Now he recalled what Fanny had taught him when two years before she had first taken him as her lover. ‘It is far more sensible to turn up the light for a moment and find out where you are than to bump into something and wake everyone up!’ He smiled at the memory and his hand reached for the light switch. When he did so he realized that he was at the door of her room, and that all he had to do was to turn the knob and go in to her. Quickly he turned out the light again and, his heart beating hard with joy and anticipation, put his hand on the door-knob in front of him.
The door did not yield. It was locked.
He knocked lightly. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder this time, and then waited. He fancied he could hear some soft panting inside. What on earth had happened? Was she playing some sort of joke on him? Angrily he knocked again, quite loudly, and called out in an annoyed voice, ‘Fanny! It’s me, why have you locked the door?’
But all he heard was some sort of stifled sob and finally Fanny replied faintly: ‘Go away. I’ve got a headache, I can’t …’
Warday was not a bad man. He felt sorry for the poor girl whose voice had sounded almost stifled as if she could hardly speak.
‘Poor Fanny, what rotten luck! Perhaps in Budapest we might …?’
‘All right! All right! But go away now, please!’ and as the young man moved cautiously back to the corridor he heard again that soft panting that had so disturbed him before.
How the poor girl must be suffering! he said to himself as he hurried back to his own room.
He was right, of course, but not in the way he thought it. Countess Beredy was lying face downwards on her bed, her hair spilled carelessly over the pillows and she was sobbing her heart out in great racking spasms. Her night-gown was torn and every now and again she would arch her back and plunge down again into the soft coverlets as if thereby she could smother herself and find oblivion.
Finally there was peace in all parts of the great castle of Jablanka. Of the hundreds who lay down there at night only four were still awake, two men and two women. Klara, in her old room, lay motionless against the high pile of lace-covered pillows, gazing up at the alabaster hanging lamp; and on the other side of the castle, Fanny was drowning in sorrow and misery, her hair and pillows wet with tears.
Pfaffulus was in the chapel, kneeling in front of the candle that burned there perpetually. He was praying for that foolish and wayward young man, the same for whom one woman wept and another gazed silently at the night-light in her room.
And Balint, too, kept vigil. Still at his open window he might have been staring into the face of destiny, the inexorable destiny that would in time overwhelm his beloved country.
Now the Berlin Express reached that curve where the valley of the Vag narrows into a mountain pass. The engine shrilled a loud warning, its whistle, screaming in the dark, echoed through the cloisters of the former monastery.
PART THREE
Chapter One
BALINT RETURNED to Budapest. There he found a stormy atmosphere in parliamentary circles.
The most noise was being made by the Independence Party. Kossuth had had to work hard to keep its members sufficiently in order to get the new commercial agreements with Austria ratified. Obstructions were being made by all those who had left the party in protest over the increases in the Hungarian contribution to the joint Austro-Hungarian army and so, with these problems in mind, the government put forward a proposal that consisted only of a single paragraph which laid down that, once accepted, all budget proposals would remain in force for ten years from the following January 1st.
Never before had any government dared to ask Parliament for such a mandate; and it was all the more surprising that this measure should come from those in the Coalition who formerly, when they were in opposition, had bent over backwards and split every hair to maintain the supremacy of Parliament in the passing of laws, and the freedom of speech of all members. However the government’s hands were now bound for they had sworn to follow a certain programme and this was the only way this promise could be redeemed.
It was in these circumstances that the party rebels took especial pleasure in attacking their former leaders in the Independence Party who, they claimed, had gone back on all their former promises! It was in vain that Apponyi, with his honeyed speech and well-known eloquence, should rise and defend the party’s actions. And so the discussions and arguments became more and more personal and venomous. Things reached such a pitch that the Minister-President found himself obliged to fight a duel with Geza Polonyi. Even though both were elderly men and none too agile, their seconds still insisted that they fought with sabres.
As it turned out no great harm was done; and no blood was shed since both men were soon so out of breath that the physicians stopped the fight declaring mutual exhaustion. Though this was nothing if not accurate, it was the source of many ribald jokes throughout Budapest — and none of them were to the government’s advantage.
This was the only sort of news to which the general public paid the slightest attention. The anti-Italian speech in Vienna, made, as Slawata had told Balint, by Mayor Lüger, aroused no interest at all in Budapest. There people were only concerned with the proceedings in Parliament and so it was remarkable that no one seemed to notice or comment upon Andrassy’s cunning ruling that all civil servants must be able to speak the language of the people they served. It had been expected that the extreme chauvinists would have a field-day haggling about the details of this measure, but the storm about the army quotas overwhelmed discussion of all other issues.
Unfortunately the Croatian situation was getting worse daily. The congress of the Starcevicz party passed a resolution declaring their firm intention to break away from their allegiance to the crown of St Stephen. Although the session of the Zagreb Parliament opened on the appointed day it had immediately to be adjourned, so revolutionary was the mood of the people who were making demonstrations daily throughout the city.
Balint was even more upset by the news from Croatia since he had listened to the talk at Jablanka.
He went home to Transylvania for Christmas in a dark and depressed mood. The awful threat posed by the rivalries of the great powers, the sinister plan for a ‘little war’ with Italy, and the upheavals beyond the Drava, all weighed upon his spirits and seemed to him only to emphasize that the political unawareness of all those in Hungary whose self-indulgence, preoccupation only with such internal issues as affected themselves, and whose self-centred conviction that only such trivial matters were of the smallest significance, was leading his country to isolation and ruin.
When Balint reached Kolozsvar he thought it would be nice to surprise his mother with a small gift which just might help to soothe the tenseness that had recently developed between them. It was difficult to know what to choose because Countess Roza had a rule that she never accepted anything personal, but only gifts intended to adorn her beloved Denestornya. Little objects such as ash-trays, antique clocks, or pieces of china would do, but little else. It had to be something which would look as if it had always been there. This gave her pleasure because for her the house was like a living person and to make it more beautiful was her daily preoccupation.