No, no.—I am going to call on Wiazewski, who has of late been quite
neglectful.
I started by complaining of things in general, and with but little of
personal feeling. He has hitherto known nothing about my relations with
Witold. And I am also ashamed of this love, in which I have been playing
so ludicrous a part.
“... And to think of the years, the golden years of youth, gliding,
gliding, gliding by, beautiful, but empty as some marble bath of ancient
days!...”
“But I told you once that men of modern times do not care to bathe in
those waters. They are too clear, too cold; they run with too swift a
stream, and with too many, oh! far too many an eddy and deep hollow.
Janka, they fail to _attract_.”
“Let me say, Stephen, that I am unhappy, and therefore come to you. You,
as a friend, have some responsibilities toward me; you can’t get out of
them. All that I am is going to pieces at this time; and I do not know
whether life or death will come of the change which is taking place.”
I had never yet yearned for Witold as at that moment, though I knew
perfectly well that no one had done me the wrong which he had done.
“What about Helen?” I asked, with friendly interest.
“There again! I have been disappointed in her.”
“What, she! Unfaithful to you? Can that be?”
“Ah, no! I, rather than she, have been at fault in that respect.”
“Well then?”
“Well, what shall I say? I have broken with her.”
Forsaken! She too had then come to swell the list, after Martha, Gina,
and myself!
“That’s horrible. She was so very much in love with you.”
“Whereas I, alas! have a preference for women who care for nothing very
much.”
“Yet I know you have been moody of late.”
“And you are right: yes, I have.”
“Well, what was it that troubled your Olympian calm? The parting
scene—tears—upbraiding?”
“_Pas le moins du monte._ She went away without uttering a word.”
“Then what was it?”
“That I have simply lost my belief in the last dogma left to me from
childhood. Everybody complains that women are too devoid of heart and
brains and soul; and I now find that it is in vain I have sought for a
woman bereft of those superfluous appendages.”
“But Helen, as I understood, answered your ideal of a woman to
perfection?”
“I fondly thought she did. Oh, you cannot imagine what I would give to
meet a woman really soulless, primitive: you know,—a creature absolutely
and bewilderingly unenlightened.”
“Really, I quite dislike you to-day, Stephen. You are positively in bad
form!”
“Please forgive me.”
“What special mark of her culture has Helen given you?”
“Culture? That would have been by far too bad. Besides, it was something
perhaps even worse: a mark of character, firm conviction.”
“Up to now,” he continued, “I had been quite satisfied with the girl;
so, a few days ago, I proposed that she should give up her employment
and come to live with me. Would you believe it? I met with a point-blank
refusal. You fancy, perhaps, it was marriage she wanted, or something of
that kind; and, word of honour! If she had, I would have taken her
willingly.... Not at all. She told me sententiously that ‘although she
recognized free love, she never would be a kept woman!’ What do you
think of that, eh? Ha, ha! It’s something astounding, isn’t it?”
But I could not laugh. I sat silent, thinking of many things, far more
pained than amused.
Stephen continued: “A girl with such splendidly expressionless eyes of a
bright azure, like a piece of water! No shadow of any yearning for the
Beyond, no shadow of anything like intellect or brightness of
thought!... By day they reflected the sun, her lamp in the evening, and
my own eyes at night. They had the beautiful dead gleam of pearls. She
might have been less pretty: with such eyes, she was pretty enough for
me. And then, that slow, sleepy, brainless voluptuousness in her glance!
And her white flashing teeth, too! I tell you, there is not a single
spot or flaw in any one of them; her molars are like the molars of a
ruminant, large and flat. She did, it is true, write me letters without
necessity; but, through my influence and under my direction, she had
come even to forget her alphabet. She truly gave me the impression
(false as I know now) that she never thought at all.
“And that girl ‘recognizes free love’! Such a surprise may well make one
throw all the beliefs of one’s life on the dustheap!”
All this talk of his seemed to me decidedly shallow and foolish. Why on
earth was he trying, by means of that far-fetched theory of his, to
justify the fact that the woman simply bored him?
He has now made up his mind to seek for his future Dulcineas amongst
kitchen-maids.
“Dressmakers have decidedly too much culture for my taste,” he said.
“I sincerely hope you may be successful,” was my parting wish.
Witold, contrary to my expectations, has not yet called again. There is
something going on that is beyond me, incomprehensible.