The Tightening String

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Eleven and a half minutes’ David said when she reappeared in the garden, where a splendid crimson glow from the western sky gave a deeper hue to the yellowing trees, the late flowers, and even to the faces round the table. ‘You said one.’

  ‘Ah, but I had visitors, and I had to show them out.’ David looked surprised; suppressed giggles on Endre’s and Lucilla’s part gave them away. ‘These children had put the donkeys in the bathroom, I fancy’ she said laughing.

  ‘Yes, just Vermouth, Hugo, please.’

  For a small country inn in the remotest part of Hungary the food at dinner was surprisingly good – strong thick bean soup, a real goulasch, and wild duck from the meres roasted to a delicate pink tenderness, with fresh salad from the garden, aromatic with chives and tarragon; spiced apples, roasted before the fire on wire strings, completed the meal. Halfway through it the gypsies appeared, and began to play. Before the advent of the Russians in 1945 practically every country inn in Hungary had its own gypsy band, slender dark men with faces rather like parrots; hence the name of the national dance, for which the inn gypsies produced the music to which peasants habitually danced when the day’s work was done – the inn was the czarda, the dance was the czardas. The Hortobagy gypsies played and sang the ‘Hortobagy Song’, which describes that unique place; Endre translated the words for Lucilla and Mrs Eynsham. The donkeys were again with them throughout the meal, stepping neatly between the close-set tables and thrusting their pretty heads between shoulders, now demanding bread; they were freely fed. Rosina thought she had never eaten in more delightful circumstances.

  Indeed that week-end on the Hortobagy was a halcyon interlude for all of them – strange, almost magical, with a sort of enchantment lying over it, as the Fata Morgana, the will-o’-the-wisp, is said to hover over the meres, luring men to their death. They went out after dinner into the warm still night and watched a full moon rise in splendour over the plain; the sweet breath of the great cattle in their pens came to them as they walked – from the lighted inn, faintly, the sound of the gypsies’ fiddles threaded the darkness, delicate strings of sound. Presently – quite early, to his wife’s relief – David Eynsham said he should go to bed; she went too, and fell asleep at once, in this deep peace. But before midnight – her little clock with its luminous dial stood by her bedside – she was wakened by a tremendous clatter of horses’ hooves galloping outside, suddenly cut short; men’s voices; then silence. David had taken a sleeping-pill, and never stirred; nor did he when two or three times, later in the night, the voices and the sound of galloping horses were repeated. How strange! – but still under the enchantment of that wonderful peace she slept again at once, each time.

  Over breakfast, which they ate in the garden in the warm autumn sunshine, the donkeys still in attendance, she asked Hugo about the noises in the night – the two young men had been up and in the hides before dawn, and had brought back* two brace of wild-duck and a couple of geese.

  ‘Oh, those were the Czikös and the shepherds and swineherds; they ride in to eat and drink and sing, and then ride back again. Tonight you really must stay up and listen – they are marvellous. You might write a poem about them! We were up till half-past two this morning.’

  ‘You can’t have slept much.’

  ‘Only two or three hours – but here this suffices.’

  ‘Mummy, they really are something out of this world! You must stay up tonight’ Lucilla said, urgently. ‘You can undress in my room, and creep in. You can’t miss it.’

  David Eynsham had breakfast in bed; when he appeared the party went off and drove about the Hortobagy in small low-hung carriages with two horses, better suited than cars to the earthen tracks. They visited some of the Czikös, the horse-masters who presided over the huge droves of horses; these men wore a most peculiar costume – full loose knee-length breeches of blue cotton, such as Zouaves wear, a short tunic, and a round black felt hat with an up-turned brim, for all the world like the hats worn by Manchu coachmen under the old régime in China. Rosina, who as a child had been in Peking, where her Father held an appointment in the Chinese Customs Service, pointed this out to David.

  ‘Of course’ he said – for once not impatiently. ‘They’re Magyars – and Magyars come from the Far East. They are practically Manchus.’

  One young Czikö showed his skill with the lasso, flinging a loop of rope from a considerable distance round a given horse and bringing it, kicking and helpless, to the ground. He invited Lucilla to try her hand; in her jodhpurs and shirt she looked so pretty, whirling the rope, but she was-not very successful – she did better riding one of the graceful creatures, on which the Czikö threw a blanket for her.

  They wandered far and wide over the great plain, the Puszta, in which the shallow lakes shone like blue enamel, with pallid clayey margins; they saw the tiny pointed wigwams, built of willow-boughs, in which the swineherds and cowherds and Czikös sheltered at night from the cold.

  ‘And the shepherds?’ Rosina asked.

  ‘Some have shelters – more, not. They build fires, and they wear exceedingly thick coats – you will see tonight,’ Hugo told her, as they walked past a flock of sheep so huge that it covered two or three acres with white rounded fleecy bodies; they were being moved, very slowly, to a fresh grazing-ground. Suddenly Mrs Eynsham came to a dead stop. ‘Oh, what is that?’ she asked, gazing skywards and gesturing with her hand.

  Away to their right, suspended in the pale blue arch of the heavens, hung a complete picture of a village – houses, streets, trees, a big church – but all upside-down! – the trees were as dark a green, the church as white, the roofs of the houses as warm an Indian-red as on earth.

  ‘Oh, the mirage!’ Hugo said. ‘How fortunate we are to see it. I am glad for you.’

  ‘But why is it upside-down? I thought mirages looked real, I mean the right way up – so that they deceived travellers in the desert.’

  ‘I cannot tell you – the Hortobagy is not a desert, and here the images are always reversed.’

  ‘Anyhow, it’s quite exquisite’ she said, staring entranced. ‘What a magical place this is.’

  ‘Yes, the Hortobagy is full of magic’ the young man replied, seriously.

  Well before sundown the whole party drove out again and took up their stations in hides by three of the larger meres, to await the wild geese and duck when they flew in at dusk. David Eynsham had equipped his family with what Hungarians used to call ‘Polish coats’, long full-skirted affairs of sheepskin, the leather tanned to a soft suède on the outside, the fleece clipped close and short within, and fastened down the front with frogged loops of leather. A sheep’s skin is practically waterproof, and Hungarians habitually wore these coats for the rather damp procedure of goose-shooting; the Eynsham ladies soon saw why. David insisted on having a hide to himself; Hugo took Lucilla to another mere, and Count Endre escorted Mrs Eynsham to one still further on. The hides were merely round holes some four and a half feet deep and less than six feet across, dug out in the stiff damp clay, with a narrow bench of sticky earth left on one side, facing the water, to sit on. Cramped in one of these, sitting knee to knee with Count Endre, Rosina could not but think of her Lucilla sitting in a similar damp hole, in equally close proximity to Hugo. But somehow she could not worry much; the enchantment of the place was strong on her as the vast simplified pageant of the sunset began, over the great empty plain – with distant lowing of cattle, the baa-ing of thousands of sheep, and the shrill whinnying of young horses being rounded up for the night. Oh, here was beauty and reality and peace – for a little while, for these few hours, let them forget the unhappy prisoners, the mistakes of the Red Cross, the menace overhanging Europe, and take what God sent! For the moment utterly happy she peered out of the hide at the blazing sky, the reddened waters, the bronze tone of the sunset-stained pastures on all sides.

  In their hide half a mile away Lucilla and Hugo were discussing much the same idea.

  ‘Are you happy, now, at th
is moment?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Yes, completely. It’s so beautiful. Are you?’

  ‘Yes. I shall be still more happy if we get some geese! But Lucilla, is this not curious, how one can live one’s life on two different levels at the same time? You endure fear and horror, don’t you, about the bombing of your country, and what your prisoners suffer?’ (He did not mention Hamish). ‘And I endure fear and horror too, at what will happen to my country – and my family – if the Germans come here. And yet this evening we can be happy, waiting for wild geese! I find this strange.’

  Lucilla considered.

  ‘No, I don’t think it all that strange’ she said at length. ‘People have got to live, and we’re given things to live by – for you and me, tonight, it’s this place, and the sunset, and presently, with luck, some geese.’ He laughed. ‘No, but that’s part of it, Hugo; shooting geese is a piece of the compensation you happen to be given for your background terrors. Accept it – don’t you think one ought to accept what one’s given?’

  ‘Yes, I do think so’ he said, after a moment’s pause. ‘One should accept the lightness of heart that comes, even when there are what you call “back-ground terrors”. We both have them – and both for our country. But you are the better off. Your country is committed- mine is not.’

  ‘No – I think your Government are being lunatics about that’ the girl said, but with no harshness in her voice. ‘They chose the wrong side in the last war, and lost Transylvania; what do they expect to happen if they choose the wrong side again this time?’

  ‘I fear they will lose everything, whichever side they choose. Between the Germans and the Russians is not much of a choice!’

  ‘But the Germans and the Russians are allies.’

  ‘Nonsense! This can never last – they are natural enemies. This Ribbentrop-Molotoff pact is merely a cover for treachery, on one side or the other. Poor Europe – how the clouds darken over her. We small States – we, and the Poles and the Serbs, and even the Rumanians – have our civilisations; as the Prussians and the Russians have not. But we lack military strength; we must be crushed by one or other of these huge, barbarian powers.’

  ‘Oh, don’t!’ she said, and put her hand on his. ‘I can’t bear the thought of it, Hugo. But what can we do?’

  ‘England? Nothing!’ the young man said bitterly.’ You gave a guarantee to Poland, yes – and what has happened to her? Invaded on one side by Germany, on the other by Russia; swamped, crushed. America could help, if she could ever begin to understand Europe; but this she cannot do. England and France and Belgium, the names she knows best, are “colonial powers”, and so anathema – Mr Roosevelt has never heard of Russian “colonial expansion” in Central Asia, and the cruel oppression of the small nations there. Pah!’

  ‘I hate all this’ Lucilla said quickly, sadly. ‘Just now, and here. I know it’s all true, and frightful for you. And I started it – my fault. But just for now can’t we stop, and go on taking what we are given?’ This brief spell alone in the hide with Hugo suddenly seemed to her to have importance, and a sort of beauty; it was a thing too precious to be wasted on criticising America or Russia or Germany, or even the impotence of England – there were other times for those things. ‘Can’t we?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes; we will. Forgive me.’ Her hand was still on his; he took it and pressed it gently.

  Suddenly out of the sky overhead came a most curious sound, really indescribable: very light, something between quacking and chattering, the talking of geese as they fly in onto a lake in the evening – utterly different from the loud honking of their high migration flights. ‘Here they are!’ Hugo exclaimed under his breath, dropping Lucilla’s hand abruptly; he raised and cocked his gun. During their conversation the light had faded, and stars were coming out in the pale sky; the great birds, skeining down onto the water, were only shadowy shapes in the near-darkness. ‘Perdition!’ Hugo muttered; ‘one sees nothing. Keep your head down’ he hissed at Lucilla, who was craning her neck up to see the geese; as she crouched down, half-laughing, he leaned round backwards and fired – once, twice.

  ‘Both! And both over the land,’ he whispered, as he jerked the empty cartridges out of his gun, and re-loaded it. The sound of his shots had disturbed the birds coming in close to them – other reports, from a distance, told them that Eynsham and Endre were also getting some sport.

  ‘The duck should be here in a moment’ Hugo whispered, peering into the darkling sky. ‘Ah yes, here they are! Damn – they’re coming in from the far side.’

  Lucilla could just make out the V-shaped formations flying in between her and the faint stars; the duck came in silence, till they landed with a little splash on the water. Hugo waited, and chose his moment well; his next two shots dropped a couple of duck close inshore. ‘I can get these easily’ he said, still in a whisper; he was wearing waders under his sheepskin coat. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No, it’s fun. Exciting.’

  They waited a little longer; Hugo managed to shoot two more geese before it became too dark to see anything at all. Then he took Lucilla’s hand and helped her out of the hide, and switched on a powerful torch.

  ‘I’ll get the duck first. Ah, I see them.’ He waded into the shallow water and came back with two dripping feathered corpses. ‘Could you perhaps carry these? Now we must find the geese.’

  Lucilla, carrying the two wild-duck by their cold scaly legs, followed Hugo as he walked about, throwing the light of his torch over the rough coarse grass. This was all part of what they were being given – his satisfaction, and her share in it. But he could only find three geese. ‘That last one was flying fast – he may have planed some distance’ he said. ‘The shepherds can have it.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s wounded?’ the girl asked, concerned.

  ‘No’ he replied abruptly. ‘We should hear it flapping about if it were. Stand still – let us listen.’ They stood; she watched the young man, tall, laden with birds, profiled against the first golden glow of the moonrise; the silence was absolute – the last birds had come in onto the mere. Then, in the distance, they heard the sound of the creaking of wheels.

  ‘The others are going back – we must go too’ he said. But for a moment he did not move. ‘You said we should take what we are given’ he said then, slowly. ‘I am being given much, tonight.’

  Lucilla had an urgent desire to say how much she had been given, too. She had been more touched by his complete detachment and avoidance of any physical approach, cramped as they had been in the hide, than by the most passionate words he could have spoken. But she resisted the impulse – poor Hamish! She wouldn’t, though, tarnish the gift with some inadequate phrase – she said nothing at all as they walked to where their little carriage waited. But as they drove back to the inn, over the darkened Puszta dotted, now, with the red gleams of the shepherds’ fires, she murmured – ‘It’s beyond beauty.’

  Dinner, accompanied by the gypsies’ music and the pretty intrusiveness of the donkey and its foal, was late that night; the moment after coffee David Eynsham said he should go to bed. He had shot four duck and two geese, and was well content. ‘You stay up, Rosie, and hear the shepherds and Czikös sing – it’s something you’ll never hear anywhere else. You won’t wake me if you don’t spend ages fussing over your face.’

  ‘Mummy’s going to undress in my room; and she never fusses over her face, not to any extent’ Lucilla told her parent repressively.

  ‘Feminine solidarity! ‘Night, my poppet’ David said, kissing his daughter. ‘Hugo, you translate the songs for them, won’t you? You know them better than Endre.’

  When he had gone to bed the others left the small restaurant where they had eaten, and after taking a turn out-of-doors in the moonlight they went and sat down on trestle benches in a huge barn-like room which Rosina had not yet seen. At the farther end were four large tables, each set for twenty or thirty – here, Hugo said, was where the people of the Hortobagy came and ate. �
�One set rides in, and eats, and then rides back to let their companions come.’ He went on to explain about the four tables.

  ‘Each category – is that how you say it? – sits together; they do not mix. That table on the right is for the shepherds; they are counted the grandest. Next come the Czikos, then the cattle-keepers – and this table nearest us is for the swineherds, who rank the lowest of all.’

  ‘Poor swineherds!’ Lucilla said laughing – she was very happy that night.

  ‘Well pigs, as animals, are obviously less noble than cattle or horses’ Count Endre said – ‘though they cannot possibly be sillier than sheep. Mrs Eynsham, do you like beer? It is rather good here, and we must spend a long time drinking.’

  Mrs Eynsham said that in that case she would rather go on with coffee, and switch to beer later; Lucilla followed her example.

  About eleven, preceded by a clatter of horses’ feet outside, a group of Czikös came in, in their exotic dress; they hung up their cloaks and Manchu hats on pegs on the wall, sat down at their own table, and proceeded to make a hearty meal, dipping bread in their bean soup and gulping down goulasch. They were followed by a dozen swineherds, who did the same at their humble table; and then by a number of cattle-tenders. Last of all, in stalked several shepherds, wearing quite fantastic garments: white woollen coats heavily embroidered in black, and so thick and stiff that they merely stood them on the floor behind their table; the loose skirts crumpled down a little, but the tops stood up, nearly four feet high.

  ‘This is what I spoke of Baron Hugo murmured to Mrs Eynsham. ‘With such coats, they hardly need shelter; they can sit and keep watch in the open; for sheep it is better so.’