Poland: A Novel Part 21

On and on the encomiums went, until Feliks gained the impression that it must have been Poles who had organized the two part.i.tions, because obviously Austria, Prussia and Russia had fought constantly to defend her.

But one afternoon when he was looking for Elzbieta, who was spending more and more of her time with Roman, he pa.s.sed an open door and heard the four men-Von Eschl, Von Starhemberg, Mniszech and Lubonski-arguing heatedly, and like any inquisitive young man, he lingered. Mniszech was saying: Tyodor Kuprin came to me at my estate in west Russia and a.s.sured me that his Catherine was now reconciled to terminating Poland. Wiping it out altogether and forever.'

'Will she back Prussia if we make the first move?'

'She will if Austria joins us.'

'We cannot trust a vague promise like that,' Von Eschl said, at which Mniszech flared: 'Are you doubting my word?' and Von Eschl said: 'I am doubting Catherine's. She has lied to us too often in the past.'

Feliks could not follow what was said next, for everyone spoke at once, but finally Von Eschl's cold, clear voice, always cutting to the heart of the matter, asked: 'Von Starhemberg, tell us in the simplest possible terms, will Austria join us in a final part.i.tion?'

Before the Viennese count could reply, Lubonski said in a voice so low that Feliks could scarcely hear him: 'Horvath Janos a.s.sured me on the day I came that he had representations from Vienna promising immediate military support if Russia and Prussia chose to make a final move.'

'And you have Catherine's and Kuprin's promise that Russia is ready to take the leap.'

Von Eschl said: 'Throw that door shut. Someone might overhear us, and I do not want Horvath to know what we're deciding.' And the door was slammed.

In great confusion of spirit Feliks dropped his speculation about Poland's freedom and directed his whole attention to the courts.h.i.+p of Elzbieta Mniszech; for two weeks Roman had enjoyed a fairly free field, but Feliks now proved himself a formidable contestant. He was not shy; he spoke well; each day he was acquiring additional sophistication, and although he was somewhat shorter than Roman, he was more pleasing in overall appearance. He was also infatuated with Elzbieta and had reason to believe that she was attracted to him.

Twice she referred to the sleigh ride at which he had performed so ably and several times she allowed herself to be trapped in corners of the castle, where they kissed pa.s.sionately. Once when they lingered there for the better part of an hour, caressing each other, she broke into tears. 'Oh, Feliks, you're going to be a man any girl would be proud of.'

He did not know how to interpret this, but the more he talked with her the more convinced he became that she was a rare creature: beautiful, compa.s.sionate, gifted in four languages, and wise. For one rich and glorious week he imagined himself married to her, and when he wakened from this dream he found her waiting for him in a corridor leading to one of the battlements, and they went out into the wintry air, where snow made the mountains and the gorges one gleaming beauty. Rarely could young people have been in love in a setting more conducive to wild feelings and bold imaginings, for the entire world seemed to lie at their feet.

'I am going to ask Pan Ignacy for your hand,' Feliks said, whereupon Elzbieta kissed him ardently, but then she began to tremble as if the cold had attacked her, and he asked if she wished to leave the exposed spot and the whistling winds.

'Oh, no!' she cried, clutching at his arm. 'It's ... well, we don't know what Father will say.'

'I think he likes me.'

'He does. He's told me so.'

'He did?'

'But I think ... I'm afraid, that is ... I think he has hoped I would marry Roman.'

Once she uttered this fear, Feliks understood how real it was; Count Lubonski had come to Niedzica not only to discuss Poland's future with the executioners but also to find a family alliance for his diffident son Roman, and with the Granicki girl already married, Elzbieta became not only an attractive prospect but perhaps the sole one. Roman, with his distinctive lineage as a real magnate, was a formidable opponent and Feliks thought it best to confront the situation openly: 'Are you in love with Roman?'

'I'm in love with you, surely you know that.'

'Will you marry me?' he blurted out.

She blushed, held his hand tightly, and then kissed him as they leaned against the battlement. Very carefully she said: 'I think, Feliks, you had better let me speak to Father about that.'

'It's my duty to speak,' he said, feeling the ardor of her hand loosen into fear. 'It's always the man's duty.'

'The Mniszechs are different,' she warned. 'If Father is angered ...'

'I would not be afraid,' he said with sharp finality, and she shrugged her shoulders and said: 'Speak to him, then.' So they descended from the tower to seek him out, and from the manner in which she stayed close to Feliks, it was apparent that she intended supporting him in his supplication.

They found Ignacy in deep consultation with Baron von Eschl, the two men leaning over a map and drawing lines which now and then they scrubbed out, and although Feliks was loath to interrupt, Elzbieta went right up to her father, saying: 'Can we speak with you, please?' Von Eschl smiled coldly, as if he could guess what they wished to speak about, for he had been watching the young people and knew fairly accurately what had been happening. Folding the map four times and placing a heavy book upon it, he left the room.

'Father, we wish to ask you a question,' Elzbieta said, reaching out for her lover's hand to lend him support, but as Feliks stepped forward to make his speech, Ignacy Mniszech moved forward too, and he seemed enormous, a giant that leaned forward like the cliffs of a river gorge, with a stare so intense that Feliks feared he might lash out with his huge fists.

Instead, his huge face broke into a warm, compa.s.sionate smile, and before Feliks could utter a word, he felt his two hands being caught in Ignacy's and clasped with pa.s.sionate warmth. 'You were wise to come to me, Feliks. It's what a gentleman should do, and I appreciate your courtesy.' Dropping the hands, he threw a bearlike paw about the young man's shoulders and eased him out of the room without allowing him to have said one sentence, and as soon as the couple were at the door they could hear him bellowing: 'Von Eschl! Find the Austrian and let's get back to work.'

'I think he accepted the idea,' Feliks said hopefully as he led Elzbieta along the stony corridors of this historic castle, and she agreed with him: 'There's hope.'

'But he said nothing,' Feliks reflected, and with these words he could feel Elzbieta grow curiously distant, a sensation which intensified when they met Roman coming in from a morning hunt. In some unstated way she had dissociated herself from Feliks and moved closer to Roman, and it was then that Feliks began to suspect that there might be some arrangement between his two friends and between Elzbieta and her father, so that words between the latter pair had been unnecessary.

Seeing this excellent girl in morning light, detached from him as it were, he realized what an exceptional person she was, how exquisitely ordained to be a wife: she was lively and brave, as she had shown at the sleigh ride; she was warm and affectionate, as her kisses had amply demonstrated; and she had strong character, as when she summoned her father from his work with the German baron; and she was as beautiful as a fawn in early summer when every meadow is an invitation to leaping and exploring. Elzbieta, he whispered to himself, if the answer is no, I think I shall die.

Ignacy Mniszech himself went into the kitchen to supervise preparation of the soup, a task at which he spent most of that day, absenting himself from the noontime meal so that he could avoid responding to Bukowski's implied proposal of marriage. He spent that time slaughtering a young pig and carefully catching all its blood in a ewer, which he brought back to the kitchen, where he added vinegar and salt to the blood and set the ewer aside.

Asking the cooks for what meat stock they had, he added to it bits of cooked pork and chicken, two large handfuls of chopped vegetables, three heavy soupbones and six large dried mushrooms that he and his daughter had gathered that autumn.

'Prunes!' he called, and cooks hurried up with a large handful. 'Cherries!' and they came with a cupful of dried delicacies, which he tossed into the brew.

He tended the soup all afternoon, tasting it now and then and soliciting advice from his professionals: 'I want this to be the best. More salt, do you think?' When it was done to everyone's approval, a distinguished golden Polish soup, he stirred in a large helping of crumbled honey cake to bind the various elements together.

'An excellent soup,' he said before the evening meal, and when he heard the guests a.s.sembling in the dining hall he divided his soup into two portions, one extremely large, the other so small that it would serve only one person, and into this latter helping he stirred the dark blood and vinegar, keeping it over the fire until it turned an ebon black.

'Dinner!' he shouted as he left the kitchen, and behind him came four servants bearing soup bowls for the guests, who sniffed approvingly as their rich portions of amber-colored soup were placed before them. Ignacy took the final bowl from the fourth servant and walked silently, ceremoniously to where Feliks Bukowski sat. Deftly, using both his big hands, he placed the bowl of black soup before the impetuous suitor, and when Feliks looked down at it and saw the terrible blackness he knew that his proposal of marriage had been rejected, and so did everyone else at the table.

Convention required that he make no comment, betray no emotion. Like a soldier a.s.signed to hateful duty, he ate his black soup, cruelly aware that the soup of the others was a rich golden brown, and after Feliks had finished his bitter dish, Ignacy Mniszech, big and bald and brazen, rose and announced to his guests: 'On this day my daughter Elzbieta is announcing her engagement to Roman Lubonski, son of my dear friend-Count Lubonski in Poland, Baron Lubonski in Austria. Wedding's to be at the Mniszech palace in Warsaw, and you are all to attend.'

Now convention required that Feliks, his black soup obediently consumed, felicitate the engaged couple, which he did with solemn grace, raising his gla.s.s and speaking in a voice from which emotion had been excised: 'May you enjoy unending happiness.' But when he resumed his seat and looked dispa.s.sionately at the guests, a terrible confusion of images hovered about the long oaken table: the sleepy bear routed from his wintry cave became Poland, driven to extremity by the hunters converging upon her; the first robber whose head had to be hacked off with many blows became the map over which the other executioners pored; and lovely Elzbieta, the fairest girl he would ever know, climbed onto the narrow sleigh, holding Roman Lubonski by a silken string as if she were playing with him.

Then the images dissolved and he realized that he had been used both at the Granickis' and now at the Mniszechs' as a foil: the spirited young man whose courts.h.i.+p of the castle princesses would awaken the interest and the jealousy of the future count. He had prepared the way for Roman; his kisses had alerted Elzbieta to the important task at hand, a union of Mniszech and Lubonski.

Ignacy was speaking: 'A century and a half ago Zofia Mniszech left Dukla to marry Cyprjan Lubonski, one of the happiest alliances in our family history. Inspired by Zofia, Count Cyprjan went on to defend Czestochowa against the Swedes and Vienna against the Turks. May this marriage with our Elzbieta encourage Count Roman, in his time, to similar braveries.' The guests cheered and started to discuss their preparations for the wedding in Warsaw, and Feliks learned with dismay that the procession would not visit the grandest of the Lubomirski walled castles, the one at Wisnicz, on the way home. He remembered that this branch of the family had two marriageable daughters and was eager to see them on the chance that he, too, might take home a bride, but when he asked: 'Shall we not halt at Wisnicz?' Count Lubonski said abruptly: 'We have much work to complete in Warsaw,' and Feliks thought: He found a bride for his son, so to h.e.l.l with me.

The Lubonski-Mniszech wedding had to be speeded, or Warsaw might disappear as the capital of a nation which no longer existed. The precise timing of Poland's demise would depend upon the plans of the Romanoffs in Russia, the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the Habsburgs in Vienna, but the design was so remorselessly set-like Lubonski's and Mniszech's design for the marriage of their children-that no reversal was possible. Poland's future and Feliks Bukowski's hopes were doomed.

Count Lubonski was so pleased with the way Feliks had functioned in the courts.h.i.+p of his son Roman-exciting Roman's interest in Elzbieta and more or less goading him into proposing to the Mniszech girl-that he insisted upon Feliks' attending the wedding. Following a three-week layover at Castle Gorka, the grand expedition was a.s.sembled again, with an entourage of seventy, and started for the capital.

As before, the riders left Austrian Poland and crossed the border unimpeded into old Poland, but this time there was a major difference: Feliks was taking with him his peasant Jan of the Beech Trees, a man slightly older than himself and one very wise in rural ways. This Jan had also been pondering many of the questions which had a.s.saulted his master during the latter's tour of luxurious palaces; he, too, wondered why his village should have been organized for the benefit of only one man, Count Lubonski, who happened to be a gentle soul but one without any feeling whatever for his peasants, and very little, so far as Jan could discern, for his various gentry like Bukowski. Jan had never seen a really sumptuous establishment like Lancut, but he had worked often at Castle Gorka and could see the vast difference between how a count lived, with his fifty horses and forty servants, and how his peasants lived, with meat once a year, a new suit of clothes once every ten years, little medicine and less education.

Therefore, when, on the way north, Feliks dropped a word here or there concerning Poland and its future, Jan listened carefully, and gradually became aware that his master was concerned about many of the problems that troubled him, and after they had pa.s.sed Pulawy, where the Czartoryskis had expressed vivid hopes for a new Poland in which even peasants would have rights, Jan felt bold enough to ask: 'When will these good things begin to happen?' and Feliks had to confess: 'Never. I think that soon there will be no Poland.' And for many miles, as ice thinned in the beautiful valley of the Vistula, these two discussed the impending fate of what had once been their homeland, and Feliks laid forth his anxiety: 'I think Poland will be destroyed by her protectors. I think that in these days, when we're building a fine new state marked by real freedom and not the Golden Freedom of a few, we will be engulfed by a new deluge and erased forever. The other nations hate us not because we're backward but because we lead the procession. Every good thing we do imperils them and they will have to strike us down.'

Jan, lacking Bukowski's education and sophistication, could not appreciate much of his master's thinking but he certainly comprehended the basic argument, which he expressed forcibly in his own terms: 'It isn't right, Pan Feliks, that I should work so hard and get so little. The Austrian king takes two weeks. The bishop takes two weeks. Count Lubonski takes six weeks. And you yourself take most of the rest. A man from Krakow came running through our village while you were gone, looking over his shoulder for the police, who followed after him three days later. He told us: "A general named Kosciuszko will bring an army to free the peasants. Be ready to join him when he comes." I think, Pan Feliks, that if he comes, I will join him.'

Discussion along these dangerous lines halted as they approached Warsaw, and many local citizens who watched the colorful parade, with its men in ancient costume and its horses caparisoned in the old style-seventy of them to attend one bridegroom-must have thought that they were witnessing a funeral procession honoring the burial of past custom, for this kind of display was now rarely seen in the capital, which was apprehensive about its very existence.

The expedition entered the city on a broad thoroughfare that had always been known under the curious name of Krakow Suburb, since it had formed in even the oldest times the initial stage of the highway leading to that southern city. As they traversed this boulevard they could see the imposing palaces of the Radziwills and the Czartoryskis, but as they approached the center of the beautiful city they came on that fine street Senatorska, where the Lubonski palace, a modest affair of marble and pyracantha bushes thirty feet high, stood beside the Lubomirski palace, a tremendous affair, and across from the stately Mniszech home, the most severe and imposing of them all. When Feliks saw the latter palace, where Elzbieta would be waiting for her wedding, he felt his heart contract, and he wanted to dash across the muddied roadway and throw himself at her feet, pleading with her to reconsider. Instead, even as he looked longingly at the Mniszech palace, he entered the portals of Count Lubonski's Warsaw home.

Although it appeared modest when seen from Senatorska Street, each of its three fine stories had thirty rooms, more or less, and this was customary in the homes of the leading magnates, for they liked to have in their Warsaw complement a dozen or so of the penurious gentry beholden to them, and these petty knights brought with them their wives and children, so that a palace might have as permanent guests some sixty or seventy persons, each of whom was obligated to serve the owner when he put in an appearance at the capital. In time of war, of course, the men would be called on to serve in the count's private army, fighting on whichever side the magnate had elected to support.

Feliks had settled into his modest room, for he had no wife to justify an apartment, for only a few minutes when a messenger from the palace next door arrived with a summons: 'The Princess Lubomirska invites you to join her in a visit of inspection to the Palais Princesse,' and when Feliks asked what that might be, the messenger smiled broadly and said: 'You'll see.'

Feliks was delighted to see Lubomirska again and was honored when she stepped forward almost eagerly to kiss him on the cheek. She was in her Warsaw costume now, fur decorating her dress, with jewels in her silvery hair and an imperious and condescending smile on her lips. 'I have such a delightful surprise for you, Feliks. Climb into my carriage.'

She directed her driver to go eastward on Senatorska toward the castle, where her arch-enemy King Stanislaw August still reigned, as she said, 'clinging on by his fingernails,' but when the six horses were almost entering the castle compound, the driver pulled them smartly to the left, and Lubomirska with her young companion entered that most charming of the Polish streets, Miodowa, the Street of Sweet Nectar. Not big and broad, like Senatorska, nor obviously important, like Krakow Suburb, it ran for only one very long block, but it contained some of the loveliest buildings in Warsaw, churches and bishops' palaces and the residences of those new millionaires who mattered in the city now.

As they rode, Lubomirska explained to Feliks who lived where and who commanded what authority, but as her carriage approached the end of Miodowa she gripped his arm and cried with the pleasure of a little girl: 'See what the Mniszechs have done for their child!' And on a plot of ground newly landscaped with the shrubs and flowers of spring, she showed him what was already called the Palais Princesse, a little marble building of exquisite taste, sitting back from the street, each window, each decoration balanced by another, as charming a small palace as all of Europe could provide.

'What a beautiful wedding present for a beautiful child!' she cried as she pointed out its various perfections. 'Quick, we must slip inside.'

The hurried building of the palasis, which would always be called by its French name, had muddied Miodowa so that Lubomirska's coachman had to carry her to the entrance and then come back for Feliks lest he muddy his boots. Once at the doorway to the palais, Lubomirska a.s.sumed command, and with grand gestures, entered the little jewel and started describing its quiet glories: 'See how everything balances, a room here, a room there, the piano here where it will echo well, the harp over here where we'll be able to see the player.

She led him to each of the floors, expostulating on what a superb job 'those heavy peasants, those bearded Mniszechs' had done, and in a small room on the third floor they found Elzbieta sewing on a piece of gold-threaded fabric. 'Darling child! No one told me you were here!' Lubomirska engulfed the bride-to-be in her arms, then pushed her toward Feliks with a gracious introduction: 'This is my young friend Feliks Bukowski, who pertains to Count Lubonski, your new father-in-law.'

Neither Elzbieta nor Feliks acknowledged any previous acquaintances.h.i.+p; they bowed; he took her hand gravely when she extended it and said: 'I wish you much happiness, Panna Elzbieta.'

'As do I!' Lubomirska cried enthusiastically, kissing her robustly, and with that they withdrew, but when the visitors had descended to the second floor, where they inspected a barely furnished salon, Feliks fell into a chair, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Lubomirska, unable to guess what had a.s.sailed her young friend, drew a chair beside him and took his hands. 'What is it, Feliks?' And he burst forth with an account of his love for Elzbieta, and their sleigh ride, and their kisses on the battlements of the frontier castle.

'Pani Izabella, what shall I do? She is my life.'

'And she should be. I would to G.o.d that I were she, at her age, with her beauty.' She gripped his hands tightly and said with a kind of grim determination: 'I was, too. I really was, Feliks. Maybe not with her striking beauty, but at seventeen, when I was supposed to marry Poniatowski, I was an important young woman with a strong mind and a good character.' He could feel her hands tightening about his as she said: 'And I was scorned as few girls ever have been. Now I move from palace to palace, from country to country, and watch that silly man who scorned me slip down and down to an infamous conclusion.'

She dropped his hands and sat with hers folded severely in her lap. 'I could have saved him, Feliks. Jan Sobieski was a great king because he had a great wife, that Frenchwoman. Stanislaw Poniatowski could have been a great king if he'd had character and support. But he doomed himself when he elected easier routes.'

She left her chair and displayed profound distress as she stamped about the room. 'He doomed himself, and I shall do everything within my power to speed that doom. He is strangling in his castle over there, and where is Catherine to help him now?' She laughed. 'Help him? She leads the three eagles who attack his liver.'

'Why do you hate him so?' Feliks asked when the storm subsided. 'I don't hate Elzbieta. I seem to love her even more.'

'You're not a Czartoryski,' she said. 'I am, and I am cursed with tremendous pride.'

'Are you working with the others ... to destroy Poland, I mean?'

'What others?'

'At Niedzica, in Hungary ... they gathered like vultures. Mniszech for Russia, Lubonski for Austria, Baron von Eschl for Prussia ...'

'Were they at Niedzica?'

'They were. For two weeks at least.'

'And had they maps?'

'They did.'

'And you guessed what they were up to?'

'I did. Count von Starhemberg came up from Vienna to speed things.'

'And what did you think, little spy, that they were doing?'

'They were preparing the final a.s.sault on Poland.'

'That is exactly what they were doing, little spy. You're a clever lad, and now we must take the necessary steps to protect your future in this time of change.'

She drew her chair close to his and said: 'I love a lad who Can weep for a lost lady. Feliks, we must find you a wife.' Before he could respond, she said with that striking realism which marked all she did: 'We must find you a wife with money, Feliks. All you have to offer is a good appearance and a respectable name. To that you must add money if you are to survive in the new Poland.'

'The Mniszechs laughed at me when I wanted to marry Elzbieta. Ignacy himself served me the black soup.'

She astonished him by saying bluntly: 'So also would I, had you come courting my daughter. No magnate of serious importance is going to accept you into his family. Poland has a thousand lads like you, young, good-looking, two horses and a historic name. Feliks, in the grand design you are nothing, and you had better realize that cruel fact.'

He gasped at the severity of her a.n.a.lysis, but when she hammered at him: 'Do you acknowledge that what I say is true?' he had to answer: 'Yes. But what shall I do?'

'Money is everything. And how shall you find money?' As she uttered this harsh summary of his situation she indicated with a sweep of her right hand the immense sums the Mniszechs must have spent to build this little palais, this flawless salon. 'Feliks, tell me, where are you going to find the money?' Again she intercepted his answer: 'Only by marriage to the daughter of some rich merchant.'

When he protested that he had no desire to humiliate himself by marrying a townsperson, she became impatient: 'Whom are you to choose, Pan Feliks? You can't marry into a magnate's family. And you mustn't just drift along, marrying the daughter of some petty gentry as impoverished as yourself. Your fathers always did that, and where did it get them?'

This brutal question had only one answer; Bukowski men had never made brilliant marriages, and as a consequence they lived in penury, obligated to do whatever the various Counts Lubonski directed, and it looked as if they must do so interminably unless Feliks could find himself a girl with money.

In the gathering darkness the Princess Lubomirska instructed the young man she had once said she wished were her son: 'There is in Warsaw a wealthy merchant of tested character. I like him, always have. His name is Orzelski and he has a daughter of your age named Eulalia. He is rich enough to hope for her marriage with a young man of n.o.bility. You're poor enough to hope for marriage with an heiress. I think we should visit this Orzelski.' And without allowing Feliks to object, she led him down the stairs of the Palais Princesse, which would now hold his beloved, and out to her waiting carriage, where she was again lifted over the mud. 'We shall go to Orzelski's.'

Gustaw Orzelski conducted a large establishment that imported goods from St. Petersburg, Paris, Vienna and London, sending in return the lumber and wheat of Poland, and since he had served as banker for many of those with whom he conducted his negotiations, he had been able to ama.s.s a respectable fortune. Princess Lubomirska, of course, had met him only at his place of business, a large and handsome store on a street parallel to Miodowa, and it was there that she went with Feliks.

'This is my dear and trusted young friend Feliks Bukowski, of good family, who has come to court your daughter.' Orzelski, now in his fifties, bowed low to the princess and offered a respectful but limited nod to Feliks. Then, with the boldness which characterized Lubomirska in all her negotiations, she said: 'I think we three should drive directly to your home, Orzelski, because these things do not wait.'

'But it wouldn't be fair to Eulalia ...'

'Send your carriage on ahead. Right now. To warn her. You ride with us.' And it was she who dispatched the Orzelski footmen with instructions that Panna Eulalia was to present herself within the quarter-hour in her own drawing room.

During the tense ride to the Orzelski home, a large house but not a palace, on Krakow Suburb, Lubomirska spoke forcefully: 'I think G.o.d must have ordained it that my Feliks should meet your Eulalia. These two young people need each other ... desperately ... a union made in heaven.'

'But, Princess, I've just met this young man, and he hasn't even seen my daughter.'

'True, but sometimes things are arranged in heaven, and this is one of them.' She would allow no further discussion. 'What a splendid little palace the Mniszechs have put together for their daughter. Have you seen it, Orzelski?' He said that he had supplied the furniture from Paris: 'And very good it was, too. Also the crystal hangings in the salon.'

'I didn't notice them,' Lubomirska said.

'For good reason. We don't install them till tomorrow.'

When they reached the Orzelski home the two men were perspiring, one more nervous than the other, and as Eulalia moved forward to greet them Princess Lubomirska understood why, for as she was to write to a confidante: 'The unfortunate girl stepped clumsily at us, fat and red and positively oafish, and my heart wept for Feliks, but she was the only young woman available with the proper amount of money, so we had to accelerate things lest she fall into the hands of another.'

It was a painful meeting, Eulalia blus.h.i.+ng like a wounded beet, Feliks barely able to hide his shocking disappointment, and Orzelski obviously dismayed to realize that he and Eulalia were not to find with Lubomirska's help a member of the magnate cla.s.s, to which they had rather fatuously aspired. Tea was served in the English manner, with china from France, and Eulalia played rather more heavily on the piano than her Viennese professor would have approved. There was no mother, she having died some years previously, but there was a younger daughter as florid and awkward as her sister.

It was a doleful meeting and Lubomirska knew it, so when the two girls were excused, with Eulalia almost bolting from the room, she became angry and sat the two men before her as if they were schoolchildren: 'You, Orzelski, are disappointed that you are unable to find a young man from a family of greater distinction. You, Feliks, behaved shamefully, showing your disappointment in not finding a rich girl of greater beauty. Who are you, pray tell me honestly, Pan Feliks, to demand anything? What have you accomplished either in acts or wealth that ent.i.tles you? I am disgusted with you, that you should humiliate a young girl in that brutal way. I am disgusted with you!

'My dear friends, both of you. Families are like birds in the sky. Yours, Orzelski, is flying upward ... wealth ... respect ... hopes. Yours, Bukowski, is swooping downward ... no money ... no propects ... only honor ... historic pride. [Here she moved her now-heavy arms beautifully in the air, making crisscrossing patterns.] You are caught in a moment when your two paths cross, one brief moment in infinity. Orzelski, Bukowski occupying the same fragment of the heavens. You will never cross paths again. You will never again share this mystical moment.

'Now I want you to listen. Orzelski, if you marry your daughter to this young man, you gain esteem and the possibility of his promotion to almost any position in the government, whatever it's to be. Bukowski, if you marry this wealthy girl, your son can aspire to the daughter of a major family and his son might marry the daughter of a magnate. This is a golden opportunity for each of you.

'Feliks, I want you to go right now to whatever room Panna Eulalia sits in, crying her heart out, and I want you to ask her if she will walk with you tomorrow, and you are to smile, and kiss her hand, and tell her that you shall await tomorrow with joy ... with joy, do you hear?'

She pushed him from the room and sat talking with Orzelski about his last purchasing trip into Russia and about how he would conduct himself if Poland were ultimately destroyed; he judged that whoever took over would require business affiliations, and he was prepared to provide them.