Poland: A Novel Part 31

'One piano can do wonders, sometimes. Remember?' And she began to hum the grand theme from the last etude, and soon they were singing together the words that Wiktor had composed: 'Home!

The fields are green,

The woods are clean,

My soul serene ...'

He took her by the hands and said: 'We'll live in Bukowo part of the year, and in Warsaw, too. But the capital of Galicia will always be Vienna, so we'll keep this apartment until your father goes home. Then we'll move into Annaga.s.se.' And this delightful scheme of existence was agreed upon.

The week after Wiktor's resignation from the ministry, the Bukowskis had an opportunity to savor Vienna at its best, for Count Lubonski gave a rather large party at 22 Annaga.s.se. For entertainment he had acquired the services of a string quartet that had given concerts in Paris and London, and tonight they were augmented by a powerful double ba.s.s and three wind instruments: horn, clarinet and ba.s.soon.

They were to offer a miniature concert, a delightful piece of music composed in Vienna: Franz Schubert's Octet in F for Strings and Winds, Opus 166, and this interesting combination of instruments enabled the listeners to follow the various themes as they appeared, sometimes in the violins, at other times in the distinctive horn or ba.s.soon. It was the acme of Viennese music-deft, inventive, light but with serious intentions-and as it unfolded in six unusually long movements, Wiktor whispered to his wife: 'This is what I could never bear to lose,' and she nodded, for it was the most congenial music she had heard since coming to Europe-not heavily significant like Beethoven or Bruckner, and not of the very highest quality like the best of Brahms, but gentle and singing and delectable, the song of Vienna.

The long fourth movement was a theme and variations, and here Schubert had outdone himself, for with the different colorations available, he took a theme that was good to begin with, then embroidered it with variations so inventive that Marjorie almost clapped her hands with joy. 'It's so exciting to hear how he brings the strands together-each instrument off on its own, then all of a sudden But the significant moment of the evening was one in which she did not partic.i.p.ate, for when the long octet came to a triumphant conclusion Count Lubonski remembered some paper work he must attend to, and he retired temporarily to a small room in the rear of the establishment where he maintained a study, and he was working there when the countess told Wiktor: 'Go fetch my husband. The German and Russian amba.s.sadors want to leave.'

So Wiktor wandered through the s.p.a.cious rooms until a maid directed him to the study, and when he entered he surprised the count. 'Excuse me,' he apologized, 'but the countess 'That's all right,' Lubonski said, and then he saw his young friend staring at a series of four carefully drawn maps which he kept on his wall.

They depicted the dismemberment of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. The fourth, labeled 1815?, showed what once had been Poland, now dissipated among the part.i.tioning powers-Russia, Germany, Austria-a nation vanished from the earth.

Lubonski said: 'I'm sorry you saw that, Wiktor. It was not intended ...'

'Do you dream of a reunited Poland?'

'Every day of my life I look at those maps and ask "When?" '

VIII.

Shattered Dreams

In 1918, at the close of what was then called the Great War, Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after an enforced absence of one hundred and twenty-three years. Various parts that had been stolen by Russia, Austria and Germany were rea.s.sembled by the victorious Allies, and with throbbing excitement an old-new nation resumed its stumbling, heroic course through history.

Count Andrzej Lubonski, now sixty-eight years old and a widower, no longer an official in the dismembered Austrian Empire, gladly moved his headquarters from the little semi-palace at 22 Annaga.s.se in Vienna to his family's castle at Gorka. He was in Warsaw a good deal of the time, advising the Polish government in the area on which he had concentrated while a senior member of the imperial Austrian government: how to deal with minorities. He had, in fact, merely transferred his seat of operations from Vienna to Warsaw, and he judged that his tasks had not become simplified in the change, for whereas Austria had grappled with its forty minorities, some, like the Hungarians and Czechs, of nation size, Poland wrestled with its half-dozen dissident groups, each with its own inflammable nationalist aspirations.

To the east the Ukrainians of Galicia yearned for a nation of their own and for freedom from both Russia and Poland; they were agitators of masterful power but they lacked any central government or the ability to form one; they were a people adrift, dreaming of freedom but ignoring the basic steps by which it might be obtained. Lubonski, much of whose life had been spent on his Ukrainian estates, prayed that some kind of Polish-Ukrainian union might be effected for the time being, acknowledging that within half a century the Ukraine would acquire enough skill in self-government to strike out on its own. But he also knew that if these wild, undisciplined Cossacks sought to establish a nation now, when they were in reality a hundred and fifty warring princ.i.p.alities, each with its own self-important ataman, they were doomed to disintegration and swift absorption by some better-disciplined neighbor.

'The only hope for the Ukraine,' he told his neighbors the Bukowskis, 'is a temporary alliance with Poland and Lithuania. Anything else is suicide.'

But the Lithuanians to the north presented a special problem. For centuries Lithuania and Poland had formed a union that dominated eastern Europe, a nation of vast size and great accomplishment. In 1410, Lithuanian armies had joined with Polish to repel the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald; Lithuanian n.o.bles had been chosen to occupy the throne of Poland; Poland's greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was a Lithuanian, as was the present national leader, Jozef Pilsudski; and most intellectual Lithuanians had been educated in Polish, the language in which they best expressed themselves.

Thus there was every reason in the world for the Lithuanians and Poles to resume their ancient alliance, and one very good reason why this might prove impossible; the Lithuanians longed for their own nation, minute though it must be, and almost no important leaders called for union with Poland, for they realized that in such an a.s.sociation, Lithuanian culture would be submerged by Polish.

'Sickness has possessed them,' Lubonski said, 'that terrible sickness we saw attacking the Austrian Empire. Each little group dreams of its own sovereignty. Each will attain it, some way or other, and in the end, each will perish.' He confided to Wiktor Bukowski that he was just as afraid of Poland's future as he was of Lithuania's and the Ukraine's: 'Unless we unite with those two countries to save them, we may not save ourselves. Russia and Germany will always want to absorb us, and we will exist in a state of peril.'

When Bukowski reminded him of that night in Vienna when he had inadvertently disclosed his continuing dream for Polish freedom, he laughed and confided: 'Tonight I'm exactly like the Croats and Slovaks who used to pester me. I have my freedom, but I'm terrified by its potentials.'

In the north Poland had a most uneasy border. The angry state of Prussia was now divided into two parts by the Polish Corridor, and Gdansk had become the so-called Free City of Danzig, yearning to unite openly with Prussia. Only the superpatriot believed that this arrangement could continue indefinitely.

In the west Poland had acquired much of Silesia, but the citizens living in those former German areas were not happy; and to the south the Poles endeavored to wrest the little province of Cieszyn away from the new nation of Czechoslovakia, which called it Teschen; what the real composition of Cieszyn was, insofar as the national allegiance of its citizens, no one could say, and privately Lubonski thought that the disputed area should be yielded to Czechoslovakia.

Within the nation itself there were the Jews, a substantial minority of the total population, about ten percent, highest in Europe. Jewish influx had begun in the eleventh century, when many flooded in to escape persecution elsewhere. Here they were given the right to own land, conduct business, and preserve their unique culture. At one time they operated the Royal Mint, and in all cities they began to form the nucleus of an emerging middle cla.s.s, something desperately needed in Poland.

Through succeeding centuries Polish kings extended protection to Jews fleeing other lands, and in what was a pluralistic and tolerant climate Jewish life thrived as nowhere else in Europe. The lives of Jews and Poles meshed together, despite inescapable divisions created by religious differences and language barriers.

But during the part.i.tion Jews fell under the rule of foreign powers that were openly and sometimes savagely anti-Semitic in their official policies. During an entire century excesses against Jews were orchestrated by the occupying powers, and pogroms, often officially sponsored, flourished. Inevitably, some Poles were raised in a climate which encouraged religious prejudice.

Now, in these exciting years when Poland was reestablishing her independence, large numbers of poor Orthodox Jews-especially those from little towns and villages-found themselves thrust into a new political environment alien to them and with which they felt no affinity. Failing to shout for Polish regeneration, they aroused suspicions among the Polish nationalists who were shouting.

Count Lubonski never shared in suspicion of the Jews, for he had lived through the disgraceful anti-Semitism of Vienna in the 1890s. He had known the flamboyant anti-Jewish mayor Karl Lueger, and had watched the skill with which he utilized racial prejudice to advance his career. Repelled by such abuse of power, Lubonski sometimes feared that some of his neighbors in Poland were awaiting their own Karl Lueger to lead the Poles in a drive to cleanse the nation of Jews and Jewish influences, and he was determined to forestall such movement if possible.

'They've given me a ma.s.sive job,' the slim white-haired man told the Bukowskis, 'but I shall leave the Jews and the Germans to others. My task is to persuade Lithuania and the Ukraine to join us in a union which will stabilize this part of Europe.' And he unfolded a map, which he kept with him at all times, and showed how sensible his plan was: 'From the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic to Kiev on the Dnieper River, from a safe border with Germany to a safe border with Russia, such a union could protect itself for the rest of this century.'

'With the hatred that would have to be submerged,' Bukowski asked, 'could such a marriage be arranged?'

'It has to be,' Lubonski said, with fire flashing from his wise old eyes. Then he took his younger friend by the arm and said: 'That night you spoke of ... in Annaga.s.se when you penetrated my secret and saw my four maps. Well, the miracle I longed for then has come to pa.s.s, a true act of G.o.d. So now I'm calling for a new one'-and he touched the map-'and I believe it, too, has a chance, if G.o.d is listening.'

Wiktor Bukowski was now fifty years old and his palace did, as his American wife, Marjorie, had once predicted, 'make Lubonski's castle look like a barn.' It consisted of a beautifully designed capital U, with the open end facing the Vistula and giving a fine view both of that river and of the ancient castle ruins to the south. It contained three stories, really, but the first was mostly underground, with only narrow windows showing. The two wings which formed the legs of the U were handsomely proportioned and faced with marble from an Austrian quarry; between them ran a fine dual driveway cutting deep into the building, so that the carriages of visitors, and now their automobiles, could come to the main entrance in one direction, deposit their guests and drive off in the other. For nine months each year the soil in between was filled with flowers, and these were the only external adornments, except that in each of the wing faades was a niche in which stood a marble statue from Italy.

There were no towers, no baroque curlicues, no unnecessary excrescences, only the lovely ma.s.s and balance of the building itself, with the huge eastern wing a major palace in itself. There was, however, to the north and nicely balancing the living quarters, a stately building longer than the widest extension of the palace; this housed the stables in which Wiktor Bukowski kept his forty Arabian horses and his thirty-six black carriages and sleighs. By good luck, plus a little rearrangement of the faade by the Italian architect who had done the palace, the building fitted perfectly the grand design of the area, while the semi-formal gardens which linked it to the palace made the Bukowski estate, with its three notable features-castle ruins, palace, stables-one of the most congenial in all Poland.

But it was the palace itself which guests remembered most, for the contents of its seventy rooms were nicely varied. Most impressive was the great hall, with Matejko's ma.s.sive Jan Sobieski on the Route to Vienna on one wall and Jozef Brandt's The Defense of Czestochowa facing it; many visitors from Paris, London and New York would gaze at the paintings with awe: 'We did not know that Poland produced such excellent art.' And Marjorie Bukowska would say with pride: 'I didn't know it, either, till I married Wiktor. But these, I think, are as good in their way as Paolo Veronese.'

Some of the better-educated guests preferred the more standard works of Rembrandt, Holbein and Correggio and said so; the men almost always elected the Jan Steen or Philips Wouwerman because of the homely treatment of familiar subjects; in these days almost no one commented on the Claude Monet Water Lilies, but Marjorie confided to certain of her European friends that she was beginning to prefer it above all her other paintings.

To her surprise, she found that many of her guests spent most of their casual time in a long gallery on the first floor, where the half-windows threw little light on the extraordinary a.s.sembly of Polish paintings she had gathered from all corners of the nation. There were thirty-one of them and they could all have been painted by the same inadequate artist, except that a knowing viewer would quickly detect that the costumes worn by the ferocious men came from widely separated periods of Polish history.

The paintings were all about eight feet tall, three and a half feet wide and heavily framed. Invariably they showed some Polish n.o.bleman in full regalia, staring fiercely out of the past as he dictated to the Seym, or tyrannized his Ukrainian peasants, or led a rebellion against some hapless king. About half the portraits showed men with their heads shaved either totally or with a two-inch strip of hair left down the middle, but all of them displayed as a major feature the magnate wearing a very wide band or sash about his ample waist, the ends trailing down his left leg.

What especially appealed to the visitors were the plaques, all done in Polish and French by the same elegant sign painter in Sandomierz, giving interesting details about the subjects: This Radziwill engineered the marriage of his beautiful sister Barbara to Zygmunt II August, King 15481572, the son of Queen Bona Sforza, the beautiful Italian whose efforts to enhance the power of the throne evoked so much antagonism among the magnates that they led an uprising against her, The Hen's War of 1537.

By no trick or inference did the American chatelaine imply that any of the thirty-one worthies was related to the Bukowskis, but the long spread of time covered by the portraits-14871799-and the wild adventures attributed to the men depicted encouraged the viewer to believe that some, at least, had touched the Bukowski family in times past.

The portrait that attracted most attention was Number 27, which showed a glaring tyrant with a head completely shaved, a monstrous mustache, ma.s.sive eyebrows and a huge beard which reached down to the eight-inch-wide gold-studded sash that held his enormous belly. Viewers at once accepted him as the epitome of the Polish magnate, but what they remembered long after the image had paled was the brief history on the plaque: Zdzislaw Mniszech, 15451619, Magnate of Dukla and seventy other towns, a wise and powerful ruler famous as the uncle of extremely beautiful Maryna Mniszech, 1590?1614, whom he maneuvered into the arms of the False Dmitri who took her as his bride while striving to attain the Czardom. In June 1605 Dmitri became Czar of All the Russias and Maryna his Czarina, an arrangement which lasted until May 1606, when Vasili Shuisky had Dmitri a.s.sa.s.sinated so that he could himself ascend the throne. Shuisky ruled only briefly, 16061610, and died in 1612, probably of poison. Maryna is said to have died of a broken heart at the age of twenty-four.

The part of the Bukowski palace that Marjorie preferred was the theater on the third floor, for it was a gem of 1896 architecture, a s.p.a.cious stage with full equipment for giving a three-act opera, but with red-and-gold armchair seats for only fifty-seven spectators. The proscenium provided s.p.a.ce for nine marble busts honoring the immortal musicians and playwrights whose work might conceivably be displayed here. In keeping with Marjorie's special feeling for music, there were five musicians: Beethoven, Bach, Verdi, Wagner, Meyerbeer. The four dramatists were: Moliere, Caldern, Shakespeare and Goethe.

Visitors were sometimes surprised to find Giacomo Meyerbeer in this distinguished grouping, and several Polish guests pointed out that he was really Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer, whose relatives had once inhabited the Polish ghettos, but Marjorie rebuffed them: 'I don't care if he is Jewish. The closest I have ever been to heaven was when Enrico Caruso stood on my stage and sang " Paradis" from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. And I know others who share that opinion.'

Many of the world's great singers had been lured to Bukowo to give recitals for an audience of thirty or forty; Pani Bukowska paid them generously from the immense Trilling fortune monitored by three Chicago banks, and when superlative artists like Caruso or Luisa Tetrazzini appeared, all seats were filled and standees were invited to line the walls.

Actors also came to Bukowo en route from St. Petersburg, in the old days, to Berlin; Sarah Bernhardt had come twice to give monologues from her greatest successes, including three deathbed scenes, the best of which was from La Dame aux Camelias. Poland's own Helena Modrzejewska, who when she became the favorite of Europe and America shortened her name to Modjeska, had made her last appearance anywhere in the world on this stage in early 1909. She was sixty-nine then, a frail elderly woman, but when she essayed the role of Schiller's Princess Eboli, the doomed Spanish woman whom Verdi was to immortalize in Don Carlos, her wavering voice filled the little theater with the mood of tragedy.

Occasionally some troop would pa.s.s through from Moscow to Paris, and Pani Bukowska would hire the entire ensemble, if not too numerous, to detour to her palace for three or four nights of entertainment, and guests would come from Krakow and Lwow and Lublin and Przemysl to enjoy a major treat. William Gillette played Secret Service here, and when Sir Henry Irving gave Oth.e.l.lo with only five players, the Moor, Desdemona, Emilia, Iago and Ca.s.sio, the mob scenes were scarcely missed.

One major change had occurred in the palace since those days in 1896 when Marjorie Trilling first envisaged what could be done with this fine setting on the Vistula: Auntie Bukowska was dead, and the firm grace with which she had ruled the decrepit mansion was deeply missed by all who had borne her sharp criticisms. Her place was taken by her daughter Miroslawa, now a tall, shy spinster of twenty-eight who governed the forty servants and ten gardeners but who otherwise kept pretty much to herself. She was essentially an attractive woman, somewhat too thin, a little more austere than required, but she had good features, strong teeth and eyes that saw far and deep.

She read a great deal, and from contacts with certain professors at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow who visited the palace to enjoy the entertainments, she had been directed to books which had moved her deeply, works on politics and the nature of a good society. Step by step, and without being aware of what was happening to her, she had in 1910 become a Positivist, a person who believed that Poland could be saved by the application of hard work, by allegiance to traditional values, and by the exercise of constant pressure on the three occupying governments-Russia, Austria and Germany-until all civil rights were obtained and a.s.sured.

It would have been difficult to ascertain which of these three ideals she subscribed to most ardently, for sometimes the Positivists were a confused lot. They had surrendered all romantic dreams of revolution as their pathway to freedom, for they had seen only disaster come from this; on the other hand, they did not preach a supine gradualism, which most often became defeatism. What they trusted was the persistent development of basic rights that could not be repressed, and they were willing to devote their lives to the genesis and protection of such rights.

Miroslawa, however, was developing her own interpretations, and during the year 1913, when Austria faced a crisis because of her arrogant annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, two territories she did not need and could not govern, she awakened to the fact that only the universal disruption of a world war could create the climate from which a free Poland could evolve, and during these hectic fifteen months from May 1913 to August 1914 this tall, quiet woman moved about the Bukowski palace awaiting Armageddon, and when it came, with Austrian troops rushing through the village on their way to the eastern front, and then Russian troops surging through in their great victory over the always hapless Austrians, and then the brutal Hungarians marching north to drive the Russians back, she watched dispa.s.sionately the tides of war, aware that it mattered little who won so long as all were losers, for in the disruption of total defeat, new things long dreamed of by her Positivists would come to pa.s.s. In brief, she had become a philosophical anarchist, even though for her the throwing of a bomb would have been impossible.

But she retained many old loyalties, and she did want the Bukowski palace to survive, because it was a center of humanity, a good, decent place. And although she refused to admit her next concern even to herself at night, she did hope that Seweryn Buk, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of Wiktor Bukowski and the maid Jadwiga Buk, would survive the various battles which raged about her so furiously.

Seweryn was several years younger than Miroslawa and he had spoken to her only a few times, but as a boy of seven he had been encouraged by her to learn his letters, and throughout his uneasy youth he had been vaguely aware of her helping her mother in the palace, reading her books under trees in the garden, or riding out on the better horses from the stables. One day, when he was fifteen, she had stopped to hold a long conversation with him, telling him for certain what he had previously heard only as a rumor: 'You're a Bukowski, just like me. You have a right to the name, to a good education. You could even attend the university at Krakow and become a leader like Wincenty Witos.'

The ideas had come too swiftly for Seweryn to digest: that he was a Bukowski, that he might become a flaming revolutionary spokesman like Witos, that this woman of the gentry cared what he became.

He asked his hard-working mother: 'Am I really a Bukowski?' and for a while she sat silent, saying at last: 'Call your father.' When Janko came in from the fields, which he tended so a.s.siduously, she said bluntly: 'The boy desires to know if he's a Bukowski,' and Janko slapped his much-loved son on the back and said: 'You sure are.'

With little embarra.s.sment the two peasant parents informed their son of the conditions of his birth, and of how it had enabled them to acquire the good fields they now owned, the cottage they enjoyed and, above all, the corner of the forest which was theirs and no one else's. Janko spoke with a certain defiance, Jadwiga with intense pa.s.sion: 'You brought this family all its goodness, Seweryn, and you will inherit it as if you were our only son. I hope your brothers Jan and Benedykt will get an education and work elsewhere.' When the boy tried to speak, his father interrupted him: 'Seweryn, before you came we lived like animals. No floor. No chimney. Smoke destroyed the eyes. No fields of our own. No fallen limbs to feed the fire. We were slaves, six days a week working for the mansion, tilling our own plot of vegetables after dark.' He gripped his son's knee as if he would break it. 'We've never told you these things because we didn't want to burden you, but you were born into a terrible world, Seweryn, and your mother made it a little better for you, and for your brothers, and for all of us.' The matter took an important turn two days later when Miroslawa came to the Buk cottage with an astonishing proposal: 'Seweryn is a Bukowski, of that there can be no doubt. And as a member of that family, I want him to take his rightful name.'

'This is craziness,' Jadwiga said promptly, determined to forestall public scandal, which would accomplish nothing. She was a powerful woman who tended the beehives from which her family earned most of its surplus cash, and she knew at once that what Miroslawa was proposing bordered on the ridiculous; it was an idea of equality she had picked up from those professors at the university.

When Miroslawa took her concern to the young priest at Gorka, Father Barski, the prelate was aghast at her presumption. 'Fifteen years ago an event happened in your village which has been absorbed, digested, accepted. Whether the right things were done, I can't say, Panna Bukowska, but I think you must agree that a workable solution was found. Don't disturb it at this late point.'

'But he is a legitimate member of my family,' Miroslawa insisted. 'He has rights. An education 'You utter three grave errors. He is not legitimate. Legally he is not a member of your family. And as a peasant, which he is, he has no right whatever to an education. Believe me, let him stay where he is, as he is.'

She next visited a lawyer in Sandomierz to ascertain whether she could adopt Seweryn and thus give him her name, but at this immodest proposal, from a woman in her twenties, the lawyer laughed. 'Panna Bukowska, what you propose might work in a radical country like France or someplace like America, where they have no traditions at all, but this is Poland. And through the years, with the help of our church, we've established certain customs and rules for dealing with b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Trust me, they're the right rules, and if you try to upset them with your modern ideas, you will create only tragedy. Now go home and forget this nonsense.' She went home but she did not forget.

This is how things stood on the right bank of the Vistula, with almost everyone accounted for: Auntie Bukowska and the grand Countess Lubonska, nee Zamoyska, both dead and sorely missed; Count Lubonski endeavoring to forge a union of three such disparate nations as Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine; Pani Marjorie Bukowska entertaining famous artists in her palace; Jadwiga and Janko Buk improving their fields with the help of their sons; the spinster Miroslawa Bukowska looking after the housekeeping at the Bukowski palace and dreaming about the future of Poland; and the young priest Father Barski watching over everything with his cautious Catholic eye. And Wiktor Bukowski-what of him? He led the relaxed, aimless life of the Polish country gentleman, tramping his estate, kicking a clod of earth now and then, and accomplishing nothing. Even though Poland had regained nationhood, he had only the vaguest understanding of who was ruling the country or what was happening in the surrounding countries. Deprived of the newspapers he used to enjoy at Landtmann's coffeehouse, and no longer involved in the governance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he sometimes felt that the world was slipping away from him and wondered what he might do to catch up.

Having turned over the management of his estate to a factotum from Warsaw, he rarely saw any of his peasants in the fields, and the palace itself was run most elegantly by Marjorie and Miroslawa. He did spend time at his stables, but even there, most decisions were made by the six grooms who tended the Arabians and the elegant carriages. He enjoyed most of all riding one of his spirited steeds up the riverbank to Castle Gorka, where he chatted with Count Lubonski if he was in residence, but he admitted he could not follow the tedious divagations of Lithuanian and Ukrainian politics. He doubted that common sense could ever be knocked into those heads and he suspected that it didn't make much difference one way or another.

Since those heady days in Vienna when he first listened seriously to the music of Chopin, he had remained devoted to the works of this great Pole, but he could never become excited by his wife's constant importation of actors and actresses for her theater. Nevertheless, he did indulge her pa.s.sion and went out of his way to be polite to her theater people, who sometimes remained at the palace for a week or more after their performances. When they did, he took them for rides in his black carriages and, in recent years, in his two Packard cars imported from America. Unlike some of the magnates, he did not like to drive automobiles and was content when a guest volunteered to do so.

He did, however, enjoy arranging excursions to places like the old Lubomirski palace at Lancut or the Austrian fortress at Przemysl, for then he could show his visitors other aspects of Polish history. He loved his country and was proud of its achievements, and was pleased when occasion came for any visit to Warsaw, for then he and his wife ensconced themselves in the charming little Palais Princesse on Miodowa Street to entertain the grand families of the new Poland.

With the dissolution of the Austrian Empire, the Lubonskis and the Bukowskis, like other Polish officials, found no further reason to spend the better part of each year in Vienna, so the families had sold their holdings in that city, and the evening galas in Annaga.s.se were no more. Wiktor missed Vienna, sometimes most desperately, but Marjorie did not. 'I've become a Pole, and Warsaw is twice as interesting to me as Vienna ever was. Anyway,' she explained to her new friends, 'the victors in the last war have made it a capital without a country, and who wants to waste time in such a place?'

What Wiktor really did was follow his wife around Poland, around Europe and around the United States. Like all Poles, he loved Paris, for it symbolized the civilized aspects of man's nature, and it also reminded him of Krystyna Szprot, the little pianist who had burst into his life with such incandescent power a quarter of a century ago. Through the journals he had followed her career; 'The Voice of Poland' they called her, and once, in New York, he and Marjorie had attended one of her concerts; at that time she was still championing Chopin and Polish nationalism and was still forbidden by the Russians to enter Poland.

He was reserved in his judgments of the United States, and as a Polish n.o.bleman, was offended by the Poles he was forced to meet in Chicago and Detroit: 'They're nothing but Galician peasants transported across the Atlantic. Some of them can't read.' He felt that they would all be better off if they went back home, returned to their villages, and allowed the Polish gentry to look after them as in times past. He was not a believer in democracy and feared that America must run into difficulty if it persisted in its undisciplined ways.

He had the same apprehensions about Poland, for he saw that with the breakup of the feudal estates and the minimizing of the gentry, the nation was losing its direction: 'A man like Count Lubonski knew how to hold his estates together, and I didn't do too poorly. Now? Anyone with fifty zlotys considers himself a leader, and where will it get us?'

In 1919, Wiktor Bukowski had no occupation, no burning interests, no commitment to anything in Poland or Europe, and no continuing concern except that payments would arrive regularly from the bankers in Chicago who handled the Trilling fortune. The old amba.s.sador had seen to it in his will that the money could not be alienated from the United States or fall into the hands of his son-in-law, 'that Polish fellow.'

So Wiktor drifted amiably along, an avatar of the eighteenth-century Polish n.o.bleman, happiest when he was with his horses, most impressive when dressed in national costume and riding some handsome beast across the plains of eastern Europe.

Who was not accounted for in this review of the Vistula settlement? The two most important members of the two leading families.

Walerian Lubonski, aged thirty-one and heir to the t.i.tle and estates of Castle Gorka, was in London perfecting his English and his understanding of the British system of government. Since it was a.s.sumed by members of his father's group that Polish democracy would incorporate the best aspects of British self-rule, mastery of English was obligatory, and young Lubonski was proving an able student, both of the language and the politics. For him the old count had great hopes.

Ludwik Bukowski, on the other hand, at the age of nineteen showed no specific apt.i.tude for anything except self-indulgence. At the beginning of the war his mother had wanted to whisk him off to Chicago, where her relatives could oversee his education at the University of Chicago, or preferably to Yale, but Wiktor had put his foot down: 'I refuse to have a son of mine attend some second-rate inst.i.tution with no sense of history or culture.' So Wiktor had employed tutors from Vienna to teach the lad French, which had always been the preferred language of the Polish n.o.bility, and when peace came in 1918, he had slipped his son into Paris, where he was now supposed to be attending the Sorbonne. Actually, he was drifting casually into various ateliers where he dabbled in the appreciation of art; for politics he had no curiosity whatever, listening with equal inattention to republicans, royalists and revolutionaries without developing the skimpiest understanding of their competing strengths and weaknesses.

These two were symbolic of the young men who would determine the future of Poland, but for the present cycle they would not be on the scene; as always, the history of this strange and marvelous land would be determined in large part by what happened outside its borders.

The two were alike in most respects; each was clean-shaven, handsome, wealthy, arrogant and of greater than average intelligence; each was emotionally supportive of things Polish and proud of that inheritance; each was eager to a.s.sume leadership, Lubonski in politics, Bukowski as a social luminary, and each had the capacity to do so. But there was one salient difference. Lubonski, like his ancestors, was a man of stern character; Bukowski was not-so that each month the future count spent in London intensified his character, while Bukowski's dawdling in Paris weakened his.

In the decades ahead-the 1940s, for example-Poland would be governed by this combination of historic strength and inherited weakness.

One day toward the close of 1919, when all the world seemed to be in flux as it tested its new boundaries, Marjorie Bukowska announced that she had succeeded in arranging a true gala of Polish music: 'I've invited many guests from Krakow and Lwow and two artists you won't believe.' When Wiktor pestered her for details, she refused to divulge her plans, and even when visitors began to arrive from the two southern cities, she still refused to share her secret.

The Bukowski palace had thirty-one guest bedrooms, but in her enthusiasm for this exceptional affair, Marjorie had invited more people than could be accommodated, so she arranged for the overflow to be housed at the Lubonski castle, and the count considered this fortunate because he was at that moment entertaining two distinguished visitors who would profit from meeting a wide selection of Polish citizens.

Witold Jurgela, a clever professor from Wilno, was head of the Lithuanian delegation with whom Lubonski was negotiating regarding the future of eastern Europe, and Taras Vondrachuk, a wealthy farmer from near Kiev, was leader of the Ukrainians. The three men had agreed to meet privately at Castle Gorka to unravel various proposals, and Pani Bukowska's musical gala would be a welcome diversion from their difficult haggling over boundary lines and innate rights.

Most of the guests had arrived at either the Bukowski palace or the Lubonski castle by Friday noon, and lavish luncheons along with the best wines were offered, and small string ensembles played local airs. But at three it was announced that a chauffeured car from Rzeszow would reach Bukowo within the half-hour and Pani Bukowska hoped that all her guests would be in attendance; another car would arrive from Krakow toward five, and it, too, would contain a surprise. So it was with increasing excitement that everyone began to cl.u.s.ter about the looped driveway that gave entrance to the Bukowski palace.

'I have no more idea than you,' Wiktor told the guests. 'This is an American plot,' and he was as stimulated as the others by the mystery.

At half after three one of the black Packards was seen pa.s.sing the castle ruins and approaching the palace; a few moments later it entered the long driveway leading to the pillared entrance, and when it drew to a halt the people began to clap, for out stepped a man of handsome appearance and great international distinction. It was Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the famous pianist who had been chosen to serve as prime minister of the new nation, a man of fifty-nine with all the honors the nations of the world could provide.

Although he normally avoided such private parties as beneath the dignity of a prime minister, he had in this case made a concession to Marjorie because of the repeated hospitalities she had accorded him during his arduous years of politicking for Poland in America and Europe. He cherished the Bukowskis as loyal Poles, 'the wife more than the husband,' he teased, and in the waning days of his leadership of the nation he was pleased to be with them.

When Marjorie stood proudly beside him she announced, 'During the next three days the Maestro will play for us occasionally,' whereupon everyone cheered, but the reception was somewhat dampened by the premature arrival of the second Packard. It brought from Krakow another pianist of distinction, who on seeing the great Paderewski, dashed across the lawn ignoring everyone to plant a kiss upon his forehead.

It was Krystyna Szprot, herself a well-known spokesman for Poland in the various capitals of Europe. Her reputation as a patriot was unblemished: exile by the czars, arrests by the secret police of both Russian and Austrian Poland, attacks from apologists in the pay of all three occupying powers, and wherever she went, unflinching testimony to the ultimate freedom of Poland.