They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  She was thinking this, and inwardly was boiling with rage while Balint, self-consciously talking rather too much, was trying to explain his plans to her. ‘Winckler has made all the measurements … painted posts indicate the parcelling … the nursery for young trees … huts for the foresters, maps, tripods …’ He went on until he sensed that his mother was not even listening but was thinking only of one thing, as he was himself, and that was of when he was going to see Adrienne again.

  ‘So I’m to be left alone as much as when you were abroad en poste! I suppose I must accept my fate!’ said Countess Abady when he was about to leave her.

  Balint took the old lady in his arms and kissed her face and hands.

  But his mother pushed him away coldly, saying, in a cool voice, ‘Well! Go, if you feel you have to! Just go!’

  The meeting seemed to go quite successfully. It was held in the office of the Prefect of Banffy-Hunyad and attended by the four notaries-public of the district where Balint intended to begin his co-operative movement. Three of them, while accepting Balint’s orders, expressed the gravest doubts as to whether the plan would work, saying that they would be more than surprised if the people of any mountain village would co-operate with those from another by whom they were treated as strangers. These three thought that the idea would never work and that the people would not even understand it. But, naturally, they said, if that was what the government wanted then they would do their best.

  Only Gaszton Simo from Gyurkuca took a more positive view. He was now riding even higher than he had been before. He was on terms of intimacy with the Prefect, who was his cousin, and he never let anyone forget that his uncle was a Court Chamberlain. It had only been due to an unlucky stroke of fate that he himself had never risen above the status of a country notary – just before his final examinations there had been some little difficulty, some prank, concerning the debating society’s petty cash, but it had all been hushed up and smoothed over by his family. So here he was, a gentleman, independent, doing the job of a notary in a country district where such a man, in such a post, could be a real pasha. And this year his sense of his own importance had been further swollen by his election as chairman of all the notaries in the district. Simo was no fool.

  All his life he had given his allegiance to whoever had been in power. After the days of Kalman Szell it had been Istvan Tisza. Now he bowed the knee to Ferenc Kossuth, just as recently he had done to Kossuth’s one-time sworn enemy, Gyula Justh.

  ‘I’ll see that this gets done all right!’ he said confidently, his little button-like eyes gleaming shrewdly beneath his bushy eyebrows. ‘I’ll round up as many people as you want for the co-operative! How many do you think will do?’ he asked Abady in a familiar tone.

  Balint found Simo every bit as antipathetic as he had each time he had met him in the past.

  ‘It’s not a question of what I want. The people must come in voluntarily, because they want to. We have to explain to them that it’s to their own advantage. We must start with some of the more intelligent among them. It doesn’t matter if they are poor or in debt because that’s why the whole movement has been started – to get them out of the money-lenders’ clutches. It is this that we have to make clear to them. If one approaches them with understanding and kindness we are sure to have results. Look what happened last year. One of those money-lenders on the mountain got himself killed during the winter. What was his name? Rusz Pantyilimon, wasn’t it? Such a thing would never have happened if all the villagers had joined together.’

  Gaszton Simo laughed, but his expression was surly enough. ‘Yes, yes. That Rusz got himself beaten to death.’

  Simo’s expression clouded over, not, however, because he was thinking of the Rusz’s fate, but because he knew Balint had alluded to the matter only to remind him that Abady suspected he had been implicated in the money-lending traffic which had led to the hated usurer’s murder. As a disciplined civil servant, however, he did not allow himself to be upset by the allusion but merely signified his agreement with everything that the government had seen fit to command. Discreetly he winked at the Prefect.

  By the time the meeting ended it had been decided that the first co-operative would be started in three villages where there were Romanian as well as Hungarian farmers, and that it would also be open to those living in smaller settlements in the mountains nearby.

  That afternoon Abady drove up to the forest. It would be the first time that he had come to his newly built log cabin in the meadow near to where the Abady lands marched with those of Count Uzdy.

  In the evening he sent his men away and remained alone.

  He dined at a little table set in front of the cabin, sitting there for a long time afterwards and watching the night fall. Hardly a sound could be heard except for a soft rustling of leaves as if, in some mysterious way, the forest itself were breathing.

  Finally he dragged himself to bed, knowing that he could not expect Adrienne to come before morning. Maybe as early as dawn?

  Had she received his few formal scribbled lines … would she be able to slip away … perhaps she had changed her mind … would everything go as they had planned it?

  As he waited every nerve in Balint’s body was racked with yearning.

  ‘I’ll have to go back now,’ said Adrienne. ‘It’ll look strange if I’m out in the forest too long.’

  She walked across to the little window which opened to the east and flung back the shutters. A golden shaft of sunlight shot into the cabin and marked out a clearly defined square on the beaten clay floor until, all at once, the inside of the little cabin, previously so mysterious in the half light, lost its magic in the sober glare of morning.

  It was the simplest and most ordinary of dwellings. It was exactly like any other refuge built in the mountains for the use of the hunter. The sides were made of round logs while the crevices between them were filled with a mixture of earth and moss to keep out the wind and the light. It contained only an iron cooking-stove in one corner, a zinc wash-stand and a simple wide bed of planks on which had been thrown a mattress filled with sweet-smelling hay instead of the usual coarse straw. Hooks had been fixed into the walls so that Balint could hang up his clothes, gun and cartridge bag. There were no luxuries, but it was all they wanted. Careful not to do anything to draw attention to themselves, Balint and Adrienne cared little for what their refuge contained or looked like, provided it was somewhere they could celebrate their re-found love. For both of them the real world was to be found only in this humble little cabin.

  For some time before Addy started for home they sat side by side on the wooden bed holding hands.

  Finally she started to say something, her golden onyx-like eyes not looking at him but staring straight ahead. Very slowly, almost heavily, she said, ‘You will have to come over to see us at Almasko soon. Uzdy heard that you were in the district in May – but you didn’t come then – and as soon as he returns home he’ll get to know you’re here again… and it won’t look right if you don’t come over. He’d find it strange.’

  Adrienne was deep in thought, thinking what she had not told Balint, about the way in which her husband had already mentioned the subject.

  About two weeks before they had been having coffee in the drawing-room after lunch, the Countess Clémence in her usual place on the sofa, Adrienne sitting in an armchair nearby and Uzdy walking up and down the room with his usual heavy affected tread. Suddenly he had stopped.

  He had been directly in front of Adrienne’s chair. Looking down at her from his great height he said sharply, ‘Did you know Abady was in the neighbourhood?’

  Adrienne had not known how to answer. For a moment she considered the alternatives: if she said ‘No’ and then Uzdy later found out she had seen Balint it could lead to his death; yet if she said ‘Yes’ it might lead to so many embarrassing questions about who had told her and where and when she had seen him, that she was sure to get entangled in a web of untruth from which she could not escape.<
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  Better deny it, come what may! She looked up and met his eyes and at once said, ‘No, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Just so! Just so! Of course, of course! But it seems he was here in May and spent several days in the forests quite close to us without so much as honouring us even once with his august presence. Honouring my mother and myself, and you, of course. Mainly you, but the rest of us too.’

  Adrienne made no reply. Then her husband walked slowly once or twice up and down the room again before stopping once more in front of her.

  ‘Don’t you find it strange?’ he asked. ‘Almost insulting, I should say, according to the normal rules of politeness, not that I care much for such things; but he was one of your admirers long ago, was he not … oh, en tout honneur, of course?’ And he laughed, his long moustaches somehow seeming even longer as the chuckle rumbled in his throat.

  Soon Uzdy had returned to the subject. ‘Don’t you find it odd? Yes, very odd, that’s the word for it, odd! Last year he called on us twice but since the autumn, after you had returned from Venice, he hasn’t been near us. You see why I find it odd, don’t you?’

  Adrienne shuddered, her skin like goose-flesh in sudden alarm. The reference to Venice was unexpected and menacing. However she managed to answer with apparent calmness, ‘Well, I’ve hardly been here since Venice. Remember how much I’ve had to be at Mezo-Varjas!’

  ‘Of course, of course! True enough! I beg your pardon,’ said Uzdy, waving his arms about in agreement. Then once again he walked down the length of the room several times before finally stopping near the door. ‘I still think it’s very odd!’ he called back and though he laughed as he said it Adrienne seemed to detect a menacing glint in his slanting tartar eyes. ‘Yes, indeed. Odd!’ Then he opened the door and stepped out, very slowly, and without making a sound closed the door behind him.

  Adrienne glanced at her mother-in-law. Countess Clémence was sitting bolt upright, absolutely immobile. She was looking straight ahead of her with the intense expression on her face of one who suddenly hears faint echoes of some ancient memory. It was as if she had heard nothing of what had actually been said.

  All this was in Adrienne’s mind when she spoke to Balint, but she had said no more than she felt to be absolutely necessary.

  She told him nothing of how worried she had been when, later, she had wondered what her husband had really meant by those sinister words. Why, she asked herself, had he mentioned the subject at all? Did he know anything of what there was, and had been, between her and Balint? Why should he, who never wanted visitors and never invited anyone to the house, suddenly want to see AB, of all people? Why just him? And the talk about Venice? Did he really suspect something or had it been just a chance remark? If he did suspect then everything he said must be part of some plan of his own, some sinister private game in which she would be used as a mere pawn to lure her lover to Almasko. Perhaps it would be wisest to prevent his coming, to keep him, at all costs, away from her husband.

  For a long time Adrienne had wrestled with this dilemma. In the end she had decided that Balint should come, no matter what the outcome might be. There was no way by which she could keep them from ever meeting each other again and so it seemed best to go forward and confront what Fate had in store for them. Adrienne’s nature, so frank and full of daring, could accept no other course, no unworthy little game of marital hide-and-seek. And, after all, she reflected, they only had one death to fear and that they had already faced in Venice.

  Even so, when she had said, ‘It is necessary that you come …’ Adrienne had not dared to look at Balint, lest he should read in her face something of what was in her mind.

  They agreed that when Balint heard that Uzdy had returned home he would present himself at Almasko at noon on the same day.

  A few days later, dressed in shooting clothes and with a shoulder bag containing a change of linen and a pair of shoes, Balint turned up at the Uzdys’.

  As he arrived in the forecourt Balint again thought how sombre and gloomy it all looked. The outbuildings that flanked the main mansion were hidden behind carefully trimmed yew hedges. The lawn at the centre of the carriage sweep was circular and all the window shutters on the main were tightly closed as if no one was in residence. The very neatness of everything seemed to underline a certain unfriendliness, a lack of welcome. Nothing had been left to chance, there was no disorder, everything was carefully and meticulously under control. At the base of the walls, for example, there was no hint of moss on the carefully dressed stone of the great uniform blocks that made up the foundations. And on the surrounding gravel not a single weed was to be found, any more than there was a flower to spoil the virgin symmetry of the lawn.

  Everything had the perfection of ice.

  Balint stopped at the huge front door. No one was to be seen.

  He wondered what he should do. In any other country house he would simply have opened the door himself and gone in search of his hosts. Somehow here that was something he could not do. It would be wiser, also, he thought, not to risk meeting Adrienne before he had greeted Uzdy or his mother.

  He had been waiting for a few moments when the great oak door swung silently inwards and the elderly butler, Maier, stepped out.

  ‘The ladies are not in the house, your Lordship,’ said Maier after making the appropriate greetings to a visitor. ‘The Dowager Countess has gone for a drive with her grandchild and Countess Adrienne has gone for a walk to the ruins. If your Lordship would care to walk in that direction he would be sure to meet the Gracious Countess.’

  ‘I would prefer first to pay my respects to Count Pali if he is in the house. Would you tell him that I am here?’

  Old Maier shook his head.

  ‘His Lordship is at home but I am afraid he is working and has given orders not to be disturbed.’

  There was something so infinitely sad in the old serving-man’s voice that Balint looked up at him sharply and asked, ‘Busy with the estate accounts, I suppose?’

  Maier lifted one of his powerful arms in a vague gesture which suggested the rolling of the ocean’s waves. He looked at Abady as if seeking sympathy, ‘Nowadays his Lordship is on to something else, some indexes, or something like that … a lot of indexes. Your Lordship must forgive me, I really don’t know. But please come in.’

  Balint decided he would prefer to wait in the garden. He went round the house and down to that bench on that side of the mansion which faced the view. There, far away on the horizon, he could see the two butter-coloured walls of the ruined castle’s donjon with, below them, firstly the dense oak forests and then, closer to where he sat, the grassy park on the sloping mountainside below, that park which was dotted with dark green box and thuya but on which no flower was allowed to bloom.

  The bench was placed between the pillars which supported the elaborate rococo balcony which led from the main drawing-room. Balint had only been sitting there for a few minutes when, from one of the windows of the strangely inappropriate Swiss chalet-like wing which projected at right angles from the otherwise classical building, came the voice of Pal Uzdy. A few seconds afterwards his face too appeared at the same window, pale and oriental-looking, framed in the darkness of the window’s small opening.

  ‘Well! Well! Well! So here you are. I am pleased to see you, very pleased indeed. You can’t imagine how pleased I am!’ From under his wide-spreading moustaches Uzdy’s teeth gleamed as he looked down on his visitor and let out a peal of laughter. ‘Wait there! I’ll be down straight away.’

  The wooden gallery creaked under his measured steps and so did the stairway at the corner of the projecting wing.

  Uzdy emerged from the stair and walked slowly towards Balint. His manner was far more amiable than it had usually been in the past; not only did he shake hands but he also patted Balint on the shoulder.

  ‘It was good of you to come, good of you to come!’ repeated Uzdy. Balint had never known him so welcoming. As his host plied him with questions as to where he no
w was and what he had been doing, all sign of his habitual cold ironic manner had vanished. Only, from time to time when he turned in Balint’s direction, his small slanting eyes seemed to have a peculiar glitter.

  They talked for a long time just as if they had always been good friends.

  At length Adrienne returned from her walk and the three of them strolled across the flowerless lawns making polite conversation. Then the butler announced that luncheon was served.

  Nothing exceptional occurred during the meal nor afterwards in the big oval drawing-room, which seemed as oppressive as ever with its cold grey walls and closed shutters. Everything was as ordered, as dull and conventional as it always had been, with heavy formal furniture symmetrically arranged with no sign of anything personal left lying casually where someone had left it. Everything was in its carefully planned position as if no one had yet come to take up residence.

  The conversation at table and afterwards was also stilted and formal, mere words being forced out to fill a vacuum while each person’s thoughts were far away. Sometimes the hesitant flow of words faltered, but it was never allowed to stop altogether, for the old countess, who had been brought up to ‘make conversation’ lest a dinner table should be forced to endure the social solecism of silence, deftly introduced new subjects to keep things going in a proper manner.

  This went on for some time. As always when he came to Almasko, Balint sensed a floating menace in the air; it was as if the cold petrified atmosphere concealed something unspoken, mysterious and menacing.

  An hour was passed in meaningless insipid talk which was carried on principally by Abady and the old countess. After the meal Adrienne sat in silence, her amber eyes open wide as if she were expecting something. Uzdy, as so often, walked up and down the room, but did not speak. He went backwards and forwards between the fireplace and the long French windows which gave onto the balcony, and as he did so his slanting eyes turned more and more in the direction of Abady. From time to time his mouth contracted spasmodically. He seemed to be on the threshold of some important decision.