The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  This was enough, more than enough. The powder was spread; all Carla had to do now was light the fuse. Privy Councillor Frau Strodtmann, widow of the great surgeon, sat in the lobby day and night like a sentry, armed with her lorgnette. Her wheelchair (the old woman was paralyzed) was the hotel’s undisputed social news desk and, most important, the final court of appeal as to what was proper and what wasn’t—an aggressive, fanatical intelligence agency laboring around the clock in the secret war of all against all. Clara sat with Frau Strodtmann and unloaded the precious cargo smoothly and quickly, giving no hint that she was anything but a friend. That Fräulein von Boolen (at least that’s what everyone calls her here) is such a charming girl, you’d never guess where she came from. But isn’t it simply splendid of Mrs. van Boolen to take this shopgirl or whatever she is and pretend so sweetly that she’s her niece, dress her up in style in her own clothes and give her a new identity. Yes, Americans do have a more democratic and generous way of thinking about these matters of social standing than backward Europeans like us who are still playing at high society (here the privy councillor’s head bobbed like an angry hen)—eventually they’ll be giving her an education and even a proper ancestry, not just clothes and money. Needless to say, the protective wing offered to the girl from the provinces was characterized in the liveliest terms. Every last deliciously damaging detail was handed over to the news desk. That very morning the story began circulating throughout the hotel, picking up dirt and debris on its way as gossip will. Some said Americans got up stenographers as millionaires all the time, did it on purpose to annoy the aristocrats (there was even a play about it over there). Others argued that Christine was probably the old man’s lover, or even his wife’s. In short, the thing worked like a charm, and on the evening of Christine’s escapade with the engineer she had no suspicion that she was the main topic of conversation throughout the hotel. No one wanted to be the one who’d been taken in, so they all claimed to have noticed a hundred fishy things before. And since memory is subject to the will, everything they’d found so charming the day before was now something to snicker at. They all knew about Christine’s innocent and reluctant deceit while she, her warm young body wrapped up in happiness, her lips parted in a sleeper’s smile, was still deceiving herself.

  The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it. That morning, pursued by prying, mocking eyes, Christine has no suspicion that she’s walking through the licking flames of a ring of fire. She graciously sits down next to the privy councillor, the most dangerous spot of all. The old lady prods her with questions, but Christine doesn’t notice how nasty they are (people all around are leaning in to listen). She charmingly kisses her white-haired antagonist’s hand before she goes off to take the planned walk with her aunt and uncle. She doesn’t notice the slight smirk on the faces of some of the guests as they return her greeting. Why would anyone be anything but pleasant? Bright and serene, she looks upon the malicious crowd with trusting eyes. She flutters through the room like a flame, beatifically confident of the goodness of the world.

  At first her aunt also notices nothing. There does seem to be something disagreeable in the air this morning, but she can’t put her finger on it. Herr and Frau von Trenkwitz, a Silesian landowner couple staying at the hotel, are very particular about the company they keep, setting great store by high birth and class and ruthlessly ignoring all commoners. They’ve made an exception of the van Boolens, mostly because they’re Americans (already nobility of a kind) without being Jews, but perhaps also because their second-oldest son, Harro, whose property is heavily encumbered by high-interest mortgages, is going to arrive tomorrow and it might not be a bad thing for him to make the acquaintance of an American heiress. A stroll with Mrs. van Boolen was planned for ten this morning, but at nine thirty (on receipt of the information from the privy councillor’s desk) they send the desk clerk to deliver the inexplicable message that, unfortunately, it won’t be possible. And strangely, instead of stopping to apologize and give some explanation for this late cancellation, they pass by the van Boolens’ table at lunchtime with no more than a stiff nod. Mrs. van Boolen, morbidly sensitive in all social matters, immediately suspects something. “Odd,” she thinks, “did we offend them? What’s happened?” Strange too that no one comes to sit with her in the lounge after lunch (Anthony is taking his afternoon nap; Christine is writing in the library). The Kinsleys or other new friends they’ve made here usually come by to chat, but now, as though by mutual agreement, everyone’s staying at their tables, and she waits alone in her deep armchair, oddly hurt that all her friends aren’t coming over and that that self-important Trenkwitz hasn’t even apologized.

  Finally someone does approach, and he’s different too, stiff-legged, awkward, solemn: Lord Elkins. He averts his eyes strangely beneath his reddish, tired-looking lids. Usually he meets your eyes so directly. What’s the matter with him? He bows almost ceremonially. “May I sit with you?”

  “Of course, Lord Elkins. Need you ask?”

  Once more she’s surprised. He seems so uncomfortable, he examines his shoes, unbuttons his coat, adjusts the creases in his trousers; strange, strange. What on earth is wrong, she thinks, he looks as though he’s about to give a speech.

  At last the old man finds the resolve to lift his bright clear eyes under the heavy lids. It’s like a blast of light, like a sword flashing.

  “I say, my dear Mrs. van Boolen, I should like to discuss something of a private nature with you. No one can hear us here. But you must allow me the liberty of being quite forthright. All this time I’ve been considering how the business might be hinted at, but hints are to no purpose in serious matters. Anything personal or awkward must be approached with that much more clarity and directness. So … I feel I shall be doing my duty as a friend if I speak quite without reservation. Will you permit me that?”

  “But of course.”

  The old man doesn’t look very relieved. For a moment he delays again as he takes his shag pipe out of his pocket and fills it laboriously, his fingers trembling strangely (is it age or agitation?). Finally he looks up and says clearly, “What I have to say to you concerns Miss Christiana.”

  He hesitates some more.

  Mrs. van Boolen is slightly shocked. Can the almost seventy-year-old man really be thinking seriously about…She’s already realized that Christine is very much on his mind. Can that really have gone so far that he…But then Lord Elkins looks up with a sharp, inquisitive expression and asks, “Is she really your niece?”

  Mrs. van Boolen looks almost offended. “Of course.”

  “And is her name really van Boolen?”

  Now Mrs. van Boolen is becoming seriously bewildered.

  “No, no … But she’s my niece, not my husband’s, she’s the daughter of my sister in Vienna … But I beg you, Lord Elkins, I know your intentions are friendly. What is the meaning of this question?”

  Elkins looks deeply and intently into his pipe. It seems to be of immense interest to him whether the tobacco is burning evenly, and he spends some time poking it about with his finger. He remains hunched over. At last he says, almost without opening his thin lips, as if speaking to his pipe, “Because … well, because a very peculiar bit of gossip has suddenly cropped up here, to the effect that … I thought it my duty as a friend to get to the bottom of the matter. Since you tell me she really is your niece, the whole tale has been put to rest as far as I’m concerned. I was immediately persuaded that Miss Christiana was incapable of being untruthful, it was just that … well, people here are saying such strange things.”

  Mrs. van Boolen feels herself turn pale, and her knees shake.

  “What … Please be candid … What are people saying?”

  The pipe begins to glow, a red disk.

  “Well, you know that this kind of hotel society, which isn’t a real society, is always more unforgiving than society itself. That cold-blooded popinjay Trenkwitz, for example, is personally offended to be sitting at the same tabl
e with someone who is not a member of the nobility and has no money. It seems he and his wife have been wagging their tongues all over the place with a story that you played a joke on them by dressing up a lower-middle-class girl and presenting her to them as a lady under a false name—as though that blockhead knew what a real lady was anyway. I’m sure I don’t have to impress upon you that the great respect and the great…the very great…the genuine liking that I have for Miss Christiana would not be diminished in the slightest if she really came from…from straitened circumstances…Perhaps she wouldn’t have any of that marvelous responsiveness and joy if she were as accustomed to luxury as this stuck-up lot. So I personally have nothing against your good-heartedly giving her your clothes, quite the contrary; and if I inquired about the truth of the matter it was only so as to be able to deal a crushing blow to this vile talk.”

  Shock has mounted from Mrs. van Boolen’s knees into her throat. She has to take three deep breaths before she can summon the strength to respond calmly.

  “My dear Lord Elkins, I have no reason at all to keep the slightest thing about Christine’s background secret from you. My brother-in-law was a prominent businessman, one of the wealthiest and most respected in Vienna” (here she was exaggerating greatly) “but lost his fortune in the war as the most decent people did. His family didn’t have an easy time of it. They considered it more honorable to work than to let us support them, and so Christine now works as a civil servant, in the post office, which, I hope, is not shameful.”

  Lord Elkins looks up with a smile. His slump has vanished and he’s plainly feeling more at ease.

  “You’re talking to someone who was himself a civil servant for forty years. If that’s something to be ashamed of, then I share the shame. But now that we’ve spoken clearly, we need to be thinking clearly too. I knew right away that all this cattiness was low gossip—it’s one of the few advantages of age that one is rarely wrong about people. Let us accept things as they are: Miss Christiana’s situation will, I fear, not be an easy one from here on in. There’s nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one. A conceited oaf like that Trenkwitz will be kicking himself for the next ten years for having been polite to a Post Office employee. That sort of thing bothers an old nitwit like him more than toothache. And it’s not impossible that others too will be less than tactful toward your niece. At the very least she’ll find that people are chilly and impolite. Now I should like to prevent that, for (as I’m sure you’ve noticed) I have an extraordinarily high regard for your niece…extraordinarily high, and I should be happy if I might be of help in sparing her any disappointment, as she’s so wonderfully guileless.”

  Lord Elkins breaks off, his face once again old and gray in thought.

  “Whether I shall be able to protect her in the long run, that … that I cannot say. That depends … that depends on the circumstances. But in any case I wish to make it clear to these fine ladies and gents that I respect her more than the entire moneyed mob of them and that whoever goes so far as to treat her rudely will have me to deal with. There are certain jokes I shan’t tolerate, and as long as I’m here they’ll have to watch themselves.”

  He stands up abruptly, more resolute and firm than Mrs. van Boolen has ever known him to be.

  “Will you permit me to ask your niece on a drive?” he asks formally.

  “But of course.”

  He bows and walks off toward the library (Mrs. van Boolen looks after him in shock), his cheeks reddened as though by a biting wind and his fists clenched. What does he want, Mrs. van Boolen thinks, still stunned. Christine is writing and doesn’t hear him come up. From behind he sees only her lovely fair hair on her neck as she bends over the paper, sees the form that has reawakened desire in him after so many years. Poor child, he thinks, she’s so carefree, she knows nothing, but they’ll get you somehow and there’s no way to protect you. He touches her shoulder. Christine gives a start and gets to her feet respectfully. From the beginning she’s always felt the need to demonstrate her respect to this exceptional man. He forces a smile: “My dear Fräulein Christiana, I’m coming with a request. I’m not feeling well today, I’ve had a headache since early this morning, can’t read, can’t sleep. I thought some fresh air might do me good, a jaunt in the car, and I should certainly get the most out of it if you would accompany me. Your aunt has already given me permission to ask. So if you’d like…?”

  “But of course … I’d be … delighted, I’d be honored …”

  “Then let’s be off.” He courteously offers his arm. It surprises her and embarrasses her a little, but how can she refuse this honor! Lord Elkins walks with her the length of the lounge, slowly, steadily, and firmly. He gives each person a quick sharp look, not something he normally does. There’s unmistakable threat expressed in his bearing: hands off! Ordinarily he’s friendly and polite, barely noticed as he moves among them like a quiet gray shadow; but now he fixes each of them with a challenging gaze. It’s immediately clear to everyone what this display of respect means, his taking Christine’s arm. The privy councillor watches guiltily, the Kinsleys nod almost apprehensively as the fearless old paladin with his snow-white hair and icy gaze strides through the broad room with the young woman, she proud and happy, suspecting nothing, he with a hard, soldierly set to his mouth as though standing at the head of a regiment about to attack an entrenched enemy.

  Trenkwitz happens to be outside the hotel door when they emerge; he greets them automatically. Lord Elkins looks past him, lifts his hand halfway to his hat and lets it fall carelessly as if acknowledging a waiter. It’s a gesture of indescribable contempt, like a rebuff. He releases Christine’s arm, opens the car door, and doffs his hat as he helps the lady in, with the same courtesy he once showed the daughter-in-law of the King of England during an automobile trip to the Transvaal.

  Mrs. van Boolen was a good deal more frightened by Lord Elkins’s discreet disclosure than she let on; without realizing it, he had reopened an old wound. Down in that dim stratum of things half known and things better left forgotten, that treacherous zone consciously entered only under duress and with trepidation, the long-since respectable and quite ordinary Claire van Boolen harbors an ancient and ineradicable fear, one that surfaces sometimes in dreams and disturbs her sleep: the fear that her own past might be discovered. When, as Klara, thirty years ago, she had found herself adroitly eased out of Europe and had met and was going to marry Anthony van Boolen, she had lacked the courage to confess to that honest but somewhat philistine burgher the troubled origins of the small capital she was contributing to their union. Lying resolutely, she’d said that the two thousand dollars was an inheritance from her grandfather, and never once during their entire married life had her guileless and adoring husband doubted the truth of this statement. There was nothing to fear from his stolid good nature, but the more proper Claire became, the more she was possessed by the mad idea that some silly happenstance, a chance meeting or anonymous letter, might suddenly bring her long-ago affair to light. For that reason she’d doggedly and purposefully avoided encounters with her compatriots for years. She wouldn’t let her husband introduce her to a Viennese business friend, and as soon as she was fluent in English she refused to hear a word of German. She aggressively terminated all correspondence with her own family, sending no more than a brief telegram even in the most important matters. But the fear did not subside; quite the contrary, it grew as she moved up the social ladder, and the better adapted she became to puritanical American ways the more nervous she was that some casual bit of talk might bring that nasty spark smoldering under the ashes to a blaze. When a dinner guest happened to remark that he’d lived for a long time in Vienna, that was enough to keep her awake all night, feeling that burning in her heart. Then came the war, and at a stroke everything that had come before was pushed back into an inaccessible and almost mythical era. The newspapers and magazines from that time were turning to dust, people in Europe h
ad other things to worry about now, talked about different things; it was over, forgotten. Like a foreign body encapsulated in scar tissue, which may cause some aching when the weather changes but is otherwise hardly felt and thus not so foreign anymore, that awkward bit of her past was forgotten amid the comfort, contentment, and wholesome activity of her new life. She was the mother of two strapping sons, she lent a hand in the business occasionally, belonged to the Philanthropic League, was vice president of the Association for Former Internees, was highly respected and honored in the city; and, after having to repress her ambitions for so long, at last she had an outlet—a new house where all the best families came to call. Little by little she forgot the episode—this was the most critical thing for her peace of mind. Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do. Klara the dress model finally died, to be reborn as the impeccable wife of the cotton merchant van Boolen. The episode was so little in her thoughts anymore that she wrote her sister to arrange a reunion the moment she arrived in Europe. But now she’s learned that, inexplicably, evil-minded people are looking into her niece’s background: didn’t it stand to reason that they’d include her too, that she herself would become the focus of attention? Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable: she realizes with horror that at the next table is an old Viennese, director of the commercial bank, seventy or eighty years old, by the name of Löwy, and suddenly she thinks she remembers that the maiden name of her late patron’s wife had also been Löwy. What if she were his sister, or his cousin! And doesn’t he seem to find it easy to chime in with some suggestive remark or other (old men do like to go on about scandals recalled from their youth!). Cold sweat breaks out on Claire’s brow. Fear has done its work well, and now she thinks old Herr Löwy looks remarkably like her patron’s wife: the same thick lips, the same hooked nose. In a hallucinatory fever of anxiety she has no doubt that he’s her brother, and of course he’ll recognize her and dredge up the old story in all its detail, and that’ll be nectar and ambrosia to the Kinsleys and Guggenheims, and the next day Anthony will get an anonymous letter which will at a stroke demolish thirty years of trusting marriage.