* ‘Good morning, Madam! I am an English student walking to Constantinople on foot, and I would so much like to do a sketch of you.’
The Postmaster’s Widow
from A Time of Gifts
In Mitter Arnsdorf I stayed under the friendly roof of Frau Oberpostkommandeurs-Witwe Hübner—the widow, that is, of Chief-Postmaster Hübner—and sat talking late.
She was between sixty and seventy, rather plump and jolly, with a high-buttoned collar and grey hair arranged like a cottage loaf. The photograph of her husband showed an upright figure in a many-buttoned uniform, sword, shako, pince-nez and whiskers that were twisted into two martial rings. She was glad of someone to talk to, she told me. Usually her only companion in the evenings was her parrot Toni, a beautiful and accomplished macaw that whistled and answered questions pertly in Viennese dialect, and sang fragments of popular songs in a quavering and beery voice. He could even manage the first two lines of Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, in celebration of Marlborough’s ally, the conqueror of Belgrade.
But his mistress was a born monologuist. Ensconced in mahogany and plush, I learnt all about her parents, her marriage and her husband, who had been, she said, a thorough gentleman and always beautifully turned out—‘ein Herr durch und durch! Und immer tiptop angezogen.’ One son had been killed on the Galician Front, one was a postmaster in Klagenfurt, another, the giver of the parrot, was settled in Brazil, one daughter had married a civil engineer in Vienna, and another—here she heaved a sigh—was married to a Czech who was very high up in a carpet-manufacturing firm in Brno—‘but a very decent kind of man,’ she hastened to add: ‘sehr aständig.’ I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness. It needed neither prompting nor response, nothing beyond an occasional nod, a few deprecating clicks of the tongue, or an assenting smile. Once, when she asked rhetorically, and with extended hands: ‘So what was I to do?,’ I tried to answer, a little confusedly, as I had lost the thread. But my words were drowned in swelling tones: ‘There was only one thing to do! I gave that umbrella away next morning to the first stranger I could find! I couldn’t keep it in the house, not after what happened. And it would have been a pity to burn it . . .’ Arguments were confronted and demolished, condemnations and warnings uttered with the lifting of an admonitory forefinger. Comic and absurd experiences, as she recalled them, seemed to take possession of her: at first, with the unsuccessful stifling of a giggle, then leaning back with laughter until finally she rocked forward with her hands raised and then slapped on her knees in the throes of total hilarity while her tears flowed freely. She would pull herself together, dabbing at her cheeks and straightening her dress and her hair with deprecating selfreproof. A few minutes later, tragedy began to build up; there would be a catch in her voice: ‘. . . and next morning all seven goslings were dead, laid out in a row. All seven! They were the only things that poor old man still cared about!’ She choked back sobs at the memory until sniffs and renewed dabs with her handkerchief and the self-administered consolations of philosophy came to the rescue and launched her on a fresh sequence. At the first of these climaxes the parrot interrupted a pregnant pause with a series of quacks and clicks and the start of a comic song. She got up, saying crossly, ‘Schweig, du blöder Trottel!,’* threw a green cloth over the cage and silenced the bird; then picked up the thread in her former sad key. But in five minutes the parrot began to mutter ‘Der arme Toni!’—(Poor Toni)—and, relenting, she would unveil him again. It happened several times. Her soliloquy flowed on as voluminously as the Danube under her window, and the most remarkable aspect of it was the speaker’s complete and almost hypnotic control of her listener. Following her rapdy, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands.
Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner’s face, the parrot’s cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni’s heckling would be blotted out for seconds, or even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with a repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.
* ‘Shut up, you silly fool!’
Lady Wentworth and Byron’s Slippers
from Roumeli
Judith Blunt-Lytton, Baroness Wentworth (1879—1957), was Byron’s great-granddaughter, and the owner of a great hoard of Byroniana. Her descent from the poet was through his daughter Ada, who married the 1st Earl of Lovelace; and their daughter Lady Anne King married Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Judith was their only child, who grew into a very remarkable woman: a world-champion tennis player, horse-breeder, and author of several books about horses.
Antony Holland was a great favourite of Lady Wentworth; she seemed really pleased that we had come to see her. Her talk
ranged with dark humour over life in the desert and the breaking and training of Arab horses; famous figures long dead were stood up and bowled over like ninepins. Answering a question about a tremendous Edwardian statesman and grandee, she said, ‘Oh, charmin,’ charmin,’ but such a milksop . . .’ She liked the idea of her great-grandfather: ‘But Lady Byron had rotten bad luck with him,’ she said. ‘You just read my uncle Lovelace’s book about it!’ The row might have taken place only a few years ago. Afterwards we hunted through a huge, disused and heavily cumbered room for a full-face portrait of Byron as a young man, but we could not find it. ‘It’s all a bit topsy-turvey,’ she murmured, hopping nimbly over corded trunks and japanned tin cases. I saw, with excitement, that these were labelled on the side, in chalk or in white paint, ‘Ld Byron’s letters’ and ‘Ly Byron’s letters.’ ‘Yes, they’re all in there,’ Lady Wentworth said sombrely, ‘and it’s the best place for them.’ We looked at a case with Byron’s Greek-Albanian velvet jacket with its gold lace and hanging sleeves. There were his velvet-scabbarded scimitar and his heavily embroidered velvet greaves—the same accoutrements, I think, that he wears in the famous Phillips portrait. We explored the amassed relics for an hour. Struck by a sudden idea, she led us to her study. It was crammed with portraits, miniatures, framed eighteenth-century silhouettes; books, keepsakes and trophies were gathered in a jungle: rummaging in her desk, she turned over a chaos of farm accounts, horse-breeding literature, lawyers’ letters, a battered missal, seedsmen’s catalogues, a rosary, farriers’ bills and circulars for cattle cake, until at last she found what she was after.
They were some letters, dated a few years back, from an Australian sergeant in Missolonghi. The Greek he was billeted on, he wrote, owned a pair of shoes belonging to Lord Byron; he said the owner would like to return them to one of Byron’s descendants. ‘But, of course, knowin’ no Greek, I couldn’t do anythin’ about it,’ Lady Wentworth said. ‘I’d like to have them, if they were really my greatgrandfather’s.’ She turned the letter over. ‘He must be a nice kind of a chap, to take all that trouble. I hope I wrote to thank him . . .’ So she lent me the sergeant’s letters and I promised to write to the owner of the shoes. She also gave me a copy of Lord Lovelace’s Astarte and a sheaf of her own poems, printed, I think, in Horsham. They were violent, very colloquial rhyming diatribes against the Germans, written during the war after a stray bomb had destroyed the royal tennis court. (Crabbet was on the direct Luftwaffe route to London.) Her polemic gifts had at last discovered a universal rather than a private target. ‘You’re smilin’,’ she said. ‘They’re no great shakes, I fear. It doesn’t always run in families . . .’ There was a pause. Then Lady Wentworth said: You’re not in a hurry, are you? Let’s have a hundred up.’
She led us along a passage and up three steps into the dim and glaucous vista of a billiard room. A log fire was blazing;
brandy and whisky and soda water flashed their welcome. Lady Wentworth gazed out at the dark afternoon. Through the lashing rain we contemplated the sodden park, the weeping trees and a sudden cavalcade of Arab ponies. ‘What a shockin’ afternoon,’ she said. ‘Let’s draw the curtains.’ We sent the tall curtains clashing along their rods and blotted out the diluvial scene and the daylight and switched on the shaded prism of lamps above the enormous table. She slipped off her many rings and lay them by the grog tray in a twinkling heap; then, after interlocking and flexing her fingers for a few moments like a concert pianist, she chose a cue, sighing ‘spot or plain?’
We played in rapt silence. A feeling of timeless and remote seclusion hung all about us, a half-delightful, half-mournful spell which the house and our companion conspired to cast. She had taken on both of us and it was soon clear she was a brilliant player: our turns were spaced out between longer and longer breaks. All was quiet, except for the occasional squeak of French chalk, the fall of a log, a splutter of raindrops down the chimney, the occasional hiss of the siphon. Sudden gusts made the trunks of the huge trees creak ominously outside. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t fetch one of them down,’ Lady Wentworth said, pausing before a difficult shot. ‘It’s been a rotten winter.’ She played the shot facing away from the table and behind her back, which she arched as pliantly as a girl’s. The balls sped unerringly to their destination and the soft clicks and the thuds on the cushion were followed by two plops. Put red back, would you, Antony?’ She crossed to the other side on silent plimsoled feet . . . The huge scores mounted up in game after lost game. The whole world seemed reduced to this shadowy room with its glowing green quadrilateral; the slow eddies of our cigar smoke under the lamps and the flickering firelight and the trundling balls. The light caught a brooch here and a locket there as our hostess moved mercilessly to and fro at her effortless, demolishing task. Tea, brought in by a housekeeper and two Irishwomen (identical twins, quite plainly), was no interruption. Lady Wentworth lifted a silver lid. ‘Oh, good,’ she murmured sadly. ‘Muffins.’ We ate them cue in hand, and the massacre went on. She looked disappointed when, night having long ago invisibly fallen, the time came to go. Why didn’t we stay and take pot luck . . .? Her slim silhouette and the anachronistic headdress were dark in the doorway and she still held a cue in her hand as she waved us goodbye. We drove away through stormy folds of woodland. The 1950s waited outside the park gates. Meanwhile, shadowy cohorts from Arabia shifted about among the soaking timber. The whites of a score of eyes flashed hysterically or gazed for a moment in the headlamps. Then with a wheel and a flounder they vanished into the dark like rainy ghosts.
The looming prospect of Missolonghi, as we mooned about Astakos and brooded on our wrongs, had brought all this rushing back.
I had written to the owner from England and he had sent a friendly answer. Indeed, he said, he longed to send the shoes of the illustrious Lord Byron to his descendant, but he was anxious lest the precious relics should go astray in the post; better wait till some reliable emissary could be found. Since then all had been silence. Well, I had thought in Astakos, I’ll be able to clear everything up in a day or two, when the boat comes. I’ll simply ask the way to the house of Kyrios —
That was the trouble! Mr Who? I had forgotten the name. It shouldn’t be hard to find in a little town like Missolonghi. But, to leave nothing to chance, I went to the post office and sent a telegram to Lady Wentworth.
Her answer was waiting in the Missolonghi poste restante; Sorry very provoking, it read, correspondence mislaid good luck Wentworth. I asked the man behind the counter if he knew anything about a fellow-citizen who owned a pair of Lord Byron’s shoes. No, he had never heard of them, nor had his colleagues, not even the postmaster himself. They and the other people in the post office were full of concern. The words ‘Tà papóutsia toù Lórdou Vyrónou’ began to hum through the building. ‘Ask at the town hall. They’ve got some Byron things there. The mayor might know . . .’ The mayor, a distinguished, spectacled figure, knew nothing either. We contented ourselves by peering at the sparse Byron relics in the glass cases. There was a cross-section of the last surviving branch of the elm tree under which the poet had reclined at Harrow; an envelope, addressed in the familiar writing, sere with age, to ‘the Honble Mrs Leigh, Six Mile Bottom, Newmarket’; a letter beginning, ‘My dearest Caroline’; the document declaring Byron an honorary citizen of the town; a picture of his daughter, Augusta Ada, as a girl; Solomos’s commemorative hymn and the broadsheets announcing his death; an aquatint of Newstead Abbey and another of ‘the Shade of Byron contemplating the ruins of Missolonghi.’ A third print, published in 1827, depicted Archbishop Germanos, who had raised the standard of revolt at Kalavryta. The beard and the canonicals vaguely approximated to the attributes of an Orthodox prelate; but the background was a soaring Beckfordian complex of lancets, triforia, clerestories and crocketed finials: a telling proof of how dimly western Europe apprehended what Greece, during the eclipse of Ottoman power, was like.
But no trace of the shoes.
We drew blank everywhere; with the clergy, the police, the various banks. There was scarcely a bar in which we did not order a swig as a prelude to enquiry. In desperation, we even accosted likely strangers in the street.
Maddened by frustration, at a restaurant table near a statue of President Tricoupis under a clump of palm trees, we scarcely touched our luncheon octopus, swallowing glass after glass of cold Fix beer to replace the salt cataract which the heat summoned from every pore. We fretted through fitful siestas and surged into the streets long before the town had woken up, and soon found ourselves at the Kypos tôn Eroôn. I had begun to wonder whether the conversations at Crabbet and the exchange of letters had all been hallucinations.
This Garden of Heroes is a stirring place. There, among the drooping and dusty trees of midsummer, stood the marble busts and the monuments of the heroes of Missolonghi. It is a mark of the importance of Lord Byron in Greek eyes that his statue, the only full-length figure there, has been accorded the central position in this Valhalla. Dotted about, too, are monuments to the other philhellenes who fought or died for the liberation of Greece: the numerous Germans, the French, the Americans, the English, and, symbolized by a huge granite totem surrounded by boulders, the Swedes; on every side, mingling with these guest-warriors, are the great Greek paladins of the Siege.
We were sitting rather dejectedly on the low wall outside, and meditating on how to resume our quest, when a flutter of coloured flounces and a plaintive murmur heralded the onslaught of a gypsy woman. But we were in no mood for fortune-telling, and when, driven away at last by the persistence of her litany; which alms had failed to stem, we rose wearily to return to the town, she gazed bale-fully in our faces and said she saw unhappiness and failure written there. Further dejected by these tidings, we returned to our quarters.
But she was wrong. A nice-looking young woman was waiting for us. Her face brightened as we appeared: were we looking for Lord Byron’s shoes? She had heard we had been asking about them. They belonged to her uncle: she told us his name; I recognized it in a flash as that of my correspondent. Could we call at his house in an hour’s time?
Words of Mercury Page 17