"The magnet has gone!" muttered the lawyer's clerk.
Hardly had the door closed when Kukucska, the butcher, exclaimed:
"Now we are free!"
He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, thus showing the head of an ox tatooed on his left arm, then winked knowingly at Mravucsán. The mayor seemed to understand the look, for he went to a cupboard and pulled out one of the drawers, from which he took a pack of cards. The knave of spades was missing, but that did not make any difference to the intelligent members of Bábaszék society, for they had once before played "Preference" with those cards, and the last player had simply received one card less when they were dealt out, though he was supposed to have the knave of spades, and it was called the "spirit card." If they were playing spades, the last player in imagination threw the knave on it, saying: "I play the spirit card!" So now, in spite of this small difficulty, they decided to play, and the game lasted till daylight. The Senators, the butcher, and the clergyman played, the lawyer's clerk dealt, and Klempa looked on, having no money to lose, and went from one player to the other, looking over their shoulders, and giving them advice what to play. But one after the other sent him away, declaring he brought them bad luck, which rather depressed him. So the poor schoolmaster wandered from one to the other, till at last he took a seat between the clergyman and the butcher, dropped his weary head on the table, and went to sleep, his long beard doubled up, and serving as a pillow. But he was to have a sad awakening, for that mischievous Pál Kukucska, seeing the beard on the table, conceived the idea of sealing it there; and fetching a candle and sealing-wax, they dropped some on the beard in three places, and Mravucsán pressed his own signet ring on it. Then they went on playing, until he should awake.
Other incidents, and not very pleasant ones either, were taking place in the house. Madame Krisbay, to whom the mayor's wife had given her own bedroom, would not go to bed with the enormous eider-down quilt over her, for she was afraid of being suffocated during the night. She asked for a "paplan" (a kind of wadded bed cover), but Mrs. Mravucsán did not possess such a thing, so she brought in her husband's enormous fur-lined cloak and threw it over madame, which so frightened the poor nervous woman that she was attacked by migraine, and the mayor's wife had to spend the night by her bed, putting horse-radish on her temples.
An unpleasant thing happened to Veronica too. As soon as she was alone in the Mravucsáns' best bedroom, she locked the door, hung a cloak on the door-handle so that no one could look through the key-hole, drew the curtains across the tiny windows which opened on to the courtyard, and then began to undress. She had taken off the bodice of her dress and unfastened her skirt, when all at once she became aware of two bright eyes watching her intently from under the bed. It was a kitten, and it was gazing at her as intently and admiringly as though it had been a prince changed by some old witch into the form of a cat. Veronica, alarmed, caught up her skirt and bodice, and put them on again.
"Go along, you tiresome kitten," she said; "don't look at me when I'm undressing."
She was such an innocent child, she was ashamed to undress before the kitten. She dressed again, and tried to drive it out of the room, but it hid itself under the bed, then jumped on a cupboard, and it was quite impossible to get rid of it. Mrs. Mravucsán, hearing the noise from the next room, called out:
"What is the matter, my dear?"
"I can't drive the cat out."