The Doll

by Bolesław Prus

  Towards five, Geist appeared in his room: he was somehow agitated and locked the door behind him. ‘Mr Suzin,’ he said, ‘it is very important to me that we should understand one another. Tell me—do you have obligations: a wife, children? Although it doesn’t seem to me…’

  ‘I have no one.’

  ‘But you have a fortune? A million…’

  ‘Very nearly.’

  ‘And tell me,’ said Geist, ‘why you are thinking of killing yourself?’

  Wokulski shuddered. ‘That was temporary,’ he said, ‘I felt giddy in the balloon.’

  Geist shook his head. ‘You have a fortune,’ he muttered, ‘you are not striving for fame, or at least not yet…There must be a woman in it,’ he cried.

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Wokulski, highly embarrassed.

  ‘It’s a woman!’ said Geist. ‘That’s bad. One can never know what she will do and what she will lead to. In any case, listen,’ he added, looking into his eyes, ‘if you ever again feel the need to try…Do you understand? Don’t kill yourself, but come to me.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll come right away,’ said Wokulski, looking down.

  ‘Not right away!’ Geist replied vivaciously. ‘Women never destroy men right away. Have you already settled your accounts with that individual?’

  ‘It seems to me…’

  ‘Aha, it only seems so. That’s bad. In any case, bear my advice in mind. It is very easy to destroy yourself in my laboratory, I assure you!’

  ‘What have you brought, professor?’ Wokulski asked him.

  ‘That’s bad, that’s bad!’ Geist muttered. ‘I have to find a buyer for my explosive material. But I thought we would combine…’

  ‘First, sir, show me what you’ve brought,’ Wokulski interrupted.

  ‘You are right,’ replied Geist, and he brought a medium-sized box out of his pocket. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is why people call me mad!’

  The box was of metal, shut in a singular manner. Geist in turn touched pins fixed in various places, casting feverish and suspicious glances at Wokulski from time to time. Once he even hesitated and made a gesture as if to put the box away: but he collected himself, touched a few pins and the lid shot up.

  At this moment he was seized by another attack of suspicion. The old man sank to the couch, hid the box behind his back and fearfully gazed around the room, then at Wokulski. ‘I’m committing a folly!’ he muttered. ‘What madness to risk everything for the first person I happen upon.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me, sir?’ asked Wokulski, no less moved.

  ‘I trust no one,’ said the old man viciously, ‘for what assurance can anyone give me? A promise or his word of honour? I’m too old to believe in promises. Only mutual profit can insure against the vilest treachery, and even that not always…’

  Wokulski shrugged and sat down. ‘I’m not forcing you, sir,’ he said, ‘to share your troubles with me. I have enough of my own.’

  Geist did not remove his gaze from him, but he gradually calmed down. Finally he exclaimed: ‘Come over here, to the table. Look, what is this?’

  He showed him a metal ball of dark colour.

  ‘It looks to me like printer’s metal.’

  ‘Pick it up.’

  Wokulski took the ball and was amazed to find it so heavy.

  ‘This is platinum,’ he said.

  ‘Platinum?’ Geist echoed with a mocking smile. ‘Here’s platinum for you.’

  And he handed him a platinum ball of the same size. Wokulski weighed both in his hands: his amazement grew.

  ‘Surely this is almost twice the weight of platinum?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes…yes,’ Geist laughed. ‘One of my academic friends even called it “compromised platinum”. A neat phrase, isn’t it? To indicate a metal whose specific gravity is 30.7. They always do that. Whenever they succeed in finding a name for a new thing, they at once say they have explained it on the basis of established laws of nature. Conceited asses—the wisest of all, such as so-called humanity abounds with. Do you recognise this?’ he added.

  ‘Well, it is a glass bar,’ replied Wokulski.

  ‘Ha ha!’ Geist laughed. ‘Pick it up, examine it. Curious glass, is it not? Heavier than iron, with a granulated cross-section, an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, which can be cut. Do you see how well this glass passes for metal? Perhaps you would like to heat it, or try it with a hammer?’

  Wokulski rubbed his eyes. There was no doubt in his mind that such glass had never yet been seen in this world.

  ‘And this?’ asked Geist, showing him another bar of metal.

  ‘That must be steel.’

  ‘Not sodium or potassium?’ asked Geist.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pick up this steel.’

  Now Wokulski’s amazement became something like alarm: the supposed steel was as light as a scrap of paper.

  ‘Surely it is hollow?’

  ‘Cut it through, or if you haven’t anything to do so with, then come to my place. You will see there far more similar curiosities and will be able to submit them to any tests you choose.’

  Wokulski gazed in turn at the metal heavier than platinum, at the transparent metal, at the metal lighter than fluff. As long as he was holding them, they seemed to him the most natural things under the sun: for what is more natural than an object which acts upon the mind? But when he gave the samples back to Geist, amazement overcame him as well as incredulity, wonder and alarm. So he inspected them again, shook his head, believed and doubted by turns.

  ‘Well, then?’ asked Geist.

  ‘Have you shown these to chemists?’

  ‘I have…’

  ‘And what have they to say?’

  ‘They inspected them, shook their heads and declared it’s all tricks and deceit, with which serious science cannot be concerned.’

  ‘How so! Didn’t they even make tests?’ asked Wokulski.

  ‘No. Some of them even said outright that if they had to choose between violating the laws of nature and delusions of their own minds, they prefer not to believe their own minds. And they added that to make serious experiments on such tricks might overturn a man’s common sense, and they finally declined.’

  ‘Are you not announcing the discoveries?’

  ‘Not for a moment. Indeed, their intellectual impotence gives me the best guarantee of preserving the secrets of my inventions. Were it otherwise, they’d have been seized upon, sooner or later the processes would have been discovered and they’d have found that which I do not want to give them.’

  ‘In other words?’ Wokulski interposed.

  ‘They’d have discovered a metal lighter than air,’ replied Geist calmly.

  Wokulski threw himself into a chair. For a moment both were silent: ‘Why are you keeping this transcendental metal secret from mankind?’ Wokulski finally asked.

  ‘For many reasons,’ replied Geist. ‘In what is called mankind, barely one genuine man is to be found in ten thousand bulls, sheep, tigers and serpents. This has always been so, even in the Stone Age. Various inventions have been bestowed on this humanity in the course of centuries. Bronze, iron, gun-powder, the magnetic needle, printing, steam-engines and electric telegraphs came willy-nilly into the hands of geniuses and idiots, noble people and criminals. And the result? By acquiring increasingly powerful weapons, stupidity and depravity have increased and multiplied instead of gradually dying out. I,’ Geist continued, ‘don’t intend to repeat that error, and if I finally discover a metal lighter than air I will pass it on only to genuine men. Let them once and for all equip themselves with a weapon for their exclusive use: let their race multiply and gain power, while the animals and monsters in human form gradually die out.’

  ‘He is very eccentric, to be sure,’ thought Wokulski. Then he added aloud: ‘What prevents you from carrying out these plans?’

  ‘The lack of money and assistants. For the final discovery eight thousand tests or so must be made, which—roughly speaking—w
ould take one man twenty years. But four men would do them in five or six years.’

  Wokulski rose from his chair and began walking about the room, pondering. Geist continued to watch him. ‘Let us suppose,’ Wokulski exclaimed, ‘that I could provide you with the money and even one or two assistants. But where is the proof that your metals aren’t some weird trick, and your hopes illusions?’

  ‘Come to my place, you’ll see, you can carry out some experiments of your own, and you’ll be convinced, I see no other way,’ Geist replied.

  ‘When could I come?’

  ‘When you choose. Give me ten francs or so to buy the necessary chemicals. And here’s my address,’ Geist concluded, giving him a grubby note.

  Wokulski handed him three hundred francs. The old man packed his samples, closed the box and, as he left, said: ‘Write to me the day before you come. I am at home nearly all the time, dusting my retorts.’

  When Geist had gone, Wokulski felt bemused. He looked at the door through which the chemist had disappeared, then at the table where he had just been shown natural objects, then again he touched his own hands or head, and walked about stamping his feet to convince himself he was not dreaming. ‘Yet it’s a fact,’ he thought, ‘that this man showed me two elements of some kind: one heavier than platinum, the other lighter than sodium. He even told me he’s looking for a metal lighter than air.’

  ‘Providing there is no incomprehensible fraud behind all this,’ he said aloud, ‘I’d have an idea it would be worthwhile sentencing myself to years of imprisonment for. Not only would I find absorbing work and the fulfilment of the wildest dreams of my youth, but I’d also see an aim before me, higher than any other to which the human soul has ever aspired. The question of flying ships would be solved, man would acquire wings.’

  Then he again shrugged, folded his arms and muttered: ‘No, it’s impossible.’

  The burden of these new natural laws or new illusions oppressed him so much that he felt the need of sharing it with someone, if only partially. So he hurried down to the elaborate reception room on the first floor and summoned Jumart. As he was wondering how to initiate this strange conversation, Jumart himself facilitated it. No sooner did he appear in the room, than he said with a tactful smile: ‘Old Geist went away very excitedly. Did he convince you, or was he defeated?’

  ‘Well, talk never convinces anyone, only facts,’ replied Wokulski.

  ‘So there were facts too?’

  ‘Only the promise of them, as yet. But, tell me, sir,’ Wokulski went on, ‘what would you think if Geist showed you a metal similar in every respect to steel, but two or three times lighter than water? Supposing you saw such material with your own eyes, and touched it with your own hands?’

  Jumart’s smile became an ironic grimace: ‘What could I say, my God, except that Professor Palmieri exhibits still greater curiosities for five francs a person.’

  ‘Who is Palmieri?’ Wokulski asked in surprise.

  ‘A professor of hypnotism,’ Jumart replied, ‘a celebrated individual. He is living in the hotel, and three times a day he exhibits his hypnotic arts in a hall which, unfortunately, only holds sixty people. It is eight o’clock now, so the evening performance is just beginning…If you wish, we might go there, sir—I am admitted free.’

  Such a powerful flush mounted into Wokulski’s face that it covered his forehead and even neck. ‘Let us go,’ he said, ‘to this Professor Palmieri.’ Privately he added: ‘So this great thinker Geist is a charlatan, and I a fool, who paid three hundred francs for a display worth five…How he caught me!’

  They went up to the second floor and into a drawing-room furnished as richly as the others in this hotel. A greater part was already filled with old and young spectators, men and women elegantly dressed and all very intent upon Professor Palmieri, who had just concluded a short speech on hypnotism. He was a man of middle age. A faded and dark man with an unkempt beard and expressive eyes. He was surrounded by a few pretty women and some young men with thin and apathetic faces.

  ‘Those are the mediums,’ Jumart whispered, ‘Palmieri exercises his art on them.’

  The spectacle, of about two hours’ duration, showed Palmieri sending his mediums to sleep by the use of his gaze, but in such a manner that they were still able to walk, answer questions and perform various acts. The persons sent to sleep by the hypnotist also displayed unusual muscular strength in obeying his commands, and even more unusual lack of sensitivity, or hyper-sensitivity of the senses.

  As Wokulski was seeing these phenomena for the first time in his life, and did not conceal his incredulity in the least, Palmieri invited him into the front row. Here, after some experiments, Wokulski realised that the phenomena he was witnessing were not conjuring tricks, but derived from some unknown properties of the nervous system. But he was most interested and even alarmed by two demonstrations which had a certain relevance to his own life. In them, the medium was persuaded of non-existent things. Palmieri gave one of the sleepers the stopper of a carafe, declaring it to be a rose. At once the medium began sniffing the stopper, displaying great enjoyment as he did so.

  ‘What are you at, sir?’ Palmieri cried to the medium, ‘that is asaphoetida.’

  And the medium instantly threw the stopper away in disgust, rubbed his hands and complained that they stank.

  To another, he gave a handkerchief and, when he told him the handkerchief weighed a hundred pounds, the medium began slumping, trembling and sweating under its weight. On seeing this, Wokulski sweated too: ‘I understand Geist’s secret now,’ he thought, ‘he hypnotised me.’

  But he experienced the most painful feeling of all when Palmieri put to sleep a frail young man, then wrapped a coal shovel in a towel and persuaded his medium it was a young and beautiful woman he must love. The medium embraced and kissed the shovel, kneeled before it and uttered the most affectionate expressions. When it was put underneath a sofa, he crawled in after it on all fours, like a dog, and drove away by force four men who tried to hold him back. When Palmieri hid it and announced she had died, the young man lapsed into such despair that he writhed on the floor and beat his head against the wall. At that moment Palmieri puffed into his eyes and the young man woke up with tears streaming down his cheeks, much to the applause and laughter of the audience.

  Terribly agitated, Wokulski quit the hall: ‘So it is all a lie! The alleged inventions of Geist and his intellect, my insane love and even she…She herself is nothing but an illusion of my bewitched thoughts…. The only reality which never deceives and which does not lie is surely—death.’

  He hastened into the street, rushed into a café and ordered cognac. This time he drank a carafe and a half, and as he drank he thought that this Paris, in which he had found the apex of intellect, the greatest illusions and total disillusion, would surely be his tomb: ‘What am I waiting for? What have I to find out? If Geist is a common trickster, and if a man can fall in love with a coal shovel, what is left to me?’

  Dazed with the cognac, he went back to his hotel and fell asleep with his clothes on. And when he awoke at eight next morning, his first thought was: ‘There is no doubt that Geist, by hypnotism, cheated me over his metals. But—who hypnotised me when I was insane about that woman?’

  Suddenly he resolved to obtain information from Palmieri. So he dressed hastily and went down to the second floor. The master of the mysterious art was awaiting clients: but as there were none yet, he received Wokulski at once, taking twenty francs in advance for his fee.

  ‘Can you’, Wokulski asked, ‘persuade anyone that a coal shovel is a woman, and that a handkerchief weighs a hundred pounds?’

  ‘Anyone who lets himself be put to sleep.’

  ‘Then kindly put me to sleep and repeat the trick with the handkerchief on me.’

  Palmieri began his rites: he stared into Wokulski’s eyes, touched his brow, rubbed his hands from wrists to palm…Finally he drew back, reluctant: ‘You, sir, are not a medium,’ he declared.
/>   ‘But supposing I had an incident in my life like that person with the handkerchief?’ Wokulski asked.

  ‘That’s impossible; you can’t be put to sleep. Even if you were, and underwent the illusion that the handkerchief weighed a hundred pounds, you still wouldn’t remember it on waking up.’

  ‘Don’t you think, sir, that someone might hypnotise me more skilfully?’

  Palmieri took offence at this: ‘There is no more skilled hypnotist than I,’ he exclaimed. ‘I, too, could put you to sleep, but it would require several months’ work…It would cost two thousand francs.…I have no intention of wasting my fluid for nothing…’

  Wokulski, not at all displeased, left the hypnotist. He still did not doubt that Miss Izabela could have bewitched him: she had had plenty of time, after all. But then Geist could not have put him to sleep in the course of a few minutes. Besides, Palmieri had declared that those put to sleep did not remember their visions: whereas he recalled every detail of the old chemist’s visit.

  So if Geist had not put him to sleep, he was not a trickster. Therefore his metals existed…and the discovery of a metal lighter than air was possible! ‘This is a city’, he thought, ‘in which I’ve experienced more during one hour than in my whole life in Warsaw. What a city!’

  For several days Wokulski was very busy. In the first place, Suzin left after purchasing a dozen or so ships. The completely legal profit from this transaction was huge—so huge that the share due to Wokulski covered all the expenses he had incurred during his recent months in Warsaw. A few hours before bidding farewell to Suzin, Wokulski lunched with him in his lavish hotel room, and they of course discussed their profits. ‘You have miraculous good luck,’ Wokulski exclaimed.

  Suzin took a mouthful of champagne and, laying his hands, adorned with rings, on his belly, said: ‘It is not good luck, Stanisław Piotrowicz, but millions. You can cut down an osier with a knife, but an oak needs an axe. A man who has kopeks does business in kopeks, and profits in kopeks: but a man who has millions can’t help making profits in millions. A rouble, Stanisław Piotrovich, is an overworked nag—you have to wait several years for it to give birth to another rouble: but a million is as fertile as a rabbit: it produces several litters every year. In two or three years, Stanisław Piotrowicz, you, too, will have a tidy little million or so, and then you’ll see how other money runs after it. Though in your case…’