Tragic Journeys

A Wandering Author Notes — Not Without Emotion — Two Manifestations of Capricious Fate

FERENC MOLNAR

LATE at night, after a première, a group of authors, actors and régisseurs were discussing the age-old problem whether there existed such incidents as could only be enacted on the stage, incidents which neither the raconteur nor the writer of books could express completely and thoroughly. I also participated in the controversy, citing a few situations and events, all of which would be more effective when acted than when told in a book. But, quite naturally, I was at home before I could remember the one incident among my reminiscences that would have answered the question. By that time the argument had long been finished and everybody except myself had more or less forgotten.

Walking down the main street of a small town in Eastern Galicia where I was stationed as a war correspondent, I met a Hungarian officer, an acquaintance of mine. It was a Summer afternoon in igi5.

"Do you want to see something interesting?" he asked me. "If you do, come with me. I'll take you to see a trial by court martial."

HE took me to the end of the village where the so-called residential section—as they know it in Eastern Galicia—was situated. In the centre of a large, unkempt garden, there stood a one-story house—headquarters of a brigade-command. In front of the house, beneath the trees, several tables were placed end to end so that they formed one long table. As near as I can remember, there were about ten or twelve officers seated on one side of the table, with a lieutenant-colonel in the centre. I stopped, with my guide, a little farther away, in order not to interfere with the proceedings. The defendant stood in front of the table: he was a handsome, gigantic Ruthenian Landwehrmann with black heard, in uniform, without his cap. There were documents scattered all over the table; among them, soda water bottles glistened in the sunshine. The trial was conducted in a loud tone but I did not understand a single word of it: the lieutenant-colonel spoke with the defendant in a Slavic language. My guide, who understood it, told me what it was all about. The Ruthenian giant was arrested when he attempted to steal over to the enemy's lines. Now he was standing trial as a spy. We stood there for a long time, staring at the scene: a long row of officers sitting behind a long row of soda water bottles, and, before them, a tall man with a black beard standing as straight as a pine tree. My guide suddenly turned to me:

"Look!" he said, pointing to the gate of the garden.

The garden was surrounded by a low wooden fence and separated from the state-road by a deep ditch. A short wooden bridge led from the gate to the road across the ditch. On the bridge there stood a great, strong girl. She stood there, rigidly, still as a statue, staring at the court martial scene. She was a broad-shouldered, hefty, ample-bosomed peasant girl. My guide remarked that when he had passed by about an hour ago, the girl had been standing there already, just as silently, just as motionless, on the very same spot. The soldiers knew her: she was the mistress of the black-bearded giant. (The brigade had been stationed in that section for three months and many of the soldiers had formed liaisons.)

The lieutenant-colonel rose from his chair and, immediately, all of the other officers followed suit. The defendant was sentenced to death. Two soldiers took him to the house, but the officers remained at the table, in small groups, arguing. The scene left such a gruesome impression on me that I felt I had to flee from the place.

"Let's go," I said to my friend and started to go, a little nervously and impatiently, toward the gate. As we crossed the little wooden bridge, the big peasant girl turned to my friend, without saying a word of greeting, with a very stern, very severe expression on her face:

"Will they kill him?"

"Yes," answered the officer.

"Thank you," said the girl, turned about, and went away. She walked in the middle of the white, wide state road, slowly but with equal steps, making not a single gesture or movement that would not have been essentially connected with walking. She walked straight, with head erect, without looking back, not quickly, not slowly. But in this walk, in this devastatingly objective going-away, in the rhythm of this walk, in its tempo, in the manner in which she held her head, in the slow, pendulous motion of her arms, in the rhythmic swing of her skirt moved by her determinedly stepping legs, something was expressed.

SOMETIIING which, I must confess, I cannot express here because I somehow feel that everything that was majestically beautiful, dramatic, poetic in that silent departure would be despoiled with every printed word with which I tried to explain it. The sentences with which I would attempt to convey this never-to-be-forgotten sight would break the perfect silence of the twilight that was an essential part of this compelling experience. We stood on the little bridge and silently watched how the girl, injured at heart but resolute, went away from the man who -would be executed in an hour. We did not move until she had disappeared from sight.

This scene, this going away, it seems to me, can only be acted. One may tell it fairly well, but it is impossible to reproduce it in writing. For the essence of the scene was the immediate, unhesitating, stubborn, self-confident, energetic, constant and merciless departure of the female from the male that had now suddenly become useless to her. All this was expressed only in a movement which completely concealed all sentiment and feeling. And yet, this movement, in its absolute simplicity, contained everything that we, the spectators, could only feel: eternal laws of the relationship of men and women, of the psychology of women, of wounded human beings, even of war itself . . .

Here was a moment that Duse could have expressed better than Balzac. Although, had this scene appeared in a play, the author would have said nothing but: Exit silently.

I once knew a famous singer, a member of the Budapest Opera, who had a very wealthy uncle. The old gentleman was very proud of his nephew and presented him each year with a princely gift. In the particular year when the following incident occurred -and that it all happened a very long time ago will he apparent at once as soon as I mention the nature of the gift—the singer received from his uncle a carriage and two beautiful Russian steeds. It was an extraordinarily handsome, black lacquer carriage of the type which—before the automobile age—the more conservative aristocrats used to have. And the horses were black, too, nervous—beautiful, fiery. After that one could see the carriage at the stage door of the Opera every night. The stage hands stared at it silently, hut the supers and the choristers generally made envious remarks. The singer, surprisingly enough, used his carriage for other purposes than display—he sometimes took long rides— usually on those days when he had to sing in the evening. An hour before the performance, he would drive to the City Park in order, as he used to say, to air his lungs and to meditate about his role.

ONE evening he was scheduled to sing Scar pia in Tosca. An hour and a half before the performance he drove through the City Park for meditation. But the two wild Russian steeds had been trotting for hardly more than ten minutes when the weather suddenly changed; the mild evening breeze turned into an icy wind and a sleet storm began. This was both bad for the lungs and for meditation. So the singer rose from his cushioned seat, opened one of the windows and said to his driver: "Drive to the Operahurry!" The driver reached for his whip and the two fiery steeds began to race toward the Opera. The singer shut the window of the carriage and started to sink back on the seat. But now that supernatural power that does not like people to live in too great comfort and security, interfered. The floor of the carriage simply dropped out, and was left behind somewhere on the avenue. There was no time left for hesitation: the singer began to run too, with his feet dangling on the ground. He started a race with his horses. It must have been a dreadful situation. Had he stopped for only a moment, or had he been unable to maintain the speed of his horses, he would have been crushed under the wheels of his carriage. He was yelling for help at the top of his lungs but his voice, coming from the closed carriage, could not be heard in the din of the crowded street. So he kept on running, framed by the beautiful lacquered carriage. In front of him, on the driver's seat, a liveried coachman; in front of the carriage, the expensive, handsome Russian steeds. And it is a mile and a half from the City Park to the Opera House. The carriage passed by thousands of pedestrians hurrying, with chattering teeth, in the icy sleet of that winter evening. Men on the street who could not see the occupant's dilemma threw envious glances at the handsome carriage and, most probably, also made cruel remarks about the presumably rich and distinguished gentleman driving to the Opera in warm comfort. Nobody realized that in the elegant vehicle a frightened, terrified man was running in agony in the mud and sleet of the street. Thus he arrived at the Opera in torn clothes, covered with dirt, half-dead of fright and fatigue.

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I do not wish to deduct any ethical moral from this anecdote, I merely wish to explain why I jotted it down in my diary at the time it happened. I thought: here was an original and perfect illustration of the old saying that, often, the envied and apparently happy men are little enviable and very unhappy. And yet, were I to write down the following sentence in a novel:

"Everybody envied the eternally smiling Count X., although he was very unhappy. He felt like the owner of a handsome carriage beneath whose feet the floor of the vehicle had fallen out and who was forced to run in his own carriage for miles."

Were I to write down this sentence, I, and anybody else, would be fully justified in saying:

"Ah, what a silly, stupid, forced, artificial, ponderous metaphor."