THE RED FLAG HAS BEEN HOISTED IN THE FRENCH TRENCHES.
REVOLUTION HAS BROKEN OUT IN BELGIUM.
SWITZERLAND IS ON THE EVE OF A REVOLUTION.
I heard a little school-girl say to her friend: “Károlyi is a great man. He makes the fashion, now even the French are imitating us....”
“Long live ...” shouted the walls and the shop windows, but the people were silent. Why? Why don’t they tear down the disgraceful posters? Why are they resigned, why do I alone protest? Or are there more of us, only we don’t know of each other? I looked carefully at the passing faces. Their eyes passed indifferently over the posters. Nothing mattered to them. I walked quickly, as if haunted, a stranger among the soulless crowd.
I reached Károlyi’s palace. The one-storeyed house, built in the Empire style, looked low under its old roof among the high, newly erected buildings. The row of windows was dark: Károlyi had already moved into the Prime Minister’s house. The first floor was inhabited only by the tenant of half the building, Count Armin Mikes, and I had come to see his wife. Since the events of October I had not been there.
The little side gate opened as I rang, noiselessly, as if automatically, and the concièrge looked out of his loge and disappeared. Nothing stirred. Under the deep arch of the entrance my steps alone resounded; they echoed strangely, as if invisible hands were dropping things behind me.
I stopped for an instant. The soul of the place seemed to be whispering in the dark. On the right side a corridor was visible through a glass-panelled door, its walls covered with revolutionary pictures, and at its end a side staircase led into Károlyi’s apartments. I shuddered, as one does when one enters a house where a murder has been committed. The traitors—perjured officers, Gallilest students, deserters—congregated up there, in the dark rooms, in the nights of October. Those who sold us and, among themselves, sentenced Tisza to death whispered and advised up there.
I went on. From the semi-obscurity of the huge staircase, marble seemed to tumble down like a frozen waterfall. Beyond, in the garden, the trees whispered in the cold wind.
Countess Mikes’ small drawing-room was light and warm. I found a gathering of Transylvanians there, and beyond the room the notorious house, the whole town, seemed to have disappeared. My own sufferings were forgotten in the recital of theirs, and I was no longer alone in my grief, for all who were present shared it with me. They helped to raise up hope, because they knew what patriotism was, it is an old legacy of theirs. The strength and the will power which supported Hungary throughout her most disastrous periods, when the Turks from the south and the Germans from the west trod on Hungary’s soil, had their source in Transylvania. When the fire of resistance was extinguished everywhere else, it went on burning among its inhabitants. And so after every dark night our race has gone to Transylvania to kindle anew the flame which has lighted it back into the dying country.