“I have always stayed with the line, General. I shall be quick as another. Don’t keep an old man, who has always stuck to the line—don’t keep one like that back in time of battle.”
Lowenkampf smiled and embraced him—sending him out with his regiment.
Mergenthaler now came in. There was something icy and hateful about this Roman-faced giant. His countenance was like a bronze shield—so small the black eyes, and so wide and high the cheek-bones. For months his Cossacks had done sensational work—small fighting, far scouting, desperate service. He despised Lowenkampf; believed he had earned the right to be the hammer to-day; and, in truth, he had, but Lowenkampf, who ranked him, had been chosen. Bleak and repulsive with rage, the Cossack chief made no effort to repress himself. Lowenkampf was reminded that he had been policing the streets of Liaoyang for weeks, that his outfit was “fat-heeledand duck-livered.”... More was said before Mergenthaler stamped out, his jaw set like a stone balcony. It seemed as if he tore from the heart of Lowenkampf the remnant of its stamina.... For a moment the three were alone in the head-quarters. Fallows caught the General by the shoulders and looked down in his face:
“Little Father—you’re the finest and most courageous of them all.... It will be known and proven—what I say, old friend—‘when we get to be men.’”
The masses of Lowenkampf’s infantry, forming on the heights among the coal-fields, melted at the outer edges and slid downward. Willingly the men went. They did not know that this was the day. They had been fearfully expectant of battle at first—ever since Lake Baikal was crossed. Battalion after battalion slid off the heights, and were lost in the queer lanes running through the rocks and low timber below. The general movement was silent. The rain held off; the air was close and warm. Lowenkampf, unvaryingly attentive to the two Americans, put them in charge of Lieutenant Luban, the young staff officer, whom Morning had caught in his arms from the back of the sorrel. Down the ledges they went, as the others.
Morning was uneasy, as one who feels he has forgotten something—a tugging in his mind to go back. He was strongly convinced that Lowenkampf was unsubstantial in a military way. He could not overcome the personal element of this dread—as if the General were of his house, and he knew better than another that he was ill-prepared for the day’s trial.
Fallows welcomed any disaster. As he had scorned the army in its waiting, he scorned it now in its strike. He looked very lean and long. The knees were in corduroy and unstable, but his nerve could not have been steadier had he been called to a tea-party by Kuroki. As one who had long since put these things behind him,Fallows appeared; indeed, as one sportively called out by the younger set, to whom severing the spine of a flanker was fresh and engrossing business.... Morning choked with suppressions. Luban talked low and wide. He was in a funk. Both saw it. Neither would have objected, except that he monopolized their thoughts with his broken English, and to no effect.
Now they went into thekao liang—vast, quiet, enfolding. It held the heat stale from yesterday. The seasonal rains had filled the spongy loam at the roots, with much to spare blackening the lower stems.... For an hour and a half they sunk into the several paths and lost themselves, Lowenkampf’s untried battalions. The armies of the world might have vanished so, only to be seen by the birds, moving like vermin in a hide.... Men began to think of food and drink. The heights of Yentai, which they had left in bitter hatred so shortly ago, was now like hills of rest on the long road home. More and more the resistance of men shrunk in the evil magic of this pressure of grain and sky and holding earth—a curious, implacable unworldliness it was, that made the flesh cry out.
“They should have cut this grain,” Luban said for the third time.
Fallows had said it first. Anyone should have seen the ruin of this advance, unless the end of the millet were reached before the beginning of battle. They had to recall with effort at last, that there was an outer world of cities and seas and plains—anything but this hollow country of silence and fatness.
If you have ever jumped at the sudden drumming of a pneumatic hammer, as it rivets a bolt against the steel, you have a suggestion of the nervous shock from that first far machine-gun of Kuroki’s—just a suggestion, because Lowenkampf’s soldiers at the moment were suffocating inkao liang.... In such a strange and expensive way, they cut the crops that day.
Morning trod on the tail of the battalion ahead. It had stopped; he had not. The soldier in front whom he bumped turned slowly around and looked into his face. The wide, glassy blue eyes then turned to Fallows, and after resting a curious interval, finally found Luban.
The face was broad and white as lard. Whatever else was in it, there was no denying the fear, the hate, the cunning—all of a rudimentary kind. Luban was held by the man’s gaze. The fright in both hearts sparked in contact. The stupid face of the soldier suddenly reflected the terror of the officer. And this was the result: The wide-staring suddenly altered to a squint; the vacant, helpless staring of a bewildered child turned into the bright activity of a trapped rodent.
Luban had failed in his great instant. His jaw was loose-hinged, his mouth leaked saliva.
Now Morning and Fallows saw other faces—twenty faces in the grain, faces searching for the nearest officer. Their eyes roved to Luban; necks craned among the fox-tails. There was a slow giving of the line, and bumping contacts from ahead like a string of cars.... Morning recalled the look of Luban, as he had helped him down from the sorrel. He had helped then; he hated now. Fallows was better. He plumped the boy on the shoulder and said laughingly:
“Talk to ’em. Get ’em in hand—quick, Luban—or they’ll be off!”
It was all in ten seconds. The nearest soldiers had seen Luban fail. Other platoons, doubtless many, formed in similar tableaux to the same end. A second machine-gun took up the story. It was far-off, and slightly to the left of the Russian line of advance. The incomprehensible energy of the thing weakened the Russian column, although it drew no blood.
A roar ahead from an unseen battalion-officer—the RussianForward. Luban tried to repeat it, but pitifully.A great beast rising from the ooze and settling backagainstthe voice—such was the answer.
The Thought formed. It was the thought of the day. None was too stupid to catch the spirit of it. Certain it was, and pervading as the grain. Indeed, it was conceived ofkao liang. The drum of the machine-gun, like a file in a tooth, was but its quickener. It flourished under the ghostly grays and whites of the sky. In the forward battalions the Thought already clothed itself in action:
To run back—to follow the paths back through the grain—to reach the decent heights again. And this was but a miniature of the thought that mastered the whole Russian army in Asia—to go back—to rise from the ghastly hollows of Asia and turn homeward again.
It leaped like a demon upon the unset volition of the mass. Full-formed, it arose from the lull. It effected the perfect turning.
Morning saw it, and wanted the source. He had planned too long to be denied now. The rout was big to handle, but he wantedthe front—a glimpse of the actual inimical line. It was not enough for him to watch the fright and havoc streaming back. Calling a cheeryadieuto Fallows, he bowed against the current—alone obeying the RussianForward.
10
Atthe edge of the trampled lane, often shunted off into the standing crop, Morning made his way, running when he could.... The pictures were infinite; a lifetime of pictures; hundreds of faces and each a picture. Men passed him, heads bowed, arms about their faces, like figures in the old Dore paintings, running from the wrath of the Lord. Here and there was[Pg 43]pale defiance. Nine sheepish soldiers carried a single wounded man, the much-handled fallen one looking silly as the rest.
The utter ghostliness of it all was in Morning’s mind.... Gasping for breath, after many minutes of running, he sank down to rest. Soldiers sought to pick him up and carry him back. There were others who could not live with themselves after the first panic. They fell out of the retreat to join him. Others stopped to fire—a random emptying of magazines in the millet. Certain groups huddled when they saw him—mistaking a civilian for an officer—and covered their faces. Officers begged, prayed for the men to hold, but the torrent increased, individuals diving into the thick of the grain and leaking around behind. White showed beneath the beards, and white lips moved in prayer. The locked bayonets of the Russians had never seemed so dreadful as when low-held in the grain.... One beardless boy strode back jauntily, his lips puckered in a whistle.
The marvelous complexity of common men—this was the sum of all pictures, and the great realization of John Morning. His soul saw much that his eyes failed. The day was a marvelous cabinet of gifts—secret chambers to be opened in after years.
Now he was running low, having entered the zone of fire. He heard the steel in the grain; stems were snapped by invisible fingers; fox-tails lopped. He saw the slow leaning of stems half-cut.... Among the fallen, on a rising slope, men were crawling back; and here and there, bodies had been cast off, the cloth-covered husks of poor driven peasants. They had gone back to the soil, these bodies, never really belonging to the soldiery. It was only when they writhed that John Morning forgot himself and his work. The art of the dead was consummate.
The grain thinned. He had come to the end of Lowenkampf’s infantry. It had taken an hour and a halffor the command to enter in order; less than a half-hour to dissipate. The rout had been like a cloud-burst.
And this was the battle. (Morning had to hold fast to the thought.) Long had he waited for this hour; months he had constructed the army in his story for this hour of demolition. It was enough to know that Lowenkampf had failed. Liaoyang, the battle, was lost.... Old Ritz went by weeping—he had been too old, they said; they had not wanted him to take his regiment to field. Yet he was perhaps the last to leave the field. Only his dead remained, and Colonel Ritz was not weeping for them....
Now Morning saw it wasnotall over. Before gaining the ridge swept by Kuroki’s fire, he knew that Mergenthaler was still fighting. It came to him with the earthy rumble of cavalry. To the left, in a crevasse under the crest of the ridge, he saw a knot of horses with empty saddles, and a group of men. Closer to them he crawled, along the sheltered side of the ridge, until in the midst of Russian officers, he saw that splendid bruising brute, who had stamped out of headquarters that morning, draining the heart of Lowenkampf as he went. Mergenthaler of the Cossacks—designed merely to be the eyes and fingers of the fighting force; yet unsupported, unbodied as it were, he still held the ridge.
Kuroki, as yet innocent of the rout, would not otherwise have been checked. His ponderous infantry was not the sort to be stopped by these light harriers of the Russian army. The Flanker was watching for the Hammer, and the Hammer already had been shattered.... Mergenthaler, cursing, handled his cavalry squadrons to their death, lightly and perfectly as coins in his palm. Every moment that he stayed the Japanese, he knew well that he was holding up to the quick scorn of the world the foot-soldiers of Lowenkampf, whom he hated. His head was lifted above the rocks to watch the field. His couriers came and went, slipping up and downthrough the thicker timber, still farther to the left.... Morning crawled up nearby until he saw the field—and now action, more abandoned than he had ever dared to dream:
An uncultivated valley strewn with rocks and low timber. Three columns of Japanese infantry pouring down from the opposite parallel ridge, all smoky with the hideous force of the reserve—machine-guns, and a mile of rifles stretching around to the right. (It was this wing’s firing that had started the havoc in the grain.)
Three columns of infantry pouring down into the ancient valley, under the gray stirring sky—brown columns, very even and unhasting—and below, the Cossacks.
Morning lived in the past ages. He lay between two rocks watching, having no active sense—but pure receptivity. Time was thrust back.... Three brown dragons crawling down the slopes in the gray day—knights upon horses formed to slay the dragons.
Out of the sheltering rocks and timber they rode—and chose the central dragon quite in the classic way. It turned to meet the knights upon horses—head lifted, neck swollen like the nuchal ribs of the cobra. In the act of striking it was ridden down, but the knights were falling upon the smashed head. The mated dragons had attacked from either side....
It was a fragment, a moving upon the ground,—that company of knights upon horses,—and the Voice of it, all but deadened by the rifles, came up spent and pitiful.
Mergenthaler’s thin, high voice was not hushed. He knew how to detach another outfit from the rocks and timber-thickets, already found by the Japanese on the ridge, already deluged with fire. Out from the betraying shelter, the second charge, a new child of disaster, ran forth to strike Kuroki’s left.... Parts of the film were elided. The cavalrymen fell away by a terrible magic. Again the point thickened and drew back, metthe charge; again the welter and the thrilling back-sweep of the Russian fragment.
Morning missed something. His soul was listening for something.... It was comment from Duke Fallows, so long marking time to events.... He laughed. He was glad to be free, yet his whole inner life drew back in loathing from Mergenthaler—as if to rush to his old companion.... And Mergenthaler turned—the brown high-boned cheeks hung with a smile of derision. He was climbing far and high on Lowenkampf’s shame.... He gained the saddle—this hard, huge Egoist, the staff clinging to him, and over the ridge they went to set more traps.
The wide, rocking shoulders of the General sank into the timber—as he trotted with his aides down the death-ridden valley. It may have been the sight of this little party that started a particular machine-gun on the Japanese right.... The sizable bay the chief rode looked like a polo-pony under the mighty frame. Morning did not see him fall: only the plunging bay with an empty saddle; and then when the timber opened a little, the staff carrying the leader up the trail.
It was the mystery which delayed the Japanese, not Mergenthaler. When at last Kuroki’s left wing continued to report no aggressive movement from Bilderling river-ward; and when continued combing in the north raised nothing but bleak hills and grain-valleys hushed between showers, he flooded further columns down the ridge, and slew what he could of the Russian horsemen who tried with absurd heroism to block his way. At two in the afternoon the Flanker fixed his base among the very rocks where Morning had lain—and the next position for him to take was the coal-hills of Yentai. Only the ghosts of the cavalry stood between—andkao liang.
Morning turned back a last time to the fields of millet in the early dusk. He had been waiting for Mergenthaler to die. The General lay in the verygo-downwhere he had outraged Lowenkampf that morning; and now the Japanese were driving the Russians from the position.... Mergenthaler would not die. They carried him to a coal-car, and soldiers pushed it on to Yentai, the station.
The Japanese were closing in. They were already in the northern heights contending with Stakelberg; they were stretched out bluffing Bilderling to the southward. They were locked with Zarubaieff at the southern front of Liaoyang. They were in the grain.... Cold and soulless Morning felt, as one who has failed in a great temptation; as one who has lived to lose, and has not been spared the picture of his own eternal failure.
He looked back a last time at the grain in the closing night. The Japanese were there, brown men, native to the grain. The great shadowed field had whipped Lowenkampf and lost the battle. It lay in the dusk like a woman, trampled, violated, feebly waving. Rain-clouds came with darkness to cover the nakedness and bleeding.
11
DukeFallows saw but one face.... John Morning studied a thousand, mastered the heroism of the Cossacks, filled his brain with blood-pictures and the incorrigible mystery of common men. Duke Fallows saw but one face. In the beauty and purity of its inspiration, he read a vile secret out of the past. To the very apocalypse of this secret, he read and understood. The shame of it blackened the heavens for his eyes, but out of its night and torment came a Voice uttering the hope of the human spirit for coming days.
Morning had left. Luban had put on bluster and roaring. Their place in the grain was now broad from trampling; the flight was on in full. It meant something to Fallows. It was not that he wanted the Japanese to win the battle; the doings of the Japanese were of littleconcern to him. He felt curiously that the Japanese were spiritually estranged from the white man. Russia was different; he was close to the heart of the real Russia whose battle was at home. Russia’s purpose in Asia was black; he was full of scorn for the purpose, but full of love for the troops. Strange gladness was upon him—as the men broke away. Reality at home would come from this disaster. He constructed the world’s battle from it, and sang his song.
One soldier running haltingly for his life looked up to the face of Luban of the roaring voice—and laughed. Luban turned, and perceived that Fallows had not missed the laugh of the soldier. This incident, now closed, was in a way responsible for the next.
... Out of the grain came striding a tall soldier of the ranks. His beard was black, his eyes very blue. In his eyes was a certain fire that kindled the nature of Duke Fallows as it had never been kindled before, not even by the most feminine yielding. The man’s broad shoulders were thrust back; his face clean of cowardice, clean as the grain and as open to the sky. His head was erect and bare; he carried no gun, scorned the pretense of looking for wounded. Had he carried a dinner-pail, the picture would have been as complete—a good man going home from a full-testing day.
In that moment Fallows saw more than from the whole line before.... Here was a conscript. He had been taken from his house, forced across Europe and Asia to this hour. The reverse of his persecutors had set him free. This freedom was the fire in his eyes.... They had torn him from his house; they had driven and brutalized him for months. And now they had come to dreadful disaster. It was such a disaster as a plain man might have prayed for. Hehadprayed for it in the beginning, but in the long, slow gatherings for battle, in the terrible displays of power, he had lost his faith to pray. Yet the plain man’s God had answeredthat early prayer. This was the brightness of the burning in the blue eyes.
His persecutors had been shamed and undone. He had seen his companions dissipate, his sergeants run; seen his captains fail to hold. The great force that had tortured him, that had seemedthe worldin strength, was now broken before his eyes. Its mighty muscles were writhing, their strength running down. The love of God was splendid in the ranker’s heart; the breath of home had come. The turning in the grain—was a turning homeward.
All this Fallows saw. It was illumination to him—the hour of his great reception.
Luban, just insulted by the other infantryman, now faced the big, blithe presence, emerging unhurried from the grain. Luban raised his voice:
“And what areyousneaking back for?”
“I am not sneaking——”
“Rotten soldier stuff—you should be shot down.”
“I am not a soldier—I am a ploughman.”
“You are here to fight——”
“They forced me to come——”
“Forced you to fight for your Fatherland?”
“This is not my Fatherland, but a strange country——”
“You are here for the Fatherland——”
“I have six children in Russia. The Fatherland is not feeding them. My field is not ploughed.”
The talk had crackled; it had required but a few seconds; Luban had done it all for Fallows to see and hear—but Fallows was very far from observing the pose of that weakling. The Ploughman held him heart and soul—as did the infallible and instantly unerring truth of his words. The world’s poor, the world’s degraded, had found its voice.
The man was white with truth, like a priest of Melchizedek.
Luban must have broken altogether. Fallows, listening, watching the Ploughman with his soul, did not turn.... Now the man’s face changed. The lips parted strangely, the eyelids lifting. Whiteness wavered between the eyes of the Ploughman and the eyes of Duke Fallows. Luban’s pistol crashed and the man fell with a sob.
Fallows was kneeling among the soaked roots of the millet, holding the soldier in his arms:
“Living God, to die for you—you, who are so straight and so young.... Hear me—don’t go yet—I must have your name, Brother.... Luban did not know you—he is just a little sick man—he didn’t know you or he wouldn’t have done this.... Tell me your name ... and the place of your babes, and their mother.... Oh, be sure they shall be fed—glad and proud am I to do that easy thing!... You have shown me the Nearer God.... They shall be fed, and they shall hear! The world, cities and nations, all who suffer, shall hear what the Ploughman said—the soul of the Ploughman, who is the hope of the world.... You have spoken for Russia.... And now rest—rest, Big Brother—you have done your work.”
The soldier looked up to him. There had been pain and wrenching, the vision of a desolated house. Now, his eyes rested upon the American. The shadow of death lifted. He saw his brother in the eyes that held him—his brother, and it seemed, the Son of Man smiled there behind the tears.... He smiled back like a weary child. Peace came to him, lustrous from the shadow, for lo! his field was ploughed and children sang in his house.
Fallows had not risen from his knees. He was talking to himself:
“... Out of the grain he came—the soul of the Ploughman. And gently he spoke to us ... andthis is the day of the battle. I came to the battle—and I go to carry his message to the poor—to those who labor—to Russia and the America of the future. Luban spoke the thought of the world, but the Ploughman spoke for humanity risen. He spoke for the women, and for the poor.... Bright he came from the grain—bright and unafraid—and those shall hear him, who suffer and are heavy-laden. This is the battle!... And his voice came to me—a great and gracious voice—for tsars and kings and princes to hear—and I am to carry his message....”
Luban laughed feebly at last, and Fallows looked up to him.
“You’ll hear him in your passing, Luban, poor lad. You’ll hear him in your hell. Until you are as simple and as pure as this Ploughman—you shall hear and see all this again. Though you should hang by the neck to-night, Luban,—this picture would go out with you. For this is the hour you killed your Christ.”
12
Lowenkampfwas the name that meant defeat. Lowenkampf—it was like the rain that night.... “Lowenkampf started out too soon.”... Morning heard it. Fallows heard it. The coughing sentries heard it. The whole dismal swamp of drenched, whipped soldiery heard it. Sleek History had awakened to grasp it; Kuropatkin had washed his hands.... Lowenkampf had started out too soon that morning. The Siberians had only left Yentai Station proper when Lowenkampf set forth from the Coal-heights. Had his supports been in position (very quickly and clearly the world’s war-experts would see this) the rout in the grain would have been checked.
As it was, many of Lowenkampf’s soldiers had run the entire ten miles from the heights to the station, Yentai—afteremerging fromkao-liang—evading the Siberian supports as they ran, as chaos flies from order. Now in the darkness (with Kuroki bivouacked upon the main trophy of the day, the Coal-heights) the shamed battalions of Lowenkampf re-formed along the main line in the midst of their unused reserves.
The day had been like a month of fever to Morning, but Duke Fallows was a younger man, and a stranger that night.... Morning tried to work, but he was too close to it all, too tired. It was as if he were trying to tell of a misfortune that had no beginning, and whose every phase was his own heart’s concern. His weariness was like the beginning of death—coldness and pervadingennui. Against his will he was gathered in the glowing currents of Duke Fallows—watching, listening, not pretending even to understand, but borne along. Together they went in to the General’s private room. Lowenkampf looked up, gathered himself with difficulty and smiled. Fallows turned to Morning, asked him to stand by the door, then strode forward and knelt by the General’s knees. It did not seem extraordinary to Morning—so much was insane.
“You were chosen, old friend. It has been a big day for the under-dog——”
“I have lost Liaoyang.”
“That was written.”
“My little boy will hear it in the street. He will hear it in the school. Before he is a man—he will hear it.”
“I shall take him upon my knee. I shall tell him of you in a way that he shall never forget. And his mother—I shall tell her——”
Lowenkampf rubbed his eyes.
“I have business in Russia. This day I heard what must be done. It is almost as if I had gotten to be a man.”
Fallows leaned back laughingly, his arms extended, as if pushing the other’s knees from him.
Some inner wall broke, and the General wept. Morning put his foot against the door. The thought in his heart was: “This is something I cannot write.”...
Morning held the idea coldly now that Fallows was mentally softened from the strain. Other things came up to support it.... He, too, had seen a soldier shot by an officer. It was discipline. At best, it was but one of the thousand pictures. It had happened less because the man was retiring without a wound—thousands were doing that—than because the man answered back, when the officer spoke. He did not hear what the soldier said. This soldier possibly had trans-Baikal children, too. The day and his long illness had crazed Fallows, now at the knees of the man who had lost the battle.
“... I know what you thought this morning—when you saw your men march down into the grain,” Fallows was saying to the General. “You thought of your little boy and his mother. You thought of the babes and wives and mothers—of those soldiers of yours whom you were sending to the front. You didn’t want to send them out. You’re too close to becoming a man for that. You wondered if you would not have to suffer for sending them out so—and if this particular suffering would not have to do withyourlittle boy and his mother——”
“My God, stop, Fallows——”
“You had to think that. You wouldn’t be Lowenkampf if you failed to think that.... I love you for it, old friend. Big things will come from Lowenkampf, and from the conscript who came to me out of the grain with vision and a voice. The battle at home won’t be so hard to win—now that this is lost.”
There was a challenge and heavy steps on the platform—and one low, hurried voice.
Lowenkampf stood up and wiped his eyes.
“The Commander——” he whispered.
A pair of captains towered above him, a grizzledcolonel behind; then Morning saw the gray of the short beard, and the dark, dry-burning of unblinking eyes, fixed upon Lowenkampf.... The latter’s shoulders drooped a little, and his eyes lowered deprecatingly for just an instant. Kuropatkin passed in. The soft fullness of his shoulders was like a woman’s. Fleshly and failing, he looked, from behind.... The Americans waited outside with the colonel and captains. The door was shut.
Midnight.... Fallows and Morning had moved in the rain among the different commands. The army at Yentai seemed to be emerging from prolonged anæsthesia to find itself missing in part and strangely disordered. It was afraid to sleep, afraid to think of itself, and denied drink. Fallows had told everywhere the story of the Ploughman; just now he helped himself to a bundle of Morning’s Chinese parchment, and was writing copy in long-hand.
His head was bowed, his eyes expressionless.
“And I alone remain to tell thee!” he muttered at last.
Morning did not answer, but resigned himself to hear more of the Messiah who came out of the grain.
“I told one of Mergenthaler’s aides the story,” Fallows said coldly. “He said it was quite the proper thing to do—to shoot down a man who was leaving the field unwounded. I told Manlewson of the First Siberians, who replied that the Russians would begin to win battles when they murdered all such, as unflinchingly and instantly as the Japanese did, and hospital malingerers as well. I told Bibinoff (who is Luban’s captain), and he said: ‘That’s the first good thing I ever heard about Luban.’ He was pleased and epigrammatic....”
Fallows stood up—his face was in shadow, so far beneath was the odorous lamp.
“Living God—I can’t make them see—I can’t make them see! They’re all enchanted. Or else I’mdead and this is hell.... They talk about Country. They talk about making a man stand in a place of sure death for his Country—in this Twentieth Century—when war has lost its last vestige of meaning to the man in the ranks, and his Country is a thing of rottenness and moral desolation! What is the Country to the man in the ranks? A group of corrupt, inbred undermen who study to sate themselves—to tickle and soften themselves—with the property and blood and slavery of the poor.... A good man, a clean man, is torn from his house to fight, to stand in the fire-pits and die for such monsters. Suddenly the poor man sees!
“... He came forth from the grain with vision—smiling and unafraid. He is not afraid to fight, but he has found himself on the wrong side of the battle. When he fights again it will be for his child, for his house, for his brother, for his woman, for his soul. Blood in plenty has he for such a war.... Think of it, John Morning, the Empire was entrusted to poor little Luban—against this man of vision! He came forth smiling from the grain. ‘I do not belong here, my masters. I was torn away from my woman and children, and I must be home for the winter ploughing. It is a long way—and I must be off. I am a ploughman, not a soldier. I belong to my children and my field. My country does not plough my field—does not feed my children....What could Luban do but kill him—little agent of Herod? But the starry child lives!...
“And listen, John, to-night—you heard them—we heard these fat-necked, vulture-breasted commanders—vain, envy-poisoned, scandal-mongering commanders, complaining to each other: ‘See, what stuff has been given us to win battles with!... I have told it and they cannot see. They are not even good devils; they are not decent devourers. They have no humor—that is their deadly sin. An adult, half-human murderer, seeing his soldiers leave the field, would cry aloud, ‘Hello, youInnocents—so you have wakened up at last!’ But these cannot see. Their eyes are stuck together. It is their deadly sin—the sin against the Holy Ghost—to lack humor to this extent!”
Morning laughed strangely. “Come on to bed, you old anarchist,” he said, though sleep was far from his own eyes.
“That’s it, John. Anarchy. In the name of Fatherland, Russia murders a hundred thousand workmen out here in Asia. In answer, a few men and women gather together in a Petersburg cellar, saying, ‘We are fools, not heroes. When we fight again it will be forOurCountry!’ And they are anarchists—their cause is Terrorism!”
“We’re all shot to pieces to-night, Duke——”
“We are alive, John. Lowenkampf is alive. But he who spoke to me this day, who came forth so blithely to die in my arms (his woman sleeps ill to-night in the midst of her babes), and he is lying out in the rain, his face turned up to the rain. God damn the fat reptile that calls itself Fatherland!... But, I say to you, that we’re come nearly to the end of the prince and pauper business on this planet. The soul of the Ploughman was heard to-day—as long ago they heard the Soul of the Carpenter.... He is lying out there in the millet—his face turned up to the rain. Yet I say to you, John, there’s more life in him this hour than in his Tsar and all the princes of the blood.”
Fallows covered his face with his hands.
“You’re tired and thick to-night, John, but you are one who must see!” he finished passionately. “You must help me tell the story to the cellar gatherings in Petersburg, to the secret meetings in all the centers of misery, wherever a few are gathered together in the name of Brotherhood—in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin.... You must help me to make other men see—help me to tell this thing so that the world will hear it, andwith such power that the world will be unable longer to lie to itself.
“I can see it now—how Jesus, the Christ, tried to make men see.... That was His Gethsemane—that He could not make men see. I tell you it is a God’s work—and it came to Jesus, the Christ, at last—‘If they crucify me, perhaps, a few will see!’... I’m going over to Russia, John, to learn how to tell them better.”
13
Thenight of the third of September, and John Morning is off for the big adventure. Between the hills, the roads are a-stream.... All day he had watched different phases of the retreat. Fighting back in the city; fighting here and there along the staggering, burdened, cruelly-punished line; a sudden breaking-out of fighting in a dozen places like hidden fires; rain and wounded and seas of mud; the gray intolerable misery of it all; the sick and the dead—Morning was glutted with the colossal derangement. And they called it an orderly retreat.
He was riding the sorrel Eve out of the zone of war. The battle was behind him now, and he breathed the world again. He had something to tell. Liaoyang was in his brain. He was off for the ships that sail. A month—America—the great story.... He felt the manuscript against him. It was in a Chinese belt, with money for the passage home, tight against his body, a hundred thousand words done on Chinese parchment and wrapped in oil-skin. The book of Liaoyang—he had earned it. He had written it against the warping cynicism of Duke Fallows. On the ship he could reshape and renew it all into a master-picture.
It had been easier than he thought to break away from Fallows, his friend. The latter was whelmed inthe soul of the Ploughman. A big story, of course, as Fallows saw it—but there were scores of big stories. It would ruin it to let an anarchist tell it. Suppose officers in general did stop to listen to troops sneaking off the field?
Duke had given him a letter, and a story for theWestern States. The first was not to be read until he was at sea out from Japan. When Morning spoke of the money he owed, the other had put the thought away. Sometime he would call for it if he needed it; it was a trifle anyway.... It hadn’t been a trifle. It had meant everything.
Morning was glad to breathe himself again. Yet there was an ache in his heart for Duke Fallows, now off for Europe the western way. He, Morning, had not done his part. He hadn’t given as he had taken; had not kept close to Duke Fallows at the last. There was a big score that money could never settle. Soundly glad to be alone, but in the very gladness the picture of Duke Fallows returned—lying on his back, in bunks and berths and beds, staring up at the ceiling, accentuating his own failures to bring out the hopeful and valorous parts of his friend. It was always such a picture to Morning, when Fallows came to mind—staring, dreaming, looking up from his back. It had seemed sometimes as if he were trying to make of his friend all that he had failed to be.... Yet the Duke Fallows of the last twenty-four hours, wild, dithyrambic—had been too much.... Again and again, irked and heavy with his own limitations, Morning’s brain had seized upon the weakness of the other, to condone his own slowness of understanding.... It may have been Eve, and her relation to the Fallows revelation, or it may have been putting hideous militarism behind, that made John Morning think of Women now as he rode, and a little differently from ever before.... Certain laughing sentences of Duke Fallows came back to him presently,with a point he seemed to have missed when they were uttered:
“We have our devils, John. You have ambition; Lowenkampf has drink; Mergenthaler has slaughter.... You will love a woman; you already drink too readily, but Ambition will stand in your house and fight from room to room at the last—and over the premises to the last ditch. He’s a grand devil—is Ambition.... My devil, John? Well, it isn’t the big-jawed male who loves a woman as she dreams to be loved. It’s the man with a touch of women in him—just enough to begin upon her mystery.... When I hear a certain woman’s voice, or see a certain passing figure—something old, very old and wise, stirs within, seems to stir and thrill with eternal life. And, John, it isn’t low—the thought. I’d tell you if it were. It isn’t low. It’s as regal as Mother Nature in a valley, on a long afternoon. It isn’t that I want to hurt her; it isn’t that I want something she has. Rather, I want all she has! I want her mind; I want her soul; I want her full animations. I want to make her yield and give; I want to feel her battle with herself, not to yield and give.... Oh, the flesh is nothing. It is the cheapest thing in the world—but her giving, her yielding—it’s like an ocean tide. It breaks every bond; it laughs at every law. Power seems to rush into a woman when she yields! That’s the conquest of my heart—to feel that power.... All devils are young compared to that in a man’s heart—all but one, and that is the passion to hold spiritual dominion over other men.”
Morning’s mind had fallen into the habit of allowing much for the other’s sayings—of accepting much as mere facility.... Thus he thought as he traveled in the rain, Eve’s swift, springy trot a stimulus to deep thinking; and always there was a bigger and finer John Morning shadowing him, fathoming his smallnesses, wondering at his puny rebellions and vain desires. Itwas in this fairer John Morning, so tragically unexpressed during the past few months, that the pang lived—the pang of parting from his friend.
Morning was terrific physically. The thing he was now doing was as spectacular a bit of newspaper service as ever correspondent undertook in Asia; and yet, to John Morning the high light of achievement fell upon the manuscript, not upon the action. It had not occurred to him to be afraid. If he could get across the ninety miles to Koupangtse—through theHun huises, through the Japanese scouting cavalry, across two large and many smaller yellow rivers—and reach the railroad, he would quickly get a ship for Japan from Tientsin or Tongu—and from Japan—home.... He was doing it for himself—passionately and with no sense of splendor.
Fallows had been so sure of his friend’s physical courage, that he made no point of it, in the expression of attachment.... He had called it vision at first, this thing that had drawn him to John Morning—a touch of the poet, a touch of the feminine—others might have called it. No matter the name, he had seen it, as all artists of the expression of the inner life recognize it in one another; and Fallows knew well that where the courage of the soldier ends, the courage of the visionary begins.
Morning was a trifle peculiar, however. Unless it sank utterly, he stuck to a ship, until the horizon revealed another sail.
He had come up through the dark. The world had grounded him deeply in illusion. Most brilliant of promises—even Fallows had not seen him that first day in too bright a dawn—but he learned hard. And his had been close fighting—such desperate fighting that one does not hear voices, and one is too deep in the ruck to see the open distance.... Much as he had been alone—the world had invariably shattered his silences. Alwayshe had worked—worked, worked furiously, angrily, for himself.... He was taught so. The world had caught him as a child in his brief, pitiful tenderness. The world was his Eli. As from sleep, he had heard Reality calling. He had risen to answer, but the false Eli had spoken—an Eli that did not teach him truly to listen, nor to say, when he heard the Voice another time—“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”
14
TheTaitse, of large and ancient establishment, runs westward from Liaoyang for twenty-five miles, and in a well-earned bed, portions of which are worn in the rock. Morning rode along the north bank, thus avoiding altogether a crossing of the Taitse, since his journey continued westward from the point where the river took its southward bend. From thence it paralleled the Hun in a race to join the Liao. The main stem of the latter was beyond the Hun, and these two arteries of Asia broke Morning’s trail. Fording streams of such magnitude was out of the question, and there was a strong chance of an encounter with theHun huisesat the ferries....
Rain, and the sorrel’s round hoofs sucked sharply in the clay. She had no shoes to lose in these drawing vacuums. The scent of her came up warm and good to the horse-lover. Alone on a road, she had always been manageable, hating crowds and noise—soldiers, Chinese, and accoutrements. Perhaps, this was merely a biding of time. Eve had a fine sense of keeping a strange road. This was not usual, although a horse travels a familiar road in the darkness better than a man. These two worked well together.
By map the distance from Liaoyang to Koupangtse was seventy miles. Morning counted upon ninety, at least. The Manchurian roads are old and odd as theOriental mind.... He passed the southward bend of the big river, and at daybreak reached Chiensen, ten miles beyond, on the Hun.
Chiensen, unavoidable on account of the ferry, was a danger-point. Japanese cavalry, it was reported, frequently lit there, and theHun huises(Chinese river-pirates and thieves in general, whom Alexieff designated well as “the scourge of Manchuria”) were at base in this village.... In the gray he found junks, a flat tow and landing.
You never know what Chinese John is going to do. If you have but little ground of language between you, he will take his own way, on the pretext of misunderstanding. Morning’s idea was to get across quickly, without arousing the river-front. He awoke the ferryman, placing three silver taels in his hand. (He carried silver, enough native currency to get him to Japan, his passport, and the two large envelopes Duke Fallows had given him, in the hip-pockets of his riding breeches.) The ferryman had no thought of making the first crossing without tea. Morning labored with him, and with seeming effect for a moment, but the other fell suddenly from grace and aroused his family. He was not delicate about it. Morning resigned himself to the delay, and was firmly persuading Eve to be moderate, as she drank from the river’s edge, when Chinese John suddenly aroused the river population. Standing well out on the tow-flat, he trumpeted at some comrade of the night before, apparently no less than a hundred yards up the river. There were sleepy answers from many junks within range of the voice. It was the one hateful thing to John Morning—yet to rough it with the ferryman for his point of view would be the only thing worse.
The landing was rickety; its jointure with the tow-boat imperfect. The American took off his coat, tossed it over the sorrel’s head, tying the sleeves under her throat. She stiffened in rebellion, but as the darknesswas as yet little broken by the day, she decided to accept the situation. Morning felt her growing reluctance, however, as she traversed the creaking, springy boards. The crevasse between the landing and the craft was bridged; and the latter, grounded on the shore-side, did not give. The mare stood in the center of the tow, sweating and tense.
Numerous Chinese were now abroad—eager, even insistent, to help. Their voices stirred the mare to her old red-eyed insanity. Morning could hold himself no longer. Once or twice before in his life this hard, bright light had come to his brain. Though the exterior light was imperfect, the ferryman saw the fingers close upon the butt of the gun, and something of the American’s look. He dropped his tea, sprang to the junk and pulled up the bamboo-sail. This was used to hold the tow against the current.
Two natives in the flat-boat stood ready with poles. And now the ferryman spoke in a surprised and disappointed way as he toiled in front. He seemed ready to burst into tears; and the two nearer Morning grunted in majors and minors, according to temperament. The American considered that it might all be innocent, although the voices were many from the town-front. Poling began; the tow drew off from the landing. Clear from the grounding of the shore, the craft sank windily to its balance in the stream.
This was too much for Eve. Her devil was in the empty saddle. She leaped up pawing. The two Chinese at the poles dived over side abruptly. Water splashed Eve’s flanks, and she veered about on her hind feet—blinded and striking the air in front. The wobble of the tow now finished her frenzy—and back she went into the stream. The saddle saved her spine from a gash on the edge of the tow. Morning had this thought when Eve arose; that he need fear no treachery from the Chinese; and this as she fell—a queer, cool, laughingthought—that after such a fall she would never walk like a man again.
He had been forced to drop the bridle, but caught it luckily with one of the poles as she came up struggling. He beckoned the ferryman forward, and Eve, swimming and fighting, was towed across. To Morning it was like one of his adventures back in the days of the race-horse shipping.
Eve struck the opposite bank—half-strangled from her struggle and the blind. The day had come. The nameless little town on this side of the Hun was out to meet him. Had he brought a Korean tiger by a string, however, he could not have enjoyed more space—as the mare climbed from the stream. He talked to her and unbound her eyes. Red and deeply baleful they were. She shook her head and parted her jaws. The circle of natives widened. Morning straightened the saddle and patted Eve’s neck softly, talking modestly of her exploit.... Natives were now hailing from mid-stream, so he leaped into the sticky saddle and guided the mare out to the main road leading to Tawan on the Liao.... Queerly enough, just at this instant, he remembered the hands and the lips of the ferryman—a leper.
Ten miles on the map—he could count thirteen by the road—and then the Liao crossing.... The mare pounded on until they came to a wild hollow, rock-strewn, among deserted hills. Morning drew up, cooled his mount and fed the soaked grain strapped to the saddle since the night before. Eve was not too cross to eat—nor too tired. She lifted her head often and drew in the air with the sound of a bubble-pipe.... Just now Morning noted a wrinkle in his saddle blanket. Hot with dread, he loosed the girth.
He looked around in terror lest anyone see his own shame and fear. He had put the saddle on in the dark, but passed his hand between her back and the cloth. Long ago a trainer had whipped him for a bad bit ofsaddling; even at the time he had felt the whipping deserved. He lifted the saddle. A pink scalded mouth the size of a twenty-five-cent piece was there.... God, if he could only be whipped now. She was sensitive as satin; it was only a little wrinkle of the rain-soaked blanket.... His voice whimpered as he spoke to her.
Only a horseman could have suffered so. He washed the rub, packed soft lint from a Russian first-aid bandage about to ease the pressure; and then, since the rain had stopped again, he rubbed her dry and walked at her head for hours, despairing at last of the town named Tawan. The Liao was visible before the village itself. Morning shook with fatigue. He had to gain the saddle for the possible need of swift action, but the wound beneath never left his mind. It uncentered his self-confidence—a force badly needed now.
And this was the Liao—the last big river, roughly half-way. The end of the war-zone, it was, too, but the bright point of peril fromHun huises.... Morning saw the thin masts of the river junks over the bowl of the hill, their tribute flags flying.... To pass was the day’s work, to make the ferry with Eve. There was too much misery and contrition in his heart for him to handle her roughly. The blind could not be used again. She would connect that with the back-fall into the Hun. The town was full of voices.
15
Chinesewere gathering. Morning went about his business as if all were well, but nothing was good to him about the increase of these hard, quick-handed men. They were almost like Japanese. With the tail of his eye, he saw shirt signals across the river. The main junk fleet was opposite. Trouble—he knew it. The hard, bright light was in his brain.
In the gathering of the natives, Eve was roused afresh. His only way was to try her without the blind. If she showed fight, he meant to mount quickly and ride back through the crowd for one of the lower-town crossings.
Without looking back, he led the way to the landing, holding just the weight of the bridle-rein. His arm gave with her every hesitation. To his amazement she consented to try. The tow-craft was larger here—enough for a bullock-pair and cart—and better fitted to the landing. Step by step she went with him to her place.
Now Morning saw that in using the blind the first time he had done her another injury. She would not have gone back into the Hun but for that. She awed him. Something Fallows had said recurred—about her being unconquerable, different every day. Also Fallows had said, “She will kill you at the last....”
He drove back the Chinese, all but two pole-men, that would have gathered on the tow. This was quietly done, but his inflexibility was felt. Many signals were sent across, as the tow receded from the shore, and numbers increased on the opposite bank.
Eve, breathing audibly, swung forward and back with the craft, as it gave to the river. The towing junk, as in the Hun, held the other against the current; the rest was poling and paddling.... The junk itself slipped out of the way as the tow was warped toward the landing. Other junks were stealing in.... Morning already had paid. He felt the girth of the saddle, fingered the bridle, tightened his belt. A warm, gray day, but he was spent and gaunt and cold. Eve was hushed—mulling her bit softly, trembling with hatred for the Chinese.
The road ascended from the river, through a narrow gorge with rocky walls. The river-men were woven across the way. While the tow was yet fifteen feet fromthe landing, Morning gained the saddle. The ferry-man gestured frantically that this had never been done before; that a man’s beast properly should be led across. Morning laughed, tightened his knees, and at an early instant loosened the bridle-rein, for the mare to jump. The heavy tow shot back as she cleared the fissure of stream.
Morning was now caught in the blur of events. The Chinese did not give way for the mare, as she trotted across the boards to the rocky shore. Up she went striking. Again he had not known Eve. The back-dive into the Hun had not cured her. She would walk like a man and pitch back into Hell—and do it again.... Someone knifed her from the side and she toppled.
The fall was swift and terrible, for the trail sloped behind. Morning’s instinct was truer than his brain, but there was no choice of way to jump. He could not push the mare from him completely to avoid the cliff. He was half-stunned against the wall, and not clear from the struggle of her fall. The brain is never able to report this instant afterward, even though consciousness is not lost. He was struck, trampled; he felt the cold of the rock against his breast, and the burn of a knife.
The Chinese struck at him as he rose. The mare was up, facing him, but dragging him upward, as a dog with a bone. His left hand found the pistol. He cleared the Chinese from him, emptying the chambers.... Eve let him come to her. He must have gained the saddle as she swung around in the narrow gorge to begin her run. The wind rushed coldly across his breast and abdomen. His shirt had been cut and pulled free. It was covered with blood. He tried to hold the mare, but either his strength was gone or she was past feeling the bit. It was her hour. All Morning could do was to keep the road.
He was all but knocked out. He had mounted as afighter gets up under the count—and fights on without exactly knowing. The mare was running head down. He tried his strength again. The reins were rigid; she had the bit and meant to end the game.... He loved her wild heart; mourned for her; called her name; told her of wrongs he had done. Again and again, the light went from him; sometimes he drooped forward to her thin, short mane, and clung there, but the heat of her made him ill. They came into hills, passed tiny villages. It was all strange and terrible—a hurtling from high heaven.... Eve was like a furnace....
And now she was weaving on the road—running drunkenly, unless his eyes betrayed.... The rushing wind was cold upon his breast. His coat was gone; his shirt had been cut. He tried to pull the blood-soaked ends together. At this moment the blow fell.
These Chinese had been quick-handed, and they knew where to search for a man’s goods. He was coldly sane in an instant, for the rending of his whole nature; then came the quick zeal for death—the intolerableness of living an instant. The wallet—the big story—some hundreds of tales in paper! It was the passing of these from next his body that had left him cold.... Fury must have come to his arms. The mare lifted her head under his sudden attack.
Yes, he could manage her now. The bloody mouth and the blind-mad head came up to him—her front legs giving like a colt’s. Down they went together. Morning took his fall limply, with something of supremely organized indifference, and turned in the mud to the mare.
She was dead. The gray of pearl was in her eyes where red life had been.... No, she raised herself forward, seemed to be searching for him, her muzzle sickly relaxed. She could not stir behind. Holding there for a second—John Morning forgot the big story.
Eve fell again. He crawled to her—tried to lift her head. It was heavy as a sheet-anchor to his arms.... Her heart had broken. She had died on her feet—the last rising was but a galvanism.... He looked up into the gray sky where the clouds stirred sleepily. He wanted to ask something from something there.... He could not think of what he wanted.... Oh, yes, his book of Liaoyang.
And now his eye roved over the mare.... Her hind legs were sheeted with fresh blood and clotted with dry.... Desperately he craned about to see further. Entrails were protruding from a knife wound. The inner tissues were not cut, but the opened gash had let them sag horribly. She had run from Tawan with that wound.... He had worn her to the quick in night; blinded her for the Hun crossing, when she would have done nobly with eyes uncovered.... He had not been able to keep her from killing herself.... John Morning, the horseman.... He had left a gaping wound in the spirit of Duke Fallows.... All that he had done was failure and loss; all that he had planned so passionately, so brutally, indeed, that the needs and the offerings of others had not reached his heart, because of the iron self-purpose weighed there.
Luban, Lowenkampf, Mergenthaler, even the Commander-in-chief, looked strangely in through the darkened windows of his mind. The moral suffocation of the grain-fields surged over him again.... He caught a glimpse of that last moment in the ravine, but not the taking of the wallet.... Was it just a dream that a native leaped forward to grasp his stirrup, and that he leaned down to fire? He seemed to recall the altered brow.
The pictures came too fast. The sky did not change. The something did not answer.... Eve was lying in the mud. She looked darker and huddled. He kissed her face, and as he gained his feet, the thought camequeerly thathemight be dead, as she was. He held the thought of action to his limbs and made them move.
When he could think more clearly, he scorned the pain and protest of his limbs. He would not be less than Eve. If he were not dead, he would die straight up, and on the road to Koupangtse.
16
Thirty-sixhours after Morning left Eve, an English correspondent at Shanhaikwan added the following to a long descriptive letter made up of refugee tales, and the edges and hearsay of the war-zone: