Part 4

I went to Obojanski to-day, in order to return to him (unread) a monograph about some species of insect.

From the ante-room I could hear a man’s voice.

My heart gave a bound of joy, mingled with trepidation; it was stilled again at once.

It was, as I presently found out, the voice of Smilowicz, a former pupil of Obojanski: an ugly little man, who makes people laugh a great deal, not by his wit, but by his queer, comical grimaces.

“I must begin by telling you quite frankly,” he says, turning to me, “that at first sight I thought you hateful; you had all the outward appearance of a fine lady. It was only when the Professor had explained to me that you were an accountant and worked for your living, that my hatred changed into sympathy for you.”

His hearty laugh infects me with a gaiety so artificial that it almost gives me pain.

“Your compliment, paid in so negative a form, I cannot doubt to be sincere; as such it is a novelty. But I have not the least wish to make my appearance symbolize the dreary lot of a woman who works.”

Obojanski, somewhat annoyed, remarks: “Alas! that even the cleverest of her sex should have this little bit of vanity!”

I glance at his form, gracefully leaning back in his easy-chair, clad in a fine suit of black cloth; at his trousers, beautifully creased, his nicely-tied cravat, and his silvery beard in perfect trim; and I smile silently. I shall not tell him what comes to my mind: he would directly begin to protest that his clothing is as unpretentious as can be; neither dirty nor untidy, but nothing more. Now all these half-conscious, but innumerable, little insincerities, are distasteful to me: there is something unmanly about them.

“Vanity is nothing but the æsthetic feeling in its maturity. Undoubtedly it contains an element of coquetry, but the latter has its source in the reproductive instinct.” This I say, seriously, but speaking quickly, to hide what I feel; adding, “It is by a woman’s clothing that her individuality and degree of artistic culture are made known.”

“Individuality? In the fetters of fashion? Bah!”

“Well, what is fashion after all? It only expresses variations in the preferences of human beings: just like the various periods in literature and art and history.”

Smilowicz interferes. “Yes, but these variations of preference should be free, not enforced.”

“There is no help for that. In every sphere of life we meet with individuals who have happy thoughts, and with crowds who imitate them. No one orders them to imitate: they do so willingly, driven by the force of other people’s opinions, because they neither think nor act for themselves. Besides, is the following of fashion necessarily a spirit of imitation? It is very often, as it were, something infectious in the air we breathe. Short sleeves succeed to long ones, sleeves puffed about the wrists, to sleeves puffed at the shoulders: just as Idealism comes after Realism, and as Mysticism reigns where Positivism reigned once.”

“Tut, tut, tut,” says the Professor, “there is some difference between literature and dress.”

“Oh, surely.... Now, every general trend should allow particular tendencies to come into play, and it is just in these that individuality is manifested. And that’s why I simply cannot bear male attire, with its never-changing stiffness and lifelessness of form.”

“Ah, but do you not see that this fixed standard is the ‘great leveller of classes,’ which annihilates inequalities in social standing? Attired as I am, there is no difference between me and a shoemaker in his Sunday suit.”

Once again, the insincerity, the cheap semi-conscious coquetry of these words, is disagreeable to me. No one looking at him could help seeing that a shoemaker, were he clad in those very garments, would be otherwise attired than he. And this Obojanski is perfectly well aware of.

“That,” I make answer, “is just what is wrong with men’s clothing; it excludes the manifestation of what in reality exists, and, by removing the outward show of an evil, it helps us to forget its presence. I do not think that to be at all right.”

“Yes,” Smilowicz chimes in with his funny smile, “its result for you, Professor, would be that people, taking you for a shoemaker, might fancy you to be an honest man who gets his bread by his work alone.”

The notes of Grieg’s _Der Frühling_ just now recur to my mind: they so strongly recall those evenings I spent with Martha. I was happier then: every present good is always greatly magnified, when past. I now look back on Klosow as on a Paradise—to which I shall never return!

Something grievous is awaiting me here. And, meanwhile, he does not come—he does not come!

“There are times when I doubt whether I am doing well to awake your mind so early, and raise doubts on all the points you were accustomed to believe in. I fear you may find such views an intolerable weight upon your mind, and lose yourself in the maze of my own sceptical musings.”

With these words, Obojanski winds up a long lecture that tends to prove there is no such thing as a God, and that the soul is but a function of the body. I smile at his fears, which (I assure him) are quite groundless: I am not in danger of any doubt whatever on things fundamental.

“I now see that I look upon you as a friend, and talk to you about everything. I forget that you are a woman—and as yet all but a little girl.”

And here the electric bell rings; its tinkle announces nothing out of the common to me!

“Who has come so late?” I ask, trembling all over.

“Roslawski, very likely.... He arrived yesterday, and wrote that he would be here; but I was not expecting him any longer.”

I hear the servant’s steps in the ante-room, and the door as it opens. Obojanski leaves the room, and presently I recognize that voice—_his_ voice! He is explaining the cause of his delay in coming.

“Have you any one with you?” he asks, evidently averse to seeing strangers now.

“No, no; only Smilowicz and Miss Dernowicz, whom you know.... Come along.”

This time my self-control has quite forsaken me, and I feel my face on fire.... My first impulse is to jump up from my chair and welcome him; fortunately, I have not the strength to rise.

I keep silence, hanging down my head, so as to conceal the working of my features. Smilowicz says something to me, but I cannot make out what.

In comes Roslawski; I bow without looking him in the face; indeed, I scarce raise my head at all.

I am terribly afraid I shall do some unexpected thing. A wild unaccountable terror comes over me, such as one feels when about to faint. I clench my teeth, expectant.

After a while, my nervousness passes away, and I can hear myself asking him about his voyage, about England, about the sea; the calm indifference of my own voice is a surprise to me.

The first coherent thought which strikes me is—that I am a handsome woman: that I _must_ be handsome. Roslawski is talking to Obojanski; it is a long time since they met, and they must be left to themselves a little while. I get up from my arm-chair and go towards Smilowicz, who stands silently by, looking at a new book on one of the shelves. Cool, majestic, with head erect and bright eyes shining serenely in the gas-light, I walk by, close to Roslawski. I see myself as from without, clad in a clinging black dress, wearing a great soft and quaintly designed autumn hat; with outlines that form a graceful silhouette, slow movements, picturesque in their indolence, the outcome of a superfluity of latent vital force, kept down and subdued by the will.

For the first time now I cast my eyes upon him, and meet that cold, critical glance of his. No one but myself has ever hitherto been able to look at me in such wise.

I am standing by Smilowicz, and stoop down with a motion full of elegance and grace, to read the title of the book he is perusing. And all the time I know that the other’s cold glance is fixed on me.

“You have changed very considerably during the vacation, Miss Dernowicz,” Roslawski says to me, in an undertone audible in the quiet room.

“Have I?” This I say with a smile, raising my head.

“Yes, you seem taller now, and more like a ‘grown-up.’ Last year there was still something of the schoolgirl in your appearance.”

I protest, laughingly, and try to talk with Smilowicz. But instead of listening to him, I am thinking.

Roslawski is to my mind not so much a man as a mechanical power, something of a nature that is hostile and full of hatred; something dangerous; a mesmeric influence. This tall, well-dressed, well-informed gentleman in glasses is not to my mind a living man: rather a sort of abstract idea. At times I can scarce believe him to have any personal existence at all.

I have somehow the impression that I am standing upon a railway track, in a whirlwind of frozen snow. Above the howling of the blast, I hear the thunder of an approaching train; but I remain rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed upon the cold unfeeling glare from the lamps of the engine rushing on and going to crush me:—rooted there as in a dreadful nightmare, and unable to take my eyes away from those calm and ever-dazzling lights. There I stand, waiting, powerless, full of hostility yet of self-abasement.

Tea is brought, and the conversation becomes general. To the atmosphere that always reigns at Obojanski’s, Roslawski now brings a newly imported stock of British iciness and rigidity. We all are sensible of the bonds of I know not what invisible etiquette, enveloping and wrapping us up like subtle, unbreakable cobwebs: we no longer venture to laugh out loud; everything is suppressed and stiff and grey.

“So then,” he says, without for a second taking his eyes off me during the whole of our conversation, “so then, you can manage to look at everything in life as an object of observation and severe minute analysis?”

“Yes, I can. Predominance of the thinking over the emotional faculties is a characteristic of my brain.”

“Don’t you consider this a disadvantage to you? Such constant vigilance must deprive you of all directness in feeling.”

“To some extent, yes. But this want of directness is fully compensated by the very process of observation and analysis, which are a source of intense pleasure to me. Besides, in the place of mere intensity of impression, I attain a far wider range; for my mind has the pleasure of perceiving and discriminating certain nice shades, which escape the notice of others.”

A smile rises to Roslawski’s lips, and I feel my soul freezing within me.

And now, summer is dead and gone: withered with suffering and desire, the flame-red flower of Life has fallen to the ground. Now once more the infinite ice-plains are stretching all around me. Behold the sun quenched in the black sky, and the greenish Northern Lights rising above the horizon. And my ice-cold dreams, that had died, now come to life again. And see! that Soul of mine, which trampled my flowers beneath her feet, girds up her loins and goes forth into the snowy Infinite, priding herself upon her sorry triumph, and singing joyously her lofty and sublime hymn to Death!

Oh, how terrible it is, when the Soul is victorious! How terrible!

The weather has changed very suddenly; it is nearly as warm as in summer, and the leaves seem to have turned yellow with heat.

I am coming home from the office, alone and forsaken by all.

I am dreaming (like a dream indeed it is) of the boundless fields, the picturesque ridges, the dark forests and fragrant meadows of Klosow. I see the park, too, with its neatly-trimmed shrubberies and lofty trees; their bare trunks and leafy tops forming a canopy high overhead under the sky, and the foliage turning yellow or red in the sunny glare. The pond, too, do I see—so large that it may be called a lake—the pond, bleak and desolate in the moonless, starless night; that night, when I broke away from the magic spell of Life, and slew my own felicity with my own hands.

Before my eyes, people are walking along the avenues, strewn with dry dead leaves. The slightest breath of air brings down from the trees these tatters and strips, once a purple kingly mantle: but men go on, pitilessly trampling down the rustling leaves.

Now I am in a strange humour—a sort of Pantheistic mood. My Ego is multiplying, growing into countless gods, and penetrating the whole world, wherein there is no room for aught save Me. And, therefore, prodigious amazement takes hold of me, when I think how all these crowds of people can tread upon my golden autumnal leaves, or glance at me, because I have a noticeable face and a hat _à la diable m’enporte_. Can I think that they live? There is no life but mine only.

No, they have not life.

And there,—an immense way off, on the farther shore of the Ocean of Infinity,—there he stands, he, the only foe worthy of me: and he waits that I should go onward to meet him!

And I—I stand in fear. For a week I have not been at Obojanski’s, where he goes pretty nearly every night.

When the thought comes to me of the splendid sorrel mount I had, and of Janusz whose lips were so sweet, I have a mind to burst out crying. But I shall not go back there, unless.... Oh, if I could help going back!

I have an irresistible inclination to seek for types amongst people. I do not like things accidental, either without logical connection, or without connection with the special nature of a given mind. If it depended upon me, I would, like a scientist at work in his laboratory, remove from every character whatever is unnecessary and unessential, lest this should render its reactions with others too complicated and obscure. For example, I should like to make of Obojanski a sage of ancient Greece, and eliminate from him everything that disagreed with this type. Smilowicz should be a narrow-minded Socialist: as matters stand, he is too clever for his type, and most needlessly cleverer than Obojanski. Roslawski is almost perfect. I should only desire—and this, too, for purely personal motives—that he might look upon marriage from a less absolutely ideal standpoint.

What my own type is, I do not know. Very likely I have none; and this has troubled my mind for ever so many a year. I am unable to find anything general in myself, or to define my own nature in one word and make an abstraction of it. For that, I am far too complex.

My father was a bricklayer; and yet there is nothing vulgar in my face or postures or motions. I sweep my floor and clean my own shoes: yet my hands are as soft as velvet. During the whole of my childhood, I used either to go barefoot, or in cheap, clumsy boots; yet my feet are white and bear no mark that I ever went so. My work for the greater part of the day—the adding up of innumerable columns of figures—is such as might benumb most brains, and yet I am quite able to think keenly. Though I neither write poetry, nor sing, nor paint, I have a thoroughly artistic mind. My way of living borders on the penurious; yet I have all the epicurean instincts of those who live at another’s expense. After all, I am (as I am perfectly well aware) nothing extraordinary; and yet, to be the little that I am, I have not undergone one twinge of conscience; in all that is Me, there is not one atom of harm done to any one, and no one single tear of any being alive.

A post-card from Martha, with a “Decadent” figure of a woman, all covered over with microscopic handwriting.

“Grandfather is dangerously ill. I have not had a wink of sleep for a week, and am almost light-headed in consequence. Nervous energy alone has sustained me till now: I cannot answer for the morrow. I continually feel as if my brain were swelling, and would presently fly to pieces. I am tormented with the horrible uselessness of undeserved pain. I don’t want to think what the end of all this is to be. I only know that something within me is giving way. Never yet has my spirit been so broken down: I am now paying the score of the Past, and with usurious interest besides. The autumn of life has come upon me, taking me unawares: nor is it relieved by any reminiscence of a springtime that never was mine. Every night, and all night long, I am sitting by poor Grandfather’s bed, going over my interminable litany of sorrow, and shedding my heart’s blood drop by drop.—M.”

And about Janusz not one word!

As I am going home from the office to-day, I come across Smilowicz, with a big parcel of books under his arm. In spite of his ridiculous smile, the man impresses me: the life he leads is in such strict conformity with the doctrines which he professes. Obojanski tells me he is a very able teacher of Natural Science; but he loses all his lessons, because he cannot reconcile his advanced opinions with what the school superintendents require. For some time past, he has had nothing, or nearly nothing, to eat: he spends his mornings in the University Library, and his evenings at Obojanski’s.

As we pass along by the “Philharmonia” building, he informs me that he has never been inside it.

“Do you object to going there?”

“Most certainly. I am against music, fine costumes, everything that represents satisfaction and amusement. To me all that only suggests extortion, wrong-doing, and injustice: for but a few are able to go there, and that only at the expense of others.”

“But you forget that wrong-doing and injustice are by no means essentials of the Beautiful, of Art, and of artistic delight, though at the present time they happen to exist in connection with these. Your theory seems to me to make far too much of what actually _is_. Try to deliver yourself from the fetters of the Temporal; look upon the present day, as being yourself outside of it and soaring above it: do you see what I mean?—I also resent whatever is unjust, but I can separate the Beautiful therefrom and love it, both in Art and in life.”

“Well, you may be right, but I cannot take up so objective a point of view. In me indignation overbears any gentler artistic sentiment. Yet more: I think it is not now the time to enjoy Art, or to plunge into the deep and subtle analyses of Estheticism. What we want at the present time is Action.”

“But, for myself, I quiet my conscience with the fact, which I know to be true, that I am living now just as I should live in that future when, as Ferri says, all are from the very outset to have equal opportunities for their development.”

Smilowicz is pleased.

“Ah, then you understand.... I was afraid you had been surprised at my friendship for Obojanski, seeing the way I am accustomed to talk. But, you know, if scientific work were properly remunerated, Obojanski’s monographs would bring him in enough money to live as sumptuously as he is doing now. So he arrives at the very same result, though by different roads. Yet that, unfortunately, is paltering with principles.”

Oh, I should not object, so far as I am concerned, to any such “paltering!” As things stand, I am working too much: I might work less and do something better.... All my talent is quite thrown away on those everlasting accounts.

My dream is now, how to make more money. And this renders me somewhat uneasy; perhaps it is on account of pecuniary circumstances that I am now considering the possibility of marriage with Janusz, in case Roslawski....

This I should not like. Not because it would show my character in an ignoble light. That’s nonsense. No, but it would mark how little I care for the creature I could take on such terms.

I am of those whose sin is greater than the sin of Eve and Adam: I have eaten of the fruit of the knowledge that there is neither good nor evil.

Yes, for I have gone on—on to the very end. Every one has something he can call his own. Sufferers magnify in their mind the power of suffering; those who have abandoned everything make a god of their strength of will to do so. But I have nothing left, nothing absolutely. Of beauty I have not enough to love that beauty in myself. Wisdom is wisdom from one standpoint only: that lost, its very idea ceases to exist. I have too much mind to be artful and mysterious, so I strike no one as being uncommon. I have all the shortcomings of a perfect sage; for I believe in nothing, and am indifferent to all things. But I am not, as sages are, encyclopædic, nor do I love knowledge, nor have I any. At the same time, I do not, like a typical Decadent, hug myself at the thought of my doubts and of my indifference. Quite the contrary—to others, nay, even to myself, I play the part of one that is blithe, well-favoured, happy, and quite satisfied with being what I am. This is not because I deliberately try to keep my secret to myself, but because merriment is to my mind less wearisome than the apathy of doubt. And I have not as my own even what I say here, for I am not sure that it is true....

Roslawski...? Well, say I am attracted by the interest of an experiment.

Out of which I am making a grave and important affair, simply because of my love for some pathos in life....

Why, Janusz himself can be “distinguished” on certain occasions.

Madame, (he writes),

May I venture to remind you that the period chosen by you, within which to give me a definite answer, will have come to an end on Monday next?

I beg to remain, Madame,

Most respectfully yours, Janusz.

Yes, the time has come. I shall go to Obojanski’s to-night.

Here I have come, with fevered lips and ice-cold heart, only to find that Roslawski went away but a quarter of an hour ago, having to dine with some friends this evening.

I still can smell in the air the brand of cigars that he smokes.... My eyebrows and lids are twitching as if agitated by some witch’s spell.

Yet I experience not the least disappointment at not finding him here: rather a sense of relief, that I can put the affair off a little longer.

Obojanski tells me what a favourite of Roslawski I am, and goes so far as to hint—in jest—that he is in love with me. This very evening he was asking why I have paid no visit to my old Professor for such a length of time. This, for a man of his sort, must mean a great deal.

In the main, however, Obojanski is this evening in a pessimistic and quarrelsome mood. He blames me for too readily taking up with new trends of thought: which does me great harm. There is no contemporary poet equal to Homer: I ought therefore to be somewhat more deeply read in the works of the old classics, which reflect such a healthy feeling of harmony between body and mind.

“You are,” he says, “daily less mindful of the admirable maxim, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano.’”

“Why, no; I decidedly uphold proper care of the body, to make it hardy and healthy, and able to resist the wear and tear of our now over-subtle and over-sensitive minds.”

“Yes, but nowadays our very minds are diseased.”

“Well, then, let my motto be: ‘In a sound body, a diseased mind!’”

Or what people may choose to call diseased.

Scholars and thinkers, though they surely must have made some studies in logic, yet reason thus by analogy: Disease of the body is any departure from its normal state: _consequently_, any but an average mind is diseased. But if they start from the premise that mind and body are identical, then why reason at all on the matter?

Now I would burst into song, to run about in the open country, flooded with the white low sunbeams, and to utter cries of joy.

Why? Because the old Professor has said: “He is in love with you!” And because I believe he has spoken the truth.

Yes, and I shall continue to believe it till sundown, and I still am dreaming of a joyful triumph. I had one before, but it was far from joyful.

To-morrow evening I shall go to see Obojanski once more; and I shall tremble with great fear.