Kobiety (Women)

III A CANTICLE OF LOVE

“I expect you will be here in a day or two; so this letter will never be sent. I am writing only to be alone with you this evening; and if I write it, it is but for my own sake.

“It is an autumn evening, most marvellously fine. I want to be with you. For I do love you, my dear, my only one!

“The earth is black, the sky is blue, the gloom is deepening. A little while since, Idalia handed me a letter from you; and now I am in a vein of tenderness. I will not even chide you for excess of openness in your naturalistic way of expressing your desires. There are moments when I can pardon everything.... I want to show that I love you, very truly and very much. The days of my ill-humour, the days of my dark misgivings, have passed away now, and the days of bright vision are come. This very morning I was 209saying to Idalia that I should advise her not to fall in love, for I am so far gone that I cannot fancy myself capable of loving anybody but you....

“I should be a hundred times better to you than I am, if I were not afraid. For now, since you made your confession, I feel afraid lest you should get the upper hand: and in love, I do not believe that two can both be on an equal footing. And if I but yield up to you one jot of my rights—anything whatever—you show no generous feeling at all, but triumph over my self-abasement, as if it were abjection. Witold, have some little generous feeling; allow me to rest for a moment from this eternal watch I must keep over myself; let me love you in peace, were it only for a short while.

“Again and again, the painful thought is borne in upon me, that—this time as well as the last—the pleasure of meeting you will not compensate for the pain of longing when apart. My mind misgives me, too, that you might have come to-day, but did not: ‘Why? you really didn’t know,’ as once before. I make no reproaches, but am a little piqued, and may once more go off, as I did last spring, 210in order to get away from you, so that you may learn better how genial, how clever, how incomparable I am.

“There is no doubt about it: you love me more than I love you. And if I say this so frankly, that is only because it is not absolutely true. Now I am going to tell you a most important thing, which I never yet pointed out to you quite clearly, and to which you have to give a direct answer. So, attention!—We might love each other equally, but I love you less: why?—Because you do not make yourself in the least uneasy about my love, neither as to what you confess you have done, nor (which is far more important) as to the disposition you may be in at the time. You have done what you have done, and you feel as you feel; and you find frankness a more convenient thing than concealment. And so I must constantly keep your love at high pressure, forcing my disposition, and not showing what I really feel. Now this is unjust. Once you said to me: ‘Never allow me to get the upper hand, for I should make a slave of you: as soon as Martha became my slave, I ceased to love her.’ I then resolved to hold my position of superiority, became 211more secret, less natural; and all that is in me of feebleness, abasement, poverty of spirit,—the ewig Weibliches—I most carefully locked up and kept to myself alone, in order to provide our love with a longer existence, which surely concerns you as much as myself. If now I told you not to press your cheek against my dress, nor humble yourself before me, because I cannot love where I do not honour—you would begin to sulk and to tell me, with the air of a cross sullen child, that you are the one of us two who loves most, and that I have shown myself a selfish girl.—In my opinion, the preservation of our mutual love is the affair of us both, and like an altar on which we should both of us sacrifice absolute sincerity, especially as concerns passing dispositions, and more especially such as imply self-abasement; we must play a part, wear a mask, and keep strictly to ourselves all such grievances as might lower one in the eyes of the other. So I ask you, who know this well by the experience of your own life: am I right or not? If I am, then: Do you intend to make me love you as much as you love me, or would you lower the level of your love to that of mine? That is: will you bear the burden of 212constant watchfulness with me, or do you deliberately consent that I should set it aside?—Answer me that. And do not forget all about it in ten minutes.—And, in spite of all, I love you very much.

Witold returned only yesterday. He was at a great shooting party in Klosow, where he was obliged to go, as a proof of his friendly relations with Janusz, and so put a stop to rumours rife among the neighbouring gentry that Martha and he were separated. Once I forbade Janusz to shoot hares; all that has long ago been forgotten, and now he astonishes everybody by his skill as a marksman. The Past—is the Past!

These few last years, which have not told at all upon Witold, have changed Janusz beyond recognition. He has married “a young lady from the country,” and grown fat and rubicund and common; he has four sons, of whom he is excessively proud: Witold brings me news that he is expecting a fifth shortly. The former wild primitiveness of his nature only shows itself now on his occasional visits to town, when he carouses and revels furiously, in company with Witold.

213As to his sister Martha, she has been in Germany for about six months, staying at a sanatorium for nervous patients. She is allowed neither to receive any letters nor to write any. We only now and then get news from the doctor, saying that she is better, and will soon be able to return to her home. She is, as the kindly German has the politeness to add, always pining after her husband and her son. The latter is being brought up with Janusz’s boys, and the country air must have a very salutary influence upon his system.

I took but a very short leave this summer, spending nearly all the time in town with Witold, and leading something like a domestic life; for he shows himself in my case very particular about keeping up appearances. I wonder why, in his former relations with Mme. Wildenhoff, he never cared a fig for them! Perhaps he means, by taking such care, to show how much he esteems me.

He read my letter through, but made no comments on it; he suddenly remembered some incident at the shooting party, telling it to me. And then he set about caressing and kissing me: he had been wanting me so very, very badly!

214“But answer my question, Witold,” I said.

“How can I? I don’t know,” was his answer, as he ardently kissed my inquisitorial eyes.

“Janka, is not this the best answer of all?”

He is always like that. My looks set us apart, his kisses unite us together.

But I am wrestling, held in the grip of my love, as a kite that soars above the clouds wrestles with the string held by a boy at play!

Idalia is not averse to having company at her lodgings, where I have met several characters in the artistic world.

Wiazewski cannot hear “Bohemianism.” Yet in spite of this he not unwillingly comes, too, to see us, and to “observe.”

“Look well at all those men,” he says. “For the most part ill-shaped, ill-favoured, sitting in corners and smoking cigarettes, and paying no attention whether ladies are present or not. All of them sceptical and pessimistic, taking no interest in any but exaggerated views, and in most deadly earnest about all their convictions. That is the type of men I most abhor. If intelligent, they grow narrow-minded; and, if dull, utterly impossible in society. You 215have surely noticed that the greatest fool, so long as he has no convictions of his own, may be a very nice gentlemanly fellow.”

“And what about the women?”

“They are less unendurable. They don’t talk of feminism, they don’t approve of women’s emancipation, and (best of all) they practise it very effectively indeed. They have a great deal of intuition, but for all that—and luckily so—not a grain of conscious experience.”

“Whom do you like best of all?”

“Miss Janina Dernowicz.”

“I was asking about artists; I am not one.”

“Ah, I see.—Artists? The prettiest is Miss Wartoslawska, whom I have known for a good long space of time. But just now she is far from looking as well as usual.—Why does not Owinski come here with her now?”

“Owinski?” I hesitated for a moment. Then: “Well, the engagement has been broken off for a month,” I said.

“Has it? Yes, I had heard something about his being affianced to some one, but fancied it was only gossip.... Why, he seemed to be a very passive sort of fellow, and bore the yoke meekly enough.”

216“I don’t know who is responsible for what has taken place.”

“Oh, you have but to look at her, and you can’t help guessing.... Besides, women always love longer and more deeply. It is through love that they attain their highest degree of culture; and I must acknowledge that, so far as culture goes, they have outstripped men; a woman’s instinct stands higher than the wisdom of a man.”

“Why, Stephen, from where have you got this attitude of benevolent optimism towards woman?”

“Of tragical pessimism, I should say,” he answered, gayly, but then was lost in a brown study.

How am I to know? Very likely this also is love. And a good thing, too, that it came to me: I was so lonely then and so crushed with longing!

Now and then I enjoy emotions of superhuman delight, of ecstatic bewilderment. And then again there flutter about me, like black moths, certain bitter self-reproaches for the past, and maddening apprehensions as to the future,—Really, it is too ridiculous!... 217As if there could be anything worse than the sepulchral monotony of my life, as it formerly was!

And yet I know—I know!—that this is not happiness: that this romantic adventure of mine will have no morrow.

Put an end to it? I cannot; for just now the man is as necessary to me as the air I breathe. But some time or other I shall not love him any more; and then I shall hold it as a sacred duty to pay him for his deeds in the past by my future conduct.

And she, this my poor love! stands here, gazing with eyes full of frantic terror at her end, that will and must come some day!

The keynote in the tragedy of woman’s life is the fact that her need for permanent love stands in contradiction with men’s instincts and with their interests. Wiazewski calls this her “higher culture.” I think that Schopenhauer’s justification of this need as simply a case of design in nature is far more convincing. For how can we see any superiority in an instinct that we find equally developed in the most refined inamorata with her deep emotions, and in the average middle-class woman, all given up to passivity and routine?

218After Owinski had engaged himself to a new fiancée, he would still, in the beginning, come at times and call upon Gina.

She would receive him with a smiling face and serene looks, and endeavour to delude him into thinking that no change had taken place, and that, if he said he had come back to her, she would be neither surprised nor dismayed.... She would talk about things which had interested them both; about her paintings and his poems. Together they read books, treating of the Beautiful, and Life, and Love. Once he said that he could not come to see her the next day, as his intended was to arrive in town; she took it as quietly as if he had announced his mother’s or his sister’s arrival. But, though they still called each other by their Christian names, they no longer kissed, not even at parting.

On one occasion, she asked him to read her one of his poems; a thing he was always willing to do. She listened, adapting to each changing phrase of his mind as she had used to do, and following every flash of his eye.—Now, there were many works of his with which she was not acquainted: formerly, she had been the first to read anything he wrote 219With a composed and tranquil mien, she listened even to the love-song, written for “the other.” Of course, they were the output of the reaction which had set in: the magic power of innocence; the first confession of love from the untouched lips of one ignorant of life; the return of his springtime, of his youth, of his ideals.... Gina had great self-control. At the end of one such poem, she handed him a love-song of the old times, written three years before, and under her enchantment. And this too he read aloud as he had read the others; and, roused to enthusiasm by the very music of the lines, showed a fire too evidently, alas! out of all connection with the object which had once inspired them.

Like a tune sunk deep in memory in bygone days, the words at once brought all the past before her: it rose up, plainly visible to her mind’s eye. The vision was agonizing, and the dismay of it made her raise her hands to her throat, as if to prevent the outburst of lamentation that now tore her bosom, as if she had been a feeble child, long and unjustly ill-treated. For she knew not how long, she wept like one distraught, even forgetting that he was present and only aware that all her universe 220had given way, was broken to pieces, crumbled to dust, annihilated.

Some one took her tenderly in his arms, smoothed her hair, kissed those moist, red, tear-swollen eyes of hers.

She felt it, and this act, meant to comfort her, seemed to her harder than all to bear. It was a kiss of pure sympathy for suffering, of mere humanity, a last farewell kiss.

The anguish she felt stifled her; she could not breathe,—till her pain tore its way out of her breast in a tempest of weeping.

Then, as in a nightmare, she heard his steps farther, farther away, and the sound of the door closing upon him. She knew it was closing upon him for ever; she knew that he would not return.

And then there came a time when she crept to his feet, like some poor beast that its master has driven away; and when, no longer admitted to his house, she loitered about for him in coffee-houses and in the street, and importuned him with letters incessantly. Whichever way he went, he was doomed to behold that face, pale as a spectre, and those eyes, so reproachful and so full of entreaty!

At present Owinski salutes her distantly, as 221he would salute some slight acquaintance; but he gives no answer at all to any of her letters. Nor does he any longer call on people at whose houses there is any chance of meeting her.

When I look at Gina, Martha recurs to my mind directly.

Once I thought I had eaten of the fruit of the knowledge that there is neither good nor evil.

And nevertheless, there is a feeling here, in my heart,—a silly persistent feeling,—that all that has happened is evil, most evil, whereas it might just as well have been good.—An adventitious otherness; circumstances, or possibly dispositions, make all the difference....

Yes, but I constantly see those eyes,—those pure dark-blue eyes, which had not merited for her such pangs as she has suffered—and the curve of that mouth, her tiny crimson mouth, set hard with pain, and always ready to burst out into lamentations.

She sometimes appears to me as a fiend, whom I hate for her obstinate will to suffer, for the childish and insensate whim of posing as a victim, for her attitudes and her love to 222gloat over herself. She comes with black wings and fluttering white hands; with a beggar’s impudence, she opens out her mourning weeds and shows me her bosom; beneath her white transparent flesh, I can see her purple-coloured heart. And she points to it. It is misery that has stained it so deep a red, filling it with red fire; for there is not a single drop of blood in it any more.

And she strokes that heart with dainty relish, and smiles on me malignantly.

I—am suffering remorse!

To differentiate between good and evil is far from wise. This is why my ethical principles are of such primitive simplicity. All my culture exists only in my brain; what is emotional in me remains elemental and primitive, full of stupid sentiment and of scruples.

And therefore it is that I am so unlike other women, whose great characteristic is that their feelings are cultured.

At times, when I see him afar, standing out from amongst the crowd, splendid in shape and wonderful in beauty, I have a sense of pride that he is mine—my own! Neither a pet cat nor a dog, neither a parrot nor a 223canary: a man of the world, tall, refined, in life’s prime. And this marvellous creature belongs to me. It is truly hard to realize this; and my brain whirls with pleasure at the very thought of such a possession.

When sitting by my side, he loses that charm of his, so extremely rare and of no less value,—the charm of aloofness. He is mine assuredly, my Witold. I know him well, I know him by heart. Never anything but by fits and starts; incorrigible in his defects, which are exceedingly hard to bear; obstinate and childish; his mind consisting of two or at most three strata, the uppermost of which alone contains a little gold; and under this you may root and dig all your life long, and never find anything but sand, and sand, and sand for ever!—But why do I always want to find things out, and go deeper and deeper?

When he kisses, it is as if he were drinking the blood out of me. I turn pale, and am weak and inert—ever more and more inert. In his arms I melt, or am like a flower drooping and dying in the sunbeams. I have not the strength even to raise my eyelids; it is as though the lashes had grown together.

But—and this is an odd thing—I never 224yield beyond a certain point, not determined by any resolve or will of mine, but by instinct and instinct alone. A moment comes when there surges up within me as it were a cold and ironically smiling energy; with one gesture, I repulse that creature full of intemperate desire, enchanting though he is in his thoughtless waywardness.

He always goes away humbled, vanquished, and concealing under the hearty kindness of a farewell kiss the gathering hostility of an everlasting antagonism.

For indeed I have never yet been his “paramour,” in any sense of the word used by Martha, when she questioned me.

Yet, when victorious, I at times wish that I had been defeated. Truly, I cannot understand myself. But I do not so much as attempt to strive against this something within me that can even overcome the natural bent of my temperament.

It is conceivably the instinct of self-preservation, which has in woman, through the immemorial working of heredity, been turned in one and only one special direction, antagonistic to unchastity. The ideal woman would 225prefer death to what is called shame, would she not?

And I also possess this involuntary and automatic tendency, instinctive yet purposeful; and in me it is only very partially blunted by the force of sober reason. But this explains well why my bias towards emancipation has its source and finds its scope chiefly in the intellectual sphere.

Last evening I spent some time in Gina’s studio. I was glad she had asked me to come, for last night there was something or other on at Witold’s club, and I do not like to pass my evenings alone now. I fear my own thoughts, which are never so profound as in solitude and by night. This activity of my mind sometimes exceeds my limited strength to bear it. And when I note that there is in this some resemblance between myself and Martha, I again hear her prediction of vengeance ringing in my ears.—There are moments when oh, how weak, how very weak I feel!

Although I have known Gina for a long time, our relations are always on a strictly formal footing. When we meet at a common friend’s, her behaviour is almost distant; 226when she is playing the part of hostess, she is not only courteous, but eager to show courtesy; and this difference in her bearing is very marked. At home, she is seldom gloomy, will not let the conversation flag for an instant, shows me her paintings, her albums, new periodicals and books; makes me most delicious black coffee; and is incessantly moving about, light-footed and supple, with lithe and snake-like motion, dressed in a long dark gown with trailing skirts, glittering with her gold ear-rings and her metallic belt, amid the easels and canvasses and stools of every shape, and all the admired disorder of her studio. And she tactfully avoids talking about herself, as she does not wish the least shade of gloom to enter our conversation.

“Are you quite comfortable?” she inquires, kindly. “Please don’t stand on ceremony, but sit down on this ottoman: very cosy, believe me. Let me put this skin under your head—the softest fur; as soft as silk. Now isn’t it nice to rest on?”

She fetches me a tiny stand, and places a cup of coffee upon its lower shelf, with teacakes and a tiny glass, so that I have everything close at hand.

227“Now, a little drop of liqueur; that will do nicely, won’t it?”

In her studio a beautiful soft red twilight prevails. The lamp, well shaded, glows in a corner upon a low table. The easels throw black lines, long-drawn, big and grotesque, upon the upper parts of the walls. A glazed roof, which forms the greater part of the ceiling, looks like black velvet, framed in white with pink flowers along the frames.

Gina is to some extent an imitator of Costenoble. The last sketch made by her for a very large painting represents a man, with head thrown back in a pose of fatuous triumph, while at his feet a woman, instinct with subtle delicacy, suggests by her attitude the coils of a writhing serpent.

The sketch, as a whole, is melodramatic, and not very convincing. I prefer Gina as Gina to Gina as an artist.

I love to look at her, sitting close to me, reclining in that big easy-chair, with her long white hands carelessly dangling from the arms of her chair, forming as beautiful and as dainty a picture as any artist could create.

“Won’t you come with me to a concert on Thursday next?” she asks. “Ileska is to recite 228a poem by my ex-fiancé. He will certainly be there—and she too. I have not yet seen her, and should like to do so. There will also be piano and vocal music. Not a bad programme.”

“Of course I shall be much pleased, but—have you considered...?”

“Oh, don’t worry, I shall manage all right.... It can surely make no great impression upon me.”

She smiled.

“I should not have forced myself on you; but since Lola Wildenhoff’s departure, I have no one but you to do me this service. I am now so very easy to upset; and any want of tact jars upon me so!”

“I fancied that you were on pretty intimate terms with Idalia.”

“Not at present. True, she is still, as she always was, as discreet as can possibly be. But she has too much sentiment and sympathy—far too much; and that is annoying and mortifying. You, so tranquil, so quiet, so entirely unmoved, act on my nerves as a sedative. I can talk with you even more openly than with Lola.”

“Oh, have you heard from her?”

229“Yes; I received one letter. She has left the Riviera, and is in Paris now, where she intends to winter along with her husband. Wildenhoff has won a good deal of money, playing at Monte Carlo; and both of them are now spending it, each of them apart.”

“And her nerves, how are they?”

“In perfect condition. She has left all her tears in the sea behind her.... That woman has an uncommonly happy disposition——”

Here followed a short but mournful pause, broken by the entrance of Radlowski, a painter who had been her fellow-student in Munich.

He noticed that my complexion was strikingly out of the common, and begged I would sit for my portrait.

Witold thinks that, of all the women he ever knew, I am the most intelligent. Before he made my acquaintance, he had been climbing up a regular ladder of emotions, of which Martha had formed the topmost rung. I, it appears, form a sort of synthesis of all his loves; I am at the same time the most beloved humanly speaking, and as a woman the most desired of all. He would not have me other 230than I am in any way.—As to this last, I wish I could say the same of him.

And yet I would not exactly have him changed—rather transformed and become another person. It seems that to be as lack-brained as an animal is not sufficient: one must besides have some primitive instincts, one must have some vigour.... What I need now, perforce and irresistibly, is matchless strength—the strength of a hurricane, of a cyclone, of some great natural force let loose.

He loves to talk with me on intellectual matters. “No one can understand his soul so well as I.”

Silent and with eyes cast down, I listen for some time to his commonplaces, uttered indeed in elaborately chosen words, and in a manner not commonplace. And I ponder. I gaze on him—on that mouth so perfectly shaped, so intensely sweet, just a little faded, it seems; and on those eyes which, beneath the tawny lashes that shade them, are so bright with the fever and the melancholy of lassitude, so full of the irresistible charm which surrounds all that is coming to an end, though you would have it remain as beautiful as only youth’s dream can be. And it is then—when 231he has not the slightest inkling of what I feel—that I love him most of all.

To-day I was sorry for him—sorry for all those desires of his, doomed to burn themselves out, never any more to be kindled.

Acting on an impulse, I went up to him, knelt with one knee upon his, put my hands round his head, wonderfully soft and velvet-like to feel, and then, turning his face up, I gazed into those enchanting, nebulous eyes, and said laughingly:

“Oh! in Heaven’s name, Witold, why must you talk about everything? You know well enough that this is not what you were made for, don’t you? Pray remember that your one strong point is love.”

And then, for the first time, I kissed him upon the lips, not waiting to be kissed by him.

He kissed me back again, but the kiss was cool, brotherly.

“I regret,” he observed, “that you show me so little of your beautiful soul, and refuse to acknowledge mine to be of a kindred nature. Yet I understand so well your dreams of the Arctic plains that you possess, of your grottoes, glimmering green in the Northern Lights; of your boundless and ever peacefully 232slumbering ocean! I am for ever very near to you....”

“That may be; but I am always very far away from you,” I retorted, with an attempt at pleasantry. Then I whispered in his ear:

“Love my snows: for there are volcanoes seething beneath them.”

At the words, his mouth fastened on to my neck, and he bit into my flesh with a kiss that gave me exquisite pain together with maddening delight.

My eyelids closed, my lips parted; I was about to faint. And I felt his mouth upon mine, and it was most sweet, with the savour of withered roses. And I drank of the crimson wine of his kisses, and it was strong as death.

And the crimson wine inebriated me.

But there came an evil moment. Was it Death, or was it Life, that then laid its cold hand upon my heart, and looked upon me with the eyes of wisdom?

The revulsion frees me, tearing me from his close embrace.—And I hated him, for he did not understand, and was unwilling to leave me. Yet, had he indeed left me thus, I should have resented it and longed for him!

233No, never I shall be won by the graces of a young page with tawny eye-lashes, nor by the refined softness and subtlety of any art whatever. Strength alone can win me. As the cat carries off its little ones in its jaws, so let Him carry me away; and whithersoever he may take me, thither I shall go.

When we entered the concert-hall, it was already full. Gina was looking like a ghost.

We saw a good many people we knew, and several gentlemen came to present their respects. They were rather surprised to see Gina there, looked at her not without some tender interest, and seemed to scent a quarry.

Czolhanski, who as representative of his paper was sitting in the first row, also perceived us.

“Where is Mr. Witold?” he asked, looking round the hall. “I have been waiting for him, but he does not come.”

“Unfortunately,” I answered in a rather dry tone, “I am not in a position to enlighten you. However, if he has made an appointment with you, he may be expected to come.”

In reality, however, I was quite sure that Witold would be absent. He had even advised 234me not to go to the concert, for he particularly wished me to be at home and with him. But I would not disappoint Gina.

“He has promised to be here for sure,” repeated Czolhanski, as he went away.

I soon perceived Owinski walking up the central passage by the side of a lady in black attire, and no longer young. He was holding some tickets and endeavouring (in vain, shortsighted as he was) to find the corresponding numbers of the chairs. A pretty girl walked by the side of the lady in black; her dark eyes sparkled, and she was evidently much impressed by the important nature of the present performance. She spoke in a low tone to her fiancé, seeming to banter him on his embarrassment, and found the seats herself. They sat down at no great distance from us, on the farther side of the central passage.

Owinski left the ladies by themselves, and was returning to seek for something or other, when he happened to perceive us, as he passed by.

He changed colour slightly, and then approached to present his respects, kissing Gina’s hand in silence. She, too, neither spoke a word nor lifted her eyes.

235I congratulated him on having got so first-rate an artiste as Ileska to recite his poem; he answered in a few polite words, and withdrew.

There was a pause.

From his shapely tapering fingers, a tall young musician shook some heavy drops of mingled sounds, then sprinkled them about, and they grew ever more and more beautiful; now daintily rounded off—musical pearls, as it were—now broken and hard and angular like stones. Now thunder was heard; the hail pattered and rattled; and someone set up a low murmured wailing, and Gina hung down her head; then sunrise was triumphantly ushered in to the pealing of bells. And the slender artist in black evening dress went on, as before, slowly, drowsily, letting his blossom-like hands fall dropping upon the piano keys, soft as velvet under their touch, and suddenly, with a gesture too rapid to be seen, he shed a perfect shower of pearls round us, from the inexhaustible treasury of his kingly munificence.

Never yet have I at any concert been able to fall under the spell of music.

I listen, and I look. I may even feel dazzled. 236But, to be spell-bound! That requires seclusion, concentration.... There are times when I prefer a barrel-organ to a concert!

I coldly admired the astonishing technique of the young virtuoso, now playing in public for the first time, and the extraordinary charm he possessed, which was like hypnotism or magic. Gina sat enthralled and following each motion of his hands. She no longer cast any glances in the direction of her victorious rival; but sombre clouds were passing over her face, and she knit her golden brows and frowned heavily.

I glanced towards Owinski; but on the way my glance and a look from two black and most observant eyes crossed each other. So! She was scrutinizing Gina!

Silence came; and then a clapping of hands: the first-rate actress, who was thin and unattractive, had appeared upon the platform. She bent her head slightly in a formal bow, and looked round the hall from under gloomy brows. The audience waited, expectant and agitated.

A clear, distinct, cold voice was heard vibrating through the brilliantly lighted hall.

Then, as if preparing for a surprise, it 237gradually grew mysterious, soft, and low. You thought of marble terraces, leading to subterranean vaults. The words seemed to take a sculptured form from her diction and utterance; their tones went lower, lower, lower still, became the muttering of a hushed lamentation, the rumbling sounds of a scarce audible curse, and the profoundest depths of the agony of death.

At intervals, Ileska would pause to cast her eyes down, and—in an ecstatic concentration of self-suggested rapture—wait while her wonderful voice, reverberated from the white and lofty walls, would echo back and fill her attentive ears....

And then she would again open her great sombre eyes, and continue her recitation, inspired as it were by the sound of that strange voice of hers.

Indeed, she gave so much of her own special individuality to the poem she was so admirably reciting, that I did not at first recognize it as the work of Owinski. Gina, wrung with anguish, cast up her eyes and threw back her head, looking steadfastly into the glare of the electric candelabra, and blinking now and then, while a couple of tears were sparkling 238in each outer corner of her eyes. She was trying to force them back into her heart by that means. Ah, yes; I know that trick, I do, how well!... But it was unsuccessful: indeed, it does fail from time to time. Once two translucent pearls trickled slowly on to her temples, and were lost in the tresses of her brown hair.

After Ileska, Mlle. Iseult Lermeaux, a singer who would, according to Czolhanski, be the great attraction of the concert, came forward on the platform. Her figure, as soon as I saw it, struck me as like some person strangely familiar. Could it—could it be?... No, the thing was incredible. I drew my brows together, that I might concentrate my attention and make sure. No, no; only a fearful unaccountable pain had taken possession of me for an instant. It was Gina’s own pain that I felt, reflected within myself.—An inexplicable bewitchment, that perhaps has its reason in the drawn-out, lazy, lascivious, dreamy notes of that song of a Southern land, which she is singing: yes, it may be that.

No. No. NO.—It is she, none but she ... she beyond all doubt. Now I know; and my knowledge is hell to me. Yes, I know all.

239Ah! but she is fair, divinely fair! All the potency of the senses, all the exquisite refinements of art have come together to create this irresistible glamour that she spreads around her. No, no,—not a word! Those eyes, so amazing in their fairy-like beauty, and the long lashes that fringe them—those drowsy yet unfathomable eyes, like those of her whom King Cophetua loved so well! Yes, and it is her mouth, too—that wondrous, wondrous mouth, now pale and wan through excess of delights, either felt or known in dreams only.—But, Heavens! I can see this mouth pressed close to that other mouth, sweet beyond all sweetness,—that mouth fragrant with its terrible death-bringing scent, its scent as of withered roses!...

This—this is death!

Not so. Oh, no, it is not death: this is Life! Understand the truth.—It is life; behold it now: life in very deed.

You see now?—All is clear. It was for that reason that Czolhanski was awaiting him here. It was for that reason that he wished you not to come, and that, because you came, he stayed away.

Is—is not this yet Death?

240No. It is Life: Life that, out of the accents of that voice, supremely melodious, drowsy, sleepy, yet replete with fire from an unfathomable abyss, out of the lazy, lascivious snaky curves of those limbs of hers; out of those glossy shoulders, so shapely, so slenderly fashioned, and of those outstretched naked arms, in hue like pale dead gold, has come forth towards you in all its hostile might!

Gina, lost in dreary amazement, was staring at me.

“What ails you?... Had we not better get away from here?”

We were both of us presently standing, frantic with pain, in the street which, lit up by the flaring windows of the great hall, was as bright as day.

“Let us go away—away!—Home? On no account.—Get drunk somewhere—lose my senses—shed some one’s blood....”

I was raving like one in a delirium.

“I beg you, Gina, come, come along—I can’t bear any more!” I stammered.

She hesitated. “Unescorted and alone—to a night-restaurant?”

“What does it matter?”

241“Better have made an appointment—somewhere—with Mr. Imszanski....”

Then I burst into laughter. “Unescorted? Ha, ha, ha!” I roared, as we got into a four-wheeler. “Forgive me, but even so,—I fancy neither of us has much to lose!

“To Lipka’s? I will not. No, I entreat you. No memories of things gone by—A hotel, any hotel!—or a first-rate night-restaurant.—Fast! As fast as horses can go! Faster, faster!”

Off they went, the great black half-starved horses. A few street-lamps flashed by in the dark night. A few jolts from the rubber-tired wheels made us sway about: and again it is all bright around. Oh! how I am tortured!

A cold blast blows, muddy pools splash, a drizzling rain sets in.... Oh, yes, yes; all this is very real: fact, not fiction.

Now a brilliantly lit doorway is before us; now a staircase, adorned with flowers and mirrors....

Gina was eyeing me in astonishment, but she said not one word. She no doubt could not guess what had come over me; but, in her state of mind, the strangest occurrence must 242have seemed quite commonplace. And then, she no longer felt so much alone in her distress; beside my madness her state of tearful dejection seemed but a small matter.

The great saloon was filled as usual with specimens of the jeunesse dorée, with financiers, and with courtesans. We attracted a good deal of attention. I had assumed the gay mien of a girl desperately bent on fun, and looked about on all sides, with lively glances at everybody.—Several men spoke to me.

In the passage on to which the doors of the private supper-rooms opened, we were met by a young but full-grown satyr, who slipped his arm under mine, and looked into my face. And yet I did not cease to laugh. It was revenge I craved—debauch—oblivion of all!

Gina’s terrified looks were expostulating with me.

“We have nothing to lose,” I returned to their speechless appeal. And thereupon she too fell a-laughing strangely.

The creature whose arm was in mine kept chattering incessantly ... about I know not what. A waiter respectfully opened the door of a small private room, and we all three went in.

243“I presume, ladies, you have been at the play?” our gentleman inquired, having remarked the dresses we wore.

“Ha, ha!” I answered. “Right you are. Been at one play, and come to another.” There was not less coarse ribaldry in my tones than in my words.

“That’s first-rate.—The bill of fare, waiter!—What will you take?”

“To eat, nothing. We want to drink, to drink, to drink!”

“Very good!” he exclaimed, in a tone of pleased surprise. “Coffee and liqueur—cognac—champagne?”

“All right: anything and everything, my dear man!”

Several bottles were standing on the table. Our companion, having leisurely prepared a mayonnaise, set to munching the lobster with great relish, showing his white teeth in a grin.—Gina drank, but was mute.—I babbled incessantly, endeavouring to pass for a cocotte. We were a puzzle to the young man nevertheless, and his behaviour towards us was lacking in assurance.

“Do you know, Madame,” he at last blurted out, addressing me, “it will be better fun if 244we make a quartette.... I have an acquaintance in the saloon here: a capital fellow he is.”

Then, turning to Gina: “You also, Madame,” he said, “should have a little diversion.”

I protested very strongly.

“Not the least need for him; let him stay where he is. You are what we want.”

I held him back, putting my hands upon his shoulders, and my face close to the animal face of that unknown man.

He smiled, much flattered: his white teeth gleamed.

“We shall not keep you long, if you wish to leave us. But for the present, you have to stay with us.”

Some one—who could it be?—filled my liqueur-glass with cognac again and again. Presently, a crimson blood-red smoke began to float from corner to corner of the small cabinet, papered with red and gold, and filled with the sound of his loud voice and the reek of tobacco. All round me, everything was afire and aflame.

He was drawing near; in every limb of mine I felt his approach. His jaws, chewing 245still, though his supper was over; his tiny eyes, to which expectancy gave a phosphorescent glow; and the hot fulsome breath from his gaping chops, embellished with splendidly shining fangs and incisors; and that blond upstanding moustache of his:—I had all these close to my face. He was unsteadily leaning over, tilting his chair towards the sofa, touching and fingering the gauze trimming of my bodice, and seeking my lips with his.

My brain, intensely excited, showed me things as they were. But I half closed my eyes, and looked at him through the lids as though about to faint.

All would not do.... My mind was sober: its powers came into full play.

At that instant I drew back, and—with all the force of my rage, hate, despair, and revenge—revenge for everything and for us all—I dealt him a furious blow with my clenched fist, right between those phosphorescent greenish lustful eyes!

He reeled, and fell along with his chair on to the floor. Gina was at the door in a flash.

I flung down upon the table all the money I had by me, and, slamming the door behind us, rushed out in Gina’s company.

246No one was in the passage. I walked out of the saloon, my face by this time wearing an unconcerned expression. In the cloakroom we put on the hooded mantles we had taken to the concert. I went home, shorn of all my strength, and in a state of complete collapse.

An astonishing woman, that Gina! She never asked me for any sort of explanation.

“This explosion scene has done me good,” was her indifferent and only comment.

From this day, I am her friend.

I have told Gina all about the whole business, from beginning to end. She said I was terribly naïve. “Things could not possibly have turned out otherwise.” She advised me to forgive Witold. It was only if he had loved another that I could have had any cause for complaint. But such a passing connection as that!... Besides, I had no rights over him; and moreover, he was a man!... Owinski, too, had been several times unfaithful to her; and yet, though their relations had been very different from ours, she had always forgiven him: though indeed not without difficulty.... It was only now that the inwardness of 247suffering had come home to her.... Had he been willing, she would have agreed to his having a dozen others besides his wife!

“Never would I agree to such a thing as that,” I replied. “If Witold gave me up for the love of some other woman, then I should at least be sure that my misery was of some service to others, and that there was on both sides equality of rights, since I too might have just as well fallen in love with another.... But if he is false to me for a mere plaything and to amuse himself with what does not mean any more to him than a good cigar, then I am absolutely unable to act, and quite defenceless against him. I shall never, never be able to do the same. And, between the measure of his guilt and of my retaliation for it, there is such huge disproportion as makes me ridiculous in my own eyes.... Why, when Roslawski forsook me, I was also most miserable: but in his behaviour at least there never was anything one whit so mean, so dirty, as this.”

“I have not the slightest wish,” returned Gina, “to impose my philosophy of life upon you.”

248He has excused himself; has assured me, even sworn that I am in error. I have refused to believe him. Women are hugely credulous, credulous in the extreme.

I have not seen him this whole week. He came here twice, but was denied entrance, as I ordered. I don’t care for the forgiving system. I don’t care to become like Martha....

However, if I act thus, it is on principle only; in reality, I am tortured by his absence. My feelings incline me to believe that he says true.... Surely he cannot possibly be thus false to me.

I fear greatly lest, if he should come again....

No, no.—I am going to call on Wiazewski, who has of late been quite neglectful.

I started by complaining of things in general, and with but little of personal feeling. He has hitherto known nothing about my relations with Witold. And I am also ashamed of this love, in which I have been playing so ludicrous a part.

“... And to think of the years, the golden years of youth, gliding, gliding, gliding by, 249beautiful, but empty as some marble bath of ancient days!...”

“But I told you once that men of modern times do not care to bathe in those waters. They are too clear, too cold; they run with too swift a stream, and with too many, oh! far too many an eddy and deep hollow. Janka, they fail to attract.”

“Let me say, Stephen, that I am unhappy, and therefore come to you. You, as a friend, have some responsibilities toward me; you can’t get out of them. All that I am is going to pieces at this time; and I do not know whether life or death will come of the change which is taking place.”

I had never yet yearned for Witold as at that moment, though I knew perfectly well that no one had done me the wrong which he had done.

“What about Helen?” I asked, with friendly interest.

“There again! I have been disappointed in her.”

“What, she! Unfaithful to you? Can that be?”

“Ah, no! I, rather than she, have been at fault in that respect.”

250“Well then?”

“Well, what shall I say? I have broken with her.”

Forsaken! She too had then come to swell the list, after Martha, Gina, and myself!

“That’s horrible. She was so very much in love with you.”

“Whereas I, alas! have a preference for women who care for nothing very much.”

“Yet I know you have been moody of late.”

“And you are right: yes, I have.”

“Well, what was it that troubled your Olympian calm? The parting scene—tears—upbraiding?”

“Pas le moins du monte. She went away without uttering a word.”

“Then what was it?”

“That I have simply lost my belief in the last dogma left to me from childhood. Everybody complains that women are too devoid of heart and brains and soul; and I now find that it is in vain I have sought for a woman bereft of those superfluous appendages.”

“But Helen, as I understood, answered your ideal of a woman to perfection?”

“I fondly thought she did. Oh, you cannot imagine what I would give to meet a woman 251really soulless, primitive: you know,—a creature absolutely and bewilderingly unenlightened.”

“Really, I quite dislike you to-day, Stephen. You are positively in bad form!”

“Please forgive me.”

“What special mark of her culture has Helen given you?”

“Culture? That would have been by far too bad. Besides, it was something perhaps even worse: a mark of character, firm conviction.”

“Up to now,” he continued, “I had been quite satisfied with the girl; so, a few days ago, I proposed that she should give up her employment and come to live with me. Would you believe it? I met with a point-blank refusal. You fancy, perhaps, it was marriage she wanted, or something of that kind; and, word of honour! If she had, I would have taken her willingly.... Not at all. She told me sententiously that ‘although she recognized free love, she never would be a kept woman!’ What do you think of that, eh? Ha, ha! It’s something astounding, isn’t it?”

But I could not laugh. I sat silent, thinking 252of many things, far more pained than amused.

Stephen continued: “A girl with such splendidly expressionless eyes of a bright azure, like a piece of water! No shadow of any yearning for the Beyond, no shadow of anything like intellect or brightness of thought!... By day they reflected the sun, her lamp in the evening, and my own eyes at night. They had the beautiful dead gleam of pearls. She might have been less pretty: with such eyes, she was pretty enough for me. And then, that slow, sleepy, brainless voluptuousness in her glance! And her white flashing teeth, too! I tell you, there is not a single spot or flaw in any one of them; her molars are like the molars of a ruminant, large and flat. She did, it is true, write me letters without necessity; but, through my influence and under my direction, she had come even to forget her alphabet. She truly gave me the impression (false as I know now) that she never thought at all.

“And that girl ‘recognizes free love’! Such a surprise may well make one throw all the beliefs of one’s life on the dustheap!”

All this talk of his seemed to me decidedly shallow and foolish. Why on earth was he 253trying, by means of that far-fetched theory of his, to justify the fact that the woman simply bored him?

He has now made up his mind to seek for his future Dulcineas amongst kitchen-maids.

“Dressmakers have decidedly too much culture for my taste,” he said.

“I sincerely hope you may be successful,” was my parting wish.

Witold, contrary to my expectations, has not yet called again. There is something going on that is beyond me, incomprehensible.

I am assailed by innumerable thoughts which make me turn pale with fear.

He, too, is possibly “seeking oblivion,” as I was; but he is scarce likely to stop in time, like me. Moreover, his vengeance will not, like mine, be a more horrible pain than the injury itself.

He has a supremely great advantage over me, and the conditions of the struggle are the most unequal possible.

Will he delay coming for long? Is it conceivable that he has given me up for ever?

I was in tears all this evening.

Idalia felt it her duty to try and comfort 254me. A kind, lovable girl she is. And she knows how to deal skilfully with “semi-tones” of every description. Her eyes are gentle, her face a little faded and careworn; there is something maternal about her.

“We take everything so very seriously, so very much au tragique,” she says. “And that, you see, puts us more in their power. We should analyse things less, and learn rather to glide over them. Analysis is a two-edged weapon: it easily turns and wounds you. Do endeavour to pass along with a cursory look about you, even with half-closed eyes; things will seem different at once. Don’t cry any more: and if he should come, the servant is to let him in, is she not?”

“On no account; on no account;” I cried, in a fury.

“But why?” she murmured, gently stroking my hair. “Why? To let him in—that does not bind you in any way: you are free to act as you like. And why not hear what he has to say?”

“Because I have heard him already.”

“And you would not believe him? You were not right in that. It is so easy to believe!... And whether the thing is true or not, 255what does it matter to you? What is true in some part of time may be false in some part of space; and vice versa. A fact is true, but only for the day. When he is beside you, and assures you of his love, you will have the greatest of all truths: the indubitable truth in the present. What took place before?... What is to come later?... Never mind: it is all the same!”

And I think she is in the right.

Every now and then Czolhanski comes and calls upon me. He came yesterday, too. This, I think, is rather too much. God! how I detest that man!... He enters, sits down, stays for three mortal hours, pays me a few compliments, lets out a few commonplaces about the lamentable position of a journalist: a man untidy, unshaven, rather dirty in his ways, and very pretentious: his finger-nails are in mourning and his hands always moist. No use to take up a newspaper, even to be more uncivil to him still: he will not take the hint and go. Once he wrote a sonnet to me! Journalism has evidently been the death of his poetical talent. But, Lord! what does it all matter after all? He will kiss my hands, 256though I always beg him not to, he disgusts me so. If I were in his place, I should go and hang myself! And he—he is quite unaware of my feelings, and very much self-satisfied.

Yesterday Radlowski came as well, and for the first time, under the pretext of a message from Gina. His company would be most pleasant, for he is so very extremely young; and his eyes sparkle like a diamond in the sun, with a sort of delectation so lively that it seems unnatural; painfully so. He has again asked me to sit for my portrait.

I have promised: but I cannot—I cannot as yet.

What is the reason of Idalia’s playing so very poorly to-day? She writhes and twists herself to and fro at the piano, with more than sensual affectation; she suddenly and convulsively coils and uncoils herself like a snake, during the more brilliant passages: and she goes on playing interminably, from dusk till far, far into the deep, dark, never-ending night.

And why is she doing so, this day of all 257others, when all my strength to bear it has left me?

The longing, the pain I feel, is stifling, is strangling me: it bites at my throat, and I shudder to feel it cling round my feet like ivy, together with the thought of my blighted joys.

These I see lying on heaps of tropical flowers—lying in long rows, naked, asleep, and beautiful as dreams of what is past forever.... Over them there blows a gentle breeze, scattering the flower-petals upon their fairy-like forms; but it does not wake them from slumber. Only, from time to time, do their long black eye-lashes open and shut, slowly and rhythmically, as the silken wings of a fluttering butterfly. They are dreaming of their delights.

Say, O say! why does all this give me such infinite pain?

And then there always come to me haunting visions, which are my childhood! A dark outline of forest-trees; a perspective fading into infinite, infinite distance, and the clear waters wherein life lay hidden once upon a time. The vision stands, I know not how, for the times of my childhood. Music always 258renders concrete even the most abstract of things.

Something is tearing my soul; it is the impossibility of any delusion about....

Ah, do not, do not bite thus at my throat!... I cannot weep!... And do not make the sharp-edged music of the violin soft by the dark velvet touch of your smooth hand!... And do not, do not press my bosom so; my heart will burst!... And do not hug my body with that tender embrace, that Lesbian caress!... Nor twine like ivy round my feet, uttering that awful moan for blighted joys!...

Witold, O Witold! behold, I return to you! O sleep, O life! Yes, I return....

I have written the following short note to Witold to-day:

“If you wish, you may come. J. D.”

It breathed the spite—the unavailing and very plebeian spite—of my humiliation. I fully recognized this: and yet I chose to send the note, thus styled.

I expected that he would come like a conqueror, triumphant and self-assured; and 259thinking so, I for the time being ceased to love him at all.

As it happened, he has belied my expectations.

On my return from the office, I found him already here. He was quite childishly delighted, and for a long while I could not free myself from his rapturous embrace.

“Janka, Janka! how cruel, how cruel you have been!” he cried out in broken words amongst his kisses. “You are a monster of barbarity! And of stubbornness too! For you know so well how much I love you!... You should have had trust in me, as I have trust in you.... Have I ever given you any cause for mistrust? I hide nothing from you, nothing whatsoever!... Oh, my dearest, my only one, my darling!... I know that you will be mine one day—mine! It must be so.... Could I ever have exposed myself to the danger of losing your love? Think of that. Think how different you are from all other women.... I know you could never have forgiven me, if....”

So handsome, so kindly, so affectionate! I knew how intensely I loved him. And then, in the secret depths of my heart of hearts, I 260was aware that I could forgive him anything in the world.

Yet I said: “My love for you would then instantly turn to hate, as it did for the last few days....”

He feigned to be horribly frightened. We were both of us in ecstasies of joy.

Long, long, did we speak together of our love. We should love each other forever and forever: and with what intensity!... Only we were to have more of mutual trust, and to be more tolerant one for the other: there would be no more of those former bickerings which had been so painful to both of us.

Closer and closer we drew. Hallucinated with rapture, I was almost out of my mind. The air around me grew rosy, and the walls had a purple glow, and the lamp was burning—how can I express it? Black, quite black! Bending down his head, he fixed his eyes on me.

“Janka!” he said, with low but clear-cut articulation; “Janka!” His voice was changed; it was strangled and seething with emotion. There was in it just a touch of surprise—surprise at the victory which he now foresaw.

261I was startled, and a shiver ran through me. A noise as of a whirlwind murmured confusedly in my ears; my throat was filled with a hot suffocating fragrance, and I felt as if the air I breathed had grown solid and came in morsels.

“Janka, Janka,” he whispered again, as if struggling with his deep perturbation; for he was greatly moved.

In a sort of hypnotic trance, I stared hard into his dimly glistening eyes. I kissed his mouth.... All my soul, with all its faculties, transported from the infinitely distant confines of the world of thought, was concentrated and poured out in that one kiss of mine!

Ah! I cannot understand what it was that at such a moment held me back, since I and all that was mine had now been transformed and had passed into one desire alone. It was no longer thirst, it was hunger—raging, ravenous hunger. I clung to him with all my might, and whispered and stammered a string of broken incoherent words; and, in a delirium of mingled agony and bliss, I sighed under my breath:

“Oh, my only one; oh, my own!”

And afterwards—afterwards, when he had 262left my side, ungratified and disappointed, as he ever had been—then, with a burst of heart-rending tears, I threw myself down upon the floor near the door which had just closed on him, and listened to the sound of his footsteps, and murmured imploringly:

“Oh, come—come—come back! I am yours!”

But had he come back—I knew it well—I should have resisted then, as always.

And perhaps it is true to say that such a thirst as mine was cannot possibly be quenched by any delight on earth!

All is once more as it was of old. I am much in love, happy (to some extent), and slightly sarcastic about things in general. Witold comes daily; he is good and tender to me beyond words.

Sometimes our conversation flags. Then we read together—novels and poems only; for Witold, scientific literature is non-existent. A volume of Owinski’s poems, just published, has given us many a pleasant hour.

She is right, Idalia: I had taken all things—and that also—too much in earnest. At 263present, I am trying to live more practically than I ever did.

Of the present situation, nothing can come—neither marriage nor anything else. So, as I reckon, it may last at the most one year more. I have to be prepared for that, and let the parting come by degrees and as easily as possible; so I am looking beforehand for some rock or other to which I may cling when wrecked. Now and then, when I think of my ideals once cherished in the past, the notion still comes to me (though rarely) of a love both deep and wise.

Better seek something far other than love—an “aim in life”—some idea—asceticism—even such as a nunnery can provide! “Dans la bête assouvie un ange se réveille!” Yes, but—is it “assouvie”? Well, I am rather tired, not only of love, but of the whole atmosphere I am living in.

In truth, disdain of all things is best of all. Yet again, disdain itself would be one of the things to be disdained!

I am curiously entangled at present, and can scarcely recognize myself as “Her of the Ice-Plains.” In this continual struggle with myself, my strength has been exhausted.

264Ah, yes; another incident. Czolhanski has proposed to me in the most naïve fashion imaginable. Although I am a woman of “advanced” ideas (and they say such a one hardly can make a good wife), still he is not alarmed; he trusts in me! Besides, he could not live with any woman unable to understand him.... Also, he gets two hundred roubles a month, which, together with my office salary, ... And so on.

I have refused him categorically, hopelessly, irrevocably. And—which is much more strange—I have done so without the shadow of a smile.

When I am very weary and out of sorts, I go and call up Wiazewski. There are people who resemble those ships which were formerly used by slave traders to convey their human freight: these had a double hold. And Wiazewski is one of such men.

He allows any one to overhaul his soul on the asking, freely and frankly. Only he does not like them, when they come to the hold, to knock too hard: the hollow sound underneath would betray his secret. Beneath the false bottom, there is a dark den into which 265he smuggles those he has enslaved to his will, never to go out free into the world again. The knowledge of this would spoil his reputation in society as an estimable man.

“Do you know, Stephen, you look like a man who has a bit of a tragedy upon his conscience, and is concealing it.”

He laughed. “Since when has Janka begun to grow romantic?”

“Since I fell in love, of course!”

“You!!” Astounded, he stared at me.

“My dear friend, what can there be to surprise you in that?”

“I really ... no, really I do not know. I was only taken aback. Certainly, on your side, it is but a natural thing. Don’t you see? I had grown so accustomed to look on you as belonging to a third sex.”

“There now, how unjust you have been! I on my own part have always looked on you as a man.”

“But come, tell me with whom you are in love, and whether your bliss is all that fancy painted it.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Bliss! It is you who are romantic now, 266Stephen. At the best, I am not bored. And the less bliss I have, the less bored I am!”

“Then you are not bored?”

“Oh, I am—very much so at times. At such moments, I come and call on you. I have learned to cherish our disinterested friendship ever more and more.”

He moved as if annoyed a little; then he lit a cigarette.

“Whom?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whom do you love?”

“Oh, an ideal according to your own taste. A bon entendeur salut.” Note: All the better if you have caught my meaning.

“Won’t you tell me?”

“No, I won’t. Guess, if you want to know.”

“A fool?”

“To some extent, yes.”

“Handsome?”

“Too much so by far.”

“Wealthy?”

“Indifferently.”

“It is—it is Imszanski! Et tu, Janka!” he exclaimed, looking into my face with a curious expression.

267I knew what question was implied by his look, and slowly shook my head.

He breathed more freely.

“And yet I should never have imagined....”

“How’s that? I have only been practising your own theory of love.”

“Ye—es, but....”

“Well, but what?”

“This is quite another thing. Of primitive elemental simplicity he has nothing at all.”

“It is true. In that point, and in that point only, has my practice departed from your theory. But I think good art is not unfrequently preferable to problematical simplicity.”

“Yes, no doubt. And, moreover....”

“Pray continue.”

“I myself have ended by abandoning that theory of mine. My experience with Helena exploded it definitely. I have radically changed my attitude; now I am without any conviction at all on the subject.”

“But I imagined that the fallen edifice of your theory was to be restored by the aid of kitchen-maids.”

“Vain hopes! They have proved impracticable, even to myself. My experiments in 268that quarter only completed the ruin of the theory.”

“Well, then, what are you going to do about it?”

“I am seeking love.”

“Oh, dear! Et tu! And it was to you I came on purpose to get a rest from it. There must be some fatality about all this—the atmosphere is vitiated everywhere.... Stephen, have mercy, have mercy!”

He smiled compassionately.

“So soon as that? Janka, how soon you get tired!”

We went to a café, where we saw Gina sitting along with Radlowski at one of the tables. There were none vacant, so we joined them at theirs, and I introduced the men to each other. Wiazewski objects to artists; but he must have been pleased with this one, whose exterior is that of a typical “gentleman.” I was in exceedingly good spirits, and set about flirting with the painter. He was now much changed from what he was when I saw him last. His eyes are not bright any more, and he looks a good deal older. We fell to talking upon speculative subjects, and I strove to be original and sparkling. Radlowski’s eyes 269were fixed steadfastly on my face all the while.

“Well, I see you are far more of a woman than I had ever thought you.”

My answer to these words of Stephen’s was only a look, but a look of triumph. At last it had come—this, the hardest of all victories to win!... Unfortunately, it came too late....

“In a few years,” he added, “when all your faculties are duly balanced, you will be an exceptional being. Perhaps a model ‘Woman of the Future.’”

“Oh, anything but that. I take no interest except in what goes on within me. If I am at all elated, it is not on account of what is there, but of the fact that these forces are incessantly in conflict with my will. I am proud of my imperfections which turn to perfections, of my ideas which treat one another with mutual contempt, of my instincts, so strongly opposed to my logic; of my atavistic tendencies, which it is a finer and more momentous work to unearth and to note down than to put into practice. I am proud of the eternal Becoming, teeming with riches, dazzling with the wildest hues, deafening with harsh discordancies, rushing on, moving 270hither and thither, turning in spiral ascension, or even spinning round. Yes, I am proud that this Becoming still goes on. I prefer a hundred times the ‘Transitional Woman’ to the ‘Woman of the Future’: for she who is transitional promises ever so much more than the other, when perfect, can fulfil.

“Neither you,” I said, turning to Gina, “with your quasi-Pantheistic theory of love; nor Madame Wildenhoff, with her volatile and almost man-like eroticism; nor Idalia, nor Martha—none of you is, any more than I am, a woman of the future; you are full of exaggerated theories, of crotchets, of false notions, of atavistic trends and extreme views. Yet I prefer you to that free and happy woman of our dreams, in whom desire, conscious and in perfect equilibrium, will not, however intense it may be, trespass beyond the limits of its possibility to be satisfied. Yes! You I prefer to the most perfect of standards, to the very best of patterns, to the wisest and most consistent of—Philistines!”

Gina said gloomily:

“Then what is it all for—this ghastly struggle, this agony of Becoming?”

“For the glory of the last specimens of our 271species. We are tending towards this goal: that the abstract type of Woman may perish as soon as it is realized, even as the abstract type of Man perished also. Having attained that level, we shall, together with Man, begin to evolve in the wider sphere of our common humanity. The struggle and the war of the elements which make up our nature will still continue in a new Becoming, but no longer in the narrow space of womanhood, which leaves us too little room to breathe.”

“All the same,” said Stephen, in conclusion, “our descendants will envy us very, very much, since we live in the days of the Last Woman.”

“Let us hope that the present period may endure for some time; say, until the gorilla is extinct.”

Stephen’s feeling of mediæval worship for woman was shocked at my words: “Women and gorillas named together!” he sighed.

Whilst we were going home, after taking leave of Gina and Radlowski, he said, hesitatingly and in some confusion:

“Janka, do not make a pastime of that Imszanski any more: he is not worth playing with.”

“Well said, but?...”

272“Hear me out, Janka. Till the present moment, I was not aware that I loved you and you alone.... May I hope, or is it quite out of the question?”

“Good God, Stephen! pray don’t think of proposing! I got a proposal only the other day. There must be something in the air—infection—the approach of spring! At any rate, I am not in a consenting mood now; so let me be.”

I laughed, but was in reality very much upset.

When last together, Gina asked me to come over to her apartments, as she wanted me to read something she had.

It was almost gayly that she welcomed me in. Her eyes had lost their customary look of apathy, and shone with a strange fire.

“Owinski is going to be married this very week,” she remarked, as if stating a fact which did not concern her. “Have you read his poems?”

“I have; Witold and I read them together.”

“One of his poems had been dedicated to me; I know, for I myself saw it in proof—a proof that I myself corrected. And now the 273dedication has been removed from the title. When he received the revised proof, he probably crossed it off.”

She then took two closely written sheets of letter-paper out of a drawer.

“A letter from her!” she explained.

“To you!”

“Yes. Just read it.”

It ran thus:

“I have long been wishing to write to you, Madame; and if I have not made up my mind till now, this was neither from any want of courage on my part, nor any misplaced sense of delicacy, which would in this case be not only exaggerated, but groundless. It simply proceeded from the fact that, as I think the greatest alleviation of sorrow to consist in the possibility of hating some one on account of it, I did not like to deprive you of the object of your hate. For I am of opinion that, as soon as you have read this, you will not think me your enemy any more.

“If I write now, it is because I believe that, in lieu of such consolation, I am able to afford you another; and I do so without the knowledge of my fiancé, for I have my doubts 274whether it would be pleasant to him or the reverse; and besides, I do not consider him as the sole means by which we might come to understand each other.

“The evening on which we were both under the same roof has remained with me as a painful memory. Not because I then felt at all to blame on your account. As I had been aware from the beginning that O. was affianced, I played no active part in the matter to attract him. Any other woman might have been in my place, and done just the same, so far as you were concerned. O. was at that time in want of a figure upon his life chessboard, such as is called a formally affianced wife; so we met and encountered each other by mere chance—a happening without logical relevance to anything. Nor was it because I felt for you what is called pity. My mind would never consent to abase you by venturing to entertain such a feeling; and I think, too, that I am an object of pity not less than yourself. No; the meeting was painful to me only for the following reason; I myself, looking on things as an outsider, cannot help having a fellow-feeling for all who have been worsted; so that I experienced self-dislike. It was 275painful, because I was present to your mind as a stranger, a successful rival, nothing but the fiancée of your fiancé, a hostile, unknown She: not a woman, drawn close to you by your and my sense of our hard fate. It was painful to me to sit so far apart from you, to be unable to approach you and look into your thoughtful eyes with eyes that were not less thoughtful, and kindly too, and talk to you about many a subject far more important than the law which thrusts us apart: the law, known from time immemorial, that love is not everlasting, and that it needs variety.

“To write of my friendly feeling towards you would certainly seem somewhat paradoxical. I will therefore say no more than this; I deeply and sincerely esteem you, as one after my own heart, as a New Woman, a woman conscious of her own value and of her rights; I appreciate you also for your subtlety of emotion, and your original artistic talent. And then, besides, I have a certain debt of gratitude which is due to you personally, and owing to the fact that O. has for several years been pretty faithful to you; and thus the list of his transitory amours which distress me so is considerably shorter than it would otherwise have 276been. I bear you no grudge, no, not even when O. (for my delectation!) goes back into the past, and tells me all about his former love for you.

“I trust you feel no longer any instinctive dislike or aversion for me; do you? And now I will, in return for what you have to suffer, give you the information that you have indeed but very little reason to envy my lot. Like you, I am one of those unhappy beings who must needs suffer, whatever their circumstances may be, because life is too brutally inexorable, and we—we whose nerves are laid bare—cannot walk through life without suffering. Then, examining the question quite objectively, may we not unhesitatingly assert that it is preferable to endure suffering for a positive loss, whilst we enjoy the memory of past happiness (or at least the illusion that such happiness would have been possible, had circumstances and environment been different), rather than to endure it at that one period of our lives when we ought not to suffer at all? than to experience such distress as excludes the possibility that we may so much as dream of ever being happy? Is not misery at its height in the very springtime of life, when 277the faculty of possible enjoyment is most developed? In this indeed, the lot of our fiancé is always and invariably an enviable one. I am not happy, and I doubt whether you have ever known happiness. A strange being he is, forever plucking flowers and smiling in the sunshine, yet unceasingly, and often unwittingly, marking his road through life by the pain he gives to others, and by the tears, so vain and so unworthy of us, which he makes us shed.

“So I am not writing to you in order that I may enjoy my honeymoon without remorse, for—as I say once more—I do not consider that I have done you any wrong. I only want you to know me just as I am, and not to look upon me as a stranger or a foe. I am not given to sentiment, and do not fear the hatred of people: on the contrary, I rather like it; but I do not wish you to hate me. What a sad thing it would be, if a poet could succeed in separating two intelligent and agreeable women from each other for ever!

“I kiss you, and with the warmest affection....”

“A sweet creature she is!” I remarked, and looked at Gina.

278She was looking depressed, and much older. Her eyes were bedimmed, and wandering helplessly from piece to piece of furniture, from wall to wall.

“And she does not even feel any love for him! A cold-hearted being, made for nothing but to chop logic! And he—for her, for her...! Ah, the cruel wrong! Why has this come to me?”

She put her hands up to her head and sobbed aloud....

Suddenly she snatched the letter from me, and crumpled it up, and tore it all to pieces with angry fingers.

“How I hate, oh, how I hate that woman!”

I brought her a glass of water to calm her nerves, thinking all the time how much, in this, her unjust outburst of fury, she was preferable to the other—the magnanimous, serene, lofty-minded New Woman.

Smilowicz, of all men in the world! was awaiting me outside the office to-day.

Time, I thought, had for an instant run backward; and the Past, so terribly gone and forgotten, was before me.

“What! You!” I exclaimed; “you, back 279from Siberia? How long have you been here?... I had not been told——”

“The manifesto: an amnesty.... Five years. Yes, five have passed by. I arrived last week, and have seen nobody but Obojanski. He did not even know your address! Was that nice of you?... Oh, how greatly you have changed!... No, I did not expect such backsliding on your part.... I have heard many things said....”

“And what about yourself?”

I saw that his plain face, which was now adorned with a thin stubbly beard, was much emaciated. His former careless smile was now quite gone, and his features were darkened and bronzed like a peasant’s.

“I?” He smiled, but with his lips only, that were always drawn: once with suffering, now with having suffered. “I? You never would guess. I married down there; yes, I married a fellow-exile. And we have a son.”

“But what of your health? And what are you going to do in Warsaw?”

“Something or other.” He raised his hand, palm down, then let it drop limply. “At present I am more or less amongst the unemployed. 280Besides, I am consumptive.... On the whole, prospects not very brilliant.”

I asked him to come to my lodgings.

He looked uneasy. “Are you living with—them?” he asked.

“No; now no longer.”

“Ah, that’s very good.... Professor Obojanski told me fearful things about you, and they grieved me. He must have been exaggerating: he bears you a deep grudge for having broken with him so. For he appreciates you very highly indeed. He counts your having thrown yourself away like that as the greatest disappointment he ever had in his life.”

So we went down the road, chatting about old times. He informed me that Roslawski had gone off on some Polar expedition. I used to call him the “Autocrat of the Ice-plains”: it seems that he belongs to them at any rate.

“But now,” Smilowicz blurted out, rather bashfully, “hadn’t you better come and see us? I have told Sophy (my wife) all about you; she would like to make your acquaintance, and does not know anybody in Warsaw. And you will see Andy, my little boy!”

281I of course agreed.

Mme. Smilowicz received us in a tiny room—bachelor’s lodgings on the fourth floor—amongst a confused medley of boxes and mattresses and lumber of various kinds. She began by asking us to speak low, not to disturb Andy, who was then asleep: then she showed him to me: a one-year-old baby, asleep in a cradle. It had a tilted Mongolian nose, the result, no doubt, of the mother’s having so often seen the type.

I paid it several compliments, of the What-a-fine-baby sort, and had not the least fear of being suspected of irony.

For the rest, Mme. Smilowicz has not the appearance of a “youthful mother”; she is a thin black-avised little woman in a dark gown, with a double eye-glass on her nose.

She poured some spirits of wine into the little pan for heating the kettle, and while it was burning itself out, she said, very low:

“My dear Madame, people say that women are weaker than men. But they do not in the least take into account all the strength that we expend over the children; just as if it were uselessly wasted! But furthermore, and setting this aside, let any one of them try to go 282through what I have undergone. With a child one year old, my dear Madame! in that bleak ice-bound land! and then, on our way home, having to do everything, my husband in wretched health.... And here again, look you! notwithstanding all this work on my hands, I have managed to translate thus much: and now we shall be able to sell it somewhere. Joseph dear, have you been able to see the publisher to-day?”

She pointed to a heap of papers, written in a fine female hand. Her husband smiled at me proudly.

As soon as the spirits were burnt out, Mme. Smilowicz worked the piston with swift strokes, pumping up a stream of gas, while her husband held a match to light it as it issued forth. A loud droning sound was heard, and a slight smell of naphtha was discernible.

“Won’t the noise wake little Andy?” I queried, with sham solicitude.

“No, no, he is accustomed to it now.”

We took tea, discussing abstract topics the while. I had not read any of the books which they mentioned; and I found this a hard thing to acknowledge. I had the impression of being spirited away on to some other planet, and 283felt all the time out of countenance and like an intruder. Also, my new dress was in such glaring and unpleasant contrast with its environment here: and I had it borne in upon me that my life, too, was in the same contrast.

After the machine had been put out and droned no more, there was heard a noise of children from beyond the partition wall: a hubbub as of many voices, now and then interrupted by the thin sound of a piercing female voice. On the fourth floor, a lot of youngsters were making merry.

“Do you hear that, Madame? And it is just the same, every day almost. They are dreadfully in the way of my work. Why are the walls made so thin?”

I was amazed, and could not help rather envying her; the contrast between us was so very glaring, and yet she had not even remarked it! She was thinking only of this annoyance; made no comparison, drew no parallel whatever!

Andy in his cradle now set up a loud and lusty wailing.

She jumped up from the table, jostling me in her haste, and rocked the child to sleep again, crooning low an inarticulate lullaby, 284tuneless, wordless, and not unlike that broken croaking which frogs utter. And again and again she would say:

“Little son of mine, my only one, my beautiful one!”

And then, sitting down to tea again, she spoke in a most interesting way about one of the books she had recently translated. It was from the English—essays on Economics.

“Joseph encourages me to write something as well; but for that one must have one’s mind more at ease.”

Then, with a tender look that she cast on her husband:

“I think,” she said, “that Joseph will soon be better in our climate; when he was sent away from Poland, he was in perfect health. Do you remember how he looked in those days?”

“Certainly I do; very well indeed.”

And I proceeded to tell her of the expeditions we both used to make to Obojanski’s.

“But,” I observed, “you have worked a miracle; he was always absolutely insensible to the charms of womankind.” This I said out of kindness, fearing lest I might otherwise give occasion to thoughts of jealousy and suspicion.

285I soon felt, however, that such delicacy was out of place and lost upon her; she was impervious to any fancies of that kind.

“When at the High School,” she told me, “I made it my purpose in life to reconcile my duties toward society with those that I owed to myself. People who are against women’s emancipation say that no woman can at the same time go in for book-learning and be a good wife and mother. That is their strongest argument. But, if only women themselves would recognize that this is possible, and that everything can be made to agree! I myself, my dear Madame, finished my course of Sociology in Brussels, where I even published a short paper in French. Since then I have followed the onward march of science, so as to be always up-to-date: I am reading continually, and am occupied in translating at present.... Sometimes, too, I am able to help Joseph with facts and information. And now I ask you, my dear Madame, could the most stolid bourgeoise, if placed in my circumstances, give herself more to her child than I do! Consider, I have no nursemaid, nor any of the aids which those much belauded ‘good mothers’ enjoy. I suckle the baby myself, I 286tidy the room, I do the cooking, the porteress brings me provisions from the market, and that is all. Oh, how I wish some of those keen-witted gentlemen could come here and see!”

“Yes,” Smilowicz put in here, “if a working woman is out of doors all day long, leaving her children uncared for, that is in order and reasonable and right! But let a woman consecrate a few hours to her studies in the evening, they will say this is emancipation, and incompatible with her duties as a mother.”

I could see how gratified she was to hear this.

“I am only sorry for those who do not know what exceeding happiness is to be found in marriage, if there is but mutual understanding and sympathy.” And she glanced at her husband with extreme tenderness.

Meanwhile, there was a continual noise on the other side of the partition, and there came a curiously disturbing sound of women’s voices, cackling with a sort of scandalized laughter—something between giggling and sobbing.

Smilowicz’s attention was drawn off by it.

287“What beasts they are!” he said at last, to relieve his feelings.

“They are not malicious, but unhappy,” she said. “For them too, I feel sorry.”

Smilowicz made no reply. Presently he was trying to persuade me to go over and see Obojanski one of these days.

“Always plunged in those books of his—overhead and ears in them—indifferent to everything else that goes on throughout the wide world. His study seems to me now such a haven as one might dream for.... Yes, let us go one day and visit him, Miss Janina.”

Really, no bad notion, that. As to Smilowicz’s surroundings, they do not agree with me. Since I have got rid of all such associations, I do not care to return to them. And then, that woman! Willingly would I throw her out of the window to the Idealistic dreamer of the noble New Woman, equal to Man; and I should cry Ecce femina! Like Diogenes throwing the plucked cock to Plato.

Yes; for the vision of the Idealist is realized—thus!

But Obojanski, the venerable, grey-bearded Master, with his mien of a Greek sage; and his never-ending, shallow sophistries and 288cheap disputes upon matters of the highest import; and even his many volumes of monographs on insects—all this has something that to me is singularly attracting!

To-day, tenderness and mutual vows once more.... Ay, we shall love, love, love each other till....

“Listen, Witold; for how long are we to be in love so?” I asked; a question I myself had not expected to put.

“Forever,” he answered with absolute assurance.

“And how long is this ‘forever’ to last?”

“Ah, well—of course—as long as we live. Do you believe in love beyond the grave?”

“Decidedly not!”

“Then, until death. And as I shall surely be the first to drop off, I shall have the best of it.” And he bowed as a courtier in Versailles, two centuries ago.

I concentrated my thoughts for a time. Behold me, sitting, clad in the raiments of ancient Greece, upon a bench of stone, my bare and shapely elbow resting on a balustrade.... Bending over the marble barrier, I look down, coldly, scrutinizingly, into the depths beyond—the 289depths of my soul. And behold, it is an abyss more than of infinite depth.—Alas! my ponderings, imaged thus, tell me but that in such an attitude, and thus arrayed, I look very handsome!

The sun is glaring high in heaven. Floating on the bright sea-waves is a light bark, with the prow shaped like a swan’s neck; and Witold is sitting in the bark. He smiles as he floats so lightly—floats on the sea of life. And I—I remain aimlessly gazing into those depths of my own being....

“Witold, you know that all this sort of thing must, sooner or later, come to an end?”

“How should I know that?”

“Not by experience?”

“Ah! Janka, my dearest, how often have I entreated you!” Then, in a gayer tone: “I am not an experimentalist in any sense of the word. And it is thus that I know to-day just as much as I did yesterday; and I cling to my illusions as I did of old times.”

“But why will you never consider this question with your eyes open and face to face? Why are you for ever afraid of it? Why must the dreadful burden of seeing things clearly always be borne by me? Oh, Witold!”

290He did not answer me, but walked nervously up and down the apartment. Then, coming to a stop at a small table, with his face turned away from me, he lit a cigarette.

A short silence followed. Then I went on.

“It’s not that I want anyone to lean upon. Understand me. I am not in need of any sustaining or protecting power. I only wish for some power able to counterbalance my own. I want to be helped by strength equivalent to that which I myself put forth: I would only have an equal weight in each scale.... Oh, if you but knew how terrified I am, when my scale, becoming heavier, sinks down, down, into the very lowest depths of my sad unfathomable pride!”

Here I paused for a time, awaiting some reply.

Unexpectedly, he began to speak, quietly, in smooth tones, and without looking in my direction.

“Let me tell you, Janka—I never yet spoke to you about this, but to-day I must: it weighs upon me too heavily, too insupportably. Straightforward I am, it may be, but I am not a man who enjoys telling the truth; I simply don’t like it. Well, there’s one point....”

291He broke off, to continue presently in yet smoother tones.

“There’s one point—I must tell you, my dearest love, that you make me suffer extreme tortures. Yes, you do. You sometimes torture me to such an extent that I lose all self-command, all patience.... I am in torments, to put it plainly—I beseech you, believe what I am saying now. I cannot break myself in to accept your theories. I am unable; besides, I will not.... You make no sacrifice, you. Have you ever given anything up for my sake? No. If not, you have no right to lay down conditions. You must take me as I am; try to understand me and to adapt yourself to me, rather than me to yourself. Remember, I have no sympathy whatever with high-flown sentiments; I cannot walk on stilts. I cannot, no, I cannot! All that is such a trial to me that I am often longing to get away—away—as far as I possibly can go! And so I concoct untruths, invent mythical shooting and supper-parties, and go to imaginary meetings—simply because I have to breathe now and then. You can see that I am at present speaking the truth! Not that I do not love you! Oh, no! who is it—if I did not love you so deeply, so 292intensely as I do—who is it that could make me bear this even for one instant?... Truly, you have not the slightest idea to what lengths of despotism your strong individuality drives you. Your demands on me are endless, Janka; you put me in fetters, with your exactions, and those tastes of yours that I have to follow. Have I ever, in anything whatever, interfered with you? No; never have I brought forward the slightest claim to anything; nay, I have preferred that you should feel yourself in some respect to be in arrears with me, for I reverence the liberty of others. Why can you not have the same toleration for me?... And then, for the life of me, I cannot make out why you are, all of you, of such jealous dispositions; nor why you all go on everlastingly philosophizing in that way!”

His outbreak having exhausted him, he sat down on an arm-chair at some distance from me, and proceeded to light another cigarette.

For many minutes, I was dumbstruck, trying to dig my way out of the ruins of that building which had fallen upon me so suddenly and in a way so unforeseen. Who would have expected this from this page of mine, with his sweet, tawny eye-lashes.

293At first, I was unable to realize it.

“But I see, Witold, that you have not the least love for me—that is, for what is most essential in me; I have at last found it out.”

I mused awhile.

“And then, besides, what you say is untrue. Recall which of us two revels more in high-flown, naïve, silly, maudlin sentiment! Who was it was always dreaming of an ideal ‘brotherhood of souls,’ instead of regarding love in the ordinary way? It was I who cannot bear what is high-flown; I, who always had to bring you down from your stilts.”

Witold was looking out of the window. There was in his bearing aristocratic boredom and lassitude, plainly expressed.

“Ah, Janka,” he said, this time in a tone of supreme indifference, “that, too, is on your part all theory. Of this you only make use, that you may struggle against the high-flown sentimentality which you feel within you, though you disown it, and deny its existence. And the eternal conflict with yourself in which you are plunged, and your empty theories, with their unconscious hypocrisy—these are the best proof of what I say, and the most high-flown sentimentality of all.... Only 294you delude yourself.... You are just as other women are, capable of infinite self-devotion and sacrifice. Hear me still. If I were now to love you no longer, to go away from you and forget you (men forget so very readily), you would be longing for me, and in anguish, like any other woman in the same situation, and in spite of all your ‘positive’ theories; you would be miserable, as you were during the last two weeks when we were parted; and you would again write first to me. And should I not come in answer to it—as I had a great mind not to come, notwithstanding my ‘idealistic’ way of looking at love—why then, you would write again and again, even to the tenth time! Don’t say you would not; I know you well. Oh, how well I know women! I’ll tell you what: I am still more certain that you love me and will be faithful than I was in Martha’s case, for all you say about paying me in my own coin, if I were false. Martha could forget herself for my sake; you never could. A bundle of theories, of sentimental scepticism, of self-assurance: that’s what you are! A poor frightened bird always popping its head under its wing!”

I felt quite broken. There was an immense 295and awful void in my heart. I had the odd delusion—or had his words suggested the feeling?—that I really experienced the weakness of which he spoke, and was unable to escape from his hands. Thereupon, I began to cry.

“I don’t—I don’t believe—that you ever loved me!”

In an instant he had changed his manner, and become kind and gentle as he had always been before. He came to my side, with caresses and words of comfort; even a little friendly banter.

“Alas!” I groaned; “why did you never tell me about this before?”

“Because I was quite sure that you would burst out crying, as you are doing at present, you naughty child!”

At those words, directly and on the spur of the moment, there fell upon me a sense of strong distaste. Back to my memory came in swarms all sorts of seeming trifles, which, together with many a minute detail of our past, made proof demonstrative and irrefutable ... of what he was.

“And you were quite sure, Witold, of something else into the bargain!”

296“What was that, Janka?”

With downcast eyes I answered, smiling:

“That I should never love you any more.”

I had spoken with absolute candour and certitude. I knew this to be a necessity of life to me; and I wiped my last tears away—

“Bah! give over, little girl. Do you not see this too is silly sentiment? You yourself don’t believe what you say.” He still spoke as in tones of tranquil persuasion; but I could see disquietude looking out of his eyes.

I smiled at him once more, saying: “Whether I believe or not, matters little. What matters is that you certainly do!”

He turned a trifle pale, and felt nervously for his cigarette-case. “Give over!” he cried out roughly, on a sudden, and again came towards me.

I rose, quivering all over with excitement, but managed to say, calmly enough:

“I should not like to part from you too tragically. And since I have had enough of love in general, and enough of your person especially, I am afraid I must ask you to have the goodness to withdraw now. Let us shake hands on parting. Go.”

He came forwards, with knit gloomy 297brows, and looks which betrayed the storm that raged within him. I stepped backwards. He stood for an instant struggling with himself, and I fully expected he would rush at me.

But his breeding prevailed. He made a courtly bow, kissed my hand and retired.

I stood where I was, with head bent forward.... That page, with his dear tawny eye-lashes—with his soft sad eyes—with his lips, of the odour of faded roses—he that once had been mine!

“All the same,” I whispered to myself, “the thing is done at last!”

To-day I feel I have crossed the Rubicon, and am standing on the farther shore, not very sure whether things are better with me now. And yet, I should not wish to go back again.

I have this morning received several nosegays.

Flowers to embellish the funeral repast! Flowers on the coffin of one gone forever!

But that is nothing. No, nothing, I swear! Often and often the monument over a sepulchre may turn into a gate that leads to a new life.

298Smilowicz has come to see me.

He, too, is mentally depressed at times: which I should never have suspected.

He edged himself into the very arm-chair in which Witold had been seated last evening. For some time he was silent; and then: “There are days,” he said, “when I think myself an idiot for having wasted my life over a mere shadow. Oh, how I envy you!”

“Why, is your life wasted?” I cried in amazement.

“You have been at our lodgings—and you have seen.” ...

“Well?”

“You have seen all!”

“But your wife is a happy woman,” I said, trying to take the optimistic side of things; though all the time I was saying to myself (and I really don’t know why): “How is love possible between those two?”

“My wife may be so,” he said, slowly. “Sometimes I cannot.”

“They say it is a great thing to have children. Even if you do not attain the goal you aim at, there always remains something of you.”

My remark elicited no reply from him. I 299could see painful and bitter thoughts flit over his thin face, as he looked round the room.

“You have no end of flowers!” he murmured.

“These are all flowers of farewell. These at least you need not envy me.”

His face darkened.

“You know how ill I am. That is what makes me so hateful. Not that I regret life, but that I have nothing in life to regret losing.”

I did not answer.

“To know for sure that death is at hand gives you quite another outlook upon life. An extraordinary attachment to things positive springs up, together with an intense hate for abstractions. Each renunciation, each victory over self, is to you like a fresh nail in your coffin.”

“But you surely love your wife?” I asked him, after a pause.

“I do.”

“And your son, too?”

He gave a nod.

“Well, then....” I tried to draw some comforting inference, but unsuccessfully. 300“Well, then....” I repeated once more, and once more relapsed into helpless silence.

“Ah, how kind you are!” he said in a low voice, and looked at me for some time with a grateful expression. “And how beautiful besides!” he added unexpectedly.

I felt startled: mere instinct on my part, for I had no reason to fear. He glanced away from me, and turned his attention to some orchids that stood close to him, stroking them with his bony hand.

“When I ask myself now for what reason I did what I did, I can find no answer to my question. Such flowers as these; I have gone through life, always trampling upon them; why? Why should Obojanski cut them to pieces, that he may, in them and from them, hit upon some new abstraction or other—their genus, their species, their variety? Why do you call them flowers of farewell? Oh, now that I know how terrible the way of self-denial and virtue is, I should this day like to lie on a bed of flowers such as these.”

“I can answer to your question: You trampled the flowers, because you were a strong man.”

301“Is love of life a weakness then?” He fell a-thinking.

“Perhaps it is. Perhaps I care for life for the same reason that made Voltaire confess before he died: vital energy giving way. And after all, life!”

Here I set to explain to him at great length that life is in reality an evil, and not worth regretting when it goes from us, that in its track it leaves a bitterness still greater than the bitterness of self-denial and self-control, and evokes a yet stronger reaction....

To that he said: “Yes, the reaction which life brings is directed against life, and makes it easier to die. All the better.”

“It is well,” he added. “It is not after all life itself that I wish for. I wish only to be convinced—convinced by experience that life is an evil thing. This is all that I would have.”

When he left me, I presented him with a great many flowers, begging him, as a pretext, to carry them to his wife from me.

Looking out of the window, I saw him going his way, clad in a fur, notwithstanding the mildness of the weather, and pressing my flowers to his heart.

302In the evening, I sent to Wiazewski, asking him to step in. I thought he would be some consolation to me; but though he made visible endeavours to show good humour, he had none. I therefore proposed we should take a walk.

It was a splendid night, fine and breezy, and steeped in the sweet, drowsy, dizzying perfume of coming spring. The lamplights twinkled away, far into the distance, like innumerable strings of diamonds; the streets were deserted, but brightly lit. The white moon was now and then visible above the irregular line of the housetops. All was picturesquely calm and cold—a condition that I especially like.

Our way led us down a great thoroughfare, along which a few belated carriages were passing.

Stephen was jesting; but it went against the grain. He was telling me about the tragical fate of some disappointed suitor.

Just in front of us, at the very corner of the street, and opposite the doorway of a large hotel, a brilliantly elegant equipage, coming at full speed, suddenly pulled up.

A servant ran to open the carriage-door. 303Witold jumped out nimbly, and helped a woman to descend.

Springing lightly from the step, and walking by his side at a rapid pace, magnificent in billowy furbelows and lace, and spreading around her an atmosphere of dainty odours, Iseult Lermeaux went in.

Witold’s eye caught mine at the very moment when, helping her out of the carriage, he was about to take her arm. In the glare of the electric lamps, I saw him turn deadly pale. He bowed instinctively; his arms dropped to his side: he was at a loss what to do. Wiazewski’s presence embarrassed him, and he stood like one transfixed. She turned round and also glanced at us.

And thus they disappeared as we walked down the long bright vista of the street, and we saw them no more. “No laggard, that man!” I thought. “The very next day!”

“As I don’t wish you to feel sorry for me, Stephen, I will inform you that I have already broken with that gentleman; so that his doings do not concern me in the least now.”

At my words, Wiazewski slackened his pace.

“Why, in that case, Janka ...” he began.

304“Pray, Stephen, don’t. I begged you once before——”

He said nothing further then, and walked on for a considerable time with head bent down; finally, he said to me in an undertone:

“May we not think of marriage, merely as a bond of friendship?”

“No, no!... Can you not see that a wife never has the disinterestedness of a friend? How can she be at one with her husband in everything? In many cases, she would be wronging herself. For instance, what interests me most in you—your scorn both for things ethical and emotional—would, if I were your wife, become hateful to me; and your close acquaintance with feminine psychology and the art of love-making, would either be dangerous to me, or, as recalling past times, unpleasant at the least. And you, you would have to become insincere; to gain a wife, you would necessarily lose a friend: and surely a friend is worth more....”

He walked along in silence, listening to me.

“And besides,” I concluded, “let me tell you that you have come too late. A year ago, at the time when you never would treat me but as a friend, it would have been possible. 305Then I was not unfrequently vexed with you, calling you (I remember) a boarding school miss, when you extolled friendship and poured your love-theory into my ears. To-day I am not for love any more. Not because Fate has dealt me any crushing blow. Nothing of the sort; but merely because it has all been most fearfully boring to me. And at present I am taking my revenge for it upon you, in the proverbial phrase: ‘Let us remain friends.’”

I had quickened my pace. Wiazewski said not a word. I felt as if I was hastening towards a dark chasm which ever drew back before me, fleeing as I advanced.... I want all to be over—to lie there, at the bottom of that murky chasm; and, do what I may, I cannot arrive at the brink. And my teeth are clenched with pain.

“If you knew how madly I love the exceeding sweetness of his mouth!” The words flashed then through my mind: a reminiscence of the far-off, far-off Past!

“I cannot understand you in the least. Never, never, should I have acted so in your place.”

“Well, Gina, it is over. Tell me now what 306remedy you would advise me to take. How do you yourself manage to bear life? To remain passive, doing nothing—that were surely impossible. Work? But work is of no avail. Unless something happens to rescue me, I shall have to leave the office; I fear I am about to go mad.... Are you still interested in art? You paint very little now; I cannot make out why.”

Gina shook her head with a drowsy air. “I always preferred Life to Art.”

“Why,” I said, noticing that she was in evening dress, “you are going out to-night!” The thought of staying by myself all the evening made me shudder. At the same time, I felt my cheeks colouring, for I feared there was a mortification in store for me which I could not understand. “I trust you will tell me quite frankly.”

For a few seconds she knit her brows and reflected. Then, “I think,” she said, “that it will not be impossible.... I have for a long time wished to make you the proposal; but, in such a matter, one cannot be too cautious.... Yet, after all, we too have something in common. And I have learned to know you.”

Abruptly she came to a decision.

307“Then—yes, I can recommend something to you. If you hold out, it is only by its means.”

“Give it me, quick!”

“Wait a little. I must in the first place demand of you to keep this a profound secret. I hide nothing else that I do: yet this I hide. Secondly: it is something that, for effects and surroundings’ sake, we do in conclave. I shall take you there.”

We went.

Radlowski came to open the door. When he saw me, he was taken aback, though he tried to carry it off under a show of courtesy.

“We have a neophyte here,” Gina explained.

But the explanation rather increased than removed his trouble, though he at once pretended lively satisfaction. He said aside to Gina: “But something must be done: Emma is here.”

Gina laughed. “Oh, all the better! If you have nothing but that to make you uneasy!”

Radlowski was now more at ease. He ushered us into his bedchamber, beyond the studio, and left us there together. Now and then we could hear a confused sound of talking, 308though the voices were low, in the next room.

“And Emma, who is she?” I asked.

“Oh, a most beautiful woman, though not exactly admissible into society. One of the celebrated étoiles of beauty, formerly a model of Radlowski’s.”

Gina, picking up a small phial from the toilet table, took some of the contents herself, and then gave me directions how the narcotic was to be taken.

We went into the studio, where a wealth of carpets, hangings, bits of tapestry, and wide low Ottomans was scattered about. Nothing here revealed the artistic disorder of the typical atelier. In a corner, however, there stood an easel, with a half-finished canvas—a portrait; and several paintings hung from the walls.

By the delicate radiance of several glass and paper patterns of artistic design, I perceived some men and women, who all rose to greet us as we came in.

Emma I recognized at the first glance. She got up and walked slowly towards Gina, looking all the time straight at us, out of wonderfully bright and unnaturally dilated pupils. 309She wore what was not so much a dress as a veil, beneath whose light clinging folds, of a steely blue tint, the shape of her body, not covered by any other garment, was discernible; and a broad Venetian girdle, gold-wrought and ponderous, dangled from the wide hips round which it passed.

Many a fair woman have I seen in my life; but, at her sight, I overflowed with admiration. As soon as I beheld her, I had a desire to laugh aloud, and kneel down, and thank her for that she was so marvellously fair.

All that had hitherto fascinated me now seemed to be effete and colourless. I would never have believed that any being so majestical, so like a classical antique, so royally more than beautiful, could exist in the real world. All there was of pure nature in her was—that she lived; the rest appeared like a masterpiece of painting, of sculpture, of poetry. She was indeed fairer than anything in nature—whether in the azure heavens, or in the meadows, or in the forests—fairer than a Midsummer night!

She kissed Gina as she went forward to welcome her. To me she gave her hand only, with a courteous but frigid mien. Her eyes, 310looking into mine, expressed distrust and scrutiny, though she strove to appear icily serene.

The other woman present belonged without question to “good society”; a pleasant, handsome, dreamy blonde. Radlowski, when he introduced us to each other, artfully found means to avoid uttering her name. She was one of the irréprochables, come here incognito. All the men were already known to me by name: two painters, a few literary men, and a poet. Like Emma, they too had unnaturally dilated pupils; Radlowski, Gina, and the irreproachable unknown lady were all alike in this respect.

On making acquaintance with these people, I remarked, not without a pleasant surprise, that all the collars were immaculate, and none turned down; that not one tie was eccentric, not one head of hair superabundant. On the contrary, their dress was in good taste, their behaviour unaffected, their bearing quietly refined. Seen in the midst of this company, Emma was a far greater anachronism—twice as striking, twice as fantastic.

They all speak under their breath; no one contradicts, no one is excited. There is no general conversation, only a few utterances 311here and there. They talk neither of literature, nor of painting; life, and the present day, is all they speak of. They hold discourse about frivolous or ordinary matters, with elaborate elegance; and their fashion of taking things, their tone and temper, shows at once what manner of men they are. They are of those who have now left behind them the Past—the stress and storm of finally triumphant Decadentism—and have arrived at some sort of fragmentary synthesis, which they have set up as their standard. Their mental equilibrium has bestowed upon them an amazing excellence of form, a philosophical calm in their way of looking upon the world, and an ecstatic cult of life, which, from their standpoint, becomes all but synonymous with the Beautiful. They are all characterized by great enlightenment, mental distinction, contempt for all unsightly mediocrity, picturesque in their life, and a moderation inexpressibly artistic and reposeful—something like the Greek soul.

One of the painters exclaimed: “I should like to remind Emma of the promise she made us last night, which was so gratifying to us all.”

312“Ah, yes: we are all expectant.”

“Emma is something of a littérateur, and writes poetry,” a slender fair-haired young man beside me explained.

An exception to the universal custom took place. She made no bashful excuses.

“As you like,” she said.

With exquisite grace in every movement, she rose from the sofa, and traversed the studio slowly, that we might feast our enchanted eyes on the spectacle of that fairy-like beauty.

Enamoured, not unlike Narcissus, of her own goodly form, and radiant with her lofty queen-like head, her shoulders moulded as perfectly as a Greek statue, her cream-hued limbs just visible beneath the clinging tissue that she wore—she came to a standstill opposite me. With a motion as harmoniously entrancing as a strain of music, she adjusted the golden fillet on her superbly chiselled Pagan brow, and began her recitation:

The recitation over, she waved us a salute, and a gold bracelet flashed above the elbow of her bare arm. Then she sank on to the nearest sofa, covered with carpeting of a rich pattern. She received no thanks, nor did she expect any. There she lay, her hands clasped beneath her head, and the black diamonds of her eyes gazing steadfastly up to the ceiling.

“Oh, what heavenly bliss I am beginning to feel now!” was the thought that flashed upon me all at once.

Yes, the narcotic was acting already. Everything in me that was evil, or pained, or imperfect, had vanished away. I was filled 315with light—a chilly splendour, supremely contemptuous of all things, supremely blissful.

The chill had spread around me. There was,—in the wide-open, quiescent eyes of all those men, gazing as in a hypnotic trance upon the miracle of female beauty which they beheld,—the uncanny greenish light which certain gases in slow combustion give out. We were in an atmosphere of superhuman delight; a delight that was not earthly; the sempiternally fascinating delight of Non-Existence.

There was a hearkening to the silence, and a listening with riveted and petrified attention. The least little murmur of life gave pain. No one was allowed into the studio; black coffee was poured out by Radlowski and Gina, and brought to each of us by them. And soft and low fell slowly from our lips words as of silken tissue, containing thoughts of delicate essence, recondite and shrouded in mystery.

The unknown blonde was saying to Emma:

“At such moments as these, I never give one thought to my lover.... I wish to feel no love for him, in order that I may dream of 316Love itself.... I see a land such as on earth there is none: where a Not-sun shines, and where Not-flowers have fragrance! A vision!... I behold a lover who is not of the earth, and him alone I love.... In a vision.... In my slumbers!”

“There is nothing in the world,” said Emma, “so beautiful as that which is not in it.... Oh, how sweet is the craving after the love that is nowhere to be found!”

We were all experiencing an extraordinary and ecstatic glow: and in our state nothing appeared too naïve or too exalté.

I felt full of kindly inclination towards these people, and of deep gratitude as well, because they were all in such harmony with one another. It was almost pure ideal friendship, based on community of admirations and disdains, and mutually uniting all those of the same caste: the cool and egotistical friendship which one demigod may feel for another.

The slenderly built young man whom I have mentioned leant forward to me:

“Pray tell me something of love.”

“Love? I know one kind only.”

“And what is that?”

“The fanatical, the Pagan love of Self.”

317I clasped my hands, and rested my head upon them. Looking forth into that infinite distance where all is rigid, where no motion is possible, and partly unconscious of what I was saying, I spoke thus:

“Oh! how I love myself in all my manifestations! In all my loves and abhorrences; in all my dreamings and scornings; in all those most mournful victories of my own unconquerable strength!—Ah! how willingly would I die this very night, this wonderful night of the blossoming and perishing of my desires!”

From one instant to the next, my feelings were growing stranger and stranger. Something akin to dread was now taking hold upon me. Somewhere—far, far away, as it were down at the very bottom of the gulf of Life,—I heard a carriage clatter past, and a shudder of unutterable dismay then shook me. Unwittingly, I drew closer to my next neighbour.... Presently, I was aware of the soothing, almost spiritual caress of some one’s cool white hand, passing over my forehead. As I felt it stroke me so gently, my alarms were dispelled; and again I was steeped in that phosphorescent zodiacal luminosity, as of gases in slow combustion.

318And now it returned, that vision, that majestic long-forgotten vision. Once more I saw around me the endless stretches of the icy plains. The sun was not seen in the jet-black sky; and above the horizon rose the cold greenish glimmer of the Northern Lights. And lo, those cold dead dreams of mine had come to life again!

There is no more any Ego of mine.... I am beyond existence and beyond nothingness—in that world wherein dies the immemorial conflict between dream and vigil, where Wrong, robed in her queenly purple, is no longer shadowed by Vengeance, attired in pallid green; where stony Hatred no longer hugs in her fierce embrace the weeping god of love; where the marble statue of Pride no more does homage to the grim spectre, Fear; wherein there are no more wretched victories, nor the portentous delights of worshipping Self and the Power of Self!

And I am in such bliss—bliss so celestial, so divine!

That?—Oh, that?... It has passed away. Only ... from time to time....

Yes, from time to time, I cast away all 319traces of kisses in the Past—put aside my wreath of purple velvet flowers—and go, walking tranquilly and slowly, by the cold light of the moon, to kneel at the grave where my dreams lie buried, and press my brow to the base of the tombstone that covers them, ... and muse.

Once, I hung up a wreath of snow-white lilies there; now, I do so no more. I never carry any flowers to that tomb now.

Nor do I ever strive to roll away the grey stone from the sepulcher—that stone, with its black fretwork of ferns graven upon it of old.

Then I go home, and again array myself in my purple velvet flowers....

Fragrance, beyond words, wild and fatal perfume of withered roses! Sweet, most sweet and ardent lips—lips now lost for ever!... Ah, that houri, with arms like pale dead gold!

All this—I can no longer say whether it was a dream or not....

Ah! but what is this? Have the cool white lilies blossomed once again in my deserted garden?

A dream!—A dream!

But why then am I so immensely, so divinely happy?

Those eyes, dim, sweet, and sad, of him who once was mine!—I can no longer say whether it was all a dream, or not. My ice-plains once more, my ice-plains!—No—before these—still farther back!... still farther! Another, and a far different, sweet smell: a fresh delicious perfume—of meadows in flower, of willow catkins, of the lilacs in blossom.—Yellow marigolds! (O heavens, those strange far-off memories!) ... O sunshine, O green fields, O adorable bygone days!... O my childhood!

Tears flow in torrents—tears for the sunshine, for life, for happiness.—Do not wipe my eyes, for they are dropping pearls! Why brush those pearls away?

321I awoke long after daybreak.

Gina was bending over me.

“Let us leave the place,” she said; “you are a little shaken. A usual thing the first time. You must accustom yourself.”

A tall woman, draped from head to foot in a long mantle of white fur, was waiting for us. Her complexion was of a muddy yellowish hue; her eyes were dull and sodden. It took me more than one glance to make sure who she was.

We were accompanied to the carriage by a grey-haired gentleman whom—so far as I could remember—I had never seen before.

I put up my hands to my eyes, unwilling now to look upon the world any more.

And with this my canticle of love comes to an end.

I had asked Smilowicz to let the Professor know I was going to call upon him: and I have been there to-day.

What a curious feeling I had in beholding once more those solemn-looking apartments, lined all round with books up to the very ceiling and the same beautiful old man, now a little older!

322He welcomed me with joy.

“My prodigal daughter,” he said, “is ever so much dearer to me now than before!”

To have kept complete silence about the rupture which had taken place, would not have satisfied his kindness.

“You must not fancy I am quite disinterested in wishing you back again,” he said. “I have something special in view.”

“What may that be, Professor?”

“I have just received permission from the Russian Government to publish a scientific journal, and it has confirmed me in my status as editor. As my secretary, you would be useful, and I ask you to accept the position.”

“I should do so with pleasure, but my occupation prevents me.”

“Your office? You will give it up: it is no fitting situation for you. I have been thinking it over: this is just what will serve most to bring your abilities into full play. You will have to do the ‘Intelligence’ columns, make summaries, and write translations—at first. And it will be necessary to read very, very much. I have by me a great number of new and highly interesting works, which I must show you.—Well, what do you say?”

323I said yes.

During our conversation, I was under the same impression that I had, when I went to see Mme. Smilowicz. I was no longer ‘up-to-date,’ for I had long given up reading.—Obojanski talked at length to me about various changes that had latterly taken place in his field of science.

Those last years had been lost for me. My abandonment of the “Ice-plains” had cost me dear. I had learned nothing by having become acquainted with Life; I was not capable of forming any synthetic views about it. The more we know of it, the less is it possible to comprehend it in any systematized generalization.—Everything in Life contradicts everything else: Science is by far more consistent.

“But,” Obojanski asked, “to what am I to ascribe your return?”

“To Smilowicz.”

“I don’t mean that. There must have been something deeper down—some change in your mind and views, eh?”

He no doubt expected to hear some romantic phrases about the barrenness of life 324spent as in those years, and of its failure to give me happiness.

Instead of which, I made him this unforeseen reply:

“Well, on the whole, it is because I prefer to return to you whom I have left, rather than to the Church!”

And Obojanski eyed me in bewilderment.