with a set “So-pleased-to-meet-you” sort of smile; gives her as much of
his time as he does to any of the women there; and converses with her,
partly flirting, partly freezing her with the haughty consciousness of
his preëminence as a drawing-room “lion.” He makes no endeavour to
conceal his liking for her, but shows just as much as it becomes him to
have for any young and handsome woman. It would be a breach of the laws
of hospitality, if he had not for each of these a few discreet
compliments, and for each a look of warm admiration, beaming from those
ever half-curtained almond eyes.

Orcio is sometimes called in from the nursery; and in he comes—a little
fair-haired boy in black velvet, with a superb collar of yellowish lace.
The ladies talk to him in French, in order to praise his accent.

To-day the following conversation took place:

“_Qui aimes-tu davantage, Georges,—papa ou maman?_” was the question put
to him by Madame Wildenhoff, who, her hand in a white glove of Danish
leather, was stroking the boy’s curls with a blandishing smile.

“_C’est papa_,” was Orcio’s reply.

“_Et pourquoi donc?_”

“_Parce que maman ne rit jamais._”

Whereupon everybody set hurriedly to expatiate upon the accomplishments
of Orcio,—who is not yet four! This they did, wishing to hide a certain
confusion felt: that _enfant terrible_ had so unconsciously touched on a
matter that every one knew, but no one talked about.

Madame Wildenhoff, who no doubt expected the boy’s answer, and had
perhaps elicited it purposely, was the only person to underline its
meaning; she let her long eye-lashes droop over her rosy cheeks,
pretending to be shocked at the unseemly associations that it had by her
means called up.

Martha laughed in merry contradiction of what Orcio had just said; then,
kissing his fair brow, she told him to make a nice bow to the company
and go back to the nursery with the maid.

Society is irksome to Martha now. We two often went together formerly to
the theatre or to a concert: at present she cares no more to go.

I mostly spend my evenings with her, in interminable conversations. She
either relates something to me, or else she “gives sorrow words.” I
listen.

She is just now much grieved that her husband Witold has for nearly a
fortnight hardly ever been at home. Some days we even dine without him.

“It is surely so,” she was saying yesterday. “He enjoys his manhood to
the full: everything is his. There, he has ‘Bohemian’ society,
revelling, fast people, singing, champagne, flowers, and forgetfulness:
here, he finds the pure and quiet light of the domestic fireside, the
delights of fatherhood, the love of a faithful wife. When he is tired of
one sort of pleasure, why then he tries the other.... And _we_—we are
all crippled, helpless things—all!”

Silence for a moment.

“There he gets his amusement at the expense of those poor weaklings,
whose souls have been wrenched away from them, who have lost the feeling
of their human dignity, the consciousness of their right to live, even
the very sense of pleasure; who groan under that most unjust burden,
their own self-contempt; who feel the continual oppression of a guilt
which does not exist, and for whom the first wrinkle is as a sentence of
death.

“But on his domestic hearth there beams another fire, and beams on
another kind of weakling; a strange creature, now no longer able to
descend into Life’s hurly-burly; for whom certain deeds, for many a
century regarded with scorn, have through long heredity of atavistic
feelings become really loathsome....

“Our duty is to amuse _them_—the lords of life and death—with the
effects of contrast; that _they_ may have the assurance of having
experienced the whole gamut of emotions, that they may enjoy their
manhood to the full.”

When Witold came home to-day from the club (which was at about noon)
Martha received him in a beautiful white _peignoir_, trimmed with Angora
fur, and asked him whether he had yet breakfasted. He thanked her
graciously, kissed her hand and brow, and desired to see Orcio.

Martha changed colour. She is not so jealous, even of women, as she is
of her beautiful little boy, perhaps because he is with her constantly.

The nursemaid brought Orcio, who at once jumped on to his father’s knee,
and began talking at the top of his voice about a number of things which
had happened to interest him since the day before.

Imszanski was enchanted with the little one, and kissed his rosy face.

For men like him, there is something incomparably sublime and
public-spirited in the fact of being a father; this they hold to be the
only thing that compensates and atones for the life they lead.

Martha shrank away; standing at a distance, fury in her heart and a
smile on her face, she looked on at the father caressing his boy.

“Look, you,” she whispered to me, “this—this is my vocation, this the
mission of my life; all the pain I have undergone, all the rage of my
never-ending and vain revolt, all my disappointed existence; all these
have been, only that they two should sit here thus, forgetting me
entirely; and that all the wrong done to me by the father should come to
life again in that son of his!”

But Witold, having caressed Orcio, went to bed. Not until the evening
did he wake up, fresh and hearty-looking, to dine with us, kiss Martha’s
hand, retail with lively wit several stories then going the round of the
town, and make his way to the club once more.

In his love-affairs, Wiazewski is just as fickle and as insatiable as
Imszanski; but their “spheres of influence” are different. Wiazewski has
a liking for seamstresses, shop-assistants, and so forth; whereas
Imszanski is specially interested in cocottes (even his intrigue with
Madame Wildenhoff is a case in point). Neither of the two has any great
liking for the other, in spite of their mutually courteous bearing at
all times. Imszanski has against my friend that he is too democratic:
whereas Wiazewski looks on Imszanski as a fool.

The latter explains his dislike for _demi-mondaines_ thus:

“I have a great liking for misdeeds, but not when committed by
professional criminals.”

The art of playing with his victims has been brought by him to the acme
of perfection. To this end, he employs what naturalists call “mimicry.”
His features being rather common, he has no trouble in putting a girl
off her guard; he makes up as a commercial man, or a lackey, or a
waiter; and in such parts he expresses himself most eloquently in the
slang of those classes, which he has picked up to perfection.

He is a thorough expert in the art of getting into touch with the minds
of such people; and the ease with which he finds his way through a
labyrinth of ideas quite unknown to us is truly admirable.

On principle, he is for continual change; but latterly he has been
making an exception, and declares he has hit upon the right sort, or
nearly so. For some time he has been “keeping company” with a girl, whom
he has, on account of her exceptional qualities, distinguished from the
common herd. I once saw her at his lodgings and was struck with her good
looks.

He has been reading a letter from her to-day. I asked him to give it to
me as a “document,” which he very readily consented to do.

It runs thus:

  “Dear Stephen I must tell you about something that is Roman the
  intended husband of Genka came to see me at the shop yesterday
  evening and he set a-talking to me this way don’t I have no notion
  where Genka is so I answer back what business of mine is that and he
  just says don’t you make believe for Genka is in Krucza with that
  there mechanic and he keeps her I hear is in love with her but I’ll
  pay him out for it, only the street and the number where he lives
  are gone clean out of my head can you tell me I know his name is
  Stephen and I answer this way don’t you go worriting an honest
  fellow for he don’t have nothing to say to no girls let alone such
  hussies as Genka he asked me where you lived and I said Krucza
  number 129 fourth floor and Stephen Tworkowski is your name and he
  said thankee and hooked it and he says he’ll ask the porter in
  Wspolna and I said don’t you poke your nose in or you’ll get your
  head punched as you did once before when you flung dirt at me so if
  he comes you tell him so and give the beast a talking to.... And
  something else my dear darling ideal I write this I love you to
  distraction I am regularly off my head with thinking of you and I
  have your photo before me and kiss it night and day. O God how I
  love him more than my life more than my faith I can’t tell what sin
  I have sinned that I have to pay so dear and you dearest you are so
  cold and you’ll bring me to my grave with your coldness and in no
  time too I don’t know but it seems to me you told Elizabeth I slept
  in Hoza and she makes a mock of me and I don’t care a fig for I am
  daft for your love no one won’t cure me and no one can’t it’s too
  late I loved you when I saw you first and shall till my life ends
  and so long as I don’t put an end to it and who will make me do that
  but you Stephen my dearest pet and sweetheart.

  “I end this scrawl of mine throwing away my pen crying my eyes out
  and dying of hunger for that blessed Sunday.

  “Your unhappy or rather love-sick

                                                                HELA.”

Quite aware that I am doing wrong, I let Martha look back into her past;
and I even question her myself so as to bring before her eyes the long
dismal perspective of her wounded love, I listen in the manner she likes
best, calmly and without any show of compassion. Nor have I any for her,
any more than for a fish that must needs live in cold water, or for a
bat that cannot bear the sunlight. Martha likes to suffer, and—perhaps
for this very reason—she is compelled to suffer. Indeed, she is
something of a Sybarite in her almost abnormal sensitiveness to pain.
She is fond of telling me all the petty foolish troubles of an injured
wife; and this procures her an odd sense of what may be called a sort of
enjoyment.

“But, all the same, there was a time once when he loved you, did he
not?”

“Oh, Witold declares that up to now he has loved none but me!”

“Well, well; but then at what time did _this_—the present phase begin?
For some time at least, he must have been faithful to you.”

“Oh, yes, for a few months. Quite at the beginning. Though I myself was
never happy.... First of all, during the six weeks before our wedding, I
was constantly a prey to such mystic terrors that I came near losing my
senses. You know that I do not admit any of those hackneyed maxims of
morality—and yet I continually felt that some evil thing was afoot, and
a day of reckoning close at hand. And besides, how intolerable then was
the thought that now I _had_ to marry him, however averse I might feel
to the act; that now I had more at stake upon my side than he on his!”

“And afterwards, by the seaside?”

“Oh, then it was entrancing! I almost felt happy. But it lasted so short
a time! Shortly after our arrival I fell sick, and grew unwieldy and
weakly and plain. And then, if you can believe me, surrounded with all
those marvels of nature and of art, I was always longing for Klosow, my
own place!”

After a silence of a few minutes, she went on:

“I saw a drawing by Brenner. It was always in my thoughts; a woman who
had died after an operation, stretched on a table, stark and stiff.
There was a man bending over her, mourning; his hair was like Witold’s.
And another picture, showing the tragedy of motherhood: a young mother
has just breathed her last; on her bosom sits a naked child, a loathsome
idiot, looking out at life with wide open, bewildered, lack-lustre eyes.
I can’t help fancying that Orcio resembles that child.”

With a sudden abrupt movement, she rang for the man-servant.

“Ask the nurse why the child is not in bed yet. I hear it making a
noise. Tell her she must put it to bed. Or else take it farther away
from this room.”

When the servant had gone out, I said to her:

“Why, what made you speak so angrily to him.”

“Really, I cannot recognize myself any more: my nerves are so horribly
unstrung.”... And she sank into a sombre reverie.

“Tell me more,” I said, to draw her out.

“More? Well, I was not so badly off then. We took delight in the blue
sky, in the murmuring green sea, and in our all but absolute solitude.
Witold was ever by my side, tender and kind—masking with his exquisite
courtesy the disgust I must have made him feel. Why, for myself I myself
often felt pity and aversion; I who had never before been other than
graceful all my life.

“Then things went worse.... Listen; but it is too much for me just now.”

“Then don’t talk of it, Martha.”

“Ah! what does it matter after all? If I could forget ... but I can’t.

“A few weeks before George’s birth, Witold for the first time spent the
night away from home. I sat up all the time, and looked out through the
window over the sea. Ah, that night!

“The servants had gone to bed long before. There was a great storm, with
boisterous gusts of wind: and I gave ear to the never-ceasing roar of
the waves. You know what a visionary I am. I at once fancied Witold must
have been sailing in a boat to the farther shore of the bay, and gone
down to the bottom of the sea. I was horribly alarmed for his sake; and
for a time, not an inkling of the truth flashed upon my mind. The horror
of my fancy came over me so strongly that I quite forgot all about his
past.... For I believed with faith unbounded in his immense love for me,
and should have scouted, as a ridiculous notion, the idea of his
possibly being unfaithful. I was out of my mind with terror. I counted
the hours that went by, in agonized expectation, surrounded with the
dark cloudy night, and hearing the terrific howling and rolling of the
winds and waves.... Ah, that night!

“In the morning he came in.

“With the mien of a youthful page, he doffed his hat to the ground in a
courtly bow, and stood motionless in my presence, humble, clasping his
hands: then, in a soft sweet voice somewhat broken by emotion, he said,
in an accent of dismay:

“‘Ah! my lady, I am afraid, greatly afraid!’

“I did not rush to welcome him, nor did I cry out aloud: I felt too weak
for any display of joy. But at that first instant, in the sole knowledge
that he was living, an infinite intensity of quiet and fathomless and
endless bliss flooded my heart: and I was minded to exclaim, like Mary
Magdalene at the Sepulchre, ‘Rabboni: which is to say, Master!’

“And then up rose the sun!

“He had never before appeared so admirable to me, as in that attitude of
a page of Mediæval times, and with the playful humility of his bright
smile; he had never yet been so loved by me, so dear beyond all measure.
No, I had never been so glad in all my life as in this one short instant
of consolation!

“And yet they say that women have intuitive minds!

“I was as it were caught and suspended in an aërial cobweb that
stretched over an abyss of waters; and there I gazed upon the golden
glitter of the morning landscape now that the tempest was over—gazed
into the blue and shimmering stillness. Beneath me, under the bridge of
hanging gossamer, rolled the sombre sea of dread and death; before me
rose the sea of life, crimson and blood-red in hue. But I—I saw nothing
there, save the dawn and the sunshine.”

Here she broke off, closed her eyes, and, resting her head on the arm of
her easy-chair, remained some time plunged in the contemplation of that
past scenery, all azure and gold. I let her rest so for a while, and
then, rousing her:

“Well, and what then?” said I.

She knit her brows slightly.

“Then, ah! then! It was a mere idle question, for I troubled about
nothing now that I had him again; but I asked him what he had been doing
all night.

“‘Oh, but I am in fear, in such fear of you,’ he said, smiling, kneeling
down before me, and clasping his hand—so! You know the gesture well; it
is almost the embodiment of childlike humility.

“‘Oh, what?’

“‘I want you to promise you will not be angry with me.’

“I was suddenly torn with a sharp misgiving.

“‘No, do not tell me, Witold,’ I whispered.

“But he was unable to conceal anything from me. All he said in excuse
was that I ought to pardon everything, by reason of his great love; that
no woman could ever snatch from me the place which I held in his heart.
That he had not been truly unfaithful, since his true and only love had
always been with me; I was the only woman that his soul loved, and not
his senses.... It is ever the same: stretch out your hands for life, and
Death will come to you!”

“And what did you do?”

“In the first moments I did not understand all. He again and again said
he loved me a hundred times more than ever before; I was the only woman,
so pure, so ideal ... and I could not make out what he meant. But my
hands, when touched by his lips, grew cold as ice.

“He was frightened, and tried to soothe me; said he would never do it
any more; it was not properly his fault, he had been overtaken with
wine: and besides, she—she was indeed most beautiful.

“At the bare memory, I saw his eyes flash bright. Oh, he is a
_connoisseur_ in women!

“And then, at last, I understood it all; and I thought (believe me, with
the utmost sincerity): ‘Why, rather than this, has he not been drowned
in the depths of the sea?’

“A mist came before my eyes: I rubbed them to see clear. Then a sudden
pain clutched at my heart and made me writhe with torture. I fainted;
when I came to, I was seized with fits of hysteria. In short, I made all
the scenes that the typical ‘injured wife’ is wont to make.

“Then, at the time when George came, I was dangerously ill. Witold did
not admit that he had done me wrong, nor did he come near me all the
time. Later, he justified himself by saying that he could have been of
no use, and was himself far too sensitive to bear the sight of
suffering.

“Finally, when all danger was over, and Orcio was making the house ring
with the noise he made, there was the same night over again; and he was
again ‘a little flushed with wine,’ and ‘guilty of no offense’; again I
was ‘his only love.’ And later, the same scene was repeated over and
over, and at shorter intervals. And this day ... it is just as usual....

“And now I am looking into the very bottom of my soul. Have you ever
seen it? An open coffin, in which there are no worms, there is no
corruption. Only patches of colour, continually fading and changing and
reviving, and forming lovely, lovely stars—just as in a kaleidoscope.
And these hues glisten like the scales of a serpent which rolls and
coils itself in ecstasy.”

A smile passed over her face. Then she gave a long shudder and closed
her eyes fast.

Starting up on a sudden, she joined her hands behind her bare and
shapely neck.

“If you knew, Janka,” she whispered, “if you only knew how I love him!
If you knew how I am longing for him every moment when he is away! If
you knew how fondly, how wildly, how madly I love the exceeding
sweetness of his mouth!”

Madame Wildenhoff does not belong to the class of women that Martha was
speaking of. I think that, were it not for her intrigue with Imszanski,
even Martha herself might acknowledge her as a “complete woman.” One
may, however, be a complete woman, and yet not a complete human being.
We are not yet in the habit of distinguishing these two ideas, as we
distinguish between “human being” and “man.” The part of a human being
is one so seldom played by a woman—they have so few opportunities of
doing so—that _we expect their womanliness to comprise the whole of
humanity_. Nor do we realize how much we lower woman by such an
expectation.

Now, as a woman, Madame Wildenhoff is complete, although her human
nature cannot be said to be rich.

Her life, which she told me with the utmost frankness, has not been
wanting in colour. The daughter of a rich land-owner, she was not yet
sixteen when she crossed the frontier to elope with a neighbour over
forty, and with whom she was not even in love! The whole affair came
about quite by chance. She was the friend of his daughter, whom (though
he was not in favour of religious education for women) he had decided to
send to a convent in France: and the parents of Lola had asked him,
since the two girls had made their studies together from the very
beginning, to take their daughter with him as well. This man, having put
his own daughter into the care of the nuns, asked Lola whether, instead
of poring over books in a convent, she would not like to go with him to
Italy. She very readily agreed to what she considered as a most natural
plan. After a few months had elapsed, she threw him over for a very
handsome Italian, who afterwards turned out to be a Parisian Jew. After
a good many other such experiences, her parents, as a last resort, took
legal measures to find her. This time they actually placed her in a
convent: and there, during three years of penance, her outlook upon life
took definite shape.

Her father at length relented, and allowed her to return home, for the
family had given up country life altogether, and now resided in town.
There, before the year was out, she entered the married state.

Her first lover was Wartoslawski, who died some time ago; Gina
Wartoslawska, whom I have mentioned, is his daughter.

No long period elapsed ere Madame Wildenhoff became unfaithful to her
husband: but he, from the height of his silent scepticism, looks down
with scornful amenity upon her “flirtation.” It may even be that he does
not dislike this state of things.

One child, a daughter, has been born of the marriage. She is two years
older than Orcio; and Madame Wildenhoff has for her the greatest care
and the tenderest maternal love.

I went to call upon her to-day, in the place of Martha, who is
constantly unwell. She was by herself; for Wildenhoff, of course, like
all husbands of his kind, either was no longer at home, or had not yet
come back.

She tried to interest me by talking, as her custom is, about herself.

“My outward appearance, when all is said in its favour that can be said,
is insufficient to explain the extraordinary success I have all my life
had with men. My only ability—call it an art if you like—consists in
influencing men by an appeal to their lower natures. That is the only
way to succeed with them: for all of them are mere animals—all!”

She offered me some fruit, taking up the vase containing it with the
gesture of a “hetaira” of old days, presenting a goblet of golden wine.

“You see,” she said, “I am an epicure. I want to get as much as I can
out of life, and I know how to get it. With nothing but champagne and
songs and flowers life would pall upon me very soon; so I like now and
then to get the atmosphere of an ‘At Home’: for instance, with the
Imszanskis. As to her, I don’t know whether she is really purer than the
atmosphere of a private supper-room: at all events, her style of
corruption is peculiar—more Gothic—and the virus is more skilfully
inoculated. I like to take a rest, and spend some quiet evenings in my
family circle, teach little Sophy her alphabet, or pass sleepless nights
in penance and vigil and sombre meditations. After which, I may perform
a sudden ‘pirouette’, Paris style, and blow from afar a farewell kiss to
husband, Sophy, mamma, grandmamma—and virtue!”

She laughed merrily.

“The future of the nations is not what I am looking forward to. No, I am
resolved to get for myself the greatest possible amount of happiness,
under the circumstances in which I am placed.... You will say I am a
mere product of environment; well, let it be so. But mind: the way I
live harms no one. If I am contented, so is my husband, and so are my
admirers as well.”

“And their wives too?” I hazarded.

“Well, but is it my fault if they are fools? Now, I’ll tell you what.
Never have I taken a man from a woman he loved. I am not of those whose
sole aim is to make difficult conquests.”

She added, after a pause:

“For ever so long (and that you must surely know) Imszanski has been
quite indifferent to his wife.”

Just then the bell rang in the ante-chamber. Madame Wildenhoff gave a
start, then burst into a fit of laughter. In that laugh of hers, I find
something peculiarly interesting; but I cannot guess what.

I rose to bid her farewell.

“Why, what are you running away for? It is only Gina. I like to see two
clever, handsome women together; a thing which, I must tell you, very
seldom happens.”

Gina came in with her customary smileless greeting, and as usual called
for a glass of water. Then she set to look through certain albums,
scattered about the table. Her figure, perfectly faultless in style,
stood out like a sort of anachronism on the background of that florid
middle-class drawing-room. In the light one could see that her eyebrows
and lashes were golden, and her wavy hair of a dark auburn hue, falling
in a dishevelled mass on to her shoulders as she bent forward.

Madame Wildenhoff attempted to lead the conversation towards topics of
general interest.

She began by the rights of women, and their failure to understand what
emancipation really signifies. Gina speaks little, but belongs, like
Madame Wildenhoff, to the category of those that are emancipated in
every sense of the word. As a matter of fact, her intended husband is
her paramour, and she has not the slightest intention ever to become his
wife.

I have for some time noticed that she is possessed with a spirit of
contradiction. In presence of people who have some certain definite
convictions, she always takes the opposite side: this possibly in order
to produce a more striking effect by the sharp contrast of tones. This
attitude called up in my mind certain reminiscences from out of
atavistic past. I began to talk about the gradual extinction of
individual monogamistic women, of the eroticism which has soaked our
democracies through and through, of the necessity for a class of
courtesans, that the type of those women who care for something besides
love intrigues may be preserved, and other nonsense of similar nature.

Gina only looked at me with a drowsy smile; but Madame Wildenhoff took
up the cudgels with a sort of enthusiasm. A curious thing: her talk is
not unlike Martha’s, though their natures are very far asunder indeed.

“Men are endowed by nature with a sense of equilibrium: so long as they
are in the prime of life, they live and love and laugh at plain and
virtuous women. _Car il faut que jeunesse se passe_. They therefore
require what may be called the ‘brute-woman’; a woman who laughs and
glitters and shines for a few years, till she ages: then of course she
withdraws from the arena, regretting that ‘she ever followed such a
path.’ It is only after men have sown their wild oats that the animal
dies out of them, and there wakes up—a plebeian, or a thinker, or a
father, or a citizen; and then he stretches out his hands towards what
we may call the ‘human woman.’ Then comes the triumph of her who
respects herself; her day of victory has dawned, she is at last
‘appreciated,’ which is to say remunerated for her virtue with that
famous respect which is never given to those of the other class. True,
the intellectuals may complain sometimes that men will not acknowledge
them as mentally their equals; but the foolish ones will be honoured by
their husbands’ friendship and confidence; and the good mothers will
have no aim or happiness in life beyond the bringing up of children:
while they each and all either look down upon the ‘brute-woman’ or
regard them with philanthropic compassion.”

“Poor things!” Gina exclaimed; “they do not know that the tragic
excitement of a single night may be perhaps worth more than a whole
existence passed in such torpid apathy as theirs.”

To-day there is some festival or other. I have not gone to the office,
and have been sitting all the morning at Martha’s bedside, who is not to
get up until the afternoon. She is as usual always complaining, her sad
eyes gazing into mine.

“Janka, I can no longer sleep a wink. Last night it was twelve before I
ceased tossing on my pillow. Like a child, I cried myself to sleep at
last: and when I woke, it was no later than three o’clock.”

She crossed behind her head her lace-decked arms, and looked out into
space with infinite wistfulness.

Then she continued in a low voice: “I cannot imagine why my former life
in Klosow now comes back to me so very vividly. I remember how sometimes
I used to rise early on a winter morning, when it was still dark, and
how I dressed by lamplight, shivering with cold, and fighting down my
longing to go back to my warm bed. Then I would put on a huge fur, and
take the keys, and go to the farm with a lantern in my hand. Do you
know, all this is present to me now, just like a vision? And then I
remember the far-off fields, lying fallow beneath the snow, and
stretching away even to the verge of the horizon, under the sky in which
the stars were beginning to grow pale. I remember the farm buildings,
vague dark spots upon the landscape, the forests like streaks of violet,
the grey fences, and the delicate tracery of the leafless garden trees.
And now through the darkness there come sounds: the clattering of tin
pails, and the faint drowsy calling of the maids to one another. Oh, and
I remember well the cold, the lusty, fresh, piercing cold, making the
teeth clatter in one’s head. And then, the close warmth of the
cow-byres, and the low black-raftered ceiling overhead; the outlines of
the solemn-looking cows and sleepy milkmaids, the bright circles of the
lanterns on the floor, and the quaint broken shadows on the beams and
girders above; the milk stream rhythmically into the pails, the indolent
lowing of the kine, and the jingling sound of the chain that bound the
savage steer to the crib.... You remember the cat, too—our cat? Don’t
you: so sharp of wit, following us everywhere like a dog? All that’s so
far off, so irrevocably gone! Oh, I tell you, I would give more than my
life, if I could but see one such morning return—only one such bleak and
dark and frosty morning, and I were now as I was then!...”

She turned her cheek to the pillow, and shed tears.

“Martha, your nerves are again in a very poor state. If you like, I
shall go with you to Klosow; and we shall spend Christmas there
together, and enjoy a few idyllic days as of old.”

“Oh, no, Janka; they would only be the miserable ghosts of times that
are past for ever. That stupid, clubby-faced woman, Janusz’s wife, would
get on my nerves so; besides, the thought that Witold would be staying
here with Madame Wildenhoff, and glad I was away!

“But,” she added with a sudden revival of spirits, “do you know, I fancy
her triumph will be over pretty soon? It is true that Witold was never
very much attached to her: but now it would seem that his affections are
strongly engaged elsewhere.”

“Are they?” I asked, much interested: for I recalled Lipka and my
unexpected meeting with Imszanski there.

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Oh, he is simply ridiculous—so hopelessly frank with me. He never will
spare me any details, and holds it in some sort as a duty to conceal
nothing from me....”

She laughed bitterly, and at once looked sullen again.

“Yesterday, before you came home from the office, I asked Witold all
about her. She is some star of the Parisian _demi-monde_, who has made
up her mind to get an engagement at any price on the stage here: and
Witold is expected, on account of his influence in Warsaw, to obtain a
fixed situation for her. It appears that her voice is tolerable, and her
outward appearance marvellous: he has described her to me in every
particular. It was, I assure you, one of the most emotional experiences
I ever went through.”

She closed her eyes, to intensify the image that she was forming in her
mind.

“The woman is tall, and seemingly of spare proportions: but only
seemingly so. Her bony framework is exceedingly slight and reed-like: so
you see, Janka, on close inquiry she is found not to be really thin.”

As she spoke, she turned upon her pillow, tearing at its satin covering
with her nails, and striving to swallow down her tears of rage.

I could not contain myself.

“Why on earth does he tell you about such things? He must be a monster.”

“There are a great many things that he never can understand—what I told
you seems but the merest trifle to him.”

She took a spoonful of bromide, and continued:

“You must know that he tells me she has large oval-shaped eyes, with
extremely long lashes—eyes of an unfathomable black, in very striking
contrast with her voluptuous mouth; always sorrowful, dreamy, and with a
far-away look, like the beggar-maid loved by King Cophetua. She has also
much originality, something like an odalisque, and uniting the
primitiveness of a mountain goat with all the cultured grace of a maid
of honour at a royal court.”

This, after the elimination of certain exaggerated points, was easily
recognizable as the description of that fair Frenchwoman whom I had seen
at Lipka’s. And now I understood why Imszanski had shown himself so very
full of courtesy toward Czolhanski. The latter, as a theatrical critic,
may be useful to him.

“She dresses, it appears, most superbly, with all the magnificence of
Babylonian times: golden combs and strings of pearls in her hair; in her
ears, rings of the greatest price. Moreover, she is a very miracle of
depravity. Witold smiled as he told me so, with an inward look, as
though recalling some particular.

“As he told me so, he smiled; and I too smiled, listening with the
blandest interest. He looked at me attentively, kissed my hand, and
said:

“‘Your nerves are better now, I see. How glad I am! You have no idea.
You have at last realized that to feel jealous of a _cocotte_ would be
unworthy of you.’

“‘Why, of course. Yes, yes; I am all right now.’ And yet, Janka, I never
felt it so deeply; I never saw things with such awful clearness of
vision. And alas! I never, never yet loved Witold with such passionate
love.

“But, more than him, I love that pain which I feel....”

She rose in bed, as if to repel something that was weighing her down;
then she sat propped up by her cushions and pillows.

“Do you imagine that in all this I had any idea of revengeful pleasure
at Mme. Wildenhoff’s disappointment, and for that reason made him tell
me what he did? Not in the least. I wanted to drink my fill of pain; as
in Spain they wave a red flag in bull-fights before the bloodshot eyes
of the poor brute, to make him yet madder with rage and despair, so I
wished to excite myself to the same delirious state.

“I do not wish for anything that can diminish the intensity of my
anguish, I hate whatever could mitigate or deaden it. I love to gloat
over the raw bleeding wounds, bare and unbandaged....”

At that moment, the nurse tapped at the door, to ask whether Orcio might
not come in to bid his mother good morning.

“No—no! shut the door! I will have no one here! Janka, you have not the
least idea how I _hate_ my son.”

At Lipka’s to-night: and this time in a private room. Mme. Wildenhoff
talked at great length, somewhat to the following effect:

“There is in reality only one kind of perfect love—that of the brute
creation; indeliberate, irreflective love, wherein victory is to the
strongest and most beautiful; the pure reproductive instinct, unalloyed
by any culture or mental analysis whatsoever. But we—we, who are
civilized—unfortunately look down upon this sort of love. For we have
reckoned, with quasi-mathematical exactitude, how much of love should be
taken, and how much rejected, in order to get the greatest possible sum
of quintessential delight. And thence has sprung quite a new type of
love: instinct which has emancipated itself from obedience to the laws
of nature—love with its chief motive, preservation of the species,
eliminated. Now love of the kind I have spoken of generally receives the
epithet of bestial; whereas on the contrary it is most specially the
outcome of refinement.”

“It appears among nations at the epoch of their highest development, and
is the harbinger of their speedy decline,” remarked Czolhanski, with
solemn dignity.

“What does it matter? _Après nous le déluge!_”

“And to what class would you assign conjugal love?” asked Owinski. Gina,
who had silently disposed her lithe, snake-like, supple figure on a
little sofa, looked round with astonishment at her _fiancé_.

“Oh, we may call it love of a third type,” answered Madame Wildenhoff:
“love sanctioned by law, the union of two souls in friendship, and the
bringing forth of rachitic offspring: an abnormal combination of brute
and human love.”

“Do you then, Madame,” urged Owinski, “perceive no good points in
marriage?”

“None whatever,” she replied with a bland smile, “because—and this
reason alone would suffice me—because I hate marriage with all my heart.
It has been and is the aim of my life to blast marriage, whenever I can
succeed in doing so. Between the happiest and most moral couples—those
in which one of the two, the husband or the wife, leads a profligate
life, and the other knows nothing of it—I bring the dissolving element,
enlightenment, and rejoice when I see the couples fall apart.”

Here she bent aside toward her husband’s chair, and said to him in an
affectionate and audible whisper:

“But we are a pattern couple, are we not?”

This time, Imszanski went home with me. I overheard Czolhanski say, on
taking leave of him: “You may rely upon me absolutely; I will manage
everything.”

It has been terribly cold, and now there is a thaw. At such times, I
love to wander up and down the avenues in the park, which then are
completely deserted.

My nostrils inhale that peculiar scent of bare moist earth, and the
effluvium from the buds as yet invisible; and I muse upon those
incomparable and marvellously beautiful things that have never been
realized.

On the yellow background of dry dead grass, there appeared in the
distance a young man to whom, as to myself, loneliness was no doubt
pleasant, and who enjoyed walking along the avenues oversprinkled with
last year’s fallen leaves.

He came up with me, and on passing by, looked keenly into my eyes, and
with something of astonishment.

I did not return his glance, but walked more slowly, so as to lag behind
him.

The young man stopped presently, and waited until I came up; then he
passed by me again with a protracted stare.

This manœuvre was repeated several times. Presently I was seized with an
unaccountable desire to burst into a fit of nervous laughter, which I
smothered down as best I could. At any rate, I had the full control of
my eyes, the expression of which was mere indifference and disdain.
Presently I looked him steadily in the face, to stare him out of
countenance; so that he could see my attitude to be unmistakably
hostile.

“But why,” I was thinking all the time, “why should I look upon him—this
handsome slender stripling—as my foe? He certainly does not mean to harm
me in any way; his interest is simply aroused in finding a person who
has the same taste for solitude as himself, whilst he naturally has a
friendly feeling towards a good-looking woman.”

The young fellow, at first kindly disposed, was nettled by the look of
hostility in my eyes. He came up close to me, with a flippant laugh, and
said in an ironical tone of sympathy:

“I would give anything in reason to know what sorrows of the heart have
driven you to take so very romantic a walk as this.”

I was silent, and knit my brows.

“Souls that pine in loneliness,” he went on, as sarcastic as before,
“ought to comfort each other, I think: don’t you?”

There was a pause, as we walked side by side.

“But why knit those fair eyebrows so? Oh, really, you frighten me....
Such malignant eyes! Come, come, I shall do you no harm; why be so
cantankerous?”

In a rage and turning my back on him, I walked swiftly away. He made no
attempt to follow. On arriving at the gate, where I was safe at last, I
looked round. He was standing where he had stood before, and from afar
waving me with bared head a graceful farewell.

The incident mortified and abashed me. I had behaved like a silly goose,
narrow-minded and ill-tempered; I had spoiled a situation that might
have had pleasant or curious developments. Why on earth had I done so?

Was this, again, only a matter of form? The necessity of that regular
introduction, so dear to the _bourgeoisie_, in a drawing-room where two
persons are made acquainted with each other by a third? Or was it not
rather that dread—now a part of our life—the instinctive dread of things
as they are, the eternal need of playing the part of a besieged fort,
which defends itself stubbornly in order to surrender on the best terms
possible?

As I came out of the park, a carriage driven at full speed passed by me;
I saw a couple of feathers and a good deal of fur. Suddenly the coachman
pulled up, and Mme. Wildenhoff jumped out and came towards me.

“Ah! how delighted I am to meet you! You won’t get away from me this
time. Pray step in: I must make a regular woman of you.”

“With pleasure: but what’s the matter?”

“You shall hear.”

We got in. Mme. Wildenhoff gave the man orders to drive slowly.

“Quite a warm day!” she observed.... “Well, you see, I have one _idée
fixe_, at least that’s what my husband calls it.”

“And that is?...”

“Ah, what a coincidence to have met you, of whom I was just thinking!”

“Very good, but what do you want me for?”

“Wait a bit; I must begin at the beginning.

“Let me tell you that I consider it a most important point that we
should, in the cause of Woman, meet and come to an understanding with
women of so-called ‘loose character.’ And, in particular, enter into
social relations with them. It is indeed an eccentricity on my part; but
I enjoy stemming and making head against the current.”

“It may lead to curious developments,” I said.

“You are perfectly right. In the first place, we must all of us get to
understand our community of interests. The social boycott which the
whole _demi-monde_ has to undergo, is a real civil war waged by women
against one another; a weakening of our powers, to which men not only do
not object, but which they also tend to aggravate. It is they who make
‘those dreadful creatures, bereft of a conscience,’ responsible for all
the transgressions which they themselves commit: so that the fury of
jealousy which their mothers and their wives, actual or intended, would
otherwise pour out upon their heads, is all transformed into a feeling
of hatred against such women. It is undoubtedly a very clever bit of
tactics on their part; but we ought not to let ourselves be taken in so
easily; we should all close our ranks and join shoulder to shoulder to
fight the common foe.”

“But what if those women hate us more than we do them?”

“That they do, is true; but it is only because they believe us to be
happier than they are. We have to dispel this egregious delusion; we
must let them know that we feel our wrongs as keenly as they do theirs;
that we recognize them as our companions in womanhood, as sharers in our
common humanity.... It is because we do nothing that such a falsehood
has been able to take such strong root.

“We should join with them, for they are our necessary complement: not
only so, but mingle with them without endeavouring to intensify the
difference between us and them by trying, in so far as we can, to
deprive our souls of those immense fields of womanliness, and renounce
to our own detriment the glamour of frivolity and of frailty. There must
be a thorough fusion; and it is only by such levelling down that we
shall arrive at the synthesis of womanhood: a new type, a complete type,
in which the only difference observable will be those of individuals,
not of avocations.”

“All that’s very fine, but where are you taking me?”

“I am coming to that. I am just paying a formal visit to an
ex-courtesan, a Mme. Wieloleska—formerly Mary _tout court_, for I don’t
know her family name. And I absolutely want you to come along with me.”

“But ... is she possible?”

“Quite; you may believe me. She takes everything as a matter of course,
and will be much pleased to receive you.... Only you will have to behave
exactly as if she were Wieloleski’s real wife.”

“What? then they are not married?”

“The idea! The man has a wife and five children somewhere down in the
country.... And that woman has got such a hold on him that he won’t stir
so much as one step from her side.... You must take a look at their
place.... She was formerly quite a common _demi-mondaine_, though well
spoken of.”

“And how did you get to know her?”

“Oh, she’s an old acquaintance, made by means of Imszanski.”

The carriage had stopped in front of an ornamental gateway, leading to a
handsome suburban villa, screened from view to some extent by a tracery
of branches and tree-trunks, and in a frame of towering fir-trees.

As I went up the broad white steps at the entrance, I felt my heart
beat, and could not tell exactly why. Perhaps at the fancy which then
came to me, that I might, within those very doors, come face to face
with the naked, dark, and horrible mystery of Life!

An elderly and very stylish footman raised the door-hanging to usher us
into a large sitting-room, conventionally furnished _à la sécession_.

In a few minutes there entered a very tall, slim, lady-like person,
quietly dressed in a clinging morning gown, somewhat like a
riding-habit, and followed by a little white lamb, which came treading
stiffly and sometimes funnily sliding along the polished floor.

Mme. Mary welcomed Mme. Wildenhoff with smiling effusion.

“I have come to call upon you with a friend of mine: Miss Dernowicz,
Mme. Wieloleska,” she said, introducing me. “I trust you will have no
objection; I wanted to show her your greenhouse very much.”

“Indeed, my dear Madame, but you are doing me a pleasure. I feel so
bored in this solitude, where I see nobody at all. All day long, my
husband is in the greenhouse or pottering about the hotbeds; he has
engaged a new gardener from Haarlem, and it is quite out of the question
getting him anywhere out of doors. If you care, we shall have a look at
the greenhouse at once. I tell you, if it were not for my books and
studies, I really might be tempted to make away with myself.”

“And why should you not take a walk sometimes? The weather is splendid
just now.”

“Oh, no! My husband won’t go out; and it would not be proper for a woman
to go out alone. You know how uncharitable people are.”

“And what may you be studying, Madame?” I asked.

“Pretty nearly everything possible,” she replied, laughing. “I take at
least five hours of lessons daily. One of my professors only just left
the house: he is giving me a course of University lessons on the ancient
literature of India. Since a week, too, I have been learning to read
hieroglyphics.... Haven’t you made a study of them?... They are very
interesting.... One is carried away—other lands, other times.... And I
am so curious about everything in the world.... But I am best in
languages. It is so extremely important to be able to read every writer
in the original.”

“For you must know,” put in Mme. Wildenhoff, “that Mme. Mary is a
well-known linguist.”

“Indeed?”

“Ah,” she said, smiling modestly, “it all comes to me so easily. At the
present time, I am proficient in French, English, German, Italian,
Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and Russian. This year I am learning the
Finnish and Japanese languages. I have, moreover, read Homer and Virgil
in the original Greek and Latin. Not one hundredth part of their
marvellous beauties can be rendered in a translation: and I am so
sensitive to the Beautiful...!”

“Do you know?” she broke off, turning towards Mme. Wildenhoff, “I have
at last managed to satisfy my husband that we must positively take a
trip to Algeria. And that will have to be in a few weeks: it is too hot
there in summer.... Ah! you can’t think how hard it is to get him away
from those flowers of his; he loves them so dearly!”

I examined Mme. Wieloleska with careful scrutiny. Her face is pale and
surrounded with scanty locks of fair hair; her eyes, small, greyish and
expressionless, and bordered with a faint pink hue, are continually in
motion to and fro; she has a tiny nose with rounded nostrils, and a
full, rather bloodless mouth, now and then moving with a quick twitch,
like a child making a wry face; and with all that she is attractive. Her
talkativeness, her tuneless voice, and a certain carelessness in her
manner, correct one’s first impression that she is pretentious, and give
the effect of a schoolgirl _désinvolture_, rather than the effrontery of
a _bona-roba_.

She stooped to caress her pet lamb, which had lain down at her feet in a
posture that suggested careful training. Then she rose, saying: “Perhaps
we may now go and look at the place.”

On our way to the conservatory, we had to pass through several rooms and
galleries full of pictures. On the right, we saw a workroom, with bright
jets of gas burning, though the night had not yet fallen. Several girls
were there, busily bending over tambour frames.

“These are my little ones,” said Mme. Wieloleska, smiling at them.
“Unfortunately, I have no children myself, so I have undertaken to bring
up these girls.”

“What are they about here?”

“They are learning embroidery, under the tuition of a German
instructress. I am particularly anxious that my philanthropic plans may
not do them more harm than good; for my husband very wisely says that
‘it is not hard to give, but to give judiciously....’”

“Well, but what do you do with the embroidered work afterwards?”

“Oh, you see, I don’t like to wear lace upon my linen—besides, it is not
the fashion nowadays—so I have everything covered over with embroidery.
Linen is far more beautiful so. I—I might perhaps show you—yes, I think
it’s all right here—only women present....”

She laughed, winking significantly, and took us farther down the
passage, where, with a swift twist and twirl, like a ballet-dancer, she
raised her dress above her knees, showing several tiers of cambric
flounces beyond her silk stockings. At no other time of our visit was
there anything to recall what she had once been.

“You, I fancy,” she said, turning to me, “wear a petticoat; I am not
sure you had not better give it up. A well-flounced undergarment makes
the dress look quite sufficiently wide; a petticoat altogether effaces
the outlines of the hips.” Then passing her hand down my waist: “It is a
pity,” she said; “for you have a splendid shape—hips like a Spanish
woman’s.”

We have found Wieloleski standing at the very end of the conservatory,
and carefully watching his gardener at work. He is a tall man, something
over forty, rather stout; very elegant-mannered, and courteous, but
distant and abstracted. He has an extensive bald place, with long thin
wisps combed over it from the left, though without any attempt at
concealment; and an abundant black beard.

As he was taking us about his greenhouse, he observed: “It is only at
present, and since I have been living here, that I have learned to
understand Tolstoi properly. It is only by a close acquaintance with
nature and with manual work, that we discover all the emptiness of
society life and its form and prejudices, and all the futility of social
dissensions and hatreds.”

I am not so well able to maintain my position as a cool observer, as
Mme. Wildenhoff is: and here I could not refrain from presenting an
objection to him.

“And nevertheless, your being able to stand thus aside in social
struggles, proceeds from the fact that you possess property; and
property itself lies within the sphere of these struggles, since they
make an object of it. So the very land you own brings you back into
these classes of society from which you flee.”

Wieloleski, rather surprised, offered me a few white kalia flowers, just
gathered, before he replied, in a calm but very dogmatic tone.

“On this point, I cannot agree with you. Those who dispute the right of
property take no account of the reality of things. Immemorial custom has
made the right of property as much a ‘category of thought,’ as Space is,
or Time.”

Mary, who was just behind us, interrupted him: “Oh, Edmund is reading
you a lecture already, I hear. My dear, you had better come and flirt
with Mme. Lola, and I’ll take Miss Janina with me.”

She came and put her arm round my waist, saying that she liked me very
much indeed. This I answered with an indulgent smile, always suitable
when women pay compliments to women.

She felt that this was not the way to win me, so she set to talk about
literature.

“There are some books,” she said, “in which I find a rest, and which
enable me to escape from reality altogether. And that’s why I can’t bear
such authors—Zola, for instance—as bring dirt which ought to revolt any
delicate mind, into a sphere where poetry alone should reign supreme.”

I hazarded another objection here.

“Do you not think that the first step towards healing the ulcers of
society is to lay them bare?”

“Ugh! why write about them? We all know them too well! In life itself,
there is, I tell you, quite enough of sorrow and of miasma. You, so
young, may possibly not have as yet had any opportunity of coming into
contact with them.... No, no: why should we ourselves spoil the short
sweet moments when it is possible to dream?”

She then proposed that we should take a rest on a seat of bamboo-work,
ensconced amongst exotic plants and shrubs in large green tubs. As soon
as we had sat down, her trained pet lamb came and lay down on the skirt
of her dress.

“Every one ought to have some sacred book—some Bible or other—ought he
not?” she asked, after a short silence. “Alas! there is no one, with
ever so little knowledge of philosophy, who can possibly believe in the
existence of God—and all the rest of it.

“But we can at any rate respect the poetry which religion contains, and
the feelings of those who have not as yet lost their faith: is it not
so?”

“Certainly,” I replied with the utmost gravity.

“Well, the Bible which I could not go to sleep without reading, and out
of which I read portions daily instead of my prayers, is that book of
legends by Voragine.... Do you know it?”

“Oh, yes,” I assented, “the _Golden Legend_.”

“Oh, what a world of poetry there is in it! What treasures of freshness
and simplicity of feeling!”

“Well, I say! if they are all of her kidney!” was all I remarked to Mme.
Wildenhoff, as I returned with her after our half-hour’s call at
Wieloleski’s. I felt a good deal bored, and mused over the meaning of
the well-known aphorism:

_Dans la bête assouvie un ange se réveille._[1]

Footnote 1:

  When the brute’s gorged, an angel wakes within it.

For some time Imszanski has been spending his evenings at home! He
either goes out later in the evening, or not at all, and Martha’s hopes
are reviving within her; but I do not take this conversion of his very
seriously.

We three sit together frequently; now and then Czolhanski and Owinski,
or Rosuchowski drop in.

One peculiarity about Owinski is the continual vague absent look in his
eyes, caused by his extremely short sight. He cannot see two paces in
front of him, and distinguishes people by their voices only. His facial
muscles are in constant play; and he never smiles but with set teeth. He
is very far indeed from being good-looking; yet I do not wonder at
Gina’s loving him to distraction.

Witold has been pleased to take me as his confidante now. He is probably
feeling compunction for his recent behaviour, somewhat late in the day.

Life, taken in general, is a barren waste. His theory of love does not
permit him to hold innocent those delusions of the senses which are
usually termed “bits of love-making,” though in reality, they and love
have nothing in common. They are then evil; but they have become
necessary evils, to which men have in the course of ages completely
accustomed themselves; evils from which women—he means of course those
of the better classes—are free, and against which they ought to be
guarded with the utmost care. By means of this reasoning, he considers
his relations with Martha to be all they should be; for he always
endeavoured to spare her, and to preserve her high ideals, and her
feelings of purity.

I could not help smiling as he said this, knowing as I did how little
his intention had been realized.

But now he too seems to be tiring of the life he leads—this howling
wilderness of a life. “These women are so shallow, so mindless, so
fatuous! Their own looseness of morals is the keynote which decides
every one of their acts.”

I could now shrewdly guess what his drift was.

“Take, for instance, Mme. Wildenhoff. She enjoys a change
of—affections—once a month. That’s her business: but why the devil does
she bring in Philosophy and Sociology, and Emancipation? The thing she
does is as old as the hills, and why trouble about her and women like
her?”

I had long ago made the remark that men object to women who argue. On
the other hand, they rate their souls very high indeed. Now, Witold
confesses, it is the soul—the soul alone, the soul at any price—that he
wants to have.

Who knows whether he will not again become a faithful husband to Martha?

I dislike all colourless people. And I dislike myself along with them,
since I find I am growing more and more colourless day by day. I feel
out of sympathy with my own type of character: I am ordinary. I have had
enough of my life; more than enough of it.

How terribly I am craving now for some one who shall tell me—and tell me
incessantly—that I am good-looking and clever and original in mind, that
I dress nicely and move gracefully.

For though at this moment I am quite satisfied that none of these things
are so: yet, if I were told so this day, I should at once believe it to
be true.

I am in pain. At times I feel a special need of saying all that I think.
At times it is so hard to wear a mask.... And I want some sympathy....

I was at the Wildenhoff’s to-day, and had a talk with Witold. I cannot
conceive how it came about, but on a sudden I found I was saying too
much—or rather, speaking too much to the point.

Finding the position I had taken up was too advanced and too much
exposed, I decided to beat a retreat.

“But can you conceive in what the tragedy of my life consists in
reality?” I asked.

On which, in mute questioning, he raised his beautiful mournful eyes to
mine.

“In that all I have told you is untrue ... and all I have not told you
is untrue likewise. It is my style to talk of my sadness one day, and
the next to tell of my life’s cloudless philosophy.”

“And to whom of all men do you tell the truth? To Wiazewski? I don’t
know. Perhaps to no one. When I have taken off, one after another, all
the styles I wear, there is nothing more left of me.”

At this juncture, Mme. Wildenhoff, dressed in a very low-cut black
velvet gown, came up to us.

“Why has not Martha been here to-day?” she asked. “We have not seen her
for ever so long.”

“She meant to come but she is continually a victim to sick headaches.”

“Ah, yes, those sick headaches,” she remarked sympathizingly. “They are
so very hard to get rid of!”

Presently she asked if I would come and look at a beautiful screen, a
birthday gift for her, painted by Gina. Imszanski remained where he was.

I asked Mme. Wildenhoff why Owinski was not present.

“Really, I cannot say,” was her answer. “He was to come: but it is
rather late.”

“I noticed that Gina was very much out of sorts to-day.”

“Yes, and I must say that I feel rather uneasy about her. There is
something here that I cannot at all understand, and I love the girl....
Owinski is perpetually wool-gathering; he is a man you cannot rely
upon.... He strikes me as one who would be deaf to any remonstrances,
any reproaches.... He is a typical poet....”

“Then it may be that Gina is wrong in holding off from marriage with the
man.”

“Marriage? A fine thing that would be! She is surely wealthy enough to
do without it.... Marriage!” she added, not without a touch of pride.
“Of what use was it in Imszanski’s case, I beg?”

She just looked into a mirror, hanging opposite her bed, and then
swiftly glanced over me from head to foot. The comparison between us
must have been not unpleasant, for she at once became more cheerful and
friendly.

“My dear Miss Janina, Gina’s is a nature far too artistic for marriage.
No one who can paint like that would ever make a husband of her
sweetheart. Pardon me; the thing is absolutely out of the question....
Look at those flowers; with what grace she has dashed them off!”

“They are certainly exquisite. But did you notice how extraordinary an
interest Owinski took in what you were saying about marriage last
Thursday?”

“Yes, oh, yes; I remember.... But I can’t suppose he is thinking of
marrying any one else.... No, that is surely impossible.”

She was at once in a state of great excitement.

“Look here. Now that marriage is no more than a contract, assuring to
the wife board and lodging for self and offspring, and to the husband a
woman in permanency, always at home and on the _qui vive_; now that a
bachelor cannot marry until he has achieved a position in the world, so
that a marrying man who is not bald sounds like a _contradictio in
adjecto_,—marriage amounts in principle to the same as prostitution,
whereas its every particular is yet more shocking.”

“I am afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

“Why, the thing is as clear as clear can be. A courtesan makes only a
temporary bargain, and if she makes it for a longer time, she always
reserves to herself complete liberty of action, some intervals of
freedom, and the power of breaking her chain whenever she pleases;
whilst the ‘honest woman’ makes the bargain for her whole life, without
any hope of ever being set free: for we need not take divorce into
account, were it but for the fact that a divorced woman is adversely
viewed by her ‘honest’ sisters.... A common courtesan, even one who
lodges in a house of ill fame, has her ‘Alphonse,’ some one to whom, and
some place wherein she can give sincere, true and disinterested love,
which the average honest woman cannot dare to allow herself, without the
imminent danger of losing her right of alimony. Now, as to the moral
difference. It lies in this: that one possesses only one husband,
together with the respect of society, whereas the other has many, and is
despised. Though I cannot for the life of me see what logical connection
there is between a number of lovers and the obligation for a woman to
respect the rights of humanity. Again: the police take charge of the
street-walker’s health; but who sees after the wife that her own husband
has contaminated? The former may die of _anything_; the other, the
honest woman, in childbed, if married; if not—if, having no portion, she
cannot have a husband—she may die of what you will—and there you are!
And Abolitionists arrange congresses, publish books and pamphlets, found
philanthropic institutions, refuges, Christian associations to raise
fallen women, and young people’s leagues to shield their purity during
school-years. All this, to what purpose? That a common doctor, and not
the police, should see after the street-girl’s health; that a few silly
females should be shut up, not in bagnios, but in sewing-rooms; and that
some women may have to teach their husbands certain things which the
latter have not yet learnt! And all this in the interest of ‘coming
generations!’ An empty phrase. Is not all that most ridiculous?”

She laughed; but to me her words were painful.

“But then, instead of this, are we to do nothing?”

“Not at all. Let us found homes and refuges: not for the women, but for
the children whose mothers are unable to take care of them. And as to
the so-called ignominy, that will remain; but we ought to laugh it to
scorn. And allow me to add,” she went on, in a more earnest tone, “that
to loosen in so far as we can all artificial bonds is a far easier and a
more natural task than to draw them still tighter. Both roads lead to
the same goal,—with the difference that in one case the goal would
signify freedom, and in the other slavery.”

As she spoke, I remembered what Witold had said to me about her.

She abruptly broke off. “Oh, let’s join the company! What will they
think of a hostess who neglects her guests so!”

In the drawing-room, Owinski had not made his appearance as yet. Gina,
as beautiful as a portrait by some Old Master, was reclining silently,
in an amaranthine-coloured easy-chair.

Imszanski shot a glance and a faint smile at Mme. Wildenhoff, and
offered me his arm to go in to supper.

Whoever it was—Amiel, I think,—who maintained that women do not care to
be analyzed, was in the wrong. It is rather men who dislike such
analysis.

Why does a woman rarely fall in love with a man inferior to herself?
Because she wants to be loved for all that is in her. And thence
proceeds the grievance, not less distasteful than groundless, that men
do not look on women as having minds as well as bodies. Now a man is
quite satisfied if the woman acknowledges his superiority over her.

Those whom I like best are not those who attract me most, but who are
able to comprehend and to realize my whole power of attraction. That is
why I dislike to hear Imszanski babbling, in a superficial and general
manner, of the excellence of my nature, not knowing in what it consists,
and unable to grasp it.

And that, too, is why I have a liking for Wiazewski, and a wish that he
could find it in his heart to love me.

Spring is coming. With a hot sun overhead, there is a cool breeze
around. I feel joyful, and frolicsome, and full of animal spirits. I
could fall upon the neck of the first man I met in the street! To be
loved by somebody, that is my craving. I might feel less fearfully alone
and cut off from everything in the world,—I would give many a year of my
life. Lord! if anyone would kiss me ... now!—Only, not one of those....
Oh, not one of them!

So many years have passed away since that parting, never to fade out of
my mind! Yes: he was the only man I could ever have loved.... How
quickly it all passed away, and how completely it all came to an end!
Strange.—A bit of life.

And now it sleeps, that happiness,—sleeps beneath the flowery palls of
many a springtime, past and gone.

Such a spring; oh, well-a-day! And in my heart and life all is so blank
and so dismal!

I have lived but a short, a very short time; and notwithstanding, how
many and how fair flowers of memory have I culled! If I could only
remember them all—all of them—why, then, life would be endurable still.

And I am ever, as I go on, closer and closer to life: I wade along,
athwart its foaming and tempestuous current; but it is in vain I would
try to plunge into its waves and moisten these lips of mine, so parched
with thirst,—as if I were traversing a sea of quicksilver, whose dry
metallic drops fly into liquid dust when they are touched.

And still I have to wait—to wait—to wait for something else, something
like the spring in its glamour and its sunshine—to wait for a marvel, a
prodigy, a miracle, that is to come!

In company with Gina and Owinski, I was just leaving a coffee-house. In
front of us, surrounded by several men, there walked a woman, rather
thickset, far from tall, who wore a short-skirted, bright-coloured
dress, and a wide-brimmed hat, also of a bright hue. She went slowly,
with an undulating motion of the hips, turning, now to right, now to
left, now behind her, chattering with lively interest, and addressing
them all together, her hands meanwhile nimble with gestures like those
of a flower-girl offering nosegays. We caught glimpses of her
profile,—very long lashes and a short straight nose. There seemed to be
some witchery wafted towards me from that figure.

“A _cocotte_?” I asked Gina.

She looked at her, and nodded, with a lowering face.

We had previously been talking of love. She resumed the subject where I
had interrupted her.

... “Ah, but I am not by any means telling you it is absolute bliss. No.
Love only intensifies all things whatever: and thus, not joy only, but
pain as well. Love is an exceedingly powerful stimulant, the
strengthener of all that belongs to life. And this, when all its colours
are thus suddenly brightened up, becomes like some magic fairy tale,
some eternal Divine Vision of life....”

Owinski, plunged deep in his musings, was not listening to us at all,
though Gina spoke especially for him. The golden fire which flashed in
her eyes died out when she realized this.

“We ourselves are alone in fault; it is we who have brought about that
immense misery, the fiery pain of which is now eating our hearts out.
For every time we have turned a man away from us, every denial of the
lips that belied the pulsing of the blood is a sin against Life. Every
such night, when those who craved love for love received it not, but
were perforce obliged to purchase it with gold, is a sin against Life—of
which _we_ are guilty.

“And therefore should we all—like consecrated priestesses,—go
forth:—forth to suffering and to shame, with the laughter of Spring, and
its cry _Evoë_! love for love, joy for joy, pain for pain,—welling up
from our hearts!”

“But why then pain?”

“I do not know; but so it has to be. Surely you feel that intense joy is
not to be purchased without intense pain.”

Owinski, looking down the long vista of the street, took not the
slightest interest in what she was saying. Gina became silent; it may be
that a feeling of shame had come upon her.

The strangely bewitching woman had stopped, coming to a sudden
standstill to take leave of some of her companions. Her laughter
resounded through the brightly lit, deserted street, with all the
effrontery and witchery of Life itself.

Half-consciously, Owinski turned towards her, and so did we; a breath of
the coming spring seemed blowing in our direction thence.

“Is she to your taste?” Gina asked her fiancé, with a curiosity in her
tone of voice that she strove to make light of.

“What did you say?—oh, I don’t know, didn’t see her,” he returned,
wool-gathering as usual.

Wishing to please her, he again turned round to look; but the whole
company had already disappeared in the doorway of a neighbouring
restaurant.

Gina took his arm, with a gesture of famished and baffled desire. Laying
her head on the sleeve of his great-coat, she brushed a wisp of hair
from her cheek.

“No,” she said to me in an undertone; “no, I cannot tell; I myself am
ignorant of the end for which suffering exists; why must there always be
suffering?”

Still Owinski heard not a word we said; so we could converse quite
freely. For my part, I could not love a man so continually lost in
thought.

“Seldom have I happened upon a type in such sharp contrast to all that I
am,” she continued, alluding to the woman we had just seen.

Far down in Gina’s eyes, whose nervous energy was tired and worn
out,—somewhere very deep down,—there shone a livid gleam of disquiet.

She gazed searchingly at her fiancé, but there was no change in the
expression of his face. After a time, he was aware that her glance was
upon him; then he bent forward to her, and, stroking her glove, said
smiling:

“What is the matter with you, Gina?”

“Nothing—only love for you,” she whispered.

Afterwards, we sat with Mme. Wildenhoff almost till dawn.

“What’s to be done? If he loves her no longer, he cannot be forced to
stay with her,” said Mme. Lola to me, speaking of Owinski, of course.
“Changes in feeling have nothing in common with ethics and the sense of
duty.” ... And so on, and so on.

Gina approached us presently.

“To-morrow I shall be living by myself,” she told us. “I am now in such
a state that I can’t bear any one, not even so amiable a person as
Idalia. She will live in my studio, which she likes very much, and the
room that she rented formerly will now be let. I should greatly like to
find another tenant for her.”

Mme. Wildenhoff turned upon me directly with these unexpected words:

“Wouldn’t you like to lodge with Idalia? She plays so beautifully; and
that family life must, I fancy, bore you by now.”

It then occurred to me that Mme. Wildenhoff’s intention was to get me
away from Imszanski! Was I right? Possibly.

“I shall think it over,” I answered in a pleasant tone. “Though indeed I
like just as much to hear Martha play.”

This staying up all night long nearly once every forty-eight hours or so
fatigues me beyond measure. They—that is, all the others—have nothing to
do; they rise at noon, and enjoy plenty of money and leisure; and their
greatest enjoyment is talking interminably about the deepest problems of
existence. But for me, what with having battle with sleep in the
morning, to walk so very far to my office through mud and slush, and to
sit motionless at my desk for so many hours, those nights charge me with
a burden very hard to bear. I have, it is true, a frame of iron: but
such a life would wear it out at length.

I am weary and miserable, and from time to time I feel almost
distracted. My state is that of one who has an appointment, and waits,
waits, waits, through the hours and through the years, although the time
allotted to keep it has long since passed by. I experience the same
fever of impatience, the same clutching at my heart, when in my delusion
I think I can at last hear his footsteps; the same chill of terror, when
for an instant I think he will never come.

All this is very banal, very “missish.” Yes, I know, I know. But now and
then it is simply beyond my power to keep down, simply overwhelming. For
the time assigned to me, the wonderful time of meeting with one whom I
love, fled into the past so long, so long ago!

Ah, it has come, that time! It came yesterday. I had already felt it in
the air for many a day; it was in Martha’s eyes; my own heart told me.
And while I yearned for it constantly, yet did I fear it like a sentence
of death.

Having returned long after Martha had fallen asleep, he noticed that
there was a light in my room, and tapped gently. I did not answer:
nevertheless he came in.

“How late you have stayed up reading!” he said in a whisper. And then,
seating himself on the couch beside me, he remained silent.

Covering my eyes with my hands, I let my head droop as low as to his
knees, and in an instant was possessed with a mad, frenzied
effervescence of expectancy. I shivered all over as with the ague; then
shook all over with soundless laughter. Something was leaping up in my
breast, palpitating in my very throat, in my brain, in my hands that
were covering my eyes.... Had this unparalleled excitement lasted but
one moment more I should have cried out aloud with terror and agony.

Then in an instant I grew quiet, overwhelmed with a sense of sudden
numbness: and I let my head droop yet lower. Witold bent over me, and
kissed my hair and shoulders. And then he raised up my head, and
showered kisses on my eyes and mouth and throat.

Not one word of love did we speak. Already, long before, we had
understood one another. But there were a thousand thoughts rushing
through my brain.

He bent his marvellously beautiful head down to my knees, and whispered
low some few strange inaudible words—words of incantation, words of
magic: he could afford to be humble, for he was like a king who knows
how mighty he is and how supreme. And then his lips were very red, as on
fire....

All at once I shook myself free with a hissing intake of the breath, and
gently extricated myself from his embrace.

“What, my Queen of the Icy Caverns!” he said in sport, with his eyes
fixed upon mine. “Has some thought of death come to make you afraid?”

“No; I was thinking of Martha.”

His bantering humour left him at once.

“Oh! for once in our lives surely we might learn to think only of
ourselves,” he said, and his tone showed that he was vexed with me.

“And have you found that lesson so very hard to learn?”

“That’s unkind of you,” he whispered, and closed my mouth with a
kiss....

“And now I have no more love left, not even for my husband. Not that I
love another, not that Witold has made me suffer torments beyond
endurance. No: I am merely unable to feel anything else in the world
save pain. The very thought of him is a torture.”

As she spoke, I bowed my head very low.

“It may be that there is some world in which Kant’s ‘categories’ do not
hold, where we are out of Space, out of Time. I believe it is so.
Sometimes space does not exist for me: I have the power to see all those
he has loved with him in one place. There are moments, too, when time
does not exist for me: I can see them all together in one instant—both
those that have been and those that are to be; _yes, those that are to
be_, Janka.”

From under her brows she threw me a questioning glance, and went on:

“But I can see, I can fancy nothing, save under the mental form of Pain.
Yes, and I have thus discovered a new ‘category’!”

It were difficult to say why, just at that moment, I remembered
Wieloleski and his discovery that land-owning was also a “category,” and
this put me in a humour of pleasantry that it was not easy to shake off.

“Looked at through this prism of Pain,” she continued, “the sun itself
is black, the most superb flowers in the Red Garden turn to tongues of
flame, and the cistern filled with flowers of bliss changes into an
infinite, infinite ocean of blood.”

She looked round, and shuddered.

“Pray, Janka, do not go to bed to-night; do not leave me alone during
the dark hours. Truly, I cannot remember when he went out. I think he
was not at all at home to-day.”

“Yes, he was; he dined with us.”

She passed her hand over her brow.

“You are right, but it doesn’t matter. At any rate, he will not be here
till morning. Janka, do not sleep in your room!”

By this time it is impossible for me to endure the sight of Martha. She
fills me with such mystic awe that I am ready to shriek aloud with dread
of her. I feel as though I were the cause of all her afflictions, as if
it were I who have marred her life. Her eyes hurt me—those great
dark-blue, sorrowful eyes. But all the same it must make no difference
to her; to her who—

On returning from the office, I stepped in to Mme. Wildenhoff’s, to see
about the room Gina spoke of. At any price, I must get away from here. I
want never to see either her or him any more.

Mme. Wildenhoff was a little paler than her wont; she looked out of
sorts, and complained that her head ached. I understood that something
had gone wrong between him and her. And again my heart was crushed with
fear. Only when I looked at her did I remember that she likewise—... I
had for the time being entirely forgotten that fact. My first impulse
was to flee her; but Mme. Wildenhoff retained me against my will. She, I
think, has not made any definite guess; but the other!

“I must confess to you,” she began, “that all I have made you think of
me is untrue—a mask of mine, a mannerism, an empty theory. All women are
at their heart’s core exactly alike; during all their life they follow
one thing alone, and perish in pursuit of it.”

“You mean love?” I questioned, trying clumsily to feign indifference.

“Yes. That is the one thing. It is our fate; if not the first thing that
we pursue, it is always the last that we give up. There is no help for
it—none. We may be all our life forcing upon ourselves the conviction
that we have the same rights as men, and are capable of bearing the same
amount of liberty as they; but there must come a moment when, for that
one true love, we most willingly give up all its counterfeits.”

“But you have, Madame, the comfort to know that men too are liable to a
similar reaction. When quite sated with freedom, the very greatest
profligates will settle down to a married life.”

“Only for a short while, and then they begin all over again, and return
to their favourite pastime.... Why, take Imszanski, for instance; you
surely know him well....”

My face flushed up as red as fire, but I undauntedly raised my eyes to
hers. She, on encountering my gaze, blushed, too. Once more I felt an
uneasy flutter at my heart.

She burst into a sudden transport.

“I love, I love, and without any return!—Oh, how unlike me, is it not?”

Whereupon she laughed hysterically, and then shed tears, tearing at her
handkerchief with her teeth. She was waiting for me to put her some
questions, that she might be able to confide her sorrows to me. I
thought I should soon be likely to go mad.

At last Gina came in. She took me to Idalia, a fairly well-known
pianist, who returned here from Paris a year since.

The room was very much to my taste; so was Idalia. There, all is
tranquil and artistic. There I find nothing of that monstrous life which
hurts me so—that lie which I feel here in my eyes as they look, in my
mouth as it speaks!

Now I have left the Imszanski’s for good. Even for my nature, life with
them was too exquisite a torment.

Martha, according to her custom, has understood everything but let
nothing come to her as a surprise. Nor has she in any way altered her
behaviour towards me.

When I told her it was too far for me to go from her house to the
office, she never asked why, during close upon three years, I had not
noticed the distance. She appears not to know that I am aware she has no
more trust in me.

When, for the last time, I entered my room, in which there was but
little change (for only a few of my things had been brought to their
flat) I burst out crying. Martha stood by my side, grave and mournful.

Later, too, at the moment of my departure, there came to me a horrible
pain of unbounded bewilderment, that took me, so to speak, suddenly by
the throat. All this was, I thought, so heart-rending, so
incomprehensible!

Imszanski was speaking to the porter who helped the man-servant to take
my things downstairs. Then I asked Martha: “Don’t you—don’t you think it
were better for me to die now, this instant?”

A smile dawned in her face, which she averted to hide it.

“No,” she said; “there is no need. Nothing comes to me unexpectedly
now.... And latterly I have found an enemy—in myself besides.”

Quietly, daintily, she kissed me on the lips, and then, with a gracious
gesture, gave her hand to Imszanski, who was going out to take me to my
new abode.

I sit for a long time, spending the evening with Imszanski. And I enjoy
myself. Although I do not for one instant forget her, that graceful
melancholy woman, who now is wandering through the magnificent
apartments of her lonely dwelling, always awaiting him, though she knows
he will not come, and at the slightest noise rushing to the
ante-chamber, listening with her ear close against the door, and her
brain on fire with excitement. But the billows of undisturbed stillness
are beating all around her.... And then she goes back to her rooms, and
seats herself upon an easy-chair, and again upon a lounge, trying to
fall asleep; and to keep herself from sobbing aloud, she bites her
fingers hard.... And in a little while she goes once again and listens
at the ante-chamber door. For now I am no longer by her side; now she is
quite, quite alone; and so cruelly abandoned!

Not for an instant do I forget all this; and yet I enjoy myself. The
faint bitterness of this tragedy gives, I suppose, an additional flavour
to our amorous and delightful dalliance.

Witold would prefer not to speak of the subject, which I nevertheless
bring forward again and again.

“But tell me now, how could you behave with such abominable baseness,
forcing yourself into Martha’s life so? For you married her under
downright compulsion: I well remember that she resisted with all her
might. Were you at the time really in love with her?”

“She attracted me extremely, and I was puzzled by her great love for
virginity. Never before had I found any woman with the instinct
developed to such a degree. And I was then in a romantic, an idealistic,
a Platonic mood, with which Martha harmonized to perfection.”

“Well, and how was it that this mood of yours came to alter so quickly?”

“I found Martha just a little disappointing: and even at the time when I
married her I was quite sure that she could not satisfy me for long. All
that alluring mystery of her ascetic philosophy of life merely proceeded
from anæmia and poverty of temperament.”

“Witold! Witold! do go back to her again. For remember; I shall never
love you as she does.”

“No, I will not; I will not,” and he gathered me in his arms: “I will
not leave you, nor would I, even if you came to hate me. Besides: what,
in this whole affair, has pained Martha most? Why, it is your leaving
us. She is always sitting in your room; and she very often talks of you,
and wonders why you don’t come.”

I had reached the conclusion that all Witold had said was but of a piece
with the rest of Martha’s behaviour, studiously correct in regard of
him: but I have got a letter from her to-day.

“Come to me, Janka, come! Do not bear me more ill-will than I bear to
you. Remember that everything in our relations is still just as it was
before. The memories are too deep-rooted; I cannot—— Once I loved you
even more than——

“I await you. M.”

I shall go to her to-morrow.

She received me, clad in a black dressing-gown, with grey borders and a
silver fringe. I found it hard to conceal the painful impression that I
felt. We talked together in a friendly way for about an hour.

With some air of mystery, she explained to me the idea she had of
fitting up a boudoir entirely in mourning. “It might be made quite
ornamental. The walls hung with crêpe, the furniture of black wood,
upholstered with white plush, crosses of silver and of ebony, standing
and suspended chandeliers of silver, a profusion of such flowers as are
used to dress a catafalque, a large table in the centre, covered with a
black cloth. And the boudoir lit with wax tapers only.”

She then showed me an album bound in black leather, with a silver cross
that stood out in relief on the cover.

With an embarrassed smile, she explained its contents to me.

“Here I have placed all Witold’s loves, in chronological order,” she
said, and the very sound of his name made her blush hotly. “The number
looks very great indeed, but this is because I have in many cases
several portraits of the same person.”

I looked it over for a time, enthralled and captivated by these faces,
each of a different type, some laughing, some grave, some pathetic,
others comical or exotic or commonplace, these full of fire, those
ethereal-looking; many attired in the strangest raiment, or posing in
voluptuous attitudes, and stretching out their half-nude limbs with
serpent-like grace,—all these surrounded with Oriental magnificence: and
again exquisite women, very _lady-like_ in their British stiffness, and
the sexless elegance of their tailor-made dresses simple but striking. A
multitudinous chaotic assembly of many a style and many a nationality,
down to one monstrously sensual negress, no doubt a singer in some
music-hall.

“Since you have been away,” she said, “it has been a custom with me to
pore over this album. Those different faces remind me of the different
periods of my life. I possess but few belonging to the old times of
Witold’s love-making; but of those he loved since he married, not one is
wanting here. Some of them I purchased myself.”

“That,” I observed, “was of old a custom of yours. I remember well how
as a girl the collections you liked best to make were post-cards with
photographs of handsome actresses.”

“Oh, but that was quite different,” she replied with a shake of the
head. “I feel such a pleasure in gloating over this collection!”

“Yes, the pleasure you take in self-inflicted torture!”

“No, not even that. You see, I gaze at those beautiful faces, those full
red voluptuous mouths, those white rounded shoulders, so pleasantly
smooth and soft; I,look through the garments and see the colour of the
flesh beneath: and each of these women I fancy delirious, swooning in
his arms; and so I feed my mind with the thought of their delight in
him—or perhaps (I am not quite sure which) of his delight in them!”

Her nostrils were quivering. She settled herself in her soft-cushioned
seat, and closed her eyelids; they were red with tears.

On one of the first pages of the album I found Mary Wieloleska, clad as
an Algerian girl, blithe and blandishing, and far better-looking than in
reality. Towards the end there were about a dozen photographs of Mme.
Wildenhoff, and one—a small one—of that French actress whom we had seen
at Lipka’s restaurant. The thought flashed upon me—a very unflattering
one assuredly—that she had already placed me there too; but, sitting as
I was by Martha’s side, I could not possibly look at the last page.
Besides, she herself held the album, and showed me no photographs after
those of Mme. Wildenhoff and of the French actress.

The same thought occurred to us both at once, and it cast over us the
shadow of a moody silence.

She laid her head on my bosom, and closed her eyes with an expression of
the utmost fatigue.

“Don’t go on like that,” I said to her soothingly. “That way madness
lies, and you might easily get there.”

“Oh, that is very likely. Indeed I wish I may. Oh, to lose memory, and
consciousness, and all feeling!” And then: “For I am everlastingly
wringing my own heart, Janka!” she added, very sorrowfully.

Silently, I stroked her long dishevelled hair, and all the while, with
tender craving and emotional entrancement, my mind was reverting to
Witold.

“Are you my husband’s paramour by now?”

It was with some surprise that I was aware the question evoked in me a
reaction of outraged dignity. But I choked down the feeling, and
unembarrassed, though with downcast eyes, I answered, in a low voice:

“No, not as yet.”

“That is better. You may then presently become his wife.”

Her mouth was slightly twitching. She has that most unpleasant habit of
melting with compassion over her own woes.

“Only, please, Martha, not death! Don’t let us hear about death!”

“I am in a very bad way.”

“The idea! You always have been so terribly afraid to die; you told me
so. Do you remember?”

“Oh, but it’s quite another thing now!—Afraid of death, I?—No, I desire
it with all the desire of my wretched heart. Yes, I desire it that you
may become his wife, that you may yourself fathom the depths of the
tortures I have gone through, and bask (as I am doing) in the beams of
the bliss they give; that you, like me, may taste the delight of them by
cupfuls brimming over!—Yet more, yet more!—May you quaff your fill of
wormwood, till you overflow with it!—be suffocated with the mortal scent
of those flowers of his—drink in their odoriferous delight and the
poisonous steam of them, even to agony, even to death!—May I be avenged,
when you are forced to yield him up to another! And may the knowledge
that even death itself is no sufficient expiation, make the bitterness
of your last hour bitterer still.... Oh, God!”

She hid her face in her hands; she was trembling all over with the
violence of her spasmodic outburst. Finally, she fell on her knees
before me, covering my hands with kisses that I felt burning hot.

“No, Janka, these words of mine are not true: they are lies,—lies! There
is no longer any hatred at all, nor any thirst for vengeance: there is
none—I love you!... I shall die, that you may be happy—in his Red
Garden—and that he too may be happy by your side. Don’t you believe me?
Won’t you look into my heart? My only wish is for your happiness: beyond
this, I have no wish whatsoever.... I humble myself at your feet thus,
see! and bless you that in your turn you have taken away from me what to
me is dearer than life itself; that you have poured into the cistern of
my bliss the last drop of that nectar which inebriates unto death. I
love you: it was Christ, was it not? who gave the command that we ought
to love our enemies.... Hear me!—I am dying that you may be happy with
him. I wish you all happiness. I want to receive death at your
hands,—your beautiful hands, so soft to caress. I would not have you
feel any twinge of remorse: I would you could kill me, and yet not know
that my death has cleared the way for your triumphal chariot.—Oh, Janka!
be happy!”

Her head fell back; her eyes closed fast, and her teeth were clenched,
showing between her half-open lips.

“Slay me, Oh, slay me!”

Now she has fainted. I lift her up, and lay her limp and lifeless body
on a couch.

The purple chamber grows dark in the gathering twilight.

                           A CANTICLE OF LOVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                  J. D.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what about the women?”

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

“Whom do you like best of all?”

“Miss Janina Dernowicz.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I—am suffering remorse!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled.

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

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

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

“Oh, have you heard from her?”

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

“And her nerves, how are they?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the crimson wine inebriated me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This—this is death!

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

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

Is—is not this yet Death?

No. It is Life: Life that, out of the accents of that voice, supremely
melodious, drowsy, sleepy, yet replete with fire from an unfathomable
abyss, out of the lazy, lascivious snaky curves of those limbs of hers;