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Updated: May 13, 2025
Béla, unconscious or indifferent to the menace which was glowing in Lakatos Andor's eyes, never departed for a moment from his attitude of swaggering insolence, and even now with an ostentatious gesture he thrust the key into his waistcoat pocket. Andor gave a hoarse and quickly-smothered cry like that of a beast about to spring: "You cur!" he muttered through his teeth, "you d d cur!"
She could not speak, she almost thought once that she was going to faint, so strange was the thrill of joy which went right through her when Andor's lips rested for one brief, sweet moment upon her shoulder. And now the lights are burning low, the gipsies scrape their fiddles with a kind of wild enthusiasm, which pervades them just as much as the dancers.
So they run: one or two women run thus for over a kilomètre, they run long after the train has disappeared from view. But Elsa stood quite still. She did not try to run after the train. Through the noise of the puffing engine, the final cries of farewell, through all the noise and the bustle, Andor's cry rose above all, his final appeal to her to be true: "Elsa! you will wait for me?"
Strangely enough, after this confession she felt far more sorry for poor Béla than she had done before, and she cried her eyes out both before and after the funeral because, do what she would, she always saw him before her as he was that last day of his life quarrelsome, dictatorial, tyrannical and she remembered how she had almost hated him for his bullying ways and compared him in her mind with Andor's kindness and chivalry.
Ten or a dozen cotton petticoats are tied round that slim waist of hers, no two of a like colour, and as she twists and twirls in Andor's arms the petticoats fly out, till she looks like a huge flower of many hues with superposed corollas, blue, green, pink and yellow, beneath which her small feet shod in boots of brilliant leather look like two crimson stamens.
He did not want the people of the village to see him just now. He turned back quietly into the room, and went to sit at his usual place, across the corner of the table. Elsa, mechanically, absently, as one whose mind and soul and heart are elsewhere, was smoothing out the creases in her gown made wet by Andor's tears. "How did it all come about, Elsa?" he asked.
But Elsa could just make out the writing: already her eye had wandered to the signature, "your ever-devoted Andor." The message seemed to come to her as from the grave, for she thought that these were probably Andor's last words to her, penned just before he died in that awful hospital in Bosnia. "My sweet dove!" she read.
Her cheeks are glowing with the excitement of the dance, her graceful figure bends to the pressure of Andor's arm around her waist.
She made no immediate reply to her fiance's self-satisfied peroration, and her silence appeared to annoy him, for he continued with some acerbity: "Don't you care to hear what I did on Andor's behalf?" "Indeed I do, Béla," she said gently, "it was good of you to worry about him and you so busy already." "I did what I could," he rejoined mollified.
I, for one, never held with those who would not believe in Andor's death; there are plenty of folk in the village and Pater Bonifácius is one of them who swear that he will come home one of these days perhaps when Pali bácsi is dead. And then he would find himself the richest man in the Commune," she added, not without a point of malice, "richer even than you, my good Béla."
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