“Oh, you beautiful woman,” I then exclaimed, looking at her. In my enthusiasm I tore the sable from her shoulders and pressed my mouth against her neck.“You love me even when I am cruel,” said Wanda, “now go!—you bore me—don’t you hear?”She boxed my ears so that I saw stars and bells rang in my ears.“Help me into my furs, slave.”I helped her, as well as I could.“How awkward,” she exclaimed, and was scarcely in it before she struck me in the face again. I felt myself growing pale.“Did I hurt you?” she asked, softly touching me with her hand.“No, no,” I exclaimed.“At any rate you have no reason to complain, you want it thus; now kiss me again.”I threw my arms about her, and her lips clung closely to mine. As she lay against my breast in her large heavy furs, I had a curiously oppressive sensation. It was as if a wild beast, a she-bear, were embracing me. It seemed as if I were about to feel her claws in my flesh. But this time the she-bear let me off easily.With my heart filled with smiling hopes, I went up to my miserable servant’s room, and threw myself down on my hard couch.“Life is really amazingly droll,” I thought. “A short time ago the most beautiful woman, Venus herself, rested against your breast, and now you have an opportunity for studying the Chinese hell. Unlike us, they don’t hurl the damned into flames, but they have devils chasing them out into fields of ice.“Very likely the founders of their religion also slept in unheated rooms.”* * * * *During the night I startled out of my sleep with a scream. I had been dreaming of an icefield in which I had lost my way; I had been looking in vain for a way out. Suddenly an eskimo drove up in a sleigh harnessed with reindeer; he had the face of the waiter who had shown me to the unheated room.“What are you looking for here, my dear sir?” he exclaimed. “This is the North Pole.”A moment later he had disappeared, and Wanda flew over the smooth ice on tiny skates. Her white satin skirt fluttered and crackled; the ermine of her jacket and cap, but especially her face, gleamed whiter than the snow. She shot toward me, inclosed me in her arms, and began to kiss me. Suddenly I felt my blood running warm down my side.“What are you doing?” I asked horror-stricken.She laughed, and as I looked at her now, it was no longer Wanda, but a huge, white she-bear, who was digging her paws into my body.I cried out in despair, and still heard her diabolical laughter when I awoke, and looked about the room in surprise.Early in the morning I stood at Wanda’s door, and the waiter brought the coffee. I took it from him, and served it to my beautiful mistress. She had already dressed, and looked magnificent, all fresh and roseate. She smiled graciously at me and called me back, when I was about to withdraw respectfully.“Come, Gregor, have your breakfast quickly too,” she said, “then we will go house-hunting. I don’t want to stay in the hotel any longer than I have to. It is very embarassing here. If I chat with you for more than a minute, people will immediately say: ‘The fair Russian is having an affair with her servant, you see, the race of Catherines isn’t extinct yet.’”Half an hour later we went out; Wanda was in her cloth-gown with the Russian cap, and I in my Cracovian costume. We created quite a stir. I walked about ten paces behind, looking very solemn, but expected momentarily to have to break out into loud laughter. There was scarcely a street in which one or the other of the attractive houses did not bear the signcamere ammobiliate. Wanda always sent me upstairs, and only when the apartment seemed to answer her requirements did she herself ascend. By noon I was as tired as a stag-hound after the hunt.We entered a new house and left it again without having found a suitable habitation. Wanda was already somewhat out of humor. Suddenly she said to me: “Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions, which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.”“But, my lady—” I interposed.“Gregor?” She entered the next open corridor and ascended a few steps of the dark stair-way; then she threw her arms about me with passionate tenderness and kissed me.“Oh, Severin, you were very wise. You are much more dangerous as slave than I would have imagined; you are positively irrestible, and I am afraid I shall have to fall in love with you again.”“Don’t you love me any longer then,” I asked seized by a sudden fright.She solemnly shook her head, but kissed me again with her swelling, adorable lips.We returned to the hotel. Wanda had luncheon, and ordered me also quickly to get something to eat.Of course, I wasn’t served as quickly as she, and so it happened that just as I was carrying the second bite of my steak to my mouth, the waiter entered and called out with his theatrical gesture: “Madame wants you, at once.”I took a rapid and painful leave of my food, and, tired and hungry, hurried toward Wanda, who was already on the street.“I wouldn’t have imagined you could be so cruel,” I said reproachfully. “With all these, fatiguing duties you don’t even leave me time to eat in peace.”Wanda laughed gaily. “I thought you had finished,” she said, “but never mind. Man was born to suffer, and you in particular. The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.”I followed her resentfully, gnawing at my hunger.“I have given up the idea of finding a place in the city,” Wanda continued. “It will be difficult to find an entire floor which is shut off and where you can do as you please. In such a strange, mad relationship as ours there must be no jarring note. I shall rent an entire villa—and you will be surprised. You have my permission now to satisfy your hunger, and look about a bit in Florence. I won’t be home till evening. If I need you then, I will have you called.”I looked at the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Logia di Lanzi, and then I stood for a long time on the banks of the Arno. Again and again I let my eyes rest on the magnificent ancient Florence, whose round cupolas and towers were drawn in soft lines against the blue, cloudless sky. I watched its splendid bridges beneath whose wide arches the lively waves of the beautiful, yellow river ran, and the green hills which surrounded the city, bearing slender cypresses and extensive buildings, palaces and monasteries.It is a different world, this one in which we are—a gay, sensuous, smiling world. The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours. It is a long ways off to the last white villas scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn’t a spot that isn’t bright with sunlight. The people are less serious than we; perhaps, they think less, but they all look as though they were happy.It is also maintained that death is easier in the South.I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn and love of the senses without torment does exist.Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the Arno, opposite the Cascine. It is surrounded by an attractive garden with lovely paths, grass plots, and magnificent meadow of camelias. It is only two stories high, quadrangular in the Italian fashion. An open gallery runs along one side, a sort of loggia with plaster-casts of antique statues; stone steps lead from it down into the garden. From the gallery you enter a bath with a magnificent marble basin, from which winding stairs lead to my mistress’ bed-chamber.Wanda occupies the second story by herself.A room on the ground floor has been assigned to me; it is very attractive, and even has a fireplace.I have roamed through the garden. On a round hillock I discovered a little temple, but I found its door locked. However, there is a chink in the door and when I glue my eye to it, I see the goddess of love on a white pedestal.A slight shudder passes over me. It seems to me as if she were smiling at me saying: “Are you there? I have been expecting you.”* * * * *It is evening. An attractive maid brings me orders to appear before my mistress. I ascend the wide marble stairs, pass through the anteroom, a large salon furnished with extravagant magnificence, and knock at the door of the bedroom. I knock very softly for the luxury displayed everywhere intimidates me. Consequently no one hears me, and I stand for some time in front of the door. I have a feeling as if I were standing before the bed-room of the great Catherine, and it seems as if at any moment she might come out in her green sleeping furs, with the red ribbon and decoration on her bare breast, and with her little white powdered curls.I knocked again. Wanda impatiently pulls the door open.“Why so late?” she asks.“I was standing in front of the door, but you didn’t hear me knock,” I reply timidly. She closes the door, and clinging to me, she leads me to the red damask ottoman on which she had been resting. The entire arrangement of the room is in red damask—wall-paper, curtains, portieres, hangings of the bed. A magnificent painting of Samson and Delilah forms the ceiling.Wanda receives me in an intoxicating dishabille. Her white satin dress flows gracefully and picturesquely down her slender body, leaving her arms and breast bare, and carelessly they nestle amid the dark hair of the great fur of sable, lined with green velvet. Her red hair falls down her back as far as the hips, only half held by strings of black pearls.“Venus in Furs,” I whisper, while she draws me to her breast and threatens to stifle me with her kisses. Then I no longer speak and neither do I think; everything is drowned out in an ocean of unimagined bliss.“Do you still love me?” she asks, her eye softening in passionate tenderness.“You ask!” I exclaimed.“You still remember your oath,” she continued with an alluring smile, “now that everything is prepared, everything in readiness, I ask you once more, is it still your serious wish to become my slave?”“Am I not ready?” I asked in surprise.“You have not yet signed the papers.”“Papers—what papers?”“Oh, I see, you want to give it up,” she said, “well then, we will let it go.”“But Wanda,” I said, “you know that nothing gives me greater happiness than to serve you, to be your slave. I would give everything for the sake of feeling myself wholly in your power, even unto death—”“How beautiful you are,” she whispered, “when you speak so enthusiastically, so passionately. I am more in love with you than ever and you want me to be dominant, stern, and cruel. I am afraid, it will be impossible for me to be so.”“I am not afraid,” I replied smiling, “where are the papers?’”“So that you may know what it means to be absolutely in my power, I have drafted a second agreement in which you declare that you have decided to kill yourself. In that way I can even kill you, if I so desire.”“Give them to me.”While I was unfolding the documents and reading them, Wanda got pen and ink. She then sat down beside me with her arm about my neck, and looked over my shoulder at the paper.The first one read:AGREEMENT BETWEEN MME. VON DUNAJEW AND SEVERIN VON KUSIEMSKI“Severin von Kusiemski ceases with the present day being the affianced of Mme. Wanda von Dunajew, and renounces all the rights appertaining thereunto; he on the contrary binds himself on his word of honor as a man and nobleman, that hereafter he will be herslaveuntil such time that she herself sets him at liberty again.“As the slave of Mme. von Dunajew he is to bear the name Gregor, and he is unconditionally to comply with every one of her wishes, and to obey every one of her commands; he is always to be submissive to his mistress, and is to consider her every sign of favor as an extraordinary mercy.“Mme. von Dunajew is entitled not only to punish her slave as she deems best, even for the slightest inadvertence or fault, but also is herewith given the right to torture him as the mood may seize her or merely for the sake of whiling away the time. Should she so desire, she may kill him whenever she wishes; in short, he is her unrestricted property.“Should Mme. von Dunajew ever set her slave at liberty, Severin von Kusiemski agrees to forget everything that he has experienced or suffered as her slave, and promisesnever under any circumstances and in no wise to think of vengeance or retaliation.“Mme. von Dunajew on her behalf agrees as his mistress to appear as often as possible in her furs, especially when she purposes some cruelty toward her slave.”Appended at the bottom of the agreement was the date of the present day.The second document contained only a few words.“Having since many years become weary of existence and its illusions, I have of my own free will put an end to my worthless life.”I was seized with a deep horror when I had finished. There was still time, I could still withdraw, but the madness of passion and the sight of the beautiful woman that lay all relaxed against my shoulder carried me away.“This one you will have to copy, Severin,” said Wanda, indicating the second document. “It has to be entirely in your own handwriting; this, of course, isn’t necessary in the case of the agreement.”I quickly copied the few lines in which I designated myself a suicide, and handed them to Wanda. She read them, and put them on the table with a smile.“Now have you the courage to sign it?” she asked with a crafty smile, inclining her head.I took the pen.“Let me sign first,” said Wanda, “your hand is trembling, are you afraid of the happiness that is to be yours?”She took the agreement and pen. While engaging in my internal struggle, I looked upward for a moment. It occurred to me that the painting on the ceiling, like many of those of the Italian and Dutch schools, was utterly unhistorical, but this very fact gave it a strange mood which had an almost uncanny effect on me. Delilah, an opulent woman with flaming red hair, lay extended, half-disrobed, in a dark fur-cloak, upon a red ottoman, and bent smiling over Samson who had been overthrown and bound by the Philistines. Her smile in its mocking coquetry was full of a diabolical cruelty; her eyes, half-closed, met Samson’s, and his with a last look of insane passion cling to hers, for already one of his enemies is kneeling on his breast with the red-hot iron to blind him.“Now—” said Wanda. “Why you are all lost in thought. What is the matter with you, everything will remain just as it was, even after you have signed, don’t you know me yet, dear heart?”I looked at the agreement. Her name was written there in bold letters. I peered once more into her eyes with their potent magic, then I took the pen and quickly signed the agreement.“You are trembling,” said Wanda calmly, “shall I help you?”She gently took hold of my hand, and my name appeared at the bottom of the second paper. Wanda looked once more at the two documents, and then locked them in the desk which stood at the head of the ottoman.“Now then, give me your passport and money.”I took out my wallet and handed it to her. She inspected it, nodded, and put it with other things while in a sweet drunkenness I kneeled before her leaning my head against her breast.Suddenly she thrusts me away with her foot, leaps up, and pulls the bell-rope. In answer to its sound three young, slender negresses enter; they are as if carved of ebony, and are dressed from head to foot in red satin; each one has a rope in her hand.Suddenly I realize my position, and am about to rise. Wanda stands proudly erect, her cold beautiful face with its sombre brows and contemptous eyes is turned toward me. She stands before me as mistress, commanding, gives a sign with her hand, and before I really know what has happened to me the negresses have dragged me to the ground, and have tied me hand and foot. As in the case of one about to be executed my arms are bound behind my back, so that I can scarcely move.“Give me the whip, Haydée,” commands Wanda, with unearthly calm.The negress hands it to her mistress, kneeling.“And now take off my heavy furs,” she continues, “they impede me.”The negress obeyed.“The jacket there!” Wanda commanded.Haydée quickly brought her thekazabaika, set with ermine, which lay on the bed, and Wanda slipped into it with two inimitably graceful movements.“Now tie him to the pillar here!”The negresses lifted me up, and twisting a heavy rope around my body, tied me standing against one of the massive pillars which supported the top of the wide Italian bed.Then they suddenly disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed them.Wanda swiftly approached me. Her white satin dress flowed behind her in a long train, like silver, like moonlight; her hair flared like flames against the white fur of her jacket. Now she stood in front of me with her left hand firmly planted on her hips, in her right hand she held the whip. She uttered an abrupt laugh.“Now play has come to an end between us,” she said with heartless coldness. “Now we will begin in dead earnest. You fool, I laugh at you and despise you; you who in your insane infatuation have given yourself as a plaything tome, the frivolous and capricious woman. You are no longer the man I love, butmy slave, at my mercy even unto life and death.“You shall know me!“First of all you shall have a taste of the whip in all seriousness, without having done anything to deserve it, so that you may understand what to expect, if you are awkward, disobedient, or refractory.”With a wild grace she rolled back her fur-lined sleeve, and struck me across the back.I winced, for the whip cut like a knife into my flesh.“Well, how do you like that?” she exclaimed.I was silent.“Just wait, you will yet whine like a dog beneath my whip,” she threatened, and simultaneously began to strike me again.The blows fell quickly, in rapid succession, with terrific force upon my back, arms, and neck; I had to grit my teeth not to scream aloud. Now she struck me in the face, warm blood ran down, but she laughed, and continued her blows.“It is only now I understand you,” she exclaimed. “It really is a joy to have some one so completely in one’s power, and a man at that, who loves you—you do love me?—No—Oh! I’ll tear you to shreds yet, and with each blow my pleasure will grow. Now, twist like a worm, scream, whine! You will find no mercy in me!”Finally she seemed tired.She tossed the whip aside, stretched out on the ottoman, and rang.The negresses entered.“Untie him!”As they loosened the rope, I fell to the floor like a lump of wood. The black women grinned, showing their white teeth.“Untie the rope around his feet.”They did it, but I was unable to rise.“Come over here, Gregor.”I approached the beautiful woman. Never did she seem more seductive to me than to-day in spite of all her cruelty and contempt.“One step further,” Wanda commanded. “Now kneel down, and kiss my foot.”She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it.“Now, you won’t lay eyes on me for an entire month, Gregor,” she said seriously. “I want to become a stranger to you, so you will more easily adjust yourself to our new relationship. In the meantime you will work in the garden, and await my orders. Now, off with you, slave!”* * * * *A month has passed with monotonous regularity, heavy work, and a melancholy hunger, hunger for her, who is inflicting all these torments on me.I am under the gardener’s orders; I help him lop the trees and prune the hedges, transplant flowers, turn over the flower beds, sweep the gravel paths; I share his coarse food and his hard cot; I rise and go to bed with the chickens. Now and then I hear that our mistress is amusing herself, surrounded by admirers. Once I heard her gay laughter even down here in the garden.I seem awfully stupid to myself. Was it the result of my present life, or was I so before? The month is drawing to a close—the day after to-morrow. What will she do with me now, or has she forgotten me, and left me to trim hedges and bind bouquets till my dying day?A written order.“The slave Gregor is herewith ordered to my personal service.Wanda Dunajew.”With a beating heart I draw aside the damask curtain on the following morning, and enter the bed-room of my divinity. It is still filled with a pleasant half darkness.“Is it you, Gregor?” she asks, while I kneel before the fire-place, building a fire. I tremble at the sound of the beloved voice. I cannot see her herself; she is invisible behind the curtains of the four-poster bed.“Yes, my mistress,” I reply.“How late is it?”“Past nine o’clock.”“Breakfast.”I hasten to get it, and then kneel down with the tray beside her bed.“Here is breakfast, my mistress.”Wanda draws back the curtains, and curiously enough at the first glance when I see her among the pillows with loosened flowing hair, she seems an absolute stranger, a beautiful woman, but the beloved soft lines are gone. This face is hard and has an expression of weariness and satiety.Or is it simply that formerly my eye did not see this?She fixes her green eyes upon me, more with curiosity than with menace, perhaps even somewhat pityingly, and lazily pulls the dark sleeping fur on which she lies over the bared shoulder.At this moment she is very charming, very maddening, and I feel my blood rising to my head and heart. The tray in my hands begins to sway. She notices it and reached out for the whip which is lying on the toilet-table.“You are awkward, slave,” she says furrowing her brow.I lower my looks to the ground, and hold the tray as steadily as possible. She eats her breakfast, yawns, and stretches her opulent limbs in the magnificent furs.She has rung. I enter.“Take this letter to Prince Corsini.”I hurry into the city, and hand the letter to the Prince. He is a handsome young man with glowing black eyes. Consumed with jealousy, I take his answer to her.“What is the matter with you?” she asks with lurking spitefulness. “You are very pale.”“Nothing, mistress, I merely walked rather fast.”At luncheon the prince is at her side, and I am condemned to serve both her and him. They joke, and I am, as if non-existent, for both. For a brief moment I see black; I was just pouring some Bordeaux into his glass, and spilled it over the table-cloth and her gown.“How awkward,” Wanda exclaimed and slapped my face. The prince laughed, and she also, but I felt the blood rising to my face.After luncheon she drove in the Cascine. She has a little carriage with a handsome, brown English horse, and holds the reins herself. I sit behind and notice how coquettishly she acts, and nods with a smile when one of the distinguished gentlemen bows to her.As I help her out of the carriage, she leans lightly on my arm; the contact runs through me like an electric shock. Sheisa wonderful woman, and I love her more than ever.* * * * *For dinner at six she has invited a small group of men and women. I serve, but this time I do not spill any wine over the table-cloth.A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly, especially when the instruction is by the way of a small woman’s hand.* * * * *After dinner she drives to the Pergola Theater. As she descends the stairs in her black velvet dress with its large collar of ermine and with a diadem of white roses on her hair, she is literally stunning. I open the carriage-door, and help her in. In front of the theater I leap from the driver’s seat, and in alighting she leaned on my arm, which trembled under the sweet burden. I open the door of her box, and then wait in the vestibule. The performance lasts four hours; she receives visits from her cavaliers, the while I grit my teeth with rage.It is way beyond midnight when my mistress’s bell sounds for the last time.“Fire!” she orders abruptly, and when the fire-place crackles, “Tea!”When I return with the samovar, she has already undressed, and with the aid of the negress slipped into a white negligee.Haydée thereupon leaves.“Hand me the sleeping-furs,” says Wanda, sleepily stretching her lovely limbs. I take them from the arm-chair, and hold them while she slowly and lazily slides into the sleeves. She then throws herself down on the cushions of the ottoman.“Take off my shoes, and put on my velvet slippers.”I kneel down and tug at the little shoe which resists my efforts. “Hurry, hurry!” Wanda exclaims, “you are hurting me! just you wait—I will teach you.” She strikes me with the whip, but now the shoe is off.“Now get out!” Still a kick—and then I can go to bed.* * * * *To-night I accompanied her to a soiree. In the entrance-hall she ordered me to help her out of her furs; then with a proud smile, confident of victory, she entered the brilliantly illuminated room. I again waited with gloomy and monotonous thoughts, watching hour after hour run by. From time to time the sounds of music reached me, when the door remained open for a moment. Several servants tried to start a conversation with me, but soon desisted, since I knew only a few words of Italian.Finally I fell asleep, and dreamed that I murdered Wanda in a violent attack of jealousy. I was condemned to death, and saw myself strapped on the board; the knife fell, I felt it on my neck, but I was still alive—Then the executioner slapped my face.No, it wasn’t the executioner; it was Wanda who stood wrathfully before me demanding her furs. I am at her side in a moment, and help her on with it.There is a deep joy in wrapping a beautiful woman into her furs, and in seeing and feeling how her neck and magnificent limbs nestle in the precious soft furs, and to lift the flowing hair over the collar. When she throws it off a soft warmth and a faint fragrance of her body still clings to the ends of the hairs of sable. It is enough to drive one mad.* * * * *Finally a day came when there were neither guests, nor theater, nor other company. I breathed a sigh of relief. Wanda sat in the gallery, reading, and apparently had no orders for me. At dusk when the silvery evening mists fell she withdrew. I served her at dinner, she ate by herself, but had not a look, not a syllable for me, not even a slap in the face.I actually desire a slap from her hand. Tears fill my eyes, and I feel that she has humiliated me so deeply, that she doesn’t even find it worth while to torture or maltreat me any further.Before she goes to bed, her bell calls me.“You will sleep here to-night, I had horrible dreams last night, and am afraid of being alone. Take one of the cushions from the ottoman, and lie down on the bearskin at my feet.”Then Wanda put out the lights. The only illumination in the room was from a small lamp suspended from the ceiling. She herself got into bed. “Don’t stir, so as not to wake me.”I did as she had commanded, but could not fall asleep for a long time. I saw the beautiful woman, beautiful as a goddess, lying on her back on the dark sleeping-furs; her arms beneath her neck, with a flood of red hair over them. I heard her magnificent breast rise in deep regular breathing, and whenever she moved ever so slightly. I woke up and listened to see whether she needed me.But she did not require me.No task was required of me; I meant no more to her than a night-lamp, or a revolver which one places under one’s pillow.* * * * *Am I mad or is she? Does all this arise out of an inventive, wanton woman’s brain with the intention of surpassing my supersensual fantasies, or is this woman really one of those Neronian characters who take a diabolical pleasure in treading underfoot, like a worm, human beings, who have thoughts and feelings and a will like theirs?What have I experienced?When I knelt with the coffee-tray beside her bed, Wanda suddenly placed her hand on my shoulder and her eyes plunged deep into mine.“What beautiful eyes you have,” she said softly, “and especially now since you suffer. Are you very unhappy?”I bowed my head, and kept silent.“Severin, do you still love me,” she suddenly exclaimed passionately, “can you still love me?”She drew me close with such vehemence that the coffee-tray upset, the can and cups fell to the floor, and the coffee ran over the carpet.“Wanda—my Wanda,” I cried out and held her passionately against me; I covered her mouth, face, and breast with kisses.“It is my unhappiness that I love you more and more madly the worse you treat me, the more frequently you betray me. Oh, I shall die of pain and love and jealousy.”“But I haven’t betrayed you, as yet, Severin,” replied Wanda smiling.“Not? Wanda! Don’t jest so mercilessly with me,” I cried. “Haven’t I myself taken the letter to the Prince—”“Of course, it was an invitation for luncheon.”“You have, since we have been in Florence—”“I have been absolutely faithful to you,” replied Wanda, “I swear it by all that is holy to me. All that I have done was merely to fulfill your dream and it was done for your sake.“However, I shall take a lover, otherwise things will be only half accomplished, and in the end you will yet reproach me with not having treated you cruelly enough, my dear beautiful slave! But to-day you shall be Severin again, the only one I love. I haven’t given away your clothes. They are here in the chest. Go and dress as you used to in the little Carpathian health-resort when our love was so intimate. Forget everything that has happened since; oh, you will forget it easily in my arms; I shall kiss away all your sorrows.”She began to treat me tenderly like a child, to kiss me and caress me. Finally she said with a gracious smile, “Go now and dress, I too will dress. Shall I put on my fur-jacket? Oh yes, I know, now run along!”When I returned she was standing in the center of the room in her white satin dress, and the redkazabaikaedged with ermine; her hair was white with powder and over her forehead she wore a small diamond diadem. For a moment she reminded me in an uncanny way of Catherine the Second, but she did not give me much time for reminiscences. She drew me down on the ottoman beside her and we enjoyed two blissful hours. She was no longer the stern capricious mistress, she was entirely a fine lady, a tender sweetheart. She showed me photographs and books which had just appeared, and talked about them with so much intelligence, clarity, and good taste, that I more than once carried her hand to my lips, enraptured. She then had me recite several of Lermontov’s poems, and when I was all afire with enthusiasm, she placed her small hand gently on mine. Her expression was soft, and her eyes were filled with tender pleasure.“Are you happy?”“Not yet.”She then leaned back on the cushions, and slowly opened herkazabaika.But I quickly covered the half-bared breast again with the ermine. “You are driving me mad.” I stammered.“Come!”I was already lying in her arms, and like a serpent she was kissing me with her tongue, when again she whispered, “Are you happy?”“Infinitely!” I exclaimed.She laughed aloud. It was an evil, shrill laugh which made cold shivers run down by back.“You used to dream of being the slave, the plaything of a beautiful woman, and now you imagine you are a free human being, a man, my lover-you fool! A sign from me, and you are a slave again. Down on your knees!”I sank down from the ottoman to her feet, but my eye still clung doubtingly on hers.“You can’t believe it,” she said, looking at me with her arms folded across her breast. “I am bored, and you will just do to while away a couple of hours of time. Don’t look at me that way—”She kicked me with her foot.“You are just what I want, a human being, a thing, an animal—”She rang. The three negresses entered.“Tie his hands behind his back.”I remained kneeling and unresistingly let them do this. They led me into the garden, down to the little vineyard, which forms the southern boundary. Corn had been planted between the espaliers, and here and there a few dead stalks still stood. To one side was a plough.The negresses tied me to a post, and amused themselves sticking me with their golden hair-needles. But this did not last long, before Wanda appeared with her ermine cap on her head, and with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She had me untied, and then my hands were fastened together on my back. She finally had a yoke put around my neck, and harnessed me to the plough.Then her black demons drove me out into the field. One of them held the plough, the other one led me by a line, the third applied the whip, and Venus in Furs stood to one side and looked on.* * * * *When I was serving dinner on the following day Wanda said: “Bring another cover, I want you to dine with me to-day,” and when I was about to sit down opposite her, she added, “No, over here, close by my side.”She is in the best of humors, gives me soup with her spoon, feeds me with her fork, and places her head on the table like a playful kitten and flirts with me. I have the misfortune of looking at Haydée, who serves in my place, perhaps a little longer than is necessary. It is only now that I noticed her noble, almost European cast of countenance and her magnificent statuesque bust, which is as if hewn out of black marble. The black devil observes that she pleases me, and, grinning, shows her teeth. She has hardly left the room, before Wanda leaps up in a rage.“What, you dare to look at another woman besides me! Perhaps you like her even better than you do me, she is even more demonic!”I am frightened; I have never seen her like this before; she is suddenly pale even to the lips and her whole body trembles. Venus in Furs is jealous of her slave. She snatches the whip from its hook and strikes me in the face; then she calls her black servants, who bind me, and carry me down into the cellar, where they throw me into a dark, dank, subterranean compartment, a veritable prison-cell.Then the lock of the door clicks, the bolts are drawn, a key sings in the lock. I am a prisoner, buried.I have been lying here for I don’t know how long, bound like a calf about to be hauled to the slaughter, on a bundle of damp straw, without any light, without food, without drink, without sleep. It would be like her to let me starve to death, if I don’t freeze to death before then. I am shaking with cold. Or is it fever? I believe I am beginning to hate this woman.* * * * *A red streak, like blood, floods across the floor; it is a light falling through the door which is now thrust open.Wanda appears on the threshold, wrapped in her sables, holding a lighted torch.“Are you still alive?” she asks.“Are you coming to kill me?” I reply with a low, hoarse voice.With two rapid strides Wanda reaches my side, she kneels down beside me, and places my head in her lap. “Are you ill? Your eyes glow so, do you love me? I want you to love me.”She draws forth a short dagger. I start with fright when its blade gleams in front of my eyes. I actually believe that she is about to kill me. She laughs, and cuts the ropes that bind me.* * * * *Every evening after dinner she now has me called. I have to read to her, and she discusses with me all sorts of interesting problems and subjects. She seems entirely transformed; it is as if she were ashamed of the savagery which she betrayed to me and of the cruelty with which she treated me. A touching gentleness transfigures her entire being, and when at the good-night she gives me her hand, a superhuman power of goodness and love lies in her eyes, of the kind which calls forth tears in us and causes us to forget all the miseries of existence and all the terrors of death.* * * * *I am readingManon l’Escaultto her. She feels the association, she doesn’t say a word, but she smiles from time to time, and finally she shuts up the little book.“Don’t you want to go on reading?”“Not to-day. We will ourselves actManon l’Escaultto-day. I have a rendezvous in the Cascine, and you, my dear Chevalier, will accompany me; I know, you will do it, won’t you?”“You command it.”“I do not command it, I beg it of you,” she says with irresistible charm. She then rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks at me.“Your eyes!” she exclaims. “I love you, Severin, you have no idea how I love you!”“Yes, I have!” I replied bitterly, “so much so that you have arranged for a rendezvous with some one else.”“I do this only to allure you the more,” she replied vivaciously. “I must have admirers, so as not to lose you. I don’t ever want to lose you, never, do you hear, for I love only you, you alone.”She clung passionately to my lips.“Oh, if I only could, as I would, give you all of my soul in a kiss—thus—but now come.”She slipped into a simple black velvet coat, and put a darkbashlyk5on her head. Then she rapidly went through the gallery, and entered the carriage.[Footnote 5: A kind of Russian cap.]“Gregor will drive,” she called out to the coachman who withdrew in surprise.I ascended the driver’s seat, and angrily whipped up the horses.In the Cascine where the main roadway turns into a leafy path, Wanda got out. It was night, only occasional stars shone through the gray clouds that fled across the sky. By the bank of the Arno stood a man in a dark cloak, with a brigand’s hat, and looked at the yellow waves. Wanda rapidly walked through the shrubbery, and tapped him on the shoulder. I saw him turn and seize her hand, and then they disappeared behind the green wall.An hour full of torments. Finally there was a rustling in the bushes to one side, and they returned.The man accompanied her to the carriage. The light of the lamp fell full and glaringly upon an infinitely young, soft and dreamy face which I had never before seen, and played in his long, blond curls.She held out her hand which he kissed with deep respect, then she signaled to me, and immediately the carriage flew along the leafy wall which follows the river like a long green screen.* * * * *The bell at the garden-gate rings. It is a familiar face. The man from the Cascine.“Whom shall I announce?” I ask him in French. He timidly shakes his head.“Do you, perhaps, understand some German?” he asks shyly.“Yes. Your name, please.”“Oh! I haven’t any yet,” he replies, embarrassed—“Tell your mistress the German painter from the Cascine is here and would like—but there she is herself.”Wanda had stepped out on the balcony, and nodded toward the stranger.“Gregor, show the gentleman in!” she called to me.I showed the painter the stairs.“Thanks, I’ll find her now, thanks, thanks very much.” He ran up the steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the poor German.Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad.* * * * *It is a sunny winter’s day. Something that looks like gold trembles on the leaves of the clusters of trees down below in the green level of the meadow. The camelias at the foot of the gallery are glorious in their abundant buds. Wanda is sitting in the loggia; she is drawing. The German painter stands opposite her with his hands folded as in adoration, and looks at her. No, he rather looks at her face, and is entirely absorbed in it, enraptured.But she does not see him, neither does she see me, who with the spade in my hand am turning over the flower-bed, solely that I may see her and feel her nearness, which produces an effect on me like poetry, like music.* * * * *The painter has gone. It is a hazardous thing to do, but I risk it. I go up to the gallery, quite close, and ask Wanda “Do you love the painter, mistress?”She looks at me without getting angry, shakes her head, and finally even smiles.“I feel sorry for him,” she replies, “but I do not love him. I love no one.I used to love you, as ardently, as passionately, as deeply as it was possible for me to love,but now I don’t love even you any more; my heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.”“Wanda!” I exclaimed, deeply moved.“Soon, you too will no longer love me,” she continued, “tell me when you have reached that point, and I will give back to you your freedom.”“Then I shall remain your slave, all my life long, for I adore you and shall always adore you,” I cried, seized by that fanaticism of love which has repeatedly been so fatal to me.Wanda looked at me with a curious pleasure. “Consider well what you do,” she said. “I have loved you infinitely and have been despotic towards you so that I might fulfil your dream. Something of my old feeling, a sort of real sympathy for you, still trembles in my breast. When that too has gone who knows whether then I shall give you your liberty; whether I shall not then become really cruel, merciless, even brutal toward; whether I shall not take a diabolical pleasure in tormenting and putting on the rack the man who worships me idolatrously, the while I remain indifferent or love someone else; perhaps, I shall enjoy seeing him die of his love for me. Consider this well.”“I have long since considered all that,” I replied as in a glow of fever. “I cannot exist, cannot live without you; I shall die if you set me at liberty; let me remain your slave, kill me, but do not drive me away.”“Very well then, be my slave,” she replied, “but don’t forget that I no longer love you, and your love doesn’t mean any more to me than a dog’s, and dogs are kicked.”* * * * *To-day I visited the Venus of Medici.It was still early, and the little octagonal room in the Tribuna was filled with half-lights like a sanctuary; I stood with folded hands in deep adoration before the silent image of the divinity.But I did not stand for long.Not a human soul was in the gallery, not even an Englishman, and I fell down on my knees. I looked up at the lovely slender body, the budding breasts, the virginal and yet voluptuous face, the fragrant curls which seemed to conceal tiny horns on each side of the forehead.* * * * *My mistress’s bell.It is noonday. She, however, is still abed with her arms intertwined behind her neck.“I want to bathe,” she says, “and you will attend me. Lock the door!”I obey.“Now go downstairs and make sure the door below is also locked.”I descended the winding stairs that lead from her bedroom to the bath; my feet gave way beneath me, and I had to support myself against the iron banister. After having ascertained that the door leading to the Loggia and the garden was locked, I returned. Wanda was now sitting on the bed with loosened hair, wrapped in her green velvet furs. When she made a rapid movement, I noticed that the furs were her only covering. It made me start terribly, I don’t know why? I was like one condemned to death, who knows he is on the way to the scaffold, and yet begins to tremble when he sees it.“Come, Gregor, take me on your arms.”“You mean, mistress?”“You are to carry me, don’t you understand?”I lifted her up, so that she rested in my arms, while she twined hers around my neck. Slowly, step by step, I went down the stairs with her and her hair beat from time to time against my cheek and her foot sought support against my knee. I trembled under the beautiful burden I was carrying, and every moment it seemed as if I had to break down beneath it.The bath consisted of a wide, high rotunda, which received a soft quiet light from a red glass cupola above. Two palms extended their broad leaves like a roof over a couch of velvet cushions. From here steps covered with Turkish rugs led to the white marble basin which occupied the center.“There is a green ribbon on my toilet-table upstairs,” said Wanda, as I let her down on the couch, “go get it, and also bring the whip.”I flew upstairs and back again, and kneeling put both in my mistress’s hands. She then had me twist her heavy electric hair into a large knot which I fastened with the green ribbon. Then I prepared the bath. I did this very awkwardly because my hands and feet refused to obey me. Again and again I had to look at the beautiful woman lying on the red velvet cushions, and from time to time her wonderful body gleamed here and there beneath the furs. Some magnetic power stronger than my will compelled me to look. I felt that all sensuality and lustfulness lies in that which is half-concealed or intentionally disclosed; and the truth of this I recognized even more acutely, when the basin at last was full, and Wanda threw off the fur-cloak with a single gesture, and stood before me like the goddess in the Tribuna.At that moment she seemed as sacred and chaste to me in her unveiled beauty, as did the divinity of long ago. I sank down on my knees before her, and devoutly pressed my lips on her foot.My soul which had been storm-tossed only a little while earlier, suddenly was perfectly calm, and I now felt no element of cruelty in Wanda.She slowly descended the stairs, and I could watch her with a calmness in which not a single atom of torment or desire was intermingled. I could see her plunge into and rise out of the crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played about her like tender lovers.Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body. The calm bliss remained with me, even now when one foot upon me as upon a footstool, she rested on the cushions in her large velvet cloak. The lithe sables nestled desirously against her cold marble-like body. Her left arm on which she supported herself lay like a sleeping swan in the dark fur of the sleeve, while her left hand played carelessly with the whip.By chance my look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would have to dissolve like mist.“What is the matter?” asked Wanda.I pointed to the mirror.“Ah, that is really beautiful,” she exclaimed, “too bad one can’t capture the moment and make it permanent.”“And why not?” I asked. “Would not any artist, even the most famous, be proud if you gave him leave to paint you and make you immortal by means of his brush.“The very thought that this extra-ordinary beauty is to be lost to the world,” I continued still watching her enthusiastically, “is horrible—all this glorious facial expression, this mysterious eye with its green fires, this demonic hair, this magnificence of body. The idea fills me with a horror of death, of annihilation. But the hand of an artist shall snatch you from this. You shall not like the rest of us disappear absolutely and forever, without leaving a trace of your having been. Your picture must live, even when you yourself have long fallen to dust; your beauty must triumph beyond death!”Wanda smiled.“Too bad, that present-day Italy hasn’t a Titian or Raphael,” she said, “but, perhaps, love will make amends for genius, who knows; our little German might do?” She pondered.“Yes, he shall paint you, and I will see to it that the god of love mixes his colors.”* * * * *The young painter has established his studio in her villa; he is completely in her net. He has just begun a Madonna, a Madonna with red hair and green eyes! Only the idealism of a German would attempt to use this thorough-bred woman as a model for a picture of virginity. The poor fellow really is an almost bigger donkey than I am. Our misfortune is that our Titania has discovered our ass’s ears too soon.* * * * *Now she laughs derisively at us, and how she laughs! I hear her insolent melodious laughter in his studio, under the open window of which I stand, jealously listening.* * * * *“Are you mad, me—ah, it is unbelievable, me as the Mother of God!” she exclaimed and laughed again. “Wait a moment, I will show you another picture of myself, one that I myself have painted, and you shall copy it.”Her head appeared in the window, luminous like a flame under the sunlight.“Gregor!”I hurried up the stairs, through the gallery, into the studio.“Lead him to the bath,” Wanda commanded, while she herself hurried away.A few moments passed and Wanda arrived; dressed in nothing but the sable fur, with the whip in her hand; she descended the stairs and stretched out on the velvet cushions as on the former occasion. I lay at her feet and she placed one of her feet upon me; her right hand played with the whip. “Look at me,” she said, “with your deep, fanatical look, that’s it.”The painter had turned terribly pale. He devoured the scene with his beautiful dreamy blue eyes; his lips opened, but he remained dumb.“Well, how do you like the picture?”“Yes, that is how I want to paint you,” said the German, but it was really not a spoken language; it was the eloquent moaning, the weeping of a sick soul, a soul sick unto death.* * * * *The charcoal outline of the painting is done; the heads and flesh parts are painted in. Her diabolical face is already becoming visible under a few bold strokes, life flashes in her green eyes.Wanda stands in front of the canvas with her arms crossed over her breast.“This picture, like many of those of the Venetian school, is simultaneously to represent a portrait and to tell a story,” explained the painter, who again had become pale as death.“And what will you call it?” she asked, “but what is the matter with you, are you ill?”“I am afraid—” he answered with a consuming look fixed on the beautiful woman in furs, “but let us talk of the picture.”“Yes, let us talk about the picture.”“I imagine the goddess of love as having descended from Mount Olympus for the sake of some mortal man. And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her. And so I shall call the picture:Venus in Furs.”* * * * *The painter paints slowly, but his passion grows more and more rapidly. I am afraid he will end up by committing suicide. She plays with him and propounds riddles to him which he cannot solve, and he feels his blood congealing in the process, but it amuses her.During the sitting she nibbles at candies, and rolls the paper-wrappers into little pellets with which she bombards him.“I am glad you are in such good humor,” said the painter, “but your face has lost the expression which I need for my picture.”“The expression which you need for your picture,” she replied, smiling. “Wait a moment.”She rose, and dealt me a blow with the whip. The painter looked at her with stupefaction, and a child-like surprise showed on his face, mingled with disgust and admiration.While whipping me, Wanda’s face acquired more and more of the cruel, contemptuous character, which so haunts and intoxicates me.“Is this the expression you need for your picture?” she exclaimed. The painter lowered his look in confusion before the cold ray of her eye.“It is the expression—” he stammered, “but I can’t paint now—”“What?” said Wanda, scornfully, “perhaps I can help you?”“Yes—” cried the German, as if taken with madness, “whip me too.”“Oh! With pleasure,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders, “but if I am to whip you I want to do it in sober earnest.”“Whip me to death,” cried the painter.“Will you let me tie you?” she asked, smiling.“Yes—” he moaned—Wanda left the room for a moment, and returned with ropes.“Well—are you still brave enough to put yourself into the power of Venus in Furs, the beautiful despot, for better or worse?” she began ironically.“Yes, tie me,” the painter replied dully. Wanda tied his hands on his back and drew a rope through his arms and a second one around his body, and fettered him to the cross-bars of the window. Then she rolled back the fur, seized the whip, and stepped in front of him.The scene had a grim attraction for me, which I cannot describe. I felt my heart beat, when, with a smile, she drew back her arm for the first blow, and the whip hissed through the air. He winced slightly under the blow. Then she let blow after blow rain upon him, with her mouth half-opened and her teeth flashing between her red lips, until he finally seemed to ask for mercy with his piteous, blue eyes. It was indescribable.* * * * *She is sitting for him now, alone. He is working on her head.She has posted me in the adjoining room behind a heavy curtain, where I can’t be seen, but can see everything.What does she intend now?Is she afraid of him? She has driven him insane enough to be sure, or is she hatching a new torment for me? My knees tremble.They are talking. He has lowered his voice so that I cannot understand a word, and she replies in the same way. What is the meaning of this? Is there an understanding between them?I suffer frightful torments; my heart seems about to burst.He kneels down before her, embraces her, and presses his head against her breast, and she—in her heartlessness—laughs—and now I hear her saying aloud:“Ah! You need another application of the whip.”“Woman! Goddess! Are you without a heart—can’t you love,” exclaimed the German, “don’t you even know, what it means to love, to be consumed with desire and passion, can’t you even imagine what I suffer? Have you no pity for me?”“No!” she replied proudly and mockingly, “but I have the whip.”She drew it quickly from the pocket of her fur-coat, and struck him in the face with the handle. He rose, and drew back a couple of paces.“Now, are you ready to paint again?” she asked indifferently. He did not reply, but again went to the easel and took up his brush and palette.The painting is marvellously successful. It is a portrait which as far as the likeness goes couldn’t be better, and at the same time it seems to have an ideal quality. The colors glow, are supernatural; almost diabolical, I would call them.The painter has put all his sufferings, his adoration, and all his execration into the picture.* * * * *Now he is painting me; we are alone together for several hours every day. To-day he suddenly turned to me with his vibrant voice and said:“You love this woman?”“Yes.”“I also love her.” His eyes were bathed in tears. He remained silent for a while, and continued painting.“We have a mountain at home in Germany within which she dwells,” he murmured to himself. “She is a demon.”* * * * *The picture is finished. She insisted on paying him for it, munificently, in the manner of queens.“Oh, you have already paid me,” he said, with a tormented smile, refusing her offer.Before he left, he secretly opened his portfolio, and let me look inside. I was startled. Her head looked at me as if out of a mirror and seemed actually to be alive.“I shall take it along,” he said, “it is mine; she can’t take it away from me. I have earned it with my heart’s blood.”* * * * *“I am really rather sorry for the poor painter,” she said to me to-day, “it is absurd to be as virtuous as I am. Don’t you think so too?”I did not dare to reply to her.“Oh, I forgot that I am talking with a slave; I need some fresh air, I want to be diverted, I want to forget.“The carriage, quick!”Her new dress is extravagant: Russian half-boots of violet-blue velvet trimmed with ermine, and a skirt of the same material, decorated with narrow stripes and rosettes of furs. Above it is an appropriate, close-fitting jacket, also richly trimmed and lined with ermine. The headdress is a tall cap of ermine of the style of Catherine the Second, with a small aigrette, held in place by a diamond-agraffe; her red hair falls loose down her back. She ascends on the driver’s seat, and holds the reins herself; I take my seat behind. How she lashes on the horses! The carriage flies along like mad.Apparently it is her intention to attract attention to-day, to make conquests, and she succeeds completely. She is the lioness of the Cascine. People nod to her from carriages; on the footpath people gather in groups to discuss her. She pays no attention to anyone, except now and then acknowledging the greetings of elderly gentlemen with a slight nod.Suddenly a young man on a lithe black horse dashes up at full speed. As soon as he sees Wanda, he stops his horse and makes it walk. When he is quite close, he stops entirely and lets her pass. And she too sees him—the lioness, the lion. Their eyes meet. She madly drives past him, but she cannot tear herself free from the magic power of his look, and she turns her head after him.My heart stops when I see the half-surprised, half-enraptured look with which she devours him, but he is worthy of it.For he is, indeed, a magnificent specimen of man, No, rather, he is a man whose like I have never yet seen among the living. He is in the Belvedere, graven in marble, with the same slender, yet steely musculature, with the same face and the same waving curls. What makes him particularly beautiful is that he is beardless. If his hips were less narrow, one might take him for a woman in disguise. The curious expression about the mouth, the lion’s lip which slightly discloses the teeth beneath, lends a flashing tinge of cruelty to the beautiful face—Apollo flaying Marsyas.He wears high black boots, closely fitting breeches of white leather, short fur coat of black cloth, of the kind worn by Italian cavalry officers, trimmed with astrakhan and many rich loops; on his black locks is a red fez.I now understand the masculine Eros, and I marvel at Socrates for having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this.* * * * *I have never seen my lioness so excited. Her cheeks flamed when she left from the carriage at her villa. She hurried upstairs, and with an imperious gesture ordered me to follow.Walking up and down her room with long strides, she began to talk so rapidly, that I was frightened.“You are to find out who the man in the Cascine was, immediately—“Oh, what a man! Did you see him? What do you think of him? Tell me.”“The man is beautiful,” I replied dully.“He is so beautiful,” she paused, supporting herself on the arm of a chair, “that he has taken my breath away.”“I can understand the impression he has made on you,” I replied, my imagination carrying me away in a mad whirl. “I am quite lost in admiration myself, and I can imagine—”“You may imagine,” she laughed aloud, “that this man is my lover, and that he will apply the lash to you, and that you will enjoy being punished by him.“But now go, go.”* * * * *Before evening fell, I had the desired information.Wanda was still fully dressed when I returned. She reclined on the ottoman, her face buried in her hands, her hair in a wild tangle, like the red mane of a lioness.“What is his name?” she asked, uncanny calm.“Alexis Papadopolis.”“A Greek, then,”I nodded.“He is very young?”“Scarcely older than you. They say he was educated in Paris, and that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred and cruelty, than by his bravery.”“All in all, then, a man,” she cried with sparkling eyes.“At present he is living in Florence,” I continued, “he is said to be tremendously rich—”“I didn’t ask you about that,” she interrupted quickly and sharply. “The man is dangerous. Aren’t you afraid of him? I am afraid of him. Has he a wife?”“No.”“A mistress?”“No.”“What theaters does he attend?”“To-night he will be at the Nicolini Theater, where Virginia Marini and Salvini are acting; they are the greatest living artists in Italy, perhaps in Europe.“See that you get a box—and be quick about it!” she commanded.“But, mistress—”“Do you want a taste of the whip?”* * * * *“You can wait down in the lobby,” she said when I had placed the opera-glasses and the programme on the edge of her box and adjusted the footstool.I am standing there and had to lean against the wall for support so as not to fall down with envy and rage—no, rage isn’t the right word; it was a mortal fear.
“Oh, you beautiful woman,” I then exclaimed, looking at her. In my enthusiasm I tore the sable from her shoulders and pressed my mouth against her neck.
“You love me even when I am cruel,” said Wanda, “now go!—you bore me—don’t you hear?”
She boxed my ears so that I saw stars and bells rang in my ears.
“Help me into my furs, slave.”
I helped her, as well as I could.
“How awkward,” she exclaimed, and was scarcely in it before she struck me in the face again. I felt myself growing pale.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked, softly touching me with her hand.
“No, no,” I exclaimed.
“At any rate you have no reason to complain, you want it thus; now kiss me again.”
I threw my arms about her, and her lips clung closely to mine. As she lay against my breast in her large heavy furs, I had a curiously oppressive sensation. It was as if a wild beast, a she-bear, were embracing me. It seemed as if I were about to feel her claws in my flesh. But this time the she-bear let me off easily.
With my heart filled with smiling hopes, I went up to my miserable servant’s room, and threw myself down on my hard couch.
“Life is really amazingly droll,” I thought. “A short time ago the most beautiful woman, Venus herself, rested against your breast, and now you have an opportunity for studying the Chinese hell. Unlike us, they don’t hurl the damned into flames, but they have devils chasing them out into fields of ice.
“Very likely the founders of their religion also slept in unheated rooms.”
* * * * *
During the night I startled out of my sleep with a scream. I had been dreaming of an icefield in which I had lost my way; I had been looking in vain for a way out. Suddenly an eskimo drove up in a sleigh harnessed with reindeer; he had the face of the waiter who had shown me to the unheated room.
“What are you looking for here, my dear sir?” he exclaimed. “This is the North Pole.”
A moment later he had disappeared, and Wanda flew over the smooth ice on tiny skates. Her white satin skirt fluttered and crackled; the ermine of her jacket and cap, but especially her face, gleamed whiter than the snow. She shot toward me, inclosed me in her arms, and began to kiss me. Suddenly I felt my blood running warm down my side.
“What are you doing?” I asked horror-stricken.
She laughed, and as I looked at her now, it was no longer Wanda, but a huge, white she-bear, who was digging her paws into my body.
I cried out in despair, and still heard her diabolical laughter when I awoke, and looked about the room in surprise.
Early in the morning I stood at Wanda’s door, and the waiter brought the coffee. I took it from him, and served it to my beautiful mistress. She had already dressed, and looked magnificent, all fresh and roseate. She smiled graciously at me and called me back, when I was about to withdraw respectfully.
“Come, Gregor, have your breakfast quickly too,” she said, “then we will go house-hunting. I don’t want to stay in the hotel any longer than I have to. It is very embarassing here. If I chat with you for more than a minute, people will immediately say: ‘The fair Russian is having an affair with her servant, you see, the race of Catherines isn’t extinct yet.’”
Half an hour later we went out; Wanda was in her cloth-gown with the Russian cap, and I in my Cracovian costume. We created quite a stir. I walked about ten paces behind, looking very solemn, but expected momentarily to have to break out into loud laughter. There was scarcely a street in which one or the other of the attractive houses did not bear the signcamere ammobiliate. Wanda always sent me upstairs, and only when the apartment seemed to answer her requirements did she herself ascend. By noon I was as tired as a stag-hound after the hunt.
We entered a new house and left it again without having found a suitable habitation. Wanda was already somewhat out of humor. Suddenly she said to me: “Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions, which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.”
“But, my lady—” I interposed.
“Gregor?” She entered the next open corridor and ascended a few steps of the dark stair-way; then she threw her arms about me with passionate tenderness and kissed me.
“Oh, Severin, you were very wise. You are much more dangerous as slave than I would have imagined; you are positively irrestible, and I am afraid I shall have to fall in love with you again.”
“Don’t you love me any longer then,” I asked seized by a sudden fright.
She solemnly shook her head, but kissed me again with her swelling, adorable lips.
We returned to the hotel. Wanda had luncheon, and ordered me also quickly to get something to eat.
Of course, I wasn’t served as quickly as she, and so it happened that just as I was carrying the second bite of my steak to my mouth, the waiter entered and called out with his theatrical gesture: “Madame wants you, at once.”
I took a rapid and painful leave of my food, and, tired and hungry, hurried toward Wanda, who was already on the street.
“I wouldn’t have imagined you could be so cruel,” I said reproachfully. “With all these, fatiguing duties you don’t even leave me time to eat in peace.”
Wanda laughed gaily. “I thought you had finished,” she said, “but never mind. Man was born to suffer, and you in particular. The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.”
I followed her resentfully, gnawing at my hunger.
“I have given up the idea of finding a place in the city,” Wanda continued. “It will be difficult to find an entire floor which is shut off and where you can do as you please. In such a strange, mad relationship as ours there must be no jarring note. I shall rent an entire villa—and you will be surprised. You have my permission now to satisfy your hunger, and look about a bit in Florence. I won’t be home till evening. If I need you then, I will have you called.”
I looked at the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Logia di Lanzi, and then I stood for a long time on the banks of the Arno. Again and again I let my eyes rest on the magnificent ancient Florence, whose round cupolas and towers were drawn in soft lines against the blue, cloudless sky. I watched its splendid bridges beneath whose wide arches the lively waves of the beautiful, yellow river ran, and the green hills which surrounded the city, bearing slender cypresses and extensive buildings, palaces and monasteries.
It is a different world, this one in which we are—a gay, sensuous, smiling world. The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours. It is a long ways off to the last white villas scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn’t a spot that isn’t bright with sunlight. The people are less serious than we; perhaps, they think less, but they all look as though they were happy.
It is also maintained that death is easier in the South.
I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn and love of the senses without torment does exist.
Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the Arno, opposite the Cascine. It is surrounded by an attractive garden with lovely paths, grass plots, and magnificent meadow of camelias. It is only two stories high, quadrangular in the Italian fashion. An open gallery runs along one side, a sort of loggia with plaster-casts of antique statues; stone steps lead from it down into the garden. From the gallery you enter a bath with a magnificent marble basin, from which winding stairs lead to my mistress’ bed-chamber.
Wanda occupies the second story by herself.
A room on the ground floor has been assigned to me; it is very attractive, and even has a fireplace.
I have roamed through the garden. On a round hillock I discovered a little temple, but I found its door locked. However, there is a chink in the door and when I glue my eye to it, I see the goddess of love on a white pedestal.
A slight shudder passes over me. It seems to me as if she were smiling at me saying: “Are you there? I have been expecting you.”
* * * * *
It is evening. An attractive maid brings me orders to appear before my mistress. I ascend the wide marble stairs, pass through the anteroom, a large salon furnished with extravagant magnificence, and knock at the door of the bedroom. I knock very softly for the luxury displayed everywhere intimidates me. Consequently no one hears me, and I stand for some time in front of the door. I have a feeling as if I were standing before the bed-room of the great Catherine, and it seems as if at any moment she might come out in her green sleeping furs, with the red ribbon and decoration on her bare breast, and with her little white powdered curls.
I knocked again. Wanda impatiently pulls the door open.
“Why so late?” she asks.
“I was standing in front of the door, but you didn’t hear me knock,” I reply timidly. She closes the door, and clinging to me, she leads me to the red damask ottoman on which she had been resting. The entire arrangement of the room is in red damask—wall-paper, curtains, portieres, hangings of the bed. A magnificent painting of Samson and Delilah forms the ceiling.
Wanda receives me in an intoxicating dishabille. Her white satin dress flows gracefully and picturesquely down her slender body, leaving her arms and breast bare, and carelessly they nestle amid the dark hair of the great fur of sable, lined with green velvet. Her red hair falls down her back as far as the hips, only half held by strings of black pearls.
“Venus in Furs,” I whisper, while she draws me to her breast and threatens to stifle me with her kisses. Then I no longer speak and neither do I think; everything is drowned out in an ocean of unimagined bliss.
“Do you still love me?” she asks, her eye softening in passionate tenderness.
“You ask!” I exclaimed.
“You still remember your oath,” she continued with an alluring smile, “now that everything is prepared, everything in readiness, I ask you once more, is it still your serious wish to become my slave?”
“Am I not ready?” I asked in surprise.
“You have not yet signed the papers.”
“Papers—what papers?”
“Oh, I see, you want to give it up,” she said, “well then, we will let it go.”
“But Wanda,” I said, “you know that nothing gives me greater happiness than to serve you, to be your slave. I would give everything for the sake of feeling myself wholly in your power, even unto death—”
“How beautiful you are,” she whispered, “when you speak so enthusiastically, so passionately. I am more in love with you than ever and you want me to be dominant, stern, and cruel. I am afraid, it will be impossible for me to be so.”
“I am not afraid,” I replied smiling, “where are the papers?’”
“So that you may know what it means to be absolutely in my power, I have drafted a second agreement in which you declare that you have decided to kill yourself. In that way I can even kill you, if I so desire.”
“Give them to me.”
While I was unfolding the documents and reading them, Wanda got pen and ink. She then sat down beside me with her arm about my neck, and looked over my shoulder at the paper.
The first one read:
“Severin von Kusiemski ceases with the present day being the affianced of Mme. Wanda von Dunajew, and renounces all the rights appertaining thereunto; he on the contrary binds himself on his word of honor as a man and nobleman, that hereafter he will be herslaveuntil such time that she herself sets him at liberty again.
“As the slave of Mme. von Dunajew he is to bear the name Gregor, and he is unconditionally to comply with every one of her wishes, and to obey every one of her commands; he is always to be submissive to his mistress, and is to consider her every sign of favor as an extraordinary mercy.
“Mme. von Dunajew is entitled not only to punish her slave as she deems best, even for the slightest inadvertence or fault, but also is herewith given the right to torture him as the mood may seize her or merely for the sake of whiling away the time. Should she so desire, she may kill him whenever she wishes; in short, he is her unrestricted property.
“Should Mme. von Dunajew ever set her slave at liberty, Severin von Kusiemski agrees to forget everything that he has experienced or suffered as her slave, and promisesnever under any circumstances and in no wise to think of vengeance or retaliation.
“Mme. von Dunajew on her behalf agrees as his mistress to appear as often as possible in her furs, especially when she purposes some cruelty toward her slave.”
Appended at the bottom of the agreement was the date of the present day.
The second document contained only a few words.
“Having since many years become weary of existence and its illusions, I have of my own free will put an end to my worthless life.”
I was seized with a deep horror when I had finished. There was still time, I could still withdraw, but the madness of passion and the sight of the beautiful woman that lay all relaxed against my shoulder carried me away.
“This one you will have to copy, Severin,” said Wanda, indicating the second document. “It has to be entirely in your own handwriting; this, of course, isn’t necessary in the case of the agreement.”
I quickly copied the few lines in which I designated myself a suicide, and handed them to Wanda. She read them, and put them on the table with a smile.
“Now have you the courage to sign it?” she asked with a crafty smile, inclining her head.
I took the pen.
“Let me sign first,” said Wanda, “your hand is trembling, are you afraid of the happiness that is to be yours?”
She took the agreement and pen. While engaging in my internal struggle, I looked upward for a moment. It occurred to me that the painting on the ceiling, like many of those of the Italian and Dutch schools, was utterly unhistorical, but this very fact gave it a strange mood which had an almost uncanny effect on me. Delilah, an opulent woman with flaming red hair, lay extended, half-disrobed, in a dark fur-cloak, upon a red ottoman, and bent smiling over Samson who had been overthrown and bound by the Philistines. Her smile in its mocking coquetry was full of a diabolical cruelty; her eyes, half-closed, met Samson’s, and his with a last look of insane passion cling to hers, for already one of his enemies is kneeling on his breast with the red-hot iron to blind him.
“Now—” said Wanda. “Why you are all lost in thought. What is the matter with you, everything will remain just as it was, even after you have signed, don’t you know me yet, dear heart?”
I looked at the agreement. Her name was written there in bold letters. I peered once more into her eyes with their potent magic, then I took the pen and quickly signed the agreement.
“You are trembling,” said Wanda calmly, “shall I help you?”
She gently took hold of my hand, and my name appeared at the bottom of the second paper. Wanda looked once more at the two documents, and then locked them in the desk which stood at the head of the ottoman.
“Now then, give me your passport and money.”
I took out my wallet and handed it to her. She inspected it, nodded, and put it with other things while in a sweet drunkenness I kneeled before her leaning my head against her breast.
Suddenly she thrusts me away with her foot, leaps up, and pulls the bell-rope. In answer to its sound three young, slender negresses enter; they are as if carved of ebony, and are dressed from head to foot in red satin; each one has a rope in her hand.
Suddenly I realize my position, and am about to rise. Wanda stands proudly erect, her cold beautiful face with its sombre brows and contemptous eyes is turned toward me. She stands before me as mistress, commanding, gives a sign with her hand, and before I really know what has happened to me the negresses have dragged me to the ground, and have tied me hand and foot. As in the case of one about to be executed my arms are bound behind my back, so that I can scarcely move.
“Give me the whip, Haydée,” commands Wanda, with unearthly calm.
The negress hands it to her mistress, kneeling.
“And now take off my heavy furs,” she continues, “they impede me.”
The negress obeyed.
“The jacket there!” Wanda commanded.
Haydée quickly brought her thekazabaika, set with ermine, which lay on the bed, and Wanda slipped into it with two inimitably graceful movements.
“Now tie him to the pillar here!”
The negresses lifted me up, and twisting a heavy rope around my body, tied me standing against one of the massive pillars which supported the top of the wide Italian bed.
Then they suddenly disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed them.
Wanda swiftly approached me. Her white satin dress flowed behind her in a long train, like silver, like moonlight; her hair flared like flames against the white fur of her jacket. Now she stood in front of me with her left hand firmly planted on her hips, in her right hand she held the whip. She uttered an abrupt laugh.
“Now play has come to an end between us,” she said with heartless coldness. “Now we will begin in dead earnest. You fool, I laugh at you and despise you; you who in your insane infatuation have given yourself as a plaything tome, the frivolous and capricious woman. You are no longer the man I love, butmy slave, at my mercy even unto life and death.
“You shall know me!
“First of all you shall have a taste of the whip in all seriousness, without having done anything to deserve it, so that you may understand what to expect, if you are awkward, disobedient, or refractory.”
With a wild grace she rolled back her fur-lined sleeve, and struck me across the back.
I winced, for the whip cut like a knife into my flesh.
“Well, how do you like that?” she exclaimed.
I was silent.
“Just wait, you will yet whine like a dog beneath my whip,” she threatened, and simultaneously began to strike me again.
The blows fell quickly, in rapid succession, with terrific force upon my back, arms, and neck; I had to grit my teeth not to scream aloud. Now she struck me in the face, warm blood ran down, but she laughed, and continued her blows.
“It is only now I understand you,” she exclaimed. “It really is a joy to have some one so completely in one’s power, and a man at that, who loves you—you do love me?—No—Oh! I’ll tear you to shreds yet, and with each blow my pleasure will grow. Now, twist like a worm, scream, whine! You will find no mercy in me!”
Finally she seemed tired.
She tossed the whip aside, stretched out on the ottoman, and rang.
The negresses entered.
“Untie him!”
As they loosened the rope, I fell to the floor like a lump of wood. The black women grinned, showing their white teeth.
“Untie the rope around his feet.”
They did it, but I was unable to rise.
“Come over here, Gregor.”
I approached the beautiful woman. Never did she seem more seductive to me than to-day in spite of all her cruelty and contempt.
“One step further,” Wanda commanded. “Now kneel down, and kiss my foot.”
She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it.
“Now, you won’t lay eyes on me for an entire month, Gregor,” she said seriously. “I want to become a stranger to you, so you will more easily adjust yourself to our new relationship. In the meantime you will work in the garden, and await my orders. Now, off with you, slave!”
* * * * *
A month has passed with monotonous regularity, heavy work, and a melancholy hunger, hunger for her, who is inflicting all these torments on me.
I am under the gardener’s orders; I help him lop the trees and prune the hedges, transplant flowers, turn over the flower beds, sweep the gravel paths; I share his coarse food and his hard cot; I rise and go to bed with the chickens. Now and then I hear that our mistress is amusing herself, surrounded by admirers. Once I heard her gay laughter even down here in the garden.
I seem awfully stupid to myself. Was it the result of my present life, or was I so before? The month is drawing to a close—the day after to-morrow. What will she do with me now, or has she forgotten me, and left me to trim hedges and bind bouquets till my dying day?
A written order.
“The slave Gregor is herewith ordered to my personal service.
Wanda Dunajew.”
With a beating heart I draw aside the damask curtain on the following morning, and enter the bed-room of my divinity. It is still filled with a pleasant half darkness.
“Is it you, Gregor?” she asks, while I kneel before the fire-place, building a fire. I tremble at the sound of the beloved voice. I cannot see her herself; she is invisible behind the curtains of the four-poster bed.
“Yes, my mistress,” I reply.
“How late is it?”
“Past nine o’clock.”
“Breakfast.”
I hasten to get it, and then kneel down with the tray beside her bed.
“Here is breakfast, my mistress.”
Wanda draws back the curtains, and curiously enough at the first glance when I see her among the pillows with loosened flowing hair, she seems an absolute stranger, a beautiful woman, but the beloved soft lines are gone. This face is hard and has an expression of weariness and satiety.
Or is it simply that formerly my eye did not see this?
She fixes her green eyes upon me, more with curiosity than with menace, perhaps even somewhat pityingly, and lazily pulls the dark sleeping fur on which she lies over the bared shoulder.
At this moment she is very charming, very maddening, and I feel my blood rising to my head and heart. The tray in my hands begins to sway. She notices it and reached out for the whip which is lying on the toilet-table.
“You are awkward, slave,” she says furrowing her brow.
I lower my looks to the ground, and hold the tray as steadily as possible. She eats her breakfast, yawns, and stretches her opulent limbs in the magnificent furs.
She has rung. I enter.
“Take this letter to Prince Corsini.”
I hurry into the city, and hand the letter to the Prince. He is a handsome young man with glowing black eyes. Consumed with jealousy, I take his answer to her.
“What is the matter with you?” she asks with lurking spitefulness. “You are very pale.”
“Nothing, mistress, I merely walked rather fast.”
At luncheon the prince is at her side, and I am condemned to serve both her and him. They joke, and I am, as if non-existent, for both. For a brief moment I see black; I was just pouring some Bordeaux into his glass, and spilled it over the table-cloth and her gown.
“How awkward,” Wanda exclaimed and slapped my face. The prince laughed, and she also, but I felt the blood rising to my face.
After luncheon she drove in the Cascine. She has a little carriage with a handsome, brown English horse, and holds the reins herself. I sit behind and notice how coquettishly she acts, and nods with a smile when one of the distinguished gentlemen bows to her.
As I help her out of the carriage, she leans lightly on my arm; the contact runs through me like an electric shock. Sheisa wonderful woman, and I love her more than ever.
* * * * *
For dinner at six she has invited a small group of men and women. I serve, but this time I do not spill any wine over the table-cloth.
A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly, especially when the instruction is by the way of a small woman’s hand.
* * * * *
After dinner she drives to the Pergola Theater. As she descends the stairs in her black velvet dress with its large collar of ermine and with a diadem of white roses on her hair, she is literally stunning. I open the carriage-door, and help her in. In front of the theater I leap from the driver’s seat, and in alighting she leaned on my arm, which trembled under the sweet burden. I open the door of her box, and then wait in the vestibule. The performance lasts four hours; she receives visits from her cavaliers, the while I grit my teeth with rage.
It is way beyond midnight when my mistress’s bell sounds for the last time.
“Fire!” she orders abruptly, and when the fire-place crackles, “Tea!”
When I return with the samovar, she has already undressed, and with the aid of the negress slipped into a white negligee.
Haydée thereupon leaves.
“Hand me the sleeping-furs,” says Wanda, sleepily stretching her lovely limbs. I take them from the arm-chair, and hold them while she slowly and lazily slides into the sleeves. She then throws herself down on the cushions of the ottoman.
“Take off my shoes, and put on my velvet slippers.”
I kneel down and tug at the little shoe which resists my efforts. “Hurry, hurry!” Wanda exclaims, “you are hurting me! just you wait—I will teach you.” She strikes me with the whip, but now the shoe is off.
“Now get out!” Still a kick—and then I can go to bed.
* * * * *
To-night I accompanied her to a soiree. In the entrance-hall she ordered me to help her out of her furs; then with a proud smile, confident of victory, she entered the brilliantly illuminated room. I again waited with gloomy and monotonous thoughts, watching hour after hour run by. From time to time the sounds of music reached me, when the door remained open for a moment. Several servants tried to start a conversation with me, but soon desisted, since I knew only a few words of Italian.
Finally I fell asleep, and dreamed that I murdered Wanda in a violent attack of jealousy. I was condemned to death, and saw myself strapped on the board; the knife fell, I felt it on my neck, but I was still alive—
Then the executioner slapped my face.
No, it wasn’t the executioner; it was Wanda who stood wrathfully before me demanding her furs. I am at her side in a moment, and help her on with it.
There is a deep joy in wrapping a beautiful woman into her furs, and in seeing and feeling how her neck and magnificent limbs nestle in the precious soft furs, and to lift the flowing hair over the collar. When she throws it off a soft warmth and a faint fragrance of her body still clings to the ends of the hairs of sable. It is enough to drive one mad.
* * * * *
Finally a day came when there were neither guests, nor theater, nor other company. I breathed a sigh of relief. Wanda sat in the gallery, reading, and apparently had no orders for me. At dusk when the silvery evening mists fell she withdrew. I served her at dinner, she ate by herself, but had not a look, not a syllable for me, not even a slap in the face.
I actually desire a slap from her hand. Tears fill my eyes, and I feel that she has humiliated me so deeply, that she doesn’t even find it worth while to torture or maltreat me any further.
Before she goes to bed, her bell calls me.
“You will sleep here to-night, I had horrible dreams last night, and am afraid of being alone. Take one of the cushions from the ottoman, and lie down on the bearskin at my feet.”
Then Wanda put out the lights. The only illumination in the room was from a small lamp suspended from the ceiling. She herself got into bed. “Don’t stir, so as not to wake me.”
I did as she had commanded, but could not fall asleep for a long time. I saw the beautiful woman, beautiful as a goddess, lying on her back on the dark sleeping-furs; her arms beneath her neck, with a flood of red hair over them. I heard her magnificent breast rise in deep regular breathing, and whenever she moved ever so slightly. I woke up and listened to see whether she needed me.
But she did not require me.
No task was required of me; I meant no more to her than a night-lamp, or a revolver which one places under one’s pillow.
* * * * *
Am I mad or is she? Does all this arise out of an inventive, wanton woman’s brain with the intention of surpassing my supersensual fantasies, or is this woman really one of those Neronian characters who take a diabolical pleasure in treading underfoot, like a worm, human beings, who have thoughts and feelings and a will like theirs?
What have I experienced?
When I knelt with the coffee-tray beside her bed, Wanda suddenly placed her hand on my shoulder and her eyes plunged deep into mine.
“What beautiful eyes you have,” she said softly, “and especially now since you suffer. Are you very unhappy?”
I bowed my head, and kept silent.
“Severin, do you still love me,” she suddenly exclaimed passionately, “can you still love me?”
She drew me close with such vehemence that the coffee-tray upset, the can and cups fell to the floor, and the coffee ran over the carpet.
“Wanda—my Wanda,” I cried out and held her passionately against me; I covered her mouth, face, and breast with kisses.
“It is my unhappiness that I love you more and more madly the worse you treat me, the more frequently you betray me. Oh, I shall die of pain and love and jealousy.”
“But I haven’t betrayed you, as yet, Severin,” replied Wanda smiling.
“Not? Wanda! Don’t jest so mercilessly with me,” I cried. “Haven’t I myself taken the letter to the Prince—”
“Of course, it was an invitation for luncheon.”
“You have, since we have been in Florence—”
“I have been absolutely faithful to you,” replied Wanda, “I swear it by all that is holy to me. All that I have done was merely to fulfill your dream and it was done for your sake.
“However, I shall take a lover, otherwise things will be only half accomplished, and in the end you will yet reproach me with not having treated you cruelly enough, my dear beautiful slave! But to-day you shall be Severin again, the only one I love. I haven’t given away your clothes. They are here in the chest. Go and dress as you used to in the little Carpathian health-resort when our love was so intimate. Forget everything that has happened since; oh, you will forget it easily in my arms; I shall kiss away all your sorrows.”
She began to treat me tenderly like a child, to kiss me and caress me. Finally she said with a gracious smile, “Go now and dress, I too will dress. Shall I put on my fur-jacket? Oh yes, I know, now run along!”
When I returned she was standing in the center of the room in her white satin dress, and the redkazabaikaedged with ermine; her hair was white with powder and over her forehead she wore a small diamond diadem. For a moment she reminded me in an uncanny way of Catherine the Second, but she did not give me much time for reminiscences. She drew me down on the ottoman beside her and we enjoyed two blissful hours. She was no longer the stern capricious mistress, she was entirely a fine lady, a tender sweetheart. She showed me photographs and books which had just appeared, and talked about them with so much intelligence, clarity, and good taste, that I more than once carried her hand to my lips, enraptured. She then had me recite several of Lermontov’s poems, and when I was all afire with enthusiasm, she placed her small hand gently on mine. Her expression was soft, and her eyes were filled with tender pleasure.
“Are you happy?”
“Not yet.”
She then leaned back on the cushions, and slowly opened herkazabaika.
But I quickly covered the half-bared breast again with the ermine. “You are driving me mad.” I stammered.
“Come!”
I was already lying in her arms, and like a serpent she was kissing me with her tongue, when again she whispered, “Are you happy?”
“Infinitely!” I exclaimed.
She laughed aloud. It was an evil, shrill laugh which made cold shivers run down by back.
“You used to dream of being the slave, the plaything of a beautiful woman, and now you imagine you are a free human being, a man, my lover-you fool! A sign from me, and you are a slave again. Down on your knees!”
I sank down from the ottoman to her feet, but my eye still clung doubtingly on hers.
“You can’t believe it,” she said, looking at me with her arms folded across her breast. “I am bored, and you will just do to while away a couple of hours of time. Don’t look at me that way—”
She kicked me with her foot.
“You are just what I want, a human being, a thing, an animal—”
She rang. The three negresses entered.
“Tie his hands behind his back.”
I remained kneeling and unresistingly let them do this. They led me into the garden, down to the little vineyard, which forms the southern boundary. Corn had been planted between the espaliers, and here and there a few dead stalks still stood. To one side was a plough.
The negresses tied me to a post, and amused themselves sticking me with their golden hair-needles. But this did not last long, before Wanda appeared with her ermine cap on her head, and with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She had me untied, and then my hands were fastened together on my back. She finally had a yoke put around my neck, and harnessed me to the plough.
Then her black demons drove me out into the field. One of them held the plough, the other one led me by a line, the third applied the whip, and Venus in Furs stood to one side and looked on.
* * * * *
When I was serving dinner on the following day Wanda said: “Bring another cover, I want you to dine with me to-day,” and when I was about to sit down opposite her, she added, “No, over here, close by my side.”
She is in the best of humors, gives me soup with her spoon, feeds me with her fork, and places her head on the table like a playful kitten and flirts with me. I have the misfortune of looking at Haydée, who serves in my place, perhaps a little longer than is necessary. It is only now that I noticed her noble, almost European cast of countenance and her magnificent statuesque bust, which is as if hewn out of black marble. The black devil observes that she pleases me, and, grinning, shows her teeth. She has hardly left the room, before Wanda leaps up in a rage.
“What, you dare to look at another woman besides me! Perhaps you like her even better than you do me, she is even more demonic!”
I am frightened; I have never seen her like this before; she is suddenly pale even to the lips and her whole body trembles. Venus in Furs is jealous of her slave. She snatches the whip from its hook and strikes me in the face; then she calls her black servants, who bind me, and carry me down into the cellar, where they throw me into a dark, dank, subterranean compartment, a veritable prison-cell.
Then the lock of the door clicks, the bolts are drawn, a key sings in the lock. I am a prisoner, buried.
I have been lying here for I don’t know how long, bound like a calf about to be hauled to the slaughter, on a bundle of damp straw, without any light, without food, without drink, without sleep. It would be like her to let me starve to death, if I don’t freeze to death before then. I am shaking with cold. Or is it fever? I believe I am beginning to hate this woman.
* * * * *
A red streak, like blood, floods across the floor; it is a light falling through the door which is now thrust open.
Wanda appears on the threshold, wrapped in her sables, holding a lighted torch.
“Are you still alive?” she asks.
“Are you coming to kill me?” I reply with a low, hoarse voice.
With two rapid strides Wanda reaches my side, she kneels down beside me, and places my head in her lap. “Are you ill? Your eyes glow so, do you love me? I want you to love me.”
She draws forth a short dagger. I start with fright when its blade gleams in front of my eyes. I actually believe that she is about to kill me. She laughs, and cuts the ropes that bind me.
* * * * *
Every evening after dinner she now has me called. I have to read to her, and she discusses with me all sorts of interesting problems and subjects. She seems entirely transformed; it is as if she were ashamed of the savagery which she betrayed to me and of the cruelty with which she treated me. A touching gentleness transfigures her entire being, and when at the good-night she gives me her hand, a superhuman power of goodness and love lies in her eyes, of the kind which calls forth tears in us and causes us to forget all the miseries of existence and all the terrors of death.
* * * * *
I am readingManon l’Escaultto her. She feels the association, she doesn’t say a word, but she smiles from time to time, and finally she shuts up the little book.
“Don’t you want to go on reading?”
“Not to-day. We will ourselves actManon l’Escaultto-day. I have a rendezvous in the Cascine, and you, my dear Chevalier, will accompany me; I know, you will do it, won’t you?”
“You command it.”
“I do not command it, I beg it of you,” she says with irresistible charm. She then rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks at me.
“Your eyes!” she exclaims. “I love you, Severin, you have no idea how I love you!”
“Yes, I have!” I replied bitterly, “so much so that you have arranged for a rendezvous with some one else.”
“I do this only to allure you the more,” she replied vivaciously. “I must have admirers, so as not to lose you. I don’t ever want to lose you, never, do you hear, for I love only you, you alone.”
She clung passionately to my lips.
“Oh, if I only could, as I would, give you all of my soul in a kiss—thus—but now come.”
She slipped into a simple black velvet coat, and put a darkbashlyk5on her head. Then she rapidly went through the gallery, and entered the carriage.
[Footnote 5: A kind of Russian cap.]
“Gregor will drive,” she called out to the coachman who withdrew in surprise.
I ascended the driver’s seat, and angrily whipped up the horses.
In the Cascine where the main roadway turns into a leafy path, Wanda got out. It was night, only occasional stars shone through the gray clouds that fled across the sky. By the bank of the Arno stood a man in a dark cloak, with a brigand’s hat, and looked at the yellow waves. Wanda rapidly walked through the shrubbery, and tapped him on the shoulder. I saw him turn and seize her hand, and then they disappeared behind the green wall.
An hour full of torments. Finally there was a rustling in the bushes to one side, and they returned.
The man accompanied her to the carriage. The light of the lamp fell full and glaringly upon an infinitely young, soft and dreamy face which I had never before seen, and played in his long, blond curls.
She held out her hand which he kissed with deep respect, then she signaled to me, and immediately the carriage flew along the leafy wall which follows the river like a long green screen.
* * * * *
The bell at the garden-gate rings. It is a familiar face. The man from the Cascine.
“Whom shall I announce?” I ask him in French. He timidly shakes his head.
“Do you, perhaps, understand some German?” he asks shyly.
“Yes. Your name, please.”
“Oh! I haven’t any yet,” he replies, embarrassed—“Tell your mistress the German painter from the Cascine is here and would like—but there she is herself.”
Wanda had stepped out on the balcony, and nodded toward the stranger.
“Gregor, show the gentleman in!” she called to me.
I showed the painter the stairs.
“Thanks, I’ll find her now, thanks, thanks very much.” He ran up the steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the poor German.
Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad.
* * * * *
It is a sunny winter’s day. Something that looks like gold trembles on the leaves of the clusters of trees down below in the green level of the meadow. The camelias at the foot of the gallery are glorious in their abundant buds. Wanda is sitting in the loggia; she is drawing. The German painter stands opposite her with his hands folded as in adoration, and looks at her. No, he rather looks at her face, and is entirely absorbed in it, enraptured.
But she does not see him, neither does she see me, who with the spade in my hand am turning over the flower-bed, solely that I may see her and feel her nearness, which produces an effect on me like poetry, like music.
* * * * *
The painter has gone. It is a hazardous thing to do, but I risk it. I go up to the gallery, quite close, and ask Wanda “Do you love the painter, mistress?”
She looks at me without getting angry, shakes her head, and finally even smiles.
“I feel sorry for him,” she replies, “but I do not love him. I love no one.I used to love you, as ardently, as passionately, as deeply as it was possible for me to love,but now I don’t love even you any more; my heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.”
“Wanda!” I exclaimed, deeply moved.
“Soon, you too will no longer love me,” she continued, “tell me when you have reached that point, and I will give back to you your freedom.”
“Then I shall remain your slave, all my life long, for I adore you and shall always adore you,” I cried, seized by that fanaticism of love which has repeatedly been so fatal to me.
Wanda looked at me with a curious pleasure. “Consider well what you do,” she said. “I have loved you infinitely and have been despotic towards you so that I might fulfil your dream. Something of my old feeling, a sort of real sympathy for you, still trembles in my breast. When that too has gone who knows whether then I shall give you your liberty; whether I shall not then become really cruel, merciless, even brutal toward; whether I shall not take a diabolical pleasure in tormenting and putting on the rack the man who worships me idolatrously, the while I remain indifferent or love someone else; perhaps, I shall enjoy seeing him die of his love for me. Consider this well.”
“I have long since considered all that,” I replied as in a glow of fever. “I cannot exist, cannot live without you; I shall die if you set me at liberty; let me remain your slave, kill me, but do not drive me away.”
“Very well then, be my slave,” she replied, “but don’t forget that I no longer love you, and your love doesn’t mean any more to me than a dog’s, and dogs are kicked.”
* * * * *
To-day I visited the Venus of Medici.
It was still early, and the little octagonal room in the Tribuna was filled with half-lights like a sanctuary; I stood with folded hands in deep adoration before the silent image of the divinity.
But I did not stand for long.
Not a human soul was in the gallery, not even an Englishman, and I fell down on my knees. I looked up at the lovely slender body, the budding breasts, the virginal and yet voluptuous face, the fragrant curls which seemed to conceal tiny horns on each side of the forehead.
* * * * *
My mistress’s bell.
It is noonday. She, however, is still abed with her arms intertwined behind her neck.
“I want to bathe,” she says, “and you will attend me. Lock the door!”
I obey.
“Now go downstairs and make sure the door below is also locked.”
I descended the winding stairs that lead from her bedroom to the bath; my feet gave way beneath me, and I had to support myself against the iron banister. After having ascertained that the door leading to the Loggia and the garden was locked, I returned. Wanda was now sitting on the bed with loosened hair, wrapped in her green velvet furs. When she made a rapid movement, I noticed that the furs were her only covering. It made me start terribly, I don’t know why? I was like one condemned to death, who knows he is on the way to the scaffold, and yet begins to tremble when he sees it.
“Come, Gregor, take me on your arms.”
“You mean, mistress?”
“You are to carry me, don’t you understand?”
I lifted her up, so that she rested in my arms, while she twined hers around my neck. Slowly, step by step, I went down the stairs with her and her hair beat from time to time against my cheek and her foot sought support against my knee. I trembled under the beautiful burden I was carrying, and every moment it seemed as if I had to break down beneath it.
The bath consisted of a wide, high rotunda, which received a soft quiet light from a red glass cupola above. Two palms extended their broad leaves like a roof over a couch of velvet cushions. From here steps covered with Turkish rugs led to the white marble basin which occupied the center.
“There is a green ribbon on my toilet-table upstairs,” said Wanda, as I let her down on the couch, “go get it, and also bring the whip.”
I flew upstairs and back again, and kneeling put both in my mistress’s hands. She then had me twist her heavy electric hair into a large knot which I fastened with the green ribbon. Then I prepared the bath. I did this very awkwardly because my hands and feet refused to obey me. Again and again I had to look at the beautiful woman lying on the red velvet cushions, and from time to time her wonderful body gleamed here and there beneath the furs. Some magnetic power stronger than my will compelled me to look. I felt that all sensuality and lustfulness lies in that which is half-concealed or intentionally disclosed; and the truth of this I recognized even more acutely, when the basin at last was full, and Wanda threw off the fur-cloak with a single gesture, and stood before me like the goddess in the Tribuna.
At that moment she seemed as sacred and chaste to me in her unveiled beauty, as did the divinity of long ago. I sank down on my knees before her, and devoutly pressed my lips on her foot.
My soul which had been storm-tossed only a little while earlier, suddenly was perfectly calm, and I now felt no element of cruelty in Wanda.
She slowly descended the stairs, and I could watch her with a calmness in which not a single atom of torment or desire was intermingled. I could see her plunge into and rise out of the crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played about her like tender lovers.
Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.
And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body. The calm bliss remained with me, even now when one foot upon me as upon a footstool, she rested on the cushions in her large velvet cloak. The lithe sables nestled desirously against her cold marble-like body. Her left arm on which she supported herself lay like a sleeping swan in the dark fur of the sleeve, while her left hand played carelessly with the whip.
By chance my look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would have to dissolve like mist.
“What is the matter?” asked Wanda.
I pointed to the mirror.
“Ah, that is really beautiful,” she exclaimed, “too bad one can’t capture the moment and make it permanent.”
“And why not?” I asked. “Would not any artist, even the most famous, be proud if you gave him leave to paint you and make you immortal by means of his brush.
“The very thought that this extra-ordinary beauty is to be lost to the world,” I continued still watching her enthusiastically, “is horrible—all this glorious facial expression, this mysterious eye with its green fires, this demonic hair, this magnificence of body. The idea fills me with a horror of death, of annihilation. But the hand of an artist shall snatch you from this. You shall not like the rest of us disappear absolutely and forever, without leaving a trace of your having been. Your picture must live, even when you yourself have long fallen to dust; your beauty must triumph beyond death!”
Wanda smiled.
“Too bad, that present-day Italy hasn’t a Titian or Raphael,” she said, “but, perhaps, love will make amends for genius, who knows; our little German might do?” She pondered.
“Yes, he shall paint you, and I will see to it that the god of love mixes his colors.”
* * * * *
The young painter has established his studio in her villa; he is completely in her net. He has just begun a Madonna, a Madonna with red hair and green eyes! Only the idealism of a German would attempt to use this thorough-bred woman as a model for a picture of virginity. The poor fellow really is an almost bigger donkey than I am. Our misfortune is that our Titania has discovered our ass’s ears too soon.
* * * * *
Now she laughs derisively at us, and how she laughs! I hear her insolent melodious laughter in his studio, under the open window of which I stand, jealously listening.
* * * * *
“Are you mad, me—ah, it is unbelievable, me as the Mother of God!” she exclaimed and laughed again. “Wait a moment, I will show you another picture of myself, one that I myself have painted, and you shall copy it.”
Her head appeared in the window, luminous like a flame under the sunlight.
“Gregor!”
I hurried up the stairs, through the gallery, into the studio.
“Lead him to the bath,” Wanda commanded, while she herself hurried away.
A few moments passed and Wanda arrived; dressed in nothing but the sable fur, with the whip in her hand; she descended the stairs and stretched out on the velvet cushions as on the former occasion. I lay at her feet and she placed one of her feet upon me; her right hand played with the whip. “Look at me,” she said, “with your deep, fanatical look, that’s it.”
The painter had turned terribly pale. He devoured the scene with his beautiful dreamy blue eyes; his lips opened, but he remained dumb.
“Well, how do you like the picture?”
“Yes, that is how I want to paint you,” said the German, but it was really not a spoken language; it was the eloquent moaning, the weeping of a sick soul, a soul sick unto death.
* * * * *
The charcoal outline of the painting is done; the heads and flesh parts are painted in. Her diabolical face is already becoming visible under a few bold strokes, life flashes in her green eyes.
Wanda stands in front of the canvas with her arms crossed over her breast.
“This picture, like many of those of the Venetian school, is simultaneously to represent a portrait and to tell a story,” explained the painter, who again had become pale as death.
“And what will you call it?” she asked, “but what is the matter with you, are you ill?”
“I am afraid—” he answered with a consuming look fixed on the beautiful woman in furs, “but let us talk of the picture.”
“Yes, let us talk about the picture.”
“I imagine the goddess of love as having descended from Mount Olympus for the sake of some mortal man. And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her. And so I shall call the picture:Venus in Furs.”
* * * * *
The painter paints slowly, but his passion grows more and more rapidly. I am afraid he will end up by committing suicide. She plays with him and propounds riddles to him which he cannot solve, and he feels his blood congealing in the process, but it amuses her.
During the sitting she nibbles at candies, and rolls the paper-wrappers into little pellets with which she bombards him.
“I am glad you are in such good humor,” said the painter, “but your face has lost the expression which I need for my picture.”
“The expression which you need for your picture,” she replied, smiling. “Wait a moment.”
She rose, and dealt me a blow with the whip. The painter looked at her with stupefaction, and a child-like surprise showed on his face, mingled with disgust and admiration.
While whipping me, Wanda’s face acquired more and more of the cruel, contemptuous character, which so haunts and intoxicates me.
“Is this the expression you need for your picture?” she exclaimed. The painter lowered his look in confusion before the cold ray of her eye.
“It is the expression—” he stammered, “but I can’t paint now—”
“What?” said Wanda, scornfully, “perhaps I can help you?”
“Yes—” cried the German, as if taken with madness, “whip me too.”
“Oh! With pleasure,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders, “but if I am to whip you I want to do it in sober earnest.”
“Whip me to death,” cried the painter.
“Will you let me tie you?” she asked, smiling.
“Yes—” he moaned—
Wanda left the room for a moment, and returned with ropes.
“Well—are you still brave enough to put yourself into the power of Venus in Furs, the beautiful despot, for better or worse?” she began ironically.
“Yes, tie me,” the painter replied dully. Wanda tied his hands on his back and drew a rope through his arms and a second one around his body, and fettered him to the cross-bars of the window. Then she rolled back the fur, seized the whip, and stepped in front of him.
The scene had a grim attraction for me, which I cannot describe. I felt my heart beat, when, with a smile, she drew back her arm for the first blow, and the whip hissed through the air. He winced slightly under the blow. Then she let blow after blow rain upon him, with her mouth half-opened and her teeth flashing between her red lips, until he finally seemed to ask for mercy with his piteous, blue eyes. It was indescribable.
* * * * *
She is sitting for him now, alone. He is working on her head.
She has posted me in the adjoining room behind a heavy curtain, where I can’t be seen, but can see everything.
What does she intend now?
Is she afraid of him? She has driven him insane enough to be sure, or is she hatching a new torment for me? My knees tremble.
They are talking. He has lowered his voice so that I cannot understand a word, and she replies in the same way. What is the meaning of this? Is there an understanding between them?
I suffer frightful torments; my heart seems about to burst.
He kneels down before her, embraces her, and presses his head against her breast, and she—in her heartlessness—laughs—and now I hear her saying aloud:
“Ah! You need another application of the whip.”
“Woman! Goddess! Are you without a heart—can’t you love,” exclaimed the German, “don’t you even know, what it means to love, to be consumed with desire and passion, can’t you even imagine what I suffer? Have you no pity for me?”
“No!” she replied proudly and mockingly, “but I have the whip.”
She drew it quickly from the pocket of her fur-coat, and struck him in the face with the handle. He rose, and drew back a couple of paces.
“Now, are you ready to paint again?” she asked indifferently. He did not reply, but again went to the easel and took up his brush and palette.
The painting is marvellously successful. It is a portrait which as far as the likeness goes couldn’t be better, and at the same time it seems to have an ideal quality. The colors glow, are supernatural; almost diabolical, I would call them.
The painter has put all his sufferings, his adoration, and all his execration into the picture.
* * * * *
Now he is painting me; we are alone together for several hours every day. To-day he suddenly turned to me with his vibrant voice and said:
“You love this woman?”
“Yes.”
“I also love her.” His eyes were bathed in tears. He remained silent for a while, and continued painting.
“We have a mountain at home in Germany within which she dwells,” he murmured to himself. “She is a demon.”
* * * * *
The picture is finished. She insisted on paying him for it, munificently, in the manner of queens.
“Oh, you have already paid me,” he said, with a tormented smile, refusing her offer.
Before he left, he secretly opened his portfolio, and let me look inside. I was startled. Her head looked at me as if out of a mirror and seemed actually to be alive.
“I shall take it along,” he said, “it is mine; she can’t take it away from me. I have earned it with my heart’s blood.”
* * * * *
“I am really rather sorry for the poor painter,” she said to me to-day, “it is absurd to be as virtuous as I am. Don’t you think so too?”
I did not dare to reply to her.
“Oh, I forgot that I am talking with a slave; I need some fresh air, I want to be diverted, I want to forget.
“The carriage, quick!”
Her new dress is extravagant: Russian half-boots of violet-blue velvet trimmed with ermine, and a skirt of the same material, decorated with narrow stripes and rosettes of furs. Above it is an appropriate, close-fitting jacket, also richly trimmed and lined with ermine. The headdress is a tall cap of ermine of the style of Catherine the Second, with a small aigrette, held in place by a diamond-agraffe; her red hair falls loose down her back. She ascends on the driver’s seat, and holds the reins herself; I take my seat behind. How she lashes on the horses! The carriage flies along like mad.
Apparently it is her intention to attract attention to-day, to make conquests, and she succeeds completely. She is the lioness of the Cascine. People nod to her from carriages; on the footpath people gather in groups to discuss her. She pays no attention to anyone, except now and then acknowledging the greetings of elderly gentlemen with a slight nod.
Suddenly a young man on a lithe black horse dashes up at full speed. As soon as he sees Wanda, he stops his horse and makes it walk. When he is quite close, he stops entirely and lets her pass. And she too sees him—the lioness, the lion. Their eyes meet. She madly drives past him, but she cannot tear herself free from the magic power of his look, and she turns her head after him.
My heart stops when I see the half-surprised, half-enraptured look with which she devours him, but he is worthy of it.
For he is, indeed, a magnificent specimen of man, No, rather, he is a man whose like I have never yet seen among the living. He is in the Belvedere, graven in marble, with the same slender, yet steely musculature, with the same face and the same waving curls. What makes him particularly beautiful is that he is beardless. If his hips were less narrow, one might take him for a woman in disguise. The curious expression about the mouth, the lion’s lip which slightly discloses the teeth beneath, lends a flashing tinge of cruelty to the beautiful face—
Apollo flaying Marsyas.
He wears high black boots, closely fitting breeches of white leather, short fur coat of black cloth, of the kind worn by Italian cavalry officers, trimmed with astrakhan and many rich loops; on his black locks is a red fez.
I now understand the masculine Eros, and I marvel at Socrates for having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this.
* * * * *
I have never seen my lioness so excited. Her cheeks flamed when she left from the carriage at her villa. She hurried upstairs, and with an imperious gesture ordered me to follow.
Walking up and down her room with long strides, she began to talk so rapidly, that I was frightened.
“You are to find out who the man in the Cascine was, immediately—
“Oh, what a man! Did you see him? What do you think of him? Tell me.”
“The man is beautiful,” I replied dully.
“He is so beautiful,” she paused, supporting herself on the arm of a chair, “that he has taken my breath away.”
“I can understand the impression he has made on you,” I replied, my imagination carrying me away in a mad whirl. “I am quite lost in admiration myself, and I can imagine—”
“You may imagine,” she laughed aloud, “that this man is my lover, and that he will apply the lash to you, and that you will enjoy being punished by him.
“But now go, go.”
* * * * *
Before evening fell, I had the desired information.
Wanda was still fully dressed when I returned. She reclined on the ottoman, her face buried in her hands, her hair in a wild tangle, like the red mane of a lioness.
“What is his name?” she asked, uncanny calm.
“Alexis Papadopolis.”
“A Greek, then,”
I nodded.
“He is very young?”
“Scarcely older than you. They say he was educated in Paris, and that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred and cruelty, than by his bravery.”
“All in all, then, a man,” she cried with sparkling eyes.
“At present he is living in Florence,” I continued, “he is said to be tremendously rich—”
“I didn’t ask you about that,” she interrupted quickly and sharply. “The man is dangerous. Aren’t you afraid of him? I am afraid of him. Has he a wife?”
“No.”
“A mistress?”
“No.”
“What theaters does he attend?”
“To-night he will be at the Nicolini Theater, where Virginia Marini and Salvini are acting; they are the greatest living artists in Italy, perhaps in Europe.
“See that you get a box—and be quick about it!” she commanded.
“But, mistress—”
“Do you want a taste of the whip?”
* * * * *
“You can wait down in the lobby,” she said when I had placed the opera-glasses and the programme on the edge of her box and adjusted the footstool.
I am standing there and had to lean against the wall for support so as not to fall down with envy and rage—no, rage isn’t the right word; it was a mortal fear.