Red Fleece Part 2

"I cannot understand," she replied. "Especially that day when I first saw you, I had nothing."

Now they ascended the terraces that commanded the Vistula. The rocky turf of the footpath, smoothed by the tread of forgotten generations (but still whispering to her of those who had pa.s.sed on); the crumbling masonry of the retaining walls, gray with the pallor of the years; and afar the curving, dust-swept farmlands, which had mothered a thousand harvests, now moved with strange planting of peasant- soldiers. Mobilization business everywhere, drilling of the half- equipped, a singing excitement of parting, recruiting--no time for the actual misery.

They stood in the very frown of the fortress at sunset. A column of raw infantry came swinging out and started the descent. A moment afterward the roar of a folk-song came up in a gust. It was as if the underworld suddenly had been cratered.

"When they sing like that, and I think of what they shall soon be called upon to do--I can hardly endure it!" she whispered.... They stood with backs against the wall, as the tail of the column moved past. "Look at that weary one--so spent and sick--yet trying to sing--"

They were in the silence again. Across the river, against the red background, they watched another column of foot-soldiers moving like a procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery, just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in Austria for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being trained for distant slaughter arenas.

"Do speak, Peter," she whispered.

He turned to find her white face looking up to him and very close.

They were alone.

"You won't mind if I think about myself this once?" he asked.

"Please do."

"I only want to say that, if you'll stay where you are, I'll come back from this stuff--I was going to say, dead or alive."

"Do you mean I am to stay in Warsaw?" she asked.

"No--not that exactly. I mean if you will stay where you are in regard to me----"

Tears filled her eyes. He would have known it even if they had not shone through the dusk, because his fingers felt the tremor in her arms. She tried to speak, but finished, "How utterly silly words are!"

The face of young Mowbray was strange with emotion, pale but brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare and perfect was this moment.

"Anyway--we understand. We understand, Berthe."

"...As for Berthe," she said slowly, as they walked back, "her heart will stay where you have put it, Peter. That's out of her power to change. But the rest--I can't tell, yet----"

It was as if a finger had crossed Mowbray's face laterally under the eyes and across his nostrils, leaving a gray welt.

"I know you belong to the moderns," he said, after a moment. "We men belong to the ancients. We want a woman to wait and weep while we go off to the wars."

"We understand," she kept repeating.... "And now, before you go, come home with me and let me make you a cup of tea--just a cup of tea-- before you go."

He went with her, and, when his tea-cup was finished, he happened to look into the bottom.

"What do you see?" she asked quickly, taking the cup.

"M-m-m," said Mowbray.

Chapter 4

Peter and Lonegan were together at dinner three hours after the message from _The States._

"It's a big chance, Mowbray. That's all I can say. I stay at the wire --no heroics."

"You ought to see it all from here."

Lonegan smiled deprecatingly. "Boylan will help you get through. You don't know him yet. Some time, perhaps, you will--two hundred and fifty pounds of soul. He'll do all he can to get you the same chance he has, because I asked him; and then he'll try to make _The States_ look obsolete as a newspaper, wherein, of course, he'll fail. But he'll try. If he takes to you, it won't make him try less, but he'd do your stuff and his, if you fell sick. There isn't another Boylan--a great newspaper man, too. _The States_ will watch closely, knowing that _Rhodes'_ will get everything possible from Boylan's part of the front. The point is--and I think he'll want it, too--you'd better work together on the main line of stuff, as we do here. Your letters on the side should be better than his, because you're a better writer. As for war stuff, Boylan is the old master-- Peking, Manchuria and the Balkans--that I think of; also the Schmedding Polar Failure. That last _was_ war--a spectacular expedition of the Germans--

"I might as well make this a lecture, now that I've started," Lonegan went on. "The war game isn't complex. All the bewildering technicalities that bristle from a military officer's talk are just big-name stuff designed to keep down the contempt of the crowd--the oldest professional trick. Whenever the crowd gets to understand your terminology your game is cooked. You know how it is in a drug-store, and you've seen the old family doctor look wise....

"There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics, and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought it and Genghis Khan--numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull old flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the bending back of wings, the crimp of a line by making a hole in one part--and all that archaic rot. As I say, the game is extinct, so far as our modern complicated intelligences go, and the men whose names are biggest in the papers from now on are the same old beefy type of rudiments whom a man wouldn't a.s.sociate with in times of national quiet.... I will end this by saying that the big story is the man-- the peasant, the trooper, the one blinded little dupe, who dies, or plunges, or loses his legs in the name of the Fatherland--"

"I see that," said Peter; "but what really is interesting to me is this peasant's blindness and the monkey other men make of him--"

"I'm glad you spoke of that, for it is a thing to avoid. Interesting, I grant, but not popular with our kind of press. We are not servants of the minority or the elect. You'll find Boylan exploiting the army he's with--just as another might have done under Napoleon. By the way, where are you going to-night?"

"I'm going to sit at the feet of the most genial anarchist at large. His name is Fallows, an American, who has been ten years in Russia among the peasants."

"Duke Fallows--I know of him. When did he come to town?"

"Two days ago."

"Peter, how did you get next?" Lonegan looked a bit in awe at the other.

"I was asked to one of his private audiences last night."

Peter knew that Lonegan had many things to ask by the quick tone in which he spoke the first question.

"You know what Fallows will do to you?"

"Yes, if one lets go. He has learned how to use his power. He has brought forth his young upon the bare rocks, as somebody said."

"He'd turn an angel into an anarchist."

"A man ought not to be afraid to listen if there's a chance for him to be proved wrong--"

"Correct, absolutely. I am merely thinking about our job."

"A man gets in the habit of thinking about his job--doesn't he?"

"Did he tell you about the plowman of Liaoyang?"

"No, but my companion did. Fallows must have seen that episode rather clearly."

"Let's not get off the job business, Peter. As I was saying, the truth isn't popular--"

"That doesn't sound like Lonegan."

"No, and I don't like the feel of saying it, but it's very much to the point--"