Books: Red Fleece
W >>
Will Levington Comfort >> Red Fleece
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12
Big Belt was in; no crawl for him. He walked the ten-inch beam with
his burden, as it sank deeper and deeper toward the center. The ice of
the water bit and tore at him. It was like a burn, too, but the
paralysis was not that of fire. The chill wrestled with his
consciousness, as he reached the depth of his waist; the current was
bewildering in its pressures--like a woman clinging to his limbs,
betraying him to an enemy. A mysterious force, this of a running
river, for the body of man is not built for it, and man's mind is slow
to learn the necessity of slow movements. The temptation to hasten is
like the tug of demons. There is much to break the nerve--and yet
nerve must remain king of every action.
Boylan may have learned the trick in other wanderings. His own weight
and the weight of his burden helped his feet in the rapid runs of
white water. He made his way deeper and deeper upon the slanting ten-
inch piece, holding his consciousness steady against the penetrating
stab of the cold as it rose higher and higher, against the dizzying
swirl of the stream, and against the fact that the timber might be
broken at the center. ...The man before him seemed to go to his knees,
reaching down with his hands. Then the white-topped rush took him....
One must stand; one must have weight to stand. The beam sunk to the
center now-the water to his heart; the man behind urging.... One
soldier ahead crawled forth where three had been.
Boylan's fears were equalized now by the sudden dread of the man
behind. If he slipped he would catch at Peter's body.
"Go slow--that's the trick!" he called. "Feel for your footing each
time. It's there. I tell you it's there, man! We rise in a moment
more--"
He felt the jointure with his feet--some renewal or stoppage of the
timber. He halted, yelling at the man behind:
"Wait--something different! I'll get you through--"
It was the slight turn of the top timbers as they had reached the
apex.
"It's the top of the bridge," he yelled above the boom of the current,
"--a turn like the peak of a low roof. A slight turn to the right. Now
the climb--"
He put it in Russian somehow, making the words clear. His intensity
was almost madness to keep the other's hands off.
A shiver passed through his burden. The water had whipped Peter's
limbs. An added call for steadiness, but a gladness about it, too,
since he was not carrying the dead.... Upgrade now. The soldier behind
had passed the turn safely and was following.
...It seemed that he had walked hours, A thousand or more German
soldiers were lost even as he. Their faces in the dusk passed him--to
and fro--hoarse questions. The gray chill dusk was all about, quite
different from anything Big Belt had known. His clothing had warmed to
him from great exertion. There was a line that caked and dampened
again down his left thigh, like an artillery stripe, from Peter's
wounds. Night came on, finding him without a command--a strange sort
of abandonment, and a certain fear of being overtaken by a Russian
party. The character of his fatigue brought back ancient memories,
when he had looked death face to face and was afraid.
"Who are you?" someone piped sharply in German.
He had moved long through the dark toward a moving file of lights.
"Two American correspondents."
"What's that you carry?"
"The other one."
Peter heard this. It seemed that terrible hands had been tugging at
his flesh for hours; yet he could not move, and lay upon a bed that
swung and swayed and stumbled.
"Two American correspondents," the voice repeated.... "Search...."
Then Peter looked into the dazzle of a flashlight, and the familiar
voice said:
"Yes, he's hard hit and heavy as hell.... Passports in hip pocket-
handle him gently. ... Thanks, I'll take care of this man--unless you
have a stretcher--"
"To whom were you formerly assigned?"
"To Colonel Ulrich. We were across the river when that trap was sprung
this afternoon--"
"Just about wiped you fellows out, didn't they?... Passports right
enough as far as I can see. Stay here, I'll try to get a conduct. I'm
afraid there isn't any Colonel Ulrich--at least I am of that
opinion...."
Peter was let down. It puzzled him a long time because the ground was
still. The big hands eased. His familiar was beside him, however, wet
and panting. Now Peter seemed to remember that he had messages to
carry.
"There's no other way--I've got to get through the lines--"
"Quite right," Boylan answered.
"I don't want to fail. She wouldn't look twice at a man who failed--"
"Hell, child, sit still. She'd look twice if you failed a thousand
times.... Hai, don't tear open a man's bridle arm. What is it?"
"He was hump-backed--no lips--teeth like a dog--and the trooper shot
him through the mouth--"
"I know, but he's dead. His back is straight now--don't look any worse
now than ten thousand others...."
For a long time all was bewilderment. He had been lifted and lost
consciousness again in the wrenching of the hands. Then slowly he came
back and eternity began as before, his bed swaying and straining. The
familiar voice was near, the German ahead. Sentry after sentry was
passed, and each time deadly waiting.... In snatches he understood
that the voice always near was Boylan's, but as often forgot it again.
Once he realized that Boylan was carrying him, but he could not hold
it in mind.... Now he was sure that it was Boylan. He wished he could
die from the cold. He recalled that the cold climbs to a man's heart
and then lets him out in comfortable dreams.
"Hai, you!" he heard in the familiar tones. "I can't go any further.
Send a stretcher or a wagon. Tell 'em two American correspondents are
sitting out here--one with a bullet or two through his chest of
drawers--"
The bed was sinking now.... Then he was dragged across the big man's
lap, and the voice was saying:
"I never knew it to fail. The man who wins a woman gets the steel,
when it's anywhere in the air, but bullets fly wide and knives curve
about a lonely maverick who has lost all his heart winnings."
They found Boylan so, his jaw clenched, the huge scarred head bare and
covered with night dew, but ready to talk. Across his legs, Mowbray
lay, and still breathed.
Chapter 5
Some unique thing, Big Belt, that rock of a man, had found in Peter
Mowbray. For seven days and nights, though broken with incredible
fatigues (a yellow line of bone color showing across his face under
the eyes), Boylan sat by in cars and ambulances until they reached
Sondreig, the city of the women-folk, and a regular civilized bed.
What he gave to Peter was clear; what he took from a man down, a
woman's property at best, is harder to tell. Perhaps in the great
strains and pressures of the campaigns, he had seen Peter inside, the
mechanism and light effects appertaining, and found it true. It may be
that Big Belt had never been quite sure that a man-soul could be true,
and having found one, was ready to go the limit. This is only a
hazard.
Peter didn't know. He was a lump--one little red lamp burning in that
long house of a man--flickering at that, its color bad, its shadow
monstrous. Everyone but Boylan declared he would die from that wound
in his chest; and Boylan was right.
The Germans were good. They gave him a little room over an apothecary
shop at the edge of the city, off one of the bullet-wards, so that the
American would suffer from no lack that the hospital routine could
furnish, and still not be denied the ministration of his friend. There
were reasons, from the German standpoint, why it was well for Mowbray
to have every chance for life. The Russian _coup_ of the destroyed
bridges, that lesser disaster, would some time be told. Boylan might be
persuaded to tell the story to America without adjectives. This was not
a very humane way to regard large kindness from saddened and maddened
men, and Boylan did not linger over it.
The Order in Sondreig soothed. It was like a fine _morale_ shown
by troops in a pinch. The city was one spacious hospital, but orderly,
the horizon smokeless, the distance free from the crash of guns. In
fact, it seemed that the city must have prepared itself for a thousand
years--as if waiting for its messiah. There was a glad quiet in the
thronging streets that seemed to say, "It has come...."
When he found that Peter would live--all the pathological vortices
past--Big Belt turned with strange joy to exterior activities. Of
course, months would be required to make his companion a man again.
There might remain a crimp in him that would last always, but Boylan
was aware that a man's weakness may be made his strength, and that a
life habit of care which comes from cushioning a wound often results
in extraordinary development of the parts of strength.
The sight of women and children brought him gusts of emotion. In one
evening hour, he followed a middle-aged woman who was leading a child
through the faintly-lit streets; trailed the pair for a square or two
through the soft snow, a sort of miracle in the picture to him, a
heaven of gentleness and order. This was his first grand reaction from
the field of strife--at least, from this campaign--and he was struck
as never before with the main fact--how little a man really needs to
live his life in brightness and calm. Such a sense of the emptiness of
war-fields surged home to him that he was left a heretic in relation
to all that had called him before. It did not occur to Boylan that
this was wisdom; rather the pith of the emotion was to the effect that
he was getting old.
The child's thin voice reached him in questionings, and the steady low
tones of the woman. A man could ask little more of the world than to
lead a child thus.... Perhaps they were poor. Boylan would have liked
to fix that. It had to do with the whole inner ideal of the man to be
a fixer of such things--to come home to a house of little ones in
quantity and many women--a broad house of aunts, sisters and old
women, a long broad table of all ages, the many problems resting on
him--and one woman looking straight across.... She would know
everything, and yet would advise with him--quiet discussions of policy
regarding this one or that one, and the interposition of food....
He was perspiring. Always after a war or expedition he had perceived
such matters more or less clearly, but not quite as now. Never before
had he constructed his secret heaven with such durable substance....
He actually believed that the field would never call to him again. It
had become like the fear of hunger that he had learned once for all.
No more of that--no more of war. He had given everything to the field,
and lost his broad board in the world-house. At least, he could find a
door-step somewhere.
They were gone. He thought of his companion--the sense of summons that
he seemed to have known always. He turned and walked back. The snow
fell softly; the street lights were pleasant and warming with this bit
of peace in the world, this little circle of life with men and women
and children together.... As he neared the apothecary shop, his
thoughts became rounder and rounder with what he had missed. He had
taken the arc and lost the globe--a sorry old specimen of a man, if
the truth were told, a career behind him designed to arouse the
wildness of boys, but without appeal and very much to be discouraged
by real men. Finally it occurred to him of the whole races of men who
had _what he lacked_, yet were restless for the harshness and
crudity of the earth.
"If they only knew what they have," he muttered. "I suppose they
forget. Just as I forget between wars what hell is like.... I suppose
they do forget, and read a man's stuff by their fires (ordering the
kids to be quiet)... thinking that this war-man writing from the field
is a great and lucky guy. I suppose they stop and think how things
might have been different with them--had _they_ taken to the open
when the old call came.... _Ordering the kids to be quiet_--Good
God--"
Whether it was the audacity of fatherhood that called this last into
the world, or the face of the woman who had passed him--is not known.
Enough that Big Belt forgot all his dreams. ...That white-skinned,
wonder-eyed girl, the fire creature, twice seen in the bitter shadows
of Judenbach!
She had looked into his face, as if she scarcely dared to trust her
eyes, as if she, too, were not sure; and yet it had come over him like
death that she was here for her own.... He tried to make himself
believe that it was an illusion, just one of the queer jolts that come
to a man when his thoughts are far off. But actualities rubbed this
out. She was a prisoner of the Germans; probably had proved invaluable
in the hospital service and had earned certain privileges; but it
wouldn't do to let Peter fall into her clutches again; that meant
revolution and death. They would make a dupe of him as before. It had
nothing to do with peace and the outer world; it meant--
Boylan saw that he wanted Peter for his own. He wiped the sweat from
under his hat.... He couldn't keep them apart; she would think out a
way; a man can't wrestle with a woman.... The world was bleak and
wide-open to disruption again. He climbed the stairs.
The wounded man was not awake. Boylan had objected from the first to
his manner of breathing--too much in the throat, hardly a man-sized
volume of air, the breathing of one who hadn't proper lung-room; but
this was an old matter. He reflected on the various fatigues Mowbray
had met with a smile, and the vitality which had finally pulled him
loose from the cold clutch itself; standing him in stead through a
journey so grisly that Boylan had not had the detachment so far to
contemplate it from first to last. So he had been forced seriously to
grant exceptions to the rule of chest inches and vitality. The soft
winter air blew in from the slightly opened casement.
Peter's face was wan and boyish--different to Boylan as a result of
his encounter in the street. He saw Peter now with the eyes of a man
who must give up.... She was here in Sondreig. He would not help her,
but if she came, there would be no fight.... It had been his fault.
Boylan had sensed the danger of giving too much--from the
beginning.... One woman brings a man into the world, sees him properly
a man, and another woman takes him away.... Just how Big Belt broke
into this particular picture must be suggested rather than explained.
He was very close to mothers that night. He could understand fathers,
too.
...They would never know what he had done. The Russians had not
understood, except Lornievitch, in part, and he was far away; the
Germans would never piece the fragments together, and Peter himself
had been mainly unconscious. Peter had not been told even of the
Dabnitz episode.... They might have pulled together for years if it
hadn't been for the woman, but there was bound to be a woman. Mowbray
was like that.
Big Belt yawned over it all, drew his cot close, so he could hear
Peter's call, lit a fresh candle, and wished he had remembered to
smoke outside. Presently, however, he was breathing forth the full
volume of a man.
Sitting by the civilized bed early the next afternoon he heard a voice
below that clenched his jaw much as it had been that night outside the
German camp before the stretcher was brought. She had found them. She
did not speak first, but looked in.... Seeing the face upon the bed,
she could not ask, nor speak, but crossed the room. It would have been
just the same so far--had Boylan not been there. In fact, he had
withdrawn from the place by his companion.... She knelt an instant.
Now she arose and faced the friend.
"He will live."
Peter was still afar off.
"Yes, ma'am--I think he will."
She came to him now. "I saw you last night," she whispered. "I saw you
come here. I could not come until now."
"Humph--" or something of the sort was heard from Boylan.
Berthe appeared to draw a certain truth from the situation. Perhaps
she saw _the woman_ in Boylan--the mysterious, draggled creature
which he designated his devil on occasion. The old war-wolf gave her
credit for no such penetration. Still she kept herself second,
advised, assisted for a few moments, but would not let Boylan go.
"He's knit to you. He might die if you go," she said.
Something about her choked him. He had been with men so continually.
"And then I can't stay," she whispered. "But I am so thankful to have
found you--that nothing else matters.... You see, we are prisoners.
They have trusted certain of us to work; still we have no names, no
way of hearing, no mails, or anything. It's a good miracle that I
found you."
Presently she said again: "You don't think I understand, but I do. You
have stood by him. He would not have been here but for you. He is
living because of you. I see that. I see that he has been very
close.... You may hate me as you wish, but you cannot help taking what
I give you."
"You're an all-right young woman," Big Belt managed to remark. "I knew
something of that." Then, in a panic, he added: "He'll know you to-
night. He's cool now. He'll pull through. He'll know you to-night, and
then I go."
"Not until he sees you.... Besides, I am a prisoner. I cannot come and
go as I would. I may not be able to come to-night--they may say
_no_." "He'll have all that he needs until you come," Boylan
said.
She did come that night. Peter had returned, but voyaged again
meanwhile. In the morning she came again.... Boylan ordered her to sit
down in the far corner. He went to the bed, for Peter was stirring,
and presently opened his eyes with reason and organization in them.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello, boy."
Peter looked beyond him and around the room.
"Go to sleep," said Boylan.
"I won't."
"All right."
Big Belt stepped aside. Peter managed to get a knuckle up to rub his
eyes.
"He's back with us," Boylan whispered.
"Don't go," she pleaded.
"Don't be a fool," said Boylan.
She was there beside him, bending lower and lower. It was against
nature for them not to forget the exterior world for a moment, and
Boylan was on the stairs....
He saw Sondreig with eyes that seemed to have dropped their scales. It
was early in the morning, and a light snow had freshened everything.
An old woman was sitting at the locked entrance of what had been a
dairy shop, weeping for her only son. Boylan stopped.
She was very poor and weak.
"Come, mother," he said, lifting her.
She looked into his face in a way that roweled the man.
"Come on," he said softly. "We'll have some breakfast. And you'll tell
me about it. I belong to the widows and the fatherless, too."
So they rocked away together.
Chapter 6
He was sleeping again. Berthe went to the window. Even in her
happiness she was afraid, for she was remaining longer than her
leave.... The window faced the south, and the apothecary shop was on
the edge of town. The day was like a pearl--snowy distance, a soft-
toned sky and the low shine of the sun. Deep down in the west, like an
island, was a thick brush of cedars, preserving their green across the
miles, and calling to her with something of the native wonder of old
Mother Earth; and to the right, east of south, was the huge blurred
stockade where King Cholera was so far imprisoned with the bait of
fresh lives each day.
The old Mother was in her winter bloom, so pure and deep-eyed, so calm
and above sorrow in her distance and coloring, that it became to
Berthe a moment not to be forgotten--such a moment as would make a
woman homesick in heaven.
...If the big man would only come back. They might be angry for her
staying. It would be so easy to lose all that she had won from the
Germans. They had come to rely upon her more and more, realizing the
character of her service, and forgetting its origin in Judenbach. She
did not want to disappoint them. With Peter Mowbray here in good hands
and climbing back to life--no woman in the midst of war could ask
more.... At the bedside again, she pondered the recent weeks to this
hour. Without words, without heaviness, he had come along, fitting so
blithely into the new places, bringing his laugh and his skepticism of
self always, asking for no sign nor reward of the future, building no
dream of heaven, but standing true to the tasks of earth. Greatly
more, and differently, she loved him now, and the distance held the
green of cedars.
...An officer came to her from the bullet-ward.
"You are to stay until Mr. Boylan, the correspondent, comes," he said.
"But will they know? They were good to let me come."
"Colonel Hartz has signed the order. Word has been sent to the
entrainment wards. You were attached there, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Let us know in case of any need here."
"Yes. Thank you."
Chapter 7
A most satisfying adventure, so that Big Belt added many things to the
matters which could not be related. The old mother had told him of her
son (as they sat together in the little room she called home) and
Boylan had seen in him a singular hero, and made the mother see it.
Presently he strode forth to the shops and returned with many packages
of food affairs, and a cart of fuel following. The prodigious prices
which these things commanded in Sondreig appealed to him as a trifle;
in fact, the simplicity of life on these direct terms of living first
hand, struck him as the eternally right way.... Then she cooked for
him, very intent and eager in the great joy of it, agitated by his
praise. In fact, he went to great lengths of breakfasting to show his
appreciation; until, perceiving what he had done, he strode forth
again with replenished understanding and restocked the cupboard by
means of the cart.... Yes, he would come to-morrow.... Yes, by all
means, while he was in Sondreig.
Even if he had not thought of the white-fire creature being held in
the room above the apothecary shop for his return, Boylan had found it
necessary to leave the old mother, since she could not be made to eat
with him there. She would have cooked for him until she fell by the
fire, but as for her sharing the repast, she begged him to have peace,
that time was plentiful for that.... He was thinking it all out once
more, a most delectable incident, as he walked swiftly through the
snow toward the apothecary shop, when his shoulder was plucked by a
passerby, and he turned, stiffening a bit at the roughness of it. A
black-bearded man of much rank peered into his face, crying out:
"Boylan, by the One God!"
"Herr Hartz--by the same!" Big Belt exclaimed.
And now they embraced--a mighty affair, a memorable spectacle of
pounding, of disengagement, of renewed embrace--so that soldiers and
hospital men circled wide in passing, and the little street was hushed
with the exceeding joy.
"Come and live with me, Boylan. I will not take no for an answer. Come
at once, and let us a table between us have, to prevent further
inderrupption of travvic--"
At no time would the cause of this majestic effusion have been made
clear to an outsider, though it was plain that the American
correspondent and the German officer of rank shared it alike. The
truth: these two, and two others somewhere in the world, were the
surviving four of a complement of over thirty men who had made up the
original outfit now known as the Schmedding Polar Failure. Colonel
Hartz, detached from his cavalry command for service in the prison-
hospital at Sondreig, was second in command here as he had been to
Schmedding in that former ill-starred expedition.
The table was between them.
"But first," said Boylan, "there is a little business in which you can
help. My friend, Mowbray... is just coming back to life from Russian
wounds. I could not leave him without being assured of his care. There
is one little nurse from the entrainment wards--it is a good story,
which I will tell in good time--competent to care for him. She is
there now, but I have already stayed longer than her leave granted.
She must be set at rest, and word sent also to her own post--"
"So much words for a little thing--dictate and I write. Then tell me
of yourself, which is more imbortant--"
It happened, even after the messages were sent, that Boylan spoke very
little of himself. He was grappling with a certain final disposal. His
talk was colored with desire. In fact, within an hour he had reached
the critical part of his narrative, and was becoming more glib
momentarily as the way out cleared:
"...You see, they met in Warsaw, where I was stationed before the war.
She did not tell him what was in her mind. He parted from her--as any
other married man taking the field. We were together with Kohlvihr's
column, of which I will tell you later.... Now what do you think?"
Herr Hartz snorted. He did not care to think.
"She didn't stay in Warsaw," Boylan went on, with great intensity.
"No, my friend, she joined the hospital corps, and followed him
afield--"
"The Russians take anyone for the hosbittles," the other remarked
impatiently.
"Exactly; and my friend Mowbray found her nursing sick soldiers in
Judenbach. It happened that they were together when the city changed
hands. By the way, there was much of interest in those days of which I
will tell you later.... This is the point. She was a Polish prisoner--
he an American non-combatant. I advised them to say nothing for the
present that they were married. It was very ticklish to change hands
anyway, and would have complicated the position of each one. So they
were separated. He was with me day by day until he was wounded. He
moved in a dream without her--a good boy, Colonel--and a good girl--
but war. I say, we learned something about men, you and I--long ago---
"
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12