The Vultures Part 40

Wanda was gay and light-hearted to the end. There was French blood in her veins--that gay, good blood which stained the streets of Paris a hundred years ago, and raised a standard of courage against adversity for all the world to imitate so long as history shall exist.

Cartoner turned once in his saddle and saw her standing in the sunlight waving him a farewell, with her eyes smiling and her lips hard pressed.

Then he rode on, with that small, small hope to help him through his solitary wanderings which he knew to be identical with the hope of Poland, for which the time was not yet ripe. He was the watcher who sees most of the game, and knew that the time might never ripen till years after Wanda and he had gone hence and were no more seen.

XXIX

IN A BY-WAY

There are few roads in Poland. Sooner or later, Cartoner must needs join the great highway that enters Warsaw from the west, pa.s.sing by the gates of the cemetery.

Deulin, no doubt, knew this, for Cartoner found him, riding leisurely away from the city, just beyond the cemetery. The Frenchman sat his horse with a straight leg and arm which made Cartoner think of those days ten years earlier, to which Deulin seldom referred, when this white-haired dandy was a cavalry soldier, engaged in the painful business of killing Germans.

Deulin did not think it necessary to refer to the object of Cartoner's ride. Neither did he mention the fact that he knew that this was not the direct way to St. Petersburg.

"I hired a horse and rode out to meet you," he said, gayly--he was singularly gay this morning, and there was a light in his eye--"to intercept you. Kosmaroff is back in Warsaw. I saw him in the streets--and he saw me. I think that man is the G.o.d in the machine.

He is not a nonent.i.ty. I wonder who he is. There is blood there, my friend."

He turned his horse as he spoke, and rode back towards the city with Cartoner.

"In the mean time," he said, "I have the hunger of a beggar's dog. What are we to do? It is one o'clock--and I have the inside of a Frenchman.

We are a great people. We tear down monarchies, and build up a new republic which is to last forever, and doesn't. We make history so quickly that the world stands breathless--but we always breakfast before mid-day."

He took out his watch, and showed its face to Cartoner, with a gesture which could not have been more tragic had it marked the hour of the last trump.

"And we dare not show our faces in the streets. At least, I dare not show mine in the neighborhood of yours in Warsaw. For they have got accustomed to me there. They think I am a harmless old man--a dentist, perhaps."

"My train goes from the St. Petersburg Station at three," said Cartoner.

"I will have some lunch at the other station, and drive across in a close cab with the blinds down."

And he gave his low, gentle laugh. Deulin glanced at him as if there were matter for surprise in the sound of it.

"Like a monstrosity going to a fair," he said. "And I shall go with you.

I will even lunch with you at the station--a station steak and a beery table. There is only one room at the station for those who eat and those who await their trains. So that the eaters eat before a famished audience like Louis XVI., and the travellers sit among the crumbs. I am with you. But let us be quick--and get it over. Did you see Bukaty?" he asked, finally, and, leaning forward, he sought an imaginary fly on the lower parts of his horse; for, after all, he was only a man, and lacked the higher skill or the thicker skin of the gentler s.e.x in dealing with certain delicate matters.

"No, I only saw the princess," replied Cartoner. And they rode on in silence.

"You know," said Deulin, at length, gravely, "if that happens which you expect and I expect, and everybody here is hoping for--I shall seek out Wanda at once, and look after her. I do not know whether it is my duty or not. But it is my inclination; and I am much too old to put my duty before my inclination. So, if anything happens, and there follows that confusion which you and I have seen once or twice before, where things are stirring and dynasties are crumbling in the streets--when friends and foes are seeking each other in vain--you need not seek me or think about our friends in Warsaw. You need only think of yourself, remember that. I shall have eloped--with Wanda."

And he finished with an odd laugh, that had a tender ring in it.

"Bukaty and I," he went on, after a pause, "do not talk of these things together. But we have come to an understanding on that point. And when the first flurry is over and we come to the top for a breath of air, you have only to wire to my address in Paris to tell me where you are--and I will tell you where--we are. We are old birds at this sport--you and I--and we know how to take care of ourselves."

They were now in the outskirts of the town, among the wide and ill-paved streets where tall houses are springing up on the site of the huts once occupied by the Jews who are now quartered in the neighborhood of the Nowiniarska market-place. For the chosen people must needs live near a market-place, and within hearing of the c.h.i.n.k of small coin. In the cities of eastern Europe that have a Jews' quarter there is a barrier erected between the daily lives of the two races, though no more than a narrow street may in reality divide them. Different interests, different hopes, aspirations, and desires are to be found within a few yards, and neighbors are as far apart as if a frontier line or the curse of Babel stood between them.

Cartoner and Deulin, riding through the Jewish quarter, were as safe from recognition as if they were in a country lane at Wilanow; for the men hurrying along the pavements were wrapped each in his own keen thought of gain, and if they glanced up at the hors.e.m.e.n at all, merely looked in order to appraise the value of their clothes and saddles--as if there were nothing beyond. For them, it would seem there is no beyond; nothing but the dumb waiting for the removal of that curse which has lasted nineteen hundred years, and instead of wearing itself out, seems to gain in strength as the world grows older.

"We will go by the back ways," said Cartoner, "and need never see any of our world in Warsaw at all."

The streets were crowded by men, for the women live an in-door life in an atmosphere that seems to bleach and fatten. The roads were little used for wheel traffic; for the commerce by which these people live is of so retail a nature that it seems to pa.s.s from hand to hand in mysterious cloth bundles and black stuff bags. The two hors.e.m.e.n were obliged to go slowly through the groups, who never raised their heads, or seemed to speak above a whisper.

"What do they talk of--what do they think--all day?" said Cartoner. And, indeed, the quiet of the streets had a suggestion of surrept.i.tiousness.

Even the children are sad, and stand about in melancholy solitude.

"I would sooner be a dog," answered Deulin, with a shake of the shoulders, as if Care had climbed into the saddle behind him. "Sooner a dog."

By these ways they reached the station, and there found a messenger to take the horses to their stable. All through the streets they had pa.s.sed men in one uniform or another, who looked stout and well-fed, who strode in the middle of the pavement, while the Poles, whose clothes were poor and threadbare, shuffled aside in their patched and shambling boots to make way for the conqueror. Sometimes they would turn and look back at some sword-bearer who was more offensive than usual, with reflective eyes as if marking him in order to know him at a future time. As is always the case, it was the smaller officials who were the most offensive--the little Jacks-in-office from the postal administration, the common officers, the hundred obscure civil servants who wear a sword and uniform unworthily in any one of the three European empires. On the other hand, the men in real authority, and notably the officers of the better regiments, sought to conciliate by politeness and a careful retention of themselves in the background. But these well-intentioned efforts were of small avail; for racial things are stronger than human endeavor or the careful foresight of statesmen. Here in Warsaw the Muscovite, the Pole, the Jew--herding together in the same streets, under the same roof, obedient to one law, acknowledging one sovereign--were watching each other, hating each other.

At the street corners the smart, quiet police took note of each foot-pa.s.senger, every carriage, every stranger pa.s.sing in a hired droschki. Cartoner and Deulin could see from the pa.s.sing glance beneath the flat, green cap that they were seen and recognized at every turn.

On the steps of the station they were watched with a polite pretense of looking the other way by two of the higher officials of the Russian-speaking police.

"I do not mind them," said Deulin, pa.s.sing through the doorway to the booking-office. "It is not of them that we need be afraid. We are doing no harm, and they cannot send us out of the country while our pa.s.sports hold out. They have satisfied themselves as to that. For they have been through my belongings twice, in my rooms at the Europe--I know when my things have been touched--they or some one else. Perhaps Kosmaroff; who knows?"

Thus he talked on in characteristic fashion, saying a hundred nothings as only Frenchmen and women can, touching life lightly like a skilled musician, running nimble fingers over the keys, and striking a chord half by accident here and there which was sonorous and had a deeper meaning. He ordered the luncheon, argued with the waiter, and rallied him on the criminal paucity of his menu.

"Yes," he said, "let it be beef. I know your mutton. It tastes like the smell of goat. So give us beef--your railway beef, which has travelled so far, but not by train. It has come on foot, to be killed and cut up by a locomotive, to be served by a waiter who has a.s.suredly failed as a stoker."

He sat down as he spoke, and rearranged the small table, covered by a doubtful cloth, through which could be felt the chill of the marble underneath. Deulin always took the lead in these small matters, and Cartoner accepted his decision without comment. The Frenchman knew him so well, it seemed, that he knew his tastes, or suspected his indifference. While he thus rattled on he glanced sharply from time to time at his companion, and when the waiter was finally sent away with a hundred minute instructions, he turned suddenly to Cartoner.

"You are absorbed. What are you thinking about?" he said.

"I was thinking how well you speak Polish. And yet you have only been here once before," answered the Englishman, bluntly.

"When I was a young man there were opportunities of learning Polish in Paris," said Deulin. "Yes--I learned Polish when I was young----"

He had arranged the table to his satisfaction, had picked up several objects to examine them and replace them with care on the exact spot from whence he had taken them, and was now looking round the room with large, deep-lined eyes which were always tired and never at rest.

"When one is young, one learns so much in a short time, especially if that time is ill-spent," he said, airily. "That is why the virtuous are such poor company; they have no backbone to their past. With the others--'nous autres'--it is the evil deeds that form a sort of spinal column to our lives, rigid and strong, upon which to lean in old age when virtue is almost a necessity."

Finally he came round in his tour of inspection to the face opposite to him.

"Do you know," he said, sharply, "you are devilish absent-minded. It is a bad habit. It makes the world think that you have something on your mind. And having nothing on its own mind--or no mind to have anything on--it hates you for your airs of superiority."

He took up the bottle of wine which the waiter had set upon the table in front of him, inspected the label, and filled two gla.s.ses. He tasted the vintage, and made a wry face. Then he raised his shoulders with an air or reconciliation to the inevitable.

"When I was a young--a very young diplomatist--an old scoundrel in gold spectacles told me that one of the first rules of the game was to appear content with that which you cannot alter. We must apply that rule to this wine. It is our old friend, Chateau la Pompe. It will not hurt you.

It will not loosen your tongue, my friend, you need not fear that."

He spoke so significantly that Cartoner looked across the table at him.

"What do you mean?"

Deulin laughed and made no answer.

"Do you think that my tongue requires loosening?"

And the Frenchman stroked his mustache as he looked thoughtfully into the steady, meditating eyes.