They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [105]
Balint jumped up unable to conceal his anger.
‘What insufferable egotism! Here is our country behind all the other powers in military preparedness. We are in the middle of an appalling international crisis, and our beloved Archduke is prepared for purely selfish reasons to hinder what is in his and the country’s best interests!’
‘No need to flare up like that!’ said Slawata. ‘After all the Old One can’t live for ever … and perhaps in a month or two …?’
‘In a month or two you’ll be able to embark on these dangerous adventures you speak of … is that it? I can see that nothing else is important to you now. All you want to do is to destroy what we already have – and the more brutally the better – only to replace it with some ill-thought-out and thoroughly nebulous super-monarchy. And that is why, as you yourself admitted, you can’t find any supporters who are worth a tinker’s cuss! The only men you’ll find to support such a plan are those who have nothing to lose or those who fancy they’ll benefit even if everything else crumbles.’
‘I’m most disappointed that you should take it this way,’ said Slawata morosely. Then he too got up. ‘And I’m sorry, because in you I had hoped to find a colleague and sympathizer.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry about! I should never ever have supported such a plan. Indeed, you have nothing to be sorry about … Servus!’
‘Servus!’
Balint turned away and left without offering his hand.
Chapter Two
IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS Balint often recalled his talk with Slawata.
For the moment everything remained much the same as before. The government resigned but was re-formed almost as it had been after some three weeks of argument and, as a result, the resolution which had so provoked the ruler was dropped. Khuen-Hedervary agreed to continue in office so as to get matters cleared up but, after another three weeks of renewed and gleeful obstruction from the opposition, gave in his final resignation and withdrew from politics. So, in the middle of April, Laszlo Lukacs became Minister-President.
Officially his programme barely differed from that of his predecessor, but he had surreptitious negotiations with Justh even before he took office. It was much the same with other grandees of the opposition, but it was soon clear that such inter-party contacts were purely formal and had little significance.
Gossip about the news now became ever more confused and confusing, to the point where the most unlikely and impossible was everywhere believed. It would be declared as gospel truth that Lukacs and Justh, those dedicated left-wing reformers, were forming a right-wing lobby with – or without – the support of Tisza, their arch-enemy. There were even some developments which seemed to lend credence to this unlikely tale, such as when the followers of Kossuth sent a delegation to Vienna to protest that Auffenberg’s message to the Budapest Parliament constituted an infringement of Hungarian sovereignty, only to find that the Austrian minister’s action was defended by one Tivadar Batthyanyi who belonged to Justh’s own inner circle. This represented a complete volte-face, and it was followed by others. Mihaly Karolyi, the president of the OMGE – the reactionary land-owners’ agricultural association – who had always been a member of the Independent Party and who only two years before had been campaigning at Tisza’s side on the suffrage issue, was now known to have switched allegiances and, as a radical, was acting as go-between between Justh and the heads of the government.
Though gossip