Beware of Pity (3 page)

Bad luck again, however—there’s no cab in the square outside the town hall, I have to wait while someone telephones for a two-horse carriage. So it’s inevitable, when I finally arrive in the hall of Herr von Kekesfalva’s house, that the big hand of the clock on the wall is pointing vertically down; it is eight-thirty instead of eight, and the coats in the cloakroom are piled on top of each other. The rather anxious look on the servant’s face also shows me that I am decidedly late—how unlucky, how really unlucky for such a thing to happen on a first visit.

However, the servant—this time in white gloves, tailcoat and a starched shirt to go with his starchy expression—reassures me; my batman delivered my message half-an-hour ago, he says, and he leads me into the salon, four windows curtained in red silk, the room sparkling with light from crystal chandeliers, fabulously elegant, I’ve never seen anywhere more splendid. But to my dismay it is deserted, and I clearly hear the cheerful clink of plates in the room next to it—how very annoying, I think at once, they’ve already started dinner!

Well, I pull myself together, and as soon as the servant pushes the double door open ahead of me I step into the dining room, click my heels smartly, and bow. Everyone looks up, twenty, forty eyes, all of them the eyes of strangers, inspect the
latecomer
standing there by the doorpost feeling very unsure of himself. An elderly gentleman is already rising from his chair, undoubtedly the master of the house, quickly putting down his napkin. He comes towards me and welcomes me, offering me his hand. Herr von Kekesfalva does not look at all as I imagined him, not in the least like a landed nobleman, no flamboyant Magyar moustache, full cheeks, stout and red-faced from good wine. Instead, rather weary eyes with grey bags under them swim behind gold-rimmed glasses, he has something of a stoop, his voice is a whisper slightly impeded by coughing. With his thin, delicately featured face, ending in a sparse, pointed white beard, you would be more likely to take him for a scholar. The old man’s marked kindness is immensely reassuring to me in my uncertainty; no, no, he interrupts me at once, it is for him to apologise. He knows just how it is, anything can happen when you’re on army service, and it was particularly good of me to let him know; they had begun dinner only because they couldn’t be sure whether I would arrive at all. But now I must sit down at once. He will introduce me to all the company individually after dinner. Except that here—and he leads me to the table—this is his daughter. A girl in her teens, delicate, pale, as fragile as her father, looks up from a conversation, and two grey eyes shyly rest on me. But I see her thin, nervous face only in passing, I bow first to her, then right and left to the company in general, who are obviously glad not to have to lay down their knives and forks and have the meal interrupted by formal introductions.

For the first two or three minutes I still feel very uncomfortable. There’s no one else from the regiment here, none of my
comrades
, no one I know, not even any of the more prominent citizens of the little town, all the guests are total strangers to me. Most of them seem to be the owners of nearby estates with their wives and daughters, some are civil servants. But they are all civilians; mine is the only uniform. My God, clumsy and shy as I am, how am I going to make conversation with these unknown people? Fortunately I’ve been well placed. Next to me sits that brown, high-spirited girl, the pretty niece, who seems to have noticed my admiring glance in the cake shop after all, for she gives me a friendly smile as if I were an old acquaintance. She has eyes like coffee beans, and indeed when she laughs it’s with a softly sizzling sound like coffee beans roasting. She has enchanting, translucent little ears under her thick black hair, ears like pink cyclamen flowers growing in dark moss, I think. Her bare arms are soft and smooth; they must feel like peaches.

It does me good to be sitting next to such a pretty girl, and her Hungarian accent when she speaks almost has me falling in love with her. It does me good to eat at such an elegantly laid table in so bright and sparkling a room, with liveried servants behind me and the finest dishes in front of me. My neighbour on the left speaks with a slight Polish accent, and although she is built rather on the generous scale she too seems to me a very attractive sight. Or is that just the effect of the wine, pale gold, then dark red, and now the bubbles of champagne, poured unstintingly from silver carafes by the servants with their white gloves standing behind us? No, the good pharmacist was not exaggerating. You might think yourself at court in the Kekesfalva house. I have never eaten so well, or even dreamt that anyone
could
eat so well, so lavishly, could taste such delicacies.
More and more exquisite dishes are carried in on inexhaustible platters, blue-tinged fish crowned with lettuce and framed by slices of lobster swim in golden sauces, capons ride aloft on broad saddles of piled rice, puddings are flambéed in rum, burning with a blue flame; ice bombs fall apart to reveal their sweet, colourful contents, fruits that must have travelled halfway round the world nestle close to each other in silver baskets. It never, never ends, and finally there is a positive rainbow of liqueurs, green, red, colourless, yellow, and cigars as thick as asparagus, to be enjoyed with delicious coffee!

A wonderful, a magical house—blessings on the good pharmacist!—a bright, happy evening full of merry sound! Do I feel so relaxed, so much at ease, just because the eyes of the other guests, to my right and my left and opposite me, are also shining now, and they have raised their voices? They too seem to have forgotten about etiquette and are talking nineteen to the dozen! Anyway, my own usual shyness is gone. I chatter on without the slightest inhibition, I pay court to both the ladies sitting next to me, I drink, laugh, look around in cheerful high spirits, and if it isn’t always by chance that my hand now and then touches the lovely bare arm of Ilona (such is the name of the delectable niece), then she doesn’t seem to take my gentle approach and then retreat in the wrong spirit, she is relaxed and elated like all of us at this lavish banquet.

I begin to feel—while wondering if it may not be the effect of the unusually good wine; Tokay and champagne in such quick succession?—I begin to feel elated, buoyant, even boisterous. I need only one thing to crown my happiness in the spell cast over my enraptured mind, and what I have
unconsciously
been wanting is revealed to me next moment, when I suddenly hear soft music, performed by a quartet of
instrumentalists, beginning to play in a third room beyond the salon. The servant has quietly opened the double doors again. It is exactly the kind of music I would have wished for, dance music, rhythmical and gentle at the same time, a waltz with the melody played by two violins, the low notes of a cello adding a darker tone, and a piano picking out the tune in sharp staccato. Music, yes, music, that was all I still needed! Music now, and perhaps dancing, a waltz! I want to move with it, feel that I am flying, sense my lightness of heart even more blissfully! This Villa Kekesfalva must indeed be a magical place where you have only to dream of something and your wish is granted. So now we stand up, moving our dining chairs aside, and two by two—I offer Ilona my arm, and once again feel her cool, soft, beautiful skin—we go into the salon, where the tables have been cleared away as if by brownie magic, and chairs are placed around the wall. The wooden floor is smooth and shiny, a mirror-like brown surface, waltzing is the apotheosis of skating, and the lively music played by the invisible instrumentalist next door animates us.

I turn to Ilona. She laughs, understanding me. Her eyes have already said “Yes”, and now we are whirling round the room, two couples, three couples, five couples moving over the whole dance floor, while the older and less daring guests watch or talk to each other. I like dancing, I may even say I dance well. Closely entwined, we skim the floor. I think I have never danced better in my life. I ask my other neighbour at dinner for the pleasure of the next waltz. She too dances very well, and leaning down to her I smell the perfume of her hair and feel slightly dizzy. Oh, her dancing is wonderful, it is all wonderful, I haven’t felt so happy for years. I hardly know what I am doing, I would like to embrace everyone, say something heartfelt, grateful to
them all, I feel so light, so elated, so blissfully young. I whirl from partner to partner, I talk and laugh and dance, and never notice the time, carried away by the torrent of my pleasure.

Then I suddenly look up and happen to see the time. It is ten-thirty—and I realise, to my alarm, that I have been dancing and talking and amusing myself for almost an hour but, great oaf that I am, I haven’t yet asked my host’s daughter to dance. I have only danced with my two neighbours at dinner and two or three other ladies, the ones I liked best, entirely neglecting the daughter of the house! What uncivil behaviour, what a slight to her! I must put that right at once!

I am shocked, however, to realise that I cannot remember exactly what the girl looks like. I bowed to her only briefly when she was already seated at table, all I recollect is the impression of fragile delicacy that she made on me, and then the quick, curious glance of her grey eyes. But where is she? She is the daughter of the house, surely she can’t have left the party? I look uneasily at all the girls and women sitting by the wall; I see no one like her. Finally I step into the third room where, hidden behind a Japanese screen, the quartet is playing, and breathe a sigh of relief. For there she is—yes, I am sure of it—delicate, slender, sitting in her pale-blue dress between two old ladies in the corner of this boudoir, at a malachite-green table with a shallow bowl of flowers on it. Her head is slightly bowed, as if she were entirely absorbed in the music, and the deep crimson of the roses in the bowl makes me notice the translucent pallor of her forehead under her heavy light-red hair. But I have no time for idle gazing. Thank God, I think fervently, now I’ve tracked her down, and I can make up for being so remiss.

I go over to the table—the music is playing merrily away—and bow to indicate that I am asking her to dance. She looks
at me in startled surprise, her lips still half open, interrupted in the middle of what she was saying. But she makes no move to rise and go with me. Didn’t she understand? I bow again, and my spurs clink softly. “May I have the pleasure of this dance, dear young lady?”

Something terrible happens next. She had been leaning slightly forward, but now she flinches abruptly back as if avoiding a blow. At the same time the blood rushes into her pale cheeks, the lips that were half open just now are pressed hard together, and only her eyes keep staring at me with an expression of horror such as I have never seen in my life before. Next moment a paroxysm passes right through her convulsed body. She braces herself on the table with both hands, making the bowl of roses clink and jangle, and at the same time something hard, made of wood or metal, falls from her chair to the ground. Both her hands are still clutching the table, which sways, her childlike body is shaken again and again, but all the same she does not run away, she only clings even more desperately to the heavy tabletop. And again and again that shaking, those tremors run from her cramped fists all the way up to her hairline. Suddenly she bursts into sobs, a wild, elemental sound like a stifled scream.

But the two old ladies are already with her, to right and left, one on each side, holding her, caressing her, speaking soothing, reassuring words to the trembling girl. Her convulsed hands relax, drop gently from the table, and she falls back into her chair. However, the weeping goes on, even worse than before, like a rush of blood, like a surge of hot vomit rising in her throat it keeps bursting forth. If the music drowning the sound of it out from behind the screen were to stop for a moment, even the dancers in the next room would hear her sobbing.

I stand there, horrified, bewildered. What exactly has happened? Baffled, I stare at the two old ladies as they try to calm the sobbing girl. Now, as she begins to feel ashamed of her outburst, she has laid her head on the table. But she still breaks into fresh tears again and again, wave after wave of them shaking her slender body up to her shoulders, and each of these abrupt fits of weeping makes the glass and china clink. As for me, I stand there at a loss, my thoughts frozen like ice, with my collar constricting my throat like a burning cord.

“I’m sorry,” I finally stammer in an undertone, and while both ladies are busy with the sobbing girl—neither of them spares me a glance—I retreat, feeling dizzy, into the hall beyond. No one here seems to have noticed anything yet. Couples are circling with verve on the dance floor, and I have to hold on to the doorpost, because the room is going round and round before my eyes. What happened? Have I done something wrong? My God, did I drink too much and too fast at dinner, did I drink enough to stupefy me and make me commit some silly blunder?

The music stops, the couples move apart. The district administrator who is Ilona’s partner relinquishes her hand with a bow, and I immediately hurry over to her and make the surprised girl go over to the window with me. “Please help me! For Heaven’s sake, help me, explain!”

Obviously Ilona was expecting me to whisper something amusing to her when I took her aside, for suddenly her glance is unfriendly. I must have looked either pitiable or alarming in my agitation. My pulse beats fast as I tell her everything. And strange to say, she cries out with the same sheer horror in her eyes as the girl in the other room.

“Are you out of your mind? … Don’t you know? … Didn’t you notice? …”

“No,” I stammer, shattered by these fresh and equally incomprehensible signs of horror. “Didn’t I notice
what?
And I don’t know anything—this is the first time I’ve been in this house.”

“But didn’t you see that Edith is … is lame? Didn’t you notice her poor crippled legs? She can’t drag herself two paces without crutches, and then you … you callous …” (here she quickly suppresses some angry term for me). “Then you ask the poor girl to dance … oh, how dreadful! I must go straight to her.”