Tales by Polish Authors Part 51

This answer soon made the round of the crowd, and a murmur arose.

"I will pay you well if you will look carefully after him. It cannot be true that people die from such an injury as that."

At this moment the sick man cried out; the doctor ran back into the house, and the mill-owner turned to go home.

"If there had been a doctor at the factory this would not have happened!" someone in the crowd called out.

"We shall all come to this if they go on keeping us at work till midnight," cried another.

Curses and threats were uttered here and there. But the old giant held his head erect, put his hands in his pockets, and pa.s.sed through the thickest crowd. Only he half closed his eyes and was pale down to his neck. He did not seem to hear what those on the edge of the crowd were saying, and those near him gave way, guessing instinctively that this man was afraid neither of curses nor even of an open attack.

Towards evening Goslawski, whom the doctor had not left for a moment, called for his wife. She came in on tiptoe, staggering and keeping back the tears that dimmed her eyes. The wounded man looked strangely haggard, and his eyes were fixed. In the dusk his face seemed to have the colour of earth.

"Where are you, Magdzia?" he asked indistinctly, and then said, with long pauses: "Nothing will come of our workshop now ... I have no arm ... I am going to follow after it ... why should I eat my bread for nothing?"

His wife began to sob.

"Are you there, Magdzia?... Remember the children. The money for my funeral is in the drawer--you know.... What a lot of flies there are ... such a buzzing...."

He began to toss about restlessly, and breathed heavily, like a man going off into a deep sleep. The doctor made a sign, and somebody took the wife away almost by force and led her into the friendly neighbour's cottage. In a few minutes the doctor followed her there; the poor woman looked into his eyes and knelt down on the floor weeping bitterly.

"Oh, sir, why have you left him? Is he so ill? Perhaps----"

"The Lord will comfort you," said the doctor.

The women crowded round to try and quiet her.

"Don't cry, Pani Goslawska. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.

Get up and don't cry--the children will hear you!"

The widow was almost choked with sobs.

"Let me be on the floor; I feel better here," she whispered. "May the Lord give you all the good, since He has given me all the bad. I have lost my Kazio! Oh, my beloved! why did you work so hard and suffer so much? Only yesterday he said that we should be on our own in October, and now he has gone to his grave instead of to his workshop!"

When the workmen entered into the dead man's home and began to move the furniture about, and she realized that no noise would wake her husband again, she gave a terrible shriek and fainted.

Goslawski's death subsequently became the cause of much disturbance at the factory and of much trouble to Adler. A deputation waited upon him on the Tuesday to ask permission for all the hands to go to the funeral. Adler was furious, and would only allow a few delegates from each room to go, announcing at the same time that every workman who should leave the factory of his own accord would be fined. In spite of this most of the hands left the mill, and Adler posted up a notice that every workman who had absented himself would have his daily pay halved and would be fined a rouble in addition. Whereupon the more spirited among the hands urged their mates to strike, and one of the stokers suggested the blowing up of the boiler. Adler would have taken no notice of such talk at another time, but now he was beside himself.

He called their grumbling mutiny, demanded police from the town, drove the leaders out of the mill and brought an action against the stoker.

When the workpeople saw these drastic measures, they were cowed into submission. They ceased to threaten a strike, but asked for the reinstatement of all the hands, and that at least a bone-setter should be engaged with the money extorted by the fines.

To this Adler replied that he would do what he liked, when he liked, and refused to listen at all to the demand for reinstatement of those he had dismissed.

By the following Monday things had calmed down at the factory. Pastor Boehme came to see Adler, with the intention of inducing him to give way to some of the reasonable demands of the workpeople. But he encountered an unexpected resistance; the mill-owner declared that, if he had ever had intentions of giving way to his workpeople's demands, he no longer had any, that he would rather close the factory than give in.

"Do you know, Martin," he said, "that they have got us talked about in the newspapers? The comic papers have ridiculed Ferdinand, and it has been said that Goslawski died from overwork and because there was no doctor."

"There is some truth in that," answered Boehme.

"There is no truth whatsoever in it," shouted the mill-owner. "I have worked much harder than Goslawski, every German workman works harder; and as for the doctor, he might just as well have been absent from the factory to visit a patient, as he was from town at that particular moment."

"The bone-setter might have been there at any rate," observed the pastor.

Adler gave no answer. He walked up and down the room with long strides, breathing hard.

"Let us go into the garden," he proposed. "Johann, take a bottle of hock into the summer-house."

The pleasant coolness in the summer-house near the pond, the freshness of the wind rustling in the trees, and perhaps the gla.s.s of good wine, gradually soothed Adler. Pastor Boehme looked at him over the rim of his gold spectacles, and seeing him in a better mood, resolved to return to the attack.

"Well," he said, clinking his gla.s.s against Adler's, "a man who keeps such excellent wine as this cannot have a bad heart. Let them off their fines, Gottlieb, take them all on again, and install a doctor.... Your health!"

"I will drink your health, Martin, but I promise nothing of the sort,"

repeated the mill-owner, although his anger had somewhat cooled.

The pastor shook his head, and muttered:

"H'm! it's a pity you are so obstinate!"

"I cannot sacrifice my interest to sentiments. If I give them a thousand roubles to-day, they will want a million to-morrow."

"You exaggerate," said Boehme, annoyed; "my advice is that, if you can settle this business for ten thousand roubles, give fifteen thousand rather, and make an end of it."

"It is at an end already," said Adler. "The worst of them are gone, and the rest know that there is discipline here. If I were as soft-hearted as you, they would trample me under foot."

The pastor said nothing, but began to throw things on to the surface of the pond--first a cork, then bits of wood broken off from a stick.

"My dear Martin, what are you throwing rubbish on the water for?"

asked Adler.

The pastor pointed towards the pond, where the things he had thrown upon the water were making circles that grew larger and larger.

"Do you see how the waves are getting farther and farther away from the middle?" he asked.

"They are always doing that. What is there peculiar in it?"

"You are quite right," said the pastor; "it is always like that--everywhere, on the pond and in our lives. When something good happens in the world, waves are produced by it; they grow larger and larger and extend farther and farther."

"I don't understand you," said Adler indifferently, sipping his wine.

"I will explain it to you, if you will not be angry with me."

"I am never angry with you."

"Very well. You see, it is like this: you have brought your son up badly and have turned him loose upon the world, as I threw that stick into the water. He has incurred debts--that was the first wave. Then you reduced the workmen's pay--that was the second. Goslawski's death was the third; the troubles in the factory and the newspaper scandals were the fourth; and so on with the dismissal of the hands and the lawsuit. What will the tenth wave be?"

"That does not concern me," said Adler. "Let your waves go out into the world and frighten fools; I am not interested in them."