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JANINA
From +hi. dran'ing by W. i. i. -â– '^a
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THE COMEDIENNE.
BY
WLADYSLAW S. REYMONT ^u.
TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY
EDMUND OBECNY
FRONTISPIECE BY
FREDERICK DORR STEELE
.5 * •
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
XCbe Itnicfterbocfter pv^B9 1920
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Original TO BE
TAINEO
FEB 25 1994
y^7/^^
Copyright, 1930
BY
G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS
• • • • ,
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PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The provincial actors of Poland are some- times colloquially called "comedians," as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw, The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provin- cials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable r61e, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, the life of the Com6dienne often embraces far more tragedy than comedy.
Wladyslaw Reymont is the most widely known of living Polish writers. The Academy of Science of Cracow nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of numerous novels dealing with var- ious phases of everyday life in Poland, many of them translated into French, German, and Swedish. The Comidienne is the first of his works to appear in English.
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Reymont himself was a peasant, rising from the bottom until to-day the light of his recog- nized genius shines in the very forefront of the Slavic intellectuals.
It is interesting to note that for several years the author was himself a ''Comedian/' traveling about what was then Russian Poland with a company of provincial players.
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THE COMEDIENNE
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The Comedienne
CHAPTER I
BuKOWiEC, a station on the Dombrowa railroad, lies in a beautiful spot. A winding line was cut among the beech and pine cov- ered hills, and at the most level point, between a mighty hill towering above the woods with its bald and rocky stmimit, and a long narrow valley, glistening with pools and marshes, was placed the station. This two-story building of rough brick containing the quarters of the station-master and his assistant, a small wooden house at the side for the telegrapher and the minor employees, another similar one near the last switches for the watchman, three switch-houses at various points, and a freight-house were the only signs of human habitation.
Surrounding the station on all sides were the
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murmuring woods, while above, a strip of blue sky, slashed with gray clouds, extended like a wide-spreading roof.
The sun was veering toward the south and glowing ever brighter and warmer; the reddish slopes of the rocky hill, with its ragged summit gashed by spring freshets, were bathed in a flood of golden stmlight.
The calm of a spring afternoon diffused itself over all. The trees stood motionless without a murmur in their boughs. The sharp emerald leaves of the beeches drooped drowsily, as though lulled to sleep by the light, the warmth, and the silence. The twitter of birds sounded at rare intervals from the thick- ets, and only the cry of the water-fowls on the marshes and the somnolent hum of insects filled the air. Above the blue line of rails stretching in an endless chain of curves and zigzags, the warm air glowed with shifting hues of violet light.
Out of the office of the station-master came a short, squarely-built man with light, almost flaxen hair. He was dressed, or rather squeezed into a stylish surtout and held his hat in his hand while a workman helped him on with his overcoat.
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The Comedienne 3
The station-master stood before him, strok- ing his grayish beard with an automatic ges- tttre and smiling in a friendly manner. He also was stocky, strongly-knit, and broad shouldered, and in his blue eyes, flashing jovi- ally from beneath heavy eyebrows and a square forehead, there also gleamed deter- mination and an imbending will. His straight nose, full lips, a certain contraction of the brows, and the sharp direct glance of his eyes, that seemed like a dagger-stroke — all these typified a violent nature.
''Good-bye, imtil to-morrow!" . . .said the blonde man merrily, extending his big hand in farewell.
"Good-bye! ... Oh come, let me hug you. To-morrow we'll celebrate the big event with a good drink."
"I am a little afraid of that to-morrow."
''Courage, my boy! Don't fear, I give you my word that everything will turn out all right. I'll tell Jenka all about it immediately. You will come to us to-morrow for dinner, propose to her, be accepted by her, in a month you will be married and we shall be neighbors . . . hey! I like you immensely, Mr. Andrew! I always dreamed of having such a son. Unfor-
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tunately I haven't any, but at least I'll have a son-in-law."
They kissed each other heartily ; the younger jumped into a light mountain rig waiting near the platform and drove away at a swift pace along a narrow road leading through the wood. He glanced back, tipped his hat, sent a deeper bow to the windows of the second story, and disappeared in the shadow of the trees. After riding a little way, he sprang from the carriage, ordered the driver to go on, and continued his journey on foot by a short cut.
The station-master, as soon as his guest had vanished from sight, reentered his office and busied himself with his official correspon- dence. He was highly satisfied that Grze- sikiewicz had asked him for his daughter's hand and he had promised her to him in the certainty that she would agree.
Grzesikiewicz, although not handsome, was sensible and very rich. The woods among which stood the station and a few neighboring farmhouses were the property of his father. The elder Grzesikiewicz was primarily a peas- ant, who had transformed himself from an innkeeper into a trader and had made a
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The Comedienne 5
fabulous fortune by the sale of timber and cattle-fodder.
Many people in the neighborhood still re- membered that the old man used to be called Grzesik in his youth. They often ridiculed him for it, but no one upbraided him for chang- ing his name, for he did not pose as an aristo- crat, nor did he asstune an overbearing air toward others because of his wealth.
He was a peasant, and in spite of all changes remained a peasant to the very core. His son received a thorough education and now helped his father. Two years ago he had made the acquaintance of the station-master's daughter after her return from the academy at Kielce and had fallen violently in love with her. His father offered no opposition, but told him plainly to go ahead and marry if he wanted.
Andrew met the girl quite often, became ever more deeply enamored of her, but never dared to speak to her of his love. She liked him, but at the same time her attitude was so frank and straightforward that his intended words of endearment and confessions of love always froze upon his lips before he had half uttered them. He felt that she belonged to a
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higher breed of women, inaccessible to such a ''chttrl" as he often frankly called himself; but precisely because of his lowly origin he loved her all the more intensely.
Finally, he decided to speak to her father about it.
Orlowski received him with open arms, and in his arbitrary way, without consulting his daughter, at once gave him his word that all would be well. Grzesikiewicz was therefore thinking that Janina would not refuse him, that she must have already spoken of the mat- ter with her father.
*'Why not!" he whispered to himself. He was yotmg, wealthy, and — ^well, he loved her so dearly. *'In a month our marriage will take place,'' he added hurriedly and that thought filled him with such joy that he began to rtm swiftly through the woods, breaking branches off the trees, kicking the rotted sttmips that were in his way, knocking off the heads of spring mushrooms, whistling and smiling. And he thought, too, how glad his mother would be to hear the news.
She was an old peasant woman, who with the exception of her dress had not changed in the least on accoimt of her wealth. She
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thought of Janina as of a princess. Her one dream was to have for a daughter-in-law a real lady, an aristocrat whose beauty and high birth would dazzle her, for her husband and his money and the respect which the entire neighborhood showed him did not suffice her. She was always conscious of being a peasant and received all honors with a true peasant- like distrust.
' ' Andy ! ' ' she often said to her son. ' ' Andy, I wish you would marry Miss Orlowska. That's what I call a real lady! When -she looks at you, she makes you shudder with awe and wish to fall at her feet and beg some boon of her. . . . She must be very good for whenever she meets folks in the woods she greets them in God's name, chats with them, and pets the children . . . another would be incapable of that! Gentle birth will always out. I sent her a basket of mushrooms and when she met me she kissed my hand for it. And she is not lacking in wisdom. Ho! ho! she knows that I have a prize of a son. Andy, marry her. Hurry, and make hay while the stm shines!"
Andrew would usually laugh at his mother's prattle, kiss her hand, and promise her to
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settle at once everything according to her wishes.
''We will have a princess in our house and seat her in state in the parlor! Don't fear, Andy, I will not let her soil her hands with anything. I will wait upon her, serve her, hand her everything she needs ; all she has to do is to read French books and play on the piano, for that is what a lady is for!" his mother would add.
And he was just as much of a peasant as she deep within himself; beneath the smooth veneer of the civilized and educated man seethed a primitive unbridled energy and the desire for a wife — a woman to rule him. This young Hercules, who, when he felt like, it, could fling imaided into the wagon two-him- dred potmd sacks of wheat, and who often had to toil like a common laborer to quell with weariness the riotous tides that often rose in his healthy blood, tmexhausted through doz- ens of generations — dreamed of Janina and was vanqtiished by her beauty and sweetness.
He now rushed along through the woods like a whirlwind and then flew across the fields, all green with the first vigorous shoots of the spring wheat, to tell his mother of the
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The Comedienne 9
happiness awaiting him. He knew that he would find her in her favorite room whose walls were adorned with three rows of holy pictures in gilt frames — ^f or that was the only luxury that she allowed herself.
The station-master, in the meanwhile, fin- ished writing his official report, signed it, made an entry in his journal, placed it in an envelope, addressed it to *' the Expeditor of the Station of Bukowiec," and called: "Anthony!"
A servant appeared at the door.
''Take this to the dispatcher!" ordered Orlowski. *
The servant took the letter without a word and with the solemnest mien in the world laid it upon a table on the other side of the window. The station-master arose, stretched himself, took off his red cap, and walked over to that table; then he put on an ordinary cap with a red border and with the greatest gravity opened the letter that he had written a mo- ment ago. He read it, wrote on the other side a few lines in reply, again signing his name, and then addressed it to the "Local Station- Master" and had Anthony deliver it to himself.
All the officials of the railway knew his mania and made merry at his expense. There
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was no expediter in Biikowiec, hence he per- formed both f tinctions, — that of station-master and dispatcher — ^but at two different tables.
As the station-master he was his own supe- rior, so he often had moments of truly insane joy when, noticing some error in his accounts, or some omission in his duty as a dispatcher, he would indite a complaint against himself.
Everybody made fun of him, but he paid no attention and persisted in following his own way, saying in justification: ''Order and sys- tem are the foimdations of everything; if they are lacking, all else fails!"
Having finished his tasks, he locked all the drawers of his desk, glanced out on the plat- form, and went to his home. He entered not by way of the anteroom, but through the kitchen, for he had to know all that was go- ing on. He peeped into the stove, gave the fire a jab with the poker, scolded the servant- girl because of some water spilled on the floor, and then proceeded to the dining-room.
"Where is Jenka?" he asked.
"Miss Janina will be here in a minute," answered Mrs. Krenska, a sort of housekeeper and duenna in one person, a pretty blonde with expressive features.
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"What are you preparing for dinner? "
''The Director's favorite dish; chicken fricassee, sorrel soup, and cutlets "
''Extravagance! By God, what extrava- gance! Soup and one kind of meat is enough even for a king ! You will ruin me ! ' '
"But Mr. Director ... I ordered this meal prepared especially for you, sir — -"
"Bosh! You women have nothing in yottr ' heads but fricassees, sweets, and dainties. . All that is bosh!"
^ "You judge us unfairly, sir; we generally
economize more than men do."
"Aha! You economize so that you can later buy yourselves more fineries ... I know, you needn't tell me."
Mrs. Krenska did not answer, but began to set the table for dinner.
Just then, Janina entered. She was a girl of about twenty-two, tall, well-formed, and broad-shouldered. Her feattires were not very regular; she had black eyes, a straight forehead, a trifle too broad, dark eyebrows strongly accented, a Roman nose, and full glowing lips. Her eyes had a deep expression indicating an introspective nature; her lips were tightly drawn together in what seemed to
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be a semblance of dignity or hidden temper. Two deep lines clouded her clear forehead. Gorgeous, wavy blonde hair, with a reddish tinge, crowned her small round head. Her amber-gold complexion had the mellowness of a ripe peach. There was something strange about her voice: an alto that at times dropped into a deep baritone of almost masculine accents.
She bowed her head to her father and seated herself on the opposite side of the table.
" Grzesikiewicz was here to see me to-day," said Orlowski slowly serving the soup, for he always presided over the meals.
Janina glanced at him calmly.
"He asked me for your hand, Jenka."
''What did you tell him, Mr. Director?'' quickly interposed Mrs. Krenska.
''That is ottr affair," he answered sternly. "Our affair . . . I told him all would be well," he said, turning to Janina. "He will be here to-morrow for dinner and you can talk it over between yourselves."
"What's the use, father! Since you have told him that all would be well, you can receive him yourself to-morrow and tell him from me that everything is far from well. . . .
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I do not wish to speak with him. To-morrow I will go to Kielce ! "
''Bosh! If you were not a crazy fool, you would understand what an excellent husband he would make for you! Even though Grzesikiewicz is a peasant he's worth more to you than a prince, for he wants you . . . and he wants you because he's a fool. He could afford to take his pick of the best. . . . You ought to be grateful to him for choosing you. He will propose to you to-morrow and in a month from now you will be Mrs. Grzesikiewicz."
"1 will not be his wife! If he can get another, let him do so "
''I swear to God that you wiU be Mrs. Grzesikiewicz!"
"No! I will not have him or anyone else! I will not marry!"
''Fool!" he retorted brutally. "You will marry because you need a roof over your head, food and dress, and someone to look after you. ... I don't intend to ruin myself completely for your sake . . . and when I am gone, what then?"
"I have my dower; I will get along without the aid of Grzesikiewicz or anyone like him.
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Aha, so your object in wanting to marry me is simply to provide for my support!" She regarded him defiantly.
*' And what of it? For what else do women marry?"
"They marry for love and marry those whom they love."
''You're a fool, I tell you once again," he shouted vehemently, helping himself to an- other portion of chicken. " Love is nothing but this sauce, you can eat the chicken just as well without it; sauce is nothing but an invention, a freak and a modem fad! "
"No self-respecting woman sells herself to the first man that comes along merely because he is capable of supporting her ! "
"You're a fool. They all do it, they all sell themselves. Love is childish prattle and nonsense. Don't irritate me."
"It is not a question of irritating you, father, or whether love is nonsense or not; it is a question of my future which you dispose of as though it belonged to you. Already at the time that Zielenkiewicz proposed to me. I told you that I do not intend to marry at all."
"Zielenkiewicz is merely Zielenkiewicz, but Gr^esikiewicz is a very lord, and what I call
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a man! He is kind-hearted, wise — ^for did he not graduate from the academy at Dublany — and as strong as a bull. A fellow who can master the wildest horse and who, when he struck a peasant in the face the other day, knocked out six of his teeth with one blow — such a fellow is not good enough for you! I swear he is ideal, the highest of all ideals!"
*'Yes, yottr ideal is an incomparable one; he'd make a good prize-fighter/'
' ' You are as crazy as your mother was. Wait ! Andrew will muzzle you and show you how such women are ruled. He will not spare the whip."
Janina violently shoved aside her chair, threw her spoon on the table, and left the room, slamming the door after her.
''Don't sit there gaping, but order the cutlets served for me," he shouted at Mrs. Krenska, who gazed after Janina with a sympathetic look.
She handed him the dish with a servile mien, whispering to him with a solicitous tone in her voice, "Mr. Director, you must not irritate yourself so, it is not good for your health."
•'Such is my fate!" he drawled. "I can't even eat in peace, without having to listen to these everlasting squabbles."
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He then began to air at length his griev- ances and complaints over Janina's stub- bornness, her wilful character, and his continual troubles with her.
Mrs. ICrenska obsequiously pretended to agree with him, and occasionally emphasized some detail. She complained discreetly that she also had to bear a great deal because of Janina, sighed deeply, and wheedled him at every opporttmity. She brought in the coffee and arrack and poured it for him herself. While doing so she fawned upon him, touched his hands and arms, as though accidentally, lowered her eyes, and kept up a continual flirtation, trjring to awaken some spark in him.
Orlowski's anger slowly abated, and having dnmk his coffee, he ejaculated, ''Thank you! I swear to God that you alone imderstand me. . . . You are a kind woman, Mrs. ICrenska."
''Mr. Director, if I could only show you what I feel, what — " she faltered, dropping her eyes.
Orlowski pressed her hand and went to his own room for a nap.
Mrs. Krenska ordered the table cleared and
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afterwards, when she was alone, took up some sewing and sat near the window facing the station platform. Occasionally she would look up from her work and gaze at the woods, or at the long line of rails, but ever5rthing seemed deserted and silent. Finally, imable to sit still any longer, she arose and began to pace aroimd the table with a soft, feline step, smiling and repeating to herself : ' ' I will get him, I will get him ! At last I will find a little rest in my life, my wanderings will come to an end ! "
Scenes from the past floated before her memory: whole years of wandering with a company of provincial actors. Krenska had abandoned the theater because she managed to catch a young fellow who married her. She lived with him for two whole years . . . two years which she recalled with bitterness. Her husband was insanely jealous and frequently beat her.
At last he died and she was free, but she had no longer any desire to return to the theater. She shuddered at the thought of restmiing that eternal pilgrimage from town to town and the everlasting poverty of a provincial actor's life. Moreover, she realized that she was growing old and homely. So she sold all her
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household furnishings, received a pension from the management to which her husband had belonged, and for half a year played the r61e of a widow. She was very eager to marry a second time and sedulously spread her nets, but all in Vain, for her own temperament stood in the way. With money in her pocket, there awakened in her again the former actress with her careless and sporty disposition and craving for pleasure and enjo5mient. Being still se- ductive, she was surrounded by a swarm of various admirers with whom she squandered all she had, together with the reputation which she had succeeded in establishing for herself with the aid of her husband.
Krenska had no abilities of any kind, but she possessed a great deal of cleverness, so, instead of resigning herself to despair when the last of her admirers had forsaken her, she inserted an advertisement in the Kielce Gazette reading : '* Middle-aged widow of a government official desires position as a housekeeper to widower, or as a social secretary.''
She did not have to wait long for results. Her advertisement was answered in person by Orlowski, who was badly in need of a house- keeper, for Janina was still attending school
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and he could not himself manage the servants. Krenska seemed so quiet, humble, and full of grief over the loss of her husband that he did not ask her any questions, but engaged her immediately.
Orlowski was a widower who possessed a good salary, a few thousand dollars in cash, and an only daughter — an absent daughter whom he detested. Krenska at first tried to turn the heads of the station officials, but very soon sized up the situation and immediately began playing a new r61e whereby she per- severingly strove to attain the last act: Matrimony.
Orlowski became used to her. She knew how to make herself indispensable and always to show that indispensability so skillfully that it did not offend.
Moreover, the gray autumn days and the long wintry evenings brought her nearer to her goal, for Orlowski, who was fifty-eight years old and had rheumatism, was always a maniac, but during his rheumatic attacks he would become a raving maniac. She alone knew how to mollify and manage him with her inherent cleverness, sharpened by many years of theatrical experience.
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There was only one obstacle in her way — Janina. Krenska realized that as long as Janina was at home she could accomplish nothing. She decided to wait — and waited patiently.
Orlowski loved his daughter with hatred, that is, he loved her because he hated her. He hated her because she was the daughter of his wife, whose memory he violently cursed — his wife, who after two years of conjugal life, left him, because she could no longer endure his tyranny and eccentricities. He brought legal action against her and tried to force her to return to him, but their separation became a permanent one. He raved with anger, but his relentlessness, imexampled stubbornness, and insane pride prevented him from begging his wife to return, which she might have done, for she was a good woman. Her only failing was an illness that baffled all the provincial doctors. She had the soul of a mimosa, so sensitive that every tear, pain, or grief would cast her into despair. Moreover she had an abnormal fear of thimderstorms, showers, frogs, dark rooms, unlucky numbers, and all loud sounds; so this husband of hers was killing her with his brutality.
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Within a few years after their separation she died of nervous prostration, leaving Janina, who was then ten years old. Orlowski immediately took her away from his wife's family by force.
An additional reason for his hatred of Janina was because she happened to be a girl. With his wild and violent disposition he wanted a son on whom he could exercise not only his fists, but also his everyday humor. He had dreamed of a son and fancied that he would be a big and half -wild fellow, ener- getic and as strong as an oak.
He immediately sent Janina to a boarding- school, seeing her only once a year during her vacation. She spent the Christmas and Easter holidays at her aimt's home.
For thjese vacations, which were now in their third year, he would wait impatiently, for he was weary of being alone at his remote station." And as soon as Janina arrived hostilities between them would begin.
Janina grew up rapidly, and her mental and physical development were of the best, but having been conceived, bom, and reared in an environment of continual hatred and quarrels and nursed with the tears and complaints of
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her mother at her father's brutality, she natu- rally disliked him and feared his scorn. This developed in her secretiveness and resent- ment. She rebelled against his despotism and niggardliness.
Janina inherited a few thousand rubles from her mother, and her father told her plainly that the interest on that sum would have to suffice her, for he did not intend to give her a single kopeck. She attended a first-class boarding-school, but after paying her fees and, later, her expenses at the academy she had so little left for her immediate needs that she had to continually think of how to make ends meet and to feel ashamed because of her worn shoes and dresses.
In a few years her classmates began to fear her, even the teachers often gave way to her, for she had her father's violent character and brooked no restraint. She never wept nor complained, but she was ever ready to avenge her wrongs with her fists, irrespective of what might happen to her. At the same time she wa^ always one of the brightest scholars in her class.
All sincerely disliked her, but had to grant her supremacy. She herself became conscious
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of her superiority over the throng of her class- mates, who treated her with aloofness, laughed at her shabby dresses and shoes, and barred her from all intimacy with them. Later she paid them back with tmrelenting vengeance.
There were times when Orlowski was proud of Janina and warmly defended her before his friends, for the whole neighborhood was shocked at her tomboyish adventures. She would tramp through the woods late at night and in all kinds of weather, alone, like a young wild-boar separated from the herd. She was not a bit ashamed of climbing up trees for birds' nests, nor of riding astride in horse- races with the peasant lads on the pasturage. To avoid her father she would stay away from home for whole days at a time, dreaming of her return to school, while at school she would again dream of returning to the solitude of her home.
Such was Janina up to about the eighteenth year of her life when she graduated from high school and returned home for good. In her outward life she quieted down, but inwardly she became even more restless than before.
With her friend, Helen Walder, ideally beautiful and day dreaming of the emanci-
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pation of woman, she had parted. Helen went to Paris to study science. Janina had no desire to go, for she didn't feel the need of any knowledge of an abstract nature. She yearned for something that would exert a more potent influence upon her temperament — something that would absorb her whole being for all time.
Men, Janina avoided almost entirely, for they angered her with their impudence; the women bored her with their everlasting repe- tition of gossip, troubles, and intrigues. People in general seemed to keep aloof from her. All sorts of stories about her, more or less false, were circulated in the neighborhood.
She was a puzzle to all who knew her. Meanwhile, in her own soul she was waging a battle with her desires, to which she knew not how to give a definite form. She asked her- self why she lived. She buried herself in books, but found no comfort there. She felt that she must find something that would absorb and thrill her entire being, felt that she would find it sooner or later, but in the mean- while the agony of waiting almost drove her mad.
Zielenkiewicz, the owner of a heavily mort-
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gaged village, proposed to her. Janina laughed outright at him and told him to his face that she did not intend to pay his debts with her dower.
She had reached her twenty-first year and was beginning to lose patience, when a com- monplace occurrence decided her whole future.
In a nearby town an amateur theatrical was being arranged. Three one-act plays were selected and the parts had already been assigned, when there came a hitch: no one wanted to accept the r61e of Pawlowa in Bli- zinski's The March Bachelor.
The dramatic coach insisted on presenting this play, for he wanted to twit a certain neighbor with it, but none of the ladies would play the parts of Pawlowa or Eulalia.
Someone proposed that they request Janina Orlowska to take the part of Pawlowa, for they knew that she dared anything. She accepted it rather indifferently, and Mrs. Krenska, in whom memories of her histrionic past had suddenly awakened, induced Orlowski to an- notmce that an amateur had also been found for the part of Eulalia.
The rehearsals lasted for about three months, for the cast of the players was changed several
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times — the usual fuss and confusion of pro- vincial theaters where none of the ladies want to assume the part of an old, quarrelsome, or shady character, or that of a maid, but all wish to be heroines.
Krenska, whom Janina kept at a respectful distance from herself, never confiding any- thing to her nor asking her advice, found a good reason in the play for approaching her. She began to give her lessons in the art of acting, imtiringly.
So absorbed did she become with her part, so deeply did she enter into the character, and so well did it fit her that she gave a very creditable presentation. She was every inch a peasant woman, a genuine Pawlowa, and received a clamorous ovation at the end of the play. This momentary triumph and the consciousness of her power filled her with a wild and tmrestrained joy. It was with a feeling of intense regret that she saw the final curtain fall.
Krenska also created quite a furore. It was a r61e that she had often played with great success on the real stage. During the intermissions everyone was speaking only of her and of Janina.
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"A comMienne! A bom actress!" whis- pered the ladies, regarding Janina with a sort of contemptuous pity.
Orlowski, whom they thanked and con- gratulated for having so talented a daughter and companion, shrugged his shoulders. He was, however, satisfied, for he went behind the scenes, petted Janina, and kissed Krenska's hand.
"Good, good! . . . Nothing extraordi- nary, but at least I don't have to feel ashamed of you," was all the praise that he gave them.
After the performance Janina drew closer to Krenska and the latter, in a moment of weak- ness, betrayed the secret concerning her past life. She revealed to Janina a new realm, wondrous and alluring.
She listened with rapt attention to Kren- ska's accotmts of the stage, her numerous appearances and triumphs, and the vivid life of an actor. As she related her experiences Krenska was herself carried away by enthusi- asm and painted them in glowing colors; she no longer remembered the miseries of that life and held up only the brightest pictures to the gaze of the enraptured girl. She pulled out of her trunk faded and musty copies of r61es she
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had once impersonated, read them to Janina and played them, stirred by memories of the past.
All this fascinated the girl and awoke in her certain strong desires, but it did not, as yet, absorb her; it was not, as yet, that mysterious "something" for which she had been waiting so long.
She began to read with great interest the theatrical criticisms and the details about actors in the newspapers. Finally, whether actuated by ennui or by an instinctive impulse, she bought a complete set of Shakespeare's works and, forthwith, was lost! She found that ''something" for which she had sought so long; she foimd her hero, her aim, her ideal — it was the theater. She devoured Shake- speare with all the inherent intensity of her nature.
It would be difficult to epitomize the violent upheaval that now took place in Janina's soul, the wild soaring of her imagination, and the enlargement and expansion of her whole being. There swarmed about her a vast throng of characters — evil, noble, base, petty, heroic, and struggKng souls. There passed through her such tones and words, such overwhelming
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thoughts and emotions that she felt as though the whole universe was contained in her soul!
She became consumed with a desire for the theater and for imusual emotions. The win- ters seemed too warm for her, the snowfalls too light; the springs dragged along too slowly, the stmimers were too cool, the autimms too dry; all this she visioned in her imagination in far grander outlines. She wished to see the acme of beauty, the acme of evil, and every act magnified to titanic proportions.
Orlowski knew a little about her ''disease," but he smiled at it in scorn.
"You comedienne ! " he called her, scofiingly.
Krenska would add fuel to this fire, for she wished at any cost to see Janina leave home. She persuaded her of her talent and warmly praised the theatrical career.
Janina could not pluck up* courage to take the decisive step. She feared those dark and vague presentiments and an imaccountable feeling of terror at times would seize upon her. She could not sunmion the necessary deter- mination. A storm of some kind only could uproot her and carry her far away from home in the same way as it uprooted the trees and scattered them over the desolate fields. She
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was waiting now for some chance happening to cast her into the world. Krenska, in the meanwhile, kept her informed of the activities of the provincial theatrical companies. Janina made certain preparations and savings. Her father paid her regularly the interest on her inheritance and this enabled her in a yearns time to lay aside about two hundred rubles.
Grzesikiewicz's proposal and her father's insistance on her marriage roused a stormy protest in her.
''No, no, no! " she repeated to herself, pacing excitedly up and down her room. " I will not marry!''
Janina had never contemplated matrimony seriously. At times the vision of a great, overwhelming love would gleam through her mind, and she would dream of it for a while; but of marriage she had never given a thought.
She even liked Grzesikiewicz, because he would never speak lightly to her about love, nor enact those amorous comedies to which other admirers had accustomed her. She liked him for the simplicity with which he would relate all that he had to suffer at school, how he was abused and humiliated as the son of a peasant and innkeeper and how he paid
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them back in peasant fashion — ^with his fists. He would smile while relating this to her, but there was in his smile a trace of sorrow.
She opened the door of her father's room and was about to tell him abruptly and de- cisively that there was no need of Grze- sikiewicz's coming, but Orlowski was already enjoying his after-dinner nap, seated in a big arm-chair with his feet propped against the window-sill. The sun was shining straight into his face which was almost entirely bronzed from sunburn.
Janina withdrew.
"No, no, no! . . . Even though I have to nm away from home, I will not marry!" she repeated to herself fiercely.
But immediately there followed this deter- mination a feeling of womanly helplessness.
" I will go to my uncle's house. . . . Yes! . . . and from there I will go to the stage. No one can force me to stay here."
Thereupon, the blood would rush to her head with indignation and she would immedi- ately gaze with courage into the future, determined to meet anything that might happen rather than submit.
She heard her father arise and then go to the
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window; she listened to the station bells, and to the jabbering of a few Jews who were board- ing the train; she saw the red cap of her father, and the yellow striped cap of the telegrapher conversing through his window with some lady; she saw and heard all, but understood nothing, so absorbed was she in thought.
Krenska entered and in her habitual way began to circle around the table with quiet, cat-like motion before she spoke. Her face bore an expression of sjnnpathy and there was tenderness in her voice.
"Miss Janina!"
The young woman glanced at her.
"No! I assure you that I will not!" she said with emphasis.
"Your father gave Grzesikiewicz his word of honor ... he will demand unquestioning obedience . . . what will come of it?"
"No! I will not marry! . . . My father can retract his word; he cannot compel me "
"Yes . . . but there will be an awful rum- pus, an awful rumpus!"
"I have stood so many, I can stand some more."
"I am afraid that this one will not end so
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smoothly. Your father has such a dreadful temper. ... I can't understand how you are able to bear as much as you do. ... If I were in your place, Miss Janina, I know what I should do . . . and doit now, immediately!"
"I am anxious to know . . . give me your advice."
"First of aU, I would leave home to avoid all this trouble before it begins. I would go to Warsaw."
''Well, and what would you do next?" asked Janina with trembling voice.
''I would join some theater and let happen what will!"
"Yes, that's a good idea, but . . . but "
And she broke off, for the old helplessness and fears reasserted themselves. She sat silent without answering Krenska.
Janina put on a jacket and felt hat and tak- ing a stick wandered off into the woods.
She climbed to the top of that rocky hill from which spread out below her a wide view of the woods, the villages beyond them, and an endless expanse of fields. She sat gazing about her for a while, but the calm that reigned all arotmd, contrasted with the feeling of unquiet and foreboding in her own soul, as
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before an impending storm, gave her no peace.
At dusk Janina rettimed home. She did not speak either to her father or to Krenska but immediately after supper went to her own room and sat reading George Sand's Consuelo tmtil a late hour.
During the night she was perturbed with tmquiet dreams from which she started up every now and then, perspiring heavily, and awoke fully before dawn, tmable to sleep any longer. She lay upon her bed with wide open eyes, gazing fixedly at the ceiling on which flickered a patch of light reflected from the station lamp. A train went roaring by and she listened for a long while to its rhythmic rumbling and clatter that seemed like a whole choir of voices and tones streaming in through her window.
At the farther end of the room, steeped in a twilight full of pale gleams that flickered like severed rays from a light long since extin- gtiished, she seemed to see apparitions and vague outlines of mysterious scenes, figures, and sotmds. Her wearied brain peopled the room with the phantoms of hallucination. She beheld, as it were, a vast edifice with a
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long row of coltimns that seemed to emerge from the dusk and take shape.
In the morning she arose so worn out that she could scarcely stand on her feet.
She heard her father issuing orders for a sumptuous dinner and saw them making preparations. Krenska circled about her on tiptoe and smiled at her with a subtle, ironi- cal smile that irritated Janina. She felt dazed with exhaustion and the storm that was brewing within her, and beheld everything with indifference, for her mind was continually- dwelling on the impending battle with her father. She tried to read or occupy herself with something, but was too nervous.
She ran off to the woods, but immediately came back, for she knew not what to do there. A lethargy seemed to take hold of her and benumb her with an ever greater fear. Try as she would, Janina could not shake off this de- pressing mood.
She sat down at the piano and began mechanically to play scales, but the somnolent monotony of the tones only added to her nervousness. Later she played some of Cho- pin's Nocturnes, lingered over those mysterious tones that seemed like strains from another
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world, full of tears, pain, cries of anguish, and bleak despair; the radiance of cold moonlight nights, moans like the whisper of departing souls, the laughter of parting, the soft vibra- tions of subtle, sad life.
Suddenly, Janina stopped playing and burst into tears. She wept for a long time, not knowing why she wept — she who since her mother's death had not shed a single tear.
For the first time in her life — ^which up till now had been one continuous struggle, revolt, and protest — she felt overcome by distress. There awakened in her an irresistible longing to share her sorrows with someone, a longing to confide to some sympathetic heart those bewildered thoughts and feelings, that un- explainable misery and fear. She yearned for sympathy, feeling that her distress would be smaller, her anguish less violent, her tears not so bitter, if she could open her heart before some sincere woman friend.
Krenska summoned her to dinner, annoimc- ing that Grzesikiewicz was already waiting.
She wiped away the traces of tears from her eyes, arranged her hair — and went.
Grzesikiewicz kissed her hand and seated himself beside her at the table.
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Orlowski was in a holiday humor and every how and then twitted Janina and hiu-led tri- umphant glances at her.
Grzesikiewicz was silent and tmeasy; oc- casionally he would speak, but in such a low tone, Janina could scarcely hear what he said. Mrs. Krenska was plainly excited.
A gloomy atmosphere htmg over them all. The dinner dragged wearily on. Orlowski at times became wrapt in thought, and would then knit his brows, angrily tug at his beard, and fling murderous glances at his daughter.
After dinner they went to the parlor. Black coffee and cognac were served. Orlowski qtdckly gulped down his coffee and left the room, kissing Janina on the forehead and growling some tmintelligible remark as he departed.
They remained alone.
Janina kept looking out of the window. Grzesikiewicz, all flushed and flustered and tmlike himself, began to say something, taking little swallows of coffee in between, tmtil, finally, he drained it off at the gulp and shoved his cup and saucer aside so vigor- ously that they went ttimbling over the table.
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She laughed at his violence and embarrass- ment.
''At a moment like this a man could swallow a lamp without noticing it," he remarked.
''That would be quite a feat," she answered, again bursting into empty laughter.
"Are you laughing at me?" he asked tmeasily.
"No, only the idea of swallowing a lamp seemed comical."
They relapsed into silence. Janina fidgeted with the window-shade, while Grzesikiewicz tore at his gloves and impulsively bit his moustache; he was literally shaking with emotion.
"It is so hard for me, so awfully hard!" he began, raising his eyes to her entreatingly.
"Why?" she queried tersely and evasively.
"Well, because . . . because . . . For God's sake, I can't stand it any longer! No, I can't endure this torment any longer, so I'll come right out with it : I love you, Miss Janina, and beg you for your hand," he cried aloud, at once sighing with immense relief. But immediately he struck his forehead with his hand and, taking Janina's hand, began anew:
" I have loved you ever so long, but feared to
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tell you. And now I don't know how to express it as I would like to. . . . I love you and beg you to be my wife. ..."
He kissed her hand fervently and gazed at her with his blue, honest eyes burning with blind love. His lips twitched nervously and a pallor overspread his features.
Janina arose from her chair and, looking straight into his eyes, answered slowly and quietly: ''I do not love you."
All her nervousness had vanished.
Grzesikiewicz recoiled violently, as though someone had struck him, as though he did not tmderstand. He said with a trembling voice:
''Miss Janina ... be my wife ... I love you!"
''I do not love you ... I cannot there- fore marry you . . . I will not marry at all ! " she answered in the same cold tone, but at the last word her voice wavered with an accent of pity for him.
"God!" cried Grzesikiewicz, holding his hand to his head. ''What does it mean? . . . You will not marry! . . . You will not be my wife! . . . You do not love me!"
He threw himself impulsively on his knees before her, seized her hands, and, covering
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them with kisses, began, with what seemed almost tears of feverish terror, to entreat her fervently, himibly.
"You do not love me? . . . You will love me in time. I swear that I, my mother, and my father will be your slaves. I will wait if you wish . . . Say that in a year, or two, or even five, you will love me. ... I will wait. . . . I swear to you that I will wait ! But do not say no to me ! For God's sake do not say that, for I shall go mad with despair! How can it be? You do not love me! . . . But I love you ... we all love you ... we cannot live without you! . . . no. . . . Your father told me that . . . that . . . and now . . . God! I will go crazy! What are you doing to me! What are you doing to me!"
Springing up from the floor he fairly cried aloud with pain.
Mechanically he pulled off his gloves, tore them to pieces and flung them on the floor, buttoned up his coat to the topmost button, and struggling to control himself said: ''Fare- well, Miss Janina. But always . . . every- where . . . forever ... I will . . ." he whispered with great effort, bowed his head and went toward the door.
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"Andrew!" she called after him forcibly.
Grzesikiewicz turned back from the door.
"Andrew," she said in a pleading voice, "I do not love you, but I respect you. ... I cannot marry you, I cannot . . . but I will always think of you as of a noble man. Surely you will tmderstand that it would be a base thing for me to marry a man whom I do not love ... I know that you detest falsehood and hypocrisy — ^and so do I. Forgive me for hurting you, but I also suffer ... I also am not happy — oh no ! "
"Janina — ^if you would only ... if you would only ..."
She regarded him with such a sorrowful expression that he became silent. Then slowly he left the room.
Janina still sat there dazed, staring at the door through which he had gone, when Orlow- ski entered the room.
He had met Grzesikiewicz on the stairs and in his face had read what had happened.
Janina uttered a little cry of fear, so great a change had come over him. His face was ashen-gray, his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, his head swayed violently from side to side.
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He seated himself near the table and with a qtiiet, smothered voice asked, ''What did you tell Grzesikiewicz ? ' '
*' What I told you yesterday; that I do not love him and will not marry him!" she an- swered boldly, but she was startled at the seeming calm with which her father spoke.
''Why?" he queried sharply, as though he did not tmderstand her.
"I told him that I do not love him and do not wish to marry at all. . . . "
"You are a fool! . . . a fool! . . . a fool!" he hissed at her through his tightly set teeth.
She regarded him calmly and all her old obstinacy retiimed.
" I said that you would marry him. I gave my word that you would marry him, and you will marry him ! "
"I will not! ... no one is able to force me!" she answered sullenly, looking with steady gaze into her father's eyes.
" I will drag you to the altar. I will compel you! . . . You must! ..." he cried hoarsely .
"No!"
"You will marry Grzesikiewicz, I tell you; I, your father, command you to do so! You will obey me immediately, or I will kill you!"
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"Very well, kill me, if you want to, but I'll not obey you!"
''I will drive you out of this house!" he shouted.
"Very well!"
"I will disown you!"
* ' Very well ! ' ' she answered with growing de- termination. Janina felt that with each word her heart was hardening with greater resolve.
"Ill drive you out . . . do you hear? . . . and even though you die of hunger, I never want to hear of you again!"
"Very well!"
"Janina! I warn you, don't drive me to extremity. I beg you marry Grzesikiewicz, my daughter, my child! . . . Isn't it for your good? You have no one but me in the world and I am old ... I will die . . . and you will remain alone without protection or support. . . . Janina, you have never loved me! . . . If you knew how imhappy I have been through- out my life, you would take pity on me ! "
"No! . . . Never! ..." she answered, unmoved even by his pleading.
"I ask you for the last time!" he shouted.
"For the last time I tell you no!" she flung back at him.
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Orlowski hurled his chair to the floor with such force that it was shattered to pieces. He tore open the collar of his shirt, so violent was the paroxysm of fury that had seized him, and with the broken arm of the chair in his hand, he sprang at Janina to strike her, but the cold, almost scornful, expression of her face brought him to his senses.
"Get out of here!" he roared, pointing to the door, "get out! . . . Do you hear? I turn you out of my home forever! . . . You will never again pass this threshold while I live, for I will kill you like a mad dog and throw you out of the door! ... I have no longer any daughter!"
"Very well, I will go . . ." she answered mechanically.
"I no longer have any daughter! Hence- forth I don't want to know you or hear any- thing of you! ... Go and perish ... I will kill you! ..." he shouted, rushing up and down the room like a madman.
His insane violence now burst out in full force. He rushed out of the house and from the window Janina saw him rtmning toward the woods.
She sat silent, dtmib, and as though turned
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to ice. She had expected everything, but never this. She burned with resentment but not a single tear clouded her eye. She gazed about her distractedly, for that hoarse cry still rang in her ears: "Get out of here! . . . get out!"
"I will go, I will go . . ." she whispered in a humble and broken voice through the tears that filled her heart, "I will go. . . ."
"God, my God! why am I so tmhappy?" she cried after a while.
Krenska, who had heard all, approached her. With feigned tears in her eyes she began to comfort her, but Janina gently pushed her away. It was not that which she needed; not that kind of comforting.
•'My father has driven me out . . . I must leave ..." she said, marveling at her own words.
"But that is preposterous! . . . Surely yoxir father can be placated. ..."
"No . . . I will not stay here any longer. I have enough of this torment . . . enough. ..."
"Are you going to your aunt's house?"
Janina was simk in thought for a moment, but suddenly her gloomy face brightened with a flash of determination.
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"I will go and join the theater. The die is cast! . . /'
Krenska glanced at her sharply.
''Come, help me pack my trtmk. I will leave on the next train."
''The next passenger train does not go to Kielce."
"It doesn't matter. I will go to Strzemi- eszyce, and from there, by the Viennese line to Warsaw. ..."
"IfIwereyou,Janina, I'd think it over. . . . Later you may regret it. ... "
"What's done can't be tmdone! ..."
And without pa3dng any further attention to Krenska's remarks, Janina began to pack. Her lingerie, her dresses, her books and notes, and various trifles she carefully folded away into her school-day trtmk, as though she were returning from her vacation.
At the end she bade farewell to Krenska indifferently. Outwardly she appeared calm and cool, while a slight tremor of her lips alone, and an inner tremor that she could not still, were the only traces of the storm.
She ordered her things carried downstairs, and, having still an hotir's time, she went to the woods.
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<n
'Forever ..." she said in a subdued tone, as though addressing the trees that seemed to bend toward her with a mournful murmur aad rustling of their leaves.
"Forever! ..." she whispered, gazing at the crimson gleams of the setting stm that filtered through the tangled branches of the beeches and shone upon the grotmd.
The woods seemed wrapt m a great silence, as though they were listening to her words of final farewell and dtmibly wondering how one who had been bom and reared in their midst, who had lived with their life, who had dreamed so many dreams in their embracing silence, could bid farewell.
The trees murmured mournfully. A sigh like a song of farewell and a sad reproach echoed through the wood. The ferns stirred with a gentle motion, the yotmg hazel leaves fluttered restlessly, the pines rustled softly with their slender needles — the whole wood trembled and became alive with a prolonged moan. The song of the birds sotmded in broken, startled little snatches, while over the sky, and over the earth carpeted with leaves and golden mosses and snowy valley-lilies, and through the whole verdant wood there
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flitted mysterious shadows, sounds and calls like the echo of sorrowful sobbing.
"Stay with me! . . . Stay!" the wood seemed to say.
The torrent roared noisily, swept away the broken boughs that impeded its course, circled and descended in a cloud of foam, a cascade of mist shining in the stm with all the col- ors of the rainbow; it went irresistibly on- ward, tritimphantly, whispering: ''Go! * . • Go!':
Then there followed a great silence, broken only by the htmi of insects and the dull clatter of falling acorns.
"Forever! . . ." whispered Janina.
She arose and started back toward the station. She walked slowly, looking about her with fond, lingering gaze upon the trees, the woodpaths, and the hillsides.
Then she began to think of the new exist- ence before her. There slowly arose in her soul a certain self-conscious power and increas- ing courage.
When she spied her father on the station platform, not so much as a tremor disturbed her. Already there loomed between them that new world which already lured her.
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She even went to the station-master's ofl&ce for a ticket. She stood before the window and asked for it in a loud voice. Orlowski (for he sold the tickets himself) raised his head with a violent start and something like a red shadow passed over his face, but he did not utter a word. He calmly handed her her change and stared at her coldly, stroking his beard.
On leaving, she turned her head and met his burning gaze. He started violently back from the window and swore aloud, while she went on, only somehow she went more slowly and her legs trembled tmder her. That gleam of his eyes, as though bloody with tears, struck deep into her heart.
The train arrived and she got on. From the window of the car she still kept gazing at the station. Krenska waved to her with a hand- kerchief from the house and pretended she was wiping away tears.
Orlowski, in a red cap and immaculately white gloves, paced up and down the platform with a stiff official air and did not glance even once in her direction.
The bell rang and the train pulled out.
The telegrapher was bowing his farewell to her, but she did not see him; she saw only how
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her father slowly turned about and entered the ofl&ce.
"Forever! . . ." she whispered.
Orlowski came in for supper at the usual hotu*.
Krenska, in spite of her joy at Janina's departure, was uneasy; she glanced into his eyes with a feeling of fear, walked about even more silently than usual, and was humbler and smaller than ever before.
Orlowski seemed to be wrestling with him- self, for he did not burst forth in curses and did not even mention Janina.
On the following day only he locked Janina's room and put the key away in his desk.
He did not sleep that night; his eyes were simken and his face deathly pale. Krenska heard him walking up and down his room all night, but on the following day he was at work as usual.
At dinner Krenska plucked up courage to speak to him about something.
''Aha ... I have still to settle with you!" he said.
Krenska grew pale. She began to speak to him about Janina, about her S5niipathy for her.
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how she had tried to dissuade her from leaving, how earnestly she had begged her.
"You're a fool!" he hurled at her. "She left because she wanted to. . . . Let her break her neck, if she wants to!"
Krenska began to commiserate his loneliness.
"A cur!" he snarled, spitting beside him in scorn. "You, madame, can leave to-day. I will pay you what is due you and then get out of this house as fast as you can go, or I swear to God I'll have my workmen throw you out! If I am to be alone I'll be entirely alone . , . without any guardians! A cur!"
Banging his glass against the table with such force that it flew into splinters, he went out.
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CHAPTER II
The little garden theater was beginning to awaken.
The curtain arose with a creaking sound and there appeared a barefooted and dis- heveled boy, clad only in a smock, who began to sweep the temple of art. The dust floated out in large clouds on the garden, settling on the red cloth coverings of the chairs and on the leaves of a few consumptive chestnut trees.
The waiters and servants of the restatirant began to put things to order under the large veranda. One could hear the clatter of washed glasses, the beating of rugs, the moving of chairs and the subdued whispers of the buffet- tender who arranged with a certain unction her rows of bottles, platters containing sandwiches, and huge bouquets d la Makart, resembling dried brooms. The glaring rays of the sun peered in at the sides of the garden and a throng of black sparrows swayed on the
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branches and perched on the chairs, clamoring for crumbs.
The clock over the btiffet was slowly and solemnly striking the hour of ten, when a tall slim boy rushed in on the veranda; a torn cap was perched on the top of his touseled red hair, his freckled face wore a mischievous smile, and his nose was upturned. He ran straight to the buffet.
''Be careful, Wicek, or you'll lose your shoes!" . . . called the barmaid.
"I don't care; I'll get them remodeled!" he retorted jovially, gazing down at his shoes which clung miraculously to his feet despite the fact that they were minus both soles and tops.
"Please, miss, let me have a thimbleful of beer!" he cried bowing ostentatiously.
''Have you the price?" asked the barmaid, extending her palm.
"This evening, I'll pay you. I give you my word, I'll pay you for it without fail," he begged.
The barmaid merely shrugged her shoulders.
"O come on, let me have it, miss. ... I'll recommend you to the Shah of Persia. . . . Such a broad dame ought to have qtiite a pull with him. . . ."
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The waiters burst out laughing, while the barmaid banged her metal tray against the counter.
"Wicek!" called someone from the en- trance.
"At your service, Mr. Manager."
"Are they all here for the rehearsal?"
"Oh! They'll all be here without fail!" he answered, laughing roguishly.
"Did you notify them? . . . Did you go to them with the circular?"
"Yes, they all signed it."
"Did you take the play-bill to the di- rector?"
"The director was still behind the scenes: he was lying in bed and gazing at his toes."
"You should have given it to his wife."
"But Mrs. Directress was in the midst of a tussle with her children; it was a little too noisy there."
"You will go with this letter to Comely Street. . . . Do you know where it is? "
"A few times over. 'She's quite a respect- able dame,' as a certain man in the front row said of Miss Nicolette the other day."
"You will take this, wait for an answer, and come right back."
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•'But Mr. Manager, will I get something for going?"
"Didn't I give you something on accoimt only last night? "
"Oh . . . only a copper! I spent it for beer and sardines, paid the balance of my rent, gave my shoemaker a deposit for a new pair of shoes, and now I'm dead broke!"
"You're a monkey! Here, take this. . . ."
*' Blessed are the hands that dispense forty- cent pieces!" he cried with a comical grimace, shuffled his shoes, and ran out.
"Set the stage for the rehearsal!" called the manager, seating himself on the veranda.
The members of the company assembled slowly. They greeted each other in silence and scattered over the garden.
"Dobek," called the stage-manager to a tall man who was making straight for the buffet. ' ' You guzzle from mom till night, and at the rehearsals I cannot hear a word you say. . . . Yotir prompting isn't worth a bean!"
"Mr. Manager, I had a bad dream that ran something like this: Night ... a well ... I stumbled and fell into it ... I was frozen stiff with fear ... I called for help ... no
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help was near . . . splash! . . . and I was up to my neck in water. . . . Brr! ... I still feel so cold that nothing will warm me."
''Oh, hang your dreams! You drink from mom till night."
'^That's because I can't drink like others: from night till mom. Brr! I feel so beastly chilled!"
''Ill order some hot tea for you "
"Thank you, I'm quite well Mr. Topolski, and use herbs only when I'm sick. Must, the extracted juice, the constituent of rye, that's the only stuff that is worthy of the complete man that I have the honor to consider myself, Mr. Manager."
The director entered and Dobek went to the bar.
"Did you assign all the r61es of Nitouche?'' the director asked.
"Not quite," answered Topolski, "those women . . . there are three candidates for Nitouche."
"Good morning, Mr. Director!" called one of the pillars of the theater, Majkowska, a handsome actress dressed in a light gown, a silken wrap, and a white hat with a big ostrich feather. She was all rosy from a good night's
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sleep and from an invisible layer of rotige. She had large, dark-blue eyes, full and car- mined lips, classical features, and a proud bearing. She played the principle r61es.
"Come here a minute, Mr. Director , . . there is a little matter I would like to speak to you about."
"Always at your service, madame. Per- haps you need some money?" ventured the director with a troubled mien.
"For the present ... no. What will you have to drink, Mr. Director?"
"Ho! Ho! Somebody's blood is going to be shed! " he cried with a comical gesture.
"I asked what will you drink, Mr. Direc- tor?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'd take a glass of cognac, but ..."
"You're afraid of your wife? She /Joes not appear in Nitouche, does she?"
"No, but ..."
"Waiter! Two cognacs and sandwiches. . . . You will give the r61e of Nitouche to Nicolette, will you not, Mr. Director? Please do so, for I have a good reason for asking it. Remember, Mr. Cabinski, that I never ask for a thing in vain, and do this for me ..."
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"That's already the fourth candidate for thepart! . . . God! all that I have to stand because of these women!"
"Which of them wants this part?"
"Well, Kaczkowska, my wife, Mimi, and now, Nicolette. ..."
"Waiter! Two more cognacs," she called, rapping on the tray with her glass. "You will give the part to Nicolette, Mr. Director. I know for a certainty that she will not accept it, for with her wooden voice she could dance, but not sing. But you see, Mr. Director, this is the very reason for giving it to her."
"Well . . . not to mention my own wife, Mimi and Kaczkowska will tear off my head if I do!"-
"You'll not lose much by that ! Til explain the matter to them. We will have a splendid farce, for you see that gentleman friend of hers win be present at to-day's rehearsal. Yester- day she boasted to him that you had her in mind when you annoimced in the papers that the r61e of Nitouche will be played by the beautiful and dashing Mme. X. X."
Cabinski began to laugh quietly.
* ' Only don't breathe a word about it. You'll see what will happen. Before him she will
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pretend to accept the part to show off. Halt will immediately begin to rehearse her and will make a fool of her before everyone. You will then take away her part and give it to whom- ever you like."
"You women are terrible in your malice." "Bah, therein lies our strength." They went out into the garden hall where several members of the company were already waiting for the rehearsal to begin. They sat about on chairs in little groups laughing, jok- ing, telling tales, and complaining while the ttining of the orchestra furnished an accom- paniment to the buzz of voices.
On the veranda an increasing ntmiber of guests was assembling and the htmi of voices, the clatter of plates and the noisy shifting of chairs grew ever louder. The smoke of cigarettes ascended in clouds to the iron roof beams.
Janina Orlowska entered. She sat down at one of the tables and inquired of the waiter: " Can you tell me if the director of the theater has already arrived?" "There he is!" "Which one of them." "What will you have, madame?"
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"I beg yotir pardon, which of those gentle- men is Mr. Cabinski?"
"A seven! . . . four whiskies!" someone called to the waiter from a nearby table.
*' Just a minute, just a minute!"
"Beer!" came another voice.
"Which of those gentlemen is the director? " patiently asked Janina for the second time.
''I will serve you in a minute, madam!" said the waiter bowing on all sides.
To Janina it seemed that they were all star- ing at her and that the waiters, as they passed with their hands full of beer-glasses and plates, cast such strange glances that she blushed in spite of herself.
Presently the waiter returned, bringing the coffee she had ordered.
'* Do you wish to see the director, madame?"
•'Yes."
'* He is sitting there in the first row of seats. That short man in a white vest . . . there! Do you see him?"
''I do. Thank you!"
"Shall I tell him you wish to speak to him?"
" No. Anyway he seems to be busy."
"He is only chatting."
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"And who are those gentlemen with whom he is talking?"
*'They are also members of our company — actors."
She paid for the coffee, giving the waiter a ruble. He fumbled about a long time, as though looking for change, but, seeing that she was gazing in another direction, he bowed and thanked her.
Having finished her coflFee, Janina went into the hall. She passed by the director and took a cursory look at him. All that she saw was a large, pale, anaemic face, covered with grayish splotches.
A few actors standing near him impressed her as handsome people. She noticed in their gestures, their smooth shaven faces, their easy, smiling airs something so superior to the men whom she had hitherto known, that she listened to their conversation with rapt attention.
The tmcurtained stage, wrapt in darkness, drew her with its hidden mystery.
For the first time Janina saw the theater at close range and the actors off stage. The theater seemed to her like a Grecian temple and those people, whose profiles she had before
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her, and whose eloquent voices sounded in her ears, seemed like true priests of art.
She was regarding everything about her with interest, when she suddenly noticed that the waiter who had served her was whispering something to the director and pointing to her with a slight gesture.
There ran through Janina a tremor of fear, strange and depressing. She did not look up again, but felt that someone was approaching, that someone's glances were resting on her head and encircling her figure.
She was still at a loss how to begin and what to say, but felt that she must speak.
She arose when she noticed Cabinski stand- ing before her.
''I am Mr. Cabinski, the director."
She stood there unable to utter a word.
** You deigned to ask for me, madame?" he queried with a courteous bow, signifying that he was ready to listen to her.
**Yes . . . if you please . . . Mr. Director. I wished to ask you . . . perhaps you could," she stuttered, imable for the moment to find the right words to express what she wished to say.
*' Pray rest a little, madame, and calm your-
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sdf. Is it something very important?" he whispered, bending toward her and at the same time winking significantly to the actors who were looking on.
''Oh, it is very important!" she answered, meeting his gaze. **I wish to ask you, Mr. Director, if you would accept me as a member of your company. "
This last sentence she uttered quickly as though fearing that her courage and voice might fail her ere it was spoken.
"Ah! ... is that all? . . . You wish to be engaged, miss?" He stiffened suddenly, studying her with a critical gaze.
''I journeyed here especially for that pur- pose. You will not refuse me, Mr. Director, will you?"
''With whom did you appear before?"
" Pardon me, but I don't quite tmderstand."
"With what company? . . . Where?"
"I have never before appeared in the theater. I came here straight from the coim- try for the express piupose of joining it."
"You have never appeared before? . . . Then, I have no place for you! " and he turned to go.
Janina was seized with a desperate fear
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that her quest would fail, so with courage and a tone of strong entreaty in her voice she began to speak hurriedly:
' ' Mr. Director ! I journeyed here especially to join your company. I love the theater so ardently that I cannot live without it! . . . Do not refuse me! I do not know anyone here in Warsaw. I came to you because I had read so much about you in the papers. I feel that I could play ... I have memorized so many r61es! . . . You will see, Mr. Di- rector ... if you only let me appear . . . you will see!"
Cabinski was silent.
''Or perhaps you would prefer to have me call to-morrow? ... I can wait a few days, if you wish," she added, seeing that he did not answer, but was observing her intently.
Her voice trembled with entreaty; it modu- lated with ease and there was so much origi- nality and warmth in her tone that Cabinski listened to her with pleasure.
" Now I have no time, but after the rehearsal we can discuss the matter more thoroughly," he said.
She wanted impulsively to press his hand and thank him for the promise, but her cour-
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age failed her, for she noticed that an increas- ing ntimber of people were curiously observing them.
''Hey there, Cabinski!"
''ManaHve!"
''Director! What's that ... a rendez- vous? In broad daylight, before the eyes of all, and scarcely three flights away from Pepa ? ' '
Such were the bantering remarks hurled at him from every direction after his parting with Janina.
"Who is the charmer?"
"Director, it's rather careless to carry on such an aifair right there in the limelight."
"Ha! ha! now we've got you! . . . You posed as a flawless crystal, my muddy amber ! " called one of the company, a fleshless indi- vidual with habitually contorted lips that seemed to spew gall and malice.
" Go to the devil, my dear ! This is the first time I saw her," retorted Cabinski.
"A pretty woman ! What does she want? "
"A novice of some kind . . • she's seeking an engagement."
"Take her. Director. There are never too many pretty women on the stage."
"The director has enough of those calves."
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"Don't fear, Wladek, they do not encum- ber the budget, for Cabinski has a custom of failing to pay his actors, particularly the young and pretty ladies."
Thereat they all began laughing.
''Treat us to a whiskey, Director, and I will tell you something," Glas began anew.
"Well, what is it?"
"That the manager will treat us to an- other. . • ."
"My funny sir, your belly grows at the ex- pense of your wit . . . you are beginning to prate like a fool," remarked Wladek.
"Only for fools ..." Glas maliciously thrust back at Wladek and retired behind the scenes.
"John!" came the voice of the director's wife from the veranda.
Cabinski went out to meet her.
She was a tall, stout woman with a face that still retained traces of great beauty, now carefully preserved with paint; she had coarse features, large eyes, narrow lips, and a" very low forehead. Her dress was of an exag- gerated youthful style and color, so that from afar she gave the impression of being a yotmg woman.
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She was very proud of her director-husband, of her dramatic talent, and of her children, of which she had four. In real life she was fond of playing the r61e of a matron occupied only with her home and the upbringing of her child- ren, while in truth she was nothing but a comedi- enne, both in life and behind the scenes. On the stage she impersonated dramatic mothers and all the elder, unhappy women, never under- standing her parts, but acting them, neverthe- less, with fervor and pathos.
She was a terror to her servants, to her own children, and to young actresses whom she suspected of possessing talents. She had a shrewish temper which she masked before others with an exaggerated calm and feigned weakness.
''Good morning, gentlemen!" . . . she called, leaning with a careless attitude on her husband's arm.
The company thronged around her, Maj- kowska greeting her with an effusive kiss.
''How charming Madame Directress looks to-day," remarked Glas.
"Your vision must have improved, for the directress always looks charming!" interposed Wladek,
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"How is your health? . . . Yesterday's performance must have taxed your strength."
''You played superbly! . . . We all stood behind the scenes in rapt attention."
''The critics were all weeping. I saw Zarski wiping his eyes with his handkerchief."
"After sneezing . . . he has a bad catarrh," called someone from the side.
"The public was fascinated and swept off its feet in the third act . . . they arose in their chairs."
"That's because they wanted to nm away from such a treat," came the mocking voice again.
"How many bouquets did you receive, Madame Directress?"
"Ask the director, he paid the bill."
"Ah, Mr. Cotmselor, you are tmbearable to-day!" cried the directress in a sweet voice, although almost pale with rage, for all the actors were growing red in the face in their effort to keep from laughing.
"It's intended as a kindness. . . . All the rest of them are saying pretty things, let me say something sensible."
"You are an impertinent man, Mr. Cotm- selor! . . . How can you say such things? . . .
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Moreover, what do I care about the theater! If I played well, I owe it to my husband; if I played badly it's the fault of the director for forcing me to appear continually in new r61es! If I had my way, I would lock myself up with my children and confine myself to domestic affairs. . . . My God! art is such a big thing and we are all, compared with it, so small, so small that I tremble with fear before each new performance!" she declaimed.
"Please let me have a word with you in private," called Majkowska.
''Do you see? . . . there is not even time to talk of art!" she sighed deeply and departed.
' * An old scarecrow ! ' '
''An everlastmg cow! . . . She thinks she is an artist!"
"Yesterday she bellowed terribly."
"She flimg herself aroimd the stage as though she had St. Vitus' dance!"
"Hush! . . . according to her that is realism!"
On the veranda Majkowska was concluding her conversation with Mrs. Cabinska.
"Will you give me your word of honor, Madame Directress?"
"Of course, I'll see to it right away."
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'*It must be done. Nicolette has made herself impossible in this company. Why, she even dares to criticize your own playing! Yesterday I saw her making disparaging remarks to that editor," Majkowska whis- pered.
''What! she dares to meddle with me?"
''I never indulge in gossip, nor do I want to sow hatred, but "
''What did she say? ... in the presence of the editor, did you say? Ah, the vile co- quette!"
Majkowska smothered a smile, but hastily replied, "No, 111 not tell you • . . I do not like to repeat gossip ! "
"Well, I'll pay her back for it! ... Wait, we'll teach her a lesson! " hissed the directress.
"Dobek, prompter! . . . get into your box!"
"Ladies and gentlemen, the rehearsal com- mences!"
"To the stage! to the stage!" was the cry that went up all over the hall as the actors hur- ried behind the scenes.
"Mr. Director!" called Majkowska, "you can give the r61e to Nicolette . . . your wife agrees to it."
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"Very well, my dears, very well. . . ."
He went out on the veranda where Nicolette was already seated with a young gentleman, very fastidiously dressed.
''We request your presence at the rehearsal, Miss Nicolette. ..."
''What are you rehearsing? " asked Nicolette.
"Nitouche . . . why, don't you know that you are to appear in the title r61e? ... I have already advertised it in the papers."
Kazckowska, who had at that moment en- tered and was looking at them, hastily covered her face with her parasol, so as not to bmst out laughing at the comical look of embarrass- ment on Nicolette's face.
"I am too indisposed at present to take part in the rehearsal," she said, scrutinizing Cabiniski and Kaczkowska.
Evidently she suspected some ruse, but Cabinski, with the solemnest mien in the world, handed her the r61e.
"Here is your part, madame. . . . We begin immediately," he said, going away.
"But Mr. Director! my dear Director, I pray you, go on with the rehearsal without me! . . . I have such a headache that I doubt I could sing," she pleaded.
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ii^
* It can't be done. We begin immediately. ' '
"Oh, please do sing, Miss Nicolette! Fm crazy to hear you sing! " begged the squire.
"Director!"
"What is it, my soprano?"
And the directress appeared, pointing to Janina who was standing behind the scenes.
"A novice," answered Cabinski.
"Are you going to engage her?"
"Yes, we need chorus girls. The sisters from Prague have left, for they made nothing but scandals."
"She looks rather homely," opined Mrs. Cabinska.
"But she has a very scenic face! . . . and also a very nice, though strange voice."
Janina did not lose a word of this conver- sation, carried on in an undertone ; she had also heard the chorus of praise that went up on the directress's appearance^, and later, the chorus of derision. She gazed with a bewildered look on that whole company.
"Clear the stage! clear the stage!"
Those standing on the stage hastily moved back behind the scenes, for at the moment the entire chorus rushed out in a gallop : a throng of women, chiefly yotmg women, but with painted
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faces, faded and blighted by their feverish life. There were blondes and bninettes, small and tall, thin and stout — ^a motley gatheringfrom all spheres of life. There were among them the faces of madonnas with defiant glances, and the smooth, round faces, expressionless and imintelligent, of peasant girls. And all were boredly cynical, or, at least, appeared so.
They began to sing.
''Halt! Start over again!" roared the director of the orchestra, an individual with a big red face and huge mutton-chop whiskers.
The chorus retired and came back again with heavy step, carrying on a sort of col- lective can-canade, but every minute there was heard the sharp bang of the conductor's baton against his desk and the hoarse yell — ' ' Halt ! Start over again ! ' ' And swinging his baton he would mutter imder his nose, ''You cattle!"
The chorus rehearsal dragged on intermin- ably. The actors, scattered about in the seats, yawned wearily and those who took part in the evening's performance paced up and down behind the scenes, indifferently waiting for their turn to rehearse.
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In the men's dressing-room Wicek was shin- ing the shoes of the stage-manager and giving him a hasty account of his mission to Comely Street.
''Did you deliver the letter? . . . Have you an answer?"
''I should smile!" and he handed Topolski a long pink envelope.
"Wicek! . . . If you squeal a word of this to anyone, you clown, you know what awaits you!V
''That's stale news! . . . The lady said just that, too. Only she added a ruble to her warning."
"Maurice!" called Majkowska sharply, appearing at the door of the dressing-room.
"Wait a minute. ... I can't go with only one shoe shined, can I!"
"Why didn't you have the maid shine them?"
"The maid is always at your service and I can't get a single thing from her."
"Well, go and hire another."
"All right, but it will be for myself alone."
"Nicolette, to the stage!"
"Call her!" cried Cabinski from the stage to those sitting arotmd in the chairs.
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''Come, Maurice," whispered Majkowska. ''It'll be worth seeing."
"Nicolette, to the stage!" cried those in the chairs.
"In a moment! Here I am ..." and Nicolette, with a sandwich in her mouth and a box of candy under her arm, rushed for the stage entrance with such violence that the floor creaked imder her steps.
"What the devil do you mean by appearing so late! This is a rehearsal ... we are all waiting," angrily muttered the conductor of the orchestra. .
" I am not the only one you are waiting for," she retorted.
"Precisely, we are waiting only for you, madame, and you know we have not come here to argue. . . . On with the rehearsal!"
"But I have not yet learned a single line. Let Kaczkowska sing . . . that is a part for her!"
"The part was given to you, wasn't it? . . . Well, then there's no use arguing! Let us begin "
"Oh, director! Can't we postpone it till this afternoon? Just now, it ..."
"Begin!"
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"Try it, Miss Nicolette . . . that part is well adapted to your voice. ... I myself asked the director to give it to you," encour- aged Mrs. Cabinska with a friendly smile.
Nicolette listened, scanning the faces of the whole company, but they were all immobile- Only the yoimg gentleman smiled amorously at her from the chairs.
The conductor raised his baton, the orches- tra began to play, and the prompter gave her the first words of her part.
Nicolette, who was noted for never being able to learn her r61e, now tripped up in the very first line and sang it as falsely as possible.
They began over again; it went a little better, but ''Halt," as they called the con- ductor, intentionally skipped a measure, caus- ing her to make an awful mess of it.
A chorus of laughter arose on the stage.
** A musical cow!"
''To the ballet with such a voice and such an ear!"
Nicolette, on the verge of tears, approached Cabinski.
"I told you that I could not sing just now. ... I had not even time to glance at my part."
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''Aha, so you cannot, madame? . . . Please hand me the r61e! . . . Kaczkowska will sing it."
''I can sing, but just now I am tmable to ... I don't want to flimk!"
''To turn the heads of gentlemen, to make intrigues, to slander others before the press reporters, to go gallivanting all about town ... for that you have time!" hissed Mrs. Cabinska.
"Oh, go and mind your children . . . but don't you dare to meddle with my affairs."
"Director! She insults me, iAa< ..."
"Hand me the part," ordered Cabinski. "You can sing in the chorus, madame, since you are tmable to sing a r61e."
"Oh no! . . . Just for that I am going to sing it! ... I don't care a snap for these vile intrigues!"
"Who are you saying that to? " cried Cabin- ska, jtmiping up from her chair.
"Well, to you, if you like."
"You are dismissed from the company!" interposed Cabinski.
"Oh, go to the devil, all of you!" shouted Nicolette throwing the r61e into Cabinski's face. "It's known long ago that in your
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company there is no place for a respectable woman !">^
''Get out of here, you adventuress!"
Cabinska sprang at her, but halfway across she stopped short and burst into tears.
"On the right there is a sofa ... it will be more comfortable for you to faint on, Madame Directress!" called someone from the chairs.
The company smiled with set faces.
"Pepa! . . . my wife! . . . calm yourself. . . . For God's sake can't we ever do any thing without these continual rumpuses!"
"Am I the cause of it?"
"I'm not blaming you ... but you could at least calm yourself . . . there's no reason for you acting this way ! "
"So that is the kind of husband and father yOu are! . . . that is the kind of director!" she shouted in fury.
"Hold out only one hour, and you'll go straight to heaven, you martyr!" someone called to Cabinski.
"Sir," queried a spectator, holding up one of the actors by the button of his coat. "Sir, are they playing something new?"
"First of all, that is a button from my coat
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which you have ptdled off!" cried the actor, *'and that, my dear sir, is the first act of a moving farce entitled Behind the Scenes; it is given each day with great success."
The stage became deserted. The orchestra was timing its instruments; *'Halt" went for a drink of beer, and the company scattered about the garden. Cabinski, holding his head with both hands, paced up and down the stage like a madman, complaining half in anger, half in commiseration, for his wife was still quietly continuing her spasms.
''Oh what people! What people! What scandals!"
Janina, startled by the brutality of the spectacle she had just witnessed, retreated behind the farthermost scene. She felt that it was now impossible to speak with the director.
''So these are artists! . . . this is the theater!" she was thinking.
The rehearsal, after a short intermission, began anew — ^with Kaczkowska as the titular heroine.
Majkowska was in a splendid humor, being so successfully rid of her rival.
The director, after his wife's departure.
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rubbed his hands in glee and motioned to Topolski. They went out to the buffet for a drink. Without a doubt he must have made something on his break with Nicolette.
Stanislawski, the oldest member of the company, walked up and down the dressing- room, spitting with disgust and muttering to Mirowska, who was sitting on a chair with her feet curled up under her.
"Scandals . . . nothing but scandals! . . . how can we expect to have any success! ..."
Mirowska nodded her assent, smiling faintly and keeping steadily on with the crocheting of a handkerchief.
After the rehearsal Janina boldly approached Cabinski.
"Mr. Director — " she began.
"Ah, it is you, miss? . . . I will accept you. Come to-morrow before the performance, and we will talk it over. I have not the time now."
"Thank you ever so much, sir!" she an- swered overjoyed.
"Have you any kind of a voice? " .
"A voice?"
"Do you sing?"
"At home I used to sing a little . . . but
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I do not think I have a stage voice . . . how- ever, I . . ."
"Only come a little earlier and we shall try you out. ... I shall speak to the musical director."
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CHAPTER III
The Lazienki Park in Warsaw was athrob with the breath of spring. The roses bloomed and the jasmines diffused their heavy odor through the park. It was so quiet and lovely- there, that Janina sat for a few hours near the lake, forgetting everything.
The swans with spreading wings, like white cloudlets, floated over the azure bosom of the water; the marble statues glowed with im- maculate whiteness; the fresh and luxuriant foliage was like a vast sea of emerald steeped in golden stmlight; the red blossoms of the chestnut trees floated down on the groimd, the waters and the lawns, and flickered like rosy sparks among the shadows of the trees.
The noisy hum of the city reached here in a subdued echo and lost itself among the bushes.
Janina had come here straight from the theater. What she had seen disquieted her; she felt within herself a dull pain of disillusion- ment and hesitation.
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She did not wish to remember anything, but only kept repeating to herself, *'I'm in the theater! . . . I'm in the theater!"
There passed before her mind the figiires of her future companions. Instinctively she felt that in those faces there was nothing friendly, only, envy and hypocrisy.
Presently she proceeded to her hotel at which she had stopped on the advice of her fellow-travelers, on the train to Warsaw. It was a cheap affair on the outskirts of the city and frequented chiefly by petty farm officials and the actors of small provincial theaters.
She was given a small room on the third floor, with a window looking out upon the red roofs of the old city, extending in crooked and irregular lines. It was such an ugly view that, on returning from Lazienki, with her eyes and soul still full of the green of the verdure and the golden sunlight, she immedi- ately pulled down the shades and began to unpack her trunk.
She had not yet had time to think of her father. The city, the hubbub and bustle which engulfed her immediately upon her arrival at the station, the weariness caused by the journey and by the last moments at
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Bukowiec, and afterwards those feverish hours at the theater, the rehearsal, the park, the waiting for evening and her own coming rehearsal — all this had so completely absorbed her that she forgot almost entirely about home.
She dressed carefully, for she wished to appear at her best.
When she arrived at the garden-theater the lights were already turned on and the public was beginning to assemble. She went boldly behind the scenes. The stage hands were arranging the decorations; of the company, no one was as yet present.
In the dressing-rotois the gaslights flared brightly. The costtimer was preparing gaudy costumes, and the make-up man sat whistling and combing a wig with long, bright tresses.
In the ladies' dressing-room an old woman was standing under the gaslight, sewing something.
Janina explored all the comers, examining everything, emboldened by the fact that no one paid the slightest attention to her. The walls behind the huge canvas decorations were dirty, with their plaster broken off, and covered with sticky dampness. The floors,
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the moldings, the shabby furniture and decorations, that seemed to her like beggarly rags, were thick with dust and filth. The odor of mastic, cosmetics, and burnt hair, floating over the stage, nauseated her.
She viewed the canvas scenes of what were supposed to be magnificient castles, the chambers of the kings of operetta, gorgeous landscapes — and beheld at close view a cheap smear of colors which could satisfy only the grossest of senses and then only from a dis- tance. In the storeroom she saw card- board crowns; the satin robes were poor imitations, the velvets were cheap taffeta, the ermines were painted cSmbric, the gold was gilded paper, the armor was of cardboard, the swords and daggers of wood.
She gazed at that future kingdom of hers as though wishing to convince herself of its worthiness. And, though it was sham, tinsel, lies, and comedy she tried to see above it all something infinitely higher — art.
The stage was not yet set, and was only dimly lighted. Janina crossed it a few times with the stately stride of a heroine, then again, with the light, graceful airiness of an ingenue, or with the quick feverish step of a woman who
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carries with her death and destruction; and with each new impersonation, her face as- sumed the appropriate expression, her eyes glowed with the flame of the Eumenides, with storm, desire, conflict, or, kindling with the mood of love, longing, anxiety they shone like stars on a spring night.
She passed through these various trans- formations imconsciously, impelled by the memory of the plays and r61es she had read, and so great was her abstraction, that she forgot about everything and paid no atten- tion to the stagehands, who were moving about her.
'' My Al used to act the same way . . . the same way ! " said a quiet voice from behind the scenes near the ladies' dressing-room.
Janina paused in confusion. She saw standing there a middle-aged woman of me- dium height, with a withered face and stem demeanor.
''You have joined our company, miss?" she inquired with a sharp energetic voice, piercing Janina with her rotmd, owl-like eyes.
''Not qtiite. ... I am about to have a trial with the musical director. Ah, yes, Mr. Cabinski even said that it was to take place
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before the performance! ..." she cried, recalling what he had told her.
'*Aha! with that drunkard ..."
Janina glanced at her, surprised.
''Have you set your heart on being with us, miss?"
''In the theater? . . . yes! ... I jour- neyed here for that very purpose."
"From whence?" asked the elderly woman abruptly.
"From home," answered Janina, but more quietly and with a certain hesitation.
"Ah ... I see . . . you are entirely new to the profession! . . . Well, well! that is curious! . . ."
"Why? . . . why should it be so strange for one who loves the theater to try to join it? . . ."
"Oh, that's what all of them say! . . . while in truth, each of them nms away either from something ... or for something. ..."
Janina was conscious of an accent of hidden malice in her voice. " Do you know, madam, how soon the musical director will arrive?" she asked.
' ' I don't ! ' ' snapped back the elderly woman, and walked away.
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Janina moved back a little, for just then the workmen were spreading a huge waxed canvas over the stage. She was gazing at this absent-mindedly, when the elderly woman reappeared and addressed her in a milder tone, "I will give you a piece of advice, miss. . . . It is necessary for you to win over the musical director."
"But how am I to do it?"
" Have you money? "
"I have, but . . ."
" If you will listen to me, I will advise you."
"Certainly."
"You must get him a little drunk, then the rehearsal will come off splendidly."
Janina glanced at her in amazement.
"Ha! ha! "laughed the other quietly. "Ha! ha! she is a real moon-calf!"
After a moment she whispered, "Let us go to the dressing-room. I will enlighten you a little . . ."
She pulled Janina after her, and afterwards, busying herself with pinning a dress on a mannikin, she remarked, "We must get acquainted."
"Tell me, madam, how about that musical director? ' ' asked Janina.
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"It's necessary to buy him some cognac. Yes ! "she added af teramoment, " Cognac,beer, and sandwiches will, perhaps, be sufficient."
"How much would that cost?"
"I think that for three rubles you can give him a decent treat. Let me have the money and I will order everything for you. I had better go right away."
Janina gave her the money.
Sowinska left and in about a quarter of an hour returned, breathless.
"Well, everything is settled! Come along, miss, the director is waiting."
Behind the restaurant hall there was a room with a piano. "Halt," flushed and sleepy, was already waiting there.
"Cabinski spoke to me about you, miss!" he began. "What can you sing? . . . Whew! how warm I feel! . . . Perhaps you will raise the window?" he said, turning to Sowinska.
Janina felt disturbed by his hoarse voice and his inflamed, drtmken face, but she sat down to the piano, wondering what she should select to sing.
"Ah! you also play, miss? . . " he queried in great surprise.
"Yes," she answered, and began playing the
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introduction to some song, without seeing the signs that Sowinska was making to her.
'* Please sing something for me," he said, ''I want to hear only your voice. . . . Or per- haps you could sing some solo part? ''
'*Mr. Director ... I feel that I have a calling for the drama, or even for the comedy, but never for the opera."
''But we are not talking about the opera . . ."
''About what, then?"
"About this . . . the operetta!" he cried, striking his knee. "Sing, Miss! ... I have only a little time and I am burning up with this heat."
She began to sing a song of Tosti's. The director listened, but at the same time gazed at Sowinska and pointed to his parched lips.
When Janina had ended, he cried, "Very well ... we will accept you ... I must hurry out, for I'm roasting."
"Perhaps you will have a drink of something with us, Mr. Director? ..." she queried timidly, understanding the signs that So- winska gave her.
He pretended to excuse himself, but in the end remained.
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Sowinska ordered the waiter to bring half a bottle of cognac, three beers and some sand- wiches, and, having drained her own glass, she hastily left them, saying that she had for- gotten something in the dressing-room.
"Halt" shoved his chair nearer to Janina's.
"Hm! . . . you have a voice, miss ... a very nice voice . . . " he said and laid his big red paw upon her knee, while with the other he began to pour some brandy into his beer.
She moved back a little, disgusted.
*' You can put on a bold front on the stage. ... I will help you . . . " he added, draining his glass at one gtilp.
'* If you will be so kind, Mr. Director ..." Janina said, drawing away from him.
"I will see to it ... I will take care of you!"
And suddenly he took her about the waist and drew her to him.
Janina shoved him back with such force that he fell sprawling upon the table, and then ran to the door, ready to cry out.
**Whew! . . . wait a minute . . . you're a fool! . . . stay! . . . I wanted to take care of you, help you, but since you're such a bloom- ing fool, go and hang yourself! ..."
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He drank the rest of his cognac and left.
On the veranda sat Cabinski with the stage-manager.
''Has she any kind of a voice? " he inquired of *'Halt," for he had seen Janina entering the room. * ' A soprano ? ' '
''Ho, ho! something unheard of . . . ahnost an alto!"
Janina sat for about an hour in that room, imable to control the indignation and rage that shook her. There were lucid moments when she would spring up as though ready to rush out and away from those people, but immediately she would sink down again with a moan.
"Where will I go?" she asked herself, and then added with a sudden determination. "No, I will stay! ... I will bear all, if it is necessary ... I must! ... I must!"
Janina became set in her stubborn, deter- mination. She collected within herself all her powers for impending battle with misforttme, with obstacles, with the whole evil and hostile world — and for a moment, she saw herself on some dizzying height where was fame and the intoxication of tritmiph.
Presently Sowinska came in.
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"Thank you, for your advice . . . and for leaving me with a pig! ..." the girl exclaimed, half weeping.
" I was in a hurry ... he did not eat you, did he? . . . He's a good man. ..."
"Then leave your daughter alone with that good man!" retorted Janina harshly.
"My daughter is not an actress, " answered Sowinska.
"Oh! . . . It doesn't matter ... It's only a lesson for me, " she whispered, turning away.
She met Cabinski and, approaching him, asked, "Will you accept me, Mr. Director?"
"You may consider yourself engaged," he answered. ' ' As for your salary we shall speak of that another day."
"What am I to play? ... I should like to take the part of Clara in The Iron Master.''
Cabinski glanced at her sharply and cov- ered his mouth with his hand so as not to burst out laughing.
"Just a moment . . . just a moment . . . you must first acquaint yourself with the stage. In the meanwhile, you will appear with the chorus. Halt told me that you know how to play the piano and read notes.
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To-morrow I will give you some scores of the operettas we play and you can learn the chorus parts."
Janina went to the dressing-room and had scarcely opened the door, when someone pushed her back, slammed the door in her face and called out angrily *' Upstairs with you! that is where the chorus girls belong ! "
She set her teeth and went upstairs.
The dressing-room of the chorus was a long, narrow and low apartment. Rows of im- shaded gaslights burned above long bare, board tables extending along the walls on three sides of the room. The walls were covered with unbeveled and unpainted boards which were scribbled all over with names, dates jokes and caricatures, done in charcoal or rouge paint. On the bare wall hung a whole string of dresses and costtimes.
About twenty women sat undressed before mirrors of various shapes, and before each one there burned candles.
Janina spying an unoccupied chair, near the door, sat down and began to look about her.
**I beg your pardon, but that is my seat!" called a stout brimette.
Janina stood aside.
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"Did you come to see someone? asked the same chorus-girl, rubbing her face with vaseline before applying powder.
** No. I came to the dressing-room. I am one of the company," answered Janina rather loudly.
"Oh, you are?"
A few heads raised themselves above the tables and a few pairs of eyes were centered upon Janina.
Janina told the brunette her name.
"Girls! . . .this new one calls herself Orlowska. Get acquainted with her!" called the brunette.
A few of those sitting nearest her stretched out their hands in greeting and then proceeded with their make-up.
"Louise, loan me some powder."
"Go buy it!"
"Say Sowinska!" called down one of the girls through the open door to the lower dress- ing-room, "I met that same guy . . . you know! . . . I was walking along NowySwiat."
* * Tell it to the marines ! Who would fall for such a scarecrow as you! " put in another.
"I've bought a new suit . . . look!" cried a small, very pretty blonde.
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' * You mean he bought it for you ! * '
''Goodness, no! ... I bought it from my own savings."
"Persian lamb! . . . oh! ... Do you think we'll believe you? . . . Come now, you bought it out of that fellow's savings, didn't you?"
"It's pure lily! . . . The waist is low-cut with a yoke of cream-colored embroidery, the skirt is plain with a shirred hem, the hat is trimmed with violets," another girl was re- coimting, as she slipped her ballet skirts over her head.
"Listen there, you lily-colored kid . . . give me back that ruble that you owe me. ...
' ' After the play when I get it I'll give it back to you, honest!"
"Ha! ha! Cabinski will give it to you, like fun . . ."
"I tell you, my dear, I'm getting desperate. ... He coughed a little . . . but I thought nothing of it . . . imtil yesterday, when I looked down his little throat I saw . . . white spots ... I ran for the doctor ... he examined him and said: diphtheria! I sat by him all night, rubbed his throat every hour
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... he couldn't say a word, only showed me with his little finger how it hurt . . . and the tears streamed down his face so pitif tilly that I thought I'd die of grief ... I left the janitress with him, for I must make some money ... I left my cloak to cover him with . . . but all, all that is not enough! ..." a slim and pretty actress with a face worn by suffering and poverty was telling her neighbor in a subdued voice, while she curled her hair, carmined her pale lips, and with the pencil gave a defiant touch to her eyes dimmed by tears and sleepiness.
"Helen! your mother asked about you to-day ..."
*' Surely, not about me . . . my mother died long ago."
''Don't tell me that! Majkowska knows you and your mother well and saw you together on Marshalkowska Street the other day."
"Majkowska ought to buy herself a pair of glasses, if she's so blind as that ... I was going downtown with the housekeeper."
The other girls began to laugh at her. The one who had denied her mother blew out her candle and left in irritation.
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' ' She' s ashamed of her own mother. That ' s true, but such a mother! ..."
**A plain peasant woman. She com- promises her before everybody. ... At least, she could refrain from making a show before other people!"
**How so? Can a girl be ashamed of her mother? ..." cried Janina, who had been sitting in silence, imtil those last words stirred her to indignation.
"You are a newcomer, so you don't know anything," several answered her at once.
''May I come in? . . ." called a masculine voice from without.
"You can't! you can't!" chorused the girls energetically.
"Zidinska! your editor has come."
A tall, stout chorus girl, rustling her skirts, passed out of the room.
"Shepska! take a look out after them."
Shepska went out, but came back immedi- ately.
' ' They've gone downstairs. ' '
The stage bell rang violently.
"To the stage!" called the stage-director at the door. ' ' We begin immediately ! ' '
There arose an indescribable hubbub. All
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the girls began to talk and shout at the same time; they ran about, tore away hairpins and curling irons from one another, powdered themselves, quarreled over trifles, blew out candles, hastily closed their dressing-cases and rushed down the stairs in crowds, for the second bell had already sounded.
Janina descended last of all and stood behind the scenes. The performance began. They were playing some kind of half fairy-like operetta. Janina could hardly recognize those people or that theater — everything had tmdergone such a magical transformation and taken on a new beauty under the influence of powder, paint, and light! ...
The music, with the quiet caressing tones of the flute, floated through the silence and stole into Janina's soul, lulling it sweetly . . . and later, a dance of some kind, soft, voluptuous, and intoxicating, enveloped her with its charm, lured and rocked her on the waves of rhythm and held her in an ecstatic lethargy.
She felt herself drawn ever farther into a confused whirl of lights, tones and colors. Her impulsive and sensuous nature, struggling hitherto with the drab commonplace of every- day events and people, was fascinated. It
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was almost as she had visioned it in her soul; ftill of lights, music, thrilling accents, ecstatic swoons, strong colors, and stonny and over- powering emotions, breaking with the force of thtmderbolts.
The suffocating odor of powder. dust floated about her like a cloud, while from the crowded hall there flowed a stream of hot breaths and desiring glances that broke against the stage like a magnetic wave, drowning in forget- fulness all that was not song, music, and pleasure.
When the act ended and a storm of applause broke loose, she was on the verge of fainting. She bent her head and eagerly drank in those murmurs resembling lightning flashes and, like them blinding the soul. She breathed in those cries of the delighted public with her full breath and with all the might of her soul that craved for fame. She closed her eyes, so that that impression, that picture might last longer.
The enchanting vision had dissolved. Over the stage moved men in their shirt sleeves and without vests; they were changing the scenes, arranging the furniture, fastening the props. She saw the grimy necks, the dirty
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and ugly faces, the coarse and hardened hands and the heavy forms.
She went out on the stage and through a slit in the curtain gazed out on the dim hall packed 'full of people. She saw htmdreds of yoimg faces, women's faces, smiling and still stirred by the music, while their owners fanned themselves; the men in their black evening clothes formed dark spots scattered at regular intervals, upon the light backgrotmd of femi- nine toilettes.
Janina felt a strange disappointment as she realized that the faces of the public were very much like those of Grzesikiewicz, her father, her home acquaintances, the principal of her boarding school, the professors at the academy and the telegrapher at Bukowiec. For the moment, it seemed to her that that was a sheer impossibility. How so? . . . She, of course, knew what to think about those others, whom long ago she had classified as fools, light- heads, drtmkards, gossipers, silly geese and house-hens; small and shallow souls, a band of common eaters-of -bread, stmk in the shallow morass of material existence. And these people that filled the theater and doled out applause, and whom she had once thought of
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as demi-gods — ^were they the same as those others? Janina asked herself, that, wonder- ingly.
''Madame!" said a voice beside her.
She tore her face away from the curtain. At her side stood a handsome, elegantly dressed yoimg man who was holding his hand to his hat, smiling in a conventional manner.
''Just let me look a moment . . . " he said.
Janina moved away a bit.
He glanced through the slit in the curtain and relinquished her place to her.
"Pardon me, pardon me for disturbing you . . ."he said.
"Oh, I've looked all I wanted to, sir . . ." she answered.
"Not a very interesting sight, is it? . . ." he queried. "The most authentic Philistia; trade-mongers and shoemakers. . . . Perhaps you think, madame, that they come to hear, and admire the play? Oh, no! . . . they come here to display their new clothes, have supper, and kill time. ..."
"Well then, who does come for the play itself?" she asked.
" In this place, no one. . . . At the Grand Theater and at the Varieties . . . there, per-
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haps, you may yet find a group, a very small group who love art and who come for the sake of art alone. I have often touched upon that matter in the papers."
"Mr. Editor, let me have a cigarette!" called an actor from behind the scenes.
''At your service." He handed the actor a silver cigarette-case.
Janina, moving away, gazed with admira- tion at the writer, delighted with the oppor- timity of observing such a man at close range.
How many times in the coimtry while lis- tening to the everlasting conversations about farming, politics, rainy and clear weather, she had dreamed of this other world, of people who would discourse to her of ideals, art, himianity, progress and poetry, and who impersonated in themselves all those ideals.
' ' You must not be very long in this company for I have not had the pleasure of seeing you before ..."
"I was engaged only to-day."
"Have you appeared elsewhere before?"
"No, never on the real stage. ... I took part only in amateur theatricals."
"That is the way nearly all dramatic tal- ent develops. I know ... I happen to
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know . . . Modrzejewska herself often men- tioned that fact to me," he remarked, with a condescending smile.
"Mr. Editor ... do your duty!'' called Kaczkowska, extending her hands.
The editor buttoned her gloves, kissed each of her hands a few times, received a slap on the shoulder in reward and retreated to the cur- tain where Janina was standing.
"So this is your first appearance in the theater? ..." he asked. "No doubt it's a case of the family opposing . . . inflexible determination on your part . . . the isolation and dullness of the cotmtryside . . . your first appearance as an amateur . . . stage fright . . . success . . . the recognition of the divine spark within yourself . . . your dreams of the real stage . . . tears . . . sleepless nights ... a struggle with an ad- verse environment . . . finally, consent . . . or perhaps a secret escape in the night . . . fear . . . anxiety . . . going the rotmds of the directors . . . seeking an engagement . . . ecstasy . . . art . . . godliness!" he spoke rapid-y, telegraphically.
"You have almost guessed it, Mr. Editor ... it was the same with me," said Janina.
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"You see, mademoiselle, I knew so from the first. It's intuition that's all! FU take care of you, upon my word! . . . Fll insert a little item about you in our next issue. Later, give a few details under a sensational headline, next, a longer article about the new star on the horizon of dramatic art," he sped on. . . . ''You will sweep them off their feet . . . the directors will tear you away fron each other, and in about a year or two . . . you will be in the Grand Theater at Warsaw! ..."
"But, Mr. Editor, no one knows me; no one, as yet, knows whether I have talent ..."
' ' You have talent, my word ! My intuition tells me that. . • . Do not believe the testi- mony of the senses, mademoiselle, hold your- self aloof from all reasoning, throw to the dogs all calculations, but do not fail to believe intuition! ..."
"Come here, editor ... hurry!" called someone to him.
"Au revoir! au revoir!" he said, throwing a kiss to Janina and touching the brim of his hat as he disappeared.
Janina arose from her seat, but that same intuition which he had advised her to heed, told her not to take his words seriously. He
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seemed to her a light-headed individual given to hasty judgments. That promise of notices and articles in the papers and his extravagant praises of her talent seemed to her merely insincere twaddle. Even his face, gestures, and manner of speaking reminded her of a certain notorious braggart living in the vicin- ity of Bukowiec.
The second act of the play commenced.
Janina looked on, but it did not carry her away as the first had done.
*' How do you like our theater? ..." asked the brunette chorus girl, whom she had met in the dressing-room.
''Very well!" answered Janina.
''Bah! the theater is like a plague; when it infects anyone, you might as well say amen! ..." whispered the bnmette, her voice hard.
Behind the scenes, in the almost dark pas- ages between the decorations there was a great number of people. The actors stood in the passages and certain pairs were crouched in the darkness; whispers and discreet laughs sounded on all sides.
The stage-director, an old, bald man with- out a collar and dressed only in a vest, with a
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scenario in one hand and a bell in the other, ran up and down at the back.
"To the stage! You enter immediately, madame! . . . enter! . . ."he cried all per- spired and flushed, and ran on again, gathered from the dressing-rooms those who were needed on the stage, and at the appropriate moment whispered ''Enter!"
Janina saw how the actors suddenly inter- rupted their conversations, left each other in the midst of some sentence, stood down half- empty glasses, and rushed for the entrances, waiting for their turn, immovable and silent or nervously whispering the words of their r61es, and entering into their characters; she saw the quivering of lips and eyelids, the trembling of legs, the sudden paleness beneath the layer of paint, and the feverish glances of stage fright . . .
"Enter!" sounded a voice like the crack of a whip.
Almost everyone started violently, hastily assumed the required facial expression, crossed himself a few times and went on.
Each time the stage door opened a thrill went through Janina at that wave of strange fire, that streamed toward her from the public.
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She began again to lose herself in the play. That mysterious gloom, those garish hues and forms, emerging from the shadows and suddenly flooded with light, the strains of invisible music, the echo of singing, the sound of subdued footfalls and strange whispers in the darkness, the feverish rapttire of the public, the glowing eyes, the excitement, the thimdering applause, like a far-away storm, streamis of dazzling light alternating with darkness, the throng of people, the pathetic ring of words, tragic cries, heart-rending sobs, moans, weeping, a whole melodrama, pom- pously and noisily acted — all this filled Janina with a fervor different from the one she had felt in the first act, the fervor of energy and action. She went through the playing with all the actors, suffered together with those paper heroes and heroines, feared with them and loved with them; she felt their nervous- ness before entering the stage, trembled with emotion in the pathetic moments of the play, while certain words and cries sent so strange and painful a tremor through her that they brought the tears to her eyes and a faint cry to her lips.
An increasing nimiber of people from the
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audience began to come behind the scenes. Boxes of candy, bouquets, and single flowers circulated freely from hand to hand. Beer, whisky, and cognac were drunk and cakes were snatched from a huge tray. Gusts of laughter broke out here and there, jokes exploded like fireworks in the air. Some of the chorus girls had dressed and were going out into the garden.
Janina saw actors in their negligee only, parading up and down before their dressing- rooms; women, in white petticoats with naked shoulders and with half of their stage make-up removed, were strolling about the stage and peeping through the curtain at the public. On noticing some stranger, they would retreat uttering little shrieks, smiling coquettishly, and darting significant glances.
Waiters from the restaurant, maids, and stage hands went flying about like himting hoxmds.
^'Sowinska!"
^'Tailor!"
''Costumer!"
'*A pair of pants and a cape!"
"A cane for the stage and a letter!"
^'Wicek! run to the director and tell him
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that it is time for him to dress for the last act!"
'*Set the stage!"
"Wicek! send me some rouge, beer, and sandwiches! ..." called one actress across the stage.
In the dressing-rooms reigned chaos, forced and hurried changing of dress, feverish make- up with cosmetics that were almost melting from the heat, and quarrels. . . .
''If you pass before me again on the stage, sir, I'll kick your shins, as I live!"
''Go kick your dog! My part calls for that . . . here, read it!"
'* You intentionally hide me from view!"
"What did I tell you!" said another. "I merely popped out and immediately there arose a murmtir of applause."
"It was only the wind and that fellow thinks it was applause," answered another voice.
"There was a murmur of disgust, because you bimgled your part."
"How the deuce can one keep from bungling when Dobek prompts like a consumptive nag?"
"Speak yourself, and I will then stop . . ,
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we'll see what a fool you'll make of yotirself ! ... I put word after word into his ear as with a shovel and . . . nothing doing! . . . I shout o'lt so loudly that Halt kicks at the stage for silence . . . but that fellow still stands there like a dummy!" retorted Dobek.
''I always know my part; you trip me up intentionally."
"Tailor! a belt, a sword and a hat . . . hurry!"
"... Mary! if you tell me to go, there will go with me night and suffering, loneliness and tears . . . Mary! do you not hear me? ... It is the voice of the heart that loves you . . . the voice ..." repeated Wladek, pacing up and down the dressing-room with his r61e and gesticulating wildly, deaf to all that was going on about him.
"Hey there, Wladek . . . put on the soft pedal. . . . You'll have enough opporttmity to roar and groan on the stage until our ears are sore," called someone.
"Gentlemen! haven't you perhaps seen Peter?" inquired an actress, poking her head through the door.
"Gentlemen, see if Peter isn't sitting some- where xmder the table," mocked someone.
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'* Milady . . . Peter went upstairs with a very pretty little dame."
''Murder him, madame! he's unfaithful!"
Such were the remarks, punctuated with laughter, that greeted her.
The actress vanished and from the other side of the stage one could hear her asking everyone, ''Have you seen Peter?"
"She will go crazy some day from jealousy over him! . . ." remarked someone.
' ' A respectable woman ! ' '
"But that doesn't prevent her from being a fool."
"How are you. Editor!"
"Oh, it's the editor, is it! . . . that means we'll have beer and cigarettes."
" And here comes the coimselor! • • ."
" Good evening Coimselor!"
"What news at the box office?"
"Fine! . . . The theater is sold out, for I saw Gold smoking a cigar."
"Praised be the gods! The advances en our salaries will be larger."
"How do you do, Bolek! . . . Don't come in here, or you will melt like butter ... we have a little Africa here to-day ..."
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"We'll cool ourselves immediately, for I've ordered the beer ..."
'*To the stage, everybody! . . . The people to the stage! The priests to the stage! The soldiers to the stage!" shouted the stage- director, rushing from one dressing-room to the other.
After a moment, all had vanished.
It was well after ten o'clock, the next morn- ing at her hotel when Janina awoke, worn-out completely; for the moment, she could not imderstand, where she was.
She no longer felt any of yesterday's feverish raptures, but rather a quiet gladness that she was already in the theater. At moments, the bright tone of her mood was overcast by some shadow, some presentiment, or imconscious memory from the past; it was the glimmering of sonciething unpleasant which, although it quickly vanished, left traces of imeasiness.
She hastily drank her tea and was about to go out, when someone gently rapped at the door.
"Come in!" she called.
There entered an old Jewish woman, neatly dressed, with a big box imder her arm.
' * Good morning, miss ! ' '
8
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''Good morning," she answered, stirprised by the visit.
"Perhaps you will buy something, miss? ... I have good, cheap wares. Perhaps you need some jewelry? Perhaps some gloves or hairpins, — they are pure silver. I have all kinds of articles at different prices and all are genuine Parisian goods! ..." she chattered on rapidly, spreading the contents of her box on the table, while her little black eyes with heavy red lids, like the eyes of a hawk, wandered about the room and took stock of everything.
Janina kept silent.
" It won't harm you to look at them ..." insisted the Jewess. ''I have cheap things and pretty things! Perhaps you will have some ribbons, or laces, or stockings? ... or will you have some of these silk handker- chiefs? ..."
Janina began to examine the collection spread out on the table and selected a few yards of some ribbon.
''Perhaps yotir mother will also buy some- thing? ..." ventured the Jewess, looking at her intently.
"I am alone."
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"Alone?'' she drawled, with an inquisitive contraction of her eyebrows.
''Yes, but I don't intend to live here," explained Janina, as though justif5mig her- self.
"Perhaps I might recommend a boarding house to you? ... I know a certain widow who ..."
"Very well," interrupted the girl, "you might find me a room with some private family on Nowy Swiat, near the theater ..."
"You belong to the theater, miss?" . . . ah! ..."
"Yes."
"Perhaps you need something else? ... I have beautiful things for the theater."
"No, I have all I want."
"I will sell them cheap ... as I'm an honest woman . . . cheap! They are just what you want for the theater."
"I don't need anjrthing."
" May I die, if they are not dirt cheap! . . . These are such hard times."
She replaced all her wares in the box and drew closer to Janina.
"Perhaps you will give me a chance to make something? ..."
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** I won't buy anything else, for I don't need it!" answered Jane, growing iippatient.
"I don't mean that!"
The old woman began to whisper hurriedly — **I know nice young men ... do you understand, miss? . . . rich yoimg men! . . . That is not my business, but they asked me to . • . They'll come to see you themselves . . . Nice, rich, young men."
''What? . . . What?" cried Janina.
"Why are you so excited. Miss?"
''Get out of here, or I'll call the servant!" shouted Janina.
"Goodness, what a temper! ... I knew at least ten ladies, who were the same as you in the beginning and afterwards they were ready to kiss my hands, if only I would introduce them to some gentleman ..."
She did not finish, for Janina opened the door, and pushed her out.
At the theater she met Sowinska on the veranda, and immediately, in the politest manner, asked her if she did not know of some room she could rent with a private family.
"Ah, that just fits in fine! . . . If you wish, there is a room in our house that you may have. We can let you have it cheap, together with
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yotir meals. It is a very nice room on the lower floor, with windows facing the south, and a separate entrance from the hall."
They agreed on the price and Janina said she would pay her a month's rent in ad- vance.
"So that all's settled!" said Sowinska. "You will find our house very quiet, for my daughter has no children. . . . Come, I will show you the room."
"Not tmtil after the rehearsal; and if you haven't the time to wait, leave me the address and I will find the place myself."
Sowinska gave her the address and went away.
Janina was handed her notes and took part in the rehearsal, singing from them.
Kaczkowska wanted Halt to accompany her at the piano.
"Give me a rest, madame! I have no time!" he answered.
"If you wish, madame, I will accompany you, providing it is from notes . . ."proposed Janina.
Kaczkowska drew her eagerly away to the room with the piano and kept her busy for about an hour; but the whole company at
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once became interested in this chorus girl who could play the piano.
Afterward Cabinska spoke with Janina a long time, and requested her to come to her home the following day after the rehearsal.
Janina went straight from the theater to Sowinska's house to look at her room.
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CHAPTER IV
"The Management has the honor of requesting the presence of the lady and gentle- man artists of the Company, as also the members of the orchestra and the choruses, at a tea and social to be held at the home of the Director on the 6th of this month, after the performance. The Director of the Society of Dramatic Artists. (Signed) John, the Anointed, Cabinski.
"Well, what do you say, Pepa? . . . Will this do? ..." the Director asked his wife after he had read aloud the invitation.
"Teddy! be quiet, I can't hear what father is reading."
"Mamma, Eddy took my roll!"
"Papa, Teddy called me a jackass!"
"Silence! By God! with those children . . . Quiet them, Pepa."
" If you give me a penny, pa, I'll be quiet."
"And me too, me too! "
Cabinski held the whip on his knee xmder 119
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the table and waited; as soon as the children had advanced near enough, he sprang up and began to belabor them.
There arose a squealing and screeching; the door flew open and the jtmior directors went sliding down the banisters to the accompani- ment of howls.
Cabinski calmly proceeded to read over again the invitation.
"At what time do you wish to invite them?"
''After the performance."
"You'll have to ask some of the reporters. But that must be done personally."
"I haven't time."
"Ask someone from the chorus to write the invitations for you."
"Bah! And let them make stupid mis- takes? Perhaps you will write them for me, Pepa? . . . You have a neat hand."
"No, it's not proper that I, the wife of the director, should write to strange men. I told that . . . what is the name of the girl whom you engaged for the chorus? ..."
"Orlowska."
"Yes ... I told her to come here to-day, I like her. Kaczkowska told me that she
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plays the piano excellently, so the thought struck me that ..."
"Well then, let her write the invitations; if she plays the piano, she must also know how to write."
**Not only that, but I think that she could teach Jadzia how to play ..."
" Do you know, that's not at all a bad idea! . . . We might include that in her future salary."
''How much are you paying her?" she asked, lighting a cigarette.
"I have not yet agreed upon a price . . . but I will pay her as much as I pay the others," he answered with a strange smile.
"Which means that ..."
"That ril pay her a great, a great deal . . . in the future.'
"Ha! ha! ha!"
Both began to laugh, and then became silent.
"John, what do you propose for the supper?"
"I don't know as yet . . . I'll talk it over at the restaurant. We'll arrange it some- how . . ."
Cabinski proceeded to make a clean copy of
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the invitation, while Pepa sat in a rocking- chair, puffing away at her cigarette.
"John! . . . Haven't you noticed any- thing peculiar about Majkowska's acting, recently?''
''No, nothing ... if she performs a little spasmodically, that's merely her style."
''A little! . . . Why, she goes into epilep- tic fits! The editor told me the papers are calling attention to it."
'Tor God's sake, Pepa! Do you want to drive away our best actress? You ousted Nicolette, who had a gallery of her own."
"Well, and you had a great liking for her too; I happen to know something about that."
"And I could tell you something about that editor of yours ..."
"What business is that of yours! . . . Do I interfere when you go prowling about back- rooms with chorus girls?"
"But neither do I ask you what you do! ... So what's the use of quarreling about it? . . . Only I will not let you touch Majkowska! With you it's merely a question of intrigue, while with me it's one of existence. You know right well that there is not another such pair of heroic actors as Mela Majkowska
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and Topolski, anywhere in the provinces, and perhaps not even at the Warsaw Theater. To tell the truth, they are the sole props of our company! You want to oust Mela, do you? ... I tell you she has the sympathy of the whole public, the press praises her . . . and she has real talent! ..."
''And I? . . ." she asked threateningly, facing him.
''You? . . . You also have talent, but" . . . he added softly, "but ..."
' ' There are no 'buts ' about it ! You "are an absolute idiot. . . . You have no conception whatever about acting, or plays, or artists. You are yourself a great artist, oh, such a great artist! Do you remember how you played the part of Francis in The Robbers? . . . Do you? ... If you don't, I'll tell you . . . You played it like a shoemaker, like a circus clown! ..."
Cabinski sprang up as though someone had struck him with a whip.
"That's a lie! The famous Krolikowski played it in the same way; they advised me to imitate him, and I did ..."
"Krolikowski played like you? . . . You're a fool, my artist!"
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"Pepa, you had better keep quiet, or I'll tell you what you are ! "
''O tell me, please do tell me!" she cried out in a rage.
''Nothing great, nor even anything small, my dear."
" Tell me plainly what you mean ..."
''Well then, I'll tell you that you are not a Modrzejewska," laughed Cabinski.
"Silence, you clown! . . /' she yelled throwing her lighted cigarette at him.
"Wait, wait, you backstairs prima donna," he hissed, growing pale with rage.
Cabinski in his dressing gown, torn at the elbows, in his night clothes and slippers, began to pace up and down the room, while Pepa, just as she had arisen from Sleep, unwashed, with yesterday's stage make-up still adorning her face, and her hair all dis- heveled, whirled arotmd in circles, her white and soiled petticoat rustling.
They stared at each other with furious and threatening glances. Their old competitive enmity burst out in full force. They hated each other as artists because they mutually and irresistibly envied each other their talents and success with the public.
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''I played poorly, did I? . . . I played like a circus clown? . . ." he shouted.
He seized a glass from one of the racks and hurled it to the floor.
Quickly Pepa intercepted him and screened . the dishes with her body.
'* Get out of the way! " he growled threaten- ingly, clenching his fists.
''These are mine!" she cried and threw the whole heap of dishes at his feet with such force that they broke into little bits.
"You cow!''
"You fool!"
"Please ma'am, let me have the money for breakfast," said the maid, at that instant entering.
" Let my husband give it to you! " answered Cabinska, and with a proud stride, went into the next room, slamming the door after her.
"Let me have the money, sir. It's late and the children are crying!"
He laid a ruble on the table, brushed his top hat with his sleeve and departed.
The nurse took a pitcher and a basket for rolls and went out.
The Cabinskis had no more time to think of their household than of their children, and
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cared for nothing, absorbed entirely by the theatef, their r61es, and their struggle for success. The canvas walls of the stage scenes and decorations representing elegant salons and interiors sufficed them entirely; there they breathed more freely and felt better. In the same way a canvas scene depicting some wild landscape with a castle on the summit of a chocolate-colored hill and a wood painted below sufficed them as a substitute for real fields and woods. The smell of mastic, cos- metics, and perfume were to them the sweetest odors. They merely came home to sleep, their real home, where they lived habitually, was on the stage and behind the scenes.
Cabinski had been in the theater some twenty years, playing continually, and still, he desired each new r61e for himself and envied others.
Pepa never took accoimt of anything, but listened only to her momentary instinct and sometimes to her husband. She doted on the melodrama, on strained and nerve-thrilling situations; she liked a sweeping gesture, an exalted tone of voice, and glaring novelties. Her pathos was often of the exaggerated variety, but she played with fervor. A certain
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play, or some accent or word wotild move her so deeply that even after leaving the stage she would still shed real tears behind the scenes.
She knew her parts better than anyone else, for she would memorize them with mechanical precision. For her children she cared about as much as for her old dresses: she bore them — ^and left them to the care of her husband and the nurse.
Immediately after Cabinski's departure Pepa called through the door, "Nurse, come here!"
The nurse had just returned with the coffee and the boys whom she had dragged in from the yard with difficulty.
She served the breakfast to the children and promised: ''Eddy . . . you will get a pair of new shoes . . . papa will buy them for you. Teddy will get a new suit and Jadzia a dress . . . Drink your coffee, dears!"
She patted their heads, handed them the rolls and wiped their faces with maternal solicitude. She loved them and fussed over them as though they were her own children.
"Nurse!" shouted Cabinska, sticking her head through the door.
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"Yes, I hear you."
''Where is Tony?"
"She's gone to the laundry."
"You will go, nurse, for my dress to Sowin- ska on Widok Street. Do you know where it is? . . ."
"Of course, I know! . . . That skinny woman who's as cross as a chained dog. ..."
"Go right away."
"Mamma! ... let us also go with nurse ..." begged the children, for they feared their mother.
"You will take the children along with you, ntirse."
"Of course, that's understood ... I wouldn't leave them here alone!" •
She dressed the children, put on a sort of woolen dress with bxoad red and white stripes, covered her head with a kerchief, and went out with them.
Cabinska dressed and was about to go out, when the bell rang. A small, rather corpulent and very active gentleman pushed his way in. It was the counselor.
His face was carefully shaven, he wore gold- rimmed glasses on his small nose, and a smile, that seemed glued there, on his thin lips.
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"May I come in? . . . Will Madame Directress permit it? . . . Only for a minute, for I must be right off again! . . . " he recited rapidly.
"Of course, the esteemed coimselor is always welcome. ..." called Cabinska, appearing.
"Good morning! Pray let me kiss your little hand. . . . You look charming to-day. I merely dropped in here on my way ..."
"Please be seated."
The coimselor sat down, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief, smoothed his very sparse, but imgrayed black hair, hastily crossed his legs, and blinked a few times with neuralgic eyes.
"I read in to-day's Messenger a very flatter- ing mention about you, Madame Directress."
"It's tmmerited, for I don't know how that r61e ought to be played."
"You played it beautifully^ wonderfully! "
"Oh, you're a naughty flatterer, Mr. Coun- selor! . . ."shechided.
"I speak nothing but the truth, the unadulterated truth, my word of honor!"
"Please ma'am it is already noon," inter- rupted the nurse, who had rettimed.
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"You are bound for the theater, Madame Directress?"
''Yes, 111 drop in to see the rehearsal, and then take a walk about town."
''Then we will go together, agreed? ..." asked the counselor. *'0n the way we shall settle a little piece of business."
Cabinska glanced at him imeasily. He was again blinking his eyes, crossing his feet, and adjusting his glasses which had a habit of continually slipping off.
"No doubt he wants that money, ..." thought Cabinska, as they were going down the stairs.
The coimselor, in the meanwhile, was smiling and chirping away in honeyed tones.
This strange individual would show up at the garden-theater at the very first perform- ance and vanish after the last, until the follow- ing spring. He freely loaned money which was never returned to him. He would give supjpers, bring gifts of candy to the actresses, take the young novices imder his wing and was always reputed to be in love with some actress platonically. Immediately upon his first appearance, Cabinski had borrowed one himdred rubles from him — and before all
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those present he had intentionally forced him to accept as security his wife's bracelet with the object of convincing them that he had no money.
They entered the theater and quietly took their seats, for the rehearsal was already in full swing and Kaczkowska with Topolski were just in the midst of a capital love scene.
The counselor listened, bowed on all sides with a smile and whispered to the directress: " Love is a splendid thing . . . on the stage!"
''Even in life it is not bad," she re- marked.
''True love is very rare in life, so I prefer it on the stage, for here I can enjoy it every day," he spoke htirriedly, and his eyelids began to blink again.
"You have been disillusioned, Counselor?"
"Oh no, by no means! . . . How are you, Piesh!"
"Well, sated with food, and bored," replied a tall actor with a handsome, thoughtful face, extending his hand.
"Will you smoke some Egyptian cigar- ettes?"
"I will, if you will let me have some," he answered coolly.
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"Mrs. Piesh is as well and as jealous as ever, eh? . . ." inqiiired the counselor, hand- ing him a cigarette.
''Just as you are always in a good humor . . . Both are diseases."
''So you consider humor a disease, eh?" asked the coimselor.
"I hold that a normal man ought to be indifferent and care for nothing."
"How long have you been riding that hobbyhorse?"
"Truth is usually learned late."
"How long will you stick to that truth? "
"Perhaps forever, if I can find nothing better."
"Piesh, to the stage! " came the voice of the stage-director.
The actor arose stiffly, and with a quick, automatic step, went behind the scenes.
"A curious, a very curious fellow!" whis- pered the coimselor.
"Yes, but very tiresome with his ever- lasting truths, ideals, and other foolish haber- dashery!" cried a yoimg actor dressed like a doll in a light suit, a pink-striped shirt and yellow calf -skin ptmips.
"Ah, Wawrzecki! . . . You must have
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again slain some innocent beauty, for your face is as radiant as the sun ..."
"It's easy for you to joke, Mr. Counsel- or! . . ."he defended himself with a know- ing smile, advancing his shapely foot. He posed gracefully, raised his hand, and flashed his jeweled rings, for the directress was gaz- ing at him through half -closed eyes.
''Well then, in your estimation who is not tiresome, eh? . . . Come now, confess my boy!"
''The coimselor, for he has htmior and a good heart; the director when he pays; the public when it applauds us; pretty and kind women, the spring, if it is warm; people, when they are happy — all that is beautiful pleas- ant and smiling; while tiresome things are all those that are ugly: cares, tears, suffering, poverty, old age and cold. ..."
"Who is that yoimg lady over there?" inquired the counselor, pointing to Janina who was listening attentively to the rehearsal.
"A novice."
"She has an engaging expression. Her face shows good breeding and intelligence. Do you know who she is? . . . "
"Wicek!" called Cabinska to the boy who
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was playing about the garden, ''go and ask that lady, standing near the box, to come here."
Wicek ran over to Janina circled about her, glanced into her eyes and said: "The old woman over there wishes to see you."
''What old woman? . . . Who? ..." she asked, imable to imderstand him.
"Cabinska, Mrs. Pepa, the directress, of course! ..."
Janina approached slowly, while the coim- selor observed her intently.
"Please have a seat, mademoiselle. This is our dear coimselor, the patron of our theater," spoke Cabinska, introducing him.
"I beg your pardon!" cried the coimselor, grasping her hand and turning the palm to the light.
"Don't be afraid. Miss Orlowska! . . . The counselor has an innocent mania of f or- time telling," cried Cabinska merrily, peering over the shoulder of the counselor into the palm he was examining.
"Ho! ho! a strange one, a strange one!" whispered the old man.
He took from his pocket a small magnif ying- glass and through it examined minutely the
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lines of the palm, the fingernails, the finger joints, and the entire hand.
"Ladies and gentlemen! We tell fortimes here from the hands, the feet, and something else besides! . . . Here we predict the future, and dispense talent, virtue, and money in the f utiire. Admission only five copecks, only five copecks! ... for the poorer people only ten groszy ! Please step in, ladies and gentlemen, please step in!'' cried Wawrzecki, excellently imitating the voice of the show criers on Ujazdowski Square.
The actors and actresses surrounded the trio on all sides.
"Tell us something, Mr. Counselor!"
"Will she marry soon?"
"When will she eclipse Modrzejewska? "
"Will she get a rich hubby?"
"How many suitors has she had in the past?"
The coimselor did not answer, but quietly continued to examine both of Janina's palms.
She heard those derisive remarks, but was unable to move, for that strange man actually held her pinned to her seat. She felt herself burning with anger, yet could not move her hands which he held.
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Finally, the counselor released her and said to those surrounding them: ''For once you might refrain from your clownishness, for sometimes it is not so foolish as it is inhuman. I beg your pardon, mademoiselle, for having exposed you to their rudeness; ... I greatly beg your pardon, but I simply could not resist examining your hands; that is my weak- ness. ..."
He kissed her hand ostentatiously and turned to the surprised Cabinska: ''Come, let us go, Mrs. Directress!"
Janina was consumed with such curiosity, that, in spite of all those spectators, she asked quietly: "Will you not tell me anything Mr. Counselor?"
The coimselor gazed about him, and then bent toward Janina and whispered very quietly: "Now, I cannot ... In two weeks, when I return, I will tell you all."
"Oh come, Coimselor!" cried Cabinska, "Oh, I almost forgot! . . . Will it be possible for you to come to see me after the rehearsal Miss Orlowska? " she asked, ttiming to Janina.
"Certainly, I'll come," answered Janina, restmiing her seat.
"Where shall we go, Madame Directress?"
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asked the counselor. He seemed less jovial, and wrapt in thought.
"I suppose we might go to my pastry shop."
Cabinska did not question him, and only after they had seated themselves at the pastry shop, where she regularly spent a few hours each day, drinking chocolate, smoking ciga- rettes, and gazing at the street crowds, did she venture to ask him with a pretended indiffer- ence: ''What did you notice in that hussy's hands, Mr. Counselor?"
The counselor shifted impatiently, put his binoculars upon his nose, and called to the waiter, *' Black coffee and very light choco- late!"
Then he turned to Cabinska. ''You see, that is a secret ... to be sure, one that means little, but nevertheless, not my own to disclose."
Cabinska insisted, for merely to say: "a secret," throws all women out of balance; but he told her nothing, only remarking abruptly, "I am leaving town, Mrs. Directress."
"Where are you going?" she inquired, greatly surprised.
" I must . . . " he said, " I will return in two
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weeks. Before I go, I would like to settle our . . ."
Cabinska frowned and waited to hear what he would say further.
"For you see, it might happen that I would return only in the fall when you will no longer be in Warsaw."
''I surmised long ago that you were an old usurer,'' Cabinska was thinking, tinkling her glass with a spoon.
''Some fruit cakes! " he called to the waiter and then, turning to her again, continued . . . ' ' And that is why I wish to return to you, dear lady, your bracelet."
"But we have not yet the money. Our success is continually being interrupted . . . we have so.many old payments to meet ..."
"Oh, don't bother about the money. Imagine that I am giving you this for your name day as a small token of friendship . . . will you? " he asked, slipping the bracelet upon her plump wrist.
"Oh, Counselor, Counselor! if I did not love my John so much, I would ..." she cried, overjoyed at regaining her bracelet without any obligations. She squeezed his hands so heartily and beamed upon him with her joyous
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gaze so closely, that he felt her breath upon his cheeks.
He gently pushed her aside, biting his lips.
*' Ah, Counselor, you are an ideal man!"
**0h, let us drop that! . . . You can invite me to be a godfather to your next child."
*'0h, you're a rogue, Mr. Counselor! . . . What's that? .... you already want to depart?"
''My train leaves in two hours. Good- bye!"
He paid the bill at the buffet and hurried away, sending her a smile through the window.
Cabinska still sat there, gazing out upon the street.
''Is it possible that he loves me?" she thought to herself, sipping her cooled chocolate*
She pulled some r61e out of her pocket, read a few lines, and again gazed out upon the street.
The dilapidated hacks, pulled by lean horses, dragged along lazily; the tramways rumbled by; along the sidewalks people threaded like a long, immovable ribbon.
The clock chimed three. Cabinska arose
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and started for home, walking slowly until she spied the editor walking with Nicolette and the calm horizon of her mind suddenly became clouded.
*'He, with Nicolette? . . . with that . . . base intriguer?"
Already from a distance she scorched them with the gaze of a Gorgon.
At the comer of Warecka Street, Nicolette suddenly disappeared and the editor ap- proached her with a beaming coimtenance.
''Good morning! . . ."he cried, extending his hand.
Pepa measured him coolly and turned her face away.
''What sort of nonsense is this, Pepa?" he asked, quietly.
"Oh, you are imspeakably mean!" she retorted.
"A comedy of some kind again? ..." he queried.
"You dare to speak to me in that way?"
"Well ... I'll quit then and merely say: good-day!" he snapped back angrily, bowed stiffly and, before she could bethink herself, jumped into a hack and drove away.
Cabinska was petrified with indignation.
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Cabinska, on returning home whipped the children, scolded the nurse, and locked herself in her room.
She heard her husband enter, askf or her, and knock at her door ; when dinner was served, she did not come out, but paced angrily up and down her room.
Soon thereafter, Janina arrived. Cabinska greeted her cordially in her boudoir, becom- ing suddenly unrecognizably hospitable.
Janina left alone, began to explore that boudoir with curiosity, for, although the entire house looked like a jtmk shop, or a railroad waiting-room of the third class, filled with packs, vaUses and trtmks, this one room possessed an almost luxurious air. It had two windows opening upon the garden, the walls were decorated with a paper resembling brocatelle, and cupids were painted on the ceiling. The grotesquely carved furniture was upholstered with crimson silk striped with gold. A cream-colored rug in imitation of antique Italian covered the floor. A set of Shakespeare, boimd in gilded morocco lay on a lacquered table painted in Chinese designs.
Janina did not pay much attention to all this, for she was entirely absorbed by the
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wreaths hanging on the walls which bore such inscriptions as these: ''To our companion on the occasion of her birthday," ''To a distin- guished artist," "From the grateful public," "To the Directress — ^from the Company," "From the admirers of your talent." The laurel branches and palm leaves were yellow and shrtmken from age and hung there cov- ered with dust and cobwebs. The broad white, yellow, and red ribbons streamed down the walls like separate colors of the rainbow with their gold-stamped letters proclaiming glories that had long since passed into oblivion. Those inscriptions and withered wreaths gave the room the appearance of a mortuary chapel.
Janina was looking through an album, when Cabinska quietly entered. Her face wore an expression of suffering and melancholy; she dropped down heavily into a chair, sighed deeply and whispered, "Pardon me for letting you bore yourself here."
" Oh I didn't feel a bit bored! "
"This is my sanctuary. Here I lock myself up when life becomes unbearable. I come here to recall a happy past and to dream of that which will never more return ..." she
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added, indicating the r61es and the wreaths hanging on the walls.
"Are you ill, Madame Directress? . . . perhaps I am intruding, and solitude is the best medicine." Janina spoke with sincere sympathy.
"Oh, please stay! ... It affords me real relief to speak with a person who is, as yet, a stranger to this world of falsehood and vanity!" she said with emphasis, as though reciting a r61e.
"I don't know whether I am worthy of your confidence," answered Janina modestly.
''Oh, my artistic intuition never deceives me! ... I pray you sit nearer to me! So you have never before been in the theater, mademoiselle?"
"No."
"How I envy you! . . . Ah, if I could begin over again, I would not know all this bitterness and disappointment! Do you love the theater?"
" I have sacrificed almost everything for it."
"Oh, the fate of artists is a sad one! One must sacrifice all; peace, domestic happiness, love, family, and friends — and for what? . . . for that which they write about us; for such
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wreaths that last only a few days; for the handclaps of the tiresome throng. ... Oh, beware the provinces, mademoiselle! . . • Look at me . . . Do you see those wreaths? . . . They are splendid and withered, are they not? And yet, not so long ago I played at Lwow. ..."
She paused for a moment as though fas- cinated by the memory of those days.
"The stages of the whole world were open to me. The director of the Comedie Frangaise came purposely to see me and offer me an engagement. ..."
"You possess also a mastery of French, madame?"
"Do not interrupt me. I was paid a salary of several thousand rubles; the papers could not find words strong enough to praise my acting; I was pelted with flowers and brace- lets set with diamonds! (She unconsciously adjusted her cheap bracelet.) Counts and princes courted my favors. . . . Then came a great misfortime which changed everything; I fell in love . . . Yes, do not wonder at that! I loved, as deeply as it is possible to love, the most beautiful and best man in the whole world. . . . He was a nobleman, a prince
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and heir to a large estate. We were about to be married. I cannot tell you how happy we were! . . . Then . . . like a bolt from the blue sky ... his family, the old prince, a tyramiical magnate without a heart parted us. . . . He took him away and wanted to pay nae a hundred thousand guldens or even a million, if only I would renounce my beloved. I threw the money at his feet and showed him the door. He avenged himself cruelly. He spread the most dishonorable calimmies about me, bribed the press, and persecuted me at every step, the base wretch! ... I had to leave Lwow and my life took an entirely different turn . . . a different turn ..."
Cabinska paced up and down the room, tears in her eyes, love in her smile, a sad bitterness upon her lips, a tragic mask of resignation upon her face, forsaken, violent grief in her voice.
She acted the tale with such mastery that Janina believed everything.
'*If you knew how sincerely I sympathize with you, madame! . . . What a dreadful fate!"
"That is already past! ..." answered Cabinska, dropping into her chair.
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She herself had come ahnost to believe in those stories, retold with ntunerous variations a hundred times over to all those who were willing to listen. Sometimes, on ending her account, moved by the picture of that fancied misf ortime, she would actually suffer.
Cabinska had acted the parts of so many tmfortunate and betrayed women that she had already lost all memory of the bounds of her own individuality; her own emotions became merged and identified in ever greater degree with the characters which she imper- sonated, and thus it happened that her fanciful tales were not downright lies.
After a long silence, Cabinska asked in a calm voice, ''You live at Mrs. Sowinska's, mademoiselle?"
"Not yet," answered Janina, "I have already rented the room, but they have to renovate it. In the meanwhile, I am living at the hotel/'
"Kaczkowska and Halt told me that you play the piano very well."
"A little bit."
''I wanted to ask you, if you would not teach my Yadzia? . . . She is a very bright girl and has a good ear for music."
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*'With real pleasure. My knowledge is rather limited, but I can teach your daughter the rudiments of music. . . . Only, I don't know whether I will have enough time. ..."
"Oh, certainly! And as to your fee, we shall include that in your salary."
"Very well. ... Is your daughter already started?"
"Excellently. You can convince yourself immediately. . . . Nurse, bring Yadzia here!" called Cabinska.
They passed into the next room in which stood the director's bed, a few packs and baskets, and an old rattle-box of a piano.
Janina heard Yadzia play and agreed that she would give her lessons regularly between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, when her parents were not at home.
"When are you to make your first appear- ance at the theater?" asked Cabinska.
"To-day, in the Gypsy Baron''
"Have you a costume?"
"Miss Falkowska promised to loan me one."
"Come with me. . . . Perhaps I'll find something for you. ..."
They went into the room where the children
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slept with the nurse. Cabinska pulled out of a package a fairly well-preserved costume and gave it to Janina.
''You see, mademoiselle, we furnish the costumes, but since the members of the com- pany prefer to have their own, because ours, of course, cannot be so very elegant, ours often lie here unused. ... I will loan you this one."
''I also will have my own."
''That is best."
They took leave of each other very cordially and the nurse carried Janina's costume after her to the hotel.
With such passionate eagerness did Janina anticipate her first appearance on the stage, that she arrived at the theater when there was hardly anyone as yet behind the scenes. The chorus girls assembled slowly and dressed even more slowly. Conversation, laughter, subdued whisperings went on as usual, but she heard nothing, so preoccupied was she with her dressing.
They all began to help her, laughing because she did not even have powder or rouge.
"What, you never powdered yourself?" they chorused.
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*'No . . . What for? . . ." she an- swered simply.
''We'll have to make her a face, for she's too pale," remarked one of them.
They rubbed her face with a layer of white cosmetic, shaded this with rouge, carmined her lips, tmderscored her eyes with a little pencil dipped in black pigment, and curled and pinned her hair. She was passed on from hand to hand and given a thousand advices and warnings.
"On entering the stage look straight at the public, so that you don't trip."
''And before you enter, see that you cross yourself."
"Always enter with your right foot fore- most."
"Now you look fine! . . . but do you want to appear on the stage in short skirts without wearing tights? "
"I haven't any! ..."
All began to laugh at her embarrassed look.
"I win loan you a pair," cried Zielinska. "I think they'll fit you." They treated her with imdisguised favor, for they had heard that she was to teach Cabinska's daughter and that Pepa had loaned her a costume.
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Janina, looking in the mirror, hardly recog- nized herself. It seemed as though she wore a mask, only slightly resembling her own face and with that strange expression that all the chorus girls wore.
She went downstairs to Sowinska.
** My dear madame, tell me truly, how do I look?" she begged, all excited and flushed.
Sowinska scrutinized her from all sides and, with her finger, spread the rouge more thor- oughly on her cheeks.
''Who gave you that costume?" she asked.
"Madame Directress loaned it to me."
"Oh! something must have melted her to- day!"
"She told me such sad stories. ..."
"The actress! ... if she only played that way on the stage there would be no better in the world."
"You must be joking, madame! . . . She told me about Lwow and her past."
"She's a liar, that old hag! She was then the sweetheart of some hussar and made such scandals that they turned her out of the theater. What was she at the Lwow theater? ... a chorus girl only. Ho ! ho ! those are old tricks. . . . We all know them here long since! "
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"Tell me how I look?'* asked Janina at length.
''Beautiful. ... I'll wager they'll all be chasing after you!"
An increasing nervousness seized Janina. She walked up and down the stage, peered through the hole in the curtain, viewed herself in all the mirrors, and then tried to sit still and wait, but could not endure it. The feverish excitement and nervousness attendant upon a first appearance shook her as with the ague. She could not stand or sit still for a single moment.
It seemed as though she did not see the people, the preparations that were going on about her, the lights, or even the stage itself, but only had in her brain the reflection of a confused and moving mass of eyes and faces. At each moment she would gaze with terror at the audience and feel as though her heart were ceasing to beat.
When the bell rang for the second time, she htirried off the stage and took her place in the chorus that was already assembled behind the scenes; while waiting for the moment to enter, she tmconsciously crossed herself, and her whole body trembled so violently that one of
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the chorus girls, noticing her confusion, took her by the arm.
"Enter!" shouted the stage-director. The throng carried her along with it and pushed her to the front of the stage.
The sudden silence and magnified glare of light restored her senses somewhat, and after leaving the stage she stood behind one of the scenes and completely regained her composure.
On her second entrance she felt only a slight tremor. She sang, heard the music, and gazed straight at the public. She was also embold- ened by seeing the editor sitting in the front row and enco\iraging her with a friendly smile. She kept looking at him and after that she was able to distingtiish with increasing clear- ness individual faces in the audience.
In some scene in which the chorus prom- enaded about the back of the stage, while a comic dialogue was going on at the front, Janina's companions indulged in whispered conversations.
"Brona, look! Your fellow is there in the third row toward the left."
"Oh look! Dasha is in the theater . . . goodness, how she is dolled up. ..."
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''Siwinska! fasten my hooks, for I feel my skirt is falling down/'
*' Lou! yotir wig is coming off."
* ' Look to your own shags ! "
*'I*m going to Marceline with someone to-morrow . . . perhaps you will go with us, Zielinska?"
''Look at the eyes that student is making at me!"
'* I don't care a snap for penniless plugs."
*'But what merry chaps they are!"
"No, thank you! They have nothing but whiskey and sardines. That's a treat, only for those of the street."
' ' Hush ! Cabinska is sitting in that box. ' '
"My gracious, what a maidenly make-up she has to-day!"
"Quiet, we sing!"
Behind the scenes stood a great variety of people: waitresses, stage-hands, restaurant boys, and actors waiting for their cues to enter — all these were gazing on the stage.
Cabinska's n\irse, with the two eldest chil- dren, was sitting near the prosceniimi imder the ropes of the curtain.
Wawrzecki from behind the scenes was violently beckoning to Mimi who was just
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then singing a duet with Wladek. In the pauses, the actress would spitefully stick out her tongue at him.
''Give me the key to the house ... I for- got my shoes, and I need them right away!" he whispered.
"It's in my skirt pocket in the dressing- room," she answered, backing away toward the center of the stage with a broad musical phrase on her lips.
''Halt" was banging the desk with his baton, for Wladek was cutting short his tones and continually wavering. The threatening anger of the orchestra director only made him all the more nervous, and his singing was growing steadily worse.
' ' The damned Hun is purposely trying to trip me!" he muttered angrily imder his breath, embracing the singing Mimi in the love scene.
' ' For God's sake don't squeeze me so hard ! " panted Mimi, at the same time smiling at him rapt\irously.
"For I adore you with the frenzy of love ... for I adore you!" sang Wladek with fiery intonation.
"Are you crazy? I will be all black and blue and ..."
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She suddenly broke oflf, for Wladek had finished his song and the applause came roaring like an avalanche, so she pulled him by the hand and they walked to the front of the stage to bow to the audience.
During the intermission Janina observed the editor standing in the center aisle, con- versing with some stout, blond man.
" Can you tell me, sir, with what paper that editor is connected?" Janina asked the stage- director, who was supervising the arrange- ment of the scenery for the next act.
"With no paper, probably. He's merely a theatrical critic."
" He told me himself that ..."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the stage-director, "I see you're green!"
"But he is sitting in the chairs reserved for the press," persisted Janina stating what she thought was a convincing argument.
' ' What of that? There are more of his kind there. Do you see that light blonde? He alone is a real writer and the rest are merely migratory birds. God alone knows what their occupation is . . . but since they hob- nob with everybody, talk a lot, have money from somewhere, and occupy the foremost
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places everywhere, no one even bothers asking who they are."
''Ah, you look so fascinating, so fascinat- ing," cried the editor at that instant rushing in upon the stage and already from a distance extending his hands to her. ''A veritable portrait by Greuze! Only a little more co\irage and everything will go smoothly. I will insert an item to-morrow about your first appearance on the stage."
"Thank you," she answered coolly, without looking at him.
The editor turned about and made off for the actors' dressing-room.
"Good evening, gentlemen!" he called entering.
"How are things going in the hall? Were you at the box office? ..."
"Nearly all the seats are sold out."
"How is the play taking?"
"Well, very well! ... I see, Mr. Director that you have replenished the chorus: that charming, new blonde attracts all eyes. ..."
"Good, good. . . . Hurry there, give me my belly!"
"Mr. Director, please let me have an order for two rubles. I must inmiediately send for
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my boots," begged some actor, hastily pulling on his costume.
"After the performance!" answered Cabin- ski, holding the pillow to his stomach, "tie it fast, Andy!"
They wrapt him about with long strips like a mummy.
"Mr. Director, I need my boots on the stage. ... I cannot play without them!"
"Go to the devil, my dear sir, and don't dist\irb me now. . . . Ring!" he called to the stage-director.
Cabinski, whenever he played, created a big confusion in the dressing-room. He always siiffered from stage fright, so he would try to overcome it by shouting, scolding, and quar- reling over every trifle. The costumer, the tailor, the property man all had to hustle about him and continually remind him lest he forget something. Despite the fact that he always commenced dressing early, he was always late. Only on the stage did he recover his equanimity.
Now it was the same; his cane had been mislaid and he rushed about, wildly shouting: "My cane! Who took my cane! . . . My cane ! Damn it ! I must go right on ! "
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"You snort like an elephant in the dressing- room, but on the stage you buzz as quietly as a fly, " slowly remarked Stanislawski, who hated all noises.
''If you don't like to hear it, go out into the hall."
"I'll stay right here, and I want quiet. No one can dress in peace with you around."
"Podesta, to the stage!" called the stage- director.
Cabinski ran out, grabbed a cane out of somebody's hand, tied a black handkerchief about his neck and rushed on the stage.
Stanislawski departed behind the scenes, all the others dispersed, and the dressing-room became deserted, only the tailor remaining to gather up the costvimes scattered over the floor and tables and take them to the store- room.
In the dressing-room of the leading ladies of the caste such a storm had broken loose that Cabinski, who was just leaving the stage, went there to po\ir oil on the troubled waters.
As he entered, Kaczkowska threw herself at him from one side and Mimi from the other ; both grasped him by the hands and each sought to out-shout the other.
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**If you allow such things to happen, Director, I will leave the company! • . ."
''It's a scandal, Director! . . . everybody saw it. . . . I will not stay in her company another hour!"
"Director! she . . •*'
"Now don't Ue!"
"It's insulting!"
"It's base and ridiculous!"
"For God's sake! what's all this about?" cried Cabinski in desperation.
"I will tell you how it happened, Director.
" It is I who ought to tell, for she is a liar! "
"Now my dears, please be quiet or I swear I'll go right out."
"It was this way. I received a bouquet, for it was most plainly intended for me, and this . . . lady, who happened to be standing nearer, cut me off and took my bouquet. . • • And, instead of giving it to me, to whom it belonged, she brazenly bowed and kept it for herself!" cried Kaczkowska amid tears and b\irsts of anger.
At that Mimi began to cry,
"Mimi, you will blur the paint under your eyes!" called someone.
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Mimi immediately stopped crying.
'*What do you ladies want me to do?" asked Cabinski, when he found an opportimity to speak.
'*Tell her to give me back that bouquet and apologize."
'*I can, but with my fist ..." retorted Mimi. ''You can ask the chorus, Director . . . they all saw."
''The chorus from the fourth act!" called Cabinski behind the scenes.
There entered a throng of women and men al- ready half-imdressed, and among them Janina.
"Well, let us arrange a judgment of Solomon!"
An increasing number of onlookers began to crowd into the dressing-room and derisive remarks, aimed at the generally disliked Kaczkowska, flew about.
"Who saw to whom the bouquet was given?" asked Cabinski.
"We weren't taking notice," all replied, tmwilling to incur the disfavor of either of the contestants. Only Janina who detested injustice, finally said : ' ' The bouquet was given to Miss Zarzecka. I stood beside her and saw distinctly."
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* ' What does that calf want here? She came from the street and thinks she can interfere in what's none of her business!" cried Kacz- kowska.
Janina advanced, her voice hoarse with anger.
' ' You have no right to insult me, madame ! ' ' she cried. *' Do you hear! I haven't ever let anyone insult me, nor will I ! "
A strange silence suddenly fell, for all were impressed by the dignity and force of Janina's words. She glared at Kaczkowska with glow- ing eyes and then turned on her heel and left the room.
Cabinski had fled to the box office after hastily divesting himself of his costtmie.
''Whew! she's a sound nut, that new one."
''Kaczkowska will never forgive her that ..."
"What can she do? . . . Miss Orlowska has the backing of the management."
Mimi, inmiediately after the play, went to the dressing-room of the chorus where she found Janina still agitated.
"How good you are!" cried the actress effusively.
"What I did was right . . . that's all," Janina replied.
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''Take a trip with us to Bielany, won't you?" begged Mimi.
''When? . . . And who are going?"
"We're going within the next few days. There will be Wawrzecki, I, a certain author, a very jolly chap, whose play we are to pre- sent, Majkowska, Topolski and you. You must come with us!"
After lengthy persuasions and kisses, which Janina received indifferently, she finally agreed to accompany them.
They waited for Wawrzecki and afterwards all went together to a pastry shop for tea, taking with them also Topolski, who there composed a circular addressed to the whole company requesting them to appear without fail at the morrow's rehearsal, pimctually at ten o'clock.
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CHAPTER V
For Cabinski all days on which there was a performance were important days, but only three days were extraordinary: Christmas Eve, Easter Day, and . . . the name day of his wife which fell on the 19th of Jtily, sacred to St. Vincent de Paid. On those three days^ the director and his wife wotdd hold a recep- tion on a grand scale.
Cabinski the miser would vanish, and in his place would appear Cabinski the mimificent, dispensing hospitality after the ancient cus- tom of the Polish nobility, while certain deeply hidden hereditary cells of lavishness opened up in his ego. The guests were received and f 6ted generously and no expense was spared. And, if later, as a result of this, advances on salaries were smaller for a month or so, their deferment more frequent, and the director's complaints of a deficit more numer- ous, hardly anyone minded, for all enjoyed
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themselves to the utmost, particularly on the name day of the directress.
Cabinska's Christian name was Vincentine, but none bothered their heads about why her husband called her ''Pepa," for nobody was interested to that extent.
In accordance with the announcement of Topolski, the company assembled punctually for the rehearsal. They were to play The Martyr by D'Ennery, in which the title role, one of the showiest and most lachrymose in her repertory, was invariably acted each year by the directress. She played it really well, putting into it her entire store of tears and vocal lamentations, and had the deep satisfaction of thrilling the public.
Those name day performances were usually a real benefit for all kinds of novices, for the caste was purposely made up of the poorest players so that the acting of Pepa might there- by shine forth more effectively.
Cabinska went direct to the stage without speaking to anyone and during the entire rehearsal wore on her face an expression of tender emotion and absorption. At the end of the rehearsal the entire company gathered about her and Topolski came forward. Cabin-
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ska modestly lowered her eyes and, pretending to be siirprised, waited.
"Allow me, esteemed Directress to extend to you in the name of yotir fellow-actors and actresses their most cordial felicitations on the occasion of your name day and to wish you with all our hearts that you may continue to remain for a long time the ornament of our stage and a blessing to your husband and children. In grateful appreciation of yotir artistic services and yo\ir companionship, the company begs you, my dear madame, to accept this htmible token of our affection which is only a poor return for your goodness and kind-heartedness. ' '
Topolski ended and handed her an open case in which was a set of sapphire gems bought from the contributions of the whole company. He kissed her hand and stepped aside.
Then all began to approach Cabinska sepa- rately; the men kissed her hands, while the women threw themselves on her neck with protestations of friendship and good wishes.
Wladek, who had been the first to pay his tribute at hand-kissing, drew Topolski aside behind the scenes.
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'*Spit out the dregs of that congrattilatory tommyrot, or you'll poison yotirself with such a big dose of hypocrisy."
"But it won't poison her."
'*Bah! the sapphires cost one hundred and twenty rubles; for so much money she can listen a whole week."
''Thank you, thank you with my whole heart! You put me to shame my dear com- rades, for in truth I do not know what I have done to merit so much kindness," said Cabin- ska with emotion. Really, the sapphires were very pretty.
The director smiled, rubbed his hands, and invited all to his home after the performance.
The directress singled out for a particularly effusive kiss Janina who, led by sympathy, had brought her a lovely bouquet of roses, explaining that she had not contributed to the fimd for the general gift as it was collected before her advent into the company.
Cabinska would not part with Janina and took her along with her to dinner.
''Truly, they must be very good people and must love you," said Janina at the table.
"Once a year will not ruin them," answered Cabinska merrily.
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Together they went to the pastry shop so as not to interfere with the preparations that were being made for the evening reception. She sat there relating to Janina the history of her past name day celebrations with a tender pathos which could not, however, disguise a certain feeling of bitterness and uneasiness over the fact that the editor had not even sent her a card of greeting.
The performance was a real ovation. From the public she received a mass of flowers, while the editor sent her a big basket of them together with an imposing bracelet.
That overwhelmed her. As soon as he appeared behind the scenes, she drew him into the darkest comer and kissed him with fiery passion.
The Cabinski home presented an imusual appearance. In the first room, in the middle of a huge rug that completely covered the dirty floor, was a circular stand bearing a fan-shaped palm, while two mirrors with marble consoles stood in the comers. Heavy, cherry-colored, velvet portieres were draped over the windows and the doors. A cltmip of azaleas and rhododendrons between the win- dows formed an oasis of gorgeous greenery.
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accentuating the beautiful lines of a yellowish plaster statue of Venus de Milo which stood on a pedestal draped with purple cloth.
The piano at the further end of the room, decked with a garland of artificial flowers, bore upon it a huge golden tray stacked with visiting cards. Four little tables with little blue chairs surrounding them were placed in the most brilliantly lighted parts of the room. The tarnished and chipped gilded frames of the mirrors were skillfully masked with red muslin, pinned artistically with flowers. The torn wall paper was covered with pictures. The whole salon presented so elegant and artistic an appearance, that Cabinska, on returning from the theater stood amazed and cried out enthusiastically: ''A splendid scene! . . . John you are a master-decorator!"
''Heavens! . . . it's as beautiful as in a comedy!" added the nurse, crossing the salon on tiptoe.
The second and larger room which ordina- rily served the purpose of a store room, crammed with scenic odds and ends, had now been transformed into a dining room and dazzled with its restaurant-like splendor: the whiteness of its table covers, its polished
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