第30章 PART I(29)

"Why have I left your kind letters from America without reply?My Julie,I have constantly thought of you;but the life I lead is slowly crushing my energies.Over and over again,I have taken up my pen;and over and over again,I have laid it aside,recoiling from the thought of myself and my existence;too miserable (perhaps too proud)to tell you what a wretched creature I am,and what thoughts come to me sometimes in the wakeful hours of the night.

"After this confession,you wonder,perhaps,why I write to you now.

"I really believe it is because I have been threatened with legal proceedings by my creditors,and have just come victoriously out of a hard struggle to appease them for the time.This little fight has roused me from my apathy;it has rallied my spirits,and made me feel like my old self again.I am no longer content with silently loving my dearest friend;I open my heart and write to her.

"'Oh,dear,how sad that she should be in debt!'I can hear you say this,and sigh to yourself--you who have never known what it was to be in want of money since you were born.Shall I tell you what my husband earns at the University?No:I feel the blood rushing into my face at the bare idea of revealing it.

"Let me do the Professor justice.My Animated Mummy has reached the height of his ambition at last--he is Professor of Chemistry,and is perfectly happy for the rest of his life.My dear,he is as lean,and almost as dirty,as the wretch who first perverted him.Do you remember my once writing to you about a mysterious Hungarian,whom we found in the University?A few years since,this man died by suicide,as mysteriously as he had lived.They found him in the laboratory,with a strange inion traced in chalk on the wall by which he lay dead.These were the words:--'After giving it a fair trial,I find that life is not worth living for.I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own discovery.My chemical papers and preparations are hereby bequeathed to my friend Doctor --,and my body is presented as a free gift to the anatomy school.Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my remains.I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me.'

And they did try,Julie--and discovered nothing.I wonder whether the suicide has left the receipt for that poison,among his other precious legacies,to his 'friend Doctor --.'

"Why do I trouble you with these nauseous details?Because they are in no small degree answerable for my debts.My husband devotes all his leisure hours to continuing the detestable experiments begun by the Hungarian;and my yearly dress-money for myself and my child has been reduced one half,to pay the chemical expenses.

"Ought I,in this hard case,to have diminished my expenditure to the level of my reduced income?

"If you say Yes,I answer that human endurance has its limits.I can support the martyrdom of my life;the loss of my dearest illusions and hopes;the mean enmity of our neighbors;the foul-mouthed jealousy of the women;and,more than all,the exasperating patience of a husband who never resents the hardest things I can say to him,and who persists in loving and admiring me as if we were only married last week.But I cannot see my child in a stuff frock,on promenade days in the Palace Gardens,when other people's children are wearing silk.And plain as my own dress may be,I must and will have the best material that is made.When the wife of the military commandant (a woman sprung from the people)goes out in an Indian shawl with Brussels lace in her bonnet,am I to meet her and return her bow,in a camelot cloak and a beaver hat?No!When I lose my self-respect let me lose my life too.My husband may sink as low as he pleases.I always have stood above him,and I always will!

"And so I am in debt,and my creditors threaten me.What does it matter?

I have pacified them,for the time,with some small installments of money,and a large expenditure of smiles.

"I wish you could see my darling little Minna;she is the loveliest and sweetest child in the world--my pride at all times,and my salvation in my desperate moods.There are moments when I feel inclined to set fire to the hateful University,and destroy all the moldy old creatures who inhabit it.I take Minna out and buy her a little present,and see her eyes sparkle and her color rise,and feel her innocent kisses,and become,for awhile,quite a good woman again.Yesterday,her father--no,I shall work myself up into a fury if I tell you about it.Let me only say that Minna saved me as usual.I took her to the jeweler's and bought her a pair of pearl earrings.If you could have heard her,if you could have seen her,when the little angel first looked at herself in the glass!I wonder when I shall pay for the earrings?

"Ah,Julie,if I only had such an income as yours,I would make my power felt in this place.The insolent women should fawn on me and fear me.Iwould have my own house and establishment in the country,to purify me after the atmosphere of the Professor's drugs.I would--well!well!never mind what else I would have.