They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [132]
It was unbelievable, Balint reflected, that those so-called political leaders, Apponyi, Kossuth and Andrassy, could have been so irresponsible as to permit such a declaration without realizing what an effect it was bound to have abroad. It was tantamount to an invitation to Russia to attack their beloved country, and it would encourage all the petty Balkan states to underrate the power of the Dual Monarchy and to scorn its warnings and authority. And in Paris and St Petersburg it would look as if the Austro-Hungarian empire was on the point of disintegration with a revolution in Hungary as the first step. How was it possible that none of them had paused to think of such consequences?
Balint got up again, went over to the window and opened it. He stood there for a long time without moving and allowing the cool air to circulate round him and calm him down.
Outside the dew still lay on that part of the grass that the sun could not reach, and there, too, the unmelted hoarfrost lay like milky glass. Elsewhere the lawn was dotted with fallen leaves, coppery-red from the plane-trees and butterfly-yellow from the maple. The leaves were still falling, very slowly and floating in the air like a light mist of golden smoke in front of the open window … But Balint saw nothing of this. He merely stood there, staring sightlessly before him.
He came to himself only when the door opened and Aron Kozma and Ganyi entered the room. They gave him their report of the Co-operative meeting and told him that the book-keeping was in order and that they had found no faults in the society’s management. Then Kozma outlined the present state of the problems attendant on the distribution of the newly acquired farmland, and said he was glad to report that the former muddles had been satisfactorily cleared up. Owing to the diligence of the more reliable members, the late-payers had been obliged to settle their debts and so the society was now in a position to repay the few thousand crowns that Abady had advanced. Kozma explained all this in great detail because he was anxious to make Balint understand how much trouble he had caused by his well-meaning but thoughtless intervention.
Balint nodded and seemed to be listening. Now and then he said something to show appreciation of what had been done, but though he was as polite and considerate as ever, his mind was not in it. All the time that Kozma was speaking Balint was still seeking to understand what lay behind that pseudo-parliamentarian debate that had so angered him.
Soon he believed that he had discovered what had led people who should have known better to act in that ridiculous way. It was nothing more than the almost universal belief of Hungarian politicians that their voices could only be heard inside their own country. Their whole conception of politics was based on this, and nobody for a moment believed that their actions and words were watched or heard by anyone abroad, not even Apponyi whose brother-in-law was ambassador in London and who presumably wrote home from time to time, nor Andrassy, whose father was close to Franz-Josef’s intimate circle and who had for a while been a diplomat himself. In the heat of domestic passions it had never occurred to them to think of such matters as anything but the skirmishes of party politics which no one outside Hungary could for a moment understand or even be interested in. To these men the horizon extended no further than Vienna and outside this circle, this little Hungarian globe, there was nothing! The motion passed in the Hotel Royal’s ballroom was not in reality meant even for the Balkan states, but only for the government in Budapest, or at best, for the monarch so that he might see how discontented its authors were.
The general public, which for centuries had had no interest in world affairs and had never even grasped the importance of the Balkan conflict, now