Words of Mercury by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Author:Patrick Leigh Fermor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

* I loved all this. I was soon suspiciously expert in all the relevant sociohistorical lore, to which others might give a grosser name. But I would have been genuinely taken aback if anyone had taxed me with snobbery.

Konrad

from A Time of Gifts

Paddy spent the night after his nineteenth birthday, 12 February 1934, in a Salvation Army hostel on the outskirts of Vienna. He was broke, and was hoping that his monthly allowance of £4 would be waiting at the British Consulate. It wasn’t; but his new friend Konrad hit upon an excellent solution to the problem.

An arresting figure in blue-striped pyjamas was sitting up reading in the next bed when I awoke. The fleeting look of Don Quixote in his profile would have been pronounced if his whiskers had been springier but they drooped instead of jutting. His face was narrow-boned and his silky, pale brown hair was in premature retreat from his brow and thin on top. His light blue eyes were of an almost calf-like gentleness. Between the benign curve of his moustache and a well-shaped but receding chin the lower lip drooped a little, revealing two large front teeth, and his head, poised on a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, was attached to a tall and gangling frame. No appearance could have tallied more closely with foreign caricatures of a certain kind of Englishman; but instead of the classical half-witted complacency—Un Anglais à Mabille—a mild, rather distinguished benevolence stamped my neighbour. When he saw that I was awake, he said, in English, ‘I hope your slumbers were peaceful and mated with quiet dreams?’ The accent, though unmistakably foreign, was good, but the turn of phrase puzzling. No trace of facetiousness marred an expression of sincere and gentle concern.

His name was Konrad, and he was the son of a pastor in the Frisian Islands. I hadn’t read The Riddle of the Sands and I wasn’t sure of their whereabouts but I soon learnt that they follow the coasts of Holland and Germany and Denmark in a long-drawn-out archipelago from the Zuider Zee to the Heligoland Bight where they turn north and die away off the Jutish coast. Tapered by tides and winds, interspersed with reefs, always crumbling and changing shape, littered with wrecks, surrounded by submerged villages, clouded with birds, and heavily invaded, some of them, by summer bathers, the islands scarcely rise above sea-level. Konrad belonged to the German central stretch. He had learnt English at school and had continued his studies, during his spare time from a multiplicity of jobs, almost exclusively by reading Shakespeare and this sometimes gave his utterances an incongruous and even archaic turn. I can’t remember what mishaps had brought him, in his late thirties, into such low water and he didn’t dwell on them. He was not a dynamic personality. The quiet good humour, the poise and the mild but unmistakable dignity of bearing that glowed from him, were strikingly at odds with the feckless morning hubbub of the enormous room.

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