Eyes Like the Sea Part 17

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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 Karoly 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Alfold[55] with the retreating Honved[56] army! Pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstances must love indeed!

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

[Footnote 56: Defending the country. The t.i.tle 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.

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

[Footnote 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 Vilagos, 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 Vilagos 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 Korosy, 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 n.o.body 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 Janos Rakoczy, 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 Vilagos 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 n.o.body 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 Rakoczy wore the genuine blue livery of a coachman. When we got into the domain of swamp and rushes, a mounted _betyar_[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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s in water, till we fought our way through into the endless plain. He would take nothing from us but a "G.o.d bless you!"

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

[Footnote 60: The tenth of a florin.]

[Footnote 61: A peasant drover.]

Our dear friend Janos Rakoczy, 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 n.o.body would have taken us any longer for gentry.

We had still to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sengers, 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. Rakoczy, with his equipage, had to be lodged in another house. Madame Telepi's brother, my tenderly remembered good friend, the worthy Beni Csanyi, 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.

Csanyi 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 pa.s.ses 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 b.u.t.tons 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. Rakoczy quitted us on the following day. He was off to the Carpathians. There he took service as coachman (naturally under an a.s.sumed 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 Beni Csanyi, 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 n.o.body 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 Beni Csanyi, 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 Janos 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.

[Footnote 62: If I _must_ speak: once; if I _may_ speak: not at all.]

[Footnote 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.

[Footnote 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. Csanyi 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 alb.u.m 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. Beni Csanyi'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.