Antal Szerb: The Pendragon Legend

“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.