She added, after a pause:
“For ever so long (and that you must surely know) Imszanski has been quite indifferent to his wife.”
Just then the bell rang in the antechamber. Madame Wildenhoff gave a start, then burst into a fit of laughter. In that laugh of hers, I find something peculiarly interesting; but I cannot guess what.
I rose to bid her farewell.
“Why, what are you running away for? It is only Gina. I like to see two clever, handsome women together; a thing which, I must tell you, very seldom happens.”
Gina came in with her customary smileless greeting, and as usual called for a glass of water. Then she set to look through certain albums, scattered about the table. Her figure, perfectly faultless in style, stood out like a sort of anachronism on the background of that florid middle-class drawing-room. In the light one could see that her eyebrows and lashes were golden, and her wavy hair of a dark auburn hue, falling in a dishevelled mass on to her shoulders as she bent forward.
Madame Wildenhoff attempted to lead the conversation towards topics of general interest.
She began by the rights of women, and their failure to understand what emancipation really signifies. Gina speaks little, but belongs, like Madame Wildenhoff, to the category of those that are emancipated in every sense of the word. As a matter of fact, her intended husband is her paramour, and she has not the slightest intention ever to become his wife.
I have for some time noticed that she is possessed with a spirit of contradiction. In presence of people who have some certain definite convictions, she always takes the opposite side: this possibly in order to produce a more striking effect by the sharp contrast of tones. This attitude called up in my mind certain reminiscences from out of atavistic past. I began to talk about the gradual extinction of individual monogamistic women, of the eroticism which has soaked our democracies through and through, of the necessity for a class of courtesans, that the type of those women who care for something besides love intrigues may be preserved, and other nonsense of similar nature.
Gina only looked at me with a drowsy smile; but Madame Wildenhoff took up the cudgels with a sort of enthusiasm. A curious thing: her talk is not unlike Martha’s, though their natures are very far asunder indeed.
“Men are endowed by nature with a sense of equilibrium: so long as they are in the prime of life, they live and love and laugh at plain and virtuous women. Car il faut que jeunesse se passe. They therefore require what may be called the ‘brute-woman’; a woman who laughs and glitters and shines for a few years, till she ages: then of course she withdraws from the arena, regretting that ‘she ever followed such a path.’ It is only after men have sown their wild oats that the animal dies out of them, and there wakes up—a plebeian, or a thinker, or a father, or a citizen; and then he stretches out his hands towards what we may call the ‘human woman.’ Then comes the triumph of her who respects herself; her day of victory has dawned, she is at last ‘appreciated,’ which is to say remunerated for her virtue with that famous respect which is never given to those of the other class. True, the intellectuals may complain sometimes that men will not acknowledge them as mentally their equals; but the foolish ones will be honoured by their husbands’ friendship and confidence; and the good mothers will have no aim or happiness in life beyond the bringing up of children: while they each and all either look down upon the ‘brute-woman’ or regard them with philanthropic compassion.”
“Poor things!” Gina exclaimed; “they do not know that the tragic excitement of a single night may be perhaps worth more than a whole existence passed in such torpid apathy as theirs.”
Today there is some festival or other. I have not gone to the office, and have been sitting all the morning at Martha’s bedside, who is not to get up until the afternoon. She is as usual always complaining, her sad eyes gazing into mine.
“Janka, I can no longer sleep a wink. Last night it was twelve before I ceased tossing on my pillow. Like a child, I cried myself to sleep at last: and when I woke, it was no later than three o’clock.”
She crossed behind her head her lace-decked arms, and looked out into space with infinite wistfulness.
Then she continued in a low voice: “I cannot imagine why my former life in Klosow now comes back to me so very vividly. I remember how sometimes I used to rise early on a winter morning, when it was still dark, and how I dressed by lamplight, shivering with cold, and fighting down my longing to go back to my warm bed. Then I would put on a huge fur, and take the keys, and go to the farm with a lantern in my hand. Do you know, all this is present to me now, just like a vision? And then I remember the far-off fields, lying fallow beneath the snow, and stretching away even to the verge of the horizon, under the sky in which the stars were beginning to grow pale. I remember the farm buildings, vague dark spots upon the landscape, the forests like streaks of violet, the grey fences, and the delicate tracery of the leafless garden trees. And now through the darkness there come sounds: the clattering of tin pails, and the faint drowsy calling of the maids to one another. Oh, and I remember well the cold, the lusty, fresh, piercing cold, making the teeth clatter in one’s head. And then, the close warmth of the cow-byres, and the low black-raftered ceiling overhead; the outlines of the solemn-looking cows and sleepy milkmaids, the bright circles of the lanterns on the
