All went black for Peter. The slope rose up and took him. For an eternity afterward he felt someone tugging at him—hands of terrible strength that would not let him die, would not let him sleep. After that a familiar voice began calling at intervals.
“Hello,” said Peter at last. “What have I been doing?”
“Not anything that you've pulled before. Is this an old habit?”
“What?”
“Passing out unhurt—lying like a log for an hour or two?”
“No, it's a new one. Where are we?”
“Judenbach. It's past supper time—”
Peter sat up, wobbled. The terrible hands steadied him again. He knew now what had lamed him.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I was wondering what hit me?”
“Now, you're getting glib again,” said Boylan. Peter's reserve had interposed. His absence had something to do with her, but he could not remember. “Where is she?” had got away from him as he crossed the border back into the racking physical domain. He didn't like that.
“Did I say anything?”
“Nothing that will be used against you,” Boylan observed. “As for what hit you—that's the mystery. Not a scratch in sight.... I was behind. You were standing still as a sentry after that shrapnel. Presently you bowled over—”
“That shrapnel?”
“Yep—”
There was an instant of silence; the picture returned and wrung a groan from Peter. All the energy of his life rebelled againstthe fact. Boylan's hand tightened upon him. For the moment Mowbray was in a kind of delirium.
“The moon had just come up,” he said, “like another sun. The real sun was still in the sky from our hill.”
“I know. I was there. Cut it, Peter.”
“Where is Samarc?”
“In one of the hospital buildings, likely. I meant to find him as soon as I could leave you—”
“I'll go with you.”
Big Belt fumbled in his saddled bags for a flask, brought it in one hand, a cup of water in the other....
They were in the streets, very dark. Once they were caught in a swift current of sheep driven in for the commissary. Judenbach sat on the slope of a hill, a little city, its heart of stone, very ancient, its “hoopskirts,” as Boylan said, made of woven-cane huts. Already the stone buildings of the narrow main street were crowded with wounded. The correspondents were not permitted far either way from headquarters. Finally it was necessary to get Dabnitz of the staff to conduct them.... It had all been a jumble of ambulances at nightfall from the field, the lieutenant said. Russian soldiers were not ticketed. Many faces on the cots were bandaged beyond recognition. The three gave up at midnight, Peter gaining strength rather than losing it in the later hours. Orders were that the streets be emptied of all but sentries.
“No, nothing like that—” said Boylan, as Mowbray sank to the floor by his blanket roll. “You haven't had supper—”
“Don't, Boylan.... I say, what do they do with the dead?”
Rain was pattering down; the smell of drugs reached them.
“Itdoesmake a difference when you know one of them—doesn't it?.... God, man, we're cluttered with wounded. The dead are at peace—”
“I wonder what stars he's watching to-night?”
“Come, come. Peter—”
“I know.... I know, Boylan. Only it shows me something. He was a great workman. There are things in the world that can't be done because he's gone. There are others like him. He had a girl. He had a friend. He had us—”
Boylan decided that talking was good. He listened and prepared soup.
“And to-morrow they're at it again,” said Peter.
“It won't look the same in the morning—”
Peter did not answer.
“Anyway, you didn't bring on the war, Peter—”
“It makes a man cold with that kind of cold a supper-fire don't help.”
“Peter, you've got me stopped with your moods—like a woman. Women were always too profound for Mr. B. B. Boylan—”
“Sorry. You've been a prince. I'll do better now. I'll get out of it. Little shock—that's all. I think it wasn't so much physical. Something changed all around. I've been taking things as I found them so long. That helps to bring on a war—”
Boylan glanced at him narrowly.
Peter laughed. “I'm all right. Head's working.”
Big Belt sighed. “I loved that little guy, too. God, I'd run east to Asia and keep on running rather than meet his girl.”
Peter drank hot soup and slept. Next morning it was like a hard problem that one has slept upon and awakened with the process and answer straight-going. They had not searched ten minutes (calling “Samarc” softly among the cots where the faces were bandaged) before a hand came up to them. It was Peter who took it; and as their hands met, the whole fabric of the man on the cot broke into trembling. They understood. Samarc had been lying there rigid with his tragedy. Peter's touch had been enough to break the dam of his misery.
“I have ceased to kill,” he said.
The head was twice as big with bandages; yet under that effigy, so terrible was the intensity of the moment, Peter became conscious of ruin there, also of a sudden icy cold in the morning air. Samarc's powerful hand still clutched his. The voice that had emerged from under the cloths was still in his ears. It had seemed to come as water from a pipe—loosely, the faucet gone. The hand was unhurt.
“...He came in the night. I did not speak—but my heart was fighting against the guns. He was moving here and there. He turned to me, as if I had suddenly cried out, 'What shall I do?'...'You can cease to kill,' he said.”
Boylan was watching Peter. His face turned gray.
They received the intelligence of the words, as they came, although at another time the mouthing would have been inarticulate as wind in one of Judenbach's archaic street-lamps.
“I'll stay with him, Boylan,” said Peter, choosing the hardest thing, but Big Belt would not leave, though the Russian columns were moving in the street—off to renew the battle among the hills. The two sat by until Samarc slept.
They were in the street again, moving close to the walls, for the cavalry was crowding the narrow highway. They crossed finally to a stone-paved area at the side of Judenbach's main building. Their feet were upon the stone flags of this court, when Dabnitz suddenly hurried forward, with a gesture for them to stand back.
“Just a moment, my friends,” he said. “A little formality, but very necessary—”
Peter lifted his eyes, perceived three men standing bare-headed against the wall of head-quarters, twenty paces away. One of them exclaimed, his voice calm but penetrating:
“We are not spies. We do not care to turn our backs. We are not afraid to die, for we have made our lives count—”
It was the voice of a public speaker; the voice of a man making good many words.... Dabnitz stepped between Boylan and Mowbray, stretching out his arms before them. It was all in an instant. They saw Dabnitz's apologetic smile—and a Russian platoon at their right, rifles raised—then the ragged volley.
Each of the three fell differently.
Boylan and Peter sat together in the ante-room of headquarters. They did not speak. Peter was getting down to the quick. He thought many things which a man never tells another man, and seldom tells a woman; yet they were matters of truth and reason, no sentiment about them. He recalled many incidents of early years in which his mother had tried to teach him sensitiveness and mercy. Until now her effort seemed to have been wasted. It had been more simple and appealing to him to follow his father's picture of manhood. Possibly his mother had wearied of pitting her will against his. He had grown up under his father's control and ideal. As it looked to him now, he had become all that was obvious and average and easy; while his mother's passion had been for him to become one of the singular and precious and elect.... He would never have seen this so clearly had it not been for Berthe Wyndham. She had given him a kind of new birth, taken up the work wherein his mother had failed....
Dabnitz came in. The young staff-officer was handsome, soldierly, black-eyed. His manner was one of enfolding cheerfulness. He had proved fair and kindly, temperate in his tastes and delicate in his appreciations of humor and natural effects. He could express himself fluently in Russian, German, English and French, but was a caste-man to the core, a militarist and autocrat. As such he proved rather appalling to Peter Mowbray on this day.
“Is General Kohlvihr out with the fronts?” Boylan asked.
“He's in the field, but not at the front. We got the point yesterday, you see. I'd rather be in the van every day than left to these matters of clean-up—”
Peter looked up at him. “Is there much of this to do?”
“I'm afraid so. They work among the hospitals. You don't catch many of them in the ranks—”
“Perhaps they would rather tend the wounded than to make the wounds.”
Dabnitz smiled cheerfully. “They're afraid of their hides. When a man does a lot of talking, he is generally shy on action—”
Peter saw the ease of the acceptance of this view on the part of the others; saw how clearly it was the view of the military man.
“And yet it was a clean-cut death of that talker and his two companions you just executed—”
“An exception now and then,” Dabnitz granted.
“How do you catch them?”
“We have a system at work for that purpose—everywhere, especially in the hospitals. There isn't much temporizing when we get them.”
Peter Mowbray's skull prickled with heat and his face was cold with sweat.
“What do they preach?” he managed to ask.
“Sometimes for men to rise and go home; sometimes for them to cease to kill, and sometimes to shoot down the officers. It isn't all that a man has to do now to lead his men forward,” Dabnitz observed. “He must do that, of course, but all the danger isn't in front. It doesn't follow that a man has turned his back upon the enemy nowadays—if he happens to be found with a wound in the back.”
“Were these—these that you put out this morning—working in the hospitals?”
“Yes.”
Peter turned away.
“In a good many cases we bring a man to his feet again from a bad wound—to find him not a soldier but a damned anarchist.”
“It's expensive and cumbersome also to carry such a hospital system afield,” Peter observed.
Dabnitz did not catch the irony. “Yes, it would be cheaper and simpler to put a hard-hit soldier out of his misery—”
Boylan, watching Peter's face, suddenly arose, suggesting that they ride out toward the fighting. ....When they were alone, he added:
“I know you don't want the front to-day, but it was very clear that I'd better get you out of there....Peter, did you ever kill a man?”
“No.” The question did not seem wild to either of them—there by the open court of Judenbach.
“I knew a man who did. I saw him getting whiter and whiter like your face—and looking into his victim's eyes in that queer surprised way you looked at Dabnitz. It wasn't in the field; in a city bar-room. I didn't look for what happened—but I knew something was coming. The fool went on talking, talking. The other watched him, and when all the blood was burned out of him....Great God, here I am talking blood—”
“It's in the air,” said Peter. “It's hard to breathe!.... No, I won't go down front to-day. I wish I could go back—back—oh, to the clean Pole—no, to some little snowy woods in the States....Boylan, does it suffocate you?”
“It's different from anything I knew,” said Boylan. “It's so damned businesslike. Something's come over the world. War was more like a picnic before. I never saw it like this. I believe we've gone crazy.”
They stood before the main building, just at the entrance of the stone court—halted by the hideous outcry that reached them from another building just a few doors below. It was as if a strong man were being murdered by torture. The big cannons boomed up the narrow cobble-paved road from the field. As far as they could see in either direction, the street was crowded with soldiers, stepping aside for artillery going south, and the stream of ambulances coming in from the front. Passing them now from the street into the court was a cortege, little but grim—a Cossack trooper leading two bare-headed men by a rope attached to his saddle, a Cossack non-commissioned officer walking behind with raised pistol. Both the prisoners were young, one a mere boy, yet he was supporting the elder. Peter's eyes turned to the blank wall of the main building where Dabnitz had been busy as they passed. To the right, in the gloom from the walls, was a row of iron gratings, the windows knocked out—darkness under the low stone lintels.
Peter had not noticed before this dim square, within the square. His mind dwelt upon it now in the peculiar way of the faculties, when thoughts are too swift and too terrible to bear....It was like something he had seen before, the dark little square. Yes, it was like part of a recess yard he had known in an old school-building years ago....
He couldn't keep off the reality long. In every direction the murderous army—no song, no laugh, no human nature, no love, no work, but death. He was imprisoned. And somewhere near or far in the midst of such a chaos, was Berthe Wyndham. Could she live in this?.... Peter was suicidal, very close to that, a new thing to him. Queerly he realized that death would be easy for himself, simple, acceptable. For there was no escape. They would not let him go. There was no place that one could go out of the army. Not even the dead go back.... It would not be fair to her. She might live, and call to him afterward. He did not think she could live, but there was that chance. He thought of his mother—quite as a little boy would, his lip quivering.... He started at the touch of Boylan's hand.
“I'll tell you what we'll do,” Big Belt said. “We'll write, Peter. We'll get out the machines to-day. We'll write a story—just as if we could file it on a free cable. It will do us good. We'll tell the story—”
“We'd have to eat it....Boylan, if I should tell this story on paper, the Russians would burn it and me and the house in which it was written....No. I must work better than that. Come back. I want Dabnitz—”
Boylan drew him face about.
“You're not going to—”
“No—no. I wasn't thinking of killing him. It wouldn't do any good. One would have to kill all the officers and save enough energy for the Little Father at the last. No, I want him to help me—”
They found him at headquarters.
“Lieutenant Dabnitz,” Peter said, his hand upon the Russian's shoulder, speaking very quietly, “I feel like a fool doing nothing all day long—and so much to do. I want you to take me over to that hospital Samarc is in, and set me officially to work. Let me be orderly, anything, to-day. I want to help, if you'll forgive me—”
“Gladly, Mr. Mowbray. I'm sure they'll be very glad. Of course, they are always short-handed in the hospitals.”
“Thanks.”
Boylan's heart gave a thump at the new light in Mowbray's eyes.
“I'll go along, too,” he said. “I'm the daddy of them all, when it comes to lifting.”
A ragged platoon volley crashed from the court as they entered the street. Peter's steps quickened.
Of course, they did not know it inThe States''office, neither the Old Man nor his managing editor, but a way had been found torockPeter Mowbray. Indeed he would have been rocked to pieces had he not found his work that day in Judenbach. ....When no one was listening, he would talk to the wounded. Peter discovered that there was a woman in him, as many a field-man has discovered. In fact he came to believe that we are all mixed men and women, and that it is the woman in us that suffers most. He had a suspicion that there was a woman in Boylan, and had to smile just there. He sank into the work, and saved himself. Samarc appeared to be asleep.
He would have laughed to have heard his own talk afterward. A man does not remember what he says to a loved horse, or to a dog that looks up in passing. Innocent as that, Peter's sayings to the wounded and dying. Had there been spies about, the American would have been counted eminently safe. He had to talk; his heart was so full; it was part of the action that saved him. All the time there was in the background of his mind a steady amazement at himself—something of his, aloof, watchful, that was not exactly ready to accede to all this change and emotion, and yet was not strong enough to prevent.
Twice through the long forenoon he saw a little black-whiskered orderly, eyes dark and wide and deep, his nose sensitive and finely shaped, his shoulders unsoldierly. Once his cap fell as he went to lift a pan, and Peter saw as noble a brow as ever dignified a man. He went to him and, as he stood there, he found there was nothing to say.
“Who are you?” the other asked.
“That's what I was trying to think to ask you?” Peter said with a smile. “I am Mowbray, an American correspondent—”
“Why are you here?” He pointed to the cots.
“I had to do something.”
“The misery called to you?”
“Perhaps. To be sure, I'd better say my own misery made me come.”
They talked in French.
“It is all the same. You are not a beast.”
“I'm not sure,” said Peter.
“That is good, too. I'm glad you have come. All morning I have watched you....”
“You did not answer me. Who are you?”
“I am Moritz Abel.”
He held a wash basin in one hand, a bit of linen in the other—this man who had done such a poem that the glory of the future flashed back through it, to sustain and to be held by men. It was a queer moment. Facing each other, Mowbray thought of Spenski—as if the little lens-maker stood behind the narrow shoulders of the poet.... Was it only the little red-headed body that they had killed? Would the immortal come back with a new story of the stars? Thus Peter found himself thinking of Spenski, with this lover of new Russia before him. And would the destroyers slay this one too?... Now his humanity came back in a cloud, and he shuddered at the thought of Russia murdering the man who wroteWe Are Free.... Perhaps it was the woman in him that made him say:
“I hopeyoulive through the long night, Monsieur.”
Moritz Abel stepped nearer. In the silence Peter grew embarrassed. What he had said would sound without footing since the poet did not understand the trend of his thoughts. He meant to, add whatthe long nightsignified, and wanted his saying really known for what it was—an utterance of pure passion against the destruction of genius. The other replied, making all explanation unnecessary:
“I knew you for one of us. It is the long night, but it is a great honor for us to be here and at work.”
“Where are your companions?”
The Russian smiled. “They are all about through the dark of the long night. We may only signal in passing. In fact, I must go now—”
The surgeon in charge had entered. Peter went to Samarc's cot, steeling himself. “Samarc,” he whispered, without bending, “Samarc—”
The wounded man stirred a little, moaned, but did not answer.... In the far corner Boylan was moving cots (occupants and all) closer together for the admission of more. His sleeves were rolled. Near him a little woman, whose waist was no larger than the white revelation of Boylan's forearm, was directing the way, the giant of the Polar Failure struggling to please. Something of ease and uplift had come to Peter from this, and from the passing of Moritz Abel. Silently battling with Dabnitz, with Kohlvihr, with king's desire and the animal of men, was this service-thing greater than all, greater than death.... A soldier called and he went toward the voice. Presently Peter was jockeying him into good humor with low talk.
All day the battle tortured the southern distance—the cannonading nearer, as the hours waned. The Austrians were holding their own or better. It was the fiercest resistance which the Russian columns had as yet encountered. All afternoon wounded were brought back. It became more and more difficult to move among the cots in the building. So it was with all Judenbach that was not in ruins. Twice through the afternoon there were volleys in the court below; and when the two went forth for food, they saw a soldier carrying baskets of dirt from the street, and covering the stone flags close to the main building.... And from that grim house a little down the street, came at intervals, shocking their senses, the hideous outcry as of murder taking place.... Boylan went down into the field an hour before sunset, Peter back to the hospital.
“I'll see what I can find,” Big Belt remarked. “You're right to go back, Peter. As for me, I can stand it better outdoors.”
Crossing the street, it seemed to Peter that he had been in Judenbach certain ages, a reckonable space of eternity—despite the lowering sun which calmly informed him that at this time yesterday the Austrians had found the range of Samarc's battery with a shrapnel or two. Many things had come to him. He wished as never before for a free cable.... Boylan came in at dark and drew him away from Samarc's cot.
“I'll be back to-night,” Peter promised.
“...There's been no break in the check to-day,” Big Belt reported. “Kohlvihr's division, and the immediate forces surrounding, are part of the great right wing, and this right is holding up the whole Russian command. I heard Kohlvihr explaining to the Commander's aide that the Austrians here had been reinforced; that they gave us Judenbach for the taking yesterday, in order to fall back into the hills beyond. The center and left, it appears, is clear, ready to fight on to Berlin or Budapest, but the whole line is held up for this right wing. Kohlvihr is desperate. There'll be a hard pull to get across the hills to-morrow—all hands, Peter.”
“This may be our last night in Judenbach then?”
“If killing a division will start a hole across that range of hills, it's our last night—”
“I'll sit it out with Samarc,” Peter said.
“Go to it, if you think best. You were a mighty sick woman this morning. Something in yonder helped you. I'll see you through for another treatment.”
“Boylan, don't you stay up. You've roughed it to-day and been afield. Don't let me spoil your sleep—with a big day ahead. It wasn't lack of sleep that got my nerve this morning—”
“Oh, I'll yap around till bedtime,” said the other. “What does Samarc say?”
“Something has come over him. Some one came to him last night and seemed to drive a nail right into his thinking—pinned him.”
“He's turned against the killing?”
“Yes. And he'll be restless to-night, sleeping so much to-day.... At least, he made the appearance of sleeping. I think he was shocked to hear his voice.... His eyes are right enough. But below—”
“What made you think he had the appearance of sleeping?”
“It just occurred to me. He didn't want to take all my time. I whispered his name several times—no answer. Once when I was leaving, his hand reached up and touched my coat.”
“Is he hurt badly?”
“Not a thing in the body. It's between his throat and his eyes.... You know I saw him last night after the shrapnel as he lifted—it was just a sheet of blood. Afterward it was covered in cloth. I don't think he knew until this morning, when he started to talk.”
“He was all knit to the little man,” Boylan said. “As good a pair as I ever met afield.... Oh, I say, eat something—”
Peter smiled at the big fellow and turned to his soup and black bread. He didn't say what he thought, but it had to do with his own field companion this time.
* * *
...Midnight. Boylan had gone back to quarters. Peter's ward was low-lit and still. ...The wounded man's hands waved before his bandage, as if to detract attention from the windy blur of his utterance. Samarc wanted to die.
“You know it was because of me that he came—” he repeated.
“But you mustn't suffer for that. Really, Samarc, a man couldn't have been a better friend than you. Spenski would tell you so if he could. These are times for men tolive. I wanted to kill myself this morning. You know I was behind you on the hill, too. That, and the tragedy all about, and then they were murdering spies and martyring real Fatherland men out in the court—as if there wasn't enough death afield. It was too much for me. Old Boylan helped me, but if I hadn't come in to work, I'd have shot my head off. Here—men dying hard and easy; men and women serving; so much to do,—I got better. Death isn't everything. I'm not a genius or a dreamer, man. I'm so slow at dreaming and brotherhood and all that, that a woman once ran from me. But I saw to-day that death isn't all. I don't know what else there is, but this is a sort of long night, this war. A few of us are awake. If we are put to sleep—that's all right—I mean knocked out, you know. But so long as we are not, we've got to watch and root for the dawn. God, man, there is much to do. We've got to make our lives count—”
He was bending forward talking very low. He thought from the pressure of Samarc's hands that he was gaining ground. It was queer and laughable to himself—this line of talk that came to him. He knew so well the pangs of that suicidal suffocation, that he could talk for the very life of the other. He added:
“A little black-whispered man looked up from his soap and towels this morning. His hat fell off, and I saw he had come a long ways. He looked at me again, and I spoke to him. Samarc, it was another of these little whirlwinds of human force—a master workman like the man you loved.
“It was Moritz Abel who wroteWe Are Free....
“And there are others—like Spenski and Abel—some of them dead—some to die to-morrow. Do you think the good God would let them die so easily if it wasn't all right? But we mustn't die without making our lives count.”
Peter's eyes were covered by slender hands. It was like passing a garden of mignonette in the night, that fleeting perfume of the hands.
“Oh, Peter, how sweet to see you and hear your voice!”
It seemed that he became molten in her presence. A heavenlyadagioafter a prolonged movement of sin and shame and every dissonance. It was as if she had come from a bath of peace to him; another inimitable moment in the life of his romance. He turned to her, holding fast to the hand that was stretched toward him. He cleared his voice.
“Excuse me, Samarc,” he said.
They looked long into each other's faces. “You were wonderful as you spoke of your friend. Did you know that, Peter?”
He turned away deprecatingly.
“Forgive me. Of course you didn't know.”
“...And you meant to come all the time?” he asked at last.
“Yes.”
“I should have known it.... That day—that day across the siding—why, Berthe, it was almost more than I could stand. I had just been thinking of you.”
“We were like two spirits who hadn't earned the right to be together,” she said.
“I'm afraid it's dangerous now,” he answered. “One mustn't have a whim, other than to extinguish the enemy. The army is afraid of itself. All day—”
Though he checked himself, she knew his thought.
“Yes, all day, they murdered white-browed men in the court below.”
“Berthe—”
“Yes.”
“I want you to guard your life—as if it were mine—just that.”
All surroundings were melting away from them. She had never seen him like this.... Even Samarc could not hear their whispers.
“You came like an angel, Berthe,—all I ever want of an angel. I tell you I am proud.”
“Of what, Peter?”
“That I had sense enough to go a second time to the Square at Warsaw.”
“I'm glad, too.... If we were only in the winter stillness—”
They were silent. Samarc's hand came up to Peter, and drew him close. It was clear that he could not bear the woman to hear his struggle for speech. “Tell her about Spenski,” came to Peter's ears in the lipless mouthing.
Berthe saw that Peter was ghostly white, as he lifted his head. She thought it had to do with what the wounded man said.
Peter began at random, gathering his thoughts on the wing. Nothing hurt him in quite the same way as that suggested havoc under the bandage. He steadied himself, and talked of the little lens-maker. Strength came from the joy he was giving Samarc.... It seemed that they were quite alone. He told of the night of stars, of the little man's superb sensitiveness.... She bent to Samarc at last.
“You wanted him to tell me?”
He nodded. There was something intensely pathetic in it all. Her eyes were full of light.
“The story thrills me,” she whispered. “Oh, this is very far from a hopeless world. What I have seen to-day—even the fortitude of infamous men—manhood, black and white—the war within the war. Don't you see, all Russia is out here in the wilderness casting forth her demon? We must not mind blood nor death—for the result means the life or death of the world's soul!”
Once she would have seemed very far and remotely high to Peter Mowbray.... They had drawn a little apart from the cot.
“What made you so white?” she asked.
“It's my weakness. We rode together for days and quartered together. He was so clean-cut. It's the way his words come. And he seems so utterly bereft without the little man.”
She pressed his hand in understanding.
“Berthe, do you sleep? Do you take food? Are you well? Are they good to you? Can you live through?”
“Yes, and what of you?”
“All is quite well with me. I can endure anything with the hope of taking you home afterward.”
“We must be ready to give up that, too. It is hard; it's our ordeal—but if the end should appear, we must find strength to look it in the face. These are the times for heroics. Every real emotion that I have ever known is a lie—if those who love each other well enough to love the world—do not pass on. Why, Peter, you said the same to him—speaking of his friend and Moritz Abel, 'Do you think the good God would let such men die so easily, if it weren't all right?'”
“Did I say that?”
She drew back her head, looking him through and through.
“Peter, it's the child in you that I love. You're so much a man, and they all think of you as a man, man—all your training to be a man—and yet it's the child that a woman's heart sees and wants to preserve for her own.”
“Do you see much of Moritz Abel?” he asked.
“Yes.... It was he who found you for me.”
Peter was watching her red lips now. It was like that morning in her room, the tall flowers between. He did not hear what she was saying. The room was dim. Samarc's face was turned from them. One man in a near cot flung his arms about his head wearily, but his eyes were toward the wall.... He caught her in his arms and loved the beauty of earth in her face.
“...Peter, we must forget ourselves!”
“I can't forget you. I want you as you are,” he repeated in tumult. “I want you here in the world—as you are now! We'll stand for what we can't help. There's no use fighting the end if it comes. The greatest thing here to a man will be the greatest thing after he's dead—that's clear enough. But I haven't had you here—only a few minutes. I want the winter stillnesson earth—in the woods—not in some paradise yet.”
“Hush—I want it too. Oh, you can never know how much!... I had better go now—”
“Not until I know all about you. To-morrow is to be the big day of the battle. All may be changed. If it's a Russian victory, this is our last night in Judenbach—”
“You will go out to the fronts?”
“Yes, for a little, but I shall watch how the day fares, so I can hurry back.”
“To-day—we were just a stone's throw apart. I was in that building down the street—the amputation cases.”
“Not the house where those cries come from?”
“Yes, we work there. Moritz Abel, Fallows, Poltneck, the singer, and others.... This morning I thought I could not bear to live. It was as you told him—about yourself. You see we had no anesthesia, except for cases of life or death—among the officers.”
“And you came to me from a day like that?” he asked unsteadily, his passion blurred, even the beauty of it. The chance of her living had suddenly darkened.
“It was like coming home,” she whispered. “...In Warsaw before your day—sometimes crossing the Square in the darkness—I used to think what it would mean to come to a house of happiness, after a long cruel day. It seemed too far from me; sometimes even farther than now. When I came in here to-night, and heard your voice—I knew what it would mean to come home. We must not ask too much. Many have never known what has been given to us—in these few minutes.”
“We must not ask too much,” he repeated.
She saw that he had a vivid picture of her day in that house of amputations, that the picture had stunned him.
“But, Peter, I have seen such courage to-day. It was a revelation. All that I had seen of isolated courage before in the world—all was there to-day, and ten times more, there in the blood and torture. And Poltneck sang to them—sang to the maimed and limbless—sang through the probings—with the sound of the cannon in the distance and more wounded coming in. He sang of home and Fatherland—even of the old Fatherland. The many love the old still; it is only the few who love the dream of the new.... We must not ask too much. The new spirit is being born into the world. This war is greater than we dream of. In Warsaw I could see only the evil, but here—under everything—is the humble and the heroic in man. Hate and soldiery are just the surface. That which is beneath will be above—”
She was far from him now; the white flame in her face. He saw that he could only go on through the days and work and wait and trust in the God he had told Samarc to trust in. How easily—without an impress of memory, he had said that; and how heroic to accomplish—for mere man.
He did not answer—just looked at her. He saw her turn and smile. Moritz Abel was standing there.
“I cannot tell you—what it meant to me to see you two standing so,” he said. “And this place of quiet—you two and your paradise!... Let me see, it occurred to me to suggest—”
He found himself reluctant to finish. He had spoken lightly as if to propose that they would be more comfortable in another room—but his thoughts concerned the volleys in the court. They knew it.
“The staff knows me rather well,” said Mowbray. “I was counting on that, but one cannot be sure—”
“There has been no secret,” she said. “Will you come in the morning before the columns go out?”
“Yes, it will be early.”
“I'll be watching. If not—he will be there to tell you why.”
Peter turned to the poet. “Watch over her—won't you?”
“You honor me, Mr. Mowbray. All that I can do—be very sure of.”
She went to Samarc's cot and took his hand. Peter saw her face differently, as she leaned. It was one of the mysteries that her tenderness was the face of one woman, her sorrow another.
“Good-by—good-night.”
.... A little later Peter found himself with Samarc's hand in his. He had been sitting by the cot watching the war within the war, head bowed on his free hand. It was a struggle of white and black—of knights and kings, plumes and horses, white and black.... Now the wounded man seemed sending messages through his hand. The lamps were low.
“It's been the day of days, Samarc,” Mowbray said. “You brought me something that I needed very much. I wish I could do as much for you. Let me know, won't you, if I can?... Yes, I'll be right here through the night—”
He heard the tread of soldiers in the hollow-sounding court below—clanking accouterments, heavy steps. There was a halt, a voice, and a long moment before he breathed. It was just a change of sentries, perhaps.