That was "the woman who went along with me."
CHAPTER X
WHERE THE WORLD IS WALLED UP
It required quite a strategical combination to transport me from the town of Vilagós to where the world is boarded up.
This place was selected for me by my wife while she was already in Pest, whence on the approach of the catastrophe she set out from home on a peasant's car to seek me up and down the kingdom. For a time she travelled with the wife of Alexander Körösy, who set her on my track. At the storming of Szegedin we were all within an ace of being blown into the air by the explosion of a powder magazine.
It was a little village called Tordona, deep in the beech forests of Borsod, the name of which was not even to be found on the chart of Francis Karacs.[59] Here the celebrated comedian and scene-painter of the National Theatre, Telepi, had built a house with the intention of seeking an asylum there with his family in troublous times. When the Russians came, he sent thither his wife and his son Charles, who was then a young artist student. Telepi gave my wife this sage piece of advice. "When the bottom of the world falls out, take your husband where nobody will find him." Tordona had taken no part in the Revolution.... The journey was quite an Odyssey. In a small covered peasant's car a lady conveys water-melons to market; the coachman and the footman sit in front together. The footman is myself, the coachman János Rákóczy, who only the day before was Kossuth's secretary. The price of water-melons was a silver tizes[60] a-piece. Our heads were not worth so much as that. The way from Vilagós to Bekes-Gyula is long, and the whole way we were going straight towards the advancing Russian host. Cossacks, lancers, infantry, artillery, gun-carriages, met us at every step, and yet nobody asked us the price of those melons or the price of those heads. It was only the two splendid horses in front of our car which might have raised suspicions that we were not itinerant market-gardeners, although Rákóczy wore the genuine blue livery of a coachman. When we got into the domain of swamp and rushes, a mounted betyár[61] took us under his protection, and guarded us along paths where a carriage had never yet gone, where our horses repeatedly waded up to their breasts in water, till we fought our way through into the endless plain. He would take nothing from us but a "God bless you!"
[59] The first Hungarian engraver (1769-1838). His celebrated map of Hungary was first published in 1813.
[60] The tenth of a florin.
[61] A peasant drover.