by Ann Bridge
“Well, you thought wrong!” Hope said in English—really to herself. “Hurry up with that coffee, Berta,” she added in Hungarian. “I’m going out.”
When the maid had gone the girl sprang up and began to dress, hurriedly; the toast and coffee came before she had finished, and she gulped down the hot liquid and munched away while she did her face and hair, the cup set on her pretty glass-topped dressing-table. Oh, could this really be true? And what would it mean, if it were, for Stefan and the rest of them?
Before half-past eight she was out and away, sitting in a bus bowling down the Andrássy ut. Some of the passengers were talking eagerly to one another, half hysterical, half incredulous; others sat silent and tight-lipped, with a shocking look of stunned fear on their faces—a Jewish woman was weeping noisily. Hope got off at the further end of the great thoroughfare, and started to walk across the Chain Bridge. But before she was half-way over she saw for herself that Berta’s tale was true. Down the embankment on the further side of the Danube flowed a steady stream of vehicles, in a noise now absolutely shattering; the embankment was cobbled, and no one who has ever heard tanks passing over cobbles can forget that infernal racket—really a sound out of Hell. Not only tanks—at times there came a strange interval of relative quiet while rubber-tyred vehicles passed by: armoured cars, artillery camouflaged in dull colours, tank cars of petrol; big lorries and light lorries full of troops—very young men, for the most part, and many of them blond who waved gaily to the crowd who watched them from above the embankment proper. Here this ran below the end of the bridge, which was carried on a flyover to the foot of the buttressed road that climbed steeply in hairpin bends up to Buda, the old citadel, perched directly above—before she reached the end of the bridge Hope paused, half aghast, half curious. The stream was steady, but she wondered how fast it was really moving. Hope had always had a secret passion for precise and accurate observations; now she pushed her wrist forward beyond the cuff of her coat and peeled back her glove (as Stefan, Polish-wise, had peeled it back to kiss her hand in farewell at the flower-market)—she studied the second-hand of her watch, and then raised her eyes to that flow of vehicles as they passed out below the end of the bridge, and began to count. She did this for some minutes, and was presently able to register, for her own satisfaction, that the German armour was passing through Budapest at the rate of fifteen a minute.
At home, and later in the bus, Hope had hardly been able to believe that it was the Germans at all, here in neutral Hungary—that the dreaded horror had come to pass at last. But any faint hope that the servants had been exaggerating and that it really might only be some Hungarian Army Manœuvres was promptly dispelled by the sight of that river of mechanization, flowing down beside the great river itself. Who in Europe but the Germans had such masses of tanks and guns? And Hope had seen Hungarian Army Manœuvres often enough to recognize this as, alas, something very different from the lines of long narrow forage-carts, drawn by lightly-built half-Arab horses, which formed the supply-trains of the local divisions—she had even watched such carts, of freshly-cut grass, being unloaded in the remoter squares and open spaces of Budapest and other towns, to feed the horses and thus supply motive power to that antiquated military machine. So different to these great camouflaged tank-cars of which another fifteen, punctual to their sixty seconds, at that moment came out from under the end of the bridge. As she walked forward the girl found something horrifying about that display of power, of soulless mechanical precision, of anonymous inhuman efficiency. And yet there was a sort of magnificence about it too. When she approached the end of the bridge, at the point where a flight of steps ran down from the fly-over to the parapet walk below, a thin crowd, perhaps four deep, was hanging over to watch the deadly procession, and she was near enough to see how splendidly these alien troops were turned out: well-fitting tunics with every button shining, glossy boots, smartly-set caps, clean-shaven chins and trim hair-cuts—everything that the British Army has meant, for the last hundred years, by the phrase “spit and polish”. The whole set-up was, in a frightful sort of way, superb.
But now she heard a strange, a shocking and poignant thing. As the troop-filled lorries passed, voices from that thin crowd called out in German—“Wohin? Wohin?” (Whither bound?—Whither bound?) And those young, blond, spendid creatures called back—“Zum krepieren! Zum krepieren!” Now krepieren is the German slang expression for the death of an animal, not used for human death at all; what these men were replying was, in effect—To die like beasts! To die like beasts! The old expression “Cannon-fodder” came into her mind; that was what they were, and they knew it.
Then she began to think about the Hungarians, and their reactions to all this. As she passed the group of police who stood at the bridge’s further end, so smart and correct in their tall steel-ribbed blue helmets, she noticed that a certain proportion of the onlookers above the parapet were stretching out their right arms in the Fascist salute when the Germans waved to them. Oh, damn them! How many were doing this?—she must know. She ran down the steps to the path below, and strolling alone, carefully casual, she counted out a hundred people, and then checked to see how many were greeting the unwished-for arrivals. Twenty! She walked on, counting another hundred, and watched again—nineteen. Still sauntering with apparent casualness along the pavement, she did the same thing several times more: twenty-four, seventeen, nineteen, twenty—say an average of twenty per cent. How extraordinary—and how loathsome. The Szállascists, she supposed, must have turned out in force to greet their Nazi Allies. The old man at the Kis-Kocsma came into her mind; he had spat into the very river because German barges floated on it. What must he be thinking, at this moment? Oh no, it wasn’t true that twenty per cent of the people of Hungary were really pro-Nazi, were welcoming these steel-borne invaders. And where were they going, anyway? Would they halt, later on, and occupy the town?
That thought made her stop her mass-observation, which had taken her a good way upstream, and sent her scurrying homewards, back towards the Chain Bridge. Indeed before she reached it she felt a little shiver of panic, the panic of the civilian suddenly confronted with armed forces not his own. Would she be able to get back? But before she reached the bridge she got a surprising confirmation of her own conviction that not all the people of Budapest did really like what was going on. There was a momentary pause in the flow of armour, and some of the watchers on the parapet turned round—several of them, she saw, wore Arrow Cross badges fastened to their coats. Now people in the crowd turned on these gentry, with angry or contemptuous remarks—there was some jostling and hustling. Hope moved out into the roadway, and hurried all the more: and then she saw a curious thing. A tall fair boy, with rather a look of Hempel about him, interposed in one of the jostling groups; he stepped back, smiling with satisfaction, one of the Szállascist badges, on a long pin, in his hand. At that moment more armour came down the embankment, and the crowd turned to the parapet again, one vociferous Swabian with a fat behind and a bullet head calling out a final insult to his opponents before he leant out once more to give the Nazi salute. Quick as light, the young man plunged the pin up to the badge into the fat man’s behind, and then stepped across to where Hope was walking and strolled demurely along, tilting his hat. The fat Nazi, with a howl of rage, turned round and hit out right and left; in a moment a free fight was going on. The young man walked on, humming a tune; Hope laughed, and he turned and grinned at her. Hope could not help it—“It occurs to me that you are perhaps a Pole,” she said to him in French. “Mais oui, Mademoiselle,” the young man replied, raising his hat; and then walked quickly away.
This incident, which delighted her, had caused Hope momentarily to forget her sudden spasm of fear. And indeed there was no trouble: she climbed the steps, recrossed the bridge, hailed a taxi and was driven swiftly home. But what ages her expedition had taken—it was after 10 o’clock!
In the lift the new young liftman said—“The Count Teleki is dead.”
“Dead? Nonsense—you mean the Countess,” said Hope brusquely—like everyone else she knew that Countess Hanna was dangerously ill.
“No, but the Count,” said the liftman, with a face of dismay—“Such a great, such a good man!”
The lift stopped at this point, and Hope got out, leaving the boy to his delusions. János opened the door of the flat before she had time to ring, he must have been waiting just inside. “Oh, such terrible news!” he said—“Has the lady heard? The Count Teleki is dead.”
Hope stood still. “How? What of?” she asked sharply. János’s face was as stricken as that of the liftman, and Hope did know enough of local politics and feeling—far more than her Mother—to realize what the Prime Minister’s death, if he was dead, would mean to this small, troubled, anxious nation: the loss of a rock of intelligence and integrity, of, literally, a tower of supporting strength. “Did the Germans do it?” she asked wretchedly.
Before János could answer her Father came out of the morning-room—he must have heard the front door open. He looked anxious and vexed. “So you’re back,” he almost snapped. “Where in all the earth have you been?”
“I went to look at the Germans. What’s the matter?” Hope asked, peeling off her coat and gloves and handing them to Berta, who had appeared as if by magic. Mercy, was the whole household hanging on her return? Kálmán the butler was also in evidence in the offing. “János, bring me some breakfast to the morning-room,” she said brusquely. Hope was as allergic to any form of fuss as John Kirkland; she got that from him. “Father, what’s all this story about Count Teleki?” she asked as she walked along the hall.
“It seems he’s dead,” said John Kirkland briefly; his face was nearly as dismayed as the faces of János and the young man in the lift.
“But why? How?—I mean, what of?” Hope exclaimed, stopping short. “Surely the Germans wouldn’t dare?”
“I don’t know, any more than you,” her Father replied, as she walked forward again. “But it will be a disaster, a major disaster, for this country, if he really is gone,” he said sombrely, as he followed his daughter into the morning-room.
“I simply can’t understand it,” Hope said, going over to warm her hands at the fire of slender logs which burned brightly in the grate—she felt chill, suddenly, even in the pretty well-warmed room. “Are you sure it’s true? Nobody thought he was ill.”
“I don’t know. I tried to get Bill on the telephone, but he was out—gone round to the Legation, I expect. I left word for him to call me as soon as he gets back. But the Germans are in here, and no resistance of any sort, it seems; that looks like some kind of a sell-out, by somebody,” John Kirkland said, moodily kicking the burning logs. “And Teleki would never stand for that. I believe he’d given assurances to the British; it must have been done over his head or behind his back. He’s a man of his word—or was,” the American said gloomily. In his concern he was speaking much more openly than he usually did about politics to the members of his family. “But I guess he really is dead, however it happened. Everyone seems to know of it.” He leaned on the mantelpiece and kicked at the logs again, and then rounded on his daughter.
“And what on earth have you been up to? Haven’t you enough sense, Hope Kirkland, to keep indoors when there are enemy troops around?”
“I went to see them—I told you. Berta came and said they were here, so I went to have a look,” Hope said defensively. “And we aren’t at war with Germany, are we?”
“Yeah, and of course they’d spot you for an American citizen at once, and leave you alone,” her Father said sardonically. “Well, what did you see, anyway?”
“I saw the tanks and guns and trucks and things, driving along the Margit Embankment,” Hope replied, pouring out the coffee which János brought in at that moment, and beginning to drink it. “But they don’t seem to be stopping; they’re just going right through, and fairly fast, too.”
“How fast?”
“Well, I can’t judge the m.p.h.,” Hope tried on a grin, as she buttered her roll—“but they’re passing the end of the Lánc-Hid at the rate of fifteen a minute.”
“How in tunket do you know that?”
“Because I counted with my watch—for seven minutes. Oh and Father—it must be the Szállascists, mustn’t it?—because twenty per cent of the people watching them from that parapet above—you know—were leaning out and giving the Fascist salute when the boys in the trucks and on the gun-tractors waved to them. Oh, they did look so horrible!” said Hope, suddenly with trembling lips—“Their tin hats, and the camouflage on everything, and the ghastly row the tanks make, and all the guns sticking out!”
Her Father left the fireplace and came over and put an arm round her, where she sat at the small table on which János had placed the breakfast-tray.
“Poor little Hopey! I’ll bet they did. They are horrible, in my estimation. War’s the most horrible thing there is, and the Germans have been worshipping it for over a hundred years, maybe longer.”
“But Father”—for some reason Hope reverted to her special dismay even while she lifted her face to his kiss, and rubbed her cheek against his as she used to do when she was little—“it must have been mostly the Szállascists saluting mustn’t it? I know some of them were—they were wearing Arrow Cross badges.” She decided to suppress the story of the young Pole and the fat-behinded Nazi, because she oughtn’t to have spoken like that to a strange man. But still she wanted reassurance. “It couldn’t be as much as twenty per cent of normal Hungarians who were glad to see those tough creatures, right here in their own city, possibly—could it?”
“No. I’d say it was the Arrow Cross, turning out in force—no doubt they got word in advance, the sons-of-bitches!” said Mr. Kirkland, with an unwonted energy of expression that made Hope giggle a little. “But how do you know it was twenty per cent? Did you count them too?” he asked, in a common parental astonishment at any display of intelligence by one’s offspring, mixed with an equally common pride.
“Of course. I counted the people off a hundred at a time, and then counted the arms—the arms that saluted. I did that most of the way up to the bridge by the Margit Island, and the average worked out at twenty per cent,” said Hope.
“Gosh!” her Father ejaculated. “Who taught you to do things like that? Not the nuns?”
She laughed out. “Of course not! No one. I just like facts, that’s all—and you get a lot of facts best by counting. Figures talk—I mean accurate figures.”
Her Father laughed in his turn, delighted. “I’ll put you into the business!” he was beginning, when the telephone rang, and he hurried over to it, saying—“It may be Bill.”
It was not Bill Hershey, however—it was Mr. Kirkland’s office, as Hope quickly guessed from the stream of sharp ejaculations—“What’s that?” “Say that again.” “Whaat?” which reached her ears. “You’d better come round and report—I don’t like all this,” John Kirkland said finally. “I’ll be along after I’ve seen you, tell Mr. Sulzberger.” He rang off.
“What’s all that?” Hope asked as he left the instrument.
“Young Armitage reporting—I’ve told him to come right round. He says the Germans have taken over all the Post Offices and telephone exchanges, and have detachments posted at every petrol-station since last night. God rot their guts!” Mr. Kirkland exploded, with a ferocity most unusual for him.
“So one can’t get petrol?” While he was talking on the telephone Hope had suddenly begun to worry again about that little party in the Radolny utca. With the Germans actually in Budapest they ought to clear out now, at all costs, all of them, secret information or no secret information. Because if the Germans were taking over telephones and all that—and petrol, which meant all means of transport—they were really going to be in control of the country; and mightn’t they bring in their own Gestapo too, to hunt undesirables? Hunt them with that frightful efficiency which Stefan had grudgingly praised when he told her about the miracle o
f the hare, outside the Kis-Kocsma. And who could be more undesirable, from the German point of view, than camp-running Poles?
“Oh, I guess we’ll get petrol all right,” her Father replied. “And if we can’t, we’ll get Bill to have us filled up. Or the British. I heard their Minister had a great big tank sunk in the Legation courtyard months back, with a pump put on top—and they say he has a whole fleet of cars and lorries tucked away some place, so he can get his staff out if they have to make a get-away in a hurry. Maybe they will have to, now! That Minister is about the most speechless man I ever met,” Mr. Kirkland observed reflectively; “but I will say he’s smart.”
Hope’s fresh preoccupation had made her lose interest in the question of petrol for the moment.
“Did Mr. Armitage say if the Germans have brought the Gestapo in too?” she asked.
“No, he didn’t.” The question rather surprised Mr. Kirkland. “Why do you want to know that?” he enquired.
“Oh, I just wondered.” But she was saved from the necessity of trying to explain her curiosity about the Gestapo, because first the chauffeur asked to see his master with some question about the cars, and then Mr. Armitage was announced. Him her Father carried off to his study; Hope rang for her breakfast to be taken away, and then hung about, restless and fidgety, waiting for more news—she felt she ought to know as much of the form as possible before she did anything about the Moranskis. At last she heard the front door open and close, and her Father came back.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, he’s certainly dead,” her Father said. “Armitage saw the posters in the streets just as he got here, and heard the news-boys crying ‘Teleki Maghalt!’ (Teleki Dead!) He bought a paper, but it only gives the official communiqué, that ‘he died with tragic suddenness’. But Armitage says the whole town is full of rumours that the Germans did it.”
“Surely no! I mean, what a thing to do—murder the Prime Minister of a friendly country!” Hope protested.