Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

Finally there was no restraining him any longer. Picking up his glass of beer, he carried it over to the table where the farmers were sitting. “Will you gentlemen make a little room for my old bones?” The farmers moved together slightly and took no further notice of him. For a while he said nothing, pushing the half-full glass alternately forwards and backwards. Once again, I saw that his fingers trembled. Finally he leant back and began talking, in quite a loud voice. It was not really obvious whom he was addressing, for the two rustics sitting next to him had clearly shown that they were disinclined to embark on any conversation. He was, in fact, addressing everyone at large. He spoke—I sensed that at once—in order to speak and to hear himself speaking.

“Well, what a business that was today!” he began. “Well-meant of the Count, well-meant, I grant you. Meets me while he’s driving along the road and stops his car, yes, indeed, he stops it specially for me. He’s taking his children down to Bolzano to go to the cinema, says he, how would I like to go with them? Well, he’s a distinguished man, a cultured, educated man, the Count knows where respect is due, and you don’t say no lightly to such a man, not if you know what’s right. So I go along with them, in the back seat of course, with his lordship the Count—after all, it’s an honour, a man like that, and I let him take me into that magic-lantern show they’ve opened in the high street with such a fuss, advertisements and lights fit for a church festival. Well, I think, why shouldn’t I see what those gentlemen the British and Americans are churning out over there, selling the stuff to us for good money? It’s said to be quite an art, this cinema acting. Shame on them, say I”—and here he spat copiously—“shame on them for the rubbish they show on that screen of theirs! It’s a disgrace to art, a disgrace to a world that has a Shakespeare and a Goethe in it! First came all that coloured nonsense with comical animals—well, I’ll say nothing about that, it may be fun for children, it does no one any harm. But then they make a film of Romeo and Juliet —now that ought to be forbidden, forbidden in the name of art! The lines sound as if someone was croaking them into a stovepipe, those sacred lines of Shakespeare’s, and all so sugary and sentimental! I’d have got up and walked out if I hadn’t been there with his lordship the Count, on his invitation. Making such rubbish out of pure refined gold! And to think that we live in times like these!”

He grasped his glass of beer, took a large draught and put it down with a loud bang. His voice was very loud now, he was almost shouting. “And that’s what actors do these days—they spit out Shakespearian lines into machines for money, filthy lucre, dragging their art in the dirt! Give me any tart in the street—I have more respect for her than for those apes with their smooth faces metres wide on the posters, raking in millions for committing a crime against art! Mutilating the word, the living word, shouting Shakespeare’s verse into a funnel instead of edifying the public, instead of educating young people. A moral institution, that’s what Schiller called the theatre, but that doesn’t hold good any more. Nothing holds good any more but money, filthy money, and the spectacle they make of themselves. And anyone who doesn’t know how to do that will die. Better die, say I—in my eyes, those who sell themselves to that sink of iniquity, Hollywood, should go to the gallows. To the gallows with them, I say, to the gallows!”

He had been shouting at the top of his voice and thumping the table with his fist. One of the trio at the card-players’ table growled, “Keep quiet, can’t you? We can’t tell what cards we’re playing through your stupid gabbling!”

The old man gave a start, as if to reply. For a moment there was strength and vigour in his dull gaze, but then he merely made a contemptuous gesture, as much as to imply that it was beneath him to answer. The two farmers beside him puffed at their pipes, and he stared silently ahead with glazed eyes, saying nothing, his expression sombre. You could tell it was not the first time he had forced himself to hold his tongue.

I was deeply shaken, and felt a pang. Something stirred in me at the sight of this humiliated man, who I felt at once must have seen better days, and yet somehow had sunk so low, perhaps because of drink. I could hardly breathe for fear that he or the others might embark on a violent scene. From the first moment when he came in and I had heard his voice, something in him—I didn’t know what—had made me uneasy. But nothing happened. He sat still, his head sinking lower, he stared ahead, and I felt as if he were muttering something quietly to himself. No one took any more notice of him.

Meanwhile, the landlady had got up from the bar to fetch something from the kitchen. I took that as a chance to follow her and ask who the man was. “Oh,” she said, unruffled, “poor fellow, he lives in the poorhouse here, and I give him a beer every evening. He can’t afford to pay for it himself. But we don’t have an easy time with him. He used to be an actor once somewhere or other, and it hurts his feelings that people don’t really believe he ever amounted to much and show him no respect. Sometimes they poke fun at him, asking him to put on a show for them. Then he stands up and spouts stuff that nobody understands for hours. Sometimes they give him some tobacco for his pains, or buy him another beer. Sometimes they just laugh at him, and then he loses his temper. You have to go carefully with him, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Two or three beers if someone will pay for them, and then he’s happy—yes, poor devil, there’s no harm in old Peter.”

“What—what is his name?” I asked, startled without knowing why.

“Peter Sturzentaler. His father was a woodcutter in the village here, so they took him in at the poorhouse.”

Well, my dear, you can imagine what had startled me so much. For at once I understood what might seem unimaginable. This Peter Sturzentaler, this down-at-heel, drunk, sick old man from the poorhouse, could be none other than the idol of our young days, the master of our dreams; the man who as Peter Sturz the actor, the male lead in our city theatre, had been the quintessence of all that was elevated and sublime, whom as you will remember, both of us—young girls who were still half children—had admired so madly, loved to such distraction. And now I also knew why something in the first words he spoke on entering the inn had troubled me. I had not recognized him—how could I have recognized him behind this mask of debasement, in such a state of change and decay?—but there had been something in his voice that found its way to my long-buried memory. Do you remember when we first saw him? He had come from some provincial city when our municipal theatre in Innsbruck offered him an engagement, and it so happened that our parents said we could go to the performance introducing him to Innsbruck audiences because it was a classic play, Grillparzer’s Sappho , and he was playing the part of Phaon, the handsome young man who creates turmoil in Sappho’s heart. But remember how he captured ours when he came on stage, in Greek costume, a wreath in his thick, dark hair, a new Apollo! He had hardly spoken his first lines before we were both trembling with excitement and holding hands with each other. We had never seen a man like this in our dull, sedate city of Innsbruck, and the young provincial actor, whose stage make-up and the artifice of whose presentation could not be seen from the gallery, seemed to us a divine symbol of all that was noble and sublime. Our foolish little hearts beat fast in our young breasts; we were different girls when we left the theatre, enchanted, and as we were close friends and did not want to endanger our friendship, we swore to each other to love and venerate him together. That was the moment when our madness began. Nothing mattered to us except him. All that happened at school, at home, in town was mysteriously linked with him, everything else paled beside him; we gave up loving books, and the only music we wanted to hear was in his voice. I think we talked of nothing else for months on end. Every day began with him; we hurried downstairs to get to the newspaper before our parents, to know what new part he had been given, to read the reviews; and none of them was enthusiastic enough for us. If there was a critical remark about him we were in despair, we hated any other actor who won praise. Oh, we committed too many follies for me to be able to remember a thousandth part of them today. We knew when he went out, and where he was going, we knew whom he spoke to, and envied everyone who could stroll down the street with him. We knew the ties he wore, the stick he carried; we hid photographs of him not only at home but inside the covers of our school textbooks, so that we could take a secret look at him in the middle of lessons; we had invented our own secret language so that at school we could signal, from desk to desk, that he was in our thoughts. A finger raised to the forehead meant, “I’m thinking of him now.” When we had to read poems aloud, we instinctively imitated his voice, and to this day I can hardly see many of the plays in which I first saw him without hearing the lines spoken in his voice. We waited for him at the stage door and followed him, we stood in the entrance of a building opposite the café that he patronized, and watched endlessly as he read the newspaper there. But our veneration for him was so great that in those two years we never dared to speak to him or try to get to know him personally. Other, more uninhibited girls who also admired him would beg for his autograph, and even dared to address him in the street. We never summoned up the courage for that. But once, when he had thrown away a cigarette end, we picked it up as if it were a holy relic and divided it in two, half for you and half for me. And this childish idolatry was transferred to everything that had any connection with him. His old housekeeper, whom we envied greatly because she could serve him and look after him, was an object of our veneration too. Once, when she was shopping in the market, we offered to carry her basket for her, and were glad of the kind words she gave us in return. Ah, what folly wouldn’t we have committed for Peter Sturz, who neither knew nor guessed anything about it?