The Portuguese Escape Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    â€˜Please?’
    Oh God, what will become of her? Townsend thought. He explained.
    â€˜But not
women?
’ Hetta said, now as incredulous as he.
    â€˜Not often, no; and never nice women, unless they are inexperienced, and it happens by mistake. Do you like that?’
    Hetta sipped, then wrinkled up her nose in a funny grimace.
    â€˜No. It has rather a disagreeable taste, I think; curious, but not agreeable. Wine is nicer.’
    â€˜Then you’d better have some sherry.’ He poured her out a glass of Manzanilla.
    Townsend, well-brought-up in the high Bostonian sense of the phrase, nevertheless had few or no qualms about thus organising drinks for himself in Countess Páloczy’s apartment. She was always liberal with them, and would have hated a compatriot, or anyone else, to sit dry and miserable in her rooms; she was fundamentally quite a kind person, he reflected, if she did tend to attach a rather exaggerated importance to social success.
    â€˜So you do drink wine?’ he said to Hetta, who was not making any faces over the sherry.
    â€˜At Detvan we did, even I—it was always on the table at meals. Our own wine—we made it at home. Pappi loved his vineyards, and was so proud of his wine.’
    â€˜I bet it was good.’ The young man followed up this promising line; he asked questions, and listened with interest to the answers, which on this familiar and obviously well-loved subject came in an eager flow. He got a clear, even a vivid picture of a happy country childhood in patriarchal surroundings—the vast flat fields, intensively cultivated; the enormous herds of cows and oxen, the droves of pigs, the flocks of geese and turkeys being brought back to the village at night by the swineherds and goose-girls. ‘Of course the pigs and geese belonged mostly to the peasants, and when they came down the village street in the evening it was so funny, how each small flock knew its own homestead, and of its own accord turned in at the right gate—the geese stepping so sedately, the cows walking, the calves perhaps jumping a little, but the pigs
galloping
, kicking up their heels and squealing!’ Her face was alight.
    â€˜But why were the pigs and the cows all mixed up together, so they had to find their own gates?’ Townsend asked, rather puzzled.
    â€˜Oh, but of course the animals from the whole village went out to feed together; Pappi gave the grazing, and paid the wages of the cowherd and swineherd. It is always so—I mean it
was
,’ the girl said, rather sadly.
    â€˜Didn’t the peasants have any land of their own, then?’
    â€˜Each house half a hectare, to grow what they liked— and of course the garden round the house. But one cannot graze five cows on half a hectare, especially with calves too.’
    â€˜Did each peasant have five cows, then? For goodness sake! And how many peasants in the village?’
    â€˜In Detvan there were a hundred-and-fifty houses; in the other two villages perhaps a little fewer; about a hundred in each, I think. But each peasant could keep up to five cows, and as many as forty pigs—not more.’
    Townsend did sums in his head.
    â€˜And your father gave free grazing to sixteen hundred cows,
and
their calves? And paid the cowherds’ wages with it? It’s fantastic!’
    â€˜Why?’ Hetta asked flatly. ‘With us it was always so.’
    â€˜Fourteen thousand pigs too,’ Townsend mused. ‘Don’t know what
they
eat. And your father just
gave
the people all this?’
    â€˜But naturally.’
    â€˜Doesn’t seem at all natural to me, in the twentieth century.’
    â€˜I cannot see what the century has to do with it. They were our people; they worked for us.’
    â€˜Did they get any wages?’
    Hetta laughed at such ignorance.
    â€˜Of
course
they received wages—and some of the produce of the estate: maize, and wheat, and wine for each