Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

But there’s a hitch at the very start—I suppose one should be superstitious and pay more attention to small signs and omens. There I am at seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, ready in my best uniform, new gloves, patent leather shoes, creases in my trousers ironed straight as a knife blade, and my batman is adjusting the folds of my overcoat and checking the general effect (I always need him to do that, because I have only a small hand mirror in my poorly lit room), when an orderly knocks vigorously on the door. The duty officer, my friend Captain Count Steinhübel, wants me to go over to join him in the guardroom. Two lancers, probably as drunk as lords, have been quarrelling, and it ended with one hitting the other over the head with the stock of his rifle. Now the idiot who suffered the blow is lying there bleeding and unconscious, with his mouth open. No one knows whether or not his skull is intact. The regimental doctor has gone to Vienna on leave, the Colonel can’t be found, so Steinhübel summons me to help him in his hour of need, damn his eyes. While he sees to the injured man, I have to write a report on the incident and send orderlies all over the place to drum up a civilian doctor from the café or wherever there’s one to be found. By now it is a quarter to eight, and I can see that there’s no chance of my getting away for another fifteen minutes or half-an-hour. Why in Heaven’s name does this have to happen today of all days, when I’m invited out to dinner? Feeling more and more impatient, I look at the time. Even if I have to hang around here for only another five minutes, I can’t possibly arrive punctually. But the principle that military service takes precedence over any private engagement has been dinned into us. I can’t get out of it, so I do the only possible thing in this stupid situation, I send my batman off in a cab (which costs me four crowns) to the Kekesfalva house, to deliver my apologies in case I am late, explaining that an unexpected incident at the barracks… and so on and so forth. Fortunately the commotion at the barracks doesn’t last long, because the Colonel arrives in person with a doctor found in haste, and now I can slip inconspicuously away.

Bad luck again, however—there’s no cab in the square outside the town hall, I have to wait while someone telephones for a two-horse carriage. So it’s inevitable, when I finally arrive in the hall of Herr von Kekesfalva’s house, that the big hand of the clock on the wall is pointing vertically down; it is eight-thirty instead of eight, and the coats in the cloakroom are piled on top of each other. The rather anxious look on the servant’s face also shows me that I am decidedly late—how unlucky, how really unlucky for such a thing to happen on a first visit.

However, the servant—this time in white gloves, tailcoat and a starched shirt to go with his starchy expression—reassures me; my batman delivered my message half-an-hour ago, he says, and he leads me into the salon, four windows curtained in red silk, the room sparkling with light from crystal chandeliers, fabulously elegant, I’ve never seen anywhere more splendid. But to my dismay it is deserted, and I clearly hear the cheerful clink of plates in the room next to it—how very annoying, I think at once, they’ve already started dinner!

Well, I pull myself together, and as soon as the servant pushes the double door open ahead of me I step into the dining room, click my heels smartly, and bow. Everyone looks up, twenty, forty eyes, all of them the eyes of strangers, inspect the late-comer standing there by the doorpost feeling very unsure of himself. An elderly gentleman is already rising from his chair, undoubtedly the master of the house, quickly putting down his napkin. He comes towards me and welcomes me, offering me his hand. Herr von Kekesfalva does not look at all as I imagined him, not in the least like a landed nobleman, no flamboyant Magyar moustache, full cheeks, stout and red-faced from good wine. Instead, rather weary eyes with grey bags under them swim behind gold-rimmed glasses, he has something of a stoop, his voice is a whisper slightly impeded by coughing. With his thin, delicately featured face, ending in a sparse, pointed white beard, you would be more likely to take him for a scholar. The old man’s marked kindness is immensely reassuring to me in my uncertainty; no, no, he interrupts me at once, it is for him to apologise. He knows just how it is, anything can happen when you’re on army service, and it was particularly good of me to let him know; they had begun dinner only because they couldn’t be sure whether I would arrive at all. But now I must sit down at once. He will introduce me to all the company individually after dinner. Except that here—and he leads me to the table—this is his daughter. A girl in her teens, delicate, pale, as fragile as her father, looks up from a conversation, and two grey eyes shyly rest on me. But I see her thin, nervous face only in passing, I bow first to her, then right and left to the company in general, who are obviously glad not to have to lay down their knives and forks and have the meal interrupted by formal introductions.

For the first two or three minutes I still feel very uncomfortable. There’s no one else from the regiment here, none of my comrades, no one I know, not even any of the more prominent citizens of the little town, all the guests are total strangers to me. Most of them seem to be the owners of nearby estates with their wives and daughters, some are civil servants. But they are all civilians; mine is the only uniform. My God, clumsy and shy as I am, how am I going to make conversation with these unknown people? Fortunately I’ve been well placed. Next to me sits that brown, high-spirited girl, the pretty niece, who seems to have noticed my admiring glance in the cake shop after all, for she gives me a friendly smile as if I were an old acquaintance. She has eyes like coffee beans, and indeed when she laughs it’s with a softly sizzling sound like coffee beans roasting. She has enchanting, translucent little ears under her thick black hair, ears like pink cyclamen flowers growing in dark moss, I think. Her bare arms are soft and smooth; they must feel like peaches.

It does me good to be sitting next to such a pretty girl, and her Hungarian accent when she speaks almost has me falling in love with her. It does me good to eat at such an elegantly laid table in so bright and sparkling a room, with liveried servants behind me and the finest dishes in front of me. My neighbour on the left speaks with a slight Polish accent, and although she is built rather on the generous scale she too seems to me a very attractive sight. Or is that just the effect of the wine, pale gold, then dark red, and now the bubbles of champagne, poured unstintingly from silver carafes by the servants with their white gloves standing behind us? No, the good pharmacist was not exaggerating. You might think yourself at court in the Kekesfalva house. I have never eaten so well, or even dreamt that anyone could eat so well, so lavishly, could taste such delicacies. More and more exquisite dishes are carried in on inexhaustible platters, blue-tinged fish crowned with lettuce and framed by slices of lobster swim in golden sauces, capons ride aloft on broad saddles of piled rice, puddings are flambéed in rum, burning with a blue flame; ice bombs fall apart to reveal their sweet, colourful contents, fruits that must have travelled halfway round the world nestle close to each other in silver baskets. It never, never ends, and finally there is a positive rainbow of liqueurs, green, red, colourless, yellow, and cigars as thick as asparagus, to be enjoyed with delicious coffee!

A wonderful, a magical house—blessings on the good pharmacist!—a bright, happy evening full of merry sound! Do I feel so relaxed, so much at ease, just because the eyes of the other guests, to my right and my left and opposite me, are also shining now, and they have raised their voices? They too seem to have forgotten about etiquette and are talking nineteen to the dozen! Anyway, my own usual shyness is gone. I chatter on without the slightest inhibition, I pay court to both the ladies sitting next to me, I drink, laugh, look around in cheerful high spirits, and if it isn’t always by chance that my hand now and then touches the lovely bare arm of Ilona (such is the name of the delectable niece), then she doesn’t seem to take my gentle approach and then retreat in the wrong spirit, she is relaxed and elated like all of us at this lavish banquet.