And they did all they could to prove to the rest of the company how much at ease they were in good German society.
Madame Krisbay seemed very contented with her neighbors, especially when she discovered that the Rev. Sámuel Rafanidesz was a bachelor. What! did clergymen marry there? (Perhaps, after all, she had not come to such a bad country!)
The schoolmaster was a much handsomer man, but he was older, and was, besides, married. He had an intelligent face, and a long, flowing black beard; he had, too, a certain amount of wit, which he dealt out in small portions. Madame Krisbay smiled at his sallies. Poor woman! She would have liked to have laughed at them, but did not dare to, for her throat was still burning from the effects of that horrid paprika. Now and then her face (which was otherwise like yellow wax) got quite red from the efforts she made to keep from coughing, which, besides being the forerunner of old age, she also considered very demeaning.
"Don't mind us, my dear," called out the mayor's wife, "cough away as much as you like. A cough and poverty cannot be hidden."
Madame began to feel more and more at home, for, as it turned out, the clergyman had been at school at Munich, and could tell a lot of anecdotes of his life there, in the Munich dialect, much to madame's delight. The Rev. Sámuel Rafanidesz did not belong to the stiff, unpleasant order of clergymen, and there was a Slovak sentence composed by Teofil Klempa, often repeated by the good people of Bábaszék, which bore reference to him, and which, if read backward, gave his name: "Szedi na fare, Rafanidesz" ("Stay in your parish, Rafanidesz".) But he never took this advice, and had already been sent away from one living (somewhere in Nográd) because of an entanglement with some lady in the parish. Mrs. Mravucsán knew the whole story, and even the lady, a certain Mrs. Bahó. She must have been a silly woman, for it was she herself who let the cat out of the bag, to her own husband too; and she was not a beauty either, as we can see from Mrs. Mravucsán's words:
"Rafanidesz was a fool. You should never ask a kiss from an ugly woman, nor a loan from a poor man, for they immediately go and boast of it."
Thus Mrs. Mravucsán. It is true she added:
"But if any one were to call me as a witness, I should deny the whole thing."
So you see, I can't stand good for the truth of it either. But that is neither here nor there.
Madame Krisbay certainly enjoyed the company of her two neighbors, and those gentlemen soon raised the whole country in her estimation. But it was lucky she understood no Slovak, and could not hear the conversation carried on by the intelligence of Bábaszék. Of course they were clever people too, in their way, and Veronica often smiled at the jokes made, for they were all new to her, though the natives of Bábaszék knew them all by heart; for instance, the rich butcher, Pál Kukucska, always got up when the third course was on the table, and drank to his own health, saying: