Red Fleece | Page 4

she said. "You would dare anything. I know your quiet, deadly kind of courage. That's the first thing I felt about you."
It was like Mowbray not to acknowledge that such a thing had been said.
"I came to you asleep. I wonder if I should always have remained asleep?"
"Your words are pretty, Peter. It makes me sad that you are going away."
"You remember that company of soldiers that passed us yesterday as we walked? I had seen many such groups before--great shocky-haired fellows who ate and drank disgustingly. But yesterday you made me see that their blood is redder than the Little Father's--that empires ripen and go to seed only on a grander scale than turnips." Her eyes were gleaming.
"We who are so wise, who have mastered ourselves, should be very good to the peasants--and not take what they have and kill them in wars."
"Did I lead you to believe in any way that I felt myself mastered?" he asked quickly.
She touched his arm. "I was talking of the Fatherland," she answered.
He had met this intensity of hers before. Her scorn was neither hot nor cold, but electric. So often when words failed her, Peter fancied himself lost in some superb wilderness... Her own gray tone was in the room to-day--her gray eyes and black hair that made the shadows seem gray; her face that no night could hide from him. Sometimes his glance was held to her lips--as one turns to the firelight. Passion there--or was it the higher thing, compassion? There was bend and give to the black cloth she wore, as to the inflections of her voice. She could forget herself. That was the first and the inexhaustible charm.
It is true that she was very poor. This room which had become his sanctuary in Warsaw was in a humble house of a common quarter. She laughed at this, and at her many hours of work each day, for which the return was meager. There was the sweetest pathos to him in her little purse, and her pride in these matters was a thing of royalty.
"My father earned the right to be poor," she once said.
It seemed to him that her father was mentioned in the moments most memorable... She was at the window now, her hand lifting the shade. The light of the gray day shone through her fingers--a long, fragile hand that trembled.
"Shall we walk somewhere, or must you go to your office, Peter?"
"I won't, just yet. Yes, let's go outside."
They felt they must climb, a bit of suffocation in their hearts. Until to-day there had been invariable stimulus for Mowbray in the age of all things, even in the dusty, narrow, lower streets, but his smiling, easy countenance was a lie that he disliked now. It pinched him cruelly to leave her, and there was small amelioration in anything that the war might bring. She would give him sympathy and zeal and honor for the work and through all the lonely days, but what a lack would be of that swift directness of purpose, the deeper seeing, the glad capacity for higher heroism which he had found only in her presence. They crossed the riverward corner of the Square, where they had met. He tried to tell her how she had seemed that first day.
"I cannot understand," she replied. "Especially that day when I first saw you, I had nothing."
Now they ascended the terraces that commanded the Vistula. The rocky turf of the footpath, smoothed by the tread of forgotten generations (but still whispering to her of those who had passed on); the crumbling masonry of the retaining walls, gray with the pallor of the years; and afar the curving, dust-swept farmlands, which had mothered a thousand harvests, now moved with strange planting of peasant- soldiers. Mobilization business everywhere, drilling of the half- equipped, a singing excitement of parting, recruiting--no time for the actual misery.
They stood in the very frown of the fortress at sunset. A column of raw infantry came swinging out and started the descent. A moment afterward the roar of a folk-song came up in a gust. It was as if the underworld suddenly had been cratered.
"When they sing like that, and I think of what they shall soon be called upon to do--I can hardly endure it!" she whispered.... They stood with backs against the wall, as the tail of the column moved past. "Look at that weary one--so spent and sick--yet trying to sing--"
They were in the silence again. Across the river, against the red background, they watched another column of foot-soldiers moving like a procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery, just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in Austria