I stared at the stranger. Why did he want to read about these things now? They have been proclaimed aloud for tens of years. But what had been done in Hungary to counteract them? Has anybody been at work among the people contradicting them? Has anyone founded a popular library to proclaim the tenets of Christ, the significance of country and family, the primary conditions of human society, with similar persistence among the people? The Communists worked hard. They fixed their goal and with every action, every word, every letter, strove to achieve domination. Meanwhile Magyardom let the decades pass passively, inactively, and now that the earth has given way under its feet it has lost its head. The alarmed fellow-traveller went on reading his book, hastily turning page after page. I should have liked to tell him that it was no good hurrying now—he was too late. Just then a man stopped in the entrance of our compartment, a violin in his grimy black hand. His low forehead was surrounded by curling oriental black hair, his eyes were bloodshot, and one of his nostrils was missing, as though it had been gnawed away by some animal. He pressed his fiddle under his bristly blue chin, a smile began to spread over his horrible syphilitic face, and with a slow rhythm the bow passed over the chords. His body swayed to and fro with the tune, and each movement seemed to raise a filthy stench in the compartment. The tune and the musician became one, and above the rattling of the train sounded the strains of the ‘Internationale.’ “I’ll play it again if anybody wants to learn it,” he said, as he finished, and looked round with a sly, aggressive look. But nobody answered. Only the man with the ‘red man’ in his button-hole jumped up nervously and waved a twenty-crown bank-note in his hand. The filthy black hands seized it eagerly and disappeared. Then we heard the fiddle whining in the next compartment: the Jew-Gipsy was teaching the new tune to the people. “If anybody wants to learn it....”