Red Fleece | Page 4

a woman like
you."
"I don't believe you're as cold-blooded as you try to seem, Peter."
"I have fought all my life to be cold-blooded."
She never forgot that. "I wonder why men do it?"
"It's the cultivation, perhaps, of that which Americans love best of all--"
"What?"
"Nerve."
"We of Poland dare to be emotional," she said.
"You are an older people. You know how."
"One needs only to be one's self."
Peter smiled. "Sometimes I dare actually to be honest with you. Even
Lonegan and I take no such liberties together."
"It isn't a matter of courage," 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