Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online

marvellous-looking partner—as, with a deft languor, she took a cigarette out of a gold and shagreen case that snapped shut with an emerald, and answered him through the smoke—it was impossible not to wonder among what unconjecturable scenery of marshland and desert and woods, when the Magyar tongue was beginning to shake itself loose from the primitive Ugrian magma, these sounds could first have been uttered.

    On a printed page the fierce-looking sentences let slip no hint of their drift. Those tangles of S’s and Z’s! Gazing at the peppery strings of diaereses and the tempests of acute accents all swaying one way like wind-blown corn, I wondered if I would ever be able to extort a meaning.
    My first effort was discouraging. There was a snug kávéház , a coffee-house (if only all Magyar were as easy as this!) less than a minute’s walk away in Holy Trinity Square (I could just manage Szent Háromság Tér, Saint Three-ship Place) and I was spending a morning of showery weather there with books and writing things. The coffee-house windows surveyed ancient palaces and the tall restored gothic steeple of the Coronation Church, and just in front, a plinth sprang from the cobbles and lifted a bronze horseman called Andreas Hadik into the raindrops; he was a commander in the Seven Years War who had dodged the armies of Frederick the Great, swooped on Berlin with a cavalcade of hussars, looted the place at lightning speed and galloped away again. At the next table, the only other person in the coffee-house was a frail, white-haired man reading the Pesti Hirláp . I couldn’t take my eyes off the headline. It ran: O boldog Angolország! I knew that the last word meant ‘England,’ and the rest was obvious: it could only mean ‘O bulldog England!,’ ‘O English bulldog!’ or something of the kind. The photograph below showed the Prince of Wales in a golfing pullover with a bold lozenge pattern and a tweed cap; but, very puzzlingly, the dog under his arm, which simultaneously stole the picture and turned it into an enigma, was a fox-terrier; they must have muddled the breeds. I couldn’t resist asking the reader in German if I had understood the words correctly. He laughed, and answered in English. No, it was nothing to do with dogs; ‘boldog’ is ‘happy’; ‘O fortunate England!’ was what the caption meant, and the gist of the article was England’s good luck in having so promising a Crown Prince. Hungary was a kingdom too, my neighbour ruefully added, but they only had a regent. The Apostolic crown was empty.
    The Apostolic Crown...I had heard much about it. Reproducedon buildings, coins, flags, cap-badges and buttons and on the top of all public notices, it was seldom out of sight. Until it should be needed for some future coronation—but whose? and when?—the crown itself was guarded in the Royal Palace. Over the centuries the shrewd marriage policy of the Habsburgs had absorbed most of the neighbouring kingdoms and finally Hungary; and the last sovereigns had been King Karl and Queen Zita, who were also, of course, Austria’s last Emperor and Empress. After the loss of both these thrones at the end of the Great War, and the breakdown of their brief and illicit return to Hungary, the lingering hopes of the dynasty had faded; and now the exiled King was dead. In photographs his son Archduke Otto, the present claimant, was usually dressed as a Hungarian magnate; but these pictures were seen more often in his native Austria than here. Nevertheless, the state was constitutionally a kingdom still, under the regency of Admiral Horthy. The beautiful Empress Elizabeth, their last queen but one, who had been assassinated in Switzerland in 1898 by an anarchist, was still their favourite. Framed on desks and tables and grand pianos, there she was, in nineteenth-century coronation robes, reading under a tree, clearing terrific