by Stefan Zweig
Then he put out the light. She saw his pale shape disappear through the doorway, soundless, wan, a nocturnal ghost, and when the door closed she felt as if the lid of a coffin were coming down. The whole world, she felt, was dead and hollow except for her own heart, beating loud and frantically against her breast in her rigid body, bringing her pain and more pain every time it beat.
Next day, when they were sitting at lunch together—the children had just been quarrelling, and it was quite difficult to make them calm down—the maid brought in a letter. For Madam, she said, and the messenger was waiting for an answer. Surprised, she saw unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope, and quickly opened it, only to suddenly turn pale when she read the first words. All at once she jumped up from the table. She was even more alarmed when she saw, from the evident surprise of the rest of the family, how thoughtlessly revealing her impetuous movement had been.
The letter was short. Just three brief lines: ‘Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once.’ No signature, no date in the obviously disguised handwriting, only that cruelly urgent command! Irene hurried to her room to get the money, but she had mislaid the key to her money box. Frantically, she flung open all her drawers, rattling the contents about until at last she found it. She put the banknotes into an envelope with trembling fingers, and herself gave them to the messenger waiting at the door. She did it all mindlessly, as if under hypnosis, without even considering the possibility of hesitating. And then—hardly two minutes after leaving the dining room—she was back with her family again.
There was silence. She sat down with a shrinking sense of uneasiness, and was just trying to think of some excuse in a hurry when—and her hand shook so much that although she had picked up her glass she had to put it down again in haste—she realised, to her horror, that she had left the letter lying open beside her plate. Just one small movement, and her husband could have picked it up. Maybe a glance would have been enough to read the large, unformed characters in which those few lines were written. Words failed her. Surreptitiously, she crumpled up the note, but now, as she put it in her pocket and looked up, she met her husband’s eyes bent severely on her. It was a penetrating, stern and painful glance. She had never known him to look like that before. Only now, during these last few days, had he suddenly made her feel distrustful with such an expression on his face. It shook her to the core, and she was unable to parry it. A glance like that had paralysed her in the middle of dancing, and he had watched over her sleep last night with the same look, his eyes gleaming like the blade of a knife.
Did he know something, or did he want to know it, was that what sharpened his glance, made it so bright, so steely, so painful? And as she was still searching for something to say, a long-forgotten memory came back to her. Her husband had once told her how, as a lawyer, he had faced an investigating judge whose trick it was to look through his files during the examination as if short-sighted, but when the really important question came he would suddenly raise his eyes and turn their piercing gaze, like a dagger, on the suddenly alarmed defendant, who would then be discomposed by this bright lightning flash of concentrated attention, and the lie he had been carefully trying to maintain would lose its force. Could her husband be employing dangerous methods of that kind himself, and was she the victim? She shuddered, particularly because she knew what a great intellectual passion he felt for his chosen profession, far beyond that necessary for a legal career. He could track down the reasons for a crime, its development, the moment it turned to extortion, as intently as others might devote themselves to eroticism or gambling, and on a day when he was engaged in this psychological hunt he seemed to be inwardly radiant. The keen nervous energy that often made him recollect forgotten verdicts in the middle of the night expressed itself outwardly then in a steely inscrutability; he ate and drank little, but smoked the whole time, and he seemed to be saving his words for the coming hour in court. She had once gone to hear him make a plea, and never went again, she was so shaken by the dark passion and almost malevolent fire of his delivery and the sombre, austere expression on his face. Now she suddenly thought she detected the same look again in his fixed gaze under those menacingly frowning brows.
All these lost memories came crowding in on her in that single second, and kept her lips from uttering the words that they were trying to form. She said nothing, and became increasingly confused the more she realised how dangerous her silence was—she was losing her last plausible chance of explaining herself. She dared not raise her eyes, yet now, looking down, she was even more alarmed to see his hands, usually so still and steady, moving up and down on the table like little wild animals. Luckily lunch was soon over, and the children jumped up and ran into the next room, chattering in their clear, cheerful voices, while the governess tried in vain to moderate their high spirits. Her husband also got to his feet, went out of the dining room, treading heavily, and did not look back.
As soon as she was alone she took out the fateful letter again. She read the lines once more: ‘Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once.’ Then she tore it into small pieces in her rage, and was crumpling them up into a ball to throw them in the waste-paper basket when she thought better of it, stopped, leant over the stove on the hearth and threw the paper into the hissing fire. The white flame that sprang up, greedily devouring the threat, soothed her.
At that moment she heard her husband’s returning footsteps. He was already at the door. She quickly straightened up, her face flushed from the warmth of the fire and from knowing that she was caught in the act. The door of the stove was still open, giving her away, and she awkwardly tried to hide it by standing in front of the fireplace. He went up to the table, struck a match to light his cigar, and as the flame came close to his face she thought she saw the quivering of his nostrils that always showed he was angry. But he looked at her quite calmly. “I would just like to point out that you are not obliged to show me your correspondence. If you want to keep secrets from me, you are entirely at liberty to do so.” She did not reply, she dared not look at him. He waited for a moment, then breathed out the smoke of his cigar as if it came from deep inside him and left the room, again with that heavy tread.
She didn’t want to think of anything, she wished only to live in a numb state, filling her heart with empty, pointless occupation. She could not bear to be in the apartment any more, she felt that if she was not to go mad with horror she had to be out in the street among other people. Those hundred crowns had at least, she hoped, bought her a brief respite, a few days of freedom from the blackmailer, and she decided that she would venture to go for a walk. There were several items that she needed to buy, but above all, if she went out walking that would cover up for the noticeable change in her habits in staying at home so much. She had developed a certain way of making her escape. On reaching the front door she rushed out into the busy life of the street with her eyes closed, as if jumping off a springboard. Once she felt the hard paving stones under her feet and knew that the warm torrent of humanity was around her, she went on in nervous haste, or as much haste as a lady could show without attracting attention, walking straight ahead with her eyes fixed on the ground, in the very natural fear of meeting that dangerous gaze again. If the woman was lying in wait, then at least she didn’t want to know it. And yet she realised that she was thinking of nothing else, and she jumped in alarm when someone touched her by chance in brushing past. Her nerves reacted painfully to every sound, every footstep behind her, every moving shadow. Only in a vehicle or in a building that she did not know could she breathe freely again.
A gentleman said good afternoon to her. Looking up, she recognised a family friend from the days of her youth, a friendly, talkative man with a grey beard. She usually tried to avoid him because of his way of talking for hours on end about his ailments, which were very likely imaginary. Today, however, she was sorry that she had merely returned his greeting instead of seeking his company. Walking with an acquaintance woul
d have been good protection against another unexpected attack from her blackmailer. She hesitated, and was considering turning back, when she felt as if someone were coming up fast behind her, and instinctively, without stopping to think, she hurried on again. But still, with a sense of foreboding cruelly enhanced by fear, she felt that someone was rapidly approaching behind her back, and she herself walked faster and faster, although she knew that she could not escape pursuit in the end. Her shoulders were beginning to shrink in anticipation of the hand that now—for the steps were coming closer and closer—she felt sure would touch her next moment, and the more she tried to quicken her pace the heavier her knees felt. She sensed that the pursuer was very close.
“Irene!” called a voice behind her urgently, yet speaking in a soft tone, and coming to her senses, she realised that it was not, after all, the voice she feared, the terrible messenger of doom. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned. It was her lover, and when she stopped so suddenly he almost collided with her. His face was pale, bearing all the signs of agitation, and now, under her uncomprehending gaze, he also looked ashamed. Uncertainly, he raised his hand in greeting and let it sink again when she did not offer him hers. The sight of him was so unexpected that she just stared at him for one or two seconds. In these days of fear, she had forgotten all about him. But now that she saw his pale, inquiring face at close quarters, with that expression of vacant perplexity, a hot wave of rage suddenly surged up in her. Her lips trembled, attempting to form words, and the distress in her face showed so clearly that he could only stammer her name in alarm. “Irene, what’s the matter?” And when he saw her impatient gesture, he added meekly, “What harm have I done you?”
She stared at him with barely repressed anger. “What harm have you done me?” she said, with a laugh of derision. “Oh, none! None at all! You’ve done only good! Only what’s right and proper.”
His expression was baffled, and his mouth dropped half-open, increasing the ridiculously simple-minded effect of his appearance. “But Irene … Irene!”
“Please don’t attract attention here!” she snapped at him brusquely. “And don’t trouble to put on an act for me! Your delightful lady friend is sure to be lurking somewhere near, ready to attack me again!”
“Who … who do you mean?”
She could have slapped his foolishly baffled, distorted face. She already felt her hand clutching her umbrella. She had never despised and hated anyone so much.
“But Irene … Irene,” he kept stammering in confusion. “What on earth have I done? All of a sudden you stay away … I’ve been waiting for you day and night. I’ve been standing outside your apartment block today, waiting for a chance to speak to you for a minute.”
“Waiting for … oh, I see! You too.” She felt that her anger was driving her mad. It would feel so good to strike him! However, she controlled herself, cast him one more glance of burning revulsion, as if considering whether to spit all her accumulated rage out into his face in a torrent of abuse, and then, instead, she suddenly turned and made her way into the busy crowd without looking back. He stood there with his pleading hand still outstretched, bewildered and shaken, until the movement of the crowd in the street took hold of him and swept him away with it like a leaf sinking in the current, rocking and circling, and finally carried away by no will of its own.
The idea that such a man had ever been her lover suddenly struck her as absolutely unreal and senseless. She could remember nothing about him, not the colour of his eyes or the shape of his face. She had no physical memory of his caresses, and none of his words echoed in her mind apart from that pitiful, childish, dog-like “But, Irene!” stammered out in desperation. Although he was the cause of all misfortune, she had not once thought of him in all these days, even in her dreams. He meant nothing in her life, he was no temptation now, hardly even a memory. She didn’t understand how her lips could ever have touched his, and she felt strong enough to have sworn that she had never really listened to him. What had driven her into his arms, what terrible madness had led her to embark on an adventure that her own heart no longer understood, and hardly even her mind? She knew nothing more about it, everything in what had passed was strange to her, she was a stranger to herself.
But then again, hadn’t everything else changed in these few days, this single week of horror? Corrosive fear had eaten into her life like nitric acid, separating its elements. The weight of everything was suddenly different, all values were reversed, all relationships confused. She felt as if until this moment she had merely been groping her way vaguely through life with her eyes half closed, and now everything was illuminated with terrible clarity. Before her, as close as her own breath, were considerations that she had never touched but which, she suddenly realised, made up her real life, and others again that had once seemed important to her had dispersed like smoke. Up to this point she had mingled with lively society in the noisy, loquacious company of people who moved in well-to-do circles, and in essence she had lived only for herself, but now, after a week immured in her own household, she felt she did not miss that society. Instead, she was repelled by the pointless hurry and bustle of those who had nothing to do, and instinctively she judged the shallowness of her old inclinations, her constant neglect of love in action, in the light of this first truly strong feeling to come to her. She looked at her past as if looking into an abyss. Married for eight years, and deluding herself that she enjoyed too modest a happiness, she had never tried to come closer to her husband, she had remained a stranger to his real nature and no less to her own children. Paid domestic staff stood between them and her, governesses and servants who relieved her of all those little anxieties which, she only now began to sense—now that she had looked more closely at her children’s lives—were more alluring than the ardent glances of men, more delightful than a lover’s embrace. Slowly, her life was acquiring new meaning. Everything had affinities, all at once turning a gravely significant face to her. Now that she had known danger, and with that danger a genuine emotion, everything, however strange, suddenly began to have something in common with her. She felt herself in everything, and the world, once as transparent to her as glass, had come to mirror the dark shape of her own shadow. Wherever she looked, whatever she heard, was suddenly real.
She went to sit with the children. Their governess was reading aloud to them, a fairy tale about a princess who was allowed into all the rooms in her palace except the one with a door that was locked with a silver key. She opened the door all the same, and unlocking it sealed her fate. Wasn’t that her own story? She too had been intrigued by forbidden fruit, simply because it was forbidden, and it had brought her misfortune. Only a week ago, the simplicity of the little story would have made her smile, but now she felt that there was deep wisdom in it. There was a story in the newspaper about an army officer who had been blackmailed into turning traitor. She shuddered, and understood him. Wouldn’t she herself make impossible efforts to get money in order to buy a few days of peace, a semblance of happiness? Every line she read about suicide, every reported crime, every act of desperation suddenly became very real to her. She could identify with all of them—the man tired of life, the desperate man, the seduced maidservant, the abandoned child. Her own story had the ring of theirs. All at once she understood the full richness of life, and knew that no hour of her own existence could seem poor to her any more. Now that it was all coming to an end, she felt for the first time that life was just beginning. And was a vicious female to have the power to take this wonderful sense of being attuned to the whole world, and tear it apart with her coarse hands? Was Irene’s one guilty act to bring everything great and fine of which, for the first time, she felt capable, down into ruin?
And why, she thought, blindly resisting a disaster that she unconsciously knew made sense, why such a terrible punishment for a small peccadillo? She knew so many women, vain, bold, sensual, who kept lovers, spending money on them and mocking their husbands in those other men’s arms, women who li
ved a lie and were very much at home there, who became more beautiful in dissembling, stronger as the chase went on, cleverer in danger, while she herself collapsed, powerless, at the first touch of fear, at her first real transgression.
But was she really guilty at all? She felt in her heart that the man who had been her lover was a stranger to her, that she had never given him any part of her real life. She had received nothing from him, he had given her nothing. All of that, now past and forgotten, was not really her offence, it was the misdemeanour of another woman whom she herself did not understand, whom she did not even like to remember. Could you be punished for an offence when time had atoned for it?
Suddenly she felt alarm. She had an idea that she had not thought that herself. Who had said it? Someone close to her, only recently, only a few days ago. She thought about it, and her alarm was no less when she realised that it was her own husband who had put the idea into her mind. He had come home from a trial looking pale and upset, and suddenly, taciturn as he usually was, he had told her and some friends who happened to be present: “Sentence was passed on an innocent man today.” Asked what he meant, he told them, still much distressed by the incident, that a thief had been condemned for a crime committed three years before. He himself felt that the offender was innocent, because three years after the crime he was no longer the same man. So another man was being punished, even punished twice over, for he had spent those three years imprisoned in his own fear and the constant anxiety of being found out and convicted.
And she remembered, with horror, how she had contradicted him at the time. Remote from real life as her feelings were, she had see the criminal only as a pest, a parasite on comfortable bourgeois society, a man who must at all costs be removed from circulation. Only now did she feel how pitiful her arguments had been, how just and kindly his. But would he be able to understand that it was not really another man she had loved, only the idea of adventure? That he himself was also guilty of showing her too much kindness, making her life so enervatingly comfortable? Would he be able to show justice in judging his own case?