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 glass
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 Bogdán 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 nobody 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 Bogdán 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 pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed
description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who
had shared Bogdán'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 Bogdán 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 Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to
timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the
shells, 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 Bogdán 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 hoarse 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 passenger to pass through. John Bogdán
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 pass through--without a word!
Poor John Bogdán'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 Bogdán. 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 "Hello, 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 Bogdán 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 Bogdán groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then
sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing
in the glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did
that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the
damned 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 Bogdán 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 Bogdán, 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 Bogdán was certain, the man sitting on the bench there
was no longer John Bogdán 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 Bogdán, 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 glass 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 Bogdán 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 Bogdán 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 Bogdán 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, Bogdán?"
He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the
next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was
Mihály the humpback.
There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county,
whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially
in a surge of gratitude. 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 Bogdán's scarred face
curiously, and he shook his head in pity.
"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."
Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.
"It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come
into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't
have done anything to me."
The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the
least sign of being insulted.
"The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked
drily. "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not
surprise me. Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up
their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich
of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as
well as you did."
"I do," Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if
you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in
the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his
cradle so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in
the battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to
eating from golden plates."
The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.
"There are all sorts of people," he observed, and was about to add
something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.
This Bogdán always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed
to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors
because he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery
and silver buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in
defense of their own wealth, and now the man sat there disfigured, with
only one eye, and still would not permit any criticism of his gracious
employers. Against such stupidity there was nothing to be done. There
was no use wasting a single word on him.
The two remained sitting for a while in silence. Bogdán filled his pipe
carefully and deliberately, and Mihály watched him with interest.
"Are you going to the castle?" the humpback asked cautiously, when the
pipe was at last lit.
John Bogdán was well aware just what the hateful creature was aiming
at. He knew him. A Socialist--that's what he was, one of those
good-for-nothings who take the bread out of poor people's mouths by
dinning a lot of nonsense into their ears, just like a mean dog who
snaps at the hand that feeds him. He had made a good living as foreman
in the brickyard, and as thanks he had incited all the workmen against
the owner, Bogdán's master, until they demanded twice as much wages, and
were ready to set fire to the castle on all four corners. Once Mihály
had tried his luck with him, too. He had wanted to make his master out a
bad man. But this time he had bucked up against the right person. A
box on his right ear and a box on his left ear, and then a good sound
kick--that was the answer to keep him from ever again trying to make a
Socialist of John Bogdán, one of those low fellows who know no God or
fatherland.
Mihály moved on the bench uneasily, every now and then scrutinizing his
neighbor from the side. At last he plucked up courage and said suddenly:
"They'll probably be glad up there that you are back. Your arms are
still whole, and they need people in the factory."
Bogdán turned up his nose.
"In the brickyard?" he asked disdainfully.
The humpback burst out laughing.
"Brickyard? Brickyard is good. Who needs bricks in war? The brickyard's
gone long ago, man. Do you see those trucks over there? They are all
loaded up with shells. Every Saturday a whole train of shells leaves
here."
Bogdán listened eagerly. That was news. A change on the estate of which
he had not yet heard.
"You see, there is such a nice division," Mihály continued, smiling
sarcastically. "One goes away and lets his head be blown off. The other
remains comfortably at home and manufactures shells and decorates his
castle with thousand-dollar bills. Well, I'm satisfied."
"What are we to do, eh, shoot with peas or with air? You can't carry on
a war without shells. Shells are needed just as much as soldiers."
"Exactly. And because the rich have the choice of being soldiers or
making shells, they choose to make the shells and send _you_ off to
have your head blown off. What are you getting for your eye? Twenty-five
dollars a year? Or perhaps as much as fifty? And the others whom the
ravens are feeding on don't get even that out of the war. But the
gentleman up in the castle is making his five hundred a day and doesn't
risk even his little finger doing it. I'd be a patriot on those terms
myself. I am telling you the truth. At first, of course, they said he
was going to war, and he did actually ride off in great state, but three
weeks later he was back here again with machines and all the equipment,
and now he delivers fine orations in the townhouse and sends other men
off to die--and on top of it is gallant to the wives left behind. He
stuffs his pockets and fools with every girl in the factory. He's the
cock of the whole district."
Bogdán, his brows knit in annoyance, let the man talk on. But the last
part struck him with a shock. He pricked up his ears and grew uneasy and
for a while struggled heroically against asking a question that burned
on his lips. But in the end he could not restrain himself and blurted
out:
"Is--is Marcsa working in the factory, too?"
The humpback's eyes flashed.
"Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa! I should say so! She's been made a
forelady, though they say she's never had a shell in her hands, but, to
make up, the lord's hands have--"
With a short, hoarse growl John Bogdán flew at the humpback's throat,
squeezed in his Adam's apple, pressing it into his neck, and held him
in a merciless clutch. The man beat about with his arms, his eyes popped
from his head in fright, his throat gurgled, and his face turned livid.
Then John Bogdán released his hold, and Mihály fell to the ground and
lay there gasping. Bogdán quickly gathered up his things and strode
off, taking long, quick steps, as if afraid of arriving too late for
something in the castle.
He gave not another look back at Mihály the humpback, never turned
around once, but quietly went his way and for a long while felt the warm
throat in his hand.
What was a man who lay gasping on the road to him? One man more or less.
In the rhythmic regularity of the marching column, he had passed by
thousands like him, and it had never occurred to his mind, dulled by
weariness, that the grey spots thickly strewn over the fields, the heaps
lining the roadway like piles of dung in the spring, were human beings
struck down by death. He and his comrades had waded in the dead, there
at Kielce, when they made a dash across the fields, and earthy grey
hands rose out of every furrow pawing the air, and trousers drenched
in blood and distorted faces grew out of the ground, as if all the
dead were scrambling from their graves for the Last Judgment. They
had stepped and stumbled over corpses. Once the fat little officer of
reserves, to the great amusement of his company, had gotten deathly sick
at his stomach because he had inadvertently stepped on the chest of a
half-decayed Russian, and the body had given way under him, and he had
scarcely been able to withdraw his foot from the foul hole. John Bogdán
smiled as he recalled the wicked jokes the men had cracked at the
officer's expense, how the officer had gone all white and leaned against
a tree and carried on like a man who has much more than quenched his
thirst.
The road glowed in the mid-day sun. The village clock struck twelve.
From the hill yonder came, like an answer, the deep bellow of the
factory whistle, and a little white cloud rose over the tops of the
trees. Bogdán quickened his pace, running rather than walking, heedless
of the drops of sweat that ran down and tickled his neck. For almost a
year he had breathed nothing but the hospital atmosphere, had smelled
nothing but iodoform and lysol and seen nothing but roofs and walls.
His lungs drew in the aroma of the blossoming meadows with deep
satisfaction, and the soles of his boots tramped the ground sturdily, as
if he were again marching in regular order.
This was the first walk he had taken since he was wounded, the first
road he had seen since those wild marches on Russian soil. At moments he
seemed to hear the cannons roaring. The short struggle with the humpback
had set his blood coursing, and his memories of the war, for a time
stifled as it were beneath a layer of dust by the dreary monotony of the
hospital life, suddenly came whirling back to him.
He almost regretted having let that damned blackguard go so soon. One
moment more, and he would never have opened his blasphemous mouth again.
His head would have fallen back exhausted to one side, he would once
again have embraced the air longingly with outspread fingers, and then
in a flash would have shrunk together, exactly like the fat, messy
Russian with the large blue eyes who was the first man to present
himself to St. Peter with a greeting from John Bogdán. Bogdán had not
let _him_ loose until he had altogether quit squirming. He had choked
him dead as a doornail. And still he was a comical fellow, not nearly so
disgusting as that rascally humpback. But he was the first enemy soldier
whom he had got into his grasp, his very first Russian. A magnificent
array of others had followed, though the fat man was the only one Bogdán
had choked to death. He had smashed scores with the butt-end of his gun
and run his bayonet through scores of others. He had even squashed with
his boots the wretch who had struck down his dearest comrade before his
very eyes. But never again did he choke a man to death. That was why
the little fat fellow stuck in his memory. He had no recollection of
the others whatever. All he saw now in his mind was a tangle of
greyish-green uniforms. And as he thought of his heroic deeds, the
gnashing, the stamping, the gasping, and the cursing of the hand-to-hand
encounters resounded in his ears. How many, he wondered, had he sent
to the other world? God alone may have counted them. He himself had
had enough to do trying to save his own skin. Had a man stopped to look
around, he would have carried his curiosity to the next world.