I listened in surprise, particularly interested by the vehemence with which he went on. “Let’s not delude ourselves. If you were to try drumming up support in any country today for a war in a completely different part of the world, say Polynesia or some remote corner of Africa, thousands and tens of thousands would volunteer as recruits without really knowing why, perhaps just out of a desire to get away from themselves or their unsatisfactory lives. But I can’t put the chances of any real opposition to the idea of war higher than zero. It takes far more courage for a man to oppose an organisation than to go along with the crowd. Standing up to it calls for individualism, and individualists are a dying species in these times of progressive organisation and mechanisation. In the war the instances of courage that I met could be called courage en masse, courage within the ranks, and if you look closely at that phenomenon you’ll find some very strange elements in it—a good deal of vanity, thoughtlessness, even boredom, but mainly fear—fear of lagging behind, fear of mockery, fear of taking independent action, and most of all fear of opposing the united opinion of your companions. Most of those whom I knew on the field as the bravest of the brave seemed to me very dubious heroes when I returned to civil life. And please don’t misunderstand me,” he added, turning courteously to our host, who had a wry look on his face, “I make no exception at all for myself.”
I liked the way he spoke, and would have gone over for a word with him, but just then the lady of the house summoned us to supper, and as we were seated some way apart we had no chance to talk. Only when everyone was leaving did we meet in the cloakroom.
“I think,” he said to me, with a smile, “that we’ve already been introduced by our mutual friend.”
I smiled back. “And at such length, too.”
“I expect he laid it on thick, presenting me as an Achilles and carrying on about my order.”
“Something like that.”
“Yes, he’s very proud of my order—and of your books as well.”
“An oddity, isn’t he? Still, there are worse. Shall we walk a little way together?”
As we were leaving, he suddenly turned to me. “Believe me, I mean it when I tell you that over the years the Order of Maria Theresia has been nothing but a nuisance to me. Too showy by half for my liking. Although to be honest, when it was handed out to me on the battlefield of course I was delighted at first. After all, when you’ve been trained as a soldier and from your days at military academy on you’ve heard about the legendary order—it’s given to perhaps only a dozen men in any war—well, it’s like a star falling from heaven into your lap. A thing like that means a lot to a young man of twenty-eight. All of a sudden there you are in front of everyone, they’re all staring at something shining on your chest like a little sun, and the Emperor himself, His Unapproachable Majesty, is shaking your hand and congratulating you. But you see, it’s a distinction that meant nothing outside the world of the army, and after the war it struck me as ridiculous to be going around as a certified hero for the rest of my life, just because I’d shown real courage for twenty minutes—probably no more courage, in fact, than ten thousand others. All that distinguished me from them was that I had attracted attention and, perhaps even more surprising, I’d come back alive. After a year when everyone stared at that little bit of metal, with their eyes wandering over me in awe, I felt sick and tired of going around like a monument on the move, and I hated all the fuss. That’s one of the reasons why I switched to civilian life so soon after the end of the war.”
He began walking a little faster.
“One of the reasons, I said, but the main reason was private, and you may find it easier to understand. The main reason was that I had grave doubts of my right to be decorated at all, or at least of my heroism. I knew better than any of the gaping strangers that behind that order was a man who was far from being a hero, was even decidedly a non-hero—one of those who ran full tilt into the war to save themselves from a desperate situation. Deserters from their own responsibilities, not heroes doing their duty. I don’t know how it seems to you, but I for one see life lived in an aura of heroism as unnatural and unbearable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I could give up parading my heroic story on my uniform for all to see. It still irritates me to hear someone digging up the old days of my glory, and I might as well admit that yesterday I was on the point of going over to your table and telling our loquacious friend, in no uncertain terms, to boast of knowing someone else, not me. Your look of respect rankled, and I felt like showing how wrong our friend was by making you listen to the tale of the devious ways whereby I acquired my heroic reputation. It’s a very strange story, and it certainly shows that courage is often only another aspect of weakness. Incidentally, I would still have no reservations about telling you that tale. What happened to a man a quarter-of-a-century ago no longer concerns him personally—it happened to someone different. Do you have the time and inclination to hear it?”
Of course I had time, and we walked up and down the now deserted streets for some while longer. In the following days, we also spent a great deal of time together. I have changed very little in Captain Hofmiller’s account, at most making a regiment of hussars into a regiment of lancers, moving garrisons around the map a little to hide their identity, and carefully changing all the personal names. But I have not added anything of importance, and it is not I as the writer of this story but its real narrator who now begins to tell his tale.
THE WHOLE AFFA IR BEGAN with a piece of ineptitude, of entirely accidental foolishness, a faux pas, as the French would say. Next came my attempt to make up for my stupidity. But if you try to repair a little cogwheel in clockwork too quickly, you can easily ruin the whole mechanism. Even today, years later, I don’t know exactly where plain clumsiness ended and my own guilt began. Presumably I never shall.
I was twenty-five years old at the time, a lieutenant serving in a regiment of lancers. I can’t say that I ever felt any particular enthusiasm for the career of an army officer, or a special vocation for it. But when an old Austrian family with a tradition of service to the state has two girls and four boys, all with hearty appetites, sitting around a sparsely laid table, no one stops for long to consider the young people’s own inclinations. They are put through the mill of training for some profession early, to keep them from being a burden on the household. My brother Ulrich, who had ruined his eyesight with too much studying even at elementary school, was sent to a seminar for the priesthood, while I, being physically strong and sturdy, entered the military academy. From such chance beginnings the course of your life moves automatically on, and you don’t even have to oil the wheels. The state takes care of everything. Within a few years, working to a preordained pattern, it makes a pale adolescent boy into an ensign with a downy beard on his chin, and hands him over to the army ready for use. I passed out from the academy on the Emperor’s birthday, when I was not quite eighteen years old, and soon after that I had my first star on my collar. I had reached the first stage of a military career, and now the cycle of promotion could move automatically on at suitable intervals until I reached retirement age and had gout. I was to serve in the cavalry, unfortunately an expensive section of the army, not by any wish of my own but because of a whim on the part of my aunt Daisy, my father’s elder brother’s second wife. They had married when he moved from the Ministry of Finance to a more profitable post as managing director of a bank. Aunt Daisy, who was both rich and a snob, could not bear to think that anyone who happened to be called Hofmiller should bring the family name into disrepute by serving in the infantry, and as she could afford to indulge her whim by making me an allowance of a hundred crowns a month, I had to express my humble gratitude to her at every opportunity. No one, least of all I myself, had ever stopped to wonder whether I would enjoy life in a cavalry regiment, or indeed any kind of military service. But once in the saddle I felt at ease, and I didn’t think much further ahead than my horse’s neck.
In that November of 1913, some kin
d of decree must have passed from office to office, because all of a sudden my squadron had been transferred from Jaroslav to another small garrison on the Hungarian border. It makes no difference whether I give the little town its real name or not, for two uniform buttons on the same coat can’t be more like each other than one provincial Austrian garrison town is to another. You find the same ubiquitous features in both: a barracks, a riding school, a parade ground, an officers’ mess, and the town will have three hotels, two cafés, a cake shop, a bar, a run-down music hall with faded soubrettes whose professional sideline consists of dividing their affections between the regular officers and volunteers who have joined up for a year. Army service means the same sleepy, empty monotony everywhere, divided up hour by hour according to the old iron rules, and even an officer’s leisure time offers little more variety. You see the same faces and conduct the same conversations in the officers’ mess, you play the same card games and the same games of billiards in the café. Sometimes you are quite surprised that it has at least pleased the Almighty to set the six to eight hundred rooftops of these small towns under different skies and in different landscapes.
But my new garrison did have one advantage over my earlier posting in Galicia—a railway station where express trains stopped. Go one way and it was quite close to Vienna, go the other and it was not too far from Budapest. A man who had money—and everyone who served in the cavalry was rich, even and indeed not least the volunteers, some of them members of the great aristocracy, others manufacturers’ sons—a man who had money could, with careful planning, go to Vienna on the five o’clock train and return on the night train, getting in at two-thirty next morning. That gave him time for a visit to the theatre and a stroll around the Ringstrasse, courting the ladies and sometimes going in search of a little adventure. Some of the most envied officers even kept a permanent apartment for a mistress in Vienna, or a pied-à-terre. But such refreshing diversions were more than I could afford on my monthly allowance. My only entertainment was going to the café or the cake shop, and since cards were usually played for stakes too high for me, I resorted to those establishments to play billiards—or chess, which was even cheaper.
So one afternoon—it must have been in the middle of May 1914—I was sitting in the cake shop with one of my occasional partners, the pharmacist who kept his shop at the sign of the Golden Eagle, and who was also deputy mayor of our little garrison town. We had long ago finished playing our usual three games, and were just talking idly about this or that—what was there in this tedious place to make you want to get up in the morning?—but the conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down.
At this point the door suddenly opens, and a pretty girl in a full-skirted dress is swept in on a gust of fresh air, a girl with brown, almond-shaped eyes and a dark complexion. She is dressed with real elegance, not at all in the provincial style. Above all she is a new face in the monotony of this godforsaken town. Sad to say, the elegantly dressed young lady does not spare us a glance as we respectfully admire her, but walks briskly and vivaciously with a firm, athletic gait past the nine little marble tables in the cake shop and up to the sales counter, to order cakes, tarts and liqueurs by the dozen. I immediately notice how respectfully the master confectioner bows to her—I’ve never seen the back seam of his swallow-tailed coat stretched so taut. Even his wife, that opulent if heavily built provincial Venus, who in the usual way negligently allows the officers to court her (all manner of little things often go unpaid for until the end of the month), rises from her seat at the cash desk and almost dissolves in obsequious civilities. While the master confectioner notes down the order in the customers’ book, the pretty girl carelessly nibbles a couple of chocolates and makes a little conversation with Frau Grossmaier. However, she has no time to spare for us, and we may perhaps be craning our necks with unbecoming alacrity. Of course the young lady does not burden her own pretty hands with a single package; everything, as Frau Grossmaier assures her, will be delivered, she can rely on that. Nor does she think for a moment of paying cash at the till, as we mere mortals must. We all know at once that this is a very superior and distinguished customer.
Now, as she turns to go after leaving her order, Herr Grossmaier hastily leaps forward to open the door for her. My friend the pharmacist also rises from his chair to offer his respectful greetings as she floats past. She thanks him with gracious friendliness—heavens, what velvety brown eyes, the colour of a roe deer—and I can hardly wait until she has left the shop, amidst many fulsome compliments, to ask my chess partner with great interest about this girl, a pike in a pond full of fat carp.
“Oh, don’t you know her? Why, she is the niece of … ”—well, I will call him Herr von Kekesfalva, although that was not really the name—“she is the niece of Herr von Kekesfalva—surely you know the Kekesfalvas?”
Kekesfalva—he throws out the name as if it were a thousand-crown note, and looks at me as if expecting a respectful “Ah yes! Of course!” as the right and proper echo of his information. But I, a young lieutenant transferred to my new garrison only a few months ago, and unsuspecting as I am, know nothing about that mysterious luminary, and ask politely for further enlightenment, which the pharmacist gives with all the satisfaction of provincial pride, and it goes without saying does so at far greater length and with more loquacity than I do in recording his information here.
Kekesfalva, he explains to me, is the richest man in the whole district. Absolutely everything belongs to him, not just Kekesfalva Castle—“You must know the castle, it can be seen from the parade ground, it’s over to the left of the road, the yellow castle with the low tower and the large old park.” Kekesfalva also owns the big sugar factory on the road to R, the sawmill in Bruck and the stud farm in M. They are all his property, as well as six or seven apartment blocks in Vienna and Budapest. “You might not think that we had such wealthy folk here, but he lives the life of a real magnate. In winter, he goes to his little Viennese palace in Jacquingasse, in summer he visits spa resorts, he stays at home here only for a few months in spring, but heavens above, what a household he keeps! Visiting quartets from Vienna, champagne and French wines, the best of everything!” And if it would interest me, says the pharmacist, he will be happy to take me to the castle, for—here he makes a grand gesture of self-satisfaction—he is on friendly terms with Herr von Kekesfalva, has often done business with him in the past, and knows that he is always glad to welcome army officers to his house. My chess partner has only to say the word, and I’ll be invited.
Well, why not? Here I am, stifling in the dreary backwaters of a provincial garrison town. I already know every one of the women who go walking on the promenade in the evenings by sight, I know their summer hats and winter hats, their Sunday best and their everyday dresses, always the same. And from looking and then looking away again, I know these ladies’ dogs and their maidservants and their children. I know all the culinary skills of the stout Bohemian woman who is cook in the officers’ mess, and by now a glance at the menu in the restaurant, which like the meals in the mess is always the same, quite takes away my appetite. I know every name, every shop sign, every poster in every street by heart, I know which business has premises in which building, and which shop will have what on display in its window. I know almost as well as Eugen the head waiter the time at which the district judge will come into the café, I know he will sit down at the corner by the window on the left, to order a Viennese melange, while the local notary will arrive exactly ten minutes later, at four-forty, and will drink lemon tea for the sake of his weak stomach—what a daring change from coffee!—while telling the same jokes as he smokes the same Virginia cigarette. Yes, I know all the faces, all the uniforms, all the horses and all the drivers, all the beggars in the entire neighbourhood, and I know myself better than I like! So why not get off this treadmill for once? And then there’s that pretty girl with her warm, brown eyes. So I tell my acquaintance, pretending to be indifferent (I don�
��t want to seem too keen in front of that conceited pill-roller) that yes, it would be a pleasure to meet the Kekesfalva family.
Sure enough—for my friend the pharmacist was not just showing off—two days later, puffed up with pride, he brings a printed card to the café with my name entered on it in an elegant calligraphic hand and gives it to me with a flourish. On this invitation card, Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva requests the pleasure of the company of Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller at dinner on Wednesday next week, at eight in the evening. Thank Heaven, I am not of such humble origins that I don’t know the way to behave in these circumstances. On Sunday morning, dressed in my best, white gloves, patent leather shoes, meticulously shaved, a drop of eau de cologne on my moustache, I drive out to pay a courtesy call. The manservant—old, discreet, good livery—takes my card and murmurs, apologetically, that the family will be very sorry to have missed seeing Lieutenant Hofmiller, but they are at church. All the better, I tell myself, courtesy calls are always a terrible bore. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. On Wednesday evening, I tell myself, you’ll go off there again, and it’s to be hoped the occasion will be pleasant. That’s the Kekesfalva affair dealt with until Wednesday. Two days later, however, on Tuesday, I am genuinely pleased to find a visiting card from Herr von Kekesfalva handed in for me, with one corner of it turned down. Good, I think, these people have perfect manners. A general could hardly have been shown more civility and respect than Herr von Kekesfalva has paid me, an insignificant officer, by returning my original courtesy call two days later. And I begin looking forward to Wednesday evening with real pleasure.
But there’s a hitch at the very start—I suppose one should be superstitious and pay more attention to small signs and omens. There I am at seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, ready in my best uniform, new gloves, patent leather shoes, creases in my trousers ironed straight as a knife blade, and my batman is adjusting the folds of my overcoat and checking the general effect (I always need him to do that, because I have only a small hand mirror in my poorly lit room), when an orderly knocks vigorously on the door. The duty officer, my friend Captain Count Steinhübel, wants me to go over to join him in the guardroom. Two lancers, probably as drunk as lords, have been quarrelling, and it ended with one hitting the other over the head with the stock of his rifle. Now the idiot who suffered the blow is lying there bleeding and unconscious, with his mouth open. No one knows whether or not his skull is intact. The regimental doctor has gone to Vienna on leave, the Colonel can’t be found, so Steinhübel summons me to help him in his hour of need, damn his eyes. While he sees to the injured man, I have to write a report on the incident and send orderlies all over the place to drum up a civilian doctor from the café or wherever there’s one to be found. By now it is a quarter to eight, and I can see that there’s no chance of my getting away for another fifteen minutes or half-an-hour. Why in Heaven’s name does this have to happen today of all days, when I’m invited out to dinner? Feeling more and more impatient, I look at the time. Even if I have to hang around here for only another five minutes, I can’t possibly arrive punctually. But the principle that military service takes precedence over any private engagement has been dinned into us. I can’t get out of it, so I do the only possible thing in this stupid situation, I send my batman off in a cab (which costs me four crowns) to the Kekesfalva house, to deliver my apologies in case I am late, explaining that an unexpected incident at the barracks… and so on and so forth. Fortunately the commotion at the barracks doesn’t last long, because the Colonel arrives in person with a doctor found in haste, and now I can slip inconspicuously away.
The Society of the Crossed Keys Page 14