The worthy pædagogue used to sit brooding over this map for hours. He would draw his boundaries with a pair of compasses, construct imaginary roads from town to town, and reconstruct a fortress from the imposing ruins in the bed of the River Waag. Nay, he even ventured upon the audacious experiment of cutting through the mountain chain separating the River Hernád from the River Poprád, and uniting these two rivers (in a state of nature they flow in diametrically opposite directions) into one broad continuous water-course, thus bringing together all the various branches of that scattered family of kindred nations which dwells between the White Sea and the Black.
In those days very little was known among us of railways beyond the rumour (the newspapers mentioned it as a sort of curiosity) that a certain Englishman, called William Griffiths, wanted to make a wheel-track of iron. Thomas Bodza's idea therefore of a continuous European waterway almost deserved to be called sublime.
Such exaltation is innocent enough in itself. It is found, more or less, in every race, and is especially vigorous wherever an impoverished, orphaned stock is aware of the existence of a powerful, dominating, gigantic kinsman beyond a mountain range.[6] Unfortunately, however, this exaltation did not remain an empty poetical dream in the bosom of our village pædagogue.
[6] E.g., The Slovaks in north Hungary, who know that Russia lies beyond the Carpathians.
Even as a student his heart was full of a bitter hatred of everything Hungarian. He went to school at Pressburg, that peculiar town where the traders are German, the gentry Hungarian, and the poor Slavonic. The traders pick holes in the gentry and the poor folks hate them both. He saw the heady young squires of the Alföld[7] idle away their time at school in unedifying contrast to the diligent sober conduct of himself and his friends, and yet the masters treated them with the greatest distinction. Some of them scarcely attended the lectures at all, and yet they sat on the front benches. They were able to have private lessons, and thus easily outstripped the poor scholars who had to slave night and day to keep pace with them. They marched about in fine clothes and got their poorer fellow-students to copy out their exercises for them. At the public examinations they declaimed Hungarian verses with such emphasis, with such a fire of enthusiasm, that even that portion of the audience which did not understand a word of their fulminating periods cheered them vociferously, whereas he, Thomas Bodza, recited the affected, pedestrian, poetic effusions of the Slavonic School of self-improvement without the slightest effect. Even in the rude arena of material strength the Asiatic race showed a determination to be paramount. The youths of the Alföld were the better wrestlers, more skilful in gymnastic exercises, and in all serious encounters asserted themselves with more self-confidence and greater enthusiasm; they boasted ostentatiously of their nationality, and scornfully looked down upon his.
[7] The great Hungarian plain.
And then, too, during the sessions of the Diet, when the haughty Hungarian gentry flocked to the capital from every quarter of the realm with extraordinary pomp and splendour, a new and clamorous life filled all the streets, and the brilliant visitors monopolized every yard of free space. It frequently happened, in the evenings, that a dozen or so of high-spirited jurati would join hand to hand, occupy the whole road, and squeeze against the wall any shabby-coated alienist who happened to come in their way. The poor devil might be carrying home his meagre jusculum[8] under his mantle in a coarse unvarnished pot, with a piece of brown bread stuck into it, revolving in his mind the whole time the story of another poor scholar in days gone by who, once upon a time, used, in the same way, to carry home his humble mess of pottage in just such another coarse earthenware pot, and who, nevertheless, came to be one of the princes, one of the great men of Hungary, with a great big coat of arms, and castles to dwell in. He forgot, however, to reflect that he, with whom he compared his own fate, was gifted at the outset with intellect and virile courage, qualities with which he himself had only been very modestly equipped by nature; their common misery in early life was the sole point of resemblance between them.
[8] Pottage.
These first bitter impressions never left his mind. He registered the disfavour of fortune and the fruits of his own limited capacity among the grievances of the oppressed nationality to which he belonged. Years of want, his little dilapidated dwelling—granted him in his capacity of village teacher but shoved away into an obscure corner of Hétfalu—his meagre barley-bread, his sordid frock-coat—all these things aggravated the anguish of his soul.
His occasional intercourse with the lord of the manor, the arrogant and pretentious Hétfalusy, was not calculated to reconcile him with his destiny. Hétfalusy regarded as a profitless loafer every man who did not seek his bread with spade and hoe, unless, of course, he happened to be a gentleman by birth. He applied this theory to the schoolmaster race especially, whom he conceived to have been invented for the express purpose of eternally hounding on the common folks against their lawful masters, the gentry. As if the world could not go on comfortably without the peasant learning his letters! What he heard in church was quite enough for him surely! On one occasion, when mention was made in his presence of a village shepherd who had forged a bank-note, he observed that if the fellow had not learnt to write he would never have gone astray. The national school teachers, he said, were the natural attorneys of the agricultural population as against the landlords. And Hétfalusy gave practical expression to his belief whenever he had the chance. The corn he was bound to supply to the schoolmaster was always measured out to him from the bottom of the sieve; he seized the courtyard of the school for his threshers, so that during school-time not a word of the lessons could be heard for the racket; he never repaired the building set apart for the cultivation of the muses, but looked on while the schoolmaster himself patched up the holes in his wall with balls of clay borrowed from his own garden, and re-thatched the dilapidated rush-roof with his own hand. Frequently he would rate the schoolmaster in the public thoroughfare, in the presence of the gaping rustics, on the flimsiest pretext, and bully him as if he were the lowest of his menials.