The New York Review of Books

Interestingly, anti-sentimentally, the object of his pity is not endearing. Edith is narcissistic and imperious—a diva of pain. At tea the day before, she had had to leave her guest early (the masseur had arrived), and, though accustomed to using a wheelchair, this time she insisted on walking:

She pressed her lips firmly together, raised herself on to the crutches and—tap-tap, tap-tap—stamped, swayed, heaved herself forward, contorted and witch-like, while the butler held his hands out behind her to catch her should she slip or collapse. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap—first one foot and then the other, and between each step there was a faint clanking and squeaking as of tautly stretched leather and metal [the sound of her braces]…. She wanted to show me, me in particular, to show all of us, that she was a cripple. She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture.

In the course of the novel, that “tap-tap” will come to sound like something out of Poe, and Edith’s witch-like character will become more pronounced. When she speaks, it sounds to Hofmiller as if she were “hacking away at something with a knife.” When she laughs, “the sound was as sharp and jagged as a saw.” In a way, her father, grieving for her, his only love (he is a widower), appeals more powerfully to Hofmiller’s compassion than Edith does. Zweig makes it clear, however, that the wounded do deserve our pity. And how are we to withhold it, though in giving it in the measure they ask—Hofmiller is soon expected at the house every afternoon—we may feel coerced?

That, in any case, is Hofmiller’s reasoning as, from day to day, he doles out the greater and greater reassurances that Edith demands. She of course falls in love with him, and her doctor tells him that he cannot disabuse her as to his feelings, or not yet, for this would doom a cure that she is about to undertake in Switzerland. So he descends ever deeper into hypocrisy. In the process, Zweig gives us a piercing analysis of the motives underlying pity. Gradually Hofmiller realizes how much he enjoys the courtesies paid to him for his emotional services, how it pleases him that when he arrives at the Schloss his favorite cigarettes—and also the novel (its pages already cut) that he had said in passing that he wanted to read—are laid out on the tea table. Nor is it lost on him that his own sense of strength is magnified by Edith’s weakness and, above all, by his growing power over the Kekesfalvas, the fact that if he, a poor soldier, does not present himself at teatime, this great, rich household is thrown into a panic, and the chauffeur is dispatched to town to spy him out and see what he is doing in preference to waiting on Edith. Beyond the matter of power …