The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [389]
‘I know,’ Wokulski replied.
‘So just try to work for science amidst such people. You will starve to death or become an idiot. But if you can dance, play an instrument, appear in amateur theatricals and — above all — amuse women, then you will forge a career for yourself. They’ll call you eminent at once, and you’ll gain a position in which your income will be ten times the value of your work. Parties and women, women and parties! But as I am not a footman to wear myself out at parties, and I regard women as very useful for bearing children, so I am getting away, even if I only go to Zurich.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Geist?’ asked Wokulski.
Ochocki reflected. ‘I’d need hundreds of thousands of roubles there, which I don’t have,’ he replied. ‘Besides, even if I had, I’d first of all have to be convinced as to what that invention really is. A decrease in specific gravities looks like a fairy-tale to me.’
‘Yet I showed you that metal,’ said Wokulski.
‘So you did … Please let me see it again.’
A sickly flush appeared and rapidly disappeared on Wokulski’s face. ‘I don’t have it any longer,’ he said in a stifled voice.
‘What happened to it?’ Ochocki asked in surprise.
‘Never mind … You may suppose it fell down a drain somewhere … But would you go to Geist if, for example, you had the money?’
‘Certainly, but primarily to check on the facts. Forgive me, but from what I know of chemistry, it is impossible to believe in a theory of decreasing specific gravity beyond certain limits.’
Both fell silent, and soon Ochocki left.
Ochocki’s visit awoke a new line of thought in Wokulski. He felt the desire and even the urge to renew his chemical experiments, and that same day he hurried into town to buy a retort, pipes and test-tubes as well as various chemicals. Still influenced by this thought, he went boldly through the streets, even got into a droshky: he looked at people with indifference, and felt no vexation on seeing that some stared at him curiously, others didn’t recognise him, while yet others smiled maliciously at the sight of him.
But in the glass shop, and still more in the apothecary’s, he realised how much his vitality had ebbed, along with his independence — if all that was needed was a conversation with Ochocki to remind him of chemistry which he had not interested himself in for some years. ‘Never mind,’ he thought, ‘as long as it fills my time.’
Next day he bought a precision balance and some complex instruments, and set to work like a schoolboy at the commencement of his studies. First he obtained hydrogen, which reminded him of university days, when hydrogen had been made in a flask wrapped in a towel, using soot. What happy times they’d been! Then he recalled the balloons he had invented, and Geist, who held that the chemistry of hydrogen combines would change the history of mankind.
‘Suppose a man like me were to hit upon the metal Geist is looking for?’ he said to himself. ‘Geist claims that the discovery will depend on testing several thousand combinations: in other words, it’s a lottery, and I’m lucky … But if I discovered the metal, what would Izabela say?’
Rage boiled up within him at the memory. ‘Ah,’ he murmured, ‘I should like to be famous and powerful, so I could tell her how much I despise her.’
Then it occurred to him that contempt is not manifested in rage, nor yet in the desire to humiliate someone, and he set to work again. The elementary experiments with hydrogen gave him the most pleasure, so he repeated them most often.
One day he made a glass harmonica and played so loudly upon it that the owner of the house called next day to inquire with the utmost civility whether he would mind leaving the apartment at the end of the quarter.
‘Have you another tenant?’ asked Wokulski.
‘The fact is … It’s like this … I very nearly have,