“Then you have done what I asked you to do,” said Wanda, “some time ago, and I am very grateful.”
“Some time ago? It was only yesterday.”
“Was it? It seems more than that,” said Wanda. And Deulin nodded his head slowly.
“I was able to give him some information which made him change his plans quite suddenly,” he explained. “So he packed up and went. He had not much to pack. We travel light—he and I. We have no despatch-boxes or notebooks or diaries. What we remember and forget we remember and forget in our own heads. Though I doubt whether Cartoner forgets anything.”
“And you?” asked Wanda, turning upon him quickly.
“I? Oh! I do my best,” he said, lightly. “But if you desire to forget anything you should begin early. It is not a habit acquired in later life.”
He rose as he spoke and looked at the clock. He had a habit of peering and contracting his round brown eyes which made many people think that he was shortsighted.
“I do not think I will wait for the Mangles,” he said. “Especially Jooly. I do not feel in the humor for Jooly. By-the-way—” He paused, and contemplated the fire thoughtfully. “You never talk politics, I know. With the Mangles you may go further, and not even talk of politicians. It is no affair of theirs that Cartoner may have quitted Warsaw—you understand?”
“I should have thought Mr. Joseph Mangles the incarnation of discretion,” said Wanda.
“Ah! You have found out Mangles, have you? I wonder if you have found us all out. Yes, Mangles is discreet, but Netty is not. I call her Netty—well, because I regard her with a secret and consuming passion.”
“And have an equally secret and complete contempt for her discretion.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, and turned to look at her again. “Have I concealed my admiration so successfully as that? Perhaps I have overdone the concealment.”
“Perhaps you have overdone the contempt,” suggested Wanda. “She is probably more discreet than you think, but I shall not put her to the test.”
“You see,” said Deulin, in an explanatory way, “Cartoner may have had reasons of his own for leaving without drum or trumpet. You and I are the only persons in Warsaw who know of his departure, except the people in the passport-office—and the others, whose business it is to watch us all. You have a certain right to know; because in a sense you brought it all about, and it concerns the safety of your father and Martin. So I took it upon myself to tell you. I was not instructed to do so by Cartoner. I have no message of politeness to give to anyone in Warsaw. Cartoner merely saw that it was his duty to go, and to go at once; so he went at once. And with a characteristic simplicity of purpose, he ignored the little social trammels which the majority of mankind know much better than they know their Bible, and follow much more closely. He was too discreet to call and say goodbye—knowing the ways of servants in this country. He will be much too discreet to send a congé card by post, knowing, as he does, the Warsaw post-office.”
He took up his hat as he sat, and broke suddenly into his light and pleasant laugh.
“You are wondering,” he said, “why I am taking this unusual course. It is not often, I know, that one speaks well of one’s friend behind his back. It is six for Cartoner and half a dozen for myself. To begin with, Cartoner is my friend. I should not like him to be misunderstood. Also, I may do the same at any moment myself. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Sometimes we remember our friends and sometimes we forget them.”
“At all events,” said Wanda, shaking hands, “you are cautious. You make no promises.”
“And therefore we break none,” he answered, as he crossed the threshold.
He had hardly gone before Netty entered the room, followed closely by Mr. Mangles. She was prettily dressed. She appeared to be nervous and rather shy. The two girls shook hands in silence. Joseph Mangles, standing well in the middle of the room, waited till the first greeting was over, and then, with that solemn air of addressing an individual as if he or she were an assembly, he spoke.
“Princess,” he said, “my sister begs to be excused. She is unable to take tea this afternoon. Last night she considered herself called upon to make a demonstration in the cause that she has at heart. She smoked two cigarettes towards the emancipation of your sex, princess. Just to show her independence—to show, I surmise, that she didn’t care a—that she did not care. She cares this afternoon. She had a headache.”
And he bowed with a courtesy with which some old-fashioned men still attempt to oppose the progress of women.
XXIV
In the West India Dock Road
It is not only in name that this great thoroughfare has the sound of the sea, the suggestion of a tarry atmosphere, and that mystery which hangs about the lives of simple sailor men. To thousands and thousands of foreigners the word London means the West India Dock Road, and nothing more. There are sailors sailing on every sea who cherish the delusion that they have seen life and London when they have passed the portals of one of the large public-houses of the West India Dock Road.
There are others who are not sailors, speaking one of the half-dozen tongues of eastern Europe, of which the average educated Briton does not even know the name, whose lives are bounded on the west by Aldgate Pump, on the east by the Dock Gates, on the north by Houndsditch, and on the south by St. Katherine’s Dock and Tower Hill. A man who would wish to knock at any door in this district, and speak to him who opened it
