Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page B

notably, in those evening celebrations round laden tables, where bang-up Corinthians in evening pink, jumping totheir feet among scattered napkins and wine-coolers and empty bottles, flourish glasses in boisterous unison. The outline-keys in the corner, among the Osbaldestones and the Assheton-Smiths, often bear the names of one or two of these Nimrods from the Great Plain. [8]
    In the library the following day, while lessons went on next door, I found out as much as I could about the Alföld, until it was time to set off for a picnic. A kind of victoria bowled up to the front on twinkling spokes, and everyone piled in. I was very struck by the hat which went with the coachman’s black-frogged livery. It was a sort of black felt pork-pie—or could it have been velvet?—with a brim turned up perpendicular and a black ostrich feather across the crown, fixed in a semicircle from front to back while two black ribands ending in fishtails fluttered behind. Was it a legacy of the Turkish spahis or the janissaries; or could it have survived from the early invading Magyars? (Such were the themes I brooded on these days.) There were many flourished hats and greetings on the way out and when we had driven about half a mile a quavering hail came from the wayside. Countess Ilona stopped the carriage, jumped down, and in a moment was being embraced by an old crone in a head-kerchief, and after cries of recognition and much talk and laughter—some tears, I think, and more embraces—she climbed in again, obviously moved: she kept waving back till we were out of sight. She was the mother of somebody from the village who had migrated to America fifteen years before and grown homesick. She had only been back two days.
    We settled on a grassy bank under some willows at a bend in the Körös and feasted there while the horses munched and swished their tails in the shade a little way off. A heron glided through the branches and subsided among the flag-leaves on a midstream shoal. We were on the edge of a large wood. It was full of birds, and in the hushed afternoon hour when talk had languished, threeroe deer, with antlers beginning to spring, stole down the river’s edge. There was some quiet singing on the way home, prompted by a song from the fields; Austrian and German and English and Hungarian. I was tongue-tied in the last, but they knew Érik a, érik a búza kalász , my favourite from Budapest. No song could have been more fitting: we were driving beside a wheat-field where swallows dipped and swerved above green ears that would soon be turning, just as the song described. It was the hour of jangling bells and lowing and bleating as flocks and cattle, all fiery in golden dust clouds, converged on the village, and our return to the kastély coincided with its owner’s arrival. Graf Johann—or Hansi—Meran was very tall with dark hair and moustache and fine aquiline looks that were marked by an expression of great kindness. His children dashed upon him and when he had disentangled himself he greeted the others by kissing first hands then cheeks in that simultaneously polite and affectionate way I had first seen in Upper Austria.
    The charms of this place and its inhabitants sound unrelievedly and improbably perfect. I am aware of this, but I can only set it down as it struck me. Also the stay had another dimension, an unexpected one which gave sudden reality to whole fragments of European history of a century earlier and more. Once again, pictures in my room put me on the track. One of these showed Archduke Charles, flag in hand, charging the Napoleonic army through the reeds of Aspern. (His statue opposite Prince Eugene on the Heldenplatz in Vienna shows him at the same moment, on a frenetically rearing steed. How surprised he would have been! He had refused all statues and honours during his lifetime.) I had first become aware of him when I gazed across the Danube at the Marchfeld after