Part 6

Count S---- affects to believe that the Germans can do anything.

"They are devils! What can we do against them?" he cries at dinner, combing his mustache with the little tortoise-shell comb he carries in his vest.

He never forgets his soda tablets after eating.

His younger brother is round and red-faced, with twinkly blue eyes. He limps, and follows his elder brother round like a faithful dog. The slightest thing amuses him. Indeed, he laughs at nothing at all. He kept the books on his brother's estates and he brought them with him in his flight. They are his pride and joy. Sometimes he brings them into the drawing-room after supper, with photographs of the property. There are pictures of boar hunts, and huntsmen on horseback, with wolf-hounds in the snow, and the tenants merry-making and the house and different sections of the property, and the horses and dogs and cattle. I look at them night after night. They love to live over again their life in telling me about it.

Among the servants with the S---- brothers is an old woman, a kindly, slack one, who rarely goes out, but observes the passing life from her windows. She wears a short, loose wrapper and petticoat, and scuffs about in list slippers.

Then there is a young girl with shy eyes and quiet, womanlike actions. We often see her peeking through a crack in the door when Janchu is naughty.

And then there is Sigmund, a sly, goody-goody child of six or seven, whom the old woman treats like a son, and whom the eldest S---- brother has adopted as his heir. He plays with Janchu. The brothers adore him and take him to Koupietsky Park, and watch him when he plays in the pension garden. We have heard that he is Count S----'s illegitimate child, and that the old woman is his mother. It seems quite probable when you think of the life on a big Polish estate--the loneliness, etc. These three people live together in one room. The samovar is always boiling and some one is always drinking tea there. The brothers share an adjoining room, but they are usually with those in there, who constitute all that remains of their former habits.

Pan A---- lives in the pension, too. I am told that he is typical of a certain kind of Pole. He is a turfman, with carefully brushed side-whiskers dyed coal-black, and hawk-like eyes. He wears check suits, and cravats with a little diamond horse-pin. His legs are bowed like a jockey's. He was the overseer of a big Polish estate and has made a fortune by cards and horses. His stable is famous. He has raced from Petrograd to London. Now, of course, his horses have been requisitioned, and he lives by his cards. Cards are a serious business to him. He will not play in a room where he is apt to be interrupted. Occasionally, his wife, a hard-faced woman with tight lips, comes to the pension, between the visits she makes to friends in the country. Pan A---- pays no attention to her except to treat her with an exaggerated politeness at table; and she, on her side, concentrates on the young men in the pension. After dinner he always hands her a cigarette first, out of his massive gold case, encrusted with arms and monograms and jewels.

"It's curious, is it not?" he says, handing me the case. "My friends have put on their arms and monograms and mounted the jewels as souvenirs."

Generally, he goes to the Café François with a tall blonde woman, the wife of an Austrian. Her husband and son are fighting in the Austrian army, but she came to Kiev with the Russian General who occupied her town. Now her protector is at the front, and she goes about with A----.

A---- is cynical. Women and horses and cards make up his life. In a conversation he feels his audience as if it were a new horse he is learning to ride. He goes as near the danger line as he dares. He has no breeding, and spends his money extravagantly.

K----, the last comer at the pension, is a journalist. He has no race or polish, and the rest rather despise him for having none of their landed traditions. He is lean and brown, with a razor-like jaw and a twisted, sardonic expression to his lips. His face is cruel. At Warsaw, where he was working, he was thrown into prison time after time on account of the radical, revolutionary character of his articles. He is well known for the strong, intellectual quality of his work. The reactionaries fear him. The slipshod Russian way of handling things gets on his nerves. His eyes get like steel when he talks about it. Russia's corruption and the German advance--ammunition willfully miscarried--guns sent to the front without ammunition, and ammunition sent that doesn't fit; and the soldiers obliged to fight with their naked fists!

He has sent me Chamberlin's "Genesis of the Fourteenth Century." We discuss it after dinner. It's interesting, though Chamberlin sets forth an idea he tries to prove at all costs. Read it, if you haven't already.

How terribly I miss you. Why do I write of Pan Tchedesky and the Morowskis when I only want to be telling you how I love you and miss you? But it is almost unbearable to write you a love-letter. So many miles are between us and so many months still separate us. Over a year more to be lived through. No. I must keep to decaying Polish gentlemen and exiled noblemen and trust you to know that every word in this letter is a love-word to you, telling you I hold you so close to me that you are one with me in everything I think or do.

July 27, 1915.

Darlingest Mother and Dad:--

It is very hot, and food is unappetizing. The drinking-water must be boiled, and inevitably we drink it lukewarm. It never has time to cool. There is fruit sold on the street, but we are warned against it on account of cholera. There is already cholera and typhus reported in the city. So we thick vegetable soup with sour cream, fried bread with chopped meat inside, cheese noodles with sour cream, etc., all Polish cooking. And we drink kvass.

"What do you think of Bulgaria, now?" Count S---- asks me gloomily, after dinner.

"I still think she will go with Russia," I reply. "In every Bulgarian house I've ever been in there is the picture of the Czar liberator. A Bulgarian regards a Russian as of his own blood. Bulgaria gave Russia her alphabet, and the languages are much the same: only the Russian is richer in words and expressions. Why, there is a Bulgarian, General Dimitrief, holding a high command in the Russian army. When I left Bulgaria there was no talk of her going with Germany. 'We will never go with Germany,' I've heard over and over."

"But there is a strong German party?"

"Yes, and they're being paid well. If England and the Entente only took the trouble to understand the Balkans. Germany has sent her ablest men to Sofia with unlimited credit. The English representatives offend by their snobbery."

"Do you think they'll go in at all?" S---- persists.

"Probably they'll be forced in, in the end. But the people don't want to abandon their neutrality. They're making money. They're recouping after the Balkan wars. Bulgaria has had nothing but wars and crises for the last five years."

"They say there are already German officers in the Bulgarian army."

"I don't believe it's so. The Bulgarians are very independent. If they went in I think they would command their own army."

"But this war is not conducted along Balkan war lines," K---- said amusedly.

"No," I agreed. "You know more about the situation now than I do. I can't even read a newspaper. All I know is the spirit of Bulgaria when I left."

"Isn't Bulgaria's Government autocratic enough to declare war without consulting the people?" K---- continued.