Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

He hits the grass with a soft, hollow impact, like a heavy fruit falling. Up in the castle, a figure leans out of the window, looking around uneasily, but nothing moves in the darkness, which is still as a millpond that has swallowed up a drowning man. Soon the light at the window goes out and the garden is left to itself again, in the uncertain twilight gleam above the silent shadows.

After a few minutes the fallen figure wakes to consciousness. His eyes stare up for a second to where a pale sky with a few wandering stars in it looks coldly down on him. But then he feels a sudden piercing, agonizing pain in his right foot, a pain that almost makes him scream at the first movement he attempts. Suddenly he knows what has happened to him. He also knows that he can’t stay lying here under Margot’s window, he can’t call for help to anyone, must not raise his voice or make much noise as he moves. Blood is running from his forehead; he must have hit a stone or a piece of wood on the turf, but he wipes it away with his hand to keep it from running into his eyes. Then, curled on his left side, he tries slowly working his way forward by ramming his hands into the earth. Every time something touches or merely jars his broken leg, pain flares up, and he is afraid of losing consciousness again. But he drags himself slowly on. It takes him almost half an hour to reach the steps, and his arms already feel weak. Cold sweat mingles on his brow with the sticky blood still oozing out. The last and worst of it is still to come: he must get to the top of the steps, and he works his way very slowly up them, in agony. When he is right at the top, reaching for the balustrade, his breath rattles in his throat. He drags himself a little farther, to the door into the room where the gentlemen play cards, and where he can hear voices and see a light. He hauls himself up by the handle, and suddenly, as if flung in, he falls into the brightly lit room as the door gives way.

He must present a gruesome sight, stumbling in like that, blood all over his face, smeared with garden soil, and then falling to the floor like a clod of earth, because the gentlemen spring up wildly. Chairs fall over backwards with a clatter, they all hurry to help him. He is carefully laid on the sofa. He just manages to babble something about tumbling down the steps on his way to go for a walk in the park, and then it is as if black ribbons fall on his eyes, waver back and forth, and surround him entirely. He falls into a faint, and knows no more.

A horse is saddled, and someone rides to the nearest town to fetch a doctor. The castle, startled into wakefulness, is full of ghostly activity: lights tremble like glow-worms in the corridors, voices whisper, asking what has happened from their bedroom doors, the servants timidly appear, drowsy with sleep, and finally the unconscious boy is carried up to his room.

The doctor ascertains that he has indeed broken his leg, and reassures everyone by telling them that there is no danger. However, the victim of the accident will have to lie motionless with his leg bound up for a long time. When the boy is told, he smiles faintly. It does not trouble him much. If you want to dream of someone you love, it is good to lie alone like this for lengthy periods—no noise, no other people, in a bright, high-ceilinged room with treetops rustling outside. It is sweet to think everything over in peace, dream gentle dreams of your love, undisturbed by any arrangements and duties, alone and at your ease with the tender dream images that approach the bed when you close your eyes for a moment. Love may have no more quietly beautiful moments than these pale, twilight dreams.

He still feels severe pain for the first few days, but it is mingled with a curious kind of pleasure. The idea that he has suffered this pain for the sake of his beloved Margot gives the boy a highly romantic, almost ecstatic sense of self-confidence. He wishes he had a wound, he thinks, a blood-red injury to his face that he could have taken around openly, all the time, like a knight wearing his lady’s favours; alternatively, it would have been good never to wake up again at all but stay lying down there, broken to pieces outside her window. His dream is already under way; he imagines her awakened in the morning by the sound of voices under her window, all talking together, sees her bending curiously down and discovering him—him!—shattered there below the window, dead for her sake. He pictures her collapsing with a scream; he hears that shrill cry in his ears, and then sees her grief and despair as she lives on, sad and serious all her life, dressed in black, her lips quivering faintly when she is asked the reason for her sorrow.

He dreams like this for days, at first only in the dark, then with open eyes, getting accustomed to the pleasant memory of her dear image. Not an hour is so bright or full of activity as to keep her picture from coming to him, a slight shadow stealing over the walls, or her voice from reaching his ears through the rippling rustle of the leaves and the crunch of sand outside in the strong sunlight. He converses with Margot for hours like this, or dreams of accompanying her on their travels, on wonderful journeys. Sometimes, however, he wakes from these reveries distraught. Would she really mourn for him if he were dead? Would she even remember him?

To be sure, she sometimes comes in person to visit the invalid. Often, when he is talking to her in his mind and seems to see her lovely image before him, the door opens and she comes in, tall and beautiful, but so different from the being in his dreams. For she is not gentle, nor does she bend down with emotion to kiss his brow, like the Margot of his dreams; she just sits down beside his chaise longue, asks how he is and whether he is in any pain, and then tells him a few interesting stories. He is always so sweetly startled and confused by her presence that he dares not look at her; often he closes his eyes to hear her voice the better, drinking in the sound of her words more deeply, that unique music that will then hover around him for hours. He answers her hesitantly, because he loves the silence when he hears only her breathing, and is most profoundly alone with her in this room, in space itself. And then, when she stands up and turns to the door, he stretches and straightens up with difficulty, despite the pain, so that he can memorize the outline of her figure in movement, see her in her living form before she lapses into the uncertain reality of his dreams.

Margot visits him almost every day. But doesn’t Kitty visit him too, and Elisabeth, little Elisabeth who always looks so startled, and asks whether he feels better yet in such kind tones of concern? Doesn’t his sister come to see him daily, and the other women, and aren’t they all equally kind to him? Don’t they stay with him, telling him amusing stories? In fact they even stay too long, because their presence drives away his mood of reverie, rouses it from its meditative peace and forces him to make casual conversation and utter silly phrases. He would rather none of them came except for Margot, and even she only for an hour, only for a few minutes, and then he would be on his own again to dream of her undisturbed, uninterrupted, quietly happy as if buoyed up on soft clouds, entirely absorbed in the consoling images of his love.

So sometimes, when he hears a hand opening the door, he closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep. Then the visitors steal out again on tiptoe, he hears the handle quietly closing, and knows that now he can plunge back into the warm tide of his dreams gently bearing him away to enticingly faraway places.

And one day a strange thing happens: Margot has already been to visit him, only for a moment, but she brought all the scents of the garden in her hair, the sultry perfume of jasmine in flower, and the bright sparkling of the August sun was in her eyes. Now, he knew, he could not expect her again today. It would be a long, bright afternoon, shining with sweet reverie, because no one would disturb him; they had all gone riding. And when the door moves again, hesitantly, he squeezes his eyes shut, imitating sleep. However, the woman coming in—as he can clearly hear in the breathless stillness of the room—does not retreat, but closes the door without a sound so as not to wake him. Now she steals towards him, stepping carefully, her feet barely touching the floor. He hears the soft rustle of a dress, and knows that she is sitting down beside him. And through the crimson mist behind his closed eyelids, he feels that her gaze is on his face.