“I end this scrawl of mine throwing away my pen crying my eyes out and dying of hunger for that blessed Sunday.
“Your unhappy or rather lovesick
Quite aware that I am doing wrong, I let Martha look back into her past; and I even question her myself so as to bring before her eyes the long dismal perspective of her wounded love, I listen in the manner she likes best, calmly and without any show of compassion. Nor have I any for her, any more than for a fish that must needs live in cold water, or for a bat that cannot bear the sunlight. Martha likes to suffer, and—perhaps for this very reason—she is compelled to suffer. Indeed, she is something of a Sybarite in her almost abnormal sensitiveness to pain. She is fond of telling me all the petty foolish troubles of an injured wife; and this procures her an odd sense of what may be called a sort of enjoyment.
“But, all the same, there was a time once when he loved you, did he not?”
“Oh, Witold declares that up to now he has loved none but me!”
“Well, well; but then at what time did this—the present phase begin? For some time at least, he must have been faithful to you.”
“Oh, yes, for a few months. Quite at the beginning. Though I myself was never happy. … First of all, during the six weeks before our wedding, I was constantly a prey to such mystic terrors that I came near losing my senses. You know that I do not admit any of those hackneyed maxims of morality—and yet I continually felt that some evil thing was afoot, and a day of reckoning close at hand. And besides, how intolerable then was the thought that now I had to marry him, however averse I might feel to the act; that now I had more at stake upon my side than he on his!”
“And afterwards, by the seaside?”
“Oh, then it was entrancing! I almost felt happy. But it lasted so short a time! Shortly after our arrival I fell sick, and grew unwieldy and weakly and plain. And then, if you can believe me, surrounded with all those marvels of nature and of art, I was always longing for Klosow, my own place!”
After a silence of a few minutes, she went on:
“I saw a drawing by Brenner. It was always in my thoughts; a woman who had died after an operation, stretched on a table, stark and stiff. There was a man bending over her, mourning; his hair was like Witold’s. And another picture, showing the tragedy of motherhood: a young mother has just breathed her last; on her bosom sits a naked child, a loathsome idiot, looking out at life with wide open, bewildered, lacklustre eyes. I can’t help fancying that Orcio resembles that child.”
With a sudden abrupt movement, she rang for the manservant.
“Ask the nurse why the child is not in bed yet. I hear it making a noise. Tell her she must put it to bed. Or else take it farther away from this room.”
When the servant had gone out, I said to her:
“Why, what made you speak so angrily to him.”
“Really, I cannot recognize myself any more: my nerves are so horribly unstrung.” … And she sank into a sombre reverie.
“Tell me more,” I said, to draw her out.
“More? Well, I was not so badly off then. We took delight in the blue sky, in the murmuring green sea, and in our all but absolute solitude. Witold was ever by my side, tender and kind—masking with his exquisite courtesy the disgust I must have made him feel. Why, for myself I myself often felt pity and aversion; I who had never before been other than graceful all my life.
“Then things went worse. … Listen; but it is too much for me just now.”
“Then don’t talk of it, Martha.”
“Ah! what does it matter after all? If I could forget … but I can’t.
“A few weeks before George’s birth, Witold for the first time spent the night away from home. I sat up all the time, and looked out through the window over the sea. Ah, that night!
“The servants had gone to bed long
