CYPRUS, FLORENCE, HUNGARY
A Winter in Cyprus--Florence--Siena--Italian
Castles--Cannes--Some Foreign Royalties--Visit During the
Following Spring to Princess Batthyany in Hungary
By the time of which I am now speaking Richard Mallock was Member for
the Torquay division of Devonshire, and I often still helped him at
political and other meetings in his constituency. Lauriston Hall,
Torquay, which had been for a time my home, was let. I stayed on such
occasions at Cockington, or somewhere else in the neighborhood. One
house at which I often stayed was Sandford Orleigh, near Newton,
belonging to Sir Samuel Baker, the traveler and Egyptian administrator,
with whom I had for years been intimate. In his cabinets, or on his
walls, Sir Samuel had treasures and trophies from half the savage or
out-of-the-way countries of the world. One day in his study he took from
a shelf a few pieces of marble--green, streaked with white, and said to
me: "Those are bits of the precious verd antique. I picked them up among
the mountains of Cyprus, where similar blocks were lying about me
everywhere. Anyone who would bring this marble down to the sea might
make a fortune in no time."
As Sir Samuel talked, the whimsical idea occurred to me of going myself
to inspect the particular spot he mentioned, and seeing whether any
enterprise of such a kind would be practicable. This idea, like
Beckett's idea of his system, was for me at first no more than a
plaything, but the very name of Cyprus had always excited my
imagination, and the thought of the island having thus by chance been
revived in me, I began to feel that a visit to it would be a very
charming adventure, and that Sir Samuel's story of the marble, even if
it should prove to be a myth, would at least be a plausible excuse for
embarking on so long a journey. Moreover, it provided Sir Samuel with an
excuse for writing to Sir Henry Bulwer, then governor of the island, and
asking him to do what he could in the way of securing accommodation for
me during my projected stay. Sir Henry's reply was to the effect that if
I would so time my movements as to reach Cyprus in January, the Chief
Secretary, Colonel Warren, would receive me as a guest for a month or
so, and that during the rest of my stay he would himself entertain me at
Government House. Posts to and from Cyprus were at that time extremely
slow, and it was not till nearly Christmas that these arrangements were
complete. Meanwhile, by Sir Samuel's advice, the specimens of the marble
were submitted to a London expert. As I was now bent on going, his
verdict, though not very favorable, did nothing whatever to discourage
me. What mainly occupied my mind were thoughts of an island which was
unknown to ordinary tourists, the history of which united the sway of
Byzantine emperors with that of crusading kings, of Venetian doges and
subsequently of Moslem dynasties, where the mountains were crowned with
castles almost lost in clouds; where the walls of the marine fortress in
which Othello lodged cast the white reflection of the Lion of St. Mark's
on the waters, and where half the inhabitants prayed with their faces
turned to Mecca and half with their eyes cast down before jeweled and
gilded icons--an island, moreover, where I could watch and explore these
hybrid scenes and pageants without any appreciable sacrifice of the
comforts and the ease of London.
In this agreeable frame of mind, I left one evening the lamps of Charing
Cross Station behind me bound via Brindisi for Alexandria, from which
port an Austrian Lloyd steamer would ultimately bring me to Cyprus,
after a voyage, incredibly slow, of very nearly a week. On my way out I
encountered several acquaintances--Sir Augustus and Lady Paget, who were
going back to Vienna, and were just visible in the gloom of the Dover
boat; Arthur Paget, bound for Africa; and also several others, among
whom were Edward Milner and John St. Aubyn, subsequently Lord St. Levan.
The goal of these last was Damascus. We three slept at Alexandria on the
boat which had brought us from Brindisi, and were next day rowed across
the enormous harbor to a black craft, the _Diana_, which had just
arrived from Trieste, and which by way of Port Said and Jaffa brought us
in four days to Beyrout. There, after a day of sightseeing, we had tea
with the English consul, whose house was very like a mosque. Milner and
St. Aubyn were to sleep that night at a hotel and start for Damascus
next morning by diligence. I returned to the ship alone, and I found
myself twelve hours later looking at Cyprus from the open roadstead of
Larnaca.
I remained in the island for something like three months, as the guest
of Sir Henry, Colonel Warren, and other British officials. A year or so
afterward I recorded my experiences in a short book called _In an
Enchanted Island_. It will here be enough to summarize the various
impressions and experiences which are there described in detail.
My impression on landing was one of half-forlorn disappointment. The
winter that year in Europe was the coldest within living memory. Even
the air of Cyprus had something in it not far from frost, and the
treeless hills seemed blighted by the clouded and inhospitable sky. But
a day like this proved to be a rare exception. Cyprus, as I knew it in
the winter, was for the most part a land of what Englishmen mean by a
late spring or an early summer when they dream of it. The evenings were
chilly, but the days were warm and shining. They were sometimes, though
not often, too warm for refreshment. The greens of the trees glittered,
the mountains were scarred with purple, and the midday shadows of
arcades were sharp as chiseled jet. My first host, Colonel Warren, had
his home in Nicosia, a town in the middle of the island, and twenty
miles from the sea. Nicosia lies in a great inland plain, and, as seen
from the hilly road which slopes slowly down to it from the south, it
resembles the pictures of Damascus with which all the world is familiar.
Nicosia, however, has one feature which is in Damascus wanting. Among a
forest of minarets is a great cathedral, used as a mosque since the days
of the Turkish conquest, but built in the Middle Ages by Christian kings
of the house of Guy de Lusignan. The town is a maze of lanes, to which
ancient houses turn unwindowed walls, broken only by doors whose high,
pointed arches often bear above them the relics of crusading heraldry,
and give access to cloistered courts, the splash of secret fountains,
and rockwork gay with violets. In a house thus secluded, and entered by
such a door, lived Colonel Warren, my host, and under his roof, the
morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the
West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just
awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the
muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting me to adore
Allah.
Colonel Warren was an ardent antiquarian, nor was he altogether
insensible to the fascination of business ventures. He was not only
eager to tell me whatever he knew of the architectural curiosities of
the island, ancient and medieval, but he also offered me every
assistance in my quest of the precise spot where, according to Sir
Samuel, the green marble was to be found. He at once put me into
communication with the owners of mules and carriages, with guides and
with other persons whose aid would be necessary for me in reaching and
exploring the mountains in whose fastnesses the treasure was concealed.
He also introduced me to a charming professor from Edinburgh, who, in
some official capacity, was excavating Phoenician tombs, and who, by
way of taking a holiday, was willing to be my companion. Accordingly one
morning we set out in a carriage which brought us to the foot of the
mountains where the rough road, made by the English, ended, and where
mules awaited us, on whose very disagreeable backs the rest of our
expedition was to be accomplished. Sir Samuel Baker's maps and
descriptions provided us with outstanding landmarks, which were more or
less unmistakable. The spot which we were seeking lay high up in the
clefts of a curious mountain known as "The Five Fingers," and was marked
by a ruined church, a cave, and a lonely cypress tree. Our first attempt
to find this spot was a failure. Our second attempt was successful.
There could be no mistake about it--the lonely cypress was there, the
cave and the church also. There, too, after a long search, we discovered
fragments of stone--duplicates of Sir Samuel's specimens. But these
were fragments only. Nothing could be found that was larger than a large
pebble. The potential quarries of which Sir Samuel had spoken were
children of his own imagination, and the only good they did us was to
illustrate how easily practical men may deceive themselves--even when,
like Sir Samuel, they are usually keen observers. We did indeed bring a
few specimens back with us, but to the marble quarry as a practical
project I had already said "Good-by." Let all disappointed prospectors
learn philosophy from me. I said it without regret. I was on the whole
relieved--for now I was free to devote myself to those pleasures of
imagination which the life and the scenes around me had already begun to
stimulate.
Before long each page of my life in Cyprus was like a page from an
illuminated missal. I climbed to the mountain castle of St. Hilarion,
once occupied by Richard the First. Through the traceries of its windows
and from its towers I looked at the snowy summits of Cilicia across
sixty miles of sea. I explored its stables, hewn out of the solid
rock--stables not for horses, but camels. I examined its cisterns,
hanging on the brinks of precipices. While on this expedition, I stayed
with one of the judges in a lodge on the mountain side, and spent a
night with him looking out on a garden of spices, and comparing the
Septuagint version of the Song of Solomon with the English. On another
occasion I came in a seaward valley to a beautiful monastery, whose
refectory still was perfect, though there was no life in its silence
but the life of oleanders peering in at the windows and half hiding from
view the foam from which Venus sprang. Often in the early morning, on
one expedition or another, I saw groups of peasants moving across dewy
plains, their coats as bright as Joseph's, who, with their ass or camel,
suggested the Flight into Egypt. When I journeyed for any distance by
road my equipage was some old landau, drawn by five horses, and
accompanied by three servants, one of these being my own, who spoke very
fair English, and who had been born on the slopes of Lebanon. It was in
this manner that, when I was staying with Sir Henry, I went from Nicosia
to Famaugusta, a distance of fifty miles, which it took ten hours to
accomplish. This was how Englishmen traveled in the days of William and
Mary. Among the remains of Famaugusta I wandered for several days, its
huge walls being still very nearly perfect, though they now inclose
little but the huts of some Turkish shepherds, about fifty deserted
churches, bright inside with frescoes, and a cathedral so profusely
carved that it looks like a hill of flowers.
Within the limits of a day's expedition from Famaugusta were the
remains--I was taken to visit them--not entirely ruinous, of the country
residence of one of the crusading nobles. I found my way into
monasteries still peopled by devotees, and saw in the eyes of many of
them monastic faith still shining. In strange churches I studied,
behind gilded screens and icons, magnificent copies of the Gospels, and
read aloud to a sacristan this passage and that, asking him to read them
also, so that I might adjust my pronunciation to his. On one occasion,
from a height near Government House, I watched, if I may so express
myself, a celebrated icon in action--a jeweled portrait of the Madonna,
said to have been painted by St. Luke. On the plain below was the broad
bed of a river, dry from continued drought. Unanswered prayers for rain
had for some time been frequent and at last this miraculous relic had
been brought forth from its hiding place, as a charm which was bound to
effect what ordinary prayers could not, and was being carried along the
banks of the river by a black procession of monks, who were followed--so
it seemed to me--by half the population of the neighborhood. As these
companies drew nearer, I gradually distinguished outbursts of distant
shouting. I had arrived at the psychological moment. Far off, along
watercourses lately dry, a streak of light was advancing like the coils
of a silver snake. This was the river, which was actually coming down in
flood. Presently, with a rattle of pebbles, it was pouring by below me.
In less than an hour the portent died away, but left the memory of a new
miracle behind it.
The only thoroughly modern thing in Cyprus at the time of my own visit
was Government House, which is not in Nicosia, but outside it. It is
built wholly of wood, and was sent out from England--a mere series of
rooms surrounding a court, which was then marked out for a tennis
ground. There was only one steam engine in the island, and (needless to
say) no railway. These appliances not being there, nobody missed them. I
myself thought the absence of railways pleasant rather than otherwise,
and steam as an aid to industry was the last thing--so it seemed--that
the native population wished for. The Duke of Sutherland, it appeared,
had not very long ago thought of buying an estate in the southern part
of the island and applying all the methods of science to the cultivation
of early potatoes. He would, however, in order to insure success, have
had to buy from the neighboring peasants certain way leaves and water
rights, and for these they banded together to ask such preposterous
prices that the duke, as they half hoped he would do, abandoned an
enterprise by which they, then the poorest of the poor, would have been
the first persons to benefit.
Sir Henry often discussed with me the economic conditions of Cyprus. The
population, he said, comprised no class that in England would be called
rich, and very few of the peasants, though mostly their own landlords,
lived a life which an English plowman would tolerate. The inhabitants as
a whole were certainly exceptionally liable to a class of diseases the
cause of which is malnutrition, and I came, as I talked to Sir Henry, to
see in Cyprus a very useful refutation of the doctrine that the masses
are only poor when a few rich people plunder them.
Meanwhile it was a satisfaction to reflect that nobody in Cyprus could
make trouble by holding up the rich to execration, the reason being that
there were no rich to execrate, and the charm which the imaginative
spectator found in the life around him was not likely to be broken by
any very rude awakening. Sir Henry himself was not perhaps sensitive to
romance, but he did all he could to aid me in my own quest of it, and
until my time for quitting his roof came, one day followed another
leaving behind it soothing or exciting memories, the colors of which
even now have not lost their freshness.
On my way homeward I went from Cyprus to Florence, to stay with some
friends who had a villa there. The time was Easter, but the weather was
like a damp winter. I found there many acquaintances. Among them was a
Madame de Tchiacheff, whom I had known in my boyhood at Littlehampton.
Scotch by birth, she had married a well-known Russian, and her house,
with its cosmopolitan company, was among the most distinguished in
Florence. I and my hostess went to pay a call on "Ouida," whom I knew
more or less by correspondence, but the coachman took us by mistake to
the Villa Careggi instead. By the kindness of Madame de Tchiacheff I was
made known to the Strozzi family, and we visited their monumental
palace, which was not then shown to the public. With two other palatial
houses I came to be acquainted also--one the home of the Russo-American
Bourtolines, the other then occupied by Mr. Macquay the banker. The
latter of these houses was specially interesting to myself as having
been once the home of the then Austrian Minister, Baron von Hugel, whose
younger son my cousin, Miss Froude, married.
The constant question which to me all these great houses suggested was,
how were the fortunes made by which they were maintained and built? The
Pitti Palace, which would hold the palace of the Strozzi in its court,
was built by a private citizen, Luca Pitti, for himself. According to
modern requirements it is too large for a king. I often thought that,
were I an American millionaire, I would secure the services of a hundred
of the most accomplished students of Europe and set them to examine
simultaneously the business archives of Florence, and thus provide (as
in a short time they might do) a mass of digested materials on which a
complete economic history of Florentine wealth might be founded.
From Florence I went for a few days to Siena, where, with a completeness
to which Florence offers no parallel, the Middle Ages spectacularly
still survive. I visited, while I was there, the great castle of
Broglio, which, standing among mountains on the brink of a wooded
precipice, lifts into the air its clusters of red-brick towers like
tulips. I visited also Cetinale--a strange classical villa, built by a
Cardinal Chigi, and surrounded by miles of ilex woods, which are peopled
with pagan statues. Returning to Florence, I discovered, with the aid of
a large-scale ordnance map, a building equally strange, and so little
known even to Florentines that our coachman had never heard of it, and
often had to ask the way. This is Torre a Cona--half medieval castle and
half classical palace. It occupies the summit of a flat-headed hill or
mountain. It is surrounded by a circular park full of deer and statues.
It is approached by an avenue of cypresses sixty feet in height, and
between these trees, on either side of the way, are colossal horses
rampant, beneath whose extended forelegs the carriage of the invader
passes. I opened a large door in one wing of the house, and found myself
in a miniature theater, with its semicircle of boxes decorated in green
and silver.
My own days at Florence, however, were on this occasion prematurely
ended by the breaking of a drainpipe in the villa of my valued hostess,
and my consequent migration at very short notice to Cannes. I started at
night, and in the small hours of the morning I had to change trains at
Genoa. As I paced the dark platform, the air was bleak and wintry, and,
looking back with regret to the shining suns of Cyprus, I took my place
at last in another train, shivering. For a few hours I slept. When I
woke I was less uncomfortable. The air, unless this was mere fancy, had
lost something of its sting. I looked out of the window, and from what I
could see in the grayness I guessed that we were somewhere or other
between Rappallo and Spezzia. As the light grew slowly clearer the
prospects were still bleak, but yet with the following of one chill five
minutes on another some change was, it seemed, in progress. The gray air
acquired a tinge of purple, the chill turned to warmth, the thin purple
turned to a soft, enveloping bloom; and when the train reached San Remo
a sunrise worthy of midsummer was shining on a world of roses.
Cannes, though the season was not far from its close, was as yet by no
means empty. As I drove to my hotel the streets were alive with
carriages, white skirts, and the shining of red sunshades. I was soon
asked to participate in a number of forthcoming dissipations, the first
of these being a tea party given by Philip Green at his villa, "La
Foret," which was close to my own doors. The company comprised a
charming and interesting group of French ex-royalties, and a live German
king, who looked like a commercial traveler. This party remains in my
mind as though it were a vignette on the last page of a diary, the
principal entries in which related to a land of which Catherine Cornaro
was the last royal ruler, and whose last democracy was democracy as
understood by the doges.
On the whole, my expedition to Cyprus, which, together with its two
sequels, had occupied about four months, did for me more than I had
ever seriously expected. It was at once a stimulus and a rest. I
returned to England in May, pleased with the prospect of enjoying a
couple of months of London, after which, in Scotland and elsewhere, I
hoped to resume my study of political and social problems, and restate
them in forms which politicians might find useful. This labor was,
however, often interrupted by the pressure of family business, which
would call me back for a week or ten days to Devonshire. When the more
urgent details were for the time settled, as they were toward the end of
the year, I went once more to Cannes, and subsequently to the Cap
d'Antibes, being one of a small party who were to stay at the same
hotels and lunch and dine in private. No such arrangement could possibly
have prospered better. I had, as I knew I should have, much time to
myself, and among my luggage was a boxload of statistical Blue Books,
which formed my companions in hours of industrious solitude. We made a
number of expeditions to old towns in the hills, one of our frequent
companions being Father Bernard Osborne, the Catholic nephew by marriage
of Mr. Froude the historian, and son of Rev. Lord Sidney Godolphus
Osborne, then the most stalwart choregus of ultraevangelical
Protestantism. Another frequent companion was Miss Charlotte Dempster,
famous as a writer of novels--especially of one, _Blue Roses_, the scene
of which was, oddly enough, Cockington. Miss Dempster, whose mere
presence was a monument to her own celebrity, was much given to the
cultivation of royalties, and which was to bring to her villa the
presence of a reigning sovereign. So important did she deem the occasion
that, before the potentate was due, she got together the ladies whom she
had honored with an invitation to meet him, and instructed them as to
how, in his august presence, they should demean themselves. The
instructions had been given, and had been followed by an expectant hush,
when sounds in the hall were heard like those of the Second Advent.
"Now, ladies," said Miss Dempster, solemnly, "rise." The ladies rose
like one man, the portals were thrown open, and a loud voice announced a
shy little pink Welshman, Mr. Hugh Price Jones, who had innocently
looked in for the purpose of a familiar call.
My original intention, when I joined my friends at Cannes, had been to
remain on the Riviera till April, and then go back to England, but I
received one morning a letter which suggested a project of a more
adventurous kind, the thought of which stirred me as much as my last
year's voyage to Cyprus, though it would not geographically take me to
any such remote distance.
This came about as follows. Among the country houses of England with
which I became familiar soon after leaving Oxford was Eaglehurst,
situated on the Solent and immediately facing Cowes. It was then
occupied by Count and Countess Edmund Batthyany, subsequently Prince
and Princess. The countess, who had seen much of the diplomatic life of
Europe, was a shrewd, kindly, and a most agreeable woman, who spoke
English like a native. Her husband, who had been educated at Eton, was
English in all his tastes and at Cowes he was an illustrious character,
on account of the many victories of his racing yacht _Kriemhilda_. From
the Cowes Week till the middle of September he kept open house at
Eaglehurst, where for ten days or a fortnight I had many times been his
guest. All kinds and degrees of ornamental and agreeable people, from
archdukes downward, flocked to Eaglehurst from The Island, and made day
after day a garden party on its lawns. When the count, on the death of
his father, succeeded to the family honors, he gave up his lease of
Eaglehurst, and the now Prince and Princess took up their abode at the
castle of Koermend in Hungary. The Prince subsequently discovered that
Vienna was more to his taste. The Princess, however, preferred Koermend,
which nothing would induce her to abandon, and there she invited a
number of her English friends to visit her. I was one of the number. Her
invitation was often renewed, but for this reason or that I had never
been able to accept it. I had, indeed, put the matter quite out of my
mind when, during my visit at Cannes, I heard from her once again. "I
saw, in some paper," she said, "that you were going to be at Cannes for
the winter. Come on to me afterward and I will show you a Hungarian
spring."
If any country had ever roused in my imagination more interest than
Cyprus, that country was Hungary. Of all European countries I gathered
that it was the least progressive; that all sorts of impossible things
might happen in its enchanted forests; that the rulers were still noble;
that the peasants were still contented (a fact which they signalized by
kissing their lords' hands), and that nothing was very different from
what it had been before the first French Revolution. Here was temptation
too strong to resist. I was asked to be a guest at Koermend from April
till the end of May. I wrote to say I would come, and when the time
arrived I went.
I was happy in having with me an admirable Austrian servant who had been
in the country before, and knew more or less of its ways. I found his
resources inexhaustible, except on one occasion. I stayed on the way at
Vicenza, for the purpose of seeing some of its Palladian palaces, and I
asked him, when I reached the hotel, to find some guide or waiter who
spoke either French or English. He could find no one who knew a syllable
of one tongue or the other. Next morning, however, he had secured an
Italian native who spoke and understood German. Here was all I wanted. I
spoke English to my servant, he spoke German to the Italian, the Italian
spoke to the people of whom I wanted to make inquiries. This
arrangement, I found, was productive of great advantages. Having made
notes of the palaces I wished to see, I told my Italian in each case to
inquire whether an English gentleman, much interested in architecture,
might be privileged to visit the interior, of the beauty of which he had
heard much. The fact that I was making my rounds with a retinue of two
attendants was accepted as such a guaranty of my own good character and
importance that I was admitted with the utmost courtesy to stately and
interesting interiors, from the portals of which I should otherwise have
been driven with suspicion and ignominy.
Having seen what I could at Vicenza, I spent a night at Treviso, whence,
having got up before sunrise, I drove in a weeping morning to the
wonderful Villa Maser, about twenty miles away--the villa whose halls
and chambers are gorgeous from end to end with the frescoes of Paul
Veronese, and whose tutelary gods look out over the vastness of the
Lombard plains, though their view is slightly impeded by the bulk of a
Renaissance church. That evening I ensconced myself in an ill-lit train,
which, passing close to Venice and crossing the Austrian frontier,
brought me and my servant to a strange little medieval town, where we
slept in an arcaded hostelry which would not have seemed strange to
Erasmus. I halted here because in the neighboring wonderland is, as I
knew from descriptions, a castle more fantastic than any fancy of
Albert Duerer's--the high-perched castle of Hoch-Osterwitz. I spent next
day in exploring it. It outdid all my dreams. Reached by a corkscrew
road which, passing through strange gatehouses, winds upward round an
isolated hill resembling a pine-clad sugar loaf, the castle covers the
summit. It suggested Tennyson's line to me: "Pricked with incredible
pinnacles into heaven." Not so large or terrific as St. Hilarion, it
inflicts perhaps on the imagination a yet acuter twinge, for St.
Hilarion belongs to an age so wholly dissociated from our own that the
distance between them is beyond the reach of measurement.
Hoch-Osterwitz, on the other hand, though in consequence of its
inconvenient position its owners no longer lived in it, was still not
wholly derelict. Its roofs were watertight; a portion of it was occupied
by a caretaker; two of its halls were full of neglected armor; and some
fragments of ancient furniture survived in a cell-like bedroom which
were sufficient for the baron when he came--as from time to time he
did--to see the caretaker, a sort of steward, on business. The life of a
distant age still smoldered within the ancient walls like a fire not
quite extinguished, and the nerves of the present and of the past formed
one living and unbroken tissue. A strange example of this fact revealed
itself to me when, wandering in a rough courtyard, I noticed a little
building which jutted out over a precipice. I opened the door, and
discovered a Lilliputian chapel with seats in it for some twenty
people. Facing me was an altar trimmed with decaying lace and supporting
a mildewed breviary, and before it, in full armor, with gauntleted hands
outstretched, was the effigy of a kneeling knight. He had knelt there as
an image of prayer for more than three centuries. When sightseeing was
over, and we descended to the world below, my excellent servant said to
me, "Ah, sir, if these trees could talk, what strange things they could
tell us!" Resuming our journey that evening, we reached Gratz by
midnight, where I slept in a lofty bedroom of the days of Maria Theresa.
By the following afternoon I was at Koermend, drinking tea with the
Princess, and answering her many questions--for she was an unappeasable
gossip--about old English friends.
The castle of Koermend lies in a great plain. On one side of it is a park
planted in radiating alleys, according to the taste of Le Notre. On the
opposite side its precincts abut on the market place of a small town,
and from the south and north it is approached by two poplar avenues
which together traverse the Batthyany territory for something like
thirty miles in an absolutely straight line. The dwelling house is a
large, square block, with a courtyard in the middle and a tower at each
angle. One of its frontages forms the side of a forecourt flanked by
grandiose outbuildings--estate offices, stables, and a great frescoed
ballroom. Elsewhere round the house was a very untidy flower garden,
which half the old women of the little town spent, so it seemed to me,
most of their days in weeding--herein reviving my recollections of
Dartington Hall and Denbury. Indeed, throughout my whole stay at Koermend
country life in Hungary was constantly reminding me of what country life
was during my own early days in Devonshire. These likenesses gave
piquancy to the points of difference. Koermend, though containing a good
deal of English furniture, and a certain amount of valuable, if not very
valuable, tapestry, was not well furnished according to English
standards. The stonework of the great staircase leading to the principal
floor was unpolished and rude, and the walls were rudely whitewashed. My
own bedroom, which in many ways was delightful, was reached by a vaulted
passage so cold and draughty that the Princess advised me always to wear
my hat when I traversed it. There was not a bell in the house, and, if I
had not had my own servant with me, who was placed in a room near mine,
I should have been helpless. And yet the doors of this dwelling were
guarded by a porter in crimson robes, who wielded a staff of office
topped by a prince's coronet. Most of the dishes at dinner might have
come from some rough farmhouse, but the pastry could hardly have been
equaled by the finest _chef_ in Paris, while the walls of the circular
dining room were daubed with theatrical pillars, so that it looked like
a ruined temple on the stage of some company of strolling players in a
barn.
Other contrasts and other notable things I discovered as the days went
by. The whole of the lower portion of one side of the house was a museum
of family archives, many of them going back to the beginning of the
fourteenth century, and most of the attic floor--a kind of museum
likewise--was crowded with precious spoils taken by the Batthyanys from
the Turks--jeweled swords and muskets, horsecloths sewn with emeralds,
and pavilions, still splendid, which once had sheltered Pashas in the
field. Another curiosity was a theater still displaying the scenery
which had been painted for some private performance before the end of
the eighteenth century.
During the first week of my visit the Princess and I were alone, and
considerately for most of the day she left me to my own devices. I had
brought out with me to Cannes a diary of my life in Cyprus, and,
inspired by my present surroundings, I set myself to begin a task which
more than once I had contemplated--the task of working my notes into a
small coherent book. I very soon found this pursuit absorbing, and my
hostess realized that my entertainment would be far from burdensome to
herself. Meanwhile when we were together I was never weary of
questioning her with regard to Hungarian life. She told me all sorts of
quaint and curious things. She told me of robbers who still haunted the
forests--of forest gypsies whose lives were a mixture of theft and
music, and who often twanged their instruments in a tavern near the
castle gates. She told me of former Batthyanys and of other castles once
possessed by them. She told me how the latest alterations of Koermend had
been made to satisfy the whims of a beautiful French mistress whom a
Batthyany had brought there from the court of Louis Quatorze. Sometimes
she asked to dinner a priest and also one of the agents called Molna, in
whom she reposed great confidence. When I was talking with the agent the
Princess played the part of interpreter. The priest and I took refuge in
bad Latin. I copied his pronunciation, and we both of us threw
Ciceronian language to the winds. On the whole we were mutually
intelligible, and we differed so favorably from the talkers of the
fashionable world that we both of us meant a great deal more than we
said. One of the questions as to which I was most anxious for
information was whether there were in the neighborhood any other old
castles, a visit to which I might find interesting. Neither the
Princess, the priest, nor the agent on the spur of the moment had very
much to tell me. At all events I found out presently for myself much
more than they could tell me.
Adjoining the dining room was a small oval library, the contents of
which the Princess had, oddly enough, never been at the trouble of
examining. I found that they consisted largely of magnificent French
folios, consecrated entirely to descriptions and elaborate engravings of
court life in Paris as it was under Louis Quinze--of royal balls, of
banquets and garden fetes, and of the chief hotels in the Faubourg--not
only of their architecture, but of their furniture also, and even of the
manner in which the furniture was arranged. Of these pictures some of
the most curious were those which represented balls or other great
entertainments as they would have appeared to the spectator had the
facades of the buildings in which they took place been removed, and the
halls, rooms, and even the servants' staircases been revealed in
section, like the rooms in a doll's house when the hinged front swings
open. In one compartment kitchen boys would be carrying up dishes from
below to magnificent footmen on a landing. In another some powdered
lady, close to the dividing wall, would be offering her eyes and patches
to the homage of some powdered beau. With pictures such as these last
the Princess was specially pleased. I brought a number of the great
volumes into the drawing-room, and we spent in examining them many
pleasant evenings.
But I presently found in the library one which, much humbler in
appearance, was to myself of much more immediate interest. It was
smaller in size, and its binding was stained and broken. This, too, was
full of pictures. As pictures they had no great merit, but together they
made up the prize for which previously I had looked in vain. This book,
published about the year 1680, consisted entirely of bald but careful
engravings of the principal castles of Hungary, some of them in ruins,
but most of them still inhabited. This book I showed to the Princess
likewise, having marked the castles which apparently were not very far
from Koermend, and asked her if they still existed, and whether a visit
to any of them would be practicable. Though she had heard of some of
them, her own knowledge was vague, but she passed the book on to Molna.
Many of these castles Molna knew by name. Some of them he had seen, some
of them were still inhabited, their aspect, so he reported, being
practically indistinguishable from that represented in the old
engravings. He picked out five or six as being well within the compass
of a day's or a two days' expedition. If, said the Princess, I wished to
see these places I might as well begin doing so at once, as she was
before long going to receive some visitors whom she trusted that I would
help her to entertain. Matters were arranged accordingly. She placed a
carriage and four brisk horses at my disposal, and under Molna's advice
my explorations began.
Most of the great castles of Hungary remained veritable castles long
after castles in England had been transformed into halls and manor
houses. The reason was that constant wars with the Turks made it still
necessary that every great house should be a fortress. Thus it came
about that the ornaments and luxuries of life--many of them under French
influence--developed themselves within walls approachable only by
drawbridges; that boudoirs were neighbored by towers loopholed for
musketry; and that under smooth lawns and orangeries rocks were hollowed
into caverns in which on occasion regiments of troops could hide. One of
the greatest of these great castles, Riegersbourg, was refortified in
the days of Pope and Addison. It covers an elevated plateau of which
every side is precipitous, and above the entrance arch is a white marble
tablet on which, in very bad Latin, the builder, Baron Hammer Purgstall,
bewails the fact that the rocks by their irregular shape have caused him
to violate the rules of classical architecture. Of such castles I
visited as many as I could. In all of them, as though by some
enchantment, the present had become the past. The unrest of western
Europe in the modern sense was dead. In dining rooms trays of the finest
Japanese lacquer formed a background for oaken tables into which the
beard of Barbarossa might have grown. Knights in armor kept watch over
billiard tables whose green baize had survived the fadings of two
hundred years. For me this half-visionary world held the same
intoxicating spell that many ears discover in Wagner's music.
The Princess, when I described these scenes to her, showed a genuine
though rather faint interest. At all events, before very long my
explorations were interrupted by the arrival of some of her promised
guests. These--a brother and sister--were in some ways modern enough,
but in one way they suggested the period of _Wilhelm Meister_. They
brought with them not only their servants. They brought with them also a
retinue of two musicians, who emerged from their quarters in the
evening, and played to us after dinner. But we had other music besides.
The weather by this time had grown rapidly warmer, and, when these
performers had retired, we went out on a balcony overlooking the great
forecourt, and from some unseen quarter beyond the castle walls came
night after night the vibrations of a gypsy band. Nor was this the only
sound. From the frondage of the park close by there would come in answer
to it the early notes of the nightingales.
The first installment of visitors, with their attendant musicians,
having departed, their places were presently taken by a distinguished
Hungarian diplomat, Count ---- and his wife. When I say of the count,
who spoke English perfectly, that one could not distinguish him from a
highly placed English gentleman, I am paying him, no doubt, an insular,
but I mean it to be a sincere, compliment.
But the Princess had still another guest in reserve, on whose qualities,
so I judged from her tones, she set even a higher store. This was a
Hungarian lady, young, well born, and married, but unfortunately
neglected by her husband, although she was extremely beautiful. As my
mind was much engaged with the thoughts of old castles, and also with
the composition of my own little work on Cyprus, I paid no great
attention to what the Princess said in praise of this guest whose advent
was now approaching. But when the lady arrived I felt that the praise
was justified. As she and her husband are by this time beyond the reach
both of praise and blame, I may say of her without fear of impertinence
that she was a model of innocent beauty, that her conversation was as
charming as her expression, and her dresses as charming as her
conversation. I am myself not much addicted to cards, but when she
proposed in the evenings to teach me the Hungarian game of Tarok I
should not have been human had I failed to become her pupil. But I was
never long in her company without being conscious of a feeling that she
was a woman who, through no fault of her own, had already had a history,
or was certain to have one some day. This feeling did not mislead me. A
year later it was justified. I learned, by accident, that her history
had been short, forlorn, and fatal. Its hidden actualities,
reconstructed by my own imagination, I afterward combined in my novel _A
Human Document_.