives you a little to do, who knows?”
“Who is Kippler?”
Steingruber raised his shoulders and sighed with impatience that anybody, even a green American student, should not know who the leading musical personalities were.
“Kippler is Kippler. Gott weiss, I think he is called maybe chief correpetiteur, or head rehearsal superintendent, more words I have not got. By Kippler they prepare the singers for the orchestra rehearsals. How many young pianists they use, you could imagine—” He flapped his hands again.
Randall stood with his lips pursed and his eyebrows peaked. This idea was a startling relief from the dim fear of a future in which he had never truly brought himself to believe. He did not yet know what to think of Steingruber’s proposal, but he was ready to learn what he could do about it. A few evenings in the top galleries of the Hofoper, dazzled more by the spectacle of royalty and beauty in the boxes than by the music from stage and pit, had not prepared him for the idea of working with singers. He said so.
“Doch,” shrugged Steingruber, “where does everybody else begin? With one thing that he can do. Then he finds where to do it. Also will you. Go now,” he said, looking at the cuckoo clock on the cluttered wall. “Go, the next poor devil is coming. Ach!”
Seymour did not read all of Randall’s letter to their mother, only as much of it as would leave her in her dream. Lily Holt had become a dim and dusty wraith, willingly cut off from every contact with reality except in her obsession about Randall. Seymour’s only insurance of peace or privacy for himself was to feed his mother continuous, judicious doses of enough good news of Randall to keep her content and busy in her imagin
ed world, where Randall was now an important musical figure. It was easy to edit Randall’s long letter in such a way that when Seymour read the blue-pencilled parts to Lily, Randall’s move to the Hofoper had become the Director’s search for a young pianist of genius, whom, for a reason conveniently left unstated, the Opera could no longer do without. Lily never even murmured a remark that Randall, without a day’s experience in the musical theatre, should leap to the grandest one in Europe straight from the Conservatorium.
“Suppose she ever found out?” said Seymour to old Professor Mundt whom he had gone to consult beforehand.
“She finds out vat? Always she iss less able to understand. By der time she finds out it can also every vord be true.”
This was unarguable. After reading the censored letter to his mother, Seymour put it carefully away and since he had no reason to reread the letter, he himself drifted into a half-belief that Randall at last was getting his feet firmly on the ground and might actually do as well as old Mundt speculated. A good many months went by while Seymour pursued a thoroughly pleasant life. He enjoyed his work immensely, he was gay, he could pick and choose among invitations, his evenings were allotted to a judicious mixture of masculine pleasures and feminine company. Best of all he liked the trial trips and shakedown cruises on new boats and yachts which the firm had built. He had found a steady, elderly Irishwoman to live with his mother on the third floor of the house, which Lily now never left; and for the rest Seymour was little at home. He usually looked in on his mother at the end of the day, just before he dressed to go out for the evening. Almost always he found her poring over the latest of Randall’s letters, smoothing and petting it with her vague, restless hands while she sat treasuring the leather box in which she kept them all. Randall had been well warned not to ruin the illusion which Seymour had thought best to spin for Lily, and after a few protests, had drifted into the easy way, not of lying as to what he was doing, but of exaggerating the significance of what he did. Seymour relaxed in the unrealistic prospect that the future would somehow take care of itself. It was a shock beyond belief when he received a cable from Randall, which he read with alarm and amazement: MUST LEAVE VIENNA ADDRESS POSTE RESTANTE DRESDEN REPLY MY LETTER PROMPTLY.
What could have happened? Seymour dismissed his first impulse to cable and inquire; Randall had obviously written already. Seymour’s imagination tormented him all through the two weeks until Randall’s letter arrived. When it came nothing had prepared Seymour for the absurd escapade which had engulfed his meek and innocent brother.
It began at Fasching, Carnival time, after Randall had spent the winter studying hard with Anton Pachl, one of the staff correpetiteurs at the Hofoper, and a favorite accompanist of the singers at their Liederabende. Pachl, like Randall’s previous teachers, could scarcely believe from his first impression how good a musician the youth really was, how much serious ability and proficiency lay behind the timid, too gentle personality. “You should get out more,” Pachl advised him in the German which Randall now spoke well. Pachl was young himself and his advice was not theoretical. “Be frivolous, be like everybody else. This is Wien, after all—why live in it as if it were a convent?”
Why, indeed? Randall was ashamed to confess that he had no idea how to change the drab existence he had pursued ever since coming here. He could not relate his own austere and frugal life, his hours of practice in his gloomy room in the Riemergasse, to the dazzling splendors that he saw on the short walk from his lodgings to the Hofoper. He had heard that there was no spectacle anywhere to compare to the Kärntnerstrasse, and he supposed this must be true. Where else could there be such glittering turnouts, such preening human peacocks in uniform, such beautiful women so richly dressed, the ladies in barouches and victorias on their way to the Ringstrasse, the demi-mondaines strolling on foot? The shop windows burgeoned with jewels and furs and fantasies. The air was rich and ripe with perfume and the fat aroma of chocolate and coffee; one could feel the texture of leisure and laxness and mischief. But what had all that to do with him, he thought; and still less could he attain a sense of any relationship to the lives of the people at the Hofoper. He could not spend an hour at work in the obscurest rehearsal-room under the eaves of the opera-house without overhearing breathless whispers, without sensing the currents of intrigue and scandal which linked the singers and ballerinas to the male ornaments of the Court who had their headquarters across the street at Sacher’s. Nor could he escape the gusty visceral humor and the affectionate teasing of the singers and other artists who had no reticence about anything.
He had barely become acquainted with some of them before their cheerful curiosity about his private life produced the astounding evidence that the lad was, apparently, quite chaste. Somebody joyfully dubbed him der Keuscher (the virgin); and this became inevitably Keuscherl or Keuschi, which caused him the agony of blushing scarlet whenever he was greeted. Pachl, however, said he should be delighted, nobody had such an original nickname and nothing remained now but to make fools of the people who took it literally. “So you will go to the Maskenball with me,” he said, “and we will see what we will see.”
“Oh—I couldn’t!” Randall was really frightened. “Why—I’ve never been to a ball. I don’t even dance.”
“Then you are in the right place to learn.”
“But not the ball,” Randall pleaded. “People like—ah—us—we—don’t go to balls.”
“To the Musikverein goes everybody on Fasching. Everybody! You didn’t hear once about Kaiserin Elisabeth?”
“No, why?”
“Ach, I forget, such a child, American too. Never mind, we go.”
“But I haven’t got—I couldn’t afford—a costume.”
“You think I do? We take something from the Garderobe here, like everybody else. Ai-Gott!” he exclaimed, pulling out his watch, “Lisl Dunkler is waiting for me.” He licked his lips and made a derisive gesture at the piano. “She enjoys her work.”
Randall sighed. He wondered how long he might stay in Vienna before he would cease to be shocked at the frank, genial promiscuity, the lively uproar in which people lived here. He tried to relate it to anything he had ever known of life and he could find no single point of contact except, to his surprise, the thought of Seymour. Seymour would know what to do here and would make the most of it; Randall would never feel like anything but a bewildered outsider.
Pachl dragged him to the Carnival Ball on Shrove Tuesday, after fitting them both to dominoes and masks in a wardrobe room at the opera house. The street as they stepped out on the Ring was a wonderland of lights, packed all its width with shouting, singing, dancing people, blowing horns and waving streamers as they pranced along. The Karlsplatz was beautifully decorated with banners and lanterns and the great doors of the Musikverein stood open in a blaze of light, welcoming all Vienna to the unique occasion of the year. Pachl hurried forward, dragging Randall by a firm grip on the elbow. Once inside, Randall saw the impossibility of escape. Never could there have been such a crowd, he thought, and surely never so good-natured a one. It was impossible to move as one chose, one felt oneself swept along in the main stream moving through the corridors to the great hall flanked by its accessory salons all brilliant with light. The crowd was so dense that it muffled the music. Randall was amazed when he could finally see the great augmented orchestra playing the irresistible Wiener Blut; only inside the ballroom could its full sonority be heard. He edged his way into a deep corner under the balcony, relieved at losing Pachl in the crowd, and fascinated by his first real view of waltzing Vienna, gayer than at any other time behind the secrets of its masks. He was lost in the spectacle when to his horror a woman’s hand slid up his forearm under the loose domino sleeve, and a masked face pressed so close to his that he drew back in terror.
“Nah!” she whispered, putting her lips against his ear. She spoke in broad dialect. “Let’s go and drink a little wine.”
“Th—thank you,” Randall gulped. “I’d rather—I’m
not—”
“Nonsense. This is Fasching, you can’t say no.”
Alone he could never have wormed his way through that vast crowd and out of the ballroom and off into a maze of halls and stairs and corridors which became less and less crowded as his companion, clinging to his arm, firmly made her way. She knew where she was going and Randall shook with suspense and the helpless knowledge that he was trapped. Once he paused at the entrance to a refreshment-hall and said, “Here, let us stop here, the wine—”
But she went on as if she had not heard him, softly chuckling to herself. They came to a dingy passage papered in dark green wallpaper and dimly lit by a gas-jet. Randall coughed and said, “I think we’ve—there’s a mistake, isn’t there?” But she only laughed and stopped walking and, her eyes glittering through the slits of her mask, slid her left hand along a moulding while her right hand stayed tucked in Randall’s arm. Behind her the wall opened. Randall stiffened and she snickered and said, “It’s nothing, just a back door.” And still teasing with her eyes she stepped backwards through the wall, drawing him with her. He found himself in a small room, quite commonplace, clearly the office or the studio of some functionary. There was a desk and a piano and a bookcase full of scores and a dado lined with plaster busts of the composers, and a narrow horsehair sofa.
“See?” she giggled, raising the black lace veil that hung from the upper half of her mask, and before Randall could stop her she had dropped onto the couch, clinging to him, and locked her mouth to his in a kiss of appalling authority. First he could not breathe and then he felt a tumult of other and more alarming sensations. He felt as if he were being wrenched apart, he loathed what was happening to him, he could have struck or roughhandled the woman to get free of her. But at the same time he liked it. In his mind he was ironbound, furious and fighting to get away. The rest of him at first did nothing, as if paralyzed, and then did what his companion intended, evidently to her pleasure for she was voluble about it. At last to his utter shame she sighed luxuriously, clinging to him, and whispered, “How should I believe it? It was true! Keuschi!” she cried, in unbridled delight, and sitting up with a jump, whipped off her mask.
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