Red Fleece | Page 5

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
for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being trained for
distant slaughter arenas.
"Do speak, Peter," she whispered.
He turned to find her white face looking up to him and very close. They
were alone.
"You won't mind if I think about myself this once?" he asked.
"Please do."
"I only want to say that, if you'll stay where you are, I'll come back
from this stuff--I was going to say, dead or alive."
"Do you mean I am to stay in Warsaw?" she asked.
"No--not that exactly. I mean if you will stay where you are in regard to
me----"
Tears filled her eyes. He would have known it even if they had not
shone through the dusk, because his fingers felt the tremor in her arms.
She tried to speak, but finished, "How utterly silly words are!"
The face of young Mowbray was strange with emotion, pale but
brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter
receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare and perfect was this
moment.
"Anyway--we understand. We understand, Berthe."

"...As for Berthe," she said slowly, as they walked back, "her heart will
stay where you have put it, Peter. That's out of her power to change.
But the rest--I can't tell, yet----"
It was as if a finger had crossed Mowbray's face laterally under the
eyes and across his nostrils, leaving a gray welt.
"I know you belong to the moderns," he said, after a moment. "We men
belong to the ancients. We want a woman to wait and weep while we
go off to the wars."
"We understand," she kept repeating.... "And now, before you go, come
home with me and let me make you a cup of tea--just a cup of tea--
before you go."
He went with her, and, when his tea-cup was finished, he happened to
look into the bottom.
"What do you see?" she asked quickly, taking the cup.
"M-m-m," said Mowbray.
Chapter 4
Peter and Lonegan were together at dinner three hours after the
message from The States.
"It's a big chance, Mowbray. That's all I can say. I stay at the wire --no
heroics."
"You ought to see it all from here."
Lonegan smiled deprecatingly. "Boylan will help you get through. You
don't know him yet. Some time, perhaps, you will--two hundred and
fifty pounds of soul. He'll do all he can to get you the same chance he
has, because I asked him; and then he'll try to make The States look
obsolete as a newspaper, wherein, of course, he'll fail. But he'll try. If
he takes to you, it won't make him try less, but he'd do your stuff and

his, if you fell sick. There isn't another Boylan--a great newspaper man,
too. The States will watch closely, knowing that Rhodes' will get
everything possible from Boylan's part of the front. The point is--and I
think he'll want it, too--you'd better work together on the main line of
stuff, as we do here. Your letters on the side should be better than his,
because you're a better writer. As for war stuff, Boylan is the old
master-- Peking, Manchuria and the Balkans--that I think of; also the
Schmedding Polar Failure. That last was war--a spectacular expedition
of the Germans--
"I might as well make this a lecture, now that I've started," Lonegan
went on. "The war game isn't complex. All the bewildering
technicalities that bristle from a military officer's talk are just big-name
stuff designed to keep down the contempt of the crowd--the oldest
professional trick. Whenever the crowd gets to understand your
terminology your game is cooked. You know how it is in a drug-store,
and you've seen the old family doctor look wise....
"There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics,
and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the
main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought
it and Genghis Khan--numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull
old flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the
bending back of wings, the crimp