They Were Found Wanting (56 page)

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

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.

I
T 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.

The foreign minister Aehrenthal, it seemed, was anxious to settle everything peacefully. As a career diplomat he naturally favoured making agreements without resorting to force, for if the guns were once fired then any subsequent arrangement would be due to the military and not to the diplomatists. For him the true art of foreign politics lay in sitting around a baize-covered table until war was definitely avoided. Opposing this view the war minister, Conrad, strongly urged a sudden attack to
eliminate
the Serbian opposition, draw Bulgaria back into the Austrian fold and restore the Monarchy’s dwindling prestige in the Balkans. In this he may have been right. It was certainly the last moment when such a move would have been possible, for most of the other great powers had let Austria know that she had a free hand in the matter while Russia was not yet ready to
intervene
. However the Emperor wanted peace and so, for once, did Franz-Ferdinand, for though he detested Aehrenthal because of his support for Hungarian national aspirations, he hated Conrad even more. In Vienna, therefore, there was a triangular battle behind the scenes in which personal animosity carried more weight than political acumen.

During these winter months it was only possible for Balint and Adrienne to see each other sporadically. Adrienne was busy arranging to spend more and more time away from her husband so as to accustom him to her absence. Had she come to Kolozsvar they could have often been together now that Margit had flown the nest and so, knowing that she would not have been able to resist the temptation, she went to her father’s house for weeks on end on the pretext that old Count Akos was not well and that Judith’s condition had taken a turn for the worse. In this way she could prepare the ground for her divorce, for as yet she did not dare either raise the subject or do anything to bring it about. Her little daughter was still at Meran with her husband’s mother and she was convinced that Countess Clémence would never let the child go back to her mother if she caught the slightest whiff of Adrienne’s plans for divorce. And under no circumstances did she wish to risk the little girl being left with the half-mad Pali Uzdy. So she had to be careful.

It would only, she told herself and Balint, be for a few more months, but until then they had both to be very circumspect and meet only occasionally and for brief encounters, lest anything should happen to destroy their chances.

Now their aim was not only to be always together, possessing each other and wanting nothing more as in the first days of their love. Their longing for a child had become their deepest desire and the phantom boy who held their minds in thrall became more and more real to them as each day passed. In their letters they wrote of little else.

In Adrienne it was symptomatic of the deepest of all female instincts, the urge to give birth and be a mother. It was the
strongest
expression of a woman’s love that she could give what to them both would be the most precious gift, the richest in shared joy and rejoicing. And the greatest gift any woman can give a man is the child of their love, borne in joyfully accepted pain and in danger of her life.

This is what Adrienne felt during those months and it was with growing joy that she read in Balint’s letters how he shared her yearning. It was a double joy for she knew that the desire to be a father was not natural to all men but rather an acquired social instinct, unknown to primitive peoples and only fostered by the growth of civilization. Even so the urge was strong in some men and Adrienne was all the more grateful that it was so strong in Balint.

Sometimes in Balint’s letters he referred to the themes he had taken up in his unfinished treatise ‘Beauty in Action’, when he tried to show that all the beauty in the world stemmed from a law of nature. Then he had been under the influence of the first mutual declaration of their love for each other. Now, that Beauty was to be the beauty of their future lives together when they could declare their love to the world and live freely and frankly without lies or pretence. And the culmination of this freedom would be the birth of an heir, who would carry on his race and all that his parents held sacred. This heir would love everything they loved, their honour, traditions and the family home where these had been nurtured. He in turn would pass it all on to the next generation, and the next, and the next, for an infinity of human tradition in which Balint saw himself merely as a link in that never-ending chain which tied the past to the future. In this way his love for Adrienne, which had begun as desire to possess the woman he loved, was gradually transformed, by the idea of this longed-for birth of a son, into the adoration for the most beautiful and graceful of mothers.