The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

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  The Europe That Was

  Geoffrey Household

  CONTENTS

  EASTERN APPROACHES

  Kindly Stranger

  Give Us This Day

  Dionysus and the Pard

  Low Water

  ROMANIA

  Sabres on the Sand

  The Cook-runner

  HUNGARY

  Tell These Men to Go Away

  The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy

  Roll Out the Barrel

  SPAIN

  Water of Iturrigorri

  Three of Castile

  The Pejemuller

  Technique

  Secret Police

  ENGLAND

  Twilight of a God

  The Greeks Had No Word for It

  Eggs as Ain’t

  Abner of the Porch

  FRANCE

  The Sword and the Rake

  Champion Antiochus

  EASTERN APPROACHES

  KINDLY STRANGER

  It is an odd thought—at this date unworldly rather than disturbing—that I am responsible for all the disasters of the last forty years, for 1914–18, for the Russian Revolution, for Hitler. No Martian arriving from outer space could have changed the quietly running world into so devastatingly wrong and fast a gear. And, as in a cautionary tale for children, it all came about through disobedience.

  My father had a dear friend named von Lech who was an undersecretary in the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Education. They had really little in common except the self-confident liberalism of their time and a passionate interest in the art of teaching. Both of them believed that when all Europeans—the rest of the world could follow later—attended secondary school Utopia would have arrived. That did not seem so comical a creed in 1914 as it does now. It was a bond of idealism strong enough for them to visit each other, and even for their wives to be polite to each other.

  Von Lech was a hard-working administrator who kept two servants, but no car or carriage. That was just the position of my father. Both of them could live comfortably and precisely in that state to which emperor and king had called them, but holidays were always a minor problem and illness a major one.

  Thus it was natural that when von Lech discovered a very cheap and hospitable hotel at Ilidze, an unknown summer resort in Austrian Bosnia, he should write to my father about it. He knew that my father was convalescing after a long illness and had been ordered by his doctor to go abroad for a rest. Frau von Lech also wrote to my mother in formal, diplomatic French. I think it was the use of French rather than German or English which overcame her mistrust. Ilidze was made to sound fashionable, which it wasn’t, and romantic, which it was.

  Neither of my parents knew anything whatever about Bosnia. My father, however, always accepted authority. Von Lech, it was plain, counted Bosnia a normal province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Provinces of the Empire were civilized and disciplined. It would therefore be an unwarranted misuse of the imagination to consider a visit to Ilidze at all adventurous. They decided to start in the middle of June. They would not hear of my travelling out by myself at the end of term—rightly, for at thirteen I was absurdly helpless—so I was let out of school six weeks early, and accompanied them by train to Trieste and by boat down the Adriatic.

  Ilidze was intensely excited by the coming visit of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his pretty wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. I cannot remember if she was really pretty. Even to a sophisticated eye all feminine royalty is dazzling. But I can see the Archduke now. I was immensely impressed by him. Not only was he going to become emperor, but he reminded me of a taller, fiercer and unsmiling edition of my headmaster.

  The pair of them stayed at Ilidze for three nights while the Archduke attended the manoeuvres. On 28 June they were to make a state visit to the neighbouring town of Sarajevo; and the von Lechs, who highly approved of the solid glimmerings of liberalism in the Archduke, loyally determined to go over and cheer. Of course, we went with them.

  We watched from a first-floor balcony on the Appel Quay. The house was some fifty yards from the cross-roads formed by Franz Joseph Street and the Latin Bridge, and belonged to some hotel acquaintance of the von Lechs—an old lady in black who entertained us with little cakes, and wine in coloured glasses. I think she must have been of rather lower social status, perhaps a native Bosnian, but I remember little about her except the coloured glasses.

  The Appel Quay was a long, straight road, bordered on one side by houses and on the other by the river. It was Sunday, and so there was a thick hedge of public on each side of the route. In the distance, to the right of our balcony, the procession was coming up the quay towards us when we heard a sharp explosion. The cars stopped. Hedges wavered inwards and were held back.

  The women of our party screamed that it was a bomb. My mother watched Frau von Lech to see whether it would be proper to faint. Frau von Lech, however, decided that my mother would show the famous English phlegm, and determined to imitate her. The old lady prayed, and fascinated me by the complicated gestures with which she crossed herself.

  The men exerted their common-sense influence. Von Lech, who was still unused to cars, suggested that the noise had been due to a burst tyre or petrol tank. My father said that the public should not be allowed to purchase fireworks. The bomb as a political weapon was inconceivable to such believers in Progress; they easily assumed that—except in Russia—it was inconceivable to everyone else.

  I myself, with the superiority of a sound preparatory school, accepted their unimaginative confidence that the incident was trivial. The melancholy procession—now of three cars instead of four—restarted and passed hurriedly below our decorated balcony. The cheering was so thin that you could distinguish individual voices. I was disappointed. It seemed hardly worth the short journey from Ilidze for so small and dull an affair. My only comparable experience had been a visit of Edward VII to Gloucester. There had been lots of yeomanry in gorgeous uniforms. The genial, top-hatted figure in the open landau had created, by the mere force of his expansive masculinity, an air of festival.

  But now that the Archduke had passed, we could see the missing fourth car drawn into the side of the road. A crowd, at a respectful distance, was round it. Another and more active crowd, led by police, was running up the dry bed of the river. We saw an indistinguishable limp puppet caught and arrested.

  Von Lech, allowing a decent interval for the stopped clock of civilization to start again, leaned over the balcony and made enquiries. Yes, it had been a bomb; a colonel in the last car had been wounded; some Bosnian students were, it was believed, responsible. Von Lech and my father took this awkward hurdle in their stride. Secondary education, they admitted, was bound to have its teething troubles.

  I was silent with a new disappointment. One read of bombs in the newspapers. Anarchists with bombs occasionally blew themselves up (but no one else) in the Boys Own Paper. And now a bomb had been thrown practically in front of my eyes, and I hadn’t even seen it.

  The party returned inside for refreshments. The women were exclamatory. My father and von Lech discussed bombs with philosophic detachment. Nobody paid any attention to me. I made myself a nuisance, and was told that I could go into the garden and look at the goldfish until the Archduke’s procession returned along the quay, but that on no account was I to leave the house.

  In cold blood I should never have dared to engage myself in the streets of so very foreign a town; but curiousity about the bomb overcame all else. I was as eager to get the horrid detail
s for my school friends as any reporter for his editor. I quietly opened and closed the front door, and slunk along the Appel Quay, keeping close under the houses in case anyone should come out on the balcony and spot me. I crossed Franz Josef Street and then, with enough people between me and the balcony, went over to the river side of the quay.

  There was nothing much to see at the car. The right back-wheel and its mudguard looked as if they had been involved in a nasty smash—a sight far more familiar now than then. Imagination produced a few drops of blood on the road—or perhaps they were really there.

  I wandered along the embankment with some vague idea of detecting traces of the would-be assassin in the river-bed. There were none, and I found myself a quarter of a mile from home with no satisfactory reason for being where I was. I became embarrassedly conscious of my outlandish appearance. In honour of the Archduke I had been compelled to put on my Eton suit—then worn by all small boys on Sundays and formal occasions. I don’t know whether Sarajevo had ever seen such an outfit before. No one assumed that I had escaped from a circus, so it cannot have been as startling as I supposed.

  While I fiddled around, no doubt taking refuge in day dreams, the two hedges of police and public opposite our balcony had grown up again. The Archduke was due to return. Worse still, there was a third hedge stretching across the Appel Quay where the procession was to turn right into Franz Josef Street. I was completely cut off from home.

  I disliked crossing the empty, wide road with everyone’s eyes upon me. However, I had to get back to the balcony before my absence was discovered. I pushed self-consciously through the line of people into the open, and was at once turned back by a policeman. His reaction, I think, must have been one of sheer surprise. He was understandably nervous.

  Turned back almost simultaneously was another spectator, a sharp-featured young man little taller than my over-grown self. He also was trying to cross the road and had left it too late. We exchanged glances. I remember his brilliant blue eyes in a yellowish face. He beckoned to me, and said in German (which I understood, though nothing would induce me to mumble it unless compelled): ‘Come with me! I will take you across.’

  Then he asked the policeman if he couldn’t see that I was a little well-born foreigner and harmless. His tone almost implied that he was my manservant or tutor. With an arm round my shoulders, taking away by his middle-class poverty the shame of my resplendent Eton suit, he led me across the road.

  We entered the crowd lining the corner of the Appel Quay and Franz Josef Street, and mingled with it. I began to bolt for home, but the procession was on us. The police car came first, then the car containing the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife. I remember Count Harrach standing on the running board on the left-hand side of the car, shielding the Archduke with his body. It did not occur to me that such was his motive. It just seemed a gallant and genuinely Ruritanian way to ride.

  The cars turned into Franz Josef Street. My kindly little friend leaned forward and fired twice. I was some distance from him and did not at first realize what he was doing. In 1914 we had not yet been educated by war and movies. Nothing spectacular happened, except that the Archduke leaned back and Sophie put her head on his knees. Then the wave of the crowd curved over Gabriel Princip. Above the bent heads and shoulders I could see Count Harrach put a handkerchief to the Archduke’s mouth. It turned suddenly red as in a conjuring trick.

  When I reached our door, the von Lechs and my parents came pouring out of it; they did not notice that I had joined them from the quay, not from inside the house. I never told them. I never said a word of my adventure at school. Guilt was already present, though it was many years before I admitted to myself that Gabriel Princip, seizing his opportunity, had used me to bluff his way through police and crowd to Franz Josef Street. Without me, he would have had to fire from some point on the Appel Quay past or through the protecting body of Count Harrach—a shot so long and hopeless that he would have drawn from his pocket only, perhaps, a cigarette.

  GIVE US THIS DAY

  Mirko Brancovitch was an old man, a calm link with the past; it seemed incredible that he could have been a bandit. He was not garrulous on the subject. There had been nothing gay in his trade, nothing dashing or even markedly virile. It was simply a way of life into which he had drifted. His reminiscences were not of stolen purses, but of poverty. He felt instinctively that thus he revealed the really essential difference between then and now. Other sufferings which had existed at the beginning of the century were still present in recognizable form, but extremes of hunger had vanished from all Europe, East and West.

  The poverty of his mountains on the border of Bosnia and Montenegro had been unimaginable, he said. His fellow peasants were mostly freeholders and proud of it, though they had little benefit from their miserable patches of stony soil but freedom to starve. They were Serbs, unwilling subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Military service was the greatest disaster. The soldier ate, but no provision was made for wife and children. The State took no account of such inglorious hindrances to patriotism. If he sent them all his pay, every single penny of it, his family would be alive when he returned. But pay could not dig the land and keep it dug, far less hire a labourer.

  Exaggerated? When the young men in the café insisted that it was, insisted, before they left on their bicycles or even motor cycles, that such hardship was impossible, the ex-bandit used to lay it down that the test of how much a man fears his fate is what he will do to avoid it. He would quote Pavlo Popovnic as an example.

  Pavlo had a young wife and two sons aged four and five—gallant little fellows but not yet able to lift their father’s clumsy tools, let alone use them. By working fourteen hours a day on his four acres of mountain—only two of which could really be counted as cultivable—he fed his family, though neither he nor his brave Despina could ever be sure of it from year to year. Flood or the failure of a single crop could tip the balance against them. Remove Pavlo’s strong arms and the place would not feed a couple of goats.

  When Pavlo was called up for three years with the colours, he had to go. So far he had managed to avoid the alien service, but in the excitements of 1913 the empire was granting no exemptions, especially to Slavs along the southern frontiers. There was nothing he could do about it. The military were up to such acts of desperation as cutting off the trigger finger. Authorities and their tame doctors looked very closely into any accidents at all which happened after a man had received his call-up papers. Even a genuine accident at so convenient a time could land him with ten years in gaol instead of three in the Army.

  As soon as Danilo, the local policeman, had delivered Pavlo’s orders and left, Despina abandoned herself to shrieks and tears. Then, like all generous women, she drew strength from her own exhaustion and started to make sensible plans. The goats, the sow and the seed potatoes could be eaten. There was an uncle who, at the worst, would give them shelter. Oh yes, she assured Pavlo, they would get through the three years somehow.

  Pavlo agreed. He would have agreed to anything. He hated to see his dark-haired darling cry. But he knew very well that even if she and the children survived his years of absence the land and its stock could not. After his return, starvation was certain.

  They were like morning and night together—Pavlo a golden Slav, Despina with the raven braids and thin-cream skin of the Mediterranean. We do not see such fine animals today, Mirko Brancovitch asserted. They won much more love than they ever knew, for they were shy of being loved except by each other.

  The next morning Pavlo went down the mountain to see the bone-setter. It was spring, but the winter stores were finished and there were still some weeks to go before his work could produce anything solid to eat. A bunch of radishes was all the present he could bring her.

  She was the only doctor peasants could afford, and they would have had to travel fifty miles to find a better, in spite of her odd pharmacopoeia of herbs and charms. She even had a medical beard of
seven coarse black bristles. Pavlo was a little afraid of her, but he knew her to be well disposed towards Despina whose two sons she had delivered.

  ‘If I break my leg, Mother,’ he asked, ‘how long before I can begin to work?’

  ‘Four weeks,’ she said. ‘Perhaps five.’

  That was all right. He would be up in time to get in the harvest. And while he was confined to bed he wouldn’t need to eat very much. The children could have his share.

  ‘You would set it crooked for me?’

  ‘You will limp a little all your life,’ she promised him.

  Pavlo could not ask better than that; but it was not so easy to break a leg and harder still to do it so convincingly that the doctor in uniform and the lawyer in his black coat would write it down on their papers as an accident.

  It was then that the bandit, Brancovitch, himself entered the story. All four went out to find him—Pavlo, Despina and the two children. They were quite confident. He did not rob peasants. He was as poor as they. When he had accumulated a little store of coins he bought powder and shot with them, just as the men who lived in cottages bought seed. He lived a lot worse than they and ate, perhaps, a bit better, for he had more meat—when he could swallow it down. It was not always very fresh meat. He used to hang it in a forked branch like a wild-cat.

  The family found him sitting in the sun at the entrance to his winter cave, preparing a pine-marten skin. He made more out of selling shabby furs than banditry. There were few travellers really worth the trouble of holding them up.

  While the children played in the scrub of the hillside, Pavlo explained the disaster of the call-up and made an eloquent speech such as his father might have delivered to a Turkish bey, begging for patronage. The formality was correct but unnecessary. Towards the neighbours Brancovitch was as benevolent as Robin Hood, within the limits of his charity. They were quickly reached. His largesse might perhaps run to a couple of sparrows on a wooden spit if a friend were ill.