The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [242]
All this made him feel that the moment for a decisive battle between intellect and heart was approaching. His intellect attracted him to Geist, his heart to Warsaw. He felt that some day soon he would have to choose: either hard work which would lead to extraordinary fame, or a flaming passion which surely threatened to reduce him to ashes.
‘But what if both are illusions, like that coal shovel and the handkerchief that weighed a hundred pounds?’
He visited the hypnotist Palmieri again, and after paying the twenty francs for an interview, began questioning him: ‘So you say, sir, that it is impossible to hypnotise me?’
‘What do you mean—impossible?’ said Palmieri, vexed. ‘It is not possible immediately, since you are not a medium, sir. But I could make you one, if not within a few months, then within a few years.’
‘So Geist did not delude me,’ Wokulski thought. He added, aloud: ‘And could a woman hypnotise a man, Mr Palmieri?’
‘Not only a woman could, but so could a piece of wood, a door-knob, water—in a word, anything in which the hypnotist places his force. I can hypnotise my mediums with a pin: I can say to them ‘I am pouring my fluid into this pin, and you will fall asleep when you look at it.’ So much the easier, therefore, to transfer my power to a woman. Providing, of course, that the person hypnotised be a medium.’
‘And then I’d be as attached to this woman as your medium was to the coal-shovel?’ asked Wokulski.
‘Why, naturally,’ Palmieri replied, glancing at his watch.
Wokulski left him, and as he wandered about the streets, he thought: ‘As for Geist, I almost have proof he wasn’t deceiving me with hypnotism: there wasn’t time. But what of her?—I am not sure but that she didn’t bewitch me in this way. There was time, but—who made me her medium?’
The more he compared his love for Izabela with the feelings of most men for most women, the more unnatural it all seemed to him. How is it possible to fall in love with someone at first sight? Or how is it possible to be insane about a woman seen once in several months, and then only to perceive that she cares nothing for you?
‘Bah!’ he muttered, ‘infrequent meetings are precisely what gave her the nature of an ideal. Who knows but what I wouldn’t have been completely disillusioned if I’d known her better?’
He was surprised to have no news of Geist. ‘Can the learned chemist have made off with three hundred francs and won’t show himself again?’ he wondered. Then he was ashamed of such suspicions: ‘Perhaps he’s ill?’ he murmured. He took a horse-drawn cab and went to the address in the Charenton district, far outside the city walls. The road stopped by a walled fence: beyond it were visible the roof and upper windows of a house. Wokulski got out and approached an iron gate in the wall, fitted with a knocker. After knocking several times, the gate suddenly opened and Wokulski went into the yard. The house had one storey, and was very old: this was attested by its moss-covered walls, dusty windows, broken in places. In the centre of the façade was a door to which led some stone steps, very dilapidated. As the gate had already closed with a dull thud, and there was no doorman to be seen, Wokulski halted in the middle of the yard, surprised and troubled. Suddenly a head in a red cap appeared at the window of the first and only floor, and a familiar voice cried: ‘Is it you, Mr Suzin? Good-day!’
The head disappeared but the open window proved it had not been an illusion. Several minutes later, the centre door squeaked open and there stood Geist. He wore shabby blue trousers, wooden sabots and a grubby flannel shirt.
‘Congratulate me, Mr Suzin!’ said Geist, ‘I have sold the rights to my explosive to an Anglo-American firm, and appear to have done rather well. A hundred and fifty thousand francs cash, and twenty-five centimes for every