Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

IN the spring of 1830 Pan Jaczewski, who was living on his ancestral estate of Rozanka, received a visit from his late friend’s only son, the young Josif Migurski. Jaczewski was an old man of sixty-five with a wide forehead, broad shoulders and a broad chest and long white whiskers on his brickred face, and he was a patriot from the time of the Second Partition of Poland. As a young man he had served alongside Migurski the elder under the banner of Kosciuszko and he detested with all the strength of his patriotic soul the ‘whore of the Apocalypse’, as he called her, the Empress Catherine II, and her loathsome, traitorous lover Poniatowski, and he likewise believed in the restoration of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania,¹ just as he believed at night that the sun would rise again by the next morning. In 1812 he had commanded a regiment in the army of Napoleon, whom he worshipped. Napoleon’s downfall grieved him but he did not abandon the hope of a restoration of the Polish kingdom, were it only a mutilated one. The opening of the Sejm² in Warsaw by Alexander I revived his hopes, but the Holy Alliance and the triumph of the general reaction across the whole of Europe, and the petty tyranny of the Grand Duke Constantine put off indefinitely any realization of his cherished longings … After 1825 Jaczewski made his home in the country, spending his time without interruption at Rozanka and occupying himself with farming, hunting, and the reading of newspapers and letters, by which means he continued ardently to follow political events in his homeland. He had taken as his second wife a beautiful but impoverished woman from the szlachta,³ and the marriage was not a happy one. He neither loved nor respected this second wife of his: he felt her to be an encumbrance and treated her harshly and rudely, as if her were punishing her for his own mistake in remarrying. He had no children by his second wife. From the first marriage there were two daughters: the elder, Wanda, a stately beauty who was aware of the value of her attractions and was bored by country life; and the younger, Albina, her father’s darling, a lively, bony little girl with curly blonde hair and, like her father, large widely-spaced sparkling blue eyes.

Albina was fifteen years old at the time of Josif Migurski’s visit. Migurski had in fact stayed with the Jaczewskis before as a student, in Wilno where they spent the winters, and had paid court to Wanda, but now he was coming to visit them in the country for the first time as a grown up and independent young man. The arrival of young Migurski was agreeable to all the inhabitants of Rozanka. The old man liked Josif Migurski because he reminded him of his friend, Josif’s father, of the time when they were both young, and of how they had talked together with great passion and the rosiest hopes about the current revolutionary ferment – and not only in Poland but also abroad, whence he had just returned. Pani Jaczewska liked him because when there were guests present old Jaczewski restrained himself and did not scold her for everything in his usual manner. Wanda liked him because she was sure that Migurski had come for her sake and that he intended to propose to her: she was preparing to accept, but she intended, as she expressed it to herself, to ‘lui tenir la dragée haute’.⁴ Albina was glad because everyone else was glad. Wanda was not the only one convinced that Migurski had come with the intention of asking for her hand. The entire household, from old Jaczewski down to nanny Ludwika, thought so, although nobody said anything.

And they were correct. Migurski had arrived with that intention, but at the end of a week he left again, somehow confused and downcast, without having made any proposal. They were all surprised by this unexpected departure and no one, with the exception of Albina, understood the reason for it. Albina knew that the cause of his strange departure was she herself.