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.