Once more life seems like the dream of a demented brain. “Everything is yours,” says the Government, so that it may take what the robbers cannot carry off. They share and share alike, and what care they that in making their division they break our hearts? The Hungarian population of Transylvania, abandoned, humiliated, betrayed, must tolerate that its ancient land should be thrown by Budapest to an uneducated, newly-risen Balkan state, whose shepherd folk, fleeing from the cruelty of its own princes, came to Hungary asking for hospitality, a few hundred years ago. The Széklers have lived for fifteen hundred years in Transylvania, and the semi-barbarous Roumanian people now laugh in the face of the original inhabitants, and by right of robbery declare that what was always ours is now their own.
The street is quiet. The town listens with a stony heart. The stars alone tremble above the roofs as if a great sob rose to them de profundis.
December 3rd.
I went to Buda, to the Castle Hill. We had a meeting at five at Count Zichy’s palace.
This house was built in the eighteenth century and is one of Buda’s finest palaces. Maria Theresa, powdered and bewigged, once lived here, and her presence still seems to linger about the walls. The stone staircase rises loftily to the hall on the first floor, whose low, decorated roof is supported by white pillars. On the white walls glittered the gilt frames of old pictures.
The lamp had not yet been lit, but a fire was burning in the wide marble fireplace and shed its light around from below. It shone back from the beauty of ancient bronzes, ran over the walls, and under its flickering touch far-off Chinese springtimes came to life on the old porcelain, and then melted again into the gloom, suddenly, as the flicker passed by. The tall furniture stood haughty and clumsy, conscious of the fact that it had always been there.
When the lamp was lit others came in, shivering, and we all gathered round the fire like conspirators, for we all suffered the same pangs, we all wanted the same thing. We knew that the hour had come, that we had to call out the women from behind their locked doors. In the history of Hungary women have not often appeared. They have never had to fight for their rights, because there is no code in the world which protects the rights of woman so well as ours did—even in the darker centuries. They could live quietly in those days, and the handsome narrow faces of Hungarian women shone only in the mild light of the home fire. Those were Hungary’s happy days. But when the land was afire and misery was reaping its harvest, then the Hungarian women rose to the occasion and stood in the fore-front of the fight. Our country has never suffered greater distress than now, and, as we sat there, we all knew that the women would respond to our call and would sow the seed of the counter-revolution. Not at meetings, not in the market-place, but in their homes, in the souls of their men exhausted by the hardships of war, men who are down-hearted to-day but who, to-morrow, will not dare to give the lie to the women who believe in their courage....
I read the draft of the programme in which, hidden among social and political reforms, I had attempted to sum up the vital needs of the whole womanhood of Christian Hungary.
“Let us set forth clearly what we want,” said Countess Raphael Zichy. All agreed, and at the head of the programme we stated, clearly and tersely, the Holy Trinity for which we meant to stand: a Christian and patriotic policy, the integrity of the country, and the sanctity of the family.