Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

The hostess’s face had begun to show traces of anxiety carefully suppressed. In spite of this she continued her insipid social conversation with the guests gathered around her. As she did so she glanced from time to time at the great clock on the chimneypiece, a massive affair of bronze and green enamel adorned with gilded baroque figures representing Kronos and Psyche. It was a famous piece by Pradier but the princess, taking its beauty for granted, was only interested in the hands of the clock which moved inexorably round without seeming to bring nearer the arrival of these important guests from whom she expected so much. At last, with a barely perceptible gesture she summoned one of the tall silent footmen.

‘Call Duke Peter,’ she murmured. And when her stepson bent over her, she murmured, ‘A carriage should be sent to the highway’. Then, even lower, she added in English, ‘Your father never thinks of anything!’

Hardly had the young man reached the far end of the big drawing-room when the double doors from the library were flung open and two men entered, one tall and one short with broad shoulders; they were Montorio and Siawata, arrived at last.

The prince, Italian in name and title only, was Austrian with vast properties in Carinthia. He was a nice-looking young man, dark-complexioned and slightly balding, with light blue eyes that startled with their brilliance. His fashionable moustaches were so narrow that they could have been stuck on with glue, and he moved with the gliding step of one used to highly waxed floors. Count Slawata, in contrast, was fair-haired and short-nosed, with broad cheekbones. He was clean-shaven and wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, an eccentricity in those days when only monocles or rimless pince-nez were the accepted form. His glasses seemed in some way ostentatious, as if the wearer wished to stress a more serious and thrifty view of life than that of the others. Slawata’s way of moving, with heavy peasant-like tread, underlined this same impression. His clothes were dark blue in colour and unexceptional in cut.

After greeting their hostess, the latest arrivals were conducted to the smoking-room to meet their host, whose stalking story, still not completed, was destined never to reach its end, as no sooner had the newcomers greeted him than the dinner gong sounded announcing that it was time to go and dress.

The house guests who had arrived that afternoon then gathered in the great entrance hall, whence they were conducted by servants to the rooms allocated to them and where their luggage had already been taken and unpacked and their evening clothes laid out.

Peter Kollonich stepped over to Laszio. ‘I hope you don’t mind but we’ve had to put you in the kitchen wing! There are so many women and married couples this year that there seemed no other way. We thought you, as the nearest relation …’ and he waved to a footman to show Laszlo the way.

The footman went to a door in the opposite side of the hall from the great State rooms where the guests had gathered. Here there was no carpet, only great stone slabs which formed the floor of the corridor. They passed the silver vaults and the butler’s pantry and along the whole length of the castle’s kitchens. Here was none of the majestic silence that had seemed to rule the other parts of the huge building. From inside the kitchen came the clatter of copper pans, the sound of the chef’s voice raised in anger at some underling and all the multifarious rhythms and drumbeats that made up the symphony of sound that accompanied the creation of a great formal dinner. A door flew open, and then slammed shut after a kitchen boy had shouted something back before running off down the passage in front of them. A scullery maid, her face flushed, ran in the opposite direction and disappeared through another door which she too banged behind her. A bevy of chambermaids, giggling, emerged from a narrow staircase and hurried past, across the courtyard, towards the guest wing.

No one paused respectfully as a guest passed. It was as if they had not even seen him.

After two turns in the long corridor they eventually reached a large room at the end of the wing opposite that where Laszlo had found his host. It was a good room, spacious and high ceilinged, differing only from the guest-rooms in the other part of the house in its old-fashioned decoration and cheap, worn furniture. Even so, it was incomparably better than Laszlo’s flat in Budapest.

Once again Laszlo felt a surge of bitter resentment that he, and only he, had been exiled to the servants’ wing — to a room which he knew was usually used to lodge visiting valets or artisans called to work in the castle. Even Peter’s friendly words of reassurance — ‘our nearest relation’ — did not soothe him. After all, Stefi Szent-Gyorgyi was a first cousin too, and he was with the other guests. Why just me? Laszlo wondered as he sat down in front of the old-fashioned dressing-table.

Old impressions flooded back to him as he sat gazing unseeingly at his ivory hairbrushes laid out in front of him. There was nothing new in the discrimination made between him and his cousins. When he had been a child he had hardly noticed, and when he did he put it down to his being an orphan, with neither father nor mother to protect him. At that time, too, he had romanticized the situation and imagined himself, perhaps after reading some children’s book like ‘The Little Lord’, as a hero of mystery, the young heir to a great position unrecognized in youth only to be triumphantly re-established after years of obscurity. This impression of a mysterious secret was accentuated by the fact that in his presence his father and mother were never mentioned.

His grown-up relations were invariably kind and attentive. At Christmas, and on birthdays, he received the same presents as they gave to their own children; at first the same toys, later there were books, riding whips, 4.10 shotguns or.22 rifles. While at school in Vienna at the Theresianum, when one of his aunts came to take the Kollonich and Szent-Gyorgyi boys for a Sunday outing, or to the opera, or to eat cakes at Demmel’s, he was always one of the party and, during the holidays, either here at Simonvasar or with the Szent-Gyorgyis, there was nothing to remind him that he was after all, here, there and everywhere, in the last analysis, a guest.

Only gradually, as he began to grow out of adolescence towards adulthood, did the real truth begin to dawn on him. Little things, minor pinpricks that wounded self-esteem and his pride — noticed perhaps only by one who had been made extra sensitive as a result of being an orphan — revealed the reality of the discrimination against him.

Some of these incidents came back to Laszlo as he sat unhappily at the table in the room usuaily given to visiting guests’ servants. One year, when he was about fifteen, the Kollonich children had been bought ponies which were ridden by Laszlo whenever he was at Simonvasar. On one occasion when the Moravian riding master was teaching them how to take their fences (though these were only low bars and hedges) the horse that Laszlo was riding came in badly, fell and strained a shoulder. The next day Niki, then an ill-behaved little brat four years younger than Laszlo, said to him:

‘You lamed my horse! I shan’t let you ride him again!’ Maybe it had only been said to tease, or perhaps it had just been a piece of childish arrogance, since the ponies were ridden by all the children and only nominally attributed to any one child; for it was the riding master who decided who rode which mount. But to Laszlo, to whom no pony had been allocated, these remarks, uttered thoughtlessly, suddenly brought home to him that he did not really belong and that even his cousins still thought of him more as a dependent than as one of themselves.