Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

Winckler, though he had little experience of the vagaries of human nature, had understood at once that the letter from Countess Abady’s agent was itself only a symptom of a greater and more dramatic upheaval. Since he could in no way question or comfort his former employer, he wanted somehow to show his sympathy, and the only way he knew was to cover his confusion with a flow of somewhat incoherent words. And again it was typical of him that he took off his pince-nez and started to polish them with his handkerchief.

That evening Balint left the mountains. Disgraced, and with his authority taken from him, he felt it impossible to remain.

What was his position? It was not even that of a tied estate-worker. How could he stay on where, until now, he had been the master on whom everything depended, where everything had been done by his orders, when he did not even know whether Azbej might not go so far as to forbid the estate foresters to supply him with pack-animals or to do anything else he might wish? There was also another reason why he should go away as quickly as possible. Soon it would become public knowledge that he no longer counted for anything in the mountains and he did not want his former dependants to start feeling sorry for him, especially as he knew how Gaszton Simo and his angry band of followers would gloat when they heard of Count Abady’s disgrace.

He struck camp at once and rode straight to Mereggyo where Winckler left him. Here they parted without anything further being said but with a warm handshake to express their mutual sympathy. Then he rumbled down to Banffy-Hunyad in a hired farm cart. It had been a lucky chance that he had left his car there and so could continue his journey by road, because he did not want to risk meeting anyone he knew at the station.

Night fell as he drove away from all those places he had loved so much. Now he could not see anything of that country to which he was bidding farewell, and as he drove swiftly through the dark all his attention was on the road illuminated by his headlights. The cold air was in his face and he told himself, ironically, that he was like a chicken hypnotized by the glare; and it was also with a certain tart irony that he was now able to look back on what the day had brought: at dawn, the royal stag in all his sovereignty; in the morning the arrival of the irate Winckler; and now it was he who was running as if pursued by the Fates.

Also, he thought, what luck that rascal Simo had! Just when Abady had acquired the power to ruin him and make him pay for his oppression of the mountain people and for his arrogant swagger, chance had intervened and saved him.

What luck that man has! he thought. And what a crazy world!

The next few weeks were dull enough for Abady, though the political scene was lively.

While he had been away in Transylvania the Coalition had been on the verge of collapse, and the atmosphere in Budapest ever more tense.

All over the country the campaign for the establishment of the independent banking system had been stoked up, but at the same time that section of the Independence Party that was led by Justh did all it could to fight against the policies of Ferenc Kossuth, still their nominal leader, proclaiming that in this matter they would accept no compromise. They even went so far as to demand that Wekerle’s government should at once vote the fantastic sum of 500 million crowns for defence.

That the army desperately needed the money at a time when all Europe was arming and Russia seemed to be preparing for a general war was true enough, especially as Austria-Hungary’s military equipment was so antiquated. It was perfectly true that the Dual Monarchy would be useless, whether as enemy or ally, unless its army could swiftly be modernized, but it was still fruitless to raise this demand at a time when the government was powerless to act. Again there was raised the spectre of the cold hand of the Heir, who was thought to be plotting to bring to power his own nominee, Laszlo Lukacs.

Once again the government resigned and Wekerle went so far as to announce in Parliament that the Coalition had been dissolved. But the Monarch said: ‘ Weiterdienen! — go back to work!’ and refused to accept the resignations.

This was the situation that Abady found when he returned to Budapest, so he was on the spot for all that followed. The government crisis was so drawn-out that it seemed like eternity. It was complicated by a kaleidoscopic change of allegiances. At one moment there was a short-lived cabinet headed by Wlassits; just before that one led by Kossuth, and just after it another with Andrassy; but all were so brief that they passed almost unnoticed, appearing and as swiftly vanishing on that fantasy stage of politics, insubstantial as some mad nirvana. Each one had his own unreasonable reasons to excuse his failure: Wlassits had no majority; Kossuth would only remain if he could go on carrying simultaneously the banners of the independent banking system and the separation of the Austro-Hungarian Customs; and Andrassy insisted that Vienna should yield on the questions of appointing Hungarians to army commands and using the Hungarian language in army orders. He was adamant on these principles and the Crown was equally adamant in refusing, even though Andrassy had proposed a face-saving formula by which the Hungarian army demands were accepted in theory but not put into practice. None of these contradictory moves did anything to alleviate the general malaise nor stop the decay of the Coalition.

It was not long before the general public wearied of all the artificial excitement, and the more they were bombarded by leading articles in the Press, each party lambasting the policies of its opponents, the more the man in the street became disillusioned with the lot of them. People no longer believed a word of what they read in the Press, until all the different political elements in the Coalition had lost credit with the general public. The fundamental flaw that brought the Coalition down was that when it had first come to power its leaders had pretended that they had now won everything for which they had fought while in opposition; while the truth was that they had capitulated on almost all points. All that nationalistic nonsense that had been used to win votes before they achieved power proved to be nothing but a bag of campaign tricks once they were in office. That famous Pactum , whose very existence had been so hotly denied until the fiction could no longer be maintained — since it had become clear to everyone that it had been the price paid for getting office — and the fact that after three and a half years nothing had been done to realize the promised universal suffrage, had brought the whole political structure into disrepute with the ordinary citizen.

The leaders of the different parties forming the Coalition fought against each other in a sort of vacuum, though they themselves still thought the battles were real and significant. They proclaimed the same slogans, for which they had once been worshipped as demigods, but now the effect was not the same. Those ideas which had once raised cheers of enthusiasm and support — the old questions of banking, customs, Hungarian sword-tassels for army officers etc. etc. etc. — now raised no more than disillusioned yawns. And the politicians were so wrapped up in their own importance that they never even noticed.

Sadly enough, this disdain for internal politics was reflected by an equal disregard for the signs of more sinister developments abroad. It should have been a warning to Hungary that when all the defendants in the Zagreb treason trial were given heavy sentences of imprisonment, the French Press hailed it as a welcome sign of Balkan disintegration. What, it should then have been asked, was the true significance of the meeting at Racconigi between the Tsar of Russia and the King of Italy? No one knew, no one cared, and no one bothered to ask. True, there were cheerful gossipy items in the Press about the meeting of the two rulers, one of them the ally of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale and the other of Austria and Germany, but it was complacently assumed that nothing would shake Italy’s loyalty to the central European powers. The newspapers wrote, ‘There is no question of Italy quitting the Triple Alliance’. No one thought to look further, and nothing was said to reassure those who might have been surprised that the Tsar‚ who had never been a peripatetic monarch like King Edward of England, should have gone to Italy at all. And yet, as was learned much later, it had been during this visit that plans were laid that led later to Italy’s change of heart during the Great War.