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

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“It is well,” says Martha. “Adaptation to environment is of avail only to brute animals: man can make his own world by viewing it in his own special way.

“I,” she goes on to say sadly, “believe in nothing. And yet women in general are inclined to have faith in an existence after death. It is simply an outcome of sympathy with suffering, and of an instinct of justice. You know how the thought of useless suffering in nature makes me beside myself. Think of all those silent agonies which never will be known; of those tortures endured throughout the world by multitudes that leave no trace behind them.... When but a little boy, Janusz once focussed the sun’s rays on a little insect he had fastened by its wing, and which was writhing in impotent throes. I can still see those poor limbs, red in the glow, quivering in excruciating pain, until I snatched the lens away from Janusz, and set the half-roasted creature free.... Those were its last impressions of life: after them came—Nothingness! I can see all the tiny invisible beings that I slay by hundreds in my daily walks, trampling them down in the long grass or under the pine-needles, and unwittingly leaving them to expire in the most dreadful torments, perhaps drawn out for many an hour.... I know, too, of the pain which fishes undergo, often kept living in the air for whole days, and seen to move convulsively, even when on the fire.... All this pain, and nothing to justify, nothing to compensate it! This I know; for beyond death there is nothing!”