They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [6]
Recalling that moment Balint conjured up in his mind the thin layer of powdery snow that covered the frozen ground and which had crackled under their feet. The others had lingered by the fences of the paddocks and that is when he should have spoken. It was there that he ought to have uttered those few banal words that were the classic form of suggesting marriage. And yet for some reason he had held back and said nothing. Stupidly he had said nothing. Had he felt that in that wintry landscape his voice would sound too matter-of-fact, too cold and businesslike, too unspontaneous? But of course he knew then, just as he knew now, that it would not have mattered how he had said it, for the girl had only been waiting for him to speak.
Balint stopped at the bridge over the mill-stream. For a moment he thought of going on into the park, which at that hour would be completely deserted, and he walked on a few steps before reflecting how silly it would be to get his patent leather evening shoes all muddied just before he went to the Prefect’s evening party. Far better to go where he could stay on the side-walk, where the slight humidity from that afternoon’s rain would have left few traces. So he continued along the road which led to the railway station.
As he wandered so aimlessly in the night Balint thought back to that time a year before when he had spent so many autumn evenings just wandering about the streets as aimlessly as he was now doing. Anything, he had thought, to keep on the move and quiet his growing anxiety as he waited for Adrienne’s letter, that letter which would at long last announce that she had started the business of her divorce. Until then every little note she had sent him had just been one more excuse for delay: ‘… it is impossible now’, or ‘Not yet, we have to wait, wait, wait!’ That was what she had written, and then he had not understood the dreadful dilemma in which she had been placed, fearing to make any move that might push her sick husband into insanity, that insanity that had come all the same and forever destroyed their hopes.
He wondered if Adrienne was still sitting in Countess Gyalakuthy’s box at the opera or whether she too had left the theatre devastated, as he had been, by the cruel chance that had brought them physically so close after so long apart. Had she too been shattered by that cruel game the Fates seemed to be playing with them?
Somehow, he thought, he must arrange that this should never happen again. He would leave Kolozsvar the next day, indeed if it had not been for that stupid supper party, he would have gone that very night.
In the morning he would go back to Denestornya, to his mother and to that old home which was the only place in the world where he could find peace. My home, he thought, with its age-old beauty and magic, where, though always enveloped in a veil of sadness, there were only the two of them to wander in that enormous house: he and his old mother. And now there always would only be the two of them. There was no one else, there never would be anyone else. There was no future and no young life to follow.
Had he proposed to Lili at Jablanka then at least he might have had that hope. What madness had prevented him?
It had been quite clear that the Szent-Gyorgyis, in their typically unobtrusive way, had made