A Time of Gifts (26 page)

Grim thoughts for a cloudless morning.

* * *

In Mitter Arnsdorf I stayed under the friendly roof of Frau Oberpostkommandeurs-Witwe Hübner—the widow, that is, of Chief-Postmaster Hübner—and sat talking late.

She was between sixty and seventy, rather plump and jolly, with a high-buttoned collar and grey hair arranged like a cottage loaf. The photograph of her husband showed an upright figure in a many-buttoned uniform, sword, shako, pince-nez and whiskers that were twisted into two martial rings. She was glad of someone to talk to, she told me. Usually her only companion in the evenings was her parrot Toni, a beautiful and accomplished macaw that whistled and answered questions pertly in Viennese dialect, and sang fragments of popular songs in a quavering and beery voice. He could even manage the first two lines of
Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter
, in celebration of Marlborough's ally, the conqueror of Belgrade.

But his mistress was a born monologuist. Ensconced in mahogany and plush, I learnt all about her parents, her marriage and her husband, who had been, she said, a thorough gentleman and always beautifully turned out—“ein Herr durch und durch! Und immer tip-top angezogen.” One son had been killed on the Galician Front, one was a postmaster in Klagenfurt, another, the giver of the parrot, was settled in Brazil, one daughter had married a civil engineer in Vienna, and another—here she heaved a sigh—was married to a Czech who was very high up in a carpet-manufacturing firm in Brno—“but a very decent kind of man,” she hastened to add: “sehr anständig.” I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness. It needed neither prompting nor response, nothing beyond an occasional nod, a few deprecating clicks of the tongue, or an assenting smile. Once, when she asked rhetorically, and with extended hands: “So what was I to do?,” I tried to answer, a little confusedly, as I had lost the thread. But my words were drowned
in swelling tones: “There was only one thing to do! I gave that umbrella away next morning to the first stranger I could find! I couldn't keep it in the house, not after what had happened. And it would have been a pity to burn it...” Arguments were confronted and demolished, condemnations and warnings uttered with the lifting of an admonitory forefinger. Comic and absurd experiences, as she recalled them, seemed to take possession of her: at first, with the unsuccessful stifling of a giggle, then leaning back with laughter until finally she rocked forward with her hands raised and then slapped on her knees in the throes of total hilarity while her tears flowed freely. She would pull herself together, dabbing at her cheeks and straightening her dress and her hair with deprecating self-reproof. A few minutes later, tragedy began to build up; there would be a catch in her voice: “...and next morning all seven goslings were dead, laid out in a row. All seven! They were the only things that poor old man still cared about!” She choked back sobs at the memory until sniffs and renewed dabs with her handkerchief and the self-administered consolations of philosophy came to the rescue and launched her on a fresh sequence. At the first of these climaxes the parrot interrupted a pregnant pause with a series of quacks and clicks and the start of a comic song. She got up, saying crossly, “Schweig, du blöder Trottel!,”
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threw a green cloth over the cage and silenced the bird; then picked up the thread in her former sad key. But in five minutes the parrot began to mutter “Der arme Toni!”—(Poor Toni)—and, relenting, she would unveil him again. It happened several times. Her soliloquy flowed on as voluminously as the Danube under her window, and the most remarkable aspect of it was the speaker's complete and almost hypnotic control of her listener. Following her raptly, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands.

Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner's face, the parrot's cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni's heckling would be blotted out for seconds, or even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with a repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.

* * *

When I crossed the bridge at Mautern and saw the low country opening eastward, I knew that a big change was coming. I hated the thought of leaving this valley. After something to eat beside the barbican of Krems I doubled back, halting for a coffee in Stein by the statue of St. John Nepomuk, whose monument dominates the little town. He had been appearing frequently along the road. This Bohemian saint, the champion of the inviolacy of the confessional, became a great favourite of the Jesuits. They have set him up with so twirling a posture and such a spin of cassock and stole that the surrounding air might be rifled. The vineyards on the hill above filled a thousand buckets at vintage time, someone told me. The cliffs are warrened with cask-lined caves.

In a mile or two, safely back in the wide and winding canyon, I got to Dürnstein. It was a little town of vintners and fishermen. Tilting uphill from the water's edge, it was shored with buttresses, pierced by arches, riddled with cellars and plumed with trees. Where the ice and the current allowed it, the Danube reflected the violin curves of the church and an Augustinian priory and a seventeenth-century schloss. It was another Starhemberg castle, half of it jutting into the river, half embedded in the fabric of the town.

From the west barbican a long crenelated wall ran steeply up the mountainside to the tip of a crag that overhung both the town and river. Obeying the polymath—in this, as in all things—I was soon clambering about the wreckage of the stronghold that covered
this low mountain top. Lancets pierced the remains of the battlemented walls, there were pointed arches and a donjon; but, except for the clustering stumps of the vaulting, all trace of a roof had gone and firs and hazel-saplings grew thick in the crumbling cincture. This wreckage was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been imprisoned.

I had forgotten how this—the result of a quarrel on the Third Crusade—had come about and when I had listened to it, over the innstove a few nights before, it had seemed extremely odd. It is briefly this. At the end of the siege of Acre the victorious sovereigns marched into the town and hoisted their banners. Richard, seeing the flag of Leopold, Duke of Austria, fluttering, as he thought, presumptuously close to his own, flew into a rage and had it hauled down and thrown into the moat. Mortally insulted, Leopold left Palestine, abandoned the Crusade and returned to Austria. Next year, Richard was summoned to England by the misgovernment of Prince John. He broke off his victorious campaign against Saladin and, to dodge his Christian enemies (who were understandably numerous), set off in disguise. Reaching Corfu, he embarked in a pirate ship which was tossed off her course by the autumn storms and wrecked at the head of the Adriatic. From here his only way lay overland through hostile states; worst of all, through the Duchy of his enemy. In a tavern near Vienna, his disguise was penetrated by some of Leopold's men and he was taken prisoner—betrayed, some say, by his commanding looks; according to others, by the careless splendour of his gloves—and donjoned incognito on this crag. How he was rescued by Blondel, his minstrel and fellow-troubadour—who is said to have discovered him by singing outside every likely prison until his friend's voice answered with the second verse—has always sounded too good to be true. But on the spot, it is impossible to doubt it.
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Wandering along the river's bank just before sunset, I felt I would like to settle and write here for ages. Meditating, admonishing and blessing, a team of sainted and weather-fretted Abbots postured with operatic benignity along the Canons' balustrade. Their haloes were dripping with icicles; snow had filled the clefts of their mitres and furred the curls of their pastoral staves. I could hear the sigh of the river just below. When I leant over the balustrade, it rose to a roar. Under the bare chestnut branches, the current was rushing by, flurrying the reflections which the lights on the other bank dropped into the flood. Beyond King Richard's castle the forested uplands of the north bank suddenly broke off. A precipice dropped sheer and at its foot, meadows and orchards followed the river upstream in a three-mile-long question-mark. Halfway, dissolving in the blue of the dusk, an island hovered over its own flawed image.

The cliff possesses an acoustic foible which I have never met anywhere else. I remembered it, standing in the same place, and hearing it again, three decades later. A tug, with a string of barges and a flag that was unidentifiable in the failing light, was creeping upstream against the press of the current. When its siren sounded, after a delay of three seconds the long-drawn out boom was joined
by an echo from the cliff which was exactly an octave higher, forming a chord; and when the lower note ended, the higher outlived it solo for another three seconds and died away.

* * *

Crossing the river by the little ferry from Dürnstein, I struck southward. By early afternoon I was approaching an enormous white building that I had espied the day before from the ruins of Dürnstein. It was the Benedictine Abbey of Göttweig, a stately rectangle lifted high above the hills and forests, with a cupola at each corner. Having enlarged so freely on the wonders of Melk, I daren't say much about Göttweig: only that it is a resplendent and worthy rival to its great sister abbey at the other end of the Wachau.

Snow-clouds were assembling as I took the uphill path. I overtook a boy of my own age, a bookish shoemaker called Paul, who had taught himself English. He was a great friend of the monks, I learnt, and I think he would have liked to have taken monastic vows himself if family responsibilities had not stood in the way. The most famous part of the Abbey is the Grand Staircase, a wide, shallow and magnificent flight where elaborate lanterns alternate with immense monumental urns at each right-angle turn of the broad marble balustrade. Paul told me that Napoleon is believed to have ridden his horse up these stairs: he passed this way, crossing the river near Krems, in the late autumn of 1805, between the victories of Ulm and Austerlitz.

He led me along an upper cloister to see an Irish monk of immense age and great charm. His words are all lost, but I can still hear his soft West of Ireland voice. Except for his long Edgar Wallace cigarette holder, our host could have sat for a picture of St. Jerome. I envied his airy and comfortable cell, his desk laden with books, and his view over the mountains and the river. The Danube was a distant gleam now, winding far away through hills where the dusk and clouds were assembling.

It was snowing hard when we started down after dark. I spent the night under Paul's roof, in the little village of Maidling im Tal, a mile or two down the valley. We had a cheerful and noisy feast with his brothers and sisters in a room next to the shop.

Next day it was snowing even harder. The magic Danubian weather was over. Paul suggested halting there till it improved but I was committed to a plan made two days before, and I reluctantly set off.

* * *

It was the eleventh of February, the morning of my nineteenth birthday. As I still had festive notions about anniversaries, I had planned to spend the end of it under a friendly roof. Not that Paul's wasn't; but, before setting out from Dürnstein, I had telephoned to some more friends of Baron Liphart who lived an easy half day's walk from Göttweig. The line had been bad and the faint voice of the Gräfin at the other end sounded a bit surprised. But she managed to convey across the chaotic wires that they longed for news of their old friend in Munich. I was expected about tea-time.

It snowed and blew all the way. The schloss, when it took shape at last through the whirling flakes, really
was
a castle. It was a huge sixteenth-century pile with a moat and battlements surrounded by a wide white park. Its dark towers would have awed Childe Roland; they called for a blast of the slughorn. I battled my way there and found a man shovelling out a path that filled up again as fast as he dug, and asked him, at the top of my voice, where the front door was—it was snowing too hard to see much in the falling dark. Which Count did I want, he bawled back: what Christian name? It sounded as if there were two or more brothers about: mine was Graf Joseph; he led me into a courtyard. I was caked and clogged and thatched like a snowman, and when I got into the hall a grey-green butler helped me to beat and brush it off, hospitality seconded by Graf Joseph, who had come down the stairs.

He must have been just old enough to have flown a 'plane at
the end of the war—its propeller stood in the hall—but he looked younger, and his wife was younger still, with a gentle and thoughtful look, and a touch of shyness, I thought. (She belonged to that interesting Greek community of Trieste which had been settled there for centuries, and formerly ran the shipping and trade of the Adriatic. The city had only ceased to be part of Austria-Hungary in 1918; and, though they retained their Greek language and Orthodox faith and a patriotic concern with Greek matters, they were much intermarried with Austrians and Hungarians.) They both talked excellent English, and after the ferocious weather out-of-doors, it seemed a miracle to be sitting on the edge of an armchair in this haven of soft lamp- and firelight, lapping up whisky and soda from a heavy cut-glass tumbler. Two handsome and slender dogs were intertwined in slumber on a white bearskin rug; and one of the painted figures on the wall, I noticed at once, was in total harmony with my recent historico-snobbish craze. It was an ancestor, famous in the Thirty Years' War, and at the Treaty of Westphalia, with an ugly, intelligent and humorous face, shoulder-length hair, Vandyke moustache and beard, and the chain of the Fleece round his shoulders. He was all in black, in the Spanish fashion which had become general after the Habsburg marriage with Joan the Mad.