Emma Orczy

A Bride of the Plains Emma Orczy

Inside the barn the guttering candles were burning low. No one thought of blowing themout, so they were just left to smoke and to smoulder, and to help render the atmosphereeven more stifling than it otherwise would have been. The heat has become almost unbearable-unbearable, that is, to anyone not wholly intenton pleasure to the exclusion of every other sensation, every other consciousness. The barnbuilt of huge pine logs, straw-thatched and raftered, is filled to overflowing with people-men, women, even children-all bent upon one great, all-absorbing object-that object, forgetfulness. The indifferent, the stolid, may call it what he will, but it is the common wish to forget thathas brought all these people-young and old-together in Ignácz Goldstein's barn thisnight-the desire to forget that hideous, fateful fourteenth of September which comes withsuch heartrending regularity year after year-the desire to forget that the lads, the flowerof the neighbouring villages, are going away to-day . . . for three years?-nay! very likely forever!-three years! and all packed up like cattle in a railway truck! and put under theorders of some brutal sergeant who is not Hungarian, and can only say "Vorwärts!" or"Marsch!" and is backed in his arbitrary commands by the whole weight of government, King and country. For three years!-and there is always war going on somewhere-and that awful Bosnia!wherever it may be-lads from Hungarian villages go there sound in body and in limb andcome back bent with ague, halt, lame or blind. Three years! More like for ever!And therefore the whole population of Marosfalva and of the villages round spends its lasthappy four-and-twenty hours in trying to forget that nine o'clock of the fourteenth day ofSeptember is approaching with sure and giant strides; everyone has a wish to forget; theparents and grandparents, the sisters, the sweethearts, the lads themselves! The future isso hideous, let the joy of the present kill all thoughts of those coming three years.