The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [97]
Wokulski felt like a man who has fallen from a height and lies stunned. His confusion did not escape the Prince’s attention, and he smiled, attributing it to delight at this visit and invitation. It never even entered his head that a ride to the Łazienki park was more important to Wokulski than any Prince or trading partnership.
‘Are we ready, then?’ the Prince inquired, rising. It was only a matter of a second for Wokulski to say he was not going, and wanted nothing to do with any partnership. But at this moment he thought: ‘The outing—that’s for me; the partnership—for her.’
He took his hat and went with the Prince. It seemed to him that the carriage was not driving along the street but over his own brains. ‘Women are not gained by sacrifice, but by brute force…’ he recalled Mrs Meliton’s phrase. Influenced by this aphorism, he felt like seizing the Prince by the scruff of the neck and throwing him bodily into the roadway. But this lasted only a moment.
The Prince was looking at him through half-closed eyes, and seeing Wokulski turn red, then white, thought: ‘I never dreamed I would give this honest fellow so much pleasure. Yes, one should always extend a hand to new people…’
Among his peers, the Prince had the reputation of a fervent patriot, almost a chauvinist; elsewhere, he enjoyed the reputation of an excellent citizen. He very much enjoyed speaking Polish, and even his conversations in French concerned matters of public interest. He was an aristocrat from top to toe, in his soul, heart and blood. He believed that society consisted of two elements: the ordinary crowd, and the chosen few. The ordinary crowd was the work of Nature, and might well be descended from monkeys, as Darwin maintained, despite Holy Scripture. But the chosen few had some higher origin, and were descended, if not from gods, then at least from heroes related to them—Hercules, Prometheus, or in the last resort Orpheus. The Prince had a good friend in France (infected to the greatest possible degree by the democratic disease) who scoffed at the divine origins of the aristocracy.
‘Cousin mine,’ he would say, ‘I think you fail fully to understand the question of stock. What are the great houses? They are made up of those whose ancestors were hetmans, senators, governors, or, in today’s terms, marshals, members of the upper house, or departmental prefects. Well—we know such gentlemen, do we not? There’s nothing unusual about them…They eat, drink, play cards, court women, amass debts—like any other mere mortal, whom they occasionally surpass in stupidity.’
A sickly flush suffused the Prince’s face.
‘Cousin,’ he retorted, ‘have you ever met a prefect or marshal with a majestic expression such as those we see in the portraits of our forefathers?’
‘There is nothing odd in that,’ laughed the plague-stricken Count. ‘Artists endowed their paintings with expression never dreamt of by the original sitters, just as heraldists and historians told fabulous legends about them. All lies, my cousin!…These are only the scenery and costumes that make of one Jack a prince and of another a ploughman. In reality they are merely miserable actors both.’
‘Derision, cousin, makes a poor debating partner!’ fulminated the Prince and escaped. He hurried home, lay down on the chaise-longue with his hands clasped behind his head and, gazing at the ceiling, watched as figures of superhuman strength, courage, reason, disinterestedness passed before him. These were his ancestors, and those of the Count, except that the latter denied them. Could he possibly have some mixed blood?…
The prince did not despise ordinary mortals, but was even benevolently disposed towards them, had contact with them and was concerned with their needs. He saw himself as a Prometheus who performed the honourable duty of bringing fire down from Heaven for