Beware of Pity

About the Author

Stefan Zweig (1881—1942) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and biographer. Born into an Austrian-­Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna’s cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and biographies. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world: extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe – he remains so in continental Europe – however, he was largely ignored by the British public.

Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Burning Secret, The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman); novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion, and the post­humously published The Post Office Girl); and his vivid psychological biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer.

In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled from Salzburg to London, then to New York, and finally to Brazil. Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before Zweig and his second wife were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

Colophon

Published by Actuel Editions

Translated from the German by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

First published in 1939 by S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin

This edition first published in 2020 © Actuel Editions

all rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

Zweig, Stefan [1881—1942], author.

Beware of Pity / Stefan Zweig; Ungeduld des Herzens / Translation by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

isbn

: 978-1-922491-16-9 (paperback)

isbn

: 978-1-922491-17-6 (ebook)

Book design and typesetting © Actuel Editions

a note on the type

The text in this book is set in Sabon. Sabon was designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964. The typeface is named after the sixteenth century typefounder, Jacques Sabon, a student of the great French punchcutter Claude Garamond. Tschichold loosely based his design on types from the 1592 specimen sheet issued by the Egenolff-­­Berner foundry: a 14-­­point roman attributed to Claude Garamond, and an italic attributed to Robert Granjon. Classic, elegant, and extremely legible, Sabon is one of the most beautiful Garamond variations.

Contents

Colophon

Author’s note

There are two kinds of pity

Introduction

Beware of Pity

Back cover

Author’s note

A short explanation may perhaps be necessary for the English reader. The Austro-­Hungarian Army constituted a uniform, homogeneous body in an Empire composed of a very large number of nations and races. Unlike his English, French, and even German confrère, the Austrian officer was not allowed to wear mufti when off duty, and military regulations prescribed that in his private life he should always act ‘standesgemäss’, that is, in accordance with the special etiquette and code of honour of the Austrian military caste. Among themselves officers of the same rank, even those who were not personally acquainted, never addressed each other in the formal third person plural, ‘Sie’, but in the familiar second person singular, ‘Du’, and thereby the fraternity of all members of the caste and the gulf separating them from civilians were emphasized. The final criterion of an officer’s behaviour was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book.

Stefan Zweig

There are two kinds of pity

One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

Introduction

‘To him that

hath, to him shall be given.’ These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: ‘To him that hath told much, to him shall much be told.’ Nothing is further from the truth than the only too common notion that the author’s fantasy is incessantly at work within him, that his invention has an inexhaustible and continuous fund of stories and incidents upon which to draw. In reality he need only, instead of setting out to find, let himself be found by, characters and happenings, which, in so far as he has preserved the heightened capacity for observing and listening, unceasingly seek him out as their instrument of communication. To the person who has over and over again tried to trace human destinies, many tell their own story.

The following story was related to me almost entirely in the form in which I here present it — and, moreover, in most unusual circumstances. One evening when I was last in Vienna, tired after a very full day, I sought out a restaurant on the outskirts of the city which I imagined had long since ceased to be fashionable and was but little frequented. No sooner had I entered it, however, than I was made disagreeably aware of my mistake. As I passed the first table, an acquaintance jumped up with every sign of genuine pleasure — I, to be sure, did not respond with equal warmth — and invited me to join him. It would be untrue to say that this importunate gentleman was in himself an impossible or unpleasant fellow; he was merely one of those embarrassingly convivial souls who collect acquaintances as assiduously as children collect postage-­stamps and are therefore peculiarly proud of every fresh addition to their collection. To this good-­natured eccentric — in his spare time an erudite and competent archivist — the whole meaning of existence lay in the modest satisfaction derived from being able to remark with airy nonchalance at the mention of any name that received mention from time to time in the Press: ‘A close friend of mine,’ or ‘Ah, I met him only yesterday!’ or ‘My friend A. tells me, and my friend B. thinks,’ and so on throughout the entire alphabet. His friends could always count on him to applaud loudly at their first nights, he would ring up every actress the morning after the show to offer his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he forbore to mention disagreeable Press notices and invariably drew attention to the favourable ones out of genuine friendliness. Not at all a bad fellow, then, for he was genuinely anxious to please and was delighted if one so much as asked a small favour of him, or better still, added a fresh specimen to his cabinet of curiosities.

But there is no need to describe friend ‘Also-­present’ — the name by which this variety of good-­natured parasite within the variegated species of snob is generally known in Vienna — in greater detail, for everyone is familiar with the type and knows it is impossible to repel its touching and inoffensive advances without being brutal. Resigning myself to my fate, therefore, I sat down beside him, and a quarter of an hour had passed in idle chatter when a man entered the restaurant — tall and striking on account of the contrast between his fresh, youthful complexion and an intriguing greyness at the temples. Something about the way he held himself immediately betrayed the ex-­officer. My neighbour jumped up eagerly to hail him with the assiduity so typical of him. The newcomer, however, responded with indifference rather than politeness, and scarcely had the waiter dashed up and taken his order when friend ‘Also-­present’ turned to me and said in a low whisper: ‘Do you know who that is?’ Knowing of old the pride he took in triumphantly displaying any even moderately interesting specimen from his collection, and fearing long-­winded explanations, I merely uttered a perfunctory ‘No,’ and continued to dissect my Sachertorte. This apathy on my part merely had the effect of increasing the celebrity-­monger’s excitement; screening his mouth cautiously with his hand, he breathed in an undertone: ‘Why, that’s Hofmiller of the Commissariat. You know, the fellow who won the Order of Maria Theresa in the war.’ Since this information did not seem to bowl me over as he had hoped, he began, with the fervour of a patriotic school primer, to enlarge upon all the valiant deeds performed by Captain Hofmiller in the war, first with the cavalry, then on an observation flight over the Piave, when he had shot down three planes single-­handed, and finally with a machine-­gun company, when for three days he had occupied and held a sector of the front — all this accompanied by a mass of detail (which I omit) and punctuated the whole time by exclamations of boundless astonishment that I should never have heard of this paragon, upon whom the Emperor Charles had in person conferred the most rare of all decorations in the Austrian army.

Involuntarily I yielded to the temptation to glance across at the other table so as to see for once at close quarters a duly and historically certified hero. But I encountered a hard, indignant look that seemed to say, ‘So that fellow’s been talking a lot of rot about me, has he? You won’t find anything to look at here.’ Whereupon he slewed his chair round with an unmistakably hostile movement and flatly turned his back on us. Somewhat abashed, I looked away, and from now on avoided so much as a glance at the cloth on his table. Shortly afterwards I took leave of my good gossip, noticing, however, as I left, that he immediately went over to his hero’s table, no doubt to give him as glowing an account of me as he had given me of him.

That was all — a mere exchange of glances. And I should have forgotten all about this fleeting encounter, but it so happened that the very next day, at a small party, I once more found myself face to face with this forbidding gentleman. In evening dress he looked even more striking and elegant than in the informal tweeds of the day before. We both had some difficulty in suppressing a faint smile, that significant smile that passes between two people who, in a fairly large group of people, share a closely guarded secret. He recognized me, as I did him, and we were probably both equally irritated or amused at the thought of our unsuccessful celebrity-­monger of the day before. At first we avoided speaking to each other, and in any case it would have been useless to try to do so, for a heated discussion was already going on all around us.

The subject of this discussion will easily be guessed when I mention that it took place in the year 1937. Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-­laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavouring to unburden itself in speech.

Our host, a lawyer by profession and dogmatic by nature, opened the discussion. Employing the usual arguments, he put forward the usual airy nonsense: the present generation, he said, knew all about war and would not let itself be tricked so innocently into the next war as it had been into the last. At the very moment of mobilization the guns would be pointed in the wrong direction, for ex-­soldiers like himself in particular had not forgotten what was in store for them. I was annoyed by the smug assurance with which, at a moment when in thousands and hundreds of thousands of factories explosives and poison gas were being manufactured, he dismissed the possibility of a war as lightly as he might flip the ash off his cigarette with a tap of his forefinger. One should not always let the wish be father to the thought, I protested with some firmness. The ministries and the military authorities who ran the whole war machine had likewise not been sleeping, and while we had been befuddling ourselves with Utopias, they had taken full advantage of the interval of peace in order to organize the masses in advance and have them ready to hand, at half-­cock, so to speak. Even now, while Europe was at peace, the general attitude of servility had, thanks to modern methods of propaganda, increased to unbelievable proportions, and one ought boldly to face the fact that from the very moment when the news of mobilization came hurtling through the loudspeakers no opposition could be looked for from any quarter. The grain of dust that was man no longer counted today as a creature of volition.

Of course they were all against me, for, as is borne out by experience, the instinct of self-­deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting us in the next room.

And now, to my surprise, the gallant hero of the day before entered the lists in my support — the very man in whom my false intuition had led me to suspect an opponent. Yes, it was sheer nonsense, he declared vehemently, to try nowadays to take into account the willingness or unwillingness of human material, for in the next war all the actual fighting would be done by machines, and men would be reduced to no more than a kind of component part of the machine. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-­nilly like a pea in a great sack. On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

I listened in astonishment, my interest particularly aroused by the vehemence with which he now went on: ‘Don’t let us deceive ourselves. If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched today for some utterly preposterous war, a war in Polynesia or in some corner of Africa, thousands and hundreds of thousands would rush to the colours without really knowing why, perhaps merely out of a desire to run away from themselves or from disagreeable circumstances. But as for any effective opposition to a war — I wouldn’t care to put it above zero. It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows. It was not until later on in civil life that I personally realized that most of those reputed to be the bravest at the front were very questionable heroes — oh, please don’t misunderstand me!’ he said, turning politely to our host, who was pulling a wry face. ‘I do not by any means except myself.’

I liked the way in which he spoke, and I had an impulse to go up to him, but at that moment our hostess called us in to supper and, since we were placed far apart at table, we had no further opportunity of talking to each other. Not until the party broke up did we run into each other, in the cloakroom.

‘I believe,’ he said with a smile, ‘we have already been indirectly introduced by our common patron.’

I also smiled. ‘And, what is more, very thoroughly.’

‘I expect he made me out to be no end of an Achilles, and no doubt he was as proud as a peacock of my Order.’

‘That’s about it!’

‘Yes, he’s damned proud of it — just as he is of your books.’

‘A rum customer. But I’ve met worse. By the way — if you’ve no objection, I’ll walk along with you.’

We walked along together. Suddenly he turned to me.

‘Believe me, I’m not talking for effect when I say that for years nothing has been a greater bore to me than this Maria Theresa Order of mine — it’s far too conspicuous for my liking. I must admit, to be quite honest, that when it was awarded to me out there at the front I was, of course, absolutely bowled over. After all, I’d been brought up as a soldier, and as a cadet I’d heard this Order spoken of as something almost legendary, this one Order which comes the way of perhaps no more than a dozen men in every war — a positive bolt from the blue. Why, for a young chap of twenty-­eight that sort of thing means a devil of a lot. All at once you find yourself standing before the whole brigade, everyone gazes up reverently as something suddenly sparkles out on your breast like a little sun, and His Majesty, the Emperor, that unapproachable deity, shakes you by the hand and congratulates you. But a distinction of that kind, you know, only had any sort of point in our military world; and when the war was over, it seemed to me ridiculous to have to go about for the rest of my life labelled as a hero, just because on one occasion I had acted with real courage for twenty minutes — probably no more courageously than thousands of others, except that I had had the good fortune to be noticed, and the perhaps still more astounding good fortune to come back alive. By the end of a year I was fed to the teeth with stalking about like a walking monument, seeing people wherever I went stare at the little metal disc and then let their gaze travel in awed admiration up to my face; in fact, my exasperation at being so eternally conspicuous was one of the reasons why, at the end of the war, I left the army and entered civilian life.’

He strode along more vigorously.

‘I say one of the reasons, but the chief reason was one that you may be able to appreciate even more. The chief reason was that I myself had become thoroughly sceptical as to my claim to be called a hero and of my heroism. After all, I knew better than all these strangers who gaped at me that the man behind the Order was anything but a hero, was even definitely the reverse — one of those who only rushed headlong into the war in order to extricate themselves from a desperate situation, men who were running away from their responsibilities rather than patriotic heroes. I don’t know how you writers feel about it — to me, at least, to live in a halo of glory seems unnatural and unendurable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I was no longer obliged to strut about with my heroic history writ large on my uniform. Even to this day it annoys me when people rake up my glorious past, and I may as well confess to you that I was very nearly on the point yesterday of coming over to your table and telling that chattering fool he’d better find someone else to brag about. The awed look you gave me kept riling me for the rest of the evening, and I had a good mind, just in order to give that fellow the lie, to compel you to hear from my own lips by what tortuous paths I attained to the status of a hero. It’s a very odd story, and yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness. Incidentally, I wouldn’t mind telling you the whole story straight out here and now. Something that goes back a quarter of a century in a man’s life no longer concerns him, but quite another person. Have you time? And it wouldn’t bore you, would it?’

Of course I had time, and we paced up and down the now deserted streets far into the night. I have only made a few changes in his narrative (I need scarcely add it was not related to me at a single interview), such as putting Uhlans instead of Hussars, to conceal the identity of the various garrisons, and, of course, changing the names of people and places. But in no instance have I added anything essential of my own invention, and it is not I but the man who lived the story who now narrates it.

Beware of Pity

The whole thing

began with a blunder on my part, an entirely innocent piece of clumsiness, a gaffe, as the French call it. Then followed an attempt to put things right; but if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you’re as likely as not to put the whole works out of order. Even today, now that years have gone by, I am unable to decide exactly where my sheer gaucherie ended and my guilt began. I dare say I shall never know.

I was twenty-­five at the time and a second lieutenant in the —th Regiment of Imperial Uhlans. I cannot claim ever to have been particularly keen about soldiering or felt it to be my vocation. But when you get four growing boys with voracious appetites and two girls in the family of an Austrian official, and there’s barely enough to feed them, you don’t bother much about their inclinations, but push them out at an early age into the treadmill of a profession, so that they won’t be a charge on the household any longer than necessary. My brother, who even at his first school swotted so hard that he ruined his eyesight, was sent to a seminary for priests; I was packed off, because of my sturdy physique, to a military academy. From that point onwards the thread of life spins itself out mechanically, there’s no need to do any more lubricating. The State sees to everything. In a few years, out of a pale, adolescent youngster it fashions, free of charge, after the prescribed military pattern, an ensign with a downy moustache, and hands him over, ready for use, to the army. One day, on the Emperor’s birthday, according to the usual custom, I was discharged from the academy, not yet eighteen years old, and shortly afterwards the first star flashed out on my collar; thus the first stage was reached, and now the successive stages of promotion could reel themselves off mechanically at suitable intervals, to end up with gout and a pension. That I should enter the cavalry of all things, the most fashionable and expensive arm of the service, was by no means my personal wish, but a caprice on the part of my Aunt Daisy, who had married my father’s elder brother as his second wife on his leaving the Ministry of Finance for a more remunerative post as the president of a bank. At once rich and snobbish, she could not bear the thought that anyone connected with her who happened also to be called Hofmiller should ‘disgrace’ the family by serving in the infantry; and since she made me an allowance of a hundred crowns a month to indulge this whim, I had to make a show of humble gratitude to her on every possible occasion. Whether it was to my liking to serve in the cavalry or, indeed, to enter the army at all, no one had ever considered, I myself least of all. Whenever I was in the saddle I felt fine, and my thoughts did not travel far beyond my horse’s neck.

In November, 1913, the year when my story opens, some order or other must have passed from one department to another, for before you could say Jack Robinson our squadron was transferred from Jaroslau to another small garrison town on the Hungarian frontier. It is of no importance whether I call the little town by its right name or not, for two buttons on a uniform could not more closely resemble each other than does one Austrian provincial garrison town another. In one as in the other the same military establishments: barracks, a riding-­school, a parade-­ground, an officers’ mess, and in addition three hotels, two cafés, a pâtisserie, a wine-­bar, a dingy music-­hall with faded soubrettes who, as a side-­line, most obligingly divide their attentions between the regular officers and the volunteers. Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible, antediluvian regulations, and even one’s leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers’ mess the same faces, the same conversation; at the café the same games of cards and billiards. Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside.

My new garrison had, it is true, one advantage to offer over the former one in Galicia; it was a stopping-­place for express trains, and was situated on the one hand near Vienna and on the other at no great distance from Budapest. Anyone who had money — and there are no end of wealthy fellows in the cavalry, to say nothing of the volunteers, who are either aristocrats or sons of industrialists — might, if he could get off, take the five o’clock train to Vienna and be back again at half-­past two in the morning by the night express: time enough, that is, to do a theatre, to saunter about the Ringstrasse, to play the cavalier and keep a look-­out for chance amours; some of the officers were even in the enviable position of keeping a flat or some kind of pied-­à-­terre for such purposes. Unfortunately, such diverting escapades were beyond the scope of my monthly allowance. The only amusements left me were the café or the pâtisserie, where, since the stakes at cards were usually too high for me, I was reduced to playing billiards, or chess, which was cheaper still.

And so one afternoon — it must have been somewhere about the middle of May, 1914 — I was sitting in the pâtisserie with our local apothecary and deputy mayor, who from time to time took me on at chess. We had long since finished our customary three games, and were chatting away out of sheer inertia — what was there to do in this boring hole? — but the conversation was already petering out like a smouldering cigarette-­end. Then, suddenly, the door opened, and a billowing skirt swept in a gust of fresh air and a pretty girl: brown, almond eyes, dark complexion, superbly dressed, not a bit provincial, and, what was more, a new face in this Godforsaken monotony. But alas! the elegant nymph did not vouchsafe us a glance as we looked up in awed admiration; briskly and spiritedly, with firm athletic tread, she walked past the nine little marble-­topped tables straight to the counter, where she proceeded to order cakes, pastries and liqueurs by the dozen. I was immediately struck by the very obsequious way in which the proprietor bowed to her; never had I seen the back-­seam of his swallow-­tails arched so tautly. Even his wife, the buxom, overblown provincial beauty, who was accustomed to accept the attentions of us officers in the most perfunctory manner (we were often in debt for all kinds of little trifles until pay-­day came round), rose from her seat at the cash desk and almost dissolved in treacly politeness. While the worthy proprietor was entering her order in his book, the pretty young lady carelessly nibbled at a few chocolates and made conversation with Frau Grossmaier: but as for us, who were, I fear, craning our necks with unseemly eagerness, we were not accorded so much as the flicker of an eyelid. Naturally the young lady did not burden her pretty hands with a single parcel; everything, Frau Grossmaier humbly assured her, would be sent at once without fail. Nor did it even enter her head to pay at the cash desk like us ordinary mortals. We all realized at once that here was a quite unusually grand, distinguished customer.

As, her order completed, she turned to go, Herr Grossmaier rushed forward to open the door for her. My friend the apothecary also got up to bow most respectfully as she swept past. She acknowledged the courtesy with regal graciousness — devil take it, what velvety deep-­brown eyes! — and I could scarcely wait until, overwhelmed with sugary compliments, she had left the shop, to begin pumping my companion about this swan in our duck-­pond.

‘You mean to say you don’t know her? She’s the niece of … (I shall call him Herr von Kekesfalva, although that was not his real name) Kekesfalva. Surely you know the Kekesfalvas?’

Kekesfalva — he threw down the name as though it were a thousand-­crown note and looked at me as if expecting me to echo as a matter of course, ‘Kekesfalva! Ah yes, of course!’ But I, a recently transferred subaltern, dropped into this new garrison only a few months since — I in my innocence knew nothing of this most mysterious deity and politely asked for further information, which my companion proceeded to impart with all the complacent pride of a provincial, far more long-­windedly and in greater detail, of course, than I shall retail it here.

Kekesfalva, he explained, was the richest man in the whole neighbourhood. Practically everything belonged to him, not only the Kekesfalva estate — ‘you must know the house, you can see it from the parade-­ground, the yellow house to the left of the high-­road with the flat tower and the huge park’ — but also the big sugar-­factory on the road to R., the saw-­mill in Brück and the stud-­farm in M.; they all belonged to him, and six or seven blocks of houses in Budapest and Vienna as well. ‘Yes, you’d scarcely believe that we can count such colossally rich people among our neighbours. Why, he lives like a grandee! In winter in the little palace in the Jacquingasse in Vienna, and in the summer in various watering-­places; he only keeps his house here open for a few months in the spring, but lord, what style he lives in! Quartets from Vienna, champagne and French wines, everything tip-­top, the best of everything.’ And incidentally, if I cared, he’d be only too glad to give me an introduction, for — with an expansive and complacent gesture — he was on the best of terms with Herr von Kekesfalva, had had frequent business dealings with him in the past and knew that he was always glad to welcome officers to his house. A word from him and I should receive an invitation.

Well, and why not? One positively suffocated in this stagnant duck-­pond of a provincial garrison town. By now one knew all the women on the promenade, knew each one’s summer hat and winter hat, best dress and everyday dress, they were always the same. And one knew their dogs and their maids and their children, one had passed and repassed them time without number. One knew all the culinary arts of the fat Bohemian mess cook, and one’s palate was gradually being dulled by the sight of the everlastingly unvaried menu at the hotel. One knew by heart every name, every sign-­board, every notice in every street, every shop in every building and every show-­window in every shop. By now one knew almost as precisely as Eugen the head waiter at what time His Worship the magistrate would appear in the café; on the stroke of half-­past four he would sit down in the window corner on the left and order a café mélange, whilst the notary in his turn would come in exactly ten minutes later, at four-­forty, take a cup of tea with lemon — blessed variation! — because of his poor digestion, and, puffing away at the everlasting cheroot, retail the same old jokes. God, one knew every face, every uniform, every horse, every driver, every beggar in the whole neighbourhood, one knew even oneself to the point of satiety! Why not break away from the treadmill for once? And then, that pretty girl, those deep-­brown eyes! And so I told my patron with feigned indifference (no over-­eagerness before this conceited vendor of pills!) that it would be a pleasure, to be sure, to make the acquaintance of the Kekesfalva family.

And lo and behold! my valiant apothecary had not been humbugging. Two days later, swelling with pride, he handed me a printed card on which my name had been neatly inscribed; and this invitation-­card informed me that Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva requested the pleasure of the company of Herr Leutnant Anton Hofmiller at dinner at eight o’clock on Wednesday of the following week. One wasn’t dragged up in the gutter, thank God, and knew what was proper in such circumstances! So on the following Sunday morning I got myself up in my very best — white gloves and patent-­leather shoes, my face relentlessly shaved, a drop of eau-­de-­Cologne on my moustache — and drove out to pay my courtesy call. The butler — old, discreet, well-­cut livery — took my card and murmured apologetically that the family would be extremely sorry to have missed the Herr Leutnant, but they were all at church. So much the better, said I to myself. Paying one’s first call, whether official or private, is always a ghastly business. At any rate, you’ve done the right thing. You’ll go to dinner on Wednesday evening, and let’s hope you’ll have a good time. That settles that, I thought, until Wednesday evening. But it was with genuine delight that two days later, that is to say, on the Tuesday, I found that a visiting-­card with the corner turned down had been left on me at the barracks by Herr von Kekesfalva. Capital, I thought to myself, these people have irreproachable manners. Fancy their repaying my call within two days — and I a mere junior officer! Why, a General couldn’t wish for greater consideration and courtesy! And I now looked forward with really pleasurable feelings of anticipation to the Wednesday evening.

But from the very start Fate played me a dirty trick — one really ought to be superstitious and pay more heed to little omens. At half-­past seven on the Wednesday evening there was I all togged up — dress uniform, new gloves, patent-­leather shoes, trousers creased as sharp as a razor-­blade — and my batman was just smoothing out the folds of my cloak and giving me a last look-­over (I always needed him for that, for I had only a small hand-­mirror in my ill-­lit little room), when there came a knock at the door. It was an orderly, to say that the officer on duty, my friend Captain Count Steinhübel, requested me to hurry over to him in the guard-­room. Two Uhlans, probably blind drunk, had been brawling, and the upshot was that one of them had hit the other over the head with the butt of his rifle. And now the clod was lying there bleeding, unconscious, his mouth wide open. They didn’t know yet whether his skull was broken or not; the regimental doctor had cleared off to Vienna on leave, the Colonel was not to be found, and in his desperation poor old Steinhübel, curse him, had sent the orderly haring off for me, me of all people, to get me to give him a hand while he looked after the injured man. So now I had to take down the evidence and send orderlies flying all over the place to hunt up a civilian doctor in the café or somewhere else. What with all this it was now a quarter to eight, and I could see that there was no chance of my getting away for another quarter or half an hour. Confound it all, this filthy business would happen today, today of all days, when I was invited out to dinner! I looked more and more impatiently at my watch; impossible to arrive punctually if I had to hang about here another five minutes. But duty’s in our very bones, it comes before any private obligation; I simply couldn’t go away. And so I did the only thing possible in this damnable situation, which was to send my batman in a cab (that little item cost me four crowns!) to the Kekesfalvas to beg them to excuse me if I were late, but I had been unexpectedly detained on duty, and so on and so on. Fortunately the hullabaloo in the barracks didn’t last much longer, for the Colonel appeared in person with a doctor who had been dug out from somewhere or other, and I was able to slip away.

But now came a further bit of bad luck. Today of all days there was no cab in the Rathausplatz, and I had to wait until they had telephoned for a carriage. And so when at long last I landed up in the great entrance hall of the Kekesfalva house, the minute hand of the clock on the wall was already hanging down vertically; it was exactly half-­past eight instead of eight, and I could see that the cloakroom was bulging with overcoats. I could tell, too, by the man-­servant’s somewhat embarrassed expression that I had arrived too late — disagreeable, very disagreeable, for such a thing to happen on one’s first visit!

Nevertheless the man-­servant — white gloves now, tails, stiff shirt and stiff features — reassured me by saying that my batman had delivered my message half an hour ago, and conducted me to the salon — four-­windowed, hung with red silk, ablaze with crystal chandeliers, a marvel of elegance, I had never seen anything more magnificent. But alas! to my confusion it turned out to be completely deserted, and from the next room I could distinctly hear the cheerful clatter of dishes. Vexing, vexing, I thought to myself, they’re already at table.

Well, anyhow, I pulled myself together, and the moment the man-­servant threw open the folding-­doors I stepped forward to the threshold of the dining-­room, clicked my heels smartly and bowed. The whole company looked up; ten, twenty pairs of eyes, strange eyes all of them, inspected the late-­comer, who, far from self-­assured, stood framed in the doorway. An elderly gentleman, doubtless the master of the house, immediately rose, hurriedly laid aside his napkin, came towards me and held out a welcoming hand. Not at all what I had imagined him to be, this Herr von Kekesfalva, not in the least the country squire with twirling Magyar moustaches, round-­faced, plump and rubicund from good living. Behind gold-­rimmed spectacles a pair of somewhat tired eyes floated above grey pouches, his shoulders seemed slightly hunched, his voice sounded wheezy, as though he were troubled by a cough; one would have taken him, if anything, for a scholar, with his slender, delicate features, which ended in a scanty, white goatee. The old gentleman’s exceptional kindliness was extraordinarily reassuring; no, no, he said, cutting short my excuses, it was for him to apologize. He knew only too well the sort of thing that cropped up in the army, and it had been particularly kind of me to send him a special message; it had only been because they had not been sure when to expect me that they had already started dinner. But now I must take my place without further delay. He would introduce me to all the guests individually later on. But first, he said, leading me to the table, I must meet his daughter. A young girl in her teens, delicate, pale, fragile like himself, looked up from a conversation, a pair of grey eyes glanced shyly at me. But I only caught a fleeting glimpse of slender, restless features, and bowed first to her, then collectively right and left to the other guests, who were obviously glad not to have to lay down their knives and forks in order to go through the tedious ceremony of a formal introduction.

For the first two or three minutes I still felt thoroughly ill-­at-­ease. There was no one there from the regiment, not a single fellow-­officer, not a single acquaintance, not even one of the town big-­wigs; nothing but strange, utterly strange faces. The guests seemed for the most part to be landowners or officials of the neighbourhood with their wives and daughters. But mufti, mufti everywhere, not a single uniform but mine! My God! how was I, clumsy, shy fellow that I was, to make conversation with all these strangers? Fortunately I had been given a very good place. By my side sat the brown-­eyed, proud beauty, the pretty niece, who had, after all, it appeared, noticed my admiring gaze in the pâtisserie, for she smiled at me kindly as at an old acquaintance. Her eyes were like coffee-­beans, and, when she laughed, they really did seem to crackle like roasting beans. She had charming, translucent little ears beneath luxuriant dark hair; like pink cyclamen nestling in moss, I thought. She had bare arms, soft and smooth; they must be like peeled peaches to the touch.

It was good to be sitting beside such a pretty girl, and the fact that she spoke with a soft Hungarian accent made me almost fall in love. It was good to be dining in so dazzlingly bright a room at such an elegantly laid table, a footman behind me, before me the most marvellous food. My left-­hand neighbour, too, who for her part spoke with a slight Polish intonation, seemed to me, if somewhat massive, not unattractive. Or was it only the wine that made me think so — the bright gold, blood-­dark wine and sparkling champagne which the footmen in white gloves behind poured out positively extravagantly from silver carafes and broad-­bellied bottles? Yes, indeed, my honest apothecary had not been boasting idly. The Kekesfalvas lived like princes. Never had I eaten such good food, never let myself dream that one could eat such good, such superb food. Ever more delicious, more costly delicacies came floating along on an inexhaustible succession of dishes: pale-­blue fish, crowned with lettuce and surrounded by slices of lobster, swam in golden sauces; capons rode on broad saddles of piledup rice; puddings blazed blue in burning rum; ice-­bombs towered up, tier upon tier; sweet and many-­hued, fruits that must have travelled half round the world kissed each other in silver baskets. There was no end to it all, no end, and then at last a veritable rainbow of liqueurs, green, red, white, yellow, cigars as thick as asparagus shoots, and delicious coffee.

A marvellous house, an