The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [245]
‘I know, now, by whom I am bewitched.’
He felt tears in his eyes, but controlled himself and they did not fall: ‘All of you poets have wasted my life … You have poisoned two generations,’ he whispered, ‘these are the results of sentimental views on love …’
He closed the book and hurled it into a corner, so that the pages fell apart. It bounced back from the wall, fell into the wash-stand then slithered with a mournful rustling to the floor. ‘Serves you right! That’s the place for you,’ Wokulski thought, ‘for who but you presented love to me as a holy mystery? Who taught me to despise ordinary women, and seek an unattainable ideal? Love is the joy of the world, the sun of life, a cheerful melody in the wilderness, but what did you make of it? A mournful altar, in front of which obsequies are sung over trampled human hearts!’
Then the question struck him: ‘If poetry has poisoned your life, who poisoned poetry? And why did Mickiewicz only yearn and despair, instead of laughing and rejoicing like the French street singers?
‘Because he, like I, loved a high-born lady who was to be the prize not of reason, labour, devotion and sacrifice even of genius but … of money and a title.
‘Poor martyr,’ Wokulski thought, ‘you gave of your finest to the nation, but what fault is it of yours that, in pouring out your own soul, you also poured out the sufferings with which it impregnated you? It is they who are guilty of your, my and our unhappiness.’
He rose and reverently picked up the scattered pages: ‘It is not enough that you were tortured by them, but are you to answer for their crimes as well? It is they who are guilty that your heart, instead of singing, groaned like a cracked bell.’
He lay down on the sofa and again thought: ‘What a strange country mine is, in which two entirely different races have for so long been living side by side: the aristocrats and the commoners. One claims to be a noble plant which has the right to drain dry the clay and manure, and the other either accedes to such claims, or else lacks the strength to protest against the injustice.
‘How did this all work out for the perpetuation of one class and the strangling in the embryo of every other! They believed so strongly in noble birth, that even the sons of artisans and dealers either bought coats of arms or pretended to be impoverished noble countrymen. No one had the courage to declare himself the child of his merits, and even I, fool that I am, spent several hundred roubles on the purchase of a noble patent.
‘Am I to go back there? What for? Here at least I have a nation living by all the talents with which man is endowed. Here the foremost places in society are not occupied by the mildew of dubious antiquity, but by essential forces which strive onwards — labour, intellect, will-power, creativity, knowledge, skill and beauty, and even sincere feelings. There, on the other hand, labour stands in the pillory, and depravity triumphs! He who makes a fortune is called a miser, a skinflint, a parvenu; he who wastes money is called generous, disinterested, open-handed … There, simplicity is eccentric, economy is shameful, artistry symbolised by shabby elbows. There, in seeking to acquire the denomination of a man, one must either have a title and money, or a talent for squeezing into drawing-rooms. Am I to go back there?’
He began to pace the room and count: ‘Geist is one, I am a second, Ochocki a third … We will find at least another two such, and after four or five years we will have exhausted the eight thousand experiments necessary to discover a metal lighter