Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/180

 But Vojtech had yet other shortcomings. He had profound feeling, and what he felt he thought was at least creditable. How he made his way in the world with these intuitions, the reader will learn later on, in the meantime one example will suffice. He was one of those foolish fellows, who, visiting the theatre, not because it is the fashion, but from the consciousness of an inward necessity, manage to pass a whole hour in the pit in akwardness and discomfort. They snatch from their mouths what they give for entrance tickets and when they return home have nothing with which to appease their craving maws, but betake themselves to a sleep of bespangled fantasies and sate themselves with the light froth of impassioned dreams. To Prague, then, came an actor who made his debut in classic characters and awoke a sensation. Vojtech at that time lectured the Horskas’s eldest daughter, Lidunka, about such characters and suggested in so many words that she should go with him to the theatre to see for herself. He said it also to her mother and on the mother’s objecting that really no one in the house had time to chaperon her daughter to the theatre, he offered himself as escort. The mother answered with a look of measured coldness that she must think it over. She did think it over, no doubt, for she never mentioned it again, but at the same time she was present at her daughter’s lessons from the beginning to the end so that no single pause or silence might occur.

I cannot say that Vojtech could have become truly happy as a domestic teacher. He felt at times but too well the passiveness of his position and his dependance on others from hour to hour and finally he felt that after all he was regarded as little better than one of the servants of the family. This truth he had read with special clearness in Pani Horska’s reply when she refused his invitation to the theatre. He repeated it to himself again and again, and even in his address and manner paraded his sense of it. He was always so measured in his discourse and so confined his movements within the merest routine that never by hint or word did he let it appear that he considered himself anything better than a servant. “I will fulfil my duty to them”, he thought, “besides that: I have no need to talk to them.” But, alas! the maxim was at fault and perhaps injured Vojtech more in their opinion of him than his invitation to the theatre. That measured manner of his, displayed on every occasion, indicated in him pride, self-conceit, and other similar characteristics. Vojtech was well aware, with what eyes they looked at him, but he determined,