Eyes Like the Sea: A Novel

by Mór Jókai

  CHAPTER X

  WHERE THE WORLD IS WALLED UP

  It required quite a strategical combination to transport me from thetown of Vilagos to where the world is boarded up.

  This place was selected for me by my wife while she was already in Pest,whence on the approach of the catastrophe she set out from home on apeasant's car to seek me up and down the kingdom. For a time shetravelled with the wife of Alexander Korosy, who set her on my track. Atthe storming of Szegedin we were all within an ace of being blown intothe air by the explosion of a powder magazine.

  It was a little village called Tordona, deep in the beech forests ofBorsod, the name of which was not even to be found on the chart ofFrancis Karacs.[59] Here the celebrated comedian and scene-painter ofthe National Theatre, Telepi, had built a house with the intention ofseeking an asylum there with his family in troublous times. When theRussians came, he sent thither his wife and his son Charles, who wasthen a young artist student. Telepi gave my wife this sage piece ofadvice. "When the bottom of the world falls out, take your husbandwhere nobody will find him." Tordona had taken no part in theRevolution.... The journey was quite an Odyssey. In a small coveredpeasant's car a lady conveys water-melons to market; the coachman andthe footman sit in front together. The footman is myself, the coachmanJanos Rakoczy, who only the day before was Kossuth's secretary. Theprice of water-melons was a silver _tizes_[60] a-piece. Our heads werenot worth so much as that. The way from Vilagos to Bekes-Gyula is long,and the whole way we were going straight towards the advancing Russianhost. Cossacks, lancers, infantry, artillery, gun-carriages, met us atevery step, and yet nobody asked us the price of those melons or theprice of those heads. It was only the two splendid horses in front ofour car which might have raised suspicions that we were not itinerantmarket-gardeners, although Rakoczy wore the genuine blue livery of acoachman. When we got into the domain of swamp and rushes, a mounted_betyar_[61] took us under his protection, and guarded us along pathswhere a carriage had never yet gone, where our horses repeatedly wadedup to their breasts in water, till we fought our way through into theendless plain. He would take nothing from us but a "God bless you!"

  [Footnote 59: The first Hungarian engraver (1769-1838). His celebratedmap of Hungary was first published in 1813.]

  [Footnote 60: The tenth of a florin.]

  [Footnote 61: A peasant drover.]

  Our dear friend Janos Rakoczy, as an old country gentleman, was acapital coachman so long as he had only to guide the horses, but thatpart of the stableman's science which deals with harnessing andunharnessing he had never learnt. So when we came to a place in thesweltering heat of the dog-days after a long drive through the vastplain, the very first thing he did was to let the unharnessed horsesimmediately drink their fill at the spring, and then tie them up in thestable, in consequence of which the shaft horse caught inflammation ofthe lungs, and expired an hour afterwards. The saddle horse survived asby a miracle. Instead of the deceased horse, therefore, we had toharness another nag, which we picked up on the road for 100 florins.This new horse was a hand and a half smaller than the steed that stillremained with us. With this slap-dash team nobody would have taken usany longer for gentry.

  We had still to pass through Miskolcz, where the Russians wereencamping. Here dwelt my wife's father, the wise and worthy professorBenke Laborfalvy. He pointed out to us the road which led into Tordona.Five hours long we penetrated through dense forests: not a humandwelling place, not a beaten tract was to be seen. A stream cut throughthe winding valley and along its bank, shifting now to the right handand now to the left, a sort of path wound its way naturally, withoutanything like a bridge; for the convenience of foot passengers, hugestones at irregular intervals had been cast into the bed of the racingstream. There, in a deeply hidden, delightful valley, lay the littlespot which is walled off from the world.

  My wife and I descended at the Telepi's house and were heartily welcomedby our worthy hostess. Rakoczy, with his equipage, had to be lodged inanother house. Madame Telepi's brother, my tenderly remembered goodfriend, the worthy Beni Csanyi, dwelt in a house a little farther off.It was he who stabled the horses. Later on I joined him.

  He was really a model of a "small country gentleman," such as they oughtto be nowadays. An accomplished, intelligent man, speaking, besides hisown language, Latin and German, with a thorough knowledge of the law,for which he had been trained, and who, for all that, now went out andploughed his own land with the aid of a man-servant. He ate hishome-made bread, drank his home-brewed wine, welcomed guests with allhis heart, and slew a sheep or a pig in their honour. His wife baked andbrewed, led the way at the spindle, and sewed her children's clotheswith her own hand. They had three sons, and the little money that flowedinto the domestic coffers was spent in the schooling of the children.Csanyi never borrows, and owes no man anything. His work-room is ajoiner and wheelwright's shed; when anything breaks in the wagon hemends it himself: it is his pet pastime. He has a library also, full ofsuch books as Sir Walter Scott's historical work on the FrenchRevolutionary Wars. Newspapers he never reads. If, again, a poempleases him, he learns it by heart, and passes it on further by word ofmouth. He never goes to law with his neighbour, and when two fall out hemakes peace between them. But when the cry goes forth, "The fatherlandis in danger! Let us make sacrifices for the commonweal!" then he cutsthe large silver buttons off his mantle, and lays them on the altar ofhis country.

  I owe it for the most part to this worthy man that I did not lose myreason altogether in these hard times.

  Thus we arrived hither. I was saved. I was no longer a dead man. Ilived.

  But what sort of a life was it? It was the sort of life which belongs toa new-born babe: absolute inability to help one's self. Rakoczy quittedus on the following day. He was off to the Carpathians. There he tookservice as coachman (naturally under an assumed name) in the family of awealthy territorial Count. They were more than contented with him, forhe was an excellent and honest coachman. But one day a strangemisadventure befell him. He was taking the Count and his brother-in-lawout for a drive, when the gentleman began talking of the era of LouisXIV., and one of them could not call to mind the name of a celebratedstatesman of those days. Then the coachman could not help turning roundtowards them, and saying, "Colbert!" The Counts immediately dismountedfrom the coach and went home on foot. The learned coachman, however,was discharged. It is not good to sleep under the same roof with acoachman who knows so much.

  My wife and I agreed that _she_ should return to Pest and resume herengagement at the National Theatre there till I should get back mypatrimony. Then we would purchase a little property in the depths of thebeech forest, close to Beni Csanyi, and plough and sow to the end of ourdays. What else _could_ we do? Our country, our nation, our liberty werenow no more. Our souls had no wings. We stuck fast in the mire.

  On the very anniversary of our wedding, which was my wife's birthday aswell, we parted. Our wedding tour had lasted exactly a year. I wishnobody such another, but I would not exchange all the joys in the worldfor the recollection of it.

  I remained behind in a vast primeval forest, entombed, forgotten.

  The latest rumours I got from worthy Beni Csanyi, who had taken my wifeto Pest, driving his four horses himself all the way from his stabledoor to the capital. They were evil times there. Haynau had appropriatedeven the National Theatre for the German players. But the director,worthy Janos Simoncsics, formerly a Conservative celebrity, protestedagainst the proceedings of the high-handed tyrant, and when Haynau beganto haggle with the stiff-necked old magistrate as to how many days aweek he would allow the German players to act in the Hungarian NationalTheatre, brave old Simoncsics replied in his own peculiar Buda-German:"Wen i reden _musz_, so sag i: amol; wen i reden _darf_, so sag i:komol."[62] And "komol"[63] it remained.

  [Footnote 62: If I _must_ speak: once; if I _may_ speak: not at all.]

  [Footnote 63: Not once.]

  My wife counselled me not to write to her through the post-off
ice, asthe whole town was full of spies. When she wrote to me she would sendthe letter to her father at Miskolcz, directed to Judith Benke.

  Even now I often draw out those _love-letters_ which were written to meand began "My dear Juczi."[64] Even now they light up that endlessdarkness which I call the _cancelled_ portion of my life.

  [Footnote 64: Contraction for Judith.]

  From August to the middle of October I knew absolutely nothing of whatwas going on in the world.

  It was a corner of the earth where no visitor ever came, and where theinhabitants themselves went nowhere. Now that winter was approaching,there would be a sledge drive, and communications would be opened upbetween Tordona and Miskolcz. Then one would be able to convey timberinto the town. Of timber there was no lack. Csanyi had four hundredacres of virgin forest to forty acres of arable land.

  Day after day I rambled up and down these forests that had never heardthe voice of man. Never did I meet a fellow creature. However manyheights I might ascend, I saw from thence nothing but the smokingchimneys of Tordona. I discovered the source of the stream that spedthrough the valley. "Linden-spring" was the name they gave it. It wasentirely circled by lindens. I hit upon the childish sport of cutting awater-mill out of elder-tree wood, piecing it together, and placing itacross the little stream. Thus I amused myself.

  One day I received a box of water-colours from my wife. I was immenselydelighted. I now had something to occupy myself with all day. I filled awhole album with my landscapes. Then I painted that journey through theplain with a horse and a half in the covered car. I painted my ownportrait on a piece of paper no bigger than a finger-nail, which couldbe inserted in a medallion. I sent it to my wife. Beni Csanyi's wifeasked me to paint her a portrait of her "old man" also. She wanted itabout the size of a kidney bean; she had a medallion just as large asthat. This was my only work in that terrible year.