Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

Not that this was jealousy; far from it!

He had met Adrienne when she came out in the spring of 1898. He was a senior student then and passionately involved with his first real love affair, with the pretty little Countess Dinora Abonyi. For Balint this was the first adventure that really mattered. He had pursued Dinora for months, and after the sparkling hopes and torturing jealousy of the chase, what a glorious fulfilment! And this was when he had first seen Adrienne, just when all his desires, all his senses, were engaged elsewhere.

He often used to pay visits to the Miloths’ town house, but not looking for love. The subject of love never rose with Adrienne and he never raised it. They did not flirt or even talk about flirting. No matter how long they spent together, nor how long they danced, she never aroused him as a woman. And they met almost daily and often sat talking for hours at a time. In their social group there was no gossip if a young man called regularly at a house where there were marriageable daughters. Indeed, at Kolozsvar there was a great deal of social life and, as in all small towns, most people met every day.

The aristocratic families of Transylvania still spent the winters in their town houses in Kolozsvar, and received their friends every afternoon quite informally. Everyone was expected to drop in, from the old ladies, their grandchildren and mothers with marriageable daughters, to cousins, aunts and friends — and all the eligible young men. Invitations were sent out only for luncheons and dinners and it was at tea-time that those who did not make the rounds for some days attracted attention and comment. It did not therefore suggest serious courtship if the same young bachelor came every day and sat with the girls drinking coffee and whipped cream which was then more popular than English tea.

The same groups used to form — three or four girls and five or six young men, brought together by mutual sympathy or family relationship. Together they would drink tea and coffee, play tennis, go to the theatre and organize picnics. In such groups the tie would be friendship and sympathy, above all sympathy, and it was this alone, which existed between Balint and Adrienne Miloth.

Perhaps Adrienne’s strange beauty played its part, but Balint’s awareness was casual not emotional, and he admired her as he would have admired a fine jewel or an exquisite bronze.

Adrienne’s figure was slender and still very girlish, yet her walk, light but in some way determined, reminded him always of a painting of Diana the Huntress he had once seen in the Louvre. She seemed to have the same elongated proportions, the same small head and supple flexible waist that the artist had given the goddess when she reached over her shoulder to take an arrow from its quiver. And when she walked she had the same long stride. Her colouring, too, recalled the Diana of his memory, the clear ivory skin with slight golden tints which never varied from her softly shining face to her neck, and the arms and shoulders that emerged from the silken décolleté of her ball-dress. Only her hair was different, and her eyes, for whereas Diana was blonde and blue-eyed, Adrienne’s hair was dark and wavy and alive — and her eyes were onyx, flecked with golden amber.

Not only was Adrienne beautiful, but she was always interesting to talk to. Her ideas were her own, very individual for a young woman of her background. And she had ideas about everything. She was well-read and cultivated, and with her one didn’t have to avoid subjects such as foreign affairs, history or literature as one did with so many young girls who would otherwise take offence thinking one was trying to show off superior knowledge. She spoke several languages and she loved to read, but not the romantic novels which were all that most other girls read. Against these she rebelled, for in the finishing school at Lausanne to which she had been sent she had been introduced to Flaubert, Balzac, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and ever since the trivial had no longer appealed to her.

The first time they had supper together, at Adrienne’s coming-out party, they had talked about books and ideas, and so they did again, each time that Balint would visit the Miloths, which he now started to do regularly. At this time Balint was reading Spencer’s Principles of Sociology and it had made a deep impression on him, especially the first volume which discussed the basic ideas about God and the origins of spiritual belief in primitive man. Carried away by his own enthusiasm he spoke impulsively on these subjects to Adrienne and found himself taken by surprise by the depth of her response and by her thirst for knowledge. This is how they began; but of course they did not stop at one subject but touched on numerous others, words flowing in an ever-guessing, probing search for the truth as is the way with the young. Balint told Adrienne about his grandfather, of his wise appreciation and understanding, of his unerring judgement and how it was only now after so many years that he realized how clearly and cogently the old man had explained life to a twelve-year-old boy. As he talked to Adrienne, ever more fluently and enthusiastically, it seemed to him that he could express himself better and more vividly to this girl who always listened with such intensity and whose answers were always so interesting. It seemed that her presence, with those amber eyes fixed on his, increased his power and his eloquence. They had spent many such hours together, and even when the days grew longer it was often dark before he left. Sometimes a late visitor interrupted them, but usually their talks were brought to an end in a different way. From beyond the double-doors which connected the two drawing-rooms would come the sour voice of Countess Miloth, stern and disapproving: ‘Why are you sitting there in the dark, Addy? You know I don’t like it. Have the lamps lit at once!’, and Adrienne would get up in silence, pausing to get control of herself, forcing herself not to answer back. She would stand for a moment, defiant, her head held high, gazing straight in front of her into the darkness. And then, still silent, she would cross the room with her long strides to the high standard lamp and light it. Before she returned to Balint she would remain there, motionless, gazing into the light with narrowing pupils.

All these memories crowded into Balint’s mind, not in order, not in words or sentences, but in pictures vivid with every detail, time and place rediscovered, recaptured without the need for connected thought or conscious recall, the images of an instant, and as fleeting.

Another carriage passed Balint’s: more acquaintances. As he waved to them the previous vision vanished, like the reflections on the smooth surface of a lake wiped off by the slightest breath of wind over the surface. Other carriages passed, more and more, hastening to Var-Siklod to bring guests after the races and, after each, billows of dust coating the verges and the meadow beyond them. Two large greys, drawing a grand open landau drew alongside. The Prefect sat alone in the rear seat. He called out a friendly greeting to Balint and then his carriage too disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Soon Balint’s old fiacre, moving slowly, was overtaken by all sorts of other vehicles, some driving so fast that he could only occasionally recognize a face or two before they too were swallowed up in the dust. He caught a glimpse of Zoltan Alvinczy alone in a one-horse gig. Then two elegant carriages, in one of which he saw the widowed Countess Gyalakuthy with her daughter, Dodo. An American racing four-wheeler hurtled by with a fearsome rattle of harness and pounding of hoofs and quickly vanished. It was Tihamer Abonyi, driving his finely-matched pair of black Russian trotters. He drove with style and elegance, his elbows out and his hands pressed to his chest, and next to him was his wife, the fascinating Dinora, who turned and waved and smiled back at him with her open, white-toothed, sensual mouth.