7. VIENNA

AN ARRESTING figure in blue-striped pyjamas was sitting up reading in the next bed when I awoke. The fleeting look of Don Quixote in his profile would have been pronounced if his whiskers had been springier but they drooped instead of jutting. His face was narrow-boned and his silky, pale brown hair was in premature retreat from his brow and thin on top. His light blue eyes were of an almost calf-like gentleness. Between the benign curve of his moustache and a well-shaped but receding chin the lower lip drooped a little, revealing two large front teeth, and his head, poised on a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, was attached to a tall and gangling frame. No appearance could have tallied more closely with foreign caricatures of a certain kind of Englishman; but instead of the classical half-witted complacency—Un Anglais à Mabille—a mild, rather distinguished benevolence stamped my neighbour. When he saw that I was awake, he said, in English, “I hope your slumbers were peaceful and mated with quiet dreams?” The accent, though unmistakably foreign, was good, but the turn of phrase puzzling. No trace of facetiousness marred an expression of sincere and gentle concern.

His name was Konrad, and he was the son of a pastor in the Frisian Islands. I hadn’t read The Riddle of the Sands and I wasn’t sure of their whereabouts but I soon learnt that they follow the coasts of Holland and Germany and Denmark in a long-drawn-out archipelago from the Zuider Zee to the Heligoland Bight where they turn north and die away off the Jutish coast. Tapered by tides and winds, interspersed with reefs, always crumbling and changing shape, littered with wrecks, surrounded by submerged villages, clouded with birds, and heavily invaded, some of them, by summer bathers, the islands scarcely rise above sea-level. Konrad belonged to the German central stretch. He had learnt English at school and had continued his studies, during his spare time from a multiplicity of jobs, almost exclusively by reading Shakespeare and this sometimes gave his utterances an incongruous and even archaic turn. I can’t remember what mishaps had brought him, in his late thirties, into such low water and he didn’t dwell on them. He was not a dynamic personality. The quiet good humour, the poise and the mild but unmistakable dignity of bearing that glowed from him, were strikingly at odds with the feckless morning hubbub of the enormous room. Holding up a disintegrating volume, he told me he was re-reading Titus Andronicus. When I realized that the book was a complete Shakespeare, I begged for it and turned to The Winter’s Tale in high excitement. We know the results. He was deeply sympathetic with my dashed hopes.

We shared some of his bread and cheese at one of the scrubbed tables down the middle of the room and, as we ate, I learnt that his feelings for the English language—and for England in general—sprang from a theory about his native archipelago. Before they were driven to the islands, the Frisians had been a powerful and important mainland race and it seems that they and their language were more akin to the ultimate English than any of the other Germanic tribes that invaded Britain. He was convinced that Hengist and Horsa were Frisians. (Where was the polymath? As Konrad spoke, I began to see the two invaders in a new light: instead of meaty, freckled and tow-haired giants barging their berserker way into Kent, I now saw two balding, slightly equine and Konrad-like figures wading ashore with diffident coughs.) He cited a further proof of the closeness of the two nations: a couple of centuries after Hengist, when the shipwrecked St. Wilfred of York began to preach to the still heathen Frisians, no interpreter was needed. It was the same when St. Willibrord arrived from Northumbria. I asked him to say something in the Frisian dialect. I couldn’t understand his answer, but the short words and flat vowels sounded just as English must to someone who doesn’t know the language.

I drew him as he talked, and it came out well—one couldn’t go wrong! He gazed at the result with thoughtful approval and offered to guide me to the British Consulate, where I hoped salvation lay. We left our effects, as he called them, in the office. “We must beware,” he said. “Among good and luckless men there is no lack of base ones, footpads and knaves who never shrink from purloining. Some love to filch.” Tall and bony in a long, threadbare overcoat and a rather wide-brimmed trilby, he looked serious and imposing, though something in his bearing and in his wide, soft gaze lent a touch of absurdity. His stylish and well brushed hat was on the point of disintegration. With unexpected worldliness, he showed me the maker’s name inside: “Habig,” he said. “He is the most renowned of the hatters of Vienna.”

The surroundings were even more depressing by daylight. The Hostel[1] lay in the Kolonitzgasse in the Third District between the loading bays of the Customs House and the grimy arches of a viaduct and an overhead railway track, silent now like the whole derelict quarter. Rubbish seemed to cover everything. Our track took us over the Radetzky Bridge and beside the Danube Canal through a dismal scene of sad buildings and dirty snow under a cloudy sky. We turned up the Rotenturmstrasse and, as we made our way into the Inner city, things began to change. We passed St. Stephen’s Cathedral and its single gothic spire. The barriers and the road-blocks of the day before were still there, but passage was free and for the moment no gunfire sounded in the distance. The city seemed to have returned to normal. Palaces began to assemble, fountains rose, and monuments with fantastical elaboration. We crossed the Graben to the Am Hof-Platz: passing a tall pillar with a statue of the Virgin, we headed for a street the other side, where a flagpole and a tin oval with the lion and the unicorn indicated the British Consulate. The clerk inside looked in all the pigeon holes for a registered letter. There was nothing.

If Vienna had looked grim and overcast before, it was doubly so as I joined Konrad below in the Wallnerstrasse. A few drops of sleety drizzle were falling. “Be not downcast, my dear young,” Konrad said, when he saw me. “We must take counsel.” We walked down the Kohlmarkt. At the other end a great archway opened into the courtyard of the Hofburg and zinc-green domes assembled over rows of windows. We turned left into the Michaelerkirche. It was dark inside and after the classical surroundings, unexpectedly gothic and empty except for a beadle who was lighting candles for an impending Mass. We settled in a pew, and after perfunctory prayers for the beadle’s benefit, Konrad said: “Hark, Michael! All is not lost. I have been ripening a plan. Have you your sketch-block by you?” I tapped the pocket of my greatcoat, and he unfolded his plan, which was that I should sketch professionally from house to house. I was appalled, firstly from timidity, secondly out of very well-founded modesty. I protested that my drawing of him had been a lucky exception. Usually they were very amateurish; putting his suggestion into practice would almost be taking money under false pretences. Konrad quickly overrode these objections. Think of wandering artists at fairs! Where was my spirit of enterprise? His siege was mild but firm.

I gave in and soon I began to feel rather excited. Before we left, I thought of lighting a candle to bring us luck, but we hadn’t a single coin between us. We headed for the Mariahilf Quarter. Falling into step, he said: “We will commence with the small buggers,”—to my surprise, for his usual discourse was rather prim. I asked him: what small buggers? He stopped dead, and a blush began to spread until it had entirely mantled his long face. “Oh! dear young!” he cried. “I am sorry! Ich meinte, wir würden mit Kleinbürgern anfangen—with little burghers! The rich and the noble here,” he waved his hand round the old city “have always lackeys, many and proud, and sometimes they are not deigning to vouchsafe.” As we walked, he rehearsed me in what to say. He thought I should ask for five schillinge a picture. I said it was too much: I would ask for two: a bit more than an English shilling, in fact. Why didn’t he keep me company for the first few times? “Ah, dear young!” he said, “I am of ripe years already! I would be always frightening them! You, so tender, will melt hearts.” He told me that Viennese front doors were pierced by peepholes at eye level, through which the inhabitants always surveyed prospective visitors before they unlatched. “Never cast your eye on it,” he advised me: “Ring, then gaze upward at the Everlasting with innocence and soul.” He took my walking stick, and advised me to carry my coat folded over my arm and to hold my sketching book and pencil in the other hand. My outfit looked a little odd, but it was still clean and tidy: boots, puttees, cord breeches, leather jerkin and a grey shirt and a pale blue hand-woven and rather artistic tie. I combed my hair in a shop window, and the closer we got to our field of action, the more I felt we must have resembled Fagin and the Artful Dodger. We shook hands earnestly in the hall of an old-fashioned block of flats and I mounted and rang the first bell on the mezzanine floor.

The little brass peep-hole gleamed cyclopically. I pretended not to notice that an eye had replaced the lid on the other side but bent my gaze on vacancy; and when the door opened and a little maid asked me what I wanted, I spoke up on cue: “Darfich mit der Gnä’ Frau sprechen, bitte?” (“Please may I speak to the gracious lady?”). She left me in the open doorway, and I waited, eagerly poised for my next utterance, which was to be: “Guten Tag, Gnä’ Frau! Ich bin ein englischer Student, der zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel wandert, und ich möchte so gern eine Skizze von Ihnen machen!”[2] But it remained unuttered, for the maid’s embassy to the drawing-room, almost before she could have opened her mouth, produced results that neither Konrad nor I could have forseen. A man’s shrill voice cried: “Ach nein! Es ist nicht mehr zu leiden!” “It’s not to be borne! I must make an end!” ; and, hot-foot on these words, a small bald figure in a red flannel dressing-gown came hurtling down the passage with the speed of a cannon ball. His head was averted and his eyes were tight shut as though to exclude some loathed vision and his palms were repellingly spread at the the ends of his arms. “Aber nein, Helmut!” he cried. “Nein, nein, nein! Not again, Helmut! Weg! Weg! Weg! Weg! Away, away, away!” His hands by now were against my chest and thrusting. He carried me before him like snow before a snowplough and the two of us, one advancing and one retreating, flowed out through the door and across the landing in a confused and stumbling progress. Meanwhile the little maid was squeaking “Herr Direktor! It’s not Herr Helmut!” Suddenly he stopped; and his re-opened eyes sprang from their sockets. “My dear young man!,” he cried aghast. “A thousand times, my apologies! I thought you were my brother-in-law! Come in! Come in!” Then he shouted to the room we had left, “Anna! It’s not Helmut!,” and a woman in a dressing-gown was soon at hand and anxiously seconding her husband’s apologies. “My dear sir!,” he continued, “please come in!” I was whirled into the drawing-room. “Gretl! Bring a glass of wine and a slice of cake! There! Sit down! A cigar?” I found myself in an armchair, facing the man and his wife, who were beaming at me. His rosy face was adorned with one of those waxed and curled moustaches that are kept in position overnight by a gauze bandage. His eyes sparkled and his fingers drummed arpeggios in double time on his knees as he talked. His wife murmured something and he said: “Oh yes! Who are you?” I slipped into my second phase: (“Student,” “Constantinople,” “sketch” etc.). He listened intently and I had barely finished before he shot into his bedroom. He emerged two minutes later in a stand-up collar, a speckled bow tie and a velvet jacket trimmed with braid. His moustache had a fresh twist to it and two carefully trained strands of hair were arranged across his scalp with great skill. Sitting on the edge of his chair, he folded his hands palm to palm on his joined knees with a challenging jut to his elbows, and, gazing nobly into the middle distance with one toe tapping at high speed, froze into a bust. I got to work, and his wife poured out another glass of wine. The sketch didn’t seem very good to me, but when it was finished, my sitter was delighted. He sprang to his feet and flew buoyantly about the room with the sketch at arm’s length, the forefinger and thumb of the other hand joined in connoisseurship. “Ein chef d’oeuvre!” he said—“Ein wirkliches Meisterstück!” They declared themselves astonished at the low fee demanded. I graciously accepted a handful of cigars as well, and did a sketch of his wife. He persisted as she sat in using the bun on the crown of her head as a pivot for swivelling her face to more telling angles; and when this was finished they led me across the landing to do a sketch of a retired lady singer who, in her turn passed me on to the wife of a music-publisher. I was launched! When I found Konrad again, he was patiently mooning about the pavement, I approached him as though I had just slain the Jabberwock, and was suitably acclaimed. In a few minutes, we were in a snug Gastzimmer, toying with Krenwurst, ordering delicious Jungfernbraten and geröstete potatoes and wine. Thanks to Trudi, Major Brock and, that morning, Konrad and my recent sitter, body and soul had been kept firmly together; but it was the first actual meal since dinner at the castle two days earlier. It seemed a long time ago. For Konrad, I think, it was the first real spread for much longer. A little flustered at first, he professed to deplore all this extravagance. My attitude, from a phrase in the Winter’s Tale which we had been looking at earlier, was “’Tis fairy gold, boy, and ’twill prove so”; and, as we clinked glasses, my elation affected him. “You see, dear young, how boldness is always prospering?” After this feast, I went back to work, leaving Konrad in a café reading Venus and Adonis.

These drawings were neither better nor worse than those which an average half-taught knack turns out. Occasionally, when dealing with very marked features, or with traits that constituted natural caricatures, I got a likeness in a few lines, but they usually took at least a quarter of an hour and sometimes much longer. It was a laborious process involving much erasure and eked out with the spreading of shadow with a stealthy finger-tip. But my sitters were not an exacting public; many people love being drawn, and it is wonderful what even worse practitioners than I can get away with. My lucky break was due, I knew, to kind Viennese hearts and though I felt a fleeting touch of guilt, it was not enough to extinguish the intoxicating thought that I could earn a more or less honest penny in an emergency. Also, I had become utterly absorbed by these sudden plunges into the unknown and my early shyness was soon replaced by nerves of brass.

A card in a metal frame under the doorbell usually revealed the householder’s identity. The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Habsburg Empire at its widest expansion.[3] Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow a stage for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of southern Slav. In one flat there was even a genial old gentleman from Bosnia, probably of Islamized Bogomil descent, Dr. Murad Aslanovic Bey who, in spite of Sarajevo, had remained firmly Austrophile. A little framed flag on the wall still showed a combination of the Austrian double-eagle and the Crescent and a paperweight on his desk was a little bronze figure of a soldier charging with fixed bayonet and fez-tassel flying, a memento of the First K.u.K. Bosniak Infantry Regiment. (These fierce mountain troops had wrought havoc all along the Italian Front from the Dolomites to the Isonzo.) He had long ago abandoned the fez for a grey jäger hat and a blackcock’s tail-feather, and, he hinted, slack observance during Ramadan. A white spade beard made him an easy sitter. In many dwellings, a solitary emblem would strike a note as clear as a tuning fork: Franz Josef, Archduke Otto in a fur-trimmed Hungarian magnate’s costume; a crucifix, a devotional oleograph, an image, a photograph of Pius X under the tiara and crossed keys; a star of David enclosing the Ineffable Tetragrammaton. Because of their frequency in books of magic, the interlocking triangles and the Hebrew symbols always seemed mysterious and arcane. There were faded blazons, framed citations, medals and diplomas and the collapsed-concertina shakos of students with embroidered cyphers on the crown and tricoloured sashes and fencing gauntlets; photographs of Marx and Lenin, a star and a hammer and sickle or two. If there are no swastikas or snapshots of Hitler in my memory, it was not through lack of Nazis: there were plenty; but at that moment, I think, the display of these emblems was an indictable offence. There were death masks of Beethoven and plaster busts, tinted like old ivory, of Mozart and Haydn. This scattered iconology ran parallel with another, where Garbo, Dietrich; Lilian Harvey, Brigitte Helm, Ronald Colman, Conrad Veidt, Leslie Howard and Gary Cooper re-affirmed their universal sway.

* * *

There was not much room to move in the first flat I tried that afternoon. The floors were blocked with trunks, crates and containers of varied and enigmatic shapes, with THE KOSHKA BROTHERS stencilled over them in scarlet letters. Multilingual posters displayed the masked and hooded Brothers crossing gorges on tight-ropes, shooting each other out of cannon, flying through the air to clasp hands in a criss-cross of spotlights, piling up in precarious and many layered pagodas and thundering round the insides of giant barrels on motor bicycles. There were Koshka sisters too, and white-haired ancestors and crawling descendants, all talking volubly in Czech. They were athletic, smiling, handsome, slightly stunned-looking and nearly identical figures who continued flexing their knees and feeling their biceps as they spoke, or slowly rotating alternate shoulder blades. I was lost for several minutes in this crowd. At last, with sinking heart, I approached a muscle-bound patriarch and mumbled my set proposal about doing a sketch. He spoke no German, but he gave me a friendly pat and despatched a descendant into the next room, who returned carrying a glossy photograph of the whole tribe. It showed all the Koshkas balanced in a vertiginous grande finale of which he was the supporting Atlas at the base. He signed it with a friendly message and a flourish and led me politely from Koshka to Koshka and each of them, from the seasoned grandsire to the minutest of unbreakable tots, added a signature with a kind word or two and a fringe of exclamation marks. When all the signatures had been garnered, I again murmured something about doing a sketch, but in a strangled voice, for my nerve had long gone. There was a pause, then they all burst out in a joyful deprecating chorus: “No! No! No! Iss a present! For de Picture, ve take not vun groschen! Not vun! Iss free!” But they were sincerely touched at the idea of my pilgrimage.

In the next flat, someone had just died.

In a third, the maid said “Ssh!” as she let me into a little softly-lit hall. After a moment a pretty ash-blonde girl tiptoed out of a pink bathroom on pink mules trimmed with swan’s down, tying the sash of a turquoise dressing-gown. She too laid her forefinger collusively across a pursed cupid’s bow, enjoining silence, and whispering “I’m busy now, schatzili!” ; she pointed significantly at the closed door next to the one she had come in by. There was a shako on the table and a greatcoat and a sabre had been flung across an armchair: “Come back in an hour!” Then, with a smile and a friendly pat on the cheek, she tiptoed away again.

But in the fourth flat was a music teacher with a free period between lessons, and we were off.

Konrad and I had a snug and cheerful dinner in one of the lanes of the old Town. Then we went to a cinema, and into a bar for a final drink. We talked about Shakespeare and England and the Frisian Islands as we puffed away at two more of the Herr Direktor’s cigars (Director of what, we wondered?) like two bookies after a lucky day at the races.

Our way back took us along the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. About lamplighting time, I had noticed a small, drifting population of decorative girls who shot unmistakable glances of invitation at passersby. Konrad shook his head. “You must beware, dear young,” he said in a solemn voice. “These are wenches and they are always seeking only pelf. They are wanton, and it is their wont.”

* * *

We drew blank at the Consulate again next morning; but this time it didn’t seem to matter. Emboldened by yesterday’s progress, Konrad thought we might lay siege to a more ambitious quarter, nearer the heart of the town, but still outside the dread zones where the proud lackeys held sway. The tall buildings didn’t look very different to me, but, as a concession to our richer prospective sitters, I let him persuade me into charging three schillinge instead of two.

The preliminary moment, standing in the hall with a score of unpressed doorbells and all the tiers of mystery piling up overhead, on the edge, as it were, of a still undrawn cover rife with quarry, was filled with a tremor of excitement. There was no sound, except someone practising the violin somewhere.

In answer to the first peal, a bearded man in a smock and a Lavallière tie ushered me into a room full of stacked and hanging canvases. There were mountain ranges showing pink in the afterglow, country inns with vine-trellises, cloisters under cascading wisteria, oases and sphinxes and pyramids and caravans casting long sunset shadows over the dunes. An easel in the middle of the room displayed a damp and half-finished atoll at daybreak, plumey with palm trees. He stroked his beard as he led me from picture to picture as though to aid me in my choice. I was embarrassed when I had to explain that I was a kind of cher confrère. He seemed rather vexed, though we both sent up jovial and insincere peals of laughter; but the glint in his eye and the gnash of his splendid teeth grew fiercer, and I felt that, had the exit corridor been longer, they might have detached a bit, like a bite out of a muffin.

The second call was a surprise. I was let in by a wild-eyed Englishwoman from Swindon with bobbed iron-grey hair. She didn’t want to be drawn but she talked without stopping as she poured out tea and plied me with short-cake and Edinburgh Rock from an old Huntley and Palmers tin. She had come to Vienna many years ago as a lady’s companion and they had both become converts to the Catholic faith and when her employer died, my hostess had inherited the little flat where she now gave English lessons. It was plain to see, and to hear, that she was in the throes of an acute and rather disturbing religious passion that was chiefly fixed on the church of the Franciscans hard by. She took me down a floor to draw an Indian friend who was a Syrian Jacobite Christian from Travancore. Voluminous in a mauve and gold-edged sari under a black fur coat, she overflowed from a rocking chair beside a roaring stove. From her I graduated to a flat that was decorated in white suède and corduroy and many cushions. Here a burly, golden-haired and Anglophil baron in a white polo jersey allowed me to draw him and then insisted on sketches of three cheerful and ornate young men in similar jerseys but of different colours while they put on Cole Porter records and gave me a Manhattan cocktail from a huge electro-plated shaker. The baron reminisced with enjoyment about London and parties and the Chelsea Arts Ball. As for Lady Malcolm’s Servants Ball, he declared that words failed him. It was a familiar London atmosphere, and I felt a bit homesick. Beyond the next door a terrible row was going on and I wished I hadn’t rung. A figure stamped down the hall shouting at someone in the depths of the flat. Jerking the door open, he glared at me with hatred and disgust, slammed it shut, and resumed his interrupted quarrel.

Shed evening clothes scattered the floor of the next flat—tails, a white tie, an opera hat, gold high-heeled shoes kicked off, a black skirt twinkling with sequins, spirals of streamers and a hail-drift of those multicoloured little papier-maché balls that are sometimes flung at parties. The face of the tousled and pyjama-clad young man who had crept to the door displayed familiar symptoms of hangover. His bloodshot eyes signalled helpless appeal. “I’m sorry!” he said. “Can’t speak...,” then: “Kopfweh!” pointing to his head. Headache...A woman’s voice moaned expiringly in the background, and I stole away. (There were similar signs in many faces and flats; it was the end of carnival, which political upsets had failed to damp. Shrove Tuesday was only a few days off.) In an armchair in a large drawing-room on another floor, inert as an aardvark or a giant ant-eater and moving his head slowly from side to side with the puzzled expression of a ruminant, sat a middle-aged man, wide-eyed. Beyond the negative and slow-motion rocking of his head, he returned no answer to my awestruck overtures. Again, there was nothing for it but retreat. But the last sitters of the morning were a jolly retired Admiral and his wife surrounded by Biedermeier and Sezession furniture. He declared, with a breezy quarterdeck laugh, that he was still an active Admiral from whom, with the loss of Trieste and Fiume—his navy had retired. His midshipman’s dirk and his dress-sword hung on the wall. There were enlarged photographs of the gun-decks of warships in those lost ports. One of these illustrated a tour of inspection by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his whiskers twisted up fiercely under his cocked hat.

It had been a splendid morning. Konrad and I agreed, unfolding and shaking out our napkins. He tucked his prudently into his collar as some cutlets of young lamb arrived. They were delicious; he declared it a lamb unparalleled. On our fourth evening, when I picked him up in a café at the end of the afternoon’s toil, we decided it had been another bumper day but we both had the feeling, I didn’t quite know why, that it might turn out to be the last. Over dinner, which we had ordered earlier—a delicious roast chicken, of the classical sort that sizzles enclouded in the strip-cartoon dreams of slumbering tramps—we talked of our plans. I outlined roughly what I thought my itinerary would be. But what about him? He had been hanging about, he had told me earlier, waiting with rather Micawber-like optimism for something—I’ve forgotten what—which persistently failed to turn up. “But I am fostering a deep plan,” he said earnestly at last. “It is a plan that leads on to fortune. It was divulged to me by a well-versed and thoughtful one. But it has need of capital...” We both looked glum: no hopes there. I asked him out of curiosity how much. He named the sum and we both nodded sadly at our wine glasses. Then—it was literally a double-take—I asked him to repeat it. “Twenty schillinge,” he said. “Twenty schillinge? But Konrad, that’s easy! We’ve probably got it already! If not, we’ll get it tomorrow morning!” I had been handing over half of the takings, but Konrad had looked on himself as my custodian and now insisted on handing them all back, knotted in a handkerchief. “There, dear young,” he said, “it is the moiety of your guerdon.” After paying for dinner, we were only two schillings short of the needed capital. I asked him what kind of enterprise he had in mind.

“For many moons, dear young,” he said, looking at me gravely with wide blue eyes, “I have been longing to become a smuggler. A saccharine smuggler, dear young! No, do not laugh!” Ever since Czechoslovakia—or was it Austria or Hungary?—had placed an exorbitant tax on saccharine, the secret import of this innocent commodity made great profits—all one needed was the initial outlay: “And there are people—wise, daring and nimble ones,” Konrad said, “who, on nights when the moon lacks, scull across the Danube in barques.” They were never caught. Austrians, Hungarians and Czechs were engaged in this traffic: “serious folk, of a gentlemanly cast of mind.” After all, it was an unjust law, much more honoured in the breach than the observance. “And this breach of the law is meaning succour to persons that ail,” he said. “It enables those of great girth to become once again slender.” I hoped he wouldn’t be involved in the frontier-crossing part. “No, no! I shall be an envoy, dear young, a stately negotiator! They think that I have a dignified bearing,” he said, straightening his tie with a cough. “I hope I have, dear young, in spite of all!” His eyes kindled happily at the thought of his prospects.

The night before, we had been looking at the photograph of the Koshka Brothers when the proprietor had brought the bill. As a great admirer of the Brothers, he had been much struck by the picture. I had made him a present of it, and his delight had found expression in two glasses of Himbeergeist. Now the photograph had been pinned on the wall; and two more tulip-shaped glasses had appeared at the same time as coffee. Sustained by the glow of future hopes, we now ordered two more, and lit the last of the Direktor’s cigars. At Konrad’s request, we spent the rest of the evening reading aloud from Shakespeare. As more Himbeergeist appeared, my renderings, in the battle-smoke of flourished cigars, became more impassioned and sonorous. “Noble words!” Konrad kept interjecting, “noble words, dear young!” We sang and recited on the long trudge back to the Heilsarmee. Both of us felt a touch of guilt about occupying our two cots there, in the midst of our affluence; it was another prompting towards departure. We were fairly tipsy; Konrad, I noticed, as he bumped into a lamp-post with a faint giggle, a little more so than I was. We both stumbled slightly going upstairs. We were anxious lest our places had been taken, but there they were, side by side at the far end and both empty still.

It was late and all was silent except for the haunting involuntary chorus that spans the watches of the night in these dormitories. As we tiptoed down the long row Konrad bumped into the foot of a bed and a bearded face like a black hedgehog shot out of the other end of a cocoon of blankets and fired off a torrent of abuse. Konrad stood murmuring and rooted to the spot, his hat lifted in a chivalrous posture of apology. The noise woke several sleepers on either side, who launched a rumbling crescendo of blasphemy and anathema at Konrad’s protesting victim. I led him by the elbow to our corner, as though on wheels and with his hat still lifted, while the altercation waxed louder until it reached a noisy climax and then very slowly waned into near-silence. Konrad sat down on the edge of his cot, murmuring, as he unlaced his boots: “He was chafed by mishap and choler unsealed their lips.”

* * *

“Let us regain our fardels,” Konrad said next morning. We bade goodbye to the people in the office and to a few fellow-inmates with whom we were on hobnobbing terms, and I hoisted on my rucksack. Konrad’s fardel—a wicker creel slung diagonally across his torso on a long baldric of canvas and leather—turned him into a lanky urban fisherman. For the fourth time we set off for the Wallnerstrasse. It was a bright, blowy morning; and we had been right to be optimistic; the moment I entered the Consulate, the clerk held up from afar a registered envelope crossed with blue chalk, and some others. The good news, which would have spread delight four days before, was something of an anti-climax now. We headed for a coffee house in the Kärntnerstrasse called Fenstergucker. Settling at a corner table by the window near a hanging grove of newspapers on wooden rods, we ordered Eier im Glass, then hot Brötchen and butter, and delicious coffee smothered in whipped cream. It was a morning of decisions, separations, departures; and they weighed on us both. Konrad was determined to set off at once and smite while the iron was hot, determination high and the capital still intact. He became gently excited and the Harfleur spirit was beating its wings in the air; but I felt anxious about him and hoped his associates had as gentlemanly a cast of mind as he thought. He, in his turn, was filled with concern about me. It was true that we had been ripping rather fast through the fairy gold; but he built up a headstrong Sir Harry Scattercash kind of picture that I rather liked. “Husband all lucre when you are in squandering vein, dear young,” he said, and “Do not dog bona robas.”

I accompanied him to the junction of the Kärntnerstrasse and the Ringstrasse by the Opera House. He was going to catch a tram to the Donaukai Bahnhof and then continue eastwards by rail along the Danube. He was rather arch and secretive about place names; I don’t think he wanted to involve me, even remotely, in these illicit doings. He climbed on the tram, sat down, then immediately gave his seat to an elderly and almost spherical nun with a carpet bag. As it clattered off, I could see him towering head and shoulders above the other passengers, strap-hanging with one hand, holding up his Habig hat between the two long first fingers of the other, smiling and slowly rotating it in valediction, while I waved until the tram clashed across the points and swung left into the Schubertring and out of sight.

I felt very lonely as I wandered back to the café. He had promised to write and tell me how things were going. I got a postcard from him in Budapest soon after Easter, saying that the Future was smiling. But he gave no address, so I had no further news until I got to Constantinople, eleven months later. There I found a fat letter, franked in Norderney, Konrad’s home island in the Frisian Archipelago. The first things to emerge from the envelope were several enormous sheets of German postage stamps whose value amounted not only to the pound note that I had thrust on Konrad much against his will—one of the four I had picked up at the Consulate—but the fairy gold as well; and I saw, as I counted up the scores of Bismarck’s heads, that he had sent half as much again. The stamps were accompanied by a long, affectionate, and deeply touching letter, which I read in a café above the Golden Horn. The smuggling, to which he guardedly referred as ‘hazardous trading, dear young,’ had become ancient history by then. All had gone well; he was back in the islands and teaching English; and there was a coy hint that he might be getting married to a lady teacher.... Apart from everything else, I was overjoyed by the idea that his English idiom might not be wholly lost. Perhaps it would spread among Frisian disciples like the words of St. Wilfred.

But as I walked back to the Fenstergucker, I was troubled by the idea that with only three pounds to last the month, I might be in a fix; especially with a stretch of town life ahead. Of course, in the light of the last days’ windfalls, I could get some more.... Yet, with Konrad gone, the zest had vanished too. What had appeared an escapade now seemed, alone and in cold blood, hideously forbidding.

Back at our café table, I took out the rest of my letters. The first, with an Indian stamp and Calcutta postmark, was from my father, the first since I had set out from England, re-forwarded from Munich. It was in answer to a letter of mine from Cologne in which I had broken the news of the fait accompli. I opened it with foreboding. But neatly folded inside the letter, was a birthday-cheque for a fiver! I had cast my bread upon the waters and it had returned to me in a quarter of an hour and, so to speak, with knobs on.

* * *

During the days with Konrad, our own preoccupations had selfishly taken precedence over everything else. Intermittently rumbling in the distance like stage thunder, the sounds of strife had gradually diminished and then ceased. Among the flat-dwellers these offstage noises had prompted deprecating clicks of the tongue and deep fatalistic sighs, but not for very long: hard times had induced a stoic attitude to trouble. The revolution vanished from the front pages of the foreign press and the headlines describing it in the café newspapers were less lurid each morning. As everything in the mood of the city conspired to reduce the scale of the events, it was easy to misunderstand them and I bitterly regretted this misappraisal later on: I felt like Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme, when he was not quite sure whether he had been present at Waterloo.

* * *

Outside the café, meanwhile, I hastened to join a one-way population drift along the Kärntnerstrasse. Everyone was heading for the Ring and I soon found myself jammed in the crowd not far from the point where I had parted from Konrad. All eyes were gazing the same way and in a little while a procession advanced out of the distance: it was to solemnize the end of the emergency. At the head, on a grey horse and carrying his sabre at the slope, rode the Vice-Chancellor, Mayor Fey, who had commanded the government forces: a grim-looking man with a jutting chin and a stahlhelm. An army contingent followed: then a column of the Heimwehr with Prince Starhemberg marching in front in a képi like a ski-cap and a long grey overcoat of martial cut, mildly waving; his face and his tall figure were immediately recognizable from his photographs. A black-clad group of ministers came next, led by the Chancellor himself. Dressed in a morning coat and carrying a top-hat, Dr. Dollfuss was hurrying to keep up. At the approach of Major Fey, the intermittent ripple of clapping remained unchanged; Starhemberg induced a slight rise in volume; but Dollfuss was hailed with something approaching an ovation. Another column of troops formed the rearguard and the procession was over.

There was something cheerful and engaging about the Chancellor, but in spite of all the anecdotes, his small stature came as a surprise. As the crowd broke up, a fellow-bystander told me yet another. One of the soldiers in the recent siege, pointing to something on the pavement, had exlaimed: “Look! Fancy seeing a tortoise in the streets of Vienna!” “That’s not a tortoise,” his companion had said, “that’s Doktor Dollfuss in his stahlhelm”; and, for an outsider, that was the last of it.

* * *

I hadn’t arrived in Vienna totally unprepared. There were a few inhabitants on whom I could stake a shadowy claim. But, for the sake of morale, prompted by a sort of vagrant’s amour-propre, I hadn’t wanted to launch myself on them when I was absolutely broke. Now that this problem was solved, I dumped my stuff at the cheapest lodging house I could find and sought out a telephone. If I were asked to a meal it would be best, I felt, to turn up unburdened; a rucksack would have been too broad a hint. Unfounded though they had been, my qualms at the last castle had implanted the uncharacteristic notion in my mind that the appearance on the doorstep of an affable tramp with all his possessions on his back might possibly be considered a nuisance. (I shudder to think of the scourge I must have been. The idea that they are always welcome is a protective illusion of the young. Dangerously untroubled by doubts, I rejoiced in these changes of fortune with the zest of an Arabian beggar clad and feasted by the Caliph or the crapulous tinker who is picked up snoring and spirited to splendour in the first scene of The Taming of the Shrew.)

In Vienna, the brunt fell on compatriots and Austrians almost equally. Robin Forbes-Robertson Hale, the sister-in-law of an old friend, put me up in a large flat which was always teeming with guests. It was perched in a gaunt and fascinating rookery in a street of the Inner City called the Schreyvogelgasse, or Shriekbird Lane. Tall and striking, she was just back, with two Austrian friends, from a wintry stay in Capri: they belonged to a small half-native and half-expatriate Bohemian set which seemed perfect from the first moment I became involved in it. With the end of the political troubles, the last days of Carnival were given over to music and dancing and dressing up. Wildish nights and late mornings set in, and after a last climactic fancy dress party, I woke in an armchair with an exploding head still decked with a pirate’s eyepatch and a cut-out skull and crossbones. At the first strokes of noon from the tower of the nearby Schottenkirche, the shuttered penumbra began to stir with groans; a concerted croaking for Alka-Seltzer broke out. A pierrot, a Columbine, a lion and a sleeping lioness with her moulting tail over the back of a sofa were disposed about the drawing-room like damaged but still just articulate toys.

The recollection of the days that followed is blurred by the penitential onslaughts of snow, rain, sleet and hail which scourged the city with all the rigours of February and Shrovetide and Ash Wednesday. It was a wild winter; but the angry skies and the wind make the fires and the lamplight glow all the brighter in retrospect. With the first days of March, the Lenten ferocity flagged a little. I was living in a state of exaltation. I couldn’t quite believe I was there; and as though to put it beyond question, I often repeated ‘I’m in Vienna’ to myself when I woke up in the night or as I wandered about the streets.

Some of this small society lived in old houses in the Inner City, others in the gently decaying fragments of subdivided palaces still adorned by swirls of wrought iron and leafy arabesques and moulded ceilings and the shutters and the double doors opened with intricately flourished handles. One of these new friends, Basset Parry-Jones, was a teacher—of English literature, I think—at the Konsularakademie, a sort of extension for older students of the Theresianum, the celebrated school founded by Maria Theresa. (Like students at St. Cyr and Saumur and the grim institution in Young Törless, the boys once wore cocked hats and rapiers which turned them into miniature French Academicians. It was the most famous place of its kind in the country and only rivalled by the Jesuit foundation at Kalksburg.) The Konsularakademie used to train candidates for the Diplomatic Service of the old Dual Monarchy and it still trailed some clouds of this k. und k. glory. Basset—half-sardonic half-enthusiastic, always beautifully dressed and a staunch guide and companion for noctambulism—lent me books and got permission for me to consult the Akademie library. Another new friend was an American girl called Lee, who was recuperating from some minor illness under the same roof. Good-looking, solemn and gentle, she was the daughter of the United States military attaché in a neighbouring capital. Surprisingly, or half-inevitably, she was a convinced pacifist. She applauded my reluctance to become a professional soldier but when I told her that I was only shy of peace-time soldiering, this excellent first impression was ruined. We often argued, and once or twice, in spite of her convalescence, until long after dawn. She was as little qualified as I for such debates: emotion and a kind heart were her guides; the arguments grew blurred on either side as the protracted but unacrimonious hours advanced, and ended in concord.

A colleague of Basset’s called Baron von der Heydte and known as Einer, was a great friend of everyone, and soon of mine. In his middle twenties, civilized, quiet, thoughtful and amusing, he belonged to a family of Catholic landowners and soldiers in Bavaria, but his style and manner were far removed from what foreigners consider the German military tradition; and with the Nazi movement he had still less in common. (A few years later, I heard he had returned to Germany. Out of family atavism, and to avoid politics and the party activities which were swallowing up the whole of German civilian life, he had become a regular cavalry officer, rather like ancien régime Frenchmen, I think, who followed the profession of arms in spite of their hatred of the government.)

On the first day of the battle of Crete, the memory of these Vienna weeks leapt back to my mind.

Shortly after the first wave of German parachutists had dropped, a captured enemy document was brought to our battle H.Q. in the rocks outside Herakleion, where I was a junior officer. The paper contained the entire enemy order of battle, and, as I was thought to know German, it was handed to me: the spearhead of the attack, it disclosed, was under the command of a Captain von der Heydte: his battalion had been dropped near Galata, at the other end of the island, between Canea and Maleme aerodrome: close to where I had been stationed until a few days before. A German officer who was taken prisoner soon after cleared up any doubt. It was Einer, beyond question: he had transferred from the cavalry to a parachute unit some time before.

The noise and the fighting died down at sunset. The short May night was illuminated by destroyed planes burning fitfully among the olive-trees and during these hours of respite, I couldn’t stop thinking of this strange coincidence. Chaos broke out again at dawn; and, all through the mortal blind-man’s-buff of the next eight days, I thanked my stars that we were loose, as it were, in different parts of the wood, for battles had degenerated during the last eighty-seven years. No chance now, like Cardigan and Radziwill recognizing each other from London ballrooms, of exchanging brief and ceremonious greetings through the smoke of the Russian guns. Again and again, in those whistling and echoing ravines, where a new and unknown smell was beginning to usurp the scents of spring, my thoughts flew back to the winter of 1934 and the tunes and jokes and guessing games, the candlelight and the scent of burning pine-cones when nothing was flying through the air more solid than snowflakes.[4]

Surrounded by maps and atlases in the Akademie library, I discovered that, as the crow flies between Rotterdam and Constantinople, I was a little less than half-way. But no crow would have flown in the enormous loop that I had followed, and when I plotted the route and stepped it out with dividers, the total came to a great deal more than half; not that this meant much: the rest of the journey was sure to take an equally tortuous course. I knocked off the miles for the trip on the Rhine-barge and the lifts I had taken in bad weather and found that the distance I had actually slogged on my two feet was seven hundred and fifty miles. The journey had lasted sixty-two days, and when I had struck out the halts of more than one night and divided the distance by the time, the average worked out at twelve miles a day. Bearing in mind a few marches from daybreak till long after dark, but conveniently forgetting the times I had merely strolled to the next village, I was a little disappointed. I had imagined it was far more. But I was delighted with everything else. I never tired of recapitulating the journey. I had crossed three parallels of latitude and eleven meridians and moved over from the North Sea—still called ‘the German Ocean’ on old maps—to a minute-line of longitude running from the Baltic to the south-east Adriatic. Even looked at from the moon—so the terrestrial and celestial globes suggested—the distance covered would have been as discernible as the Great Wall of China.

Back among the maps, and conscious all at once of the accessibility of the Mediterranean, I was assaulted by a train of thought which for a moment set the expedition in jeopardy. It is a famous hazard. All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of a nearly irresistable pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandoline strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe’s Law and is ineluctable as Newton’s or Boyle’s. I had felt twinges of its power as I crossed the Inn between Augsburg and Munich during a snowstorm: why not follow the river upstream to the Brenner, soft voices had seemed to whisper, and swoop down on Lombardy? And, sitting as restlessly as a fifth-century Goth and gazing at the cartographic defiles that cross the atlas page to Venice, I felt it now; but not for long. Thank heavens the fit passed. Venice, after all, was on the edge of familiar territory: Italy could wait. Just in time, the windings of the Middle and the Lower Danube began to reassert their claims and the Carpathians and the Great Hungarian Plain and the Balkan ranges and all these mysterious regions which lay between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea brought their rival magnetisms into play. Was I really about to trudge through this almost mythical territory? How would it compare to the lands I had already crossed? I would have been amazed had I known how circuitous it would be, and how much further than I had thought.

* * *

Meanwhile, there was Vienna.

I had always enjoyed museums and picture galleries, but it was firmly established here that no stranger could let any of the city’s wonders elude him—“I suppose you’ve seen the Harrach collection? Have you looked at Habsburg tombs in the Kapuzinerkirche yet? What about the Belvedere?”—that I was shamed into exploring Vienna with unusual thoroughness. I found a companion now and then. One, much too briefly, was a funny, extremely vague and marvellously beautiful girl who was being finished in Vienna, called Ailsa McIver. She had the sort of radiant high spirits that made everyone turn round and smile. But usually I was alone.

Few delights could compare with these wintry days: the snow outside, the bare trees outlined by the frost, the muted light, and, indoors, the rooms following each other filled with the spoils, the heirlooms and the dowries of a golden age. The galleries of the hibernating city retreated and grew smaller in the distance like vistas along dim rectangular telescopes. I had heard someone say that Vienna combined the splendour of a capital with the familiarity of a village. In the Inner City, where crooked lanes opened on gold and marble outbursts of Baroque, it was true; and, in the Kärntnerstrasse or the Graben, after I had bumped into three brand-new acquaintances within a quarter of an hour, it seemed truer still, and parts of the town suggested an even narrower focus. There were squares as small and complete and as carefully furnished as rooms. Façades of broken pediment and tiered shutter enclosed hushed rectangles of cobble; the drip of icicles eroded gaps in the frozen scallops of the fountains; the statues of archdukes or composers presided with pensive nonchalance; and all at once, as I loitered there, the silence would fly in pieces when the initial clang from a tower routed a hundred pigeons crowding a Palladian cornice and scattered avalanches of snow and filled the geometric sky with wings. Palace succeeded palace, casemented arches sailed across the streets, pillars lifted their statues; ice-fettered in their pools, tritons floundered beneath a cloudy heaven and ribbed cupolas expanded by the score. The greatest of these, the dome of the Karlskirche, floated with a balloon’s lightness in an enclosing hemisphere of snow and the friezes that spiralled the shafts of the two statue-crowned guardian columns—free-standing and as heavily wrought as Trajan’s—gained an added impromptu spin when they vanished half-way up in a gyre of flakes.

A hint of touchy Counter-Reformation aggression accompanies some ecclesiastical Baroque. There is a dash of it here and there in Vienna, and St. Stephen’s—steep and streamlined and Gothic—springs up unchallenged in the heart of it as though the balance needed redress. Bristling with finials and unloosing its gargoyles, the Cathedral lifts a solitary and warning steeple which dominates every dome and cupola and bell-tower in the city. (Styles of architecture become an obsession in this town. They played a great part in the circle I had strayed into. In a game of analogies, someone had suggested a murex shell, with its spines and its centrifugal asymmetry and its flaky and crusted surfaces, as the epitome of Rococo. Likewise, the symmetrical convolutions and the balancing arabesques of Baroque could be symbolized by a violin. A crosier hit off the brackeny helix and the exfoliation of Flamboyant; and Gothic could be a mitre—in the case of a cathedral, a whole Council of them piled like a card house until they vanished tapering in the clerestory shadows where void and solid change places and turn to stone.) In the rank of fiacres outside the south door of St. Stephen’s, cabbies in bowlers conversed in the Vienna dialect while they straightened the blankets on their horses’ quarters and gave them their feed in buckets. Some of these were as heavily whiskered as their masters. They steamed and fidgeted between the shafts, scattering their oats over the caked snow and the cobbles and sending an agreeable stable-yard whiff across the fumes of the hot coffee and the fresh cakes in the pastrycooks’ shops. Joining in my memory with the cold edge of the frost, the combination of these scents conjure up the city in a second.

* * *

‘When the right vertuous E.W. and I were at the Emperour’s court togither, wee gave our selves to learne horsemanship of Ion Pietro Pugliano.’ It was the opening sentence of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie; he was talking of Vienna in the winter of his twentieth year—1574—when he and Edward Wotton were on some unexacting mission from Elizabeth to Maximilian II: Their duties left them plenty of free hours for the riding school and for listening to the fertile Italian wit of their friend and instructor. ‘He said...horsemen were the noblest of soldiers...they were the maisters of war, and ornaments of peace, speedie goers, and strong abiders, triumphers both in Camps and Courts: nay, to so unbleeved a point he proceeded, as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a Prince, as to be a good horseman. Skill of government were but a Pedanteria, in comparison; then would he adde several praises, by telling what a peerless beast the horse was, the only serviceable Courtier without flattery, the beast of most bewtie, faithfulnesse, courage, and such more, that if I had not beene a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I think he would have perswaded mee to have wished my selfe a horse.’ Basset Parry-Jones had read the passage aloud to show that Vienna had always been a temple for the cult of horsemanship. It had been an imported Italian skill in Renaissance times, like fencing, sonnet-writing, building loggias and the technique of foreshortening; but in later centuries the passion rioted like a native growth all over the Empire and there were still plenty of Austrians with a horsy gait and bearing—and of Hungarians, even more, as I was to learn during the coming months—who had a soft spot for the British Isles on purely equestrian grounds. There, they felt, lay the central shrine: not of dressage and haute école, but of speed and huge fences and broken necks, and their eyes would cloud over at the memory of antediluvian seasons in the shires. Hard-bitten centaurs from both parts of the Dual Monarchy recalled with just pride how their great-uncle Kinsky had won the Grand National on Zoedone in 1883. Among these earnest experts omniscience in horse-genealogy ran neck and neck with mastery of the Almanach of Gotha, and they fondly cherished the many equine links between the two countries. Why, an Austrian affirmed, three Turkish mares, seized from the rout of the Turkish cavalry at the relief of Vienna, had been sent to England in 1684, several years before any of the famous founding sires of English bloodstock had set a hoof in the kingdom. Where was the Godolphin Barb then, or the Byerly Turk, and where the Darley Arabian? That was nothing, a grizzled Hungarian would protest, his brows beetling: what about the Lister Turk, the stallion the Duke of Berwick had captured from the Ottomans at the siege of Buda a couple of years later, and taken back to James II’s stables?

It was our visit to the Spanish Riding School that had given rise to all this. (The beautiful wing of the Hofburg was built a century and a half later than the oval where Sidney and Wotton must have practised, but Maximilian’s stables were up already; they are resonant still with whinnying and munching.) We had lolled over the balcony like Romans at the games while virtuosi in glistening jackboots and brown frock-coats—the scarlet was kept for Sundays—evolved beneath us. They wore their bicornes sideways like Napoleon and sat erect and still as tin horsemen in the saddles of their Lipizzaner greys. These horses were traditionally derived from the noblest Spanish or Neapolitan strains—which probably means they were Arabs, like the godlike Barbs and Arabians and Turks we were talking about—and they used to be bred at Lipizza, in the Slovenian hills and oak-woods to the north-east of Fiume.[5] Slightly darker in hue when young, they get paler as they grow and the juvenile dappling fades from their quarters like freckles from children’s cheeks. Fully grown, they are snow white creatures of great beauty, strong, elegant, compact and mettlesome, wide-eyed under their taciturn riders and with manes and tails as sleekly combed and as rippling as the tresses of Rhine-maidens.

They moved with grace and precision about the glaucous concavity of the school: caracoling across the raked and muffling tan, rhythmically changing step, passaging, advancing as though double-jointed, flicking out their forelegs as straight as match-sticks, slewing over the manège in side-stepped hesitation waltzes, pawing the air as they backed slowly on their haunches and taking to the air at last like Pegasus and seeming to remain there for long moments of suspension and stasis. Except when a recondite feat evoked a crackle of applause, the sequence unfolded in a stilly hush. Learned writers derive the style from the classical school of the seventeenth century and, in particular, from the principles elaborated in the Duke of Newcastle’s great work. He wrote and published it during the Commonwealth when he was a Royalist general in exile at Antwerp. Anyone turning over the plates in the splendid folio, especially when he gazes on engravings of the author himself in action, will notice the kinship at once. (The dales and the queer rusticated façade of Bolsover sweep across the background and the solitary cavalier, periwigged, ribanded and plumed and as cool as a cucumber, is levitated in patrician aloofness astride a mount with its mane tied in neat bows and curvetting in mid-air with the resilience of a dolphin. Watching his lavoltas and corantos, expert hidalgos from Castille with rowels the size of Michaelmas daisies would make the sign of the cross and cry “Miraculo!”) These later Viennese evolutions were as precise and as complex and as unhastening as the Spanish etiquette which, so the survivors say, constricted the Habsburg court till the end. Poker-faces froze the riders’ features into masks which were symbolic of the arcane and introvert madness which pervades all haute école; and a spell-bound aura, as of four-footed zombies, clothed their neurotic and ravishing steeds. A vision of haunting wonder.

There was much talk of this obsolete Spanish etiquette. It is hard to imagine when one is surrounded by the easy-going charm of present-day Austrian ways, but portraits are lavish with hints. It is clear that something new and strange was planted in the Habsburg Empire at the marriage of Philip the Handsome to Joan the Mad. She brought Castille and Aragon and all Spain and an array of new kingdoms as a dowry, and Sicily and half Italy and a slice of North Africa and nearly all the new-found Americas; and ceremoniousness as well, and black clothes and the high Spanish punctilio. With the lapse of generations, when lantern jaws and pendulous underlips held sway in both capitals and infantas and archduchesses were almost interchangeable, sombre capes with the scarlet crosses of Santiago and Calatrava began to mingle with the gaudy plumes and slashes of the Landsknecht captains; Escurial solemnity threw the shadows of ritual postures along the Hofburg flagstones and the Holy Roman Empire and the Most Catholic Kingdom were fused. Was Don John a Spanish or an Austrian hero? Above the cavernous bends of the Tagus, hewn or picked out in coloured scales on the barbicans of Toledo, the great double-headed eagle of the Empire opens its feathers wider, even today, than any kindred emblem by the Danube or in Tyrol. Crossing the Atlantic with its wings heraldically spread on the sails of his fleets, the same bird was emblematic of the sudden expanse of Charles V’s amazing inheritance. Cut in volcanic stone and crumbling among the lianas, that display of stone feathers still puzzles the Quetzal-conscious Maya; four centuries of earthquakes have spared them from ruin by Lake Titikaka. Charles was the epitome of the double heritage, a living symbol of the Teutonic and the Latin compound and the whole age. Darkly clad against a dark background, wearied with governing and campaigning, standing with one hand resting on his dog’s head, how thoughtfully and sombrely the great Emperor looks out from Titian’s picture! When he retired after his abdication, it fitted the prevailing duality that he should settle neither in Melk nor Göttweig nor St. Florian nor in any of the famous Austrian abbeys, but in a small royal annexe which he attached like a limpet to the walls of the little Hieronymite monastery of Yuste, among the beech and ilex woods of Estremadura.

* * *

I had never understood till now how near the Turks had got to taking Vienna. Of the first siege in Tudor times there were few mementoes in the museums. But the evidence of the second, more than a century later, and of the narrow escape of the city, was compellingly laid out. There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows; scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums; helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha’s tent, cannon and flags and horsetail banners with their bright brass crescents. Charles of Lorraine and John Sobiesky caracoled in their gilded frames and the breastplate of Rüdiger v. Starhemberg, the town’s brave defender, gleamed with oiling and burnishing. (When John Sobiesky of Poland met the Emperor on horseback in the fields after the city was saved, the two sovereigns conversed in Latin for want of a common tongue.) There, too, was the mace of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the skull of Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizir strangled and decapitated at Belgrade by Suleiman’s descendant for his failure to take Vienna; and beside it, the executioner’s silken bowstring. The great drama had taken place in 1683, eighteen years after the Great Fire of London; but all the corroborative detail, the masses of old maps, the prints and the models of the city, turned it into a real and a recent event.

A huge wall encircled the roofs of the city. Eagle banners fluttered from the gables and the battlements and above them loomed many of the towers and steeples I could see when I looked out of the windows. The trenches and the mines of Turkish sappers, all heading for the two key bastions, wriggled across mezzotints like a tangle of wormcasts; the moats, the glacis, the ruins, and the bitterly contested ravelins had all been tilted by the engravers as though for the convenience of a studious bird. Hundreds of tents encompassed the walls; spahis and janissaries pressed forward; the wild cavalry of the Khan of Krim Tartary scoured the woods and bristling regiments of lancers moved about like counter-marching cornfields. Tethered beyond the fascines and the gabions and the stacked powder-kegs, a score of camels that had padded all the way from Arabia and Bactria gazed at the scene and then at each other, while turbaned gunners simultaneously plied their linstocks and clouds of smoke burst out of the cannon. And lo! even as I looked, the same guns, captured and melted down and recast as bells when the Moslems were driven downstream, were peacefully chiming the hour from the steeple of St. Stephen’s.

It had been a close run thing. What if the Turks had taken Vienna, as they nearly did, and advanced westward? And suppose the Sultan, with half the east at heel, had pitched his tents outside Calais? A few years before, the Dutch had burnt a flotilla of men-of-war at Chatham. Might St. Paul’s, only half re-built, have ended with minarets instead of its two bell-towers and a different emblem twinkling on the dome? The muezzin’s wail over Ludgate Hill? The moment of retrospective defeatism set off new speculations: that wall—fortifications two and a half miles in length and sixty yards wide—had once enclosed the Inner City with a girdle of rampart and fosse. Like the fortifications of Paris which gave way to the outer boulevards in the last century, they were pulled down and replaced by the leafy thoroughfare of the Ring. Very much in character, the Viennese of the late ’50’s whirled and galloped about their ballrooms to the beat of Strauss’s new ‘Demolition-Polka,’ composed in celebration of the change. But, for as long as it stood, that massive wall of defensive masonry, twice battered by the Turkish guns and twice manned by the desperate Viennese, had been, for all its additions, materially the same as the great wall of the thirteenth century; and the cost of building it, I learnt with excitement, had been paid for by the English ransom of Richard Coeur de Lion. So the King’s fury on the battlements of Acre had been the first link in a chain which, five centuries later, had helped to save Christendom from the paynims! The thought of this unconscious and delayed-action crusading filled me with keen delight.

Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan’s Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moons of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They mark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.

* * *

Waking one morning, I saw that it was March 3rd. It was impossible to believe that I’d been in Vienna three weeks! The days had sped by. They had simultaneously spun themselves into a miniature lifetime and turned me into a temporary Viennese. (Unlike halts in summer, winter sojourns bestow a kind of honorary citizenship.) There is little to account for this long lapse of days; there seldom is, in the towns on this journey. I had met many people of different kinds, had eaten meals in a number of hospitable houses, above all, I had seen a lot. Later, when I read about this period in Vienna, I was struck by the melancholy which seems to have impressed the writers so strongly. It owed less to the prevailing political uncertainty than to the fallen fortunes of the old imperial city. These writers knew the town better than I, and they must have been right; and I did have momentary inklings of this sadness. But my impression of infinite and glowing charm is probably the result of a total immersion in the past coupled with joyful dissipation. I felt a touch of guilt about my long halt; I had made friends, and departure would be a deracination. Bent on setting off next day, I began assembling my scattered gear.

What was the name of the village on that penultimate morning, and where was it? West of Vienna, and certainly higher; but all the other details have gone. It was Saturday; everybody was free; we drove there in two motor-cars and feasted in an inn perched on the edge of a beech forest. Then, tingling with glühwein and himbeergeist, we toiled in high spirits and with the snow halfway up our shanks down a long forest ride. We halted in clouds of our own breath and looked north-east and across Vienna towards Czechoslovakia and the dim line of the Little Carpathians; and, just as the sun was beginning to set, we came on a tarn in a ghostly wood of rime-feathered saplings as two-dimensional and brittle-seeming as white ferns. The water was solid, like a rink. Breaking icicles off the trees, we sent the fragments bounding across the surface and into the assembling shadows with an eerie twittering sound and an echo that took half a minute to die away. It was dark when we drove back, talking and singing with the prospect of a cheerful last evening ahead. How different it seemed from my first arrival, under the tarpaulin with Trudi! Where was Konrad? It might have been a year ago. Prompted by my recent preoccupations, perhaps, the conversation veered to Charles V’s grandfather, the first Maximilian: The Last of the Knights, as he was called, half-landsknecht, and, until you looked more carefully at Dürer’s drawing, half playing-card monarch. Someone was describing how he used to escape from the business of the Empire now and then by retiring to a remote castle in the Tyrolese or Styrian forests. Scorning muskets and crossbows and armed only with a long spear, he would set out for days after stag and wild boar. It was during one of these holidays that he composed a four-line poem, and inscribed it with chalk, or in lampblack, on the walls of the castle cellar. It was still there, the speaker said.

Who told us all this? Einer? One of the Austrian couple who were with us? Probably not Robin or Lee or Basset...I’ve forgotten, just as I’ve forgotten the place we were coming from and the name of the castle. Whoever it was, I must have asked him to write it out, for here it is, transcribed inside the cover of a diary I began a fortnight later—frayed and battered now—with the old Austrian spelling painstakingly intact. There was something talismanic about these lines, I thought.

They have a more hopeful drift than the comparable five lines by an earlier Caesar, especially the last line. I preferred Maximilian’s end to Hadrian’s desolating

[1] It was closed years ago and a new hostel was opened in the Schiffgasse, in the Second District.

[2] “Good morning, Madam! I am an English student walking to Constantinople on foot, and I would so much like to do a sketch of you.”

[3] Florence, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Fiume, Lubljana, Zagreb, Ragusa, Sarajevo, Budapest, Clausenburg, Csernovitz, Lvov, Brno, Prague...all of them, for varying periods, were part of the Empire. The influx of their citizens to Vienna is the other side of the medal from endemic irredentism and sporadic revolt. (Habsburg absolutism, backed by Metternich’s secret police and the dread Moravian fortress-prison of Spielberg were the villains of much nineteenth-century literature: Browning, Meredith and Stendhal spring to mind.)

[4] I only learnt with certainty that Einer had survived the battle when his admirable book about it came out. Daedalus Returned (Hutchinson, 1958) gives a thoughtful, sympathetic and compelling picture of the anxieties and dangers of those days. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross after the battalion he commanded had been the first to enter Canea. Following many operations on the Russian front, he was taken prisoner in 1944 during the Ardennes counter-offensive. I. Mc. D. G. Stewart, in his The Struggle for Crete, says: ‘Von der Heydte’s...barely disguised distaste for the leaders of the regime was said to have blocked his promotion.’ He is now a professor of International Law at Würzburg University, and in a recent letter posted during a journey across Ethiopia, he writes: “I hope we may meet soon and wander once more along the silver streets of our youth.”

[5] It is in Yugoslavia now. When I went there two years ago, it was a soaking day, so I could only catch a glimpse of the lovely spectres through a film of rain.

[6] Live, don’t know how long,

And die, don’t know when;

Must go, don’t know where;

I am astonished I am so cheerful.

   Stop press! I’ve just discovered that the castle is called Schloss Tratzberg. It is near Jenbach, still standing, and not very far from Innsbruck.