Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

I felt paralysed. I had no power to push him away, no power to bear that self-confident and, indeed, I might almost say self-satisfied look. I walked quickly on. God forbid I should accuse even an innocent animal, let alone a human being, of a crime he did not commit. But since that day I cannot get rid of the terrible thought: “He did it. He was the one who did it.”

MY DEAR ELLEN,

I know you will be surprised to receive a letter from me after so long; it must be five or perhaps even six years since I last wrote to you. I believe that then it was a letter of congratulations on your youngest daughter’s marriage. This time the occasion is not so festive, and perhaps my need to confide the details of a strange encounter to you, rather than anyone else, may strike you as odd. But I can’t tell anyone else what happened to me a few days ago. You are the only person who would understand.

My pen involuntarily hesitates as I write these words, and I have to smile at myself a little. Didn’t we exchange the very same “You are the only person who would understand” a thousand times when we were fifteen or sixteen years old—immature, excitable girls telling each other our childish secrets at school or on the way home? And didn’t we solemnly swear, long ago in our salad days, to tell each other everything, in detail, concerning a certain person? All that is more than a quarter of a century ago; but a promise, once made, must be kept. And as you will see, I am faithfully keeping my word, if rather late in the day.

This was how it all happened. I have had a difficult and strenuous time of things this year. My husband was appointed medical director of the big hospital in R., so I had all the complications of moving house to deal with; meanwhile my son-in-law went to Brazil on business, taking my daughter with him, and they left their three children in our house. The children promptly contracted scarlet fever one after the other, and I had to nurse them… and that wasn’t all, because then my mother-in-law died. Everything was happening at once. I thought at first that I had survived all these headlong events pretty well, but somehow they must have taken more out of me than I knew, because one day my husband said, after looking at me in silence for some time, “Margaret, I think that now the children, thank goodness, are better again you ought to do something about your own health. You look overtired, you’ve been well and truly overdoing things. Two or three weeks at a sanatorium in the country, and you’ll be your old self again.”

My husband was right. I was exhausted, more so than I admitted to myself. I became aware of it when I realized that in company—and since my husband took up his post here, there have been many functions to host and many calls to be paid—after an hour I couldn’t concentrate properly on what people were saying, while I forgot the simplest things more and more often in the daily running of the household, and had to force myself to get up in the morning. With his observant and medically trained eye, my husband had diagnosed my physical and mental weariness correctly. All I really needed was two weeks to recover. Fourteen days without thinking about the meals, the laundry, paying calls, doing all the everyday business—fourteen days on my own to be myself, not a mother, grandmother, housekeeper and wife of the medical director of a hospital all the time. It so happened that my widowed sister was available to come and stay, so everything was prepared for my absence; and I had no further scruples in following my husband’s advice and going away by myself for the first time in twenty-five years. Indeed, I was actually looking forward quite impatiently to being invigorated by my holiday. I rejected my husband’s suggestion only in one point: his idea that I should spend it at a sanatorium, although he had thoughtfully found one whose owner had been a friend of his from their youth. But there would have been other people whom I knew there, and I would have had to go on being sociable and mixing in company. All I really wanted was to be on my own for fourteen days with books, walks, time to dream and sleep undisturbed, fourteen days without the telephone and the radio, fourteen days of silence at peace with myself, if I may put it like that. Unconsciously, I hadn’t wanted anything so much for years as this time set aside for silence and rest.

And then I remembered that in the first years of my marriage, when my husband was practising as an assistant doctor in Bolzano, I had once spent three hours walking up to an isolated little village high in the mountains. In its tiny marketplace, opposite the church, stood one of those rural inns of the kind so often to be found in the Tyrol, its ground floor built of massive stones, the first floor under the wide, overhanging wooden roof opening on to a spacious veranda, and the whole place surrounded by vine leaves that in autumn, the season when I saw it, glowed around the whole house like a red fire gradually cooling. Small outbuildings and big barns huddled to the right and left of it, but the house itself stood on its own under soft autumnal clouds drifting across the sky, and looked down at the endless panorama of the mountains.

At the time I had felt almost spellbound outside that little inn, and I wanted to go in. I’m sure you know what it’s like to see a house from the train or on a walk, and think all of a sudden: oh, why don’t I live here? I could be happy in this place. I think such an idea occurs to everyone sometimes, and when you have looked at a house for a long time secretly wishing to live happily in it, everything about it is imprinted on your memory. For years I remembered the red and yellow flowers growing in window boxes, the wooden first-floor gallery, where laundry was fluttering like colourful banners the day I saw it, the painted shutters at the windows, yellow on a blue background with little heart-shapes cut out of the middle of them, and the roof ridge with a stork’s nest on the gable. When my heart felt restless I sometimes thought of that house. How nice it would be to go there for a day, I would think, in the dreamy, half-unconscious way that you think of something impossible. And now wasn’t this my best chance to make my old, and by this time almost forgotten, wish come true? Wasn’t the prettily painted house on the mountainside, an inn without the tiresome amenities of our modern world, with no telephone or radio, the very thing for overtired nerves? I would have no visitors there, and there would be no formalities. As I called it to mind again, I thought I was breathing in the strong, aromatic mountain air, and hearing the far-off ringing of rustic cowbells. Even remembering it gave me fresh courage and made me feel better. It was one of those ideas that take us by surprise apparently for no reason at all, although in reality they express wishes that we have cherished for a long time, waiting in the unconscious mind. My husband, who didn’t know how often I had dreamt of that little house, seen only once years ago, smiled a little at first but promised to make enquiries. The proprietors replied that all of their three guest rooms were vacant at the moment, and I could choose whichever I liked. All the better, I thought, no neighbours, no conversations; and I went on the night train. Next morning, a little country one-horse trap took me and my small suitcase up the mountain at a slow trot.

It was all as delightful as I could have hoped for. The room was bright and neat, with its simple, pale pine furniture, and from the veranda, which was all mine in the absence of any other guests, I had a view into the endless distance. A glance at the well-scoured kitchen, shining with cleanliness, showed me, experienced housewife that I am, that I would be very well looked after here. The landlady, a thin, friendly, grey-haired Tyrolean, assured me again that I need not fear being disturbed or pestered by visitors. True, the parish clerk, the local policeman and a few of the other neighbours came to the inn every evening to drink a glass or so, play cards and talk. But they were all quiet folk, and at eleven they went home again. On Sunday after church, and sometimes in the afternoon, the place was rather livelier, because the locals came to the inn from their farms or the mountains; but I would hear hardly any of that in my room.