The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [161]
‘It looks as if the audience is going to be very lively,’ muttered the unhappy Ignacy with a pallid smile, taking his seat in the front row.
At first he gazed fixedly at the right-hand hole in the curtain, vowing he would not remove his eyes from it. However, a few minutes later his agitation cooled down, and he even plucked up enough courage to begin looking around. The auditorium looked rather small and dirty, and it was not until he began pondering over the reasons for this, that he realised he had last been in the theatre more or less sixteen years ago, to see Dobrski in Halka.
Meanwhile the auditorium was filling, and the sight of pretty women taking their places in the boxes completely emboldened Ignacy. The old clerk even brought out a small pair of opera-glasses and began gazing at their countenances: whereupon he made the sad discovery that he too was being looked at from the amphitheatre, from the stalls behind and even from the boxes…When he transferred his psychic talents from eye to ear, he caught phrases flying over his head like so many wasps: ‘Who on earth is that eccentric?’
‘Someone up from the provinces…’
‘But where in the world did he acquire that frock-coat?’
‘And just look at the trinkets on his watch-chain! How disgraceful!’
‘Whoever does his hair like that nowadays?’
Ignacy very nearly left his album and top-hat and fled bareheaded from the theatre. Fortunately he caught sight in the eighth row of a piemaker of his acquaintance, who left his seat in response to a bow from Ignacy and approached the front row.
‘For goodness’ sake, Mr Pifke,’ he whispered, drenched in sweat, ‘take my place and let me have yours…’
‘With pleasure, I’m sure,’ the red-faced pie-maker replied loudly, ‘what, don’t you like it? A splendid seat…’
‘Yes, it’s excellent, but I prefer being further back. It’s so hot…’
‘It’s the same back there, but I’ll change with you. What’s that packet you have?’
Only now did Rzecki recollect his duty: ‘Look, my dear Mr Pifke, an admirer of this…this Rossi…’
‘Bah, who isn’t an admirer of Rossi?’ Pifke replied, ‘I have the book of words to Macbeth, would you care for it?’
‘Certainly…but this admirer, you see, bought an expensive album from us and asked me to hand it to Rossi after the third act.’
‘I’ll do it with pleasure,’ the stout Pifke exclaimed, squeezing himself into Rzecki’s seat.
Ignacy passed a few more disagreeable moments. He had to extricate himself from the front row of the stalls, where dandies eyed his frock-coat and tie and his velveteen waistcoat with ironical smiles. Then he had to get into the eighth row of the stalls where, admittedly, they looked at his costume without any irony, but where he had to press the knees of seated ladies.
‘A thousand pardons,’ he said, embarrassed, ‘but it’s so tight…’
‘No need to use such expressions,’ one of the ladies replied, in whose rather painted eyes Ignacy observed quite the opposite of vexation for his squeezing. He was so embarrassed he would willingly have gone to confession, if only he could purify his soul of the stains left by those squeezes.
Finally he found his place and breathed again. Here at least no one paid any attention to him, partly because the theatre was already full and the performance was beginning.
The acting at first did not interest him, so he looked around the auditorium and caught sight of Wokulski. He was in the fourth row and was not gazing at Rossi at all, but at a box occupied by Izabela, Tomasz and the Countess. Rzecki had seen hypnotised people a few times in his life and he thought that Wokulski looked like a man hypnotised by that box. He was sitting there motionless, like a man asleep with his eyes wide open.
What could