Children of the Soil

“I have. Whether a man fails for a hundred thousand, or a hundred and ten thousand, is all one; but I thank thee for the question.”

Here Mashko added cognac to a second cup of tea, and said, —

“Do not think that I am beginning to drink from despair; I have not sat down since morning, and I am terribly tired. Ah, how much good this has done me! I will say now to thee openly that I have not thrown up the game. Thou seest that I have not fired into my forehead. That is a melodrama! that is played out. I know, indeed, that everything is ended for me here; but in this place I could not sail out anyhow. Here the interests are too small simply, and there is no field. Take the west, Paris! There men make fortunes; there they take a somersault, and rise again. What is to be said in the case if it is so? Dost thou know that Hirsh had not, perhaps, three hundred francs on leaving this country? I know, I know! from the standpoint of local mustiness and stupidity here, this will seem a dream, – the fever of a bankrupt. But still, men inferior to me have made millions there, – inferior to me! Lose or win. But if I come back at any time – ”

And evidently the tea and cognac had begun to rouse him, for, clinching his fist, he added, —

“Thou wilt see!”

“If that is not dreaming,” answered Pan Stanislav, with still greater impatience than before, “it is the future. But now what?”

“Now,” said Mashko, after a while, “they will count me a swindler. No one will think that there are falls and falls. I will tell thee, for instance, that I have not taken from my wife a single signature, a single surety, and that she will have everything which she had before marriage. I am going now; and until I am settled she will remain here with her mother. I do not know whether you have heard that Pani Kraslavski has lost her sight. I cannot take them at present, for I am not even sure where I shall live, – in Paris perhaps, perhaps in Antwerp. But I hope that our separation will not be lasting. They know nothing yet. See in what the drama is! See what tortures me!”

And Mashko put his palm on the top of his head, blinking at the same time, as if from pain in his eyes.

“When wilt thou go?” inquired Pan Stanislav.

“I cannot tell. I will let thee know. Thou hast had the evident wish to aid me, and thou mayest, though not in money. People will avoid my wife at first; show her, then, a little attention; take her under thy protection. Is it agreed? Thou hast been really friendly to me, and I know that thou art friendly to her.”

“As God lives, one might go mad,” thought Pan Stanislav; but he said aloud, —

“Agreed.”

“I thank thee from the soul of my heart; and I have still a prayer. Thou hast much influence over those two ladies. They will believe thy words. Defend me a little in the first moments before my wife. Explain to her that dishonesty is one thing, and misfortune another. I, as God lives, am not such a rogue as people will consider me. I might have brought my wife also to ruin, but I have not done so. I might have obtained from thee a few thousand more rubles; but I preferred not to take them. Thou wilt be able to put this before her, and she will believe thee. Is it agreed?”

“Agreed,” replied Pan Stanislav.

Mashko covered his head with his hands once more, and said, with a face contracted as if from physical pain, —

“See where real ruin is! See what pains the most!”

After a while he began to take farewell, thanking Pan Stanislav, meanwhile, again for good-will toward his wife, and future care of her.

Pan Stanislav went out with him, sat in a carriage, and started for Buchynek.

On the road he thought of Mashko and his fate; but at the same time he repeated to himself, “I too am a bankrupt!”

And that was true. Besides this, for a certain time some sort of general uncomprehended alarm had tormented him; against this he could not defend himself. Round about he saw disappointment, catastrophes, ruin; and he could not resist the feeling that all these were for him, too, a kind of warning and threat of the future. He proved to himself, it is true, that such fears could not be logically justified; but none the less, the fears did not cease to stick in the bottom of his soul somewhere, and sometimes he said to himself again, “Why should I be the one exception?” Then his heart was straitened with a foreboding of misfortune. This was still worse than those pins which, without wishing it, people, even the most friendly, drove into him by any word, unconsciously. In general, his nerves had suffered recently, so that he had become almost superstitious. He returned daily to Buchynek in alarm, lest something bad might have happened in the house during his absence.

This evening, he returned later than usual because of Mashko’s call, and drove in about the time when real darkness had come. Stepping out before the entrance on the sandy road, which dulled the sound of the carriage, he saw through the window Marynia, Pani Emilia, and the professor sitting near a table in the middle of the parlor. Marynia was laying out patience, and was evidently explaining the play to Pani Emilia, for her head was turned toward her, and she had one finger on the cards. At sight of her Pan Stanislav thought that which for some time he had been repeating mentally, and which filled him at once with a feeling of happiness, and with greater anger at himself: “She is the purest soul that I have met in life.” And with that thought he entered the room.

“Thou art late to-day,” said Marynia, when he raised her hand to his lips with greeting; “but we are waiting for thee with supper.”

“Mashko detained me,” answered he. “What is to be heard here?”

“The same as ever. All happy.”

“And how art thou?”

“As well as a fish!” answered she, joyously, giving him her forehead for a kiss.

Then she began to inquire about Pan Ignas. Pan Stanislav, after the disagreeable talk with Mashko, breathed for the first time more freely. “She is in health, and all is right,” thought he, as if in wonder. And really he felt well in that bright room, in that great peace, among those friendly souls and at the side of that person so good and reliable. He felt that everything was there which he needed for happiness; but he felt that he had spoiled that happiness of his own will; that he had brought into the clear atmosphere of his house the elements of corruption and evil, and that he was living under that roof without a right.

CHAPTER LX

In the middle of September such cold days came that the Polanyetskis moved from Buchynek to their house in the city. Pan Stanislav, before the arrival of his wife, had the house aired and ornamented with flowers. It seemed to him, it is true, that he had lost the right to love her, but he had lost only his former freedom with reference to her; but perhaps, just because of this, he became far more attentive and careful. The right to love no one gives, and nothing can take away. It is another case when a man has fallen, and in presence of a soul incomparably more noble than his own, feels that he is not worthy to love; he loves then with humility, and does not dare to call his feeling by its name. What Pan Stanislav had lost really was his self-confidence, his commanding ways, and his former unceremoniousness in his treatment of his wife. At present in his intercourse with her he bore himself sometimes as if she were Panna Plavitski, and he a suitor not sure of his fate yet.

Still that uncertainty of his had the aspect of coldness at times. Finally, their relation, in spite of Pan Stanislav’s increased care and efforts, had become more distant than hitherto. “I have not the right!” repeated Pan Stanislav, at every more lively movement of his heart. And Marynia at last observed that they were living now somehow differently, but she interpreted this to herself variously.

First, there were guests in the house, before whom, be what may, freedom of life must be diminished; second, that misfortune had happened to Pan Ignas, – a thing to shock “Stas” and carry his mind in another direction; and finally Marynia, accustomed now to various changes in his disposition, had ceased also to attach to them as much meaning as formerly.

Having gone through long hours of meditation and sadness, she came at last to the conviction that in the first period, while certain inequalities and bends of character are not accommodated into one common line, such various shades and changes in the disposition are inevitable, though transient. The sober judgment of Pani Bigiel helped her also to the discovery of this truth; she, on a time when Marynia began to praise her perfect accord with her husband, said, —

“Ai! it didn’t come to that at once. At first we loved each other as it were more passionately, but we were far less fitted for each other; sometimes one pulled in one and the other in another direction. But because we both had honesty and good-will the Lord God saw that and blessed us. After the first child all went at once in the best way; and this day I wouldn’t give my old husband for all the treasures of earth, though he is growing heavy, and when I persuade him to Karlsbad he will not listen to me.”

“After the first child,” inquired Marynia, with great attention. “Ah! I would have guessed at once that it was after the first child.”

Pani Bigiel began to laugh.

“And how amusing he was when our first boy was born! During the first days he said nothing at all; he would only raise his spectacles to his forehead and look at him, as at some wonder from beyond the sea, and then come to me and kiss my hands.”

The hope of a child was also a reason why Marynia did not take this new change in “Stas” to heart too much. First, she promised herself to enchant him completely both with the child, which she knew in advance would be simply phenomenal, and with her own beauty after sickness; and second, she judged that it was not permitted her to think of herself now, or even exclusively of “Stas.” She was occupied in preparing a place for the coming guest, as well in the house, as in her affections. She felt that she must infold such a figure not only in swaddling clothes, but in love. Hence she accumulated necessary supplies. She said to herself at once that life for two living together might be changeable; but for three living together it could not be anything but happiness and the accomplishment of that expected grace and mercy of God.

In general, she looked at the future with uncommon cheerfulness. If, finally, Pan Stanislav was for her in some way a different person, more ceremonious, as it were, and more distant, he showed such delicacy as he had never shown before. The care and anxiety which she saw on his face she referred to his feeling for Pan Ignas, for whose life there was no fear, it is true, but whose misfortune she felt with a woman’s heart, understanding that it might continue as long as his life lasted. The knowledge of this gave more than one moment of sadness to her, and to the Bigiels, and to all to whom Pan Ignas had become near.

Moreover, soon after the arrival of the Polanyetskis in the city, news came all at once from Ostend which threatened new complications. A certain morning Svirski burst into the counting-house like a bomb, and, taking Bigiel and Pan Stanislav to a separate room, said, with a mien of mysteriousness, —

“Do you know what has happened? Kresovski has just been at my studio, and he returned yesterday from Ostend. Osnovski has separated from his wife, and broken Kopovski’s bones for him. A fabulous scandal! All Ostend is talking of nothing else.”

Both were silent under the impression of the news; at last Pan Stanislav said, —

“That had to come sooner or later. Osnovski was blind.”

“But I understand nothing,” said Bigiel.

“An unheard of history!” continued Svirski. “Who could have supposed anything like it?”

“What does Kresovski say?”

“He says that Osnovski made an arrangement one day to go with some Englishmen to Blanckenberg to shoot dolphins. Meanwhile he was late at the railroad, or tramway. Having an hour’s time before him, he went home again and found Kopovski in his house. You can imagine what he must have seen, since a man so mild was carried away, and lost his head to that degree that, without thinking of the scandal, he pounded Kopovski, so that Kopovski is in bed.”

“He was so much in love with his wife that he might have gone mad even, or killed her,” said Bigiel. “What a misfortune for the man!”

“See what women are!” exclaimed Svirski.

Pan Stanislav was silent. Bigiel, who was very sorry for Osnovski, began to walk back and forth in the room. At last he stopped before Svirski, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, said, —

“But still I don’t understand anything.”