I are put upon our good behavior--that our lives are safe only so long
as we are not seen speaking to Cartoner, or are not suspected of having
any communication with him.”
And Kosmaroff was silent.
He had ceased eating, and had laid aside his knife and fork. It was
clear that his whole mind and body were given to one thought and one
hope. He looked indifferently at the simple dishes set before him, and
had satisfied his hunger on that nearest to him, because it came first.
“I tell you this,” he said, after a silence, “because no one else dared
to tell you. Because I know, perhaps better than any other, all that you
have done--all that you are ready to do.”
“Yes--yes. Everything must be done for Poland,” said the prince,
suddenly pacified by the recollection, perhaps, of what the speaker's
life had been. Wanda had risen as if to go. The clock had just struck
ten.
“And the princess says the same?” said Kosmaroff, rising also, and
raising her hand to his lips to bid her good-night, after the Polish
fashion.
“Yes,” she answered, “I say the same.”
XXVIII
IN THE PINE-WOODS
The prince was early astir the next morning. He was a hardy old man,
and covered great distances on his powerful horse. Neither cold nor rain
prevented him from undertaking journeys to some distant village which
had once owned his ancestor as lord and master--in those days when a
noble had to pay no more for killing a peasant than a farmer may claim
for an injured sheep to-day.
The prince never discussed with Wanda those affairs in which, as a
noble, he felt compelled to take an active interest. He had seen,
perhaps, enough in the great revolution of his younger days to teach him
that women--and even Polish women--should take no part in politics. He
believed in a wise and studied ignorance of those things which it is
better not to know. He made no reference to Kosmaroff at breakfast the
next morning, and Wanda asked no questions. She had not slept until
nearly morning, and had heard her father bolt the doors after the
departure of the ex-Cossack. She had heard Kosmaroff's light and quick
step on the frozen snow as he started on his seven-mile walk to Warsaw.
Cartoner's name, then, was not mentioned during the morning meal, which
the prince ate with the deliberation of his years. The morning was
bright and sunny, with a crisp air and sufficient frost to keep the snow
from melting. The prince had recovered from his anger of the previous
evening, and was gay. Wanda, too, seemed light-hearted enough. She was
young and strong. In her veins there flowed the blood of a race that
had always been “game,” that had always faced the world with unflinching
eyes, and had never craved its pity. Her father had lost everything, had
lived a life of hardship, almost to privation for one of his rank; and
witnessed the ruin or the downfall of all his friends; and yet he could
laugh with the merry, while with the mourner it was his habit to purse
up his lips beneath the grizzled mustache and mutter a few curt words,
not of condolence, but of stimulation to endure.
He liked to see cheerful faces around him. They helped him, no doubt,
to carry on to the end of his days that high-handed and dignified fight
against ill-fortune which he had always waged.
“If you have a grievance,” he always said to those who brought their
tales of woe to his ears, “air it as much as you like, but speak up, and
do not whine.”
He had to listen to a great number of such tales, and to the majority
of grievances could suggest no cure; for they were the grievances of
Poland, and in these later times of Finland also, to which it appears
there is no cure.
“I shall make a long round to-day,” he said to Wanda, when he was in the
saddle, with his short, old-fashioned stirrup, his great boots covering
his knee and thigh from the wind, and his weather-beaten old face
looking out from the fur collar of his riding-coat. “It may be the last
time this winter. The spring must come soon.”
And he went away at an easy canter.
Wanda, left alone for the whole day in the stillness of this forest
farm, had her round to do also. She set out on foot soon after her
father's departure, bound to a distant cottage in the depths of the
pine-woods. The trees were quiet this morning; for it is only at the
time of thaw, when the snow, gathering moisture from the atmosphere,
gains in weight and breaks down the branches, that the woods crack as
beneath the tread of some stealthy giant. But a frost seems to brace the
trees which in the colder weather stand grim and silent, bearing their
burden without complaint.
The sky was cloudless and the air quite still. There is no silence like
that of a northern pine-wood in winter; for the creatures living in
the twilight there have been given by God silent feet and a stealthy
habit--the smaller ones going in fear of the larger, and the beasts of
prey ever alert for their natural enemy--man. The birds kept for the
most part to the outer fringes of the forest, nearer to the crops and
the few, far cottages.
Wanda had grown from childhood amid the pines, and the gloomy
forest-paths were so familiar as to have lost all power to impress her.
In the nursery she had heard tales of wolves and bears, but had never
seen them. They might be near or far; they might be watching through the
avenues of straight and motionless stems. In their childhood it had been
the delight of Martin and herself to trace in the snow the footprints
of the wolves--near the house, in the garden, right up to the nursery
window. They had gradually acquired the indifference of the peasants who
work in the fields, or the woodmen at their labors amid the trees, who
are aware that the silent, stealthy eyes are watching them, and work
on without fear. The prince had taught the children fearlessness, or,
perhaps, it was in their blood, and needed no education. He had taught
them to look upon the beasts of the forests not as enemies, but as
quiet, watching friends.
Wanda went alone whithersoever she listed, without so much as turning
her head to look over her shoulder. The pine-woods were hers; the
peasants were her serfs in spirit, if not in deed. Here, at all events,
the Bukatys were free to come and go. In cities they were watched, their
footsteps dogged by human wolves.
There are few paths through the great forests of Poland, of Posen, and
of Silesia, and what there are, are usually cut straight and at right
angles to each other. There was a path just wide enough to give passage
to the narrow timber carts from the farm direct to the woodman's
cottage, and so flat is the face of the earth that the distant trees are
like the masts of ships half-hidden by the curve of the world. It seems
as if one could walk on and on forever, or drop from hunger and fatigue
and lie unheeded for years in some forgotten corner. In the better-kept
forests the paths are staked and numbered, or else it would be
impossible to know the way amid such millions of trees--all alike, all
of the same height. But the prince was too poor to vie with the wealthy
land-owners of Silesia, and his forests were ill-kept.
In places the trees had fallen across the original path, and the few
passers-by had made a new path to one side or the other. Sometimes a
tree had grown outward towards the light and air, almost bridging the
open space.
Wanda could not, therefore, see very far in front or behind, and was
taken by surprise by the thud of a horse's feet on the beaten snow
behind her. She turned, thinking it was her father, who for some reason
had returned home, and, learning whither she had gone, had followed
her. But it was not the prince. It was Cartoner. Before she had quite
realized that it was he, he was on his feet leading his horse towards
her.
She paused and looked at him, half startled; then, with a curt,
inarticulate cry of joy she hurried towards him. Thus were given to them
a few of those brief moments of complete happiness which are sometimes
vouchsafed to human beings. Which must assuredly be moments stolen from
heaven; for angels are so chary with them, giving them to a few favored
ones only once or twice in a whole lifetime, and, to the large majority
of mankind, never at all.
“Why have you come?” asked Wanda.
“To see you,” replied this man of few words.
And the sound of his voice, the sight of his strong face, swept away all
her troubles and anxieties; as if, with his greater physical strength,
he had taken a burden which she could hardly lift, and carried it
easily. For he always seemed to know how to meet every emergency and
face every trouble. A minute ago she had been reflecting with relief
that he was not in Poland, and now it seemed as if her heart must break
had he been anywhere else. She forgot for the moment all the dangers
that surrounded them; the hopelessness of their love, the thousand
reasons why they should not meet. She forgot that a whole nation stood
between them. But it was only for a moment--a moment borrowed from
eternity.
“Is that the only reason?” she asked, remembering with a sort of shock
that this world of glittering snow and still pine-trees was not their
real world at all.
“Yes,” he answered.
“But you cannot stay in Poland! You must go away again at once! You do
not know--” And she stopped short, for their respective positions were
such that they always arrived at a point where only silence was left to
them.
“Oh, yes,” he answered with a short laugh. “I know. I am going away
to-night--to St. Petersburg.”
He did not explain that his immediate departure was not due to the fears
that she had half expressed.
“I am so glad.” She broke off, and looked at him with a little smile. “I
am so glad you are going away.”
She turned away from him with a sharp sigh. For she had now a new
anxiety, which, however, like Aaron's rod, had swallowed all the rest.
“I would rather know that you were safe in England,” she said, “even
if I were never to see you again. But,” and she looked up at him with a
sort of pride in her eyes--that long-drawn pride of race which is strong
to endure--“but you must never be hampered by a thought of me. I want
you to be what you have always been. Ah! you need not shake your head.
All men say the same of you--they are afraid of you.”
She looked at him slowly, up and down.
“And I am not,” she added, with a sudden laugh. For her happiness
was real enough. The best sort of happiness is rarely visible to the
multitude. It lies hidden in odd corners and quiet places; and the
eager world which, presumably, is seeking it, hurries past and never
recognizes it, but continues to mistake for it prosperity and riches,
noise and laughter, even fame and mere cheap notoriety.
They walked slowly back towards the farm, and again the gods were kind
to them; for they forgot how short their time was, how quickly such
moments fly. Much that they had to say to each other may not be
expressed on paper, neither can any compositor set it up in type.
They were practical enough, however, and as they walked beneath the
snow-clad pines they drew up a scheme of life which was astonishingly
unlike the dreams and aspirations of most lovers. For it was devoid
of selfishness, and they looked for happiness--not in an immediate
gratification of all their desires and an instant fulfilment of their
hopes, but in a mutual faith that should survive all separation and
bridge the longest span of years. Loyalty was to be their watchword.
Loyalty to self, to duty, and to each other.
Wanda did not, like the heroine of a novel, look for a passion that
should stride over every obstacle to its object, that should ignore
duty, which is only another word for honor, and throw down the spectres,
Foresight, Common-sense, Respect, which must arise in the pathway of
that madness, a brief passion. She was content, it seemed, that her
lover should be wise, should be careful for the future, should take her
life into his hands with a sort of quiet mastery as if he had a right
to do so--a right, not to ruin and debase, such as is usually considered
the privilege of that which is called a great passion and admired as
such--but a right to shape, guard, and keep.
Cartoner had not much to say about his own feelings, which, perhaps,
made him rather different from most lovers. He went so far as to
consider the feelings of others and to place them before his own, which,
of course, is quite unusual. And yet the scheme of life which was his
reading of Love, and which Wanda extracted from him that sunny March
morning and pieced together bit by bit in her own decided and conclusive
way, seemed to content her. She seemed to gather from it that he loved
her precisely as she wished to be loved, and that, come what might,
she had already enough to make her life happier than the lives of most
women.
And, of course, they hoped. For they were young, and human, and the
spring was in the air. But their hope was one of those things of which
they could not speak; for it involved knowledge of which Wanda had
become possessed at the hand of the prince and Martin and Kosmaroff. It
touched those things which Cartoner had come to Poland to learn, but not
from Wanda.
The smell of the wood-smoke from the chimneys of the farm told them that
they were nearing the edge of the forest, and Wanda stopped short.
“You must not go any nearer,” she said. “You are sure no one saw you
when you came?”
“No one,” answered Cartoner, whom fortune had favored as he came. For
he had approached the farm through the wood, and he had seen Wanda's
footsteps in the snow. He had often ridden over the same ground on the
very horse which he was now riding, and knew every inch of the way to
Warsaw. He could get there without being seen, might even quit the city
again unobserved.
For he knew--indeed, Wanda had told him--the dangers that surrounded
him. He knew also that these dangers were infinitely greater for Martin
and the prince.
“It is only what you foresaw,” she said, “when--when we first
understood.”
“No, it is worse than I foresaw,” he answered.
So they parted, with the knowledge that they must not meet again in
Poland when their meeting must mean such imminent risk to others. They
could not even write to each other while Wanda should be within the
circle of the Russian postal service. There was but the one link between
them--Paul Deulin; and to him neither would impart a confidence. Deulin
had brought about this meeting to-day. Warned by telegram, he had met
Cartoner at Warsaw Station, and had counselled him not to go out into
the streets. Since he was only waiting a few hours in Warsaw for the St.
Petersburg train, he must either sit in the station or take a horse and
go for a ride into the country. The Bukatys, by-the-way, were not in
town, but at their country house.
“Go and see them,” he added. “A man living on a volcano may surely play
with firearms if he wants to. And you are all on the volcano together.
Pah! I know the smell of it. The very streets, my friend, reek of
catastrophe.”
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, passing 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 god in the machine.
He is not a nonentity. 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 sex 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 chink 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 horsemen 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 pass from hand to hand in
mysterious cloth bundles and black stuff bags. The two horsemen 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 surreptitiousness.
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 passed
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-passenger, every carriage, every stranger passing in a hired
droschki. Cartoner and Deulin could see from the passing 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, passing 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 passports
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?”