fool--and yet, in the matter of intellect, you are as superior to me as
I am superior to you . . . in swordsmanship.”
And he made another pass into thin air with his stick.
“I should like to fight some one to-night,” he said. “Some one of
the very first order. I feel in the vein. I could do great things
to-night--and the angels in heaven are talking of me.”
In his light-hearted way he bared his head and looked up to the sky.
But there was a deeper ring in his voice. It almost seemed as if he were
sincere.
As he stood there, bareheaded, with his coat open and his shirt gleaming
in the moonlight, a carriage rattled past, and stopped immediately
behind them. The door was opened from within, and the only occupant,
alighting quickly, came towards them.
“There is only one man in Warsaw who would apostrophize the gods like
that,” he said. The speaker was Prince Martin Bukaty.
He recognized Cartoner at this moment.
“You!” he said, and there was a sharp note in his voice. “You, Cartoner!
What are you doing in the streets at this time of night?”
“We have been dining with Mangles,” explained Deulin.
“And we do not quite know what we are doing, or where we are going,”
added Cartoner. “But we think we are going home.”
“You seem to be on the spree,” said Martin, with a laugh in his voice,
and none in his eyes.
“We are,” answered Deulin.
“Come,” said Martin, turning to send away the carriage. “Come--your
shortest way is through our place now. My father and Wanda are out at a
ball, or something, so I am afraid you will not see them.”
“Do it,” whispered Deulin's voice from behind.
And Cartoner followed Martin up the narrow passage that led to the
garden of the Bukaty Palace.
XXI
A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING
Martin led the way without speaking. He opened the door with a key, and
passed through first. The garden was dark; for the trees in it had grown
to a great height, and, protected as they were from the wild winds
that sweep across the central plain of Europe, they had not shed their
leaves.
A few lights twinkled through the branches from the direction of the
house, and the shape of the large conservatory was dimly outlined, as
though there were blinds within, partially covering the glass.
“Yes,” said Martin, carefully closing the door behind him. “You find
me in sole possession. My father and sister have gone to a reception--a
semi-political affair at which they are compelled to put in an
appearance. It only began at half-past nine. They will not be home till
midnight. Mind those branches, Cartoner! You will come in, of course.”
And he hurried on again to open the next door.
“Thank you, for a few minutes,” answered Deulin, and seeing a movement
of dissent on Cartoner's part, he laid his hand on his arm.
“It is better,” he said, in an undertone. “It will put them completely
off the scent. There are sure to be more than two in it.”
So, reluctantly, Cartoner followed Martin into the Bukaty Palace for the
first time.
“Come,” said the young prince, “into the drawing-room. I see they have
left the lights on there.”
He pushed open the door of the long, bare room, and stood aside to allow
his guests to pass.
“Holloa!” he exclaimed, an instant later, following them into the room.
At the far end of it, where two large folding-doors opened to the
conservatory, half turning to see who came, stood Wanda. She had some
flowers in her hand, which she had just taken from her dress.
“Back again already?” asked Martin, in surprise.
“Yes,” answered Wanda. “There were some people there he did not want to
meet, so we came away again at once.”
“But I thought they could not possibly be there.”
“They got there,” answered Wanda, “by some ill chance, from Petersburg,
just in time.”
And as she spoke she shook hands with Cartoner.
“It is not such an ill chance, after all,” said Deulin, “since it gives
us the opportunity of seeing you. Where is your father?”
“He is in his study.”
“I rather want to see him,” said Deulin, looking at Martin.
“Come along, then,” was the answer. “He will be glad to see you. It will
cheer him up.”
And Wanda and Cartoner were left alone. It had all come about quickly
and simply--so much quicker and simpler than human plans are the plans
of Heaven.
Wanda, still standing in the doorway of the conservatory, of which the
warm, scented air swept out past her into the great room, watched her
brother and Deulin go and close the door behind them. She turned to
Cartoner with a smile as if about to speak; but she saw his face, and
she said nothing, and her own slowly grew grave.
He came towards her, upright and still and thoughtful. She did not look
at him, but past him towards the closed door. He only looked at her with
quiet, remembering eyes. Then he went straight to the point, as was his
habit.
“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said that fate could be hampered by
action. Nothing can hamper it. For fate has brought me here again.”
He stood before her, and the attitude in some way conveyed that by the
word “here” he only thought and meant near to her. There was a strange
look in her eyes of suspense and fear, and something else which needs
no telling to such as have seen it, and cannot be conveyed in words to
those who have not.
“A clear understanding,” he said abruptly, recalling her own words.
“That is your creed.”
She gave a little nod, and still looked past him towards the door
with deep, submissive eyes. One would have thought that she had done
something wrong which was being brought home to her. Explain the
thought, who can!
“I made another mistake,” he said. “Have been acting on it for years.
I thought that a career was everything. I dreamed, I suppose, of an
embassy--of a viceroyalty, perhaps--when I was quite young, and thought
the world was easy to conquer. All that . . . vanished when I saw you.
If it comes, well and good. I should like it. Not for my own sake.”
She made a little movement, and her eyelids flickered. Ah! that clear
understanding, which poor humanity cannot put into words!
“If it doesn't come”--he paused, and snapped the finger and thumb that
hung quiescent at his side--“well and good. I shall have lived. I shall
have known what life is meant to be. I shall have been the happiest man
in the world.”
He spoke slowly in his gently abrupt way. Practice in a difficult
profession had taught him to weigh every word he uttered. He had never
been known to say more than he meant.
“There never has been anybody else,” he continued. “All that side of
life was quite blank. The world was empty until you came and filled it,
at Lady Orlay's that afternoon. I had come half round the world--you had
come across Europe. And fate had fixed that I should meet you there.
At first I did not believe. I thought it was a mistake--that we should
drift apart again. Then came my orders to leave for Warsaw. I knew then
that you would inevitably return. Still I tried to get out of it--fought
against it--tried to avoid you. And you knew what it all came to.”
She nodded again, and still did not meet his eyes. She had not spoken to
him since he entered the room.
“There never can be anybody else,” he said. “How could there be?”
And the abrupt laugh that followed the question made her catch her
breath. She had, then, the knowledge given to so few, that so far as
this one fellow-creature was concerned she was the whole earth--that
he was thrusting upon her the greatest responsibility that the soul can
carry. For to love is as difficult as it is rare, but to be worthy of
love is infinitely harder.
“I knew from the first,” he continued, “that there is no hope. Whichever
way we turn there is no hope. I can spare you the task of telling me
that.”
She turned her eyes to his at last.
“You knew?” she asked, speaking for the first time.
“I know the history of Poland,” he said, quietly. “The country must
have your father--your father needs you. I could not ask you to give up
Poland--you know that.”
They stood in silence for a few moments. They had had so little time
together that they must needs have learned to understand each other in
absence. The friendship that grows in absence and the love that comes to
life between two people who are apart, are the love and friendship which
raise men to such heights as human nature is permitted to attain.
“If you asked me,” said Wanda, at length, with an illegible smile--“I
should do it.”
“And if I asked you I should not love you. If you loved me, you would
one day cease to do so; for you would remember what I had asked you.
There would be a sort of flaw, and you would discover it--and that would
be the end.”
“Is it so delicate as that?” she asked.
“It is the frailest thing in the world--and the strongest,” he answered,
with his thoughtful smile. “It is a very delicate sort of--thought,
which is given to two people to take care of. And they never seem to
succeed in keeping it even passably intact--and not one couple in a
million carry it through life unhurt. And the injuries never come from
the outer world, but from themselves.”
“Where did you learn all that?” she asked, looking at him with her
shrewd, smiling eyes.
“You taught me.”
“But you have a terribly high ideal.”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you do not expect the impossible?”
“Quite.”
She shook her head doubtfully.
“Are you sure you will never have to compromise? All the world
compromises.”
“With its conscience,” said Cartoner. “And look at the result.”
“Then you are good,” she returned, looking at him with a speculative
gravity, “as well as concise--and rather masterful.”
“It is clear,” he said, “that a man who persuades a woman to marry
against her inclination, or her conviction, or her conscience, is
seeking her unhappiness and his own.”
“Ah!” she cried. “But you ask for a great deal.”
“I ask for love.”
“And,” she said, going past that question, “no obstacles.”
“No obstacles that both could not conscientiously face and set aside.”
“And if one such object--quite a small one--should be found?”
“Then they must be content with love alone.”
Wanda turned from him, and fell into thought for some moments. They
seemed to be feeling their way forward on that difficult road where so
many hasten and such numbers fall.
“You have a way,” she said, “of putting into words--so few words--what
others only half think, and do not half attempt to act up to. If they
did--there would, perhaps, be no marriages.”
“There would be no unhappy ones,” said Cartoner.
“And it is better to be content with love alone?”
“Content,” was his sole answer.
Again she thought in silence for quite a long time, although their
moments were so few. A clock on the mantel-piece struck half-past ten.
Cartoner had bidden Joseph P. Mangles good-night only half an hour
earlier, and his life had been in peril--he had been down to the depths
and up to the heights since then. When the gods arrive they act quickly.
“So that is your creed,” she said at length. “And there is no
compromise?”
“None,” he answered.
And she smiled suddenly at the monosyllable reply. She had had to deal
with men of no compromise more than the majority of villa-dwelling women
have the opportunity of doing, and she knew, perhaps, that such are the
backbone of human nature.
“Ah!” she said, with a quick sigh, as she turned and looked down the
length of the long, lamp-lit room. “You are strong--you are strong for
two.”
He shook his head in negation, for he knew that hers was that fine,
steely strength of women which endures a strain all through a lifetime
of which the world knows nothing. Then, acting up to her own creed of
seeking always the clear understanding, she returned to the point they
had left untouched.
“And if two people had between them,” she suggested, wonderingly, “that
with which you say they might be content, if they had it, and were sure
they had it, and had with it a perfect trust in each other, but knew
that they could never have more, could they be happy?”
“They could be happier than nearly everybody else in the world,” he
answered.
“And if they had to go on all their lives--and if one lived in London
and the other in Warsaw--Warsaw?”
“They could still be happy.”
“If she--alone at one end of Europe--” asked Wanda, with her
worldly-wise searching into detail--“if she saw slowly vanishing those
small attractions which belong to youth, for which he might care,
perhaps?”
“She could still be happy.”
“And he? If he experienced a check in his career, or had some
misfortune, and felt lonely and disappointed--and there was no one near
to--to take care of him?”
“He could still be happy--if--”
“If--?”
“If he knew that she loved him,” replied Cartoner, slowly.
Wanda turned and looked at him with an odd little laugh, and there were
tears in her eyes.
“Oh! you may know that,” she said, suddenly descending from the
uncertain heights of generality. “You may be quite sure of that. If that
is what you want.”
“That is what I want.”
As he spoke he took her hand and slowly raised it to his lips. She
looked at his bent head, and when her eyes rested on the gray hairs
at his temples, they lighted suddenly with a gleam which was strangely
protecting and dimly maternal.
“I want you to go away from Warsaw,” she said. “I would rather you went
even if you say--that you are afraid to stay.”
“I cannot say that.”
“Besides,” she added, with her head held high, “they would not believe
you if you did.”
“I promise you,” he answered, “not to run any risks, to take every care.
But we must not see each other. I may have to go away without seeing
you.”
She gave a little nod of comprehension, and held her lips between her
teeth. She was looking towards the door; for she had heard voices in
that direction.
“I should like,” she said, “to make you a promise in return. It would
give me great satisfaction. Some day you may, perhaps, be glad to
remember it.”
The voices were approaching. It was Deulin's voice, and he seemed to be
speaking unnecessarily loud.
“I promise you,” said Wanda, with unfathomable eyes, “never to marry
anybody else.”
And the door opened, giving admittance to Deulin, who was laughing and
talking. He came forward looking, not at Wanda and Cartoner, but at the
clock.
“To your tents, O Israel!” he said.
Cartoner said good-night at once, and went to the door. For a moment
Deulin was left alone with Wanda. He went to a side-table, where he had
laid his sword-stick. He took it up, and slowly turned it in his hand.
“Wanda,” he said, “remember me in your prayers to-night!”
XXII
THE WHITE FEATHER
It is to be presumed that the majority of people are willing enough
to seek the happiness of others; which desire leads the individual to
interfere in her neighbor's affairs, while it burdens society with a
thousand associations for the welfare of mankind or the raising of the
masses.
Looking at the question from the strictly commonsense point of view,
it would appear to the observer that those who do the most good or the
least harm are the uncharitable. Better than the eager, verbose man
is he who stands on the shore cynically watching a landsman in a boat
without proffering advice as to how the vessel should be navigated,
who only holds out a cold and steady hand after the catastrophe has
happened, or, if no catastrophe supervenes, is content to walk away in
that silent wonder which the care of Providence for the improvident must
ever evoke.
Paul Deulin was considered by his friends to be a cynic; and a French
cynic is not without cruelty. He once told Wanda that he had seen men
and women do much worse than throw their lives away, which was probably
the unvarnished truth. But there must have been a weak spot in his
cynicism. There always is a weak spot in the vice of the most vicious.
For he sat alone in his room at the Hotel de l'Europe, at Warsaw, long
into the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and thinking thoughts
which he would at any other juncture have been the first to condemn. He
was thinking of the affairs of others, and into his thoughts there
came, moreover, the affairs, not of individuals, but of nations. A
fellow-countryman once gave it as his opinion that so long as the trains
ran punctually and meals were served at regular intervals he could
perceive no difference between one form of government and another. And
in the majority of instances the fate of nations rarely affects the
lives of individuals.
Deulin, however, was suddenly made aware of his own ignorance of
affairs that were progressing in his immediate vicinity, and which
were affecting the lives of those around him. More than any other
do Frenchmen herd together in exile, and Deulin knew all his
fellow-countrymen and women in Warsaw, in whatsoever station of life
they happened to move. He had a friend behind the counter of the small
feather-cleaning shop in the Jerozolimska. This lady was a French
Jewess, who had by some undercurrent of Judaism drifted from Paris
to Warsaw again and found herself once more among her own people. The
western world is ignorant of the strength of Jewry in Poland.
Deulin made a transparent excuse for his visit to the cleaner's shop.
He took with him two or three pairs of those lavender gloves which
Englishmen have happily ceased to wear by day.
“One likes,” he said to the stout Jewess, “to talk one's own tongue in a
foreign land.”
And he sat down quite affably on the hither side of the counter.
Conversation ran smoothly enough between these two, and an hour slipped
past before Deulin quitted the little shop. It was still early in the
day, and he hurried to Cartoner's rooms in the Jasna. He bought a flower
at the corner of the Jerozolimska as he went along, and placed it in
his buttonhole. He wore his soft felt hat at a gay angle, and walked the
pavement at a pace and with an air belonging to a younger generation.
“Ah!” he cried, at the sight of Cartoner, pipe in mouth, at his
writing-table. “Ah! if you were only idle, as I am”--he paused, with
a sharp, little sigh--“if you only could be idle, how much happier you
would be!”
“A Frenchman,” replied Cartoner, without looking up, “thinks that noise
means happiness.”
“Then you are happy--you pretend to happiness?” inquired Deulin,
sitting down without being invited to do so, and drawing towards him a
cigarette-case that lay upon the table.
“Yes, thank you,” replied Cartoner, lightly. He seemed, too, to be gay
this morning.
“Don't thank me--thank the gods,” replied Deulin, with a sudden gravity.
“Well,” said Cartoner presently, without ceasing to write, “what do you
want?”
Deulin glanced at his friend with a gleam of suspicion.
“What do I want?” he inquired, innocently.
“Yes. You want something. I always know when you want something. When
you are most idle you are most occupied.”
“Ah!”
Cartoner wrote on while Deulin lighted a cigarette and smoked half of it
with a leisurely enjoyment of its bouquet.
“There is a certain smell in the Rue Royale, left-hand side looking
towards the Column--the shady side, after the street has been
watered--that my soul desires,” said the Frenchman, at length.
“When are you going?” asked Cartoner, softly.
“I am not going; I wish I were. I thought I was last night. I thought
I had done my work here, and that it would be unnecessary to wait on
indefinitely for----”
“For what?”
“For the upheaval,” explained Deulin, with an airy wave of his
cigarette.
“This morning--” he began. And then he waited for Cartoner to lay aside
his pen and lean back in his chair with the air of thoughtful attention
which he seemed to wear towards that world in which he moved and had his
being. Cartoner did exactly what was expected of him.
“This morning I picked up a scrap of information.” He drew towards him
a newspaper, and with a pencil made a little drawing on the margin.
The design was made in three strokes. It was not unlike a Greek cross,
Deulin threw the paper across the table.
“You know that man?”
“I do not know his name,” replied Cartoner.
“No; no one knows that,” replied Deulin. “It is one of the very few
mysteries of the nineteenth century. All the others are cleared up.”
Cartoner made no answer. He sat looking at the design, thinking,
perhaps, with wonder of the man who in this notoriety-loving age was
still content to be known only by a mark.
“Up to the present I have not attached much importance to those rumors
which, happily, have never reached the newspaper,” said Deulin, after
a pause. “One has supposed that, as usual, Poland is ready for an
upheaval. But the upheaval does not come. That has been the status quo
for many years here. Suppose--suppose, my friend, that they manufacture
their own opportunity, or agree with some other body of malcontents as
to the creating of an opportunity.”
“Anarchy?” inquired Cartoner.
“The ladies of the party call it Nihilism,” replied the Frenchman, with
an inimitable gesture, conveying the fact that he was not the man to
gainsay a lady.
“Bukaty would not stoop to that. Remember they are a patient people.
They waited thirty years.”
“And struck too hastily, after all,” commented Deulin. “Bukaty would not
link himself with these others, who talk so much and do so little. But
there are others besides Bukaty, who are younger, and can afford to
wait longer, and are therefore less patient--men of a more modern stamp,
without his educational advantages, who are nevertheless sincere enough
in their way. It may not be a gentlemanly way--”
“The man who goes by the name of Kosmaroff is a gentleman, according to
his lights,” interrupted Cartoner.
“Ah! since you say so,” returned Deulin, with a significant gesture,
“yes.”
“Bon sang,” said Cartoner, and did not trouble to complete the saying.
“He is too much of a gentleman to herd with the extremists.”
But Deulin did not seem to be listening. He was following his own train
of thought.
“So you know of Kosmaroff?” he said, studying his companion's face. “You
know that, too. What a lot you know behind that dull physiognomy. Where
is Kosmaroff? Perhaps you know that.”
“In Warsaw,” guessed Cartoner.
“Wrong. He has gone towards Berlin--towards London, by the same token.”
Deulin leaned across the table and tapped the symbol that he had drawn
on the margin of the newspaper, daintily, with his finger-nail.
“That parishioner is in London, too,” he said, in his own tongue--and
the word means more in French.
Cartoner slowly tore the margin from the newspaper and reduced the
drawing to small pieces. Then he glanced at the clock.
“Trying to get me out of Warsaw,” he said. “Giving me a graceful chance
of showing the white feather.”
Deulin smiled. He had seen the glance, and he was quicker than most at
guessing that which might be passing in another man's mind. The force
of habit is so strong that few even think of a train without noting the
time of day at the same moment. If Cartoner was thinking of a train
at that instant, it could only be the train to Berlin on the heels of
Kosmaroff, and Deulin desired to get Cartoner away from Warsaw.
“The white feather,” he said, “is an emblem that neither you nor I need
trouble our minds about. Don't get narrow-minded, Cartoner. It is a
national fault, remember. For an Englishman, you used to be singularly
independent of the opinion of the man in the street or the woman at the
tea-table. Afraid! What does it matter who thinks we are afraid?”
And he gave a sudden staccato laugh which had a subtle ring in it of
envy, or of that heaviness which is of a life that is waxing old.
“Look here,” he said, after a pause, and he made a little diagram on
the table, “here is a bonfire, all dry and crackling--here, in Warsaw.
Here--in Berlin or in London--is the man with the match that will set
it alight. You and I have happened on a great event, and stand in the
shadow that it casts before it, for the second--no, for the third time
in our lives. We work together again, I suppose. We have always done so
when it was possible. One must watch the dry wood, the other must know
the movements of the man with the kindling. Take your choice, since
your humor is so odd. You stay or you go--but remember that it is in the
interests of others that you go.”
“Of others?”
“Yes--of the Bukatys. Your presence here is a danger to them. Now go or
stay, as you like.”
Cartoner glanced at his companion with watchful eyes. He was not
deliberating; for he had made up his mind long ago, and was now weighing
that decision.