They Were Counted (21 page)

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 they 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.

After greeting their hostess, the latest arrivals were conducted to the smoking-room to meet their host, whose stalking story, still not completed, was destined never to reach its end, as no sooner had the newcomers greeted him than the dinner gong sounded announcing that it was time to go and dress.

The house guests who had arrived that afternoon then
gathered
in the great entrance hall, whence they were conducted by servants to the rooms allocated to them and where their luggage had already been taken and unpacked and their evening clothes laid out.

Peter Kollonich stepped over to Laszio. ‘I hope you don’t mind but we’ve had to put you in the kitchen wing! There are so many women and married couples this year that there seemed no other way. We thought you, as the nearest relation …’ and he waved to a footman to show Laszlo the way.

 

The footman went to a door in the opposite side of the hall from the great State rooms where the guests had gathered. Here there was no carpet, only great stone slabs which formed the floor of the corridor. They passed the silver vaults and the butler’s pantry and along the whole length of the castle’s kitchens. Here was none of the majestic silence that had seemed to rule the other parts of the huge building. From inside the kitchen came the clatter of copper pans, the sound of the chef’s voice raised in anger at some underling and all the multifarious rhythms and drumbeats that made up the symphony of sound that accompanied the creation of a great formal dinner. A door flew open, and then slammed shut after a kitchen boy had shouted something back before
running
off down the passage in front of them. A scullery maid, her face flushed, ran in the opposite direction and disappeared through another door which she too banged behind her. A bevy of chambermaids, giggling, emerged from a narrow staircase and hurried past, across the courtyard, towards the guest wing.

No one paused respectfully as a guest passed. It was as if they had not even seen him.

After two turns in the long corridor they eventually reached a large room at the end of the wing opposite that where Laszlo had found his host. It was a good room, spacious and high ceilinged, differing only from the guest-rooms in the other part of the house in its old-fashioned decoration and cheap, worn furniture. Even so, it was incomparably better than Laszlo’s flat in Budapest.

Once again Laszlo felt a surge of bitter resentment that he, and only he, had been exiled to the servants’ wing – to a room which he knew was usually used to lodge visiting valets or artisans called to work in the castle. Even Peter’s friendly words of
reassurance
– ‘our nearest relation’ – did not soothe him. After all, Stefi Szent-Gyorgyi was a first cousin too, and he was with the other guests. Why just me? Laszlo wondered as he sat down in front of the old-fashioned dressing-table.

Old impressions flooded back to him as he sat gazing
unseeingly
at his ivory hairbrushes laid out in front of him. There was nothing new in the discrimination made between him and his cousins. When he had been a child he had hardly noticed, and when he did he put it down to his being an orphan, with neither father nor mother to protect him. At that time, too, he had
romanticized
the situation and imagined himself, perhaps after reading some children’s book like ‘The Little Lord’, as a hero of mystery, the young heir to a great position unrecognized in youth only to be triumphantly re-established after years of obscurity. This impression of a mysterious secret was accentuated by the fact that in his presence his father and mother were never mentioned.