Between the Woods and the Water (11 page)

“Yes,” Countess Ilona said when I asked about him, “he was Hansi's great-grandfather, and there,” pointing to a picture, “is the charming Anna. She was terrifically pleased when she thought their first child showed signs of a Habsburg lip, poor mite!” (There was not much sign of it in her husband and it seemed entirely to have vanished from their children.) She told me the whole tale with patience and humour, abetted now and then by Count Hansi, who was smoking and reading a paper in a nearby armchair. “I must say,” she continued with a laugh, “when there was all that fuss and talk a few years ago about who should be King, I couldn't help thinking”—and here she nodded in the Count's direction—
“why not
him
?” Her husband said, “Now, now!” disapprovingly, and after a few seconds, laughed to himself and went on with his paper.

* * *

I half wished, when I set off, that my plans were leading me in another direction, for a couple of days' march north-east would have brought me to the Hortobágy desert and its herds of wild horses and their fierce and famous herdsmen. (Rather surprisingly these spurred and whip-cracking gauchos were strict Protestants; Debrecen, their steppe capital, had been a Calvinist stronghold since the Reformation.) But I had been swayed by the old maps in the library the day before and there were satisfactory hints of remoteness and desolation in the south-eastern route I was actually taking. A hundred years ago much of this stretch of the Alföld resembled a vast bog relieved by a few oases of higher ground. Hamlets were grudgingly scattered and, unlike the old village of Körösladány, many of these were nineteenth-century settlements which had sprung up when the marsh was drained. The air of desolation was confirmed by those tall and catapult-like sweep-wells rearing their timbers into the emptiness. In the southern parts of the Cuman region celebrated by Petöfi—it is strange how the names of Hungarian poets cropped up the whole time in conversation and books!—heavy rains often marooned the villages on their small hills, until they formed little archipelagoes only to be reached in flat-bottomed boats. But, to redress the balance, there were regions near Szeged which July and August dried up into glittering tracts of soda crystals, and to unwary travellers, already perplexed by mirages and dust-devils, these crystalline acres must have completed the summer's hallucinations. Shallow lakes had been known to dry up completely then fill once more until, after a short evolutionary gap, reeds grew again, fish swam, tadpoles followed and frogs began to croak. It was refreshing to think of the unchanging carp-filled lakes of the south-west and the teeming
abundance of the Tisza; and what about the fish those boys had been whisking out of the swift Körös by the armful? When the forlorn woods that lay all about me were no-man's-land still, betyárs infested them: affable highwaymen and brigands who held travellers to ransom, drove away flocks and herds and levied tribute from noblemen islanded in their castles. It was a region of hazards, legends and fierce deeds.

I hadn't far to go. Virtuously shunning the offer of a lift in a ponytrap, I slogged on to Vesztö and reached it in the afternoon. Count Lajos—Louis that is, though he was always referred to by a nickname—was a cousin of my Körösladány friends. (In Central Europe, in those days, if you met one Count, you were likely, if you also came across his kith and kin, to run into a whole team of them. The polymath of the Wachau was very entertaining about this proliferation of prefixes, including his own. “Count and earl are more or less equated,” he said, “so if Tennyson's Lady Clara Vere de Vere had been born in this part of the world, she could easily have been the grandmother of a hundred earls, instead of merely their daughter—with a bit of luck, of course. Ten sons, with another ten apiece. There's a hundred for you—instead of only one, as in England.”)

I found him strolling in the avenue that led to the house. He must have been about thirty-five. He had a frail look, a slight tremor, and an expression of anguish—not only with me, I was relieved to see—which a rather sorrowful smile lit up. A natural tendency to speak slowly had been accentuated by a bad motor-crash brought about by falling asleep at the wheel. There was something touching and very nice about him, and as I write, I am looking at a couple of sketches in the back of my notebook; not good ones, but a bit of this quality emerges.

German was his only alternative to Magyar. He said, “Come and see my
Trappen
!” I didn't understand the last word, but we strolled to the other side of the house where two enormous birds were standing under the trees. A first glance suggested a mixture of goose and turkey but they were bigger and nobler and heftier than
either and, at a closer look, totally different; the larger bird was well over a yard from beak to tail. His neck was pale grey with a maroon collar, his back and his wings a speckled reddish buff and strange weeping whiskers swept backwards from his beak like a slipstream of pale yellow Dundrearies. Their gait was stately; when our advent sent them scuttling, Lajos made me hang back. He approached them and scattered grain and the larger bird allowed his head to be scratched. To Lajos's distress, their wings had been clipped by the farmer who had found them the month before, but when the larger bird opened his, and then spread a fine fan-shaped tail like a turkey's, he looked, for a moment, completely white, but turned dark again as he closed them. They were Great Bustards, rare and wild birds that people wrongly related to the ostrich. They love desolate places like the puszta and Lajos planned to keep them till their feathers had grown enough for them to fly away again. He loved birds and had a way with them, for these two followed him up the steps with a stately pace, then through the drawing room and the hall to the front door and, when he shut it, we could hear them tapping on it from time to time with their beaks.

At dinner he talked of the spring and autumn migrations of cranes and wild geese. These sometimes travel in a wedge formation, at others beak to tail for miles on end; unlike storks which, as I had seen a couple of weeks ago, move in an endless, loose-knit mob as ragged as nomads in the Dark Ages. I knew he was an excellent shot. He had been talking about woodcock and, when I thought he had finished, he said, very slowly, “Their Latin name is
Scolopax
.” A long pause followed; then he said, “
rusticola
,” and finally, after an even longer pause, he added another “
rusticola
” as a trance-like afterthought.

His wife was away and during dinner and afterwards, as we sat and chatted by lamplight, the house had a lonely feeling (I suppose that is when the sketches were done; it looks like it by the shading) and when he asked me to stay on for a day or two, I felt it was not just from mere politeness; but I had to get on.

* * *

Breakfast was brought into a sunny room near his quarters. “I'm not much of an early bird,” he said, holding out his cup for some more coffee. He was still in slippers and a smocked old-fashioned nightshirt with the initials W.L.
[9]
on the breast under a discreet nine-pointed coronet and I felt sure, as I listened to the almost dreaming pace of his discourse, that a kind heart was beating underneath. Afterwards, people kept coming in and out for orders: some of them kissed hands and the room was soon full of slow gossip and laughter. There was a Molière touch about the mood of the hour, a hint of the
petit lever du roi
; and as he slowly dressed, taking each new bit of apparel from an attentive Jeeves-like figure, he answered his visitors and agents in hasteless and spell-bound tones and finally emerged in a plus-four suit and well polished brogues. He took some maize from a basket in the hall and we went to see the bustards.

“Don't you carry a walking-stick?” Lajos asked in the hall, as I put on my rucksack, about to set off. I said mine was lost. He picked one out of the stand and rather solemnly gave it to me. “Here! A souvenir from Vesztö. My old shepherd used to make them, but he's dead now.” It was a very handsome stick, beautifully balanced and intricately carved all over with a pattern of leaves, and embowered in them, a little way down the shaft, were the arms of Hungary: the fesses on the dexter side were the country's rivers, while a triple hillock on the sinister, with a two-barred cross in the middle, symbolised the mountain ranges and the presiding faith, and over them both was the apostolic crown with its lop-sided cross. I was excited by such a present. It was a timely one too: my last one had gone astray a week earlier. Taking Malek's stirrup-leathers up a hole, I had stuck my ash-plant in a bush and, once in the saddle, forgot about it. (Perhaps it's still there. The ferrule had come off so it may have taken root and shot up fifty feet by now.)

I was due that evening, after an easy day's walk, at yet another kinsman of his. “Yes,” he said, “there are lots of us, aber wir sind wie die Erdäpfel, der beste Teil unter der Erde”—“We are like potatoes, the best part is underground”—and I couldn't make out whether this was very profound or the reverse. When we said goodbye, I looked back and saw him scattering grain to the huge advancing birds.

* * *

At one moment the plain looked empty for miles; and at another, soon after, you were among fields and water-meadows, or, as though it had suddenly risen from the puszta, walking across the yard of a moor-farm full of ducks and guinea fowl. (In reality, the opposite sometimes occurred: large buildings had been known to sink five or six feet into the soft soil.) I reached Doboz after dark and got a boisterous welcome from Lajos's cousin Lászlo: word of the hazard moving across the south-east Alföld must have got about and thank God I shall never know whether it loomed as a threat or as a bit of a joke. It was treated as the latter by Graf Lászlo (or rather, gróf, in Hungary) and the moment we had settled down over drinks, I had to recount the journey to him and his fair-haired grófnö. He was rubicund and dashing and she—as I had been told but had forgotten—was English, indeed from London, “as you can tell,” she said cheerfully. She had been on the stage—“not in a very highbrow way, I believe,” someone had said—as a dancer or a singer, and though she was no longer a sylph, one could see how pretty she must have been, and how nice she was. Both of them radiated kindness. In Germany and Austria, after I had revealed what I was up to, the first question had invariably been: where were my mother and father? When I had said, “In India and England,” a second question always followed, “Und was denkt Ihre Frau Mama davon?”—“What does your Mamma think of it? She must miss you, wandering all over the place like this...” and so it was today. I told them all was well and that I wrote to her often.

They showed concern, too, about my crossing the frontier into Rumania. Neither of them had been there, but they were full of foreboding. “It's a terrible place!” they said. “They are all robbers and crooks! You can't trust them. They'll take everything you've got, and”—voices sank collusively here—“whole valleys are riddled with VD, oh do beware!” I could see from their earnest looks that they really meant it and began to experience a touch of misgiving as well as excitement. My days on the Slovakian bank of the Danube, where most of the inhabitants were Hungarians, had given me the first hint of the strength of Hungarian irredentist convictions. The bias against the Slovaks was strong; but, since the loss of Transylvania at the Treaty of Trianon, the very mention of Rumania made them boil over, and I think the amputation was even more angrily and bitterly resented than the loss of Slovakia; far more than the cession of the southern part of pre-war Hungary to Yugoslavia. I shall have to go into this harrowing and insoluble problem later on. This was by no means the first time the subject had cropped up, so I knew how fiercely feelings ran.

Suddenly my hostess ran upstairs and came down holding a neat leather container that looked just too big for a pack of cards. “You
must
take care of yourself, dear,” she said. Gróf Lászlo nodded gravely. I wondered what it could contain. The thought flitted through my mind, but only for a wild second, that it might be some counter-charm to the insidious medical threat of those valleys. “One comes across all sorts of rum people on tours! This was given me years and years ago by an admirer of mine,” she went on. “It's no use to me now so do please take it.” When the leather flap came out of its slot, it revealed a minute automatic pistol that could be described as ‘a lady's weapon'; the butt was plated with mother-of-pearl and there was a box of rounds of a very small bore. It was the kind of thing women on the stage whisk out of reticules when their honour is at stake. I was rather thrilled and very touched. But their anxiety, which had no foundation as it turned out, was very real.

* * *

I was halted next day by the Körös. There was no bridge in sight, so I followed a bank teeming with rabbits until an old fisherman, pale as a ghost and dressed all in white, sculled me to the other side. The people in the inn looked different and I pricked my ears at the sound of a Slav language. They were Slovaks who had come here centuries ago, hundreds of miles from their old abode, to settle in the empty region when the Turks were driven out, devout Lutherans of the Augsburg Confession, unlike the Protestants of Debrecen who were Calvinists to a man.

The distance was getting longer than I had reckoned. For once, I sighed for a lift; I didn't want to be late, and just as the wish took shape, a cloud of dust appeared on the path and then a governess-cart with a fleece-capped driver and two nuns. One of the sisters made room with a smile and a clatter of beads. We drove several miles and the town of Békéscsaba hovered far away to the right, with the twin steeples of the Catholic cathedral and the great tea-cosy of the Protestants' green copper dome glimmering beyond the tall maize-stalks. Both had vanished again when they put me down at my turning. The nuns were rather impressed when I told them my destination, and so was I.