After a hurried conversation with a scared official, she turned. “If it's to do with food, they'll accept it. The lines may be cut at any moment.”
He dashed off his telegram. “Crisis sooner than expected. Without delay start food-trains under armed guard for Budapest and Vienna.”
It might spell bankruptcy for him—the ruin of all his plans. He rebelled against the improvidence of philanthropy, yet dimly he discerned the proportions of his chance. If he would, he could teach the world how wars could be stopped. As he watched the message being dispatched, he wondered why he had sent it. Was he frightened by the sight of bloodshed, or angered, like Varensky, by an unjust display of force? Or had he sent it because this maelstrom of human agony swirled between him and the woman he loved, and food might prove to be the only means by which she could be rescued? He sought to explain his actions by business motives: if his food trains were actually on the spot, he could strike a better bargain with tottering governments.
II
The express for Budapest was several hours late. When at last it got under way, it carried few passengers. It was plunging straight into the heart of the danger, from which all the world which possessed the price of a fare was escaping.
Santa listened to and reported on the conversation of fellow-travelers. They were Hungarian officers returning to their regiments, to whom a fight spelt opportunity; they were husbands and fathers, careless of their own safety in their dread of what might be happening to their families; they were merchants and men of wealth, anxious to be at hand for the defense of their possessions. As the talk went on, the greatness of the risk grew increasingly obvious; it bred an atmosphere of free-masonry. Strangers accosted each other, exchanging views on the hazards; they crowded about the entrance of any compartment where a speaker seemed possessed of accurate information. Most of what was said was no more than conjecture; much of it was utterly contradictory. One man asserted that the Bolsheviks were attacking all along the Russian front; another that Bolshevism had collapsed and the peasants were massacring. Another knew for certain that throughout Central Europe the Reds were rising; yet another that the Monarchists had sprung to arms and were marching. Every rumor or invention was accepted with equal credulity. Anything was possible. No one knew for certain either the magnitude or the cause of the rumored disaster. Only one fact seemed indisputable: somewhere further eastward had occurred a catastrophe of shattering proportions—a catastrophe in the tragedy of which each one of them would shortly be involved.
Hindwood turned away from the babel of voices to the autumn landscape gliding past the windows. It consisted as far as eye could stretch of unboundaried, level fields, gridironed by straight, military roads, marked by avenues of pollarded trees, intersecting always at right angles. The fields were neglected. They told their own story of seed consumed, which should have been saved for sowing, and of cattle slaughtered. Over everything, despite the brilliant blueness of the sky, there hung an atmosphere of melancholy. Down white-penciled highways little groups were trekking, always in the one direction. They appeared crushed and harmless, more like insects, scarcely human. They limped forlornly, dragging carts and carrying children. They were the advance-guard of the army of starvation. Hindwood remembered the Captain's prophecy. “They'll march to the lands of plenty like Death swinging his scythe, like a pestilence, like gaunt wolves.”
At the frontier, where the train crossed from Austria into Hungary, he gained his first lesson in the resistlessness of necessity. There had been an unequal battle, in which only one side had been armed. It appeared that the Austrian guards had tried to turn back the Hungarian fugitives. They had fired their rifles till their ammunition was exhausted; then they had sickened of the slaughter. Opposition had made no difference; the tide of fugitives had still pressed on. Misery had proved more potent than explosives; it had made death, if not desirable, at least negligible. Its meek persistence had conquered. The Austrian soldiery had revolted against their officers and stood with grounded arms, watching the stream of poverty trickling through the barrier of corpses.
“Like water finding its own level,” Hindwood thought. It would be like this the world over, if something were not done at once to check it. The outcast nations lay one behind the other, like terraced avalanches, in an ascending scale of destitution—behind the Austrians the Hungarians, behind the Hungarians the Poles, behind the Poles the Russians, each a degree more agonized in its privation. Now that the movement had started it would go on, sliding, filtering, settling, until the peoples of the earth had regained an economic level. The Dives nations, which had refused to share, would try to hold the Lazarus nations at bay by force. They would spray them with cannon. They would charge them with bayonets. They would bomb them, gas them, dig labyrinths of trenches. In the end, as had happened here, though the pariah portion of humanity was weaponless, the meek persistency of its misery would conquer. Careless of oblivion, it would press on. He alone could give the Dives nations a seventh hour chance; at the price of his financial ruin, he could prevent the deluge of famine from spreading by damming it with a wall of bread.
Darkness had fallen. The carriages were unlighted. The train was moving cautiously, jerking, stopping, starting, like a live thing scenting carnage. Scattered through the night camp-fires were burning. In the gloom conversation dragged on wearily with reiterated guesses.