The Pendragon Legend

by Antal Szerb

  “This morning two policemen went up to the plateau to look for Bátky. And, can you imagine? … the hut had burned down. From what was left, they decided that it had happened quite recently … in the early hours of this morning in fact. Among the ruins they found the charred bodies of a man and a woman. There was just about enough of them left for the workmen to identify our friends.”

  “How can it have happened?” asked Lene.

  “The most reasonable explanation would be suicide. You never can tell when knowledge of one’s crimes might suddenly turn into a guilty conscience.”

  “So then,” Lene remarked, “Llanvygan is safe, and I have come to the end of my mission. But it’s all very strange. What do you make of it, Doctor? And by the by, you haven’t said a word about where you’ve been gadding these past few days. Some little Welshwoman?”

  “I’m saying nothing, Lene. I can’t. There are some things that have an inner truth, but become nonsense when spoken. It just isn’t possible to explain … We live simultaneously in two worlds, and there are two levels of meaning. One can be understood by everyone, the other is beyond words, and is utterly horrible.”

  “You’re in fine philosophical mood today,” she retorted. “And considering that you are a Doctor of Philosophy, your wisdoms are rather banal and dilettantish. But we won’t pry into your secrets, or the little Welshwoman hiding behind your hocus-pocus.”

  Osborne smacked his brow.

  “If Mrs Roscoe is dead, the Roscoe fortune, as far as I am aware, devolves automatically on the house of Pendragon. A tidy little sum. Even if Asaph had discovered how to make gold we would never have become this rich. Hm, Lene?”

  “I’m not happy about it. I don’t believe in large sums of money. It’s not good news for you, Osborne. If you had no money at all you’d be a dear little chap. I couldn’t wish for a better husband. It’d be such a joy looking after you.”

  Osborne telephoned instructions to call off the search, and informed Llanvygan that I had been found. Then we got in the car, and before long the outlines of the castle came into view.

  I had a bath, changed and went down to tea. I found Osborne and Lene in the Chippendale room. Osborne had a sandwich in his hand, and was pacing up and down the room with giant strides, excitedly holding forth:

  “The moment we have legal confirmation of her death I shall go to London to see Seton, on uncle’s behalf. Unfortunately I don’t have the appropriate technical jargon for the legal action we’ll take, but the net result will be that the entire Roscoe fortune, the mines, the estates, the forests, the factories in South-East Asia and the whole God-knows-what will be in the possession of the House of Pendragon. My uncle won’t trouble himself with such mundane matters, and the running of the entire business empire will fall on my feeble shoulders.”

  His face was transfigured with joy. For the first time I became aware that behind his affected and effeminate manner lurked a downright, practical, dominant Englishman.

  Lene heard him out with a face of sorrow, and then two enormous tears slid down her cheeks. She was thinking how much she would have loved Osborne as a poor and helpless little boy.

  He suddenly stopped, deep in thought. He looked at Lene and his face brightened.

  “Lene … but you’re an economist, and a good one at that! How would you like to be my secretary?”

  She thought about it for a while.

  “It’s something we could discuss.”

  “But where’s Cynthia?”

  That in fact was the question I had being wanting to ask ever since I set foot in the castle. But a sort of lover-like bashfulness had held me back.

  “She could well be in Switzerland by now,” Osborne stated. “We packed her off the day after we got back from Caerbryn. She was a wreck: absolutely not herself at all. Our aunt, the Duchess of Warwick, came and took her away.”

  At just this moment the door opened, and there stood the towering figure of the Earl. But with what a changed face. There were black rings round his eyes, scored by who knows what dreadful tempests of the soul. His serene self-possession had vanished. Every line of his face was as sharp-set as those of the dead who have greatly suffered. The sight of him was so shocking even Lene dared not speak.

  “Ah, Bátky,” he said, very softly, by way of greeting. And he started to walk back and forth, with his long strides. His desolate footfalls commanded silence.

  Then he stopped, and looked at us.

  “You all know she’s dead … that they’re both dead?”

  “Oh yes, Your Lordship. I … I … ”

  But I fell silent. I had no wish to speak in front of Osborne and Lene about the visionary events I had been part of.

  “János Bátky … where have you been? We have been very anxious about you.”

  “I shall tell you everything. But only you.”

  “Then come up to the Library.”

  From the depths of his vast armchair he listened in silence to the tale I stammered and stumbled out to him. He showed not the least surprise. From time to time he nodded his head, as if he had known all along exactly what would happen. Only the way he gripped the arm of his chair revealed his feelings. When I came to the story of Eileen’s horrific death he stared at me fixedly for a moment, then his gaze fell away, like a meteor plunging to the bottom of the sea.

  When I had finished he remained silent for a long, long time.

  “And after that, you didn’t see the … spirit … again?” he finally asked.

  “No.”

  “No one has seen it. No one. It couldn’t be otherwise … Bátky, will you come with me up to Pendragon? If we’re quick we can get there while it’s still light.”

  A few minutes later we were in the car, following the now familiar route, and before long we stood beside the ruins. We made our way quickly down, opening the hidden door by means of the rose cross, and the Earl led me directly towards our goal—down into the womb of the castle where the tombs of ancient Pendragons gaped, down along the corridors through which, speechless with terror, du Fresnoy and St Germain had followed Bonaventura. But I was not afraid. I had been face to face with the Impossible, and my standards had shifted. Thus the Egyptian priests must have walked the secret vaults of their temples, thronged with deities and spectres.

  We now stood under the mysterious body of light whose rays illuminated the altar. The Earl raised the altar and lifted the slab of the tomb. We gazed down into the pit.

  The figure was lying on the catafalque, dressed in black. His hands were folded on his breast, in the manner of the pious dead, and rings covered his fingers. His face was bloodless, lifeless, rigid … but this was not the serene rigidity of Nordic gods; it was bitter, tortured, unspeakably dark. Then I noticed it … the golden hilt of an antique dagger planted in the breast. The deathless horseman had slain himself.

  A tear slid down the Earl’s cheek. Then he closed the tomb.

  We went up into the light of day. Twilight had begun, and the sun was setting in a blaze of colour. Below us, steeped in its glory, lay the mountains and valleys, the villages and farmhouses, the whole magical domain of the Earls of Gwynedd. And as night approached, the landscape became tinged from end to end with a gentle melancholy, a profound feeling of transience.

  “I am tired,” the Earl said, and we sat on a stone bench, green with moss.

  We were there for some time. First the stars came out, then a kindly moon. Suddenly he started to talk. To this day I don’t know what made him abandon his reticence. Perhaps it was his weariness, or the dreadful anguish of all he had been through; and because everything had come to an end.

  “They were waiting for a particular moment,” he began: “a rare conjunction of the stars, or some other sign we can’t guess at. They called it the Coming of the Prophet Elias. It was the moment Asaph was also waiting for, lying in the tomb he had built for himself. Well, it came … long after the last Rosicrucians had vanished, and a once-mocking world had forgotten them. It coinci
ded exactly with my own ordeal. The midnight rider, the deathless dispenser of justice, had saved the lives of his descendants once again, but the Great Work wasn’t proceeding according to plan. Only black magic and conjuration of the Devil could help, and that required a sacrifice. So he carried off the farmer’s son. I searched for him, day after day, in the mountains. I was desperate. Eventually I found him, in the house Morvin had built. He made me choose. Either the woman would be sacrificed, he said, or the boy. It was a dreadful struggle. Anyway, I chose to save the little boy, the innocent child. I left the woman to her fate, and it found her. But the Great Work failed after all … If it was as you describe it then the Devil did appear to him … but we can’t be sure about any of that. Only that he died in total despair. Come, Dr Bátky.”

  When we were back at the castle, the Earl addressed me in a very different voice. It was calm and perfectly objective:

  “My dear friend, I have a final favour to ask of you. Would you go up to London once more, and call on Julian Huxley? He’s Professor at the King’s College Institute of Zoology. Tell him I shall be offering them the giant axolotls. And my instruments. And my tables of statistics. They can use them all, if they wish, and they can publish the results.”

  “You’re going to abandon your research?”

  “What is there left to study? Anyway my little experiments were laughable compared to everything the Rosicrucians knew, and with events that have taken place before our very eyes. I … believe in the resurrection of the body, and whether others do or not is of no interest to me. So, János Bátky … that is the end of my tale. All that’s left are the years and months allotted to an old man, who is no longer consoled by thoughts of resurrection, but only of eternal death.”

  And with that the Welsh story came to its end.

  The next day the Earl left for Scotland. Lene travelled back to Oxford, and Osborne and I to London. I contacted Julian Huxley, whom I had long admired as a great biologist and brother of Aldous Huxley, the cleverest and wittiest of all English novelists.

  As Llanvygan’s envoy, I became a minor celebrity among zoologists. They fêted me as if I had discovered the axolotl myself, and I revelled in it. After the historical nightmares I had endured, the natural sciences were as refreshing as an Alpine scene.

  I saw Osborne regularly. A few days after our return to the capital he told me he had had a letter from Cynthia, saying she was now out of danger, and asking after me in the warmest possible terms.

  I wrote back immediately, without revealing that I planned to follow her to Switzerland. As it happened, the trip was deferred again and again. Among my new acquaintances was a gentleman who invited me to accompany him to America to a conference on the history of natural science, where I was to read a paper on Lenglet du Fresnoy and the Alchemists of the Eighteenth Century.

  The trip to America was extremely tempting. So far my travels had been limited to a single continent. Besides, common sense dictated that I should forget Cynthia. This love, or whatever it should be called, was quite hopeless. I could never marry her. My own snobbery recoiled at the thought of anyone so closely connected with the age of Shakespeare and Milton making herself the ‘life-companion’ of a so petty bourgeois a creature as myself.

  And even if by some miracle she did become my bride, the marriage, I told myself, would not be a truly happy one. Cynthia as middle-class housewife would have lost everything I loved in her, the one quality she perhaps had never possessed at all—the proud, lofty inaccessibility of the legendary Lady of the Castle.

  While I pondered and deliberated, the following letter arrived:

  My Dear Friend,

  It’s extremely kind of you to think of me, especially as I’ve been reading a great many books, and I would love to have your opinion of them. Most of them are in French. It would be so nice if you were here, because there is so much I don’t understand.

  I am quite well now, and go out for short walks in the mountains. I wish I could write you a description of them, but I can’t think what to say. Could you recommend a good book about the Engadin people and the Ladins in general?

  I have excellent company here. My school friend Daphne Fitz William is here with her brother, who is a captain in the Navy. He’s a very nice boy, and very intelligent. You would certainly find a good friend in him. Captain Fitz William has asked me to marry him.

  I’d like it very much if you would write to me in detail about your plans for the future, and your work. In any case, never forget that I am, and always will be, your very good friend. Do write.

  Yours,

  Cynthia Pendragon

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  Antal Szerb’s first full-length novel was the product of an enchanted year (1929–1930) on a postdoctoral scholarship in England, much of it spent in that cradle of learned eccentricity, the Reading Room of the British Museum. Already fluent in several European languages, Szerb was gathering material for his ground-breaking Histories of English Literature and World Literature. At the same time, though a committed Catholic, he was deeply interested in heterodox religious ideas and unusual states of consciousness, and in the late twenties Rosicrucianism and the Occult were very much in the air. The happy result of this conjunction was The Pendragon Legend (1934).

  Into this, his first full-length novel, Szerb poured all his enthusiasms, many of them distinctly non-scholarly. In it he draws on, and quietly parodies, popular crime writing, gothic horror, romantic fiction, the regional novel, various forms of occult treatise and the historical memoir. The hero of the book is an unmistakable version of the writer himself, cruelly satirised. Most of the other characters are affectionate caricatures of the English (the category ‘English’ to include the Irish, Scots and Welsh), for whom he held an intense, if at times baffled, admiration. ‘Continentals’ such as the Hungarian anti-hero Janos Bátky and Lene, the sexually omnivorous Teutonic ‘modern woman’, receive the same irreverent treatment. The upshot of all this foolery is, against expectation, a highly original psychological study, with some intensely dramatic, and some delicately touching, moments.

  Born in 1901, Szerb was an essayist, playwright, novelist, literary historian and academician. By 1934 he was Hungary’s most respected writer: a small, shy, loveable man noted for his unfailing kindness and vast erudition, sweetened by an ever-playful wit. As the poet Agnes Nemes Nagy remarked: “Fifty per cent of what he said made you laugh, and ten per cent filled you with awe.” But he was born into a deeply troubled Hungary, with his Jewish origins coming under increasing scrutiny, a disadvantage which he compounded by his consistently anti-fascist stance. His brutal death in a labour camp in 1945 was an unspeakable loss, not just to Hungary but to European literature.

  For all its stylistic assurance, its almost post-modern virtuosity in playing literary genres off against one another to create a work of vital originality, Pendragon is probably not Szerb’s masterpiece. That remains Journey by Moonlight (Utas es Holdvilág, 1937), a novel seemingly as dark and probing as Pendragon is light and flippant. But the two have more in common than meets the eye. Both are the record of a spiritual journey, thoughtlessly begun, that ends in significant failure. Bátky, like his counterpart Mihály in Journey, is a fatally shallow ‘seeker’ whose blunderings bring him up against profound truths the significance of which he never quite grasps. Both anti-heroes represent important aspects of Szerb himself, subjected to unsparing scrutiny. What the two books share above all is a particular irony, no doubt ‘middle-European’ in character but also distinctive to this particular writer. It is less a literary device than a mode of vision, in which a fiercely searching intelligence is balanced by a delight in humanity and an irrepressible playfulness. The Ego, as Bátky’s progress reveals, is a pathetic, often absurd creature, a disconcerting mixture of ill-understood promptings and wild improvisation, always the prey of circumstance, and far less important than people imagine. Szerb has read his Freud, but the perspective here is closer to that of the mystic. As
the narrator observes, in one of his wry flashes of self-insight: “What a shame that those moments when man is noble and pure and akin to the gods are so transient, so fleeting, while that complicated nonentity the Ego is always with us––of which one can speak only in terms of protective tenderness and gently irony”. In that sentence lies the core of these endearing novels.

  LEN RIX

  May 2006

  Copyright

  Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

  Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

  From ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’

  W B Yeats 1899

  English translation © Len Rix 2006

  First published in Hungarian as

  A Pendragon legenda 1934

  © Estate of Antal Szerb

  First published in 2006 by

  Pushkin Press

  12 Chester Terrace

  London NW1 4ND

  Reprinted 2006, revised edition published 2007

  This ebook edition published 2011

  ISBN 9781 9 06548 52 0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

  Cover: Knebworth House, Hertfordshire Simon Marsden

  © The Marsden Archive UK/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Frontispiece: Antal Szerb

  Set in 10 on 12 Baskerville

  Pushkin Press acknowledges with gratitude a translation grant towards publication from the Hungarian Book Foundation