Only someone who like me had known the countess, the baron and the marquise for such a long time, the elegance of their movements, the delicacy, the frugality and subtlety of all their habits (especially their habits of eating), and the impeccable nobility of their features - only he could appreciate the impression they had made upon me. At that moment I glanced accidentally at a copy of the Red Courier sticking out from my coat pocket and my attention was drawn to a sensational headline:
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF CAULIFLOWER!
Cauliflower Under Threat of Freezing to Death!
And below the following note:
- The farm-hand Walenty Cauliflower from the village of Rudka which belongs to the widely esteemed Countess Kotlubay has reported at the police station that his son Bolek, eight years old, round nose, blond hair, has run away from home. According to the police report the boy ran away because his father flogged him with a belt when drunk and his mother starved him (unfortu nately a common occurrence in these days of crisis). There is a fear that the boy could freeze to death wandering about the fields in the bitter autumn weather.
"Tss," I hissed to myself. "Tss ..." I looked through the window at the fields veiled by a thin screen of rain. I returned to the dining-room where the enormous silver platter gaped emptily with the remains of the cauliflower. The countess's stomach looked as if she were seven months pregnant, the baron was virtually drowning his head in the plate and the old marquise was chewing, tirelessly moving her jaws - indeed I'm forced to admit it - like a cow. "Divine! Marvellous!" they kept repeating, "Splendid, supreme!" Utterly confused I tried the cauliflower once more, giving it all my attention. But I tried in vain to find something that would even partially justify the astounding behaviour of the guests.
"What on earth can you see in it?" I mumbled shyly, a bit ashamed.
"Ha ha ha, he's asking!" cried out the baron stuffing himself, in excellent humour.
"Don't you really see, young man?" asked the marquise without stopping her consumption even for a second.
"You are not a gastronome, sir," remarked the baron as if with a shade of polite commiseration. "And me ... Et moi, je ne suis pas gastronome - je suis gastrosophe!" And either my ears deceived me or, as he was pronouncing this French phrase, something swelled within him so that the last word "gastrosophe" was expelled from the puffed cheeks with an ostentatious superiority which I had never seen him show before.
"Well cooked, certainly ... very tasty, yes, very ... but.. I stumbled.
"But? ... What `but'? So you really cannot grasp the taste? The delicate freshness, the ... smack ... indefinable firmness, the particular pepperiness, the fragrance, the alcohol? Why, of course, dear sir is only pretending, he must be teasing us." It was the first time since we met that I had been addressed from such a height as "dear sir".
"Don't tell him!" the countess interrupted coquettishly, rolling with laughter, "Don't tell him! He won't understand anyway!"
"Good taste, young man, one sucks with one's mother's milk," lisped the marquise good-naturedly, giving me, as it seemed, to understand that my mother - peace to her memory - must have fed me with a different kind of milk.
And then all of them, forgoing the rest of the dinner, carried their full stomachs over to the golden Louis XVI boudoir where, sprawling on all the softest armchairs, they began to laugh heartily, no doubt at me, as if I had indeed given them reason for such merriment. I have been rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy at teas and charitable concerts for a long time but on my word never have I seen such behaviour, never such a transformation, such an inexplicable metamorphosis. Not knowing whether to stand or sit down, whether to be serious or rather faire bonne mine a mauvais jeu and grin, I made a vague and shy attempt to return to Arcadia, that is to Beauty, that is to the pumpkin soup:
"Returning to what is beauty...
"Enough! Enough," cried out Baron de Apfelbaum stopping his ears. "What a bore! Now playtime! S'encanailler! I'll sing something better for you! An operetta piece!"
"Bravo!" exclaimed the countess and the marquise repeated after her, revealing her gums in a senile giggle, "Bravo! Cocasse! Charmantf'
"But it seems to me that ... it's not like that . . ." I stuttered, my stupefied look ill becoming my evening dress.
"We, the aristocracy," the marquise leaned towards me good-naturedly, "we cultivate a great liberty of manners within our closest circles; but then, as you might have heard, sometimes we even use coarse expressions, sometimes we are frivolous and more often than not - in our own way - vulgar. But one doesn't need to be frightened. One needs to get used to us."
"We are not so terrible," added the baron patronisingly. "Although our vulgarity is more difficult to comprehend than our elegance."
"No, we are not terrible!" shrieked the countess, "We don't eat people alive!"
"We don't eat anybody except...
"Apart from ..."
"Fi donc, ha ha ha!" they burst out laughing, throwing embroidered cushions in the air, and the countess sang:
"But why," I whispered, "Countess ... Peas, carrots, celery, kohlrabi ..."
"Cauliflower," added the baron choking suspiciously.
"That's it," I said in complete confusion, "That's it! .. . Cauliflower! ... Cauliflower ... Fasting ... Vegetarian vegetables ..."
"And what about the cauliflower? Tasty, what? Good? I expect you've understood the taste of this cauliflower." What a tone. How patronising. What a scarcely detectable but dangerous lordly impatience in his tone. I began to stutter, didn't know what to answer, how to deny, or confirm. And then (oh! I would never have believed that this noble, humane individual, this brother-poet, could let me feel to such an extent how their lordships change their manners), then, having spread himself comfortably in the armchair, caressing the thin leg he had inherited from Princess Pstryczynska, he said to the ladies in a tone which virtually annihilated me: "Truly, dear Countess, it's not worth inviting to dinner individuals whose taste has not yet passed the stage of a complete primitive."
And no longer paying any attention to me they began, glasses in hand, to tell jokes among themselves, in such a way that all of a sudden I became superfluous, quantite negligeable: about Alice and her "chimeras", about Gaba and Buba, about Princess Mary, about some "pheasants" and about this one being "intolerable" and the other "impossible". They gossiped and told anecdotes in a coded, higher language, using expressions such as "maddening", "fantastic", "incredible", "absolutely", and as often as not swearing - "damn it" or "bloody hell", till it seemed almost possible that this kind of conversation was the peak of human abilities. And I, with my concept of Beauty, humanity and all the other topics of a thinking reed, not knowing why and how, annihilated and put aside like a useless tool, I couldn't find a word to say. They also swapped baffling, aristocratic jokes which caused extraordinary mirth, but to which I, unable to understand them, could hardly raise a smile. Oh God! What had happened? What a sudden and cruel change! Why was their behaviour so different now? Were these the same people with whom, not so long ago, I had been sharing so harmoniously the milk of human kindness and the pumpkin soup? Why this sudden and inexplicable estrangement and coldness? Why so much irony, so much incomprehensible, painful derision, even in their appearance? And such distance, such unapproachable remoteness! I couldn't explain to myself this metamorphosis, and the marquise's words about the "closed circle" led me to think of all those horrible rumours which were spread among the middle classes, which I usually refused to believe, about the two faces of aristocracy and their double life. In the end, incapable of enduring my own silence, which with every second was pushing me into a terrible abyss, I addressed the countess without rhyme or reason, like a late echo from the past:
"Please forgive my interruption Countess ... you promised to sign for me your trioletes Chit-chats of my Soul."
"Pardon me?" she asked not hearing the question, playful and exhilarated. "You were saying?"
"Do forgive me - you promised to s
ign for me your poems Chit-chats of my Soul."
"Ah yes, true, true," said the countess absent-mindedly but with her usual kindness (usual? or different? or new to such an extent that my cheeks flushed crimson without any conscious co-operation on my part); and having taken from a little table a small book bound in white she scribbled casually a few kind words on the title page and signed it: "Countess Kotuboy". "But Countess!" I cried out painfully, hurt seeing this historic name so twisted, "Kotlubay!"
"What absent-mindedness!" exclaimed the countess amidst the general merriment, "What absent-mindedness!" But I found nothing to laugh at in all this. Tss ... I almost hissed again. The countess laughed loudly and proudly and at the same time her aristocratic foot performed various flourishes on the carpet in an immensely ticklish and enticing way, as if delighting itself with the thinness of its own ankle - now to the left, now to the right, and in circles. The baron, tilted back in his armchair, seemed to be just getting ready for an excellent bon-mot -but his little ear, so typical of the Pstryczynskis, was even smaller than usual, while the fingers pushed a grape between his lips. The marquise was sitting with her usual elegance, yet it was as if her long thin neck, the neck of a grand dame, grew even longer, and its withered skin seemed to be winking at me. And I should add a small but not irrelevant detail that out there the rain, blown by the wind, was lashing against the window panes like a thin whip.
Perhaps I took my sudden and undeserved fall from grace too much to heart and, perhaps, this gave way to that persecution complex which preys on low-born individuals admitted to high society, while certain accidental associations, certain, say, analogies may have made me over-sensitive. I don't want to deny it, perhaps ... But suddenly I sensed an extraordinary change in them. And I'm not denying that their grandness, subtlety, elegance and politeness were still as grand, subtle, elegant and polite as they could possibly be - no doubt, but at the same time, and without reason, they were so suffocating that I was inclined to think that all those splendid and humanitarian virtues had gone berserk, as if bitten by a gadfly! What's more, it struck me suddenly (and it was undeniably the effect of that little foot, the ear and the neck), that without looking, and ignoring me in a lordly manner, they still saw my confusion and found it a constant source of delight. I was also touched with a premonition that "Kotuboy" wasn't necessarily only a lapsus linguae, that in a word, if I'm to state it clearly - Kotuboy, means - "kot-u-boy". "Caught you boy!" Yes, yes, the glittering noses of their patent-leather shoes confirmed my terrifying suspicion. It seemed that behind my back they were still splitting their sides with laughter because I hadn't caught on to the taste of the cauliflower, that for me this cauliflower was an ordinary vegetable, that I had proven thus my complete naivety and my lamentably bourgeois breed by failing to appreciate the cauliflower as I ought. They were secretly splitting their sides with laughter which was about to burst forth had I but given the slightest inkling of the emotions raging within me. Yes, oh yes, they were ignoring me, pretending I was not there, but at the same time, using slyly those particular parts of their aristocratic bodies - that little foot, the ear, the neck - they were provoking and daring me to break off the seal on their secret.
No need to repeat again how this quiet tempting, this sly, unhealthy flirting shocked everything that was of the thinking reed in me. I remembered vaguely the "secret" of aristocracy, this mystery of taste, this secret which no one will come to possess who is not one of the chosen, even if, as Schopenhauer says, one were to memorise three hundred rules of savoir-vivre. And if I were dazzled for a while with the hope that having discovered this secret I would be initiated into their circle, that I would be saying "fantastic" and "absolutely" just like them, even then, other things aside, the anxiety and the fear of - why not say it openly - of being slapped on the face completely paralysed my burning curiosity. One is never sure of the aristocracy. With the aristocracy one needs to be more careful than with a tamed leopard. Once, someone from the bourgeoisie was asked by a Princess X about his mother's maiden name. Encouraged by the liberal manners reigning in that salon and by the tolerance with which his two previous jokes had been acknowledged, thinking he could take liberties, he answered, "Excuse the expression - Pigdzik." And because of this "Excuse ..." (which turned out to be vulgar), he was immediately thrown out.6
"Philip. . ." I was thinking carefully, "But Philip swore ... ! A cook is nevertheless a cook. A cook is a cook, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and the countess a countess, and I wouldn't wish anyone to forget about the last! Yes, the countess is a countess, the baron is a baron, the gusts of wind and the rain outside - wind and rain. And the little hands groping in the darkness, the back bruised by a fatherly thong, now lashed by waves of rain, are just little hands and a bruised back, nothing more ... And the countess is without any doubt a countess. The countess is a countess and, would to God, that she may not dish out a flick on the nose!"
Seeing that I remained in a complete, virtually paralysed state of passivity, they began to circle stealthily around me, closer and closer, growing more and more provocative and showing more openly their readiness to indulge in mockery and pranks. "Look at his frightened face!" cried the countess suddenly and they all began to jeer and mock me, that, surely, I must be "scandalised" and "horrified" since no doubt in my sphere no one "talks rhubarb" or plays pranks, that in my sphere manners are incomparably better, and not as barbaric as amongst them, the aristocracy. Pretending to be frightened by my seriousness they began to rebuke and admonish each other jokingly as if to show that above all they cared about my opinion.
"Don't talk nonsense, sir! You are awful!" cried out the countess (although in fact the baron wasn't awful; apart, that is, from his little ear which he was touching, not without pleasure, with the tips of his thin bony fingers).
"Behave yourselves, you lot!" shouted the baron. (The countess and the marquise were behaving quite properly.) "Stop drivelling! Don't sprawl on the sofa! Stop fidgeting and don't put your feet on the table!" (God forbid! The countess was in no way going to do anything of the sort.) "You are hurting the feelings of this unfortunate. Your little nose, Countess, is too aristocratic, really. Have pity!" (Who, I ask, was supposed to be pitied on the account of that little nose?) The marquise shed silent tears of joy. However, the fact that I put my head in the sand like an ostrich excited them more and more: they looked as if they had thrown caution to the winds, insisting that I should understand; and unable to restrain themselves they were making more and more transparent allusions. Allusions? To what? Oh, naturally, still to the same thing, and more clearly, circling closer and closer, with more and more daring ..
"May I smoke?" asked the baron with affectation, taking out a gold cigarette-case. ("May I smoke?" As if he was unaware that out there the dampness and rain, and the dreadful cold wind could freeze one stiff within minutes. "May I smoke?")
"Can you hear the rain lashing down?" lisped the marquise naively. (Lashing?! Sure it's lashing! It must have lashed everything good and proper.) "Ah, listen to that pitter-patter of single drops. Listen to the tap-tap-tap, listen, oh listen to the raindrops!"
"Oh, what foul weather, what awful wind," said the countess. "Ah, ha ha ha, what a terrific squall, hell to look at! The very sight makes me laugh and gives me goosepimples!"
"Ha ha ha!" followed the baron. "Look how everything is dripping so magnificently! Look at the arabesques the water is drawing on the window panes. Look at the squelchy mud, its greasy stickiness, how smudgy it is. Just like Cumberland sauce! And this little bit of rain, how it flays and flays, beautifully flays! And this little bit of wind, how it bites and bites! How it crushes, how it tenderises, how it roasts! On my word, it makes my mouth water!"
"Truly, it's very tasty, very, very tasty."
"Extremely elegant!"
"Just like cotelette de volaille!"
"Just like fricassee a la Heiner'
"Or like crabs in ragout!"
After these bon-mots thrown around with th
e liberty which only the full-blooded aristocracy can afford, there followed movements and gestures whose ... whose meaning I wished, curled up in my chair, oh, how I wished I couldn't understand! I won't even mention here that the ear, the nose, the neck and the little foot were exceeding themselves and were reaching the stage of complete frenzy. What's more, the banker, having inhaled his cigarette smoke deeply, was puffing little blue circles into the air. Had it been one or two, by God! But he puffed and puffed one after another, his lips shaped into a little moue, while the countess and the marquise clapped their hands! And every circle soared up into the air, vanishing in a melodious haze. The long, white, serpent-like hand of the countess rested all the time on the variegated satin of the armchair while her nervy ankle twisted under the table, evil like a snake, black and baneful. It made me feel very uneasy! And that's not all, I swear I don't exaggerate, the baron went so far in his effrontery that having lifted his upper lip he took out his tooth-pick from his pocket and started to pick his teeth - yes, his teeth - rich, corrupt, abounding with gold, teeth!
Struck dumb, completely at a loss as to what to do and where to escape to, I turned imploringly to the marquise - who of all of them had been the most sympathetic, and who at the dining table had extolled so movingly Charity and children suffering from the English disease - I turned to her and began to talk about Charity, almost begging for it myself? "You, Madame," I said, "who with such sacrifice assist the unfortunate children. Madame?" For Christ's sake! Do you know what she said? Surprised, she looked at me with her faded eyes, wiped away the tears caused by the excess of hilarity and then, as if remembering, she said: "Oh you mean my little ones suffering from the English disease?. . . Oh yes, indeed, when one sees how clumsily they move on those twisted pegs of theirs, how they stumble about and fall over, it makes one feel still vigorous! Old but vigorous! In the old days I used to ride in a black riding-hood and shiny boots, on English thoroughbreds, but now - helas, les beaux temps sont passes - now that I'm not able to because of my age I ride cheerfully on my little twisted English cripples." Her hand suddenly stretched down and I jumped away, for I swear she was going to show me her old but straight, healthy and vigorous leg!
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