Books: Red Fleece
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RED FLEECE
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
Author of "Midstream," "Down Among Men," "Fate Knocks At the Door,"
"Routledge Rides Alone," Etc., Etc.
1915,
TO THE HOUR--WHEN TROOPS TURN HOME
CONTENTS
I. THE WOMAN AND THE EXILE
II. THE COURT OF EXECUTION
III. THE HOUSE OF AMPUTATIONS
IV. IN THE BOMB-PROOF PIT
V. THE SKYLIGHT PRISON
VI. THE FIELD OF HELMETS
VII. THE GREEN OF CEDARS
I
THE WOMAN AND THE EXILE
Peter Mowbray first saw her at the corner of Palace Square nearest the
river. He was not in the least the kind of young man who appraises
passing women, very far from a starer. At the instant their eyes met,
his thoughts had been occupied with work matters and the trickery of
events. In fact, there was so much to do that he resented the
intrusion, found himself hoping in the first flash that she would show
some flaw to break the attraction.
It may have been that her eyes were called to the passer-by just as
his had been, without warning or volition. In any event their eyes met
full, leisurely in that stirring silence before the consciousness of
self, time, place and convention rushes in. ... Though she seemed very
poor, there was something about her beyond reach in nobility. He was
left with the impression of the whitest skin, the blackest hair and
the reddest lips, but mainly of a gray-eyed girl--eyes that had become
wider and wider, and had filled with sudden amazement (doubtless at
her own answering look) before they turned away.
Desolation was abroad in Warsaw after this encounter. Mowbray thought
of New York with loneliness, the zest gone from all present activity.
Presently with curious grip his thoughts returned to a certain
luncheon in New York with a tired literary man who had talked about
women with the air of a connoisseur. The pith of the writer's
observations was restored to his mind in this form:
"If I were to marry again it would be to a Latin woman--French,
Italian, even Spanish--a close-to-nature woman born and bred in one of
the Mediterranean countries. Not a blue-blood, for that has to do with
decadence, but a woman of the people. They are passionate but pure, as
Poe would say. If they find a man of any value, he becomes their
world. They are strong natural mothers--mothering their children and
their husband, too,--and immune to common sicknesses. Given a little
food, they know enough to prepare it with art. If a man has a bit of a
dream left, such a woman will either make him forget it painlessly, or
she will make it come true."
There was no apparent relation, and none that proved afterward. What
he had seen at the corner of Palace Square nearest the Vistula was not
the face of a Latin woman, nor was any looseness of common birth
evident in it. The key might have had to do with the little hat she
wore, just a hat for wearing on the head, a protection against sun and
rain, and with the austerely simple black dress; but these weathered
exteriors again were effective in contrast to the vivid freshness of
her natural coloring. As for what remained of the literary man's
picture of the ideal woman to marry, it was the last word of
decadence--the eminent selfishness of a man willing to accept the
luxury of a woman who asks little to be happy. ... The next day at the
same time and place Mowbray was there, and saw her coming from afar.
She seemed both afraid and angry, stopped abruptly and asked in Polish
what he wanted. He was startled. It was a hard moment. He explained
with difficulty that her language was as yet an inconvenient vehicle
for him.
"You are not Russian?" she said in French.
He shook his head. She seemed to be relieved and he wondered why.
"What do you want?" she asked, though not quite with the original
asperity.
"It did not occur to me you would notice," he said in the language she
had ventured. "I saw you yesterday. You made me think of New York. As
I was near to-day, I hoped to see you again---" "You are American?"
She spoke now in English, and with a still softer intonation.
"Yes,--you speak English, too?"
"I like it. It is---" she checked herself and asked with just a shade
of coldness, "Is there anything I can do for you?"
It might be construed as a courtesy to a stranger from one who lived
in Warsaw. Peter liked it, a certain vista opening. However, there was
no answer within reach except the truth, and he plunged:
"I should like to know you better."
The red lower lip disappeared beneath the other. Her gray eyes grew
very wide; something intrepid and exquisite in her manner as she
searched his face. Whatever she knew of the world, she dared still to
trust her intuition--this was something of the revelation he drew.
"Why?"
Many people were passing. He looked toward the quieter center of the
Square.
"Will you walk with me there?" he asked. "It is not easy to explain
this sort of thing---"
"No. I must go on. You may walk a little way."
"You are very good.... You see, I cannot tell just _why_--as you
asked. If I knew you well, I could tell you. Yesterday I was quite
unromantic---"
She made it hard for him and did not let him see her smile. "You mean
you are romantic to-day?"
Peter laughed. "What a trap--and I was trying so hard to tell you."
"You _were_ trying---"
"I don't need to tell you. All there is to say is that I want you to
be my friend."
"I should have to think," she answered.
"Of course. ... Do you pass here every day?"
"I should have to think," she said.
It was the third day afterward that she passed again.
Chapter 2
The first time that Boylan of the _Rhodes News Agency_ of New
York saw Peter Mowbray was in the office of Lonegan of _The
States_, Mowbray's chief in Warsaw. Lonegan had known Peter in New
York and had wanted him for his second many months before the fact was
brought about. This was the Boylan of the Schmedding Polar Failure, of
various wars and expeditions, a huge spectacle of a man, an old-timer,
and very fond of Lonegan, though as representative of _Rhodes'_
he was structurally the competitor of _The States_ in this
territory.
"Young Mowbray may be all right," Boylan observed, "but the curse of
the student is on him. I should say that he isn't gusty enough for
hard work--vest buttons too safe--"
"You can't measure health by the pound," Lonegan observed, regarding
the other's bulk with one eye shut. "I never heard of Mowbray spending
much time in bed outside of the small hours." "How old is he?"
"Twenty-six or seven."
"I suppose he put on his gear all in a year or two?"
"There is that look about him, but he's safely over it. Some people
never stop, but I've had to look up at him from the same angle now and
then during the last five years.... It was just a little before that
he happened into--his route like mine--his cub-year in London, then
assistant in Antwerp, then in Dresden. He had Dresden alone for a
year. I've been angling for him some time----"
"Yes," Boylan remarked, "you need the right kind of help to stand up
with _Rhodes_ from this end----"
"You do make it wildly exciting," Lonegan answered gently. "We'll rock
Peter yet."
This chat took place in June. Ten weeks afterward Boylan came in with
the big news, and found Lonegan bending over the following cablegram,
almost the last that came through in the private cipher of _The
States:_
Get Mowbray post with Russians. We are mailing influential matters.
Warsaw key-desk for northern campaigns. We are to be congratulated on
having Lonegan there.
It was from the Old Man, who in certain cases ventured thus to be
expensively felicitous....
"I'm sorry, Lonegan," Boylan said. "I thought you would be taking the
field---"
"No, the Old Man's got the right eye for these affairs. I'm a desk
man."
What Lonegan had swallowed to make his voice clear and steady, only he
knew, but his nerve was effective. "You've got to help me, Boylan," he
said. "You know the military end. You've got to help me get him
attached. I know you'd do it for me, but I want you to do it for him--"
A grunt from the big man, who disappeared.
...Lonegan's lip curled. Again it was only Lonegan who knew why. He
read the cablegram carefully again, and felt his face as if
speculating whether he could wait until morning for a shave. There was
routine to do, and the developments of the day to file. Peter was on a
mail story.... It occurred to him presently that his second would be
interested in this eventuality from the Office. He called several
places by 'phone without locating the younger man.
"He's with the woman," Lonegan concluded.
Peter had left her address somewhere, but it was not at hand; neither
was her house available to telephone. Lonegan took down the Warsaw
directory, and came finally to the street-number after this line:
"_Bertha Solwicz, sempstress_."
Chapter 3
She, too, was almost a stranger in Warsaw, and lonely. Each had their
work, and many hours each day were required for it; still, after the
first fortnight, they managed to meet often. Peter's time was hers,
for he had the habit of leaving his feature-letter for the quiet hours
of the night.
"I hate the name of Solwicz," she told him the first time he came to
her house, "especially from you. And you must call me _Berthe_,
not Bertha." In spite of her obvious lack of means, she had a few
friends of rare quality, and yet he did not meet them. On her table
that first day, he picked up a little book of poems, the leader of
which was entitled _We Are Free_. Peter had read it a few weeks
before and given it a quality of appreciation that was seldom called
in these days. Just now he noted that the volume was affectionately
inscribed to her from the author, Moritz Abel. She spoke of him and of
the group of young master workmen to which he belonged. Then she read
the poem, as they stood together. It was a moment of honor to the
poet. Peter had turned pale, and the little room was hushed about
them, as if Warsaw were suddenly stilled.
"You see what they are doing," she said. "There is a new race of
artists in Russia. They have passed the emotions---"
"This poem was due in the world," Peter said. "But it is still an age
ahead of the crowd."
"That's what makes it so hard for them--for him. He does not like
that. He would like to talk to all men straight. Moritz Abel--the name
will not be forgotten. He is like the others of the new race. They are
terrible in their calm. They have passed the emotions. They are free.
Other artists in Europe or America repress the emotions. That is but
the beginning of the mastery. When they are as great as this group of
young men, they will show the spirit of the thing, not the emotion of
it. Emotions are red. This is pure white, don't you see?"
For three days Warsaw had been upheaved in excitement. On the
afternoon that the messenger from Lonegan brought the news of the
cablegram, Berthe and Peter were planning an excursion into the
country for the next day. She watched him closely as he read, and was
sensitive enough to realize the importance of the message, before he
spoke.... He found her gray eyes upon him. She chose her own way to
break the tension:
"The country is heaven, no doubt about that. One must die to get
there. Also one must live just so. Even when I was little, something
always happened--just as we were planning to set out for the country."
He showed her the message, but had hardly heard her words. His
discovery of this slender solitary red-lipped girl and what it meant,
was rarely clear at this moment. She had awakened him plane by plane,
awakened his passion and his mercy and his intuition.
"Tell me again what you said about the country. I was away for a
minute."
"It is hard to think of a little excursion to the fields--with such a
holiday ahead, as you are called upon."
"I wasn't thinking of that either, Berthe, but of you."
"Of course, you will go?"
"Doubtless."
"I was only talking foolishly, about our little excursion. One's own
wants are so pitifully unimportant now."
"I had hardly expected personally to encounter a war," he remarked and
added smilingly, "The fact is, I hadn't thought of meeting a woman
like you."
"I don't believe you're as cold-blooded as you try to seem, Peter."
"I have fought all my life to be cold-blooded."
She never forgot that. "I wonder why men do it?"
"It's the cultivation, perhaps, of that which Americans love best of
all--"
"What?"
"Nerve."
"We of Poland dare to be emotional," she said.
"You are an older people. You know how."
"One needs only to be one's self."
Peter smiled. "Sometimes I dare actually to be honest with you. Even
Lonegan and I take no such liberties together."
"It isn't a matter of courage," she said. "You would dare anything. I
know your quiet, deadly kind of courage. That's the first thing I felt
about you."
It was like Mowbray not to acknowledge that such a thing had been
said.
"I came to you asleep. I wonder if I should always have remained
asleep?"
"Your words are pretty, Peter. It makes me sad that you are going
away."
"You remember that company of soldiers that passed us yesterday as we
walked? I had seen many such groups before--great shocky-haired
fellows who ate and drank disgustingly. But yesterday you made me see
that their blood is redder than the Little Father's--that empires
ripen and go to seed only on a grander scale than turnips." Her eyes
were gleaming.
"We who are so wise, who have mastered ourselves, should be very good
to the peasants--and not take what they have and kill them in wars."
"Did I lead you to believe in any way that I felt myself mastered?" he
asked quickly.
She touched his arm. "I was talking of the Fatherland," she answered.
He had met this intensity of hers before. Her scorn was neither hot
nor cold, but electric. So often when words failed her, Peter fancied
himself lost in some superb wilderness... Her own gray tone was in the
room to-day--her gray eyes and black hair that made the shadows seem
gray; her face that no night could hide from him. Sometimes his glance
was held to her lips--as one turns to the firelight. Passion there--or
was it the higher thing, _compassion?_ There was bend and give to
the black cloth she wore, as to the inflections of her voice. She
could forget herself. That was the first and the inexhaustible charm.
It is true that she was very poor. This room which had become his
sanctuary in Warsaw was in a humble house of a common quarter. She
laughed at this, and at her many hours of work each day, for which the
return was meager. There was the sweetest pathos to him in her little
purse, and her pride in these matters was a thing of royalty.
"My father earned the right to be poor," she once said.
It seemed to him that her father was mentioned in the moments most
memorable... She was at the window now, her hand lifting the shade.
The light of the gray day shone through her fingers--a long, fragile
hand that trembled.
"Shall we walk somewhere, or must you go to your office, Peter?"
"I won't, just yet. Yes, let's go outside."
They felt they must climb, a bit of suffocation in their hearts. Until
to-day there had been invariable stimulus for Mowbray in the age of
all things, even in the dusty, narrow, lower streets, but his smiling,
easy countenance was a lie that he disliked now. It pinched him
cruelly to leave her, and there was small amelioration in anything
that the war might bring. She would give him sympathy and zeal and
honor for the work and through all the lonely days, but what a lack
would be of that swift directness of purpose, the deeper seeing, the
glad capacity for higher heroism which he had found only in her
presence. They crossed the riverward corner of the Square, where they
had met. He tried to tell her how she had seemed that first day.
"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 passed 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 associate 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--"
"Possibly."
"Mowbray, we are taking our bread, and its cake, too, from a paper that
expects us to exploit the orthodox heroics. The pity and atrocious sham
of it all has its side. But the fact still remains its side does not
furnish the stuff that American newspapers pay men and cable tolls to
furnish."
"Won't you come to-night?" Peter asked laughing. "Perhaps we can both
reach the high point some day when we have earned the right to be poor."
"That's a higher point than I dream of, Peter. I can't help but think
what a nest you've got into. Of course, I mean with Fallows and his
kind--"
"An eagle's nest."
"But the eaglets are starving."
"Heretofore the job has been served. Come along with me and meet Duke
Fallows again--"
"No. I must go back to the wire for the present. Boylan would be
shocked, too. By the way, I've got a bid in for you with General
Kohlvihr. Boylan is to help me put it through, of course. The more
decorated they are the more they fall for Boylan. There's a chance
that you'll start south with a column within two days. So you'd better
get at that encyclopedia stuff--"
"Yes, I'll attend to that."
Peter left him smiling, and turned his steps across the Square, into a
narrow street of the poor quarter, and on toward a little room and a
low lamp, where a woman's hands sewed magically as she waited.
Chapter 5
Fallows met them in his small bleak room, turned the lamp low, and
opened the door of the diminutive wood-stove to let the firelight in
the room. The three sat around it.... Peter Mowbray felt strange and
young beside them. The woman seemed to belong to this world, and it
was a world at war with every existing power. All Peter's training
resisted stubbornly. Still, right or wrong, there was a nobility about
their stand. He did not need to be sure their vision was absolutely
true, yet the suspicion developed that they saw more clearly than he,
and acted more purely. Mowbray did not lack anything of valor, but he
lacked the fire somehow. He loved Berthe Solwicz, could have made
every sacrifice for her, but that was a concrete thing.
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