Csardas Read online

  It was bitterly cold outside. Karoly, helping the general into his coach, saw steam rising from the horses’ nostrils and a thin frosting of ice on the top of the carriage. The lanterns in the trees were still glowing and colourful but there was a brittle look about them, as though icicles would hang from them if they were left there all night. The spring wind had dropped and now there was only the reminder that it was still possible to have frosts and even a late fall of snow. The general shivered at the change of temperature.

  “Alfred keeps his library too hot,” he grumbled.

  It took a long time to bundle him—respectfully—up into the coach, and all the time Karoly was worrying that the girl in the pink dress might have vanished when he got back to the drawing-room. He was going straight to Cousin Alfred—or perhaps Kati would be better—and ask to be presented. It was too late to dance, but if only he knew her name he could call or somehow arrange to be at a place where she was also.

  “G’night,” said the general from the carriage window. Karoly saluted, smiled, turned away—and was just in time to see the girl in pink climbing into a coach that appeared to be in the sole charge of a large and surly sergeant of hussars.

  “Damn!” he said and hurried forward, only to have the door closed firmly in his face by the old coachman.

  “No,” rumbled Uncle Sandor. He glared at Karoly from beneath scowling black brows and then climbed onto the box and took the reins into his hands. The horses fidgeted, bored with waiting and anxious to be home out of the frosty air.

  As the coach started to move, Karoly ran to the window and looked in. “Please!” he said, raising a hand as two astonished young faces turned towards him. “Please, your name....”

  “Eva,” giggled the dark little girl, even though he was staring directly at the other one. “Eva Ferenc.”

  There was a sudden violent lurch. Uncle Sandor had looked back and seen a young rakehell from the hussars talking to the young ladies who should have been home by now. He struck the horses sharply with the reins and was pleased to see the young officer thrown to one side as the coach jerked forward.

  “Karoly Vilaghy!” shouted the lieutenant to the rapidly moving coach. Just as he had given up hope a head appeared out of the window and she smiled and waved at him. He had a brief glimpse of her face wrapped round with a pale gray hood—her face and the smile and a small hand covered in white silk—and then she was gone.

  The gypsy violinist was hunched in the doorway, his face pinched and lined and his violin clamped beneath his arm so that he could hold his hands inside the front of his jacket. He was waiting hopefully, in case some of the young gentlemen wished to employ him for the usual after-party pursuit of following the girls home and playing outside their windows. When he saw Karoly, a young officer just ripe for falling in love, he removed his hands from his jacket, blew on his fingers, and hurried forward with a tired smile on his face.

  “Perhaps the lieutenant would wish to follow the lady’s coach?” he asked, holding his violin up towards his face. “A gypsy love song for a beautiful young girl?”

  Karoly hesitated. He had always scorned the contrived romanticism of his comrades in the regiment: the flowers sent the day following a ball, the hiring of musicians to play beneath windows while the suitor stood by looking gratified and foolish.

  “The lady had to leave a little early?” said the gypsy persuasively. “She will be disappointed at leaving so soon. She would like to take the music with her?”

  He drew his bow sharply across the strings and with an arpeggio of sound tried to entice the coins from Karoly’s pocket.

  Karoly began to make rapid mental calculations. Even the few filler necessary for the gypsy would throw his hairbreadth economy into disruption, but at the moment it seemed far more important to follow her and tell her—in the traditional way—that he was bewitched. “How much—?” he began and then his voice was drowned by the clatter of feet coming down the stairs and turning into the courtyard. Six young men, two of them military, crowded round the gypsy. They were flushed, noisy, and aggressively male. “Can you ride a horse, gypsy? Come now, Adam, get the horses round before the coach has gone. Up you come, fellow. Give him a drink; he looks too cold to play well and, fellow, you must play well when you serenade the Ferenc sisters, the enchanting Ferenc sisters!”

  The gypsy knew whose trade would be the more profitable. Six slightly drunken young men were likely to be far more generous than one sober, hesitant lieutenant. He took a long swallow of the brandy offered him and endeavoured to throw himself into the mood of the party.

  They were nearly home when they heard the band of horsemen behind them. Eva hung out of the window, screaming excitedly, trying to see who made up the party. Amalia began to pull her in, then became nearly as excited herself.

  “Oh, Malie! The first time it’s happened to us! And they’re going to play. Truly, I can see the gypsy!”

  “You shouldn’t, really you shouldn’t! Oh, but Eva, is the young officer there, the one who asked our name?”

  Eva held tightly to the window frame. The coach was rocking violently because Uncle Sandor, in a fury, was going faster than he had any right to go. “I can’t see,” she wailed. “Uncle Sandor is lurching so much I can’t see! Malie! What are you doing?”

  Malie, in a completely un-Malie-like way, had suddenly pulled Eva from the window and taken her place. She had tried to see from the other window but the curve of the road made it impossible and Eva’s hysterical account of who was there and who was not was suddenly more than she could bear. Screwing her eyes against the tide of cold air rushing along the side of the coach she counted horses, then tried to define faces.

  “No, he’s not there,” she said quietly, the excitement draining rapidly away. “The fair young officer isn’t there. I suppose there’s no reason why he should be.”

  Eva was pulling at her arm. “Is Felix there? Please! Tell me if Felix is there.”

  “Felix is there.”

  “Oh!” Eva fell back against the seat, her hands clasped in the clouds of her skirt.

  “Adam too.”

  “Oh, him.” Adam was forgotten as quickly as he had been mentioned. There was no other man in the world but Felix.

  “And Uncle Sandor looks absolutely murderous,” finished Malie in tones of detached interest.

  Uncle Sandor was indeed furious. The coach tilted into the courtyard at a dangerous angle, the door was flung open, the steps put down, and the girls were “assisted” out at a speed which nearly precipitated them onto the ground. As the door of the house opened to reveal an anxious Mama, Uncle Sandor gave a deep belch of relief. The granddaughters of the Bogozy were his responsibility no more.

  Eva flung herself onto her mother in a paroxysm of ecstasy.

  “Oh, Mama! It’s been wonderful, just wonderful! And Felix Kaldy is following us with a violinist! The first time, Mama! Not just him, five or six of them, but he thought of it I’m sure! And we danced every dance and we were the prettiest girls there and Aunt Gizi was so cross that we went alone but I told her we were Bogozys and—why, Mama, what is it? Why have you been crying?”

  It took Eva some time to notice, through her own excitement, the reactions of others. Mama’s face, through the blur of an evening composed of Felix Kaldy and a fight with Aunt Gizi and a chase through the streets with six young men on horseback, was suddenly observed to be pale and tearstained. Eva was at once stricken with guilty grief.

  “Whatever has happened, Mama?”

  Mama sniffed. “Papa has returned. He came... specially... so that he could follow us to Kati’s party. He was very angry with me for letting you go alone. Very angry indeed!”

  “Oh, dear.” Malie and Eva looked guilty. Mama, who was gay and feckless like all her family, was terrified of Papa when he was angry. This evening he had called her “indolent and irresponsible and completely lacking in family commitment.”

  “He said he couldn’t think what his sister would say when
she saw you and Amalia arriving without me. He said I was to call on Gizi tomorrow and explain and apologize. And he said he hoped you had both behaved like young ladies, in spite of going without me.”

  Amalia patted her mother comfortingly on the shoulder. “Of course we did, Mama. Would we behave any other way?”

  Eva stared at the ground. An uneasy recollection of her behaviour was filtering back to her. What would Aunt Gizi tell Papa about the quarrel, and the low neckline on her dress? And then there was the wink. Who knows how many people had seen her wink at Felix Kaldy?

  “Was he very angry?” she asked nervously.

  Mama nodded. “He said you are both to accompany me to Gizi and Alfred’s tomorrow.”

  “Oh, dear.” Eva slumped white-faced against the stair-rail and then, as she heard a stirring outside the door and the first scrapings of a bow across strings, she became erect once more, eyes shining, head thrown back, eager to finish out the night’s adventures. She hugged Mama effusively. “Don’t worry, darling Mama. I’m sure Papa won’t be so cross in the morning, and anyway I’ll tell him we’re sorry and we’ll never do it again and I’m sure it will be all right and... oh, Malie, we must go upstairs at once and see them outside the window.”

  She didn’t wait any longer. She gave her mother a final embrace and then held her skirts up and scampered up the stairs. She tried to be quiet—because of Papa—but it was so difficult to be controlled when such marvellous things were happening. In the bedroom she flung her wrap on the bed and smoothed her hair quickly in front of the mirror. She rubbed a little powder (how angry Papa would be if he knew) onto her nose and across the shiny part of her cheeks, and then she went over to the window, pulled the curtains back, and stepped out onto the tiny iron balustraded ledge.

  The violinist stood immediately beneath her, scraping fervently away at a familiar folk melody and thinking of the generous fee he was bound to receive very shortly. He was also thinking—ruefully—of the long walk home he had to his village, which was situated five miles outside the town. He looked up once and noticed that the girl on the balcony was very pretty, but then they were all pretty after a party when they were being serenaded by admiring young men. He sighed and played on.

  The young men all bowed when she opened the curtains. Felix lifted his hand to his lips in a poetic and romantic gesture, and her heart began to pound. When shall I see him again? she thought, agonized, and wondered if she dare call down. Malie’s voice behind her brought her forcibly back to sanity.

  “Don’t call out, Eva, Papa would hear and he’d never excuse you if you did that.”

  As Malie was seen, the small party below bowed again and the fiddler gave a little crescendo scrape, a concession to the fact that there were two ladies, not one (he counted on being paid accordingly). The other young men, encouraged by Felix, began to blow kisses, place hands on hearts, make gestures of comic yearning up towards the balcony. Only Adam Kaldy stood a little apart, unmoving, staring at the two girls in the window.

  “Adam’s such a lump!” said Eva fretfully, as though resenting that one of the number refused to join in the blatant worship of the Ferenc sisters. “He took me in to supper and hardly spoke a word. I can’t think why he has to do everything Felix does. Why doesn’t he go off and enjoy himself with other people?”

  Malie had wandered away. She was busy taking off her wrap and removing a damask table-napkin from her evening purse. She went to the door on the far side of the room and listened. The noise of the violinist and the not altogether silent horseplay of the young men made it impossible to hear, and—gently—she opened the door. Two small, soft faces stared wide-eyed at her from over the top of the feather quilt.

  “Here you are,” she said. “I didn’t forget you. I’ve brought something of everything. Two of each so you can both taste.”

  The feather quilt shot back. The two small boys sat up, hands outstretched for the napkin, eyes aglow at the forbidden fruits of a nighttime banquet.

  “Why is there a noise?” whispered Leo, who was only four and hadn’t really heard gypsy violins before.

  “Some young men are playing music to Eva.”

  “Why?” Jozsef wasn’t really interested. His mouth was full of strudel and he wanted to prolong the unorthodox visit of his elder sister.

  “Because she is so pretty.”

  “I think you are pretty,” said Leo loyally. He was trying to decide what to eat next: caviar and egg or a portion of mocha cake.

  Jozsef stopped eating for a gloomy moment. “Papa came home,” he said nervously. “He was very angry about something. We heard Mama crying, and then Papa went to his room and stayed there.”

  “It wasn’t us, was it?” asked Leo. His small round face topped with tight black curls was frightened and he looked as though he were going to cry.

  Malie bent over and kissed him. “Of course it wasn’t you, darling.”

  Leo gazed hard at her, seeking reassurance, then decided it was all right and laughed, a small boy’s gurgling chuckle. He reached up and tangled his fat hand in her hair.

  “I shan’t like you if you do that,” said Malie crossly. She had spent all afternoon having her hair washed and curled, and now she could smell caviar being wiped across it. Leo’s face crumpled and his lower lip began to tremble.

  “Baby!” said Jozsef contemptuously, seizing the other strudel, which was really Leo’s.

  Malie wiped their fingers on the napkin, kissed them, and pulled the cover up to their chins.

  “Was it a lovely party, Malie?” breathed Leo.

  “Lovely, darling.”

  “And did you meet a prince?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Did Eva?”

  Malie smiled. “Oh, yes. Eva met a prince.”

  Eva was in bed when she went back to their room. Her clothes were flung all over the floor. The window was still open and Eva lay, like the small boys in the room next door, in young animal slumber. Malie began to pick her sister’s clothes from the floor and then suddenly let them fall back to where they had been. She remembered the fair young soldier; why hadn’t he followed the coach with all the others? And why, with a town full of young men who would, given a little encouragement, adore her, could she not fall in love?

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to meet a prince,” she said crossly, and let her dress fall untidily on the floor beside Eva’s.

  2

  It was very bad at breakfast the following morning. Eva was fretful and bad-tempered, Mama guilty and nervous, and the little boys were, as always, terrified. Breakfast was the one meal of the day, other than Sunday lunch, that they shared with their father. It was in fact the only time they saw their father other than when they were being punished, and consequently the huge dark man at the other end of the table, the stern disciplinarian who rarely smiled, took on the aspect of an ogre. On this particular morning the little boys were aware, as was everyone else in the house, that Zsigmond Ferenc was very angry.

  He said good morning and waited for Eva and Amalia to come round the table and touch his cheek with tremulous lips. The little boys, as they had been taught, said in unison, “Good morning, Papa,” and then silence descended over the table as Marie brought in coffee and milk and hot new bread.

  The noise of eating and drinking, of cups clinking against saucers, of knives on plates, sounded loud and offensive in the oppressive silence of the dining-room. Jozsef drank his milk too quickly, hiccoughed, and said very quickly, “Sorry, Papa,” before he could be reprimanded. Leo’s eyes filled with sympathetic tears at the thought that his brother had transgressed so badly and thus left himself open to one of Papa’s rebukes. Malie caught his nervous glance and made a little comforting moue of mouth and eyes at him. Leo gave a watery half-smile.

  “I would be obliged, Amalia, if you would refrain from pulling faces at your brother at the breakfast table.”

  “Sorry, Papa.”

  Leo’s eyes filled once again. The troubles of
other people, especially those he loved, were almost more than he could bear.

  “I have decided,” Papa said, after a further long silence in which everyone made a pretence of eating, “that it would be courteous if I accompanied you, Marta, and the girls, when you go to visit my sister this morning.”

  Mama slumped despondently over the table. “Yes, Zsigmond. If you think that is best.”

  “It is the least we can do.”

  Eva roused herself from a gloomy reverie in order to try and prevent the impending disaster that a meeting between Papa and Aunt Gizi would inevitably produce. She took a deep breath, drew her back up straight, and smiled.

  “Papa, it was perfectly all right, you and Mama not being there, really it was. Kati had a wonderful party and we gave her Mama’s present and she was delighted. And Uncle Sandor brought us home early, and I’m sure that if Malie and I go to see Kati and Aunt Gizi this morning everyone will be quite, quite happy....” Her voice trailed away under Papa’s gaze.

  “I am sorry, Eva, to see that at the age of seventeen you still have no idea of what is meant by duty to one’s family. It was bad enough that I was absent on the occasion of Kati’s party. We have only a small society in this town, and we do not delude ourselves that we are aristocrats observing formal manners. Nonetheless certain standards, the code of our class, must be respected. Your cousin Kati was launched into the society of our community at great trouble and expense. If we, her family, are not prepared to observe the formalities of such a gathering, then the structure of our society means nothing. I have told you before, many times, that the family is the foundation on which our civilization is built. Obey the rules of the family, and nothing can go wrong with the society in which we live.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “My business transaction coinciding with Kati’s debut was unfortunate but unavoidable. I did my best to rectify it by returning at the end of a long and tiring day in order to join my family—albeit briefly—in my sister’s house. Imagine my disappointment and... and anger”—Papa’s voice began to grow louder as his fury renewed itself— “to find my wife playing cards and my daughters attending the most important family function of the year as though they were members of the demimonde.”