Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

Brought up at the expense of the parish because of her illegitimate birth, put out to domestic service at the age of twelve, and then later a scullery maid in a carters’ tavern, she had finally left that establishment, where she was known for her tenacious, ox-like capacity for work, and had risen to be cook at an inn that was popular with tourists. Crescenz rose there at five in the morning every day, worked, swept, cleaned, lit fires, brushed, cleared up, cooked, kneaded dough, strained food, washed dishes and did the laundry until late at night. She never took any holiday, she never went out in the street except to go to church; the fire in the kitchen range was her sun, the thousands and thousands of wooden logs it burned over the years her forest.

Men left her alone, whether because a quarter-century of dour, dull toil had taken every sign of femininity from her, or because she had firmly and taciturnly rejected all advances. Her one pleasure was in money, which she doggedly collected with the hamster-like instincts of the rustic labouring class, so that in her old age she would not have to eat the bitter bread of charity in the parish poorhouse yet again.

It was only for the money, in fact, that this dull-witted creature first left her native Tyrol at the age of thirty-seven. A woman who was a professional agent for domestic staff had come there on holiday, saw her working like a madwoman from morning to night in the kitchen and public rooms of the inn, and lured her to Vienna with the promise of a position at double the wages. During the railway journey Crescenz hardly said a word to anyone, and in spite of the friendly offers of other passengers to put the heavy wicker basket containing all her worldly goods up in the net of the luggage rack, she held it on her knees, which were already aching, for deception and theft were the only notions that her clumsy peasant brain connected with the idea of the big city. In her new place in Vienna, she had to be accompanied to market for the first few days, because she feared all the vehicles as a cow fears a motor car. But as soon as she knew her way down the four streets leading to the marketplace she no longer needed anyone, but trotted off with her basket, never looking up, from the door of the building where her employers lived to the market stalls and home again to sweep the apartment, light fires and clear out her new kitchen range just as she had cleared the old one, noticing no change. She kept rustic hours, went to bed at nine and slept with her mouth open, like an animal, until the alarm clock went off in the morning. No one knew if she liked her job; perhaps she didn’t know herself, for she approached no one, answered questions merely with a dull “Very well”, or if she didn’t agree, with a discontented shrug of her shoulders. She ignored her neighbours and the other maids in the building; the mocking looks of her more light-hearted companions in domestic service slipped off the leathery surface of her indifference like water. Just once, when a girl imitated her Tyrolean dialect and wouldn’t stop teasing her for her taciturnity, she suddenly snatched a burning piece of wood out of the range and went for the horrified, screaming young woman with it. From that day on, everyone avoided her, and no one dared to mock someone capable of such fury again.

But every Sunday morning Crescenz went to church in her wide, pleated skirt and flat peasant hat. Only once, on her first day off in Vienna, did she try taking a walk. As she didn’t want to ride on the tram, and had seen nothing but more and more stone walls in her cautious exploration of the many bewildering streets, she went only as far as the Danube Canal, where she stared at the flowing water as at something familiar, turned and went back the way she had come, always keeping close to the buildings and anxiously avoiding the carriageway. This first and only expedition must obviously have disappointed her, for after that she never left the house again, but preferred to sit at the window on Sundays either busy with her needlework or empty-handed. So the great metropolis brought no change into the routine treadmill of her days, except that at the end of every month she held four blue banknotes instead of the old two in her gnarled, tough, battered hands. She always checked these banknotes suspiciously for a long time. She unfolded the new notes ceremoniously, and finally smoothed them out flat, almost tenderly, before putting them with the others in the carved, yellow wooden box that she had brought from her home village. This clumsy, heavy little casket was her whole secret, the meaning of her life. By night she put its key under her pillow. No one ever found out where she kept it in the day.

Such was the nature of this strange human being (as we may call her, although humanity was apparent in her behaviour only in a very faint and muted way), but perhaps it took someone with exactly those blinkered senses to tolerate domestic service in the household of young Baron von F—which was an extremely strange one in itself. Most servants couldn’t put up with the quarrelsome atmosphere for any longer than the legally binding time between their engagement and the day when they gave notice. The irate shouting, wound up to hysterical pitch, came from the lady of the house. The only daughter of an extremely rich manufacturer in Essen, and no longer in her first youth, she had been at a spa where she met the considerably younger Baron (whose nobility was suspect, while his financial situation was even more dubious), and had quickly married that handsome young ne’er-do-well, ready and able as he was to display aristocratic charm. But as soon as the honeymoon was over, the newly-wedded wife had to admit that her parents, who set great store by solid worth and ability, had been right to oppose the hasty marriage. For it quickly transpired that besides having many debts to which he had not admitted, her husband, whose attentions to her had soon worn off, showed a good deal more interest in continuing the habits of his bachelor days than in his marital duties. Although not exactly unkind by nature, since at heart he was as sunny as light-minded people usually are, but extremely lax and unscrupulous in his general outlook, that handsome would-be cavalier despised all calculations of interest and capital, considering them stingy, narrow-minded evidence of plebeian bigotry. He wanted an easy life; she wanted a well-ordered, respectable domestic existence of the bourgeois Rhineland kind, which got on his nerves. And when, in spite of her wealth, he had to haggle to lay hands on any large sum of money, and his wife, who had a turn for mathematics, even denied him his dearest wish, a racing stables of his own, he saw no more reason to involve himself any further in conjugal relations with the massive, thick-necked North German woman whose loud and domineering voice fell unpleasantly on his ears. So he put her on ice, as they say, and without any harsh gestures, but none the less unmistakably, he kept his disappointed wife at a distance. If she reproached him he would listen politely, with apparent compassion, but as soon as her sermon was over he would wave her passionate admonitions away like the smoke of his cigarette, and had no qualms about continuing to do exactly as he pleased. This smooth, almost formal amiability embittered the disappointed woman more than any opposition. And as she was completely powerless to do anything about his well-bred, never abusive and positively overpowering civility, her pent-up anger broke out violently in a different direction: she ranted and raged at the domestic staff, wildly venting on the innocent her indignation, which was fundamentally justified but in those quarters inappropriately expressed. Of course there were consequences: within two years she had been obliged to engage a new lady’s maid no less than sixteen times, once after an actual physical scuffle—a considerable sum of money had to be paid in compensation to hush it up.