A Time of Gifts (40 page)

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:

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

becomes

and the transposition of

is

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.

Baron Pips kept me company across the fields till we said good-bye outside the little village of Kissujfalu. I looked back when I reached it. He waved when he saw I'd taken the right path, then turned and disappeared into his woods with the spaniel trotting behind.

“Pips Schey?” someone, a vague relation-in-law, said to me, years later in Paris. “What a charming man! Magical company! And wonderful looking. But he never did anything, you know.” Well, he did in my case, as I have more than hinted. Though we never met again, we corresponded for years. He married soon afterwards, and, when things began to go wrong in Austria and Czechoslovakia, they left Kövecses and settled at Ascona, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, just north of the Swiss-Italian
frontier. He died in 1957 in his younger daughter's country house in Normandy—about twenty miles, in fact, from Cabourg, which is the main candidate for the Proustian town of Balbec. The literary coincidence completes a fortuitous literary circle in my mind. I wish we had met again. I thought of him often, and I still do.

* * *

I felt so buoyed up by these days, that even the vague speculation as to how I might have struck him failed to damp my elation: precocious, immature, restless, voluble, prone to show off, unreliably bookish perhaps...it didn't seem to matter a damn. My journey had taken on a new dimension and all prospects glowed.

 

[1]
Kis
, little.

[2]
I can't find this tiny village (which means ‘Big Hungarian') in any map. There is a much larger place called Nagy Megyer some distance off, but it can't be the same. It's rather confusing.

[3]
Pronounced Követchesh.

[4]
They were married soon after.

[5]
I learnt later on that the eponymous hero (though not the plot) of Wassermann's two-volume novel
Christian Wahnschaffe—‘World's Illusion'
in translation—was based on Baron Pips as a young man: and hastened to read it. It's an extraordinary book, written before the first World War; rather turgid and very melodramatic. The hero is a young patrician of dazzling looks, brilliant talents and great wealth. Through idealism and some not very clearly expounded philosophy he gradually divests himself of all his friends, his money and his goods in order to live a life of Franciscan poverty and unworldliness among the poor and the criminals and the whores of a great city. There is a touch of resemblance, I think; with the exception that the saintly fictional figure is without a flicker of the humour of his living prototype.

[6]
He died in 1914.

[7]
“It's
incroyable
, Princess! Your carriage seems quite
introuvable
.”

[8]
He abdicated in 1919.

[9]
Waag in German, Vag in Magyar.

[10]
Minka Strauss and Alix de Rothschild.

[11]
The diary lays a lot of stress on cigar- and pipe-smoking; I had forgotten the latter. I think they were both slightly self-conscious symbols of emancipation and maturity. I always seem to be ‘puffing away thoughtfully' or ‘enjoying a quiet pipe,' in these pages.

T
HIS BUOYANCY
carried me all the way across the flat country from Kissujfalu to the little town of Nové Zamky—Érsekujvár in Hungarian, and Neuhäusl in German—an hour or two after dark. I can't resist letting the diary take over for a few paragraphs: