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THE
BURNING SECRET
BY
STEFAN ZWEIG
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE PARTNER 9
II QUICK FRIENDSHIP 21
III THE TRIO 34
IV THE ATTACK 44
V THE ELEPHANTS 55
VI SKIRMISHING 64
VII THE BURNING SECRET 75
VIII SILENT HOSTILITY 86
IX THE LIARS 99
X ON THE TRAIL 114
XI THE SURPRISE ATTACK 127
XII THE TEMPEST 134
XIII DAWNING PERCEPTION 147
XIV DARKNESS AND CONFUSION 156
XV THE LAST DREAM 164
THE BURNING SECRET
CHAPTER I
THE PARTNER
The train, with a shrill whistle, pulled into Summering. For a moment
the black coaches stood still in the silvery light of the uplands to
eject a few vivid human figures and to swallow up others. Exacerbated
voices called back and forth; then, with a puffing and a chugging and
another shrill shriek, the dark train clattered into the opening of the
tunnel, and once more the landscape stretched before the view unbroken
in all its wide expanse, the background swept clean by the moist wind.
One of the arrivals, a young man pleasantly distinguished by his good
dress and elastic walk, hurried ahead of the others and entered one of
the hotel 'buses. The horses took the steep road leisurely. Spring was
in the air. Up in the sky floated the white shifting clouds of May and
June, light, sportive young creatures, playfully coursing the blue path
of heaven, suddenly dipping and hiding behind the mountains, embracing
and running away, crumpling up like handkerchiefs, elongating into gauzy
scarfs, and ending their play by roguishly perching white caps on the
mountain tops. There was unrest below, too, in the wind, which shook the
lean trees, still wet from the rain, and set their limbs a-groaning
softly and brought down a thousand shining drops. Sometimes a cool
breath of snow descended from the mountains, and then there was a feel
in the air both balmy and cutting. All things in the atmosphere and on
the earth were in motion and astir with the ferment of impatience. The
horses tossed their heads and snorted as they now trotted down a
descent, the sound of their bells jingling far ahead of them.
On arriving at the hotel, the young man made straight for the registry
and looked over the list of guests. He was disappointed.
"What the deuce have I come here for?" he thought in vexation. "Stuck
'way up here on top of the mountain all alone, no company; why it's
worse than the office. I must have come either too early or too late. I
never do have luck with my holidays. Not a single name do I know. If
only there was a woman or two here to pick up a flirtation with, even a
perfectly innocent one, if it must be, just to keep the week from being
too utterly dismal."
The young man, a baron not very high up in the country's nobility, held
a government position, and had secured this short vacation not because
he required it particularly, but because his colleagues had all got a
week off in spring and he saw no reason for making a present of his
"week off" to the government. Although not without inner resources, he
was a thoroughly social being, his sociability being the very quality
for which his friends liked him and for which he was welcomed in all
circles. He was quite conscious of his inability to stay by himself and
had no inclination to meet himself, as it were, but rather avoided his
own company, feeling not the least urge to become intimately acquainted
with his own soul. He knew he required contact with other human beings
to kindle his talents and stir up the warmth and exuberance of his
spirits. Alone he was like a match in a box, frosty and useless.
He paced up and down the hall, completely out of sorts, stopping now and
then irresolutely to turn the leaves of the magazines, or to glance at
the newspapers, or to strike up a waltz on the piano in the music-room.
Finally he sat down in a sulk and watched the growing dusk and the gray
mist steal in patches between the fir-trees. After a long, vain,
fretful hour he took refuge in the dining-room.
As yet only a few of the tables were occupied. He took them in at a
swift glance. No use. No one he knew, except--he responded to the
greeting listlessly--a gentleman to whom he had spoken on the train, and
farther off a familiar face from the metropolis. No one else. Not a
single woman to promise even a momentary adventure. He became more and
more impatient and out of sorts.
Being a young man favored with a handsome face, he was always prepared
for a new experience. He was of the sort of men who are constantly on
the lookout for an opportunity to plunge into an adventure for the sake
of its novelty, yet whom nothing surprises because, forever lying in
wait, they have calculated every possibility in advance. Such men never
overlook any element of the erotic. The very first glance they cast at a
woman is a probe into the sensual, a searching, impartial probe that
knows no distinction between the wife of a friend or the maid who opens
the door to her house. One rarely realizes, in using the ready-made word
"woman-hunter," which we toss in contempt at such men, how true the
expression is and how much of faithful observation it implies. In their
watchful alertness all the passionate instincts of the chase are afire,
the stalking, the excitement, the cruel cunning. They are always at
their post, always ready and determined to follow the tracks of an
adventure up to the very brink of the precipice, always loaded with
passion, not with the passion of a lover, but with the cold,
calculating, dangerous passion of a gambler. Some of them are doggedly
persevering, their whole life shaping itself, from this expectancy, into
one perpetual adventure. Each day is divided for them into a hundred
little sensual experiences--a passing look, a flitting smile, an
accidental contact of the knees--and each year into a hundred such days,
in which the sensual experience constitutes the ever-flowing,
life-giving and quickening source of their existence.
There was no partner for a game here--that the baron's experienced eye
instantly detected. And there is nothing more exasperating than for a
player with cards in his hands, conscious of his ability, to be sitting
at the green table vainly awaiting a partner. The baron called for a
newspaper, but merely ran his eyes down the columns fretfully. His
thoughts were crippled and he stumbled over the words.
Suddenly he heard the rustling of a dress and a woman's voice saying in
a slightly vexed tone:
"_Mais tais toi donc, Edgar._" Her accent was affected.
A tall voluptuous figure in silk crackled by his table, followed by a
small, pale boy in a black velvet suit. The boy eyed the baron
curiously, as the two seated themselves at a table reserved for them
opposite to him. The child was making evident efforts to be correct in
his behavior, but propriety seemed to be out of keeping with the dark,
restless expression of his eyes.
The lady--the young man's attention was fixed upon her only--was very
much betoiletted and dressed with conspicuous elegance. She was a type
that particularly appealed to the baron, a Jewess with a somewhat
opulent figure, close to, though not yet arrived at, the borderline of
overmaturity, and evidently of a passionate nature like his, yet
sufficiently experienced to hide her temperament behind a veil of
dignified melancholy. He could not see her eyes, but was able to admire
the lovely curve of her eyebrows arching clean and well-defined above a
nose delicate yet nobly curved and giving her face distinction. It was
her nose that betrayed her race. Her hair, in keeping with everything
else about her, was remarkably luxuriant. Her beauty seemed to have
grown sated and boastful with the sure sense of the wealth of admiration
it had evoked.
She gave her order in a very low voice and told the boy to stop making a
noise with his fork, this with apparent indifference to the baron's
cautious, stealthy gaze. She seemed not to observe his look, though, as
a matter of fact, it was his keen, alert vigilance that had made her
constrained.
A flash lit up the gloom of the baron's face. His nerves responded as to
an underground current, his muscles tautened, his figure straightened
up, fire came to his eyes. He was not unlike the women who require a
masculine presence to bring out their full powers. He needed the
stimulation of sex completely to energize his faculties. The hunter in
him scented the prey. His eyes tried to challenge hers, and her glance
crossed his, but waveringly without ever giving an occasional relaxation
of the muscles round her mouth, as if in an incipient smile, but he was
not sure, and the very uncertainty of it aroused him. The one thing that
held out promise was her constant looking away from him, which argued
both resistance and embarrassment. Then, too, the conversation that she
kept up with her child encouraged him, being obviously designed for
show, while her outward calm, he felt, was forced and quite superficial,
actually indicating the commencement of inner agitation. He was
a-quiver. The play had begun.
He made his dinner last a long while, and for a full half-hour, almost
steadily, he kept the woman fixed with his gaze, until it had travelled
over every line of her face and touched, unseen, every spot of her
body.
Outside the darkness fell heavily, the woods groaned as if in childish
fear of the large, rain-laden clouds stretching out gray hands after
them. The shadows deepened in the room, and the silence seemed to press
the people closer together. Under the dead weight of the stillness, the
baron clearly noted that the mother's conversation with her son became
still more constrained and artificial and would soon, he was sure, cease
altogether.
He resolved upon an experiment. He rose and went to the door slowly,
looking past the woman at the prospect outside. At the door he gave a
quick turn, as if he had forgotten something, and caught her looking at
him with keen interest. That titillated him.
He waited in the hall. Presently she appeared, holding the boy's hand
and paused for a while to look through some magazines and show the child
a few pictures. The baron walked up to the table with a casual air,
pretending to hunt for a periodical. His real intention was to probe
deeper below the moist sheen of her eyes and perhaps even begin a
conversation.
The woman instantly turned away and tapped the boy's shoulder.
"_Viens, Edgar. Au lit._"
She rustled past the baron. He followed her with his eyes, somewhat
disappointed. He had counted upon making the acquaintance that very
evening. Her brusque manner was disconcerting. However, there was a
fascination in her resistance, and the very uncertainty added zest to
the chase. At all events he had found a partner, and the play could
begin.