Cartoner made no answer. He sat looking at the design, thinking, perhaps, with wonder of the man who in this notoriety-loving age was still content to be known only by a mark.
“Up to the present I have not attached much importance to those rumors which, happily, have never reached the newspaper,” said Deulin, after a pause. “One has supposed that, as usual, Poland is ready for an upheaval. But the upheaval does not come. That has been the status quo for many years here. Suppose—suppose, my friend, that they manufacture their own opportunity, or agree with some other body of malcontents as to the creating of an opportunity.”
“Anarchy?” inquired Cartoner.
“The ladies of the party call it Nihilism,” replied the Frenchman, with an inimitable gesture, conveying the fact that he was not the man to gainsay a lady.
“Bukaty would not stoop to that. Remember they are a patient people. They waited thirty years.”
“And struck too hastily, after all,” commented Deulin. “Bukaty would not link himself with these others, who talk so much and do so little. But there are others besides Bukaty, who are younger, and can afford to wait longer, and are therefore less patient—men of a more modern stamp, without his educational advantages, who are nevertheless sincere enough in their way. It may not be a gentlemanly way—”
“The man who goes by the name of Kosmaroff is a gentleman, according to his lights,” interrupted Cartoner.
“Ah! since you say so,” returned Deulin, with a significant gesture, “yes.”
“Bon sang,” said Cartoner, and did not trouble to complete the saying. “He is too much of a gentleman to herd with the extremists.”
But Deulin did not seem to be listening. He was following his own train of thought.
“So you know of Kosmaroff?” he said, studying his companion’s face. “You know that, too. What a lot you know behind that dull physiognomy. Where is Kosmaroff? Perhaps you know that.”
“In Warsaw,” guessed Cartoner.
“Wrong. He has gone towards Berlin—towards London, by the same token.”
Deulin leaned across the table and tapped the symbol that he had drawn on the margin of the newspaper, daintily, with his fingernail.
“That parishioner is in London, too,” he said, in his own tongue—and the word means more in French.
Cartoner slowly tore the margin from the newspaper and reduced the drawing to small pieces. Then he glanced at the clock.
“Trying to get me out of Warsaw,” he said. “Giving me a graceful chance of showing the white feather.”
Deulin smiled. He had seen the glance, and he was quicker than most at guessing that which might be passing in another man’s mind. The force of habit is so strong that few even think of a train without noting the time of day at the same moment. If Cartoner was thinking of a train at that instant, it could only be the train to Berlin on the heels of Kosmaroff, and Deulin desired to get Cartoner away from Warsaw.
“The white feather,” he said, “is an emblem that neither you nor I need trouble our minds about. Don’t get narrow-minded, Cartoner. It is a national fault, remember. For an Englishman, you used to be singularly independent of the opinion of the man in the street or the woman at the tea-table. Afraid! What does it matter who thinks we are afraid?”
And he gave a sudden staccato laugh which had a subtle ring in it of envy, or of that heaviness which is of a life that is waxing old.
“Look here,” he said, after a pause, and he made a little diagram on the table, “here is a bonfire, all dry and crackling—here, in Warsaw. Here—in Berlin or in London—is the man with the match that will set it alight. You and I have happened on a great event, and stand in the shadow that it casts before it, for the second—no, for the third time in our lives. We work together again, I suppose. We have always done so when it was possible. One must watch the dry wood, the other must know the movements of the man with the kindling. Take your choice, since your humor is so odd. You stay or you go—but remember that it is in the interests of others that you go.”
“Of others?”
“Yes—of the Bukatys. Your presence here is a danger to them. Now go or stay, as you like.”
Cartoner glanced at his companion with watchful eyes. He was not deliberating; for he had made up his mind long ago, and was now weighing that decision.
“I will go,” he said, at length. And Deulin leaned back in his chair with a half-suppressed yawn of indifference. It was, as Cartoner had observed, when he was most idle that this gentleman had important business in hand. He had a gay, light, easy touch on life, and, it is to be supposed, never set much store upon the gain of an object. It seemed that he must have played the game in earnest at one time, must have thrown down his stake and lost it, or won it perhaps, and then had no use for his gain, which is a bitterer end than loss can ever be.
“I dare say you are right,” he said. “And, at all events, you will see the last of this sad city.”
Then he changed the subject easily, and began to talk of some trivial matter. From one question to another he passed, with that air of superficiality which northern men can never hope to understand, and here and there he touched upon those grave events which wise men foresaw at this period in European history.
“I smell,” he said, “something in the atmosphere. Strangers passing in the street look at one with a questioning air, as if there were a secret which one might perhaps be party to. And I, who have no secrets.”
He spread out his hands, with a gay laugh.
“Because,” he added, with a sudden gravity, “there is nothing in life worth making a secret of—except one’s income. There are
