Venus in Furs
“Place thy foot upon thy slave,
Oh thou, half of hell, half of dreams;
Among the shadows, dark and grave,
Thy extended body softly gleams.”
And—so on. This time I really got beyond the first stanza. At her request I gave her the poem in the evening, keeping no copy. And now as I am writing this down in my diary I can only remember the first stanza.
I am filled with a very curious sensation. I don’t believe that I am in love with Wanda; I am sure that at our first meeting, I felt nothing of the lightning-like flashes of passion. But I feel how her extraordinary, really divine beauty is gradually winding magic snares about me. It isn’t any spiritual sympathy which is growing in me; it is a physical subjection, coming on slowly, but for that reason more absolutely.
I suffer under it more and more each day, and she—she merely smiles.
Without any provocation she suddenly said to me to-day: “You interest me. Most men are very commonplace, without verve or poetry. In you there is a certain depth and capacity for enthusiasm and a deep seriousness, which delight me. I might learn to love you.”
After a short but severe shower we went out together to the meadow and the statue of Venus. All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air. The trees were still shedding drops, but sparrows and finches were already hopping from twig to twig. They are twittering gaily, as if very much pleased at something. Everything is filled with a fresh fragrance. We cannot cross the meadow for it is still wet. In the sunlight it looks like a small pool, and the goddess of love seems to rise from the undulations of its mirror-like surface. About her head a swarm of gnats is dancing, which, illuminated by the sun, seem to hover above her like an aureole.
Wanda is enjoying the lovely scene. As all the benches along the walk are still wet, she supports herself on my arm to rest a while. A soft weariness permeates her whole being, her eyes are half closed; I feel the touch of her breath on my cheek.
How I managed to get up courage enough I really don’t know, but I took hold of her hand, asking,
“Could you love me?”
“Why not,” she replied, letting her calm, clear look rest upon me, but not for long.
A moment later I am kneeling before her, pressing my burning face against the fragrant muslin of her gown.
“But Severin—this isn’t right,” she cried.
But I take hold of her little foot, and press my lips upon it.
“You are getting worse and worse!” she cried. She tore herself free, and fled rapidly toward the house, the while her adorable slipper remained in my hand.
Is it an omen?
All day long I didn’t dare to go near her. Toward evening as I was sitting in my arbor her gay red head peered suddenly through the greenery of her balcony. “Why don’t you come up?” he called down impatiently.
I ran upstairs, and at the top lost courage again. I knocked very lightly. She didn’t say come-in, but opened the door herself, and stood on the threshold.
“Where is my slipper?”
“It is—I have—I want,” I stammered.
“Get it, and then we will have tea together, and chat.”
When I returned, she was engaged in making tea. I ceremoniously placed the slipper on the table, and stood in the corner like a child awaiting punishment.
I noticed that her brows were slightly contracted, and there was an expression of hardness and dominance about her lips which delighted me.
All of a sudden she broke out laughing.
“So—you are really in love—with me?”
“Yes, and I suffer more from it than you can imagine?”
“You suffer?” she laughed again.
I was revolted, mortified, annihilated, but all this was quite useless.
“Why?” she continued, “I like you, with all my heart.”
She gave me her hand, and looked at me in the friendliest fashion.
“And will you be my wife?”
Wanda looked at me—how did she look at me? I think first of all with surprise, and then with a tinge of irony.
“What has given you so much courage, all at once?”
“Courage?”
“Yes courage, to ask anyone to be your wife, and me in particular?” She lifted up the slipper. “Was it through a sudden friendship with this? But joking aside. Do you really wish to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Severin, that is a serious matter. I believe, you love me, and I care for you too, and what is more important each of us finds the other interesting. There is no danger that we would soon get bored, but, you know, I am a fickle person, and just for that reason I take marriage seriously. If I assume obligations, I want to be able to meet them. But I am afraid—no—it would hurt you.”
“Please be perfectly frank with me,” I replied.
“Well then honestly, I don’t believe I could love a man longer than—” She inclined her head gracefully to one side and mused.
“A year.”
“What do you imagine—a month perhaps.”
“Not even me?”
“Oh you—perhaps two.”
“Two months!” I exclaimed.
“Two months is very long.”
“You go beyond antiquity, madame.”
“You see, you cannot stand the truth.”
Wanda walked across the room and leaned back against the fireplace, watching me and resting one of her arms on the mantelpiece.
“What shall I do with you?” she began anew.
“Whatever you wish,” I replied with resignation, “whatever will give you pleasure.”
“How illogical!” she cried, “first you want to make me your wife, and then you offer yourself to me as something to toy with.”
“Wanda—I love you.”
“Now we are back to the place where we started. You love me, and want to make me your wife, but I don’t want to enter into a new marriage, because I doubt the permanence of both my and your feelings.”
“But if I am willing to take the risk with you?” I replied.
“But it also depends on whether I am willing to risk it with you,” she said quietly. “I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his inate strength, do you understand? And every man—I know this very well—as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman’s hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel. I’ve gotten to like you so much, however, that I’ll try it with you.”
I fell down at her feet.
“For heaven’s sake, here you are kneeling already,” she said mockingly. “You are making a good beginning.” When I had risen again she continued, “I will give you a year’s time to win me, to convince me that we are suited to each other, that we might live together. If you succeed, I will become your wife, and a wife, Severin, who will conscientiously and strictly perform all her duties. During this year we will live as though we were married—”
My blood rose to my head.
In her eyes too there was a sudden flame—
“We will live together,” she continued, “share our daily life, so that we may find out whether we are really fitted for each other. I grant you all the rights of a husband, of a lover, of a friend. Are you satisfied?”
“I suppose, I’ll have to be?”
“You don’t have to.”
“Well then, I want to—”
“Splendid. That is how a man speaks. Here is my hand.”
For ten days I have been with her every hour, except at night. All the time I was allowed to look into her eyes, hold her hands, listen to what she said, accompany her wherever she went.
My love seems to me like a deep, bottomless abyss, into which I subside deeper and deeper. There is nothing now which could save me from it.
This afternoon we were resting on the meadow at the foot of the Venus-statue. I plucked flowers and tossed them into her lap; she wound them into wreaths with which we adorned our goddess.
Suddenly Wanda looked at me so strangely that my senses became confused and passion swept over my head like a conflagration. Losing command over myself, I threw my arms about her and clung to her lips, and she—she drew me close to her heaving breast.
“Are you angry?” I then asked her.
“I am never angry at anything that is natural—” she replied, “but I am afraid you suffer.”
“Oh, I am suffering frightfully.”
“Poor friend!” she brushed my disordered hair back from my fore-head. “I hope it isn’t through any fault of mine.”
“No—” I replied,—“and yet my love for you has become a sort of madness. The thought that I might lose you, perhaps actually lose you, torments me day and night.”
“But you don’t yet possess me,” said Wanda, and again she looked at me with that vibrant, consuming expression, which had already once before carried me away. Then she rose, and with her small transparent hands placed a wreath of blue anemones upon the ringletted white head of Venus. Half against my will I threw my arm around her body.
“I can no longer live without you, oh wonderful woman,” I said. “Believe me, believe only this once, that this time it is not a phrase, not a thing of dreams. I feel deep down in my innermost soul, that my life belongs inseparably with yours. If you leave me, I shall perish, go to pieces.”
“That will hardly be necessary, for I love you,” she took hold of my chin, “you foolish man!”
“But you will be mine only under conditions, while I belong to you unconditionally—”
“That isn’t wise, Severin,” she replied almost with a start. “Don’t you know me yet, do you absolutely refuse to know me? I am good when I am treated seriously and reasonably, but when you abandon yourself too absolutely to me, I grow arrogant—”
“So be it, be arrogant, be despotic,” I cried in the fulness of exaltation, “only be mine, mine forever.” I lay at her feet, embracing her knees.
“Things will end badly, my friend,” she said soberly, without moving.
“It shall never end,” I cried excitedly, almost violently. “Only death shall part us. If you cannot be mine, all mine and for always, then I want to be your slave, serve you, suffer everything from you, if only you won’t drive me away.”
“Calm yourself,” she said, bending down and kissing my forehead, “I am really very fond of you, but your way is not the way to win and hold me.”
“I want to do everything, absolutely everything, that you want, only not to lose you,” I cried, “only not that, I cannot bear the thought.”
“Do get up.”
I obeyed.
“You are a strange person,” continued Wanda. “You wish to possess me at any price?”
“Yes, at any price.”
“But of what value, for instance, would that be?”—She pondered; a lurking uncanny expression entered her eyes—“If I no longer loved you, if I belonged to another.”
A shudder ran through me. I looked at her She stood firmly and confident before me, and her eyes disclosed a cold gleam.
“You see,” she continued, “the very thought frightens you.” A beautiful smile suddenly illuminated her face.
“I feel a perfect horror, when I imagine, that the woman I love and who has responded to my love could give herself to another regardless of me. But have I still a choice? If I love such a woman, even unto madness, shall I turn my back to her and lose everything for the sake of a bit of boastful strength; shall I send a bullet through my brains? I have two ideals of woman. If I cannot obtain the one that is noble and simple, the woman who will faithfully and truly share my life, well then I don’t want anything half-way or lukewarm. Then I would rather be subject to a woman without virtue, fidelity, or pity. Such a woman in her magnificent selfishness is likewise an ideal. If I am not permitted to enjoy the happiness of love, fully and wholly, I want to taste its pains and torments to the very dregs; I want to be maltreated and betrayed by the woman I love, and the more cruelly the better. This too is a luxury.”
“Have you lost your senses,” cried Wanda.
“I love you with all my soul,” I continued, “with all my senses, and your presence and personality are absolutely essential to me, if I am to go on living. Choose between my ideals. Do with me what you will, make of me your husband or your slave.”
“Very well,” said Wanda, contracting her small but strongly arched brows, “it seems to me it would be rather entertaining to have a man, who interests me and loves me, completely in my power; at least I shall not lack pastime. You were imprudent enough to leave the choice to me. Therefore I choose; I want you to be my slave, I shall make a plaything for myself out of you!”
“Oh, please do,” I cried half-shuddering, half-enraptured. “If the foundation of marriage depends on equality and agreement, it is likewise true that the greatest passions rise out of opposites. We are such opposites, almost enemies. That is why my love is part hate, part fear. In such a relation only one can be hammer and the other anvil. I wish to be the anvil. I cannot be happy when I look down upon the woman I love. I want to adore a woman, and this I can only do when she is cruel towards me.”
“But, Severin,” replied Wanda, almost angrily, “do you believe me capable of maltreating a man who loves me as you do, and whom I love?”
“Why not, if I adore you the more on this account? It is possible to love really only that which stands above us, a woman, who through her beauty, temperament, intelligence, and strength of will subjugates us and becomes a despot over us.”
“Then that which repels others, attracts you.”
“Yes. That is the strange part of me.”
“Perhaps, after all, there isn’t anything so very unique or strange in all your passions, for who doesn’t love beautiful furs? And everyone knows and feels how closely sexual love and cruelty are related.”
“But in my case all these elements are raised to their highest degree,” I replied.
“In other words, reason has little power over you, and you are by nature, soft, sensual, yielding.”
“Were the martyrs also soft and sensual by nature?”
“The martyrs?”
“On the contrary, they were supersensual men, who found enjoyment in suffering. They sought out the most frightful tortures, even death itself, as others seek joy, and as they were, so am I—supersensual.”
“Have a care that in being such, you do not become a martyr to love, the martyr of a woman.”
We are sitting on Wanda’s little balcony in the mellow fragrant summer night. A twofold roof is above us, first the green ceiling of climbing-plants, and then the vault of heaven sown with innumerable stars. The low wailing love-call of a cat rises from the park. I am sitting on footstool at the feet of my divinity, and am telling her of my childhood.
“And even then all these strange tendencies were distinctly marked in you?” asked Wanda.
“Of course, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have them. Even in my cradle, so mother has told me, I was supersensual. I scorned the healthy breast of my nurse, and had to be brought up on goats’ milk. As a little boy I was mysteriously shy before women, which really was only an expression of an inordinate interest in them. I was oppressed by the gray arches and half-darknesses of the church, and actually afraid of the glittering altars and images of the saints. Secretly, however, I sneaked as to a secret joy to a plaster-Venus which stood in my father’s little library. I kneeled down before her, and to her I said the prayers I had been taught—the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo.
“Once at night I left my bed to visit her. The sickle of the moon was my light and showed me the goddess in a pale-blue cold light. I prostrated myself before her and kissed her cold feet, as I had seen our peasants do when they kissed the feet of the dead Savior.
“An irresistible yearning seized me.
“I got up and embraced the beautiful cold body and kissed the cold lips. A deep shudder fell upon me and I fled, and later in a dream, it seemed to me, as if the goddess stood beside my bed, threatening me with up-raised arm.
“I was sent to school early and soon reached the gymnasium. I passionately grasped at everything which promised to make the world of antiquity accessible to me. Soon I was more familiar with the gods of Greece than with the religion of Jesus. I was with Paris when he gave the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to everything base, vulgar, unbeautiful.
“To me, the maturing youth, love for women seemed something especially base and unbeautiful, for it showed itself to me first in all its commonness. I avoided all contact with the fair sex; in short, I was supersensual to madness.
“When I was about fourteen my mother had a charming chamber-maid, young, attractive, with a figure just budding into womanhood. I was sitting one day studying my Tacitus and growing enthusiastic over the virtues of the ancient Teutons, while she was sweeping my room. Suddenly she stopped, bent down over me, in the meantime holding fast to the broom, and a pair of fresh, full, adorable lips touched mine. The kiss of the enamoured little cat ran through me like a shudder, but I raised up my Germania, like a shield against the temptress, and indignantly left the room.”
Wanda broke out in loud laughter. “It would, indeed, be hard to find another man like you, but continue.”
“There is another unforgetable incident belonging to that period,” I continued my story. “Countess Sobol, a distant aunt of mine, was visiting my parents. She was a beautiful majestic woman with an attractive smile. I, however, hated her, for she was regarded by the family as a sort of Messalina. My behavior toward her was as rude, malicious, and awkward as possible.
“One day my parents drove to the capital of the district. My aunt determined to take advantage of their absence, and to exercise judgment over me. She entered unexpectedly in her fur-lined kazabaika,2 followed by the cook, kitchen-maid, and the cat of a chamber-maid whom I had scorned. Without asking any questions, they seized me and bound me hand and foot, in spite of my violent resistance. Then my aunt, with an evil smile, rolled up her sleeve and began to whip me with a stout switch. She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last, notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for mercy. She then had me untied, but I had to get down on my knees and thank her for the punishment and kiss her hand.
“Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on my aunt became the most desirable woman on God’s earth.
“My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an ideal woman, if possible for the goddess of love herself.
“I went to the university at a very early age. It was in the capital where my aunt lived. My room looked at that time like Doctor Faustus’s. Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge closets stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a Jewish dealer on the Servanica;3 there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the heavens, skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It looked as though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the huge green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment.
“I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection: chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Kosmos, Casanova’s Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical, more supersensual. All the time a beautiful ideal woman hovered in my imagination. Every so and so often she appeared before me like a vision among my leather-bound books and dead bones, lying on a bed of roses, surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she appeared gowned like the Olympians with the stern white face of the plaster Venus; sometimes in braids of a rich brown, blue-eyes, in my aunt’s red velvet kazabaika, trimmed with ermine.
“One morning when she had again risen out of the golden mist of my imagination in all her smiling beauty, I went to see Countess Sobol, who received me in a friendly, even cordial manner. She gave me a kiss of welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was probably about forty years old, but like most well-preserved women of the world, still very attractive. She wore as always her fur-edged jacket. This time it was one of green velvet with brown marten. But nothing of the sternness which had so delighted me the other time was now discernable.
“On the contrary, there was so little of cruelty in her that without any more ado she let me adore her.
“Only too soon did she discover my supersensual folly and innocence, and it pleased her to make me happy. As for myself—I was as happy as a young god. What rapture for me to be allowed to lie before her on my knees, and to kiss her hands, those with which she had scourged me! What marvellous hands they were, of beautiful form, delicate, rounded, and white, with adorable dimples! I really was in love with her hands only. I played with them, let them submerge and emerge in the dark fur, held them against the light, and was unable to satiate my eyes with them.”
Wanda involuntarily looked at her hand; I noticed it, and had to smile.
“From the way in which the supersensual predominated in me in those days you can see that I was in love only with the cruel lashes I received from my aunt; and about two years later when I paid court to a young actress only in the roles she played. Still later I became the admirer of a respectable woman. She acted the part of irreproachable virtue, only in the end to betray me with a rich Jew. You see, it is because I was betrayed, sold, by a woman who feigned the strictest principles and the highest ideals, that I hate that sort of poetical, sentimental virtue so intensely. Give me rather a woman who is honest enough to say to me: I am a Pompadour, a Lucretia Borgia, and I am ready to adore her.”
Wanda rose and opened the window.
“You have a curious way of arousing one’s imagination, stimulating all one’s nerves, and making one’s pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.”
In the middle of the night there was a knock at my window; I got up, opened it, and was startled. Without stood “Venus in Furs,” just as she had appeared to me the first time.
“You have disturbed me with your stories; I have been tossing about in bed, and can’t go to sleep,” she said. “Now come and stay with me.”
“In a moment.”
As I entered Wanda was crouching by the fireplace where she had kindled a small fire.
“Autumn is coming,” she began, “the nights are really quite cold already. I am afraid you may not like it, but I can’t put off my furs until the room is sufficiently warm.”
“Not like it—you are joking—you know—” I threw my arm around her, and kissed her.
“Of course, I know, but why this great fondness for furs?”
“I was born with it,” I replied. “I already had it as a child. Furthermore furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures. This is due both to general and natural laws. It is a physical stimulus which sets you tingling, and no one can wholly escape it. Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth; at any rate, their effects upon the human organism are related. The torrid zone produces more passionate characters, a heated atmosphere stimulation. Likewise with electricity. This is the reason why the presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly-organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.”
“A woman wearing furs, then,” cried Wanda, “is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?”
“Certainly,” I replied. “That is my explanation of the symbolic meaning which fur has acquired as the attribute of power and beauty. Monarchs and the dominant higher nobility in former times used it in this sense for their costume, exclusively; great painters used it only for queenly beauty. The most beautiful frame, which Raphael could find for the divine forms of Fornarina and Titian for the roseate body of his beloved, was dark furs.”
“Thanks for the learned discourse on love,” said Wanda, “but you haven’t told me everything. You associate something entirely individual with furs.”
“Certainly,” I cried. “I have repeatedly told you that suffering has a peculiar attraction for me. Nothing can intensify my passion more than tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a beautiful woman. And I cannot imagine this woman, this strange ideal derived from an aesthetics of ugliness, this soul of Nero in the body of a Phryne, except in furs.”
“I understand,” Wanda interrupted. “It gives a dominant and imposing quality to a woman.”
“Not only that,” I continued. “You know I am supersensual. With me everything has its roots in the imagination, and thence it receives its nourishment. I was already pre-maturely developed and highly sensitive, when at about the age of ten the legends of the martyrs fell into my hands. I remember reading with a kind of horror, which really was rapture, of how they pined in prisons, were laid on the gridiron, pierced with arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild animals, nailed to the cross, and suffered the most horrible torment with a kind of joy. To suffer and endure cruel torture from then on seemed to me exquisite delight, especially when it was inflicted by a beautiful woman, for ever since I can remember all poetry and everything demonic was for me concentrated in woman. I literally carried the idea into a sort of cult.
“I felt there was something sacred in sex; in fact, it was the only sacred thing. In woman and her beauty I saw something divine, because the most important function of existence—the continuation of the species—is her vocation. To me woman represented a personification of nature, Isis, and man was her priest, her slave. In contrast to him she was cruel like nature herself who tosses aside whatever has served her purposes as soon as she no longer has need for it. To him her cruelties, even death itself, still were sensual raptures.
“I envied King Gunther whom the mighty Brunhilde fettered on the bridal night, and the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress had sewed in the skins of wolves to have him hunted like game. I envied the Knight Ctirad whom the daring Amazon Scharka craftily ensnared in a forest near Prague, and carried to her castle Divin, where, after having amused herself a while with him, she had him broken on the wheel—”
“Disgusting,” cried Wanda. “I almost wish you might fall into the hands of a woman of their savage race. In the wolf’s skin, under the teeth of the dogs, or upon the wheel, you would lose the taste for your kind of poetry.”
“Do you think so? I hardly do.”
“Have you actually lost your senses.”
“Possibly. But let me go on. I developed a perfect passion for reading stories in which the extremest cruelties were described. I loved especially to look at pictures and prints which represented them. All the sanguinary tyrants that ever occupied a throne; the inquisitors who had the heretics tortured, roasted, and butchered; all the woman whom the pages of history have recorded as lustful, beautiful, and violent women like Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolane, the Russian Czarinas of last century—all these I saw in furs or in robes bordered with ermine.”
“And so furs now rouse strange imaginings in you,” said Wanda, and simultaneously she began to drape her magnificent fur-cloak coquettishly about her, so that the dark shining sable played beautifully around her bust and arms. “Well, how do you feel now, half broken on the wheel?”
Her piercing green eyes rested on me with a peculiar mocking satisfaction. Overcome by desire, I flung myself down before her, and threw my arms about her.
“Yes—you have awakened my dearest dream,” I cried. “It has slept long enough.”
“And this is?” She put her hand on my neck.
I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me through her half-closed lids.
“To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship.”
“And who on that account maltreats you,” interrupted Wanda, laughing.
“Yes, who fetters me and whips me, treads me underfoot, the while she gives herself to another.”
“And who in her wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why not? This final tableau doesn’t please you so well?”
I looked at Wanda frightened.
“You surpass my dreams.”
“Yes, we women are inventive,” she said, “take heed, when you find your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you more cruelly than you anticipate.”
“I am afraid that I have already found my ideal!” I exclaimed, burying my burning face in her lap.
“Not I?” exclaimed Wanda, throwing off her furs and moving about the room laughing. She was still laughing as I went downstairs, and when I stood musing in the yard, I still heard her peals of laughter above.
“Do you really then expect me to embody your ideal?” Wanda asked archly, when we met in the park to-day.
At first I could find no answer. The most antagonistic emotions were battling within me. In the meantime she sat down on one of the stone-benches, and played with a flower.
“Well—am I?”
I kneeled down and seized her hands.
“Once more I beg you to become my wife, my true and loyal wife; if you can’t do that then become the embodiment of my ideal, absolutely, without reservation, without softness.”
“You know I am ready at the end of a year to give you my hand, if you prove to be the man I am seeking,” Wanda replied very seriously, “but I think you would be more grateful to me if through me you realized your imaginings. Well, which do you prefer?”
“I believe that everything my imagination has dreamed lies latent in your personality.”
“You are mistaken.”
“I believe,” I continued, “that you enjoy having a man wholly in your power, torturing him—”
“No, no,” she exclaimed quickly, “or perhaps—.” She pondered.
“I don’t understand myself any longer,” she continued, “but I have a confession to make to you. You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood. I am beginning to like the things you speak of. The enthusiasm with which you speak of a Pompadour, a Catherine the Second, and all the other selfish, frivolous, cruel women, carries me away and takes hold of my soul. It urges me on to become like those women, who in spite of their vileness were slavishly adored during their lifetime and still exert a miraculous power from their graves.
“You will end by making of me a despot in miniature, a domestic Pompadour.”
“Well then,” I said in agitation, “if all this is inherent in you, give way to this trend of your nature. Nothing half-way. If you can’t be a true and loyal wife to me, be a demon.”
I was nervous from loss of sleep, and the proximity of the beautiful woman affected me like a fever. I no longer recall what I said, but I remember that I kissed her feet, and finally raised her foot and put my neck under it. She withdrew it quickly, and rose almost angrily.
“If you love me, Severin,” she said quickly, and her voice sounded sharp and commanding, “never speak to me of those things again. Understand, never! Otherwise I might really—” She smiled and sat down again.
“I am entirely serious,” I exclaimed, half-raving. “I adore you so infinitely that I am willing to suffer anything from you, for the sake of spending my whole life near you.”
“Severin, once more I warn you.”
“Your warning is vain. Do with me what you will, as long as you don’t drive me away.”
“Severin,” replied Wanda, “I am a frivolous young woman; it is dangerous for you to put yourself so completely in my power. You will end by actually becoming a plaything to me. Who will give warrant that I shall not abuse your insane desire?”
“Your own nobility of character.”
“Power makes people over-bearing.”
“Be it,” I cried, “tread me underfoot.”
Wanda threw her arms around my neck, looked into my eyes, and shook her head.
“I am afraid I can’t, but I will try, for your sake, for I love you Severin, as I have loved no other man.”
To-day she suddenly took her hat and shawl, and I had to go shopping with her. She looked at whips, long whips with a short handle, the kind that are used on dogs.
“Are these satisfactory?” said the shopkeeper.
“No, they are much too small,” replied Wanda, with a side-glance at me. “I need a large—”
“For a bull-dog, I suppose?” opined the merchant.
“Yes,” she exclaimed, “of the kind that are used in Russia for intractable slaves.”
She looked further and finally selected a whip, at whose sight I felt a strange creeping sensation.
“Now good-by, Severin,” she said. “I have some other purchases to make, but you can’t go along.”
I left her and took a walk. On the way back I saw Wanda coming out at a furrier’s. She beckoned me.
“Consider it well,” she began in good spirits, “I have never made a secret of how deeply your serious, dreamy character has fascinated me. The idea of seeing this serious man wholly in my power, actually lying enraptured at my feet, of course, stimulates me—but will this attraction last? Woman loves a man; she maltreats a slave, and ends by kicking him aside.”
“Very well then, kick me aside,” I replied, “when you are tired of me. I want to be your slave.”
“Dangerous forces lie within me,” said Wanda, after we had gone a few steps further. “You awaken them, and not to your advantage. You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors. What would you say should I try my hand at them, and make you the first object of my experiments. I would be like Dionysius who had the inventor of the iron ox roasted within it in order to see whether his wails and groans really resembled the bellowing of an ox.
“Perhaps I am a female Dionysius?”
“Be it,” I exclaimed, “and my dreams will be fulfilled. I am yours for good or evil, choose. The destiny that lies concealed within my breast drives me on—demoniacally—relentlessly.”
“My Beloved,
I do not care to see you to-day or to-morrow, and not until evening the day after tomorrow, and then as my slave.
Your mistress
Wanda.”
“As my slave” was underlined. I read the note which I received early in the morning a second time. Then I had a donkey saddled, an animal symbolic of learned professors, and rode into the mountains. I wanted to numb my desire, my yearning, with the magnificent scenery of the Carpathians. I am back, tired, hungry, thirsty, and more in love than ever. I quickly change my clothes, and a few moments later knock at her door.
“Come in!”
I enter. She is standing in the center of the room, dressed in a gown of white satin which floods down her body like light. Over it she wears a scarlet kazabaika, richly edged with ermine. Upon her powdered, snowy hair is a little diadem of diamonds. She stands with her arms folded across her breast, and with her brows contracted.
“Wanda!” I run toward her, and am about to throw my arm about her to kiss her. She retreats a step, measuring me from top to bottom.
“Slave!”
“Mistress!” I kneel down, and kiss the hem of her garment.
“That is as it should be.”
“Oh, how beautiful you are.”
“Do I please you?” She stepped before the mirror, and looked at herself with proud satisfaction.
“I shall become mad!”
Her lower lip twitched derisively, and she looked at me mockingly from behind half-closed lids.
“Give me the whip.”
I looked about the room.
“No,” she exclaimed, “stay as you are, kneeling.” She went over to the fire-place, took the whip from the mantle-piece, and, watching me with a smile, let it hiss through the air; then she slowly rolled up the sleeve of her fur-jacket.
“Marvellous woman!” I exclaimed.
“Silence, slave!” She suddenly scowled, looked savage, and struck me with the whip. A moment later she threw her arm tenderly about me, and pityingly bent down to me. “Did I hurt you?” she asked, half-shyly, half-timidly.
“No,” I replied, “and even if you had, pains that come through you are a joy. Strike again, if it gives you pleasure.”
“But it doesn’t give me pleasure.”
Again I was seized with that strange intoxication.
“Whip me,” I begged, “whip me without mercy.”
Wanda swung the whip, and hit me twice. “Are you satisfied now?”
“No.”
“Seriously, no?”
“Whip me, I beg you, it is a joy to me.”
“Yes, because you know very well that it isn’t serious,” she replied, “because I haven’t the heart to hurt you. This brutal game goes against my grain. Were I really the woman who beats her slaves you would be horrified.”
“No, Wanda,” I replied, “I love you more than myself; I am devoted to you for death and life. In all seriousness, you can do with me whatever you will, whatever your caprice suggests.”
“Severin!”
“Tread me underfoot!” I exclaimed, and flung myself face to the floor before her.
“I hate all this play-acting,” said Wanda impatiently.
“Well, then maltreat me seriously.”
An uncanny pause.
“Severin, I warn you for the last time,” began Wanda.
“If you love me, be cruel towards me,” I pleaded with upraised eyes.
“If I love you,” repeated Wanda. “Very well!” She stepped back and looked at me with a sombre smile. “Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.” And at the same moment she gave me a kick.
“How do you like that, slave?”
Then she flourished the whip.
“Get up!”
I was about to rise.
“Not that way,” she commanded, “on your knees.”
I obeyed, and she began to apply the lash.
The blows fell rapidly and powerfully on my back and arms. Each one cut into my flesh and burned there, but the pains enraptured me. They came from her whom I adored, and for whom I was ready at any hour to lay down my life.
She stopped. “I am beginning to enjoy it,” she said, “but enough for to-day. I am beginning to feel a demonic curiosity to see how far your strength goes. I take a cruel joy in seeing you tremble and writhe beneath my whip, and in hearing your groans and wails; I want to go on whipping without pity until you beg for mercy, until you lose your senses. You have awakened dangerous elements in my being. But now get up.”
I seized her hand to press it to my lips.
“What impudence.”
She shoved me away with her foot.
“Out of my sight, slave!”
After having spent a feverish night filled with confused dreams, I awoke. Dawn was just beginning to break.
How much of what was hovering in my memory was true; what had I actually experienced and what had I dreamed? That I had been whipped was certain. I can still feel each blow, and count the burning red stripes on my body. And she whipped me. Now I know everything.
My dream has become truth. How does it make me feel? Am I disappointed in the realization of my dream?
No, I am merely somewhat tired, but her cruelty has enraptured me. Oh, how I love her, adore her! All this cannot express in the remotest way my feeling for her, my complete devotion to her. What happiness to be her slave!
She calls to me from her balcony. I hurry upstairs. She is standing on the threshold, holding out her hand in friendly fashion. “I am ashamed of myself,” she says, while I embrace her, and she hides her head against my breast.
“Why?”
“Please try to forget the ugly scene of yesterday,” she said with quivering voice, “I have fulfilled your mad wish, now let us be reasonable and happy and love each other, and in a year I will be your wife.”
“My mistress,” I exclaimed, “and I your slave!”
“Not another word of slavery, cruelty, or the whip,” interrupted Wanda. “I shall not grant you any of those favors, none except wearing my fur-jacket; come and help me into it.”
The little bronze clock on which stood a cupid who had just shot his bolt struck midnight.
I rose, and wanted to leave.
Wanda said nothing, but embraced me and drew me back on the ottoman. She began to kiss me anew, and this silent language was so comprehensible, so convincing—
And it told me more than I dared to understand.
A languid abandonment pervaded Wanda’s entire being. What a voluptuous softness there was in the gloaming of her half-closed eyes, in the red flood of her hair which shimmered faintly under the white powder, in the red and white satin which crackled about her with every movement, in the swelling ermine of the kazabaika in which she carelessly nestled.
“Please,” I stammered, “but you will be angry with me.”
“Do with me what you will,” she whispered.
“Well, then whip me, or I shall go mad.”
“Haven’t I forbidden you,” said Wanda sternly, “but you are incorrigible.”
“Oh, I am so terribly in love.” I had sunken on my knees, and was burying my glowing face in her lap.
“I really believe,” said Wanda thoughtfully, “that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.”
“Well then, make me sane,” I murmured. My hands were running through her hair and playing tremblingly with the gleaming fur, which rose and fell like a moonlit wave upon her heaving bosom, and drove all my senses into confusion.
And I kissed her. No, she kissed me savagely, pitilessly, as if she wanted to slay me with her kisses. I was as in a delirium, and had long since lost my reason, but now I, too, was breathless. I sought to free myself.
“What is the matter?” asked Wanda.
“I am suffering agonies.”
“You are suffering—” she broke out into a loud amused laughter.
“You laugh!” I moaned, “have you no idea—”
She was serious all of a sudden. She raised my head in her hands, and with a violent gesture drew me to her breast.
“Wanda,” I stammered.
“Of course, you enjoy suffering,” she said, and laughed again, “but wait, I’ll bring you to your senses.”
“No, I will no longer ask,” I exclaimed, “whether you want to belong to me for always or for only a brief moment of intoxication. I want to drain my happiness to the full. You are mine now, and I would rather lose you than never to have had you.”
“Now you are sensible,” she said. She kissed me again with her murderous lips. I tore the ermine apart and the covering of lace and her naked breast surged against mine.
Then my senses left me—
The first thing I remember is the moment when I saw blood dripping from my hand, and she asked apathetically: “Did you scratch me?”
“No, I believe, I have bitten you.”
It is strange how every relation in life assumes a different face as soon as a new person enters.
We spent marvellous days together; we visited the mountains and lakes, we read together, and I completed Wanda’s portrait. And how we loved one another, how beautiful her smiling face was!
Then a friend of hers arrived, a divorced woman somewhat older, more experienced, and less scrupulous than Wanda. Her influence is already making itself felt in every direction.
Wanda wrinkles her brows, and displays a certain impatience with me.
Has she ceased loving me?
For almost a fortnight this unbearable restraint has lain upon us. Her friend lives with her, and we are never alone. A circle of men surrounds the young women. With my seriousness and melancholy I am playing an absurd role as lover. Wanda treats me like a stranger.
To-day, while out walking, she staid behind with me. I saw that this was done intentionally, and I rejoiced. But what did she tell me?
“My friend doesn’t understand how I can love you. She doesn’t think you either handsome or particularly attractive otherwise. She is telling me from morning till night about the glamour of the frivolous life in the capital, hinting at the advantages to which I could lay claim, the large parties which I would find there, and the distinguished and handsome admirers which I would attract. But of what use is all this, since it happens that I love you.”
For a moment I lost my breath, then I said: “I have no wish to stand in the way of your happiness, Wanda. Do not consider me.” Then I raised my hat, and let her go ahead. She looked at me surprised, but did not answer a syllable.
When by chance I happened to be close to her on the way back, she secretly pressed my hand. Her glance was so radiant, so full of promised happiness, that in a moment all the torments of these days were forgotten and all their wounds healed.
I now am aware again of how much I love her.
“My friend has complained about you,” said Wanda to-day.
“Perhaps she feels that I despise her.”
“But why do you despise her, you foolish young man?” exclaimed Wanda, pulling my ears with both hands.
“Because she is a hypocrite,” I said. “I respect only a woman who is actually virtuous, or who openly lives for pleasure’s sake.”
“Like me, for instance,” replied Wanda jestingly, “but you see, child, a woman can only do that in the rarest cases. She can neither be as gaily sensual, nor as spiritually free as man; her state is always a mixture of the sensual and spiritual. Her heart desires to enchain man permanently, while she herself is ever subject to the desire for change. The result is a conflict, and thus usually against her wishes lies and deception enter into her actions and personality and corrupt her character.”
“Certainly that is true,” I said. “The transcendental character with which woman wants to stamp love leads her to deception.”
“But the world likewise demands it,” Wanda interrupted. “Look at this woman. She has a husband and a lover in Lemberg and has found a new admirer here. She deceives all three and yet is honored by all and respected by the world.”
“I don’t care,” I exclaimed, “but she is to leave you alone; she treats you like an article of commerce.”
“Why not?” the beautiful woman interrupted vivaciously. “Every woman has the instinct or desire to draw advantage out of her attractions, and much is to be said for giving one’s self without love or pleasure because if you do it in cold blood, you can reap profit to best advantage.”
“Wanda, what are you saying?”
“Why not?” she said, “and take note of what I am about to say to you. Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in woman’s nature than you imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman’s character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the most divine, of the filthiest as well as of the purest, thoughts, emotions, and actions. In spite of all the advances of civilization, woman has remained as she came out of the hand of nature. She has the nature of a savage, who is faithful or faithless, magnanimous or cruel, according to the impulse that dominates at the moment. Throughout history it has always been a serious deep culture which has produced moral character. Man even when he is selfish or evil always follows principles, woman never follows anything but impulses. Don’t ever forget that, and never feel secure with the woman you love.”
Her friend has left. At last an evening alone with her again. It seems as if Wanda had saved up all the love, which had been kept from her, for this superlative evening; never had she been so kind, so near, so full of tenderness.
What happiness to cling to her lips, and to die away in her arms! In a state of relaxation and wholly mine, her head rests against my breast, and with drunken rapture our eyes seek each other.
I cannot yet believe, comprehend, that this woman is mine, wholly mine.
“She is right on one point,” Wanda began, without moving, without opening her eyes, as if she were asleep.
“Who?”
She remained silent.
“Your friend?”
She nodded. “Yes, she is right, you are not a man, you are a dreamer, a charming cavalier, and you certainly would be a priceless slave, but I cannot imagine you as husband.”
I was frightened.
“What is the matter? You are trembling?”
“I tremble at the thought of how easily I might lose you,” I replied.
“Are you made less happy now, because of this?” she replied. “Does it rob you of any of your joys, that I have belonged to another before I did to you, that others after you will possess me, and would you enjoy less if another were made happy simultaneously with you?”
“Wanda!”
“You see,” she continued, “that would be a way out. You won’t ever lose me then. I care deeply for you and intellectually we are harmonious, and I should like to live with you always, if in addition to you I might have—”
“What an idea,” I cried. “You fill me with a sort of horror.”
“Do you love me any the less?”
“On the contrary.”
Wanda had raised herself on her left arm. “I believe,” she said, “that to hold a man permanently, it is vitally important not to be faithful to him. What honest woman has ever been as devotedly loved as a hetaira?”
“There is a painful stimulus in the unfaithfulness of a beloved woman. It is the highest kind of ecstacy.”
“For you, too?” Wanda asked quickly.
“For me, too.”
“And if I should give you that pleasure,” Wanda exclaimed mockingly.
“I shall suffer terrible agonies, but I shall adore you the more,” I replied. “But you would never deceive me, you would have the daemonic greatness of saying to me: I shall love no one but you, but I shall make happy whoever pleases me.”
Wanda shook her head. “I don’t like deception, I am honest, but what man exists who can support the burden of truth. Were I say to you: this serene, sensual life, this paganism is my ideal, would you be strong enough to bear it?”
“Certainly. I could endure anything so as not to lose you. I feel how little I really mean to you.”
“But Severin—”
“But it is so,” said I, “and just for that reason—”
“For that reason you would—” she smiled roguishly—“have I guessed it?”
“Be your slave!” I exclaimed. “Be your unrestricted property, without a will of my own, of which you could dispose as you wished, and which would therefore never be a burden to you. While you drink life at its fullness, while surrounded by luxury, you enjoy the serene happiness and Olympian love, I want to be your servant, put on and take off your shoes.”
“You really aren’t so far from wrong,” replied Wanda, “for only as my slave could you endure my loving others. Furthermore the freedom of enjoyment of the ancient world is unthinkable without slavery. It must give one a feeling of like unto a god to see a man kneel before one and tremble. I want a slave, do you hear, Severin?”
“Am I not your slave?”
“Then listen to me,” said Wanda excitedly, seizing my hand. “I want to be yours, as long as I love you.”
“A month?”
“Perhaps, even two.”
“And then?”
“Then you become my slave.”
“And you?”
“I? Why do you ask? I am a goddess and sometimes I descend from my Olympian heights to you, softly, very softly, and secretly.
“But what does all this mean,” said Wanda, resting her head in both hands with her gaze lost in the distance, “a golden fancy which never can become true.” An uncanny brooding melancholy seemed shed over her entire being; I have never seen her like that.
“Why unachievable?” I began.
“Because slavery doesn’t exist any longer.”
“Then we will go to a country where it still exists, to the Orient, to Turkey,” I said eagerly.
“You would—Severin—in all seriousness,” Wanda replied. Her eyes burned.
“Yes, in all seriousness, I want to be your slave,” I continued. “I want your power over me to be sanctified by law; I want my life to be in your hands, I want nothing that could protect or save me from you. Oh, what a voluptuous joy when once I feel myself entirely dependent upon your absolute will, your whim, at your beck and call. And then what happiness, when at some time you deign to be gracious, and the slave may kiss the lips which mean life and death to him.” I knelt down, and leaned my burning forehead against her knee.
“You are talking as in a fever,” said Wanda agitatedly, “and you really love me so endlessly.” She held me to her breast, and covered me with kisses.
“You really want it?”
“I swear to you now by God and my honor, that I shall be your slave, wherever and whenever you wish it, as soon as you command,” I exclaimed, hardly master of myself.
“And if I take you at your word?” said Wanda.
“Please do!”
“All this appeals to me,” she said then. “It is different from anything else—to know that a man who worships me, and whom I love with all my heart, is so wholly mine, dependent on my will and caprice, my possession and slave, while I—”
She looked strangely at me.
“If I should become frightfully frivolous you are to blame,” she continued. “It almost seems as if you were afraid of me already, but you have sworn.”
“And I shall keep my oath.”
“I shall see to that,” she replied. “I am beginning to enjoy it, and, heaven help me, we won’t stick to fancies now. You shall become my slave, and I—I shall try to be Venus in Furs.”
I thought that at last I knew this woman, understood her, and now I see I have to begin at the very beginning again. Only a little while ago her reaction to my dreams was violently hostile, and now she tries to carry them into execution with the soberest seriousness.
She has drawn up a contract according to which I give my word of honor and agree under oath to be her slave, as long as she wishes.
With her arm around my neck she reads this, unprecedented, incredible document to me. The end of each sentence she punctuates with a kiss.
“But all the obligations in the contract are on my side,” I said, teasing her.
“Of course,” she replied with great seriousness, “you cease to be my lover, and consequently I am released from all duties and obligations towards you. You will have to look upon my favors as pure benevolence. You no longer have any rights, and no longer can lay claim to any. There can be no limit to my power over you. Remember, that you won’t be much better than a dog, or some inanimate object. You will be mine, my plaything, which I can break to pieces, whenever I want an hour’s amusement. You are nothing, I am everything. Do you understand?” She laughed and kissed me again, and yet a sort of cold shiver ran through me.
“Won’t you allow me a few conditions—” I began.
“Conditions?” She contracted her forehead. “Ah! You are afraid already, or perhaps you regret, but it is too late now. You have sworn, I have your word of honor. But let me hear them.”
“First of all I should like to have it included in our contract, that you will never completely leave me, and then that you will never give me over to the mercies of any of your admirers—”
“But Severin,” exclaimed Wanda with her voice full of emotion and with tears in her eyes, “how can you imagine that I—and you, a man who loves me so absolutely, who puts himself so entirely in my power—” She halted.
“No, no!” I said, covering her hands with kisses. “I don’t fear anything from you that might dishonor me. Forgive me the ugly thought.”
Wanda smiled happily, leaned her cheek against mine, and seemed to reflect.
“You have forgotten something,” she whispered coquettishly, “the most important thing!”
“A condition?”
“Yes, that I must always wear my furs,” exclaimed Wanda. “But I promise you I’ll do that anyhow because they give me a despotic feeling. And I shall be very cruel to you, do you understand?”
“Shall I sign the contract?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Wanda. “I shall first add your conditions, and the actual signing won’t occur until the proper time and place.”
“In Constantinople?”
“No. I have thought things over. What special value would there be in owning a slave where everyone owns slaves. What I want is to have a slave, I alone, here in our civilized sober, Philistine world, and a slave who submits helplessly to my power solely on account of my beauty and personality, not because of law, of property rights, or compulsions. This attracts me. But at any rate we will go to a country where we are not known and where you can appear before the world as my servant without embarrassment. Perhaps to Italy, to Rome or Naples.”
We were sitting on Wanda’s ottoman. She wore her ermine jacket, her hair was loose and fell like a lion’s mane down her back. She clung to my lips, drawing my soul from my body. My head whirled, my blood began to seethe, my heart beat violently against hers.
“I want to be absolutely in your power, Wanda,” I exclaimed suddenly, seized by that frenzy of passion when I can scarcely think clearly or decide freely. “I want to put myself absolutely at your mercy for good or evil without any condition, without any limit to your power.”
While saying this I had slipped from the ottoman, and lay at her feet looking up at her with drunken eyes.
“How beautiful you now are,” she exclaimed, “your eyes half-broken in ecstacy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You have the eye of a martyr.”
Sometimes, nevertheless, I have an uneasy feeling about placing myself so absolutely, so unconditionally into a woman’s hands. Suppose she did abuse my passion, her power?
Well, then I would experience what has occupied my imagination since my childhood, what has always given me the feeling of seductive terror. A foolish apprehension! It will be a wanton game she will play with me, nothing more. She loves me, and she is good, a noble personality, incapable of a breach of faith. But it lies in her hands —if she wants to she can. What a temptation in this doubt, this fear!
Now I understand Manon l’Escault and the poor chevalier, who, even in the pillory, while she was another man’s mistress, still adored her.
Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us.
It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and ask not whither?
A Russian prince made his first appearance today on the promenade. He aroused general interest on account of his athletic figure, magnificent face, and splendid bearing. The women particularly gaped at him as though he were a wild animal, but he went his way gloomily without paying attention to any one. He was accompanied by two servants, one a negro, completely dressed in red satin, and the other a Circassian in his full gleaming uniform. Suddenly he saw Wanda, and fixed his cold piercing look upon her; he even turned his head after her, and when she had passed, he stood still and followed her with his eyes.
And she—she veritably devoured him with her radiant green eyes—and did everything possible to meet him again.
The cunning coquetry with which she walked, moved, and looked at him, almost stifled me. On the way home I remarked about it. She knit her brows.
“What do you want,” she said, “the prince is a man whom I might like, who even dazzles me, and I am free. I can do what I please—”
“Don’t you love me any longer—” I stammered, frightened.
“I love only you,” she replied, “but I shall have the prince pay court to me.”
“Wanda!”
“Aren’t you my slave?” she said calmly. “Am I not Venus, the cruel northern Venus in Furs?”
I was silent. I felt literally crushed by her words; her cold look entered my heart like a dagger.
“You will find out immediately the prince’s name, residence, and circumstances,” she continued. “Do you understand?”
“But—”
“No argument, obey!” exclaimed Wanda, more sternly than I would have thought possible for her, “and don’t dare to enter my sight until you can answer my questions.”
It was not till afternoon that I could obtain the desired information for Wanda. She let me stand before her like a servant, while she leaned back in her arm-chair and listened to me, smiling. Then she nodded; she seemed to be satisfied.
“Bring me my footstool,” she commanded shortly.
I obeyed, and after having put it before her and having put her feet on it, I remained kneeling.
“How will this end?” I asked sadly after a short pause.
She broke into playful laughter. “Why things haven’t even begun yet.”
“You are more heartless than I imagined,” I replied, hurt.
“Severin,” Wanda began earnestly. “I haven’t done anything yet, not the slightest thing, and you are already calling me heartless. What will happen when I begin to carry your dreams to their realization, when I shall lead a gay, free life and have a circle of admirers about me, when I shall actually fulfil your ideal, tread you underfoot and apply the lash?”
“You take my dreams too seriously.”
“Too seriously? I can’t stop at make-believe, when once I begin,” she replied. “You know I hate all play-acting and comedy. You have wished it. Was it my idea or yours? Did I persuade you or did you inflame my imagination? I am taking things seriously now.”
“Wanda,” I replied, caressingly, “listen quietly to me. We love each other infinitely, we are very happy, will you sacrifice our entire future to a whim?”
“It is no longer a whim,” she exclaimed.
“What is it?” I asked frightened.
“Something that was probably latent in me,” she said quietly and thoughtfully. “Perhaps it would never have come to light, if you had not called it to life, and made it grow. Now that it has become a powerful impulse, fills my whole being, now that I enjoy it, now that I cannot and do not want to do otherwise, now you want to back out— you—are you a man?”
“Dear, sweet Wanda!” I began to caress her, kiss her.
“Don’t—you are not a man—”
“And you,” I flared up.
“I am stubborn,” she said, “you know that. I haven’t a strong imagination, and like you I am weak in execution. But when I make up my mind to do something, I carry it through, and the more certainly, the more opposition I meet. Leave me alone!”
She pushed me away, and got up.
“Wanda!” I likewise rose, and stood facing her.
“Now you know what I am,” she continued. “Once more I warn you. You still have the choice. I am not compelling you to be my slave.”
“Wanda,” I replied with emotion and tears filling my eyes, “don’t you know how I love you?”
Her lips quivered contemptuously.
“You are mistaken, you make yourself out worse than you are; you are good and noble by nature—”
“What do you know about my nature,” she interrupted vehemently, “you will get to know me as I am.”
“Wanda!”
“Decide, will you submit, unconditionally?”
“And if I say no.”
“Then—”
She stepped close up to me, cold and contemptuous. As she stood before me now, the arms folded across her breast, with an evil smile about her lips, she was in fact the despotic woman of my dreams. Her expression seemed hard, and nothing lay in her eyes that promised kindness or mercy.
“Well—” she said at last.
“You are angry,” I cried, “you will punish me.”
“Oh no!” she replied, “I shall let you go. You are free. I am not holding you.”
“Wanda—I, who love you so—”
“Yes, you, my dear sir, you who adore me,” she exclaimed contemptuously, “but who are a coward, a liar, and a breaker of promises. Leave me instantly—”
“Wanda I—”
“Wretch!”
My blood rose in my heart. I threw myself down at her feet and began to cry.
“Tears, too!” She began to laugh. Oh, this laughter was frightful. “Leave me—I don’t want to see you again.”
“Oh my God!” I cried, beside myself. “I will do whatever you command, be your slave, a mere object with which you can do what you will—only don’t send me away—I can’t bear it—I cannot live without you.” I embraced her knees, and covered her hand with kisses.
“Yes, you must be a slave, and feel the lash, for you are not a man,” she said calmly. She said this to me with perfect composure, not angrily, not even excitedly, and it was what hurt most. “Now I know you, your dog-like nature, that adores where it is kicked, and the more, the more it is maltreated. Now I know you, and now you shall come to know me.”
She walked up and down with long strides, while I remained crushed on my knees; my head was hanging supine, tears flowed from my eyes.
“Come here,” Wanda commanded harshly, sitting down on the ottoman. I obeyed her command, and sat down beside her. She looked at me sombrely, and then a light suddenly seemed to illuminate the interior of her eye. Smiling, she drew me toward her breast, and began to kiss the tears out of my eyes.
The odd part of my situation is that I am like the bear in Lily’s park. I can escape and don’t want to; I am ready to endure everything as soon as she threatens to set me free.
If only she would use the whip again. There is something uncanny in the kindness with which she treats me. I seem like a little captive mouse with which a beautiful cat prettily plays. She is ready at any moment to tear it to pieces, and my heart of a mouse threatens to burst.
What are her intentions? What does she purpose to do with me?
It seems she has completely forgotten the contract, my slavehood. Or was it actually only stubbornness? And she gave up her whole plan as soon as I no longer opposed her and submitted to her imperial whim?
How kind she is to me, how tender, how loving! We are spending marvellously happy days.
To-day she had me read to her the scene between Faust and Mephistopheles, in which the latter appears as a wandering scholar. Her glance hung on me with strange pleasure.
“I don’t understand,” she said when I had finished, “how a man who can read such great and beautiful thoughts with such expression, and interpret them so clearly, concisely, and intelligently, can at the same time be such a visionary and supersensual ninny as you are.”
“Were you pleased,” said I, and kissed her forehead.
She gently stroked my brow. “I love you, Severin,” she whispered. “I don’t believe I could ever love any one more than you. Let us be sensible, what do you say?”
Instead of replying I folded her in my arms; a deep inward, yet vaguely sad happiness filled my breast, my eyes grew moist, and a tear fell upon her hand.
“How can you cry!” she exclaimed, “you are a child!”
On a pleasure drive we met the Russian prince in his carriage. He seemed to be unpleasantly surprised to see me by Wanda’s side, and looked as if he wanted to pierce her through and through with his electric gray eyes. She, however, did not seem to notice him. I felt at that moment like kneeling down before her and kissing her feet. She let her glance glide over him indifferently as though he were an inanimate object, a tree, for instance, and turned to me with her gracious smile.
When I said good-night to her to-day she seemed suddenly unaccountably distracted and moody. What was occupying her?
“I am sorry you are going,” she said when I was already standing on the threshold.
“It is entirely in your hands to shorten the hard period of my trial, to cease tormenting me—” I pleaded.
“Do you imagine that this compulsion isn’t a torment for me, too,” Wanda interjected.
“Then end it,” I exclaimed, embracing her, “be my wife.”
“Never, Severin,” she said gently, but with great firmness.
“What do you mean?”
I was frightened in my innermost soul.
“You are not the man for me.”
I looked at her, and slowly withdrew my arm which was still about her waist; then I left the room, and she—she did not call me back.
A sleepless night; I made countless decisions, only to toss them aside again. In the morning I wrote her a letter in which I declared our relationship dissolved. My hand trembled when I put on the seal, and I burned my fingers.
As I went upstairs to hand it to the maid, my knees threatened to give way.
The door opened, and Wanda thrust forth her head full of curling-papers.
“I haven’t had my hair dressed yet,” she said, smiling. “What have you there?”
“A letter—”
“For me?”
I nodded.
“Ah, you want to break with me,” she exclaimed, mockingly.
“Didn’t you tell me yesterday that I wasn’t the man for you?”
“I repeat it now!”
“Very well, then.” My whole body was trembling, my voice failed me, and I handed her the letter.
“Keep it,” she said, measuring me coldly. “You forget that is no longer a question as to whether you satisfy me as a man; as a slave you will doubtless do well enough.”
“Madame!” I exclaimed, aghast.
“That is what you will call me in the future,” replied Wanda, throwing back her head with a movement of unutterable contempt. “Put your affairs in order within the next twenty-four hours. The day after to-morrow I shall start for Italy, and you will accompany me as my servant.”
“Wanda—”
“I forbid any sort of familiarity,” she said, cutting my words short, “likewise you are not to come in unless I call or ring for you, and you are not to speak to me until you are spoken to. From now on your name is no longer Severin, but Gregor.”
I trembled with rage, and yet, unfortunately, I cannot deny it, I also felt a strange pleasure and stimulation.
“But, madame, you know my circumstances,” I began in my confusion. “I am dependent on my father, and I doubt whether he will give me the large sum of money needed for this journey—”
“That means you have no money, Gregor,” said Wanda, delightedly, “so much the better, you are then entirely dependent on me, and in fact my slave.”
“You don’t consider,” I tried to object, “that as man of honor it is impossible for me—”
“I have indeed considered it,” she replied almost with a tone of command. “As a man of honor you must keep your oath and redeem your promise to follow me as slave whithersoever I demand and to obey whatever I command. Now leave me, Gregor!”
I turned toward the door.
“Not yet—you may first kiss my hand.” She held it out to me with a certain proud indifference, and I the dilettante, the donkey, the miserable slave pressed it with intense tenderness against my lips which were dry and hot with excitement.
There was another gracious nod of the head.
Then I was dismissed.
Though it was late in the evening my light was still lit, and a fire was burning in the large green stove. There were still many things among my letters and documents to be put in order. Autumn, as is usually the case with us, had fallen with all its power.
Suddenly she knocked at my window with the handle of her whip.
I opened and saw her standing outside in her ermine-lined jacket and in a high round Cossack cap of ermine of the kind which the great Catherine favored.
“Are you ready, Gregor?” she asked darkly.
“Not yet, mistress,” I replied.
“I like that word,” she said then, “you are always to call me mistress, do you understand? We leave here to-morrow morning at nine o’clock. As far as the district capital you will be my companion and friend, but from the moment that we enter the railway-coach you are my slave, my servant. Now close the window, and open the door.”
After I had done as she had demanded, and after she had entered, she asked, contracting her brows ironically, “well, how do you like me.”
“Wanda, you—”
“Who gave you permission?” She gave me a blow with the whip.
“You are very beautiful, mistress.”
Wanda smiled and sat down in the arm-chair. “Kneel down—here beside my chair.”
I obeyed.
“Kiss my hand.”
I seized her small cold hand and kissed it.
“And the mouth—”
In a surge of passion I threw my arms around the beautiful cruel woman, and covered her face, arms, and breast with glowing kisses. She returned them with equal fervor—the eyelids closed as in a dream. It was after midnight when she left.
At nine o’clock sharp in the morning everything was ready for departure, as she had ordered. We left the little Carpathian health-resort in a comfortable light carriage. The most interesting drama of my life had reached a point of development whose denouement it was then impossible to foretell.
So far everything went well. I sat beside Wanda, and she chatted very graciously and intelligently with me, as with a good friend, concerning Italy, Pisemski’s new novel, and Wagner’s music. She wore a sort of Amazonesque travelling-dress of black cloth with a short jacket of the same material, set with dark fur. It fitted closely and showed her figure to best advantage. Over it she wore dark furs. Her hair wound into an antique knot, lay beneath a small dark fur-hat from which a black veil hung. Wanda was in very good humor; she fed me candies, played with my hair, loosened my neck cloth and made a pretty cockade of it; she covered my knees with her furs and stealthily pressed the fingers of my hand. When our Jewish driver persistently went on nodding to himself, she even gave me a kiss, and her cold lips had the fresh frosty fragrance of a young autumnal rose, which blossoms alone amid bare stalks and yellow leaves and upon whose calyx the first frost has hung tiny diamonds of ice.
We are at the district capital. We get out at the railway station. Wanda throws off her furs and places them over my arm, and goes to secure the tickets.
When she returns she has completely changed.
“Here is your ticket, Gregor,” she says in a tone which supercilious ladies use to their servants.
“A third-class ticket,” I reply with comic horror.
“Of course,” she continues, “but now be careful. You won’t get on until I am settled in my compartment and don’t need you any longer. At each station you will hurry to my car and ask for my orders. Don’t forget. And now give me my furs.”
After I had helped her into them, humbly like a slave, she went to find an empty first-class coupe. I followed. Supporting herself on my shoulder, she got on and I wrapped her feet in bear-skins and placed them on the warming bottle.
Then she nodded to me, and dismissed me. I slowly ascended a third-class carriage, which was filled with abominable tobacco-smoke that seemed like the fogs of Acheron at the entrance to Hades. I now had the leisure to muse about the riddle of human existence, and about its greatest riddle of all—woman.
Whenever the train stops, I jump off, run to her carriage, and with drawn cap await her orders. She wants coffee and then a glass of water, at another time a bowl of warm water to wash her hands, and thus it goes on. She lets several men who have entered her compartment pay court to her. I am dying of jealousy and have to leap about like an antelope so as to secure what she wants quickly and not miss the train.
In this way the night passes. I haven’t had time to eat a mouthful and I can’t sleep, I have to breathe the same oniony air with Polish peasants, Jewish peddlers, and common soldiers.
When I mount the steps of her coupe, she is lying stretched out on cushions in her comfortable furs, covered up with the skins of animals. She is like an oriental despot, and the men sit like Indian deities, straight upright against the walls and scarcely dare to breathe.
She stops over in Vienna for a day to go shopping, and particularly to buy series of luxurious gowns. She continues to treat me as her servant. I follow her at the respectful distance of ten paces. She hands me her packages without so much as even deigning a kind look, and laden down like a donkey I pant along behind.
Before leaving she takes all my clothes and gives them to the hotel waiters. I am ordered to put on her livery. It is a Cracovian costume in her colors, light-blue with red facings, and red quadrangular cap, ornamented with peacock-feathers. The costume is rather becoming to me.
The silver buttons bear her coat of arms. I have the feeling of having been sold or of having bonded myself to the devil. My fair demon leads me from Vienna to Florence. Instead of linen-garbed Mazovians and greasy-haired Jews, my companions now are curly-haired Contadini, a magnificent sergeant of the first Italian Grenadiers, and a poor German painter. The tobacco smoke no longer smells of onions, but of salami and cheese.
Night has fallen again. I lie on my wooden bed as on a rack; my arms and legs seem broken. But there nevertheless is an element of poetry in the affair. The stars sparkle round about, the Italian sergeant has a face like Apollo Belvedere, and the German painter sings a lovely German song.
“Now that all the shadows gather
And endless stars grow light,
Deep yearning on me falls
And softly fills the night.”
“Through the sea of dreams
Sailing without cease,
Sailing goes my soul
In thine to find release.”
And I am thinking of the beautiful woman who is sleeping in regal comfort among her soft furs.
Florence! Crowds, cries, importunate porters and cab-drivers. Wanda chooses a carriage, and dismisses the porters.
“What have I a servant for,” she says, “Gregor—here is the ticket—get the luggage.”
She wraps herself in her furs and sits quietly in the carriage while I drag the heavy trunks hither, one after another. I break down for a moment under the last one; a good-natured carabiniere with an intelligent face comes to my assistance. She laughs.
“It must be heavy,” said she, “all my furs are in it.”
I get up on the driver’s seat, wiping drops of perspiration from my brow. She gives the name of the hotel, and the driver urges on his horse. In a few minutes we halt at the brilliantly illuminated entrance.
“Have you any rooms?” she asks the portier.
“Yes, madame.”
“Two for me, one for my servant, all with stoves.”
“Two first-class rooms for you, madame, both with stoves,” replied the waiter who had hastily come up, “and one without heat for your servant.”
She looked at them, and then abruptly said: “they are satisfactory, have fires built at once; my servant can sleep in the unheated room.”
I merely looked at her.
“Bring up the trunks, Gregor,” she commands, paying no attention to my looks. “In the meantime I’ll be dressing, and then will go down to the dining-room, and you can eat something for supper.”
As she goes into the adjoining room, I drag the trunks upstairs and help the waiter build a fire in her bed-room. He tries to question me in bad French about my employer. With a brief glance I see the blazing fire, the fragrant white poster-bed, and the rugs which cover the floor. Tired and hungry I then descend the stairs, and ask for something to eat. A good-natured waiter, who used to be in the Austrian army and takes all sorts of pains to entertain me in German, shows me the dining-room and waits on me. I have just had the first fresh drink in thirty-six hours and the first bite of warm food on my fork, when she enters.
I rise.
“What do you mean by taking me into a dining-room in which my servant is eating,” she snaps at the waiter, flaring with anger. She turns around and leaves.
Meanwhile I thank heaven that I am permitted to go on eating. Later I climb the four flights upstairs to my room. My small trunk is already there, and a miserable little oil-lamp is burning. It is a narrow room without fire-place, without a window, but with a small air-hole. If it weren’t so beastly cold, it would remind me of one of the Venetian piombi.4 Involuntarily I have to laugh out aloud, so that it re-echoes, and I am startled by my own laughter.
Suddenly the door is pulled open and the waiter with a theatrical Italian gesture calls “You are to come down to madame, at once.” I pick up my cap, stumble down the first few steps, but finally arrive in front of her door on the first floor and knock.
“Come in!”
I enter, shut the door, and stand attention.
Wanda has made herself comfortable. She is sitting in a neglige of white muslin and laces on a small red divan with her feet on a footstool that matches. She has thrown her fur-cloak about her. It is the identical cloak in which she appeared to me for the first time, as goddess of love.
The yellow lights of the candelabra which stand on projections, their reflections in the large mirrors, and the red flames from the open fireplace play beautifully on the green velvet, the dark-brown sable of the cloak, the smooth white skin, and the red, flaming hair of the beautiful woman. Her clear, but cold face is turned toward me, and her cold green eyes rest upon me.
“I am satisfied with you, Gregor,” she began.
I bowed.
“Come closer.”
I obeyed.
“Still closer,” she looked down, and stroked the sable with her hand. “Venus in Furs receives her slave. I can see that you are more than an ordinary dreamer, you don’t remain far in arrears of your dreams; you are the sort of man who is ready to carry his dreams into effect, no matter how mad they are. I confess, I like this; it impresses me. There is strength in this, and strength is the only thing one respects. I actually believe that under unusual circumstances, in a period of great deeds, what seems to be your weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you are my slave, my—”
She suddenly leaped up; the furs slipped down, and she threw her arms with soft pressure about my neck.
“My beloved slave, Severin, oh, how I love you, how I adore you, how handsome you are in your Cracovian costume! You will be cold to-night up in your wretched room without a fire. Shall I give you one of my furs, dear heart, the large one there—”
She quickly picked it up, throwing it over my shoulders, and before I knew what had happened I was completely wrapped up in it.
“How wonderfully becoming furs are to your face, they bring out your noble lines. As soon as you cease being my slave, you must wear a velvet coat with sable, do you understand? Otherwise I shall never put on my fur-jacket again.”
And again she began to caress me and kiss me; finally she drew me down on the little divan.
“You seem to be pleased with yourself in furs,” she said. “Quick, quick, give them to me, or I will lose all sense of dignity.”
I placed the furs about her, and Wanda slipped her right arm into the sleeve.
“This is the pose in Titian’s picture. But now enough of joking. Don’t always look so solemn, it makes me feel sad. As far as the world is concerned you are still merely my servant; you are not yet my slave, for you have not yet signed the contract. You are still free, and can leave me any moment. You have played your part magnificently. I have been delighted, but aren’t you tired of it already, and don’t you think I am abominable? Well, say something—I command it.”
“Must I confess to you, Wanda?” I began.
“Yes, you must.”
“Even if you take advantage of it,” I continued, “I shall love you the more deeply, adore you the more fanatically, the worse you treat me. What you have just done inflames my blood and intoxicates all my senses.” I held her close to me and clung for several moments to her moist lips.
“Oh, you beautiful woman,” I then exclaimed, looking at her. In my enthusiasm I tore the sable from her shoulders and pressed my mouth against her neck.
“You love me even when I am cruel,” said Wanda, “now go!—you bore me—don’t you hear?”
She boxed my ears so that I saw stars and bells rang in my ears.
“Help me into my furs, slave.”
I helped her, as well as I could.
“How awkward,” she exclaimed, and was scarcely in it before she struck me in the face again. I felt myself growing pale.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked, softly touching me with her hand.
“No, no,” I exclaimed.
“At any rate you have no reason to complain, you want it thus; now kiss me again.”
I threw my arms about her, and her lips clung closely to mine. As she lay against my breast in her large heavy furs, I had a curiously oppressive sensation. It was as if a wild beast, a she-bear, were embracing me. It seemed as if I were about to feel her claws in my flesh. But this time the she-bear let me off easily.
With my heart filled with smiling hopes, I went up to my miserable servant’s room, and threw myself down on my hard couch.
“Life is really amazingly droll,” I thought. “A short time ago the most beautiful woman, Venus herself, rested against your breast, and now you have an opportunity for studying the Chinese hell. Unlike us, they don’t hurl the damned into flames, but they have devils chasing them out into fields of ice.
“Very likely the founders of their religion also slept in unheated rooms.”
During the night I startled out of my sleep with a scream. I had been dreaming of an icefield in which I had lost my way; I had been looking in vain for a way out. Suddenly an eskimo drove up in a sleigh harnessed with reindeer; he had the face of the waiter who had shown me to the unheated room.
“What are you looking for here, my dear sir?” he exclaimed. “This is the North Pole.”
A moment later he had disappeared, and Wanda flew over the smooth ice on tiny skates. Her white satin skirt fluttered and crackled; the ermine of her jacket and cap, but especially her face, gleamed whiter than the snow. She shot toward me, inclosed me in her arms, and began to kiss me. Suddenly I felt my blood running warm down my side.
“What are you doing?” I asked horror-stricken.
She laughed, and as I looked at her now, it was no longer Wanda, but a huge, white she-bear, who was digging her paws into my body.
I cried out in despair, and still heard her diabolical laughter when I awoke, and looked about the room in surprise.
Early in the morning I stood at Wanda’s door, and the waiter brought the coffee. I took it from him, and served it to my beautiful mistress. She had already dressed, and looked magnificent, all fresh and roseate. She smiled graciously at me and called me back, when I was about to withdraw respectfully.
“Come, Gregor, have your breakfast quickly too,” she said, “then we will go house-hunting. I don’t want to stay in the hotel any longer than I have to. It is very embarassing here. If I chat with you for more than a minute, people will immediately say: ‘The fair Russian is having an affair with her servant, you see, the race of Catherines isn’t extinct yet.’”
Half an hour later we went out; Wanda was in her cloth-gown with the Russian cap, and I in my Cracovian costume. We created quite a stir. I walked about ten paces behind, looking very solemn, but expected momentarily to have to break out into loud laughter. There was scarcely a street in which one or the other of the attractive houses did not bear the sign camere ammobiliate. Wanda always sent me upstairs, and only when the apartment seemed to answer her requirements did she herself ascend. By noon I was as tired as a stag-hound after the hunt.
We entered a new house and left it again without having found a suitable habitation. Wanda was already somewhat out of humor. Suddenly she said to me: “Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions, which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.”
“But, my lady—” I interposed.
“Gregor?” She entered the next open corridor and ascended a few steps of the dark stair-way; then she threw her arms about me with passionate tenderness and kissed me.
“Oh, Severin, you were very wise. You are much more dangerous as slave than I would have imagined; you are positively irrestible, and I am afraid I shall have to fall in love with you again.”
“Don’t you love me any longer then,” I asked seized by a sudden fright.
She solemnly shook her head, but kissed me again with her swelling, adorable lips.
We returned to the hotel. Wanda had luncheon, and ordered me also quickly to get something to eat.
Of course, I wasn’t served as quickly as she, and so it happened that just as I was carrying the second bite of my steak to my mouth, the waiter entered and called out with his theatrical gesture: “Madame wants you, at once.”
I took a rapid and painful leave of my food, and, tired and hungry, hurried toward Wanda, who was already on the street.
“I wouldn’t have imagined you could be so cruel,” I said reproachfully. “With all these, fatiguing duties you don’t even leave me time to eat in peace.”
Wanda laughed gaily. “I thought you had finished,” she said, “but never mind. Man was born to suffer, and you in particular. The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.”
I followed her resentfully, gnawing at my hunger.
“I have given up the idea of finding a place in the city,” Wanda continued. “It will be difficult to find an entire floor which is shut off and where you can do as you please. In such a strange, mad relationship as ours there must be no jarring note. I shall rent an entire villa—and you will be surprised. You have my permission now to satisfy your hunger, and look about a bit in Florence. I won’t be home till evening. If I need you then, I will have you called.”
I looked at the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Logia di Lanzi, and then I stood for a long time on the banks of the Arno. Again and again I let my eyes rest on the magnificent ancient Florence, whose round cupolas and towers were drawn in soft lines against the blue, cloudless sky. I watched its splendid bridges beneath whose wide arches the lively waves of the beautiful, yellow river ran, and the green hills which surrounded the city, bearing slender cypresses and extensive buildings, palaces and monasteries.
It is a different world, this one in which we are—a gay, sensuous, smiling world. The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours. It is a long ways off to the last white villas scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn’t a spot that isn’t bright with sunlight. The people are less serious than we; perhaps, they think less, but they all look as though they were happy.
It is also maintained that death is easier in the South.
I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn and love of the senses without torment does exist.
Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the Arno, opposite the Cascine. It is surrounded by an attractive garden with lovely paths, grass plots, and magnificent meadow of camelias. It is only two stories high, quadrangular in the Italian fashion. An open gallery runs along one side, a sort of loggia with plaster-casts of antique statues; stone steps lead from it down into the garden. From the gallery you enter a bath with a magnificent marble basin, from which winding stairs lead to my mistress’ bed-chamber.
Wanda occupies the second story by herself.
A room on the ground floor has been assigned to me; it is very attractive, and even has a fireplace.
I have roamed through the garden. On a round hillock I discovered a little temple, but I found its door locked. However, there is a chink in the door and when I glue my eye to it, I see the goddess of love on a white pedestal.
A slight shudder passes over me. It seems to me as if she were smiling at me saying: “Are you there? I have been expecting you.”
It is evening. An attractive maid brings me orders to appear before my mistress. I ascend the wide marble stairs, pass through the anteroom, a large salon furnished with extravagant magnificence, and knock at the door of the bedroom. I knock very softly for the luxury displayed everywhere intimidates me. Consequently no one hears me, and I stand for some time in front of the door. I have a feeling as if I were standing before the bed-room of the great Catherine, and it seems as if at any moment she might come out in her green sleeping furs, with the red ribbon and decoration on her bare breast, and with her little white powdered curls.
I knocked again. Wanda impatiently pulls the door open.
“Why so late?” she asks.
“I was standing in front of the door, but you didn’t hear me knock,” I reply timidly. She closes the door, and clinging to me, she leads me to the red damask ottoman on which she had been resting. The entire arrangement of the room is in red damask—wall-paper, curtains, portieres, hangings of the bed. A magnificent painting of Samson and Delilah forms the ceiling.
Wanda receives me in an intoxicating dishabille. Her white satin dress flows gracefully and picturesquely down her slender body, leaving her arms and breast bare, and carelessly they nestle amid the dark hair of the great fur of sable, lined with green velvet. Her red hair falls down her back as far as the hips, only half held by strings of black pearls.
“Venus in Furs,” I whisper, while she draws me to her breast and threatens to stifle me with her kisses. Then I no longer speak and neither do I think; everything is drowned out in an ocean of unimagined bliss.
“Do you still love me?” she asks, her eye softening in passionate tenderness.
“You ask!” I exclaimed.
“You still remember your oath,” she continued with an alluring smile, “now that everything is prepared, everything in readiness, I ask you once more, is it still your serious wish to become my slave?”
“Am I not ready?” I asked in surprise.
“You have not yet signed the papers.”
“Papers—what papers?”
“Oh, I see, you want to give it up,” she said, “well then, we will let it go.”
“But Wanda,” I said, “you know that nothing gives me greater happiness than to serve you, to be your slave. I would give everything for the sake of feeling myself wholly in your power, even unto death—”
“How beautiful you are,” she whispered, “when you speak so enthusiastically, so passionately. I am more in love with you than ever and you want me to be dominant, stern, and cruel. I am afraid, it will be impossible for me to be so.”
“I am not afraid,” I replied smiling, “where are the papers?’”
“So that you may know what it means to be absolutely in my power, I have drafted a second agreement in which you declare that you have decided to kill yourself. In that way I can even kill you, if I so desire.”
“Give them to me.”
While I was unfolding the documents and reading them, Wanda got pen and ink. She then sat down beside me with her arm about my neck, and looked over my shoulder at the paper.
The first one read:
Notes
3 The street of the Jews in Lemberg.
4 These were notorious prisons under the leaden roof of the Palace of the Doges.