A LEADER OF THE PEOPLE.
The other rector, Mr. Thomas Bodza, had read a lot of things in the
course of his life.
He had read the history of Themistocles who, with a handful of Greeks,
converted millions of Persians into rubbish heaps; he had read of the
exploits of the valiant Marahas, who, when one of their warriors flung
his sandal into the air and uttered thrice the word: "Marha, Marha,
Marha!" swept the Roman legions from the face of Pannonia; he had learnt
from the Spanish historian all about Ferdinand VII., who chased the
Moors from the Alhambra where they had held sway for hundreds of years;
he had read of the Scythian Bertezena, who, starting in life as a simple
smith had delivered his race from the grinding yoke of the Geougs;--and
finally he had not only read but learnt by heart all the great works of
our savants in which it is demonstrated with the most exact scholarship
and the most inflexible logic, that the Greeks, the Marahas, the
Spaniards, the Scythians, and, in fact, all the most famous nations of
the earth have originated from a single powerful race which numbers
among its chiefest branches, such noble nations as the Russians, the
Poles, the Bohemians, and the Croats, &c., inasmuch as the languages of
all these various nations are so crammed with original Slavonic words,
that if these words were suddenly demanded back from them by their
rightful owners, any sort of verbal intercourse amongst the nations in
question would be henceforth impossible.
All this Thomas Bodza had read and crammed into his head. Once he had
even written a dissertation in which, with astonishing profundity and
ingenuity, he had demonstrated the striking resemblance and the
identical significance of the Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}
{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} and the Slavonic _tiszi_, which
dissertation was received with general applause in the local mutual
improvement society where he recited it.
In his library were to be found all those learned tomes which do our
dear native land the honour of only noticing her in order to disparage
her, attributing _inter alia_ a Slavonic origin to all our chief towns,
and forcing upon us the crushing conviction that we Hungarians cannot
even call a single water-course our own, inasmuch as all our rivers rise
in other countries--certainly a most depressing, poverty-stricken state
of things, especially as regards our cattle dealers and boatmen, who, of
course, can do so little without water.
After long-continued scientific investigations, materially assisted by a
vigorous imagination, Thomas Bodza had constructed a map of his own, in
which the various countries appeared in a shape diverging essentially
from that which they actually occupy, and indeed only the figure of the
virgin Europa, and the outlines of the unchangeable water-courses made
one suspect that it was a representation of the old world at all. Not
only did the boundaries of the realm suffer strange permutations, but
the classical termination "grad,"[5] unusual and unnatural as it seemed
to all but the initiated, was tacked on pretty frequently to the names
of purely Hungarian towns both small and great; and there was also
noticeable this slight and fanciful deviation from the strict truth, to
wit, that whereas cities of unappropriatable Asiatic origin like
Debreczen, Kecskemet, Nagy-Koeros, and others, appeared degraded into
insignificant villages by being marked with tiny points, every little
twopenny-halfpenny Slavonic village in the Carpathians was magnified
into a cathedral city, or starred to represent a formidable fortress.
[Footnote 5: The Slavonic word for "town," thus Constantinople is
Tsargrad.]
The worthy paedagogue used to sit brooding over this map for hours. He
would draw his boundaries with a pair of compasses, construct imaginary
roads from town to town, and reconstruct a fortress from the imposing
ruins in the bed of the River Waag. Nay, he even ventured upon the
audacious experiment of cutting through the mountain chain separating
the River Hernad from the River Poprad, and uniting these two rivers (in
a state of nature they flow in diametrically opposite directions) into
one broad continuous water-course, thus bringing together all the
various branches of that scattered family of kindred nations which
dwells between the White Sea and the Black.
In those days very little was known among us of railways beyond the
rumour (the newspapers mentioned it as a sort of curiosity) that a
certain Englishman, called William Griffiths, wanted to make a
wheel-track of iron. Thomas Bodza's idea therefore of a continuous
European waterway almost deserved to be called sublime.
Such exaltation is innocent enough in itself. It is found, more or less,
in every race, and is especially vigorous wherever an impoverished,
orphaned stock is aware of the existence of a powerful, dominating,
gigantic kinsman beyond a mountain range.[6] Unfortunately, however,
this exaltation did not remain an empty poetical dream in the bosom of
our village paedagogue.
[Footnote 6: _E.g._, The Slovaks in north Hungary, who know that Russia
lies beyond the Carpathians.]
Even as a student his heart was full of a bitter hatred of everything
Hungarian. He went to school at Pressburg, that peculiar town where the
traders are German, the gentry Hungarian, and the poor Slavonic. The
traders pick holes in the gentry and the poor folks hate them both. He
saw the heady young squires of the _Alfoeld_[7] idle away their time at
school in unedifying contrast to the diligent sober conduct of himself
and his friends, and yet the masters treated them with the greatest
distinction. Some of them scarcely attended the lectures at all, and yet
they sat on the front benches. They were able to have private lessons,
and thus easily outstripped the poor scholars who had to slave night and
day to keep pace with them. They marched about in fine clothes and got
their poorer fellow-students to copy out their exercises for them. At
the public examinations they declaimed Hungarian verses with such
emphasis, with such a fire of enthusiasm, that even that portion of the
audience which did not understand a word of their fulminating periods
cheered them vociferously, whereas he, Thomas Bodza, recited the
affected, pedestrian, poetic effusions of the Slavonic School of
self-improvement without the slightest effect. Even in the rude arena of
material strength the Asiatic race showed a determination to be
paramount. The youths of the _Alfoeld_ were the better wrestlers, more
skilful in gymnastic exercises, and in all serious encounters asserted
themselves with more self-confidence and greater enthusiasm; they
boasted ostentatiously of their nationality, and scornfully looked down
upon his.
[Footnote 7: The great Hungarian plain.]
And then, too, during the sessions of the Diet, when the haughty
Hungarian gentry flocked to the capital from every quarter of the realm
with extraordinary pomp and splendour, a new and clamorous life filled
all the streets, and the brilliant visitors monopolized every yard of
free space. It frequently happened, in the evenings, that a dozen or so
of high-spirited _jurati_ would join hand to hand, occupy the whole
road, and squeeze against the wall any shabby-coated alienist who
happened to come in their way. The poor devil might be carrying home his
meagre _jusculum_[8] under his mantle in a coarse unvarnished pot, with
a piece of brown bread stuck into it, revolving in his mind the whole
time the story of another poor scholar in days gone by who, once upon a
time, used, in the same way, to carry home his humble mess of pottage in
just such another coarse earthenware pot, and who, nevertheless, came to
be one of the princes, one of the great men of Hungary, with a great big
coat of arms, and castles to dwell in. He forgot, however, to reflect
that he, with whom he compared his own fate, was gifted at the outset
with intellect and virile courage, qualities with which he himself had
only been very modestly equipped by nature; their common misery in early
life was the sole point of resemblance between them.
[Footnote 8: Pottage.]
These first bitter impressions never left his mind. He registered the
disfavour of fortune and the fruits of his own limited capacity among
the grievances of the oppressed nationality to which he belonged. Years
of want, his little dilapidated dwelling--granted him in his capacity of
village teacher but shoved away into an obscure corner of Hetfalu--his
meagre barley-bread, his sordid frock-coat--all these things aggravated
the anguish of his soul.
His occasional intercourse with the lord of the manor, the arrogant and
pretentious Hetfalusy, was not calculated to reconcile him with his
destiny. Hetfalusy regarded as a profitless loafer every man who did not
seek his bread with spade and hoe, unless, of course, he happened to be
a gentleman by birth. He applied this theory to the schoolmaster race
especially, whom he conceived to have been invented for the express
purpose of eternally hounding on the common folks against their lawful
masters, the gentry. As if the world could not go on comfortably without
the peasant learning his letters! What he heard in church was quite
enough for him surely! On one occasion, when mention was made in his
presence of a village shepherd who had forged a bank-note, he observed
that if the fellow had not learnt to write he would never have gone
astray. The national school teachers, he said, were the natural
attorneys of the agricultural population as against the landlords. And
Hetfalusy gave practical expression to his belief whenever he had the
chance. The corn he was bound to supply to the schoolmaster was always
measured out to him from the bottom of the sieve; he seized the
courtyard of the school for his threshers, so that during school-time
not a word of the lessons could be heard for the racket; he never
repaired the building set apart for the cultivation of the muses, but
looked on while the schoolmaster himself patched up the holes in his
wall with balls of clay borrowed from his own garden, and re-thatched
the dilapidated rush-roof with his own hand. Frequently he would rate
the schoolmaster in the public thoroughfare, in the presence of the
gaping rustics, on the flimsiest pretext, and bully him as if he were
the lowest of his menials.
Thomas Bodza totted up all these outrages on the back of his map, and
whenever he was immersed in that odd production, his eyes always
fastened themselves on three red crosses which he had marked over the
little town which indicated Hetfalu; and at all such times he would
heave a deep sigh, as if he found this long waiting for the day of
retribution almost too much for his patience.
For that a day of retribution would arrive sooner or later was his
strong belief.
Frequently, on popular festivals, you might notice on his index-finger a
rude iron ring (the handiwork of a blacksmith rather than of a jeweller,
from the look of it), the seal of which was engraved with the three
letters: U. S. S. On such occasions, anyone observing him closely could
have remarked that he carried his head higher than usual, and whenever
he was asked what these initial letters signified, he would simply shrug
his shoulders and say that he had got the ring from a comrade in his
student days, and really did not know _what_ the letters meant.
During vacation time he would regularly undertake long journeys on foot
into distant parts of the land, traversing no end of mountains and
valleys, and always returning home more surlily disposed towards the
lord of the manor than ever, at the same time dropping mysterious hints
in the presence of his confidants, and talking darkly of old
expectations being realised, of extraordinary forthcoming events, and of
important changes in the general order of things here below.
Nowadays people will scarcely believe that there are men whose whole
course of life is determined by such baseless and centrifugal ideas.
Such a species of human ambition is certainly a great rarity. It
resembles that cryptogram which goes by the name of "star-ashes," whose
tremulous spray-like masses only appear in rare seasons and odd places
after the warm summer rains. No ordinary soil is good enough for them.
At any rate, Mr. Thomas Bodza would have acted more wisely if he had
endeavoured to inoculate the minds of the faithful committed to his
charge with a little reading, a little writing, and some slight
knowledge of geography, ethnology, natural history, and fruit
cultivation, instead of assembling round him all the loafers of the
district in the pot-house, the meeting-house, at the hut of the forest
rangers, or in some underground cellar outside the village, and there
putting into their heads ideas which, interpreted by their ignorant
fanaticism, could only be productive of infinite mischief.
He had in all the villages round about personal acquaintances, whom he
was wont to visit successively in the course of every year, and whose
fantastic aspirations he constantly did his best to keep alive.
And at last the opportunity had presented itself for beginning his great
work.
Being a very well-read man himself, he had been the first to learn from
the newspapers of the approach of that dangerous contagious sickness,
the antidotes against which were still unknown.
Suddenly a mysterious rumour began to spread through the villages that a
powerful foreign nation was about to invade the kingdom for the purpose
of reconquering for the descendants of the Quadi and the Marahanas the
Pannonian provinces that they had held centuries before.
The country folk could see for themselves the soldiery hastening on its
way through the land to the frontiers; every carter, tramp, and
traveller, brought news of the military cordons which were drawn far and
wide, from town to town, and required every person passing to and fro to
show his passport, a very unusual institution in those days.
The wiser and better informed persons quieted the whisperers by
explaining that these measures were not adopted against any foreign foe,
but were simply taken to prevent the spread of the terrible pestilence
which was already raging beyond the limits of the kingdom.
And then a still more terrible rumour began to raise aloft its
dragon-like head.
It was generally said, muttered, whispered, and at last proclaimed
aloud, that it was no pestilence the people had to fear, but that the
gentry themselves who had resolved to exterminate the common-folks!
They had determined to exterminate them in an execrable horrible way--by
poison! They were casting into the barns, the wells, and the vats of the
pot-house a deadly poison of swift operation-_that_ was the way in which
they meant to destroy the people.
The doctors, apothecaries, and innkeepers had all been corrupted;
everyone with short cropped hair; everyone who wore a cloth coat was to
be regarded as an enemy; nobody was to be trusted!
Who spread this terrible rumour?--spread it first of all in secret, in
mysterious whispers from house to house, but presently proclaimed it in
the public thoroughfares with a loud voice and amidst the clash of arms?
Ah! who can say? So much only is certain that the tissues of this
network of calumny spread far and wide. It is possible to make human
weakness, ignorance, and rustic stupidity believe almost anything. The
severity of the gentry in the past had, no doubt, contributed something
to this end; but certainly not much, for, as a matter of fact, the
common people raged most furiously against those of the gentry who had
done them most good; it was their benefactors they treated the most
savagely. And then, too, the usual vices of every community, the love of
loot, the thirst for vengeance, blind fury, anger of heart, low greed,
were so many additional predisposing causes of the horrors that
followed.
Yet a red thread ran all through this woof of sorrow and mourning;
"blind destiny," upon whom man so cheerfully casts the burden of his
sins, had but little to do with it at all.
* * * * *
It was after vespers, and Thomas Bodza was taking a walk across the
fields. This was his usual promenade. Sometimes he went as far as the
boundaries of the neighbouring village with a little book under his arm
which he perused with philosophic tranquility.
It was the works of Horace, all of whose verses he knew by heart; for,
inasmuch as it had once been very wisely observed in his presence by
some distinguished scholar that no other human lute-strummer had ever
sung so beautifully and so grandly as Horace, it thenceforth became a
point of honour with Mr. Bodza to read nothing else; so he never
troubled his head about any other poet or poets, whatever language they
wrote in. He made an exception in favour of himself indeed, for he also
had his moments of inspiration, but even his poems were not _quite_ as
good as those of Horace.
And now also he was reading over again those lines he already knew so
well. He had sat down to rest beneath a large poplar tree on a big round
stone that had often served him as a seat before, and he had just come
to the verses, beginning with the beautiful words:
"Nunc est bibendum! Nunc pede libero,
Pulsando tellus...."
when the sound of approaching footsteps disturbed his tranquil enjoyment.
"I have been awaiting you, Ivan," said the master, thrusting his little
book beneath his arm again, but not before he had carefully turned down
the leaf at the place where he had stopped reading, lest he should
forget where he had left off.
"I could only get off late. The old man would not let me go till
vespers."
"Ivan, the long expected signal has at last been given."
"How so?" inquired the fellow, amazed.
"It has been announced in every church, in every school; it has been
nailed in printed form on every wall, on every post. The county itself
has given the signal. That about which the people were still in doubt,
that which it refused to believe, it believes now, for it has been
officially proclaimed. Death is approaching, and woe to him who fears
it. I fear it not. Do you?"
The fellow shuddered, yet he replied,
"Not I."
"The plague will break out suddenly in various places, and wherever
there are dead bodies, there the living will fly to arms, and seek out
those on whom they would wreak their vengeance."
Ivan's face turned a pale green, but he stifled his inward terror. It
was indeed a terrible time that was coming.
"In the town there is a great commotion, but that does not amount to
much. I know the Hetfalu folks. They are cowards and only half ours so
far. There are many strangers, many traitors among them. Even when their
fury is at the highest point, a gentleman with silver buttons has only
to come among them with honied words, or a heyduke has only to appear
among them with a stick, or, at the most, a couple of gamekeepers with
loaded muskets, and they scatter and fly in all directions like startled
game. It is useless; they are a race of cowards. They are a mongrel set
after all. Yet here must be our starting point. We must compel the folks
here to tackle to the business--a petty village cannot take the
initiative without some stimulus from without."
Ivan listened to the master's words admiringly; he began to have the
strong conviction that Bodza possessed the qualifications of a great
general.
"We must bring in the folks from some neighbouring village just to stir
them up. The people of the Tribo district are best suited for that I
should think. Many of them are shepherds and herdsmen; men who lie in
the fields, who can be brought together in the night time, without
anyone observing it. There is a distillery in the village too, and he
who says that poison is concocted there does not lie in the least. In
general, every village should choose its leaders from some other
village, so that the local gentry may not recognise the strange faces.
Some men are easily put out if people, when they begin to supplicate,
call them by their name."
Ivan nodded his head approvingly at these sage suggestions. Bodza will
certainly deserve a plume of feathers in his cap, thought he.
"You will go at night to all the shepherds, one after the other, and
bring them together in front of the lonely inn near the main-road. I
will not tell you what you are to do, you must be guided by your own
common-sense. You must not all remain on the high road however, some of
you must march towards the village."
"The best hiding-place will be the headsman's dwelling."
"Will not the Zudar woman betray us?"
"Not till she has burnt down the castle of Hetfalusy, at any rate."
"Does she hate them then as much as her mother, the old crone?"
"As much! far more. The old crone is all talk."
"I have often heard her say that Hetfalusy seized her property, but one
can't go by what she says. She says that one wing of the castle is built
upon her land."
"It was like this. Dame Anna's husband was a poor gentleman who had a
little plot of land in the neighbourhood of the castle, which was the
occasion of an eternal squabble between him and the lord of the manor.
One day, Hetfalusy--you know how overbearing these great gentlemen
are!--suddenly fell upon this poor gentleman as he was walking on this
little plot of land of his and gave him a sound drubbing. The result was
a great lawsuit. Hetfalusy questioned Dudoky's gentility, and the
latter could not make good his claim to be regarded as an _armiger_. He
lost his case in the local court, and the suit dragged on for years. The
heavy law costs soon swallowed up all the appellant's means, till at
last his little property was put up to auction to defray his expenses.
Hetfalusy acquired it for a mere song, and even while the suit was
proceeding, he revenged himself on his adversary by building a new wing
to his house on the very plot of land the ownership of which was still a
matter of dispute. Then Dudoky had an apoplectic stroke which carried
him off. His orphan daughter took service for a time in town. Thence she
got into a house of no very extraordinary reputation where somebody
suddenly found her and offered her his hand in marriage. The wretched
woman agreed and accepted him. And who, you will ask, was the luckless
creature who sought out a wife in such a place? _She_ only discovered it
on the wedding-day. It was the headsman of Hetfalusy. Thus Barbara
Dudoky became the headsman's bride. If old Dame Anna became mad, her
daughter was partly the cause of it. This also they put down to the
account of the Hetfalusies. Since then Dame Anna has frequently sought
opportunities for revenging herself on the Hetfalusy family--'the
snail-brood,' as Barbara is wont to call them. The old night-owl loves
to torment the souls of those who anger her; she loves to fill the inner
rooms of the splendid Hetfalusy castle with tears and groaning; she
loves to see her haughty enemy grow grey beneath his load of sin and
sorrow; she rejoices at the spectacle of his shame and remorse and agony
of mind, for the old hag knows how to concoct the sort of venom that
corrodes the heart. Now Barbara is not like that. Whenever that woman
speaks of the Hetfalusies, her downy lips swell out, her cheeks flush,
her black eyes cast forth sparks like a crackling fire, and if at such
times she has a knife in her hands, it is not well to approach her. She
longs to taste the blood of her enemy, and smack her lips over it; she
longs to see his haughty castle in a blaze. I have often heard her say
so, and then add, 'After that they may kill me if they like, I don't
care.' Oh! that is indeed a terrible woman, you ought to see her."
"A veritable Libussa!" cried Thomas rapturously. "If we win, a great
destiny awaits her. Are you in love with her?"
"Perhaps it is more correct to say she loves me. I am very comfortable
with her, anyway. The old man does not mind a bit."
"He must be got out of the way."
"We'll take care of that."
"All the exits from the place must be seized after nightfall, and a band
of our bravest lads must make a dash for the town hall. Take care that
no close-cropped head[9] escapes from the place, even if he be dressed
as a peasant. The rest shall be my care."
[Footnote 9: No gentleman.]
"All right, master."
"Then we must have Mekipiros ready in front of the forester's hut."
"Why that, master? The fellow is dumb and foolish. You know that he bit
out his tongue under torture."
"So much the better. He cannot talk. He must have brandy, and lots of
it."
"When he drinks brandy he becomes like a wild beast. He can bite and
scratch now, but when he is drunk you can make him worry people like a
dog."
"That is just what we want. There may be things to be done which a man
would willingly keep out of and yet have done all the same. Do you take
me?"
"Yes, perfectly, you are worthy of all admiration, master. We can let
loose this wild beast in cases where we don't want our own hands to be
soiled. When he has lots of brandy he would shoot his own father if you
put a gun in his hands. And if anything goes wrong we can lay all the
blame on him."
The master regarded his pupil with a look of solemn reproach.
"And you are capable," said he, "capable of saying in cold blood, 'if
anything goes wrong'? Ivan, you are not a true believer. Ivan, you are a
worthless fellow."
The youth was greatly taken aback at these words, and made a feeble
attempt to defend himself.
"Ivan, you are a worthless fellow, I say. I regret that I chose you out
to take part in this great work."
Ivan grew angry.
"What! you chose me! Why, it was I who chose you! Am I not the head of
the conspiracy?"
"And am I not its soul?"
"What! with those weak pipe-stem arms of yours! Look at my arms! Look!"
said Ivan, turning up his shirt sleeves and exposing his fleshy arms. "I
could do more with one of my arms than you could with your whole body."
"And yet you are a coward if you ask, shall we succeed?"
"I'll show what I am when I am on the spot," said Ivan, sticking out his
brawny chest and boastfully thumping it with his clenched fist; at that
moment he wore the expression of a savage proud of his bones and sinews.
"Till then, however, let there be peace between us," said Bodza,
extending his dry and skinny hand towards Ivan in token of
reconciliation, and Ivan squeezed the hand with all his might, not so
much to convince the master of the firmness of his friendship as to give
him some idea of the expressive vigour of his grip.
Bodza did not move a muscle of his face during this violent tension;
but, all at once, Ivan began writhing, his features contracted with
pain, and he placed one hand on his stomach.
"Well, what is the matter?" inquired Bodza.
The fellow doubled up with pain.
"I have a sudden stitch, in the side."
"What! is that all? and you make so much fuss over it! I didn't flinch
just now, when you nearly crushed my fingers, did I?"
"But this is horrible--such spasms."
"Perchance, Ivan, you too have been poisoned."
"Oh, don't joke like that," said the fellow with a pale and agitated
face.
"Why you know the whole thing to be a fable."
Ivan gave a great sigh with an air of relief.
"It has gone now. I felt so odd. It is a fable, of course. But what a
peculiar pain it was!"
"Drive the idea out of your head and swallow some comforting cordial.
And now go and look after our confidants."
Ivan was still a little pale, and it seemed to him as if the master's
face also was of an odd yellow colour.
"How yellow the sky is!" said he, looking up, "not a speck of blue
anywhere. And what a long black cloud is rising up from the
horizon--just like a large black bird."
"Gape not at the sky, Ivan, but make haste and have everything ready
against the night."
"You can look right into the sun, there's not a bit of light in it when
it goes down," murmured he--and his head felt strangely dizzy.
"What have you got to do with the sky, or the sun, or the clouds?"
inquired the master sarcastically.
"Nothing, I suppose, nor with what is beyond them either. Good night, my
master," he cried after a pause, and turned truculently away.
"A happy and peaceful good night!" said the other with an ironical
smile.
"Pleasant dreams."
"And a joyful awakening."
And with that they parted. The master returned towards the village,
reading the immortal verses of Horace all the way along. But Ivan
hastened towards the lonely forest hut, looking up from time to time at
the yellow sky, the faded sun, and the long black cloud, and then
glancing around him horror-stricken, to perceive that he cast no shadow
either before or behind.
That sombre yellow light, how odd it was!--and then, too, that brown,
copper-coloured cloud, which was gradually covering the whole earth, and
enveloping the whole horizon with its broad sluggish wings like some
huge bat-like monster of the Nether World! And the little black letters
in the master's open book seemed to be dancing together in long dizzying
rows, and this is what he read:
"... Pallida Mors
Aequo pede pulsat
Pauperum tabernas
Regumnque turres..."