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.

 

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