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 semiofficial 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 highborn 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 borné 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
