A Place to Stand Read online

  “Have you ever done that?—hopped the frontier, and been chased by the dogs?” she asked, rather breathlessly.

  “Oh good Heavens, yes! So many times.” He hesitated, and then went on—“Once I thought we were really for it. We—Jurek and I—heard the dogs ranging through the wood after us; there was no stream—you know that if you wade along a stream, the dogs lose the scent, for the water cannot carry it. They were very close, and had got between us and what we thought was the frontier line—for in such places, among woods or growing corn, the line is fairly indeterminate; but the guards take a chance on that, and shoot two or three kilometres beyond it, often.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We found a little hollow among some hazel-bushes, and hid in it; we scuffed up the dead leaves behind us with a long branch, to lessen the scent, and pulled more leaves over us; but it was quite hopeless, really. We lay quaking! There was no chance of escape,” he said, turning to her—and now his eyes were wide. “But I prayed to Our Lady, like mad!—you know that she is Queen of Poland; we are all under her protection—and I prayed to St. Stephen too—of course he is my patron saint. The dogs came nearer and nearer, so close that we could hear their breath, as well as their feet rustling among the dry leaves. Do you know the loud sniffing that a dog seeking the scent makes? It is a terrible sound, if you are the hunted,” he said, staring at her. “One of them even began to whimper, as they do when they pick up the trail of the quarry. And then”—He stopped abruptly.

  “What?” Hope asked. She felt as if she was with him and Jurek in that hollow among the hazels.

  “A perfectly straight miracle happened,” Stefan said slowly. “A hare sprang up out of that little hollow in which we lay, up over the bank and away through the wood, and the hounds followed it, baying—such an appalling sound, so deep! Really blood-curdling.” He shivered, standing there beside the tranquil river—Hope was shocked by the expression on his face. “And of course the guards followed the dogs—chasing a hare! A false hare!” he said, with a rather shaken little laugh.

  “But—it’s so extraordinary! Why didn’t it get up before?” the girl asked.

  “Why indeed? That was the miracle. The hare is one of the shyest of living creatures; and that hollow was so small, she must have been lying within three feet of us, at the most. And yet she never stirred till the moment of our need, and then sprang up, and led the dogs away from us.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “We gave it ten minutes, while the sound of the dogs and men moved further and further away, and then ran like hares ourselves for about three kilometres, till we met a man, a wood-cutter, who told us we were in Hungarian Ruthenia. So we went to the nearest village, and had such a drink!—and slept; and next day we came on to Budapest by train.”

  “Didn’t you go into the church to thank Our Lady?” Hope asked; after her years at the Sacré Cœur this seemed to her the natural thing to do.

  He looked curiously embarrassed.

  “Well yes—in fact I did,” he said. “We got hold of the village priest that night, and got Confession, and both made our Communions next morning. But—” He hesitated.

  “What?” Hope asked. She was puzzled by his embarrassment over anything so normal.

  “Well you see, actually it was the first time I had made my Communion for ever so long—two or three years,” he replied, somewhat shamefacedly. “I hadn’t even been to Mass at all regularly—only when I was at home, at times like Christmas, and then to please my Father and Mother.”

  “Oh.”

  Hope was rather shocked. Her Hungarian friends, girls and young men alike, were mostly thoroughly pratiquants as Catholics—she suddenly remembered Tibor going off to Mass at 6 a.m. after the ball at the Park Club. “Why was that?” she asked. In the new intimacy which this whole day, and still more his telling her about the miracle which saved his life had brought into being between them, she found it quite natural to ask this question.

  “Oh, you know what young men are. Well no, I suppose you don’t! But—well, one leaves home, and goes into the army, and rages about; and then one commits sins, and it is so troublesome to confess them—and one must resolve not to sin again, when one wishes to. All are not like me in our country; do not think it—many Poles are good Catholics; the women, all. That is why I was so ashamed,” he ended, in a burst.

  Hope was at once startled and fascinated by these confidences.

  “Ashamed when? When you went to confession?”

  “No!” He almost shouted the word. “When I prayed to Our Lady in the wood. I said to her—’I am a lãche, a wretch; I have ignored you, I have been a bad Christian, I have sinned and wished to sin—but save me now!’ And when She did immediately save me, there and then, by such a miracle, you can imagine how I felt. Oh, abased—and so unutterably grateful to her for her generosity.”

  “And since then?” Hope asked rather shyly, after a little pause. Suddenly it seemed enormously important to her to know all these things about Stefan’s inner life. This was the clearest of symptoms, though she did not know it, of the early stages of a love-affair. But whether Stefan recognized the symptom or not, he was quite ready to tell her.

  “Oh, of course I have been absolutely regular at Mass ever since now for more than a year. How could I do otherwise, after that?”

  “No, of course you couldn’t,” she said slowly.

  He glanced at her rather curiously.

  “You are a Catholic yourself?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not. Sometimes I wish I were. But if I go to church anywhere here it’s usually to Mass at the Coronation church.”

  “But why?—if you are not a Catholic?” He in his turn found that he wanted to know about her inner life.

  “Well, all my friends go there—you see I was at school at the Sacré Cœur; and of course there we all heard Mass every morning. But besides that”—she paused, frowning and wrinkling her nose a little, while she sought for words to express what she had never hitherto tried to express even to herself, but now, for some unrecognized reason, greatly desired to make clear to Stefan.

  “So?” the young man asked, as she remained stuck and silent, watching the expression, at once puzzled and searching, on her very young face—somehow that expression brought home to him, as nothing had yet done, how exceedingly young she was.

  “Oh well—I mean that I don’t only go to meet my friends.” She paused again, still with that seeker’s look. Then all of a sudden her words came in a burst.

  “There’s something so tremendous about the Mass; even to me, an Episcopalian.” (That word stumped Stefan completely, of course; he had never heard of such a thing.) But she was going on. “It sort of holds God up to you, right in your face, whether you care or whether you don’t care: it’s take it or leave it! But the thing is, it doesn’t depend on you at all, or the way you feel about it—I mean feel about God. It’s just there” Her eyes were very wide as she said that; the young man, Catholic born and bred, noted with surprise what an impact had been made on her by what was obvious and familiar to him.

  “Ex opere operator he murmured.

  “What did you say?”

  Hope’s Latin was confined to the responses in the liturgy, learned in the Convent school.

  “Nothing. I mean, it is just the correct, the official words for what you have been saying—that the Mass is independent of our personal response. Though of course we ought to give it,” he said, looking out over the river.

  Something about the tone of his voice made Hope feel out of her depth. She had been considerably shaken emotionally by the story of the miracle of the hare, and still more by their subsequent interchanges; she came back now to more immediate problems, and put a question which seemed to her exceedingly urgent. “Shall you have to cross the frontier again this time to get—whatever it is? I thought it was coming to you here.”

  “Yes; it will be brought to us, this time.”

  “But when?”


  “Ah, how can one know when? When another miracle has been worked, perhaps, for another messenger!”

  “Well, but look—I shall want to know, you know,” Hope said, with a certain obstinacy.

  “Of course—and you have every right to know.” He thought for a moment. “The telephone is not so good; I do not want your line to be tapped too. Though I daresay it is already, on your Father’s account!—so perhaps if Litka rang you up and asked you to come round it would be no great harm. But then—” he paused, looking worried—“the less you are seen coming to the Penzio, the better.”

  “Why?” Hope could not understand this concern about her, an American citizen, in connection with these two-cent European police.

  “I don’t want people to get to know you by sight; I don’t want you involved in this at all,” he said, almost angrily. “It is too dangerous.” He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke, while Hope couldn’t help remembering the sudden anger of Dr. Kraljic, and how he had used almost the same words. But the broad road behind them held no lurking figure, only the endless stream of bicycles. The girl could not believe that he was not exaggerating, but she had her own difficulties.

  “Coming to the Penzio isn’t so easy anyway,” she said, drawing her dark eyebrows together and wrinkling her pretty nose up rather comically. “I’m not up against the police like you are, but my Mama is pretty well a Deuxième Bureau by herself, let me tell you!—she always wants to know where I’m going or where I’ve been, and I’m beginning to run short of excuses for when I go to the Penzio. I can’t go to the hairdresser every single day.”

  He laughed. “No, I see. But what can you suggest?”

  “Well, a place I do go to, most days, is the flower-market; you know, upstairs at the Central Market. I thought if we were to meet there, I could hear your news, and bring home the flowers for the table like I always do—and no questions asked.”

  “That is an excellent idea,” he said. “I believe Dr. Kraljic told you once before that you are accomplished at intrigue!”

  “Anyone who knows people like you needs to be! I never was before,” Hope said candidly. “All right—Friday?” (It was Tuesday then.) “You might have heard something by then, I expect.”

  “Anyhow, on Friday we will meet at the Market,” he answered.

  “At the top of the stairs—all right. At eleven.”

  The old landlord of the “little wine-room” strolled up at this point, greeted Hope with great courtesy, and joined them where they stood, likewise leaning his elbows on the parapet overhanging the river. He gestured at several barges with large white swastikas painted on their sides, moored a little way upstream, which were being diligently loaded with great wooden cases from some tugs tied up beside them—machine tools from the island factories, he said. He spat into the Danube. “I said to them this morning, those creations on board—’Why don‘t you god-damned Germans pack up the whole god-damned river, and take that away too, while you’re about it?’“

  Hope laughed. Stefan said to her, in French—“That is the right sort of Hungarian! And they are in the majority.” He turned to the old man, and asked if they could not go in and have a kis-pálinka, “a small spirit”. The landlord, bowing, agreed, and they went together to the tiny establishment. There were tables on the flagged pavement above the river, but the sun was now low, and Stefan said that it would be too cold outside, so they went in—to a running accompaniment of apologies from the old fellow. These were merited. The small wine-room was being done up, and wooden steps, buckets and crumbs of spilt cement lay all about; but the old man cleared and wiped down a table and a couple of chairs, and they sat and drank barack, for the second time that day. The late sun, streaming in from across the river, turned the rough new plaster on the walls to a deep burning rose; they sat and sipped in a contented silence, happy to be together, and not feeling any particular need for speech. But at one point Hope’s mind came back, ruminatively, to the little couplet Stefan had sung about the Green Frontier, and she quite startled him by saying suddenly—“It’s like ‘The Country of the Camisards’.”

  “Please?”

  “That little song you sang. It reminded me of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scotch poet, who walked about France with a donkey.” She couldn’t help repeating it, for the lovely sound of the words:

  “We travelled in the print of golden wars

  Where all the land was green;

  And love we found, and peace,

  Where fire and war had been.

  They pass and smile, the children of the sword;

  No more the sword they wield—

  And oh, how deep the corn

  Along the battlefield.”

  “My English is bad,” he said. “Could you translate?”

  Hurriedly, she gave him a prose version in French, to which he listened gravely. “It was the corn that made me think of it,” she said, half apologetically.

  “It is beautiful,” he said, but sadly. “I hope that love and peace may be found presently along our battlefields—but oh, I am so afraid!”

  “What of?”

  “Of the Russians. Godlessness and devilry.”

  She had no answer to make to that, and they continued to sit in silence—which Hope somehow found easier than speech, so often, with Stefan. But just to sit quietly with him, watching his dark clever face and his splendid deep-set eyes—that was a simple happiness, which was not in the least marred today by the fact that the old landlord continually hovered about them, asking if their drinks were of the right temperature, showing them the barack bottle, and explaining exactly where and how he obtained such an admirable spirit—from an uncle of his wife’s, an old man, over ninety, who had always had a magic hand for distilling barack. “He uses only the best apricots, from the orchards of neighbours; and he knows all about crushing the kernels properly.” Hope had never before heard the vendor of a drink describe its origins like that; it opened up whole new vistas to her. Did the makers of Bourbon possibly talk in the same way about how they harvested their rye, in the places where rye grew? Where was that? She didn’t know—she only knew the bottled product. How queer, and yet how nice it was, she thought, to be told the very name of the village from which a particular drink came, by the nephew-in-law of the man who had brewed it.

  The sun faded at last off the rough plaster, leaving it a cold grey; Hope and Stefan drank the last glass, lingeringly, and rose to leave. The old man kissed her hand—“The next time you come, all the plastering and whitewashing will be finished, and it will be a palace!” he said earnestly.

  As they drove off in the car, Hope said to Stefan—“Actually I don’t suppose we’ll ever come here again. You’ll be going away—and anyhow we’re neither of us the sort of people who live in palaces,” she added half laughing—because for some absurd reason there were almost tears in her eyes at the thought of not sitting again with Stefan in that little bare untidy room, where the sun had burned like roses on the walls.

  He turned and looked at her for a second, sitting beside him—the embankment road stretched ahead of them, wide and once again empty; the factory hands and their bicycles were all gone by now. He said slowly: “You might well live in a palace; you look like the Princess in one of our winter fairy-tales.” And Hope turned her head aside, towards the Danube, because those ridiculous tears actually brimmed over and fell, when he said that.

  6

  Hope heard no more from any of them before the Friday, but the ever-observant Mrs. Kirkland noticed that whenever the telephone rang her daughter leapt up, like a galvanized frog, and flew to it, sometimes even taking the receiver from her Mother’s hand with a brusque—“It may be for me.” The good lady speculated worriedly over this. Sam wasn’t likely to be ringing up from Istanbul, he couldn’t afford calls like that; so for what call, from whom, was her precious child so nervously on the watch? She thought of talking to her husband about it, but decided not to; John was always markedly allergic to any for
m of fussing. And anyhow these days he was inclined to be rather silent and abstracted—worrying, his wife guessed from various stray remarks that he let fall, over the international situation. “You can’t ever know what new devilry or mischief the Boches are going to spring,” he said one day. “Hitler never stays put for any length of time; he has to keep on the move, it seems—maybe it’s always that way with dictators! And I guess he must have been pretty fed up with that Hungarian-Yugoslav Treaty of Friendship.”

  “What was that?” Mrs. Kirkland asked.

  “Why dear, I told you at the time. Back in the winter. The Hungarians and the Yugoslavs signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Count Teleki did it while Csáky was away—he wouldn’t have got by with it, else! Csáky was too pro-German.”

  Mrs. Kirkland, vague as she was about politics, did at least know that the Prime Minister, Count Teleki, world-renowned as a geographer, a brilliant naturalist, and as incorruptible as he was able, did not favour the Nazi regime; and no American in Budapest at that time could fail to have registered that Count Csáky, the sickly irritable Foreign Minister, had been at once intensely pro-German—hadn’t he married a German wife just the other day?—and bitterly anti-American; his brusque rudeness had caused the American Minister not to be on speaking terms with him for months past. In fact nobody had really liked poor Count Csáky very much; and when he had died suddenly a few weeks before, and his great funeral ceremony was performed in the exquisite domed Parliament Building beside the Danube, only those who absolutely had to had followed in the long procession to the snowy churchyard, through the bitter wind. “Mourir pour Csáky? Non!” one diplomat’s wife, shivering in her furs, had muttered as she returned to her car—and the mot had gone all round Budapest. Mrs. Kirkland remembered it now, and laughed a little.