After five weeks he was going about on crutches. He visited the laboratory more and more, working like a nigger until the pain in his foot began again, so that on the way home he literally hung on the attentive Holz. Mr. Carson glowed with pleasure when he saw Prokop again so peaceable and industrious, and from time to time threw out allusions to Krakatit; but this was a subject which Prokop positively would not hear about.
One evening there was an important soirée at the castle. Prokop prepared a coup for this occasion. The Princess was standing in a group of generals and diplomatists when the doors opened and there entered—without a stick—the obstinate prisoner, who was thus making his first visit to the company in the castle. Oncle Charles and Carson ran forward to meet him while the Princess confined herself to giving him a quick discriminating glance over the head of the Chinese Minister. Prokop had imagined that she would come to greet him, but when he saw that she remained with two old ladies, both of them with their dresses cut incredibly low, his brow clouded, and he retired into a corner, bowing with a bad grace to the distinguished personages to whom Carson introduced him as “a distinguished scientist,” “our eminent guest,” and the like. It was as if Mr. Carson had assumed the role of Holz, for he never left Prokop for a moment. As the evening went on Prokop became desperately bored; he retired still deeper into his corner and glowered at the whole world. Now the Princess was talking with various dignitaries, one of them an admiral and the other some famous foreign lion. The Princess glanced quickly in the direction in which Prokop was standing sullenly, but at that moment the claimant to some lost throne or other came up to her and led her off in the opposite direction. “Well, I’m off home,” muttered Prokop, and decided in the depths of his dark soul that within three days he would make a further attempt to escape. Just then the Princess approached him and held out her hand. “I’m so glad that you are well again.”
Prokop forgot all the education he had received from Oncle Charles. Making a heavy movement with his shoulders which was intended for a bow, he said in a surly tone: “I thought that you did not even see me.” Mr. Carson disappeared as quickly as if he had sunk through the earth.
The Princess wore a low-necked dress which had the effect of confusing Prokop. Whichever way he might look he saw her firm swarthy flesh and smelt the fragrance of her delicate scent.
“I hear that you are working again,” said the Princess. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Well, one thing and another,” answered Prokop, “nothing particularly important.” Here was a chance to repair his insulting behaviour in seizing her hand, but what on earth could he say by way of expiation? “If you would like me to,” he mumbled, “I could … make an experiment with your powder.”
“What sort of experiment?”
“An explosive. You’ve enough on you to charge a cannon.”
The Princess smiled. “I didn’t know that powder was an explosive?”
“Everything is an explosive … if you treat it properly. You yourself—”
“What?”
“Nothing. A latent explosion. You are terribly explosive.”
“When I am treated properly,” smiled the Princess, and suddenly grew serious. “Wicked, unfeeling, violent, curious, and proud, eh?”
“A girl who wants to sacrifice her skin … for an old woman.”
The Princess flared up. “Who told you that?”
“Mon Oncle Charles,” babbled Prokop.
The Princess grew stiff, and was suddenly a hundred miles away. “Ah, Prince Rohn,” she corrected him dryly. “Prince Rohn talks a great deal. I’m glad that you are all right.” A brief nod of the head and Willy glided across the room at the side of someone in uniform, leaving Prokop to rage in a corner.
Nevertheless, the next morning Mr. Paul brought Prokop something precious, which the Princess had sent by her femme de chambre.
It was a box of brownish powder, with a penetrating scent.
XXIX
Prokop, working inclined over this box of powder, was disturbed and excited by this strong feminine scent; it was as if the Princess herself was in the laboratory and was bending over his shoulder.
In his youthful ignorance he had never realized that powder was nothing but starch; he had regarded it as inorganic colouring. Well, starch is a magnificent thing, let us say, for damping too powerful explosives, because in itself it is dull and unresponsive; even more so when it becomes an explosive itself. He had no idea how to begin with it, and buried his head in his hands, pursued by the penetrating scent of the Princess. He did not leave the laboratory even at night.
The people at the castle whom he liked best ceased to visit him, as he was always shut off from them by his work and treated them impatiently, absorbed all the time in the cursed powder. What the devil was he to try next? After five days he began to see the light; he feverishly studied aromatic nitro-amines, after which he began the slowest synthetic work which he had ever done in his life. One night the powder lay in front of him, unchanged in appearance and exuding its penetrating scent; a brown powder, reminiscent of a woman’s healthy complexion.
He stretched himself out on the divan, completely exhausted. It seemed to him that he saw a placard with the inscription “Powderite, the finest explosive powder for the complexion,” and on the placard was a picture of the Princess putting out her tongue at him. He tried to turn away, but two bare brown arms stretched out from the placard and, medusa-like, drew him towards her.
