Eszterhazy rubbed the end of his slightly-pointed nose. “Hm. Let me think. Ah. Have you considered Nuszboum’s Arcade?”
They had not considered Nuszboum’s Arcade. They considered it now. De Metz gave an entire sequence of his birdy-nods. Brozz said, “I have often enjoyed watching some of the machines and automata in the Arcade. I have no doubt that the principles of the tuned, harmonic, water-powered, turbine and compressed-air pump might be successfully applied to them, at any rate to some of them, and of course on a much larger scale.” It was clear that they liked the idea.
It was clear, very soon, that Nuszboum liked it, too. Nuszboum made an arrangement with the inventor, Nuszboum provided space for the invention next to his Test-the-Electricity Machine and just after his Slightly Naughty Magic Zooscope Lantern Peep (fat women in corsets). And in front of the Arcade, Nuszboum posted two masterpieces of posters appearing to be immense enlargements of the small item on the front page of the Gazette which had attracted Eszterhazy’s attention: IMPORTANT NEW INVENTION: actually, both posters had been painted by the famous Master Sign-Painter Adler. How many people saw them and how many had read them and how many people had been intrigued by them enough to go inside, no one could say. But somebody had gone inside. And somebody was not even interested in testing the Electrical Machine or peeping into the Zooscope Lantern ... which was just fme with those who were, tinsmiths and plasterers and other such subjects of the Triune Monarchy whose wives were just as fat but never wore corsets . . . and someone asked a question or so of Nuszboum and obtained an answer. And so, then —
“And how is our friend Engineer Brozz?” — one day.
“Quite well. He has gone away to set up his full-scale water engine.”
Eszterhazy was astonished. “He has? ”
“Oh yes. Someone is interested in investment possibility.” Eszterhazy asked just enough questions as to reassure himself that Someone was not a cheapjack or mounteback or floater of bogus shares; Someone was not. And further than that, Eszterhazy did not ask and De Metz did not offer and their conversation continued on into a very technical discussion of counterpoint and polyphony. And presently the season of the lessons with De Metz was over and the season for a holiday in the country was at hand, and whilst Eszterhazy was botanizing amidst the crags and high valleys and wildwoods of Little Byzantia, the matter of Engineer Brozz left his mind, and left it as completely (one might think) as though it had never been in it. When next he was in “Big Bella” the mock-newspaper posters were no longer up in front of Nuszboum’s Arcade and he had forgotten that they had ever been up. The matter occurred to him, vaguely, when he received the customary letter of felicitation from De Metz upon the award of the Doctorate in Music; but it was very vague indeed. On the vacation following, Eszterhazy went geologizing in the mountains behind Nimtsoran: and nothing there reminded him of Brozz, or of the vacuum-pump and the compressed-air engine. But on the vacation after that —
This time Eszterhazy took the Limited Express to Numbitszl, in the Avar Alps, from Numbitszl the mule-drawn diligence went to Gro, and at Gro he was met by a smart mountain wagon; its brightly-painted signs showed a figure with a halo who was mounted on something like a short-legged horse with a ruff of hair around its neck: this was Saint Mammas. Put a lion on Mammas! the heathen throng in the amphitheater had shouted, and this was done. Mammas had preached to the lion, Mammas had so to speak converted the lion, and Mammas had calmly ridden out of the arena mounted on the lion. — So at least the legend said, and if orthodox church historiographers and hagiographers said anything different, no one in the Avar Alps knew or cared. And it was at the piously-named (and well-appointed and well-run) Inn of St. Mammas that Eszterhazy was going to stay. For a full fortnight he might not even see a musical score or hear a musical instrument . . . except perhaps a peasant on the zither or the penny-whistle or the woodenhorn.
The road went around and around and up and up and up, the air was clean and clear, not alone different from the thicker air of the city of Bella but certainly far different from the air in the train. In theory the train-carriage’s windows were sealed, but the black soot seeped in anyway, and the air grew hot and stale, and if one opened the windows then the smoke from the engine rushed in, and in addition to grime on one’s face there was the inevitable cinder in one’s eye. Cinders. Eyes. But here all was clean. By the side of the narrow, winding road grew yellow wood-sorrel and the blue blossoms of the cornflower and the blue blue blooms of the chicory.
From the balcony of his two-and-one-half-room suite Eszterhazy could see a broken silver line: the Little River and its several falls, and — past that — the unbroken silver line of the broad ox-bow in its lower course. Eszterhazy’s Romanou valet had been given the fortnight off; and he himself was now being tended to by the inn’s servants, and tended to well enough; very well, he had to shave himself or submit to the unsophisticated ministrations of the village barber? Tut.
He rode the small rough horses of the mountains, he rode their rough large ponies, once or twice he rode their rusty-colored mules. And he walked. He walked and walked, sometimes botanizing, sometimes birdwatching, sometimes photographing. His face grew red, then brown; his nerves, calmer ... he had hardly realized that they had been otherwise. And then one night he said, more as a vocal expression of good spirits than an actual question, “Well, landlord, and what shall I do tomorrow?”
Barrel-bodied, immaculately-aproned, vastly-bearded and broadly- moustached, Karrolo the innkeeper answered, “Why, sir doctor sir, a party of the gentry be going cross the frontier a-morrow, and I do wonder if you be not wanting to go with’um.”
The frontier, there had been no “frontier,” even officially, since the Great Unification (“The Big Union”), but old manners of speech . . . and of thought, which gives utterance to speech, That which has no form of its own giving it to that which becomes formed. . . died hard. When (here in this remote area) they ever died at all. “Going from the Avar Land into Scythia, are they?” he asked, lazily stretching before the fire on which a red- hearted chestnut log burned. “Where there?”
The answer checked his lazy stretch. “Why, sir doctor sir, to the Sacred Grove.”
How could this be? The Sacred Grove was far away. It was. Was it not? A moment’s reflection showed him that, really, it was not. He had gone there before, from Bella: a longish trip. He had come here, from Avar-Ister — another longish trip. But from exactly here, St. Mammas’s Inn, to there, the Sacred Grove, was not really that far at all. Eszterhazy had not come to St. Mammas’s Inn in Pannonia directly from Bella in Scythia, because there was no direct railroad connection, and even sufficient connection via diligence — “stage coach,” they called it in Northamerica — was lacking. But rapidly he conjectured vision of a map, from here to there was but a small way indeed. He might easily go. Why should he not go? He could think of no reason why not. “Yes, Karrolo, I think it an excellent idea. Have them pack me some food . . . and a little brandy.”
Idly, he picked up the Avar-Ister newspaper, and turned to the classified notices. He made a mark in a margin.
The picnic went well enough. Karrolo would have felt his house disgraced if there had not been the usual seven sorts of sausages, seven kinds of cheese, and seven of pickled things and seven of pastry. In order to minister to the possibly more finicking tastes of the gentry, Hanni, his wife, who had worked a while in Avar-Ister (sometimes called “the Paris of the Balkans” by people who had spent more time in the Balkans than in Paris ... a lot more), had prepared sandwhishkas — thin slices of this and that between thin slices of bread. She had even made cucumber sandwhishkas, though her failure to peel the cucumbers occasioned mild merriment.