Whirlpools: A Novel of Modern Poland Part 7

"My Laudie, n.o.body will coerce, nor even try to persuade you to accept."

But Dolhanski asked:

"Tell me, is this some mythical disinterestedness or is it ill humor caused by your not receiving a greater bequest?"

"Do not judge by yourself," answered Krzycki; "but I will tell you something which you certainly will not believe; since this estate is to be devoted to such an object as a peasants' agricultural school, I am highly delighted and have much greater esteem for the deceased. I give you my word that I speak with entire sincerity."

"Bravo!" exclaimed Pani Otocka, "it is pleasant to hear that."

Pani Krzycki looked with pride first upon her son, then upon Pani Otocka; and, though a feeling of disappointment lingered in her heart, said:

"Well, let there be a peasants' school, if only our Jastrzeb peasants will be permitted to send their sons to it."

"That does not admit of any doubt," explained Gronski. "There will be as many pupils as accommodations can be provided for. They may come from all parts, though preference is to be given to Rzeslewo peasants."

"What do they say about the bequest?"

"There were more than a dozen of them at the opening of the will, as they expected a direct gift of all the manor lands to them. Somebody had persuaded them that the deceased left everything to them to be equally divided. So they left very much displeased. We heard them say that this was not the genuine will and that they do not need any schools."

"Most fully do I share their opinion," said Dolhanski, "and in this instance, contrary to my nature, I will speak seriously. For at present there is raging an epidemic of founding schools and no one asks for whom, for what, how are they to be taught in them, and what is the end to be attained. I belong to that species of birds who do not toil, but look at everything, if not from the top, then from the side, and, perhaps for that very reason, see things which others do not observe.

So, at times, I have an impression that we are like those children, for instance, at Ostend, who build on the sea-sh.o.r.e forts with the sand.

Every day on the beach they erect them and every day the waves wash them away until not a trace of them remains."

"In a way you are right," said Gronski; "but there, however, is this difference: the children build joyfully and we do not."

Afterwards he meditated and added:

"However, the law of nature is such that children grow while the adults rear d.y.k.es, not of sand, but of stone upon which the weaves dash to pieces."

"Let them be dashed to pieces as quickly as possible," exclaimed Ladislaus.

But Dolhanski would not concede defeat.

"Permit me then," he said, "since we have not yet grown up and have not yet started to build of stone, to remain a pessimist."

Gronski gazed for a while into the depths of the garden like a man who was pondering over something and then said:

"Pessimism--pessimism! We hear that incessantly nowadays. But in the meanwhile if there exists anything more stupid than optimism, which often pa.s.ses for folly, it is particularly pessimism, which desires to pose as reason."

Dolhanski smiled a trifle biliously and, turning to the ladies, said, pointing to Gronski:

"Do not take this ill of him, ladies. It often happens for him in moments of abstraction to utter impertinences. He is a good--even intelligent--man, but has the unbearable habit of turning over everything, examining it from all sides, pondering over it, and soliloquizing."

But Marynia suddenly flushed with indignation in defence of her friend and, shaking the teapot which at that moment she held in her hand, began to speak with great ardor:

"That is just right, that is just sensible; that is what everybody ought to do--"

Dolhanski pretended to be awe-stricken and, bowing his head, cried:

"I am vanquished; I retreat and surrender arms."

Gronski, laughing, kissed her hand, while she, abashed at her own vehemence and covered with blushes, began to ask:

"Is it not the truth? Am I not right?"

But Dolhanski already recovered his presence of mind.

"That does not prove anything," he said.

"Why?"

"Because Gronski once promulgated this aphorism: It is never proper to follow the views of a woman, especially if by accident she is right."

"I?" exclaimed Gronski. "Untangle yourself from me. I never said anything like that. Do not believe him, ladies."

"I believe only you, sir," answered Marynia.

But further conversation was interrupted by Pani Krzycki, who observed that it was time for the May ma.s.s. In the Jastrzeb manor-house, there was a room especially a.s.signed for that purpose and known as the chapel. At the main wall, opposite the windows, stood an altar with a painting of the Divine Mother of Czestochowo. The walls, altar, painting, and even the candles were decorated with green garlands. On the side tables stood bouquets of elders and jasmines whose fragrance filled the entire room. Sometimes, when the rector of Rzeslewo arrived, he conducted the services; in his absence the lady of the house. All the inmates of the house, with the exception of Laskowicz, during the entire month of May met every evening in the chapel. At present the gentlemen followed the ladies. On the way Ladislaus asked Gronski:

"Is Miss Anney a Catholic?"

"To tell you the truth, I do not know," answered Gronski, "but it seems--but look, she is entering also. So she must be a Catholic.

Perhaps her name is Irish."

In the chapel the candles were already lit, though the sun had not entirely set and stood in the windows, low, golden, and ruddy, casting a l.u.s.tre on the white cloth which covered the altar and on the heads of the women. At the very altar the lady of the house knelt, behind her the lady visitors; after them the female servants and the old asthmatic lackey, while the gentlemen stood at the wall between the windows. The customary songs, prayers, and litanies began. Their sweetness struck Gronski. There was in them something of spring and at the same time of the evening. The impression of the spring was created by the flowers, and of the evening by ruddy l.u.s.tre entering through the windows, and the soft voices of the women who, repeating the choral words of the litanies, reminded one of the last chirp of birds, subsiding before the setting of the sun. "Healer of the sick. Refuge of sinners, Comforter of the afflicted," repeated Pani Krzycki; and those soft, subdued voices responded, "Pray for us,"--and thus did that country home pray on that May evening. Gronski, who was a sceptic, but not an atheist, like a man of high culture, at first felt the aesthetic side of this childlike "good-night" borne by these women to a benign deity.

Afterwards, as if desiring to corroborate the truth of Dolhanski's a.s.sertion that he was wont to turn over every subject on every side and to ponder over every phenomenon, he began to meditate upon religious manifestations. It occurred to him that this homage rendered to a deity was an element purely ideal, possessed solely by humanity. He recalled that as often as he happened to be in church and saw people praying, so often was he struck by the unfathomable chasm which separates the world of man from the animal world. As a matter of fact, religious conceptions can only be formed by higher and more perfect organisms; therefore he drew the conclusion that if there existed beings ten times more intelligent than mankind, they would, in their own way, be ten times more religious. "Yes, but in their own way," Gronski repeated, "which perhaps might be very different." His spiritual drama (and he often thought that there were many people like him) was this: that the Absolute appeared to him as an abyss, as some synthetic law of all the laws of existence. Thus he presumed that according to a degree of mental development it was impossible to imagine that law in the form of the kindly old man or in the eye on the radiant triangle, unless one takes matters symbolically and a.s.sumes that the old man and the eye express the all-basis of existence, as the horizontally drawn eight denotes infinity. But in such case what will this all-basis be for him?

Always night, always an abyss, always something inscrutable; barely to be felt by some dull sensation and not by any clear perception, from whose power can be understood the phenomenon of existence and an answer be made to the various whys and wherefores. "Mankind," mused Gronski, "possesses at the same time too much and too little intelligence. For, after all, to simply believe one must unreservedly shut the blinds of his intellectual windows and not permit himself to peer through them; and when he does open them he discovers only a starless night." For this reason he envied those middle-aged persons, whose intelligence reared mentally edifices upon unshaken dogmas, just as lighthouses are built upon rocks in the sea. Dante could master the whole field of knowledge of his time and yet, notwithstanding this, could traverse h.e.l.l, purgatory, and paradise. The modern man of learning could not travel thus, for if he wished to pa.s.s in thought beyond the world of material phenomenon, he would see that which we behold in Wuertz's well-known painting, a decapitated head; that is, some element so undefined that it is equivalent to nothing.

But the tragedy, according to Gronski, lay not only in the inscrutability of the Absolute, in the impossibility of understanding His laws, but also in the impossibility of agreeing on them and acknowledging them from the view point of human life. There exist, of course, evil and woe. The Old Testament explains them easily by the state of almost continual rage of its Jah. "Domine ne in furore tuo arguas me, neque in ira tua corripias me," and afterwards "saggittae tuae infixae sunt mihi et confirmasti super me manuo tuum." And once having accepted this blind fury and this "strengthening of the right hand," it is easy to explain to one's self in a simple manner misfortune. But already in the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes doubts whether everything in the world is in order. The New Testament sees evil in matter in contraposition to the soul; and that is clear.

However, viewing the matter, in the abstract, as everything is a close chain of cause and effect, therefore everything is logical, and being logical it cannot per se be either evil or good, but may appear propitious or unfavorable in its relation to man. Besides, that which we call evil or misfortune may, according to the absolute laws of existence, and in its profundity, be wise and essential principles of development, which are beyond human comprehension, and therefore something which in itself is an advantageous phenomenon.

Yes, but in such case, whence does man derive the power to oppose his individual thoughts and his concrete conceptions to this universal logic? If everything is a delusion, why is the human mind a force, existing, as it were, outside of the general laws of existence? There is this something, unprecedented and at the same time tragical, that man must be subjected to these laws and can protest against them. On earth spiritual peace was enjoyed only by the G.o.ds, and is now only by animals. Man is eternally struggling and crying veto, and such a veto is every human tear.

And here Gronski's thoughts a.s.sumed a more personal aspect. He began to look at the praying Marynia and at first experienced relief. There came to his mind the purely aesthetic observation that Carpaccio might have placed such a maiden beside his guitar-player and Boticelli should have foreseen her. But immediately afterwards he thought that even such a flower must wither, and nothing withers or dies without pain. Suddenly he was seized with a fear of the future, which in her traveling-pouch carries concealed evil and woe. He recalled, indeed, the aphorism which he had uttered, a short time before, about pessimism; but that gave him no comfort, because he understood that the pessimism which flowed from the exertions of the intellect is different from the worldling's pessimism which Dolhanski, by shrugging his shoulders at everything, permitted himself to indulge in when free from card-playing. He moreover propounded to himself the question whether that debilitating pessimism could in any manner be well founded, and here unexpectedly there stood before his eyes another friend, entirely different from Dolhanski, though also a sceptic and hedonist,--Doctor Parebski. He was a college-mate of Gronski and in later years had treated him for a nervous ailment; therefore he knew him perfectly. Once, after listening to his various reflections and complaints about the impossibility of finding a solution of the paramount questions of life, Doctor Parebski said to him: "That is a pastime for which time and means are necessary.

If you had to work for your bread as I have, you would not upset your own mind and the minds of others. All that reminds me of a dog chasing his own tail. And I tell you, look at that which environs you and not at your own navel; and if you want to be well, then--carpe diem!"

Gronski at that time deemed these words somewhat brutal and more in the nature of medical than philosophical advice, but now when he recalled them he said to himself: "In truth the road on which, as if from bad habit, I am continually entering leads to nowhere; and who knows whether these women praying this moment with such faith are not, without question, more sensible than I am, not to say more at ease and happier?"

In the meantime Pani Kryzcki began to speak: "Under Thy protection we flee. Holy Mother of G.o.d," and the women's voices immediately responded: "Our entreaties deign not to spurn and from all evil deign to preserve us forever." Gronski was swept by an intense longing for such a sweet, tutelary divinity who does not deign to scorn entreaties and who delivers us from evil. How well it would be with him if he could enjoy such peace of mind, and how simple the thought!

Unfortunately he already had strayed too far away. He could, like women, yearn, but, unlike them, he could not believe.

Gronski mentally reviewed the whole array of his acquaintances and noted that those who fervently believed, in the depths of their souls, were very few in number. Some there were who did not believe at all; others who wanted to believe and could not; some acknowledged from social considerations the necessity of faith, and finally there were those who were simply occupied with something else. To this latter category belonged men who, for instance, observed the custom of attending ma.s.s as they did the habit of eating breakfast every morning, or of donning a dress-coat each evening or wearing gloves. Through habit it entered into the texture of their lives. Here Gronski unwillingly glanced at Ladislaus, for it seemed to him that the young man was a bird from that grove.

Such, in fact, was the case. Krzycki, however, was neither a dull nor thoughtless person. At the university he, like others, philosophized a little, but afterwards the current of his life carried him in another direction. There existed, indeed, beside Jastrzeb and the daily affairs connected therewith, other matters which deeply interested him. He was sincerely concerned about his native land, her future, the events which might affect her destiny, and finally--women and love. But upon faith he reflected as much as he did upon death, upon which he did not reflect at all, as if he was of the opinion that it was improper to think of them, since they in the proper time will not forget anybody.

At present, moreover, owing to the guests, he was more than a hundred miles from thinking of such questions. At one time, while yet a student, when during vacation time he drove over with his mother to Rzeslewo to attend high ma.s.s, he cherished in the depths of his soul the poetical hope that some Sunday the rattle of a carriage would resound without the church doors and a young and charming princess, journeying from somewhere beyond the Baltic to Kiev, would enter the church; that he would invite her to Jastrzeb and later fall in love with her and marry her. And now here unexpectedly those youthful dreams were in some measure realized, for to Jastrzeb there came not one but three princesses of whom he could dream as much as he pleased, for behold, they were now kneeling before the family altar, absorbed in prayer. He began to gaze--now at Pani Otocka and then at the form of Marynia, which resembled a Tanagra figurine, and repeated to himself: "Mother desires to give one of them to me as a wife." And he had nothing against the idea, but thought of Pani Otocka, "That is a book which somebody has already read, while the other is a fledgeling who can play a violin." Ladislaus was of the age which does not take into calculation any woman under twenty years. After a while, as if unwillingly, he directed his eyes towards Miss Anney,--unwillingly because she formed the most luminous object in the room, for the setting sun, falling upon her light hair, saturated it with such l.u.s.tre that the whole head appeared aflame. Miss Anney from time to time raised her hand and shaded her head with it as if she desired to extinguish the l.u.s.tre, but as the rays each moment became less warm, she finally discontinued the action. At times she was hidden from view by the figure of some dark-haired girl, whom Ladislaus did not know, but who, he surmised, must be a servant of one of these ladies. Towards the close of the services the girl bowed so low that she no longer obscured the view of the light hair or the young and powerful shoulders.

"That," he said to himself, "would be the greatest temptation, but mother would be opposed, as she is a foreigner."

But suddenly, as if to rebuke his conscience, there came to his memory the pensive eyes and slender shoulders of Panna Stabrowska. Ah! if only Rzeslewo and the funds had fallen to his lot! But uncle bequeathed Rzeslewo for educational purposes and the funds for trips to Carlsbad by the Mats, as Dolhanski had said, and a few thousand for Hanka Skibianka. At this recollection his brow clouded and he drew his hand across his forehead.