The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
Prochazka (in a fury). 'No--not ear boxing, but genuine blows!'
Vieholawek. 'I would rather take my hat off to a Jew than to Wolf!'
Strohbach (to Wolf). 'Jew flunky! Here we have been fighting the Jews
for ten years, and now you are helping them to power again. How much do
you get for it?'
Holansky. 'What he wants is a strait-jacket!'
Wolf continues his reading. It is a market report now.
Remark flung across the House to Schonerer: 'Die Grossmutter auf dem
Misthaufen erzeugt worden!'
It will be judicious not to translate that. Its flavour is pretty high,
in any case, but it becomes particularly gamy when you remember that the
first gallery was well stocked with ladies.
Apparently it was a great hit. It fetched thunders of joyous enthusiasm
out of the Christian Socialists, and in their rapture they flung biting
epithets with wasteful liberality at specially detested members of
the Opposition; among others, this one at Schonerer, 'Bordell in der
Krugerstrasse!' Then they added these words, which they whooped, howled,
and also even sang, in a deep-voiced chorus: 'Schmul Leeb Kohn! Schmul
Leeb Kohn! Schmul Leeb Kohn!' and made it splendidly audible above the
banging of desk-boards and the rest of the roaring cyclone of fiendish
noises. (A gallery witticism comes flitting by from mouth to mouth
around the great curve: 'The swan-song of Austrian representative
government!' You can note its progress by the applausive smiles and nods
it gets as it skims along.)
Kletzenbauer. 'Holofernes, where is Judith?' (Storm of laughter.)
Gregorig (the shirt-merchant). 'This Wolf-Theatre is costing 6,000
florins!'
Wolf (with sweetness). 'Notice him, gentlemen; it is Mr. Gregorig.'
(Laughter.)
Vieholawek (to Wolf). 'You Judas!'
Schneider. 'Brothel-knight!'
Chorus of Voices. 'East-German offal tub!'
And so the war of epithets crashes along, with never-diminishing energy,
for a couple of hours.
The ladies in the gallery were learning. That was well; for by-and-by
ladies will form a part of the membership of all the legislatures in the
world; as soon as they can prove competency they will be admitted. At
present, men only are competent to legislate; therefore they look
down upon women, and would feel degraded if they had to have them for
colleagues in their high calling.
Wolf is yelling another market report now.
Gessman. 'Shut up, infamous louse-brat!'
During a momentary lull Dr. Lueger gets a hearing for three sentences of
his speech. They demand and require that the President shall suppress the
four noisiest members of the Opposition.
Wolf (with a that-settles-it toss of the head). 'The shifty trickster of
Vienna has spoken!'
Iro belonged to Schonerer's party. The word-of-honour incident has
given it a new name. Gregorig is a Christian Socialist, and hero of the
post-cards and the Wimberger soda-squirting incident. He stands vast
and conspicuous, and conceited and self-satisfied, and roosterish and
inconsequential, at Lueger's elbow, and is proud and cocky to be in such
a great company. He looks very well indeed; really majestic, and aware
of it. He crows out his little empty remark, now and then, and looks as
pleased as if he had been delivered of the Ausgleich. Indeed, he does
look notably fine. He wears almost the only dress vest on the floor; it
exposes a continental spread of white shirt-front; his hands are posed
at ease in the lips of his trousers pockets; his head is tilted back
complacently; he is attitudinising; he is playing to the gallery.
However, they are all doing that. It is curious to see. Men who only
vote, and can't make speeches, and don't know how to invent witty
ejaculations, wander about the vacated parts of the floor, and stop in
a good place and strike attitudes--attitudes suggestive of weighty
thought, mostly--and glance furtively up at the galleries to see how it
works; or a couple will come together and shake hands in an artificial
way, and laugh a gay manufactured laugh, and do some constrained and
self-conscious attitudinising; and they steal glances at the
galleries to see if _they_ are getting notice. It is like a scene on the
stage--by-play by minor actors at the back while the stars do the great
work at the front. Even Count Badeni attitudinises for a moment; strikes
a reflective Napoleonic attitude of fine picturesqueness--but
soon thinks better of it and desists. There are two who do not
attitudinise--poor harried and insulted President Abrahamowicz, who
seems wholly miserable, and can find no way to put in the dreary time
but by swinging his bell and discharging occasional remarks which nobody
can hear; and a resigned and patient priest, who sits lonely in a great
vacancy on Majority territory and munches an apple.
Schonerer uplifts his fog-horn of a voice and shakes the roof with an
insult discharged at the Majority.
Dr. Lueger. 'The Honourless Party would better keep still here!'
Gregorig (the echo, swelling out his shirt-front). 'Yes, keep quiet,
pimp!'
Schonerer (to Lueger). 'Political mountebank!'
Prochazka (to Schonerer). 'Drunken clown!'
During the final hour of the sitting many happy phrases were distributed
through the proceedings. Among them were these--and they are strikingly
good ones:
'Blatherskite!'
'Blackguard!'
'Scoundrel!'
'Brothel-daddy!'
This last was the contribution of Dr. Gessman, and gave great
satisfaction. And deservedly. It seems to me that it was one of the most
sparkling things that was said during the whole evening.
At half-past two in the morning the House adjourned. The victory was
with the Opposition. No; not quite that. The effective part of it
was snatched away from them by an unlawful exercise of Presidential
force--another contribution toward driving the mistreated Minority out
of their minds.
At other sittings of the parliament, gentlemen of the Opposition,
shaking their fists toward the President, addressed him as 'Polish Dog'.
At one sitting an angry deputy turned upon a colleague and shouted,
'----------!'
You must try to imagine what it was. If I should offer it even in the
original it would probably not get by the editor's blue pencil; to
offer a translation would be to waste my ink, of course. This remark was
frankly printed in its entirety by one of the Vienna dailies, but the
others disguised the toughest half of it with stars.
If the reader will go back over this chapter and gather its array of
extraordinary epithets into a bunch and examine them, he will marvel at
two things: how this convention of gentlemen could consent to use such
gross terms; and why the users were allowed to get out the place alive.
There is no way to understand this strange situation. If every man in
the House were a professional blackguard, and had his home in a sailor
boarding-house, one could still not understand it; for, although
that sort do use such terms, they never take them. These men are not
professional blackguards; they are mainly gentlemen, and educated; yet
they use the terms, and take them too. They really seem to attach no
consequence to them. One cannot say that they act like schoolboys; for
that is only almost true, not entirely. Schoolboys blackguard each other
fiercely, and by the hour, and one would think that nothing would ever
come of it but noise; but that would be a mistake. Up to a certain limit
the result would be noise only, but, that limit overstepped, trouble
would follow right away. There are certain phrases--phrases of
a peculiar character--phrases of the nature of that reference to
Schonerer's grandmother, for instance--which not even the most
spiritless schoolboy in the English-speaking world would allow to pass
unavenged. One difference between schoolboys and the law-makers of
the Reichsrath seems to be that the law-makers have no limit, no
danger-line. Apparently they may call each other what they please, and
go home unmutilated.
Now, in fact, they did have a scuffle on two occasions, but it was not
on account of names called. There has been no scuffle where that was the
cause.
It is not to be inferred that the House lacks a sense of honour because
it lacks delicacy. That would be an error. Iro was caught in a lie, and
it profoundly disgraced him. The House cut him, turned its back upon
him. He resigned his seat; otherwise he would have been expelled. But it
was lenient with Gregorig, who had called Iro a cowardly blatherskite
in debate. It merely went through the form of mildly censuring him. That
did not trouble Gregorig.
The Viennese say of themselves that they are an easy-going,
pleasure-loving community, making the best of life, and not taking it
very seriously. Nevertheless, they are grieved about the ways of their
Parliament, and say quite frankly that they are ashamed. They claim
that the low condition of the parliament's manners is new, not old.
A gentleman who was at the head of the government twenty years ago
confirms this, and says that in his time the parliament was orderly and
well-behaved. An English gentleman of long residence here endorses this,
and says that a low order of politicians originated the present forms of
questionable speech on the stump some years ago, and imported them
into the parliament.(2) However, some day there will be a Minister of
Etiquette and a sergeant-at-arms, and then things will go better. I mean
if parliament and the Constitution survive the present storm.
IV.--THE HISTORIC CLIMAX
During the whole of November things went from bad to worse. The
all-important Ausgleich remained hard aground, and could not be sparred
off. Badeni's government could not withdraw the Language Ordinance and
keep its majority, and the Opposition could not be placated on easier
terms. One night, while the customary pandemonium was crashing and
thundering along at its best, a fight broke out. It was a surging,
struggling, shoulder-to-shoulder scramble. A great many blows
were struck. Twice Schonerer lifted one of the heavy ministerial
fauteuils--some say with one hand--and threatened members of the
Majority with it, but it was wrenched away from him; a member hammered
Wolf over the head with the President's bell, and another member choked
him; a professor was flung down and belaboured with fists and choked; he
held up an open penknife as a defence against the blows; it was snatched
from him and flung to a distance; it hit a peaceful Christian Socialist
who wasn't doing anything, and brought blood from his hand. This was the
only blood drawn. The men who got hammered and choked looked sound and
well next day. The fists and the bell were not properly handled, or
better results would have been apparent. I am quite sure that the
fighters were not in earnest.
On Thanksgiving Day the sitting was a history-making one. On that day
the harried, bedevilled, and despairing government went insane. In order
to free itself from the thraldom of the Opposition it committed this
curiously juvenile crime; it moved an important change of the Rules of
the House, forbade debate upon the motion, put it to a stand-up vote
instead of ayes and noes, and then gravely claimed that it had been
adopted; whereas, to even the dullest witness--if I without immodesty
may pretend to that place--it was plain that nothing legitimately to be
called a vote had been taken at all.
I think that Saltpeter never uttered a truer thing than when he said,
'Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.' Evidently the
government's mind was tottering when this bald insult to the House was
the best way it could contrive for getting out of the frying-pan.
The episode would have been funny if the matter at stake had been a
trifle; but in the circumstances it was pathetic. The usual storm was