Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

I sensed the man’s shadow beside me, a flickering, spectral shape at my feet, now disintegrating, now coming together again as the light of the dim street lamps changed. I could say nothing, I could give no comfort and had no questions, but I felt his silence clinging to me, heavy and oppressive. Then, suddenly, he clutched my arm. He was trembling.

“But I won’t leave this place without her… I’ve found her again, after months… She torments me, but I won’t give up… I beg you, sir, talk to her… I must have her, tell her that, she won’t listen to me… I can’t go on living like this… I can’t watch the men going in to her… and wait outside the house until they come down again, drunk and laughing… The whole alley knows me now, they laugh when they see me waiting… it drives me mad… and yet I go back again every evening. Sir, I beg you, speak to her… I don’t know you, but do it for God’s merciful sake… speak to her…”

Instinctively, and with horror, I tried to free my arm. But as he felt my resistance to his unhappiness, he suddenly fell on his knees in the middle of the road and embraced my feet.

“I beg you, sir… you must speak to her… you must, or… or something terrible will happen. I’ve spent all I have looking for her, and I won’t… I won’t leave her here alive. I’ve bought a knife… I have a knife, sir… I won’t leave her here alive, I can’t bear it… Speak to her, sir…”

He was rolling about on the ground in front of me like a madman. At that moment two police officers came down the street. I violently wrenched him up and to his feet. He stared at me for a moment, astonished. Then he said in a dry and very different voice, “Turn down that side-street, and you’ll see your hotel.” Once more he stared at me with eyes whose pupils seemed to have merged into something terribly white and empty. Then he walked away.

I wrapped my coat around me. I was shivering. I felt nothing but exhaustion, I was in a confused daze, black and devoid of any emotion, a darkly moving slumber. I wanted to think all this over, but that black wave of weariness kept rising inside me, carrying me away. I staggered into the hotel, fell into bed, and slept as soundly as a brute beast.

Next morning I didn’t know how much of it all had been a dream and how much was real, and something in me didn’t want to know. I had woken late, a stranger in a strange town, and I went to look at a church where there were said to be some very famous mosaics dating from the days of classical antiquity. But I stared blankly at them. Last night’s encounter rose more and more clearly before my mind’s eye, and I felt an irresistible urge to go in search of that alley and that house. But those strange alleys come to life only at night; by day they wear cold, grey disguises, and only those who know them well can recognise them. However hard I looked, I couldn’t find the alley. I came back tired and disappointed, pursued by images of something that was either memory or delusion.

The time of my train was nine in the evening. I left the town with regret. A porter fetched my bags and carried them to the station for me. On our way, I suddenly turned at a crossing; I recognised the alley leading to the house, told the porter to wait, and—while he smiled first in surprise, then knowingly—went to look at the scene of my adventure once more.

There it lay in the dark, as dark as yesterday, and in the faint moonlight I saw the glass pane in the house door gleaming. Once again I was going closer when, with a rustling sound, a figure emerged from the darkness. With a shudder, I saw him waiting there in the doorway and beckoning me to approach. Dread took hold of me—I fled quickly, in cowardly fear of getting involved here and missing my train.

But then, just before I turned the corner of the alley, I looked back once again. When my gaze fell on him he pulled himself together and strode to the door. He quickly opened his hand, and I saw the glint of metal in it. From a distance, I couldn’t tell whether the moonlight showed money or a knife gleaming there in his fingers…

IN MARCH 1912 a strange accident occurred in Naples harbour during the unloading of a large ocean-going liner which was reported at length by the newspapers, although in extremely fanciful terms. Although I was a passenger on the Oceania , I did not myself witness this strange incident—nor did any of the others—since it happened while coal was being taken on board and cargo unloaded, and to escape the noise we had all gone ashore to pass the time in coffee-houses or theatres. It is my personal opinion however, that a number of conjectures which I did not voice publicly at the time provide the true explanation of that sensational event, and I think that, at a distance of some years, I may now be permitted to give an account of a conversation I had in confidence immediately before the curious episode.

When I went to the Calcutta shipping agency trying to book a passage on the Oceania for my voyage home to Europe, the clerk apologetically shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know if it would be possible for him to get me a cabin, he said; at this time of year, with the rainy season imminent, the ship was likely to be fully booked all the way from Australia, and he would have to wait for a telegram from Singapore. Next day, I was glad to hear, he told me that yes, he could still reserve me a cabin, although not a particularly comfortable one; it would be below deck and amidships. As I was impatient to get home I did not hesitate for long, but took it.

The clerk had not misinformed me. The ship was over-crowded and my cabin a poor one: a cramped little rectangle of a place near the engine room, lit only dimly through a circular porthole. The thick, curdled air smelled greasy and musty, and I could not for a moment escape the electric ventilator fan that hummed as it circled overhead like a steel bat gone mad. Down below the engines clattered and groaned like a breathless coal-heaver constantly climbing the same flight of stairs, up above I heard the tramp of footsteps pacing the promenade deck the whole time. As soon as I had stowed my luggage away amidst the dingy girders in my stuffy tomb, I then went back on deck to get away from the place, and as I came up from the depths I drank in the soft, sweet wind blowing off the land as if it were ambrosia.

But the atmosphere of the promenade deck was crowded and restless too, full of people chattering incessantly, hurrying up and down with the uneasy nervousness of those forced to be inactive in a confined space. The arch flirtatiousness of the women, the constant pacing up and down on the bottleneck of the deck as flocks of passengers surged past the deckchairs, always meeting the same faces again, were actually painful to me. I had seen a new world, I had taken in turbulent, confused images that raced wildly through my mind. Now I wanted leisure to think, to analyse and organise them, make sense of all that had impressed itself on my eyes, but there wasn’t a moment of rest and peace to be had here on the crowded deck. The lines of a book I was trying to read blurred as the fleeting shadows of the chattering passengers moved by. It was impossible to be alone with myself on the unshaded, busy thoroughfare of the deck of this ship.

I tried for three days; resigned to my lot, I watched the passengers and the sea. But the sea was always the same, blue and empty, and only at sunset was it abruptly flooded with every imaginable colour. As for the passengers, after seventy-two hours I knew them all by heart. Every face was tediously familiar, the women’s shrill laughter no longer irritated me, even the loud voices of two Dutch officers quarrelling nearby were not such a source of annoyance any more. There was nothing for it but to escape the deck, although my cabin was hot and stuffy, and in the saloon English girls kept playing waltzes badly on the piano, staccato-fashion. Finally I decided to turn the day’s normal timetable upside down, and in the afternoon, having anaesthetized myself with a few glasses of beer, I went to my cabin to sleep through the evening with its dinner and dancing.