The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig
But wait… wait, or you will not understand how stupid and pointless what I did was. I must describe the whole room to you first. It was the great hall of the government building, entirely illuminated by lights and almost empty… the couples had gone into the other room to dance, gentlemen had gone to play cards… only a few groups were still talking in the corners, so the hall was empty, every movement conspicuous and visible in the bright light. And she walked slowly and lightly through that great hall with her shoulders straight, exchanging greetings now and then with indescribable composure, with the magnificent, frozen, proud calm that so enchanted me. I… I had stayed behind, as I told you, as if paralysed, before I realised that she was leaving… and then, when I did realise, she was already at the far side of the hall and just approaching the doors. Then… and I am still ashamed to think of it now… something suddenly came over me and I ran… I ran, do you hear?… I did not walk but ran through the hall after her, my shoes clattering on the floor. I heard my own footsteps, I saw all eyes turning to me in surprise… I could have died of shame… even as I ran I understood my own derangement, but I could not… could not go back now. I caught up with her in the doorway. She turned to me… her eyes stabbed like grey steel, her nostrils were quivering with anger… I was just going to stammer something out when… when she suddenly laughed aloud… a clear, carefree, whole-hearted laugh, and said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Oh, doctor, have you only just remembered my little boy’s prescription? Ah, you learned scientists!’ A couple of people standing nearby laughed kindly… I understood, and was shattered by the masterly way she had saved the situation. I put my hand in my wallet and tore a blank leaf off my prescription block, and she took it casually before… again with a cold smile of thanks… before she went. For one second I felt easy in my mind… I saw that her skill in dealing with my blunder had made up for it and put things right—but next moment I also knew that all was over for me now, she hated me for my intemperate folly… hated me worse than death itself. I could come to her door hundreds upon hundreds of times, and she would always have me turned away like a dog.
I staggered through the room… I realised that people were looking at me, and I must have appeared strange. I went to the buffet and drank two, three, four glasses of cognac one after another, which saved me from collapsing. My nerves could bear no more, they were in shreds. Then I slunk out through a side entrance, as secretly as a criminal. Not for any principality in the world could I have walked back through that hall, with her carefree laughter still echoing from its walls. I went… I really can’t say now exactly where I went, but into a couple of bars where I got drunk, like a man trying to drink his consciousness away… but I could not numb my senses, the laughter was there in me, high and dreadful… I could not silence that damned laughter. I wandered around the harbour… I had left my revolver in my room, or I would have shot myself. I could think of nothing else, and with that thought I went back to the hotel with one idea in my mind… the left-hand drawer of the chest where my revolver lay… with that single idea in mind.
The fact that I didn’t shoot myself after all… I swear it wasn’t cowardice, it would have been a release to take off the safety catch and press the cold trigger… how can I explain it? I still felt I had a duty… yes, that damned duty to help. The thought that she might still need me, that she did need me, made me mad… it was Thursday morning before I was back in my room, and on Saturday, as I have told you, on Saturday the ship would come in, and I knew that this woman, this proud and haughty woman would not survive being shamed before her husband and the world… Oh, how my thoughts tortured me, thoughts of the precious time I had unthinkingly wasted, the crazy haste that had thwarted any prospect of bringing her help in time… for hours, I swear, for hours on end I paced up and down my room, racking my brains to think of a way to approach her, put matters right, help her… for I was certain that she wouldn’t let me into her house now. Her laughter was still there in all my nerves, I still saw her nostrils quivering with anger. For hours I paced up and down the three metres of my cramped room… and day had dawned, morning was here already.
Suddenly an idea sent me to the desk… I snatched up a sheaf of notepaper and began to write to her, write it all down… a whining, servile letter in which I begged her forgiveness, called myself a madman, a criminal, and begged her to entrust herself to me. I swore that the hour after it was done I would disappear from the city, from the colony, from the world if she wanted… only she must forgive me and trust me to help her at the last, the very last minute. I feverishly wrote twenty pages like this… it must have been a mad, indescribable letter, like a missive written in delirium, for when I rose from the desk I was bathed in sweat… the room swayed, and I had to drink a glass of water. Only then did I try reading the letter through again, but the very first words horrified me, so I folded it up, trembling, found an envelope… and suddenly a new thought came to me. All at once I knew the right, the crucial thing to say. I picked up the pen again, and wrote on the last sheet, ‘I will wait here in the beach hotel for a word of forgiveness. If no answer comes by seven this evening, I shall shoot myself.’
Then I took the letter, rang for a boy, and told him to deliver the envelope at once. At last I had said everything—everything!”
Something clinked and fell down beside us. As he moved abruptly he had knocked over the whisky bottle; I heard his hand feeling over the deck for it, and then he picked it up with sudden vigour. He threw the empty bottle high in the air and over the ship’s side. The voice fell silent for a few minutes, and then feverishly continued, even faster and more agitated than before.
“I am not a believing Christian any more… I don’t believe in heaven or hell, and if hell does exist I am not afraid of it, for it can’t be worse than those hours I passed between morning and evening… think of a small room, hot in the sunlight, red-hot at blazing noon… a small room, just a desk and a chair and the bed… and nothing on the desk but a watch and a revolver, and sitting at the desk a man… a man who does nothing but stare at that desk and the second hand of his watch, a man who eats and drinks nothing, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t move, who only… listen to me… who only stares for three long hours at the white circle of the dial and the hand of the watch ticking as it goes around. That… that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting… but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistence.
Well, I won’t try to describe those hours to you… they are beyond description. I myself don’t understand now how one can go through such an experience without going mad. Then, at twenty-two minutes past three… I remember the time exactly, I was staring at my watch… there was a sudden knock at the door. I leap up… leap like a tiger leaping on its prey, in one bound I am across the room and at the door, I fling it open, and there stands a timid little Chinese boy with a folded note in his hand. As I avidly reach for it, he scurries away and is gone.
I tear the note open to read it… and find that I can’t. A red mist blurs my vision… imagine my agony, I have word from her at last, and now everything is quivering and dancing before my eyes. I dip my head in water, and my sight clears… once again I take the note and read it. ‘Too late! But wait where you are. I may yet send for you.’
No signature on the crumpled paper torn from some old brochure… the writing of someone whose handwriting is usually steady, now scribbling hastily, untidily, in pencil. I don’t know why that note shook me so much. Some kind of horror, some mystery clung to it, it might have been written in flight, by someone standing in a window bay or a moving vehicle. An unspeakably cold aura of fear, haste and terror about that furtive note chilled me to the heart… and yet, and yet I was happy. She had written to me, I need not die yet, I could help her… perhaps I could… oh, I lost myself in the craziest hopes and conjectures. I read the little note a hundred, a thousand times over, I kissed it… I examined it for some word I might have forgotten o
Suddenly I gave a start. Wasn’t that a knock at the door? I held my breath for a minute, two minutes of perfect silence… and then it came again, like a mouse nibbling, a soft but urgent knock. I leaped to my feet, still dizzy, flung the door open, and there outside it stood her boy, the same boy whom I had once struck in the face with my fist. His brown face was pale as ashes, his confused glance spoke of some misfortune. I immediately felt horror. ‘What… what’s happened?’ I managed to stammer. He said, ‘Come quickly!’ That was all, no more, but I was immediately racing down the stairs with the boy after me. A sado, a kind of small carriage, stood waiting. We got in. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked him. He looked at me, trembling, and remained silent, lips compressed. I asked again… still he was silent. I could have struck him with my fist once more, but his doglike devotion to her touched me, and I asked no more questions. The little carriage trotted through the crowded street so fast that people scattered, cursing. It left the European quarter near the beach in the lower town and went on into the noisy turmoil of the city’s Chinatown district. At last we reached a narrow, very remote alley… and the carriage stopped outside a low-built house. The place was dirty, with a kind of hunched look about it and a little shop window where a tallow candle stood… one of those places where you would expect to find opium dens or brothels, a thieves’ lair or a receivers’ cellar full of stolen goods. The boy quickly knocked… a voice whispered through a crack in the door, which stood ajar, there were questions and more questions. I could stand it no longer. I leaped up, pushed the door right open, and an old Chinese woman shrank back with a little scream. The boy followed me, led me along the passage… opened another door… another door, leading to a dark room with a foul smell of brandy and clotted blood. Something in the room groaned. I groped my way in…”
Once again his voice failed. And what he next uttered was more of a sob than words.
“I… I groped my way in… And there… there on a dirty mat, doubled up with pain… a groaning piece of human flesh… there she lay…
I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. My eyes weren’t yet used to it… so I only groped about and found… found her hand, hot, burning hot… she had a temperature, a very high one, and I shuddered, for I instantly knew it all… how she had fled here from me, had let some dirty Chinese woman mutilate her, only because she hoped for more silence in that quarter… she had allowed some diabolical witch to murder her rather than trust me… because, deranged as I was, I hadn’t spared her pride, I hadn’t helped her at once… because she feared me more than she feared death.
I shouted for light. The boy ran off; the appalling Chinese woman, her hands trembling, brought a smoking oil lamp. I had to stop myself taking her by her filthy yellow throat as she put the lamp on the table. Its light fell bright and yellow on the tortured body. And suddenly… suddenly all my emotions were gone, all my apathy, my anger, all the impure filth of my accumulated passion… I was nothing but a doctor now, a human being who could understand and feel and help. I had forgotten myself, I was fighting the horror of it with my senses alert and clear… I felt the naked body I had desired in my dreams only as… how can I put it?… as matter, an organism. I did not see her any more, only life defending itself against death, a human being bent double in dreadful agony. Her blood, her hot, holy blood streamed over my hands, but I felt no desire and no horror, I was only a doctor. I saw only her suffering… and I saw…
And I saw at once that barring a miracle, all was lost… the woman’s criminally clumsy hand had injured her, and she had bled half to death… and I had nothing to stop the bleeding in that stinking den, not even clean water. Everything I touched was stiff with dirt…
‘We must go straight to the hospital,’ I said. But no sooner had I spoken than her tortured body reared convulsively.
‘No… no… would rather die… no one must know… no one… home… home…’
I understood. She was fighting now only to keep her secret, to preserve her honour… not to save her life. And—and I obeyed. The boy brought a litter, we placed her in it… and so we carried her home, already like a corpse, limp and feverish, through the night, fending off the frightened servants’ inquiries. Like thieves, we carried her into her own room and closed the doors. And then… then the battle began, the long battle with death…”
*
Suddenly a hand clutched my arm, and I almost cried out with the shock and pain of it. His face in the dark was suddenly hideously close to mine, I saw his white teeth gleam in his sudden outburst, saw his glasses shine like two huge cat’s eyes in the pale reflection of the moonlight. And now he was not talking any more but screaming, shaken by howling rage.
“Do you know, stranger, sitting here so casually in your deckchair, travelling at leisure around the world, do you know what it’s like to watch someone dying? Have you even been at a deathbed, have you seen the body contort, blue nails scrabbling at the empty air while breath rattles in the dying throat, every limb fights back, every finger is braced against the terror of it, and the eye stares into horror for which there are no words? Have you ever experienced that, idle tourist that you are, you who call it a duty to help? As a doctor I’ve often seen it, seen it as… as a clinical case, a fact… I have studied it, so to speak—but I experienced it only once, there with her, I died with her that night… that dreadful night when I sat there racking my brains to think of something, some way to staunch the blood that kept on flowing, soothe the fever consuming her before my eyes, ward off death as it came closer and closer, and I couldn’t keep it from her bed. Can you guess what it means to be a doctor, to know how to combat every illness—to feel the duty of helping, as you so sagely put it, and yet to sit helpless by a dying woman, knowing what is happening but powerless… just knowing the one terrible truth, that there is nothing you can do, although you would open every vein in your own body for her? Watching a beloved body bleed miserably to death in agonising pain, feeling a pulse that flutters and grows faint… ebbing away under your fingers. To be a doctor yet know of nothing, nothing, nothing you can do… just sitting there stammering out some kind of prayer like a little old lady in church, shaking your fist in the face of a merciful god who you know doesn’t exist… can you understand that? Can you understand it? There’s just one thing I don’t understand myself: how… how a man can manage not to die too at such moments, but wake from sleep the next morning, clean his teeth, put on a tie… go on living, when he has experienced what I felt as her breath failed, as the first human being for whom I was really wrestling, fighting, whom I wanted to keep alive with all the force of my being… as she slipped away from me to somewhere else, faster and faster, minute after minute, and my feverish brain could do nothing to keep that one woman alive…
And then, to add to my torment, there was something else too… as I sat at her bedside—I had given her morphine to relieve the pain—and I saw her lying there with burning cheeks, hot and ashen, as I sat there, I felt two eyes constantly fixed on me from behind, gazing at me with terrible expectation. The boy sat there on the floor, quietly murmuring some kind of prayer, and when my eyes met his I saw… oh, I cannot describe it… I saw something so pleading, so… so grateful in his doglike gaze! And at the same time he raised his hands to me as if urging me to save her… to me, you understand, he raised his hands to me as if to a god… to me, the helpless weakling who knew the battle was lost, that I was as useless here as an ant scuttling over the floor. How that gaze tormented me, that fanatical, animal hope of what my art could do… I could have shouted at him, kicked him, it hurt so much… and yet I felt that we were both linked by our love for her… by the secret. A waiting animal, an apathetic tangle of limbs, he sat hunched up just behind me. The moment I asked for anything
Towards morning she woke again and opened her eyes… they were not cold and proud now… there was a moist gleam of fever in them as they looked around the room, as if it were strange… Then she looked at me. She seemed to be thinking, trying to remember my face… and suddenly, I saw, she did remember, because some kind of shock, rejection… a hostile, horrified expression came over her features. She flailed her arms as if to flee… far, far away from me… I saw she was thinking of that… of the time back at my house. But then she thought again and looked at me more calmly, breathing heavily… I felt that she wanted to speak, to say something. Again her hands began to flex… she tried to sit up, but she was too weak. I calmed her, leaned down to her… and she gave me a long and tormented look… her lips moved slightly in a last, failing sound as she said, ‘Will no one ever know? No one?’
‘No one,’ I said, with all the strength of my conviction. ‘I promise you.’
But her eyes were still restless. Her fevered lips managed, indistinctly, to get it out.
‘Swear to me… that no one will know… swear.’
I raised my hand as if taking an oath. She looked at me with… with an indescribable expression… it was soft, warm, grateful… yes, truly, truly grateful. She tried to say something else, but it was too difficult for her. She lay there for a long time, exhausted by the effort, with her eyes closed. Then the terrible part began… the terrible part… she fought for another entire and difficult hour. Not until morning was it all over…”