Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 19

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IN the autumn of 1911 I entered the Commercial Academy, the only boy in my form from the nonclassical school of Malá Strana. Once again I was a stranger, in a strange world. Here I found none of the stiff good manners, the studied quietness, the tendency to use as few words as possible in expressing ideas, that had characterized the social habits of the sons of the military in the Malá Strana. Instead I was surrounded by noisy, rambunctious youths with no manners at all, and I despised them for their crudeness. They were sons of wealthy merchants and men of commerce. It was obvious they were imitating their fathers. They seemed to think that the louder they spoke and the more they emphasized their presence by obtrusive behavior, the more important they would be thought.

The academy was housed in an old, medieval building in the Staré Město behind the Tyn Church, at the other extremity of Prague from Smichov. The corridors were too narrow, the rooms too dark, and the desks too cramped. It was necessary to keep the hanging gas lamps lighted through most of the days, and during the short periods between classes we had a choice between the dark corridors or a cobblestoned courtyard for relaxation. It was in the courtyard that the janitor sold sausages and bread every day at ten o’clock in the morning. Across the street was an open meat market which shared its flies with us. They not only came to walk over the sausages, but they stayed to torment us in the classrooms as well.

If I went into the courtyard during recess I was lonely in the midst of the horseplay and noise. So I usually wandered through the corridors until classes reassembled. One day I found a row of old photographs on one of the walls, showing classes back to the year 1858, when the academy had been founded. There was Uncle in one of them, a young man with hard, thin lips and a tense expression about his eyes. I felt sympathy for him for the first time.

I hated the studies of accountancy and bookkeeping and insurance algebra, of commercial economics, stenography and business correspondence. I hated the sausages and bread sold by the janitor when I remembered the morning lunches we had eaten in the nonclassical school. And so one day in the courtyard, when I had been pushed more roughly than usual by some son of the bourgeoisie who wanted to show me how much of an outsider I was, I found myself tripping him so that he sprawled on his face. Before he could get to his feet I had walked away.

It was a tremendous relief. I had never been strong and knew I could never defend myself adequately in a straightforward fight. Now I found that I could use my wits for protection. Whenever I was mocked or pushed about I discovered that I could kick and hit faster than they expected me to do. I seldom fought fair; my purpose was to make them leave me alone, and I didn’t care what their reasons were so long as I achieved peace for myself.

But the final result was unexpected. Instead of being outlawed by my classmates, I became an object of admiration. I was invited to join a gang of boys who considered me a suitable member. In no time at all I was given a place of honor second only to their leader. This was a fellow whose name was Eisenstein. He had come to the Commercial Academy with the reputation of being the champion nuisance in the school from which he had graduated. He was the son of a rich furniture manufacturer and he detested the Commercial Academy almost as much as I did. He had wanted to study engineering, but was being forced instead into preparation for the management of his father’s prosperous firm.

Eisenstein taught me how to grease the blackboards; how to put a powder in the inkstand which would cause the ink to bubble over the professor’s desk; how to smear the edges of the desks with ink where he was in the habit of leaning as he walked up one aisle and down another. And I became adept at cutting figures and maps on the tops of the desks, following the grain of the wood with a knife to make outlines of German colonies in Africa where I would much have preferred to be.

For the first time in my life I found myself inside a group, able to keep others out if I didn’t like them. I also found that there were boys who had no wish to belong to the herd, who wouldn’t have accepted an invitation from us had one been offered. That was a new idea to me. Karel Berounský was such a fellow. He was handsome, sharply intelligent, independent and scornful of what, even then, he called the mass mind. I had the feeling that he was always watching his fellow students from a vantage point of judgment outside their comprehension. I admired his ability to be completely at ease with himself, but for the moment the excitement of belonging to a group who wanted me as a member and even looked to me as a potential leader went to my head. I could never have guessed then that Berounský would one day be my closest friend.

In every respect but one I obeyed the rules of the gang and helped to devise new kinds of deviltry with Eisenstein. The exception was a matter of work. It was a point of pride with us never to be seen on the way to or from school carrying textbooks. A stationery shop half a block away let us use a shelf in the back of the place to hold our books overnight. I threw my texts onto the shelf each afternoon with the others, and picked them up on the way to school in the morning. But I always carried a notebook in my inside pocket, where I kept notes on each day’s work to guide my studies at home in the evening.

The subject of girls occupied a good share of the conversation in our gang. Boys who were the sons of rich families, like Karel Berounský, walked on the Graben every Sunday noon with the daughters of their families’ friends. On the same street in the evening they threw an eye, as we phrased it, on the girls who were without social status in Prague. Those of us without girls preferred to pass our fellow students on Sunday noon and make embarrassing remarks through half-closed lips. In the evening we affected more familiarity than we felt with the shopgirls, clerks, waitresses and domestic servants who let us fall into step beside them and then said “Go on and don’t bother me” as soon as we spoke.

Though I enjoyed walking the streets with my gang, I could never bring myself to show off by accosting one of these girls. They would doubtless have been easy to know if we had had more to offer them in the way of an evening’s entertainment. The time would come, I knew, when I would have to prove that I was as familiar with girls as I pretended to be. But I could never risk the possibility of an open rebuff.

There was one girl on the boulevards in the evening whom we never spoke to, though all of us admired her without restraint. She was tall and slim and cool and distant, with lovely honey-blonde hair. Her figure looked particularly beautiful as she walked. She was older than we were, probably as much as twenty, and we considered the way she dressed the last word in smartness and distinction. Wherever she went she attracted the glances of passing men, but no one ever spoke to her. Even we admired her from afar and discussed her respectfully among ourselves.

It must have been in the spring of 1914 that I met this lovely vision walking in the Kinský Gardens one Saturday afternoon. I followed her at a discreet distance, and when she sat down on a bench I prepared to walk past her, looking the other way. Then something fell at my feet. I don’t remember now what it was, a book or a glove or a handkerchief. I picked it up and saw her hand held out to receive it. She said something about what a beautiful day it was and how lovely the gardens were, but she was shy and embarrassed, too. I mumbled a reply and walked on.

All the way home I could think of nothing but her smile. I was convinced she was the sweetest person in the world because she had been so pleasant to me. I was still thinking about her when I walked with Eisenstein and two other members of our gang on the Národní třída the next evening.

They saw her coming toward us before I did. My heart began to beat very fast as they remarked on the blue dress she was wearing.

“So long,” I heard my voice saying to Eisenstein. “I’ll see you later. I’ve got an appointment.”

Before they could question me I strode ahead and approached the lovely vision coming toward us. “Please, may I walk with you just a little way?” I said under my breath as I reached her side.

She stared at me and my knees began to shake. Then her face broke into a smile and she took my arm. Just as my companions reached us they heard her say, “I was afraid you weren’t coming. Where shall we go this time?”

We walked off in the direction from which I had come. I didn’t dare catch the eyes of my companions, but I knew they had turned and were following us. She talked easily and swiftly and I tried to smile, as though I heard what she said. After a block or two my heart returned to a normal beat.

Her name was Julča, she was telling me. She worked in the Kaiser Kaffee on the Václavské náměstí. It was a well-known night club frequented by officers and members of society. In Austria-Hungary in those days officers could go to the most expensive places without cost because their presence in any night club or restaurant or coffeehouse made it fashionable. Others who would spend money freely followed the whimsical taste of the military caste. And the Kaiser Kaffee was popular with the officers that spring.

Every evening, she said, she was paid to sit at the bar, talking to anyone who wanted company. It was her duty to see that only expensive drinks were chosen by her companions, while she drank colored water. She hated her work and wished desperately that she could find something else to do.

As we reached the door of the Kaiser Kaffee I tried to say I was grateful for the permission to walk with her. My companions had disappeared. I bowed as she turned to leave, and then she came back. “Would you like to walk home with me after I’ve finished here tonight?” she said.

I was too surprised to find a reply. But she smiled again and said she would meet me on the corner at twelve-thirty. For nearly six hours I walked the streets, smoking my first cigarettes which nearly choked me because they were the cheapest brand. It was after one in the morning when she finally appeared, and we walked through the dark streets to her home. She lived behind the abattoir in Holesovice.

When I told my interested companions next morning at school that they were wrong in believing there was anything more than casual friendship between Julča and me, I was confident they would not believe me. They were ready to judge from my tired eyes that a more intimate relationship existed than I could have invented. So Julča served as my prestige in the eyes of the gang, as well as a good comrade for the next few months.

At least three nights each week I met her in the early morning hours and walked home with her. She listened to the outpouring of my dreams and hopes, and I believed she understood me as no one else had ever done. In turn, she fascinated me with her recital of the brutality and bad taste to which she was subjected every night. I realize now that I was probably the only male of her acquaintance who was more interested in her heart than in her body. I never asked for more than these few hours of walking home in the darkness by her side. And nothing more was offered.