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?"