Such desperate dissipation has now been modified, in so far as the party, separating towards 8 or 9 A.M., only meet again at 6 P.M., first to dine and then to dance. I could not get any one to explain to me the reason of this Ash-Wednesday dissipation, which I have never come across in any other place. Most of those I asked could assign no reasons at all, except that it had always been the custom there as long as any one could remember; but one version I heard was that in 1848 the Austrian Government took into its head to forbid dancing in Lent. “So, naturally, after that we had to make a point of dancing just on Ash-Wednesday to show our independence,” said my informant. The delicate flavor of forbidden fruit, which, no doubt, adds so much to the sweetness of these Ash-Wednesday parties, is kept up by the Klausenburg clergy, who, after having for years vainly attempted to put a stop to this regularly recurring Lenten profanation, now contents itself with a nominal protest each year against the revellers. Thus, as often as the day comes round, a black-robed figure, sent hither to preach sackcloth and ashes, makes his appearance on the ball-room premises; but, more harmless than he looks, his bark is worse than his bite, and he interferes with no one’s enjoyment. He does not indite maledictions in letters of fire on the wall; neither does he act the part of Banquo’s ghost at the banquet. Probably he has in former years too often acted this part in vain, so finds it wiser now to compromise the matter by accepting a modest sum as alms for his church, and abandoning the sinners to their own devices.
In place of the limp and crushed tulles and tarlatans of the previous night, the young girls had now appeared mostly in pretty muslin and fresh summer toilets adorned with natural flowers. Some of them looked rather pale, as well they might after their previous efforts; but at the first notes of the csardas every trace of fatigue was gone as if by magic, and not for worlds would any one of them have consented to sit through a single dance. “Of course I am tired,” said a young girl to me, very seriously, “but you see it is quite impossible to sit still when you hear the csardas playing; even if you are dying you must get up and dance.”
For my part, I confess that the mere effort of looking on this fourth night was positive exhaustion. Long after midnight they were still dancing away like creatures possessed—dancing as though they never meant to stop, and as though their very souls’ salvation depended on not standing still for a single moment. My brain began to reel, and feeling that worn-out Nature could do no more, I made the best of my way to carriage and bed, pursued by nightmares of a never-ending csardas.
After Ash-Wednesday Klausenburg society settled down to a somewhat calmer routine of amusement, consisting in skating, theatre-going, visiting, and parties.
There is a pleasing elasticity about Klausenburg visiting arrangements, people there restricting themselves to no particular hour, and no precise costume for going to see their acquaintances; so that ladies bound for the theatre or a party may often be seen paying two or three visits en route, not at all embarrassed by such trifles as short sleeves or flowers in the hair.
About two parties a day seemed to be the usual allowance here in Lent. Some of these reunions, beginning at five o’clock, were accompanied by cold coffee, ham sausages, and cakes; others, commencing at nine in the evening, were connected with tea and supper, so that frequently the self-same party might be said to begin in one house and terminate in another.
The gypsies were everywhere and anywhere to be seen, for most of these social gatherings end in dancing, and without the Tzigane no pleasure is considered complete. Pougracz, the present director of the Tzigane band at Klausenburg, has, so to say, grown up in society, his father having filled the post before him, and he himself, a man well on in middle-age—with such a delightfully shrewd, good-natured, rascally old face—has played for another generation of dancers, fathers and mothers of the young people who now fill the ball-room. There are other Tzigane bands as good, but his is the only one “in society,” and it is most amusing to note the half-impudent familiarity of his manner towards both gentlemen and ladies who have grown up to the sound of his fiddle. It is positive agony to him to witness bad dancing, and he was wont to complain most bitterly of one gentleman to whom nature had denied an ear for music (a rare defect in any Hungarian). “None of you young people dance particularly well nowadays,” he remarked, with frank criticism, “but among you there is one who makes me positively ill to look at. If I were not to play at him and send my violin into his feet, he would never be able to get round at all.”
On another occasion, when the figures of the Écossaise threatened to melt away into hopeless confusion, Pougracz angrily turned round and apostrophized a married lady who was sitting near me. “How can you sit there and see them making such a mess of it all?” he said. “It is not so long ago that you were dancing yourself as to have forgotten all about it, so go and make order among them!”
The pretty old-fashioned custom of serenades being still here en vogue, sometimes on a dark winter’s night, between two and three o’clock, one may hear the Tzigane band strike up under the window of some fêted beauty, playing her favorite air or nota. The serenade may either have been arranged by a special admirer, or merely by a good friend of the family. Often, too, several young men will arrange to bring serenades to all the young ladies of their acquaintance, going from one house to another. The lady thus serenaded does not show herself at the window, but if the attention be agreeable to her, she places a lighted candle in the casement in token that the serenade is accepted.
Such acceptance is, however, by no means compromising, no serious construction being necessarily put upon what may simply be intended as a friendly attention.