Read They Were Found Wanting for Free Online

good,’ he called to Laszlo.
    ‘My nerves?’ said Laszlo, his voice seeming to come from a great distance. ‘Why?’
    ‘This is why!’ cried Uzdy, and fired two more shots in quick succession past Laszlo’s head, but the latter merely reached for his glass and drank down his wine as calmly as before.
    This brought the serenade to an abrupt end. The gentlemen, all of them now in a chastened mood but delighted to get away‚ hurried back to town grumbling among themselves about what a strange, unpredictable fellow that Uzdy was. The only exception was Gyeroffy.
    He walked now with a proud air, his previous diffidence completely gone, his head held high, his tall hat at the back of his head and, below those eyebrows that met so menacingly across his face, his aquiline nose was lifted in proud disdain. Laszlo’s lower lip stuck out, giving his whole face an air of arrogance. ‘Don’t stumble about like that,’ he said to Pityu Kendy when they were about fifty yards from the villa. ‘You’re in my way!’
    The others whispered among themselves because they realized that he was extremely drunk.
    And drunk he was, so drunk that he no longer remembered all the humiliations that he had suffered before returning to Transylvania the previous spring. Then, when he had been sober he had never been free of a nagging sense of self-accusation, never free from the knowledge that the cousin with whom he had been so in love, Klara Kollonich, had married someone else because he, Laszlo, had shown himself to be too weak of character to deserve her; never free either of the disgrace of being forced to resign from all his clubs in the capital because he could not pay his gambling debts. When sober he could never escape a nagging sense of being inferior to others. He had convinced himself that he was worthless and that he wore on his forehead a visible brand that advertised this worthlessness to everyone he met, even if they were kind to him and pretended not to see it. And if anyone showed signs of being friendly, he took it for pity.
    At the moment when he had had such terrible losses at the gaming table, he would have been able to settle if he had not thought it more important to repay his mistress the money she had paid out for him on a similar occasion some months before. He had felt himself more dishonoured by being indebted to a woman, even though no one else knew of it, than by the public scandal which had put an end to his being accepted in the high society of the capital. And at the time he had felt that there was something noble and uplifting, cruel but at the same time triumphant , in choosing social death over private dishonour.
    It was not long before the exaltation, the sense of the spiritual strength which had then given him such support, began to wither and die. Soon the recollection of his folly and weakness came back more and more strongly, to the point that he could only banish these gnawing regrets by getting drunk. And when he was drunk he went at once to the opposite extreme. Then he would become arrogant and scornful, letting everyone see that he thought himself infinitely superior to them. At these times he would believe himself to be a great artist, which indeed he could have been if he had not squandered his time and neglected his talent. But of this he never spoke. Even when drunk he would tell himself that they would never understand; and so confined his boasting to telling tales about his social success in grand society as if that were the only thing that would impress ‘those country bumpkins’.
    His drinking companions noticed at once what was happening and so, as soon as Laszlo began to hold his head high and look haughtily down his nose at them, they would start quite consciously to tease him, which is, and always has been, the favourite pastime of the men of Transylvania.
    Today‚ it was Baron Gazsi who went up to him and said, apparently quite seriously‚ ‘You did very well to tell off Pityu. He