She turned her cheek to the pillow, and shed tears.
“Martha, your nerves are again in a very poor state. If you like, I shall go with you to Klosow; and we shall spend Christmas there together, and enjoy a few idyllic days as of old.”
“Oh, no, Janka; they would only be the miserable ghosts of times that are past forever. That stupid, clubby-faced woman, Janusz’s wife, would get on my nerves so; besides, the thought that Witold would be staying here with Madame Wildenhoff, and glad I was away!
“But,” she added with a sudden revival of spirits, “do you know, I fancy her triumph will be over pretty soon? It is true that Witold was never very much attached to her: but now it would seem that his affections are strongly engaged elsewhere.”
“Are they?” I asked, much interested: for I recalled Lipka and my unexpected meeting with Imszanski there.
“Did he tell you anything?”
“Oh, he is simply ridiculous—so hopelessly frank with me. He never will spare me any details, and holds it in some sort as a duty to conceal nothing from me. …”
She laughed bitterly, and at once looked sullen again.
“Yesterday, before you came home from the office, I asked Witold all about her. She is some star of the Parisian demimonde, who has made up her mind to get an engagement at any price on the stage here: and Witold is expected, on account of his influence in Warsaw, to obtain a fixed situation for her. It appears that her voice is tolerable, and her outward appearance marvellous: he has described her to me in every particular. It was, I assure you, one of the most emotional experiences I ever went through.”
She closed her eyes, to intensify the image that she was forming in her mind.
“The woman is tall, and seemingly of spare proportions: but only seemingly so. Her bony framework is exceedingly slight and reed-like: so you see, Janka, on close inquiry she is found not to be really thin.”
As she spoke, she turned upon her pillow, tearing at its satin covering with her nails, and striving to swallow down her tears of rage.
I could not contain myself.
“Why on earth does he tell you about such things? He must be a monster.”
“There are a great many things that he never can understand—what I told you seems but the merest trifle to him.”
She took a spoonful of bromide, and continued:
“You must know that he tells me she has large oval-shaped eyes, with extremely long lashes—eyes of an unfathomable black, in very striking contrast with her voluptuous mouth; always sorrowful, dreamy, and with a faraway look, like the beggar-maid loved by King Cophetua. She has also much originality, something like an odalisque, and uniting the primitiveness of a mountain goat with all the cultured grace of a maid of honour at a royal court.”
This, after the elimination of certain exaggerated points, was easily recognizable as the description of that fair Frenchwoman whom I had seen at Lipka’s. And now I understood why Imszanski had shown himself so very full of courtesy toward Czolhanski. The latter, as a theatrical critic, may be useful to him.
“She dresses, it appears, most superbly, with all the magnificence of Babylonian times: golden combs and strings of pearls in her hair; in her ears, rings of the greatest price. Moreover, she is a very miracle of depravity. Witold smiled as he told me so, with an inward look, as though recalling some particular.
“As he told me so, he smiled; and I too smiled, listening with the blandest interest. He looked at me attentively, kissed my hand, and said:
“ ‘Your nerves are better now, I see. How glad I am! You have no idea. You have at last realized that to feel jealous of a cocotte would be unworthy of you.’
“ ‘Why, of course. Yes, yes; I am all right now.’ And yet, Janka, I never felt it so deeply; I never saw things with such awful clearness of vision. And alas! I never, never yet loved Witold with such passionate love.
“But, more than him, I love that pain which I feel. …”
She rose in bed, as if to repel something that was weighing her down; then she sat propped up by her cushions and pillows.
“Do you imagine that in all this I had any idea of revengeful pleasure at Mme. Wildenhoff’s disappointment, and for that reason made him tell me what he did? Not in the least. I wanted to drink my fill of pain; as in Spain they wave a red flag in bullfights before the bloodshot eyes of the poor brute, to make him yet madder with rage and despair, so I wished to excite myself to the same delirious state.
“I do not wish for anything that can diminish the intensity of my anguish, I hate whatever could mitigate or deaden it. I love to gloat over the raw bleeding wounds, bare and unbandaged. …”
At that moment, the nurse tapped at the door, to ask whether Orcio might not come in to bid his mother good morning.
“No—no! shut the door! I will have no one here! Janka, you have not the least idea how I hate my son.”
At Lipka’s tonight: and this time in a private room. Mme. Wildenhoff talked at great length, somewhat to the following effect:
“There is in reality only one kind of perfect love—that of the brute creation; indeliberate, irreflective love, wherein victory is to
