Suzin sighed, frowned and drank more champagne.
‘What about me?’ asked Wokulski.
‘Well…’ Suzin replied, ‘you, instead of doing business for yourself, in your own trade in this city, you do nothing. You wander around with your head up or down, not looking at anything, or even (as a Christian I’m ashamed to say it!) flying in the air in a balloon. Are you thinking of becoming a fairground jumper, then? And let me tell you, Stanisław Piotrowicz, you have offended a very distinguished lady, that Baroness. Yet you might have visited her, played cards, met charming women and found out about all sorts of things. I’d advise you to let her make something out of you before you leave: if you don’t give a lawyer a rouble, he’ll find ways to extract a hundred. Oh, my dear fellow…’
Wokulski listened attentively, Suzin sighed again and went on: ‘And you confer with magicians (faugh! the powers of darkness…) though there, I assure you, you won’t make a penny-piece, and may offend the Almighty…It’s not decent! The worst of it is you think no one else knows what is troubling you. Yet everyone knows you are undergoing some kind of moral crisis—except that one person thinks you’re trying to acquire forged currency, and another suspects you’d gladly go into bankruptcy, if you haven’t already.’
‘Do you think this?’ asked Wokulski.
‘Ah! Stanisław Piotrowicz, it is not right of you to call me a fool. You think I don’t know that you’re preoccupied with a woman…Well, a woman can be a tasty dish, and sometimes it so happens that a woman can turn the head of some quite solid man. Enjoy yourself, therefore, when you have money. But I’ll tell you one thing, Stanisław Piotrowicz—shall I?’
‘Please do.’
‘He who asks for a shave must not be angry if he gets scratched. Let me tell you a parable, you idiot. There is some miraculous water in France that cures all sicknesses (I forget its name). So listen—some people go there on hands and knees and hardly dare look: but others unceremoniously drink the water and clean their teeth in it. Ah, Stanisław Piotrovich, you don’t know how those who coarsely drink mock the ones who pray. Consider, therefore, whether you are not one of them, and if you are—then spit on everything. But what’s the matter? Does it hurt? Of course…Well, try more wine.’
‘Have you heard anything about her?’ Wokulski asked dully.
‘I swear I have heard nothing out of the ordinary,’ Suzin replied, striking himself on the chest. ‘A tradesman needs clerks, and a woman needs men to kneel before her, if only to conceal the bold man who refuses to kneel. It’s very natural. But don’t you, Stanisław Piotrowicz, go against the herd—or, if you must, then hold your head high. Half a million roubles capital is not to be sneezed at: people ought not to laugh at such a man.’
Wokulski rose and stretched himself like a man on whom an operation with red-hot irons had just been performed. ‘It may be so, or it may not…’ he thought, ‘but if it is, then I’d give a part of my fortune to any happy admirer for curing me.’
He went back to his room and began for the first time to run over in his mind, quite calmly, all Izabela’s admirers whom he had seen with her, or even heard of. He recollected significant conversations, melting looks, strange implications, all Mrs Meliton’s reports, all the gossip about Izabela circulating amidst her admiring public. Finally he sighed deeply: it seemed to him he had found a thread to lead him out of the labyrinth. ‘It will lead me into Geist’s workshop, surely,’ he thought, feeling that the first seeds of contempt had fallen into his heart.
‘She has the right, she has every right!…’ he muttered, laughing. ‘But what a choice, or perhaps even choices…Ah, what a vile creature I am; and Geist considers me a human being…’
After Suzin’s departure, Wokulski reread a letter from Rzecki, handed him that day. The old clerk wrote little about business, but a great deal about Mrs Stawska, the unhappy but beautiful woman whose husband had disappeared. ‘I will be for ever in your debt,’ wrote Rzecki, ‘if you can provide definitive evidence whether Ludwik Stawski is dead or alive.’ There followed a list of dates and localities in which the missing man had been seen since leaving Warsaw.
‘Stawska?…Stawska?…’ Wokulski thought, ‘ah, yes, I know…She’s that pretty woman with the little girl, who lives in my apartment house. What a strange coincidence: perhaps I bought the Łęcki house in order to make the acquaintance of this other woman? She means nothing to me as long as I stay here, but why not help her, since Rzecki asks me to? Excellent! Now I’ll have a reason for giving the Baroness a present, as Suzin so firmly suggested…’
He took the Baroness’s address and drove to Saint-Germain. In the wing of the house she lived in was an old curiosity shop. Talking to the porter, Wokulski involuntarily glanced at some books and caught sight, with joyful surprise, of a copy of Mickiewicz’s poetry, the very same edition he had read while still a clerk at Hopfer’s. The sight of the worn covers and musty paper brought his entire youth before his eyes. He at once bought the book, and could have kissed it like a relic.
The doorman, whose heart Wokulski had won with a franc, took him to the door of the Baroness’s apartment, wishing him (with a smile) an agreeable time. Wokulski rang, and at once saw a footman in pink livery. ‘Hm…’ he muttered.
In the drawing-room, naturally enough, there were gilded articles of furniture, pictures, carpets, flowers. A moment later the Baroness appeared, with the look of an offended person who, nevertheless, is willing to forgive. In fact she forgave him. During a brief conversation, Wokulski mentioned the purpose of his visit, wrote down Stawski’s name and the locations where he had been, and urged the Baroness to provide him with accurate news of the missing man through her numerous contacts.
‘It is possible,’ said the great lady, ‘but…will not the expense discourage you? We must appeal to the German police, the English, the American…’
‘Well?…’
‘So you are prepared to spend some three thousand francs?’
‘Here’s four thousand,’ said Wokulski, giving her a cheque for the appropriate sum, ‘and when may I expect a reply?’
‘I cannot say,’ replied the Baroness, ‘perhaps within a month, perhaps not for a year. I think, however,’ she added severely, ‘that you have no doubt my search will be genuine?’
‘So much so, that I’m leaving an order for another two thousand francs, payable at Rothschild’s on receipt of news about this man.’
‘Are you leaving soon?’
‘Oh no. I shall stay here for a while yet.’
‘Ah, so Paris has charmed you,’ said the Baroness with a smile. ‘You will like it still better from the windows of my drawing-room. I am at home every evening.’
They parted with mutual gratification: the Baroness at her client’s wealth, and Wokulski because he had been able to take Suzin’s advice and to fulfil Rzecki’s request at one blow.
Now Wokulski was left entirely isolated in Paris, with nothing to do. Once again he visited the Exhibition, the theatres, unknown streets, forgotten halls in museums. Once again he admired the vast potential of France, the regularity in the erection and life of this city, with its population of a million, the influence of the mild climate on the expeditious development of civilisation…Again he drank cognac, ate costly dishes or played cards in the Baroness’s drawing-room, where he always lost…
This way of spending time tired him out well enough, but gave not a drop of joy. The hours dragged by like days, the days were interminable, and the nights did not bring tranquil sleep. For, although he slept fast, without unpleasant or agreeable dreams, and although he lost consciousness, he could not rid himself of a sensation of unfathomed bitterness in which his soul was drowning, seeking in vain either the abyss or the shore. ‘Give me an aim…or death,’ he sometimes said, looking at Heaven. Then a moment later he would smile and think: ‘To whom am I speaking? Who will listen to me in this machinery of blind forces I’ve become the plaything of? What a cruel destiny it is not to be attached to any
thing, not to wish for anything, yet to understand so much…’
It seemed to him he could see an immense factory, from which emerged new suns, new planets, new species, new nations—but in which there were people and hearts which the Furies were tearing apart—love, hope and pain. Which is the worst of these? Not pain, for it at least never lies: but hope, which hurls a man the deeper, the higher it has elevated him…And love, that butterfly with one wing called uncertainty, the other—deception.
‘It is all the same to me,’ he muttered. ‘If we must stupefy ourselves with something, then let us do so with no matter what…With what, though?’
Then, in the depths of obscurity called Nature, two stars seemed to appear to him. One was pallid but fixed—this was Geist and his metals; the other, sparkling as the sun or suddenly dying out—was she. ‘Which am I to choose?’ he thought, ‘if one is doubtful and the other inaccessible and uncertain? Even if I were to attain her, should I ever trust her? Could I ever trust her?’
All this made him feel that the moment for a decisive battle between intellect and heart was approaching. His intellect attracted him to Geist, his heart to Warsaw. He felt that some day soon he would have to choose: either hard work which would lead to extraordinary fame, or a flaming passion which surely threatened to reduce him to ashes.
‘But what if both are illusions, like that coal shovel and the handkerchief that weighed a hundred pounds?’
He visited the hypnotist Palmieri again, and after paying the twenty francs for an interview, began questioning him: ‘So you say, sir, that it is impossible to hypnotise me?’
‘What do you mean—impossible?’ said Palmieri, vexed. ‘It is not possible immediately, since you are not a medium, sir. But I could make you one, if not within a few months, then within a few years.’
‘So Geist did not delude me,’ Wokulski thought. He added, aloud: ‘And could a woman hypnotise a man, Mr Palmieri?’
‘Not only a woman could, but so could a piece of wood, a door-knob, water—in a word, anything in which the hypnotist places his force. I can hypnotise my mediums with a pin: I can say to them ‘I am pouring my fluid into this pin, and you will fall asleep when you look at it.’ So much the easier, therefore, to transfer my power to a woman. Providing, of course, that the person hypnotised be a medium.’
‘And then I’d be as attached to this woman as your medium was to the coal-shovel?’ asked Wokulski.
‘Why, naturally,’ Palmieri replied, glancing at his watch.
Wokulski left him, and as he wandered about the streets, he thought: ‘As for Geist, I almost have proof he wasn’t deceiving me with hypnotism: there wasn’t time. But what of her?—I am not sure but that she didn’t bewitch me in this way. There was time, but—who made me her medium?’
The more he compared his love for Izabela with the feelings of most men for most women, the more unnatural it all seemed to him. How is it possible to fall in love with someone at first sight? Or how is it possible to be insane about a woman seen once in several months, and then only to perceive that she cares nothing for you?
‘Bah!’ he muttered, ‘infrequent meetings are precisely what gave her the nature of an ideal. Who knows but what I wouldn’t have been completely disillusioned if I’d known her better?’
He was surprised to have no news of Geist. ‘Can the learned chemist have made off with three hundred francs and won’t show himself again?’ he wondered. Then he was ashamed of such suspicions: ‘Perhaps he’s ill?’ he murmured. He took a horse-drawn cab and went to the address in the Charenton district, far outside the city walls. The road stopped by a walled fence: beyond it were visible the roof and upper windows of a house. Wokulski got out and approached an iron gate in the wall, fitted with a knocker. After knocking several times, the gate suddenly opened and Wokulski went into the yard. The house had one storey, and was very old: this was attested by its moss-covered walls, dusty windows, broken in places. In the centre of the façade was a door to which led some stone steps, very dilapidated. As the gate had already closed with a dull thud, and there was no doorman to be seen, Wokulski halted in the middle of the yard, surprised and troubled. Suddenly a head in a red cap appeared at the window of the first and only floor, and a familiar voice cried: ‘Is it you, Mr Suzin? Good-day!’
The head disappeared but the open window proved it had not been an illusion. Several minutes later, the centre door squeaked open and there stood Geist. He wore shabby blue trousers, wooden sabots and a grubby flannel shirt.
‘Congratulate me, Mr Suzin!’ said Geist, ‘I have sold the rights to my explosive to an Anglo-American firm, and appear to have done rather well. A hundred and fifty thousand francs cash, and twenty-five centimes for every kilogram sold.’
‘Well, under the circumstances you’ll surely abandon your metals,’ said Wokulski, smiling.
Geist eyed him with good-natured contempt. ‘These conditions,’ he replied, ‘have altered my situation so much that I need not concern myself for the next few years with a wealthy partner. But as for the metals, I am just now working on them, look…’
He opened a door to the right of the wing. Wokulski saw a large square room, very cold. In the centre stood a huge cylinder, like a barrel: its metal sides were a yard thick and held in four places by powerful hoops. Various pieces of apparatus were attached to the bottom: one looked like a safety valve through which a small cloud of steam emerged from time to time and quickly evaporated, the other was reminiscent of a manometer with its hand moving.
‘A steam boiler?’ Wokulski asked. ‘Why such thick sides?’
‘Touch it,’ said Geist.
Wokulski did so, and exclaimed with pain. Blisters rose on his fingers, but they were from cold, not heat. The vat was terribly cold, and the cold could be felt throughout the room.
‘Six hundred atmospheres of internal pressure,’ Geist added, not noticing Wokulski’s mishap.
The latter started on hearing this figure. ‘A volcano!’ he murmured.
‘That is why I urged you to work here,’ Geist replied, ‘As you can see, an accident is easily come by…Let us go upstairs.’
‘You leave the vat unattended?’ Wokulski asked.
‘Oh, a nurse-maid isn’t required for this work: everything functions by itself and there can be no surprises.’
Upstairs they found themselves in a large room with four windows. Its furniture consisted mainly of tables scattered with retorts, bowls and pipes of glass, porcelain and even lead or brass. A dozen or so artillery shells lay on the floor and in corners, including several exploded ones. Stone or brass bowls full of coloured liquids stood by the windows: a bench along one wall carried a huge electric pile. Not until he turned around did Wokulski notice an iron safe bricked into the wall near the door, a bed covered with a worn quilt from which dirty padding was emerging, a desk with papers by a window and an armchair, leather-covered but torn and shabby, by it.
Wokulski looked at the old man, like the poorest of labourers in his wooden sabots, then at the equipment, from which poverty stared out, and he thought that nevertheless this man might acquire millions for his inventions. But he had renounced them for the good of some future, better humankind…Geist at this moment reminded him of Moses leading an unborn generation into the Promised Land.
But the old chemist did not guess Wokulski’s thoughts this time: he gazed gloomily at him and said, ‘Well, Mr Suzin, a sombre place, sombre labour. I have been living forty years like this. Several millions have already gone into these pieces of apparatus, and perhaps that is why their owner does not enjoy himself, has no servants and sometimes nothing to eat … It is no occupation for you,’ he added with a gesture.
‘You are wrong, professor,’ Wokulski replied, ‘and besides, the grave is certainly no more cheerful.’
‘What do you mean — “the grave”? … Rubbish, sentimental rubbish,’ Geist muttered. ‘There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enabl
e us to be chemists, others only chemical substances. Intellect consists of taking advantage of opportunities which arise, not of wasting time on nonsense, but in doing something.’
‘I understand that,’ Wokulski replied, ‘but … forgive me, sir, your discoveries are so novel.’
‘I understand, too,’ Geist interrupted, ‘my discoveries are so novel that … you regard them as trickery! In this respect the members of the Academy are no wiser than you, so you’re in good company … Aha! Would you like to see my metals again, to test them? Very well …’
He hurried to the iron safe, opened it in a very complicated way and began bringing out, one after another, the blocks of metal heavier than platinum, lighter than water, and transparent … Wokulski examined them, weighed, heated, hit them, let electric currents pass through them, cut them with a knife. These tests took several hours: in the end, however, he decided that, physically at least, he was dealing with genuine metals.
When he had finished the tests, Wokulski sat down wearily in the armchair; Geist put away his specimens, closed the safe and asked, smiling: ‘Well, now — fact or illusion?’
‘I don’t understand at all,’ Wokulski murmured, clutching his head with both hands, ‘my head is reeling! A metal three times lighter than water … incomprehensible!’
‘Or a metal around 10 per cent lighter than air, what? …’ laughed Geist. ‘Specific gravity refuted … The laws of nature undermined, what? Ha! Ha! … Not at all. The laws of Nature, in so far as they are known to us, will remain intact, even in the face of my metals. Only our ideas about the properties of bodies and their internal structures will be extended, as will the limits of human technology, of course.’