Eyes Like the Sea Part 40

"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.]

"Ah! 'tis you, brother, eh?" said I.

"So you still recognise me, then?"

I must admit that his physiognomy had considerably changed. During the campaign the officers were permitted to grow absolutely counter-regulationary beard-pieces. Wenceslaus was now bearded _a la Haynau_, that is to say, the beard was shaved so as to run into the moustache, till the two seemed one, which contributed not a little to the formidability of the whole face. But a still more notable correction of the features was due to his nose, which had grown quite red,--a piece of ruby.

He began by laying his index finger on the bridge of his nose.

"Do you see that? My sole booty from the Russo-Turkish war is this red nose. Last winter, while we were encamping on the Galician frontier, I happened to be out in the open field the whole of one night, and got in the way of a villainous Russian blast. The wind drove the powdered snow into my face, and each flake stung me like a red-hot needle-point. I was not even able to turn my back upon it. In the morning my nose was just as you see it now. That same week twenty of my men were frozen to death in their saddles, half of my regiment was down in the hospital with inflammation of the lungs, scurvy, and hunger-typhus. Of my whole squadron I only brought forty men home--and this blood-red nose as a trophy."

At this I did not know whether to condole with or congratulate him.

"I shouldn't have minded so much if only we had been able to fight with some one; but to go through a six-months' campaign without having anything else to do with one's sword than lay the flat of the blade about the shoulders of stubborn peasants during our requisitions for hay, that I _do_ call hard. Sometimes our foreposts were so close to the enemy that we could _see_ each other's breath, and yet we were not allowed to attack. At one time we were face to face with the Turks, at another time with the Muscovites. It would have been all one to me whom I pitched into, so long as I could pitch into some one. No such luck!

Just when I was fancying that now we really were going to begin the battle, the order came again, 'Sheathe your swords!' and we marched somewhere else. I would have preferred storming trenches with cavalry to this sort of thing. And then that cursed maize-bread! Nothing but maize-bread, and not always enough of that. Half-roasted horse-flesh, too! Thank you for nothing!"

"But, thank Heaven, it is all over now!" said I encouragingly.

"It is over, certainly. But what have I gained by it?"

He pointed to his collar. There certainly were only two stars there still.

"No promotion. I am just where I was before. And yet our major has retired. He was obliged to go, poor fellow; every limb was full of rheumatism. Our senior captain was promoted to his place, our second captain into the first captain's place. His place is now empty. I am the senior lieutenant, but there's not a word said about me. It is enough to make a fellow blow his brains out!"

I earnestly begged him not to think of such a thing. He had other duties. With such an amiable consort too!

"True, brother! She really is an angel. I dare not think what that woman has gone through during these bitter times. She was with me everywhere; but for her, perhaps, I should have gone to the bad. Ah, my friend, you don't know what bliss it is when, after going one's rounds through a biting snowstorm, one returns to one's quarters to find there an angel awaiting you with a bowl of steaming-hot punch."

"I do know, for I've tried it."

"The punch never failed. If rum was to be had for money, she got it from somewhere. I have known her, sir, get into her sledge and drive a day's journey into town to get rum for me. A diamond-hearted woman, I say! And then her love, too! Despite this ruby nose of mine, she loves me. She says it suits me very well. Nay, she is not even hurt at remaining simply the wife of a senior lieutenant. But for her I should have sent a bullet through my head long ago."

I tried to comfort him with the a.s.surance that a senior lieutenant in active service was worth ever so much more in the world's estimation than a general on the retired list.

He wound up by inviting me to have a gla.s.s of punch with him in the evening as soon as his lodgings were ready to receive me.

I didn't go.

Frequently did he invite me, by letter in his wife's name even, and yet I never went to drink punch with them. When we met together afterwards, I always invented some excuse. On the first occasion I said my head ached; on the second occasion I said I was too busy; on the third occasion unexpected country cousins had looked in upon me, and so on.

Every time I met him, however, friend Wenceslaus always wound up with the bitter exclamation: "I shall have to blow my brains out. Still no promotion!"

At last I was tired of telling so many lies, so I told my friend the truth.

Now, there are three sorts of truths in the world.

The first sort of truth is that which pleases my friend, but doesn't please me.