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The soul of the dead seemed to speak in the voice of the heroic music, recalling to the harassed contestants for liberty the great days of the revolts of the fatherland, the old memories of the struggles against the Turks, the furious charges of the cavaliers across the free puszta, the vast Hungarian plain.
Before the travellers extended the endless plain of the Alföld, like a bridge rising from her bed to greet her beloved Lord, the Sun. On Mr. Gerzson, however, the romantic spectacle of sunrise on the puszta produced no romantic impression whatsoever. He neither observed the golden clouds in the sky, nor the dappled shadows flitting across the dewy fields, nor the lilac-coloured nebulous horizon.
First of all you made all four of Hátszegi's horses lame; in the second place you compelled his poor wife to spend a night in a csárdá of the puszta, and in the third place you got so drunk that you began to quarrel with her and at last did not know whether you were boy or girl.
Henrietta recognized him at once, though Squire Gerzson saw him now for the first time. It was old Ripa. "I am a guest here myself," said he. "Thou blockhead! by the soul of thy father I charge thee where is the hostess?" "She is outside in the cool air." "What is she doing there?" "She is guarding the moles" which means in the flowery language of the puszta: "she is dead."
How often did I reproach him with his unhappy "puszta" patriotism, that was digging a grave for him and all of us. It was impossible to change him; he was obstinate and unbending, and his greatest fault was that, all his life, he was under the ban of a petty ecclesiastical policy. Not a single square metre would he yield either to Roumania in her day, nor to the Czechs or the Southern Slavs.
The very air of the room was all at once difficult to breathe, and she only felt better when she sat in the carriage again. But even there she was haunted by some unendurable, undefinable, torturing feeling which struck her still more unpleasantly when Clementina remarked: "Yes, there is nothing but good land on this puszta."
She died in that Russian house, every stone of which she hated, even to the Muscovite crucifix over the door, which her faith, however, forbade her to have removed; she died making her daughter swear that the last slumber which was coming to her, gently lulling her to rest after so much suffering, should be slept in Hungarian soil; and, after the Tzigana's death, this young girl of twenty, alone with Vogotzine, who accompanied her on the gloomy journey with evident displeasure, crossed France, went to Vienna, sought in the Hungarian plain the place where one or two miserable huts and some crumbling walls alone marked the site of the village burned long ago by Tchereteff's soldiers; and there, in Hungarian soil, close to the spot where the men of her tribe had been shot down, she buried the Tzigana, whose daughter she so thoroughly felt herself to be, that, in breathing the air of the puszta, she seemed to find again in that beloved land something already seen, like a vivid memory of a previous existence.
To escape from this hated service, many a young man fled from his home in anticipation of the next levy of the conscription, and hid himself in the shepherds' tanya in the plain. These remote dwellings in the distant puszta were no bad hiding places, and the fugitives were freely harboured by the shepherds, who shared the animosity of the "poor lads" against the Austrian conscription.
Finally, the beast who is getting the worst of it, feeling that his rival is the stronger, begins with a terrific roar to fly away through the herd, and runs wild on the puszta; with blood-red eyes, with blood-red lolling tongue, he wanders up and down the fields and meadows, frequently returning to the scene of his humiliation; but he mingles no longer with the herd, and woe betide every living animal he encounters!
A female phantom, who is described as hurrying along the puszta, or steppe, in a mortar, pounding with a pestle at a tremendous rate, and leaving a long trace on the ground behind her with her tongue, which is three yards long, and with which she seizes any men and horses coming in her way, swallowing them down into her capacious belly.
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