The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [47]
He stopped half-way along the road and looked at the district between Nowy Zjazd and Tamka Street, stretching out at his feet. He was struck by its resemblance to a ladder, one side formed by Dobra Street, the other by a line from Gabarska to Topiel, with several alleys across, forming rungs. This ladder leads nowhere. It’s a sick place, a wild place. And he thought bitterly that this area of riverside earth, strewn with the refuse of the whole city, had given birth to nothing but two-storey houses coloured chocolate and bright yellow, dark green and orange. To nothing but black and white fences separating empty spaces, in which a several-storey apartment house rose here and there like a pine tree spared in a forest laid waste by the axe and uneasy at its own solitude.
‘Nothing, nothing…’ he repeated, wandering through the alleys with their shacks sunk below street level, roofs overgrown with moss, buildings with shutters and doors nailed shut, with tumbledown walls, windows patched with paper or stuffed with rags. He walked along looking through dirty window-panes into dwellings, and absorbed the sight of cupboards without doors, chairs with only three legs, sofas with torn seats, clocks with one hand and cracked faces. He walked along and silently laughed to himself to see labourers interminably waiting for work, craftsmen employed only at patching old clothes, women whose entire property was a basket of stale cakes—and to see ragged men, starving children and unusually dirty women.
‘This is a microcosm of Poland,’ he thought, ‘where everything tends to make people wretched and to extinguish them. Some perish through poverty, others through extravagance. Work is taken from other people’s mouths to feed the useless; charity breeds insolent loafers, while poverty is unable to acquire tools and is beseiged by perpetually hungry children, whose greatest virtue is to die a premature death. Individuals with initiative are of no use here, for everything conspires to chain initiative and waste it in a vain struggle—for nothing.’
Then his own story rose up before him in broad outline. As a child he had yearned for knowledge—they had put him to work in a shop and restaurant. As a clerk he had been killing himself with night work—everyone mocked him, from the kitchen-hands to the intelligentsia getting drunk in the shop. When he finally reached the university—they tormented him with the dishes he had recently served up to customers.
He only breathed freely when he reached Siberia. There he had been able to work, had gained the recognition and friendship of Czerski, Czekanowski, Dybowski. He returned to Poland almost a scholar, but when he sought employment in that field, he had been laughed at and scorned and sent into trade… ‘A good living, in times like these!’
So he had gone back to trade, but then people exclaimed he had sold himself and was living on his wife, on the Mincels’ work.
It had so happened that after a few years his wife died, leaving him a quite sizeable fortune. After burying her, Wokulski withdrew somewhat from the store and again took to his books. And perhaps the haberdashery merchant might have become a good natural scientist, had he not been once to the theatre and seen Izabela there. She was sitting in a box, with her father and Flora, wearing a white gown. She was looking not at the stage, which was holding the attention of everyone else, but at somewhere before her, who knows where or at what? Was she, perhaps, thinking of Apollo?…
Wokulski gazed at her all the time. She made a peculiar impression upon him. It seemed he had seen her before, and knew her well. He gazed still more intently into her dreaming eyes and recalled,