It was late March [Drake said] in the second year after the Bolshevist horror began. Coming up from Constantinople, where I had been sent by the New York police to find a man who was dead when I got there, I decided to give myself a late holiday week in Paris, see my old friends of the Paris police, and make a few social calls.
For two years I had had no letter from my friend, the eighty-year-old Russian Princess Vorontsov, though I had learned in Constantinople that she had escaped, from her devastated country and was back in her Paris house, in the Boulevard Suchet. Escaped from Russia — at eighty! But that did not really surprise me. She had always been an amazing person.
Her only son, Prince Michael Vorontsov, had also, I learned, got through the net of the Red Terror and had made his way into France; but he had died three months ago, in Nice. That was all I could learn about them in Constantinople. Where was Prince Boris, the old lady’s grandson? They could not tell me. Was he alive? They did not know.
Now, I had known Boris Vorontsov since he was fifteen years old, though I had not seen him since the spring of 1914, when he was twenty. A delightful, impulsive, romantic young Russian he had been. What was he now — if he had survived?
But the first friend I saw in Paris assured me that Boris was with his grandmother. He had been in the old Russian army of the czar, and he also had made his way out — but alone, and after great hardships. Was he changed? No, not on the surface — the same gay, irresponsible, childlike young soul we had always known.
“But has the old princess any money now?” I asked.
“Nobody seems to know,” my friend said. “She keeps only three servants instead of seven, and she no longer wears jewels — not a stone. She won’t even talk about her escape — it’s all very mysterious.”
The servants, I thought, might be Russians, glad even of a roof.
“The princess,” my friend ran on, “says that the world has come to an end, but that she has to sit tidily on the ruins for eighteen years longer, and cultivate her neglected talents.”
It sounded just like her.
Many times the old princess had assured me that she was going to live to be ninety-eight. When she was a girl, and lady-in-waiting to some Russian empress whose name I have forgotten, a gypsy woman had told her that her span of life was a hundred years minus two years. Nothing could shake her belief in it. It was one of her many delightful oddities. “I shall see you a middle-aged man with gray hair, Dexter Drake,” she said to me once, years ago, when I was twenty-one and she seventy.
While the octogenarian princess was “cultivating her neglected talents,” I wondered when secret emissaries of the Reds would begin to peddle the Vorontsov jewels round the capitals of western Europe. Rumor had valued them long ago at the equivalent of a million dollars.
And Prince Michael was dead! But him I had never known well, for he was generally in Russia. I remembered a portrait of him in brilliant uniform which hung over the chimneypiece in the great semi-detached room the Vorontsovs called the studio — for the princess dabbled with paints. She also wrote verses. The house in the Boulevard Suchet had once belonged to a sculptor who had sacrificed part of his garden to build the big studio. The garage was behind it, with its back against the house. If you will remember these details, they will help you to visualize my struggles with the Vorontsov puzzle. But the excitement did not begin until after Boris went down to Nice.
In the late afternoon of that first day of my holiday week in Paris, I was ringing the bell in the gate of their high-walled garden. I saw the house door slowly open and a middle-aged manservant — a Frenchman — came to unlock the gate.
No, the princess was not at home; she had been in Nice for the last month. But Prince Boris was there; he was alone in the studio.
“Then don’t announce me,” I said, and I turned down the little gravel walk to the right, and knocked on the well-remembered oaken door.
The door opened — there was a breathless moment...
“Why, Dexter! Dexter Drake! I don’t believe it — I don’t believe it — I don’t—”
Grasping my hand, Boris drew me into the studio.
He was wearing a brown velvet house coat, and there was a gold-tipped cigarette between his slim fingers.
My friend had been right. The terrible years had but slightly changed Boris Vorontsov. The slight graceful figure was half an inch taller, maybe, and he had acquired a little yellow mustache. But the old spontaneous gaiety was there still, the laughter on the lips and in the tawny eyes.
Ensconcing me in the largest easy-chair, he gave me tea from the samovar, gave me sweets, cigarettes.
Where was I staying? But I must have my things sent right over. Of course I must stay with them. Grandmamma would be so delighted. He was just starting for Nice, that night, to fetch her home. I must remain here while he was gone — a couple of days only. François would make me comfortable — he and the Russian cook. Of course I remembered his own old room at the head of the stairs? That was for me. He now occupied the Louis XIV room — the one which had been his father’s. (Prince Michael, you know.) I had no engagement that evening? No? Oh, that was perfect! Then we could dine here together, early; I could see him off at the Gare de Lyon, then fetch my things from the hotel.
The lapse of years seemed unreal. This had always been their family living room; the French drawing room in the main building was used only on formal occasions.
A few minor changes I noticed. A fine tapestry portrait of Louis XIV, with the sun disk over his head, which used to hang in Prince Michael’s bedroom upstairs, was now in the studio — hung flat on the door of a large closet at the back of the room. And in the deep alcove, which with the closet divided that end of the studio, a new and magnificent lionskin covered the couch, in place of the old Kis Kilim.
“Isn’t he a fine beast?” Boris smiled, when I noticed the lion. “Grandmamma found him six weeks ago in a shop in the Rue Chateaudun.”
I did not say, but I thought that he must have been rather expensive.
It is better not to talk to Russians now about Russia — unless they mention it first. After a time Boris mentioned it, told me how he got out. It was a hair-raising tale, and it added a man’s respect to my old affection for him. A man’s and an adventurer’s respect. I have.been in some dangerous corners myself.
“Grandmamma says I must work now,” he told me, “develop my brains, earn money. I am going to study medicine. She says life has now done the worst it can do. So we must look forward — be gay of heart.”
Yes. Sitting “tidily” on the ruins.
Boris was silent for a moment. Then suddenly he looked round at me with his frank boyish eyes.
“I really don’t know what we’re living on,” he declared. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Dexter! But she got out of Russia with nothing — disguised in a peasant’s rags. I believe there is something else. She helps the others — those who also have lost everything. Oh, she is deep — deep! Her playfulness doesn’t deceive me. She has always complained of my indiscretion, but before she went down to Nice — she joined an old friend there at three hours’ notice — she said that on her return she had something for me to do — a difficult task. Though she smiled — you know her odd little twisted smile. I wonder—”
When it was time for Boris to go to the station, the French manservant, François, got us the taxicab. The big motorcar of other days was gone now. The garage behind the studio was empty.
As I left my friend in a wagon-lit of the Riviera express, he said, with a little flush of apology: