The Burning Secret Chapter 5 by Stefan Zweig
CHAPTER V
THE ELEPHANTS
EDGAR’S mother stayed at table with the baron a while longer. But the two no longer spoke of elephants or hunting. An indefinable embarrassment instantly sprang up between them, and a faint sultriness descended upon their conversation. After a time they went out into the hall and seated themselves in a corner.
The baron was more brilliant than ever. The woman was a little heated by her two glasses of champagne, so that the conversation quickly took a dangerous turn. The baron was not what is called exactly handsome. He was simply young and had a manly look in his dark-brown, energetic, boyish face, and he charmed her with his fresh, almost ill-bred movements. She liked looking at him at such close range and was no longer afraid to encounter his eyes.
Gradually there crept into his language a boldness which vaguely disconcerted her. It was like a gripping of her body and then a letting go, an intangible sort of desire which sent the blood rushing to her face. The next moment, however, he would laugh again, an easy, unconstrained, boyish laugh, which made his little manifestations of desire seem like joking. Sometimes he said things she felt she ought to object to bluntly, but she was a natural-born coquette, and his trifling audacities only provoked in her the taste for more. She was carried away by his bold gaze, and at length got so far as to try to imitate him, answering his looks with little fluttering promises from her own eyes, and giving herself up to him in words and gestures. She permitted him to draw close to her, so that every now and then she felt the warm graze of his breath on her shoulders.
Like all gamblers, the two forgot the passage of time and became so absorbed that they started in surprise when the lights in the hall were turned off at midnight.
The woman jumped up in response to the first impulse of alarm she had felt. In the same moment she realized to what audacious lengths she had ventured. It was not the first time she had played with fire, but now her instincts, all aroused, told her the game had come perilously close to being in earnest. She shuddered inwardly at discovering that she no longer felt quite secure, that something in her was slipping and gliding down into an abyss. Her head whirled with alarm, with slight intoxication from the champagne, and with the ring of the baron’s ardent language in her ears. A dull dread came over her. She had experienced the same sort of dread several times before in similar dangerous moments, but it had never so overpowered her. This extreme dizziness was something she had never before experienced.
“Good-night,” she said hastily. “See you in the morning again.”
She felt like running away, not so much from him as from the danger of the moment and from an odd, novel insecurity she felt within herself.
But the baron held her hand in a tight but gentle grip and kissed it four or five times from the delicate tips of her fingers to her wrist. A little shiver went through her at the graze of his rough mustache on the back of her hand, and her blood ran warm and mounted to her head. Her cheeks glowed. There was a hammering at her temples. A wild unreasoning fear made her snatch her hand away.
“Don’t go, don’t go,” the baron pleaded in a whisper. But she was already gone, the awkwardness of her haste revealing plainly her fright and confusion. She was undergoing the excitement that the baron wanted. She was all confused, one moment in awful dread that the man behind might follow and put his arms round her, and the next instant regretting that he had not done so. In those few seconds the thing might have taken place that she had been dreaming of for years, the great adventure. She had always taken voluptuous delight in creeping up to the very edge of an adventure and then jumping back at the last moment, an adventure of the great and dangerous kind, not a mere fleeting flirtation. But the baron was too proud to push his advantage now, too assured of his victory to take this woman like a robber in a moment of weakness and intoxication. A fair sportsman prefers his game to show fight and to surrender quite consciously. The woman could not escape him. The virus, he knew, was already seething in her veins.
She stopped on the landing above and pressed her hand to her throbbing heart. She had to rest a while. Her nerves were snapping. She heaved a great sigh, partly of relief at having escaped a danger, partly of regret. Her emotions were mixed, and all she was vividly conscious of was the whirl of her blood and a faint giddiness. With half-closed eyes she groped her way like a drunken woman to the door and breathed with relief when she felt the cool door-knob in her hand. At last she was safe.
She opened the door softly and the next second started back in fright. Something had moved way back in the dark. In her excited state this was too much, and she was about to cry for help when a very, very sleepy voice came from within, saying:
“Goodness gracious! What are you doing here?”
She rushed to the sofa where Edgar was lying curled up trying to keep himself wide awake. She thought the child must be ill and needed attention.
“I waited for you so long, and then I fell asleep.”
“You know. To hear about the elephants.”
“Elephants?” As she asked the question Edgar’s mother remembered her promise. She was to tell him all about the elephant hunts and the baron’s other adventures that very night. And so the simple child had crept into her room and in unquestioning faith had waited for her until he had dropped asleep. The absurdity of it enraged her, or rather she was angry with herself, and for that reason she wanted to outshriek the tiny whisper of her conscience telling her she had done a shameful wrong.
“Go to bed at once, you nuisance!” she cried.
Edgar stared at her. Why was she so angry? He hadn’t done anything wrong. But his very amazement only made her angrier.
“Go to bed at once,” she shouted, in a rage, because she felt how unjust she was to the child.
Edgar went without a word. He was dreadfully sleepy and felt only in a blur that his mother had not kept her promise and that somehow or other he was being treated meanly. Yet he did not rebel. His susceptibilities were dulled by sleepiness. Besides, he was angry with himself for having fallen asleep while waiting.
“Like a baby,” he said to himself in disgust before dropping off to sleep again.
Since the day before he hated himself for being still a child.