The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [332]
But after walking a few hundred yards in the frost, he cooled down. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘what’s extraordinary about it? She must live among the people she is used to; and if she lives among them, she must listen to their foolish talk. Is it her fault that she is as beautiful as a goddess, and indeed is one, to everyone? Although … a taste for such company … Oh, how vile I am, always vile, vile!’
Whenever such doubts beset him like troublesome flies after a visit to Izabela, he hastened back to work. He checked accounts, learned English phrases, read new books. But when these didn’t help, he walked to Mrs Stawska’s, spent the whole evening in her apartment and, strangely enough, found, if not complete tranquillity then at least relief, in her company.
They talked of the most everyday things. Usually, she told him how business in the Miller store was steadily improving because people had learned that the store belonged mainly to Wokulski. Then she said that Helena was growing more and more well-mannered, and if she was ever naughty, then Grandmama frightened her by saying she’d tell Mr Wokulski, and the child stopped misbehaving at once. Then again she would mention Mr Rzecki, who sometimes called and was much liked by granny, because he told her many things about Mr Wokulski’s life. And that granny also liked Mr Wirski, who quite simply adored Mr Wokulski.
Wokulski looked at her in surprise. To begin with, it occurred to him that this was flattery, and he felt disagreeably. But Mrs Stawska said these things with so much innocent simplicity that he slowly began to divine in her the best of friends who, though she overestimated him, was nevertheless speaking without a trace of deception.
He also noticed that Mrs Stawska was never concerned about herself. When she finished in the store, she would think about Helena, or help her mother, or worry about the servant’s problems and those of many other people, mostly poor and unable to show their gratitude by anything. And when these were lacking, she would peep into the canary’s cage, to change its water or sprinkle grain.
‘The heart of an angel!’ thought Wokulski. One evening he said to her: ‘Do you know what strikes me when I look at you?’
She glanced at him in alarm.
‘That if you were to touch a badly hurt person, not only would the pain leave them, but surely their wounds would heal.’
‘You think me a witch?’ she asked, very troubled.
‘No, madam. I think the saints must have looked like you.’
‘Mr Wokulski is right,’ affirmed Mrs Misiewicz.
Mrs Stawska began laughing. ‘Oh, the saints — and me!’ she replied. ‘If anyone could look into my heart, he’d realise how much I deserve condemnation … But now it is all the same to me,’ she added, with despair in her voice.
Mrs Misiewicz imperceptibly crossed herself, but Wokulski did not notice. He was thinking of another woman.
Mrs Stawska could not describe her feelings for Wokulski. She had known him by sight for several years, he had even impressed her as a handsome man, but he never concerned her. Then Wokulski vanished from Warsaw, the news spread that he had gone to Bulgaria, and later that he had made a great fortune. He was much talked of, and Mrs Stawska began to grow interested in him as an object of public curiosity. When one of her acquaintance said of Wokulski: ‘That’s a man with diabolical energy,’ Mrs Stawska liked the phrase ‘diabolical energy’, and she made up her mind to observe Wokulski more closely.
With this purpose in mind she sometimes called at the store. A few times she did not find Wokulski there at all, once she saw him, but from the side, and once she exchanged a few words with him. Then he made a peculiar impression on her. She was struck by the contrast between the phrase ‘diabolical energy’ and his manner: he did not look in the least diabolical, rather he was calm and sorrowful. And she noticed one other