Part 9

“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.