She pressed her forehead against the warm pane. The gold of the world outside cast a sheen of gold on her profile. Her unwanted loveliness hurt him. It reproached him. It recalled to him the ache of his old desire in the days before he had known that he could have her. And now that he could have her for the asking....
“Captain Lajos gave them to me. They've been arriving ever since we parted. He waited till you'd gone; then he came to me. He came to tell me why he'd followed me. He was persuaded I was your mistress. This morning he did something noble—very noble for a man of his sort to a woman of mine; he begged me to become his wife.”
“Without knowing anything about you? He must be mad.”
“Don't say that.” She closed her eyes painfully. “I shan't trouble you or any one much longer. I shall soon be so still. When one's sure of that, it's good to be loved just once again, even though—” She turned slowly and faced him. “I don't need to tell you who it is that I love truly. This man—he's nothing. No man ever will—— You see I've lived for men and admiration—for things like—” She pointed to the roses. “It's new to me to be neglected. So it's comforting to know that a man can still desire me, even though I'd rather kill myself than go with him.”
He broke the silence that had settled between them. “You mustn't talk like this. You've years of life before you. I'll get you away safely.”
She smiled. “No.” Then she changed the subject. “What happened to you?”
“You mean at my conference?” He seated himself beside her dressing-table. “The worst that could have happened—nothing. Some change has taken place for which I can't account. When I sent my suggestions from America, they were hailed with enthusiasm. I was a saviour—everything that's splendid and extravagant. But now—— The Government's paralyzed. It isn't a Government; it's a passenger. 'You've let us starve too long. It doesn't matter now—' that's what I was told this morning. The ministers with whom I consulted spoke as if they were sitting on the edge of a volcano, waiting to be blown up. They're so sure that an eruption's inevitable that they don't consider it worth while to make an effort to save themselves. I couldn't rouse them. When I pressed them for the cause of their lethargy, they prophesied a new war, in very much the same words as Captain Lajos—a war in which the well-fed are to be pillaged by the starving.”
“But did you tell them that you could ship food into Austria at once?”
“I told them. I assured them that I could put Austria back on her feet in twelve months. I offered to provision her and to supply coal for her factories, if they'd give me control of the railroads and a per capita percentage on the total increase of national industry. 'Provision us with pleasure' was their attitude; 'we'll raise no official objection.' 'Very kind of you,' I replied; 'but where do I come in. I'm no philanthropist.'” He brought his fist down with a bang on the dressing-table. “There's a nigger in the wood-pile. Upon my soul, I believe those fellows are determined that I shan't prevent their nation from dying. If I shipped them the food as a gift, they'd burn it.”
She came over from the window and stood gazing down at him. “You're right. They would if they dared. Can't you guess?”
“I can't. Their currency's hardly worth the paper it's printed on. People are dropping dead in the streets—I saw them. Their gaols are packed with children turned criminals through hunger. There'll be no crops next year; the grain's consumed that should have been saved for the sowing. They've butchered all their live-stock. The brains of the country are in exile. The intellectual classes have been wiped out. And here I come with my offer to save them, and they reject it. Without the help of some outside force like myself, things can only go from bad to worse.”
“Precisely.”
He glanced up, irritated by the promptitude of her agreement. “Precisely! Why do you say that?”
“It's what they want—things to go from bad to worse. The worse things get, the more certain they are of revolution. They're afraid your food would postpone it.”
“Afraid! Why on earth?”
“Because they hope to snatch more out of the catastrophe of revolution than you can offer them. These ministers with whom you've been dealing are the tools of the exiled monarchists. They belong to the party in all countries which made the last war possible and all wars before it. What do they care for the people? They never have cared. Let the brutes starve,' they say, 'if it suits our purpose. We can always breed more.' They regard the people as their serfs, to be fooled with patriotism when danger threatens and to be kept in chains to toil for them when peace has been restored. If the people go hungry long enough, they'll reason that the loss of their kings is the cause. They'll rise up and recall them. They'll start to die for them afresh. It'll happen in all the outcast countries. In the wholesale scramble, it'll be every nation for itself. The strong will struggle to expand their frontiers, and the weak will go to the wall. The deluge of blood—” She sank to her knees, seizing his hands imploringly. “If you'll sacrifice your stores of food, you can stop it.”
“But if I do that, without guaranties, I'm bankrupt. I get nothing.”
“You'll get more than I got when, to accomplish the same purpose, I murdered Prince Rogovich. I'll get the scaffold. You'll earn the thanks of humanity. You'll go down to the ages....”
He could see only the wide greyness of her eyes, pleading, coercing, unbalancing his judgment.
He jumped to his feet, shaking off their spell. “I'm no dreamer—no Varensky,” he said gruffly. “I have to make a profit.” Then, defending himself from her unspoken accusation, “We're only guessing. We have no facts. There are other famished countries—Hungary and Poland. What Austria refuses, they may accept.” He dug his hand into his pocket. “That reminds me. Here's a telegram from Budapest. I can't understand it. It's in German.”
She was crouched on the floor. As he stooped to give it to her, she caught sight of the signature.
“From Anna. Varensky must be with her. Then the crisis is nearer than I thought.”
“Read it. Tell me what it says,” he urged.
She looked up palely, wilted with disappointment. “'Come at once. I need you.' That's all.”
“Does she give no address?”
“She wouldn't risk it. I know where to find her.”
“Then we'll start—”
“But what about—?”
He did not hear her. The blood was hammering in his temples. He left her forgotten, seated among her roses. The music of a wild exultation was maddening his heart.
SO Anna had turned to him out of all the world!
She had felt so sure of him that she had not even stated the reason for her urgency—only “Come at once. I need you.” That she should have relied so implicitly on his compliance put him on his honor not to disappoint her. She must have known that her telegram would find him involved in important business. The earliest she could have counted on seeing him must have been to-morrow. He was determined, if it were humanly possible, to exceed her best expectations; he would see her to-night. Having phoned for the hotel porter to be sent to him, he immediately commenced to pack. He recalled the message that Santa had delivered him: “Varensky's setting out on his last journey. He told me to say, 'Soon you can have her.'” Did Anna's telegram mean that Varensky's final journey was ended?
He was throwing his belongings together when the porter entered.
“You wanted me, sir?”
“Yes. What's the first train—the fastest to Budapest?”
“The first, if it's still running, starts from the Nord-Bahnhof within the hour. But—”
“Then order me a taxi. I'll be ready in ten minutes. Have my bill made up. Send some one to my secretary's room to fetch down her baggage.”
“Certainly. But—”
Hindwood glanced at the man coldly. “I'm in too much of a hurry for conversation.”
A little later, as he was pocketing his change, having settled his account, the cashier addressed him.
He shook his head. “Don't understand.” Then, catching sight of Santa, he beckoned. “The fellow's trying to say something. Find out what's troubling him.”
The cashier repeated more earnestly the words that he had previously uttered.
“He wants to know whether you really think you can leave Vienna,” Santa translated.
“What's to prevent?” Then he caught her arm, lowering his voice. “Perhaps they're on to you.”
The Kârtner-Ring was extraordinarily deserted. Against the curb a wheezing taxi was standing—the only one in sight. Its engine was running. The bags had been piled on the front seat beside the driver, evidently very much to his annoyance; he was doing his best to tumble them back on to the pavement. The hotel porter was vigorously restraining him. An altercation was in progress which threatened any minute to develop into a fight.
“What's the matter?”
The porter replied across his shoulder, still holding the bags in place. “He doesn't want to drive you.”
“Tell him I'll give him five times the legal fare.”
When the offer had been translated, the man seemed mollified.
The porter opened the door. “Quietly. Jump in before he changes his mind. He promises to do his best.”
“His best! I should think so.”
As the cab moved off, Hindwood missed the porter's parting words. He turned to Santa. “Do they always come this hold-up game with foreigners in Vienna?”
“It isn't a hold-up game. He didn't want to drive us. He was afraid. Something's wrong. Look how empty the streets are. Didn't you see how white and scared every one was in the hotel? The cashier would have told us; you wouldn't even let me listen to him.”
“Jealous!” he thought. “It'll be awkward having to take care of both her and Anna.”
They had driven for ten minutes in silence when Santa spoke again. “It's a queer way he's taking us.”
“How queer?”
“So round-about.”
“As long as he keeps going, we don't need to worry.”
“But why should he turn up all the side-streets?”
“I don't know. It'll be time to grow nervous when he stops.”
At that moment he stopped, but it was only for a second. Spinning his cab about, he spurted off in a new direction. Glancing from the window as he turned, they saw that the main thoroughfare ahead was blocked by what appeared to be a procession. Street after street he tried, working round in a circle, never getting any nearer. At last, growing desperate, he took the plunge, tooting his horn and forcing his way through the outskirts of the seething mob. By the time Hindwood had ordered him to turn back it was too late; for a hundred yards behind them, from pavement to pavement, the thoroughfare was packed with pedestrians and vehicles, all headed in the one direction. To get out and walk, even if they had been willing to sacrifice their baggage, was out of the question. The crowd in front was more dense than the crowd behind. The air was full of shrieks of fainting women and the shiver of plate-glass as shop-windows gave way under the pressure. To escape the crush, which was momentarily increasing, people were clambering to the roof of the taxi and standing thick along the running-boards.
Santa was speaking in a torrent to the strangers clinging to the doors.
“Can't you stop long enough to tell me what's happening?” Hindwood interrupted.
She apologized. “I forgot for the moment that you can't speak German. They're as puzzled as we are. All they know is that they're doing what every one else is doing. They don't know the cause. The same thing's happening at every station. A panic's struck Vienna—a foreboding of disaster. It's a case of nerves. In some places looting has started. Every one's escaping—the entire population. It's anything to get westward to France, Switzerland, Germany, away from this nightmare of starvation. They're storming the trains in the Bahnhof, trying to compel the engineers to—”
Turning from him, she commenced to ply more questions in her hurried flow of German.
It was all clear now—the porter's hesitancy, the cashier's earnestness, the driver's reluctance. They had been trying to prevent him from hurrying a woman into danger. He had been too obsessed by the thought of reaching Anna even to pay attention. For confirmation of what Santa had told him, he had only to glance at the surrounding throng. The lean multitude was absurdly prepared for its futile exodus. Irrespective of class, every individual was burdened with whatever he or she had had time to rescue of the household goods. They carried bundles beneath their arms and sacks on their backs. Everything on wheels had been commandeered. Some pushed perambulators, piled high with ill-assorted belongings; others had harnessed themselves to carts. None of them could have considered whether his or her presence would be allowed in a happier country. Obviously over night the half of Vienna could not have procured the necessary permits to travel.
On the outskirts those who were most desperate, because furthest from the station, had begun to charge. Hindwood watched the stampede—how terror was transforming forlorn human beings into animals. They were of all kinds and sorts, mechanics, waiters, slum-dwellers, merchants, shop-girls,' demi-mondaines, with here and there a sprinkling of patrician faces from the palaces of the bankrupt aristocracy. There were lonely men and women, but for the most part they were grouped in families, the children dragging at their mother's skirts and the youngest in the father's arms. They pushed, jostled and fought, trampling the weak in their frenzy to get forward.
Suddenly the madness of self-preservation froze with horror. At the end of the street, far up the pale river of gray faces, horsemen were advancing, standing tall in their stirrups, smiting with their swords. Santa flung herself to the floor. “Down. Keep down. The children—oh, my God!”
Like a volley of hail, bullets commenced to patter. They whipped the street from end to end, hissing in their flight and thudding as they found their target. The taxi tossed and rocked like a rowboat in a mill-race. The mob had given way; like water from a burst dam, it roared between the tall, confining houses. It swept backwards weeping, bleeding, desperate, exhausted, wilder in its retreat than it had been in its advance. Behind it came the cavalry, riding it down, firing and stabbing. In five minutes nothing was in sight, save upset vehicles, scattered belongings, dead lying awkwardly in the October sunshine and wounded crawling weakly in search of refuge.
Reaching through the shattered window, Hindwood tapped the driver's shoulder. “Drive on.”
At the touch the man crumpled. There was a crimson blot in the center of his forehead.
Santa sat up, staring furiously. “If you'd not refused them bread—”
“I didn't.”
“You did. You were only willing to sell.”
Her eyes were blazing. Her hands were clenched. Her tears fell slowly. In the terrific silence which followed so much clamor, the street itself seemed to accuse him. Picking up their bags, he led the way to the station. Scenes such as the one he had witnessed might be happening in Budapest. There was no time to be lost.
“Find out whether it's possible to send a wire.”
“Where to?” she asked suspiciously.
“To Amsterdam.”
“What for?”
“Do you need to ask?”
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.
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.
He felt his hand clasped.
“What is it?” he whispered. “Frightened? You won't be caught now. You're as safe as the rest of us. No one'll have time to remember you.”
“I wasn't thinking of myself.”
“Then—?”
“Of you—that perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”
“Ah!” He drew his breath. The echo of his own thought! “And perhaps you, too,” he suggested.
She twisted herself, leaning her breast against his arm. Glancing down through the darkness, he caught the tenderness in her eyes and the gleaming smoothness of her cheek and throat.
“I wish I could believe it,” she said softly; “to stand beside you, making you strong.... You could never love me; but to stand beside you, when you rescue the world, that would mean redemption.”
“When I rescue the world!” He laughed quietly. “I'm no Varensky. I came here to make money.”
She swept aside his cynicism. “You were born for this moment. And I, an outcast woman whom the world has hunted, will help you. Perhaps I shall give my life for you.” She spoke exultantly. “I, whom you have rejected.”
“You exaggerate. Things may not be as bad as they appear. What we've seen may be no more than a local disturbance.”
She refused to argue. “Be kind to me while we're together.”
On the outskirts of Budapest they came to a halt. The air was tainted with a nauseating odor. Standing on a siding was a long line of freight-cars in process of being shunted. By the light of lanterns swung by men on the tracks, it was possible to see that the freight-cars were inhabited. Figures hung out of them thin as skeletons, entirely naked or clad in flapping rags. The passengers of the express had crowded to the windows, pointing, commenting, gesticulating.
Hindwood turned to Santa. “What is it?”
She answered bitterly. “The death train.”
“But the people aren't dead.”
“Not yet. They're families ruined by the war and by the peace. Some of them saw their homes burned by the Cossacks; others had their farms stolen to pay the Allies' debts. They're nobody's business. When you've reached the end of your tether in Hungary, you join the death train and die by inches. You have no food, no sanitation. Wherever you halt, you spread contagion. When things have grown too bad in one place, you're dragged to another.” She swallowed down a sob. “The train's full of children—and you tell me that you came here to make money.”
On arrival at Budapest they found the station picketed by soldiers. They were immediately conducted under an armed guard to an office where the purpose of their journey was investigated. When Hindwood had explained their errand—that it had to do with the food-supply—he was treated with courtesy and given his choice of hotels. Santa chose the Ritz. A military order was made out for their rooms. A safe-conduct was handed them. A rickety conveyance, with a lean horse between the shafts, was allotted to them. They were launched into a city quenched of lights, with a soldier seated beside the driver for protection.
The wide avenues down which they drove were deserted. They were still unaware of what had happened. They had not dared to ask, lest any slip of the tongue might lead to trouble. There were no signs of revolution in the thoroughfares. They were hushed and reverent as the aisles of a cathedral. Every few hundred yards a mounted gendarme rode out to challenge them; then, seeing the soldier on the box, backed into the shadows. Only one disquieting incident occurred. The uneasiness which it caused was due to guilty memories rather than to any actual menace. As they were turning towards the Danube, they heard a sharp trotting behind them. A closed brougham swept past, drawn by a pair of high-stepping horses. The equipage was one which must formerly have belonged to the Royal Palace; it was the ghost of a forgotten splendor. Hindwood rose in his seat to watch it vanish. Then he saw something that made him catch his breath. Running between its wheels was a snow-white Russian wolfhound.
Santa heard his commotion. “What's the excitement?”
“Nothing.”
By the time she had raised herself to follow his glance, the hint of peril was gone. The next moment they were drawing up at the hotel.
Again as the door swung to behind them, they were greeted by sounds of merriment and dancing, only here the abandon was wilder than at Vienna. Hindwood saw at a glance that this was no assemblage of alien hucksters, drawn from all the world to gather bargains. As regards the men, they were devil-may-care and smart, of the same type as Captain Lajos—the sort who would follow the game to the last throw of the dice. Many of them had made no attempt to disguise their profession; they were clad in gorgeous uniforms of Hungarian regiments long since ordered disbanded by the Allies. Their breasts were ablaze with Imperial decorations. They strode the marble floors with the clink of spurs and the rattling of swords. While they drugged the midnight hours with laughter and debauch, their faces were feverish with listening expectancy—the expectancy of an event for which they waited.
The women looked like captives of a raid. Some hung back timidly; some were bold with wine; all were weary and pinched with hunger. Like the men, they seemed only to be acting a part. In the midst of recklessness they would give way to distaste, as though remorseful of this way of combating starvation.
With the stench of the death train still in his nostrils, Hindwood stared at the spectacle in pity and disgust. “Fiddling while Rome is burning,” he muttered.
His elbow was jogged by a black-coated individual with the appeasing manners of a tailor.
“I understand English. What is it you desire?”
Hindwood swung round. “So much the better. I want what one usually wants at a hotel—accommodation.”
The man rubbed his hands. “Sorry, sir. We're full up. Every room, in fact every lounge is taken.”
“You'll have to find something. I have a military order.”
Having read it the man returned the slip of paper. “That's different. You're here on Government business—for the same purpose as these other gentlemen, I take it?”
Hindwood replied non-committally. “Yes, on Government business.”
“In that case I'll give you a room in the basement—a servant's, my last. It's all I have to offer.”
“But two rooms are necessary. I have my secretary with me—this lady.”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “To demand the impossible is useless. To-morrow—who knows? If things happen, I may be able to give you more rooms than you require. For the present...”
Seeing that nothing was to be gained by arguing, Hindwood consented to the arrangement.
“The room will be my secretary's. If you'll lend me blankets, I'll find a place in the passage.”
The room proved to be poor in the extreme—nothing but four bare walls and an iron cot. When he had turned the key he tiptoed over to Santa.
“What's this monstrous thing for which they're waiting—this something that may happen to-morrow?”
She placed her hands in his, as though she felt the need of protection. Her golden face was tragic. “War.”
His common sense revolted. Though everything seemed to prove her guess correct, he refused to accept it. “War! It can't be. What would any one gain by it? It was war that produced all this hideous mess—the death train and all that. Besides, how can people fight who can scarcely crawl? They have one foot in the grave already. Ten well-fed men could defeat a battalion. Whatever's in the wind, it isn't war. To launch a war requires money.”
“With you it's always money. To launch this kind of a war requires nothing but despair.”
Stepping back from him tempestuously, she flung herself full length on the cot. Her face was hidden, buried in the pillow. While she lay there tense, the sound of dance-music, advancing and retreating, tapped dreamily against the walls. It spoke to him of romance, of a woman he could love, and of passion snatched perilously before life ended, in a mysterious city after nightfall.
She had raised herself and was regarding him feverishly. Her red lips were parted as with thirst.
“I know you so well,” she was saying softly; “I know you because I love you. You refuse to believe it's war because you wouldn't be able to sell and bargain. But it is war—the sort of war we saw at the frontier: a war in which weaponless millions will march to the overthrow of embattled thousands.”
“You're unjust.” He spoke patiently. “I'm unwilling to believe it's war because I can't see any reason for it.”
“Any reason!” Her eyes became twin storms. “Would you require a reason if you'd seen your children die for lack of bread? You'd perish gladly, if you could first tear the throat out of one person who was too well nourished.”
He went and stood beside her, stooping over her, placing his hand against her forehead. “You're burning. You've been through too much. Get some rest. To-morrow we'll find Anna and perhaps Var-ensky; it's more than likely they'll be able to tell us.” He paused. “I know what makes you so relentless; it's your own dead child—”
Her arms shot up, dragging him down and nestling his face against her breast. “Oh, my man, it's not that. It's that I'm jealous for you—so afraid you may deceive yourself and miss your chance.” He stumbled back from the temptation of her yielding body and the comfort of her fragrant warmth.
“My chance is yours; we may both have been born for this moment.”
Long after he had stretched himself outside her door, he felt that in the austerity of the four bare walls she still crouched watching from her bed.
He slept restlessly. The music and the dancing rarely halted. Once when he roused, it was with the suffocating sense that a man was bending over him, fumbling at the handle of Santa's door. As he sat up, he was convinced that the man looked back just before he vanished around the corner.
When he finally wakened, it was in the chill of dawn. He was surrounded by a ghostly stillness. Rising softly, he slipped down the passage and out into the public rooms of the hotel. It was as though a wizard had waved his wand. The merry-makers lay strewn about carelessly, wherever sleep had overtaken them. In the pale light of morning, robbed of animation, their faces showed waxlike and wan. Swords, which had clattered martially, sprawled grotesquely by crumpled bodies. Uniforms looked tarnished, dresses shabby. Girls, with their lips parted and their hair disordered, lay with heads stretched back in their lovers' arms. Over all was spread the weariness of folly.
Tiptoeing from group to group, he searched for the man who had tried Santa's door. Nowhere could he find him. Returning to her room, he tapped lightly. He was afraid to make more noise in that atmosphere of menace. Receiving no answer, he pushed the door stealthily and peered across the threshold. He had feared lest he might find her gone; there she lay curled up in her cot, her hair poured across her pillow, her face cushioned against her hollowed arm. Gray light falling from a narrow window clothed her with a lonely pathos. Bending over her, he shook her shoulder. “Santa.”
She sat up with a start.
“Has it happened?”
“Not yet. They're sleeping like the dead.”
“Then why—?”
“There's someone who knows us here. He tried your door. It makes me think we're watched. We can slip out now and hunt up Varensky. If we wait till later, we'll be followed.”
Her pupils dilated, obscuring the grayness of her eyes; they became black pools, mirroring her terror. “To be caught with Varensky would mean death.” He seated himself on the edge of her cot. “I didn't think you knew what fear was. Don't be frightened. I'll protect you.”
“Dear!” All of a sudden she had become intensely calm. “Did you think I was afraid for myself? Before many days, perhaps before to-day is out, it'll be you who'll need protecting. I beg you, don't go near Varensky.”
“But—”
“Let me go myself,” she implored. When he glanced away without replying, she rushed on impetuously. “Some one's got to take risks. I don't count. Your life must be spared.”
With an effort he brought his gaze back. “There's Anna.”
Instead of the explosion he had expected, her voice became gravely tender. “I forgot. You care for her as I care for you. I'm sorry.”
Her feet slipped to the floor; he saw them marble white against the bare, scrubbed boards—beautiful as hands, the feet of a dancer. As he retreated, she smiled bravely, “You shan't wait long.”
So far as they were aware, no one had noticed their departure. The deep breathing of the motley throng had been like the beat of a muffled engine. Even the night-porter, who should have been on guard, had collapsed across his desk with his face buried in his arms.
They had stepped out of the hotel into a pulseless street where mists from the Danube hung like cobwebs. Hindwood could not rid himself of the suspicion that they were followed. He glanced back repeatedly, drawing Santa sharply into doorways in attempt after attempt to trap the tracker. If a tracker there was, he never revealed himself. At last Hindwood realized that precautions were profitless. The cessation of their own footsteps gave ample warning. A pursuer had only to halt when they halted, to escape detection behind the fog.
They scarcely dared talk, and then only in brief whispers. It puzzled him how she could keep her direction. It was like tunneling a passage through chalk, which crumbled, yielded, and caved in as one went forward. The whole world dripped sullenly—unseen gutters, unseen trees, treacherous pavements. And there was always the drifting whiteness, pricking one's eyes as with little darts.
She had gone too far and turned back, feeling her way along the wall. Before a large double-door she paused and knocked. She rapped three times peculiarly before a grill was slipped back and a question asked. The answer which she gave appeared to be the countersign. A smaller door in the doubledoor was opened and they entered.
The person who had admitted them was a new type to Hindwood: flat featured, fair-headed, blue-eyed, clad in a loose khaki shirt, which bulged like a blouse, and in a pair of baggy breeches which were tucked into high-boots, roomy as pouches. But it was the expression of the man that was most impressive—his brooding appearance of enormous patience. Santa spoke rapidly in a language which was neither German nor French. The man nodded and led the way across a gloomy courtyard, up stairs rotten with decay, into a stone corridor lined with stout forbidding doors.
“Is it a prison?” Hindwood whispered.
“Little better. It's a barracks inhabited by the brains of outcast Russia—students, for the most part, male and female, who have escaped from the Red Terror. Russia has no use for brains at present. Brains are too dangerous. Wherever the Bolshevist finds them, he blows them out. Many of these exiles are survivors of Denikin's and Kolchak's armies. Having tried to save their country with rifles, they're now preparing themselves to rescue her with knowledge. They're learning to be doctors, engineers and lawyers, so that they may become the soul of the Russia of the future. Meanwhile they live anyhow, sleep anywhere and starve abominably. They're not wanted in Hungary or in any European country. They're suspected and hounded. The only reason they've been allotted this mildewed dwelling is in order that they may be watched.”
The guide had thrown open a door and stood signing to them, trying to catch their attention.
It was a grim sight that met their eyes, similar to the one they had left behind at the hotel only a thousand times more sordid. The windows were locked and heavily barred. The air was poisonous. The room was stripped of furnishings. On bare boards innumerable human beings, without a shred of bedding, sprawled, drugged with sleep, herded together in indecent proximity. There was scarcely space to walk between them. They were of both sexes. Here and there a child lay folded in a parent's arms. The men were of all ages, but for the most part young and still in the tattered uniforms of their defeated armies. The women were scarcely distinguishable from the men. Their heads were cropped. They wore odd garments of mixed masculine and feminine attire, such as could be purchased for next to nothing at any rag-shop. Some retained the soldier-garb of the Battalions of Death. As Hindwood gazed across the pool of mud-colored faces, “Heaven help us, if this is the soul of the future Russia!” he thought.
Suddenly his interest shifted. In the corner remotest from the door, his eye had caught the shining of golden tresses. Their owner's face was turned away from him; they seemed to weigh her down and were piled beneath her head in a cushion. On her left lay an aged peasant woman; on her right a man with a death-white face and a head that was peaked like a dunce's cap. The guide was already stooping over the man, touching him with a strange reverence. The man sat up. His green eyes opened. Hindwood experienced the same sensation of discomfort he had felt, when he had first seen them peering at him above the edge of the cliff at Seafold.
Varensky had risen. With his peculiarly catlike motion, he was picking a path towards them. He held out his hand.
“It was brave of you to come.” And then to Santa, “Of you, too. But of you it was expected.”
Hindwood bristled like a dog. He was distrustful of romantic attitudes. “Let's get down to facts. You know as well as I do that it wasn't any lofty motive that brought me.”
“No?” The eye-brows arched themselves comically. “Then what?”
“Your wife's message.”
“Ah! I understand. She didn't tell me. You see, she thinks I'm going to get myself killed at last; probably she wants you to help stop me. Not that I'm of the least use to her—don't think that. But she's the soul of honor. My death would mean her freedom; because of that she'd do anything in her power to prevent—”
Hindwood drew himself erect. “These are matters which it's not decent for us to discuss.”
The narrow shoulders flew up into a shrug. “Why on earth not? When things are so, there can be nothing indecent in being frank about them. Is it less indecent for you to love my wife than for me to tell that I know you love her? There'd be no sense in your loving her unless you both hoped—I won't finish what I was going to say; your feelings are so sensitive.” He rested his hand not unkindly on Hindwood's arm. “Don't you realize, my dear fellow, that you're to be congratulated? This happening which means catastrophe for countless millions, for you and Anna spells opportunity. Be honest. You would not have risked visiting me, if you had not realized that.”
Hindwood sought for spitefulness in Varensky's tones. All he found was the surge of a quiet happiness.
“One would think that I wanted you to die!” he exclaimed blankly.
“Well, don't you? Why shouldn't you?” Varen-sky smiled sadly. “If I could love Anna or any other woman the way you do—— But no—to me such affections have been denied. I love people only in crowds, by tens of thousands and by nations; in my heart there's no room for more human passions. I'm God's instrument; the hour of my testing is at hand. These mildewed walls inclose my Gethsemane.”
He flung his arms apart grotesquely; they formed with his body the shape of a cross. The fire of fanaticism blazed in his eyes. “To-morrow I shall be crucified.” He drew a shuddering breath.
“A born actor!” was Hindwood's silent comment—“An egoist who craves the lime-light.”
And yet, to his chagrin, he found himself impressed. He was so deeply stirred that he dared not trust himself to speak for a moment; when he did, it was with calculated coldness.
“You think only of yourself. It's not you alone; even those of us who make no claim to be God's instruments, stand more than a sporting chance of being crucified, as you call it. There are Santa and Anna, for instance; there's the collection of wretched down-and-outs gathered in this building; there are the scarecrows I saw in the death train; there are all the teeming swarms of human lice crawling westward along a thousand roads. In the presence of an agony so widespread, I can't muster a tear for your individual tragedy. It's no time for theatrics.”
For an instant Varensky's gaunt face quivered. Making an effort, with an air of mocking courtliness he mastered his injured pride.
“I was mistaken and I ask your pardon. We all have our plans to make ahead. I supposed you were here to ascertain approximately the hour at which I proposed to—— Shall we say, depart?”
“You were badly mistaken,” Hindwood cut in contemptuously. “I'm here to find out if there's any possible way in which we can save the situation.”
“We!”
Varensky stared. He became rigid as though he were carved from marble. “We!” he repeated haughtily.
While Hindwood was searching for a clue to his amazement, his next words supplied it.
“I thought it was I who was to save the world.”
“Splendid! You have a plan?”
Varensky's eyes filmed over. “Yes. But if I were to tell you, you wouldn't understand.” Coming out of the clouds, he placed his hand tolerantly on Hind-wood's shoulder. “Splendid, you said. So you want me to have a plan? Let's sit down and talk more quietly. These people are tired—in sleep they forget. So you also have ambitions to become a saviour?”
It was like the night in the hut all over again, when they had talked of Santa's redemption. There he sat, this discredited dictator, half-saint, half-charlatan, his knees drawn sharply up to his chin, his white face peering over them. The stale air sighed with the breathing of sleepers. A child whimpered and was hugged closer to the breast. In the far corner lay the desired woman. Gazing eagerly into both their eyes was the oriental countenance of the other woman, for whom neither of them cared.
“A saviour! No. I have no ambitions in that direction. But I have a scheme,” Hindwood admitted.
“What is it?”
“Bread. I came to sell bread for trade-concessions. In Austria I found the Government unwilling to purchase. This morning, when I consult with Hungarian officials, I may be met with the same refusal. What's the game? Why should men in control of hungry nations refuse my help? For six months they've been urging me to come to them. Something's happened—the signs of it are everywhere. Trains running westward are packed with women. The last sight we had of Vienna was a street-riot and people brutally shot down. And again at the frontier there were piles of dead—not only men: women and children who had been butchered to prevent them from escaping. Budapest's under military law. By some error, Santa and I on arrival were mistaken for conspirators in an army plot. We're billeted at what appears to be its headquarters—a place jammed with carousing officers of supposedly disbanded regiments. What's in the air? What is this dreadful news which some people rejoice over, from which others flee in panic, but which no one dares to mention? If you can tell me, I shall know how to act.”
“If I can tell you—! Suppose I were to tell you the worst, how would you act then?”
“That depends. I'm no more unselfish than anybody else. At a pinch I could forget my own interests and ruin myself for the public welfare. Here's how I stand. I have enough food at my command to keep Europe for several weeks from actual starvation. If the crisis is genuine, that ought to give time for the conscience of the civilized world to be aroused. But even if the world's conscience should prove too sluggish, I still have a personal fortune which would keep hunger at bay for several months. I'm no philanthropist—I should make myself penniless reluctantly. I'm in no sense your rival for the honors of Calvary. My mission in Europe is to sell at a profit. So if you can do better——”
“What you're telling me,” Varensky interrupted, “is that, if by personal sacrifice you could avert a world disaster, you'd be willing to give something for nothing.”
“Precisely. But I must first be convinced that the circumstances warrant it.”
“There's one point you've overlooked.” Varen-sky's green eyes narrowed. “Up to the moment you entered this room, I was fully persuaded that I was the man on whom the privilege of paying the price must fall. I'd coveted the privilege. All my life I'd worked for it. If you rob me of it, have you reckoned the cost?”
“In money?”
“In something more valuable. If I live, you can never be Anna's husband.”
Hindwood hated the man for his subtlety. He was being deliberately tempted. He threw a glance toward the sleeping woman in the corner whose fate, as well as his own, he was deciding. Close to him, drawing nearer, he saw the pleading eyes of Santa. He gave his answer.
“I may be the man who was born for this moment. Play fair by me; tell me what's happened.” Varensky rocked himself slowly back and forth. Suddenly he came to rest.
“I'm the thing that's happened. I'm responsible for everything. I've never learnt to let bad alone; in trying to make things better, I make them worse. It was my hand that shot down the crowd at Vienna. It was I who butchered the women and children at the frontier. I'm the force which drives behind the human lice who crawl westward along a thousand roads. You think me mad; but listen. Every freedom gained entails a new bondage. I helped to free Russia from the Czar; in so doing, I prepared the way for Bolshevism. I've fought Bolshevism with my dreams, my happiness, with everything I possess. Bolshevism is overthrown. What have I produced? Chaos.”
“Overthrown! Then that's the meaning of it.” Santa had half risen.
Varensky turned his death-white face on her, chilling her enthusiasm. “It's collapsed like a pack of cards. With it have vanished the last of the restraints. Every Russian's his own master now to choose his own ditch in which to perish. We've destroyed a vision that turned out to be a nightmare, but we've set up nothing in its stead. We, who are idealists, have worked the final disillusion. We've made two hundred millions hopeless. They're fleeing from the emptiness. The contagion of their despair is spreading. You saw its results in Vienna. It runs ahead of them; they're already on the march. They've broken into Poland. They're drawing nearer. How to stop them——?”
Hindwood's lips had squared themselves. “I can stop them. My food-trains will be here by tomorrow. What hungry men need is not political programs, but bread.” Then he added thoughtfully, “I can stop them, if I'm not prevented. There's some one who's playing a different game; he's some one who wants the world to starve. That's what Austria's refusal meant; that's the meaning of these secret signs of rejoicing. He's bigger than any nation. Who is he?”
Varensky shook his head. “There was a man.” He looked knowingly at Santa. “He was drowned.”
Hindwood jumped to his feet as though there was no time to be lost. “I'm going to find out. I have an appointment with the Governor of Hungary. If he rejects my offer, I shall demand——”
“And if he refuses——?”
“I shall play my winning-card. Don't ask me what it is. But if I play it, I shall need your help. You've talked of crucifixion: I may provide you with the chance. How many of these——?” He pointed to the sleeping outcasts.
Varensky's eyes were shining. “I've four hundred: three hundred veterans of Denikin's and Kolchak's armies and a hundred girl-soldiers of the Battalions of Death.”
“Have them warned.”
As he turned on his heel, he saw that Anna had wakened. She cried out after him. He dared not face her. Leaping down the stairs, he went at a run across the courtyard. It was only when the door into the street had closed behind him, that he realized that Santa was panting at his elbow.
Mists were clearing. The sun had emerged fiery above a mountain-range of clouds. As they hurried in search of their hotel, they caught glimpses of the Danube, spanned by many bridges, and on the further bank the palace-crowned heights of Buda. The ancient city looked imperially beautiful. There was a touch of the East about it, a lavishness and rose-tinted whiteness. Its quays and pavements shone wet, as though they had been daubed with lacquer. It seemed incredible that behind its gold-splashed walls the ghosts of hunger gathered.
During their absence from the Ritz, a transformation had been effected. All signs of disorder had been banished. In place of the untimely Bacchanalians, stiff-bosomed waiters stood guard over neat tables with a solicitous air which was bewilderingly normal. Even the breakfast menu gave the lie to starvation.
They took their seats in silence, eating without interest whatever was set before them. Hindwood's sensations were those of a man who has given way to his emotions at a theatre. It was as though the lights had gone up, shaming him in public. There had been nothing to warrant his surrender to sentiment. He totaled up the accumulated incentives: he had witnessed a street-riot, people slain at the frontier, the hideous contrast between the death train and dancing—and last of all Varensky. But these things in themselves constituted no argument; the cause that lay behind them was still conjectural. As for Varensky, whatever he had said was unreliable. His wish was parent to his thought. He was a man born to stir up turbulences, which he considered it his mission to pacify. He was dangerous as a forest-fire: one spark of his wild idealism made the whole world lurid. In the breath of adversity he became a sheet of flame, destructive and self-destroying. His goal was the vanishing-point, in the No Man's Land between desire and things attainable.
Hindwood writhed at remembering the ease with which his judgment had been unseated. In his weakness he had given a promise, which it would be folly to fulfill and dishonorable to withdraw. He glanced across at Santa. How was she taking this return to normality?
She met his eyes with passionate adoration. “It was god-like of you.”
He pretended ignorance. “What?”
“Your self-denial. You've given up everything—Anna, ambition, money—all the things you worship.”
He assumed a judicial expression. “Perhaps not. It mayn't be necessary.”
“But it will.”
“If it is,” he said, “I shall stick to my contract. But I've reason to believe we've exaggerated.”
“Would to God we had!”
Her fervor disturbed him. He leaned across the table. “You don't mean to tell me you accept this bogey story about starving millions marching? There's a sense of security this morning. Surely you must have felt it?”
She shook her head. “We've had a meal—that's all. Within a mile from here I could show you a hospital where five hundred babies sit shivering like monkeys. They're wrapped in paper; they've never known what it was not to be hungry from the day they were born. I could take you to the workmen's quarter, where naked men and women would squirm at your feet like dogs; they're too weak to walk. I could lead you past the bread-lines, already forming——”
He stayed her by covering her hand. “I'm not denying it. When countries make wars they have to pay penalties.”
The storm that was brewing betrayed itself in her eyes. “What are you denying?”
“Don't let's make a scene,” he urged. “My promise holds if I find that circumstances warrant it. In a little while I'm seeing the Governor of Hungary; after that I'll be sure. While I'm gone, I have one request to make of you: keep your room and talk to nobody.”
She rose from the table in suppressed defiance.
“Why?”
“For your own safety. It was lucky I slept across your threshold last night. Your door was tried.”
Her smile accused him. “By whom?”
“If I'm not mistaken, by the man who afterwards tracked us through the fog.”
She turned away as though she were finished with him. When she found that he was following, she delivered a parting shot. “You told me this to frighten me. Did you think you could make me your accomplice in cowardice?”
So these were the rewards of knight-errantry! In his anger he was glad to be rid of her. He was free at last. She'd been nothing but an embarrassment. If she were to attempt a reconciliation, he would turn his back on her. It wasn't likely that he'd put his neck into the same noose twice.
Little by little from resenting her, he began to suspect her. Had she been using him as a cat's-paw in a deeper game? Every man with whom she had ever associated, she had destroyed; could she be expected, to show more mercy to a man by whom she had been rejected? Her husband's words came back: “When she has added you to her list of victims, if she gives you time before she kills you, remember that I warned you.”
Everything to do with her became distorted when interpreted in the light of treachery. The pathos of her unrequited affection had been a mask; her humanitarianism had been a cloak for her designs. When he retraced his relations with her, it seemed glaringly probable that from the start she had been the agent of his financial rivals, placed by them on board theRyndamwith the definite intention of accomplishing his ruin. Except for her final error in tactics, she would have attained her object. He had escaped by the narrowest of margins.
But the other people who had come upon the scene, where did they stand? Were they her puppets, jumping whichever way she pulled the wires, or were they her active co-conspirators? Varensky and the Little Grandmother were undoubtedly her puppets; she employed their enthusiasms to serve her purposes. Anna was her victim—a woman wronged and cheated, infinitely dear to him and tragic. It was Captain Lajos who troubled him. The more he thought about him, the more certain he became that the Captain and Santa were hand in glove. The farce which they had enacted on the train had been prearranged with a view to intimidating him. His most unnerving information, concerning the menace of starving millions, had come from the Captain. And there was a further fact, which had been disquieting him all morning: it was Captain Lajos who had tried Santa's door last night.
What did they think to gain by their plotting? Having pondered the conundrum, he decided that their object was to thwart his schemes for grasping world-power, and that the means they had chosen were to compel him to give for nothing the hoards of food which he had intended that Europe should buy.
Well aware that this theory was far from covering all the facts, he was still feeling his way through a quagmire of surmise, when a visitor was announced. In the foyer he found an officer, resplendently uniformed, waiting to escort him to his audience at the Royal Palace. He was whizzed away in a handsome car. As he traveled, his companion entertained him with anecdotes, grimly humorous, of Bela Kun's reign of terror.
“Experiments of that sort soon disprove themselves,” he said cheerfully. “We live through them and go on again.”
“And your country is going on again?” Hindwood inquired.
“Emphatically. Signs of revival are already apparent.”
“But what about Russia? How's revival possible without security?”
The officer laughed carelessly. “I catch your meaning; you've heard this latest about Bolshevism's downfall. In our part of the world we pay no heed to rumors; they're inventions of political opportunists or of gamblers in the international exchange. Even if this latest is true, it's the best thing that could have happened.”
Hindwood twisted in his seat that he might lose nothing of his companion's expression. “The best thing in the long run—that's granted. But meanwhile, because of the breakdown in organization, over a hundred million Russians are likely to die.”
Again the officer laughed, stretching his long legs. “The fittest will survive. One has to die somehow. The last war was fought because the world was too crowded. Famine's nature's cure for overpopulation.”
The remark sounded singularly ill-timed, coming from a man whose country was also starving. Hindwood frowned. “A heartless cure and, thank goodness, not the only one.”
“Not more heartless than civilized society's, which encourages armed nations to strangle each other with every filthy invention of science. When you forbid Nature to correct matters in her own way, sooner or later you find yourself with a war on your hands. The matter's very simple: so many mouths to fill and so many rations. When the mouths are in excess of the rations, some one has to go short. The people who are selected to go short can either drop in their tracks or fight. If they fight and win, the result's the same—some one else has to go without. The adjustment's automatic.”
“The thought of death,” Hindwood suggested quietly, “especially of other people's death, doesn't seem to trouble you.”
“That's natural. Killing and dying are my trade.”
Brutal as was the point of view, after Santa's sentimental fallacies, there was something honest and direct about these bald assertions.
Hindwood spoke again. “What applies to Russia, applies equally to Hungary. My errand at the Palace is to offer sufficient food to keep your country alive. According to your theory, I'm interfering with Nature's laws. I'm doing something economically immoral. I ought to leave you to your fate.”
To his amazement he was met with a polite concurrence. “That's how I regard it.”
It was impossible to credit the man's sincerity. Hindwood glanced aside, irritated and shocked. He was seeking a motive for such disinterested frankness. There was nothing more to say.
He had been so much absorbed in the conversation that he had not noticed their direction. They were skimming high above the Danube, crossing a bridge that spanned the sunlit gulf in giant strides. Behind lay Pest, modern as a second Paris; in front lay Buda, ancient and scarcely Christian, still bearing the marks of its Turkish occupation. On reaching the further bank, the ascent to the Palace begun to climb.
It was just as they were reaching the top that Hindwood was for a second time startled by the ghost of memory. Peering down on him from the ramparts, with its head between its paws, was a snow-white Russian wolf-hound. The next moment they had passed beneath an arch, between saluting sentries, and had halted in the Palace-yard.