The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [292]
I have visited Mrs Stawska often since meeting her. Not every day. Sometimes once in a few days, though sometimes twice on the same day. After all, I was responsible for the house, that’s one thing. Then I had to tell Mrs Stawska I’d written to Wokulski with regard to finding her husband. Furthermore, I had to call on her with the news that Wokulski hadn’t found out anything definite. Then I visited her to study Maruszewicz’s habits through the windows of her apartment, as he lodges in the opposite wing. Then too, I was concerned with investigating Baroness Krzeszowska and her relations with the students who live upstairs, and whom she was everlastingly complaining of.
An outsider might think I visited Mrs Stawska too often. However, after mature consideration, I decided I didn’t visit her often enough. After all, I had an excellent post in her apartment for observing the entire building, and in addition I was cordially made welcome. Whenever I called, Mrs Misiewicz (the respectable mother of Mrs Helena) would greet me with open arms, little Helena would climb into my lap and Mrs Stawska herself livened up, and said that during the hours I spent in their apartment, she forgot her troubles. So how could I help visiting them often since they welcomed me so? Upon my word, I did not visit them enough, I think, and had I greater chivalrous leanings I should have sat there from morning till night. Even if Mrs Stawska were to dress in my presence. What harm would it have done?
During these visits I made several important observations. First, those students on the third-floor front were really restless spirits. They sang and they shouted until two in the morning, sometimes they even howled and, all in all, tried to use the most inhuman sounds possible. During the day, if only one was home — and there was always someone — whenever Baroness Krzeszowska put her head out of the window (she did so a dozen or more times a day), someone would always try to pour slops down on her.
I must even say that a sort of game developed between her and the students overhead, which consisted of her peeping out of the window, then trying to draw her head back in again as quick as she could, while they tried to pour slops down as often and as copiously as possible.
Then, in the evenings, these young men who had no one overhead to soak them with slops, would call the washerwomen and servant-girls of the entire building into their room. Shrieks and spasms of weeping could be heard in the Baroness’s apartment.
My second observation related to Maruszewicz, who lived almost vis-à-vis Mrs Stawska. This man followed a very peculiar way of life, marked by unusual regularity. He failed to pay his rent regularly, regularly every few weeks they removed a quantity of objects from his apartment: statues, mirrors, carpets, clocks. But what was more interesting — just as regularly they brought in new mirrors, new carpets, new clocks and statues to his apartment … After each removal, Mr Maruszewicz would appear for the next few days at one of his windows. He shaved at it, combed his hair, waxed his moustache, even dressed in it, casting very ambiguous looks in the direction of Mrs Stawska’s windows. But when his apartment filled again with new articles of luxury and comfort, then Mr Maruszewicz drew the blinds again. Then (incredible though it sounds!) lights burned day and night in his apartment, and the voices of many men, and sometimes even of women, could be heard. But what concern of mine is another man’s business?
One day early in November, Staś said to me: ‘Apparently you’re visiting Mrs Stawska?’
I grew quite warm. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I exclaimed, ‘what do you mean?’
‘Nothing at all,’ he replied,