Chapter X: Part IV: I (1)

The main destination of my journey was Paris, where I hoped to meet old friends, well acquainted with my eccentricities; congenial spirits who understood my moods, knew all about my whims, admired my courage, and were consequently in a position to gauge accurately the temporary state of my mind. In addition to this some of the foremost of the Scandinavian poets had just taken up a permanent abode in Paris; I meant to claim their protection and with their help defy Marie's sinister schemes; for she intended to have me shut up in a lunatic asylum.

During the whole journey she continued her hostilities and treated me as a person altogether beneath contempt, whenever we were without witnesses. She was always lost in thought, absent-minded, indifferent. In vain I took her sight-seeing in the towns where we were forced to spend the nights; she took no interest in anything, saw nothing, hardly listened to me. My attentions bored her; she seemed to be fretting for something. But for what? For the country where she had suffered, in which she had not left one single friend, but--a lover, perhaps?

During the whole time she behaved like the most unpractical and ignorant of women; she displayed none of the qualities of the organiser and manager of which she had boasted so much. She insisted on staying at the most expensive hotels, and for the sake of one night she often had the whole furniture rearranged; a badly served cup of tea provoked interviews with the hotel proprietor; the noise which she made in the corridors drew unflattering comments upon us. We missed the best trains because she would lie in bed until dinner-time; through her carelessness our luggage went astray; and when we left, her tips to the servants were of the meanest.

"You are a coward!" she said in reply to one of my remonstrances.

"And you are ill-bred and slovenly!"

It was a charming pleasure-trip, indeed.

* * * * *

As soon as we had arrived in Paris and settled down among my friends, who were proof against her spells, she found that I had got the better of her, and felt like a wild animal caught in a trap. She was furious because the leading Norwegian poet received me warmly, and overwhelmed me with kindness. She promptly detested him, for she sensed in him a friend who might some day raise his voice in my favour.

One evening, at a dinner given to artists and writers, he proposed my health, calling me the chief representative of modern Swedish literature. Marie, poor martyr by reason of her marriage with the "notorious pamphleteer," was present. The applause of the diners depressed her to a degree which excited my compassion, and when the speaker tried to make me promise to stay for at least two years in France, I could no longer resist the wistful expression of her eyes. To comfort her, to give her pleasure, I replied that I never took an important decision without consulting with my wife. My reward was a grateful look and the sympathy of all the women present.

But my friend remained obdurate. He urged me to prolong my stay, and with a fine flourish of oratory asked all those present to support his proposition. All raised their glasses in response.

My friend's obstinacy always remained inexplicable to me, although I quite well understood at the time that a secret struggle was being fought between my wife and him, the motive of which I could not guess. Maybe he was better informed than I, and had penetrated my secret with the clear-sightedness which frequently accompanies first impressions; moreover, he was himself married to a woman of strange morals.

* * * * *

Marie did not feel at home in Paris, where her husband's genius was generally acknowledged, and after three months' stay she hated the beautiful city. She was indefatigable in warning me of "the false friends who would one day bring me misfortune."

She was again expecting to become a mother, and again life with her was unbearable. But this time I had no reason to doubt the paternity of the expected baby.

Our stay in Paris came to an end; we broke up our tents and slowly made our way to Switzerland.

_Isn't It Enough?_

It does not matter very much that the wealthy man did not ask Jesus what he should do in order to solve the problem of life, for Jesus would very likely have replied in the same way in which He replied to the question relating to the Kingdom of Heaven: "Go and sell all thou hast and give it to the poor." But it is a pity that the wealthy man did not carry out this suggestion, and above all things that he did not live to see a scorching day in June in the year 1885 in the humble form of a sixty-year-old coster who pushed a heavy barrow down the Avenue de Neuilly, ceaselessly calling out in a voice trembling with hunger and increasing age--

"Cresson de fontaine!
La santé du corps!
Quatre liards la botte!
Quatre liards la botte!"

He went down on the left side of the avenue, halting before every door; but everywhere the porters' wives shook their heads, for the younger and stronger ones had stolen a march on the old man, and had already supplied the necessary requirements for the day. He reached Porte Mailot and gazed down the avenue which stretched before him, apparently endlessly, down towards the Seine. He took off his black cotton cap and with the sleeve of his blue blouse wiped the perspiration off his forehead. Should he turn round and walk up on the right side, or should he go to Paris to try his luck there? the wonderful luck to earn the few pence by virtue of which he could keep up sufficient strength to push his barrow along when to-morrow had dawned? Should he invest his last shilling in the payment of the toll and go on to meet the unknown fate awaiting him? He took the risk, paid the octroi and trudged along the Avenue de la Grande Armée.

The sun had risen higher in the sky, and the pavements were still warm from the previous day; the gay town smelled like the close, fetid atmosphere of the bedroom, which streamed through the open windows and hung heavily in the still air. The sunbeams heated the dust which rose in clouds from the carpets beaten against the doorsteps; showy advertisements flashed from privies and news-stalls, and a suffocating smell of ammonia penetrated through the half-open doors; cigar ends, tobacco, manure, orange skins, celery stalks, pieces of paper from forgotten refuse heaps were carried away by the rushing stream which gushed from the main and swept everything towards the gratings of the gutter.

The old man cried his wares, but carts and omnibuses drowned his voice, and no one bought. Tired, forsaken by every one, he sat down on a seat under the plane trees. But the sunbeams found him out, and scorched him in spite of the dusty leaves. How dismal the sun appeared to the worn-out traveller, who longed for an overcast sky and a downpour to relieve the unbearable heat, which robbed his nerves of their strength and shrivelled up his muscles.

Yet the torture of the excessive heat did not make him insensible to the torture of hunger and the dread of the morrow. He rose, seized the shafts of his barrow, and toiled up the steep incline which leads to the Arc de Triomphe, shouting incessantly--

"Quatre liards la botte!"

At the last street corner a little dressmaker bought two bunches.

He dragged himself through the Champs Elysées, and met the wealthy man, seated in his carriage behind his English coachman, on his way to the Bois de Boulogne, there to brood over the problem of life. The palaces and large restaurants bought nothing; the fierce rays of the sun dried up the water-cress, and the long green leaves of his cauliflowers hung limp, so that he was obliged to sprinkle them with water at the fountain near the Rond-Point.

It was noon when he passed the Place de la Concorde and arrived at the Quays. Before the restaurants men were sitting and lunching; some of them had already arrived at the coffee. They looked well-fed, but bored, as if they were fulfilling a melancholy and painful duty by keeping alive. But to the old man they were happy mortals who had staved off death for a few hours, while he felt his soul shrinking like a dried apple.

The barrow rattled past the Pont-Neuf, and every stone against which the wheels pushed shook the muscles and nerves of his tired arms. He had not broken his fast since the early morning; his voice sounded thin like the voice of a consumptive, so that his cries were more like cries for help now, with little preliminary sighs caused by want of breath.

His feet were burning and his hands trembled; he felt as if the marrow in his spine were melting with the heat, and the thin blood hammered in his temples as he turned towards the city, seeking the shade of the Quai de l'Horloge. He halted for a moment before a wine-shop in the Place de Parvis, half inclined to spend his few pennies on a glass of wine. But he pulled himself together and trudged on, past Notre-Dame, towards the Morgue.

He could not drag himself away from this mysterious little house, where so many problems of life have been solved, and he entered. How cool and beautiful it was inside, where the dead lay on marble slabs, the hoar-frost on their hair and beards sparkling as on a beautiful, bright winter day. Some of them looked distressed, because the rush of the water into their lungs, or the stab of the knife into the heart, had given them pain; one of them smiled as if he were glad that all was over; one lay there with an expression of indifference on his face, as if nothing mattered; the problem was solved, at any rate: he had lived until he died. No more clothes required, no more food, no shelter! No sorrow, no cares. All held in their grasp the greatest boon life has to bestow: a calm which neither want, failure of crops, sickness, death, war or famine, American wheat or the hard laws which regulate wages, could disturb. Sleep without dreams, how gentle a sleep! And without an awakening, how splendid!

The old man must have envied the sleepers, for he turned his head on leaving, to feast his eyes once more on the sight of those blessed ones, who slept in cool seclusion behind the large glass panes.

He plodded on to the other side of the church and stopped at the principal entrance. He asked the dealer in relics to keep an eye on his barrow, and entered. He stirred the holy water with his right hand and cooled lips and brow. Inside the church it was cool, for the sunbeams were powerless to penetrate the stained-glass windows. The pulpit was occupied by a little abbé, freshly shaved, with traces of powder still visible on his bluish skin; he was speaking, and the old man listened.

"'Consider the lilies in the field,'" said the abbé, "'how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any one of these! Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have store-houses nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls!'"

"How much more are we better than the fowls!" sighed the old man.

"But rather seek ye the Kingdom of God," concluded the abbé, "and all else will be added, to you."

"All else," sighed the old man, "all else! First the Kingdom of God, and then all else."

Leaning against a pillar in the side aisle, the wealthy man, holding a Baedeker in his hand, tried to solve the problem of the essence and origin of life by means of a careful study of the architecture of the past. He did not believe in the Kingdom of God, but he brooded over the purpose of life, and could not understand why a man should go to so much trouble to kill time until he was seventy or at the most eighty years old. Had it not been against all conventions, he would have gone to the old man and said to him who had already passed his allotted time--

"Give me your solution of the problem of life!"

And the old man, unless he had been too exhausted with hunger and thirst, would have answered--

"The problem of life, as I understood it, is the maintenance of one's own life."

"Is that all?" the wealthy man would have answered, astonished.

"All? Isn't it enough? All?"

"We do not understand one another."

"No, we do not understand one another; we have never understood one another."

"Because you are a selfish old man, who has lived but for himself. But humanity...."

"Sir, I too have lived for humanity, for I have brought up and educated four children, a problem which was more difficult perhaps to solve than yours, the solution of which you can buy at any bookseller's. Yes, go, sell all you have and give it to the poor, then you will see whether there is room in life for anything else!"

But the wealthy man preferred to leave the problem unsolved and keep his gold; therefore he continued to study his Baedeker, and did not ask the poor coster for his opinion.

The old man, with faith unshaken, left the church, the abbé's comforting words ringing in his ears: "Take no heed of to-morrow," and crossed to the left shore of the river.

At the corner of the Boulevard St. Michel he was fortunate enough to sell six centimes' worth of his stuff at a reduced price. And on he trudged and turned into the Rue Bonaparte.

It was afternoon, that saddest time of the day when the sun is setting, but darkness has not yet fallen, darkness which brings in its train peace for the weary souls who long to rest and play for a while before they are compelled to face torturing dreams and memories.

He sat down on a stone step and counted his money: eighty centimes; that was twenty centimes less than the franc which he had spent at the gate. How could he pay six francs to the nursery gardener? How could he buy food and drink, how return before nightfall to Suresnes? He saw in imagination the endless Champs Elysées, the long Avenue de la Grande Armée, the terrible Avenue Neuilly. No, it was too far to go back, too far.

He looked about searchingly, and his dim eyes were dazzled by the gleam of the blue and red glass bottles in the chemist's shop on the other side of the street, which sparkled in the rays of the setting sun. They stood on long shelves, filled with bottles and boxes; patent medicines for indigestion; appetite restoratives; powders to calm feverish brains which had brooded too long over the riddle of life; means of protection from over-population or increasing poverty; headache pencils for those who tried to solve social problems; rouge for night-birds, tabloids for nervous ailments and financially independent people. All these things could be bought there.

The old man rose hastily, as if a buyer had beckoned to him, and entered the chemist's shop.

"Six centimes' worth of laudanum, please," he said. "My wife is suffering from convulsions."

And as if to prove his words, he lifted his right hand to show the ring on his third finger. But there was only a white line and a groove in the brown skin.

But the chemist, who, perhaps, had also been waiting for a buyer, took no notice of his gesture; he filled a small bottle with the required liquid, licked a label, bit a cork, took the money, and resumed the study of his pharmacopoeia. What business was it of his?

The old man, the bottle in his pocket, staggered out of the shop, once again seized the shafts, and wandered up the street. He stopped at a bookseller's, and as if to make one more bid for good fortune, he called out for the last time--

"Quatre liards la botte!
Quatre liards la botte!"

Afraid that somebody might beckon to him in reply, he put the bottle to his lips and greedily drank the dark-red liquid, as if to quench a burning thirst. The pupils of his eyes contracted as if he were staring into the sun; a vivid scarlet flame shot across his cheeks, his knees bent, and he fell on the edge of the gutter. He snored loudly like a man in a sound sleep; the perspiration stood in large drops on his face, and there was a quivering movement of his legs.

By the time the police had arrived he lay quite still, but the expression of his face plainly betrayed his last conscious thoughts--

"Life was sometimes good, evil every now and then, but the best thing came last. I solved the problem as well as I could, and it was not easy, although the rich man found that it was not enough. But we did not understand one another. It is a pity that men are not meant to understand one another."

II

Arrived in Switzerland, we took rooms in a private hotel, so as to avoid all quarrels on the subject of housekeeping.

Marie made up for lost time, for being alone now, and unbacked by sympathising friends, I was again in her power. From the very beginning she posed as the keeper of a harmless lunatic. She made the acquaintance of the doctor, informed proprietor and proprietress, the waitresses, the servants, the other guests. I was shut off from association with intelligent people of my own kindred who understood me. At meals she revenged herself for the silence to which she had been condemned in Paris. She missed no opportunity of joining in the conversation, and literally inundated us with a never-ending stream of foolish twaddle which, she knew, irritated me horribly. And since the uncultured, commonplace crowd among whom we lived always very politely agreed with her, there was nothing for me to do but to keep silence; they regarded my silence as a proof of my inferiority.

She looked ill and fragile, and appeared to be suffering from a great grief; she treated me with dislike and contempt.

All I loved, she detested: she was disappointed with the Alps because I admired them; she scorned the beautiful walks; she avoided being alone with me; she made a practice of anticipating my wishes so as to thwart them; she said Yes whenever I said No, and vice versa; there was no doubt that she hated me.

Alone and solitary in a strange country, I was compelled to seek her society; but since we never talked for fear of quarrelling, I had to be content with merely seeing her at my side, with feeling that I was not quite isolated.

My illness became worse; I was so ill that I could take nothing but beef tea; I lay awake at night, suffering agonies, tortured by an unbearable thirst which I tried to relieve by drinking cold milk.

My brain, keen and refined by study and culture, was thrown into confusion by contact with a coarser brain; every attempt to bring it into harmony with my wife's caused me to have convulsions. I tried to get into touch with strangers. But they treated me with the forbearance which a sane person usually shows to a lunatic.

For three months I hardly opened my lips. At the end of that time I noticed with horror that I had almost lost my voice, and, from sheer want of practice, had no longer any control of the spoken word.

Determined not to be defeated in the struggle, I began a brisk correspondence with my friends in Sweden. But their guarded language, their deep sympathy, their well-meant advice, plainly betrayed the opinion which they had formed of my mental condition.

She triumphed. I was on the verge of insanity, and the first symptoms of persecutional mania showed themselves. Mania? Did I say mania? I was being persecuted, there was nothing irrational in the thought.

It was just as if I had become a child again. Extremely feeble, I lay for hours on the sofa, my head on her knees, my arms round her waist, like Michel Angelo's Pieta. I buried my face in her lap, and she called me her child. "Your child, yes," I stammered. I forgot my sex in the arms of the mother, who was no longer female, but sexless. Now she regarded me with the eyes of the conqueror, now she looked at me kindly, seized with the sudden tenderness which the hangman is said to feel sometimes for his victim. She was like the female spider which devours her mate immediately after the hymeneal embrace.

* * * * *

While I suffered thus, Marie led a mysterious life. She always remained in bed till the one o'clock dinner. After dinner she went to town, frequently without any definite purpose, and did not return until supper, sometimes even later. When I was asked where she had gone, I replied--

"To town!"

And the inquirer smiled furtively.

I never suspected her. I never thought of playing the spy. After supper she remained in the drawing-room, talking to strangers.

At night she often treated the servants to liqueurs; I heard their whispering voices, but I never stooped so low as to listen at her door....

What was it that held me back? I don't know. Only an instinct, I suppose, which teaches us that those actions are unmanly and dishonourable. Moreover, it had become a sort of religion with me to leave her an absolutely free hand.

* * * * *

Three months passed. Then the fact suddenly struck me that our expenditure was enormous. Now that our expenses were regulated, it was easy to check them.

We paid twelve francs a day at our hotel, that is three hundred and sixty francs a month, and I had given Marie a thousand francs a month. She had therefore spent six hundred francs a month in incidental expenses.

I asked her to account for her extravagance.

"The money has been spent on incidental items!" she exclaimed furiously.

"What! with an ordinary expenditure of three hundred and sixty francs, you spent six hundred francs incidentally? Do you take me for a fool?"

"I don't deny that you have given me a thousand francs, but you have spent the greater part on yourself!"

"Have I? Let's see! Tobacco (very inferior quality), and cigars at one penny each: ten francs; postage: ten francs; what else?"

"Your fencing lessons!"

"I've only had one: three francs!"

"Riding lessons!"

"Two: five francs."

"Books!"

"Books? Ten francs--together thirty francs; let us say one hundred francs; that leaves five hundred francs for incidental expenses.... Preposterous!"

"Do you mean to say I'm robbing you? You cad!" What could I say? Nothing at all!...

I was a cad, and on the following day all her friends in Sweden were informed of the progress of my insanity.

And gradually the myth grew and developed. The salient characteristics of my personality became more and more unmistakable as time went on, and instead of the harmless poet, a mythological figure was sketched, blackened, touched up until it closely resembled a criminal.

I made an attempt to escape to Italy, where I felt sure of meeting artists and men after my own heart. The attempt was a failure. We returned to the shores of the Lake of Geneva, there to await Marie's confinement.

When the child was a few days old, Marie, the martyr, the oppressed wife, the slave without rights, implored me to have it baptised. She knew very well that in my controversial writings I had fought Christianity tooth and nail, and was therefore strongly opposed to the ritual of the church.

Although she was not in the least religious herself, and had not set a foot inside a church for the last ten years, or been to communion for goodness knows how long; although she had only prayed for dogs, fowls and rabbits, the thought of this baptism, which she meant to elaborate into a great festival, completely obsessed her. I had no doubt that the motive which actuated her was the thought of my dislike to ceremonies which I considered insincere, and which are opposed to all my convictions.

But she implored me with tears in her eyes, appealed to my kind and generous nature. In the end I yielded to her importunity, on condition, however, that I was not expected to be present at the ceremony. She kissed my hand, thanked me effusively for what she called a mark of my affection for her, and assured me that her baby's baptism was a matter of conscience to her, a very vital point.

The ceremony took place. After her return from church, she ridiculed the "farce" in the presence of many witnesses, posed as a free-thinker, made fun of the ceremonial, and even boasted that she knew nothing whatever of the church into which her son had just been received.

She had won the game and could afford to laugh at the whole business; the "vital question" transformed itself into a victory over me, a victory which served to strengthen the hands of my adversaries.

Once again I had humiliated myself, laid myself open to attack, in order to humour the fads and fancies of an overbearing woman.

But my measure of calamities was not yet full. A Scandinavian lady appeared, on the scene, full of the mania called the "Emancipation of Woman." She and Marie became friends at once, and between them I had no chance.

She brought with her the cowardly book of a sexless writer who, rejected by all parties, became a traitor to his own sex by embracing the cause of all the blue-stockings of the civilised world. After having read _Man and Woman_, by Emile Girardin, I could well understand that this movement was bound to result in great advantages to the hostile camp of the women.

To depose man and put woman in his place by the re-introduction of the matriarchate; to dethrone the true lord of creation who evolved civilisation, spread the benefits of culture, created all great ideals, art, the professions, all that there is great and beautiful in the world, and crown woman who, with few exceptions, has not shared in the great work of civilisation, constituted to me a challenge to my sex. The very thought of having to witness the apotheosis of those intelligences of the iron age, those manlike creatures, those semi-apes, that pack of dangerous animals, roused my manhood. It was strange, but I was cured of my illness, cured through my intense repugnance to an enemy who, though intellectually my inferior, was more than a match for me on account of her complete lack of moral feeling.

In a tribal war the less honest, the more crafty, tribe generally remains in possession of the battlefield. The more a man respects woman, the more leisure he leaves her to arm and prepare herself for the fight, the smaller are his prospects of winning the battle. I determined to take the matter seriously. I armed myself for this new duel and wrote a book which I flung, like a gauntlet, at the feet of the emancipated women, those fools who demanded freedom at the price of man's bondage.

In the following spring we changed our hotel. Our new abode was a kind of purgatory where I was continually watched by twenty-five women who, incidentally, furnished me with copy for my book.

In three months' time the volume was ready for publication. It was a collection of stories of matrimonial life with an introduction in which I voiced a great number of disagreeable home-truths.

"Woman," I contended, "is not a slave, for she and her children are supported by her husband's work. She is not oppressed, for nature has ordained that she should live under the protection of the man while she fulfills her mission in life as mother. Woman is not man's intellectual equal; the man, on the other hand, cannot bear children. She is not an essential factor in the great work of civilisation; this is man's domain, for he is better fitted to grapple with spiritual problems than she is. Evolution teaches us that the greater the difference between the sexes, the stronger and more fit will be the resulting offspring. Consequently the aping of the masculine, the equality of the sexes, means retrogression, and is utter folly, the last dream of romantic and idealistic socialism.

"Woman, man's necessary complement, the spiritual creation of man, has no right to the privileges of her husband, for she can only be called 'the other half of humanity' by virtue of her numbers, proportionally she is merely the sixth part of a sixth. She should not, therefore, invade the labour market as long as it falls to the lot of the man to provide for his wife and family. And the fact should not be lost sight of that every time a woman wrests an appointment from a man, there is one more old maid or prostitute."

The fury of the feminists, and the formidable party which they formed, may easily be imagined when one realises that they demanded the confiscation of my book and brought a lawsuit against me.

But despite their attempt to represent my attack as an offence against religion (the folly of the unsexed actually aspired to raise their cause to the dignity of a religion), they were not clever enough to win their case.

Marie obstinately opposed my intention to go to Sweden unaccompanied by her; to take my family with me was out of the question on account of my limited means. Secretly she was afraid that I might escape from her strict guardianship and, worse still, that my appearance in court, before the public, would give the lie to the rumours concerning my mental condition which she had so sedulously disseminated.

She pleaded illness, without, however, being able to make a definite statement as to the nature of her illness, and kept her bed. Nevertheless I decided to appear personally in court, and left for Sweden.

The letters which I wrote to her during the following six weeks, while I was threatened with two years' penal servitude, were full of love, love rekindled by our separation. My overwrought brain cast a glamour over her fragile form, wove a resplendent halo round her sweet face; restraint and longing clothed her with the white garments of the guardian angel. Everything that was base, ugly, evil, disappeared; the madonna of my first love-dream reappeared. I went so far as to admit to an old friend, a journalist, "that the influence of a good woman had made me more humble and pure-minded." Probably this confession made the round of the papers of the United Kingdoms.

Did the unfaithful wife laugh when she read it?

The public got its money's worth, at any rate.

Marie's replies to my love-letters bore witness to the keen interest which she took in the financial side of the question. But her opinion underwent a change in the same proportion in which the ovations I received in the theatre, in the street and in court increased, and she called the judges stupid, and regretted that she was not a member of the jury.

She met my ardent declarations of love with clever reserve; she refused to be drawn into an argument, and confined herself to the repetition of the words: "To understand one another," "To comprehend each other's nature and ideas." She blamed my failure to understand her for the unhappiness of our marriage. But I could swear that she herself never understood a single word of the language of her learned poet.

Amongst the number of her letters there was one which reawakened my old suspicions. I had mentioned my intention to live permanently abroad, if I was fortunate enough to escape the meshes of the law.

This upset her; she scolded me, threatened me with the loss of her love; she appealed to my pity, went down on her knees before me, as it were, evoked the memory of my mother, and confessed that the thought of never again seeing her country (by which she did not mean Finland) sent cold shudders down her spine and would kill her.

Why cold shudders? I wondered....

To this day I have not found an explanation.

I was acquitted. A banquet was given in my honour, and--oh, irony of fate!--Marie's health was drunk "because she had persuaded me to appear personally before my judges."

It was indeed amusing!

As soon as possible I returned to Geneva, where my family had lived during my absence. To my great surprise Marie, whom I had believed to be ill and in bed, met me at the station; she looked well and happy, but a trifle absent-minded.

I soon recovered my spirits, and the evening and night which followed fully compensated me for all the sufferings I had endured during those six weeks.

On the following day I discovered that we were living in a boarding-house which was mainly patronised by students and light women. While listening to their chatter, it came home to me with a pang that Marie had found pleasure in drinking and playing cards with these shady characters. The familiar tone which prevailed revolted me. Marie posed to the students as the little mother (her old game); she was the bosom friend of the most objectionable of the women; she introduced her to me: a slut, who came down to dinner semi-intoxicated.

And in this hell my children had lived for six weeks! Their mother approved of the place, for she was without prejudices! And her illness--her simulated illness--had not prevented her from taking part in the amusements of this disreputable company.

She lightly dismissed all my remonstrances. I was jealous, a stickler, a snob....

And again it was war between us.

* * * * *

We were now confronted by a new difficulty: the question of the education of the children. The nurse, an uneducated country girl, was made their governess, and, in collusion with the mother, committed the most outrageous follies. Both women were indolent, and liked to stay in bed until broad daylight. Consequently the children were obliged to stay in bed also, during the morning, no matter how wide awake they were; if they insisted on getting up, they were punished. As soon as I became aware of this state of things, I interfered; without much ado I sounded the reveille in the nursery, and was greeted with shouts of delight as a deliverer from bondage. My wife reminded me of our contract: personal freedom--her interpretation of which was the limitation of the liberty of others--but I took no notice of her.

The monomania of weak and inferior brains, that desire to equalise what can never be equal, was the cause of much mischief in my family. My elder daughter, a precocious child, had for years been allowed to play with my illustrated books, and had, besides, enjoyed many of the priviliges usually enjoyed by the firstborn. Because I would not extend the same privileges to the younger one, who had no idea of handling an expensive book, I was accused of injustice.

"There ought to be no difference whatever," she said.

"No difference? Not even in the quantity of clothes and shoes?"

There was no direct reply to my remark, but a contemptuous "fool" made up for the omission.

"Every one according to merit and ability! This for the elder, that for the younger one!"

But she refused to understand my meaning, and stubbornly maintained that I was an unjust father, and "hated" my younger daughter.

To tell the truth, I was more attached to the elder one, because she awakened in me memories of the first beautiful days of my life, and because, also, she was sensible in advance of her years; I may also have been influenced by the fact that the younger one was born at a time when I had grave doubts of my wife's fidelity.

The mother's "justice," I may say, evidenced itself in complete indifference to the children. She was always either out or asleep. She was a stranger to them, and they became devoted to me; their preference for me was so marked that it aroused her jealousy, and in order to conciliate her, I made a practice of letting her distribute the toys and sweets which I bought for them, hoping that in this way she might win their affection.

The little ones were a very important factor in my life, and in my darkest moments, when I was almost broken by my isolation, contact with them bound me afresh to life and their mother. For the sake of the children the thought of divorcing my wife was unthinkable; an ominous fact, as far as I was concerned, for I was becoming more and more her abject slave.

III

The result of my attack on the strongholds of the feminists soon made itself felt. The Swiss press attacked me in such a manner that my life in Switzerland became unbearable. The sale of my books was prohibited, and I fled, hunted from town to town, to France.

But my former Paris friends had deserted me. They had become my wife's allies, and, surrounded and hemmed in like a wild beast, I again changed the arena; almost without means I at last made port in a colony of artists in the neighbourhood of Paris.

Alas! I was caught in a net, and I remained enmeshed for ten miserable months!

The society in which I found myself consisted of young Scandinavian artists, recruited from various professions, some of them of strange origin; but, worse still, there was a number of lady-artists, women without prejudices, completely emancipated and so enamoured with hermaphroditic literature that they believed themselves the equals of man. They tried to conceal their sex as far as possible by adopting certain masculine characteristics; they smoked, drank, played billiards ... and made love to each other. They wallowed in the lowest depths of immorality.

As an alternative to utter isolation, we made friends with two of those monstrous women; one of them was a writer, the other an artist.

The writer called on me first, as is customary when one happens to be a well-known author. My wife was jealous at once: she was anxious to win an ally sufficiently enlightened to appreciate my arguments against the unsexed.

But certain events happened which made my henceforth notorious mania break out in irrepressible fury.

The hotel boasted of an album which contained caricatures of all the well-known Scandinavians, sketched by Scandinavian artists. My portrait was amongst them, adorned with a horn cleverly contrived by the manipulation of a lock of hair.

The artist was one of our most intimate friends. I concluded that my wife's infidelity was an open secret; everybody knew it, everybody except myself. I asked the proprietor of the collection for an explanation.

Marie had taken care to inform him of my mental condition soon after our arrival, and he swore that the decoration of my forehead existed in my imagination only, that there was no trace of it in the sketch, and that I had worked myself into a passion for no reason whatever. I had to be content with this explanation until I was able to obtain more reliable information.

One evening we were sipping our coffee in the hotel garden in the company of an old friend who had just arrived from Sweden. It was still broad daylight, and from where I sat I could watch every expression on Marie's face. The old man gave us all the latest news. Amongst other names he mentioned that of the doctor who had treated my wife by massage. She did not let the name pass without comment, but interrupted him with a defiant--

"Ah! you know the doctor?"

"Oh yes, he is a very popular man.... I mean to say he enjoys a certain reputation----"

"As a conceited fool," I interposed.

Marie's cheeks grew pale; a cynical smile drew up the corners of her mouth, so that her white teeth became visible. The conversation dropped amid a general sense of embarrassment.

When I was left alone with my friend, I begged him to tell me frankly what he knew of those rumours which were giving me so much uneasiness. He swore a solemn oath that he knew nothing. I continued urging him, and at last drew from him the following enigmatical words of comfort--

"Moreover, my dear fellow, if you suspect one man, you may be sure that there are several."

That was all. But from this day onward Marie, who had been so fond of telling tales, of mentioning the doctor's name in public, that it sometimes seemed as if she were trying to get accustomed to talk about him without blushing, never again alluded to him.

This discovery impressed me so much that I took the trouble to search my memory for similar evidence. I recollected a play which had appeared at the time of her divorce. It threw light, vague, uncertain light, it is true, but yet sufficient light, on the channel which led up to the source of those rumours.

A play--by the famous Norwegian blue-stocking, the promoter of the "equality-mania," had fallen into my hands. I had read it without connecting it in the least with my own case. Now, however, I applied it easily, so easily that the blackest suspicions of my wife's good fame seemed justified.

This was the story of the play--

A photographer (the realism of my writings had won me this designation) had married a girl of doubtful morality. She had been the mistress of a smelter, and funds which she received from her former lover kept her home going. She made herself proficient in her husband's profession; and while she worked left him to loaf and spend his time in the cafés, drinking with boon companions.

The facts, albeit disguised in this way, must have been plain enough to the publisher; for although the latter knew that Marie was a translator, he did not know that I edited her translations and paid her the proceeds of her work without condition or deduction.

Matters did not improve when the unfortunate photographer discovered that his daughter, whom he idolised, had come into the world prematurely and was not his child at all, that he had been duped by his wife when she had prevailed on him to marry her.

To complete his degradation the deceived husband accepted a large sum from the old lover in lieu of damages.

In this I saw an allusion to Marie's loan which the Baron had guaranteed; it was the same guarantee which I had been compelled to countersign on our wedding-day.

I could not, at first, see any similitude between the illegitimate birth of the child in the play and my own case, for my little daughter was not born until two years after our marriage.

But I reflected.... What about the child who died?... I was on the right track!... Poor little dead baby!... It had been the cause of our marriage which otherwise might never have taken place.

I knew that my conclusion was not altogether sound, nevertheless I had arrived at a conclusion of some sort. Everything fitted in. Marie had visited the Baron after the divorce, he was on friendly terms with us, the walls of my home were decorated with his pictures, there was the loan, and all the rest of it.

I was determined to act, and laid my plans accordingly. I intended to suggest that Marie should draw up an indictment, or rather a defence, which would clear us both, for both of us had been attacked by the feminists' man of straw; he, doubtless, had been bribed into undertaking this profitable job.

When Marie entered my room, I received her in the most friendly manner.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"A very serious thing which concerns us both!" I told her the story of the play, and added that the actor who played the part of the photographer had made up to resemble me.

She reflected, silently, a prey to very evident excitement.

Then I suggested the defence.

"If it is true, tell me; I shall forgive you. If the little one who died was indeed Gustav's baby, well--you were free at the time; vague promises only bound you to me, and you had never accepted any money from me. As for the hero of the play, he behaved, in my opinion, like a man of heart; he was incapable of ruining the future prospects of his wife and daughter. The money which he accepted on behalf of the child was nothing but a quite legitimate compensation for an injury done to him."

She listened with great attention; her small soul nibbled at the bait without, however, swallowing it.

To judge from the calm which smoothed her conscience-stricken features, my assertion that she had a right to dispose of her body because she had never taken money from me pleased her. She agreed that the deceived husband was a man of heart. "A noble heart," she maintained.

The scene ended without my succeeding to draw a confession from her. I showed her the way out of the difficulty; I appealed to her for advice as to the best means of repairing our honour; suggested that we should publish our "defence" in the shape of a novel, and so cleanse ourselves before the world and our children from all those infamies....

I talked for an hour. She sat at my writing-table, playing with my penholder, in a state of intense agitation, without making a sound, only giving vent occasionally to a short exclamation.

I went out for a walk and then played a game of billiards. When I returned, after a couple of hours, I found her still sitting in the same place, motionless, like a statue.

She roused herself when she heard my footsteps.

"You were setting a trap for me!" she exclaimed.

"Not at all! Do you think I want to lose the mother of my children for ever?"

"I consider you capable of anything. You want to be rid of me; you made an attempt some time ago when you introduced a certain friend of yours to me." She mentioned a name which had never before been mentioned in this connection. "You hoped that I should betray you with him, didn't you?"

"Who told you that?"

"Helga!"

"Helga?"

She was Marie's last "friend" before we left Sweden. The revenge of the Lesbian!

"And you believed her?"

"Of course I did.... But I deceived you both, him and you!"

"You mean there was a third?"

"I didn't say so!"

"But you just confessed it! Since you deceived both of us, you must have deceived me! That is a logical conclusion."

She fought my arguments desperately, and demanded that I should prove them.

"Prove them!..."

Her treachery, surpassing the lowest depths of degradation of which I held a human heart capable, weighed on me like a crushing load. I bowed my head, I fell on my knees, I whined for mercy.

"You believed in the tittle-tattle of that woman! You believed that I wanted to be rid of you! And yet I have never been anything to you but a true friend, a faithful husband; I can't live without you! You complained of my jealousy ... while I regarded all women who run after me, trying to make love to me, as evil spirits. You believed what that woman said!... Tell me, did you really believe it?"

She was moved to compassion, and, all at once, yielding to a prompting to tell the truth, she confessed that she had never really believed it.

"And you deceived me.... Confess it, I'll forgive you.... Deliver me from the terrible, pitiless thoughts which torment me.... Confess it...."

She confessed nothing, and merely confined herself to calling my friend a "scoundrel."

A scoundrel he, my most intimate, my closest friend!

Oh, that I lay before her dead! Life was unbearable....

During dinner she was more than kind to me. When I had gone to bed, she came into my room, and, sitting on the edge of my bed, stroked my hands, kissed my eyes, and at last, shaken to the very foundation of her soul, burst into uncontrollable weeping.

"Don't cry, darling, tell me what's the matter; let me comfort you!..."

She stammered unintelligible, disconnected words about my generous heart, my kindness, my forbearance, the great compassion which I extended even to the worst of sinners.

How absurd it all was! I accused her of infidelity, she praised and caressed me.

But the fire had been kindled, and the flames could not be extinguished.

She had deceived me.

I must know the name of my rival!

The following week was one of the darkest of my whole life.

I fought a desperate fight against all those inbred principles which we inherit, or, rather, which we acquire through education. I resolved to open Marie's letters and make sure how I stood with her. And yet, although I allowed her to open all communications which came for me during my absence, I recoiled from tampering with the sacred law of the inviolability of letters, this most subtle obligation imposed on us by silent agreement between the whole community.

But my desire to know the full truth was stronger than my sense of honour, and a day dawned when the sacred law was forgotten. A letter had arrived; I opened it with trembling fingers; my hands shook as if they were unfolding the death-warrant of my honour.

It was a letter from the adventuress, friend No. 1. The subject of it was my insanity, mockingly, contemptuously discussed; it concluded with a prayer that God might soon deliver "her dear Marie" from her martyrdom by extinguishing the last glimmer of my reason.

I copied the worst passages, re-sealed the envelope, and laid the letter aside, ready to hand it to my wife with the evening mail. When the time came I gave it to her, and sat down by her side to watch her while she read it.

When she came to the part where the writer prayed for my death--at the top of the second page--she burst into shrill laughter.

So my beloved wife saw no other way out of her difficulties than my death. It was her only hope of escape from the consequences of her indiscretions. When I was gone, she would cash my life insurance and receive the pension due to the widow of a famous writer; then she would marry again, perhaps, or remain a gay widow all her life ... my beloved wife....

_Moriturus sum!_ I resolved to hasten the catastrophe by a liberal recourse to absinthe, sole source of happiness now, and in the meantime play billiards to calm my excited brain.

* * * * *

A fresh complication confronted me, worse, if possible, than any of the previous ones. The authoress who had pretended to be in love with me made a conquest of Marie, and Marie became so devoted to her that her attachment gave rise to a great deal of gossip. This roused the jealousy of the authoress's former "inseparable," a fact which was not calculated to contradict the ugly rumours.

One evening Marie asked me whether I was in love with her friend....

"No, on the contrary! A common tippler! You can't be serious!"

"I am mad on her," she replied. "It is strange, isn't it?... I am afraid of being alone with her!"

"Why?"

"I don't know! She is so charming ... delicious...."

"Indeed...."

In the following week we invited some of our Paris friends, artists, without scruples or prejudices, and their wives.

The men came, but alone; the wives sent apologies, so transparent that they amounted to insults.

Dinner degenerated into perfect orgy. The scandalous conduct of the men revolted me.

They treated Marie's two friends as if they were prostitutes, and when every one was more or less intoxicated I saw one of the officers present repeatedly kissing my wife.

I waved my billiard cue above their heads and demanded an explanation.

"He's a friend of my childhood, a relative! Don't make yourself a laughing-stock, you silly!" replied Marie.

"Moreover, it is a Russian custom to kiss in public, and we are Russian subjects."

"Rubbish!" exclaimed one of the convives. "A relative? Humbug!"

I nearly committed a murder then. I had every intention to ... but the thought of leaving my children without father and mother arrested my arm.

When the company had left I had a scene with Marie.

"Prostitute!"

"Why?"

"Because you submit to being treated like one."

"Are you jealous?"