Chapter 9

In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a jerk. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret to his men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again. He wanted to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire front, from Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to each gunner, each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over there! He even wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too, had had records screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home, too, back to Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay piled up in the store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help each individual to recover his head, whether friend or foe.

But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn't soaring any more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep him from revealing the great secret.

Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted before:

"Phonograph!--Bring the heads!--Phonograph!--"

Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in the midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not shout. He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his brain.

A needle?

Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed off, too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When he tried to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and ran mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.

No! He could not bear it! He'd rather keep quiet--keep the secret to himself. Only not to feel that pain--that maddening pain in his head!

But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both hands and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn't stop that thing in time from going round and round, then his revolving head would certainly break his neck in a few seconds.

Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. "Miska!" he yelled in the extreme of his distress.

But Miska did not know what to do.

The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March. All the sinews in the Lieutenant's body grew tense. Again and again he felt his head slip from between his hands--his spine was already rising before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get his hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and--the long ward was at length as silent as an empty church.

When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room Miska's whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers' division was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly beckoned him to his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the gentlemen could hear:

"The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings." Then he added in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy March."

VI. HOME AGAIN

At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.

John Bogdán leaned way out of the train window and looked at everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory. Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came within an ace of upsetting the carriage.

John Bogdán drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face. A bunch of damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime--all of them, the great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise. And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.

With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.

Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing to a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different colors. His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of bloated raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly! A fright! And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow, deep enough to hold a man's finger. And it was for this he had let himself be tortured so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen times, like a patient sheep, into that confounded room with the glass walls and the shining instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the recollection of the tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth, just to look like a human being again and be able to go back home to his bride.

And now he _was_ home.

The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf acacias in front of the station-master's hut sent a greeting through the window. Grimly John Bogdán dragged his heavy bag through the train corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss, looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.

He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy beads of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had he come here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home soil for which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him for the hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours before, full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all those men wrapped in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or disfigured. There nobody was revolted by the sight of his mutilated face, no indeed. On the contrary, most of them envied him. He was at least capable of going back to work, his arms and legs were sound, and his right eye was perfect. Many would have been ready to exchange places with him. Some had begrudged him his lot and said it was wrong for the government to have granted him a pension on account of losing his left eye. One eye and a face a little scratched up--what was that compared with a wooden leg, a crippled arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed and rattled like a poor machine at the slightest exertion?

Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdán was looked upon as a lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages were removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred opinions were pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who had shared Bogdán's room with him from the start described the former awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken part in the successful operations.

Thus John Bogdán had gradually become almost vain of his shocking mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he left the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a sensation in his village.

And now?

Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a distance before him, John Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not dreamed of in the hospital.

He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that he had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdán who was known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful contrast between the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had sung out a last hoarse farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first day of mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing in front of the same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered cheekbone, a patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and cast down, as if it were only that morning that he had met with the misfortune.

At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard, Kovacs--since the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been somewhere on the Russian front--talking and holding the ticket-puncher, impatiently waiting for the last passenger to pass through. John Bogdán saw her, and his heart began to beat so violently that he involuntarily lingered at each step. Would she recognize him, or would she not? His knee joints gave way as if they had suddenly decayed, and his hand trembled as he held out the ticket.

She took the ticket and let him pass through--without a word!

Poor John Bogdán's breath stopped short.

But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his voice:

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?" the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then quickly turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight. He wanted to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured "Jesus, son of Mary," as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered on, deeply wounded.

"She did not recognize me!" the blood hammered in his ears. "She did not recognize me--did not recognize me!" He dragged himself to the bench opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on the seat.

She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did not recognize John Bogdán. The house of her parents stood next to the house of his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had been confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and kissed her, heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the village to woo her. And _she_ had not recognized him! Not even by his voice, so great was the change.

He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling of the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so hideously disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive curse, and then his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a deserted woman.

What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants' quarters, and call out a saucy "Hello, Marcsa" to the astonished girl?

That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often he had painted the picture to the dot--the maids' screaming, Marcsa's cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to his awed, attentive listeners.

But now--how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face that had made Julia, the station-guard's wife, cross herself in fright? Wasn't Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and haughty ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them, made fools of them all, until she finally fell in love with him.

John Bogdán thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing. Then he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.

Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had gone through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an excellent jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his horses, as his horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the women as he dashed by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come to their faces. Only with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she was famous for her beauty far and wide. Even John's master, the lord of the castle, had patted him on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa and he had become engaged.

"A handsome couple," the pastor had said.

John Bogdán groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing in the glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the damned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together--what did it have to do with _that_ John Bogdán whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the war? For Marcsa there was only _one_ John Bogdán, the one that was coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying--that's what they would put him to--cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife of a miserable day laborer?

No, of this John Bogdán was certain, the man sitting on the bench there was no longer John Bogdán to Marcsa. She would not have him now--no more than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is a cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdán, not to the fright that he was bringing back home to her.

His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!

He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl? Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and experiences, John Bogdán suddenly thought of one of the village characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself, his leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and then he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by the children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community. "In the service of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.

John Bogdán gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.

So deep was John Bogdán sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front of him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle. Suddenly a voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged into his face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he heard some one say:

"Is that you, Bogdán?"

He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was Mihály the humpback.

There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county, whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially in a surge of gratitude. But this humpback--he never had wanted to have anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the only disfigured person in the place.

"Yes, it's I. Well?"

The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdán's scarred face curiously, and he shook his head in pity.

"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."

Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.

"It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't have done anything to me."

The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the least sign of being insulted.

"The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked drily. "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not surprise me. Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as well as you did."

"I do," Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his cradle so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in the battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to eating from golden plates."

The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.

"There are all sorts of people," he observed, and was about to add something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.

This Bogdán always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors because he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery and silver buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in defense of their own wealth, and now the man sat there disfigured, with only one eye, and still would not permit any criticism of his gracious employers. Against such stupidity there was nothing to be done. There was no use wasting a single word on him.

The two remained sitting for a while in silence. Bogdán filled his pipe carefully and deliberately, and Mihály watched him with interest.

"Are you going to the castle?" the humpback asked cautiously, when the pipe was at last lit.

John Bogdán was well aware just what the hateful creature was aiming at. He knew him. A Socialist--that's what he was, one of those good-for-nothings who take the bread out of poor people's mouths by dinning a lot of nonsense into their ears, just like a mean dog who snaps at the hand that feeds him. He had made a good living as foreman in the brickyard, and as thanks he had incited all the workmen against the owner, Bogdán's master, until they demanded twice as much wages, and were ready to set fire to the castle on all four corners. Once Mihály had tried his luck with him, too. He had wanted to make his master out a bad man. But this time he had bucked up against the right person. A box on his right ear and a box on his left ear, and then a good sound kick--that was the answer to keep him from ever again trying to make a Socialist of John Bogdán, one of those low fellows who know no God or fatherland.

Mihály moved on the bench uneasily, every now and then scrutinizing his neighbor from the side. At last he plucked up courage and said suddenly:

"They'll probably be glad up there that you are back. Your arms are still whole, and they need people in the factory."

Bogdán turned up his nose.

"In the brickyard?" he asked disdainfully.

The humpback burst out laughing.

"Brickyard? Brickyard is good. Who needs bricks in war? The brickyard's gone long ago, man. Do you see those trucks over there? They are all loaded up with shells. Every Saturday a whole train of shells leaves here."

Bogdán listened eagerly. That was news. A change on the estate of which he had not yet heard.

"You see, there is such a nice division," Mihály continued, smiling sarcastically. "One goes away and lets his head be blown off. The other remains comfortably at home and manufactures shells and decorates his castle with thousand-dollar bills. Well, I'm satisfied."

"What are we to do, eh, shoot with peas or with air? You can't carry on a war without shells. Shells are needed just as much as soldiers."