Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig Page B

opening the door to me with a cordial expression, as if he had seen me coming through a magical peephole. Everything showed clearly and affectionately how naturally I was regarded as part of the family; special attention born of familiarity was taken of all my little weaknesses and preferences. The brand of cigarettes that I particularly liked was always there; if on my last visit I had happened to mention a book that I would like to read some day, there was a copy—new, but with the pages carefully cut—lying as if by chance on the little stool; a certain armchair opposite Edith’s chaise longue was always regarded as ‘my’ place—small, trifling things, all of them, but perfectly calculated to warm a strange room pleasantly with a sense that I was at home, to cheer and raise the spirits imperceptibly. I sat there more confidently than I ever did among my military comrades, talking and joking just as the fancy took me, perceiving for the first time that any form of compulsion binds the real powers of the mind, and the true qualities of a human being come to light only when he is at ease.
    But something else, something much more mysterious also contributed, unconsciously, to the fact that the time I spent daily with the two girls made me feel so elated. Ever since Ihad been sent off, a mere boy, to the military academy, and thus for the last ten or fifteen years, I had been living in an exclusively masculine environment. From morning to night, from night to first thing in the morning, in the dormitory at the military academy, in tents when we were on manoeuvres, in the officers’ mess, at table and on the road, in the riding school and the lecture hall, I had never breathed the odour of any but male companions, first boys, then adolescent lads, but always men—men accustomed to energetic gestures, their firm, loud footsteps, their deep voices, the aura of tobacco about them, their free and easy ways, sometimes verging on vulgarity. To be sure, I liked most of my comrades very much, and could hardly complain if they did not feel quite so warmly about me. But that atmosphere lacked something to lighten it, it did not contain enough ozone, enough exciting, intriguing, electrifying force. And just as our excellent military band, in spite of its rhythmical verve, played nothing but music for brass—hard, cold, down to earth, intent on nothing but keeping time, lacking the tender and sensuous tone of stringed instruments—so even our most cordial regimental occasions had none of that muted fluidity that the presence or even the mere proximity of women adds to any social gathering. Even at the time when we fourteen-year-olds paraded through the town two by two in our smart cadet uniforms, when we met other young lads flirting with girls, or talking to them easily, we had felt, with vague longing, that we were being forcibly deprived of something by spending our youth in barracks while we did our training, something that our contemporaries took for granted daily in the street, on the promenade or the skating rink, in the dance hall—they were entirely at their ease in the company of girls. Shut away behind bars as we were, we used to stare at those girlsin their short skirts as if they were magical beings, and dreamt of a single conversation with a girl as something unattainable. One doesn’t forget such deprivation. Later adventures, fleeting and usually cheap, with all kinds of obliging females, were no substitute for these boyish dreams, and although I had now slept with a dozen women, the awkwardness and stupidity that afflicted me in company when I happened to meet a young girl made me feel that long deprivation had ruined me for natural, straightforward social intercourse, and it would be denied to me for ever.
    And now, suddenly, the boyish wish, to which I had never admitted, for friendship with young women instead of only with my bearded, uncouth, masculine comrades was granted in full. Every afternoon I sat,