They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [11]
This trial had opened at the beginning of December and Professor Friedjung had at once declared that he could prove the truth of everything that he had alleged; and he presented documents to support his accusations. These, of course, had been provided by the Ballplatz and sent secretly to the famous and respectable historian. Then, as the trial entered its second week, things began to go wrong; some of the documents had been shown to be forgeries.
It was this that had been the principal subject of conversation that last night at Jablanka. It had been the considered opinion that the professor had been right in principle and that those he had accused, especially Supino, the author of the Fiume Resolution, had certainly been Serbian agents, but that the Austrian Foreign Ministry had carelessly failed to verify all the material produced by their own spies. It had been clear that, unfortunately, there had been more than mere muddle or justifiable human error. What had emerged was no less than intentional falsification. It had been generally accepted that this was always to be expected when recourse had to be made to common or garden spies, who were often paid by both sides, and especially in this case where some of the secret agents had been Serbs who, no doubt, had received the false documents from Belgrade with the full knowledge of the Serbian government!
Naturally this had been discussed frequently during the three days’ shooting at Jablanka and whenever the scandal had been mentioned it had always been in that bland, well-informed, unexaggerated, half-spoken, half-insinuated manner which was the well-bred style adopted by the Szent-Gyorgyi circle. On the last evening it had seemed to Balint that they could talk about nothing else and though, the year before, he had been fascinated by the political discussions in his cousins’ house, now his own inner turmoil prevented him from taking any interest in what they were saying. On that last evening he felt he could no longer stay talking politics with the group round the drawing room fire; and so, as soon as everyone had drunk their coffee, he left the room and went to see his aunt. It was, of course, right that he should do so as he would be leaving at dawn to catch the Budapest express and would have no other opportunity of taking his leave. But his hurried flight to Elise Szent-Gyorgyi’s own sitting-room was really because he could not bear to remain in the same room as little Lili whom he had just hurt so much. To reach his aunt’s rooms he had to pass once again through the library, and there, on the table, still lay the album of Forray’s travels, slightly askew, just as it had been left when Lili had pushed it aside and gone to the window. The big red and gold leather-bound volume glittered under the savage glare of the chandelier overhead and had seemed to him the corpus delicti – the proof of the crime he had just committed against both himself and her. His heart had constricted when he saw the book lying there in front of him.
His aunt Elise had been sitting in her usual chair which was protected from any draught by a glass screen. In front of her were two women guests from Vienna. Before he had come in they had talked only of unimportant Viennese society gossip but this had stopped when Balint entered the room. Then she had grabbed his hand in her own and forced him to sit down on a sofa beside her chair. For a moment neither aunt nor nephew had spoken. The two Austrian visitors had grasped at once that their hostess wanted