Sarah opened her eyes and looked deeply into her father’s face, as if she very badly needed a consoling answer from him.
“My child,” the disturbed father responded after a pause, “there are certain norms and laws in human society that cannot be violated. The world does not pose questions of a young girl in love, it concerns itself not at all with the tears poured out by an unhappy love. With its hard hands it grasps only the naked facts. The sorrows of a love-filled heart cannot serve as the guideline for its procedures and measures. Believe me, my dear child, I would not place any barriers in the way of your love if Lajos had not removed himself from human society through his dreadful deed, which will always mark him no matter how splendid his heart and character.”
“If the world rules in that way,” Sarah responded earnestly, “then it is extremely unjust and without feeling.”
“Lajos committed a deed that the law cannot ignore. His wrath, spurred by a severe assault on his personal dignity, is not placed on the scales of justice the Law holds in her hands. Take some advice from your father, who means well by you, shake off this unfortunate love and give your heart once more the peace you had.”
In truth, Watson thought the Hungarian to be a splendid man, and in no way did he believe that Lajos had ever betrayed anyone. Lajos had long since been acquitted in his own court. He only held it necessary to keep his true conviction secret from his daughter in order not to strengthen her love. He understood quite well how easily a man’s wrath could lead him to such a deed, and that Lajos was more sinned against than he was a sinner. The language he had used to lead Sarah to this subject had been calculated to discover the secret of his child’s heart.
“It seemed to me that someone was at that window,” Watson remarked as he raised his head and stared at the spot. Sarah followed his gaze automatically.
At the same moment the hound left his spot at the door and stretched his neck into the air.
“Look, Sarah, how alert Nero is!”
“You’re mistaken, father—Nero, lie down, it’s nothing.”
“Close the curtains, my child,” the farmer commanded, “that dumb animal really thinks he saw something.”
Sarah left her place and went to the window in question.
She was in the process of releasing the cord that bound back the curtains when she suddenly dropped her hands and rushed to the arms of her amazed father, her face turned pale.
“Father, father, stay where you are!” Sarah beseeched him, holding him back.
“Father … Lajos!” those were the only words her father could get from her on repeated questioning.
“La—jos? …” trembled in extended sounds from the farmer’s lips, and he, too, went pale as death.
From outside, the cry for help sounded ever more clearly and more urgently.
Nero’s barks transformed into an uncanny howl that normally would be taken as the premonition of an impending death.
Sarah was not mistaken. It was indeed Lajos who had looked into her eyes while she had been standing in front of the window.
To explain the appearance of the Hungarian at this place, so unexpectedly, we will have to go back a bit.
When old Carr jumped on Lajos, the latter succeeded in escaping his fists through clever movement, only to throw himself at the old farmer with redoubled force. Lajos quickly threw him to the floor. In the first rush of his rage, the Hungarian pressed his hands so hard around the man’s throat that in a few seconds old Carr had ceased to breathe.
Lajos had hardly noticed this until the dreadful results of his deed flashed before his eyes, and, without looking behind him, he rushed over the fence of the surrounding farms and did not stop until he fell to the ground on a limestone cliff near the bank of the Mississippi.
An impenetrable darkness surprised him. No stars were in the sky.
Here and there a steamer puffed by him, and the reddened faces of the stokers appeared to him in the glow of their fires.
He awaited the break of day with feverish agitation and anxious impatience.
He did not close his eyes for the entire night.
When the morning began to dawn, he noted with no small pleasure that he was on a landing where boats normally took on wood to stoke their fires.
He decided to take the next boat that would be coming up the Mississippi to load wood. He had no money whatsoever and also had no desire to pay for his passage by working as a deck hand, but, at the worst, he expected to be set ashore. Since the next landing was on the opposite shore in Illinois, he wanted nothing more than to be told to leave the boat.
That is precisely what happened.
About five in the morning, the Amazonia put in at the landing, having left St. Louis a half-hour before. It was in the habit of stopping here, since the wood was cheaper than in St. Louis or five miles further north.
Lajos boarded the boat and mixed with the considerable number of deck passengers.
The Amazonia had hardly gone twelve miles when the clerk of the boat made his usual inspection of the deck.
Several other passengers had boarded along with Lajos.
After the clerk had collected their fares, he approached Lajos, who sat at the end of the rear deck at a considerable distance from all the others. From afar, he seemed to be following the furrow the rudder was making in the water.
“I have no money,” was his dry response when the clerk of the boat demanded his fare.
“If you’ve got no money,” the clerk bellowed hoarsely, “then help load wood at the next landing, or we’ll set you ashore.”
When the Amazonia reached the next landing, Lajos left the boat and did not return.
The clerk and the mate searched the entire boat, looking for him to put him to work.
They sought him in vain.
The Hungarian visited farm after farm, offering his labor, but always hoping he would not be hired. On these occasions he did not have to be asked twice whether he might like something to eat.
So, after two days of wandering, he arrived at that country grocery where he made the acquaintance of Cleveland the peddler. He pressingly persuaded the man of his sad situation, how he had been looking for work for several days to no avail. Cleveland offered him a horse to ride with him to Shellville, where he could have a place with an acquaintance for good wages. We already know the rest, and now we have to join the story where we last saw him, riding madly forward, hanging with both hands onto the Lydia’s mane for dear life.
The peddler Cleveland’s effects, used as kindling, had started a fire in the rotting underbrush beneath the tall grass. A wind that began gently, then grew intense, turned a twelve-mile stretch of prairie into a lake of fire in a matter of minutes. The fire rolled in the direction of the wind with raging speed.
Since Lajos had the wind at his back, the crackling flames quickly reached him as well. They soon licked at the hooves of the racing horse—only a few more seconds and the man and horse would have found their graves there and then—but Lydia hurled herself into the floods of Little Creek, separating Looking-Glass Prairie from Rolling Prairie on the opposite bank. The flames leaped the gap time and again, strengthened by the intensifying firestorm, but they found no nourishment on the other side and spared that place.
Utterly soaked and shaking from the cold from head to foot, Lajos left the wet bed that had protected him so surprisingly from utter, unavoidable catastrophe.
He saw the racing lake of fire rolling toward him from afar, and it seemed to him that a mounting column of smoke marked the place where a farm or perhaps an entire village had gone up in flames.
Lydia appeared either to have drowned or to have run away. He could see nothing of her. But what outbreaks of wrath he let loose when he saw that he had lost all of the money he had robbed, that his four thousand dollars had vanished.
The straps of the money-belt that he had tied around himself must have loosened—he was sure of that. “Does the belt lie in the river, or is it on the scorched p
rairie? How many miles did I go, which way did Lydia take?” Those were questions whose answers were driving him to distraction.
It was only an hour after midnight.
“Thunder and lightning! Is the whole of hell conspiring to ruin me? Am I not Satan enough to command it to help me and join me? I believe that if a person has committed two murders in such rapid succession, he can justly claim the support of hell!”
His being was silent for a moment, then it broke loose with even greater fury.
“Money! Money! Honor, fame, good name—I would rather lose everything, but not my money! Satan, Satan—money, money!”
If the stars had been able to hear these words, they would have withdrawn back into their blue beds and quit glittering for one night. But they drew the sorrowing West along with them—far, far beyond the smoking prairie to the corpse of the murdered peddler.
The Hungarian rushed across the short grass of Rolling Prairie with long steps, after having looked about the banks of the creek for a quarter-hour. After some consideration, he thought it wiser to put the area behind him as quickly as possible.
Only now did he think about the dumb trick he had played by igniting the peddler’s pack, starting a prairie fire. He saw only too late that it would have been smarter to have waited for daylight or to have departed in the most obvious direction. In neither of the two cases would he have risked as much as he had now actually lost. And weren’t there other means as well?
As so often happens, even the cleverest loses sight of the right way and blindly blunders into ruin when confronted by difficult circumstances.
Lajos covered a considerable stretch in the remaining portion of the night. When he saw a farm in the morning, he was so exhausted that he would gladly have sat down to rest. His cheek also hurt him a great deal. He pulled loose his handkerchief and tied it about his face so that people could not see the dreadful wound, but he neglected to wash off the blood clinging to his entire face.
Keeping to his earlier tactics, he asked for work here as well, but only in order to get something to still his hunger.
The farmer, a Pennsylvania German, saw the blood-stained face of the approaching man, and he gaped in amazement as this pale man asked for work on his farm.
When the farmer remarked on Lajos’s blood-stained face, he responded that he had tripped over a large stone during a night journey by foot and that the sharp edges of the stone had pierced his cheek.
The farmer, who was not entirely convinced by this story, invited him to breakfast, since the grain had already been harvested and he could do the rest with the aid of his fifteen-year-old son. Lajos’s dreadful appearance also moved him to offer him a worn blue blanket coat with a broad black stripe up the back. Lajos took it with what appeared to be great thanks, and he put it on at once.
“Certainly you haven’t been in the country long?” the farmer asked as the Hungarian departed, in a dialect peculiar to the peasants of Pennsylvania, made up of German and English words.
“No, not long,” the Hungarian sighed in hypocritical tones. “We poor immigrants have a hard time until we become acquainted with the dominant style in your country. And even if a person has set a few dollars aside, if he gets sick, gets the ague or a fever, he is no further along than he was before, which is to say he again has nothing. You have no idea how bad it can be for one of us who does not know the morals and customs of your country. Whoever wants to earn something with his hands in honorable labor comes out the worst.”
“Don’t say that,” the Pennsylvanian interrupted in a good-hearted voice. “You appear to me to have picked up the notion that one can only make his way here by swindling and conscienceless speculation. Believe me, even if you do find a man here and there who has gained his riches that way, this does not sully the character and solidity of our nation. Look around you, see all these flourishing farms with their beautiful, friendly cabins? They rose because of the labor of hands, and they cost a great deal of sweat. Visit my neighbors, and you will find nothing but hard-working, just men who can only bring honor to our glorious republic. I see by your distorted face that you have only seen the underside of our country. If you don’t have a living right now, don’t let that discourage you or lead you to the false notion that our republic is a bad country that does not know how to nourish its children. Come back to me, now, you look to be so sad and depressed to me that it would do you good not to reject the gift of a ten-dollar bill. I will not ask you the source of your distress—it doesn’t concern me.”
When the Hungarian left the farm, the farmer said to his son: “Sam, I don’t know, but this man fills me with horror—I don’t know what he’s done … The bloodstains on his face and the bandaged cheeks do not please me—people just don’t fall over stones and smash half a face. I wish him all possible luck on his trip—I have done my duty …”
Now Lajos began a period of truly Satanic striving that appeared to have as its goal the injury of his fellow man and the destruction of family ties. His path was laden with curses, and he did injury even to his benefactors when he was in the position to do so.
It is a grace to mankind that very few such as Lajos walk the earth. The world would become an open grave on whose edge the hyenas and vipers would hold their Sicilian Vespers.
Lajos was utterly filled with hatred for people, whom he believed existed only for him to exploit. He enjoyed encountering persons who had lost all the peace in their beings, or who once had been happy but now wallowed in the deepest misery. He saw all of them as allies who would stand at his side or at least be useful in some way, without his conceiving any obligation toward them. The same hand that was extended to help them would just as easily strike them to the ground. If Lajos had been a real human being, he might not have been grateful to the Pennsylvanian who pressed money into his hand, but he would not have imputed to him a bad motive, which was in fact what he did.
“That stupid codger,” he said to himself, “he could just as easily given me a hundred-dollar bill. I hope Satan burns out his entire farm that means so much to him—that ramshackle peasant, who makes so much of this doghouse of a republic—cornbread, bacon, and molasses—molasses, bacon, and cornbread—those are the fine dishes this republic serves us on its great table. The White House treats ambassadors to corned beef and cabbage and hangs the temperance medal of Father Matthew around their dried-out throats. Bah, bah! If you served this people Tokay and Ruster, it would sweep both of them aside to make way for the syrup jug.”
Winter had arrived, and Lajos was even worse off than he had been before that affair on Looking-Glass Prairie, despite many swindles and extortions of money. Since his flight from Bissell’s Island, his exterior had undergone such major changes that he could only be recognized with considerable difficulty. A full, pitch-black beard covered his entire face, rendering him unrecognizable and hiding a good half of the scar on his cheek, which reached almost all the way to his lower eyelid. His manner no longer betrayed his criminal plans or a devilish decision, and nothing bothered him any more—the most amazing things could happen and not a line of his face would respond. Someone could step up to him and call him a murderer—he would have taken a slap in icy calmness without betraying his thoughts in the slightest.
The external person had changed—but his inner being was permanently active, though without having yet achieved anything great, even for evil. His crimes up to now appeared to be only so many links in a long chain of crimes he intended to forge that would make him great one day, if only in crime.
Trusting in his altered exterior, he had dared to return to St. Louis. In fact he was bold enough to visit the beer hall where the judge who had ejected him for his betrayal of the poor soldier was a steady customer and spent almost every evening.
Here, tormented by the bitterest need, thrown out of every boarding-house, he finally decided to return to New Orleans in order to seek out Frida, who perhaps had some property and whom he had abandoned so shamefully the year before. He inten
ded to extort money from Emil and start a free life at a greater distance.
But how to get to New Orleans? Without money? Perhaps he could decide to work for his passage. Or have himself set ashore time after time? That would require a useless journey of six to ten days, and it would conflict with his intention of getting there as quickly as possible.
How to get money in St. Louis, that was the important matter—for who would give him even a cent here? He would even have stooped to stealing. He was already so decadent and depraved that he would not hesitate to commit a common theft of a few dollars, although he would have preferred to arrange a murder from which he could make thousands.
He went across the street to the windows of the money-changers; he often stood musing there, several times deciding to seize a few hundred dollars through a bold grab and then flee.
That was such a dangerous game that it would only have been possible with the magical grasp of a practiced pickpocket.
Then one day his gaze dropped on Bissell’s Island, which he utterly seemed to have forgotten, and where there was someone who was willing to do anything for him. “Shouldn’t I go to Sarah and get some money? How would I, old Carr’s murderer, be received by Sarah’s father? Sarah’s father has a good heart—should Lajos suddenly appear, wouldn’t the man give him the means to go to another part of the Union? That deed was done only in a momentary seizure—Mr. Watson would be able to understand that—and he would not deny me his sympathy. I will settle the story of betrayal easily enough, in case Sarah has told her father about that—old Carr was either drunk or mistook me for another! Who has proof to the contrary? And where there is no certain proof, the scale of sympathy has to go my way. Today is perfect weather—deep snow, cold, raw wind—I, ragged and trembling with the cold—that will assure me of Watson’s sympathy.”
We already know he decided on that course.
He circled around the farmhouse for a long time, and he saw Sarah working with her father, putting the seeds in order and distributing them into packets.
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 19
