PART IV

I

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

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

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

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

"And you are ill-bred and slovenly!"

It was a charming pleasure-trip, indeed.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

_Isn't It Enough?_

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Quatre liards la botte!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We do not understand one another."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

"To town!"

And the inquirer smiled furtively.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

I asked her to account for her extravagance.

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

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

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

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

"Your fencing lessons!"

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

"Riding lessons!"

"Two: five francs."

"Books!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did the unfaithful wife laugh when she read it?

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

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

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

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

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

Why cold shudders? I wondered....

To this day I have not found an explanation.

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

It was indeed amusing!

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

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

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

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

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

And again it was war between us.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah! you know the doctor?"

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

"As a conceited fool," I interposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the story of the play--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is the matter?" she asked.

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

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

Then I suggested the defence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She roused herself when she heard my footsteps.

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

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

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

"Who told you that?"

"Helga!"

"Helga?"

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

"And you believed her?"

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

"You mean there was a third?"

"I didn't say so!"

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

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

"Prove them!..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had deceived me.

I must know the name of my rival!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

"Indeed...."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Prostitute!"

"Why?"

"Because you submit to being treated like one."

"Are you jealous?"

"Yes, I am jealous; jealous of my honour, the dignity of my family, the reputation of my wife, the future of my children! It is because of your unworthy conduct that we are ostracised by all decent women. To allow a stranger to kiss you in public! Don't you realise that you are mad, that you neither see, nor hear, nor understand what you are doing, that you are absolutely devoid of all sense of duty? I shall have you shut up if you don't mend your ways, and, to begin with, I forbid you to have anything more to do with those two women!"

"It's all your fault! You egged me on!"

"I wanted to see how far you would go!"

"See how far I would go! What proof have you that the relationship between me and my friends is such as you suspect?"

"What proof! None! But I have your admissions, your slippery tales. And didn't one of your friends admit that in her own country she would fall into the hands of the law?"

"I thought you denied the existence of vice!"

"I don't care how your friends amuse themselves so long as their amusements do not interfere with the welfare of my family. From the moment, however, that their 'peculiarities,' if you prefer this word, threaten to injure us, they are, as far as we are concerned, criminal acts. True, as a philosopher, I don't admit the existence of vice, but only of physical or moral defects. And, quite recently, when this unnatural tendency was discussed in the French parliament, all the French physicians of note were of opinion that it was not the province of the law to interfere in these matters, except in cases where the interests of individual citizens were violated."

I might as well have preached to stone walls. How could I hope to make this woman, who acknowledged no other law but her animal instincts, grasp a philosophical distinction!

To be quite sure of the facts, I wrote to a friend in Paris and asked him to tell me the plain truth.

In his reply, which was very candid, he told me that my wife's perverse tendencies were no secret in Scandinavia, and that the two Danes were well-known Lesbians in Paris.

We were in debt at our hotel, and had no money; therefore we were unable to move. But the two Danish ladies got into trouble with the peasants, and were compelled to leave.

We had known them for eight months, and an abrupt termination of our friendship was impossible; moreover, they belonged to good families, and were well educated; they had been comrades in trouble, and I resolved to grant them a retreat with honours. A farewell banquet was therefore arranged in the studio of one of the young artists.

At dessert, when every one was more or less gay with the wine which had been drunk, Marie, overcome by her feelings, rose to sing a song of her own composition. It was an imitation of the well-known song in _Mignon_, and in it she bade farewell to her friend. She sang with fire and genuine feeling, her almond-shaped eyes were full of tears and glowed softly in the reflection of the candle-light; she opened her heart so wide that even I was touched and charmed. There was a candour, an ingenuousness in this woman's love-song to a woman, so pathetic that it kept all unchaste thoughts at bay. And how strange it was! She had neither the appearance nor the manners of the hermaphrodite; she was essentially woman; loving, tender, mysterious, unfathomable woman.

How different from her was the object of her tenderness! She was a pure Russian type, with masculine features, a hooked nose, a massive chin, yellow eyes and bloated cheeks, a flat chest, crooked fingers--a truly hideous woman--a peasant would not have looked at her.

When she had finished her song Marie sat down by the side of this freak; the latter rose, took Marie's head in her two hands and kissed her on the lips. That at least was pure and unadulterated sensuality.

I drank with the Russian until she was quite intoxicated; she stumbled, looked at me with large, bewildered eyes, and, sobbing like an imbecile, clutched the wall to support herself. I had never before seen such ugliness in human shape.

The banquet ended with a row in the street. On the following morning the two Danes left.

* * * * *

Marie passed through a terrible crisis; I was genuinely sorry for her; her longing for her friend, her suffering, were unmistakable. It was a genuine instance of unhappy love. She went for solitary walks in the woods, sang love-songs, visited the favourite haunts of her friends, exhibited every symptom of a wounded heart. I began to entertain fears for her sanity. She was unhappy, and I could not console her. She avoided my caresses, pushed me aside when I tried to kiss her. My heart was full of hatred for the woman who had robbed me of my wife's love. Perfectly unconscious of herself, Marie made no secret of the identity of the person for whom she was mourning. She talked of nothing but her love and her sorrow. It was incredible!

* * * * *

The two friends carried on a brisk correspondence. Infuriated with her indifference to me, I one day seized one of her friend's letters. It was a genuine love-letter. "My 'darling, my little puss, my clever, delicate, tender, noble-hearted Marie; that coarse husband of yours is but a stupid brute...." and so on. The letter further suggested that she should leave me, and proposed ways and means of escape....

I stood up against my rival, and on the same evening--oh, my God! Marie and I fought in the moonshine. She bit my hands, I dragged her to the river to drown her like a kitten--when suddenly I saw a vision of my children. It brought me to my senses.

I resolved to put an end to myself, but before doing so I determined to write the story of my life.

* * * * *

The first part of the book was finished when the news spread through the village that the Danish ladies had engaged rooms.

I instantly had the trunks packed, and we left for German Switzerland.

IV

Lovely Argovia! Sweet Arcady, where the postmaster tends his flocks, where the colonel drives the only cab, where the young girls are virgins when they marry, and the young men shoot at targets and play the drum. Utopia! land of the golden beer and smoked sausages; birthplace of the game of ninepins, the House of Habsburg, William Tell, rustic merry-makings and naïve songs straight from the heart, pastors' wives and vicarage idylls!

Peace returned to our troubled hearts. I recovered, and Marie, weary of strife, wrapped herself in undisguised indifference. We played backgammon as a safety-valve, and our conversations, so fraught with danger, were replaced by the rolling of dice. I drank good, wholesome beer instead of wine and the nerve-shattering absinthe.

The influence of our environment soon made itself felt. I was amazed to find that such serene calm could follow the storms we had weathered, that the elasticity of the mind could withstand so many shocks, that we could forget the past, that I could fancy myself the happiest husband of the most faithful wife.

Marie, deprived of all society and friends, uncomplainingly devoted herself to her children. After a month had elapsed the little ones were dressed in frocks which she had cut out and made with her own hands. She was never impatient with them, and allowed them to absorb her completely.

For the first time now I noticed a certain lassitude in her; her love of pleasure was less pronounced, approaching middle-age made itself felt. How grieved she was when she lost her first tooth! Poor girl! She wept, put her arms round me and implored me never to cease loving her. She was now thirty-seven years old. Her hair had grown thinner, her bosom had sunk like the waves of the sea after a storm, the stairs tired her little feet, her lungs no longer worked with the old pressure.

And I, although I had not yet reached my prime, although my strength was increasing and I enjoyed excellent health, I loved her more than ever at the thought that now she would belong entirely to me and her children. Shielded from temptation, surrounded by my tender care, she would grow old in the fulfilment of her duties towards her family....

Her return to a more normal state of mind manifested itself in many pathetic ways. Realising her hazardous position as the wife of a comparatively young man of thirty-eight, she took it into her head to be jealous of me; she was more particular about the details of her dress, and took care of herself during the day, so that she might be fresh and able to please me in the evening.

She need have had no fear, for I am monogamous by temperament, and, far from abusing the situation, I did my utmost to spare her the cruel pangs of jealousy by giving her proof after proof of my renewed love.

* * * * *

In the autumn I made up my mind to make a tour through French Switzerland; I intended to be away for three weeks, and never stay longer than a day at any one place.

Marie, still clinging to the idea of my shattered health, tried to dissuade me.

"I am sure it will kill you," she reiterated.

"We shall see!"

The tour was a point of honour with me, an attempt to win her back completely, to reawaken in her the love of the virile.

* * * * *

I returned after incredible hardships, strong, brown and healthy.

There was a look of admiration, a challenge in her eyes when she met me, which was, however, quickly superseded by a look of disappointment.

I, on the other hand, after my three weeks' absence and abstinence, treated her as a man treats a beloved mistress, a wife from whom he has been parted all too long. I put my arm round her waist and, like a conqueror, seized my own, after a journey of forty-eight hours without a break.... She did not know what to think; she was amazed, afraid of betraying her real feelings; frightened at the thought of finding the "tamer" in her husband.

When my excitement had abated a little, I noticed that Marie's expression had undergone a change. I scrutinised her appearance: her missing tooth had been replaced, a fact which made her look much younger. Certain details of her dress betrayed a wish to please. It roused my attention. I soon discovered the reason in the presence of a young girl of about fourteen, with whom she was exceedingly friendly. They kissed one another, went for walks together, bathed together....

There was nothing left for me to do but to take her away it once.

V

We took rooms in a German private hotel on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne.

Marie relapsed into her former ways. She paid a great deal of attention to one of the guests, a young officer; played ninepins with him, and took melancholy walks in the garden while I worked.

I noticed at dinner that they exchanged tender glances, although no words were uttered. They seemed to caress one another with the eyes. I resolved to put them to the test at once, and, turning round sharply, looked straight into my wife's face. She tried to throw me off the scent by letting her eyes glide along the young man's temples until they rested on the wall, on a spot which was adorned by a huge poster advertising a brewery. She made an inane remark to cover her confusion.

"Is that a new brewery?" she stammered.

"Yes ... but don't imagine that you can hoodwink me," I retorted.

She bent her neck, as if I had pulled in the reins, and remained silent.

Two days later, in the evening, on pretence of being tired, she kissed me good-night and left the room. I too went to bed, and after reading for a little while, fell asleep.

All of a sudden I awoke. Some one was playing the piano in the drawing-room; a voice was singing--it was Marie's voice.

I arose and called the children's nurse.

"Go and tell your mistress to go to bed at once," I said. "Tell her that if she refuses I shall come down myself and shake her in the presence of the whole company."

Marie came up-stairs at once. She seemed ashamed, and with an air of injured innocence she asked me why I had sent her so strange a message; why I would not allow her to stay in the drawing-room, although there were other ladies present?

"I don't mind your staying in the drawing-room," I replied angrily. "But I do object to your sly ways of getting rid of me whenever you want to be there by yourself."

"If you insist, very well, I'll go to bed."

This candour, this sudden submission.... What had happened?

* * * * *

Winter had set in in good earnest. There was an abundance of snow; the sky was leaden, and we were cut off from all society. Everybody had left; we were the last guests in the modest hotel. The extreme cold compelled us to take our meals in the large public dining-room of the restaurant.

One morning, while we were at luncheon, a strong, thick-set man, rather nice-looking, evidently belonging to the servant class, entered, sat down at one of the tables, and asked for a glass of wine.

Marie scrutinised the stranger in her free and easy manner, took his measure, as it were, and became lost in a reverie.

The man went away, confused and flattered by her attention.

"A nice-looking man," she remarked, turning to the host.

"He used to be my porter."

"Was he? He really is unusually good-looking for his class! A very nice-looking man indeed!"

And she went into details, praising his virile beauty in terms which puzzled our host.

On the following morning the dashing ex-porter was already in his place when we entered. Dressed in his Sunday best, hair and beard trimmed, he appeared to be fully aware of his conquest. He bowed; my wife acknowledged his bow with a graceful bending of her head; he squared his shoulders and gave himself the airs of a Napoleon.

He returned on the third day, determined to break the ice. He started a polite conversation, reminiscent of the back-door, all the while addressing himself directly to my wife without wasting any time over the usual trick of first conciliating the husband.

It was intolerable!

Marie, in the presence of her husband and children, allowed herself to be drawn into a discussion by a stranger.

Once more I tried to open her eyes, begged her to be more careful of her reputation.

Her only answer was her usual: "You have a nasty mind!"

A second Apollo came to the rescue. He was the village tobacconist, an undersized man, at whose shop Marie was in the habit of making small purchases. More shrewd than the porter, he tried to make friends with me first; he was of a more enterprising nature. At the first meeting he stared impudently at Marie and loudly exclaimed to our host--

"I say, what a distinguished-looking family!"

Marie's heart caught fire, and the village beau returned night after night.

One evening he was intoxicated, and therefore more insolent than usual. He approached Marie while we were playing backgammon, and asked her to explain the rules of the game to him. I answered as civilly as I could under the circumstances, and the worthy man returned to his seat, snubbed. Marie, more sensitive than I, was under the impression that she ought to make amends for my rudeness; she turned to him with the first question which came into her mind--

"Do you play billiards?" she said.

"No, madame, or rather, I play badly...."

He rose again, approached a step or two, and offered me a cigar. I declined.

He turned to Marie. "Won't you smoke, madame?" Fortunately for her, for the tobacconist and the future of my family, she too declined, but she refused in a manner which flattered him.

How dared this man offer a lady a cigarette in a restaurant in the presence of her husband?

Was I a jealous fool? Or was my wife's conduct so scandalous that she excited the desire of the first-comer?

We had a scene in our room, for I regarded her as a somnambulist whom it was my duty to awaken. She was walking straight to her doom, without being in the least aware of it. I gave her an epitome of her sins, old and new, and minutely criticised her conduct.

Silently, with a pale face and dream-shadowed eyes, she listened until I had finished. Then she rose and went down-stairs to bed. But this time--for the first time in my life--I fell so low as to play the spy. I crept down-stairs, found her bedroom door, and looked through the keyhole.

The rich glow of the lamp fell on the children's nurse, who sat opposite the door right in the field of my vision. Marie was pacing the room excitedly, vehemently denouncing my unfounded suspicions; she conducted her case as a criminal conducts his defence.

And yet I was innocent, quite innocent, in spite of all my opportunities to sin....

She produced two glasses of beer, and they drank together. They sat down, side by side, and Marie looked at her caressingly. Closer and closer she moved to the girl, put her head on the shoulders of this new friend, slipped her arm round her waist and kissed her....

Poor Marie! Poor, unhappy woman, who sought comfort far from me, who alone could set her mind at rest and give her peace. All of a sudden she drew herself up, listened, and pointed towards the door.

"Some one's there!"

I slipped away.

When I returned to my post of observation I noticed that Marie was half undressed, exposing her shoulders to the gaze of the girl, who, however, remained quite unmoved. Then she resumed her defence.

"There can be no doubt that he is mad! I shouldn't be surprised if he tried to poison me.... I suffer unbearable pains in my inside.... But no, it's hardly probable ... perhaps I ought to fly to Finland.... What do you think?... Only it would kill him, for he loves the children...."

What was this, if not the outpourings of an evil conscience?... Stung with remorse, she was terror-stricken and sought refuge on the bosom of a woman! She was a perverted child; an unfaithful wife, a criminal; but, above all, she was an unhappy woman.

I lay awake all night, a prey to my tormenting thoughts. At two o'clock in the morning I heard her moaning in her sleep. Full of pity, I knocked on the floor to dispel the visions which terrified her. It was not the first time that I had done this.

She thanked me on the following morning for having awakened her from her nightmare. I made much of her, and begged her to tell me, her best friend, everything.

"Tell you what?... I have nothing to tell."

I should have given her absolution for whatever crime she had confessed to me at that moment, for my heart was full of compassion. I loved her with an infinite love, despite of, or perhaps because of, all the misery she had wrought. She was but an unhappy woman. How could I raise my hand against her?

But instead of delivering me once and for all from the terrible doubts which haunted me, she offered me the most strenuous resistance. She had persuaded herself that I was insane; her instinct of self-preservation had built up a legend behind which she could shield herself from the attacks of her anguished conscience.

* * * * *

_Sunwards_.

Not a single ray of sunlight had gladdened the little village of Gersau on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne for three long weeks, not, in fact, since the beginning of October, when the Foehn began to blow. There had been a dead calm; after sunset I had fallen asleep and slept until I was awakened, in the middle of the night, by the ringing of the church bells and a noise which mingled with the peculiar rushing sound of the tempest as it came sweeping across the Alps, flung itself on the southern shore of the lake, was compressed into the valley and forced into the streets of our village, where it tore at the signs, shook the window shutters, rattled the slates and howled through the branches of trees and shrubs.

The waves of the lake dashed against the dam, foamed over the border and plashed against the sides of the boats. Handfuls of storm-lashed sand were flung at our windows; the leaves, torn from their branches, went dancing and whirling by, the doors of the stoves clattered, the walls shook. I looked out of the window; the church was lighted up, and the bells were ringing to awaken those who still slept. In these parts the Foehn is accounted as full of danger as an earthquake, for it does not only sweep away the houses, but it tears the mountains to pieces and flings them into the valleys. Our house was situated at the base of a mountain which, though only fifteen hundred metres high, carried on its summit a loose litter of rocks, peculiarly adapted to stone-throwing on a large scale. The tempest raged for three hours, then the danger was over; but on the following morning everybody in the village knew that at Schwyz a rock had fallen on a farmhouse and carried away the right wing without injury to those who lived in the left.

After this warm but terrific gale a fog descended on village and lake. The sky was overcast, but no rain fell; yet there was no sunshine. This continued for three weeks, and if the outlook had been grey to begin with, it ended by being black. The beautiful alpine landscape, the unrivalled restorer of flagging spirits, had lost its potency, for it was impossible to see further ahead than a hundred yards up the steep rocks; the heart became heavy as lead and indescribably depressed. The tourists had turned their faces homewards, the hotels were empty, November was upon us, sombre and gloomy. The hours dragged on wearily; one longed for the end of the dreary day and the cheerful light of the lamps; the dismal sky was grey, the lake was grey, the landscape was grey.

No wind, no rain, no thunder. Nature, so varied and diversified, had become monotonous, calm and quiet; so peaceful that an earthquake would have been a relief.

Wherever the light did not fall, greyness reigned; vision was dimmed, and drowsiness, akin to laziness, enveloped the soul.

One evening, when I complained to the magistrate of the long absence of the sun, he answered with the phlegm which characterises the German-Swiss--

"The sun! You can see the sun all day long on the Hochfluh!"

The Hochfluh was one of the small mountain ranges which surrounded the valley in which we lived; it was only two hundred metres lower than the Sulitelma, and consequently a favourite walk of young English tourists. Being a worshipper of the sun, I decided to make a pilgrimage to my deity, and early one November morning I set out on my travels.

The inhabitants of Gersau, living at the base of a mountain which, as I have already mentioned, every now and then transforms itself into a volcano and rains rocks and stones on the valleys, have from time immemorial cultivated the habit of preparing themselves for death by visiting their church three times a day, at morning, noon and evening. I was not surprised, therefore, to meet the church-goers now, at eight o'clock in the morning, carrying their Prayer Books in their hands. Two old women, patiently performing their daily half-mile trudge to morning prayers, were counting their beads on the highroad. One of them started the angelic salutation "Ave Maria!" and her companion joined in the burden "In sæcula sæculorum, Amen." They kept up their monotonous' mumbling the whole way, and though this counting of beads may not have done any actual good, it at least prevented any misuse of the tongue; I could not help thinking of the well-known anecdote of the count who made his butler whistle whenever he was busy in the wine cellar.

Soon after I had left the old women and the highroad behind, and begun the ascent, I came upon some sights which were so striking that they made a lasting impression on me. Close to the first curve of the road grew a walnut tree, to which were nailed a crucifix and a tablet; the inscription on the latter informed the passer-by that farmer Seppi, while busy with the harvest, fell from the tree and was killed. God have mercy on his soul! Pray for him! Amen!

At the next corner there was a queer little shrine built of whitewashed bricks, small like a child's dolls'-house. A peep through the railings disclosed pictures of the Holy Family, painted, perhaps, in the sixteenth century, and a legend to the effect that criminals on their way to execution were allowed a few minutes' respite before the shrine to utter a last prayer. I was, therefore, on the road which led to the gallows, and a few minutes later I arrived at the place of execution, a pleasant open spot on the top of an overhanging cliff which jutted out in the direction of the lake. From this point one had a magnificent view. To bid farewell to life with a last look at such a picture as greets the eye from the summit of Pilatus, Buechserhorn or Buergenstock is quite conceivably a genuine pleasure. Even Voltaire could have felt none of the repugnance which was excited in him by the idea of being hanged in secret, a contingency which filled him with such extreme disgust, that he was quite consistent in accusing Rousseau of a vanity so great that it would permit him to submit cheerfully to be hanged, if he could be sure of his name being nailed to the gallows.

In the distance, near the shore, I could dimly discern a faint outline of a haunted little church, called "Kindlimord" because a grief-stricken father is said there to have killed his starving child.

I left these four melancholy landmarks behind me in the grey morning light, and hastened my ascent to those happier heights where the sun was shining.

Very soon beeches took the place of chestnut and walnut trees. I rested for a while in a dairy cottage in the company of fine cattle and a horrible cur, and then entered cloudland. I seemed to be walking in a dense fog, which grew in density and almost completely blotted out the landscape. The effort to see made my eyes ache; trees and shrubs loomed indistinctly through a cloud of smoke; the millions of cobwebs which festooned the branches were richly studded with raindrops; it looked as if the old woman of the wood, if there is such a being, had hung up thousands of lace handkerchiefs to dry.

It was difficult to breathe; the fog hung on my coat, hair, beard and eyebrows, gave out a stale, sickly smell, and rendered the rocks so smooth and slippery that I could hardly keep my footing; it darkened the heart of the wood, where the trunks were quickly swallowed up in a monotonous grey, which limited the range of vision to a few yards.

I had to climb up through this layer of fog, extending about a thousand metres upwards, a cold and damp purgatory, before I could reach the sun; and I struggled on, with sublime faith in the magistrate's word of honour that the fog would cease before the mountain ceased and grey space began.

I had no barometer with me, but I felt that I was ascending, that the fog was growing less dense, and that I was approaching a purer atmosphere.

A feeling of intoxication seized me--a faint glimmer from above dimly illuminated the narrow pass, like the first dawn of day shining through the picture of a landscape painted on a window-blind; the trees stood out more distinctly, the field of vision increased, the tinkling of cowbells--from above--fell on my ear. And now, right on the summit, there hung a golden cloud; a few more steps and the stunted beeches and brushwood shone and glittered, dazzling splashes of gold, copper, bronze and silver, wherever a stream of broken sunlight fell on the faded foliage which was still clinging to the branches. I was standing in an autumn landscape looking out into a sun-bathed summerland; through my mind flashed the memory of a sail on the Lake of Mälar; I remembered how I was sitting in the sunshine, watching the passing of a black hail-storm no further off than a cable-length to leeward. And now I, too, stood in the sunlight, gazing at a northern landscape made up of firs and birch trees, green fields and red cattle, little brown cottages with old women on the thresholds, knitting socks for father, who was toiling far down in the canton of Tessin; my eyes rested on potato fields and lavender bushes, dahlias and marigolds.

The sun dried my hair and coat, and warmed my shivering limbs; I bared my head before the glowing orb, source and preserver of all there is, completely indifferent whether I was worshipping unquenchable flames of burning hydrogen, or the not yet scientifically acknowledged primordial substance, helium. Was it not the All-Father, who had given birth to the Cosmos, the Almighty, the Lord of life and death, ice and heat, summer and winter, dearth and plenty?

My eyes, which had been feasting on summer joy and green fields, plunged into the gloom of the abyss whence I had climbed. The mantle of cold and darkness which had been lying on the surface of the lake was cold and dark no longer; dazzling clouds, like snowy, sunlit piles of wool, hid from my gaze the twilight and the polluted earth; above them rose snow-clad peaks, glistening and sparkling, fashioned of condensed silver fog, a crystallised solution of air and sunlight, drift-ice on a sea of newly fallen snow. It was a vision of transcendent beauty, compared to which the cowbell-idyll under the birch trees was commonplace.

The dead silence was suddenly broken by a sound from below, where melancholy men and women toiled and trembled in the grey gloom. It was a splashing sound which approached deliberately; so deliberately that my eyes unconsciously tried to follow its course under the cloud-cover. It sounded like a millstream, a brook swollen with rain, a tidal wave. Then a scream rent the air, loud and wild, as if all the dwellers in the four cantons were calling for help against Uri-Rotstock; it was the shrill whistle of the paddle-boat which, penetrating the layer of clouds, gained in volume in the pure air and was caught up and tossed from rock to rock by the redundant echo of the Hochfluh.

It was noon! Time to begin my descent through the fog down to the greyness, the darkness, the damp, the dirt, and wait for another three weeks, perhaps, for another glimpse of the sun.

VI

After the New Year we left Switzerland and took up our abode in Germany; we had decided to stay for a while at the lovely shores of the Lake of Constance.

In Germany, the land of militarism, where the patriarchate is still in full force, Marie felt completely out of it. No one would listen to her futile talk about women's rights. Here young girls had just been forbidden to attend the University lectures; here the dowry of a woman who marries an officer of the army has to be deposited with the War Office; here all government appointments are reserved for the man, the breadwinner of the family.

Marie struggled and fought as if she had been caught in a trap. On her first attempt to hoodwink me she was severely taken to task by the women. For the first time in my life I found the fair sex entirely on my side; henceforth she had to play second fiddle. The friendly intercourse with the officers braced me; their manners influenced mine; and after ten years of spiritual emasculation my manhood reasserted itself.

I let my hair grow as it liked, and abolished the fringe on which Marie had insisted; my voice, which had grown thin from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its former volume. The hollows in my cheeks filled out, and although I was now beginning my fortieth year my whole physique gained in strength and vigour.

I was friendly with all the women in the house, and soon fell into the habit of taking a very active part in the conversation, while Marie, poor, unpopular Marie, once again sat in silence.

She began to be afraid of me. One morning, for the first time in the last six years of our marriage, she appeared fully dressed in my bedroom before I was up. I could not understand this sudden move, but we had a stormy scene, during which she admitted that she was jealous of the girl who came into my room every morning to light the fire in my stove.

"And I do detest your new ways!" she exclaimed. "I hate this so-called manliness, and loathe you when you give yourself airs!"

Well, I knew that it had always been the page, the lap-dog, the weakling, "her child" that she loved. The virago never loves virility in her husband, however much she may admire it elsewhere.

I became more and more popular with the women. I sought their society; my whole nature was expanding in the friendly warmth which they emanated, these true women, who inspired the respectful love, the genuine devotion which a man only feels for a womanly woman.

* * * * *

We were discussing our return home. But again my old suspicions tormented me. I shrank from the renewal of old relations with former friends, some of whom might quite conceivably have been my wife's lovers. To put an end to my doubts, I determined to cross-examine her, for my letters to friends in Sweden had been so much waste of paper. I had been unable to elicit a candid statement.

Everybody pitied the "mother." No one cared whether or not the "father" would be ruined by the ridicule which threatened to befall him.

An excellent idea occurred to me. I would make use of the resources of the new science of psychology and thought-reading. I introduced it into our evening amusements, as if it were a game, employing the methods of Bishop and his kind. Marie was suspicious. She charged me with being a spiritualist; laughingly called me a superstitious free-thinker; overwhelmed me with abuse--in fact, used every means in her power to divert my attention from practices the danger of which she apparently anticipated. I pretended to give in, and dropped hypnotism, but I resolved to make my attack some time when she was off her guard.

The opportunity came one evening when we were sitting alone in the dining-room, facing each other. I gradually led the conversation to gymnastics. I succeeded in interesting her so much that she became excited and, compelled either by my will-power or the association of ideas which I had aroused in her mind, she mentioned massage. This suggested the pain caused by the treatment, and remembering her own experience in this connection she exclaimed--

"Oh yes, the treatment is certainly painful--I can feel the pain now when I think of----"

She paused. She bowed her head to hide her pallor; her lips moved as if she were anxious to change the subject; her eyelids flickered. A terrible silence followed which I prolonged as much as possible. This was the train of thought which I had set in motion and guided, full steam on, in the intended direction. In vain she tried to put on the brake. The abyss lay before her; she could not stop the engine. With a superhuman effort she broke from the grip of my eyes and rushed out of the room.

The blow had struck home.

She returned a few minutes later; her face had lost its strained expression. Under pretence of demonstrating to me the beneficial effect of massage, she came behind my chair and stroked my head. Unfortunately the little scene was acted before a mirror. A furtive glance showed me her pale, terrified face, her troubled eyes which scrutinised my features ... our searching glances met.

Contrary to her habit she came and sat on my knee, put her arms round me lovingly and murmured that she was very sleepy.

"What wrong have you committed to-day that you caress me like this?" I asked.

She hid her face on my shoulder, kissed me and went out of the room, bidding me good-night.

I am perfectly well aware that this sort of evidence would not satisfy a jury, but it was sufficient for me, who knew her so well.

And to my thinking the evidence was strengthened by the fact that a short time ago my brother-in-law had forbidden the doctor his house, because the latter had made advances to my sister.

* * * * *

I was therefore determined not to return to my own country. At home I should be compelled to associate daily with men whom I distrusted, and to escape the ridicule which inevitably falls to the share of the duped husband, I fled to Vienna.

Alone in my hotel, the vision of the wife I had worshipped haunted me. Utterly unable to work, I began a correspondence with her. I wrote her love-letters twice a day. The unknown town affected me like a cemetery. I moved through the thronging crowd like a phantom. But after a while my imagination began to people this solitude. I invented a romantic story for the sole reason of introducing Marie into this dreary desert, and soon life was pulsing everywhere. I pictured her as a famous singer, and to lend my dream a semblance of reality and make of the fine city a more convincing background for her, I made the acquaintance of the director of the Conservatoire. I, who detested the theatre, visited the opera or a concert every night. Everything interested me intensely, because I reported everything to her. No sooner had I arrived at my hotel than I sat down and gave her a minute description of Miss So-and-so's performance, drawing comparisons which were invariably in her own favour.

Her spirit pervaded the picture galleries. I spent an hour before the Venus of Guido Reni in the Belvedere, because she was so like my beloved.

In the end my longing grew so irresistible that I packed my box and returned home as fast as the express could carry me. Surely I was bewitched; there was no means of escape from her.

I had a royal reception.

My love-letters seemed to have rekindled Marie's love. I ran up the little garden to meet her. I covered her face with passionate kisses. I took her little head between my hands.

"Can you really work magic, little witch?"

"What do you mean? Your journey was not an attempt at flight, was it?"

"It was! But you are stronger than I am.... I throw down my arms...."

On my writing-table lay a spray of red roses.

"You do love me a little?"

She was covered with confusion like a young girl--she blushed ... it was all over with me, my honour, my efforts to break the chains which bound me, and which I longed for when I was free.

Six months went by; we lived in a wonderful dream: we chirruped like starlings, we kissed, our love was endless. We played duets and backgammon. The most beautiful days of the last five years were surpassed. Spring had returned in the autumn of our lives! And had we not dreaded the approach of the winter?

* * * * *

I was fast again in her toils. She was convinced that the love philtre which she had given me to drink had intoxicated me afresh, and relapsed into her former indifference. She neglected her appearance, and despite all my remonstrances no longer took the trouble to make the best of herself. I foresaw that the result would be coldness on both sides, in spite of ourselves. Even her preference for her own sex reappeared, more dangerous and more pitiable, for this time she made love to young girls.

One evening we had invited the commandant and his fourteen-year-old daughter, cur hostess and her daughter, a girl of fifteen, and a third girl of about the same age to a quiet little dinner-party, which was to be followed by a dance.

Towards midnight--to this day I grow hot when I think of it--I saw that Marie, who had been drinking freely, had gathered the young girls round her and, looking at them with lascivious eyes, was kissing them on the lips.

The commandant was watching the scene from a dark corner of the room, hardly able to control himself. In imagination I saw prison, penal servitude, a scandal which we could never live down; I made a rush at the group and broke it up, telling the girls to join in the dancing....

When we were left alone I took Marie to task. We argued and stormed till daylight. Since she had had more wine than was good for her, she lost her head and confessed things which I had never even dreamed of.

Beside myself with anger, I repeated all my indictments, all my suspicions, and added a new charge, in which I did not really believe myself.

"And this mysterious illness, these headaches from which I suffer...."

"What! You blame me for that too!"

I had not meant what she insinuated; I had merely referred to the symptoms of cyanide poisoning which I had observed in myself.

All of a sudden a reminiscence flashed into my mind; the thought of something which at the time had seemed too improbable that it had left no permanent trace in my memory....

My suspicion was strengthened when I remembered a certain epithet used in an anonymous letter which I had received a short time after Marie's divorce. The letter referred to her as "the prostitute of Södertälje."

What did it mean? I had made inquiries which had come to nothing. Was I on the point of making a fresh discovery?

When the Baron, Marie's first husband, made her acquaintance at Södertälje, she was half and half engaged to a young officer, a man with admittedly bad health. Poor Gustav had played the part of a greenhorn. That accounted for the warm gratitude which she felt for him even after the divorce; she had confessed at the time that he had delivered her from dangers ... what dangers she had not mentioned.

But "the prostitute of Södertälje"? I reflected ... the retired life which the young couple led, without friends, without society; they had been ostracised by the class to which they belonged.

Had Marie's mother, formerly a governess of middle-class origin, who had wheedled Marie's father into a marriage with her; who had fled to Sweden to escape from pressing debts; had she, the widow who so cleverly contrived to conceal her poverty, stooped to sell her daughter when they were living at Södertälje?

The old woman, a coquette still at the age of sixty, had always inspired me with mingled feelings of compassion and dislike; mean, pleasure-loving, with the manners of an adventuress, a veritable "man-eater," she regarded every man as her legitimate prey. She had made me support her sister; she had deceived her first son-in-law, the Baron, with the story of a dowry swindled out of one of her creditors.

Poor Marie! Her remorse, her unrest, her dark moods were rooted in that shady past. In putting old events by the side of new ones I had the key to the quarrels between mother and daughter, brutal quarrels, frequently verging on violence. I could understand Marie's hitherto incomprehensible words, "I could kick my mother!"

Had her game been to silence the old woman? Probably; for the latter had threatened to ruin our lives by confessing "everything."

There could have been no doubt of Marie's dislike for her mother, to whom the Baron frequently referred as "that old blackguard," an invective which he justified with the half-truth that she had taught her daughter all the tricks of coquetry to enable her to catch a husband.

All these coincidences strengthened my determination to separate from her. It had to be! There was no alternative. And I left for Copenhagen to make inquiries into the past of the woman in whose keeping I had confided my honour.

* * * * *

In meeting my countrymen after several years' absence I found that they had formed very definite opinions of me; the eager exertions of Marie and her friends had borne fruit. She was a holy martyr; I was a madman, whose lunacy consisted in believing himself to be saddled with an unfaithful wife.

Make inquiries? It was like beating my head against a stone wall. People listened to what I had to say with a furtive smile and stared at me as if I were a rare animal. No information was vouchsafed to me; I was deserted by every one, especially by those who secretly yearned for my ruin, so that they might rise over my fallen body.

I returned to my prison. Marie met me with evident misgivings; I learned more from the expression of her face than I had learned during the whole of my melancholy journey.

For two months I champed upon the bit; then I fled for the fourth time, in the height of summer, this time to Switzerland. But the chain which held me was not an iron chain which I might have been able to break; it was rather an indiarubber cable, elastic and capable of infinite expansion. The stronger the tension, the more irresistibly I was pulled back to the starting point.

Once more I returned, to be rewarded with open contempt; she was sure that another attempt to free myself from her net would kill me, and my death was her only hope.

I fell ill, severely ill, so that I believed myself to be dying; I made up my mind to write the whole story of the past. I could see plainly now that I had been in the power of a vampire. I only wanted to live long enough to cleanse my name from the filth with which she had sullied it. I wanted to live long enough to revenge myself; but first of all I must have proofs of her infidelity.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it is the anthithesis of love. I hated her because I loved her.

It was on a Sunday, while we were dining in the summer-arbour, that the electric fluid which had gathered during the last ten years discharged itself. I cannot remember my actual motive, but I struck her, for the first time in my life. I struck her face repeatedly, and when she tried to defend herself I seized her wrists and forced her on her knees. She gave a terrified scream. The temporary satisfaction which I had felt at my action gave way to dismay, for the children, frightened to death, cried out with fear. It was a horrible moment! It is a crime, a most unnatural crime, to strike a woman, a mother, in the presence of her children. It seemed to me that the sun ought to hide his face.... I felt sick to death.

And yet there was peace in my soul, like the calm after a storm, a satisfaction such as is only derived from duty done. I regretted my action, but I felt no remorse. My deed had been as inevitable as cause and effect.

In the evening I saw her walking in the moonlit garden. I joined her; I kissed her. She did not object; she burst into tears. We walked for a few minutes, then she accompanied me to my room and stayed with me until midnight.

How strange is life! In the afternoon I had struck her. At night she held me in her arms and kissed me.

What an extraordinary woman she was, to kiss her executioner with willing lips!

Why had I not known it before? If I had struck her ten years ago I should now have been the happiest of husbands.

Remember this, my brothers, if ever you are deceived by a woman!

But she had no intention of foregoing her revenge. A few days after this incident she came into my room, began telling me a long, rambling story, and after endless digressions gave me to understand that she had once, only once, been violated; it had happened, she said, while on her theatrical tour in Finland.

It was true, then!

She implored me not to think that it had happened more than once; not to suspect her of having had a lover. That meant several times, several lovers.

"Then it is true that you have deceived me, and in order to deceive the world, too, you have invented the myth of my insanity. To hide your crime more completely you meant to torture me to death. You are a criminal. I have no longer any doubt of it. I shall divorce you!"

She threw herself on her knees, weeping bitterly, and asking me to forgive her.

"I'll forgive you; nevertheless our marriage must be annulled."

* * * * *

On the following day she was very quiet; on the second day she had regained her former self-possession; on the third she behaved in every respect like an innocent woman.

Since she had confessed herself, she was more than innocent; she was a martyr who treated me with insulting condescension.

She did not realise the consequences of a crime such as she had committed, and therefore she did not understand my dilemma. If I continued to live with her, I became a public laughing-stock; on the other hand, to leave her spelled disaster also; my life was ruined.

Ten years of martyrdom to be paid for with a few blows and a day of tears. Was it fair?

For the last time I left my home, secretly, for I had not the heart to say good-bye to the children.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon I went on board a steamer bound for Constance. I had decided to visit my friends in France, and there to write the story of this woman, the true representative of the age of the unsexed.

At the last moment Marie appeared on the landing-stage, tear-stained, excited, feverish, yet pretty enough to turn the head of any man. But I remained cold, callous, silent, and received her treacherous kiss without returning it.

"Say at least that we are parting friends!"

"Enemies for the short time which remains for me on earth!"

We parted.

The steamer started. I watched her walking along the quay, trying to draw me back with the magic of her eyes which had held me under their spell for so many years. She came and went like a forsaken little dog. I waited for the moment when she would jump into the water; I should jump after her, and we should drown together. But she turned away and disappeared in a little side-street, leaving me with a last impression of her bewitching figure, her little feet, which I had allowed to trample on me for ten years without a murmur. Only in my writings perhaps I had occasionally given vent to my feelings, but even there I had always tried to mislead the reader by concealing her real crimes.

To steel my heart against grief and regret, I went at once into the saloon. I sat down to dinner, but an aching lump in my throat compelled me to rise, and I climbed again on deck.

I watched the green hill gliding past, and thought of the little white cottage with the green shutters which crowned it. My children lived there, but the home was desolate, they were without protection, without means.... An icy pang shot through my heart.

I was like the cocoon of the silkworm when the great steam-engine; slowly reels off the shining thread. At every stroke of the piston I grew thinner, and as the thread lengthened the cold which chilled me increased.

I was like an embryo prematurely detached from the umbilical cord. What a complete and living organism is the family! I had thought so at that first divorce, from which I had recoiled conscience-stricken. But she, the adulteress, the murderess, had remained unmoved.

At Constance I caught the train for Basle. What a wretched Sunday afternoon!

I prayed to God, if God there was, to preserve even my bitterest foes from such agony.

At Basle I was overwhelmed with an irresistible desire to revisit all those places in Switzerland where we had stayed together, to gladden my sad heart with memories of happy hours spent with her and the children.

I stayed for a week in Geneva and some days at Ouchy, hunted by my misery from hotel to hotel, without peace or rest, like a lost soul, like the wandering Jew. I spent my nights in tears, haunted by the little figures of my beloved children; I visited the places they had visited; I fed "their" seagulls on the Lake of Geneva, a poor, restless ghost, a miserable phantom.

Every morning I expected a letter from Marie, but no letter came. She was too clever to furnish her opponent with written evidence. I wrote to her several times a day, love-letters, forgiving her for all her crimes--but I never posted them.

Doubtless, my judges, if I had been destined to end my days in a lunatic asylum, my fate would have come upon me in those hours of keenest agony and bitterest sorrow.

My power of endurance was exhausted; I wondered whether Marie's confession had not been a ruse, so as to get rid of me and begin life all over again with her unknown lover, or, perhaps, to live with her Danish friend. I saw my children in the hands of a "stepfather" or the clutches of a "stepmother"; Marie would be quite rich with the proceeds of my collected works; she would perhaps write the story of my life as seen through the eyes of the unnatural woman who had come between us. The instinct of self-preservation stirred within me; I conceived a cunning plan. The separation from my family paralysed me mentally; I decided to return to them and stay with them until I had written the story of Marie's crimes. In this way she would become the unconscious tool of my revenge, which I could throw away when I had no further use for it.

With this object in view I sent her a telegram, business-like, free from all sentimentality; I informed her that my petition for a divorce had been refused; pretended that I required a power of attorney from her, and suggested an interview at Romanshorn, on this side of the Lake of Constance.

* * * * *

I despatched the telegram with a sense of relief. On the following day I took the train and in due time arrived at the appointed place. The week of suffering was a thing of the past; my heart was beating normally, my eyes shone with added lustre; I drew a deep breath at the sight of the hills on the opposite shore, where my children lived. The steamer approached the landing stage; my eyes searched for Marie.

Presently I caught sight of her on the deck, her face woe-begone, ten years older. The sight of her, suddenly grown old, wrung my heart. She walked with dragging footsteps, her eyelids were red with weeping, her cheeks hollow and drooping.

At that moment all feeling of hatred and disgust was swamped by pity. I felt a strong temptation to take her into my arms, but I pulled myself together, drew myself up and assumed the devil-may-care expression of a young blood who had come to a tryst. When I looked at her more closely I discovered in her a strange resemblance to her Danish friend; the likeness was really extraordinary; she had the same expression, the same pose, the same gestures, the same way of wearing her hair. Had she played me this last trick? Had she come to me straight from her "friend"?

Warned by these details, I recapitulated the part I meant to play. While I accompanied her to the hotel she was depressed and ill at ease, but she kept her self-possession. She questioned me very intelligently on the projected divorce proceedings, and when she found that I exhibited no trace of grief or emotion, she dropped her woe-begone aspect and began to treat me, as far as she dared, with a certain condescension.

During the interview she reminded me so much of her friend that I was tempted to ask for news of the lady. I was especially struck by a very tragic pose, a favourite one of her friend's, a pose which was accompanied by a certain gesture of the hand which rested on the table ... ugh!

I rang for wine. She drank greedily and became sentimental.

I took the opportunity to ask after the little ones. She burst into tears; she said that she had suffered greatly during the past week; from morning till night the children had worried her with questions about their father; she did not see how they could get on without me.

All at once she noticed the absence of my wedding-ring; she became agitated.

"Your wedding-ring?" she gasped breathlessly.

"I sold it in Geneva. There's no need to ask what I did with the money."

She grew pale.

"Then we are quits. Shall we make a fresh start?"

"Is that what you call fair play? You committed an act fraught with tragic consequences for the whole family, for through it I am compelled to doubt the legitimacy of my children. You are guilty of having tampered with the lineage of a family. You have dishonoured four people: your three children of doubtful paternity and your husband, whom your infidelity has made a public laughing-stock. What, on the other hand, are the consequences of my act?"

She wept. I remained firm. I said that the divorce proceedings must go on, that I should adopt the children--in the meantime she could remain in my house, if she liked. Would it not be the free life she had always been dreaming of? She had always cursed matrimony.

She reflected for a moment. My proposal did not please her.

"I remember you saying you would like the position of a governess in the house of a widower. Here's the widower for you!"

"Give me time.... We shall see.... But in the meantime do you intend to live with us?"

"If you ask me to."

"We are waiting for you."

And for the sixth time I returned to my family, but this time firmly resolved to use the remaining weeks to finish my story....

EPILOGUE

Seated at my writing-table, pen in hand, I fainted; a feverish attack prostrated me. This very inopportune attack frightened me, for I had not been seriously ill for fifteen years. It was not fear of death, oh no. Death held no terrors for me; but I was thirty-nine years old and at the end of a turbulent career, my last word still unsaid, the promises of my youth only partly fulfilled, pregnant with plans for the future. This sudden cutting of the knot was far from pleasing me. For the last four years I had lived with my family in half-voluntary exile; I was at the end of my resources, and had settled down in a small town in Bavaria; I had come into conflict with the law, for one of my books had been confiscated, and I had been banished from my own country. I had but one desire left when I was thrown on my sick-bed--the desire for revenge.

A struggle arose within me; I had not sufficient strength left in me to call for help. The fever shook me as one shakes a feather bed; it seized me by the throat and throttled me; it put its foot on my breast and scorched my brain, so that my eyes started from their sockets. I was alone with Death, who had crept in by stealth and was attacking me.

But I was unwilling to die; I resisted, and an obstinate fight began. The tension of my nerves relaxed, the blood coursed through my veins. My brain twitched like a polypus that has been thrown into vinegar. But before loner I realised that I must succumb in this dance of death. I relinquished my hold, fell backwards and submitted to the fatal embrace of the dread monster.

Immediately an indescribable calm came over me, a voluptuous weakness composed my limbs, and perfect peace soothed body and soul, which had lacked all wholesome recreation during so many years of toil.

I fervently desired that it really should be the end. Slowly all will to live ebbed away. I ceased to observe, to feel, to think. I became unconscious, and a delicious sensation of blankness filled the void created by the cessation of the racking pain, the tormenting thoughts, the secret terrors.

When I regained consciousness I found my wife sitting by my bedside and gazing at me with terrified eyes.

"What is the matter with you dear?" she said.

"Nothing; I am ill," I replied. "And there are times when illness is welcome."

"What do you mean? You are jesting!"

"No, it is the end at last ... anyhow, I hope it is."

"Heaven forbid that you should leave us in these straits!" she exclaimed. "What is to become of us in a strange country, without friends, without means?"

"There is my life insurance," I said, attempting to console her. "I know it isn't much, but it is enough to take you home."

She had not thought of this, and she looked a little reassured as she continued--

"But you cannot lie here like this! I shall send for a doctor."

"No, I won't have a doctor!"

"Why not?"

"Because--I won't!"

The glances which we exchanged spoke volumes.

"I want to die," I said, anxious to put an end to our conversation. "I am sick of life; the past is a tangled skein which I cannot unravel. It is time that my eyes closed for ever--that the curtain fell!"

She remained unmoved.

"Your old suspicion ... is it still alive, then?" she asked.

"Yes, still alive. Drive away the spectre, you alone can do it."

She assumed her favourite part of little mother, and gently laid her soft hand on my burning forehead.

"Does that relieve you?"

"Yes...."

It was a fact. The mere touch of that light hand which rested so heavily on my life exorcised the evil spirit, the secret trouble which would not let me rest.

Another and more violent attack of fever followed. My wife rose to make me some elder tea.

Left by myself I sat up in bed and looked out through the window opposite. It was a large window in the shape of a triptychon, framed by wild vine; I saw a part of the landscape surrounded by green leaves; in the fore-ground the beautiful scarlet fruit of a quince tree rocked gently among the dark green foliage; apple trees, a little further off, studded the green grass; still further away the steeple of a small church rose into the radiant air, behind it a blue spot, the Lake of Constance, was visible, and far in the background the Tyrol Alps.

We were in the height of summer, and, illuminated by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, the whole scene formed a charming picture.

From below rose the twittering of the starlings which sat on the vine-props in the vineyards, the chirping of the young chickens, the strident note of the crickets, the tinkling cowbells, clear as crystal. The loud laughter of my children, the directing voice of my wife, who was talking to the gardener's wife about my illness, mingled with these gay sounds of country life.

And as I gazed and listened life seemed good to me, death to be shunned. I had too many duties to perform, too many debts to pay. My conscience tortured me, I felt an overpowering need to confess myself, to ask all men's forgiveness for the wrongs I had committed, to humiliate myself before some one. I felt guilty, stricken with remorse, I did not know for what secret crime; I was burning with the desire to relieve my conscience by a full confession of my fancied culpability.

During this attack of weakness, the result of a sort of innate despondency, my wife returned carrying a cup in her hand; alluding to a slight attack of persecutional mania from which I had once suffered, she tasted the contents before offering it to me.

"You may drink without fear," she said smilingly, "it contains no poison."

I felt ashamed. I did not know what to say. And to make amends for my suspicion I emptied the cup at one draught.

The somniferous elder tea, the fragrance of which recalled in me reminiscences of my own country where the mystic shrub is held sacred by the people, made me feel so sentimental that I there and then gave expression to my remorse.

"Listen to me carefully," I said, "for I believe that my days are numbered. I confess that I have always lived a life of utter selfishness. I have sacrificed your theatrical career to my literary ambition.... I will tell you everything now ... only forgive me...."

She tried to calm me, but I interrupted her and continued--

"In compliance with your wishes we married under the dotal system. In spite of it, however, I have wasted your dowry to cover sums which I had recklessly guaranteed. My greatest grief now is the fact that you cannot touch the proceeds of my works. Send for a notary at once, so that I can settle on you all my nominal or real property. ... Above everything, promise that you will return to the stage which you gave up to please me."

She refused to listen any further, treated my confession as a joke, advised me to go to sleep and rest, and assured me that everything would come right, and that I was not on the point of death.

I seized her hand, exhausted. I begged her to stay with me until I had fallen asleep. Grasping her little hand more firmly, I again implored her to forgive me for all the wrong I had done her. A delicious drowsiness stole over me and closed my tired eyelids. Under the radiations of her shining eyes, which expressed infinite tenderness, I felt as if I were melting away as ice melts in the rays of the sun. Her cool lips, touching my forehead, seemed to press a seal on it, and I was plunged into the depths of ineffable bliss.

* * * * *

It was broad daylight when I awoke from my stupor. The rays of the sun fell on a Utopian landscape. To judge from the matutinal sounds which rose from below, it must have been above five o'clock. I had slept soundly during the whole night without dreaming or waking up. On the little table by my bedside stood the cup which had contained the elder-tea; the chair on which my wife had been sitting when I fell asleep was still in its place. I was covered with her cloak; the soft hairs of the fox skins with which it was lined tickled my chin.

My brain felt as refreshed and rested as if I had slept for the first time in ten years. I collected my thoughts, which had been rushing hither and thither in wild disorder, and with this powerful, well-drilled and disciplined army I prepared to meet those attacks of morbid remorse which frequently accompany physical weakness.

Looming large, filling my mind completely, were the two ugly blots which, under guise of a confession, I had revealed to my wife on the previous day; the two dark blots which had spoiled my life for so many years.

I resolved to re-examine them at once, to dissect those two "facts" which up to now I had allowed to pass unchallenged, for I had a vague presentiment that they were unsound.

"Let me see," I said to myself, "what have I done that I should look upon myself as a selfish coward, who has sacrificed the artistic career of his wife to his ambition? Let me see what really happened...."

At the time of our betrothal she was playing very small parts. Her position in the artistic world had sunk to a very modest one, once her want of talent, character and originality had made her second appearance in public a fiasco. She lacked all the essentials which go to make a successful actress. On the day before our wedding she was playing the part of a society woman in a very commonplace play; she had only a dozen words to speak.

For how many tears, how much misery was our marriage made responsible! It robbed the actress of all charm, and yet she had been so fascinating as Baroness, divorced from her husband that she might devote her life entirely to art.

It was true, I was to blame for this deterioration, which, after two years' weeping over steadily shrinking parts, resulted in her leaving the stage.

At the very moment when her engagement came to an end I had a success, an undoubted success, as a novelist. I had already conquered the stage with small, unimportant plays. Now I was burning to write a play which would create a sensation; it should be one of those spectacular plays which delight audiences; my purpose, of course, was to help my wife to a re-engagement. It was a repugnant task, for one of my most cherished dreams was the reform of the drama. In writing my new play I sacrificed my literary faith. But I meant to force my wife on a hostile public, throw her at their heads with all the means in my power, move heaven and earth to make her popular. All my efforts were in vain. The public would have none of the divorced wife who had married a second time; the manager hastened to cancel a contract which brought him no advantage.

"Well, was that my fault?" I asked myself, voluptuously stretching my limbs, well satisfied with the result of this first self-examination. Was there a greater blessing than a good conscience?

With a lighter heart I continued my musing--

A miserable year passed, was wept away, despite the happiness it brought us in the birth of a little girl.

And all of a sudden my wife had another attack of stage mania, more violent than the previous one. We besieged the agencies, stormed the managerial offices, advertised ourselves hugely--but everywhere we failed, all doors were closed to us, everybody threw cold water on our schemes.

Disillusioned by the failure of my drama, and on the point of making a name in science, I had sworn never again to write a play round an actress, more especially as this sort of work had no attraction for me. In addition, I was little disposed to break up our home merely to satisfy a passing whim of my wife's, and therefore I resigned myself to bearing my share of the incurable sorrow.

But after a time I found the task beyond my strength. I made use of my connections with a theatre in Finland, and, thanks to my efforts, my wife was engaged for a number of performances.

I had made a rod for my own back. For a whole month I was widower, bachelor, head of the family, housekeeper. In compensation my wife, on her return, brought home with her two large packing-cases full of wreaths and bouquets.

But she was so happy, so young and so charming, that I took at once the necessary steps to secure a fresh engagement for her. I knew that by doing this I was running the risk of having to leave my country, my friends, my position, my publisher--and for what? For a woman's whim.... But let that pass! Either a man is in love or he isn't....

Fortunately for me, my correspondent had no room in his company for an actress without a repertoire.

Was that my fault? At the thought of it I literally rolled over in my bed with pleasure. What a good thing an occasional little self-examination is! It unburdens the heart ... it rejuvenated me.

But to proceed. Children were born to us at short intervals. One--two--three. But again and again her yearning for the stage returned. One ought to persevere! A new theatre was being opened. Why not offer the manager a new play with a good part for the leading actress, a sensational play, dealing with the "woman question" which loomed so large at the time?

No sooner thought than done. For, as I have already said, either a man is in love, or he isn't.

The play was produced. It contained a splendid part for the leading actress, magnificent dresses (of course), a cradle, much moonshine, a villain; an abject husband in love with his wife (myself), a wife about to become a mother (a stage novelty), the interior of a convent--and so on.

The actress had an extraordinary success, but from the literary point of view the play was a failure, an awful failure ... alas!

She was saved. I was lost, ruined. But in spite of everything, in spite of the supper which we gave to the manager at a hundred crowns per head; in spite of a fine of fifty crowns which we had to pay for illegal cheering, late at night before the agent's office--in spite of all our efforts, no engagement was offered to her. It was not my fault. I was blameless in the matter. I was the martyr, the victim. Nevertheless, in the eyes of her sex I henceforth was a ruffian who had ruined his wife's career. For years I had suffered remorse on this account, remorse so bitter that it poisoned my days and robbed my nights of peace.

How often had the reproach been publicly flung into my face! It was always I who was guilty!... That things came about in quite a different way, who cared? ... One career had been ruined, that I admit ... but which, and by whom?

A horrible thought came into my mind; the idea that posterity might blame me for this ruined career seemed to me no laughing matter, for I was defenceless and without a friend capable of stating the facts undisguised and unmisrepresented.

* * * * *

There remained the spending of her dowry.

I had once been made the subject of a paragraph entitled: "A squanderer of his wife's fortune." I also, on another occasion, had been charged with living on my wife's income, a charge which had made me put six cartridges into my revolver.

Let us examine this charge also, since an investigation has become desirable, and after due examination let us pronounce sentence.

My wife's dowry consisted of ten thousand crowns in doubtful shares; I had raised a mortgage on these shares with a bank of mortgages, amounting to fifty per cent of their face value. Like a bolt from the blue the general smash came. The shares were so much waste-paper, for we had omitted to sell them at the right moment. I was consequently compelled to pay the full amount of my mortgage: fifty per cent of the face value. Later on my wife received twenty-five per cent of her claim, this being the proportion which the creditors received after the bank's failure.

How much did I squander?

Not one penny, in my opinion. The holder of the shares received the actual value of her unsaleable investments which my personal guarantee had increased by twenty-five per cent.

Truly I was as innocent in this connection as in the other.

And the anguish, the despair which had more than once driven me to the verge of suicide! The suspicion, the old distrust, the cruel doubts, began to torture me afresh. The thought that I nearly died as a scoundrel almost drove me mad. Worn out with care, overwhelmed with work, I had never had time to pay much attention to the dark innuendoes, the veiled allusions. And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, slanderous rumours had been started, which became more and more insistent and definite, although they had no other foundation than the talk of the envious and the idle gossip of the cafés. And I, fool that I was, believed everybody, doubted no one but myself. Ah!...

Was I really never insane, never ill, no degenerate? Was I merely fooled by a trickster whom I worshipped, whose little embroidery scissors had cut off Samson's locks when he laid his weary head on the pillow, worn out by heavy toil, exhausted by care and anxiety on her account and the children's? Trustful, unsuspicious, I had lost my honour, my manhood, the will to live, my intellect, my five senses, and alas! much more even, in this ten years' sleep in the arms of the sorceress.

Was it possible--the thought filled me with shame--that a crime had been committed in these fogs in which I had lived for years like a phantom? An unconscious little crime, caused by a vague desire for power, by a woman's secret wish to get the better of the man in the duel called matrimony?

Doubtless I had been a fool! Seduced by a married woman; compelled to marry her to save her honour and her theatrical career; married under the dotal system and the condition that each should contribute half of the expenses, I was ruined after ten years, plundered, for I had borne the financial burden on my own shoulders entirely.

At this very moment when my wife denounced me as a spendthrift, incapable of providing the necessities of life; when she represented me as the squanderer of her so-called fortune; at this very moment she owed me forty thousand crowns, her share of the expenses, according to the verbal agreement made on our wedding day.

She was my debtor!

Determined to settle all accounts once and for ever, I jumped out of bed like a man who has dreamed that he is paralysed, and on awakening flings away the crutches with which he had walked in his dream. I dressed quickly and ran down-stairs to confront my wife.

Through the half-open door my enraptured gaze met a charming spectacle.

She lay, stretched out at full length, on her tumbled bed, her lovely little head buried in the pillow over which the flood of her golden hair waved and curled; her transparent nightgown had slipped off her shoulders, and her virginal bosom gleamed white under the lace insertion; the soft, red-and-white striped coverlet betrayed the swelling curves of her graceful, fragile body, leaving her bare feet uncovered--tiny arched feet with rosy toes and transparent flawless nails--a genuine work of art, perfect, fashioned in flesh after the model of an antique marble statue: and this was my wife.

Light-hearted and smiling, with an expression of chaste motherliness, she watched her three little ones as they were climbing and tumbling about among the flowered down pillows, as if on a heap of newly mown flowers.

The delightful spectacle softened me. But a whispering doubt in my heart warned me: "Beware of the she-panther playing with her cubs!"

Disarmed by the majesty of motherhood, I entered her room with uncertain steps, timid as a schoolboy.

"Ah! You are up already, my dear," she greeted me, surprised, but not as pleased as one might have expected.

I stammered a confused reply, smothered by the children, who had climbed on my back when I stooped to kiss their mother.

Was it possible? Could she really be a criminal? I pondered the question as I went away, subdued by her chaste beauty, the candid smile of those lips which could surely never have been tainted by a lie. No, a thousand times no!...

I stole away, convinced of the contrary.

And yet doubt remained, doubt of everything: of my wife's constancy, my children's legitimate birth, my sanity; doubt which persecuted me, relentlessly and unremittingly.

It was time to make an end, to arrest the flood of sterile thoughts. If only I could have absolute certainty! A crime had been committed in secret, or else I was mad! I must know the truth!

To be a deceived husband! What did I care, as long as I knew it! I should be the first to laugh at it. Was there a single man in the world who could be absolutely certain that he was his wife's only lover?...

When I thought of the friends of my youth, now married, I could not pick out one who was not, to some extent, hoodwinked. Lucky men whom no doubts tortured! It was silly to be small-minded. Whether one is the only one, or whether one has a rival, what does it matter? The ridicule lies in the fact of not knowing it; the main thing is to know all about it.

Yet if a man were married for a hundred years he would still know nothing of the true nature of his wife. However deep his knowledge of humanity, of the whole cosmos, he would never fathom the woman whose life is bound up with his own life. For this reason the story of poor Monsieur Bovary is such pleasant reading for all happy husbands....

But as far as I was concerned I wanted the truth. I must have it. For the sake of revenge? What folly! Revenge on whom? On my favoured rivals? They did but make use of their prerogative as males! On my wife? Did I not say one ought not to be small-minded? And to hurt the mother of my darlings? How could I do it?

But I wanted to know; I wanted to know everything. I determined to examine my life, carefully, tactfully, scientifically; to make use of all the resources of psychology: suggestion, thought-reading, mental torture--none should be neglected; I determined to probe the deepest depths, not even despising the well-worn, old-fashioned means of burglary, theft, interception of letters, forged signatures....

I determined to make the most searching investigations.... Was that monomania, the paroxysm of rage of a lunatic? It is not for me to say.

I appeal to the reader for a verdict after a careful study of my confession. Perhaps he will find in it elements of the physiology of love, some light on the pathology of the soul, or even a strange fragment of the philosophy of crime.

_September_ 1887--_March_ 1888.

* * * * *

CONCLUDING REMARKS OF THE AUTHOR

This is a terrible book, I fully admit it, and I regret that I ever wrote it.

How did I come to write it?

I had to wash my corpse before it was laid in its coffin.

Four years ago, if I remember rightly, a friend of mine, a writer, a declared enemy of the indiscretions--of others--said to me one day when talking about my first marriage--

"Do you know, it would make excellent copy for the sort of novel which I should like to write."

Certain of my friend's applause, I decided there and then to write it myself.

"Don't be angry with me, dear old fellow, that I, as the original owner, make use of my property."

I also remember, it is twelve years ago now, a remark my future mother-in-law made to me one evening when I was watching her daughter carrying on a flirtation with a group of young men--

"Wouldn't she make a splendid heroine for a novel?"

"With what title?"

"A passionate woman!"

Happy mother, who died in the nick of time, I have carried out your suggestion. The novel has been written. I can die in peace.

MS. 1888.

The other day I met again the hero of this novel. I upbraided him for having induced me to publish the story of his first marriage. He is married again, father of a sweet little girl, and looks ten years younger.

"Dear old boy," he said in reply to my reproaches, "the sympathy which everybody felt for the heroine of the novel, when it was first published, absolves me. You! may gauge from this fact the great depth of the love I bore her, for not only did it survive so much brutality, but it communicated itself even to the reader. This, however, has not prevented a French academician from denouncing my constancy as weakness, my steadfast loyalty to my family, including my children, baseness, in view of my wife's brutality, inconstancy and dishonesty. I wonder whether this man would consider an insignificant Caserio superior to an eminent Carnot, simply because the former stabbed the latter?

"Moreover, this book, which you had wanted to write yourself, is only the woof of a fabric the richness of which is known only to those of my countrymen who have followed my literary career as it unfolded itself side by side with the sorrows of my heart, without suffering to be influenced. I could have left the battlefield. I remained steadfastly at my post. I fought against the enemy at home, day and night. Was this not courage?

"The 'poor, defenceless woman' was backed by the four Scandinavian kingdoms, where she counted nothing but allies in her war against a man who was sick, solitary, poor, and threatened with confinement in a lunatic asylum because his intellect rebelled against the deification of woman, this penultimate superstition of the free-thinkers.

"The dear souls who conceal their revengeful thoughts under the term 'divine justice' have condemned my 'Confession' in the name of their Nemesis divina, bringing spurious evidence for their assertion that I had deceived the husband of Marie's first marriage. Let them read the scene where the Baron throws his wife into my arms, when I stood before him with clean hands and confessed to him my guiltless love for the wife he neglected. Let them remember the important fact that I took upon my young shoulders the whole burden of our fault, to save his position in the army and the future of his little girl. Let them then say whether it is just to punish an act of self-sacrifice by an act of brutal revenge.

"One must be young and foolish to act as I have acted, I admit that. But it will not happen again--never again.... But ... enough of it! And then ... no ... good-bye!"

He walked away quickly, leaving me under the spell of his perfect honesty.

I never again regretted having published the story of this idealist, who has now disappeared from literature and the world. But I abandoned my former intention to write "The Confession of a Foolish Woman," because, after all, it goes too much against common-sense to allow a criminal to give evidence against her victim.

French Original Edition, 1894.

It was the outspoken account of his first marriage, written in self-defence and as a last testament, for he intended to take his life as soon as the book was finished. For five years the sealed manuscript, which was not meant for publication, was in the safe keeping of a relative. Only in the spring of 1893, under the pressure of circumstances and after public opinion and the press had attacked him in the most unjust manner, did he sell the book to a publisher.

"Separated," 1902.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Confession of a Fool, by August Strindberg