A Time of Gifts (28 page)

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.

 

[1]
True Bohemia—the modern Czech frontier—began twenty-five miles further north.

[2]
“Shut up, you silly fool!”

[3]
Leopold handed Richard over to his suzerain, Henry VI Hohenstaufen, the son of Barbarossa and the father of the
Stupor Mundi
. Leopold himself belonged to the house of Babenberg. (It was still nearly a hundred years before the Habsburgs, who were great lords in Swabia, began their centuries of rule over both Austria and the Empire.) The enormous ransom demanded for King Richard was never entirely paid.

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.

A
N 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
[1]
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!”
[2]
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
.