Many carriages and peasant carts had travelled that way in the morning, all hastening to the Sunday races at Vasarhely, raising clouds of dust in their wake. Now in the early afternoon all was still. The dust had settled and the road was empty.
A single vehicle approached slowly from the direction of the town. It was an open hired fiacre drawn by three horses. Sitting back in the passenger seat was a young man, Balint Abady, slim and of medium height, his long silk dustcoat fastened up to his chin. When he took off the wide-brimmed felt hat that had become the fashion throughout Europe after the Boer War, the sunlight caught reddish glints in his wavy hair and made his blue eyes seem even lighter in colour. His features had a faintly oriental cast, with a high forehead, wide cheekbones and unexpectedly slanting eyes. Balint had not been at the races. He had come direct from the station and was heading for Var-Siklod, the country place of Count Laczok who was giving a recepton after the races, which in turn would be followed in the evening by a dinner and dance.
He had come by train direct from Denestornya even though his mother had offered one of her teams of carriage horses. He had refused the offer, warmly as it had been made, because he sensed she had hoped he would. He knew how much she loved the horses she raised and how she worried over possible hardship for them. In strange stables they would catch cold or be snagged by other horses. So, with a smile, he had told her that it would be too much for them to drive the fifty kilometres from Denestornya to St George’s Meadow beyond Vasarhely, back to the town again and then out to the Laczoks’. They would have to be put to, unharnessed again, fed at an inn … no, he would rather go by train. In that way he would arrive early and maybe have an opportunity to discuss local affairs with the politicians who were sure to be there.
‘All right, my boy, if that is what you prefer — though you know I would give the horses willingly’, his mother had said; but he knew she was glad he had not accepted. So now he was on his way to Siklod, travelling slowly in the old fiacre, with its jingling harness and its ancient springs. He enjoyed the leisurely pace along the lonely road with the dust rising like the lightest of veils carried by an almost imperceptible breeze over meadows where doe-eyed cows lazily looked towards the carriage.
How good it was to be back in his own country after so many years away, to be back home again and to be carried so peacefully and gently to a place he loved and where he would meet so many old friends. It was a long time since he had seen them; since, after his years at the Theresianum in Vienna and afterwards at the University of Kolozsvar, he had had to go back again to Vienna to prepare his diplomatic examinations and, after his military service, he had been posted abroad for two years. Now he was back. How much better this was, he thought, than the diplomatic service where there was no hope of earning money and where the small allowance, which was all his mother could afford, barely covered his living expenses. He did not grudge the meagreness of his allowance. Though her holdings were large — sixteen thousand acres of pine forest on the slopes of Vlegyasza, three thousand at Denestornya, rich farmlands between the Aranyos and the Maros, three-quarters of the great lake at Lelbanya, and smaller holdings here and there — he knew his mother never had any spare money, however hard she tried to save.
It was far better to come home, where he could live cheaply, and where, with his experience and qualifications, he could perhaps make himself useful in his own country.
When, therefore, he was at home on leave in the spring of 1904 and the Prefect of the district had come to Denestornya asking him to stand for the vacant parliamentary seat of Lelbanya, he had accepted without hesitation. He had only one condition; he would be an Independent, free of party ties. Even when abroad he had read in the newspapers of the fierce parliamentary battles in Budapest which had swept away two governments in as many years and, to Balint, the idea of being tied to a party line and obliged to follow a party whip was infinitely distasteful.
The Prefect, somewhat to Balint’s surprise, had raised no objections. He agreed to the Independent label provided that Balint would respect the 1867 Compromise with Vienna, that agreement which ensured the independence of Hungary. What the Prefect did not say was that for him the only important thing was to keep out the opposition and to be sure that Lelbanya should not be represented by some ‘foreigner’ who had bought his seat from the party leaders in Budapest. Although Lelbanya, once a royal town, had declined until it had become a mere country market town with barely three hundred votes, it still had the right to elect a member of Parliament. For some time the elections had been rigged. Aspiring politicians, with money in their pockets, had come from the capital to win the seat. They would be welcomed, and their pockets emptied, by the Prefect and his friends, to an apparently vicious contest with a loud-mouthed demagogue who, spouting the revolutionary principles of 1848, had been employed to contest the seat. On one occasion the rich candidate from Budapest had tired of paying and retired; and, to the province’s shame and embarrassment, the phoney candidate had been elected.
If young Count Abady would stand, the Prefect knew that nothing would go wrong. Since the town’s mine had stopped being worked many years before and the soil of the district only offered a poor living, the inhabitants of Lelbanya had lived chiefly by gathering and working the reeds of the lake, which was Abady property. Against the owner of the lake no ‘foreign’ candidate stood a chance, for if Count Abady decided to sell the reeds elsewhere, the citizens would lose their livelihood.
Of course the Prefect said none of this to the young man. He spoke only in general terms, of the need for a sense of duty, of patriotism and, in Countess Abady’s presence, he spoke, with an air of understanding and sympathy, of how she and her people would benefit from the young count’s presence in his own country. He spoke too, temptingly, of the salaries earned by Members of Parliament which, though low enough, would be useful. He emphasized that there would be no embarrassing contest and that the election would be almost unanimous. Only when Balint and his mother had been convinced did he visit the countess’s agent, Kristof Azbej, and tell him that it would be wise to send a stranger to Lelbanya who would, in a most obvious manner, assess the autumn’s reed crop as if Count Abady were considering selling elsewhere. The electors would get a good fright and when, as in previous years, the crop was still made available to the town Count Abady would be elected. And this is what happened; even though Balint had no idea why the electors cheered him so heartily. Balint’s innocence stemmed not only from his straightforward nature and an upbringing that had shielded him from dishonesty and greed, but also from the fact that the protected years at the Theresianum college, at the university and even in the diplomatic service, had shown him only the gentler aspects of life. He had lived always in a hothouse atmosphere where the realities of human wickedness wore masks; and Balint did not yet have the experience to see the truth that lay behind.
None of this was in Balint’s mind as he travelled slowly towards Siklod in the old hackney carriage. Leaning back in his seat, he thought only of how good it was to be home again and to have the chance to put to good use what he had seen abroad, how he could pass on the benefits of what he had seen in Germany of the new trade unions, of their methods of property administration, of tied-cottages and small holders’ rights. Though he had already spoken of such things to the electors, they were still not clearly defined in his mind. In the meantime, the sun was beautiful, the countryside smiling and the sky clear and blue.