I emptied the saddle-bag on a chair next day to re-pack my rucksack and when some sketches dropped out Mrs. Haviar gathered them up. They weren’t very good but she asked me to do a drawing of her daughter, Erszi, an amazing and pretty little girl of about ten. I had often done sketches in Germany and Austria as a kind of thank-offering to hosts—no one seemed to mind their inexpertness—so I jumped at the suggestion and Erszi ran off excitedly to tidy her hair. When she was still not back after ten minutes, they gave her a shout and she arrived looking extraordinary in a cloche hat of her mother’s, long ear-rings and a fox stole; she had covered her face with powder and had turned her lips into a sticky Cupid’s bow. Perching on a tuffet, she crooked a bangled wrist on her hip while her other hand flourished a twelve-inch cigarette-holder and tapped off the ash with vampish languor. It was convincing and rather eerie, an advanced case of lamb dressed up as mutton. “Isn’t she silly?” her mother said fondly. I’m not sure the sketch did her justice.
Later, back in her ordinary clothes, she and her father and I set off for Malek’s quarters. I was armed with some valedictory lumps of sugar and steeled for an Arab’s farewell to his steed. We found Malek fooling about with some ponies at the far end of a paddock but when I called him he cantered over with a gratifying flutter of mane and tail and I patted the blaze on his brow and stroked his beautiful arched neck for the last time. I said goodbye and set off. My sitter, still elated by her recent avatar, kept waving and jumping up and down and shouting “Viszontlátásra!” until we were all out of earshot.
* * *
The Körös kept me company the whole day. The river was banked against flooding and all of it was wooded, so branches dappled the path and the river’s edge with shadows all the way. Thistledown fluff from the willow-herb span across the water and diving frogs marked almost every step. Reeds and tall clumps of bullrushes sheltered families of moorhens, and purple dragonflies hovered and settled among the yellow flags. When I sat down for a smoke, an abrupt movement gave away an otter; he looked about, then ran along the root of a willow and slipped in with a plop which stirred the backwater with spreading rings. There was plenty of food for him: fish gleamed in the clear water and, a little further upstream, two boys were busy with long reeds and cork floats. Their catch was strung through the gills inside a hollow tree and we had scarcely exchanged greetings when there was a silver flash and another was whisked leaping out of the current. When I said “Eljen!”—Bravo! I hoped—they offered to give it to me but I felt shy about turning up at my next halt like Tobias. Cattle gathered under the branches and waded knee-deep while flocks, filling every inch of shade in the fields, hid from the noonday as still as fossils.
An abrupt swarm of Gypsies made me look among the tents and the carts in case they were my friends from north of Cegléd, but in vain. Men with bill-hooks carried long sheaves of reeds on their heads that bounced up and down as they walked. Women were thigh-deep in the water, washing and wringing out their rags and their tattered finery, and then festooning them over the undergrowth and branches, while troops of boys, like the ones on the Slovak shore at Easter, scoured the banks for the lairs of their just-edible quarry—voles, weasels, water-rats and so on. They left the serious work to their little sisters, who trotted tirelessly alongside their only prospect of the day, calling out “Bácsi! Bácsi!”—for the masculine prey of small Gypsies are all honorary uncles; and their shrill uncle-uncle cries continued for about a furlong. When the reproachful diminuendo had died away I was alone again with nothing but swallows curvetting through the shadows or the occasional blue-green flash of a kingfisher to ruffle the stillness of leaves and water.
Early in the afternoon, the river branched and I went upstream beside the Sebes (swift) Körös, until a red-shingled steeple told me I had reached the old village of Körösladány.
The look of the Magyar word kastély—which is rather perversely pronounced ‘koshtay,’ or very nearly—suggests, like Schloss, a fortified and castellated building, but the nearest English equivalent to most of those I saw in Hungary and Transylvania would be a manor house and the term leaps to mind when I try to conjure up the memory, blurred at the edges a little by the intervening decades, of the kastély at Körösladány. Single-storeyed like a ranch but with none of the ad hoc feeling the word suggests, it was a long ochre-coloured late eighteenth-century building with convoluted and rounded baroque pediments over great gates, faded tiles and house-martins’ nests and louvred shutters hooked back to let in the late afternoon light. Leaving my things under the antlers in the hall, I was led through the open doors of several connecting rooms, meeting my hostess at the middle of a shadowy enfilade. She was charming and good-looking with straight, bobbed fair hair—I think it must have been parted in the middle for it was this, a few years later, that reminded me of her when I met Iris Tree. She wore a white linen dress and espadrilles and had a cigarette-case and a lit cigarette in her hand. “So here’s the traveller,” she said in a kind, slightly husky voice and took me through a french window to where the rest of her family, except her husband, who was due back from Budapest next day, were assembled round tea things under tall chestnut trees whose pink and white steeples were stickily bursting out. I can see them gathered like a conversation piece by Copley or Vuillard, and can almost catch their reflection in the china and silver. They were Countess Ilona Meran, just described, a son and daughter called Hansi and Marcsi, about thirteen and fourteen, and a much smaller girl called Helli, all three of them very good-looking and nice-mannered and a little grave. There was a friend, perhaps a relation, with horn-rimmed spectacles, called Christine Esterházy, and an Austrian governess. All except the last spoke English; but I can’t remember a word that was uttered—only their appearance and the scene under the wide leaves and the charm of the hour. We sat talking until it was lighting-up time, and indoors pools of lamplight were being kindled with spills along the succession of lavender-smelling rooms. It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano. What music? I can’t remember; but suddenly, sailing into my mind after all these years, there is a bowl on the piano full of enormous white and red peonies and a few petals have dropped on the polished floor.
While getting tidy for dinner, and later, before going to bed, I looked at the pictures on the walls of my room. There was a Schloss Glanegg poised on a precipitous rock and many Almásy kinsmen of Countess Ilona and several Wenckheims in furred and scimitared glory; and there was an early nineteenth-century colour print that I was very taken by. It showed a dashing post-Regency buck—I think he was called Zichy—with twirling beard and whiskers, a blue bird’s-eye stock and an English scarlet hunting coat. He was one of those tremendous Hungarian centaurs who became famous in the Shires for the intrepid way they rode to hounds. Lounging about the lawn meet at Badminton, or in Ackermann prints of calamities at cut-and-laid fences, hounds in full cry, drawing Ranksborough Gorse, leaping the Whissendine Brook, chasing across green parishes from spire to spire, there they are; and, most notably, in those evening celebrations round laden tables, where bang-up Corinthians in evening pink, jumping to their feet among scattered napkins and wine-coolers and empty bottles, flourish glasses in boisterous unison. The outline-keys in the corner, among the Osbaldestones and the Assheton-Smiths, often bear the names of one or two of these Nimrods from the Great Plain.[8]
In the library the following day, while lessons went on next door, I found out as much as I could about the Alföld, until it was time to set off for a picnic. A kind of victoria bowled up to the front on twinkling spokes, and everyone piled in. I was very struck by the hat which went with the coachman’s black-frogged livery. It was a sort of black felt pork-pie—or could it have been velvet?—with a brim turned up perpendicular and a black ostrich feather across the crown, fixed in a semicircle from front to back while two black ribands ending in fi
shtails fluttered behind. Was it a legacy of the Turkish spahis or the janissaries; or could it have survived from the early invading Magyars? (Such were the themes I brooded on these days.) There were many flourished hats and greetings on the way out and when we had driven about half a mile a quavering hail came from the wayside. Countess Ilona stopped the carriage, jumped down, and in a moment was being embraced by an old crone in a head-kerchief, and after cries of recognition and much talk and laughter—some tears, I think, and more embraces—she climbed in again, obviously moved: she kept waving back till we were out of sight. She was the mother of somebody from the village who had migrated to America fifteen years before and grown homesick. She had only been back two days.
We settled on a grassy bank under some willows at a bend in the Körös and feasted there while the horses munched and swished their tails in the shade a little way off. A heron glided through the branches and subsided among the flag-leaves on a midstream shoal. We were on the edge of a large wood. It was full of birds, and in the hushed afternoon hour when talk had languished, three roe deer, with antlers beginning to spring, stole down the river’s edge. There was some quiet singing on the way home, prompted by a song from the fields; Austrian and German and English and Hungarian. I was tongue-tied in the last, but they knew Érik a, érik a búza kalász, my favourite from Budapest. No song could have been more fitting: we were driving beside a wheat-field where swallows dipped and swerved above green ears that would soon be turning, just as the song described. It was the hour of jangling bells and lowing and bleating as flocks and cattle, all fiery in golden dust clouds, converged on the village, and our return to the kastély coincided with its owner’s arrival. Graf Johann—or Hansi—Meran was very tall with dark hair and moustache and fine aquiline looks that were marked by an expression of great kindness. His children dashed upon him and when he had disentangled himself he greeted the others by kissing first hands then cheeks in that simultaneously polite and affectionate way I had first seen in Upper Austria.
The charms of this place and its inhabitants sound unrelievedly and improbably perfect. I am aware of this, but I can only set it down as it struck me. Also the stay had another dimension, an unexpected one which gave sudden reality to whole fragments of European history of a century earlier and more. Once again, pictures in my room put me on the track. One of these showed Archduke Charles, flag in hand, charging the Napoleonic army through the reeds of Aspern. (His statue opposite Prince Eugene on the Heldenplatz in Vienna shows him at the same moment, on a frenetically rearing steed. How surprised he would have been! He had refused all statues and honours during his lifetime.) I had first become aware of him when I gazed across the Danube at the Marchfeld after leaving Vienna: it was there, a few miles from Wagram, that the battle, the first allied victory over Napoleon, was fiercely fought and won. The next print showed his brother, the subject of that endless song in deep Styrian dialect called the Erzherzog-Johanns-Lied: I had first heard it at an inn opposite Pöchlarn and often since. These brothers, two of many, were grandchildren of Maria Theresa, nephews of Marie Antoinette, and sons of Leopold II; and their elder brother, who succeeded as Francis II, was the last Holy Roman Emperor. (Lest Napoleon should attempt to usurp it, he gave up the stupendous honour and became Emperor of Austria, just over a thousand years after the crowning of Charlemagne.)
But Archduke Johann was the most interesting of them. He courageously led an army against Napoleon at the age of eighteen, governed provinces with wisdom and justice and was often called to high office at critical times. Intelligent, determined and steeped in the principles of Rousseau, he was a lifelong opponent of Metternich and his passion for the simplicities of life in the mountains made him a sort of uncrowned king of the Alps from Croatia to Switzerland. In the romantic picture in my room, made about 1830, he was leaning on an alpenstock among forested peaks, a fowling piece on his shoulder, and a broad-brimmed wideawake was thrust back from a thoughtful brow. What a relief to record the qualities of these Habsburg paragons! Courage, wisdom, capacity, imagination and a passion for justice led them in ways deeply at variance with the ill-starred fortunes of their dynasty, and this particular prince put the final touch to his abhorrence of the capital by a morganatic marriage to the daughter of a Styrian postmaster. She and their children were given a title from what was then Meran, in the South Tyrol, now Merano in the Alto Adige.
“Yes,” Countess Ilona said when I asked about him, “he was Hansi’s great-grandfather, and there,” pointing to a picture, “is the charming Anna. She was terrifically pleased when she thought their first child showed signs of a Habsburg lip, poor mite!” (There was not much sign of it in her husband and it seemed entirely to have vanished from their children.) She told me the whole tale with patience and humour, abetted now and then by Count Hansi, who was smoking and reading a paper in a nearby armchair. “I must say,” she continued with a laugh, “when there was all that fuss and talk a few years ago about who should be King, I couldn’t help thinking”—and here she nodded in the Count’s direction—“why not him?” Her husband said, “Now, now!” disapprovingly, and after a few seconds, laughed to himself and went on with his paper.
* * *
I half wished, when I set off, that my plans were leading me in another direction, for a couple of days’ march north-east would have brought me to the Hortobágy desert and its herds of wild horses and their fierce and famous herdsmen. (Rather surprisingly these spurred and whip-cracking gauchos were strict Protestants; Debrecen, their steppe capital, had been a Calvinist stronghold since the Reformation.) But I had been swayed by the old maps in the library the day before and there were satisfactory hints of remoteness and desolation in the south-eastern route I was actually taking. A hundred years ago much of this stretch of the Alföld resembled a vast bog relieved by a few oases of higher ground. Hamlets were grudgingly scattered and, unlike the old village of Körösladány, many of these were nineteenth-century settlements which had sprung up when the marsh was drained. The air of desolation was confirmed by those tall and catapult-like sweep-wells rearing their timbers into the emptiness. In the southern parts of the Cuman region celebrated by Petöfi—it is strange how the names of Hungarian poets cropped up the whole time in conversation and books!—heavy rains often marooned the villages on their small hills, until they formed little archipelagoes only to be reached in flat-bottomed boats. But, to redress the balance, there were regions near Szeged which July and August dried up into glittering tracts of soda crystals, and to unwary travellers, already perplexed by mirages and dust-devils, these crystalline acres must have completed the summer’s hallucinations. Shallow lakes had been known to dry up completely then fill once more until, after a short evolutionary gap, reeds grew again, fish swam, tadpoles followed and frogs began to croak. It was refreshing to think of the unchanging carp-filled lakes of the south-west and the teeming abundance of the Tisza; and what about the fish those boys had been whisking out of the swift Körös by the armful? When the forlorn woods that lay all about me were no-man’s-land still, betyárs infested them: affable highwaymen and brigands who held travellers to ransom, drove away flocks and herds and levied tribute from noblemen islanded in their castles. It was a region of hazards, legends and fierce deeds.
I hadn’t far to go. Virtuously shunning the offer of a lift in a ponytrap, I slogged on to Vesztö and reached it in the afternoon. Count Lajos—Louis that is, though he was always referred to by a nickname—was a cousin of my Körösladány friends. (In Central Europe, in those days, if you met one Count, you were likely, if you also came across his kith and kin, to run into a whole team of them. The polymath of the Wachau was very entertaining about this proliferation of prefixes, including his own. “Count and earl are more or less equated,” he said, “so if Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere had been born in this part of the world, she could easily have been the grandmother of a hundred earls, instead of merely their daughter—with a bit of luck, of course. Ten sons, with another te
n apiece. There’s a hundred for you—instead of only one, as in England.”)
I found him strolling in the avenue that led to the house. He must have been about thirty-five. He had a frail look, a slight tremor, and an expression of anguish—not only with me, I was relieved to see—which a rather sorrowful smile lit up. A natural tendency to speak slowly had been accentuated by a bad motor-crash brought about by falling asleep at the wheel. There was something touching and very nice about him, and as I write, I am looking at a couple of sketches in the back of my notebook; not good ones, but a bit of this quality emerges.
German was his only alternative to Magyar. He said, “Come and see my Trappen!” I didn’t understand the last word, but we strolled to the other side of the house where two enormous birds were standing under the trees. A first glance suggested a mixture of goose and turkey but they were bigger and nobler and heftier than either and, at a closer look, totally different; the larger bird was well over a yard from beak to tail. His neck was pale grey with a maroon collar, his back and his wings a speckled reddish buff and strange weeping whiskers swept backwards from his beak like a slipstream of pale yellow Dundrearies. Their gait was stately; when our advent sent them scuttling, Lajos made me hang back. He approached them and scattered grain and the larger bird allowed his head to be scratched. To Lajos’s distress, their wings had been clipped by the farmer who had found them the month before, but when the larger bird opened his, and then spread a fine fan-shaped tail like a turkey’s, he looked, for a moment, completely white, but turned dark again as he closed them. They were Great Bustards, rare and wild birds that people wrongly related to the ostrich. They love desolate places like the puszta and Lajos planned to keep them till their feathers had grown enough for them to fly away again. He loved birds and had a way with them, for these two followed him up the steps with a stately pace, then through the drawing room and the hall to the front door and, when he shut it, we could hear them tapping on it from time to time with their beaks.
Between the Woods and the Water Page 8