CHAPTER X.
PEST.
How astonished would the traveller be, how utterly flabbergasted and dumbfounded, were he set down suddenly at Pest without having been previously informed of his whereabouts! How puzzled, as he threaded the clean and handsome streets, and looked at the names over the shop windows and doorways, to conjecture at what part of the globe he could possibly have arrived! One can fancy his rubbing his eyes and imagining himself half asleep, or else that the odd arrangement of the letters of his once-familiar alphabet, bristling all over with accents like porcupine quills, must surely be some post-prandial jumble that will come all right to-morrow morning, and that as to himself he must be suffering from some temporary lapse of memory as to the proceedings of his own immediate past.
As he walks along he will see such names as the following: Mészáros Imre, Stőszer Ignatz, Miskolczy Testvérek, Vadász Ferener, Szép Ferenz, Lápossy Jankó, Vértessy Sándor, and a thousand others equally outlandish. If he wants to buy mineral waters, he will probably do so at the shops of Édeskuty Lajos, or grocery either at Messrs. Radocsay and Bángay’s or Szenes Ede’s; whilst if he happen to be a person of a literary turn of mind he will probably go to Ráth Mór Könyvkiadóhivatala, who will publish his book on the shortest possible notice, in spite of his long superscription.
Occasionally however, like roses amongst thorns, he will come upon such modest and familiar names as Jones Thomas, Hill Robert, or Brown John, for the surname as we have seen always precedes the Christian name in this strange country.
Nor will the stranger be less astonished, if he takes a stroll along one of the beautiful quays in the evening, at the extraordinary number of pretty women gracefully pacing the asphalt promenade, accompanied by their duennas. Where else can one see so many lovely faces or such ravishing toilettes?
Hardly even in Paris can we hope to find such a quiet and delicious harmony of tints, or such perfect refinement of style, as in the dress of these Hungarian ladies; and nowhere indeed such lovely combinations and simple elegance. And as we gaze at them admiringly, we wonder who the goddesses can be who invent such charming costumes, and make them fit so beautifully the graceful and slender figures, and whether they are Manaszterly and Kuzniek, who announce themselves as Hölgyruhakészítő (ladies’ dressmakers).
What a bright, clean, beautiful city, it is with its noble mansions, the very type of the Magyars themselves! Here there is no sham, no struggle to keep up appearances under false pretensions, no stucco that will crumble away and lay bare in a few years the miserable counterfeit behind; all is real and what it seems. Its palaces not only look like palaces, but are built of solid stone, to defy the ravages of Time the destroyer; whilst the magnificent position of the capital, situated as it is on the banks of the Danube, with the rock-built city of Buda facing it and the majestic Blocksberg rising above it, constitute, to my mind, the most beautiful place I have ever seen.
Walk along the terrace of the embankment on an evening in early summer, when the robinias are in bloom! The odour of the flowers, the beauty of the women, the fresh breeze blowing from the river; the noble mountain buttress opposite, rising out of the water a sheer precipice of eight hundred feet; the setting sun illuminating the black-and-gold cupolas above the houses and suffusing the waves of the Danube with a crimson dye,—all form as perfect a whole as can well be imagined on the earth this side of Paradise!
The evening must be fine, however, and the weather warm, for the butterflies do not spread their wings and come forth at other seasons; and, ah me! how cold it is at Pest sometimes! It freezes one’s blood even to think of it! But we will banish the remembrance of the nipping blasts that blow over the ice in winter and spring. It is June now, the best month of the whole year in which to visit Pest: the robinias are decked in their fairest green, the fountains plash, and the butterflies are abroad in all their glory.
Pest, which threatens one day to rival Vienna in size as it already does in position, has greatly changed even within the last four years; and when one considers the peculiar difficulties against which its people have had to contend from first to last, the progress it has made is marvellous.
Situated on a quicksand to begin with, the very ground on which the houses stand had to be thickly covered with cement before the foundations could be built, besides which the absence of stone in the Alfőld has naturally been a very serious drawback. Before the days of railways, and when the now obsolete vorspann was almost the only means of travelling through Hungary, it is said that when a postboy happened to see a stone or pebble on the road he would stop his horses to pick it up, and, placing it carefully in his pocket, carry it home as a curiosity, or something very precious, to be kept as an heirloom in the family and handed down to successive generations!
In spite of all these disadvantages, Buda-Pest with its splendid river embankments is, as I have said, one of the most beautiful capitals in the world. The Magyars are a most patriotic people, and contribute nobly to all national institutions, responding liberally to every object that is undertaken for the benefit of their country. Occasionally, however, they embark in almost more than so young a nation—which thirty years ago had scarcely emerged from the barbarism of the Middle Ages—can afford; and their notions of splendour and eager desire to embellish their beloved metropolis are sometimes, it is to be feared, too mighty for the state of their finances. The National Museum, a very large and handsome building, was erected partly by private subscription. The Magyars likewise contributed voluntarily a million and a half of gulden for the endowment of the palace of the Academy of Sciences, a beautiful edifice completed in 1865, at a cost of 800,000 gulden; while the Redoute, a splendid building in the Moorish style near the river, which contains a spacious ballroom and restaurant, was erected at a cost of no less than 600,000 gulden.
Although comparatively few English travellers come to Pest—“fewer and fewer each year, mein Herr,” the porter said, as he deposited our luggage in the room that had been allotted to us—we took care here, as we invariably do when “pilgriming” abroad, to avoid hotels recommended either by Murray or Bradshaw, preferring not only to mingle with the natives of the place rather than our own countrymen, but to fall in with the national customs as well. On our arrival therefore, we drove at once to the “Jägerhorn,” and, finding all its lower rooms occupied, took up our abode at the Hôtel —— in the Servieten Platz, one of the most completely Magyar hotels in Hungary. Although small, we are most delightfully situated at this hotel, and never can I forget its appalling cleanliness, the dusting and scrubbing that perpetually go on, or the exquisite texture and dazzling whiteness of the linen. I name these facts because the Hungarians are a much-maligned people, and are supposed to be behind the majority of other nations in the matter of cleanliness.
That melancholy institution the table d’hôte does not exist in Hungary, and the traveller has the option of either taking his meals à la carte or ordering his meal beforehand. The Hungarian bill of fare includes wild boar, red deer, and, as the irrepressible Murray informs us, “frogs in the proper season!” Perhaps it may with propriety be questioned whether there does exist any “proper season” for the devouring of those little reptiles of the Batrachian tribe, or of snails either, another delicacy previously alluded to, to which Magyar epicures are much addicted; but, with the exception of these two items of the Hungarian school of gastronomy, we were quite willing to partake of anything which their cuisine afforded. But “Si Romæ fueris Romæ mores sequeris” being our motto when travelling abroad, we were not prepared to satisfy our hunger with anything so English as “ros-bif” or “bif-stek,” which the waiter—who had evidently discovered to what nation we belonged—informed us, on handing the day’s bill of fare, we could also have if we did not mind waiting for it.
Now, as an Englishwoman, I object to the belief commonly entertained by all foreigners that in our island habitat we live and move and have our being solely by the agency of those two sources of nutriment. In France the notion does not surprise one; for is it not a creed amongst her people that it is by these means that “Jong Boule” has conquered one-half of the world and bullied the other? But here, not only in the heart of the Magyar capital, but in the seclusion of a Magyar hotel, where English persons so rarely come, to be thus reminded of our national weaknesses, and have them in a manner thrust down our throats, is more than provoking, and I am afraid we answer rather snappishly that we wish neither the one nor the other. At this doubtless we sank considerably in the waiter’s estimation, for how could we be true Ángolok and not require our ros bif or bif-stek!
The sun is scorching in the city. But on the heights of the Blocksberg we shall enjoy a cooler air, to which end we must cross the suspension bridge, a triumph of engineering skill accomplished by an Englishman, Mr. Tierney Clarke; Herr Clarkey, as he is invariably called by the grateful Hungarians, who never fail to speak of him to the stranger when alluding to the bridge.
Yonder flows old Danube, tearing along in desperate hurry, as though he had lost time somewhere in his wanderings farther north-west, and had to make it up, or he would be late in his arrival at the Black Sea.
The magnificent structure spanning it, of which the Hungarians may well be proud, was erected at a cost of £460,000. The width of its central span is much greater than even that of the Menai chain-bridge, and its strength was tested in a very severe and singular manner, when, in 1849, it was opened for the first time to admit of the Hungarian army crossing the Danube under the leadership of Kossuth when pursued by the Austrians. It is stated that during those first two days, no fewer than 260 pieces of ordnance and 66,000 troops passed over the bridge; and the scene, as graphically described to us by an eye-witness, must have been one of the wildest tumult and confusion, the retreating army being closely followed by squadrons of Austrian cavalry and artillery.
The last time we were here we happened to see the breaking up of the winter’s ice, and it was a wondrous sight to behold the great blocks, borne down by the swift current, heave and struggle and beat against each other, and then dash headlong against the massive stonework of the bridge, with a crash like that of a volley of musketry.
The breaking up of the ice is always a time of especial anxiety to the immediate dwellers on the banks of the Danube, particularly to those of Buda and Pest, with the remembrance of the calamity of 1838 ever in their memory. Should a rapid thaw take place higher up the river, the pent-up waters, suddenly let loose, pour down en masse, and, bursting the ice, hurl huge blocks many tons in weight up into the air, not unfrequently throw them on to the shore, and wreck many a small craft moored to the river’s banks.
So terrible indeed is the apprehension when a sudden thaw occurs that alarm-guns are fired to apprise the inhabitants of the threatened danger, while the ice itself is cannonaded in order to break it up and allow the imprisoned waters to escape.
During the present century there have been no fewer than fourteen inundations, none however so disastrous in their effects as that of 1838. Only three years ago one occurred which threw the citizens on both sides the river into a state of great consternation. The snow, which had melted unusually early in the mountains of the Tyrol, caused the Danube to rise to an alarming height, and the ice getting jammed a few miles below Pest, the blocks which the waters gathered in their progress hither heaped themselves one upon another and formed a complete barrier to all outlet.
“It was like a great ice mountain,” exclaimed a German-speaking Magyar with whom we got into conversation as we leant over the bridge together and watched the unruly river tearing by.
“Ach! lieber Himmel,” he continued, “that too was a dreadful time. We scarcely went to bed for three nights. Buda was under water, and the houses could scarcely live in the surging flood which threatened at each instant to inundate Pest.”
In fact, not only has the physical formation of the country rendered this “beata Ungaria” a perpetual anxiety to the children of her soil, but ever since the time of Constantine until the middle of the present century she has seldom been otherwise than in a state of anarchy and confusion from causes which have reached her principally from without. Five times has Pest been under the dominion of the Turk alone; and though her political horizon is now tolerably free from cloud, she has her own two great climatic evils perpetually hanging over her,—inundation on the one hand and drought on the other; so that nature and man seem to have conspired together to render this grand but unhappy country the sport of fortune.
But we must loiter no longer on the bridge, or evening will have closed ere we can return. Before us in bold outline rise the porphyry mountains, on which shadows are already beginning to lengthen. Opposite rises the proud citadel of Buda, which bravely held its own during the twenty sieges that were laid against it in the course of three centuries, not only by Moslems, but by Christians also. On the summit of the rock, with its terraced gardens and magnificent flights of steps sloping at right angles down to the river, stands the Regal Palace, together with the ruins of a church, once dedicated to the Cross, but which, once and again, has borne on its sacred frontal the ensign of the infidel Crescent.
Taking a droszky at the other end of the bridge, we make for the majestic Blocksberg. What a glorious and at the same time singular panorama greets us from its steeps! How beautiful looks Pest from this elevation, with its noble palaces, above which rise conspicuously its many cupolas and spires of ebon and gold! Below lies its sister-city Buda, a name said to be a corruption of Bléda, given to it by Attila, after one of his brothers—wearing such an odd old-world look that, forgetful of the long, long centuries that have come and gone, one can almost imagine the Huns still established here under their great leader, who is said to have fixed his court and camp on the spot where Buda now stands. A little above, on the site of the ancient fort, rises the citadel, bristling with cannon, in which a Turkish Pasha, to whom the half of Hungary was compelled to own allegiance, once ruled supreme. Nor was Pest the only city that owned his sway, for in 1529 the conquests of the Sublime Porte extended to Vienna, where for two centuries the Crescent replaced the Cross on the cathedral there.
The united population of Pest and Buda, the modern and ancient cities, is estimated at rather more than 200,000.
From the heights on which we are standing we look down upon the citadel which has been the scene of so many sanguinary struggles. Ah! if those stones could but speak to us, what tales of bloody conflict and dauntless bravery would they not unfold! What a strange contrast, too, do these twin-cities present, the one so ancient, bearing in everything evidences of a bitter past, the other a splendid city of to-day!
Between them flows the Danube. Who would suppose, looking down upon it now so calm and smiling, that it is in reality such an ill-conditioned river, and so absolutely without self-control, keeping the peaceful inhabitants settled on its inhospitable shores in such a frequent state of alarmed expectancy? Yes! there it goes! rolling on in majestic silence, coldly indifferent to the presence of friend or foe: invasion, conquest, bloodshed, flood and drought, are equally unheeded. Yonder in its arms lie peacefully the fair green islands. How like toys look the steamers that ply between them and Pest, as like some monster shuttle they “weave each together into closer and closer union”!
In the distance rise the gentle vine-clad slopes of Buda, from the grapes of which various kinds of wine are made, amongst which are Ofner, Adelsberger, and another appropriately called “Turk’s blood,” which I should imagine the Hungarians, with their memories ever keenly alive to bygone days, must partake of with considerable relish. Beyond all stretch the sandy plains, the great Alfőld steeped in a rich mingling of varied hues which a hot tremulous vapour has blended and softened into one delicious harmony. In the remote distance the mountains of the Mátra, dimly floating in a dreamy haze, rest their summits against the azure.
On first arriving at Pest, the traveller—who will doubtless have heard so much of the national costumes—will feel not a little disappointed; for the railways, which have already done so much to rob Switzerland and the Tyrol of a great part of their old charm, are slowly but surely doing their work here. The so-called civilisation of the West is likewise toning down not only the costumes, but the primitive customs of this part of Eastern Europe.
The gradual extinction of the former is a source of intense regret to the Hungarians of the old school, who regard it as a sign of coming evil, attributing it to German influence. Occasionally in the streets a man with an immense round beaver hat and curious short jacket thrown across his shoulders may be seen, and there are plenty of sheepskins and fur-lined mantles everywhere; but to see costumes that once so astonished the traveller one must go some distance from the capital. The great fear that possesses the mind of a true Magyar—the very bête noire of his existence—is lest his country should become Germanised. The Magyars of the old school in all internal matters are strongly conservative: they do not object to progress, but it must wear the Hungarian costumes, speak the Hungarian language and think the Hungarian thoughts, and must be of that kind which opposes with clenched antagonism the faintest shadow of German innovation; for any sympathy with the Teutonic nation he looks upon as an evidence of national decadence.
“There was a time within my memory, and not so long ago either,” remarked mein Herr Dulovics, the landlord of the hotel, an old man with a tow-coloured wig, who liked to have a quiet talk with the Ángolok, much as he disliked speaking the hated German tongue—the only medium of communication between us, for he knew neither French, Italian, nor Latin—“There was a time when even the nobles wore the gatya and a distinctive dress, and Pest was vastly different in those days. Now, on the contrary, even the servants wear Schleppen and Hauben forsooth (trains and bonnets), and the Magyars, who used to be so much sought after as making the best of servants, are now avoided, and we have to get them from Bohemia and Poland, and goodness knows where besides;” and the old man sighed heavily as he thought of the “good old times.”
Not a lass however of the kind he had been describing, who wore a Schleppe and Haube, was the chambermaid of the Hôtel Dulovics, with her modest head-gear, a clean white kerchief crossed over her smooth, fair hair and tied under her chin. What a deft little woman she was, as she went trudging about with her duster and broom and neat checquered apron pinned over her bosom! No enterprising spider wove seductive webs behind the curtains where she reigned supreme, nor did dust attempt to evade her eye by collecting in remote corners; and as she tidied the room, the polished furniture gave back her bright little image as from a many-sided mirror.
The waiters, on the contrary, wore the ugly garments of Western Europe. The head man, to whom appertained the making out of the bills and superintendence of the hotel generally, was a sort of black divinity in whose presence the importance even of Herr Dulovics himself was dwarfed. He also waited upon us, doing so as though we had been of royal blood, not obsequiously however, like our tálnok of Székes Fejérvár, but with a deference and dignity of manner quite perfect. I never saw anything like the stately bearing of this grave, broad-shouldered, handsome specimen of Magyar, or the amplitude of his embroidered shirt-front. He might have been, and probably was, a prince or “noble” in disguise. Nothing whatever brought the ghost of a smile over his countenance, and he was altogether so extremely solemn and correct that we almost lost our appetite as he waited on us. It seemed indecorous, somehow, to be hungry in the immediate presence of such deportment, and we often wondered whether that grave visage ever relaxed when, his duties ended, he retired within the secret recesses of his own lair, and whether he ate and drank and slept like mortals.