Midwife Fazekas

The kingless Kingdom of Hungary is still a country of great landed estates in the hands of a few very wealthy men. Far more than cash does the ownership of even a few acres of land bring prestige to a Hungarian peasant. "Land hunger," greed to increase their holdings by hook or crook, is a besetting vice of the Magyar. Fear lest their acres should have to be subdivided is one reason why Hungarian landowners seldom have more than one child. Tenant farmers are notably more prolific.

Sometimes, even among the best families, accidents will happen. In Nagyrev village, one Mrs. Fazekas was much in demand as a "wise woman'' or midwife because of the frequency with which unwanted babies were born dead under her ministrations. Unfortunately mothers often died as well. One day Mrs. Fazekas saw a fly sip from a saucer in which was a sheet of arsenical flypaper, drop dead. She saw a chicken eat the fly and drop dead in turn. Mrs. Fazekas pondered these interesting phenomena, then ordered great quantities of flypaper from neighboring villages.

Babies were no longer born dead in Nagyrev. They died a few days later, of cholic. In Nagyrev churchyard sprang up a whole row of little graves, all beautifully cared for, for they belonged to Nagyrev's best families.

Came the War. Babies grew scarce in Nagyrev. On the other hand unwanted husbands were invalided home, parents, aunts, uncles continued to live to the embarrassment of poverty-stricken heirs, and Mrs. Fazekas continued to make essence of flypaper. Business expanded. She was soon forced to engage an assistant, one Mrs. Csordas. A third member of the firm was the village barber-undertaker-coroner, Midwife Fazekas' brother-in-law.

Busybodies in neighboring villages soon spread rumors about the firm of Fazekas, Csordas & Co. The rumors crystallized. Letters containing definite particulars of numerous deaths in the village of Nagyrev were sent to local police offices, finally to the district prosecutor of Szolnok. By his orders the body of an unpopular uncle, buried twelve years, was exhumed, assayed, found to contain enough arsenic to kill a team of mules. Other exhumations followed until 22 arsenicated corpses were discovered. Only then did a pair of Hungarian gendarmes, black cock feathers in their bowler hats, march down the main street of Nagyrev to arrest the terrible Mrs. Fazekas. She saw them coming, instantly drained a stiff tumbler of her potent essence of flypaper and died.

Justice, long delayed, moved thoroughly. Thirty persons accused of complicity in the Nagyrev poisonings were in Hungarian jails last week. Hungarian police promised that when the trial opened at least 100 would be in the dock.

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