Page:Poet Lore, volume 21, 1910.djvu/474

 your warm, unpolluted blood, and I grasped your hands and laid my head on your chest like a vampire. But it was only for the moment. I am, poor boy, used to greater whirlwinds of passion, to warmer sensations, and your petty, feverish fantasy hardly was enough for one quiet evening. Mr. Petr, you would be ridiculous if for one such petty moment you would be wrecking your entire future, your entire life.

Petr (he had been listening to her, with a growing consternation).—Now he breaks out).—You lie! You lie! Only to get rid of me.

Maya (coldly and harshly).—Yes, I lie, but not for the purpose of getting rid of you. You would not even be able to reach beyond your own petty environment. You would soon sink under the surface without a stir on my part.

Petr.—Why did you come back? You would not have come back if the things you say were true!

Maya.—Why I came back? Because I pitied you. I pity all weak people and that pity is the only beautiful feature of my tranceful life. I do not feel sorry for strong people—they are my equals—the people of my blood—to such I grant with passion a moment at my side. Perhaps only for this reason that I should add sweetness to their toilsome life, before an early death. And that is why I have come to undeceive you from your delusions. See, even such a Christian mission amuses me at times.

Petr.—I don’t believe you.

Maya.—You cannot believe me. I understand you. In your pious naïveness you have learned to classify people into good and bad only. Into apostles and devils, into saints and sinners. You do not know that human nature is an undivided composite element which contains parts of both—evil and good. That it often does good in order to effect evil and sometimes acts evilly to bring about good. The strength, that yearning strength of my life, has given me a plentitude of different passions and sentiments, but when I was tired of everything, my glory, my art, and my passions, I went out to seek something different, something unusual—the enchantment of primitive memories and recollections, these small dainty flowers that grew alongside of the paths of my childhood, the fairy tales of my once unspotted soul. That is why I was so good when I came here again after so many years, that is why I gloried in that evening. But how long could it have lasted ? In its footprints I felt the coming