Foghorns from steamers joined the applause. The throng dispersed into a spell of midsummer sweetness that lingered into fall.
***
When vacationers returned to Vienna they found in its streets a mellowing temper. The weather helped. During July and August frequent showers had punctuated sunshine. Rain had washed away most blossoms; but it had kept foliage juicy. As a result the proletariat of the outer districts, where their tenements adjoined the Vienna Woods, could stroll into green whose freshness ignored autumn. A few hellers would buy them a stick of horsemeat salami from stands by the vineyard inns; a few more coins would bring a bottle fermented from local grapes. Very soon they would lean against each other, sitting on the wine garden's hard wooden benches as happy as if on Sacher Hotel plush, singing of "the wine that will still sparkle when we no longer breathe, the girls that will laugh long after we are gone…… enjoying an evanescent, convivial, inexpensive, very Viennese binge in a bower.
Possibly it was the clement air as well as the Party's stand on capital punishment that made the widow of Franz Schuhmeier, the murdered Socialist deputy, send a request for lenience to the Minister of Justice; the killer's brother remained a leader of the Conservative Party, but just the same she asked His Excellency to commute the death penalty imposed on the man who had assassinated her husband.
There were other amicable gestures, some quite unexpected. The first prominent fall event unfolding in the whiteand-gold rococo of the Musikvereinssaal was not a concert but the Eleventh International Zionist Congress. Nine thousand attended, including a visitor from Prague, the labor-insurance official and would-be litterateur Franz Kafka, in town to give a speech at the concurrent Second International Conference on Accident Prevention.
His seven days in the Austrian capital pushed Kafka into insomnia, malaise, and the necessity for constant cold compresses. But another voice, then much more widely heard and known for its abrasive bigotry, took on a sudden gemutlich tone. The newspaper Reichspost, cutting edge of Austrian antiSemitism, hailed the Jewish event in the Musikvereinssaal as proof of Vienna's cosmopolitan importance, its pre-eminence as a congress city.
In the fall of 1913 Vienna even seemed to make peace with the future without jeopardizing its stature as a virtuoso of the past. In this matter the Emperor himself provided an example. Until now he had shrugged aside the new century's contraptions. Franz Joseph's adjutants-never His Majesty-picked up the telephone. He never climbed into a motorcar unless forced by etiquette-say, in the company of an automobile addict like the Kaiser. But in Bad Ischl, on August 19, the day after his eighty-third birthday, he consented to view Mr. Thomas Edison's newest invention, the Kinetophone. This machine coordinated the wizardries of the film projector with those of the gramophone. At a special premiere in the Ischl Town Theater, the monarch and his lady took their seats in the first row. Frau Schratt heartily applauded the image of Enrico Caruso intoning do re mi fa sol. The Emperor's clapping was, well, polite. Still he sanctified new technology with his presence.
Forty-eight hours earlier he had made a move which, while also not necessarily enthusiastic, carried greater significance. He had dispatched a document with his seal to Bluehnbach Castle near Salzburg; this was one of Franz Ferdinand's hunting estates where the archduke was currently shooting stag. The sovereign's handwritten letter appointed his nephew Inspector General of all Imperial and Royal Armed Forces-the most powerful post given the Crown Prince so far. This ele vation, a surprise considering the queasy relationship between the two, was effective immediately-and immediately made public. It, too, was seen as an ancient ruler's concession to tomorrow.
When the Court Train took Franz Joseph from Ischl back to Vienna on September 3, the city had been given, as it were, an All-Highest license to welcome modern things.
This it proceeded to do, with a baroque bow, of course. On some of the broader thoroughfares leading to the center of town, for example, the mayor established special lanes for motorcars in a hurry. Behind chauffeurs driving along these "fast strips" sat gentlemen registering, just as fast, the fall fashions of 1913. You could see them whiz by (at a velocity almost equaling the Crown Prince's Graf & Stift) in suits of the latest English "country cut," tweeds of informal blue gray. And though it wasn't cool enough as yet, the ladies went even further, anticipating winter's first harbingers from the Paris fashion houses: Directoire collars high in back to plunge rather heedlessly in front, crepe de chine dresses with ermine trimmings, huge "fantasy necklaces" of amber, coral, or lapis lazuli.
Most of such forward-minded feminine elegance could not be risked in automobiles. Their speed undid the perfection of the coiffure, not to speak of the plumage on the hat. No, ladies preferred the more leisured showcase of the fiacre. This horsedrawn cab, banned for a while, now received renewed municipal blessing. Indeed, to encourage fiacres against the proliferation of the fume-spewing taxi, they were permitted to dispense with set tariffs and to arrive at fares by mutual agreement. The fiacre, said the Mayor's office, would "return to the street scene a dear Viennese tradition."
Similar concerns touched a committee preparing, months in advance, the Industrialists' Ball-bound to be a highlight of the 1914 carnival season. The committee announced that there would be music from two orchestras as well as from six gramophone discs to be specially recorded in Buenos Aires by Los Caballeros; it was a band famous for that new rage, the tango (whose risque modernity had just led Kaiser Wilhelm to forbid all German soldiers from even listening to it while in uniform). On the other hand-and all rumors to the contraryVienna's Industrialists' Ball would be opened by an eighteenth-century cotillion, according to custom. In the fall of 1913 the city seemed readier than ever to absorb onward thrusts of the future into its own timeless choreography.
The Habsburg government applied the technique to its increasingly huffy little Balkan opponent. Flushed with victory over Bulgaria, the Serbs had once more deepened their raids into Albanian territory. Belgrade argued that Vienna used Albania as a staging ground for agents who fostered sedition among Albanian ethnics within Serb borders. Vienna militants contended that these complaints were a blind for Serb expansionism growing more rampant daily.
In his Chief of Staff's office Baron Conrad paced, dictating letter after letter to the Emperor; each paragraph tried to impress on His Majesty the outrages Belgrade visited in Albania on Austria's stature. From Belvedere Palace the Crown Prince countered with a letter to Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold stating that "all such Serb horror stories leave me cold."
As always, the Emperor had to arbitrate. In the spirit of the fall of 1913, Franz Joseph's government decided to combine the latest of mailed fists with an old-fashioned diplomatic smile. The Minister of War, Baron von Krobatin, announced that four more dreadnoughts would be built at a cost of 106 million kronen each; the ships would boast every twentiethcentury advance in armor and cannon; together they would constitute the most formidable task force in the Adriatic. At almost the same time Count von Berchtold held his fall reception for accredited ambassadors at the Ballhausplatz where he remarked, between toasts of champagne, that the sole purpose of Austrian strength was peace-especially peace with Serbia.