They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [9]
Together they had turned the pages slowly; and as they did so sometimes their arms or their fingers had touched and sometimes they had exchanged a word or two: ‘This must be Malta!’, ‘Do look at the camel-driver!’, ‘The Khedive’s palace …’, words without any real meaning whose purpose had only been to break the silence.
Several times Balint had thought that the moment had come to speak the words for which she was waiting. He had only to take her hand and murmur a few short sentences and with that simple action he would have wiped out the past and started a new era in his life. Adrienne had wanted it that way and had expected it of him; but somehow the right words had never come, only those banal phrases about the engravings in the album on the table before them. And yet, as he was saying something obvious about the temple at Karnak and how large its stones were, he had been wondering if he ought then to have said ‘I love you’, which would have been a lie, or whether all that would have been needed was ‘Will you be my wife?’ until the moment had passed and they had been obliged to get up and go into the drawing-room where the other guests had started to gather.
Lili had then got down from the chair on which she had been kneeling and slowly straightened up. Balint remembered that he had wondered then if she thought he might have been embarrassed to speak under the bright glare of the electric chandelier above them, especially as she had walked straight over to one of the deep window embrasures, where the thickness of the old walls would have made them invisible to the guests in the other room. She had gone right up to the window and then, with her face close to the glass, and clearly to find another reason for the move, she had murmured ‘Do look at the frost. It is like flowers made of ice!’ and then she had turned and glanced back at him.
But Balint, who had followed her only as far as the beginning of the deep window embrasure, had just stood there still looking at the vast library.
The walls were lined with wooden bookcases almost to the ceiling, all curved and convoluted with elaborate carved and gilded decorations and divided by twisted columns of different precious woods. Above the elaborate cornice were metal conch shells and gilded putti brandishing highly-coloured heraldic shields, all in the most sophisticated manner of the Viennese baroque. The atmosphere of abounding opulence was overwhelming, and when Balint had watched the slim girlish figure of Lili stepping so elegantly across the inlaid parquet floor he had suddenly felt that all this was her proper background, where she truly belonged. This somewhat foreign luxury, itself so truly Austrian, was her birthright; and yet it was alien and strange to anyone with his downright Transylvanian background. How could he uproot her and carry her off to his own so different home? Even if she were in love with him, he had thought, would she not feel herself transplanted into an alien, possibly hostile, soil. For all its size and grandeur, Denestornya in its simple Hungarian way could not compare with this sophisticated splendour, just as the way of life in Transylvania could hardly be compared with what Lili was used to. All this had flashed through Balint’s mind as he had stood there looking at her, and it was like a sudden draught of cold air in his face. More, it had been just one more inhibition to be added to the others.
‘It must be icy outside.’
‘It was six below zero at dusk.’
‘How bright the moonlight is!’
‘That’s why it’s so cold. The sky is quite clear now.’
With these and other meaningless, inane phrases they had filled in the gaps between pauses that seemed endless to them both. At length Lili had turned away from the window. For an instant she had looked straight into Balint’s face and then, seeming to glide across the floor, she had returned to the drawing room without saying another word.