‘I will be travelling on with my escort, some cheerful young officers who provide me with good company. They’re not likely to start duelling with each other. Not one of them regards the other as dispensable. I can’t stand jealous men.’
Sindbad smiled. He felt he had known this woman a long long time ago. Her voice went straight to his heart. It was as if they had been engaged in conversation for years before this meeting.
‘Mind you, you look like a man who could be jealous,’ said Mrs Boldogfalvi, tapping her riding boots with her jasper-studded crop.
‘I admit it,’ Sindbad muttered. ‘I have expected the women I loved to be faithful. I cannot share with others. All their thoughts, their every word, had to be mine alone. Even their dreams.’
‘How sweet,’ laughed the woman. ‘All this is very appealing, of course, but only as long as love lasts. Looking at you I imagine you are the sort of man who quietly takes his hat, gloves and walking stick as soon as he notices he is surplus to requirements. What stupidity it is to burden a woman with your presence. How devastatingly boring it is, worse than being ill on a dull autumn afternoon, to have a man go on about his love when nobody is interested any more. I am sure you have kissed hands and bowed farewell more than once in your life, and then remembered the time spent together with gratitude. You might even have gone to say Mass at the local church and prayed for the salvation of the lady’s soul. Perhaps — if you are as generous as I like to think you might be — you might even have been careful to ensure that your faithless lover should not fall into hands less worthy than yours, that your successor should at least deserve the tender mercies now accorded to him. Yes. I am sure you went when it was time to go, just went and no longer made a nuisance of yourself.’
Sindbad contemplated this a while. ‘I think I have always departed in good time. I have never pressed my company on a woman who was clearly trying to stifle her yawns.’
‘You see, I have not been disappointed in you. This evening, once I have gone,’ Mrs Boldogfalvi went on in a meditative, sing-song voice, ‘a blue-eyed, restless-looking young man will come galloping into the courtyard of this inn. He will enquire about me. And if his horse can stand the pace he will continue his pursuit of me. I want to ask you a favour. I would like you to keep this unhappy young man company, be kind and friendly to him, don’t let him alone. Sit with him at supper and talk to him gently about the beauty of the end of love, and about life, which we must strive to live through with extraordinary grace so that we may deserve a graceful death. You will be sure to tell the suffering blue-eyed boy that true love can never end in scandal or in tragedy. As the poor woman has already given him everything let her at least keep her honour. Courtly love passes as quietly as the distant sobbing you hear at the far end of the wood … And the past is not worth regretting, since happy precious memories remain. No one can steal those, either from him or from me. I trust, my dear unknown friend, that you will go a little out of your way to take care of the stranger, and if he hangs his head you might stroke his hair, should the mood take you. Tell him that the most beautiful love affairs are those which entertain the imagination once the affair is over. The traveller is called Albert, and when he mentions a woman called Polly, be so good as to remember me, dear sir.’
Sindbad did not hesitate to agree to undertake this peculiar task.
By way of goodbye the woman took Sindbad’s hand and gazed deep into his eyes. ‘I want you to be a good friend to my poor, suffering boy. If ever you find yourself in Pest you are welcome to seek me out.’
She took from her glove the calling card she had prepared for him. Pauline von Boldogfalva, it said. The little spurs were already jangling down the stone steps of The Bear by the time Sindbad raised his eyes. The hussars were leaping into their saddles and galloped off after Mrs Boldogfalvi. At the church Polly turned round and looked back at the old inn, certain that Sindbad would be at the window. Then the mounted company vanished.
Sindbad stored the calling card in his wallet and walked up and down in front of The Bear. The ancient church was casting long shadows across the market-place and the bell-ringer was entering the belfry with a lit lantern in his hand.
There was a sound of galloping hooves from the south. A young man in tall riding boots, a romantic cloak and plumed hat pulled his pale horse up in front of the inn.
‘The fool has arrived,’ thought Sindbad. ‘How strange, how amusing people are.’
The young man’s face was covered in dust from his long ride, but his blue eyes shone like china. He leapt off his horse and asked after the lady rider, as she said he would. When the innkeeper told him that she had gone he cried, ‘Devil take her! What am I doing wearing this fancy dress?’ He glared contemptuously at his outfit and threw his plumed hat on the dining room floor. He ate voraciously, forgetting to admire the deep red of the wine set before him. He darted an impatient glance at Sindbad.
He was about thirty years of age, blond, with a milky complexion, a man brought up by women. His mother would have done his washing for him. On Sundays he would go to church just as he did when he was a little boy and sit patiently at his mother’s side while the sermon droned on. He was the sort of man who would be astonished to find that not every woman had such delicate feelings as his mother, or that they had any thought but to sew on his buttons when the thread broke.
Sindbad stepped over to him and introduced himself as though they were a pair of knights errant in ancient Castile meeting at a wayside inn. In a few words he let him know that he was aware of the sorrow which drove him, Albert of the blue eyes, across the hills. Indeed, it was his good fortune to have met the deity in question.
‘So you know her,’ cried Albert. ‘All the better that you should know the woman who insisted I dress in this courtly garb, that I wear a beret because that’s the only thing she liked me in. It is for her sake I am galloping up and down the highway in this ridiculous cloak. What will a man not do for love! We all cut such pathetic figures. If Polly had demanded that I should walk the streets tarred and feathered, I would have done it for her sake!’
Sindbad gripped his new friend’s hand in solidarity.
‘I swear to God,’ cried Albert, ‘the only reason I want to see her again is to cast a contemptuous glance at her, to turn my back and … to reject her! Yes, to reject her!’
Sindbad nodded quietly. ‘We will talk about that.’
Albert Finds New Employment
That evening at The Bear, as dusk drew on and the light slowly faded in the vaulted dining room, the young knight errant was to be found with his head leaning on Sindbad’s shoulder, articulately if a little shamefacedly — and not before swearing Sindbad to secrecy — telling his new friend all he knew of Mrs Boldogfalvi. It is a rare woman that all her male acquaintance describe in similar terms. Different men see the same woman in a variety of ways. One may only remember the birthmark on one side of her body, another might be able to guess what the object of desire is thinking in the evening as she goes to bed. If these various men were once to sit down together — in great old age, of course, with a few glasses to loosen their tongues — these men who had loved the same woman, granted this were possible, and they were honestly to tell each other everything they knew for certain about her, it would soon be evident that they were all speaking of a different woman. Mrs Boldogfalvi lived in at least fifty forms in men’s imaginations since that was the number of men who had loved her, until, that is, they grew acquainted with death and solemnly closed their eyes for the last time. If this gathering of greybeards were to sit round a stone table, much like Heine’s gathering of retired hangmen, and hold council one mysterious night, they could at best only establish certain words, certain well-defined movements where the experiences of lovers X and Y seemed to correspond. For example, when Mrs Boldogfalvi was really passionately in love she would address her lover as Milord at the most intimate moments. Milord was sometimes blond and sometimes dark. But no matter how ancient the men were they never betrayed to one another Mrs Boldogfalvi’s characteristic habits. And so the majority of them, poor trusting males, believed that it was they the woman had first favoured with this loving epithet. The truth was that there were a great many Milords walking the streets of Hungary.