Wouldn’t she herself make impossible efforts to get money in order to buy a few days of peace, a semblance of happiness? Every line she read about suicide, every reported crime, every act of desperation suddenly became very real to her. She could identify with all of them—the man tired of life, the desperate man, the seduced maidservant, the abandoned child. Her own story had the ring of theirs. All at once she understood the full richness of life, and knew that no hour of her own existence could seem poor to her any more. Now that it was all coming to an end, she felt for the first time that life was just beginning. And was a vicious female to have the power to take this wonderful sense of being attuned to the whole world, and tear it apart with her coarse hands? Was Irene’s one guilty act to bring everything great and fine of which, for the first time, she felt capable, down into ruin?

And why, she thought, blindly resisting a disaster that she unconsciously knew made sense, why such a terrible punishment for a small peccadillo? She knew so many women, vain, bold, sensual, who kept lovers, spending money on them and mocking their husbands in those other men’s arms, women who lived a lie and were very much at home there, who became more beautiful in dissembling, stronger as the chase went on, cleverer in danger, while she herself collapsed, powerless, at the first touch of fear, at her first real transgression.

But was she really guilty at all? She felt in her heart that the man who had been her lover was a stranger to her, that she had never given him any part of her real life. She had received nothing from him, he had given her nothing. All of that, now past and forgotten, was not really her offence, it was the misdemeanour of another woman whom she herself did not understand, whom she did not even like to remember. Could you be punished for an offence when time had atoned for it?

Suddenly she felt alarm. She had an idea that she had not thought that herself. Who had said it? Someone close to her, only recently, only a few days ago. She thought about it, and her alarm was no less when she realised that it was her own husband who had put the idea into her mind. He had come home from a trial looking pale and upset, and suddenly, taciturn as he usually was, he had told her and some friends who happened to be present: “Sentence was passed on an innocent man today.” Asked what he meant, he told them, still much distressed by the incident, that a thief had been condemned for a crime committed three years before. He himself felt that the offender was innocent, because three years after the crime he was no longer the same man. So another man was being punished, even punished twice over, for he had spent those three years imprisoned in his own fear and the constant anxiety of being found out and convicted.

And she remembered, with horror, how she had contradicted him at the time. Remote from real life as her feelings were, she had see the criminal only as a pest, a parasite on comfortable bourgeois society, a man who must at all costs be removed from circulation. Only now did she feel how pitiful her arguments had been, how just and kindly his. But would he be able to understand that it was not really another man she had loved, only the idea of adventure? That he himself was also guilty of showing her too much kindness, making her life so enervatingly comfortable? Would he be able to show justice in judging his own case?

 

But she was not to be allowed to indulge in hope. Another note arrived the very next day, another whiplash reviving her exhausted fear. This time the blackmailer was demanding two hundred crowns, and she handed them over meekly. The sudden steep rise in the sum of blackmail extorted was terrible. Nor did she now feel financially capable of satisfying it, for although her own family was prosperous she was not in any situation to get her hands on large sums without attracting attention. And then, what use would it be? She knew that tomorrow the demand would be for four hundred crowns, soon it would be a thousand, the more she gave the more would be asked, and finally, as soon as her money ran out, the anonymous letter would arrive and it would all be over. What she was buying was only time, a breathing space, two days of rest, or three, maybe a week, but time that was worthless in itself, full of torment and suspense. She had been sleeping poorly for weeks now, and her dreams were worse than waking; she felt the lack of fresh air, exercise, rest, occupation. She could not read any more, could not do anything, hunted as she was by the demons of her own fear. She did not feel well. Sometimes she had to sit down suddenly when her heart palpitated too vigorously, and a restless heaviness filled her limbs with almost painful weariness, like some viscous liquid, but that weariness still fought against sleep. Her whole life was undermined by her devouring fear, her body was poisoned, and in her heart she really longed for her sickness to break out in visible pain, some kind of obvious, perceptible clinical condition, something that those around her would understand and pity. In these hours of secret torment, she envied the sick.