Between the Woods and the Water (10 page)

Dr. vitéz Haviar Gyula was tall, dark and slightly eastern-looking with heavy-lidded eyes, a swooping nose, high narrow temples and a rather sad smile. I wondered if he could have been of Armenian descent: numbers of these, respected for their nimble wits and teased for their prominent noses, were scattered about the country like little gatherings of toucans. But it wasn't an Armenian name, nor yet Hungarian. Rumanian names originating in a profession—equivalent of ‘Potter' or ‘Tyler'—sometimes ended in -
ar
, but not here, I think: well-known engravings of Kossuth and Déak
hung in his drawing room and apart from the not very fluent German in which we conversed, Magyar was his only language. I had dinner with him and his family in a restaurant in the main street under a new moon and a trellis heavy with lilac (
orgona
in Magyar; the word has suddenly surfaced in my mind after nearly half a century). The air was motionless after the shower and it was suddenly very hot. The little town was full of evening strollers and many of them halted at our table for a chat; I had a mental glimpse of what towns on the Great Plain must be like in August. Dinner, and then bed appeared as though pre-ordained. Raven-fed like Elijah, I was no longer surprised; but never stopped rejoicing.

I emptied the saddle-bag on a chair next day to re-pack my rucksack and when some sketches dropped out Mrs. Haviar gathered them up. They weren't very good but she asked me to do a drawing of her daughter, Erszi, an amazing and pretty little girl of about ten. I had often done sketches in Germany and Austria as a kind of thank-offering to hosts—no one seemed to mind their inexpertness—so I jumped at the suggestion and Erszi ran off excitedly to tidy her hair. When she was still not back after ten minutes, they gave her a shout and she arrived looking extraordinary in a cloche hat of her mother's, long ear-rings and a fox stole; she had covered her face with powder and had turned her lips into a sticky Cupid's bow. Perching on a tuffet, she crooked a bangled wrist on her hip while her other hand flourished a twelve-inch cigarette-holder and tapped off the ash with vampish languor. It was convincing and rather eerie, an advanced case of lamb dressed up as mutton. “Isn't she silly?” her mother said fondly. I'm not sure the sketch did her justice.

Later, back in her ordinary clothes, she and her father and I set off for Malek's quarters. I was armed with some valedictory lumps of sugar and steeled for an Arab's farewell to his steed. We found Malek fooling about with some ponies at the far end of a paddock but when I called him he cantered over with a gratifying flutter of mane and tail and I patted the blaze on his brow and stroked his beautiful arched neck for the last time. I said goodbye and set off.
My sitter, still elated by her recent avatar, kept waving and jumping up and down and shouting “Viszontlátásra!” until we were all out of earshot.

* * *

The Körös kept me company the whole day. The river was banked against flooding and all of it was wooded, so branches dappled the path and the river's edge with shadows all the way. Thistledown fluff from the willow-herb span across the water and diving frogs marked almost every step. Reeds and tall clumps of bullrushes sheltered families of moorhens, and purple dragonflies hovered and settled among the yellow flags. When I sat down for a smoke, an abrupt movement gave away an otter; he looked about, then ran along the root of a willow and slipped in with a plop which stirred the backwater with spreading rings. There was plenty of food for him: fish gleamed in the clear water and, a little further upstream, two boys were busy with long reeds and cork floats. Their catch was strung through the gills inside a hollow tree and we had scarcely exchanged greetings when there was a silver flash and another was whisked leaping out of the current. When I said “Eljen!”—Bravo! I hoped—they offered to give it to me but I felt shy about turning up at my next halt like Tobias. Cattle gathered under the branches and waded knee-deep while flocks, filling every inch of shade in the fields, hid from the noonday as still as fossils.

An abrupt swarm of Gypsies made me look among the tents and the carts in case they were my friends from north of Cegléd, but in vain. Men with bill-hooks carried long sheaves of reeds on their heads that bounced up and down as they walked. Women were thigh-deep in the water, washing and wringing out their rags and their tattered finery, and then festooning them over the undergrowth and branches, while troops of boys, like the ones on the Slovak shore at Easter, scoured the banks for the lairs of their just-edible quarry—voles, weasels, water-rats and so on. They left the
serious work to their little sisters, who trotted tirelessly alongside their only prospect of the day, calling out “Bácsi! Bácsi!”—for the masculine prey of small Gypsies are all honorary uncles; and their shrill uncle-uncle cries continued for about a furlong. When the reproachful diminuendo had died away I was alone again with nothing but swallows curvetting through the shadows or the occasional blue-green flash of a kingfisher to ruffle the stillness of leaves and water.

Early in the afternoon, the river branched and I went upstream beside the Sebes (swift) Körös, until a red-shingled steeple told me I had reached the old village of Körösladány.

The look of the Magyar word
kastély
—which is rather perversely pronounced ‘koshtay,' or very nearly—suggests, like
Schloss
, a fortified and castellated building, but the nearest English equivalent to most of those I saw in Hungary and Transylvania would be a manor house and the term leaps to mind when I try to conjure up the memory, blurred at the edges a little by the intervening decades, of the
kastély
at Körösladány. Single-storeyed like a ranch but with none of the ad hoc feeling the word suggests, it was a long ochre-coloured late eighteenth-century building with convoluted and rounded baroque pediments over great gates, faded tiles and house-martins' nests and louvred shutters hooked back to let in the late afternoon light. Leaving my things under the antlers in the hall, I was led through the open doors of several connecting rooms, meeting my hostess at the middle of a shadowy enfilade. She was charming and good-looking with straight, bobbed fair hair—I think it must have been parted in the middle for it was this, a few years later, that reminded me of her when I met Iris Tree. She wore a white linen dress and espadrilles and had a cigarette-case and a lit cigarette in her hand. “So here's the traveller,” she said in a kind, slightly husky voice and took me through a french window to where the rest of her family, except her husband, who was due back from Budapest next day, were assembled round tea things under tall chestnut trees whose pink and white steeples were stickily bursting out. I can see them gathered like a conversation
piece by Copley or Vuillard, and can almost catch their reflection in the china and silver. They were Countess Ilona Meran, just described, a son and daughter called Hansi and Marcsi, about thirteen and fourteen, and a much smaller girl called Helli, all three of them very good-looking and nice-mannered and a little grave. There was a friend, perhaps a relation, with horn-rimmed spectacles, called Christine Esterházy, and an Austrian governess. All except the last spoke English; but I can't remember a word that was uttered—only their appearance and the scene under the wide leaves and the charm of the hour. We sat talking until it was lighting-up time, and indoors pools of lamplight were being kindled with spills along the succession of lavender-smelling rooms. It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano. What music? I can't remember; but suddenly, sailing into my mind after all these years, there is a bowl on the piano full of enormous white and red peonies and a few petals have dropped on the polished floor.

While getting tidy for dinner, and later, before going to bed, I looked at the pictures on the walls of my room. There was a Schloss Glanegg poised on a precipitous rock and many Almásy kinsmen of Countess Ilona and several Wenckheims in furred and scimitared glory; and there was an early nineteenth-century colour print that I was very taken by. It showed a dashing post-Regency buck—I think he was called Zichy—with twirling beard and whiskers, a blue bird's-eye stock and an English scarlet hunting coat. He was one of those tremendous Hungarian centaurs who became famous in the Shires for the intrepid way they rode to hounds. Lounging about the lawn meet at Badminton, or in Ackermann prints of calamities at cut-and-laid fences, hounds in full cry, drawing Ranksborough Gorse, leaping the Whissendine Brook, chasing across green parishes from spire to spire, there they are; and, most notably, in those evening celebrations round laden tables, where bang-up Corinthians in evening pink, jumping to
their feet among scattered napkins and wine-coolers and empty bottles, flourish glasses in boisterous unison. The outline-keys in the corner, among the Osbaldestones and the Assheton-Smiths, often bear the names of one or two of these Nimrods from the Great Plain.
[8]

In the library the following day, while lessons went on next door, I found out as much as I could about the Alföld, until it was time to set off for a picnic. A kind of victoria bowled up to the front on twinkling spokes, and everyone piled in. I was very struck by the hat which went with the coachman's black-frogged livery. It was a sort of black felt pork-pie—or could it have been velvet?—with a brim turned up perpendicular and a black ostrich feather across the crown, fixed in a semicircle from front to back while two black ribands ending in fishtails fluttered behind. Was it a legacy of the Turkish spahis or the janissaries; or could it have survived from the early invading Magyars? (Such were the themes I brooded on these days.) There were many flourished hats and greetings on the way out and when we had driven about half a mile a quavering hail came from the wayside. Countess Ilona stopped the carriage, jumped down, and in a moment was being embraced by an old crone in a head-kerchief, and after cries of recognition and much talk and laughter—some tears, I think, and more embraces—she climbed in again, obviously moved: she kept waving back till we were out of sight. She was the mother of somebody from the village who had migrated to America fifteen years before and grown homesick. She had only been back two days.

We settled on a grassy bank under some willows at a bend in the Körös and feasted there while the horses munched and swished their tails in the shade a little way off. A heron glided through the branches and subsided among the flag-leaves on a midstream shoal. We were on the edge of a large wood. It was full of birds, and in the hushed afternoon hour when talk had languished, three
roe deer, with antlers beginning to spring, stole down the river's edge. There was some quiet singing on the way home, prompted by a song from the fields; Austrian and German and English and Hungarian. I was tongue-tied in the last, but they knew
Érik a, érik a búza kalász
, my favourite from Budapest. No song could have been more fitting: we were driving beside a wheat-field where swallows dipped and swerved above green ears that would soon be turning, just as the song described. It was the hour of jangling bells and lowing and bleating as flocks and cattle, all fiery in golden dust clouds, converged on the village, and our return to the
kastély
coincided with its owner's arrival. Graf Johann—or Hansi—Meran was very tall with dark hair and moustache and fine aquiline looks that were marked by an expression of great kindness. His children dashed upon him and when he had disentangled himself he greeted the others by kissing first hands then cheeks in that simultaneously polite and affectionate way I had first seen in Upper Austria.

The charms of this place and its inhabitants sound unrelievedly and improbably perfect. I am aware of this, but I can only set it down as it struck me. Also the stay had another dimension, an unexpected one which gave sudden reality to whole fragments of European history of a century earlier and more. Once again, pictures in my room put me on the track. One of these showed Archduke Charles, flag in hand, charging the Napoleonic army through the reeds of Aspern. (His statue opposite Prince Eugene on the Heldenplatz in Vienna shows him at the same moment, on a frenetically rearing steed. How surprised he would have been! He had refused all statues and honours during his lifetime.) I had first become aware of him when I gazed across the Danube at the Marchfeld after leaving Vienna: it was there, a few miles from Wagram, that the battle, the first allied victory over Napoleon, was fiercely fought and won. The next print showed his brother, the subject of that endless song in deep Styrian dialect called the
Erzherzog-Johanns-Lied
: I had first heard it at an inn opposite Pöchlarn and often since. These brothers, two of many, were
grandchildren of Maria Theresa, nephews of Marie Antoinette, and sons of Leopold II; and their elder brother, who succeeded as Francis II, was the last Holy Roman Emperor. (Lest Napoleon should attempt to usurp it, he gave up the stupendous honour and became Emperor of Austria, just over a thousand years after the crowning of Charlemagne.)

But Archduke Johann was the most interesting of them. He courageously led an army against Napoleon at the age of eighteen, governed provinces with wisdom and justice and was often called to high office at critical times. Intelligent, determined and steeped in the principles of Rousseau, he was a lifelong opponent of Metternich and his passion for the simplicities of life in the mountains made him a sort of uncrowned king of the Alps from Croatia to Switzerland. In the romantic picture in my room, made about 1830, he was leaning on an alpenstock among forested peaks, a fowling piece on his shoulder, and a broad-brimmed wideawake was thrust back from a thoughtful brow. What a relief to record the qualities of these Habsburg paragons! Courage, wisdom, capacity, imagination and a passion for justice led them in ways deeply at variance with the ill-starred fortunes of their dynasty, and this particular prince put the final touch to his abhorrence of the capital by a morganatic marriage to the daughter of a Styrian postmaster. She and their children were given a title from what was then Meran, in the South Tyrol, now Merano in the Alto Adige.