At these words the little girl clung crying to her mother’s skirts. “Mummie dear,” she implored, “you won’t let the horrid State take me away from you....” The woman shook her head. The coachman laughed and said: “I don’t know, if you are really naughty....” The child howled, so her mother picked her up in her arms and in that one tender movement negatived all Communist ordinances. She disappeared, carrying the weeping child and seeming to become one with it. I followed them with my eyes: beyond them, set in a sea of darkness, were the soft outlines of the sleeping village: the roofs of the cottages alone were visible under the starry sky. And Lenin is to come here too! Bled white, the villages sleep and offer no resistance. But in their very dreams the villagers cling to the soil; and the soil is their country, and their country is Great Hungary. My heart went out to the villages. The village, the Hungarian village, is selfish like a child, indifferent like a sign-post, and as strong as wind and weather. Its sins are the wild revels derived from its vineyards; the desire for fecundity in men, women and soil alike. Its blessings are sowing and reaping. There is here a ray of hope. Will the Hungarian village be our salvation? * * * * * _April 1st–2nd._ Even a few days seems a long time when one is counting the hours. And now the second week has gone and there is no sign of our distress coming to an end. Bolshevism is destroying with the impudence of ignorance and building with the inexperience of barbarism. Lenin decreed that the old order should be ruthlessly destroyed and the new order constructed without delay. The Bolsheviks of Budapest hasten to obey. With such insatiable zeal do they set to work that their topsy-turvy legislation is but a disclosure and a legalisation of their previous arbitrary actions. The papers give practically no other news. They aim blows at human ethical conceptions and at Hungarian life. They provide a defence for evil-doers and for brigands. The Jewish Commissary for Justice has proscribed the administration of justice, for he has suspended the sittings of the law-courts! Never before have I realised to what an extent we are at these people’s mercy. Károlyi set the criminals free; the criminals let crime loose to supply their needs. Immorality and lawlessness require the freedom of crime for their sway. To produce unlimited means for its rule Bolshevism abolishes the private property of others, distributes it among its own adherents, and uses it to pay its servants. Anxiety is now perpetually with me: I feel like a person going late at night through a dark abandoned street who hears moaning from behind a closed window. It is impossible to enter: no policeman can be found. What is happening? Dark speculations haunt one’s mind as long as night endures.