Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

At last he pulled himself together and struck a light, which flared briefly from his tinder, illuminating a scene that made him stagger back. On the ground, among ruins, lay the Italian master’s sweetly sad Madonna, the Madonna of the Wounded Heart, transfixed by a dagger thrust. But it was not the picture, it was the figure of the Madonna herself. Cold sweat stood out on his brow as the flame went out again. He thought this must be a bad dream. When he struck his tinder again, however, he recognised Esther lying there dead of her wound. And by a strange miracle she, who in life had been the embodiment of his own picture of the Virgin, revealed in death the features of the Italian master’s Madonna and her bleeding, mortal injury.

Yes, it was a miracle, an obvious miracle. But the old man would not believe in any more miracles. At that hour, when he saw the girl who had brought mild light into the late days of his life lying there dead beside his smashed picture, a string broke in his soul that had so often played the music of faith. He denied the God he had revered for seventy years in a single minute. Could this be the work of God’s wise, kind hand, giving so much blessed creativity and bringing splendour into being, only to snatch them back into darkness for no good purpose? This could not be a benign will, only a heartless game. It was a miracle of life and not of God, a coincidence like thousands of others that happen at random every day, coming together and then moving apart again. No more! Could good, pure souls mean so little to God that he threw them away in his casual game? For the first time he stood in a church and doubted God, because he had thought him good and kind, and now he could not understand the ways of his creator.

For a long time he looked down at the dead girl who had shed such gentle evening light over his old age. And when he saw the smile of bliss on her broken lips, he felt less savage and did God more justice. Humility came back into his kindly heart. Could he really ask who had performed this strange miracle, making the lonely Jewish girl honour the Madonna in her death? Could he judge whether it was the work of God or the work of life? Could he clothe love in words that he did not know, could he reject God because he did not understand his nature?

The old man shuddered. He felt poor and needy in that lonely hour. He felt that he had wandered alone between God and earthly life all these long years, trying to understand them as twofold when they were one and yet defied understanding. Had it not been like the work of some miraculous star watching over the tentative path of this young girl’s soul—had not God and Love been at one in her and in all things?

Above the windows the first light of dawn was showing. But it did not bring light to him, for he did not want to see new days dawning in the life he had lived for so many years, touched by its miracles yet never really transfigured by them. And now, without fear, he felt close to the last miracle, the miracle that ceases to be dream and illusion, and is only the dark eternal truth.

A STRANGE THING HAPPENED one one day when the slender, elegantly groomed waiter François was leaning over the beautiful Polish Baroness Ostrovska’s shoulder to serve her. It lasted for only a second, it was not marked by any start or sudden movement of surprise, any restlessness or momentary agitation. Yet it was one of those seconds in which thousands of hours and days of rejoicing and torment are held spellbound, just as all the wild force of a forest of tall, dark, rustling oak trees, with their rocking branches and swaying crowns, is contained in a single tiny acorn dropping through the air. To outward appearance, nothing happened during that second. With a supple movement François, the waiter in the grand hotel on the Riviera, leaned further down to place the serving platter at a more convenient angle for the Baroness’s questing knife. For that one moment, however, his face was just above her softly curling, fragrant waves of hair, and when he instinctively opened the eyes that he had respectfully closed, his reeling gaze saw the gentle white radiance of the line of her neck as it disappeared from that dark cascade of hair, to be lost in her dark red, full-skirted dress. He felt as if crimson flames were flaring up in him. And her knife clinked quietly on the platter, which was imperceptibly shaking. But although in that second he foresaw all the fateful consequences of his sudden enchantment, he expertly mastered his emotion and went on serving at the table with the cool, slightly debonair stylishness of a well-trained waiter with impeccable good taste. He handed the platter calmly to the Baroness’s usual companion at table, an elderly aristocrat with gracefully assured manners, who was talking of unimportant matters in crystal-clear French with a very faint accent. Then he walked away from the table without a gesture or a backward glance.

Those minutes were the beginning of his abandoning himself to a very strange kind of devotion, such a reeling, intoxicated sensation that the proud and portentous word ‘love’ is not quite right for it. It was that faithful, dog-like devotion without desire that those in mid-life seldom feel, and is known only to the very young and the very old. A love devoid of any deliberation, not thinking but only dreaming. He entirely forgot the unjust yet ineradicable disdain that even the clever and considerate show to those who wear a waiter’s tailcoat, he did not look for opportunities and chance meetings, but nurtured this strange affection in his blood until its secret fervour was beyond all mockery and criticism. His love was not a matter of secret winks and lurking glances, the sudden boldness of audacious gestures, the senseless ardour of salivating lips and trembling hands; it was quiet toil, the performance of those small services that are all the more sacred and sublime in their humility because they are intended to go unnoticed. After the evening meal he smoothed out the crumpled folds of the tablecloth where she had been sitting with tender, caressing fingers, as one would stroke a beloved woman’s soft hands at rest; he adjusted everything close to her with devout symmetry, as if he were preparing it for a special occasion. He carefully carried the glasses that her lips had touched up to his own small, musty attic bedroom, and watched them sparkle like precious jewellery by night when the moonlight streamed in. He was always to be found in some corner, secretly attentive to her as she strolled and walked about. He drank in what she said as you might relish a sweet, fragrantly intoxicating wine on the tongue, and responded to every one of her words and orders as eagerly as children run to catch a ball flying through the air. So his intoxicated soul brought an ever-changing, rich glow into his dull, ordinary life. The wise folly of clothing the whole experience in the cold, destructive words of reality was an idea that never entered his mind: the poor waiter François was in love with an exotic Baroness who would be for ever unattainable. For he did not think of her as reality, but as something very distant, very high above him, sufficient in its mere reflection of life. He loved the imperious pride of her orders, the commanding arch of her black eyebrows that almost touched one another, the wilful lines around her small mouth, the confident grace of her bearing. Subservience seemed to him quite natural, and he felt the humiliating intimacy of menial labour as good fortune, because it enabled him to step so often into the magic circle that surrounded her.

So a dream suddenly awakened in the life of a simple man, like a beautiful, carefully raised garden flower blooming by a roadside where the dust of travel obliterates all other seedlings. It was the frenzy of someone plain and ordinary, an enchanting narcotic dream in the midst of a cold and monotonous life. And such people’s dreams are like a rudderless boat drifting aimlessly on quiet, shining waters, rocking with delight, until suddenly its keel grounds abruptly on an unknown bank.