The school sought to develop other Boone Wellvers from the same beginnings … to help others toward a similar fulfilment.
The musical critic heard a faint gasping breath from the chair at his side. He turned quickly and was startled by the pale, emotion-drawn face of the young woman who sat there without escort. For an instant he thought that some poor creature actually pinched by want had crept in, attracted by the light and warmth for a brief interval of rest, then he looked with a more piercing appraisement at the features and discarded that idea.
"Are you ill?" he demanded in a low voice. "Can I serve you?"
The young woman shook her head and forced a smile whose graciousness must have come less from conscious effort than from life habit.
"No, thank you," she answered in a low voice that had meaning to one who knew music wherever he found it. "It was nothing … I came late … who is the girl who sang?"
"She was introduced as Miss Happy Spradling," said the critic.
His questioner's hands were at her sides where he did not see them tighten convulsively, but he saw the pale cheeks go a shade whiter and wondered if she was going to faint.
She did not faint, and though through the course of the evening the elderly man found time, more than once, to turn his friendly glance of solicitude her way he did not again intervene with questions. Clearly this young woman, whatever the cause, was in a condition of nerves that might mean skirting the precipitous edge of collapse. Clearly too she had that fortitude which can resist and after a shock bring itself back to the poise of equilibrium. What had shocked her? He could not guess, but he knew that in the depleted condition that her pale cheeks and thinness argued, unaccountable trifles may assume the gravity of a crisis. And besides the critic found his attention and interest elsewhere engaged. That other girl who was singing claimed them both. She was having a little triumph there on the platform beside the piano. On her smooth, dark face was a pink flush and her deep eyes glowed with pleasure for the enthusiasm that had capped the cordiality of her reception.
When the program came to its end the audience in large part gathered about the platform and the meeting resolved itself into an informal reception. Among the first to go forward was the critic and as he rose, noticing a struggle between eagerness and hesitation in the violet eyes of his chance neighbour, he yielded to an impulse of the moment.
"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have a question or two to ask her?"
But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had not wished them to be readable.
Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into the group about the speaker and singer – a group in which her clothes would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.
Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of the East Side where the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission school. Its assembly rooms, crêches and diet kitchens constituted her present world.
They had said that there was nothing she could do – a society girl with a drawing room and hunting field equipment – and only the All-seeing and herself knew how near true it had proven.
All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.
For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.
A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy Spradling – to talk to her under an assumed name – and to lay to the bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills she had once loved so intensely – something of the man who was now a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.
There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and she would show herself as conquered.
Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the Forties.
Opposite the door, and across the street, she paused, holding herself hard in hand against a tidal sweeping of emotions, and as she stood there she saw the door open and Mrs. Ariton come out, followed by Happy. The two crossed the sidewalk to the curb and stepped into the great lady's limousine.
Anne still hesitated, then she shook her head and turned resolutely away. The car rolled forward and rounded a corner, and the one possible association with a part of Anne's old world was lost.
Anne herself went over to the avenue and climbed to the roof of a bus.
On the way downtown as the traffic crowded, the limousine and the omnibus passed and repassed each other. It was a frostily clear forenoon with Fifth Avenue sparkling like a string of jewel beads, and sometimes Anne could see Happy's face thrust out with wonderment written large upon its features. To her it was all new: this miracle of a city of millions. Her heart was fluttering to the first sight of that tide of men and motors; that crest-pluming of wealth and undertow of misery; that gaiety and tragedy that rolls in vigour and in poison along a mighty urban artery.
But Anne felt like a fragment of flotsam carried hopelessly on the current.
When the limousine had turned into a side street of dignified old houses, Anne rode on, and leaving the bus made her way on foot through meaner streets where the smell of garlic hung pervasive and the gutturals of Slavic speech came from bearded and beady eyed faces. She went through the East Side's warrens of congestion and poverty, slipping through crowds of shawled and haggling women who elbowed about push-carts.
Yet when she had time to retreat again to the sanctuary of her own small room, Anne felt that an element of augmented strength had come to her, as if she had caught a breath of the laurel bloom from Slag-face through the stenches and the jargons.
"If I can hold out," she told herself, "if I can only hold out, I'll have my self-respect!" After a moment she added, "She will probably see him soon, but she can't tell him she saw me – because she doesn't know it."
CHAPTER XLIV
Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts. Except when the spring thaws carried a tawny flood up almost to the edge of his doorstep and the "tide" had right of way, that creek bed and the sandy lane angling across it constituted the junction of the Smoky Hollow Road and that debouching over to "The left hand fork of Nighway Creek." Roundabout it were streamlets with pools where, in season, the mountain trout leaped and darted in shimmering flashes, and to the store one summer noon came two hungry fishermen from the lowlands. They sat on cracker boxes, eating canned peaches and "Vienny" sausages, encouraging the keen-eyed old storekeeper to talk and plying him with questions as to what his coal royalties had run to on this tract and what on that, in the space of the past few years. With neither boast nor evasion, the old man answered them.
"But, heavens above, Uncle Billy," exclaimed one of the visitors – (for every man and child called him Uncle Billy – "An' I reckon," he said, "ther houn-dawgs would too, if so be they had ther gift of speech"). "Heavens above, if you go on making money like that you'll be able to sign a check for a million dollars before you end up!"
The storekeeper fished from the pocket of cotton overalls some crumbs of "natural leaf" to rub between his leathery palms, and thrust them greedily between his white-stubbled lips.
"I reckon, son," he answered drily as he once more shoved forward along the counter the tin of crackers, "ef so be thar was any sich-like need, I could back a bank-check fer thet much money terday."
His visitors sat up agaze, with "Vienny" sausages poised between tin-can and lip, dripping grease on their khaki-clad knees.
At last one of them inquired in a dazed voice, "But why don't you live like a rich man, Uncle Billy? Aren't you sick of this God-forsaken desolation?"
Uncle Billy leaned with his elbows on his counter and seemed to be giving the question judicial reflection. Finally he shook his head.
"A man's right apt ter weary of anything in due time, but I've always lived hyar. I wouldn't hardly hev no ease in my mind no-whars else, I reckon. I leaves all thet newfangled business ter my children an' gran'children and I follers in the track of my fore-parents my own self." He paused, then added with a note of defensive pride:
"Not thet I denies myself nothin' though. My old woman's got a brussels cyarpet on ther floor upsta'rs right now an' a pianner thet hit tuck four yoke of oxen ter team acrost ther mountings from ther railroad cars."
"Would she play it for us, Uncle Billy?"
"Wa'al she kain't jest ter say play hit, yit, but she aims ter git somebody ter l'arn her how some day – She l'arnt readin' an' writin' when she war past three score."
Back in Marlin Town – a town now boasting sidewalks of concrete and a new brick station, the fishermen saw the columned and porticoed mansions of the old man's sons – and their thoughts went back to the store with its bolts of calico, its harness, and above it the living quarters where these children had been born.
For the wealth of that county in coal had brought spurs of railroads bristling into pockets of the wilderness where there had hardly been "critter trails," and overnight fortunes had sprung into being. Moneyed interests that centered there would have made the young attorney, who was also the district's member in Congress, something more than a local representative, had he not chosen to represent the native holders and to stand as a buffer between their unsophistication and their would-be exploiters. But if Boone could set his name to no million-dollar checks or build himself no colonial mansions, more practice came to the office where his shingle hung than he and his two new associates could handle.
In other newly developed sections, Boone had seen the native exploited and embittered. It had been his care that when prosperity came into Marlin it should come as a blessing to the hill dwellers and not as a curse. To that end he had locked horns with some adroit and powerful adversaries, outriders of capital who would have been bandits had the way lain open. They had first laughed at him, then resolved to crush him and in the end sought to propitiate him. Finally they gave him his half of the road and shook their heads in wonderment because he chose the way of folly and refused to be made deviously rich.
To each new advance he had had one answer: "I belong to these people, gentlemen. They must be fairly dealt with."
And yet while these mighty transitions worked themselves into being, the alchemy of the Midas touch left life unchanged back of Cedar Mountain itself. The brooding range threw its cordon of peaks across the tide of development and turned it right and left. Not until the many fields lying virgin and accessible had been worked out, would capital need to wrestle with engineering assaults upon those sky-high barriers of flint.
And with fidelity to history's ironic precedent, the man whose dream had been strong in a world of doubters stood by unbenefited, while others who had not known the nature of a vision reaped wealth. For Larry Masters had thrown his initial winnings into other speculative properties. He was the gambler who had won a large bet, and whose ambition straightway burns to "break the bank." He had bought land in his own right on a rising tide of values, and he had seen his own veins of coal narrow to nothing, until his engineers had "pulled the pillars" and abandoned the lodes. Finding himself ill omened and fallen on desert spots in a land of oases, he had closed his bungalow in disgust and taken a salaried position with an oil concern operating in Mexico.
Sometimes there comes into a Kentucky midsummer a strayed touch of autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.
On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.
He did not require the spell of that indefinable melancholy which lay along the hilltops to bring home to him a mood of sadness, because for two weeks he had been here alone with his thoughts. It had been his whim during that time to isolate himself completely, and to wear, as a man may wear old clothes or old shoes, the ease of solitude that makes no demands upon one's conventional self.
In Washington there was always the need of living before other eyes. Here he had not even ridden across the ridge for letters or papers.
At the moment, while the bees droned loudly about him and the mountains slept in their ancient impassivity, he held on his knees Victor McCalloway's tin dispatch box, and his eyes were deep with thoughts of bereavement.
The veteran had said that, on his death, Boone might turn the key of that battered receptacle and read the papers which would give him a full knowledge of the identity of his benefactor.
Once he had declared, half smilingly and half in earnest:
"I suppose that at any time you hear nothing of me for five years you may assume my death." It had been five years now, and more, since he had left the little world of his hermitage, and no word had come back to Boone.
The young man's heart was heavy with loneliness, and as he sat there alone, he ached to know the secret that had shadowed the life of the man to whom his devotion was almost an idolatry; the secret that had robbed of a name one whose past must have been both colourful and tragic.
In those five years since they had met, Boone had passed the milestones from the local to the national, and if he held the respect of his colleagues he owed it all to Victor McCalloway. They said that he was a man with a broad and national vision. That, too, if it were true, was a reflection of the soldier's teaching.
But if McCalloway were to be only a memory, Boone looked forward to a life almost beggared. There was that solitary strain in his nature which came perhaps of having attached himself too strongly to a few, all-important friends. Of these McCalloway had been the chief. A facetious fellow-member had given Boone a nickname out of Kipling in coatroom small-talk, and the title had stuck. "Wellver," said the representative, "is 'the cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him.'"
Now, if he were not to see his old preceptor again, he must indeed walk by himself.
With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been, and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.
The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had his friend played a part?
Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary exile – a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the war-eagles.
Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to him. He had seen – often – the warmth of affection like the softened glow of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and – on occasion – the keen, cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too, white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it had taken the battlefield to bring out.
And these he did not know.
He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought, undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.
Prince himself had been a historian, and yet Boone doubted whether he could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing. As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes. He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments, governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.
Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe that often it became adverse criticism.
Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.
Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.
For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodpecker rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the house again, unopened.
Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the sunlight he was thinking of her.
He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville had been an adventure, daring everything.
All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation.
Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud:
"It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!"
But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her… You always will!"
Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast.
But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white.
Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands:
"Is it politics, Morgan?"
Wallifarro nodded.
"In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane."
"Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't follow you."
"My God, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, "don't you know?"
"Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks," smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days."
Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply:
"The war… It's four days old and more… Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it – and yesterday England came in."
The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodpecker began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow butterflies.
Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"
Morgan shook his head. "Two weeks ago," he said, "the whole thing was a sheer impossibility… Now anything is possible."
Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy… "When that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of peace but belched from the mouths of guns – riding the gales of war."
"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."
Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another errand. What was it?"
Morgan, who had been seated, rose and paced the floor with his mouth tight drawn, and then stopping before his host, he broke out bluntly: "Once before, Boone, we talked about her. Now we must do it again."
Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and with Morgan it was impossible.
"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed, and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour – I can't talk of her."
"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk of her?"
"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My God, man, don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them – and, if you do, don't waste time!"
For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command, had failed to learn anything of her or her circumstances.
"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some cabin in a frozen wilderness – without provisions, without even matches or an axe, and God knows what she found there!"
The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard Morgan again:
"Between us – somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what parted you – but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see her married to you – and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her. Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps she wouldn't hide from you – "
Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:
"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."
But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he had come.
One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed, and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned over for burial among the pauper dead.
Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him. In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires of candle-light.