They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [187]
Gabor Daniel, Pekar and several others ran back to Tisza.
‘You have to speak to them! They only want to hear you!’ they cried. For a long time they argued and insisted, distressed and upset by their leader’s stubborn refusal to move.
Further away some of his followers did not hide their resentment, muttering to each other that his stubbornness was impossible to understand. How could he, who for years had been the most hated man in Hungary, refuse to appear when everything had been changed and the mob was calling hysterically for him? Now they wanted to cheer him – and he wanted none of it! Now of all times, when it was so important. And they whispered to each other: ‘This is sheer masochism! He’s happy only when they hate him!’ The whole party was indignant.
They could not have known that Tisza was opposed to the war. No one knew, except only those who had attended the King’s Council meetings. On the day that the ultimatum had been decided, Tisza had at once resigned. He had remained in office only because ordered to by the monarch himself. He had resigned because he had thought that by doing so he would be able to modify the harsh terms of the ultimatum; but when he had found that his struggle would be in vain and that he would never be able to bring Berchtold and Conrad to his way of thinking, he had decided to stay as he knew that he alone was strong enough to hold the country together at such a critical time. At the express wish of the King he had agreed to keep his opposition secret, principally because he knew that Hungary’s new-found unity would be shattered if it was known what he really felt. So he accepted responsibility for a war he had fought hard to prevent. Out of a sense of duty he had accepted a task he loathed, the task of organizing a war knowing well what it would mean. He accepted it in silence, a silence that lasted until his death. And he never changed his opinion, even though it was hidden from the world. In his public speeches he spoke only of effort, duty and self-sacrifice; but he never tried to justify the conflict.
Tisza’s real views only became known years after his death when the secret files in Vienna were made public. At the time therefore the resentment of the party’s rank and file at their leader’s refusal to speak was only to be expected.
There was nothing to be done. They had to let the crowd go, explaining, with a lie, that the Minister-President wasn’t there, that he had had to be absent on some urgent business.
Morose and disappointed the great crowd melted away. Many of the party members also went home. Darkness fell and few people were left in the party headquarters.
Balint, who had been every bit as irritated by Tisza’s intransigence as the others, saw that the number of those surrounding him had diminished and decided he would try to speak to him. He started to move across the hall, but halfway across he caught sight of Tisza’s face and stopped in his tracks.
There the man sat, in a deep armchair, not speaking to anyone, with a dark expression on his face and teeth clenched. What a tragic face the man had! Abady was startled and he sensed at once that there must have been some deep compulsion to explain why he had refused to speak, why he had rejected all appeals from his followers, why he could not allow himself to go out and make a speech and allow himself to be cheered – at least not that, never that!
Balint knew he could not intrude, so he turned away and went home. But he never forgot the moment when he had seen him there, sitting in silence in the deep armchair with his legs crossed, his thick-lensed glasses making his eyes seem so much larger, a bitter crease on his forehead and even more bitter lines reaching down each side of his face. He had sat there motionless, staring ahead of him as if all he could