The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [198]
And he actually knelt down before Staś and kissed his hand. The people present grew still more moved, lifted Staś and Leon up and vowed that each would give his life for such men as they.
Today, when I remember those goings-on, it sometimes seems like a dream. Certainly I never met such an enthusiast as Leon before or after.
Early in 1861, Staś resigned from Hopfer’s. He lived with me (in my room with a barred window and green curtains), dropped trade and at once began attending academic lectures as an auditor. His farewell to the shop was strange: I remember it because I was there myself. He embraced Hopfer, then went into the cellars to embrace Machalski, where he stayed a few minutes. Sitting in the diningroom, I heard a noise, the laughter of the customers and shop lads, but didn’t suspect a joke.
Suddenly (the opening leading into the cellar was in the same room) I beheld a pair of red hands emerging from the cellar. These hands clutched at the floor and were immediately followed by Staś’s head which appeared once and then again. The customers and lads were laughing.
‘Aha!’ one waiter exclaimed, ‘see how difficult it is to get out of a cellar without the steps? And here you are hoping to jump out of the shop and into the university at one go! If you are so clever, come on out!’
Staś extended his arms from below again, grabbed the edge of the opening and pulled himself half-way up. I thought he would burst a blood vessel.
‘Here he comes! Just look at him…He’s doing it!’ a second waiter cried.
Staś got one leg to the floor and in a moment was in the room. He was not angry, but he refused to shake hands with any of his colleagues, merely took his bag and went to the door.
‘Come now, aren’t you saying goodbye to the customers, Herr Doktor?’ Hopfer’s waiters shouted after him.
We walked along the street without uttering a word. Staś was biting his lips and it occurred to me that getting out of the cellar like that was a symbol of his life, which had led him to tearing up his roots from Hopfer’s shop and setting out into a wider world. A prophetic incident! For to this very day Staś always comes out on top. And God knows what such a man mightn’t do for his country if only the ladder were not moved away at every step he takes, and if he did not have to waste time and energy uprooting himself every time.
After moving into my room, he worked entire nights and days until sometimes I was quite cross with him. He rose before six and read. At ten he hurried to a lecture, then started reading again. At four he went out tutoring in various houses (mostly Jewish, where Szuman introduced him), and on coming home again he read and read until he went to bed, dead with fatigue, well after midnight.
He would have had a reasonable income from these lessons, had it not been for his father, who visited him from time to time, and only altered in that he wore a snuff-coloured frock-coat instead of the sand-coloured one, and wrapped his documents up in a blue handkerchief. Otherwise he remained the same as when I first met him. He would sit at his son’s table and put his papers on his knees and say in a low querulous voice: ‘Books…nothing but books! Here you are, wasting money on study, while I haven’t enough for the law-suit. Even if you graduate from two universities, you won’t get out of your present wretchedness until we get grandfather’s estate back. Only then will people admit you’re a gentleman, equal to others. And then relatives will turn up …’
Staś spent his spare time experimenting with balloons. He got a large demijohn and prepared some kind of gas in it, using vitriol (I don’t remember what kind of gas it was) and filled a balloon — not a very large one, admittedly, but very artfully constructed. There was a machine with a propeller under it…And it actually flew up to the ceiling, then burst by hitting the wall. Thereupon Staś tinkered with it, repaired it, filled the demijohn with all sorts of messes, and tried again, interminably. Once the demijohn burst and the vitriol nearly burned out his