Authors: Stefan Zweig
“But it
will
soon be over. You must just have courage a little longer, a little more courage and patience.”
She raised herself slightly in her bed. “Do you think … do you honestly think this new treatment will work? You know, the day before yesterday when Papa came in to tell me, I was quite sure it would myself … but last night, I don’t know why, I suddenly felt afraid that the doctor was wrong and had told me something that wasn’t true, because I … because I remembered something. I used to trust Dr Condor like God himself once. But it’s always the same … at first a doctor observes his patient, but in the long run the patient starts observing the doctor, and yesterday—I haven’t said this to anyone but you—while he was examining me yesterday I sometimes felt that … oh, I don’t know how to explain it … well, as if he was just putting on an act. He seemed to me so uncertain, so evasive, not as open and
kind as usual. I don’t know why, but I felt as if he was ashamed in front of me for some reason. Of course I was terribly glad to hear that he’s sending me straight to Switzerland … and yet somehow, in secret—mind, I’m not telling anyone else this … I kept feeling that pointless fear … oh, don’t tell him, whatever you do!—the fear that there was something the matter with that new course of treatment … as if he was just trying to pretend to me. Or perhaps to reassure Papa … well, you see, I just can’t shake that distrust off. But how can I help it? How can I not be suspicious of myself and everyone, after I’ve been told so often it will soon be over, and then it all goes on again so slowly, so dreadfully slowly. I can’t, I really can’t bear this eternal waiting much longer!”
In her agitation she was sitting up. Her hands began to shake. I quickly leant closer to her.
“No, don’t … don’t excite yourself again! Remember what you promised me just now …”
“Yes, you’re right! It’s no good tormenting myself, I’m only taking it out on other people. And it’s not their fault! I’m enough of a burden on them already … but no, I didn’t want to talk about that, I really didn’t … I just wanted to thank you for not being cross with me for the silly way I got over-excited … and for always being so good to me, when I don’t deserve it … and to think I said to you, of all people … but no, we’re not going to talk about that any more, are we?”
“No, never again. Trust me. And now you must have a good rest.”
I got to my feet and was going to offer her my hand. Smiling up at me from her cushions, half still anxious, half reassured, she was a touching sight—a child still, a child on the point of going to sleep. All was well; the atmosphere had cleared
like the sky after a thunderstorm. I went up to her in an easy, natural way, feeling almost cheerful. But she sat up suddenly, abruptly.
“For goodness’ sake … whatever happened to your uniform?”
She had noticed the large damp patch on my tunic. Guiltily, she must have remembered that only the cups swept off the table as she fell could have caused that little accident. Her eyes immediately disappeared under hooded lids; her hand, already stretched out, shrank back in alarm. Because she took the silly little incident so seriously, I felt impelled to soothe her, and took refuge in a jocular tone of voice.
“Oh, that’s nothing to worry about,” I said, adding playfully. “A naughty little girl spilt something over me.”
There was still distress in her eyes. But she gratefully reacted to my tone of voice, answering in the same vein.
“And did you punish the naughty little girl?”
“No,” I said, still keeping the game going. “There was no need. She’s a good girl again now.”
“And you’re really not cross with her any more?”
“Not a bit! You should have heard how prettily she said sorry!”
“Then you won’t hold it against her?”
“No, indeed, it’s all forgiven and forgotten. Mind you, she must go on being good, of course, and do everything she’s told!”
“And what must she do, then?”
“Always be patient, always be good-tempered and cheerful. Not sit in the sun too long, go for plenty of drives, and do exactly as the doctor tells her. But now she must get some sleep—no more talking and thinking! Good night.”
I gave her my hand. She looked captivatingly pretty lying there and smiling at me, her eyes sparkling. She laid five slender fingers, warm and relaxed, in my hand.
I turned to go, my heart eased. I was already turning the door handle when I heard a little chime of laughter behind me.
“Is she a good little girl now, then?”
“As good as gold. Top marks! But now go to sleep, go to sleep and don’t think of anything unpleasant.”
I already had the door half open when I heard that laughter behind me once more, childish, mischievous. And the voice came from the pillows again.
“Have you forgotten what a good little girl gets before she goes to sleep?”
“What does she get?”
“A good little girl always gets a goodnight kiss.”
Somehow I was not entirely comfortable with that idea. There was an odd note in her voice, and I didn’t like it. Her eyes had been too feverishly bright a little while ago. But I didn’t want to provoke her, touchy as she could be.
“Yes, of course,” I said, apparently casually. “I almost forgot.”
I took the few steps back to her bed, and sensed, from the sudden silence, that she was holding her breath. Her eyes were fixed on me now, moving when I did, while her head lay motionless on the pillows. Her hands and finger were still; only those eyes followed my every movement and never left me.
Quick, I thought with increasing discomfort, quick, and I bent down swiftly and brushed her forehead with my lips, lightly, fleetingly. I deliberately hardly touched her hair, and felt only, at close quarters, the confusing scent of her skin.
But then both her hands, lying obviously in readiness on the bedspread, suddenly came up. Before I could turn my head away they clasped my temples firmly, and carried my mouth down from her forehead to her lips. She pressed her own mouth to it, sucking at my lips with such greedy heat that our teeth touched,
and her breasts rose and fell rapidly, urgently reaching up to my body as it bent over her. Never in my life had I received such a wild, fierce, desperately thirsty kiss as that crippled child gave me.
But even that was not enough. With frenzied force, she held me close to her until her breath failed her. Then she loosened her grip, her hands, agitated, moved away from my temples, and her fingers ran through my hair. But still she would not let go of me, except just for a moment, to lean back as if enchanted and stare into my eyes. Then she clutched me close again, aimlessly, hotly kissing my cheeks, my forehead, my eyes and my lips with fierce and at the same time helpless avidity. At each kiss she groaned and stammered, “Idiot … idiot … oh, you idiot … ” and gasped more and more heatedly, “You … you … you … ” Her assault on me was greedier and greedier, more and more passionate. Ever more fiercely, ever more convulsively she held and kissed me. Then a sudden convulsive spasm ran through her. She let go of me, her head fell back on her pillows, and only her eyes flashed at me in triumph.
Then she whispered, hastily turning away from me, both exhausted and ashamed, “Go away now, you idiot … go away!”
I walked … no, I staggered out. The last of my strength left me once I was in the dark corridor. My senses were spinning; I felt dizzy and had to support myself on the wall. So that was it! That was the secret of her restlessness—a secret revealed far too late in the day. It accounted for her aggressive attitude to me, which I had never before been able to explain. My horror was boundless. I felt like someone who, bending over a flower and thinking no harm, is attacked by an adder. If the
sensitive child had struck me, called names, spat at me—well, the frail state of her nerves meant one had to be prepared for unpredictable behaviour at any time, and none of that would have astonished me as much as this one thing—the fact that she, disabled, sick, could love and wish to be loved. To think that this child, this half-being, this imperfectly formed, helpless creature had the
audacity
—I can’t call it anything else—to love and desire with the conscious, sensuous love of a real woman! I had thought of everything else, but not that a girl mutilated by fate, without the strength to drag her own body about, could dream of someone as a lover, as
her
lover, that she so entirely misunderstood me when I came to see her again and again, solely out of pity. But next moment I realised with new horror that nothing was so much to blame as my own passionate pity if this girl, lonely and shut away from the world, expected the only man who visited her out of sympathy in her dungeon day after day, deluded by his own pity, to show her another and more tender feeling. Idiot that I indeed was, hopelessly simpleminded in my total inability to guess as much, I had seen her only as a suffering cripple, a child and not a woman. Not for a minute had it crossed my mind, even for a fleeting second, that under the covers over her was a breathing, feeling body waiting, the body of a woman who felt desire and wished to be desired in return, like other women. At the age of twenty-five I had never entertained any idea that women who were sick, disabled, immature, old, outcast, marked out from other women by fate would
dare
to love. A young, inexperienced man facing real life nearly always forms his ideas of the world on the model of what he has heard and read, and inevitably dreams of his own experience in terms of other people’s images and examples. And in the books and plays I knew, or at the
cinema (where everything is two-dimensional and simplified), it was exclusively young, attractive people who desired each other, and so I had supposed—hence also my general timidity with women—that you must be particularly good-looking and specially favoured by Fate to arouse a woman’s interest. That was why I could be so free and easy in the company of those two girls, because anything erotic in our relationship seemed to be ruled out from the first, and I never suspected that they could see more in me than a nice boy, a good friend. Even if I sometimes felt attracted to Ilona’s pretty, sensuous looks, I had never thought of Edith as a member of the opposite sex, and certainly not the shadow of an idea had crossed my mind that her poor body contained the same organs and her soul felt the same desire as the bodies of other women. Only at that moment did I faintly begin to understand (and this is something that most writers never mention) that the outcasts, the ugly, the faded and afflicted, the social misfits desire with a much more passionate and dangerous longing than those who are happy and healthy, that they love with a dark, fanatical, black love, and no passion on earth is felt more greedily and desperately than by those of God’s stepchildren who have no hope, but feel that their earthly existence can be justified only by loving and being loved. In my ignorance and inexperience, I had never ventured to guess at that terrible secret—a lust for life cries out in panic most fiercely of all from the lowest, grim depths of despair. Only now did that realisation strike me like a red-hot knife.
Idiot! Now I understood why she came out with that particular word in the midst of her turbulent emotions, while she clung to me pressing her half-developed breasts close to my chest. Idiot—yes, she was right to call me an idiot! It must have been obvious to
everyone else from the first—her father and Ilona, Josef and the rest of the domestic staff. They must all of them have suspected that she nurtured loving, indeed passionate feelings—perhaps they suspected it with horror, probably with dark foreboding. Everyone but me, fooled as I was by my own pity, playing the part of good, kind, sometimes clumsy friend, joking all the time, never noticing how my incomprehensible failure to understand was tormenting her ardent feelings. Just as in a bad farce the unfortunate hero is at the centre of an intrigue, every member of the audience has known for ages what a fix he is in, and only he, the idiot, goes on acting in deadly earnest, never understanding what a tangled web he is caught up in (while everyone else has seen every twist and turn in the web from the first)—so all of them in the house must have seen me groping around in a silly game of emotional blind man’s buff, until the blindfold was suddenly snatched awry from my eyes. But in the same way as a single light flaring up is enough to illuminate a dozen objects in a room at the same time, I now, in retrospect—too late, too late!—recognised, to my shame, the meaning of many little incidents over all these weeks. Only now did I see why she was so angry whenever I cheerfully called her “child”—she didn’t want to appear a child to me, but a woman, to be desired as a lover. Only now did I see why her lips often quivered restlessly when her lameness obviously distressed me, why she hated my pity so bitterly—obviously her feminine instinct recognised that pity is far too lukewarm a feeling, an emotion to be felt between brother and sister, a poor imitation of real love. How the unhappy girl must have waited for some word, some sign that I understood—and it never, never came! How she must have suffered, listening to me chattering on inconsequentially, while she was racked by impatience, waiting with a trembling heart,
waiting for the first tender gesture, or at least waiting for me to understand, at long last, how passionate her feelings were. I had not said anything, I had not done anything, and yet I hadn’t stayed away, thus both strengthening her feelings by my daily attendance and distressing her by my lack of perception—how understandable it was, then, that her nerves finally failed her and she fixed on me as her prey!
The realisation of all this now flooded into me, illustrated by a hundred images, while I leant against the wall in the dark corridor, breathless and with my legs feeling almost as weak as hers. I twice tried to stagger further, and only at the third attempt did I get as far as the door leading out of the corridor. From here, I thought quickly, I can get into the salon, and then through the door on the left of it into the hall, where I could pick up my sword and cap. So I must get across the salon and then leave, get away from here before the manservant appears. Down the steps and away, well away! Escape from this house before anyone sees me, I thought, and subjects me to an interrogation. I must get out of here without seeing her father, or Ilona, or Josef—they all of them left me, like a fool, to entangle myself further and further in this web! I must get away!