The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [196]
So we sat and talked until one in the morning. Machalski stayed the night with me, and at six the next morning he hurried off to Lesisz. ‘What will you do after dinner?’ I asked him.
‘After dinner I’ll drop in at Fukier’s cellars, then I’ll come back for the night,’ he replied.
He stayed a week in Warsaw. Nights he spent at my place, and the days in wine-cellars. ‘I’d hang myself,’ he said, ‘if I had to wander about outdoors for a week or more. The crowds, the heat, the dust…Maybe pigs can bear it, but not people.’
He seemed to me to be exaggerating. For although I, too, prefer the shop to Krakowskie Przedmieście, yet the shop is not a wine-cellar. The fellow must have grown eccentric in his wine-cellaring.
Of course, what did Machalski and I talk of, if not old times and Staś? In this manner, the story of Staś’s youth came before me as if it were yesterday.
I recollect (it was in 1857 or ’58) that I walked once into Hopfer’s, where Machalski was working. ‘Where’s Jan?’ I asked the lad.
‘In the cellar.’ So I went down into the cellar. Behold, there was Jan by the light of a tallow candle, siphoning wine from a barrel into bottles, and in the recess I saw two shadows lurking; a grey-haired old man and a young lad with cropped hair and the countenance of a brigand. They were Staś Wokulski and his father.
I sat down quietly (Machalski didn’t like to be interrupted when drawing wine) and the grey-haired old man in a sand-coloured frock-coat was going on in a querulous voice to the lad: ‘Why spend your money on books? Give it to me, because if I have to drop the law-suit, then everything will be wasted. Books won’t extricate you from the humiliation you are now in, only the law-suit can do that. When I win and when we get back our estate, which grandfather left us, then people will remember that the Wokulskis are old-established gentlefolk and relatives will turn up…Last month you spent twenty zloty on books, yet that was just the amount I needed for a lawyer…Books, nothing but books! As long as you work in a shop they will spurn you, even if you are as wise as Solomon and although you are a gentleman and your grandfather on your mother’s side was a chancellor. But when I win that law-suit, when we move into the country …’
‘Let’s go away,’ the lad muttered, glancing sideways at me.
Obedient as a child, the old man wrapped his papers up in a red kerchief and went out with his son, who had to help him up the stairs.
‘Who were those simpletons?’ I asked Machalski, who had just finished his work and sat down on a stool: ‘Ah,’ he made a gesture, ‘the old man isn’t all there in the head, but the lad is bright. His name is Stanisław Wokulski. A bright rascal!’
‘What can he do?’ I asked.
Machalski snuffed the candle, poured me a glass of wine and said: ‘He’s been with us four years. Not much use in the shop or cellar, though…But as a mechanic! He constructed a sort of machine that pumps water, and then pours it on a wheel which works the pump. A machine like that could go on pumping until Judgement Day, but something went wrong, so it only worked fifteen minutes. It was up there in the dining-room and attracted customers for Hopfer: but six months ago it broke.’
‘So that’s the kind of lad he is,’ said I.
‘Well, not quite,’ Machalski replied, ‘there was a professor from the Technical College here, he had a look at the pump and said it was good for nothing, but that the lad was bright and ought to study. From that day on we’ve had pandemonium in the place. Wokulski has grown conceited, mumbles at customers, by day he looks half asleep but for all that he studies nights and buys books. On the other hand his father would sooner spend the money on a law-suit over some estate or other left by their grandfather. You heard what he said…’
‘What does he hope to achieve by this studying?’ I said.
‘He says he’ll go to Kiev, to the University. Ha, let him!’ Machalski declared, ‘perhaps for once it will make a man of a shop-clerk. I don’t interfere with him, I don’t make him work: when he’s in the cellar, he can read if he likes.