Books: Red Fleece

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"Not at all. Your record stands. It was well known to us when you were
accepted to accompany our column. You will recall that it was your
estimate of Mr. Mowbray's superior that decided us to accept the
younger man--"

"I have been with Mowbray night and day. He is a newspaper man, brain
and soul--one of the coolest and most effective I have ever met. He
has been for years in Paris and Berlin, before Warsaw."

"I am sorry. You did not know that he caught a young surgeon by the
throat this morning, when the former was very properly stimulating a
malingerer?"

"I did not. But a personal matter ought not to weigh against a man's
life--"

"You did not know that he was seen in somewhat extended conversation
yesterday and last evening with one of the most dangerous of our
recent discoveries among the revolutionists?"

"I did not."

"Or that a woman came to him last night, in the heart of the night--
and talked long--and was called for by the same revolutionist; that
Mr. Mowbray went to her a little after daybreak this morning--"

"Ah, Dabnitz--a little romance! All night he was serving in the
hospital. I went out to find him this morning, and saw him turn into
the amputation house. Following, I saw him standing there.... He had
probably never seen her until last night. You know how some young
fellows are. They--you turn around--and they are in an affair--"

"But the two were overheard to speak of days in Warsaw together. It is
not such a little affair."

"I know nothing of it, but is such a thing fatal?"

"She is under arrest with the other revolutionist that I mentioned--a
case against her that is hardly breakable--"

Boylan sat down,

"Of course you are aware--of the remark he made this morning in the
field headquarters? I saw how gallantly you tried to cover it. It was
that remark, by the way, which nearly cost the life of our General.
The hospital steward, took up the action as you know--"

"Dabnitz, I was shocked as you. Peter was beside himself. He had come
in from the field--the actuality of it. He forgot where he was. The
unparalleled energy of the General to win the day, you know--and Peter
had just come in from the hollows where the men lay--"

"My dear Boylan, I'm sorry--"

For the first time, Big Belt felt the iron personality of the other.
There was something commercial in the manner of the last, a kind of
ushering out one who would not do. There are men who remain as aloof
as the peaks of Phyrges, though their words and intonations come down
running softly out of a smile. Boylan looked away, and then, with an
inner groan, turned back.

"I tell you it is a mistake. The boy is as sound as--"

He couldn't finish. There were exceptions to everything he thought of.
"I want to see him," he added.

"I'll try to manage that for you, a little later."

* * *

It was darkening. In the front room of the house, Kohlvihr sat bung-
eyed by a telegraph instrument. The further strategy from Judenbach
was still in the dark to Boylan. He wished the heavens would fall. As
never before, he had the sense that he had pinned his life and faith
to matters of no account; not that Peter Mowbray belonged to these
matters, but that he, too, was meshed in them.... A shot from
somewhere below in the town. Boylan shivered. There was shooting from
time to time for various butchering reasons, but this particular shot
was all Big Belt needed to finish the picture.

"Why, they'll shoot the lad," he muttered.

The sentence remained in his brain in lit letters.

The States of America couldn't help him; even Mother Nature had turned
her face from this war.... "My dear Boylan, I'm sorry--" something
crippling in that.

Dabnitz returned, bringing a pair of saddle bags.

"They're Mr. Mowbray's," he said. "His horse got loose and tangled
himself in a battery. One of the men brought in the bags."

"Thanks, Lieutenant," said Boylan.

Dabnitz started to the door when Boylan called, "Oh, I say, did you
look through 'em?"

The Russian smiled deprecatingly.

"Of course, I needn't have asked that, but I wanted you to. I'll
gamble you didn't find anything--"

"A little book of poems by a man we're familiar with. A woman's name
on the front page--a woman we're familiar with. Nothing startling, Mr.
Boylan."

Dabnitz was gone, the bags lying on the floor. Big Belt opened the
nearest flap. On top was a case containing a tooth brush and a pair of
razors.

"Peter will want these," he muttered.

V

THE SKYLIGHT PRISON

Chapter 1

Peter walked ahead unbound. He could not keep his mind on the journey
with the sentry. His thoughts winged from Lonegan at Warsaw, to _The
States'_ office and home, as if carrying the message of his own
end.... Boylan might finally break out with the details.... The
personal part ended suddenly, like an essential formality, leaving him
a sorrow for Boylan and his mother especially. His full faculties now
opened to Berthe Wyndham.

He was ordered to turn twice to the left. They had left the little
stone court, entering the main street, and back again into the first
side street for a short distance to a narrow stairway, between low
mercantile houses now used for hospitals. Up the creaking way; the
sentry within answered the sentry without and opened the door. A long
narrow room with a single square of light from the roof, and Moritz
Abel came forward.

"I'm sorry," the poet said. "I had hoped--"

"Yes, we had hoped," Peter replied with a smile.

Duke Fallows appeared from the shadows and hastily pressed his hand.
Abel had turned toward the square of light, as if there were still
another.

She came forward like a wraith--into the light--and still toward him,
her lips parted, her eyes intent upon him. The sentry who had brought
him turned, clattered down the stairs. The door was shut by the other
sentry. Her lips moved, but there was nothing that he heard. With one
hand still in his, she turned and led him back under the daylight to
the shadows.... He heard Moritz Abel's voice repeating that he had
been a poor protector. Fallows spoke....

There was much to it, hardly like a human episode--the silence so far
as words between them, the tragedy in each soul that the other must
go; the tearing readjustments to the end of all work in the world, and
the swift reversion of the mind to its innumerable broken ends of
activity; and above all, the deep joy of their being together in this
last intense weariness.... She wore her white veiled cap and apron;
having followed the summons from her work. There was a chair in the
shadows, and she pressed him down in her old way, and took her own
place before him (as in her own house) half-sitting, half-kneeling.

"Peter, I could not believe--until I touched you. I was praying just
here, that you would not come--"

"I am very grateful to be here," he said.

"I was so lonely. I was afraid of death. Fallows talked to me and
Moritz Abel--but it did not do. I was thinking of you at the battle,
as if you were a thousand miles away--as if I were waiting, as a
mother for you, waiting for tidings with a babe in her arms--"

She paused and he said, "Tell me," knowing that she must speak on.

"...It was just like that. I prayed that you would live--that you
would not be brought here--that the time would pass swiftly. We have
been here hours. They came for us soon after you went. We were all
together in that place--all at our work. They led us here through the
streets. It seemed very far. Something caught in the throat when the
soldiers looked at me. I know what my father felt when he kept saying,
'It's all right. Yes, this is all right.' I know just how the surprise
and the amazement affected him from time to time, and made him say
that.... Then we were here. I wanted this darker chair. They came--I
mean our good friends--Fallows came and talked to me, and Moritz Abel,
but it wasn't what I seemed to need. Ah, Peter, I'm talking in
circles--"

Something warned him that she was going to break, but he could not
speak quickly enough. The human frightened little girl that he had
never seen before in Berthe Wyndham, was so utterly revealing to his
heart that he was held in enchantment. She seemed so frail and tender,
as she said plaintively:

"We must be very dear to each other--"

There were tears in her eyes now, and her breast rose and fell with
emotion, as poignant to Mowbray as if it were his own.

"I did pray for them not to bring you here," she added. "If I had not
left Warsaw, you would not be here now--"

"Listen--oh, Berthe, don't say that. Please, listen--"

The current was turned on in his brain, thoughts revolving faster and
faster:

"It would all have been a mere military movement if you had not come.
I would not have understood Spenski, nor the real Samarc, nor Kohlvihr
as he is, nor the charges of infantry. The coming of Moritz Abel,
words I have heard, the street, the singing, the field, the future--
why, it's all different because you came. I am not dismayed by this. I
have had a great life here. If this is our last day--the matter is
lifted out of our hands. And dear Berthe, what do you think it means
to me--this last hour together?"

"What does it mean, Peter?'

"I look into your face, and know that I've found something the world
tried to make me believe wasn't here. Everything I did as a boy and
man tried to show me that there isn't anything uncommon in a man
finding a woman. My mother knew differently, but every time she wanted
to tell me something happened. Another voice broke in, or perhaps she
saw I wasn't attentive or ready. But I know now--and it didn't come to
me until here in Judenbach--"

"She must have known," Berthe whispered.

Fallows drew near. He seemed calm but very weary. "May I bring up my
chair for a little while?" he asked as an old nurse might.

"Please do," they said.

"Thank you," Fallows answered, and returned with his wooden chair. "If
you change the subject I shall have to go."

"I was just saying that I had found something in the world that my
mother knew all the time," Peter explained.

"Oh, I say, this is important. Moritz must come in," Fallows told
them.

They nodded laughingly.

"Moritz," he called. "Here's a little boy and girl telling stories--
very important stories. You must hear.... We're all one, Peter
Mowbray."

They drew closer together. Berthe was watching Peter intensely,
knowing that it was his test, very far from his way. Then she
remembered the death-room, and that all things are changed by that.
She sat very still, trying to give him strength to go on. "I've always
used my head," he said, "always explained why, and made diagrams. The
one time I didn't use my head--well, the best thing happened in my
experience."

Peter was in for it, and weathered gracefully.

"You'll forgive me," he said, when they asked to know. "I was thinking
of meeting Berthe Wyndham. I saw her one day passing through the
Square in Warsaw near the river corner. Well, it all came about,
because I went there again the next day at the same time--"

He was a little breathless, but the glad and eager sincerity of his
listeners helped him, and he wanted more than all to lift Berthe if he
could.

"I could not help thinking of that when I recalled another little
matter yesterday--in Judenbach. Once when we were little, my brother
Paul and I quarreled. My mother and I were alone afterward. I told her
of the tragedy. Everything seemed lost since I had lost Paul. She
said, 'Some time you will find your real playmate, if you are good and
search very hard.' I suppose she has forgotten. I forgot for years.
But it came to me here.... You see I never suffered before, never was
tested, everything came smoothly, everything covered up--"

"You are good to let us listen," Fallows said quietly. He was staring
at the ceiling.

"Here in Judenbach the relations of all other days began to match up.
It was as if the whole war was to show _me_, each department
carried on clearly. I didn't know a man could stand so much. Day
before yesterday morning, I wanted to quit. I had a kind of madness
from it all--an ache that wouldn't break or bleed, and was driving the
life out of me. I found the way out by going into the hospital. I had
to forget myself or go under.... When it seemed all over to-day, and
the sentry was marching me here (you see I had gone back to the house
of amputations and couldn't find any of you, and then to the Court of
Execution, and you were not there), it was all slipping away in a
loneliness not to be described, when I found you here--"

Fallows straightened his head and blinked.

"'It was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described,'" he
repeated. "We know that. This is too fine."

Peter laughed. He was thinking of what Lonegan had said on the night
he came back from Berthe's door, after she had asked him not to come
in.... "Peter, you're lying. I don't believe you'd let anybody see
your fires--not even how well you bank 'em."

They seemed to require further talk from him. He did not want the two
men, sorry they had drawn up their chairs. His heart was very tender
to them--Fallows and Abel, and the woman who had changed him. They
were before him now as messengers from the benignant empire of the
future--strange strong souls gathered together now in waiting at the
end of a road.... He told them of the bomb-proof pit, the naked
animalism of Kohlvihr, the infantry advances and of Samarc. Presently
his heart was light again, the pent forces of expression springing
gladly into use.

"...The laughable thing about it," he finished, "--the thing that held
me speechless as Samarc left my side there in the dark corner of the
pit--was that just a few minutes before Kohlvihr had promised to see
that the Little Father decorated him. He had almost reached the
General when my throat worked, and I called, 'Samarc.' It was as if he
didn't hear me. Nothing would have stopped him. It was his idea, yet I
think he meant only to stop the order of another infantry advance. He
had ceased to kill, you know...."

Peter ended it hastily. They were all interested to know why Samarc
was to have been decorated. This opened the earlier part of the day,
and his strange wandering with Samarc among the hills--the magic of
the hospital steward's coat, the scent of the cedars, and Peter's
persistent sense of Berthe's nearness.

"Actually, I had to stop and think," he explained. "Each time I fell
into an abstraction, it struck me that she was there. It seems
yesterday, too--"

"I was just here," Berthe said. "It was soon after we came. We were
all quiet at first--in different corners--"

"Slipping away in that loneliness," Fallows suggested.

"As for me," said Moritz Abel, "I had to make peace with myself. We
have been very busy the last few days. I have discovered that I am a
bit of a coward at heart--and I missed having something to do--"

They smiled at him. "Perhaps I was out there," Berthe said. "Perhaps I
was only sitting here--"

It was a queer matter that the three men, each of whom would have
given his life to save the woman's, to all appearances accepted the
fact of her as one of them in courage and control. It was Abel who
mentioned the singer, Poltneck, whom Peter had not met. He had been
left in the hospital when the others were taken; yet he had been one
in all their interests and the most reckless and outspoken of all in
his hatred of slaughter. They did not understand, but hoped he would
be saved.

"He's a magician," Abel said. "He sang to them yesterday--as they bore
the knife. He seemed to hold them in the everlasting arms. It was
worth living to witness that, but I'm afraid Poltneck will come to us.
He's got the fury. Hearing that we are gone, he will start something--
if only to join us. Then there will be no one to escape with the
story. It troubles me.... If Mr. Mowbray were only free. Doesn't it
seem that our brothers should hear the story?"

His voice broke a little. His brow was wet.

Fallows came back from the ceiling, and said:

"Moritz, my boy, all is well with us. That which is true is immortal."

Chapter 2

Abel reflected.

"Yes," he said presently, "but we have not fulfilled our purpose....
You know, we set out in high courage to start the army back home
again--and now, here we are."

"A man named Columbus set out to discover a short passage to India and
found a New World. Really my son--these are not our affairs. We have
done what we could.... Once I wanted the world to answer abruptly to
my service--to speak up sharp. But I have made terms--hard terms we
all must make. This is it--to do our part the best we can, and keep
off the results. They are God's concern, Moritz."

"I dare say."

"When I was younger," Fallows went on, "I wanted to make a circle of
light around the world. I thought they must see it, as I did. And
often I left my friends discussing my failure. But once I came home
and looked into the eyes of a little boy--a little peasant child named
Jan. I saw that his love for me had awakened his soul.... Man, these
matters are managed with a finer art than we dream of. The work is the
thing." Peter swung into the larger current. They had all been cold.
Fallows was burning for them. The ice and the agony were melting from
each heart.

"We think all is going wrong. We sit and breathe our failures often
when the celestial answer is in the air. If we were not so obtuse and
fleshly, we could see the quickening of light about us. We have had
our hours here. We have breathed the open. A very huge army is about
us, and we are thrust aside. It would seem that we and our little
story are lost in the great brute noise. Why, Moritz, these things
that we have thought and dreamed will rise again in the midst of a
world that has forgotten the tread of armies."

They heard a voice in the street--a running step upon the stair.
Queerly it happened in that instant of waiting, that Peter heard the
sound of dropping water beyond the partition--drip, drip, drip, upon a
tinny surface. Berthe had risen, and followed Fallows and Abel to the
door. A moment later Poltneck, the singer, was with them, and the
sentry who brought him took his post with the other at the entrance.
He freed himself from them, and strode alone to the front of the room,
where he sat, face covered in his hands, weaving his head to and fro.

"You do not well to welcome me," he groaned at last. "I should have
been in a cell alone--not here among friends. You see in me the most
abject failure--a mere music-monger who forgot his greater work."

"Tell us--"

He did not answer at once. They led him back into the shadows where
Peter and Berthe had been; gathered closely about, so their voices
would not carry.

"We were hoping not to see you, said Abel, "yet sending our dearest
thoughts. What you have done is good, and we will not be denied a
song. Speak, Poltneck--"

"I was all right till you went. I was thinking of everything--but then
I became blind. The work in the hospitals palled. I did not do what I
could. They saw I was different, and watched closely. That made me
mad. I am a fool to temper and pride. All I have is something that I
did not earn--something thrust upon me that makes sounds. The rest is
emptiness. In fact there must be emptiness where sounds come from--"

"We know better than that," said Fallows. "Tell us and we will judge."

Poltneck straightened up and met the eyes of Peter. "This is the
correspondent?" he asked.

"He came up from the field this morning and in looking for us--fell
under suspicion," Berthe explained.

The long hard arm stretched out to Peter, who still was somewhat at
sea, as Boylan had been, and afraid that he detected a taint of the
dramatic.

"I saw your companion in the bomb-proof pit," Poltneck declared. "In
fact, I just came from there, but I will tell you.... I was perhaps
two hours or more in the hospital, after you three were taken, when
they sent for me. I thought it a summons, of course, such, as you--"

He glanced at the faces about him, and continued:

"But instead of leading me in the direction you had taken, the sentry
bade me mount a horse at the door, and we rode rapidly down to the
edge of the valley, to Kohlvihr's headquarters--a pestilential place
sunken in the ground and covered with sods. There they broke it to me
what was wanted--"

His listeners began to understand.

"Yes, I was to sing to the lines," Poltneck added. "It appears they
had been driven back several times, leaving their dead and wounded in
such numbers on the field--officers and men--that there was some
hesitation about the expediency of trying it again. Not, however, in
the bomb-proof pit. Kohlvihr was of a single mind, determined to make
his reputation as man-indomitable at the expense of his division. A
patchy old rodent of a man--

"I was to be used to sing the men forward. Great God, they didn't see
the difference from singing to wounded men, to men under the knife
without sleep, to dying men and to homesick bivouacs--from this that
they asked. It is my devil. I played with them. I made them think I
was afraid. I made them think I was simple. One of them told me of the
tenor Chautonville with the army. I played to that. It was very petty
of me to get caught in this cleverness, because that's how I fell--"

"You didn't sing the lines into a new advance?" Fallows asked. His
face looked lined and gray as he leaned forward.

"No, I didn't do that. But I made them wait to find out. I was so
occupied with repartee and acting that I failed to seize the real
chance of all the world. I told them I had been tried out as an
anesthetic, but was not sure of myself in an opposite capacity. I
begged them to send for the member of imperial orchestra stars--"

Poltneck's self-scorn was vitriolic as he now spoke.

"I told them I was a poor simple man afraid of great numbers, abased
even before wounded, but that if they would wound the men first I
would try. It was this that betrayed me--the joy of astonishing. Oh,
they were without humor. It goes with the army--to be without humor.
Really, you would have been dumfounded at the brittleness of mind
which I encountered in the bomb-proof pit.... Of course, it had to
come. It dawned on them--what I meant, and what the real state of my
scorn was--at least, in part. And I was taken away, very pleased with
myself and joyous--"

"I do not see where you failed. Where, where?" Berthe asked.

It was Fallows who understood first--even before Abel and Peter, who
was not so imbued with the specific passion of the revolutionist.

"I was here--back in the city when it came to me what I might have
done. And so clearly the cause of the failure was shown to me,"
Poltneck said, with a humility that touched Peter deeply, for his
first thought had vanished before the fact that Poltneck neither in
the action nor the narrative had once thought of his own life or
death.

"I should have gone out to the lines and met the men face to face. Oh,
it is hard--hard that I did not think of it, for I could have sung
them home, instead of on into the valley. We might have been marching
back now--all the lines crumbling--the bomb-proof pit squashed!"

The final stroke fell upon him this instant. None of the others had
thought of it.

"And these--doors! Living God, we could have opened these doors!"

Their hands went out to him.

Chapter 3

A basket of food was sent in during the early afternoon. They gathered
about, making a place for the woman under the light. Abel was
brighter, his eyes full of tenderness. Poltneck had not long been able
to hold out in his misery against the philosophy of Fallows, who said
as they broke the bread:

"We have spoken our testimony, and the big adventure is ahead. It's
against the law to look back. We are honored men. I am proud to be
here, proud of a service that requires no herald. In all my dreaming
in the little cabin in the Bosks I could think of no rarer thing than
this--five together, a singer, a poet, a peasant, and two lovers. It's
like a pastoral--but the dark suffering army is about us. ... Listen
to the fighting. ... But there will be an end to fighting? ... Our
Poltneck may already have sung the song to turn the armies back. Be
very sure, he would have thought of his _coup_ in time to-day,
had the hour struck for that. Sing to us now, my son. Your soul will
come home to you. Sing to us--_The Lord Is Mindful of His Own_--"

It was started as one would answer a question--food in his hand, and
his eyes turned upward--a song of the Germans, too, the music of
Mendelssohn.

... It became very clear to the five that the plan was good, that
nothing mattered but the inner life, and that the soul breathes deeply
and comes into its own immortal health, by man's thought and service
to his brother. They saw it again--that goodly rock of things. The
light was shining above. Their eyes filled with tears, and their hands
touched each others' like children in a strange hush and shadow. ...

They heard a ragged volley of platoon fire from the distant court, but
it did not hold their thoughts from the song nor change a note. The
huge sandy head was turned upward, and the hand with its bit of broken
bread moved to and fro. ...

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