Part 18 (2/2)

[Footnote 37: From the celebrated Szozat (appeal) calling on the Hungarian to be true to his fatherland.]

A Magyar stomach detests what is b.u.t.tery. He becomes melancholy and sickly from it; he runs away from the very mention of it, and if some sly housekeeper deceitfully gives him b.u.t.tery things to eat, all his life long he considers that as an attempt upon his life, and will never again sit down to such a poison-mixer's table.

You may place him where you like abroad, still he will long to return from the cursed b.u.t.ter-smelling world, and if he cannot he grows thin and fades away: and like the giraffe in the European climate, he cannot reproduce his kind in a foreign land. Roughly speaking, all his neighbors cook with b.u.t.ter, oil and dripping: and ”be harsh or kind, the hand of fate, here thou must live, here die.”[38]

[Footnote 38: Also from the ”Szozat.”]

The lawyer was a true Magyar of the first water. And when he perceived that the crab soup was made with b.u.t.ter, he put down his spoon beside his plate and said he could not eat crabs. Since he had learned that the crab was nought else but a beetle living in water, and since a company had been formed in Germany for making beetles into preserves for dessert, he had been unable to look with undismayed eye upon these retrograde monsters.

”Ach, take it away, Boris,” sighed the host. He himself was not eating, for was he not atoning for his sins?

Mistress Boris removed the dish with an expression of violent anger.

Just imagine a housekeeper, whose every ambition is the kitchen, when her first dish is despatched away from the table without being touched.

The second dish--eggs stuffed with sardines--suffered the same fate.

The lawyer declared on his word of honor that they had buried his grandfather for tasting a dish of sardines, and that every female in the family immediately went into spasms from the smell of the same. He would rather eat a whale than a sardine.

”Take this away, too, Mistress Boris. No one will touch it.” Mistress Boris began to mutter under her breath that it was absurd and affected to turn up one's nose at these respectable eatables, which were quite as good as those they had eaten in their grandfather's house. Her last words were rather drowned by the creaking of the door as she went out.

Then followed some kind of salad, with bread crumbs. The lawyer had in his university days received such a dangerous fever from eating such stuff, that it would indeed be a fatal enterprise to tackle it now.

This was too much for the housekeeper. She attacked Mr. Sarvolgyi:

”Didn't I tell you not to cook a fasting dinner? Didn't I say so? You think everyone is as devout as you are in keeping Friday? Now you have it. Now I am disgraced.”

”It is part of the punishment I have inflicted on myself,” answered Sarvolgyi, with humble acquiescence.

”The devil take your punishment; it is me that will come in for ridicule if they hear about it yonder. You become more of a fool every day.”

”Say what is on your tongue, my good Boris; heaven will order you to do penance as well as me.”

Mistress Boris slammed the door after her, and cried outside in bitter disappointment.

The lawyer swore to himself that he would eat whatever followed, even if it were poison.

It was worse: it was fish.

We have medical certificates to enable us to a.s.sert that whenever the lawyer ate fish he promptly had to go to bed. He was forced to say that if they chased him from the house with boiling water he could not venture to put his teeth into it.

Mistress Boris said nothing now. She actually kept silent. As we all know, the last stage but one of a woman's anger is when she is silent, and cannot utter a word. There is one stage more, which was imminent.

The lawyer thought the dinner was over, and with true sincerity begged Mistress Boris to prepare a little coffee for him and the magistrate.

Boris left the room without a word, placing the coffee machine before Sarvolgyi himself; he did not allow anyone else to make it, and occupied himself with the preparations till Mistress Boris came back.

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