The Pendragon Legend

by Antal Szerb

  “I should be delighted to be of service.”

  “And I must also ask you not to tell the Earl from whom you received it. Tell him it was sent to you in an anonymous letter requesting you to pass it on to him.”

  “Excuse me, but surely you want the ring to remind him of you?”

  “Oh yes, but I would like him to work out for himself who sent it. If he can’t manage that, then he doesn’t deserve to be so much in my thoughts. And you will give me your word of honour that you will never, in any circumstances, tell him that you got it from me.”

  This was not a request, or even a command. It was a simple statement of fact, delivered in the same colourless tone as her previous speech, a simple assumption that I would now give her my word. She spoke as if the possibility never occurred to her that one might not accede to her wish.

  I gave her my word.

  Yet something inside me protested fiercely. Quite apart from the malign aura that clung to her from the association with Cristofoli, I could not forget that Eileen St Claire was Maloney’s friend. All this might well have been arranged in advance, a conspiracy. Every suspicious circumstance seemed to be aimed at Llanvygan, entangled ever deeper in this unfathomable mystery. Her personal secret was part of the greater secret surrounding the Earl, the one that my intuition warned me so strongly against, the one that attracted and repelled me so intensely. And yet, I had given my word. Why? Because Eileen St Claire was so extremely beautiful, and I am so helpless.

  I put the ring away.

  And thus we arrived at Chester. Maloney and I got out at the station and took our leave.

  “So you will do what I asked you,” she said. “When you get back to London, tell me what the Earl said. Goodbye.”

  She looked at me, smiled, and took off her glove.

  “Yes, you may kiss my hand.”

  We were sitting on the train, continuing our journey. At one point Maloney asked if I would put a package in my suitcase, as it was too large for his. Nothing else of note occurred on the way.

  Soon we were winding in and out among the mountains of North Wales. There was a change of train, after which the landscape became even more picturesque, and by the time we reached Corwen it was distinctly rugged. Osborne was waiting for us, and after a brief exchange of greetings we set off again.

  The road ran through a narrow valley between precipitous mountains. Osborne slowed down.

  “The track on the left leads directly up to the old family seat, Pendragon Castle. As you can see, the surface has been rather neglected. Only tourists use it now; the peasants avoid these parts. They’re still worried about old Asaph, the sixth Earl. That was where he practised his black arts.”

  The valley widened out, and we could now see the ruins of the castle, high on the mountain peak, perched on the barren edge of the cliff and looking for all the world as if it had grown out of the rock itself. Huge, black birds circled round the derelict Norman tower. Maloney expressed exactly what I was feeling when he remarked:

  “It must have been damned uncomfortable, living up there.”

  After that, the landscape became rather more friendly. In no time at all we passed through the village of Llanvygan and caught sight of the opulent iron railings of the park. A mighty avenue of trees led to the castle, a large, bright, inviting construction, altogether different from what I had been imagining. Once inside, however, the poor lighting in the vast rooms, the ancient furniture and the immense silence left me feeling properly subdued once again.

  As I dressed I composed a little speech with which to greet my host. We were shown into a spacious hall, across which the Earl, with a young girl at his side and three liveried footmen behind him, approached us with rapid steps. It all had the air of a princely reception. His severe, distinguished countenance wore an expression far removed from that of the amiable scholar-aristocrat I had met at Lady Malmsbury-Croft’s. He did not even wait for us to greet him. He simply shook my hand and began speaking, as if issuing the orders for the day.

  “So you’re Maloney? Very good. I hope you will enjoy your stay. This lady is my niece Cynthia, Osborne’s sister. Rogers—the butler—has instructions to show you to the library in the morning, Doctor. Regrettably, I am unable to dine with you tonight. Do you have any questions?”

  “Yes. I’ve received a ring, sent to me in an anonymous letter, asking me to give it to you. I think I should let you have it straight away.”

  The Earl took the ring, and his face became even bleaker.

  “You say you don’t know who this ring is from?”

  “I have no idea, My Lord.”

  The Earl turned on his heel and left us without another word.

  “Interesting man,” Maloney remarked.

  But my astonishment and dismay were too much for me. I felt absolutely disconsolate. It was impossible to deny: my premonition had not deceived me. Eileen St Claire brought men nothing but trouble. And now, it was quite clear, she had caused me to lose the Earl’s goodwill. What a fool I am! I always come to grief when I do favours for other people. John Bonaventura Pendragon was right: “Every good deed gets the punishment it deserves.”

  I took a bath, changed again, and went down to dinner. The lady of the house was seated next to me, in a magnificent gown. I cannot have amused her greatly. I was too nervous and feeling sorry for myself, and with good reason.

  On the other hand, she was very good-looking. But even if she had not been so very pretty, she was also the Lady of the Castle, the descendent of Pendragons, and I felt too unworthy to do so much as open my mouth. The reader might think me a snob: let him think so. I admit that I do privately believe that an Earl is different from other men.

  The things she was telling Maloney intimidated me even more. Two years earlier she had been presented at court; she spent the London season with her aunt, the Duchess of Warwick, who lived in Belgravia in a street so superbly exclusive that tears came to my eyes whenever I walked down it. And garden parties with Lady This, and evening parties with Lady That, and bazaars with someone else … The names of her girl friends, all resonantly historic names that tripped so lightly off her tongue, fell on my head like hammer blows.

  If every meal is to be taken in such an aristocratic milieu, I thought, I shall waste away. I should mention that during my time in England I had quite often been in ‘good society’, but almost invariably as a hired secretary, not as a guest. But these Pendragons were something above ‘good society’. And, last but not least, a distinguished young woman was in my eyes even more exalted and formidable than, for example, a distinguished old gentleman.

  To all this was added the oppressive sense that, through Eileen St Claire’s intrigues, I had permanently forfeited the right ever to be made a welcome guest at Llanvygan. In my misery I drank a great deal of the full-bodied wine of the house, hoping it might help me sleep. Such was the introduction to my first night at Llanvygan, the start of my supernatural and inexplicable adventures.

  I was lying in my oppressively historic bed (no doubt dating back to Queen Anne), reading and reading. It was a philosophical work. Philosophy nearly always calms my mind and sends me quickly to sleep, perhaps as a refuge from boredom. The subjective and the objective, whose particular mutual relationship had been the topic in question, began to take on human characteristics in my half-waking, half-dreaming state.

  “What a wind!” said Subject to Object.

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s blowing from windward,” replied Object to Subject, the way the left half of the brain will chat to the right half when one is half-asleep … Then I found myself most thoroughly awake.

  What was that?

  I became aware that I had been hearing the noise for quite some time—that human-inhuman, indefinable something of a noise. Now, in the darkness, nothing else seemed to exist. First it went tap, tap; then something like tree-ee; and then came something that could never be recorded in writing—a long drawn-out sigh, like a terrified gasping for air. It was dee
ply unnerving.

  And the whole sequence was repeating itself at intervals of about three minutes, though the timing cannot have been entirely regular—it was more a question of when I noticed it.

  Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine—Napoleon strutting back and forth with his hands behind his back, or a slender woman seated at her spinning wheel. But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions … And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. Not a pleasant sensation.

  I lit a cigarette. The dance of smoke from my Gold Flake drifted across the room but failed to make it any more congenial. I was desperately tired. The wind was howling down the open fireplace like an uncontrolled blast of interference on the radio. And, time and time again, tap, tree-ee, and the inexpressible sigh.

  Of course I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.

  I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.

  I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.

  It opened on to a corridor. The corridor was in pitch-black darkness, draughty and thoroughly unfriendly. Like a man who has tested the icy water and drawn back his foot, I went back into my room.

  At times like this I arm myself with a revolver: they are what I keep one for. It might seem a little too much like something in a film, that a man should sleep with a loaded revolver, especially one like me, living such a peaceable life, but I had no choice: it was a long-established habit.

  I pulled out the drawer of my bedside table—and thought my eyes must be playing tricks on me. If in place of the revolver I had found a tortoise, I could not have been more amazed. It was no longer in the right-hand corner, where I had put it, but in the left. There could be no question of error. I had even counted my cigarettes as I put them in, one by one.

  No cinema fantasy was required for the next step. I opened the cylinder. It was empty. Someone had removed the cartridges.

  As a general rule, only three things are stolen from me: cigarettes, razor blades and handkerchiefs. Never before a revolver cartridge. The distressing thing was that I now had none left. I had loaded it with six when I bought it ten years earlier and it had carried five ever since, after I fired one off to test it. I reckoned they would last me a lifetime. I never seriously thought I might use a single one in anger.

  If I tell you I was not enjoying the situation, I am using a degree of understatement.

  Meanwhile the noises off were rising in crescendo, as was my nervousness. It was as if loudspeakers were booming away in all sixty rooms of the house: tap, tree-ee, ahh … h … hh. Charming hospitality, when your windows roar like this. No—it couldn’t be a window. Here at last was the great and terrible adventure my anxieties had been leading me towards for ten long years.

  In place of my revolver I took a torch. I drew a deep breath and leapt out into the corridor.

  The window facing my bedroom door was shut. The sound seemed to be coming more from the left, so I headed in that direction. The next window was over ten paces away, and before it the corridor made a slight bend. The ancients hadn’t bothered much about lighting.

  And then, to my immeasurable satisfaction, I came face to face with the culprit. Of course it was a window. It wasn’t properly shut. It swung to and fro like a corpse on the gallows. I immediately set about trying to close it.

  I say trying, because this was no simple task. The window had a fiendishly historic lock. It now dawned on me how very clever I was to have once perused an excellent standard work on old English locksmithery. This was one of those very rare occasions, crosswords apart, when the knowledge I had acquired would be put to some use. I slammed it shut with a flourish that no Shakespearean chambermaid could have bettered.

  The tension in my nerves eased. Wearily, but immensely reassured, I staggered back to my room. Through a combination of sheer courage and technical skill I had seen off my major fear. I would take a sedative and at last get some sleep. The business of the revolver could wait till the morning.

  But fate willed otherwise. The window was merely a gentle prelude.

  The moment I reached the bend in the corridor I saw a light outside the door of my room. I stepped two paces closer, and then, forgetting all sense of geography in my fright, began shouting in three languages at once. In front of the door, with a flaming torch in his hand, stood a gigantic medieval figure.

  Just to be clear on this: not for a moment did I think it could be any sort of ghostly apparition. While it is a fact that English castles are swarming with ghosts, they are visible only to natives—certainly not to anyone from Budapest.

  In fact the astonishing thing was, that it wasn’t a ghost. If the spirit of some elderly Englishman appears in a castle by night, there can be no complaint. It is something we have all been prepared for by literature. We solemnly vow to give his bones a decent Christian burial, and that is that.

  The single most eerie thing about our planet is that there are no such things as ghosts. For this, as for everything else, there must be a rational explanation, but it has always escaped me. What, for example, is one supposed to do, at midnight, when a giant medieval figure that is not a ghost is standing before your bedroom door? It is in fact in excellent health, and though it stares at you in a slightly hostile way, it politely enquires:

  “You have perhaps mislaid something?”

  “Would you be so kind as to explain who on earth you are?”

  “My name is John Griffith, sir.”

  “Pleased to meet you. The Earl, I think … ”

  “Yes, sir. I am in the service of the Earl of Gwynedd. Would you have mislaid anything?”

  I related the story of the window. My new acquaintance listened to my tale with typical British impassivity. I had the distinct feeling he did not believe a word I said. We were silent for some time. Then he added:

  “So all is well. Good night, sir … But if I were you … I would avoid going out into the corridors at night … These old corridors are somewhat … draughty. I mention this just in case.”

  And he strolled away, torch in hand, a truly medieval vision.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but the advice seemed to carry some sort of threat.

  Back in my room, I began setting things straight. John Griffith had not been wearing medieval costume but, so far as I could be sure in my rather peculiar state of mind, garments from the early seventeenth century—a black doublet with puffed sleeves and padded black trunk hose. His collar was turned down as in the later portraits of Shakespeare. But enough of that.

  I felt like the old Israelite in the Bible—I forget his name—who went in search of his father’s asses and found a kingdom. The window I had been driven towards by my nervous false alarm had proved to be only a window. On the other hand, it was an undeniable fact that cartridges had been removed from my revolver, and that I was under surveillance from a giant in period costume. All this required some thought.

  I decided to lock the door, only to discover, with an astonishment greater than any I had experienced earlier that night, that while it had a lock, there was no key.

  Nonetheless I went to bed. I was exhausted, and managed somehow to put all these worrying concerns from my mind. I was just drifting off when I heard the door quietly open.

  The wind poured in again, and all the terrors of the night came flooding back
. My heartbeat stopped, my brain ceased to function, but my instincts were still working—a bit like St Denis strolling away from Montmartre after his decapitation.

  I flicked the light on, aimed the empty revolver at the intruder, and said:

  “Stop!”

  I seemed to be acquiring a sort of sleuth-like nonchalance.

  With confidence, and consciousness, returning, I realised it was Maloney. He wore a black, skin-tight outfit which I immediately decided must be for rock-climbing. He closed the door carefully behind him and whispered:

  “Hullo-ullo-ullo.”

  “Hullo-ullo-ullo,” I returned, with a slightly interrogative intonation.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he went on.

  “Optimistic as ever,” I replied. “How did you get here? And more to the point, what are you doing in that outfit? Do you always dress up for your constitutional?”

  “My dear Doctor, we haven’t time for your witticisms. Some very odd things are going on in this building.”

  “They certainly are.”

  “If I wasn’t from Connemara, I’d swear the place was haunted. But as things are, I don’t know what to say. Tell me, have you by any chance come across … er … what shall I call it … an apparition?”

  “It depends what sort of apparition you mean.”

  “A huge great fellow, in a sort of Christmas pantomime outfit. With a torch in his hand. He stares at you and then moves away. Not a nice experience.”

  “I’ve actually spoken to him. He’s called John Griffith.”

  “Well, not a very ghostly name. In Wales every other person is called Griffith. But what’s he up to, prowling round outside our rooms?”

  “I haven’t the faintest.”

  “I can’t help it, but I am not happy with bogey-men like that lurking outside my room. And have you noticed anything else? For example, have you a key in your door?”