Albert Kinross

“ The moon had cleared the forest when a two-horse sleigh, lamps burning, carrying with it a flying dust of snow, sprang out of the night and came to a halt within a yard of where he stood. It was superbly done.
"Pan Slavinski?" cried an unfamiliar voice.
Slavin was aware of a man, young as himself, slender, tall, fine-featured, and with a little fair mustache. Irresistibly the strength, the lightness, and the fineness of him recalled a greyhound. He had leaped out of the sleigh, and then, in easy French, introduced himself and made apologies for the Pole. ”

“ It was the ancient Polish battle-cry: "Kill, kill!"
Vainly the Russian officer shrieked his orders, fired his pistol, and gesticulated. His men, superstitious and fearful, simple peasants put into uniform, stood rooted to the spot. Wide-eyed and trembling, they gazed before them; for here, indeed, were demons, were spirits monstrous and invulnerable, the proud and pitiless legionaries of Antichrist himself; and well they knew that such places were haunted. ”

“ The Russian things of Moscow, the German, the Lettish things of Riga, infinitely more tragical—homes fired over heads thenceforth homeless, faces holed with unrecorded death—all that butchery, all that futility, had never penetrated beyond the surface. It was their business, not his. Often he had wondered at himself, questioned himself, a little despised himself. "I'm looking on like a man in a theatre," he had said; "but if I believed in it, it would break my heart; and then I wouldn't be much use to a newspaper." ”

“ A torrent, a triumph, level with the composer's music, of velvets bordered with fur, of silks and tissues, of satins and dyed leathers, of damasks and brocades, jewelled, begemmed, aigretted, mixed here and mingled. The Venetians had known how to dress with splendor, but here in Poland it had been an art, ranking with music, with painting, and the chronicles of poet-historian. And thus attuned, attired, entered upon, their dancing had become a greater art, their greatest—national, impersonal, something different from a drilled performance in an opera-house. ”

“ Silently, reverently, the men unbraced their wings and gave them to the flames.
"You too," said the Pole, addressing Slavin—he had himself set the example. And Slavin obeyed.
After the wings came arms and armor; came lance and sword and leopard-skin and plume.
Slavin found his fur cap, his coat, his vest, his overcoat, and when he had donned them, there was no man here that did not wear the dress of every day. Two of them, indeed, were priests, he discovered with some amazement. All their pomp, all their splendor, all their chivalry had perished, were cast into those hungry flames. ”

“ It occurred to Slavin that, ordinarily, these ruins were used as a place of storage by the woodmen of the forest. There was fuel enough here to feed a score such fires. Soon it was blazing, was leaping once more to the sky; reddening the darkness, playing upon the men, their pride, and their magnificence.
The Pole rode out before them and made a speech. It was brief; it was vigorous. What the exact content of it was Slavin could not say; but he guessed from the fervor it aroused that it was national, and that its reasoned passages had the full approval of this audience. ”

“ Slavin had Wolomin station to himself.
He stood there a long half hour, huddled in his furs and wondering. The darkness grew less dark, the skyline more distinct—it was the moon rising above the blackness of the forest. A mile away, he knew from his Baedeker, was the town of Wolomin.
Doggedly he stuck to his post outside the station. The Pole had promised, the Pole had made this rendezvous. If the Pole failed him, he would be more utterly adrift, more utterly wrecked than ever. He might just manage to return to Warsaw—and then? The landscape won a new desolation ”

“ As far as the eye carried, the line had been torn up, the rails scattered and flung in all directions.
"This will teach them to suppress a Polish opera!" cried the young man.
"But what's the good of destroying a railway train?" asked Slavin; "some of your own people may be on board."
"The train will not suffer—there is no embankment. It will only stop—stop rather unpleasantly. It is the Petersburg Express. To-night it brings the money with which to pay the Russian garrison—to pay the governor-general—to pay everybody." ”

“ If only he could have seen it that way at the time! "A true Pole—we are all gamblers," the other had laughed; but, by Gum, it wasn't a laughing matter! If it had been his own money he might have stood it and stuck it out—it wouldn't have been joyous exactly. A feeling, recognizable as actual funk, possessed him as the train drew up at Wolomin.
The station was a bare shed, dumped down in the darkness and the snow; beyond it, making a skyline, was the black edge of a forest. Slavin was the only passenger who descended; an official, carrying a lantern, saw the train proceed upon its way. ”

“ Nothing very strenuous happened till Slavin picked up four aces in the last deal of all. He had been losing steadily throughout the afternoon, in the pernicious, deadly way a man will lose when the luck is sheer against him, when misfortune seems to have settled on him, like a cloud over his head, immovably, malignantly, and as though it bore him a personal grudge. ”

“ A hatred, burning, unquenchable, lowered in the man's eyes. He had closed these overtures, this conversation, with a single abrupt negative; and Slavin then knew that where he saw valkyries and gods, this other saw Sathanas, something accursed, to be stamped out with blood and iron.
"The hussars were really like that. They were even more than that—we are but in a theatre." Slavin looked up. It was the Pole, returned to his old dominant station, more towering, more formidably representative than ever. ”

“ And now, to the note of a bugle, the whole company rode out into the open, showing itself, standing clear and splendid against the forest. As had so evidently been foreseen, the effect of this manœuvre was to make the Russian officer join up his forces. The Pole nodded his approval, and, turning to Slavin, "When the bugle sounds a second time, we charge," he said. "Heaven help us if they have the sense to make a fortress of the train!" ”

“ The hotel porter, consulted that morning about the opera, had expressed astonishment; also he had folded his hands behind his long tail-coat and wagged a dubious head. The opera? Did not Mr. Slavin know? A ticket would be a very difficult affair. For over a month the house had been sold out. Everybody was going; he himself was going. To-night, it appeared, was no ordinary night, but a première, a first performance. And such a performance! The porter was full of it. To-night was the first night of "Maria." ”

“ Against human foes they would stand firm, even at night-time and in the darkness.... Before the Poles could close with them, they had dropped their rifles and fled all ways into the forest. When Slavin next saw the officer a lance had pierced his throat, half lifting him, half carrying him backward into death.
From several of the carriage windows now came shots. The Pole, a hand uplifted, rode to meet them. ”

“ It had been his pride which first dictated this change, and now the paternal heart confirms it. 'I wish my children, should God grant me children, to be free, to escape the shadow that has fallen on my nation,' he says. 'I wish them to know no other nationality than the one to which they have been given. Let them serve this new country, their mother's country, with undivided hearts.' ... Such, as well as I can remember them, are his words, his intention. He died suddenly, in the city of Baltimore, where he had made his home. It was on the same day that Napoleon entered Warsaw. ”

“ Slavin watched him go out, then felt in his waistcoat-pocket for the ticket. He had asked the hotel porter to get him one that morning. It would pass away the time; he was fond of music; and Warsaw, without the revolution, was dead slow.
On the way between the hotel and the Grand Theatre, it occurred to him that he might cable home some quite astounding lie about himself; say that he had been robbed, pillaged, hooliganized.... No, they weren't out for that. They might stand something tall about other people ”

“ At thirty rubles only Slavin and the Englishman remained. Would the Englishman run away? Slavin hoped to play him a little longer. He, too, had kept four and taken one. He might have a straight, or a flush, or a full-house. He might—it was all but impossible—have fours as well. In any case he couldn't beat four aces. So Slavin kept on; and so did the Englishman.
They betted, coolly, regularly, unhurriedly, in five-ruble raises, and occasionally in tens, which was the limit. When they wanted change they helped themselves from the money on the table. ”

“ The long low murmur of it, gathering from afar in that nocturnal stillness, could mean one thing, and one thing only. The men, waiting for it, unlocked their pistols. They looked out, sitting their horses behind the giant boles, from which they would presently emerge into the open. ”

“ IN the winter of 1905–6 a half-dozen men sat round a table in the Hotel Bristol at Warsaw and played a game of poker. As many agencies and newspapers had sent them out to report upon the Russian revolution. They had seen men die behind the Moscow barricades, and women and small children ”

“ John Slavin, teacher of the violin and foreign languages. Miss Pascoe was one of his pupils. Referring to the alteration in his name, he writes in one of his letters: 'They tell me it is an Irish name, which is the next best thing to Polish.' And on another occasion: 'Should Poland have need of me,' he says, 'my life is at her service; yet, while I am in America, why should I wear a name that so proclaims my nationality and our misfortunes ”

“ You will find all the money you need within this parcel," and he indicated the package that he had placed upon the writing-table. "It is not a gift," he resumed, waving aside Slavin's hesitations; "it is a simple act of restitution. The Russian confiscated your home, the little property that should have come to you. Bien, we have made him disgorge. It is our wish. You will accept it from us? We have done precisely the same thing with the people at the theatre."
"I can't afford to refuse it; but some day——"
"We are living in the present; "and the Pole moved to the door. ”

“ Briefly, in 1794, when Kosciuszko was taken, when Warsaw had fallen, when all hope was dead, Slavinski, the hero of Polonna, of Raclawice, one of the many heroes of the siege, escaped to Danzig. From there he embarked on a ship bound for America. Its captain befriended him and offered him the passage. There was a price upon his head; he was in the enemy's country; he was without money or the means of procuring money. A man in his position does not hesitate.
"He crossed the Atlantic safely; and then—he himself has written it—his troubles began in earnest. Over there little was known of Poland ”

“ Perhaps, as he had indicated to the Pole, an American only troubled about such things after he had made money. ... It was time he opened his Baedeker and found out something more of Wolomin station. For he was going. He jotted the name down on a slip of paper and the hour at which his train started. Then he set fire to the note, as the Pole had requested, and watched it burn.
The purchase of his railway ticket brought him up against fact—hard fact. It left him with but a single three-ruble bill and the loose silver in his pocket. He owed money at the hotel ”