Chapter I

The surging crowds, swaying, shuffling, grumbling, waited impatiently in the grim Parliament Square, as yet lit but faintly by the dawning from the east.

A motley crew, a corrupt community; the scene was but a typical picture of Budapest and all Hungary in the grip of revolution, a revolt of the proletariat for government by the proletariat, the shadow of Lenin falling upon an unhappy country, already torn by years of recent strife and earlier suppression.

A country, monarchist to the core, now ground down by Soldiers' Councils and Workers' Councils, headed by the Russian-taught Bela Kun, and the bloodthirsty tyrant Tibor Szamuelly, his Terror Boys, and the merciless Korvin-Klein. Unhappy Hungary!

Down through the ages have trickled histories of the French Revolution, the people versus the 'aristos.' Too well is known the toll of Madame Guillotine, and the cruel justice of Robespierre. There have been written histories of the Revolution, of the howling mobs, the vampire women; readers have felt a saddened pain at the thought of fleeing émigrés, driven from their own country, the land of their birth.

Yet how many are aware that in less than a year more horrible deeds, more bloodthirsty deaths occurred during the dictatorship of Bela Kun than during all the years of the French Revolution?

Even in the crowd which waited this morning there were whispers of horrible tortures: of men, whose only crime was that of belonging to the hated bourgeoisie, who were strung up by the hands and gagged with the lighted ends of cigars and cigarettes; of others who were bayoneted by the Terror Boys, and flung into a newly dug grave and buried, even while the breath still remained in their bodies.

Other tales there were also, all too true unfortunately, of prisoners of Szamuelly, of the proletariat, who were, incredible as it may sound, flayed alive by their own countrymen.

Murder, theft, blackmail! These were not crimes—merely the prerogative of the proletariat. To be a bourgeois! There was no worse sin in the calendar of Dante; and so the towns and villages of Hungary ran red with the blood of the Hungarians, and all because the shadow of Lenin fell upon the unhappy land.

"Well done, Bela Kun! Well done, Szamuelly!" applauded Lenin, and, thus encouraged, these two flung the war-battered country into the maelstrom of bloody revolution, unheeded by the outside world, for all Europe was itself only just free of the throes of a ghastly war.

Not a soul to aid the unhappy victims, not a man to stretch out a helping hand—save one.

* * * * * *

"They keep us waiting. See the rope swinging. It is waiting too; it has good work to do these days. A good piece of hemp, comrade. It must love the blasted bourgeoisie, it embraces them so closely. Maybe, though, it's bullets to-day. A little piece of lead makes a nice hole, eh! a nice hole!"

The speaker grinned evilly, and his companion chuckled likewise. They were two of the many who waited, two Red-cockaded workmen who were there to see men hanged to satisfy the sated appetite of Korvin-Klein.

"They are a long time. Perhaps they are holding a trial."

The one who answered was a contrast to his companion, for the first speaker was as tall as Comrade George Garami was short, and as scarred as the other was unpleasant. They might have been a source of humour, these two, to the hundreds who surrounded them, but people did not laugh much these days.

"Pah!" The tall man spat. "Korvin-Klein knows how to treat the pigs. Trials! What do they want trials for? That is what I ask you, comrade. What do they want with trials? Hang them, I say, and quickly."

"Me too," agreed Garami, "but Bela Kun says the Allies may interfere."

The other man scowled. "Not they. The more we kill the better they will be pleased. It saves them the trouble."

Garami grinned. "You speak well, comrade. Only if it were the Allies it might be you who would hang instead of the bourgeois dogs. There were those fifty Italian prisoners you said you bayoneted——"

"Stop your mouth," muttered the scarred one. "You talk too much, you, George Garami. Your tongue wags freely, friend, and maybe it will lead you into trouble."

Garami grunted. "What have I to fear, eh! friend Wenzel? I am a good Communist, me."

"So well you may be; but even good Communists have talked too much lately. It is said that they gossip too freely and that the White Knight has long ears."

"The White Knight! What and who may he be, comrade?"

Wenzel turned his hideously scarred face toward the smaller man. "What, dolt, do you mean to say you have never heard of the White Knight?"

"Should I question you otherwise?" asked Garami testily.

Wenzel burst into a harsh roar of raucous laughter, and the unusual sound attracted the attention of others around him, and they turned his way. Wenzel, observing this, waved his arms wide, claiming their attention.

"Sisters, comrades," he announced, "my little friend here has never heard of the White Knight!"

There was no echoing smile of derision from his listeners; instead Wenzel saw nothing but blank faces.

He raised his eyebrows. "What!" he exclaimed, "have none of you yet heard of the White Knight?"

Several shook their heads, and a woman called out: "Tell us, comrade, of him. Does he belong to the counter-revolution?"

Wenzel grinned, and the effect was so repulsive that the woman shrank back in disgust.

"Tell you! Gladly, comrades. 'Tis not often my lot to be the town-crier. I feel as important as a local commissary.

"Know you, then, that this White Knight is a mysterious being of whom, so far, no one has yet any knowledge. Maybe he is a man, possibly a woman, or perhaps a bastard brat sent up from Hell to assist the Devil's spawn, the bourgeoisie.

"He was first heard of about a month ago, when the People's Commissary at Balassagyarmat arrested the outlaw Stephen Arpad. It was known to Bela Kun that this Stephen Arpad was indulging in treasonable correspondence with traitors here in Budapest with a view to establishing a White counter-revolution.

"Well, friends, Bela Kun awaited his time, but at last this dog Arpad was arrested and thrown into the Balassagyarmat jail, and there he was kept awaiting the time when Tibor Szamuelly should arrive to hang him.

"On the night before Szamuelly arrived, what do you think happened, friends? Arpad escaped."

There was a deep-throated growl from the crowd, and Wenzel, realizing that he was working them up, and appreciating the fact that he was at the moment the centre of interest, became more bombastically theatrical.

"Yes, comrades," he continued, his ugly face glowing malignantly, "Arpad escaped, and there was no one to offer any explanation. All that was found in his cell was a small chess-piece, a white knight.

"What did Szamuelly do? Why, he did what all good Communists should do. He hanged the commissary as a warning to others not to let good hanging meat escape in the same way."

Wenzel roared with laughter; but there was no one to join in with him. Steeped in bloody thoughts and deeds, familiar with ghastly sights, insane with revolutionary lust as they were, yet Wenzel appalled them.

At least a head higher than the tallest of his listeners, he was conspicuous, not only by his height, but likewise by his face, his head, and his general appearance.

In the first place, his greasy cap, gaudily illuminated by a brilliant Red cockade, the badge of the Communist and the proletariat, did not entirely conceal his closely cropped head of hair, naturally parted on the right-hand side by a vivid and extraordinarily straight scar—one of the many which disfigured his strange features.

Six scars there were, including the one described above. There was one which shaved his left eyebrow, one which scored his left cheek, one which stretched from his mouth, pulling it perpetually out of shape across to the lobe of his right ear, one small one just above, and finally one across his throat, creating the ghastly impression that the man had once endeavoured to commit suicide by inflicting there, with a razor, a self-made wound.

Two of the scars, though obviously healed up, were so deeply impressed into the skin that at times they betrayed traces of the warm blood which flowed beneath. His emotions aroused, these two wounds flushed redly, as if on the point of reopening.

The effect of these blemishes was to make the man so hideously ugly that it was disgusting to cast eyes upon him.

In himself he was of broad stature, and this, with his height, made him lumbering and ungainly. His hands were big and filthy, the nails scratched and cracked, and worn down to the quick.

His clothes were greasy, frayed at the sleeves and at the bottom of the trousers. His boots were laced with string.

Repulsive was the only word to describe him. Of the ravenous wolves, of the cruel, barbarous vultures, dragged up by the Revolution from the slums to which they belonged, this man, Istvan Wenzel, was, in appearance at least, the most vicious, the most terrifying.

To the student of physiognomy he was a man of vice, and to his lengthy list of undesirable traits might be added vanity. Surrounded by a city's scum, only a little better than himself, he was conscious that he was, for the moment, the centre of interest, that his words were creating attention: the fact that his fellow-Communists drew away at his ghoulish laughter did not seem to wound his sensibilities, even if he were possessed of any.

"Yes, comrades, he was the first prisoner to escape. Yet there were others, more of these bourgeois, who mysteriously vanished just in time to escape the hangman's rope or our soldiers' bullets. Each time there was left behind a chess-piece, always the white knight, and so the man who has been responsible for these escapes has become known as the White Knight."

There was a shout from the rear. "Ay, comrade, you say nothing but the truth. I have heard of this pig, the White Knight. It is said that he has sworn to rescue the Count Kalman Bakocz. Comrade Szamuelly is to take a hand in the game. This White Knight will soon be in Red Mourning, eh, friends?"

"Ay, ay," cried several, amidst a ripple of laughter.

There was a sudden stir, and the people swung round. At the far end of the square came into view a group of Red soldiers, laughing and joking. In their midst three prisoners walked unhappily, doomed to die, condemned to death by the inhuman Korvin-Klein, the uneducated, uncouth judge appointed by the Dictator to try all enemies of the proletariat.

Pushing through the crowd, the soldiers made their way toward that part of the square above which the stone lions proudly growled defiance to the world. Here the three victims were made to stand, calmly awaiting their fate.

There was silence, a muttered word of command: the sharp resonant clash of gun-fire echoed across the square, and three patriots slipped to the ground, killed by Hungarian bullets that were fired by Hungarian men at the command of a Hungarian.

Scarcely had the sound of the discharge died away when Wenzel laughed loudly and slapped his friend Garami on the shoulder.

"Three more traitors sent about their business, eh, comrade!" he cried.

Garami, rubbing his shoulder where Wenzel's hand had caught him, laughed too.