The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [404]
At the end of July, Henryk Szlangbaum celebrated his birthday as owner of the store and director of the trading company. Although he didn’t get ahead half as well as Staś did last year, all Wokulski’s friends and enemies gathered and drank the Szlangbaums’ health … until the windows rattled.
Oh, mankind! They’d go into the sewers for a full plate and a bottle, and I don’t know where — for a rouble.
Fie, fie! Today I was shown a newspaper, in which Baroness Krzeszowska was called one of the most eminent and benevolent of our ladies, for giving two hundred roubles to some orphanage. Clearly they’ve forgotten her court case against Mrs Stawska and those squabbles with her lodgers. Can it be that her husband has broken the old hag in?
Bad feeling against the Jews is still mounting. There are even rumours that Jews trap Christian children and bake them in matzos. My goodness, when I hear such tales, I rub my eyes and ask myself whether I’m tossing in a fever, and whether my youth was a dream? But what angers me most, is Dr Szuman’s relish at the ferment.
‘Serves the Kikes right,’ he says, ‘let them make a row, let them learn sense. They may be a race of genius, but they’re such scoundrels that you won’t break ’em in without using whip and spurs.’
‘But, doctor,’ I replied, for I had lost patience, ‘if the Jews are such scoundrels as you say, even spurs won’t help.’
‘Maybe spurs won’t improve them, but they’ll drive more sense into them, and teach them to hold hands tighter,’ he replied. ‘Once the Jews have solidarity …’
That doctor is an odd fellow. Honest he certainly is, and intelligent too: but his honesty doesn’t come from feelings, but from — how shall I say it? — from habit, perhaps: and his sense is of such a kind that it’s easier for him to mock and destroy a hundred things than build one. Sometimes it occurs to me, when I’m talking to him, that his soul is like a sheet of ice: it may reflect fire, but will never warm of its own accord.
Staś has left for Moscow, to settle his accounts with Suzin, I suspect. He has some half million roubles with him (who would have supposed anything like this two years ago?), but I cannot imagine what he will do with so much money.
But Staś always was eccentric, and went in for surprising people. Is he going to do it again? I am almost afraid he may …
Meanwhile Mraczewski has proposed to Mrs Stawska and, after a brief hesitation, she accepted. If they open a store in Warsaw as Mraczewski plans, I would go into the company and live with them. And, my goodness, I’d nurse Mraczewski’s children, though I used to think I would only carry out such an office with Staś’s children … Life is painfully hard.
Yesterday I gave five roubles for a mass for Prince Louis Napoleon. Only that, for perhaps he has not died, though everyone says so … If, on the other hand … I know nothing of theology, but it is always safer to make some good connections for him in the other world. For who knows? …
I really am poorly, although Szuman says everything is going well. He has forbidden me beer, coffee, wine, walking fast, getting vexed … All very well for him! I too could write out a prescription like that: but just you try and carry it out!
He talks to me as though he suspects I’m uneasy as to Staś’s fate. Comical of him! Isn’t Staś a grown man, and wasn’t I once parted from him for seven years? The years passed, Staś came back, and got into trouble again.
This time it will be the same: just as he suddenly disappeared, so he will suddenly return. And yet it is difficult to live in this world. Sometimes I ask myself whether there’s really any plan according to which all mankind is moving towards better things, or whether it isn’t all the work of chance,