On an Odd Note

THE BEGGARS’ STONE

The monotony of the plain becomes so heartbreaking that you would thank God for the sight of a withered tree. The land lies flat. The road forks and runs away into the unknown distance. Look east, look west; there is nobody, nothing but dust and grass and a dry, melancholy wind which twists the clouds into tortured shapes. The plain is mournful and legend-haunted.

Dig in it and you may find strange things: skulls scored with scars, bits of metal, defaced coins, weapons which at a touch fall to green powder. It swallows men like a sea. The Tartars passed this way, with the flat-faced riffraff of the Bad Lands. “Where my horses’ hoofs have passed no grass grows.” But grass has grown; the grass always wins in the end, and it covers everything, humbly bending before the wind, but savagely clutching the earth with its roots—bitter, gluttonous Puszta grass that devours the soil.

I say the road forks and is terribly lonely. But a few paces away from the point at which it divides there stands a stone, incalculably ancient, roughhewn into a rectangular shape, bury­ing itself by its own weight . . . “digging its own grave,” as they say in these parts.

It used to lie flat. Now it stands erect. In the place where it used to lie there is a deep hole. Grass has begun to encroach on the stone itself. The hard, pale surface sprouts sparse tufts like an old man’s chin. These tufts somehow make the stone look older. By moonlight they give it an appearance of something grotesquely like life.

Three sides of the stone are marked with inscriptions. Bend sideways and you may read initials, names and broken phrases in all the languages of the earth: J. H.; M. B. Hunyadi; several crosses; “GOD WILL PUNISH THEM,” in ancient Slavonic. In one corner somebody has laboriously hacked out a heart and an arrow. Roman, Greek, Russian, Tartar, Georgian—all alphabets may be found there. There is even the name of one FA’OUZI, beautifully carved in curling Arabic. To whom did these names and symbols belong? Only God knows.

The time will come when even these desolate marks will have been rubbed away by the rain and the dust, and then there will be nothing but the tired old stone, imperceptibly disintegrating atom by atom in the loneliness of the plain at the fork of the dreary road.

Why was the stone dropped there? For centuries nobody knew. Tramps used it as a seat, a bed, a kitchen and a meeting place. The friction of their bodies alone had worn little hollows in it. Their weight had helped to press it down. Their names were cut into it. They had nothing but names to leave. Some of them, no doubt, were so poor that they had no names. Men and women who lived and died up and down the interminable roads of Europe; people beyond society; lost souls; the forgotten of God; men without hope; eaters of garbage; beggars for charity; people who lived on their sores and deformities; bear trainers, lone bandits, wandering musicians and contortionists—they all rested on that stone, left their marks if they had marks to leave, and went their ways to their unknown graves.

The plainsmen call it The Beggars’ Stone, to this day.

One evening in 1906, two men met at the stone. The first had only one leg. He was a short, squat fellow, wrapped in rubbish, crowned with a cowman’s round hat which pressed his ears down, and bearded until he resembled a gray mildewed vegetable rather than a man. The other had an air of crime and misery. Life had crushed him dry and flat, like a grape in a press. His face was a Rosetta Stone of bygone violence—it bore the cuneiform scars of a hatchet, the hieroglyphics of a knife, and the queer marks of broken glass. People had tried to kill that man. He was beyond hope and fear.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening.”

“Cold.”

“Bitter,” said the one-legged man, nursing his stump.

“Come far?”

“Far enough. And you?”

“Far enough. Where are you heading for?”

“Buda, maybe. You?”

“Maybe Buda. What’s your name? They call me Bicskas.”

“Probka.” The one-legged man sighed. “Well, the stone still lies here. Many’s the night I’ve slept here.”

“Me too. See that dent? It fits my head. It might have been made for me.”

“Nice soft stone,” said Bicskas, grinning. “It’s kind of them to let us have even this much. Ha! A stone. I see you pick the south side. You’re no fool. You know the ropes. Good. Have you got any food?”

“I’ve got some bread,” said Probka.

“I’ve got some bacon,” said Bicskas.

“I’ve got some wine,” Probka pulled out a bottle.

“We can have a banquet,” muttered Bicskas, grinning again. “Look at this.” He displayed the stumps of five cigars.

“Things were not always like this, Bicskas, my brother-in-law.”

“You’re right. Bacon, bread, wine, cigars. What more could you want? Geese?”

“What I mean to say is, I wasn’t always poor like this.”

“Who cares?” said Bicskas. “However poor you are there’s always a consolation. Somewhere there’s someone poorer. You have always got something somebody else wants. I’ve seen a man knifed in the back in Medvegy’s Cellar for a boot—one old boot with a hole in the sole. Good, that, eh?”

“Medvegy’s Cellar; that’s in Budapest.”

“In the spring, if you hang around the hotels—my dear sir,” said Probka, “you’d be surprised at the things they throw away. Many’s the leg of fowl I’ve got out of the dustbins in Budapest in the spring.”

“Leg? Once I found a half a duck. I dusted it off a bit and there it was, like new. They’ve got so much, these people, they don’t know what to do with it. So they chuck it in the dust hole. It had some sauce on it, too.”

“I once found a whole chicken,” said Probka.

“Yes? I once found a goose, a whole goose, in a copper pan.”

“You lie,” he said distinctly.

“Say that again.”

“Bah.” Probka uncorked the bottle. “I know a man who was in Berlin once, and so one day he happens to open up a dustbin and finds—guess what! A ham. I tell you, a whole ham, only a little bit off. But give me sausage.

“In the old days,” said Probka, “I used to eat a lot of sausage, a kind of special sausage made with goose-fat and garlic.”

“Millionaire,” sneered Bicskas.

“I used to have a rag-and-bone business.”

“You needn’t try to come over me with your rag-and-bone business. I used to be chucker-out in the Café Cseh. I had a blue uniform. I nearly bought a watch.”

“By God,” said Probka, “it grows cold. I bet neither of us lives through the winter.”

“I have also been a coachman. I had some proper boots then, I don’t mind telling you.”

“We ought to have a fire,” said Probka.

“My master was a count. We had Arab horses.”

“I used to drink hot brandy on cold nights. I could do with some now, by heaven I could. Do you know what happened here last winter?”

“What?”

“A woman was found frozen right here, with a newborn baby in her arms. She was a lady, too.”

“Lady!”

“Yes, here she sat, blue and stiff, with this kid, not two hours old, dead in her arms.”

“If she was a lady she wouldn’t have been here. She’d be at home, by the fire, that’s where she’d be.”

“You wouldn’t understand, friend Bicskas. Perhaps there was a disgrace. I’ve dealt with many a noble family, and I understand things like that.”

“Remember the wolves?” said Bicskas. “The winter when the wolves came down here and they sent fifty soldiers to kill them off? Snap-snap! All they found next day was fifty rifles in the snow. Not even a bloodstain; they’d lapped it all up. They’re devils, wolves.”

“It was sixty soldiers.”

“Fifty.”

“I’ve been coming here for thirty years, so I ought to know.”

“I’ve been here off and on for forty years.”

“I can read and write,” said Probka.

“I can read capital letters.”

There was silence. Then Bicskas laughed and said, “The sun looks like blood.”

“I ought to know what goes on round here,” said Probka, offended. “It’s house and home to me, this stone.”

“Well, damn it, so it is to me, too. It’s a place. ‘Where now?’ you say; and then you say, ‘Let’s go to the stone.’ That’s how it is.”

“You can sit here, sleep here, talk here, eat here. It’s a club. You can also write your name down. Then there’s sort of something. I cut my name over there.”

“I did not exactly cut my name,” said Bicskas, “but I made a cross.”

“Let us try to sleep,” said Probka.

By daybreak four more tramps had come. There was a woman who did not resemble a woman, and a man who did not look like a man; there was a bundle of rags wrapped in an old sheepskin, that laughed and smoked, accompanied by his wife who sat in impenetrable silence. They rested, fitting their bones into the mossier indentations of the stone.

“But who is this who comes?” asked Bicskas, suddenly.

A train of carts, followed by a carriage, rolled slowly down the north fork of the road. The tramps, watching, saw that there were also men in uniform, riding horses.

A giant in blue and silver, with a mustache quite twelve inches from tip to tip, rode up to the stone, surveyed the tramps with a supercilious scowl, wrinkled his nose and said, “Off.”

“Sir?” said Probka.

“Clear out.”

Bicskas snarled.

“Off!” roared the giant with the mustache. The tramps dragged themselves away. Only Probka and Bicskas remained.

“We insist on our rights,” said Probka. “This is our stone.”

The horseman drew a revolver, and said, “Two seconds.”

“If you shoot it’s murder,” said Probka.

“Get out!”

Probka went away. Bicskas followed him. From a distance they watched. The shapeless thing in the sheepskin, speaking for the first and last time, said, “I cut a J, for Janos, in the right-hand corner, with a horseshoe nail, for luck. And an E for Etelka. That’s my old woman.”

“They’ve brought up a crane,” said Bicskas. “They’re taking the stone away. By God! Let’s . . .”

“Against guns?” said Probka. “I think they’re only turning it over.”

The woman who did not resemble a woman shrieked suddenly. “It moves!”

Slowly, encumbered by the weight of all its centuries, the stone moved. The earth cracked. Pale insects that lived out of the daylight writhed, terrified, back into the ground. The stone groaned. The crane groaned. The workmen shouted. The watchers held their breath. Probka prayed, “Oh God, let the chains break!”

But the chains held. The bottom of the stone became visible, black with earth. The tramps cried out. They felt in the soles of their feet the jolt of the huge stone teetering on end. A workman yelled, “Hold!” The stone stood, gently rocking. An old gentleman said, “Here. Now.” Soon, having propped up the stone with beams, men began to dig. When night fell, flares were lit. The men dug till dawn. More men came with picks and spades. The waiting tramps, now fifty strong, muttered among themselves.

From out of the newly dug pit came a shout, “Eljen! Eljen!” It was a cry of triumph. The chains clanked again. Men groaned. “Hup!” Strange objects were coming out of the ground into the light—dull, dirty pieces of armor; huge pots and troughs; battered cups; bent disks—masses of old, broken metal of unfamiliar shapes and unwieldy sizes.

Probka, bowing low before an armed guard, said, “Honored sir, be graciously pleased to tell me why this old iron was buried here.”

“That is not old iron,” said the guard. “That is pure gold. It is one of the treasures of the Scourge of God, Attila. It is worth God knows how many millions.”

“And for seven hundred years we have been dying of hunger here,” said Probka. Nothing more was said. Bitterness was too profound for expression. There were no words, even in the frightful vocabularies of the damned.

The tramps camped about the hole. When the diggers had gone away, they probed the pit with their fingers, hoping to find some forgotten coin or jewel. But they found nothing, except worms and stones, and a heavy smell as of the grave. And so, at last, they went their ways over the endless, wind-tattered plain; and although it covered a treasure the plainsmen still call the stone The Beggars’ Stone, in spite of the fact that since it was disturbed no beggar has rested there.