"János!"
"Endre!"
A few heartrending cries as each revolution of the wheels takes the lads a little further away from their homes.
"Elsa, you will wait for me?" comes as a final, appealing cry from Andor.
He stands in the door of the carriage, which he holds wide open, and through a mist of tears which he no longer tries to suppress he sees Elsa standing there, quite still—a small image of beauty and of sorrow. The sun glints upon her hair, it shines and sparkles like living gold; her hands are clasped tightly together, and with her full, many-hued petticoats round her slim waist and tiny red-shod feet she looks like a flower.
The crowd below moves alongside of the train—for the first minute or so they all keep up with it, close to the carriage at the door of which can still be seen the head of son or brother or sweetheart. But now the engine puts on more speed, the wheels revolve more quickly—some of the crowd fall away, unable to run so fast.
Only the mothers try to keep up—the old women, some of them bare-footed, stolid, looking straight before them—hardly looking at the train, just running . . . alongside the train first of all, then they must needs fall back—but still they run along the metals, even though the train moves away so quickly now that soon even a mother could not distinguish her son's head, like a black pin-point leaning out of the carriage window.
So they run:—one or two women run thus for over a kilomètre, they run long after the train has disappeared from view.
But Elsa stood quite still. She did not try to run after the train.
Through the noise of the puffing engine, the final cries of farewell, through all the noise and the bustle, Andor's cry rose above all, his final appeal to her to be true: