Red Fleece | Page 7

deep, often turning to Peter with secret intentness, and openly regarding
the young woman with amazement and delight. Nearing fifty, Fallows
was tall, thin and tanned. The deep lines of his face were those which
make a man look homely to himself, but often interesting to others. His
soft, low-collared shirt was somewhat of a spectacle in consideration of
the angular and weathered neck. No rest could exist in the room that
contained such loneliness as burned from his eyes. It was said that he
had been rich, though everything about him was poor now. One would
suspect the articles in his pockets to be meager and of poor quality--the
things you might find in a peasant's coat. That which he called home
was a peasant's house in the Bosk hills--the house of the plowman of
Liaoyang, whose children he fathered. Annually, however, he went
abroad, telling the story of the underdog, usually making the big circuit
from the East to the West, and stopping at a certain little cabin within
hearing distance of the whistles of Manhattan, where his first disciple
worked in solitude mainly, and against the stream. Just now Fallows
was planning a different winter's work.... They talked of the first
fighting.
"The startling thing to realize is that for the present we are allied with

England," said Fallows. "I mean Russia. You see, I am Russian, now,
not the Russia of the Bear, but of the Man--"
Mowbray and the woman exchanged glances, each thinking of the
tea-cup in the afternoon.... The exile showed traces of his ten years'
training among simple men. Rhetoric and dithyramb were gone from
his speech and habit of mind. The whole study and vision of the man
was to make his words plain. Thus he said slowly:
"The peasants are children--children in mind and soul. We who have
come a little farther are responsible for them, as a father is responsible
for his children. So far we have wronged them, taught them to grasp
instead of to give, to look down instead of up. We have even stolen
from them the fruits of their looking down. The time is near at hand
when we shall have to pay for all this.... A true father would die for his
children. I know men who have done that, and there are men about us
here, even in Warsaw tonight, who are ready for that--"
Fallows' voice was tender. He watched the face of the woman as he
spoke. She was looking hard into the fire.
Fallows added: "There are fifty million men here in Russia--roughly
speaking. Very strong, very simple, possibly very brutal men, but brutal
as a fine dog is brutal, a simplicity about that. I do not idealize them. I
have lived among them. I know this: They might be led to virtue,
instead of to wickedness. My heart bleeds for them being led to
slaughter again. The hard thing is to make them see, but the reason for
that is simple, too. If they could see--they would not be children. They
must be led. Never in modern history have they been purely led. Words
cannot make them see; wars so far have not made them see. It may be
that the sufferings and heroisms of this war shall be great enough to
make them see...."
"What would you have the peasants see first?" Peter asked.
"Their real fathers--that men of wisdom and genius are the true fathers
of the Fatherland, not the groups of predatory men. True fathers would
die for their children. To me it has been blasphemy, when the nations

of the past have called themselves Fatherlands. I would have the
peasants fathered by men who realize that the peasants are the strength
and salt of the earth; men who realize that the plan of life is good--that
the plan of life is for concord and service each to the other--that the
hate of man for man is the deadly sin, the hell of the world--that the
fields and all the treasures of the mother earth are for those who serve
and aspire, and not for those who hold fast, look down and covet
more."
Mowbray was interested in the fact that Fallows had passed the stage of
eloquence and scorn and burning hatred against evil in persons and
institutions. There was no hue and cry about his convictions. He
seemed to live in continual amazement at the slowness with which the
world moves--the slowness to a man who is ahead and trying to pull his
people along. Moreover there was that final wisdom which Fallows
revealed from time to time--momentary loss of the conviction that he
himself was immortally right. Fallows saw, indeed, that a man may be
atrociously out of plumb, even to the point of becoming