Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

‘As your Lordship wishes!’ said Azbej, and backed out hurriedly before Laszlo could think of anything else he wanted to keep for himself.

Sara’s carriage rumbled across the level crossing beside the station at Apahida, drove up the hill on the right and stopped in front of her house. Now the sleet had turned to snow and the storm was so gusty that they were almost swept off the steps that led to the front door; it was the same storm that had prevented Abady catching the night express.

Still in their overcoats Sara and Laszlo ran straight into the dining-room beyond the hall. Here they took them off, Gyeroffy still by the door, Sara just the other side of the big table. Then, although it was only five o’clock, she lit the hanging lamp, for it was already dark and the windows covered with snow.

When she had finished she looked at Laszlo.

He stood near the table where the lamp cast a harsh glow on his face. His chin was covered with stubble and there was an unusually deep vertical furrow on his brow. To Sara this seemed inexpressibly sinister. Laszlo’s hair fell in a dishevelled mass over his forehead and with his dirty collar and wrinkled suit he looked far more depraved than he had seven months before when she had rescued him from the inn at Szamos-Ujvar and brought him home.

Then he had been drunk; now he was sober, menacingly sober, and standing stiffly upright as if hewn out of granite.

An icy hand seemed to clutch at Sara’s heart, for in his face she saw a cruel determination. His eyes were shining with hatred. She could hardly believe it, but hatred it certainly was, hatred which Laszlo had conjured up for himself. He had now convinced himself that it was this woman who was the root cause of his moral degradation. It was she who had picked him up, who knowingly had kept him by her, lulling his conscience with the dark beauty of her body and confusing his judgement by loving, lascivious kisses and his soul by enchanting drafts from her soft mouth, so that she could keep him by her in shameful servitude just as Circe had kept Ulysses’s crew in a pigsty, so drugged that they did not notice their degradation. And so it was with him. Everything she had done, she had done so that he too should remain unaware of the baseness of his life, the life of a parasite kept by her as drones are kept by worker bees. How could she have done it? How could she have taken advantage of his weakness, his poverty and his restless, homeless life and then have surrounded him with such luxury that he should not notice what she had made of him? How could she have done it?

For some moments they stood looking at each other across the table, she hurt and frightened and he with unrelenting malice. Sara wanted to say something, but though her lips moved no sound came from them.

Gyeroffy reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out two envelopes. He threw one to her.

‘Here! Take it! It’s the money for your beloved pigs, 16,000 crowns of it. You were afraid I’d steal it, weren’t you? Well, you were wrong. It’s all there, to the last penny. Count it!’

‘Laszlo!’ the poor woman cried. ‘What do you mean? The idea …!’ She felt she was living a nightmare.

‘Count it! Now, in front of me! I don’t ever want it said that I took your money. Go on, count it!’

Sara was so upset and frightened that she did not dare disobey. As quickly as she could she went through the motions of counting and then replaced the notes in the envelope. Now Gyeroffy spoke again, and this time his voice was even colder than before and had an ironic ring to it.

‘We might as well settle all our accounts at the same time. Here is what I owe you! Count it!’ he repeated and he threw the other envelope on the table in front of her. A few thousand-crown notes fell out as it hit the table in front of Sara. Totally bewildered she asked, ‘What’s this? What’s it for? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s 15,000 crowns. I have stayed here since September. That’s 210 days at 50 crowns a day. Fifty crowns for bed and board — quite generous, don’t you think, but then I wanted to pay for everything — everything, do you understand? — every single thing you have done for me.’

At first Sara did not grasp what he meant but when the full implications became clear to her she drew herself up and in her anger herself became a figure of menace, tall, with broad shoulders, her black eyes burning with anger between those thick lashes and her mouth curved back like one of the Furies. For an instant she remained quite still. Then her arm shot out and she pointed to the door.

‘Out! Get out! At once! Out! Out!’

Laszlo crumpled as if some spring inside him had suddenly broken. He turned away and ran to the door not even noticing that the money was thrown after him. He grabbed his coat and ran out into the snow.

Behind him the door was slammed by the wind.

Laszlo stumbled down the hill. The storm was in his face but he felt nothing, not even those myriad ice-needles which seemed to press into his skin. He ran down the valley, ran like a hunted animal keeping to a familiar path, oblivious of where he was going or what was happening to him, ran until he could run no longer. Then, though almost at the end of his strength, he still tried to run, for he sensed that the demon of arrogance and evil that had possessed him had now done its work and would soon vanish; and he was afraid that when that happened he would break down and weep.

He ran too to escape from the fact that this attitude from which he had somehow expected to find some moral satisfaction had turned into a morass of shame, shame for his lack of gratitude, for his intolerable rudeness and brutality.

When he reached the main road he saw in front of him the squalid little inn beside the station. He burst through the door.

The room was filled with smoke and the few railway workers who were sitting there with their brandy took no notice of the newcomer and indeed did not even notice how wet, muddy and dishevelled he was.

‘Brandy! Brandy! A half-bottle of brandy!’ he muttered.

‘Which sort, aniseed or sweet?’ enquired the innkeeper curtly.

‘Either. It doesn’t matter,’ replied Laszlo. ‘But make sure it’s strong, very strong.’

Laszlo drank it all down almost as soon as it was on the table. Then he had another, and another. Now he was already fuddled with drink and it occurred to him that Sara was sure to have sent someone out to look for him and that they had better not find him there, anything but that. So he flung a couple of crowns on the table and rushed out once again into the storm.

He ran on like a man pursued. On the road there were large patches of snow and between them puddles of black water. Laszlo ran straight ahead no matter what lay in his way and hardly even noticing whether he stepped in mud, water or snow. On the edge of the village there was another inn. There he stopped again and drank more measures of brandy; and the more he drank the more he became convinced that someone was following him and that sooner or later he would be caught and taken back. But who it was and where he would be taken he no longer knew; only the fear stayed with him, the fear that someone was after him and that therefore he had to keep on running, running, running, even though his legs could hardly carry him.

He managed to stagger through the village, though the snow was piling up in drifts beside the road and it was snowing so hard that no one, sober or drunk, could have told where they were. Somehow he pushed himself onward.