Beware of Pity

  It could not often have been recorded in the annals of the little bar that a customer had occupied one of the alcoves merely for the purpose of having a private chat. But I felt it would be disagreeable for us to be disturbed by either the greetings or the curiosity of fellow-officers, or to have to jump smartly to attention if a senior officer entered the bar. I found it unpleasant enough to have to cross the main room in Dr Condor’s company — what badinage would I not be subjected to next morning were I to be seen hiding myself away in such intimate seclusion with a strange, plump gentleman! — but the moment we entered the bar I noticed with extreme satisfaction that it was as deserted as such a place always is at the end of the month in a small garrison town. No one from our regiment was there, and we had our choice of the alcoves.

  Evidently in order to prevent the waitress from bothering us again, Condor immediately ordered two litres of white wine, paid for it on the spot and tossed the girl such an enormous tip that she disappeared for good with a grateful ‘Your very good health, sir!’ The curtain fell, and it was only indistinctly that from time to time we caught the sound of a laugh or a few words from the tables in the middle of the room. We were completely sealed up and secure in our little cell.

  Condor poured out the wine into the tall, long-stemmed glasses. I realized from a certain hesitancy in his movements that he was inwardly cogitating all that he was going to tell me (and possibly, too, not tell me). When eventually he turned to me, the sleepy, comfortable look which had so annoyed me earlier on in the evening had completely disappeared. His gaze was now concentrated and alert.

  ‘Perhaps we had better begin at the beginning and for the moment leave our aristocratic friend Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva completely out of the picture. For when my story begins no such person existed. There was no landed proprietor in a long black coat, with gold-rimmed spectacles, no Hungarian nobleman. There was only, in a wretched little village on the Hungarian-Slovak frontier, a keen-eyed, narrow-chested little Jewish lad called Leopold Kanitz, familiarly referred to, I believe, as Lämmel Kanitz.’

  I must have started or in some other way betrayed my extreme surprise, for I was prepared for anything but this. But Condor went on in smiling, matter-of-fact tones:

  ‘Yes, Kanitz — Leopold Kanitz, I can’t change that. It was only much later that on the recommendation of a Minister the name was so sonorously Magyarized and decked out with a prefix of nobility. You have probably overlooked the fact that a man with influence and good connections, who has lived in this country for a long time, can grow a new skin, can have his name Magyarized and sometimes even acquire a title. A young fellow like you can’t be expected to know that; and besides, a great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since that puny creature, that keen-eyed, wily young Jewish lad minded the peasants’ horses or carriages whilst they were drinking in the inn, or carried the market-women’s baskets for them in return for a handful of potatoes.

  Kekesfalva’s father, or rather Kanitz’s father, then, far from being an aristocrat, was the poverty-stricken, be-ringleted Jewish landlord of a wayside tavern just outside the town. The woodcutters and coachmen looked in there every morning and evening to warm themselves with a glass or two of kontuschowska before or after their drive through the Carpathian frost. Sometimes the fiery liquid went too quickly to their heads; at such times they would smash chairs and glasses, and it was in a brawl that Kanitz’s father received his death-blow. A number of peasants who had arrived tipsy from the market started a scrimmage, and when old Kanitz, in order to save his few sticks of furniture, tried to pull them apart, one of them, a great hulking brute of a coachman, hurled him so violently into the corner that he lay there groaning. From that day on he spat blood, and a year later he died in hospital. He left no money whatever, and the mother, a plucky woman, managed to support herself and her small children by taking in washing and acting as a midwife. As a side-line she went out hawking, and Leopold carried her packages on his back. In addition, he scraped together a few kreutzers wherever he could. He got a job at the local shop, and went on errands from village to village. At an age when other children are still playing happily at marbles he knew exactly what everything cost, where and how one bought and sold things, how one made oneself useful and indispensable, and, what was more, he found time to pick up a few scraps of knowledge. The rabbi taught him to read and write, and he was so bright that by the age of thirteen he was able to do occasional clerical work for a lawyer, and to do accounts and fill up tax forms for the little shopkeepers in return for a few kreutzers. To save light, for every drop of oil was an extravagance for the poverty-stricken household, he sat night after night by the signal-lamp at the level-crossing — the village had no station of its own — and pored over torn or discarded newspapers. Even at that time the old people of the village wagged their beards approvingly and predicted that this lad would make his way in the world.

  How he managed to leave the Slovak village and get to Vienna I don’t know. But when he appeared in this district at the age of twenty he was already an agent for a reputable insurance firm, and, indefatigable as ever, combined with his official function a hundred and one other little jobs. He became what is known in Galicia as a “factor”, a man who trades in everything, acts as middle-man for everything, and in all sorts of ways spans the bridge between supply and demand.

  At first people tolerated him. Soon they began to take notice of him and even to need him. For he knew everything and was an expert on everything; was there a widow, for example, who was trying to marry off her daughter, he would come out in the role of marriage broker; was there someone who wanted to emigrate to America and needed information and papers, Leopold would procure them. In addition, he bought and sold old clothes, clocks, antiquarian articles, valued and exchanged land and goods and horses, and when an officer wanted a loan, he always managed to procure it for him. His knowledge and his sphere of operations widened from year to year.

  With that sort of energy and tenacity a man can make money in all sorts of ways. But real fortunes are only made as the result of a special relation between receipts and expenditure, between earnings and out-goings. This, then, was the other secret in the rise of our friend Kanitz: in all those years he spent as good as nothing, apart from the fact that he supported a whole string of relations and paid for his brother’s studies. The only money he really spent on himself went in the purchase of a black coat and those gold-rimmed spectacles which you know so well and by means of which he won for himself amongst the peasants the reputation of being a “scholar”. But long after he had become affluent he continued to pose in the district as a little agent. For “agent” is a wonderful word, an all-embracing cloak, which covers a multitude of sins, all sorts of things, and Kanitz concealed behind it, above all, the fact that he had long since ceased to be a middle-man, and was now an entrepreneur and capitalist. It seemed to him to be more important and more sensible to become rich than to be regarded as rich (one might have thought he had read Schopenhauer’s wise paralipomena with regard to what one is or merely represents oneself to be).

  The fact that a man who is at once hard-working, clever and thrifty will sooner or later make money seems to me to be so obvious as to require no particular philosophical meditation; and there does not seem to be anything particularly admirable in his doing so; after all, we doctors know better than anyone that at decisive moments a man’s banking account is of very little use. The thing that really impressed me about friend Kanitz from the start was his positively daemonic determination to add to his knowledge at the same time as his fortune. Whole nights in trains, every free moment while travelling, in hotels, on expeditions, he read and studied. He studied all the text-books on both commercial and industrial law so as to be able to act as his own lawyer, he followed all the auctions in London and Paris like a professional antiquarian, and he was as versed as a banker in the intricacies of investments and financial transactions. And so it followed as a matter of course that his busines
s assumed more and more grandiose proportions. From the peasants he turned to the farmers, from the farmers to the great aristocratic landed proprietors; soon he was negotiating the sale of whole harvests and forests, building factories, founding syndicates, and finally even securing certain army contracts. The black coat and the gold-rimmed spectacles were now to be seen more and more frequently in the ante-rooms of the Ministries. But still — and by this time he had a fortune of a quarter of a million, perhaps half a million crowns — the people here in this part of the world still took him to be an insignificant agent and still greeted little Kanitz extremely casually, until at last he pulled off his big coup and at one blow was transformed from Lämmel Kanitz into Herr von Kekesfalva.’

  Condor broke off. ‘What I have told you so far, I know only at secondhand. The story that follows, however, I had from him himself. He told it me after the operation on his wife, while we sat waiting in a room at the sanatorium from ten o’clock at night until dawn. From this point on I can vouch for every word, for at such moments a man does not lie.’

  Slowly and thoughtfully Condor sipped his wine before lighting a fresh cigar — I think it was the fourth he had smoked that evening, and it was this incessant smoking in particular which made me realize that the exaggeratedly comfortable, jovial manner he assumed in the role of doctor, his drawling way of talking and apparent nonchalance, were all part of a technique specially adopted to enable him to sort out his impressions (and perhaps to observe his patients) at leisure. He took several pulls at his cigar, sucking at it almost drowsily with his thick lips and gazing at the smoke with almost dreamy interest. Then he pulled himself up sharply.

  ‘The story of how Leopold Kanitz became lord and master of Kekesfalva begins in a slow train from Budapest to Vienna. Although he was forty-two by this time, and his hair was already greying at the temples, our friend still spent most of his nights travelling — the avaricious are thrifty with time as well as money — and it goes without saying that he invariably travelled third. An old hand at the game, he had developed a certain technique for night journeys. First of all, he would spread out over the hard wooden seat a plaid rug that he had picked up at an auction. Then he would hang the inevitable black coat carefully on the peg, put his gold-rimmed glasses away in their case, take out of his canvas travelling-bag — he never aspired to a leather one — a woolly dressing-jacket, and finally tilt his cap over his face to keep the light out of his eyes. All these preparations complete, he would snuggle up in the corner of the carriage, for he had long since become accustomed to dozing off even in a sitting position. That a man has no need of a bed for the night and of comfort for sleep, little Leopold had learned as a child.

  But on this occasion our friend did not fall asleep, for there were three other people besides himself in the compartment, and they were talking “shop”. And when people talked “shop”, Kanitz could never keep his ears shut. His thirst for knowledge had diminished as little with the years as his thirst for possessions; the two were no more to be sundered than are a pair of pincers.

  He was just on the point of dozing off when the mention of a sum of money made him start like a horse at the sound of a bugle-call. ‘And would you believe it, it was really only through his blasted stupidity that the lucky swine made sixty thousand crowns at one swoop!’

  Sixty thousand? Who? What? How? In a flash Kanitz was wide awake; it was as though an icy-cold shower had driven the sleep from his eyes. Who had earned sixty thousand, and how? He must find out at all costs. Of course he took good care not to let his three fellow-travellers know that he was eavesdropping. He pulled his cap even lower over his forehead, so that its shadow should completely cover his eyes and the others should think he was asleep; then, cunningly and cautiously making use of each jolt of the carriage, he edged nearer to them, so as not to lose a word, despite the rattling of the wheels.

  The young man who had been talking away with such vehemence and had let out the trumpet blast of indignation which had caused Kanitz to prick up his ears was, it transpired, a clerk in the office of a Viennese lawyer, and in his anger at his employer’s amazing luck he continued to hold forth in excited tones:

  ‘And the joke is that the fellow bungled the whole thing from start to finish. Because of a piffling little court case that brought him in fifty crowns at the most he was a day late in getting to Budapest, and in the meantime the silly cow had let herself be soft-soaped right up to her ears. The whole affair had gone off marvellously — an incontestable will, perfect witnesses from Switzerland, unimpeachable medical evidence that the old girl Orosvár had been in full possession of her faculties when she had made her will. The gang of great-nephews and connections by marriage would never have got a brass farthing in spite of the scurrilous stories that their lawyer managed to get into the evening newspapers, and so dead certain was my muttonhead of a chief that, because the case was not to come on until Friday, he went back without a qualm to Vienna for a silly little court case. In the meantime that artful dodger Wiezner got at her by paying her a friendly visit — what d’you think of that, the lawyer on the other side! The half-witted cow went all hysterical. “But I don’t want such an awful lot of money, all I want is peace,’” he mimicked in some North German dialect or other. ‘Ah, well, she’s got her peace now, and the others, quite needlessly, have grabbed three-quarters of her inheritance! Without waiting for my chief to turn up, the silly cow of a woman agreed to a settlement out of court, the most idiotic settlement there ever was. She signed away a good half of her fortune with one stroke of the pen.’

  ‘And bear in mind, Herr Leutnant,’ said Condor, turning to me, ‘that during the whole of this philippic our friend Kanitz sat rolled up in the corner like a hedgehog, his cap pulled right down over his eyes, not missing a single word. He realized at once what it was all about, for the Orosvár case — I’m using another name, because the real one is too well known — was at that time front-page news in all the Hungarian newspapers, and was a really fantastic affair. I’ll give you a brief account of it.

  The old Princess Orosvár, already fabulously rich when she came from the Ukraine, had outlived her husband by a good thirty-five years. She was as hard as nails and as wicked as they make ’em, and ever since her only two children had died in one night of whooping-cough she had hated all the other Orosvárs with a deadly hatred for having outlived her own poor brats; and it seems to me quite credible that it should have been out of sheer spite and a malicious desire not to let her impatient nephews and great-nieces inherit her fortune that she should have lived to be eighty-four. Whenever any of the relatives who were waiting so eagerly for her death turned up to see her, she would refuse to receive them, and even the most cordial letter from any member of the family was thrown unanswered into the waste-paper basket. Misanthropic and eccentric ever since the loss of her children and her husband, she never spent more than two or three months of the year in Kekesfalva, and no one visited her; the rest of the time she gadded about the world, lived in grand style in Nice and Montreux, dressed and undressed, had her hair done, her hands manicured and her face made up, read French novels, bought masses of clothes, went from shop to shop, haggling and cursing like a Russian market-woman. Naturally, her companion, the only person whose presence she tolerated, had by no means an easy life of it. Day after day the poor, quiet creature had to feed, brush and take out three loathsome, smelly terriers, play the piano to the old fool, read aloud to her, and let herself be bullied in the most vile manner for no reason at all. Sometimes, when the old lady had drunk more brandy or vodka than was good for her — a habit she had brought with her from the Ukraine — the poor young woman, it is said on the best authority, had even to put up with blows. In all the luxury resorts of Europe, in Nice and Cannes, in Aix-les-Bains and Montreux, everyone knew the bloated old woman with the enamelled pug-face and the dyed hair who, in a raucous voice, without caring who was listening, blustered like a sergeant-major at the waiters and grimaced at people whom she
didn’t like. Wherever she went there followed her like a shadow on these ghastly promenades — walking behind her with the dogs, never by her side — the companion, a thin, pale, fair-haired creature with frightened eyes, who, one could tell, never ceased to be ashamed of her mistress’s vulgarity, and yet feared her as though she were the devil incarnate. In her seventy-eighth year the Princess Orosvár had a very severe attack of pneumonia in the hotel in Territet which the Empress Elizabeth so frequently visited. How the news found its way to Hungary is a mystery. But without any prearranged plan the relatives came rushing along, packed out the hotel, pestered the doctor for news, and waited, waited, for the old lady’s death.