“Wanda,” he said, “remember me in your prayers to-night!”
It is to be presumed that the majority of people are willing enough to seek the happiness of others; which desire leads the individual to interfere in her neighbor's affairs, while it burdens society with a thousand associations for the welfare of mankind or the raising of the masses.
Looking at the question from the strictly commonsense point of view, it would appear to the observer that those who do the most good or the least harm are the uncharitable. Better than the eager, verbose man is he who stands on the shore cynically watching a landsman in a boat without proffering advice as to how the vessel should be navigated, who only holds out a cold and steady hand after the catastrophe has happened, or, if no catastrophe supervenes, is content to walk away in that silent wonder which the care of Providence for the improvident must ever evoke.
Paul Deulin was considered by his friends to be a cynic; and a French cynic is not without cruelty. He once told Wanda that he had seen men and women do much worse than throw their lives away, which was probably the unvarnished truth. But there must have been a weak spot in his cynicism. There always is a weak spot in the vice of the most vicious. For he sat alone in his room at the Hotel de l'Europe, at Warsaw, long into the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and thinking thoughts which he would at any other juncture have been the first to condemn. He was thinking of the affairs of others, and into his thoughts there came, moreover, the affairs, not of individuals, but of nations. A fellow-countryman once gave it as his opinion that so long as the trains ran punctually and meals were served at regular intervals he could perceive no difference between one form of government and another. And in the majority of instances the fate of nations rarely affects the lives of individuals.
Deulin, however, was suddenly made aware of his own ignorance of affairs that were progressing in his immediate vicinity, and which were affecting the lives of those around him. More than any other do Frenchmen herd together in exile, and Deulin knew all his fellow-countrymen and women in Warsaw, in whatsoever station of life they happened to move. He had a friend behind the counter of the small feather-cleaning shop in the Jerozolimska. This lady was a French Jewess, who had by some undercurrent of Judaism drifted from Paris to Warsaw again and found herself once more among her own people. The western world is ignorant of the strength of Jewry in Poland.