THE MACCABÆAN
OLDNEY-LAND
“If you will it, It is no fable.”
BOOK I
AN EDUCATED AND DESPERATE YOUNG MAN
WRAPPED in deep melancholy, Dr. Friedrich Löwenberg sat at the round marble table of the coffee-house which he regularly frequented.
CHAPTER I
It was one of the old, comfortable Vienna cafés on the Alsergrunde. He had been a habitué even from his student days. With the precision of a bureaucrat, he entered at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and the pale, ailing waiter greeted him with becoming respect. Löwenberg made a pompous bow to the pale lady-cashier to whom he never spoke.
Then he sat down at a round reading-table, drank his coffee, and read all the newspapers through as they were brought to him in quick succession. The reading of the daily and weekly journals, the comic papers and the trade organs occupied no less than an hour and a half. When this task was at an end, he engaged in conversation with friends or simply sat and mused. That is to say, at one time he chatted; now he only dreamt; for the two good friends, who for years had participated in these characteristic and charming evenings in Café Birkenreis, had recently died. Both were older than he, and as the one, Heinrich, wrote in his farewell letter to Löwenberg before he put a cartridge through his brains, “It might be said that it was chronologically reasonable that I would be driven to despair earlier than you.” The other, Oswald, had sailed for Brazil to aid in the settlement of the Jewish proletariat, and there he had succumbed to the yellow fever.