The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [57]
In a word, all were pleased, and Zięba was content.
IX
Footbridges on which People of Various Worlds Meet
EARLY ON Good Friday, Wokulski recalled that on this day and the next, Countess Karolowa and Izabela would be accepting charitable offerings in church.
‘I must go and give them something,’ he thought, and took five golden half-imperials from the safe. ‘Although,’ he added after a moment, ‘I have already sent them carpets, stuffed birds, a music box and even a mechanical fountain… Surely that will suffice to save one soul. I won’t go.’
But in the afternoon he told himself that perhaps Countess Karolowa was expecting him. And in that case it would not do to decline or offer only five half-imperials. So he took five more from the safe and wrapped them all up in tissue paper.
‘Yet,’ he told himself, ‘Izabela will be there, and it wouldn’t do to offer her only ten half-imperials.’ So he undid the roll, added ten more gold pieces and still debated whether to go or not.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t join that charitable market-place.’
He threw the roll into the safe and did not go to the ceremony that Friday.
But on Easter Saturday the matter presented itself to him in a very different light. ‘I was insane,’ he said. ‘If I don’t go to church, then where else shall I meet her? How can I draw attention to myself if not with money? I’m losing my wits…’
But still he hesitated, and not until about two in the afternoon, when Rzecki had ordered the store closed on account of the holiday, did Wokulski take from the safe twenty-five half-imperials and go in the direction of the church. He did not go in directly, however; something held him back. He wanted to see Izabela, but at the same time he was afraid to, and was ashamed of his half-imperials. ‘To throw down a pile of gold… How impressive in these days of paper money and—how bourgeois! Well, but what am I to do if they are waiting for money? Maybe it won’t be enough…’
He walked to and fro in the street opposite the church, unable to take his gaze from it.
‘I’ll go in,’ he thought. ‘Just a moment, though… Oh, what has come over me?’ he added, feeling that his distraught soul could not accomplish even as simple an act as this without hesitation.
Then he recalled how long it had been since he had been in church. ‘When was it? My wedding was once…my wife’s funeral another…’
But in neither case had he been fully aware of what was happening; so now he looked at the church as if it were something completely new to him.
‘What’s that huge building, which has towers instead of chimneys, in which no one lives, where only the remains of the dead sleep? Why that waste of space and walls; for whom does the light burn night and day; why do crowds of people gather there? They go to the market for food, to the shops for goods, to the theatre for entertainment, but why here?’
Involuntarily he compared the smallness of the pious people standing near the church with the huge dimensions of the sacred edifice, and a peculiar notion came into his mind. Just as, once upon a time, powerful forces had raised mountain chains from the flat plains, so once upon a time another immeasurable force had existed in mankind, which had raised up this kind of building. Contemplating such buildings, a man might think that giants had lived in the depths of our planet who had undermined the earth’s crust and left traces of their activities in the form of impressive edifices.
‘Where did they go to, those giants? To another, higher world, perhaps. And if the tides of the sea prove that the moon is not merely an illusory gleam, but genuine reality, then why should not these strange buildings confirm the existence of another world? Do they not attract human souls as powerfully as the moon attracts the waves of the sea?’
He went into the church and was struck by another sight. Some mendicants, male and female, were begging for the charity which God would repay to the charitable in the next world. Some of the faithful were kissing the feet of a Christ who had been tortured