“Tell them,” he commanded, “that starvation is ended. I'll feed them on one condition: that they refuse to fight. Tell them I'll drive the Russian menace back without a single shot being fired. Tell them that I promise, on my honor as an American, to feed them all. Though food-trains are exhausted to-night, more will arrive to-morrow. More and more.”
He paused, blinded with emotion at sight of the forest of thin hands strained up to him. Shooting out his fist tremendously, he threatened. “And tell them that I won't feed a jack one of them, if there's another man, woman or child slaughtered, or a hint of rioting.”
VI
He had kept his word; as far as Hungary was concerned, every living soul had been nourished. For seven days and nights, sleeping only at odd intervals, he had sat in the barracks of the Russian refugees with the map of Europe staring down on him from the wall. Wherever a food-train had been despatched, the place had been marked by a little red flag. He had had a wireless-apparatus installed; from that bare room, heavy with mildew, he had sent out his S. O. S. calls to humanity. He had begged, threatened, argued, commanded until at last he knew that he had won his cause. What he did not know was that his own example had proved more convincing than many words. The simple drama of his personal conversion—that he should be giving what he had come to sell—had stirred men's consciences. It had given him the right to talk. Where once troops would have been hurried, food was being pushed forward. It was an experiment alarmingly novel; but his phrase caught on, “The Barricade of Bread.” It had been flashed across five continents. Wherever the printed word had power, it had kindled men's imaginations. By a world war-wrecked, confronted by yet another war, it had been hailed as the strategy that would end all wars.
Loaf by loaf, sack by sack the barricade was rising. Those little red flags, pinned on the map, marked its progress. It was deepening and spreading in a flanking movement, just as formerly army corps had massed for offensives. Soon the barricade would be complete; it would stretch in an unbroken line from the Dardanelles to the Baltic. There would be fighting, probably to the east of Poland, where the Monarchists were marching in a forlorn attempt to defeat the famished hordes. That could not be prevented. But by the time the outcasts struck his main defense, he would be in a position to halt them.
It was only now, when the situation was in hand, that he had leisure to realize what he had been doing. He was filled with depression in his hour of triumph. It was long past midnight. He felt gray and spent. The barracks were as quiet as a morgue. He wondered why; they had been so crowded with derelicts of valiant armies, men and girls, who, having failed to save Russia with the rifle, had been preparing to rescue her with knowledge. Then he recalled. He had sent them all away. They had been the new kind of soldier, by whose sacrifice his ideal had conquered. He saw again their uplifted faces, as he had summoned them one by one and ordered them on their perilous journeys. Wherever a red flag was pinned on the map, one of those derelicts was in command. The “Little Grandmother,” she had been the last. Beside himself and his wireless operators, there could be no one left except Varensky, Santa and Anna.
He glanced at the window. It was a square of jet. During the early days and nights it had framed a heart of fire, where the Palace had smouldered on the heights of Buda. Like a subsided volcano, the Palace had burned itself out. It was as though the fury of his life were ended. He bowed his head in his arms, striving to reconjure what had happened.
Flitting about the room, with his strangely catlike tread, Varensky had been forever entering and exiting. He had been his second self, silent and agile, anticipating his plans without a word spoken. It was Varensky who had marshaled his exiled compatriots and placed their services at his disposal. It was Varensky who had warned him of the strategic points where the barricade must be strengthened. It had been always Varensky to whom he had turned for advice and courage when things were darkest. Without Varensky he could have accomplished nothing. And yet it was Varensky whom he had dethroned. This should have been his moment. He had shouted him down, snatched control from him and earned the credit. The self-effacement of one whom he had despised as an egoist made him humble. In a rush of tenderness he discovered that he loved him. The peaked head was forgotten, and the face scared white as if it had seen a ghost. The timidity of his appearance no longer counted; the thing that mattered was the spirit, resolute and shining as a sword, that hid within the scabbard of the grotesque body.
And now that he remembered, there had been grief in his green eyes—the grief of a man who had been cheated. Once again Varensky had drawn him near to Calvary; the chance to die had been stolen from him.
And Anna—he could not guess how she felt or what she thought. In all those seven days and nights it seemed as though she had never looked at him. She had moved about him like a nun, ministering to his wants with her gaze averted. Vaguely he was aware that to him she was not what she appeared to others. The old legend had been revived; again, as in St. Petersburg after the fall of Czardom, wherever she passed people knelt. To him she was no saint; his desire was too human.