Why must she menace me with Papa? thought Klara mutinously as she descended the stairs, though by the time she reached the bottom step she had consoled herself with the thought that she had only promised to tolerate Montorio’s courting. She had not bound herself to anything that might affect … No! She could not harm anyone by that!
And so that evening, she flirted lightly with Montorio at dinner and afterwards: and on the last two days of the shoot she often went to stand beside him.
But she did not allow things to go any further.
Chapter Five
ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE THIRD DAY Balint found himself at the end of the line. It was a quiet stand with few birds coming his way, and it was where he nearly always found himself for, as a comparatively near relation, second cousin to the hostess, and an indifferent shot, he had no claims to a better place and he was not needed to ‘help’ the guests of honour.
Although the beaters were rattling away furiously in the distance the birds were all being directed to the far end of the line where guns were going off as rapidly as in battle. Where Balint stood only a few wise old cocks moved quietly about in the brush having discovered that they should never run in the direction they were being herded and, above all, that they should never leave the ground. They strutted in two’s and three’s not far from Balint, only occasionally putting out their emerald-green necks, waiting for a good moment to run to the next block of cover.
Balint had never been an ambitious or even very eager shot and now he welcomed his quiet corner as it gave him time to think.
He was still troubled by the talk he had had with Slawata. Whenever he had been alone in the two days that had followed, the Counsellor’s indiscreet confidences came constantly to his mind insisting that he decide where he stood. That much was clear: the whispers about the Heir were true; he was planning the breakup of the old Hungarian constitution.
Balint pondered the programme outlined by Slawata: centralization, rule by an Imperial Council, the ancient kingdom of Hungary reduced to an Austrian province, and national boundaries to be re-arranged statistically according to the ethnic origin of the inhabitants! Why all this? To what purpose? Slawata had given him the answer: Imperial expansion in the Balkans so that feudal kingdoms for the Habsburgs reached the Sea of Marmora; and it was all to be achieved with the blood of Hungarian soldiers and paid for by Hungarian tax-money! So it was merely to help Vienna spread Austrian hegemony over the nations of the Balkans that Tisza was to be helped to build up the Hungarian national armed forces.
It seemed now to Balint that both parties in Parliament were fighting instinctively, but without a clear understanding either of their motives or of the inevitable results of their policies and strategy. While Tisza battled to strengthen the army, he could have no inkling that, once strengthened, it would be used to suppress the very independence it was designed to assure — and when the opposition delayed the implementation of Tisza’s policy by petty arguments about shoulder-flashes and army commands, they were unaware that, inadvertently, they were providing ammunition for those very arguments that in the near future would threaten the integrity of the constitution.
How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the figures, those cold statistics that took no account of people’s feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that together made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that distinguished each nation?
How would anyone believe that any good was to be obtained by adding the Balkan states to the already unwieldy Dual Monarchy and so increasing the Empire to a hundred million souls with differing traditions and cultures? Of course armies could be recruited and young men could die, but great States evolved only through centuries of social tradition and mutual self-interest; they were not imposed by bayonets. To believe the contrary would be as mad as the folly which had put the Archduke Maximilien on the throne of Mexico.
Balint had been taken so unawares by Slawata’s disclosures that he had not known how to reply to the the diplomat’s proposals. This distressed him because it revealed to him his own chronic failure ever to know the right answers. He needed deep reflection before he could make up his mind what to say.
Seated on his shooting stick at the end of a quiet shoot, everything became clear to him, not in any ordered sequence of words or arguments that like tiny pieces of mosaic gradually revealed a finished picture, but rather as a painter, before he put paint to canvas, envisages the finished effect.
‘Why, you look just like Rodin’s Penseur!’ The mocking voice came from Fanny Beredy who, a smile on her beautiful face, had come up and stood beside him. Balint offered her his seat.
‘What deep, interesting thoughts am I disturbing? I hope you’re not cross!’ she said, accepting the stick.
‘Very!’ laughed Abady, who only now realized that the first beat was finished and that he must wait for the second line to start. He sat on the ground at Fanny’s feet.
‘I have to ask. With you Transylvanians it’s so difficult to know where you are! One’s never sure of one’s welcome!’ She laughed, and when Balint protested, she went on, quite seriously: ‘But it’s true! You can’t see it, but I can. You’re quite different from the rest of us here. You’re an individual, not moulded out of one pattern as we are — the group here that is. One can never be sure what your reaction will be, or why!’
‘Perhaps from living with bears?’
‘Oh, they are sweet! Nice clumsy bumbling little bears. Oh, no, it isn’t that. The only two I know are you and Gyeroffy, and you two are much more amusing animals.’
‘Monkeys, perhaps? They can be amusing!’
‘Oh, no! More like birds of prey, hawks, always gazing into the far distance, to the horizon, and never noticing what lies at their feet, what is close at hand.’
‘And what is close at hand?’
Fanny gave him a rapid sideways glance, and then looked away. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just said it not meaning anything in particular,’ she continued, chatting lightly and jumping from one subject to another, perhaps so as to deflect his attention from what she had just said.
‘Cocks to the right! Cocks to the right!’ The beaters’ cries brought Balint back to his feet, shooting what he could of the sudden rush of birds in the sky above. He also bagged a few hares on the ground.
As suddenly as it had begun the beat was over. While the fallen birds were being collected, most of the guns went back to the waiting carriage. Balint waited until only he and Fanny, the two Lubianszky girls and Laszlo remained behind.
‘Gyeroffy’s a cousin of yours, isn’t he?’ asked Fanny. ‘He said he’d accompany me and I had my music sent over yesterday, but somehow he seems to have forgotten.’
‘How boorish of him! I’ll remind him.’
‘No! Don’t say anything about it! It’s not important. It was just seeing him there in front of us …’ She quickened her pace and moved forward between the rows of beaters carrying the bag to the game carts.
Abady, following behind her, noticed her strange swaying walk. Fanny placed one foot precisely in front of the other and Balint realized that if she were walking through snow she would make a single line of tracks like a wild cat.