The Vultures Part 35

He held up his hand to command silence, for Kosmaroff, with eyes that suddenly blazed in anger, had stepped forward to the table, and was about to interrupt. And Kosmaroff, who was not given to obedience, paused, he knew not why.

"Think," said the other, in his smooth, even voice--"one month from now, after waiting twenty years. In a month you yourself may be in a very different position to that you now occupy. You commit yourselves to nothing. You do not even give ground for the conclusion that the Polish party ever for a moment approved of our methods. Our methods are our own affair, as are the risks we are content to run. We have our reasons, and we seek the approval of no man."

There was a deadly coldness in the man's manner which seemed to vouch for the validity of those reasons which he did not submit to the judgment of any.

"Five thousand roubles," he concluded. "And in exchange I give you the date--so that Poland may be ready."

"Thank you," said Kosmaroff, who had regained his composure as suddenly as he had lost it. "I decline--for myself and for the whole of Poland.

We play a cleaner game than that."

He turned and took up his hat, and his hand shook as he did it.

"If I did not know that you are a patriot according to your lights--if I did not know something of your story, and of those reasons that you do not give--I should take you by the throat and throw you out into the street for daring to make such a proposal to me," he said, in a low voice.

"To a deserter from a Cossack regiment," suggested the other.

"To me," repeated Kosmaroff, touching himself on the breast and standing at his full height. No one spoke, as if the silent spell of History were again for a moment laid upon their tongues.

"Captain Cable," said Kosmaroff, "you and I have met before, and I learned enough of you then to tell you now that this is no place for you, and these men no company for you. I am going--will you come?"

"I'm agreeable," said Captain Cable, dusting his hat.

When they were out in the street, he turned to Kosmaroff and looked up into his face with bright and searching eyes.

"Who's that man?" he asked, as if there had been only one in the room.

"I do not know his name," replied Kosmaroff.

They were standing on the doorstep. The dirty man had closed the door behind them, and, turning on his heel, Kosmaroff looked thoughtfully at the dusty woodwork of it. Half absent-mindedly he extended one finger and made a design on the door. It was not unlike a Greek cross.

"That is who he is," he said.

Captain Cable followed the motion of his companion's finger.

"I've heard of him," he said. "And I heard his voice--sort of soft-spoken--on Hamburg quay one night, many years ago. That is why I refused the job and came out with you."

XXV

THE CAPTAIN'S STORY

More especially in northern countries nature lays her veto upon the activity of men, and winter calls a truce even to human strife. Cartoner awaited orders in London, for all the world was dimly aware of something stirring in the north, and no one knew what to expect or where to look for the unexpected.

It was a cold winter that year, and the Baltic closed early. Captain Cable chartered the _Minnie_ in the coasting trade, and after Christmas he put her into one of the cheaper dry-docks down the river towards Rotherhithe. His ship was, indeed, in dry-dock when the captain opened with the Brothers of Liberty those negotiations which came to such a sudden and untoward end.

Paul Deulin wrote one piteous letter to Cartoner, full of abuse of the cold and wet weather. "If the winter would only set in," he said, "and dry things up and freeze the river, which has overflowed its banks almost to the St. Petersburg Station, on the Praga side, life would perhaps be more endurable."

Then the silence of the northern winter closed over him too, and Cartoner wrote in vain, hoping to receive some small details of the Bukatys and perhaps a mention of Wanda's name. But his letters never reached Warsaw, or if they travelled to the banks of the Vistula they were absorbed into that playful post-office where little goes in and less comes out.

There were others besides Cartoner who were wintering in London who likewise laid aside their newspaper with a sigh half weariness, half relief, to find that their parts of the world were still quiet.

"History is a.s.suredly at a stand-still," said an old traveller one evening at the club, as he paused at Cartoner's table. "The world must be quiet indeed with you here in London, all the winter, eating your head off."

"I am waiting," replied Cartoner.

"What for?"

"I do not know," he said, placidly, continuing his dinner.

Later on he returned to his rooms in Pall Mall. He was a great reader, and was forced to follow the daily events in a dozen different countries in a dozen different languages. He was surrounded by newspapers, in a deep arm-chair by the table, when that came for which he was waiting. It came in the form of Captain Cable in his sh.o.r.e-going clothes. The little sailor was ushered in by the well-trained servant of this bachelor household without surprise or comment.

Cartoner made him welcome with a cigar and an offer of refreshment, which was refused. Captain Cable knew that as you progress upward in the social scale the refusal of refreshment becomes an easier matter until at last you can really do as you like and not as etiquette dictates, while to decline the beggar's pint of beer is absolute rudeness.

"We've always dealt square by each other, you and I," said the captain, when he had lighted his cigar. Then he fell into a reminiscent humor, and presently broke into a chuckling laugh.

"If it hadn't been for you, them Dons would have had me up against the wall and shot me, sure as fate," he said, bringing his hand down on his knee with a keen sense of enjoyment. "That was ten years ago last November, when the _Minnie_ had been out of the builder's yard a matter of six months."

"Yes," said Cartoner, putting the dates carefully together in his mind.

It seemed that the building of the _Minnie_ was not the epoch upon which he reckoned his periods.

"She's in Morrison's dry-dock now," said the captain, who in a certain way was like a young mother. For him all the topics were but a number of by-ways leading ultimately to the same centre. "You should go down and see her, Mr. Cartoner. It's a big dock. You can walk right round her in the mud at the bottom of the dock and see her finely."

Cartoner said he would. They even arranged a date on which to carry out this plan, and included in it an inspection of the _Minnie's_ new boiler. Then Captain Cable remembered what he had come for, and the plan was never carried out after all.

"Yes," he said, "you've a reckoning against me, Mr. Cartoner. I have never done you a good turn that I know of, and you saved my life, I believe, that time--you and that Frenchman who talks so quick, Moonseer Deulin--that time, over yonder."

And he nodded his head towards the southwest with the accuracy of one who never loses his bearings. For there are some people who always know which is the north; and others who, if asked suddenly, do not know their left hand from their right; and others, again, who say--or shout--that all men are created equal.

"I've been done, Mr. Cartoner--that is what I've come to tell you. Me that has always been so smart and has dealt straight by other men. Done, hoodwinked, tricked--same as a Sunday-school teacher. And I can do you a good turn by telling you about it; and I can do the other man a bad turn, which is what I want to do. Besides, it's dirty work. Me, that has always kept my hands----"

He looked at his hands, and decided not to pursue the subject.

"You'll say that for me, Mr. Cartoner--you that has known me ten years and more."

"Yes, I'll say that for you," answered Cartoner, with a laugh.

"They did me!" cried the captain, leaning forward and banging his hand down on the table, "with the old trick of a bill of lading lost in the post and a man in a gold-laced hat that came aboard one night and said he was a government official from the a.r.s.enal come for his government stuff. And it wasn't government stuff, and he wasn't a government official. It was----"

Captain Cable paused and looked carefully round the room. He even looked up to the ceiling, from a long habit of living beneath deck skylights.

"Bombs!" he concluded--"bombs!"

Then he went further, and qualified the bombs in terms which need not be set down here.

"You know me and you know the _Minnie_, Mr. Cartoner!" continued the angry sailor. "She was specialty built with large hatches for machinery, and--well, guns. She was built to carry explosives, and there's not a man in London will insure her. Well, we got into the way of carrying war material. It was only natural, being built for it. But you'll bear me out, and there are others to bear me out, that we've only carried clean stuff up to now--plain, honest, fighting stuff for one side or the other. Always honest--revolutions and the like, and an open fight. But bombs----"

And here again the captain made use of nautical terms which have no place on a polite page.