Three Novellas

The Bust of the Emperor

I

In what used to be Eastern Galicia, and today is Poland, far indeed from the solitary railway line which links Przemysl with Brody, lies the small village of Lopatyny, about which I intend to tell a remarkable tale.

Will readers be so kind as to forgive the narrator for prefacing the facts which he has to impart by a historico-political explanation. The unnatural moods which world history has recently exhibited compel him to this explanation, since younger readers may wish, perhaps need, to have it pointed out to them that a part of the eastern territories, which today belong to the Polish Republic, formed a part of the many Crown Lands of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy until the end of the Great War which is now called the World War.

Thus, in the village of Lopatyny, there lived the Count Franz Xaver Morstin, the scion of an old Polish family, a family which (in parenthesis) originated in Italy and came to Poland in the sixteenth century. Count Morstin had, in his youth, served in the Ninth Dragoons. He thought of himself neither as a Polish aristocrat nor as an aristocrat of Italian origin. No: like so many of his peers in the former Crown Lands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, he was one of the noblest and purest sort of Austrian, plain and simple. That is, a man above nationality, and therefore of true nobility. Had anyone asked him, for example — but to whom would such a senseless question have occurred? — to which “nationality” or race he felt he belonged, the Count would have felt rather bewildered, baffled even, by his questioner, and probably bored and somewhat indignant. And on what indications might he have based his member ship of this or that race? He spoke almost all European languages equally well, he was at home in almost all the countries of Europe. His friends and relations were scattered about the wide colorful world. Indeed the Imperial and Royal monarchy was itself a microcosm of this colorful world, and for this reason the Count’s only home. One of his brothers-in-law was District Commandant in Sarajevo, another was Counselor to the Governor in Prague; one of his brothers was serving as an Oberleutnant of artillery in Bosnia, one of his cousins was Counselor of Embassy in Paris, another was a landowner in the Hungarian Banat, a third was in the Italian diplomatic service and a fourth, from sheer love of the Far East, had for years lived in Peking.

From time to time it was Franz Xaver’s custom to visit his relations; more frequently, of course, those who lived within the monarchy. They were, as he used to say, his “tours of inspection.” These tours were not only mindful of his relatives, but also of his friends, certain former pupils at the Theresianische Akademie who lived in Vienna. Here Count Morstin would settle twice a year, winter and summer (for a fortnight or longer).

As he traveled backwards and forwards and through the center of his many-faceted fatherland he would derive a quite particular pleasure from certain distinguishing marks which were to be picked out, unvarying but gay, on all the railway stations, kiosks, public buildings, schools and churches of the old Crown Lands throughout the Empire. Everywhere the gendarmes wore the same cap with a feather or the same mud-colored helmet with a golden knob and the gleaming double eagle of the Habsburgs; everywhere the doors of the Imperial tobacco monopoly’s shops were painted with black and yellow diagonal Stripes; in every part of the country the revenue officers carried the same green (almost flowering) pommels above their naked swords; in every garrison town one saw the same blue uniform blouses and black formal trousers of the infantry officers sauntering down the Corso, the same coffee-colored jackets of the artillery, the same scarlet trousers of the cavalry; everywhere in that great and many-colored Empire, and at the same moment every evening, as the clocks in the church towers struck nine, the same retreat was sounded, consisting of cheerfully questioning calls and melancholy answers.

Everywhere were to be found the same coffee-houses, with their smoky vaulted ceilings and their dark alcoves where the chess-players sat hunched like strange birds, with their sideboards heavy with colored bottles and shining glasses, presided over by golden-blonde, full-bosomed cashiers. Almost everywhere, in all the coffee-houses of the Empire, there crept with a knee already a little shaky, feet turning outwards, a napkin across his arm, the whiskered waiter, the distant humble image of an old servitor of His Majesty, that mighty whiskered gentleman to whom all Crown Lands, gendarmes, revenue officers, tobacconists, turnpikes, railways, and all his peoples belonged.

And in each Crown Land different songs were sung; peasants wore different clothes; people spoke a different tongue or, in some instances, several different tongues. And what so pleased the Count was the solemn and yet cheerful black-and-yellow that shone with such familiar light amidst so many different colors; the equally solemn and happy Gott erhalte, God Save the Emperor, which was native among all the songs of all the peoples, and that particular, nasal, drawling, gentle German of the Austrians, reminding one of the Middle Ages which was always to be picked out again among the varying idioms and dialects of the peoples. Like every Austrian of his day, he loved what was permanent in the midst of constant change, what was familiar amid the unfamiliar. So that things which were alien became native to him without losing their color, and his native land had the eternal magic of the alien.

In his village of Lopatyny the Count was more powerful than any of the administrative branches known to, and feared by, the peasants and the Jews, more powerful than the circuit judge in the nearest small town, more so than the local town mayor himself and more so than any of the senior officers who commanded the troops at the annual maneuvers, requisitioning huts and houses for billets, and generally representing that warlike might which is so much more impressive than actual military power in wartime. It seemed to the people of Lopatyny that “Count” was not only a title of nobility but also quite a high position in local government. In practice they were not far wrong. Thanks to his generally accepted standing, Count Morstin was able to moderate taxes, relieve the sickly sons of Jews from military service, forward requests for favors, relieve punishments meted out to the innocent, reduce punishments which were unduly severe, obtain reductions in railway fares for poor people, secure just retribution for gendarmes, policemen and civil servants who overstepped their position, obtain assistant masterships at the Gymnasium for teaching candidates, find jobs as tobacconists, deliverers of registered letters and telegraphists for time-expired NCOs and find “bursaries” for the student sons of poor peasants and Jews.

How happy he was to attend to it all! In order to keep abreast of his duties, he employed two secretaries and three writers. On top of this, true to the tradition of his house, he practiced “seigneurial charity,” as it was known in the village. For more than a century the tramps and beggars of the neighborhood had gathered every Friday beneath the balcony of the Morstin manor and received from the footmen copper coins in twists of paper. Usually, the Count would appear on the balcony and greet the poor, and it was as if he were giving thanks to the beggars who thanked him: as if giver and receiver exchanged gifts.

In parenthesis, it was not always goodness of heart which produced all these good works, but one of those unwritten laws common to so many families of the nobility. Their far distant forebears might indeed, centuries before, have practiced charity, help and support of their people out of pure love. Gradually, though, as the blood altered, this goodness of heart had to some extent become frozen and petrified into duty and tradition. Furthermore, Count Morstin’s busy willingness to be helpful formed his only activity and distraction. It lent to his somewhat idle life as a grand seigneur who, unlike his peers and neighbors, took no interest even in hunting, an object and an aim, a constantly beneficent confirmation of his power. If he had arranged a tobacconist’s business for one person, a license for another, a job for a third, an interview for a fourth, he felt at ease not only in his conscience but in his pride. If, however, he proved unsuccessful in his good offices on behalf of one or another of his protégés, then his conscience was uneasy and his pride was wounded. And he never gave up; he invariably went to appeal, until his wish — that is, the wish of his protégés—had been fulfilled. For this reason the people loved and respected him. For ordinary folk have no real conception of the motives which induce a man of power to help the powerless and the unimportant. People just wish to see a “good master”; and people are often more magnanimous in their childlike trust in a powerful man than is the very man whose magnanimity they credulously assume. It is the deepest and noblest wish of ordinary folk to believe that the powerful must be just and noble.

This sort of consideration was certainly not present in Count Morstin’s mind as he dispensed protection, beneficence and justice. But these considerations, which may have led an ancestor here and an ancestor there to the practice of generosity, pity and justice, were still alive and working, in the blood or, as they say today, the “subconscious” of this descendant. And just as he felt himself in duty bound to help those who were weaker than himself, so he exhibited duty, respect and obedience towards those who were higher placed than himself. The person of His Royal and Imperial Majesty was to him for ever a quite uniquely remarkable phenomenon. It would, for example, have been impossible for the Count to consider the Emperor simply as a person. Belief in the hereditary hierarchy was so deep-seated and so strong in Franz Xaver’s soul that he loved the Emperor because of his Imperial, not his human, attributes. He severed all connection with friends, acquaintances or relations if they let fall what he considered a disrespectful word about the Emperor. Perhaps he sensed even then, long before the fall of the monarchy, that frivolous witticisms can be far more deadly than criminal attempts at assassination and the solemn speeches of ambitious and rebellious world reformers; in which case world history would have borne out Count Morstin’s suspicions. For the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy died, not through the empty verbiage of its revolutionaries, but through the ironical disbelief of those who should have believed in, and supported, it.

II

One fine day — it was a couple of years before the Great War, which people now call the World War — Count Morstin was told in confidence that the next Imperial maneuvers were to take place in Lopatyny and the adjacent territory. The Emperor planned to spend a day or two, or a week, or longer in his house. And Morstin flew into a real taking, drove to the town mayor, dealt with the civil police authorities and the urban district council of the neighboring market town, arranged for the policemen and night-watchmen of the entire district to have new uniforms and swords, spoke with the priests of all three confessions, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, and the Jewish Rabbi, wrote out a speech for the Ruthenian mayor of the town (which he could not read but had to learn by heart with the help of the schoolteacher), bought white dresses for the little girls of the village and alerted the commanding officers of every regiment in the area. All this so much “in confidence” that in early spring, long before the maneuvers, it was known far and wide in the neighborhood that the Emperor himself would be attending the maneuvers.

At that time Count Morstin was no longer young, but haggard and prematurely gray. He was a bachelor and a misogynist, considered somewhat peculiar by his more robust equals, a trifle “comic” and “from a different planet.” Nobody in the district had seen a woman near him, nor had he ever made any attempt to marry. None had seen him drink, gamble or make love. His solitary passion was combating “the problem of nationalities.” Indeed it was at this time that the so-called “problem of nationalities” began to arouse the passions. Everybody like himself — whether he wished to, or felt impelled to act as if he wished to — concerned himself with one or other of the many nations which occupied the territory of the old Monarchy. It had been discovered and brought to people’s attention in the course of the nineteenth century that in order to possess individuality as a citizen every person must belong to a definite nationality or race. “From humanity, via national ism to bestiality,” the Austrian poet Grillparzer had said. It was just at this time that nationalism was beginning, the stage before the bestiality which we are experiencing today. One could see clearly then that national sentiment sprang from the vulgar turn of mind of all the people who derived from, and corresponded with, the most commonplace attitudes of a modern country. They were generally photographers with a sideline in the volunteer fire brigade, self-styled artists who for lack of talent had found no home in the art academy and in consequence had ended up as sign-painters and paper-hangers, discontented teachers in primary schools who would have liked to teach in secondary schools, apothecaries’ assistants who wanted to be doctors, tooth pullers who could not become dentists, junior employees in the Post Office and the railways, bank clerks, woodmen and, generally speaking, anyone with any of the Austrian nationalities who had an unjustifiable claim to a limitless horizon within that bourgeois society. And all these people who had never been anything but Austrians, in Tarnopol, Sarajevo, Brünn, Prague, Czernowitz, Oderburg or Troppau; all these who had never been anything but Austrian, began in accordance with the “Spirit of the Age” to look upon themselves as members of the Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, German, Roumanian, Slovenian and Croatian “nations,” and so on and so forth.

At about this time “universal, secret and direct suffrage” was introduced in the Monarchy. Count Morstin detested this as much as he did the concept of “nation.”

He used to say to the Jewish publican Solomon Piniowsky, the only person for miles around in whose company he had some sort of confidence, “Listen to me, Solomon! This dreadful Darwin, who says men are descended from apes, seems to be right. It is no longer enough for people to be divided into races, far from it! They want to belong to particular nations. Nationalism; do you hear Solomon?! Even the apes never hit on an idea like that. Darwin’s theory still seems to me incomplete. Perhaps the apes are descended from the nationalists since they are certainly a step forward. You know your Bible, Solomon, and you know that it is written there that on the sixth day God created man, not nationalist man. Isn’t that so, Solomon?”

“Quite right, Herr Graf!” said the Jew, Solomon.

“But,” the Count went on, “to change the subject: we are expecting the Emperor this summer. I will give you some money. You will clean up and decorate this place and light up the window. You will dust off the Emperor’s picture and put it in the window. I will make you a present of a black and yellow flag with the double eagle on it, and you will fly it from the roof. Is that understood?”

Indeed, the Jew Piniowsky understood, as, moreover, did everybody else with whom the Count had discussed the arrival of the Emperor.

III

That summer the Imperial maneuvers took place, and His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty took up residence in Count Morstin’s castle. The Emperor was to be seen every morning as he rode out to watch the exercises, and the peasants and Jewish merchants of the neighborhood would gather to see him, this old man who was their ruler. And as soon as he and his suite appeared they would shout hoch and hurra and niech zyje, each in his own tongue. A few days after the Kaiser’s departure, the son of a local peasant called upon Count Morstin. This young man, whose ambition was to become a sculptor, had prepared a bust of the Emperor in sandstone. Count Morstin was enchanted. He promised the young sculptor a free place at the Academy of Arts in Vienna.

He had the bust of the Emperor mounted at the entrance to his little castle.

Here it remained, year in, year out, until the outbreak of the Great War which became known as the World War.

Before he reported for duty as a volunteer, elderly, drawn, bald and hollow-eyed as he had become with the passage of years, Count Morstin had the Emperor’s bust taken down, packed in straw and hidden in the cellar.

And there it rested until the end of the war and of the Monarchy, until Count Morstin returned home, until the constitution of the new Polish Republic.

IV

Count Franz Xaver Morstin had thus come home. But could one call this a homecoming? Certainly, there were the same fields, the same woods, the same cottages and the same sort of peasants — the same sort, let it be said advisedly — for many of the ones whom the Count had known had fallen in battle.

It was winter, and one could already feel Christmas approaching. As usual at this time of year, and as it had been in days long before the war, the Lopatinka was frozen, crows crouched motionless on the bare branches of the chestnut trees and the eternal leisurely wind of the Eastern winter blew across the fields onto which the western windows of the house gave.

As the result of the war, there were widows and orphans in the villages: enough material for the returning Count’s beneficence to work upon. But instead of greeting his native Lopatyny as a home regained, Count Morstin began to indulge in problematical and unusual meditations on the question of home generally. Now, thought he, since this village belongs to Poland and not to Austria, is it still my home? What, in fact, is home? Is not the distinctive uniform of gendarmes and customs officers, familiar to us since childhood, just as much “home” as the fir and the pine, the pond and the meadow, the cloud and the brook? But if the gendarmes and customs officers are different and fir, pine, brook and pond remain the same, is that still home? Was I not therefore at home in this spot — continued the Count enquiringly — only because it belonged to an overlord to whom there also belonged countless other places of different kinds, all of which I loved? No doubt about it! This unnatural whim of history has also destroyed my private pleasure in what I used to know as home. Nowadays they are talking hereabouts and everywhere else of this new fatherland. In their eyes I am a so-called Lackland. I have always been one. Ah! but there was once a fatherland, a real one, for the Lacklands, the only possible fatherland. That was the old Monarchy. Now I am homeless and have lost the true home of the eternal wanderer.

In the false hope that he could forget the situation if he were outside the country, the Count decided to go abroad. But he discovered to his astonishment that he needed a passport and a number of so-called visas before he could reach those countries which he had chosen for his journey. He was quite old enough to consider as fantastically childish and dreamlike such things as passports, visas and all the formalities which the brazen laws of traffic between man and man had imposed after the war. However, since Fate had decreed that he was to spend the rest of his days in a desolate dream, and because he hoped to find abroad, in other countries, some part of that old reality in which he had lived before the war, he bowed to the requirements of this ghostly world, took a passport, procured visas and proceeded first to Switzerland, the one country in which he believed he might find the old peace, simply because it had not been involved in the war.

He had known the city of Zurich for many years, but had not seen it for the better part of twelve. He supposed that it would make no particular impact on him, for better or for worse. His impression coincided with the not altogether unjustified opinion of the world, both rather more pampered and rather more adventurous, on the subject of the worthy cities of the worthy Swiss. What, after all, could be expected to happen there? Nevertheless, for a man who had come out of the war and out of the eastern marches of the former Austrian Monarchy, the peace of a city which even before that war had harbored refugees, was almost equivalent to an adventure. Franz Xaver Morstin gave himself up in those first days to the pursuit of long-lost peace. He ate, drank and slept.

One day, however, there occurred a disgusting incident in a Zurich night club, as the result of which Count Morstin was forced to leave the country at once.

At that time there was often common gossip in the newspapers of every country about some wealthy banker who was supposed to have taken in pawn, against a loan to the Austrian royal family, not only the Habsburg Crown Jewels, but also the old Habsburg Crown itself. No doubt about it that these stories came from the tongues and pens of those irresponsible customers known as journalists and even if it were true that a certain portion of the Imperial family’s heritage had found its way into the hands of some conscienceless banker, there was still no question of the old Habsburg crown coming into it, or so Franz Xaver Morstin felt that he knew.

So he arrived one night in one of the few bars, known only to the select, which are open at night in the moral city of Zurich where, as is well known, prostitution is illegal, immorality is taboo, the city in which to sin is as boring as it is costly. Not for a moment that the Count was seeking this out! Far from it: perfect peace had begun to bore him and to give him insomnia and he had decided to pass the night-time away wherever he best could.

He began his drink. He was sitting in one of the few quiet corners of the establishment. It is true that he was put out by the newfangled American style of the little red table lamps, by the hygienic white of the barman’s coat which reminded him of an assistant in an operating theater and by the dyed blonde hair of the waitress which awoke associations with apothecaries; but to what had he not already accustomed himself, this poor old Austrian? Even so, he was startled out of the peace which he had with some trouble arranged for himself in these surroundings by a harsh voice announcing: “And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crown of the Habsburgs!”

Franz Xaver stood up. In the middle of the long bar he observed a fairly large and animated party. His first glance informed him that every type of person he hated — although until then he had no close contact with them — was represented at that table: women with dyed blonde hair in short dresses which shamelessly revealed ugly knees; slender, willowy young men of olive complexion, baring as they smiled sets of flawless teeth such as are to be seen in dental advertisements, disposable little dancing men, cowardly, elegant, watchful, looking like cunning hairdressers; elderly gentlemen who assiduously but vainly attempted to disguise their paunches and their bald pates, good-humored, lecherous, jovial and bow-legged; in short a selection from that portion of humanity which was for the time being the inheritor of the vanished world, only to yield it a few years later, at a profit, to even more modern and murderous heirs.

One of the elderly gentlemen now rose from the table. First he twirled a crown in his hand, then placed it on his bald head, walked round the table, proceeded to the middle of the bar, danced a little jig, waggled his head and with it the crown, and sang a popular hit of the day, “The sacred crown is worn like this!”

At first Franz Xaver could not make head nor tail of this lamentable exhibition. It seemed to him that the party consisted of decaying old gentlemen with gray hair (made fools of by mannequins in short skirts); chambermaids celebrating their day off; female barflies who would share with the waitresses the profits from the sale of champagne and their own bodies; a lot of good-for-nothing pimps who dealt in women and foreign exchange, wore wide padded shoulders and wide flapping trousers that looked more like women’s clothes; and dreadful-looking middlemen who dealt in houses, shops, citizenships, passports, concessions, good marriages, birth certificates, religious beliefs, titles of nobility, adoptions, brothels and smuggled cigarettes. This was the section of society which was relentlessly committed, in every capital city of a Europe which had, as a whole continent, been defeated, to live off its corpse, slandering the past, exploiting the present, promoting the future, sated but insatiable. These were the Lords of Creation after the Great War. Count Morstin had the impression of being his own corpse, and that these people were dancing on his grave. Hundreds and thousands had died in agony to prepare the victory of people like these, and hundreds of thoroughly respectable moralists had prepared the collapse of the old Monarchy, had longed for its fall and for the liberation of the nation-states! And now, pray observe, over the grave of the old world and about the cradles of the newborn nations, there danced the specters of the night from American bars.

Morstin came closer, so as to have a better view. The shadowy nature of these well-covered, living specters aroused his interest. And upon the bald pate of this bow legged, jigging man he recognized a facsimile — for facsimile it must surely be — of the crown of St. Stephen. The waiter, who was obsequious in drawing the attention of his customers to anything noteworthy, came to Franz Xaver and said, “That is Walakin the banker, a Russian. He claims to own the crowns of all the dethroned monarchies. He brings a different one here every evening. Last night it was the Tsars’ crown; tonight it is the crown of St. Stephen.”

Count Morstin felt his heart stop beating, just for a second. But during this one second — which seemed to him later to have lasted for at least an hour — he experienced a complete transformation of his own personality. It was as if an unknown, frightening, alien Morstin were growing within him, rising, growing, developing and taking possession not only of his familiar body but, further, of the entire space occupied by the American bar. Never in his life, never since his childhood had Franz Xaver Morstin experienced a fury like this. He had a gentle disposition and the sanctuary which had been vouchsafed him by his position, his comfortable circumstances and the brilliance of his name had until then shielded him from the grossness of the world and from any contact with its meanness. Otherwise, no doubt, he would have learned anger sooner. It was as if he sensed, during that single second that changed him, that the world had changed long before. It was as if he now felt that the change in himself was in fact a necessary consequence of universal change. That much greater than this unknown anger, which now rose up in him, grew and overflowed the bounds of his personality, must have been the growth of meanness in this world, the growth of that baseness which had so long hidden behind the skirts of fawning “loyalty” and slavish servility. It seemed to him, who had always assumed without a second thought that everyone was by nature honorable, that at this instant he had discovered a lifetime of error, the error of any generous heart, that he had given credit, limitless credit. And this sudden recognition filled him with the honest shame which is sister to honest anger. An honest man is doubly shamed at the sight of meanness, first because the very existence of it is shameful, second because he sees at once that he has been deceived in his heart. He sees himself betrayed and his pride rebels against the fact that people have betrayed his heart.

It was no longer possible for him to weigh, to measure, to consider. It seemed to him that hardly any kind of violence could be bestial enough to punish and wreak vengeance on the baseness of the man who danced with a crown on his bald whoremongering head; every night a different crown. A gramophone was blaring out the song from Hans, who does things with his knee; the barmaids were shrilling; the young men clapped their hands; the barman, white as a surgeon, rattled among his glasses, spoons and bottles, shook and mixed, brewed and concocted in metal shakers the secret and magical potions of the modern age. He clinked and rattled, from time to time turning a benevolent but calculating eye on the banker’s performance. The little red lamps trembled every time the bald man stamped. The light, the gramophone, the noise of the mixer, the cooing and giggling of the women drove Count Morstin into a marvelous rage. The unbelievable happened: for the first time in his life he became laughable and childish. He armed himself with a half-empty bottle of champagne and a blue soda-siphon, then approached the strangers. With his left hand he squirted soda water over the company at the table and with his right hand struck the dancer over the head with the bottle. The banker fell to the ground. The crown fell from his head. And as the Count stooped to pick it up, as it were to rescue the real crown and all that was associated with it, waiters, girls and pimps all rushed at him. Numbed by the powerful scent of the women and the blows of the young men, Count Morstin was finally brought out into the street. There, at the door of the American bar, the obsequious waiter presented the bill, on a silver tray, under the wide heavens and, in a manner of speaking, in the presence of every distant and indifferent star; for it was a crisp winter night.

The next day Count Morstin returned to Lopatyny.

V

Why — said he to himself during the journey — should I not go back to Lopatyny? Since my world seems to have met with final defeat and I no longer have a proper home it is better that I should seek out the wreckage of my old one!

He thought of the bust of the Emperor Franz Josef which lay in his cellar, and he thought of this, his Emperor’s corpse, which had long lain in the Kapuzinergruft.

I was always odd man out, thought he to himself, both in my village and in the neighborhood. I shall remain odd man out.

He sent a telegram to his steward announcing the day of his arrival.

And when he arrived they were waiting for him, as always, as in the old days, as if there had been no war, no dissolution of the Monarchy, no new Polish Republic.

For it is one of the greatest mistakes made by the new — or as they like to call themselves, modern — statesmen that the people (the “nation”) share their own passionate interest in world politics. The people in no way lives by world politics, and is thereby agreeably distinguishable from politicians. The people lives by the land, which it works, by the trade which it exercises and by the craft which it understands. (It nevertheless votes at free elections, dies in wars and pays taxes to the Ministry of Finance.) Anyway, this is the way things were in Count Morstin’s village of Lopatyny, and the whole of the World War and the complete redrawing of the map of Europe had not altered the opinions of the people of Lopatyny. Why and how? The sound, human sense of the Jewish publicans and the Polish and Ruthenian peasants resented the incomprehensible whims of world history. These whims are abstract: but the likes and dislikes of the people are concrete.

The people of Lopatyny, for instance, had for years known the Counts Morstin, those representatives of the Emperor and the house of Habsburg. New gendarmes appeared, and a tax-levy is a tax-levy, and Count Morstin is Count Morstin. Under the rule of the Habsburgs the people of Lopatyny had been happy or unhappy — each according to the will of God. Independent of all the changes in world history, in spite of republics and monarchies, and what are known as national self-determination or suppression, their life was determined by a good or bad harvest, healthy or rotten fruit, productive or sickly cattle, rich pasture or thin, rain at the right or the wrong season, a sun to bring forth fruit or drought and disaster. The world of the Jewish merchant consisted of good or bad customers; for the publican in feeble or reliable drinkers and for the craftsman it was important whether people did or did not require new roofs, new boots, new trousers, new stoves, new chimneys or new barrels. This was the case, at least in Lopatyny. And in our prejudiced view the whole wide world is not so different from the village of Lopatyny as popular leaders and politicians would like to believe. When they have read the newspapers, listened to speeches, elected officials and talked over the doings of the world with their friends, these worthy peasants, craftsmen and shopkeepers — and in big cities the workmen as well — go back to their houses and their places of work. And at home they find worry or happiness; healthy children or sick children, discontented or peaceable wives, customers who pay well or pay slowly, pressing or patient creditors, a good meal or a bad one, a clean or a dirty bed. It is our firm conviction that ordinary folk do not trouble their heads over world events, however much they may rant and rave about them on Sundays. But this may, of course, be a personal conviction. We have in fact only to report on the village of Lopatyny. These things were as we have described them.

No sooner was Count Morstin home than he repaired at once to Solomon Piniowsky, that Jew in whom innocence and shrewdness went hand in hand, as if they were brother and sister. And the Count asked the Jew, “Solomon, what do you count on in this world?”

“Herr Graf,” said Piniowsky, “I no longer count on anything at all. The world has perished, there is no Emperor any more, people choose presidents, and that is the same thing as when I pick a clever lawyer for a lawsuit. So the whole people picks a lawyer to defend it. But, I ask myself, Herr Graf, before what tribunal? Just a tribunal of other lawyers. And supposing the people have no lawsuit and therefore no need to be defended, we all know just the same that the very existence of these lawyers will land us up to the neck in a lawsuit. And so there will be constant lawsuits. I still have the black and yellow flag, Herr Graf, which you gave me as a present. What am I to do with it? It is lying on the floor of my attic. I still have the picture of the old Emperor. What about that, now? I read the newspapers, I attend a bit to business, and a bit to the world. I know the stupid things that are being done. But our peasants have no idea. They simply believe that the old Emperor has introduced new uniforms and set Poland free, that he no longer has his Residence in Vienna, but in Warsaw.”

“Let them go on thinking that,” said Count Morstin.

And he went home and had the bust of the Emperor Franz Joseph brought up from the cellar. He stood it at the entrance to his house.

And from the following day forward, as though there had been no war and no Polish Republic; as though the old Emperor had not been long laid to rest in the Kapuziner-gruft; as though this village still belonged to the territory of the old Monarchy; every peasant who passed by doffed his cap to the sandstone bust of the old Emperor and every Jew who passed by with his bundle murmured the prayer which a pious Jew will say on seeing an Emperor. And this improbable bust — presented in cheap sandstone from the unaided hand of a peasant lad, this bust in the uniform jacket of the dead Emperor, with stars and insignia and the Golden Fleece, all preserved in stone, just as the youthful eye of the lad had seen the Emperor and loved him — won with the passing of time a quite special and particular artistic merit, even in the eyes of Count Morstin. It was as if the passing of time ennobled and improved the work which represented this exalted subject. Wind and weather worked as if with artistic consciousness upon the simple stone. It was as if respect and remembrance also worked upon this portrait, as if every salute from a peasant, every prayer from a believing Jew, had ennobled the unconscious work of the young peasant’s hands.

And so the bust stood for years outside Count Morstin’s house, the only memorial which had ever existed in the village of Lopatyny and of which all its inhabitants were rightly proud.

The bust meant even more, however, to the Count, who in those days no longer left the village any more. It gave him the impression, whenever he left his house, that nothing had altered. Gradually, for he had aged pre maturely, he would stumble upon quite foolish ideas. He would persuade himself for hours at a time, although he had fought through the whole of the greatest of all wars, that this had just been a bad dream, and that all the changes which had followed it were also bad dreams. This in spite of the fact that he saw almost every week how his appeals to officials and judges no longer helped his pro tégés and that these officials indeed made fun of him. He was more infuriated than insulted. It was already well known in the neighboring small town, as in the district, that “old Morstin was half crazy.” The story circulated that at home he wore the uniform of a Rittmeister of Dragoons, with all his old orders and decorations. One day a neighboring landowner, a certain Count, asked him straight out if this were true.

“Not as yet,” replied Morstin, “but you’ve given me a good idea. I shall put on my uniform and wear it not only at home but out and about.”

And so it happened.

From that time on Count Morstin was to be seen in the uniform of an Austrian Rittmeister of Dragoons, and the inhabitants of Lopatyny never gave the matter a second thought. Whenever the Rittmeister left his house he saluted his Supreme Commander, the bust of the dead Emperor Franz Josef. He would then take his usual route between two little pinewoods along the sandy road which led to the neighboring small town. The peasants who met him would take off their hats and say: “Jesus Christ be praised!” adding “Herr Graf!” as if they believed the Count to be some sort of close relative of the Redeemer’s, and that two titles were better than one. Alas, for a long time past he had been powerless to help them as he had in the old days. Admittedly the peasants were unable to help themselves. But he, the Count, was no longer a power in the land! And like all those who have been powerful once, he now counted even less than those who had always been powerless: in the eyes of officialdom he almost belonged among the ridiculous. But the people of Lopatyny and its surroundings still believed in him, just as they believed in the Emperor Franz Josef whose bust it was their custom to salute. Count Morstin seemed in no way laughable to the peasants and Jews of Lopatyny; venerable, rather. They revered his lean, thin figure, his gray hair, his ashen, sunken countenance, and his eyes which seemed to stare into the boundless distance; small wonder, for they were staring into the buried past.

It happened one day that the regional commissioner for Lwow, which used to be called Lemberg, undertook a tour of inspection and for some reason had to stop in Lopatyny. Count Morstin’s house was pointed out to him and he at once made for it. To his astonishment he caught sight of the bust of the Emperor Franz Josef in front of the house, in the midst of a little shrubbery. He looked at it for a long while and finally decided to enter the house and ask the Count himself about the significance of this memorial. But he was even more astonished, not to say startled, at the sight of Count Morstin coming towards him in the uniform of a Rittmeister of Dragoons. The regional commissioner was himself a “Little Pole”; which means he came from what was formerly Galicia. He had himself served in the Austrian Army. Count Morstin appeared to him like a ghost from a chapter of history long forgotten by the regional commissioner.

He restrained himself and at first asked no questions. As they sat down to table, however, he began cautiously to enquire about the Emperor’s memorial.

“Ah, yes,” said the Count, as if no new world had been born, “His late Majesty of blessed memory spent eight days in this house. A very gifted peasant lad made the bust. It has always stood here and will do so as long as I live.”

The commissioner stifled the decision which he had just taken and said with a smile, as it were quite casually, “You still wear the old uniform?”

“Yes,” said Morstin, “I am too old to have a new one made. In civilian clothes, do you know, I don’t feel altogether at ease since circumstances became so altered. I’m afraid I might be confused with a lot of other people. Your good health,” continued the Count, raising his glass and toasting his guest.

The regional commissioner sat on for a while, and then left the Count and the village of Lopatyny to continue his tour of inspection. When he returned to his Residence he issued orders that the bust should be removed from before Count Morstin’s house.

These orders finally reached the mayor (termed Wojt) of the village of Lopatyny and therefore, inevitably, were brought to the attention of Count Morstin.

For the first time, therefore, the Count now found himself in open conflict with the new power, of whose existence he had previously hardly taken cognizance. He realized that he was too weak to oppose it. He recalled the scene at night in the American bar in Zurich. Alas, there was no point any more in shutting one’s eyes to these new bankers and wearers of crowns, to the new ladies and gentlemen who ruled the world. One must bury the old world, but one must give it a decent burial.

So Count Morstin summoned ten of the oldest in habitants of the village of Lopatyny to his house — among them the clever and yet innocent Jew, Solomon Piniowsky. There also attended the Greek Catholic priest, the Roman Catholic priest and the Rabbi.

When they were all assembled Count Morstin began the following speech,

“My dear fellow-citizens, you have all known the old Monarchy, your old fatherland. It has been dead for years, and I have come to realize that there is no point in not seeing that it is dead. Perhaps it will rise again, but old people like us will hardly live to see it. We have received orders to remove, as soon as possible, the bust of the dead Emperor, of blessed memory, Franz Josef the First.

“We have no intention of removing it, my friends!

“If the old days are to be dead we will deal with them as one does deal with the dead: we will bury them.

“Consequently I ask you, my dear friends, to help me bury the dead Emperor, that is to say his bust, with all the ceremony and respect that are due to an Emperor, in three days’ time, in the cemetery.”

VI

The Ukranian joiner, Nikita Koldin, made a magnificent sarcophagus of oak. Three dead Emperors could have found accommodation in it.

The Polish blacksmith, Jarowslaw Wojciechowski, forged a mighty double eagle in brass which was firmly nailed to the coffin’s lid.

The Jewish Torah scribe, Nuchin Kapturak, inscribed with a goose quill upon a small roll of parchment the blessing which believing Jews must pronounce at the sight of a crowned head, cased it in hammered tin and laid it in the coffin.

Early in the morning — it was a hot summer day, countless invisible larks were trilling away in the heavens and countless invisible crickets were replying from the meadows — the inhabitants of Lopatyny gathered at the memorial to Franz Josef the First. Count Morstin and the mayor laid the bust to rest in its magnificent great sarcophagus. At this moment the bells of the church on the hill began to toll. All three pastors placed themselves at the head of the procession. Four strong old peasants bore the coffin on their shoulders. Behind them, his drawn saber in his hand, his dragoon helmet draped in field gray, went Count Franz Xaver Morstin, the closest person in the village to the dead Emperor, quite lonely and alone, as becomes a mourner. Behind him, wearing a little round black cap upon his silver hair, came the Jew, Solomon Piniowsky, carrying in his left hand his round velvet hat and raised in his right the black and yellow flag with the double eagle. And behind him the whole village, men and women.

The church bells tolled, the larks trilled and the crickets sang unceasingly.

The grave was prepared. The coffin was lowered with the flag draped over it, and for the last time Franz Xaver Morstin raised his saber in salute to his Emperor.

The crowd began to sob as though the Emperor Franz Josef and with him the old Monarchy and their own old home had only then been buried. The three pastors prayed.

So the old Emperor was laid to rest a second time, in the village of Lopatyny, in what had once been Galicia.

A few weeks later the news of this episode reached the papers. They published a few witticisms about it, under the heading, “Notes from all over.”

VII

Count Morstin, however, left the country. He now lives on the Riviera, an old man and worn out, spending his evenings playing chess and skat with ancient Russian generals. He spends an hour or two every day writing his memoirs. They will probably possess no significant literary value, for Count Morstin has no experience as a literary man, and no ambition as a writer. Since, however, he is a man of singular grace and style he delivers himself of a few memorable phrases, such as the following for example, which I reproduce with his permission: “It has been my experience that the clever are capable of stupidity, that the wise can be foolish, that true prophets can lie and that those who love truth can deny it. No human virtue can endure in this world, save only one: true piety. Belief can cause us no disappointment since it promises us nothing in this world. The true believer does not fail us, for he seeks no recompense on earth. If one uses the same yardstick for peoples, it implies that they seek in vain for national virtues, so-called, and that these are even more questionable than human virtues. For this reason I hate nationalism and nation states. My old home, the Monarchy, alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.”

So, proudly and sadly, writes the old Count. Peaceful, self-possessed, he waits on death. Probably he longs for it. For he has laid down in his will that he is to be buried in the village of Lopatyny; not, indeed, in the family vault, but alongside the grave of the Emperor Franz Josef, beside the bust of the Emperor.