Chapter 10. A Leader Of The People

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_ CHAPTER X. 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 ον 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-Köros, 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 pædagogue 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 Hernád from the River Poprád, 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 pædagogue.

[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 _Alföld_[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 _Alföld_ 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 Hétfalu--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 Hétfalusy, was not calculated to reconcile him with his destiny. Hétfalusy 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 Hétfalusy 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 Hétfalu; 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 Hétfalu 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 Zudár woman betray us?"

"Not till she has burnt down the castle of Hétfalusy, 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 Hétfalusy 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, Hétfalusy--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. Hétfalusy 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. Hétfalusy 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 Hétfalusy. 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 Hétfalusies. Since then Dame Anna has frequently sought opportunities for revenging herself on the Hétfalusy 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 Hétfalusy 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 Hétfalusies, 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..." _

Read next: Chapter 11. The First Spark

Read previous: Chapter 9. The Plague

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