_November 21st._
To-day the newspapers are full of the complaints of Károlyi’s government.
The government has sent protesting telegrams to the Allies, the Czechs,
the Roumanians. It appeals to the armistice concluded with the Allied
armies, to the Wilsonian principles, to world-saving pacifism. It
clamours for justice, help, food, and coal. And Károlyi threatens that
“if the Allies do not want to see the formation of ‘green’ forces—he does
not mention the ‘red’ because he has already formed those—”if the Allies
do not wish that this part of Europe should be given up to plunder,
incendiarism and robbery, it is the eleventh hour....”
But the Allies are well aware that Károlyi’s rule has already achieved
all this, and they don’t trouble to answer. On the other hand Kramarz,
with whom Károlyi had conspired against the interests of his country
during the war answers in the name of the Czechs, haughtily, derisively:
“The Allies have decided that the territories inhabited by the Slovaks
shall form part of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, and not of the Hungarian
state. Consequently Hungary cannot conclude an armistice for the Slovak
parts, as these have already been incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia.”
That is his answer, and the King of Roumania’s answer is an appeal to his
army: “Soldiers. The long expected hour has come. The Allies have crossed
the Danube and it is time that we should rise to arms.... Our brethren
in Bukovina and Transylvania call us to the last battle. Victory is
ours. Forward! God is with us.”
The armistice of Belgrade makes all our enemies see red. Károlyi’s
government has opened the door to the Serbians, and the rest of them are
breaking it in for themselves; they come aflame with hatred, and come
incessantly.
I feel like death, and giddy with rage, when I read Károlyi’s speeches.
“Confidence is due to the government,” says he—and he defends the
Socialists: “Let nobody presume to say that they are unpatriotic, that
the fate of their country is not dear to their hearts ...” and the
radicals: “In Arad, Minister Jászi has fought to the last gasp for the
integrity of Hungarian territory....” In short, he defends everybody who
does not defend the country.
Among the parties which support the government differences become more
manifest every day. They have practically formed two distinct sections,
on one side the guilty, misguided Hungarians, on the other, the
Socialists and Radicals, the foreign race. The latter are the stronger
because they are better organised, and know what they want. Michael
Károlyi is entirely under their influence, caught in the meshes of a net
that is being drawn rapidly towards the extremist side.
Unity in politics only exists as long as it is a question of attaining
power. The power, once attained, itself serves to divide the
victors—swollen with pride and insolence. That is the moment to smash
them.
“It would be premature,” Count Dessewffy told me, when I met him to-day
in the street. I had only a short talk with him, for he was due at a
meeting. They are forming an agrarian party, and hope to organise the
peasant proprietors of the country.
“I have just remembered,” he added with a laugh; “only think of it.
Károlyi means to send you on a political errand to Italy....”
“Does he always choose with such discernment?” I replied, and I could
not help laughing myself. “Let him get me a passport and I will use my
Italian connections—on two conditions.”
“What are they?”
“Firstly, that I travel at my own expense, so that I needn’t accept a
penny from them; secondly, that I do not go in the interest of their
republic and their government, but exclusively in the interest of my
country. But that, I fear, won’t suit them.”
As I walked on I reflected on what I had heard. Dessewffy had information
of the country’s mood, and he had said:
“The peasantry and the provincial towns do not take to the idea of this
disguised communist republic, suggested by Pest. There are considerable
parts of the country which are restrained with difficulty from openly
espousing the cause of monarchy.”
“Don’t hold them down, let them raise their voice and sweep the board
of this scum!” I had cried. But Dessewffy only repeated: “It would be
premature. Let this crowd die off first.”
I ran into a ladder standing across the footpath; a man was sitting on
top of it, scraping the wall diligently. Dirt has effaced the last traces
of such inscriptions as “By appointment to the Imperial and Royal Court,”
which October 31st had torn down in its fury. Now new work is being done
on the shop-signs, and those that bear names like Hapsburg, Berlin,
Hohenzollern, Hindenburg, and Vienna, are taken down. The cafés are in
a tearing hurry to alter the names they bore before the war, and the
Judaized town sycophantically re-christens itself, plastering its places
of amusement with labels such as: Paris Salon, French Café, English Park
and American Bar.
I feel the utmost contempt for them, and I’m sure that the foreign
invaders, whom fate will bring here, will feel the same towards them. A
people which denies, or tolerates that others should deny in its name,
its past, tramples on its own honour. For days the government has been
announcing the arrival of French troops. The town is being prepared for
their reception, and we have to sit down quietly under this hideous farce
and suffer it.
One of Károlyi’s papers writes to-day: “The first French soldiers will
probably arrive to-morrow in Budapest, and the youngest republic greets
with love the champions of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. Instead
of stiff, haughty German swashbucklers, charming, good-humoured French
officers; instead of the clumsy German soldiers with their heavy boots,
our streets will be filled with the petted _poilus_.... Beside the
Hungarian inscriptions we ought to put up French inscriptions everywhere
on our public institutions ... tradespeople should put on their shops:
‘_Ici on parle français._’ German translations on the bills of fare
should be omitted....”
A government which prints such shame in its newspapers, a press which can
find a single compositor to set it, a public which will stand it, must
surely have reached the lowest depths of humiliation.
Flags of the national colours float festively overhead. And the
government calls in the French troops of occupation, and offers their
commander the most beautiful spot in the country, the royal castle, as a
residence, because, it says: “They are not enemies, but gladly welcomed
guests....”
Every drop of blood in me is boiling with shame and helpless rage, and
my mind goes back to a long past page of memory—1871. An early morning
in Paris. In close formation, headed by its flags, the victorious German
army enters Paris. Along its route the windows are closed, flags of
mourning float from the houses, and the still-burning street-lamps are
shrouded in crepe; the people, conscious of its dignity even in the
moment of its humiliation, observes a gloomy silence in the streets.
No order has been given, no instructions have been issued, yet, men,
women and children, all turn their heads aside, and the eyes of the
victors fail to meet the tear-dimmed eyes, burning with hate, of the
vanquished....
* * * * *
_November 22nd._
The sky has descended to the very roofs. Snow falls continually and
deepens in the streets. But the Office of Public Health appeals in
vain for workmen at twenty crowns a day to remove the snow from the
streets. They roar with laughter as they read it, and go on to draw their
unemployment dole, while still the snow falls and falls, obstructing the
doors of houses, lying knee-deep in the quiet side-streets.
Near the principal railway station it is like wading in a dusty, white,
ploughed field, and even in the covered interior of the station one walks
on soft ground, for there dirt and decaying garbage accumulate in heaps.
Nobody does any cleaning nowadays. There is the unemployment dole!
To-day even the refreshment room is invaded by an insufferable stench,
and there are vermin creeping on the walls. The bread given to the
wounded is uneatable, and the tea is just slop-water. There is no fire
in the stove, and the cold is biting; even during the war the place was
never so miserable as it is now. There are fewer wounded, and the place
is filled with able-bodied soldiers passing through the town. They come
from distant battle-fields, ragged and dirty, and often they only get
here to learn that there is no home for them to go to. Nowhere! Serbians,
Roumanians and Czechs have occupied the ancient homes of Hungarian
peasants.
A Transylvanian Hussar sat on a bench and cursed loudly, sobbing now and
then like a child. An old peasant from the Banat, a wounded old soldier,
knelt there with tears pouring from his eyes. He was a descendant of
those Saxons who had settled in Hungary six hundred years ago, and he
exclaimed in his archaic German: “The Serbians have come to us! Oh, our
poor country, poor country!” and the sergeant of the medical corps in his
red-cockaded cap swore loudly at him.
Then a woman came through the door, dragging two little children by the
hand. She asked for bread, they had been three days without food. “I
shall go to Károlyi,” she cried, “he shall see that justice is done! My
husband is an official in the Banat. The Serbians have arrested him. They
beat him till he fainted and then locked him up. There are many like
that. Those who do not swear allegiance to them are cudgelled and locked
up. All the Hungarian administration has disappeared.... The police have
been disarmed too. Then they requisition and don’t pay. There are no
newspapers—they are confiscated. They call us ‘dogs of Hungarians’ and
say that our land is now in Serbia. There is no post—all the letters
addressed to Hungarians are opened, and if they contain money it is
taken.”
A soldier came close up and listened with open mouth.
“Do you come from the Banat?” the woman asked. “Then don’t you go home!
The Serbians are enlisting our men and taking them to forced labour.
Nobody comes back from that.”
The man looked at her for a while vacantly, then muttered helplessly:
“But surely, now there is peace....”
Night began to fall. The big chandelier hung unlighted from the ceiling
of the dirty hall, save for an isolated side-branch here and there,
which scattered an ugly patchy glare in the twilight. On a bench a blind
soldier lay on his back; he smiled continually in a queer way, as if the
smile were frozen on his face, and his cap was tilted over his sightless
eyes.
“You hail from the Great Plain?” I asked him.
“I come from Szalonta ...” he grumbled sleepily.
And I imagined the poor young fellow, in the stifling summer heat of the
Plain, stretched at the foot of a stack for his mid-day rest, shading his
eyes from the glaring rays of the sun with his little round hat. But now
no sunshine will ever hurt his eyes again, and the soil of a thousand
Hungarian harvests is being torn from us. Poor fellow! Does he know that
he has sacrificed his young eyes for nought?
A man of the Army Medical Corps came in and told us that some wounded
had arrived in the shed. My sister Vera and I took tea and bread. As
I went along I overheard a conversation among some soldiers near the
wall. Said one: “I put my knife into him with a will; the point came out
at his back. The other one escaped.” “I did one in too,” said a deeper
voice. I thought I must be dreaming. I stopped, but could not make out
what else was said, as they began to talk in thieves’ jargon. “I’ll
report them ...” I thought—but I only thought that for a moment, for I
saw the sergeant with the red ribbon on his arm, and the pince-nez on
his nose, going up to them and shaking hands.... No, one can’t report
anyone nowadays. As I went on, the talk became louder behind me. They
mentioned a name, but it meant nothing to me; at that moment it was a
mere sound, and it was not till much later that I remembered that I had
heard it before—Béla Kún. He had been a communist agitator in Russia,
who, with several others, had been sent to Hungary by Trotski to work
in his interest. It is said that they brought money with them, a lot of
money, and it is rumoured that they had something to do with the events
of October. More followed them, and though the government knows all about
them, still it allows them to cross the border. Trotski, Liebknecht,
Rosa Luxemburg, and then this lot—Nets are spread broadcast and tunnels
burrowed under-ground. The suburbs of Budapest are haunted by ugly,
red-eyed monsters. To-day they still hide in the dark, slink along the
walls with drawn-in claws. But to-morrow—who knows?
* * * * *
_November 23rd._
The dark wall at the station and the voices I heard there followed me
into the night, lingered in my thoughts, and were still there in the
morning when I woke.
In the evening I mentioned the incident to my mother, and she too had
heard of the man called Béla Kún. His real name was Berele Kohn, the
son of a Galician Jew who came over the frontier with a pack on his
back. He himself had risen to be a journalist and the secretary of the
Socialist party in Kolozsvár, from which job he went to the Workman’s
Benevolent Society. There he stole. The war saved him from prosecution.
He was called up, and sent to the Russian front, where he soon managed
to surrender. Through his international racial connections he got to
Moscow, where he fell in with Trotski, and from then onward carried on
his propaganda among prisoners. He became the leader in Russia of the
Jewish Communists from Hungary, edited a Hungarian paper called “The
Social Revolution,” and finally joined a Bolshevist directorate in one of
the smaller towns and played his part in the atrocities committed there.
“I heard,” my mother said, “that he came back with a lot of Russian
money. Károlyi’s government does not interfere with him in any way.”
“Of course; Károlyi is said to be in communication with Trotski through
Diener-Dénes and Landler,” I replied.
Károlyi went to Switzerland in the autumn of 1917 with Diener-Dénes and
Jászi, who introduced him to Henri Guilbeaux, an extreme syndicalist
and defeatist editor, who used his newspaper to work for the same moral
dissolution which was carried to power in Russia by Lenin and Trotski.
It is said that it was this Guilbeaux who converted Károlyi to the
ideas which Béla Kún has now come to represent among us. Later came the
congratulatory wire of the Soviet’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, the
destructive work of the Radical and Socialist ministers, the confirmation
of Pogány’s Soldiers’ Council and of his system of confidential
shop-stewards and the unrestricted freedom of communist agitators....
These are signs of his guilt, and they are a dark augury for the future.
This is a new milestone which fills us with apprehension, another one of
those measures which are meant to undermine the existing Social order.
The great French Revolution was fatally influenced from the day that the
people and the rabble of Paris stormed the Arsenal and plundered it.
In Budapest no force is required. The Police Commissioner himself has
instructed the police and the people’s guards to confiscate all arms and
ammunition from those who possess no permit—and nowadays permits are only
given to workmen and the mob.
That is another breach in the power of resistance of the middle classes
and in the sanctity of the home. Henceforth the people’s guards have the
right to search for arms. The citizens are helpless, and I hear that
everywhere people are giving up their shotguns and revolvers.
We are a pack of spell-bound sleep-walkers. The wizard glares at us with
his big, oriental eyes and pronounces his spell, which varies according
to the times: Democracy, Socialism. Yesterday the magic word was
Liberalism, to-morrow it may be Communism.
* * * * *
_November 24th._
Nights are sleepless nowadays, yet I cannot work. As if every word of
beauty had been engulfed by the mire through which I wade in day time,
I cannot form a single idea. In the dreary desert of my brain nothing
wanders but horrors: the morning brings them, and they are not banished
by the end of the day.
[Illustration: BELA KUN (KOHN).
(_To face p. 160._)]
I wrote some letters last night, and this morning I sent out for stamps.
The maid put them on the writing table before me.
What is this?—Printed across the portrait of the King, of the Queen,
across the picture of the house of Parliament, there is the black
surcharge: “Republic.” Printed over the beautiful little head of the
Queen, “Republic”: the word runs across St. Stephen’s crown on the King’s
head!
A thought that has tortured me many times since the 16th of November once
again wrings my heart: The crown, our crown....
It is not a jewel, it is not an ornament, it is not pomp, it is Hungary
itself. Kingdoms have come and gone, but there was no people in this
world to whom its crown meant so much as our crown meant to us. The
Hungarian crown is every Hungarian soul, every clod of its soil, every
Hungarian harvest. With it is torn from the country’s head not kingship
alone, but all that we have been, all that we may ever be. From century
to century the ancient symbol wrought in gold has been preserved in
an iron-bound chest up there in the religious gloom of the castle of
Buda; within the last thousand years it has only appeared in the light
of day fifty-three times, borne on the heads of fifty-three Kings—over
the Hungarian land. And once more, when a thousand years had passed, on
the day of the Millenium.... Exposed to the public view, it lay on the
altar of the Coronation Church. The people came, I saw them with my own
eyes—gray-haired peasants, workmen, lords—and bent the knee in front of
it as if before a holy thing. And I saw it on the head of King Charles
on a December day, under the ancient walls of regal Buda, amidst the
unfurled banners of sixty-three counties, amidst deafening cheers, amidst
the sound of our great, clear, national anthem.
Traitors and _sans-patries_ have torn St. Stephen’s crown from its
place with sacrilegious hands. That crown was not only a King’s
head-dress. Like a golden hoop it welded together the giant range of
the Carpathians, Transylvania, the blue gulf of Adria, Croatia and
Slavonia—the whole realm of the Great Plain, the country which formed
the most perfect geographical unit in Europe. And now that the golden
hoop holds it together no longer, that which has been united since the
beginning of time falls to pieces and to ruins.
I was gripped by a maddening fear and began to tremble with apprehension
for the crown, as if it were something more living than life itself. I
felt that we only existed as long as it existed, that its destruction
would make our destruction inevitable. What do they plot, these present
despots of ours, who hate everything that connects us with our past? It
is not Károlyi who will stop them: as far as he is concerned they can do
what they like with the crown.
A few days ago Count Ambrózy, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, went to
Michael Károlyi’s house and asked for admittance. Károlyi was lunching
with Count Pejacsevich when the butler announced that the Keeper of the
Crown Jewels was waiting.
“Let him wait,” said Károlyi. “I am lunching,” and continued his meal
undisturbed. After a time he was told again that Count Ambrózy wanted to
see him urgently, as he had to leave town. Károlyi, to whom Kéri, Jászi
and Pogány are admitted at all hours, sent a message to the first grandee
of Hungary, to wait. He lit his cigar and sipped his coffee. About half
an hour later the Keeper of the Crown Jewels sent another message.
“If he cannot wait, let him go,” said Károlyi. Count Pejacsevich implored
him. At last he gave in. “All right, I’ll settle with him in two minutes.”
He went out, cigar in mouth, and two minutes later was back again.
“Settled,” he said laughing. “Ambrózy came to ask me what should be
done with the crown. I told him: take it to a bank, or put it into your
pocket, I don’t care....”
[Illustration: ST. STEPHEN’S CROWN (THE HOLY HUNGARIAN CROWN).
(_To face p. 162._)]
And I seemed to see again the mystic dusk of the Coronation Church,
its pillars and arches, and there in front of the altar, set on purple
velvet, the pale gold of the Crown.... I see the gray head of an aged
peasant whose sharp Turanian features seem as if cut out with a chisel
from the gloom of the church; the head bows, and his horny hand makes
the sign of the cross on his breast.
* * * * *
_November 25th._
My mother brought a porcelain figure into the room to-day. “It is
broken,” she said, and put the Sévres shepherd and his tiny broken hand
on the table. Its beauty filled me for a moment with extraordinary
rapture: doubtless it appeared so lovely to me because nowadays
everything we see is so very ugly and depressing.
“Of course I know it’s going to stay here with you for the winter,” my
mother said with a slight reproach in her voice, reminding me of the many
small commissions I forgot from time to time.
“I’ll take it at once ...” I said.
“There is no need for that; there is plenty of time if you are otherwise
engaged.”
At that moment I felt I had no other task in the whole world but her
little porcelain figure. I said goodbye and went.
It was getting dark. Here and there the sparsely subdued glimmer of the
gas-lamps made a pretence of lighting the streets; dust-bins full of
garbage stood in front of the houses, but nobody could be found to cart
them away. The air was saturated with an acid, unwholesome smell, which
fostered the epidemic that had raged in the town for weeks, creeping in
through filthy entrances, climbing the dirty stairs, and, in the chill of
fireless houses, laying its hand on the heart of the inhabitants.
When I reached the little street I wanted it was practically in darkness.
Only the shop windows cast square patches of yellow light on the
footpath. I entered a little shop in one of whose mean windows some old
china was displayed. The shelves, the tables, every available space was
filled with broken china, and the repairer sat among the débris, with
his hat on his head and in his winter coat, looking for all the world
like a picture by a Dutch master. He had noble features, and his white
beard covered his chest, and on his first finger he wore an old ring
with a coat of arms.... One day when I had gone there he had told me
that he came of a county family. He had owned land, and a nice house
with a pillared court, under the shade of old trees; he used to drive
a four-in-hand and to collect china as a hobby. Somehow the land, the
house, the horses disappeared; so did his collection, and the only thing
that was left to him was the art of repairing broken porcelain by which
he now eked out a sort of living.
When I had finished my business with him I did not go straight home. One
street after another seemed to call to me, and I walked on thinking sadly
of that old Hungarian’s fate. Shop after shop I passed, all with Jewish
names—marine stores, crockery-shops, tallow-chandlers, small bazaars. A
few years ago their owners had lived in Galicia, and all of a sudden they
had appeared in the streets of Pest selling boot-laces. They had never
shouldered a hod, never carried bricks, never followed the plough, but
made money without hard work, by buying and selling; now they had their
shop, the cradle of millions. They start their careers in the narrow
streets in which our own folk end theirs.
Somehow I had wandered into the crowded quarters of Budapest’s ghetto.
These streets had been fixed by nobody as the abode of the invading Jews.
The times have passed long ago when a Jew was not allowed to stay a night
either in Buda or in Pest, and when he could own neither house nor shop.
In fifty years they have conquered the town, and yet they have formed
for themselves a little ghetto of their very own. They have invaded
whole streets, occupying tenement-houses, in which they can live amongst
themselves. The newly built streets and houses soon became filthy, and
the entrances vomited the same odour which I have smelt in the ghettoes
of Amsterdam, Rome and Venice.
As I looked up I felt as if I were in a foreign town whose houses were
silently conspiring in the dark above the lighted shops. I had never
noticed it before, but there seemed to be here a secret, antagonistic
life which had nothing in common with ours, from which we were excluded.
The mask was dropped and the character of the streets became visible. The
sense of security of this foreign race had increased to such an extent
that it forgot to hide itself. It had been dissembling for a good while,
though, and we had lived here, and had heard and seen nothing. We did
not trouble about the course of events, and while they clasped hands
fanatically, from the gin shops at the village end, from tenement-houses,
editorial offices, shops, banks and palaces, over five continents, we
forsaken Hungarians could not hold together even in our own little
country.
Some of us begin to see clearly to-day, though what is happening now
happened yesterday too—then in secretive darkness, now in open daylight.
The immigrants have effaced the features of our race from the land, have
dug out our souls from our national affairs and substituted their faces,
their soul. This evil work has been going on for a long time.
The people who came from foreign lands were foreign to us only, but not
to the people of the ghetto. They whispered things we did not hear, went
to the ghetto of some other town, whispered again, and again went on and
on. Trotski had been in Budapest—he had lived here years ago. Others came
too, people whose co-religionists alone knew what they were after. We
only saw worms that cringed, we never listened to what they said to each
other.
I felt as if the whole quarter were speaking, as if every house, every
street in it were quoting from the ancient book of its inhabitants: “A
people which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear and
hear not.”
My wandering eyes were suddenly arrested by the sight of three men. One
had the features of a negro, the second a heavy, fat face, and the third
was quite small, with red eyelids and white eyelashes. Their heads were
close together. When I stopped in front of a shop window and pretended to
look at its contents they stopped talking, and I saw by the reflection
in the window that they looked at me, nodded at one another and moved
on. Two others, clad in gabardines, came towards me. They wore fur caps
and gesticulated violently with dirty hands raised to the level of their
shoulders. One was speaking; the other listened with his eyes fixed on
the ground and with dirty fingers caught hold of the lock dangling from
the side of his head and drew it out straight to his chin. He stood like
that for a time, reflectively, and occasionally mumbled a word. Then,
noticing that I was looking at him, he stopped in the middle of a word
and let his lock go; it curled up to his ear like a spring. Then they too
went on.
King Street swarmed around me. Unkempt, fat women stood in the doorways,
silk dresses rustled on the pathway, and the smell of filth mingled with
that of cheap scent. Children shrieked. From the entrances of restaurants
with Hebrew names the reek of garlic spread into the street. The doors of
small shops opened and closed continually, and the articles suspended on
them swung about; chains and watches rattled against the panes, stockings
and ribbons fluttered to and fro, and the medley of badly lit windows
displayed old clothes, confectionery, plucked geese, jewellery, boots. A
woman passed, pushing along a perambulator laden with soap. On the street
corner a bandy-legged little monster in a gabardine sold figs and blinked
with his dull eyes at the passers-by. A red-bearded man stopped near him.
They spoke fast and their lips moved as if they had gulped down some
burning hot mouthfuls of something. As I approached them the red-bearded
one turned abruptly round and slipped into a goldsmith’s shop. I looked
after him.... A quaint old watch was hanging in the shop-window. I
wondered what they wanted for it.
The chains hanging from the entrance door tinkled as I went in. A shaded
lamp hung from the smoky ceiling low above the glazed counter, in which
rings and ear-rings were displayed on velvet cushions. Several people
were standing in a corner, but as soon as they saw me they retired to
the back of the shop. Only a fat flabby girl remained, and as she asked
me what I wanted she fingered her untidy black hair, and scratched
herself. Meanwhile she watched the door, and when it opened bent quickly
over the counter and pointed with her grimy thumb over her shoulder. A
well-dressed man in a fur coat, and with a typical face, passed behind
me and joined the others. Then a sailor came in and he too was called
in to join the group. Many voices whispered mysteriously in the room at
the back of the shop. I listened attentively, straining my ears to hear
something, one sentence, of all this talk which was not meant for us and
was only mentioned among themselves—but I could not understand a word....
“I am afraid it won’t do,” I said to the girl, and hurried out of the
shop in disgust.
I walked fast, almost running through the crowd, as if I were escaping
the meshes of a conspiracy which floated in the air but which one could
not grasp, because as soon as one touched it it fell to pieces like slime.
The whole quarter was on the look-out for some prey. Its streets were
haunted by some premeditated crime. In its houses a greedy monster, which
has never shut its eyes for a thousand years, kept vigil.
Away from here, into the fresh air! I was haunted by the thought of the
room in the little shop, the whispering Jews, Russian money on the table;
of the sergeant with his golden pince-nez, who had mentioned the name of
Béla Kún to the soldiers; of the faces of Jászi, Kunfi and Louis Hatvany;
of the bandy-legged monster at the street corner, the man with the red
beard and the flabby girl.... They are all after the same thing and are
helping each other all they can, while we have lost the power of wanting
anything at all....
That night I wrote an appeal to the women of Hungary. Women! sleep not,
or your children will have no place to lay their heads....
* * * * *
_November 26th._
In the afternoon I walked towards the boulevards.
Countess Louis Batthyany had telephoned that she wanted to see me. I made
my way through a dense crowd, for the town is overrun by the constant
influx of refugees and of thousands of home-coming soldiers. On the
boulevards people thronged; there hardly seemed to be enough room for
them. The human tide overflowed into the by-streets, pushed, pressed,
swarmed and accumulated in front of the windows of newspaper offices
like a knotted muscle. In the office window of an evening newspaper were
some photographs, and under one of them was an inscription, “The members
of the Soldiers’ Council.” There were too many people for me to get
near, so that I could only see it at a distance as I passed—the faces,
exhibited in glory, of those who were guilty of the rebellion of October,
and who may one day be called to account.
“What do you think of that?” a voice asked among the loiterers. “The
Minister for War has had Heltai arrested for embezzlement, robbery and
murder.” “What? the ex-commander of the town?” “That’s him ... and now
his sailors are coming in armoured cars with machine-guns to rescue him.
There’s going to be trouble.” The news spread at once. “Have you heard
it?” “It is not true?” “But it is!” There was a panic. And the people in
the streets carried it on with them: “The sailors are coming! They have
left Pressburg, they have left the Czechs....”
Crowded electric trams passed, so crammed with people that the pressure
inside nearly broke the cars’ sides; outside people were hanging on
everywhere. I saw some soldiers coming along, when suddenly one of them
tumbled forward, tripped over his own foot and fell, face downward, on
the pavement. Nobody troubled about him and even his companions went on
indifferently. With a remnant of war-time charity I stooped over him,
thinking that perhaps he had an artificial leg, or was suffering from an
epileptic fit. When I took hold of his arm to help him to get up again,
however, I found that he was drunk and vomiting. As I started back I
heard his companions roar with laughter.
The crowd carried me on, but the incident was like a thorn thrust into
one’s heart. Soldiers, Hungarian soldiers! There had been a time when
my eyes filled with tears at the sight of them. How proud I had felt of
them, how I had respected them, I had loved them as being the personified
courage of my race. What are they now...?
When I arrived at my friend’s house I found the talk turning on Michael
Károlyi, to whom several of those present were related. I asked them if
they knew the conditions of the armistice concluded with Diaz, that they
had safeguarded the frontiers of the country, which the Belgrade treaty
had sacrificed? The news was so mad, so impossible, that doubt showed in
every eye.
“I know it for certain,” I said; “a member of the armistice commission,
Lieut.-Colonel Julier, told my brother so.”
Anger succeeded consternation on every face.
“Get me the text,” Count Julius Batthyany shouted, “and I will have the
two documents posted up, side by side, and within twenty-four hours the
whole government will collapse.”
His beautiful mother looked at him doubtfully:
“Do you imagine that there is so much liberty left in this town? The
posters would be torn to shreds before they could be stuck on the walls.”
“They promised us the freedom of the press and of opinions, and we get
nothing but lies.”
“Let us organise against them. That is the only way to defeat their
lies,” said Countess Batthyany, “it was with that intent that I asked you
to come.”
“You are thinking of the women?”
“Yes....”
“I have thought of them too,” I said. “There are several of us who think
the same. We must find some common-place programme to hide our real
purpose: women alone can rebuild the lost faith.”
“Work out the programme and take the leadership of the movement.”
“I don’t want to be anything but a common soldier,” I answered; “I am
only an author and know nothing of these things.”
“For all that you will have to do it. Your lead will be followed. I want
to work too.”
I shook my head. I was ready to do anything, but did not feel the
vocation for leadership.
“We will try too,” said Count Batthyany. “Somehow we must succeed in
getting rid of this crowd.”
“We will talk it all over,” said his mother.
So she is with us too, I pondered when leaving. She, the aunt of both
Count Michael and Countess Károlyi! How many of us felt the same thing!
It seemed to be floating in the air, and waiting for someone among us to
put it into words.
The street had changed while I had been in the house. No lamps were
burning, the trams were not running, and the snow was falling heavily.
Had a strike broken out suddenly? Was the supply of coal exhausted? Or
was it because of Heltai’s sailors?
The little side-streets gaped dismally in the dark. A ramshackle cab
trotted through the snow.
“How much to Stonemason Street?” I asked.
“Sixty crowns,” the driver answered from his seat.
“Not so long ago it would have been two crowns....”
He drove on, cursing me, and I went on, ploughing my way through the
snow. There was an uncanny silence about the place. Out in the country
the silence of the woods and meadows is that of rest, while here in town
silence seems to be the preliminary of some hidden attack. That was what
it felt like now. Against my will I was looking behind me all the time,
and I hurried as fast as I could across the entrances of the alleys.
The bright, clean streets, policemen, protection, security of the
past—where have they all gone?
Civilisation was only a scaffolding which was covered with paper posters
so that we should not see that there was no building behind it, and it
has collapsed at a single blow. It is a wreck, and wolves prowl over the
abandoned ground. The town has slipped suddenly back to the times when
nobody who started on an errand at night knew if he would ever see home
again.
At the next corner a cab turned out into the boulevard and I felt a
little safer. But I did not enjoy the sight of the cab for very long. Two
soldiers emerged from a doorway and ran after it, shouting loudly. The
driver made signs that he had passengers, but stopped out of fear that
they might shoot him. The soldiers didn’t trouble to discuss the matter,
but simply opened the door of the cab, kicked the passenger out of it,
and took his place. The cab, as if driving into a white veil, disappeared
rapidly in the falling snow. The street became lonely and quiet. Only the
snow glittered, and even as the flakes drifted into my face I decided
that after all in these days it was wiser to walk....