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.”