A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior—mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers—the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality—and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.
    This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: “Who rides so late through night and wind?” But I was puzzled by reitet . (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe’s famous Erlkönig , made more famous still by the music of Schubert?) What, a foreigner? I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue:... “Englischer Student...zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel”...I’d got it pat by now. “Konstantinopel?” she said. “ Oh Weh! ” O Woe! Sofar! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said, “You can’t go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!” she answered. “And where are you staying tonight, pray?” I hadn’t thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. “Stay with us,” he said. “You must be our guest.”
    They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess’s orders, I fished out things to be washed—it was my first laundry since London—and handed them over to the maid: wondering, as I did so, how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.
    * * *
    One of the stained-glass armorial shields in the windows bore the slanting zigzag of Franken. This old stronghold of the Salian Franks is a part of northern Bavaria now and the Red Ox Inn was the headquarters of the Franconia student league. All the old inns of Heidelberg had these regional associations, and the most exalted of them, the Saxoborussia, was Heidelberg’s Bullingdon and the members were Prussia’s and Saxony’s haughtiest. They held their sessions at Seppl’s next door, where the walls were crowded with faded daguerrotypes of slashed and incipiently side-whiskered scions of the Hochjunkertum defiant in high boots and tricoloured sashes. Their gauntlets grasped basket-hilted sabres. Askew on those faded pates little caps like collapsed képis were tilted to display the initial of the Corps embroidered on the crown—a contorted Gothic cypher and an exclamation mark, all picked out in gold wire. I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of thehumanities. [1] With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm. Distance was measured;