Red Fleece Part 29

Peter heard this. It seemed that terrible hands had been tugging at his flesh for hours; yet he could not move, and lay upon a bed that swung and swayed and stumbled.

"Two American correspondents," the voice repeated.... "Search...."

Then Peter looked into the dazzle of a flashlight, and the familiar voice said:

"Yes, he's hard hit and heavy as h.e.l.l.... Pa.s.sports in hip pocket- handle him gently. ... Thanks, I'll take care of this man--unless you have a stretcher--"

"To whom were you formerly a.s.signed?"

"To Colonel Ulrich. We were across the river when that trap was sprung this afternoon--"

"Just about wiped you fellows out, didn't they?... Pa.s.sports right enough as far as I can see. Stay here, I'll try to get a conduct. I'm afraid there isn't any Colonel Ulrich--at least I am of that opinion...."

Peter was let down. It puzzled him a long time because the ground was still. The big hands eased. His familiar was beside him, however, wet and panting. Now Peter seemed to remember that he had messages to carry.

"There's no other way--I've got to get through the lines--"

"Quite right," Boylan answered.

"I don't want to fail. She wouldn't look twice at a man who failed--"

"h.e.l.l, child, sit still. She'd look twice if you failed a thousand times.... Hai, don't tear open a man's bridle arm. What is it?"

"He was hump-backed--no lips--teeth like a dog--and the trooper shot him through the mouth--"

"I know, but he's dead. His back is straight now--don't look any worse now than ten thousand others...."

For a long time all was bewilderment. He had been lifted and lost consciousness again in the wrenching of the hands. Then slowly he came back and eternity began as before, his bed swaying and straining. The familiar voice was near, the German ahead. Sentry after sentry was pa.s.sed, and each time deadly waiting.... In s.n.a.t.c.hes he understood that the voice always near was Boylan's, but as often forgot it again.

Once he realized that Boylan was carrying him, but he could not hold it in mind.... Now he was sure that it was Boylan. He wished he could die from the cold. He recalled that the cold climbs to a man's heart and then lets him out in comfortable dreams.

"Hai, you!" he heard in the familiar tones. "I can't go any further.

Send a stretcher or a wagon. Tell 'em two American correspondents are sitting out here--one with a bullet or two through his chest of drawers--"

The bed was sinking now.... Then he was dragged across the big man's lap, and the voice was saying:

"I never knew it to fail. The man who wins a woman gets the steel, when it's anywhere in the air, but bullets fly wide and knives curve about a lonely maverick who has lost all his heart winnings."

They found Boylan so, his jaw clenched, the huge scarred head bare and covered with night dew, but ready to talk. Across his legs, Mowbray lay, and still breathed.

Chapter 5

Some unique thing, Big Belt, that rock of a man, had found in Peter Mowbray. For seven days and nights, though broken with incredible fatigues (a yellow line of bone color showing across his face under the eyes), Boylan sat by in cars and ambulances until they reached Sondreig, the city of the women-folk, and a regular civilized bed.

What he gave to Peter was clear; what he took from a man down, a woman's property at best, is harder to tell. Perhaps in the great strains and pressures of the campaigns, he had seen Peter inside, the mechanism and light effects appertaining, and found it true. It may be that Big Belt had never been quite sure that a man-soul could be true, and having found one, was ready to go the limit. This is only a hazard.

Peter didn't know. He was a lump--one little red lamp burning in that long house of a man--flickering at that, its color bad, its shadow monstrous. Everyone but Boylan declared he would die from that wound in his chest; and Boylan was right.

The Germans were good. They gave him a little room over an apothecary shop at the edge of the city, off one of the bullet-wards, so that the American would suffer from no lack that the hospital routine could furnish, and still not be denied the ministration of his friend. There were reasons, from the German standpoint, why it was well for Mowbray to have every chance for life. The Russian _coup_ of the destroyed bridges, that lesser disaster, would some time be told. Boylan might be persuaded to tell the story to America without adjectives. This was not a very humane way to regard large kindness from saddened and maddened men, and Boylan did not linger over it.

The Order in Sondreig soothed. It was like a fine _morale_ shown by troops in a pinch. The city was one s.p.a.cious hospital, but orderly, the horizon smokeless, the distance free from the crash of guns. In fact, it seemed that the city must have prepared itself for a thousand years--as if waiting for its messiah. There was a glad quiet in the thronging streets that seemed to say, "It has come...."

When he found that Peter would live--all the pathological vortices past--Big Belt turned with strange joy to exterior activities. Of course, months would be required to make his companion a man again.

There might remain a crimp in him that would last always, but Boylan was aware that a man's weakness may be made his strength, and that a life habit of care which comes from cus.h.i.+oning a wound often results in extraordinary development of the parts of strength.

The sight of women and children brought him gusts of emotion. In one evening hour, he followed a middle-aged woman who was leading a child through the faintly-lit streets; trailed the pair for a square or two through the soft snow, a sort of miracle in the picture to him, a heaven of gentleness and order. This was his first grand reaction from the field of strife--at least, from this campaign--and he was struck as never before with the main fact--how little a man really needs to live his life in brightness and calm. Such a sense of the emptiness of war-fields surged home to him that he was left a heretic in relation to all that had called him before. It did not occur to Boylan that this was wisdom; rather the pith of the emotion was to the effect that he was getting old.

The child's thin voice reached him in questionings, and the steady low tones of the woman. A man could ask little more of the world than to lead a child thus.... Perhaps they were poor. Boylan would have liked to fix that. It had to do with the whole inner ideal of the man to be a fixer of such things--to come home to a house of little ones in quant.i.ty and many women--a broad house of aunts, sisters and old women, a long broad table of all ages, the many problems resting on him--and one woman looking straight across.... She would know everything, and yet would advise with him--quiet discussions of policy regarding this one or that one, and the interposition of food....

He was perspiring. Always after a war or expedition he had perceived such matters more or less clearly, but not quite as now. Never before had he constructed his secret heaven with such durable substance....

He actually believed that the field would never call to him again. It had become like the fear of hunger that he had learned once for all.

No more of that--no more of war. He had given everything to the field, and lost his broad board in the world-house. At least, he could find a door-step somewhere.

They were gone. He thought of his companion--the sense of summons that he seemed to have known always. He turned and walked back. The snow fell softly; the street lights were pleasant and warming with this bit of peace in the world, this little circle of life with men and women and children together.... As he neared the apothecary shop, his thoughts became rounder and rounder with what he had missed. He had taken the arc and lost the globe--a sorry old specimen of a man, if the truth were told, a career behind him designed to arouse the wildness of boys, but without appeal and very much to be discouraged by real men. Finally it occurred to him of the whole races of men who had _what he lacked_, yet were restless for the harshness and crudity of the earth.

"If they only knew what they have," he muttered. "I suppose they forget. Just as I forget between wars what h.e.l.l is like.... I suppose they do forget, and read a man's stuff by their fires (ordering the kids to be quiet)... thinking that this war-man writing from the field is a great and lucky guy. I suppose they stop and think how things might have been different with them--had _they_ taken to the open when the old call came.... _Ordering the kids to be quiet_--Good G.o.d--"

Whether it was the audacity of fatherhood that called this last into the world, or the face of the woman who had pa.s.sed him--is not known.

Enough that Big Belt forgot all his dreams. ...That white-skinned, wonder-eyed girl, the fire creature, twice seen in the bitter shadows of Judenbach!

She had looked into his face, as if she scarcely dared to trust her eyes, as if she, too, were not sure; and yet it had come over him like death that she was here for her own.... He tried to make himself believe that it was an illusion, just one of the queer jolts that come to a man when his thoughts are far off. But actualities rubbed this out. She was a prisoner of the Germans; probably had proved invaluable in the hospital service and had earned certain privileges; but it wouldn't do to let Peter fall into her clutches again; that meant revolution and death. They would make a dupe of him as before. It had nothing to do with peace and the outer world; it meant--

Boylan saw that he wanted Peter for his own. He wiped the sweat from under his hat.... He couldn't keep them apart; she would think out a way; a man can't wrestle with a woman.... The world was bleak and wide-open to disruption again. He climbed the stairs.

The wounded man was not awake. Boylan had objected from the first to his manner of breathing--too much in the throat, hardly a man-sized volume of air, the breathing of one who hadn't proper lung-room; but this was an old matter. He reflected on the various fatigues Mowbray had met with a smile, and the vitality which had finally pulled him loose from the cold clutch itself; standing him in stead through a journey so grisly that Boylan had not had the detachment so far to contemplate it from first to last. So he had been forced seriously to grant exceptions to the rule of chest inches and vitality. The soft winter air blew in from the slightly opened cas.e.m.e.nt.

Peter's face was wan and boyish--different to Boylan as a result of his encounter in the street. He saw Peter now with the eyes of a man who must give up.... She was here in Sondreig. He would not help her, but if she came, there would be no fight.... It had been his fault.

Boylan had sensed the danger of giving too much--from the beginning.... One woman brings a man into the world, sees him properly a man, and another woman takes him away.... Just how Big Belt broke into this particular picture must be suggested rather than explained.

He was very close to mothers that night. He could understand fathers, too.

...They would never know what he had done. The Russians had not understood, except Lornievitch, in part, and he was far away; the Germans would never piece the fragments together, and Peter himself had been mainly unconscious. Peter had not been told even of the Dabnitz episode.... They might have pulled together for years if it hadn't been for the woman, but there was bound to be a woman. Mowbray was like that.

Big Belt yawned over it all, drew his cot close, so he could hear Peter's call, lit a fresh candle, and wished he had remembered to smoke outside. Presently, however, he was breathing forth the full volume of a man.

Sitting by the civilized bed early the next afternoon he heard a voice below that clenched his jaw much as it had been that night outside the German camp before the stretcher was brought. She had found them. She did not speak first, but looked in.... Seeing the face upon the bed, she could not ask, nor speak, but crossed the room. It would have been just the same so far--had Boylan not been there. In fact, he had withdrawn from the place by his companion.... She knelt an instant.

Now she arose and faced the friend.

"He will live."

Peter was still afar off.

"Yes, ma'am--I think he will."

She came to him now. "I saw you last night," she whispered. "I saw you come here. I could not come until now."

"Humph--" or something of the sort was heard from Boylan.