“Why on earth does he tell you about such things? He must be a monster.”
“There are a great many things that he never can understand—what I told
you seems but the merest trifle to him.”
She took a spoonful of bromide, and continued:
“You must know that he tells me she has large oval-shaped eyes, with
extremely long lashes—eyes of an unfathomable black, in very striking
contrast with her voluptuous mouth; always sorrowful, dreamy, and with a
far-away look, like the beggar-maid loved by King Cophetua. She has also
much originality, something like an odalisque, and uniting the
primitiveness of a mountain goat with all the cultured grace of a maid
of honour at a royal court.”
This, after the elimination of certain exaggerated points, was easily
recognizable as the description of that fair Frenchwoman whom I had seen
at Lipka’s. And now I understood why Imszanski had shown himself so very
full of courtesy toward Czolhanski. The latter, as a theatrical critic,
may be useful to him.
“She dresses, it appears, most superbly, with all the magnificence of
Babylonian times: golden combs and strings of pearls in her hair; in her
ears, rings of the greatest price. Moreover, she is a very miracle of
depravity. Witold smiled as he told me so, with an inward look, as
though recalling some particular.
“As he told me so, he smiled; and I too smiled, listening with the
blandest interest. He looked at me attentively, kissed my hand, and
said:
“‘Your nerves are better now, I see. How glad I am! You have no idea.
You have at last realized that to feel jealous of a _cocotte_ would be
unworthy of you.’
“‘Why, of course. Yes, yes; I am all right now.’ And yet, Janka, I never
felt it so deeply; I never saw things with such awful clearness of
vision. And alas! I never, never yet loved Witold with such passionate
love.
“But, more than him, I love that pain which I feel....”
She rose in bed, as if to repel something that was weighing her down;
then she sat propped up by her cushions and pillows.
“Do you imagine that in all this I had any idea of revengeful pleasure
at Mme. Wildenhoff’s disappointment, and for that reason made him tell
me what he did? Not in the least. I wanted to drink my fill of pain; as
in Spain they wave a red flag in bull-fights before the bloodshot eyes
of the poor brute, to make him yet madder with rage and despair, so I
wished to excite myself to the same delirious state.
“I do not wish for anything that can diminish the intensity of my
anguish, I hate whatever could mitigate or deaden it. I love to gloat
over the raw bleeding wounds, bare and unbandaged....”
At that moment, the nurse tapped at the door, to ask whether Orcio might
not come in to bid his mother good morning.
“No—no! shut the door! I will have no one here! Janka, you have not the
least idea how I _hate_ my son.”
At Lipka’s to-night: and this time in a private room. Mme. Wildenhoff
talked at great length, somewhat to the following effect:
“There is in reality only one kind of perfect love—that of the brute
creation; indeliberate, irreflective love, wherein victory is to the
strongest and most beautiful; the pure reproductive instinct, unalloyed
by any culture or mental analysis whatsoever. But we—we, who are
civilized—unfortunately look down upon this sort of love. For we have
reckoned, with quasi-mathematical exactitude, how much of love should be
taken, and how much rejected, in order to get the greatest possible sum
of quintessential delight. And thence has sprung quite a new type of
love: instinct which has emancipated itself from obedience to the laws
of nature—love with its chief motive, preservation of the species,
eliminated. Now love of the kind I have spoken of generally receives the
epithet of bestial; whereas on the contrary it is most specially the
outcome of refinement.”
“It appears among nations at the epoch of their highest development, and
is the harbinger of their speedy decline,” remarked Czolhanski, with
solemn dignity.
“What does it matter? _Après nous le déluge!_”
“And to what class would you assign conjugal love?” asked Owinski. Gina,
who had silently disposed her lithe, snake-like, supple figure on a
little sofa, looked round with astonishment at her _fiancé_.
“Oh, we may call it love of a third type,” answered Madame Wildenhoff:
“love sanctioned by law, the union of two souls in friendship, and the
bringing forth of rachitic offspring: an abnormal combination of brute
and human love.”
“Do you then, Madame,” urged Owinski, “perceive no good points in
marriage?”
“None whatever,” she replied with a bland smile, “because—and this
reason alone would suffice me—because I hate marriage with all my heart.
It has been and is the aim of my life to blast marriage, whenever I can
succeed in doing so. Between the happiest and most moral couples—those
in which one of the two, the husband or the wife, leads a profligate
life, and the other knows nothing of it—I bring the dissolving element,
enlightenment, and rejoice when I see the couples fall apart.”
Here she bent aside toward her husband’s chair, and said to him in an
affectionate and audible whisper:
“But we are a pattern couple, are we not?”
This time, Imszanski went home with me. I overheard Czolhanski say, on
taking leave of him: “You may rely upon me absolutely; I will manage
everything.”
It has been terribly cold, and now there is a thaw. At such times, I
love to wander up and down the avenues in the park, which then are
completely deserted.
My nostrils inhale that peculiar scent of bare moist earth, and the
effluvium from the buds as yet invisible; and I muse upon those
incomparable and marvellously beautiful things that have never been
realized.
On the yellow background of dry dead grass, there appeared in the
distance a young man to whom, as to myself, loneliness was no doubt
pleasant, and who enjoyed walking along the avenues oversprinkled with
last year’s fallen leaves.
He came up with me, and on passing by, looked keenly into my eyes, and
with something of astonishment.
I did not return his glance, but walked more slowly, so as to lag behind
him.
The young man stopped presently, and waited until I came up; then he
passed by me again with a protracted stare.
This manœuvre was repeated several times. Presently I was seized with an
unaccountable desire to burst into a fit of nervous laughter, which I
smothered down as best I could. At any rate, I had the full control of
my eyes, the expression of which was mere indifference and disdain.
Presently I looked him steadily in the face, to stare him out of
countenance; so that he could see my attitude to be unmistakably
hostile.
“But why,” I was thinking all the time, “why should I look upon him—this
handsome slender stripling—as my foe? He certainly does not mean to harm
me in any way; his interest is simply aroused in finding a person who
has the same taste for solitude as himself, whilst he naturally has a
friendly feeling towards a good-looking woman.”
The young fellow, at first kindly disposed, was nettled by the look of
hostility in my eyes. He came up close to me, with a flippant laugh, and
said in an ironical tone of sympathy:
“I would give anything in reason to know what sorrows of the heart have
driven you to take so very romantic a walk as this.”