Chapter III: A Canticle of Love (2)

“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, what 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, though 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 others, 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 renders 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 thinking 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 was 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.

I 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 left 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 present, 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.

Ah, 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 he 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, Stephen. 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.

I 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 that 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 were 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 hither 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 species. 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?...”

“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 dedication 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 whether 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 painful, 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 been. 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 the 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.

She 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 from 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. Besides, 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!”

I 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 through 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 felt 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, tuneless, 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.

I 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 tidy 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.

“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 cheap 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 depths 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!”

He 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....”

He 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 intensely 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.

At 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 you 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 and 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!”

“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 brows, 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.

Smilowicz 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 could 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. “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.”

“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!”