Part 60 (1/2)

”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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 friends.h.i.+p 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?”