The Dark Star

Now, across the intersections of streets and alleys beyond where they stood, policemen and Garde cavalry were shooting into doorways, basements, and up the sombre, dusky lanes, the dry crack of their service revolvers re-echoing noisily through the street.

Toward the Boulevard below, a line of police and of cavalrymen blocked the rue Vilna; and, beyond them, the last of the mob was being driven from the Café des Bulgars, where the first ambulances were arriving and the police, guarding the ruins, were already looking out of windows on the upper floors.

A cavalryman came clattering down the rue Vilna, gesticulating and calling out to Sengoun and Neeland to take their ladies and depart.

“Get us a taxicab – there’s a good fellow!” cried Sengoun in high spirits; and the cavalryman, looking at their dishevelled attire, laughed and nodded as he rode ahead of them down the rue Vilna.

There were several taxicabs on the Boulevard, their drivers staring up at the wrecked café. As Neeland spoke to the driver of one of the cabs, Ilse Dumont stepped back beside the silent girl whom she had locked in the bedroom.

“I gave you a chance,” she said under her breath. “What may I expect from you? Answer me quickly! – What am I to expect?”

The girl seemed dazed:

“N-nothing,” she stammered. “The – the horror of that place – the killing – has sickened me. I – I want to go home–”

“You do not intend to denounce me?”

“No – Oh, God! No!”

“Is that the truth? If you are lying to me it means my death.”

The girl gazed at her in horror; tears sprang to her eyes:

“I couldn’t – I couldn’t!” she stammered in a choking voice. “I’ve never before seen death – never seen how it came – how men die! This – this killing is horrible, revolting!” She had laid one trembling little hand on Ilse Dumont’s bare shoulder. “I don’t want to have you killed; the idea of death makes me ill! I’m going home – that is all I ask for – to go home–”

She dropped her pretty head and began to sob hysterically, standing there under the growing daylight of the Boulevard, in her tattered evening gown.

Suddenly Ilse Dumont threw both arms around her and kissed the feverish, tear-wet face:

“You weren’t meant for this!” she whispered. “You do it for money. Go home. Do anything else for wages – anything except this! —Anything, I tell you–”

Neeland’s hand touched her arm:

“I have a cab. Are you going home with her?”

“I dare not,” she said.

“Then will you take this Russian girl to her home, Sengoun?” he asked. And added in a low voice: “She is one of your own people, you know.”

“All right,” said Sengoun blissfully. “I’d take the devil home if you asked me! Besides, I can talk to her about my regiment on the way. That will be wonderful, Neeland! That will be quite wonderful! I can talk to her in Russian about my regiment all the way home!”

He laughed and looked at his friend, at Ilse Dumont, at the drooping figure he was to take under his escort. He glanced down at his own ragged attire where he stood hatless, collarless, one sleeve of his evening coat ripped open to the shoulder.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” he cried, bursting out into uncontrollable laughter. “Neeland, my dear comrade, this has been the most delightfully wonderful night of my entire life! But the great miracle is still to come! Hurrah for a thousand lances! Hurrah! Town taken by Prince Erlik! Hurrah!”

And he seized the young girl whom he was to escort to her home – wherever that hazy locality might be – and carried her in his arms to the taxicab, amid encouraging shouts of laughter from the line of cavalrymen who had been watching the proceedings from the corner of the rue Vilna.

That shout of Gallic appreciation inflamed Sengoun: he reached for his hat, to lift and wave it, but found no hat on his head. So he waved his tattered sleeve instead:

“Hurrah for France!” he shouted. “Hurrah for Russia! I’m Sengoun, of the Terek! – And I am to have a thousand lances with which to explain to the Germans my opinion of them and of their Emperor!”

The troopers cheered him from their stirrups, in spite of their officers, who pretended to check their men.

“Vive la France! Vive la Russie!” they roared. “Forward the Terek Cossacks!”

Sengoun turned to Ilse Dumont:

“Madame,” he said, “in gratitude and admiration!” – and he gracefully saluted her hand. Then, to his comrade: “Neeland!” – seizing both the American’s hands. “Such a night and such a comrade I shall never forget! I adore our night together; I love you as a brother. I shall see you before I go?”

“Surely, Sengoun, my dear comrade!”

“Alors – au revoir!” He sprang into the taxicab. “To the Russian Embassy!” he called out; and turned to the half fainting girl on the seat beside him.

“Where do you live, my dear?” he asked very gently, taking her icy hand in his.

CHAPTER XXXIV

SUNRISE

When the taxicab carrying Captain Sengoun and the unknown Russian girl had finally disappeared far away down the Boulevard in the thin grey haze of early morning, Neeland looked around him; and it was a scene unfamiliar, unreal, that met his anxious eyes.

The sun had not yet gilded the chimney tops; east and west, as far as he could see, the Boulevard stretched away under its double line of trees between ranks of closed and silent houses, lying still and mysterious in the misty, bluish-grey light.

Except for police and municipal guards, and two ambulances moving slowly away from the ruined café, across the street, the vast Boulevard was deserted; no taxicabs remained; no omnibuses moved; no early workmen passed, no slow-moving farm wagons and milk wains from the suburbs; no chiffoniers with scrap-filled sacks on their curved backs, and steel-hooked staves, furtively sorting and picking among the night’s débris on sidewalk and in gutter.

Here and there in front of half a dozen wrecked cafés little knots of policemen stood on the glass-littered sidewalk, in low-voiced consultation; far down the Boulevard, helmets gleamed dully through the haze where municipal cavalry were quietly riding off the mobs and gradually pushing them back toward the Montmartre and Villette quarters, whence they had arrived.

Mounted Municipals still sat their beautiful horses in double line across the corner of the rue Vilna and parallel streets, closing that entire quarter where, to judge from a few fitful and far-away pistol shots, the methodical apache hunt was still in progress.

And it was a strange and sinister phase of Paris that Neeland now gazed upon through the misty stillness of early morning. For there was something terrible in the sudden quiet, where the swift and shadowy fury of earliest dawn had passed: and the wrecked buildings sagged like corpses, stark and disembowelled, spilling out their dead intestines indecently under the whitening sky.

Save for the echoes of distant shots, no louder than the breaking of a splinter – save for the deadened stamp and stir of horses, a low-voiced order, the fainter clash of spurs and scabbards – an intense stillness brooded now over the city, ominously prophetic of what fateful awakening the coming sunrise threatened for the sleeping capital.

Neeland turned and looked at Ilse Dumont. She stood motionless on the sidewalk, in the clear, colourless light, staring fixedly across the street at the débris of the gaping, shattered Café des Bulgars. Her evening gown hung in filmy tinted shreds; her thick, dark hair in lustrous disorder shadowed her white shoulders; a streak of dry blood striped one delicate bare arm.

To see her standing there on the sidewalk in the full, unshadowed morning light, silent, dishevelled, scarcely clothed, seemed to him part of the ghastly unreality of this sombre and menacing vision, from which he ought to rouse himself.

She turned her head slowly; her haggard eyes met his without expression; and he found his tongue with the effort of a man who strives for utterance through a threatening dream:

“We can’t stay here,” he said. The sound of his own voice steadied and cleared his senses. He glanced down at his own attire, blood-stained, and ragged; felt for the loose end of his collar, rebuttoned it, and knotted the draggled white tie with the unconscious indifference of habit.

“What a nightmare!” he muttered to himself. “The world has been turned upside down over night.” He looked up at her: “We can’t stay here,” he repeated. “Where do you live?”

She did not appear to hear him. She had already started to move toward the rue Vilna, where the troopers barring that street still sat their restive horses. They were watching her and her dishevelled companion with the sophisticated amusement of men who, by clean daylight, encounter fagged-out revellers of a riotous night.

Neeland spoke to her again, then followed her and took her arm.

“Where are you going?” he repeated, uneasily.