Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

The Baron, painfully embarrassed, rose to his feet. He had not expected it to come so soon. He began to say, stammering, that he was sure it hadn’t been meant like that, she ought to try to get on with his other servant, adding whatever other unthinking remarks came to his lips.

But Crescenz stayed put, her gaze boring into the carpet, her shoulders hunched. Bitter and dogged, she kept her head bowed like an ox, letting all his kindly remarks pass her by, waiting for just one word that did not come. And when at last he fell silent, exhausted and rather repelled by the contemptible role he was obliged to adopt, trying to ingratiate himself with a servant, she remained obstinate and mute. Then at last she got out something else. “I only wants ter know if sir himself tells Anton ter fire ’un.”

She somehow got it out—harshly, reluctantly, violently. And already on edge as he was, he felt it like a blow. Was that a threat? Was she challenging him? All at once all his cowardice was gone, and all his pity. The hatred and disgust that had been dammed up in him for weeks came together with his ardent wish to make an end of it at last. And suddenly changing his tone entirely, and adopting the cool objectivity that he had learned at work in the ministry, he confirmed, as if it were of no importance, that yes, that was indeed so, he had in fact given the manservant a free hand to organise the household just as he liked. He personally wished her well, and would try to persuade Anton to change his mind about dismissing her. But if she still insisted on maintaining hostilities with the manservant, well, he would just have to dispense with her services.

And summoning up all his will-power, determined not to be deterred by any sly hint or insinuating remark, he turned his glance as he spoke these last words on the woman he assumed to be threatening him and looked straight at her.

But the eyes that Crescenz now raised timidly from the floor were those of a wounded animal, seeing the pack just about to break out of the bushes ahead of her. “Th… thank ’ee, sir,” she got out, very faintly. “I be goin’… I won’t trouble sir no more…”

And slowly, without turning, she dragged herself out of the door with her bowed shoulders and stiff, wooden footsteps.

That evening, when the Baron came back from the opera and reached for the letters that had arrived on his desk, he saw something strange and rectangular there. As the light flared up, he made out a wooden casket with rustic carving. It was not locked: inside, neatly arranged, lay all the little things that he had ever given Crescenz: a few cards from his hunting expeditions, two theatre tickets, a silver ring, the entire heaped rectangle of her banknotes, and there was also a snapshot taken twenty years ago in the Tyrol in which her eyes, obviously taken unawares by the flashlight, stared out with the same stricken, beaten look as they had a few hours ago when she left his study.

At something of a loss, the Baron pushed the casket aside and went out to ask the manservant what these things of Crescenz’s were doing on his desk. The servant immediately offered to bring his enemy in to account for herself. But Crescenz was not to be found in the kitchen or anywhere else in the apartment. And only the next day, when the police reported the suicidal fall of a woman about forty years old from the bridge over the Danube Canal, did the two men know the answer to the question of where Leporella had gone.

PERSONALLY I’M AS GOOD AS CERTAIN that he was the murderer. But I don’t have the final, incontrovertible proof. “Betsy,” my husband always tells me, “you’re a clever woman, a quick observer, and you have a sharp eye, but you let your temperament lead you astray, and then you make up your mind too hastily.” Well, my husband has known me for thirty-two years, and perhaps, indeed probably, he’s right to warn me against forming a judgement in too much of a hurry. So as there is no conclusive evidence, I have to make myself suppress my suspicions, especially in front of other people. But whenever I meet him, whenever he comes over to me in that forthright, friendly way of his, my heart misses a beat. And a little voice inside me says: he and no one else was the murderer.

So I am going to try reconstructing the entire course of events again, just for my own satisfaction.

About six years ago my husband had come to the end of his term of service as a distinguished government official in the colonies, and we decided to retire to some quiet place in the English countryside, to spend the rest of our days, already approaching their evening, with such pleasures of life as flowers and books. Our choice was a small village in the country near Bath. A narrow, slowly flowing waterway, the Kennet and Avon Canal, winds its way from that ancient and venerable city, passing under many bridges, towards the valley of Limpley Stoke, which is always green. The canal was built with much skill and at great expense over a century ago, to carry coal from Cardiff to London, and has many wooden locks and lock-keepers’ stations along its length. Horses moving at a ponderous trot on the narrow towpaths to right and left of the canal used to pull the broad, black barges along the wide waterway at a leisurely pace. It was planned and built on a generous scale, and was a good means of transport for an age when time still did not mean much. But then came the railway to bring the black freight to the capital city far more cheaply and easily. Canal traffic ground to a halt, the canal fell into decay and dilapidation, but the very fact that it is entirely deserted and serves no useful purpose makes it a romantic, enchanted place today. Waterweed grows so densely from the bottom of the sluggish, black water that the surface has a shimmer of dark green, like malachite; pale water lilies sway on the smooth surface of the canal, which reflects the flower-grown banks, the bridges and the clouds with photographic accuracy. There is barely a ripple moving on the drowsy waterway. Now and then, half sunk in the water and already overgrown with plants, a broken old boat by the bank recalls the canal’s busy past, of which even the visitors who come to take the waters in Bath hardly know anything, and when we two elderly folk walked on the level towpath where the horses used to pull barges laboriously along by ropes in the old days, we would meet no one for hours on end except, perhaps, pairs of lovers meeting in secret to protect, by coming to this remote place, their youthful happiness from neighbours’ gossip, before it was officially declared by their engagement or marriage.

We were delighted by the quiet, romantic waterway set among rolling hills. We bought a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, just where the slope from Bathampton falls gently to the waterside as a beautiful, lush meadow. At the top of the rise we built a little country cottage, with a pleasant garden path leading past fruit trees, vegetable beds and flower beds and on down to the canal, so that when we sat out of doors on our little garden terrace beside the water we could see the meadow, the house and the garden reflected in the canal. The house was more peaceful and comfortable than anywhere I had ever dreamt of living, and my only complaint was that it was rather lonely, since we had no neighbours.

“Oh, they’ll soon come when they see what a pretty place we’ve found to live in,” said my husband, cheering me.

And sure enough; our little peach trees and plum trees had hardly established themselves in the garden before, one day, signs of another building going up next to our house suddenly appeared. First came busy estate agents, then surveyors, and after them builders and carpenters. Within a dozen or so weeks a little cottage with a red-tiled roof was nestling beside ours. Finally a removal van full of furniture arrived. We heard constant banging and hammering in the formerly quiet air, but we had not yet set eyes on our new neighbours.