They Were Counted (26 page)

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF THE THIRD DAY
Balint found himself at the end of the line. It was a quiet stand with few birds coming his way, and it was where he nearly always found himself for, as a comparatively near relation, second cousin to the hostess, and an indifferent shot, he had no claims to a better place and he was not needed to ‘help’ the guests of honour.

Although the beaters were rattling away furiously in the
distance
the birds were all being directed to the far end of the line where guns were going off as rapidly as in battle. Where Balint stood only a few wise old cocks moved quietly about in the brush having discovered that they should never run in the direction they were being herded and, above all, that they should never leave the ground. They strutted in two’s and three’s not far from Balint, only occasionally putting out their emerald-green necks, waiting for a good moment to run to the next block of cover.

Balint had never been an ambitious or even very eager shot and now he welcomed his quiet corner as it gave him time to think.

He was still troubled by the talk he had had with Slawata. Whenever he had been alone in the two days that had followed, the Counsellor’s indiscreet confidences came constantly to his mind insisting that he decide where he stood. That much was clear: the whispers about the Heir were true; he was planning the breakup of the old Hungarian constitution.

Balint pondered the programme outlined by Slawata:
centralization
, rule by an Imperial Council, the ancient kingdom of
Hungary
reduced to an Austrian province, and national boundaries to be re-arranged statistically according to the ethnic origin of the inhabitants! Why all this? To what purpose? Slawata had given him the answer: Imperial expansion in the Balkans so that feudal kingdoms for the Habsburgs reached the Sea of Marmora; and it was all to be achieved with the blood of Hungarian soldiers and paid for by Hungarian tax-money! So it was merely to help Vienna spread Austrian hegemony over the nations of the
Balkans
that Tisza was to be helped to build up the Hungarian
national
armed forces.

It seemed now to Balint that both parties in Parliament were fighting instinctively, but without a clear understanding either of their motives or of the inevitable results of their policies and strategy. While Tisza battled to strengthen the army, he could have no inkling that, once strengthened, it would be used to
suppress
the very independence it was designed to assure – and when the opposition delayed the implementation of Tisza’s policy by petty arguments about shoulder-flashes and army commands, they were unaware that, inadvertently, they were providing
ammunition
for those very arguments that in the near future would threaten the integrity of the constitution.

How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the
figures
, those cold statistics that took no account of people’s feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that
together
made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that
distinguished
each nation?

How would anyone believe that any good was to be obtained by adding the Balkan states to the already unwieldy Dual
Monarchy
and so increasing the Empire to a hundred million souls with differing traditions and cultures? Of course armies could be
recruited
and young men could die, but great States evolved only through centuries of social tradition and mutual self-interest; they were not imposed by bayonets. To believe the contrary would be as mad as the folly which had put the Archduke Maximilien on the throne of Mexico.

Balint had been taken so unawares by Slawata’s disclosures that he had not known how to reply to the the diplomat’s
proposals
. This distressed him because it revealed to him his own chronic failure ever to know the right answers. He needed deep reflection before he could make up his mind what to say.

Seated on his shooting stick at the end of a quiet shoot,
everything
became clear to him, not in any ordered sequence of words or arguments that like tiny pieces of mosaic gradually revealed a finished picture, but rather as a painter, before he put paint to canvas, envisages the finished effect.

 

‘Why, you look just like Rodin’s
Penseur
!’ The mocking voice came from Fanny Beredy who, a smile on her beautiful face, had come up and stood beside him. Balint offered her his seat.

‘What deep, interesting thoughts am I disturbing? I hope you’re not cross!’ she said, accepting the stick.

‘Very!’ laughed Abady, who only now realized that the first beat was finished and that he must wait for the second line to start. He sat on the ground at Fanny’s feet.

‘I have to ask. With you Transylvanians it’s so difficult to know where you are! One’s never sure of one’s welcome!’ She laughed, and when Balint protested, she went on, quite seriously: ‘But it’s true!
You
can’t see it, but I can. You’re quite different from the rest of us here. You’re an individual, not moulded out of one
pattern
as we are – the group here that is. One can never be sure what your reaction will be, or why!’

‘Perhaps from living with bears?’

‘Oh, they are sweet! Nice clumsy bumbling little bears. Oh, no, it isn’t that. The only two I know are you and Gyeroffy, and you two are much more amusing animals.’

‘Monkeys, perhaps? They can be amusing!’

‘Oh, no! More like birds of prey, hawks, always gazing into the far distance, to the horizon, and never noticing what lies at their feet, what is close at hand.’

‘And what is close at hand?’

Fanny gave him a rapid sideways glance, and then looked away. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just said it not meaning anything in particular,’ she continued, chatting lightly and jumping from one subject to another, perhaps so as to deflect his attention from what she had just said.

‘Cocks to the right! Cocks to the right!’ The beaters’ cries brought Balint back to his feet, shooting what he could of the
sudden
rush of birds in the sky above. He also bagged a few hares on the ground.

As suddenly as it had begun the beat was over. While the fallen birds were being collected, most of the guns went back to the waiting carriage. Balint waited until only he and Fanny, the two Lubianszky girls and Laszlo remained behind.

‘Gyeroffy’s a cousin of yours, isn’t he?’ asked Fanny. ‘He said he’d accompany me and I had my music sent over yesterday, but somehow he seems to have forgotten.’

‘How boorish of him! I’ll remind him.’

‘No! Don’t say anything about it! It’s not important. It was just seeing him there in front of us …’ She quickened her pace and moved forward between the rows of beaters carrying the bag to the game carts.

Abady, following behind her, noticed her strange swaying walk. Fanny placed one foot precisely in front of the other and Balint realized that if she were walking through snow she would make a single line of tracks like a wild cat.

 

As the guests gathered in the red drawing-room Balint turned to Laszlo and asked: ‘Are you going back tonight?’

‘I think so. If I start at half past nine I can catch the midnight milk train.’ Laszlo spoke somewhat uncertainly. He did not look at his cousin as his eyes were fixed the end of the room where Montorio and Klara were sitting on a sofa and sipping tea.

Klara had chosen this place so that her stepmother, from her chair in the next room, could see how well she was obeying orders.

‘I asked because Countess Fanny mentioned her singing. I think that she’s a trifle hurt that you didn’t play for her yesterday. Perhaps you should say something to her?’

‘Oh, Lord! I completely forgot. Well, maybe I’ll stay on; it would be churlish not to. One night more or less won’t make all that difference.’

Balint looked sharply at his cousin. He regretted immediately that he had given him a reason for staying on as he sensed that Laszlo had taken advantage of this pretext even though his real reason was something quite different. Noticing how tense and
tormented
his cousin looked, and how his gaze always returned to the sofa at the end of the room, Balint realized that what he had always assumed was a mere cousinly flirtation had taken on for Laszlo a fatal seriousness: fatal for Laszlo, for Balint grasped what apparently his cousin had not, that there would be a thousand
obstacles
standing in the way of any happy fulfilment to such a dream. He wondered if Klara returned Laszlo’s love and, if she did, whether she had the determination and stamina to overcome what lay ahead. Dismissing these thoughts from his mind, he said: ‘We can leave together if you like, tomorrow morning?’

‘Why not? We came together, we go together,’ and his look made the words into a promise. Then, to justify what he was doing, Laszlo went over to the chair where Fanny was sitting and started to talk about what she would like to sing that evening.

 

The long Bösendorfer grand stood at one end of the music-room and in its curve, leaning back against the mellow walnut sheen of the piano, stood Fanny Beredy, conscious that her pose showed her supple figure at its best and that her salmon-pink dress and golden honey-coloured hair stood out advantageously against the apple-green of the walls and the ivory and dove-grey of the
panelling
. Apart from Fanny herself, everything in the room was in pastel shades, even the furniture standing around the walls and the cherry-wood parquet floor. High above, only the stucco swags of flowers that bordered the ceiling were in stronger shades of
angry
blue and gold.

Candles burned in two three-branched candelabra on the piano for, when electric light had been installed, no one had thought to put a point nearby.

Laszlo was playing soft roulades while the other guests came in and sat down. Several armchairs had been placed in front of the doors into the library and here the princess and the older ladies were seated. Behind them were their husbands, who had most unwillingly been induced to abandon their cards, all except the field marshal who had chosen a sofa near the piano either
because
he was a little deaf or else to be closer to the beautiful Fanny.

When everyone had taken their places Fanny moved round to Laszlo and gave him a sign that she was ready. He played the first notes and she began to sing – it was Schumann’s
Mondnacht.

She sang beautifully, with the ease of a well-trained voice, which, if not exceptionally powerful, was rich and warm
especially
in the lower register; and from the moment she started it was clear that she was entirely absorbed by the music. The gay, flirtatious, light-hearted Fanny that everyone knew was changed into a completely different person; simple, sincere, without either artifice or the smallest sign of self-consciousness, a transition as
remarkable
as it was unexpected. She stood very straight,
seemingly
mesmerized by the music, and her eyes, normally hooded and watchful like those of a bird of prey, opened wider and wider as if she were hypnotized by some apparition being brought ever
closer
on the wings of the song and only fading as the last notes died away. Then she closed her eyes with infinite resignation.