"No."
"That is certainly an improvement," I reflected. In Warsaw, in Russian days, most waiters fawned disgustingly for tips. But it seems now as if there were an entirely new population. However, I resumed my quest of a lodging. At the Imperial Hotel they kindly relieved me of my knapsack and overcoat, and advised me to come back at eight or nine at night—there might be a room then. Meanwhile I should continue seeking. So the Cracowsky was tried, and the Lipsky, once Leipzig, and the Adlon and the Pretoria, and many another haunt of mice and men. Then I returned to the Imperial for the second time. No, there was no room. It had been a lovely day, only too hot, and the evening was warm. I thought pleasantly of the Saxon Gardens and its seats.
Then Poland revealed itself. "You want a room very badly, don't you?" said the Imperial Hotel porter. "I'll arrange it for you. But it will cost you something. You take my card to a certain hotel, which I will mention to you, hand it to the porter and give him a thousand marks, and he'll fix you up at once."
So I repaired to the Hotel Vienna, opposite the Vienna station. The night porter was very pessimistic, wouldn't take the thousand marks. "Come back in an hour," said he in a loud voice; "if there is a room then you'll have it; if not, you can't."
I went out to an orchestral "bar" near by and supped. When I came back the porter asked quietly for the thousand, and gave me the key of "Number Five." "At your service," said he, demurely.
Warsaw has greatly changed during the time I have known it, from the days of panic and police-assassinations in 1906, when the miserable green waggons of open horse-trams woggled along the main ways, and it seemed a city of endless cobbled stones. Warsaw was being governed by Russia much as we govern Ireland now, and murders of constabulary alternated with reprisals in which the innocent suffered more than the guilty. Strangely enough, the relentless methods of official Russia succeeded in subduing the revolutionaries, and in a few years was seen a calm and prosperous condition of affairs which lasted until the outbreak of the late war. A handsome service of electric trams and a great new bridge over the Vistula raised Warsaw's level from an external point of view, and made it something like a modern city. Then came the war, the German aeroplanes and their bombs, the violent attacks and the panics, shell-fire, the blowing-up of bridges, wild exodus of Warsaw people and entry of the Germans. Of the people who fled into Russia in 1915 few seem to have returned. Their places have been filled by Poles from German and Austrian Poland. The German-speaking Pole has displaced the Pole who knew Russian.
The Germans, of course, held the city from the summer of 1915 until the armistice, and they repaired the bridges and instituted German order in the city. The miracle of the armistice raised Poland from death, and now we have Warsaw as capital of a large new State. The maps of Poland in the streets, Poland as she is plus Poland as she believes she will be, show a country considerably larger than Germany.
It used to seem rather amusing in the drinking scene in "The Brothers Karamazof," when the Pole Vrublevsky, in proposing the health of Russia, inserted the proviso: "To Russia, with the boundaries she had before 1772." But it is serious matter to-day. For Poland has not only reached most of the boundaries of 1772 but some of them she has even transgressed, and still she asks more.
Poland is at enmity with all her neighbours, and by some of them is hated, loathed, and despised. And as an offset to the surrounding nations she has one open and rather noisy friendship, and that is with France. England she considered to be her enemy even before the British Government stated its view on the question of Silesia. She had decided to help France, and France had promised to help Poland, and England stood in the way of all manner of injustice and aggression. It is pathetic to think now of the work done for Poland by England during the war: the meetings that were held, the encouragement given to Padarewski, Dmowski and others, the immense sums subscribed to the Great Britain to Poland fund, and to the Polish Relief fund. These latter "charities" printed the woes of Poland in the advertisement columns of the British press for years, and collected the shillings and pounds of the benevolent everywhere. But you did not see such work being done for Poland in France. The Frenchman is more careful of his franc than the Englishman of his pound. But perhaps it is not easy to find now the Poles who benefited by British "charity." How much Great Britain subscribed and how the money was distributed is not generally known to the Pole. And, in any case, who cares?
The Germans disdain the Poles wordlessly. It is not easy to get a German to discuss the Polish people. The Russians do not like the Poles, but they are indulgent towards them and wait the day when Russia will wipe out insults. "Russia has plenty of time," is the formula. It must be a little galling to the Russian refugees, of whom General Wrangel estimates there are 100,000 in Poland, to see every public notice in the Russian language blued out as if there were no Russian-speaking people, to see Russian monuments cast down, and churches despoiled of their golden domes. But they bear it with equanimity, biding their time. Some, on the other hand, forgive the Poles because they recognize that Russians would have done the same in like case. The people of the other neighbouring States are distrustful or aloof. In a friendship with France, however, Poland would make up for all other enmities. Marshal Pilsudsky, with the glory of having defeated the Russians and won a victorious peace, is now pictured with Napoleon. He is even represented on picture post-cards pinning an order of merit on the breast of Napoleon—the occasion being the centenary of Napoleon's death. Pilsudsky is a man of sentiment, and when he made his important diplomatic journey to Paris last February, he bore with him a picture of Joan of Arc by Jan Mateiks, in order to express the gratitude of the Polish people to France. In Pilsudsky's honour a lesson in Polish geography and history was ordered to be given in all the schools of France on the 5th of February, 1921.