So it is with Wokulski. I have known him twenty years, and keep thinking he is a politician, body and soul. I’d have given my life that Staś concerned himself with nothing but politics. Not until that duel with the Baron and the ovation for Rossi did suspicions that he might be in love awaken within me. I no longer doubt this now, particularly after my talk with Szuman.
But that’s nothing, for a politician can be in love too. Napoleon I fell in love right and left, yet even so he shook Europe to its foundations. Napoleon III also had a number of mistresses, and I hear that his son is following in his father’s footsteps, and has already found himself some English girl or other. So if a weakness for the ladies did not embarrass the Bonapartes, why should it enfranchise Wokulski?
Just as I pondered thus, a small incident occurred which reminded me of things long since dead and buried, which presented Staś himself in another light. No, he is no politician; he is something entirely different, which I do not even understand very well.
Sometimes he seems to me a man injured by society. But hush! Society never injures anyone. If we stopped believing that, goodness knows what claims might not arise. Perhaps no one would concern himself with politics, but would think of nothing but settling accounts with his nearest and dearest. So it is better not to open such questions. (How talkative I have become in my old age, and none of it about what I meant to say when I started!)
Thus, as I was drinking tea in my room one evening (Ir is still moody), the door opened and someone entered. I looked up — a stout figure, red face, red nose, grey hair. I sniffed and caught the smell of something like wine and mould in the room: ‘This gentleman,’ thought I, ‘is either a corpse or a cellarman. For no one else would smell so of mould …’
‘Well, I never!’ the visitor exclaimed, ‘you are become so proud that you don’t recognise a fellow?’
I rubbed my eyes. And it was none other than Machalski, the cellarman from Hopfer’s … We were in Hungary together and later here in Warsaw; but we had not met for fifteen years, since he moved to Galicia and remained a cellarman. Of course we embraced like long-lost brothers, once, twice and a third time …
‘When did you get here?’ I asked.
‘This morning,’ said he.
‘And where have you been until now?’
‘I went to the Dziekanka, but I was so depressed that I went to the Lesisz wine cellars … There are cellars for you, my dear sir!’
‘And what did you do there?’
‘I helped the old man a little and sat about. I’m not such a fool as to walk around the town when there’s a cellar like that to sit in.’
He was a real cellarman of the olden days. Not a dandy like those of today, who prefer going to dances rather than sitting in a wine-cellar. And who even wear patent leather shoes in the cellar! Poland will perish through such wretched tradesmen.
So we sat and talked until one in the morning. Machalski stayed the night with me, and at six the next morning he hurried off to Lesisz. ‘What will you do after dinner?’ I asked him.
‘After dinner I’ll drop in at Fukier’s cellars, then I’ll come back for the night,’ he replied.
He stayed a week in Warsaw. Nights he spent at my place, and the days in wine-cellars. ‘I’d hang myself,’ he said, ‘if I had to wander about outdoors for a week or more. The crowds, the heat, the dust…Maybe pigs can bear it, but not people.’
He seemed to me to be exaggerating. For although I, too, prefer the shop to Krakowskie Przedmieście, yet the shop is not a wine-cellar. The fellow must have grown eccentric in his wine-cellaring.
Of course, what did Machalski and I talk of, if not old times and Staś? In this manner, the story of Staś’s youth came before me as if it were yesterday.
I recollect (it was in 1857 or ’58) that I walked once into Hopfer’s, where Machalski was working. ‘Where’s Jan?’ I asked the lad.
‘In the cellar.’ So I went down into the cellar. Behold, there was Jan by the light of a tallow candle, siphoning wine from a barrel into bottles, and in the recess I saw two shadows lurking; a grey-haired old man and a young lad with cropped hair and the countenance of a brigand. They were Staś Wokulski and his father.
I sat down quietly (Machalski didn’t like to be interrupted when drawing wine) and the grey-haired old man in a sand-coloured frock-coat was going on in a querulous voice to the lad: ‘Why spend your money on books? Give it to me, because if I have to drop the law-suit, then everything will be wasted. Books won’t extricate you from the humiliation you are now in, only the law-suit can do that. When I win and when we get back our estate, which grandfather left us, then people will remember that the Wokulskis are old-established gentlefolk and relatives will turn up…Last month you spent twenty zloty on books, yet that was just the amount I needed for a lawyer…Books, nothing but books! As long as you work in a shop they will spurn you, even if you are as wise as Solomon and although you are a gentleman and your grandfather on your mother’s side was a chancellor. But when I win that law-suit, when we move into the country …’
‘Let’s go away,’ the lad muttered, glancing sideways at me.
Obedient as a child, the old man wrapped his papers up in a red kerchief and went out with his son, who had to help him up the stairs.
‘Who were those simpletons?’ I asked Machalski, who had just finished his work and sat down on a stool: ‘Ah,’ he made a gesture, ‘the old man isn’t all there in the head, but the lad is bright. His name is Stanisław Wokulski. A bright rascal!’
‘What can he do?’ I asked.
Machalski snuffed the candle, poured me a glass of wine and said: ‘He’s been with us four years. Not much use in the shop or cellar, though…But as a mechanic! He constructed a sort of machine that pumps water, and then pours it on a wheel which works the pump. A machine like that could go on pumping until Judgement Day, but something went wrong, so it only worked fifteen minutes. It was up there in the dining-room and attracted customers for Hopfer: but six months ago it broke.’
‘So that’s the kind of lad he is,’ said I.
‘Well, not quite,’ Machalski replied, ‘there was a professor from the Technical College here, he had a look at the pump and said it was good for nothing, but that the lad was bright and ought to study. From that day on we’ve had pandemonium in the place. Wokulski has grown conceited, mumbles at customers, by day he looks half asleep but for all that he studies nights and buys books. On the other hand his father would sooner spend the money on a law-suit over some estate or other left by their grandfather. You heard what he said…’
‘What does he hope to achieve by this studying?’ I said.
‘He says he’ll go to Kiev, to the University. Ha, let him!’ Machalski declared, ‘perhaps for once it will make a man of a shop-clerk. I don’t interfere with him, I don’t make him work: when he’s in the cellar, he can read if he likes. But upstairs the other clerks and customers plague him.’
‘What does Hopfer think of it?’
‘Nothing,’ Machalski went on, putting another candle into the iron holder, ‘Hopfer doesn’t want to turn him away, for Kasia Hopfer dotes on Wokulski and maybe the lad will get his grandfather’s estate back after all.’
‘Does he dote on Kasia?’ I inquired.
‘He never so much as looks at her, ungovernable young rascal that he is,’ Machalski replied.
I at once guessed that a lad with such a brain, who bought books and cared nothing for girls might do well as a politician, so I made the acquaintance of Staś that very day and from then on we have got on well together…
Staś was at Hopfer’s three more years and during that time he made many acquaintances among the students and young officials who outdid one another in providing him with books so that he might take the university entrance exam. Among these young men was a certain Mr Leon, a lad still (he wasn’t twenty yet), handsome and clever — but an enthusiast! He was, as it were, my assistant in Wokulski’s political education; for when I talke
d about Napoleon and the great mission of the Bonapartes, Mr Leon would talk about Mazzini, Garibaldi and other eminent persons. And how well he could inspire the soul!
‘Work hard,’ he sometimes said to Staś, ‘and have faith, because faith can stop the sun in its course, not to mention improving the lot of mankind.’
‘Maybe it will send me to the university?’ Staś asked.
‘I’m positive,’ replied Leon, his eyes flashing, ‘that if you have the faith the first apostles had, even for a while, you’d be at the university already.’
‘Or in a lunatic asylum …’ Wokulski muttered.
Leon began striding about the room, waving his arms. ‘How despicable,’ he exclaimed, ‘if even a man like you has no faith. Just remember what you have already achieved in such a short time: you know so much that you might sit for the examination today …’
‘But what shall I do there?’ Staś sighed.
‘Not much — by yourself. But some dozen, some hundreds like you and me…do you know what we might do?’
His voice broke off at this point. Leon went into convulsions. We could hardly calm him.
On another occasion, Leon reproached us for lacking the spirit of sacrifice. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that Christ alone saved mankind through the power of sacrifice? How much better the world would be, if there had always been individuals prepared to sacrifice their lives…’
‘Am I to sacrifice my life for customers who treat me like a dog, or for those lads and clerks who plague me?’ Wokulski asked.
‘Don’t try to wriggle out of it!’ Leon cried, ‘Christ died for the sake of his executioners. But there is no spirit in you. Your spirit is rotting away…Listen to what Tyrteus said: “Sparta, perish! Ere the Messenine hammer crumble the monument of your greatness, and the tombs of your ancestors and scatter their revered bones as prey to the dogs and banish the shades of your forefathers from the gates…Oh ye people, ere the enemy claps you in fetters, smash your fathers’ weapons on the threshold of your home and hurl yourselves into the abyss. Let not the world know what swords were yours, but that your hearts were wanting.” Hearts!’ Leon repeated.
Even then, Staś was very cautious in accepting Leon’s theories; but the lad could influence people as well as any Demosthenes. I remember a crowded meeting one evening, when we all — young and old alike — burst into tears when Leon spoke to us of a perfect world in which stupidity, poverty and injustice would disappear: ‘From that time on,’ he said in great excitement, ‘there will be no differences between people. Gentry and bourgeois, peasants and Jews — all will be brothers.’
‘And clerks?’ Wokulski asked from his corner.
But this interruption did not upset Leon. He suddenly turned to Wokulski, enumerated all the unpleasantness which Staś had been subjected to in the shop, the obstacles put to his studies, and wound up: ‘So that you believe like a brother, so that you can cast out anger from your heart — here I kneel to you, and beg your forgiveness in the name of mankind.’
And he actually knelt down before Staś and kissed his hand. The people present grew still more moved, lifted Staś and Leon up and vowed that each would give his life for such men as they.
Today, when I remember those goings-on, it sometimes seems like a dream. Certainly I never met such an enthusiast as Leon before or after.
Early in 1861, Staś resigned from Hopfer’s. He lived with me (in my room with a barred window and green curtains), dropped trade and at once began attending academic lectures as an auditor. His farewell to the shop was strange: I remember it because I was there myself. He embraced Hopfer, then went into the cellars to embrace Machalski, where he stayed a few minutes. Sitting in the diningroom, I heard a noise, the laughter of the customers and shop lads, but didn’t suspect a joke.
Suddenly (the opening leading into the cellar was in the same room) I beheld a pair of red hands emerging from the cellar. These hands clutched at the floor and were immediately followed by Staś’s head which appeared once and then again. The customers and lads were laughing.
‘Aha!’ one waiter exclaimed, ‘see how difficult it is to get out of a cellar without the steps? And here you are hoping to jump out of the shop and into the university at one go! If you are so clever, come on out!’
Staś extended his arms from below again, grabbed the edge of the opening and pulled himself half-way up. I thought he would burst a blood vessel.
‘Here he comes! Just look at him…He’s doing it!’ a second waiter cried.
Staś got one leg to the floor and in a moment was in the room. He was not angry, but he refused to shake hands with any of his colleagues, merely took his bag and went to the door.
‘Come now, aren’t you saying goodbye to the customers, Herr Doktor?’ Hopfer’s waiters shouted after him.
We walked along the street without uttering a word. Staś was biting his lips and it occurred to me that getting out of the cellar like that was a symbol of his life, which had led him to tearing up his roots from Hopfer’s shop and setting out into a wider world. A prophetic incident! For to this very day Staś always comes out on top. And God knows what such a man mightn’t do for his country if only the ladder were not moved away at every step he takes, and if he did not have to waste time and energy uprooting himself every time.
After moving into my room, he worked entire nights and days until sometimes I was quite cross with him. He rose before six and read. At ten he hurried to a lecture, then started reading again. At four he went out tutoring in various houses (mostly Jewish, where Szuman introduced him), and on coming home again he read and read until he went to bed, dead with fatigue, well after midnight.
He would have had a reasonable income from these lessons, had it not been for his father, who visited him from time to time, and only altered in that he wore a snuff-coloured frock-coat instead of the sand-coloured one, and wrapped his documents up in a blue handkerchief. Otherwise he remained the same as when I first met him. He would sit at his son’s table and put his papers on his knees and say in a low querulous voice: ‘Books…nothing but books! Here you are, wasting money on study, while I haven’t enough for the law-suit. Even if you graduate from two universities, you won’t get out of your present wretchedness until we get grandfather’s estate back. Only then will people admit you’re a gentleman, equal to others. And then relatives will turn up …’
Staś spent his spare time experimenting with balloons. He got a large demijohn and prepared some kind of gas in it, using vitriol (I don’t remember what kind of gas it was) and filled a balloon — not a very large one, admittedly, but very artfully constructed. There was a machine with a propeller under it…And it actually flew up to the ceiling, then burst by hitting the wall. Thereupon Staś tinkered with it, repaired it, filled the demijohn with all sorts of messes, and tried again, interminably. Once the demijohn burst and the vitriol nearly burned out his eye. But that didn’t matter to him, since he hoped the balloon would at least help him ‘extricate’ himself from his wretched position.
From the day when Wokulski moved into my room, our shop gained a new customer in Kasia Hopfer. I don’t know what it was she liked about us — whether it was my beard, or Jan Mincel’s stoutness. For though the girl had a dozen haberdashery shops nearer home, she came to ours several times a week: ‘A ball of wool, please…A reel of silk, please…Ten groszy worth of needles…’ She would run a mile in rain or shine for such things as these, and after buying a packet of pins for a few pennies, would sit half an hour in the shop talking to me: ‘Why don’t you gentlemen ever come to see us?…Along with Stanisław?’ said she, blushing, ‘my father is ever so fond of you both — we all are.’
At first I was surprised by old Hopfer’s unexpected affection, and suggested to Kasia that I didn’t know her father well enough to pay him visits. But she insisted: ‘Stanisław must be angry with us, I can’t think why, because at least papa…and all of us…are very fond of him. Stanisław surely can’t complain that he has
been unfairly treated by us…Stanisław…’
And while talking thus about Stanisław, she would buy silk thread instead of wool, or needles instead of a pair of scissors.
The worst of it was that the poor thing was pining away week by week. Every time she came to the shop for her little purchases, she seemed to be looking a little better. But as soon as the blush of momentary excitement had gone from her face, I could see she was even paler than before, her eyes unhappier and deeper set. And the way she used to inquire: ‘Doesn’t Stanisław ever come into the shop?’ And she would look at the door leading to the passage and my apartment, where, at a few yards distance, Wokulski sat frowning over his books, never guessing that here he was so sought after.
I was sorry for the poor girl, so once, when drinking tea with Wokulski in the evening, I remarked: ‘Don’t be childish — call on Hopfer. The old man has plenty of money.’
‘Why should I?’ he replied, ‘haven’t I had enough of that place?’ As he spoke, he shuddered.
‘You ought to go, because Kasia dotes on you,’ said I.
‘Don’t mention Kasia to me,’ he interrupted, ‘she’s a very good girl, sometimes she would secretly sew on a coat-button for me, or throw a flower through the window, but she’s not for me, nor I for her.’
‘She’s a positive dove of a child,’ I put in.
‘So much the worse, for I’m no dove. The only kind of woman who could attract me would be one like myself. And I’ve never met such a one.’ (He met one sixteen years later, but God knows he has no reason to be glad of it!)
Kasia gradually ceased coming to the shop, and instead old Hopfer paid a visit to Mr and Mrs Jan Mincel. He must have mentioned Staś to them, for the next day Mrs Mincel hurried downstairs and began scolding me: ‘What sort of a lodger have you, Ignacy, that young ladies dote on him so? Who’s this Wokulski? Jan,’ she turned to her husband, ‘why hasn’t the gentleman called on us? We must marry him off. Tell him to come upstairs this minute …’
‘Oh, let him go upstairs,’ Jan Mincel replied, ‘but as for marrying him off, that I won’t. I’m an honest shopkeeper and don’t want to go in for match-making.’