Presently she added in French: ‘Perhaps I did wrong in going there, but… it is all the same to me.’
‘Bela, I think,’ said her companion gravely, pouting, ‘that it would have been proper to discuss it with your father or aunt first.’
‘You mean,’ Izabela interposed, ‘that I must discuss it with the marshal or Baron? There will be time for that; today I still lack the courage.’
The conversation broke off. Silent, the ladies returned home. Izabela was irritable all day.
When Izabela had left the shop, Wokulski returned to his accounts and added up two long columns of figures without a single error. Half-way down the third column, he stopped and marvelled at the calm in his soul. How could he be so indifferent after a whole year of feverish yearning and outbursts of madness? Had he been cast from a ballroom into a forest, or from a stifling prison cell into cool, expansive fields, he could not have known more profound astonishment.
‘Obviously I have been almost insane for a year,’ Wokulski thought. ‘There was no risk, no sacrifice I would not have made for her — yet scarcely do I set eyes on her, than I am no longer even interested …
‘And the way she spoke to me! That contempt for a wretched tradesman … “Pay that gentleman!” … These great ladies are quite amusing: an idler, a card-sharp, even a criminal would be acceptable to them in society, providing he had a fine name, even though his features were those of his mother’s footman rather than his father. But a merchant is a pariah … However, what concern is it of mine: let them all rot …’
He added up another column without even noticing what was happening in the shop.
‘How does she know’, he went on to himself, ‘that it was I who bought the dinner-service and the silver …? And how anxious she was to find out whether I had paid more than it was worth! I would gladly have made her a present of this little trifle. I owe her a lifelong debt of gratitude, for had I not been insane about her, I would never have made a fortune but would have mouldered away behind a counter. But now perhaps I’ll miss all that misery, despair and hope … What a stupid life! … We’re all of us chasing a dream in our hearts and it is not until the dream escapes us that we realise it was an illusion … Well, I would never have believed there could be such a miraculous cure. An hour ago I was poisoned, but now I’m as calm as — and somehow empty, too, as if my soul and innards had left me with nothing but skin and my clothing. What shall I do now? What shall I live for …? Maybe I’ll go to the Paris Exhibition and afterwards the Alps …’
At this moment Rzecki tiptoed over to him and whispered: ‘That Mraczewski is splendid, isn’t he? He knows how to talk to women!’
‘Like an impertinent barber,’ said Wokulski, without looking up.
‘Our customers have made him so,’ said the old clerk, but when he saw he was interrupting his master, he retired. Wokulski sank into a brown study again. He glanced imperceptibly at Mraczewski and suddenly noticed that the young man had something peculiar in his face.
‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘he is insufferably stupid and that is no doubt why women like him.’
He wanted to laugh both at the looks Izabela had given the handsome young man and at his own delusions, which had left him so suddenly.
Then he shuddered: he heard the name of Izabela and noticed there were no customers in the shop.
‘Well, today you didn’t even have to conceal your devotion,’ said Klein to Mraczewski, with a dismal smile.
‘The way she looked at me, oh my!’ Mraczewski sighed, one hand on his heart, the other twisting his moustache. ‘I am positive,’ he said, ‘that in a day or two I’ll get a scented note. Then — the first rendezvous, then “for your sake I’ll break the rules I’ve been brought up in”, and then “now you despise me?” Beforehand it is all very delightful, but later on a man has trouble with ’em …’
‘What are you talking about?’ Lisiecki interrupted. ‘We know your conquests: they are all called Matilda and you impress them with a pork chop and glass of beer.’
‘The Matildas are for every day, ladies for holidays. But Bela will be the greatest holiday of all. I give you my word that no woman has ever made such an impression on me … And how keen she was on me!’
The door slammed and a grey-haired gentleman entered: he asked for a watch-guard, but shouted and banged his stick so fiercely that one would have thought he wanted to buy up all the trinkets in the shop.
Wokulski listened to Mraczewski’s boasting but did not move. He felt as if a burden had fallen upon his head and shoulders.
‘All in all, it is no concern of mine,’ he whispered.
After the grey-haired gentleman, a lady came in for a parasol, then a middle-aged man for a hat and a young man who wanted a cigar-case, followed by three young ladies, one of whom asked for a pair of Szok’s gloves, and only Szok’s, for she wore no others.
Wokulski put aside the ledger, rose slowly and reached for his hat, then went towards the door. He was out of breath and his head was reeling.
Ignacy stopped him.
‘Are you going out? Perhaps you’ll glance into the other shop,’ he said.
‘No, I’m tired,’ Wokulski replied, without looking at him.
When he had gone, Lisiecki nudged Rzecki.
‘The old man looks as if he’s on his last legs,’ he whispered.
‘Well,’ said Ignacy, ‘organising that deal with Moscow was not a mere trifle. That’s obvious.’
‘What is he going into that for?’
‘To increase our wages,’ replied Ignacy sternly.
‘Then I hope he organises a hundred business deals, even with Irkutsk, if he puts our wages up every year,’ said Lisiecki. ‘I won’t quarrel with that. But anyhow I think he’s devilishly changed, particularly today. The Jews,’ he added, ‘when they get an inkling of what he’s up to, they’ll give him a licking.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The Jews, I say! … They all keep together and won’t let any Wokulski get in their way, for he’s no Jew, not even a convert.’
‘Wokulski is making connections with the nobility,’ Ignacy replied, ‘and that is where the money is.’
‘Who knows which is worse — the Jews or the nobility?’ put in Klein and raised his eyebrows in a very lamentable manner.
VIII
Meditations
IN THE STREET, Wokulski stood on the pavement as if wondering which way to go. He was not drawn in any particular direction. Not until he happened to glance to the right, at his recently finished shop, in front of which people were already stopping, did he turn away with distaste and go to the left.
‘It’s odd how little it all concerns me,’ he said to himself. Then he thought of the dozen people he gave work to, and of the dozens more he was to employ after 1 May, of the hundreds whom he was to supply with work in the coming year, and the thousands who would be able to better their wretched lot with his cheap merchandise — and he felt that at this moment none of these people and their families concerned him.
‘I’ll give up the shop and the company and go abroad,’ he thought.
‘But what about the disappointment you will cause these people who have placed their hopes in you?’
‘Disappointment? … Haven’t I too been disappointed?’
He felt uncomfortable as he walked along, then realised he was irritated by continually stepping aside for the passers-by; so he crossed the street, where there was less traffic.
‘But that Mraczewski is infamous!’ he thought. ‘How can he say such things in the shop? “In a few days I’ll get a note and then—a rendezvous …” Ha, she has only herself to blame, one should not flirt with fools. Ah well, it is all the same to me.’
He felt a strange emptiness in his soul and, at its very depths, something like a drop of stinging bitterness. No force, no desires, nothing—only that drop, so small that it could barely be perceived, and so bitter that the whole world could be poisoned by it.
; ‘A momentary apathy, exhaustion, lack of stimulation … I think too much about business,’ he said.
He stopped and looked around. It was the eve of a holiday and the fine weather had enticed many people out on to the city’s streets. A string of carriages and a motley, undulating crowd between the statues of Copernicus and Zygmunt III looked like the flock of birds which were rising at that very moment above the town, heading north.
‘How singular,’ he said. ‘Every bird above and every man below imagines that he goes where he pleases. And only someone observing from the sidelines sees that everyone is being pushed forward together by some ill-starred current, stronger than their expectations and desires. Perhaps the very one that tosses up the streaks of sparks blown out at night by the locomotive? They glitter for the twinkling of an eye, only to be extinguished for all eternity, and that is called life. “Human generations pass like waves on a wind-tossed sea; and their joys leave no memories, and their sorrows are beyond recall.” Where did I read that?… No matter.’
The constant rumbling and murmuring was intolerable to Wokulski, and terrible his internal emptiness. He wished to occupy himself with something and remembered that one of the foreign capitalists had requested his opinion regarding the question of avenues along the banks of the Vistula. He had already formed his opinion: the whole vastness of Warsaw was weighing and shifting down towards the Vistula. If the banks were to be reinforced with avenues, it would become the most beautiful part of the city: buildings, shops, boulevards…
‘I must go over and see how it would look.’ Wokulski murmured and turned into Karowa.
By the gate leading in that direction he saw a barefoot porter, all hung about with string, drinking straight from the water fountain. He had splashed himself from head to toe but had a most pleased expression and laughing eyes.
‘There’s someone who has what he desired. Scarcely have I approached my source, when I see that not only has it disappeared, but my very desires begin to wither. And yet I am envied and he is to be pitied. What a monstrous misunderstanding!’
He rested a moment on Karowa. It seemed to him that he was like the chaff already discarded by the mill of big city life, and that he was floating slowly downwards in the gutter between these ancient walls.
‘And what of the avenues?’ he thought. ‘They may stand for a time, then they will begin to crumble, overgrown and dilapidated, like these walls here. Those who laboured so to build them had other aspirations also: health, security, wealth, and fun, perhaps, caresses. And where are they now?…a few cracked walls is all that’s left of them, like the shell of a long-gone snail. And the only profit this heap of bricks and a thousand other heaps will bring will be to some future geologist who will describe them as the human stratum, just as today we refer to coral reefs or chalk as the protozoan strata. “And what does a man’s toil profit him?… And all his labours commenced under the sun?… Nothing—his works are fleeting, his life the flicker of an eye.” Where did I read that? No matter.’
He stopped half-way along the road and looked at the district between Nowy Zjazd and Tamka Street, stretching out at his feet. He was struck by its resemblance to a ladder, one side formed by Dobra Street, the other by a line from Gabarska to Topiel, with several alleys across, forming rungs. This ladder leads nowhere. It’s a sick place, a wild place. And he thought bitterly that this area of riverside earth, strewn with the refuse of the whole city, had given birth to nothing but two-storey houses coloured chocolate and bright yellow, dark green and orange. To nothing but black and white fences separating empty spaces, in which a several-storey apartment house rose here and there like a pine tree spared in a forest laid waste by the axe and uneasy at its own solitude.
‘Nothing, nothing…’ he repeated, wandering through the alleys with their shacks sunk below street level, roofs overgrown with moss, buildings with shutters and doors nailed shut, with tumbledown walls, windows patched with paper or stuffed with rags. He walked along looking through dirty window-panes into dwellings, and absorbed the sight of cupboards without doors, chairs with only three legs, sofas with torn seats, clocks with one hand and cracked faces. He walked along and silently laughed to himself to see labourers interminably waiting for work, craftsmen employed only at patching old clothes, women whose entire property was a basket of stale cakes—and to see ragged men, starving children and unusually dirty women.
‘This is a microcosm of Poland,’ he thought, ‘where everything tends to make people wretched and to extinguish them. Some perish through poverty, others through extravagance. Work is taken from other people’s mouths to feed the useless; charity breeds insolent loafers, while poverty is unable to acquire tools and is beseiged by perpetually hungry children, whose greatest virtue is to die a premature death. Individuals with initiative are of no use here, for everything conspires to chain initiative and waste it in a vain struggle—for nothing.’
Then his own story rose up before him in broad outline. As a child he had yearned for knowledge—they had put him to work in a shop and restaurant. As a clerk he had been killing himself with night work—everyone mocked him, from the kitchen-hands to the intelligentsia getting drunk in the shop. When he finally reached the university—they tormented him with the dishes he had recently served up to customers.
He only breathed freely when he reached Siberia. There he had been able to work, had gained the recognition and friendship of Czerski, Czekanowski, Dybowski. He returned to Poland almost a scholar, but when he sought employment in that field, he had been laughed at and scorned and sent into trade… ‘A good living, in times like these!’
So he had gone back to trade, but then people exclaimed he had sold himself and was living on his wife, on the Mincels’ work.
It had so happened that after a few years his wife died, leaving him a quite sizeable fortune. After burying her, Wokulski withdrew somewhat from the store and again took to his books. And perhaps the haberdashery merchant might have become a good natural scientist, had he not been once to the theatre and seen Izabela there. She was sitting in a box, with her father and Flora, wearing a white gown. She was looking not at the stage, which was holding the attention of everyone else, but at somewhere before her, who knows where or at what? Was she, perhaps, thinking of Apollo?…
Wokulski gazed at her all the time. She made a peculiar impression upon him. It seemed he had seen her before, and knew her well. He gazed still more intently into her dreaming eyes and recalled, without knowing why, the limitless tranquillity of the Siberian steppe, where sometimes it was so hushed that you could almost hear the rustle of souls flying back to the West. Not until later did he realise he had never before seen her anywhere, yet it was somehow as if he had been awaiting her for a long time.
‘Are you she—or not?’ he asked in his soul, unable to look away from her.
Henceforth he concerned himself little with the store or his books, but kept seeking opportunities to see Izabela at the theatre, concerts or lectures. He would not have called his feelings ‘love’, and in fact was not sure whether human language had a word to express them. All he knew was that she had become a mystic point where all his memories, longings and hopes coincided, a hearth without which his life would have neither sense nor meaning. His work in the grocery store, the university, Siberia, marriage to Mincel’s widow, finally his involuntary visit to the theatre when he had not in the least wanted to go—all these were but pathways and stages through which fate had led him to catch sight of Izabela.
From then on, his time consisted of two phases. When he was looking at Izabela he felt completely calm and somehow greater; away from her, he thought about her and yearned for her. Sometimes it seemed there was a sort of error deep within his feelings, and that Izabela was not the centre for his soul at all, but an ordinary and perhaps even very commonplace eligible young lady. But then a strange plan came into his head.
‘I shall make her acquaintance, and ask her point-blank: “Are you she for whom I have been wa
iting all my life? If not, I will go away without bearing you any grudge or being unhappy.”’
A little later he saw that this plan showed mental aberration on his part. So he laid aside his inquiry as to what she was or was not and decided, come what may, to make the acquaintance of Izabela. Then he realised there was no one among his acquaintances able to introduce him into the Łęcki home. Worse still: Mr Łęcki and the young lady were customers in his store, but this relationship, instead of facilitating a meeting, made it more difficult.
Gradually he formulated the conditions required for making Izabela’s acquaintance. In order simply to talk frankly to her, he must not be in trade, or be a very rich merchant; must be of genteel birth at least, and be acquainted with aristocratic circles; above all, however, he must have a great deal of money.
It had not been difficult to prove his genteel birth. Last May he set about the matter, which his journey to Bulgaria had expedited so that by December he already had the necessary certificate. It had been more difficult to make a fortune, but Fate had helped.
At the beginning of the Eastern War, a rich Muscovite, Suzin, a friend of Wokulski’s from Siberia, passed through Warsaw. He called on Wokulski and forcefully urged him to go in for army supplies. ‘Get together as much money as you can, Stanisław Piotrovich,’ he had said, ‘and I give you my word you’ll make a million.’ Then, in an undertone, he revealed his plans.
Wokulski had listened. He wanted nothing to do with some of them, others he accepted, though hesitantly. He regretted leaving the city where he at least saw Izabela from time to time. But when she left Warsaw in June for her aunt’s estate, and when Suzin began urging him on with telegrams, Wokulski made up his mind, and drew out all his late wife’s cash, amounting to thirty thousand roubles, which the lady had kept untouched in her bank.
Some days before his departure, he visited a doctor of his acquaintance, Szuman, whom he rarely saw despite a mutual liking. The doctor was Jewish, an old bachelor, yellow and tiny, with a black beard and the reputation of an eccentric. As he had private means, he practised medicine for nothing, and only as much as was necessary for his ethnographical studies; to his friends, however, he would give a piece of advice, once and for all: ‘Take any medicine you like, from the smallest dose of castor oil to the largest of strychnine, and it’ll help you somehow—even if you have glanders.’