Nothing So Strange (12 page)

While we talked, just chatting about this and that, Pauli moved about the
small apartment with the quiet efficiency I was beginning to expect in all
that she did. Presently there was a meal on the table, nicely served and well
cooked. Yet it didn’t give an impression of being specially achieved for my
benefit. I noticed too that everything was neat and homelike and spotlessly
clean, though there were no elegancies and nothing that showed any sign of
money to spare. It was not a place one would have chosen to live in, however
austerely, if one could have afforded something a bit better. Every city has
its prevalent smell, and this apartment had the Vienna smell at full
strength— a mixture of coffee, bread baking, paprika, and drains. There
was nothing anyone could do except to learn to tolerate it.

“Well?” Brad said, when Pauli was in the kitchen.

“She’s lovely,” I answered. “I think you’re very fortunate.”

“You bet I am…. She’s quite a scientist, too—used to work in the
laboratory with me—that’s how we met. She also taught me German. I
taught her English. We have a rule that we speak nothing but English and
German every other day, but today we broke it—in your honor.”

“You shouldn’t have. I can speak German fairly well too.”

“How fortunate,” said Pauli, coming into the room with a plate of
pastries. “It will enable you to study the political situation, which is what
I understand you have come here for.” (I suppose Brad had shown her my
letter.)

Brad yawned. “That’s a signal for me to go to bed.
Politics.
Vienna’s leading industry nowadays. Where I come from they have a big dose
every four years, but here it keeps on all the time…. Good night, Jane.
You’ll get all the politics you want from Pauli.”

He called me Jane so easily now. And he had also said “where I come from”
as if I weren’t American also.

Pauli said she thought it best for him to go to bed early, because of his
temperature. I said I wouldn’t stay long myself, but she begged me not to
leave immediately. “All right,” I agreed, “provided we skip politics. I’d
much rather talk about you … and Brad.”

“So would I,” she answered, smiling that same composed smile. “So you call
him Brad?…
I
call him Mark.”

“Sounds reasonable. His name
is
Mark.” And then, for no reason I
could think of, I added: “It was my mother who started calling him Brad.”

“Oh yes? … He was once in love with her, wasn’t he?”

“
Was
he?”

“He told me so. I think it is lucky when the first woman a young man falls
in love with is someone very charming and much older than himself whom he
knows he cannot marry because she is already quite happily married.”

Well, I thought, if that’s what he told you, or how you look at it,
fine.

She went on, still smiling: “So you see I am not a bit jealous. Mark and I
are very happy.”

“I’m sure you are.”

It seemed to me she was laying a foundation on which we could be friendly,
and that the only difference in our attitudes was that I was prepared to be
friendly without any foundation at all.

I said: “Brad told me you worked with him in the laboratory.”

“Oh yes, but
for
him, not
with
him.” A sort of proud
humility in that. “He is going to be a very great scientist, did you
know?”

“Scientist or mathematician, which is it?”

“The one includes the other, in his case. Of course the work he does is
far beyond me now, but it is still possible for me to save some of his time.
I type out all his notes.”

“That must be a help. And incidentally, you speak excellent English, and
you cook so beautifully….”

“I am glad you think so. You must come here as much as you can during your
stay.”

“If Brad doesn’t mind. He might. I was just a friend, that’s all.”

“I know. He doesn’t have any
close
friends. But you were the
nearest to it.”

Had I been? It would have been more thrilling to learn it less
retrospectively.

She went on: “He used to take walks with you, he said. If you have time,
when his chill is better, I wish you would do that with him here … some
Sunday. That is one of the things I cannot do, owing to a lack of strength.”
A slight accent and an occasional phrase like that were the only signs that
her English was studied. Brad had done his job well.

I told her I’d be very glad to, if Brad asked me.

“I will suggest it,” she answered, with that same touch of inexorableness
matching the humility. “He needs the recreation. He works too hard. Far too
hard.”

“Professor Framm must be a bit of a slave driver,” I commented.

“I would not say he is to blame,” she replied, in a curiously guarded way.
“It is Mark’s own desire to work that drives him.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “He always was like that.”

“But now he is more like that than ever. And if it goes on, I am afraid
there will be a disaster.” She then told me that since he had come to Vienna
two years before he had had no time off except Sundays, and often even then
he worked at home. “It is true of course that we could not afford a holiday,”
she added, as if anxious to be fair.

“Doesn’t Framm pay enough?”

But she wouldn’t admit that either. “In Austria, unfortunately, there is
very little money.”

“Nor is there anywhere—for anything educational. Even in America,
which is supposed to be rich, teachers are the worst paid of all the
professions.”

“Ah, but in America….” I have so often heard those words spoken by
Europeans, and nearly always with the sentence unfinished. It is as if the
words stopped short at the beginning of the dream.

I left soon after that, telling her I’d use my influence, which wasn’t
much, and my walking capacity, which was considerable, to make Brad give
himself a day in the fresh air. She took me to a corner where I could find a
cab. There was a parade passing the end of the street, with banners,
uniforms, and scattered raucous shouting. “This is a district where there is
sometimes trouble,” she said—not nervously, but with a certain
watchfulness.

He said he was too busy to take a full day off, but I had
him and Pauli to
dinner at my hotel several times, and one Sunday, after I had called at his
apartment after lunch, he and I took a tram to the center of the city and
walked in the Burggarten. There seemed little reason why Pauli should not
have come with us, but she said she had his notes to type and that was that.
She was the sort of person who makes up her mind, and I wondered whether she
had at some exact moment made up her mind to marry Brad. That she loved him
and would devote herself to him was obvious, but whether in all things he
liked to be managed quite so efficiently I also wondered.

There had been rioting in the streets that morning, with many casualties
and arrests, yet the open-air orchestra in the Burggarten was playing the
overture to
Egmont
according to advertised schedule, and a throng of
all ages and classes listened intently. The music seemed to make a little
island of truce in the ocean of political turbulence; one did not feel that
listeners were indifferent to the political issue, but—much more
wonderfully—that for an hour or so they were putting it aside. I was
impressed by students who followed the score from large folios, and by the
shocked glances turned on someone who struck a match. All this could not have
happened in Hyde Park or in Central Park, I thought, but neither could the
marchings and countermarchings in which many of these listeners would take
part when the truce was over. There was something both frantic and pitiable
about the whole Viennese situation, and as we moved away from the crowd when
the overture ended I gave Brad a cue to talk about it.

But he had little to say. Politics was not in his line. He had a typical
American phobia for foreign issues; his view of Europe as a group of
squabbling states with no Washington (the city, not the man) had that large
simplicity that was, at root, pure Dakota—a rationalization of the
farmer’s exasperation with distant city-bred troubles. But in addition to
that, he had taken refuge in the scientist’s ivory tower, much higher and
less accessible than artists had ever had. He said he did not like the Nazis
any more than I did, but he thought the basic idea of
Anschluss
was
sound economically, except that it was far too fragmentary—there should
really be an
Anschluss
of all western Europe, though not under German
dictatorship. Such a large concept was doubtless impractical, but that, after
all, was the fault of the politicians who made it so and of the peoples who
elected the politicians. As far as Vienna was concerned, he hoped that the
Nazis would not come into power, but if they did, he hoped they would stop
the disorders in the city; that at least would confer a benefit. “Anyhow,” he
ended, “I’m not a politician. I don’t pretend to know much about the various
methods of hood- winking the electorate.”

“And to you it’s all nothing more than that?”

He smiled as if my seriousness required a concession. “Perhaps it’s a bit
in my bones to feel that way. I had an uncle I was very fond of as a child
because he was a bit of an amateur geologist and I used to think he knew
everything. As I was at the age when I wanted to know everything too, I asked
him once what had formed North Dakota—I meant geologically. He answered
‘The Republican Party, because they wanted two extra seats in the Senate.’ I
puzzled a lot over that answer then, and politics still puzzles me. Whenever
I hear a hot political argument I feel I’m eavesdropping in somebody else’s
world.”

“You once said the aim of science was to save the world. You can’t do that
if you don’t know what to save it from.”

“From politics, maybe—or from itself.” He laughed, then looked
embarrassed. “Did I really say that about saving the world?”

“You did. One night at the Hampstead house when Julian Spee came in after
dinner.”

“‘M, I remember. No wonder he asked me if I wouldn’t feel better in a
pulpit than a laboratory. But even he didn’t go so far as to suggest a
political career…. By the way, what happened to Julian?”

“He’s still doing quite well … but I’d rather talk about what’s happened
to you. So you don’t think any more that science could save the world?”

“I don’t know what you mean exactly.”

“Whatever
you
meant that night.”

“Probably I was thinking of mere technics.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh … crop management, reforestation, sanitation, health and welfare …
that sort of thing.”

“Nothing very mere about it.”

“True—and I expect there
are
a hundred men in the world
today— most of them names one hasn’t heard of—who could blueprint
a paradise on earth and organize it into existence … provided everyone else
would take orders from them for a few generations. But what chance is there
of that?”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“It would be, until the politicians got hold of it. Then you’d see some
changes made. Where would
they
be without the vested interests that
make and duplicate their own jobs?”

“So you’d require science to stage a world-wide revolution as a first
step?”

“That’s a big order too. There’s supposed to be a science of revolution,
but I never heard of any scientist who was interested in it—only the
politicians, for their own ends. Where are we, then, after all this argument?
We agree that the world needs saving, and that’s as far as we get.”

“We also agree that the world could save itself by letting scientists save
it if they
would
save it.”

“Maybe the world doesn’t want to save itself. It often behaves as if it
didn’t. Anyhow, until it makes up its mind, science has enough to do to
follow its own natural aim—which is to discover truth simply because it
is
truth.”

“Curiosity, Julian called it.”

“Yes—to an outsider it might look like that.”

“And I love that word ‘outsider.’ It fits in perfectly with the ivory
tower.”

“If you knew us better you wouldn’t think so badly of us.”

“You put yourselves on a pedestal.”

“If we do, it only makes us a better target. The politicians all hate us.
They’re also a bit afraid of what we might do someday—so they label as
well as libel us whenever they can. Bolshevik science, Germanic science,
Jewish science- -you hear plenty of that sort of nonsense nowadays in
Vienna.”

“Tell me about your work.”

“You mean my own work—at Framm’s laboratory?”

“Yes. Or is it private?”

“Of course not—nothing’s private. But I think you’d find it a bit
dull if I went into details. To put it vaguely, we’re trying to find what the
world’s really made of—what makes it go….”

“And where it’s going?”

“Yes, that’s all included.”

“I suppose it’s silly to ask if you’ve had any luck yet.”

He smiled. “We’ve got a few ideas, but they can’t be expressed outside the
language of mathematics.”

“I see. Not much good to the man in the street.”

“None at all. I know that sounds superior, but I can’t help it. From an
everyday standpoint it certainly isn’t of any immediate practical
importance.”

“You say ‘we.’ Do you mean yourself and Framm?”

“Well no, that would be flattering myself—
yet
. I should have
said
they
—meaning a few investigators scattered about the world
who don’t think a century or so’s too far to look ahead. They keep in touch.
They exchange results through articles in scientific journals. They don’t
bother about frontiers or nationalities. Even wars don’t interrupt them.
During the last war, for instance, Einstein put out his general theory, and
certain proofs of it required astronomical observations that could only be
made on a certain date from a certain place in the Atlantic Ocean. British
scientists wanted to make these observations, and I’ve been told that the
German Navy was contacted and agreed not to torpedo the ship. As it happened,
the war was over before the specified date, but the idea of pure science as
something above and beyond ordinary affairs had survived a pretty good
test…. Of course the whole thing had to be kept dark. Neither the British
nor the German public in wartime could have endured the thought of anything
international quietly going about its business as if all the nonsense weren’t
happening.”