Part 40 (1/2)

”From Ollendorf's grammar?”

”Yes.”

”Do you recollect exercise No. 2: '_Why does the Captain weep?--Because the Englishman has no bread._'--Well, then, let us _give_ the Englishman some bread.”

At this every one burst out laughing. The lieutenant also laughed.

And so this scene came to an end. We sat down to table, and amidst the merry ring of gla.s.ses we made a good deal of fun out of the odd and mystical question of Ollendorf's, ”Why does the Captain weep?” and the still more curious answer, ”Because the Englishman has no bread.”

The lieutenant's frame of mind remained an inexplicable enigma to me. In after years I discovered its true solution.

The cause of his weeping was altogether different from what Ollendorf had supposed.

CHAPTER XVI

SOLDIERING

The idyll did not last very long, and was quickly followed by the epic.

War broke out, not among the young married folks, but among the European Powers. This only so far concerned my ward as Kvatopil was also mobilized; with his dragoon regiment he went towards the eastern frontier. Bessy, naturally, went with him.

We parted abruptly. They both came to me to say good-bye. Kvatopil's face was radiant with joy, and the reflection of it was visible in the smiling face of the lady. There will be war. The soldier's harvest will now ripen.

For the purpose of sending her her quarterly allowance it was absolutely indispensable that I should know their place of sojourning.

”Our t.i.tle for the present will be--'An Ihre hochwohlgeboren Frau Oberlieutenantin Elisabeth von Kvatopil!' For the present, I say. Later on we shall no doubt advance _farther_ and _higher_.”

”_Farther_ towards the frontier, and _higher_ in the scale of rank, I suppose?” said I, by way of solving the rebus.

My ward (she was four years younger than I) was very pleased with my polite elucidation, and the pair of them parted from me in the best humour in the world.

After that I received a letter from my ward every week. There is absolutely nothing in the most intricately combined knights' moves of the severest chess problems which can be compared with their peripatetic zigzagings. Now towards the south, a week afterwards towards the west, then up again towards the north, retreating, advancing, then back again; knocking about in such utterly unknown hamlets, that one could only discover them on the best charts by means of microscopes. Finally, the war took a flying leap into Wallachia and Moldavia, skipped about Ja.s.sy and Bucharest, and then leaped across and all along the Pruth, and at last settled down in Czernovicz, till it had to move on farther to Przemysl, whence again it happily doubled back by way of Stry, Munkacs, Tokaj, Miskolcz, Kecskemet, and through Kalocsa again to Buda-Pest.

Bessy accompanied her husband everywhere. All the vicissitudes of the seasons which naturally abounded in such a martial pleasure trip she patiently endured with him. The letters which she sent to me during this period would make a very interesting chapter in a history of camp life.

_Opportunist_ reasons restrain me from making them public--they might deter our young persons (I allude, of course, to the female s.e.x) from following Bessy's example.

Often and often I thought how accurately this young woman had foretold all these things of herself when we sat beside each other in my little wooden hut on the Comorn islet. In a straw-hut, in a cow-stall, in a besieged fortress, in a bare barrack, in the tent of an itinerant player, at the bivouac of an out-camping soldier--anywhere and everywhere, it is Love that makes us happy, and its sweet illusion can conjure up fairy palaces out of these wretched surroundings. And remember, too, that an officer in the field is by no means an amiable husband. Plagued, worried, chicaned by his official superiors; flouted by the weather; looking at the enemy with wolf's eyes, and kept back from falling upon him; eternally bickering with an unfriendly population; a guest beheld with evil eyes; and his wife (if he have one) like an iron chain hanging to his neck--it requires no small amount of love on the lady's part for her to follow him everywhere, and put up with his ill-humour.

And she had prophesied all this beforehand. What was to be the end of it all?

But there had been no advance whatever up the ladder of rank. My last letter was still addressed to a lieutenant's lady.

When the great universal war was over, which left behind it so much bitter disillusion, Lieutenant Wenceslaus Kvatopil again came tapping at my door.

Clerk Coloman was no longer with me. The _Delibab_ had come to grief. I now edited the _Vasarnapi Ujsag_, in the place of the publicly advertised and responsible editor Albert Pakh, who was lying ill at Graefenberg. My new name was ”Kakas Martin.”[101] Eh, what a popular man I was then! There were Kakas Martin meerschaum pipes and Kakas Martin clays, with bowls in the shape of c.o.c.k-headed men. I really was in the mouth of the nation in those days. _O tempi pa.s.sati!_

[Footnote 101: Martin c.o.c.k.]