Before my eyes, people are walking along the avenues, strewn with dry dead leaves. The slightest breath of air brings down from the trees these tatters and strips, once a purple kingly mantle: but men go on, pitilessly trampling down the rustling leaves.
Now I am in a strange humour—a sort of Pantheistic mood. My Ego is multiplying, growing into countless gods, and penetrating the whole world, wherein there is no room for aught save Me. And, therefore, prodigious amazement takes hold of me, when I think how all these crowds of people can tread upon my golden autumnal leaves, or glance at me, because I have a noticeable face and a hat à la diable m’enporte. Can I think that they live? There is no life but mine only.
No, they have not life.
And there,—an immense way off, on the farther shore of the Ocean of Infinity,—there he stands, he, the only foe worthy of me: and he waits that I should go onward to meet him!
And I—I stand in fear. For a week I have not been at Obojanski’s, where he goes pretty nearly every night.
When the thought comes to me of the splendid sorrel mount I had, and of Janusz whose lips were so sweet, I have a mind to burst out crying. But I shall not go back there, unless.... Oh, if I could help going back!
I have an irresistible inclination to seek for types amongst people. I do not like things accidental, either without logical connection, or without connection with the special nature of a given mind. If it depended upon me, I would, like a scientist at work in his laboratory, remove from every character whatever is unnecessary and unessential, lest this should render its reactions with others too complicated and obscure. For example, I should like to make of Obojanski a sage of ancient Greece, and eliminate from him everything that disagreed with this type. Smilowicz should be a narrow-minded Socialist: as matters stand, he is too clever for his type, and most needlessly cleverer than Obojanski. Roslawski is almost perfect. I should only desire—and this, too, for purely personal motives—that he might look upon marriage from a less absolutely ideal standpoint.
What my own type is, I do not know. Very likely I have none; and this has troubled my mind for ever so many a year. I am unable to find anything general in myself, or to define my own nature in one word and make an abstraction of it. For that, I am far too complex.
My father was a bricklayer; and yet there is nothing vulgar in my face or postures or motions. I sweep my floor and clean my own shoes: yet my hands are as soft as velvet. During the whole of my childhood, I used either to go barefoot, or in cheap, clumsy boots; yet my feet are white and bear no mark that I ever went so. My work for the greater part of the day—the adding up of innumerable columns of figures—is such as might benumb most brains, and yet I am quite able to think keenly. Though I neither write poetry, nor sing, nor paint, I have a thoroughly artistic mind. My way of living borders on the penurious; yet I have all the epicurean instincts of those who live at another’s expense. After all, I am (as I am perfectly well aware) nothing extraordinary; and yet, to be the little that I am, I have not undergone one twinge of conscience; in all that is Me, there is not one atom of harm done to any one, and no one single tear of any being alive.
A post-card from Martha, with a “Decadent” figure of a woman, all covered over with microscopic handwriting.