The express for Budapest was several hours late. When at last it got
under way, it carried few passengers. It was plunging straight into the
heart of the danger, from which all the world which possessed the price
of a fare was escaping.
Santa listened to and reported on the conversation of fellow-travelers.
They were Hungarian officers returning to their regiments, to whom a
fight spelt opportunity; they were husbands and fathers, careless of
their own safety in their dread of what might be happening to their
families; they were merchants and men of wealth, anxious to be at hand
for the defense of their possessions. As the talk went on, the greatness
of the risk grew increasingly obvious; it bred an atmosphere of
free-masonry. Strangers accosted each other, exchanging views on the
hazards; they crowded about the entrance of any compartment where a
speaker seemed possessed of accurate information. Most of what was said
was no more than conjecture; much of it was utterly contradictory. One
man asserted that the Bolsheviks were attacking all along the Russian
front; another that Bolshevism had collapsed and the peasants were
massacring. Another knew for certain that throughout Central Europe the
Reds were rising; yet another that the Monarchists had sprung to arms
and were marching. Every rumor or invention was accepted with equal
credulity. Anything was possible. No one knew for certain either the
magnitude or the cause of the rumored disaster. Only one fact seemed
indisputable: somewhere further eastward had occurred a catastrophe of
shattering proportions--a catastrophe in the tragedy of which each one
of them would shortly be involved.
Hindwood turned away from the babel of voices to the autumn landscape
gliding past the windows. It consisted as far as eye could stretch of
unboundaried, level fields, gridironed by straight, military roads,
marked by avenues of pollarded trees, intersecting always at right
angles. The fields were neglected. They told their own story of seed
consumed, which should have been saved for sowing, and of cattle
slaughtered. Over everything, despite the brilliant blueness of the sky,
there hung an atmosphere of melancholy. Down white-penciled highways
little groups were trekking, always in the one direction. They appeared
crushed and harmless, more like insects, scarcely human. They limped
forlornly, dragging carts and carrying children. They were the
advance-guard of the army of starvation. Hindwood remembered the
Captain's prophecy. “They'll march to the lands of plenty like Death
swinging his scythe, like a pestilence, like gaunt wolves.”
At the frontier, where the train crossed from Austria into Hungary, he
gained his first lesson in the resistlessness of necessity. There
had been an unequal battle, in which only one side had been armed. It
appeared that the Austrian guards had tried to turn back the Hungarian
fugitives. They had fired their rifles till their ammunition was
exhausted; then they had sickened of the slaughter. Opposition had made
no difference; the tide of fugitives had still pressed on. Misery had
proved more potent than explosives; it had made death, if not desirable,
at least negligible. Its meek persistence had conquered. The Austrian
soldiery had revolted against their officers and stood with grounded
arms, watching the stream of poverty trickling through the barrier of
corpses.
“Like water finding its own level,” Hindwood thought. It would be like
this the world over, if something were not done at once to check it. The
outcast nations lay one behind the other, like terraced avalanches, in
an ascending scale of destitution--behind the Austrians the Hungarians,
behind the Hungarians the Poles, behind the Poles the Russians, each a
degree more agonized in its privation. Now that the movement had started
it would go on, sliding, filtering, settling, until the peoples of
the earth had regained an economic level. The Dives nations, which had
refused to share, would try to hold the Lazarus nations at bay by force.
They would spray them with cannon. They would charge them with bayonets.
They would bomb them, gas them, dig labyrinths of trenches. In the
end, as had happened here, though the pariah portion of humanity was
weaponless, the meek persistency of its misery would conquer. Careless
of oblivion, it would press on. He alone could give the Dives nations
a seventh hour chance; at the price of his financial ruin, he could
prevent the deluge of famine from spreading by damming it with a wall of
bread.
Darkness had fallen. The carriages were unlighted. The train was moving
cautiously, jerking, stopping, starting, like a live thing scenting
carnage. Scattered through the night camp-fires were burning. In the
gloom conversation dragged on wearily with reiterated guesses.
He felt his hand clasped.
“What is it?” he whispered. “Frightened? You won't be caught now. You're
as safe as the rest of us. No one'll have time to remember you.”
“I wasn't thinking of myself.”
“Then--?”
“Of you--that perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”
“Ah!” He drew his breath. The echo of his own thought! “And perhaps you,
too,” he suggested.
She twisted herself, leaning her breast against his arm. Glancing down
through the darkness, he caught the tenderness in her eyes and the
gleaming smoothness of her cheek and throat.
“I wish I could believe it,” she said softly; “to stand beside you,
making you strong.... You could never love me; but to stand beside you,
when you rescue the world, that would mean redemption.”
“When I rescue the world!” He laughed quietly. “I'm no Varensky. I came
here to make money.”
She swept aside his cynicism. “You were born for this moment. And I, an
outcast woman whom the world has hunted, will help you. Perhaps I
shall give my life for you.” She spoke exultantly. “I, whom you have
rejected.”
“You exaggerate. Things may not be as bad as they appear. What we've
seen may be no more than a local disturbance.”
She refused to argue. “Be kind to me while we're together.”
On the outskirts of Budapest they came to a halt. The air was tainted
with a nauseating odor. Standing on a siding was a long line of
freight-cars in process of being shunted. By the light of lanterns swung
by men on the tracks, it was possible to see that the freight-cars were
inhabited. Figures hung out of them thin as skeletons, entirely naked or
clad in flapping rags. The passengers of the express had crowded to the
windows, pointing, commenting, gesticulating.
Hindwood turned to Santa. “What is it?”
She answered bitterly. “The death train.”
“But the people aren't dead.”
“Not yet. They're families ruined by the war and by the peace. Some
of them saw their homes burned by the Cossacks; others had their farms
stolen to pay the Allies' debts. They're nobody's business. When you've
reached the end of your tether in Hungary, you join the death train and
die by inches. You have no food, no sanitation. Wherever you halt, you
spread contagion. When things have grown too bad in one place, you're
dragged to another.” She swallowed down a sob. “The train's full of
children--and you tell me that you came here to make money.”
On arrival at Budapest they found the station picketed by soldiers. They
were immediately conducted under an armed guard to an office where the
purpose of their journey was investigated. When Hindwood had explained
their errand--that it had to do with the food-supply--he was treated
with courtesy and given his choice of hotels. Santa chose the Ritz. A
military order was made out for their rooms. A safe-conduct was handed
them. A rickety conveyance, with a lean horse between the shafts, was
allotted to them. They were launched into a city quenched of lights,
with a soldier seated beside the driver for protection.
The wide avenues down which they drove were deserted. They were still
unaware of what had happened. They had not dared to ask, lest any slip
of the tongue might lead to trouble. There were no signs of revolution
in the thoroughfares. They were hushed and reverent as the aisles of
a cathedral. Every few hundred yards a mounted gendarme rode out to
challenge them; then, seeing the soldier on the box, backed into the
shadows. Only one disquieting incident occurred. The uneasiness which it
caused was due to guilty memories rather than to any actual menace. As
they were turning towards the Danube, they heard a sharp trotting behind
them. A closed brougham swept past, drawn by a pair of high-stepping
horses. The equipage was one which must formerly have belonged to the
Royal Palace; it was the ghost of a forgotten splendor. Hindwood rose in
his seat to watch it vanish. Then he saw something that made him
catch his breath. Running between its wheels was a snow-white Russian
wolfhound.
Santa heard his commotion. “What's the excitement?”
“Nothing.”
By the time she had raised herself to follow his glance, the hint of
peril was gone. The next moment they were drawing up at the hotel.