The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb Page B

beautiful as parks always are when one walks in them with a girl. I played a great deal of tennis, swam and sunbathed. In short, I was spending my summer holiday in the shadow of danger every bit as calmly as the rich who disport themselves below snow-laden mountains of deadly height.
    In time I even came to feel at home in the Llanvygan library, and picked up my studies where I had left off in the British Museum.
    The library was particularly rich in seventeenth-century material . Mystical tracts which I knew of only from bibliographical references, things that were not even in the British Museum, I now held reverently in my hands.
    The number of German works of the period was very striking. With singular emotion I turned the pages of Simon Studion’s unpublished Naometria , and first editions of Paracelsus, Weigel and Johann Valentin Andreae, volumes which Asaph Pendragon must have brought back with him after his early years in that country. Over these texts he would have mused and deliberated with his friend Robert Fludd: their cabbalistic symbols were still visible above the archaic gothic script. As I sat there in the gathering dusk, an insignificant mortal in the shadow of the vast ranksof books, the centuries passed before me in procession, in reverse order. Where are the Stuarts, and where is Cromwell now? But books live on, as does man’s eternal thirst for them.
    It seemed as if I had only to open a door to see directly into the era of Asaph Pendragon. Every now and then I was overwhelmed by a strange, disconcerting happiness. I felt preternaturally old, a relic from the age of folios staring out in astonishment at the mankind of today.
    In short, I was in a lyrical mood. I kept breaking off to construct , with much labour, a sonnet in English. Let us suppose: I was in love with Cynthia. That might be one way of approaching the truth, at the expense of a double lie. I wasn’t in love, and not with Cynthia.
    As a rule I don’t fall in love, though it did happen to me once when I was very young. Even if the rather pleasing solemnity I now felt pulsing in my veins could really be termed love, it was not Cynthia I was in love with, but the Lady of the Castle, the maid of Llanvygan.
    A woman’s worth is furnished by her background, her reputation (good or bad), the lovers she has had, and the world of otherness she has come from. Love is like an old-fashioned landscape painting: in the foreground a diminutive figure, the woman who is loved; behind her mountains and rivers, a rich, grand scenery, charged with meaning.
    Cynthia’s scenery was Llanvygan and Pendragon, Welsh legend and English history. Whoever married Cynthia would find himself related, however distantly, to the deathless pentameters of Shakespeare and Milton.
    But the real Cynthia was simple, warm-hearted and natural, as all true aristocrats are when you get to know them. She had no interest in ‘society’, nor was she self-centred and demanding the way young girls are who have been spoilt. Because of her mother’s recent death she had ‘come out’ rather later than usual, and rarely mixed with people.
    She was sincerely and unaffectedly pleased that I was at Llanvygan, where she had passed so many sad and lonely months, and our friendship grew daily more intimate. She was fond of, rather than passionate about, sport, but she was as enthusiastic awalker as I was and enjoyed displaying her knowledge of folklore while showing me round the local places of interest.
    She was extremely communicative. By degrees I got to know all about the garden parties she had attended, and all about her friends. Those who did not go in for folklore ranked rather lower in her esteem. There was only one person she really adored, an older woman, whose name she did not tell me. She surrounded this attachment with a element of romantic secretiveness, and I was instantly jealous.
    I had good reason, as the tones in which she spoke of this woman were those of love. In her