The Pendragon Legend E-Book

Antal Szerb

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 421

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, GuardianAt an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Bátky, is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Bátky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go. Once there, nothing is quite as it seems... Antal Szerb's first novel is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres, crossed with a murder mystery to produce a fast-moving and often hilarious romp. But beneath the surface, Szerb's steely intelligence poses disturbingly modern questions about the nature of self and reality.

Leseprobe

ANTAL SZERB

THE PENDRAGON LEGEND

Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

PUSHKIN PRESSLONDON

Contents

Title PageThe Pendragon LegendTranslator’s AfterwordCopyright

THE PENDRAGON LEGEND

The Pendragon Legend

“MY WAY IS TO BEGIN at the beginning” said Lord Byron, who knew his way around polite society.

Strictly speaking, I suppose all my stories begin with the fact that I was born in Budapest and that soon after—though it escaped my notice at the time—I was given the name I still bear today, János Bátky.

I pass over the events of the next thirty-two years—which include the Great War—between my birth and my first encounter with the Earl of Gwynedd, for he rather than myself is the hero of this remarkable tale.

So, to our first meeting.

Early one summer, with the London season drawing to its close, I was at a soirée at Lady Malmsbury-Croft’s. This kind lady had taken me under her wing ever since my time as Donald Campbell’s scientific secretary. I should explain that my occupation is to assist elderly Englishmen in the pursuit of their intellectual whims. Not to earn my living, as it happens: I have a small inheritance from my mother on which I can get by in whatever country I choose. For some years now that country has been England. I am extremely fond of its noble landscapes.

During the course of the evening the hostess seized me and led me off to a tall, grey-haired gentleman with the most wonderfully impressive head. He was seated in an armchair and smiling silently to himself.

“Your Lordship,” said she, “this is Mr John Bátky, the expert on medieval British insectivores—or was it old Italian threshing machines?—I really can’t remember at this moment. But whatever it is, I know you’ll find it absolutely fascinating.”

And with that she left us.

For some time we smiled benignly at one another. The Earl had a remarkably handsome head, of the sort one sees wreathed in laurel on the frontispiece of old books: a kind you don’t often see nowadays.

At the same time, I was rather embarrassed. I felt the noble lady’s somewhat inexact description had made me appear mildly ludicrous.

“Allow me, if I may,” the Earl began at last, “to ask what our hostess actually meant.”

“My Lord, the sorry truth is that the good lady was to some extent right. I am a Doctor of Philosophy, specialising in useless information, with a particular interest in things a normal person would never consider important.”

This was a facetious attempt to fend off a more serious topic, namely, what I actually do. I have found that the English do not approve of displays of intellectual curiosity.

A strange smile crossed the Earl’s face.

“Not at all. I am quite happy to talk about serious topics. I am not English. I am Welsh. That makes me, apparently, fifty per cent more like a Continental. No Englishman, by the way, would ever ask you your occupation. However, for my own intellectual satisfaction, I must insist on an answer to the question.”

He had such an intelligent-looking head that I blurted out the truth.

“At the moment I’m working on the English mystics of the seventeenth century.”

“Are you indeed?” the Earl exclaimed. “Then Lady Malmsbury-Croft has made another of her miraculous blunders. She always does. If she gets two men to sit with each other thinking that they were together at Eton, you may be sure that one of them is German and the other Japanese, but both have a special interest in Liberian stamps.”

“So My Lord is also a student of the subject?”

“That’s a rather strong term to use, in this island of ours. You study something, we merely have hobbies. I dabble in the English mystics the way a retired general would set about exploring his family history. As it happens, those things are part of the family history. But tell me, Doctor—mysticism is a rather broad term—are you interested in it as a religious phenomenon?”

“Not really. I don’t have much feeling for that aspect. What interests me within the general field is what is popularly called “mystic”—the esoteric fantasies and procedures through which people once sought to probe nature. The alchemists, the secrets of the homunculus, the universal panacea, the influence of minerals and amulets … Fludd’s Philosophy of Nature, whereby he proved the existence of God by means of a barometer.”

“Fludd?” The Earl raised his head. “Fludd shouldn’t be mentioned in the company of those idiots. Fludd, sir, wrote a lot of nonsense because he wished to explain things that couldn’t be accounted for at the time. But essentially—I mean about the real essence of things—he knew much, much more than the scientists of today, who no longer even laugh at his theories. I don’t know what your opinion is, but nowadays we know a great deal about the microscopic detail. Those people knew rather more about the whole—the great interconnectedness of things—which can’t be weighed on scales and cut into slices like ham.”

The fervour in his eyes was certainly un-English. The subject was clearly close to his heart.

Then he was overcome with embarrassment. He smiled, and assumed a more casual tone.

“Yes, Fludd is a bit of an obsession with me.”

At that moment a pretty girl joined us, and chatted away at great length, rather inanely, while the Earl, with true good breeding, generously encouraged her. I writhed with frustration, desperate to resume the conversation. Nothing interests me more than the way people relate emotionally to the abstract—why Mr X is a convinced Anglo-Catholic and Miss Y is devoted to Gastropoda. And why an Earl should be so enthusiastic about someone so distant and thoroughly dead as Fludd—that justly-forgotten quack and sorcerer—was a particularly interesting question.

But once again, Lady Malmsbury-Croft descended on me, and this time her blunderings proved less inspired. She led me to a distinguished old dame who would not have looked out of place in a museum and who quizzed me about animal rights in Romania. My protests were in vain: she insisted on regaling me with shocking examples from her last visit to Armenia. Apparently some lapdogs had become separated from their owner and been forced to fend for themselves.

Luckily a friend of mine, Fred Walker, suddenly appeared before us, with a sleekly-groomed young man in tow. He seated this person beside the lady, gathered me up and whisked me away. The old dowager failed to notice the change.

“Who is this Earl?” I asked him.

“You don’t know him? Why, he’s the one genuinely interesting person in the room. Owen Pendragon, Earl of Gwynedd. A thoroughly fascinating crank—just the chap for you.”

“So what’s his story?”

Gossip was one of Fred’s strong points.

“Well, then—this is years ago now—he had a mistress, a woman of rather dubious reputation, as you will see. She began her career in Dublin, walking the streets. He was going to marry her—people were quite outraged—but she had second thoughts, dumped him and married an old millionaire called Roscoe. Roscoe was the Earl’s father’s best friend.

“The amusing bit in all this,” he went on, “is that the Earl is otherwise a convinced, if rather quixotic, aristocrat. The story goes that while he was up at Oxford he joined a society that was so exclusive there were only three men in the entire university of sufficient rank to belong. Then the other two went down, and he stayed on as the one and only member. For two years he pondered who to take on as Vice-President, but couldn’t find anyone. Finally he went down himself and the society folded. For similar reasons, he has never once set foot in the House of Lords.”

“I’m sorry, Fred, but I don’t see anything special in this. Your stories are usually a lot better. From a man with a head like that, I expected something much more interesting. For an aristocrat to marry a woman of the lowest class is only natural. His social rank is enough for two.”

“True, János. But that’s not why I described him as an odd character. He really is odd. Anyone will tell you that. But the other stories I’ve heard about him are so absurd and nonsensical I’d better not repeat them.”

“Let’s hear some of this nonsense.”

“Well … for example, what should I make of the story that he buried himself like a fakir, and after two years, or two weeks—I forget which—they dug him up and found him in perfect health? And in the war, they say, he went around during the gas attacks without his mask on and suffered no ill effects. He’s supposed to have magical healing powers. The most incredible of these stories is that he revived the Duke of Warwick a day after his doctors had pronounced him dead. There’s a rumour that he has a huge laboratory in Wales where he carries out strange experiments on animals. And he’s created some new creature that comes alive only at night … He doesn’t make any of this public because he loathes the democratic nature of the sciences. But it’s all nonsense. All I know is that, in company, he’s always extremely kind, and no one ever notices anything at all strange about him. But he isn’t seen very often. He doesn’t leave his castle for weeks on end.”

With that, he leant over towards me and whispered in my ear:

“Mad as a hatter!”

And he left me there.

In the course of the evening I successfully contrived a second meeting with the Earl. I sensed that he found me not uncongenial. He told me my eyes reminded him of a seventeenth-century doctor, one Benjamin Avravanel, whose portrait hung in his castle. The man had been murdered.

I won’t transcribe the long conversation we had, particularly since I did most of the talking while he asked the questions. And though I never did discover why the Earl was interested in Fludd, the discussion was not unproductive. I seemed to have gained his sympathy because, as we parted, he said:

“There are some old volumes on your subject in the possession of my family. If the mood takes you, do call in at my little place in Wales, and spend a few weeks there, looking them over.”

I felt the honour keenly, but am so idle by nature I would never have taken it seriously. However a few days later I received a written invitation that actually specified a date. That was how it all began.

I mentioned the invitation to one of my friends, Cecil Howard, an employee of the British Museum working on a subject related to my own. When he heard the news, the colour drained from his face.

“Bátky, you’re a lucky dog. In this country it’s only foreigners who get that sort of chance. Wonders are spoken of the Pendragon Library. But since Sackville-Williams was there to catalogue it, eighty-five years ago, no one with any expertise has been allowed in. The Pendragons have been reclusive for centuries. If you work up the material they’ve got there you’ll be the leading authority on the history of seventeenth-century mysticism and the occult.

“My God,” he sighed, sounding utterly deflated. “You’ll write the Life of Asaph Pendragon. You’ll get telegrams of congratulation from America, and five PhD students will come on annual pilgrimage from Germany to consult you. You’ll even get a mention in the French journals. And apart from all that, it’s quite something to be invited to Llanyvgan. It’s the finest and most exclusive castle in Wales.”

I left him to his envy. A colleague’s envy, when all is said and done, is the scholar’s one reward on earth. I didn’t tell him that in all likelihood I wouldn’t be publishing anything. My nature is to spend years amassing the material for a great work and, when everything is at last ready, I lock it away in a desk drawer and start something new. I had in fact revealed my horror of writing for publication to the Earl and had met with his full sympathy. I think the confession may well have led to the invitation. The Earl felt sure that the outcome of my researches would not be any sort of masterwork.

I also concealed from my colleague one fact he would have sneered at from the dizzy heights of his learning: that it was the living Earl of Gwynedd rather than the dead Robert Fludd that had seized my imagination. The Earl’s face, his person, his whole being, together with the tales Fred had told me, had set my mind racing. He seemed to embody an historical past the way no book ever could. My intuition told me that here was the last living example—and an exceptional one at that—of the genuine student of the arcane in the guise of the aristocrat-alchemist, the last descendant of Rudolph II of Prague, one for whom, as late as 1933, Fludd had more to say than Einstein.

I tell you, the invitation thrilled me. To pass the intervening time—and what else could anyone like me, seeking spiritual adventure, do in my position?—I set about researching the family history. I found a mass of material in the Dictionary of NationalBiography, and enough references to occupy me for a month of full-time work.

The Pendragons trace their origin—though I notice the line isn’t exactly clear—to Llewellyn the Great. This is the Llewellyn ap Griffith who was beheaded by Edward I, the king whom János Arany immortalised for the young reader in Hungary as riding a pale-grey horse. The old Welsh bards who went to their death in the flames singing like the doomed heroes of their own tragic art were in fact being punished for praising the house of Pendragon. But all this is in the mists of the past. These are the medieval Pendragons, living with their half-savage tribes among the great mountains: in their wars against the English there is something redolent of the hopeless struggle of the American Indians.

Then a strange incident disturbed the tranquillity of my studies.

I was smoking my pipe in the foyer of the hotel one evening, in the company of Fred Walker, when I was called to the phone.

“Hello, is that János Bátky?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing at the moment?”

“I’m talking on the phone. Who are you?”

“Never mind. Are you in an enclosed booth?”

“Yes.”

“János Bátky … you would be well advised not to get involved in other people’s affairs. You can be quite sure that the people you are working against are aware of your movements.”

“I’m sorry, there must be some mistake. I’ve never worked against anyone. This is János Bátky speaking.”

“I know. Just bear this in mind: everyone who pokes their nose into the Earl of Gwynedd’s little experiments comes to a sticky end. Dr McGregor died in a road accident. The same thing could happen to Dr Bátky”.

“Who is this McGregor?”

“Your predecessor.”

“My predecessor? In what way?”

“I can’t speak more openly. The less you know about this, the better for you. All I can tell you is: stay in London.”

“But why?”

“The air in Wales won’t do you any good. You must sever all connection with … ”

He was trying to articulate something.

“Hello, hello … I can’t catch what you’re saying. Can you speak more clearly … ?”

But he had hung up. I went back to Fred, thoroughly agitated, and told him what had passed.

“Strange … ” he said, and tapped the ash from his pipe into the fireplace, seemingly lost in thought.

“Fred, for God’s sake, don’t be so damn English. Say something. Can you think of no explanation?”

“Well, I did tell you the Earl of Gwynedd is an odd fellow. Everything to do with him is a bit weird. You’ll certainly have some unusual experiences at Llangyvan.”

I leapt to my feet and began pacing rapidly back and forth. The mere thought of travel upsets me at the best of times, even without this sort of mysterious threat.

“Who could this Dr McGregor be? How could I find out?”

“It won’t be easy. In parts of Scotland every second person is called McGregor, and there are plenty of doctors up there.”

My pacing became even more erratic.

“Tell me, Fred, what do you advise? You know how impractical I am … Would you go to Llangyvan, after this?”

He looked at me in surprise, but gave no answer.

“Well … say something!”

“What can I say?” he asked. “It would never occur to me for a moment not to go. I’d be ashamed to let a thing like that influence me.”

Now I was ashamed. ‘If you’re a man, be a man …’ All the same, it isn’t every day you get a phone call like that … and everything to do with the Earl was so very strange …

“Tell me,” asked Fred, “who have you spoken to about this trip?”

“Only to Howard, at the BM.”

“Oh, Howard? Surely the whole thing is just one of his jokes? He knows about your … Continental temperament … ”

“Or perhaps … ”—I found myself shouting it out—“he wants to stop me going, because he’s jealous!”

“I’d expect no less from an academic. Well, that’s it, then. Don’t give it another thought, old man.”

I took his advice, and did my best to forget the peculiar phone call.

The next day I resumed my studies in the British Museum Reading Room.

The Pendragons entered English history when a Welshman, in the person of Henry VII, ascended the throne. A Gwyn Pendragon had fought at Bosworth Field, side by side with Richmond, the white-armoured Champion of Truth. Perhaps he even saw the gory ghosts flitting prophetically between the camps of Richard III and the challenger; perhaps he heard the evil king rush howling onto the field of battle, promising his kingdom for a horse … at all events he moved as familiarly among the sainted heroes and monstrous villains of Shakespeare’s pentameters as I did among the readers in the British Museum. In 1490, as a reward for his services, he was given the title of Earl of Gwynedd—which had remained in the family ever since, and now graced my future host—and he built Pendragon Castle, which was to be the family seat down the centuries. The name in Welsh means ‘Dragon’s Head’.

The pseudoscientific volumes upon which my fancy lit were brought to me by blank-faced young assistants moving about on silent feet. The only sound to be heard under the great dome was the pleasing murmur of turning pages. From the bearded black doorman with the stove-pipe hat, who looked for all the world as if he’d been there since the official opening in the last century, to the swarm of elderly eccentrics who teem in all the libraries of the University of Life, everyone was in his or her place.

Or not quite everyone.

For a full month now the chair on my right had been occupied by a flat-chested old lady with a look of permanent disapproval on her face. She was researching the love-life of primitive peoples. But today she was nowhere to be seen, and there was no umbrella signifying her occupation. Instead, an elegant, athletic-looking young man sat there, reading a newspaper and glancing around from time to time with a troubled air. I quickly diagnosed his condition: it was his first time in the Reading Room, and he felt like a man on his first day in the madhouse.

The young athlete filled me with a mixture of pity and malicious amusement. As a sportsman he deserved no better, and anyway, what on earth was he doing in this place? Clearly he would have felt the same about me on a golf course.

I continued reading.

I learnt that the era when rough ancestors hewed castles from the cliff face had finally given way to more halcyon days, a prolonged springtime. Successive Earls of Gwynedd were courtiers of Henry VIII, attendants upon Elizabeth and ambassadors to the brilliant Continental courts of the Renaissance. They wrote verses and commanded fleets; they roasted Irish rebels on spits and commissioned paintings from the Italian masters; they fell in love with ladies-in-waiting and plundered monasteries; they made spectacular bows before the Virgin Queen, and poisoned their wives, as the custom was, unless their wives had managed to poison them first.

I looked up dreamily from my book. Before me rose a pile of another ten. On my neighbour’s desk there was still not a single one, and his discomfort was visibly growing. Finally, with an air of decision, he turned towards me:

“Excuse me … what do you do, to get them to bring you all those books?”

“I simply fill in the title and catalogue number on a slip, and put it in one of the baskets on the circular counter.”

“That’s interesting. Did you say catalogue number? What’s that?”

“Every book here has one.”

“And how do you find it?”

“You look in the catalogues. Those big black volumes over there.”

“And what sort of books do people here read?”

“Whatever they like. Whatever they’re working on.”

“You, for example, what are you working on?”

“Family history, at the moment.”

“Family history: that’s wonderful. So … if I wanted to study family history, what would I have to do, then?”

“Please, would you mind speaking as quietly as you can—the superintendent is staring at us. It depends on what sort of family you want to study.”

“Hm. Well, actually, none. I’ve had nothing but trouble from mine since I was little.”

“So what does interest you?” I asked, sympathetically.

“Me? Rock climbing, most of all.”

“Fine. Then I’ll order you a book that really should appeal to you. If you would just write your name on this slip.”

He wrote, in a large, childish hand: George Maloney. I requested Kipling’s Kim for him, and my new acquaintance buried himself in it, with great apparent interest. For some while I was left in peace.

Everything I read about the Pendragons was lent a mysterious perspective by the tales Fred Walker had told me, by the telephone call, and by the Earl’s character and imposing presence. By now James I was on the throne, and studying the natural history of demons. Previously scholars had pursued the noble and the beautiful, but now they were starting to turn to the world of the occult, in search of the Ultimate Wisdom.

Asaph Christian, the sixth Earl, was not a courtier like the fifth. He wrote no sonnets, did not fall in love or leave fifteen illegitimate children, or even a legitimate one, and after him the title passed to his younger brother’s son.

Asaph spent his youth in Germany, in the cities of the old South, where the houses stooped menacingly over the narrow streets, and the scholars worked all night in their long, narrow bedrooms whose cobwebbed corners were never pierced by candlelight. Amongst alembics, phials and weirdly-shaped furnaces, the Earl pursued the Magnum Arcanum, the Great Mystery, the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a member of the secret brotherhood of Rosicrucians, about whom their contemporaries knew so little and therefore gossiped all the more. They were alchemists and doctors of magic, the last great practitioners of the occult. It was through Asaph that the cross with the symbolic rose in each of its corners was added to the family coat of arms.

On his return to Wales, Pendragon Castle became an active laboratory of witchcraft. Processions of visitors, in coaches with darkened windows, came from far and wide. Heretics arrived, fleeing from the bonfire. Ancient shepherds brought the accumulated lore of their people down from the mountains. They were joined by bent-backed Jewish doctors, driven from royal courts for seeming to know more than is permitted to man. And they say that here too, in disguise, came the King of Scotland and England, the demon-haunted James, to probe his host’s secrets in nightly conference. Here the first English Rosicrucians initiated their believers, and Pendragon Castle became the second home of Robert Fludd, the greatest student of Paracelsus the Mage.

This was the Fludd through whom I had befriended the Earl. Truly speaking, I owed the invitation to him. At this stage I had no idea that all this ancient material, and all these names that had meant so little to me—Pendragon Castle, Asaph Pendragon—would come to play such an extraordinary part in my life.

From a collection of North Wales folklore I learnt that the legend of Asaph Pendragon began soon after his death. It speaks of him as a midnight horseman, never leaving the castle by day, setting out only at night, with a carefully chosen band of followers, to gather plants with magical properties by the light of the moon. But such prosaic purposes were not enough to satisfy popular imagination, and the story grew that the terrifying night horseman had been out dispensing justice, an attribute he retained even after his death.

By night he would catch robbers sharing out their booty in secret dens, and next morning, to their utter amazement, the victims would find their treasures returned. The felons had been so astonished by the apparition that they kept every one of the undertakings extracted by him, and died soon after.

The most gruesome of these histories concerns three murderers. The volume I held in my hands tells it rather well.

Once, in a Welsh mountain inn, three young noblemen killed and robbed a Jewish doctor on his way to join the Earl in his castle. The court, which in those times might well be suspected of anti-Semitism, acquitted the men, and they set sail for France. That night some peasants watched with awe as the night rider and his retinue turned to the south, galloped up the rocky slopes of nearby Moel-Sych and soared into the sky in a southerly direction. The next day the three noblemen were found in the castle moat, their limbs crushed and their necks broken. The Earl had meted out the justice due to his intending visitor.

At eleven I went for a coffee. My neighbour tagged along.

“Jolly good read,” he said of Kim: “amazing book. Chap who wrote it must have been there. Really knows the place.”

“You’ve been to India yourself?”

“Of course. There as a kid. Grew up there. And in Burma. Then South Africa and Rhodesia. Not a bad place, Rhodesia.”

Once again I felt that deep sense of awe I always experience when I come up against the British Empire. These people nip over to Burma the way we do to Eger. Only, they’re less curious about it. They know that wherever they go in the world they will be among exactly the same sort of people as themselves.

“Actually, my old man was a major in an Irish regiment,” he continued. “Stationed all over the place. That’s why I missed out a bit on my education. Things to do with books and so forth. But it’s also why I did so well in the tropics.”

“You were a soldier too?”

“No. I never quite made it into the army. I have this bad habit of failing exams. Some of them I must have had five goes at … But I never got lucky. But forget about that. What’s done is done. We Irish live for the future. I didn’t become a soldier; not everyone can be a soldier. I just loafed around wherever I wanted in the Empire. Not a bad place to be. Have you heard of the East African Uwinda expedition?”

“Yes, as I recall … ” I said, scrambling to salvage my self-respect.

“I was in it. We were over nine thousand feet up. Fantastic climbing. There was one mountain, I tell you, with sides like glass. You moved up three feet and slid back five. We slithered around for two whole days and got nowhere. I said to the Colonel:

‘Look here, sir, are we from Connemara, or are we not?’ Because you know, that’s where I’m from,” he explained, with deep reverence. Then he continued:

‘True,’ says the Colonel (a typical patronising Englishman): ‘we’ve even had one or two chaps from there who were sane.’

‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll show you who’s sane.’ I fitted one of those lightweight climbing ropes on to the camp cat, round its waist. I fixed the doctor’s surgical clamps tight on its tail, made the blacks stand in a ring around the base of the slope, and the cat shot off, all the way up to the top. Amazingly good at that sort of thing, cats.

Up at the top, there was a tree. The cat skimmed up the tree and thrashed around among the branches. Then it stopped, because the rope had got thoroughly tangled up and was holding it fast. I tugged for a while on the rope to see how firmly it was attached to the tree. Then I climbed straight up, removed the clamps from the cat’s tail—no point of inflicting unnecessary pain on poor dumb animals—and hauled the whole party up after me.”

I gazed in wonder at this Münchausen and began to question whether he’d ever been near the tropics. But he was an agreeable young chap. He was practically chinless, his arms were uncommonly long, and he moved with the ease and grace of an animal. Altogether he seemed somewhat closer than most to our primal nature.

By the time we got back to the British Museum the usual old madwoman was already centre stage in the garden outside the entrance, giving the pigeons their midday feed. As ever, her face was transfigured with the joyous smile of a Franciscan saint soaring up to Heaven. Around her you could see nothing but pigeons. Her whole person was smothered in pigeons. Three sat on her head, five on each shoulder, and countless numbers clung to her dress. I could tell that she fancied herself as saintly as Francis himself, and she filled me with loathing.

“I’d like to shoot her,” I said to my new friend, as we ascended the stairs.

Almost as I said this, he spun round and hurled a large pebble—I didn’t even see him pick it up—which hit her a glancing blow on the nose, a full fifty metres away. She uttered a powerful scream and dropped the pigeon feed, the birds took flight and the woman collapsed. She had clearly never reckoned on being hit by lightning while performing the great good deed of her life. Her sense of a moral universe must have collapsed with her in that moment.

Maloney continued walking, very calmly. The whole thing had happened so quickly that, apart from myself, no one had seen who did it.

“What was all that about?” I asked in amazement when we got inside the foyer. We were standing in the half-light, under the bearded heads of Assyrian kings some four thousand years old.

“Why do you ask? You yourself said you could shoot her. But all you can do is talk. You aren’t from Connemara.”

From that point on, and after what followed later, I became inclined to believe about half of the impossible yarns Maloney spun. And I could see that Connemarans weren’t quite like anyone else.

We returned to our reading for a while.

The seventh Earl, and those following him down the century, were relative nonentities. It was as if the memory of the great Asaph had cast a shadow of dullness over them. The tenth Earl moved away from the ancestral seat at Pendragon and built the castle at Llanvygan, the family home since 1708, which has been so much praised for its beauty.

With the move away from dismal Pendragon, the family history took a brighter turn. Throughout the eighteenth century, like every other noble house, it produced distinguished admirals, diplomats and minor poets, and the enigmatic shadow of Asaph appeared to have been lifted. Or not entirely. The thirteenth Earl requires a mention.

This gentleman, despite his unfortunate number, was the most convivial and thoroughly human character in the whole saga. He was the only Earl who had affairs with actresses, the only one who knew how to drink, and the only one who could crack a good joke in company.

One of these jokes was considered particularly witty in its time, though it is difficult now to see exactly where its humour lies. He was told one day, while at cards, that his mistress—whom he had raised from the level of a simple orange-seller—had run off with the fencing master, taking a significant quantity of the family baubles with her. His sole response was, “Every good deed gets the punishment it deserves,” and he carried on with the game.

His Christian name, incidentally, was John Bonaventura, his mother having been Italian. This odd combination of names stopped me in my tracks. I had the feeling that I had come across it, or one very like it, once before. But the memory escaped me, and did not come back to me until much later, in connection with some very odd occurrences.

To the remaining pages I gave only a cursory glance. They dealt with the nineteenth-century Pendragons, who flourished peacefully and with honour in the never-ending reign of Victoria. The present Earl’s father had been caught up in the fashionable imperialism of the day and was seldom at home. He served in various colonial regiments, held high office over subject peoples and died, in 1908, as governor of one of the provinces of Indo-China. His death was due to some sort of tropical disease that had broken out in the area at the time.

My limited information about the present Earl, the eighteenth, is provided by Who’s Who. Born in 1888, he was thus forty-five at the time of my tale. His full name was Owen Alastair John Pendragon of Llanvygan. Educated at Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford, he served in various colonial regiments, distinguished himself in several different ways and belonged to a great many clubs. Who’s Who usually goes on to give details of hobbies and interests—these being of the greatest importance to the English—but the Earl seemed not to have provided any response to this question.

Lunchtime was upon us. I returned my books, along with Maloney’s, and was about to leave.

“Well, this is something else I’ve learnt,” he remarked. “So now I know what goes on in a library. I’d rather be in a nice little swamp. My God! I haven’t read so much in ten years. Where are you eating, by the way?”

“Greek Street. In a Chinese restaurant.”

“Would you swear blue murder if I joined you? I hate eating on my own.”

Even by Continental standards this was a rapid beginning of friendship—or whatever you might call it—and I was taken by surprise. But there was something rather touching about him, like a chimpanzee on the loose in the London streets, misunderstood by everyone but full of well-meaning.

“I’d be delighted,” I said. “But I ought to warn you, I’m lunching with a Chinese friend. I don’t know how developed your sense of colour is, or how you feel about yellow gentlemen.”

“I’ve nothing against Chinks if they aren’t cheeky. We Connemarans make no distinction between one man and another. Only if they give cheek. I once had a kaffir boy who didn’t clean my boots properly, and when I spoke to him about it he answered me back. So I grabbed him, stuck some kid’s shoes on his feet and made him walk in them for three days in the Kalahari Desert. It’s a pretty hot place. I tell you, by the third day the kaffir’s feet were half their original size. You could have used him as a fairground exhibit.”

We had reached the restaurant. Dr Wu Sei was already waiting for me. When he saw that I’d brought a stranger with me he retreated behind his most affable oriental smile and fell silent. But Maloney simply chatted all the more, and won my heart by proving not just a lover of Chinese food like myself, but a real connoisseur. Normally when I ate there I would let Wu Sei do the ordering, then enjoy whatever was brought without bothering to find out whether the finely-chopped delicacies were pork, rose-petal soup or bamboo. Maloney conducted himself like a man discriminating between veal escalope and boeuf à la mode; he could distinguish seventeen flavour gradations of chop suey, and he won my unstinting admiration.

“Which way are you going?” he asked me after lunch.

I told him.

“Would you curse me if I went part of the way with you?”

Now I was really surprised.

“Tell me,” he asked, with some embarrassment, as we strolled along: “you’re a bloody German, aren’t you?”

“Oh, no. I’m Hungarian.”

“Hungarian?”

“Hungarian.”

“What’s that? Is that a country? Or are you just having me on?”

“Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.”

“And where do you Hungarians live?”

“In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.”

“Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.”

And he roared with laughter.

“Alright, so you’re a Hungarian … Good country, that. And what language do you Hungarians speak?”

“Hungarian.”

“Say something in Hungarian.”

It was some years since I had last spoken the language and, strangely moved, I recited some Ady:

Mikor az ég furcsa, lila-kék

S találkára mennek a lyányok,

Ó, be titkosak, különösek

Ezek a nyári délutánok.

(Under a strange, lilac-blue sky

The girls stroll to their assignations;

Mysterious, enigmatic

Summer afternoons.)

“Very nice. But you don’t fool me. That was Hindustani. It means: ‘Noble stranger, may the Gods dance on your grave in their slippers.’ I’ve heard that one before. However, since you’re the first Hungarian I’ve met, let’s do something to celebrate this splendid friendship. Come and have dinner with me tonight. Please, I’m asking you. If you find me a bit mad, don’t worry—you’ll get used to it, everybody does. And anyway there’ll be three of us. I’ll introduce you to a very clever chap, just down from Oxford, nephew of some Lord or other. He’s a scream. He can get his mouth round five-syllable words you’ve never even heard of, easy as you could say ‘hat’.”

After a little hesitation I accepted. I love meeting new people, and as it happened I had nothing else to do. To tell the truth, I was rather bowled over by the fact that he was inviting me to the Savoy, a place so grand I would never have been able to afford to go there at my own expense. I even began to see Maloney in a new light. Mad, I said to myself, but a gentleman.

We met that evening in the bar.

I found him there in the company of a young man: a tall, very slim young man with a remarkably engaging, delicate and intelligent face; rather effeminate, perhaps, with the athletic sort of effeminacy that characterises so many interesting Oxford men.

“Allow me to introduce you to the Hon Osborne Pendragon,” said Maloney.

“Pendragon?” I exclaimed. “Would you perhaps be related to the Earl of Gwynedd?”

“As a matter of fact, I have the honour to be his nephew,” he replied, in a curiously exaggerated and affected drawl. “What’s your cocktail?”

My least concern just then was a cocktail.

“Might you be spending your summer vacation at Llanvygan?” I asked.

“That is absolutely correct. I’m off to the family home in Wales the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m going there myself, fairly soon.”

“Bathing no doubt in the sea off Llandudno? I prefer a private bathroom, myself. Fewer people, and rather more select.”

“No, no.”

“Or perhaps you’re off to climb Snowdon?”

“Not at all.”

“Where else does one go in North Wales?”

“Llanvygan, for example.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Earl has very kindly invited me to his place at Llanvygan.”

At this point Maloney gave vent to an ancient Irish battle cry.

“Man, man!” he roared, and almost dislocated my arm.

“Well?”

“So we can travel together! Osborne has invited me too. What a coincidence! First of all, I ask myself, how did I end up in the Reading Room of the British Museum? Well, we all have our moments. And of all the five hundred freaks sitting there, it happens to be this gentleman I start to pester, and go on badgering, until it turns out we’ll soon be staying in the same place. Magnificent. Let’s drink to it!”

And indeed it was a strange coincidence. I felt truly exhilarated. It was as if the mystical power of Llanvygan Castle had projected itself all that distance. I felt the hand of Fate upon me, and was once again seized by the old, pleasurable angst that had so often haunted me, the feeling that once again things were stirring around and above me; that the Parcae were teasing out the threads of my future.

But then again: neither the half-wit Maloney nor this thoroughly affected young aristocrat carried the mark of destiny on their brows, unless it were the mocking destiny of a degenerate and cynical age such as our own.

Through all this, the young Pendragon had remained perfectly impassive. Then:

“These days even Fate has become debased,” he remarked, his voice rising towards the end of the sentence. “In Luther’s time, for example, the notion of Chance consisted of no more than a bolt of lightning striking the ground before him. It didn’t even have to hit him. And the result was the Reformation. Nowadays it means nothing more than two chaps going off together on the same holiday. Where now is ananké, where is Destiny? Or the amorfati Nietzsche praises, if I remember correctly, as the noblest thing a man could pursue?”

“Osborne is amazingly clever,” said Maloney.

“Yes, but only because it’s so unfashionable in England. If I’d been born in France I’d have become an idiot, just to spite them. So what do we say to getting stuck into that dinner?”

The dinner was superb. Over the meal, Maloney did most of the talking. His adventures became more and more richly-coloured with each glass of Burgundy.

His first story concerned a routine tiger hunt, but he went on to set entire Borneo villages aflame to make the point that Connemara men could light their pipes even in a stiff breeze, and he ended by tying the tail of a king cobra in a knot while its head was held by his tame and ever-faithful mongoose William.

“I envy our egregious friend,” observed Osborne. “If only a quarter of what he relates in the course of a dinner is true, his life could be described as decidedly adventurous. It seems things do still happen, out there in the colonies. A merry little tiger or king cobra might produce a pleasurable frisson even in the likes of me. My one wish is to go there myself. To some place out in the back of beyond, where missionaries remain the staple diet of the natives.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Sadly, since my grandfather of blessed memory died of some wonderful tropical disease my uncle has concluded that the air in those parts doesn’t agree with us. I have thus to spend the greater part of my time in Wales in our electrified eagle’s nest, from which every self-respecting spook since the time of the late lamented Queen Victoria has been driven out. Sir, three years ago, the last remaining ghost in Wales was assaulted with tear gas: the poor fellow—an elderly admiral—was sobbing like a child. But for me, belief in these things would be extinct in the region. However I have some interesting plans for the summer, and I hope you’ll assist me in them. I’ve had terrific success at Oxford with my supernatural recordings on the portable gramophone. I can produce heartfelt sighings in the most improbable of places, together with the rattling of chains and lengthy prayers in Middle English. But of course this is just sport. Real adventure is dead and buried. It couldn’t take the smell of petrol.”

“You’re eighteen, are you not?” I asked.

“I am.”

“On the Continent, young men of your age have a quite different idea of adventure.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I was thinking of women.”

“I don’t even think of them,” he replied, faintly blushing. “I’m very fond of them, at a distance. But the moment they approach me I feel a mild horror. I feel that if I took hold of them they would somehow fall apart in my hands. You are a Continental … have you never had that sensation?”

“Not at all. I can’t recall a single woman who might have disintegrated in my hands. Why, has it ever happened to you?”

“To be perfectly frank with you, I’ve never risked the experiment.”

“Permit me to observe that I think it precisely on account of this seclusion that you feel your life to be uneventful. On the Continent, relations with women are considered to be what life is all about.”

“Then I must repeat the words of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: ‘Living? Our servants will do that for us.’”

As we left the Savoy I found myself, under the influence of a great quantity of Burgundy, in a thoroughly buoyant mood. It just wasn’t true, I said to myself, that London is boring, and I congratulated myself on having met two such splendid young men. It was ridiculous to pass my days surrounded by books. One should live! And I meant this word in its Continental sense. A woman … even in London … would be good occasionally.

At Maloney’s prompting we went on to a night club. These are places where you can actually drink all night, and we availed ourselves of the privilege. One whisky followed another, each with less and less soda. Osborne was sitting rather stiffly. The general ambience of the place clearly made him uncomfortable, but he was too proud to show it.

Maloney had reached the high point of a yarn in which he had roped a Malay girl to a tree when, just at the crucial moment, ten of her uncles appeared brandishing their krises.

We never discovered what followed, because he spotted a woman at a nearby table, roared out a loud greeting and abandoned us. I watched ruefully as he chatted to her on the friendliest of terms. She was very attractive.

“Strange fellow, this Maloney,” said Osborne. “If I came across any of his stories in a book, I’d throw it away.”

“Do you think any of it is true?”

“Oddly enough, I believe a lot of it is. I’ve seen him do some quite unpredictable and crazy things—things that completely defy logic. If I may say so, this whole evening has been entirely typical, though I suppose I shouldn’t talk like this.”

“Tell me, all the same. We Continentals are relatively so much less discreet, we reckon an Englishman can afford to let his hair down once in a while.”

“Well, take this example. Yesterday, Maloney had no more than thruppence ha’penny in his pocket. For weeks, I am quite sure, it’s all he had in the world. And this evening he’s treated us like lords. It seems to me quite probable that last night he knocked someone down in a dark street. No harm intended, of course—he just wanted to prove that Connemarans can knock a man down with the best of them. Then he helped himself to the chap’s money, as a way of combining business with pleasure.”

Maloney returned.

“Would you gentlemen mind if my very old friend, Miss Pat O’Brien, joined us? She’s also from Connemara, which tells you all you need to know. She’s in the chorus at the Alhambra. A supreme artist.”

“Delighted,” I said, perhaps too readily.

But Osborne’s face was stiffer than ever.

“Well … er … Much as I admire your compatriots—I’m a Celt myself, of the same stock—wasn’t the general idea supposed to be that this evening was for men only?”

“My dear fellow,” said Maloney, “you’re the cleverest chap on earth and, upon my word, it brings tears to my eyes to think I have such a friend; but it really wouldn’t hurt you to spend ten minutes in female company once every few months. You’d certainly make some surprising discoveries. Not so, Doctor?”

“Without question.”

“Well, if you gentlemen insist,” returned Osborne, with a gesture of resignation.

Maloney had already brought her.

“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” she proclaimed, and sat herself down with the smile of someone confident of having contributed her share of witty conversation. Given that it was still summer, I smiled dutifully at the remark. Osborne made no such effort.

“Cheer up, young fella,” the girl said to him, raising her glass; and she sang a little song conveying the same basic idea.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Osborne solemnly declared.

This Osborne is an idiot, I said to myself. The girl was simply stunning, in the innocent, rosy-cheeked way which, together with the manly British character, is the finest ornament of these islands.

She certainly enlivened me, and she listened in respectful silence to my fumbling compliments—not something Englishmen lavish on their women. With us, if we are even slightly drawn to a woman, we tell her we adore her. An Englishman hopelessly in love will merely observe: “I say, I do rather like you”.

“Come away with me to the Continent,” I urged her in my rapture, stroking her bare arm. “You should live in Fontainebleau and glide three times a day up the crescent staircase of Francis I, trailing your gown behind you. The moment they set eyes on you, the three-hundred-year old carp in the lake will find they are warm-blooded after all. Miss France herself will panic and give birth to twins.”

“You’re a very sweet boy, and you’ve got such an interesting accent. But I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

This cut me to the quick. I am very proud of my English pronunciation. But what could a Connemara lass know of these things?—she spoke some dreadful Irish brogue herself. I left her to amuse herself with Osborne while Maloney and I made serious inroads on the whisky.

By now Maloney was looking, and sounding, rather tipsy.

“Doctor, you’re a hoot. We certainly hit the jackpot when we met. But this Osborne … I’d be so happy if Pat could seduce him. These English aren’t human. Now we Irish … back home in Connemara, at his age I’d already had three sorts of venereal disease. But tell me, dear Doctor, now that we’re such good friends, what’s the real reason for your visit to Llanvygan?”

“The Earl of Gwynedd invited me to pursue my studies in his library.”

“Studies? But you’re already a doctor! Or is there some exam even higher than that? You’re an amazingly clever man.”

“It’s not for an exam … just for the pleasure of it. Some things really interest me.”

“Which you’re going to study there?”

“Exactly.

“And what exactly are you going to study?”

“Most probably the history of the Rosicrucians, with particular reference to Robert Fludd.”

“Who are these Rosicrucians?”

“Rosicrucians? Hm. Have you ever heard of the Freemasons?”

“Yes. People who meet in secret … and I’ve no idea what they get up to.”

“That’s it. The Rosicrucians were different from the Freemasons in that they met in even greater secrecy, and people knew even less about what they did.”

“Fine. But surely you at least know what they did in these meetings?”

“I can tell you in confidence, but you must reveal it to no one.”

“I’ll harness my tongue. Now, out with it!”

“They made gold.”

“Great. I knew all along it was a hoax. What else were they making?”

“Come a bit closer. Homunculi.”

“What’s that?”

“Human beings.”

Maloney roared with laughter and slapped me on the back.

“I’ve always known you were a dirty dog,” he said.

“Idiot. Not that way. They wanted to create human beings scientifically.”

“So, they were impotent.”

We were both thoroughly tipsy, and found the idea hilarious in the extreme. In my hysterics I knocked over the glass in front of me. Maloney immediately sent for another.

“Now tell me, Doctor, how did you get to know the Earl of Gwynedd? He’s very unsociable.”

“I’ve not seen that. I met him at Lady Malmsbury-Croft’s, and he immediately invited me.”

“How did you manage that?”