The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [243]
‘Well, under the circumstances you’ll surely abandon your metals,’ said Wokulski, smiling.
Geist eyed him with good-natured contempt. ‘These conditions,’ he replied, ‘have altered my situation so much that I need not concern myself for the next few years with a wealthy partner. But as for the metals, I am just now working on them, look…’
He opened a door to the right of the wing. Wokulski saw a large square room, very cold. In the centre stood a huge cylinder, like a barrel: its metal sides were a yard thick and held in four places by powerful hoops. Various pieces of apparatus were attached to the bottom: one looked like a safety valve through which a small cloud of steam emerged from time to time and quickly evaporated, the other was reminiscent of a manometer with its hand moving.
‘A steam boiler?’ Wokulski asked. ‘Why such thick sides?’
‘Touch it,’ said Geist.
Wokulski did so, and exclaimed with pain. Blisters rose on his fingers, but they were from cold, not heat. The vat was terribly cold, and the cold could be felt throughout the room.
‘Six hundred atmospheres of internal pressure,’ Geist added, not noticing Wokulski’s mishap.
The latter started on hearing this figure. ‘A volcano!’ he murmured.
‘That is why I urged you to work here,’ Geist replied, ‘As you can see, an accident is easily come by…Let us go upstairs.’
‘You leave the vat unattended?’ Wokulski asked.
‘Oh, a nurse-maid isn’t required for this work: everything functions by itself and there can be no surprises.’
Upstairs they found themselves in a large room with four windows. Its furniture consisted mainly of tables scattered with retorts, bowls and pipes of glass, porcelain and even lead or brass. A dozen or so artillery shells lay on the floor and in corners, including several exploded ones. Stone or brass bowls full of coloured liquids stood by the windows: a bench along one wall carried a huge electric pile. Not until he turned around did Wokulski notice an iron safe bricked into the wall near the door, a bed covered with a worn quilt from which dirty padding was emerging, a desk with papers by a window and an armchair, leather-covered but torn and shabby, by it.
Wokulski looked at the old man, like the poorest of labourers in his wooden sabots, then at the equipment, from which poverty stared out, and he thought that nevertheless this man might acquire millions for his inventions. But he had renounced them for the good of some future, better humankind…Geist at this moment reminded him of Moses leading an unborn generation into the Promised Land.
But the old chemist did not guess Wokulski’s thoughts this time: he gazed gloomily at him and said, ‘Well, Mr Suzin, a sombre place, sombre labour. I have been living forty years like this. Several millions have already gone into these pieces of apparatus, and perhaps that is why their owner does not enjoy himself, has no servants and sometimes nothing to eat … It is no occupation for you,’ he added with a gesture.
‘You are wrong, professor,’ Wokulski replied, ‘and besides, the grave is certainly no more cheerful.’
‘What do you mean — “the grave”? … Rubbish, sentimental rubbish,’ Geist muttered. ‘There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enable us to be chemists, others only chemical substances. Intellect consists of taking advantage of opportunities which arise, not of wasting time on nonsense, but in doing something.’
‘I understand that,’ Wokulski replied, ‘but … forgive me, sir, your discoveries are so novel.’
‘I understand, too,’ Geist interrupted, ‘my discoveries are so novel that … you regard them as trickery! In this respect the members of the Academy are no wiser than you, so you’re in good company … Aha! Would you like to see my metals again, to test them? Very well …’
He hurried to the iron safe, opened it in a very complicated way and began bringing out, one after another, the blocks of metal heavier than platinum, lighter than water, and transparent … Wokulski examined them, weighed, heated, hit them, let electric