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. 396
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.