Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page B

with that single idea in mind.
    The fact that I didn’t shoot myself after all … I swear it wasn’t cowardice, it would have been a release to take off the safety catch and press the cold trigger … how can I explain it? I still felt I had a duty … yes, that damned duty to help. The thought that she might still need me, that she did need me, made me mad … it was Thursday morning before I was back in my room, and on Saturday, as I have told you, on Saturday the ship would come in, and I knew that this woman, this proud and haughty woman would not survive being shamed before her husband and the world … Oh, how my thoughts tortured me, thoughts of the precious time I had unthinkingly wasted, the crazy haste that had thwarted any prospect of bringing her help in time … for hours, I swear, for hours on end I paced up and down my room, racking my brains to think of a way to approach her, put mattersright, help her … for I was certain that she wouldn’t let me into her house now. Her laughter was still there in all my nerves, I still saw her nostrils quivering with anger. For hours I paced up and down the three metres of my cramped room … and day had dawned, morning was here already.
    Suddenly an idea sent me to the desk … I snatched up a sheaf of notepaper and began to write to her, write it all down … a whining, servile letter in which I begged her forgiveness, called myself a madman, a criminal, and begged her to entrust herself to me. I swore that the hour after it was done I would disappear from the city, from the colony, from the world if she wanted … only she must forgive me and trust me to help her at the last, the very last minute. I feverishly wrote twenty pages like this … it must have been a mad, indescribable letter, like a missive written in delirium, for when I rose from the desk I was bathed in sweat … the room swayed, and I had to drink a glass of water. Only then did I try reading the letter through again, but the very first words horrified me, so I folded it up, trembling, found an envelope … and suddenly a new thought came to me. All at once I knew the right, the crucial thing to say. I picked up the pen again, and wrote on the last sheet, ‘I will wait here in the beach hotel for a word of forgiveness. If no answer comes by seven this evening, I shall shoot myself.’
    Then I took the letter, rang for a boy, and told him to deliver the envelope at once. At last I had said everything —everything!”
     
    Something clinked and fell down beside us. As he moved abruptly he had knocked over the whisky bottle; I heard his hand feeling over the deck for it, and then he picked it up with sudden vigour. He threw the empty bottle high in the air and over the ship’s side. The voice fell silent for a few minutes, and then feverishly continued, even faster and more agitated than before.
    “I am not a believing Christian any more … I don’t believe in heaven or hell, and if hell does exist I am not afraid of it, for it can’t be worse than those hours I passed between morning and evening … think of a small room, hot in the sunlight, red-hot at blazing noon … a small room, just a desk and a chair and the bed … and nothing on the desk but a watch and a revolver, and sitting at the desk a man … a man who does nothing but stare at that desk and the second hand of his watch, a man who eats and drinks nothing, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t move, who only … listen to me … who only stares for three long hours at the white circle of the dial and the hand of the watch ticking as it goes around. That … that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting … but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistence.
    Well, I won’t try to describe those hours to you … they are beyond description. I myself don’t understand now how one can go through such an experience without going mad. Then, at twenty-two minutes past three …