A Son of the People/Chapter 6

village and countryside never actually learnt, as it had hoped to do, what wealth András found hidden away after his father’s death. And, truly, though old Kemény was eccentric in one way, his son bid fair to outdo him, in that respect, for his conduct after his father’s death was peculiar in the extreme. For three consecutive years he and his mother continued their existence at the tumble-down old farmhouse of Kisfalu. True András would not allow his mother to do any kind of work, and paid two village girls to wash and cook for them both, otherwise their life remained the same. He himself supervised all the labour, and continued his father’s dealings with Rosenstein the Jew, but the greater part of his time he spent with the good priest at Árokszállás, who, it soon transpired, taught him to read and to write, and many other things that a peasant lad does not usually learn. Kemény András, whatever his motives were, brought the same energies to bear upon his mental work, that he had done upon physical toils. His father, he soon discovered, had, owing to his wonderful avarice, and greed of gain, left him a very large amount of money; so large that, at first, András and his mother, accustomed to their constantly empty pockets, hardly realised its full value nor the benefits, which it would confer upon them. Their slowly-thinking peasant minds hardly could understand that all those old wine barrels, which had been filled with gold and silver pieces by the eccentric old miser, were all absolutely theirs, and meant so much comfort and luxury to them, who, up to now, did not know what it was to sleep in a comfortable bed, or to eat their entire fill. Money has so very little meaning in that land of plenty, that, just for a moment, András viewed his wealth, with a feeling that was almost one of disappointment. He hardly knew himself what he had really expected, when with his own hands he had driven the last nails in the boards which covered him, who had been the arbitrary master of Kisfalu; hardly knew what he used to hope for, when on hot summer nights, after a hard day's toil, his young shoulders still sore from the paternal correction, for some real or imaginary offence, he used to stroll out upon the vast puszta, and his gaze lost in the far-off immensity of the horizon, he vaguely wondered at the meaning of the word “happiness.”

And those mountains of gold and silver, jingling and glittering, seemed so poor, so tawdry in comparison with those nightly day-dreams. Presently, however, the shrewd mind, inborn in every peasant, rose to the conception, still weak, and far distant, of all that riches might mean. He remembered chance derisive words his father had, from time to time, thrown out, as if involuntarily, on the subject of the heavy sacrifices the lord of Bideskút often made to get a handful of this gold, with which to gratify his every whim. If it was not too great a sacrifice to give up bits of land, one’s ancestors had owned for hundreds of years, in order to handle some of these gold pieces, why then, since they had, as it were dropped in his lap, he would try and learn, study to find out, what was the best use to be made of it. The lord of Bideskút parted with his land to obtain gold, why should not he, Kemény András, the peasant, the son of the eccentric old miser of Kisfalu, part with the gold to gain the land? Oh! to absolutely call some of that loved soil his, the soil which, from his childhood, he had learnt to coax into yielding to his avaricious father, all the treasures it contained, his own; that he could share all products with his mother, and, perhaps, who knows? in time to come with someone else, who would call him husband and, someone else wee and very dear, who would learn to say “Father!” Oh! for the delight of owning every grain of wheat, the fleece of every sheep, every drop of milk from his cows, and not to have to give of the first and of the best, to the noble lord out there, at Bideskút, who never came to Kisfalu, who trafficked with the devil, and allowed Satan to work the land that should have been sacred in his eyes.

András, who had in twenty years of enforced self-restraint learnt to keep his own counsels, and to whisper to no one what was passing in his mind, never communicated his thoughts to anyone. No one knew what treasures were found in old Kemény’s coffers, no one knew if the dead man had indeed been a liar or a fool. The work in the field continued. Kemény András’ flour was as fine and white as his father’s had been, the linen woven from his flax the softest in the county, his wine the most delicately flavoured; no wonder that the Jew traders from Gyöngyös were always seen at Kisfalu, in every season of the year, when there was aught to sell. As for András, who never in his life had bought, sold or exchanged, he very soon learnt the full value of the products which the fat land yielded him.

For three years he learnt from the good old priest how to read, to write and to reckon; with the patient stolidity, with which he had accepted his daily hard tasks from his father, he fulfilled now the task his own shrewd mind had allotted to himself. He soon found out that the Jews played upon the credulity of the peasants, that they presented in a distorted aspect the value of the trifling loans they made, and the usurious interest they received. To fathom the actual value of the exchange, the money for the product, András resolutely imposed the task upon himself. The peasant mind in Hungary is a merry one, full of love for pretty girls, gay dancing, poetic music, but it is obstinate and tenacious, and that tenacity András—who knew little of love or pleasure—applied entirely to the furtherance of his aim.

Little by little he employed some of his money in improving the old farmhouse, he rendered it comfortable for his mother to live in, and also—he could not himself give any reasons for doing it—he added a few rooms, furnished them cosily with furniture he bought at Gyöngyös, and even papered the walls, over the whitewash, which when finished caused a veritable procession from the two neighbouring villages, to see this luxury, which had become far famed.

Gradually as he felt more at home in his altered circumstances, and saw his mother more happy and cheerful, he lost that taciturnity, which his wounded pride had as it were built round him, and began to mix more freely among the peasants in the neighbouring villages. Soon the sunny nature inherent in every Hungarian reasserted itself; gradually he took up every habit which those of his age pursued. He again went to church with his mother, but now they both stopped at the porch after Mass, and András ventured on looking at the pretty girls in their Sunday finery, and on asking them for a dance or two, in the afternoon in the big barn. He did not find them unapproachable: the belief had gained ground, that old Kemény had left masses of money, and that András was wealthy, beyond any Jew for miles round; ay! some even asserted that he was becoming almost as rich as the lord of Bideskút himself.

A certain romanticism hung round him, owing to his lonely childhood, his mysterious learning—which in the minds of his neighbours had assumed boundless proportions—and above all owing to his manly bearing, his fine eyes, which had retained a certain defiant fierceness, only tempered by his now frequent and cheerful smile. Soon half the village beauties were in love with him, and many were the quarrels with jealous swains that András had to fight out, after the Sunday afternoon dance. But now the venom had gone out of his disposition; the quarrels, fierce for a moment, always ended suddenly by András’ cheerful, good-natured giving in, and by a couple of bottles of the best wine the county of Heves produced, in which to drown any lurking feeling of jealousy against the handsome youth who was so liberal, and such a merry companion.

But in spite of his attraction towards the fair sex, András was still single, and still the devoted son in prosperity, which he had been in time of trouble. He flirted with all, made merry love to many, but not one of the bevy of pretty girls, who trotted briskly to church on Sunday mornings, could boast of having induced the rich Kemény András to think of sharing his fabulous wealth with her. When the older women or men threw chaffing hints out, as to the probable future mistress of Kisfalu, András would laugh and say:

“Hey! hey! but the pity is I love them all, and I cannot bring the lot to Kisfalu, there is no room, and my dear mother would not approve, and … if I choose … how can I choose one among a hundred beauties … without being very rude to the ninety-nine others that I love?”

If his mother gently expressed a wish to see, at some future time, her grandsons round her knee, András would throw his arms round her neck, and kiss her rough cheeks.

“Mother,” he would say, “there is only one saint in the county of Heves; you are the saint. When an angel comes down from heaven, I will ask her to marry me; but until then, I will be content to love my saint.”

The mother sighed, the girls cried, and András, at five-and-thirty, was still a dutiful son, in single blessedness.