Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

I begin to feel—while wondering if it may not be the effect of the unusually good wine; Tokay and champagne in such quick succession?—I begin to feel elated, buoyant, even boisterous. I need only one thing to crown my happiness in the spell cast over my enraptured mind, and what I have unconsciously been wanting is revealed to me next moment, when I suddenly hear soft music, performed by a quartet of instrumentalists, beginning to play in a third room beyond the salon. The servant has quietly opened the double doors again. It is exactly the kind of music I would have wished for, dance music, rhythmical and gentle at the same time, a waltz with the melody played by two violins, the low notes of a cello adding a darker tone, and a piano picking out the tune in sharp staccato. Music, yes, music, that was all I still needed! Music now, and perhaps dancing, a waltz! I want to move with it, feel that I am flying, sense my lightness of heart even more blissfully! This Villa Kekesfalva must indeed be a magical place where you have only to dream of something and your wish is granted. So now we stand up, moving our dining chairs aside, and two by two—I offer Ilona my arm, and once again feel her cool, soft, beautiful skin—we go into the salon, where the tables have been cleared away as if by brownie magic, and chairs are placed around the wall. The wooden floor is smooth and shiny, a mirror-like brown surface, waltzing is the apotheosis of skating, and the lively music played by the invisible instrumentalist next door animates us.

I turn to Ilona. She laughs, understanding me. Her eyes have already said “Yes”, and now we are whirling round the room, two couples, three couples, five couples moving over the whole dance floor, while the older and less daring guests watch or talk to each other. I like dancing, I may even say I dance well. Closely entwined, we skim the floor. I think I have never danced better in my life. I ask my other neighbour at dinner for the pleasure of the next waltz. She too dances very well, and leaning down to her I smell the perfume of her hair and feel slightly dizzy. Oh, her dancing is wonderful, it is all wonderful, I haven’t felt so happy for years. I hardly know what I am doing, I would like to embrace everyone, say something heartfelt, grateful to them all, I feel so light, so elated, so blissfully young. I whirl from partner to partner, I talk and laugh and dance, and never notice the time, carried away by the torrent of my pleasure.

Then I suddenly look up and happen to see the time. It is ten-thirty—and I realise, to my alarm, that I have been dancing and talking and amusing myself for almost an hour but, great oaf that I am, I haven’t yet asked my host’s daughter to dance. I have only danced with my two neighbours at dinner and two or three other ladies, the ones I liked best, entirely neglecting the daughter of the house! What uncivil behaviour, what a slight to her! I must put that right at once!

I am shocked, however, to realise that I cannot remember exactly what the girl looks like. I bowed to her only briefly when she was already seated at table, all I recollect is the impression of fragile delicacy that she made on me, and then the quick, curious glance of her grey eyes. But where is she? She is the daughter of the house, surely she can’t have left the party? I look uneasily at all the girls and women sitting by the wall; I see no one like her. Finally I step into the third room where, hidden behind a Japanese screen, the quartet is playing, and breathe a sigh of relief. For there she is—yes, I am sure of it—delicate, slender, sitting in her pale-blue dress between two old ladies in the corner of this boudoir, at a malachite-green table with a shallow bowl of flowers on it. Her head is slightly bowed, as if she were entirely absorbed in the music, and the deep crimson of the roses in the bowl makes me notice the translucent pallor of her forehead under her heavy light-red hair. But I have no time for idle gazing. Thank God, I think fervently, now I’ve tracked her down, and I can make up for being so remiss.

I go over to the table—the music is playing merrily away—and bow to indicate that I am asking her to dance. She looks at me in startled surprise, her lips still half open, interrupted in the middle of what she was saying. But she makes no move to rise and go with me. Didn’t she understand? I bow again, and my spurs clink softly. “May I have the pleasure of this dance, dear young lady?”

Something terrible happens next. She had been leaning slightly forward, but now she flinches abruptly back as if avoiding a blow. At the same time the blood rushes into her pale cheeks, the lips that were half open just now are pressed hard together, and only her eyes keep staring at me with an expression of horror such as I have never seen in my life before. Next moment a paroxysm passes right through her convulsed body. She braces herself on the table with both hands, making the bowl of roses clink and jangle, and at the same time something hard, made of wood or metal, falls from her chair to the ground. Both her hands are still clutching the table, which sways, her childlike body is shaken again and again, but all the same she does not run away, she only clings even more desperately to the heavy tabletop. And again and again that shaking, those tremors run from her cramped fists all the way up to her hairline. Suddenly she bursts into sobs, a wild, elemental sound like a stifled scream.

But the two old ladies are already with her, to right and left, one on each side, holding her, caressing her, speaking soothing, reassuring words to the trembling girl. Her convulsed hands relax, drop gently from the table, and she falls back into her chair. However, the weeping goes on, even worse than before, like a rush of blood, like a surge of hot vomit rising in her throat it keeps bursting forth. If the music drowning the sound of it out from behind the screen were to stop for a moment, even the dancers in the next room would hear her sobbing.

I stand there, horrified, bewildered. What exactly has happened? Baffled, I stare at the two old ladies as they try to calm the sobbing girl. Now, as she begins to feel ashamed of her outburst, she has laid her head on the table. But she still breaks into fresh tears again and again, wave after wave of them shaking her slender body up to her shoulders, and each of these abrupt fits of weeping makes the glass and china clink. As for me, I stand there at a loss, my thoughts frozen like ice, with my collar constricting my throat like a burning cord.

“I’m sorry,” I finally stammer in an undertone, and while both ladies are busy with the sobbing girl—neither of them spares me a glance—I retreat, feeling dizzy, into the hall beyond. No one here seems to have noticed anything yet. Couples are circling with verve on the dance floor, and I have to hold on to the doorpost, because the room is going round and round before my eyes. What happened? Have I done something wrong? My God, did I drink too much and too fast at dinner, did I drink enough to stupefy me and make me commit some silly blunder?

The music stops, the couples move apart. The district administrator who is Ilona’s partner relinquishes her hand with a bow, and I immediately hurry over to her and make the surprised girl go over to the window with me. “Please help me! For Heaven’s sake, help me, explain!”

Obviously Ilona was expecting me to whisper something amusing to her when I took her aside, for suddenly her glance is unfriendly. I must have looked either pitiable or alarming in my agitation. My pulse beats fast as I tell her everything. And strange to say, she cries out with the same sheer horror in her eyes as the girl in the other room.

“Are you out of your mind?… Don’t you know?… Didn’t you notice?…”

“No,” I stammer, shattered by these fresh and equally incomprehensible signs of horror. “Didn’t I notice what ? And I don’t know anything—this is the first time I’ve been in this house.”