A Time of Gifts (39 page)

In for a penny, in for a pound! I will let my nineteen-year-old forerunner carry on till we get to Kövecses
[3]
and then stop.

* * *

The house had the charm of a large and rambling rectory occupied by a long line of bookish and well-to-do incumbents torn between rival passions for field sports and their libraries. “It's not a
Schloss
,” Baron Pips said when he was showing me my room, “though they call it that. It's a shooting-box really. But it's also Liberty Hall.” His English was so good that I never heard a single mistake during my whole stay, though he occasionally used an Edwardian turn of phrase that might have fallen into disuse in England a few decades earlier. He was spending the winter there. Except for his own bedroom and a couple of others in case friends turned up and the delightful library where I had found him, most of the rooms had been shut up.

The library was so crammed that most of the panelling was hidden and the books, in German and French and English, had overflowed in neat piles on the floor. The surviving area of wall was filled by antlers and roebuck horns, a couple of portraits and a Rembrandt etching. There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars with a cutter made out of a deer's slot and, beside them, a number of silver cigarette cases laid in a neat row, each of them embossed with a different gold monogram. (This, I noticed later on, was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary. They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and
so on.) There were shaded lamps and leather armchairs beside a huge open stove, a basket of logs and a spaniel asleep in front of it.

“I'm on the last volume,” Baron Pips said, lifting up a French paper-bound book. It was
Le Temps Retrouvé
and an ivory paper-knife marked the place three quarters of the way through. “I started the first volume in October and I've been reading it all winter.” He put it back on the table by his chair. “I feel so involved in them all, I don't know what I'll do when I've finished. Have you ever tried it?”

As one can guess from the tone of my diary, I had only just heard of Proust, but always mentioned in tones of such respect that I was flattered by his question. I took the first volume to bed that night; but it was too dense a wood. When I tried again in Rumania next year, the wood lightened and turned into a forest whose spell has been growing ever since: so, in spite of this hesitant start, Baron Pips was my true initiator. Perhaps because of this, some perverse process of the subconscious for a long time associated him in my mind's eye with the figure of Swann. Beyond one or two haphazard points in common, the resemblance was not close. Certainly not physically, if Swann is to be identified with photographs of Charles Haas in Mr. Painter's book. Nevertheless the confusion persisted for years.

He was fifty-two years old and tall and slim and his extraordinary good looks were marked by a kind of radiant distinction. I remember them all the more lucidly—the rather pale, high forehead, the chiselled lines of brow and nose and jaw, the clear blue eyes and the straight silver hair—from making a careful sketch a couple of days later. There was a cast of wisdom and kindness in his face and something about the mouth which suggested an artist or a musician, and his features often lit up with humour and amusement. He wore a very old tweed shooting jacket, soft leather breeches of the kind I had envied in Austria, and thick ribbed green stockings, and his slippers replaced some muddy brogues I had seen in the hall. From his demeanour and the excellence of his English I think a stranger in a railway carriage would
have taken him for an Englishman but of a half-patrician, half-scholarly kind which even then seemed threatened with extinction. I knew that his life had been full of movement and adventures, quite apart from his two marriages, the first to a charming and highly suitable member of a similar dynasty, the other to a famous actress in Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin. There existed, at the time we met, a great attachment between him and a beautiful and poetic-looking white Russian I had met in Bratislava, I think on her way from Kövecses.
[4]

On the evening I arrived, Sari laid dinner on a folding table in the library. When it was cleared away, we went back to the armchairs and the books with our brandy glasses and, undeterred by a clock striking midnight somewhere in the house, talked until nearly one o'clock.
[5]

* * *

These days at Kövecses were a sojourn of great delight and an important private landmark. The delight is plain sailing—the kindness and charm of Baron Pips, and all the erudition, worldly wisdom, reminiscence and humour squandered on someone a third of his age; but the importance as a landmark is more complex. Being told by someone much older to stop calling him Sir may have had something to do with it. It was a sort of informal investiture with the
toga virilis
. I seemed to be getting the best of every world. The atmosphere at Kövecses was the culmination of a
change which had been taking place ever since my departure from England. In the past, I had always arrived on any new scene trailing a long history of misdeeds and disasters. Now, the continuity was broken. Somewhere between the Dogger Bank and the Hook of Holland the scent had gone cold; and, for a quarter of a year there had been no rules to break except ones I had chosen. Things were on the mend! No wonder I looked on life with a cheerful glance.

It is hard to think of anyone less didactic than my host. Yet, without any effort, he exerted an emancipating and de-barbarizing influence similar to the mood that radiates from a few exceptionally gifted dons: liberators, that is, whose tact, insight, humour and originality clear the air and store it with new oxygen. He resembled a much-travelled Whig aristocrat—a friend of Voltaire and Diderot, perhaps—who, after enjoying and exhausting the intrigues and frivolities of half a dozen European courts, had retired to his books in some remote and well wooded shire.

I could never tire of hearing about the frivolous aspects of Central European life and it was my curiosity, not his choice, that often led his reminiscences into these worldly channels. He had spent several years in England at the beginning of the century and he recalled those longfled seasons with all their gleaming details intact: feasts and regattas, race-meetings and house-parties and summer nights when a young bachelor could go to several balls in the same evening. “I used to, often,” he said, “it seems too extraordinary to think of. Night after night, getting back to my cousin's house in broad daylight. I remember, just about dawn, seeing a flock of sheep streaming out of Knightsbridge and into the Park at Albert Gate.” He remembered, for my benefit, anecdotes about Edward VII, Mrs. Keppel, Lily Langtry, Rosebery, Balfour, Sir Ernest Cassel and Ellen Terry and recalled the conversation of the young Mrs. Asquith. The names of the Benson brothers, of Anthony Hope and Frank Schuster came to the surface—but in what connection? I've forgotten. The re-discovered diary is to blame for this sudden profusion.

As he spoke, fashionable Europe at the turn of the century rose like an emanation of absurd and captivating splendour. Sovereigns and statesmen confabulated in a rose-coloured, dove-grey mist. Ambassadors, proconsuls and viceroys, winking with jewelled stars, postured in colloquy. The scene was scattered with uniforms of scarlet and skyblue; it was afloat, above all, with women of almost supernatural radiance. In Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne or the Prater or the Borghese Gardens, they cantered with cockaded grooms in attendance through the sliding leaf-shadows and a ripple of lifted toppers. Under hats which were ibises swerving round corners, they twirled like figures in a dream down perspectives of pleached horn-beam in a retinue of cloth-topped boots. After dark, rainbowed in chandelier-refracting tiaras, with swan-throats clasped in cylinders of pearl, they gyrated through a cloud of sighs to the tunes of
Fledermaus
and
Lily of Laguna
. Paris, he said, had been dazzling in a different and even more complex style. “Rather like this,” he went on, touching the volume at his side. “It was still recovering from the Dreyfus case when I first knew it.” He told me how he had listened to older people, just as I was listening to him, describing an anterior France of the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris.

‘The Kaiser and Little Willie sound pretty dreadful,' I wrote in my diary, ‘though Baron Pips is very fair about them.' I asked him about the von Moltke circle and the Eulenburg scandal with its exotic Wildean parallels. He had been much in Germany; but the thought of the new régime was poisoning his memory of them retrospectively. “Not only on race grounds,” he said, “though of course that counts.” He had had many German friends, but few had survived the recent changes. How could they? It was as if an entire civilization were sliding into calamity and taking the world with it. We talked much of these things and once, as we were walking to our rooms late at night, he stopped in the passage and said “I feel I ought to set out like a kind of Don Quixote,” then added with a sad laugh, “but of course I won't.”

Austria was a rich mine for reminiscence. The familiar figures
of Franz Josef and the Empress Elizabeth led to Pauline Metternich, Frau Schratt, the tragedy of Mayerling, the axioms of Taaffe, the misadventures of Bay Middleton. An entire mythology unfolded and I felt glad that Vienna had recently become a real background, in my mind, both for these shadows and for the newer
dramatis personae
I was meeting at one remove: Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Kokoschka, Musil and Freud and a galaxy of composers whose importance I didn't really take in till years later. (I wished I had gone to the Opera! I might have broken into an unknown field of delights a decade earlier than I did.) Hölderlin, Rilke, Stefan George and Hofmannsthal were the poets I remember him taking down from the bookshelves when I asked how they sounded. Apropos of Lewis Carroll and Lear and nonsense poetry in general, he introduced me to Christian Morgenstern.
[6]
I developed an immediate passion for the characters in his poems and for the vague and hallucinating world they inhabit: a world in which unprincipled architects steal and make off with the empty spaces between the uprights of a railing; where unclassified creatures, followed by their young, stalk on the scene on their multiple noses; and where the legs of two boys, side by side in the cold, begin to freeze, one boy centigrade, the other fahrenheit... An inventor, in one poem, after building a smell-organ, composes music for it—triplets of eucalyptus, tuberose and alpine flowers are followed by hellebore scherzos; and later on, the same inventor creates a giant wicker trap into which he lures a mouse by playing the violin, in order to set it free in the solitudes of a distant forest. Dreamland.

* * *

We were sitting in front of the house in the shade of two ancient and enormous poplars and Baron Pips, to illustrate the reckless frequency of French words in pre-war Austrian conversations, told me that when he was a small boy, he had overheard the Emperor
saying to a Princess Dietrichstein at a garden-party at Bad Ischl, “Das ist ja
incroyable
, Fürstin! Ihr Wagen scheint ganz
introuvable
zu sein.”
[7]
Similar surroundings were the scene of another tale. Friedrich-August, the last King of Saxony, a fat, easy-going and proverbially good-natured man, loathed all court functions and especially the midsummer garden party at Dresden. Once, in liquefaction after a heat-wave afternoon, he was escaping, his duty done, to a cool drink in his study when he spotted, at the other side of the park under a tree, two aged and dismal-looking professors he had forgotten to greet. Hating to hurt anyone's feelings he toiled all the way over to them and shook their hands limply. But the afternoon's output had been too much for him: he just managed to croak “Na, ihr beide”—“Well, you two”—and tottered away again.
[8]