The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (20 page)

Her lover came in. She spoke to him kindly and without resentment; it pained her to think that she was so pitilessly deceiving the last man who had meant anything to her, even if he had not meant much. She did not want anyone to speak of her with resentment, only with admiration and gratitude. And she felt an urge to lavish the jewellery from the casket on him, in return for that one last night. It was a fortune.

But he was half-asleep and inattentive. In his boorish greed for gain, he thought of nothing but his position, his future. The memory of their passionate caresses made him yet bolder. Abruptly, he said he must set off for Paris at once, or he might arrive too late, and he demanded rather than requested the letter of recommendation. Something froze inside her. She had hired him, and now he was asking for payment.

She wrote the letter, a letter to a man who did not exist and whom he could never find. But she still hesitated to give it to him. Once more she put off her decision. She asked if he couldn’t stay one day longer; she would like that very much, she said. And as she spoke she balanced the casket in her hand. She felt that if he said yes it might yet save her. But all their decisions led the same way. He was in a hurry. He didn’t want to stay. If he had not said it in such a surly manner, making her feel so clearly that he had let himself be bought only for one night, she would have given him the jewellery, which was worth hundreds of thousands of livres. But he was brusque, his glance impudent and with no love in it. So she took a single, very small jewel with only a dull glow to it—dull as his eyes—and gave it to him in return for taking the casket, of whose contents he had no idea, to the Ursuline convent in Paris. She added a letter asking the nuns to say Masses for her soul. Then she sent the impatient young man off to find the Duke of Berlington.

He thanked her, not effusively, and left, unaware of the value of the casket that he himself was carrying. And so, after acting out a comedy of her feelings in front of them all, she deceived even the last man to cross her path.

Then she closed the door and quickly took a small flask from a drawer. It was made of fine Chinese porcelain, with strange, monstrous dragons coiling and curling in blue on it. She looked at it with curiosity, toyed with it as carelessly as she had toyed with her fellow men and women, with princes, with France, with love and death. She unscrewed the stopper and poured the clear liquid into a small dish. For a moment she hesitated, really just from a childish fear that it might have a bitter flavour. Cautiously, like a kitten sniffing warm milk, she touched it with her tongue; no, it didn’t taste bad. And so she drank the contents of the dish down in a single draught.

The whole thing, at that moment, seemed to her somehow amusing and extremely ludicrous: to think that you had only to take that one tiny sip, and tomorrow you wouldn’t see the clouds, the fields, the woods any more, messengers would go riding, the King would be horrified and all of France amazed. So this was the great step that she had feared taking so much. She thought of the astonishment of her guests, of the legends that would be told of the way she had foretold the day of her death, and failed to understand only one thing: that she had given herself to death because she missed the company of humans, those same gullible humans who could be deceived with such a little comedy. Dying seemed to her altogether easy, you could even smile as you died—yes, you could indeed, she tried it—you could perfectly well smile, and it wasn’t difficult to preserve a beautiful and tranquil face in death, a face radiant with unearthly bliss. It was true, even after death you could act happiness. She hadn’t known that. She found everything, human beings, the world, death and life, suddenly so very amusing that the smile she had prepared sprang involuntarily to her carefree lips. She straightened up, as if there were a mirror opposite her somewhere, waited for death, and smiled and smiled and smiled.

But death was not to be deceived, and broke her laughter. When Madame de Prie was found her face was distorted into a terrible grimace. Those dreadful features showed everything that she had really suffered in the last few weeks: her rage, her torment, her aimless fear, her wild and desperate pain. The deceptive smile for which she had struggled so avidly had been helpless, had drained away. Her feet were twisted together in torment, her hands had clutched a curtain so convulsively that scraps of it were left between her fingers, her mouth was open as if in a shrill scream.

And all that show of apparent merriment, the mystic prophecy of the day of her death had been for nothing too. The news of her suicide arrived in Paris on the evening when an Italian conjuror was displaying his arts at court. He made rabbits disappear into a hat, he brought grown geese out of eggshells. When the message arrived people were slightly interested, were surprised, whispered, the name of Madame de Prie went around for a few minutes, but then the conjuror performed another amazing trick and she was forgotten, just as she herself would have forgotten someone else’s fate at such a moment. Interest in her strange end did not last long in France, and her desperate efforts to stage a drama that would never be forgotten were in vain. The fame she longed for, the immortality she thought to seize by force with her death, passed her name by: her story was buried under the dust and ashes of trivial events. For the history of the world will not tolerate intruders; it chooses its own heroes and implacably dismisses those not summoned to that rank, however hard they may try; someone who has fallen off the carriage of fate as it goes along will never catch up with it again. And nothing was left of the strange end of Madame de Prie, her real life and the ingeniously devised deception of her death but a few dry lines in some book of memoirs or other, conveying to their reader as little of the passionate emotions of her life as a pressed flower allows one to guess at the fragrant marvel of its long-forgotten spring.

H
AS RAIN BEEN SWEEPING
over the city again in the wind? Is that what suddenly makes it so dim in our room? No. The air is silvery clear and still, as it seldom is on these summer days, but it is getting late, and we didn’t notice. Only the dormer windows opposite still smile with a faint glow, and the sky above the roof ridge is veiled by golden mist. In an hour’s time it will be night. That will be a wonderful hour, for there is no lovelier sight than the slow fading of sunset colour into shadow, to be followed by darkness rising from the ground below, until finally its black tide engulfs the walls, carrying us away into its obscurity. If we sit opposite one another, looking at each other without a word, it will seem, at that hour, as if our familiar faces in the shadows were older and stranger and farther away, as if we had never known them like that, and each of us was now seeing the other across a wide space and over many years. But you say you don’t want silence now, because in silence one hears, apprehensively, the clock breaking time into a hundred tiny splinters, and our breathing will sound as loud as the breathing of a sick man. You want me to tell you a story. Willingly. But not about me, for our life in these big cities is short of experience, or so it seems to us, because we do not yet know what is really our own in them. However, I will tell you a story fit for this hour that really loves only silence, and I would wish it to have something about it of the warm, soft, flowing twilight now hovering mistily outside our windows.

I don’t remember just how I came to know this story. All I do know is that I was sitting here for a long time early this afternoon, reading a book, then putting it down again, drowsing in my dreams, perhaps sleeping lightly. And suddenly I saw figures stealing past the walls, and I could hear what they were saying and look into
their lives. But when I wanted to watch them moving away, I found myself awake again and on my own. The book lay at my feet. When I picked it up to look for those characters in it, I couldn’t find the story any more; it was as if it had fallen out of the pages into my hands, or as if it had never been there at all. Perhaps I had dreamt it, or seen it in one of those bright clouds that came to our city today from distant lands, to carry away the rain that has been depressing us for so long. Did I hear it in the artless old song that an organ-grinder was playing with a melancholy creaking sound under my window, or had someone told it to me years ago? I don’t know. Such stories often come into my mind, and I let them take their playful course, running through my fingers, which I allow to drop them as you might caress ears of wheat and long-stemmed flowers in passing without picking them. All I do is dream them, beginning with a sudden brightly coloured image and moving towards a gentler end, but I do not hold and keep them. However, you want me to tell you a story today, so I will tell it to you now, when twilight fills us with a longing to see some bright, lively thing before our eyes, starved as they are in this grey light.

How shall I begin? I feel I must pluck a moment out of the darkness, an image and a character, because that is how those strange dreams of mine begin. Yes, now I remember. I see a slender youth walking down a broad flight of steps leading out of a castle. It is night, and a night of dim moonlight, but I see the whole outline of his supple body, and his features stand out clearly. He is remarkably good-looking. His black hair falls smoothly over his high—almost too high—forehead, combed in a childish style, and his hands, reaching out before him in the dark to feel the warmth of the air after a sunlit day, are delicate and finely formed. His footsteps are hesitant. Dreamily, he climbs down to the large garden, where the rounded treetops rustle; the white path of a single broad avenue leads through it.

I don’t know when all this is set, whether yesterday or fifty years ago, and I don’t know where; but I think it must be in England
or Scotland, the only places where I am sure there are such tall, massive stone castles. From a distance they look menacing, like fortresses, and reveal their bright gardens full of flowers only to an eye familiar with them. Yes, now I know for certain: it is to the north, in Scotland. Only there are the summer nights so light that the sky has a milky, opalescent glow, and the fields are never entirely dark, so that everything seems full of a soft radiance, and only the shadows drop, like huge black birds, down to pale expanses of countryside. Yes, it’s in Scotland, I remember that now for certain; and if I racked my brain I would also find the names of this baronial castle and the boy, because now the darkness around my dream is beginning to peel away, and I feel it all as distinctly as if it were not memory but experience. The boy has come to spend the summer with his married sister, and in the hospitable way of distinguished British families he finds that he is not alone; in the evening there is a whole party of gentlemen who have come for the field sports of shooting and fishing, and their wives, with a few young girls, tall, handsome people, who in their cheerfulness and youth play laughing, but not noisily, to the sound of the echo from the ancient walls. By day they ride horses, there are dogs about, two or three boats glitter on the river, and liveliness without frantic activity helps the day to pass quickly and pleasantly.

But it is evening now, the company around the dinner table has broken up. The gentlemen are sitting in the great hall, smoking and playing cards; until midnight, white light, quivering at the edges, spills out of the bright windows into the park, sometimes accompanied by a full-throated, jocular roar of laughter. Most of the ladies have already gone to their rooms, although a few of them may still be talking to each other in the entrance hall of the castle. So the boy is on his own in the evening. He is not allowed to join the gentlemen yet, or only briefly, and he feels shy in the presence of ladies because when he opens a door they suddenly lower their voices, and he senses that they are discussing matters he isn’t meant to hear. And he doesn’t like their company anyway, because they
ask him questions as if he were still a child, and only half-listen to his answers; they make use of him to do them all sorts of small favours, and then thank him in the tone they would use with a good little boy. He thought he would go to bed, but his room was too hot, full of still, sultry air. They had forgotten to close the windows during the day, so the sun had made itself at home in here, almost setting light to the table, leaving the bedstead hot to the touch, clinging heavily to the walls, and its warm breath still comes out of the corners and from behind curtains. And moreover it was still so early—and outside, the summer night shone like a white candle, peaceful, with no wind, as motionless as if it longed for nothing. So the boy goes down the tall castle steps again and towards the garden, which is rimmed by the dark sky like a saint’s halo. Here the rich fragrance given off by many invisible flowers comes enticingly to meet him. He feels strange. In all the confused sensations of his fifteen years of life, he couldn’t have said exactly why, but his lips are quivering as if he has to say something in the night air, or must raise his hands and close his eyes for a long time. He seems to have some mysterious familiarity with this summer night, now at rest, something that calls for words or a gesture of greeting.

Then, all of a sudden, as he goes deeper into the darkness, an extraordinary thing happens. The gravel behind him crunches slightly, and as he turns, startled, all he sees is a tall white form, bright and fluttering, coming towards him, and in astonishment he feels strong and yet caught, without any violence, in a woman’s embrace. A soft, warm body presses close to his, a trembling hand quickly caresses his hair and bends his head back; reeling, he feels a stranger’s open mouth like a fruit against his own, quivering lips fastening on his. The face is so close to him that he cannot see its features. And he dares not look, because shudders are running through his body like pain, so that he has to close his eyes and give himself up to those burning lips without any will of his own; he is their prey. Hesitantly, uncertainly, as if asking a question, his arms now go round the stranger’s body, and, suddenly intoxicated,
he holds it close to his own. Avidly, his hands move over its soft outline, fall still and then tremble as they move on again more and more feverishly, carried away. And now the whole weight of her body, pressing ever more urgently against him, bending forward, a delightful burden, rests on his own yielding breast. He feels as if he were sinking and flowing away under her fast-breathing urgency, and is already weak at the knees. He thinks of nothing, he does not wonder how this woman came to him, or what her name is, he merely drinks in the desire of those strange, moist lips with his eyes closed, until he is intoxicated by them, drifting away with no will or mind of his own on a vast tide of passion. He feels as if stars had suddenly fallen to earth, there is such a shimmering before his eyes, everything flickers in the air like sparks, burning whatever he touches. He does not know how long all this lasts, whether he has been held in this soft chain for hours or seconds; in this wild, sensual struggle he feels that everything is blazing up and drifting away, he is staggering in a wonderful kind of vertigo.

Then suddenly, with an abrupt movement, the chain of heat holding them breaks. Brusquely, almost angrily, the woman loosens the embrace that held him so close; she stands erect, and already a shaft of white light is running past the trees, clear and fast, and has gone before he can raise his hands to seize it and stop her.

Who was she? And how long had it lasted? Dazed, with a sense of oppressive uneasiness, he stands up, propping himself against a tree. Slowly, cool thought returns to the space between his fevered temples: his life suddenly seems to him to have moved forward a thousand hours. Could his confused dreams of women and passion suddenly have come true? Or was it only a dream? He feels himself, touches his hair. Yes, it is damp at his hammering temples, damp and cool from the dew on the grass into which they had fallen. Now it all flashes before his mind’s eye again, he feels those burning lips once more, breathes in the strange, exciting, sensual perfume clinging to her dress, tries to remember every word she spoke—but none of them come back to him.

And now, with a sudden shock of alarm, he remembers that in fact she said nothing at all, not even his name; that he heard only her sighs spilling over and her convulsively restrained sobs of desire threatening to break out, that he knows the fragrance of her tousled hair, the hot pressure of her breasts, the smooth enamel of her skin, he knows that her figure, her breath, all her quivering feelings were his—and yet he has no idea of the identity of this woman who has overwhelmed him with her love in the dark. He knows that he must now try to find a name to give to his happy astonishment.

And then the extraordinary experience that he has just shared with a woman seems to him a poor thing, very petty compared to the sparkling mystery staring at him out of the dark with alluring eyes. Who was she? He swiftly reviews all the possible candidates, assembling in his mind’s eye the images of all the women staying here at the castle; he recalls every strange hour, excavates from his memory every conversation he has had with them, every smile of the only five or six women who could be part of this puzzle. Young Countess E., perhaps, who so often quarrelled violently with her ageing husband, or his uncle’s young wife, who had such curiously gentle yet iridescent eyes, or—and he was startled by this idea—one of the three sisters, his cousins, who are so like each other in their proud, haughty, abrupt manner. No—these were all cool, circumspect people. In recent years he had often felt sick, or an outcast, when secret stirrings in him began disturbing and flickering in his dreams. He had envied all who were, or seemed to be, so calm, so well-balanced and lacking in desires, had been afraid of his awakening passion as if it were an infirmity. And now?… But who, which of them all could be so deceptive?

Slowly, that insistent question drives the frenzy out of his blood. It is late now, the lights in the hall where guests were playing cards are out, he is the only guest in the castle still awake, he—and perhaps also that unknown woman. Slowly, weariness comes over him. Why go on thinking about it? A glance, a spark glimpsed between someone’s eyelids, the secret pressure of his hand must
surely tell him everything tomorrow. Dreamily, he climbs the steps, as dreamily as he climbed down them, but he feels so very different now. His blood is still slightly agitated, but the warm room seems to him clearer and cooler than it was.

When he wakes next morning, the horses down outside the castle are already stamping and scraping their hooves on the ground; he hears voices, laughter, and his name is called now and then. He quickly leaps out of bed—he has missed breakfast—dresses at high speed and runs downstairs, where the rest of the party cheerfully wish him a good morning. “What a late riser you are!” laughs Countess E., and there is laughter in her clear eyes as well. His avid look falls on her face; no, it couldn’t be the Countess, her laughter is too carefree. “I hope you had sweet dreams,” the young woman teases him, but her delicate build seems to him too slight for his companion last night. With a question in his eyes, he looks from face to face, but sees no smiling reflection answering it on any of them.

They ride out into the country. He assesses each voice, his eyes dwell on every line and undulation of the women’s bodies as they move on horseback, he observes the way they bend, the way they raise their arms. At the luncheon table he leans close to them in conversation, to catch the scent of their lips or the sultry warmth of their hair, but nothing, nothing gives him any sign, not a fleeting trail for his heated thoughts to pursue. The day draws out endlessly towards evening. If he tries to read a book, the lines run over the edge of the pages and suddenly lead out into the garden, and it is night again, that strange night, and he feels the unknown woman’s arms embracing him once more. Then he drops the book from his trembling hands and decides to go down to the little pool. But suddenly, surprised by himself, he finds that he is standing on that very spot again. He feels feverish at dinner that evening, his hands are distracted, moving restlessly back and forth as if pursued, his eyes retreat shyly under their lids. Not until the others—at last, at last!—push back their chairs is he happy, and soon he is running out of his room and into the park, up and down the white path
that seems to shimmer like milky mist beneath his feet, going up and down it, up and down hundreds, thousands of times. Are the lights on in the great hall yet? Yes, they come on at last, and at last there is light in a few of the first-floor windows. The ladies have gone upstairs. Now, if she is going to come, it can be only a matter of minutes; but every minute stretches to breaking point, fuming with impatience. Up and down the path, up and down, he is moving convulsively back and forth as if worked by invisible wires.