The Europe That Was by Geoffrey Household Page B

to stand up as a supporter of the traditional liberalism of the last hundred years. I wish I could slap it down on your desk; but I am not in the confidence of the Almighty. I cannot imagine Marton—so rounded, so passionate a European—as a contented American unless one of his unpredictable loyalties wereengaged. I think it has been, but that is for you to judge. None of his friends could ever foretell how he would react to any new landscape of humanity, though we had absolute faith that the personal expression of his emotions—when, as it were, complete, varnished and framed—would be just as satisfying as his notorious gesture in defence of Sarita’s religion.
    You’ve met Sarita Hevessy, of course. I am certain that it was she, not he (for the one time he never appealed to his friends was when he was in trouble), who told you to refer to me. I can imagine her facing you across the files on the table, all fragrant with common sense and her very great love of her husband. You refused to be impressed by all that beauty, didn’t you? You kept a professional poker face, and reserved judgement. But your first impression was right. She’s gold from the heart outwards.
    Sarita! So un-Hungarian a name may have made you uneasy. Her family were Sephardic Jews, who chose to remain behind at Budapest when the Turks retreated. Reverence for their religion sat pretty lightly on her and her family. They were refreshing and agreeable citizens of the capital. And Budapest was an Eden, you remember, where nobody bothered, until Nazi and Zionist had coiled themselves around the Tree of Knowledge, how host or guest elected to walk with God. If Marton had married Sarita five years earlier than he did, she would merely have mentioned—between casual drinks, perhaps—that she supposed she was a Jewess if she was anything, and left it at that.
    In 1938, however, there was a tough crowd round the Tree of Knowledge. They ate the apples and threw at each other those they couldn’t digest. Marton despised the lot of them, and took action. He wasn’t a man to address a public meeting or write a letter to the press; his revolt was personal. He told Sarita that before he could allow her to honour him with her hand in marriage he would become a Jew.
    Sarita protested. She was a most capable and tolerant child, and she tried to laugh Marton out of this misplaced loyalty. Still, she was Magyar all through—for her family had loved and lived and drunk their wine and ridden their horses on Danube banks for five hundred years—and as a Magyar she couldn’t help being impressed by irresistible extravagance of gesture on the part of her lover. Marton had put himself in the class of those Hungarian magnates who ordered from Nice a special train of flowers merely to pave the courtyard for the entrance of a bride, or built a Cinderella’s glass coach that she might be carried to a single birthday picnic in the forest.
    She wasn’t conceited. She didn’t think that she was worth such fantasies. She never suspected that any good citizen of Budapest would have been ashamed of his ignorance if he couldn’t tell to a visiting provincial the name of that golden arrow flighting down the Corso, withthe chestnut hair and the velvety warm skin of Magyar horse and woman. No, it wasn’t any sense of her own value that made her give way to Marton’s insistence. It was just the glowing unnecessariness of any such sacrifice at all.
    The Hevessy marriage was near perfect—as soon as Sarita had managed to stop her husband’s sober visits to the synagogue, which were embarrassing to everyone but himself. She didn’t prohibit, of course. She just knew how long Marton needed to tire of any of his exciting perversities. Moral for a policeman, Joe!
    On which side did he fight? But what a question! Hasn’t Sarita told you that he is the most loyal man she ever met, that the key to his