They Were Divided (4 page)

Czibulka had then fallen silent, gazing ahead as if conscious only of his own memories. Then he had got up and looked at Abady as if excusing himself for having burdened the young man with such personal reminiscences.

‘You must forgive my idle chatter,’ he said. ‘I seem to have gone on at length about things which only concern myself. But this chapel, you see, means so much to me.’

Then he had made another quick genuflection towards the altar, switched out the lights, and escorted Balint out of the
chapel
. They walked back together to the drawing-room where everyone was gathering for tea.

They had thought of every way to encourage and reassure him, and so everything had depended on him and on him alone. And then he had let the moment pass and so thrown away his chances, if not of love then at least of a kind and loving wife, of a family, and of a nest to come home to.

It had been on the last evening of his stay that he had let the final opportunity escape him.

He had dressed for dinner early and when he had entered the drawing-room he had found it deserted. Then, through the open doors to the library, he had seen Lili, who for some reason of her own had also dressed before the others. She had been kneeling on a chair drawn up to a long table in the centre of the room, leaning forward with her bare elbows reflected on the polished wooden table top as she turned the pages of a large album of engravings. She had seemed totally engrossed in the pictures before her.

At that moment he had instinctively known that she had come down early to the library with a single purpose, and that that had been, if possible, to give him one final occasion on which to make his proposal, final because it had been the last night of that gathering at Jablanka to which he had been invited just for that purpose.

‘Do you know this collection?’ Lili had asked when Balint had come up to her and leaned beside her on the table. ‘It is very rare. It’s the record of a journey to Egypt by a Hungarian, a Count Forray. Aren’t these coloured engravings lovely? Do look! Look at this one! Isn’t it beautiful?’ and as she had looked up at him the question in her wide open violet-blue eyes had had nothing to do with the pictures on the table.

Together they had turned the pages slowly; and as they did so sometimes their arms or their fingers had touched and sometimes they had exchanged a word or two: ‘This must be Malta!’, ‘Do look at the camel-driver!’, ‘The Khedive’s palace …’, words without any real meaning whose purpose had only been to break the silence.

Several times Balint had thought that the moment had come to speak the words for which she was waiting. He had only to take her hand and murmur a few short sentences and with that simple action he would have wiped out the past and started a new era in his life. Adrienne had wanted it that way and had expected it of him; but somehow the right words had never come, only those banal phrases about the engravings in the album on the table before them. And yet, as he was saying something obvious about the temple at Karnak and how large its stones were, he had been wondering if he ought then to have said ‘I love you’, which would have been a lie, or whether all that would have been needed was ‘Will you be my wife?’ until the moment had passed and they had been obliged to get up and go into the
drawing-room
where the other guests had started to gather.

Lili had then got down from the chair on which she had been kneeling and slowly straightened up. Balint remembered that he had wondered then if she thought he might have been
embarrassed
to speak under the bright glare of the electric chandelier above them, especially as she had walked straight over to one of the deep window embrasures, where the thickness of the old walls would have made them invisible to the guests in the other room. She had gone right up to the window and then, with her face close to the glass, and clearly to find another reason for the move, she had murmured ‘Do look at the frost. It is like flowers made of ice!’ and then she had turned and glanced back at him.

But Balint, who had followed her only as far as the beginning of the deep window embrasure, had just stood there still looking at the vast library.

The walls were lined with wooden bookcases almost to the
ceiling
, all curved and convoluted with elaborate carved and gilded decorations and divided by twisted columns of different precious woods. Above the elaborate cornice were metal conch shells and gilded
putti
brandishing highly-coloured heraldic shields, all in the most sophisticated manner of the Viennese baroque. The atmosphere of abounding opulence was overwhelming, and when Balint had watched the slim girlish figure of Lili stepping so
elegantly
across the inlaid parquet floor he had suddenly felt that all this was her proper background, where she truly belonged. This somewhat foreign luxury, itself so truly Austrian, was her
birthright
; and yet it was alien and strange to anyone with his
downright
Transylvanian background. How could he uproot her and carry her off to his own so different home? Even if she were in love with him, he had thought, would she not feel herself transplanted into an alien, possibly hostile, soil. For all its size and grandeur, Denestornya in its simple Hungarian way could not compare with this sophisticated splendour, just as the way of life in Transylvania could hardly be compared with what Lili was used to. All this had flashed through Balint’s mind as he had stood there looking at her, and it was like a sudden draught of cold air in his face. More, it had been just one more inhibition to be added to the others.

‘It must be icy outside.’

‘It was six below zero at dusk.’

‘How bright the moonlight is!’

‘That’s why it’s so cold. The sky is quite clear now.’

With these and other meaningless, inane phrases they had filled
in the gaps between pauses that seemed endless to them both. At length Lili had turned away from the window. For an instant she had looked straight into Balint’s face and then, seeming to glide across the floor, she had returned to the drawing room
without
saying another word.

Knowing now that he had finally lost her, Balint had followed her slowly, his heart filled with sadness: and yet it had been a mild sadness and on his face had been the slight ironic smile of someone who had had to forgo a pleasure he had never really expected to be his.

What madness it had been to throw all that away!

Thinking back to the past Balint stamped his feet in
momentary
anger and quickened his pace. In a few moments he found himself in the square in front of the station, which was full of
bustle
and noise for the express from Budapest had just arrived. Several luggage-laden motors passed him on their way to the city centre and this sudden rush of activity brought Balint to a halt. For a moment he hesitated, trying to choose between continuing on the muddy pavement in front of some warehouses, or crossing the road which was even muddier. Neither seemed sensible.

As he stood there motionless for a moment newsboys ran
forward
offering the capital’s midday papers. Thinking that
anything
might be a distraction from his self-torment, Balint stopped one, took a paper at random, pressed a coin into the lad’s hand, stuffed the paper into one of his greatcoat pockets and, without waiting for the change, turned away and started to walk back to the city centre. I’ll go to a café and pass the rest of the time
reading
, he said to himself; but he had only gone a few steps before he had already forgotten what he had just decided.

At dinner on the last night of his stay at Jablanka they had
discussed
the problem of Croatia. The Friedjung trial had been brought before the Viennese courts at the beginning of the month, December, and the Austrian newspapers had arrived at the castle that afternoon. They had all written about the case, and almost everything that had been printed had been
disagreeable
and critical.

It had all started when Professor Friedjung had written a most controversial article, which had been published in the
Neue
Freie
Presse
at the end of March 1909. The subject had been the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in it the Professor had
named some fifty Croatian politicians whom he had accused of belonging to a irredentist organization supported by the
government
of Serbia. It had been fairly obvious from the start that Friedjung’s revelations had been inspired by the Austrian Foreign Office, for the material for the article could only have been provided by the Ballplatz. That these accusations should have been broadcast to the world’s press in this way had shown the whole affair to have been part of a plot by which the Dual Monarchy was to be forced into sending an ultimatum, with impossible terms, to Belgrade and then, when Serbia inevitably refused to comply, declaring war.

Some trouble had been gone to in order to prepare the world diplomatically for these developments. Germany had already confirmed her solidarity with Vienna; Russia, though reluctantly and with a bad grace, would not intervene, and various other European powers had made it clear to Belgrade that Serbia would receive no support from abroad.

The article in the
Neue
Freie
Presse
had appeared on March 25th, which had also been the date planned for the ultimatum, though this had never materialized because on the same day the Grown Prince of Serbia, George Karageorgevitch, had resigned his post as head of the pro-war party. A few days later Serbia showed herself willing to accept any terms offered her.
Nevertheless
the incendiary article had appeared and events later showed that, no matter what had transpired in Belgrade, the Friedjung article was part of a far-reaching plan hatched in Vienna and would have been published anyhow. A month later the
monarchy
’s Prosecutor-General arraigned another group of fifty-four Croatians, all accused of treason. This had been brought about by Baron Rauch, the Coalition-nominated Ban of Croatia, who was as anxious to see irredentism wiped out in Zagreb as were the Austrian politicians to stop Serbian irredentist activities in Vienna. The Zagreb trial had lasted five
months and had ended that October with thirty-one of the defendants found guilty. Appeals had been launched, and it had been fairly obvious that they were likely to succeed since the whole prosecution had been based on the weakest of cases. The Zagreb trial had provoked a most disagreeable anti-Austrian feeling abroad and the French press had written about the ‘Death of Justice’ in Vienna. The strong reaction abroad and the indecisive results of the Zagreb trial now gave new heart to those who had been pilloried by the Friedjung article and so they had accused him of slander.

This trial had opened at the beginning of December and Professor Friedjung had at once declared that he could prove the truth of everything that he had alleged; and he presented
documents
to support his accusations. These, of course, had been
provided
by the Ballplatz and sent secretly to the famous and respectable historian. Then, as the trial entered its second week, things began to go wrong; some of the documents had been shown to be forgeries.