# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 13

Chapter XIII
Out on THE Puszta
Food and Lodging for a Tune
I FEEL as if I had been walking a lifetime over dusty roads and meadowland since I left Mezökövesd. I envy the professional tramps, for they can hypnotize themselves into a jog-trot and press on hour after hour mechanically. As for me, my heavy hobnailed boots lacerated my feet, and the weight of my rucksack and fiddle weighed me down as though I were carrying boulders. Across the River Tisza I wended my way and halted at the little town of Polgár. Then on again the weary road at haphazard, for I was determined not to ask the way. Mile after mile of cultivated land full of corn, gleaming golden in the sunlight. In one place I met an old pedlar who was trudging along carrying a sack on his back. We sat down together in the shelter of a tree and I offered him a share in a bottle of beer I had bought at Polgár. He in his turn took out some sausage and a loaf of bread, and we made a hearty meal. The old pedlar was an orthodox Jew, for he had on a black soiled gaberdine and a round black hat. I never have seen anyone so curious; he peppered me with questions in German as to my race, nationality and business. “I knew you were not Hungarian,” he said; “you are too fair, and besides, you are not so arrogant-looking as the typical Magyar. As for me, I am Polish ​and I try to eke out a living in this country, but it is not easy.” From his conversation I inferred that Poland must have been decidedly uncomfortable for the orthodox Jews in certain towns, for he showed no inclination to return to his native land. Instead he wanted to move on to Transylvania to the city of Nagy Várad, where there were many Jews. Solomon, for so I called him mentally, was a keen business man, for hardly had we finished our meal when he opened his sack and insisted on showing me his knick-knacks and trinkets. My unkempt, poverty-stricken appearance did not convince him that I was penniless. Come now, sir, I shall give you this knife for one and a half pengös: it is a gift and you cannot refuse me.” In the end I began to feel restless and bored with the old fellow, for he never stopped his confounded questions. He managed to extract from me the information that I came from Ireland and he wanted to know was it not in England. “Ah, yes, I remember once reading in the paper of a mayor who starved himself to death for love of his country.” I had then to tell him all the story of MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, in every detail, and explain all the vicissitudes of the Irish struggle for freedom—no easy task on a boiling day on the Puszta. At last I was able to get rid of him when he saw that there was not a cent. to be made out of me, and he departed on the track of some peasants who were driving a cart drawn by two oxen.
It was now evening time and the sky was lit up in crimson. As far as my eye could reach I saw nothing but the immense sweep of corn-fields, faintly rippling in the breeze as though they were the waves of a yellow ocean. There is something primeval about those plains of Hungary in the setting sun, as though the humanity inhabiting them were still in the Biblical stage. I ​expected to see Ruth appear in the wake of the harvesters to glean the remaining sheaves. The sunset transformed the smiling fields into a great noble landscape with something cosmic about it, and my thoughts travelled far away to the parched uplands of Castile, between Medina de Campo and Salamanca, where there is naught to break the monotony but ghostly cypress-trees here and there. Above, in the sky, which seemed in this Hungarian sunset to be so far away, I could see pyramids, towers and castles battlemented. Why does a race perpetuate the scene of its beginning? I saw here upon the central plateau of Asia, beneath the pyramid-shaped clouds, the snowy mountains in the distance and the nomadic race sowing the corn that would feed the bronzed men and women before they set out in the following year for fresh plains. At this tranquil hour of the evening, when not a living being seemed to stir, an overpowering feeling of loneliness descends upon the solitary wanderer. Wandering in the mountains never induces loneliness, because they limit the flight of the human spirit, but in the plain that loses itself in the blue horizon there 1s infinity. In the mountains I hear church bells resounding in the valleys, and there is comfort in the distant sounds of village life; but in the never-ending plain, discouragement dogs the wanderer who longs to see hills in the distance, for they make him think of the spires and towers of cities. Probably this feeling of melancholy which I experienced was due to weeks of wandering in the plains, for the people who dwell in plains are never merry. I have found that their folk-music is always sad, and though the Hungarian rhythms lash us up to the pitch of excitement, they are always in a minor key.
Night on the Puszta descends imperceptibly, gradually, the stillness increases, broken only from time to time ​by the distant barking of a dog. It is mysterious to walk through the lonely fields between the thousands of corn-stalks that look like armies of motionless soldiers. Here and there, like colonies planted over the mighty Puszta, are farm-houses, or tanyas as they are called, with their clump of trees and their outhouses. Outside one I halted, and seeing a group of children with an oldish man and a woman, I took my fiddle out of the bag and played a few Magyar tunes. The children clapped and crowded round me, and then the man came up, put twenty filler in my hand, and motioned me to go away. Night had already descended, a balmy night with a brilliant moon, and as I walked along, rabbits and hares darted in amid the corn-stalks. On all sides there seemed to be a buzzing sound as though at night every living organism was palpitating in a general rhythm that was communicated to the earth by the myriads of stars overhead. I was feeling very hungry and melancholy. I longed for a good dish of gulyás and some wine. The light of the moon is unkind, and I understand why vagabonds are afraid of her silver light: she is so cold, so pure, so heartless. I should be afraid to sleep alone here in the open under the moon, for fear she might bewitch me as she did Endymion. Besides, as a Gypsy friend once told me, fevers pollute the air in the moonlight and there may be witches about who try to draw her down by threads from the sky. The paths through the fields away from the high roads seemed to me full of phantoms and I wished I could find some hospitable cottage to rest my weary body, but just at that moment I could see no lights in the distance.
At last I saw a light through some trees and I came to a small tanya on a rising ground. I went up bravely to the door and knocked loudly. Not a sound did I hear except the barking of a dog somewhere at the back. ​Again I knocked and this time I heard footsteps, but nobody opened to me. At last a harsh voice shouted out some words to me in Hungarian which I could not understand, but which surely meant—“Clear out to Hell out of this, you son of a bitch!” I then remembered that Magyar peasants, like all other peasants in the world, are loath to open the doors of their cottages at night to strangers. After all the heath is a deserted place, and what protection would yonder peasant have if I was a fierce marauding Gypsy intent on armed robbery? My experiences in the Irish Civil War, when you were liable to be raided at any hour of the night in the country, should have taught me not to be insistent, but nevertheless I knocked away.
Not a sound. The peasant must have gone to bed, thought I. Then suddenly—an idea entered my head. Why not try the influence of music? Orpheus was able to soften even the heart of Cerberus, the three-headed dog guardian of Hell. I took out my fiddle and started to play “Hullamszó Balaton,” followed by “Cserebogár,” two tunes which should admit me to the innermost sanctum of the Magyar soul.
“Hullamszó Balaton tetején, Csolnakázik egy haldáz legény.”
Hardly had I finished when the bolts of the door rattled and a man clad in a long shirt with bare legs rushed out, embraced me on both cheeks and led me into his home. After loosing a torrent of excited Magyar speech of which I did not understand a single word, he seized my violin from me, deposited it on the table and pointed to a chair.
Never was a guest of honour received with more ​spontaneous hospitality. I understood by his gestures that he placed his house at my disposal. He disappeared for a few moments and reappeared, followed by a youngish woman dressed in an embroidered smock, who immediately started to prepare a meal for me. There in a majestic voice my host shouted Eljen! Eljen!” and handed me a glass of wine. Soon we were fast friends, and as 1 played for him and his wife I had a vision of numerous little heads peering at me through the door leading to a long passage.
Some hours later my host brought me to a big bed in an inner room, which was piled nearly up to the ceiling with huge eiderdowns covered with embroideries. “This must be the nuptial bed,” said I to myself, “and where are those poor people going to sleep?” I felt embarrassed, but my host made signs to me to get undressed. Later on he came into the room, curled himself up on the floor on an eiderdown and fell asleep. As for his pretty wife, I do not know what happened to her, but I suppose she joined the children whose heads I had seen bobbing up in the doorway. For two days those peasants fed and lodged me in a manner characteristic of Magyar hospitality, and when the time came for me to set out on my way not a penny would either of them accept. All they did was to point to my fiddle, and instead of a stirrup cup, it was a farewell tune that I gave them. Few countries in Europe can compare with Hungary for spontaneous hospitality which is given to the stranger without any thought of favours to come. I am sure that fairy stories were invented by vagabonds who wanted to secure a bed and food, and it was they who told the peasants that the poor, ragged, dishevelled beggars were really fairies in disguise. “Yes, my good man: you must always be kind to them and give them good cheer, because they ​will bring the sunlight into your house and give joy to your children.” In Greek days the traveller, after calling upon Zeus, walked into the cottage and sat down by the hearth, and the master of the house raised him from that suppliant position and made him sit by him at the table, for the stranger was under the God’s protection and it was sacrilege not to assist him. I did not call upon Zeus, God of Hearth, but I trusted to Orpheus, a far more potent God among the rhythm-loving Hungarians.
In that tanya, life was sane and wholesome, in spite of its natural poverty. I have never seen a cleaner or more orderly house. The woman spent nearly all her day washing and airing sheets, blankets, eiderdowns. Around the walls were white cloths embroidered in red, trailed up as ornament, and in the corner of the kitchen was an enormous oak press containing quantities of linen. In the other corner was the huge green earthenware oven, rising from floor to ceiling like a gigantic olive jar. On a slab of brick in this oven they did their cooking, and above the fire was a rail, on which they hung bones to smoke. The oven is the great comforter of the home in winter when the wind whistles across the plain, and when the family are cold they sit around its broad base and tell stories. Early in the morning my host would depart with two of the boys on his cart, drawn by two horses, and in the evening after feeding the animals he would point to my fiddle and ask me to play again, such tunes as “Hullamszó Balaton.” On the second evening some neighbours came from a distance to hear me and outside the cottage under the clump of trees the inevitable csárdás began, and it was I who played them until I nearly fainted from fatigue. At last I saw the dance of the Tavern performed in all its manly vigour out on the lonely ​Puszta by the strong-backed sons and daughters of the people. Among these simple, unspoiled folk it became magnified into the lofty symbol of a whole race, and I could not help murmuring to myself the words of Petöfi: “Oh Puszta, Puszta, thou art the image of liberty.”