She gazed at the quiet river flecked with spots of white foam and at the indistinct silhouettes of boats trailing along in midstream. She breathed in deeply the calm that surrounded her and felt a resurgence of her wasted strength.

Janina lay down upon the yellowish sand of the bank and, gazing at the gleaming expanse of waters, forgot everything. It seemed to her as though she were flowing on with the current of the river, pa.s.sing the sh.o.r.es, houses, and woods and hurrying on continually into a blue and boundless distance like the illimitable expanse of heaven that hung over her. It seemed to her as though she no longer remembered anything, but felt only the ineffable delight of rocking with the waves.

Janina suddenly awoke from that half dream, for there pa.s.sed near her an old man with a fishing rod in his hand. He looked at her in pa.s.sing, sat down almost beside her on the very edge of the river, cast his line into the water and waited.

He had so honest a face that she felt a desire to speak to him and was thinking how to begin, when he addressed her first: "Would you like to take a trip over to the other side?"

Janina glanced at him questioningly.

"Aha! I see that we don't understand each other. I thought that you wanted to drown yourself," he said.

"I wasn't even thinking about death," she replied quietly.

"Ha! ha! It would be an unexpected honor for the river."

He adjusted his fishing tackle and became silent, centering all his attention on the fish that had begun to circle about the bait and the hook.

A deeper silence, as it were, diffused itself about and began to fill Janina's soul with a blissful calm. She felt that an immense goodness was pervading her, that the majesty of that expanse of heaven, of the waters and the verdure was uplifting her and drawing from her breast a hymn of thanksgiving and the pure joy of living, free from all earthly things.

The old man cast a sidelong glance at her and on his narrow lips there hovered an unfathomable smile.

Janina felt that look and in turn glanced at him. Their eyes met in a long and friendly gaze.

She felt a sudden and irresistible impulse to reveal the depths of her soul to him.

She moved closer to him and said quietly: "I was not thinking about death."

"Then you were seeking calm?"

"Yes, I wanted to take a look at nature and to forget."

"Forget about what?"

"About life!" Janina whispered hoa.r.s.ely and tears of violent grief filled her eyes.

"You are a child. It must have been some disappointment in love, some thwarted ambition, or perhaps the lack of a dinner that put you in such a tragic mood."

"All that taken together is not enough to make one feel very, very unhappy," answered Janina.

"All that taken together is one big zero, for according to my way of thinking there is nothing that can make wholly unhappy an individual who knows himself," he said.

"Who are you . . . that is, what do you do?" he asked, after pausing a while.

"I am in the theater," answered the girl.

"Aha! the world of comedy! Simulation which you afterwards take for reality. Chimeras! All that warps the human soul. The greatest actors are merely phonographs wound up sometimes by sages, sometimes by geniuses, but most often by fools. And they speak to even greater fools. Actors, artists, creators are merely blind instruments of nature which uses them to reveal itself and for ends known to itself alone! To them it seems that they are something real, but that is a sad deception, for they are merely instruments which are thrown into the discard when they are no longer needed or have lost their usefulness."

"Who are you?" Janina asked, almost unknowingly, stirred by his words.

"An old man as you see, who fishes and likes to chat. Oh yes, I am very old. I come here for a few hours every day in the summertime, if the weather is fair, and catch fish, if they let themselves be caught. What good will it do you to know who I am? My name will tell you nothing. In the sum total of humanity I am merely a p.a.w.n which is given a certain number upon entrance into this world and retains the same at the time of its exit. I am a cell of feeling long ago registered and cla.s.sified by my fellow-beings as a 'ne'er-do-well,'"

he said, smiling.

"I had no intention of offending you by my question."

"I never get angry about anything. Only foolish people anger themselves or rejoice. A man ought merely to look on, observe, and go his own way," he added, drawing a gudgeon from his hook.

Janina was a bit chilled by his gravity and by his decisive way of speaking which admitted of no discussion.

"Are you from the Warsaw Theater?" he asked, throwing out his line again.

"No, I am in Cabinski's company. No doubt you know him."

"I don't know him, nor have I heard about him."

"Is it possible that you have never heard anything about Cabinski, nor read about the Tivoli?" asked Janina greatly surprised that there could be anyone in Warsaw who did not know and was not interested in the theater.

"I do not go to the theater at all and I do not read the papers," he answered.

"Impossible!"

"One can see right away that you must not be more than twenty years old, for you cry out in amazement, 'Impossible!' and look at me as though I were a lunatic or a barbarian."

"But after talking with you, it was impossible for me to a.s.sume even for a moment that . . ."

"That I am not interested in the theater, yes, that I do not read the papers," he concluded for her.

"I can't even understand why."

"Well, because that does not interest me at all," he answered simply.

"Are you not at all interested in what is going on in the world, in how people are living, what they are doing, what they are thinking?"

"No. To you that doubtless appears monstrous; nevertheless it is entirely natural. Do our peasants interest themselves in the theater or in world affairs? They do not. Isn't that true?"

"Yes, but they are peasants and that is entirely different."

"It is the same thing, merely with this addition; that for them your famous and great men do not exist at all and it doesn't make the slightest difference to them whether Newton or Shakespeare ever lived or not. And they are just as well off with their ignorance, just as well."

Janina became silent, for what he had said appeared to her paradoxical and not very true.

"What will I learn from your newspapers and your theaters? Merely that people love, hate, and fight one another the same as ever; that evil and brute force continue to reign as they always have done; that the world and life are merely a big mill in which brains and consciences are ground to dust. It is more comfortable to know nothing rather than that," he continued.

"But is it right for anyone to seclude himself so egoistically from all that is going on in the world?" asked Janina.

"Precisely in that lies wisdom. To desire nothing for ourselves, care for nothing, and be indifferent that is what we ought to aim at."

"Is it possible to attain such a state of complete apathy?"

"It is attained through the experience of life and through thinking.