Макс Нордау - How Women Love

Panna went daily to the churchyard and busied herself for hours about her husband’s grave. She ordered a stone cross from the city with the inscription: "To her cruelly murdered husband by his unforgetting widow." But when she wanted to have the monument set up, the priest interfered with great vehemence and declared he would never permit this cross to be placed in "his" churchyard. Panna did not make the least attempt to rebel against this command, but quietly told the workmen to carry the stone to her house; there it was leaned against the wall opposite to her bed, and daily, when she rose and went to rest, she sat a long time on the edge of her pallet, gazing thoughtfully at the cross and inscription.

Once she interrupted her father in the midst of an ordinary conversation with the abrupt inquiry, whether, in dismissing a prisoner, the time fixed in the sentence was rigidly kept, and if, for instance, any one was condemned to six months' imprisonment, this six months would run from the end of the trial or from the following morning.

The old man thought the question strange and did not know how to answer it. He, too, was secretly beginning frequently to share the opinion now tolerably current in the village, that Panna was not altogether right in her mind.

Meanwhile Spring had come, Panna worked industriously in the fields and in the vineyard, nothing betrayed what thoughts were occupying the mind of the silent, reserved woman. Not until the latter part of May did she begin to grow restless and excited, then she repeatedly entreated her father and the gardener, though it evidently cost her a great effort to control herself, to ask at the castle whether the day of the master’s release was known. Her father flatly refused to comply with her crazy wishes, and very earnestly exhorted her to trouble herself no farther about the castle and its owner. As for the gardener, he had cautiously intimated repeatedly that it would be unnatural for so young, robust, and beautiful a woman to remain a widow long, especially when there was some one who would consider himself only too happy to put an end to her widowhood, and he now added his entreaties to the old man’s that she would at last banish from her mind the memory of the evil past.

Accident rendered Panna the service she had vainly asked of the two men. One evening, when she was returning from the fields, she passed the housekeeper at the castle who, with her back to the road, stood leaning against the low half-door of a peasant’s hut, and called to her friend who was working in the yard: "Well, the master wrote to-day; he wants Janos to bring the carriage at six o’clock to-morrow morning to take him from the prison."

At this moment the peasant woman saw Panna passing, and made the housekeeper a sign which silenced her at once. But Panna had heard enough. She quickened her pace to reach home quickly, put down her hoe, and ascertained that her father was already in the house. Her voice betrayed no trace of excitement as she asked if he was going out again, which he answered in the negative. Then she went to her room, put on a warm woollen shawl, slipped the few florins she still possessed into her pocket, and went away, telling her father to go to sleep, she would be back again.

Hastening to a peasant who lived at the other end of the village, she begged him to drive her to the city at once; she would pay whatever he asked. The man replied that his horses were tired out, he had driven them to the pasture, and could not bring them home now, etc. Panna went to the second house beyond and repeated her request. This peasant was more curious than his neighbour and asked what she wanted in the city in such a hurry.

"My father has suddenly been taken very ill, and I must get a doctor."

"Why don’t you go to the village surgeon if the case is so urgent?"

"I have been there," was the quick, glib answer which fell from Panna’s tongue, "he isn’t at home, and won’t come before morning. He has been called to a farm two miles off."

"H’m! And you are leaving the sick man all alone?"

"He isn’t alone, a neighbour is with him."

"Wouldn’t it be better for you to ask the neighbour to go to the city, and stay with your father yourself?"

"To cut the matter short, neighbour," Panna, who had grown terribly impatient, now burst forth, "will you take me or not? I’ll answer your foolish questions on the way."

The peasant cautiously named the price of the ride, which Panna, without a word of objection, instantly placed in his hand, after which he at last went to draw out the waggon and harness the horses. A few minutes later the vehicle was rolling over the dusty high-road.

Panna, wrapped in her shawl, sat on a bundle of straw which the peasant had put in to furnish a seat for his passenger, staring with dilated eyes at the landscape, illumined by a soft radiance. It was a marvellously beautiful night in May. The full moon was shining in a cloudless sky, the ripening grain waved mysteriously to and fro in the white light, over the darker meadows a light mist was rising which, stirred by the faint breeze, gathered into strange shapes, then dispersed again, now rose a little, now sank, so that the straggling bushes scattered here and there alternately appeared above the floating vapour and were submerged in it; the fragrance of the wild flowers mingled with the fresh exhalations from the damp earth and gave the warm air a stimulating aroma. Now and then, where the bushes grew more thickly along the edge of the road, the rapturous songs of the nightingales were heard, the only sound, except the distant barking of a dog, or the buzzing of a huge night-beetle flitting past the waggon, which, at times, interrupted the silence of the night.

But Panna’s senses were closed to all this varied beauty. Her whole existence, all her thoughts and feelings were now centred upon a single point, the purpose which brought her to the city. With a torturing effort, which drove the blood to her brain, she again reviewed the events of the past month, of her whole life. She strove to examine them on all sides, judge them impartially, consider them from various standpoints.

Was it right that Abonyi should now be at liberty to move about as the great lord he had always been, after being permitted to make himself comfortable for six months in a prison, which was no jail to him? Was it not her duty to execute the justice which neither the laws nor men would practise? Had she not a perfect right to do so, since she, and those who belonged to her, had hitherto always atoned fully and completely, rigidly and more than rigidly, for every sin?

In her early childhood her soul had been ravaged by a terrible grief, which had never been overcome; the law had killed her brother; in her girlhood, she had been tortured by only too frequent repetitions of the sight of her father, whom the law had loaded with chains and punished with severe imprisonment; her sorely wounded heart had found consolation only in a single thought which, amid her sufferings and afflictions, had gradually become established as firmly as a rock within her soul, that every sin found a harsh punishment, that this was an immovable, inexorable law of the universe, which could not be escaped, that it would be easier to pluck the stars from the sky than to do wrong without atoning for it. When, by a sudden act of violence, she injured Pista for life, it was instantly apparent to her that she owed expiation for it, and she had not hesitated or delayed an instant in punishing herself more severely than any judge would have done, by voluntarily sacrificing the happiness of her whole existence. This had cost her no self-conquest, it was a matter of course; the eternal law of the universe of sin and atonement required it, and to this demand there could be no resistance.

This law was her religion, she believed it and could not help believing; if she did not, if there was no august law of the universe, beyond all doubt, that sin exacted pitiless requital, it surely would not have been necessary to shoot her brother, to deliver her father so often to the hardships of prison-life, to bind her own youth to a hideous being whom she did not love when she married him, whom only the consciousness of duty voluntarily and proudly fulfilled afterwards rendered dear to her. If this was not a necessity, surely God, fate, mankind—use whatever name you choose—had basely, atrociously, robbed her brother, her father, and herself of life and happiness, and their destiny was enough to cause frenzy, despair, madness!