Читать книгу St. Peter's Umbrella - Kálmán Mikszáth - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The new priest had arrived in the only cart the villagers had at their disposal. Two cows were harnessed to it, and on the way the sacristan stopped to milk them, and then offered some of the milk to the young priest.

"It's very good milk," he said, "especially Bimbo's."

His reverence's luggage was not bulky; it consisted of a plain wooden box, a bundle of bed-clothes, two walking-sticks, and some pipes tied together with string. As they passed through the various villages the sacristan was often chaffed by the inhabitants.

"Well," they called out to him, "couldn't you find a better conveyance than that for your new priest?"

Whereupon the sacristan tried to justify his fellow-villagers by saying with a contemptuous look at the luggage in the cart:

"It's good enough, I'm sure. Why, a calf a month old could draw those things."

But if he had not brought much with him in the way of worldly goods, János Bélyi did not find much either in his new parish, which appeared to be going to wreck and ruin. The relations of the dead priest had taken away every stick they could lay hands on, and had only left a dog, his favorite. It was a dog such as one sees every day, as far as his shape and coat were concerned, but he was now in a very unpleasant position. After midday he began to wander from house to house in the village, slinking into the kitchens; for his master had been in the habit of dining every day with one or other of his parishioners, and always took his dog with him.

The dog's name was Vistula, but his master need not have gone so far to find the name of a river, when the Bjela Voda flowed right through the meadows outside the village. (The Hungarian peasants generally give their dogs the name of a river, thinking it prevents hydrophobia.) The dog had already begun to feel that he and the priest together had been better received than he alone, though, until now, he had always imagined, with his canine philosophy, that his master had in reality been eating more than his share of the food. But now he saw the difference, for he was driven away from the houses where he had once been an honored guest. So altogether he was in a very miserable, lean condition when the new priest arrived. The sacristan had shown him his new home, with its four bare walls, its garden overgrown with weeds, its empty stable and fowl-house. The poor young man smiled.

"And is that all mine?" he asked.

"All of it, everything you see here," was the answer, "and this dog too."

"Whose dog is it?"

"It belonged to the poor dead priest, God rest his soul. We wanted to kill the poor beast, but no one dares to, for they say that the spirit of his old master would come back and haunt us."

The dog was looking at the young priest in a melancholy, almost tearful way; perhaps the sight of the cassock awoke sad memories in him.

"I will keep him," said the priest, and stooping down he patted the dog's lean back. "At all events there will be some living thing near me."

"That will be quite right," said the sacristan. "One must make a beginning, though one generally gets something worth watching first, and then looks out for a watch-dog. But it doesn't matter if it is the other way about."

János Bélyi smiled (he had a very winning smile, like a girl's), for he saw that old Vistula would not have much to do, in fact would be quite like a private gentleman in comparison to his companions.

All this time people had been arriving in the yard to have a look at the new priest; the women kept at a distance, and said: "Dear me! so young and already in holy orders!"

The men went up and shook hands with him, saying, "God bless you! May you be happy with us!"

An old woman called out, "May you be with us till your death!"

The older women admired his looks, and remarked how proud his mother must be of him.

In fact the new priest seemed to have taken every one's fancy, and he spoke a few words with them all, and then said he was tired, and went across to the schoolmaster's, for he was to live there for a time till he could get his own place a bit straight, and until he saw some signs of an income.

Only a few of the more important villagers accompanied him to talk over the state of affairs: Péter Szlávik, the sacristan; Mihály Gongoly, the nabob of Glogova; and the miller, György Klincsok. He began to question them, and took out his note-book, in order to make notes as to what his income was likely to be.

"How many inhabitants are there in the village?"

"Rather less than five hundred."

"And how much do they pay the priest?"

They began to reckon out how much wood they had to give, how much corn, and how much wine. The young priest looked more and more serious as they went on.

"That is very little," he said sadly. "And what are the fees?"

"Oh, they are large enough," answered Klincsok; "at a funeral it depends on the dead person, at a wedding it depends on the people to be married; but they are pretty generous on that occasion as a rule; and at a christening one florin is paid. I'm sure that's enough, isn't it?"

"And how many weddings are there in a year?"

"Oh, that depends on the potato harvest. Plenty of potatoes, plenty of weddings. The harvest decides it; but as a rule there are at least four or five."

"That is not many. And how many deaths occur?"

"That depends on the quality of the potato harvest. If the potatoes are bad, there are many deaths, if they are good, there are less deaths, for we are not such fools as to die then. Of course now and then a falling tree in the woods strikes one or the other dead; or an accident happens to a cart, and the driver is killed. You may reckon a year with eight deaths a good one as far as you are concerned."

"But they don't all belong to the priest," said the nabob of Glogova, smoothing back his hair.

"Why, how is that?" asked the priest.

"Many of the inhabitants of Glogova are never buried in the cemetery at all. The wolves eat them without ever announcing it in the parish."

"And some die in other parts of the country," went on György Klincsok, "so that only very few of them are buried here."

"It is a bad lookout," said the priest. "But the parish fields, what about them?"

Now they all wanted to speak at once, but Klincsok pulled the sacristan aside, and stood up in front of the priest.

"Fields?" he said. "Why you can have as much ground as you like. If you want one hundred acres ..."

"One hundred acres!" shouted Szlávik, "five hundred if you like; we shall not refuse our priest any amount of ground he likes to ask for."

The priest's countenance began to clear, but honest Szlávik did not long leave him in doubt.

"The fact is," he began, "the boundaries of the pasture-lands of Glogova are not well defined to this day. There are no proper title-deeds; there was some arrangement made with regard to them, but in 1823 there was a great fire here, and all our documents were burnt. So every one takes as much of the land as he and his family can till. Each man ploughs his own field, and when it is about used up he looks out a fresh bit of land. So half the ground is always unused, of course the worst part, into which it is not worth while putting any work."

"I see," sighed the priest, "and that half belongs to the church."

It was not a very grand lookout, but by degrees he got used to the idea of it, and if unpleasant thoughts would come cropping up, he dispersed them by a prayer. When praying, he was on his own ground, a field which always brought forth fruit; he could reap there at any minute all he was in need of—patience, hope, comfort, content. He set to work to get his house in order, so that he could at least be alone. Luckily he had found in the next village an old school friend, Tamás Urszinyi, a big, broad-shouldered man, plain-spoken, but kind-hearted.

"Glogova is a wretched hole," he said, "but not every place can be the Bishopric of Neutra. However, you will have to put up with it as it is. Daniel was worse off in the lions' den, and after all these are only sheep."

"Which have no wool," remarked his reverence, smiling.

"They have wool, but you have not the shears."

In a few days he had furnished his house with the money he had borrowed of his friend, and one fine autumn afternoon he was able to take possession of his own house. Oh, how delightful it was to arrange things as he liked! What pleasant dreams he would have lying in his own bed, on pillows made by his own mother! He thought over it all when he lay down to sleep, and before going to sleep he counted the corners of the room so as to be sure and remember his dreams. (The Hungarian peasants say, that when you sleep in a room for the first time you must count the corners, then you will remember your dream, which is sure to come true.) He remembered his dream the next morning, and it was a very pleasant one. He was chasing butterflies in the fields outside his native village, looking for birds' nests, playing games with the boys and girls, having a quarrel with Pali Szabó, and they were just coming to blows when some one tapped at the window outside.

The priest awoke and rubbed his eyes. It was morning, the sun was shining into the room.

"Who is it?" he called out.

"Open the door, Jankó!"

Jankó! Who was calling him Jankó? It seemed to him as though it were one of his old schoolfellows, from whom he had just parted in his dream.

He jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

"Who is it?" he repeated.

"It is I," was the answer, "Máté Billeghi from your old home. Come out, Jankó, no, I mean of course, please come out, your reverence. I've brought something."

The priest dressed hastily. His heart was beating fast with a kind of presentiment that he was to hear bad news. He opened the door and stepped out.

"Here I am, Mr. Billeghi; what have you brought me?"

But Mr. Billeghi had left the window and gone back to the cart, where he was unfastening the basket containing little Veronica and the goose. The horses hung their heads, and one of them tried to lie down, but the shaft was in the way, and when he tried the other side, he felt the harness cutting into his side, which reminded him that he was not in the stable, and a horse's honorable feeling will not allow of its lying down, as long as it is harnessed to the cart. There must be something serious the matter to induce it to lie down in harness, for a horse has a high sense of duty.

Máté Billeghi now turned round and saw the priest standing near him.

"Hallo, Jankó! Why, how you have grown! How surprised your mother would be if she were alive! Bother this rope, I did make a firm knot in it!"

The priest took a step toward the cart, where Billeghi was still struggling with the knot. The words, "if your mother were alive," had struck him like a blow, his head began to swim, his legs to tremble.

"Are you speaking of my mother?" he stammered. "Is my mother dead?"

"Yes, poor woman, she has given up the ghost. But" (and here he took out his knife and began to cut the rope) "here is your little sister, Jankó, that is, I mean, your reverence; my memory is as weak as a chicken's, and I always forget whom I am talking to. I've brought your reverence's little sister; where shall I put her down?"

And with that he lifted up the basket in which the child was sleeping soundly with the goose beside her. The bird seemed to be acting the part of nurse to her, driving off the flies which tried to settle on her little red mouth.

The autumn sunlight fell on the basket and the sleeping child, and Máté was standing with his watery blue eyes fixed on the priest's face, waiting for a word or a sign from him.

"Dead!" he murmured after a time. "Impossible. I had no feeling of it." He put his hand to his head, saying sadly, "No one told me, and I was not there at the funeral."

"I was not there either," said Máté, as though that would console the other for his absence; and then added, as an afterthought:

"God Almighty took her to Himself, He called her to His throne. He doesn't leave one of us here. Bother those frogs, now I've trodden on one!"

There were any amount of them in the weedy courtyard of the Presbytery; they came out of the holes in the damp walls of the old church.

"Where shall I put the child?" repeated Mr. Billeghi, but as he received no answer, he deposited her gently on the small veranda.

The priest stood with his eyes fixed on the ground; it seemed to him as though the earth, with the houses and gardens, Máté Billeghi and the basket, were all running away, and only he was standing there, unable to move one way or the other. From the Ukrica woods in the distance there came a rustling of leaves, seeming to bring with it a sound that spoke to his heart, the sound of his mother's voice. He listened, trembling, and trying to distinguish the words. Again they are repeated; what are they?

"János, János, take care of my child!"

But while János was occupied in listening to voices from a better land, Máté was getting tired of waiting, and muttering something to himself about not getting even a "thank you" for his trouble, he prepared to start.

"Well, if that's the way they do things in these parts, I'll be off," he grumbled, and cracking his whip he added, "Good-by, your reverence. Gee-up, Sármány!"

Father János still gave no answer, did not even notice what was going on around him, and the horses were moving on, Máté Billeghi walking beside them, for they had to go uphill now, and the good man was muttering to himself something about its being the way of the world, and only natural that if a chicken grows into a peacock, of course the peacock does not remember the time when it was a chicken. When he got up to the top of the hill he turned round and saw the priest still standing in the same place, and, making one last effort to attract his attention, he shouted:

"Well, I've given you what I was told to, so good-by."

The priest's senses at last returned from the paths in which they had been wandering, far away, with his mother. In imagination he was kneeling at her death-bed, and with her last breath she was bidding him take care of his little sister.

There was no need for it to be written nor to be telegraphed to him; there were higher forces which communicated the fact to him.

János's first impulse was to run after Máté, and ask him to stop and tell him all about his mother, how she had lived during the last two years, how she had died, how they had buried her, in fact, everything. But the cart was a long way off by now, and, besides, his eyes at that moment caught sight of the basket and its contents, and they took up his whole attention.

His little sister was still asleep in the basket. The young priest had never yet seen the child, for he had not been home since his father's funeral, and she was not born then; so he had only heard of her existence from his mother's letters, and they were always so short. János went up to the basket and looked at the small rosy face. He found it bore a strong resemblance to his mother's, and as he looked the face seemed to grow bigger, and he saw the features of his mother before him; but the vision only lasted a minute, and the child's face was there again. If she would only open her eyes! But they were firmly closed, and the long eyelashes lay like silken fringes on her cheeks.

"And I am to take care of this tiny creature?" thought János. "And I will take care of her. But how am I to do it? I have nothing to live on myself. What shall I do?"

He did as he always had done until now, when he had been in doubt, and turned toward the church in order to say a prayer there. The church was open, and two old women were inside, whitewashing the walls. So the priest did not go quite in but knelt down before a crucifix at the entrance.