"Mamma is ill with neuralgia; I am nursing her, and cannot see you to-day. I regret this, for the talk about dissonances began to be interesting. Bring me the continuation of it to-morrow!"
She gave this card, in an envelope addressed to the baron, to a servant, and sat down again to her chrysanthemums, this time with a smile both malicious and gladsome. With his appearance in that house, though unseen by her, Baron Emil had lent form in her head to a certain whimsical idea. She knew that it was whimsical, but just for that reason it pleased her, and must also please the baron. She began quickly, almost with enthusiasm, to paint dark outlines of imps among the flowers. She disposed them so that they seemed to separate the flowers and keep them apart from one another. Some imps were climbing up, others were slipping down; they peeped out from behind petals, climbed along stems, but all were malicious, distorted, capricious, and pushed the tops of the flowers apart in such fashion that they did not let the half-bending petals meet in kisses. Painting quickly, Irene laughed. She imagined Baron Emil saying at sight of this work: "C'est du nouveau! It is not a painted pot! it is an individual thought. There is a new quiver there. It bites."
The expressions "painted pots," "Arcadians," "it bites," "new quivers," "rheumatism of thought," and many more she had from him. And she was not the only one who borrowed. These expressions had spread in a rather largo circle of people who despised everything existing, and were seeking everything which was new and astonishing. Baron Emil was cultured, had read much. He read frequently Nietsche's "Zarathustra," and spoke of the coming "race," the super-humans. He spoke somewhat through his nose and through his teeth.
The superhuman is he who is able to will absolutely and unconditionally.
When Irene thought that perhaps she would soon become the baron's wife, and leave that house, her brows contracted and her jeering smile vanished. Oh, she would not let him escape her! She had an absolute condition to put before the baron; he would accept it most assuredly, through deference to the amount of her dower. Energy glittered in her blue eyes. She turned her face toward the door of her mother's room with so quick a movement that the metallic pin in her hair cast a gleam of sharp steel above her head.
"One must know how to will," whispered she.
CHAPTER IV
When Kranitski entered his own lodgings, after passing the night with Maryan, and after the long conversation with Malvina, old widow Clemens looked at him from behind her great spectacles, and dropped her hands:
"Are you sick, or what? Arabian adventure! Ah, what a look you have! What has happened? Maybe those pains have come; you have had them a number of times already. Why not take off your fur? Wait! I will help you this minute. Oh, you will be sick in addition to everything else."
She was a squatty woman, heavy, with a striped kerchief on her shoulders, and wearing a short skirt, from under which appeared flat feet in tattered overshoes. She was seventy years old, at least; her large, sallow face was much withered. Bordered by gray hair and a white cap that face was bright with the gleam of dark eyes, still fiery, and quickly glancing from under a wrinkled, high forehead. Her whole figure had in it something of the fields, something primitive, which seemed not to have the least relation to that little drawing-room and its owner. That room contained everything which is found usually in such apartments, therefore: a sofa, armchairs, a table, a mirror with a console, a low and broad ottoman with cushions in Oriental fashion, porcelain figures on the console, old-fashioned shelves with books in nice bindings, a few oil paintings, small but neat, on the walls, a number of photographs, tastefully grouped above the ottoman, a large album on the table before the sofa. But all this was a collection brought together at various seasons, and injured by time. The covering of the cushions had faded, the gilding on the mirror frame was worn here and there, the leather covering on the furniture was worn and showed through cracks the stuffing within, the album was torn, the porcelain base of the lamp was broken. At the first cast of the eye the little drawing-room seemed elegant, but after a while, through spots and rents mended carefully, want was observed creeping forth. This want was hidden chiefly by perfect and minute cleanliness, in which one could recognize active, careful hands, industrious, untiring sweeping out, rubbing out, sewing, mending—those were the lean, aged hands, with broad palms and short fingers, which were now helping Kranitski to remove his fur coat. Meanwhile, a scolding, harsh voice, with tenderness at the base of it, continued: