The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

by Stefan Zweig

  He was silent for some time. I did not notice until the bell struck from amidships, once, twice, three times—three o’clock. The moon was not shining so brightly now, but a different, faint yellow glow was already trembling in the air, and the wind blew light as a breeze from time to time. Half-an-hour more, an hour more, and it would be day, the grey around us would be extinguished by clear light. I saw his features more distinctly now that the shadows were not so dense and dark in the corner where we sat—he had taken off his cap, and now that his head was bared his tormented face looked even more terrible. But already the gleaming lenses of his glasses were turned to me again, he pulled himself together, and his voice took on a sharp and derisive tone.

  “It was all over for her now—but not for me. I was alone with the body—but I was also alone in a strange house and in a city that would permit no secrets, and I… I had to keep hers. Think about it, think about the circumstances: a woman from the colony’s high society, a perfectly healthy woman who had been dancing at the government ball only the evening before, suddenly dead in her bed… and a strange doctor with her, apparently called by her servant… no one in the house saw when he arrived or where he came from… she was carried in by night in a litter, and then the doors were closed… and in the morning she was dead. Only then were the servants called, and suddenly the house echoes with screams… the neighbours will know at once, the whole city will know, and there’s only one man who can explain it all… I, the stranger, the doctor from a remote country station. A delightful situation, don’t you agree?

  I knew what lay ahead of me now. Fortunately the boy was with me, the good fellow who read every thought of mine in my eyes—that yellow-skinned, dull-minded creature knew that there was still a battle to be fought. I had said to him only, ‘Your mistress did not want anyone to know what happened.’ He returned my glance with his moist, doglike, yet determined gaze. All he said was, ‘Yes, sir.’ But he washed the blood off the floor, tidied everything—and his very determination restored mine to me.

  Never in my life before, I know, was I master of such concentrated energy, and I never shall be again. When you have lost everything, you fight desperately for the last that is left—and the last was her legacy to me, my obligation to keep her secret. I calmly received the servants, told them all the same invented story: how the boy she had sent for the doctor happened to meet me by chance on his way. But while I talked, apparently calmly, I was waiting… waiting all the time for the crucial appearance of the medical officer who would have to make out the death certificate before we could put her in her coffin, and her secret with her. Don’t forget, this was Thursday, and her husband would arrive on Saturday…

  At last, at nine o’clock, I heard the medical officer announced. I had told the servants to send for him—he was my superior in rank and at the same time my rival, the same doctor of whom she had once spoken with such contempt, and who had obviously already heard about my application for a transfer. I sensed his hostility at once, but that in itself stiffened my backbone.

  In the front hall he immediately asked, ‘When did Frau… naming her by her surname—when did she die?’

  ‘At six in the morning.’

  ‘When did she send for you?’

  ‘Eleven last night.’

  ‘Did you know that I was her doctor?’

  ‘Yes, but this was an emergency… and then… well, she asked especially for me. She wouldn’t let them call any other doctor.’

  He stared at me, and a flush of red came into his pale, rather plump face. I could tell that he felt bitter. But that was exactly what I needed—all my energies were concentrating on getting a quick decision, for I could feel that my nerves wouldn’t hold out much longer. He was going to return a hostile reply, but then said more mildly, ‘You may think that you can dispense with my services, but it is still my official duty to confirm death—and establish the cause of death.’

  I did not reply, but let him go into the room ahead of me. Then I stepped back, locked the door and put the key on the table. He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this?’

  I faced him calmly. ‘We don’t have to establish the cause of death, we have to think of a different one. This lady called me to treat her after… after suffering the consequences of an operation that went wrong. It was too late for me to save her, but I promised I would save her reputation, and that is what I’m going to do. And I am asking you to help me.’

  His eyes were wide with astonishment. ‘You surely aren’t saying,’ he stammered, ‘that you’re asking me, as medical officer, to conceal a crime?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I must.’

  ‘So I’m to pay for your crime?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I didn’t touch this lady, or… or I wouldn’t be here talking to you, I would have put an end to myself by now. She has paid for her transgression, if that’s what you want to call it. There’s no need for the world to know about it. And I will not allow this lady’s reputation to be tarnished now for no good reason.’

  My firm tone made him even angrier. ‘You will not allow… oh, so I suppose you’re my superior, or at least you think you are! Just try giving me orders… when you were summoned here from your country outpost I thought at once there was something fishy going on… nice practices you get up to, I must say, here’s a pretty sample of your skill! But now I will examine her, I will do it, and you may depend upon it that any account to which my name is signed will be correct. I won’t put my name to a lie.’

  I kept quite calm. ‘This time you must. You won’t leave the room until you do.’

  I put my hand in my pocket. In fact I did not have my revolver with me, but he jumped in alarm. I came a step closer and looked at him.

  ‘Listen, let me tell you something… and then we need not resort to desperate measures. I have reached a point where I set no store by my life or anyone else’s… I am anxious only to keep my promise that the manner of this death will remain secret. And listen to this too: I give you my word of honour that if you will sign the certificate saying that this lady died of… well, died accidentally, I will leave this city and the East Indies too in the course of this week… and if you want, I will take my revolver and shoot myself as soon as the coffin is in the ground and I can be sure that no one… no one, you understand—can make any more inquiries. That ought to satisfy you—it must satisfy you.’

  There must have been something menacing in my voice, something quite dangerous, because as I instinctively came closer he retreated with the obvious horror of… of someone fleeing from a man in frenzy running amok, wielding a kris. And suddenly he had changed… he cringed, so to speak, he was bemused, his hard attitude crumbled. He murmured something with a last faint protest. ‘It will be the first time in my life that I’ve signed a false certificate… still, I expect some form of words can be found… Who knows what would happen if… but I can’t simply…’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said helpfully, to strengthen his will—only move fast, move fast, said the tingling sensation in my temples—‘but now that you know you would only be hurting a living man and doing a terrible injury to a dead woman, I am sure you will not hesitate.’

  He nodded. We approached the table. A few minutes later the certificate was made out; it was published later in the newspaper, and told a credible story of a heart attack. Then he rose and looked at me.

  ‘And you’ll leave this week, then?’

  ‘My word of honour.’

  He looked at me again. I realised that he wanted to appear stern and objective. ‘I’ll see about a coffin at once,’ he said, to hide his embarrassment. But whatever it was about me that made me so… so dreadful, so tormented—he suddenly offered me his hand and shook mine with hearty good feeling. ‘I hope you will be better soon,’ he said—I didn’t know what he meant. Was I sick? Was I… was I mad? I accompanied him to the door and unlocked it—and it was with the last of my strength that I closed it again behind him. Then th
e tingling in my temples returned, everything swayed and went round before my eyes, and I collapsed beside her bed… just as a man running amok falls senseless at the end of his frenzied career, his nerves broken.”

  *

  Once again he paused. I shivered slightly: was it the first shower carried on the morning wind that blew softly over the deck? But the tormented face, now partly visible in the reflected light of dawn, was getting control of itself again.

  “I don’t know how long I lay on the mat like that. Then someone touched me. I came to myself with a start. It was the boy, timidly standing before me with his look of devotion and gazing uneasily at me.

  ‘Someone wants come in… wants see her…’

  ‘No one may come in.’

  ‘Yes… but…’

  There was alarm in his eyes. He wanted to say something, but dared not. The faithful creature was in some kind of torment.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He looked at me, trembling as if he feared a blow. And then he said—he named a name—how does such a lowly creature suddenly come by so much knowledge, how is it that at some moments these dull human souls show unspeakable tenderness?—then he said, very, very timidly, ‘It is him.’

  I started again, understood at once, and I was immediately avid, impatient to set eyes on the unknown man. For strangely enough, you see, in the midst of all my agony, my fevered longing, fear and haste, I had entirely forgotten ‘him’, I had forgotten there was a man involved too… the man whom this woman had loved, to whom she had passionately given what she denied to me. Twelve, twenty-four hours ago I would still have hated him, I would have been ready to tear him to pieces. Now… well, I can’t tell you how much I wanted to see him, to… to love him because she had loved him.

  I was suddenly at the door. There stood a young, very young fair-haired officer, very awkward, very slender, very pale. He looked like a child, so… so touchingly young, and I was unutterably shaken to see how hard he was trying to be a man and maintain his composure, hide his emotion. I saw at once that his hands were trembling as he raised them to his cap. I could have embraced him… because he was so exactly what I would have wished the man who had possessed her to be, not a seducer, not proud… no, still half a child, a pure, affectionate creature to whom she had given herself.

  The young man stood before me awkwardly. My avid glance, my passionate haste as I rushed to let him in confused him yet more. The small moustache on his upper lip trembled treacherously… this young officer, this child, had to force himself not to sob out loud.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said at last. ‘I would have liked to see Frau… I would so much have liked to see her again.’

  Unconsciously, without any deliberate intention, I put my arm around the young stranger’s shoulders and led him in as if he were an invalid. He looked at me in surprise, with an infinitely warm and grateful expression… at that moment, some kind of understanding existed between the two of us of what we had in common. We went over to the dead woman. There she lay, white-faced, in white linen—I felt that my presence troubled him, so I stepped back to leave him alone with her. He went slowly closer with… with such reluctant, hesitant steps. I saw from the set of his shoulders the kind of turmoil that was ranging in him. He walked like… like a man walking into a mighty gale. And suddenly he fell to his knees beside the bed, just as I had done.

  I came forward at once, raised him and led him to an armchair. He was not ashamed any more, but sobbed out his grief. I could say nothing—I just instinctively stroked his fair, childishly soft hair. He reached for my hand… very gently, yet anxiously… and suddenly I felt his eyes on me. ‘Tell me the truth, doctor,’ he stammered. ‘Did she lay hands on herself?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And… I mean… is anyone… is someone to blame for her death?’

  ‘No,’ I said again, although a desire was rising in me to cry out, ‘I am! I am! I am! And so are you! The pair of us! And her obstinacy, her ill-starred obstinacy.’ But I controlled myself. I repeated, ‘No… no one is to blame. It was fate!’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he groaned, ‘I can’t believe it. She was at the ball only the day before yesterday, she waved to me. How is it possible, how could it happen?’

  I told a lengthy lie. I did not betray her secret even to him. We talked together like two brothers over the next few days, as if irradiated by the emotion that bound us… we did not confess it to each other, but we both felt that our whole lives had depended on that woman. Sometimes the truth rose to my lips, choking me, but I gritted my teeth, and he never learned that she had been carrying his child, or that I had been asked to kill the child, his offspring, and she had taken it down into the abyss with her. Yet we talked of nothing but her in those days, when I was hiding away with him—for I forgot to tell you that they were looking for me. Her husband had arrived after the coffin was closed, and wouldn’t accept the medical findings. There were all kinds of rumours, and he was looking for me… but I couldn’t bear to see him when I knew that she had suffered in her marriage to him… I hid away, for four days I didn’t go out of the house, we neither of us left her lover’s apartment. He had booked me a passage under a false name so that I could get away easily. I went on board by night, like a thief, in case anyone recognised me. I have left everything I own behind… my house, all my work of the last seven years, my possessions, they’re all there for anyone who wants them… and the government gentlemen will have struck me off their records for deserting my post without leave. But I couldn’t live any longer in that house or in that city… in that world where everything reminded me of her. I fled like a thief in the night, just to escape her, just to forget. But… as I came on board at night, it was midnight, my friend was with me… they… they were just hauling something up by crane, something rectangular and black… her coffin… do you hear that, her coffin? She has followed me here, just as I followed her… and I had to stand by and pretend to be a stranger, because he, her husband, was with it, it’s going back to England with him. Perhaps he plans to have an autopsy carried out there… he has snatched her back, she’s his again now, not ours, she no longer belongs to the two of us. But I am still here… I will go with her to the end… he will not, must not ever know about it. I will defend her secret against any attempt to… against this ruffian from whom she fled to her death. He will learn nothing, nothing… her secret is mine alone…

  So now do you understand… do you realise why I can’t endure the company of human beings? I can’t bear their laughter, to hear them flirting and mating… for her coffin is stowed away down there in the hold, between bales of tea and Brazil nuts. I can’t get at it, the hold is locked, but I’m aware of it with all my senses, I know it is there every second of the day… even if they play waltzes and tangos up here. It’s stupid, the sea there washes over millions of dead, a corpse is rotting beneath every plot of ground on which we step… yet I can’t bear it, I cannot bear it when they give fancy dress balls and laugh so lasciviously. I feel her dead presence, and I know what she wants. I know it, I still have a duty to do… I’m not finished yet, her secret is not quite safe, she won’t let me go yet…”

  Slow footsteps and slapping sounds came from amidships; the sailors were beginning to scour the deck. He started as if caught in a guilty act, and his strained face looked anxious. Rising, he murmured, “I’ll be off… I’ll be off.” It was painful to see him: his devastated glance, his swollen eyes, red with drink or tears. He didn’t want my pity; I sensed shame in his hunched form, endless shame for giving his story away to me during the night. On impulse, I asked him, “May I visit you in your cabin this afternoon?”

  He looked at me—there was a derisive, harsh, sardonic set to his mouth. A touch of malevolence came out with every word, distorting it.

  “Ah, your famous duty—the duty to help! I see. You were fortunate enough to make me talk by quoting that maxim. But no thank you, sir. Don’t think I feel better now that I have torn my guts out be
fore you, shown you the filth inside me. There’s no mending my spoiled life any more… I have served the honourable Dutch government for nothing, I can wave goodbye to my pension—I come back to Europe a poor, penniless cur… a cur whining behind a coffin. You don’t run amok for long with impunity, you’re bound to be struck down in the end, and I hope it will soon all be over for me. No thank you, sir, I’ll turn down your kind offer… I have my own friends in my cabin, a few good bottles of old whisky that sometimes comfort me, and then I have my old friend of the past, although I didn’t turn it against myself when I should have done, my faithful Browning. In the end it will help me better than any talk. Please don’t try to… the one human right one has left is to die as one wishes, and keep well away from any stranger’s help.”

  Once more he gave me a derisive, indeed challenging look, but I felt that it was really only in shame, endless shame. Then he hunched his shoulders, turned without a word of farewell and crossed the foredeck, which was already in bright sunlight, making for the cabins and holding himself in that curious way, leaning sideways, footsteps dragging. I never saw him again. I looked for him in our usual place that night, and the next night too. He kept out of sight, and I might have thought he was a dream of mine or a fantastic apparition had I not then noticed, among the passengers, a man with a black mourning band around his arm, a Dutch merchant, I was told, whose wife had just died of some tropical disease. I saw him walking up and down, grave and grieving, keeping away from the others, and the idea that I knew about his secret sorrow made me oddly timid. I always turned aside when he passed by, so as not to give away with so much as a glance that I knew more about his sad story than he did himself.

  Then, in Naples harbour, there was that remarkable accident, and I believe I can find its cause in the stranger’s story. For most of the passengers had gone ashore that evening—I myself went to the opera, and then to one of the brightly lit cafés on the Via Roma. As we were on our way back to the ship in a dinghy, I noticed several boats circling the vessel with torches and acetylene lamps as if in search of something, and up on the dark deck there was much mysterious coming-and-going of carabinieri and of other policemen. I asked a sailor what had happened. He avoided giving a direct answer in a way that immediately told me the crew had orders to keep quiet, and next day too, when all was calm on board again and we sailed on to Genoa without a hint of any further incident, there was nothing to be learned on board. Not until I saw the Italian newspapers did I read accounts, written up in flowery terms, of the alleged accident in Naples harbour. On the night in question, they wrote, at a quiet time in order to avoid upsetting the passengers, the coffin of a distinguished lady from the Dutch colonies was to be moved from the ship to a boat, and it had just been let down the ship’s side on a rope ladder in her husband’s presence when something heavy fell from the deck above, carrying the coffin away into the sea, along with the men handling it and the woman’s husband, who was helping them to hoist it down. One newspaper said that a madman had flung himself down the steps and onto the rope ladder; another stated that the ladder had broken of itself under too much weight. In any case, the shipping company had done all it could to cover up what exactly had happened. The handlers of the coffin and the dead woman’s husband had been pulled out of the water and into boats, not without some difficulty, but the lead coffin itself sank straight to the bottom, and could not be retrieved. The brief mention in another report of the fact that, at the same time, the body of a man of about forty had been washed ashore in the harbour did not seem to be connected in the public mind with the romantic account of the accident. But as soon as I had read those few lines, I felt as if that white, moonlit face with its gleaming glasses were staring back at me again, in ghostly fashion, from behind the sheet of newsprint.