Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,
Mais quand un et un font trois,—c’est diablerie!
Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the future,—somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn, by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side, and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is, and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the soul and spirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century. Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth, and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur, always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists. There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has very sweet lips.”
‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I imagine at this period the traveller must have returned, and received the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him, it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator. Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They ought to begin with the professors and the rascally magistrates. As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her own bright land, or has it found a grave in the half-frozen breast of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.
‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses of vodka, I found her shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s wine when the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’
‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet! Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness in the laundress or the grisette, but a Spanish girl with arched feet and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy Andromeda?’
‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to suggest, touched by that little stroke, It is very cold, and his fear of losing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we may be sorry for him too.’
‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard. Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation, and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He has found an occupation of vivid interest,—that of watching the development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in the Revista. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’
‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.
‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter was most pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,—a place he has been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’