`I was wrong to think that charity was dead in the hearts of all men. I owe my life to a moisjhik who found me and carried me to his shack. He and his family nursed me through the crisis of the fever. I recovered, but every one of them caught the cholera from me and died. I was so weak that, after I had buried them, I had to lie up there for a long time before I could begin to stagger south again. The adventures which befell me and the hardships I encountered would take a dozen nights to tell, but the one thought which braced me up was that if only I could keep going I should eventually get home and find my beautiful young wife again. At last, a lean, starved skeleton, I crept out of Russia.
'But the country that I entered was not a part of Austria as it used to be. It was a new Republic where the people were hostile to Austrians and refused to speak German or succour a German speaking stranger. The war was long since over, but the whole of Central Europe was still in turmoil and racial feeling was running high. The peasantry were little better off than those I had left on the other side of the frontier. True, their homes were not being burnt over their heads by merciless Commissars who accused them of giving help to the Whites, but their barns were empty, thousands of them were dying from the influenza plague which ravaged Europe after the war, the breasts of the nursing mothers were bone dry, their feverish eyes buried deep in their emaciated faces, while the children who survived on starvation rations were twisted with rickets and prematurely old. The people had the same wolfish look that I had grown to know so well in Russia, yet they were too weak and apathetic to do much work upon their farms. It seemed as if they were just waiting for death to take them; convinced that things had gone too far for the world ever to right itself again.
`When I reached Austria, a filthy, broken down, penniless tramp, no one to whom I spoke would believe my story and lend me money for a train fare. Starvation was rampant there also; work at a standstill, and everybody bankrupt. I had to tramp even the last hundred miles until I entered Vienna.
`I went straight to my house. It was empty, shut up, and to let. For a little I just walked about the streets not knowing what to do. In spite of all that I had seen while begging my way through the country, I had somehow expected my house and servants to be ready to receive me if I could only reach the end of my journey. The blow was a terrible one and I almost lost the last remnant of sanity which lingered in my brain; already half crazed from years of acute privation. Then I thought of Sacker's Hotel.
'Old Madame Sacker, who owned the place, was a great character. Every member of the Austrian nobility before the war was known to her, and many of us counted her a dear friend. She is dead now, but her hotel is still, I think, the most comfortable in Vienna. Its cuisine has a European reputation, and there is that personality about the place which makes it far more attractive than some of its larger rivals. I went to Sacker's and, before the waiter could stop me, slipped through the bar, which adjoins the street, to her private office on the ground floor.
'Dear soul, she knew me, once I gave my name, in spite of my ragged beard and tattered, mud soiled clothing. I can see her now as she wept over me and sought to comfort me. When I had told her my story I collapsed from strain and weakness. She had me bathed and put to bed, then sent for my friends. For some days I was delirious and for weeks I hovered between life and death. At last I was fit to be moved, but she would not allow me to talk about my bill. Before the war she had amassed a great fortune; afterwards she gave it all away in credit to old clients like myself whom the war had ruined. She was a great woman whom I am very proud to have known. when I was fit to go about again, I found that everything was changed. It was a new world that I did not understand. Little by little my exhausted brain began to take in all that had happened in my long absence and some aspects of the almost unbelievable situation. I was still Baron Foldvar, but I had no money, no estates. My family had believed me dead; a cousin had succeeded to my properties for a time. Later, when the Exchange collapsed, he had sold them all for the price of a ticket to America. He was living there in the most desperate poverty, so rumour said, barely supporting life by giving German lessons.
There was nothing to be done. Old friends that I met were in a similarly unhappy situation. Some had become professional dancing partners, others guides. They were glad to take any job which would secure them one square meal a day. Their women I shudder to think of it, but more than half of those delicately nurtured girls I had known as a young man were living as cocottes; often to keep destitute parents or husbands and brothers disabled in the war who could not find employment at any price. That was what the war did for my beloved Austria.
`Naturally, even during my illness, the thought uppermost in my mind had been my wife. Nobody had seen or heard of her for years. My friends either would not or could not tell me what had become of her. At last I traced her. She was in the paupers' ward of a public asylum.
`I went at once to see her. It was very terrible. She did not know me. I did not know her. She was about twenty six then, but she had the appearance of a woman of sixty. Her head was covered with bedraggled wisps of grey white hair; her face was lined and shrunken like that of an old crone. She spat at me. They told me that she spat all the time at any man who came near her. That little, old, shrunken thing who, only a few years before, had been a lovely girl in the first flush of her beauty, reviled me in the most foul and abominable language. Her mind was utterly gone. She was dead; is dead as any living creature could ever be. Only the
ill kept shrivelled husk of her remained, and that was quite unrecognizable.
'Later, they told me her history. In the Russian breakthrough during the first winter of the war, when a large section of our front gave way, she, and the inmates of the hospital to which she was attached, had been captured. She fell into the hands of the Cossacks. They looted the stores and got drunk on the brandy. Their officers could not restrain them. She was only twenty more beautiful than words can say, and our marriage six months before had 'brought her beauty to its zenith.
`How many of them there were I, mercifully, shall never know. She lived through it; but when our troops advanced again and drove the Russians back they found her stark naked on the floor of the hospital canteen, unconscious. Her hair had gone white in a single night and her brain had given way. When she came round she was a raving lunatic.'
As the Baron ceased speaking, Valerie shuddered. 'It just doesn't bear thinking about,' she said softly, 'that such things are possible in our vaulted civilisation. Poor dear and you. I just can't say any more. It's too utterly terrible.'
The Baron shrugged. `Please do not distress yourself. It all happened so long ago and mine was only one of a hundred thousand tragedies which occurred when you were a little, laughing child playing with your dolls.'
`Good God!' exclaimed Christopher. `But don't you see that the same horrors may engulf us again at anytime.,
'Of course,' the Austrian laughed and finished up his beer. 'Life goes on much as it always did. The dictators and the politicians of every country continue to make fresh promises which do not mean a thing. The nonsense talked at the League has caused this miserable population of blacks to defy the power of modern Italy. Mussolini was quite willing to leave the Emperor on his throne providing he would accept Italian advisers and allow the country to be properly policed and civilized. The Abyssinians would never have fought unless they had believed that Britain was coming to their aid. She won't, of course, and in consequence countless hideous tragedies which could have been avoided are being enacted as we sit here. But the politicians will dine no less well tonight in London, Paris and Geneva.'