# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 12

Chapter XII
The Story or Fair Manczi
EVERY vagabond imagines that when he crosses the breast of yonder hill he will encounter romance. Else why ever go vagabonding?
The moment I set foot in Mezökövesd romance descended to meet me and I was wounded to the quick. It was Manczi who made me victim. I met her in the dingy hall of our inn—a blue-eyed girl dressed in white jumper, white skirt and white stockings, with the daintiest golden ringlets framing her rosy cheeks. “Ah, here is the real innocent rustic beauty of the Magyars,” said I to myself, but why that golden hair and blue eyes? No, my girl, you cannot have roved over the plain from Central Asia, but sailed down the Danube from the North. She was a chubby girl, full of high spirits, and when she laughed she showed a set of brilliantly-white teeth. At first I thought she was one of the daughters of the establishment—a younger sister of the proud maidens who sat at the window on Sundays and looked disdainfully at the motley crowd of peasants. But Manczi had none of the airs and graces of the princess: she was too healthy and muscular to act like the princess in the fairy story who felt the pea through the piled-up mattresses. Manczi was the life and soul of the inn: the men teased her and chased her down passages, chucked her under the chin, pinched her ​waist, and she smacked their faces and made fun of them. Ah, Manczi, life in the inn would be gloomy if it were not for your golden hair that catches the sunlight and dazzles us all. She was coquettish with me: she ogled, she flirted, until I felt like a Cavalier of Spain: I wished I had a cloak, to lay it on the ground for her to step upon. “Here she is,” thought I, “a delicate rose fated to waste her sweetness on the desert air.” In the dining-room she presided at a counter and everyone came up to ask her opinion on everything in the world. I was puzzled about Manczi, for she was so different to the modest women of the house, and she was too familiarly treated by the guests to be the daughter of the landlord. Then Kovács enlightened me. Manczi was not the lady of the house: she was the paid play-girl of the establishment, and Gluck secured her services that she might be a decoy. It was her duty to entice the men of the town to spend their evenings in the Rákoczi Inn, and pour their pengös into the family coffers. “She is worth her weight in gold to old Gluck,” said Kovács; “half the men wouldn’t come here, if it were not for her charming smile of welcome. She sits there all the evening, reading a book, or talking to them, for by police order she is not permitted to go off with anyone until two o’clock in the morning. After that hour she may sit down and drink with you. If you have money to spend on her, you may then take her away with you.” I was deeply moved by Koviács’ words. “Poor girl: you are only eighteen years of age, with your hair still down your back, and here you are condemned to this monstrous life of cheap vice.” Kovács laughed at my display of emotion and told me that Manczi knew more of the world than I did. “Ask her to tell you her story: she has seen life, I tell you. Hungarian women are very strictly kept and are never ​allowed to go about unchaperoned, but once they kick over the traces they go as wild as the horses on the Hortobdgy.” Kovács is an agreeable fellow, but he lacks the refinements of sensibility. He looks on women as the chattels of the male, fashioned in this world to serve as shock-absorbers and endure the lusts, caprices, blows and kicks of the Oriental Don Juan, who sends souls flying. Poor Manczi, I cannot help weeping for you, because you are a lithe, well-formed daughter of the people with a certain joyousness of temperament; surely, your case is one that deserves pity?
Late at night, after twelve o’clock, nearly everyone would leave the tavern, and yet there was Manczi seated at her counter, dressed in her white jumper with the red embroidery, reading her book. How sleepy she looked as she sat there, and yet she would have to stay until two o’clock to see if anyone wanted her. One evening Kovács lent me some pengös, and I determined to sit up late and invite Manczi to drink with me and tell me her story. We were all alone in the coffee-room, for even the ragged Gypsy band had departed and there was only Lajos to bring us wine. Lajos is a roguish fellow and he winked his eye at me as he said to Manczi: “Go on, tell how you ran away from home. If you ask this gentleman nicely he will take you back to Mamma and Papa, and perhaps he will prevent them from smacking their little girl who ran away from home.”
Manczi came from the large town of Miskolc, which is about fifteen miles from Mezökövesd. Her parents were prosperous people who had a shop and Manczi had all that a child could desire. She was petted and spoilt by her parents, but then one day her mother died and her father married a woman who changed the happiness of the house into woe. She had been an ​actress in a touring company, and she fretted at having to endure the monotonous existence of a provincial town. Anyhow, she would go away with Manczi’s father for long periods, leaving the girl to the care of relations. Thus, it came to pass that Manczi grew up without any discipline of any kind. At fifteen years of age she was careering about the streets of Miskolc, hanging round the doors of the celebrated dance hall called the “Papagai,” consorting with the cocottes or “dancing partners,” as they were called there. It was not long before she fell into the hands of an unscrupulous Jew, who after making her his mistress, turned her out on to the streets. Her parents were away in Budapest and she was afraid to go home, for everyone in the neighbourhood knew of her intrigue with the old satyr. So she joined a low-class travelling troupe as a chorus girl and wandered about the country. Then finally she became one of the many girls who live in the Hungarian cafés as decoys for men, and destiny brought her to the little town of Mezökövesd near her home. All this story she told me amid laughter and tears. She was the most curious girl I have ever met, for her nature resembled nothing so much as an April morning in England—at one moment sunshine, at another showers of rain. She would drink off her wine with an impudent gesture and look at me with wild blue eyes and then burst into tears as she told me about her father. “I still love him,” she said, “and it tortures me to think of how I’ve treated him. I know he has been searching for me for months, and he little knows that I am so near him at Mezökövesd. I ran away with that old satyr simply to spite him, for I was jealous that he had married again. I was jealous of my stepmother because she blotted out of my father’s life the memory of my mother.” She then went on to tell me of the ​misery of her life in the inn—the monotony and hopelessness of it all. No one could have any idea what it meant to have to submit every night to the promiscuous embraces of the strangers who could buy her at a low price. “It is not the inmates of the place I hate, for they are poor, decent souls, and I know them so well that I have an affection for them: it is those travellers from Budapest who halt at this town, in order to see the embroideries of the peasants: how I hate them and yet I must submit.” T tried to comfort Manczi and persuade her to return to Miskolc: surely her father and stepmother would not be so inhuman as to refuse to take her back again? But the mere thought of returning home filled her with alarm. “You don’t know my Magyar father: he would kill me if he knew my disgrace. No: I must go on living this life of misery until I am thrown out.” The strangest trait in Manczi was her exterior light-heartedness. No one who saw her chattering away in the inn would ever suppose that she had a moment’s qualm of conscience. The postman of the district told me confidentially, that it was a pity Manczi was a prostitute, for she would make the finest little country wife in the district. Shes the best mother of the whole lot of them,” he said to me feelingly.
I had occasion to ascertain the correctness of his opinion before I left the Rákoczi Inn. My cubby-hole of a room was just above the level of a small stagnant river, into which flowed the drainage system of our part of the town. In the July nights, when the heat was stifling, the smell of the river became wellnigh unbearable. As a result, there descended upon me a terrible onslaught of my chronic malady, bronchial asthma. With difficulty I propped myself up on the bed by means of a pillow resting on my rucksack, and prepared to fight the battle for breath. Asthma is a ​curious disease, for it reduces the sufferer to the condition of one in a hallucination. I had taken several doses of brandy, from the emergency flask in my knapsack, and aspirin, but the result was to induce a curious semi-comatose state wherein various visions surged up before my mind. I was feverish, and when I closed my eyes, circles of red seemed to revolve concentrically in ceaseless rhythm: then I suddenly felt a buzzing sound in my head as though countless bees were making a hive of my skull. They buzzed and buzzed, and then curly snakes uncoiled in the darkness around me as though the hairs on my head had turned to Gorgon serpents and were about to lash me with their tails. After a period of ceaseless buffeting I seemed to pass away in sleep to the sound of my own wheezing breath. Then of a sudden I awoke in agony—I was suffocating and every muscle in my body was taut in the effort of gasping. I was helpless, for even the slightest movement meant agony, and then there was the terrifying sensation that the loss of breath would reach the climax, when the suffering would be intolerable. Hour after hour the agony seemed to last—and yet no relief. I had Himrod’s herb powders to burn, but alas no match to light them, and it was now three o’clock in the morning. What was I to do? To one who is suffering from lung trouble in the watches of the night, solitude becomes intolerable. Oh! if I only had some dutiful damsel near me to soothe the pain that racks my lungs. Just at the very moment that I formulated the wish, there was a tap at my door and a ghost appeared. It was Manczi dressed in a light-blue peignoir and carrying a candle. The sight of that angelic figure made me think that I had passed into a further hallucination, but she said to me: “You looked so ill to-night that I determined to call in to see you before I went to bed.” No hospital ​nurse ever had softer hands than Manczi, when she raised me up and soothed my pain. As she sat beside my bed, in the fitful light of the candle she looked like some strange good fairy that appears in the hour of distress and conquers the demon. She started to mumble prayers to herself, thinking that I was asleep, and gradually under the influence of those incantations, pronounced in Hungarian, I relapsed into sleep and her figure seemed to fade into a fresh dream. I was wandering down an immense corridor, and outside the building I heard a strange moaning music that increased and then diminished in volume. In the distance I could see a desolate garden with dark, glowering tree-trunks. But on all sides there were glow-worms sparkling, and in the air hosts of black and white butterflies fitted before my eyes in such numbers that my head reeled. And now the moaning music was becoming more and more distinct until it seemed to drive my consciousness farther on past the gnarled tree-trunks and foliage to a lake with hills around it. And out of this lake, as an embodiment of the sound, rose a fair-haired mermaid, an Undine spirit that beckoned to me with her song. And I felt myself sinking and sinking into her white arms, and the singing grew fainter and fainter and the atmosphere grew whiter and mistier until. . .
When I awoke the sun was streaming through the window and Manczi had disappeared. She nursed me, however, very tenderly during the days of my illness, and so much so that she incurred the jealous ire of the bony Adila, the drudge who considered me her personal care. I was glad to escape from my tiny room after witnessing a few famous encounters between the two women, conducted in voluble Hungarian, of which I only understood the word lubnyi, which was bandied about frequently.
​I was sorry to leave Mezökövesd because I was interested in the fate of poor Manczi, I urged her repeatedly to leave her present life and go back to her father at Miskolc, and I tried to show her the hopelessness of her case if she did not break away from Mezökövesd. But there was a great deal of animal fatalism about her: she had that curious resignation which refuses to allow the mind to stir from its lethargy. This resignation made her accept every terrible thing that befel her as if it was the most natural thing in the world. One night she rushed into my room weeping floods of tears. A drunken man had beaten her because she would not respond to his advances. Yet next morning, when I met her again, she was the usual fair-haired, blue-eyed Manczi, laughing and chattering as though nothing had happened.
I went so far with her as to offer to accompany her to her family. In my heart of hearts 1 was frightened lest she might accept my proposal, for the task would have been an arduous one. I imagined our arrival at the house of her father. First of all he would look at me suspiciously and fire questions at me in Hungarian, which I would fail to understand. Then in a stuttering voice I should try to explain Manczi’s story by means of an interpreter, and it would all be very difficult, for the old man would think that I was one of her seducers.
No, there was nothing for it but to leave Manczi to her fate. She did tell me before I left Mezökövesd that she would go back and throw herself upon their mercy. The day I departed she accompanied me on my way, and gave me a silk scarf knitted by her hands as a souvenir. The parting was tearful and I saw her, far away in the distance, standing on the little bridge that spanned a stream, a figure dressed in white, with her hair glistening in the sunlight.