over the causes she had championed.
“Nay,” replied Joseph, winking gravely at a policeman in Northumberland
Avenue.
“Perhaps Lord Orlay is open to conviction.”
“If you tackle Orlay, you'll find you've bitten off a bigger bit than
you can chew,” replied Joseph, who had a singular habit of lapsing into
the vulgarest slang when Julia mounted her high horse in the presence of
himself only. When others were present Mr. Mangles seemed to take a sort
of pride in this great woman. Let those explain the attitude who can.
Lady Orlay's entertainments were popularly said to be too crowded, and
no one knew this better than Lady Orlay.
“Let us ask them all and be done with them,” she said; and had said it
for thirty years, ever since she had begun a social existence with no
other prospects than that which lay in her husband's brain--then plain
Mr. Orlay. She had never “done with them,” had never secured that
peaceful domestic leisure which had always been her dream and her
husband's dream, and would never secure it. For these were two persons,
now old and white-haired and celebrated, who lived in the great world,
and had a supreme contempt for it.
The Mangleses were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of
rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent
beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of pink
and self-effacing quietness.
“We shall know no one,” she said, with a shrinking movement of her
shoulders as they mounted the stairs.
“Not even the waiters,” replied Joseph Mangles, in his lugubrious bass,
glancing into a room where tea and coffee were set out. “But they will
soon know us.”
They had not been in the room, however, five minutes before an
acquaintance entered it, tall and slim, like a cheerful Don Quixote,
with the ribbon of a great order across his shirt-front. He paused for a
moment near Lord and Lady Orlay, and his entrance caused, as it usually
did, a little stir in the room. Then he turned and greeted Joseph
Mangles. Over the large, firm hand of that gentleman's sister he bowed
in silence.
“I have nothing to say to that great woman,” he sometimes said. “She is
so elevated that my voice will not reach her.”
Deulin then turned to where Miss Cahere had been standing. But she had
moved away a few paces, nearer to a candelabrum, under which she was now
standing, and a young officer in full German uniform was openly admiring
her, with a sort of wonder on his foolish, Teutonic face.
“Ah! I expected you had forgotten me,” she said, when Deulin presented
himself.
“Believe me--I have tried,” he replied, with great earnestness; but the
complete innocence of her face clearly showed that she did not attach
any deep meaning to his remark.
“You must see so many people that you cannot be expected to remember
them all.”
“I do not remember them all, mademoiselle--only a very, very few.”
“Then tell me, who is that lovely girl you bowed to as you came into the
room?”
“Is there another in the room?” inquired Deulin, looking around him with
some interest.
“Over there, with the fair hair, dressed in black.”
“Ah! talking to Cartoner. Yes. Do you think her beautiful?”
“I think she is perfectly lovely. But somehow she does not look like one
of us, does she?” And Miss Cahere lowered her voice in a rather youthful
and inexperienced way.
“She is not like one of us, Miss Cahere,” replied Deulin.
“Why?”
“Because we are plebeians, and she is a princess.”
“Oh, then she is married?” exclaimed Miss Cahere, and her voice fell
three semitones on the last word.
“No. She is a princess in her own right. She is a Pole.”
Miss Cahere gave a little sigh.
“Poor thing,” she said, looking at the Princess Wanda, with a soft light
of sympathy in her gentle eyes.
“Why do you pity her?” asked Deulin, glancing down sharply.
“Because princesses are always obliged to marry royalties, are they
not--for convenience, I mean--not from . . . from inclination, like
other girls?”
And Miss Cahere's eyelids fluttered, but she did not actually raise her
eyes towards her interlocutor. An odd smile flickered for an instant on
Deulin's lips.
“Ah!” he said, with a sharp sigh--and that was all. He bowed, and
turned away to speak to a man who had been waiting at his elbow for some
minutes. This also was a Frenchman, who seemed to have something special
to report, for they walked aside together.
It was quite late in the evening before Deulin succeeded in his efforts
to get a few moments' speech with Lady Orlay. He found that unmatched
hostess at leisure in the brief space elapsing between the arrival of
the latest and the departure of the earliest.
“I was looking for you,” she said; “you, who always know where everybody
is. Where is Mr. Mangles? An under-secretary was asking for him a moment
ago.”
“Mangles is listening to the music in the library--comparatively happy
by himself behind a barricade of flowers.”
“And that preposterous woman?”
“That preposterous woman is in the refreshment-room.”
Thus they spoke of the great lecturer on Prison Wrongs.
“You have seen the Bukatys?” inquired Lady Orlay. “I called on them the
moment I received your note from Paris. They are here to-night. I have
never seen such a complexion. Is it characteristic of Poland?”
“I think so,” replied Deulin, with unusual shortness, looking away
across the room.
Lady Orlay's clever eyes flashed round for a moment, and she looked
grave. It was as if she had pushed open the door of another person's
room.
“I like the old man,” she said, with a change of tone. “What is he?”
“He is a rebel.”
“Proscribed?”
“No--they dare not do that. He was a great man in the sixties. You
remember how in the great insurrection an unfailing supply of arms and
ammunition came pouring into Poland over the Austrian frontier--more
arms than the national government could find men for.”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“That is the man,” said Deulin, with a nod of his head in the direction
of the Prince Bukaty, who was talking and laughing near at hand.
“And the girl--it is very sad--I like her very much. She is gay and
brave.”
“Ah!” said Deulin, “when a woman is gay and brave--and young--Heaven
help us.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Deulin.”
“And when she is gay and brave, and . . . old . . . milady--God keep
her,” he said with a grave bow.
“I liked her at once. I shall be glad to do anything I can, you know.
She has a great capacity for making friends.”
“She has already made a few--this evening,” put in the Frenchman, with a
significant gesture of his gloved hand.
“Ah!”
“Not one who can hurt her, I think. I can see to that. The usual
enemy--of a pretty girl--that is all.”
He broke off with a sudden laugh. Once or twice he had laughed like
that, and his manner was restless and uneasy. In a younger man, or one
less experienced and hardened, the observant might have suspected some
hidden excitement. Lady Orlay turned and looked at him curiously, with
the frankness of a friendship which had lasted nearly half a century.
“What is it?”
He laughed--but he laughed uneasily--and spread out his hands in a
gesture of bewilderment.
“What is what?”
Lady Orlay looked at her fan reflectively as she opened and closed it.
“Reginald Cartoner has turned up quite suddenly,” she said. “Mr. Mangles
has arrived from Washington. You are here from Paris. A few minutes
ago old Karl Steinmetz, who still watches the nations en amateur, shook
hands with me. This Prince Bukaty is not a nonentity. All the Vultures
are assembling, Paul. I can see that. I can see that my husband sees
it.”
“Ah! you and yours are safe now. You are in the backwater--you and
Orlay--quietly moored beneath the trees.”
“Finally,” continued Lady Orlay, without heeding the interruption, “you
come to me with a light in your eye which I have seen there only once
or twice during nearly fifty years. It means war, or something very like
it--the Vultures.”
She gave a little shiver as she looked round the room. After a short
silence Deulin rose suddenly and held out his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said. “You are too discerning. Good-bye.”
“You are going--?”
“Away,” he answered, with a wave of the hand descriptive of space. “I
must go and pack my trunks.”
Lady Orlay had not moved when Mr. Mangles came up to say good-night.
Miss Julia P. Mangles bowed in a manner which she considered impressive
and the world thought ponderous. Netty Cahere murmured a few timid words
of thanks.
“We shall hope to see you again,” said Lady Orlay to Mr. Mangles.
“'Fraid not,” he answered; “we're going to travel on the Continent.”
“When do you start?” asked her ladyship.
“To-morrow morning.”
“Another one,” muttered Lady Orlay, watching Mr. Mangles depart. And her
brief reverie was broken into by Reginald Cartoner.
“You have come to say good-bye,” she said to him.
“Yes.”
“You are going away again?”
“Yes.”
“And you will not tell me where you are going.”
“I cannot,” answered Cartoner.
“Then I will tell you,” said Lady Orlay, who, as Paul Deulin had said,
was very experienced and very discerning.
“You are going to Russia, all of you.”
VII
AT THE FRONTIER
Daylight was beginning to contend with the brilliant electric
illumination of the long platform as that which is called the Warsaw
Express steamed into Alexandrowo Station. There are many who have never
heard of Alexandrowo, and others who know it only too well.
How many a poor devil has dropped from the footboard of the train
just before these electric lights were reached--to take his chance of
crossing the frontier before morning--history will never tell! How many
have succeeded in passing in and out of that dread railway station with
a false passport and a steady face, beneath the searching eye of
the officials, Heaven only knows! There is no other way of passing
Alexandrowo--of getting in or out of the kingdom of Poland--but by this
route. Before the train is at a standstill at the platform each one
of the long corridor carriages is boarded by a man in the dirty white
trousers, the green tunic and green cap, the top-boots, and the majesty
of Russian law. Here, whatever time of day or night, winter or summer,
it is always as light as day, thanks to an unsparing use of electricity.
There are always sentries on the outer side of the train. The platform
is a prison-yard--the waiting rooms are prison-yards.
With a passport in perfect order, vised for here and there and
everywhere, with good clothes, good luggage, and nothing contraband in
baggage or demeanor, Alexandrowo is easy enough. Obedience and patience
will see the traveller through. There is no fear of his being left
in the huge station, or of his going anywhere but to his avowed and
rightful destination. But with a passport that is old or torn, with a
visa which bears any but a recent date, with a restless eye or a hunted
look, the voyager had better take his chance of dropping from the
footboard at speed, especially if it be a misty night.
Like sheep, the passengers are driven from the train in which not so
much as a newspaper is left. Only the sleeping-car is allowed to go
through, but it is emptied and searched. The travellers are penned
within a large room where the luggage is inspected, and they are
deprived of their passports. When the customs formalities are over they
are allowed to find the refreshment-room, and there console themselves
with weak tea in tumblers until such time as they are released.
The train on this occasion was a full one, and the great
inspection-room, with its bare walls and glaring lights, crammed to
overflowing. The majority of the travellers seemed, as usual, to be
Germans. There were a few ladies. And two men, better dressed than the
others, had the appearance of Englishmen. They drifted together--just as
the women drifted together and the little knot of shady characters who
hoped against hope that their passports were in order. For the most
part, no one spoke, though one German commercial traveller protested
with so much warmth that an examination of his trunks was nothing but an
intrusion on the officer's valuable time that a few essayed to laugh and
feel at their ease.
Reginald Cartoner, who had been among the first to quit Lady Orlay's,
was an easy first across the frontier. He had twelve hours' start of
anybody, and was twenty-four hours ahead of all except Paul Deulin,
whose train had steamed into Berlin Station as the Warsaw Express left
it. He seemed to know the ways of Alexandrowo, and the formalities to be
observed at the frontier, but he was not eager to betray his knowledge.
He obeyed with a silent patience the instructions of the white-aproned,
black-capped porter who had a semi-official charge of him. He made no
attempt to escape an examination of his luggage, and he avoided the
refreshment-room tea.
Cartoner glanced at the man, whose appearance would seem to indicate
that he was a fellow-countryman, and made sure that he did not know him.
Then he looked at him again, and the other happened to turn his profile.
Cartoner recognized the profile, and drew away to the far corner of
the examination-room. But they drifted together again--or, perhaps, the
younger man made a point of approaching. It was, at all events, he who,
when all had been marshalled into the refreshment-room, drew forward a
chair and sat down at the table where Cartoner had placed himself.
He ordered a cup of coffee in Russian, and sought his cigarette-case. He
opened it and laid it on the table in front of Cartoner. He was a fair
young man, with an energetic manner and the clear, ruddy complexion of a
high-born Briton.
“Englishman?” he said, with an easy and friendly nod.
“Yes,” answered Cartoner, taking the proffered cigarette. His manner was
oddly stiff.
“Thought you were,” said the other, who, though his clothes were English
and his language was English, was nevertheless not quite an Englishman.
There was a sort of eagerness in his look, a picturesque turn of the
head--a sense, as it were, of the outwardly pictorial side of existence.
He moved his chair, in order to turn his back on a Russian officer who
was seated near, and did it absently, as if mechanically closing his eye
to something unsightly and conducive to discomfort. Then he turned to
his coffee with a youthful spirit of enjoyment.
“All this would be mildly amusing,” he said, “at say any other hour of
the twenty-four, but at three in the morning it is rather poor fun. Do
you succeed in sleeping in these German schlafwagens?”
“I can sleep anywhere,” replied Cartoner, and his companion glanced at
him inquiringly. It seemed that he was sleepy now, and did not wish to
talk.
“I know Alexandrowo pretty well,” the other volunteered, nevertheless,
“and the ways of these gentlemen. With some of them I am quite on
friendly terms. They are inconceivably stupid; as boring as--the
multiplication-table. I am going to Warsaw; are you? I fancy we have the
sleeping-car to ourselves. I live in Warsaw as much as anywhere.”
He paused to feel in his pocket, not for his cigarettes this time, but
for a card.
“I know who you are,” said Cartoner, quietly: “I recognized you from
your likeness to your sister. I was dancing with her forty-eight hours
ago in London.”
“Wanda?” inquired the other, eagerly. “Dear old Wanda! How is she? She
was the prettiest girl in the room, I bet.”
He leaned across the table.
“Tell me,” he said, “all about them. But, first, tell me your name.
Wanda writes to me nearly every day, and I hear about all their
friends--the Orlays and the others. What is your name? She is sure to
have made mention of it in her letters.”
“Reginald Cartoner.”
“Ah! I have heard of you--but not from Wanda.”
He paused to reflect.
“No,” he added, rather wonderingly, after a pause. “No, she never
mentioned your name. But, of course, I know it. It is better known
out of England than in your own country, I fancy. Deulin--you know
Deulin?--has spoken to us of you. No doubt we have dozens of other
friends in common. We shall find them out in time. I am very glad to
meet you. You say you know my name--yes, I am Martin Bukaty. Odd that
you should have recognized me from my likeness to Wanda. I am very glad
you think I am like her. Dear old Wanda! She is a better sort than I am,
you know.”
And he finished with a frank and hearty laugh--not that there was
anything to laugh at, but merely because he was young, and looked at
life from a cheerful standpoint.
Cartoner sipped his coffee, and looked reflectively at his companion
over the cup. “Cartoner,” Paul Deulin had once said to a common friend,
“weighs you, and naturally finds you wanting.” It seemed that he was
weighing Prince Martin Bukaty now.
“I saw your father also,” he said, at length. “He was kind enough to ask
me to call, which I did.”
“That was kind of you. Of course we know no one in London--no one, I
mean, who speaks anything except English. That is a thing which is never
quite understood on the Continent--that if you go to London you must
speak English. If you cannot, you had better hang yourself and be done
with it, for you are practically in solitary confinement. My father does
not easily make friends--you must have been very civil to him.”
“According to my lights, I was,” admitted Cartoner.
Martin laughed again. It is a gay heart that can be amused at three in
the morning.
“The truth is,” continued Martin, in his quick and rather heedless way,
“that we Poles are under a cloud in Europe now. We are the wounded man
by the side of the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and there is a
tendency to pass by on the other side. We are a nation with a bad want,
and it is nobody's business to satisfy it. Everybody is ready, however,
to admit that we have been confoundedly badly treated.”
He tossed off his coffee as he spoke, and turned in his chair to nod
an acknowledgment to the profound bows of a gold-laced official who had
approached him, and who now tendered an envelope, with some murmured
words of politeness.
“Thank you--thank you,” said Prince Martin, and slipped the envelope
within his pocket.
“It is my passport,” he explained to Cartoner, lightly. “All the rest of
you will receive yours when you are in the train. Mine is the doubtful
privilege of being known here, and being a suspected character. So they
are doubly polite and doubly watchful. As for you, at Alexandrowo
you rejoice in a happy obscurity. You will pass in with the crowd, I
suppose.”
“I always try to,” replied Cartoner. Which was strictly true.
“You see,” went on Martin, not too discreetly, considering their
environments, “we cannot forget that we were a great nation before there
was a Russian Empire or an Austrian Empire or a German Empire. We are
a landlady who has seen better days; who has let her lodgings to three
foreign gentlemen who do not pay the rent--who make us clean their boots
and then cast them at our heads.”
The doors of the great room had now been thrown open, and the passengers
were passing slowly out to the long, deserted platform. It was almost
daylight now, and the train was drawn up in readiness to start, with a
fresh engine and new officials. The homeliness of Germany had vanished,
giving place to that subtle sense of discomfort and melancholy which
hangs in the air from the Baltic to the Pacific coast.
“I hope you will stay a long time in Warsaw,” said Martin, as they
walked up the platform. “My father and sister will be coming home before
long, and will be glad to see you. We will do what we can to make the
place tolerable for you. We live in the Kotzebue, and I have a horse for
you when you want it. You know we have good horses in Warsaw, as good as
any. And the only way to see the country is from the saddle. We have the
best horses and the worst roads.”
“Thanks, very much,” replied Cartoner. “I, of course, do not know how
long I shall stay. I am not my own master, you understand. I never know
from one day to another what my movements may be.”
“No,” replied Martin, in the absent tone of one who only half hears.
“No, of course not. By-the-way, we have the races coming on. I hope you
will be here for them. In our small way, it is the season in Warsaw
now. But, of course, there are difficulties--even the races present
difficulties--there is the military element.”
He paused and indicated with a short nod the Russian officer who was
passing to his carriage in front of them.
“They have the best horses,” he explained. “They have more money than we
have. We have been robbed, as you know. You, whose business it is.”
He turned, with his foot on the step of the carriage. He was so
accustomed to the recognition of his rank that he went first without
question.
“Yes,” he said, with a laugh, “I had quite forgotten that it is your
business to know all about us.”
“I have tried to remind you of it several times,” answered Cartoner,
quietly.
“To shut me up, you mean?” asked the younger man.
“Yes.”
Martin was standing at the door of Cartoner's compartment. He turned
away with a laugh.
“Good-night,” he said. “Hope you will get some more sleep. We shall meet
again in a few hours.”
He closed the sliding door, and as the train moved slowly out of
the station Cartoner could hear the cheerful voice--of a rather high
timbre--in conversation with the German attendant in the corridor. For,
like nearly all his countrymen, Prince Martin was a man of tongues. The
Pole is compelled by circumstances to learn several languages: first,
his own; then the language of the conqueror, either Russian or German,
or perhaps both. For social purposes he must speak the tongue of the
two countries that promised so much for Poland and performed so
little--England and France.
Cartoner sat on the vacant seat in his compartment, which had not been
made up as a bed, and listened thoughtfully to the pleasant tones. It
was broad daylight now, and the flat, carefully cultivated land was
green and fresh. Cartoner looked out of the window with an unseeing
eye, and the sleeping-carriage lumbered along in silence. The Englishman
seemed to have no desire for sleep, though, not being an impressionable
man, he was usually able to rest and work, fast and eat at such times
as might be convenient. He was considered by his friends to be a rather
cold, steady man, who concealed under an indifferent manner an almost
insatiable ambition. He certainly had given way to an entire absorption
in his profession, and in the dogged acquirement of one language after
another as occasion seemed to demand.
He had been, it was said, more than usually devoted to his profession,
even to the point of sacrificing friendships which, from a social and
possibly from an ambitious point of view, could not have failed to be
useful to him. Martin Bukaty was not the first man whom he had kept at
arm's-length. But in this instance the treatment had not been markedly
successful, and Cartoner was wondering now why the prince had been so
difficult to offend. He had refused the friendship, and the effect had
only been to bring the friend closer. Cartoner sat at the open window
until the sun rose and the fields were dotted here and there with the
figures of the red-clad peasant women working at the crops. At seven
o'clock he was still sitting there, and soon after Prince Martin
Bukaty, after knocking, drew back the sliding door and came into the
compartment, closing the door behind him.
“I have been thinking about it,” he said, in his quick way, “and it
won't do, you know--it won't do. You cannot appear in Warsaw as our
friend. It would never do for us to show special attention to you.
Anywhere else in the world, you understand, I am your friend, but not in
Warsaw.”
“Yes,” said Cartoner, “I understand.”
He rose as he spoke, for Prince Martin was holding out his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said, in his quiet way, and they shook hands as the train
glided into Warsaw Station.
In the doorway Martin turned and looked back over his shoulder.
“All the same, I don't understand why Wanda did not mention your name to
me. She might have foreseen that we should meet. She is quick enough, as
a rule, and has already saved my father and me half a dozen times.”
He waited for an answer, and at length Cartoner spoke.
“She did not know that I was coming,” he said.
VIII
IN A REMOTE CITY