Balint Abady did not return home until the first days of June. After leaving Budapest he had gone straight to Kolozsvar and remained there to attend to his estate business, even though nearly everyone he knew there had already left the town for the country. After his prolonged absence in the capital there was a great deal that needed Balint’s attention.
First of all there was much that had to be discussed with his mother. Then there were consultations with Azbej and with the new forestry manager, with whom he had to make a contract before the man went up to the mountains. The first problem to be settled was where the new manager should be based and, though in all the discussions in Countess Roza’s presence Azbej supported Balint’s ideas with enthusiasm — and his zeal was not faked because he was determined to keep Balint so embroiled in the management of the mountain forests that he would have no time to investigate matters nearer home — a new complication arose since the old forest superintendent, Nyiresy, adopted a policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation. As a result, matters were so delayed that it was ten days before Balint could send his new manager to the mountains and himself follow his mother to Denestornya, arriving late at night in pouring rain.
The next day Balint awoke soon after sunrise to find that it was a beautiful morning. The windows of his room in one of the round towers faced east and through the louvred shutters horizontal rays of sunlight filtered through the room’s semi-darkness and picked out the gilded bronzes on the commode opposite as might the glow of firelight. Outside a nightingale sang in almost crazed ecstasy.
Balint jumped out of bed and went to the window. With one movement he flung open both shutters and the sunlight was so brilliant that for a moment he stepped back, reeling.
The sun was already high above the farthest hilltops beyond the Maros. These hills looked so ethereal that they might have been formed only of vapour and mist, that same pale cobalt-blue mist that rose from the river valley and spread over the surrounding countryside, softening the outlines of the poplar plantations, and rising until even the lines of the far horizon were blurred and uncertain. The river Maros itself could not be seen; it was too far away and its banks too thickly wooded. In the far distance the silver-grey leaves of the poplars shone with a creamy whiteness in the early morning sun while nearer to the house the Canadian variety, giant trees whose trunks glowed pale lilac, cast long shadows over the cropped grassland of the park and over the newly-mown lawns. These shadows held none of the harsh shade of the forest but were dim, hazy and bluish in colour, hardly darker than the grass beneath.
Balint stood at the window watching the light spreading slowly between the groves of trees, lighting up the paler leaves of a shrub, catching the white glow of a may-tree’s blossom which was like the lace of a girl’s summer dress, bringing colour to the lilac flowers, and delving eagerly and inexorably to uncover the secrets of the forest undergrowth. As the sunlight grew stronger so the carmine of the Japanese cherry-trees flamed into glowing colour until it was as if the whole of nature blushed with joy and love, quivering with delight at the sweet secrets of spring. It was there in the song of the nightingales and the antiphonal chorus of all the other song-birds who called triumphantly from the clumps of jasmine, from the ivy-coloured walls, from the pastel fronds of the little groups of trimmed thuja and, above all, from the great horse-chestnut trees whose branches were now richly covered with white and pink flowers.
Balint dressed quickly and went out, stopping for a moment on the north terrace to take a new look at the parkland in front of him before starting down the hill to follow the avenue of tall Hungarian oaks whose stately branches were almost as dense as those of cypresses. On both sides the grass was filled with crowsfoot and dotted with the golden stars of buttercups. All the way down the slope from the castle’s corner tower to the avenue below there were thickets of lilac bushes, now so heavy with scented flower panicles that hardly any leaves were to be seen. And everywhere the nightingales were singing, only falling silent for a moment as Balint passed the bushes in which they were concealed and then starting up again as if unable to contain their joy.
The young man reached the bank of the millstream near where the outer wooden palisades had once stood. He crossed over what was still called the Painted Bridge, even though every vestige of colour had long since disappeared, to the place where the wide path divided and led either to the left or the right, while ahead the view stretched across the park interrupted only by the clumps of poplars, limes or horse-chestnuts. In this part of the park the grass was quite tall, thick and heavy with dew. It was filled with the feathery white heads of seeding dandelions, with golden cowslips, bluebells, waving stalks of wild oats and the trembling sprays of meadow-grass, each bearing at its extremity a dew drop that sparkled in the sun. So heavy was the dew that the grasslands, as far as the eye could see, were covered with a delicate shining liquid haze.
For Balint this pageant of wild flowers was something new since, during his long years at school, at the university and later when he was always abroad serving as a diplomat, he had never managed to get home before the end of June and so had never before seen the ancient park in all the bloom of early summer. The radiance of this early morning, when spring was just merging into summer, was so inviting that Balint left the path and started to walk across the meadow. The grass was high and so wet that it was almost like walking through a stream, and each time that his knees touched the spears of grass and wild oats a tiny shower would fall before the blades straightened up as if proud that they had been brushed by the legs of the master.
After a while Balint, soaked to the knees, reached the avenue of lime trees which bordered the far side of the meadow and was immediately filled with memories of his childhood. This was where he had been taught to ride when very young, in the old avenue that had been planted so long ago. It was almost two hundred years since the Abady of those times had laid out three wide allées which fanned out, star-shaped, from where the predecessor of the Painted Bridge crossed the millstream a little higher up than the later bridge and thus directly in front of the castle façade. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the fashion for informal ‘English’ gardens was spreading all over Europe, Balint’s grandfather had had the central avenue cut down so as to plant the lawns directly below where the castle stood. He wanted to have the view from the terrace as open and informal as possible, with a wide view to the distant plantations; for it was well understood that in English landscaping all straight lines were forbidden. Even so, the avenue that remained was still between five and six hundred metres long and, as the earth between the lines of trees was a soft loam, it was there that the Groom of the Stables, as the castle’s head écuyer was called, would put the boy on his tiny pony and gallop him up and down, ten, twenty, thirty times until he no longer fell off.
Lord, how many times I fell! thought Balint as he gazed once more along the familiar grass-covered allée and remembered those frisky mischievous little ponies with minds of their own who were all the more wilful for being overfed and under-exercised. He recalled Croque-en-bouche, his first pony, who always shied at that gnarled old tree in front of him and then bucked, especially when Balint was being made to ride without stirrups and with just a blanket strapped on in the place of a saddle. And, at that huge lime-tree with the split trunk, his second pony had always stopped in her tracks and refused to budge until given a sharp reminder by his instructor’s long-lashed hunting crop.