As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out
between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to
close the sluice gates of fear and hold his equilibrium by a
self-hypnosis of arrested thought.
But words of newsprint broke through this factitious barrier. The "brown
hair" of the reportorial description might be the same that McCalloway
had called a disputed dominion along the border land of gold and brown.
The "evidences of former beauty" might be an unappreciative appraisement
of _her_, badgered by misfortunes to her death.
Standing at last on the curb before the undertaker's establishment,
Boone had to be reminded to pay his fare, because his attention dwelt
with a morbid fascination on the gilt words, "Funeral Directors and
Embalmers," etched on the black plate glass of the windows.
After an appreciable interval of struggle with panic, he drew himself
together and went in through the open door, becoming instantly conscious
of a subtle, chemical odour.
From his newspaper a man in broadly patterned green and lavender
shirt-sleeves lifted his eyes without rising. On the desk beside him,
however, ready at notice to convert him from the liveliness of colour
which in private life he fancied to the sable formality of his art,
stood celluloid cuffs and a made-up tie as black and sober as his
caskets.
"I am an attorney," said Boone curtly. "I came to see if--" He broke off
and, proffering the newspaper clipping, made a fresh beginning: "To see
if I could identify her."
Then the proprietor rose and, not deeming it essential, for that
occasion, to cover the fitful pattern of his shirt, led the way to the
back of the place, nursing a cigar stump between his fingers. The
heightened beating of Boone's temples was as though with small,
insistent knuckles all his imprisoned emotions were rapping against his
skull for liberation, and when the undertaker swung open one of several
doors along a narrow and darkened hallway, he found himself halting like
a frightened child. The motor centres of his nerves mutinied, so that it
seemed a labour of Hercules to force his balking foot across the
threshold, and when he saw that the room was too dark for recognition a
gasp of relief broke from his tight-pressed lips as if in gratitude for
even so momentary a reprieve.
"Stand right there," directed the matter-of-fact voice of his conductor;
"I'll switch on the light."
Boone Wellver was trembling, with a chill dampness on his forehead and
hair. He struggled against the powerful impulse to beg another minute of
unconfirmed fear. Then the light flashed, and Boone started as an
incoherent sound came from him which might have meant anything--the
muscular expulsion of breath deep held and the relaxation of a cramped
throat.
The girl, who lay there, was very slender, and the still features were
delicately chiselled. She had been, as the clipping stated, in a fashion
beautiful, but it was not Anne's beauty.
Perhaps the ivory whiteness and the wan thinness of the crossed hands
were the attributes of death rather than of the living girl. Most of all
he felt, with an awed appreciation, the serene and calm courage written
on the lifeless features. He had tried to reassure himself in advance
that it could not be Anne, because Anne's courage would not seek the
coward's escape of self-destruction. Now he could no longer reconcile
any idea of cowardice with that sweet tranquillity.
"She must of caught her lip in her teeth," the undertaker interrupted
his reflections to inform him. "She took gas, you know, and sometimes
just at the last there's a little struggle against it."
The Kentuckian nodded silently, and the proprietor went on: "I take it
she's not the party you were looking for, then?"
"No." The response was brusque, and with a sudden craving for the outer
air, Boone turned on his heel to go--but stopped again inside the
threshold. "If relatives don't claim her," he said, "I want her to have
a private burial. Arrange the details--and look to me for settlement."
In the office stood a little man, gray and poorly dressed, yet with that
attempt at fashion that strives through shabbiness after at least an
echo of smart effect.
"I have come to learn when this poor child is to be buried, gentlemen,"
he began, with that ready emotion which is easily stirred and runs to
volubility. "I didn't know her until a few days ago, when she took a
small room in the house where I board. She kept to herself, but her
manner was sunny and gracious, and her refinement was a matter of
comment among us. None of us suspected that she was contemplating--this!
I passed her in the hallway the night before it happened, and she smiled
at me."
Boone sat afterward in the dreary little mortuary chapel while a
clergyman whom, the undertaker said, "came in in these cases,"
performed, with the perfunctoriness of routine, the services for the
dead. Later, still with the gray little man at his side, the Kentuckian
drove in the one cab that followed the hearse to a Brooklyn cemetery
where Boone had paid for a grave. The little man, it seemed, had been a
character actor and, from his own testimony, one of ability beyond the
appreciation of a flippant present.
Their mission today recalled to his mind others of like nature, and as
he talked of them, enlarging upon the piteous helplessness of young
women whose gentle natures are unequipped for the predatory struggles of
a city where one does not know one's next-door neighbour, Boone's
anxieties grew heavier.
Those months of unavailing search stood always out luridly in his
memory, and because his search was a thing that could accommodate
itself to no rule except to follow faint trails into all sorts of
places, he grew to an astonishing familiarity with parts at least of the
town whose boast it is that no man knows it.
It was natural that he should take up his own quarters near Greenwich
Village, where the fringes of the town's self-styled bohemia trail off
from Washington Square. There, with all its eccentricities and
absurdities, effort dwelt side by side with dilettante anarchy, and
strugglers with definite goals brushed shoulders with the "brittle
intellectuals that crack beneath a strain."
He grew to know some of the sincere workers of this American _Quartier
Latin_ and some exponents of affectation-ridden cults who travesty life
and the arts under creeds of pathetically shallow pretence.
But these things, though absorbed into observation were small,
foreground details of Boone's life at that time. The motif of the
picture was the vain search for Anne Masters, and the whole was drawn
against the sombre and colossal background of the war itself. For in
those epic months was fought the First Battle of the Marne. In them
Hindenburg emerged from the obscurity of retirement to drive the Russian
hordes back from East Prussia, and, most tragic of all, the flood was
sweeping across Belgium.
If he could think little of other matters than the girl he loved and had
come to seek, neither could the spirit that McCalloway had shaped ever
quite escape a deep feeling of the war, like an incessant rolling of
distant and sinister drums.
* * * * *
In the spring of 1916 the legations and embassies at Washington had
their birds of passage. They were neither secretaries nor attaches in
precise definition, yet men vouched for by their chiefs. Uniforms
bloomed, and among the visitors were those who wore scars and
decorations. To this category belonged the Russian Ivangoroff, and
between him and Boone Wellver sprang up a friendship which, if not
intimate, was certainly more than casual.
Ivangoroff was young, tall and electric with energy. Animation snapped
and sparkled in his dark eyes; it broke into a score of expressive
gestures that enlivened his words: it manifested itself in quick
movements and a freshet flow of unflagging conversation.
It puzzled Boone that, though he was some sort of adjunct to the Russian
Embassy, his gossip of intrigue at the Court of Petrograd should, on
occasion, permit itself a seemingly unguarded candour.
One evening, as the two sat together at dinner, the Kentuckian made bold
to suggest something of the sort, and his companion laughed with an
infectious spontaneity that bared the flash of his white teeth.
"Even at the court itself talk is quite frank," he declared. "Every
dinner party is a small cabal. What would you, with a German army
hammering at our front and a German influence infecting those about the
Tzarina?"
"But surely," expostulated the congressman, "you can't be serious. How
can an enemy influence survive at a belligerent capital?"
Ivangoroff shrugged his shoulders.
"You call it incredible, yet because of that influence the greatest
soldier in Europe was stripped of his powers as commander-in-chief and
exiled to a nominal viceregency in the Caucasus."
Boone leaned forward, his attention challenged.
"You mean the Grand Duke Nicholas?"
"Yes. You ask how such things can be. I can reply only that they are."
The Russian raised his hands and let them fall in a gesture of one who
expresses disgust for the unalterable.
"And yet what would you?" he demanded. "If a weak monarch is torn
between a genuine love, almost an idolatry, for a stronger man, and a
carefully fostered fear of him? If, while the soldier is in the field,
there are those at home who every day are whispering into the anxious,
imperial ear that his great kinsman will presently overshadow and
replace him, what are the probabilities? With the Empress ruling her
consort, and herself being ruled by a closet cabinet of women and monks,
what else was possible than that the captain who was busy stemming the
outer enemy should fall before the inner enemy?"
"And," mused Boone thoughtfully, "there were few who could not have been
better spared."
"My friend," asserted the Russian, "the world does not yet appreciate
the Grand Duke's measure. In retrospect history will devote some pages
to his achievements. She will canonize the magnificent ability and the
grim courage with which he fought on without support, without munitions,
crying out for the metal which did not come, and vainly demanding the
death of traitors at home whose failure to supply him was eating up his
armies. She will celebrate an orderly retirement which under other
leadership would have been a rout: the reluctant giving back of hosts
that were interposing bare breasts to artillery. As for the Tzar's
jealous fears--bah!"
The speaker paused to light a cigarette, and from it puffed nervous
clouds of brown smoke through his nostrils.
"I was at the Moghileff headquarters," he resumed, "when the Tzar
arrived to take into his own hands the duties that those stronger hands
had held. What took place between the two Romanoffs, I cannot tell you.
My place was not inside those doors ... but at the end I saw them both."
Again the narrative broke in a pause, and the bright, dark eyes of the
Russian sobered into reflectiveness and pain.
"You have seen his pictures? Nicholas Nicholaivitch, I mean? Yes, of
course; but they fail to give the adequate impression: the tall, gaunt
power of the figure; the dauntless eagle pride of the eye and stern
sadness of the mouth; the noble dignity of bearing! When the Tzar stood
with him at the railway station bidding him farewell, it was the eyes
of the monarch that held incertitude and tears. It was the Tzar who was
shaken with the wish to undo what he had done, yet who lacked the
resolution."
For a little while the two men sat over their coffee, and even the
voluble animation of the Russian was stilled; then, as the talk drifted,
chance guided it to the topic of army caste.
"Generally speaking, we are officers or men by heredity--yet anything
can happen in Russia," declared Ivangoroff, "when a peasant monk can
gain a hold like Rasputin's at court!" He paused, then laughed. "I even
know of one man who came to the Grand Duke's headquarters in civilian
garb--who was not a Russian--who was unknown. He secured an audience,
and ten days later found him a member of the leader's personal staff--a
confidant of the Commander-in-Chief!"
Boone raised his brows. It occurred to him that this highly entertaining
companion might be more vivacious than authentic, and he murmured some
expression of interest.
"Read your dispatches," said the Russian. "Occasionally you will find
there the name of one General Makailoff. It is not a name you will have
seen in our army matters before this war. True, one could look at this
man and know that he was a soldier, yet he was a foreigner, and it was
at a time when spy-ridden Russia distrusted every one. He went into the
Commander-in-Chief's presence. He said something to the
Commander-in-Chief, which no one else heard. He came out an officer on
the staff."
With a sudden flash of deeper interest that made his words eager, Boone
bent across the table. "Tell me," he demanded, "what was his
appearance?"
"It interests you?" laughed Ivangoroff. "Naturally, because it has the
essence of drama, has it not? He is tall and spare, with a florid face
and gray temples. He is hard-bitten and leather-tanned, as a soldier
should be, and in his eye, a gray-blue eye, dwells a quality which one
does not find in common eyes."
"And when the Grand Duke went into his retirement in the Caucasus--what
became of this other soldier?"
"That I cannot say. I fancy, judging from what I know of Nicholas
Nicholaivitch, that he did not waste this man. I should hazard the guess
that he passed him on to another commander--perhaps to Alexieff--perhaps
to Brussilov."
"Do you know anything more about General Makailoff?" The Kentuckian
sought to clothe his question in the casual tone of ordinary interest,
but as he lighted a cigar his fingers held a tremour.
Ivangoroff shook his head.
"Of course there was mess-table talk--but that is always the gauziest
myth. Perhaps you know the fable that is told in all European armies of
the ghost general?"
"No, I've never heard it."
"The story runs that there is a certain man of extraordinary military
genius--genius of the first class--who is not so much a soldier of
fortune as a super-soldier. In peace times no army knows him. No
government owns him. He disappears as does the storm petrel when the sea
is quiet. But when the tempest breaks and the need arises for a leader
beyond small leaders--then, under a new name each time, this
ghost-commander reappears. You see, they make the story a good one. Mess
tables have embellished and elaborated it with much retelling over their
wine glasses. It is even said that the mystery man fights on the
righteous side and brings victory." The Russian lighted a fresh
cigarette and naively observed, "When we fought Japan, however, he was
reported to be against us, guiding the hand of Kuroki. When Savoff
defeated the Turks, it was rumoured that he sat in the Bulgar's
councils. Now"--Ivangoroff laughed--"now it is whispered in Petrograd
and Moscow that he laid his sword at the service of the Grand Duke
Nicholas and stands shoulder to shoulder with the men he fought in
Manchuria."
The _raconteur_ glanced at his wrist watch and rose hastily.
"I have overstayed my time," he declared. "It is hard for me to leave
one who suffers me to talk--even when I talk of moonshine gossip like
this."
But when he had gone, Boone sat for a long while unmoving, and before he
went to his bed that night he had resolved, so soon as his duties freed
him long enough, to undertake a journey to Russia.