“Oh, I have no principles,” said Cartoner, rising from his chair, and looking round absent-mindedly for his hat.
“You would be no friend of mine if you had. There is no moderation in principles. If a man has any at all, he always has some to spare for his neighbors. And who wants to act up to another man's principles? By-the-way, are you doing any good here, Cartoner?”
“None.”
“Nor I,” pursued Deulin; “and I am bored. That is why I want you to come to the races with me. Besides, it would be more marked to stay away than to go—especially for an Englishman and a Frenchman, who lead the world in racing.”
“That is why I am going,” said Cartoner.
“Then you don't like racing?”
“Yes, I am very fond of it,” answered the Englishman, in the same absent voice, as he led the way towards the door.
In the Jasna they found a drosky, where there is always one to be found at the corner of the square, and they did not speak during the drive up the broad Marszalkowska to the rather barren suburb of the Mokotow (where bricks and mortar are still engaged in emphasizing the nakedness of the land), for the simple reason that speech is impossible while driving through the streets of the worst-paved city in Europe. Which is a grudge that the traveller may bear against Russia, for if Poland had been a kingdom she would assuredly have paved the streets of her capital.
The race-course is not more than fifteen minutes' drive from the heart of the town, and all Warsaw was going thither this sunny afternoon. At the entrance a crowd was slowly working its way through the turnstiles, and Deulin and Cartoner passed in with it. They had the trick, so rare among travellers, of doing this in any country without attracting undue attention.
It was a motley enough throng. There were Polish ladies and gentlemen in the garb of their caste, which is to-day the same all the world over, though in some parts of Ruthenia and Lithuania one may still come across a Polish gentleman of the old school in his frogged coat and top-boots. German tradesmen and their families formed here and there one of those domesticated and homely groups which the Fatherland sends out into the world's trading centres. And moving amid these, as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, the Russian officers, who virtually had the management of the course—tall, fair, clean men, with sunburned faces and white skins—energetic, refined, and strong. They were mostly in white tunics with gold shoulder-straps, blue breeches, and much gold lace. Here and there a Cossack officer moved with long, free strides in his dressing-gown of a coat, heavily ornamented with silver, carrying high his astrakhan cap, and looking round him with dark eyes that had a gleam of something wild and untamed in them. It was a meeting-ground of many races, one of the market-places where men may greet each other who come from different hemispheres and yet owe allegiance to one flag: are sons of the empire which to-day gathers within one ring-fence the north, the south, the east, and the west.