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

by Bánffy, Miklós

  Abady got up and left the room. He fled, not from the anger of the party whose representative had been attacked, but rather from those who had rallied to his side. This they had done, he was forced to accept, not because they thought he was right or that justice ought to be done, but solely out of party interest, for to them nothing else mattered.

  Abady’s intervention had unexpected consequences.

  Two days later an article appeared in the Independence Party’s local newspaper; it was signed by the lawyer Zsigmond Boros. The subject was Abady’s words ‘the Orphans’ Court should inspect more closely the manner in which the orphans’ assets have been invested.’ Balint had phrased it in those words so as not to impugn Bartokfay’s personal integrity. Boros used this phrase to attack Abady.

  He wrote that he did not doubt the widow Olajos had believed everything she had recounted to Count Abady. He wished only to elucidate the facts. Five years earlier the mill and the land had indeed been worth 50,000 crowns, as he personally had confirmed when Bartokfay had asked for his professional opinion. This he would declare to the whole world. The problem, as he saw it, was that Olajos had defaulted on his mortgage payments, which had amounted to some 12,000 crowns, and had completely neglected the maintenance of the mill. He, Boros, could hardly be held responsible for that! There followed a few well-turned sentences, designed to touch the hearts of his readers, about how the old chairman was now incapacitated by illness and attacked when he could no longer defend himself. Then followed a number of equally well-turned but poisonous phrases about the thoughtless aristocrat who was rash enough to meddle with things he knew nothing about.

  Balint was taken by surprise by this unprovoked attack. He had no idea that such a prominent man as Boros had been in any way connected with procuring that dubious property for the Olajos boy. Reading the article, it was now clear that Boros had come out into the open only because he had assumed that Balint had, for some purpose of his own, withheld the lawyer’s name and so, with this counter-attack, he hoped to forestall the criticism that might follow further revelations. After all it was not easy to prove the value of property especially after the passage of years.

  It was a clever article, self-assured, authoritative and calm in tone and its venom was partially concealed by the manner adopted, the patronizing manner of an older and more experienced man telling the facts of life to a blundering youth.

  Balint felt unable to ignore this now personal attack, and so he sent a short statement to the newspaper maintaining everything that he had said at the meeting.

  From such a trivial and inadvertent incident was started the avalanche that finally brought about the downfall of the mighty Dr Zsigmond Boros.

  Countess Roza developed another persistent cold that autumn and again decided to follow her doctor’s advice and spend the winter by the Mediterranean. This time she went to Abbazia which had been suggested by Balint who was unhappy about the course of international events and thought it better that she should remain on Austro-Hungarian soil. Though naturally he had said nothing to his mother about the possibilities of war and its inevitable consequences, the old lady had understood.

  This time she did not protest or need to be persuaded, as had been the case two years before when she had been to Portofino. Ever since the scene that had occurred when Balint had told her of his plans to marry Adrienne, relations between mother and son had remained cold. Whatever signs of love or trust they sought to display both knew it was mere play-acting; for the truth was that whenever they were together Adrienne’s invisible presence was always there too, an adored picture in the son’s eyes, a baleful and hated vision in the mother’s. And so she left willingly and without demur, knowing that if she were to remain in Kolozsvar she would inevitably hear daily the name of the hated woman she believed to have enticed and seduced her beloved son. To remain therefore might have led to another disagreeable scene between her and Balint and the idea of wintering at Abbazia came as a welcome solution, an escape that neither could have construed as surrender. Her son accompanied her on the voyage. After a few days in Budapest they took the express train to Fiume, and it was a sign of those troubled times that it was delayed for five hours on the way. The immediate cause was the movement of troops, for the long military transport trains were too much for the small provincial stations where they had to wait. When these had been constructed there had been peace for so long that no one had thought of anything but ordinary civilian traffic. Balint was filled with misgivings when his train stopped and he found himself face to face with crowds of young reservists who had been called back to the colours. He felt only slight reassurance when he recalled Tisza’s words about the possibility of a peaceful solution.

  They stayed at a hotel by the sea and Balint remained with his mother until after the New Year. The tension between them was unabated but he had no reason to remain at home that year. Young Margit’s wedding had been on December 10th, celebrated with much pomp, with hundreds of guests many of whom, like the bridal couple, had worn traditional Hungarian festive dress. Balint, of course, had been invited but Adrienne had asked him not to come as too many people’s eyes would be upon them. As soon as the wedding was over Adrienne wanted to be free to start making plans for her divorce and she felt it would be better to take every precaution to avoid furnishing food for gossip. Also, to make things even more difficult, Adrienne, who had to act as mother of the bride, moved from the Uzdy villa on the Monostor road to the Laczoks’ town house from which Margit was to be married. This meant, of course, that they would not be able to spend the nights alone together. Directly after the wedding it was planned that Adrienne should go to her father’s place, where they would be joined at Christmas by the young couple and in this strictly family reunion there would be no place for Balint.

  When Balint left his mother he went first to Denestornya. There he found a huge pile of letters waiting for him, far more than usual. Most of these came from people unknown to him, from such places as Csik, Gyergyo and Maros-Torda. Some of these letters merely wanted to congratulate him on his stand against injustice, but many of the others contained complaints and accusations and complicated accounts of problems for which his help was asked. And almost every single letter told him something more about Boros, about some abuse which had resulted in loss to the writer. One envelope contained merely two newspaper cuttings describing some lawsuit to do with a dispute about forest-lands together with an anonymous accusation that Boros had dishonestly approved an agreement which was against his client’s interests. Nauseated, Balint threw it away.

  It was clear that his speech at the meeting had been the root cause of all this, and yet no one would have believed that Balint had taken up the issue almost by accident and would have had no idea that Boros was in any way implicated if the lawyer himself had not taken up the cudgels and protested his innocence so publicly. Now all those who had suffered from Boros’s dishonest dealings saw in Balint a messiah who had been sent to smite the hitherto mighty and untouchable lawyer.

  Among the more serious letters there was one from Tamas Laczok, the renegade younger brother of Count Jeno Laczok of Var-Siklod, who was now working as an engineer in a Szekler-owned railway company. His letter was peppered with phrases in French, for it had been in Paris that he had obtained his professional diploma after many years of thoughtless dissipation and it had been in the French colonies that he had gained his experience.

  It started off ‘Très cher ami …’ and went on to congratulate Balint on taking issue with Boros. After a few light-hearted remarks he turned to facts and figures and his subject was the same forestry matter that had been reported in the newspaper cuttings. It seemed that in the Gyergyo district a pine forest had been bought by the Laczok Timber Company which had been founded by ‘my darling brother Jeno’ and the banker Soma Weissfeld to exploit the Laczok forests. Somehow, they had arranged matters so that Count Jeno and the banker lived like kings on their dividends while the younger brother, who held a one-
third share, received almost nothing. The company also bought timber from a communally-owned forest nearby and this was brought to the works by train. One day a spark from the engine set the forest on fire and about three thousand acres were destroyed. The loss amounted to millions of crowns. The community took the company to court, claiming damages and the cost of replanting the trees. Zsigmond Boros was appointed lawyer for the communal owners with power of attorney to settle in their best interests. Boros had used his powers to obtain a settlement out of court, even though it was most disadvantageous to the community who had lost so much of their forest. Despite protests at the community’s next meeting the settlement had been reluctantly accepted, largely owing to the persuasive oratory of the famous lawyer. The letter went on:

  J’ai tout de suite flairé une cochonnerie – I smelt a rat at once! Only now, after I read about your interest, did I come to my senses and start to check through the balance sheets of Laczok Timber. And what did I find? Boros got 80,000 crowns from us, discreetly paid through Weissfeld’s bank. I have all the details and will send them to you if you wish. If’s quite enough to hang the man!

  After a few French jokes Laczok brought his letter to an end with the words:

  Now I am trying to get the community to have their case against our family firm reopened. Of course if they succeed I will be one of the losers but I wouldn’t mind that as long as it brings down my beloved brother. He can drown in it for all I care; and my sister Alice too who has always hated me! I’ve never worked so hard at anything in all my life!

  Balint threw down the letter with distaste, even though he realized that what it contained was almost certainly true. It fitted in too neatly with Dinora’s idle chatter at Denestornya that summer when she had admitted that Boros was daily expecting some large sum of money. But Tamas Laczok’s hatred of his brother, which oozed out of every word he wrote, shocked and disgusted him. He would never have believed it of the good-humoured, good-tempered fellow he remembered meeting once at the inn at Vasarhely. Physically Tamas was the exact double of his brother Jeno. Short and thickset, they could have been twins, the only obvious difference being that while Jeno sported only a pair of imposing moustaches, Tamas also wore a beard. Perhaps, thought Balint, it’s because they are so alike that they hate each other so much.

  Most of these letters Balint just threw into an empty drawer but Tamas’s letter he answered. He wrote that he had only spoken out in the public interest and did not intend to start a manhunt. Then he put the affair out of his mind, thinking that now, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS NOT LONG before Boros got wind of what Tamas Laczok was up to and so to prevent the matter coming to court he quickly applied to his own professional body, the Vasarhely Law Society, for an enquiry into his conduct. Of course he was soon cleared of unprofessional dealings, for the settlement out of court had been legally accepted by all parties and, since the Law Society had no power to subpoena documents or witnesses, Tamas could produce no tangible evidence to back up his allegations. Boros took good care to see that the newspapers gave wide coverage to his vindication and even persuaded one of them to print in full the beautiful speech he had made in his defence. Then a banquet was held to celebrate his victory, with many toasts and speeches. Here, too, he made a speech and one sentence – in which he spoke of being ‘stalked stealthily by evil men, the enemies of all independent thought, who sought to fling dirt at any champion of the people’s freedom’ – was loudly cheered, being taken as a reference to Abady. And so he stood there at the head of the table, proud and fearless, holding his head high and with his well-trimmed beard the very picture of virile innocence, to everyone present the personification of noble probity.

  At about this time there appeared a short notice in the commercial columns of the Budapest papers. It announced that the State Railways had signed a ten-year contract giving the firm of Eisler a monopoly on supplying railway sleepers. Few people took much notice, for there were many far more important matters to think about.

  In the New Year the Prime Minister and Kossuth, as leader of the Radical Party, announced an increase in the defence budget and also in the numbers to be called for compulsory military service.

  When this became known some of the more extreme members of the Independence Party ran at once to Gyula Justh demanding an official protest from their party. Unexpectedly they received an uncompromising refusal. Justh, it appeared, had already agreed to the increase in conscription, and had not even tried to extort in exchange any concession to the other long-standing party demands such as the introduction of Hungarian as the army’s official language of command. Everyone was taken by surprise as such a volte-face was the last thing anyone had expected of Justh. They did not then know, of course, that he had already thrown in his lot with the party surrounding the Heir and was secretly, through Kristoffy, conspiring to frustrate the liberalization of the voting franchise.

  All this caused great excitement when the House reassembled. Then one of the directors of the National Bank made some indiscreet allusion to banking cartels and at once the followers of Hollo and Barra made such an uproar that no one paid any further attention to such matters as conscription and the army estimates. Never had there been such discord since the Coalition government came to power.

  Nevertheless those in the timber business and landowners with forestry holdings were seriously upset by the deal between the State Railways and the firm of Eisler, because it meant inevitably that they would be at the mercy of the Austrian company who could depress the selling prices for sleepers at will since the State Railways company was almost the only buyer for that class of timber. The new arrangement was contrary to all established trading conditions imposed on the administration of public transport. However, as Kossuth had countersigned the monopoly contract, there was not much anyone could say in protest. Some of the timber companies tried to come to terms with the Eisler firm but the forest owners were slower to react. For the moment they said nothing.

  Abady himself could think only about the news from abroad.

  Almost every day the international situation shifted and changed as dramatically as a kaleidoscope. For the first ten days of January it seemed that war was inevitable. In Vienna the Ballplatz demanded an explanation and an apology for the harsh words uttered by the foreign minister of Serbia. No sooner had this storm subsided than the Montenegrins leapt to their feet proclaiming that they would go to war all on their own, if need be, should the great powers not at once settle their legitimate aspirations. Three days after that everything changed again when the results of the talks between Austria-Hungary and Turkey were made public and as the agreement included the acceptance by the Turks of the annexation of their former province, in return, of course, for an indemnity of some 54 millions, the Serbs found themselves obliged to stop their own protest. For a moment there was a lull … until, all of a sudden, the news came that the Bulgarian army had been massed on the Turkish frontier and that there was general mobilization in Serbia.

  All this was treated by the Press, as much abroad as in Budapest, in somewhat subdued tones; but Balint had learned to read between the lines during his years as a diplomat and it became more and more evident to him what a double role was being played by Russia. It was cleverly done but it seemed to him quite clear that while her foreign minister Izvolsky was presenting himself to the great powers at an international peacemaker, he was simultaneously inciting the Serbs to defy Vienna and doing all he could to subvert Bulgaria, who had been much more friendly before the crisis.

  There was a further development when Russia agreed to pay an indemnity as a quid pro quo for Turkey’s dropping her claims to Bulgaria. This was easy enough, for Turkey had owed this sum – and much more – to Russia for more than forty years and, by writing it off in this way, a debt that would never have been paid was settled by the stroke of a pen, while Prince Ferdinand could henceforth be greeted as King of Bulgaria by the
Tsar at St Petersburg. Nevertheless things were not quite what they seemed, for when Izvolsky told the Russian Duma of the Berlin agreement, which gave Austria-Hungary a free hand in her dealings with Serbia, he also declared Russian support for the southern Slavs, thus heralding the subsequent formation of the Balkan Federation which, three years later, was to attack Turkey and make a mockery of Vienna’s cherished Eastern policies.

  As always. these things were hardly noticed by the Hungarians, and life went on as usual in Budapest. Among the party political leaders only Andrassy saw clearly where these events were leading; but he was powerless to act for it was now the great banking issue which occupied everyone’s minds. The alliance between Kossuth and Justh was beginning to wear extremely thin, with one of them supporting the idea of an independent national bank and the other carrying the banner of the traditional links with Vienna. The leaders of the Independence Party could not make up their minds and cheered on alternatively one side or the other. Still it was becoming clear that while Kossuth’s position was progressively weakened so Justh became more and more the choice of the majority.

  All this time Abady felt like a sleepwalker. He moved about automatically and had never before felt himself to be a stranger in his own country. His thoughts were only for the sinister developments abroad and for all those otherwise insignificant pointers to what was now going on in those circles close to the monarch and his heir. At Jablanka, where he went for three days’ shooting, they spoke of little else. It was most elegantly done, as was natural in that house, and few words were wasted, for Antal Szent-Gyorgyi did not relish vulgar enthusiasm or indeed any form of exaggeration. But for those with ears to hear the message was clear enough. This time Slawata was not there … but the faithful Pfaffulus, as always, was exceptionally well informed.