When last together, Gina asked me to come over to her apartments, as she
wanted me to read something she had.
It was almost gayly that she welcomed me in. Her eyes had lost their
customary look of apathy, and shone with a strange fire.
“Owinski is going to be married this very week,” she remarked, as if
stating a fact which did not concern her. “Have you read his poems?”
“I have; Witold and I read them together.”
“One of his poems had been dedicated to me; I know, for I myself saw it
in proof—a proof that I myself corrected. And now the dedication has
been removed from the title. When he received the revised proof, he
probably crossed it off.”
She then took two closely written sheets of letter-paper out of a
drawer.
“A letter from her!” she explained.
“To you!”
“Yes. Just read it.”
It ran thus:
“I have long been wishing to write to you, Madame; and if I have not
made up my mind till now, this was neither from any want of courage on
my part, nor any misplaced sense of delicacy, which would in this case
be not only exaggerated, but groundless. It simply proceeded from the
fact that, as I think the greatest alleviation of sorrow to consist in
the possibility of hating some one on account of it, I did not like to
deprive you of the object of your hate. For I am of opinion that, as
soon as you have read this, you will not think me your enemy any more.
“If I write now, it is because I believe that, in lieu of such
consolation, I am able to afford you another; and I do so without the
knowledge of my _fiancé_, for I have my doubts whether it would be
pleasant to him or the reverse; and besides, I do not consider him as
the sole means by which we might come to understand each other.
“The evening on which we were both under the same roof has remained with
me as a painful memory. Not because I then felt at all to blame on your
account. As I had been aware from the beginning that O. was affianced, I
played no active part in the matter to attract him. Any other woman
might have been in my place, and done just the same, so far as you were
concerned. O. was at that time in want of a figure upon his life
chessboard, such as is called a formally affianced wife; so we met and
encountered each other by mere chance—a happening without logical
relevance to anything. Nor was it because I felt for you what is called
pity. My mind would never consent to abase you by venturing to entertain
such a feeling; and I think, too, that I am an object of pity not less
than yourself. No; the meeting was painful to me only for the following
reason; I myself, looking on things as an outsider, cannot help having a
fellow-feeling for all who have been worsted; so that I experienced
self-dislike. It was painful, because I was present to your mind as a
stranger, a successful rival, nothing but the _fiancée_ of your
_fiancé_, a hostile, unknown She: not a woman, drawn close to you by
your and my sense of our hard fate. It was painful to me to sit so far
apart from you, to be unable to approach you and look into your
thoughtful eyes with eyes that were not less thoughtful, and kindly too,
and talk to you about many a subject far more important than the law
which thrusts us apart: the law, known from time immemorial, that love
is not everlasting, and that it needs variety.
“To write of my friendly feeling towards you would certainly seem
somewhat paradoxical. I will therefore say no more than this; I deeply
and sincerely esteem you, as one after my own heart, as a New Woman, a
woman conscious of her own value and of her rights; I appreciate you
also for your subtlety of emotion, and your original artistic talent.
And then, besides, I have a certain debt of gratitude which is due to
you personally, and owing to the fact that O. has for several years been
pretty faithful to you; and thus the list of his transitory amours which
distress me so is considerably shorter than it would otherwise have
been. I bear you no grudge, no, not even when O. (for my delectation!)
goes back into the past, and tells me all about his former love for you.
“I trust you feel no longer any instinctive dislike or aversion for me;
do you? And now I will, in return for what you have to suffer, give you
the information that you have indeed but very little reason to envy my
lot. Like you, I am one of those unhappy beings who must needs suffer,
whatever their circumstances may be, because life is too brutally
inexorable, and we—we whose nerves are laid bare—cannot walk through
life without suffering. Then, examining the question quite objectively,
may we not unhesitatingly assert that it is preferable to endure
suffering for a positive loss, whilst we enjoy the memory of past
happiness (or at least the illusion that such happiness would have been
possible, had circumstances and environment been different), rather than
to endure it at that one period of our lives when we ought not to suffer
at all? than to experience such distress as excludes the possibility
that we may so much as dream of ever being happy? Is not misery at its
height in the very springtime of life, when the faculty of possible
enjoyment is most developed? In this indeed, the lot of our _fiancé_ is
always and invariably an enviable one. I am not happy, and I doubt
whether you have ever known happiness. A strange being he is, forever
plucking flowers and smiling in the sunshine, yet unceasingly, and often
unwittingly, marking his road through life by the pain he gives to
others, and by the tears, so vain and so unworthy of us, which he makes
us shed.
“So I am not writing to you in order that I may enjoy my honeymoon
without remorse, for—as I say once more—I do not consider that I have
done you any wrong. I only want you to know me just as I am, and not to
look upon me as a stranger or a foe. I am not given to sentiment, and do
not fear the hatred of people: on the contrary, I rather like it; but I
do not wish _you_ to hate me. What a sad thing it would be, if a poet
could succeed in separating two intelligent and agreeable women from
each other for ever!
“I kiss you, and with the warmest affection....”
“A sweet creature she is!” I remarked, and looked at Gina.
She was looking depressed, and much older. Her eyes were bedimmed, and
wandering helplessly from piece to piece of furniture, from wall to
wall.
“And she does not even feel any love for him! A cold-hearted being, made
for nothing but to chop logic! And he—for her, for her...! Ah, the cruel
wrong! Why has this come to me?”
She put her hands up to her head and sobbed aloud....
Suddenly she snatched the letter from me, and crumpled it up, and tore
it all to pieces with angry fingers.
“How I hate, oh, how I hate that woman!”
I brought her a glass of water to calm her nerves, thinking all the time
how much, in this, her unjust outburst of fury, she was preferable to
the other—the magnanimous, serene, lofty-minded New Woman.
Smilowicz, of all men in the world! was awaiting me outside the office
to-day.
Time, I thought, had for an instant run backward; and the Past, so
terribly gone and forgotten, was before me.
“What! You!” I exclaimed; “you, back from Siberia? How long have you
been here?... I had not been told——”
“The manifesto: an amnesty.... Five years. Yes, five have passed by. I
arrived last week, and have seen nobody but Obojanski. He did not even
know your address! Was that nice of you?... Oh, how greatly you have
changed!... No, I did not expect such backsliding on your part.... I
have heard many things said....”
“And what about yourself?”
I saw that his plain face, which was now adorned with a thin stubbly
beard, was much emaciated. His former careless smile was now quite gone,
and his features were darkened and bronzed like a peasant’s.
“I?” He smiled, but with his lips only, that were always drawn: once
with suffering, now with having suffered. “I? You never would guess. I
married down there; yes, I married a fellow-exile. And we have a son.”
“But what of your health? And what are you going to do in Warsaw?”
“Something or other.” He raised his hand, palm down, then let it drop
limply. “At present I am more or less amongst the unemployed. Besides, I
am consumptive.... On the whole, prospects not very brilliant.”