A Time of Gifts (43 page)

But it was a group of splendid figures, sauntering and halting along the flagstones of the quay that caught and held the eye. They were clad in dark, sumptuous and variously coloured doublets of heavy silk—or occasionally of velvet—fastened with chased buttons the size of gold hazelnuts and edged with brown fur at the cuffs and the throat and over the shoulders. Some wore knee-length over-tunics, furred likewise and open down the front and frogged with gold lace; others wore them slung across their backs with careful abandon, or askew over one shoulder like swinging dolmans. Tight breeches, stiff with embroidery, ended in Hessian boots which were black, scarlet, blue or rifle-green; gold braid edged their notched tops and gilt spurs were screwed into the heels. One or two had gold or silver chains about their necks and all of them wore kalpacks of light or dark fur. These were shaped like hussars' busbies, tilted on their brows at challenging slants and plumed with white aigrettes or herons' feathers that burst from their jewelled clasps like escapes of steam. Carried nonchalantly under their arms or in the crooks of their elbows or with points touching the flagstones when stationary and hands resting lightly on the cross-hilts, their nearly semi-circular scimitars were sheathed in green or blue or plum-coloured velvet and mounted in gold and adorned with jewels at intervals along the scabbards. The splendour of princes in a legend stamped these magnates; and, except for one,
who was nearly spherical and rashly kalpacked in white fur and booted in the same scarlet as his complexion, they carried off all this bravery with accomplished ease: strolling, gossiping, glancing at their watches, leaning on their scimitars and halting with one leg straight and the other Meredithianly bent. As he talked and nodded, the monocle of a tall dandy flashed back the sunset in dots and dashes like Morse code. A carriage halted, three similarly-clad congeners alighted and there was a ceremonious doffing of bear's fur and egret and the clink of heels politely joining. A magnificent old man remained inside; lame perhaps, for his white-bearded chin rested on hands crossed on the bone crook of a malacca cane. His scimitar was laid across his knee as he bent forward, talking and laughing. The energy and humour of the white-bristling face reminded me of Victor Hugo. Apart from the brown fur and a gold chain round his shoulders and an order at his throat, he was dressed entirely in black, and all the more magnificent for this sobriety. (‘'Twould have made you crazy'—the lines suddenly surfaced after years of oblivion—‘to see Esterhazy/with jools from his jasey/to his dimond boots.'
[5]
Yes, indeed.) Slowly this covey of grandees, with the carriage and its white-bearded passenger driving alongside them at a walking pace, strolled upstream under the sequin twinkle of the poplars.

Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets and those enormous kingcups that grew in the streams. I waved as they dashed by, and one of them turned and sent a string of good-tempered dactyls over her shoulder. If the Hungarians had not been monotheists, the impending Resurrection might have been followed by the ascent of Adonis and Prosperine.

* * *

I found it impossible to tear myself from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now: a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels. The river below, meanwhile, was carrying the immediate past downstream and I was hung poised in mid-air between the two.

But today, with the clairvoyance of retrospect, I can fend off the fateful moment by assembling the data whose results the next few hours would reveal... For I know now what must have been afoot. I can see the citizens of Esztergom aligning candles on their window-sills—wicks which, added to the tapers in the hands of a myriad watching peasants, were to surround the procession, later on, with a twinkling forest; and, peering up at the Basilica, I can float inside and along the vistas of acanthus-leaves and through the darkening criss-cross of mezzotint shading into the vast sacristy where the tiers of presses and the rows of treasure-chests have disgorged their silk and their brocade, all unfolded now, and their sacred instruments and their vessels. Mitres are clicked open, copes spread, the jewelled gloves and the pallium laid ready, candelabra and monstrances and crosiers set forth. In the Pannini-like emptiness under the dome, pale armfuls of new and unlit candles are pricked in tall palisades across the gloom. An unrolling carpet ascends the shallow steps under the Archbishop's canopy and the bell-ringers in their loft are getting thirsty.

In the stable-yard of the Archbishop's palace half-way up the hill, there is a clattering and a mutter of unseasonable oaths from the booted and busbied postillions and the grooms. Restive horseshoes strike sparks from the cobbles. The hindmost of the Cardinal's four greys, with a toss of mane and plume, is being backed between the shafts while the traces are run through. Half the size of the other postillions but identically frogged and plumed, a pink-cheeked tiger polishes the silver door-handle for the last time, then runs a rag over the varnished panel where a scarlet painted
hat encloses a mitre-and-crown-topped escutcheon between its five-tiered pyramids of tassels, and slams it shut.

On the walls inside the Palace, meanwhile, Duccio's sombre Jeremiah and the shrivel-cheeked hermits and Doctors of Crivelli grow dim in their frames; likewise the Virgins and Child of Matteo di Giovanni and the Nativities of Giovanni di Paolo. The enthroned Madonna of Taddeo Gaddi and Lorenzo di Credi's
Assumption of the Magdalene
are losing their lustre and the sacred groups from Siena and Florence and Venice and Umbria and the Marches and the Low Countries and Spain are all on the brink of dissolution. Ambiguity ranges abroad! A Lombardic maiden has become one with the unicorn she clasps in her vermilion arms; and in a score of Martyrdoms, the gesso gleam of the haloes will outlive the incumbent saints. By assimilative collusion, the Danube School Temptations and Crucifixions have already swallowed up the shadows that are assembling along the valley. Evening gathers. Perhaps the Transylvanian visions of Thomas of Koloszvár—knights and bishops and St. Giles in an ilex-glade shielding his pet hind from an archer—will be the last to succumb.

The other floors are astir with expectancy. There is a coming and going of staff, an anxious eye for the clocks that tick in the great rooms, an ear for the cathedral bells, a downward glance at the stables; but at the heart of all, in Monsignor Seredy, Cardinal Mindszenty's immediate predecessor, reigns imperturbable calm. A scarlet presence can be divined, a good-humoured face, a red skull-cap, a ringed hand on a table beside a red biretta incandescent in the dusk. About his shoulders, instead of the customary lace, a white fur mantle is patterned with ermine: an ancient use makes the primate of Hungary a temporal prince as well as an archbishop and a Prince of the Church. All round his chair, the stiff, wide folds of his
cappa magna
cover the design of the carpet with yard upon yard of geranium-coloured watered silk. Pince-nez flashing, all cuff and Adam's apple, his chaplain and train-bearer flits attentively at his side. Anxiously at hand, punctiliously turned out in dark magnate's splendour and with his hair neatly brushed, a
youthful and newly-appointed gentleman-at-arms hovers. A plumed fur hat rests in the crook of his arm, a gloved hand grasps a scimitar in a black velvet scabbard at the point of balance. He is determined, come what may in the complexities of the long night ahead, to keep his spurs and his sword-point clear of that ocean of scarlet silk... There is still time for a discreet cigarette at the far end of the room... The Archbishop's chestnut-trees have opened a thousand fans under the tall windows, each to be pronged with a pink or white steeple before the month is out. An owl hoots! Beyond the poplars and the empty quay, the cobweb of the bridge looms across the Danube and somebody still lingers there. But beyond it, all turns dark. Upstream it is still daylight and the river glows wide and pale as it loiters west through the insubstantial green and silver foliage. As though in answer to the more urgent tolling, the voices of the frogs are suddenly louder.

* * *

I too heard the change in the bells and the croaking and the solitary owl's note. But it was getting too dim to descry a figure, let alone a struck match, at the windows of the Archbishopric. A little earlier, sunset had kindled them as if the Palace were on fire. Now the sulphur, the crocus, the bright pink and the crimson had left the panes and drained away from the touzled but still unmoving cirrus they had reflected. But the river, paler still by contrast with the sombre merging of the woods, had lightened to a milky hue. A jade-green radiance had not yet abandoned the sky. The air itself, the branches, the flag-leaves, the willow-herb and the rushes were held for a space, before the unifying shadows should dissolve them, in a vernal and marvellous light like the bloom on a greengage. Low on the flood and almost immaterialised by this luminous moment, a heron sculled upstream, detectable mainly by sound and by the darker and slowly dissolving rings that the tips of its flight-feathers left on the water. A collusion of shadows had begun and soon only the lighter colour of the river would survive.
Downstream in the dark, meanwhile, there was no hint of the full moon that would transform the scene later on. No-one else was left on the bridge and the few on the quay were all hastening the same way. Prised loose from the balustrade at last by a more compelling note from the belfries, I hastened to follow. I didn't want to be late.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

[1]
A Bratislava nightclub.

[2]
Owing to my ignorance of both the local tongues, from now on all conversations were in German, unless stated otherwise.

[3]
Like a number of minor placenames in this chapter and the last, the name is part of the sudden rush of detail in the re-discovered journal; and, like many other names there, I can't find it on any map. Another of Baron Pips's parting presents was a set of pre-war large-scale maps, made by Freytags in Vienna—which disintegrated long ago, unfortunately—and perhaps this name was taken from one of them, or from a local signpost. As these maps were published in 1910, they had all the old Austro-Hungarian placenames and frontiers; though Cvenke, with that diacritic over the C, giving it a ‘tch' sound, looks Slovakian. The Hungarian form of the same sound would be ‘Csénké.'

[4]
As we know from an earlier chapter, all went well. But this imbroglio on the Danube's banks made me anxious about him for some time to come.

[5]
Ingoldsby Legends
.