Readers of the foregoing pages will have had occasion to remark that, except when diversified by fire or bloodshed, life at Hermanstadt was not a lively one; therefore an invitation which I received during my second winter in Transylvania to spend some weeks at Klausenburg during the carnival season was very welcome. It was a decided relief to get away from the vulgar monotony of those antiquated flirtations which in Hermanstadt did duty for society, and to be reminded of things one was in danger of forgetting—of fresh young faces, light pretty dresses, and real dancing.
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Nor was I disappointed in what I saw during my fortnight’s stay at Klausenburg: pretty dresses in plenty; prettier faces, for the girls of the place are justly celebrated for their good looks; and as for dancing—why, I do not think I ever knew before what it was to see real, heartfelt, impassioned, indefatigable dancing. An account of the three last carnival days, as I spent them at Klausenburg, will convey some notion of what is there understood by the word dancing.
We had arrived late on the evening of the Saturday preceding Ash-Wednesday, therefore only the gentlemen of the party, unwilling to lose a single instant of their precious holiday-time, rushed off to a large public ball or redoute.
The following evening—Carnival Sunday—assembled the whole society in the salons of the military commander, Baron V——, whose guest I was at the time. There were from thirty to thirty-six dancing couples, and the first thing to strike a stranger on entering the room was, that not a single plain face was to be seen among them. Almost all the young girls were pretty, some of them remarkably so; dark beauties mostly, with a wealth of black plaits, glorious eyes, and creamy complexions, and with the small hand and high-curved instep which characterize Hungarian ladies. The faintest suspicion of a dark shade on the upper lip was not without charm in some cases; and when viewed against a strong light, many of the well-cut profiles had a soft, downy appearance, which decidedly enhanced their piquante effect. Side by side with these, however, were one or two faces fair enough to have graced any English ball-room.
What pleased me here to see was, that the married women, as a matter of course, leave the dancing-field to the young girls, and do not attempt, by display of an outrageous luxury in dress, to concentrate attention on themselves: the particular type of exquisite élégante never missing from a French or Polish salon has no place here. This is surely as it should be and as nature intended; pleasure, dancing, flirtation are for the young and the unmarried, and those who have had their turn should be content to stand aside and look on henceforth; but when, as is too often the case, it comes to be a trial of strength between matrons and maidens as to which shall capture the best partners and carry off the greatest number of trophies, the result can only be an unnatural and distorted state of society.
What Edinburgh society was to London some fifty years ago, so does Klausenburg stand to-day with regard to Pesth. As nearly all{333} the people here are connected by ties of blood as well as of friendship, something of the privacy of a family circle marks their intercourse; and while lacking none of the refining touches of modern civilization, a breath of patriarchal sans gêne pervades the atmosphere.
The weak side of Klausenburg society at present is a minority of gentlemen, as of late years many members of distinguished families have got to prefer the wider range of excitement offered by a season at Buda-Pesth to the more restricted circle of a purely Transylvanian society which satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. On this occasion, however, there was no lack of dancers, for the young hussars who had come with us from Hermanstadt efficiently filled up the social gaps, restoring the balance of sex in the most satisfactory manner.
What interested me most in the ball-room was to watch the expression of the Tzigane musicians crowded together in a door-way; their black eyes rolling restlessly from side to side, nothing escapes their notice, and they are evidently far better informed of every flirtation, mistake, coolness, or quarrel in the wind, than the most vigilant chaperon.
Of course here, as at every Hungarian ball, the principal feature was the csardas; and it was curious to see how, at the very first notes of this dance, the young people all precipitated themselves to the end of the room where the musicians were placed, jostling one another in their anxiety each to get nearest to the music. To an uninitiated stranger it looks most peculiar to see this knot of dancers all pressed together like herrings in a barrel in one small corner, while fully two-thirds of a spacious ball-room are standing empty; but the Hungarians declare that the Tziganes only play the csardas with spirit when they see the dancers at close quarters, treading on their very toes and brushing up against the violins. Sometimes the band-master, unable to control his excitement, breaks loose from the niche or door-way assigned to the band, and, advancing into the room, becomes himself the centre of the whirling knot of dancers.
Whenever the csardas comes to an end there is a violent clapping of hands to make the music resume. Hungarians are absolutely insatiable in this respect, and, however long the dance has lasted, there will always be eager cries for more and more and more.
The cotillon, which was kept up till seven in the morning, was much prettier than any I remember to have seen danced before, for{334} Hungarians are as superior to Germans or Englishwomen in point of grace as they are to Poles in the matter of animation—and they executed all the usual figures demanding the introduction of a cushion, a mirror, a fan, India-rubber balls, etc., in a manner equally removed from boisterous romping as from languid affectation.
The following evening (Monday) the society reassembled at the pleasant and hospitable house of Mme. de Z——, whose dark-eyed daughters take a foremost rank among Transylvanian beauties. In order to have some strength remaining for what was still to come, dancing was on this occasion reduced to the modest allowance of six hours, the gypsies being compulsorily sent away soon after three o’clock, in order to force the young people to take some rest.
On Tuesday we all met again at the Casino for the bachelor’s ball, given by the gentlemen of the place, and where, with the exception of supper and occasional snatches of refreshment, dancing was kept up uninterruptedly till near eight o’clock next morning. At the conclusion of the cotillon each lady received from her partner a pretty white and silver fan, on which her initials were engraved—a souvenir which I have much pleasure in preserving, in remembrance of the happy days I passed at Klausenburg.
An old traditional dance, which they here call écossaise (but which in reality is simply a pot-pourri of several English country-dances), is danced at Klausenburg after midnight on Shrove-Tuesday, or rather Ash-Wednesday morning.[76] This dance having been somewhat neglected of late years, the young people blundered sorely over some of the figures, and the dance would have lapsed into hopeless chaos had not the former generation gallantly thrown themselves into the breach. Respectable fathers of grown-up daughters, and white-haired grandmothers, now started to their feet, instinctively roused to action by vivid recollections of their own youth; and such is the power of memory that soon they were footing it with the nimblest dancers, going through each figure with unerring precision, and executing the complicated steps with an accuracy and grace which did honor to the dancing-masters of half a century ago.
One of these figures was the old one of cat and mouse, in which{335} the girl, protected by a ring of dancers, tries to escape the pursuit of her partner, who seeks to break through the line of defenders—the moment when the cat seizes its prey being always marked by the band-master causing his violin to give a piteous squeak, imitating to perfection the agonized death-shriek of a captured mouse.
It is de rigueur that the last dance on Ash-Wednesday morning should be executed by daylight. This was about seven o’clock, when, the lights being extinguished and the shutters flung open, the gypsies threw all their remaining energies into a last furious, breathless galop—a weirder, wilder scene than I ever witnessed in a ball-room, to look at this frenziedly whirling mass of figures, but dimly to be descried in the scarcely breaking dawn—gray and misty-looking as ghosts risen from the grave to celebrate their nightly revels, and who, warned by the cock’s crow of approaching daybreak, are treading their last mazes with a fast and furious glee; while the wild strains of............