A Place to Stand

by Ann Bridge

  “Ah, we don’t know—I’ve heard that Teleki was much tougher than some of the others about falling in with the German plans: a whole lot tougher than Csáky, anyhow,” her Father said darkly. He looked at his watch. “I wish Bill would ring up. It’s going on for twelve—I ought to go round to the office; Sulzberger’s in a bit of a stew, and no wonder! But I don’t want to leave till Bill’s called up—I want the low-down on all this.” He seemed more anxious and worried than Hope had ever seen him—he went over and kicked the fire again, and then threw on more of those pretty thin silvery logs.

  “Couldn’t I tell Bill to call you at the office, if you were to go round now?” Hope suggested, anxious to help.

  “No. No I’d better wait till Bill has rung. He’s more likely to get through here, to a private number, that those damned Boches mayn’t have had time to check up on yet.” He went on fidgeting about the room, and Hope continued her private worrying about the Moranskis—she didn’t like to leave her Father while he was in such a fuss, and she, too, wanted to learn all she could about what had happened, and was likely to happen, before she started to do anything. At last the telephone rang again. Mr. Kirkland hurried to it, and this time it was Hershey. “Bill? Oh, thank goodness!” she heard her Father say. “Now look—what is all this Teleki story?” She listened with all her ears, but she could make little of the bald exclamations of—“You don’t tell me!” “God Almighty!” “But Bill—” When at last Mr. Kirkland put down the receiver and came back, mechanically, to the fire, there was an almost stunned look on his face.

  “What does Bill say?” the girl asked.

  “They think he died by his own hand,” Mr. Kirkland said slowly. He spoke as if he were very tired. “It’s still not official—they may be trying to hush it up; but that’s the idea. Bill says the Regent’s at his house now.”

  “Do you mean suicide?” Hope exclaimed, horrified. “But he couldn’t! He’s a Catholic, and so devout.”

  “I don’t know what his being a Catholic has to do with it,” said poor Mr. Kirkland, rather irritably—not having been brought up by nuns he was pardonably ignorant of Catholic doctrine on the subject of suicide. “I’m only telling you what Bill told me. He’s been round at our Legation, and heard all they know—and what they’ve figured out, putting two and two together. Erdmannsdorf—the German Minister, you know-called on the Regent last evening, that they know for a fact—and they guess he brought some message from Hitler, probably. Teleki wasn’t present; he was at a sort of Scoutmasters’ service at the Basilica—he’s mad on this Boy Scout business—and after that he went to the Szanatorium to see his wife. On his way home they say he looked in at the Foreign Ministry, and stayed there a while; and when he got home he called that pretty girl—she’s some relation—who does his confidential typing for him, but she was out.”

  “Goodness, how does Bill know that?” Hope interjected.

  “Oh, servants talk—everyone talks, when something like this happens,” her Father said, with a sort of angry sadness. “But he must have wanted her to take down something, to someone, even at that hour.” He paused. “Well, I suppose some time or other he went to bed. He’d told his servant to call him at half-past six, because he was taking his troop of Junior Boy Scouts to early Communion—his Scoutmaster’s kit, whatever it is they wear, was all laid out in his room, ready. So the valet went in this morning at 6.30, and drew back the curtains, and turned to the bed and said—‘It’s a dry, clear morning, Your Excellency’—and got no answer. It seems that surprised him: Teleki always woke like a shot, and had a pleasant word for everybody. So the man went over to the bed, saying it again—and then he saw the wound in the head, and blood on the pillow, and the revolver on the floor.”

  “Oh mercy, how terrible! Oh, the poor man,” Hope exclaimed. She was greatly shocked by this account—it was so obviously first-hand, and so detailed.

  “It seems there were a couple of letters on the table by the bed,” Mr. Kirkland went on—“or so Bill gathers; more servants’ talk, I expect, but it could be true. One to the Regent, and the other to his son. What that girl wasn’t at home to take down. No one knows what was in them, of course.”

  “So what did the valet do then?” Hope asked.

  “Sent another servant to the church to tell the kid Scouts not to wait, as their master wouldn’t be coming!” Mr. Kirkland said explosively. “What a nation!—with the Prime Minister dead! After that he called the police, or the Regent’s palace, or both—he let someone know, anyway.”

  “I think that valet was sweet—and quite right,” Hope put in stoutly. “But Father, why did he do it?—Count Teleki, I mean?”

  “No one can say that yet. But as Erdmannsdorf saw the Regent yesterday evening, it may be that when poor Teleki Paul went round to the Foreign Office after seeing his wife, he heard that the Germans were to be allowed through. The head of the first column reached the city early this morning, and at the rate they’re going—which you know as much about as they do at the Legation, if not more,” said Mr. Kirkland, with a fleeting gleam of amusement even in his distress—“they figure they must have started crossing the frontier around midnight, if not before. And presumably someone pretty high up must have let Teleki know that they were to be let across. I told you there’d been a sell-out,” he added bitterly.

  “But who’s higher up than the Prime Minister?” Hope asked.

  “That’s just it—who indeed? There was a meeting of the Defence Council day before yesterday, and Bill believes it wasn’t fixed then. But someone fixed it, or let it be fixed, late last night—who knows, they may have started crossing the frontier even before he was told—and when he found he couldn’t stop a thing he wouldn’t stand for, like I said, he just went and killed himself. That’s mostly guess-work,” said Mr. Kirkland—“but when the truth comes out, if it ever does, I bet you ten thousand dollars that that will be the reason why he committed suicide. And partly, maybe, to show that there was one honest man—a man who wouldn’t break his word—in Hungary anyway.”

  He sighed, and paused. Hope was astonished at his emotion; she knew that her Father had liked and admired Count Teleki, but his profound distress and concern was unexpected. Had Daddy, too, got all mixed up with European worries?

  “Bill has a story,” Mr. Kirkland went on slowly, almost meditatively, “that in his bedroom they found, stuck up on a table, a photograph of an ancestor of his, Lászlo Teleki, who committed suicide too—way back, nearly a hundred years ago—because something went against his conscience. But that’s just more talk—it may not be true.” (In fact, it was true.)

  “Oh,” Hope breathed again; it was a long, dismayed sound—“Oh, the poor man!” Her dismay partly arose from her Catholic training: a man she knew had put his immortal soul in jeopardy to save his country’s honour. Was one’s country worth that sacrifice? How would such things be balanced in the eternal scales? It was a question that many Hungarians, belonging to one of the most Catholic of nations, were to ask themselves—then, and later, when the facts came out.

  “Poor man is right,” said Mr. Kirkland. “And poor Hungary too—that’s even righter.”

  Hope’s mind was running round, as a young mind does, over this whole extraordinary series of events—now to Count Teleki’s immortal soul, now to politics.

  “But Father,” she said, seizing on one point—“you said the Germans were being let through; but let through where to?

  “Oh, to Yugoslavia, of course.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with Yugoslavia?”

  “My dear child, don’t you read the papers? Or listen to the radio?” John Kirkland asked impatiently. “There’s been a coup d’état down there, just a few days ago; they’ve pushed out Prince Paul, who was Regent, and made that little Prince, Peter or whatever his name is, King. And some General is head of the Government.”

  In fact Hope seldom read the newspapers, and didn’t listen to the radio much—she preferred the gramophone, which gave you
what you chose in the way of music, not what it chose; radio news she generally switched off, unless prevented by her Father. And for the last few days, tucked away in her secret world, absorbed in her private thoughts, she had not so much as opened a paper. However, she was always ready with a come-back to either of her parents.

  “Why didn’t you tell us, if it was all that interesting?” she countered.

  “No use meeting trouble half-way,” her Father replied, pushing the logs again with his foot. “They might have got by with it. They’ve been plucky enough, standing out against Hitler. They put that Minister Sweatkovitch, or whatever his name is, out, because he’d signed along the dotted line with Hitler only last week—signed that infernal Tripartite Pact; and they put Paul out because they thought he was too liable to play ball with the Germans, and they didn’t like it. Anyway he was only Regent, and they had this teen-age king up their sleeve. I gather from Bill that the whole thing was a teen-age revolution: it was kids from the schools who took the notices round to all the barracks and the revolutionary groups.”

  “Good Heavens, how extraordinary!”

  “Wasn’t it? Simoviç!” exclaimed her Father. “That’s the General who ran it. He’s Prime Minister or something now. But I don’t think he’ll stay that for long; I’ll bet that darned Adolf means business this time.”

  “Didn’t he mean it before, in Czecho and Rumania?”

  “Oh, that was different. They never resisted properly in either country; they really let him in. People talk a lot of nonsense at home about the ‘betrayal of Munich’,” said Mr. Kirkland, who in his way was a genuine student of European affairs, with profound contempt—“but there was nothing to stop the Czechs from resisting, if they’d wanted to resist. They had thirty-five fully equipped divisions and a front-line air strength of 1,500 machines: and they had the Skoda Works, pretty well the biggest arms factory in Europe—they could have fought all right if they’d wanted to, as the Yugoslavs will fight now—mark my words! But they didn’t want to; they aren’t fighters. The Serbs are—killers, too! Like the Poles—they’re fighters all right.”

  Hope was interested by this aperçu of recent European history, and was about to put a further question when Mrs. Kirkland came in.

  “Morning, John dear. Morning, Hope darling.” A kiss to each. “Margit has some extraordinary story about the Germans being here,” Mrs. Kirkland said, sitting down in a chair by the fire. “And she says that Count Teleki is dead, too. What can she mean? Is any of it true, John?”

  “Yes, all of it,” said her husband. “If you open the window you’ll hear the Germans driving along by the river—they’re making row enough! And Teleki is dead—I’ve just been talking with Bill.”

  Hope sprang up and made for the door. Her anxiety about her Polish friends kept on being deflected by all these things which seemed to be going on all at once—Count Teleki’s suicide, and the news of the coup d’état in Belgrade; goodness, it wasn’t a month since she’d been in Belgrade herself, and seen Prince Paul and his beautiful wife at a concert—during which she and Sam had in fact held hands. But the anxiety was there all the time, and she felt that she must get off to her room and be by herself, and think out what to do. There must be something she ought to do for them. Did they know about the petrol-stations, for instance? Suppose Stefan had been out last night, camp-running, and hadn’t heard—he might be copped as he came back, in a truck with Polish number-plates! But as she opened the door her Father called to her—“Hey, Hope!”

  “Yes?”

  “Mind, no more running around. You stay in this flat till I say you can go out.”

  The girl stared at him almost in despair.

  “But Father—”

  “Where’s Hopey been running to?” Mrs. Kirkland asked, beginning to polish her nails with a buffer; her usual tranquillity remained practically undisturbed, either by the presence of Germans in Budapest, or by the Prime Minister’s death.

  “Oh, she just went out to look at the Germans. But it was a damn-fool thing to do. Now you mind what I say, Hope—and you too, Alice.”

  Hope went out without a word, closing the door quietly after her. Her own door, however, at the far end of the long, warm, deeply-carpeted corridor she slammed good and hard, and alone in her room she burst into tears. She was chilled, nervous and over-wrought; the shock of what she had seen had been greater than she realized, and she fell into a frenzy of anxiety and distress. Oh, what could she do?—what could she do? She wasn’t to go out, and she couldn’t telephone! Telephoning would be the most dangerous of all, for them, with the Germans in charge of the exchanges—she realized that as she glanced longingly at the cream-coloured instrument by her bed. But she couldn’t fail them now; in a way they would look to her, she was sure, because she’d fixed so many things for them already. She thought of ringing up the Sörözö and asking the horn-faced woman to get a message to them—hadn’t Stefan said she was completely reliable? But it wasn’t on the telephone, as she discovered when she looked in the book.

  She heard the front door open; that would be her Father going off to the office. The thought of defying his express command, and slipping out, did come into her mind; but the habit of obedience is strong, and anyhow her Mother came in almost at once to ask about what Hope had seen, and to say how tiresome it was that she couldn’t go out and choose some flowers, because John was coming back for a late lunch, and the flowers needed re-doing. Hope, remembering Stefan’s gentleness with Mme Moranska, forced herself to be sympathetic, and went and picked over the flowers and re-did them on a reduced scale; that consoled her a little, as even the most modest deeds of charity always do console the doer of them—but it was one of the most wretched mornings of her life. She wondered once or twice, in a sort of astonishment, that it was possible to be so unhappy—surely there could be nothing worse than this agony of anxiety and helplessness? But there could be, as she was to find out.

  9

  “Well, we’re off!” Mr. Kirkland said, coming in briskly to the morning-room where his wife and daughter sat waiting for dinner. “The Legation is asking all Americans that can, except diplomats and consular officials, to leave at once.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Kirkland asked, with a calm which almost exasperated Hope, though indeed the good lady had no wish to leave Budapest, where for eight years she had found life so agreeable.

  “Legations always want to get rid of as many of their nationals as possible when there’s any trouble going,” said Mr. Kirkland; he poured himself out a drink while he enunciated this uncontestable truth, and brought his glass over to the fire. “I think they’re right; goodness knows what’s going to happen. Anyway, I agreed with the Counsellor—he spoke to me himself. I’ve decided to go.”

  “Well, John dear, I’m sure you’re right, whatever you decide,” his wife said resignedly. “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow night. I have all the sleepers and reservations fixed, right through to Istanbul. That’s what made me late, getting them—I went myself. There’s a good deal of pressure on the railway—the Jews, and so on, are all busy getting out.”

  “What about the office?” Mrs. Kirkland asked—and for this question Hope was forced to admire her. Mother adored her flat—and she wasn’t saying a word about leaving it, or getting packed and off in under thirty-six hours.

  “I’m leaving Nagy in charge; you know, our local sub-manager.” (Mrs. Kirkland did know; she also recognized this gentleman’s name, though Mr. Kirkland, correctly but surprisingly, pronounced it “Nodge”.)

  “Will he manage all right?” she asked.

  “Yes. Nagy is good. Anyway he’ll have to. But he will, as long as it’s possible to manage anything. Nagy is good,” Mr. Kirkland repeated.

  “What about the flat?”

  Hope asked this.

  “We’ll leave it the way it is. Only pack your clothes and the things you really need; there’s sure to be trouble on the train if we try to take too much stuff. It will be l
ocked up, and Bill will keep one key and Kálmán the other, so he can come in and air it now and again, he and Margit.” (Margit, Mrs. Kirkland’s maid, was Kálmán the butler’s wife.) “I’ll fix that with Kálmán. And Alice, you give all the servants six weeks’ wages in lieu of notice—here’s some money.” He drew a fat envelope out of his pocket and tossed it into his wife’s lap.

  “Kálmán and Margit ought to have more than six weeks’ wages, if they’re going to come and air the flat and see to things for some time,” said Mrs. Kirkland mildly.

  “I know. I’ve fixed that with Bill—he’ll pay them a retainer. And I’ll have references typed for the lot of them at the office if you’ll give me a list, dear: their names, and how long they’ve been here—I’m damned if I know any of their surnames! I suppose we can recommend them all?”

  “Oh yes, they’re all very good.”

  “Mother darling, the chef is just a plain thief,” Hope put in.

  “Well maybe—I fancy chefs usually are, they have such opportunities,” said Mrs. Kirkland, quite untroubled. “But he’s a good chef—lots of them are robbers, and cook badly with it. Chef doesn’t; he cooks well.”

  Her husband laughed.

  “O.K.—good reference for Chef.”

  “But John,” Mrs. Kirkland said, at last advancing one of her own preoccupations, “what about the silver? I don’t think we ought to leave that here: for one thing it would hardly be fair to Kálmán—it’s a big responsibility. And there’s a lot of my family things—like those spoons of my Great-grandmother’s, made out of British prize money melted down from the War of Independence—that I’d really rather not lose.”

  “How big would it be, packed? A grip?”

  “Oh no—a cabin-trunk. Only I haven’t a cabin-trunk to spare. It came in two big crates.”

  “Well get it packed in anything you have, and I’ll send a truck round to take it to the Legation, or the Consulate. When can you have it ready?”