But there was another note, quite another, that rang lustily out from
the Kaerntner Street, for there the new feudal lords of Vienna, (which
inevitably has lords of some kind), walked with ringing tread in the
triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel
and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life
that once great, powerful "First Society."
As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost
entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert,
stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it
her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her
otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom
arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their
gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes,
Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy
even of those not of it. What the new Lords did and how they lived was
a mystery to Frau Stacher that she had no desire to solve. Her fear
increased. She felt but a bit of pallid wreckage in the flooding of
that active, highly-colored element. It beat against her suffocatingly,
frighteningly, that new blood flowing vehemently in Vienna's veins, its
only blood indeed. In the familiar street she was both stranger and
outcast daughter. She couldn't even look at the Bristol, whither so
many of those new lords seemed bent, there where people still crumbled
their bread at dinner instead of eating it.... It was Fanny's world.
Perhaps even now Fanny would be on her way there with her light,
straight, flying step, like a bird in the air. They all knew that walk
of Fanny's....
That first comfortable feeling of owning the pavement, of independence
had gone. She was increasingly confused by the myriad signs and symbols
of money of which she had none. Everywhere "Cambio-Valute," "Devisen"
in gilt letters, and banknotes laid out in patterns in the windows ...
exchange bureaux, in which unholy rites were performed by those chosen
men standing fatly, firmly on gold, while the rest of Vienna tottered
and fell on paper. She was exhausted too, by the buffeting of the
everlasting wind, and she suddenly and recklessly decided to take the
three hundred crowns remaining in her purse and get on the trolley.
There was one at the very corner that, mercifully, would take her up
the interminability of the Mariahilfer Street. After lunch the wind
would perhaps have fallen and she could walk back. She tried not to
think how far it would be. She was too spent for thought by her impact
with that new world, that world that suddenly had too much, trampling
to death the world that almost as suddenly had too little or nothing.
Outcast indeed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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