The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  The Family knew Bacso well—far from a hero and not the sort of man to interfere with his own comfort. He was gorgeous, bumbling, incoherent, and harmless as an old turkey cock. He gobbled at Miss Titterton and Hitler’s SS. While he recovered from the shock of this forcible collection of free gifts.

  The sergeant was not at all the modern policeman with a probation order in one hand and a tax demand in the other. He did not think of himself as representing the arbitrary benevolence of the State; he was just the protector of the haves, however humble, against the have-nots. Not a very worthy ideal. But, such as it was, it absolutely prevented him from pointing out quietly to Miss Titterton that a private individual should not argue with the SS. For Sergeant Bacso property was property.

  He drew out his notebook and formally asked Miss Titterton whether she was or was not willing to present the furniture of one bedroom to the Reich. She replied decidedly that she was not. He took down her statement, closed his notebook and put it back in his pocket.

  The SS men were grinning at him as if he were a circus clown in policeman’s uniform. He had a wide-open escape route from the deadlock if he merely pointed out that Miss Titterton was British and that he washed his hands of her. The Family doubted if it ever occurred to him. He was used to thinking of her as one of the town’s old ladies. The only officials likely to remember her nationality off-hand were those of the former British Legation where she appeared once a year for the party on the King’s Birthday in some astonishing confection twenty years out of date and carefully pressed and ornamented.

  Having decided that his customer’s complaint was justified, Sergeant Bacso pulled his splendid moustache and awaited an invitation to act. He got it.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Miss Titterton, ‘is it not your duty to tell these men to go away?’

  It was a gentle inquiry rather than a command. But there was no disobeying. Miss Titterton had developed her confident manner through taking over two generations of spoilt children from dear old peasant nannies who—regrettably but so very naturally—had no idea at all of discipline. Her voice was sufficient. Unlike the SS she had never been compelled to use corporal punishment.

  Sergeant Bacso settled his gleaming shako on his head and joined Miss Titterton at the front door. What really bothered him was not so much standing up to a detachment of the most conscienceless thugs in the German Army as giving orders to an officer. Hungarians of his generation had a very great respect for officers.

  He saluted and apologized with every second sentence, but he was firm. Miss Titterton’s furniture could not be requisitioned without payment, and it was not going to leave her house until he had referred the matter to his superiors.

  By this time a small crowd had gathered. They probably did not cheer, but looked as if they wanted to. The two SS men who were still carrying the dressing-table put it down. Their comrades stood by the truck, lounging and contemptuously interested. The unconscious arrogance of an old lady and a town policeman had surpassed their own.

  The officer called them to attention and began to storm at Bacso. The foaming, emphatic German was a little too fast for the sergeant, but not for Miss Titterton—though there were words the meaning of which she preferred to ignore. She stopped the flow with a slight gesture of her hand and remarked that in the great days of the German Army the officers she met were always gentlemen. Women had been slung across the street for less. But Miss Titterton’s rebukes were always unanswerable. That phrase ‘the great days’ made any violent retort extremely difficult.

  The SS were almost about to climb into their truck and visit other free contributors. Afterwards, of course, they would have returned and had the furniture of the whole house off her. But for the moment they were on the defensive. They were back in school with the copybook maxims of truth, courage and good manners.

  Sergeant Bacso, triumphant and peaceable, invited his country’s allies to accompany him to the police station; he meant that he was only too willing to refer the question of Miss Titterton’s bedroom to higher authority if they would be good enough to come with him. But the SS officer, ready for any excuse to reimpose himself on the situation, pretended to believe that the sergeant was threatening arrest. He nodded to his bullies around the truck who intimidatingly strolled forward.

  Bacso in a noble access of Magyar defiance drew his pistol. The illusion of civic law and order was destroyed. By resorting to violence he immediately removed himself from the fantastic world which Miss Titterton had created.

  It could easily have been his last act; but the Herrenvolk, relieved of unwelcome memories of civilization and back in their familiar environment, decided that he and his pop-gun were merely comic. They disarmed him and, according to Ellen Titterton, deprived him of his nether garments. She was reluctant to give details. Good manners were as needful as always even if you young people chose to call them inhibitions. It appeared that the SS detachment had hustled Bacso round the corner and launched him into the main street by a kick on the bare backside. He had the sympathy of the whole town, but it was recognized that he never would get over the humiliation, never be so professionally fierce and polished again.

  Miss Titterton’s respectability, too, was gravely compromised. The police came for her at once, and the local magistrate with them. In spite of being a distant cousin of the Family and a frequent visitor—a highly-strung little boy, she remembered, who had been so unnecessarily afraid of the dark—he would not hold any conversation with her and would not listen. He bundled her off to his court under the eyes of the SS, and promptly gaoled her for insulting glorious allies and creating a disturbance. A common gaol it had been, among common criminals. She had been very glad to see how well the poor women were treated. She was sure that she had been allowed no special privileges beyond permission to decorate her cell with curtains and chintz covers and to invite selected prisoners to coffee. Their moral education had been sadly neglected, and she hoped that her influence on them had been for the good.

  Miss Titterton felt that it was very forgiving of the Family to rescue her and fly her back to London immediately after the war. When they explained to her that prison had been the only way of preserving her from a quite certain concentration camp and the very possible attentions of the Gestapo, she tried hard to believe them. But in her experience, she said, justice was always done. She was afraid it stood to reason that she had deserved her sentence—perhaps for not taking enough care with the unruly member, my dear. It was very kind of them all to accept her disgrace so light-heartedly.

  THE PICKET LINES OF

  MARTON HEVESSY

  My dear Joe:

  It’s good to hear that at least one government has had the sense to put a round peg in a round hole, and that some small part of the security of the United States is in your hands. And thanks for kind words. My memory is that we learned from you, not you from us. But that we should both have this impression is probably what Eisenhower wanted.

  So Marton Hevessy has given me as a reference. I have no reason to believe that he was ever a communist. I must confess, however, that his father always said he would end in jail. He used to say it lovingly, if you see what I mean, for he was very proud of Marton; but he was afraid, like any other father, lest his son’s nonconformity should draw upon him the resentment of the herd.

  First, here is a solid fact to reassure you. In old days any Budapest bank would have given Marton Hevessy a tiptop reference. From a banker’s point of view—I’ll come to mine later—he was an honourable, enterprising commercial man who had built up his own business from nothing. Industrial design, it was. If you invented an ingenious electric shoe cleaner, for example, you called on Hevessy to give it the form which would most appeal to the public—though once in a while he would turn out a design so preposterously imperial that it would have won a gold medal at the Exhibition of 1851. That was the aristocrat in him; he considered it his duty to set standards, not to accept them. The Hevessys are a very ancient family, and M
arton cannot help looking like one of his ancestors. I don’t suppose that so much tall, audacious elegance has ever been to him anything but a handicap.

  What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Joe, it’s like a question set in an examination paper. State shortly what you know of Don Quixote.

  I can guess what sort of answer you want: some little definite sentence which will enable you to stand up as a supporter of the traditional liberalism of the last hundred years. I wish I could slap it down on your desk; but I am not in the confidence of the Almighty. I cannot imagine Marton—so rounded, so passionate a European—as a contented American unless one of his unpredictable loyalties were engaged. I think it has been, but that is for you to judge. None of his friends could ever foretell how he would react to any new landscape of humanity, though we had absolute faith that the personal expression of his emotions—when, as it were, complete, varnished and framed—would be just as satisfying as his notorious gesture in defence of Sarita’s religion.

  You’ve met Sarita Hevessy, of course. I am certain that it was she, not he (for the one time he never appealed to his friends was when he was in trouble), who told you to refer to me. I can imagine her facing you across the files on the table, all fragrant with common sense and her very great love of her husband. You refused to be impressed by all that beauty, didn’t you? You kept a professional poker face, and reserved judgement. But your first impression was right. She’s gold from the heart outwards.

  Sarita! So un-Hungarian a name may have made you uneasy. Her family were Sephardic Jews, who chose to remain behind at Budapest when the Turks retreated. Reverence for their religion sat pretty lightly on her and her family. They were refreshing and agreeable citizens of the capital. And Budapest was an Eden, you remember, where nobody bothered, until Nazi and Zionist had coiled themselves around the Tree of Knowledge, how host or guest elected to walk with God. If Marton had married Sarita five years earlier than he did, she would merely have mentioned—between casual drinks, perhaps—that she supposed she was a Jewess if she was anything, and left it at that.

  In 1938, however, there was a tough crowd round the Tree of Knowledge. They ate the apples and threw at each other those they couldn’t digest. Marton despised the lot of them, and took action. He wasn’t a man to address a public meeting or write a letter to the press; his revolt was personal. He told Sarita that before he could allow her to honour him with her hand in marriage he would become a Jew.

  Sarita protested. She was a most capable and tolerant child, and she tried to laugh Marton out of this misplaced loyalty. Still, she was Magyar all through—for her family had loved and lived and drunk their wine and ridden their horses on Danube banks for five hundred years—and as a Magyar she couldn’t help being impressed by irresistible extravagance of gesture on the part of her lover. Marton had put himself in the class of those Hungarian magnates who ordered from Nice a special train of flowers merely to pave the courtyard for the entrance of a bride, or built a Cinderella’s glass coach that she might be carried to a single birthday picnic in the forest.

  She wasn’t conceited. She didn’t think that she was worth such fantasies. She never suspected that any good citizen of Budapest would have been ashamed of his ignorance if he couldn’t tell to a visiting provincial the name of that golden arrow flighting down the Corso, with the chestnut hair and the velvety warm skin of Magyar horse and woman. No, it wasn’t any sense of her own value that made her give way to Marton’s insistence. It was just the glowing unnecessariness of any such sacrifice at all.

  The Hevessy marriage was near perfect—as soon as Sarita had managed to stop her husband’s sober visits to the synagogue, which were embarrassing to everyone but himself. She didn’t prohibit, of course. She just knew how long Marton needed to tire of any of his exciting perversities. Moral for a policeman, Joe!

  On which side did he fight? But what a question! Hasn’t Sarita told you that he is the most loyal man she ever met, that the key to his whole character is loyalty? He’s a Hevessy and a patriot, and of course he fought for Hungary against the hereditary enemy. Marton went off to war with Russia as a dashing captain of cavalry. A little elderly for the part, perhaps, but for youth he substituted enthusiasm—or as much of it as his hatred of Hitler allowed.

  Ah, but what happened to Sarita, you’ll ask. Isn’t it easy to account for Marton’s communist sympathies? Didn’t the coming of the Russians save her from an extermination camp? No, it didn’t. Even the most rabid Hungarian Nazis would have thought it ridiculous to pester Hevessys, however they might describe their religion on a government form.

  What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Well, I can answer for him in the post-war years. Siege, slaughter and Russian occupation looted from him everything movable, including, we thought, his romanticism. Just to feed his wife and children and remake his business were tasks of knight-errantry valiant enough even for him. He succeeded, and he was content. He wasn’t a worker to be bullied, or a capitalist to be ruined. He was a specialist; and whether he designed for private clients or for the State, his living was secure. Sarita was a little sad. She found herself married to a sober, tranquil professional of industry. He even used to spend free evenings with his lawyers.

  I am surprised that these unusual absences did not worry her, especially since he avoided all discussion. Still, his character appeared to have changed. She might easily have thought him obsessed, like any other solid citizen in his middle forties, by some dull and technical affair such as patent rights. And lawyers are indestructible; they continue to function under the milder forms of communism so long as there is any private property left in the deed boxes.

  No, there was nothing to arouse a wife’s suspicion until Marton began to take an interest in history. History, he insisted, would judge their period as one of necessary but too drastic reforms. It was the duty of a loyal citizen not to allow all the links with the, past to vanish. For example, the Hungarian Nobility should not be forgotten. Whatever its sins in the past, it might again—in a hundred years perhaps—be needed.

  I expect that at first Sarita merely listened from one tolerant little ear, and received these magnificent lectures with a proper pleasure that her husband was enjoying his dinner. It was hardly tactful to point out that in the ten years of their marriage she had never heard Marton allow to the hereditary nobility any value whatever.

  He held his great-grandfather to be disgracefully typical of the whole class. Great-grandfather had lost every cent of the Hevessy money at cards, and was left with nothing but an entailed estate which he couldn’t sell. He returned his estate and barony to the Emperor with a request—and a model it was of dignified Hungarian prose—that his Imperial and Royal Majesty should be pleased to pay the Hevessy debts and save the Hevessy honour. He then dressed himself in full regalia and galloped his favourite hunter over a cliff, with the reins—so far as rigor mortis permitted an opinion—still lightly grasped in his left hand. It was a death in style which should have appealed to Marton, but did not.

  So when Marton’s sudden passion for aristocracy grew and flourished before as well as after dinner, Sarita at last took it very seriously and connected it, quite rightly, with the mysterious visits to his lawyers. She couldn’t help assuming that her disappointingly sober husband was engaged in some crazy plot to restore the old régime and—though no doubt preserving the motherly smile on her delicious face—she panicked. She began, all unknown to Marton, the long series of intrigues and letters and pullings of gossamer wire by invisible hands, which were to take the Hevessy family out of Hungary and into your office files, Joe. She should have remembered that Marton’s revolts were always personal and unlikely to draw upon him the wrath of governments—even communist governments—but her haste was forgivable. Of every four men she had known in 1939, at least one must have been killed by politics. That omits, of course, those who were killed by war.

  While Sarita was worrying herself sick over State trials and searching the papers for news of any
arrests which could possibly lead to her own circle, Marton, I have no doubt, preserved an exasperating complacence—until one evening, in the midst of a terrifying week of militant communism on the march, he came home from the office and kissed Sarita’s hand with gay, exaggerated deference and addressed her as Baroness Hevessy.

  She was. That was his business with the lawyers. He had been proving to the satisfaction of the High Court that great-grandfather, when he so flamboyantly paid his debts, had a son two years old, the existence of whom, in all that dignified excitement, he had omitted to mention to the Emperor. Consequently the Imperial and Royal action was void. The entail could not be broken. The barony could not revert to the Crown.

  There was nothing at all that Sarita could do about it. The case was simple and, for the courts, a joyous holiday from legalizing the dictates of dictators. The lawyers had all gone to work with immense professional zest to settle a claim that was satisfyingly constitutional and wholly useless. Beyond a shadow of doubt Marton and Sarita were Baron and Baroness Hevessy.

  Their friends—and believe me, Joe, every one of them will be grateful to you for giving him the chance to speak—were as delighted with Marton as at his solemn circumcision. I am told that even hardened communists took a careful look round and laughed. There is still a wry sense of fun in Budapest.

  I can hear you remarking sternly that he doesn’t call himself Baron Hevessy. But of course he doesn’t! The title was only for use in reddest Hungary. It was his personal protest. He wouldn’t dream of using it in a country where it might be of some use to him.

  I don’t know how Sarita got him to leave his (in spite of everything) beloved country when her schemes came to fruition. My personal opinion is that the government unofficially expelled him. He was too well known in low cafés and high, and his exquisite, unpunishable gestures might have started a fashion. However that may be, there they are in your hands—Sarita, Marton and the children.