The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth Read Free Book Online

nine from the cashbox if you sign for them. Be careful with women! Most of them are diseased.” And, after a pause: “I’ve decided that you’re going to be a lawyer. It will take two years. There’ll be time enough for the army. It can be deferred until you’re done.”
    The boy took the nine guldens as obediently as he took his father’s wish. He seldom visited women, chose among them carefully, and had six guldens left when he came home again in the summer holidays. He asked his father for permission to invite a friend. “Fine,” said the major, somewhat astonished. The friend came with little baggage but a huge paint box, which did not appeal to the master of the house.
    “He paints?” asked the old man.
    “Very nicely,” said Franz, the son.
    “Don’t let him splatter up the house. He can paint the landscape.”
    The guest did paint outdoors, but not the landscape. He was painting Baron Trotta from memory. At every meal he memorized his host’s features.
    “Why are you staring at me?” asked the baron. Both boys turned red and peered at the tablecloth. Nevertheless the portrait was finished, framed, and presented to the old man when the boys left. He studied it thoughtfully and with a smile. He turned it over as if seeking further details perhaps left out on the front; he held it up to the window, then far from his eyes, gazed at himself in the mirror, compared himself with the portrait, and finally said, “Where should it hang?” It was his first joy in many years. “You can lend your friend money if he needs something,” he murmured to Franz. “Get along with each other!” Theportrait was and remained the only one ever done of old Trotta. Later it hung in his son’s study and even haunted his grandson’s imagination.
    Meanwhile the portrait kept the major in a rare mood for several weeks. He hung it now on one, now on another wall, feeling flattered delight as he scrutinized his hard, jutting nose, his clean-shaven jaw, his pale, narrow lips, his gaunt cheekbones rising like hills in front of the tiny black eyes, and the low, heavily creased forehead covered by the awning of close-cropped, bristly, thorny hair. Only now did he grow acquainted with his features; he sometimes had a mute dialogue with his own face. It aroused unfamiliar thoughts and memories, baffling, quickly blurring shadows of wistfulness. He had needed the portrait to experience his early old age and his great loneliness; from the painted canvas loneliness and old age came flooding toward him. Has it always been like this? he wondered. Has it been like this always?
    Now and then, aimlessly, he went to the cemetery, to his wife’s grave, peered at the gray pedestal and the chalky-white cross, the dates of her birth and death: he calculated that she had died too early and he admitted that he could not remember her clearly. He had forgotten, say, her hands. Quinquina Martial Wine flashed into his mind, a medicament she had taken for many long years. Her face? Shutting his eyes, he could still evoke it, but soon it vanished, blurring into the reddish circular twilight. He became mild-mannered in the house and on the farm, sometimes stroking a horse, smiling at the cows, drinking liquor more often than before, and one day he wrote a brief letter to his son outside the normal schedule. People began greeting him with smiles; he nodded pleasantly. Summer came. The holidays brought the son and the friend; the old man drove them to town, entered a restaurant, had a few gulps of slivovitz, and ordered a lavish meal for the boys.
    The son became a lawyer, visited home more frequently, looked around the estate, felt one day that he wanted to manage it and abandon his law career. He confessed his wish to his father. The major said, “It’s too late. You’ll never become a farmer or manage an estate in your lifetime. You’ll make an able official,that’s all.” The matter was settled. The son obtained a political office, becoming a