The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [52]
‘Thirty thousand roubles means as much as sixty small workshops or stores, which whole families could live on. And am I to destroy their existence, suck the human souls out of them and drive them to this garbage heap?
‘Very well—but if it were not for her, would I have this fortune now? Who knows what would have become of me and this money had it not been for her? Perhaps it is precisely because of her that the money will acquire creative properties; maybe at least a dozen families will benefit by it.’
Wokulski turned and suddenly caught sight of his own shadow on the ground. Then he recalled that his shadow went before, after or beside him always and everywhere, just as the thought of this woman accompanied him always and everywhere, awake or dreaming, interfused with all his aims, plans and acts.
‘I can’t give her up,’ he whispered, clasping his hands together as if explaining to someone.
He rose from the planks and went back to town.
Walking along Oboźna Street he recalled the driver Wysocki, whose horse had fallen and been destroyed, and it seemed to him he could see a whole row of carts, in front of which lay fallen horses, with a whole row of drivers in despair over them, each with a group of wretched children and a wife who washed linen for people who couldn’t pay.
‘A horse?’ Wokulski whispered, and somehow his heart ached. Once, last March, as he had been crossing Aleje Jerozolimskie, he had seen a crowd of people, a black coal-wagon standing across the street by a gate, and an unharnessed horse a few feet away. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Horse broke its leg,’ one of the passers-by replied cheerfully; he had a violet scarf on, and kept his hands in his pockets.
Wokulski looked at the culprit as he passed. It was a lean nag with its ribs showing, and kept lifting its back leg. Tied to a small tree, it stood quietly, looked with its rolling eye at Wokulski and gnawed in its pain at a branch covered with hoar-frost.
‘Why should I be reminded of that horse just now?’ Wokulski thought. ‘Why do I feel this pity?’
He walked thoughtfully up Oboźna and felt that, in the course of the few hours spent by the river, a change had come upon him. Formerly—ten years ago, a year ago, even yesterday—while walking about in the streets he never met anything unusual. People passed by, droshkies drove along, shops opened their doors hospitably for customers. But now a new kind of feeling had come to him. Each ragged man looked as if he were shouting for help, the more loudly because he said nothing but only cast a fearful glance, just as that horse with the broken leg had done. Each poor woman looked like a washerwoman, supporting her family on the brink of poverty and decline with her worn hands. Each pitiful child seemed condemned to premature death or to spending days and nights on the garbage heap in Dobra street.
It was not only people who concerned him. He shared the weariness of horses pulling heavy carts along, and the sores where their horse-collars had drawn blood. He shared the fright of a lost dog barking in the street for his master and the despair of a starving bitch as she ran from one gutter to the next, seeking food for herself and her puppies. And on top of these sufferings he was even pained by the trees with their bark cut, the pavements like broken teeth, dampness on broken pieces of furniture and ragged garments. It seemed