He should have gone straight over, but instead he stood there watching and thinking how lovely Adrienne was, gliding effortlessly across the ice like a shadow in a dream. She was wearing a dress of brick red which seemed almost black in the half light, the same colour as her hair and the sealskin collar, hat and edging to the hem of the funnel-shaped skirt, which fluttered round her like an ever widening saucer as she turned and twisted in the movements of the dance.
How beautiful she was! She looked weightless and ethereally tall as she danced with both men at once, doing a few turns with one and then, with a double turn, seeming to fly into the arms of the other, spinning arabesques of grace to the rhythm of the old waltz. It was like a ballet with every step lengthened into great sweeps of movement each covering more than thirty feet to a single beat.
As she danced Adrienne seemed more youthful than Balint had ever seen her, her fine elongated silhouette more slender, more alluring, watching her now, passing so lightly from one admirer to another, her lips parted in a dazzling smile of pleasure as each man in turn caught her by the waist and whirled her away with the speed of an eagle taking its prey, Balint knew that he would never again think of Adrienne as the reincarnation of Diana the Huntress who hated men.
In total surrender to the intoxication of the dance, she seemed to be moving in a trance, dazed but ecstatic. This was no virgin goddess performing her hieratic ritual dance; this was a wild young mænad caught in a magic wintery bacchanalia, a prey to every madness of love and abandon, drunk with unrestrained desire and ready for whatever the night might bring. She was the stuff that dreams were made of, impelled by speed, by the rushing strength of her own young body and by the darkness of night in which all desire could be fulfilled and yet remain secret, a nature free of all restraint.
Balint felt like an intruder, a Peeping Tom to whom something forbidden had inadvertently been revealed. This was no longer the Adrienne he knew, neither the moody Addy of his youth nor the bitter Adrienne who escaped from the gaiety of the dance to pour out her disillusion on a moonlight night. Nor was it the playful, childish Adrienne who climbed the haystack with her sisters at Mezo-Varjas, or even the sad woman in flight from the bitterness of a failed marriage who had revealed her soul to him in her father’s garden and then rounded on him in anger and disgust when he dared to kiss her arm. This was a different being, someone he did not know, a stranger, flirtatious, without fear, without regrets and free of the constraints with which he had thought his Adrienne to be inexorably hedged.
Suddenly he felt himself a stranger, an intruder who had no right to be granted this forbidden insight. He had no business to be there unless, perhaps, he was just one more young man she was drawn to seduce!
The music of the barrel-organ stopped abruptly. Adrienne and her two young admirers skated smoothly to the side of the lake where, spreading the fur rug on a bench, they took out their picnic and started to eat. Even from where he stood Balint could see what a good time they were having, how they laughed together and joked and chatted, and how the vapour of hot tea curled up from the open thermos beside them.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked himself. Spying?’
He turned away, left the frozen lake, and walked slowly home.
The very same evening he sent off a telegram: ‘ARRIVE BELES MORNING TRAIN WEDNESDAY. HAVE SLEIGH AND HORSES READY AT NOON.’
Chapter Three
THE SLEIGH BELLS TINKLED MERRILY as they drove Up through the pine forests to the ridge of Csonka-Havas which formed the watershed that had to be crossed before they could reach the little settlement of Beles. Andras Zutor, known as ‘Honey’, the forest ranger who had come to Kolozsvar, and the coachman, ‘Clever’ Janos Rigo, sat huddled together in the driver’s seat. Both wore jackets made of thick flannel embroidered in patterns of red, blue and green. Over these they had old worn sleeveless sheepskin waistcoats, for no one wore new clothes to go to the mountains in the winter. These too were elaborately embroidered with flowers and traditional Hungarian symbols. Both jackets and waistcoats were short and when their wearers bent forward they showed a line of bare tanned skin between them and the tops of their trousers: all Kalotaszeg folk wore short shirts and jackets, for it was said that they did not feel the cold as other mortals did. Both men were of similar build, stocky and so wide of shoulder that there was only just room for the two of them on the narrow driver’s seat of the sleigh.
As they turned a bend in the road Andras Zutor turned to Balint. ‘That’s Beles in front of us now,’ he said. On the floor of the valley below, Balint could see a huddle of little shingle-roofed huts where the foresters and workers in the sawmill were lodged. From a distance they looked like rows of blackened wooden coffins. Beyond them could be seen the canteen, the houses of the sawmill manager and clerks and, still farther on, the larger roofs of the sawmill itself surrounded by huge piles of uncut tree-trunks, neat mountains of cut planks and heaps of greying sawdust.
The little settlement was ringed with mountains, the Gyalu Boulini side of the Funcinyeli range, and these, shrouded in greyish mist darkened by wisps of smoke rising from the houses and the sawmill, effectively obscured any more distant view.
The noon siren sounded as they drove between the houses. Here the snow had been trodden into mud. All this, explained Andras, was part of the Abady estate. They passed a group of workers, some of whom raised their hats. Once through the settlement the sleigh turned once towards the mountains passing between snow-covered meadows, bare and white between dark plantations of fir trees. Here and there a rock stood out above the snow. As they passed an old willow tree that leaned over the edge of a deep canyon Andras turned again to Balint and explained that this marked the boundary of the Count’s property. Even though the road now started to climb steeply the horses increased their speed knowing that they would soon be home. Behind a fence stood a row of ash trees laden now with bunches of red-brown berries, and behind these again stood the little house of the forest manager. The sleigh turned in through an open gate and drew up before the front door where Kalman Nyiresy, he who had made such a bad impression on Balint when he had come to Denestornya, stood waiting on the steps, pipe in mouth and cap in hand.
‘Welcome, your Lordship, welcome!’ he cried, taking the meerschaum from his lips and shaking hands heartily. ‘I must say I never thought you’d really come in the winter! Come in and have a little something to warm the heart after such a long cold ride. And something to eat too! I’m afraid lunch won’t be until two; we never thought you’d get here so soon!’
‘I shall not be staying to lunch. I want to arrive before dark so as to set up camp,’ replied Balint coldly.
Old Nyiresy was stunned. ‘You won’t stay? You won’t honour my house? But I have invited guests to meet your Lordship; two of my best friends, the notary Gaszton Simo from Gyurkuca and the manager of the State forests. They’re fine men both of them, especially Simo who’s of a very good family from Bud-Szent-Katolnay. Why his uncle … If your Lordship’s really set on going up there you could start tomorrow morning.’