I mostly spend my evenings with her, in interminable conversations. She either relates something to me, or else she “gives sorrow words.” I listen.
She is just now much grieved that her husband Witold has for nearly a fortnight hardly ever been at home. Some days we even dine without him.
“It is surely so,” she was saying yesterday. “He enjoys his manhood to the full: everything is his. There, he has ‘Bohemian’ society, revelling, fast people, singing, champagne, flowers, and forgetfulness: here, he finds the pure and quiet light of the domestic fireside, the delights of fatherhood, the love of a faithful wife. When he is tired of one sort of pleasure, why then he tries the other. … And we—we are all crippled, helpless things—all!”
Silence for a moment.
“There he gets his amusement at the expense of those poor weaklings, whose souls have been wrenched away from them, who have lost the feeling of their human dignity, the consciousness of their right to live, even the very sense of pleasure; who groan under that most unjust burden, their own self-contempt; who feel the continual oppression of a guilt which does not exist, and for whom the first wrinkle is as a sentence of death.
“But on his domestic hearth there beams another fire, and beams on another kind of weakling; a strange creature, now no longer able to descend into Life’s hurly-burly; for whom certain deeds, for many a century regarded with scorn, have through long heredity of atavistic feelings become really loathsome. …
“Our duty is to amuse them—the lords of life and death—with the effects of contrast; that they may have the assurance of having experienced the whole gamut of emotions, that they may enjoy their manhood to the full.”
When Witold came home today from the club (which was at about noon) Martha received him in a beautiful white peignoir, trimmed with Angora fur, and asked him whether he had yet breakfasted. He thanked her graciously, kissed her hand and brow, and desired to see Orcio.
Martha changed colour. She is not so jealous, even of women, as she is of her beautiful little boy, perhaps because he is with her constantly.
The nursemaid brought Orcio, who at once jumped on to his father’s knee, and began talking at the top of his voice about a number of things which had happened to interest him since the day before.
Imszanski was enchanted with the little one, and kissed his rosy face.
For men like him, there is something incomparably sublime and public-spirited in the fact of being a father; this they hold to be the only thing that compensates and atones for the life they lead.
Martha shrank away; standing at a distance, fury in her heart and a smile on her face, she looked on at the father caressing his boy.
“Look, you,” she whispered to me, “this—this is my vocation, this the mission of my life; all the pain I have undergone, all the rage of my never-ending and vain revolt, all my disappointed existence; all these have been, only that they two should sit here thus, forgetting me entirely; and that all the wrong done to me by the father should come to life again in that son of his!”
But Witold, having caressed Orcio, went to bed. Not until the evening did he wake up, fresh and hearty-looking, to dine with us, kiss Martha’s hand, retail with lively wit several stories then going the round of the town, and make his way to the club once more.
In his love-affairs, Wiazewski is just as fickle and as insatiable as Imszanski; but their “spheres of influence” are different. Wiazewski has a liking for seamstresses, shop-assistants, and so forth; whereas Imszanski is specially interested in cocottes (even his intrigue with Madame Wildenhoff is a case in point). Neither of the two has any great liking for the other, in spite of their mutually courteous bearing at all times. Imszanski has against my friend that he is too democratic: whereas Wiazewski looks on Imszanski as a fool.
The latter explains his dislike for demimondaines thus:
“I have a great liking for misdeeds, but not when committed by professional criminals.”
The art of playing with his victims has been brought by him to the acme of perfection. To this end, he employs what naturalists call “mimicry.” His features being rather common, he has no trouble in putting a girl off her guard; he makes up as a commercial man, or a lackey, or a waiter; and in such parts he expresses himself most eloquently in the slang of those classes, which he has picked up to perfection.
He is a thorough expert in the art of getting into touch with the minds of such people; and the ease with which he finds his way through a labyrinth of ideas quite unknown to us is truly admirable.
On principle, he is for continual change; but latterly he has been making an exception, and declares he has hit upon the right sort, or nearly so. For some time he has been “keeping company” with a girl, whom he has, on account of her exceptional qualities, distinguished from the common herd. I once saw her at his lodgings and was struck with her good looks.
He has been reading a letter from her today. I asked him to give it to me as a “document,” which he very readily consented to do.
It runs thus:
“Dear Stephen I must tell you about something that is Roman the intended husband of Genka came to see me at the shop yesterday evening and he set a-talking to me this way don’t I have no notion where Genka is so I answer back what business of mine is that and he just says don’t you make believe for Genka is in Krucza with that there mechanic and he keeps her I hear is in love with her but I’ll pay him out for it, only the street and the number where he lives are
