by James Hilton
… Perhaps not, but I still think those beers had something to do with his sending me such a letter. He never wrote like that again, and incidentally, it was the only time he ever mentioned Framm.
* * * * *
Later that year, 1937, our correspondence seemed to peter out, probably my fault as much as his. I didn’t try for my examination a second time, because I hankered more and more after a journalist’s life; what I really wanted was to travel and write about what I saw, especially the political and economic side of things; but here again I was up against the curious obstacle of my name. As this is not my family’s story, or even primarily my own, I can pass over the matter briefly. My father has acquired that basic unpopularity in public life which comes of personifying the wrong kind of myth for his age. A century ago he might have been held as a model for American boyhood; a century hence historians may give him his due, which won’t be overwhelming, but may well be adjusted to the realization that he was no worse than others whose reputations now stand higher. I think he knows all this, and it makes him grateful for chance encounters on trains and park benches where people listen to what he says because they don’t know who he is. He once called himself the Forgotten Man whom everybody remembers, and another time he said he hadn’t only backed the wrong horse, he was the wrong horse. Anyhow, it’s ironical that I got my first job from people who were anxious to please him, and was fired because the stuff I wrote didn’t show any similar anxiety on my own part. Then I tried the people who weren’t anxious to please him, but mostly they weren’t anxious to please me either, because I was his daughter. However, I had money, so I traveled on my own, writing what I liked, sometimes getting it into print, mostly not. I suppose I was too young even to expect to free-lance successfully, but I didn’t feel I was; one never does, at the time, though since then I have thought there was a certain impertinence in a girl barely twenty bombarding editors with articles about the state of the world. I did, however, discover by experience that my reporting was preferred to my opinions, so I wisely concentrated on the former, and tried to be where reportable events were happening. This was the main reason I arrived in Vienna in the early part of 1938. The political kettle there was coming to the boil, and all the signs were that Hitler would make Anschluss with Austria the first big test of his rising power.
I wrote to Brad ahead of my arrival, announcing it and giving details. Because the weather was unsuitable for flying I traveled from Paris by train through the Arlberg. I thought it just barely possible he might be on the platform at the West Station to meet me, and when I couldn’t see him I had a cup of coffee at the station restaurant in case he came late and would look for me. While I was there, with my small suitcase and a portable typewriter on the floor near by, I noticed that a young woman was eying them, as I thought, suspiciously. Then she came over and asked me, in quite good English, if I were Miss Waring.
That name has so often heralded me badly into fresh company and new places, I’ve almost developed a suppression complex about it.
I answered rather rudely: “What do you want to know for?”
She said: “I’m Mrs. Bradley. He sent me here to meet you.”
I pulled the luggage aside and made her sit down and ordered more coffee, all to gain time while I came to terms with any emotion in me that would follow the shock. It didn’t prove to be too much, or at any rate whatever it was surrendered to discipline. But the shock lingered; I kept looking at her, trying to make my glance less scrutinizing; in the end I decided to be frank. I said: “You must excuse me for staring—I’ve known Brad off and on for several years—I always hoped he’d marry someone nice, and already I’m thinking he has.”
She smiled a quiet, composed smile, as if she liked the compliment, but was not going to be overwhelmed by it. No doubt she was just as curious about me, as any wife is about her husband’s pre-marital girl-friends, but I was slightly piqued that she was able to conceal it so well; I envied her the achievement, knowing how incapable I was of matching it. She was attractive, and the more so after you decided she was; you could then evaluate her good features, dark timid-looking eyes, clear complexion, and exceptionally small and beautiful hands.
I reached for one of them and pressed it. She kept on smiling. Then, because I felt my emotion again needed disciplining, I flagged the waiter. “Let’s go … and while we’re in the cab, tell me about him. How is he? I suppose he was too busy to come himself, so he sent you…. I’m glad—it was a lovely surprise…. I’m so happy about it … but tell me about him….”
“He’s ill,” she said, as we left the table. “That’s why he sent me.”
“Ill?”
“Oh, nothing serious—just a high temperature. I thought he ought not to go out.”
“Of course. Quite right. And you mustn’t let me bother him, if you think I oughtn’t…. Perhaps it would be better if I saw him in the morning?”
“No. He sent me. He expects you.”
There was something both dutiful and inexorable in that.
During the taxi journey we discussed Vienna and general affairs, and probably I began talking as freely as I might have done in London or New York, for she interrupted: “It is best not to talk politics outside.”
“Outside?” There was no one who could have heard except possibly the taxi driver.
“It is better to be careful,” she answered. “Especially when you mention names.”
We drove along the boulevards and even though I had seen so little of the city on my first visit I had an impression of deterioration. People looked tired, peevish, strained; there were many signs of poverty and unemployment. Soon I became aware that the taxi driver was listening, so I talked trivialities for the rest of the journey. When he pulled up at the address he carried my luggage across the pavement with almost excessive cordiality and gave a sketchy version of the Nazi salute.
“Evidently he didn’t understand English,” I said when he had driven off.
She answered judicially: “One cannot be sure. He may have.”
“Then why would he be so polite after what I said about Hitler?”
“He would know you are foreign and that might make him wish to be polite so that you could go back to your country and say the Nazis are all right in Austria because the taximen are so polite. Like the trains in Italy that run on time. So many foreigners are impressed by things like that. But of course I know you are too sensible. You will soon get underneath the surface of things, and then you will realize how careful one has to be.”
I think I did realize that, fairly soon, but it led me into a misunderstanding about Pauli that wasn’t cleared up until she, being careful herself, trusted me sufficiently.
* * * * *
No doubt he was bound to look a little different. He was sitting in an armchair under a reading lamp, and that gave him a look of thinness and pallor that wasn’t real. He seemed quite genuinely pleased to see me—much more than when we had met a year earlier at that restaurant. But the brightness of his eyes was probably due to temperature, I told myself cautiously. I rallied him about being ill—I said I had always thought he enjoyed the sort of health that is called rude. He said yes, that was true in the main, and he had been perfectly well till a couple of days ago, when he had caught a chill. His temperature had been at one time as high as a hundred and three, but was now down to ninety-nine point five, which showed that he was almost better.
While we talked, just chatting about this and that, Pauli moved about the small apartment with the quiet efficiency I was beginning to expect in all that she did. Presently there was a meal on the table, nicely served and well cooked. Yet it didn’t give an impression of being specially achieved for my benefit. I noticed too that everything was neat and homelike and spotlessly clean, though there were no elegancies and nothing that showed any sign of money to spare. It was not a place one would have chosen to live in, however austerely, if one could have afforded something a bit better. Every city has its prevalent smell
, and this apartment had the Vienna smell at full strength— a mixture of coffee, bread baking, paprika, and drains. There was nothing anyone could do except to learn to tolerate it.
“Well?” Brad said, when Pauli was in the kitchen.
“She’s lovely,” I answered. “I think you’re very fortunate.”
“You bet I am…. She’s quite a scientist, too—used to work in the laboratory with me—that’s how we met. She also taught me German. I taught her English. We have a rule that we speak nothing but English and German every other day, but today we broke it—in your honor.”
“You shouldn’t have. I can speak German fairly well too.”
“How fortunate,” said Pauli, coming into the room with a plate of pastries. “It will enable you to study the political situation, which is what I understand you have come here for.” (I suppose Brad had shown her my letter.)
Brad yawned. “That’s a signal for me to go to bed. Politics. Vienna’s leading industry nowadays. Where I come from they have a big dose every four years, but here it keeps on all the time…. Good night, Jane. You’ll get all the politics you want from Pauli.”
He called me Jane so easily now. And he had also said “where I come from” as if I weren’t American also.
Pauli said she thought it best for him to go to bed early, because of his temperature. I said I wouldn’t stay long myself, but she begged me not to leave immediately. “All right,” I agreed, “provided we skip politics. I’d much rather talk about you … and Brad.”
“So would I,” she answered, smiling that same composed smile. “So you call him Brad?… I call him Mark.”
“Sounds reasonable. His name is Mark.” And then, for no reason I could think of, I added: “It was my mother who started calling him Brad.”
“Oh yes? … He was once in love with her, wasn’t he?”
“Was he?”
“He told me so. I think it is lucky when the first woman a young man falls in love with is someone very charming and much older than himself whom he knows he cannot marry because she is already quite happily married.”
Well, I thought, if that’s what he told you, or how you look at it, fine.
She went on, still smiling: “So you see I am not a bit jealous. Mark and I are very happy.”
“I’m sure you are.”
It seemed to me she was laying a foundation on which we could be friendly, and that the only difference in our attitudes was that I was prepared to be friendly without any foundation at all.
I said: “Brad told me you worked with him in the laboratory.”
“Oh yes, but for him, not with him.” A sort of proud humility in that. “He is going to be a very great scientist, did you know?”
“Scientist or mathematician, which is it?”
“The one includes the other, in his case. Of course the work he does is far beyond me now, but it is still possible for me to save some of his time. I type out all his notes.”
“That must be a help. And incidentally, you speak excellent English, and you cook so beautifully….”
“I am glad you think so. You must come here as much as you can during your stay.”
“If Brad doesn’t mind. He might. I was just a friend, that’s all.”
“I know. He doesn’t have any close friends. But you were the nearest to it.”
Had I been? It would have been more thrilling to learn it less retrospectively.
She went on: “He used to take walks with you, he said. If you have time, when his chill is better, I wish you would do that with him here … some Sunday. That is one of the things I cannot do, owing to a lack of strength.” A slight accent and an occasional phrase like that were the only signs that her English was studied. Brad had done his job well.
I told her I’d be very glad to, if Brad asked me.
“I will suggest it,” she answered, with that same touch of inexorableness matching the humility. “He needs the recreation. He works too hard. Far too hard.”
“Professor Framm must be a bit of a slave driver,” I commented.
“I would not say he is to blame,” she replied, in a curiously guarded way. “It is Mark’s own desire to work that drives him.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “He always was like that.”
“But now he is more like that than ever. And if it goes on, I am afraid there will be a disaster.” She then told me that since he had come to Vienna two years before he had had no time off except Sundays, and often even then he worked at home. “It is true of course that we could not afford a holiday,” she added, as if anxious to be fair.
“Doesn’t Framm pay enough?”
But she wouldn’t admit that either. “In Austria, unfortunately, there is very little money.”
“Nor is there anywhere—for anything educational. Even in America, which is supposed to be rich, teachers are the worst paid of all the professions.”
“Ah, but in America….” I have so often heard those words spoken by Europeans, and nearly always with the sentence unfinished. It is as if the words stopped short at the beginning of the dream.
I left soon after that, telling her I’d use my influence, which wasn’t much, and my walking capacity, which was considerable, to make Brad give himself a day in the fresh air. She took me to a corner where I could find a cab. There was a parade passing the end of the street, with banners, uniforms, and scattered raucous shouting. “This is a district where there is sometimes trouble,” she said—not nervously, but with a certain watchfulness.
* * * * *
He said he was too busy to take a full day off, but I had him and Pauli to dinner at my hotel several times, and one Sunday, after I had called at his apartment after lunch, he and I took a tram to the center of the city and walked in the Burggarten. There seemed little reason why Pauli should not have come with us, but she said she had his notes to type and that was that. She was the sort of person who makes up her mind, and I wondered whether she had at some exact moment made up her mind to marry Brad. That she loved him and would devote herself to him was obvious, but whether in all things he liked to be managed quite so efficiently I also wondered.
There had been rioting in the streets that morning, with many casualties and arrests, yet the open-air orchestra in the Burggarten was playing the overture to Egmont according to advertised schedule, and a throng of all ages and classes listened intently. The music seemed to make a little island of truce in the ocean of political turbulence; one did not feel that listeners were indifferent to the political issue, but—much more wonderfully—that for an hour or so they were putting it aside. I was impressed by students who followed the score from large folios, and by the shocked glances turned on someone who struck a match. All this could not have happened in Hyde Park or in Central Park, I thought, but neither could the marchings and countermarchings in which many of these listeners would take part when the truce was over. There was something both frantic and pitiable about the whole Viennese situation, and as we moved away from the crowd when the overture ended I gave Brad a cue to talk about it.
But he had little to say. Politics was not in his line. He had a typical American phobia for foreign issues; his view of Europe as a group of squabbling states with no Washington (the city, not the man) had that large simplicity that was, at root, pure Dakota—a rationalization of the farmer’s exasperation with distant city-bred troubles. But in addition to that, he had taken refuge in the scientist’s ivory tower, much higher and less accessible than artists had ever had. He said he did not like the Nazis any more than I did, but he thought the basic idea of Anschluss was sound economically, except that it was far too fragmentary—there should really be an Anschluss of all western Europe, though not under German dictatorship. Such a large concept was doubtless impractical, but that, after all, was the fault of the politicians who made it so and of the peoples who elected the politicians. As far as Vienna was concerned, he hoped that the Nazis would not come into power, but if they did, he hoped they would stop the d
isorders in the city; that at least would confer a benefit. “Anyhow,” he ended, “I’m not a politician. I don’t pretend to know much about the various methods of hood- winking the electorate.”
“And to you it’s all nothing more than that?”
He smiled as if my seriousness required a concession. “Perhaps it’s a bit in my bones to feel that way. I had an uncle I was very fond of as a child because he was a bit of an amateur geologist and I used to think he knew everything. As I was at the age when I wanted to know everything too, I asked him once what had formed North Dakota—I meant geologically. He answered ‘The Republican Party, because they wanted two extra seats in the Senate.’ I puzzled a lot over that answer then, and politics still puzzles me. Whenever I hear a hot political argument I feel I’m eavesdropping in somebody else’s world.”