Journey by Moonlight

Well, that’s the situation. Your father was not entirely persuaded that I should write to you at all. You can imagine how nervous and distressed these events have made him, and how alarming he finds the prospect that sooner or later we shall have to pay everything back to your wife. He’s taken it all so much to heart that we want to send him on a holiday for a break (we’re thinking mainly of Gastein), but he won’t hear of it because of the extra expense of travelling during the summer holiday season.

So, dear Misi, on receipt of this letter be so good as to pack up and come straight home, the sooner the better.

Love from everyone,

Tivadar

Tivadar had certainly enjoyed writing that letter, revelling in the fact that he, the feckless playboy of the family, was now in a position to preach morality to the sober and serious Mihály. This in itself, and the superior tone of voice from a totally unsympathetic younger brother, made him very angry. Now, returning home could be seen as nothing more than an imposition, a horrid and hateful command.

But, it seemed, there really was no alternative. If he paid back the loan from Millicent there would be nothing left for him to live on in Rome. What also disturbed him deeply was what Tivadar had said about his father. He knew that Tivadar was not exaggerating. His father had a tendency to depression, and the whole disaster, in which material, social and emotional problems were linked together in such a complicated way, was just the sort of thing to destroy his peace of mind. If the other elements failed to achieve this, it was enough in itself that his favourite son had behaved so impossibly. He really would have to go home, if only to make amends for this, to explain to his father that he simply could not have done other than he did, not even for Erzsi’s good. He needed to show that he was not a runaway, that he took full responsibility for his action, as a gentleman should.

And once home he would have to knuckle down to work. Now everything would be work. Work was the promised reward for a young man setting out, for completing his studies, and work was the penitential act and punishment for those who met with failure. If he went home and worked steadily, sooner or later his father would forgive him.

But when he thought in detail about this ‘work’—his desk, the people he had to deal with, and above all the things that filled his time after work, the bridge parties, the Danube outings, the well-to-do ladies, he felt exasperated to the point of tears.

“What did the shade of Achilles say?” he pondered. “‘I would rather be a cotter in my father’s house than a prince among the dead.’ For me it’s the reverse. I’d rather be a cotter here, among the dead, than a prince at home, in my father’s house. Only, I’d need to know what exactly a cotter is … ”

Here, among the dead … for at that moment he was walking in the little Protestant cemetery behind the pyramid of Cestius, beside the city wall. Here lay his fellows, dead men from the North, drawn here by nameless nostalgias, and here overtaken by death. This fine cemetery, with its shady wall, had always lured souls from the North with the illusion that here oblivion would be sweeter. At the end of one of Goethe’s Roman elegies there stands, as a memento: Die Pyramide vorbei, leise zum Orcus hinab. “From the tomb of Cestius, the way leads gently down to Hell.” Shelley, in a wonderful letter, wrote that he would like to lie here in death, and so he does, or at least his heart is there, beneath the inscription: Cor cordium.

Mihály was on the point of leaving when he noticed a small cluster of tombs standing apart in one corner of the cemetery. He went over and perused the inscriptions on the plain Empire-stones. One of them read simply, in English: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water”. On the second a longer text declared that there lay Severn, the painter, the best friend and faithful nurse on his death-bed of John Keats, the great English poet, who had insisted that his name should not be inscribed on the neighbouring stone, under which he lay.