Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

Balint told the story coldly, recounting what he had seen and heard that day as briefly as he could, suppressing all his personal impressions, keeping to himself much of the detail and all his own outraged feelings. But he had heard and seen everything that had happened and he would never forget it.

What had really happened was this. After the closed meeting had ended, Balint went into the dark Chamber and stood behind the last row of benches facing the Speaker’s raised desk. Suddenly the supporters of the Government party started flooding in; they had all been in the bar waiting for the closed meeting to come to an end. They had rarely been present in such numbers and never in such a belligerent mood.

Tisza rose to speak. His tall virile figure seemed etched in black before the upturned well-lit faces of the deputies seated behind him. In a firm voice, with strength and power and passion he warned the House what would happen if order was not restored to their debates. Speaking like one of the prophets of old his words became ever more impassioned, as once again he foretold the catastrophe that Hungary would face if all progress were to be blocked by petty party politics. Would only a great national upheaval, he asked, disastrous to everything they held dear, fatal to the greatness of the Hungarian nation, bring them to their senses? He begged, exhorted, commanded them to listen before it was too late. The left-wing members listened in silence, stone-faced. They stopped their interruptions and their clamour: it was as if they were under a spell.

From time to time some members on the right jumped up and cried, ‘Put it to the vote! Vote!’ and started stamping their feet, but Tisza waved them back, determined to be heard to the end. And he went on despite the increasing noise and confusion, only barely keeping order by the authority or his voice and gesture, an authority increasingly challenged until, at his last ringing words, ‘Let the comedy end!’, his party rose in a body all crying out, ‘Vote! Vote! Vote!’ If any members of the opposition had shouted back no one could hear them; they were drowned in the roar of several hundred government voices.

The Speaker stood up on his platform, waving a folded order-paper in a vain attempt to restore order. His mouth could be seen to move but not a sound could be heard above the uproar. Finally he had tottered down from his seat of authority apparently completely overcome.

A crowd of members poured down to the floor of the Chamber and filled the wide space where the ‘Table of the House’ was covered with the law books and State papers. There they argued, shouted, gesticulated — a rabble out of control — and as the argument became more heated so a leaf of paper was thrown upwards, then a book or two, then more, not thrown in aggression, only upwards, apparently without reason.

At this point Abady had left, weak with nausea, his head sick with a bitter sense of the deepest disillusion.

Only Tisza’s speech had seemed real; only that had been honest, truly felt, sincere. The rest had been mere play-acting. All that jumping about and shouting, those apparently zealous members rising and calling for a vote, inciting the other members of their party, all that had been thought out and rehearsed in advance, as was the opposition’s attitude of shock and surprise: it was all a fake. Balint had turned away and walked swiftly down the corridor, his footsteps deadened by the soft carpeting.

The silence was now so great that the huge building seemed dead. Turning a corner Balint found himself face to face with the old Speaker of the House, supported on one side by the Secretary of the House and on the other side by the Keeper. What happened? Balint had asked. What ruling had he given? But the old gentleman had been so overcome that he could only stammer: ‘Everything, everything is … ov …’ and helped by his two faithful supporters he tottered away to the Speaker’s room.

The National Casino Club, when Balint arrived, was swarming with people, like an ant-hill accidentally disturbed. The Deak Room was the headquarters of the opposition led by Andrassy and it was filled with his supporters, while every corner of the club was occupied by groups of four or five, all arguing, protesting, worrying and either outraged or triumphant according to their political allegiances. Only the card-rooms were unaffected; the bridge and tarot players engrossed only by such problems as whether they shouid try a finesse or whether their double would be successful.

Balint did not reveal all this in the smoking-room of Simonvasar. He neither mentioned what he had felt nor what his feelings had been. He answered the questions put to him but he did not elaborate, even though it was obvious that they wanted to hear more. He could not explain his reluctance, he only knew that he must keep his feelings and his opinions to himself.

Antal Szent-Gyorgyi’s reactions were predictable. He saw everything from the Olympian height of the Hofburg in Vienna. He was delighted that those who ‘ignored His Majesty’s wishes’ had been taught a lesson. He was glad, without thinking for a moment of any individual’s personal involvement, because to him all politics were a sordid business not fit for the attention of a gentleman, a necessary evil, like muck-spreading on the farms. He managed to overlook the fact that Balint was a Member of Parliament only because, as a learned genealogist, he knew too that the Abadys’ first ancestor had been a Bessenyo chief from the Tomai clan, who had settled in Hungary as long ago as the reign of Prince Geza, and that Abadys had been princes, governors and palatines in Transylvania under the Arpad dynasty. With antecedents like those it was perhaps permissible, if one felt like it, once in a while, to indulge a taste for the gutter.

Lubianszky’s views were not so clear-cut. He had been Lord Lieutenant in Tolna during the time of the Szell regime and now, after his resignation, he had joined the dissident group that supported Andrassy. He had a horror of the revolutionaries of 1848 but, as he loathed Tisza, he had hoped that if the demagogues could be broken they would take him with them in their fall.

Though these two attitudes could hardly be reconciled, Kollonich was not really interested in either. Like every other catholic magnate, he felt obliged to contribute to the National Front each time there was an election. Therefore, in so far as they existed at all, his sympathies lay with the official government party. At the same time, he distrusted all governments, no matter which party might find itself in power. The only matters Prince Kollonich took seriously were hunting and shooting, and he could hardly wait to get back to his deer-stalking story which had been so unnecessarily interrupted by the arrival of Abady. Now that the political tale had been told he felt he could return to more important matters.

‘Well, as I was saying, I had just about reached the cover of the beech hedge when a roebuck started calling from the left! What was I to do? I thought it would be best if carefully I were to …’

Balint rose and made his way back to the ladies in the red salon.

Most of the guests had now arrived at the castle. Only two were still missing: the guests of honour, Count Slawata, Counsellor to the Foreign Office and Prince Montorio-Visconti. It was known that they had set off by motor from Vienna that morning but, although it was now long past six o’clock, they had still not arrived.