Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

When Balint had finished explaining the situation and had begun to suggest ways of putting matters right Timisan’s obvious interest vanished. Now Balint proposed co-operative societies as an antidote to the individual peasant’s dependence on bank loans. He said that such co-operatives should group together people of the same region regardless of race or religion, that smaller centres should be established where the population was sparser, that teachers and trained accounting clerks should be posted to country districts and that bigger credits, at lower interest rates, should be available to the communities. He also proposed that free legal aid should be given to those who were already entangled in the money-lenders’ clutches.

Carried away by his own enthusiasm Balint spoke warmly and urgently, with colourful phrases that reflected his perennial urge to help others. Even so there was very little applause when he sat down and the next speaker was called upon to rise.

Balint gathered together his notes and left the Chamber. At the end of the corridor he was met by Timisan.

‘My congratulations on your Lordship’s maiden speech!’ he said, holding out his hand. Then, smiling slyly under his grey moustache, he said, ‘Do you remember when you honoured me with your visit? Was I not right? Now you can see for yourself: the Hungarians are too busy with other things to bother with such matters!’

He turned to go. Then, looking back over his shoulder, as if it were an afterthought, he said, ‘It was kind of you not to have mentioned my name! Thank you!’

Then the old man stumped heavily back into the Chamber.

The Spring was so beautiful in the forest that gradually these disagreeable memories faded from Balint’s mind. His footsteps made no sound as he walked slowly over the carpet of fallen leaves now softened by the melting of winter snow. Tiny bell-like flowers glistened on the red-brown loam that lay below the giant beeches whose pale grey trunks towered high above him. In the clearings between the trees cornelian-coloured cherries were in bloom and the hazel bushes were tasselled with catkins. Orange-red ‘Bleeding Hearts’ glowed beneath the white stars of blackthorn and here and there wild cherries were festooned with cream-coloured bouquets. Looking up through the lacy green trembling foliage of the trees one could see that the sky, though flecked with a few barely moving clouds, was still brilliantly blue; down below the shadows of dusk were just beginning to blur the outlines of the magic forest, giving it a dreamlike quality of unreality.

In the trees the evening calls of those day birds who would break into full chorus at dawn were dying away, to be interrupted by the first tentative notes of a nightingale whose broken roulades seemed to suggest that he was only waiting for darkness to fall before breaking into full song.

Balint’s path took him slightly uphill to the eastern edge of the forest. Already he could glimpse the line of the ridge that marked the boundary and in a few moments, without planning or even consciously thinking where he was going, he found himself standing on the summit. It was as if his feet alone, automatically, instinctively, had carried him to just that place from which he could see, across the valley, an open clearing sloping towards him.

Here he stopped.

He looked across to the hills opposite which were covered with oak saplings, clad in pale green and standing in fields of lush grass. Above them there was a wall of tall young trees. To his left the valley twisted sharply away so that the vista was closed by a ring of small hills whose tree-covered crests concealed the world beyond. Everything was green, green of all shades, sprinkled with the cool freshness of young shoots, some so pale as to be almost yellow, nature’s renewal triumphant.

Balint looked around. He was at the place where the Uzdy forest began.

It seemed to him that he had come to the very spot where he had stood a year and a half before. And yet perhaps it was not quite there but a little further up, for there near the path was the giant beech tree at whose foot he had stood, one morning last November, waiting for Adrienne. It was from there that he had seen her, crossing the ridge opposite and emerging from the trees by the bend in the valley, hurrying towards him with her long even strides.

She had worn a grey homespun dress. He remembered it well.

Even now it seemed to him that he could see her. Then everything had been golden-bronze in colour, purple and flame; now it was all emerald green. Yes, surely it was there, just a little way away where the huge tree’s forking branches towered above the shrubs beneath, that he had waited so anxiously on that autumn morning when they were to say goodbye for ever. And how much had happened since!

Spontaneously he started to walk towards the tree, still without thinking, as one does when going to meet a friend at a familiar rendezvous.

To reach the great beech he had to get round the trunk of a tree felled by the wind which lay across the path, and to do so he was forced to fight his way through thick undergrowth, breaking off shoots as he went. By the time Balint emerged once more onto the path it was getting dark. He stood there, alone. Before him, barely twenty paces distant, was the old tree, its vast trunk like a tower, its spreading roots covered with velvet moss.

And between the roots, leaning against the tree, was a woman, her grey dress melting into the dove-grey of the bark. Only the pale oval of her face, framed by the dark aureole of her hair, stood out against the shadowy background. She stood quite still, her amber eyes gazing straight into his, wide open as if she were seeing a vision.

It was she, Adrienne! And she stood there, melting into the tree, just as if she knew he was coming and was waiting for him.

As a gust of wind will seize a leaf and make it fly so the young man stormed forward. In a second he stood before her and in another they were in each others’ arms.

Thirsty lips searched for thirsty lips, their arms held their bodies in tight embrace while their hands grabbed and tore at each other’s flesh all the more fiercely for after many months of enforced separation and suppressed longings they were both overcome by a storm of desire, an elemental force that neither could withstand. For Balint and Adrienne it was like an earthquake or typhoon, a destroying power which no words could express, sublime and irresistible, annihilating everything in the world but their need for each other. The only words they could find were each other’s names, endlessly repeated and half swallowed by the eagerness and desperation of their kisses as they pulled themselves to the ground and sank tightly entwined into the deep carpet of moss and leaves, abandoning themselves to their mutual passion …

In the twilight sky above a few bats flew ever upwards barely visible between the forest and the deep violet of the heavens.

At length Adrienne sat up and raised her hands to tidy her tousled hair.

Balint looked up at her, hesitant and worried. After the joy and daze of their unexpected meeting had subsided he was suddenly assailed by terrible misgivings, remembering Addy’s baleful words in Venice nearly a year before when they had parted at dawn and when she had said, ‘I will try to go on living … provided we never meet again.’

That had been their agreement, and he had accepted it to save her from the despairing self-inflicted death she had determined upon if ever their love were consummated and to which he had again agreed after they had become lovers and then been forced to part. The threat of death had long been with them, not only her own freely chosen suicide but also from outside, from Adrienne’s husband, Pal Uzdy, the mad son of a mad father, who, burdened by his own baleful heredity, always carried a loaded revolver and delighted in the fear he inspired. During Balint’s long pursuit of Adrienne he had paid little heed to the menace of Pal Uzdy’s unstable temperament, but it had haunted them both when, a year before, Adrienne had travelled to Venice with her sisters.