"Sacrificed everything?... To your love, perhaps, but not to me. And have I not sacrificed my life to you? You are angry with Gustav and you're venting your anger on me ... be reasonable."
Tears, tears! What a wedding tour! I steeled my nerves, put on my armour. I became indifferent, impenetrable.
"Restrain your emotions! From to-day you must use your common-sense. Weep, weep until the source of your tears is dry, but then lift up your head. You are a foolish woman, and I have honoured you as a queen, as a ruler! I have done your bidding because I thought myself the weaker of the two! Unfortunately! Don't make me despise you. Don't ever try to blame me alone for what has happened. I admired Gustav's shrewdness last night. He has realised that the great events in life have always more than one cause. Who is to blame? You? I? He? She? The threatening ruin, your passion for the stage, your internal trouble, the inheritance from your thrice-married grandfather? Your mother's hatred of bearing children which is the cause of your vacillating disposition? The idleness of your husband, whose profession left him too much leisure? My instincts? The instincts of the man who has risen from the lower classes? My accidental meeting with your Finnish friend who brought us together? An endless number of motives, a few of which only are known to us. Don't debase yourself before the mob who will unanimously condemn you to-morrow; don't believe, like those poor in spirit, that you can solve such an intricate problem by taking neither the crime nor the criminal seriously!... And, moreover, have I seduced you? Be candid with yourself, with me, while we're here alone, without witnesses."
But she would not be candid.
She could not, for candour is not a woman's characteristic.
She knew herself to be an accomplice in crime; she was tortured by remorse. She had but one thought, to ease her conscience by throwing the whole blame on me.
I left her to herself, and wrapped myself in a callous silence.
Night fell. I opened the window and leaned against the door, gazing at the quickly-passing black Scotch firs, behind which the pale moon was rising. Then a lake passed, surrounded by birch trees; a brook bordered by alders; cornfields, meadows, and then Scotch firs again, a long stretch of them. A mad desire to throw myself out of the carriage seized me; a desire to escape from this prison where I was watched by an enemy, kept spell-bound by a witch. But the anxiety for her future oppressed me like a nightmare; I felt responsible for her, who was a stranger to me, for her unborn children, for the support of her mother, her aunt, her whole family, for centuries to come.
I should make it my business to procure for her success on the stage; I should bear all her sorrows, her disappointments, her failures, so that one day she could throw me in the dust like a squeezed-out lemon—me, my whole life, my brain, the marrow of my spine, my life-blood; all in exchange for the love which I gave her, and which she accepted and called "sacrificing herself to me." Delusions of love! hypnotism of passion!
She sat without moving until ten o'clock, sulking. One more hour and we should have to say good-bye.