by Antal Szerb
The pseudoscientific volumes upon which my fancy lit were brought to me by blank-faced young assistants moving about on silent feet. The only sound to be heard under the great dome was the pleasing murmur of turning pages. From the bearded black doorman with the stove-pipe hat, who looked for all the world as if he’d been there since the official opening in the last century, to the swarm of elderly eccentrics who teem in all the libraries of the University of Life, everyone was in his or her place.
Or not quite everyone.
For a full month now the chair on my right had been occupied by a flat-chested old lady with a look of permanent disapproval on her face. She was researching the love-life of primitive peoples. But today she was nowhere to be seen, and there was no umbrella signifying her occupation. Instead, an elegant, athletic-looking young man sat there, reading a newspaper and glancing around from time to time with a troubled air. I quickly diagnosed his condition: it was his first time in the Reading Room, and he felt like a man on his first day in the madhouse.
The young athlete filled me with a mixture of pity and malicious amusement. As a sportsman he deserved no better, and anyway, what on earth was he doing in this place? Clearly he would have felt the same about me on a golf course.
I continued reading.
I learnt that the era when rough ancestors hewed castles from the cliff face had finally given way to more halcyon days, a prolonged springtime. Successive Earls of Gwynedd were courtiers of Henry VIII, attendants upon Elizabeth and ambassadors to the brilliant Continental courts of the Renaissance. They wrote verses and commanded fleets; they roasted Irish rebels on spits and commissioned paintings from the Italian masters; they fell in love with ladies-in-waiting and plundered monasteries; they made spectacular bows before the Virgin Queen, and poisoned their wives, as the custom was, unless their wives had managed to poison them first.
I looked up dreamily from my book. Before me rose a pile of another ten. On my neighbour’s desk there was still not a single one, and his discomfort was visibly growing. Finally, with an air of decision, he turned towards me:
“Excuse me … what do you do, to get them to bring you all those books?”
“I simply fill in the title and catalogue number on a slip, and put it in one of the baskets on the circular counter.”
“That’s interesting. Did you say catalogue number? What’s that?”
“Every book here has one.”
“And how do you find it?”
“You look in the catalogues. Those big black volumes over there.”
“And what sort of books do people here read?”
“Whatever they like. Whatever they’re working on.”
“You, for example, what are you working on?”
“Family history, at the moment.”
“Family history: that’s wonderful. So … if I wanted to study family history, what would I have to do, then?”
“Please, would you mind speaking as quietly as you can—the superintendent is staring at us. It depends on what sort of family you want to study.”
“Hm. Well, actually, none. I’ve had nothing but trouble from mine since I was little.”
“So what does interest you?” I asked, sympathetically.
“Me? Rock climbing, most of all.”
“Fine. Then I’ll order you a book that really should appeal to you. If you would just write your name on this slip.”
He wrote, in a large, childish hand: George Maloney. I requested Kipling’s Kim for him, and my new acquaintance buried himself in it, with great apparent interest. For some while I was left in peace.
Everything I read about the Pendragons was lent a mysterious perspective by the tales Fred Walker had told me, by the telephone call, and by the Earl’s character and imposing presence. By now James I was on the throne, and studying the natural history of demons. Previously scholars had pursued the noble and the beautiful, but now they were starting to turn to the world of the occult, in search of the Ultimate Wisdom.
Asaph Christian, the sixth Earl, was not a courtier like the fifth. He wrote no sonnets, did not fall in love or leave fifteen illegitimate children, or even a legitimate one, and after him the title passed to his younger brother’s son.
Asaph spent his youth in Germany, in the cities of the old South, where the houses stooped menacingly over the narrow streets, and the scholars worked all night in their long, narrow bedrooms whose cobwebbed corners were never pierced by candlelight. Amongst alembics, phials and weirdly-shaped furnaces, the Earl pursued the Magnum Arcanum, the Great Mystery, the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a member of the secret brotherhood of Rosicrucians, about whom their contemporaries knew so little and therefore gossiped all the more. They were alchemists and doctors of magic, the last great practitioners of the occult. It was through Asaph that the cross with the symbolic rose in each of its corners was added to the family coat of arms.
On his return to Wales, Pendragon Castle became an active laboratory of witchcraft. Processions of visitors, in coaches with darkened windows, came from far and wide. Heretics arrived, fleeing from the bonfire. Ancient shepherds brought the accumulated lore of their people down from the mountains. They were joined by bent-backed Jewish doctors, driven from royal courts for seeming to know more than is permitted to man. And they say that here too, in disguise, came the King of Scotland and England, the demon-haunted James, to probe his host’s secrets in nightly conference. Here the first English Rosicrucians initiated their believers, and Pendragon Castle became the second home of Robert Fludd, the greatest student of Paracelsus the Mage.
This was the Fludd through whom I had befriended the Earl. Truly speaking, I owed the invitation to him. At this stage I had no idea that all this ancient material, and all these names that had meant so little to me—Pendragon Castle, Asaph Pendragon—would come to play such an extraordinary part in my life.
From a collection of North Wales folklore I learnt that the legend of Asaph Pendragon began soon after his death. It speaks of him as a midnight horseman, never leaving the castle by day, setting out only at night, with a carefully chosen band of followers, to gather plants with magical properties by the light of the moon. But such prosaic purposes were not enough to satisfy popular imagination, and the story grew that the terrifying night horseman had been out dispensing justice, an attribute he retained even after his death.
By night he would catch robbers sharing out their booty in secret dens, and next morning, to their utter amazement, the victims would find their treasures returned. The felons had been so astonished by the apparition that they kept every one of the undertakings extracted by him, and died soon after.
The most gruesome of these histories concerns three murderers. The volume I held in my hands tells it rather well.
Once, in a Welsh mountain inn, three young noblemen killed and robbed a Jewish doctor on his way to join the Earl in his castle. The court, which in those times might well be suspected of anti-Semitism, acquitted the men, and they set sail for France. That night some peasants watched with awe as the night rider and his retinue turned to the south, galloped up the rocky slopes of nearby Moel-Sych and soared into the sky in a southerly direction. The next day the three noblemen were found in the castle moat, their limbs crushed and their necks broken. The Earl had meted out the justice due to his intending visitor.
At eleven I went for a coffee. My neighbour tagged along.
“Jolly good read,” he said of Kim: “amazing book. Chap who wrote it must have been there. Really knows the place.”
“You’ve been to India yourself?”
“Of course. There as a kid. Grew up there. And in Burma. Then South Africa and Rhodesia. Not a bad place, Rhodesia.”
Once again I felt that deep sense of awe I always experience when I come up against the British Empire. These people nip over to Burma the way we do to Eger. Only, they’re less curious about it. They know that wherever they go in the world they will be among exactly the same sort of people as themselves.<
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“Actually, my old man was a major in an Irish regiment,” he continued. “Stationed all over the place. That’s why I missed out a bit on my education. Things to do with books and so forth. But it’s also why I did so well in the tropics.”
“You were a soldier too?”
“No. I never quite made it into the army. I have this bad habit of failing exams. Some of them I must have had five goes at … But I never got lucky. But forget about that. What’s done is done. We Irish live for the future. I didn’t become a soldier; not everyone can be a soldier. I just loafed around wherever I wanted in the Empire. Not a bad place to be. Have you heard of the East African Uwinda expedition?”
“Yes, as I recall … ” I said, scrambling to salvage my self-respect.
“I was in it. We were over nine thousand feet up. Fantastic climbing. There was one mountain, I tell you, with sides like glass. You moved up three feet and slid back five. We slithered around for two whole days and got nowhere. I said to the Colonel:
‘Look here, sir, are we from Connemara, or are we not?’ Because you know, that’s where I’m from,” he explained, with deep reverence. Then he continued:
‘True,’ says the Colonel (a typical patronising Englishman): ‘we’ve even had one or two chaps from there who were sane.’
‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll show you who’s sane.’ I fitted one of those lightweight climbing ropes on to the camp cat, round its waist. I fixed the doctor’s surgical clamps tight on its tail, made the blacks stand in a ring around the base of the slope, and the cat shot off, all the way up to the top. Amazingly good at that sort of thing, cats.
Up at the top, there was a tree. The cat skimmed up the tree and thrashed around among the branches. Then it stopped, because the rope had got thoroughly tangled up and was holding it fast. I tugged for a while on the rope to see how firmly it was attached to the tree. Then I climbed straight up, removed the clamps from the cat’s tail—no point of inflicting unnecessary pain on poor dumb animals—and hauled the whole party up after me.”
I gazed in wonder at this Münchausen and began to question whether he’d ever been near the tropics. But he was an agreeable young chap. He was practically chinless, his arms were uncommonly long, and he moved with the ease and grace of an animal. Altogether he seemed somewhat closer than most to our primal nature.
By the time we got back to the British Museum the usual old madwoman was already centre stage in the garden outside the entrance, giving the pigeons their midday feed. As ever, her face was transfigured with the joyous smile of a Franciscan saint soaring up to Heaven. Around her you could see nothing but pigeons. Her whole person was smothered in pigeons. Three sat on her head, five on each shoulder, and countless numbers clung to her dress. I could tell that she fancied herself as saintly as Francis himself, and she filled me with loathing.
“I’d like to shoot her,” I said to my new friend, as we ascended the stairs.
Almost as I said this, he spun round and hurled a large pebble—I didn’t even see him pick it up—which hit her a glancing blow on the nose, a full fifty metres away. She uttered a powerful scream and dropped the pigeon feed, the birds took flight and the woman collapsed. She had clearly never reckoned on being hit by lightning while performing the great good deed of her life. Her sense of a moral universe must have collapsed with her in that moment.
Maloney continued walking, very calmly. The whole thing had happened so quickly that, apart from myself, no one had seen who did it.
“What was all that about?” I asked in amazement when we got inside the foyer. We were standing in the half-light, under the bearded heads of Assyrian kings some four thousand years old.
“Why do you ask? You yourself said you could shoot her. But all you can do is talk. You aren’t from Connemara.”
From that point on, and after what followed later, I became inclined to believe about half of the impossible yarns Maloney spun. And I could see that Connemarans weren’t quite like anyone else.
We returned to our reading for a while.
The seventh Earl, and those following him down the century, were relative nonentities. It was as if the memory of the great Asaph had cast a shadow of dullness over them. The tenth Earl moved away from the ancestral seat at Pendragon and built the castle at Llanvygan, the family home since 1708, which has been so much praised for its beauty.
With the move away from dismal Pendragon, the family history took a brighter turn. Throughout the eighteenth century, like every other noble house, it produced distinguished admirals, diplomats and minor poets, and the enigmatic shadow of Asaph appeared to have been lifted. Or not entirely. The thirteenth Earl requires a mention.
This gentleman, despite his unfortunate number, was the most convivial and thoroughly human character in the whole saga. He was the only Earl who had affairs with actresses, the only one who knew how to drink, and the only one who could crack a good joke in company.
One of these jokes was considered particularly witty in its time, though it is difficult now to see exactly where its humour lies. He was told one day, while at cards, that his mistress—whom he had raised from the level of a simple orange-seller—had run off with the fencing master, taking a significant quantity of the family baubles with her. His sole response was, “Every good deed gets the punishment it deserves,” and he carried on with the game.
His Christian name, incidentally, was John Bonaventura, his mother having been Italian. This odd combination of names stopped me in my tracks. I had the feeling that I had come across it, or one very like it, once before. But the memory escaped me, and did not come back to me until much later, in connection with some very odd occurrences.
To the remaining pages I gave only a cursory glance. They dealt with the nineteenth-century Pendragons, who flourished peacefully and with honour in the never-ending reign of Victoria. The present Earl’s father had been caught up in the fashionable imperialism of the day and was seldom at home. He served in various colonial regiments, held high office over subject peoples and died, in 1908, as governor of one of the provinces of Indo-China. His death was due to some sort of tropical disease that had broken out in the area at the time.
My limited information about the present Earl, the eighteenth, is provided by Who’s Who. Born in 1888, he was thus forty-five at the time of my tale. His full name was Owen Alastair John Pendragon of Llanvygan. Educated at Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford, he served in various colonial regiments, distinguished himself in several different ways and belonged to a great many clubs. Who’s Who usually goes on to give details of hobbies and interests—these being of the greatest importance to the English—but the Earl seemed not to have provided any response to this question.
Lunchtime was upon us. I returned my books, along with Maloney’s, and was about to leave.
“Well, this is something else I’ve learnt,” he remarked. “So now I know what goes on in a library. I’d rather be in a nice little swamp. My God! I haven’t read so much in ten years. Where are you eating, by the way?”
“Greek Street. In a Chinese restaurant.”
“Would you swear blue murder if I joined you? I hate eating on my own.”
Even by Continental standards this was a rapid beginning of friendship—or whatever you might call it—and I was taken by surprise. But there was something rather touching about him, like a chimpanzee on the loose in the London streets, misunderstood by everyone but full of well-meaning.
“I’d be delighted,” I said. “But I ought to warn you, I’m lunching with a Chinese friend. I don’t know how developed your sense of colour is, or how you feel about yellow gentlemen.”
“I’ve nothing against Chinks if they aren’t cheeky. We Connemarans make no distinction between one man and another. Only if they give cheek. I once had a kaffir boy who didn’t clean my boots properly, and when I spoke to him about it he answered me back. So I grabbed him, stuck some kid’s shoes on his feet and made him walk in them for three days in the Kal
ahari Desert. It’s a pretty hot place. I tell you, by the third day the kaffir’s feet were half their original size. You could have used him as a fairground exhibit.”
We had reached the restaurant. Dr Wu Sei was already waiting for me. When he saw that I’d brought a stranger with me he retreated behind his most affable oriental smile and fell silent. But Maloney simply chatted all the more, and won my heart by proving not just a lover of Chinese food like myself, but a real connoisseur. Normally when I ate there I would let Wu Sei do the ordering, then enjoy whatever was brought without bothering to find out whether the finely-chopped delicacies were pork, rose-petal soup or bamboo. Maloney conducted himself like a man discriminating between veal escalope and boeuf à la mode; he could distinguish seventeen flavour gradations of chop suey, and he won my unstinting admiration.
“Which way are you going?” he asked me after lunch.
I told him.
“Would you curse me if I went part of the way with you?”
Now I was really surprised.
“Tell me,” he asked, with some embarrassment, as we strolled along: “you’re a bloody German, aren’t you?”
“Oh, no. I’m Hungarian.”
“Hungarian?”
“Hungarian.”
“What’s that? Is that a country? Or are you just having me on?”
“Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.”
“And where do you Hungarians live?”
“In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.”
“Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.”
And he roared with laughter.
“Alright, so you’re a Hungarian … Good country, that. And what language do you Hungarians speak?”
“Hungarian.”
“Say something in Hungarian.”
It was some years since I had last spoken the language and, strangely moved, I recited some Ady:
Mikor az ég furcsa, lila-kék
S találkára mennek a lyányok,