The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [240]
Wokulski listened attentively, Suzin sighed again and went on: ‘And you confer with magicians (faugh! the powers of darkness…) though there, I assure you, you won’t make a penny-piece, and may offend the Almighty…It’s not decent! The worst of it is you think no one else knows what is troubling you. Yet everyone knows you are undergoing some kind of moral crisis—except that one person thinks you’re trying to acquire forged currency, and another suspects you’d gladly go into bankruptcy, if you haven’t already.’
‘Do you think this?’ asked Wokulski.
‘Ah! Stanisław Piotrowicz, it is not right of you to call me a fool. You think I don’t know that you’re preoccupied with a woman…Well, a woman can be a tasty dish, and sometimes it so happens that a woman can turn the head of some quite solid man. Enjoy yourself, therefore, when you have money. But I’ll tell you one thing, Stanisław Piotrowicz—shall I?’
‘Please do.’
‘He who asks for a shave must not be angry if he gets scratched. Let me tell you a parable, you idiot. There is some miraculous water in France that cures all sicknesses (I forget its name). So listen—some people go there on hands and knees and hardly dare look: but others unceremoniously drink the water and clean their teeth in it. Ah, Stanisław Piotrovich, you don’t know how those who coarsely drink mock the ones who pray. Consider, therefore, whether you are not one of them, and if you are—then spit on everything. But what’s the matter? Does it hurt? Of course…Well, try more wine.’
‘Have you heard anything about her?’ Wokulski asked dully.
‘I swear I have heard nothing out of the ordinary,’ Suzin replied, striking himself on the chest. ‘A tradesman needs clerks, and a woman needs men to kneel before her, if only to conceal the bold man who refuses to kneel. It’s very natural. But don’t you, Stanisław Piotrowicz, go against the herd—or, if you must, then hold your head high. Half a million roubles capital is not to be sneezed at: people ought not to laugh at such a man.’
Wokulski rose and stretched himself like a man on whom an operation with red-hot irons had just been performed. ‘It may be so, or it may not…’ he thought, ‘but if it is, then I’d give a part of my fortune to any happy admirer for curing me.’
He went back to his room and began for the first time to run over in his mind, quite calmly, all Izabela’s admirers whom he had seen with her, or even heard of. He recollected significant conversations, melting looks, strange implications, all Mrs Meliton’s reports, all the gossip about Izabela circulating amidst her admiring public. Finally he sighed deeply: it seemed to him he had found a thread to lead him out of the labyrinth. ‘It will lead me into Geist’s workshop, surely,’ he thought, feeling that the first seeds of contempt had fallen into his heart.
‘She has the right, she has every right!…’ he muttered, laughing. ‘But what a choice, or perhaps even choices…Ah, what a vile creature I am; and Geist considers me a human being…’
After Suzin’s departure, Wokulski reread a letter from Rzecki, handed him that day. The old clerk wrote little about business, but a great deal about Mrs Stawska, the unhappy but beautiful woman whose husband had disappeared. ‘I will be for ever in your debt,’ wrote Rzecki, ‘if you can provide definitive evidence whether Ludwik Stawski is dead or alive.’ There followed a list of dates and localities in which the missing man had been seen since leaving Warsaw.
‘Stawska?…Stawska?…’ Wokulski thought, ‘ah, yes, I know…She’s that pretty woman with the little girl, who lives in my apartment house. What a strange coincidence: perhaps I bought the Łęcki house in order to make the acquaintance of this other woman? She means nothing to me as long as I stay here, but why not help her, since Rzecki asks me to? Excellent! Now I’ll have a reason for giving the Baroness a present, as Suzin so firmly suggested…’
He took the Baroness’s address and drove to Saint-Germain. In the wing of the house she lived in was an old curiosity shop. Talking to the porter, Wokulski involuntarily