CHAPTER XLV
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 attachés 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 naïvely 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.
CHAPTER XLVI
The snow that had lain along the Appalachian slopes had felt the first breath of thawing breezes in March, 1917. Here and there, in a sun-touched hollow, dry twigs grew less brittle and the hint of buds gave timid forecasting of spring. The roads were deep in red mud and black mud, and men in ill-lighted cabins looked to crowbar and pike-pole and made ready for the swelling of the "spring tide" that should heft their rafted logs on its shoulders of water to the markets of a flattened world.
In the log house which Victor McCalloway had built, Boone Wellver was making his final preparations to go to Washington again – and, after that, if God willed, to Russia. Upon his wall calendar once more a date was marked; the date of a call, come at last, for which through two years his spirit had fretted.
The President had sent his summons for Congress to gather in extraordinary session, and that order, given first for April the sixteenth, had been advanced to April the second. That could carry one meaning only – that at last the fiction of a national aloofness was to be cast aside as a garment unworthy of its wearer; that at last the nation was to take her place at Armageddon!
Ahead lay action; the only medicine for a deep-rooted sorrow which, after a grim clinging to the fringe of hope, had begun to admit despair.
For almost three years Boone had divided himself between his work and his search for Anne, and his mission had come to seem as far from attainment as that of the seekers of the Holy Grail. Now he was to be one of those whose voices should speak for the nation in its declaration of war.
That would not be enough. It would be only a beginning of his self-required service, but since the well-springs of sentiment were deeper in his nature than he realized, it was important to him that he, the pioneer type of American, should join with his modern brethren in committing his country to her forward stride across the Atlantic.
The sun was setting over the "Kaintuck' Ridges" in a blazing glory of wine red and violet, and his imagination flamed responsively until it saw in the bristle of crest pine and spruce, the silhouette of lance-bearing legions marching eastward.
Already his trunk had gone in a neighbour's "jolt wagon," and the horse that he was to ride across Cedar Mountain was saddled. Other respondents to that call might motor to their trains. He must make the beginning of his journey on horseback, with his most immediate needs packed in saddle bags – as Jefferson had done before him.
Boone paused at the door of the house, where already the fire had been quenched and the windows barred. Now he turned the key in the lock and went slowly to the barn, but even when he had led out his mare and stood at the stirrup, something held him there with the spell of memory.
He was not coming back here until he had fulfilled the resolve long ago made – and since in these days overseas journeys were less simple than in other times, he could not be sure of coming back at all. So with his bridle rein over his forearm, he stood for a while with the picture of the log cabin and the sunset in his eyes.
Then he mounted and rode slowly away.
In a few days he was to hear the earnest voice of the President sounding over the sober faces of his gathered colleagues: "Gentlemen of the Congress: – I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making."
Though he came bearing no official mission, because he was a member of the American Congress and because the United States Ambassador had exerted himself to that end, Boone Wellver found it possible to leave revolutionary Petrograd and make his way to the front where, after a year of successful offensive, the armies of Brussilov lay drugged with the insidious poison of anarchy.
Already, "Order Number One to Army" had with a pen-stroke abolished all the requirements of discipline and all the striking power of unity.
The marvel was that the heart of the organization had not at once stopped beating – but old traditions still held the fragments loosely cemented, and the resolute hand of Brussilov still grasped and steadied the brittle material left to him in the face of the enemy and disaster.
If guns still thundered on the eastern front, the men who had for a year been launching successful assaults knew that their voices were hollow. If his army groups still maintained a zone of activity between themselves and the foe, he knew that it was only a screen behind which he sought to shield the evaporating powers of his forces.
Yet even in these days the commander adhered to his custom and received the correspondents, and when Boone came to his headquarters with the credentials that had passed him that far, he was turned over to an intelligence officer, whose instructions were to serve him in every way compatible with military expediency until the general could grant him an audience.
He had been motored through a timber-patched country of waving wheat fields and had listened to the deep voices of the guns. He had been taken into the trenches where he read the spirit of decay in sullen eyes that had once been stolidly impassive or cheerfully childlike. He had seen the "little and terrible keyholes of heaven and hell" through which one looks, both sickened and exalted, upon modern warfare.
In his mind, still unassimilated, were countless impressions, gruesome and inspiring, petty and magnificent, appalling and ennobling; impressions of broken men and broken villages, of pock-marked country and unbruised valour. As the battered military car, mud-brown over its gray, wallowed back from the front lines, he seemed to be leaving the war behind him, though he knew that he was approaching the nerve centre from which emanated the impulses which forged and wrought the purposes of the Inferno.
Finally in a village less hideously war-spoiled than its fellows, and in a small but tidy room of what had been the inn, he awaited the pleasure of the Commander.
Of his conductor along the front he had put questions as to General Makailoff. Yes, the officer, of course, knew of the General, but where he was now he could not say.
The General was a wheel in the mechanism of Brussilov's staff – and that directing force was remote from the lives of lower grade officers. It belonged to the part of the temple which lay behind the veil. Even in attempted description of the man, the intelligence officer grew vague, and Boone did not press him for a greater explicitness. That military reticence that no civilian could justly appraise might be parent to the officer's indefinite responses, and, if so, its covertness must be respected.
So in the room of the Russian inn the man from the Cumberlands waited, and at length, when he opened his door in response to a light rap, he saw an officer in a major's uniform, who saluted smartly and announced in excellent English,
"General Brussilov will receive you now, sir."
Again a battered military car lurched through village streets darkening to twilight, and brought up before a plain two-storied house, whose walls, though shell marked, stood upright.
Into a whitewashed room, littered with map-strewn tables, and empty until they entered it, Boone was ushered and left alone.
A lamp upon a crude table stood as yet unkindled, and only candles in two tall sticks on a wall-shelf gave a yellow effect against which the shadows stirred cloudily.
Even the whitewashed walls were the gray yellow of putty in that feeble light, and Boone turned his eyes toward the brighter spot of the door, giving upon another room, where operators sat at switchboards and where were mingled the buzz of voices, the tramp of booted feet, the clink of spurs and accoutrements, into a tempered babel as restlessly constant as surf on rocks.
That door was a kaleidoscopic patch of changing colour, and Boone watched it with a sense of confused unreality until a second opened, letting in a draught under which the candles wavered and grew more dim, and a spare figure entered through it, clad in a field uniform which had seen heavy wear, and holding between the tapering fingers of the left hand a freshly lighted cigarette.
Boone had a realization in that first moment of a shadowy shape in a semi-obscurity, yet out of the dimness, as though they were brightly painted on a dark canvas, stood clear – or so it seemed to him – the features of the man and the cross of St. George on his breast.
Alexieff Brussilov closed the door behind him and inclined his head in something less casual than a nod and less formal than a bow, and the flames of the candles rose and steadied as if standing at attention. In all of Boone's subsequent remembrance of that meeting, it was difficult for him to unravel the fact from the play of an imagination, more fitful just then than the candle glimmer, or to dissociate from the impressions of that moment all that he had known before or learned afterwards of this man, whose feats of arms he had heard so widely acclaimed.
Even when the General's voice had broken the silence and they had exchanged commonplaces, a surge of influences quite apart from his words seemed to emanate from the erect figure and the stern eyes, as electric waves flow out from an induction coil.
Boone questioned himself sternly afterwards and could never answer his own questioning as to whether he actually felt at that time or only realized in retrospect the strong impression of doom and heartbreak in Brussilov's eyes. His story was not yet ended, but he must have known its end. He was yet to be commander-in-chief for two months of futile struggle with crumbling armies, succeeding Alexieff, and being himself supplanted by Korniloff. He was even to essay one more offensive – yet his inner vision must already recognize the writing on the wall. He must have seen the black smudge-smoke of disaster stifling the clean fire of his achievement.
But Boone knew that the time granted him out of those hours of stress must not be abused, and as shortly as possible he told the General with full candour why he had come, and ended by asking that he be presented to General Makailoff and be allowed to see his face. If in Ivangoroff's story there had been even a germ of truth, this man of mysterious advent into the Russian army might well look to his superiors to protect his secret.
So Boone made it unmistakably clear that his eagerness was that of a foster son, and he felt that his testimony needed no corroboration, because under the searching severity of the eyes which held his own, as he talked, any falsity must break into betrayal as manifest as a flaw in crystal.
When he had finished, Brussilov did not at once reply, and Boone thought that back of the mask of reserve stirred a shadowing of strong emotion. At last the General spoke evenly, almost stiffly:
"As to General Makailoff's former record, I have practically no knowledge. He came to me from the Grand Duke Nicholas. Naturally I required nothing more. Of my own knowledge I can declare him a soldier with few peers in Europe."
"Then I may have the honour of being presented, sir? I may see his face? If he is the man I have come to learn of, he will welcome me, I think. If not, I shall pay my respects and rest under a deep obligation to you."
The eager thrill of the civilian's voice was unmistakable, and for a moment the soldier stood looking into the face of his visitor, seeming himself uncertain of his answer. But it was only the words of its couching that troubled him, and presently Brussilov raised a hand and let it fall while his reply came in few syllables and blunt directness:
"Makailoff is dead."
"Dead!" Boone echoed the word with a gasp. Only now did he realize how strongly the hopes stirred to rebirth by Ivangoroff's fantastic narrative had laid hold upon him and what power of shock lay in this dénouement. Then he heard again the voice of Russia's second in command:
"It is incredibly strange that you should have come just now – if indeed he is the man you seek. Thirty-six hours since you might have talked with him." The General broke off and began afresh with an undertone of savage protest in his voice: "In these late days when troops may ballot and wrangle as to whether they will advance or retire, we must squander our most indispensable. It is only by precept and example that we can hope to hold them. Makailoff was such a sacrifice. He fell yesterday in a position as far forward as that of any colonel or major of the line. Had I been left a free hand, I could have enforced obedience more cheaply – with machine guns!"
He broke off and raised the forgotten cigarette to his lips, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, while Boone Wellver steadied himself with an effort.
"You must make allowances for my impatience, sir," he implored. "The suspense of uncertainty is hard. May I know at once?"
Brussilov bowed, and the falcon eyes moderated with the abruptness of a transformation. "He lies only a few versts from this spot. Tonight we bury him and fire his last salute… You shall go with me… I am waiting now for – a gentleman, who knew him even better than I. I cannot say who was more devoted to him, for that, I think, would be impossible."
An aide entered, saluted, handed his chief a paper, and went out again. To Boone it seemed the irritating interruption of an automaton, in boots of clicking heels that moved on hinges and pivots, but it served to bring back to the General's attitude and bearing that impersonal and aloof concentration which for the moment had been lost. Again his eyes were windows of drawn shades, and as he studied the communication in his hand, the civilian remembered that, though comrades fell, the task went on, and its director could not be deflected.
Beyond the door the noise of the switchboard operators and the tramp of heavy feet coming and going sounded monotonously through the silence, and then a second officer entered, saluted, as though he were twin automaton to the first, and spoke in Russian.
"You will excuse me for a moment," said the General. "The gentleman of whom I spoke has arrived."
He left the room, and Boone remained standing, his gaze wandering, but his brain singularly numb and inoperative, like stiff machinery, until he heard footsteps again, and with a conscious effort shook off his heaviness of torpor. Then quite instinctively his civilian attitude altered into something like the soldier's attention, as General Brussilov re-entered with another figure, wrapped to the chin in a heavy motor coat. The newcomer was not in uniform, yet Boone felt the creep along his scalp of an electric and dramatic thrill because the giant height of lean stature, the calmly indomitable bearing and the indescribable stamp of greatness proclaimed the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaivitch; the man from whose sure grasp the supreme command had been filched by a jealous weakling; the man who might have saved Russia.