The Scarlet Boy by Arthur Calder-Marshall

Author:Arthur Calder-Marshall [Calder-Marshall, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-06T23:00:00+00:00

12: SURPRISES

The first surprise was when Magda asked me if on our way home I could point out where the church was. I had assumed, because she was a refugee under Kit’s care, that she was some sort of Hungarian Communist, believing in the Marxist-Leninist gospel according to Imre Nagy. Though I had noticed a thin gold chain around her neck, the cross itself was hidden by her dress. “You want the Roman Catholic church?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I am Lutheran.”

“Then I can take you,” I said. “There is Communion at eight or the Sung Eucharist at nine-fifteen.” I myself prefer the Sung Eucharist as a rule, but I was so excited by the thought that if the Evernesses took Anglesey House there would be at least one adult Christian to keep an eye on Rosa that I was quite indifferent which she chose. “If they sing well,” she said, “I like the Sung Eucharist.”

“They do.”

I prefer to walk to church, because it gives time for the collection of thought. But walking down to St. Luke’s next morning, I spent my time interrogating Magda—or rather, prompting her to tell me her story.

She and her husband had been as opposed to the Communists as to the Horthy regime, because each was a different expression of the same tyranny. They were Christian Socialists who felt that in the national rising there was at last a hope for freedom and social justice. Her husband, being a doctor, had not fought; but he was killed by a stray bullet, when dressing the wounded in a street in Buda. Her son, a student of eighteen, had fought until the collapse and then fled with her to Austria. He had been killed by a mine on the frontier. “I wish I had died too,” she said.

I find as I grow older that my ability to judge the age of those younger than myself grows worse and worse. I had imagined Magda as a young woman, thirty at the oldest. She shook her head. “I am forty at the next nativity.” It was hard to believe. There was not a gray hair on her head and the lines about her eyes were only those of a woman whose face is more than usually expressive of emotion.

I felt in the presence of her loss utterly inadequate to give her solace. My own life, so humdrum, so free from tragedy, appeared to me worthless and superficial; and when I said, “You are still young; there is so much to live for,” I realized its inanity even before she said in a flat voice, “Is there?” Her life had been laid waste by the loss of what I had been too selfish—lazy? work-busy? or divided—ever to gain. Together we knelt, the devastated and the fallow, at the altar rail.

Father Martin as usual went down the aisle and greeted the congregation going out of the porch. I introduced Madame Kovacs to him, as someone who might be coming to live in Wilchester if my friends bought Anglesey House.

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