"I don't wish to marry; not yet."
The girl thus roughly apostrophized turned slowly round. She seemed
neither hurt nor even surprised at the young man's exhibition of temper.
In her blue eyes there was a strange look--one which had lately been
habitual to her, but which neither her mother nor Béla were able to
interpret: it was a look which conveyed the thought of resignation or
indifference or both, but also one which was peculiarly lifeless, as of
a soul who had touched the cold hand of despair.
Far be it from me to seek complexity in so simple a soul as was that of
this young Hungarian peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of
self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her;
she would never have dreamed of searching the deep-down emotions of her
heart and of dragging them out for her mind to scrutinize. The morbid
modern craze for intricate and composite emotions was not likely to
reach an out-of-the-way Hungarian village that slept peacefully on the
banks of the sluggish Maros, cradled in the immensity of the plain.
Elsa had loved Lakatos Andor--the handsome, ardent young lover whose
impetuous courtship of her five years ago had carried her on the wings
of Icarus to a region so full of brightness and of sunlight that it was
no wonder that the wings--which had appeared god-like--turned out to be
ephemeral and brittle after all, and that she was soon precipitated
back and down into the ordinary sea of everyday life.
Elsa had never heard of Icarus, but she had felt herself soaring upwards
on heavenly wings when Andor--his lips touching her neck--had whispered
with passionate ardour: "Elsa, I love you!"
She had never heard of Icarus' fall, but she had experienced her own
from the giddy heights of heavenly happiness, down to the depths of
dull, aching despair. The fall had been very gradual--there had been
nothing grand or heroic or soul-stirring about it: Andor had gone away,
having told her that he loved her, and adjured her to wait for him. She
had waited for three years, patiently, quietly, obstinately, despite the
many and varied sieges laid to her heart and her imagination by the
inflammable, eligible youth of the countryside. Elsa Kapus--the
far-famed beauty of half the county, counted her suitors by the score.
Patiently, quietly, obstinately she kept every suitor at bay--even
though many were rich and some in high positions--even though her
mother, with the same patience, the same quietude, and the same
obstinacy worked hard to break her daughter's will.
But Andor was coming back. Andor had adjured her to wait for him: and
Elsa was still young--just sixteen when Andor went away. She was in no
hurry to get married.
No one, of course, guessed the reason of her obstinate refusal of all
the best matrimonial prizes in the county. No one guessed her
secret--the depth of her love for Andor--her promise to wait for
him--her mother guessed it least of all. Everyone put her stubbornness
down to conceit and to ambition, and no one thought any the worse of her
on that account. When she refused young Barna--the mayor's eldest son,
and Nagy Lajos, the rich pig merchant from Somsó, people shrugged their
shoulders and said that mayhap Elsa wanted to marry a shopkeeper of Arad
or even a young noble lord. Irma néni said nothing for the first year,
and even for two. She saw Nagy Lajos go away, and young Barna court
another girl. That was perhaps as it should be. Elsa was growing more
beautiful every year--and there was a noble lord who owned a fine estate
and a castle close by, who had taken lately to riding over on Sunday
afternoons to Marosfalva, and paid marked attention to Elsa.
Noble lords had been known to marry peasant girls--at least in books, so
Irma néni had been told, and, of course, one never knows! God's ways
were wonderful sometimes.
But when two years had gone by, when a rich shopkeeper from Arad had
come and courted and been refused, and when the noble lord had suddenly
ceased his Sunday afternoon visits to Marosfalva, Irma became more
anxious. She had a long and serious talk with her daughter, which led to
no good.
To all her mother's wise counsels and sound arguments Elsa had opposed
the simple statement of facts:
"I do not wish to marry, mother dear; not just yet."
This, of course, would never do. Irma realized that she had allowed her
ambition for her daughter to run away with her common-sense. Elsa must
have got some queer notion or other in her head; that intimacy with the
schoolmistress--who came from Budapest and talked a vast amount of
sentimental stuff which she had imbibed out of books--must be stopped at
once, and Elsa be taken in hand by her own mother.
To aim high was quite one thing, but to let every chance, however
splendid, slip through one's fingers was the work of a fool.
The work of taking Elsa in hand was thus promptly undertaken. Fate
favoured the mother's intentions: old Kapus was stricken with paralysis,
and Elsa had, from that hour forth, to spend most of her time with her
father in the house, and immediately under her mother's eye.
Though young Barna was married by now, and the pig merchant, the noble
lord and the rich shopkeeper all gone to seek a sweetheart elsewhere,
there were still plenty of suitors dangling round the beauty of the
country-side: in fact her well-known pride and aloofness had brought a
surfeit of competitors in the lists. Foremost among these was Erös Béla,
who was not only young and in a high position as my lord the Count's
chief bailiff, but was also reputed to be the richest man for miles
around.
Erös Béla had long ago made public his determination to win Elsa for
wife, and he had carried on his courtship unostentatiously but persistently
all along, despite the many rivals in the field. Elsa never disliked
him, she accepted his attentions just as she did those of everyone else.
Periodically Béla would make a formal proposal of marriage, which Irma
néni, in her own name and that of Elsa's paralytic father, invariably
accepted. But to his sober and well-worded proposals Elsa gave the same
replies that she gave to her more impetuous adorers.
"I don't want to marry. Not yet!"
When the work of taking Elsa in hand began in earnest, Irma used Erös
Béla as her chief weapon of attack. He was very rich, young enough to
marry, my lord the Count looked upon him as his right hand--moreover
Béla had made Irma néni a solemn promise that if Elsa became his wife,
his father and mother-in-law should receive that fine house in the
Kender Road to live in, with a nice piece of garden, three cows and five
pigs, and a little maid-of-all-work to wait upon them.
Backed with such a bargain, Béla's suit was bound to prosper.
And yet, for another whole year, Elsa was obstinate. Irma had to resort
to sterner measures, and in a country like Hungary, where much of the
patriarchal feeling toward parents still exists, a mother's stern
measures become very drastic indeed. A child is a child while she is
under her parents' roof. If she be forty she still owes implicit
obedience, unbounded respect to them. If she fail in these, she becomes
an unnatural creature, denounced to her friends as such, under a cloud
of opprobrium before her tiny, circumscribed world.
Kapus Irma brought out the whole armoury of her parental authority, her
parental power: and her methods could be severe when she chose. I will
not say that she ill-treated the girl, though it was more than once that
Elsa's right cheek and ear were crimson when the left were quite pale,
and that often, on the hot Sundays in July and August, when the girls go
in low-necked corslets and shifts to church, Elsa wrapped a kerchief
over her shoulders--the neighbours said in order to hide the corrections
dealt by Irma néni's vigorous hand. But it was morally that her mother's
authority weighed most heavily upon the girl. Her commands became more
defined, and presently more peremptory. Elsa was soon placed in the
terrible alternative of either being faithless to Andor or disobedient
to her mother.
And it is characteristic of that part of the world that of the two sins
thus in prospect, the latter seemed by far the more heinous.
Yet Andor was due back at the end of the summer. The fourteenth of
September came and went and the new recruits went with it--another week,
and those who had completed their three years would be coming home.
Andor would, of course, be among them. There had come no adverse report
about him, and no news during those three years is always counted to be
good news. No letters or sign of life had come from him, but, then, many
of the lads never wrote home while they did their three years, and Andor
had no one to write to. He would not be allowed to write to Elsa, or,
rather, Elsa would never be allowed to receive letters from him, and his
uncle Lakatos Pál, the old miser, would only be furious with him for
spending his few fillérs on note-paper and stamps. But Elsa had waited
patiently during three years, knowing that though she had no news of
him, he would not forget her. She never mistrusted him, she never
doubted him.
She waited for him, and he did not return. At first, his non-appearance
excited neither surprise nor comment in the village. Andor had no
relations except his uncle Lakatos Pál, who did not care one brass
fillér about him: there had been no one to count the years, the months,
the days when he would return: there was only Elsa who cared, and she
dared not say anything at first, for fear of making her mother angry.
But at the turn of the year Lakatos Pál became ill, and when he got
worse and worse and the doctor seemed unable to do anything to make him
well, he began to talk of his nephew, Andor.
That is to say, he bewailed the fact that his only brother's only child
was dead, and that he--a poor sick man--had no one to look after him.
He first spoke of this to Pater Bonifácius, who was greatly shocked and
upset to hear such casual news of Andor's death, and it was only bit by
bit that he succeeded in dragging fuller particulars out of the sick
man. It seems that when the lad's regiment was out in Bosnia there was
an outbreak of cholera among the troops. Andor was one of those who
succumbed. It had all occurred less than a month before his discharge
was actually due, in fact these discharges had already been distributed
to those who were sick, in the hope that the lads would elect to go home
as soon as they could be moved, and thus relieve the Government of the
burden and expense of their convalescence.
But Lakatos Andor had died in the hospital of Slovnitza. An official
letter announcing his demise was sent to Lakatos Pál, his uncle and sole
relative, but Lakatos only threw the letter into a drawer and said
nothing about it to anybody.
It was nobody's business, he said. The Government would see to the lad's
burial, no doubt, but some busy-bodies at Marosfalva might think that it
was his--Lakatos'--duty to put up a stone or something to the memory of
his nephew: and that sort of nonsense was very expensive.
So no one in Marosfalva knew that Andor had died of cholera in the
hospital of Slovnitza until Lakatos Pál became sick, and in his
loneliness spoke of the matter to Pater Bonifácius.
Then there was universal mourning in the village. Andor had always been
very popular: good-looking, as merry as a skylark and a splendid dancer,
he was always the life and soul of every entertainment. Girls who had
flirted with him wept bitter tears, the mothers who thought how rich
Andor would have been now that old Lakatos was sure to die very
soon--sighed deep sighs of regret.
Many there were who never believed that Andor was dead. He was not the
lad to die of cholera: he might break his neck one day--riding or
driving--for he was always daring and reckless--but to lie sick of
cholera and to die in a hospital?--no, no, that did not seem like Andor.
Presently it became known that the official letter--announcing the
death--had not been quite in order; it was only a rumour--but the rumour
quickly gained credence, it fitted in with popular sentiment. Pater
Bonifácius himself, who had seen the letter, declared that the wording
of it was very curt and vague--much more curt and vague than such
letters usually were. It seems that there were a great many cases of
cholera in the isolation hospital at Slovnitza and lists were sent up
daily from there to Budapest of new cases, of severe cases, of
discharges and of deaths. In one of these lists Andor's name certainly
did appear among the dead, and a brief note to that effect had been
officially sent to Lakatos. But surely the news should have had
confirmation!
Where was the lad buried?
Who was beside him when he died?
Where were the few trinkets which he possessed; his mother's
wedding-ring which he always wore on his little finger?
Pater Bonifácius wrote to the War Office at Budapest asking for a reply
to these three questions. He received none. Then he persuaded Barna
Jenö--the mayor--to write an official document. The War Office up at
Budapest sent an equally official document saying that they had no
knowledge on those three points: Lakatos Andor was one of those whose
names appeared on the list of deaths from cholera at Slovnitza, and that
was quite sufficient proof to offer to any reasonable human being.
Pater Bonifácius sighed in bitter disappointment, Lakatos Pál continued
to bemoan his loneliness until he succeeded in persuading himself that
he had always loved Andor as his own son, and that the lad's supposed
death would presently cause his own.
And the neighbours--especially the women--held on to the belief that
Andor was not dead; they declared that he would return one day to enjoy
the good-will of his rich uncle now, to marry a girl of Marosfalva, and
to look forward to a goodly legacy from Pali bácsi by and by.