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....
CHAPTER XI.
November 27th.
After all this humiliation, shameful submission and silence entire districts of the country are raising their voices in protest.
The Széklers in Transylvania have risen; the flag of the Székler’s corps has been unfurled, and Count Stephen Bethlen has organised a Székler National Council. Transylvania is graven on his heart and he has remained faithful to himself. He has always sacrificed everything to the good of the country. It is encouraging to hear his name in these times when everybody thinks only of himself. And after Transylvania, Upper Hungary raises its voice, the towns of Zips, Zemplén and our faithful brethren the Slovaks, whom neither gold nor the lash will persuade that they belong to the Czechs. The Bunyevats swear to stick to their fatherland and so do the Catholic Serbians; and far away in the North the Ruthenians, Rákoczi’s own folk, that gens fidelissima et carissima, protest violently—they, who live precariously in the depths of the Carpathians, on the road by which the Galician Jews invade us. I know their poor little villages, pounced upon by the army of leeches in gabardines, bloodthirsty, insatiable, on its westward march. That is the road by which, for decades, the Polish and Russian Jews have come to us; they cut off their payés, side-locks, in Kassa, throw off their gabardines in Miskolocz and become barons and millionaires in Budapest.
Successive Hungarian Governments have left the Ruthenians of the frontier undefended against this invading horde, and yet these pious people have remained, for all their poverty, patient and faithful to us. And now they stand by our side, desperately; they don’t ask for autonomy, they want no special privileges, they just want to remain one with us, because we have never harmed them. Neither the propaganda of the Ukrainians and Russian Imperialists, nor the schismatical attempts at their conversion, nor anything else has had any effect on them. They are clamouring for Hungarian schools, while a foreign race speaking in the name of Budapest denies them their very nationality; and their Bishop, Andrew Szabó, sends the following message in their name: “There is no need of a declaration of loyalty on the part of Hungary’s Ruthenians, because this people has never faltered.”
But this does not suit Mr. Jászi, the Minister for Nationalities. He wants to transform our great geographical unit into a sort of Eastern Switzerland, and he has invented a new name, Ruszka-Krajna, for the green counties of whispering woods, the ancient part of Hungary inhabited by the Ruthenians.
There he stands, in the midst of a poisoned town, the son of Russo-Polish Jews, declaiming, with all the destructive vigour of his race, separatist theories against associations made by nature itself, forgetting that, while in Switzerland the extreme branches of three races join in a common summit, in Hungary the peoples’ streams flow into a common basin, the strength and soul of which must always be the Hungarian people.
And while he holds forth, and declares that in a single moment he is going to efface the history of a thousand years, these thousand years of Hungarian history shout from every side in desperate protest. Széklers, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Germans and Catholic Serbians clamour like suffering brethren, appealing to each other over the indifference shown by a muzzled land. The voices of their anguish come like a storm down the mountains and join over the Great Plain under the November sky in a harmony that knows no discord. And the winds on their myriad wings carry the sad appeal on and on, and sow it as a seed for the future from which, one day, we shall gather a rich harvest of revenge.