The outbreak of the war found him in Paris. His financial position had now become strained. The life-interest in his property, heavily mortgaged, left him no surplus. Yet he went on spending and gambling. Nobody knew whence his money came. Nor did anybody know why he alone was allowed to leave France at the outbreak of the war, while obscure individuals were mercilessly interned for its duration.
It was after his return that Károlyi began to spread the infection which, on the 31st of October 1918, like a septic sore that had long been festering, broke out in putrid suppuration.
The lamp-lighter came up the street. The glass of the lamps rattled and the little flames flared up. Over the bridge an arc of light appeared in the mist rising from the river. In the tunnel under the Castle Hill old-fashioned lamps lit up the damp walls. Two soldiers were walking in front of me, otherwise the tunnel was practically empty. Their voices resounded from the roof—they were quarrelling in a strange thieves’ jargon. On the other side a well-dressed man came towards us on the pavement. The two soldiers discussed something in their incomprehensible lingo, then crossed together to the other side, saluted the stranger and, as if asking him a question, bent towards him. Obviously they were asking him the time. The gentleman drew his watch. One of the soldiers grasped him suddenly by the shoulders, the other bent over him. A loud shout rolled away under the vault, and next moment the two soldiers were running in their heavy boots with loud clatter towards the other end of the tunnel. It was quickly done and created no sensation. The whole thing was quite in keeping with our daily life nowadays.
This night vagabond soldiers again visited the empty villa and shots were fired near the garden. The dogs barked no more. Have they been shot, or have they got accustomed to it?
November 4th.
I went through the rooms again. In front of the gate the carriage was awaiting to take us away for the winter, from among the trees to among the houses. The small light of the carriage-lamps filtered hesitatingly through the mist on to the bare branches of the shrubs. A vague anxiety took hold of me. It seemed to me that hitherto we had looked on from the shore, but that now we were going to wade into the turbulent, muddy flood. Whither will its torrent carry us; what is to be our fate?
I went all over the house, and, one after the other, opened the doors of the cupboards and the drawers. I left everything open so that if burglars did break into the house in winter the locks might not be forced, the cupboards not smashed with hatchets. The fireplaces cooled down slowly. We had had no fires during the day in order to avoid accidents after we had gone. In one of the grates the embers still retained a little warmth, the others were as cold as the dead. I fastened the grated shutters in every room. In the semi-darkness, against the whitewashed walls, the old furniture, the old story-telling engravings, friends of my childhood, the big vase, the parrot-chandeliers, the coloured glasses in which the flowers of a hundred summers had blossomed in the rooms of my mother and my grandmother, all looked at me as if in sorrow. I looked also at my books, the old Bible on the shelf, at everything for which no room could be found in the vans and which had to be left behind.