THE DAWN OF THE DAY
Count Sergius believed that he had settled the affaire Gessner when he
gave his instructions to the Chief of the Police, and the subsequent
hours found him exceedingly pleased with himself. An artist in his
profession, he flattered himself that it had all come about in the
manner of his own anticipations and that he would be able to carry back
to London a story which would not only win upon a rich man's gratitude,
but advance him considerably in the favor of those who could well reward
his labors.
This was an amiable reflection and one that ministered greatly to his
self-content. No cloud stood upon the horizon of his self-esteem nor did
shadows darken his glowing hopes. He had promised Richard Gessner to
arrest the girl Lois Boriskoff, and arrested she would be before twelve
o'clock to-morrow. As for this amiable English lad, so full of fine
resolutions, so defiant, so self-willed, it would be a good jest enough
to clap him in a police-station for four-and-twenty hours and to bow him
out again, with profuse apologies, when the girl was on her way to
Petersburg to join her amiable father in the Schlusselburg.
For Alban personally he had a warm regard. The very honesty of his
character, his habit of saying just what he meant (so foreign to the
Count's own practice), his ingenuous delight in all that he saw, his
modern knight-errantry based upon an absurdly old-fashioned notion of
right and wrong and justice and all such stuff as that, these were the
very qualities to win the admiration of a man of the world who possessed
none of them. Count Sergius said that the lad must suffer nothing. His
intrigues with the daughter of a Polish anarchist were both dangerous
and foolish. And was he not already the acknowledged lover of Anna
Gessner, whom he must marry upon his return to London. Certainly, it
would be very wrong not to lock him up, and he, Sergius, was not going
to take the responsibility of any other course upon his already
over-burdened shoulders.
These being his ideas, he found it amusing enough to meet Alban at the
dinner-table and to speak of to-morrow and its programme. The reply to
the cable they had dispatched to London lay already warm in his pocket,
sent straight to him from the post-office as the police had directed. It
was fitting that he should open the ball with a lie about this, and add
thereto any other pleasant fancy which a fertile imagination dictated.
"Gessner does not cable us," he said at that moment of the repast when
the glasses are first filled and the tongue is loosed. "I suppose he has
gone over to Paris again as he hinted might be the case. If there is no
news to-morrow, we must reconsider the arguments and see how we stand.
You know that I am perfectly willing to be guided by him and will do
nothing of my own initiative. If he can procure the old man's freedom,
I will be the first to congratulate you. Meanwhile, I am not to forget
that we have a box at the opera and that _Huguenots_ is on the bill.
When I am not in musical circles, I confess my enjoyment of _Huguenots_.
Meyerbeer always seemed to me a grand old charlatan who should have run
a modern show in New York. He wrote one masterpiece and some five miles
of rubbish--but why decry a great work because there are also those
which are not great. Besides, I am not musician enough really to enjoy
the Ring. If it were not for the pretty women who come to my box to
escape ennui, I would find Wagner intolerable."
Alban, very quiet and not a little excited to-night, differed from this
opinion altogether.
"My father was a musician," he said. "I believe that if he had not been
a parson, he would have been a great musician. I don't know very much
about music myself, but the first time that Mr. Gessner took me to hear
one of Wagner's operas, I seemed to live in a new world. It could not
have been just the desire to like it, for I had made up my mind that it
would be very dry. There is something in such music as that which is
better than all argument. I shall never forget the curious sensation
which came to me when first I heard the overture to Tannhaeuser played by
a big orchestra. You will not deny that it is splendid?"
"Undoubtedly it's fine--especially where the clarinets came in and you
seem to have five hundred mice running up your back. I am not going to
be drawn into an argument on the point--these likes and dislikes are
purely individual. To me it seems perfectly ridiculous that one man
should quarrel with another because a third person has said or written
something about which they disagree. In politics, of course, there is
justification. The Have-Nots want to get money out of the Haves and the
pockets supply the adjectives. But in the arts, which exist for our
pleasure,--why, I might as well fall foul of you because you do not like
caviar and are more partial to brunettes than to blondes. My taste is
all the other way--I dote upon caviar; golden-haired women are to me
just a little more attractive than the angels. But, of course, that does
not speak for their tempers."
He laughed at the candor of it, and looking round the brilliant
restaurant where they dined to-night, he began to speak in a low tone of
Russian and Polish women generally.
"The Polish ladies are old-fashioned enough to love one man at a
time--in their own country, at any rate. The Russians, on the contrary,
are less selfish. A Russian woman is often the victim of three
centuries, of suppressed female ambitions. She has large ideas, fierce
passions, an excellent political sense--and all these must be cooled by
the wet blanket of a very ordinary domesticity. In reality, she is not
domesticated at all and would far sooner be following her lover--the one
chosen for the day--down the street with a flag. Here you have the
reason why a Russian woman appeals to us. She is rarely beautiful--some
of them would themselves admit the deficiency--but she is never an
embarrassment. Tell her that you are tired of her and you will discover
that she was about to stagger your vanity by a similar confidence. In
these days of revolution, she is seen at her best. Fear neither of God
nor man will restrain her. We have more of the show of religion and less
of the spirit in Russia than in any other country in the world. Here in
Poland, it is a little different. Some of our women are as the idealists
would have them to be. But there are others--or the city would be
intolerable."
Alban had lived too long in a world of mean cynics that this talk should
either surprise or entertain him. Men in Union Street spoke of women
much as this careless fellow did, rarely generous to them and often
exceedingly unjust. His own ideals he had confessed wholly to none, not
even to Anna Gessner in the moment of their greatest intimacy. That fine
old-world notion of the perfect womanhood, developed to the point of
idolatry by the Celts of the West, but standing none the less as a
witness to the whole world's desire, might remain but as a memory of his
youth--he would neither surrender it nor admit that it was unworthy of
men's homage. When Sergius spoke of his own countrywomen, Alban could
forgive him all other estimates. And this was as much as to say that the
image of Lois was with him even in that splendid place, and that some
sentiment of her humble faith and sacrifice had touched him to the
quick.
They went to the opera as the Count had promised and there heard an
indifferent rendering of the _Huguenots_. A veritable sisterhood of
blondes, willing to show off Count Sergius to some advantage, came from
time to time to his box and was by him visited in turn. Officers in
uniform crowded the foyers and talked in loud tones during the finest
passages. A general sense of unrest made itself felt everywhere as
though all understood the danger which threatened the city and the
precarious existence its defenders must lead. When they quitted the
theatre and turned into one of the military clubs for supper, the common
excitement was even more marked and ubiquitous enough to arrest the
attention even of such a _flaneur_ as Sergius.
"These fellows are sitting down to supper with bombs under their
chairs," he said _sotto voce_. "That is to say, each thinks that a bomb
is there and hopes that it will kill his neighbor. We have no sympathy
in our public life here--the conditions are altogether against it.
Imagine five hundred men upon the deck of a ship which has struck a
rock, and consider what opportunities there would be to deplore the
drowned. In Russia each plays for his own safety and does not care a
rouble what becomes of the man next door. Such a fact is both our
strength and our weakness--our strength because opportunities make men,
and our weakness because we have no unity of plan which will enable us
to fight such a combination as is now being pitted against us. I myself
believe that the old order is at an end. That is why I have a villa in
the south of France and some excellent apartments in Paris."
"You believe that the Revolutionaries will be victorious?" Alban asked
in his quiet way.
"I believe that the power is passing from the hands of all autocratic
governments, and that some phase of socialism will eventually be the
policy of all civilized nations."
"Then what is the good of going to England, Count, if you believe that
it will be the same story there?"
"It is only a step on the road. You will never have a revolution in your
country, you have too much common sense. But you will tax your bourgeois
until you make him bankrupt, and that will be your way of having all
things in common. In America the workingman is too well off and the
country is too young to permit this kind of thing yet. Its day will be
much later--but it will come all the same, and then the deluge. Let us
rejoice that we shall not see these things in our time. It is something
to know that our champagne is assured to us."
He lifted a golden glass and drank a vague toast heartily. Others in the
Club were frankly intoxicated and many a heated scene marked the
progress of unceremonious and impromptu revels. Young officers, who
carried their lives in their hands every hour, showed their contempt of
life in many bottles. Old men, stern and gray at dawn, were so many
babbling imbeciles at midnight. The waiters ran to and fro ceaselessly,
their faces dripping with perspiration and their throats hoarse with
shouting. The musicians fiddled as though the end of all things was at
hand and must not surprise them at a broken bar. In Russia the scene was
familiar enough, but to the stranger incomprehensible and revolting.
Alban felt as one released from a pit of gluttony when at three in the
morning Sergius staggered to his feet and bade a servant call him in a
drosky.
"We have much to do to-morrow," he muttered, "much to do--and then, ah,
my friend, if we only knew what we meant when we say 'and then.'"