Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

At last, after a few days, one of them, the younger girl, notices the governess discreetly giving Otto a look full of meaning. He nods in answer. The child quietly takes her sister’s hand under the table. When her sister turns to her, she flashes her a meaning glance of her own. The elder girl understands at once, and she too is on the alert.

As soon as they rise from table, the governess tells the girls, “Go to your room and occupy yourselves quietly with something. I have a headache, I’d like to rest for half-an-hour.” The children look down. Cautiously, they communicate by touching hands. And as soon as the governess has left, the younger girl hurries over to her sister. “You wait and see—Otto will go to her room now.”

“Of course! That’s why she sent us to ours.”

“We must listen outside her door.”

“But suppose someone comes along?”

“Who?”

“Well, Mama.”

The younger girl takes fright. “Yes, then…”

“I tell you what. I’ll listen at the door, you stay further along the corridor and warn me if there’s anyone coming. That way we’ll be safe.”

The smaller girl looks cross. “But then you won’t tell me anything!”

“Yes, I will. I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Really all about it?”

“Yes, I promise. You must cough as a signal if you hear someone coming.”

They wait in the corridor, trembling with excitement. Their hearts are beating fast. What will happen? They press close to each other.

Footsteps are approaching. The girls retreat into the shadows. Sure enough, it is Otto. He takes hold of the door handle, and the door closes after him. The elder girl shoots up to it like an arrow from the bow, pressing close to the door, holding her breath as she listens. The younger sister looks wistfully at her from a distance. She is burning with curiosity, and it tears her away from her post. She creeps up, but her sister angrily pushes her away. So she waits at a distance for two or three more minutes that seem to her like an eternity. She is quivering with impatience, stepping from foot to foot as if the floor were burning hot. In her excitement and anger she is near tears—to think that her sister can hear it all and she can’t hear anything! Then, in a third room, a door closes. She coughs. And both girls hurry away back to their room. They stand there for a moment breathless, their hearts thudding.

“Come on then, tell me all about it,” demands the younger girl avidly.

Her elder sister looks thoughtful. At last she says, dreamily, as if to herself, “I can’t make it out!”

“What?”

“It’s so strange.”

“What? What’s so strange?” The younger girl is impatient to know. Her sister tries to collect her thoughts. The smaller girl is pressing very close to her so as not to miss a word.

“It was really funny… not at all what I expected. I think when he came into the room he was going to hug her or kiss her, but then she said, ‘Don’t do that, I have something serious to discuss with you.’ I couldn’t see anything, because the key was in the lock on the inside of the door, but I could hear every word. ‘Well, what is it?’ asked Otto, but I’ve never heard him speak like that before. You know his usual cheerful, loud way of talking, but he sounded uncertain of himself when he said that, and I felt at once that he was somehow scared. And she must have noticed that he was pretending, too, because she just said very quietly, ‘You know what it is.’ ‘No, I don’t, I have no idea,’ he said. ‘Oh,’ she said, so sadly, so terribly sadly, ‘then why are you avoiding me all of a sudden? It’s a week since you spoke a word to me, you avoid me whenever you can, you don’t go out with the children or to the park with us any more. Am I such a stranger all at once? Oh, you know very well why you’re keeping away from me.’ He said nothing for a bit, then he said, ‘I’m about to sit my examinations, I have a great deal of work to do and no time for anything else. It can’t be helped.’ Then she began crying, and she said to him, through her tears but so kindly, she wasn’t angry, ‘Otto, why are you lying to me? Tell the truth. I really haven’t deserved this from you. I never asked for anything, but now the two of us have to discuss something after all. You know what I am going to say to you, I can see it from your eyes.’ And then he said, ‘Well, what is it?’ But very faintly. And she said…”

Suddenly the girl began trembling, and in her emotion she could get no further. Her younger sister pressed close, saying, “And then what?”

“Then she said, ‘What am I going to do about our baby?’”

The smaller girl started with surprise, and cried, “Their baby? What baby? That’s not possible!”

“But she said it.”

“You can’t have heard properly.”

“I did, I did. And he repeated it, he sounded just as surprised as you, he cried, ‘A baby!’ She didn’t say anything for quite a time, and then she asked, ‘What’s to become of me now?’ And then…”

“And then?”

“Then you coughed, and I had to run away.”

The younger girl stares ahead of her, dismayed. “A baby! But that’s impossible. Where is the baby?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Maybe at home where… well, where she was living before she came to be our governess. Mama probably wouldn’t let her bring the baby with her because of us. And that’s why she’s so sad.”

They both fall silent again, baffled, brooding, unable to come to any conclusions. The thought of the baby is weighing on their minds. Once again it is the smaller girl who speaks first. “A baby, I mean it isn’t possible! How can she have a baby? She isn’t married, and only married people have babies, I know that!”

“Perhaps she was married.”

“Don’t be so silly. Not to Otto.”

“Then how?…”

They stare at each other, at a loss.

“Oh, poor Fräulein,” says one of the girls very sadly. They keep repeating the same phrase, and it dies away into a sigh of sympathy. But their curiosity also keeps flaring up.

“I wonder if it’s a girl or a boy?”

“How could we find out?”

“Suppose I asked her some time, very, very carefully… What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy!”

“Why? She’s so nice to us.”

“Oh, do stop and think! No one tells us that sort of thing. They hush everything up. When we come into a room they break off their conversation and start talking to us in a silly way as if we were little children. And I’m thirteen already! What’s the point of asking? Grown-ups always tell lies.”

“But I really, really would like to know.”

“Do you think I wouldn’t?”

“I tell you what, the bit I understand least is why Otto didn’t sound as if he knew about it. You know if you have a baby, the way you know that you have a mother and a father.”

“He was only pretending not to know. He’s horrid. Otto is always pretending.”

“But you wouldn’t pretend about something like that. Perhaps he’s just trying to fool people…”

However, at this point the governess comes in. They stop talking at once and seem to be doing homework. However, they surreptitiously glance at her. Her eyes look reddened, her voice is rather huskier and more vibrant than usual. The children keep very quiet, suddenly regarding her with awed timidity. She has a baby, they keep thinking, that’s why she’s so sad. And soon they are feeling sad themselves.

*

At the dining-room table next day they hear unexpected news. Otto is leaving the family apartment. He has told his uncle that with his examinations so close he has to work very hard, and there are too many distractions here. He will rent a room somewhere for the next month or so, he says, until the exams are over.