Homo Sapiens: Overboard by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
XVIII.
Falk and Isa sat in the train compartment that same evening! They were heading to Paris.
“Do you love me?” she asked, looking at him happily.
Falk didn’t answer. He squeezed her hand and gazed into her eyes with infinite tenderness.
“You, my… You!” They sat for a long time, pressed close together. She grew tired. He made her a bed of blankets, wrapped her up, and kept looking at her with the same fervent, tender warmth.
“You, my… my…”
“Kiss me!” She closed her eyes.
He kissed her fleetingly, as if hesitant to touch her. “Now sleep, sleep…”
“Yes.”
He sat across from her.
Now she was his woman. Now he was happy.
He barely thought of Mikita. Strange, how little he cared about him. But if… oh God, one goes to ruin because one lacks the ability to live, because the actual conditions for life are missing, so because one must go to ruin; no one is to blame for that.
Had he gone to ruin? No! His torment was something entirely different. Those were the feverish paroxysms that produced the great will. Yes: he suddenly understood it. How could he put it? The new will—the will born from instincts—the will…
Hmm, how could he say it? The will of instincts, unhindered by conscious barriers, by atavistic feelings… the will where instinct and mind become one.
He still had to suffer because he was a transitional man, he still fevered because he had to overcome the mind. But he wouldn’t suffer once he’d overcome that piece of posthumous past, those atavistic remnants in himself.
Suddenly, he laughed quietly to himself.
God, God, this foolish, idiotic reasoning. This nonsensical babble about a new will and such things. In the end, he’d think himself an Übermensch, because—well, because his sexuality was so ruthless, and because she followed him out of love.
In the end, he just wanted to numb himself a bit… Nonsense!
He looked at her. She was his, she was his because she had to be his… And they were heading into happiness…
He stepped to the window.
He saw trees and fields and station buildings flash by.
All this will be yours, if only this new will is there, the will of instincts sanctified by the mind.
He thought of Napoleon.
No! That wasn’t it. That was the will of a fanatical epileptic—of a…
Strange that he kept instinctively searching for examples of similar ruthlessness…
Those were probably just remnants of the torments he’d been through. Now he had happiness, and he would enjoy it.
And he stretched tall in the feeling of his great happiness, which he had won through his will.
Everything else lay behind him as an experience, a powerful, blood-filled experience, a reproach, material for a great, shattering soul drama.
She seemed to be sleeping.
That was the woman he didn’t know. But he didn’t need to know her. Why should he? He had her now, he had wrested her from another.
He was the elk… no! That was too animalistic. The image of torn entrails hanging from antlers was painful to him.
With all his strength, he fought against a giant mass of painful, unpleasant feelings… Heh, heh… as if someone had poked a wasp’s nest.
But he calmed down again.
It all had to happen this way. Strange that he kept falling back into old notions of free will, of a will that can act…
And now—now… Where was it carrying him now?
Into happiness! Into an endless happiness full of new, unknown joys and pleasures…
Oh, how proud, how happy, how powerful he felt.
And the train raced and raced… Houses, villages, and cities flashed by the windows, and deep in the sky, a star glowed in dim, violet light…
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