I came to Merano irritable and in a bad mood. The teas and balls bored me; I now found the usual chatter about Mitzi and Baby and Putzi hard to take. Among all the people I met, there was only one I liked – old Herr von Pribam.* Years before he had been tutor to my father and his brothers and had subsequently filled a rather high post in some ministry. Now he lived with his wife and son in a pretty, tastefully furnished villa.
I was flattered that the old gentleman, who avoided all his wife’s other guests, enjoyed chatting with me, and I was always delighted when his son would whisper to me at one of her teas: “Papa is in his study. You are to be sure to drop in on him.”
Surrounded by his books, the old man led a solitary existence, writing up his memoirs. He could speak interestingly about many aspects of the old Austria; he did not like the “new times.” He did not agree with my reading newspapers: “They are not for young girls.” But he encouraged my
reawakening literary ambition, and patiently read two horrendously bad novels and many equally bad short stories that I had concocted.
That winter I appeared in print for the first time, in the Meraner Zeitung, under a fine pseudonym. I shall never forget the friendly, sandy-haired editor, Herr Ellmenreich. I have rarely felt so grateful to someone. The tiny editorial office lives on in my memory as an impressive, awe-inspiring room and I still have warm feelings for the Meraner Zeitung in which two feuilletons by me appeared.
I hardly noticed that I received no honorarium. It was honour enough simply to have been published.
After this good fortune (and after the well-intentioned editor had sent back both my novels), I suddenly discovered that every decent person should learn a trade, and I apprenticed myself to a book-binder. At first the honest Tyrolean thought I was mad, but later he got used to me and yelled at me as much as he yelled at the other apprentices when I cut a book crooked or spoiled the gold lettering. For months I applied myself diligently and learned everything I could in the little work-shop. Then I decided that for one week I would try to work the eight-hour day that was the still unattained goal of the labour movement.
After the first two days, however, I had already made the discovery that the eight-hour day was a most remarkable ideal. My back and shoulders ached as though they were going to break, my hands trembled, I cut myself with every one of the knives, bruised my fingers with the paper-mill and upset the lime-pot. After work I could not eat, and at night I could not sleep.
I could not get the smell of lime out of my nose and it made me nauseous.
But I did not give in and held out for the entire week. Then, when, at last, on Saturday, our day off was about to come, I startled the entire shop by falling to the floor half dead and beginning to weep uncontrollably. I was very ashamed of myself, but I could not help it.
That one week taught me more about social problems than a dozen heavy tomes.
Marriage
In the meantime father had retired, and my parents had to decide where they wanted to settle. This was not a simple matter. Father wanted to go to
Switzerland and become a naturalized Swiss. He had always had a strong liking for Switzerland and the Swiss. But mother was against it; she did not like “hotel places.” Finally they agreed upon Baden-Baden where we spent a completely uneventful summer as far as I was concerned.
In the autumn my parents went to India, and I again went to Merano with a lady companion.
I was now twenty-four years old and, according to Austrian law, no longer a minor. I did not in the least enjoy living with my parents, and I had all sorts of wild schemes to make myself independent; but what could I actually do? In practical matters, I was as inexperienced as a child; all my life everything had been there for me and everything had been done for me, as though that was part of the natural order. I did not even know how one checks baggage at the station. But I wanted to get away from my parents at all costs. One of my aunts advised me to become a canoness, and I spent a considerable amount of time drawing up my family tree; for at that time anyone who aspired to become a canoness was required to demonstrate sixteen “incontestable” ancestors on both the paternal and the maternal sides. I could have spared myself this tedious task, for just at the point when I had successfully collected all my ancestors, I met a young Balt* at a ball, and three weeks later I was engaged to be married.
Had the two of us searched the whole world over it would have been impossible for either of us to have found anyone less suited than we were to each other. There was nothing about which we did not have opposing opinions. My future husband related with pride and enthusiasm that he had spent most of his time in the previous two years shooting revolutionaries;
I, on the other hand, dreamed of an estate run as a co-operative, in which all the workers had a share. Neither of us made a secret of our convictions, but the young Balt, accustomed to the submissive German women of his homeland, assumed that after the first two or three children my “madness”
would automatically disappear, while I, for my part, was convinced that it would be an easy matter for me to “convert” him.
For that matter, we had little time to argue; ten days after our engagement he went back to Russia in order to be home for the Saat – the Sowing.
I knew nothing about the Saat, could scarcely distinguish between barley and rye, and had never lived in the real country. But everything, as I imagined it, was very beautiful: the endless Russian steppe, the solitude and quiet, the many animals. The Russian cold did not alarm me in the least: “One goes south in the winter, of course.” I had occupied myself with
social questions practically since childhood, but I could not conceive of an existence in which one did not spend the winter in warmer climes and in which everything was not designed to enhance one’s comforts and satisfy one’s taste for the beautiful.
*
When my parents returned from their Indian trip they were not exactly enthusiastic about my engagement. Father came to Merano to meet his future son-in-law; he found him pleasant and likeable, but – the misalliance!
First the barons and now a Herr von. A Protestant too, on top of that.
“I will not try to dissuade you,” father said. “You are old enough to know what you are doing. But has it occurred to you that your sons can never become chamberlains or your daughters ladies of the Order of the Star and Cross?”
I had not thought of it, nor did the revelation now worry me in the least.
My sons and daughters would fight for the liberation of humanity, and for that they did not need to be either chamberlains or ladies of the Order of the Star and Cross.
I went with father to Baden-Baden. Mother was already there. “You’ll see how disagreeable it will be when people only call you ‘gnädige Frau’“
she said scornfully. But she was glad to get rid of me at last and with great eagerness helped me prepare my trousseau. We were married in June, but not in Baden-Baden: that would have brought the grown daughter, whom my still beautiful mother preferred to keep a secret from people, too conspicuously into the limelight. She suffered enough from the grievous fact of my existence, even though father, in order to make things easier for her, had found a charming way of saving her youth. He always introduced me to strangers as: “My daughter from my first marriage.” Thus without lying, as he always proudly insisted, he succeeded in getting people to take me for my mother’s step-daughter. In order to heighten the illusion, I also had to call her by her first name.
For these reasons, therefore, the wedding was not to take place in Baden-Baden, but in Frankfurt. Two days before the ceremony we discovered that the civil marriage had to be in Baden-Baden. We went back in all haste and experienced an amusing scene in the city clerk’s office. I was wearing a tailor-made dress, while father, my fiancé and his two brothers were in lounge suits. The clerk wrinkled his forehead when we appeared before him and said sternly:
“Why have you come here dressed in everyday clothes? A marriage is a festive occasion in a person’s life. Go home and put on the proper clothes, and then I will marry you.”
Our trunks were in Frankfurt, and we had no other clothing with us. But we were so intimidated by the clerk’s strictness that we rushed to tailor and dressmaker to have ourselves fitted out with the “proper clothes.” I came off easiest; my white lace dress was put together with a few stitches and some pins, but my father and my fiancé were most extraordinary looking in their ill-fitting frock coats. Still, they were indeed frock coats, and the clerk was content. Father was so angry about the makeshift coat and stared so furiously at the official during the whole ceremony that I could scarcely keep a serious face. Also, during the clerk’s long, unctuous speech he kept up a steady stream of facetious remarks; it was a very jolly wedding.
The next day the church wedding took place. I do not remember now in what church; since then I have looked for it in vain. For me, however, the ceremonial aspect was marred by the fact that I had never been to a Protestant wedding before and did not know how to act.
The leave-taking from my parents was not especially moving. Poor father found my father-in-law, who had come to the wedding, an unmitigated bore and had but one wish – to get rid of us all. By way of farewell, mother said: “I know that you would now like to have no more to do with us. Just remember, however, that it is very mauvais genre to break completely with one’s family when one gets married. Don’t forget it.”
I kissed our little fox-terrier Jack, took his sister Gilly, whom I had begged from father, under my arm and went with my husband to Berlin, where we planned to remain for a week.