"Then you can go straight to him and don't show up here again!" shouted Cabinski, driven to fury by the mention of Topolski.
"Listen there, Director!" began Glas, but Janina listened no longer and, pushing her way through the crowd, left the theater.
"Go and earn it . . ." she repeated to herself.
She walked along the almost empty streets. The gas-lamps cast a ghastly, yellowish glare like that of funeral tapers on the silent and deserted thoroughfares and alleys. The dark-blue vault of the sky hung over the city like a huge canopy embroidered with brightly scintillating stars. A cool breeze swept down the streets and chilled Janina to the marrow.
"Go and earn it!" she again repeated to herself, passing before the
Grand Theater. She had come here without being aware of it.
Janina glanced at the building and turned back. An unbearable pain racked her head, as though there was a burning iron ring about it. She was so utterly weak and worn-out that at moments she could scarcely resist the desire to sit down on the curbstone and remain there. Then again, so desperate a realization of her poverty filled her that she was almost ready to give herself to anyone who might ask, if she could only relieve that agonized trembling within herself, that almost deathly weakness and exhaustion.
She dragged herself heavily along the streets, for she no longer knew what to do, and the chill night air, the silence, and that deathly weariness gave her a sort of painful ecstasy. Before her eyes there hovered only phantom forms and fiery spots, so that she knew not where she was or what was happening to her. She felt only one thing and that was that she would no longer be able to endure it.
"What am I going to do further?" Janina asked thoughtlessly, looking before herself.
The silence of the sleeping city and the silence of the dark heavens seemed to be the only answer to her question.
Janina felt as though she were falling swiftly down a steep incline and that there, at the very bottom, lay the outstretched corpse of Niedzielska.