It was only through the newspapers that I learned what had happened. Advised by Károlyi, the King had received at Gödöllö the day before the Radical journalist Oscar Jászi and the two organisers of his party, Zsigmond Kúnfi and Ernest Garami, both Socialist journalists. Károlyi’s press was shouting victory, and having obtained all it wanted, it began to see red and started to defame the King. Poor young King! The reception was a sad and useless concession. These men were revolutionaries and poisoners whose due was not an audience but a warrant of arrest. Even now everything could have been saved, all that was wanted was a fist that dared to strike. But the King’s beautiful hands, according to Jászi’s report of the audience, only toyed nervously with his rings.... Their Majesties went in the evening to Vienna. They left their children in the royal castle and took Károlyi with them in the royal train. [Illustration: COUNT MICHAEL KÁROLYI AND HIS ENTOURAGE. Károlyi Böhm Pogány (_To face p. 50._)] The morning papers spoke of “Károlyi, the Prime Minister designate of Hungary.” There was to be a monster meeting in town in front of the House of Parliament. The workmen appeared in full force. Lovászy, Count Batthyany, and “comrades” Garbai and Pogány made revolutionary speeches. A group of workmen, to show their approval of these measures, carried a gallows on which a doll dressed like Tisza in red hussar breeches was suspended. In the evening the crowd went to the railway station to receive Károlyi on his return from Vienna. Later in the day my brother Géza telephoned to me from Baden (near Vienna); he had just come from General Headquarters. Archduke Joseph and Michael Károlyi had come in the same train. The King had recalled the Archduke from the Italian front and sent him as _homo regius_ to Budapest. The Archduke obeyed, though he would have preferred to return first to his troops and come back at their head to restore order in the capital. The King, however, vetoed this plan. Two unfortunate blunders. The Archduke arrived without backing, and Count Károlyi infinitely offended in his vanity. The youths of the Galilee Circle were waiting for the latter at the railway station, and he shook his long yellow hands in the air and shouted: “I will not forsake Hungary’s independence.” Meanwhile worse and worse news reached us. We reeled under it, stunned. Our inertia was folly. Everybody expected somebody else to do something, and in the dark hours of our mad misfortune Károlyi’s National Council alone became bolder.