The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [360]
‘I should have learned about women, not through the spectacles of Mickiewicz or Krasiński or Słowacki’s poetry, but through statistics, which teach us that every angel is one-tenth a prostitute; well, and if I’d been disillusioned, at least it would have been pleasant…’
At this moment, there was a roaring noise of some sort; water was being poured into a boiler or tank. Wokulski stopped. It seemed to him that in this long-drawn and melancholy sound he could hear an entire orchestra, playing the Invocation from Robert le Diable: ‘You who repose beneath the cold clay…’ Laughter, weeping, sorrow, squeaks and weird cries all resounded together, and above them rose a powerful voice full of hopeless grief.
He could have sworn he heard an orchestra, and again he had a hallucination. He seemed to be in a cemetery, among open graves from which hideous shadows were flitting out. After a moment, each shadow became a beautiful woman, among whom Izabela cautiously moved, beckoning to him with her hand and gaze…He was overwhelmed with such terror that he crossed himself, and the phantoms disappeared. ‘Enough,’ he thought, ‘I shall go out of my mind here…’
And he decided to forget Izabela.
It was already two at night. A lamp with a green shade was burning in the telegraph office, and the tapping of the apparatus could be heard. A man was walking past the station, he touched his cap: ‘When does the train leave for Warsaw?’ Wokulski asked him.
‘At five o’clock, sir,’ the man replied, making as if to kiss his hand. ‘If you please, sir, I’m…’
‘Not until five!’ Wokulski echoed. ‘Horses, perhaps…What time does the next train from Warsaw get in?’
‘In forty-five minutes. If you please, sir…’
‘Three-quarters of an hour…’ Wokulski murmured. ‘Quarters.…Quarters…’ he repeated, sensing that he was not articulating the letter ‘r’ properly. He turned away from the unknown man and walked by the flower-beds, in the direction of Warsaw. The man watched him, shook his head and disappeared into the darkness.
‘Quarters…Quarters…’ Wokulski muttered. ‘Is my tongue refusing to function? What an extraordinary muddle; I studied how to win Izabela, but have learned how to lose her. Or Geist. He produced a great invention, and entrusted me with a sacred deposit, so that Mr Starski might have one more reason for researches…She has deprived me of everything, even my last hope…If I were asked at this moment whether I really knew Geist, or saw his strange metal, I wouldn’t be able to reply, and I don’t even know whether it wasn’t all an illusion. Oh, if only I could stop thinking about her…For a few minutes…
‘Well, I won’t think about her…’
The night was starry, the fields dark, signal lamps glowed at great distances along the track. Walking along in a ditch, Wokulski tripped over a large stone and at that moment there stood before his eyes the ruins of the castle at Zasław, the stone on which Izabela had been seated, and her tears. But this time a look of deceit gleamed behind her tears.
‘I won’t think about her…I’ll go to Geist, I’ll work from six in the morning to eleven at night, I shall have to observe every change of pressure, temperature, current…It won’t leave me a spare moment.’
He had the impression that someone was coming after him. He turned around, but saw nothing. However, he noticed that his left eye saw less well than the right, and this began to irritate him immeasurably. He wanted to go back to people, but felt he wouldn’t be able to endure the sight of them. Merely thinking was a torture, painful. ‘I never knew how much a man’s own soul can weigh,’ he muttered. ‘Ah, if only I could stop thinking…’
Far away in the east, a glimmer showed and the thin sickle of the moon appeared, enveloping the landscape in an indescribably sombre light. And suddenly another vision appeared to Wokulski. He was in a silent and deserted forest; the pine trunks were slanting in a peculiar manner, not a bird uttered,