The Doll (29 page)

These were strange periods for Wokulski. On being told that the ladies would be in the Łazienki park on the morrow, he became restless today. He grew indifferent to business, became irritable; time seemed to stop and tomorrow was never coming. His night was full of wild dreams; sometimes, half awake, he would mutter: ‘In the end—what is it all for? Nothing! Oh, what a brute I am…'

But when the morning came, he feared to look out of the window lest he saw a cloudy sky. And the morning dragged so that all his life might have been anchored in it, poisoned with a dreadful poison. ‘Can this possibly be love?' he asked himself in despair.

In a state of fever he would order the carriage for noon. At every moment it seemed to him he was about to meet the Countess's carriage on its way back, or that his horses, chafing at the bit, were going too slowly.

In the Łazienki park he jumped out of the carriage and hurried to the pond where the Countess usually walked, as she liked feeding the swans. He arrived too early, sank on a bench, drenched in cold sweat, and sat motionless, gazing towards the palace, oblivious of the whole world. Finally, two female figures appeared at the end of the path, one in black, the other in grey. The blood rushed to Wokulski's head: ‘There they are! Will they speak to me?…'

He rose from the bench and went towards them like a madman, breathless. Yes, it was Izabela; she was with her aunt, talking to her. Wokulski stared at her, and thought: ‘Well, what is there about her that is so extraordinary? She's a woman like any other…Surely I am unnecessarily crazy about her?…'

He bowed, the ladies bowed. He walked by without turning his head, so as not to betray himself. Finally he glanced back; both ladies had disappeared into the shrubbery.

‘I'll go back,' he thought, ‘I'll look at her again…No—it wouldn't do.' And at this moment he felt the glittering water of the pond was drawing him with irresistible power: ‘Oh, if only I could be sure that death is forgetfulness. Suppose it is not?…No, there is no pity in nature. Is it right to equip wretched human hearts with an infinity of yearning, without at least giving them the consolation that death means oblivion?'

At the same time, the Countess would be saying to Izabela: ‘I am becoming increasingly convinced that money does not bring happiness, Bela. That Wokulski has made himself a fine career by his standards, but what good is it? He doesn't work in his shop any more, but bores himself here in the Łazienki park…Didn't you see how bored he looked?'

‘Bored?' Izabela echoed, ‘he strikes me most of all as comical.'

‘I wouldn't have said that,' the Countess was surprised.

‘Well—unpleasant,' Miss Izabela corrected herself.

Wokulski lacked the courage to leave the park. He walked along the other side of the pond and watched that grey dress fluttering among the trees. Not until later did he realise he was watching two grey dresses and a third, blue one, none of which belonged to Izabela: ‘I am abysmally stupid,' he thought. Yet this did not help.

One day in the first half of June, Mrs Meliton let Wokulski know that Izabela would be out walking the next day with the Countess and the Duchess. This small incident might well have capital significance. For Wokulski had visited the Duchess several times since that memorable Easter, and knew that the old lady was extremely well disposed towards him. He usually listened to her tales of olden times, talked about his uncle and recently had even discussed erecting a gravestone for him. During these talks, the name of Izabela appeared in some unexplained manner, so unexpectedly that Wokulski was not able to conceal his emotion: his face changed; his voice darkened.

The old lady put on her spectacles and looked at Wokulski, then asked: ‘Am I right in thinking you are not indifferent to Miss Łęcka?'

‘I hardly know her…I have only spoken to her once in my life,' Wokulski explained, in confusion.

The Duchess fell to pondering, nodded and murmured: ‘Ah…'

Wokulski bade her goodbye but that ‘Ah…' remained in his mind. In any case, he was sure he did not have an enemy in the Duchess. And now, less than a week since that conversation, he had learned that the Duchess was going to the Łazienki park with the Countess and Izabela. Could she have found out that the ladies sometimes encountered him there? Perhaps she wanted to bring them together?

Wokulski looked at his watch: it was three in the afternoon. ‘So it's to be tomorrow,' he thought, ‘within twenty-four hours…No, not so many…how many?' He could not estimate how many hours would flow between three o'clock and one o'clock next afternoon. He was overwhelmed with nervousness; he ate no dinner; his imagination rushed ahead, but cold common sense put the brake on it: ‘Let us see what tomorrow brings. Perhaps it will rain, or one of the ladies will be ill.'

He hurried out into the street and wandered about aimlessly, repeating: ‘Well, we shall see what tomorrow brings…Perhaps they won't even stop? In any case, Izabela is a pretty woman, even unusually pretty, but she is only a woman, not a supernatural being. Thousands of equally pretty women walk about this world, yet I don't dream of attaching myself to their skirts. What if she rejects me? So be it! I shall fall into the clutches of another, still more frantically…'

In the evening he went to the theatre, but left after the first act. Again he wandered about the town, and wherever he went, was haunted by the thought of the walk tomorrow and by an obscure premonition that it would bring him closer to Izabela.

That night passed, and dawn came. At noon, he ordered the carriage to be harnessed. He wrote a note to the shop that he would come later, and ripped a pair of gloves to shreds. At last the servant came in: ‘The horses are ready!' He reached for his hat. ‘The Prince!' said the servant.

Everything grew dark before Wokulski's eyes: ‘Announce him…'

The Prince entered: ‘Good morning, Mr Wokulski,' he cried, ‘are you going out? To the shops or the railway, I'll be bound. But none of that! I hereby place you under arrest and am taking you off to my house. I will even be uncivil enough to commandeer your carriage, as I didn't bring mine today. However, I am sure you will forgive me in view of the splendid news…'

‘Please be seated…'

‘Well, just for a moment. Pray imagine,' said the Prince, as he took a chair, ‘that I have teased our fraternal gentlemen—was not that neatly phrased?—until they have promised to come to my house and listen to the plans for your partnership. So I will take you at once, or rather I shall come along with you, and we shall be off to my house.'

Wokulski felt like a man who has fallen from a height and lies stunned. His confusion did not escape the Prince's attention, and he smiled, attributing it to delight at this visit and invitation. It never even entered his head that a ride to the Łazienki park was more important to Wokulski than any Prince or trading partnership.

‘Are we ready, then?' the Prince inquired, rising. It was only a matter of a second for Wokulski to say he was not going, and wanted nothing to do with any partnership. But at this moment he thought: ‘The outing—that's for me; the partnership—for her.'

He took his hat and went with the Prince. It seemed to him that the carriage was not driving along the street but over his own brains. ‘Women are not gained by sacrifice, but by brute force…' he recalled Mrs Meliton's phrase. Influenced by this aphorism, he felt like seizing the Prince by the scruff of the neck and throwing him bodily into the roadway. But this lasted only a moment.

The Prince was looking at him through half-closed eyes, and seeing Wokulski turn red, then white, thought: ‘I never dreamed I would give this honest fellow so much pleasure. Yes, one should always extend a hand to new people…'

Among his peers, the Prince had the reputation of a fervent patriot, almost a chauvinist; elsewhere, he enjoyed the reputation of an excellent citizen. He very much enjoyed speaking Polish, and even his conversations in French concerned matters of public interest. He was an aristocrat from top to toe, in his soul, heart and blood. He believed that society consisted of two elements: the ordinary crowd, and the chosen few. The ordinary crowd was the work of Nature, and might well be descended from monkeys, as Darwin maintained, despite Holy Scripture. But the chosen few had some higher origin, and were descended, if not from gods, then at least from heroes related to them—Hercules, Prometheus, or in the last resort Orpheus. The Prince had a good friend in France (infected to the greatest possible degree by the democratic disease) who scoffed at the divine origins of the aristocracy.

‘Cousin mine,' he would say, ‘I think you fail fully to understand the question of stock. What are the great houses? They are made up of those whose ancestors were hetmans, senators, governors, or, in today's terms, marshals, members of the upper house, or departmental prefects. Well—we know such gentlemen, do we not? There's nothing unusual about them…They eat, drink, play cards, court women, amass debts—like any other mere mortal, whom they occasionally surpass in stupidity.'

A sickly flush suffused the Prince's face.

‘Cousin,' he retorted, ‘have you ever met a prefect or marshal with a majestic expression such as those we see in the portraits of our forefathers?'

‘There is nothing odd in that,' laughed the plague-stricken Count. ‘Artists endowed their paintings with expression never dreamt of by the original sitters, just as heraldists and historians told fabulous legends about them. All lies, my cousin!…These are only the scenery and costumes that make of one Jack a prince and of another a ploughman. In reality they are merely miserable actors both.'

‘Derision, cousin, makes a poor debating partner!' fulminated the Prince and escaped. He hurried home, lay down on the
chaise-longue
with his hands clasped behind his head and, gazing at the ceiling, watched as figures of superhuman strength, courage, reason, disinterestedness passed before him. These were his ancestors, and those of the Count, except that the latter denied them. Could he possibly have some mixed blood?…

The prince did not despise ordinary mortals, but was even benevolently disposed towards them, had contact with them and was concerned with their needs. He saw himself as a Prometheus who performed the honourable duty of bringing fire down from Heaven for the benefit of the poor people. Moreover, religion required him to sympathise with the humble, and the Prince blushed to think that most members of high society would eventually stand before the seat of Heavenly Judgement without ever having performed this kind of good deed. So, in order to avoid bringing shame upon himself, he frequented and even invited to his house various committees, spent twenty or even a hundred roubles on various charitable public causes and above all, he continually grieved over the unhappy position of his country, ending all his speeches with the phrase: ‘Gentlemen, let us first of all consider how to elevate our unhappy country…' And as he said this, a weight would fall from his heart, and the weight varied in proportion as to the number of listeners he had, or the amount he had spent on good deeds.

He believed it was a citizen's duty to hold committee meetings, to encourage trade and to grieve, grieve continually over his unhappy country. Had he been asked whether he ever planted a tree to provide shade for people or the earth, or whether he ever removed a stone from a horse's hoof, he would have been frankly astonished. For he felt, thought, yearned and grieved for millions. He had never done anything useful. He thought that continual fretting about the whole country was far more valuable than wiping the nose of a grubby child.

In June, the character of Warsaw undergoes a marked change. The hotels, hitherto empty, fill and put up their prices; advertisements appear on many houses: ‘Furnished Apartments to Let for a Few Weeks'. All droshkies are hired, all the messengers run hither and thither. Figures not to be met with at other times are now encountered in the streets, parks, theatres, restaurants, exhibitions, shops and stores selling ladies' dresses. Among them are stout and ruddy men in blue peaked caps, in boots too wide and gloves too tight, wearing suits in styles invented by provincial tailors. They are accompanied by ladies not distinguished either for beauty or Warsaw chic, and by equally numerous crowds of clumsy children, glowing with health.

Some of these rural visitors bring wool for the market; others come for the races; yet others to see both the wool and the races; some to meet neighbours who live but a mile away; others to refresh themselves with the cloudy water and the dust of the city, and yet others wear themselves out by travelling several days without knowing why.

The Prince took advantage of these gatherings to bring together Wokulski and some landowners.

The Prince occupied a huge apartment on the second floor of his own palace. That part which consisted of the master's study, library and smoking room was used for meetings of gentlemen, at which the Prince would introduce his own or other people's plans concerned with matters of public interest. This happened several times a year. The previous spring session had been devoted to the question of paddle-boats on the Vistula river, at which three sides had made themselves very clear. The first, consisting of the Prince and his personal friends, absolutely demanded the introduction of paddle-boats, although the second, the bourgeois—while admitting the plausibility of the plan, considered it premature and did not want to spend money on it. The third side consisted only of two men—a certain technician who declared that paddle-boats could not navigate on the Vistula, and a certain deaf magnate, who always replied to any appeal addressed to his pocket: ‘A little louder, pray, I cannot hear a word…'

The Prince and Wokulski arrived at one o'clock, and a quarter of an hour later other members of the committee began gathering. The Prince greeted everyone with agreeable familiarity, introduced Wokulski, then checked off the arrival's name on his list of members with a very long and very red pencil.