Miklos Banffy - They Were Divided

Gornergrat, 3, 300 metres above sea level .

ON A NARROW RIDGE OF GRANITE there stood a small hotel built of wood on stone foundations. A broad terrace stretched across the front of the building, looking over a deep abyss. All around there was perpetual snow and, directly beneath, glaciers. Beyond these was a further immense valley shaped like a giant cauldron, so deep that from above it seemed almost unreal and the occasional houses as small as grains of rice. Beyond the cauldron was a wall of mountains over which towered the Matterhorn, a solitary peak which shot high in the air with an almost perpendicular rock-face culminating in a narrow granite spike so sharp that it was like some giant claw reaching out to the sky above.

The hotel could only be reached by cable-car. Balint had arrived at midday, called there by Adrienne who had chosen this place because, in the middle of July, there would be few other guests, for in those days tourists only came to such high altitudes in August. And also because it was little more than an hour’s drive from Montana where was the sanatorium to which her daughter had been taken when she became ill at school. Adrienne had been there since February.

Balint spent his time wondering why she had sent for him and what it was she wanted to tell him. Her telegram had included the words ‘ there are decisive matters we must discuss …’

His heart had constricted. What did she mean by the cold formal phrase ‘decisive matters’? What could there be that she was not able to write in a letter, that she had to tell him herself? What sort of danger could be threatening them now? In her last letter Adrienne had written that her daughter had suffered a lung hæmorrhage. It had been a short letter, and then there had been nothing for two weeks, though before that she had written nearly every day.

Then, five days ago before had come this telegram with every detail of their meeting carefully planned.

For what seemed an eternity Balint waited alone for Adrienne to arrive, alone with dismal thoughts and nagging distress and foreboding.

He must have walked up and down the terrace at least fifty times before he was able to pull himself together and force himself to think about other things. Otherwise I shall go crazy, he said to himself.

There were plenty of other matters to worry about.

At the end of June the Heir had been assassinated at Sarajevo, in a double tragedy which had taken the life not only of Franz-Ferdinand but also of his wife, the only being he had ever loved and probably the only person who had ever loved him. At the news of his death the Hungarian people had breathed more easily, for they all knew he was no lover of their country and no one, as yet, had imagined that his murder might lead to war. In this their feeling was reinforced by the general indifference with which the Heir’s death had been greeted in Vienna itself. He had even been buried with far less ceremony than his rank would normally have demanded and Balint had been one of the few politicians in Budapest who judged that this was a grave error, for if Austria-Hungary was to maintain her position as a great power it should at once have realized that the assassination had been the direct result of a Serbian conspiracy hatched in Belgrade and should have been treated as such. To those farsighted few the future seemed full of foreboding.

The prospects were indeed dark. Any military retaliation would inevitably explode into war, that war that had already twice seemed inevitable; once in 1908 after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and then again, in the previous year, when the Balkan conflict had started.

There seemed to be only one hope. A royal prince had been brutally murdered and it was unlikely that any European monarch would wish to side with those who had killed the heir to a brother kingdom.

If the Ballplatz were to be sufficiently adroit to exploit this aspect of the crisis and demand satisfaction without raising the spectre of official Serbian complicity, if it were possible to do this without giving rise to the assumption that Austria was seeking an excuse to invade and annex Serbia, then perhaps war might be avoided.

This was not impossible. With skilful diplomacy it might just be achieved, but the crucial question still remained — was this what Berchtold really wanted and was he sufficiently able to bring it off? So far his handling of the Balkan problem did not give rise to hope. Maybe he could do it … maybe …?

It had never seemed that he wanted war, and indeed until now he had managed to avoid it, even if only by dint of shameful concessions. Would it be the same now?

But if he failed, what then? What would be the fate of Hungary, unprepared as she was, with an antiquated army and a leadership composed only of those who had always been bitterly opposed even to discussing anything that concerned the defence of the nation?

Balint tried to force himself to think only about such matters, to drown his personal worries in analysing the world’s problems; but he failed. Subconsciously he could not shake off a sense of some deep personal tragedy and his heart seemed to beat at the back of his throat.

Adrienne did not arrive until after four o’clock.

‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t start when I wanted to. Clemmie was so restless that I had to wait until she calmed down.’

She was very pale. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and she was worn out after a succession of sleepless nights. She had lost weight and the skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones. Her chin seemed sharper, perhaps because she was so much thinner, perhaps because of what she had decided she must tell him. She seemed unusually solemn, and her manner was distant.

They sat down facing each other at one of the tables on the terrace.

‘What is it … what is it you have to tell me?’ asked Balint hesitantly. He felt so self-conscious that he could hardly get out the words.

Adrienne’s eyes opened wide and her golden irises gazed straight at Balint. After a few moments’ silence she started to speak, very slowly: ‘We can never get married! I have to take back my promise.’

‘But that is ridiculous!’ he cried, almost jumping out of his seat.

‘Wait a minute! You must let me explain.’

‘Explain? How can you explain such a thing?’

‘Be patient with me, Balint … and please don’t interrupt, it’s difficult enough without that!’

Clemmie, she said, had been brought up to the sanatorium at Montana after her first hæmorrhage. She had needed careful round-the-clock nursing and had to be watched every minute of the day and kept to a strict régime of meals and rest-times and lying in the sun. It had not been easy for the little girl was wilful and rebellious and would not listen to anyone except her mother. The doctors and nurses alone could do nothing with her if her mother was not there beside them. It seemed that the girl had confidence only in her. At first she had even been suspicious of Adrienne, but as her condition had improved so had her trust in her mother.

After a while it had seemed that the child was getting better. She had put on weight and her recurrent fevers had diminished and they had even said that maybe soon she would be able to come down to a milder climate. Then came a second haemorrhage. A new lesion had opened on the other side of the lung. This was usually fatal and Adrienne had been told that if she left the sanatorium the child would be dead in a few weeks. It would be by staying where she was and strictly obeying the doctors’ orders that her life could be prolonged. If she did that then she might live for a few years — perhaps five or six, perhaps ten or even twelve — but no more. That was the verdict of the specialist, and everything that Adrienne had read told her the same thing. And even this would only be if she stayed in the high mountains with the most expert nursing.