The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [417]
Towards nine in the morning he heard Szlangbaum liberate Gutmorgen, and then start knocking on his door. However, he did not reply, and when Kazimierz arrived, Rzecki told him never to let Szlangbaum in. ‘I’m moving out of here,’ he said, ‘at New Year, very likely. Even if I have to live in an attic or rent a hotel room … They made me out a thief … Staś entrusted thousands of roubles to me, and that scoundrel fears for his shoddy merchandise …’
By noon he had written two letters: one to Mrs Stawska, suggesting she move to Warsaw and enter business with him; the second to Lisiecki, inquiring whether he wouldn’t like to come back and accept a position in the new store. As he wrote and reread the letters a malicious smile never left his face. ‘I can imagine Szlangbaum’s expression,’ he thought, ‘when we open a store in competition right under his very nose … He he he! He gave them orders to watch me! Serve me right for letting that trickster gain power over me … He he he!’
At this moment he knocked the pen with his sleeve and it fell to the floor. Rzecki leaned over to pick it up, and suddenly felt a strange pain in his chest, as if someone had pierced his lungs with a thin knife. For a moment everything went dark and he felt slightly faint: so, without picking up the pen, he rose from the chair and lay down on the chaise-longue. ‘Szlangbaum will be bankrupt within a few years, or I’m a booby,’ he thought, ‘I’m an old fool … I bothered my head with the Bonapartes and the rest of Europe, and meanwhile an old-clothesman grew up under my nose, who told them to watch me as a thief … Well, at least I’ve gained experience: enough for a lifetime … Now you can all stop calling me a romantic and a dreamer.’
Something obstructed his left lung. ‘Asthma?’ he muttered. ‘I must cure myself properly … Otherwise I’ll be a complete invalid in five or six years … Ah, if only I’d paid attention ten years ago …’
He closed his eyes, and it seemed to him he could see his whole life, from the present moment back to his childhood, unfolded like a panorama along which he was moving with a curiously tranquil motion … He was merely struck by the fact that each picture, as it passed, was obliterated in his mind so irrevocably that he could not possibly recall what he had been looking at a moment earlier. Here was the dinner in the Hotel Europe, on the occasion of opening the new store … Here the old store and Miss Łęcka talking in it to Mraczewski … Here was his room with the barred window, into which Wokulski had just that moment entered on his return from Bulgaria …
‘Just a moment … What did I see before that?’ he thought.
It was Hopfer’s wine-cellar, where he had met Wokulski. And here was the battlefield, where bluish smoke was rising above lines of blue and white uniforms … And here was old Mincel in his armchair, pulling the strings of the Cossack in the window …
‘Did I really see all this, or was it only a dream? Merciful God …’ he whispered.
Now it seemed to him he was a little boy and that, while his father was talking about the Emperor Napoleon to Mr Raczek, he himself had climbed into the attic and was looking through the window at the Vistula river, over towards Praga. But gradually the image of the city faded before his eyes, and there remained only the window. First it was as large as a plate, then the size of a saucer, then it diminished to the size of a silver coin …
At the same time he was seized on all sides by oblivion and darkness, or rather by a profound blackness, in which only that window gleamed, like a star of ever-diminishing brightness.
Finally that last star went out, too.
Perhaps he saw it again, but never on earth.
Towards two that afternoon Ignacy’s servant Kazimierz came in with a basket and plates. He laid the table noisily, and seeing that his master did not wake up, cried: ‘Please, sir, your dinner will get cold …’
As Ignacy still didn’t stir, Kazimierz approached the chaise-longue and said: ‘If you please, sir …’
Suddenly he drew back, ran into the passage and