Men in War Part 10

VI. HOME AGAIN

At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.

John Bogdan leaned way out of the train window and looked at everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory.

Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came within an ace of upsetting the carriage.

John Bogdan drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those d.a.m.ned city folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face.

A bunch of d.a.m.ned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime--all of them, the great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise.

And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.

With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.

Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing to a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different colors. His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of bloated raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly!

A fright! And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow, deep enough to hold a man's finger. And it was for this he had let himself be tortured so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen times, like a patient sheep, into that confounded room with the gla.s.s walls and the shining instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the recollection of the tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth, just to look like a human being again and be able to go back home to his bride.

And now he _was_ home.

The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf acacias in front of the station-master's hut sent a greeting through the window. Grimly John Bogdan dragged his heavy bag through the train corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss, looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.

He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy beads of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had he come here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home soil for which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him for the hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours before, full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all those men wrapped in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or disfigured. There n.o.body was revolted by the sight of his mutilated face, no indeed. On the contrary, most of them envied him. He was at least capable of going back to work, his arms and legs were sound, and his right eye was perfect. Many would have been ready to exchange places with him. Some had begrudged him his lot and said it was wrong for the government to have granted him a pension on account of losing his left eye. One eye and a face a little scratched up--what was that compared with a wooden leg, a crippled arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed and rattled like a poor machine at the slightest exertion?

Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdan was looked upon as a lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages were removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred opinions were p.r.o.nounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who had shared Bogdan's room with him from the start described the former awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken part in the successful operations.

Thus John Bogdan had gradually become almost vain of his shocking mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he left the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a sensation in his village.

And now?

Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a distance before him, John Bogdan suddenly felt himself a prey to timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the sh.e.l.ls, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not dreamed of in the hospital.

He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that he had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdan who was known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful contrast between the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had sung out a last hoa.r.s.e farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first day of mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing in front of the same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered cheekbone, a patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and cast down, as if it were only that morning that he had met with the misfortune.

At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard, Kovacs--since the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been somewhere on the Russian front--talking and holding the ticket-puncher, impatiently waiting for the last pa.s.senger to pa.s.s through. John Bogdan saw her, and his heart began to beat so violently that he involuntarily lingered at each step. Would she recognize him, or would she not? His knee joints gave way as if they had suddenly decayed, and his hand trembled as he held out the ticket.

She took the ticket and let him pa.s.s through--without a word!

Poor John Bogdan's breath stopped short.

But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his voice:

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?" the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then quickly turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight.

He wanted to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured "Jesus, son of Mary," as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered on, deeply wounded.

"She did not recognize me!" the blood hammered in his ears. "She did not recognize me--did not recognize me!" He dragged himself to the bench opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on the seat.

She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did not recognize John Bogdan. The house of her parents stood next to the house of his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had been confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and kissed her, heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the village to woo her. And _she_ had not recognized him! Not even by his voice, so great was the change.

He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling of the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so hideously disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive curse, and then his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a deserted woman.

What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants'

quarters, and call out a saucy "h.e.l.lo, Marcsa" to the astonished girl?

That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often he had painted the picture to the dot--the maids' screaming, Marcsa's cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to his awed, attentive listeners.

But now--how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face that had made Julia, the station-guard's wife, cross herself in fright?

Wasn't Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and haughty ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them, made fools of them all, until she finally fell in love with him.

John Bogdan thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing.

Then he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.

Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had gone through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an excellent jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his horses, as his horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the women as he dashed by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come to their faces. Only with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she was famous for her beauty far and wide. Even John's master, the lord of the castle, had patted him on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa and he had become engaged.

"A handsome couple," the pastor had said.

John Bogdan groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing in the gla.s.s was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the d.a.m.ned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together--what did it have to do with _that_ John Bogdan whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the war? For Marcsa there was only _one_ John Bogdan, the one that was coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying--that's what they would put him to--cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife of a miserable day laborer?

No, of this John Bogdan was certain, the man sitting on the bench there was no longer John Bogdan to Marcsa. She would not have him now--no more than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is a cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdan, not to the fright that he was bringing back home to her.

His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!

He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the cursed mirror, until the gla.s.s broke into bits and cut his hand. The blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl?

Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and experiences, John Bogdan suddenly thought of one of the village characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself, his leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and then he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by the children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community.

"In the service of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.

John Bogdan gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.

So deep was John Bogdan sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front of him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle.

Suddenly a voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged into his face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he heard some one say:

"Is that you, Bogdan?"

He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was Mihaly the humpback.

There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county, whose hand John Bogdan would not at that moment have grasped cordially in a surge of grat.i.tude. But this humpback--he never had wanted to have anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the only disfigured person in the place.

"Yes, it's I. Well?"

The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdan's scarred face curiously, and he shook his head in pity.

"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."

Bogdan snarled at him like a vicious cur.