Chapter 4

Mr. Mangles continued to gaze with a speculative eye into Northumberland Avenue. If, as Cartoner had suggested, the profession of which Mr. Joseph P. Mangles was a tardy ornament, needed above all things a capacity for leaving things unsaid, the American diplomatist was not ignorant in his art. For he did not inform his sister that the invitation to which she attached so flattering a national importance owed its origin to an accidental encounter between himself and Lord Orlay--a friend of his early senatorial days--in Pall Mall the day before.

Miss Mangles stood with the card in her hand and reflected. No woman and few men would need to be told, moreover, the subject of her thoughts. Of what, indeed, does every woman think the moment she receives an invitation?

“Jooly,” Mr. Mangles had been heard to say behind that lady's back--“Jooly is an impressive dresser when she tries.”

But the truth is that Jooly did not always try. She had not tried this morning, but stood in the conventional hotel room dressed in a black cloth garment which had pleats down the front and back and a belt like a Norfolk jacket. Miss Mangles was large and square-shouldered. She was a rhomboid, in fact, and had that depressing square-and-flat waist which so often figures on the platform in a great cause. Her hair was black and shiny and straight; it was drawn back from her rounded temples by hydraulic pressure. Her mouth was large and rather loose; it had grown baggy by much speaking on public platforms--a fearsome thing in a woman. Her face was large and round and white. Her eyes were dull. Long ago there must have been depressing moments in the life of Julia P. Mangles--moments spent in front of her mirror. But, like the woman of spirit that she was, she had determined that, if she could not be beautiful, she could at all events be great.

One self-deception leads to another. Miss Mangles sat down and accepted Lady Orlay's invitation in the full and perfect conviction that she owed it to her greatness.

“Are they abstainers?” she asked, reflectively, going back in her mind 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.