Why?  I alone in the world understand and could have answered that question,—­and that is the reason I go back to Ploszow.  It is not her position she takes tragically, but my desertion.  My despair she is aware of, the sundering of those ties that have grown dear to her from the time when after so much suffering, so many efforts, she contrived to change them into ideal relations.  Only now I enter into her thoughts, into her very soul.  From the moment I came back to Ploszow there arose a struggle between duty and feeling in that noble heart.  She wished to remain true to him to whom she had promised her faith, because her spiritual nature abhors impurity and falsehood; and at the same time she could not help being drawn to the man she had loved with all the fresh feelings of her young heart,—­all the more as the man was near her, loved her, and was supremely unhappy.  Whole months had passed in that struggle.  At last there came a moment of peace, when the feeling had become a union of souls so pure and unearthly that neither her modesty nor her loyalty could take exception to it.  This is the reason of her unhappiness; I am reading now her soul as an open book,—­therefore I go back.

I also now see clearly that I would not have left her if I had had a complete certainty that her feelings would outlast all changes in her life.  The mere animal jealousy that fills my mind with rage because another has rights over her which are denied to me would not have been sufficient to drive me away from the one woman who is all the world to me.  But I thought that the child, even before it was born, would take possession of her heart, draw her closer to her husband, and blot me out of her heart and life forever.

I do not delude myself even now, for I know that I shall not be to her what I have been, nor what I might have been but for the combined forces of circumstances.  I might have been the dearest and only one for her, attaching her to life and happiness; now it will be quite different.  But as long as there is a glimmering spark of feeling for me I will not leave her, because I cannot; I have nowhere to go.

Therefore I return; I shall nurse that spark, fan it into life again, and get some warmth from it for myself.  I am reading again my aunt’s words:  “If you only knew how she asks after you day by day, whether a letter has arrived, and if you were well, when you will be going, and how long you mean to stop at Berlin,” and I cannot fill myself enough with these words.  It is as if I had been starving, and somebody had given me a piece of bread.  I am eating it, and feel as if I could cry from sheer gratitude.  Perhaps God’s mercy toward me is beginning to appear at last.  For I feel that I am changed; the former self has died in me.  I shall not revolt against her will any more; I will bear everything, will soothe and comfort her; I will even save her husband.

4 November.