A Glove Shop In Vienna

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It was mid-December and a night of snow. All day the thick, soft flakes had fallen quietly, covering the blank-faced nymphs and satyrs on Vienna’s innumerable fountains; blanketing the bronze rumps of the rearing horses on which dead warriors of the Habsburg Empire rode forever; giving the trees along the Ringstrasse a spare, Siberian splendour.

Sounds in the snow were muffled. The sound of carriage wheels on the cobbles, the sound of street sellers crying their wares — even the sound of church bells, so much a part of Vienna in those days before the First World War — came far more gently in the snow.

The gas-lamps threw rings of brightness into the squares, the smart shops along the Kartner Strasse looked like stage sets. In the big apartment houses, those grand, slightly crumbling Viennese houses which look like Renaissance palaces but house simply doctors and lawyers and other self-respecting members of the bourgeoisie, the closed shutters were pierced by rays which the snow threw back in unaccustomed brightness.

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