The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [124]
‘May the devil take them! May the devil take you all, with your silly conventions…’ the doctor exclaimed, shaking his fist.
That evening, Ignacy took the pistols and called on Wokulski. He found him alone, at tea. Rzecki poured himself some, and exclaimed: ‘Mind you, Staś, they are perfectly honourable people. The Baron who, as you know, is very absent-minded, is prepared to apologise to you…’
‘No apologies.’
Rzecki fell silent. He drank the tea and dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. After a long pause he said: ‘Of course, you will have considered the store… In the event of…’
‘No accident will befall me,’ Wokulski replied angrily.
Ignacy sat for another quarter-hour in silence. He did not like the tea, his head ached. He finished it, looked at his watch, then left his friend’s house, saying farewell: ‘Tomorrow we leave at half-past seven in the morning.’
‘Very well…’
When Ignacy had gone, Wokulski sat down at his desk, wrote a few lines on a piece of notepaper and put Rzecki’s address on the envelope. It seemed to him he could still hear the Baron’s unpleasant voice: ‘I am pleased, cousin, that your admirers have triumphed…I’m sorry it was at my expense, though…’ And wherever he looked, he saw Izabela’s beautiful face flushed with shame.
Unutterable rage was fuming within his heart. His hands were becoming like iron bars, his body taking on such strange rigidity that surely any bullet would rebound from it. The word ‘death’ crossed his mind and for a moment he smiled. He knew death does not attack the bold; it merely confronts them like a mad dog, and glares with green eyes, waiting for a muscle to twitch.
That night, as every night, the Baron was playing cards. Maruszewicz, who was also at the club, reminded him at midnight, then again at one and two o’clock, that he ought to go to bed as he was to get up at seven next morning. The absent-minded Baron answered: ‘Presently! Presently!’ but sat on until three, at which time one of his partners exclaimed: ‘Basta, Baron! Sleep a few hours, for your hands will tremble and you’ll miss your mark.’
These words, and even more his partners’ desertion of the table, sobered the Baron. He left the club, went home and told his valet Konstanty to wake him at seven.
‘Your excellency must have gone and done something silly again,’ muttered his servant, crossly undressing the Baron.
‘You booby!’ said the Baron, vexed, ‘do you expect me to explain it all to you? I’m to fight a duel, so there…Because I choose to. At nine o’clock I am to shoot some wretched bootmaker or barber…Do you forbid me, then?’
‘You can shoot the devil himself,’ Konstanty replied, ‘all I would like to know is—who is to pay off your promissory notes? And the rent? And the housekeeping money? Just because you have a matter to see to at the cemetery, the landlord will put the bailiffs in and I’m afraid I’ll starve to death…A fine business, and no mistake!’
‘Then be off with you,’ roared the Baron, seizing a gaiter and throwing it at the retreating valet. The gaiter struck the wall and almost brought down a bronze statuette of Sobieski.
Having settled with his faithful servant, the Baron went to bed and began pondering on his wretched situation: ‘Just my confounded luck to have a duel with a tradesman,’ he thought. ‘If I hit him, I’ll look like a hunter who goes out for a bear and gets a peasant’s cow instead. If he hits me, it will be as though a droshky driver had hit me with his whip. If we both miss…No, we are to shoot for first blood. Damn appearances—I’d almost have preferred to apologise to this jackanapes in a notary’s office, dressed up for the occasion in a frock-coat and white tie…Oh these damnable liberal times! My father would have had such an impudent scoundrel whipped by his dog-keepers, but I have to give him satisfaction, as if I were a dealer in cinnamon myself…If only this confounded social revolution would come and finish us or the liberals off!’
He began dozing and dreamed Wokulski had killed him. He saw two messengers