“So I am not writing to you in order that I may enjoy my honeymoon without remorse, for—as I say once more—I do not consider that I have done you any wrong. I only want you to know me just as I am, and not to look upon me as a stranger or a foe. I am not given to sentiment, and do not fear the hatred of people: on the contrary, I rather like it; but I do not wish you to hate me. What a sad thing it would be, if a poet could succeed in separating two intelligent and agreeable women from each other forever!
“I kiss you, and with the warmest affection. …”
“A sweet creature she is!” I remarked, and looked at Gina.
She was looking depressed, and much older. Her eyes were bedimmed, and wandering helplessly from piece to piece of furniture, from wall to wall.
“And she does not even feel any love for him! A cold-hearted being, made for nothing but to chop logic! And he—for her, for her … ! Ah, the cruel wrong! Why has this come to me?”
She put her hands up to her head and sobbed aloud. …
Suddenly she snatched the letter from me, and crumpled it up, and tore it all to pieces with angry fingers.
“How I hate, oh, how I hate that woman!”
I brought her a glass of water to calm her nerves, thinking all the time how much, in this, her unjust outburst of fury, she was preferable to the other—the magnanimous, serene, lofty-minded New Woman.
Smilowicz, of all men in the world! was awaiting me outside the office today.
Time, I thought, had for an instant run backward; and the Past, so terribly gone and forgotten, was before me.
“What! You!” I exclaimed; “you, back from Siberia? How long have you been here? … I had not been told—”
“The manifesto: an amnesty. … Five years. Yes, five have passed by. I arrived last week, and have seen nobody but Obojanski. He did not even know your address! Was that nice of you? … Oh, how greatly you have changed! … No, I did not expect such backsliding on your part. … I have heard many things said. …”
“And what about yourself?”
I saw that his plain face, which was now adorned with a thin stubbly beard, was much emaciated. His former careless smile was now quite gone, and his features were darkened and bronzed like a peasant’s.
“I?” He smiled, but with his lips only, that were always drawn: once with suffering, now with having suffered. “I? You never would guess. I married down there; yes, I married a fellow-exile. And we have a son.”
“But what of your health? And what are you going to do in Warsaw?”
“Something or other.” He raised his hand, palm down, then let it drop limply. “At present I am more or less amongst the unemployed. Besides, I am consumptive. … On the whole, prospects not very brilliant.”
I asked him to come to my lodgings.
He looked uneasy. “Are you living with—them?” he asked.
“No; now no longer.”
“Ah, that’s very good. … Professor Obojanski told me fearful things about you, and they grieved me. He must have been exaggerating: he bears you a deep grudge for having broken with him so. For he appreciates you very highly indeed. He counts your having thrown yourself away like that as the greatest disappointment he ever had in his life.”
So we went down the road, chatting about old times. He informed me that Roslawski had gone off on some Polar expedition. I used to call him the “Autocrat of the Ice-plains”: it seems that he belongs to them at any rate.
“But now,” Smilowicz blurted out, rather bashfully, “hadn’t you better come and see us? I have told Sophy (my wife) all about you; she would like to make your acquaintance, and does not know anybody in Warsaw. And you will see Andy, my little boy!”
I of course agreed.
Mme. Smilowicz received us in a tiny room—bachelor’s lodgings on the fourth floor—amongst a confused medley of boxes and mattresses and lumber of various kinds. She began by asking us to speak low, not to disturb Andy, who was then asleep: then she showed him to me: a one-year-old baby, asleep in a cradle. It had a tilted Mongolian nose, the result, no doubt, of the mother’s having so often seen the type.
I paid it several compliments, of the What-a-fine-baby sort, and had not the least fear of being suspected of irony.
For the rest, Mme. Smilowicz has not the appearance of a “youthful mother”; she is a thin black-avised little woman in a dark gown, with a double eyeglass on her nose.
She poured some spirits of wine into the little pan for heating the kettle, and while it was burning itself out, she said, very low:
“My dear Madame, people say that women are weaker than men. But they do not in the least take into account all the strength that we expend over the children; just as if it were uselessly wasted! But furthermore, and setting this aside, let any one of them try to go through what I have undergone. With a child one year old, my dear Madame! in that bleak icebound land! and then, on our way home, having to do everything, my husband in wretched health. … And here again, look
