Joseph regarded him doubtfully. Then, as if all his own will were gone, he tremblingly found his seat.
“I’m ashamed,” said Karel, “for all of you here. I’m ashamed for my friend Kravat who has let his personal feelings run away with him, against his own better intentions. And I don’t want to have to be ashamed for men with whom I have worked and with whom I want to work in the future.”
“Another Benda!” grumbled Blatnik audibly. “Nothing but Bendas. It makes me sick!”
“It does?” said Karel. “See me after the meeting.”
Some of the men laughed—but at Blatnik.
“If you’re sick, call the doctor. If you think a man is a criminal, call the police. If you think you have a case against him, there are courts of law. If you want to get rid of your manager, or of your National Administrator, you are the union, you decide it, and you report so to your headquarters in Prague and to the Government. Am I right, Kravat?”
Kravat’s head moved in assent. He felt ill-at-ease. He had wanted to give Joseph a long-deserved lesson. But somewhere along the line, the lesson had run away with the meeting and himself; somewhere, he’d made a serious mistake.
Karel stepped to the edge of the stage. “Now, apparently, you want to assess the blame for what happened at Martinice, and you’re entitled to that. You are the men who will have to carry the main burden for making up what was lost there. We know it was arson, and we know that the fire was laid by one or more of the Germans in Martinice. They weren’t satisfied with what they did to us during the war and the occupation. They had to add another crime to their list before we could banish them from our country forever.”
Karel noticed that the men were beginning to hang on his words, like the sick whom he had shepherded from Buchenwald camp to the sanatorium in the mountains of Thuringia and back home to Prague.
“So if you must blame someone for the fire and the destruction, blame those who stood by while the Germans were allowed to live and to work in Martinice, through all this time. Blame yourselves. There’s only one man in this hall who ever protested against it, and that’s my brother Thomas. But my brother Joseph, and Kravat, and I, and every single one of you—What did we ever do about it? Did any one of you ever offer to move to Martinice and work there and help Kravat and my brother? The handful of Czechs employed at the Hammer Works came from somewhere else. Maybe it’s the Government’s fault. But who is the Government? We are. So, again, it’s our fault. And because it is, and because Blatnik and Master Czerny and Kravat and all of you feel that it is, you’re trying to push it all on one man. That may be the natural way in which the human mind works, but it’s not just, and it’s not right.”
He had succeeded in shoving the men back to a sensible consideration of their problem and their facts. They were knocking their feet on the floor to warm them, and the cold damp air again was filling with the smoke of cheap tobacco.
“Now I don’t know enough about the making of glass to help you with the proposals that are expected from you—the proposals that will have to come from this meeting, as Kravat has pointed out to you....”
He floundered. He tried to smile. He had really said everything he had to say.
“Thank you all,” he concluded.
He wanted to hurry off the platform, but had to permit Kravat to grasp his hand while the men applauded and some remarked loudly, “Very true!” and, “That’s how it is!” and, “Good for our doctor!”
Finally Kravat let go of him, and he went back through the aisle to Thomas, looking neither right nor left, intent on merging once more with the background and on listening to the discussion he hoped would follow.
It was subdued at first, but became more alive and faster with every suggestion the workers made. They volunteered overtime at the Benda Works. They pledged to reduce the rate of rejects and to increase the speed of their work. They offered to organize brigades and to help rebuild the Hammer Works. They formed delegations to be sent to other glass furnaces in the country in order to tell what had happened and to ask further help. They made motions and voted on them and named committees and even listened to some pointers Joseph threw in, and acted on them. They were grave and busy and inventive and practical and enthusiastic. They closed the meeting with a resolution to guard the property of the people like the apple of their eye from this point on, because watching over and increasing the property of the people was a worker’s most noble function and the essence of democracy.
As the men walked out of the auditorium, stamping their feet and beating their arms around their chests, Thomas turned to Karel. “You know,” he said, “I’m a coward. I should have spoken. I should have defended Joseph. Not because he came to me the other day and asked me to, but because all that happened tonight—the mob, and democracy, and discipline, and my emotions, and yours, and Joseph’s—all this was blueprinted in my mind and is graphed out on paper, in my book. But here, I was frightened and disgusted by them....”
He waited for Karel’s reaction.
Then he went on, “You’re probably a greater person than I. You did something—”
Karel cut him off. “I’m not certain I did the right thing,” he said.
“Why not?”
Karel dusted his hat which he had recovered from under an aisle seat. “They usually have a damned good instinct—” he pointed at the last men pressing out through the door.
“That’s ridiculous! To tie Joseph up with the fire—”
Karel shook his head. “I mean—perhaps our conception of the word sabotage is too narrow—”
He broke off. Joseph was coming to thank him.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALTHOUGH the prospectus made its old claims, the Declerques Institute had ceased to be a boarding school proper. Mademoiselle Declerques still issued beautifully printed diplomas; her pupils, however, no longer spent the better part of their day in the spacious, gloomy old house in Vinohrady—a section of Prague formerly known as the Royal Vineyards—but had to attend the crowded, ugly schools of the State.
Mademoiselle Declerques refused to admit that her grandeur had gone out with the Hapsburgs. She felt a bitter pride in her Institute, the last of its kind in the capital. Of course, her wards of today were not the young countesses and baronesses of the past—they were daughters of wholesalers, ex-bankers, lawyers, and others distinguished more by their wealth than their blood. Nevertheless, she tried to maintain as much of the old spirit as she could, and she had her pupils concentrate their remaining hours on undoing the harm they had suffered in their contact with the ruder classes.
In this endeavor, Count Arkadij Tolstoy was her mainstay. The Count’s joints creaked with a rheumatism which he was said to have acquired leading a regiment of Cossacks against the Reds in 1919. His title was rather vague, as was his connection with the well-known family of the same name; but he enabled Mademoiselle to advise the parents of a potential pupil that their child would learn poise, posture, and the waltz from a direct descendant of the author of Anna Karenina.
Coarse financial considerations had forced Mademoiselle to recast most of the rest of her staff and to lower not only the social but also the scholastic standards of her boarders. When the law came through which said that all children of Czechoslovakia would have to go to schools of the State, Mademoiselle Declerques’s Institute had to become a glorified cramming school for moneyed young females. This, in turn, meant a switch of emphasis from fencing and needle point and manners and the gentler arts to mathematics and other harsh disciplines. It brought to the Institute a new type of instructor, like Vlasta Rehan, who was definitely plebeian but who knew how to explain the Pythagorean principle so that even the biggest dunce could memorize it for the next term test.
It also meant that the few intelligent boarders, dumped on the Institute by parents who resided out of town or were divorced or otherwise incapable of coping with a child, formed an unruly, unhappy, contrary clique of their own, raised havoc with the nerves and the time-
hallowed ways of the old lady, and questioned and doubted everything.
Petra had become the leader of this set as soon as she snapped out of her original depression at coming to Prague and saw that her exile did not necessarily involve a betrayal by Karel. In one way, Mademoiselle was an accessory to the fact that Petra was able to make herself undisputed chief of the malcontents. Child of a deputy and pet of a Minister, she took in Mademoiselle’s mind the place which, thirty years ago, the illegitimate daughter of Archduke Ferdinand Karl had held—she ranked the others, so to speak; she was a publicity asset for the Institute, and she was rarely disciplined.
And then there was Vlasta Rehan, tragic Vlasta. Outwardly unbending, her black, smooth hair worn close to her skull, her ascetic, pale face always carried high, she was strictly equable toward her students; and yet, through a warmth that flashed into her gray, even eyes, through a sudden motion, a slightly different tone of voice, she seemed to favor Petra. Vlasta never punished. Vlasta could make even the most insensitive of girls obey and work to the point of collapse by merely talking softly and looking at her questioningly and unsmilingly.
There were many rumors about her, and they contributed to her natural aura. Her lover, the story went, had been tortured to death by the Nazis. She was supposed to have been raped by a high Gestapo official and to have killed him with her bare hands. She never talked of these things, but she did wear a simple, heart-shaped silver medallion inside of which was believed to be a photo miniature or a lock of hair or some other memento of the man she had lost. The known facts were that she was dirt-poor and worked for Mademoiselle at a pitiable salary because she refused public stipends and had to have a place to live and food to eat while she finished her studies at Charles University. “In these times,” she once said, “the Government can find more profitable use for its funds.”
Petra, whose formal education had large gaps going back to the war and her inability to adjust herself to Rodnik, sat through her first lesson with Vlasta Rehan without saying a word and without paying much attention to the lecture and the examples on the blackboard. She was wrapped up in the voice and would have given up her best black-market dress to know that this voice was directed only to her. After class, when the other girl who had shared the lesson was gone, Vlasta called Petra over and said, “Petra Benda, you must listen and learn. Life is better if we know what it’s about. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I do.” Petra felt as she did in church—oh, much more than that; the Reverend Trnka had never caused such deep, almost agonizing shivers to go down her spine.
“So, don’t gape at me!” Vlasta concluded severely. She saw Petra’s eyes cloud over and withdraw into themselves. She was sorry for the girl. It was to Vlasta, at this moment, as if she had caught a glance at herself, a much younger self, on the other side of the gulf of the war years—yet unmistakably herself, reaching out for some sort of love and companionship, and finding herself rebuffed.
She laid a light hand on Petra’s hair. “You may come to me whenever you feel it is necessary.”
Petra came often, with or without good reason, and was always welcomed; but she was never quite certain whether she was liked for her own sake. It puzzled and frustrated her. Then Petra detected that Vlasta showed displeasure at the frequent visits to Dolezhal. To Petra, this displeasure was not disagreeable at all—it was a happy discovery. From that point on she told Vlasta at length and in detail of the attentions the Minister showered on her, exaggerating in some degree so as to watch the darkening of Vlasta’s face and the hasty shadows of disquiet that moved across it. She described the Minister’s small, soft, white hand and how it felt when he touched her, and observed Vlasta’s throat constrict in ill-concealed disgust. It was the chink in Vlasta’s armor. Petra did not bother about why this was so; it was enough for her to have found it and to exploit it and to enjoy being the object of personal concern.
After some months, Vlasta Rehan stepped over the limits of teacher-pupil relationship and began to invite Petra to go out with her on Wednesdays or Saturdays, which were free evenings at Mademoiselle Declerques’s. They would visit the Valdstyn Gardens or walk up Hradcany Hill to the Castle, or take in a movie or go to a meeting where Petra heard men, or women, speak of socialism, and nationalization—words she knew well from back home, but which seemed to have a quite different meaning among the people in these large, noisy, badly ventilated halls.
Once, they went to the amusement park near Havlicek Square and rode on the Ferris wheel, swaying high above the earth, holding on to one another, laughing and being afraid at the same time. At such moments, Vlasta’s face was no longer ascetic but serene and animated by a happiness which made Petra happy, too.
Joseph knew little of Vlasta. Petra had mentioned her to him, along with Arkadij Tolstoy and the quirks of Mademoiselle.
In addition to the fee for board and tuition, the parents paid Mademoiselle a certain amount as pocket money for her charges. A part of this was given to the girls to be invested in candy and movie tickets and other unnecessaries. The larger share was held by Mademoiselle to pay for the monthly visits to the opera, to serious concerts, or to reliable classic dramas; for such small emergencies as the loss of a Schoolbook or the replacement of a doily in the cubicles which served the girls as personal quarters; and for presents on birthdays or saints’ days—and these presents, though paid for by the pupils themselves, were never imaginative but always practical.
The money was kept on Mademoiselle’s desk, in a locked tin box whose paint had come off at the edges; the money was accounted for down to the last crown; yet it was a permanent bone of contention between Mademoiselle and her boarders. The share of which the girls could dispose was so small as to permit no real splurge. If one of them came to plead for a little more of what belonged to her, Mademoiselle demanded an exact report on why the private share had been spent so soon, and for what precisely the requested sum was to be used.
Petra gathered the malcontents, because the Ferris wheel had upset her budget and because she judged the time ripe. Outside the Declerques Institute, life was breathing into the regular schools of the State; a good part of the students were organizing in councils and talked in the classrooms as did their fathers in the unions. Only here, in the secluded house on the former Royal Vineyards, the Old Crow ruled as if the country had never gone through a revolution against the Hapsburgs, a war, an occupation, and another revolution.
Petra remembered what she had heard at the meetings to which Vlasta had taken her. “Let’s organize this place!” she said. “Let’s make up our demands—so: Number One, our pocket money is ours, and we get all of it to do with as we like; Number Two, every evening and all of Sunday are free. We work hard enough in the real schools and with our tutors here; we’ve earned our free time. Number Three—you name it, we’ll get it; collective action will get it for us. Let’s appoint a delegation and vote on the proposal. And if the Old Crow doesn’t back down, we’ll go on strike.”
“How?”
“We won’t eat the stuff she puts on the table. It’s horrible, anyhow. We’ll just throw it back at her.”
“Really? Really throw it?”
Petra had visions of the evil-tasting pap they got for breakfast being pasted all over Mademoiselle’s dainty, wrinkled face, and said, “Why not? It’ll teach her. And we just won’t show up for lessons, even if we like”—she stopped, but then went on—“even if we like the instructor. It’s for the common good.”
“Will you head the delegation?”
“Of course!”
“And will you speak for us?”
“Yes.”
She was not afraid. In union there was strength. And she was the daughter of a deputy and the friend of a Minister, and Mademoiselle would think twice before permitting a scandal to develop.
Arkadij Tolstoy wondered why everything went wrong this afternoon.
“Young ladies!” he clapped his hands, “att-ention!”
Ma
demoiselle frowningly repeated the opening bars of “The Blue Danube.” The first couple—a tall, pimply-faced girl who perspired profusely, and a little one with plump calves and a blond, toupée-like hairdo—stepped off.
“One—two three! One—two three!” Arkadij Tolstoy was shouting, stamping his stiff leg on the One. In the rear of the dance studio, a suppressed giggle rippled through the waiting couples. Someone imitated Arkadij’s throaty accent, “Von—tu tree! Von—tu tree!”
The second couple came forward, lost the rhythm, and stopped, convulsed with laughter.
The music stopped, too.
Mademoiselle stood up and pulled her ruffles down over her flat chest. “It is in very bad taste to ridicule a person’s habits, traits, weaknesses. The girl who said ‘Von—tu tree’ will be punished by a 50 per cent reduction of her personal allowance, not for her lack of discipline, but for her display of bad taste. Well?”
Her pin-point eyes slowly made the rounds.
No one volunteered.
“Well?”
Petra knew it was a question of leadership, even though, for a change, she had not been the one who had mimicked Arkadij.
“Mademoiselle!” she said.
“The class is dismissed. You will see me in my office, Petra—now!”
Mademoiselle Declerques picked up her big book of Simple Waltzes with Fingering, pressed it under her arm, and marched out, trailed by Count Tolstoy.
“Girls!” called Petra. “The time has come.”
Hesitantly, the three who had been nominated to serve with her on the delegation joined her. They walked down the flight of stairs, silent and composed and with a tight feeling in their stomachs. The others clustered at some distance behind, like white mice in a laboratory cage when the gloved hand reaches in.
Mademoiselle glanced up from behind the tin box at the three with Petra. “And what do you want?”
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