The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [370]
Once, he envisioned himself lying on a high catafalque, and he began thinking about death. It seemed to him he must inescapably die of paralysis of the heart; but this neither alarmed nor consoled him. Sometimes his legs hurt from the constant sitting in the armchair, and then he thought that death was coming and he calculated with indifferent wonder how fast the pain would reach his heart. These observations gave him a sort of temporary pleasure, but they soon dissolved into apathy again.
He told the servant not to let anyone in; nevertheless, Dr Szuman visited him a few times. During the first visit, he took his pulse and told him to show his tongue.
‘In English?’ asked Wokulski, but at once recollected himself and took his hand away. Szuman gazed sharply into his eyes. ‘You are unwell,’ he said, ‘what ails you?’
‘Nothing. Have you gone back to practising medicine?’
‘I should say so!’ Szuman exclaimed, ‘and the first cure I made was myself; I healed myself of dreaming.’
‘Very nice,’ Wokulski replied. ‘Rzecki mentioned something of your cure to me.’
‘Rzecki is an imbecile … an old Romantic. That’s a dying breed! Anyone who wants to live must look at the world soberly. Pay attention, and close each eye in turn … When I tell you … the left … the right … Cross your legs.’
‘What are you doing, my dear fellow?’ Wokulski inquired.
‘Examining you.’
‘Oh? And you hope to find something?’
‘I expect so.’
‘And then?’
‘I shall cure you.’
‘Of dreaming?’
‘No, of neurasthenia.’
Wokulski smiled and said after a moment: ‘Can you take out a man’s brain and provide him with another in its place?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, in that case let me alone.’
‘I can give you other desires.’
‘I already have them. I should like to sleep under the earth, as deep as … the well in the Zasław castle. And also I’d like them to heap me with ruins, me and my fortune, and even any trace of the fact that I ever existed. These are my desires, the fruit of all the ones that went before.’
‘Romanticism!’ exclaimed Szuman, patting him on the shoulder, ‘but that too will pass.’
Wokulski made no reply. He was angry with himself for his own last phrase, and was surprised: whence had that sudden frankness come? Why had he said that? Why had he exposed his own wounds, like some shameless beggar?
After the doctor had gone, he observed that something within him had changed; against the background of his previous apathy, some sort of feeling had appeared. It was at first a nameless ache, very small, but which rapidly increased and reached its medium. To begin with, it might have been compared to the delicate pricking of a pin, but later to a sort of obstruction in the heart, no bigger than a hazelnut. He already regretted the apathy, when Feuchtersleben’s phrase crossed his mind: ‘I was glad of my pain, for it seemed to me I could see within myself that fruitful struggle which created and still creates everything in this world, where infinite forces are everlastingly in conflict.’
‘All the same, what can it be?’ he asked himself, feeling that in his soul the place of apathy was being taken by dull pain. At once he replied: ‘Yes, it is the awakening of consciousness.’
Slowly, in his mind, an image which seemed hitherto to have been veiled in mist began to appear. Wokulski watched it curiously, and saw — the shape of a woman in a man’s embraces. This image at first had the pale gleam of phosphorescence, then it grew pink — yellow — greenish — finally as black as velvet. Then it disappeared for a few moments and again began appearing by turn in all the colours, starting with phosphorescence and ending in black. At the same time the pain intensified. ‘I suffer, therefore I am,’ thought Wokulski, and he smiled.
Thus several days passed in watching that image change colour and in pain which varied in