“I hate life, Janka!” she replies.
Silence follows. The cat leaps from off the couch, stretches herself, and makes for the fireplace with leisurely velvet tread. She rubs herself against me, lies down in the full glare of the hearth, and instantly falls asleep.
“Once,” Martha continues, “I saw them kill a black sheep, as I had told them to do. A clean-shaven old farm-labourer first tied its legs, and then sharpened his knife on a whetstone for a long time. Finally, he turned its beautiful tapering head on one side, and deliberately, skilfully, drew the knife backwards and forwards across its throat. And the poor animal did not so much as shrink: never did it once bleat, or show the least sign of reluctance. I wanted to run away, or cover my eyes, or at least turn from the sight: but I forced myself to undergo that internal agony, in order to atone for the quiet death of that meek, harmless beast. I asked the labourer afterwards whether he was not sorry for killing it. He answered me: ‘Why should I be? It was my lady’s order. I would cut a man’s throat for her, if she told me to.’
“Once my threshing-machine killed a man. Corn had been stolen, and I had to watch the men by myself, the steward being away at the time. They had stolen it, because I had more than they. … I remember the man leaning forwards incautiously—a horrible cry—a dull grinding sound—and a sudden silence. The machine had stopped; out of it they took only a bleeding mass. I made the dead man’s widow a life-pension, and saw to the bringing up of the children. And because of that, they call me benefactress and angel!
“Or again. A woman of seventeen died in childbed. Three days and three nights she lay howling in the farm-servants’ quarters, howling like a wounded beast, so that I could hear her even in my own room. Well, she died at last; but the boy survived. He is now three years old, he laughs in the sunshine, cuts earthworms to pieces for a pastime, and tears off cockchafers’ legs.
“Kosa, a peasant here, had a son who was dying slowly of consumption. The priest was sent for, and brought him the last sacraments. Outside the hut, he had to bargain with Kosa about the burial fees.
“Once, in our pond, the loathsome swollen corpse of a newborn child came floating to the surface. What harm had it ever done? Possibly it was put to death because its life of a day or two had made it the instrument of some wrong done!
“Janka, I hate life!”
“Listen,” I say, casting my eyes down. “I—I don’t know how to begin; that is, I wanted to tell you that it may be I am leaving you only for a short time. In a few weeks, I shall perhaps be here again.”
“I wish you would,” she replies. “Janusz is in a pitiful state.”
Another pause ensues. I am thinking how far indeed I am from such a wish; and I feel something rising in my throat. Suddenly I decide to speak now.
“Martha,” I say, “tell me the reason why you refused Imszanski.” She starts, and stares at me with eyes like a frightened deer’s.
“Fear nothing,” I say, reassuringly. “You must not think I shall inflict compassion on you; I am only calmly and objectively interested. Tell me: can you possibly not be in love with so amazingly handsome a man?”
She is silent a while, debating with herself; and then:
“Yes, I was in love with him,” she replies, in a calm low voice.
“Well, and have you sacrificed your happiness to that abstract theory of yours?”
Another pause.
“Not exactly. … The fact is that I simply could not bear to think I had not been his only love.”
There she stops, but I feel she is only waiting for me to question her further: this is the moment when she must lay bare to me what she has hitherto, with her wonted secretiveness, concealed from every eye. Yet I refrain from questions.
Again she speaks, slowly and as one that looks back on memories that are still fresh: “We often spent the winter evenings together. His soul was the thing nearest and dearest to me on earth, but I loved him yet more because his eyes were so mournful and his lips so fine.
“He may have been too outspoken: he desired I should know all about him, before I plighted my troth. I wish I had known nothing; there is bliss only where there is ignorance. … For there have been some instants of forgetfulness; and these have given me an inkling of what my happiness would have been—how immense, how incredible—had I been his only love in the past, as I am (it yet may be) his only love in the present.
“It was on a most beautiful winter’s night, silvery in the moonbeams, that I saw it pass before me, that long procession of women, fair as the flowers of spring: ‘a connoisseur in women’ is what they call him. A whole garden of red flowers sprang up in the snowy wilderness, shining afar like a great pool of gore. I closed my eyes with the torture of the sight.
“If it be true that love consists of happiness and delight, then all this delight ought to have been mine: and Life had taken it from me: not to give it to others, but just to throw it away (ah! the crime of it!) to fritter it away amongst a multitude of delights that might have been. For indeed, what would have made my bliss was a wrong inflicted upon others, in the form of compulsion and shame, the torment of humiliation, the infringement of their right to live, hurling them into an abyss of misery and abandonment, and closing the gates against their return to a happier state:—all these deeds of wrongdoing were acts that
