by Stefan Zweig
The unconscious author of this change in the woman who was so devoted to him, the Baron, noticed it less than anyone, for who ever turns to look at his own shadow? He knows it is following faithfully and silently along behind his own footsteps, sometimes hurrying ahead like a wish of which he is not yet conscious, but he seldom tries to observe its shape imitating his, or to recognise himself in its distortion. The Baron noticed nothing about Crescenz except that she was always there at his service, perfectly silent, reliable and devoted to him to the point of self-abnegation. And he felt that her very silence, the distance she naturally preserved in all discreet situations, was specially beneficial; sometimes he casually gave her a few words of appreciation, as one might pat a dog, now and then he even joked with her, pinched her earlobe in kindly fashion, gave her a banknote or a theatre ticket—small things for him, taken from his waistcoat pocket without a moment’s thought, but to her they were holy relics to be treasured in her little wooden box. Gradually he had become accustomed to thinking out loud in front of her, and even entrusting complex errands to her—and the greater the signs he gave of his confidence in her, the more gratefully and assiduously did she exert herself. An odd sniffing, searching, tracking instinct gradually appeared in her as she tried to spy out his wishes and even anticipate them; her whole life, all she did and all she wished for, seemed to pass from her own body into his; she saw everything with his eyes, listened hard to guess what he was feeling, and with almost depraved enthusiasm shared his enjoyment of all his pleasures and conquests. She beamed when a new young woman crossed the threshold, and looked downcast, as if her expectations were disappointed, if he came home at night without such amorous company—her once sluggish mind was now working as quickly and restlessly as only her hands used to, and a new, vigilant light shone in her eyes. A human being had awoken in the tired, worn-out work-horse—a human being who was reserved and sombre but cunning and dangerous, thinking and then acting on her thoughts, restless and intriguing.
Once when the Baron came home unexpectedly early, he stopped in the corridor in surprise: wasn’t that giggling and laughter behind the usually silent kitchen door? And then Leporella appeared in the doorway, rubbing her hands on her apron, bold and awkward at the same time. “’Scuse us, sir,” she said, eyes on the floor, “it’s the pastry-cook’s daughter’s here, a pretty girl she be, she’d like to meet sir ever so!” The Baron looked up in surprise, not sure whether he should be angry at such outrageous familiarity or amused at her readiness to procure for him. Finally his male curiosity won the day. “Well, let her have a look at me!”
The girl, a fresh, blond sixteen-year-old, whom Leporella had gradually enticed with flattering talk, appeared, blushing, and with an embarrassed giggle as the maid firmly pushed her through the doorway, and twirled clumsily in front of the elegant gentleman, whom she had indeed often watched with half-childlike admiration from the pâtisserie opposite. The Baron thought her pretty, and invited her to take a cup of tea in his study. Uncertain whether she ought to accept, the girl turned to look for Crescenz, but she had already disappeared into the kitchen with conspicuous haste, so there was nothing the girl could do, having been lured into this adventure, but accept the dangerous invitation, flushed and excited with curiosity.
But nature cannot leap too far: though the pressure of a distorted, confused passion might have aroused a certain mental agility in her dull and angular nature, Crescenz’s newly acquired and limited powers of thought were not enough to overcome the next obstacle. In that, they were still related to an animal’s short-term instincts. Immured in her obsession to serve the master she loved with doglike devotion in every way, Crescenz entirely forgot his absent wife. Her awakening was all the more terrible: it was like thunder coming out of a clear sky when one morning the Baron came in with a letter in his hand, looking annoyed, and brusquely told her to set everything in the apartment to rights, because his wife was coming home from the sanatorium next day. Crescenz stood there pale-faced, her mouth open with the shock: the news had struck her like a knife. She just stared and stared, as if she didn’t understand. And so immeasurably and alarmingly did this thunderclap distort her face that the Baron thought he should calm her a little with a light-hearted comment. “It looks to me as if you’re not best pleased either, Cenzi, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
Soon, however, something began to move in her rigid face again. It worked its way up from deep down in her, as if coming out of her guts, a mighty convulsion that gradually brought dark red colour to the cheeks that had been white just now. Very slowly, forced out with harsh thrusts like heartbeats, words emerged: her throat was trembling under the pressure of the effort. And at last they were there and came dully through her gritted teeth. “Could be—could be summat as ’un could do …”
It had come out harsh as the firing of a deadly shot. And so evil, so darkly determined did that distorted face look after she had vented her feelings with such violence that the Baron instinctively started, flinching back in surprise. But Crescenz had already turned away again, and was beginning to scour a copper bowl with such convulsive zeal that she looked as if she meant to break her fingers on it.
With the home-coming of the Baron’s wife, stormy winds filled the apartment again, slamming doors, blowing angrily through the rooms, sweeping away the comfortable, warm atmosphere like a cold draught. Whether the deceived wife had found out, from informers among the neighbours or anonymous letters, about the despicable way in which her husband had abused the freedom of the household, or whether the nervous and obvious ill temper that he did not scruple to show on her return had upset her, no one could tell—but in any case, two months in the sanatorium seemed to have done her strained nerves no good, for weeping fits now alternated with occasional threats and hysterical scenes. Relations between the couple became more insufferable every day. For a few weeks the Baron manfully defied the storm of her reproaches with the civility he had always preserved before, and replied evasively and indirectly when she threatened him with divorce or letters to her parents. But this cool, loveless indifference of his in itself drove the friendless woman, surrounded as she was by secret hostility, further and further into her nervous agitation.
Crescenz had armoured herself entirely in her old silence. But that silence had turned aggressive and dangerous. On her mistress’s arrival she defiantly stayed in the kitchen, and when she was finally summoned she avoided wishing the Baroness well on her return. Shoulders obdurately braced, she stood there like a block of wood and replied with such surliness to all questions that her impatient mistress soon turned away from her. With one glance, however, Crescenz darted all her pent-up hatred at the unsuspecting woman’s back. Her greedy emotions felt wrongfully robbed by the Baroness’s return; from the delights of the service she had so passionately relished, she was thrust back into the kitchen and the range, deprived of her intimate name of Leporella. For the Baron carefully avoided showing any liking for Crescenz in front of his wife. Sometimes, however, when he was exhausted by the unendurable scenes, and feeling in need of comfort and wanted to vent his feelings, he would slip into the kitchen and sit down on one of the hard wooden chairs, just so that he could groan, “I can’t stand this any longer!”
These moments, when the master she idolized sought refuge with her from his excessive tension, were the happiest of Leporella’s life. She never ventured to reply or say a word of consolation; silent and lost in thought, she just sat there, and only looked up sometimes with a sympathetic, receptive and tormented glance at her god, thus humiliated. Her silent sympathy did him good. But once he had left the kitchen, an angry fold would return to her brow, and her heavy hands expressed her anger by battering defenceless pieces of meat or savagely scouring dishes and cutlery.
At last the ominous atmosphere in the apartment since the wife’s return discharged itself stormily; during one of the couple’s intemperate scenes the Baron finally lost patience, abruptly abandoned the meekly indiff
erent schoolboy attitude he had adopted, and slammed the door behind him. “I’ve had enough of this,” he shouted so angrily that all the windows in the apartment shook. And still in a furious temper, red in the face, he went out to the kitchen, where Crescenz was quivering like a bent bow. “Pack my case at once and find my sporting gun. I’m going hunting for a week. Even the Devil couldn’t endure this hell any more. There has to be an end to it.”
Crescenz looked at him happily: like this, he was master in his own house again! And a hoarse laugh emerged from her throat. “Sir be right, there have to be an end to ’un.” And twitching with eager zeal, racing from room to room, she hastily snatched everything he would need from cupboards and tables, every nerve of the heavily built creature straining with tension and avidity. She carried the case and the gun out to the car herself. But when he was seeking words to thank her for her eager help, his eyes looked away from her in alarm. For that spiteful smile, the one that always alarmed him, had returned to her narrowed lips. When he saw her seeming to lie in ambush like that, he was instinctively reminded of the low crouching movement of an animal gathering itself to spring. But then she retreated into herself again, and just whispered hoarsely, with almost insulting familiarity, “I hopes sir has a good journey, I’ll do ’un all.”
Three days later the Baron was called back from his hunting trip by an urgent telegram. His cousin was waiting for him at the railway station. At his very first glance the anxious man knew that something terrible must have happened, for his cousin looked nervous and was fidgeting. After a few words solicitously designed to prepare him, he discovered what it was: his wife had been found dead in her bed that morning, with the whole room full of gas. Unfortunately a careless mistake was out of the question, said his cousin, because now, in May, the gas stove had not been lit for a long time, and his wife’s suicidal frame of mind was also obvious from the fact that the unhappy woman had taken some veronal the evening before. In addition there was the statement made by the cook Crescenz, who had been alone at home that evening, and had heard her unfortunate mistress going into the room just outside the bedroom in the night, presumably on purpose to switch on the gas supply, which had been carefully turned off. On hearing this, the police doctor who had also been called in agreed that an accident was out of the question, and recorded death by suicide.
The Baron began to tremble. When his cousin mentioned the statement that Crescenz had made he suddenly felt the blood in his hands turn cold. An unpleasant, a dreadful idea rose in his mind like nausea. But he forcibly suppressed this seething, agonising sensation, and meekly let his cousin take him home. The body had already been removed; family members were waiting in the drawing room with gloomy and hostile expressions. Their condolences were cold as a knife. With a certain accusatory emphasis, they said they thought they should mention that, unfortunately, it had been impossible to hush up the ‘scandal’, because the maid had rushed out on the stairs that morning screaming, “The mistress has killed herself!” And they had decided on a quiet funeral—yet again that sharp, chilly blade was turned against him—because, deplorably, all kinds of rumours had aroused the curiosity of society to an unwelcome degree. The downcast Baron listened in confusion, and once instinctively raised his eyes to the closed bedroom door, but then cravenly looked away again. He wanted to think something out to the end, an unwelcome idea that kept surfacing in his mind, but all this empty, malicious talk bewildered him. The black-clad relations stood around talking for another half-hour, and then one by one they took their leave. He was left alone in the empty, dimly lit room, trembling as if he had suffered a heavy blow, with an aching head and weariness in his joints.
Then there came a knock at the door. “Come in,” he said, rousing himself with a start. And along came a hesitant step, a dragging, stealthy step that he knew well. Suddenly horror overcame him; he felt as if his cervical vertebra were firmly screwed in place, while at the same time the skin from his temples to his knees was rippling with icy shudders. He wanted to turn, but his muscles failed him. So he stood there in the middle of the room, trembling and making no sound, his hands dropping by his sides and rigid as stone, and he felt very clearly how cowardly this guilt-ridden attitude must look. But it was useless for him to exert all his strength: his muscles just would not obey him. The voice behind him said, “I just wants ter ask, sir, will sir eat at home or out?” The Baron shivered ever more violently, and now the icy cold made its way right into his breast. He tried three times before he finally managed to get out the words, “No, I don’t want anything to eat.” Then the footsteps dragged themselves away, and still he didn’t have the courage to turn. And suddenly the rigidity left him: he was shaking all over with spasms, or nausea. He suddenly flung himself at the door and turned the key in it, so that those dreadful footsteps following him like a ghost couldn’t get at him. Then he dropped into a chair to force down an idea that he didn’t want to entertain, although it kept creeping back into his mind, as cold and slimy as a snail. And this obsessive idea, though he hated the thought of coming close to it, filled all his emotions: it was inescapable, slimy, horrible, and it stayed with him all that sleepless night and during the hours that followed, even when, black-clad and silent, he stood at the head of the coffin during the funeral.
On the day after the funeral the Baron left the city in a hurry. All the faces he saw were too unendurable now: in the midst of their sympathy they had—or was he only imagining it?—a curiously observant, a painfully inquisitorial look. And even inanimate objects spoke to him accusingly, with hostility: every piece of furniture in the apartment, but more particularly in the bedroom where the sweetish smell of gas still seemed to cling to everything, turned him away if he so much as automatically opened the doors. But the really unbearable nightmare of his sleeping and waking hours was the cold, unconcerned indifference of his former accomplice, who went about the empty apartment as if nothing at all had happened. Since that moment at the station when his cousin mentioned her name, he had trembled at the thought of any meeting with her. As soon as he heard her footsteps a nervous, hasty restlessness took hold of him; he couldn’t look at that dragging, indifferent gait any more, couldn’t bear her cold, silent composure. Revulsion overcame him when he even thought of her—her croaking voice, her greasy hair, her dull, animal, merciless absence of feeling, and part of his anger was anger against himself because he lacked the power to break the bond between them by force, like a piece of string, although it was almost throttling him. So he saw only one way out—flight. He packed his case in secret without a word to her, leaving only a hasty note behind to say that he had gone to visit friends in Carinthia.
The Baron stayed away all summer. Returning once during that time, when he was called back to Vienna on urgent business concerning his late wife’s estate, he preferred to come quietly, stay in a hotel, and send no word to that bird of ill omen waiting for him at home. Crescenz never learned of his presence because she spoke to no one. With nothing to do, dark-faced, she sat in the kitchen all day, went to church twice instead of once a week as before, received instructions and money to settle bills from the Baron’s lawyer, but she heard nothing from the Baron himself. He did not write and he sent her no messages. She sat there silently, waiting: her face became harder and thinner, her movements were wooden again, and so she spent many weeks, waiting and waiting in a mysterious state of rigidity.
In autumn, however, urgent business no longer allowed the Baron to extend his stay in the country, and he had to return to his apartment. At the doorway of the building he stopped, hesitating. Two months in the company of close friends had almost made him forget a good deal of it—but now that he was about to confront his nightmare again in physical form, the person who perhaps was his accomplice, he felt exactly the same nauseating spasm as before. It made him retch. With every step he took as he went more and more slowly up the stairs, that invisible hand crept up his throat and tightened its grip. In the end he had to make a mighty effort to s
ummon up all his will-power and force his stiff fingers to turn the key in the lock.