5. ACROSS THE FOREST

“FRATER Petre, possumusne kugli ludere post Vesperas?”

“Hodie non possumus, fili,” Brother Peter said. “Tarde nimium est. Cras poterimus.”

“Quando? Qua hora?”

“Statim post Missam. Expecte me ad egressum ecclesiae.”

“Bene, frater, sed nonne ante Missam fieri potest?”

“Velnon. Est contra regulam nostram.”

“Eheu!”

Easy to spot the odd man out in this dog-Latin! Kugli—Kegeln in German—is Magyar for skittles. Brother Peter was assistant guest-master in the Conventual Franciscan Abbey of Maria Radna, and the cheerful face and tonsured head, the sandals, brown hooded habit and the white cord knotted round his wide waist gave him a convincing look of Friar Tuck; and as we had no common tongue, Latin was forced on us. (My share of the conversation was less glib than it looks. I thought out each sentence in advance, hoping to place a supine in um; and I was struck by the use of velnon. I couldn’t find it in Latin dictionaries later so perhaps it was just the two words, a negative only used in church circles to take the place of the non-existent ‘no’; but it sounded single. ‘Yes’ was etiam.) Except for construing at school or spouting verse on the road, I had no more spoken Latin than anyone else, so all this gave an exhilarating illusion of slipping back to the time when Latin was the common tongue of literate Europe: it conjured up the world of the wandering scholars whom I had presumptuously thought of as models before setting out, and lately rather drifted away from.

The way from Ötvenes that morning had run south-east until the wooded hills fell asunder about twenty miles east of Arad, where my path joined the beautiful valley of the Maros; and then, a little way upstream, the bronze cupolas of the Maria Radna caught the afternoon light. The Abbey was founded in 1520, but nobody, at a glance, would have connected this High Baroque pile with the Franciscan Order. Destroyed in the sixteenth century by the army of Mustafa II, it was re-built in its new shape when the Ottomans were routed a hundred years later. Then a wonder-working image of Our Lady made it famous; patronage accumulated, and the church filled with pilgrims and ex votos.

Dappled with the shadows of chestnut leaves, a wide staircase climbed between the tall baroque statues of St. Francis of Assisi and St. John Nepomuk. At the top, I fell in with Brother Peter setting up an array of skittles. He was looking for someone to play with, so my arrival was well-timed and we played all through the late afternoon, happily incommunicado except for our occasional cumbrous Latin. It needed some strength to send the heavy balls clashing and scattering among the giant ninepins: we were both in a muck-sweat when the bell for Vespers put an end to play and it was after helping him collect the skittles that the foregoing colloquy took place. Vespers over, he led me to a guest cell and later to the refectory, where about forty monks sat down to supper while one of them read aloud from a pulpit, first in Latin and then in Magyar.[1] I met him again in the cloisters after Compline and asked him, “Dormitum ibant omnes?”—I had been ready for it!—but he only smiled and put a finger across his lips: it was the first time I had stayed under a monastic roof and the magnum silentium had begun.

Next morning, 2nd June, was a Sunday, and he was busy with visitors, so I waited as bidden, fearing he might have to play non possum; but he arrived in a flurry of cord and homespun, and when we had finished our game, I tried to leave some money; he waved it aside—I was a stranger, a viator and a pelegrinus; so I dropped some coins through a slot in the church with a face-saving jingle. Helping me on with my rucksack, he said, “May God go with you,” in Latin, and then, “Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis.” Impressed by the words, and rather puzzled, I started down the great staircase towards the river; they had been spoken like a quotation and I wondered where they came from.[2]

* * *

When the river Danube had fallen behind a month earlier, then the Tisza and finally the Great Hungarian Plain, I had felt I was saying goodbye to famous landmarks. I had never heard of the Maros.[3]

It is the great river of Transylvania and its tributaries spread like a fan of nerve-ends across the whole western slant of the Carpathians where they rush downhill and cohere in a great stream that wends south-westwards through minor ranges, sweeps past the Abbey, and then rolls on into Hungary. At Szeged it joins the Tisza about seventy miles south of the bridge that Melek and I had clip-clopped across at Szolnok; then the united waters drop deep into Yugoslavia and enter the Danube; soon the Sava, swollen with tribute from Slavonia and the Alps, joins the great river under the walls of Belgrade and then, with all their individualities drowned in the Danubian currents, they advance on the Iron Gates and head for the Black Sea.

Hills enclosed the north bank of this particular reach and the monastery was hardly out of sight before the tapering ruins of the castle of Solymos jutted on a pedestal of rock; it was a stronghold of the great John Hunyadi but much older than he. Then the trees of the foothills began to pile up in waves, with sprays of wild lilac scattered among the branches. The hills on the other shore stood aloof, and between the two ranges the great river lazily unwound. Sometimes it looped away for a mile or two, then meandered back and the clouds of willows and aspens that marked its windings were interspersed with poplars tapering in spindles or expanding like butterfly nets. The women in the fields wore kerchiefs on their heads under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty.

I found a clump of alders full of buttercups, poppies and dandelion-clocks, ate bread and cheese and gave way to the prevailing lethargy; then woke up with greenfinches and a cloud of gnats fidgeting in the twigs overhead. I hadn’t far to go. It had been arranged that I should stay the night at Mr. v. Konopy’s. I learnt that I had passed the kastély a few miles back, so I got a lift on a hay-waggon and the driver soon pointed out a country house jutting from the wooded hillside.

* * *

It might have been a rural deanery, and Mr. v. Konopy, with his mild manner and silvery hair, could easily have been a clergyman; there was a touch of Evensong about him. His hobby was wheat-breeding and the two Swedish colleagues staying with him were as soft-voiced and as quiet as he. Wheat-ears covered the furniture and one of the Swedes, well versed in the English terminology of his passion, explained as we strolled from specimen to specimen the differences between turgid ears and the common bearded kind; then we surveyed the Polish variety and appraised the spikelets and the awns, the median florets and the glumes. He had brought Mr. v. Konopy a German edition of The Story of San Michele, which had been all the rage in England a few years earlier. Two calm days drifted while he read it aloud. It was all very different from the recent ambience of antlers and hooves and Tibor’s memories of champagne out of dancers’ slippers.

* * *

The hills along the north bank grew higher and as the trees multiplied, I had the feeling of plunging inextricably in deep and unknown regions. By mid-afternoon I got to Soborsin,[4] where a Nádasdy château lay secluded in the woods, and crossed a bridge to the other bank. Although this region south of the river was Transylvanian in feeling, strictly speaking it was the north-easternmost corner of the old Banat of Temesvár, named after its capital—Timis, oara in Rumanian—which lies to the west. Lost by Hungary to the advancing Turks in the sixteenth century and largely depopulated, it was reconquered by Prince Eugene and Count Pálffy two centuries later, and re-settled. The largest single element of the modern province was Rumanian, as it had been all along my itinerary, but it was said that the newcomers were of such varied origins that a chameleon placed on a coloured population-map of the Banat would explode.[5]

After an hour or two, I loped exhausted through long shadows to the kastély at Kápolnás. Double flights of steps mounted to a balustraded terrace, where people were sitting out in the cool moment before the sun set; there were glimpses through french windows of lighted rooms beyond. Count Paul Teleki, my kind geographical benefactor in Budapest, had written to the owner, who was his first cousin, and I had telephoned the day before. He was called Count Eugene of the same name—Jenö in Hungarian—and he got up and ambled hospitably across.

“So you managed it?” he said kindly; then, rather surprisingly, “Come and sit ye doon.”

He was a tall, spreading, easy-going middle-aged man, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a remarkably intelligent, slightly ugly and very amusing face; like his cousin’s, it had a remotely Asiatic look. I knew he was a famous entomologist and a great authority on moths, especially those of the Far East, and he was said to keep two insect-hunters permanently busy, one in China, the other in Japan, sending him back a steady flow of specimens. Lepidoptera were on parade in glass cases all over the house. Some of them were large and furry and brightly coloured, some drab or stick-like or transparent and some almost too small to see. Apart from this, he had all the instincts of a polymath: everything aroused his curiosity and sent him climbing unwieldily up the library steps. He delighted in gossip and comic stories, and he had a passion for limericks, the racier the better. He would reminisce for hours: one fascinating anecdote would lead to another; many of them depicted famous or venerable figures in an absurd but always amusing light. He thirsted for similar stories and success was rewarded by overmastering though nearly silent laughter, upheavals of inaudible hilarity that left him carefully wiping his spectacles with his handkerchief as composure returned. He was much travelled and knew the British Isles well; his English was nearly perfect and a nanny from the Highlands had left him with a stock of Scotch sayings uttered with just a hint of inverted commas: asked what he thought of a neighbour, he said, “I hae me doots”; and, toying with some dilemma, “I’ll dree my own weird.” (Before the war, it would have been hard to exaggerate the sway of British nannies among some Central European children; toes kept count of pigs going to market before fingers learnt to tell beads and Three Blind Mice rushed in much earlier than inklings of the Trinity). His wife, Countess Catherine—Tinka—was tall, dark-haired, fine-looking, very kind and very intelligent, and widely read in quite different fields from his. In one particular, she was literally unique in this marooned Hungarian society: she was Rumanian; but of an unusual kind. A number of Hungarian families in Transylvania had, in fact—however fervently Hungarian they became when they rose in the world—once been of Rumanian stock. The Countess’s ancestors were from exactly this mould, except that, though they were Hungarian nobles, they remembered their origins and supported Rumanian aspirations. Magyar may have been their earliest language for generations; but, as MPs, they always expressed heterodox views in the Budapest parliament. Count Jenö, scion of one of the great Hungarian houses of Transylvania, was as deeply rooted in post-war resentment as any backwoods squire, though he was not emphatic in expressing it; while Countess Tinka, when occasion arose, was discreetly eloquent on the opposite side; and when one of them uttered controversial views, the other would later make it privately clear to a guest that they were nonsense. (“What a pity! Jenö’s such a clever man, but so biased,” and, “Well, I’m afraid Tinka was talking through her hat again...”) They were extremely fond of each other and far too civilised for public contradiction. There was a nice looking, rather spoilt son called Michael and his Hungarian tutor at the castle, and a moving population of visitors; and one was aware of the Countess’s recently invalid mother in one wing of the building. “She’s not feeling quite the thing,” the Count said.

* * *

Dense woods shot up steeply behind the house. In front, wavering meadows sank gently towards the Maros but the steep woods were echoed on the northern bank. “It’s only early nineteenth-century,” the Count said, referring to his house, “and perhaps a bit showy.” Rusticated ashlars formed the first storey, pilasters rose to a cornice and fluted Corinthian columns ran the length of a façade adorned with the masks of sibyls and nymphs and satyrs.

The terrace was the Count’s afternoon and evening retreat. He would sit and talk in one of the wicker chairs for hours or stroll disquisitively under a grey linen sunshade lined with green. A more ambitious walk led to the stables. A loft there harboured fantails and a brood of tumbler pigeons which soared, hovered, turned back-somersaults, then dropped like stones and recovered in a flurry of snowy plumage that was entrancing to watch. Lilac shaded the homeward path. The peonies were dropping their last petals and the air was full of the scent of lime trees in flower.

But the library, with its thousands of books and its nets and vascula and collector’s gear, was his favourite haunt. He led me there after breakfast and I would explore with the step-ladder while he settled down at his table with a sigh of pleasure. Unpacking parcels, covered with strange stamps and posted in the foothills of Fujiyama or at some river-port on the Yangtse, he would begin sorting out the contents with tweezers, inspecting them under a lens or a microscope and accompanying his task with a murmured multilingual commentary. “...Jól van...gyönyörü!... What a beauty. Look at this chap! Ah so there you are at last!...and here’s Euploea leucostictus...from Java, I bet...Hullo. What’s this?...I’ll look him up in Hampson...or Kirby...I dinna ken, I dinna ken...or in Breitenbach, perhaps...” It was impossible to think of anyone happier. As far as I was concerned, boundless treasures beckoned: rows of encyclopaedias in several languages, the cynical Latin verses of Janus Pannonius, a fifteenth-century Hungaro-Croatian bishop of Pécs, ‘the Martial of Hungary’; memoirs and prints of old Transylvanian life, letters-patent, transfers of villeins, parchment title-deeds with bulky red seals; genealogies gleaming with scutcheons tricked or illuminated in faded hues and the marvellous and many-volumed Geographie Universelle of Elysée Reclus. A score of temptations lured one to trifle the morning away.

The Count was prone to abstruse prepossessions. At the moment he was much taken by Hugo v. Kutschera’s theory about the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe: could they really spring from the inhabitants of the old Khazar empire, whose rulers abandoned paganism for the Jewish faith in the Dark Ages? He was particularly interested by the evidence of correspondence between Itil—the Khazar capital near the mouth of the Volga, roughly on the site of Astrakhan—and the Hebrew scholars of Cordova: were the letters forgeries? Had King Joseph of the Khazars and the Andalusian Rabbi Hazdai-ibn-Shaprut really been in touch?[6] Once, following up some research on the runic inscriptions of the Goths, he got led astray and, looking up from a book, asked in a surprised voice what I thought the Huns used to wear. I said I should have guessed the hides of animals with some metal here and there. “So should I,” he said, “but we are wrong,” and he read out from Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of the mission to Attila: “They are clad in linen raiment or in the skins of field mice sewn together.”[7]

His family had always been immersed in travel and science and literature. One branch explored Central Africa and discovered lakes and volcanoes on the Ethiopian border; my Budapest friend had mapped archipelagoes in the Far East; Count Samuel Teleki, a wily Transylvanian chancellor in the eighteenth century gathered 40,000 books together in Márosvásarhély—Târgu Mures, in Rumanian—in a library specially built for them, and gave it to the town: it was crammed with incunabula and princeps editions and manuscripts, including one of the earliest of Tacitus. (He must be the same as a namesake who collected and edited the epigrams of Pannonius.) A Count Joseph Teleki, travelling in France with this bibliophile cousin, became a friend and partisan of Rousseau and launched a clever attack on Voltaire, which ran into three editions; and here it was on the shelf: Essai sur la Foiblesse des Esprits Forts, Leyden, 1760. My bedroom contained part of the library’s overflow: Henty, Ballantyne, Jock of the Bushveld, Owd Bob, The Story of the Red Deer, Black Beauty, The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories. There were any amount of Tauchnitz editions, industriously tunnelled by insects, faded by the last summers of the Habsburg monarchy and redolent of those peaceful times when, apart from the habitual ragged fusillade in the Balkans, scarcely a shot was fired between the battle of Sedan and Sarajevo: Ouida, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, The Dolly Dialogues, My Friend Prospero, The Cardinal’s Snuffbox, The Indiscretions of Ambrosine, Elizabeth and her German Garden; Maupassant, Gyp, Paul de Kock, Victor Margueritte, early Colette... But the most important and revealing trove was half a dozen historical novels by the Hungarian writer Maurus Jókai (1825–1904), translated in Victorian days: ’Midst the Wild Carpathians, Slaves of the Padishah, An Hungarian Nabob, The Nameless Castle, The Poor Plutocrats, Pretty Michael, Halil the Pedlar, Ein Fürstensohn—there were several more. The plots were laid in stirring times: the Kossuth rebellion, the wars against the Turks with the whole of Transylvania going up in flames; soaring castles, yawning chasms, wolves, feuding magnates, janissaries, spahis, pashas with six horsetails, sieges, battle-fields and last stands; stories involving all the great figures of local history: Hunyadi, Zrinyi, Thököly, the Rákóczi dynasty, Bocskays, Bethlens, Báthorys, Bánffys—B’s seem to abound among Transylvanian leaders and princes; and Telekis, of course. The plots were a heady mixture of Scott, Harrison Ainsworth and Dumas père transposed to the Carpathians and the puszta. It was after dipping into these and asking about them, on the banks of the Maros where the Countess had taken us all to a bathing picnic, that the idea of an historical jaunt cropped up.

It warranted the emergence of the car, a solemn event in these regions of bad roads. The Countess drove, and when a wandering buffalo held us up, the Count, with memories of Cowes, would lift his hand and murmur, “Sail before steam!” and we would wait while it lumbered over. We drove eastwards along the leafy north bank of the river, turned south under the steep, ruin-crowned hill at Deva,[8] and got out a few valleys further on, where precariously tall stone piers lifted a narrow bridge over a chasm.

On the other side perched the castle of Vajdahunyad,[9] chief stronghold of the great John Hunyadi, a building so fantastic and theatrical that, at a first glance, it looked totally unreal. Like many castles, it had once been damaged by fire and built up again in its former shape; but it was perfectly genuine. The bridge led to a sallyport in a tall barbican which ended high above in a colonnade supporting a vertiginous roof that soared in a wedge, like the great barbicans in Prague: spikes of metal or shingle erected for the laming of infernal cavalry flying low after dark. Towers, clustering at different heights, some square and some round and all of them frilled with machicolations, were embedded in the steep fabric. The light showing between the pillars holding up the great angular cowl of the barbican gave the pile an airy, lifted, slightly improbable look, and the closely spaced parade of the perpendicular buttresses made the upward thrust still more impetuous. Beginning deep in the abyss, these piers of masonry ascended the curtain wall and the donjon and the outside of the banqueting hall in unbroken flight and then burst out high above in a row of half-salient and half-engaged octagonal side-towers, all of them lighted by windows which carried on a dominating line of mullioned lancets, and an interweaving network of late gothic tracery branched and flourished and linked them together with all the impulse and elaboration of the French Flamboyant style.

Along the eaves of the precipice of roof overhead, the jutting towers ended in disengaged extinguisher-tops, cones that alternated with faceted octagonal pyramids and barbed the eaves with a procession of spikes, while beyond them coloured tiles diapered the roofs in intricate patterns, like those on St. Stephen’s in Vienna. Beyond the sallyport, the inner courtyard mounted in galleries and balustrades and tiers of Romanesque arches; cusped ogees led to spiralling steps; and indoors, springing from the leafy capitals of polygonal rose-coloured marble pillars, beautiful late gothic vaults closed over the Hall of the Knights. I had seen nothing like it since Vienna and Prague; the sudden outburst of flamboyant moulding conjured up the Hradcany and the banks of the Loire.[10]

My head was full of Hunyadi and I paced the yards and climbed the steps and explored the vaulted chambers in a state of great excitement. He is the most celebrated hero in Hungarian history; Rumanians rightly claim him as a kinsman; and he was the greatest fifteenth-century champion of the whole of Christendom. When young, he entered the service of King Sigismund of Hungary (son of the blind King of Bohemia killed at Crecy; and, later, Holy Roman Emperor), whose natural son Hunyadi was sometimes rumoured to be. He won brilliant victories, ruled Transylvania in times of trouble and finally administered the whole kingdom. His campaign in the Balkans broke the Sultan’s power in Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania; and his greatest single achievement was the rout, outside beleaguered Belgrade, of the army of Mehmet II, three years after the conquering Sultan had captured Constantinople. This deliverance, and the triumph over the invincible Mehmet, were re-celebrated daily by church bells rung at noon throughout the Catholic world; in Hungary they still are. The victory had reprieved the kingdom for seventy more years, until the battle of Mohács, in fact. Known all over Europe as the White Knight, he was not only a great commander and statesman, but a rock of uprightness in a kingdom and an age that seethed with conspiracy.[11]

Born in late Plantagenet times, he was coeval with Joan of Arc and the Wars of the Roses. (It is only by links like these, and sometimes by dress, that I can fix historical figures in their backgrounds, and I put them in these pages now and then in case the reader suffers in the same way.) The architectural flourishes on the castle may have been the work of his famous son, who enlarged it.[12] Matthias, in a slightly different way, was as remarkable as his father. Usually known as Matthias Corvinus or Corvin from the raven on their shield, he accompanied his father’s campaigns at the age of twelve; later he was elected to the throne of Hungary by forty thousand nobles precariously assembled on the frozen Danube and he became one of their greatest kings. Fresh victories over the Turks continued his father’s task in the Balkans; he scattered the armies of the Poles and the Emperor and strove with the Hussites; and the Czech Catholics elected him King of Bohemia. He invested Breslau, occupied Ancona, recovered Otranto from the Turks, and his reduction of half Austria was marked by a triumphal entry into Vienna. Apart from his martial gifts, he was a statesman, a legislator, an orator and a scholar of singular brilliance who used to sit up half the night over his books. ‘Undisputably the greatest man of his day,’ an English historian says, ‘and one of the greatest who ever reigned.’ He was profoundly learned, a polyglot, a passionate humanist, the collector of the fabulous Corvinus Library, and a great palace-builder—a splendid Renaissance prince, in fact; but, unlike many of these (the historian continues), ‘with his immeasurable experience of ingratitude and treachery, he was never guilty of a single cruel or vindictive action.’

The fine state of the castle was an exception to the post-war neglect or abolition of Hungarian monuments which I had been hearing about, and for a very good reason. ‘János Hunyadi,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and nearly all historians agree, ‘was the son of Vojk (or Vaic), a magyarised Vlach,’ which means that the great crusader was of Rumanian origin. The Rumanians felt, and still feel a justifiable pride in their share in these two paragons, especially in the father; perhaps the son’s Western field of activity, and an identification with the Catholic Church even closer than his father’s, carried him too far from the ambit of the Orthodox East. Of course Rumanians were proud of him, and with every right. But anyone reading the explanatory notices inside the castle might assume that Hunyadi was a purely Rumanian hero: the Hungarian activities with which his whole life was bound up were underplayed to such a degree that he might have had nothing to do with the kingdom. It was sad to see this shining figure dragged into the bitterness and murk of territorial rivalry. The splendour seemed all at once dim and parochial.

Count Jenö reacted with fatalism, “They seem to think the Treaty of Trianon awarded them Hungarian history as well as territory,” he said, moodily uncorking a bottle. “It’s like Corsicans celebrating Napoleon without mentioning France.” Turning our backs on the rust and slag of some iron-works nearby, we had settled under a tree. The castle soared straight ahead. “Well,” the Countess said, laying plates on the grass and handing round chicken sandwiches, “I expect the Hungarians underplayed the Rumanian side.”

I expect they did.

* * *

So the first weeks of June slipped by with books and talk and jaunts and exchanges of visits. Many neighbours called; the hair of one of them was dyed a rich and obvious auburn. “He’s great fun,” said the Count. “But his appearance! O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!” They took me with them to luncheon at the Nádasdy château across the river; it was inhabited by a tall, distinguished couple: Hunyadis, like the hero, but not relations, I believe. A Hungarian diplomatist called Baron Apor was staying with them—it is odd how figures seen only once suddenly shoot into the memory, complete at all points: he had a spherical, totally shaven head and I can see the shine of his scalp, and the veined bloodstone on his signet ring, as though he had left the room a minute ago; but can’t recall a syllable that was said.

A cousin of the Countess lived at Bulci, a few miles away, and their family’s adherence to Rumanian causes in the pre-war Hungarian parliament had stood him in good stead when it was over. With a high-bridged nose and receding chin, fiftyish, cosmopolitan, urbane and clever, he was an excellent shot, and King Carol had appointed him Grand Veneur du Roi, or Master of the Royal Hunt; the position involved game, beaters and shooting rather than horses and hounds. (Count Jenö explained—with a sniff, I thought—that his cousin-in-law’s footing in both camps might have suggested him to the King as a possible bridge between the Rumanians and the Hungarian Transylvanians: then he shrugged dismissively, and said, “What a hope!”) The Grand Veneur had a house-party from Bucharest. “He’s bringing them over for a bite!” the Count announced; and there was daily to-and-fro movement during their stay.

Apart from peasants and my hostess—who, in a way, only half counted—these were the only Rumanians I had met; and, from the Regat or the ‘Old Kingdom,’ absolutely the first. One was a tall diplomatist with a monocle, rather aloof and quiet, a minister on leave called Grégoire Duca.[13] The well-cut Paris country clothes and the pearls of the women, and their discreet but just detectable scent transported ported us to the pages of Vogue. All of them spoke English well, but, rather astonishingly, conversed among themselves in French as though it were their first language; and, strangely, so it was. One, extremely beautiful and with enormous grey-green eyes, was the daughter of a former Foreign Minister. (At the opera in Paris, where he was staying for the Peace Conference, a friend had asked him who someone—another Rumanian—had married; and he had answered, truthfully, “Une grue, hélas,” “Alas, a harlot”; and a few moments later, a hand appeared from the next box, holding a visiting card from the husband in question; there was a duel with pistols and her father was shot through the stomach and spent the rest of his life in great pain.) “Their duels are much worse than our affairs with sabres, where you just slash away,” the Count said. “They go in for pistols—or rapiers which are just as bad.” Another woman—chalk white, dressed all in black with a long jade cigarette-holder and transfigured in a permanent cloud of smoke—was a passionate and famous bridge player and rather frightening; another, Marcelle, nice-looking and intelligent, was attached to a tall, charming and good-looking diplomatist called Josias v. Rantzau. When trim chauffeurs had driven them off in two dark and gleaming motor-cars, the Count suggested a wee drappie in the library and it was as we sipped that we learnt all about them. “Rantzau is First Secretary at the German Legation,” Count Jenö said, “comes from Holstein; they are great people there. Mixed up with the court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz or is it Schwerin?—I never can remember. Louis XIV made one of them a marshal of France but Mazarin locked him up in the Bastille...” (I repeat these details because these new acquaintances re-appear three hundred miles and five months further on; Josias v. Rantzau and I got to know each other well, as we shall see;[14] and some of them recurred in my life later still, and long after these travels came to an end.)

“How smart they are,” the Countess said, rather ruefully. “They make one feel very rustic and dowdy.”

“‘And what ho! when they lifted the lid!’” Count Jenö murmured, as he lifted the top off a freshly-arrived box of specimens. In spite of his eagerness for new limericks, he remained true to those he had learnt in his youth. “‘What ho! when they lifted the lid!’” he repeated in delectation, tweezers in hand; the word ‘chuckle’ might have been coined for him. I had thought of a riddle during the night and sprang it on him at breakfast:

PLF, “Which is the most entomological of Shakespeare’s plays?”

JT (after a pause), “I give up.”

PLF, “Antennae and Coleoptera.”

It was a great success and the words immediately wove themselves into the multilingual comment and soliloquy and the fragments of limerick that accompanied his task of unpacking and classification—“Ah! There’s a bonny wee fellow!... Kenspeckle! Antennae and Coleoptera, indeed! Retenetes!”[15] While he adjusted the milled controls of his microscope, I settled with a pile of books and a peaceful library morning lay ahead.

But soon the Countess came in, looking troubled. Her mother had taken a steep and sudden turn for the worse: it looked as though the kastély might be turned into a house of mourning. My next stepping-stone had been arranged; it was the other side of the river at Zám, some miles upstream; and I determined, against polite demur, to set off in the morning.

* * *

Strictly speaking, Zám was the first real Transylvanian halt on this journey. The frontier of the old principality lay just west of the village, and its southern border was the river. Xenia, the kastély-dweller there, was thirty years old but looked much younger. She was very pretty and altogether unusual. Her father, Michael Csernovitz, whom everyone spoke of with affection, had been to school in England and travelled all over the world, and the tall, exotic trees he had brought back overshadowed the walks and the pools. When Count Jenö was mentor to a newcomer (as he was here, with me) history seemed to drop from the air and spring out of the ground. He told me that a collateral ancestor of Csernovitz had been the famous Arsenius, independent Orthodox Patriarch of Ipek,[16] which stands on the edge of Albania, Montenegro and the old Sanjak of Novipazar. At the Emperor Leopold’s prompting, he rose against the Turks at the time of Prince Eugene’s great advance in 1717 which led to yet another storming of Belgrade. But when the Turkish re-capture of the fortress threatened revenge, the Emperor granted asylum to Arsenius and his kin (hence the presence of Xenia’s family at Zám) and his 40,000 Serbian followers were scattered all over the Habsburg dominions. The Csernovitzes remained Orthodox—‘Greek Oriental’ as they called it thereabouts—and Count Jenö and Xenia’s other friends used to tease her about her wild Serbian blood. There was something arresting and unforgettable about her ivory complexion and raven hair and wide sloe-black eyes. The house had remained uninhabited for some time and there was a touch of melancholy about it, and of magic, too. At least, so it seemed for the few days I was there as we walked under the Himalayan and Patagonian trees and looked down at the Maros, which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales.

* * *

The last true Transylvanian sojourn and the longest unfolded some miles further along the Maros and every detail sticks in my mind.

I had heard of István[17] as far back as Budapest and we had met once or twice among the moths and the limericks at Kápolnás, where they loved him. He had been sent to school at the Theresianum, that Viennese establishment set up by Maria Theresa for sons of her noble subjects: kshatriyas in a Brahminical hierarchy which had remained unaltered until the Empire and the Kingdom had both vanished forever. (The place was closely linked to the Konsular Akademie, where I had pored over maps in February; and, which rather impressed me, the students of both places formerly wore cocked hats and dress-swords, like Young Törless.) He ran away to join a Hussar regiment during the War and was commissioned at once, just in time for all the disasters. Later, during the Béla Kun regime, he escaped from one of Szamuely’s execution squads and was involved in the troubled aftermath; and soon afterwards Transylvania was ceded to Rumania. Cultivated, tall, fine-looking with a hawk’s nose, a high forehead and wide clear blue eyes like a francolin’s, he was a brilliant shot, horseman and steeplechaser, and a virtuoso in all he took up. He was now in his early thirties and at the height of his vigour; and his dash, charm, enterprise and humour made him liked by everyone, though it sometimes landed him in scrapes, including four of ‘those affairs with sabres,’ each time as the challenged party. Land-reform soon left very little of an estate which, though it had always prospered, had never been enormous. His family’s tenure had been long; his elderly parents still lived there. He was linked with a deep atavistic attachment to the place, and though managing the remnant of arable and forest had kept him from seeking new fortunes abroad, the confinement irked him. When we talked of my earlier intention of joining the Indian army, his eyes kindled. “I’d have loved that!” he said. “Could I do it now, do you think?” Why not? An Irish O’Donnell had been governor of Transylvania in the eighteenth century; “and what about that chap Rantzau’s relation—a Holsteiner!—commanding an army for Louis XIV? I would be very happy with a squadron of Bengal Lancers!” He could see himself clearly in the role, and so could I.[18] He poured new drinks and sighed; how provincial and constricted the world had become! I admired him very much; he was tremendous fun, and we became great friends. (Like nearly everyone in these pages, he vanished from sight when the War came and the subsequent uprooting and dispersal interposed eight years before we were able to pick up the threads, and then it was by chance.)

Why not stay on a month or two, he would urge. Or a year? And what was all the hurry, even when I did set off?

“I’ve got an idea!” he exclaimed at luncheon. “We’ll all club together and buy you a calf! You could drive it along the road in front of you. When it grows up, you can introduce it to a bull; and then there’s another calf; and later on, another. You could arrive in Constantinople in a few years with an enormous herd...”

Meanwhile, like a kind host, he was eager that I should miss nothing. One of the neighbours we called on was a serious, elderly Swabian who asked me what I was studying: “Was studieren Sie?” It was an awkward question; I couldn’t think of an answer. Languages? Art? Geography? Folklore? Literature? None of them seemed to fit. Seconds ticked by, and in desperation, I said, “Gar nichts!”—“Absolutely nothing!” The ensuing shocked silence lasted longer still and it was even more uncomfortable. For a German worshipper of diligence and application—Fleissigkeit, indeed—my confession was blasphemy, and István laughed intermittently all the way home. Absence prevented us from visiting another neighbour he thought I would be interested in. Gróf K, who lived in the Hátszeg valley beyond Vajdahunyad—Hunedoara—sounded a kind of Squire Weston, with a dash of Mytton and Waterton thrown in. “I once saw him get on a horse for a bet,” István said. “Then someone tied a bag over its head. It went mad, but he managed to stay on for five minutes.”

István’s Rumanian was fluent in practical country matters, and one or two farming details even came to him more readily in the vernacular, but too limited for anything abstract or high-flown. Once we supped with forty peasants and farmers, some of them the new owners of his land, at a trestle-table in a clump of beech trees; and he took me to see an old shepherd, who unfolded tales of spirits, fairies and werewolves. (Priculici, akin to the Slavonic vrkolak, were named; they were vampires. And stafi and strigoi, who sounded like a mixture of evil spirits and ghosts; and witches too, if strigoi, like the Italian strega, comes from the Latin stryx.) All the country people thereabouts believed in these supernaturals and dreaded them; werewolves lurked, ready to change shape at dusk; and woe to man or beast who drank the rainwater out of a bear’s footprint! He also took me to a withered crone who was a witch, and begged her to recite some metrical spells. She intoned them through gums which held one dark tooth like the single eye of the Three Grey Sisters and I took down a few of them phonetically: mysterious, alliterative incantations: descântece, as they are called. I met similar ones in Moldavia later on.

* * *

The kastély was much older than any I had stayed in so far. In aspect a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead, it stood on a tree-covered knoll overlooking the Maros, and the woods, rolling on beyond, climbed into the distance. A flattened arch through the massive ochre walls gave on a courtyard where gigantic chestnut trees still dropped their petals and the pigeons on the cobbles underneath would suddenly take off with a noise like the wind. Two sheepdogs and their puppies always bounded forward in greeting and the young storks nesting on a moss-covered barn were beginning to stretch their necks among the scarlet legs of their parents. Stables, granaries and coach-houses with carriages, waggons and sleighs lined one side of the yard and the other three were colonnades, like a cloister of square pillars sliced at the corners into octagons, and constantly traversed by the swish of the martins whose nests congregated there. Green and purple panes glimmered in a fanlight at the far end of an arcade, and the door beneath led to a loggia where we sat at night looking out over a wide vista of timber and water. Indoors, shaded paraffin lamps shed their lustre on the fine portrait of an ambassadorial ancestor and the familiar properties of a Transylvanian interior; the scutcheon scattered about the house and carved over the gate showed a bent bow with an arrow pointing skywards; at a venture, as it were.

Withdrawn from life in a cloud of smoke, István’s elderly and heavily-moustached father puffed away testily behind the pages of a week-old Pesti Hirláp; but his mother, who spoke in French whenever I lagged behind in German, was quick and amusing, with a touch of severity and a clear glance like István’s and that of his sister Ilona, who was quiet and good and kind; and after dinner they would bring their sewing out of doors, while Sándor, a correct, elderly manservant, arranged the coffee and decanters and glasses. (Several old servants wandered about the kastély; another man looked after the horses and drove the ancient carriage; and frail and aged dependants lingered in the offing. There was little actual cash about, but plenty of everything else, and I think the staff—like the family, so to speak—were paid in kind. This was exactly how Moldavian boyars managed, further east.) Every night István chopped up some peppery tobacco leaves on the side-board and Ilona would arrange the flakes on a strip of linen between the two spools of a patent machine and turn out beautifully made cigarettes for all of us; and, when she and her mother retired, she left a heap of new ones ready. Once or twice we sat up over old maps: István had a passion for Napoleon’s campaigns; but usually we just sat and talked, sometimes till dawn. He hated going to bed as much as I did; when the supply of cigarettes ran out, he rolled them by hand with the careless skill of a cowboy (an art I mastered too) and sealed them with a flick of the tongue, then lit them at the lamp-chimney. I can still see the flame turning his face to a bright mask for a moment as he twisted up the wick.

Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them. They were the Perseids, meteors which shower down late that month and in early August, from the bell- or flower-shaped constellation of Perseus, where Algol blinks among minor stars with a restless flash. El Ghul—the Ghoul or Fiend—is the Arabian astronomers’ word for the Gorgon, and the starry hero, grasping the snake-locks, flourishes her head across the North and shakes these fragments loose; or so we decided after a decanter or two. If we were late enough, nightingales filled in the rare gaps in our talk; the Pleiades and then Orion followed the slant of Cassiopeia and Perseus above the trees.

* * *

Long before this, startling news from outside had reached our valley. In the middle of the night, Hitler, Goering and Himmler had rounded up and murdered many of their colleagues, and a number—perhaps several hundred—of the rank and file of the SA. Nobody knew how to interpret these bloody portents but they spread dismay and little else was spoken of for a day or two; and then the topic died, drowned by the heat and the weight of summer.

A few days later, a telephone message announced the death of the Countess’s mother. A train, flying a pale feather of smoke and looking like a toy among the trees and the hills, travelled along the valley twice a day. It carried István and me downstream through fields of tall maize and wheat; we picked up Xenia, who was sheltering from the sun under the platform-acacias of Zám, and found the Kápolnás carriage waiting at Soborsin.

The Countess was all in black. The service was held in the hall, where three Uniat priests, with short beards and clipped hair, quite unlike the flowing locks and the voluminous beards of the Orthodox clergy the other side of the Danube, intoned the funeral rite in Rumanian. (The coffin was open; it was the first time I saw anyone dead.) The ceremony ended at the family vault and, after luncheon back at the kastély where the last wisps of incense still lingered, the Count led us all to the library to show us some new specimens, “and while we’re about it, we’ll have a wee doch an doris afore ye gang awa’.” Travelling back, I felt I had known them all for ever.

* * *

When István was in training with his regiment of Honvéd Hussars in 1917, he won the third prize for dressage out of a hundred hussars, dragoons and uhlans, and came in second for jumping. “You should have seen us moving off for Galicia and Bukovina,” he said. “The uhlans in their square czapkas and red trousers, dragoons in long Waffenrocks, and hussars like us in pale blue.” He still had his uniform in a cupboard, and I drew him in it: a powder-blue frogged tunic and a fur-collared dolman to be slung loose over one shoulder—“an Attila, they called it,” he said, arranging the hang—Hessian boots, a shako with a white plume, and a frogged sabre. How strange this seemed, allied to that grim period of the war! I knew something about the campaigns of the Western Front; but those early mounted clashes with cossacks which led to terrible battlefields on the far slopes of the Carpathians were a matter of hearsay and dim conjecture.

Many years later, I thought of these late-night talks with István when I read and heard about the poet Férenc Békássy from his sister Eva. He was the son of a surprisingly liberal-minded landowner in western Hungary who sent all his sons and daughters to Bedales. From there he went on to King’s, Cambridge, where his poems first became known. He was an Apostle, a friend of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and especially Maynard Keynes, who went to stay with him in Hungary during a Long Vacation. His poems—one of them is a light-hearted skit on ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’—show great promise, and his last letters to friends in England, delivered posthumously when the war was over, reveal a sensitive and engaging cast of mind. Returning to Hungary at the outbreak of war, he was soon a Lieutenant in the 7th Honvéd Hussars. At the end of a letter to Nowel Olivier, dated in Budapest, May 1915, he wrote, ‘By the time I go, there will be roses and I shall go with a crest of three red ones on my horse’s head (but people won’t know the reason) because there are three over the shield in our coat-of-arms. This isn’t at all the letter I meant to write, but I can’t help it. I long to see you... And we shall meet again, shan’t we, one day?’ He was killed in a cavalry engagement in Bukovina on June 25th, 1915, at the age of twenty-two.[19]

* * *

One day when we were invited to luncheon by some neighbours, István said, “Let’s take the horses” and we followed a roundabout, uphill track to look at a remaining piece of forest. “Plenty of common oak, thank God,” he said, turning back in the saddle as we climbed a path through the slanting sunbeams, “you can use it for everything.” The next most plentiful was Turkey oak, very good firewood when dry, also for stablefloors and barrelstaves. Beech came next, “It leaves scarcely any embers”; then yoke elm and common elm, “useful for furniture and coffins.” There was plenty of ash, too—handy for tools, axe-helves, hammers, sickles, scythes, spades and hay-rakes. Except for a few by the brooks, there were no poplars up there but plenty by the Maros: useless, though, except for troughs and wooden spoons and the like. Gypsies made these. They settled in the garden and courtyard of the kastély with their wives and their children and whittled away until they had finished. “There is no money involved,” István said. “We’re supposed to go halves, but, if it’s an honest tribe, we’re lucky to get a third. We do better with some Rumanians from out-of-the-way villages in the mountains, very poor and primitive chaps, but very honest.”[20]

In a clearing we exchanged greetings with a white-haired shepherd leaning on a staff with a steel hook. The heavily embroidered homespun cloak flung across his shoulders and reaching to the ground was a brilliant green. His flock tore at the grass among the tree-stumps all round him. Then a path led steeply downhill through hazel-woods with old shells and acorns crunching and slipping under the horses’ hoofs.

It was a boiling hot day. On the way back from a cheerful feast, we went down to the river to look at some wheat. Overcome by the sight of the cool and limpid flood, we unsaddled in a shady field about the size of a paddock, took off all our clothes, climbed down through the reeds and watercress and dived in. Swimming downstream with lazy breast-stroke or merely drifting in the shade of the poplars and the willows, we talked and laughed about our recent fellow guests. The water was dappled with leafy shade near the bank and scattered with thistle-down, and a heron made off down a vista of shadows. Fleets of moorhens doubled their speed and burst noisily out of the river, and wheat, maize and tiers of vineyard were gliding past us when all at once we heard some singing. Two girls were reaping the end of a narrow strip of barley; going by the colours of their skirts and their embroidered tops, braid sashes and kerchiefs, they had come for the harvest from a valley some way off. They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. István interpreted, “They say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,” he said, “and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.”

Then he shouted back, “You mustn’t be unkind to strangers! You look out, or we’ll come and catch you.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” came the answer. “Not like that, naked as frogs.”

“What are these for?” István pointed to the branches by the shore. “We could be as smartly dressed as Adam.”

“You’d never catch us! What about your tender white feet in the stubble? Anyway, you’re too respectable. Look at your hair, going bald in front.”

“It’s not!” István shouted back.

“And that young one,” cried the second girl, “he wouldn’t dare.”

István’s blue eye was alight as he translated the last bit. Then without exchanging another word we struck out for the shore as fast as crocodiles and, tearing at poplar twigs and clumps of willow-herb, bounded up the bank. Gathering armfuls of sheaves, the girls ran into the next field, then halted at the illusory bastion of a hay-rick and waved their sickles in mock defiance. The leafy disguise and our mincing gait as we danced across the stubble unloosed more hilarity. They dropped their sickles when we were almost on them and showered us with the sheaves; then ran to the back of the rick. But, one-armed though we were, we caught them there and all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter.

* * *

“Herrgott!” I heard István suddenly exclaim—much later on, and a few yards round the curve of the rick—smiting his brow with his hand. “Oh God! The Bishop! The Gräfin! They’re coming to dinner, and look at the sun!”

It was well down the sky and evening was gathering. The ricks and the poplars and the serried rows of sheaves and haycocks were laying bars of shadow over the mown field and a party of birds was flying home across the forest. István’s hay-entangled hair was comically at variance with his look of consternation and we all laughed. Extracting strands of hay and the clinging barley, we tidied Safta and Ileana’s plaits disordered by all this rough and tumble, and set off hand in hand with them for the river, István and I on tiptoe. “Poor feet,” they murmured. After goodbyes we dived in and started the long swim back, turning many times to wave and call to those marvellous girls and they waved and answered until they were out of earshot and then, after a bend in the river, out of sight as well.

The current was faster than we thought. Close to the bank it ran sluggishly but rushes and cress and duckweed were a hindrance, so either way our rate was much slower than our buoyant journey downstream. Swallows skimmed under the branches; a shepherd and some returning harvesters looked at us with amazement. After long toil, and trusting to nightfall, we got out and ran through thickening dusk and at last, thank God, found everything as we had left it. We dressed and saddled up, then cantered three miles home through the lit outskirts of the village and into the woods again, stooping under the low branches, racing each other the last half-mile until we hammered over the bridge and under the archway and leapt to the ground with pounding hearts, scattering the pigeons. We washed, changed and brushed our hair at high speed and were soon climbing the steps to the loggia.

Dinner was laid at one end, and the guests, sitting or decorously standing glass in hand, were gathered at the other. The thin and jewelled fingers of the iron-grey shingled Gräfin were crossed in her lap and the purple sash of the Bishop glowed in the lamplight.

“Ah, there you are,” István’s mother said. We weren’t late at all; and in a few moments István was kissing the Gräfin’s hand in his polished and easy style, and then the Bishop’s ring. When we were settled at table, I couldn’t keep my mind on the conversation: the afternoon’s aura still compassed me about; my feet tingled from the prick of the stubble and it was hard to keep a private smile off my face. The Gräfin unfolded her napkin and shook it loose with a twinkle of sapphires.

“Well, István,” she said, in the affectionate and rallying tone an aunt might use to a favourite nephew. “What have you been up to?” I avoided looking in his direction. If our eyes had crossed, we would have been done for.

We went back to the fields two days later, but there was nobody there. All had been harvested and even the sheaves had gone. We never saw Safta and Ileana again and felt sad.

* * *

The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly. Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and, finally, wonderful melons and raspberries. The scarlet blaze of paprika—there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder—was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before, when—it was impossible to imagine it!—snow covered all. Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow. They snored among sheaves and hay-cocks and a mantle of flies covered them while the flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved.

Behind the thick walls and the closed afternoon shutters of the kastély, sleep reigned fitfully too, but resurrection came soon. The barley was already in and István was busy with his reapers and the last of the wheat. (In Hungary, the harvest began on the 29th of June, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, but it was a bit earlier hereabouts.) When we set off, István’s mother called from an upper window, “Do take your hat!” She sent it skimming down and he dropped his rein, caught it in flight and clapped it on, “You’re getting as black as a Gypsy.” After the long weeks of sickles and scythes and whetstones, it was threshing time. Old machines were toiling away and filling the valleys with their throbbing, driven by engines with flapping belts and tall Puffing Billy chimneys expanding in a zigzag at the top. Up in the mountains, horses harnessed to wooden sledges and rollers for shelling the grain trotted round and round on circles of cobble. Winnowing followed, when clouds of skied grain sparkled and fell and then sparkled again as the next wooden shovelful transfigured the afternoon with chaff. The sacks, carried off in ox-carts, were safe in the barns at last. If the waggoners were Rumanians, instead of crying “stânga!” or “dreaptă!” in their native tongue when they wanted their oxen to turn left or right (or “jobb!” or “bal!” in Magyar if they were Hungarians) they would shout “heiss!” and “tcha!” I had first noticed these arcane cries when buffaloes were being coaxed or goaded along. István thought that the Turks had first brought these animals here, probably from Egypt, though they must originally have come from India. But the words are neither Turkish, Arabic, Romany, Hindi nor Urdu.

July brought a scattering of younger Transylvanians and their relations in search of refuge along the river valley from the heat of Budapest, which summer had turned into one of the great tropical cities of the world. There were parties and picnics and bathing, and tennis at István’s till it was too dark to see the ball, on a court sunk among thick trees like a shady well; and feasting and singing round pianos in those long disintegrating drawing-rooms, and sometimes dancing to a gramophone. A few of the records were only a year or two out of date, many much older: Night and Day, Stormy Weather, Blue Skies, Lazybones, Love for Sale, Saint Louis Blues, Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise. In case of need, István was revealed as a proficient pianist—“but only for this sort of stuff,” he said, vamping, syncopating, honky-tonking and glissandoing away like mad; then, spinning completely round on the piano-stool, he ended with a lightning thumbnail sweep of the whole keyboard from bass to treble.

The village calendar was starred with feasts and saints’ days and weddings. Gypsies throve, the sound of their instruments was always within earshot and the village squares were suddenly ringed with great circular wreaths of dancers in wonderful clothes with their hands on each others’ shoulders, a couple of hundred or more: and the triple punctuating stamp of the horă and the sârbă, falling all together, would veil all their bravery for a mo-ment in dust-clouds. (I learnt all these dances later on.) It was at night that they impinged most insistently, especially on the eve of a wedding, when the groom and his paranymphs went through the slow stages of a mock abduction. If the rhythms of High Hat, The Continental or Get Along, Little Dogie flagged for a moment among the faded looking-glasses and sconces and portraits in the kastély, staccato cries, high-pitched and muted by distance, as the bride was hoisted aloft, would come sailing up from the village below and through the long windows. “Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!”[21] The dancing was spurred on late into the night by the new apricot brandy, and the fiddles and zithers and clarinets and double-basses were heckled by the distant yelping of wild rustic epithalamia; then strings, hammers and the shrill reeds would be drowned once more by Dinah, and our own hullabaloo under the chandeliers.

“Hai, pe loc, pe loc, pe loc!” the dancers below were stamping in unison. “Să răsară busuioc!” (“Stamp on the ground, let the basil shoot up!”)

“Foiae verde, spic de griu, măi!” A wailing doină of real Gypsies mounted through the glimmer, followed by a reedy twirl on the clarinet; but the green leaf and the wheat-ear of the local song hadn’t a chance:

[1] The only followers of the Latin Rite in this part of Rumania were the Hungarians and the Swabians. The surrounding population were mostly Uniats, I think: Catholics of the Oriental Rite, that is, whose Orthodox liturgy had been sung in Rumanian since the late seventeenth century, after the Greek period which followed the original Church Slavonic.

[2] The problem was solved twenty years later at the Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy. It is the eleventh verse of Psalm 91 and, as it is sung every night at Compline, I must have heard it the night before.

[3] The Rumanian, thus the official name is Mures, (pronounced ‘Mooresh’), but as chance willed that I only heard its Magyar form of Maros (pronounced ‘Marosh’) during this part of the journey, I find it unnatural to put it down differently. From now on there are often two or three names for geographical features, so confusions are bound to occur and I apologise for them in advance.

[4] S, avars, in.

[5] A ‘Ban,’ a Persian word first brought to these regions by the Avars, was a military governor and his jurisdiction was a Banat, a term later applied to some frontier provinces of Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia; but the unqualified ‘Banat’ has always meant this particular region. Rather oddly, a Ban never ruled over it.

[6] The memory of Count Jenö’s prepossession cropped up at luncheon with Arthur Koestler in an Athens taverna about twenty years ago. Immediately alert, Koestler said it had interested him too, but he didn’t know as much about it as he would like. A year or two later The Thirteenth Tribe appeared, causing a stir among Jewish historians. Could this taverna conversation have been the impulse that prompted him to take it up again? It is too late to ask him.

[7] Bruce Chatwin, for whom nomads and their history hold fewer and fewer secrets, tells me that this is borne out by finds from 400 bc, dug up in a Turkic kurgan (barrow) at Katanda in the Altai kept intact by the permafrost, of a nomad chief clad in a patchwork jerkin of lozenges, 4” x 3”, dyed orange, blue, yellow and red, skinned off small mammals—jerboas, perhaps, that bound about the steppe.

[8] It is haunted by the sacrifice of the master mason’s wife, like the Bridge of Arta in Epirus and Curtea de Arges, in Wallachia. All three are the theme of old ballads.

[9] Hunedoara.

[10] An exact replica of this castle stands among poplars on a lake-island in the City Park of Budapest. It was put up in honour of Hunyadi for the 1898 celebrations of a thousand years of Hungarian history, and it was the memory of this fleeting glimpse which, for a moment, had given the Transylvanian original its almost fictional look.

[11] Some experts, including David Rosenthal, its most recent translator, are convinced that the great Catalan epic of chivalry, Tirant lo Blanc, was based on the feats of Hunyadi. Written a few decades after the hero’s death, it was one of the favourite books of Cervantes; and if, as some think, lo Blanc—‘the White’—is really ‘the Vlach’ (V and B being interchangeable), the theory of his Rumanian paternity is strengthened.

[12] It was added to further by Gábor Bethlen, the celebrated Thirty Years’ War commander.

[13] His brother Jean, the last Prime Minister, had been assassinated by the Iron Guard six months before. “A horrible lot of people,” Count Jenö succinctly said; then: “What a pity! Duca was the best politician in the country.”

[14] He was a close friend of Adam v. Trott and was involved, later on, in the Stauffenberg Conspiracy, though it seems he had scruples about actual assassination. See Tatiana Metternich’s autobiography Tatiana in England, Under Five Passports in the United States and The Berlin Diaries 1940-45 of ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov (Chatto, 1986).

[15] Pronounced ‘Rett-en-ett-esh!,’ it means ‘terrible.’

[16] It is now Pec′, in southern Yugoslavia. The Patriarch’s old monastery still stands, shaded by plane trees and full of marvellous frescoes. The region is almost entirely inhabited today by those Albanian Moslems known as Kossovars.

[17] Some of the people in these pages have vanished from the scene but here and there, when, like István, and Angéla in the next chapter, they are as extant as I am, it seems best to alter names. It gives greater freedom in piecing together their talk. Also, many things have changed since those easy-going times.

[18] See A Time of Gifts, p. 219.

[19] See Sir Roy Harrod The Life of John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett’s The Golden Echo and Dr G. Gömöri in the New Hungarian Quarterly (No. 79, Autumn 1980). Keynes was reproached by some of his Bloomsbury friends for arranging for the release of frozen funds for Békássy’s return to take part in the war instead of safe internment for the duration.

[20] I think they must have belonged to the interesting ancient community of the Motsi, who inhabit peaks and valleys deep in the western Transylvanian massif.

[21] At some of these rough nuptials, it was said, cries of acclaim would hail the display of a gory sheet or a shift from the bride’s window in proof of maidenhead now ended; a consummation said sometimes to be abetted, if doubt hovered, by her mother’s privy sacrifice of a pigeon behind the scenes.

[22] Stop Press! Of course, it was Dinah’s Dixie eyes, not Gypsy eyes, that blazed, but the latter is what we mistakenly sang, and the error has got immovably lodged in the memory.