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"Geese, too," one of the watermen said. |
"Ducks," the other added. |
"Lambs." |
"Dogs." |
"Dick had better look out!" Maria appended. |
My polymath neighbour's reassuring pats on the shaggy scalp at his side were rewarded by a languorous gaze and a few tail-thumps, while his master told me that a swallowed poodle had been cut out of a catfish a year or two before. |
"They are terrible creatures," he said, "terrible and extraordinary." |
I asked him what they looked like and he repeated the question ruminatively to himself. "Beastly!" he said at last. "You see, they have no scales, they are quite smooth. Dull-coloured and slimey. But the face! That's the thing! It has great blunt features and hateful little staring eyes." As he spoke, he lowered his brows in a scowl and somehow contrived to make the large frank eyes behind the lenses contract and protrude simultaneously in a glare of venomous rage—"and its mouth!" he went on, "its mouth is the worst of all! It's underslung and fitted with rows of terrifying little teeth." He widened his mouth to a slit that sank balefully at both ends and thrust out his lower jaw in a hideous Habsburg jut. "And it has long, long whiskers," he said, spreading his finger-tips across both his cheeks, "sweeping out on either side." He fanned them airily away and over his shoulders like the long barbels of the giant catfish streaming in the current. "It looks like this!" he said, slowly rising from his chair and, as he did so, he thrust the dreadful mask towards us across the wine glasses. It was as if the great fish had swum in silently through the door. Maria said "Herr Jesus!" with a nervous laugh, and the dog jumped up and barked excitedly. Then his features resumed their normal cast, and he sat back again smiling at our amazement. |
I had chanced on a gold mine! 'Enquire Within About Everything': flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology—it was a richer source than any castle library. His English, mastered from governesses with his brothers, was wide in range, flawless in its idiom and polished by many sojourns in England. He was full of stories about the inhabitants of Danubian castles, of which he was one, as I had more or less gathered from the others' style in addressing him: his lair was a battered Schloss near Eferding, and it was the empty heronry I had noticed there which had first excited him when he was a boy about the fauna of the river. He had a delightful Bohemian, scholar-gipsy touch. |
He was on his way back from an antiquarian visit to Ybbs, the little town immediately across the river. His goal there had been the carved tomb of Hans, Knight of Ybbs: "A figure," he said, "of knock-out elegance!" He showed me a snapshot the parish priest had given him. (It was so striking that I crossed the river to see it next day. The Knight, standing in high relief in a rectangle which is deeply incised with gothic lettering, was carved in 1358. Falling in battle in the same decade as Crécy and Poitiers, he was an exact contemporary of du Guesclin and the Black Prince: at the very pinnacle, that is, of the age of chivalry. He is in full plate armour and the fingers of his right gauntlet curl round the shaft of a lance from which a pennant flutters. Those of the other, under an elbow bent at an angle which shifts the breastplated torso to one side from a wasp waist, are spread on the cross-hilt of a two-handed sword, to which a notched shield is strapped. His pointed steel cap is ridged like an almond and chain mail covers cheek, chin and throat like a nun's wimple: similar to that arrangement, with starched linen in lieu of metal, which gives a knight-like look to the nuns in some Orders. A huge oak-leaf-crested and slit-eyed tilting helm balances on one of his plated shoulders. The sinuous flow of the carving gives a lively, poetical and debonair stance to the Knight which is probably unique in such effigies.) |
At the mention of the Ritter von Ybbs, I asked him the exact meaning of von. He explained how a 'Ritter von' and an 'Edler von'—Knight, or Nobleman, 'of' somewhere—were originally feudal landowners holding a fief, and usually an eponymous one, in knight's fee. Later it simply became the lowest rank in the scale of titles. Its fiendish aura in England, due to the military bent of Prussian junkers, is absent in Austria where a milder, squire-ish feeling hovers about the prefix. This was the cue for an excursus on Central European aristocracy, conducted with great brio and the detachment of a zoologist. I had got the hang of it on broad lines; but what about those figures who had intrigued me in Germany: landgraves, margraves, rhinegraves and wildgraves? Who was the Margravine of Bayreuth and Anspach? The answers led him to a lightning disquisition on the Holy Roman Empire and how the tremendous title had pervaded and haunted Europe from Charlemagne to the Napoleonic Wars. The rôles of the Electors—the princes and prelates who chose the Emperors until the Crown became an unofficial Habsburg heirloom, when they ratified it still—were at last made clear. Between his election and accession, I learnt, a prospective Emperor was styled King of the Romans. "Why!" he said, "there was an English one, King John's son, Richard of Cornwall! And his sister Isabella married the Emperor Frederick II, the stupor mundi! But Richard never succeeded, poor fellow—as you know"—a tacit, all-purpose nod seemed the best response here—"he died of grief when his son Henry of Almain was murdered by Guy de Montfort at Viterbo. Dante writes about it..." By this time I had stopped being surprised at anything. He explained the mediatization of lesser sovereign states when the Empire was dissolved; and from here, at a dizzy pace, he branched into the history of the Teutonic Knights, the Polish szlachta and their elective kings, the Moldowallachian hospodars and the great boyars of Rumania. He paid brief tribute to the prolific loins of Rurik and the princely progeny they scattered across the Russias, and the Grand Princes of Kiev and Novgorod, the Khans of Krim Tartary and the Kagans of the Mongol Hordes. If nothing had interrupted, we would have reached the Great Wall of China and flown across the sea to the Samurai world. "No, no!" he said, rather contradictorily. "They should be preserved at all costs—the world is getting quite dull enough. And they are not really multiplying—history and ecology are against them. Think of the Oryx! Think of the Auckland Island Merganser! The Great Auk! The Dodo!" His face was divided by a grin: "You ought to see some of my aunts and uncles." But a moment later his brow was clouded by concern. "Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power-dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They'll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East—they would never come back! Never, never, never!" He looked so depressed that I changed the subject by asking him about the Germanic tribes who had once lived here—the Marcomanni and the Quadi—I couldn't get their odd names out of my head. "What?" He cheered up at once. Those long-haired Wotan-worshippers, who peered for centuries between the tree-boles, while the legionaries drilled and formed tortoise on the other bank? His eyes kindled, and I drank in more about the Völkerwanderungen in a quarter of an hour than I could have gleaned in a week with the most massive historical atlases. |
The others had stolen away to bed hours before. The third bottle of Langenlois was empty and we stood up too. He paused in front of a glass case in which a bright-eyed and enormous stuffed trout was swimming urgently through a tangle of tin water-weed. "It's a pity you didn't go on over the hills from St. Florian," he said. "You would have got to the little town of Steyr, and the Enns valley"—this was the green tributary I had watched curling out of the hills opposite Mauthausen—"It's only half a dozen miles. Schubert wrote the Trout quintet there. He was on a walking tour, like you." |
He whistled the tune as we strolled along the snow-covered quay, with Dick bounding ahead and sliding comically out of control on the concealed ice. The steeple of Ybbs stood clear above the roofs and the tree-tops the other side. Above the roofs of our own shore, almost inevitably, a large baroque castle soared into the starlight. "You see the third window on the left?" the polymath asked. "It's the room where Karl, our last Emperor, was born." After a pause, he went on whistling the tune of The Trout. "I always think of streams running down to the Danube," he said, "whenever I hear it." |
Woefully arrayed, |
My blood, man, |
For thee ran, |
It may not be nayed; |
My body blue and wan, |
Woefully arrayed. |
[ THE DANUBE: APPROACH TO A KAISERSTADT ] |
Next morning, after we had rowed across to Ybbs and back, conversation in the sunny front room of the inn flowed on till luncheon. The sun was well down the sky when I set out, and by nightfall I found myself in a mildly spurious kind of hunters' tavern in a valley only five miles further on. There was an open stove and the walls were laden with guns, hunting knives, horns, animal traps, badgers, moor-hens, weasels, pheasant and deer. Everything was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers. There were even some genuine foresters among the people out for the evening from Krems. A tireless accordionist accompanied the singing and through the thickening haze of wine, even the soppiest songs sounded charming: 'Sag beim Abschied leise "Servus,"' 'Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier,' and 'In einer kleinen Konditorei.' Songs from the White Horse Inn followed, and regimental marches of the most unmilitary kind, like the Deutschmeistermarsch ('Wir sind vom K.u.K. Infanterieregiment'), the Kaiserjäger and Radetzky Marches and the Erzherzog-Johann-Lied. Musically speaking, London never plucks at the heart-strings. But Paris, from Villon to Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker, never stops, nor does Naples, nor, above all, does Vienna: 'Goodnight Vienna'; 'Ich möcht mal wieder in Grinzing sein; Wien, Wien, nur du allein!'—they followed each other staunchlessly and the eyes of the singers grew mistier and mistier with home-sickness. Then we moved on to the rival dreamland of Styria and the Tyrol: peaks, valleys, forests, streams, cowbells, shepherds' flutes, chamois and eagles: 'Zillertal, du bist mein Freud!,' 'Fern vom Tirolerland,' 'Hoch vom Dachstein an'... Everything became blurred and golden. The one I liked most was the Andreas-Hofer-Lied, a moving lament for the great mountain leader of the Tyrolese against Napoleon's armies, executed in Mantua and mourned ever since. I found myself, with two new friends, still singing it in the small hours as we descended the valley. We passed the luminous vision of a watermill fossilized in ice and snow. When we reached the river, we rowed across to a circular bastion and a tall belfry glimmering among the trees on the other bank. As we climbed the steps into the starry town of Pöchlarn, a window opened and told us to stop making such a noise. |
We were invading one of the most important Danubian landmarks of the Nibelungenlied! The polymath had said it was the only place in the whole saga where no slaughter had broken out. The Margrave Rüdiger entertained the Nibelungen-Burgundians in this very castle, feasting them in coloured tents pitched all over the meadows. They were celebrating a betrothal with dancing and songs to the viol. Then the great army rode away to Hungary and their doom. 'And none of them,' the poet says, 'ever got back alive to Pöchlarn.' |
The mountains had once more loosened their hold on the river and the little towns succeeded each other at shorter intervals. Those across the water slid into view quietly posing above their reflections with a two-dimensional and stage-like solemnity. The gabled and coloured façades, entwined with ironwork and symmetrically leaved with shutters, joined in a line of scenery that ran the length of each quay. A few arches pierced this back-drop. Russet or sulphurous cupolas were lifted above the roofs. Higher still there was always a castle and stream-beds descended the darkly timbered valleys. But the quays and the nets and anchors along the water's brink might have belonged to small maritime ports. |
Strictly speaking, the Bohemian Forest had come to an end some way upstream. The old Kingdom of Bohemia, which had belonged to the Empire for the last three centuries, vanished when it became part of Czechoslovakia in 1919. It had always been landlocked by surrounding states. How could the famous stage-direction—"The Coast of Bohemia"—have ever slipped from Shakespeare's pen? When he introduced it in The Winter's Tale, Bohemia wasn't a half-mythical country, like 'Illyria' in Twelfth Night. Its whereabouts and its character were as well known as Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost, or Scotland in Macbeth. In fact, as an important Protestant stronghold, it was particularly famous at the time. The Elector Palatine—the Protestant champion of Europe—was married to Princess Elizabeth, and three years after Shakespeare's death he was elected to the throne of Bohemia. (The Winter Queen again! Shakespeare must have known her well and, according to some, the bridal masque in The Tempest was written for their betrothal.) How could Shakespeare have thought that her Kingdom was on the sea? |
As I marched downstream, inspiration struck. 'Coast' must originally have meant 'side' or 'edge,' not necessarily connected with 'sea' at all! Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia—at any rate, the Coast of the Forest: near enough! |
Let us run quickly through the relevant part of the story. The King of Sicily is unjustly convinced that Perdita, his infant daughter, is the bastard offspring of his Queen Hermione by his former friend and guest, the King of Bohemia. Antigonus, a faithful old courtier determined to save Perdita from her father's anger, flees from the court with the baby under his cloak, and takes ship for Bohemia. By what route? Shakespeare doesn't say. He would scarcely have gone via the Black Sea. I saw him sailing from Palermo, landing at Trieste, travelling overland, then embarking in Vienna in a vessel sailing upstream. The ship, running into a terrible storm, probably among the Grein whirlpools, founders. Antigonus, the old courtier, scrambles ashore—perhaps just under the castle of Werfenstein!—and then, amid thunder and lightning, he just has time to perch the swaddled Perdita in a safe place when the second of Shakespeare's most famous stage-directions—'Exit pursued by bear'—comes into force. (Bears have died out in the Austrian mountains, but there were plenty then.) While the beast in question devours Antigonus in the wings, enter an old shepherd. He sees Perdita and carries the little bundle home, and, finally brings her up as his daughter. Sixteen years later comes the marvellous sheep-shearing feast, with its promise of recognition and a happy ending and its magical speeches. It was probably celebrated in one of those upland farms... |
I hastened along the banks to get to Vienna a day earlier: 'Sir: Perhaps I can shed a little new light on a matter which has puzzled generations of scholars.' The mock-modest fuse that would touch off the bombshell began forming and re-forming... |
Who first misquoted and launched the phrase 'the Coast of Bohemia'? The correct stage-direction, as I discovered on my first morning in Vienna, runs: 'Bohemia: A desert country near the Sea.' |
It was total collapse. |
At night the stars flashed in a cloudless void. Nothing but an early, brief mist dimmed the pale skies in the morning and the snow on the peaks was coloured at both ends of each day by almost too poignant a flush. I felt that I had been let loose among a prodigality of marvels, and the thought was made more exhilarating still by the illusion of privacy. This landscape might have been an enormous and unending park, scattered with woods and temples and pavilions, for often the only footprints in the snow were mine. |
Through the last water-meadow, before the mountains resumed their grip, I was approaching one of those landmarks. High on a limestone bluff, beneath two baroque towers and a taller central dome, tiers of uncountable windows streamed away into the sky. It was Melk at last, a long conventual palace cruising above the roofs and the trees, a quinquereme among abbeys. |
No janitor was about. A young Benedictine, finding me loitering in the gatehouse, took me in tow, and as we crossed the first great courtyard, I knew I was in luck. He spoke beautiful French; he was learned and amusing and the ideal cicerone for all that lay ahead. |
Afterwards, it was in confused musical terms that the stages of our progress strung themselves together in my memory. This is how they resound there still. Overtures and preludes followed each other as courtyard opened on courtyard. Ascending staircases unfolded as vaingloriously as pavanes. Cloisters developed with the complexity of double, triple and quadruple fugues. The suites of state apartments concatenated with the variety, the mood and the décor of symphonic movements. Among the receding infinity of gold bindings in the library, the polished reflections, the galleries and the terrestrial and celestial globes gleaming in the radiance of their flared embrasures, music, again, seemed to intervene. A magnificent and measured polyphony crept in one's ears. It was accompanied by woodwind at first, then, at shortening intervals, by violins and violas and 'cellos and then double basses while a sudden scroll-work of flutes unfurled in mid-air; to be joined at last by a muted fanfare from the ceiling, until everything vibrated with a controlled and pervading splendour. Beyond it, in the church, a dome crowned the void. Light spread in the painted hollows and joined the indirect glow from the ovals and the lunettes and the windows of the rotunda. Galleries and scalloped baldachinos and tiered cornices rose to meet it; and the soft light, falling on the fluted pilasters and circles of gold spokes, and on the obelisks wreathed with their sculpted clouds, suffused the honeycomb side-chapels and then united in a still and universal radiance. Music might just have fallen silent; unless it were about to begin. In the imagination, instruments assembled—unseen cymbals just ajar that would collide with a resonance no more strident than a whisper; drums an inch below their padded sticks with palms ready to muffle them; oboes slanting, their reeds mute for a moment more; brass and woodwind waiting; fingers stretched motionless across the wires of a harp and fifty invisible bows poised in the air above fifty invisible sets of strings. |
For me the famous buildings were a peak in a mountain range of discovery which had begun at Bruchsal and continued long afterwards. Again and again during these weeks I was to find myself wandering through great concavities illuminated by reflections from the snow. Sunlight flared in lintels and broken pediments, and streamed in over snowy sills so close to the ceilings that they gave a last lift to the trompe l' oeil Ascensions and Transfigurations and Assumptions as they poured across them and quickened the white and cream wreaths of stucco holding them aloft: garlands doubly etherealized by the reverberated radiance of the snowflakes, and composed of all that reed and palm-leaf and tendril and scallop and conch and the spines of the murex can inspire. |
In this high baroque style, halted at a point on the frontier of rococo where the extravagant magic of later decades is all implicit, how easily the same aesthetic mood glides from church to palace, from palace to ballroom, from ballroom to monastery and back into church again! Paradox reconciles all contradictions. Clouds drift, cherubim are on the wing, and swarms of putti, baptised in flight from the Greek Anthology, break loose over the tombs. They try on mitres and cardinals' hats and stumble under the weight of curtains and crosiers while stone Apostles and Doctors of the Church, who are really encyclopaedists in fancy dress, gaze down indulgently. Female saints display the instruments of their martyrdom as light-heartedly as dice-boxes and fans. They are sovereigns' favourites, landgravines dressed as naiads; and the androgynous saint-impersonating courtiers who ogle the ornate ceilings so meltingly from their plinths might all be acting in a charade. Sacred and profane change clothes and penitents turn into dominoes with the ambiguity of a masqued ball. |
In the half-century following Melk, rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes. Scripture pastorals are painted on the walls of the stately interiors. Temples and cylindrical shrines invade the landscape of the Bible. Chinese pagodas, African palms, Nile pyramids and then a Mexican volcano and the conifers and wigwams of Red Indians spring up in Arcady. Walls of mirror reflect these scenes. They bristle with sconces, sinuous gold and silver boundaries of twining branches and the heaped-up symbols of harvest and hunting and warfare mask the joins and the great sheets of glass answer each other across wide floors and reciprocate their reflections to infinity. The faded quicksilver, diffusing a submarine dusk, momentarily touches the invention and the delight of this looking-glass world with a hint of unplanned sadness. |
But one is always looking up where those buoyant scenes in grisaille or pastel or polychrome, unfolding elliptically in asymmetric but balancing girdles of snowy cornice, enclose room after room with their resplendent lids. Scriptural throngs tread the air among the banks of vapour and the toppling perspectives of the balustrades. Allegories of the seasons and chinoiserie eclogues are on the move. Aurora chases the Queen of the Night across the sky and Watteau-esque trios, tuning their lutes and their violins, drift by on clouds among ruins and obelisks and loosened sheaves. A sun declining on a lagoon in Venice touches the rims of those clouds and veils the singing faces and the plucked strings in a tenuous melancholy; irony and pity float in the atmosphere and across the spectator's mind, for there is little time left and a closing note sounds in all these rococo festivals. |
Ceremonious and jocund, Melk is high noon. Meridian glory surrounded us as a clock in the town struck twelve. The midday light showered on the woods and a yellow loop of the Danube and a water-meadow full of skaters, all foreshortened as they wheeled and skimmed beneath the flashing line of windows. We were standing at the centre of a wide floor and peering—under a last ceiling-episode of pillars and flung cloud where the figures rotated beneath a still loftier dayspring of revelation—at a scene like a ballroom gallop getting out of hand. Draperies whirled spiralling up biblical shanks and resilient pink insteps trod the sky. We might have been gazing up through a glass dance-floor and my companion, touching me on the elbow, led me away a couple of paces and the scene reeled for a second with the insecurity of Jericho, as trompe l'oeil ceilings will when a shift of focus inflicts the beholder with a fleeting spasm of vertigo. He laughed, and said: "On se sent un peu gris, vous ne trouvez pas?" |
A bit tipsy... It was quite true. We had been talking about the rococo interplay of spiritual and temporal, and for a few instants, at these last words, my companion was transformed as well: habit, scapular, cowl and tonsure had all vanished and a powdered queue uncoiled down his brocaded back from a bow of watered silk. He was a Mozartian courtier. His light-hearted voice continued its discourse as he stood with his left hand poised on his sword knot. With explanatory sweeps of a clouded cane in his right, he unravelled the stratagems of the ceiling-painter; and when, to balance the backward tilt of his torso, he advanced a leg in a Piranesi stance, I could all but hear a red heel tap on the chessboard floor. |
One of the Abbey's bells began tolling on a more insistent note and, with an apology from my mentor, who was safely back in his native century, we hastened our step. In a few minutes I was several fields away, high above the Danube with the dome and the cupolas already dropping out of sight below a clump of trees. Twin gold crosses followed them and the cross on the dome last of all. Nothing remained in those hills to give the Abbey's presence away. The vanished pinnacles might have been the pigeon-loft of a farm. |
Un peu gris. It was too mild a term. |
The footpath along the southern bank was leading me into the heart of the Wachau, a region of the Danube as famous as those stretches of the Rhine I had travelled at Christmas or the Loire in Touraine. Melk was the threshold of this unspeakably beautiful valley. As we have seen by now, castles beyond counting had been looming along the river. They were perched on dizzier spurs here, more dramatic in decay and more mysteriously cobwebbed with fable. The towered headlands dropped sheer, the liquid arcs flowed round them in semicircles. From ruins further from the shore the land sloped more gently, and vineyards and orchards descended in layers to the tree-reflecting banks. The river streamed past wooded islands and when I gazed either way, the seeming water-staircase climbed into the distance. Its associations with the Nibelungenlied are close, but a later mythology haunts it. If any landscape is the meeting place of chivalrous romance and fairy tales, it is this. The stream winds into distances where Camelot or Avalon might lie, the woods suggest mythical fauna, the songs of Minnesingers and the sound of horns just out of earshot. |
I sat under a birch tree to sketch Schloss Schönbühel. Gleaming as though it were carved ivory, it sprang out of a pivot of rock which the river almost surrounded and ended in a single and immensely tall white tower crowned with a red onion cupola. "It's the castle of the Counts Seilern," a passing postman said. Smoke curled from a slim chimney: luncheon must have been on the way. I imagined the counts seated expectantly down a long table, hungry but polite, with their hands neatly crossed between their knives and forks. |
A falcon, beating its wings above an unwary heron half way up this northern bend, would command the same view of the river as mine. I had climbed to the ruins of Aggstein—unnecessarily steeply, as I had strayed from the marked pathway—and halted among the battlements of the keep to get my breath back. This gap-toothed hold of the Künringers teems with horrible tales; but I had scrambled up here for a different reason. The polymath's talk, two nights before, had made me long to look down on this particular reach. |
There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action! |
I mentioned earlier that we—or rather, the polymath—had talked about the Marcomanni and the Quadi, who had lived north of the river hereabouts. The habitat of the Marcomanni lay a little further west; the Quadi dwelt exactly where we were sitting. "Yes," he had said, "things were more or less static for a while..." He illustrated this with a pencil-stub on the back of the Neue Freie Presse. A long sweep represented the Danube; a row of buns indicated the races that had settled along the banks; then he filled in the outlines of eastern Europe. "...and suddenly, at last," he said, "something happens!" An enormous arrow entered the picture on the right, and bore down on the riverside buns. "The Huns arrive! Everything starts changing place at full speed!" His pencil leaped feverishly into action. The buns put forth their own arrows of migration and began coiling sinuously about the paper till Mitteleuropa and the Balkans were alive with demons' tails. "Chaos! The Visigoths take shelter south of the lower Danube, and defeat the Emperor Valens at Adrianople, here!," he twisted the lead on the paper—"in 476. Then—in only a couple of decades"—a great loop of pencil swept round the tip of the Adriatic and descended a swiftly-outlined Italy "—we get Alaric! Rome is captured! The Empire splits in two—" the pace of his delivery reminded me of a sports commentator "—and the West totters on for half a century or so. But the Visigoths are heading westwards," an arrow curved to the left and looped into France, which rapidly took shape, followed by the Iberian peninsula. "Go West, young Goth!," he murmured as his pencil threw off Visigothic kingdoms across France and Spain at a dizzy speed. "There we are!" he said; then, as an afterthought, he absentmindedly pencilled in an oval across northern Portugal and Galicia, and I asked him what it was. "The Suevi, same as the Swabians, more or less: part of the whole movement. But now," he went on, "here go the Vandals!" A few vague lines from what looked like Slovakia and Hungary joined together and then swept west in a broad bar that mounted the Danube and advanced into Germany. "Over the Rhine in 406: then clean across Gaul—" here the speed of his pencil tore a ragged furrow across the paper "—through the Pyrenees three years later—here they come!—then down into Andalusia—hence the name—and hop!—" the pencil skipped the imaginary straits of Gibraltar and began rippling eastwards again "—along the north African coast to"—he improvised the coast as he went, then stopped with a large black blob—"Carthage! And all in thirty-three years from start to finish!" His pencil was busy again, so I asked him the meaning of all the dotted lines he had started sending out from Carthage into the Mediterranean. "Those are Genseric's fleets, making a nuisance of themselves. Here he goes, sacking Rome in 455! There was lots of sea activity just about then." Swooping to the top of the sheet, he drew a coast, a river's mouth and a peninsula: "That's the Elbe, there's Jutland." Then, right away in the left hand corner, an acute angle appeared, and above it, a curve like an ample rump; Kent and East Anglia, I was told. In a moment, from the Elbe's mouth, showers of dots were curving down on them. "—and there go your ancestors, the first Angles and Saxons, pouring into Britain only a couple of years before Genseric sacked Rome." Close to the Saxon shore, he inserted two tadpole figures among the invading dots: what were they? "Hengist and Horsa," he said, and refilled the glasses. |
This was the way to be taught history! It was just about now that a second bottle of Langenlois appeared. His survey had only taken about five minutes; but we had left the Marcomanni and the Quadi far behind... The polymath laughed. "I forgot, about them in the excitement! There's no problem about the Marcomanni," he said. "They crossed the river and became the Bayuvars—and the Bayuvars are the Bavarians—I've got a Markoman grandmother. But the Quadi! There are plenty of mentions of them in Roman history. Then, all of a sudden—none! They vanished just about the time of the Vandals' drive westward..." They probably went along with them too, he explained, as part of the slipstream... "A whole nation shimmering upstream like elvers—not that there are any eels in the Danube," he interrupted himself parenthetically, on a different note. "Not native ones, unfortunately: only visitors—suddenly, the forests are empty. But, as nature hates a vacuum, not for long. A new swarm takes their place. Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden!" There was no room on the Neue Freie Presse, so he shifted a glass and drew the tip of Scandinavia on the scrubbed table top. "This is the Baltic Sea, and here they come." A diagram like the descent of a jellyfish illustrated their itinerary. "By the middle of the fifth century they were settled all along the left bank of the Middle Danube—if 'settled' is the word—they were all such fidgets." I'd never heard of the Rugii. "But I expect you've heard of Odoaker? He was a Rugian." The name, pronounced in the German way, did suggest something. There were hints of historical twilight in the syllables, something momentous and gloomy...but what? Inklings began to flicker. |
Hence my ascent to this ruin. For it was Odoacer, the first barbarian king after the eclipse of the last Roman Emperor. ("Romulus Augustulus!" the polymath had said. "What a name! Poor chap, he was very good-looking, it seems, and only sixteen.") |
Behind the little town of Aggsbach Markt on the other bank, the woods which had once teemed with Rugians rippled away in a fleece of tree-tops. Odoacer came from a point on the north bank only ten miles downstream. He dressed in skins, but he may have been a chieftain's, even a king's son. He enlisted as a legionary, and by the age of forty-two he was at the head of the winning immigrant clique in control of the Empire's ruins, and finally King. After the preceding imperial phantoms, his fourteen years' reign seemed—humiliatingly to the Romans—an improvement. It was not a sudden night at all, but an afterglow, rather, of a faintly lighter hue and lit with glimmers of good government and even of justice. When Theodoric replaced him (by slicing him in half with his broadsword from the collar-bone to the loins at a banquet in Ravenna) it was still not absolutely the end of Roman civilization. Not quite; for the great Ostrogoth was the patron of Cassiodorus and of Boëthius, "the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman." But he slew them both and then died of remorse; and the Dark Ages had come, with nothing but candles and plainsong left to lighten the shadows. "Back to the start," as the polymath had put it, "and lose ten centuries." |
Grim thoughts for a cloudless morning. |
In Mitter Arnsdorf I stayed under the friendly roof of Frau Oberpostkommandeurs-Witwe Hübner—the widow, that is, of Chief-Postmaster Hübner—and sat talking late. |
She was between sixty and seventy, rather plump and jolly, with a high-buttoned collar and grey hair arranged like a cottage loaf. The photograph of her husband showed an upright figure in a many-buttoned uniform, sword, shako, pince-nez and whiskers that were twisted into two martial rings. She was glad of someone to talk to, she told me. Usually her only companion in the evenings was her parrot Toni, a beautiful and accomplished macaw that whistled and answered questions pertly in Viennese dialect, and sang fragments of popular songs in a quavering and beery voice. He could even manage the first two lines of Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, in celebration of Marlborough's ally, the conqueror of Belgrade. |
But his mistress was a born monologuist. Ensconced in mahogany and plush, I learnt all about her parents, her marriage and her husband, who had been, she said, a thorough gentleman and always beautifully turned out—"ein Herr durch und durch! Und immer tip-top angezogen." One son had been killed on the Galician Front, one was a postmaster in Klagenfurt, another, the giver of the parrot, was settled in Brazil, one daughter had married a civil engineer in Vienna, and another—here she heaved a sigh—was married to a Czech who was very high up in a carpet-manufacturing firm in Brno—"but a very decent kind of man," she hastened to add: "sehr anständig." I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness. It needed neither prompting nor response, nothing beyond an occasional nod, a few deprecating clicks of the tongue, or an assenting smile. Once, when she asked rhetorically, and with extended hands: "So what was I to do?," I tried to answer, a little confusedly, as I had lost the thread. But my words were drowned in swelling tones: "There was only one thing to do! I gave that umbrella away next morning to the first stranger I could find! I couldn't keep it in the house, not after what had happened. And it would have been a pity to burn it..." Arguments were confronted and demolished, condemnations and warnings uttered with the lifting of an admonitory forefinger. Comic and absurd experiences, as she recalled them, seemed to take possession of her: at first, with the unsuccessful stifling of a giggle, then leaning back with laughter until finally she rocked forward with her hands raised and then slapped on her knees in the throes of total hilarity while her tears flowed freely. She would pull herself together, dabbing at her cheeks and straightening her dress and her hair with deprecating self-reproof. A few minutes later, tragedy began to build up; there would be a catch in her voice: "...and next morning all seven goslings were dead, laid out in a row. All seven! They were the only things that poor old man still cared about!" She choked back sobs at the memory until sniffs and renewed dabs with her handkerchief and the self-administered consolations of philosophy came to the rescue and launched her on a fresh sequence. At the first of these climaxes the parrot interrupted a pregnant pause with a series of quacks and clicks and the start of a comic song. She got up, saying crossly, "Schweig, du blöder Trottel!," threw a green cloth over the cage and silenced the bird; then picked up the thread in her former sad key. But in five minutes the parrot began to mutter "Der arme Toni!"—(Poor Toni)—and, relenting, she would unveil him again. It happened several times. Her soliloquy flowed on as voluminously as the Danube under her window, and the most remarkable aspect of it was the speaker's complete and almost hypnotic control of her listener. Following her raptly, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands. |
Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner's face, the parrot's cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni's heckling would be blotted out for seconds, or even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with a repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever. |
When I crossed the bridge at Mautern and saw the low country opening eastward, I knew that a big change was coming. I hated the thought of leaving this valley. After something to eat beside the barbican of Krems I doubled back, halting for a coffee in Stein by the statue of St. John Nepomuk, whose monument dominates the little town. He had been appearing frequently along the road. This Bohemian saint, the champion of the inviolacy of the confessional, became a great favourite of the Jesuits. They have set him up with so twirling a posture and such a spin of cassock and stole that the surrounding air might be rifled. The vineyards on the hill above filled a thousand buckets at vintage time, someone told me. The cliffs are warrened with cask-lined caves. |
In a mile or two, safely back in the wide and winding canyon, I got to Dürnstein. It was a little town of vintners and fishermen. Tilting uphill from the water's edge, it was shored with buttresses, pierced by arches, riddled with cellars and plumed with trees. Where the ice and the current allowed it, the Danube reflected the violin curves of the church and an Augustinian priory and a seventeenth-century schloss. It was another Starhemberg castle, half of it jutting into the river, half embedded in the fabric of the town. |
From the west barbican a long crenelated wall ran steeply up the mountainside to the tip of a crag that overhung both the town and river. Obeying the polymath—in this, as in all things—I was soon clambering about the wreckage of the stronghold that covered this low mountain top. Lancets pierced the remains of the battlemented walls, there were pointed arches and a donjon; but, except for the clustering stumps of the vaulting, all trace of a roof had gone and firs and hazel-saplings grew thick in the crumbling cincture. This wreckage was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been imprisoned. |
I had forgotten how this—the result of a quarrel on the Third Crusade—had come about and when I had listened to it, over the innstove a few nights before, it had seemed extremely odd. It is briefly this. At the end of the siege of Acre the victorious sovereigns marched into the town and hoisted their banners. Richard, seeing the flag of Leopold, Duke of Austria, fluttering, as he thought, presumptuously close to his own, flew into a rage and had it hauled down and thrown into the moat. Mortally insulted, Leopold left Palestine, abandoned the Crusade and returned to Austria. Next year, Richard was summoned to England by the misgovernment of Prince John. He broke off his victorious campaign against Saladin and, to dodge his Christian enemies (who were understandably numerous), set off in disguise. Reaching Corfu, he embarked in a pirate ship which was tossed off her course by the autumn storms and wrecked at the head of the Adriatic. From here his only way lay overland through hostile states; worst of all, through the Duchy of his enemy. In a tavern near Vienna, his disguise was penetrated by some of Leopold's men and he was taken prisoner—betrayed, some say, by his commanding looks; according to others, by the careless splendour of his gloves—and donjoned incognito on this crag. How he was rescued by Blondel, his minstrel and fellow-troubadour—who is said to have discovered him by singing outside every likely prison until his friend's voice answered with the second verse—has always sounded too good to be true. But on the spot, it is impossible to doubt it. |
Wandering along the river's bank just before sunset, I felt I would like to settle and write here for ages. Meditating, admonishing and blessing, a team of sainted and weather-fretted Abbots postured with operatic benignity along the Canons' balustrade. Their haloes were dripping with icicles; snow had filled the clefts of their mitres and furred the curls of their pastoral staves. I could hear the sigh of the river just below. When I leant over the balustrade, it rose to a roar. Under the bare chestnut branches, the current was rushing by, flurrying the reflections which the lights on the other bank dropped into the flood. Beyond King Richard's castle the forested uplands of the north bank suddenly broke off. A precipice dropped sheer and at its foot, meadows and orchards followed the river upstream in a three-mile-long question-mark. Halfway, dissolving in the blue of the dusk, an island hovered over its own flawed image. |
The cliff possesses an acoustic foible which I have never met anywhere else. I remembered it, standing in the same place, and hearing it again, three decades later. A tug, with a string of barges and a flag that was unidentifiable in the failing light, was creeping upstream against the press of the current. When its siren sounded, after a delay of three seconds the long-drawn out boom was joined by an echo from the cliff which was exactly an octave higher, forming a chord; and when the lower note ended, the higher outlived it solo for another three seconds and died away. |
Crossing the river by the little ferry from Dürnstein, I struck southward. By early afternoon I was approaching an enormous white building that I had espied the day before from the ruins of Dürnstein. It was the Benedictine Abbey of Göttweig, a stately rectangle lifted high above the hills and forests, with a cupola at each corner. Having enlarged so freely on the wonders of Melk, I daren't say much about Göttweig: only that it is a resplendent and worthy rival to its great sister abbey at the other end of the Wachau. |
Snow-clouds were assembling as I took the uphill path. I overtook a boy of my own age, a bookish shoemaker called Paul, who had taught himself English. He was a great friend of the monks, I learnt, and I think he would have liked to have taken monastic vows himself if family responsibilities had not stood in the way. The most famous part of the Abbey is the Grand Staircase, a wide, shallow and magnificent flight where elaborate lanterns alternate with immense monumental urns at each right-angle turn of the broad marble balustrade. Paul told me that Napoleon is believed to have ridden his horse up these stairs: he passed this way, crossing the river near Krems, in the late autumn of 1805, between the victories of Ulm and Austerlitz. |
He led me along an upper cloister to see an Irish monk of immense age and great charm. His words are all lost, but I can still hear his soft West of Ireland voice. Except for his long Edgar Wallace cigarette holder, our host could have sat for a picture of St. Jerome. I envied his airy and comfortable cell, his desk laden with books, and his view over the mountains and the river. The Danube was a distant gleam now, winding far away through hills where the dusk and clouds were assembling. |
It was snowing hard when we started down after dark. I spent the night under Paul's roof, in the little village of Maidling im Tal, a mile or two down the valley. We had a cheerful and noisy feast with his brothers and sisters in a room next to the shop. |
Next day it was snowing even harder. The magic Danubian weather was over. Paul suggested halting there till it improved but I was committed to a plan made two days before, and I reluctantly set off. |
It was the eleventh of February, the morning of my nineteenth birthday. As I still had festive notions about anniversaries, I had planned to spend the end of it under a friendly roof. Not that Paul's wasn't; but, before setting out from Dürnstein, I had telephoned to some more friends of Baron Liphart who lived an easy half day's walk from Göttweig. The line had been bad and the faint voice of the Gräfin at the other end sounded a bit surprised. But she managed to convey across the chaotic wires that they longed for news of their old friend in Munich. I was expected about tea-time. |
It snowed and blew all the way. The schloss, when it took shape at last through the whirling flakes, really was a castle. It was a huge sixteenth-century pile with a moat and battlements surrounded by a wide white park. Its dark towers would have awed Childe Roland; they called for a blast of the slughorn. I battled my way there and found a man shovelling out a path that filled up again as fast as he dug, and asked him, at the top of my voice, where the front door was—it was snowing too hard to see much in the falling dark. Which Count did I want, he bawled back: what Christian name? It sounded as if there were two or more brothers about: mine was Graf Joseph; he led me into a courtyard. I was caked and clogged and thatched like a snowman, and when I got into the hall a grey-green butler helped me to beat and brush it off, hospitality seconded by Graf Joseph, who had come down the stairs. |
He must have been just old enough to have flown a 'plane at the end of the war—its propeller stood in the hall—but he looked younger, and his wife was younger still, with a gentle and thoughtful look, and a touch of shyness, I thought. (She belonged to that interesting Greek community of Trieste which had been settled there for centuries, and formerly ran the shipping and trade of the Adriatic. The city had only ceased to be part of Austria-Hungary in 1918; and, though they retained their Greek language and Orthodox faith and a patriotic concern with Greek matters, they were much intermarried with Austrians and Hungarians.) They both talked excellent English, and after the ferocious weather out-of-doors, it seemed a miracle to be sitting on the edge of an armchair in this haven of soft lamp- and firelight, lapping up whisky and soda from a heavy cut-glass tumbler. Two handsome and slender dogs were intertwined in slumber on a white bearskin rug; and one of the painted figures on the wall, I noticed at once, was in total harmony with my recent historico-snobbish craze. It was an ancestor, famous in the Thirty Years' War, and at the Treaty of Westphalia, with an ugly, intelligent and humorous face, shoulder-length hair, Vandyke moustache and beard, and the chain of the Fleece round his shoulders. He was all in black, in the Spanish fashion which had become general after the Habsburg marriage with Joan the Mad. |
This was all very well. But, from the friendly but puzzled faces of my hosts, I understood that, apart from my all-but-inaudible telephone conversation, they had no notion of any impending visit. No letter had reached them from Munich. My telephone call had conveyed an impression, I think, of some Englishman motoring to Vienna proposing himself for tea or a drink. Instead of this urbane imaginary absentee, they were confronted by an affable tramp with a knapsack and hobnailed boots. When we had been talking about our Munich friends for half an hour, a moment of silence prolonged itself for a few seconds; and, during the gap made by this angel's overflight, a swarm of anxieties and doubts and uncharacteristic scruples rushed into my mind. I felt suddenly convinced that they longed to be alone. Perhaps they had just heard bad news; other visitors might be expected at any moment; or they might simply be bored stiff: why not? Anyway, I was convinced that a stranger's presence might be a curse past bearing, and this loss of nerve gave way to a touch of insanity: perhaps they thought I was a burglar? I heard myself clumping to my feet and inventing, in a strangled voice, an excuse for departure. I had to catch a train that night, I said, in order to meet a friend arriving in Vienna by train next day. The unconvincing lameness and confusion of this invention called up looks of surprise, then bewilderment and finally concern as though they had a mild lunatic on their hands. At which station was I meeting my friend? Desperately, and at a venture, I said, the Western one...luckily, a Westbahnhof did exist. When was I meeting this friend? "Oh—at noon." "Then that's all right," they said. "You can't possibly go on tonight in weather like this! We'll get you to the station in plenty of time for your rendezvous in Vienna." I think it must have been obvious that the entire rigmarole was nonsense, but none of us could say so. They may have guessed that it had been prompted by diffidence. My fears had been chimerical; but I was committed to my mythical programme. In spite of all this, dinner and the evening were easy and delightful. When I outlined my future journey, they were full of suggestions, my hostess made me take down the names and addresses of kinsmen and friends on the way who might help, especially in Hungary, and she promised to write to them. (She did. It made a great difference later on.) I didn't let on about my birthday; what could I have been expecting? |
The Gräfin, opening her letters over breakfast, gave a joyful cry and waved one over her head. It was the Baron's, re-forwarded several times! She read it out, and, on the strength of its splendid tenor, I thought of telling the truth about my Vienna improvisation but I didn't quite dare. |
The day was dark and threatening. Why didn't I stay on a bit? How I would have liked to! But I was entangled in a fiction that no one believed and there was no way out. We were talking in the library, snugly surrounded by books, when the man in green announced that the car was waiting. No good saying, now, that I would rather walk to the station: I would have missed my unwanted train and been late for my phantom rendezvous... But when we said goodbye, they looked truly worried, as though I were not quite safe on my own. |
I sailed away, half-cocooned in a fur rug, in the back of an enormous car that swished its way, under an ever-darkening sky, to a little country station on the St. Pölten-Vienna line. A few warning flakes were falling when we arrived and the chauffeur jumped out, carrying my rucksack and stick. He wanted to help at the ticket office, put me into a corner seat and see me off. |
Here was a new panic. Even had I wanted to go by train, I hadn't enough money for the ticket. All this brought on a recrudescence of last night's folly: someone had told me—who, and where?—that one tipped chauffeurs in Central Europe. Taking my stick and shouldering the rucksack, I found four coins in my pocket, and pressed them on the chauffeur with mumbled thanks. He was a white-haired, friendly and cheerful old man, a former coachman, I think. He had been telling me, over his shoulder on the way, how he too had loved wandering about as a young man. He looked surprised and distressed at this sudden unwanted largesse—he didn't in the least expect me to try to keep up with the Liechtensteins—and he said, with real feeling, "O nein, junger Herr!" and almost made as though to give the wretched coins back. Leaving him with his coronetted cap in his hand, scratching his head with a puzzled and unhappy look, I dashed in confusion into the station for cover and oblivion and watched him get slowly back in the car and drive off. The station master, who had exchanged friendly greetings too, headed for the office to sell me a ticket. Instead, I gave him an ambiguous wave, slunk out again and strode fast along the Vienna road. Looking back in a minute or two, I saw him standing on the platform, staring bemusedly at my dwindling figure. I wished I were dead. |
There was another serious cause for anxiety. The coins that had made up that ridiculous tip had been the last. Not a groschen remained. With luck, four pounds would be waiting in Vienna, but till then I would have to trust to farms and cowsheds. |
The day matched the general distress. Low mountains rose on either side of a gloomy road. The snowflakes became scarce and sticky and finally stopped altogether. A fierce gust ran along the valley and clashed the laden branches, shaking down cascades of snow. All at once the clouds, which had been growing steadily darker, burst open. The snow, pitted like smallpox for a second, turned to slush and the whole sky was dissolving in water and sound. |
I got into a barn just in time and despondently surveyed the grim scene from a heap of straw. After an hour of wild thunder and lightning the storm dwindled to a stubborn downpour and a few intermittent rumbles. The sky was dark as twilight. I pressed on when the rain slackened, and sat through the next deluge in an almost pitchdark church. On a lonely stretch of road the driver of a lorry, creeping along slowly for fear of skidding, pulled up and shouted to me to climb in behind. |
Snug under lashed tarpaulin in a nest among piled planks, a scarlet-cheeked girl with a kerchief tied under her chin was sitting with a basket of eggs by her side and her arms clasped round her knees. I huddled beside her, and the drops hammered down on the re-fastened waterproof. She shook hands politely, asked me my name and told me hers was Trudi. Then she said, grinning with enjoyment: "Hübsches Wetter, nicht?," and laughed: "Nice weather, eh?" She gave me a slice of cake sprinkled with caraway seeds out of her basket and I was halfway through it when a loud quack came from the other side. A huge bird was sitting in a second basket held there by a zigzag of strings: "Er ist schön, nicht wahr?" She was taking this handsome drake to her grandmother who lived with five unhusbanded ducks in Vienna. Her parents had a farm the other side of St. Pölten, she told me; she was fifteen, the eldest of six: how old was I? Nineteen yesterday. She shook my hand again solemnly and wished me "herzliche Glückwünsche zum Geburtstag." Where did I come from, with that funny accent? When I told her, she clicked her tongue. What a long way from home. |
The rain had sunk to a steady drizzle and the truck crawled on through the slush while we huddled together and sang. It was impossible to make out much in the dark, but Trudi said we must be in the Wienerwald by now; Strauss's Vienna Woods. But there were no lights on the horizon where Vienna should have begun to show. When the lorry pulled up, we could hear voices, and then a torch was flashed on us by a helmeted soldier with a slung rifle and fixed bayonet and we saw that we were in a built-up street, and already inside Vienna. But torches were the only lights on the pavements and the gleam of candles behind window-panes. A breakdown, apparently. |
When the truck put us down, the people in front said they didn't know what was going on. There had been some disorders in Linz. I took the egg basket, and Trudi the drake, and she put her free arm companionably through mine. The drake, which had been asleep most of the journey, was wide awake now and quacking frequently. The atmosphere in the street was inexpressibly dismal. There was a sound of more thunder, or something like it. After a mile or so, barbed wire barriers closed the way and a couple of helmeted soldiers, again with their bayoneted rifles slung, peered into the baskets. One of them started handling the eggs rather clumsily and Trudi told him, with considerable firmness, to mind what he was doing. He let us through, and when we asked him what was up, he answered: the hell of a mess. |
What was going on? A general strike, as well as a breakdown? The noise we had taken for thunder boomed again, followed by a scattering of sharper reports. Trudi, with a wide, hopeful grin and sparkling eyes, said "Perhaps it's War!"—not out of bloodthirstiness, but anything for a change. "It must be the Nazis again! They're always shooting at people, throwing bombs, starting fires! Pfui Teufel!" She had to go to the north of the city, and I was heading for the centre. At the point where our ways parted, she asked for my handkerchief and handed it back with a dozen eggs knotted inside: "There!" she said. "A birthday present for you! Don't bump them about." She hitched the basket in the crook of one arm and the drake, with a quack or two, over the other. She turned round after a few steps to shout cheerful post-valedictory wishes for good luck. |
The sooty and rain-pocked snow, banked along the pavements, showed in pale lines. Once or twice the beam of a searchlight moved beyond the roofs. The distant rumbling, interspersed with the crackle of small arms and a few continuous bursts, was unmistakably gunfire now. At another road block, I asked a policeman if there were a Jugendherberge in Vienna where I might sleep for the night. He conferred with a colleague: the Heilsarmee, they said, was the only place. I didn't understand the word—something Army?—and I got in a muddle about their directions. One of them came along with me for a furlong or two. He knew Vienna as little as I did; he had only arrived from the country that afternoon; but he knocked at lighted windows and asked the way. When I asked him whether it were a Nazi putsch, he said no, not this time: in fact, just the opposite. It was trouble between the Army and the Heimwehr on one side and demonstrating Social-Democrats on the other. He didn't know any details. No papers had appeared. Trouble had started early that morning in Linz and then spread. There was martial law, and an outbreak of strikes, hence the darkness and general chaos. I said it didn't seem fair to use weapons against unarmed political demonstrators. At the word 'unarmed' he stopped and looked at me in surprise, and repeated the word: "unbewaffnet?" He gave a grim laugh and said "You don't seem to know much about things here, young man. They've got thousands of weapons that they've been keeping hidden for years. Rifles, machine guns, bombs, everything! All over the country. It's an armed battle over there in the Nineteenth District!" |
That was all he knew about it. It was not till later that it was possible to get a very slightly clearer idea of events. Afterwards, the dead on both sides were reckoned in hundreds by the government; by their opponents, in thousands. After retreating from street-barriers, the Social Democrats, some of whom were in uniform, had taken up defensive positions in a block of workers' flats in Heiligenstadt, the Neunzehnte Bezirk. Their chief defensive position was the Karl-Marx-Hof, a massive building over half a mile long; and the noise I had mistaken for thunder was the sound, muted by distance, of a battle settling down into a siege. The besiegers, unable to make a frontal attack across an open space under machine gun fire from the besieged building, had brought up mortars, howitzers and field guns; but they were firing solid shot, as opposed to the normal and much more destructive high-explosive shells. The command of the besieging troops and the Heimwehr were much blamed afterwards for using artillery. By cutting off water and supplies, it was held, the besieged could finally have been induced to surrender with many less casualties. Before the surrender, the Social Democrat leaders fled to Czechoslovakia; and Vienna, except for bitterness and recrimination, returned, more or less, to normal. Or rather, to a resumption of the briefly interrupted Nazi subversion. |
Robbed of their historical context, these were the purely physical circumstances. At the time, one had only a confused inkling of events. Immediately afterwards, these were blurred, in conversations and newspapers, by conflict of versions and rumour and recrimination. And then, most surprisingly—at least, so it seemed to a stranger in the city—the whole topic vanished from the air as though it had never happened and, with amazing speed, ordinary life resumed its course. |
It was a desperate time for Austria. All through 1933, the country had been shaken by disturbances organized by the Nazis and their Austrian sympathizers. During one outbreak, they had attempted to assassinate Dr. Dollfuss. Soon after these February troubles, similar activities started again. They culminated five months later in a Nazi coup d'état. It failed, but not without bloodshed and heavy fighting and the murder of Dr. Dollfuss. Afterwards there was ostensible quiet until the final disaster of the Anschluss in 1938, when Austria disappeared as an independent nation until the destruction of the Third Reich. |
We seemed to have been walking for miles in this dim wilderness. At last, not far, I think, from the Danube Canal, we reached a quarter full of sidings and warehouses, and tramlines running over cobblestones glimmered amid dirty snow, and broken crates were scattered about. Under the lee of a steep ramp, a lighted doorway opened at the foot of a large building whose windows were bright in the murk. The policeman left me and I went in. |
A large antechamber was filled with a moving swarm of tramps. Each one had a bundle; their overcoats flapped like those of scarecrows and their rags and sometimes their footgear were held together by rusty safety-pins and string. There were Guy Fawkes beards and wild or wandering eyes under torn hat brims. Many of them seemed to have known each other for years. Social greetings and gossip combined in an affable manner and a vague impulse kept them on the move in a shuffling ebb and flow. |
A door opened, and a voice shouted "Hemden!"—"Shirts!"—and everyone stampeded towards the door of the next room, elbowing and barging and peeling off their upper clothes as they went. I did the same. Soon we were all naked to the waist, while a piercing unwashed smell opened above each bare torso like an umbrella. Converging wooden rails herded us in a shuffling, insolvent swarm towards a circular lamp. As each newcomer came level with it, an official took his shirt and his under-linen, and, stretching them across the lamp, which was blindingly bright and a yard in diameter, gazed searchingly. All entrants harbouring vermin were led away to be fumigated, and the rest of us, after giving our names at a desk, proceeded into a vast dormitory with a row of lamps hung high under the lofty ceiling. As I wriggled back into my shirt, the man who had taken my name and details led me to an office, saying that a Landsmann of mine had arrived that evening, called Major Brock. This sounded strange. But when we entered the office, the mystery was solved and the meaning of the word Heilsarmee as well. For on the table lay a braided and shiny-peaked black forage-cap with a maroon strawberry growing from the centre of the crown. The words 'Salvation Army' gleamed in gold letters on a maroon band. The other side of the table, drinking cocoa, sat a tired, grey-haired figure in steel-rimmed glasses and a frogged uniform jacket unbuttoned at the neck. He was a friendly-looking man from Chesterfield—one could tell he was from The North—and his brow was furrowed by sober piety and fatigue. Breaking his journey on a European inspection tour of Salvation Army hostels, I think he had just arrived from Italy. He was leaving next day and knew as little about events as I. Too exhausted to do much more than smile in a friendly way, he gave me a mug of cocoa and a slice of bread. When he saw how quickly they went down, a second helping appeared. I told him what I was up to—Constantinople, etc.—and he said I could stay a day or two. Then he laughed and said that I must be daft. I untied Trudi's eggs and arranged them on his desk in a neat clutch. He said "Thanks, lad," but looked nonplussed about what to do with them. |
I lay on my camp-bed fully dressed. A dream feeling pervaded this interior; and soon the approach of sleep began to confuse the outlines of my fellow-inmates. They flitted about, grouping and re-grouping in conversation, unwinding foot-cloths and picking over tins of fag ends. One old man kept putting his boot to his ear as though he were listening to sea-sounds in a shell and each time his face lit up. The noise of talk, bursting out in squabbles or giggles on a higher note and then subsiding again to a universal collusive whisper, rippled through the place with a curious watery resonance. The groups were reduced in scale by the size and the height of the enormous room. They seemed to cluster and dissolve like Doré figures swarming and dwindling all over the nave of some bare, bright cathedral—a cathedral, moreover, so remote that it might alternatively have been a submarine or the saloon of an airship. No extraneous sound could pierce those high bare walls. To those inside them, everyday life and the dark strife of the city outside seemed equally irrelevant and far away. We were in Limbo. |
There is a strange and perplexing coda to all this. Four knights of Richard's father had murdered St. Thomas à Becket two decades earlier. One was Hugo de Morville, and when the crowd from the nave had tried to come to the rescue, he had kept them at bay with his sword while Tracy, Brito and Fitzurse struck down the Archbishop in the N.W. Transept. We know the sequel; the flight to Saltwood, to Scotland, then the outcast solitude of the four murderers in Morville's Yorkshire castle; penance, rehabilitation, possibly pilgrimage to the Holy Land. According to a tradition, Morville died there in 1202 or 1204 and was buried in the porch (now indoors) of the Templar's Hostel at Jerusalem, which became the Mosque of El Aksa. |
But the poet Ulrich von Zatzikhoven says that when Leopold transferred the King to the Emperor's custody in 1193, Richard's place was taken by a hostage. This was a knight called Hugo de Morville, who lent the poet a volume containing the Legend of Lancelot in Anglo-Norman verse, from which he translated the famous Lanzelet, who thus followed Sir Percival and Tristan and Yseult into German mythology. Some authorities think the two Morvilles are the same. I hope they are right. |
[ 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 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!" 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. |
Subsets and Splits