Red and white blotches of paper and alternate signatures: Heltai, Commander of the Garrison, Linder, Commander-in-Chief.
Linder? I never heard this name during the war. And yet it seemed familiar to me. Then I remembered. I met him at a social gathering, and once at an afternoon tea. On both occasions he seemed under the influence of drink. That was the reason I noticed him, otherwise his insignificance would have wiped him out of my memory. Now I seemed to see his face. He gave me the impression of an elderly stage swashbuckler. His well-groomed hair was grey, his shoulders high, his neck thick-set, his face congested; his tiny grey eyes winked all the time, and when he laughed they disappeared entirely. Linder.... Can this stage swashbuckler be the new Minister of War?
I now noticed that more and more people hurried past me, and that all were going towards the House of Parliament. A crowd was gathering in the big, beflagged square. People dressed in black, officers in field uniform, poured from the neighbouring streets. Some mounted police arrived. Then came a military band. A military cordon was formed in the centre.
“What is happening here?” I asked a woman who stood aimlessly among the loafers on the kerb.
“I don’t know.” A young man, who might have been in her company, answered for her: “The officers of the Garrison are swearing allegiance to the National Council.”
“There are crowds of them,” said the woman, and moved her neck like a duck in a pond. The young man laughed with contempt. “There may be four hundred.” His accent seemed to proclaim him from Transylvania.
Motor cars rushed past me. Overhead, aeroplanes were circling and strewing leaflets among the crowd: “The glorious revolution! The people have conquered!” Leaflets on the ground, leaflets in the gutter, leaflets everywhere.
The great grey mass of the House of Parliament hid the Danube from our sight like a petrified lace curtain. On its walls the ancient coats of arms of various counties, the monuments of past Kings, appeared and disappeared in the mist like a dissolving view. At the sides of the building the square extended to the river, and the ghostly outlines of a bronze figure on horseback stood out against the background of mist-covered Buda: the statue of Andrássy, the great Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the haze it seemed that the rider moved, as though he wanted to turn his steed and ride away to the sound of brazen horse-shoes, back along the banks of the Danube, to see if the river had changed its course—the river which had imposed upon the lands between the Black Forest and the Black Sea the alliance which he had written on paper. Had it left its bed, had it dried up, that great Danube, the ancient zone across Europe’s body, that some man should be so bold as to tear up the scrap of paper which confirmed the bond? Mist rose over the yellow waves. The poisoned town threw its image across a veil into the river and poisoned its waters. And the stream carried the poison, and perhaps by to-morrow the lands it crosses may already writhe with internal pains.
To-morrow.... Everything is lost in a mist. Round the square the houses showed their many-eyed faces through a haze. Below, the rain-covered asphalt pavement shone, reflecting the people who stood upon it. In the windows of the houses, on the stone steps of the House of Parliament, between two stone lions, more people. I looked at my watch. It was eleven o’clock. Another motor car dashed up, there was some cheering in the centre of the square, and the figure of a man rose above the crowd. He stood on the steps of the House of Parliament in a dark overcoat, a bowler-hat on his head, a glaring red tie round his neck.
