Between the Woods and the Water (26 page)

Lázár, the owner of the house and the motor-car, was a friend of Count Jenö and of István, and the Count had been full of amusing tales about his adventures. He had been a cowboy in America and a gaucho in the Argentine, ridden in a circus rodeo when short of cash, and his side-whiskers, piercing eyes and handsome, leathery face perfectly fitted the role. His house was only a dozen miles south of István's, and the fourth guest was another neighbour, from Maros Illye, also on the north bank, called István Horváth, who was always amiably teased for the naïvety of his observations. Dinner was a bachelor party under a lime tree, but our
host's cook and housekeeper, a pretty Swabian like a soubrette in an opera who often joined gaily in the talk as she handed the dishes round, obviously mitigated the celibacy of the house. I remember their lamplit faces and the sound of István's lively touch on the piano keys later on. We spent another day there, I wrote to Angéla, and István and I parted at last, each trailing a faint cloud of hangover in opposite directions; and I was on my own again.

Oblivion veils all for a moment; then the path emerges in clear detail. It twisted from stream to stream up a steep and sunless canyon under dripping rocks soft with moss and tufted with fern. Dank hamlets and moulting thatch huddled like clumps of toadstools in the folds of the hillside. Buffaloes and oxen lurched moodily uphill under wooden yokes that were fixed to the shaft with a steel pin and one could hear the intermittent click-clack of water-wheels long before the ivy-smothered mills came in sight; the animals halted there and drank while the waggoners unloaded their sacks. Except for a few minutes a day, no sunbeam could reach these depths. Many of the blanched and ailing villagers were stricken with goitre, and these rustic distempers made me think of all the Hungarian warnings about the prevalence of veneral disease east of the frontier; it had almost sounded as though pox lurked in the rocks and hedges and leaped out at the traveller like a thunderclap.
[1]
István had laughed when I told him. No worse here than elsewhere, he said: in Rumania they were called ‘the worldly ills'—
boale lumești
. (An infant born out of wedlock was called ‘a child of the flowers'—
un copil din flori
—a kinder term than ours.) Still brooding on those warnings, I came to a sudden halt. What about that wretched automatic pistol? I had forgotten it at the back of a bedroom drawer at István's. After a moment I thought: what a relief! It could have been nothing but an embarrassment and a nuisance—a danger, even, if found during a search in the wilds of
Bulgaria or Turkey. But still—the mother-of-pearl butt, the gleaming nickel, the neat leather case! I would ask István to look after it.

The mass of the Carpathians to the left forced my itinerary south-west. The foothill canyon opened, but tall upheavals still confined the sky when I got to Tomesști at nightfall, where I found another pre-arranged haven under the roof of Herr Robert v. Winckler; he was a tall, thin, scholarly man, living alone with his books and his guns on the steep edge of the forest. He and his library were a treasure-house of relevant knowledge, and the stairs, on the way to bed, were forested with horns, antlers, fowling-pieces and wolf-traps. There were the skins of two enormous wolves on the landing, a stuffed lynx on the wall, a row of boars' tushes and a bear's skin on my bedroom floor; and the last thing I remember before blowing out the candle is the double reflection of the wick in its glass eyes. The depth of the flared embrasures showed the thickness of the walls and the logs stacked to the ceiling beside the massive tiled stove told how cold it must have been in winter. It was hard, in the summer moonlight, to imagine the onslaught of the wind along the canyons, the icicle-portcullises and the silent obliterating flakes that would place all these buildings under siege.

* * *

Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvár, the Great Plain, the Tatra mountains, Bukovina, Galicia, Podolia, Lodomeria, Moravia, Bohemia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia and, above all, the Carpathians themselves—how closely the geography of Austria-Hungary and its neighbours approximated to the fictional world of earlier generations! Graustark, Ruritania, Borduria, Syldavia and a score of imaginary kingdoms, usurped by tyrants and sundered by fights for the throne, leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of Gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them
with walnut-juice or lurk under the battlements and melt the chatelaines' hearts with their strings. There are mad noblemen and rioting jacqueries; robbers too, half-marauder and half-Robin Hood, straddling quite across the way with their grievous crab-tree cudgels. I had read about betyárs on the Alföld; now haidouks and pandours had begun to impinge. Fur-hatted and looped with pearls, the great boyars of the Rumanian principalities surged up the other side of the watershed; ghostly hospodars with their nearly mythical princesses trooped in tall branched crowns round the walls of fortress-monasteries in frescoed processions; and beyond them to the north stretched ice-bound rivers and steppes and bogs where herds of elk moved at a shambling trot, and, once upon a time, the great aurochs, extinct now except on heraldic shields; wastes unfolded north-east to which unstable troops of Cossacks laid claim, or destructive settlements of Tatars; further still, a kingdom of sledded Polacks retreated into the shadows, and then a region of snowfalls where the Teutonic Knights cut the pagans of Lithuania to bits on the frozen Baltic, surviving still in the East Prussian world of scars and spikes; and beyond them, Muscovy and all the Russias... But to the south, closer than these and getting closer with every step, the valleys and woods of the Danube had been the theatre for momentous battles between Christendom and Islam: the armies of the Sultan moving upstream under green banners and preposterous turbans, while kings, voivodes and cardinals (the contusion of whose maces absolved them from bloodshed) and all the paladins of the West—their greyhounds curvetting beside them, sunbeams catching gold-inlay under their ostrich-plumes and the spirals and stripes on their lances, like Uccello's in the
Battle of San Romano
—cantered light-heartedly downstream to their doom.

An old addict, I had been re-reading Saki just before setting out. Many pages are haunted by ‘those mysterious regions between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea,' and here I was, as deep in that maze of forests and canyons as it was possible to get. The timbered slopes outside the windows, and thoughts of the snow and
the winter solstice, brought these stories to mind, especially the ones about wolves, the villains and the presiding daemons of East European winter. The terrible arrival of
The Interlopers
, in the last monosyllabic paragraph of the story, might have taken place a few miles away; and another,
The Wolves of Czernogratz
, with the howling crescendo of the same dread monsters, conjured up a thousand castles to the north and the west; and I had always been struck by the broken traveller in
The Unbearable Bassington
, ‘a man whom wolves had sniffed at.' István was one, my host another, Gróf K a third; Transylvania was full of them. All the castles were haunted, and earthly packs of wolves were reinforced after dark by solitary werewolves; vampires were on the move; witches stirred and soared; the legends and fairy stories of a dozen nations piled up and the region teemed with everything that Goethe told the New World it was better without: ‘Useless memories and vain strifes...knights, robbers and ghost stories... Ritter und Raüber und Gespenstergeschichten...' In the end, I stayed three nights, listening to stories of wolves and forests and reading in the library, and some of it must have found its way into the bloodstream. M. Herriot has left a consoling message for cases like this: ‘La culture, c'est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié.'

A scramble through valleys and foothills, bearing south-west to avoid the Lugoj road, and a night's sleep under an oak tree, brought me dog-tired and long after dark on the second day to a brick-kiln on the Caransebes, road, where I curled up and fell asleep just as the moon was coming up.

* * *

Travels like these are times of such well-being that spirits soar, and this, with the elation of being on the move again, helped to cure the feelings of loneliness after parting from István and the end of the magic days with Angéla.

I feared I might have got rusty, but all was well and my kit seemed in as good repair as the first day in Holland. The ammunition
boots from Millets in the Strand, crunching along on their only slightly blunted hobnails, were still good for unlimited miles. The old breeches were soft with much wear and cleaning, and every stitch was intact; only the grey puttees had suffered minor damage, but nothing showed when I had snipped off the ragged edges where snow and rain had frayed them. A grey shirt with the sleeves rolled up completed this marching gear. (I was darkening to the hue of a teak sideboard, with hair correspondingly bleached by the sun.) I blessed my stars that my first rucksack, with its complex framework and straps, heavy water-proof sleeping-bag and White Knight superfluity of gear had been stolen in Munich; the one my Baltic Russian friends had bestowed was smaller but held all I needed; to wit: a pair of dark flannel bags and another light canvas pair; a thin, decent-looking tweed jacket; several shirts; two ties, gym-shoes, lots of socks and jerseys, pyjamas, the length of coloured braid Angéla had given me; a dozen new handkerchiefs (as we know) and a sponge-bag, a compass, a jack-knife, two candles, matches, a pipe—falling into disuse—tobacco, cigarettes and—a new accomplishment—papers for rolling them, and a flask filled in turn, as the countries changed, with whisky,
Bols, schnapps, barack, tzuica, slivovitz, arak
and
tziporo
. In one of the side pockets there was a five-shilling Ingersoll watch that kept perfect time when I remembered to take it out and wind it up. The only awkward item was the soldier's greatcoat; I hadn't worn it for months, but felt reluctant to get rid of it. (Luckily. It was perfect for sleeping out, and, folded into a tight sausage and tied round the top of the rucksack, scarcely visible.) I still had the Hungarian walking-stick, intricately carved as a mediaeval crosier, the second replacement for the original ninepenny ashplant from the tobacconist's off Sloane Square. Apart from sketch-book, pencils and disintegrating maps, there was my notebook-journal and my passport. (Dog-eared and faded, these sole survivors are both within reach at this moment.) There was
Hungarian
and
Rumanian Self-Taught
(little progress in the one, hesitant first steps in the other); I was re-reading
Antic Hay
; and there was Schlegel & Tieck's
Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark
, bought in Cologne; also, given by the same kind hand as the rucksack, and carefully wrapped up, the beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam. It was bound in stiff, grass-green leather; the text had long ‘s's, mezzotint vignettes of Tibur, Lucretilis and the Bandusian spring, a scarlet silk marker, the giver's bookplate and a skeleton-leaf from his Estonian woods.
[2]

It would have been hard to set off much later than the cock crew that morning, as the bird itself was flapping its wings on a barrel ten yards away; so I sloshed some water on my face and set off. It was going to be a sizzling day.

Pisica Veselă, the Merry Cat—the drovers' inn where I halted and drank a tapering phial of tzuica—was awhirl with flies; a huge mahogany and orange hornet was dismantling a piece of meat on the earth floor, and the valley outside held the heat like a kiln. I was a pillar of dust and sweat by the time I got to a more congenial place further on, part-café, part-bar and part-grocer's shop. ‘Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang' was written round the walls in twirling German script, ‘Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang!' I told the innkeeper of my first encounter with this couplet in Goch, on my first night in Germany. He was a cheerful Arad
Schwob
and he laughed and asked me if I knew who the poet was. “No? It was Martin Luther.”
[3]
I was rather surprised. Unlike the Lutheran Saxons, the Swabians were all Catholics.

He was full of useful information, which he poured out as we both sipped mugs of cold beer, and I came to a sudden decision. He helped me stock up: a salami cut into halves, to be kept out of the sun this time; some cooked pork, a packet of pumpernickel, bars of chocolate, cheese, several apples and two loaves, on the
crust of which stamps were rather disturbingly glued. (“It's a government tax,” he said, prizing them off. “The stamp shows it has been paid.”) He pointed out the way from the door and waved me godspeed.

The Banat mountains on the right of the road were wooded and imposing enough, but to the east the forest rose in the steep upheaval of the Carpathians and far away, above and beyond and well out of sight from my track, some of the tallest cordilleras of the Transylvanian Alps sailed up in bare and spectacular spikes. My sudden decision was to strike left and get away from the heat and dust of this beautiful incandescent valley; then, if I could, make my way south-east along the cool rim of the forest. Hastening there, I was soon under the first branches. A small track twisted uphill steeply through the boles and I plunged in.
[4]

* * *

It was like going indoors. Climbing in the shade at once made the valley seem far away and the woods silent at first until the ear was attuned to the birds.

An hour's climb ended on the edge of a slanting field where a string of reapers were getting in the late upland harvest: biblical, white-clad countrymen and women in wide hats of plaited straw, some with babies slung across their backs like papooses; when they got in the way, they hung them in the shade, snugly laced into their wooden troughs. Baskets, water jars, sickles and rakes were heaped up, half-a-dozen ponies were grazing and conical bee-hives were set in rows along the edge of the enfolding trees. As they moved forward and reaped and gathered and gleaned, an old woman's high quaver sang the lead of a never-ending sequence of
verses to a grave and rather haunting tune; the others joined in at each second line. I had heard it on the climb to the little plateau; it still floated up diminuendo long after the harvesters themselves had dropped out of sight, and when it died away, I could see them far below in occasional foreshortened glimpses among the sheaves and the ricks as though I were looking at them backwards through an ever-lengthening telescope, dwindled to specks by now. Then tree-tops hid them.