But I am the reverse of elated by my victory. For now I can no longer believe in the omnipotence of mere physical strength, which has just shown itself less mighty than the power of Mind.
Had Janusz continued to grapple with me thus for a few seconds more, I think I might have given way to him. And now I envy him the incomparable joy of acknowledging my predominance.
The warrior does not delight in triumphing over one less strong, but in confessing the power of him that has been found stronger, and by whom he has been overcome.
Over this writhing figure, shaken with sobs that grow fainter and fainter with fatigue, I look out far into the night. No moon, not a star. And the rushes along the shore keep up an incessant rustling.
And the dark lake, my soul, is looking up with unseeing eyes to the dark sky.
All around is dead: no life anywhere. Nothing remains but my loneliness—the unbounded loneliness of my strength, self-centred and unparalleled.
Never yet have I felt my power so strongly, and never yet has it made me so sad.
The black sky bends its lowering vault above me; under its clouds the black pond lifts up swelling waves. Between the Infinite and my soul, there is nowhere any room for strength.
Oh, “I am so weary, weary of these heights!” How I desire to meet with a force able to subdue mine!
“Pray, Janusz, pray get up,” I say, gently stroking his hair; “I beg you, rise; it must be very late. Where are the oars?”
I am lying in the hollow between two rows of graves, breathing the perfume of the white forest gilliflowers, abloom in the “Kirkut,” and thinking of life—of this most admirable and most beautiful marvel, life. I am explaining to Martha how my worship of life is really the outcome of resignation.
“But in me resignation has taken a form that it has not in you. ‘If I cannot have all, I refuse to have anything;’ such is the creed of despairing pride, held by slaves and wretched men. My belief in Azoism is nothing but the creed of a proud woman, who is reconciled to her slavery, and will take up no spurious imitations of freedom. Such a withdrawal from the vortex we live in, enabling me to look on all things as Garborg does, from above them, and with a smile of dignified amenity—this is what I love. It often seems to me, so little I feel adapted for my life on earth, that I have somehow wandered hither by a mischance, a blunder.”
“It is well,” says Martha. “Adaptation to environment is of avail only to brute animals: man can make his own world by viewing it in his own special way.
“I,” she goes on to say sadly, “believe in nothing. And yet women in general are inclined to have faith in an existence after death. It is simply an outcome of sympathy with suffering, and of an instinct of justice. You know how the thought of useless suffering in nature makes me beside myself. Think of all those silent agonies which never will be known; of those tortures endured throughout the world by multitudes that leave no trace behind them. … When but a little boy, Janusz once focused the sun’s rays on a little insect he had fastened by its wing, and which was writhing in impotent throes. I can still see those poor limbs, red in the glow, quivering in excruciating pain, until I snatched the lens away from Janusz, and set the half-roasted creature free. … Those were its last impressions of life: after them came—Nothingness! I can see all the tiny invisible beings that I slay by hundreds in my daily walks, trampling them down in the long grass or under the pine-needles, and unwittingly leaving them to expire in the most dreadful torments, perhaps drawn out for many an hour. … I know, too, of the pain which fishes undergo, often kept living in the air for whole days, and seen to move convulsively, even when on the fire. … All this pain, and nothing to justify, nothing to compensate it! This I know; for beyond death there is nothing!”
“But did it never strike you that, if there is nothing beyond death, it is impossible for nothingness to be there?”
She looks at me inquiringly.
“The ideas of justice, of vengeance, of compensation, are purely of this earth, though they once formed a religious ideal in the worship of Jehovah. I put them in the same category as the concept of mercy, now prevailing amongst Christians. Some other idea will spring up later, equally foreign to that of existence beyond the grave.”
“Well, and what do you infer from that?”
“My belief is, that the phenomenon called death consists in our losing all sensations, ‘categories,’ concepts and all projections (so to speak) of this our world; and in our finding other sensations in the next. Perhaps not even that. For in the next world, just as there will be no idea of justice, so there may be none of sensations. Do you follow me?”
“So you think you shall continue to exist then?”
“I cannot say—I cannot say.”
For a few minutes I listen to the undertone of the pine-trees, sounding far above us in the sky.
“You see,” I continue, “there, it may well be, we shall have no idea of an Ego which excludes and contradicts the Non-Ego. The distinction between them has arisen from the fact of our existence upon earth: it is a form into which we mould our impressions; something purely accidental, depending upon the quality and mechanism of the brain. … There, too, the idea of Time may be wanting; also that of Space. Of course, from our earthly point of view, it is nonsense to say that the world is boundless: that which the brain calls ‘the Infinite’ cannot be
