Not in the most fleeting day-dream had it ever seemed conceivable to me that I too could be so boundlessly loved by a woman. I had, it is true, heard my friends brag how this woman or that ‘ran after’ them; I may even have joined in the general amusement aroused by such indiscreet revelations of female importunacy, for at that time I had had no idea that every form of love, even the most ridiculous and absurd, is the destiny of someone, and that even by one’s indifference one can incur a debt to love. But all that one has heard and read passes one by; it is only from personal experience that the heart can learn the true nature of its emotions. I had to experience for myself the burden of misery that the hopeless love of another imposes on one’s conscience in order to feel pity with either the woman who forces her love upon a man, or the man who vigorously defends himself against her unwelcome passion. But how inconceivably greater was the responsibility that had fallen to my lot! For if in itself it is cruelty, brutality almost, to disappoint a woman where her emotions are concerned, how much more horrible, then, was the ‘No’ that I should have to utter to this passionate child. I should have to hurt a cripple, to wound more deeply than ever one who had already been grievously wounded by Life, to snatch from one who was inwardly unsure of herself the last crutch of hope with which she kept herself erect. I knew that by fleeing from her love I should perhaps imperil the life and the reason of this girl who had aroused in me so pure an emotion of pity. I was gruesomely aware of the monstrous crime that I should, against my will, be committing if, incapable though I was of returning her love, I did not at least make some show of responding to it.
But I had no choice. Even before my mind had consciously realized the danger, my body had revolted against that sudden embrace. Our instincts are always more prescient than our waking thoughts; in that very first moment of horror, when I had torn myself away from her violent caresses, I had dimly foreseen this, known that I should never have the selfless strength to love the crippled girl as she loved me, and, probably, not even enough pity simply to bear with this unnerving passion. At the first recoil I had divined that there was no way out, no middle course. Either the one or the other of us, perhaps both, was bound to be made unhappy by this futile love.
How I reached the town that day I shall never be able to explain to myself. I only knew that I walked very quickly and that one thought alone kept beating through my mind with every throb of my pulse: away! away! Away from this house, away from this entanglement, flee, escape, vanish! Never again enter that house, never again see those people, or any people at all! Hide yourself, make yourself invisible, never again be under an obligation to anyone, never again be ensnared! I know that I tried to carry my thoughts a stage further; that I said to myself that I must leave the army, get money from somewhere and then flee into the world, so far away that I should be out of reach of this crazy desire. But all these plans were dreamed rather than thought out clearly, for that one word kept hammering at my temples: away, away, away!
From the dust on my shoes and the tears brambles had made in my trousers I realized later that I must have rushed pell-mell across fields and meadows and lanes. However that may be, when I finally found myself on the high-road the sun was already setting behind the roof-tops. And I started like a sleepwalker when someone unexpectedly slapped me on the back.
‘Hallo, Toni, so there you are! It’s high time we ran into you. We’ve been searching for you in every nook and cranny, and we were just going to ring you up at your baronial hall.’
I found myself surrounded by four of my friends, among them the inevitable Ferencz, Jozsi, and Captain Count Steinhübel.
‘Look lively now! Just imagine! Balinkay’s suddenly drifted in on us, from Holland or America or God knows where, and he’s invited all us officers to dinner this evening. The Colonel’s coming and the Major. There’s going to be a grand do at the Red Lion at half-past eight. It’s a jolly good thing we ran into you. The old man would have really made a fuss if you’d been missing! You know how he dotes on Balinkay. When he turns up, everyone has to answer the roll.’
I had not yet collected my scattered thoughts. ‘Who’s come?’ I asked, still in a daze.
‘Why, Balinkay! Don’t look so stupid! I suppose you’ll be telling us next you don’t know who Balinkay is!’
Balinkay? Balinkay? My head was still in a whirl and I had to drag the name out laboriously as though from a pile of dusty lumber. Oh yes, of course, Balinkay — at one time he had been the black sheep of the regiment. Long before my transfer to this garrison he had served here as second and then first lieutenant. He had been the best rider, the maddest fellow in the regiment, an incorrigible gambler and Don Juan. But then there had been some unpleasant incident, I had never inquired what it was. At any rate, within twenty-four hours he had taken off his uniform, and had gone wandering about all over the world. All sorts of strange rumours of his doings had reached the regiment. At length he had got on his feet again by hooking a rich Dutch woman at the Excelsior Hotel in Cairo, a widow with pots of money, the owner of a shipping line with seventeen ships and vast plantations in Java and Borneo. Ever since then he had been our invisible benefactor and patron.
Colonel Bubencic must have got Balinkay out of the dickens of a scrape, for Balinkay’s loyalty to him and the regiment was really touching. Whenever he returned to Austria, he made a point of paying a visit to the garrison, and he would throw his money about so wildly that it would be the talk of the town for weeks afterwards. It seemed to be a sort of emotional necessity for him to put on the old uniform for one evening, to be accepted once more by the officers as one of themselves. When he sat, entirely at his ease, at the familiar table, one felt that he was a hundred times more at home in the smoky room at the Red Lion with its grubby walls than in his feudal palace on an Amsterdam canal. We were and always would be his children, his brothers, his real family. Every year he offered a prize for our steeple-chase, regularly every Christmas he would send along two or three cases of Bols and of champagne, and every New Year the Colonel was able to pay a nice fat cheque into the mess account at the bank. Anyone who wore the Uhlan’s tunic and our facings on his collar could depend on Balinkay if ever he got into difficulties — a letter, and the whole thing was cleared up.
At any other time I should have been genuinely overjoyed at the opportunity of meeting this celebrity. But the thought of a binge with all the attendant rowdiness and toasts and after-dinner speeches seemed to me, in my overwrought state, about the most intolerable thing on earth. I tried, therefore, to get out of it, saying that I did not feel quite up to the mark. Ferencz, however, promptly seized me by the arm with a flat ‘Nonsense! No slinking off for you today, my lad!’ and I had no option but to yield. They dragged me along and I listened in a daze as he told stories of people whom Balinkay had got out of a hole, and how he had found a job for his brother-in-law; and if any member of the regiment, he said, was unable to get promotion quickly enough, he simply took the next boat to Alexandria or to the Dutch Indies, where Balinkay was entirely at his service. That lean, morose fellow Jozsi punctuated good old Ferencz’s hymn of grateful praise with an occasional acid comment. Would the Colonel receive his ‘blue-eyed boy’ so cordially, he jeered, if Balinkay had not hooked that fat Dutch shell-fish? Incidentally, she was said to be twelve years older than he. ‘If you’re going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price!’ laughed Count Steinhübel.
Now, in retrospect, it seems odd to me that in spite of my bemused state my memory registered every word of this conversation. It is not uncommon, indeed, for a state of subconscious nervous excitement to exist side by side with a paralysis of one’s conscious mind, and even when we arrived in the big dining-room of the Red Lion, I did what I had to do, thanks to the hypnotic power of discipline, more or less competently. And there was plenty to do. The whole array of bunting, flags and emblems, which usually only graced a regimental ball, were brought out, orderlies were hammering away noisily and cheerfully at the wall
s, and in the next room Steinhübel was instructing the bugler as to when and how to sound the fanfare. Jozsi, who happened to have the neatest handwriting, was given the task of writing out the menu, in which all the dishes were given humorously suggestive names, while I was fobbed off with the job of arranging the places at table. In the meantime the houseboy was getting ready chairs and tables, and the waiter was setting out rows of bottles of wine and champagne, which Balinkay had brought in his car from Sacher’s in Vienna. Curiously enough, this noisy whirl of activity did me good, for it drowned the dull, insistent throbbing at my temples.
At last, by eight o’clock, everything was ready. All that remained to be done was to go over to the barracks, have a quick wash, and change. My batman had been forewarned, and my dress uniform and patent-leather shoes were put out ready. I quickly plunged my head into cold water and then glanced up at the clock. Another ten minutes at the most, for we had to be confoundedly punctual for the Colonel. I rapidly undressed, and kicked off my dusty shoes. But just as I was standing in front of the mirror in my underclothes in order to brush my tousled hair, there was a knock at the door.
‘I’m not at home to anyone,’ I told Kusma, my batman. He rushed off obediently, and there was a moment’s whispering outside in the ante-room. Then he returned with a letter in his hand.
A letter for me? Standing there in shirt and pants, I took the square blue envelope — it was fat and heavy, almost a small package — and it was like a live coal in my hand. I had no need to look at the handwriting to know who it was that was writing to me.
Later, later! — a sudden instinct warned me. Don’t read it, don’t read it now. But against all the dictates of my reason I tore open the envelope and read, read the letter, which seemed to crackle more and more violently in my hands.
It was a letter sixteen pages long, written in tearing haste, in an unsteady hand; a letter such as a person writes only once, and receives only once, in a lifetime. The sentences were poured out unremittingly like blood from an open wound; there were no paragraphs, no punctuation; one word overtook, outstripped, tumbled headlong over the next. Even now, after years and years, I can see every line, every character before me. Even now I could repeat that letter by heart, page by page, from beginning to end, at any time of the day or night, so often have I read it. For months and months after that day I carried that folded blue packet about in my pocket, again and again taking it out — at home, in barracks, in the trenches and by the camp-fires during the war. And it was not until the retreat in Volhynia, when our division was being trapped on both flanks by the enemy, that, seized with anxiety lest this confession made in a moment of exaltation might fall into strange hands, I tore the letter up.
‘I have already written you six letters,’ the letter began, ‘and torn them all up. For I did not want to give myself away, I did not want to. I held myself in as long as I had any powers of resistance. For weeks and weeks I struggled to hide my feelings from you. Every time you came to see us, in all friendliness and innocence, I commanded my hands to keep still, my gaze to feign indifference, so as not to upset you; often, even, I deliberately treated you harshly and contemptuously, so that you should have no inkling of how my heart burned for you — I tried everything that lies in the power, and beyond the power, of a human being. But today it happened, and I swear to you that it came over me against my will, it took me by surprise. I myself no longer know how I could let such a thing happen; afterwards I felt like beating and punishing myself, I felt so desperately ashamed. For I know, oh, I know, how mad, how crazy it would be to force myself upon you. A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people’s lives a burden with her presence. Oh yes, I know all that — I know it, and it is because I know it that I am a lost soul. I should never have dared to throw myself at you, but who except you has ever given me any assurance that I should not continue for ever to be the wretched monstrosity that I am? That I should be able to move, to walk about, like other people, like all the millions of superfluous people who simply don’t know that every unimpeded step they take is a blessing and a glory? I had made an iron resolve to preserve silence until I had really reached the point when I was a human being, a woman like other women, and perhaps — perhaps — worthy of you, beloved. But my impatience, my hunger, to get well, was so frantic that at the moment when you bent over me I believed, genuinely believed, honestly and foolishly believed, myself to be that other, that new, that well person! You see, I had wanted and dreamed of being so too long, and then you were near me — and for a moment I forgot my wretched legs, I saw only you, felt myself to be what I wanted to be for your sake. Can’t you understand one’s losing oneself in a day-dream for a moment, when one has dreamed only one dream day and night, year in year out? Believe me, beloved — it was only the crazy illusion that I had cast off my deformity that so went to my head; it was only my impatient yearning not to be an outcast, a cripple, any longer that caused my heart to run away with me so madly. Do understand — I had wanted you so long and so interminably.
‘But now you know what you ought never to have known until I was literally on my feet, and know too for whom it is I want to be cured, for whom alone on this earth — for you alone! For you alone! Forgive me, my heart’s beloved, for this love, and above all I implore you — do not be afraid of me, do not shrink from me! Do not think that because I have once been importunate I shall trouble you again, that I, infirm and abhorrent to myself as I am, will try to hold you. No, I swear to you — you shall never find me forcing myself upon you, I shall try to hide my feelings from you. I only want to wait, wait patiently, until God takes pity on me and makes me well. And so I implore you — do not be afraid, dearest, of my love. Remember, you who have taken pity on me as no one else has, remember how horribly helpless I am, chained to my chair, unable to take a single step by myself, powerless to follow you, to rush after you. Remember that I am a prisoner who has to wait in my prison, to wait always in impatient patience, until you come and bestow an hour of your time upon me, until you permit me to look at you, to hear your voice, to know we are breathing the same air, to feel your presence, the first and only happiness that has been granted to me for years. Remember it, picture it to yourself: there I lie and go on lying, waiting, waiting, day and night; and every hour stretches out endlessly until the tension is unbearable. And then you come, and I cannot jump up like another woman, cannot go to meet you, cannot seize you, cannot hold you. I have to sit and control myself, master my feelings and keep silent, have to keep a watch upon my every word, my every look, every tone of my voice, so that you shall not think that I presume to love you. And yet believe me, beloved, even this agonizing happiness has nevertheless been happiness, and I have praised myself, loved myself every time I have succeeded in restraining myself, and you have gone away, unsuspecting, free and untrammelled, knowing nothing of my love. My only torture then has been the realization of how hopelessly I have fallen under your spell.