A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (Journey Across Europe Book 1) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Author:Patrick Leigh Fermor [Leigh Fermor, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590175170
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-09-13T22:00:00+00:00

There was always a Golden Hart or a White Rose for bread and cheese among the huddle of roofs, or for a coffee and Himbeergeist. Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures . . .a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

* * *

After supper and filling in my diary in the front room of the inn in Persenbeug—I think I must have been staying there on the charitable-burgomaster principle—I started to sketch the innkeeper’s daughter Maria while she busied herself over a basket of darning. I was talking to her about my visit to St. Florian: either it had been the wrong time for sightseers or a day when the Abbey was officially shut. The janitor was adamant. I told him it was my only chance—I had come all the way across Europe to see the Abbey; and at last, when I must have sounded on the brink of tears, he had begun to melt. He had handed me over to the friendly Canon in the end, who showed me all. Maria laughed. So did a man at the next table who lowered the Neue Freie Presse, and looked over his spectacles. He was a tall and scholarly-looking figure with a long amusing face and large blue eyes. He was dressed in leather breeches and a loden-jacket, and a big dark dog with Breughel tendencies called Dick lay quietly beside his chair. “You did the right thing,” he said. “In Germany you would only have got in by shouting.” Maria and two watermen, the only other people in the Gastzimmer, laughed and agreed.

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