The Day of Wrath Read online

  THE DAY OF WRATH.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE BIRD OF ILL-OMEN.

  Whoever has traversed the long single street of Hetfalu will havenoticed three houses whose exterior plainly shows that nobody dwells inthem.

  The first of these three houses is outside the village on a great greenhill, round which the herds of the village peacefully crop the pasture.Only now and then does one or other of these quiet beasts start backwhen it suddenly comes upon a white skeleton, or a bleachedbullock-horn, in the thickest patches of the high grass. The houseitself has no roof, and the soot with which years of heavy rains havebedaubed the walls, points to the fact that once upon a time the placewas burnt out. Now, dry white stalks of straw wave upon the moulderingbalustrades.

  The iron supports have been taken out of the windows, on the thresholdthorns and thistles grow luxuriantly. There is no trace of apath--perhaps there never was one.

  The land surrounding this house is full of all sorts of fragrantflowers.

  The second house stands in the centre of the village, and was the castleof the lord of the manor. It is a dismal wilderness of a place. A stonewall, long since fallen to pieces, separated it at one time from theroad. Now only a few fragments of this wall still stand upright, and thewild jasmine creeps all over it, casting down into the road itspoisonous dark red cherries. The door lolls against its pillars, itlooks as if it had once upon a time been torn from its hinges and thenleft to take care of itself. The house itself, indeed, is intact, onlythe windows have been taken out and the empty spaces bricked in. Everydoor, too, has been walled up, boards have been nailed over theventilators in the floor, the white stone staircase leading up to thehall has been broken off and propped up against the wall, and the samefate has befallen a red marble bench on the ground floor.

  Here and there the cement has fallen away from the front of the house,and layers of red bricks peep through the gap. In other places largeheaps of white stone are piled up in front of the building. In the rearof it, which used to look out upon a garden, it is plain that a goodmany of the windows have also been built in, and, to obliterate alltrace of them, the whole wall has been whitewashed. All round about manyfruit-trees seem to have been rooted up, and for three years running,the caterpillar-host has fallen upon the remnant; nobody looks afterthem, and they are left to perish one by one, consumed by yellow mould.

  The third house is a little shanty at the far end of the village, shovedaway behind a large ugly granary, with its little yard full of reeds, inthe midst of which is a crooked, dilapidated pump. The panes of glass inthe lead-encased frames have been frosted over, the marl of the thatchedchimney is crumbling away, and the whole of the roof is of a beautifulgreen, like velvet, due to the luxuriantly spreading moss.

  It is thirty years since these three houses were inhabited.

  In the little hut, on the reed-thatched roof of which the screech-owlnow lays its eggs, dwelt thirty years ago, a crazy old woman, theycalled her Magdolna. She must have been for a long time out of her wits;some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof hadfallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmedthat the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause ofher mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time whenthis woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become abeggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in thosedays this old woman exercised a peculiar influence over thesuperstitious peasantry.

  A sort of awe-inspiring exaltation seemed to take possession of thiscreature whenever she stood at the threshold of her hut, within thewalls of which she usually remained in a brown study insensible to hersurroundings for days together.

  When, at such times of exaltation, she stepped forth into the street,all the dogs in the village would fall a howling as they are wont to dowhen the headsman goes his rounds. All who met her timidly shrunk aside,for, not infrequently, she would foretell the hours of their death, andcases were known in which her prophesies had come true. She could tellat a single glance which of the young unmarried women did honour totheir _partas_[1] and which did not. She could read in the faces of thechildren the names of their parents, and she often gave them names verydifferent from the names they bore. The maids and young married women ofthe village therefore, not unnaturally, trembled before her.

  [Footnote 1: _Parta_--head-dress of the young peasant maids.]

  She recognised the stolen horse in front of the cart, and shouted to thefarmer who drove it: "You stole that, and it will be stolen back again!"

  At other times she would sit in the church-door, lay her crutch acrossthe threshold, and wait to see who would dare to step across it. Woethen to whomsoever had transgressed any of the commandments! All throughthe summer the ague would plague him, his oxen would die, the tareswould choke his corn, his limbs would be racked with pleurisy, or hewould be nearly mauled to death in the village tavern.

  Often she sat for hours at home, among her thorns and thistles, sobbingand moaning, and at such times the common folks believed that the wholedistrict would be visited by a hailstorm. Sometimes she roamed about forweeks, nobody knew where, nobody knew why, and during all that time thehosts of grasshoppers, wood-lice, spiders, caterpillars, and otherHeaven-sent plagues, multiplied terribly throughout the land; but themoment the old woman returned they all disappeared again in a daywithout leaving a trace behind them.

  At one time they fancied she was at the point of death.

  She lay outside her hut close to the well and drank incessantly of itswater. At last she collapsed altogether, she could not even lift herhands. The passers-by perceived that she was parched with thirst, waswrestling with death, and yet could not die. If they had but given her adrink of cold water, she would immediately have been freed from thetorments of life, but nobody durst approach to give her to drink. Onthat same day the lightning thrice struck the village, and such a delugeof rain descended that the water flooded the roads and invaded thehouses.

  The next day there was nothing at all the matter with the old woman, butshe went about bowed down, shaking and leaning heavily on her crutch asat other times.

  When the spring of 1831 was passing away, all sorts of terriblepremonitory signs warned the people of the frightful visitation whichwas about to befall humanity. Nature herself made the people anxiousand uncomfortable. There were showers of falling stars, it rained bloodin various places, death-headed moths flew about in the evenings,wolves, tame and fawning like dogs, appeared in the village and letthemselves be beaten to death before the thresholds of the houses.

  What was going to happen?--nobody could tell.

  Everyone augured, feared, felt that mourning and woe were close at hand;yes, everyone.

  The trees made haste to put forth their blossoms, they made even greaterhaste to produce their ripened fruit. All nature knew not what to do,man least of all.

  In those days when a single good word spoken in season, a single lucididea might have meant the saving of many lives, the sole prophet in thewhole country-side was this crazy old woman, who, in the dolorousexaltation of her deranged mind, sometimes blindly blurted out things onwhich the future was to impress the seal of truth. But, for the mostpart, her multitudinous, ambiguous utterances might be interpreted thisway or that, according to the liking of her hearers, and obscured ratherthan revealed the future.

  When the summer came, with its terribly hot days, the woman's madnessseemed to culminate in downright frenzy, for whole nights together shewent shrieking through the village. The dogs crept forth from under thegates to meet her, and she sat down beside them, put her arms roundtheir heads, and they would howl together in hideous unison. Then shewould go into the houses weeping and moaning, and would ask for a glassof water, and would moisten her hands and her eyes therewith. In some ofthe houses she would simply say: "Why don't you smoke the room out,there's a vile odour of death in it;" in other places she would ask fora Prayer Book, and would fold down the page at the Office of Pr
ayers forthe Dead. Or she would send messages to the other world through peoplewho were on their legs hale and hearty, and would tell them not toforget these messages.

  "Get a cross made for you!" was her most usual greeting. And woe betidethe family into whose windows she cried: "Get two crosses made! Getthree made! One for yourself, one for your wife, one for each of yoursons and each of your daughters!"

  The people lived in desperate expectation; they would have run away hadthey known whither to run.

  And what then were the wise and learned doing all this time, they whoknew right well that a mortal danger was approaching; for they had readof its ravages, they had looked upon the very face of it in pictures,they knew the pace at which it was travelling day by day--what did theydo to soothe the anguish of the people, and inspire them with confidencein the tender mercies of God?

  All they did was to have a cemetery ready dug for those who were to diein heaps in the course of the year.