WELTSCHMERZ CONDITIONS[25]--"REMAIN OR FLY!"
[Footnote 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.
[Footnote 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.
[Footnote 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.
[Footnote 28: "The Hangman's Rope." It certainly is a wretched
performance.--TR.]
[Footnote 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!"
[Footnote 30: When the Hungarian revolution of 1848 began.]
[Footnote 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!"