t those who
accosted them. Ribald laughter and coarse jokes flew around like
fire-works and were immediately answered by broad, thoughtless
merriment.

The public expressed its satisfaction with the singing by shouting,
beating time with their canes, and banging their beer glasses. At
moments the wind would entirely drown out the singing, or bend the
few wretched trees with a rustling sound and scatter the leaves over
the stage and the heads of the public.

Wolska continued to sing. Her red vaudeville costume, with low-cut
front, gleamed like a gaudy spot against the blue background of the
stage and excellently accentuated her thin, thickly painted face,
her sunken and pale eyes, and her sharp features which looked like
the skeleton-like face of a starving man. She swayed from side to
side with a heavy motion to the measure of the song:

"Such ardent love took hold of me, I embraced Stach most tenderly."

Her voice floated through the garden with a hollow, rasping sound
and added to the din made by that noisy and drunken crowd. Brutal
laughs broke out in sharp, penetrating scales, and those bravos
emitted by the drunken threats of a Sunday public and interrupted by
hiccoughs, beat against the stage with a hoarse and hollow roar
together with the biting jibes that were not spared the singer. But
she heard nothing and sang on, indifferent and cold to all that
surrounded her. She flung forth tones, words, and mimicry with the
automatism of a hypnotized woman, only at moments, her eyes would
seek Janina's as though they were begging for pity.

Janina grew pale and red by turns, unable to endure any longer that
alcohol-saturated atmosphere and that drunken din which filled her
with aversion and disgust.

"I would rather die!" she thought. Oh, no, she would never be able
to amuse such a public. She would spit in its eyes and scorn herself
and then . . . if there were no other way out . . . drown herself in
the Wisla!

Wolska finished her song and her partner, dressed in a Cracovian
costume, went about among the drinking crowd with his notes in his
hand, collecting money. Remarks that froze one with their cynicism
and brutal frankness, were hurled into his face, but he only smiled
with the dull smile of a habitual drunkard, nervously twitched his
lips and humbly bowed his thanks for those ten-copeck pieces that
were thrown on his notes.

Wolska, with closed eyes, stood beside the piano, nervously tugged
at the gold