an impermissible and secret weakness

excerpt from the emperor’s tomb by joseph roth

for a long time I fought, vainly, against this love, not so much because I felt myself endangered by it, but because I feared the unspoken scorn of my skeptical friends. in those days, just before the great war, there prevailed a disdainful pride, an overweaning self-identification with ‘decadence’, so-called, with a half-assumed, over-acted weariness and unfounded boredom. in this atmosphere there was hardly room for sentiment. as for passion, that was in the worst of taste. my friends had small unimportant liaisons with women whom they would put aside, and indeed sometimes lend out, like overcoats; women whom one forgot, like umbrellas, or left behind on purpose like heavy parcels, for which one does not trouble to look for fear that they might be brought back. the circle in which I moved considered love an aberration, engagement a form of apoplexy, marriage an incurable disease. we were young. we regarded marriage, indeed, as an inescapable part of life, just as we recognized that in twenty or thirty years arterio-sclerosis must inevitably set in. I could have found many opportunities to be alone with the girl, although in those days it was taken for granted that a young lady could not spend more than an hour alone with a young gentleman without an acceptable excuse. I took advantage of only a few of these opportunities. as I said, to have taken them all would have shamed me in the eyes of my friends. indeed, I was at pains to ensure that nothing of my feelings was observed and I often used to worry that one or other of my circle might well know something of the matter, that I might already have betrayed myself in one way or another. when, on occasion, I joined my friends unexpectedly I would assume from their sudden silence that, just before my arrival, they had been discussing my love for elizabeth kovacs. I would be put out, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, or as if some impermissible and secret weakness had been discovered in me. during the few hours, however, which I spent alone with elizabeth I seemed to sense the lack of meaning and, indeed, of responsibility in my friends’ scorn, skepticism and arrogant ‘decadence’. yet at the same time I suffered from a kind of nagging conscience at having betrayed their sacred principles. I therefore led, in a certain sense, a double life, and I found that it did not agree with me at all.