The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [93]
‘For?’ he echoed, gazing blankly at me, ‘it’s for Miss Łęcka…’
‘Are you mad? What’s for Miss Łęcka?’
‘These business deals…the store…this dinner…all for her…And it was because of her that I was kicked out of the shop,’ said Mraczewski, leaning on me for he couldn’t keep his feet.
‘What?’ I asked, seeing he was quite tipsy, ‘so you were kicked out of the shop on her account, were you? And perhaps it was on her account that you were sent to Moscow?’
‘Of course it was…of course. She whispered one little word.…And I got three hundred roubles a year more. Iza can make the old man do anything she wants.’
‘Come, off to bed with you,’ I said.
‘Certainly not…I’m going to join my friends…Where are they? They’d handle Iza better…She wouldn’t lead them a dance as she does the old man…Where are my friends?’ he began shouting. Naturally I had him taken to a room upstairs. I suspect, though, he was only pretending to be tipsy in order to bedevil me.
By midnight the hall was like a mortuary or hospital; they kept having to take people upstairs or out to a droshky. Finally I found Dr Szuman, who was sober too, and took him to my room for tea.
Dr Szuman is a Hebrew, but an unusual man for all that. He was once to have been christened, for he fell in love with a Christian girl, but as she died he left matters alone. People even say he poisoned himself from grief, but was saved. Today he has quite abandoned his medical practice. He has a large fortune, and busies himself with investigating people and their hair. A small, yellow man, he has an alarming gaze before which nothing can be hidden. But as he has known Staś for years, he must know all his secrets.
After the noisy banquet I was curiously troubled and wanted to loosen Szuman’s tongue a little. If he did not tell me something about Staś, then surely I would never know. When we reached my room and the samovar had been brought, I remarked: ‘Tell me frankly, doctor—what do you think of Staś? He is making me uneasy. I can see that for a year he has been throwing himself into all sorts of things. That trip to Bulgaria, and today this store…the trading company…his own carriage…There is a peculiar change in his character.’
‘I see none,’ Szuman replied, ‘he always was a man of action who carried out whatever came into his head. He decided to go to the university, and went; he decided to make a fortune, and did so. If he has got some folly or other into his head, he will not hesitate to commit it. It’s his character.’
‘But for all that,’ I said, ‘I see many contradictions in his behaviour…’
‘That is hardly to be wondered at,’ the doctor interrupted, ‘for two men are merged in him: a Romantic of the pre-1863 kind, and a positivist of the ’70s. What onlookers find contradictory is perfectly consistent with Wokulski himself.’
‘But has he not been involved in any new…incidents?’ I asked. ‘I know of none,’ Szuman replied drily.
I fell silent and it was a moment before I began again: ‘What will become of him in the long run?’
Szuman raised his eyebrows and clasped his hands: ‘Nothing good,’ he replied. ‘People like him either reconcile themselves to everything, or come up against a great obstacle and break their heads open on it. Hitherto things have gone well with him…but no man wins every time in his life.’
‘What then?’ I asked.
‘So we may well be witnesses of a tragedy,’ Szuman concluded. He drank a glass of tea, then went home.
I could not sleep that night. Such terrible predictions on what should have been a day of triumph…But the Lord knows more than Szuman and surely He will not let Staś go to waste…
XI
Old Dreams and New Acquaintances
MRS MELITON had been through a hard school in life, where she even learned to despise all generally accepted notions. When she was young, it had been a truth universally acknowledged that a pretty and virtuous girl could marry even if she had no money; yet she