The Rebels Read Online Free PDF Page A

grateful to him that he entrusted me with officers, not common people. As I have said, my family stands in especial debt to the Prockauers. I hear the condition of the noble lady has deteriorated.”
    “When did you hear?” asked Ábel overeagerly.
    He immediately regretted asking the question. The cobbler’s eyes roved round the room then suddenly found and buried themselves in his own, the feeling hot and sharp. It was like looking into dazzling light. He closed his eyes. The condition of Tibor’s mother had been giving cause for concern for several days. It was a strange feeling, this anxiety. They didn’t talk about it. The colonel’s wife had been bed-bound for three years: her condition changed but she didn’t rise from her bed. Her elder son, who had returned a few months previously as an ensign, having lost an arm at the front, stubbornly kept repeating that she was perfectly capable of getting up and simply didn’t want to. He told people that once the boys were in bed at night she would rise from her sickbed and walk about in the apartment. If there was indeed a change in the condition of Tibor’s mother then something had to be done quickly for the colonel might appear any day. He didn’t dare look at the cobbler who stood directly in front of him and who seemed to have grown somewhat in the twilight. Ábel knew he was the same height as the cobbler but felt as though he were being forced to look up at him. The light in the cobbler’s eyes slowly went out. They both looked down.
    “It’s nothing to do with me,” said the cobbler. “I humbly beseech the young gentleman not to mention the matter in front of Master Tibor. The elder son of Colonel Prockauer was here earlier, also seeking my son Ernõ. He mentioned it in passing.”
    “What?”
    The oxyacetylene lamp flared up. The cobbler limped over to the lamp and carefully turned the flame down.
    “As people do in conversations. Young Master Lajos, if I may so refer to him, being a fellow soldier on the front and a comrade in arms, has made a significant sacrifice for the homeland. Soldiers who have served at the front look each other up when opportunity affords. We talk of a good many things at such times. Young Master Lajos also made mention of the fact that young Master Tibor was worried. I must not neglect to mention that apart from losing an arm in that great bloodbath, young Master Lajos made a spiritual sacrifice too. He doesn’t remember very much of what he has said. And when he says something, pretty soon after he doesn’t want to know anything about it. In the course of conversation he mentioned that it was not absolutely impossible that there had been some deterioration in the noble lady’s condition. We must prepare ourselves, he said. That’s how I know.”
    Ábel knew nothing of this for certain. It could be that the one-armed invalid had imagined it all. The elder of the Prockauer boys was given to strange behavior at times. Once he had avoided and laughed at his younger brother’s circle of friends and their amusements: now he was forever seeking them out. Little by little they included him in everything. He was the first to make the acquaintance of the actor. Ábel thought about it: they had known the actor by sight for a long time, but the one-armed Lajos was the first to introduce himself and get him to meet the others. No doubt he had been his loquacious self.
    He talked with the cobbler about Tibor’s anxieties, anxieties that resulted in him betraying their common secret. It would be good to know how far Lajos had taken the cobbler into his confidence. The cobbler was inclined to talk, admittedly in his own peculiar way, though much depended on whom he was addressing. Ernõ told them his father was not a frequenter of bars and that he kept his set speeches about the new order between rich and poor, and on the collapse and rebuilding of the world, for a selected audience.
    He had never doubted that the cobbler was not