Читать книгу Kobiety (Women). A Novel of Polish Life онлайн

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The black sky bends its lowering vault above me; under its clouds the black pond lifts up swelling waves. Between the Infinite and my soul, there is nowhere any room for strength.

Oh, “I am so weary, weary of these heights!” How I desire to meet with a force able to subdue mine!

“Pray, Janusz, pray get up,” I say, gently stroking his hair; “I beg you, rise; it must be very late. Where are the oars?”

I am lying in the hollow between two rows of graves, breathing the perfume of the white forest gilliflowers, abloom in the “Kirkut,” and thinking of life—of this most admirable and most beautiful marvel, life. I am explaining to Martha how my worship of life is really the outcome of resignation.

“But in me resignation has taken a form that it has not in you. ‘If I cannot have all, I refuse to have anything;’ such is the creed of despairing pride, held by slaves and wretched men. My belief in Azoism is nothing but the creed of a proud woman, who is reconciled to her slavery, and will take up no spurious imitations of freedom. Such a withdrawal from the vortex we live in, enabling me to look on all things as Garborg does, from above them, and with a smile of dignified amenity—this is what I love. It often seems to me, so little I feel adapted for my life on earth, that I have somehow wandered hither by a mischance, a blunder.”