# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 9

Chapter IX
Life on the Hungarian Plain
Mezökövesd
FROM Budapest I wended my way to the little country town of Mezökövesd in the plain, which was to be my next base of operations. Ask any Hungarian where the most characteristic customs of the Magyar are to be seen and he will probably say: “Go to Mezökövesd: for there you will see the men and girls wear beautiful embroidered garments, and in the evening you will hear the melancholy tárogató played by love-sick swains out on the Puszta.”
My arrival at the village was not so unobtrusive as I could have wished. As I was trudging along the dusty road leading to the town, a ragged victoria, drawn by a horse as lean as Don Quixote’s nag, passed me, and the driver, noticing my footsore appearance, invited me to mount. He was a lanky youth, with a great shock of untidy hair, and on the top of it all he wore a curious oil-cloth hat, with large brim. At first he fired one quick sentence after another at me in Magyar, but finding that I did not answer he relapsed into a moody silence.
Mezökövesd is a primitive place—full of thatched cottages that give it the air of an Irish village. The women wear embroidered smocks, but they walk about barefooted, and their voluminous petticoats and their ​scarf head-dresses give them a grotesque appearance. Many of them look like Dutch peasants who have suddenly taken it into their heads to paint their faces with walnut juice. As we clattered along the road some hurled remarks at my driver and he cracked his whip. At one point the road was all white in the distance as though snow had fallen on the burning earth. But no! it was a huge herd of geese on their way back from the meadows. Goose-farming is one of the great industries of a country that in its cooking delights to serve up the delicate livers of those bounteous birds. In another place I came across a herd of pigs, squealing and grunting as they were driven on by their swineherds. In the town my struggles began. My driver wanted to insist that I should go into an imposing building called the “Szleginger” Hotel. He begged and entreated, but I was firm. I had not enough money for such an imposing place, and I saw at the other side of the street a smaller place called “Rákoczi Vendeglö” which was more modest. My driver then started to curse and drove off, leaving me to my fate. I suppose he is paid by the rival hotel as a decoy duck.
After a great deal of bargaining with the curious little proprietor I obtained a room at two pengös, or one shilling and fourpence, which was to be my pied-á-terre. Here I could leave my few belongings when I started out to scour the country. In order to reach it I had to pass through two bars, a kitchen, a scullery, a washhouse and a broken-down lavatory. The door of the room was off its hinges and every moment peasant girls came in and chattered to me. One of them was the slatternly maid of all work of the hotel, and she had been scrubbing clothes. Her red petticoat covered a portion of her bare legs and her open smock revealed her breasts. She sat on my bed and pointed to my fiddle. There was ​nothing for it but to play a csárdás for her, and a tall bony wench she was, with the high cheek-bones and slanty eyes of the Mongolian type. Her name was Adila, and she was the patient mule-like drudge of the whole establishment. Whenever I groped my way through the dark passages of the hotel I heard the name of Adila shouted on all sides. She was cursed, she was ordered, she was pushed, and always she maintained an air of dignified composure as though she were Patience sculpted on a monument. Sometimes I would hear her mumbling strange words under her breath and her eyes would flash as though her resentment had risen to fever heat. Then she would shake her head sadly and relapse into her animal composure again, Adila was a friend: she would steal dainties from the kitchen and bring them to me, and we would devour them together, both seated on my bed. She always imagined that I was a penniless adventurer, for one day she saw me looking glum, pulled out a pengö from her purse and gave it to me. I suppose she thought that I was in need of food and her generous Hungarian nature was touched.
In the two bars of the inn there is great commotion in the evening, for the peasants come in to drink, and there are two ragged Gypsies who play the fiddle, each of them in separate parts of the room. They are both tiny little men as dark as Hindoos and very wild-looking. One of them was sitting beside an oldish man with tousled hair and crazy expression. The latter every few minutes seized the fiddle from the Gypsy and sang ludicrous songs at the top of his voice, accompanying himself pizzicato on the fiddle.
Outside, the evening was balmy and the sunset transfigured the squalid houses of the town; on all sides I saw pigs driven by to the sound of horns blown by the ​swineherds. Every beast seemed to know its place in the serried, grunting throng, and here and there groups dispersed into their stalls for the night. Hungary finds its riches to-day in those hosts of geese and pigs and oxen: the Treaty of Versailles may have taken away 68 per cent. of its ancient territories, but the spirit of the people is not to be crushed thus. Since the War, in little Hungary, agricultural production has increased ten-fold in intensity. Few countries in Europe produce such an amount of beet for sugar, and then there is the wine trade, which has increased of late owing to the fame acquired by the scented Tokay wine. The life in those villages of Hungary is the last relic of feudalism that is fast disappearing from Europe, except in parts of Spain and South Italy. The Hungarian peasant will have none of the new-fangled ideas, for he prefers to remain true to his own tradition of life. On Sundays here you will see him dressed in shirts, embroidered in red and black, with velvet breeches and shiny Hungarian jack-boots. If he is engaged to a girl he wears a kind of skirt arrangement, all embroidered too by hand and a curious top-hat which give him the appearance of a grotesque doll. As for the girl, his fiancée, she is gorgeously arrayed in brocade suiting with rosettes and ribbons in her hair. And she is not afraid to walk about with her arms bare and her bodice tightly drawn over her buxom breast. She will not pay attention to slender hips or curves, for she wears the famous seven petticoats of light colours which undulate as she walks along proudly, as if she were upon the stage. All those village maidens fascinate the stranger by their vigorous and graceful movements. They resemble young untamed lions as they walk about in pairs, holding each other by the hand, for no young man may attend unless he is the accepted suitor, “Do ​not imagine that yonder laughing girls are an easy prey for you, O! Don Juanesque stranger. They are as closely watched by their parents as though they carried the family fortune within that brocade bodice. In the evening, should you meet one of them, she would not bow to you unless you had done the ‘thou’ ceremony with her. This consists in putting your arm through your girl’s as you sit beside her and in drinking both from the same cup. After you have performed that ceremony you must consider yourself engaged to her and she will walk about with you. Otherwise do not tempt the maidens of the village, O! stranger, for they will run from you, as a gazelle from the hunter.” I found, however, that a fiddle sounds its way into hearts that otherwise would be adamant. As I walked down the main street in Mezökövesd, I noticed a group of young girls chatting together in a doorway. As soon as they saw me with the fiddle they laughed and beckoned to me. Then one of them made signs that I should play. In a few minutes I was as intimate a friend as though I had performed the “thou” ceremony with every one of them. As I played, some of them, more mischievous than the rest, pinched my backside and threw my cap over my eyes. They laughed and jostled one another and skitted like frolicsome kittens. I began to preen myself and strut about like Chanticleer in the farmyard, proudly conscious of my powers of fascination and my ascendancy over the simple girl, when suddenly I realized that they looked on me, not as a normal man, but as a grotesque Gypsy, one to provoke mirth and be pinched and kicked like the stupid clown. And to tell the truth, I had very little of the normal human being about me, for I was in rags and I had not shaved or washed for eight days. To them I was the hardy, chronic tramp who enlivens their lives ​by his pranks before he moves on to the next village. Then a thought of revenge sprang up in my mind. I stopped playing and, taking off my cap, I passed it round gravely for alms. The girls gave me one quick look and darted away laughing.
In the inn life moves with even course. There are various strata of society that must not be confused. First of all there is the inn-keeper himself—a small, podgy man called Gluck. He is a keen business man with an eye to publicity. He is very conscious of his social position, for he has a fat florid wife and two beautiful daughters, who were not born to waste their sweetness on the desert air of the Puszta—oh! no, they were meant to be princesses to grace the castle of some lord. On Sundays, old Gluck would invite them into the coffee-room, and they would trip daintily to the window and sit in state there to watch the passers-by. Old Gluck may soil his hands by trafficking with peasants, beating them down to the last penny at their fairs; he is a hard man, but after all, is it not all for the glory of God and the delectation of those two slender blossoms of girls and that radiant sunflower, his wife? “You know they were not meant to exist in my humble station,” he said to me one day, “and so I keep them away from it as far as I can. Why, sir, they must get married to men of position, and they will, for I have saved up a good dowry for each of them.” Gluck is a hard man and the peasants and gypsies fear him, but he in his turn is the patient mule to be ridden to earth by those haughty women.
Then after Gluck come the notable habitués of the place who congregate there every evening.
They are the big people of the town, clerks, tradesmen, landowners, and they use the big room of the hotel as their club. Some of them play chess, others listen to ​Gypsy music, and at one end of the room is a large billiard table. In my dreams I shall always remember that long room, with its dingy advertisements, its bar in the corner, its smell of stale beer, sausages, garlic, fish, cigar smoke, sweat and charcoal. In sound it will crowd upon me as a medley of Gypsy music, punctuated by rattling billiard balls, exclamations, coughs and the sizzling of frying-pans. And amid it all were the habitual cronies.
How I loved those strange old men, in glossy-seated trousers and tan boots, who sat playing chess hour after hour, or else the squireens in their knickers and green sporting-coats. There was one who fascinated me because he looked as if Arpád had made him one of the legendary band. There was a kindly fierceness about him as though you took an eagle and mated it with a dove. I made friends with him very soon because he loved to sing the Magyar songs and he was liberal with his money. “Come on,” he would say to the dimunitive Gypsy orchestra—Mulatni; “come here, you bastards: now play like mad or I'll hit you over the head with your own fiddles.” And when the band would start he would dash off a glass of wine and start singing in his rollicking voice. Then he would stride up to the cimbalom player and mimic his flourishes with the felt-padded hammers. With him was a very fat man to whom everyone in the hotel paid deference. I was told that he was the great man of the district. There was something kind and optimistic about his quadruple chin and his Falstaffian paunch. When he saw me sitting forlorn in a corner alone he came up and asked me who I was, where did I come from, what was my nationality. At first I thought he was a Jew, for his nose was curved, but then he told me to my surprise that his name was Gyula Patay de Baji and he came of very ​old Hungarian nobility. He is a big farmer, chairman of the Electricity Board (for it is he who at his own expense installed electricity here) and Director of the People’s Bank (of which he owns 90 per cent. of the shares). He has been seventeen years settled here in this humdrum town, but before that he had travelled the length and breadth of the world, for he was an impresario attached to singers and players. “Ah, sir!” he said to me, “I am a Midas in this countryside, for every enterprise I engage in turns to gold, but I don’t care a fig for it—je men fiche. What good is it to me to be shut in here for ever when I think of those days when I roamed through America.”
If M. Patay de Baji was the Prospero of the party and the melodious landowner the Ariel, Kovács, the Magyar-turned-American, was the Caliban. A queer fellow, Kovács—Pittsburg grafted on to Mezökövesd. He was born in this town, but he grew up and was educated in the Middle West, but without losing his Hungarian education. In fact, American civilization seemed to have left in him an outer layer that was completely out of harmony with his Magyar nature. From America he had learnt all there was to know about the cinema and the dog track: his English speech was a mass of curious idioms culled from the lips of gangsters, lounge-lizards, snoopers and racketeers, punctuated every now and then with the eternal “son of a bitch.” But this American outer personality was not the real Kovács who was born in the plains of Hungary. He had come back from Pittsburg with his invalid father so that the old man might have the consolation of dying in his native town. Kovács enlightened me concerning the lives of the folk at Mezökövesd. At present in the month of July and August the town is not so gay, because the peasants are all away in the fields working ​at the harvest; but in October, when all the granaries are full, there is a rush back to the town from the Puszta. The rustic streets are so thronged that it is difficult to thread your way through the maze of carts: the cafés are crowded with excited revellers, eager to enjoy the respite from toil. Kovács told me that many a drama breaks out in this little country town, for the people here are of a proud nature and traditional in their point of view. Honour is cherished above all things. If a man loses his honour he commits suicide, for he has no further desire to live. Suicides are thus frequent in these parts of Hungary, and he told me that when a man who has been respected cheats at cards or becomes a forger, it is the custom for his friends to leave a revolver in his room—a gentle hint that he should blow his brains out. Kovács did not tell me what would happen if the man who found the revolver did not turn it on himself. I can imagine the commotion that would take place if the recipient of the revolver were to send it back in a tidy parcel to his friends with a polite note declining the invitation. It might run as follows:
“Gentlemen,—
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of the nine mm. revolver and to express my gratitude for the kind thought of my friends. I am deeply conscious of the noble motives which prompted you to interest yourselves in the welfare of my soul. I must, however, decline to avail myself of the opportunity which you so delicately offer me. I have always been rather timid where firearms are concerned. Perhaps this may be due to the fact that I am not entirely Magyar in race, for my mother had Gypsy blood, and the Gypsies, as you know, have never been remarkable for their courage. In my ​opinion the courage required to use a revolver is of the more brutal kind and quite unnatural to me.
I am, Gentlemen, Your obedient servant, Farkas Lajos.”
Such a man would not have a happy life in Hungary, for then he might have to fight a duel. Koviács told me that men in some parts of the country wear gloves for the purpose of duelling. When you want to insult a man and make him challenge, you thrust towards him a glove, or else you smack his face with it. His words made me feel cold inside, and ever afterwards I avoided any men I saw in cafés wearing gloves. I prefer our North European methods of quarrelling. If a man insults you, deliver a short jab to the point of his jaw and put him down for a count of nine. There is not much romance about such fights with fists, but we are spared the agonizing suspense, the patronizing of the seconds, who are not risking their own lives, and the significant order of “pistols for two and coffee for one.”
Among all my friends at the Rákoczi Hotel, I preferred Lajos, the waiter, for he seemed to me to possess every quality of the perfect man, totus teres atque rotundus, of Horace. In the first place he was rotund—of the pleasant rotundity of body, face and smile that inspires confidence in the guests at an inn. An inn-keeper should always employ fat, florid waiters to advertise his cooking, and yet the majority of waiters in the world are lean and dyspeptic as though they were the living embodiments of digestive misery. They seem to cry out: “Eat no more: Master hath murdered food!” Lajos was a chubby figure dressed in a white coat and black trousers. Behind his ear he carried a half-smoked cigarette and ​in his mouth was the everlasting quill toothpick. As he trotted from one table to another, napkin in hand, he would hum or whistle the latest tune. Lajos was the Johannes Factotum of our inn: he knew everyone and everything. He told me the names of every inmate and described them to me in two ways. First of all he would give their outer personality in the following way: “That is Mr. Farkas Lajos: he is a prosperous farmer and has so many acres of land and deposits in Mr. Patay’s Bank of so many thousand pengös. He is a great friend of the Parish Priest and pays the biggest subscription to the church.” Then he would sidle up nearer to me and say confidentially in a lower voice: “There was a great scandal last year: he went down to the Othon Kávéház in the street over there and made an appointment with Maca—you know she is the paid girl of the establishment—and his wife followed him and caught the two of them together. There was the deuce of a row, I tell you: he protested: the girl screamed as the wife beat her with her umbrella: crowds gathered and it was a roaring farce, I tell you.” Nothing escaped the notice of Lajos, and every person as described by him had a shadow as well as a real personality. He was all things to all men: to Mr. Patay and his friends he was discreet and respectful. To me he was roguish, for he considered me a tramp, and his curiosity knew no bounds, when I explained how I had been in London and New York.
If Lajos disappeared, Mr. Gluck, the proprietor, might as well shut up the shutters and abandon the inn, for life could not go on. At one moment he would be waiting at table, at another serving drinks in the bar. At billiards he was unrivalled, and one of his duties was to make up a game with any guest who so desired. His gifts for diplomacy made him size up his opponent ​and lose gracefully in the interests of the inn. Lajos came from the town of Kaposvár and had secret contempt for the inhabitants of Mezökövesd which to him symbolized the stupid unenlightenment of the peasant. “You should see the people of Kaposvár,” he would say, “they are a bright-eyed people: why, even the Tzigans there are no match for them.” One evening Kovács, who had plenty of American dollars in his pocket, decided to give me a party. When you give a party in a Hungarian inn, you engage a private room and order wine. Then when the guests arrive and the corks begin to fly, the lean Gypsies creep in and start tuning their fiddles. At first the clatter of talking is deafening, punctuated by loud shouts, but gradually the mellow Tokay begins to set in motion the musical recollections of the guests and they start singing. Kovács had invited all the usual inmates of the hotel and in addition four or five playgirls from other cafés in the town. It was a wild party, for everyone sang at the top of his voice and the Gypsies played until the sweat ran down their faces in streams. As for me, I stood on the table in the middle of the room and tried my best to keep up with the vertiginous music, but in vain, for the Tokay had gone to my head and I floundered about in the maze of rhythm.