Макс Нордау - How Women Love

Panna hastily let her hands fall, gazed full at him with her sparkling black eyes, and said gently:

"You always have girls in your head. Must you please them all? Wouldn’t one satisfy you?"

"Why, of course, but the one must be had first," replied Pista, with forced cheerfulness.

Panna flushed crimson and made no reply; Pista looked at her in surprise and doubt, but also remained silent, and in a few minutes the girl went away with drooping head.

Pista now went to work again and endured days of bitter suffering. He was ridiculed because a girl had thrashed him, the cruel nickname of "the Hideous One" was given him, people gazed at him with horror whenever he appeared in the street. Panna continued to visit him every Sunday, but he received her distantly, taciturnly, even sullenly.

So Christmas came. On Christmas Eve Panna had a long talk with her father, and the next morning, after church, he again went to old Frau Molnar and without any preamble, said bluntly and plainly:

"Why won’t Pista marry my Panna?"

The widow clasped her hands and answered:

"Would she take him?"

"You are all blind mice together," scolded the peasant, "of course she would, or surely she wouldn’t do what she has done for months past. Isn’t it enough that she runs after the obstinate blockhead? She can’t ask him to have her."

Just then Pista himself came in. His mother hesitatingly told him what she had just heard, and the old woman looked at him enquiringly and expectantly. When the young man heard what they were discussing he became very pale and agitated, but at first said nothing. Not until his mother and the guest assailed him impatiently with "Well?" and "Is it all right?" did he summon up his composure and reply:

"Panna is a good girl, and may God bless her. But I, too, am no scoundrel. Honest folk would spit in my face, if I should accept Panna’s sacrifice. I’d rather live a bachelor forever than let her do me a favour and poison her own life."

His mother and would-be father-in-law talked in vain, he still persisted:

"I cannot believe that Panna loves me, and I won’t take favours."

The simple, narrow-minded fellow did not know that the sense of justice and absolute necessity can move a human soul as deeply, urge it as strongly to resolves, as love itself, so from his standpoint he really was perfectly right.

To cut the matter short: Pista remained obdurate from Christmas until New Year, notwithstanding that his mother and Panna’s father beset him early and late. The girl suffered very keenly during this period, and her eyes were always reddened by tears. But when New Year came, and still Pista did not bestir himself, the strong, noble girl, after violent conflicts in her artless mind, formed a great resolution, went to Pista herself, and said without circumlocution, excitement, or hesitation:

"I understand your pride and, if I were a man, would behave as you do. But I beg you to have pity on me. If you don’t have an aversion to me, or love another, marry me. I shall not do you a favour, you will do me one. Unless I become your wife, I shall never be happy and contented so long as I live, but always miserable whenever I think of you. As your wife, I shall be at peace, and satisfied with myself. That you are now ugly is of no consequence. I shall see you as you were, before--" Here, for the first time, she hesitated, then with a sudden transition, not without a faint smile, said:

"And it will have its good side, too, I shall not be obliged to be jealous."

"But I shall!" exclaimed Pista, who had hitherto listened in silence.

"Nor you either, Pista," she said quickly, "for whenever I see your face I shall say to myself how much I must make amends to you and, believe me, it will bind me far more firmly than the handsomest features could."

Pista was not a man of great intellect or loquacious speech. He now threw his arms around Panna’s neck, patted her, caressed her, covered her head and her face with kisses, and burst into weeping that would soften a stone. Panna wept a little, too, then they remained together until long after noon and, in the evening, went to the spinning-room and presented themselves as betrothed lovers. Three weeks after they were married amid a great crowd of the villagers, some of whom pitied Pista, others Panna, and from that time until the moment when the incidents about to be described occurred, they lived together five years in a loyal, model marriage.

Besides the church and the tile-roofed town hall built of stone, the main street of Kisfalu contained only one edifice of any pretension, the manor or, as it is called in Hungary, "the castle" of Herr von Abonyi. It was really a very ordinary structure, only it had a second story, stood on an artificial mound, to which on both sides there was a very gentle ascent, and above the ever open door was a moss-grown escutcheon, grey with age, on which a horseman, with brandished sword, could be discerned in vague outlines, worn by time and weather.

The owner of this mansion, Herr von Abonyi, was a bachelor about fifty years old.

His family had lived more than three hundred years on their ancestral estates, which, it is true, were now considerably diminished, and he was connected by ties of blood or marriage with all the nobility in the county of Pesth. Up to the year 1848 the whole village of Kisfalu, with all its peasants, fields, and feudal prerogatives (such as mill, fish, tavern and other privileges) belonged to the Abonyis, and the present lord, Carl von Abonyi, came from that gloomy time, termed—I know not why--"patriarchal," when the peasant had no rights, and the nobleman dwelt in his castle like a little god, omnipotent, unapproachable, only not all-wise and all-good, walked through his village whip in hand, like an American "Massa," and dealt the peasant a blow across the face if he did not bow humbly and quickly enough, ordered the village Jew to be brought to the manor, stretched on a bench by two strong lackeys (called in Hungary heiducks) and soundly thrashed whenever he felt a desire for cheap amusement; regarded the women of the village, without exception, as his natural harem, spent his days and nights in immoderate feasting and wild drinking, derived all his education from the Bible with 32 leaves (the number of cards contained in the pack commonly used in the country), and only displayed to ladies of his own station a certain romantic chivalry, which was manifested in rude brawling with real or imaginary rivals, unrestricted duelling on the most trivial pretext, exaggerated gallantry and ardent homage, serenades which lasted all night long under the windows of the favoured fair, and similar impassioned, but tasteless eccentricities. At the present time all this has certainly greatly changed, but many of the nobles who, in the year 1848, the period of the vast transformation, had partly or wholly attained maturity, could not or would not adapt themselves wholly to the new era; in their inmost hearts they still consider themselves the sovereign lords of the soil and its inhabitants, and it is with rage and gnashing of teeth that they force themselves not to display this feeling in words and deeds at every opportunity.

Abonyi, an only son, was a lieutenant in the Palatine Hussars, when the revolution of 1848 broke out. He at once joined the honveds with his troop and, in their ranks, performed, until the close of the war for freedom, prodigies of daring on every battle field, rising, in spite of his youth, within less than eleven months, to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After the disaster of Vilagos, he fled from the country and spent several years in Turkey as a cavalry officer. In 1860, he again returned home and took possession of his estates, which since his father’s death, occurring meanwhile, had been managed by a legally appointed trustee. What wrath and raging there was! The regulation of property-ownership had been executed during the trusteeship, and as Abonyi believed, with outrageous curtailment and robbery of the lords of the estate. The best, most fertile fields—so he asserted—had been allotted to the parish, the most sandy, barren tracts of the land to him; the parish had the beautiful oak forest, which had already been shamefully ravaged, he, on the other hand, received the reed-grown, marshy border of the stream; in the division of the pasturage the peasants had the easily cultivated plain, which was therefore at once ploughed by the new owners, he, on the contrary, the gravelly, steep hillside; in short, he was almost insane with rage when he first saw what the commission had made of his land, and the trustee who had unresistingly agreed to all these unjust acts would have fared badly, if he could have laid hands upon him the first time he went to inspect the bounds of the parish. There was nothing for him to do, however, except to adapt himself to the new state of affairs as well as he could; for nothing could be accomplished by indictments, because the trustee had possessed full legal authority to act, and everything had been done in strict accordance with the law. Far less could he hope to effect anything by violence, since peasants understand no jesting if their beloved acres are touched, and, at the first sign of any intention on his part to disturb their possessions, would quickly have set fire to his house and, moreover, tattooed on his body, with the tines of a pitchfork, a protest to which a counter-plea would scarcely have been possible. Only he could never carry self-control and composure so far that, after nearly twenty years' habitude, he did not become furiously excited at the sight of certain pieces of land, and experience something akin to a paroxysm of longing to shoot, like a mad dog, the first peasant who came in his way.