After lunch everyone went their own ways. Rattle, tired out by the previous evening’s dancing, decided to have a nap. Zoltan‚ Akos, Gazsi and Ida went down to the lake to look at the wild duck, and Margit and Adam, with Adrienne and Abady behind them, went walking in the garden.
Since Countess Miloth’s death the garden had been almost abandoned; the lilac bushes were untrimmed and the lawns were covered in weeds. As they followed a winding path Adam, to his disappointment, found himself once again alone with Margit whom he still thought of as a mere child. He was angry because he had only come to Mezo-Varjas to see Adrienne and had hoped, during his afternoon walk, once again to pour out to her all his adoration and love. Perhaps, persuaded by his eloquence, by the beautiful phrases he had planned in advance, she might at last be persuaded to take him seriously.
He looked sadly at Margit. ‘You see‚’ he cried. ‘She’s avoiding me. She won’t even hear what I have to say. Oh, I’m the unhappiest man in the world. If only I could tell her all my sorrows!’
Margit put her hand on the young man’s arm. ‘Well, you can tell me, you know. I’m your friend, a good friend, and I’m a very good listener‚’ and she led him away from the garden, through the park and up to an old wooden bench on a hilltop which overlooked the village and the abandoned Protestant cemetery.
Adam now poured out his heart as he once more went over all that he felt for Adrienne, how in the past she had seemed to listen to him sympathetically. Of course it was true that she had always teased him and joked about his declarations of love, but that had not mattered because his feelings for her were so true and beautiful and all he had wanted was to be allowed to adore her, to kneel before her without touching even the hem of her skirt. He knew he was not worthy of her but all he wanted was the chance to talk to her and show her what was in his heart. And now not even that was possible for she always cut him short and stopped him before he had got a word out. She wouldn’t even give him the chance to speak – even though that would be the only consolation possible for his hopeless sorrowing heart.
Young Margit was a wonderfully sympathetic confidante. She seemed to understand every nuance of what was in Adam’s heart as she cleverly led him on to bare his soul to her. And she seemed, too, to share his sorrow, saying how cruel it was of Adrienne and asking how she could possibly allow herself to be so cold and merciless. Adrienne was beautiful, of course, oh yes, very beautiful, but she could have no heart if she could so torment someone like Adam, someone so true and lacking in guile or deceit. Oh, how could she cause so much pain? And so she went on, comforting the lovesick young man, stroking his shoulders and lending him her minute lace handkerchief when he had to brush away his tears.
They sat on the bench until it was almost dark and for Margit it was time well spent. Adam felt happier than he had for days because at last he had been able to tell everything that was in his heart to such a sweet, selfless girl. It was like talking to the sympathetic sister he had never had, whose hands he could squeeze in sympathy and with whom he could share his tears and his sadness. Although they had often talked of all this before it had never been so good as today on the bench on the hilltop. As they walked back to the house Margit suggested that perhaps he would like to write to her, especially if he was far away and needed some relief for his aching heart. Wouldn’t that be a help to him, she said, a comfort in his loneliness? And he agreed that it would.
Adrienne and Balint, in order to escape from the other two, turned off the path at the angle of the manor-house and continued to the end of a long side wing. This was where Judith Miloth had lived since her mind had become clouded and they had brought her home. Next to the house was the wire fence of the poultry yard that Adrienne had had made for her sister when she discovered that the girl took pleasure in looking after small animals.
On the sunny side there was a double row of chicken coops and next were several separate little houses for broody hens. A little further on was a low hut to house the rabbits in front of which a clay floor had been laid. Further on still there was a pile of sand which was renewed each month by a cart sent up from the Maros. This was necessary because no sand was to be found in the high prairie-lands and the health of the chickens depended on it. Once, before Adrienne had organized this, some epidemic had broken out, the hens had died and Judith had cried for days on end.
There was a narrow path between the fence and the lilac bushes and along this Adrienne led Balint in single file. From here he caught his first sight of Judith whom he had not seen since she had been brought home from Venice a year and a half before.
The girl was sitting on the ground. A black kerchief covered her hair and was tied under her chin like the peasant girls’. She wore a wide blue cotton apron which was spattered with whitish chicken droppings as were her hands. On the ground beside her was a metal scraper with which she had just cleaned the clay floor of the chicken run. Around her was a cluster of rabbits greedily munching on the lettuce leaves she had just given them. As she sat there Judith with one hand flung out handfuls of feed to the chickens while with the other she nursed a crippled chick which had been born lame.
‘Eat, my little one,’ she was murmuring. ‘Go on, eat! No one will harm you here. It’s good, isn’t it? Eat, little one, eat!’
Judith only spoke to her animals; to people she hardly opened her mouth.
The old maidservant who looked after her was standing at the door of her room and, as Adrienne passed by, she called out, ‘Kiss your hand, my Lady.’
As the old woman spoke Judith looked up. Seeing only Adrienne at first her expression did not change; but the moment she saw that Abady was with her, and lifted his hat in polite greeting, her face was contorted with horror and she looked at him with a mixture of surprise and terror, her eyes opened wide with shock. Her thin lips opened, as she straightened up, hands hanging loosely at her sides. She only looked at him for a few seconds but it seemed to him that perhaps she was, however uncertainly, recalling the moment when he had brought her home after she had been abandoned by the man she loved.
Abady too was thinking of that moment when he had found her alone at the railway station at Kolozsvar, waiting for the man she loved, that scoundrel Wickwitz with whom she had planned to elope to Austria but who had fled across the Romanian border the night before without even troubling to send her word. He remembered well the terrified expression on her face, like some caged wild bird, when he had stepped up to her just after the Budapest express had already left and told her that she was waiting in vain. Today, for a brief instant, he saw in her face that same expression, but it remained there only briefly and then the vacant look returned, empty and blind as it had been ever since that second shock which had broken her completely, when an unknown woman had sent her all the letters she had written to Wickwitz.
Now Judith lived shut away in these rooms in a remote corner of her father’s house. She lived there like a shadow. She was alive but she might have been dead. She was still beautiful, but she was paler than before, and thinner, and her glance held no more meaning than the unblinking stare of a wild animal.
Adrienne and Balint walked on without speaking. They had both been upset by the sight of Judith.
When they had been wandering in the orchard for a while Balint started to speak, and as so often happened between them, he said exactly what was in her mind too.
‘Ever since I left Almasko I’ve been thinking that if Uzdy is now so wrapped up in his new hobby, and if he doesn’t seem so jealous and possessive as he was, surely a divorce might now be possible?’
Adrienne answered very slowly, ‘Yes, maybe. I often think about it, especially when I’m with you. But he isn’t always the same, you know. Sometimes … well, sometimes he seems to … oh, he’s completely unpredictable … and … and, well, demanding!’ Her face clouded over and she shut her eyes tightly. It was clear that her victory over him was by no means certain.
‘I use every excuse,’ she went on, ‘to go away. Now
I’ll stay here for a week or so; then maybe go to Kolozsvar for the hunting at Zsuk. I really ought to do that for Margit’s sake and of course I’ll say it’s for her, to give her a chance of meeting some young men. I may not be able to pull it off as of course we can’t go to balls as we’re still in mourning. Anyhow I’m doing all I can to get him used to my being away.’ They walked on in silence. Then Adrienne tried to sum up her feelings: ‘This is what I’m working on, but I can’t make a final decision yet. The time isn’t ripe and I feel it’s impossible just now. If I raised the matter I’d have to tell him why. Even if I didn’t tell him and he didn’t already suspect the reason, he’d soon find out … and then …’ She shuddered. ‘No, it’s impossible now.’
Balint thought he caught a note of fear in her voice, even though she had not told him everything that was in her mind.
The day after she had last been with Balint into the forest she had returned to take a walk in the same direction, westwards, towards the Abady holdings. On that day she had not gone as far as the boundary between the properties before turning to go home: and then a most unexpected thing had happened. She found herself face to face with her husband. There, on the path, was Uzdy who never normally walked more than a hundred paces away from the house and who ran his estates by studying the agents’ reports in the comfort of his own study. But there he was, standing in front of her!
He must have been spying on her, she thought. That could be the only reason why he had got up so unusually early. She could only imagine that he had been secretly watching to see when she left the house and then, wearing noiseless rubber-soled shoes so as not to be heard as he stole after her, he must have followed wherever she went, presumably at some little distance. And he, who never took a shot at any living animal but only at targets set up in the park or in the castle shooting gallery, was carrying a precision rifle on one shoulder. He surely would not carry such a thing for no reason – he must have brought it either for her, or for Abady.
All these thoughts passed swiftly through her head as she saw him on the path in front of her. Everything fell into place. It was obvious! And how lucky it was that AB had left the day before and was nowhere near. Quickly she walked up to Uzdy and stood before him, ‘Whatever are you doing here?’ she asked belligerently with her head held high.
Uzdy laughed somewhat awkwardly. For a moment he looked like a young boy caught out in some minor misdeed. ‘Why, I wanted to see for myself how nice a morning walk could be. Don’t you approve, dear Addy?’
She shrugged her shoulders. His words seemed hardly to warrant any reply, so she merely said, ‘And the rifle? Are you going shooting?’
‘Shooting? No! But I thought maybe I’d find some convenient target here in the woods, a tree, or a stone … something like that!’ He laughed again, somewhat maliciously, Adrienne thought; and for an instant his eyes flashed dangerously. ‘I thought it might be interesting to try some target without measuring the distance beforehand. If I could hit it accurately … That’s the important thing, accuracy … accuracy. The whole beauty is in accuracy, to hit accurately, just that. Accuracy,’ and he repeated the word several times.
They had walked home together without speaking; and afterwards the incident was never again mentioned between them.
Adrienne was thinking of this incident when she again said, ‘No! We can’t do it yet, not yet. We can’t bring it up now.’
After dinner at the Miloths everyone remained in the dining-room, the ladies leaning their elbows on the wrinkled table-cloth and the men drinking their wine and dropping cigar ash on the table just as if they had been in a tavern. The footman and the maid leant against the wall scarcely troubling to conceal their yawns. This would never have happened while Countess Miloth was still alive but since her death what little order she had contrived had vanished. Everybody did as they pleased and young Margit, who was trying to run the household as best she could, followed her own instincts and pursued her own goals which were, simply, that the young men who came to the house should feel themselves at home and be able to talk as they pleased and drink what they wanted. Even if anyone had questioned her she would probably just have replied that it was best that way.
The first person to get up from table was old Mademoiselle Morin, who retired to the drawing-room as soon as the meal was ended, offended and sighing deeply, to continue knitting the eternal woollen stocking on which she seemed to have been engaged for the last twenty years. Later on old Rattle dragged the youngest Alvinczy there too so as to have a captive audience for his tales of the Garibaldi campaigns. The others had stayed in the dining-room for, with peals of laughter, they rebelled at the idea of hearing all that again. What they wanted to talk about was the previous night’s adventure and what it had led to. Nemesis, it seemed, had caught up with the night watchman, for the village council had met and dismissed him; and so the drama of the cow, as in a Greek tragedy, had had its inexorable effect.
Although everyone was laughing and joking the evening was not entirely carefree; a shadow lurked behind the mirth for no one could quite forget that poor Judith, their former companion and playmate, was living there, at the end of the house, her mind clouded. A few of them, like Abady, had caught a glimpse of her, and the others had been told by Ida Laczok. The knowledge that she was there afflicted them all and gradually the jokes and laughter died away. One or two of them occasionally glanced at the glazed door that led to the veranda and even fancied that they glimpsed there the face of a young girl with death in her eyes.
As their mirth faded so they began to talk about more serious subjects, about people who were lucky and those that were not, about the disappearance of Laszlo Gyeroffy, about Dinora Malhuysen who had signed bank drafts for Wickwitz and who had everywhere been ostracized when the scandal became known; and about Fate who distributed good and bad luck with total indifference and how some people were destroyed without apparent reason while others, who might not deserve it, had joy and success thrust upon them.
‘You can’t measure happiness equally; everybody is not the same!’ said Adam Alvinczy sadly, as he looked at Adrienne. Then Gazsi thumped the table loudly.
‘That’s just not true,’ he shouted. ‘Everybody is the same, neither happy nor unhappy. It’s the same rotten deal for us all!’
Everyone looked up at him in astonishment for Gazsi had never been known to think about anything but practical jokes and horses.
‘Oh, yes,’ cried Gazsi. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve often noticed that in company …’
‘The company of horses?’ interrupted Adam, who resented having his own pessimistic attitude adopted by anyone else, especially by Gazsi.
This made Kadacsay angry. Adam’s scornful tone seemed to touch some deep wound within him, some sorrow of whose existence even he may have been previously unaware. Always before he had reacted to such mockery with such comic self-deprecation that everyone laughed. Today, however, perhaps because he had had a lot to drink, the mask of comedy had dropped and everyone could see he was offended.
‘I suppose you think that just because a man knows how to ride he must be a complete dolt? Of course I spend a lot of my time with horses – perhaps too much; but I can still think when I’m in the saddle, and that wouldn’t be easy for you even standing still!’
Balint sensed that the conversation was getting dangerously out of hand and decided to intervene, ‘Well, Gazsi, let’s hear what you do think! Tell us!’
‘Yes! Yes! Do go on, Gazsi!’ cried the ladies, ‘and then we’ll tell you what we think.’
Kadacsay leaned his head on one side and his plaintive eyebrows rose even higher than usual. With his long nose he looked like a raven contemplating some strange object. Fixing his eyes on the table-cloth, as if he could read something there, he started to talk, though at first in broken phrases. His manner was dreamlike, but his logic did not falter. Using rather too many words and often repeating himself, he said that no matter what one achieved, no matter what
joy came one’s way, it was never enough; there was always some further goal before complete happiness could be won. No one could ever say, ‘Now I wish for nothing more!’ Whatever Fate sent one’s way, somehow it was never enough. It was not a question of wanting more of the same thing, it was just that there was always something else, something one did not yet have but which was or now seemed necessary for complete happiness. It was this constant desire which kept human joy in check, for everyone felt that if only he could achieve just this one little thing more then all would be well. It was the same with unhappiness. No matter what terrible sorrow came one’s way there was always some tiny grain of hope to be one’s consolation and which kept one from despair. It didn’t matter what one called it – duty, a debt to be paid, a moral obligation – there was always something more to be done despite the shattering blow one had just suffered. When someone very dear to one died, there were things to be done and people to be cared for. And in every other sort of sorrow there was some compensation which provided its own joy, something that could not be left undone, some work to be concluded, some person who needed care and help – be it a relation or a friend or servant, or even an animal. It did not matter who or what it was but there was always someone or something for whose sake one must accept the sorrow and bear it with fortitude, for that someone or something had no other person to whom to turn. Even the profoundest mourning had its compensations.
‘It is like a giant scales,’ said Gazsi. ‘One side of the balance holds happiness, the other sorrow. And they are always there in equal measure, no matter if one side seems full and the other almost empty!’
They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy) Page 14
