The Tempering Part 60

"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 grat.i.tude 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 rea.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 hea.r.s.e 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 emba.s.sies at Washington had their birds of pa.s.sage. 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 Emba.s.sy, 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," a.s.serted 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 n.o.ble 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 incert.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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.