The Doll Read Online Free PDF Page B

distaste at this witticism. However, Mraczewski got permission to leave before seven that evening, and a few days later acquired a note in Rzecki’s private journal:
    â€˜He was at the
Huguenots
in the eighth row of the stalls with a certain Matilda …’
    Mraczewski might have found some consolation to discover that the same journal contained notes about his colleagues, the cashier, the messenger-boys and even the servant Paweł. How Rzecki knew these and similar details of the lives of his fellow employees is a secret he never confided in anyone.
    Towards one o’clock that afternoon, Rzecki handed over the cash-box to Lisiecki whom, despite their continual bickering, he trusted the most, and disappeared into his room to eat dinner brought in from a restaurant. At the same time Klein left, then returned to the shop at two: whereupon he and Rzecki remained on duty while Lisiecki and Mraczewski went for dinner. By three, they were all in their places once more.
    At eight in the evening they closed: the clerks went off, and only Rzecki remained behind. He made out the day’s accounts, checked the cash, planned his activities for the morrow and wondered whether everything had been done that should have been done that day. For he paid for any neglected duties with insomnia and dismal dreams of the shop in ruins, of the final decline and fall of the Bonaparte dynasty and with the thought that all the hopes he had ever had in his life were only nonsense.
    â€˜Nothing will ever happen! We’re doomed, and there’s no hope,’ he groaned, tossing on his hard mattress.
    But if the day had gone well, Ignacy was content. Then before going to bed he would read the
History of the Consulate and Empire
, or look at newspaper cuttings of the Italian war of 1859 or sometimes, though less frequently, he would get his guitar out from under the bed and play the Rakoczi March on it, joining in with his feeble tenor.
    Then he would dream of the wide Hungarian plains, the blue and white ranks of armies veiled in clouds of smoke … Next morning, however, he was always cross and complained of a headache.
    His most agreeable days were Sundays, when he thought over and drew up plans for window displays during the coming week.
    His view was that the windows summarised the contents of the store and should at the same time attract the attention of passers-by, either with the smartest merchandise, by handsome window-dressing, or by the use of diverting contrivances. The right-hand windows were earmarked for luxurious articles, usually displaying a bronze bust, a porcelain vase, a whole china set for a boudoir table, around which were arranged albums, fans, wallets and candlesticks accompanied by walking-sticks, umbrellas and innumerable small but elegant objects. In the left-hand window, which contained displays of neck-ties, gloves, galoshes and perfumes, toys, mostly mechanical, occupied the central position.
    Sometimes during this solitary task of arranging, the child awoke again in the old clerk. Then he would bring out and set up all the mechanical toys on the table. There was a bear that climbed a post, a cock that crowed, a mouse that ran, a train that ran on rails, a circus clown which trotted along on a horse and pulled another clown behind it, and some couples who waltzed to the strains of indistinct music. Ignacy would wind up these figures and set them all in motion at the same time. And when the cock began to crow, flapping its stiff wings, when the lifeless couples danced jerkily, stopping every now and then, when the leaden passengers in the train began to stare at him in amazement, and when all this world of dolls took on a sort of fantastic life in the flickering gas-light, then the old clerk leaned on his elbow and laughed at them quietly and muttered: ‘Ha ha! Where are you off to, you travellers? And you there, acrobat! Why risk your neck in that fashion? And why do you dancers squeeze one