Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

One morning there was a knock at our door. A pretty, slender woman with clever, friendly eyes, not much more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, introduced herself as our neighbour and asked if we could lend her a saw; the workmen had forgotten to bring one. We fell into conversation. She told us that her husband worked in a bank in Bristol, but for a long time they had both wanted to live somewhere more remote, outside the city, and as they were walking along the canal one Sunday they had fallen in love with the look of our house. Of course it would mean a journey of an hour each way for her husband from home to work and back, but he would be sure to find pleasant travelling companions and would easily get used to it. We returned her call next day. She was still on her own in the house, and told us cheerfully that her husband wouldn’t be joining her until all the work was finished. She really couldn’t do with having him underfoot until then, she said, and after all, there was no hurry. I don’t know why, but I didn’t quite like the casual way she spoke of her husband’s absence, almost as if she were pleased not to have him there. When we were sitting over our meal alone at home, I commented that she didn’t appear to be very fond of him. My husband told me I shouldn’t keep jumping to hasty conclusions; he had thought her a very agreeable young woman, intelligent and pleasant, and he hoped her husband would be the same.

And it wasn’t long before we met him. As we were taking our usual evening walk one Saturday, when we had just left our house, we heard footsteps behind us, brisk and heavy, and when we turned we saw a large, cheerful-looking man catching up with us, offering us a large, red, freckled hand. He was our new neighbour, he said, he’d heard how kind we had been to his wife. Of course he ought not to be greeting us like this in his shirtsleeves, without paying a formal visit first. But his wife had told him so many nice things about us that he really couldn’t wait a minute longer to thank us. So here he was, John Charleston Limpley by name, and wasn’t it a famous thing—they’d already called the valley Limpley in his honour long before he himself could ever guess that he’d be looking for a house here some day? Yes, here he was, he said, and here he hoped to stay as long as the good Lord let him live. He liked this place better than anywhere else in the world, and he would promise us here and now, hand on his heart, to be a good neighbour.

He talked so fast and cheerfully, with such a flow of words, that you hardly had a chance to get a word in. So I at least had plenty of time to scrutinise him thoroughly. Limpley was a powerful figure of a man, at least six foot tall, with broad, square shoulders that would have graced a navvy, but he seemed to have a good-natured, childlike disposition, as giants so often do. His narrowed, slightly watery eyes twinkled confidently at you from between their reddish lids. As he talked and laughed, he kept showing his perfect white teeth. He didn’t know quite what to do with his big, heavy hands, and had some difficulty in keeping them still. You felt that he would have liked to clap you on the shoulder in comradely fashion with those hands, and as if to work off some of his strength he at least cracked the joints of his fingers now and then.

Could he, he asked, join us on our walk, in his shirtsleeves just as he was? When we said yes, he walked along with us talking nineteen to the dozen. He was of Scottish descent on his mother’s side, he told us, but he had grown up in Canada. Now and then he pointed to a fine tree or an attractive slope; how beautiful, he said, how incomparably beautiful that was! He talked, he laughed, he expressed enthusiasm for everything almost without stopping. An invigorating current of strength and cheerfulness emanated from this large, healthy, vital man, infectiously carrying us away with it. When we finally parted, my husband and I both felt pleased with the warmth of his personality. “It’s a long time since I met such a hearty, full-blooded fellow,” said my husband who, as I have already indicated, is usually rather cautious and withdrawn in assessing character.

But it wasn’t long before our first pleasure in finding such an agreeable new neighbour began to diminish considerably. There could not be the least objection to Limpley as a human being. He was good-natured to a fault, he was interested in others, and so anxious to be obliging that you were always having to decline his helpful offers. In addition he was a thoroughly decent man, modest, open and by no means stupid. But after a while it became difficult to put up with his effusive, noisy way of being permanently happy. His watery eyes were always beaming with contentment about anything and everything. All that he owned, all that he encountered was delightful, wonderful; his wife was the best woman in the world, his roses the finest roses, his pipe the best pipe ever seen, and he smoked the best tobacco in it. He could spend a full quarter-of-an-hour trying to convince my husband that a pipe ought to be filled just so, in exactly the way he filled his own, and that while his tobacco was a penny cheaper than more expensive brands it was even better. Always bubbling over as he was with excessive enthusiasm about the most unimportant, natural and indifferent of things, he evidently had an urge to expound the reasons for falling into such banal raptures at length. The noisy engine running inside him was never switched off. Limpley couldn’t work in his garden without singing at the top of his voice, couldn’t talk without laughing uproariously and gesticulating, couldn’t read the paper without jumping up when he came upon a news item that aroused his interest and running round to tell us about it. His huge, freckled hands were always assertive, like his big heart. It wasn’t just that he patted every horse and every dog he met; my husband had to put up with many a comradely and uninhibited Canadian slap on the knee when they sat comfortably talking together. Because his own warm, full heart, which constantly overflowed with emotion, took an interest in everything, he assumed that it was only natural for everyone else to take a similar interest, and you had to resort to all kinds of little tricks to ward off his insistent kindness. He respected no one’s hours of rest or even sleep, because bursting as he was with health and strength he simply could not imagine anyone else ever feeling tired or downcast. You found yourself secretly wishing he would take a daily dose of bromide to lower his magnificent but near-intolerable vitality to a more normal level. Several times, when Limpley had spent an hour sitting with us—or rather not sitting, but leaping up and down and striding around—I caught my husband instinctively opening the window, as if the presence of that dynamic and somehow barbaric man had overheated the room. While you were with him, looking into his bright, kindly eyes—and they were indeed always brimming over with kindness—you couldn’t dislike him. It was only later that you felt you were worn out and wished him at the Devil. Before we knew Limpley, we old folk had never guessed that such admirable qualities as kindness, goodness of heart, frankness and warmth of feeling could drive us to distraction in their obtrusive superfluity.

I now also understood what I had found incomprehensible at first, that it by no means showed lack of affection on his wife’s part when she accepted his absence with such cheerful equanimity. For she was the real victim of his extravagant good humour. Of course he loved her passionately, just as he passionately loved everything that was his. It was touching to see him treat her so tenderly and with such care; she had only to cough once and he was off in search of a coat for her, or poking the fire to fan the flames, and if she went on an expedition to Bath he overwhelmed her with good advice as if she had to survive a dangerous journey. I never heard an unkind word pass between the two of them; on the contrary, he loved to sing her praises to the point where it became quite embarrassing. Even in front of us, he couldn’t refrain from caressing her and stroking her hair, and above all enumerating her many beauties and virtues. “Have you noticed what pretty little fingernails my Ellen has?” he would suddenly ask, and in spite of her bashful protest he made her show us her hands. Then I was expected to admire the way she arranged her hair, and of course we had to taste every batch of jam she made, since in his opinion it was infinitely better than anything the most famous jam manufacturers of England could produce. Ellen, a quiet, modest woman, always sat with her eyes cast down on these embarrassing occasions, looking uncomfortable. She seemed to have given up defending herself against her husband’s boisterous behaviour. She let him talk and tell stories and laugh, putting in only an occasional weary, “Oh, really?” or, “Fancy that.”