‘It’s time I left this world,’ he murmured, oblivious of his visitors. ‘High time!’ The two young men stole away, but the old actor hardly noticed.
Balint and Laszlo walked together back up the hill. Then Balint decided he must go back to Minya’s house and talk to Jopal. He wanted to help the unhappy young mathematician, as was always his impulse when he found someone in trouble. While still in school at the Theresianum he had helped half the class with their examination papers and sometimes this had got him into trouble. He might have been inherited this from his grandfather, who always did his best to help and protect others, or it might have been an unconscious reversion to the noblesse oblige habits of his more distant ancestors who had voluntarily served their people, their church or their country. Back at Minya’s little house, Balint found that Jopal had taken the broken model off the cart. The ex-tutor was annoyed with himself because, however much he told himself that he was right to have acted as he did, an inner voice constantly reminded him that, if he hadn’t let his temper run away with him, things would not have ended as they had, up in the tower room at Var-Siklod.
This is what had happened.
Count Jeno Laczok had gone to bed at five, but by nine o’clock he was wide awake and unable to go back to sleep. Tired and cross, he had got up. No one was about. After much shouting he had roused a cook to get him some breakfast; but when it arrived the coffee was cold and his egg almost raw. Although normally good-tempered, a bad breakfast always irritated him and put him in a bad temper. He went to the stables, but found all the lads and the coachmen were asleep, lying like corpses in the straw. In the kitchens even the cook had gone back to bed: in the gardens, not a gardener, not a sweeper, not a handyman.
Count Jeno could find no one on whom to vent his ill-humour until it occurred to him that, as his sons had not stayed up all night, they would be up and about. So he walked over to the corner tower where the boys’ work room was on the ground floor, with Andras Jopal’s lodging above it.
When he entered the room the boys were already dressed. Dezso was lying on a couch reading an adventure story while Erno was sharpening a pencil. Their tutor was nowhere to be seen.
‘Is this how you work, you rascals?’ shouted Count Jeno. ‘Where is your teacher?’
‘He’s just gone up to his room.’ The boys lied to protect Jopal who, always busy with his invention, never made them work hard. One of them jumped up to go and find him, but their father barred the way with his walking stick. ‘You stay here! I’ll go myself!’ he shouted, and made for the steep wooden stairs.
The boys were dismayed. They realized that this meant serious trouble, because Jopal always bolted the door when he was in the room, and when he went out, he locked it and took the key with him.
The boys knew what was in the room. Hanging from the roof-rafters was a huge dragonfly-shaped contraption, whose wings were made of canvas stretched over wooden laths. A big designer’s desk near the window was spread with gigantic drawings which meant nothing to them. But there the answer was, for all to see in large letters on each plan: ‘Blueprint for Jopal’s Flying Machine’. They had discovered it one day when the tutor had gone into the village and they had climbed in through a window that gave on to the ramparts. It had been a dare-devil adventure. Taking care that it did not break under their weight they had had to climb up the centuries-old ivy that grew up from the edge of the moat and, slipping through the battlements, clung to the inside of the walls. Then had come the most difficult part. After edging their way along the side of the wall, hanging on only with their hands, they had had to bridge a two-metre gap between the wall and the open window. This they had managed by stepping, one by one, on the old stone supports of a former wooden defence platform that jutted at intervals from the wall like chipped teeth over the abyss below. They had made it without mishap, being experienced nest-robbers who were used to scaling sixty-foot high poplars to get at the doves’ eggs in the spring.
They had never told anyone what they had found in the room. By anyone, they meant grown-ups. Under great oaths of secrecy they did tell their sisters and with them, and them alone, they laughed at the Mad Professor who was their tutor.
When Count Jeno had heaved his heavy bulk up the rickety wooden steps with considerable difficulty, he leaned, out of breath, against the door of Jopal’s room. It did not yield.
‘Who’s there?’ cried an angry voice from inside.
‘It’s me! Open at once!’ cried Count Jeno, rapping on the door with his stick.
The bolt rattled and the door swung open under the weight of the irate count, sweeping Jopal, who tried to stop him, out of the way.
At first the master of the house stood dumb with surprise at what he saw. Then he started shouting: ‘What the Devil’s going on here? What’s this contraption? Instead of doing your job you waste your time making toys for children?’
The inventor, whose quick temper always landed him in trouble, was cut to the quick. Full of his own self-importance, and conscious that his so-called ‘toy’ could be of world-shattering importance, he stepped in front of the model machine and spread out his arms dramatically.
‘This! This! This! Do you know what this is? It’s the most important invention … the Flying Machine!’ He was sure this staggering answer would confute all criticism, but it had quite the reverse effect. At another time Count Jeno might have found the situation absurd and laughable, but now, angry already, he growled deeply and then shouted:
‘So you’re spending my time on this … this idiotic contraption? That’s not what I pay you for. You ought to be locked up in an asylum!’ and he went on in the same vein, working himself up into a towering rage.
For a while Jopal listened, his face stony, his lips tight over clenched teeth, and only his blazing eyes revealed the extent of his hurt and anger. Suddenly he screamed at the count: ‘Shut up!’
Surprised, Count Jeno fell silent, and now it was Jopal’s turn to pour forth a torrent of words. He went at it with all the fanaticism of someone bent on a single goal. All the bitterness of years of privation and frustration erupted at this moment. Blind to everything but his own unrecognized genius he became defiant, praising his lonely struggle and his importance and reviling the blindness, ignorance and lack of imagination of people like Count Laczok. Finally he spat out: ‘It’s I! I … who would have brought everlasting fame to this stinking, rotten owl’s nest, this God-forsaken rat-hole. My name would have made Siklod go down in history!’
This was too much for the count. Slashing at the machine with his stick until it spun on the cords from which it hung, he cried, ‘What? This idiocy? This crazy rubbish! This is what I think of it!’ and he struck out again, breaking the slender laths and tearing the canvas.
‘I won’t stay here another minute!’ screamed Jopal, from behind the swinging remains of the broken model.
Count Jeno did not answer. He turned on his heel and clumsily, with difficulty, descended the rickety wooden stair. By the time he had reached the bottom his anger had evaporated; and if he had not had the last word at least it was his action that had brought the confrontation to an end. It flashed through his mind, too, that it was all the same if Jopal left now or later. If the tutor broke his contract and left at once he would not have to be paid and, as the boys’ examinations were only two days away, they would not be able to learn much more anyway. This thought put him back in a good humour and he had left the tower and gone for a walk, smiling and quite pleased with himself.