Red Fleece Part 15

The surgeon turned to the other cot. "Let this fellow sleep another day," he said.

The soldier lying there gave Peter a look almost uncanny in its grat.i.tude.

"Sit down, Samarc. I'll get you a blouse," the latter said and left the ward.

Chapter 4

Big Belt awoke early in his own quarters, and beat around under the blankets for his friend. Peter was not there. Boylan remembered and sat up. This was the day of the great battle, but there was to be breakfast first. He recalled what was in the saddle-bags. This proved unsatisfactory. Even that hinged on Peter, as every thought so far.

... Boylan now reflected that he might have stayed longer in the ward last night. There was just as much to hold him to the cot of Samarc as had called Peter. Altogether, the day was not beginning in a way to suit,

He sat in the center of a tired tangle of woolen blankets and buckled on his leggings. His face p.r.i.c.ked his chest as he bent forward. There was a stabbing run of ideas that had to do with marble baths, tepid plunges and fragrant steam. This collection he made haste to banish with matters of the day, and the absence of Peter,--but the pictures were various and persistent--exceptionally enticing baths from all his history recurring. He stretched out his gray woolen shirt and brushed it hard with handfuls of dried gra.s.s; he washed uncomfortably. It was like an ablution before one is undressed--that pervasive beard affair --and a general chill and dampness about clothes and boots that had not yet worked warm. The day was alternate gray and red. Noise gained in the street. Big Belt stepped forth.

Just at this moment he saw Peter Mowbray disappear into that grim street entrance from which the unspeakable human outcry had issued yesterday. He followed, twisting into doorways to let provision wagons pa.s.s, quickening his steps to cross between detachments of infantry. A certain dead cavalry horse was powerful in the air. Boylan knew exactly where it lay, for it had called attention these three days, an Austrian property, saddle and all, a ghastly outpouring upon the turf.

Boylan found himself stepping forward with a gladness that was answered with sharp objection by his own nature, and which he would not have let Peter Mowbray know for all Judenbach. He was disgusted with the weakness that made a man friend such a profound inst.i.tution in his breast.

The hall-way was dark. Boylan heard low voices; something from them prevailed to hush his entrance. In fact, at the turning he stood quite still for possibly three seconds. Beyond in the shadows Peter stood with a woman. Afterward Boylan recalled that there had been one poignant cry of pain from above, as if born of the monotone of moaning in that house.

They did not see him.... A little man appeared from the shadows, joined the two, and handed Peter a Russian blouse such as is worn by hospital stewards of the service. Peter thanked him; the other departed; the two were once more alone.... The huge scarred head of the old war-wolf withdrew jerkily; with stealth, he stepped back into the street. He did not stop until he reached his own quarters. There he found that he had not folded his blankets. In the midst of this work his hands stopped.... He was as accustomed as any man can be to unremoved horse by this time. It came steadily to his nostrils, mingled with the leathery smell of his own field-outfit. Presently he looked at his watch, and snapped the case shut with a crack. The strength of his fingers would have broken a filbert.

"Some men can find 'em anywhere," he muttered. "And such a one! She was a flame.... As for Mr. B. B.--it's dead horse all his days."

Chapter 5

Ashamed of himself, Big Belt waited to see if Peter would turn in to their quarters, as he approached carrying the hospital steward's blouse across his arm. Boylan would not call. It was like a woman's way--to learn if a man had forgotten her; still he would not call....

Clean-shaven, very straight and full of life, Peter approached, smiling at packers and soldiers, a smile for all the world. "Why not?"

Boylan thought. Peter did turn in, and came toward him, hand out.

"Tomato ketchup with duck's eggs. Draw up a chair," said Boylan. He appeared just now to see the steward's blouse.

"Samarc takes the field to-day. It's for him," Peter explained....

"He's going out to kill himself. Only one reservation--that he kill no one else."

Boylan seemed staring at Peter's knees.

"You're letting the ketchup burn," Peter said mildly.

"I suppose that's what he really means to do," Big Belt observed, after a moment. "And what are we to do about it?"

"I thought I would stand by a little--not so as to be a nuisance, you know--"

"Naturally not. Of course."

They ate in silence--a thousand things to say.

"I won't be very far from the staff," said Peter, hurrying back to the hospital. "Poor old Samarc has two wounds, you know--"

It wasn't a day to explain things--not a day to talk. Men afield can never tell what they are doing; some devilish irony is in the air.

They laugh; they listen; they hope--only a jest comes. The most thrilling and stupendous situations bring forth but a curse or a roar.

Human throats are inarticulate, afield; the reality that voices heroic utterance and makes it memorable is not at work in man-fabric; splendid faces and brave actions--but the words are the revealers of emptiness. For the animal is awake and upstanding; the spirit that quickens reality is apart.

The battlefield opened to Mowbray's eyes that day with abnormal clearness, as if he had brought rest and reflection to a problem that long had harried him, He felt singularly light and full of ease--as one does sometimes in the first hours of the day after a sleepless night. The day was wild with west wind, a touch of south still clinging. The east arrayed itself again and again in all the delicate blends of pink and gray, watery yellow, rose, and azure; a different arrangement at each glance, as if separate groups of maidens followed each around a Roman bath.

Samarc was given a seat in an ammunition wagon, with orders to join his battery. Peter found his horse, already saddled by Boylan, and overtook the wagon train as it left the town. In a halt for the way to clear, Kohlvihr and his staff pa.s.sed, Dabnitz and Boylan riding together. The General sat soft and lumpy in the saddle, his eyes small and feverish, his face hotly red. The staff pa.s.sed on, all except Boylan believing that the correspondent had fallen in behind. Riding with the wagons, Peter frequently turned to the terrifying bandage above the steward's blouse. When the light was right, he caught a glint of the eyes beneath.

The way became steep for the wagons as they neared the emplacements.

Peter swung off and led his pony. Infantry was already engaged down in the hollows; the reek of powder began to cut the air at intervals, but the strong wind as often cleansed it away, and the scent of woods came up startlingly, with the warmth of the sun upon the ground--the sweet healing breath of drying cedar boughs.

He was sorry now he had roughed it with the young doctor; that sort of thing was very far from him. He had no memory of another episode like it. On occasion, dropping into the queerest abstractions, he fancied _her_ near.... It had been like a soldier leaving his lady for the battle--the precious few minutes less than an hour ago. She had promised to be with him. There had been no talk nor thought of the terrifying day she faced in the hospital; everything had to do with his taking the field. She would follow him with her thoughts. Perhaps he would find his soul out there, she suggested, as he had never found it before. Peter wondered now just what she meant by that. It was not his way to fall back upon any such abstraction.

He reflected how her presence always changed him, gave him strength of a different sort, and directness of aim.... It was true that she seemed near--on the other side from Samarc--a part of the mountain fragrance that would not be overpowered in the gun-reek. He felt if he could turn quickly enough he would catch the gleam of her colors. This was her country. She was of the north and the cold lands; she belonged to the purity of the cedars.

He played with the thought that she was near; and from the thought, because it was good, a glimpse of the future came to him--the peace to come, when men would dwell again with their loves, and the dream of superb affiliation would come true. All this madness of men would pa.s.s, as the rising powder-reek would pa.s.s from these Galician hills, and leave them their silence and their natural fragrance.

The wagons had gone on. Samarc's battery might have been rubbed out for all their ability to find it. All faces strange--gunners, range- finders, and the cartridge hands. Peter felt a horror in his breast for the immediate presence of the guns--as if he had reached the end of toleration in the one day with them. Samarc felt this hate, too, his ruling pa.s.sion.... Any moment one of the rapid-firers might drum into action. Their sense was one--that something would be uncoupled in their minds. They turned, Peter laughing at his desire to run--as they found another group of machines emplaced in a rocky shelter a little higher than the spot where the shrapnel had struck three days before.

No one called to them as they turned back. A small belated wagon train rumbled by, but no one hailed them from the seats. They were free, alone. Peter inhaled the scent of the forest, sharp again from the acrid taint of the cool, hazy air. He loved the sweet mountain wind as never before--almost as if he were to leave it all. There was little need of exchange of words. Each understood mainly the thoughts of the other. Big guns thundered at each other from the remoter hills. Again they saw an infantry movement start forth below--the endless strings of infantry along the broad lower slopes. They stopped to watch them.

Creatures of the hollows, their business to rise and be swept back-- marching forth now--Kohlvihr's command. Peter's eyes filled and his throat stopped at the spectacle of the gray lines. Surely something was the matter with him, he thought. Was it pathological--loss of sleep, or fatigue? Or was it something that Spenski and Abel, the field and hospital; more than all was it something that Berthe Wyndham had given him? In any event, it seemed as if those infantry lines marching out now to the burning front were being torn from his own breast, every _moujik_ precious. He wanted to be with them, not with the heinous guns. He wished he could spare them, stop the continual sacrifice. Miles of gray lines moving out now. ...His companion's tugging hand.

It dawned upon Peter before many sounds that Samarc wanted to go alone. He pointed the trail back around the hills toward Judenbach, where it would meet the road Kohlvihr had taken, suggesting that Peter join the staff. He, Samarc, would continue the search for his battery.

As a rule Mowbray was the last to continue in the presence of a man who wanted him to go; and yet, he knew that Samarc hated the field pieces as much as he, and that he did not mean to live through the day. He hesitated. The final urging was pitiful--a sort of tumult from under the cloths.

"Nothing doing, Samarc," he said suddenly. "You and I for it--at least a while yet. I say--do the hard thing. The little man would have it so. We'll go down closer to the infantry stuff and forget ourselves."

...Yes, Samarc would do the hard thing. There was grat.i.tude for which Peter had no receptivity--grat.i.tude for the friendship, the night's watching. His hand was taken and carried to the other's breast, as only a Russian could do--and down they went together.

The infantry was their magnet as they made the down grade--miles of gray lines. The lower land was trampled and dusty; the breeze lost itself in the hollows. Just as an orchardist, discovering a certain parasite on his trees, thinks of a specific poison, so they knew that this great "forward" of the Russian foot-soldiers would start the Austrian machine and rapid-fire batteries.

They were moving now in front of a long line of new Russian works which had appeared deserted. Boylan would have known better; Samarc should have known. Peter had taken for granted that these had been emptied by the huge advances already in movement. They were in the path of Kohlvihr's reserves, it appeared, in the center of the line, when the signal "forward" was sounded. The works suddenly blackened with men. It was too much for the pony. Peter found a bridle with a broken throat latch in his hand, as he watched the little beast tear down the front, and heard the roar of laughter from the oncoming line.

The new front seemed endless in the rolling land. They were instantly enveloped. Out of the throng appeared one face that Peter had bowed to once or twice before--a captain, now working his way toward them. He glanced at the civilian insignia on Peter's sleeve, and said, with a smile:

"You've tricked us well this time, Mr. Mowbray. I hope you get back as cheerfully. You'll have to go forward now--at least, until we stretch out in skirmish. We're rather thick just here. Stay with my command--"

"We thought we were back of you," Peter said. "I a.s.sure you I didn't plan this, but it's very kind of you."

The Captain glanced at Samarc and turned to the American as they urged on.