A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The library was so crammed that most of the panelling was hidden and the books, in German and French and English, had overflowed in neat piles on the floor. The surviving area of wall was filled by antlers and roebuck horns, a couple of portraits and a Rembrandt etching. There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars with a cutter made out of a deer’s slot and, beside them, a number of silver cigarette cases laid in a neat row, each of them embossed with a different gold monogram. (This, I noticed later on, was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary. They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and so on.) There were shaded lamps and leather armchairs beside a huge open stove, a basket of logs and a spaniel asleep in front of it.

  “I’m on the last volume,” Baron Pips said, lifting up a French paper-bound book. It was Le Temps Retrouvé and an ivory paper-knife marked the place three quarters of the way through. “I started the first volume in October and I’ve been reading it all winter.” He put it back on the table by his chair. “I feel so involved in them all, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’ve finished. Have you ever tried it?”

  As one can guess from the tone of my diary, I had only just heard of Proust, but always mentioned in tones of such respect that I was flattered by his question. I took the first volume to bed that night; but it was too dense a wood. When I tried again in Rumania next year, the wood lightened and turned into a forest whose spell has been growing ever since: so, in spite of this hesitant start, Baron Pips was my true initiator. Perhaps because of this, some perverse process of the subconscious for a long time associated him in my mind’s eye with the figure of Swann. Beyond one or two haphazard points in common, the resemblance was not close. Certainly not physically, if Swann is to be identified with photographs of Charles Haas in Mr. Painter’s book. Nevertheless the confusion persisted for years.

  He was fifty-two years old and tall and slim and his extraordinary good looks were marked by a kind of radiant distinction. I remember them all the more lucidly—the rather pale, high forehead, the chiselled lines of brow and nose and jaw, the clear blue eyes and the straight silver hair—from making a careful sketch a couple of days later. There was a cast of wisdom and kindness in his face and something about the mouth which suggested an artist or a musician, and his features often lit up with humour and amusement. He wore a very old tweed shooting jacket, soft leather breeches of the kind I had envied in Austria, and thick ribbed green stockings, and his slippers replaced some muddy brogues I had seen in the hall. From his demeanour and the excellence of his English I think a stranger in a railway carriage would have taken him for an Englishman but of a half-patrician, half-scholarly kind which even then seemed threatened with extinction. I knew that his life had been full of movement and adventures, quite apart from his two marriages, the first to a charming and highly suitable member of a similar dynasty, the other to a famous actress in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin. There existed, at the time we met, a great attachment between him and a beautiful and poetic-looking white Russian I had met in Bratislava, I think on her way from Kövecses.[4]

  On the evening I arrived, Sari laid dinner on a folding table in the library. When it was cleared away, we went back to the armchairs and the books with our brandy glasses and, undeterred by a clock striking midnight somewhere in the house, talked until nearly one o’clock.[5]

  * * *

  These days at Kövecses were a sojourn of great delight and an important private landmark. The delight is plain sailing—the kindness and charm of Baron Pips, and all the erudition, worldly wisdom, reminiscence and humour squandered on someone a third of his age; but the importance as a landmark is more complex. Being told by someone much older to stop calling him Sir may have had something to do with it. It was a sort of informal investiture with the toga virilis. I seemed to be getting the best of every world. The atmosphere at Kövecses was the culmination of a change which had been taking place ever since my departure from England. In the past, I had always arrived on any new scene trailing a long history of misdeeds and disasters. Now, the continuity was broken. Somewhere between the Dogger Bank and the Hook of Holland the scent had gone cold; and, for a quarter of a year there had been no rules to break except ones I had chosen. Things were on the mend! No wonder I looked on life with a cheerful glance.

  It is hard to think of anyone less didactic than my host. Yet, without any effort, he exerted an emancipating and de-barbarizing influence similar to the mood that radiates from a few exceptionally gifted dons: liberators, that is, whose tact, insight, humour and originality clear the air and store it with new oxygen. He resembled a much-travelled Whig aristocrat—a friend of Voltaire and Diderot, perhaps—who, after enjoying and exhausting the intrigues and frivolities of half a dozen European courts, had retired to his books in some remote and well wooded shire.

  I could never tire of hearing about the frivolous aspects of Central European life and it was my curiosity, not his choice, that often led his reminiscences into these worldly channels. He had spent several years in England at the beginning of the century and he recalled those longfled seasons with all their gleaming details intact: feasts and regattas, race-meetings and house-parties and summer nights when a young bachelor could go to several balls in the same evening. “I used to, often,” he said, “it seems too extraordinary to think of. Night after night, getting back to my cousin’s house in broad daylight. I remember, just about dawn, seeing a flock of sheep streaming out of Knightsbridge and into the Park at Albert Gate.” He remembered, for my benefit, anecdotes about Edward VII, Mrs. Keppel, Lily Langtry, Rosebery, Balfour, Sir Ernest Cassel and Ellen Terry and recalled the conversation of the young Mrs. Asquith. The names of the Benson brothers, of Anthony Hope and Frank Schuster came to the surface—but in what connection? I’ve forgotten. The re-discovered diary is to blame for this sudden profusion.

  As he spoke, fashionable Europe at the turn of the century rose like an emanation of absurd and captivating splendour. Sovereigns and statesmen confabulated in a rose-coloured, dove-grey mist. Ambassadors, proconsuls and viceroys, winking with jewelled stars, postured in colloquy. The scene was scattered with uniforms of scarlet and skyblue; it was afloat, above all, with women of almost supernatural radiance. In Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne or the Prater or the Borghese Gardens, they cantered with cockaded grooms in attendance through the sliding leaf-shadows and a ripple of lifted toppers. Under hats which were ibises swerving round corners, they twirled like figures in a dream down perspectives of pleached horn-beam in a retinue of cloth-topped boots. After dark, rainbowed in chandelier-refracting tiaras, with swan-throats clasped in cylinders of pearl, they gyrated through a cloud of sighs to the tunes of Fledermaus and Lily of Laguna. Paris, he said, had been dazzling in a different and even more complex style. “Rather like this,” he went on, touching the volume at his side. “It was still recovering from the Dreyfus case when I first knew it.” He told me how he had listened to older people, just as I was listening to him, describing an anterior France of the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris.

  ‘The Kaiser and Little Willie sound pretty dreadful,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘though Baron Pips is very fair about them.’ I asked him about the von Moltke circle and the Eulenburg scandal with its exotic Wildean parallels. He had been much in Germany; but the thought of the new régime was poisoning his memory of them retrospectively. “Not only on race grounds,” he said, “though of course that counts.” He had had many German friends, but few had survived the recent changes. How could they? It was as if an entire civilization were sliding into calamity and taking the world with it. We talked much of these things and once, as we were walking to our rooms late at night, he stopped in the passage and said “I feel I ought to set out like a kind of Don Quixote,” then added with a sad laugh, “but of course I won’t.”

  Austria wa
s a rich mine for reminiscence. The familiar figures of Franz Josef and the Empress Elizabeth led to Pauline Metternich, Frau Schratt, the tragedy of Mayerling, the axioms of Taaffe, the misadventures of Bay Middleton. An entire mythology unfolded and I felt glad that Vienna had recently become a real background, in my mind, both for these shadows and for the newer dramatis personae I was meeting at one remove: Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Kokoschka, Musil and Freud and a galaxy of composers whose importance I didn’t really take in till years later. (I wished I had gone to the Opera! I might have broken into an unknown field of delights a decade earlier than I did.) Hölderlin, Rilke, Stefan George and Hofmannsthal were the poets I remember him taking down from the bookshelves when I asked how they sounded. Apropos of Lewis Carroll and Lear and nonsense poetry in general, he introduced me to Christian Morgenstern.[6] I developed an immediate passion for the characters in his poems and for the vague and hallucinating world they inhabit: a world in which unprincipled architects steal and make off with the empty spaces between the uprights of a railing; where unclassified creatures, followed by their young, stalk on the scene on their multiple noses; and where the legs of two boys, side by side in the cold, begin to freeze, one boy centigrade, the other fahrenheit... An inventor, in one poem, after building a smell-organ, composes music for it—triplets of eucalyptus, tuberose and alpine flowers are followed by hellebore scherzos; and later on, the same inventor creates a giant wicker trap into which he lures a mouse by playing the violin, in order to set it free in the solitudes of a distant forest. Dreamland.

  * * *

  We were sitting in front of the house in the shade of two ancient and enormous poplars and Baron Pips, to illustrate the reckless frequency of French words in pre-war Austrian conversations, told me that when he was a small boy, he had overheard the Emperor saying to a Princess Dietrichstein at a garden-party at Bad Ischl, “Das ist ja incroyable, Fürstin! Ihr Wagen scheint ganz introuvable zu sein.”[7] Similar surroundings were the scene of another tale. Friedrich-August, the last King of Saxony, a fat, easy-going and proverbially good-natured man, loathed all court functions and especially the midsummer garden party at Dresden. Once, in liquefaction after a heat-wave afternoon, he was escaping, his duty done, to a cool drink in his study when he spotted, at the other side of the park under a tree, two aged and dismal-looking professors he had forgotten to greet. Hating to hurt anyone’s feelings he toiled all the way over to them and shook their hands limply. But the afternoon’s output had been too much for him: he just managed to croak “Na, ihr beide”—“Well, you two”—and tottered away again.[8]

  I loved these stories. Another, prompted by a mention of Frederick the Great, cropped up while we were walking through the woods at the other end of the demesne. As I’ve never heard or read it anywhere else, here it is.

  Learning that one of his officers had fought with great bravery, the King recommended him for an immediate award of the Pour le Mérite Cross, the Prussian equivalent of the V.C., which he had just founded. The ribbon was sent off at once. A few days later, when the officer turned up at the King’s headquarters with dispatches, Frederick glanced at his neck and asked him why he wasn’t wearing it. There had been a terrible mistake, the officer explained. The award had gone to a cousin in his regiment with the same rank and name. A look of deepening horror spread over the King’s face, and when he had finished, the King jumped to his feet and drove him out, crying “Weg! Geh’ weg! Du hast kein Glück!” —“Away! Go away! You’ve no luck!”

  “Perhaps he said it in French,” Baron Pips said after a pause. “He hated talking German.”

  * * *

  These walks carried us far afield. All trace of winter had vanished and the snow with it, except for a dwindling line here and there under a hedge or in the lee of a wall where the sun never reached. Otherwise, the season had leaped forward into spring. The grass, recovered from the lank pallor of its first re-emergence, was bright green, and the banks and the roots of the trees were thick with wild violets. Green lizards, freshly woken from their winter torpor, scuttled electrically and froze in postures of alert petrifaction. The hazel-spinneys and the elms and the poplars and the willows and aspens along the streams were all putting out new leaves. The universal white had vanished and an unseen Europe was coming to the surface. The scores of larks and the returning migrants reminded me that I had hardly seen any birds except rooks, ravens and magpies, and an occasional robin or a wren, for a quarter of a year. There was a fidgeting of wagtails and the twittering that accompanied all the building and nest-repair was almost an uproar. The peasants in the fields lifted fleece caps and black hats with friendly greetings and Baron Pips would answer with a wave of an old green felt with a cord round it, and the ritual response in Slovak or Hungarian. The Vah,[9] the wide, swift river that formed one of the estate boundaries, rose two hundred miles to the north-east, near the Polish frontier. The sides were banked high against the danger of floods when the thaw came to the Tatra mountains. The weather had changed so much, we could lie on the grass there, talking and smoking cigars and basking under a cloudless sky like the lizards, watching the water flow past on its way to the Danube. One afternoon, carrying guns so beautifully balanced that they seemed as light as feathers—“relics of former splendour,” Baron Pips had said, filling his pockets with cartridges in the hall—we went out after rabbits. We returned through a vast warren as evening was coming on. They were scampering about and sitting in groups and casting shadows across the fields. I said, although I was carrying three of them, that they looked so cheerful and decorative it was a shame to shoot them. After a moment, I heard Baron Pips laugh quietly and asked why. He said: “You sound just like Count Sternberg.” He was an ancient and rather simple-minded Austrian nobleman, he explained. When he was on his death-bed his confessor said the time had come to make a general confession. The Count, after racking his brains for a while, said he couldn’t remember anything to confess. “Come, come, Count!” the priest said, “you must have committed some sins in your life. Do think again.” After a long and bewildered silence, the Count said, rather reluctantly, “Habe Hasen geschossen”—“I’ve shot hares”—and expired.

  Just after sunset, six or seven log-rafts, bound for the Danube and the Balkans, floated by. The trunks had been felled in the Slovakian forests, then lashed together and laden with timber in neat criss-cross stacks. A hut was built on the stern of each of them and the fires for the raftsmen’s suppers cast red reflections in the river. The lumberjacks in their leather knee-boots were turning into silhouettes in the failing light. They wished us good evening as they passed, and waved their fur caps. We waved back and Baron Pips called: “God has brought you.” Except for the fires and their reflections, the rafts had melted into the dark by the time they slid out of sight among the distant trees.

  One evening, after my temporary setback with Proust—though I enjoyed the passages that Baron Pips read out when he was particularly struck; for instance, the opinions of Charlus as he crossed Paris during an air-raid—I discovered a hoard of children’s books and took them to bed. There were both Alices, several Coloured Fairy Books, Struwwelpeter in the original, which I’d never seen, and the illustrated couplets of Wilhelm Busch: Max und Moritz, Hans Huckebein and so on. There was plenty of French: Becassine, I remember, and the innumerable volumes of the Bibliothèque Rose. All these books were inscribed in childish writing with the names ‘Minka’ and ‘Alix,’ and here and there the same hands had brushed in the outlines of the black-and-white illustrations with bold swirls of water-colour. They were my host’s two beautiful daughters,[10] both by his first marriage, and already familiar from the photographs on his desk in the library. I was only to discover years later and long after the War, when we met in France and became friends, that I had an odd link with these girls—the addiction, that is, to saying things backwards. This habit is first engendered, I suspect, by the sight of the words rumpled across the bathroom floor when learning to read, and then by deciphering
and while gazing out of the windows of restaurants and cafés. At first single words are formed, then whole sentences and, by the time they are spoken fast enough to sound like an unknown language, this useless accomplishment has become an obsession. When I had run out of material for recitation on the march I would often find myself, almost without knowing it, reciting, say, the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in this perverse way:

  Ym traeh sehca dna a ysword ssenbmun sniap

  Ym esnes, sa hguoht fo kcolmeh I dah knurd

  Ro deitpme emos llud etaipo ot eht sniard

  Eno etunim tsap dna Ehtelsdraw dah knus,

  and so on. For the initiated, these utterances have an arcane and unearthly beauty.

  Away! Away! For I will fly to thee!

  becomes

  Yawa! Yawa! Rof I lliw ylf ot eeht!

  and the transposition of

  Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways,

  is

  Hguorht suorudrev smoolg dna gnidniw yssom syaw.

  It seems almost to surpass the original in forest mystery.

  * * *

  I would have remembered most of the details of these days, even without the re-discovery of my diary, but not all. The leaving-present of a pocket-volume of Hölderlin would have outlasted oblivion, and the old leather cigar-case filled with Regalia Media cigars, but not the two-ounce tin of Capstan pipe tobacco[11] that Baron Pips had discovered in a cupboard; nor the contents of the lunch parcel Sari had made up. Her name would have stuck, but not Anna’s, the old housemaid, although I remember her face clearly.