"Money won't buy everything."
Inside the barn the guttering candles were burning low. No one thought
of blowing them out, so they were just left to smoke and to smoulder,
and to help render the atmosphere even more stifling than it otherwise
would have been.
The heat has become almost unbearable--unbearable, that is, to anyone
not wholly intent on pleasure to the exclusion of every other sensation,
every other consciousness. The barn built of huge pine logs,
straw-thatched and raftered, is filled to overflowing with people--men,
women, even children--all bent upon one great, all-absorbing
object--that object, forgetfulness.
The indifferent, the stolid, may call it what he will, but it is the
common wish to forget that has brought all these people--young and
old--together in Ignácz Goldstein's barn this night--the desire to
forget that hideous, fateful fourteenth of September which comes with
such heartrending regularity year after year--the desire to forget that
the lads, the flower of the neighbouring villages, are going away to-day
. . . for three years?--nay! very likely for ever!--three years! and all
packed up like cattle in a railway truck! and put under the orders of
some brutal sergeant who is not Hungarian, and can only say "Vorwärts!"
or "Marsch!" and is backed in his arbitrary commands by the whole weight
of government, King and country.
For three years!--and there is always war going on somewhere--and that
awful Bosnia! wherever it may be--lads from Hungarian villages go there
sound in body and in limb and come back bent with ague, halt, lame or
blind.
Three years! More like for ever!
And therefore the whole population of Marosfalva and of the villages
round spends its last happy four-and-twenty hours in trying to forget
that nine o'clock of the fourteenth day of September is approaching with
sure and giant strides; everyone has a wish to forget; the parents and
grandparents, the sisters, the sweethearts, the lads themselves! The
future is so hideous, let the joy of the present kill all thoughts of
those coming three years.
Marosfalva is the rallying-point, where this final annual jollification
takes place. They all come over on the thirteenth from Fekete and Görcz,
and Kender, in order to dance and to sing at Marosfalva in the barn
which belongs to Ignácz Goldstein the Jew. Marosfalva boasts of a
railway station and it is from here that at nine o'clock in the morning
the lads will be entrained; so all day on the thirteenth there has been
a pilgrimage along the cross-roads from the outlying villages and
hamlets round Marosfalva--a stream of men and women and young children
all determined to forget for a few hours the coming separation of the
morrow; by five o'clock in the afternoon all those had assembled who had
meant to come and dancing in the barn had begun.
Ignácz Goldstein's barn has always been the setting in which the final
drama of the happy year is acted. After that night spent there in
dancing and music and merry-making, down goes the curtain on the comedy
of life and the tragedy of tears begins.
Since five o'clock in the afternoon the young people have been
dancing--waltzing, polkaing, dancing the csárdás--mostly the csárdás,
the dance of the nation, of the people, the most exhilarating, most
entrancing, most voluptuous dance that feet of man have ever trod. The
girls and lads are indefatigable, the slow and languorous Lassu (slow
movement) alternates with the mad, merry csárdás, they twirl and twist,
advance, retreat, separate and reunite in a mad, intoxicating whirl.
Small booted feet stamp on the rough wooden floor, sending up clouds of
dust. What matter if the air becomes more and more stifling? There are
tears and sighs to be stifled too.
"Ho, there, czigány! Play up! Faster! Faster! 'Tis not a funeral dirge
you are playing."
The gipsy musicians, hot and perspiring, have blown and scraped and
banged for fifteen solid hours; no one would ever think of suggesting
that a gipsy needed rest; the clarinetist, it is true, rolled off his
seat at one time, and had to be well shaken ere he could blow again, but
the leader--as good a leader, mind you, as could be found in the
kingdom--had only paused when the dancers were exhausted, or when bite
and sup were placed before him. There they were, perched up on a rough
platform made up of packing-cases borrowed from the station-master; the
czimbalom player in the centre, his fat, brown hands wield the tiny
clappers with unerring precision, up and down the strings, with that
soft, lingering tone which partakes of the clavecins and the harp alike.
At the back the double-bass, lean and dark, with jet-black eyes that
stare stolidly at his leader.
There is a second fiddle, and the fat clarinetist and, of course, the
leader--he whose match could not be found in the kingdom. He stands on
the very edge of the rough platform, his fiddle under his chin, and he
stoops well forward, so that his hands and instrument almost touch the
foremost of the dancing pairs.
They--the dancers--crowd closely round the gipsy band, for so must the
csárdás be danced, as near the musicians as possible, as close together
as the wide, sweeping petticoats of the girls will allow.
Such petticoats! One on the top of the other, ten or a dozen or more,
and all of different colour: the girls are proud of these
petticoats--the number of them is a sign of prosperity; and now as they
dance and swing from the hips these petticoats fly out, caught by the
currents of air until they look like gargantuan showers of
vividly-coloured petals shaken by giant hands.
Above the petticoats the girls' waists look slim in the dark,
tight-fitting corslet, above which again rises the rich, olive-tinted
breast and throat; full white sleeves of linen crown the bare, ruddy
arms, and ribbons of national colours--red, white and green--float from
the shoulders and the waist.
The smooth, thick hair is closely plaited, from the crown of the head in
two long, tight plaits; it is drawn rigidly away from the forehead,
giving that quaint, hard finish to the round, merry face which is so
characteristic of the Asiatic ancestry.
Each one of them a little picture which seems to have stepped straight
out of a Velasquez canvas, the bell-shaped skirt, the stiff corslet, the
straight, tight hair and round eyes full of vitality.
The men wear their linen shirt and full trousers with fringed,
embroidered ends, the leather waistcoat and broad belt covered with
metal bosses and wrought with bright-coloured woollen threads. They get
very excited in the mazes of the dance, they shout to the gipsies to
play faster and ever faster; each holds his partner tightly round the
slim waist and swings her round and round, till she stumbles, giddy and
almost faint in his arms.
And round the dancers in a semicircle the spectators stand in a dense
crowd--the older folk and the girls who have not secured partners--they
watch and watch, indefatigable like the dancers, untiring like the
musicians. And behind this semicircle, in the dark corners of the barn,
the children foot it too, with the same ardour, the same excitement as
their elders.
The last csárdás of this memorable night! It is eight o'clock now, and
through the apertures in the log wall the brilliant light of this late
summer's morning enters triumphant and crude.
Andor is dancing with Elsa--pretty, fair-haired Elsa, the daughter of
old Kapus Benkó,[1] an old reprobate, if ever there was one. Such a
handsome couple they look. Is it not a shame that Andor must go
to-day--for three years, perhaps for ever?
[Footnote 1: In Hungary the surname precedes the Christian name.]
The tears that have struggled up to Elsa's tender blue eyes, despite her
will to keep them back, add to the charm of her engaging personality,
they help to soften the somewhat serious expression of her young face.
Her cheeks are glowing with the excitement of the dance, her graceful
figure bends to the pressure of Andor's arm around her waist.
Ten or a dozen cotton petticoats are tied round that slim waist of hers,
no two of a like colour, and as she twists and twirls in Andor's arms
the petticoats fly out, till she looks like a huge flower of many hues
with superposed corollas, blue, green, pink and yellow, beneath which
her small feet shod in boots of brilliant leather look like two crimson
stamens.
The tight-fitting corslet bodice and the full, white sleeves of the
shift make her figure appear peculiarly slim and girlish, and her bare
throat and shoulders are smooth and warmly tinted like some luscious
fruit.
No wonder that Andor feels this dance, this movement, the music, the
girl's sweet, quick breath, going to his head like wine. Elsa was always
pretty, always dainty and gentle, but now she is excited, tearful at the
coming parting, and by all the saints a more exquisite woman never came
out of Paradise!
The semicircle of spectators composed of older folk draws closer round
the dancers, but the other couples remain comparatively unheeded. It is
Elsa and Andor whom everyone is watching.
He is tall and broad-shouldered, with the supple limbs of a young stag,
and the mad, irresponsible movements of a colt. His dark eyes shine like
two stars out of his sun-burnt face; his muscular arms encircle Elsa's
fine waist with a grip that is almost masterful. The wide sleeves of his
linen shirt flutter above his shoulders till they look like wings and he
like some messenger of the gods come to carry this exquisite prey off
from the earth.
"What a well-matched couple!" murmur the older women as they watch.
"Elsa will be the beauty of the village within the next year, mark what
I say!" added a kindly old soul, turning to her neighbour--a slatternly,
ill-kempt, middle-aged woman, who was casting looks on Andor and Elsa
that were none too kind.
"Hm!" retorted the latter, with sour mien, "then 'tis as well that that
good-for-nothing will be safely out of the way."
"I would not call Andor good-for-nothing, Irma néni,"[2] said one of the
men who stood close by, "he has not had much chance to do anything for
himself yet. . . ."
[Footnote 2: Aunt Irma--the words aunt (_néni_) and uncle (_bácsi_) are
used indiscriminately in Hungary when addressing elderly people, and do
not necessarily imply any relationship.]
"And he never will," snapped the woman, with a click of her thin jaws,
"I know the sort--always going to do wonderful things in a future which
never comes. Well! at any rate while he is a soldier they will teach him
that he is no better than other lads that come from the same village,
and not even as good, seeing that he has never any money in his wallet."
"Andor will be rich some day," suggested the kindly old soul who had
first spoken, "don't you forget it, Irma néni."
"I have no special wish to remember it, my good Kati," retorted Irma
dryly.
"I thought," murmured the other, "seeing that Andor has really courted
Elsa this summer that . . . perhaps . . ."
"My daughter has plenty of admirers," said Irma, in her bitter-toned,
snappish way, "and has no reason to wait for one who only may be rich
some day."
"Bah! Lakatos Pál cannot live for ever. Andor will have every fillér of
his money when he dies, and Pál will cut up very well."
"Lakatos Pál is a youngish man--not fifty, I imagine," concluded Irma
with a sneer. "He may live another thirty years, and Elsa would be an
old woman herself by then."
The other woman said nothing more after that. It was no use arguing the
point. Irma was the wife of old Kapus--both of them as shiftless,
thriftless, ill-conditioned a pair as ever stole the daylight from God
in order to waste it in idleness. How they came to be blessed with such
a pretty, winning daughter as Elsa an all too-indulgent God only knew.
What, however, was well known throughout the village was that as Kapus
and his wife never had a crown to bless themselves with, and had never
saved enough to earn a rest for themselves in their old age, they had
long ago determined that their daughter should be the means of bringing
prosperity to them as soon as she was old enough for the
marriage-market.
Elsa was beautiful! Thank the good God for that! Kapus had never saved
enough to give her a marriage-portion either, and had she been ugly, or
only moderately pretty, it would have been practically impossible to
find a husband for her. But if she became the beauty of Marosfalva--as
indeed she was already--there would be plenty of rich men who would be
willing to waive the question of the marriage-portion for the sake of
the glory of having captured the loveliest matrimonial prize in the
whole countryside.
"Leave Irma néni alone, mother," said the man who had first taken up the
cudgels in favour of Andor; "we all know that she has very ambitious
views for Elsa. Please God she may not be disappointed."
From more than one group of spectators came similar or other comments on
pretty Elsa and her partner. The general consensus of opinion seemed to
be that it was as well Andor was going away for three years. Old Kapus
and his wife would never allow their daughter to marry a man with
pockets as empty as their own, and it was no use waiting for dead men's
shoes. Lakatos Pál, the rich uncle, from whom Andor was bound to inherit
some day, was little past the prime of life. Until he died how would
Andor and a penniless wife contrive to live? For Lakatos Pál was a miser
and hoarded his money--moreover, he was a confirmed bachelor and
woman-hater; he would do nothing for Andor if the young man chose to
marry.
Ah, well! it was a pity! for a better-looking, better-matched pair could
not be found in the whole county of Arad.
"Lucky for you, Béla, that Andor goes off to-day for three years," said
a tall, handsome girl to her neighbour; "you would not have had much
chance with Elsa otherwise."
The man beside her made no immediate reply; he was standing with legs
wide apart, his hands buried in the pockets of his trousers. At the
girl's words, which were accompanied by a provocative glance from her
large, dark eyes, he merely shrugged his wide shoulders, and jingled
some money in his pockets.
The girl laughed.
"Money won't buy everything, you know, my good Béla," she said.
"It will buy most things," he retorted.
"The consent of Irma néni, for instance," she suggested.
"And a girl's willingness to exchange the squalor of a mud hut for
comfort, luxury, civilization."
Unlike most of the young men here to-night, who wore the characteristic
costume of the countryside--full, white linen shirt and trousers, broad
leather belt, embossed and embroidered and high leather boots, Béla was
dressed in a town suit of dark-coloured cloth, cut by a provincial
tailor from Arad. He was short of stature, though broad-shouldered and
firmly knit, but his face was singularly ugly, owing to the terrible
misfortune which had befallen him when he lost his left eye. The scar
and hollow which were now where the eye had once been gave the whole
face a sinister expression, which was further accentuated by the
irregular line of the eyebrows and the sneer which habitually hovered
round the full, hard lips.
Béla was not good to look on; and this is a serious defect in a young
man in Hungary, but he was well endowed with other attributes which made
him very attractive to the girls. He had a fine and lucrative position,
seeing that he was his Lordship's bailiff, and had an excellent salary,
a good house and piece of land of his own, as well as the means of
adding considerably to his income, since his lordship left him to
conclude many a bargain over corn and plums, and horses and pigs. Erös
Béla was rich and influential. He lived in a stone-built house, which
had a garden round it, and at least five rooms inside, with a separate
kitchen and a separate living-room, therefore he was a very eligible
young man and one greatly favoured by mothers of penniless girls; nor
did the latter look askance on Béla despite the fact that he had only
one eye and that never a pleasant word escaped his lips.
Even now he was looking on at the dancing with a heavy scowl upon his
face. The girl near him--she with the dark, Oriental eyes and the thin,
hooked nose, Klara Goldstein the Jewess--gave him a nudge with her
brown, pointed elbow.
"I wouldn't let Andor see the temper you are in, my friend," she said,
with a sarcastic little laugh; "we don't want any broken bones before
the train goes off this morning."
"There will be broken bones if he does not look out," muttered the other
between his teeth, as he drew a tightly clenched fist from his pocket.
"Bah! why should you care?" retorted Klara, who seemed to take an impish
delight in teasing the young man, "you are not in love with Elsa, are
you?"
"What is it to you?" growled Béla surlily.
"Nothing," she replied, "only that we have always been friends, you and
I--eh, Béla?"
And she turned her large, lustrous eyes upon him, peering at him through
her long black lashes. She was a handsome girl, of course, and she knew
it--knew how to use her eyes, and make the men forget that she was only
a Jewess, a thing to be played with but despised--no better than a gipsy
wench, not for a Hungarian peasant to look upon as an equal, to think of
as a possible mate.
Béla, whose blood was hot in him, what with the wine which he had drunk
and the jealous temper which was raging in his brain, was nevertheless
sober enough not to meet the languorous glances which the handsome
Jewess bestowed so freely upon him.
"We are still friends--are we not, Béla?" she reiterated slowly.
"Of course--why not?" he grunted, "what has our friendship to do with
Andor and Elsa?"
"Only this: that I don't like to see a friend of mine make a fool of
himself over a girl who does not care one hairpin for him."
Béla smothered a curse.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
"Everyone knows that Elsa is over head and ears in love with Andor, and
just won't look at anyone else."
"Oho!" he sneered, "everyone knows that, do they? Well! you can tell
that busy-body everyone from me that before the year is out Kapus Elsa
will be tokened to me, and that when Andor comes back from having
marched and drilled and paced the barrack-yard he will find that Kapus
Elsa is Kapus no longer, but Erös, the wife of Erös Béla, the mother of
his first-born. To this I have made up my mind, and when I make up my
mind to anything, neither God nor the devil dares to stand in my way."
"Hush! hush! in Heaven's name," she protested quickly, "the neighbours
will hear you."
He shrugged his shoulders, and murmured something very uncomplimentary
anent the ultimate destination of those neighbours.
Some of them certainly had heard what he said, for he had not been at
pains to lower his voice. His riches and his position had made him
something of an oracle in Marosfalva, and he held all the peasantry in
such contempt that he cared little what everyone thought of him. He
therefore remained indifferent and sulky now whilst many glances of
good-humoured mockery were levelled upon him.
No one, of course, thought any the worse of Erös Béla for desiring the
beauty of the village for himself--he was rich and could marry whom he
pleased, and that he should loudly and openly proclaim his determination
to possess himself of the beautiful prize was only in accordance with
the impulsive, hot-headed, somewhat bombastic temperament of the Magyars
themselves.
Fortunately those chiefly concerned in Erös Béla's loudly spoken
determination had heard nothing of the colloquy between him and the
Jewess. The wild, loud music of the csárdás, their own gyrations and
excitement, shut them out entirely from their surroundings.
Their stamping, tripping, twirling feet had carried them into another
world altogether; Ignácz Goldstein's barn had become a fairy bower, they
themselves were spirits living in that realm of bliss; there was no
longer any impending separation, no military service, no blank and
desolate three years! Andor, his arm tightly clasped round Elsa's waist,
his head bowed till his lips touched her bare shoulder, contrived to
whisper magic words in her ear.
Magic words?--simple, commonplace words, spoken by myriads of men before
and since into myriads of willing ears, in every tongue this earth hath
ever known. But to Elsa it seemed as if the Magyar tongue had never
before sounded so exquisite! To her the words were magic because they
wrought a miracle in her. She had been a girl--a child ere those words
were spoken. She liked Andor, she liked her father and her mother,
little Emma over the way, Mari néni, who was always kind. She had loved
them all, been pleased when she saw them, glad to give them an
affectionate kiss.
But now, since that last csárdás had begun, a strange and mysterious
current had gone from Andor's arm right through her heart; something had
happened, which caused her cheeks to glow with a fire other than that
produced by the heat of the dance and made her own hands tremble when
they rested on Andor's shoulder. And there was that in his look which
made her eyes burn and fill with tears.
"You are beautiful, Elsa! I love you!"
She could not answer him, of course; how could she, when she felt that
her throat was choked with sobs? Yet she felt so happy, so happy that
never since the day of her first communion, when Pater Bonifácius had
blessed her and assured her that her soul was as white as that of an
angel--never since then had she known such perfect, such absolute
happiness. She could not speak, she almost thought once that she was
going to faint, so strange was the thrill of joy which went right
through her when Andor's lips rested for one brief, sweet moment upon
her shoulder.
And now the lights are burning low, the gipsies scrape their fiddles
with a kind of wild enthusiasm, which pervades them just as much as the
dancers. Round and round in a mad twirl now, the men hold the girls with
both hands by the waist, the girls put a hand on each of their partner's
shoulders; thus they spin round and round, petticoats flying, booted
feet stamping the ground.
The young faces are all hot and streaming, quick breaths come in short,
panting gasps from these young chests. The spectators join in the
excitement, the men stamp and clap their heels to the rhythm of the
dance, the women beat their hands one against the other to that same
wild, syncopated measure. Old men grasp middle-aged women round the
waist; smiling, self-deprecatingly they too begin to tread; Hej! 'Tis
not so long ago we were young too, and that wild Hungarian csárdás fires
the blood until it glows afresh.
Everyone moves, every body sways, it is impossible to keep quite still
while that intoxicating rhythm fills the air.
Only Klara the Jewess stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood
is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple,
sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig
with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Erös Béla too is
still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the
group of twirling dancers to that one couple close to the musicians'
platform.
In the noise that goes on around him he cannot, of course, hear the
words which Andor speaks, but he sees the movements of the young man's
lips, and the blush which deepens over Elsa's face. That one eye of his,
keener than any pair of eyes, has seen the furtive kiss, quick and
glowing, which grazed the girl's bare shoulder, and noted the quiver
which went right through the young, slender body and the look that shot
through the quickly-veiled blue eyes.
He was only a peasant, a rough son of the soil, whose temperament was
hot with passion and whose temper had never known a curb. He had never
realized until this moment how beautiful Elsa was, and how madly he
loved her. For he called the jealous rage within by the sacred name of
love, and love to a Magyar peasant is his whole existence, the pivot
round which he frames his life, his thoughts of the present, his dreams
of the future.
The soil and the woman!--they are his passions, his desires, his
religion--to own a bit of land--of Hungarian land--and the woman whom he
loves. Those two possessions will satisfy him--beyond these there is
nothing worth having--a plough, of course--a hut wherein to sleep--an ox
or two, perhaps--a cow--a horse.
But the soil and the woman on whom he has fixed his love--we'll call it
love . . . he certainly calls it so--those two possessions make the
Hungarian peasant more contented than any king or millionaire of Western
civilization.
Erös Béla had the land. His father left him a dozen kataszter (land
measure about two and three-quarter acres) or so; Elsa was the woman
whom he loved, and the only question was who--he or Andor--would be
strong enough to gain the object of his desire.