“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.