“Wanda,” he said, “remember me in your prayers tonight!”
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 Hôtel 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
