Part 23 (1/2)
Count Sergius believed that he had settled the affaire Gessner when he gave his instructions to the Chief of the Police, and the subsequent hours found him exceedingly pleased with himself. An artist in his profession, he flattered himself that it had all come about in the manner of his own antic.i.p.ations and that he would be able to carry back to London a story which would not only win upon a rich man's grat.i.tude, but advance him considerably in the favor of those who could well reward his labors.
This was an amiable reflection and one that ministered greatly to his self-content. No cloud stood upon the horizon of his self-esteem nor did shadows darken his glowing hopes. He had promised Richard Gessner to arrest the girl Lois Boriskoff, and arrested she would be before twelve o'clock to-morrow. As for this amiable English lad, so full of fine resolutions, so defiant, so self-willed, it would be a good jest enough to clap him in a police-station for four-and-twenty hours and to bow him out again, with profuse apologies, when the girl was on her way to Petersburg to join her amiable father in the Schlusselburg.
For Alban personally he had a warm regard. The very honesty of his character, his habit of saying just what he meant (so foreign to the Count's own practice), his ingenuous delight in all that he saw, his modern knight-errantry based upon an absurdly old-fas.h.i.+oned notion of right and wrong and justice and all such stuff as that, these were the very qualities to win the admiration of a man of the world who possessed none of them. Count Sergius said that the lad must suffer nothing. His intrigues with the daughter of a Polish anarchist were both dangerous and foolish. And was he not already the acknowledged lover of Anna Gessner, whom he must marry upon his return to London. Certainly, it would be very wrong not to lock him up, and he, Sergius, was not going to take the responsibility of any other course upon his already over-burdened shoulders.
These being his ideas, he found it amusing enough to meet Alban at the dinner-table and to speak of to-morrow and its programme. The reply to the cable they had dispatched to London lay already warm in his pocket, sent straight to him from the post-office as the police had directed. It was fitting that he should open the ball with a lie about this, and add thereto any other pleasant fancy which a fertile imagination dictated.
”Gessner does not cable us,” he said at that moment of the repast when the gla.s.ses are first filled and the tongue is loosed. ”I suppose he has gone over to Paris again as he hinted might be the case. If there is no news to-morrow, we must reconsider the arguments and see how we stand.
You know that I am perfectly willing to be guided by him and will do nothing of my own initiative. If he can procure the old man's freedom, I will be the first to congratulate you. Meanwhile, I am not to forget that we have a box at the opera and that _Huguenots_ is on the bill.
When I am not in musical circles, I confess my enjoyment of _Huguenots_.
Meyerbeer always seemed to me a grand old charlatan who should have run a modern show in New York. He wrote one masterpiece and some five miles of rubbish--but why decry a great work because there are also those which are not great. Besides, I am not musician enough really to enjoy the Ring. If it were not for the pretty women who come to my box to escape ennui, I would find Wagner intolerable.”
Alban, very quiet and not a little excited to-night, differed from this opinion altogether.
”My father was a musician,” he said. ”I believe that if he had not been a parson, he would have been a great musician. I don't know very much about music myself, but the first time that Mr. Gessner took me to hear one of Wagner's operas, I seemed to live in a new world. It could not have been just the desire to like it, for I had made up my mind that it would be very dry. There is something in such music as that which is better than all argument. I shall never forget the curious sensation which came to me when first I heard the overture to Tannhauser played by a big orchestra. You will not deny that it is splendid?”
”Undoubtedly it's fine--especially where the clarinets came in and you seem to have five hundred mice running up your back. I am not going to be drawn into an argument on the point--these likes and dislikes are purely individual. To me it seems perfectly ridiculous that one man should quarrel with another because a third person has said or written something about which they disagree. In politics, of course, there is justification. The Have-Nots want to get money out of the Haves and the pockets supply the adjectives. But in the arts, which exist for our pleasure,--why, I might as well fall foul of you because you do not like caviar and are more partial to brunettes than to blondes. My taste is all the other way--I dote upon caviar; golden-haired women are to me just a little more attractive than the angels. But, of course, that does not speak for their tempers.”
He laughed at the candor of it, and looking round the brilliant restaurant where they dined to-night, he began to speak in a low tone of Russian and Polish women generally.
”The Polish ladies are old-fas.h.i.+oned enough to love one man at a time--in their own country, at any rate. The Russians, on the contrary, are less selfish. A Russian woman is often the victim of three centuries, of suppressed female ambitions. She has large ideas, fierce pa.s.sions, an excellent political sense--and all these must be cooled by the wet blanket of a very ordinary domesticity. In reality, she is not domesticated at all and would far sooner be following her lover--the one chosen for the day--down the street with a flag. Here you have the reason why a Russian woman appeals to us. She is rarely beautiful--some of them would themselves admit the deficiency--but she is never an embarra.s.sment. Tell her that you are tired of her and you will discover that she was about to stagger your vanity by a similar confidence. In these days of revolution, she is seen at her best. Fear neither of G.o.d nor man will restrain her. We have more of the show of religion and less of the spirit in Russia than in any other country in the world. Here in Poland, it is a little different. Some of our women are as the idealists would have them to be. But there are others--or the city would be intolerable.”
Alban had lived too long in a world of mean cynics that this talk should either surprise or entertain him. Men in Union Street spoke of women much as this careless fellow did, rarely generous to them and often exceedingly unjust. His own ideals he had confessed wholly to none, not even to Anna Gessner in the moment of their greatest intimacy. That fine old-world notion of the perfect womanhood, developed to the point of idolatry by the Celts of the West, but standing none the less as a witness to the whole world's desire, might remain but as a memory of his youth--he would neither surrender it nor admit that it was unworthy of men's homage. When Sergius spoke of his own countrywomen, Alban could forgive him all other estimates. And this was as much as to say that the image of Lois was with him even in that splendid place, and that some sentiment of her humble faith and sacrifice had touched him to the quick.
They went to the opera as the Count had promised and there heard an indifferent rendering of the _Huguenots_. A veritable sisterhood of blondes, willing to show off Count Sergius to some advantage, came from time to time to his box and was by him visited in turn. Officers in uniform crowded the foyers and talked in loud tones during the finest pa.s.sages. A general sense of unrest made itself felt everywhere as though all understood the danger which threatened the city and the precarious existence its defenders must lead. When they quitted the theatre and turned into one of the military clubs for supper, the common excitement was even more marked and ubiquitous enough to arrest the attention even of such a _flaneur_ as Sergius.
”These fellows are sitting down to supper with bombs under their chairs,” he said _sotto voce_. ”That is to say, each thinks that a bomb is there and hopes that it will kill his neighbor. We have no sympathy in our public life here--the conditions are altogether against it.
Imagine five hundred men upon the deck of a s.h.i.+p which has struck a rock, and consider what opportunities there would be to deplore the drowned. In Russia each plays for his own safety and does not care a rouble what becomes of the man next door. Such a fact is both our strength and our weakness--our strength because opportunities make men, and our weakness because we have no unity of plan which will enable us to fight such a combination as is now being pitted against us. I myself believe that the old order is at an end. That is why I have a villa in the south of France and some excellent apartments in Paris.”
”You believe that the Revolutionaries will be victorious?” Alban asked in his quiet way.
”I believe that the power is pa.s.sing from the hands of all autocratic governments, and that some phase of socialism will eventually be the policy of all civilized nations.”
”Then what is the good of going to England, Count, if you believe that it will be the same story there?”
”It is only a step on the road. You will never have a revolution in your country, you have too much common sense. But you will tax your bourgeois until you make him bankrupt, and that will be your way of having all things in common. In America the workingman is too well off and the country is too young to permit this kind of thing yet. Its day will be much later--but it will come all the same, and then the deluge. Let us rejoice that we shall not see these things in our time. It is something to know that our champagne is a.s.sured to us.”
He lifted a golden gla.s.s and drank a vague toast heartily. Others in the Club were frankly intoxicated and many a heated scene marked the progress of unceremonious and impromptu revels. Young officers, who carried their lives in their hands every hour, showed their contempt of life in many bottles. Old men, stern and gray at dawn, were so many babbling imbeciles at midnight. The waiters ran to and fro ceaselessly, their faces dripping with perspiration and their throats hoa.r.s.e with shouting. The musicians fiddled as though the end of all things was at hand and must not surprise them at a broken bar. In Russia the scene was familiar enough, but to the stranger incomprehensible and revolting.
Alban felt as one released from a pit of gluttony when at three in the morning Sergius staggered to his feet and bade a servant call him in a drosky.
”We have much to do to-morrow,” he muttered, ”much to do--and then, ah, my friend, if we only knew what we meant when we say 'and then.'”
CHAPTER XXV
COUNT ZAMOYSKI SLEEPS
A glimmer of wan daylight in the Count's bedroom troubled him while he undressed and he drew the curtains with angry fingers. Down there in the dismal streets the Cossacks watched the night-birds going home to bed and envied them alike their condition and its consequences. If Sergius rested a moment at the window, it was to mark the presence of these men and to take heart at it. And this is to say that few who knew him in the social world had any notion of the life he lived apart or guessed that authority stood to him for his s.h.i.+eld and buckler against the unknown enemies his labors had created. Perhaps he rarely admitted the truth himself. Light and laughter and music were his friends in so far as they permitted him to forget the inevitable or to deride it.