They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  The station was dimly lit and Balint had to look furtively around for a while until he discovered her sitting alone in the second-class waiting room. There she was, hunched on a bench by the wall and clutching a small overnight case on her lap, waiting.

  Keeping discreetly out of sight Balint, wondered what he should do next. Should he speak to her? But if he did, what could he say? He would have to explain how he came to be here, disclosing that he had followed her from the villa and therefore revealing too that he had been with Adrienne. That was clearly impossible. He decided to wait and see what transpired and, as he stood there, began to piece together what must have happened. He was filled with pity for the poor girl who did not know that the man she loved so much had already left the previous day without giving her a thought. Here she was, at dawn the day after he had bolted, waiting, waiting, waiting for him to come so that they could escape together to Austria to what she thought would be infinite bliss.

  Poor, poor Judith … to be waiting for Wickwitz!

  What could he possibly do? Should he go to her and tell her the truth? She would never believe him and was sure to assume that he had made it all up, and God knows what she would do then! It was a pity that he had no way to warn Adrienne of what was happening, but it was already after four and if he were to return to the villa, he would have to do so on foot, for at that early hour there were no fiacres available and it would soon be dawn and someone was sure to see him. Best, perhaps, to stay where he was and speak to Judith only after the express to Budapest, which was to have taken Judith and Wickwitz on the first stage of their journey to Graz, had already left. Then he would not have to explain anything for the facts would speak for themselves: and what hideous, vile facts they were!

  Slowly the station came to life. A locomotive could be heard shunting in the marshalling yards. Then there was a plaintive whistle and a goods train rumbled slowly by the sooty windows of the station. Some lamps were waved at the end of the platform and a market train came slowly to a halt, from which third-class passengers emerged carrying heavy loads on their shoulders.

  Then dawn came, and dim light began to filter on to the platform. The carriages for the Budapest train were shunted in and a few sleepy passengers began to arrive. Soon the platform was crowded.

  Bells rang in the waiting rooms and a porter started shouting: ‘Nagy-Varad, Puspokladany, Szolkok, Budapest!’ in a slurred voice, and people began boarding the train. Balint watched Judith from a distance. She did not move but, as time went by, she obviously became more and more restless. Her hands were clenched nervously on the handles of the bag on her lap. When the second bell sounded she came out on to the platform, brushing by Balint without seeing him, her eyes searching down the length of the platform. She looked into the train and then into the first-class waiting room. Finally Balint could stand it no longer. He stepped over to her and touched her arm. The girl started violently.

  ‘Judith! The man you’re looking for left yesterday!’ he said.

  Judith stared at him, eyes wide open as if she had seen a ghost, her mouth distorted with hatred.

  ‘You? You here? Everywhere it’s you!’

  Balint repeated what he had just said.

  ‘Who? What are you saying? Left yesterday?’

  The carriage doors were being slammed shut. There was a blast from the locomotive’s whistle and the train started to move. The girl looked wildly around her, then she ran forward a few steps but the train gathered speed and moved off down the track. Her hopes vanished as she looked vainly after the disappearing train and her knees gave way under her. She would have fallen if Abady had not quickly put his arms round her waist and supported her.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in standing about!’

  He led her swiftly out of the station and into a one-horse carriage which he found waiting there. ‘To the Monostor road. I’ll tell you where later,’ said Abady to the driver.

  Until now Judith had let herself be led without seeming to notice what was happening. The shaking of the carriage soon brought her to her senses. When she saw who it was sitting beside her, she shrank back into the corner of the carriage, her eyes filled with fright like a wild bird caught in a trap. She stared into Abady’s face with a look of surprise and loathing and as they drove her gaze never wavered, so hard was she looking at him. Petrified, unable to speak, she just stared at him as the carriage rumbled slowly down the long road to the Uzdy villa. Twice Abady tried to explain that he himself had just been going to catch that train when he had chanced to see her, but he faltered, unable to continue, faced with the look in those wide-open eyes.

  When at last the carriage stopped in front of the wrought-iron gates of the Uzdy villa, Judith was still staring at him in silence.

  Balint did not know what to do next. It was only now that they had reached the girl’s home that he realized how awkward it would be if he were to be caught bringing home one of the Miloth girls at dawn. How could he possibly smuggle her into the house without being seen by the servants, who must at that time be stirring? To be discovered now would provoke God knows what gossip!

  He need not have worried, thanks to Margit’s quickness in grasping what had happened. Margit had woken just as dawn was breaking. She saw at once that Judith’s bed was empty. She had dressed quickly and run down to Adrienne who had told her of the dramatic turn in the story, of the duel between Laszlo and Wickwitz and how Wickwitz had left town suddenly. Sensibly Margit did not enquire how Adrienne knew all this, but she quickly realized though she had not herself seen it, that Zoltan, who had come to see them in the morning, must had brought a message for Judith and that Judith must have tried to follow their prepared plan and slipped away to the station in the night. It was there that they must look for her.

  As Adrienne was dressing hurriedly Margit went to find the Uzdy doorman and sent him to find a fiacre, and she was therefore waiting for it to arrive when the one-horse carriage bringing Abady and Judith drew up before the gates. She ran out, helped her sister out of the carriage, kissed her swiftly and led her into the house without saying a word.

  All this was done so rapidly that none of the Uzdy servants were aware that anything untoward had happened to Judith. So resolutely and sensibly did Margit act that neither then nor ever afterwards did anyone in the house except Adrienne and Margit – nor anyone in the great world outside – ever hear even a whisper of Judith’s attempted escape.

  If Judith Miloth was spared the town’s gossip, poor little Dinora Abonyi was not, and her part in the Wickwitz débâcle was quickly the talk of Kolozsvar.

  Outside the family the only people to know the truth – Abady, Gyeroffy and Kadacsay – kept their mouths shut and said nothing. And yet, within the space of two weeks everyone knew all about Dinora and her promissory notes.

  Aunt Lizinka’s overheated and airless drawing-room was the Solfatara – the sulphurous volcano – from which most of the poison gas was distributed abroad. Recently the old Countess Sarmasaghy had occupied herself principally with the so-called ‘Tulip Drive’. This was the new craze from Budapest where a number of grand society ladies had started a movement to buy only Hungarian-made articles. Though everyone convinced themselves that thereby they were striking a body-blow at the industries of Austria, and the capital rang with patriotic speeches and fervent leading articles in praise of the movement, the fact remained that it had little practical effect. Shopkeepers cunningly pretended that all their fabrics were made in Hungary, whether or not the silk was really manufactured at Lyons and woollens and linen in Austria. In Transylvania the vogue did not catch on as it did in the capital, for everyone had always bought their rich trousseaus and grand dresses in Vienna as things were cheaper there than in Budapest, and they were not going to change just because someone in Budapest said they should. In the past, Aunt Lizinka had done the same. However, learning that her archenemy Miklos Absolon bought his boots from Goisern, his suit-lengths from Tyrol and his sporting guns fr
om Springer, she threw herself into the Tulip Drive principally so that she could accuse him publicly of being a traitor to his country.

  The Wickwitz affair came as a godsend to Aunt Lizinka, who promptly dropped the hopeless cause of the Tulip Drive for the infinitely more delectable task of stirring the cauldron of local scandal. She applied herself to this with tremendous energy, serving up daily to the old ladies who frequented the Sarmasaghy drawing-room new slices of scandal-cake, each more titillating than the last and new draughts of witches’ brew strong enough and shocking enough to go to anyone’s head. Lizinka made the very most of such a tasty affair and stirred up the biggest storm she could: a storm in a teacup it might be, but a tempest to those who lived in a teacup – and poor little Dinora drowned in it. It was not long before Aunt Lizinka had ferreted out all the facts, and everything she discovered she immediately broadcast using an assumed moral indignation to mask her enjoyment of such lurid and sordid details. She became a sort of dirt volcano whose daily eruptions splattered all within reach. Apart from the central figures, Wickwitz, Dinora and poor Tihamer Abonyi, there were plenty of others who suffered from Lizinka’s gossip factory. Jeno Laczok and his banker friend Baron Soma Weissfeld were given a good smear as it had been their establishment that had first accepted Dinora’s notes when presented by the Austrian baron: ‘What a disreputable action by a bank, my dears, downright shady I call it to accept such things’; Laszlo Gyeroffy: ‘my precious nephew, you know, the reckless gambler’; young Dodo Gyalakuthy, because Wickwitz had once pursued her; Baron Gazsi, because he was Wickwitz’s companion in arms; Abady: ‘Remember how he used to run after that little whore!’; and even Miklos Absolon, though all she could think up to say about him was: ‘I can’t say anything now, but you’ll all soon find out that that old liar is mixed up in it too!’ Everyone came in for their share of Lizinka’s brand of innuendo and self-righteous condemnation.

  Abonyi, though much against his will for he owed his social position to his wife, found himself obliged by convention to sue for divorce and, when this was granted, retired sadly to his own property in the Vas district where he counted for nothing.

  Poor little Dinora was socially ostracized and cut by everyone. She found herself with a mountain of debts, but she somehow managed to survive and remain cheerful, for being possessed of very little brain she never really understood what had happened to her.

  In every great upheaval there is always someone who comes out a winner: and this time it was Kristof Azbej, Countess Roza Abady’s cunning little man of business.

  A few days after the Wickwitz affair had set the town by the ears, Azbej received a telegram from Gyeroffy asking him tersely to come to see him at Kozard.

  As Countess Roza was still at Portofino, Azbej was free to do as he wished. He replied that he would obey at once. At the station at Iklod a carriage was waiting for him which took him swiftly to Laszlo’s manor-house at Kozard. As he drove, Azbej had a careful look at the fields beside the road: they were loam-rich meadows which bordered the river. On arrival an unkempt old man led Azbej into the house. From a small entrance hall a staircase without a hand rail led to the low first-floor rooms under the sloping roof. The walls were only whitewashed for the Kozard manor-house had not been finished when Laszlo’s father had shot himself and the big reception rooms on the ground floor had not even been plastered for decoration. Laszlo had therefore installed himself upstairs, as his parents had before him. Here everything gave the impression of being temporary, even improvised, the furniture placed at random with no attempt at order or convenience. Laszlo’s bed, which stood in one corner of the long room, was unmade and the remains of the previous day’s meal were still on a tray together with a half-empty bottle of plum brandy.

  When the little hedgehog-like attorney waddled into the room he found Laszlo pacing up and down impatiently. Laszlo stopped briefly to shake hands and then at once started again to walk up and down as he had done for several days.

  ‘Here I am…’ said the lawyer, and pushing aside a pile of clothes from the chair on which they had been thrown, he sat down without further ceremony, ‘…at your Lordship’s service.’

  The young man did not answer at once but continued marching up and down the room. Then he stopped and said in a stern voice: ‘I need eighty-six thousand crowns … at once!’

  ‘Ah,’ said the attorney with a sigh, ‘that is a very large sum, a very large sum indeed!’

  ‘I know. I’ve tried every way I can think of but I can’t raise it. I don’t understand these things. That is why I sent for you.’

  The fat little attorney closed his bulging, prune-shaped eyes.

  ‘How large is the estate?’ he asked, his lips hardly moving behind his untrimmed beard.

  ‘The cultivated part is eight hundred acres.’

  ‘Is it mortgaged?’

  ‘Yes. For sixty thousand.’

  ‘I see! I see!’ repeated Azbej, seemingly deep in thought. After a long pause he said: ‘When do you need the money?’

  ‘I’ve told you already. Now! At once!’ cried Gyeroffy. ‘I can’t wait. I can’t stand it any more!’

  ‘Excuse me. Please…’ said Azbej apologetically. ‘I don’t quite know … if your Lordship would permit me, perhaps I could just have a look round, and then … then maybe I could think up some solution to your Lordship’s problem.’ Bowing obsequiously, he backed out of the room.

  In an hour he was back, still bowing as obsequiously as before. He sat down and now the words poured from him.

  He was ready to help, he said. His only object, naturally, was to be of service for he was after all only a servant, a servant of the Count’s family and, as Count Gyeroffy was a member of the Noble Family he served, therefore, and only because of this and to please the noble Count, he would seek a way to make himself useful. Then he recounted all the difficulties there were in raising money, listing the various obstacles and delays there would be in trying to raise such a sum from the banks. Even though this might eventually produce results there were bound to be delays for all the necessary discussions, searches and legal formalities, not to speak of the expenses involved. Some other solution must be sought, either leasing the estate or pre-selling that year’s crops or a part of them. Yet even the whole would not raise the sum needed, and tenants were always reluctant to pay in advance even if an eager tenant could be found at such short notice. This was the sort of thing which could never be done in a hurry and anyway he would never recommend it for he had only his Lordship’s best interests at heart. No! That sort of solution could never be hurried, indeed he wouldn’t even consider it!

  ‘Well then, why are you telling me all this?’ asked Laszlo angrily.

  For a few moments Azbej looked at him without expression, seemingly bewildered and helpless. Then, as if he had suddenly seen the light, he opened wide his eyes so that they protruded more than ever and cried: ‘I have it! I’ll do it myself, even though it’ll be a sacrifice! I’ll lease the whole property myself, come what may. I’ll pay you what you need!’

  The very same day the contract was drawn up and signed and Azbej became Laszlo’s tenant, paying ten years’ rent in advance. As it was to be paid all at once it was only reasonable – was it not? – that he should set the rent at five crowns an acre. That made forty thousand crowns. For a further fifty thousand crowns or thereabouts he bought all the agricultural machinery, though, as God was his witness it was worth barely half that sum, but he did not care for his only desire was to be of help. The next day he handed Laszlo three savings-bank books from Kolozsvar worth eighty-seven thousand crowns in all and three new banknotes of a thousand crowns each.

  ‘I am very happy,’ said the little attorney on taking his leave, ‘to be of service to your Lordship in this way. Should your Lordship find some other solution at a later date, naturally I will withdraw and we can cancel the arrangement.’

  In this way Laszlo raised enough to redeem Countess Beredy’s pearls. The next day he
went to Budapest by the midday train, thinking that with such a large sum in his pockets it was wiser to travel by day.

  Chapter Eight

  A DRIENNE SAT AT HER DESK but she was not writing. Instead she looked out over the garden which, though leafless was now free of the winter snow, to the rickety wooden bridge over which ten days before Judith had made her escape from the house and which Balint had used each time he came to see her.

  He had been there only last night …

  Because of Judith, Adrienne had still only been able to see Balint at night. If she so much as heard his name Judith’s face became contorted with terror as if it had been he who had been the sole cause of her terrible disappointment. Most of the day the girl would wander about pathetically, answering mechanically any questions put to her. She would only come to life if Balint were mentioned, and then it was as if the sound of his name was a torment to her. Consequently Adrienne could not allow Balint to visit her during the day as long as her sisters remained at the Uzdy villa; and for the moment there was no question of their leaving, for Countess Miloth was still in the sanatorium.

  All the same, thought Adrienne, these night visits must stop, and not only because of the risks involved.

  Four days before, when Balint had just let himself in through the drawing-room window, Uzdy had arrived unexpectedly from the country. Luckily they had heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs from the courtyard and there had just been time for Balint to slip back into the darkness of the drawing-room and hide himself behind the door to Adrienne’s room, holding himself rigidly motionless lest the parquet should give a creak under his weight, and for Adrienne to replace the candle on the table by the bed, when Uzdy entered her room still in his hat and travelling coat.

  ‘You’re still awake? At this hour? Why is that?’ he asked from the door that led from the passage.

  ‘My sisters have only just left me.’