Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

  Quickly, quickly! I thought, in growing discomfort. And I bent over her as hurriedly as possible, my lips rested lightly and fleetingly on her forehead. Quite deliberately, I scarcely touched her skin, and only from near-by inhaled the faint fragrance of her hair.

  But her hands, which had evidently been lying in wait on the pillow, shot up, and before I could turn my head away, seized me by the temples in a vice-like grip, tore my mouth from her forehead and pulled it down to her lips, which she pressed so hotly and greedily to mine that teeth touched teeth, while her breast strained and arched and thrust upwards to touch, to feel my body as I leaned over her. Never in my life had I received such a wild, despairing, thirsty kiss as the one given me by this crippled girl.

  And it was not enough, not enough! With a kind of drunken strength she held me clasped to her until her breath gave out. Then her grip relaxed, and her hands began feverishly to wander from my temples and to bury themselves in my hair. But still she did not let me go. Only for a moment did she relax her hold in order to lean back and stare as though bewitched into my eyes; then she pulled me to her afresh, and pressed hot, blind kisses on my cheeks, my forehead, my eyes, my lips, with wild and yet impotent avidity. And every time she pulled my head down, she stammered, groaned, ‘You silly ... you silly ... oh you great silly, you!’ Ever more avid, ever more passionate was her onslaught, ever more vehemently, convulsively did she seize me and kiss me. And then suddenly a spasm rent her frame. Her hold on me relaxed, her head fell back on the pillows, and only her eyes continued to sparkle triumphantly at me.

  Turning abruptly away from me, she whispered, at once exhausted and ashamed: ‘Now go, go, you old silly ... go!’

  I went — no, I staggered — out of the room. Before I had reached the end of the dark corridor the last remnants of my strength left me, and my senses reeled so that I had to steady myself by holding on to the wall. So that was it! This was the secret, so belatedly revealed, of her restlessness, her hitherto inexplicable aggressiveness. I was appalled. I felt like one who, stooping innocently over a flower, is stung by an adder. If the hypersensitive creature had struck me, reviled me, spat at me, I should have been less disconcerted, for in view of her uncertain temper I was prepared for anything but this one thing — that she, an invalid, a poor, afflicted cripple, should be able to love, should desire to be loved; that this child, this half-woman, this immature, impotent creature, should have the temerity (I cannot express it otherwise) to love, to desire, with the conscious and sensual love of a real woman. I had envisaged every possibility but this: that a being whom Fate had so maimed, who had not the strength to drag herself along, could dream of a lover, a beloved, that she should so horribly misunderstand me, who, after all, visited and went on visiting her simply out of pity. But the next moment I realized with a fresh shock that it was my own burning pity that, more than anything else, was to blame if this lonely girl, cut off as she was from the outside world, should fancy that she perceived in me, the foolish slave of my pity, the only man who was sympathetic enough to visit her day after day in her prison, signs of tender emotion. Whereas I, fool, hopeless simpleton that I was, had only seen in her a sufferer, a cripple, a child and not a woman. Not even for a fleeting moment had it occurred to me to think that under that concealing coverlet there breathed, felt, waited, a naked body, a female body which, like any other, desired and longed to be desired. Never had I, even in my wildest dreams, imagined that invalids, cripples, the immature, the prematurely aged, the despised and rejected, the pariahs among human beings, dared to love. For a young and inexperienced person almost invariably forms a picture of real life and experience that is a reflection of the world of which he has heard or read in books; before he has experienced life at first-hand he inevitably moulds his ideas of it on second-hand experience. In books, in plays, or in films, where you get a levelling down, a simplification of reality, it is always and without exception the young, the beautiful, the elect of this world, who desire one another; and so I had assumed — hence my shrinking from many a love-affair — that one had to be specially attractive, specially privileged, specially favoured by fortune, to arouse the passion of a woman. It was only because it had seemed to me that anything of an erotic nature was precluded in our relations from the start, and because I had never so much as suspected that Edith could look upon me as anything more than a nice boy, a good friend, that I had been able to preserve such an innocent, light-hearted friendship with the two girls. Even if I had sometimes been stirred by Ilona’s sensual beauty, I had never even thought of Edith as a member of the opposite sex; it had never even so much as crossed my mind that her crippled body was possessed of the same organs, that her soul harboured the same urgent desires, as those of other women. It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved. That it is precisely from the lowest abysses of despair that the panic cries and groans of those hungry for love ring out most gruesomely — this was the dread secret which I, in my raw inexperience, had never ventured to suspect. It was not until this moment that the knowledge penetrated my consciousness like a red-hot knife.

  ‘Silly!’ — now too I understood why this particular word had risen to her lips in the midst of her emotion, as she had pressed her immature breast to mine. ‘Silly!’ — she had been right to call me that. They must all have seen through the whole thing from the very start — the old man and Ilona and Josef and the other servants. They must all long since have suspected her love, her passion, viewed it with alarm, no doubt with foreboding. I alone had had no inkling of it, I, the foolish slave of my pity, who had played the role of the good, kind, blundering comrade, who had joked like a clown and never noticed that my blindness, my incomprehensible lack of perception, had been excruciating torture to her ardent soul. Just as in a cheap farce the sorry hero is the centre of an intrigue, the ramifications of which everyone in the audience has long since realized, and only he, poor innocent, goes on playing in deadly earnest, blissfully unaware of the net in which he is entangled (although the others have known its every thread and every mesh from the outset) — so everyone at Kekesfalva must have seen me blundering about in this foolish blind-man’s-bluff of the emotions until at last she had torn the bandage violently from my eyes. But just as a single flash of light suffices to illuminate a dozen objects in a room simultaneously, so now in retrospect — too late, alas, too late! — did innumerable details of the past few weeks become embarrassingly plain to me. Only now did it occur to me why it was she had been so infuriated whenever I had blithely called her ‘my dear child’ — she, who wished to be regarded by me of all people not as a child but as a woman, to be yearned for as a lover. Only now did I realize why her lips sometimes quivered so ominously when she saw that her lameness so visibly affected me, why my pity so enraged her. Obviously she had realized with a woman’s clairvoyant instinct that pity is far too lukewarm and fraternal a feeling, and but a sorry substitute for real love. How the poor creature must have waited for a word, a sign of understanding that never came, how she must have suffered from my easy garrulity while she lay on the burning spit of impatience, and with trembling soul waited, waited, for the first tender gesture, or at least for me to become aware of her passion! And I, I had said nothing and yet had not stayed away, ever giving her fresh strength by my daily visits and at the same time driving her to distraction by my spiritual deafness. How easy it was to understand, then, that her nerves should at last have got the better of her and that she should have pounced upon me as her prey! A hundred and one scenes and pictures chased through my m
ind whilst, as though struck down by an explosion, I leaned against the wall, the breath knocked out of me and my legs almost as impotent as hers. Twice I tried to grope my way onwards, but only at the third attempt did I succeed in grasping the door-handle. This leads to the salon, I thought to myself quickly; to the left is the door into the hall, where I left my sword and cap. Quickly then, across the room and away, away before Josef comes! Straight down the stairs and away, away! Get out of the house before meeting anyone to whom you will have to give an account of yourself. You must get away, avoid running into the old man, or Ilona, or Josef, or any of those who have let you foolishly run your head into this noose. Away, you must get away!

  But it was too late. There in the salon Ilona was waiting; evidently she had heard me coming. At the sight of me her face changed.

  ‘Mother of God, what’s the matter? You’re as pale as death! Has ... has anything happened to Edith again?’

  ‘No, nothing, nothing,’ I just had the strength to stammer out, and prepared to go. ‘I believe she’s sleeping now. Excuse me, I must go.’

  There must, however, have been something alarming in my brusque behaviour, for she seized me resolutely and forced, nay, pushed me, into an armchair.

  ‘There — sit down for a moment. You must recover ... And your hair ... what does it look like? You’re all dishevelled ... No, stay,’ she ordered, as I tried to jump up. ‘I’ll fetch you a brandy.’

  She ran to the cupboard and poured out a glass; I gulped it down. She gazed at me uneasily as I put down the glass with shaking hand (never in my life had I felt so weak, so utterly shattered). Then she quietly sat down beside me and waited in silence, occasionally stealing a sidelong, cautious, uneasy glance at my face, as though I were ill.

  ‘Did Edith ... say anything?’ she asked at length. ‘I mean, anything as regards ... yourself?’

  I could tell from her sympathetic manner that she had guessed everything, and I was too weak to put her off. So I merely murmured a faint ‘Yes’.

  She neither stirred nor spoke. I merely noticed that her breath suddenly came and went more violently. Cautiously she leaned towards me.

  ‘And ... had you really only just noticed it?’

  ‘How could I possibly have had any idea of such a thing ... of anything so preposterous? So crazy? How was it that she ...? Why me ... me of all people?’

  Ilona sighed. ‘Oh my God! And she always thought that you came only on her account ... that that was the only reason you came to see us. I ... I never believed it, because you ... you were so much at your ease ... and so friendly in quite a different way. From the very first I was afraid that you felt no more than pity. But how could I warn the poor child, how be so cruel as to rob her of an illusion that made her happy? For weeks she has lived only on the thought that you ... And when she kept on asking and asking me whether I thought that you were really fond of her, I simply couldn’t be brutal ... I had to comfort and encourage her.’

  I was unable to contain myself any longer. ‘Well, you must disillusion her, without fail. It’s madness on her part, a fever, a childish whim ... nothing but the usual teenage infatuation for a uniform, and if another officer were to turn up tomorrow, it would be transferred to him. You must explain that to her ... you must disillusion her while there’s still time. It’s only by chance that I came along, and not another of my fellow-officers, a better man. One gets over these things quickly at her age ...’

  But Ilona sadly shook her head. ‘No, my dear friend, don’t deceive yourself. In Edith’s case it’s serious, dreadfully serious, and it gets more dangerous every day. No, my dear friend, I can’t smooth out a difficult situation like this for you all in a moment. Oh, if you only knew what goes on in this house! Three times, four times a night her bell rings, ruthlessly waking us all up, and when we rush to her bedside in a panic lest something should have happened, we find her sitting there, bolt upright, distraught, staring into space. “Do you think he’s just a little bit fond of me, just a very little?” she asks over and over again. And then she asks for a mirror, but throws it aside again, and then she herself realizes that she’s behaving crazily. And then two hours later, the whole thing begins all over again. In her despair she cross-questions her father and Josef and the maids, and yesterday she got that gypsy — you remember the one we met the other day? — to come secretly and tell her the same things all over again. Five times she’s written letters to you and torn them up again. From morning to night, from dawn to dusk, she thinks and speaks of nothing else but you. Sometimes she asks me to go to see you and find out if you’re fond of her, just a little bit fond, or if ... if she’s a nuisance to you, since you’re always so silent and evasive. I have to go off to find you that very minute, stop you on your way home, and the chauffeur has to go rushing off to fetch the car. Three, four, five times she makes me repeat by heart what I am to say to you, to ask you. Then, at the last moment, when I’m in the hall, her bell shrills out again, and I have to go back in my hat and coat and swear to her by all that I hold dear never to make the slightest allusion to the matter. Oh, how should you know all this! For you the whole thing’s over when you shut the door behind you, but no sooner have you left than she repeats to me every word that you have said to her, and asks me if I believe this and think that. And if I say to her, “Surely you can see how fond he is of you?” she shrieks at me, “You’re lying! It’s not true. He didn’t say a single kind word to me today,” but all the same she wants to hear it all over again, and I have to repeat it three times over and swear it’s true. And then there’s my uncle into the bargain. Ever since she’s been in this state he’s been at his wits’ end; he loves and worships you, by the way, as though you were his own son. You ought to see him sitting hour after hour by her bedside, his eyes utterly weary, stroking and soothing her until at last she falls asleep. And then he himself paces up and down his room all night long. And you — do you mean to say you’ve noticed nothing of all this?’

  ‘No,’ I shouted in my uncontrollable despair. ‘No, I swear to you, nothing! Nothing whatever! Do you think I would have gone on coming, that I could have sat playing chess and dominoes with you, or listening to gramophone records, if I had had the slightest notion of what was going on? But how could she run away with the crazy idea that I ... I of all people ... how expect me to fall in with such nonsense, such childishness? No, no, no, I tell you!’

  I was on the point of jumping up, so excruciating was the thought of being loved against my will, but Ilona seized me firmly by the arm.

  ‘Calm down! I beg you, dear friend — don’t get excited, and do please be a little quieter. She has a way of hearing through the very walls. And for heaven’s sake don’t be unfair! The poor child took it as a good omen that it was you who brought the good news, that it was you who were the first to tell her father about this new treatment. You know how he rushed straight up to her in the middle of the night and woke her up. Can’t you really picture to yourself how they both sobbed and thanked God that these horrible times were at an end and how they were both convinced that as soon as Edith was cured, was just like other people, you would — well, I needn’t tell you. That is why you must not plunge the poor child into despair at the very moment when she needs all her nervous energy to cope with this new treatment. We must be exceptionally careful, and God forbid that she should suspect that you find it all so ... so horrible.’

  But desperation had made me ruthless. ‘No, no, no!’ I said, hammering violently on the arm of the chair. ‘No, I can’t ... I won’t be loved, loved like this. And I can’t go on behaving as though I had noticed nothing, I can’t go on sitting about unconcernedly and playing the cavalier. I can’t! You don’t know what happened there in her room ... she’s under a complete misapprehension about me. I really only felt pity for her. Only pity, nothing else, nothing else whatever.’

  Ilona was silent and gazed straight ahead.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed at last. ‘I feared that from the start. I could
feel it in my bones the whole time. But my God, what’s going to happen now? How are we going to break it to her?’

  We sat there in silence. All that there was to be said had been said. We both knew that there was no way out at all. Suddenly Ilona sat up, and seemed to be straining her ears to listen, and almost at the same moment I could hear the crunching sound of a car on the gravel outside. That must be Kekesfalva. She jumped up quickly.

  ‘It’s better that you shouldn’t meet him now. You’re too upset to talk to him calmly ... Wait, I’ll fetch your cap and sword, and you can creep out through the back door into the park. I’ll find some excuse for your not staying on to dinner.’

  In one bound she had fetched my things. Fortunately Josef had hurried out to the car and so I was able to slip past the estate buildings unnoticed. Once I was in the park, my panic lest I should have to stop and speak to anyone lent me wings. For the second time I fled, as stealthily and furtively as a thief, from this fateful house.

  In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one’s will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another’s passion. Of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look on impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love, is lost beyond redemption; for it is not in his power to set a limit to the other’s passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another’s desire. Perhaps only a man can realize to the full the tragedy of such an undesired relationship, for him alone the necessity to resist it is at once martyrdom and guilt. For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when Fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman’s love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman’s advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed to him her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman’s love, he takes a load of guilt upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off! Only a moment ago you felt free, you belonged to yourself and were in debt to no one, and now suddenly you find yourself pursued, hemmed in, prey and object of the unwelcome desires of another. Shaken to the depths of your soul, you know that day and night someone is waiting for you, thinking of you, longing and sighing for you — a woman, a stranger. She wants, she demands, she desires you with every fibre of her being, with her body, with her blood. She wants your hands, your hair, your lips, your manhood, your night and your day, your emotions, your senses, and all your thoughts and dreams. She wants to share everything with you, to take everything from you and to draw it in with her breath. Henceforth, day and night, whether you are awake or asleep, there is somewhere in the world a being who is feverish and wakeful and who waits for you, and you are the centre of her waking and her dreaming. It is in vain that you try not to think of her who thinks always of you, in vain that you seek to escape, for you no longer dwell in yourself, but in her. Of a sudden a stranger bears your image within her as though she were a moving mirror — no, not a mirror, for that merely drinks in your image when you offer yourself willingly to it, whereas she, the woman, this stranger who loves you, she has absorbed you into her very blood. She carries you always within her, carries you about with her, no matter where you may flee. Always you are imprisoned, held prisoner somewhere else, in some other person, no longer yourself, no longer free and light-hearted and guiltless, but always hunted, always under an obligation, always conscious of this ‘thinking-of-you’ as though it were a steady devouring flame. Full of hate, full of fear, you have to endure this yearning on the part of a being who suffers on your account; and I now know that it is the most senseless, the most inescapable, affliction that can befall a man to be loved against his will — torment of torments, and a burden of guilt where no guilt is.