He has committed a gaffe, a social error, and has thereby dishonored both his regiment and himself within the regiment: “At our mess table every piece of idiocy on the part of any one of us was chewed over for the next ten or twenty years.” The following morning, spending all he has left of his month’s pay, he sends Edith a great bouquet of roses. In return, he receives a note from her, inviting him to tea. He needn’t say what day he’s coming, she adds: “I am — alas! — always at home.” Already she is appealing to his compassion, and when, the next afternoon, he pays his call, she does so again, telling him how, before the illness that paralyzed her legs five years earlier, she loved to dance, she wanted to be Pavlova. But alas!

The day after this visit, the innocent Hofmiller is riding out to the morning parade, his men behind him. He loves riding, and he spurs his horse to a gallop: “On, on, on, gallop, gallop, gallop! Ah, to ride thus, to ride thus to the ends of the earth!” But suddenly, in the midst of this ecstasy, he remembers Edith, and is ashamed of his physical strength, physical enjoyment. He orders his men to slow to a trot. Disappointed, they obey. That, Hofmiller says, was “the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity.”

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 been forced to leave 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.... 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. 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. Even in this grotesque scene, however, Zweig makes it clear 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 day — we may feel coerced?

That, in any case, is Hofmiller’s reasoning as, from day to day, from teatime to dinnertime, 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 attentions 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, however, Hofmiller finds that the emotion of pity is a pleasure just in itself. It exalts him, takes him to a new place. Before, as an officer, he was required only to obey orders and be a good fellow. Now he is a moral being, a soul.

That analysis of compassion is one of the book’s foremost contributions, but any psychoanalyst could have done it. What only Zweig could have created are the scenes between Hofmiller and Edith: the concrete, subtle, and hair-raising enactments of ambivalence, hers as she vacillates between appealing to his pity and asking for his love, his as he is torn between solicitude and recoil. Late in the novel, during one of his visits, she finds his attentions insufficient. She starts to have one of her fits, and to allay it, he places his hand on her arm:

Suddenly the spasm ceased; she grew rigid again and did not stir. It was as though her whole body were straining to understand what this touch indicated, to know whether it was a gesture of ... love or merely of pity.