11. THE MARCHES OF HUNGARY

THIS BUOYANCY carried me all the way across the flat country from Kissujfalu to the little town of Nové Zamky—Érsekujvár in Hungarian, and Neuhäusl in German—an hour or two after dark. I can’t resist letting the diary take over for a few paragraphs:

In these parts, SS. Cyril and Methodius, whose names are as inseparably joined as Swan is to Edgar, still enjoy great fame. In The Good Soldier Svvejk, the hero’s peculiar conduct lands him temporarily in a Prague lunatic asylum where he is surrounded by raving megalomaniacs. ‘A chap can pass himself off as God Almighty there,’ he said, ‘or the Virgin Mary, the Pope, the King of England, His Imperial Majesty or St. Wenceslas... One of them even pretended to be SS. Cyril and Methodius, just to get double rations.’

* * *

The dry paths had turned my boots and puttees white with dust. The empty sky was the clear blue of a bird’s egg and I was walking in my shirt sleeves for the first time. Slower and slower however: a nail in one of my boots had mutinied. I limped into the thatched and white-washed village of Köbölkut as it was getting dark. There was a crowd of villagers in the street and I drifted into the church with them and wedged myself into the standing congregation.

The women all had kerchiefs tied under the chin. The men, shod in knee-boots, or in raw-hide moccasins cross-gartered halfway up their shanks, had wide felt hats in their hands, or cones of fleece. Over the shoulders of a couple of shepherds were flung heavy white capes of stiff homespun frieze. In spite of the heat and the crush, one of them was wrapped in a cloak of matted and uncured sheepskin, shaggy-side out, that reached down to the flagstones. Things had become much wilder in the last hundred miles. The faces had a knobbly, untamed look: they were peasants and countrymen to the backbone.

The candles, spiked on a triangular grid, lit up these rustic masks and populated the nave behind them with a crowd of shadows. At a pause in the plainsong one of the tapers was put out. I realized, all at once, that it was Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae were being sung, and very well. The verses of the penitential psalms were answering each other across the choir and the slow recapitulations and rephrasings of the responsories were unfolding the story of the Betrayal. So compelling was the atmosphere that the grim events might have been taking place that night. The sung words crept step by step through the phases of the drama. Every so often, another candle was lifted from its pricket on the triangle and blown out. It was pitch dark out of doors and with the extinction of each flame the interior shadows came closer. It heightened the chiaroscuro of these rough country faces and stressed the rapt gleam in innumerable eyes; and the church, as it grew hotter, was filled by the smell of melting wax and sheepskin and curds and sweat and massed breath. There was a ghost of old incense in the background and a reek of singeing as the wicks, snuffed one after the other, expired in ascending skeins of smoke. “Seniores populi consilium fecerunt,” the voices sang, “ut Jesum dolo tenerent et occiderent”; and a vision sprang up of evil and leering elders whispering in a corner through toothless gums and with beards wagging as they plotted treachery and murder. “Cum gladiis et fustibus exierunt tamquam ad latronem...” Something in the half-lit faces and the flickering eyes gave a sinister immediacy to the words. They conjured up hot dark shadows under a town wall and the hoarse shouts of a lynch-mob; there was a flicker of lanterns, oafish stumbling in the steep olive groves and wild and wheeling shadows of torches through tree trunks: a scuffle, words, blows, a flash, lights dropped and trampled, a garment snatched, someone running off under the branches. For a moment, we—the congregation—became the roughs with the blades and the cudgels. Fast and ugly deeds were following each other in the ambiguity of the timbered slope. It was a split-second intimation! By the time the last of the candles was borne away, it was so dark that hardly a feature could be singled out. The feeling of shifted rôles had evaporated; and we poured out into the dust. Lights began to kindle in the windows of the village and a hint of moonrise shone at the other end of the plain.

* * *

I was looking for a barn for the night and a cobbler’s shop—or, linguistically more easily, a smithy—to get my boot-nail knocked in. But as Smith—Kovács—is the commonest Hungarian surname, just as it is in English, there was immediate confusion: which Kovács? János? Zoltán? Imre? Géza? At last a voice in a doorway said: “Was wollen Sie?” It was a red-haired Jewish baker and he not only hammered in the nail but put me up for the night as well. ‘We made a bed of straw and blankets on the stone floor of the dark bakery,’ my diary records, ‘and here I am, writing this by candlelight. Maundy Thursday is “Green Thursday” in German, Gründonnerstag. I wonder why? Good Friday is Karfreitag.’

Next morning we talked in the sun outside the shop. There was a bench under a tree. My host was from a Carpathian village where quite a number of Jews, including his family, belonged to the Hasidim, a sect which sprang up two centuries ago in the province of Podolia—Russian then, Polish later—the other side of the Carpathians. The sect represented a break with Talmudic scholasticism and a plunge into mystic thought—the Cloud of Unknowing versus the Tree of Knowledge—and the belief of the Hasidim in a kind of all-englobing divine presence (a concept more familiar to Christians than to Jews) was condemned by the orthodox, in particular by a famous scholar and rabbi in the Lithuanian town of Vilna. But in spite of its heterodoxy and the anathema of the Gaons, the sect multiplied. It prospered especially in Podolia, Volhynia and the Ukraine and their tenets soon began to spread from these flat and Cossack-harried provinces and found their way south through the mountain passes. The baker himself was not a zealot: the face under the carroty hair was plump, shrewd and twinkling. I said I enjoyed reading the Bible. “So do I,” he said; then he added with a smile, “Especially the first part.” It took me a further couple of seconds to get the point.

The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service, a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell.

When the low hills dropped, furrows fledged with young wheat-blades ran symmetrically into the distance under scores of larks. The footpath wandered through whitewashed farms and the yards of low manor-houses and later through spinneys filled with violets and primroses. Streams unwound under the willow branches, dwindling and expanding again into pools that were covered with watercress and duckweed and giant kingcups. The tadpole season was over and the water-lily leaves were rafts for little frogs. On a gregarious impulse, the shrill chorus would stop suddenly for a few seconds and then strike up again, and my advance touched off a mass of semicircular frog-trajectories and plops while herons cruised low and settled among the rushes balanced watchfully on one leg. On a bank tufted with sedge and reeds among mossy swamps a flock of sheep were tearing at the rough grass and black pigs snouted after last year’s acorns. The herdsman lay smoking under an oak tree in his sheepskin and there was no one else but scarecrows for miles. A fox trotted across a clearing in a wood. The overhead blaze had reduced me to shirt sleeves again and I was darkening like a piece of furniture. About four in the afternoon I got to the little village of Karva. The lane ended at the foot of a bank, and when I climbed it, there below—once again, long before I had expected it—the Danube was sweeping along.

Close to the bank, where reeds and willow-herb grew thick, the water gave off a gaseous tang of stagnation; but the ripples and the creases in midstream showed the speed of its flow. The plains which had expanded from Bratislava, with all their deviations and marshes and loops and islands, had yielded a few miles upstream to the enclosing advance of the hills. All strays had been gathered in and the higher ground on my bank was answered on the Hungarian shore by the undulations of the Bakony Forest; and, at long last, I was face to face with Hungary. It was only a river’s width away. For a few miles it flowed unswerving between an escort of reflected woods and slid into the distance in either direction like a never-ending Champs Elysées of water.

I set off under the flickering poplar-leaves and I hadn’t gone far before three villagers on horseback came trotting towards me upstream, one in loose white clothes and the others in black, with a chestnut foal scampering alongside. When we came level, we exchanged greetings and up went their three hats in a triple flourish. I knew the answer to the ritual question—‘Where do you come from?’—which always came first; it was: ‘Angolországbol!’ (England-from! Magyar is a language of suffixes.) And to the next question—‘Whither?’—the answer came equally pat: ‘Konstantinópolybá!,’ Constantinopleward. They smiled tolerantly. They hadn’t the dimmest notion of the whereabouts of either. In dumb show, and with a questioning twiddle of the wrist, I asked where they were bound for. “Komárombá!” they answered. Then straight as ninepins in their saddles, they put me in God’s care and unlidded in concert once more. Touching their horses they headed Komárom-wards in a slow and stylish canter that lifted a long feather of dust along the towpath. The foal, taken by surprise, galloped anxiously to catch up until all four were out of sight many furlongs upstream. I wished I had had a hat to lift. These Hungarian salutes were magnificently ceremonious and hidalgo-like. (Komárom was an old town a few miles upstream at the mouth of the Váh. It disembogued in the Danube about thirty miles south of the point where Baron Pips and I had watched the rafts floating by. There was a bridge over the river there and some famous fortifications that the Hungarians defended through a long Austrian siege in 1848.)

The last sign of human habitation was a riverside hamlet called Cvenke,[3] where crowds of rooks were noisily gathering for the night. Thereafter, the feeling of remoteness and solitude grew more pronounced with every step. It was getting darker too, but no colder: although it was the end of March, the air was as warm and as still as an evening in summer. Frog-time had come. Each pace, once more, unloosed a score of ragged parabolas and splashes. Flights of waterfowl detonated like spring-guns loosing off a whirr of missiles across the water. It was a world of scales and webbed feet and feathers and wet whiskers. Hundreds of new nests were joining the old ones in the damp green maze and soon there would be thousands of eggs and then wings beyond counting.

The meaning of the twin messages of the temperature and the wilderness took a moment or two to impinge. Then I understood, with sudden elation, that my first and longed-for night in the open had arrived. I found a hollow lined with leaves among the willow-trunks about three yards from the water and after a supper of Kövecses-remains and a new loaf from my baker friend and watercress from a stream, I stuck a candle on a stone to fill in my diary. It burned without a tremor. Then I lay, gazing upwards and smoking with my rucksack for a pillow, wrapped in my greatcoat in case of cold later on.

The sky had changed. Flashing like a lozenge of icicle fragments, Orion had reigned unchallenged all winter. Now it was already far down in the west and leading a retinue of constellations into decline and some of its wintry glitter had gone. The lower tip was growing dim in the vapour and dust that overhang horizons and soon the Pleiades were following the famous stars downhill. All the trees and reeds and flag-leaves and the river and the hills on the other bank glimmered insubstantially in the starlight. The fidgeting of moorhens and coots and of voles and water-rats doing the breast-stroke through the stems grew less frequent and every half-minute or so two bitterns—one quite near, the other perhaps a mile away—sounded across the vague amphibian world: loneliest of muffled cries, plainly to be heard above the shrill rise and fall of millions of frogs. This endless population, stretching upstream and down for leagues, made the night seem restlessly alive and expectant. I lay deep in one of those protracted moments of rapture which scatter this journey like asterisks. A little more, I felt, and I would have gone up like a rocket. The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

The dimness of those dropping constellations was not all the fault of the vapours that haunt horizons. A rival pallor was spreading at the other end of the sky, and very fast. Behind a flutter of hills a rim of blood-red lunar segment was rising. It expanded to its full diameter and then dwindled; and when the circumference was complete a tremendous crimson moon was casting loose. It changed to orange and then to yellow as it climbed and diminished until all the colour had ebbed away and left it to soar with the aloof and airy effulgence of silver. During the last hour’s walking, twilight and darkness had masked the behaviour of the hills. Now the moon revealed that they had receded once more and left the Danube free to break loose. It was a week after the spring equinox and only a few hours short of the full moon, and as this is one of the few reaches where the river flows due east, the line of the moon’s reflection lay amidstream where the current runs fastest and shivered and flashed there like quicksilver. The reefs and shoals and islands and the unravelling loops of water which had lain hidden till now were all laid bare. Wastes of fen spread from either shore and when the surfaces were broken by undergrowth or sedge or trees, they gleamed like fragments of flawed looking-glass. All was changed. The thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods. This frosty radiance played tricks with levels and distances until I was surrounded by a dimensionless and inconcrete fiction which was growing paler every second. While the light was seeking out more and more liquid surfaces for reflection, the sky, where the moon was now sailing towards its zenith, seemed to have become an expanse of silvery powder too fine for the grain to be descried. Silence transcended the bitterns’ notes and the industry of the frogs. Stillness and infinity were linked in a feeling of tension which, I felt sure, presaged hours of gazing watchfulness. But I was wrong. In a little while my eyes were closing under a shallow tide of sleep.

* * *

“Co tady devláte?”—‘I awoke with a start’—my diary says—‘someone was shaking me by the collar and shouting. As soon as I was fully awake, I made out two men in uniform. One of them, with an old-fashioned bull’s-eye lantern on his belt, was keeping me covered with a rifle and his fixed bayonet was nearly touching my chest. Completely at a loss, I asked what was happening; but they spoke no German and only a word or two of Hungarian, so we were stuck. They made me get up and marched me along the path, one of them holding my arm in a ju-jitsu grip while the other, having slung his rifle, now carried an enormous automatic pistol. It was rather a comic scene; some mistake somewhere. Whenever I opened my mouth I was told to shut up, so I did, at least for a bit. After a while our little Svvejk-like procession reached a wooden hut and I was put in a chair, still covered by the huge firearm. The pistol’s owner had a bristling moustache; he fixed me with a bilious and bloodshot eye while the other began to search me from top to toe. He emptied every pocket and made me take my puttees and boots off. It was more and more mysterious. By the lamp in the hut I saw they were wearing the grey uniform of the Frontier Guard, which I had seen just before crossing to Bratislava. When he had finished with me, he untied the cord of my rucksack and turned it upside down so that everything tumbled on the floor in a disorderly heap. Then he began to unfold, or open and examine, every single item, feeling in the pockets of pyjamas and looking down the backs of books, even this wretched journal. This went on for some time until at last, as though realizing there was nothing to interest him, he knelt back in the middle of the floor, which was now littered with my ransacked belongings, and scratched his head in a mystified and baffled manner. The man with the pistol had also become a bit less fierce, and the two talked sadly, casting dubious glances at me from time to time. One of them picked up my passport, the only object that had attracted no notice during the search. When it emerged that I was English, it seemed to make a great difference. The man with the moustache laid down his automatic and I was offered a cigarette. We had been smoking for a minute or two when a third frontier-watchman turned up, a fat man who spoke German. He asked me what I was up to. I said I was on a walking tour across Europe. He kept looking from the photograph in the passport to me and back again, asked me my age and checked that it was nineteen. Suddenly he came to a decision: he smacked his hand hard on the table and burst out laughing. The others cheered up too. He told me I had been mistaken for a notorious saccharine smuggler called Cverny Josef’—Black Joseph—‘Fekete Jozi,’ on the Magyar shore—who plied his trade from Cvenke across the Danube into Hungary; the taxes on saccharine are so high there that it is an easy way of making a lot of money. I immediately thought of poor Konrad! But he’d promised me he was only going to take part on the business side.[4] Apparently Black Jo hides among the trees and the reeds on this deserted reach of the river until a boat rows across from the other side in the dark to pick him up; so it had been rather a surprise to capture him—or someone like him—on a night with a full moon; the trouble was, Jo was over fifty... We all laughed and the two men apologised for their brusque treatment. In the end, they said they would fix quarters for me. I’d have much rather slept out but didn’t want to hurt their feelings. We walked a mile or two inland across the water-meadows and the moon was beginning to go down when we reached a little farm. I am in the stable now on a soft heap of straw with a hurricane lamp and catching up with the rest of the night’s doings before I forget them.

‘Next day. The farm people were from Silesia. He was big and tough and she very handsome, with jet black hair. There was a stuffed otter on the wall—plenty of them lodge in the Danube’s banks. They gave me a lovely breakfast with coffee and black bread and two boiled eggs and some hard white cheese sprinkled with red paprika, and a swig of barack. Also, some things wrapped up to eat on the way. I’m beginning to feel like Elijah, fed by ravens.

‘Dew covered the grass and a thin mist veiled the river, but both were soon gone. The path still followed a grassy ridge banked against flooding. I could see for miles, all last night’s scenery: strange and unbelievable then, calm and beautiful now, rather like the woods and the polders seen from a dyke-road in Holland. Poplars, willows and aspens sheltered the path—a blessing, as it’s been the hottest day of the year—and the branches made a criss-cross of shade. I met nobody till I came on some Gypsy boys who spend their time hunting weasels, stoats, rats, field-mice and other humble fauna. The way they go about this is very unsporting. They find their holes in the banks, pour a bucket of water in the highest one and the animals come scuttling half-drowned out of exits lower down and the boys catch them and wring their necks. When I passed them they waved bunches of dismal and draggled little corpses at me, wanting me to buy some, as they eat them and expect you to do the same—they eat anything. Baron Pips told me that when his farm people bury a horse that has died of old age or disease, Gypsies are sure to dig it up and eat it in the middle of the night...’

* * *

There was a lull in the air. Holy Saturday, with its lamps out and shrines empty and the distant tolling over the fields, cast a spell of catalepsy and suspense. It was a time of sealed tombs and sleeping sentries with the Protagonist of the week’s drama deep underground harrowing Hell... There was not a fisherman on the river, not a peasant in the fields, nothing but those little vole-catchers and skimming wagtails, the waterbirds and the massed larks and the frogs, whose steady diurnal croak, though universal, seemed milder than the full-moon brekekekexing the night before. A thrown stick could silence an acre for several seconds. The flecks of dust on the current and the spinning fluff suggested midsummer. I ate my bread and cheese on the shady side of a rick and fell asleep. (Hay-ricks are conical hereabouts, cleverly stacked round a centre pole and when most of the hay has been sliced away for fodder, the sun catches the shorn planes as if lopsided obelisks had been erected in the fields.) I awoke later than I had intended. The woods, full of rooks and wood-pigeons, were sending long shadows over the grass. I drank at a brook, sloshed some water on my face and tidied up. Civilization lay ahead.

Far away on the other bank I could see my destination; it had been growing steadily in size since my first glimpse that morning. A cliff loomed over a long sweep of the river and on this ledge was perched a white fane that resembled St. Peter’s in Rome. A light circle of pillars lifted a gleaming dome into the sky. It was dramatic, mysterious, as improbable as a mirage and unmistakable as a landmark for many miles across the desert of liquid and solid. The Basilica of Esztergom, I knew, was the Metropolitan Cathedral of all Hungary, the largest religious building in the Kingdom and the archiepiscopal See of the Cardinal-Prince-Archbishop: the Hungarian equivalent, that is, of Rheims, Canterbury, Toledo, Armagh and old Cracow. The Basilica, though spectacular and splendid, is not old: little in that part of Hungary was spared the ravages of the Tartars and the Turks; after the Reconquest everything had to begin again. But the town—the Latin Strigonium and the German Gran—is one of the oldest in the country. Ever since the first Apostolic King of Christian Hungary—the conquering Árpáds’ descendant, St. Stephen himself—was born and crowned in Esztergom, history has been accumulating here and entwining itself with myth. From my footpath, the Basilica was the only building in sight. The monasteries, the churches, the palaces and the libraries that encrust the steep little town were all in baulk. The great pile, with its twin cupola-topped belfries, its ring of pillars and its great nacreous dome, hovered above water and timber and fen as though upheld, like a celestial city in a painting, by a flurry of untiring wings.

* * *

The air was full of hints and signs. There was a flicker and a swishing along the river like the breezy snip-snap of barbers’ scissors before they swoop and slice. It was the skimming and twirling of newly arrived swifts. A curve in the stream was re-arranging the landscape as I advanced, revealing some of the roofs of Esztergom and turning the Basilica to a new angle as though it were on a pivot. The rolling wooded range of the Bakony Forest had advanced north from the heart of Transdanubia, and the corresponding promontory on the northern shore—the last low foothills of the Matra mountains, whose other extremity subsides in the north eastern tip of Hungary—jutted into the water under the little town of Parkan. Reaching for each other, the two headlands coerced the rambling flood yet once more into a narrower and swifter flow and then spanned the ruffle with an iron bridge. Spidery at first, the structure grew more solid as the distance dwindled. (Twenty miles east of this bridge, the Danube reaches a most important point in its career: wheeling round the ultimate headland of the Bakony Forest and heading due south for the first time on its journey, it strings itself through Budapest like a thread through a bead and drops across the map of Europe plumb for a hundred and eighty miles, cutting Hungary clean in half. Then, reinforced by the Drava, it turns east again, invades Yugoslavia, swallows up the Sava under the battlements of Belgrade, and sweeps on imperturbably to storm the Iron Gates.)

In an hour, I had climbed the cliff-path into the main street of Parkan. A little later my passport was stamped at the frontier post at the Czechoslovakian end of the bridge. The red, white and green barrier of the frontier post at the far end marked the beginning of Hungary. I lingered in the middle of the bridge, meditatively poised in no man’s air.

* * *

The masonry of the piers below sent green Ophelia-like tresses of waterweed swaying down the current. Upstream, the water broke up the reflected turquoise of a sky full of dishevelled cirrus clouds. Pink and crimson threads were dispersed in conflicting drifts and then frozen in motionless turmoil; it was all the stranger as there had not been a breath of wind all day. Swifts were still skimming through the air and a heron flew across the river from wood to wood. A number of large and mysterious birds were floating high overhead and at first I thought they were herons too, but they carried their necks extended instead of coiled between their shoulders, and they were white. They were larger and more slender and less hurried than swans: the spread of wings scarcely moved as they revolved on the air-currents. There were about a dozen, snow-plumed except for black flight-feathers which ran along the inner edge of their wing like a senatorial stripe of mourning. They were storks! When they circled lower, the long beaks and the legs that trailed in the slipstream showed red as sealing wax. An old shepherd was leaning on the ramp close by and gazing up at them too. When some of the great birds floated lower, the draught of their feathers brushed our upturned faces, and he said something in Magyar—“Nét, góbyuk!” and smiled. He hadn’t a tooth in his head. Two of the birds glided upstream. One dropped on a haystack and fluttered to regain its balance. The second landed underneath in the meadow—becoming, as it folded its wings, a white bobbin with red lacquer stilts and bill—and paced to the water’s edge. The others, meanwhile, were alighting on the tiles of the two little bridgehead towns and advancing with ungainly steps along the roofs to inspect the dishevelled nests that cumbered many of the chimneys. Two of them were even attempting, in defiance of the bells which were tolling there, to land in one of the Cathedral belfries—they remembered the harmless hazard from former incumbency. The bell-hampers were choked with tangles of last year’s twigs.

Touching my arm, the shepherd pointed downstream at something in the dark-shadowed east high above the river and just discernible across the failing sky. Ragged and flocculent, fading to grey, scattered with specks of pink from the declining sun, varying in width as random fragments were dropping away and re-cohering and agitated with motion as though its whole length were turning on a single thread, a thick white line of crowding storks stretched from one side of the heavens to the other. Mounting Africa along the Nile, they had followed the coasts of Palestine and Asia Minor and entered Europe over the Bosphorus. Then, persevering along the Black Sea shore to the delta of the Danube, they had steered their flight along that shining highway until they had come to the great bend a few miles downstream. Defecting from the river, their journey was now following a westerly as well as a northern bias; they were bound for Poland, perhaps, and shedding contingents as they went at hundreds of remembered haunts. We gazed at them in wonder. It was a long time before the rearguard of that great sky-procession had vanished north. Before nightfall the whole armada would subside in a wood or settle all over some Slovakian hamlet—astonishing the villagers and delighting them, for storks are birds of good omen—like a giant snow storm; taking to the air again at first light. (Six months and hundreds of miles later, I halted on the southern slopes of the Great Balkan Range, and watched the same great migration in reverse. They were making for the Black Sea, retracing their spring journey before wintering beyond the Sahara.)

There was much going on: in the air and the sky, on the river, along the banks; almost too much. I was determined to linger, suspended there in a void, and let a few more hundred thousand tons of liquid rush under the girders before stepping across the remaining yards into Hungary. I might have been in the royal box opposite the milling dramatis personae as the curtain was going up.

A solitary bell, forerunner of the peals and scales that would come tumbling into the moonlight later on, had been joined by several others, but their summoning notes failed to hasten the ebb and flow under the trees: though the crowd, strolling and hobnobbing all along the waterfront, showed a slight tendency to veer towards a road that led uphill. There were hundreds of peasants from neighbouring villages. The men were mostly in black and white, but a burly figure in bandman’s rig toiled through the crowd stooping under a big drum and the slanting sunbeams picked out a trombone here and a bassoon there, and three colleagues equipped with French horns who were drifting the same way. The clothes of the women and the girls, with their many-pleated skirts and their different-coloured bodices and aprons and kerchiefs, were enlivened here and there by clusters of ribbons and stiff bright panels of embroidery on billowing sleeves. As usual the brightest colours were at play in the flaring and flouncing of Gypsy women: violet and magenta and orange and yellow and shrill green. The hues were sprinkled like the flowers of an Indian temple-garland broken and scattered among the tamer European blooms. No rustic gathering was to be without them for the rest of the journey. On the plank of a rough cart outside an inn, a brown bear was seated as though he were about to pick up the reins; his dark-skinned master climbed beside him and they drove away. Creeping through the crowd and the village carts and pony-traps and the groups of horsemen, an anachronistic charabanc halted and discharged two nuns and a troop of schoolgirls and honked its way slowly offstage. A trio of tall Dominicans in shovel hats, as easy as magpies to pick out by their black and white markings, were gathered under a chestnut tree.

But it was a group of splendid figures, sauntering and halting along the flagstones of the quay that caught and held the eye. They were clad in dark, sumptuous and variously coloured doublets of heavy silk—or occasionally of velvet—fastened with chased buttons the size of gold hazelnuts and edged with brown fur at the cuffs and the throat and over the shoulders. Some wore knee-length over-tunics, furred likewise and open down the front and frogged with gold lace; others wore them slung across their backs with careful abandon, or askew over one shoulder like swinging dolmans. Tight breeches, stiff with embroidery, ended in Hessian boots which were black, scarlet, blue or rifle-green; gold braid edged their notched tops and gilt spurs were screwed into the heels. One or two had gold or silver chains about their necks and all of them wore kalpacks of light or dark fur. These were shaped like hussars’ busbies, tilted on their brows at challenging slants and plumed with white aigrettes or herons’ feathers that burst from their jewelled clasps like escapes of steam. Carried nonchalantly under their arms or in the crooks of their elbows or with points touching the flagstones when stationary and hands resting lightly on the cross-hilts, their nearly semi-circular scimitars were sheathed in green or blue or plum-coloured velvet and mounted in gold and adorned with jewels at intervals along the scabbards. The splendour of princes in a legend stamped these magnates; and, except for one, who was nearly spherical and rashly kalpacked in white fur and booted in the same scarlet as his complexion, they carried off all this bravery with accomplished ease: strolling, gossiping, glancing at their watches, leaning on their scimitars and halting with one leg straight and the other Meredithianly bent. As he talked and nodded, the monocle of a tall dandy flashed back the sunset in dots and dashes like Morse code. A carriage halted, three similarly-clad congeners alighted and there was a ceremonious doffing of bear’s fur and egret and the clink of heels politely joining. A magnificent old man remained inside; lame perhaps, for his white-bearded chin rested on hands crossed on the bone crook of a malacca cane. His scimitar was laid across his knee as he bent forward, talking and laughing. The energy and humour of the white-bristling face reminded me of Victor Hugo. Apart from the brown fur and a gold chain round his shoulders and an order at his throat, he was dressed entirely in black, and all the more magnificent for this sobriety. (‘’Twould have made you crazy’—the lines suddenly surfaced after years of oblivion—‘to see Esterhazy/with jools from his jasey/to his dimond boots.’[5] Yes, indeed.) Slowly this covey of grandees, with the carriage and its white-bearded passenger driving alongside them at a walking pace, strolled upstream under the sequin twinkle of the poplars.

Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets and those enormous kingcups that grew in the streams. I waved as they dashed by, and one of them turned and sent a string of good-tempered dactyls over her shoulder. If the Hungarians had not been monotheists, the impending Resurrection might have been followed by the ascent of Adonis and Prosperine.

* * *

I found it impossible to tear myself from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now: a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear but because, within arm’s reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels. The river below, meanwhile, was carrying the immediate past downstream and I was hung poised in mid-air between the two.

But today, with the clairvoyance of retrospect, I can fend off the fateful moment by assembling the data whose results the next few hours would reveal... For I know now what must have been afoot. I can see the citizens of Esztergom aligning candles on their window-sills—wicks which, added to the tapers in the hands of a myriad watching peasants, were to surround the procession, later on, with a twinkling forest; and, peering up at the Basilica, I can float inside and along the vistas of acanthus-leaves and through the darkening criss-cross of mezzotint shading into the vast sacristy where the tiers of presses and the rows of treasure-chests have disgorged their silk and their brocade, all unfolded now, and their sacred instruments and their vessels. Mitres are clicked open, copes spread, the jewelled gloves and the pallium laid ready, candelabra and monstrances and crosiers set forth. In the Pannini-like emptiness under the dome, pale armfuls of new and unlit candles are pricked in tall palisades across the gloom. An unrolling carpet ascends the shallow steps under the Archbishop’s canopy and the bell-ringers in their loft are getting thirsty.

In the stable-yard of the Archbishop’s palace half-way up the hill, there is a clattering and a mutter of unseasonable oaths from the booted and busbied postillions and the grooms. Restive horseshoes strike sparks from the cobbles. The hindmost of the Cardinal’s four greys, with a toss of mane and plume, is being backed between the shafts while the traces are run through. Half the size of the other postillions but identically frogged and plumed, a pink-cheeked tiger polishes the silver door-handle for the last time, then runs a rag over the varnished panel where a scarlet painted hat encloses a mitre-and-crown-topped escutcheon between its five-tiered pyramids of tassels, and slams it shut.

On the walls inside the Palace, meanwhile, Duccio’s sombre Jeremiah and the shrivel-cheeked hermits and Doctors of Crivelli grow dim in their frames; likewise the Virgins and Child of Matteo di Giovanni and the Nativities of Giovanni di Paolo. The enthroned Madonna of Taddeo Gaddi and Lorenzo di Credi’s Assumption of the Magdalene are losing their lustre and the sacred groups from Siena and Florence and Venice and Umbria and the Marches and the Low Countries and Spain are all on the brink of dissolution. Ambiguity ranges abroad! A Lombardic maiden has become one with the unicorn she clasps in her vermilion arms; and in a score of Martyrdoms, the gesso gleam of the haloes will outlive the incumbent saints. By assimilative collusion, the Danube School Temptations and Crucifixions have already swallowed up the shadows that are assembling along the valley. Evening gathers. Perhaps the Transylvanian visions of Thomas of Koloszvár—knights and bishops and St. Giles in an ilex-glade shielding his pet hind from an archer—will be the last to succumb.

The other floors are astir with expectancy. There is a coming and going of staff, an anxious eye for the clocks that tick in the great rooms, an ear for the cathedral bells, a downward glance at the stables; but at the heart of all, in Monsignor Seredy, Cardinal Mindszenty’s immediate predecessor, reigns imperturbable calm. A scarlet presence can be divined, a good-humoured face, a red skull-cap, a ringed hand on a table beside a red biretta incandescent in the dusk. About his shoulders, instead of the customary lace, a white fur mantle is patterned with ermine: an ancient use makes the primate of Hungary a temporal prince as well as an archbishop and a Prince of the Church. All round his chair, the stiff, wide folds of his cappa magna cover the design of the carpet with yard upon yard of geranium-coloured watered silk. Pince-nez flashing, all cuff and Adam’s apple, his chaplain and train-bearer flits attentively at his side. Anxiously at hand, punctiliously turned out in dark magnate’s splendour and with his hair neatly brushed, a youthful and newly-appointed gentleman-at-arms hovers. A plumed fur hat rests in the crook of his arm, a gloved hand grasps a scimitar in a black velvet scabbard at the point of balance. He is determined, come what may in the complexities of the long night ahead, to keep his spurs and his sword-point clear of that ocean of scarlet silk... There is still time for a discreet cigarette at the far end of the room... The Archbishop’s chestnut-trees have opened a thousand fans under the tall windows, each to be pronged with a pink or white steeple before the month is out. An owl hoots! Beyond the poplars and the empty quay, the cobweb of the bridge looms across the Danube and somebody still lingers there. But beyond it, all turns dark. Upstream it is still daylight and the river glows wide and pale as it loiters west through the insubstantial green and silver foliage. As though in answer to the more urgent tolling, the voices of the frogs are suddenly louder.

* * *

I too heard the change in the bells and the croaking and the solitary owl’s note. But it was getting too dim to descry a figure, let alone a struck match, at the windows of the Archbishopric. A little earlier, sunset had kindled them as if the Palace were on fire. Now the sulphur, the crocus, the bright pink and the crimson had left the panes and drained away from the touzled but still unmoving cirrus they had reflected. But the river, paler still by contrast with the sombre merging of the woods, had lightened to a milky hue. A jade-green radiance had not yet abandoned the sky. The air itself, the branches, the flag-leaves, the willow-herb and the rushes were held for a space, before the unifying shadows should dissolve them, in a vernal and marvellous light like the bloom on a greengage. Low on the flood and almost immaterialised by this luminous moment, a heron sculled upstream, detectable mainly by sound and by the darker and slowly dissolving rings that the tips of its flight-feathers left on the water. A collusion of shadows had begun and soon only the lighter colour of the river would survive. Downstream in the dark, meanwhile, there was no hint of the full moon that would transform the scene later on. No-one else was left on the bridge and the few on the quay were all hastening the same way. Prised loose from the balustrade at last by a more compelling note from the belfries, I hastened to follow. I didn’t want to be late.

TO BE CONTINUED

[1] A Bratislava nightclub.

[2] Owing to my ignorance of both the local tongues, from now on all conversations were in German, unless stated otherwise.

[3] Like a number of minor placenames in this chapter and the last, the name is part of the sudden rush of detail in the re-discovered journal; and, like many other names there, I can’t find it on any map. Another of Baron Pips’s parting presents was a set of pre-war large-scale maps, made by Freytags in Vienna—which disintegrated long ago, unfortunately—and perhaps this name was taken from one of them, or from a local signpost. As these maps were published in 1910, they had all the old Austro-Hungarian placenames and frontiers; though Cvenke, with that diacritic over the C, giving it a ‘tch’ sound, looks Slovakian. The Hungarian form of the same sound would be ‘Csénké.’

[4] As we know from an earlier chapter, all went well. But this imbroglio on the Danube’s banks made me anxious about him for some time to come.

[5] Ingoldsby Legends.