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

by Bánffy, Miklós

  She was tall and still beautiful, even though her dark hair was streaked with grey and her once radiantly pink complexion was now touched here and there with tiny dark-brown liver spots. She wore a tea-gown in the English fashion, the neck and sleeves sewn with festoons of old lace which set off her still beautiful hands and arms. Although the garment was loose and flowing she sat so erect that it was obvious that she also wore a tightly-laced corset.

  At the princess’s side sat one of the principal guests, Field Marshal Count Kanizsay, who commanded the national cavalry regiments, a heavy old man who had been a hero of the Bosnian occupation. He came from an ancient Hungarian family and was descended from the Kanizsay who fell with Zrinyi at the siege of Szigetvar. His ancestors had played a great part in the wars against the Turks, always serving the Habsburg interests, and in recognition of this service the Kanizsay coat of arms bore the motto Perpetuus in Komarvar and the head of the family was made hereditary military governor of that little Bosnian fortress. In spite of his family’s great national past the old soldier only spoke broken Hungarian, having spent all his life in German-speaking regiments of the Austro-Hungarian army. Although the field marshal had long retired from active service he always wore uniform, a grey tunic with a collar of gold braid, countless medal ribbons and one order, the Maria Theresia Cross, gleaming white on his still powerful chest.

  Sitting on the silken sofa on her hostess’s left was the wife of the field marshal, a massive, boring old German lady who was very conscious of her own importance in being related to the Wittelsbachs by a morganatic marriage; and the Countess Lubianszky, who had brought her two pretty daughters with her from Somogy. Opposite them sat the young and beautiful Countess Beredy, the lovely Fanny, who was obliged by her rank to seat herself with the old ladies even though she longed to be in the red salon with the young.

  The hostess and her principal guests sat in a circle round the tea table, where everything from the silver to the hot muffins and thin sandwiches was arranged in the fashionable English style. Beside the door to the adjoining salon the butler, Szabo, stood motionless with the face of a Roman emperor, together with a bearded man in the livery of a Kollonich Jäger. Two tall footmen in tailcoats served the guests, moving from one to another as silently as shadows.

  At a second table sat Klara and her two brothers, her cousins Stefi and Magda Szent-Gyorgyi, the two Lubianszky girls and a somewhat older young man, Fredi Wuelffenstein, who was Fanny Beredy’s younger brother.

  As Laszlo and Balint had passed through the red salon, and again as they had greeted their hostess and the others present, Laszlo could not help noticing his cousin’s calm assurance. Though every bit as polite and deferential as the occasion demanded, every movement, every word showed that he belonged to these circles; that he knew himself to be in every way their equal and in no way an intruder. Laszlo watched him with envy, wondering if he had acquired this air of smooth distinction while en poste abroad, and wondering too if he could ever attain the same ease, he to whom every greeting, every nod and handshake seemed fraught with condescension, as if he were no more than a humble serf tolerated by consciously superior beings.

  He knew he had no reason for this sense of inferiority; no one present was better born than he, indeed his own family was older than theirs, the Gyeroffys having been noble in the Middle Ages; and his own estate, though small and only bringing him a modest measure of independence, was an ancient freehold rather than a modern donation from the crown. He knew, too, that the grandeur of the Kollonich family dated only from the end of the seventeenth century when one of them had become a cardinal, while the great wealth they now displayed, indeed everything they owned – the great castle and estate, the palaces in Budapest and Vienna – had all been purchased by his cousins’ grandmother, the daughter of a banker called Sina, a Greek who had spent his life polishing the seat of his office desk. Why then, he wondered, did he, the descendant of conquering Magyar warlords, feel that his relations were grander, better, more distinguished, than he?

  All these thoughts vanished the instant that he held Klara’s soft hand in his and when he looked into her wide-open greenish-grey eyes and saw her warm smile of happiness and welcome.

  After exchanging a few words of polite conversation with everyone in the room, Balint Abady, who had not been at Simonvasar for several years, asked where he could find his host. Uncle Louis was in the smoking-room, replied Stefi, as their aunt did not allow cigars in her drawing-room. Indeed since the state rooms had been redecorated, Stefi went on in a low voice, Aunt Agnes hardly tolerated even cigarettes.

  Passing through a side door Balint and Laszlo went down a long, wide carpeted corridor which followed the horseshoe curve of one of the castle’s side wings. At last, at the far end, they reached the smoking-room, a vast tobacco-coloured apartment whose walls were covered with hunting trophies, stuffed heads of deer, chamois, wild boar, bear and buffalo, and countless sets of antlers on shield-shaped plaques of polished mahogany. The furniture, in contrast to that of his wife’s rooms, was heavy, comfortable, even shabby, with plenty of deep leather-covered chairs and ancient sofas.

  Uncle Louis cared nothing for fashion and when the Princess Agnes had spent a fortune in redecorating every other room in the castle he had allowed her her way providing that his own comfortable room was left untouched.

  Three men sat at ease in a corner of the vast, barely lit apartment. They were the host, a chubby man of middle height dressed in Austrian hunting clothes with a pair of carpet slippers on his feet; his brother-in-law, Antal Szent-Gyorgyi, beside him; and, sprawled in an ancient armchair facing them, the huge form of Pali Lubianszky. The prince was telling a seemingly endless and complicated story about an incident during the last deer stalk, and Pali Lubianszky was having difficulty in concealing his impatience.

  With every turn and twist of the story the host made sweeping gestures, imitating now the spread of the great antlers of the red deer, now the warning snorts and nervous movements of the fawns; and with every gesture he heaved himself from side to side so that the springs creaked under him, and with every sound it made it seemed as if the chair would collapse, as indeed it often had. Antal Szent-Gyorgyi looked silently on with a faint ironic smile as if that were what he was hoping would happen.

  The two brothers-in-law were extreme opposites – a greyhound and a pug. Szent-Gyorgyi was tall and thin, with a long narrow face and bluish-grey hair; Kollonich was fair with a round face, a tiny nose and small eyes almost buried in the fat of his cheeks, and he wore a moustache and a short round beard like the Emperor’s. Beneath Szent-Gyorgyi’s acquiline beak was a thin moustache clipped in the English style.

  Lubianszky did not conceal his pleasure when Balint and Laszlo came in, partly because it put an end to Prince Louis’ stalking tale – and sportsmen are rarely interested in any stories but their own – but principally because he was deeply interested in politics and wanted to hear from Balint the truth about the recent developments in Budapest, of which until now he knew only what he had read in the newspapers. Szent-Gyorgyi was also interested, but from a less nationalistic point-of-view, being a court official, Master of the Horse to the Emperor, and a natural courtier.

  The prince lit a new cigar as the others started to ply Balint with questions about what had happened in Parliament. Had he been present? What was the real truth? Who had said what? He must stay with them, sit down and recount all he knew.

  Laszlo took his leave and went to rejoin the girls, and Balint began his tale.

  The session of Parliament on the 18th of November was all that interested the four men in the smoking room.

  In Budapest things had been far from calm.

  When the House reassembled in November it was in an atmosphere of such tension that it was clear to all that a real storm was brewing. The Minister-President, Count Tisza, immediately submitted proposals for the reform of the House of Representatives and asked for the appointment of a committee to study them and,
if necessary, submit amendments. Even this moderate suggestion met with fierce obstruction from the demagogues, who tried every trick, every subterfuge to block agreement and talked out the Government’s proposals so as to prevent any progress toward their acceptance. In this mood of obstruction and artificially engendered resentment, the Leader of the Opposition announced his total rejection of the Tisza proposals.

  Then came the 18th of November.

  Since the previous day, a series of simultaneous though parallel meetings had been in session and on the afternoon of the fatal 18th, the opposition met behind closed doors. Late in the evening session of the House, members of the Government party started appearing in force and when Tisza finished speaking, with only occasional interruptions from the thirty-odd opposition members present, some Government supporters stood calling for an immediate vote. ‘Put it to the vote!’ they cried in increasing numbers. ‘A vote! A vote! Put it to the vote now!’ they cried from every corner of the Chamber; and in the bedlam the Speaker rose, waving a paper and mouthing words that no one could hear above the uproar.

  Balint told the story coldly, recounting what he had seen and heard that day as briefly as he could, suppressing all his personal impressions, keeping to himself much of the detail and all his own outraged feelings. But he had heard and seen everything that had happened and he would never forget it.

  What had really happened was this. After the closed meeting had ended, Balint went into the dark Chamber and stood behind the last row of benches facing the Speaker’s raised desk. Suddenly the supporters of the Government party started flooding in; they had all been in the bar waiting for the closed meeting to come to an end. They had rarely been present in such numbers and never in such a belligerent mood.

  Tisza rose to speak. His tall virile figure seemed etched in black before the upturned well-lit faces of the deputies seated behind him. In a firm voice, with strength and power and passion he warned the House what would happen if order was not restored to their debates. Speaking like one of the prophets of old his words became ever more impassioned, as once again he foretold the catastrophe that Hungary would face if all progress were to be blocked by petty party politics. Would only a great national upheaval, he asked, disastrous to everything they held dear, fatal to the greatness of the Hungarian nation, bring them to their senses? He begged, exhorted, commanded them to listen before it was too late. The left-wing members listened in silence, stone-faced. They stopped their interruptions and their clamour: it was as if they were under a spell.

  From time to time some members on the right jumped up and cried, ‘Put it to the vote! Vote!’ and started stamping their feet, but Tisza waved them back, determined to be heard to the end. And he went on despite the increasing noise and confusion, only barely keeping order by the authority or his voice and gesture, an authority increasingly challenged until, at his last ringing words, ‘Let the comedy end!’, his party rose in a body all crying out, ‘Vote! Vote! Vote!’ If any members of the opposition had shouted back no one could hear them; they were drowned in the roar of several hundred government voices.

  The Speaker stood up on his platform, waving a folded order-paper in a vain attempt to restore order. His mouth could be seen to move but not a sound could be heard above the uproar. Finally he had tottered down from his seat of authority apparently completely overcome.

  A crowd of members poured down to the floor of the Chamber and filled the wide space where the ‘Table of the House’ was covered with the law books and State papers. There they argued, shouted, gesticulated – a rabble out of control – and as the argument became more heated so a leaf of paper was thrown upwards, then a book or two, then more, not thrown in aggression, only upwards, apparently without reason.

  At this point Abady had left, weak with nausea, his head sick with a bitter sense of the deepest disillusion.

  Only Tisza’s speech had seemed real; only that had been honest, truly felt, sincere. The rest had been mere play-acting. All that jumping about and shouting, those apparently zealous members rising and calling for a vote, inciting the other members of their party, all that had been thought out and rehearsed in advance, as was the opposition’s attitude of shock and surprise: it was all a fake. Balint had turned away and walked swiftly down the corridor, his footsteps deadened by the soft carpeting.

  The silence was now so great that the huge building seemed dead. Turning a corner Balint found himself face to face with the old Speaker of the House, supported on one side by the Secretary of the House and on the other side by the Keeper. What happened? Balint had asked. What ruling had he given? But the old gentleman had been so overcome that he could only stammer: ‘Everything, everything is … ov …’ and helped by his two faithful supporters he tottered away to the Speaker’s room.

  The National Casino Club, when Balint arrived, was swarming with people, like an ant-hill accidentally disturbed. The Deak Room was the headquarters of the opposition led by Andrassy and it was filled with his supporters, while every corner of the club was occupied by groups of four or five, all arguing, protesting, worrying and either outraged or triumphant according to their political allegiances. Only the card-rooms were unaffected; the bridge and tarot players engrossed only by such problems as whether they shouid try a finesse or whether their double would be successful.

  Balint did not reveal all this in the smoking-room of Simonvasar. He neither mentioned what he had felt nor what his feelings had been. He answered the questions put to him but he did not elaborate, even though it was obvious that they wanted to hear more. He could not explain his reluctance, he only knew that he must keep his feelings and his opinions to himself.

  Antal Szent-Gyorgyi’s reactions were predictable. He saw everything from the Olympian height of the Hofburg in Vienna. He was delighted that those who ‘ignored His Majesty’s wishes’ had been taught a lesson. He was glad, without thinking for a moment of any individual’s personal involvement, because to him all politics were a sordid business not fit for the attention of a gentleman, a necessary evil, like muck-spreading on the farms. He managed to overlook the fact that Balint was a Member of Parliament only because, as a learned genealogist, he knew too that the Abadys’ first ancestor had been a Bessenyo chief from the Tomai clan, who had settled in Hungary as long ago as the reign of Prince Geza, and that Abadys had been princes, governors and palatines in Transylvania under the Arpad dynasty. With antecedents like those it was perhaps permissible, if one felt like it, once in a while, to indulge a taste for the gutter.

  Lubianszky’s views were not so clear-cut. He had been Lord Lieutenant in Tolna during the time of the Szell regime and now, after his resignation, he had joined the dissident group that supported Andrassy. He had a horror of the revolutionaries of 1848 but, as he loathed Tisza, he had hoped that if the demagogues could be broken they would take him with them in their fall.

  Though these two attitudes could hardly be reconciled, Kollonich was not really interested in either. Like every other catholic magnate, he felt obliged to contribute to the National Front each time there was an election. Therefore, in so far as they existed at all, his sympathies lay with the official government party. At the same time, he distrusted all governments, no matter which party might find itself in power. The only matters Prince Kollonich took seriously were hunting and shooting, and he could hardly wait to get back to his deer-stalking story which had been so unnecessarily interrupted by the arrival of Abady. Now that the political tale had been told he felt he could return to more important matters.

  ‘Well, as I was saying, I had just about reached the cover of the beech hedge when a roebuck started calling from the left! What was I to do? I thought it would be best if carefully I were to …’

  Balint rose and made his way back to the ladies in the red salon.

  Most of the guests had now arrived at the castle. Only two were still missing: the guests of honour, Count Slawata, Counsellor to the Foreign Office and Prince Montorio-Visconti. It was known that the
y had set off by motor from Vienna that morning but, although it was now long past six o’clock, they had still not arrived.

  The hostess’s face had begun to show traces of anxiety carefully suppressed. In spite of this she continued her insipid social conversation with the guests gathered around her. As she did so she glanced from time to time at the great clock on the chimneypiece, a massive affair of bronze and green enamel adorned with gilded baroque figures representing Kronos and Psyche. It was a famous piece by Pradier but the princess, taking its beauty for granted, was only interested in the hands of the clock which moved inexorably round without seeming to bring nearer the arrival of these important guests from whom she expected so much. At last, with a barely perceptible gesture she summoned one of the tall silent footmen.

  ‘Call Duke Peter,’ she murmured. And when her stepson bent over her, she murmured, ‘A carriage should be sent to the highway’. Then, even lower, she added in English, ‘Your father never thinks of anything!’

  Hardly had the young man reached the far end of the big drawing-room when the double doors from the library were flung open and two men entered, one tall and one short with broad shoulders; they were Montorio and Siawata, arrived at last.

  The prince, Italian in name and title only, was Austrian with vast properties in Carinthia. He was a nice-looking young man, dark-complexioned and slightly balding, with light blue eyes that startled with their brilliance. His fashionable moustaches were so narrow that they could have been stuck on with glue, and he moved with the gliding step of one used to highly waxed floors. Count Slawata, in contrast, was fair-haired and short-nosed, with broad cheekbones. He was clean-shaven and wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, an eccentricity in those days when only monocles or rimless pince-nez were the accepted form. His glasses seemed in some way ostentatious, as if the wearer wished to stress a more serious and thrifty view of life than that of the others. Slawata’s way of moving, with heavy peasant-like tread, underlined this same impression. His clothes were dark blue in colour and unexceptional in cut.