All at once I shook myself free with a hissing intake of the breath, and gently extricated myself from his embrace.
“What, my Queen of the Icy Caverns!” he said in sport, with his eyes fixed upon mine. “Has some thought of death come to make you afraid?”
“No; I was thinking of Martha.”
His bantering humour left him at once.
“Oh! for once in our lives surely we might learn to think only of ourselves,” he said, and his tone showed that he was vexed with me.
“And have you found that lesson so very hard to learn?”
“That’s unkind of you,” he whispered, and closed my mouth with a kiss. …
“And now I have no more love left, not even for my husband. Not that I love another, not that Witold has made me suffer torments beyond endurance. No: I am merely unable to feel anything else in the world save pain. The very thought of him is a torture.”
As she spoke, I bowed my head very low.
“It may be that there is some world in which Kant’s ‘categories’ do not hold, where we are out of Space, out of Time. I believe it is so. Sometimes space does not exist for me: I have the power to see all those he has loved with him in one place. There are moments, too, when time does not exist for me: I can see them all together in one instant—both those that have been and those that are to be; yes, those that are to be, Janka.”
From under her brows she threw me a questioning glance, and went on:
“But I can see, I can fancy nothing, save under the mental form of Pain. Yes, and I have thus discovered a new ‘category’!”
It were difficult to say why, just at that moment, I remembered Wieloleski and his discovery that land-owning was also a “category,” and this put me in a humour of pleasantry that it was not easy to shake off.
“Looked at through this prism of Pain,” she continued, “the sun itself is black, the most superb flowers in the Red Garden turn to tongues of flame, and the cistern filled with flowers of bliss changes into an infinite, infinite ocean of blood.”
She looked round, and shuddered.
“Pray, Janka, do not go to bed tonight; do not leave me alone during the dark hours. Truly, I cannot remember when he went out. I think he was not at all at home today.”
“Yes, he was; he dined with us.”
She passed her hand over her brow.
“You are right, but it doesn’t matter. At any rate, he will not be here till morning. Janka, do not sleep in your room!”
By this time it is impossible for me to endure the sight of Martha. She fills me with such mystic awe that I am ready to shriek aloud with dread of her. I feel as though I were the cause of all her afflictions, as if it were I who have marred her life. Her eyes hurt me—those great dark-blue, sorrowful eyes. But all the same it must make no difference to her; to her who—
On returning from the office, I stepped in to Mme. Wildenhoff’s, to see about the room Gina spoke of. At any price, I must get away from here. I want never to see either her or him any more.
Mme. Wildenhoff was a little paler than her wont; she looked out of sorts, and complained that her head ached. I understood that something had gone wrong between him and her. And again my heart was crushed with fear. Only when I looked at her did I remember that she likewise— … I had for the time being entirely forgotten that fact. My first impulse was to flee her; but Mme. Wildenhoff retained me against my will. She, I think, has not made any definite guess; but the other!
“I must confess to you,” she began, “that all I have made you think of me is untrue—a mask of mine, a mannerism, an empty theory. All women are at their heart’s core exactly alike; during all their life they follow one thing alone, and perish in pursuit of it.”
“You mean love?” I questioned, trying clumsily to feign indifference.
“Yes. That is the one thing. It is our fate; if not the first thing that we pursue, it is always the last that we give up. There is no help for it—none. We may be all our life forcing upon ourselves the conviction that we have the same rights as men, and are capable of bearing the same amount of liberty as they; but there must come a moment when, for that one true love, we most willingly give up all its counterfeits.”
“But you have, Madame, the comfort to know that men too are liable to a similar reaction. When quite sated with freedom, the very greatest profligates will settle down to a married life.”
“Only for a short while, and then they begin all over again, and return to their favourite pastime. … Why, take Imszanski, for instance; you surely know him well. …”
My face flushed up as red as fire, but I undauntedly raised my eyes to hers. She, on encountering my gaze, blushed, too. Once more I felt an uneasy flutter at my heart.
She burst into a sudden transport.
“I love, I love, and without any return!—Oh, how unlike me, is it not?”
Whereupon she laughed hysterically, and then shed tears, tearing at her handkerchief with her teeth. She was waiting for me to put her some questions, that she might be able to confide her sorrows to me. I thought I should soon be likely to go mad.
At last Gina came in. She took me to Idalia, a fairly well-known pianist, who returned here from Paris a
