Ferdydurke (32 page)

Fortunately, this son of the peasantry found his lordship's whims amusing. He probably reached the conclusion that his lordship had gone soft in the head (and nothing emboldens the rabble like their lordships' mental illness), and he proceeded to make fun, peasant style, which created a kinship of sorts. Soon enough the farmhand was fraternizing to such a degree that he was poking Kneadus in the ribs and finagling small change from him.

"Gimme, mister, for some smokes!"

But this wasn't it at all, it was hostile, unbrotherly, and unfriendly, full of peasant style mockery, lethal, far from the desired fraternization. Yet Kneadus put up with it, he preferred the valet to abuse him, rather than to abuse the valet as if he were his lord and master. A kitchen maid, Marcy, came out of the kitchen with a wet rag to wash the floor and began to marvel at the shenanigans:

"Jesus A'mighty! This really is somethin'!"

The house was asleep—and so they could, with impunity, indulge in frolicking with his lordship who was paying them a visit in the pantry, to laugh at him with their peasant, rustic superlaugh. Kneadus himself helped them along and laughed with them. But gradually, while ridiculing Kneadus, they began also to laugh at their own master and mistress. "That's them ohright! They do notin', they're fer ever doin' notin' but stuffin' and stuffin' 'emselves till they bust! They stuff 'emselves, get sick, lie around, walk about their rooms, talkin' about somethin'. An' how they gobble! O Mother o' Jesus! I wouldn't eat half that much, even though 'am just a simple bastard. There's dinner, and afternoon tea, candy, and fruit preserves, eggs 'n onions for brunch. Their lo'dships eat like pigs and gorge 'emselves with sweets, then—bellies up they lie about and get sick from it all. An' during a hunt the squire clambered up the gamekeeper! Up the gamekeeper he clambered! Vincenty, the gamekeeper, was standin' behind him with a spare shotgun, the squire shot at a boar, the boar bounded toward him, so the squire dropped the shotgun and clambered up Vincenty— Marcy, be quiet-up Vincenty he clambered! 'Cause there was no tree close by, he clambered up Vincenty! Later the squire gave him a zloty an' told him not to breathe a word of it, or it'll cost him his job." "O Jesus! Oh, for chrissakes stop it, me belly aches from laughin'!" Marcy grabbed her belly. "An' the young lady promenades, lookin' around—goes for walks. The Mr. and Mrs. promenade, lookin' around. His lo'dship Zygmunt keeps lookin' at me, only I'm kind 'a below him—he pinched me once, but nothin' doin'! He kept lookin', an' lookin' around so nobody's watchin' us till I got a belly ache from laughin', an' I run away! So later he gave me a zloty, told me not to tell nobody, but nobody, he said he was drunk!" "Drunk, me foot!" the farmhand butted in. "Other girls won't have nothin' to do with him either, 'cause he's for ever lookin' round. So he's got that hag in the village, Josie, the widah, an' he keeps meetin' up with her in the bushes by the pond, but he made her swear she'd never blab on him to nobody, but nobody—oh, yeah, I bet!" "Hee, hee, hee, hee! Shush, Valek, darlin'! Their lo'dships are very proper-like! Very delicate-like!" "Oh, yeah, delicate, you have to wipe their noses, they can't do nothin' fer the'selves. 'Gimme this, hand me that, fetch me t'other,' you have to hold their coats for 'em, they won't put 'em on the'selves. When ah first came here—ah felt kinda strange. If anybody got to groomin' and accommodatin' me like that, ah'd rather sink into the ground—honest. I have to put lotions on the squire of evenin's." "A'n I have to knead the young lady," squeaked the girl, "knead the young lady wit' my hands, 'cause she's flabby-like. The Mr. and Mrs. are so soft, and their little hands! Hee, hee, hee, what soft little hands they have!" "O Jesus! They promenade, they gorge the'selves, they parley Francey, and git bored." "Shush, Valek, darlin'! That's loose talk, the squire's lady's kind!" "Oh, yeah, kind, she puts the squeeze on us folk—so she's got to be kind! The stomachs in the village are growlin'

wit' hunger. Them put the squeeze on us. Yes, siree, everybody works for 'em, the squire goes into the fields just to watch 'em slavin' away."

"An' the squire's lady's afraid of the cows. She's afraid of the cows!!! Their lo'dships are conversin'! Their lo'dships walk about and converse—hee, hee, hee—their lo'dships' skin is so white-like! . .." The wench went on clamoring and marveling, the farmhand prattled in wonderment, gloating, when suddenly Francis walked in ...

"Francis walked in?" I interrupted Kneadus. "The butler?"

"Yes, Francis! The devil himself brought him," Kneadus squeaked. "Marcy's clamor must have wakened him. He didn't dare say anything to me, of course, but he scolded Marcy and the farmhand— that this was no time for jabbering, scram, to work, he told them that the hour was late and the dishes weren't done. They took off. What a mean lackey!"

"Did he hear anything?"

"I don't know—maybe he did. He's so commonplace—a flunky with sideburns and a stiff collar. A peasant with sideburns—a traitor. A traitor and an informer. If he heard anything—he's sure to tell on us. And we had such a good time gabbing."

"There will be hell to pay ..." I said softly.

But he whined, raising his voice to a treble.

"Traitors! And you too—you're a traitor! You're all traitors, traitors..."

I couldn't fall asleep for a long time. Above the ceiling, in the attic, martens or rats scurried around making a racket, I heard their squeaks, sudden jumps, running and chasing, awful screeches of animals tense with wildness. The roof dripped with water. Dogs howled like so many automatons, and our room with its shades drawn tightly was a box of darkness. Kneadus lay on the other bed awake, I lay supine on mine, also awake, my hands under my head, my gaze fixed on the ceiling—we were both watchful as our inaudible breathing indicated. What was he doing under the cover of darkness—yes what, since he wasn't asleep he must have been doing something—and I was doing something too. Someone who is not asleep is active, cannot be inactive. Hence he must have been active. I too was active. What was he thinking about? What was he longing for in his squeaky, high-pitched state, tense and taut as if seized by claws. I was asking God to let him sleep, so that he wouldn't be so silent, but more open, less secretive—he'd relax, loosen up ...

A night of torture! I didn't know what to do! Run away at the crack of dawn? I was sure that Francis, the old servant, would tell my aunt and uncle about the mug-slapping and Kneadus' palaver with the farmhand. And then the infernal dance would begin, and discord, deceit, devil on the loose, and the mug, the mug would come into its own again! And the pupa! Is this why I escaped from the Young-bloods? We had awakened the beast! We had released the servants' impudence! That terrible night, as I lay sleepless on my bed, I finally grasped the mystery of a country manor, of squires and landed gentry in general, the mystery whose manifold and murky symptoms had, from the very first moment, filled me with foreboding of the mug and its terrifying business! It was their servants who were the mystery. Ragtag peasantry was the gentry's mystery. Against whom did my uncle yawn, or shove one more sweet strawberry into his mouth? Against the ragtag peasantry, against his own servants! Why didn't he pick up his cigarette case? So that the servants would pick it up for him. Why did he extend civilities to us with a schoolboy's zeal, so much politeness and consideration, so much style and
bon ton?
In order to draw the line between himself and the servants and, by opposing the servants, to preserve patrician custom. And everything, no matter what the gentry did, was done with regard to and in the face of servants, in relation to house servants and to farmhands.

Could it have been otherwise? Those of us living in the city didn't even feel like lords of the manor, we dressed, spoke and gestured the same way as the proletariat, and a myriad of imperceptible semitones united us with the proletariat—going down the rungs of society to the shopkeeper, the street car conductor, the cabdriver, one could inconspicuously go down all they way to the garbage collector; but here in the country, lordliness towered like a lonely poplar in all its nakedness. Here at the manor there was no intermediary between the squire and his servant, the estate manager lived in the farm outbuildings, the priest lived at the refectory. My uncle's proud, ancestral lordliness sprouted directly out of the rabble undergrowth, it was from the rabble that it drew its vital juices. In the city, services were provided in a roundabout way, in a discretionary manner— each to each, a little at a time—while here the squire had an actual, personal yokel, who, when the squire raised his leg, would clean his shoe . . . And my uncle and auntie certainly didn't know what was said about them in the pantry—how they looked in the yokels' eyes. They knew—but they wouldn't let this knowledge loose, they stifled it, strangled it, pushed it into the cellars of their brain.

Oh, to be seen through the eyes of your yokel! To be watched and tattled about by a yokel! To be constantly refracted by the boorish prism of a servant who has access to your rooms, who hears your conversations, who watches your behavior, who is allowed to serve coffee at your table or at your bedside—to be the subject of coarse, fallow, insipid kitchen prattle, and never be able to explain yourself on an equal footing. Truly, it is only through servants like the butler, coachman, chambermaid, that one can discover the core of country gentry. Without the butler you will not know the squire. Without the chambermaid you will not fathom the mettle of the squire's lady nor the pitch of her lofty aspirations, and you will know the squire's son through the country wench. Oh, I finally understood the cause of their strange anxiety and constraint, which struck everyone coming from the city to visit a country manor. It was the rabble that scared the gentry. It was the rabble that constrained them. The rabble had them in their pocket. Here was—the real cause. Here was—their perpetual, secret festering. Here was—their subterranean, life and death pain, seasoned with all the possible venoms of their struggles, concealed and subterranean. A hundredfold worse than mere financial disputes, because it was a struggle dictated by otherness and estrangement—otherness of body and estrangement of spirit. Their souls, in the midst of peasant souls, were in the woods; their lordly and delicate bodies, in the midst of yokels' bodies, were in the jungle. Their hands were repulsed by the yokel paws, their legs hated yokel legs, their faces hated the mugs, their eyes—the yokels' eyeballs, their little fingers—the rabble's stubby fingers, the situation smacked all the more of humiliation because they were constantly touched and groomed by them, as the farmhand had said, pampered and rubbed down with creams ... To have in one's own home and near you nothing but dissimilar, foreign body parts!—because indeed, within the radius of many kilometers there were only peasant limbs, peasant speech " 'course, darlin'," "I ain't," "you was," "chrissake," "mommy-luv," "daddy-luv," and only the parish priest and the manager in the farm buildings were the squires' kinsmen. But the manager merely had a position, and the priest actually wore a skirt. Wasn't it loneliness then, that gave rise to the rapacious hospitality with which they clung to us after supper—with us they felt more at ease. We were their allies. Yet Kneadus betrayed their lordly faces with the farmhand's peasant mug.

The perverse fact that the valet had hit Kneadus' face—the face, no less, of his lordship's guest and a young sir himself—must bear equally perverse consequences. The time-honored hierarchy was based on the supremacy of lordly parts, and it was a system of intense and feudal hierarchy, in which his lordship's hand was level with the servant's mug, and his leg was at the peasant's midriff. This was archaic hierarchy. An ancient system, canon and law. It was the mystical clasp holding his lordship's and the yokel's body parts together, sanctified by centuries of custom, and it was solely in this configuration that their lordships could touch and make contact with the yokels. Hence the magic of mug-slapping. Hence Valek's almost religious worship of mug-slapping. Hence Zygmunt's lordly revelry. Nowadays, of course, they slapped no more (although Valek did admit sometimes getting it from my uncle), yet the potential for a slap in the face was always there, and that's what sustained them in their lordliness. And now, didn't the yokel's paw unceremoniously mate with his lordship's face?

And now the servants were proudly raising their heads. On went the kitchen tittle-tattle. On went the peasantry, emboldened and corrupted by familiarity with the body parts, openly denigrating their lordships, the yokels' criticism was on the rise—what will happen, what will transpire when this penetrates to my aunt and uncle, and his lordship's face stands face to face with the peasant's lumpish mug?

14 Mug on the Loose and New Entrapment

And indeed, next morning after breakfast my aunt took me aside. It was a brisk, sunny morning, the earth was damp and black, copses of trees trailing their cerulean autumn foliage stood in the huge courtyard; under the trees peaceable hens scratched and pecked at the ground. Time stood still at that morning hour, and golden streaks of sunlight lay on the floor of the smoking room. Docile dogs wandered about here and there. Equally docile pigeons cooed. My aunt, however, was inwardly billowing like a heavy sea.

"My dear child," she said, "please explain . . . Francis told me that your friend is apparently hobnobbing with the servants in the kitchen. Is he some kind of an agitator?"

"He's a theoretician," Zygmunt said. "Don't worry, Mother—he's a theorist of life! He arrived here to the countryside with his theories— a democrat from the city!"

He was still cheerful and somewhat foppish after last night.

"Ziggie, my dear, he's no theoretician, he's a practitioner! Apparently, Francis says, he shook hands with Valek!"

Fortunately, the old butler hadn't told everything, and, as far as I could tell, my uncle hadn't been informed of what had happened. I pretended that I hadn't heard either, I chuckled (oh, how often life makes us chuckle), I said something about Kneadus' leftist ideology, and so, for the time being, the whole affair came to nothing. Of course no one talked with Kneadus about it. We played
King—
a card game Zosia had suggested, it would have been rude to refuse—and the game held us in its grip until dinner. Zosia, Zygmunt, Kneadus, and I, all of us bored yet laughing, laid out the cards on the green felt, higher denominations on lower, by color, hearts were trump. Zygmunt played with precision—an austere game, as if he were at his club, a cigarette between his lips—he threw his cards horizontally, aiming accurately at the stack, and his white fingers picked up the tricks with a snapping sound. Kneadus licked his fingers, kneaded the cards, and I noticed that he was embarrassed, playing such a lordly game as
King,
he repeatedly looked at the door, wondering whether the farmhand saw this—he would have preferred to sit on the floor and play
Dummie.
Above all I feared dinnertime because I was almost certain that Kneadus would not be able to handle an encounter at the table with the farmhand—my fears turned out to be justified.