And the next day they would brag about it. To the young girls in their drawing-rooms they would puff themselves up and say, ‘God, was I drunk last night!’ And the girls, even if they didn’t take these tales too seriously, would act duly impressed. For them it was important to please, and thereby to find a husband; and to be told such stories was not only amusing, but meant that they were sufficiently popular to be given such confidences. If they seemed sympathetic and understanding of such behaviour, and seemed to like the gypsy music, it meant also, at the end of such evenings, that it was under their windows that the young men would bring the musicians to play and sing their messages of love and admiration.
Nor were the mothers any more shocked than their daughters. Most of their husbands had grown up before the revolution of 1848, after which a career in public service, previously expected from young men of noble families, had no longer been open to them. Direct rule from Vienna had removed any opportunity for their traditional occupations and many, in their enforced idleness, took to drink instead. Nevertheless they usually remained good husbands even if a few died of dipsomania, and who could say for sure that the wives were not to blame for failing to keep them off the bottle? Mothers, too, had another and more cogent reason for not looking askance at the young men spending their evenings with the gypsies. Sometimes in Transylvania girls of good family would be invited to the more staid of such evenings, and marriage proposals came more easily when the wine was flowing. And if, as they were more apt to do, the men were getting drunk with the gypsies in all-male groups, they were at least among themselves with no chance of getting entangled with some ‘wicked creature’. So, when the young bloods were known to be out spending their time and their money on drink and gypsy music, the matrons would sigh among themselves and be consoled by the thought that otherwise, ‘God-knows, dear, where they’d go and catch some nasty disease!’
Reminded by the sight of the two Kendys of those student days of five or six years before, Balint recalled that there was at least one girl who did not feel, or pretend to feel, sympathy for the man who was a notorious rake. He had met only one who, when some young man would start to boast of his exploits, would frown, straightening her well-shaped brows, and lift her chin with disapproval and distaste.
Only one: Adrienne Miloth.
What a strange independent girl she had been, different in almost every way from the others. She preferred a waltz to a csardas, she scarcely touched champagne and in her glance there was a sort of grave thoughtfulness, sweet and at the same time intelligent. How could she have married such an ugly and gloomy man as Pal Uzdy? Some women seemed to like such grim looks, but then Adrienne Miloth was not ‘some women’ and, remembering this, Balint felt again the same stab of senseless irritation that he had experienced two years before when he had heard of her betrothal.
Not that this was jealousy; far from it!
He had met Adrienne when she came out in the spring of 1898. He was a senior student then and passionately involved with his first real love affair, with the pretty little Countess Dinora Abonyi. For Balint this was the first adventure that really mattered. He had pursued Dinora for months, and after the sparkling hopes and torturing jealousy of the chase, what a glorious fulfilment! And this was when he had first seen Adrienne, just when all his desires, all his senses, were engaged elsewhere.
He often used to pay visits to the Miloths’ town house, but not looking for love. The subject of love never rose with Adrienne and he never raised it. They did not flirt or even talk about flirting. No matter how long they spent together, nor how long they danced, she never aroused him as a woman. And they met almost daily and often sat talking for hours at a time. In their social group there was no gossip if a young man called regularly at a house where there were marriageable daughters. Indeed, at Kolozsvar there was a great deal of social life and, as in all small towns, most people met every day.
The aristocratic families of Transylvania still spent the winters in their town houses in Kolozsvar, and received their friends every afternoon quite informally. Everyone was expected to drop in, from the old ladies, their grandchildren and mothers with marriageable daughters, to cousins, aunts and friends — and all the eligible young men. Invitations were sent out only for luncheons and dinners and it was at tea-time that those who did not make the rounds for some days attracted attention and comment. It did not therefore suggest serious courtship if the same young bachelor came every day and sat with the girls drinking coffee and whipped cream which was then more popular than English tea.
The same groups used to form — three or four girls and five or six young men, brought together by mutual sympathy or family relationship. Together they would drink tea and coffee, play tennis, go to the theatre and organize picnics. In such groups the tie would be friendship and sympathy, above all sympathy, and it was this alone, which existed between Balint and Adrienne Miloth.
Perhaps Adrienne’s strange beauty played its part, but Balint’s awareness was casual not emotional, and he admired her as he would have admired a fine jewel or an exquisite bronze.
Adrienne’s figure was slender and still very girlish, yet her walk, light but in some way determined, reminded him always of a painting of Diana the Huntress he had once seen in the Louvre. She seemed to have the same elongated proportions, the same small head and supple flexible waist that the artist had given the goddess when she reached over her shoulder to take an arrow from its quiver. And when she walked she had the same long stride. Her colouring, too, recalled the Diana of his memory, the clear ivory skin with slight golden tints which never varied from her softly shining face to her neck, and the arms and shoulders that emerged from the silken décolleté of her ball-dress. Only her hair was different, and her eyes, for whereas Diana was blonde and blue-eyed, Adrienne’s hair was dark and wavy and alive — and her eyes were onyx, flecked with golden amber.
Not only was Adrienne beautiful, but she was always interesting to talk to. Her ideas were her own, very individual for a young woman of her background. And she had ideas about everything. She was well-read and cultivated, and with her one didn’t have to avoid subjects such as foreign affairs, history or literature as one did with so many young girls who would otherwise take offence thinking one was trying to show off superior knowledge. She spoke several languages and she loved to read, but not the romantic novels which were all that most other girls read. Against these she rebelled, for in the finishing school at Lausanne to which she had been sent she had been introduced to Flaubert, Balzac, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and ever since the trivial had no longer appealed to her.