A Time of Gifts (20 page)

I made myself as tidy as I could after my bath. At dinner the Count, drawing on a well-stored but failing memory, recalled ancient journeys he had made as a young A.D.C., attached to an Archduke who was a passionate shot. Out of affability to me, I think, his reminiscences were all connected with the British Isles. ‘Grandes battues' in County Meath were recalled, and almost antediluvian pheasant-stands at Chatsworth and late-Victorian grouse-drives at Dunrobin; house parties of untold magnificence. “—Und die Herzogin von Sutherland!,” he sighed: “eine Göttin!” A goddess! Ancient balls were conjured up and dinners at Marlborough House; there were discreet hints of half-forgotten scandals; and I saw, in my mind's eye, hansoms bound for assignations, bowling up St. James's and turning into a gaslit Jermyn Street. When the name of a vanished grandee escaped his memory, his wife would prompt him. His mind wandered back and away to the estates of a cousin in Bohemia—“The Czechs have taken them away now,” he said with another sigh—and a wild boar shoot which had been held there in honour of Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales: “Er war scharmant!” I was fascinated by all this. As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count's cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I'd learnt what to do with that in recent weeks—
or so I thought
—and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!,” he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono—!”

I didn't know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count's troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count's face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the
table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count's features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for
my
sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn't schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar—the last of a bottle of a liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age. When we had recovered I felt glad that this marvellous drink had been rescued, above all for the Count's sake—it was too late a stage in life for any more shocks—and ashamed of my pot-house ways; but they were too kind-hearted for the feeling to last long.

The Count retired early, kissing first the hands and then the cheeks of his wife and daughter-in-law. When he said goodnight to me, his hand felt as light as a leaf. With his free hand he gave my forearm a friendly pat and faded away down a lamplit grove of antlers. Then the elder Gräfin, who had put on spectacles and spread her needlework on her lap, said, “Now come and tell us all about your travels.” So I did my best.

* * *

At this dead time of the year, when agriculture had come to a halt, most of the dwellers in these castles were dispersed until harvest or shooting or school holidays should muster them again. When I think of these havens, later castles at other seasons intrude their memories and the resulting confusion of unlabelled lantern-slides composes a kind of archetypal schloss, of which each separate building becomes a variation.

An archetypal schloss... At once, in my mind's eye, an angular relic of the Dark Ages confronts the wind on top of a crag. More slowly, a second vision begins to cohere. Staircases entwine. Allegorical ceilings unfold. Conch-blowing tritons, at the heart of radiating vistas of clipped hornbeam, shoot plumes of water at the sky. Both visions are true. But finally a third category emerges: a fair-sized country house, that is, which combines the castle-principle with a touch of the monastery and the farm. It is usually beautiful
and always pleasing and sometimes age or venerability demand sterner epithets. A rustic baroque, even if it is only a later superimposition on a much older core, is the presiding style. There are shingle roofs, massive walls whitewashed or mottled with lichen and rectangular and cylindrical towers capped with pyramids or cones or with wasp-waisted cupolas of red or grey tiles. Cavernous gateways breach the arcades of thick and flattened arches. There is a chapel and stables and a coach-house full of obsolete carriages; barns and waggons and sledges and byres and a smithy; then fields and hayricks and woods. Indoors, a pattern of flagstones rings underfoot, or the lighter resonance of polished wood. The spans of elliptical and snow-white cross-vaults spring low in the corners of the rooms and between them flared embrasures taper to tall double windows that are tight shut and ice-flowered in winter, with bolsters between them to foil draughts. In summer the tilt of the slatted shutters guides the glance downwards to leaf-shadows on cobblestones and a battered fountain or a sundial. The pockmarked statues are curdled with lichen. Scythes swish through deep hayfields. There is an interlock of orchards and slanting meadows; and beyond them, cattle and woods and a herd of deer that lift all their antlers simultaneously at the sound of a footfall.

As I shut my eyes and explore, looking-glasses throw back the faded reflections: the corroborative detail assembles fast. In portraits,
[3]
the solemn seventeenth-century magnates in lace collars and black breastplates are out-numbered by descendants in Addisonian periwigs and powder. Later, by slender figures romantically moustached, and dressed in white uniforms that conjure up pictures of Sarah Bernhardt in
l'Aiglon
. Lancers' torsoes taper into their sashes like bobbins. Red and white ribbons cross their breasts and sometimes the Golden Fleece sprouts from those high star-crusted collars. Hands rest on the hilt of a sabre looped with a
double-headed-eagle sabretache.
[4]
Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon's helmet or an uhlan's czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette. In later pictures, pale blue replaces these snowy regimentals, in melancholy homage to the progress in firearms and marksmanship since the battle of Königgrätz. The passion for the chase breaks out over the walls and stags' antlers spread their points among the panoplies. There are elks' horns from the frontiers of Poland and Lithuania, bears from the Carpathians, the tushes of wild boars twisting up like moustaches, chamois from the Tyrol and bustards, capercaillies and blackcock; along every available inch of the passages, the twin prongs of roe deer, calligraphically inscribed with a faded date and the venue, multiply forever. A respectable assembly of books fills the library. There is a missal or two in the hall, the
Wiener Salonblatt
and
Vogue
lie anachronistically about the drawing room and perhaps a poetical grandson or great-niece has left a pocket-volume of
Hyperion
or the
Duino Elegies
on a window-sill. Miniatures and silhouettes constellate the spaces between the portraits and the looking-glasses. Heraldic details abound: crowns or circlets with nine, seven or five pearls celebrate the owner's rank and stamp his possessions as plentifully as brands on a ranch. On a handy shelf the small gilt volumes of the
Almanach de Gotha
, a different colour for each degree, fall open automatically, like the Baronetage in the hands of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, at the castellan's own family. Biedermeier tables are crowded with photographs. Scores of summers have faded the green, the royal blue, the canary and the claret-coloured velvet of their frames. Between his embossed crown and a signature turned yellow with age, Franz Joseph presides like an
agathos daimon
. The Empress, goddess-like among a photographer's cardboard turrets, gazes into the distance with her hand on the head of an enormous deer-hound. Sewn into her
habit, she clears prodigious fences; or with a swan-like turn of her throat, she looks over her bare shoulder under piled-up tiers of thick plaits or cascading coils that are sprinkled with diamond stars.

The libraries of all these castles contained Meyer's
Konversations-lexikon
. As soon as I decently could, I would beg to be let loose among its many volumes, with the plea that questions had cropped up on the road that it was a torment to leave unsolved. This often caused surprise, always pleasure: at the least, it solved the problem of entertainment, and sometimes it stirred a kindred curiosity, leading to searches in the library through dense columns of Gothic type.
Meyer
was sometimes backed up by the
Larousse XXème Siècle
or the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
; once, miraculously, in Transylvania, and once, later on, in Moldavia, all three were present. Atlases, maps and picture books were loaded into one's arms at bedtime.

Shaded paraffin lamps, I think, not electricity, light up a few of these rooms after dark. I'm sure candles lit the music when I turned over for someone at the piano—I can see the glitter of their flames in the removed rings at the end of the keyboard as clearly as I can hear the lieder of Schubert and Strauss and Hugo Wolf, and
Der Erlkönig
at last. Music played a leading part in all these households. The sound of practising winds along passages, sheet music and bound scores scatter the furniture. The variously shaped instrument cases gathering dust in the attics, bear witness to palmier days when the family and its staff and its guests would assemble for symphonies. Now and then, the pipes of an organ cluster in the hall, and a gilt harp gleams in a corner of the library with all its strings intact.

After I had said goodnight and made my way book-laden along an antlered corridor and up a stone spiral to my room, it was hard to believe I had been sleeping in a byre the night before. There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster, and then back again. Cocooned in smooth linen and lulled by the smell of logs and beeswax and lavender, I nevertheless stayed
awake for hours, revelling in all these delights and contrasting them with joy to the now-familiar charms of cow-sheds and haylofts and barns. The feeling would still be there when I woke up next morning and looked down from the window.

The last sunrise of January was sliding across a lawn, catching the statues of Vertumnus and Pales and finally Pomona at the far end and stretching their thin and powdery shadows on the untouched snow. Rooky woods feathered the skyline and there was a feeling in the air that the Danube was not far.

* * *

Castles were seldom out of sight. Clustering on the edge of country towns, recumbent with sleepy baroque grace on wooded ledges or beetling above the tree tops, they loomed from afar. One is aware of their presence all the time, and when the traveller steps over the border of a new sphere, he feels like Puss-in-Boots when the peasants tell him that the distant chateau and the pastures and the mills and the barns belong to the Marquis of Carabas. A new name impinges. For a stretch it is Coreth or Harrach or Traun or Ledebur or Trautmannsdorff or Seilern; then it dies away and gives place to another. Perhaps I struck lucky; for when, on the road or during halts at an inn, the theme of the local castle-dwellers cropped up, as they invariably did, there were no Cobbett-like diatribes. The villagers would speak of the local castellan and his family in the possessive tones they might have used for a font or a roodscreen of great antiquity in the parish church. Feelings were often warmer than this; and when bad luck, gambling, extravagance or even total imbecility had sent a local dynasty into decline, this eclipse of a familiar landmark was bewailed as yet another symptom of dissolution.

This hovering Ichabod feeling was everywhere epitomized by old photographs of Franz Josef, battered and faded but cherished; rather strangely, perhaps. His reign had been a succession of private tragedies and public though peripheral erosion. Every few
decades some irredentist-loosened fragment of the Empire was detached or—occasionally and worse still—rashly annexed. But these regions were far away at the Empire's fringes, their inhabitants were foreign, they spoke different languages, and life at the heart of the Empire was still serene and cheerful enough to muffle these shocks and omens. After all, most of that huge assembly of countries, slowly and peacefully acquired through centuries of brilliant dynastic marriage—‘Bella gerunt alii; tu, felix Austria, nubes!'—was still intact; and until 1919—when the centrifugal break-up spared only the Austrian heartlands—a buoyant douceur de vivre had pervaded the whole of life. Or so it appeared to them now, and many seemed to look back to those times with the longing of the Virgilian farmers and shepherds in Latium when they remembered the kind reign of Saturn.

* * *

At Eferding, where I stayed the night, the baroque palace that filled one side of the central square belonged to a descendant of Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the great defender of Vienna in its second siege by the Turks. The name was once more on everyone's lips, owing to the present Prince Starhemberg's rôle as commander of the Heimwehr: a Home Guard or militia, I was told, ready to foil any attempted seizure of power by either of the political extremes. I had seen columns of this corps on country roads, dressed in grey uniforms and semi-military ski-caps, shouldering raw-hide knapsacks with the brindled and piebald marking turned outwards. Rather mild they had seemed, to eyes and ears attuned to the fiercer tempo and the stamping and barking the other side of the German border; but they did not escape the accusation of fascism by one half of their opponents. After Dr. Dollfuss, Starhemberg's picture was the one most often seen in public places: which—again compared to Germany—was not much. They showed a tall, handsome young man with a high-bridged nose and a rather weak chin.

* * *

The scene was beginning to change. My path followed a frozen woodland stream into a region where rushes and waterweed and marsh vegetation and brambles and shrubs were as densely entangled as a primeval forest. Opening on expanses of feathered ice, it was like a mangrove swamp in the Arctic circle. Encased in ice and snow, every twig sparkled. Frost had turned the rushes into palisades of brittle rods and the thickets were loaded with icicles and frozen rainbow-shooting drops. Of birds, I could only see the usual crows and rooks and magpies, but the snow was arrowed with forked prints. It must have teemed with water-fowl at a different time of year and with fish too. Nets were looped stiffly in the branches and a flat-bottomed boat, three-quarters sunk, was frozen in for the winter. It was a white, hushed region under a spell of catalepsy.