CHAPTER XVI
"The waters of the Maros flow sluggishly."
But even the bridegroom's unconventional and reprehensible conduct had not the power to damp for long the spirits of the guests.
By the time the soup had been eaten and the glasses filled with wine, the noise in the schoolroom had already become deafening, and no person of moderate vocal calibre could have heard himself speak. The time had come for everyone to talk at the top of his or her voice, for no one to listen, and for laughter—irresponsible, immoderate laughter—to ring from end to end of the room.
The gipsies were scraping their fiddles, blowing their clarionets and banging their czimbalom with all the vigour of which they were capable. They, at any rate, were determined to be heard above the din. The leader, with his violin under his chin, had already begun his round of the two huge tables, pausing for awhile behind every chair—just long enough to play into the ear of every single guest his or her favourite song.
For thus custom demands it.
There are hundreds and hundreds of Hungarian folk-songs, and to a stranger's ear no doubt these have a great similarity among themselves, but to a Hungarian there is a world of difference in each: for to him it is the words that have a meaning. The songs are, for the most part, love-songs, and all are written in that quaint, symbolic style, full of poetic imagery, which is peculiar to the Magyar language.
When we remember that in the terrible revolution of '48, when these same Hungarian peasant lads who composed the bulk of Kossuth's followers fought against the Austrian army, and subsequently against the combined armies of Russia and of Austria, when we remember that throughout that terrible campaign they were always accompanied by their gipsy bands, we begin to realize how great a part national music plays in the national spirit of Hungary. The sweet, sad folk-songs rang in the fighting lads' ears when they fell in their hundreds before the superior arms and numbers of their powerful neighbours, they inspired them and urged them, they helped them to win while they could, and to yield only when overwhelming numbers finally crushed their powers of resistance. Gipsy musicians fell beside the young soldiers, playing to them until the last the songs that spoke to them of their village, their sweethearts and their home. And the sweet, sad strains rang in the ears of the lads when they closed their eyes in death.
And now when Andor—face to face with the first great sorrow of his life—felt as if his heart must break under it, he loved to hear the gipsy musician softly caressing the strings of his violin as he played close to his ear the sweetest, saddest melody among all the sweet, sad melodies in the Magyar tongue. It begins thus: