Chapter 9

He went to the restaurant of the Hotel de France, which is a quiet place of refreshment close to the Jasna, which has no political importance, like the restaurant of the Europe, and there dined. The square was deserted as he stumbled over the vile pavement towards his rooms. The concierge was sitting at the door of the quiet house where he had taken an apartment. All along the street the dvornik of every house thus takes his station at the half-closed door at nightfall. And it is so all through the town. It is a Russian custom, imported among others into the free kingdom of Poland, when the great empire of the north cast the shadow of its protecting wing over the land that is watered by the Vistula. So, no man may come or go in Warsaw without having his movements carefully noted by one who is directly responsible to the authorities for the good name of the house under his care.

“The poet is in. There is a letter up-stairs,” said the door-keeper to Cartoner, as he passed in. Cartoner's servant was out, and the lamps were turned low when he entered his sitting-room. He knew that the letter must be the reply to his application for a recall. He turned up the lamp, and, taking the letter from the table where it lay in a prominent position, sat down in a deep chair to read it at leisure.

It bore no address, and prattled of the crops. Some of it seemed to be nonsense. Cartoner read it slowly and carefully. It was an order, in brief and almost brutal language, to stay where he was and do the work intrusted to him. For a man who writes in a code must perforce avoid verbosity.

XV

A TALE HALF TOLD

The heart soon accustoms itself to that existence which is called living upon a volcano. Prince Bukaty had indeed known no other life, and to such as had daily intercourse with him he was quite a peaceful and jovial gentleman. He had brought up his children in the same atmosphere of strife and peril, and it is to be presumed that the fit had survived, while the unfit princess, his wife, had turned her face to the wall quite soon, not daring to meet the years in which there could be no hope of alleviation.

The prince's friends were not in Warsaw; many were at the mines. Some lived in Paris; others were exiled to distant parts of Russia. His generation was slowly passing away, and its history is one of the grimmest stories untold. Yet he sat in that bare drawing-room of a poor man and read his _Figaro_ quite placidly, like any bourgeois in the safety of the suburb, only glancing at the clock from time to time.

“He is late,” he said once, as he folded the paper, and that was all.

It was nearly eleven o'clock, and Martin had been expected to return to dinner at half-past six. Wanda was working, and she, too, glanced towards the clock at intervals. She was always uneasy about Martin, whose daring was rather of the reckless type, whose genius lay more in leadership than in strategy. As to her father, he had come through the sixties, and had survived the persecution and the dangers of Wielopolski's day--he could reasonably be expected to take care of himself. With regard to herself, she had no fear. Hers was the woman's lot of watching others in a danger which she could not share.

It was nearly half-past eleven when Martin came in. He was in riding-costume and was covered with dirt. His eyes, rimmed with dust, looked out of a face that was pale beneath the sunburn. He threw himself into a chair with an exclamation of fatigue.

“Had any dinner?” asked his father.

Wanda looked at her brother's face, and changed color herself. There was a suggestion of the wild rose in Wanda's face, with its delicate, fleeting shades of pink and white, while the slim strength of her limbs and carriage rather added to a characteristic which is essentially English or Polish. For American girls suggest a fuller flower on a firmer stem.

“Something has happened,” said Wanda, quietly.

“Yes,” replied Martin, stretching out his slight legs.

The prince laid aside his newspaper, and looked up quickly. When his attention was thus roused suddenly his eyes and his whole face were momentarily fierce. Some one had once said that the history of Poland was written on those deep-lined features.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing that affects affairs,” replied Martin. “Everything is safe.”

Which seemed to be catch-words, for Kosmaroff had made use of almost the identical phrases.

“I am quite confident that there is no danger to affairs,” continued Martin, speaking with the haste and vehemence of a man who is anxious to convince himself. “It was a mere mischance, but it gave us all a horrid fright, I can tell you--especially me, for I was doubly interested. Cartoner rode into our midst to-night.”

“Cartoner?” repeated the prince.

“Yes. He rang the bell, and when the door was opened--we were expecting some one else--he led his horse into our midst, with a loose shoe.”

“Who saw him?” asked the prince.

“Every one.”

“Kosmaroff?”

“Yes. And if I had not been there it would have been all up with Cartoner. You know what Kosmaroff is. It was a very near thing.”

“That would have been a mistake,” said the prince, reflectively. “It was the mistake they made last time. It has never paid yet to take life in driblets.”

“That is what I told Kosmaroff afterwards, when Cartoner had gone. It was evident that it could only have been an accident. Cartoner could not have known. To do a thing like that, he must have known all--or nothing.”

“He could not have known all,” said the prince. “That is an impossibility.”

“Then he must have known nothing,” put in Wanda, with a laugh, which at one stroke robbed the matter of much of its importance.

“I do not know how much he perceived when he was in--as to his own danger, I mean--for he has an excellent nerve, and was steady; steadier than I was. But he knows that there was something wrong,” said Martin, wiping the dust from his face with his pocket-handkerchief. His hand shook a little, as if he had ridden hard, or had been badly frightened. “We had a bad half-hour after he left, especially with Kosmaroff. The man is only half-tamed, that is the truth of it.”

“That is more to his own danger than to any one else's,” put in Wanda, again. She spoke lightly, and seemed quite determined to make as little of the incident as possible.

“Then how do matters stand?” inquired the prince.

“It comes to this,” answered Martin, “that Poland is not big enough to hold both Kosmaroff and Cartoner. Cartoner must go. He must be told to go, or else----”

Wanda had taken up her work again. As she looked at it attentively, the color slowly faded from her face.

“Or else--what?” she inquired.

Martin shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, Kosmaroff is not a man to stick at trifles.”

“You mean,” said Wanda, who would have things plainly, “that he would assassinate him?”

Wanda glanced at her father. She knew that men hard pressed are no sticklers. She knew the story of the last insurrection, and of the wholesale assassination, abetted and encouraged by the anonymous national government of which the members remain to this day unknown. The prince made an indifferent gesture of the hand.

“We cannot go into those small matters. We are playing a bigger game that that. It has always been agreed that no individual life must be allowed to stand in the way of success.”

“It is upon that principle that Kosmaroff argues,” said Martin, uneasily.

“Precisely; and as I was not present when this happened--as it is, moreover, not my department--I cannot, personally, act in the matter.”

“Kosmaroff will obey nobody else.”

“Then warn Cartoner,” the prince said, in a final voice. His had always been the final word. He would say to one, go; and to another, come.

“I cannot do it,” said Martin, looking at Wanda. “You know my position--how I am watched.”

“There is only one person in Warsaw who can do it,” said Wanda--“Paul Deulin.”

“Deulin could do it,” said the prince, thoughtfully. “But I never talk to Deulin of these matters. Politics are a forbidden subject between us.”

“Then I will go and see Monsieur Deulin the first thing to-morrow morning,” said Wanda, quietly.

“You?” asked her father. And Martin looked at her in silent surprise. The old prince's eyes flashed suddenly.

“Remember,” he said, “that you run the risk of making people talk of you. They may talk of us--of Martin and me--the world has talked of the Bukatys for some centuries--but never of their women.”

“They will not talk of me,” returned Wanda, composedly. “I will see to that. A word to Mr. Cartoner will be enough. I understood him to say that he was not going to stay long in Warsaw.”

The prince had acquired the habit of leaving many things to Wanda. He knew that she was wiser than Martin, and in some ways more capable.

“Well,” he said, rising. “I take no hand in it. It is very late. Let us go to bed.”

He paused half-way towards the door.

“There is one thing,” he said, “which we should be wise to recollect--that whatever Cartoner may know or may not know will go no farther. He is a diplomatist. It is his business to know everything and to say nothing.”

“Then, by Heaven, he knows his business!” cried Martin, with his reckless laugh.

There are three entrances to the Hotel de l'Europe, two beneath the great archway on the Faubourg, where the carriages pass through into the court-yard--where Hermani was assassinated--where the people carried in the bodies of those historic five, whose mutilated corpses were photographed and hawked all through eastern Europe. The third is a side door, used more generally by habitues of the restaurant. It was to this third door that Wanda drove the next morning. She knew the porter there. He was in those days a man with a history and Wanda was not ignorant of it.

“Miss Cahere--the American lady?” she said. And the porter gave her the number of Netty's room. He was too busy a man to offer to escort her thither.

Wanda mounted the stairs along the huge corridor. She passed Netty's room, and ascended to the second story. All fell out as she had wished. At the head of the second staircase there is a little glass-partitioned room, where the servants sit when they are unemployed. In this room, reading a French newspaper, she found Paul Deulin's servant, a well-trained person. And a well-trained French servant is the best servant in the world. He took it for granted that Wanda had come to see his master, and led the way to the spacious drawing-room occupied by Deulin, who always travelled _en prince_.

“I am given for my expenses more money than I can spend,” he said, in defence of his extravagant habits, “and the only people to whom I want to give it are those who will not accept it.”

Deulin was not in the room, but he came in almost as soon as Wanda had found a chair. She was looking at a book, and did not catch the flash of surprise in his eyes.

“Did Jean show you in?” he said.

“Yes.”

“That is all right. He will keep everybody else out. And he will lie. It would not do, you know, for you to be talked about. We all have enemies, Wanda. Even plain people have enemies.”

Wanda waited for him to ask her why she had come.

“Yes,” he said, glancing at her and drawing a chair up to the table near which she was sitting. “Yes! What is the matter?”

“An unfortunate incident,” answered Wanda, “that is all.”

“Good. Life is an unfortunate incident if we come to that. I hope I predicted it. It is so consoling to have predicted misfortune when it comes. Your father?”

“No.”

“Martin?”

“No.”

“Cartoner,” said Deulin, dropping his voice half a dozen tones, and leaning both elbows on the table in a final way, which dispensed with the necessity of reply.

“Allons. What has Cartoner been doing?”

“He has found out something.”

“Oh, la! la!” exclaimed Deulin, in a whisper--giving voice to that exclamation which, as the cultured reader knows, French people reserve for a really serious mishap. “I should have thought he knew better.”

“And I cannot tell you what it is.”

“And I cannot guess. I never find out things, and know nothing. An ignorant Frenchman, you know, ignores more than any other man.”

“It came to Martin's knowledge,” explained Wanda, looking at him across the table, with frank eyes. But Deulin did not meet her eyes. “Look a man in the eyes when you tell him a lie,” Deulin had once said to Cartoner, “but not a woman.”

“It came to Martin's knowledge by chance, and he says that--” Wanda paused, drew in her lips, and looked round the room in an odd, hurried way--“that it is not safe for Mr. Cartoner to remain any longer in Warsaw, or even in Poland. Mr. Cartoner was very kind to us in London. We all like him. Martin cannot, of course, say anything for him. My father won't--”

Deulin was playing a gay little air with his fingers on the table. His touch was staccato, and he appeared to be taking some pride in his execution.

“Years ago,” he said, after a pause, “I once took it upon myself to advise Cartoner. He was quite a young man. He listened to my advice with exemplary patience, and then acted in direct contradiction to it--and never explained. He is shockingly bad at explanation. And he was right, and I was wrong.”

He finished his gay little air with an imaginary chord, played with both hands.

“Voila!” he said. “I can do nothing, fair princess.”

“But surely you will not stand idle and watch a man throw away his life,” said Wanda, looking at him in surprise.

He raised his eyes to hers for a moment, and they were startlingly serious. They were dark eyes, beneath gray lashes. The whole man was neat and gray and--shallow, as some thought.

“My dear Wanda,” he said, “for forty years and more I have watched men--and women--do worse than throw their lives away. And it has quite ceased to affect my appetite.”

Wanda rose from her chair, and Deulin's face changed again. He shot a sidelong glance at her and bit his lip. His eyes were keen enough now.

“Listen!” he said, as he followed her to the door. “I will give him a little hint--the merest ghost of a hint--will that do?”

“Thank you,” said Wanda, going more slowly towards the door.

“Though I do not know why we should, any of us, trouble about this Englishman.”

Wanda quickened her pace a little, and made no answer.

“There are reasons why I should not accompany you,” said Deulin, opening the door. “Try the right-hand staircase, and the other way round.”

He closed the door behind her, and stood looking at the chair which Wanda had just vacated.

“Only the third woman who knows what she wants,” he said, “and yet I have known thousands--thousands.”

XVI

MUCH--OR NOTHING

If we contemplate our neighbour's life with that calm indifference to his good or ill which is the only true philosophy, it will become apparent that the gods amuse themselves with men as children amuse themselves with toys. Most lives are marked by a series of events, a long roll of monotonous years, and perhaps another series of events. In some the monotonous years come first, while others have a long breathing space of quiet remembrance before they go hence and are no more seen.

A child will take a fly and introduce him to the sugar-basin. He will then pull off his wings in order to see what he will do without them. The fly wanders round beneath the sugar-basin, his small mind absorbed in a somewhat justifiable surprise, and then the child loses all interest in him. Thus the gods--with men.

Cartoner was beginning to experience this numb surprise. His life, set down as a series of events, would have made what the world considers good reading nowadays. It would have illustrated to perfection; for it had been full of incidents, and Cartoner had acted in these incidents--as the hero of the serial sensational novel plays his monthly part--with a mechanical energy calling into activity only one-half of his being. He had always known what he wanted, and had usually accomplished his desires with the subtraction of that discount which is necessary to the accomplishment of all human wishes. The gods had not helped him; but they had left him alone, which is quite as good, and often better. And in human aid this applies as well, which that domestic goddess, the managing female of the family, would do well to remember.

The gods had hitherto not been interested in Cartoner, and, like the fly on the nursery window that has escaped notice, he had been allowed to crawl about and make his own small life, with the result that he had never found the sugar-basin and had retained his wings. But now, without apparent reason, that which is called fate had suddenly accorded him that gracious and inconsequent attention which has forever decided the sex of this arbiter of human story.

Cartoner still knew what he wanted, and avoided the common error of wanting too much. For the present he was content with the desire to avoid the Princess Wanda Bukaty. And this he was not allowed to do. Two days after the meeting at the Mokotow--the morning following the visit paid by Wanda to the Hotel de l'Europe--Cartoner was early astir. He drove to the railway station in time to catch the half-past eight train, and knowing the ways of the country, he took care to arrive at ten minutes past eight. He took his ticket amid a crowd of peasants--wild-looking men in long coats and high boots, rough women in gay shades of red, in short skirts and top-boots, like their husbands.

This was not a fashionable train, nor a through train to one of the capitals. A religious fete at a village some miles out of Warsaw attracted the devout from all parts, and the devout are usually the humble in Roman Catholic countries. Railways are still conducted in some parts of Europe on the prison system, and Cartoner, glancing into the third-class waiting room, saw that it was thronged. The second-class room was a little emptier, and beyond it the sacred green-tinted shades of the first-class waiting-room promised solitude. He went in alone. There was one person in the bare room, who rose as he came in. It was Wanda. The gods were kind--or cruel.

“You are going away?” she said, in a voice so unguardedly glad that Cartoner looked at her in surprise. “You have seen Monsieur Deulin, and you are going away.”

“No, I have not seen Deulin since the races. He came to my rooms yesterday, but I was out. My rooms are watched, and he did not come again.”

“We are all watched,” said Wanda, with a short and careless laugh. “But you are going away--that is all that matters.”

“I am not going away. I am only going across the frontier, and shall be back this afternoon.”

Wanda turned and looked towards the door. They were alone in the room, which was a vast one. If there were any other first-class passengers, they were waiting the arrival of the train from Lemberg in the restaurant, which is the more usual way of gaining access to the platform. She probably guessed that he was going across the frontier to post a letter.

“You must leave Warsaw,” she said; “it is not safe for you to stay here. You have by accident acquired some knowledge which renders it imperative for you to go away. Your life, you understand, is in danger.”

She kept her eyes on the door as she spoke. The ticket-collector on duty at the entrance of the two waiting-rooms was a long way off, and could not hear them even if he understood English, which was improbable. There were so many other languages at this meeting-place of East and West which it was essential for him to comprehend. The room was absolutely bare; not so much as a dog could be concealed in it. It these two had anything to say to each other this was assuredly the moment, and this bare railway station the place to say it in.

Cartoner did not laugh at the mention of danger, or shrug his shoulders. He was too familiar with it, perhaps, to accord it this conventional salutation.

“Martin would have warned you,” she went on, “but he did not dare to. Besides, he thought that you knew something of the danger into which you had unwittingly run.”

“Not unwittingly,” said Cartoner, and Wanda turned to look at him. He said so little that his meaning needed careful search.

“I cannot tell you much--” she began, and he interrupted her at once.

“Stop,” he said, “you must tell me nothing. It was not unwitting. I am here for a purpose. I am here to learn everything--but not from you.”

“Martin hinted at that,” said Wanda, slowly, “but I did not believe him.”

And she looked at Cartoner with a sort of wonder in her eyes. It was as if there were more in him--more of him--than she had ever expected. And he returned her glance with a simplicity and directness which were baffling enough. He looked down at her. He was taller than she, which was as it should be. For half the trouble of this troubled world comes from the fact that, for one reason or another, women are not always able to look up to the men with whom they have dealings.

“It is true enough,” he said, “fate has made us enemies, princess.”

“You said that even the Czar could not do that. And he is stronger than fate--in Poland. Besides----”

“Yes.”

“You, who say so little, were indiscreet enough to confide something in your enemy. You told me you had written for your recall.”

And again her eyes brightened, with an anticipating gleam of relief.

“It has been refused.”

“But you must go--you must go!” she said, quickly. She glanced at the great clock upon the wall. She had only ten minutes in which to make him understand. He was an eminently sensible person. There were gleams of gray in his closely cut hair.

“You must not think that we are alarmists. If there is any family in the world who knows what it is to live peaceably, happily--quite gayly--” she broke off with a light laugh, “on a volcano--it is the Bukatys. We have all been brought up to it. Martin and I looked out of our nursery window on April 8, 1861, and saw what was done on that day. My father was in the streets. And ever since we have been accustomed to unsettled times.”

“I know,” said Cartoner, “what it is to be a Bukaty.” And he smiled slowly as she looked at him with gray, fearless eyes. Then suddenly her manner, in a flash, was different.

“Then you will go?” she pleaded, softly, persuasively. And when he turned away his eyes from hers, as if he did not care to meet them, she glanced again, hurriedly, at the clock. There is a cunning bred of hatred, and there is another cunning, much deeper. “Say you will go!”

And, sternly economical of words, he shook his head.

“I do not think you understand,” she went on, changing her manner and her ground again. And to each attack he could only oppose his own stolid, dumb form of defence. “You do not understand what a danger to us your presence here is. It is needless to tell you all this,” with a gesture she indicated the well-ordered railway station, the hundred marks of a high state of civilization, “is skin deep. That things in Poland are not at all what they seem. And, of course, we are implicated. We live from day to day in uncertainty. And my father is such an old man; he has had such a hopeless struggle all his life. You have only to look at his face--”

“I know,” admitted Cartoner.

“It would be very hard if anything should happen to him now, after he has gone through so much. And Martin, who is so young in mind, and so happy and reckless! He would be such an easy prey for a political foe. That is why I ask you to go.”

“Yes, I know,” answered Cartoner, who, like many people reputed clever, was quite a simple person.

“Besides,” said Wanda, with that logic which men, not having the wit to follow it, call no logic at all, “you can do no good here, if all your care and attention are required for the preservation of your life. Why have they refused your recall? It is so stupid.”

“I must do the best I can,” replied Cartoner.

Wanda shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and tapped her foot on the ground. Then suddenly her manner changed again.