The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page A

feel strong enough to bear the shattering effect of finding that he was wrong, and he was afraid that this one moment could crush his life even more cruelly than the merciless self-torment of his despairing heart. Only when his pulse was beating more steadily and slowly, and he no longer felt it like a hammer blow in his throat, did he pull himself together and look up slowly from the shelter of his hand at the window where he had seen that seductive image framed.
    He had been mistaken. It was not the girl from the young master’s Madonna. Yet all the same, his raised hand did not sink despondently. What he saw also appeared to him a miracle, if a sweeter, milder, more human one than a divine apparition seen in the radiant light of a blessed hour. This girl, looking thoughtfully out of the sunlit window frame, bore only a distant resemblance to the altarpiece in the chapel—her face too was framed by black hair, she too had a delicate complexion of mysterious, fantastic pallor, but her features were harder, sharper, almost angry, and around the mouth there was a tearful defiance that was not moderated even by the lost expression of her dreaming eyes, which held anold, deep grief. There was a childlike wilfulness and a legacy of hidden sorrow in their bright restlessness, which she seemed to control only with difficulty. He felt that her silent composure could dissolve into abrupt and angry movement at any time, and her mood of gentle reverie did not hide it. The painter felt a certain tension in her features, suggesting that this child would grow to be one of those women who live in their dreams and are at one with their longings, whose souls cling to what they love with every fibre of their being, and who die if they are forced away from it. But he marvelled not so much at all this strangeness in her face as at the miraculous play of nature that made the sunny glow behind her head, reflected in the window, look like a saint’s halo lying around her hair until it shone like black steel. And he thought he clearly felt here the divine hand showing him how to complete his work in a manner worthy of the subject and pleasing to God.
    A carter roughly jostled the painter as he stood in the middle of the street, lost in thought. “God’s wrath, can’t you watch out, old man, or are you so taken with the lovely Jew girl that you stand there gaping like an idiot and blocking my way?”
    The painter started with surprise, but took no offence at the man’s rough tone, and indeed he had scarcely noticed it in the light of the information provided by this gruff and heavily clad fellow. “Is she Jewish?” he asked in great surprise.
    “So it’s said, but I don’t know. Anyway, she’s not the child of the folk here, they found her or came by her somehow. What’s it to me? I’ve never felt curious about it, and I won’t neither. Ask the master of the house himself if you like. He’ll know better than me, for sure, how she comes to be here.”
    The ‘master’ to whom he referred was an innkeeper, landlord of one of those dark, smoky taverns where the liveliness and noise never quite died down, because it was frequented by so many gamblers and seamen, soldiers and idlers that the place was seldom left entirely empty. Broad-built, with a fleshy but kindly face, he stood in the narrow doorway like an inn sign inviting custom. Onimpulse the painter approached him. They went into the tavern, and the painter sat down in a corner at a smeared wooden table. He still felt rather agitated, and when the landlord put the glass he had ordered in front of him, he asked him to sit at the table with him for a few moments. Quietly, so as not to attract the attention of a couple of slightly tipsy sailors bawling out songs at the next table, he asked his question. He told the man briefly but with deep feeling of the miraculous sign that had appeared to him—the landlord listened in surprise as his slow understanding, somewhat clouded by wine,