Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

Crookface and Ambrus were alike in more than looks. Both were coarse-spoken, irritable, and contrary, given to reply with a single obscene expletive. This was an innovation started by Crookface in Transylvania, where none of his family, even in boundless fury, to which they were much given, had ever been known to use bad language. But though the coarseness of these two Kendys was the same, it was expressed in different ways. Crookface was sombre and stern and was rude in such a commanding way that few ventured to answer back. Ambrus imitated the rough rudeness of his cousin, but he transformed it to his own advantage. When obscenities fell from his mouth they did so, not aggressively like Crookface, but with a sort of natural jolly roughness, as if he couldn’t help it, as if it were merely uncouth honesty. It was as if he were saying, ‘Of course I am foul-mouthed, but I was born that way, coarse and rough maybe, but sincere, straight and true.’ And this impression of honest good-fellowship was heightened by the kindly look in his light-blue eyes, his deep rumbling voice, his heavy stamping tread and the smile that never left his face. Everyone liked this robust, attractive man and many women loved him. When Balint Abady had come to the university of Kolozsvar at the end of the nineties he found that all the students admired ‘Uncle’ Ambrus and made him their model, everyone imitated him, letting it be known that real men all spoke as he did, using foul language with zest, and that only affected weaklings spoke politely. Ambrus was the students’ leader in other ways too. Though married and the father of seven children, he was a great rake and loved drinking and carousing late into the night. He had a strong head, and when he came to Kolozsvar — which was often and always for long visits — there were revelries every night; with heavy drinking and wild gypsy music. The young students loved it and copied him slavishly.

Balint remembered vividly how he too had followed the fashion, entering into the excesses that always started as soon as Uncle Ambrus appeared. Though it was not really to their taste, he and Laszlo had been swept along by the tide. Perhaps he would not have been tempted if he had been older. Perhaps he would have resisted had he not come straight from the seclusion of boarding school. But as it was he did not resist, and neither did Laszlo. Both felt the need to belong, for, in spite of being related to many of their fellow students, they were treated as outsiders, newcomers, to whom few of the others really took, or confided in, as they did among those with whom they had grown up. Nothing of this reserve, this withholding of comradeship, this intangible dislike, showed upon the surface. There was nothing that Balint or Laszlo could get hold of, nothing for which they could seek an explanation; but it was there nevertheless, in the thousand daily trivialities of casual encounter.

Against Laszlo this antagonism, though it never entirely disappeared, soon subsided when they discovered how well he could play the violin. It was a great advantage to be able to stand in for the band-leader and lead the revels with intoxicating gypsy music. And he could also play the oboe, and clarinet and piano. But the latent hostility to Balint did not change. Maybe it was because he never drank himself under the table, never really let himself go. No matter how much he drank, he always knew what he was doing and what everyone else was doing too. It was as if he could never rid himself of that inner critic, ever alert and ironical, who would watch how he would dance in his shirt-sleeves in front of the gypsies and sing and lark about like the others, and who would say to him, ‘You are a hypocrite, my boy. Why play the fool?’ Still, always hoping that he would get closer to the others, always deluding himself that they would accept him as one of themselves and forget his ‘foreign’ background, he would throw himself into their drinking parties, shout and break things and try to do everything they did. But that inner voice was never silenced. Even so Balint persevered, trying to merge himself with these companions who despised anyone who didn’t get drunk, who didn’t go wild at the sound of gypsy music, who didn’t know the words of every song, and who didn’t have his own tune, at the sound of which one was expected to jump on the table, fall on the floor and break, if not all the furniture, at least a few glasses. Uncle Ambrus did all these things, so everyone else must follow suit; and it was considered a real proof of good fellowship if, towards dawn, one sat crying in the band-leader’s lap or kissed the cellist. Much of this was the natural rivalry of young male animals. They had to surpass each other, to show themselves the better man; and one exploit would lead to another, each more exaggerated than the last.

And the next day they would brag about it. To the young girls in their drawing-rooms they would puff themselves up and say, ‘God, was I drunk last night!’ And the girls, even if they didn’t take these tales too seriously, would act duly impressed. For them it was important to please, and thereby to find a husband; and to be told such stories was not only amusing, but meant that they were sufficiently popular to be given such confidences. If they seemed sympathetic and understanding of such behaviour, and seemed to like the gypsy music, it meant also, at the end of such evenings, that it was under their windows that the young men would bring the musicians to play and sing their messages of love and admiration.

Nor were the mothers any more shocked than their daughters. Most of their husbands had grown up before the revolution of 1848, after which a career in public service, previously expected from young men of noble families, had no longer been open to them. Direct rule from Vienna had removed any opportunity for their traditional occupations and many, in their enforced idleness, took to drink instead. Nevertheless they usually remained good husbands even if a few died of dipsomania, and who could say for sure that the wives were not to blame for failing to keep them off the bottle? Mothers, too, had another and more cogent reason for not looking askance at the young men spending their evenings with the gypsies. Sometimes in Transylvania girls of good family would be invited to the more staid of such evenings, and marriage proposals came more easily when the wine was flowing. And if, as they were more apt to do, the men were getting drunk with the gypsies in all-male groups, they were at least among themselves with no chance of getting entangled with some ‘wicked creature’. So, when the young bloods were known to be out spending their time and their money on drink and gypsy music, the matrons would sigh among themselves and be consoled by the thought that otherwise, ‘God-knows, dear, where they’d go and catch some nasty disease!’

Reminded by the sight of the two Kendys of those student days of five or six years before, Balint recalled that there was at least one girl who did not feel, or pretend to feel, sympathy for the man who was a notorious rake. He had met only one who, when some young man would start to boast of his exploits, would frown, straightening her well-shaped brows, and lift her chin with disapproval and distaste.

Only one: Adrienne Miloth.

What a strange independent girl she had been, different in almost every way from the others. She preferred a waltz to a csardas, she scarcely touched champagne and in her glance there was a sort of grave thoughtfulness, sweet and at the same time intelligent. How could she have married such an ugly and gloomy man as Pal Uzdy? Some women seemed to like such grim looks, but then Adrienne Miloth was not ‘some women’ and, remembering this, Balint felt again the same stab of senseless irritation that he had experienced two years before when he had heard of her betrothal.