I flew into a rage. I had never heard of any lodgings being commandeered for Transylvanian refugees: they are expelled, while Galician refugees of Austrian nationality are planted in our midst. What are they afraid of? What are they fleeing from, that they thrust their way into the homes of Christians?
“I’ll arrange it all, don’t you worry,” I said to my mother. “We haven’t come to that yet....”
January 5th.
It was my mother herself who took in the invitation, and the man who brought it made her promise solemnly that she would deliver it into my own hands alone.
I knew what it was about, and early in the afternoon I started on my errand. It was five o’clock before I entered the door of the house owned by the Franciscans. Some gentlemen were on the staircase before me. We met in the rooms of Stephen Zsembéry, a former deputy. All the leaders and principal members of the anti-revolutionary parties were present with the exception of Count Julius Andrássy, who had mysteriously disappeared, and Count Apponyi, who has retired from politics. Count Stephen Bethlen proposed the union of all parties, as the only means of saving the country. At first he was supported, then objections were raised and—when we broke up it was decided to meet again soon, in order to come to some final decision.
I was sad when I went home. On the way I remembered a story I had once written of how an inn stood on the plain, on the great military road. Warriors passed in great numbers, on their way to recover Buda from the Turks. They hailed from all the corners of the earth. There were only two Hungarians in the inn, but they could not get on with each other: they quarrelled, came to blows, killed each other. Over their bleeding corpses their greatest foe said happily: “That is a good job: if they had not killed each other, we never could have got the better of them.”
These two Hungarians have had many names in the course of the centuries. Once they were called Ujlaki and Gara, at another time Kuruc and Labanc; then Görgey and Kossuth, quite lately Tisza and Andrássy. And to-day our perennial ghost seemed to have walked during our labours.
Æterna Hungaria....