Balint worked calmly with nothing to disturb him. Even at home there was a lull in the otherwise turbulent political life in Budapest. Kristoffy, the Minister of the Interior, had managed to break down the organized civil disobedience of the municipalities, and those noisy undisciplined meetings that had so disturbed town halls all over the country had become rarer and finally ceased altogether. The counties and districts were now ruled by government-appointed commissioners and somehow the daily work of administration was done, though no one was quite sure how. As Parliament had not met to pass the budget no taxes had been put to the vote and so little money was coming in. Men who had completed their period of military service could not be demobilized and so the next age-group was not being called up. The recall of Parliament had been indefinitely postponed. In this situation the opposition sat quietly waiting with clenched fists, praying for the day when a total collapse of law and order would call them to power. It was their only hope. Even they had now come to realize that their economic and political programme was hopelessly inadequate and would never work, no matter how much they brandished their well-worn slogans. The party leaders went on repeating themselves, and they were echoed by the newspapers they controlled; but the general public, after all the excitements of the previous summer, was content to resume normal life.
Apart from what he was able to glean from the Hungarian newspapers, which took an unconscionable time to reach him, Balint had little news from home. One day he met an old friend in Genoa who told him that Gyeroffy was still gambling heavily and also that he had again been named as elotancos for the autumn season. He heard a little society gossip, how the King of Bulgaria had passed through Budapest and how a grand ball had been given by the archduke in his honour. This, apparently, had been a magnificent occasion; but it was of no interest to Abady.
Apart from his work Balint wrote only to Adrienne, short, non-committal letters every two or three weeks; and she in turn sent him news of what she was doing. He knew therefore that Addy had made her usual move to Kolozsvar for the winter and that there she was chaperoning her two sisters; that Wickwitz was not there as he had been unable to get leave of absence from his regiment. Judith was apparently much calmer, and Adrienne even wrote that maybe her sister had got over all that nonsense. Later Adrienne reported that the doctors had ordered an urgent cure for her mother, who had gone into a nursing home in Vienna. As a result the Miloth girls had also moved to the Uzdy villa where they were living in the rooms of Adrienne’s daughter who had gone to Meran with her grandmother. Adrienne now spent all her days with her sisters, for the old countess had closed the main reception rooms of the villa leaving Adrienne the use only of her own drawing-room in the wing that led off the courtyard. It was tiresome for Adrienne no longer to be sure of the privacy of her own rooms, but at least it meant that they passed most of each day in each other’s company. In consequence things were going much better between her and Judith. ‘It was rather awkward at first‚’ wrote Adrienne, ‘especially for Judith, but maybe she’ll stop thinking of me as her enemy! In the evening when we don’t go out to a ball they both come in and talk to me while I go to bed.We talk for ages … and that’svery good. I hope that I maybe ableto help healher wounds. Maybe I’llsucceed …’
Their love was never mentioned in these letters; indeed they made only oblique allusion to it: Adrienne would end each letter with three letters instead of a signature: Y.E.M. And Abady would head his missives with the same cryptic initials. They stood for ‘Yellow-Eyed Monster’.
Each time that Balint reached this ending to Adrienne’s letters, he would think back to that day when they had walked up to the Hazsongard and he had angrily given her that name on realizing for the first time that for all her beauty she was not a real woman but only the incomplete image of one, infinitely desirable, but remote and hating the realities of love. How little progress he had made in his pursuit! Practically none, if their last day in the woods was any criterion. However perhaps it was better like that for who knew what might happen if he did become her lover? This was not something that could be a passing adventure, rather it would be a bondage for life. Perhaps, after all, it would be better to lose himself in work. He would pour his love into his writing and perhaps, possibly, if he could transform his feelings into words he would somehow manage to cauterize and burn out the yearning he felt to possess her body. As the weeks went by he consoled himself with these thoughts and became quieter, even, he fancied, free.
On 16th February a telegram arrived: ‘PLEASE COME AT ONCE. Y.E.M.’ No more. What could have happened? It must have been serious. Perhaps Pali Uzdy, or the mother-in-law? Whatever it was, however dangerous or disastrous, Adrienne clearly thought that only he could help. He had to leave at once to go to her; he must.
The telegram had been delivered early in the morning before his mother was awake, so Balint had plenty of time to work out some untruth that his mother would accept. Only one thing seemed plausible. Parliament had unexpectedly been recalled for 19th February, in three days’ time, and though there was no need for him to go, his mother would certainly believe him if he told her that he had been asked to return. It would only be for a few days, or a week, and then he would come back to bring her home.
Countess Roza listened in silence when Balint said that he had to leave at once for Budapest. Though her eyes filled with tears she said nothing to hold him back. At last she said: ‘All right, I’ll wait for your return. I know a few people here now so I shall not be too lonely. They’ll keep me company until you come back.’
Balint left the same evening.
Chapter Five
WICKWITZ HAD TO RETURN to his regiment in the middle of October. He did not want to do so but it was forced upon him by a chain of unfortunate events. In August he received a letter from Tihamer Abonyi, Dinora’s husband, begging him to come back to Maros-Szilvas for a few weeks so as to get his horses ready for the races at Vasarhely and Szuk. Abonyi wrote that he had no faith in any other trainer. When Baron Egon told Mme Bogdan Lazar that he was going to accept this invitation she was not at all pleased, thinking that it was merely his excuse for going back to Dinora. Nitwit tried to convince her that she was being stupid as he really was going there only to train racehorses, but she wouldn’t believe him and threw him out.
That autumn the Miloths did not go either to Vasarhely or to Kolozsvar and this made it extremely difficult for Wickwitz to keep in touch with Judith. Occasionally he sent her a scribbled note — addressed naturally to Zoltan — just to make sure that the girl ‘stayed in form’; but as letter-writing bored him and he felt he was no good at it he soon realized that he’d better look for some girl near at hand in Brasso, or his affairs would never get settled. He had heard tell of the daughter of a textile millionaire, who was going to come out that winter, so he did everything he could to scrape acquaintance. It might well have worked, for the girl clearly liked him, but her family began to notice Wickwitz’s attentions and, as they had already decided that the girl should marry a cousin who had shares in the family firm, they took care to keep Baron Egon away from the house. This was serious, because Wickwitz had spent a lot of time in pursuing the girl, time that was now seen to have been wasted, and the date was not far off when Dinora’s promissory notes, which he had deposited with the banker at Nagy-Varad, would expire. The Privatbank Blau, as the money-lender so pretentiously styled himself, had recently been pressing for repayment and though, this had been done with a veneer of respect, Wickwitz was quite bright enough to detect the menace behind the polite phrases. Something had to be done very soon, for Wickwitz was haunted by two little words that seemed engraved in huge black letters in his brain: ‘Infam kasssiert’ — dishonourably discharged — cashiered’.