Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

A great hare shoot was about to begin, and it needed over three hundred people to be properly organized.

Where the carriages stopped was the start. Between each gun, well spaced out, were six or seven peasant youths. The main band of beaters were nearly out of sight, divided into two halves, those on the left flank being nearly a mile apart from those on the right. These were mostly made up of girls who were more disciplined than young men and did not jump about so much but who remained well in line, their full skirts spread wide, crouching close to each other so that none of the hares should pass between them. From where the guns were placed for the start their multi-coloured blouses and head-scarves looked like an endless row of field poppies disappearing into the distance.

All the beaters were Slovaks, for the shoot was taking place at Jablanka in Slovakia, a country estate belonging to Antal Szent-Gyorgyi, which was situated just where the valley of the Vag opens out onto the Lesser Alfold, the northern part of the Great Hungarian Plain. The landscape shone in the wintry sun. In the east could be seen the peaks of the smaller Carpathians while to the west the Tapolcsany range closed the great horseshoe-shaped ring of mountains to the north of the plains which stretched away endlessly to the south. In the centre of the horseshoe there was a row of gently undulating hills and there, right in the middle, was the snow-white square of the great castle of Jablanka, its windows, though more than a mile away, shimmering in the sunshine. Far behind, on a jutting outcrop of rock, the ruined fortress of Jablo was silhouetted against the shadowy outlines of the far-off Trencsen mountains.

The shoot had been arranged so that the guns advanced towards the castle, finishing just at the edge of the park, where the two long lines of standing beaters converged. This was carefully thought out because the host was anxious not to over-tire either himself or those who had had the honour of an invitation to shoot with him. Unlike his brother-in-law, Louis Kollonich, whose ambition it always was to set up record bags, Antal Szent-Gyorgyi merely sought elegance and style. For him a shoot should be a pleasure, not a competitive chore. It should not start too early; and it should not last too long. The guests invited to shoot should have room to shoot as they pleased — which is why they were placed so far apart. It was for this reason that he never had more than eight guns and he only invited enough guests to make up this number. As both his sons were at home only five others had been asked this year. It was considered a great honour to be invited to shoot at Jablanka, and all the more so because Antal Szent-Gyorgyi was known to be extremely choosy as to whom he might ask. Apart from his own relations hardly anyone was held worthy of an invitation. Count Antal’s group of acceptable guests was like the very smallest of concentric circles, like the monarch’s own chosen group of shooting friends whose composition was forever frozen in immutable categories of which only the innermost could ever hope for an invitation. As in Dante’s Purgatory the ever-rising floors finally dwindle into the narrowest, uppermost circle and there, right at the top, the peak of the whole envied structure, was Paradise.

Szent-Gyorgyi’s reasons for exclusion, starting from the outer rings, were quite clear. Ruled completely out were the bad shots; these were utterly unacceptable. Next were the bad-mannered, people who were known to be querulous or irritable or bad-tempered if they missed a shot: they were not to be thought of either. These were followed by anyone with decided political opinions, for Szent-Gyorgyi loathed politics — and politicians — and though such subjects were by no means banned in his presence, and indeed he would from time to time speak of such matters himself, they had to be discussed dispassionately as if the speaker were infinitely distanced from his subject. The fourth criterion was birth and here Count Antal had his own special individual standpoint. With a rich knowledge of history and genealogies, he was capable, if he thought their ancestry ignoble or unworthy, of placing ruling princes and families closely connected to royalty, in a lower category than some simple country nobleman whose ancestors had been ‘nice people’ since time immemorial. For Count Antal, anyone who was able to trace his descent from the days of the Arpad kings, especially if they had earned no black marks by unfortunate behaviour in the ensuing centuries, took precedence over all others, provided always that they fulfilled his other requirements. A fifth category, which was totally excluded, was composed of anyone of Czech origin no matter what rank he might hold. Whether it was because in the fifteenth century the lands of the Szent-Gyorgyi and Bazini families had been overrun by the army of Giskra, or because he believed that anyone even remotely connected with the ever growing pan-Slav movement had to be pro-Russian and was therefore automatically the enemy of the Habsburg monarchy, was not clear: but all Czechs were automatically banned from Jablanka. For the sixth group, which was composed of anyone who had had any kind of connection with the Heir, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, he had more personal reasons for antagonism. As hereditary Master of the Horse to the King of Hungary, Szent-Gyorgyi gave his entire loyalty to the old Emperor and he classed all those who grouped themselves around the person of the Heir (and who were clearly only waiting for the demise of the old monarch to be shown in their true colours) as greedy, unacceptable opportunists. The seventh category, those who were eligible for invitations, therefore had to pass unscathed the severe requirements of the first six.

This year, however, there were some surprises as there had been included two guests who would never normally have qualified at all.

The first was Fredi Wuelffenstein, who was not important but who was well-known to be a party man, ferociously partisan, loud-mouthed, outspoken, argumentative and always knowing better than anyone else. It was hoped that here at Jablanka he would be sufficiently in control of himself to keep quiet, especially as he owed his invitation solely to the influence of his sister, Fanny Beredy, the only female guest who was not herself a relation of the host or hostess.

More important than Fredi was Count Jan Slawata, whose presence was indeed astonishing for according to the rules he should have foundered on all counts; firstly at the outermost circle because he was such a bad shot, secondly because he was a politician, thirdly because one of his ancestors, in 1618, who had never drawn his sword to defend himself, was flung out of a window in the fortress of Hradčany in Prague and, instead of being killed honourably on the flagstones below, landed on a dung-heap and lived (thereby falling inevitably into the category of ‘unacceptable behaviour’), fourthly because he was a self-declared Czech nationalist which he proclaimed by signing his name ‘Jan’ instead of ‘Johann’; and finally because it was well-known that he belonged to the group who clustered round Franz-Ferdinand in the Belvedere Palace and indeed was rumoured to be the Heir’s confidential adviser on foreign affairs. And yet he had been admitted to Eden, to that Paradise of sportsmen, a shooting party at Jablanka.

It was such an amazing thing that even such a self-assured man as Antal Szent-Gyorgyi felt impelled to offer some explanation to the other guests — Balint, Imre Warday and even to his nephew, young Louis Kollonich — as to why Slawata had been invited.

Szent-Gyorgyi had ordered a pedigree pointer puppy from Germany. The dog had been sent in a specially constructed cage by the Orient Express but at the frontier post at Passau the customs officers found some reason to object to the animal’s importation into Austria and wished to take it off the train until some obscure difficulty as to its legal status could be cleared up. As it happened Slawata was on the same train, learned what was causing the delay, and used his diplomatic position not only to keep the dog on the train but also to free it from its prison cage and take it into his own private compartment (though it wasn’t yet house-trained). Such a personal service had to be properly rewarded.