White Stallion of Lipizza

  Contents

  1. The Morning Parade

  2. Only a Schilling

  3. First in Line

  4. Without the Dream

  5. A Momentous Cable

  6. From the Imperial Box

  7. Visitors from Styria

  8. Cheers for Xenophon

  9. So Much to Learn

  10. To Piber!

  11. The Foaling Place

  12. The Imperial Stables

  13. Sudden Changes at Home

  14. The World Is a Wheel

  15. Special Assignment

  16. Borina’s Cue

  17. Spectacular Entrance

  18. A New World for Hans

  19. The Four-legged Professor

  20. The First Milestone

  21. Borina Plays a Trick

  22. Between the Pillars

  23. A Rascal in the Gallery

  24. I Willed It to Happen!

  25. One Beam of Splendor

  Epilogue

  About the Author and Artist

  To Colonel Alois Podhajsky, Director of the Spanish Court Riding School of Vienna

  Whose life is dedicated to the purpose which he has expressed in his own words: “Our Spanish Court Riding School is a tiny candle in the big world. Our duty, our privilege, is to keep it burning. If we can send out one beam of splendor, of glory, of elegance into this torn and troubled world, that is worth a man’s life.”

  Chapter 1

  THE MORNING PARADE

  THE CLOCK on the steeple of St. Michael’s church showed two minutes before seven. Hans, driving his father’s bakery cart, clucked to Rosy to hurry. In two minutes they must be at the Hofburg. Rosy broke into a shambling trot, clattering over the cobbles at her best pace. And just as the church bells were chiming the hour of seven the policeman on the Josefsplatz threw wide his arms in a commanding “Halt!”

  From both directions all cars screeched to a stop. Hans pulled up smartly. His body alerted, and a smile of eagerness spread across his face. His luck and timing had been perfect this morning. He and Rosy were not only first in line, but they were nearest the curb, too. The very best spot to see.

  It was the Lipizzaners Hans was watching for, the famous white stallions of Vienna. Every morning they were led out from their stables on one side of the Hofburg, then through the archway to the great old Palace which housed the Spanish Court Riding School. Here they were carefully trained in the intricate and beautiful movements of classical ballet. And here each Sunday great crowds thronged the vast hall to see their unique performance.

  Hans, the baker boy, had never been inside the Palace. He had no money for a ticket. But the horses fascinated him, and morning after morning he maneuvered for a glimpse of them in passing. From before daylight, while he splashed just enough water on his face to pass inspection by his mother, he began scheming how to hurry her as she filled the big bakery trays with poppyseed bread and rye, long rolls and tiny kipferln. On the rare occasions when she was ahead of schedule, he dawdled over his tasks of carrying empty flour bags and butter tubs to the attic storeroom. But when she was behind, he pitched in and helped feverishly, one eye on the clock. In his haste he sometimes dropped a kipferl, and once he clumsily let go a whole tray of hot bread. That day he ended up last in line, behind all the spitting, chuffing automobiles, and in the fog and fumes he couldn’t see at all. But today, here he was in first place.

  It was bitter cold this early February morning, but Hans was unaware of his cold fingers. The bright moment of his day had come. His eyes fixed on the great stable doors. They swung open. Even before he caught his first glimpse, his whole body vibrated to the kettledrum rhythm of hoofbeats on the cobblestones. First one vague shape emerged from the depth of the stables; then suddenly the semidarkness was slashed by a parade of white stallions, blanketed in red and gold.

  “Notice me! Notice me!” Rosy neighed sharply. For a whisper of time the lead stallion glanced at the aged mare hooked to the bakery cart. Then he faced front, and in majestic dignity stepped across the street with long, supple strides. The other stallions never turned their heads.

  Spellbound, Hans watched the rippling movement of the powerful hindquarters, the thrust of foreleg, the proud curve of the neck. A groom in dark uniform was leading each stallion, but he seemed part of the thick winter fog so that for Hans he did not exist at all. There were only the stallions, possessed of such power and nobility that Hans watched in a state of bliss as they crossed the street while all traffic stood still.

  With their disappearance into the Palace, Rosy let out a whinny of yearning.

  “Never mind, Rosy,” Hans spoke to the old mare. “At least the biggest one noticed you.”

  The strident tooting of automobile horns set Hans in motion. He jiggled the reins and the old mare shook herself into action, ambling along at her own pace. She knew the next stop, and the next, and now that she had seen the white horses for this day there was no need to hurry.

  Hans, born and reared in Vienna, accepted as his birthright the austere grandeur of the Imperial Palace; and he accepted the fame and beauty of the white stallions though he did not know the story of how they came to be in Vienna. When he first began watching them, he was satisfied with looking. It was an interesting event in his workaday world. He didn’t mind being a delivery boy. In fact, some of the waitresses at the coffee houses were very nice and gave him treats of thick slices of sausage, which he much preferred to the baked goods his father made. And he even liked school, now that he was in the seventh year where history and science were full of daring and adventure. His world was small and ordered, and seemed likely to flow on quietly, like an arm of the Danube.

  But lately as he jolted along, the old wagon creaking, Hans began to feel restless. He felt shut out when the great doors of the Palace closed on the mysteries of what went on within. Moved by an urge almost like Rosy’s herd instinct, he felt he must join the white stallions.

  “From the stable to the Riding School they go,” he thought, “from one paradise to another. While Rosy and I just deliver today’s bakery goods and pick up yesterday’s trays, some washed clean, some spattered with whipped cream gone sour.”

  With his glimpse of the horses each morning, curiosity was building up in Hans. Now he watched the newspapers for accounts of the Sunday performances. Every picture of the Lipizzaners doing their ballet routines he clipped and saved. The names of the movements fascinated him. It was like another language. The capriole, the courbette, the levade, the piaffe. What did they mean? When was he going to find out what went on inside the great Riding Hall? How did the Riding Masters work the miracles he saw in the pictures? How did they make a great big powerful stallion stand up on his hind legs and hop along as if he weighed nothing at all? How did they get him to fly through the air like the winged Pegasus in his mythology book? How did they do it?

  One night he cornered his father in the kitchen where he was braiding fat ropes of dough into bread. “Papa,” Hans blurted, “could I go to the Riding School and learn to ride the white stallions?”

  Before the man could straighten up and answer, Hans’s mother handed him a shaker marked Poppyseeds. “Ach, Hans,” she said, “never has there been a rider in our family. Or your papa’s. The bakery business will be yours some day. Listen how nice it sounds: Hans Haupt: Braided Bread a Specialty. And when Rosy is gone,” she added as if offering a premium, “you buy yourself a shiny new truck, yes?”

  Hans seemed not to have heard. He watched the pastry brush in his father’s hands as it slapped the melted butter up and down and across the fat cheeks of the braided loaves. Dutifully Hans shook the poppyseeds over them and watched them slither into place.

  “Pap
a,” he repeated, “could I?”

  “Hans!” his mother scolded. “Not so thick! The seeds come high. The price is up.”

  Still there was no answer from the boy’s father. Not until a dozen loaves were glazed and shoveled into the huge oven did he give his full attention to his son. Studying Hans’s face, he wiped his floury arms and hands on his apron and settled himself into an old leather armchair in the living part of the kitchen. He nodded to his wife to leave the room. She picked up her bag of mending and obediently left. When the door had clicked shut, Herr Haupt smiled at Hans in understanding and affection. “The truth is what you want, eh, Hans?”

  “Please!”

  “Well, then, you must remember who you are.”

  Hans shifted from one foot to the other; he hated long lectures.

  “You come from a family of bakers, Hans. My grosspapa, my papa, your papa, and soon you. We are working stock. We do not venture behind the gates of palaces where great folks ride.”

  “But, Papa, maybe if I just looked inside to see how . . .”

  “No one is ever satisfied with looking, Hans. It only builds the hunger. Like a starving man watching through coffeehouse windows, seeing people lift the forkful of strudel to their mouth.”

  He got up and roughed his hand through Hans’s flaxen hair, as if now the query were answered and settled for all time. “Wash your mind of the white stallions, Hans. They are not for us; they belong to emperors and kings.”

  He chuckled softly to himself. “The life of a baker is not so bad. In a way he is an artist, too. Now, do your papa a favor and run to the tobacco shop and buy me a schilling’s worth of my regular mixture.”

  On his way to the tobacconist, Hans joined a crowd of window-shoppers studying a lighted display of art collections. Among them were porcelain statues of the Lipizzans. They were so real-looking that just by squinching his eyes he could will them to life and make them jump clear across the window on their hind legs. In another window were red velvet saddlecloths bordered in gold, and saddles of leather so fine that Hans could almost feel their smoothness. Reluctantly he left the scene and bought the tobacco, his mind still busy with the horses.

  Next morning at five minutes to seven he was slow-trotting Rosy past St. Michael’s gate. If they let all traffic whiz by and if they hugged close to the curb, they could again be first in line.

  Chapter 2

  ONLY A SCHILLING

  HANS’S BEDROOM was on the second floor, above the kitchen. Depending on the hour, he could smell sugar browning, butter melting, almonds toasting, goulash simmering, coffee brewing. He was used to all these smells which told him the time of day. The room measured only eight feet by ten, but he liked it because it was all his. Once he had shared it with his sister. But since she had married a French baker and gone to Paris to live, he could sleep in her nice featherbed, and his old cot was stored among the flour sacks in the attic.

  The walls of his room were painted a color that was neither yellow nor brown but a dull buff tone. “Just let me catch you pinning white horses on this nice clean wall and I’ll . . .” His mother never quite said what the punishment would be, but the warning was enough. And so all that beautiful empty space went to waste. However, before she left, his sister, who was very pretty, had purchased an enormous mirror that covered almost half of one wall. Hans had poked fun of it at the time, but now it made a neat bulletin board. He had transformed it with pictures of the Lipizzaners. Some of the pictures were from newspapers, but these were not nearly so exciting as the colored ones from magazines. He had an arrangement with the news vendor near the Hofburg to sell him rain- or snow-damaged copies for a groschen apiece. Eagerly he brought them home and dried them on top of the oven. Once they were dry, he cut out each picture carefully, erased the dirt, and with his mother’s flatiron smoothed out the creases. Then he pasted the pictures up on his mirror. Now when he awoke each morning he was, for an instant, in the great Riding Hall—in a box seat, mind you—clapping in wild delight at horses leaping, horses rearing, horses dancing. And he saw the performance in all its glory. Then in the midst of his dream his mother’s voice shrilled up the stairs. “Hans! Breakfast!”

  But late in the day, back home after school, he had only to cross the threshhold to pick up the dream again.

  Hans’s schoolfellows regarded the collection with indifference, as something remote from their lives. They talked of soccer, and sailing on the old Danube, and bicycling to the Vienna forests, and hunting deer and hare in the mountains. Hans listened politely, then sooner or later he brought the talk around to the Lipizzaners. But unless at the same time he could offer warm pastries from the kitchen and hot chocolate with dollops of whipped cream, his friends found excuses to go home. Hans felt himself an outsider then. He could not join in their interests, nor they in his. No one but Rosy shared his enchantment with the white stallions.

  As the brief morning meetings with the horses went on, Hans’s curiosity mounted to the bursting point. Suddenly the not knowing what took place in the Riding Hall became intolerable. He committed himself to a bold purpose. He would no longer use the money he earned doing odd jobs at the coffeehouses to buy his own clothes. His mother was good at sewing. He would swallow his pride and wear his father’s hand-me-downs. With the money saved he could afford a ticket to the Sunday ballet.

  “Let him do it, Papa!” his mother urged one evening as she sat weaving a patch onto the seat of his school trousers. “Let him get this foolishness out of his head. Once seen, soonest forgotten, I say.”

  Hans warmed to her generosity. He leaned over and planted a kiss on the back of her neck so that she couldn’t reach around and hug him. “Sure, Mama, that’s all I want to do. I just want to see how they get those horses to leap and dance and do things that seem so unnatural. Maybe,” he added, “I can even try out what I learn on Rosy.”

  His father looked troubled, but he did not object.

  Next morning when Hans had finished his deliveries and was on his way home, the policeman on the Josefsplatz agreed to watch Rosy while Hans went into the visitors’ entrance of the Palace to inquire the cost of tickets.

  Facing the massive door, Hans paused, almost afraid to enter. A well-dressed man stepped in front of him and pushed it open. With a nod and a smile he waved the boy inside.

  Hans stared at the businesslike look of the place. A wide aisle led directly to an enormous glass-enclosed office, and within it were a dozen or more girls busy at their typewriters.

  Clutching his cap as if it might fly away, Hans approached the one open window. In awkward silence he stood waiting for someone to notice him. At last a girl with glinty red hair came over to the window.

  “Yes?” She raised a question mark with her eyebrows.

  In his best manner Hans had been rehearsing what to ask and how to ask it. Now he winced and dropped his cap, and in picking it up stepped on the bright shoeshine of the man behind him.

  “Please excuse,” he stammered.

  The girl tried to conceal her amusement. “Come now, young boy. Did you want a ticket for some Sunday performance, perhaps?”

  “Why, yes!” Hans said in astonishment. The girl had read his mind! “That is, no. Ach, I came to ask only how much is the cost.”

  “It all depends. The court loge, first row, would be twenty schilling. The first gallery lengthside is only five schilling.”

  “Five schilling!”

  “But of course. Even so, we have no seats left for three months ahead.”

  Hans started to turn away when the girl spoke again.

  “Why don’t you just queue up, young man, and buy standing room in the second gallery? You can see as well from there; some think better. Then you just pay as you enter.”

  Hans took new courage. “How much is standing room?”

  “Only a schilling. But you must come very early. Even at six-thirty in the morning the line begins.”

  The boy thought this over, a fresh new hope rising in him. On
e schilling he could save! He heard the man behind him cough politely and felt the nudge of an overcoat. Hans turned and smiled up at him. Then he ran down the corridor and out into the sunshine. He thanked his friend the policeman, climbed up onto his seat in the bakery wagon, and clucked to Rosy. Traffic shot past them as she clip-clopped along on the way home. Hans let the reins fall loose; he was figuring how long it would take before he could do as the girl said. “Just queue up and buy room in the gallery.” In three weeks he could do it! Why had he not thought of it sooner?

  Chapter 3

  FIRST IN LINE

  They were happy weeks. It was early March and the city was stirring from its winter sleep like a bear that has hibernated too long. On week nights people were flocking to the Opera House, celebrating the birth month of Johann Strauss, the waltz king. On Sunday mornings they stormed the Spanish Riding School; in the afternoons they visited the parks and palaces.

  Hans caught the heightened spirit of spring and took a streetcar one Sunday to see the Schönbrunn Palace of the Habsburgs, because he was studying about them in school. Unlike the tourists, he never set foot in the Palace itself, but spent all of his time in the carriage house. The place was enormous! It held a hundred vehicles! Gingerly he fingered the coronation carriage of Napoleon, the carrousel of Empress Maria Theresa. There were all manner of carriages—golden chaises, chariots with tongues and spidery wheels of gold, and wagonets with neat folding steps, and barouches and phaetons, and splendid funeral cars in rich crimson and deepest black. And there was one stout excursion coach for mountain travel with even a toilet seat in it.

  As he left the carriage house, Hans parted with five of his precious groschen to buy a set of colored postcards. They would be nice to illustrate the theme he was writing on the Habsburgs.

  After his visit to Schönbrunn, Rosy’s old cart seemed shabbier than ever. But nothing could dim Hans’s spirits. Spring and the incoming tourists meant more orders for buns and rolls, and more after-school jobs in the coffeehouses. The proprietors liked to have Hans around. “Nothing is too much for that boy,” they bragged to their customers, “nor too little.”