Between the Woods and the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

Turkish conquest.

2. BUDAPEST
    W HEN A mid-morning sunbeam prized one eyelid open a few days later, I couldn’t think where I was. An aroma of coffee and croissants was afloat under a vaulted ceiling; furniture gleamed with beeswax and elbow-grease; books ascended in hundreds, and across the arms of a chair embroidered with a blue rampant lion with a forked tail and a scarlet tongue, a dinner jacket was untidily thrown. An evening tie hung from the looking glass, pumps lay in different corners, the crumpled torso of a stiff shirt (still worn with a black tie in those days) gesticulated desperately across the carpet and borrowed links glittered in the cuffs. The sight of all this alien plumage, so unlike the travel-stained heap that normally met my waking eyes, was a sequence of conundrums.
    Then, suddenly, illumination came. I was in Budapest.
    * * *
    Little remains of the journey from Szentendre: a confused impression of cobbled approaches, the beginnings of tramlines, some steep streets and airy views of the Danube and its bridges and the search for the hill of Buda. The subsequent magnificence was due, at one or two removes, to the Baltic-Russian friends in Munich whose kindness had begun in recent weeks to scatter my rough itinerary with oases like this.
    I was back among barons and these ones lived on the steep hill of Buda (the Vár or citadel) which lifted the empty Royal Palace high above the right bank of the river. The Uri utca— die Herrengasse in German—a waving street of jutting windows, tiled roofsand arched doors with coats of arms, ran along the very summit of this castled height. It must have been built soon after 1686, when the city was recaptured from the Turks, and the foundations of many of the houses were tunnelled with sinister Turkish cellars. Perched above the din of the capital, this patrician quarter had something of the hush of a country town, and the houses, inhabited by the same families for generations, were called Palais so-and-so, including the charming one that harboured me. “All rot, of course,” my hostess said; she had been brought up largely in England. “We seem to have a passion for grand styles in Hungary. It’s a perfectly ordinary town house.”
    Tibor and Berta were in their mid-forties. Duly forewarned, they had taken me under their wing with a completeness for which Esztergom might have been some preparation; the way Hungarians construed hospitality seemed a recurring miracle. Tibor was a captain in a regiment of Horse-Gunners, and the lowness of his rank, for he had served all through the war, was due to the minute size of the Hungarian army after the Treaty of Trianon. Liked by everyone, amusing, rather caustic, intolerant of nonsense, and usually dressed in a tweed coat and skirt, Berta was tall and handsome with a stripe of grey in her dark hair. Her father, a distinguished Graf—or rather gróf in Hungarian—had been governor of Fiume before the war, and as we drove about Budapest in her small car she told me fascinating stories about the lost world of Trieste, Fiume, Pola and the Istrian peninsula. The family, like many another, was fairly hard-up now and some of the house was let; she sat on many committees and was always busy. I was caught up in her activities, accompanying her on shopping expeditions combined with sight-seeing. If she thought they promised interest or amusement, I went with her on calls, and when in a couple of days there was a dance in a house nearby, she got me asked and set about assembling evening things from Tibor’s wardrobe and then from neighbours’. When I asked if she were going, she laughed and said, “Catch me! But you’ll enjoy it.” And so I did.
    The ball was all that it should have been and, as she pointedout, it took place in a real palace; on the stairs leading to the ballroom, a friendly touch on the elbow revealed my stork-loving Esztergom ally, who promptly resumed his