Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

These moments, when the master she idolized sought refuge with her from his excessive tension, were the happiest of Leporella’s life. She never ventured to reply or say a word of consolation; silent and lost in thought, she just sat there, and only looked up sometimes with a sympathetic, receptive and tormented glance at her god, thus humiliated. Her silent sympathy did him good. But once he had left the kitchen, an angry fold would return to her brow, and her heavy hands expressed her anger by battering defenceless pieces of meat or savagely scouring dishes and cutlery.

At last the ominous atmosphere in the apartment since the wife’s return discharged itself stormily; during one of the couple’s intemperate scenes the Baron finally lost patience, abruptly abandoned the meekly indifferent schoolboy attitude he had adopted, and slammed the door behind him. “I’ve had enough of this,” he shouted so angrily that all the windows in the apartment shook. And still in a furious temper, red in the face, he went out to the kitchen, where Crescenz was quivering like a bent bow. “Pack my case at once and find my sporting gun. I’m going hunting for a week. Even the Devil couldn’t endure this hell any more. There has to be an end to it.”

Crescenz looked at him happily: like this, he was master in his own house again! And a hoarse laugh emerged from her throat. “Sir be right, there have to be an end to ’un.” And twitching with eager zeal, racing from room to room, she hastily snatched everything he would need from cupboards and tables, every nerve of the heavily built creature straining with tension and avidity. She carried the case and the gun out to the car herself. But when he was seeking words to thank her for her eager help, his eyes looked away from her in alarm. For that spiteful smile, the one that always alarmed him, had returned to her narrowed lips. When he saw her seeming to lie in ambush like that, he was instinctively reminded of the low crouching movement of an animal gathering itself to spring. But then she retreated into herself again, and just whispered hoarsely, with almost insulting familiarity, “I hopes sir has a good journey, I’ll do ’un all.”

Three days later the Baron was called back from his hunting trip by an urgent telegram. His cousin was waiting for him at the railway station. At his very first glance the anxious man knew that something terrible must have happened, for his cousin looked nervous and was fidgeting. After a few words solicitously designed to prepare him, he discovered what it was: his wife had been found dead in her bed that morning, with the whole room full of gas. Unfortunately a careless mistake was out of the question, said his cousin, because now, in May, the gas stove had not been lit for a long time, and his wife’s suicidal frame of mind was also obvious from the fact that the unhappy woman had taken some veronal the evening before. In addition there was the statement made by the cook Crescenz, who had been alone at home that evening, and had heard her unfortunate mistress going into the room just outside the bedroom in the night, presumably on purpose to switch on the gas supply, which had been carefully turned off. On hearing this, the police doctor who had also been called in agreed that an accident was out of the question, and recorded death by suicide.

The Baron began to tremble. When his cousin mentioned the statement that Crescenz had made he suddenly felt the blood in his hands turn cold. An unpleasant, a dreadful idea rose in his mind like nausea. But he forcibly suppressed this seething, agonising sensation, and meekly let his cousin take him home. The body had already been removed; family members were waiting in the drawing room with gloomy and hostile expressions. Their condolences were cold as a knife. With a certain accusatory emphasis, they said they thought they should mention that, unfortunately, it had been impossible to hush up the ‘scandal’, because the maid had rushed out on the stairs that morning screaming, “The mistress has killed herself!” And they had decided on a quiet funeral—yet again that sharp, chilly blade was turned against him—because, deplorably, all kinds of rumours had aroused the curiosity of society to an unwelcome degree. The downcast Baron listened in confusion, and once instinctively raised his eyes to the closed bedroom door, but then cravenly looked away again. He wanted to think something out to the end, an unwelcome idea that kept surfacing in his mind, but all this empty, malicious talk bewildered him. The black-clad relations stood around talking for another half-hour, and then one by one they took their leave. He was left alone in the empty, dimly lit room, trembling as if he had suffered a heavy blow, with an aching head and weariness in his joints.

Then there came a knock at the door. “Come in,” he said, rousing himself with a start. And along came a hesitant step, a dragging, stealthy step that he knew well. Suddenly, horror overcame him; he felt as if his cervical vertebrae were firmly screwed in place, while at the same time the skin from his temples to his knees was rippling with icy shudders. He wanted to turn, but his muscles failed him. So he stood there in the middle of the room, trembling and making no sound, his hands dropping by his sides and rigid as stone, and he felt very clearly how cowardly this guilt-ridden attitude must look. But it was useless for him to exert all his strength: his muscles just would not obey him. The voice behind him said, “I just wants ter ask, sir, will sir eat at home or out?” The Baron shivered ever more violently, and now the icy cold made its way right into his breast. He tried three times before he finally managed to get out the words, “No, I don’t want anything to eat.” Then the footsteps dragged themselves away, and still he didn’t have the courage to turn. And suddenly the rigidity left him: he was shaking all over with spasms, or nausea. He suddenly flung himself at the door and turned the key in it, so that those dreadful footsteps following him like a ghost couldn’t get at him. Then he dropped into a chair to force down an idea that he didn’t want to entertain, although it kept creeping back into his mind, as cold and slimy as a snail. And this obsessive idea, though he hated the thought of coming close to it, filled all his emotions: it was inescapable, slimy, horrible, and it stayed with him all that sleepless night and during the hours that followed, even when, black-clad and silent, he stood at the head of the coffin during the funeral.

On the day after the funeral the Baron left the city in a hurry. All the faces he saw were too unendurable now: in the midst of their sympathy they had—or was he only imagining it?—a curiously observant, a painfully inquisitorial look. And even inanimate objects spoke to him accusingly, with hostility: every piece of furniture in the apartment, but more particularly in the bedroom where the sweetish smell of gas still seemed to cling to everything, turned him away if he so much as automatically opened the doors. But the really unbearable nightmare of his sleeping and waking hours was the cold, unconcerned indifference of his former accomplice, who went about the empty apartment as if nothing at all had happened. Since that moment at the station when his cousin mentioned her name, he had trembled at the thought of any meeting with her. As soon as he heard her footsteps a nervous, hasty restlessness took hold of him; he couldn’t look at that dragging, indifferent gait any more, couldn’t bear her cold, silent composure. Revulsion overcame him when he even thought of her—her croaking voice, her greasy hair, her dull, animal, merciless absence of feeling, and part of his anger was anger against himself because he lacked the power to break the bond between them by force, like a piece of string, although it was almost throttling him. So he saw only one way out—flight. He packed his case in secret without a word to her, leaving only a hasty note behind to say that he had gone to visit friends in Carinthia.