In one of the low windows some flower-pots stood between the curtains. A clock struck in the room, and a young girl started watering the flowers with a little red watering-can. Doubtless she watered them yesterday at the same hour and life will be the same for her to-morrow. Meanwhile, on the other bank of the Danube they shout: Long live the revolution! Revolution.... Madness! What good can a revolution do now? Nobody takes it seriously, not even those who made it. Madness! It did me good to repeat the word, and I began to take heart. Nothing will come of it. The Hungarian is not a revolutionary—he fights for freedom. Every commotion in our history of a thousand years has been a war of liberation. And freedom has come: independence has fallen from its own accord into the nation’s lap....
A light already shone in one of the little houses. Under the hanging lamp, round a circular table, people sat peacefully. They knew of nothing.... In one of the yards someone played an accordion. The homely, suburban music, the fatigue of my long silent walk, weakened the awful impressions of the other shore. All that had tortured me was disappearing, and my thoughts were only of hanging lamps and accordions.
The density of the mist increased with the evening, and when I reached the old military cemetery it had nearly absorbed the outlines of all objects. Over the collapsing graves, between the many little rotting wooden crosses, the tombstones dissolved like ghosts in the fog. In Pest by now the mist would be a yellow reeking fog, while here it became a thing of beauty. Nowadays everything that is beautiful in the country turns to filth in Pest.
Again I forgot to pay attention to the road, and my thoughts harped on what I had lately seen.
It was impossible that a few slums of a single town should make a revolution when the whole country was against it.... Then, I don’t know how, I came to think of The Possessed—Dostoevski’s wonderful novel. I remembered a reception which I had attended last winter. We talked of Russia, Lenin and Bolshevism, and I asked one of Michael Károlyi’s relations if Károlyi had ever read that book.
“Of course, and he loves it, too. He lent it to me to read.”
There had been curious rumours about Károlyi for some time.
“Is he learning from it how to make a revolution?” I asked, but received no answer.
I was tired and walked on slowly. Along the road the old, leafless chestnut trees came towards me in hazy monotony, and there recurred to my memory the little Russian town in Dostoevski’s book, into which with his genius he has crowded a picture of Russia as a whole. Young revolutionaries, back from Switzerland, meet accidentally in the little town. The demoniacal leader of these morbid youths, craving for power, destroys the existing order and produces chaos. Consumptive students, alcoholics, syphilitic degenerates, prospective suicides, cracked intellects, murderers and despairing cowards gather round him and he forms a group of five from the select. And then he convinces them that innumerable similar groups are waiting with eagerness for the signal to revolt. When his five men hesitate he tricks them to commit a murder, so that the knowledge of common guilt should make his slaves mutually suspicious of each other. At his order they will raise the pyre.... The actors of the revolution are together and the primal conditions are ready. And then dissolution, terror and panic will come, and the frightened, despoiled people will be prepared to suffer anything and to recognise anybody as their omnipotent master who can create order, whatever that order may be. “We take the sly ones with us, and lord it over the simple.” That is the idea of Dostoevski’s hero. The eleven internationalists of the National Council think the same. They too share the power with the cunning ones and use Károlyi as a stepping-stone to power. After all Károlyi is nothing but the tool of this Council. Who the demon is, I do not yet know.