They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy Read Free Book Online Page B

up?’
    ‘That’d take far too long, the fire’s been out for ages,’ said Adrienne, laughing. ‘I’m so hungry! Let’s have them as they are! They’ll taste every bit as good.’
    So as not to soil Adrienne’s sheets with the chestnut peelings they used the newspaper as a tablecloth in the centre of the bed and leaning over from each side they tackled the long-cold nuts with gusto. As they did so Balint told how he had nearly knocked over the old woman who was roasting the chestnuts and how, automatically, he had bought the paper from the news-vendor in the station square; and he related both tales as if they were unreal amusing anecdotes from a remote past which now hardly concerned them, indeed as if they had never really happened.
    It was the same with all the suffering they had both endured during the past year and a half. The pain and bitterness and the torment they had both gone through all those months when Uzdy’s incipient madness was slowly growing to its climax; the ultimate catastrophe of his complete breakdown; Adrienne’s renunciation of their love and her decree that they must not see each other; and the seemingly endless days and nights of sorrowand self-recrimination that they had both suffered; all these things now vanished from their minds like the mists of early morning. Not only did they not think about it but they barely even wondered if there had ever really been any reason for the torture they had endured. They did not remember it because it no longer existed, because they were together again and at home in each other’s arms, because they belonged to each other, a real couple, male and female of the same species, and because anything which did not concern them now was as unreal as a mere phantom.
    So, together on the wide bed, he in her silken wrap and she with her night-dress slightly torn and slipping down over one shoulder, they fell on the sooty chestnuts with hungry delight.
    ‘Wasn’t it lucky you bought them!’ said Addy.

Chapter Two
    W HEN KAROLY KHUEN-HEDERVARY formed a new government in January, 1910, few people, and especially those who had been immersed in the fantasy world of Coalition politics, believed it would achieve any more than had its predecessors. Everywhere it was said that the new government would soon suffer the same fate as that of General Fejervary five years before for it was still believed that a government made up of people not in Parliament had no solid base and therefore would not stand the pace. Indeed so frosty was the lack of welcome with which it was received that when Khuen-Hedervary announced that Parliament was to be adjourned he was met with an immediate motion of ‘No Confidence’.
    But things had changed and the political climate in 1910 was not at all what it had been five years before. The public had become disillusioned and now there were not many who bothered themselves with anything so trivial as a change of government.
    In 1905 such had been the general optimism that people had really believed that Hungary stood on the threshold of a new golden age. The resounding promises of reform and improvement which had been brandished as the election slogans of the parties forming the Coalition – as, for example, the separation of the army commands and the establishment of an independent Customs service – had everywhere been taken as if these goalshad already been achieved or, if not exactly achieved, at the very least only temporarily delayed by the unpatriotic plots of their political opponents, that wicked camarilla whose sinister influence would be swept away as soon as the Coalition came to power. Few people had then paused to reflect that the trade-unionists would never really co-operate with any other group and had only joined in the call to overthrow the existing government because they themselves had never expected to be called upon to face the realities of political power; nor that there were forces in the running of a great nation