Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

The carriage in which Fanny was riding passed Wuelffenstein’s place and arrived next at the place allotted to the elder Szent-Gyorgyi boy, Stefi. Here she told the coachman to stop, for further on there were only Imre Warday and Magda, the daughter of the house, and finally, at the corner stand, there was Balint Abady.

Also there was another young girl, Lili Illesvary, a young niece of Count Antal who was barely out of the schoolroom. Just turned seventeen, Lili was still chubby with a rounded face and a teenager’s rather plump arms. She was also shy and timid, unsure of herself, as if she knew that she was like a picture that was almost finished but still needed the finishing touches. Her femininity was still a little uncertain. But that she would soon be a beauty no one who saw her could doubt. Her eyes were exceptionally large and azure-blue in colour, and the line of her mouth and profile was as finely etched as in a Greek cameo, though the determined chin inherited from her Szent-Gyorgyi grandmother was still partly hidden by baby fat.

Lili had wanted to stay with her cousin at Warday’s stand but they had made her go on to Abady who was alone in the corner.

‘It’s a bore to be too many!’ Magda had said. ‘Go on to the last gun. The ground will be better there too, the beaters will have trodden down a proper path.’ Lili had done as she was told.

‘Can I stay here, with you?’ she asked timidly when she came up to Balint and just smiled shyly when Balint greeted her in a friendly manner, her eyes opening even wider with astonishment at finding herself accepted so naturally in the great grown-up world she was now entering for the first time. Her companion thought: what sweet fresh youthfulness!

At this moment the horns sounded. First at one end of the line of beaters and then at the other and then in the distance from the invisible ends of the two flanks — came the cry: ‘ Vorwä-ä-ärts — forward march! Advance!’

The shoot began. In front of Balint lines of peasant girls, led by Szent-Gyorgyi huntsmen carrying a gun, stamped their feet in a regular rhythm. Behind him was his loader, a man carrying his cartridge-case, and four men with long poles, whose job it was to collect what Balint had shot. On each side of him were the male beaters who were given a stream of orders from the estate’s mounted foresters. ‘ Pomali! Rovno! — Slowly now! Straight ahead!’, while some distance away the country lanes were filled with a rearguard of farm wagons to carry the day’s bag drawn by enormous Pinzgau horses like a baggage train following an army.

And suddenly there were hares everywhere. Some were small, the colour of lightly baked buns, not at all like the hares of Transylvania which gave such sport to the mounted huntsmen at Zsuk. Only city-dwellers think of hares as all being alike. Quite different from the long-legged mountain hares, those of the plain came in all sizes, great and small, and they behaved differently too, from one district to another. In the great plain they ran powerfully before the line of beaters, invisible to the guns for nearly an hour, so that it was only at the end of the drive that they all swarmed together in a rush to escape. Here in the valley of the Vag, on the other hand, they rushed about in front of the advancing beaters and all the guns sounded off from the first steps of the drive.

There always seemed to be at least two or three, and often five or six hares running wildly about no more than a hundred metres in front of the guns. And a charming sight it was. On the beautifully tended fields of rape or young green corn the animals seemed to be dancing, kicking up their tails with every leap they made and sometimes sitting down and apparently gazing unconcerned at the fluttering line of the peasant girls’ gaily coloured skirts, before again running forward through the furrows left by the plough. They always kept the same distance, only occasionally dashing further away when Stefi or Fredi shot at them from the centre of the advancing guns. The only times the little animals went at full speed was when they found themselves close to the openings at the end of the line and then they ran for their lives. A few there were that waited until the beaters were almost upon them and then, instead of racing forward they would double back and try their luck by darting swiftly through the line. Most of these were females and the order had been given to let them go, at least for the first half-hour. Even Wuelffenstein did not dare attempt a shot as he was walking next to his host. Some of the hares would run in a wide circle only to be shot as they approached the centre, but mostly they would run for the corners and so Abady, at the end of the line, and Warday next to him, were kept busy. Behind them the game collectors walked proudly two by two carrying long poles on their shoulders from which, like tassels, hung ten or fifteen dead hares.

Each huge square field was divided from the next by hedges planted with gleditschia trees — the honey-locust — in which openings had been left for the guns to pass through. As they did so each had to wait until they had been joined by the beaters who then reformed the line as the horns sounded and there came the order: ‘ Virovnajte clapci! — Line up, lads!’ Then the horns sounded again and they moved relentlessly on.

Balint and little Lili Illesvary had just passed through one of the hedges and entered a field of young clover when with a sudden strident whirring a dense cloud of partridges rose up and flew over them at high speed. They turned away to the left as the wind from the north made them fly at a great height towards the centre of the line.

‘How beautiful they are!’ exclaimed Lili as she gazed up at them.

It was an exceptionally large covey, and they flew straight towards Szent-Gyorgyi who always chose this place as it was here that the late winter partridges always came. With the speed of a hurricane they flew towards him. Four shots were heard, and four little specks, two in front of him and two behind, fell from the sky rolling along the ground from the force of their own velocity.

This happened several times and Abady, who was never more than an average shot himself, was so lost in admiration of his host’s skill that more than one hare found its way safely past him.

As the long line of guns and beaters passed steadily from field to field through well-tended hedges or avenues of trees — occasionally passing neat little groups of farm buildings all surrounded, after the Austrian custom, by low stone walls — great herds of Electoral-Negretti sheep, which were reputed to produce the finest wool, stared stupidly up at them and then went on contentedly chewing the rich grass.

Until then the drive had been much like any other at a well-organized shoot. Now the picture began to change. Instead of the simple well-tended fields of a great agricultural complex, there began to appear clumps of fir-trees, standing like islands in the wide paddocks‚ lines of tall Lombardy poplars on the banks of little streams, and thick plantations of oak at the edge of each meadow, all so cunningly planted that the game would run in the most diverse manner possible and the birds fly at even dizzier heights. And so it was: the hares stopped running predictably and darted unexpectedly in every direction, disappearing into thickets of undergrowth and vanishing from sight round the edge of each plantation; and the partridges and pheasants got up as if shot from catapults and rose high in the sky over the lines of the tall poplar-trees only to take refuge once again in the next block of covert. Every shot was different and every hit a triumph.