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 Tannhäuser 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-fashioned 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 passions, 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 embarrassment. 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 God 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 passages. 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 flâneur 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 ship 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 passing from the hands of all autocratic governments, and that some phase of socialism will eventually be the policy of all civilized nations."