Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

One day Elisabeth is sitting beside his chaise longue again. The sun is shining brightly outside, a reflection of the green treetops in the wind trembles on the walls. At such moments her hair is as fiery as burning clouds, her skin pale and translucent, her whole being shines and seems airy. From his cushions, which lie in shadow, he sees her face smiling close to him, and yet it looks far away because it is radiant with light that no longer reaches him. He forgets everything that has happened at this sight. And when she bends down to him, so that her eyes seem to be more profound, moving darkly inward, when she leans forward he puts his arm round her, brings her head close to his and kisses her delicate, moist mouth. She trembles like a leaf but does not resist, only caresses his hair with her hand. And then she says, merely breathing the words, with loving sorrow in her voice, “But Margot is the only one you love.” He feels that tone of devotion go straight to his heart, that gentle, unresisting despair, and the name that shakes him with emotion strikes at his very soul. But he dares not lie at that minute. He says nothing in reply.

She kisses him once more, very lightly, an almost sisterly kiss on the lips, and then she goes out without a word. That is the only time they talk about it. A few more days, and then the convalescent is taken down to the garden, where the first faded leaves are already chasing across the path and early evening breathes an autumnal melancholy. Another few days, and he is walking alone with some difficulty, for the last time that year, under the colourful autumn canopy of leaves. The trees speak louder and more angrily now than on those three mild summer nights. The boy, in melancholy mood himself, goes to the place where they were once together. He feels as if an invisible, dark wall were standing here behind which, blurred in twilight already, his childhood lies; and now there is another land before him, strange and dangerous.

He said goodbye to the whole party that evening, looked hard once more at Margot’s face, as if he had to drink enough of it in to last for the rest of his life, placed his hand restlessly in Elisabeth’s, which clasped it with warm ardour, almost looked past Kitty, their friends and his sister—his heart was so full of the realization that he loved one of the sisters and the other loved him. He was very pale, with a bitter expression on his face that made him seem more than a boy; for the first time, he looked like a man.

And yet, when the horses were brought up and he saw Margot turn indifferently away to go back up the steps, and when Elisabeth’s eyes suddenly shone with moisture, and she held the balustrade, the full extent of his new experience overwhelmed him so entirely that he gave himself up to tears of his own like a child.

The castle retreated farther into the distance, and through the dust raised by the carriage the dark garden looked smaller and smaller. Then came the countryside, and finally all that he had experienced was hidden from his eyes—but his memory was all the more vivid. Two hours of driving took him to the nearest railway station, and next morning he was in London.

A few more years and he was no longer a boy. But that first experience had left too strong an impression ever to fade. Margot and Elisabeth had both married, but he did not want to see them again, for the memory of those hours sometimes came back to him so forcefully that his entire later life seemed to him merely a dream and an illusion by comparison with its reality. He became one of those men who cannot find a way of relating to women, because in one second of his life the sensation of both loving and being loved had united in him entirely; and now no longing urged him to look for what had fallen into his trembling, anxiously yielding boyish hands so early. He travelled in many countries, one of those correct, silent Englishmen whom many consider unemotional because they are so reserved, and their eyes look coolly away from the faces and smiles of women. For who thinks that they may bear in them, inextricably mingled with their blood, images on which their gaze is always fixed, with an eternal flame burning around them as it does before icons of the Madonna? And now I remember how I heard this story. A card had been left inside the book that I was reading this afternoon, a postcard sent to me by a friend in Canada. He is a young Englishman whom I met once on a journey. We often talked in the long evenings, and in what he said the memory of two women sometimes suddenly and mysteriously flared up, as if they were distant statues, and always in connection with a moment of his youth. It is a long time, a very long time since I spoke to him, and I had probably forgotten those conversations. But today, on receiving that postcard, the memory was revived, mingling dreamily in my mind with experiences of my own; and I felt as if I had read his story in the book that slipped out of my hands, or as if I had found it in a dream.

But how dark it is now in this room, and how far away you are from me in the deep twilight! I can see only a faint pale light where I think your face is, and I do not know if you are smiling or sad. Are you smiling because I make up strange stories for people whom I knew fleetingly, dream of whole destinies for them, and then calmly let them slip back into their lives and their own world? Or are you sad for that boy who rejected love and found himself all at once cast out of the garden of his sweet dream for ever? There, I didn’t mean my story to be dark and melancholy—I only wanted to tell you about a boy suddenly surprised by love, his own and someone else’s. But stories told in the evening all tread the gentle path of melancholy. Twilight falls with its veils, the sorrow that rests in the evening is a starless vault above them, darkness seeps into their blood, and all the bright, colourful words in them have as full and heavy a sound as if they came from our inmost hearts.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1899, the incredible, improbable news that that ugly creature Ruzena Sedlak, known to everyone far and wide as ‘the Death’s Head’, had had a baby aroused much mirth in the small Southern Bohemian town of Dobitzan. Her alarmingly and indeed distressingly ugly appearance had often enough caused amusement that none the less was more pitying than spiteful, but even the most inventive joker would never have ventured to speculate that such a battered, unattractive pot would ever find its lid. Now, however, a young huntsman had vouched for what was surely a miracle, if a miracle in the worst of taste. He had actually seen the baby in the remote part of the forest where Ruzena Sedlak lived, had seen it suckling happily from her breast, and the maidservants who heard this amazing news made haste to carry it back with their buckets to all the shops, inns and houses of Dobitzan. All that grey October evening, no one talked of anything but the unexpected infant and its presumed father. Forthright souls drinking at the regulars’ table dug one another meaningfully in the ribs, spluttering with laughter as they accused each other of that unappetizing claim to fame, and the pharmacist, who had a certain amount of medical knowledge, described the probable course of the amorous scene in such realistic detail that everyone had to put back another schnapps or so in order to recover. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, the unfortunate Ruzena had provided her fellow citizens with piquant and abundant material for jokes.

Of course Nature herself, long ago, had been the first to play a cruel and ineradicable joke on the poor monstrosity, the daughter of a syphilitic brewer’s man, by squashing her nose while she was still in the womb, and the derisive nickname that clung so terribly came into the world with her. For as soon as the midwife, who had seen plenty of strange and ugly creatures born in forty years, set eyes on the newborn baby she hastily made the sign of the cross and cried, losing all control of herself, “A death’s head!” For where the arch of the nose normally rises clear and distinct in a human face, protecting the eyes and shading the lips, dividing light and shadow on the human countenance, there yawned in this child only a deep-set, empty Nothing: just two breathing holes, black as bullet wounds and shockingly empty in the pink surface of flesh. The sight, which no one could stand for long, reminded people forcibly of a skull, where a similarly monstrous and disturbing void lies between the bony forehead and the white teeth. Then, recovering from her first shock, the midwife examined the baby and found that otherwise the little girl was well proportioned, healthy and shapely. The unfortunate child needed nothing to be the same as other babies but an inch of bone and gristle and a small amount of flesh. But Nature has made us so accustomed to the regularity of her laws that the slightest deviation from their familiar harmony seems repellent and alarming. Every mistake made by the creator arouses our bitter dislike of the failed creation—an injustice for which there is no remedy. Fatally, we feel revulsion not for the negligent designer but for the innocent thing it has designed. Every maimed and malformed being is doomed to suffer horribly not only from its own torment, but from the ill-concealed discomfort of those who are normally formed. And so a squinting eye, a twisted lip, a split palate, all of them just single mistakes of Nature, become the lasting torment of a human being, the inescapable misery of a soul—indeed, such diabolical misery that the sufferer finds it hard to believe in any sense of justice on the circling star we call the Earth.