She pointed to a heap of papers, written in a fine female hand. Her husband smiled at me proudly.
As soon as the spirits were burnt out, Mme. Smilowicz worked the piston with swift strokes, pumping up a stream of gas, while her husband held a match to light it as it issued forth. A loud droning sound was heard, and a slight smell of naphtha was discernible.
“Won’t the noise wake little Andy?” I queried, with sham solicitude.
“No, no, he is accustomed to it now.”
We took tea, discussing abstract topics the while. I had not read any of the books which they mentioned; and I found this a hard thing to acknowledge. I had the impression of being spirited away on to some other planet, and felt all the time out of countenance and like an intruder. Also, my new dress was in such glaring and unpleasant contrast with its environment here: and I had it borne in upon me that my life, too, was in the same contrast.
After the machine had been put out and droned no more, there was heard a noise of children from beyond the partition wall: a hubbub as of many voices, now and then interrupted by the thin sound of a piercing female voice. On the fourth floor, a lot of youngsters were making merry.
“Do you hear that, Madame? And it is just the same, every day almost. They are dreadfully in the way of my work. Why are the walls made so thin?”
I was amazed, and could not help rather envying her; the contrast between us was so very glaring, and yet she had not even remarked it! She was thinking only of this annoyance; made no comparison, drew no parallel whatever!
Andy in his cradle now set up a loud and lusty wailing.
She jumped up from the table, jostling me in her haste, and rocked the child to sleep again, crooning low an inarticulate lullaby, tuneless, wordless, and not unlike that broken croaking which frogs utter. And again and again she would say:
“Little son of mine, my only one, my beautiful one!”
And then, sitting down to tea again, she spoke in a most interesting way about one of the books she had recently translated. It was from the English—essays on Economics.
“Joseph encourages me to write something as well; but for that one must have one’s mind more at ease.”
Then, with a tender look that she cast on her husband:
“I think,” she said, “that Joseph will soon be better in our climate; when he was sent away from Poland, he was in perfect health. Do you remember how he looked in those days?”
“Certainly I do; very well indeed.”
And I proceeded to tell her of the expeditions we both used to make to Obojanski’s.
“But,” I observed, “you have worked a miracle; he was always absolutely insensible to the charms of womankind.” This I said out of kindness, fearing lest I might otherwise give occasion to thoughts of jealousy and suspicion.
I soon felt, however, that such delicacy was out of place and lost upon her; she was impervious to any fancies of that kind.
“When at the High School,” she told me, “I made it my purpose in life to reconcile my duties toward society with those that I owed to myself. People who are against women’s emancipation say that no woman can at the same time go in for book-learning and be a good wife and mother. That is their strongest argument. But, if only women themselves would recognize that this is possible, and that everything can be made to agree! I myself, my dear Madame, finished my course of Sociology in Brussels, where I even published a short paper in French. Since then I have followed the onward march of science, so as to be always up-to-date: I am reading continually, and am occupied in translating at present. … Sometimes, too, I am able to help Joseph with facts and information. And now I ask you, my dear Madame, could the most stolid bourgeoise, if placed in my circumstances, give herself more to her child than I do! Consider, I have no nursemaid, nor any of the aids which those much belauded ‘good mothers’ enjoy. I suckle the baby myself, I tidy the room, I do the cooking, the porteress brings me provisions from the market, and that is all. Oh, how I wish some of those keen-witted gentlemen could come here and see!”
“Yes,” Smilowicz put in here, “if a working woman is out of doors all day long, leaving her children uncared for, that is in order and reasonable and right! But let a woman consecrate a few hours to her studies in the evening, they will say this is emancipation, and incompatible with her duties as a mother.”
I could see how gratified she was to hear this.
“I am only sorry for those who do not know what exceeding happiness is to be found in marriage, if there is but mutual understanding and sympathy.” And she glanced at her husband with extreme tenderness.
Meanwhile, there was a continual noise on the other side of the partition, and there came a curiously disturbing sound of women’s voices, cackling with a sort of scandalized laughter—something between giggling and sobbing.
Smilowicz’s attention was drawn off by it.
“What beasts they are!” he said at last, to relieve his feelings.
“They are not malicious, but unhappy,” she said. “For them too, I feel sorry.”
Smilowicz made no reply. Presently he was trying to persuade me to go over and see Obojanski one of these days.
“Always plunged in those books of his—overhead and ears in them—indifferent to everything else that goes on throughout the wide world. His study seems to me now such a haven as one might dream for. … Yes, let us go one day and visit him, Miss Janina.”
Really,
