Antal Szerb: The Pendragon Legend

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!”