Finally, with a breath as though for strength, she reached into one of the lower pigeonholes and drew forth a packet of letters. Among them she found one that she sought. It had a Chicago postmark.
... and perhaps you might like to know, she read, that the fellow you were so curious about a while ago, the Forge fellow, that I might have told you about all along if I’d only known you were interested in him, ... called off to see me on his way through to San Francisco last week ... he brought me a little packet of love letters we wrote to each other when we were school-kids, years ago ... Oh, Madge, dear, you’re the dearest friend I ever had, I’ve got to tell you! ... after he had gone they broke me all up, Madge! After all, they meant so much! ... I told you a story, Madge, when I said he didn’t come out of that jail scrape clean. He did come out of it clean. He’s an awful provincial, Madge, ... he’d shock you to death in lots of ways ... his etiquette is impossible ... but I guess he never had a chance, Madge, like you and me. I’m sorry I treated him so. I said a lot of things which hurt him terribly. But he’s gone now and I don’t know where he is, to let him know I’m sorry ... he lost both his child and his wife ... there’s no woman in his life ... but there’s something hickory about him, Madge, deep down under his awful manners ... oh, Madge! ... I wish he didn’t come from a small town ... I wish he wasn’t a small-town fellow ... I wish I wasn’t so world-wise ... I’d like to have him love me greatly, a man like him ... and forget ... everything ... in his great, strong tenderness ...
Madelaine read the letter, in its coarse, underscored penmanship, to the end.
It was two o’clock when she laid down on her bed and tried to get a few hours’ sleep before morning.
Next day the marines went into action at Château-Thierry.
CHAPTER XIII
INTERLUDE
I
Take your atlas, find Siberia, locate Vladivostok in the northwest corner of the Japan Sea and trace your finger inland. Follow the Trans-Siberian railroad. One branch will travel upward along the Amur River, as though in the United States the traveler started from Boston, went northward and down the St. Lawrence, to reach Buffalo. Another branch of the Trans-Siberian drops in a southwesterly direction toward Harbin, Manchuria, then up to Chita, away across the steppes to Lake Baikal and beyond, thousands of miles beyond, almost in a straight line into European Russia. Transposing Vladivostok for Boston, Harbin would be Binghamton, Chita would be Buffalo, Lake Baikal would be Lake Michigan, Irkutsk would be Chicago. Further west Omsk would be Lincoln, Nebraska, Ekaterinburg would be Denver, the Urals would be the Rockies, Petrograd would be San Francisco, Moscow would be Los Angeles. The geographical similarity of the two countries is extraordinary. Only Siberian distances are three times as great and Siberian populations one-thirtieth as large.
If any lasting gain is totaled from the great Russian bedlam, emphasized in it prominently must be the opening of Siberia to the world. As boys and girls, and even as grown men and women, we thought of Siberia as an arctic waste of snow and ice, ravaged by man-hunting wolves, dotted with world-lost exile mines, peopled by a strange semi-barbaric race in fur and lambskin and dwelling in half-real dusk beneath the bondage of the knout.