The Dark Star

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.

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.