Adventure, December 1914 — page 220: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

218 have for her, but they were far from clean. A fifty-mile ride across country took us to a railroad station, and thence we reached Buda-Pest, which considers itself well with- in the limits of European civilization, and at any rate may be called the outer gateway to Vienna and Paris. Posing as an Ameri- can professor and his wife, who had been observing political developments in the Balkans, Masoya and I had no difficulty in concealing our identity and passed through Austria without being recognized. ft ea AND so this chapter of adventure | @ 8 was brought to a close. But I can 13 not help thinking that there may be more to add to the story in the future. Let- ters from old Vassili Kurtsky, who is labor- ing hard to repair the ruin that he could not avert, and from Boris, who is now a full- fledged general, lie before me as I write. They hint of far-reaching changes. Bul- garia beaten through the scheming of: half a dozen powerful enemies and the stupidity of the policy thrust upon her against her will, has swallowed the bitter pill forced down her throat by Fate. But she is waiting to take her revenge. On whom that re- venge will fall first I do not know. Per- haps no man knows definitely save old Kurtsky, and he is too wary to say before it is time. Yet I think there is a day coming when the Lady of Czarigrad may again be a factor in Balkan affairs. She says otherwise. She wants no more to do with politics, she Adventure tells me. She has worry and cares enough at home. But when I speak to her of the gray mass of the towers of that fairy fortress of mystery, Czarigrad, looming over the blue frontier hills of Macedonia, there comes a light to her eyes that is different from that with which she looks at me at other times. “No, Dan,” she laughingly insists, when I twit her on it. “I don’t want to go back. Indeed I don’t, dearest; and I wouldn’t be an Empress for worlds. But I should so like to show you Czarigrad some day.” I wonder. There are times when I should like to make personal acquaintance with the spell of Masoya’s fairy castle, when I feel again a gust of primitive anger that such scoundrels as Constantine Gortcheff and Carl von Griffenstein should be alive and plotting; when I long to match my wits against that contradictory person, Héléne von Anhalt and Kemil Bey, if he is still alive, as I have nodoubt he is. And above all I should like again—don’t think me egotistical—to beard Czar Ferdinand in his Palace. But more than this I wonder what would have happened had Sasha Kroyevich—I’d like to meet him again, too, for he was a man—failed me there on the river bank at Semlin and allowed me to fall into the hands of-the Austrians. It’s futile, of course; but still a man who has married and settled down, no matter how contented he may be, can only hark back over the past. I wonder. THE END Editorial Note:—The European ‘war, like many another crisis in the past, arose in the Balkans. It is this potentiality for history-making that makes them such excellent matertal for fiction. In“The Sinews of War’’ the time is set during the war with Turkey and the ensuing war among the allies, with the rest of Europe hovering uneasily on the edge of the combat. The general color may be relied upon, for the author knows the Balkans at first-hand. For the rest, it 1s fiction pure and simple. Several historical people appear in the tale, but their portraiture is in accordance with the needs of fiction, not with their actual characteris- Most of the characters are entirely fictional, though some of them have been put into And the Balkans, tics. high places. But the spirit of reality 1s there—the spirit of the Balkans. for half a century, have been one of the Great Keys to the world’s history. comicloook C©