Part 10 (2/2)

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 ”h.e.l.lo, 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 Bogdan 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 Bogdan groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing in the gla.s.s was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the d.a.m.ned 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 Bogdan 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 Bogdan, 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 Bogdan was certain, the man sitting on the bench there was no longer John Bogdan 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 Bogdan, 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 gla.s.s 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 Bogdan 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 Bogdan 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 Bogdan 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, Bogdan?”

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

There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county, whose hand John Bogdan would not at that moment have grasped cordially in a surge of grat.i.tude. 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 Bogdan's scarred face curiously, and he shook his head in pity.

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

Bogdan snarled at him like a vicious cur.

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