Fear by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page B

everything was illuminated with terrible clarity. Before her, as close as her own breath, were considerations that she had never touched but which, she suddenly realised, made up her real life, and others again that had once seemed important to her had dispersed like smoke. Up to this point she had mingled with lively society in the noisy, loquacious company of people who moved in well-to-do circles, and in essence she had lived only for herself, but now, after a week immured in her own household, she felt she didnot miss that society. Instead, she was repelled by the pointless hurry and bustle of those who had nothing to do, and instinctively she judged the shallowness of her old inclinations, her constant neglect of love in action, in the light of this first truly strong feeling to come to her. She looked at her past as if looking into an abyss. Married for eight years, and deluding herself that she enjoyed too modest a happiness, she had never tried to come closer to her husband, she had remained a stranger to his real nature and no less to her own children. Paid domestic staff stood between them and her, governesses and servants who relieved her of all those little anxieties which, she only now began to sense—now that she had looked more closely at her children’s lives—were more alluring than the ardent glances of men, more delightful than a lover’s embrace. Slowly, her life was acquiring new meaning. Everything had affinities, all at once turning a gravely significant face to her. Now that she had known danger, and with that danger a genuine emotion, everything, however strange, suddenly began to have something in common with her. She felt herself in everything, and the world, once as transparent to her as glass, had come to mirror the dark shape of her own shadow. Wherever she looked, whatever she heard, was suddenly real.
    She went to sit with the children. Their governess was reading aloud to them, a fairy tale about aprincess who was allowed into all the rooms in her palace except the one with a door that was locked with a silver key. She opened the door all the same, and unlocking it sealed her fate. Wasn’t that her own story? She too had been intrigued by forbidden fruit, simply because it was forbidden, and it had brought her misfortune. Only a week ago, the simplicity of the little story would have made her smile, but now she felt that there was deep wisdom in it. There was a story in the newspaper about an army officer who had been blackmailed into turning traitor. She shuddered, and understood him. Wouldn’t she herself make impossible efforts to get money in order to buy a few days of peace, a semblance of happiness? Every line she read about suicide, every reported crime, every act of desperation suddenly became very real to her. She could identify with all of them—the man tired of life, the desperate man, the seduced maidservant, the abandoned child. Her own story had the ring of theirs. All at once she understood the full richness of life, and knew that no hour of her own existence could seem poor to her any more. Now that it was all coming to an end, she felt for the first time that life was just beginning. And was a vicious female to have the power to take this wonderful sense of being attuned to the whole world, and tear it apart with her coarse hands? Was Irene’s one guilty act to bringeverything great and fine of which, for the first time, she felt capable, down into ruin?
    And why, she thought, blindly resisting a disaster that she unconsciously knew made sense, why such a terrible punishment for a small peccadillo? She knew so many women, vain, bold, sensual, who kept lovers, spending money on them and mocking their husbands in those other men’s arms, women who lived a lie and were very much at home there, who became more beautiful in dissembling, stronger as the chase went on, cleverer in danger, while she herself collapsed, powerless, at the first touch of fear, at her first real