Monday

Yesterday I paid my farewell visit to Princess Metternich; her palace out on the Rennweg is dark and gloomy and oh, so cold. Once the meeting place of the noblesse, it is now dreary and deserted. No equipages block the driveway, and all the bedizened flunkeys have vanished. A crippled retainer took in my card. Like everyone else the Princess, once the toast in Paris and supreme in Vienna, has fallen upon evil days, and she has fallen farther than most, for her place was very high.

“Die Pauline,” as the Viennese called her with affectionate familiarity, had always been gracious and helpful to me during my days as a correspondent in Vienna, and, unlike so many others, only once had she asked for her quid pro quo, and alas! on that occasion I had failed her. One of the papers had announced that Charles M. Schwab, the American Goldmensch, was in Vienna for a few days. “I would so like to meet him,” said the Princess. “I have grown up with men who were born with silver spoons in their greedy mouths. I have lived with Rentiers, with men, and women, too, who have wasted their substance and have wagered their estates on the turn of a card. Now I would like to meet a Goldmensch, one with the Midas touch, who has made his own money. And it is not mere idle curiosity,” continued the Princess. “I’m thinking of starting a milk route (this was 1904). The people of Vienna need milk and I could supply it from my farms—if I only knew how to go about it. All my friends are wasters, they could not help me, but Der Schwab, he knows; he could.”

For several days I ransacked the town for the Goldmensch, but in vain. He had gone back to the little poverty-stricken village in Galicia or in Slovakia, from which, a barefoot boy, he had started on the road to fortune.

On this sad day the Princess recalled my failure but with kindly words of appreciation. “I wish I could have seen him,” she said. “That was a man from whom I might have learned much.”

Then she voiced another regret, and this in poignant words: “When before the war my daughter married in Bavaria I felt the need of money. You see with us marriage is a costly business, and to meet the expense I thought of my noble forests in Styria.

“There was wealth lying idle—an undeveloped gold mine. I put myself in touch with a great lumber merchant and together we drove down there. How beautiful were my trees, tall and straight and full of sap and vigor. And the man could not conceal how he coveted them. ‘Hoheit,’ he said, ‘I will give you three million florins for your trees, and you will still have your land.’ ‘I must think about it,’ I said. And indeed I did. That night I never closed an eye. I could hear the blows of the ax, the rasping, creaking noises of his sawmills, and I heard the fall of my stately trees—so full of sap and vigor. The lumberman came with the papers the next morning. ‘Please sign here,’ he insisted. ‘I want to begin cutting next week, and I must bring my machines from the Bohemian forest.’ ‘You may go to the devil!’ I shouted. ‘May the Henker have you in his unholy keeping! Never, never will I sign the death warrant of my noble trees—so strong and stately—so full of sap and vigor!’

“Then the war came,” and here the brave old lady sobbed but soon regained control of her emotions. “There was great need of timber on the Italian front and the army cut down all my trees to plank the roads, without which the big guns would never have reached the front. But the Government was very honest and the War Minister asked me what the trees were worth. I told him that I had been offered three millions but from Austria in her hour of need I would only take a million. He sent it to me in war bonds and with it came a bouquet of flowers. The war bonds are not worth the paper they are printed on now, but I shall always treasure the faded flowers. The bonds, yes, they are in that drawer. Do you think I could trade them in for a pound of sugar?”

This gave me my cue. I was leaving and I still had a box of sugar brought from Paris. I would send it to the Princess as a parting gift. For a week or two it would sweeten her dire distress. But as I went out of the hotel to carry out this mission myself, for in these days there is no one in Vienna who could be trusted with sugar, I came upon two pretty, ragged girls padding about barefoot in the snow and slush and sleet. “Uns friert es Euer Gnaden [We are freezing].” But they did not whimper; indeed as they sloshed about in the dirty snow they sang with their rich young voices:

“Es gibt nur ’er Kaiser-Stadt
Es gibt nur ’er Wien,
Es gibt nur ’er Rauber Nest
Und es heisst Berlin!”¹

I liked these sentiments and the girls were pretty and brave, so I gave them half the sugar which I had intended to give wholly to the once-proud Princess who had fallen on such evil days. The girls kissed my hand in gratitude. They had a future and their present need was great.