Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

It was then that, at long last, Adrienne had summoned Balint to join her. It was just to be for four weeks, no more, just four weeks of joy and the fulfilment of their dreams, four weeks of paradise for which she had decreed she would pay with her life. At the time it had not seemed too high a price to pay.

On their first night together they had been on the point of drawing back but, overcome by their love, they had been carried away until no withdrawal was possible. At the end of their brief month it was only fear for what might happen to Balint that made Adrienne’s determination falter.

Long before they finally had come together they had been haunted by the Angel of Death when Adrienne, at last conscious of her love for Balint, had written to him imploring him to go away rather than make her surrender to his passion, saying, ‘… if that would happen I would kill myself … I am his wife, his chattel. Howcould I live … if with him and with you too?I would rather die. There is no other way!’

What happened later, until their sad parting in Venice, was now only a memory, but the words of Adrienne’s letter had remained with him as an ever-present threat. What would now happen? What could now happen? To part again was to him unthinkable, nothing would make him leave her again; but his heart missed a beat at the thought that this unplanned meeting might not have released Adrienne from her promise and that, as before, she would never accept a double existence with her husband and with him.

From where he lay he could not properly see her face. He sat up, his hand on Adrienne’s knee. He said only one word, but in it was framed the only question to which he needed an answer. ‘Addy?’ he said.

She looked at him smiling faintly with her mouth and more frankly with her eyes. She gave him her hand, her long supple fingers gently caressing his own.

‘I don’t mind anything any more … not now,’ she said slowly.

Adrienne had also been thinking back to their parting in Venice and to what she had then said.

When, after Balint had left her and she had stood at the window gazing sightlessly over the great lagoon, she had felt that she had already died, that her life was over, and that in promising her lover that she would not now take her own life she had merely done so to comfort him. In reality she had decided that she would do nothing for some weeks, or even months, so that no one would make any connection between her death and the man in whose arms she, for the first and only time in her life, had been made happy.

Afterwards she had not changed her intention.

When her husband arrived in Venice she had greeted him with as much interest as if she were walking in her sleep. She had been kept busy with arranging the details of their return and above all with caring for her sick younger sister, Judith.

It was concern for Judith which had kept Adrienne sane in the first days after Balint had gone away. Poor Judith! What a sad fate hers had been! The trip to Venice had been arranged by the family to give the girl a change of air and to take her far away from the place where she had been shocked into mental withdrawal when her lover was proved a villain and ran away without giving her a thought. Maybe, the family had hoped, the change would help bring her to her senses.

As it had turned out Judith had already been nearer to a complete breakdown than anyone had realized; and the final blow that thrust her over the edge had come in Venice, at the Lido, when her own love-letters were sent back to her by an unknown woman in whose house Judith’s lover had left them. Until then Judith had not realized the full extent of the betrayal, thinking her lover as much sinned against as sinning, and the shock of this new knowledge had completely unhinged her. Her mind, already disturbed, had then become so totally withdrawn that she was hardly conscious of her surroundings and had to be tended, with great gentleness, as if she were a backward child.

Afterwards there had been the trip to Vienna to consult nerve specialists and also to visit the sanatorium where her mother had been for some time. And when they had returned at last to her father’s home at Mezo-Varjas Adrienne had found that it was she who had to take charge of everything, for her father, though full of goodwill, was capable of little more than shouting at the servants and creating confusion wherever he went. The responsibilities had helped Adrienne to get through the first five weeks after Balint had had to leave her.

All this time Adrienne had lived only for other people and it had seemed to her that her own life did not exist, that she had become a mere abstraction, a will, whose only function was to keep her family from breaking up.

With these burdens upon her shoulders Adrienne had spent almost all her time at her father’s house where she had found herself obliged to manage everything. It was to her that the estate manager came for all decisions, discreetly and without letting Count Miloth see that he was doing so; and it was Adrienne who had seen to it that the heavy cost of her mother’s stay in the Austrian sanatorium was paid promptly and in full.

As for Judith, it had been obvious that she could no longer continue to share a room with her younger sister, Margit. Accordingly Adrienne had decided she would be better off isolated at the far end of one of the wings of the old one-storey manor-house where she would not be disturbed by the noise of her father shouting at the servants.

Adrienne had chosen two unused rooms, furnished them, and installed Judith in one while in the other she placed a kindly old serving woman who had lived at Varjas all her life and who had known Judith since she had been a child.

One day Adrienne had noticed that the sight of some small domestic animals had awakened some sign of interest in Judith’s muddled brain and she had, accordingly, arranged for her a little domestic poultry yard at the corner of the house with a few hens and some rabbits. This had been a great success. Judith had seemed overjoyed when she was first shown this new toy and ever since she had spent much of her time here, feeding and tending her new pets.

All this at last made Adrienne more independent of the authority of her mother-in-law and of her husband. This was a duty, and before such a duty her husband and his mother had had to yield. Furthermore it had provided a wonderful excuse to escape frequently from her husband’s house, Almasko, where Adrienne had had nothing to do and where it was as if she were a guest in her own home. There it was the old countess who ran the household and supervised the upbringing of Adrienne’s little daughter — and in both she brooked no interference from Adrienne. For the rest, Pal Uzdy did everything, himself attending to the smallest details of the running of the estate and the forests. Adrienne had tried to interest herself in the gardens and orchards but it had soon become obvious that the others despised her for it, tolerating such activity with condescending smiles as if it were a mere pastime, the futile and meaningless games of a child.

But now everything was different, for Adrienne’s family responsibilities were real. Until now Pal Uzdy had always treated his wife as if she were some sort of bought slave who had no other function in his house but to look beautiful, act obediently, and be there whenever he desired her. Now it was as if some new recognition had dawned in Uzdy, as if, however dimly, he had become aware that she might just be human — and it even appeared, in some strange way, as if he took pride in her being of use to her family.