Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page B

anger because he still hoped to trick the boy, and was thinking only of his own aims. But his mother kept losing controlof herself. A chance to shout at him came almost as a relief. “Don’t play with your fork,” she snapped at him at table. “What a naughty boy you are, you don’t deserve to be eating with grown-ups!” Edgar just kept smiling and smiling, his head slightly tilted to one side. He knew that she was snapping at him in desperation, and felt proud that she was exposing herself like that. His glance was perfectly calm now, like a doctor’s. Once he might perhaps have been naughty in order to annoy her, but you learn a lot when you hate, and you learn it fast. Now he said nothing, he went on and on saying nothing, until the sheer pressure of his silence had her at screaming-point.
    His mother could bear it no longer. When the adults rose from table and she saw that Edgar was about to follow them, still looking as if such devotion was only to be taken for granted, her resentment suddenly burst out. She abandoned all caution and spat out the truth. Tormented by his insidious presence, she reared and bucked like a horse tortured by flies. “Why do you keep following me around like a three-year-old toddler? I don’t want you on my heels all the time. Children don’t belong with adults, remember that! Go and do something on your own for an hour or so. Read a book, do anything you like, but leave me alone! You’re making me nervous, slinking around like that with your horrible hangdog look.”
    At last he’d wrung an admission out of her! Edgar smiled, and she and the Baron now seemedembarrassed. She turned and was about to move away, angry with herself for showing the child her annoyance. But Edgar just said coolly, “Papa doesn’t want me going around here all on my own. Papa made me promise to be careful, he wanted me to stay close to you.”
    He emphasized the word “Papa”, having noticed already that it had a certain inhibiting effect on them both. So somehow or other his father too must be part of that burning secret. Papa must have some kind of secret power over the couple, something that he himself didn’t know about, for even the mention of his name seemed to cause them alarm and discomfiture. Once again they did not reply. They had laid down their arms. His mother went ahead, the Baron with her. After them came Edgar, but not humbly like a servant, instead he was harsh, stern, implacable as a jailer. Invisibly, he clinked their chains—they were rattling those chains, but they couldn’t break them. Hatred had steeled his childish power; he, who didn’t know the secret, was stronger than the two whose hands were bound by it.

9
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    B UT TIME WAS RUNNING OUT . The Baron had only a few days left, and he wanted to make the most of them. Resistance to the angry child’s obstinacy, they both felt, was useless, so they resorted to the last and ignoble way out: flight, just to get away from his tyranny for an hour or two.
    “Take these letters to the post office, will you, and send them by registered mail,” Edgar’s mother told him. They were both standing in the hotel lobby while the Baron spoke to a cabby outside.
    Suspiciously, Edgar took the two letters. He had noticed a servant delivering some kind of message to his mother earlier. Were they hatching a plot against him after all?
    He hesitated. “Where will I find you?”
    “Here.”
    “Sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “Mind you don’t go away, though! You’ll wait for me here in the lobby until I get back, won’t you?” In his awareness of having the upper hand he spokeimperiously, as if giving his mother orders. Much had changed since the day before yesterday.
    Then he went out with the two letters. At the door he met the Baron and spoke to him for the first time in two days. “I’m just taking two letters to the post. My Mama will wait for me here. Please don’t leave before I come back.”
    The Baron brushed quickly past him.