Aszód!... The train stopped. I had often heard that after Budapest Aszód had been the place where the Communists had met with the greatest measure of success. I looked out of the window. Over the Reformatory a huge red flag was flying, and a similar flag was hoisted over the station. A crowd gathered in front of one of the carriages, and some people who were late came tearing along and took their hats off. A fat little man with Semitic features and a red rosette descended from a reserved compartment. He might have been a broker, but now he was addressed as “Comrade on a Political Mission.” He was received by a deputation and people cringed before him. I noticed that the crowd was composed of two types only: the impudent adventurer and the frightened coward, but presently others joined them. Someone said they were agitators from Budapest and had come with armed soldiers. Propaganda and terror—the two means of government of the Communists. The fiddler was one of them: he, too, was an agitator. I passed through the festive crowd unobserved, they being too busy to pay any heed to the travellers. Far out beyond the platform a dilapidated little local train was smoking. Mrs. Kállay and her two daughters were heading for it, so I followed them. At last we dared to get into the same compartment. We even exchanged a few words, and the further we got from the Red town the freer we felt. Elisabeth Kállay whispered to me that she was hiding her diadem in her dress, and Lenke furtively produced an old revolver from under her coat. We could not help laughing. Other passengers also seemed to have their secrets, for many of them were abnormally corpulent and sat uncomfortably on their seats. Everybody was saving whatever he could, and nowadays only that which one can carry on one’s person can be said to belong to one. The air blowing in through the window was pure and sharp, and beyond the line were lush meadows, deep, swampy fields, budding trees, white cottages, roads, carts and peasants. Here everything seemed to be going on as usual, as if nothing had happened. The mud of the country roads was cleaner than that on the asphalt of the town. We had left the flat country of the disgraced capital and presently the hillocks of Nográd came to meet us under the evening sky, the bare, red-brown woods and white villages on the banks of the Galga forming the landscape. A landau was waiting for us behind the station. The coachman took off his hat respectfully and spoke to us just as in the old days. How strange it seemed! Springless carts rattled down the road and the elderly men in them doffed their hats: had not they yet been told that they were in duty bound to hate those who had always protected them? A church bell pealed somewhere on the top of a hill, and the light of a bright fire streamed out of the door of a house. A woman stood within its beams and made the sign of the Cross. She did not yet know that the new power had declared war on God.