Vienna, Tuesday

To escape the hospital smell that pervaded the Bristol, I went to the opera last evening. I was in uniform, and when I presented myself at the ticket window they were opposed to taking my money. “Soldiers, officials, do not pay,” quavered a voice through the little window, but I insisted. I was hardly settled in my stall and was gazing up at the fourth or fifth gallery which was where I sat in my student days, when I was suddenly surrounded by what seemed the whole management. There they were crowding my neighbors, bowing and scraping.

“It was unerhört they asserted. “I must occupy a box—otherwise they would die of shame.” To be sure, as they admitted, the imperial box was crowded; there, where Franz Josef had so often snoozed throughout the performances, was a badly dressed flock of civil servants of the new government and their ladies. But we have an archducal box we would most gladly place at your disposal. “Euer Gnaden, come! Do us this favor. No, no! Euer Gnaden! here you must not sit.” Say it they did not, but in gestures they pointed with contempt to the fairly common herd by whom I was surrounded. But I wouldn’t move. In Berlin, of course, I could be arrogant and assertive, but not in my dear Vienna. Just because I was in uniform, a temporary officer and a make-believe conqueror, I would not even seem to crack the whip. I would sit with my friends, the good, the gemütliches Volk of the Kaiser-stadt. At last the management withdrew and my neighbors beamed on me. I sat with them because in other years I had shared their joys and some of their sorrows, too. I had lived with them as a corps student with Bummler aufgesetzt. In 1915 I had driven many great nails in the Wehrmann in Eisen out on the Schwarzenberg Platz in the hope that by its forbidding mien and some mystic quality it would defend these liebe Leute from their war allies of the north, and if I was only a Wiener Kind by adoption I was the father of a real authentic child of the Kaiser-stadt because my second son had come to us one happy day in the Pelikangasse.

So I sat with the dear plain people who in former years had perched up in the highest gallery just as I did. As my thoughts were far away, in time at least, if not in space, it is perhaps not strange that I do not remember the opera and now only twenty-four hours later I cannot recall its name. It was, to be sure, a sad spectacle, and as the tenore robusto tottered across the stage I noticed how shrunken were his shanks, how feeble his voice. But truth to tell, I peopled the stage and the boxes with figures that have for the most part vanished from the scene. There I used to see Princess Pauline graciously giving to Count Hübner her hand to be kissed, the favorite of Metternich and perhaps the first of the old-school diplomats who had circumnavigated the world on his grand tour. There swaggered Count Kalnoky and here passed Taaffe with his soft, gliding step. And on the stage I saw Cerale and Fräulein Abel pulsating with life, resplendent in beauty, and yet now they are as dead as Maria Theresa, and Josef and Kaunitz and the King of Rome!