‘Look at its counterpart,’ replied my strange friend, without heeding my question.
The counterpart was an excellent copy of Titian’s well-known Venus with the Mirror in the Dresden Gallery.
‘And what is the significance?’
Severin rose and pointed with his finger at the fur with which Titian garbed his goddess of love.
‘It, too, has Venus in furs,’ he said with a slight smile. ‘I don’t believe that the old Venetian had any secondary intention. He simply painted the portrait of some aristocratic Messalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture period baptised the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian’s fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that constitute woman’s essence and her beauty.
‘But enough of that. The picture, as it now exists, is a bitter satire on our love. Venus in this abstract north, in this icy Christian world, has to creep into huge black furs so as not to catch cold –’
Severin laughed, and lighted a fresh cigarette.
Just then the door opened and an attractive, stoutish, blonde girl entered. She had wise, kindly eyes, was dressed in black silk, and brought us cold meat and eggs with our tea. Severin took one of the latter, and decapitated it with his knife. ‘Didn’t I tell you that I want them soft-boiled?’ he cried with a violence that made the young woman tremble.
‘But my dear Sevtchu –’ she said timidly.
‘Sevtchu, nothing,’ he yelled, ‘you are to obey, obey, do you understand?’ and he tore the kantchuk (a long whip with a short handle), which was hanging beside some other weapons, from its hook.
The woman fled from the chamber quickly and timidly like a doe.
‘Just wait, I’ll get you yet,’ he called after her.
‘But, Severin,’ I said, placing my hand on his arm, ‘how can you treat a pretty young woman thus?’
‘Look at the woman,’ he replied, blinking humorously with his eyes. ‘Had I flattered her, she would have cast the noose around my neck, but now, when I bring her up with the kantchuk, she adores me.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Nonsense, nothing, that is the way you have to break in women.’
‘Well, if you like it, live like a pasha in your harem, but don’t lay down theories for me –’
‘Why not,’ he said animatedly. ‘Goethe’s “you must be hammer or anvil” is absolutely appropriate to the relation between man and woman. Didn’t Lady Venus in your dream prove that to you? Woman’s power lies in man’s passion, and she knows how to use it, if man doesn’t understand himself. He has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman. As soon as he gives in, his neck is under the yoke, and the lash will soon fall upon him.’
‘Strange maxims!’
‘Not maxims, but experiences,’ he replied, nodding his head. ‘I have actually felt the lash. I am cured. Do you care to know how?’
He rose, and got a small manuscript from his massive desk, and put it in front of me.
‘You have already asked about the picture. I have long owed you an explanation. Here – read!’
Severin sat down by the chimney with his back towards me, and seemed to dream with open eyes. Silence had fallen again, and again the fire sang in the chimney, and the samovar and the cricket in the old walls. I opened the manuscript and read:
Confessions of a Supersensual Man
The margin of the manuscript bore as motto a variation of the well-known lines from Faust:
Thou supersensual wooer, A woman leads you by the nose.
MEPHISTOPHELES
I turned the title-page and read: ‘What follows has been compiled from my diary of that period, because it is impossible ever frankly to write of one’s past, but in this way everything retains its fresh colours, the colours of the present.’
Gogol, the Russian Molière, says – where? well, somewhere – ‘the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down’.
A wonderful saying.
So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a headache. The smoke of the fireplace curls and condenses into figures, small grey-bearded cuckolds that mockingly point their finger at me. Chubby-cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my knees. I have to smile involuntarily, even laugh aloud, as I am writing down my adventures. Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds, long scarred over, have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to write idylls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of paintings, furnish a theatre with new pieces for an entire season, a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios and duos, but – what am I saying – the upshot of it all is that I don’t do much more than to stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am – no false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don’t quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself – I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante in life.
Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything. I am such a one.
But what am I saying?
To the business in hand.
I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me with despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How wonderful the outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven with golden sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the heavens into which snow-capped crags project; how green and fresh the forested slopes; the meadows on which small herds graze, down to the yellow billows of grain where reapers stand and bend over and rise up again.
The house in which I live stands in a sort of park, or forest, or wilderness, whatever one wants to call it, and is very solitary.
Its sole inhabitants are myself, a widow from Lemberg, and Madame Tartakovska, who runs the house, a little old woman, who grows older and smaller each day. There are also an old dog that limps on one leg, and a young cat that continually plays with a ball of yarn.
