Miklos Banffy: They Were Divided

So this, thought Balint, is the girl who is going to be my wife! Infinitely well-bred, the scion of countless generations whose sons and daughters, being always rich and independent, had never needed to marry some ugly ducking for her dowry or accept anyone second-rate for his money. Now she had nearly come up to where he stood. She did not increase her speed nor for a moment change her demeanour; and yet there was something special in the movement she made in putting out her hand to him, in the yielding softness with which she took his, and in the joyful flash of her corn-flower blue eyes.

Balint sensed it all at once and knew exactly what it meant.

During the three days of shooting Lili was often to be found beside him and remained with him for the whole of the most important beat on the third day when once again Balint found himself allotted the place of honour at the extreme right hand end of the line of guns. They somehow seemed to spend hours together, and even on those long afternoon walks on which, of course, they were never alone but always accompanied by several other young people, the two of them often seemed to be left to walk some twenty or thirty paces behind the others. And then Lili, who otherwise was lively and talkative, would remain silent, leaving it to him to decide what they would talk about. She was hoping he would propose: and that is when he ought to have done so, either in the long hornbeam avenue or else when coming back from visiting the thoroughbred mares.

Recalling that moment Balint conjured up in his mind the thin layer of powdery snow that covered the frozen ground and which had crackled under their feet. The others had lingered by the fences of the paddocks and that is when he should have spoken. It was there that he ought to have uttered those few banal words that were the classic form of suggesting marriage. And yet for some reason he had held back and said nothing. Stupidly he had said nothing. Had he felt that in that wintry landscape his voice would sound too matter-of-fact, too cold and businesslike, too unspontaneous? But of course he knew then, just as he knew now, that it would not have mattered how he had said it, for the girl had only been waiting for him to speak.

Balint stopped at the bridge over the mill-stream. For a moment he thought of going on into the park, which at that hour would be completely deserted, and he walked on a few steps before reflecting how silly it would be to get his patent leather evening shoes all muddied just before he went to the Prefect’s evening party. Far better to go where he could stay on the side-walk, where the slight humidity from that afternoon’s rain would have left few traces. So he continued along the road which led to the railway station.

As he wandered so aimlessly in the night Balint thought back to that time a year before when he had spent so many autumn evenings just wandering about the streets as aimlessly as he was now doing. Anything, he had thought, to keep on the move and quiet his growing anxiety as he waited for Adrienne’s letter, that letter which would at long last announce that she had started the business of her divorce. Until then every little note she had sent him had just been one more excuse for delay: ‘… it is impossible now’, or ‘Not yet, we have to wait, wait, wait!’ That was what she had written, and then he had not understood the dreadful dilemma in which she had been placed, fearing to make any move that might push her sick husband into insanity, that insanity that had come all the same and forever destroyed their hopes.

He wondered if Adrienne was still sitting in Countess Gyalakuthy’s box at the opera or whether she too had left the theatre devastated, as he had been, by the cruel chance that had brought them physically so close after so long apart. Had she too been shattered by that cruel game the Fates seemed to be playing with them?

Somehow, he thought, he must arrange that this should never happen again. He would leave Kolozsvar the next day, indeed if it had not been for that stupid supper party, he would have gone that very night.

In the morning he would go back to Denestornya, to his mother and to that old home which was the only place in the world where he could find peace. My home, he thought, with its age-old beauty and magic, where, though always enveloped in a veil of sadness, there were only the two of them to wander in that enormous house: he and his old mother. And now there always would only be the two of them. There was no one else, there never would be anyone else. There was no future and no young life to follow.

Had he proposed to Lili at Jablanka then at least he might have had that hope. What madness had prevented him?

It had been quite clear that the Szent-Gyorgyis, in their typically unobtrusive way, had made sure that there would have been no obstacles in the path of such a marriage. They had even thought about the difference of religion and, with a tactfulness that amounted almost to an art, had taken pains to let him know that his being a Protestant would create no difficulties

The memory came back to him with sudden clarity, perhaps because it had all been so surprising.

On the afternoon of the second day of the shooting party Balint had just changed and was on his way to join the others in the drawing-room when he met Pfaffulus in the passage. He had the impression that the priest had been waiting for him.

‘I was just on my way to the chapel,’ said Canon Czibulka in his slight Slovakian accent. ‘If you’ve never seen it perhaps you’d like to come with me? It’s really very fine, well worth seeing.’

They walked together to that part of the former monastery that formed the rear part of the cloister-court and faced the main entrance over which was the refectory now transformed into the main drawing-room. In the centre of the first floor gallery which encircled the court was a massive stone doorway, whose carved and ornamented architraves framed the door-posts which bordered a pair of huge doors inlaid with many different kinds of precious woods in the full opulence of ecclesiastical baroque.

Pfaffulus pushed open the doors which swung back noiselessly. They went in.

The chapel was the size of a church and the semi-circle of windows behind the altar must, Balint had realized, have projected out towards the mountainside. Although darkness had nearly fallen there was enough evening light to cast a soft mystical radiance in front of which the lines of the baldaquin over the altar stood out as if etched in black on grey. Then Pfaffulus had switched on the electric chandeliers and the chapel blazed with light. It was indeed beautiful.

Along each side wall stood the carved wooden stalls where the monks had sat for worship, the panelling divided by columns which supported a carved rococo veil that seemed to swirl with an almost musical rhythm towards the altar. All along its border were placed winged angels’ heads and surmounting all this splendour was the monastic order’s symbolic bird, a raven carrying bread in its beak, huge and gilded, like an emphatic exclamation mark floating above the mellow brown woodwork of the canopy itself. Over the tabernacle the baldaquin, fringed with golden tassels and supported by twisted columns, supported a picture of the Virgin surrounded by a golden sun-burst. On each side angels dressed identically in blue and gold, with gilded wings, knelt in the exaggerated attitudes so beloved in the baroque era.