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

42 страница из 53

We three are riding together over the desolate plain. Janusz rides in front of us, playing acrobatic tricks on horseback, and really performing wonderful feats of agility.

But it is now ebb-tide with me. Those tight trousers, those raw leather boots of his—I hate them, and scorn myself for having let that sort of thing ever make any impression on me; assuredly there is nothing in all this that is worthy of scorn.

Autumn has come. That is all.

We come abreast upon the muddy highway, all three strangely sick at heart. In silence we ride on.

Latterly Janusz has altered very much. His face is pale; it is the face of a man lost in troubled thought. When we are by ourselves, he scarcely ever raises his eyes to mine; and his outbursts of energy resemble the frenzy of delirium. After the equestrian evolutions just performed, he looks wearied and gloomy, and his lips are closed fast as he rides.

Why is each of us thus? I alone can tell. Because Martha is thinking of Imszanski, and Janusz of me, and I am thinking of Roslawski. It is just like a novel: each of us as remote as one star is from another.