Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

Seeing this Adrienne began to realize what an accomplished man he was.

Altogether he spent five days at Almasko. On the sixth day he left at dawn. The night before, when he said his goodbyes, his host made him promise to return at the end of the summer.

‘I’ll come then because the most interesting butterflies are to be found at the beginning of the autumn,’ Dr Kisch replied, playing his part as a specialist in such matters.

Though offered the carriage he left on foot as he had come, taking the path to the crest of the hills where it joined the road to Banffy-Hunyad. It was barely dawn when he left.

A few hours later Adrienne went for a walk, not on the same path but in the same direction. They had agreed this in advance for it had been quite impossible for them to talk privately while the doctor was staying in the house. The matter had been fixed by Maier, the butler, who was the only person at Almasko whom Adrienne could trust with the knowledge of the doctor’s real identity and the purpose of his visit. They had worked it all out when she returned from seeing Dr Kisch at Regen.

Adrienne had always been an early riser and often in the mornings would go for long walks in the forest, so there was nothing unusual about her doing the same that morning.

Filled with anxiety she hurried through the young trees. Her heart was beating furiously for she realized that her fate would shortly be decided and that she would soon know whether it would be possible to bring up the question of divorce. She had no presentiments, either good or bad, for she had been able to read nothing in the doctor’s face, even though she had been watching closely for five long days.

As she emerged from the woods Adrienne saw that Dr Kisch was waiting for her just beyond where the last trees had been felled. He was sitting, exactly as planned, on one of the posts that marked the boundary of the Uzdy properties.

As it would not be wise for them to be seen together, for no one gossiped more than country people and many of them used this little road on their way to market, Adrienne at once suggested that they left the path and walked back into the trees.

There was only one direction in which they could go. Only there, into the Abady lands at that ancient beech-tree surrounded by young shoots, to the same spot where she and Balint had renewed their love the year before, could she be sure of not being seen. For months before that, during their long separation, she had often come there alone, hoping subconsciously for that longed-for reunion, for that unplanned meeting which one day had become a reality. Why had she chosen that spot? Because it was there that she used to meet Balint at the very beginning of their love for each other, and because it was their own secret meeting-place.

Adrienne had come to look on the giant old tree as her friend and protector, for it had been the only witness of their mutual fulfilment and so to her was symbolic of their passion for each other.

Now, when Adrienne had led the doctor to this secret place, she leaned back against the great trunk. He stood before her and told her what she had to know.

He spoke carefully‚ choosing his words with his usual circumspection. He started by going over the known facts: Uzdy’s parents had both been mentally afflicted, the father clinically mad and Countess Clémence seemed to him to be far from normal. This in itself did not mean very much, for hardly anybody would be considered normal if all their oddnesses and quirks of behaviour were to be known.

Adrienne nodded her understanding but did not interrupt, only her large topaz-coloured eyes widened in anxious expectation.

The doctor went on, his soothing voice blunting the effect of the harsh facts he had to convey. His meaning, however, was utterly clear. He believed that Uzdy was at present in a state of high nervous tension. This might, indeed probably would, diminish in time, especially if he took regularly the calming medicine he had recommended.

‘I didn’t give him an official prescription as a doctor would,’ he said smiling. ‘He believes me to be some sort of amateur quack. I had to make it appear that way if he was going to take me seriously! He thinks it’s something to stimulate the brain for the unusual but interesting work on which he is engaged. Nothing else can be done for the present. We have got to wait until this degree of over-excitement had died down.’

Then he explained that people like her husband suffered alternating periods of excitement and unnatural calm, and that these periods could be longer or shorter and could even disappear altogether. There was always the possibility of cure. Now followed the doctor’s considered diagnosis for which Adrienne had been waiting with agony in her heart. Dr Kisch’s voice became lower as he pronounced the fatal words: ‘ Bei dieser heute latenten Erregung könnte jedeseelischeErschütterungirgendeinerArteineheftigeKrisezum Ausbruchbringen,dienichtohneernsteFolgenbliebe — in this state of latent excitement any spiritual shock might bring on a crisis which could have dangerous secondary effects.’ This obviously meant her divorce, for that would be a severe ‘spiritual shock’ — it was, in fact, the exact opposite of everything that she had been hoping for these last long years.

When they finally said goodbye Dr Kisch added some phrases so as not to sound too discouraging, words that could be taken as hopeful but which, in the pain and disappointment of knowing that they still had to wait, Adrienne only remembered long afterwards.

For some time she remained there at the foot of the tree. She gazed ahead of her across the familiar clearing, in front of which she had so often paused before taking the path which led to the log-cabin that Balint had had built so that they should have a place to make love. It was here that a sudden wind had once torn down the young undergrowth, and now it seemed to the young woman standing there with such unnatural stillness that great swirls of mist were rising all around her and that the whole world grew darker and darker until she was alone in a sea of blackness. Then her knees buckled and she slid unconscious down the trunk of the great tree and lay in a faint between its entwining roots.

It was a long time before Adrienne came to, and by then the noonday sun was shining on her face. She had been lying on the same soft bed of moss on which she and Balint had fallen into each other’s arms that evening in May a year before.

ADRIENNE’S FIRST LETTER FOUND Balint at Denestornya, the next at Budapest. In between he received a brief note which ‘Honey’ Andras Zutor, the forest guard, delivered to Abady at Banffy-Hunyad. All this said was:

We can’t see each other, not for a long time. I’ll write to Budapest.

Adrienne had had to send it there because Balint, when he had received her first breathless message at Denestornya, had at once written back that he would come to the cabin in the forest so that they could meet.

Though the fact that this new turn in events meant that the inevitable break with his mother was now delayed was some slight consolation, the despair he sensed from Adrienne’s brief letter was a deep source of worry. It was because of this that he had decided to go to the Kalotaszeg so that they would be able to talk matters out face to face. Life at home was becoming more and more intolerable as the relations between mother and son grew ever colder and more tense. Everything they said to each other had an artificial ring, so much so that they might have been two sleep-walkers speaking at each other. Mother and son would still have their meals together, walk down to see the horses, stroll in the park and round the gardens, but it was all a sham; to both of them everything they did was no more than a charade designed to fill in the ever-diminishing time they had together before the storm broke.