I love to look at her, sitting close to me, reclining in that big easy-chair, with her long white hands carelessly dangling from the arms of her chair, forming as beautiful and as dainty a picture as any artist could create.
“Won’t you come with me to a concert on Thursday next?” she asks. “Ileska is to recite a poem by my ex-fiancé. He will certainly be there—and she too. I have not yet seen her, and should like to do so. There will also be piano and vocal music. Not a bad programme.”
“Of course I shall be much pleased, but—have you considered … ?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I shall manage all right. … It can surely make no great impression upon me.”
She smiled.
“I should not have forced myself on you; but since Lola Wildenhoff’s departure, I have no one but you to do me this service. I am now so very easy to upset; and any want of tact jars upon me so!”
“I fancied that you were on pretty intimate terms with Idalia.”
“Not at present. True, she is still, as she always was, as discreet as can possibly be. But she has too much sentiment and sympathy—far too much; and that is annoying and mortifying. You, so tranquil, so quiet, so entirely unmoved, act on my nerves as a sedative. I can talk with you even more openly than with Lola.”
“Oh, have you heard from her?”
“Yes; I received one letter. She has left the Riviera, and is in Paris now, where she intends to winter along with her husband. Wildenhoff has won a good deal of money, playing at Monte Carlo; and both of them are now spending it, each of them apart.”
“And her nerves, how are they?”
“In perfect condition. She has left all her tears in the sea behind her. … That woman has an uncommonly happy disposition—”
Here followed a short but mournful pause, broken by the entrance of Radlowski, a painter who had been her fellow-student in Munich.
He noticed that my complexion was strikingly out of the common, and begged I would sit for my portrait.
Witold thinks that, of all the women he ever knew, I am the most intelligent. Before he made my acquaintance, he had been climbing up a regular ladder of emotions, of which Martha had formed the topmost rung. I, it appears, form a sort of synthesis of all his loves; I am at the same time the most beloved humanly speaking, and as a woman the most desired of all. He would not have me other than I am in any way.—As to this last, I wish I could say the same of him.
And yet I would not exactly have him changed—rather transformed and become another person. It seems that to be as lack-brained as an animal is not sufficient: one must besides have some primitive instincts, one must have some vigour. … What I need now, perforce and irresistibly, is matchless strength—the strength of a hurricane, of a cyclone, of some great natural force let loose.
He loves to talk with me on intellectual matters. “No one can understand his soul so well as I.”
Silent and with eyes cast down, I listen for some time to his commonplaces, uttered indeed in elaborately chosen words, and in a manner not commonplace. And I ponder. I gaze on him—on that mouth so perfectly shaped, so intensely sweet, just a little faded, it seems; and on those eyes which, beneath the tawny lashes that shade them, are so bright with the fever and the melancholy of lassitude, so full of the irresistible charm which surrounds all that is coming to an end, though you would have it remain as beautiful as only youth’s dream can be. And it is then—when he has not the slightest inkling of what I feel—that I love him most of all.
Today I was sorry for him—sorry for all those desires of his, doomed to burn themselves out, never any more to be kindled.
Acting on an impulse, I went up to him, knelt with one knee upon his, put my hands round his head, wonderfully soft and velvet-like to feel, and then, turning his face up, I gazed into those enchanting, nebulous eyes, and said laughingly:
“Oh! in Heaven’s name, Witold, why must you talk about everything? You know well enough that this is not what you were made for, don’t you? Pray remember that your one strong point is love.”
And then, for the first time, I kissed him upon the lips, not waiting to be kissed by him.
He kissed me back again, but the kiss was cool, brotherly.
“I regret,” he observed, “that you show me so little of your beautiful soul, and refuse to acknowledge mine to be of a kindred nature. Yet I understand so well your dreams of the Arctic plains that you possess, of your grottoes, glimmering green in the Northern Lights; of your boundless and ever peacefully slumbering ocean! I am forever very near to you. …”
“That may be; but I am always very far away from you,” I retorted, with an attempt at pleasantry. Then I whispered in his ear:
“Love my snows: for there are volcanoes seething beneath them.”
At the words, his mouth fastened on to my neck, and he bit into my flesh with a kiss that gave me exquisite pain together with maddening delight.
My eyelids closed, my lips parted; I was about to faint. And I felt his mouth upon mine, and it was most sweet, with the savour of withered roses. And I drank of the crimson wine of his kisses, and it was strong as death.
And the crimson wine inebriated me.
But there came an evil moment. Was it Death, or was it Life, that then laid its cold hand upon my heart, and looked upon me with the eyes of wisdom?
The revulsion frees me, tearing me from his close embrace.—And I hated him, for he did not understand, and was unwilling to leave me. Yet, had he indeed left me thus, I should have resented
