by Ann Bridge
Tibor, listening to her, was struck, as Bill Hershey had been struck, by her new gravity, her new maturity. Loving this Pole had done great things for her. He realized at once, of course, from the way she spoke, that it had been what Henry James would have called “a virtuous attachment”—but then he had gone nap on its being that during that very odd conversation with Bill, over drinks in the café next to the garage. He saw it all so clearly. The very young girl, in circumstances of perfect ease and security, fancying herself in love with delightful young man A; and then—this emerged more and more as she described her acquaintance with the Moranskis—discovering, in entirely novel circumstances of danger and insecurity, the reality of love with young man B. Hope’s own interior story was really one of escape, quite as much as that of the friends who had, thanks to her, physically escaped from Hungary: escape from a foggy happy unreality into a sharp-edged, dangerous, unhappy reality, which even in this short time had brought her something of the fulfilment that suffering always brings.
And as for the things she had done under this impulse of which she was so much ashamed!—he was left almost gasping as she told him how after arranging the corpse—“We used your carnations for her, Tibor; they were exactly the Polish national colours”—she had sent Litka off with all her own papers, and then settled down on the camp bed to sleep, a sleep from which she was aroused by the Deuxième Bureau men.
“But didn’t you realize what a frightful risk you were running in impersonating the Polish girl?” the young man asked at one point, when she had told him a little of what happened when the special police arrived.
“Well, Father Kow—I mean the Polish priest—did say they might be nasty, but I didn’t think about it very much, because I was an American; and anyway I was pretty tired,” she replied matter-of-factly.
If it had been to Tibor Zichy, and just then, that Mother Antony had made her remark about Hope’s “potentiality of soul”, the nun would have got a much ampler response than she had had from Bill Hershey. Tibor was unacquainted, naturally with the English hymn which says—
“God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform”
but his thoughts at that moment were not far from it. He had a sudden sharp perception of the manner in which God does, more often than we recognize or would even dare to ask, make use of our poor, our all too natural human emotions to impel us to truly heavenly actions. Because Hope had fallen in love with Stefan Moranski—and had at the same time become emotionally involved, by pity and affection, with his sister and his old mother—she had been led to perform a work not only of mercy, but of true self-sacrifice and heroism, though without stopping to think why she did it, or indeed realizing that she had done anything of the sort. But this non-recognition of hers did not—his Catholic mind instantly registered the fact—lessen the ultimate value of what she had done. Father Kowalski had seen this at once, and the young Hungarian, who usually passed for a society butterfly, saw it as clearly as the little priest.
It struck him, too, forcibly, that he must try somehow to make her see that she was the better, not the worse, for this strange lyrical interlude with the young man called Stefan. If he didn’t, nobody would; not in her peculiar rigid world of black-and-white moral imperatives. He poured another cocktail for each of them, thinking with the quickness of his race as he did so, and then spoke.
“It is really a wonderful thing for Sam that this has happened—your falling in love with Monsieur Stefan, I mean.”
“For Sam? What on earth do you mean? I feel awful about Sam, Tibor.”
“I feel sure you do—and you are quite wrong. Listen—will you listen?”
“Yes, surely—only I can’t think what you mean.”
“That is why you must listen,” he said rather dogmatically, making her giggle at his manner. “Now see—you told me yourself just now that when you got engaged to Sam you were really only looking for fun and pleasure—it was not in the least a mentally dedicated love.”
She nodded her head gravely at the phrase, as if it had rung a bell in her mind. Tibor saw this, and was glad.
“But when you fell in love with this Pole,” he went on, “it was something quite different. You loved with your mind as well as with your heart—your young, silly heart.”
“How can you know all this?” Hope cried then, quite loudly. “Oh, it’s absolutely true!”
“Of course it is true. Before you met Stefan you had no idea of what love really is—now, in this love that you had for him, you have discovered it.”
“Yes, that’s true too,” she said thoughtfully. “But all the same”—she recurred to her own idea—“what about Sam?” she almost wailed.
“Sam will benefit,” he said roundly. “He will profit all his life, if you go on and marry him, as I understand you mean to do”—she nodded again, slowly. “Because now he will be married to someone who knows a little of what love means, instead of to a pretty shallow puppet.” He leant forward and took her hand. “Dear Hope, will you forgive me, because this is so important? Were you not a pretty shallow puppet when you got engaged to Sam?”
“Oh yes, I was! I know it! I told you so, didn’t I?—only not in your clever words. A puppet,” she repeated slowly. “They dance, don’t they? Yes, I was a dancing puppet. I didn’t measure up to Sam at all.”
“Well, now you do,” the young man said. “I wish you would recognize this. An unfulfilled love can do so much—and I take it you both realized that your love must remain unfulfilled.”
He paused, scanning her face, giving her time to absorb his words; he did not want to sweep her along too fast in a spate of new ideas. Hope, her hand still gently clasped in his, sat looking past him into the sunlit garden, frowning a little; she was trying to measure, against the neat gay flower-beds which she did not really see, a future full of challenge—both in its difficulties and in its promise. At last her eyes came back to his, with a tiny shadow of fear in them: the fear he had heard in her voice on the telephone, now visible.
“But Tibor,” she began—“Do you think I should—I mean, after this, will Sam and I be able to—”
“Hullo! You both there?” Bill’s voice fairly trumpeted his greeting from the hall outside, whence followed sounds of cheerful colloquy with Erich as he took off his hat and coat. Slowly Tibor rose to his feet, releasing Hope’s hand. But, Bill, why couldn’t you have given us another five minutes, he thought regretfully. He could guess so well what her questions would have been, if she had been given time to frame them; but now she hadn’t, and she would have to answer them alone. All the age-old questions: “Shall I tell him? Will he understand? Shall we both be able to accept the past, and let it help, not harm our future together?” No, that last was wrong. It would never occur to Hope, with her inexperienced literal-ness about right and wrong as seen in America, to understand how often some of the finest and truest relationships are built on the wreckage of earlier frustrated ones. He himself, though, young as he was, had seen precisely that happen over and over again; and in Hope’s case he felt a certain confidence that given time—and given too Sam, that patient, tolerant, persevering individual—she would find the right answers. He had said all there was time for, all he could—well, almost all. As Bill Hershey, affectionate and hearty, irrupted into that pleasant drawing-room, so unwontedly charged with emotion, Tibor spoke very quietly—“Yes, dearest Hope, you will.”
“Well, you two! Got drinks? That’s right. I’ll join you.” He poured out a glass for himself, and raised it to Hope.
“Here’s to you, Hopey! Your parents are safe, and waiting for you; so’s your young man—one of the very best! And you’ll see them all this evening—there’s a plane to Sofia around tea-time, and I’ve had a call put through to your Father to say you’re coming. I’ll drive you out to Budaörs.” He pulled something out of his pocket, and held it out to her. “I’ve fixed you a fresh passport, too—since you will go slinging your own away!”
Hope, rather pale, said�
��“Oh, thanks a million, Bill. How good you are.”
Tibor, very slowly, also raised his glass and said—“A thousand wishes, Hope.” She bent her head again, gravely, in acknowledgement.
They went in to lunch. Over it—“Did you get to the Parliament Building this morning, Tibor?” Bill asked. “I couldn’t make it.”
“Yes, I was there. I wish you had not missed it—it was very moving.”
“What was happening?” Hope asked. She had begun to recover herself after Bill’s announcement, and her sense of social obligation re-emerged.
“Teleki’s funeral,” both men told her simultaneously—and she suddenly remembered the garage hand pulling off his cap only three days before, and what he had said.
“Do tell us about it, Tibor,” she urged.
State funerals in Hungary in those days always included a religious ceremony in the Parliament Building, whose lovely slender dome, rising ribbed like a policeman’s helmet above the Danube, is such a feature of the profile of Pest, the lower and newer city. Within, the central space is surrounded by boxes, like an opera-house, in which the diplomatic body, Government officials, and those otherwise entitled to a place are present at the proceedings. Hope was familiar with the set-up; she had attended Count Csáky’s obsequies there only some three months earlier, and while Tibor spoke she could visualize the whole scene.
“Of course the place was packed, and the crowds outside immense,” he began. “But there was such an emotion!—it could almost be felt, vibrating like the bass string of a ’cello. Bárdossy made the oration—he spoke quite remarkably; I did not know he had it in him. The catafalque of course was on the east side, as it always is—so superb, that black velvet and silver—and the Prince-Primate of Esztergom went over to cense and asperse it: he was a most imposing figure with his train five metres long, carried by those ecclesiastics in their gorgeous antique robes. But all that splendour wasn’t the truly moving thing.”
“What was the truly moving thing?” Hope asked, as he paused.
“Those little Boy Scouts; his own troop, with whom he was to have made his Communion four mornings ago—you remember that Teleki Paul’s Scout uniform was all laid out ready for him to put on, when they found him dead. There they were, those children, in their comic little shorts and shirts, right in front; I do not know who arranged this, but it was so right,” Tibor said eagerly. “Because just before the catafalque was taken out to be placed on the bier for the procession to the cemetery, they went forward and laid their own flowers on it—little bunches of common spring flowers such as you are so fond of,” he said, turning to Hope. “And they put them down on the velvet pall among all those huge grandiose wreaths from diplomats and the Government, and foreign Powers and rich people—so simple, so humble. Just what he would have liked best, for he was so simple and humble himself. And also a very good botanist,” Tibor added.
Hope did find this account moving—in her rather shaken state it brought the tears to her eyes. It was all so odd, and so intensely Hungarian—a Prime Minister who was both a botanist and a Boy Scout, and found time among his manifold official duties to train a group of little boys in tasks like making fires and tying knots; who had intended, before some treachery behind his back drove him to suicide in protest, to make his Communion with those same children. Between Tibor’s story and what was to come later that day, her inevitable meeting with Sam, she had had, she felt, all that she could take—to say nothing of Tibor’s views, still undigested, on her brief love-affair with Stefan. She was rather silent for the remainder of the meal and when they moved into the sitting-room for coffee she refused it, and said that she would like to go and rest. Could Anna be told to call her in time to drive out to the plane?
Bill said: “Yes, of course.” Tibor took her hand, and as he kissed it said: “Goodbye, Hope. Give Sam my love, and my especial congratulations.”
The Budaörs airfield lies some twenty minutes’ drive outside Budapest, near the village that gives it its name, in a shallow valley under a low ridge of hills clothed in the darkness of young pines, with grey rocks above and grassy slopes, in spring a wonderful place for wild flowers, below. For Hope Kirkland it was all full of memories. The road, a shiny grey-blue ribbon of faultlessly surfaced tarmac, was one of the roads one took driving out in summer to the Balaton, the immense lake, fifty miles long, which is Hungary’s playground par excellence—or was when Hungary still had playgrounds other than those organized by the State. And those pine-woods along the ridge had always been one of her favourite haunts in spring-time, when the small gorges running up into the miniature range had been sunny-yellow with Cornus, its lacy balls of bloom set thick along bare boughs, and the grass below was full of anemones and the huge shining faces of aconites, while tits made their little chipping noises among the pine-branches; further on, down towards the rich ploughland, there were spinneys of hazel and oak scrub which later in the year were ringing with nightingales. In the gay little airport buildings she had so often met people and seen people off—especially Sam, on his frequent journalist’s comings and goings. It was with a rather poignant sense of finality that she drove out there that afternoon with Bill; for her, this was almost certainly the end of her life in Budapest, which she had enjoyed so deeply; which was in fact the bulk of her really conscious life so far—for one is not very conscious before one is ten, she thought.
The sense of finality was stronger still when the plane rose, circled to gain height, crossed the pine-clad ridge, and began to wing its way steadily south. Below her now lay the city, with its seven bridges spanning the Danube; there was the Horthy Miklós Bridge, whose black slender line had been so much a foreground to her emotions during that last afternoon with Stefan up on the Gellért-hegy—the sight of it brought him sharply into her mind. Why had she loved him so quickly, and so much, she asked herself, as she saw out of her tiny square of window the great river broadening to enclose Csepel Island—just by the bridge was a tiny speck which could only be the Kis-Kocsma, whose rough walls had glowed so red while he and she sat and drank barack in a happy silence, after their day on the Hármashatár-hegy. Where had the magic come from? Encouraged by Tibor’s fearless words to look her love for Stefan in the face unashamedly, she sought for the answer to that question while the aircraft sped on over the great plain, geometrically flat, and Budapest sank away behind into the mists of distance. What was it? What was there about them that had made the whole family so enormously attractive—more, valuable to her?
She went on pondering the answers to those questions for most of the flight. Well of course there was their outstanding intelligence and good breeding—but lots of other people, French and English and Hungarians, were intelligent and well-bred. No, there was something special about Poles, or these Poles, anyway—a brilliant directness of perception and, still more, an equally brilliant directness of speech, immensely endearing and lovable. She remembered what Litka said to her, that time when they met alone in the Sörözö—“I should like to see you every day.” What other girl would have said that? It was of course more normal—because young men who were in love with one would say pretty well anything—that Stefan outside the Herend shop should have said—“We cannot part like this!” But to say it right there on the pavement, with people who certainly understood French passing by all the time, was less usual—it was part of the Polish simplicity and direct action about important things, and of the clear Polish perception of what things were important. Oh, it was about that that they were so wonderful! Stefan up on the Gellért-hegy had been as lucid as Tibor about the hopelessness of their feeling for one another, despite the fact that he loved her, and was deeply involved; but while Tibor had spoken in a general way of their love remaining “unfulfilled,” Stefan had been utterly concrete: “No home, no children, no stable old age.” That was the thing, that directness and concreteness; combined with all the rest, courage and danger and charm, no wonder that one fell in love.
She had about reached tha
t conclusion when a general chatter and gesturing in the plane caused her to peer out. Away to the right she could see distant smoke rising in the angle formed by the junction of two great rivers, the Sava and the Danube, of course—still rising, slowly, from ruined Belgrade. It hid the ruins, but it covered such a large area as to give a horrible idea of destruction; Hope shuddered, thinking how many had perished there, and how easily all the people she loved best in the world might have perished among them. But as that sinister smoke fell behind she sat back again, and her thoughts raced ahead—to Sofia and Sam. She pulled out one of Bill’s cigarettes and lit it, nervously. Why had Tibor said “Yes, dearest Hope, you will,” just as Bill came in—when she hadn’t even had time to put her interior question into words? How could he know what I was going to ask, she thought. Well, he must have guessed—easily enough, maybe; but could he be right in thinking that Sam would profit in the end from her love for Stefan? And recurring to her earlier train of thought she remembered how positively Stefan had asserted, up on the Gellért-hegy, that Sam would understand. She recalled his very words: “Sam will understand this, you know.” Were they both right, Stefan and Tibor? Obviously Sam and Stefan must have known one another pretty well, whatever their involvement had been—Sam had shown such great anxiety about Stefan and Jurek getting safely away, and had even got her mixed up in their affairs and their dangers to that end. Men presumably did understand each other’s point of view; and here were two of the ones she liked and trusted most, Tibor and Stefan, saying practically the same thing. Were they right, after all?
A sharp pain in her ears suddenly made her unable to think of anything else. The plane was coming down. As it banked she caught a glimpse of the pink-and-white ice-creamy little capital, streaked with the green of its leafy avenues; and with a sudden intense relief, ears or no ears, she thought that in two or three minutes she would be seeing her Father and Mother. She had treated them terribly, she would have to do quite a bit of explaining; but in the end they would forgive her and love her, whether they understood or not—they always had and they always would; that was parents! Still under the spell of that relaxed and happy confidence, eager to meet them, she climbed down the steps out of the plane, and found her hand being wrung by Sam’s.