EYES LIKE THE SEA

A NOVEL

By MAURUS JÓKAI

TRANSLATED FROM THE HUNGARIAN
BY
R. NISBET BAIN

NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
27 and 29 West 23d St
1894

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The pessimistic tone of Continental fiction, and its pronounced preference for minute and morbid analysis, are quite revolutionizing the modern novel. Fiction is ceasing to be a branch of art, and fast becoming, instead, a branch of science. The aim of the novelist, apparently, is to lecture instead of to amuse his readers. Plot, incident, and description are being sacrificed more and more to the dissection of peculiar and abnormal types of character, and the story is too often lost in physiological details or psychological studies. The wave of Naturalism, as it is called (though nothing could really be more unnatural), has spread from France all over Europe. The Spanish and Italian novels are but pale reflections of the French novel. The German Naturalists have all the qualities of the French School, minus its grace. In Holland, the so-called Sensitivists are at great pains to combine a coarse materialism with a sickly sentimentality. Much more original, but equally depressing, is the new school of Scandinavian novelists represented by such names as Garborg, Strindberg, Jacobsen, Löffler, Hamsun, and Björnson (at least in his later works), all of whom are more or less under the influence of Ibsenism, which may be roughly defined as a radical revolt against conventionality. In point of thoroughness some of these Northern worthies are not a whit behind their fellow craftsmen in France. The novel of the year in Norway for 1891 was a loathsomely circumstantial account of slow starvation. There is a lady novelist in the same country who could give points to Zola himself; and nearly every work of Strindberg's has scandalized a large portion of the public in Sweden. Nay, even remote Finland has been reached at last by the wave of Naturalism in fiction, and Respectability there is still in tears at the perversion of the most gifted of Finnish novelists, Juhani Aho. In the Slavonic countries also the pessimistic, analytical novel is paramount, though considerably chastened by Slavonic mysticism, and modified by peculiar political and social conditions. Though much nobler in sentiment, the novel in Poland, Russia, and Bohemia is quite as melancholy in character as the general run of fiction elsewhere. A minor key predominates them all. There is no room for humour in the mental vivisection which now passes for Belles-lettres. We may learn something, no doubt, from these fin de siècle novelists, but to get a single healthy laugh out of any one of them is quite impossible.

There is, however, one country which is a singular exception to this general rule. In Hungary the good old novel of incident and adventure is still held in high honour, and humour is of the very essence of the national literature. This curious isolated phenomenon is due, in great measure, to the immense influence of the veteran novelist, Maurus Jókai, who may be said to have created the modern Hungarian novel,[1] and who has already written more romances than any man can hope to read in a life-time. Jókai is a great poet. He possesses a gorgeous fancy, an all-embracing imagination, and a constructive skill unsurpassed in modern fiction; but his most delightful quality is his humour, a humour of the cheeriest, heartiest sort, without a single soupçon of ill-nature about it, a quality precious in any age, and doubly so in an overwrought, supercivilized age like our own. Lovers of literature must always regret, however, that the great Hungarian romancer has been so prodigal of his rare gifts. He has written far too much, and his works vary immensely. Between such masterpieces, for instance, as "Karpáthy Zoltán" and "Az arány ember" on the one hand, and such pot-boilers as "Nincsen Ordög," or even "Szerelem Bolondjai," on the other, the interval is truly abysmal. But that such a difference is due not to exhaustion, but simply to excessive exuberance, is evident from the story which we now present for the first time to English readers. "A tengerszemü hölgy" is certainly the most brilliant of Jókai's later, and perhaps[2] the most humorous of all his works. It was justly crowned by the Hungarian Academy as the best Magyar novel of the year 1890, and well sustains the long-established reputation of the master. Apart from the intensely dramatic incidents of the story, and the originality and vividness of the characterization, "A tengerszemü hölgy" is especially interesting as being, to a very great extent, autobiographical. It is not indeed a professed record of the author's life-like "Emlékeim" (My Memoirs) for instance. It professes to be a novel, and a most startling novel it is. Yet in none of Jókai's other novels does he tell us so much about himself, his home, and his early struggles both as an author and a patriot; he is one of the chief characters in his own romance. Of the heroine, Bessy, I was about to say that she stood alone in fiction, but there is a certain superficial resemblance, purely accidental of course, between her and that other delightful and original rogue of romance, Mrs. Desborough, in Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's "More New Arabian Nights," though all who have had the privilege of making the acquaintance of both ladies will feel bound to admit that Jókai's Bessy, with her five husbands, is even more piquant, stimulating, and fascinating than Mr. Stevenson's charming and elusive heroine.

R. NISBET BAIN.

[1] I do not forget Kármán, Jósika, and Eötvös, but the former was an imitator of Richardson, and the two latter of Walter Scott.

[2] I say "perhaps," as I can only claim to have read twenty-five out of Jókai's one hundred and fifty novels.

EYES LIKE THE SEA

CHAPTER I

SEA-EYES—MONSIEUR GALIFARD—THE FIRST NEEDLE-PRICK

Never in my life have I seen such wonderful eyes! One might construct a whole astronomy out of them. Every changeful mood was there reflected; so I have called them "Eyes like the Sea."

When first I met pretty Bessy, we were both children. She was twelve years old, I was a hobbledehoy of sixteen. We were learning dancing together. A Frenchman had taken up his quarters in our town, an itinerant dancing-master, who set the whole place in a whirl. His name was Monsieur Galifard. He had an extraordinarily large head, a bronzed complexion, eyebrows running into each other, and short legs; and on the very tip of his large aquiline nose was a big wart. Yet, for all that, he was really charming. Whenever he danced or spoke, he instantly became irresistible. All our womankind came thither on his account; all of them I say, from nine years old and upwards to an age that was quite incalculable. I recall the worthy man with the liveliest gratitude. I have to thank him for the waltz and the quadrille, as well as for the art of picking up a fallen fan without turning my back upon the lady.

Bessy was the master's greatest trouble. She would never keep time; she would never take to the elegant "pli," and he could never wean her from her wild and frolicsome ways. Woe to the dancer who became her partner!

I, however, considered all this perfectly natural. When any one is lovely, rich, and well-born, she has the right to be regarded as the exception to every rule. That she was lovely you could tell at the very first glance; that she was rich anybody could tell from the silver coach in which she rode; and by combining the fact that every one called her mother "Your Ladyship" with the fact that even the "country people" kissed her hand, you easily arrived at the conclusion that she must be well-born. Her lady-mother and her companion, a gentlewoman of a certain age, were present at every dancing lesson, as also was the girl's aunt, a major's widow in receipt of a pension. Thus Bessy was under a threefold inspection, the natural consequence of which was that she could do just as she liked, for every one of her guardians privately argued, "Why should I take the trouble of looking after this little girl when the other two are doing the same thing?" and so all three were always occupied with their own affairs.

The mother was a lady who loved to bask on the sunny side of life; her widowhood pined for consolation. She had her officially recognised wooers, with more or less serious intentions, graduated according to rank and quality.

The companion was the scion of a noble family. All her brothers were officers. Her father was a Chamberlain at Court; his own chamber was about the last place in the world to seek him in. The young lady's toilets were of the richest; she also had the reputation of being a beauty, and was famed for her finished dancing. Still, time had already called her attention to the seriousness of her surroundings; for Bessy, the daughter of the house, had begun to shoot up in the most alarming manner, and four or five summers more might make a rival of her. Her occupation during the dancing hour was therefore of such a nature as to draw her somewhat aside lest people should observe with whom and in what manner she was diverting herself, for there is many an evil feminine eye that can read all sorts of things in a mere exchange of glances or a squeeze of the hand, and then, of course, such things are always talked to death.

But it was the aunt most of all who sought for pretexts to vanish from the dancing-room. She wanted to taste every dish and pasty in the buffet before any one else, and well-grounded investigators said of her, besides, that she was addicted to the dark pleasure of taking snuff, which naturally demanded great secrecy. When, however, she was in the dancing-room, she would sit down beside some kindred gossiper, and then they both got so engrossed in the delight of running down all their acquaintances, that they had not a thought for anything else.

So Bessy could do what she liked. She could dance csárdás[3] figures in the Damensolo; smack her vis-à-vis on the hands in the tour de mains, and tell anecdotes in such a loud voice that they could be heard all over the room; and when she laughed she would press both hands between her knees in open defiance of Monsieur Galifard's repeated expostulations.

[3] The national dance of Hungary.

One evening there was a grand practice in the dancing-room. With the little girls came big girls, and with the big girls big lads. Such lubbers seem to think that they have a covenanted right to cut out little fellows like me. Luckily, worthy Galifard was a good-natured fellow, who would not allow his protégés to be thrust to the wall.

"Nix cache-cache spielen, Monsieur Maurice. Allons! Walzer geht an. Nur courage. Ne cherchez pas toujours das allerschlekteste Tänzerin! Fangen sie Fräulein Erzsike par la main. Valsez là."[4] And with that he seized my hand, led me up to Bessy, placed my hand in hers, and then "ein, zwei."

[4] "Don't play hide-and-seek, Master Maurice. Off you go! 'Tis a waltz, remember. Come, come! courage. Don't always pick out the worst partner. Take Miss Bessy by the hand. Waltz away!"

Now, the waltzes of those days were very different from the waltzes we dance now. The waltz of to-day is a mere joke; but waltzing then was a serious business. Both partners kept the upper parts of their bodies as far apart as possible, whilst their feet were planted close together. Then the upper parts went moving off to the same time, and the legs were obliged to slide as quickly as they could after the flying bodies. It was a dance worthy of will-o'-the-wisps.

The master kept following us all the time, and never ceased his stimulating assurances: "Très bien, Monsieur Maurice! Ça va ausgezeiknet! 'Alten sie brav la demoiselle! Nix auf die Füsse schauen. Regardez aux yeux. Das ist riktig. Embrassiren ist besser als embarrasiren! Pouah! Da liegst schon alle beide!"[5]

[5] "Very good, Master Maurice! That's capital! Hold the lady nicely! Don't look at your feet. Look at her eyes. That's right! To embrace is better than to embarrass. Pooh! There, they both are together!"

No, not quite so bad as that! I had foreseen the inevitable tumble, and in order to save my partner I sacrificed myself by falling on my knees, she scarcely touched the floor with the tip of her finger. My knee was not much the worse for the fall, but I split my pantaloons just above the knee. I was annihilated. A greater blow than that can befall no man.

Bessy laughed at my desperate situation, but the next moment she had compassion upon me.

"Wait a bit," said she, "and I'll sew it up with my darning-needle." Then she fished up a darning-needle from one of the many mysterious folds of her dress, and, kneeling down before me, hastily darned up the rent in my dove-coloured pantaloons, and in her great haste she pricked me to the very quick with the beneficent but dangerous implement.

"I didn't prick you, did I?" she asked, looking at me with those large eyes of hers which seemed to speak of such goodness of heart.

"No," I said; yet I felt the prick of that needle even then.

Then we went on dancing. I distinguished myself marvellously. With a needle-prick in my knee, and another who knows where, I whirled Bessy three times round the room, so that when I brought her back to the garde des dames, it seemed to me as if three-and-thirty mothers, aunts, and companions were revolving around me.

CHAPTER II

MY FIRST DISTINCTION—MY FIRST GRIEVANCE—THE DAMENWALZER—THE FRIGHTFUL MONSTER—THE READJUSTED SCARF—THE SECOND NEEDLE-PRICK

I am really most grateful to Monsieur Galifard. I have to thank him for the first distinction I ever enjoyed in my life. This was the never-to-be-forgotten circumstance that when my colleagues, the young hopefuls of the Academy of Jurisprudence at Kecskemet, gave a lawyers' ball, they unanimously chose me to be the elötánczos.[6] To this day I am proud of that distinction; what must I have been then? On the heels of this honour speedily came a second. The very same year, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, on the occasion of the competition for the Teleki prize, honourably mentioned my tragedy, "The Jew Boy," and there were even two competent judges, Vörösmarty and Bajza,[7] who considered it worthy of the prize.... When, therefore, I returned to my native town, after an absence of three years, I found that a certain renommée had preceded me. I had also very good reasons for returning home. The legal curriculum in my time embraced four years. The third year was given to the patveria, the fourth year to the jurateria.[8] Every respectable man goes through the patveria in his own country, but the jurateria at Buda-Pest.

[6] The dancer who leads off the ball.

[7] Two of the most eminent Hungarian poets.

[8] Different branches of Hungarian law.

And I had something else to boast of, too. In my leisure hours I painted portraits, miniatures in oil. So well did I hit off the Judge of Osziny (and he did not give me a sitting either) that every one recognised him; but a still greater sensation was caused by my portrait of the wife of the Procurator Fiscal, who passed for one of the prettiest women in the town.

And yet, despite all this, when in the following Shrovetide the Lord Lieutenant gave a ball to the county (they were something like Lord Lieutenants in those days), I was not called upon to open the ball! Ungrateful fatherland!

And who was it, pray, who caused me this bitter slight? A dandy, who did not belong to our town at all; a certain Muki Bagotay, of whom the world only knew that he had been to Paris, and was a good match. In my rage I had resolved not to dance at the Lord Lieutenant's ball, although I had received an invitation. Moreover, my indignation was increased by the circumstance that rumour had already designated Bessy as the semi-official partner of the opener of the ball.

However, Nemesis overtook the pair of them.

At this ball Bessy wore a frisure à l'Anglaise, which did not suit her face at all; and I rejoiced beforehand at the misadventure I clearly foresaw, for I was certain that her flying dishevelled hair would catch in the buttons of her partner's dress-coat.

As for Muki Bagotay himself, the first time we cast eyes upon him, my young brother and I immediately agreed that it was an absolute impertinence to be so handsome. Only a romance-writer has the right to produce such perfect figures; they have no business to exist in reality. I comforted myself with the reflection that such a handsome fellow must be a blockhead. I didn't know then that dulness was fashionable. Why, even gold has a dull ring!

But I was a very inexperienced youngster in those days. I had no down on my face, I did not know how to smoke, I would not have drunk wine for worlds, and had never even looked a lady in the face.

But, as I said before, Nemesis overtook them.

The dance opened with a waltz. If I had been master of the ceremonies, I should have started with a körmagyar.[9] Ah! that körmagyar. That is something like a dance. It requires enthusiasm to dance that, and you want eight or sixteen couples to dance it properly, and all thirty-two dancers must dance it with histrionic precision, and that was not an easy thing to do, I can tell you. But, then, Bagotay was all for waltzes. The "Pecsovics"![10]

[9] An old Hungarian round dance.

[10] One who preferred foreign and especially Austrian customs to Hungarian.

But there's a Nemesis!

It was the regular custom then for the band to play ten or twelve bars of each dance before it began, and then stop for a few moments so that the public might know whether the next dance was to be a polka, quadrille, or waltz. Muki Bagotay did not know this (what did he know, forsooth?), so when the band gave the usual signal, he took his partner on his arm and started off with her in a fine whirl, till the band suddenly stopped, and they found themselves high and dry at the other end of the room with no music for their feet to dance to; so they had to sneak back shamefacedly to the place from whence they had started. Bessy was furious, and Muki was full of excuses; you would have taken them for a married couple of six months' standing. Serve them right!

I did not watch them dance any more, but sat down in a corner and sketched caricatures on the back of my invitation card. Then I made my way to the buffet to drink almond-tea, and gathered round me two or three blasé young men, like myself weary of existence. Let the gay company inside there try and amuse themselves without our assistance if they could!

Suddenly some one tapped me on the shoulder with a fan, then I recognised a voice; it was Bessy. "What," she said, "not content with flying from the dancing-room yourself, must you keep away other dancers also! Come back, sir! A Damenwalzer is beginning."

For the privilege of a Damenwalzer I capitulated unconditionally of course. Having completed the turn round the room with my partner, I led Bessy back to her mother, and thanked her for the never-to-be-forgotten distinction. She had to be off again almost immediately, for the voice of the master of the ceremonies announced a cotillon. The couples flew round with the velocity of will-o'-the-wisp. But her mother remained where she was, and there was an empty chair beside her.

"You are quite forgetting your old acquaintances," said she, breathing heavily (she was stout and suffered from asthma). "You don't trouble your head about us now you have become a famous man."

A famous man! What! then does she also know that the Academy of Sciences honourably mentioned my tragedy? No, no! My other fame it was that had reached her—my pictorial successes.

"We have seen the lovely portrait that you painted. Yes, it was Madame Müller to the life—just as she looked fifteen years ago. Why did you not rather paint her daughter, she is much prettier? But you don't like painting girls, do you—you are afraid it is a losing game, eh?"

The lady had certainly very peculiar expressions.

Of course I could only reply that I was not a bit afraid, and that if they would let me, I should have the greatest pleasure in painting Miss Bessy.

She was gracious enough to give her consent. The only thing was to fix when it should be. It could not be at once, as for some days after a ball young ladies do not look their best. Then they had to get ready for another dancing party, or were busy, and on Sundays they went to church. At last, however, after much calculation, a day was hunted up on which Bessy was free to sit to me.

Then there was another question for consideration: was the portrait to be painted on ivory with water-colours, or on linen with oils? "Ivory is better," I insinuated, "because one can always wipe off a portrait in water-colours with a wet sponge whenever one likes."

The lady remarked the self-reproach, and was gracious enough to neutralize it by a contradiction.

"Then I declare for oils, for we wish to keep the picture for ever."

I felt that I could have done anything for her.

Meanwhile the cotillon had come to an end. Bessy returned to her mother, and the companion also resumed her place. The chair which I had appropriated belonged to her, and resigning it to its lawful possessor, I would have withdrawn, but the lady considered it her duty to present me to the ruling planet of the day, Muki Bagotay, who was escorting back his partner. She immediately acquainted him with my artistic qualifications, and made it generally known that I was going in a few days to paint her daughter's portrait.

On the afternoon of the day appointed I appeared at Bessy's house. I had sent on beforehand my easel and my canvas by our servant. I found not a single soul of a lackey either in the passage or the ante-chamber. I was obliged to stand there and wait till some one came to announce me, and in the meantime I could not help overhearing the conversation in the adjoining room.

"You are a good-for-nothing rascal yourself—a shameful, impertinent fellow!"

I recognised the voice of the mistress of the house.

In reply came a protesting shriek.

"Where is there a stick?" cried the lady.

And at the same instant a hoarse voice replied: "Madame, vous êtes une friponne!"

A pretty conversation truly. I had certainly arrived at the wrong time.

Meanwhile the door opened, and the flunkey came in rubbing one of his hands with the other; he was evidently in pain.

"Have you been beaten?" cried I, in amazement; to which he angrily replied: "No! I have been bitten."

What, actually bitten the footman!

"Would you kindly walk in, sir; they are waiting for you."

The moment I entered the room this enigmatical state of things was immediately plain to me. The personage to whom her ladyship was meting out these offensive epithets, and who was returning her such contemptuous replies, was a grey parrot who had just bitten the lackey in the finger and been chastised for this misdeed. The whole company was in the utmost excitement. There was a large assembly both of ladies and gentlemen; amongst the latter my eye immediately caught sight of Muki Bagotay. But the chief personage was the parrot. He was a grey-liveried, red-tailed, big-billed monster, and he stood in the middle of the tea-table in a threatening attitude. Somehow or other he had contrived to open the door of his bronze cage, and in a twinkling he stood in the midst of the tea-things on the covered table. "Oh, I only hope he won't get on my head!" cried a somewhat elderly lady, holding on to her chignon with both hands. Nobody dared to assume the offensive. The footman who had attempted to seize the fugitive had already been laid hors de combat by the winged rebel, while the parlour-maid declared that she would not go near him if they gave her the whole house. The lady of the house meanwhile was making little dabs at the bird with a small Spanish cane, and calling it all sorts of abusive names; but the warlike pet always grasped the end of the cane with its strong beak, while he repaid with interest the injurious epithets bestowed upon him.

When I joined the company I was scarcely noticed and the lady of the house, in reply to my salutation, "I kiss your hand," said, "You infamous scoundrel!" though she immediately added, "I did not mean you."—"You're one yourself," retorted the bird.

"Come now, find a rhyme to that, Mr. Rhymster!" said Mr. Muki Bagotay. The wretch was apostrophizing me.—Rhymster, indeed!

"Don't go near it!" cried Bessy; "he might bite your hand, and then you would not be able to paint me."

They'd terrify me, eh? It only needed that. I instantly went straight for the bird. I would have done so had it been the double-headed Russian eagle itself. Was it divination which made me hit upon the proper word to say to such a human-voiced monster? "Give me your head!" said I. And at that word the terrible wretch bobbed down his head till he was actually standing on his curved beak, while I scratched his head with my index finger, which gratified him so much that he began to flutter his wings.

Then I hazarded a second command.

"Give me your foot!"

And then, to the general amazement, the parrot raised its formidable three-pronged foot and clasped me tightly round the index finger with its claws; then it seized my thumb with its other foot, and allowed me to lift it from the table. Nor was that all. While I held it on my hand, just as the mediæval huntsmen held their falcons, the parrot bent its head over my hand and began to distribute kisses; but finally he went through every variation of the kiss till it was a perfect scandal. The ladies laughed. "Who ever could have taught him?"

"I got the bird during the lifetime of my late lamented husband," explained the lady of the house, with some confusion.

Finally, the conquered sphinx affectionately confided to me his name: "Little Koko! Darling Koko!" But I transferred Koko from my fist to his cage, and put him on to the swinging ring, which he seized, and began to climb upwards with his beak. He was a veritable triped! On settling comfortably in his ring, he made me a low bow, and cried with a naïve inflexion of voice—"Your humble servant!"

"Positively marvellous!" gasped the lady-mother; "you ought really to be a tamer of animals!"

"I mean to be."

"Indeed! And what sort of beasts will you tame?"

"Men!"

Not one of them understood me.

"Well, Mr. Poet," joked Muki Bagotay, "the ballad was a success; now let us see whether the picture also will be superlative."

"How do you want to see it?"

"So!" and with that he stuck his eye-glass into the corner of his nose.

"Then you're just mistaken!" said I, "for when I paint a portrait nobody is allowed in the room except myself and the sitter."

The whole company was amazed. Every one fancied that it would have been a public exhibition, and so they had all congregated together to see how a person's eye, mouth and ear came out. A large round table had been prepared for me, in order that a whole lot of them might sit around it with their hands on their elbows, and give me general directions as I went along: That eye a bit higher! that ringlet a little lower! A little more red here, and a little more white there! However, I declared plainly that I would not paint before a crowd; it was the rule in painting, I said. When portraits were being painted, nobody must be in the atelier but the painter and his model. Barabás,[11] too, always made that a rule.

[11] Michael Barabás, a famous Hungarian painter, born at Markosfalu in 1810.

My resolution produced an imposing effect on the company. It's a very nice thing when a man can do something which nobody else can! They had to agree that Bessy and I should sit alone in a little side room, which had only one window, and the lower part of even this window had to be covered by a Spanish screen so as to get a proper light. And nobody was to disturb us so long as the sitting lasted.

The first sitting did not last long. In oil painting, the image should first of all be painted under, that is to say, with dull neutral colours. In those days I had never heard of such a thing as a first coating; while it is in this stage the picture is not fit to be looked at. It is absolutely hideous, and the better the likeness, the worse it looks. I allowed nobody to look at it, not even Bessy. I locked up the first essay in my painter's knapsack; it was a miniature. At this stage it was quite sufficient if the insetting had succeeded, with the figure in profile, but the countenance quite en face; the shadows piled up, but the background merely thrown out tentatively, and the fundamental colours of the dress just insinuated. Every one will see that this last part is the hardest of all.

The company was very much deceived in its expectations when it was informed that I had nothing to show it. Every one had expected that in an hour and a half I should have finished the eye or the mouth at any rate; they now thought to themselves that nothing at all would come of it.

"Well, but will Bessy look pretty in this dress?" asked her mother.

What could I do at such a question as this but look silly? As if I knew whether Bessy had had a pretty dress on or not! All I knew was that I had had to use for it a little "English lake," some "Neapolitan yellow," "Venetian white," and just a scrinch of "burnt ochre."

"I can tell you that it was a very tiresome amusement," said Bessy. "The face a little more that way—Not so serious—Not so smiling—Don't sit so stiffly—Raise your finger—Don't move about so much.—And you've laid so much licorice-juice on my portrait that they'll fancy I'm a gipsy girl."

I hastened to assure her that this was only laying the ground work, and that on the morrow it would be a much merrier business.

The next day I was there again after an early dinner. In the forenoon I was with my chief at the office. Thus before dinner I was a lawyer, and after dinner I was artist, poet, and reciter.

This time there was no company. The picture proceeded briskly, and the members of the family were allowed to come in from time to time, one by one, and have a peep at it.

I had now begun to study the face more in detail. It was an interesting head. The face was almost heart-shaped, terminating below in a little chin which was delicately divided by a single dimple. There were spiral-like lips of dazzling red enamel; a slightly retroussé nose, with vibrating nostrils; round, rosy-red cheeks, with little beauty spots here and there, which I christened "black stars in the ruddy dawning heavens!" Her densely thick hair curled naturally, and gleamed like golden enamel, diminishing, after the manner of Phidias' ideal Venus, the smoothest of foreheads, and fluttering the most roguish of little ringlets over the blue-veined temples. (How could I help learning by heart such minute details when every one of them passed beneath my brush?) But what my brush could not possibly reproduce was her marvellous pair of eyes. They drove me entirely to despair. I really believe that even if I had been a true artist instead of a wretched dilettante, I should never have been able to conjure forth their secrets. Just when I was thinking I had fixed them, her eyes would flash, and my whole work was thrown away. At last I had to be content with a dreamy expression, which pleased me, at any rate, best. The inspecting family trio said that they had never seen such an expression on Bessy's face; nevertheless they acknowledged, with one voice, that it was a speaking likeness.

The head was now ready, the dress was to remain till to-morrow.

On that day there was a préférence party in town at the General's. Bessy's mother was an enthusiastic préférence player.... Consequently she was not at home. The aunt alone remained as the guardian of maidens, and she used generally to take a nap in the afternoon, or play patience. I don't know who presided over Bessy's toilet on this occasion, perhaps nobody. That clean-cut, pale pink bodice on other days had given full scope to her charming figure; but on this particular day it was more insinuating than ever. It seemed to me as if the frill of English tulle had crept considerably lower down the shoulder, nay, lower still.

One cannot imagine a lovelier masterpiece of a creative hand than that bust. And it is a painter's right, nay, his duty, not merely to look, but to observe. A dangerous privilege. My hand trembled, I seemed to freeze, and yet beads of sweat stood out upon my forehead.... She, too, seemed to remark my agitation. A roguish flame sparkled in her eye. She was now not a bit like her yesterday's portrait. She seemed to be flouting me. And I was putting that treacherous frill of tulle to rights in the picture, putting it where it ought to have been. That is what I really call "corriger la fortune."

At this sitting the face was completely finished, and the dress also was painted. I thanked the fair self-sacrificing victim, and told her that she might now look at the picture; it was ready. The girl rose from her chair and peeped over my shoulder. She looked at the picture and laughed in my face.

"Why, you've readjusted the frill of my dress, haven't you?" said she.

"So you wore it like that purposely, eh?"

"Then was there something you didn't want to see?"

"There was something I didn't want other people to see."

"Well, now, I've been looking at you for days and days, and I've observed something on you which is very nasty, and which I don't like at all."

"I had no idea you gave me so much of your attention."

"It is only a mere speck, no bigger than the eye of a bean."

"What can it be?"

"The wart on your right hand."

And, indeed, on my right hand, just below the thumb, was a not very ornamental excrescence, which everybody could see when I was writing or painting.

"I cannot cut it out, because it is just above the artery. I showed it to a doctor, and he said it would be a rather dangerous operation."

"What does the doctor know about it? I'll destroy it for you; it won't hurt you. I learned it at school from my school-fellows. I'll destroy it in a moment."

"By incantations, eh?"

"Oh, dear no! It will smart dreadfully. But if a girl can stand it, you can."

I consented.

She lit a candle forthwith, and placed it on the table beside me. Then she produced a darning-needle from somewhere (I thought of the other darning-needle), took firm hold of it, shoved it right down to the very roots of the wart, held up my hand, and placed the head of the needle in the candle flame till it was heated to a white heat. And all the time her wondrous eyes were opened round and wide, and looked straight into my eyes with irises turned downwards. It is thus that the demons of hell must look upon those whom they are roasting!

"Does it hurt?" she hissed between her teeth. She appeared to be in a state of ecstatic delight.

"It hurts, but it is not the needle."

"Well, now you can take your wart away with you."

Two days after, the calcined wart fell from my hand, leaving behind it a little speck no bigger than a lentil; and that speck is there still, and is of a whiteness which contrasts strongly with the colour of the rest of the hand. And every day I set to work writing, I must needs look at this little white spot, and when I have looked at it long, it seems to me as if her face were appearing before me in the midst of this tiny circle just as it looked then; and then that face runs through all its variations down to that last shape of all, which still startles me from my slumbers.

CHAPTER III

MY MASTERPIECE AND MY HUT

In the later stages of the painting we could converse. Indeed, conversation is necessary for completing one's study of one's subject, and prevents, besides, the constraint of sitting from becoming too tiresome.

"Have you read the poems of Petöfi?"[12]

[12] The Burns of Hungary.

"Oh, at our house we read nothing."

"Why not?"

"Because those who come to see us bring no books with them."

"Then don't you get any newspaper?"

"Oh, yes, the Journal des Demoiselles; but it's a frightful bore."

"A Hungarian paper would be better, the Pesti Divatlap, for instance."

"I'll tell my mother to order it. You write for it sometimes, don't you?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"The description of a desert island among the sedges."

"Have you ever been on this desert island?"

"No; I only imagine it."

"What's the good of that?"

"It's part of a romance I'm working at."

"Ah, so you write romances! Will you put us into them?"

"Oh, no! Romance writing does not consist in merely copying down all that one sees and hears about one."

"I should like to know how you set about it?"

"First of all I think out the end of the story."

"What, you begin at the end?"

"Yes. Then I create the characters of the story. Then I deal out to these characters the parts they must play, and the vicissitudes they must go through down to the very end of the story."

"Then, according to that, none of it is true?"

"It is not real, perhaps, but it may be true, for all that."

"I don't understand. And how much time do you take to write a story? I suppose it will come out?"

"Certainly."

"Ah, yes, 'tis an easy thing for you to do! You have a rich aunt at Ó Gyalla, and you've only got to say a word to her and she'll get your book printed for you. I suppose you've only got to ask her?"

"I shall not tell my rich aunt a word about it."

"Then you'll get your book printed at Fani Weinmüller's, I suppose. Now listen, that won't do at all. I knew an author who published his own book and went from village to village, and persuaded every landed proprietor to buy a copy from him. That is a rugged path."

"My romance will not be one of those which the author himself has to carry from door to door; it will be one of those for which the publisher pays the author an honorarium."

She absolutely laughed in my face.

And after all, when you come to think about it, surely it is somewhat comical when a person comes forward and barefacedly says, "Here, I've written something in which there is not one word of truth, and nevertheless I insist upon people reading it, and paying me for writing it."

"Do you fancy, Miss Bessy, that Petöfi was not paid for his poems? He got two hundred florins for 'Love's Pearls.'"

"'Love's Pearls'! And pray what are they?"

"Lovely poems to a beautiful girl."

"And did he get the girl?"

"No, he did not."

"Well, now, that is a nice thing. A fellow courts a girl, puts his feelings into verse, finally gets a basket[13] from her, and then demands that this basket should be filled for him with silver pieces."

[13] The Hungarian "Kosarat kapni," like the German "einen Korb bekommen" (to get a basket), is the equivalent of our "to get a flea in one's ear," i.e., "a rejection."

The same day I sent her Petöfi's "Love's Pearls," and his "Cypress Leaves" also.

I resumed my portrait painting three days afterwards, and immediately asked her whether she had taken up "Love's Pearls."

"Oh, yes; I took them up to dry flowers in them."

"But I suppose you've just dipped into the 'Cypress Leaves'?"

"I don't like such things. I always burst into tears; and then my nose gets quite red."

I did not pursue the subject further.

Miss Bessy hastened, however, to sweeten my bitter disappointment with the delightful intelligence that, at my suggestion, mamma had at once subscribed to the Pesti Divatlap, and for six months, too.

I was there when the postman brought the first four copies of the paper. In those days every paper had to be sent through the post in an envelope, postage stamps had not yet been invented....

After the solemnity of breaking open the envelope, the assembled womankind naturally looked to see if there were any pictures, especially pictures of the fashions.

Was it not called "Divatlap"?[14] And a fashionable journal it really was. That worthy, high-souled patriot, Emericus Vahot, was labouring with iron determination to make fashion a national affair.

[14] Fashionable journal.

"Well, whoever wore that might exhibit herself for money!" That was the universal verdict of the ladies. They alluded to one of the fashion patterns.

The illustrated supplement to the second number was Gabriel Egressy as Richard III., in the dream scene, surrounded by spectres; the picture was sketched by our countryman Valentine Kiss.

Her ladyship asked me which was the head of the principal figure, and which the feet. And I must confess that I myself could not quite make out how Richard III. had got his head between his knees.

With the illustrated supplement to the third number, however, they were quite satisfied. It was Rosa Laborfalvy[15] as Queen Gertrude, by Barabás, a work of real artistic merit. This interested the ladies greatly.

[15] Jókai's future wife, as will be seen in the sequel.

"They say she has such wonderful eyes that there's nothing like them anywhere," said Miss Bessy.

The logical consequence of this should have been a contradiction accompanied by a flattering compliment on my part; but all at once it was as if something so squeezed my throat that I absolutely could not get the courtly expression out anyhow. "I have never seen her," I replied.

At the end of the fourth number was a lithograph representing a slim, youthful figure, and beneath it was written the name, Alexander Petöfi. It was one of the best sketches of Barabás. It is the one absolutely faithful portrait of the immortal poet. As such he was known by all those who lived with him, that eye gazing forth into the far distance, that mouth opened prophetically, those hands crossed behind him as if he would hide something in them. The whole portrait seems to say, "I will be Petöfi"; all the other portraits say, "I am Petöfi."

This picture produced a great impression upon the ladies, for the appearance of a lithographed portrait in a journal was a great event. In those days there were none of the beneficent penny papers, whose right of existence is considered amply justified if the frontispiece represents some one battering an old woman's head in with an axe. Only great and famous patriots enjoyed the distinction of figuring on title-pages, and photography was not yet invented.... The appearance, then, of Petöfi's portrait in an illustrated supplement of the Divatlap created quite a sensation.... The companion at once undertook to read the book of verses which had been sent to the house by me. Bessy, on the other hand, desired to know whether she would find anything of mine in the portion of the journal devoted to the Belles-Lettres. Immediately afterwards she actually hit upon it. It was a portion of my romance, which appeared there under the title of "Az ingovány oáza"—"The Oasis of the Fens."

"Well, I mean to read this at once."

I gave her plenty of time to do so, for I only appeared again after the lapse of several days.

She really had read it. It was the first thing she told me.

"Now I am curious to know," she added, "what was the beginning of the story and what will be the end? You know, don't you?"

"How can I help knowing?"

"But I don't understand the title. Where does the 'oiseau'[16] come in?"

[16] The Hungarian oáza (oasis) and the French oiseau are pronounced so very much alike, that the ill-instructed Bessy, who had never heard of the former, not unnaturally confounded them.

I explained to her that the "oáz" was not a flying fowl, but a plot of verdure concealed in the desert.

"Then why don't you write 'island'?"

She was right there.

"Apropos of island," she continued, "I often see you from the verandah of our island summer-house walking up and down in front of our garden; yet you never give us so much as a glance, though we make noise enough."

"That is quite possible. At such times I am immersed."

"Immersed in what?"

"In working at my romance."

"Working and walking at the same time?"

"Such is my habit. I work out the whole scene in my head first of all, down to the smallest details, so that when I sit down it is a mere mechanical a-b-c sort of business."

"Then according to that, when you are marching with rapid strides up and down that long path, you neither hear nor see anything?"

"Pardon me, I see grass, trees, flowers, birds, stumps of trees, and huts of reeds overgrown with brambles. Amongst all these I weave my thoughts like the meshes of a spider's web. And I hear, too. I hear the piping of the yellow-hammer, the twittering of the titmouse, the notes of the horn from distant ships, the humming of the gnats, and they all have something to whisper to me, something to tell me. A buzzing wasp lends wings to my imagination; but if I meet a human face, the whole thing flies out of my thoughts, and a single 'your humble servant' will dissolve utterly my fata Morgana, until I turn back and reconstruct the ends of my spider's-web among the freshly-discovered reed-built huts, tree-trunks and trailing flowers, when the well-known voices of the dwellers in the wilderness bring back to me again my scattered ideas; then I retreat into the little wooden summer-house in our garden, and there, disturbed by nobody, I transfer to paper the images which stand before my mind."

And Bessy, contrary to my expectation, didn't laugh at this elucidation. On the contrary, she had grown quite serious. The expression of her eyes now resembled the expression which I had given them in her portrait.

"And this gives you pleasure?" she whispered. "It is just as if a man were to set off dreaming after taking care beforehand that all his dreams should turn out beautiful."

"Mr. Muki Bagotay," announced the footman.

I took up my hat. I could not endure that fellow. He had already enjoyed everything in reality which existed for me only in imagination....

The little wooden hut there in the orchard on the Danubian islet (whether it is still there I know not) was the most splendid palace in which I ever dwelt. 'Twas there I wrote my first romance. It is true that it had to put up with a lot of criticism, that first romance. What, indeed, did a young mind which knew nothing of men or of the world understand about romance writing? And yet I loved my first work, just as much as a man loves his first-born, though it may be deformed by all sorts of physical and spiritual defects. How plainly I still see before me those large, wide-spreading Reineclaude trees, crammed with fruit ripe to bursting, which covered the little hut. A little farther off was an apple-tree covered with blood-red fruit, and then a second with taffety white, and a third with velvety apples. From the open door of the hut one could see right along the overgrown path, which was bordered on both sides by bowery vines. When the warm blood-red rays of summer pierced through the meshes of the foliage, it seemed as if every shadow was of green-gold. Far away on the banks of the Danube could be heard the delusive echoes from the military band in the "English Garden," whilst closer at hand the yellow-hammer piped, and a frog here and there croaked in the irrigating trenches. I was writing the hardest part of my romance—the love part, that most undiscoverable of all unknown worlds. One may write down a description of the marsh world from the imagination, but not a description of the world of love. If the heart has not already discovered it, the head can tell us nothing at all about it.

All at once the green-gold shadows were lit up by something bright. She was standing there in the door of my hut, dressed in a white frock, with a straw hat fastened to two blue ribbons hanging upon her arm, and her dishevelled locks floating down her shoulders. For a moment I fancied that the dream-shapes of my imagination had taken bodily form. Then her ringing peal of laughter assured me that a living person stood before me.

"How did you come here?"

"How? Why, by walking over the soft grass, of course."

"Alone?"

"Alone! Why not? Whom should I have brought with me, I should like to know? I suppose I may come to a neighbour's garden unattended?"

It was quite true that our gardens were only about a hundred feet apart, lying one on each side of the common path, which ran right through the island.

"You don't seem to give me a very hearty reception," pouted she, as she entered my hut.

My head began to swim.

"On the contrary, I am overjoyed at the honour you do me, and I'll gather for you at once some of our princely plums."

Nobody else had such plums then, and it was a good excuse, besides, for quitting the hut.

"I did not come for the sake of your princely plums; I filch them long before you ever taste them. I have come now to see how you make up your romance."

I pointed out to her that here was the paper and there the pen, and all a man had to do was to take up the pen, and it went on writing of its own accord.

"Then you don't peep into any book first of all?"

"You can see that I am provided with no tools of that sort."

"Well, now, sit down, and I'll sit down beside you and see how you write."

And then, not waiting for an invitation, she sat down at the end of my sofa, driving me into the dilemma of sitting down by the table, willy-nilly, likewise. I may mention that my hut was so narrow that the table reached from the door to the window.

"I can't write a word, though, at this moment," said I.

"Why? Because I'm here?"

"Naturally."

"Then read me what you have just written."

"There's a lot of it."

"So much the better. I can remain here all the longer."

"Won't they miss you at home?"

"They know that I am sure to turn up again."

Vanity is the horn by which one may always catch hold of a man. It flattered me to read what I had written, whoever the listener might be. In other parts of the kingdom I had already gained applause with my recitations, but nobody in my own narrow little town had ever heard me speak. Nemo profeta in patria.

And Bessy was a very appreciative audience. You could read from her face the effect I produced and the interest she took. She rested her face on her hand, smoothed down her hair, and fixed her attention that she might listen the better. She seemed quite frightened at the exciting scenes, her eyes and lips opened wide. I do not say this to praise myself, but simply as a justification of the fact that in those days I could recite with considerable emphasis. In one place, however, my voice began to falter.

"Well, what is it? Can't you read your own writing?"

"Yes—no, I mean. I think we had better leave off here?"

"Why? You've come to the most interesting part."

"I don't want to read it to you."

"Why? Do you mean to say you write such things as a girl ought not to know?"

"No, no! Anybody may read it except myself—before you."

The girl laughed, but there was something bitter in her laugh too.

"Oh, don't be anxious on my account, pray! We read, at school, things of which you have no idea. It is an old institution among us that every girl when she marries shall write a letter to her school friends on the very day after her wedding. We have a whole collection of such letters."

"And do you mean to tell me that you have promised to increase this collection?" I cried, with all the indignation of my youthful mind.

The girl must have guessed my anger from my face, for she cast down her eyes and said, in a low voice: "It depends upon whose I shall be."

Immediately afterwards she laughed uproariously: "You may read your love-scene before me."

I answered more firmly than ever: "I will not read it before you."

She understood and stared at me.

"You fear, perhaps, that I shall take it for a declaration? You think, perhaps, that I shall laugh at you in consequence?"

"No! You will not laugh at me."

"Then what are you afraid of?"

"I do not fear, I wait."

"Wait! For what?"

"I am waiting till I count for something in the world; at present I am a mere cipher."

"One who is born a man can never be a mere cipher."

"Look now! This wooden booth is at present the whole of my property, this little pile of paper my whole claim upon the world; but in my soul there is a vigorous flame to which I can give no name. This flame would suffice to make a man a pretender to a throne, but it is not sufficient to make him propose to a girl."

"But you know that I am rich."

"And I am still richer, for I dine deliciously off a crust of bread, and I sleep sweetly on a bed of straw."

"Well, and that pleases me too. I like a crust of bread and a bed of straw. You do not know me. A man might make a she-devil of me, though he built a temple in my name straight off, enshrined me on the altar, and knelt down before me. But he whom I truly loved might make an angel of me. I could be happy anywhere: in a shepherd's hut, a strolling player's tent, at a soldier's bivouac, in a schoolmaster's clay cabin. I would dream of luxury on my bed of straw."

And with that, she threw herself at full length on my bare sofa, and clasped her hands above her head.

Oh, what distracting loveliness!

Was it a blessing or a chastisement on the part of guiding Providence that I was able, at that moment, to see with my soul as well as with my eyes? This girl had in a few words unfolded before me the whole of her coming destiny.... I sat down at her feet by the side of the bare old sofa, and looked into her eyes.

Very softly I said to her: "She whom I love will not be my slave, but my queen. I will not filch my happiness, but win it. And she to whom I shall dedicate my heart shall be crowned by me with an aureola of glory, just as the rich of this world load their darlings with pearls and diamonds. The lady of my heart must be honoured by all the world—but most of all by myself."

At these words the half-closed eyelids opened. The girl began to sob violently, leaped to her feet, threw her arms round my neck, kissed me, and ran away.

And I looked after her like one that dreams, while the shrubs and the vine-leaves concealed her vanishing form. The yellow-hammer cried in my ear, "Silly boy, silly boy!" And immediately there occurred to my mind the story of the young man whose confessor gave him a bundle of hay to eat as a penance for a sin unachieved.

And now, too, when I stand before the big silly bookcase, which is filled with nothing but my own works, I often think, would it not have been better if they had none of them been ever thought out? And instead of writing so much for the whole world, would it not have been better if I had written for my own private use, just so much as would go within the inside cover of a family Bible? Nowadays, a whole street in my native town is called after my name: would it not have been better if all I had there were a simple hut?

But no! I willed it so, and if it were possible for me to go back to the diverging cross-roads of my opening life, I would tread once more in the self-same footprints that I have left so long behind me.

CHAPTER IV

PETÖFI WITH US—PLANS FOR THE FUTURE—THE RAPE OF THE BRIDES—AMATEUR THEATRICALS—MY MENSHIKOV

I really imagined that I loved and was beloved. I was always a welcome guest at her ladyship's house, and was a regular visitor on her "at home" days. On such occasions I learnt to know Bessy from another point of view. She was a musician also. She could play the fiddle. Whether she played artistically I really cannot say, for I don't understand music, and couldn't tell the difference between Paul Racz[17] and Sarasate; but so much is certain, she knew all the cunning tricks and poses which I admired so much in the famous musicians of a later day. She could make arpeggios and pizzicatos like Ole Bull, fughe di diavolo like Reményi, and pianissimos like Sarasate. She could make her fiddle weep softly like Milanollo and Miss Terezina Tua, and she could lash it savagely with her fiddle-bow like the Russian Princess Olga Korinshka, or play with the instrument close up to ear like a gipsy primás.[18] When she played she had the beauty of a demon; every limb was set in motion, her shoulders marked time, her bosom heaved, her body waved to and fro, her mouth smiled provocatively, her eyes sparkled; at one moment she softly caressed the fiddle with her bow, at another she flogged the strings unmercifully, and at the end of the performance she stood there with the pose of a triumphant Toreadrix. At such moments every one was fascinated by her; why, then, should I have been an exception?

[17] A famous gipsy musician.

[18] The leader of a gipsy band.

One day I got a letter from Petöfi, in which he informed me he was going to call upon us the following Sunday. I naturally skipped off to town at once, and showed the letter to all my acquaintances. It was a great event in our little town. Petöfi's popularity in those days was great indeed; he was worshipped from one end of the kingdom to the other. His visit was regarded as an extraordinary distinction. On Sunday afternoon, therefore, half the population of the town had assembled on the island, where the landing-stage of the steamers now is. Bessy's family was also there. All the religious persuasions were represented by the presence of the Benedictine priests and the Calvinist and Lutheran ministers. The captain of the civic train bands, with two lackeys in gold liveries; represented the magistracy; and Muki Bagotay was there on behalf of the county (he held some petty office or other), and maintained that he knew Petöfi very well. Congratulatory speeches had been got ready, and lovely hands were to present handsome bouquets to the coming guest. Petöfi, however, when he had crossed over the steamship bridge to the other side, troubled himself not one bit about the congratulatory mob, left in the lurch the lovely ladies with their bouquets, and the distinguished gentlemen with their speeches, and, dressed as he was in his short carbonari mantle, rushed straight towards me, threw his arms round my neck, knocked my hat from my head, and cried, "Why, Marksi! Is it you, you old scoundrel, Marksi!" (he never would call me by my proper name), and, with that, wrapping me in one-half of his mantle, he dragged me with him towards the town just as if he knew the way quite well (he had never been there before in his life). The windows of the chief thoroughfares of the town were adorned with flowers and with fair damsels, who had tricked themselves out in Petöfi's honour, which, when he perceived, he thrust me down a side street, and so we got at last to our house by roundabout by-paths, on which we met not a single soul. My worthy mother received our dear guest most heartily, not because he was such a famous poet, but because he was my good friend. I had known him ever since we had been students together at Pápá, when they had called him "Petrovics." Now, however, they added a syllable to his name, and called him "Petrekovics." Nothing used to put Petöfi into such a rage as when anybody called him by his rejected family name. But even this he took in good part from my mother. He never even tried to put her right. "Let me always remain Petrekovics in your house!" he would say to her, as he kissed her hand. This was by no means his usual custom, the only other person whose hand he used to kiss was his own mother. The first question after that naturally was about his favourite dish. My mother herself looked after the cuisine, and the following day the whole family assembled to dinner—my brother Charles, my sister Esther, and my brother-in-law Francis Vály included.

We had scarcely risen from the table when a lackey in silver livery arrived from Bessy's mother with a gold-edged letter for Petöfi, in which her ladyship invited him to her "at home" that evening. The entertainment was arranged in his honour. All the beauties and the notabilities of the town would be there together. I had naturally received a similar invitation some days before.

'Twas thus that Petöfi answered the messenger—his words are recorded in the family records: "Tell her ladyship that I am inconsolable at the impossibility of coming to her reception this evening; but this time I have come specially to visit my beloved Marksi, and will go nowhere else."

The astonished lackey could scarcely grasp the meaning of this terrible reply. But my mother understood it right well, and said, "Noble young fellow!"

But I said nothing, for I candidly confess that in those days I worshipped a pretty girl far, far more than any man however famous, or any friend however good.

I tried, therefore, to explain the situation to my good friend. "I tell you what, though; that pretty girl is there about whom I wrote to you."

"Then give yourself up to that pretty girl, but don't sacrifice me to her likewise."

"If you could only hear how splendidly she plays the fiddle."

"Fiddle, do you say? Then don't give yourself up to her either! You know there are three things in this world that I hate—horse-radish with milk, the critics, and after that, music." (He could never be persuaded to listen to an opera.)

"But Tony Várady also plays the fiddle!" (I should explain that this young lawyer shared Petöfi's room with him.)

"He fiddles, it is true, but it is useful to me."

"How so?"

"In our neighbourhood dwells a rascally card-player, who comes home every night between two and three, and begins to sing. I immediately wake Tony and say to him, 'Rise, and fiddle away at that fellow there!' Then he begins to fiddle in a way that makes your hair stand on end, and your blood run cold, and in ten minutes our neighbour, falling upon his knees, sobs for mercy, and declares that he will leave off singing. However, from to-day I live no longer with Tony."

"Have you quarrelled?"

"On the contrary, we are the best of friends. But I'll tell you about that later on; let us now talk about serious things. What have you been doing since I last saw you?"

I showed him the MS. of "Hétköznapok."[19] It was just ready.

[19] "Every-day Days." One of the best, if not the best, of Jókai's earlier works.

"Why do you call it 'Hétköznapok'?"

"In order that nobody may expect anything extraordinary in it."

He turned over the leaves, but only read the headings of the chapters.

"Well, that was an original idea of yours, I must say, to choose mottoes from popular ballads for your chapter headings. I'll take this with me to Pest, and get it published."

"Nobody knows me."

"You're wrong. Bajza and Vörösmarty are inquiring about you. Your specimen composition has been much approved. I've squeezed twelve florins for it out of Emericus Vahot. Frankenburg was more liberal. He sends you fifteen for 'The Island Nepean.'"

And Petöfi counted out the twenty-seven silver florins on to the table. It was my first honorarium. I fancied myself a Rothschild.

"This romance now shall be published by Hartleben."

"Are you on good terms with him?"

"I don't know the German fellow, but he's the publisher of Ignatius Nagy's romances, and Nagy shall recommend it to him."

"But will Ignatius Nagy like to do it?"

"What! When I bring him such work as yours! He is a great enemy of mine, I know, but he is a man of honour."

And with that he thrust my manuscript into his knapsack, but without locking it.

"And what else have you written?"

I produced another heap of papers.

"A play entitled Two Guardians."

"And what do you want to do with it?"

"To compete for the Academy prize."

"Don't do that! I won't allow you. You competed once, and they did not give you the prize, and yet two Academicians were on your side; don't give them any more. Give your pieces to the theatre."

I had nothing for it but to surrender.

"Now, I'll take your piece to Szigligeti.[20] He will at once recognise in you a dangerous rival, and for that very reason will have your piece brought out instantly. That's the sort of man he is!"

[20] Pseudonym of the eminent Hungarian dramatist, Joseph Szathmáry.

I entrusted my piece to his care.

"And try to get up to Pest as soon as possible. Don't go loafing about all your days in a village!"

"As soon as I have got through with my patvaria I'll hasten to join you."

"Get ready to go away at once. To-morrow I'll take you with me to Gran."

I was greatly astonished.

"To Gran! Why, what business have we there?"

"We go not to do business, but to rob. We must steal away Tony Várady's bride for him. That is why we no longer live together."

But now the members of my family had also a word to say.

Petöfi then related, quite calmly, that our common friend, the worthy lawyer, wished to take to wife the daughter of a landed proprietor at Gran. The girl's parents were Catholics, the bridegroom was a Calvinist, they therefore would not permit the marriage. But the young people really loved each other. So there was nothing for it but to steal the bride.

The thing was quite clear. I could make no objection. When a man is poet and Protestant, girl-stealing in such a situation becomes a duty. Just then a great parliamentary strife was going on concerning mixed marriages. It was Guelph and Ghibelline over again. One had to choose one's party.

So on the following day I really did set out with Petöfi to steal a girl for the benefit of a third friend. The affair succeeded beyond all expectation. We had no need of the darkness of midnight and scaling ladders, the mere appearance of Petöfi and myself at the bride's house was sufficient; the parents gave way, and the priest united the two lovers. Yet for all that we always made much of our damsel-robbing adventure. And, indeed, it seemed likely to turn out a dangerous precedent. Example is contagious.

But I returned home with the guilty consciousness that I had absolutely spoiled the soirée. I expected that I should be pretty severely taken to task for it. How should I put things to rights again?

I discovered how to make amends, but it was not without great artfulness that I succeeded.

Our city was not only the capital of the county, but a fortress. Consequently one might frequently come upon vehicles in our streets which consisted of little more than a round chest on two wheels, crammed full of water-butts from the Danube, ammunition, bread, and sacks of meal, and between the poles of these conveyances were fastened a couple of human beings in garments of grey baize, with twenty-pound chains fastened to their legs. The creatures were called in plain Hungarian—slaves.[21] You could hear the rattling of their fetters from afar. On certain days while the self-same creatures were suffering the flogging with sticks, which was part of their sentence, their woful cries resounded through the whole town. Thus the rattling of chains and the howls of woe were a sort of speciality in our town. And the sight of those starved faces too! From my childish years upwards this slave-life used to disturb my dreams.

[21] They were prisoners condemned to penal servitude.

I got up an agitation among the more enthusiastic of the youths and maidens of our town on behalf of the poor slaves. If the affair had succeeded, I should of course never have bragged about it; but as I failed in it, I may as well make a clean breast of it.

It was determined, at my suggestion, to invite Bessy's mother to be the president of our philanthropic society. A deputation set off at once to her house, and, naturally, I was its spokesman. The distinction thus conferred upon her quite wiped out my former offence, and I was again taken into favour.

The first problem in any case was to establish our beneficent scheme on a sound, financial basis, and the simplest way of getting funds was by means of an amateur entertainment. Of this, too, I was the manager. With very great difficulty the programme was finally settled. Overture: Beatrice di Tenda.—"What's the watchword? Death, torture, ruin, to the betrayers of the fatherland!" rendered by the glee club of the College. After that a flute duet from Lucia di Lammermoor, piped by the local musical society and a young lawyer. That was to be followed by a humorous recitation of my own: "Gregory Sonkolyi"; then came an exhibition of legerdemain by Muki Bagotay; and last of all, as pièce de résistance, Bessy's fiddling.

It was a terrible business to bring all this about. We had rehearsals every day at Bessy's house. I was very busy just then. I ought to have been working as an articled clerk, but I'm quite sure I never looked at a law-book. At last, however, it was possible to fix the day on which the concert would come off.

Meanwhile, the time was approaching when I ought to have passed my patvaria, and gone through my jurateria. My elder brother Charles wrote to a well-known lawyer at Pest, who had a large practice, to take me into his office as a juratus. And as winter was also drawing nigh, and I was about to go far, far away into a strange world, my good and ever-blessed mother was busying herself about my outfit. Nowadays people will regard it as a fable, but say it I must, that all the linen I wore during the time when I was a juratus was spun by my mother's own hands. I verily believe that that shirt, spun by a mother's hand, and worn by me, was the magic web which turned aside so many of the blows of fate.

A tailor and a weaver lived in some of the smaller houses we possessed; we had no need of the help of strangers. My mother also provided me with a good winter overcoat.

It was really a capital overcoat, which covered me down to the very heels, a real Menshikov overcoat, very fashionable forty years later, but in those days worn by nobody but the porters of the Benedictine Order.

When I appeared at the amateur rehearsals at Bessy's house in this prematurely born Menshikov, a circle was instantly formed round me, and every one asked me, with ironical congratulations, where I had had it made. Was it possible to get the fellow of it? Bessy even remarked that there was room for two in it, and I was not a bit offended with her.

When I withdrew (a letter, just arrived from Pest, called me home), I scarcely had time to close the door behind me, when I heard an outburst of merriment inside. When, however, I had got out into the street and turned round to have a last look at the house I had left behind me, lo and behold! all the windows were filled with groups of smiling faces, amongst which I saw Bessy's face also. "They are all in a very good humour to-day," I thought to myself.

Hastening home, I found there the letter from the Pest lawyer, in which he informed me, with official brevity, that there was a vacant place for a juratus in his office, which I might occupy. If, however, I did not come and claim it within three days, the vacant place would be given to some one else. The amateur entertainment had been fixed for Sunday, and it was now Tuesday. If I am not there by Friday, another will sit in my place. But what will become of the concert? Ought I to leave Bessy in the lurch—so faithlessly?

And how about the poor slaves?

Perhaps the lawyer at Pest would make a bargain with me and give me a couple of days' grace? I sat down to reply to him: "Worshipful Mr. Advocate—I feel in duty bound to say, in reply to your honourable communication——" Yes, but what? I must tell him some lie or other. Nay, not a lie, only a freak of fancy. A sudden illness? No, that's no joke. An uncompleted piece of law business, which I must finish for my old chief? The Pest lawyer will never believe that. What pretext could I hit upon to steal a little more time?

While I was still biting my pen, my mother came into the room, and said to me: "Where have you been, my dear son?"

I said I had been at Bessy's house.

Then she said: "Now, tell me, my darling, why do you run after these great people? Don't you see that they are only making fun of you?"

Something like a cold ague fit ran down my back.

Hadn't I myself seen and heard them laugh at me, and didn't know it? and here was my mother who had neither seen nor heard it, and yet she knew it!

Not another word did I say, but I went on with my letter ... "that I will come to Pest at once to-morrow morning, and take the place of juratus offered by you."

I then showed my mother both letters, whereupon she rewarded me with that blessed smile of hers which has made her face so unforgettable to me.

She immediately packed up my belongings and placed in my hand what little money she had put by, so that I might not want for anything in the expensive capital. I wanted to write to Bessy with an apology for my sudden departure.

"Don't go scribbling to them," said my mother; "I'll go myself to-morrow to her ladyship and tell her what has happened."

The following afternoon I was sitting on the steamer, and in three days I arrived at Pest.... And for this sudden change of fortune I had to thank my Menshikov alone.

CHAPTER V[22]

OLYMPIAN STRIVINGS

[22] This chapter is somewhat condensed.

It was Petöfi who introduced me to my associates of the "Table of Public Opinion" (as the long table close to the counter in the Café Pillwax was called), and who got me a place there. "This is a true Frenchman!" said Petöfi, as he presented me to his young army of literati who were assembled there. In those days this was the highest conceivable praise. The face of every liberty-loving nation was turned towards France, and from thence we expected the dawn of the new era. We read nothing but French books. Lamartine's "History of the Girondists" and Tocqueville's "Democracy" were our bibles. Petöfi worshipped Beranger, I had found my ideal in Victor Hugo.... This school might easily have become dangerous to us had not its influence fortunately coincided with the opening up of a new and hitherto unexplored field—popular literature. Hitherto it had been the endeavour of Hungarian writers to write in a style which was distinct from the language of ordinary life. Our group, on the other hand, started the idea that it was just those very constructions, expressions, and modes of thought employed in every-day life that Hungarian writers ought to take as the fundamental principle of their writing; nay, that they should even develop the ideally beautiful, poetry itself, from the life of the common people.... As belonging to this camp of ours I must also reckon Sigismund Czakó, who acclimatized the modern drama to our stage with marked success; and finally Anthony Csengery, the editor of the Pesti Hirlap, who wrote nothing in the way of belles lettres himself, but whose immense erudition and thorough knowledge of literature enabled him to exercise a most beneficial influence over the whole of our group. Amongst our older writers also, Vörösmarty and Bajza watched over us with stimulating encouragement; but it was Ignatius Nagy in particular who befriended us, and of him I have the most pleasant recollections.... At this time he was a cripple. He was rarely to be seen in the street, and then only on his wife's arm. He stopped at home all day at his writing-table, writing those life-like sketches of the little world of Buda-Pest which testify to such a serene good-humour. The first time I saw him was when I went to speak to him about my novel, "Hétköznapok." He had a most embarrassing face covered with dark-red spots right up to his astonishingly lofty forehead, whose shiny baldness was half cut in two, as it were, by a bright black peruke. He had also an inconceivably big red nose, at which, however, you had no time to be amazed, so instantly were you spell-bound by a couple of squinting eyes, one of which glared as fixedly at you as if it were made wholly of stone. His voice, on the other hand, was as the voice of a sick child. And within this repulsive frame dwelt the noblest of souls, in this crippled body the most energetic of characters. From no strange face did I ever get a kinder glance than I got from those stiff fishy eyes, and that sick voice announced to me my first great piece of good news. Upon his recommendation, the publisher Hartleben agreed to publish my first romance, and gave me for it 360 silver florins. In those days that was an immense fortune to me. I had no further need to go scribbling all day long in a lawyer's office at six florins a month. And his fatherly solicitude for me went still further. He introduced me to Frankenburg as a dramatic critic. The editor of the Eletképek had just parted with his dramatic critic (he had been a little too unmerciful to the artistes), and was looking out for a new colleague. By way of honorarium he offered me a free seat at the theatre, and ten florins a month. But my year of office came to an end the very first week. To make amends for the sins of my predecessor, I lauded every artist to the skies, according to the dictates of my youthful enthusiasm. And I can honestly say that I wrote it all from my very heart. It was then that I saw a ballet for the first time in my life. It was my solemn conviction that I was bound by a debt of gratitude to the excellent damsel who exhibited her natural charms to the public eye with such magnanimous frankness. And a pretty lecture Frankenburg read me for it too! "Delightful Sylphid indeed! A clumsy stork, I should say!" Still, that might have passed. But it was my magnifying of Lilla Szilágyi who took the part of Smike in the Beggars of London which did the business for me. I said of her that she was "a lovely sapling!" and promised her a brilliant future in her dramatic career. "Leave her where you found her! She has got no heart that's certain!" said the editor. "Then she'll get one!" said I. "But you'll never get to be a critic," said he.

And so, for Lilla Szilágyi's sake, I laid down my rôle of critic, and yet I was right after all, for, as Madame Bulyovszky, she really did become a great artiste. Now, however, I bless my fate that things fell out as they did. Terrible thought: fancy if I now only had the reputation of a famous—critic!

A few days after that, a new career suddenly opened before me. Paul Királyi invited me to join his newspaper, the Jelenkor, as a correspondent. He offered me a salary of thirty-five florins a month. Of course I jumped at it. Newspaper writing was a very grateful task in those days. The paper appeared thrice a week. That was quite sufficient to give us all the news. It is different now. Nowadays more murders, suicides, and burglaries occur in the twenty-four hours than occurred in a whole twelvemonth then.

And a newspaper contributor was then a personage of some importance. Let me give an example:—

I lived with the dramatist, Szigligeti. In the summer we occupied a whole flat in a brand-new house in Pipe Street, and there I had a room of my own, with an exit opening on the staircase. The other flats were empty. The Szigligetis flitted during the summer to the suburbs of Buda. Thus I had the whole of the first floor of the new house at my disposal, to my great satisfaction, for I could work away quite undisturbed. In the autumn, however, the Szigligetis returned, and the adjoining flats at the same time got new tenants. The very next night I discovered, to my horror, with whom I was living under the same roof. It was the wife of the possessor of a flower-garden, who also kept a dancing academy. What afternoons, what nights I passed!

At last I could stand it no longer, and I implored Szigligeti to appeal most energetically to the authorities against the nuisance. Szigligeti fully shared my indignation himself, so he posted off at once to the Town Captain to lay his complaint.

"Sir," said he, "the proprietress of a flower-garden has settled down in my immediate neighbourhood."

"But flowers must bloom somewhere, I suppose?"

"But the people dance the livelong night."

"That doesn't injure any one, surely?"

"But after dancing they sit down to rest."

"That is very natural."

"But they take their rest and recreation very noisily."

The Town Captain shrugged his shoulders, he could do nothing in the matter; it was a ticklish business to interfere in; it did not fall within his jurisdiction, etc., etc.

But when, finally, Szigligeti said: "My lodger, the correspondent of the Jelenkor, cannot sleep all night because of them," then, indeed, the Town Captain suddenly leaped from his chair, set all his myrmidons in motion, and by the next day the whole flower-garden and dancing academy was transferred to another forcing bed. Such in those days was the authority of a newspaper correspondent.... I was therefore no longer a mere cipher. I was a something now. And, more than that, I was a somebody also. For it was in those days that I passed my legal examination, and became a certificated lawyer in the ordinary and commercial courts. My diploma, indeed, was not præclarus, but at any rate it was laudibilis. The oral rigorosum I passed through brilliantly, but in the scripturistik (there's a fine dog Latin word for you!) my Hungarian style was not considered satisfactory.

The publication of my legal diploma in the county court was a sufficiently dignified excuse for a visit to my native town. With head erect I could now enter the presence of the fairy damsel with the sparkling "eyes like the sea."

CHAPTER VI

AN ODD DUEL—THE FATEFUL LETTER J.—I ALSO BECOME A PETER GYURICZA

Emericus Vahot had discovered a youthful humorist whom he attached to the staff of his newspaper. Ultimately he became a most eminent writer, but at first he was quite a savage genius. He knew no languages but Hungarian and Latin. He was really after all a very worthy young fellow. He, too, took his place amongst us at the "Table of Public Opinion," and even brought a pair of friends with him. One of the friends was a wry-shouldered critic, who judged the stage from a philological point of view, but the other was Muki Bagotay. He was not a writer, but a mere figure head. As, however, he drank with us, he considered himself as one of us.

One afternoon the humorist and Muki fell out. Muki had thought good to boast of a certain conquest of his, the humorist had made a joke of it; a squabble ensued, and from words they came to blows. I was not there, but I heard all about it from those who were. There could not be a doubt that the end of it would be a duel. Late in the evening, just as I was preparing to go to bed, the wry-shouldered critic rushed into my room. His face was even more portentous than usual.

"I have to communicate a secret to you, but you must give me your word as a gentleman not to let the matter go any further."

"I give you my word upon it."

"Our friend is going to fight Muki Bagotay to-morrow, I am his second."

"That's all right."

"Would you be so good as to lend us the weapons?"

"My friend, I only possess one pistol, and that is a double-barrelled one."

"That will just do!"

"What the deuce? I suppose one of them will fire with it first, and if he does not hit his man he'll hand it over to the other, and he'll fire back with it?"

"Precisely!"

The crooked critic said this with such a solemn face that it was impossible not to believe him. This was quite a novel mode of duelling, and not a bad idea either.

Early next morning, before I had got up, the second again appeared before me. He brought back the fatal pistol.

"It is over," said he, with mournful dignity.

"What was the result?"

"Our poor friend was hit!"

"Dangerously?"

"The bullet penetrated his arm. But it has been taken out now."

The news excited all my sympathy.

I threw on my clothes and made my way to the Pillwax coffee-house. I found my good friends already at the "Table of Public Opinion," and every one of them shared my compassion. The critic related the mournful details to us.

All at once two of our comrades, Degré and Lauka, rushed excitedly into the coffee-house. "The whole duel was a swindle!" they cried. "There was no harm done to any one. He was not even wounded. He is lying in bed with his arm tied up, and a bloody shirt; they are giving him ice cataplasms—the whole thing is a pure farce!"

The second, however, solemnly maintained that his principal had been wounded.

"We will convince ourselves of the fact."

"Surely you would not want them to tear the bandages from the gaping wound?" This I also resolutely opposed, and, taking the part of my colleague, devised another expedient.

"Who was the doctor who bound up the wound?"

The critic mentioned the doctor's name.

"We'll go to the doctor, then."

Dr. K——y was a worthy, honest, high-spirited fellow, who well deserved the public respect.

We rushed upon him in a body.

"Tell us, now," we said, "is there a wound on the arm of the humorist?"

"There is," replied the doctor.

"Is it true that you took a bullet out of it?"

"It is true."

"On your professional reputation?"

"On my professional reputation."

With that my friends were bound to be satisfied. No further inquiries could be made.

When, however, my two friends had withdrawn, I remained behind with the doctor, and I said to him, "My dear doctor, you have answered the question, did you take a bullet out of our friend's arm? but now answer me this question, who put that bullet in?"

"Egad! egad! egad!" growled the doctor, "you imaginative people are really sad scamps!"

The fact was that our humorist and Muki Bagotay had fought an American duel: whoever drew the black ball had—well, not to die, but to get Dr. K——y to make a wound in his arm. The doctor, with his lancet, made an incision about two centimètres in length and four millemètres in depth, in the epidermis just below the biceps; into this wound he insinuated a bullet, then took it out, sewed up the wound, and so wounded honour was amply satisfied. And I'll not say a single word against this being the most correct mode of procedure imaginable.

Then I went home to my native town, ostensibly to advertise my legal diploma, but really to look once more upon her from whom I had been so long absent.

I was very well received in the bosom of my family; the whole clan came together for dinner at my mother's, and for supper at the house of my brother-in-law, Francis Vály. The two Calvinist ministers were also invited, and one of them toasted me as "the ward of one guardian and the guardian of two wards" (an allusion to my father's profession and my new drama, The Two Wards); it was the first toast that made me blush.

The next day was the meeting of the county board, at the end of which, with open doors, my diploma was promulgated. On that self-same day my dear mother gave me my father's silver-mounted sword, and the cornelian signet-ring, with the old family crest engraved upon it, which he used to wear. Democrat as I am, I frankly confess that to me there was a soul-steeling thought in the reflection that with this sword my worthy ancestors, who were much better men than myself, had defended their nation, country, laws, and constitution of yore, and that this signet-ring had put the seal upon their covenanted rights for all time. According to ancient custom, the sword and signet-ring of the father belonged of right to the younger son; my father had given my elder brother a ring and sword of his own when he brought home his diploma.

After that, I had to pay visits of ceremony to the county and municipal authorities; I called upon my principal also, and a pretty little girl was there whose features I had perpetuated in a portrait; she still went to the convent school. This little girl, I may add, never had her romance; she died young, and thus found her true bliss.

It was only in the afternoon that I was able to get to Bessy's.

Among all earthly joys, is there one that can be compared with that heart-throbbing which a young man feels when he again approaches, after a long absence, the woman whom he idolises, with the thought that she also has been dreaming of him all the time? It is true that our parting had been somewhat abrupt, and a hill of thorns had risen up between us perhaps in consequence; but, on the other hand, my absence had had a definite, deliberate aim—I went to win for myself name and fame, and a worldly position. And lo! but six months had passed and all this was already accomplished. I was an author. I had the right to speak of myself in the plural "we," like a king; nay, I had even a better right, for the king can only lay the peasantry under contribution, but I could make the gentry pay up as well, and that right was also "Dei gratia." I fancied the whole world was mine, and that triumphs would go before and follow after me whithersoever I went.

I was dressed according to the latest fashion. The famous firm of tailors, "Martinek and Korsinek," had performed a masterpiece upon me: my feet were shod with varnished dress-shoes, I had a whale-bone cane with a gold-headed handle, I wore Jaquemar gloves. I no longer singed my hair with heated hair-tongs as in the days when I was a patvarist, but a hairdresser had twisted it into ringlets; and now, too, I had a sprucely twisted moustache and a beard.

I really must make the most of all these glories to emphasize the dramatic climax.

I found Bessy's mother and her aunt in the well-known reception room; the companion was on a visit to her relations. After the ceremonial kissing of hands, my first question was, "And Miss Bessy?"

"She is in her own room, yonder."

"May I go there?"

"Oh, by all means!"

It was that memorable room in which I had painted her portrait.

The girl was alone, seated by her little table, and was bending over her embroidery frame. She really must have been very much absorbed in her work, as otherwise she must certainly have seen through the window that I was coming to her. It was a sort of pearl embroidery that she was busy over, meant apparently for the cover of a portfolio. On perceiving me enter, she hastily covered it with her handkerchief, but for all that, my eyes caught a momentary glimpse of a large letter "J." on the embroidery. What else could it be but the initial letter of my surname? I was confirmed in this belief by the circumstance that on the same little table stood my portrait of her on a gorgeous stand.

She greeted me kindly, but I could detect a certain hostile sentiment in her smile. It is only in the eyes that one can read such things, and practised swordsmen always can tell from the expression of their opponents' eyes how they are going to lunge.

She questioned me about everything, and I replied with great precision; but these questions and answers were mere feints: the points of the swords were so far only twirling around each other.

All at once she lunged straight at my head with her sword.

"And pray what is the amiable little sapling doing?"

In my first amazement I absolutely did not know what she was alluding to.

"What sapling?"

"Why, that darling little stage fairy, of course, who kindled you to such enthusiasm."

So it turned up again now! Even here they cast it in my teeth! Was it not enough to have smarted once in my life for pretty Lilla's sake? In vain did I assure her that never in my life had I seen the young artiste except on the stage; that there indeed she had earned my admiration, but that I had never felt any tender sentiment either for her or for any other mortal maiden in the whole of Buda-Pest.

"Let that go, then!" said Bessy mockingly. "We are well informed of everything that goes on. How about your landlord's three pretty daughters?"

"Pardon me, but the eldest of them is only nine years old."

"And your gay neighbours, the flower-garden ladies?"

Well, this was simply appalling. How could I tell her the whole story? And yet I was the very person who had got them removed.

"Whom the Town Captain was forced to interfere with? Oh, we know all about it! My little finger has whispered it to me."

I was quite confused. Who could have been tittle-tattling about me so?

And all the time her eyes were flashing sparks at me!

But I was not to remain in doubt long. A new visitor arrived, his voice was already heard in the ante-chamber. It was Muki Bagotay.

It was plain to me now that it was he who had whispered all these things to Bessy.

Into the room he rushed. He certainly was infamously handsome. My head of curls was quite dwarfed by his. His dress was much more fashionable than mine. And what a cocksure air he had! I dared not so much as press Bessy's hand, while he knelt down before her and laid his hat—together with his heart—at her feet.

"Go away with you—don't be silly!" said Bessy, by way of correction, pointing at me.

"Your servant, comrade," cried Muki, becoming aware of my presence.

Then he occupied himself with me no more, but turned towards Bessy and tried to remove the handkerchief from the embroidery, which attempt Bessy resisted with all her might.

"It's mine, after all, you know," insisted Muki.

"Then wait your turn, and you shall have it on your birthday."

His birthday! A thought flashed through my brain. Muki's name was János. That initial letter was his, not mine.

A dramatic climax. How instantly Muki became the sensible fellow and I the blockhead! At that moment I must have cut a somewhat queer figure the very type of gaping confusion.

By way of explanation Muki seized Bessy's hand and raised it to his lips, and said to me as a matter of form, "Bessy is my betrothed."

And it was for this, then, that all these Sardanapalian accusations had been piled upon my head. The sapling of the stage, the flower-garden, and my landlord's young ladies were the golden bridge for a retreat.

It was only then that I hit upon more sensible ideas and hastened to congratulate them.

And now I made it a point to remain where I was. They shall see that the whole matter is of the utmost indifference to me.

"You know, I suppose," said Muki, "what was the cause of my last duel?"

"That famous duel of yours, eh?"

"Yes, it was pretty famous, I think. That poor young fellow whom I shot was a worthy comrade, but had he been my born brother I would have shot him for his disrespectful allusions to my bride."

"Go along with you, you bloodthirsty man!" cried Bessy, with coquettish self-satisfaction.

And he had the cheek to say all this before me who knew the whole history of the duel! How ridiculous I could have made him look, if I had told how it had happened! But do it I wouldn't, because I felt that they were a worthy pair. I merely said: "I must admit, friend Muki, that in the way of imagination you are much greater than I."

"And greater in other things also," said Muki, half drawing his sword.

"We'll see about that one of these days in the fencing-school."

"What! That swindling fencing! Wrestling is the thing to test a man's mettle. That fashionable gymnastic rubbish is a mere farce. I should like to see a fellow do what I can do when I go out on my puszta.[23] I have a stout gulgásy[24] there, Peter Gyuricza, with whom I am wont to wrestle. A stalwart fellow, hard as a stone; he can keep the upper hand over a hundred steers. Twice out of three bouts have I floored Peter Gyuricza, and Peter Gyuricza has only floored me once."

[23] The Hungarian steppe or great plain.

[24] Neat-herd, peculiar to Hungary.

"A pretty pastime, certainly."

"It is not to be learnt by pen-scribbling or brush-daubing, anyhow."

That I had to let pass, for there's no getting over the truth. It is not only true that I was no Samson, but it is also true that, compared with a hundred oxen, my poor Pegasus was but a sorry beast of draught. But Muki Bagotay was not even content with this triumph, he wanted to absolutely trample me beneath his feet; and as if he had only just observed for the first time the picture of Bessy painted by me, he chose to make that the bone of contention.

"Meanwhile, till I possess the original, I appropriate this picture."

Bessy protested. "No, no, I will not part with that."

But Muki thereupon took the picture from the table and held it aloft, so that Bessy could not get it out of his hand. She begged, implored, raved, but Muki only laughed and said he meant to stick to the picture.

It was then that my ill-humour got the better of me.

"Sir," said I, laying my hand on his shoulder, "put down that portrait! I did not paint it for you."

How scornfully he looked at me over his shoulder! "You would needs try conclusions with me—you, a mere poet!"

And he flung himself upon me with the pious resolve of forcing me out of Bessy's boudoir into the ante-chamber. When he saw that I resisted, he threw both his arms round my body. I also hugged him, and to work we went straightway.

Muki was furious because I would not allow my frame to be smashed so easily. Bessy began shrieking, and took refuge in the bow window. Suddenly I rallied all my strength and pitched Muki on to the sofa with such violence that the back of it cracked and came off.

"I also am a Peter Gyuricza!" I cried.

I would not have exchanged that triumph for all the glory in the world.

At the noise of this great scuffle, the mother and the aunt rushed into the room, and great was their indignation when they saw me kneeling on Muki's breast.

"Let me get up, fellow!" said my antagonist.

All that I wanted to do was to take the portrait from the hands of its unlawful possessor. Meanwhile the poor portrait had got terribly mauled. During the struggle it had fallen to the ground, and the pair of us had left the impression of our heels upon it. Bessy burst into tears when she saw the wreckage of her own portrait, but her mother lamented over the broken sofa.

I comforted Bessy with the assurance that I would make the damaged portrait all right again—there were special colours for that.

"But she must not sit again," hastily intervened her mother. She was afraid I should begin coming to the house again and spoil the good match.

"And I haven't got that dress either," said Bessy.

It certainly was a pretty dress. Would that she had never had it!

I assured them, however, that I would be able to put the picture to rights at home, all by myself. And with that I put it in my pocket. I never went back there again.

The mother and the aunt ostentatiously occupied themselves with Muki, expressing all the time their regretful sympathy, at which he was beside himself for fury.

I beat a retreat without any attempt to say good-bye. But Bessy ran after me, and, overtaking me in the doorway, seized my hand, and whispered in an ardent voice, "You'll put me to rights, won't you?"

"The portrait? oh yes!"

An hour afterwards I was sitting on the steamer and gazing at the lingering smoke which hid my native town from my eyes. It was just as if I were returning from a funeral.

CHAPTER VII

WELTSCHMERZ CONDITIONS[25]—"REMAIN OR FLY!"

[25] Világ fájdalmas állapotok. There is no English equivalent of Világ fájdalmas.

When I got back to Pest, I found two letters awaiting me on my writing-table, one from Tony Várady, inviting me to stand godfather to his new-born son, and the other from Petöfi, informing me that he had just been married to Julia Szendrey, and that they were having very happy days at Teleky's Castle, Koltó. Both of these friends were poor fellows, like myself; and the ladies who had chosen to be their companions through life were girls belonging to wealthy, eminent families, accustomed to luxury and splendour, surrounded by obsequious wooers, and their mothers loved them as the apples of their eyes. Their families opposed the marriages, and the enamoured young ladies, handicapped as they were by the weight of their parents' refusal, followed their beloveds notwithstanding.

Then true love is no dream after all, but pure gold. And yet when I seek this pure gold they call me a crazy alchemist!

And now Petöfi begged me by letter to seek out a convenient lodging for him, where they and I could live together. That a newly-married bridegroom should invite his faithful bachelor comrade to be a fellow-lodger with him is a fact which belongs to the realm of fairy tales.

I immediately hunted up in Tobacco Street a nice first-floor-apartment,[26] consisting of three chambers and their domestic offices; the first room was for the Petöfis, the second for me, while the intermediate one was to be a common dining-room, and there were separate entrances for each of us.

[26] Used here in the French sense of a suite of rooms.

The young couple came in during the autumn; they kept one maid, and I had an old servant. We had both very primitive furniture. Mrs. Petöfi had left her father's house without a dowry; she had not so much as a fashionable hat to bless herself with; she had sewed herself together a sort of head-dress of her own invention, which she never wore. Her hair was cut short, so that she looked like a little boy. They had nothing, and yet they were very happy! Julia's sole amusement was to learn English from Petöfi, and afterwards, at dinner (which was sent in from "The Eagle"), we spoke English, and laughed at each other's blunders. And I had to be a witness of their bliss every day!

It was just as if one were to season hell with piquant pepper.

Just about this time there appeared in Eletképek some very ordinary verses entitled "Word-Echoes," by one "Aggteleki,"[27] ostensibly addressed to a certain actress. I am now able to confess that I was the author of those verses. But for all that (though the verses were not so bad) I solemnly forbid any one at any time to include these verses among my works, for even now, forty years after the event, I am not such an old, decrepit, suicidally inclined fellow as Aggteleki was.

[27] Aged Teleki.

But, indeed, every one of the works that I wrote at that period breathe the same bitter tone. The paroxysms of a crushed spirit, the dreamy phantoms of a diseased imagination, self-contempt, a moon-sick view of the world in general, characterise all my tales belonging to that period. And yet they pleased people then. I even had imitators. I turned Petöfi himself away from the right path. He himself confessed that his novel entitled "Hóhér Kötele"[28] was written under the influence of my "Nyomarék naplója,"[29] a literary abortion.

[28] "The Hangman's Rope." It certainly is a wretched performance.—Tr.

[29] "The Cripple's Diary."

Who knows whither I should have got to with my tower of Babel, had not a healthy earthquake brought it to the ground?

One day Petöfi caught me in the act of touching up Bessy's portrait. He saw from my eyes that I had been weeping. I tried to hide it, for I was a bit ashamed.

"It is well that it is so, my son," said he on that occasion; "it is men who are unhappy that the world wants now."

A memorable saying!

It was in those days that he wrote "I dream, I dream of bloody days," and "My Songs," with this final strophe, all blood and fire:—

"Wherefore doth this race of thralls endure it?
Wherefore rise not? Rend your chains and cure it!
Do ye wait, forsooth! till God's good pleasure
Rusts them off, and makes them drop at leisure?"

And then he would lead me into his room. On the walls there, in handsome frames, hung the portraits of the chiefs of the French Revolution—this was his only luxury—Danton, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Saint-Juste, Madame Roland. There, too, the parts we were to play were distributed; Saint-Juste was designed for me, Madame Roland for Julia. And then we spoke of "the bloody days." They were to be no mere dream, we were to see them with our eyes wide open. And we were to be among the first to feel them.

A healthy-minded man would have been ready after such words as these to have left the house by jumping out of the window; but they had a charm for me. It suited my peculiar frame of mind just then to set on fire the Dejanira robe that was about me, and then rush out among the people and set them on fire also.

"Man's fate is woman!"

Had that young lady the last time I held her hand in mine said "Stay!" I should certainly have remained. I should have crept into my little nook of bliss and never have gazed after the moonshine of fame. In that case I should now perhaps have been one of the judicial assessors at the Royal Courts, and have joined heartily in the laugh when one or other of my colleagues at the end of a friendly banquet might take it into his head to quote some monstrous sentences out of my earliest romance, an imperfect copy of which turns up now and then as a literary curiosity among other antiquarian rubbish.

This is what would have happened if the young lady had said "Stay!"

But if that young lady had said "Fly!" then I should have flown like the rest after the falling stars. And, indeed, of those who stood with me on the 11th March[30] before the mob on the balcony of the town-hall to announce "This is the day of national liberty!" of those my youthful-visaged, warm-hearted comrades, three have perished in defence of that word "Liberty" then pronounced: those three names are "Petöfi,"[31] "Vasváry," "Bozzai." And certainly, in that case, the four ounces of lead, or the cossack's lance, or the grenade splinter which killed them, might have sufficed for me also—that is, of course, if that young lady had said "Fly!" Fate, in fact, confronted me with this paradox—"Either live and be forgotten, or be remembered as one who died young!"

[30] When the Hungarian revolution of 1848 began.

[31] Petöfi was most probably killed at the battle of Segesvár in July, 1849; at any rate he was never seen or heard of afterwards. He was only twenty-seven, and in him the world lost one of its great lyric poets.

"Stay!" or "Fly!"

Then a voice said to me: "Go! but let us go together!"

But it was not the voice of the lady with the eyes like the sea.

One morning Petöfi rushed into my room roaring with laughter.

"Ha! ha! ha! Do you want to laugh? Just catch hold of that Honderü." And into my hands he thrust the latest number of the opposition paper.

I immediately caught sight of what had made him laugh so much. There was a magnificent description from my native town of the wedding which had taken place between Mr. János Nepomuk Bagotay and the world-renowned beauty—I didn't trouble to look at the name. "The happy pair will spend their honeymoon at Paris!"

"Ha! ha! ha! ha!"

CHAPTER VIII

PETER GYURICZA'S CONSORT

After the March days, I quitted the Petöfis and went into another lodging. I had got on so well that I could maintain a bachelor's establishment, consisting of two rooms, which I furnished myself. Properly speaking, it only became a bachelor's establishment when I entered, for before I took it it was occupied by a little old woman who kept a registry office for providing respectable families with servants. Every one knew "Mámi," as she was called.... I was very well satisfied with my lodging, which quite answered all my requirements. It had this one drawback, however, that a whole mob of cooks, parlour-maids, and nursery-maids were constantly opening my door under the persuasion that I could provide them with places, and they disturbed my work terribly. Besides, this constant flow of petticoats towards my door was sufficient of itself to bring a young man into disrepute. From the apartments at the opposite end of the corridor it was possible to catch a glimpse of my door, and it was just in these very apartments that Rosa Laborfalvy lived. I was afraid that some one might think ill of me.

It was no longer the Weltschmerz, but a Privatschmerz,[32] that afflicted me.

[32] Privát fájdalmas—private anxiety.

Again I had applied myself to portrait-painting. A tall, slender girl in a white atlas dress, with large black eyes, and coal-black ringlets à l'Anglaise rolling down to her shoulders, was standing on my easel; I was just giving it the finishing-touch, I had no need for the original to be my model. I have the portrait to this day.

All at once there came a knocking at my door "Come in!" The door opened, and in came a stylish young peasant girl. I thought as much; here we have another nursery-maid in search of a place.

"No, no; go away! The registry-office lady does not live here!" said I viciously, for I was busy with my portrait; and perceiving that the intruder did not retire even now, I bawled out, not over gently: "In Heaven's name, be off, my dear!"

At this the peasant girl began to laugh. Had I not heard that laughing voice somewhere before? I turned round and looked at her, and the more I looked, the more astonished I felt. It was Bessy!

She wore a bright red gown trimmed with yellowish-green flowers, over that a dark blue, double-bordered damask apron, and a black silk bodice with puff sleeves. Above the bodice was a bib with beautifully embroidered palm flowers; on her head sat a cockscomb like Haube, frilled with starched thread-lace; on her arm she carried a covered basket by the handle.

Her face was ruddy and bronzed from exposure to the sun, and a sort of waggish little imp was nestling provocatively in her smiling features. I couldn't believe my own eyes.

"What! don't you know me?" she cried, with a merry laugh. "I'm Bessy!"

I saw that, but for the life of me I could not conceive what her object was in coming masquerading like this through the streets of Buda in broad daylight. And to hit upon my lodgings of all places in the world!

"Madame de Bagotay?" I stammered in my confusion.

"Oh, I am no longer Madame Bagotay, but Madame Peter Gyuricza!"

"What on earth do you mean? Mrs. Gyuricza! The wife of a herdsman?"

My amazement was so genuine that Bessy clapped her hands together with glee.

"Then you actually don't know about it? They haven't written to you from home?"

"It is a long time since I received a letter from home."

"But this was a scandal which set seven counties in an uproar; there has been nothing like it since the French Revolution—and you call yourself the editor of a newspaper!"

"My paper does not meddle with purely family matters."

Bessy's face was flushed, and she began smoothing it with the palms of both hands; she thought, perhaps, that she would brush the tell-tale blush away.

"I have heated myself a little on that steep staircase of yours," she said.

She blamed the staircase for that flaming face of hers.

It then occurred to me that it would only be polite to ask my fair visitor to take a seat. I offered her the sofa.

"Oh, dear, no! That's only for ladies! This will do quite well enough for me." And with that she sat down on my trunk, and put down her basket beside it. "I really am quite tired. I have travelled by the corn-boat as far as Vácz,[33] and thence I have walked all the way to Pest."

[33] Waitzen.

"But you could have gone by steamer?"

"But my master[34] could not give me steamboat fare. We are poor people. Look! this is my whole provision for the journey."

[34] i.e., husband.

And with that she lifted the lid of the basket, and showed me what was inside it: a piece of black bread, and something wrapped up in greasy paper—a piece of cheese possibly, and a garlic-seasoned sausage.

"I must keep this for my return journey."

The cynicism of the proceeding revolted me.

"But now, if you please, I should very much like to know what's the meaning of it all. Is it a practical joke you are playing upon me?"

"Oh, no! certainly not! Pray don't suppose that I have dressed up on your account. I am now a real peasant woman, and such I mean to remain. It is a serious thing for me, I can tell you, and I've come to you, not that you may write about it in your paper, but that you may give me advice."

"I give you advice?"

"Certainly! Whom else should I ask? The whole world condemns and tramples upon me, and yet I have offended nobody, not even in thought. You are the only one I have injured, bitterly injured, so it is from you that I must seek protection."

Woman's logic with a vengeance! I stood up in front of her, leaning on the edge of the table. I was contriving all the time to prevent her from seeing the portrait I was painting.

"I'll begin from the very beginning," continued the lady, lowering her long eyelashes. "I was married. So much you know. We gave a splendid banquet. The whole town, half the county was there. I fancy they described it in the newspapers; and why shouldn't they, when the richest, best-known, and most handsome girl in the town was married to the ideal cavalier? The lady brought a dowry of 100,000 florins, and the gentleman conveyed his bride to his ancestral castle in a carriage drawn by four fiery horses. The universal envy was a more piquant grace to the meal than the benediction of the priest. The gentlemen envied the bridegroom, and the ladies envied the bride, and every one was forced to say: 'A couple made for each other.' Alas! the only joy which remained in my heart when I came out of church and looked among the crowd was the thought, 'Ah! you all envy me, I know!'

"We went straight from church to my husband's castle," continued Bessy. "Thirty carriages escorted us. I counted them. A splendid banquet followed. That day I changed my dress four times. The fifth time I put on a lace négligé, and the bridesmaids led me to the bridal chamber. This room was a veritable masterpiece of upholstery. A Vienna furnisher had decorated it most elaborately. I couldn't sleep all night. The voice of the bass viol and the clarionet resounded in my ears from the banqueting-room, and the noise and uproar of the guests also. I did not see my husband till the morning. Then the guests began to disperse. Only now and then did a cracked and piping voice mingle with the frantic music of the gipsies. Then it was that my husband appeared before me, and a pitiable object he looked. He called me his darling little sister, and asked me if I could tell him where he lived. Then he undressed himself on the sofa and talked such nonsense that at last I couldn't help laughing. 'Well,' said I to myself, 'I suppose this is always the way when they take leave of their bachelordom.' Then sleep overcame me and I dreamed the silliest stuff. You were continually in my dreams. But why mention such things now?"

With that she readjusted the kerchief which was tied around her head-dress and proceeded:—

"It was afternoon when I awoke. I must have wept a great deal in my dreams, for the pillow on which my head lay was quite wet. My husband was no longer reposing on the sofa, but sprawling on the floor like a stuffed frog. It cost me a great deal of trouble to shake him into life again. It was a still greater effort to make him understand in what part of the world he was, and in what relations we stood to each other here below. After that he insisted upon my crawling with him under the sofa, and when I wouldn't hear of it, he began to cry like a child, and demanded a pistol from me that he might blow his brains out. Then I brought a washing-basin and washed his face for him, and ducked it once or twice in cold water. He roared like a baby who is being tubbed, but finally recovered his spirits, and allowed himself to be raised from the ground. Then he drank out of the water-jug, and his eyes opened, but they were as tiny as a mole's, and I now perceived for the first time that they were a little crooked."

During this narration Bessy laughed and laughed again.

"What a sight the fellow did look! his hair all rumpled, his moustache all askew, his clothes soiled and tousled. He had to be dressed all over again. I began to scold him a little, 'A pretty condition of things, I must say!' To which he replied that I ought to have seen his comrades, Nusi, and Lenezi, and Blekus, and how they had been settled. They had all fallen under the table, and he had remained the victor. And he yawned so much as he told me this, that I had to beg him not to swallow me. At last I got him to sit down on a chair while I did his hair for him, and he meanwhile howled and swore continually that every single hair pained him as much as if devils were tweaking him with iron pincers."

Again the lady stopped to laugh.

"That's quite a novel state of things to you, eh? A person who becomes the bride of an out-and-out dandy must expect to see something extraordinary. But perhaps there was nothing extraordinary in it after all. And now the banquet was resumed, commencing with a pick-me-up. I presided at the table with a turban on my head. All our guests were still drunk. I had to listen to very peculiar anecdotes. At such times the best man is he who can pay the new bride the compliment which will make her blush the most. The lady guests had all departed in the morning, and had come to bid me good-bye one by one. They all wept over me—it is the usual thing. I was the only lady left, and glad was I when I managed to get away from the gentlemen. I think that they had been awaiting my withdrawal; they could then continue their interrupted pastime. Again I could not sleep; my head was throbbing. For the first time in my life I recognised the existence of the headache, that frightful curse of feminine nerves which I had hitherto always put down to affectation or imagination. How good it would have been for me if some one had laid a cool, refreshing hand upon my temples! Perhaps a single word of comfort would have relieved my pangs! I waited for it in vain. I sent a message. He never came to me. Suddenly, while an oppressive dream was benumbing my pain, a hellish uproar awoke me. I fancied that Pandemonium had been let loose. It was only my husband, but he had brought with him the whole of his drunken crew. I saw before me a whole legion of them, with guffawing, sardonic, lascivious, distorted faces, and amongst them my husband, with the grin of a satyr on his idiotic face. I rose in terror from my bed, cast my counterpane around me, fled into my waiting-maid's room, and barricaded myself behind the door. There he thumped and thundered for some time. I threatened to throw myself out of the window if he broke in by force. Thereupon some of his comrades, in whom a little human feeling still remained, contrived to drag him away, though not without difficulty. Then followed a little sulky squabble on both sides. I wouldn't leave my room for four-and-twenty hours; he wouldn't come to me. The noise that he made over head was sufficient evidence to me that he hadn't committed suicide in the meantime. The third day was passed by the bridal guests in a more profitable occupation. They played at cards. The table, vigorously punched by their fists, proclaimed their handiwork aloud. It was like blacksmiths' apprentices pounding iron on the anvil with sledgehammers. Only in the morning did 'my lord and master' turn up while I was still only half-dressed. He was sober then, and, what is more, ill-tempered. His loss at cards was mirrored in his face like a guilty conscience. He frankly told me all about it. He had been peppered finely, and his comrades were vile curs.... Such was my wedding."

Bessy covered her face with both her hands. Was she laughing? Was she weeping? I cannot say.

All at once she asked me, "Did you ever play at cards?"

"Yes, but only for copper coins."

"It's all one. You ought not to waste your time with it."

"Well, really, I only spend that time on it which I do not know how to employ otherwise, the time when I am tired of work, and want a rest from thinking. Cards are very good things at such times."

"Then what a pity girls also do not learn the science of card-playing at school, just as they learn to find out towns on maps, or gather the properties of exotic plants and animals from zoological albums; then at least a newly-married bride would understand why it is necessary to subtract so much from her heritage to sacrifice it to such mythological deities as skiz and pagát.[35] ..."

[35] Terms used in Tarok.

Meanwhile I didn't interrupt her, but remained standing and looking at her with my hands resting on the table. This seemed to put her out.

"Why don't you smoke a cigar? Don't mind me."

"I would only remind you that you used always to make fun of me because I didn't smoke."

"True. Smoking becomes a man. A cigar or a pipe makes his face so cosy-looking. Just look at any man who hasn't a pipe stuck into his mouth, and tell me if he doesn't look like a judge pronouncing judgment, or a priest shriving a penitent? Believe me, that one of the reasons why I was faithless to you was that you didn't smoke. Well, at any rate, I have got my reward for it.

"Now, Muki used to suck Havannahs all day. Yes, nothing but Havannahs; but Gyuricza smokes the coarsest tobacco, and even chews pigtail."

I burst out laughing; I couldn't help it. In what ways are a woman's graces gained! No, I wouldn't chew pigtail if the favour of the Goddess Melpomene herself depended on it.

"I will not weary you with our diversions at Paris. There, I perceived, it is the common practice for husband and wife to take their pleasures apart. My husband did no more than what other husbands do. It is not good form to ask a husband who returns home at dawn where he has been. Besides, Muki, with perfect candour, informed me all about these places of public entertainment and the joys of les petits soupers; once he took me with him to these delights—I didn't ask to go again.... I was very glad when the season was over and we returned to our village, and after all the bustling diversions, flirtations, visitings and boredom, I could once more be alone and fill my straw hat with forget-me-nots on the banks of the river, as of old on the island. You remember my visit to your rustic hut, don't you? You remember the golden thrushes who used to speak to you? To you they said, 'Silly boy! silly boy!' to me they cried, 'What's the good! what's the good!' On returning to his estates my husband became quite another man: you would have said that he was a changeling. The dainty dandy became an enthusiastic agriculturist. He was up early, on horseback all day, went from one puszta to another, and brought home ears of barley in his hat. The only things he talked about at home were sheepshearing and the diseases of horned cattle. He had a stud and a neat-herd, and of the latter he appeared to be particularly proud. Sometimes he drove me all over his demesne in a light gig. A fine demesne it was. You might drive about it the whole day and not see the whole of it. He showed me his herds. He told me that herds like them were not to be had in the whole kingdom. I didn't understand it. All that I could see was that the oxen had very large horns. But the form of the herdsman really did surprise me. He was a veritable ancient-hero sort of a man, such as we imagine the primeval Magyars to have been who wandered hither out of Asia. His bronzed face beamed with health, his thick black hair whipped his shoulders with its greasy curls, and add to that his sun-defying glance, his stately bearing, his long mantle embroidered with tulips and cast lightly across his shoulder. His white linen garment fluttered in the breeze, and when he raised his arm to take off his cap, the loose fluttering short sleeves fell right back and revealed an arm like the arm of the figure of an athlete cast in bronze. 'Why, Peter,' said I, 'is it with you that your master is wont to wrestle?' The Hercules, thus addressed, timidly cast down his eyes and said: 'Yes!' 'But how on earth is your master ever able to throw you?' At this question, Peter Gyuricza shifted his mantle from one shoulder to the other, and twisting his moustache, replied: 'As often as his Excellency throws me I get five florins.' So that was the secret of Muki's acrobatic triumphs. After that, the herdsman conducted us to the great summer farm, which was a good distance from the hut where the calves are put to rest at midday. There, a savoury luncheon, prepared by the wife of the herdsman, awaited us. She was a buxom, smart young woman, with roguish eyes and radiating eyebrows, all life and freshness, a true blossom of the puszta.[36] I caught myself looking repeatedly in the mirror, and making comparisons between her face and my own. After luncheon we went all round the farm, and the herdsman's wife guided us from stable to stable. A thorn got into my foot through my slipper. The herdsman's wife bobbed down and drew the thorn out. 'You don't feel the thorn now, do you?' she asked, flashing a look upon me. 'I do not feel it in my foot,' I replied."

[36] i.e., a true heath-flower.

Bessy paused for a moment, and smoothed her brows with both hands as if to refresh her memory.

"I took another sort of thorn away with me. I began to be suspicious of the grand economical zeal of my husband. Such assiduity was not natural. Early one morning he again took horse, called to his greyhounds, and told me not to wait for him to dinner, he would not be home till evening. A certain instinct would not let me rest. I went out into the garden, right to the boundary fence and into the stubble beyond, and then I went on foot into the puszta, through the turnip fields and the Indian corn. Nobody saw me. The vesper-bell was ringing in the village when I entered the courtyard of the herdsman. In the stubble I saw the two dogs hunting a hare on their own account. Truly, a Cockney sportsman who allows his dogs to win their own meat like that! I whistled to them, they recognised me and came leaping around me. 'Where's your master?' The dogs understood me. They began yelping and barking, and darted on before me helter-skelter, with their heads between their legs as if to give me to understand that they would lead me to the spot if I followed them. They made straight for the hut. No doubt they fancied they were doing something very knowing. When I marched in at the door the little servant exclaimed, 'Good gracious!' and let fall the wooden trencher in which she was kneading some dough with a large pot-ladle, and when I advanced towards the dwelling-room door, she stood in my way, and said, 'Please don't go in now!' I boxed her ears for her, first on the right side and then on the left, pushed her into a cupboard and locked the door upon her. Then I opened the door of the dwelling-room. There was nobody there. But the door of a little side room, which in peasants' houses is, as a rule, always open, was closed. On the table, however, I perceived my lord's hat and his riding-whip. I made no disturbance. The clothes of the herdsman's wife lay in a heap on a bench. I took off my clothes and put on hers carefully, one by one. I was just as you see me now."

She stood up before me and turned herself round that I might have a better look at her.

"Then I went into the outer hut again, and picked the ladle from the floor which the maid had let fall in her terror. It was a mess of bacon dumplings that she had been engaged upon. I kneaded the dough for the dumplings, I made twelve beautiful little round ones out of it, boiled them, beat up a nice garlic sauce with them, and poured the whole lot of it into a varnished jug, first tasting to see that it was not over salted. Then I tied up the jar in my kerchief, and set off with it towards the pasturage. But another idea also occurred to me. I concealed behind my apron my husband's riding whip that was reposing on the table, and took it away with me.

"The pasturage is pretty far from the hut. It was somewhat late when I arrived there. The herdsman was quite impatient, and had climbed up a 'look-out' tree, and when he saw my striped dress and bright red kerchief, he began to bawl out, 'Hillo! Come along, can't you! I'll give you what for! I'll teach you something, you cursed blockhead! What have you done with my dinner? A pretty time when they're already ringing vespers in the village. I suppose you've been carrying on with his honour again? Let me catch you at it, that's all, and I'll tickle your hide for you with my whip.' When I got up to him and lifted the kerchief from my head, he stopped short with his mouth open. 'Well, I never! if it isn't her ladyship!'—'True, Peter!' said I. 'I've cooked your dinner for you, and now you see I've brought it to you. Your wife cannot come. She's learning French from my husband. I've also brought with me my husband's whip. I found it on your table. You may flog with it whomever you like, either me or your wife.'"

Here she stopped short. She evidently meant me to find out the rest of the story for myself.

"Poor woman!" I murmured. I was sorry and embarrassed.

She burst out laughing.

"Don't pity me, pray! I am perfectly happy. Gyuricza did not strike me with his whip. I am now mistress in the herdsman's hut."

And she seemed quite proud of it all!

Then she began to tell me of her new hero with real enthusiasm. He was what man was meant to be when first created, all strength and truth; there was nothing artificial, nothing false, nothing effeminate about him. "When he comes home at night he goes to the fireplace to smoke his pipe; then he empties a can of buttermilk to the very dregs. Wine is only put upon the table on Sundays. Then he asks, 'Have you any good dumpling soup, sweetheart?' 'Of course I have, and cured bacon and groat pottage as well.' As soon as it is ready we turn it out and sit down to it. We eat with tin spoons out of a large common dish. No invitation is needed there. The lady herself fetches the water from the spring. The master drinks one half of it and offers the other half to his wife: 'You drink too!' And after that they don't go in for much stargazing, nor do they care a fig for the world and all its thousand troubles. They sleep with open doors, and the four sheep-dogs guard the house.

"At three o'clock in the morning Bessy gets up and goes into the stable to milk the cows; by dawn it must be all done. The little milking-stool is now her throne. She pours the fresh foaming milk into the pails and takes them into the cellar with the help of the serving maid. When the boy sounds his horn the cows must be driven out; they must be pastured apart from the brood-cows. And all this time the master is eating his breakfast: peppered bacon and green leeks with good papramorgó,[37] and then he follows his herds out into the pastures. The reason why he cracks his whip so loudly is because he knows that some one is standing there in the little door and looking after him. Then she has to skim the cream from the standing milk, churn the milk, and take the butter to market. Then she has to buckle to bread-baking. The maid is sent to heat the oven; meanwhile she herself is kneading the dough, then she shovels out the burning embers with the oven scoop, and wipes down the inside of the oven with a wet kitchen-clout; then the loaves are shot in by means of the long baking-shovel (first of all, however, are baked the 'fire-cakes,' which 'my soul'[38] loves so much), finally the 'lock-up' stone is smeared with clay and placed in front of the oven, and one must be ready to an instant to pull the stone from the mouth of the oven again and take out the loaves. Meanwhile, she has had time to prepare upon the hearth a pottage of millet and smoked bacon, and carry it quickly, pot and all, to the pasturage, so that when the mid-day bell rings, the master may have his victuals ready laid on his outspread fur pelisse. After dinner, beneath the shadow of the big wild nut-tree, she may take a nap with an apron thrown over her face. On returning home she gets out her bruised flax and heckles it, so that when the husband returns home he finds wife and family sitting by the distaff and singing together the spinning songs of the country folk, till the pigs come running home with a great grunting and demand their slush.—Oh, such a life as that is pure enjoyment!"

[37] A sort of eau-de-vie.

[38] Lelkem, i.e., "My darling."

I shook my head dubiously.

"It will bore you one day."

"Bore me! Don't you recollect when I was in your lath hut I painted this very life to you as my ideal?—A hut of rushes and a bed of straw. You spoke to me of fame and glory. The lowing of kine, the tinkling of sheep-bells, the cracking of whips is my delight. It was so even then. Since that time I have learnt to know the great world, but it hasn't altered me. I am full of disgust with everything that is to be found in palaces. Those demi-men, those Sunday husbands—those refined and exquisitely polite she-sinners, those model sticklers for virtue who sin through the whole ten commandments day after day, and vie even with the ladies of the ballet, with this difference, however, that the ballet-dancers are much more modest in private than these great ladies are in public—I am sick and weary of the whole lot of them. I would rather have a man who never washes his mouth after he has eaten garlic, than a man who returns home from an orgie and pretends he has been to a political conference. The famous Hamilton bed, which costs you a hundred ducats if you sleep in it for a single night, is wretchedness itself compared to the bed of fresh straw on which I sleep. Believe me when I tell you that I am perfectly happy."

"I'll believe anything you like, but there's one circumstance I cannot understand. How is it that nobody disturbs this sweet idyll of yours? Is the one man who is so confoundedly nearly interested in your happiness, is that man still alive? Does Muki Bagotay still exist anywhere in the wide world?"

"I fancy so."

"Well, if he does, I'll only say that what flows through his veins is milk, not blood. Is he content to carry the horns of his hundred oxen? A rich and powerful landlord, a county magnate, and the master of your ideal peasant!—A thousand lightnings! if I were only in his place!"

Bessy, with a sarcastic smile, folded her hands together above her knees.

"Well, come now! If you were in dear Muki's place what would you do?"

"I'll tell you. I wouldn't call Peter Gyuricza out, but one fine day I would put my democratic principles on the shelf, and collecting my heydukes and my rustics, I'd give chase to the herdsman, trounce him according to his deserts, and kick him out of my employment. I would get another herdsman; but as for my wife, I'd tie her to the pummel of my saddle, and drag her like that to my castle. That's what I would do, were I the husband of Muki Bagotay's wife!"

I had certainly got a little heated. It was only afterwards that I reflected, "What's Hecuba to me? Why should I bother my head about Peter Gyuricza?"

Bessy, however, laughed most heartily.

"Ha! ha! ha! You'd have done that to me, would you? You'd have tied me to your horse's tail and whipped me home, eh? How sorry I am then that I did not choose you! What a fine thing it would have been if I could have boasted of bearing the impression of your blows on my body! Tell me now, have you ever struck any one who was unable to hit you back?"

At this I was fairly put to silence.

"But let that be! You could not be so good a Muki Bagotay as Muki Bagotay himself would have been if he could. He actually did try the very recipe which you now recommend. The very next day he sent his bailiff with the verbal message to Peter Gyuricza to pack himself off forthwith, but me the bailiff was to bring straight home. The bailiff gave himself airs, and would have used force, so I gave him a sound box on the ears, which he'll not forget in a hurry; whereupon Peter Gyuricza threw him out of the house.

"Next day the wounded honour of the offended husband resorted to still stronger measures: six pandurs[39] appeared upon the scene with swords and pistols. Peter and I were outside in the pastures. Thither they came after us. But Peter was not a bit put out. He hastily called together his young shepherds; there were four of them; they caught up their cudgels, and the four sheep dogs took the same side. The six pandurs never dreamt we should tackle them. The corporal of the pandurs threatened to fire if we offered the least resistance. I immediately rushed forward in front of Peter, and said to them, 'Very well! there you are! Fire!' There was a pretty rumpus, the dogs began to bark, and at last even the stolid steers got mad, and the big old bull rushed out of the herd and charged straight at the pandurs, who were thronging round the herdsman. They took to their heels straightway, and those who did not leave their shakos behind them might think themselves lucky."

[39] County police.

"Why, that was quite an epic poem!"

"Wasn't it! But you haven't heard the end of it yet. After the repulse of the second assault, Muki began to carry on the war in grim earnest. One evening, our maid, who had been sent out as a spy, came back with the terrifying news that his honour had sent out orders that on the following day all his tenants were to assemble in the courtyard of the castle armed with cudgels, flails, and pitchforks; to his huntsmen and heydukes also he had distributed guns and ammunition. The whole of this host was to advance upon us in battle array on the morrow. It would have been well, perhaps, to have fled before them while there was yet time. But we did not fly."

"Then what was the end of it all?"

"A very droll ending indeed. When the danger was greatest, good luck sent a deliverer, a good friend, just as usually happens in happily-constructed dramas, who intervened with a mighty hand and diverted the stroke from our heads."

"And who was this good friend?"

"Why, who else but the bearer of this fine blonde beard!" cried she, with an ironical smile, caressing my chin.

"I? Why, I was not in that part of the country at all."

"Ah! but poets have long arms, you know. At the very moment when Muki was placing firearms in the hands of his peasants, freedom was proclaimed at Pest. The rumour spread throughout the kingdom like wildfire—the Revolution had broken out. They say in Pressburg that Petöfi and you were on the Rákos[40] at the head of 40,000 peasants, and that a new Dózsa[41] war had begun. The retainers of Muki also thronged up to his castle, not to carry me off by force, but to demand their liberties. 'We'll work no more!' they cried; 'we'll pay no more tithes, and no more hearth-money.'[42] Freedom had broken out with a vengeance! Muki was thereupon so terrified that he fled incontinently through the back door in the clothes of his lackey, and never stopped till he was safely out of the kingdom. I have heard nothing of him since. So you see your mighty hand turned aside the danger that was hovering over our heads. We drank your health afterwards in big bumpers."

[40] A plain to the east of Pest, where, from the earliest times, elective assemblies were held.

[41] George Dózsa, the leader of the Hungarian jacquerie of 1514, who was finally captured and executed after truly infernal torments.

[42] Füstpenz—lit., smoke money, so much on each chimney.

I certainly had never calculated upon success of this sort.

"Well," said I, "you have certainly disposed of Mr. János Nepomuk Bagotay for a time (though I would call your attention to the fact that he will not be very long in perceiving that there is no Dózsa war in Hungary, and will then return with reinforcements), but may I ask what her ladyship your mother says to all this?"

"I should have come to that, even if you had not asked me. In fact, this is the very thing which brings me to you. One fine evening when I was returning home from the maize fields, with my kerchief full of pods, I found an official notification nailed on the door of our hut. The lawyer's clerk who brought it, delighted to find nobody at home, had fastened the document to the door-post and decamped. It gave me to understand that Muki was bringing an action against me for adultery. A term was fixed, however, within which, according to custom, we might appear before the priest at any place we liked and be reconciled if possible. After the lapse of six weeks the priest would make another attempt to bring about a reconciliation; if this did not succeed, he would bid us go to the ——! and we should have to appear before the judge instead!"

I now began to see to what I was indebted for the pleasure of her visit. I should very much have liked to have banged the door in her face with the words: "I am not a lawyer, though I have served my terms!" But I let her go on.

"I immediately took down the notification from the door," she resumed, "and sent my little maid with it to town to my mother's. By way of explanation I wrote her a letter, a task not unattended with difficulty, as Peter Gyuricza's hut was singularly ill-provided with writing materials. First of all I had to manufacture ink from wild juniper berries, then I carved a pen from a goose-quill; in place of paper I made use of beautifully smooth maize leaves."

"Just as the Egyptians used papyrus?"

"Yes, and if papyrus was good enough for the daughters of the Pharaohs, why shouldn't maize-membranes be good enough for me? I wrote and told her everything that had happened. I entirely justified my proceedings. If there was but one drop of justice in her composition she would be bound to acknowledge that my line of action was as clear as the day. Muki had made off with the herdsman's wife; I, following the lex talionis—an eye for eye—had made off with Gyuricza. He had brought an action against me; Gyuricza would bring an action against his own wife. The pair of us stood on exactly the same legal footing. If the two divorces were carried out, I meant to make the man of my choice my lawful husband, and would become in name what I already was in fact, the wife of Peter Gyuricza. I referred to you also in my letter."

"To me?"

"Yes. I argued that there was now no difference between peasants and gentlemen, and pointed out that since the 15th March you had omitted the privileged 'y'[43] from the end of your name, and had substituted for it a simple 'i,' and you were a 'glorious patriot,' as every one knew. Nobody therefore had any reason to be ashamed of Peter Gyuricza. Besides, I did not mean that he should remain a herdsman any longer; but as soon as my mother handed over to me my patrimony (so much of it I mean as Muki had not already squandered away), I meant to purchase a farm, and Gyuricza and I would settle down upon it as independent proprietors."

[43] The "y" at the end of Hungarian personal names has much the same value as the French de or the German von—Tr.

The matter now really began to amuse me. I could imagine to myself the Hogarthian group when the trio of ladies began spelling out syllable by syllable the letter that had been written on a maize-leaf.

"Well! and what answer did you get?"

"The answer you may easily have anticipated. My mother replied that she repudiated me entirely, that I should not get a farthing from her, and that I was never again to presume to show my face in a family which I had so utterly disgraced."

"And did Peter know all about this?"

"I was obliged to tell him, for my mother had nearly frightened to death the bearer of my letter, our little serving maid. She told her that if she ever dared to come to town again she would have her seized and tied to the pillory (though there wasn't one), and well flogged into the bargain; so that neither by cuffs nor entreaties was the wench to be persuaded to go to town again. She said as much to Peter. She said she would rather lose her place. And yet she ought to have gone every market-day to the town with cheese and butter, for these wares were Peter's chief means of livelihood. What was I to do now? I did this. I resolved to take the butter and cheese to market myself."

"You? But how?"

"Not in a glass carriage, you may be sure. The market is a good two hours' journey from our hut, and the direction is marked by the church tower. The peasant women, when they pack with wares the baskets which they put on their heads, make, first of all, a sort of wreath of rags, which they place below the baskets to lighten the pressure and maintain the equilibrium."

"And you did the same?"

"Naturally! It is no greater hardship for me, surely, than for the other poor girls who do it. And remember, besides, that this marketing is just as great an amusement to the peasant women as a promenade concert is to fine ladies. There was only one little nuisance connected with it. Just at this time all the irrigation waters had overflowed, and all the fields and meadows between our hut and the market town were turned into a lake, through which we had to wade."

"What! you waded through the flooded fields?"

"Oh, the water did not really come above my knees. It was only here and there, by the side of the streams, that we had to truss up our petticoats pretty high, and then we took off our boots and carried them tied on to the handles of our baskets. That is how all the women go."

"And you picked your way along like that too?"

"Again and again! I might, indeed, have gone along by the dykes, but then I should have had to turn into the village and make a circuit of four miles with the mud up to my knees. Along the even marshes, on the other hand, it is pleasant going, the soft soil does not hurt your heels, and there are no leeches."

"But did no one see you?"

"What did I care? I quite enjoyed my aquatic promenade. It was every bit as good as bathing at Trouville, and there I had by no means so ample a toilet. On arriving in town, I at once readjusted my clothes, put on my boots, and went to sell butter and cheese right in front of my mother's house. It was really a capital position that I chose; a corner-house between two thoroughfares, opening out upon the market-place."

"And nobody recognised you?"

"Why shouldn't they? Every one recognised me, even the money-collector who hires out the standing-rooms. He allowed me my standing-room gratis, because I 'belonged to the place.' I was surrounded by quite a crowd of my former cavaliers, who bought up all my butter, and I sold my cheese by the ounce, at fancy prices; there was quite a run upon it. Never had Peter Gyuricza seen so much money as I brought home to him from the sale of his butter and cheese."

"And your worthy mother?"

"Alas! all that the poor thing could do was to pull down all the blinds in broad daylight. I, however, purchased with the proceeds of the butter and cheese as much salt and tobacco as we required, packed them all up in the basket, and, placing it on my head, returned through the floods the same way by which I came."

"And did you do this often?"

"Every market day. Sometimes it was rainy. Then the peasant woman is wont to throw her upper garment over her head, that is her umbrella. I had to get accustomed to that too. Once, a couple of my former young gentlemen acquaintances took it into their heads to play me a practical joke. They paddled a canoe out of the Danube into the submerged plain, and when I began my wading tour they paddled after me. That did me no harm, but it turned out badly for them, for the peasant girls who went with me charged upon them like the host of Sisera, wrested the paddles from their hands, and left them rocking helplessly to and fro in the midst of the waters."

"But hasn't the water all dried up now?" I asked impatiently.

"Oh, how he snaps at me! Of course! Now we can go dry-shod. Only when we come to a ditch do we take off our shoes. But, dear heart! how I do go on gabbling without ever coming to the point. I must explain why I have come all the way hither to you, my dear Mr. Advocate. As I will not appear before the priest to further the reconciliation project, and my husband (my first, I mean) will do so neither, I must, of course, appear before the judge! and as, moreover, my mother must be admonished to hand over my little property, if you would take my case up for me I should be exceedingly obliged to you."

I told her that I did not practise as an advocate, and that I had no experience whatever of divorce proceedings, not having been taught the subject in the schools.

Then she began to speak in a very solemn voice. She said she had never expected me to take up her case, but had sought me out because she had been informed that the advocates with whom I had served my articles were very eminent practitioners; she would like to entrust her double suit to them. As, however, she feared that they would neither receive her nor believe her if she appeared before them in her present costume, she earnestly begged that I would give her a letter of introduction to the firm of Molnár & Vérchovszky for friendship's sake—or for any other price.

"Well, I can do that for you—for nothing."

To write this letter I had to sit down at my writing-table.

"May I peep and see what you write about me?"

"If you like."

I could not take offence at her curiosity.

"I'll help you!" said she, with naïve archness, and went and stood behind my back.

I must say that she had a very odd notion of helping me. She leant right over me so that I could feel her burning breath on my face, and the throbbing of her heart against my shoulder. I spoiled the first sheet of paper by writing last year's date at the top of it. Then I could not call to mind the name of my client, and I thought one thing and wrote another. Add to that that I made a mess of the simplest sentences, and wrote in a style worthy of a pedantic grammarian. Finally I got hopelessly involved in the maze of a long-winded phrase which I began but could not finish. That's what happens to a man when he has to listen to the beating of two hearts!

It was on this self-same table that the picture stood which I have already mentioned. I had no time to conceal it in my drawer. And why should I have tried to hide it? Was I bound to make a mystery of it before her?

Right opposite to my writing-table was a mirror on the wall. On one occasion, when I was pursuing an elusive word, I raised my head from my writing-desk and saw in the mirror the figure of the woman who was standing behind my back. Oh, what a face was that! She was not looking into my letter, but at the portrait. The eyes were turned sideways, so that the upper parts of the whites were visible; the lips were drawn aside, and the teeth clenched.

I saw this from the mirror. And this mirror, too had the property of making things look green. Viewed in this magic light, the fair lady standing behind me appeared like the Iblis of the Thousand-and-one Nights, who sucks the blood of her lovers and leads the dances of the dead.

I finished the letter to my old chiefs.

Then I dried it with a piece of blotting-paper. Sand I have always hated. I also felt, in this respect, like Stephen Szechenyi,[44] who, whenever he received a sanded-letter, used to give it first of all to his lackey to be taken out in the hall and dusted. Before enclosing the letter, however, I turned round and handed it to her.

[44] Count Stephen Szechenyi, "the greatest of the Magyars," was born in 1791. He brilliantly distinguished himself at the battle of Leipsic, and at Tolentino, in 1815, at the head of his Hussars, annihilated Murat's cavalry. After the war, he devoted himself to domestic politics with a tact, courage, and noble liberality which speedily made him the most popular man in Hungary. The Hungarian Academy and the Hungarian National Theatre were founded at his initiative and mainly at his expense. The breach with Austria in 1848 so preyed upon his mind that he went mad, and was confined in an asylum, where he destroyed himself in 1860.—Tr.

"Would you read it, please?"

The menacing spectre was no longer there. Iblis had changed into a smiling young bride.

"And how do you know that I haven't read the letter?" she asked, in her astonishment.

"My little finger whispered it to me!"

At this she burst out laughing, and pushed the letter away.

"I don't mean to read it! I know that you have written no end of good things about me."

I folded up my letter, sealed it and wrote the address—"Joseph Molnár and Alexander Vérchovszky, Advocates." Then I handed it to her.

Still she kept standing there in front of my writing-table, twirling the letter round and round in her hands, and gazing continually at the portrait. Her face had become quite solemn. In her deeply downcast eyes there was a suspicious brightness testifying to restrained tear-drops.

She heaved a deep sigh.

"But this is mere folly!" She thrust my letter beneath her bodice, and in a voice of real warmth and sincerity, she stammered: "I thank you most kindly." Then she added, in a voice half grave, half gay: "But come now! You won't write my story in the newspapers, will you?"

"I assure you it is not my practice."

"And you won't put my stupid story into a novel or a romance, eh? At least not while I'm alive?"

"Never! Put your mind at rest on that point."

"No; don't say never. Let it be only as long as I'm alive. But when I die, wherever it may be, you shall receive a letter from me, which I will write to you at my last hour, authorizing you to write all that you know of me."

"My dear friend, death is written much more plainly on my brow than on yours."

She shuddered. Twice she shuddered. Then she threw her basket over her arm, and took her leave. I would have escorted her to the door of the ante-chamber, but she held me back.

"Stay where you are. I do not wish any one to see you paying attention to a country wench."

When I was by myself again and thinking over the whole scene, it seemed to me as if a golden thrush were piping derisively in my ear again—

"Foolish fellow! Foolish fellow!"

For the second time I had let slip the opportunity of pilfering Paradise, conceded to me by a special and peculiar favour of the gods. I candidly confess that I am no saint.... I am a true son of Adam, of real flesh and blood. No vow binds me to an ascetic life. Let temptation come to me again in the shape of that pretty woman to-day and she shall see what I am made of!... All day long these feverish imaginings haunted me. In the drawer of my writing-table was the portrait which I once wrested in knightly tourney from her bridegroom, and which she herself had given me to put to rights. I went again and again to my writing-table in order to take out that portrait and have another look at it. But that other portrait lay there on my table and would not allow it. It was much better to leave the house. I occupied the whole day in strolling about the town. Perhaps I may meet her somewhere in the street.

Late in the evening I returned home.

I was alone. My lackey only came to me in the morning.

I had scarcely lighted my lamp when I heard a knocking at my door. I certainly had forgotten to shut the door of my ante-chamber, and so my visitor had managed to penetrate so far. Who could it be at such a late hour? "Come in!"

The blood flew to my head when the door opened.

She had come back!

Then she was here again!

She did not come in, however, but stood with the door-latch in her hand, as if she were afraid of me.

"It is not nice of me, I know," she stammered, with a faltering voice, "to come here so late. I have been here three times, but you were out. I must tell you what I've heard. Don't be angry."

I begged her to come in, and took her by the hand. My heart beat feverishly.

"The lawyers received me very well. They were both at home. They took up my case and assured me that it was bound to result in my favour, and that they would pay the preliminary expenses. They behaved like gentlemen. Then the conversation turned upon you. They asked how long we had been acquainted. I told them as much as was necessary, and wound up by saying that you were the one thoroughly disinterested friend that I possessed. Then one of the advocates, the tall dry one I mean, said, with perfect good-nature: 'Well, if you are kindly disposed towards our young friend, just tell him that the path along which he is now rushing so impetuously leads straight to the gallows,' whereupon the blonde, ruddy-faced man added, 'or else to suicide.' I felt I must tell you that."

And with these words she stepped back from the door.

An icy shudder would have run down the shoulders of any other man at these words, but the message regularly set me on fire. It was my pet idea they wanted me to give up, the idea which I adored even more than my lady-love, the idea of my youth—the idea of liberty. If any one offends my lady-love I will shed his blood, but let not even my lady-love interfere with my principles, as for them I am ready to pour out my own blood to the last drop.

"Be it so!" I cried passionately; "that has nothing to do with you;" and I shut the door in her face. Every fibre of my body quivered with rage.

They threaten me with the gallows, or with the suicidal dagger of a Cato! I fear them not.

My poor chiefs! Half a year later they were rushing along the self-same path, at the end of which so many monsters were lurking. I only lost my hair in the hands of these monsters, but they lost their heads. Their own prophecy was fulfilled on them both.

From that day forth I was very wrath with the lady with the eyes like the sea.

CHAPTER IX

THE WOMAN WHO WENT ALONG WITH ME

And now we'll go back to the day which forms so remarkable a turning-point in the life of the Hungarian nation, the 15th March, 1848.

It did not come without due preparation. The emancipation of the people, a free press and a free soil, equality of taxation and equality before the law—all these splendid ideas had been fought for during the last ten years by those great minds which towered above their fellows. The time had now arrived, the process had been decided, the judgment lived in the heart of every honest patriot. The great sacrifices which the metamorphosis required were not demanded, but volunteered. We debated about them in the Diet, party against party, with all the fervour of conviction.

A melancholy example was before us, which, like that fata Morgana of the ocean, the phantom galley overturned, warns the seaman of the danger that is hovering over his head. I allude to the events in Galicia the year before.

The Polish gentry of Galicia demanded their liberties, and emphasized their demands by force of arms. There was no need on the part of the authorities to set in motion an army corps against this new confederacy, the peasantry did the work for them instead. The Galician peasants[45] crushed the Polish gentry. The censorship had prevented the Hungarian newspapers from making known the details of this rebellion, but when the Diet met, it was impossible to prevent the fiery deputy for Comorn, the youthful Denis Pazmandy, from raising his mighty voice on behalf of the Poles, and making known the shocking particulars of the bloody massacre to the Hungarian nation. There are many sad pages in the history of the Polish nation, but none so sad as this. And the hand which wrote that page could easily glide over to the next page also, and that next page was the history of the Hungarian nation. Here half a million of gentry stand face to face with fifteen millions of serfs which serve, suffer, pay, carry arms, and are silent. Then the Paris Revolution broke out. The French nation overthrew the throne. (By the way, a tatter from the canopy over the French throne was brought home by one of our young writers, Louis Dóbsa, as a present for Petöfi. Dóbsa fought on the February barricades.) Serious debates were held in the Hungarian Diet. But Pressburg[46] was much too cold a field for such things. They wanted assistance from Pest. We didn't say Buda-Pest then, Buda[47] was not ours.... Meanwhile the Vienna Revolution broke out. The streets of Vienna resounded with the watchword "Freedom," and were painted with the blood of the heroes that had fallen for it.

[45] They were mostly Ruthenians, and racial and religious differences had much to do with their antagonism. This inveigling of the peasantry against the gentry, generally attributed to Metternich, is one of the darkest blots in Austrian history.—Tr.

[46] The old coronation city of Hungary, but more of a German than a Magyar city then.—Tr.

[47] It was an Austrian fortress.—Tr.

"So these Vienna people whom we blackguard so much show that they know how to shed their blood for freedom while we glorious Magyars sit at our firesides!" cried Petöfi bitterly. "Let us send no more petitions to the Diet," he added, "it is deaf! Let us appeal to the nation: it will hear!"

Then he wrote his "Talpra Magyar!"[48]

[48] "Up! Magyar, up!"

Early in the morning we assembled in my room by lamplight. There were four of us—Petöfi, Paul Vasváry, Julius Bulyovszky, and myself. My companions entrusted me with the drawing up of the Pest Articles in a short popular form intelligible to everybody. While I was thus occupied, they were disputing about what should happen next. The most violent of them was Paul Vasváry, who had the figure of a mighty young athlete. In his hand was a sword-stick with a horn handle, which he was flourishing about in a martial manner, when, all at once, the jolted stiletto flew from its case, and turning a somersault, flew through the air over my head and struck the wall.

"A lucky omen!" cried Petöfi.

The proclamation was ready. We hastened into the street. We said nothing to Madame Petöfi. Every one of us had arms of some sort. I pocketed the famous duplex pistol already mentioned.

Every one knows ad nauseam what followed—how the human avalanche began to move, how it grew, and what speeches we made in the great square. But speech-making was not sufficient, we wanted to do something. The first thing to be done was to give practical application to the doctrine of a free press. We resolved to print the Twelve Articles of Pest, the Proclamation, and the "Talpra Magyar" without the consent of the censor.

The printing press of Landerer and Heckenast was honoured with this compulsory distinction. The printers were naturally not justified in printing anything without permission from the authorities, so we turned up our sleeves and worked away at the hand-presses ourselves. The name of the typesetter who set up the first word of freedom was Potemkin.

While Irinyi and other young authors were working away at the press, it was my duty to harangue the mob that thronged the whole length of Hatváni Street. I had no idea how to set about it, but it came of its own accord.

My worthy and loyal contemporary, Paul Szontagh, occasionally quotes to me, even now, some of the heaven-storming phrases which he heard me say on that occasion; e.g., "... No! fellow-citizens; he is not the true hero who can die for his country; he who can slay for his country, he is the true hero!"

That was the sort of oratory I used to practise in those days!

Meanwhile the rain began to fall, and rain is the most reactionary opponent of every revolution. But my people were not to be dispersed by the rain, and all at once the whole street was filled with expanded umbrellas.

"What! gentlemen," thundered I from the corner of the street, "if you stick up your umbrellas now against mere rain-drops, what will you stick up against the bullets which will presently begin to fall?"

It was only then that I noticed that there were not only gentlemen around me but ladies also. A pair of them had insinuated themselves close to my side. In one of them I recognised "Queen Gertrude."[49] On her head she wore a plumed cap, and was wrapped up in a Persian shawl embroidered with palm-tree flowers. Both cap and shawl were dripping with rain. I had met the lady once or twice at the Szigligetis'. I exhorted the ladies to go home; here they would get dripping-wet, I said, and some other accident might befall them.

[49] i.e., the actress who took that part.

"We are no worse off here than you are," was the reply.

They were determined to wait till the printed broad-sides were ready.

Not very long afterwards Irinyi appeared at the window of the printing-office, for to get out of the door was a sheer impossibility. He held in his hands the first printed sheets from the free press.

Ah, that scene! when the very first free sheets were distributed from hand to hand! I cannot describe it. "Freedom, freedom!" It was the first ray of a new and better era!... A free press! the first-fruit of the universal tree of knowledge of Paradise. What a tumult arose when they actually clutched that forbidden fruit in their hands.... Hail to thee, O Freedom of the Press! Thou seven-headed dragon, how many times hast thou not bitten me since then! Yet I bless the hour when I first saw thee creep out of thy egg and gave thee what little help I could!

Young authors, clerks, advocates, all hot-headed young people, crowded around the invisible banner.

A young county official was now seen forcing his way through the dense crowd right to the very door of the printing-office, and from thence he addressed me. The influential Vice-Lieutenant of the County, Paul Nyáry, sent word to me that I was to go to him to the town hall.

"Why should I go?" cried I from my point of vantage. "I'll be shot down with cannon-balls rather! If the Vice-Lieutenant of the County wants to speak to us, let him come here. We are the 'mountain' now."

And Mohammed really did come to the "mountain," and with him came a group of grave-faced men, the veteran leaders of the camp of freedom.

Amongst them was a dwarfish little oddity of a man, the assistant editor of the Eletképek, the gallant little Sükey, who, despite a chronic asthma, fought through the whole campaign, musket in hand. Besides being a cripple, he was a really extraordinary stammerer. When he saw the grave-visaged men making their way to us through the crowd, he scrambled along beside them, and with all the force of his lungs bellowed out this notable declaration: "D-d-d-don't li-li-li-listen to those wi-wi-wi-wiseacres!"

But the wiseacres hadn't come to convert us to wisdom. On the contrary, Nyáry had come to approve of what we had done hitherto, and then to go together with us to the town hall, that they might there, together with the town councillors, ratify the Articles of the liberal programme.

It was a fine scene. The town hall was crammed to suffocation. Those who were called upon to speak stood upon the green table, and remained there afterwards, so that at last the whole magistracy of the county, and I and all my colleagues were standing on the top of the table. The flames spread! The burgomaster, the worthy Rotterbiller, announced from the balcony of the town hall, that the town of Pest had adopted the Twelve Articles as its own; and with that the avalanche carried the whole of the burgesses along with it. But the matter did not end even there. In the evening crowds of workmen inundated the streets. They had got from somewhere or other a banner, inscribed with the three sacred words, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"

... Such a great day must needs have a brilliant close, so the town was illuminated in the evening, and a free performance was given at the theatre, Bánk-bán[50] being the piece selected. But the mob, which by this time was in a state of ecstasy, had no longer the patience to listen to the pious declamations of Ban Peter. It called for "Talpra Magyar."

[50] Joseph Katona's celebrated tragedy.

What was to be done? The brilliant court of King Andrew II., with the Queen and Bánk-bán to boot, had to stand aside and form a group round Gabriel Egressy, who, in a simple attila, with a sword by his side, stood in the middle of the stage and declaimed with magnificent emphasis Petöfi's inspiring poem.

That was all very well, but it was not enough.

Then the whole company sang the "Szózato," and the people in the pit and the galleries joined in.

That also was soon over.

What shall we give next?

The band struck up the Rákóczy[51] march. That kindled the excitement, instead of extinguishing it. And it was high time that something should be done to quench it, for the excited populace was drunk with triumph.

[51] Prohibited in Hungary at this time as being of revolutionary tendency.

Then a voice from the gallery cried: "Long live Táncsis!"[52]

[52] Michal Táncsis, a prisoner who had been released from the citadel of Buda the same morning by the mob.

And with that the whole populace suddenly roared with one voice: "Let us see Táncsis!"

A frightful tumult arose. Táncsis was not at hand. He lived some way out in the suburb of Ferenczváros. But even had he been near, it would have been a cruel thing to have dragged on the stage a worn-out invalid, that he might merely bow to the public like a celebrated musician.

But what was to be done?

"Well, my sons," said Nyáry, with whom I was standing in the same box, "you have awakened this great monster, now see if you can put him to sleep again!"

My young friends attempted to address the people one after the other, Petöfi from the Academy box, Irinyi from the balcony of the Casino club, but their voices were drowned in the howling of the mob. The curtain was let down, but then the tumult was worse than ever; the gallery stamped like mad; it was a perfect pandemonium.

Then a thought occurred to me. I could get on to the stage from Nyáry's box; I rushed in through the side wings.

I cut a pretty figure I must say. I was splashed up to the knees with mud from scouring the streets all day. I wore huge, dirty overshoes, my tall hat was drenched, so that I could easily have made a crush-hat of it and carried it under my arm.

I looked around me and perceived Egressy. I told him to draw up the curtain, I wanted to harangue the people from the stage.

Then "Queen Gertrude" came towards me. She smiled upon me with truly majestic grace, greeted me and pressed my hand. No sign of fear was to be seen in her face. She was wearing the tricoloured cockade[53] on her bosom, and, of her own accord, she took it off and pinned it on my breast. Then the curtain was raised.

[53] Red, white, and green, the Hungarian colours.

When the mob beheld my drenched and muddy figure, it began to shout afresh, and the uproar gradually became a call for every one to hear me. When at last I was able to make my voice heard, I came out with the following oratorical masterpiece: "Brother citizens! our friend Táncsis is not here. He is at home in the bosom of his family. Allow the poor blind man to taste the joy of seeing his family once more!"

It was only then that I felt I was talking nonsense. How could a "blind man" see his family? If the mob began to laugh I should be done for!

It was the tricoloured ribbon that saved me.

"Do you see," I cried, "this tricoloured cockade on my breast? Let it be the badge of this glorious day! Let every man who is Freedom's warrior wear it; it will distinguish us from the hireling host of slavery! These three colours represent the three sacred words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! Let every one in whom Hungarian blood and a free spirit burns wear them on his breast."

And so the thing was done.

The tricoloured cockade preserved order. Whoever wished to pin on the tricoloured cockade had to hurry home first. Ten minutes later the theatre was empty, and next day the tricoloured cockade was to be seen on every breast, from the paletots of the members of the Casino[54] to the buckram of the populace, and those who went about with mantles on wore the cockade in their hats.

[54] The Nobles' club.

In the intoxication of my triumph I hastened after Rosa Laborfalvy as soon as this scene was over, and pressed her hand.

With that pressure of our hands our engagement began.

I have recorded the whole of this episode in order to explain how it was that that portrait found its way to my table, which was able to convert in an instant the smiling face of the lady with the eyes like the sea into the hideous features of Iblis. Four months had passed away since then.

And the honeymoon was in keeping with the engagement. The roar of cannon and the clash of swords was the music that played at my wedding.

Oh what a marriage night was that!

At the very moment when the happy bridegroom asks his bride, "Dost thou love me as I love thee?" at that very moment there is the roll of drums in the streets, and the cry goes forth, "To arms, citizens!" An Italian regiment had revolted against the Hungarian Government. Without waiting for a kiss or an embrace, I had to snatch up my musket and hurry off to the place of meeting, and thence to go straight into fire among the flying bullets. We had to storm the Károly Barracks. By dawn the mutinous regiment had to lay down its weapons, and the bridegroom, with his face sooty with smoke, returned home, and again put the question to his bride, "Dost thou love me as I love thee?"

And the answer? Ah! the heart alone can feel it, the lips cannot express it.

That was our honeymoon. With the shame of lost battles in our hearts, and despairing even of divine justice, those who can love under such circumstances must love dearly indeed!

And then out into the desolate world, in the midst of a Siberian winter, with everything crackling with cold in a night lit only by the blaze of artillery, forcing one's way along through the snowy deserts of the Alföld[55] with the retreating Honved[56] army! Passing the night in an inhospitable hut where the closed door had frozen to the ground by morning, and the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets aroused us to toil on still farther! Those who can love under such circumstances must love indeed!

[55] The low-land. The name given to the great Hungarian plain.

[56] Defending the country. The title of the Hungarian national forces.

My wife went everywhere with me.

She quitted a comfortable home, sacrificed a fortune, a brilliant career, to endure hunger, cold, and hardship with me. And I never heard her utter one word of complaint. When I was downhearted, she comforted me. And when all my hopes were stifled, she shared her hopes with me. At the new seat of the Hungarian Government, Debreczin, we were huddled together in a tiny little room, compared with which the hut of Peter Gyuricza was a palace from the Thousand-and-one Nights. And my queen worked like a slave, like the wife of a Siberian convict. She worked not for a joke, not in sheer defiance; she did not play the part of a peasant girl, she was a serving-woman in grim earnest.

The hazard of the die of war changed. We advanced. We marched in triumph from one battle-field to another. I was present at the storming of the citadel of Buda. Even in those awful days she never left me, when every night the sky seemed about to plunge down upon our heads.

The brilliant days of triumph were again succeeded by misfortune. The Northern ogre[57] threw all his legions upon us. Again we had to fly, to leave our happy hut, and continue our marriage tour through desolate wildernesses, where savage hordes had devastated whole villages. Our night's lodging was four bare sooty walls, our couch a bundle of charred straw. Hated by strangers, feared by acquaintances, we were a terror to the people from whom we begged a shelter.

[57] Pastliewich, by command of the Tzar, invaded Hungary in 1849, with 100,000 men.

The chaos of war finally parted us. I insisted that she should remain away from me. I could not endure to see her suffering any longer. It was not right that I should accept such sacrifices. I bade her leave me to meet my fate alone.

After the catastrophe of Vilagós[58] my life was ended. That mighty giant, the famous Hungary of our dreams, collapsed into atoms: her great men became grains of dust.

[58] When the Hungarian Commander-in-chief finally capitulated to the Russians.

I also became a nameless, weightless, aimless grain of dust.

The end of all things had arrived. The prophecy of the lady with the eyes like the sea lay literally fulfilled before me. Either the gibbet or suicide was to be my fate. I was twenty-four years of age, and a dead man. My former chief, the brave Catonian, Joseph Molnar, the president of the national court martial, had set me the example. He lay before me on the sward of Vilagós, slain by his own hand. The last hussar breaking his sword was a spectacle he could not bear to survive. Then it was that a burning hand seized my hand. It was hers, the hand of the woman who loved me. When all was lost, her love was not lost. She came after me. She took me with her. She set me free. When all Hungary was already subdued, there was still one corner in our native land where the hand of authority never came. She discovered that corner, and led me thither with her through every hostile camp.

That was "the woman who went along with me."

CHAPTER X

WHERE THE WORLD IS WALLED UP

It required quite a strategical combination to transport me from the town of Vilagós to where the world is boarded up.

This place was selected for me by my wife while she was already in Pest, whence on the approach of the catastrophe she set out from home on a peasant's car to seek me up and down the kingdom. For a time she travelled with the wife of Alexander Körösy, who set her on my track. At the storming of Szegedin we were all within an ace of being blown into the air by the explosion of a powder magazine.

It was a little village called Tordona, deep in the beech forests of Borsod, the name of which was not even to be found on the chart of Francis Karacs.[59] Here the celebrated comedian and scene-painter of the National Theatre, Telepi, had built a house with the intention of seeking an asylum there with his family in troublous times. When the Russians came, he sent thither his wife and his son Charles, who was then a young artist student. Telepi gave my wife this sage piece of advice. "When the bottom of the world falls out, take your husband where nobody will find him." Tordona had taken no part in the Revolution.... The journey was quite an Odyssey. In a small covered peasant's car a lady conveys water-melons to market; the coachman and the footman sit in front together. The footman is myself, the coachman János Rákóczy, who only the day before was Kossuth's secretary. The price of water-melons was a silver tizes[60] a-piece. Our heads were not worth so much as that. The way from Vilagós to Bekes-Gyula is long, and the whole way we were going straight towards the advancing Russian host. Cossacks, lancers, infantry, artillery, gun-carriages, met us at every step, and yet nobody asked us the price of those melons or the price of those heads. It was only the two splendid horses in front of our car which might have raised suspicions that we were not itinerant market-gardeners, although Rákóczy wore the genuine blue livery of a coachman. When we got into the domain of swamp and rushes, a mounted betyár[61] took us under his protection, and guarded us along paths where a carriage had never yet gone, where our horses repeatedly waded up to their breasts in water, till we fought our way through into the endless plain. He would take nothing from us but a "God bless you!"

[59] The first Hungarian engraver (1769-1838). His celebrated map of Hungary was first published in 1813.

[60] The tenth of a florin.

[61] A peasant drover.

Our dear friend János Rákóczy, as an old country gentleman, was a capital coachman so long as he had only to guide the horses, but that part of the stableman's science which deals with harnessing and unharnessing he had never learnt. So when we came to a place in the sweltering heat of the dog-days after a long drive through the vast plain, the very first thing he did was to let the unharnessed horses immediately drink their fill at the spring, and then tie them up in the stable, in consequence of which the shaft horse caught inflammation of the lungs, and expired an hour afterwards. The saddle horse survived as by a miracle. Instead of the deceased horse, therefore, we had to harness another nag, which we picked up on the road for 100 florins. This new horse was a hand and a half smaller than the steed that still remained with us. With this slap-dash team nobody would have taken us any longer for gentry.

We had still to pass through Miskolcz, where the Russians were encamping. Here dwelt my wife's father, the wise and worthy professor Benke Laborfalvy. He pointed out to us the road which led into Tordona. Five hours long we penetrated through dense forests: not a human dwelling place, not a beaten tract was to be seen. A stream cut through the winding valley and along its bank, shifting now to the right hand and now to the left, a sort of path wound its way naturally, without anything like a bridge; for the convenience of foot passengers, huge stones at irregular intervals had been cast into the bed of the racing stream. There, in a deeply hidden, delightful valley, lay the little spot which is walled off from the world.

My wife and I descended at the Telepi's house and were heartily welcomed by our worthy hostess. Rákóczy, with his equipage, had to be lodged in another house. Madame Telepi's brother, my tenderly remembered good friend, the worthy Béni Csányi, dwelt in a house a little farther off. It was he who stabled the horses. Later on I joined him.

He was really a model of a "small country gentleman," such as they ought to be nowadays. An accomplished, intelligent man, speaking, besides his own language, Latin and German, with a thorough knowledge of the law, for which he had been trained, and who, for all that, now went out and ploughed his own land with the aid of a man-servant. He ate his home-made bread, drank his home-brewed wine, welcomed guests with all his heart, and slew a sheep or a pig in their honour. His wife baked and brewed, led the way at the spindle, and sewed her children's clothes with her own hand. They had three sons, and the little money that flowed into the domestic coffers was spent in the schooling of the children. Csányi never borrows, and owes no man anything. His work-room is a joiner and wheelwright's shed; when anything breaks in the wagon he mends it himself: it is his pet pastime. He has a library also, full of such books as Sir Walter Scott's historical work on the French Revolutionary Wars. Newspapers he never reads. If, again, a poem pleases him, he learns it by heart, and passes it on further by word of mouth. He never goes to law with his neighbour, and when two fall out he makes peace between them. But when the cry goes forth, "The fatherland is in danger! Let us make sacrifices for the commonweal!" then he cuts the large silver buttons off his mantle, and lays them on the altar of his country.

I owe it for the most part to this worthy man that I did not lose my reason altogether in these hard times.

Thus we arrived hither. I was saved. I was no longer a dead man. I lived.

But what sort of a life was it? It was the sort of life which belongs to a new-born babe: absolute inability to help one's self. Rákóczy quitted us on the following day. He was off to the Carpathians. There he took service as coachman (naturally under an assumed name) in the family of a wealthy territorial Count. They were more than contented with him, for he was an excellent and honest coachman. But one day a strange misadventure befell him. He was taking the Count and his brother-in-law out for a drive, when the gentleman began talking of the era of Louis XIV., and one of them could not call to mind the name of a celebrated statesman of those days. Then the coachman could not help turning round towards them, and saying, "Colbert!" The Counts immediately dismounted from the coach and went home on foot. The learned coachman, however, was discharged. It is not good to sleep under the same roof with a coachman who knows so much.

My wife and I agreed that she should return to Pest and resume her engagement at the National Theatre there till I should get back my patrimony. Then we would purchase a little property in the depths of the beech forest, close to Béni Csányi, and plough and sow to the end of our days. What else could we do? Our country, our nation, our liberty were now no more. Our souls had no wings. We stuck fast in the mire.

On the very anniversary of our wedding, which was my wife's birthday as well, we parted. Our wedding tour had lasted exactly a year. I wish nobody such another, but I would not exchange all the joys in the world for the recollection of it.

I remained behind in a vast primeval forest, entombed, forgotten.

The latest rumours I got from worthy Béni Csányi, who had taken my wife to Pest, driving his four horses himself all the way from his stable door to the capital. They were evil times there. Haynau had appropriated even the National Theatre for the German players. But the director, worthy János Simoncsics, formerly a Conservative celebrity, protested against the proceedings of the high-handed tyrant, and when Haynau began to haggle with the stiff-necked old magistrate as to how many days a week he would allow the German players to act in the Hungarian National Theatre, brave old Simoncsics replied in his own peculiar Buda-German: "Wen i reden musz, so sag i: amol; wen i reden darf, so sag i: komol."[62] And "komol"[63] it remained.

[62] If I must speak: once; if I may speak: not at all.

[63] Not once.

My wife counselled me not to write to her through the post-office, as the whole town was full of spies. When she wrote to me she would send the letter to her father at Miskolcz, directed to Judith Benke.

Even now I often draw out those love-letters which were written to me and began "My dear Juczi."[64] Even now they light up that endless darkness which I call the cancelled portion of my life.

[64] Contraction for Judith.

From August to the middle of October I knew absolutely nothing of what was going on in the world.

It was a corner of the earth where no visitor ever came, and where the inhabitants themselves went nowhere. Now that winter was approaching, there would be a sledge drive, and communications would be opened up between Tordona and Miskolcz. Then one would be able to convey timber into the town. Of timber there was no lack. Csányi had four hundred acres of virgin forest to forty acres of arable land.

Day after day I rambled up and down these forests that had never heard the voice of man. Never did I meet a fellow creature. However many heights I might ascend, I saw from thence nothing but the smoking chimneys of Tordona. I discovered the source of the stream that sped through the valley. "Linden-spring" was the name they gave it. It was entirely circled by lindens. I hit upon the childish sport of cutting a water-mill out of elder-tree wood, piecing it together, and placing it across the little stream. Thus I amused myself.

One day I received a box of water-colours from my wife. I was immensely delighted. I now had something to occupy myself with all day. I filled a whole album with my landscapes. Then I painted that journey through the plain with a horse and a half in the covered car. I painted my own portrait on a piece of paper no bigger than a finger-nail, which could be inserted in a medallion. I sent it to my wife. Béni Csányi's wife asked me to paint her a portrait of her "old man" also. She wanted it about the size of a kidney bean; she had a medallion just as large as that. This was my only work in that terrible year.

CHAPTER XI

VALENTINE BÁLVÁNYOSSI AND TIHAMÉR RENGETEGI

When the beech-mast began to fall from the trees in the beginning of October, unexpected guests came to us at Tordona—two country gentlemen from the beechwood district. They were kinsmen keeping house together, whose whole estate consisted of forest, and whose whole economy was an enormous herd of swine. They were both jolly thick-set men, with fur pelisses of nicely embroidered sheepskins, and boots of red Russian leather. They had come to rent the beech-mast district in the Tordona forests. Pig just then was an article not quoted in the market. Hungarian money there was none. It had all been destroyed. German money had not yet been introduced. Pig-rearers were therefore obliged to let their herds go into winter quarters. The pigs in question were really fine fellows of the good old Szalonta breed, with legs as long as stags', red bristles and pointed ears; they were half-savage beasts, too, who faced the wolf instead of fleeing from him. They develop but slowly, however; only after two years' time do they become as large as the Mangalicza swine. But they more than atone for this fault by the good quality of wanting neither stall nor sty; winter and summer alike they camp out in the woods and seek their own food, thus costing their masters no more than two florins a head, and three pints of palinka,[65] which is the perquisite of the swine-herd. Each of these kinsmen had a thousand of such pigs.

[65] Hungarian brandy.

And a thousand pigs give a man a lot to think about.

They were good, genial fellows. In fact, they knew not what melancholy meant. It was now the season when the new wine was beginning to ferment. The two kinsmen used to drink it in that state, and I joined them. It went very well with well-peppered swine stew.

They brought a new song with them also, and I learnt it.

"The milk-pail stood behind the door,
The Gendarme came, flopped in and swore!
Dárum-madárum, dárum-madárum!"

From this song I gathered that there was now a being in the world called Gendarme,[66] and also that the Magyars had no very great affection for him.

[66] Zsandar. The name as well as the thing was quite new to Hungary.—Tr.

It was only after supper that the guests began to give me to understand that they did not yet know "whom they had the honour of addressing."

My worthy host constrained his honest features, and introduced me under the pseudonym by which I was known in the village, "Mr. Albert Benke."

"Surely not the actress Rosa Laborfalvy's younger brother, Bebus?"

"Yes, Bebus! the very same."

(That might pass very well. Poor Bebus! he had perished in some out-of-the-way corner during the war.)

"Why, I knew him quite well! I have a lively recollection of his features. Why, 'tis Bebus, of course! And how's your sister? Is it true that she's married?"

"So I have heard."

"To a certain Maurus Jókai, eh? Do you know him?"

"I have never spoken to him."

(And this was quite true.)

"You were one of those theatre-fellows, too, I understand?"

"Yes, I was an actor, certainly."

"I saw you once at Miskolcz. What were you playing then?"

"Claude Frolló in the Tower of Notre Dame."

"And won't you join some other company now?"

"I don't know whether there is one to be found."

"What! There is a troupe all ready at Miskolcz at the present moment. They mean to play at the new theatre during the coming winter, and then they are going to Kassa. Bálványossi wants to put new blood into his company. You know the director, Valentine Bálványossi, don't you?"

I was just on the point of blurting out that he was from the same birthplace as myself. He was, in fact, the person who had coached Bessy in the rôle which she had to play with me in our second dramatic entertainment. All I did say, however, was that I knew him by report.

"Anyhow, he knows you very well. He asks frequently about you. If he only knew that you were loafing about here he would certainly come and see you."

It only needed that!

"I was not aware that he was able to collect together another troupe."

"Oh dear, yes! Why, he's got a prima donna now. She is his wife also. Such a bonny little bride! She'll turn the heads of all the young fellows, I know. But you're in hiding here, are you not?"

"In hiding?"

"Yes, and I tell you what—entre nous, of course—Bálványossi also has reason to make himself scarce."

"Why?"

"Why, because he played such a great part in the Revolution."

"I never heard anything about it."

"Ah! but he might have been a famous man without your hearing anything about it. You also were a comedian during the Revolution, weren't you?"

I allowed him to suppose so.

Then the second kinsman took up his parable. He was better informed than the first one.

"Let me make things clear to you, amice! During the Revolution, the theatre director, Valentine Bálványossi, acted under the name of Tihamér Rengetegi."

"Ah! yes, of course, I remember the name."

"Many a nut has he cracked beneath the very noses of the Germans."

The other kinsman confirmed the statement.

"If they can only catch him they'll make the wind cool his heels for him."

"But that theatre director is really a most knowing rogue," explained the younger kinsman, with a laugh. "During the Revolution, he entered the service of the Hungarian Government and rose to be major. They say he performed prodigies. But at the same time he took the precaution to completely alter his personal appearance. During the Revolution he dyed his beautiful fair hair a deep black, and carefully fostered a gigantic moustache with whiskers to correspond; in that guise he looked exactly like Don Cæsar de Bazan. When, however, things began to go wrong, he speedily had his hair shaved off and his beard also, and is now waiting in retirement till his original fair hair has grown again. Then he will once more come before the world as Valentine Bálványossi; and who will dare to say that there was ever such a person as Tihamér Rengetegi?"

One really must admit that it was a stroke of genius to serve the Revolution with a black-dyed head of hair!

"When he hears that you are strolling about here he will most certainly come and engage you."

It was necessary to put a stop to this forthwith.

"I regret that I shall not remain here very long," I said; "I, too, have to go up to Pest."

"And what is your business at Pest?"

"I want to look out for some appointment."

At this, both the pig-Crœsuses pulled a very wry face. Whoever went to Pest in those days to seek an appointment was looked upon with suspicion. It was as well to have as little as possible to do with such a person.[67]

[67] It was a point of honour with every loyal Hungarian to starve rather than to accept any appointment whatsoever from the Austrian Government.—Tr.

Henceforth the pair of them treated me very superciliously.

I, however, continued to go about and paint landscapes in the vast beech forests. I have those pictures by me still. What splendid motives I had; if only the hand of a true artist had been there to seize them! In the midst of the gloomy virgin forest lay the ruin of a Paulinian cloister—gigantic Gothic walls of grey granite; on the friezes of the pillars winged angel-heads; the pointed arches terminated in flowers, and these stone-flowers were supplemented by the living stone-rose, which grew luxuriantly between the mouldings. Behind the vast blue-shadowed ruin lay the dark beech forest; in front was a spring, which, in wondrous wise, bubbled forth from the roots of a huge prostrate linden. From the summit of the ruin depended a large and ample hazel-nut tree, the foliage of which was now a reddish-brown from the autumn frost, while from the windows the dark-green chaplets of the wild-rose tree hung down in the midst of cornel-shrubs and spindle-plants variegated with scarlet, pink, and vermilion berries. And the floor of the ruin is covered with a tangled carpet of brownish-green angelica. And there is but one single living figure in this vast and silent tableau. From the gloom of the ancient church porch a timidly glancing stag peeps forth like the mythical guiding-star of the Hunnic-Magyar pagan legends. Alas! thou white-antlered hind of our ancient leader Almos, whither hast thou led us? Would that thou hadst left us in Asia! There, at any rate, we should not have been obliged to learn German!

And then that other picture, the mighty stone of the Holy Ghost. This was a rock as large as a tower, which rose from the edge of the table-land. Close beside it were two gigantic beech-trees, whose summits just reached up to the middle of this rock, and Autumn, that great decorative artist, had touched the leaves of one with reddish-brown, and the other with golden-yellow. On the very top of this rock are three trees rich with verdure: how did they ever get up there?

It is possible to scramble up at the risk of one's neck, and from thence one can see fresh pictures to paint. From the dizzy height of the rock a view into a deep valley opens out. The two lines of hill opposite are closed up by a curved and undulating range of other hills. The setting sun lights up the hillside, and bathes the whole scene in transparent lilac mist, while the forest fringe of the summits projects in sharply defined golden lines. Down below, the valley winds along like a dark-green ribbon, and on the spot where it is lost in the evening mist is to be seen a little hut whose kitchen fire twinkles from the depths like a blood-red star. Can any human creature be living there?

But the most magnificent landscape-motive (in which I was happily immersed) was the panorama which presented itself from the "Precipice Stone." This "Precipice Stone" was the highest point of the beech mountain-district. Viewed from Tordona, it was like a projecting mountain-spar, but one could get to the top of it by making a long circuit. This rock was generally the goal of my wanderings. It took half a day to get there and half a day to get back, and at midday I used to kindle a fire of twigs and make a princely banquet of toasted bread and bacon; and then, sitting down on the dizzy edge of the rock, I would tackle the impossible artistic problem—at least it was impossible to me. Beneath my feet, in the foreground, was a dark spot formed by a crown of beech-trees, and where this ended there was a smiling little nook, and in the midst of it tiny, smoky, stony Tordona, with its scattered cottages, surrounded by their yellow dice-like vineyards, and their hills striped with green corn, above which the still darker green beech hills show their heads. Above these crowds the group of the Gömöri Hills, whose shadows are now deepening into lilac; but these again are dominated by the chain of the Trencséni and Turoczi Hills. These hills are of a clouded blue, and above them rises, like a fata Morgana, the princely range of the fair Carpathians, as blue as heaven itself, and only to be distinguished from it by the dividing line of their diamond-like snowy peaks. My skill was, naturally, not equal to such a task. If I succumbed when I struggled with it, that was not my fault.

With a mighty lead-loaded oaken staff in my hand, and a sharp kitchen-knife in my roomy jack-boots, I deemed myself sufficient to cope with any wolf I might meet on the way. As for a musket, those who had them took good care to keep them well hidden. Rumour said that to be found with a musket was as much as a man's life was worth.

The middle of October had come.

Another guest now arrived at Tordona. This time it was a heartily welcome guest, the merry-minded Telepi. He had come to fetch his little Charlie that he might take him abroad for his education. He was the favourite comic actor of the National Theatre.... He had a round face, a round figure, and was all vivacity, with sparkling eyes, pointed eyebrows, and tiny pointed moustache; it was just as if he had four eyebrows and four moustaches: he was Hungarian humour personified.

'Twas he who brought me my first news from the outside world: the horrible events of the October days, the inconceivable deeds of horror done by a madman,[68] who was not even sufficiently punished by being burned alive twice.

[68] Haynau.—An allusion to the massacre of Hungarian prisoners and the brutalities inflicted on their wives.—Tr.

Fortunately, I heard these things from a joking, smiling, devil-may-care, comic mouth! For Telepi knew how to season the tidings with so many happy anecdotes and comforting assurances that he quite turned the edge off the murderous knife. And then he was so full of optimism. "Our time is coming," he would say. "England and France are hastening to our assistance. The Turks are arming, the Americans are showing their fists." And when I shook my head at all this, he comforted me with the assurance that an amnesty was at hand.

But when we were quite alone, and nobody else was listening, then he told me everything frankly, and without embellishment.

My wife would have come herself, but she had been ailing; in fact she had been very ill. She was better now. As soon as she could leave her bed she would hasten to me at Tordona. I might expect her this very month. My wife had a plan whereby she hoped to free me completely, so that I should not be exposed to persecution any more. What it was, however, she could not tell me. She only begged one thing of me, but that she begged most earnestly, and it was this: until she came to me I was to show myself nowhere, hold no communication with anybody, let nothing be known of my whereabouts. I was not even to write a letter, for they might recognise my handwriting, and then all would be over. So I had to solemnly promise that I would go nowhere, and speak to nobody whatever but the good and honest men of Tordona. I gave my word upon it.

My wife sent me at the same time a warm winter overcoat, a large fur cap, and a pair of double-soled Russia-leather boots. Winter was approaching, and I should have to spend it here among the forests. Telepi also brought me a little silver money from my wife, for bank-notes were of no use here. She also sent me some coffee. That, too, was not to be had here, and I am fond of it in the morning. In the course of the conversation, Telepi inadvertently let out that my wife had sold her emeralds, had gone into pokey lodgings, and was living very sparingly. "But what's the good of fretting?" he added. "The God of the Magyars is still alive!" I shall never forget that jocose, smiling face, when, in the midst of his magnanimous assurances, a tear suddenly rolled down his round, red countenance!

Then I gave all the pictures I had painted hitherto to Telepi, that he might take them home to my wife.

CHAPTER XII

THE MEETING AT THE PAGAN ALTAR

After Telepi had gone back, a deep melancholy took possession of me.

My wife was ill, and I had never even dreamt of the possibility of such a thing. What if she were to die without being able to exchange a last adieu? She wants to set me free, she says; but how? She cannot tell me. She cannot tell anybody. Why should she have any secrets from me? Ah! that green-eyed monster is a bad guide to the imagination. A celebrated actress can so readily find protectors. Perhaps they are men in authority, who hold life and death in their hands. Oh, eternal darkness, do not deprive me of the light of my reason! Suppose I were to gain readmittance into the world at such a price as that! This condition of mind was becoming absolutely unendurable.

Sometimes the desire seized me to rush out of the forest, knock at the door of the first Commandant I came to, and give up my name: "I am that notorious rebel—take my head, I'll pay the price!"

But my given word, my word of honour, held me back. Ah! a man's word of honour must be kept, even though it be only given to his wife.

I had promised to go nowhere. But surely the forest is nowhere, and that Precipice Stone is, indeed, the most out-of-the-way nowhere in the whole world. Thither no man ever goes. Thither at least I am free to go.

My first, not very successful, picture of the great panorama I had sent to my wife. I would now have another try at it.

One fine autumn morning I again took up my lead-loaded stick, and said to my dear good hostess that she was not to expect me home to dinner that day, as I was going to scramble up to the Pagan Altar and sketch there.

The gentry call this rocky pinnacle the Pagan Altar; the peasants call it the Precipice Stone.

"But don't stay long," said Mrs. Csányi; "suppose your dearest were to arrive in the meantime?"

My dearest! As if she thought of seeking me out! They only put me off with promises, just as they tell a sick child that he shall have a rocking-horse when he gets well. It was exactly seven weeks since she had left me. What an endless time!

I made my way at once towards the linden spring, and thence up the forest hill-side by the often-trodden familiar path. The nuts came showering down; the frost had already tweaked the Cornelian cherries. I crammed my knapsack full of both: I shall have a luxurious banquet to-day. I also found a large coral-coloured mushroom; roasted in embers, it would make a tit-bit worthy of a gourmet.

It was about ten o'clock when I got up to the Pagan Altar.

When I went out upon the rocky ledge, a truly wondrous scene spread itself out before me; it was quite certain that I should never be able to paint it. The whole kingdom was under the sea! The autumn mist, like a snow-cloud, covered the whole landscape to the very horizon, from which towered vast snowy peaks and snowy cupolas; in other places the misty mantle resembled frozen waves, out of which here and there rose round, blackish islands, the peaks of the higher mountains. It was a faithful image of reality: nothingness. There was nothing left now.

I could calculate pretty surely on the mist descending at midday, and painting field and forest with frost; but till then I could sketch nothing.

So I lay down upon the rocky ledge, and marvelled at this motionless, huge, white winding-sheet which covered a whole realm. I had no thought of eating now. I hung up my knapsack with my bread and bacon on a spruce-fir tree, and when I had looked my fill of wonder at the sea of mist, I watched the itinerant ants who, following their regular road, crept right over my body, never troubling themselves very much about the circumstance that a giant, like a mountain range, lay right across their path.

At this height not even the thrush's whistle broke the stillness.

The sun shone down. Not a breeze was stirring. My head was resting on a large green mossy stone; I felt like dropping off to sleep.

All at once, as if I really were dreaming, from somewhere not very far off a song rang out:—

"Lo! on the mountain top
A valiant man doth stand,
And on his trusty weapon rests
His stalwart good right hand."

It was a man's voice, and I seemed to recognise it.

My first feeling was joy. I was about to meet some old acquaintance in that vast wilderness. It only occurred to me afterwards that this would be contrary to my compact. I was to meet no man who could possibly recognise me.

But it was too late to avoid him now. Only one single path led up to the summit of the Precipice Stone, whether one came from Tordona or from Malyinka, and my songster was evidently coming from the latter place.

The next verse of the song sounded very much nearer:—

"Lo! on his kalpag[69] see
A blood-red nodding plume;
A mantle black surrounds his neck,
His wild eye lowers with gloom."

[69] The tall fur hat, generally plumed, which forms part of the Hungarian national costume.

And now I heard a woman's voice also.

Some one was telling the singer not to sing while climbing.

So there was a pair of them!

And as the singer gradually mounted higher and higher, his figure also became visible from behind the rocky ledge.

"Presumptuous mortal, quake and fear
When thou his awful name dost hear:
Diavolo, Diavolo, Diavolo!"

Yet nobody quaked so much as Fra Diavolo himself, when he perceived a human shape stretched before him on the ground as he scaled the very summit of the rocky ledge.

And certainly I was not a very reassuring spectacle, as, with my sheepskin cap pressed closely to my head, and a large cudgel in my fist, I slowly rose from my knees.

I recognised him before he recognised me.

"Your servant, Bálványossi! Why, how did you manage to get here, where not even the bird that flies can come?"

Then his terror was turned into joy.

"Ah, ha! my poet-friend! What a divine encounter here in Heaven above!" With that he hastened up to me and we embraced.

By this time his lady companion had also got the better of the rocky zig-zag which led up to the mountain ledge.

It was now the turn of my own heart to stop beating. That female shape was Bessy—the sea-eyed beauty!

How came they two to be together? How came they to be both here at the same time?

But it was no vision. The fair lady recognised me instantly. Her face, red already from her mountain scramble, could be no redder at the sight of me, nor could her bosom heave more than it was heaving now; but on her face there was a sort of holding-back expression.

Friend Valentine perceived the look of amazed inquiry on my face, and turning with true histrionic humour towards his lady-companion, introduced her to me with the words, "My grandmother!"

At this witticism the lady laughed, and I had sufficient self-control not to reply to this introduction with a single word.

"Then come to my bosom, my son, for I am thy grandfather."

"It is very strange we should meet here," I put in.

But my friend's features suddenly darkened as if he were obeying a stage direction like, "here he suddenly assumes a grave face."

"First of all, my dear friend," said he, "I demand your word of honour not to reveal to any one in the created world that you have seen me. You know that I am now Tihamér Rengetegi till the old blonde hair grow again (what I'm wearing now is a wig); for a heavy price is fixed upon my head. A word, and I am lost. Your parole that you'll say nothing about me?"

"The promise must be mutual, then," I replied. "I just as solemnly require you to say not a word to anybody about me, for I also am in hiding here."

At this he began to laugh. It was a stage laugh, for he placed his hand on his stomach, crooked his back, and turned upon his heel, choking with laughter.

"And you also are hiding away here from the Germans! Well, that is a joke!"

I inquired somewhat brusquely what there was to laugh at.

"Why, at your hiding—hiding away from the Imperialists. You, of all people! Why, don't you know, then, that very many deputies defended themselves before the court-martials by declaring themselves former contributors to your Esti Lap?[70] Why, every one knows that you were the organ of the peace party at Debreczin. Every one is well aware that you were the ally of the Imperialists."

[70] Evening News.

At this I at once flew into a rage.

"Have you ever seen the Esti Lap?"

"No, I've not actually seen it, but it was the general opinion among us soldiers that you were higgling with the Imperialists."

At this Bessy intervened by giving a good tug at her friend's collar.

"Rubbish! Such rumours are only circulated by pot-house heroes like yourself. He certainly was no traitor! Would that all who open their mouths so loudly were as good patriots?"

My friend, with sheepish obsequiousness, hastened to readjust his opinion to the satisfaction of his "grandmother."

"Good, good! I never believed a word of it myself—why should I?" said he.

"The best proof that I am not what calumny would make me is the fact of my meeting you here at the Pagan Altar; and again I beg of you to tell nobody that we have met."

Here Bessy again intervened.

"I'll answer for that. I shall now be constantly at the side of this honest gentleman, and if his tongue begins to wag, my hand will be ready to stop it for him."

Mr. Valentine laughed.

"What a woman it is! She really has a most rapid hand. Not a day passes but she lets me feel the weight of her palm."

At this I made a very critical face. My good friend could read very well from it that I wished to know by what right his cheeks were allowed to feel the force of Bessy's rosy palms day by day.

"We met together in camp, and the field-chaplain blessed our union to the roaring of guns and the beating of drums."

That was right enough, surely!

Bessy's eyes were raised towards me as if she could add a great deal to this short history. Friend Valentine thought it good to become loudly enthusiastic.

"What a woman, my friend! A heroine! A perfect Jeanne d'Arc! We were bound together by a whole chain of wonders and exploits. She was not my consort—nay! she was much more, my companion in arms. I'll tell you the whole thing one of these days."

"That will do...."

"What? That will do? Are you, then, so poor-spirited? I am ready to meet the spectres of the darkness face to face. I'll set in motion the avalanche which shall wrench the world from its hinges."

I left him to set his avalanche in motion while I went to gather dry twigs and leaves and make a heap of them. Meanwhile Valentine declaimed to the clouds.

"What a spectacle! The whole realm a sea! We stand alone, like the co-operating Demiurges at the creation, in the face of chaos."

"Have you got your troupe together?" I inquired, thus bringing him down at once from his pedestal.

"My troupe? That's just what I am going about now. Brutus must play the fool until his day has come. But when once the hour of retribution arrives, we will rise as one man and win back our outraged liberties."

"With my bludgeon, I suppose?"

"Oh, not with that sort of thing," said friend Valentine, with haughty condescension. "I have no secret to hide from you. An American hero of freedom has invented a weapon which, placed in the hand of a simple citizen, will give him an irresistible advantage over the hireling soldiery. Its English name is 'revolver.' I have one by me. Thanks to my acquaintances beyond the ocean, I have managed to provide myself with it. Look here!"