He had kept his word; as far as Hungary was concerned, every living
soul had been nourished. For seven days and nights, sleeping only at odd
intervals, he had sat in the barracks of the Russian refugees with the
map of Europe staring down on him from the wall. Wherever a food-train
had been despatched, the place had been marked by a little red flag. He
had had a wireless-apparatus installed; from that bare room, heavy with
mildew, he had sent out his S. O. S. calls to humanity. He had begged,
threatened, argued, commanded until at last he knew that he had won
his cause. What he did not know was that his own example had proved
more convincing than many words. The simple drama of his personal
conversion--that he should be giving what he had come to sell--had
stirred men's consciences. It had given him the right to talk. Where
once troops would have been hurried, food was being pushed forward.
It was an experiment alarmingly novel; but his phrase caught on,
“The Barricade of Bread.” It had been flashed across five continents.
Wherever the printed word had power, it had kindled men's imaginations.
By a world war-wrecked, confronted by yet another war, it had been
hailed as the strategy that would end all wars.
Loaf by loaf, sack by sack the barricade was rising. Those little red
flags, pinned on the map, marked its progress. It was deepening and
spreading in a flanking movement, just as formerly army corps had massed
for offensives. Soon the barricade would be complete; it would stretch
in an unbroken line from the Dardanelles to the Baltic. There would be
fighting, probably to the east of Poland, where the Monarchists were
marching in a forlorn attempt to defeat the famished hordes. That could
not be prevented. But by the time the outcasts struck his main defense,
he would be in a position to halt them.
It was only now, when the situation was in hand, that he had leisure
to realize what he had been doing. He was filled with depression in his
hour of triumph. It was long past midnight. He felt gray and spent. The
barracks were as quiet as a morgue. He wondered why; they had been so
crowded with derelicts of valiant armies, men and girls, who, having
failed to save Russia with the rifle, had been preparing to rescue her
with knowledge. Then he recalled. He had sent them all away. They
had been the new kind of soldier, by whose sacrifice his ideal had
conquered. He saw again their uplifted faces, as he had summoned them
one by one and ordered them on their perilous journeys. Wherever a red
flag was pinned on the map, one of those derelicts was in command. The
“Little Grandmother,” she had been the last. Beside himself and his
wireless operators, there could be no one left except Varensky, Santa
and Anna.
He glanced at the window. It was a square of jet. During the early
days and nights it had framed a heart of fire, where the Palace had
smouldered on the heights of Buda. Like a subsided volcano, the Palace
had burned itself out. It was as though the fury of his life were ended.
He bowed his head in his arms, striving to reconjure what had happened.
Flitting about the room, with his strangely catlike tread, Varensky had
been forever entering and exiting. He had been his second self, silent
and agile, anticipating his plans without a word spoken. It was Varensky
who had marshaled his exiled compatriots and placed their services at
his disposal. It was Varensky who had warned him of the strategic points
where the barricade must be strengthened. It had been always Varensky
to whom he had turned for advice and courage when things were darkest.
Without Varensky he could have accomplished nothing. And yet it was
Varensky whom he had dethroned. This should have been his moment. He had
shouted him down, snatched control from him and earned the credit.
The self-effacement of one whom he had despised as an egoist made him
humble. In a rush of tenderness he discovered that he loved him. The
peaked head was forgotten, and the face scared white as if it had seen a
ghost. The timidity of his appearance no longer counted; the thing
that mattered was the spirit, resolute and shining as a sword, that hid
within the scabbard of the grotesque body.
And now that he remembered, there had been grief in his green eyes--the
grief of a man who had been cheated. Once again Varensky had drawn him
near to Calvary; the chance to die had been stolen from him.
And Anna--he could not guess how she felt or what she thought. In all
those seven days and nights it seemed as though she had never looked at
him. She had moved about him like a nun, ministering to his wants with
her gaze averted. Vaguely he was aware that to him she was not what she
appeared to others. The old legend had been revived; again, as in St.
Petersburg after the fall of Czardom, wherever she passed people knelt.
To him she was no saint; his desire was too human.
Watching the three of them with sphinxlike wisdom, there had been Santa,
her womanhood clamorous and ignored. What had she made of it? Had she
found material for humor in their temporary heroism?
And so he came back to his first question--what had he been doing? In
constructing the barricade of bread, he had been preventing Varensky
from dying; in preventing Varensky from dying, he had been raising a
barricade between himself and Anna. Having bankrupted his pocket, he had
bankrupted his heart. In spite of warnings, he had gone in search of the
vanishing point, where the parallel rails of possibility and desire seem
to join--the point at which, to quote Varensky's words, “The safety of
the journey ends.” It was the goal of every man who wrecks himself in
the hope that he may save a world.
How long had he been sitting there brooding? He was cold. The square
of window had turned from jet to gray. Furtively he glanced behind him.
Anna was gazing down on him.