Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig

awkward, I find new courage in myself. I laugh with the girls, and make them laugh. The three of us sit comfortably together there in the corner like high-spirited children.
    And yet as I crack joke after joke, apparently entirely absorbed in our cheerful little company, I am half aware of a gaze resting on me. It comes from above the frame of a pair of glasses, that glance, it comes from the card table, and it is a warm, happy expression that increases my own happiness yet further. In secret (I think he is ashamed of it in front of the others) and very cautiously, the old man is peering at us from time to time over his cards, and once, when I catch his eye, he gives me a confidential look. At that moment his face has the concentrated, radiant glow of a man hearing music.
    This goes on almost until midnight, and not once does our cheerful conversation flag. Once again we are served something delicious to eat—excellent sandwiches—and surprisingly, I am not the only one to fall upon them. The two girls help themselves as well, and they too are drinking a good deal of the fine, heavy, dark old English port. But finally we have to wish one another goodnight. Edith and Ilona shake hands with me as they would with an old friend, a dear, reliable comrade. Of course I have to promise them to come again soon, perhaps tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Then I go out into the hall with the three other gentlemen. The car is to take us home. I fetch my own coat while the manservant is busy helping the Lieutenant Colonel into his. Then, as I fling the coat on, I suddenly feel someone trying to help me; it is Herr von Kekesfalva, and while I resist, horrified—how can I let him play the part of a servant, an old gentleman helping a callow lad like me?—he comes close to me, speaking in a whisper.
    “Lieutenant Hofmiller,” says the old man shyly, low-voiced. “Oh, Lieutenant Hofmiller, you have no idea, you can’t imagine how happy it has made me to hear the child laugh properly again. She has no pleasures usually, but today she was almost back to what she was in the old days when …”
    At this moment the Lieutenant Colonel approaches us. “Well, shall we be off?” he says, addressing me with a friendly smile. Of course Kekesfalva does not venture to contradict him, but I feel the old man’s hand stroking my sleeve, stroking it very, very lightly and timidly, as you might caress a child or a woman. There is infinite liking and gratitude in the hidden, surreptitious nature of this shy touch; I sense such mingled happiness and despair in it that I am deeply moved once again, and as I go down the three steps to the car with the Lieutenant Colonel, bearing myself with proper military deference, I have to take care that no one notices my bemused state of mind.
     
    I could not drop off to sleep at once that evening; I was too excited. Slight as the cause of that might seem to outward view—an old man’s hand touching my arm with affection, nothing more—that single restrained sign of fervent gratitude had been enough to flood my heart to overflowing. I had sensed more pure yet passionate feeling in that touch than I had known before, even from a woman, and it bowled me over. Young as I was, this was the first time in my life that I had been aware of having helped someone else, and I was astonished to think that an insignificant, ordinary young officer like me, still uncertain of himself, really had the power to make someone so happy. To account for the intoxicating emotion that I felt in that abrupt discovery, perhaps I oughtto explain, and indeed remind myself, that ever since childhood nothing had weighed on my mind more than my conviction that I was an entirely superfluous person, of no interest at all to anyone else, or at the best a matter of indifference to others. At cadet school and then the military academy, I had always been one of those average students who attracted no attention, never one of the popular or