Books: Red Fleece
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Will Levington Comfort >> Red Fleece
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"I wish I hadn't spoken of it. It's almost unearthly far--in such a
time. But, Berthe, will you ever be satisfied with one who hasn't the
white fire of passion--as you have, in the cause of the peasants?"
"Oh, that's what I wanted to tell you. We are to be separated. We are
grown up--a man and a woman. We dare speak to each other. At least, I
dare.... Peter, I couldn't love you if you were all that--all that---"
She hesitated.
"All that you missed in me last night?" he suggested.
"Yes, but I didn't miss it exactly. I was excited and overwrought. You
are splendid with me. It is when others are near, that you are--cold
and unemotional. I know it's your training--that thing you Americans
have from the English. You are that way with men. You are not so with
me. But, if you were like Fallows, or like my father, I could not love
you. I would not dare---"
"Why?"
"First, I could not--and then I would not dare. First, that which we
are, we do not love. We love another kind--for completion----"
"Clearly said. That must be true," he answered quickly. "And why would
you not dare?"
"Because we should have a little baby, and it would suffer so in
coming years. Peter, the poise and the balance--the very qualities I
need in you, and which I love, the little baby would require as his
gift from his father."
II
THE COURT OF EXECUTION
Chapter 1
"Hai, you, Peter--wake up!"
It was Boylan's voice, seemingly afar off, but coming closer.
"Wake up.... I say, young man, what do you think of it by this time?"
Thus Peter was awakened the seventh morning out--and in a place he had
not observed the previous night. It was as good a place as usual, if
not better, except for the smell of fish that had gone before. Clearly
it had been a fish shop, business suspended some time. There were
certain scaly trays on the sloping showboards to the street; scales
glistened among the cobwebs of the low ceilings; also the floor was of
turf, and doubtless very full of phosphor, an excellent base for rose-
culture. The place dwindled and darkened to the rear, from which the
head and shoulders of Samarc presently emerged, and a moment later
Little Spenski, his companion, sat up and rubbed his eyes. These two,
invariably together, were men of a rapid-fire battery, to meet their
pieces lower in the fields, and attached for the present, as were
Boylan and Mowbray, to the staff of General Kohlvihr's command.
"Think of what?" Peter asked.
Boylan disdained answer. He was strapping a pigskin legging over a
bulging calf, always a severe strain. He looked up presently, reached
across and touched his forefinger to Peter's chin then to his own,
which bristled black and gray.
"Young man, you've got a secret," he remarked darkly.
Peter smiled. He kept his razors in the same case as his tooth-brush,
and the case had not been mislaid so far. He could shave in the dark.
"You're either not of age, or your face is sterile," said Boylan.
"The floor of this fish shop isn't," said Peter.
"I've been with you the last forty-eight hours straight. No sign of
life in that time."
"You went out looking for fresh meat at sundown. You were gone---"
"I was gone just five minutes, because the train wasn't up. You had
tea on when I came back."
"There was a bit too much hot water."
"Peter, that will do once more, but I've got a suspicion. No man
living can shave in the saddle--so you won't be able to spring that
one. Besides, you are willing to discuss the matter."
"Did you ask what town this is?"
"No," said Boylan; "I couldn't remember if they told me. New town
every night. The only thing to name a town is a battle. God, smell the
wood smoke--doesn't it make you keen?"
"For what?"
Boylan looked at him. "What are we out for?"
"Apparently the column is out for blood, but I thought you might mean
breakfast."
"The column will get blood, right enough," said Boylan, "whether it
gets breakfast or not. What's the news, I wonder?"
"I've forgotten my relation to news.... Where are you going?"
"To see if that beef-train is in. I suppose you'll have rigged up a
turkish bath and be in the cooling room by the time I get back."
Peter fed the horses and had tea and black bread served for two, by
the time Boylan called from a distance: "Put on the griddle, Peter--a
regular steak.... I stopped in the farrier's on the way back and had
it anviled a bit. That's what kept me," he added.
Peter tossed it in the pan. Their fire was in the turf at the door of
the fish shop. Boylan drew in close, having washed noisily, and
deposited the remaining provisions in the two saddle-bags. "We're
fixed for supper and breakfast," he remarked, with a sigh.
"You said that the army that would win this war must win through
famine. The Russians had better begin--"
"I didn't say anything about Mr. B. B. Boylan--"
"Mr. Big Belt Boylan," Peter muttered, twisting his face away from the
heat and sizzling smoke steam. The name held.
The huge Rhodes' man liked Peter more than the latter knew, and his
likings of this sort were deep and peculiar. Boylan was nearing fifty,
a man all in one piece--thick, ponderous, hard, scarred with _la
viruela_, a saber sweep, a green-blue arc in his throat where some
dart or arrow had torn its way in between vital columns. His head was
bald and wrinkled, but very large, his neck and jaw to match, his eyes
a soft blue that once had been his secret shame. Very often he had
been called into the public glare.
"I was so hungry once," Boylan said, "that I've been a slave to the
fear of it ever since." He referred to the Polar Failure. "Once in
Farrel's Island--we were four," he added. "We drew lots to find out
which one of us we must eat. That _was_ a winter.... All you
fellows may begin famine as soon as you like. You'll come a long way
before you arrive at the personal familiarity of the subject earned by
this same little fat boy.... Turn it again, Peter."
Samarc rushed past, speaking excitedly in French, and in the shadows
behind they saw the eyes of Spenski, sympathetic and wistful.
"What did he say, Peter?" Boylan asked quickly. "Samarc's French is
like my Russian."
"He said his face had been fixed for tea--and toast with Spenski--
until we began to steam up the place. Now he's gone to the feed-
wagons."
"Why, bless the ruffian, there's enough here for four."
"I told him that, but you know Samarc."
Little Spenski's voice now drawled from behind.
"We're getting low, anyway. It was right for him to fill the bags this
morning, though very kind of you to offer--"
"I don't like that, Spenski," said Boylan. "Bull cheek for four was my
order. Why, you fellows--"
Boylan was going to say how consistently generous with rations and
private provisions the two Warsaw men had been, but got tangled in the
language. Peter helped him. Boylan wouldn't have it otherwise, and
quartered the steak, serving Spenski and covering the fourth with a
tin. It was an excellent feast. For five days these two pair had
cautiously, timidly even, stood for each other in that reserved way
that much-weathered men integrate a memorable friendship.... Samarc
returned. They helped him cache his provisions and drew him into the
quadrangle around the fire. There was time for an extra pot of tea,
and the dawn rose superbly. That day in the column Spenski was called
into the personal escort of Kohlvihr, Boylan accompanying. Samarc and
Peter rode as usual with the forward infantry--just behind the van,
headquarters back a quarter of a mile.
"Tell me about Spenski," Peter asked. "He's an interesting chap. I
heard him talking to you about the stars last evening, before supper,
pointing out Venus and Jupiter."
"He'll grow on you," said Samarc, their talk in French. "He did in my
case. We've been together six years in and out of the big instrument
shop in Warsaw--Bloom's. We make a camera, microscopes and even a
telescope now and then. I invented a rather profitable objective for
the Blooms, for which they gave me a position, and a small interest
that has kept me from wandering far from Warsaw. In the first days
they told me about Spenski--his remarkable workmanship--and pointed
out the wiry, red-headed little chap with the quick imperative smile
you've seen. We got on well together from the first. It has been no
small thing for me that he likes my ways. I got him in this service,
by the way, and I don't know whether I'm very proud of that. He's a
lot more famous as a workman now than six years ago."
"What is his work?" Peter asked.
"A lens-maker. His art is one of the finest of the human eye--requires
genius to begin with. Spenski's craft on a glass in many cases doubles
the price of the instrument. No one knows better what kind of a
workman he is, nor can follow his particular finish with a keener or
more appreciative eye, than old Dr. Abbe himself. Spenski has letters
from that old master.
"He knows all sorts of out-of-the-way things--like the star stuff.
He'll name for you scores of the vague, indefinite ones, not to speak
of the larger magnitudes, which he can call by color at any hour of
the night. It was this passion of his for the stars which showed him
his work as a boy. That started him fabricating glasses to see them
better. He has a supreme eye for light, circles and foci, and a brain
that just plays with heavy mathematics--the most abstruse
calculations. Yet, you see, he carries it all with the ease of a boy.
I think men who come with a task to do are like that. It's part of
them. They don't feel the weight of what they know, because it's all
through them--not localized. You might be with Spenski an hour or a
week and never know that he was more than just a mechanic--if you were
just a mechanic."
"It's very interesting," said Peter, as charmed with his companion as
with the man he talked about.
"A little while ago Spenski found his girl, and I would have
withdrawn--for that is the high test," Samarc resumed. "But Spenski
managed to keep us both without strain.... And then the war came
along. A blight fell upon all workmanship in an hour. I had been on
the military side of things from a boy, a matter of training and
heredity. Of course, I would go. Spenski looked around the shop when I
told him this. It was stricken, the machinery cranking down, the faces
of the men white and troubled. 'I'll go, too,' said he.... I reminded
him of her.... 'She wouldn't be interested in a chap who remained at
home,' he said.... I told him of the big plants in Switzerland and
America, where he could be of great value, but he was not tempted. 'I
want to go if they'll take me in your battery,' was his last word on
the matter.
"Of course I saw to that, but there's no work here, and there won't
be, that can bring out Spenski's real values. Think of using such a
man to feed the hopper of a rapid-fire piece.... But it's good to have
him along. Spenski's a hard habit to break."
That night, when Boylan and Mowbray were together again, but a little
apart from the others, Big Belt said:
"Say, Peter, that little Spenski is a card. A good little chap, smart
and modest. I like him."
"I found Samarc worth cultivating, too," said Peter.
Chapter 2
Marching south along the Vistula with the old-fashioned army--no
airships, nothing that intensely puzzled Mowbray in this service--that
is, in the exteriors of it--nothing but earth poundage and earth
power, a game that had much to do with earth and not with heaven.
Seven quiet days of marching in splendid summer weather, the raw
peasant soldiery well fed and comfortable, becoming a unit, all
outbreak of separate consciousness anywhere more and more impossible,
hardening to the peculiar day's work. They were used to heavy work,
but this was a particular task that needed specific hardening of feet
and lungs; also the personal idea in each breast required numbing. The
physical aim was to make men light for heavy work; to give them a
taste of the joy and the true health of the field--before the
entrainments, the haste and the fighting; but the psychological
purpose was to make each atom forget itself, to weave it well into the
fabric of the mass. Kohlvihr's division had to be moved; very well,
let the movement gather the values of practice marching as well.
A raw division, with a scattering of Poles and Finns mixed with the
straight Slav peasantry and regarded by the Russian war office, as
Peter Mowbray understood at once, a ticklish proposition. The cement
for this new service was "green" as yet; it had to set, required
frequent wettings of fine humor and affiliation. The marvel to Mowbray
was that the thousands fell for it. They had practically all left
something that was life and death to them--land, labor, women,
children. Each had established the beginnings at least of a personal
connection in the world, and this relation had to be rubbed out. What
had they been promised to take its place? _Freedom_, doubtless.
But intrinsically they were free men.
Peter recalled what Fallows had said: that properly fathered this
peasantry might be led into a citizenship and virtue that would change
the world. Instead they were to be impregnated with every crime. With
such thoughts Peter felt the spirit of Berthe Wyndham awake in his
mind.
Seven days and not a breath from the outer world. The correspondents
were allowed to move in and out of Kohlvihr's headquarters; and,
though they paid richly for everything, were treated well, and
regarded as guests by the staff officers. Peter had met Kohlvihr in
Warsaw before the thought of war--a good-tempered, if dull and
bibulous old man, he had seemed in the midst of semi-civilian routine;
but a different party here afield. Peter recalled the saying of old
sailors that you never know a skipper until you ship under him.
Moments of evening, in the sharp hazes of wood smoke, when the whole
army seemed nestling into itself, laughing, covering its nostalgia,
putting on its strength, Peter met in certain moments the advisability
of turning his back upon Boylan and Spenski and Samarc. The
extraordinary nature of Berthe Wyndham would flood home to him, as to
one to whom it belonged, very dear but very far.... He would smile
when he thought of _The States_ and the Old Man.... "He thinks
I'm clutched in the ripping drama and waiting for blood," he muttered,
"that I am burning to stop the breath of the outer world with my story
of gore and conquest.... But I'm eating his bread. I won't betray.
There must be a wise way to feed the red melodramatic receptivity of
the cities and at the same time to tell the real story."
He stood in the midst of square miles of men and military engines. On
every road other Russian forces moved southward and to the southeast.
The railroads groaned with troops, for the most part in a better state
of preparation than Kohlvihr's division. Rumors reached the staff, as
they neared the Galician border, that the Austrian fields below were
already bleeding; finally word came, as they turned eastward, that
they were to entrain at Fransic and make a junction with the main
Russian columns preparing to invade Galicia from the northeast.
On the night before they entered Fransic, Mowbray awoke, and saw a
figure sitting in the doorway of the little hut assigned them for
quarters. It was Spenski, his face upturned in the starlight. He sat
so still that Peter slipped out from the blankets (which covered
Boylan as well) and took his place beside the lens-maker. Spenski was
facing the east. The street of the little hill town lost itself in a
sharp declivity just ahead; the nearer huts were low. The whole east
was naked to the horizon and an indescribable glory of starlight.
"Aren't they amazing?" Spenski whispered. "It must be nearly morning,
for those are the winter stars. I think they must have wakened me up.
Do you know them?"
"Just the first magnitudes. They are more brilliant than I have ever
known."
Orion and a great kite of suns stood out with new and flashing power.
"I never saw that huge _W_ before--" said Peter.
"You don't mean Cassiopeia? Her chair isn't there, but over to the
north--"
"No, no--_there_. Rigel, the upper right corner, down to the
left, the Dog-star; up to Betelguese, down to the left again to
Procyon, and up to the brightest of all--the stranger, not usually
there--"
Spenski clutched him. "I was watching the bigger configuration, and
didn't notice. Your stranger is the planet Saturn in transit between
Taurus and Orion. Saturn completes the _W_, and the _W_
stands for--"
"War, possibly," said Peter.
There was a growl just now from Boylan: "Come on back to bed, you
star-gazers."
"Saturn is so far and moves so slowly," the little man whispered,
"that the _W_ will not be deranged for many months."
The hurry call for Kohlvihr came as expected in Fransic. The first
sections of the divisions were entrained the next day--an end to
summer road-work.... A day and night of intolerable slowness in a vile
coach, and on the following noon the troop-train was halted, while a
string of Red Cross cars drew up to a siding to give the soldiers the
right of way; a momentary halt--the line of passing windows filled
with cheering, weeping nurses.
Just one reposeful face--as both trains halted a second or two. It was
the face of one who seemed to understand the whole sorry story,
already to be contemplating the ruin ahead. Her hands were folded, the
eyes intent upon the distance rather than the immediate faces of men.
Mowbray could not articulate. Above all he wanted to meet her eyes, to
put back the light of the present in them, but it was neither sound
nor gesture that accomplished it; rather the storming intensity of
anguish in his mind. His train jerked, her eyes found him, her arms
raised toward him, lips parted. It became the one, above all, of the
exquisite pictures in his consciousness, and the reality passed so
quickly--gone, and no word between them.
Thus her colors came to him again--the mystic trinity of white and
gray and black--all he had since known and loved added to the mystery
of their first meeting. It was like an awakening to the rack of thirst
after one has dreamed of a spring of gurgling water--the swift passing
of that face of tender beauty and fortitude, that fair brow, gray eyes
and black hair....
Boylan was looking deeply into his face.
"Good God, man, you're a ghost. What is it, Peter?"
"It struck me queer to see a trainload of girls down here in the
field," said Peter quite steadily.
"Well, if a trainload of strange women can do that to you--here's
hoping we never do Paris together."
Little Spenski opposite had seen the outstretched hands, and Peter saw
that he had seen.
Chapter 3
And now a rainy field. Two days of cold wind and rain after the
cattle-cars; a different tone and temper from the men, coughing
instead of laughter at night-fall. Another nameless village--Galician,
now, for the border had been crossed, and the stillest night Peter
Mowbray had so far known among the troops. It was a listening army--
the far distance breathing just the murmur of cannonading.
He moved about within the cordon of head-quarter sentries, studying
the edges of the bivouac as the rain and the darkness fell. Kohlvihr's
division was but a tooth of the main army now; the whole region was
massed with Russians marching westward; but still the outfit from
Warsaw was enough, all that he could encompass of the mystery of
numbers. Others had met the enemy, but these were still virgin. They
were listening.
Their faces looked white in the thickening dark, noses pinched and the
rest _beard_.... Hair--it was like some rapidly ripening harvest
in the command, different each day, making the faces harder and harder
to memorize. Mowbray had been disgusted at first--faces like
changelings, atrocious like chickens. But the beards were taking form
now--all gradations of yellow and red and black--many of that gray-
yellow which loses itself in the middle distance and becomes a blur.
How he hated hair like that!
The next day dawned bright and cold. At ten Kohlvihr, in the midst of
the southern wing, brushed the tail of an Austrian force in its
turning. The engagement was sharp exhilaration to Peter; perhaps it
was to certain of the soldiers; yet it was the first. Its touch of
blood quivered through Kohlvihr's command not yet assimilated, stirred
this raw entity with deep inexplicable passion.
The correspondents were riding with the staff; the point of the van
was moving below in plain sight when its baptism fell. Kohlvihr licked
his white lips, the upper lip uncontrollable like a deprived
drunkard's. Below a skirmish was spreading out, the commands
trumpeting back their messages. Mowbray turned. A little battery of
mountain guns was racing forward through the infantry column, the
drivers yelling for _gangway_. It was like a small town's fire
department in action. Now the infantry poured down the rocky slopes
that bordered the old iron road. Peter turned quite around in the
saddle. The murmur in the air was queer--like something wrong below in
a ship at sea. Kohlvihr's face interested him, the skirmish lines and
their reinforcements, the voice of Boylan (though his faculties were
too occupied to catch that rush of humorous comment in English); the
mountain guns interested him, and the sudden racket of Russian riflery
below.
Now one of the peasant soldiers was running up the slope from the van
toward the staff. He was bare-headed, shocky-haired and bearded,
making queer, high sounds like a squirrel as he ran--quite out of
order and amazed at himself. He would have been struck down by his
nearest neighbor ten days later, felled with the nearest officer's
sword, but there was funk and a bit of dismay in the heart of the raw
division that suffered the soldier to make his way to the staff.
Lifting his legs lumberingly, he held fast to his left wrist, where a
bullet had started the blood. He held the wound high, like a trophy,
the blood spurting, crying about it.... This was sudden discovery of
something the army had started out to find, but had forgotten in the
length of days. This was the red fleece--its drips of red were in each
raw soul now. A little way farther and the staff awoke. An officer
spoke. The peasant was caught and booted quiet. Kohlvihr licked his
lips to keep them still. He perceived that Mowbray's eyes had fastened
upon his mouth. The lips opened again. The order came forth for the
soldier to be flogged.... It was their particular friend, Dabnitz, a
lieutenant of the staff, who was given the execution of this order.
Chapter 4
The four were much together for a few days after that, Samarc and
Spenski not yet assigned to their battery. They learned each other in
those few days as men often fail to learn the hearts of their
immediate associates during years. There was fighting--scattered,
open, surprising often to one out of touch with the points and the
scouting. Different towns every day, and a continual giving of
territory on the part of the Austrians.
"This is not the main fighting at all," said Boylan. "This is but the
edge of the game. It won't break into print. The big stuff is farther
on. These that we meet are the Austrian columns hurrying forward. This
territory is ours for the marching through. We'll catch it later--and
this will be forgotten."
Samarc had known these towns that the Russian column was passing
through, yet he had to ask the names, because of the destruction. The
Austrians would always destroy in haste before leaving, and more
leisurely the Russians would destroy. It seemed to affect Samarc, as
some landmark reopened from its ruin for his eyes,
"It seems to say," he told the lens-maker, "'I was this at one time,
and now I must go.'" Orders came for Samarc and Spenski, but they were
not to be remotely stationed, since their battery was assigned to
Kohlvihr's division--a different camp but the same field. Few words
about the separation, but each of the four understood.... Night and
day, the dead had been with them in the recent days--in such richness
and variety they could not escape, could not cover them, and something
from the dead entered their hearts. To Peter--so queerly were his
thoughts running--the memorable incident of their last night together
had to do with an ant colony.
Supper was over, and they had tossed on a decayed log to keep up the
fire. A nest of ants was presently driven forth by the heat from the
soft heart of the wood. They found themselves hemmed in flame and
turned back, as Peter thought, to seek the treacherous shelter of the
nest again. It was not so; they were wiser than that, and marched
forth in scores once more, each carrying an egg in its jaws. Spenski
swung the end of the log out to the grass for them to make good their
retiring. It was all very sane and admirable. Peter respected them....
The dead were with them. They had not learned to forget. Spenski would
whimper in his sleep. The days did not fill him, wearied his body but
other faculties and potencies were restless at night. This man who
could grind a lens so that a line from the center of the earth to the
center of the sun would pass through it without chromatic aberration,
was more shocked than the other three by the cursory killing of the
days, his imagination intoxicated and sleep perverted. His companion
who imagined himself of coarser and heavier texture often placed his
hand upon the dreaming one. Spenski would start, open his eyes and
say, "Thanks, Samarc."
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