Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  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.

  Lászlo’s elder brother Józsi (Joseph), head of that numerous family, and his wife Denise were the only two of all my benefactors on the Great Plain I had met before. It had been at a large, rather grand luncheon at their house
on the slopes of Buda and when they had heard I was heading for the south-east, they had asked me to stay. Another brother, Pál, a diplomatist with the urbane and polished air of a Hungarian Norpois, said, “Do go! Józsi’s a great swell in those parts. It’s a strange house, but we’re very fond of it.”

  Once through the great gates, I was lost for a moment. A forest of huge exotic trees mingled with the oaks and the limes and the chestnuts. Magnolias and tulip trees were on the point of breaking open, the branches of biblical cedars swept in low fans, all of them ringing with the songs of thrushes and blackbirds and positively slumbrous with the cooing of a thousand doves, and the house in the middle, when the trees fell back, looked more extraordinary with every step. It was a vast ochre-coloured pile, built, on the site of an older building perhaps, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Blois, Amboise and Azay-les-Rideaux (which I only knew from photographs) immediately floated into mind. There were pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flags flying and flights of covered stairs ending in colonnades of flattened arches.

  Great wings formed a courtyard and, from a terrace leading to a ceremonial door, branching and balustraded steps descended in a sweep. As I was crossing this place d’armes, several people were coming down the steps, and one of them was Count Józsi. Forewarned by Lászlo, he spotted me at once. He waved a greeting and cried, “You are just what we need! Come along!” I followed him and the others across the yard to a shed. “Have you ever played bike-polo?” he asked, catching me by the elbow. I had played a version of it at school with walking sticks and a tennis-ball on the hard tennis-courts; it was thought rather disreputable. But here they had real polo-sticks cut down to the right size and a proper polo ball and the shed was full of battered but sturdy machines. Józsi was my captain, and a famous player of the real game called Bethlen had the rival team; two other guests and two footmen and a groom were the rest of the players. The game was quick, reckless and full of collisions, but there was nothing to match the joy of hitting the ball properly: it made a loud smack and gave one a tempting glimmer of what the real thing might be like. I couldn’t make out why all shins weren’t barked to the bone; nor why, as one of the goals backed on the house, none of the windows were broken. The other side won but we scored four goals, and when the iron Maltese Cats were back in their stands, we limped back to the steps, where Countess Denise and her sister Cecile and some others had been leaning on the balustrade like ladies gazing down into the lists.

  What luck those nuns turning up, I thought a bit later, lapping down whisky and soda out of a heavy glass! Someone took me along a tall passage to my room and I found one of the young polo-playing footmen there, spick and span once more, but looking puzzled as he tried in vain to lay out the stuff from my rucksack in a convincing array. We were reciprocally tongue-tied, but I laughed and so did he: knocking one another off bicycles breaks down barriers. I got into a huge bath.

  Countess Denise and Count Józsi were first cousins and earlier generations had been similarly related. “We are more intermarried than the Ptolemies,” she told me at dinner. “We all ought to be insane.” She and Cecile had dark hair and beautiful features and shared the rather sad expression of the rest of the family; but it likewise dissolved in friendly warmth when they smiled. Her husband’s distinguished face, under brushed-back greying hair, had the same characteristic. (In a fit of melancholy when he was very young he had fired a bullet through his breast, just missing his heart.) He looked very handsome in an old claret-coloured smoking jacket. Dürer’s family came from the neighbouring town of Gyula, the Countess said; the Hungarian Ajtós—‘doorkeeper’—was translated into the old German Thürer—then into Dürer when the family migrated and set up as gold- and silversmiths in Nuremberg. Afterwards in the drawing room, my footman friend approached Count Józsi carrying an amazing pipe with a cherry-wood stem over a yard long and an amber mouthpiece. The meerschaum bowl at the end was already alight, and, resting this comfortably on the crook of his ankle, the Count was soon embowered in smoke. Seeing that another guest and I were fascinated by it, he called for two more of these calumets and a few minutes later in they came, already glowing; before they were offered, the mouthpieces were dipped in water. The delicious smoke seemed the acme of oriental luxury, for these pipes were the direct and unique descendants of those long chibooks that all Levant travellers describe and all the old prints depict; the Turks of the Ottoman Empire used them as an alternative to the nargileh. (That sinuous affair, the Turkish hookah, still survived all over the Balkans and before summer was out I was puffing away at them, half-pasha and half-caterpillar, in many a Bulgarian khan. But Hungary was the only country in the world where the chibook still lingered. In Turkey itself, as I discovered that winter, it had vanished completely, like the khanjar and the yataghan.)

  Ybl, the architect of the castle, had given himself free rein with armorial detail. Heraldic beasts abounded, casques, crowns and mantelling ran riot and the family’s emblazoned swords and eagles’ wings were echoed on flags and bed-curtains and counterpanes. The spirits of Sir Walter Scott and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to preside over the place and as I had been steeped in both of them from my earliest years, anything to do with castles, sieges, scutcheons, tournaments and crusades still quickened the pulse, so the corroborative detail of the castle was close to heart’s desire.

  Wheat-fields scattered with poppies enclosed the wooded gardens and the castle, and when we got back from a ride through them next morning, my hostess’s sister Cecile looked at her watch and cried out, “I’ll be late for Budapest!” We accompanied her to a field where a small aeroplane was waiting; she climbed in and waved, the pilot swung the propellor, the grass flattened like hair under a drier and they were gone. Then Szigi, the son of the house, took me up the tower and we looked out over an infinity of crops with shadows of clouds floating serenely across them. He was going to Ampleforth in a few terms, he said: what was it like? I told him I thought it was a very good school and that the monks umpired matches with white coats over their habits, and he seemed satisfied with these scant items. Exploring the library, I was fascinated by a remote shelf full of volumes of early nineteenth-century debates in the Hungarian Diet; not by the contents—humdrum stuff about land-tenure, irrigation, the extension or limitation of the franchise and so on—but because they were all in Latin, and I was amazed to learn that in Parliament until 1839, and even in the county courts, no other language was either spoken or written.

  The bicycle polo after tea was even rougher than the day before. One chukka ended in a complete pile-up and as we were extricating ourselves, our hostess called from the balustrade.

  A carriage with two horses and a coachman in a feathered and ribboned hat was drawing up at the foot of the steps. Dropping his stick, our host went over to help the single passenger out, and when he had alighted, bowed. This tall, slightly stooping newcomer, with white hair and beard of an Elizabethan or Edwardian cut, a green Alpine hat and a loden cape, was Archduke Joseph. Living on a nearby estate, he belonged to a branch of the Habsburgs which had become Hungarian and during the troubled period after Hungary’s defeat and revolution, he had briefly been Palatine of the kingdom—a sort of regent, that is—until the victorious Allies dislodged him. Our hostess had been coming down the stairs as the Archduke was slowly climbing them, calling in a quavering voice, “Kezeit csókólóm kedves Denise grófnö!”—“I kiss your hand, dear Countess Denise”;—and when he stooped to do so, she curtseyed, and, diagonally and simultaneously, they both sank about nine inches on the wide steps and recovered again as though in slow motion. When we had been led up steaming and dishevelled and presented, we leaped back into the saddle and pedalled and slashed away till it was too dark to see.

  I was lent something more presentable than my canvas trousers and gym shoes for dinner. The Archduke joined in the chibook smoking afterwards and the memory of those aromatic fumes still enclouds the l
ast night and the last house on the Great Plain.

  * * *

  Someone had said (though I don’t think it was exact) that the Rumanian authorities let no one over the frontier on foot: the actual crossing had to be made by train. So all next day I threaded my way through cornfields in the direction of Lökösháza, the last station before the frontier: an empty region with a few farms and innumerable skylarks, where crops alternated with grazing. A compass forgotten in a rucksack-pocket kept me on a south-easterly course along a loose skein of byways. There were spinneys of aspens and frequent swampy patches and the sound of curlews; goslings and ducklings followed their leaders along village paths. The only traffic was donkey-carts and long, high-slung waggons fitted with hooped canvas. Driven by tow-haired Slovaks, they tooled along briskly behind strong horses with fair manes and tails, harnessed three abreast like troikas. Crimson tassels decorated their harnesses and colts and fillies, tethered on either side, cantered along industriously to keep up. The plain rang with cuckoos.

  I fetched up at a hay-rick at the approach of dusk. A wide ledge had been sliced two-thirds of the way up and a ladder conveniently left. I was soon up it, unwrapping the buttered rolls and smoked pork and pears they had given me at O’Kigyos. Then I finished off the wine I had broached at noon. The sudden solitude, and going to bed at the same time as the birds, seemed abit sad after this week of cheerful evenings; but this was counter-balanced by the fun of sleeping out for the fourth time, and the knowledge that I was near the beginning of a new chapter of the journey. Wrapped in my greatcoat and with my head on my rucksack, I lay and smoked—carefully, because of the combustibility of my sweet-smelling nest—and gave myself up to buoyant thoughts. It was like my first night-out by the Danube: I had the same almost ecstatic feeling that nobody knew where I was, not even a swineherd this time; and, except that I regretted leaving Hungary, all prospects glowed. Not that I had seen the last of the Hungarians, thank Heavens: pre-arranged stopping-places already sprinkled the western marches of Transylvania; but faint worry, coupled with a hint of guilt, hung in the air: I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar, sleeping in ditches and ricks and only consorting with birds of the same feather. But recently I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps. These deviations could hardly be condemned as climbing: this suggests the dignity of toil, and these unplanned changes of level had come about with the effortlessness of ballooning. The twinges weren’t very severe. After all, in Aquitaine and Provence, wandering scholars often hung about châteaux; and, I continued to myself, a compensating swoop of social frogmanship nearly always came to the rescue.