‘It is I,’ her father replied joyfully, ‘Wokulski is unharmed, the Baron wounded in the face.’
‘Is that so?’
She had a migraine, and stayed in bed till four in the afternoon. She was pleased the Baron had been wounded, and surprised that Wokulski, whom she had mourned, was not dead. As she had risen so late, Izabela went out for a short stroll in the Boulevard before dinner. The sight of the clear sky, the beautiful trees, the birds flying about and the cheerful passers-by erased all traces of her nocturnal visions, and when she was noticed and greeted from several passing carriages, satisfaction awoke within her.
‘God is merciful, all the same,’ she thought, ‘since He has spared a man who may be useful to us. My father counts on him so, and I, too, am gaining confidence in him. I’d have experienced far fewer disappointments in my life if I’d had a sensible and energetic friend…’
She did not care for the word ‘friend’, though. A ‘friend’ of Izabela’s would have to own an estate at least. A haberdashery salesman only qualified as adviser and administrator.
On returning home, she saw at once that her father was in an excellent humour. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I went to congratulate Wokulski. He’s a splendid fellow, a real gentleman! He has forgotten the duel already, and even seems sorry for the Baron. No two ways about it—genteel blood always tells, no matter what a man’s social position.’
Then, taking his daughter into his study, and glancing several times into the looking-glass, he added: ‘Now, who said one cannot trust in heavenly protection? The death of this man would have been a serious blow to me—and he has been spared! I must enter into closer contact with him, then we shall see who comes out best—the Prince with his great lawyer, or I with my Wokulski. What do you think?’
‘I was thinking the very same thing just now,’ Izabela replied, struck by the analogy between her own feelings and those of her father, ‘you really must have a capable and trustworthy man at your side.’
‘And one who is in addition attracted to my service,’ Tomasz added, ‘and a sharp man! He understands that he will do more and gain a better reputation by helping an ancient family to rise again than if he were to rush ahead by himself. A very intelligent man,’ Tomasz repeated, ‘and although he had temporarily acquired the support of the Prince and the entire aristocracy, he is showing greater attachment to me. And he will not regret it, once I regain my position in the world.’
Izabela gazed at the gee-gaws arranged on his desk and thought that her father was deluding himself all the same in thinking that Wokulski was attracted into his service. However, she did not correct his error, but on the contrary admitted privately that it would be quite proper to draw a little closer to this tradesman and overlook his social position. A lawyer…a merchant…it came to almost the same thing; and if a lawyer could have a prince’s confidence, then why should not a tradesman (oh, how vulgar!) become a man of confidence in the Łęcki household?
Dinner that evening, and the next few days too, passed very pleasantly for Izabela. She was struck by one circumstance, namely—that they were visited by more people during this short time than had called during a whole month. There were hours when the sound of laughter and conversation resounded in the formerly empty drawing-room, until the well-rested furniture itself was surprised by the throng, and in the kitchen it was whispered that Mr Łęcki must have laid his hands on a large sum of money. Even the ladies who had failed to recognise Izabela at the races, now called on her. As for the young men, although they did not call, they recognised her in the street, and bowed respectfully.
Tomasz had visitors too. Count Sanocki called, to urge that Wokulski stop attending race-meetings and playing at duels, and should instead concern himself with the partnership. Count Licinski called and told amazing stories of Wokulski’s gentlemanliness. Most important of all was that the Prince called several times to tell Tomasz that, despite the incident with the Baron, Wokulski should not grow discouraged about the aristocracy and should bear his unfortunate country in mind.
‘And, cousin, pray dissuade him from fighting duels,’ the Prince concluded. ‘It is quite unnecessary—all very well for young men, but not for serious and respectable citizens.’
Tomasz was delighted, particularly when he thought that all these agreeable ovations were greeting him on the eve of selling the apartment-house; a year ago, the proximity of such an event would have frightened people away…
‘I am beginning to regain my proper position in the world,’ Tomasz murmured, and suddenly looked up. It seemed to him that Wokulski was standing before him. So, to calm himself, he repeated several times: ‘I will reward him, indeed I will…He can be sure of my support.’
On the third day after Wokulski’s duel, Izabela received a costly box and a letter which startled her. She recognised the Baron’s hand:
Dear cousin, If you will forgive my unfortunate marriage, I in return will forgive your references to my wife, who has already teased the life out of me. As a material symbol of eternal peace between us I am sending you the tooth which Wokulski shot because of what—I think—I ventured to say to you at the races. I assure you, my dear cousin, that it is the very same tooth with which I have in the past bitten you, and that I will no longer bite. You can throw it away, but pray keep the box as a souvenir. Accept this trifle from a man who is rather ill today, and is not, believe me, a bad man, and I hope you will at some time be able to forget my clumsy malice, Your affectionate and respectful cousin, Krzeszowski.
P.S. If you do not throw my tooth away, pray send it back to me, so I can present it to my neglected spouse. She will have something to think about for a few days, which the doctors are supposed to have recommended to the poor soul. Your Mr Wokulski is a very agreeable and distinguished man, and I admit I have grown sincerely fond of him, though he did me such an injury.
Inside the costly box was a tooth, wrapped in tissue. After some thought, Izabela wrote the Baron a very affable letter, declaring she was no longer cross and acknowledging the box, while she was sending back the tooth, with all due respect, to its owner.
She could no longer doubt it was only thanks to Wokulski that the Baron had come to terms with her and asked her pardon. Izabela was not a little moved by her triumph, and felt something not unlike gratitude toward Wokulski. She shut herself up in her boudoir and began day-dreaming.
She dreamed that Wokulski sold his store and bought a landed estate, but remained director of the trading partnership, which brought in vast profits. All the aristocracy received him in their homes while she, Izabela, made him her right-hand man. He restored their fortune and brought it back to its former splendour; he executed all her orders; he took risks when necessary. Finally he found her a husband, suitable to the eminence of the Łęcki family.
He did all these things because he loved her with an ideal love, more than his own life. And he was completely happy if she smiled at him, looked at him kindly, or if—after some exceptional service—pressed his hand sincerely. If the good Lord were to give them children, then he would find nursemaids and governesses, would increase their fortune and finally, when she herself died (at this point tears came to Izabela’s beautiful eyes), he would shoot himself at her tomb…Or no—the delicate feelings she had developed in him would make him shoot himself a few tombs away.
The entrance of her father interrupted the course of her fantasies. ‘So Krzeszowski has written to you?’ Tomasz asked with curiosity. His daughter showed him the letter on her bureau, and the golden box. Mr Tomasz shook his head as he read, and finally said: ‘Always a lunatic, though a good fellow at heart. But…Wokulski has done you a real service; you have conquered a mortal foe.’
‘Father, I think it would be proper to invite this gentleman to dinner…I should like to be better acquainted with him…
‘For some days I have been wanting to ask you the same thing,’ Tomasz replied, gratified, ‘it is not right to stick too closely to etiquette with such a useful ma
n.’
‘Naturally,’ Izabela put in, ‘after all, we admit faithful servants to some degree of intimacy…’
‘I adore your common sense and tact, Bela,’ Tomasz exclaimed, and in his delight he kissed her, first on the hand, then on the brow.
XV
How a Human Soul is Devastated by Passion and by Common Sense
AFTER Wokulski received Łęcki’s invitation to dinner, he hurried out into the street.
The little office had stifled him, and the conversation with Rzecki, in which the clerk warned him and commented, seemed perfectly fatuous: for was it not fatuous that a frigid old bachelor, who believed in nothing but the shop and the Bonapartes, should accuse him of madness? ‘Am I wrong, then,’ Wokulski thought, ‘in loving her? Perhaps it has come a little too late, but I have never allowed myself such a luxury in my life. Millions of other people fall in love, the whole sensate world loves, why should I alone be forbidden this? And if this is justified, then surely so is everything I do. Any man who wants to marry must have a fortune, so I have acquired one. A man must draw close to the woman he has chosen; I have done so. He must be concerned for her material well-being, and protect her from enemies; I am doing both. Have I harmed anyone in this fight for happiness? Have I neglected my duties to society or my neighbours? Those well-beloved neighbours of mine are also society—which has never concerned itself with me, but has put up all sorts of obstacles, and keeps demanding sacrifices from me…
‘But it is precisely what they call ‘madness’ that makes me carry out these otherwise imaginary duties. Were it not for this, I’d be wrapped up in my books like a worm, and several hundred people would have less income. So what do they expect of me?’
Walking in the open air calmed him; he reached Aleje Jerozolimskie and turned towards the Vistula. The brisk east wind enveloped him and aroused certain indefinable feelings reminiscent of childhood. Walking along Nowy Świat he felt he was a child again, and could feel the surging pulse of youthful blood. He smiled to see a sand-carter and his load weighing down a wretched nag and its long cart, while a spectre begging seemed to him a very pleasant old lady. He enjoyed the whistle of a factory, and would have liked to talk to a crowd of delightful little boys who were throwing stones at passing Jews from a roadside hill.
He stubbornly pushed away any thoughts of the letter and tomorrow’s visit to the Łęckis; he wanted to stay level-headed, yet his passion overwhelmed him: ‘Why have they invited me?’ he wondered, feeling a slight inward uneasiness. ‘Izabela wants to get to know me better…But surely what they are doing is making it clear that I may marry her! They would be blind or idiots if they hadn’t noticed what my feelings are towards her.’
He began to shiver so that his teeth chattered: but then common sense stirred within him: ‘Just a moment, pray! It’s a long way from one dinner-party and one visit to a close acquaintance. After all, less than one close acquaintance in a thousand leads to a proposal of marriage: and less than one proposal in ten is accepted, and of these only half end in marriage. A man would therefore have to be an out-and-out lunatic to think, even during close acquaintance with a woman, of marriage, when there is only one chance in twenty thousand of it coming off. Is that clear, or not?’
Wokulski had to admit it was. If every acquaintance led to marriage, then every woman would have some dozen husbands, every man some dozen wives, priests would not be able to handle the ceremonies, and the whole world would become a lunatic asylum. Whereas he, Wokulski, was still not even a close friend of Miss Łęcka, but was only on the threshold of making her acquaintance.
‘So what have I gained,’ he wondered, ‘from the risks I took in Bulgaria, at the races here or in the duel?’
You have acquired a better opportunity,’ common sense told him. ‘A year ago you had perhaps one-hundred-millionth or one-twenty-millionth chance that she would marry you, and within a year you may have a one-twenty-thousandth chance…’
‘Within a year?’ Wokulski echoed, and again a sort of severe chill struck him. He cast it aside, however, and asked: ‘Suppose Izabela falls in love with me—or has already done so?’
‘First, you must find out whether Izabela is capable of loving anyone…’
‘Is she not a woman?’
‘There are women with moral defects who are incapable of loving anyone or anything except their own fleeting caprices, just as there are such men; it is a defect like deafness, blindness or paralysis, only less obvious.’
‘Let us suppose…’
‘Very well,’ the voice went on, reminding Wokulski of the sarcastic advice Dr Szuman had given him, ‘if this woman is capable of loving anyone, the second question arises—will she fall in love with you?’
‘I’m not repulsive, after all…’
‘On the contrary, you may be, just as the most superb of lions is repulsive to a cow, or an eagle to a goose. You see, I am even complimenting you by comparing you to a lion or eagle, which—despite all their good qualities—nevertheless arouse horror in the females of other species. So you should avoid females of a species different from yourself.’
Wokulski came to and looked around. He was now not far from the Vistula, near some wooden barns, and passing carts were bespattering him with black dust. He turned back quickly towards town, and began considering: ‘There are two men in me,’ he thought, ‘one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer…What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins? What a terrible thing it would be to possess a great fund of emotion, yet be unable to lay it at the feet of a female of another species: a cow, a goose, or something even worse! How humiliating it would be to smile at the triumph of a bull or goose, yet at the same time to have to weep because one’s own heart is torn to shreds, shamefully trampled underfoot…Would life be worth living under such conditions?’
Wokulski felt a longing for death at the mere thought—but a death so oblivious that even his ashes would not remain on this earth. Gradually he calmed down, however, and on returning home began to consider quite coolly whether to wear a frock-coat or a tail-coat for the next day’s dinner-party. Would some unforeseen obstacle occur to prevent him yet again from drawing closer to Izabela? Then he completed his accounts of the latest commercial transaction, sent a few telegrams to Moscow and St Petersburg, and wrote a letter to old Szlangbaum, suggesting he should use his name for acquiring the Łęcki property.
‘The lawyer was right,’ he thought, ‘it would be better to buy the house in someone else’s name. Otherwise they may suspect me of wanting to take advantage of them or—still worse—think I mean to do them a favour.’
However, a storm was brewing within him behind the façade of these trivial duties. Common sense shouted aloud that tomorrow’s dinner-party meant nothing, and prophesied nothing. Yet hope whispered softly, very softly, that—perhaps he was loved, or might be…But so softly, that Wokulski had to listen to its whisper with the utmost attention.
The next day, so significant to Wokulski, was not marked by anything unusual either in Warsaw or in Nature. Here and there in the streets, dust was stirred up by door-keepers’ brooms; droshkies rushed wildly along or stopped for no particular reason, and an endless stream of passers-by moved this way and that, merely to get in the way of the traffic. Sometimes ragged people shuffled along under walls, stooping, hands hidden in their sleeves as if it was not June, but January. Sometimes a peasant cart rolled by in the street, loaded with rubbish, driven by a bold-faced old lady in a blue coat and red kerchief.
The throngs passed between two long walls of variegated coloured houses, over which loomed the high façades of churches. Two monuments stood at either end of the street, watching over the city like sentries. At one end was King Zygmunt, standing on what looked like an enormous candle, inclined towards the Bernadine church as if he wanted to communicate something to the passers-by. At the other end, Copernicus, holding a motionless globe in one hand, turned his back on the sun which rose every day
behind the Karas Palace, ascended over the Society of Friends of Art and went down behind the Zamoyski Palace, as much as to contradict the saying: ‘He stopped the sun—and made the earth rotate.’
Wokulski, who was looking in that direction from his balcony, sighed involuntarily, remembering that the astronomer’s only friends had been porters and sawyers, not distinguished (as we know) by any precise knowledge of Copernicus’s services to mankind. ‘Much good it did him,’ he thought, ‘to be called the “pride of the nation” in a few books…I can understand working for happiness, but working for a fiction calling itself society, or fame—no, I wouldn’t undertake that. Let society think of itself, as for fame…What prevents me from thinking I may be famous on Syrius, say? Yet Copernicus is in no better position today regarding the earth, and is about as much concerned with statues in Warsaw as I am with pyramids on Vega. I’d gladly give three centuries of fame for a brief period of happiness, and am surprised I was ever so stupid as to think otherwise…’
As if in response to this, he noticed Ochocki on the opposite side of the street, head bowed, hands in pockets, walking slowly along. This plain coincidence startled Wokulski. For a moment he even believed in premonitions, and thought in joyful amazement: ‘Does not this mean that he will have the fame of Copernicus—and I happiness? Go, build your flying-machines, but let me have your cousin! Yet—what superstition is this?’ he reflected after a moment, ‘I—and superstition!’
All the same he was much pleased by the notion that Ochocki might have immortal fame while he himself possessed the living Izabela. He felt encouraged. He could not help laughing at himself, but felt calmer and encouraged nevertheless.
‘Let us suppose,’ he thought, ‘that despite all my efforts—she rejects me. Well, then? Upon my word, I’ll take a mistress at once, and sit with her in a box next to the Łęckis. The worthy Mrs Meliton and perhaps…Maruszewicz—will find me a woman with looks like hers: even that can be found for a few thousand roubles. I’ll dress her up in lace from head to foot, I’ll lavish jewels upon her—then we’ll see whether Izabela doesn’t pale beside her. Let her marry the marshal or Baron if need be…’