Red Fleece

Peter Mowbray first saw her at the corner of Palace Square nearest the river. He was not in the least the kind of young man who appraises passing women, very far from a starer. At the instant their eyes met, his thoughts had been occupied with work matters and the trickery of events. In fact, there was so much to do that he resented the intrusion, found himself hoping in the first flash that she would show some flaw to break the attraction.

It may have been that her eyes were called to the passer-by just as his had been, without warning or volition. In any event their eyes met full, leisurely in that stirring silence before the consciousness of self, time, place and convention rushes in. ... Though she seemed very poor, there was something about her beyond reach in nobility. He was left with the impression of the whitest skin, the blackest hair and the reddest lips, but mainly of a gray-eyed girl-eyes that had become wider and wider, and had filled with sudden amazement (doubtless at her own answering look) before they turned away.

Desolation was abroad in Warsaw after this encounter. Mowbray thought of New York with loneliness, the zest gone from all present activity. Presently with curious grip his thoughts returned to a certain luncheon in New York with a tired literary man who had talked about women with the air of a connoisseur. The pith of the writer's observations was restored to his mind in this form:

"If I were to marry again it would be to a Latin woman-French, Italian, even Spanish-a close-to-nature woman born and bred in one of the Mediterranean countries. Not a blue-blood, for that has to do with decadence, but a woman of the people. They are passionate but pure, as Poe would say. If they find a man of any value, he becomes their world. They are strong natural mothers-mothering their children and their husband, too,-and immune to common sicknesses. Given a little food, they know enough to prepare it with art. If a man has a bit of a dream left, such a woman will either make him forget it painlessly, or she will make it come true."

There was no apparent relation, and none that proved afterward. What he had seen at the corner of Palace Square nearest the Vistula was not the face of a Latin woman, nor was any looseness of common birth evident in it. The key might have had to do with the little hat she wore, just a hat for wearing on the head, a protection against sun and rain, and with the austerely simple black dress; but these weathered exteriors again were effective in contrast to the vivid freshness of her natural coloring. As for what remained of the literary man's picture of the ideal woman to marry, it was the last word of decadence-the eminent selfishness of a man willing to accept the luxury of a woman who asks little to be happy. ... The next day at the same time and place Mowbray was there, and saw her coming from afar.

She seemed both afraid and angry, stopped abruptly and asked in Polish what he wanted. He was startled. It was a hard moment. He explained with difficulty that her language was as yet an inconvenient vehicle for him.

"You are not Russian?" she said in French.

He shook his head. She seemed to be relieved and he wondered why.

"What do you want?" she asked, though not quite with the original asperity.

"It did not occur to me you would notice," he said in the language she had ventured. "I saw you yesterday. You made me think of New York. As I was near to-day, I hoped to see you again--"

"You are American?" She spoke now in English, and with a still softer intonation.

"Yes,-you speak English, too?"

"I like it. It is--" she checked herself and asked with just a shade of coldness, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

It might be construed as a courtesy to a stranger from one who lived in Warsaw. Peter liked it, a certain vista opening. However, there was no answer within reach except the truth, and he plunged:

"I should like to know you better."

The red lower lip disappeared beneath the other. Her gray eyes grew very wide; something intrepid and exquisite in her manner as she searched his face. Whatever she knew of the world, she dared still to trust her intuition-this was something of the revelation he drew.

"Why?"

Many people were passing. He looked toward the quieter center of the Square.

"Will you walk with me there?" he asked. "It is not easy to explain this sort of thing--"

"No. I must go on. You may walk a little way."

"You are very good.... You see, I cannot tell just why-as you asked. If I knew you well, I could tell you. Yesterday I was quite unromantic--"

She made it hard for him and did not let him see her smile. "You mean you are romantic to-day?"

Peter laughed. "What a trap-and I was trying so hard to tell you."

"You were trying--"

"I don't need to tell you. All there is to say is that I want you to be my friend."

"I should have to think," she answered.

"Of course. ... Do you pass here every day?"

"I should have to think," she said.

It was the third day afterward that she passed again.

* * *

The first time that Boylan of the Rhodes News Agency of New York saw Peter Mowbray was in the office of Lonegan of The States, Mowbray's chief in Warsaw. Lonegan had known Peter in New York and had wanted him for his second many months before the fact was brought about. This was the Boylan of the Schmedding Polar Failure, of various wars and expeditions, a huge spectacle of a man, an old-timer, and very fond of Lonegan, though as representative of Rhodes'' he was structurally the competitor of The States in this territory.

"Young Mowbray may be all right," Boylan observed, "but the curse of the student is on him. I should say that he isn't gusty enough for hard work-vest buttons too safe-"

"You can't measure health by the pound," Lonegan observed, regarding the other's bulk with one eye shut.

"I never heard of Mowbray spending much time in bed outside of the small hours."

"How old is he?"

"Twenty-six or seven."

"I suppose he put on his gear all in a year or two?"

"There is that look about him, but he's safely over it. Some people never stop, but I've had to look up at him from the same angle now and then during the last five years.... It was just a little before that he happened into-his route like mine-his cub-year in London, then assistant in Antwerp, then in Dresden. He had Dresden alone for a year. I've been angling for him some time--"

"Yes," Boylan remarked, "you need the right kind of help to stand up with Rhodes from this end--"

"You do make it wildly exciting," Lonegan answered gently. "We'll rock Peter yet."

This chat took place in June. Ten weeks afterward Boylan came in with the big news, and found Lonegan bending over the following cablegram, almost the last that came through in the private cipher of The States:

Get Mowbray post with Russians. We are mailing influential matters. Warsaw key-desk for northern campaigns. We are to be congratulated on having Lonegan there.

It was from the Old Man, who in certain cases ventured thus to be expensively felicitous....

"I'm sorry, Lonegan," Boylan said. "I thought you would be taking the field--"

"No, the Old Man's got the right eye for these affairs. I'm a desk man."

What Lonegan had swallowed to make his voice clear and steady, only he knew, but his nerve was effective. "You've got to help me, Boylan," he said. "You know the military end. You've got to help me get him attached. I know you'd do it for me, but I want you to do it for him-"

A grunt from the big man, who disappeared.

...Lonegan's lip curled. Again it was only Lonegan who knew why. He read the cablegram carefully again, and felt his face as if speculating whether he could wait until morning for a shave. There was routine to do, and the developments of the day to file. Peter was on a mail story.... It occurred to him presently that his second would be interested in this eventuality from the Office. He called several places by 'phone without locating the younger man.

"He's with the woman," Lonegan concluded.

Peter had left her address somewhere, but it was not at hand; neither was her house available to telephone. Lonegan took down the Warsaw directory, and came finally to the street-number after this line:

"Bertha Solwicz, sempstress."

* * *

She, too, was almost a stranger in Warsaw, and lonely. Each had their work, and many hours each day were required for it; still, after the first fortnight, they managed to meet often. Peter's time was hers, for he had the habit of leaving his feature-letter for the quiet hours of the night.

"I hate the name of Solwicz," she told him the first time he came to her house, "especially from you. And you must call me Berthe, not Bertha." In spite of her obvious lack of means, she had a few friends of rare quality, and yet he did not meet them. On her table that first day, he picked up a little book of poems, the leader of which was entitled We Are Free. Peter had read it a few weeks before and given it a quality of appreciation that was seldom called in these days. Just now he noted that the volume was affectionately inscribed to her from the author, Moritz Abel. She spoke of him and of the group of young master workmen to which he belonged. Then she read the poem, as they stood together. It was a moment of honor to the poet. Peter had turned pale, and the little room was hushed about them, as if Warsaw were suddenly stilled.

"You see what they are doing," she said. "There is a new race of artists in Russia. They have passed the emotions--"

"This poem was due in the world," Peter said. "But it is still an age ahead of the crowd."

"That's what makes it so hard for them-for him. He does not like that. He would like to talk to all men straight. Moritz Abel-the name will not be forgotten. He is like the others of the new race. They are terrible in their calm. They have passed the emotions. They are free. Other artists in Europe or America repress the emotions. That is but the beginning of the mastery. When they are as great as this group of young men, they will show the spirit of the thing, not the emotion of it. Emotions are red. This is pure white, don't you see?"

For three days Warsaw had been upheaved in excitement. On the afternoon that the messenger from Lonegan brought the news of the cablegram, Berthe and Peter were planning an excursion into the country for the next day. She watched him closely as he read, and was sensitive enough to realize the importance of the message, before he spoke.... He found her gray eyes upon him. She chose her own way to break the tension:

"The country is heaven, no doubt about that. One must die to get there. Also one must live just so. Even when I was little, something always happened-just as we were planning to set out for the country."

He showed her the message, but had hardly heard her words. His discovery of this slender solitary red-lipped girl and what it meant, was rarely clear at this moment. She had awakened him plane by plane, awakened his passion and his mercy and his intuition.

"Tell me again what you said about the country. I was away for a minute."

"It is hard to think of a little excursion to the fields-with such a holiday ahead, as you are called upon."

"I wasn't thinking of that either, Berthe, but of you."

"Of course, you will go?"

"Doubtless."

"I was only talking foolishly, about our little excursion. One's own wants are so pitifully unimportant now."

"I had hardly expected personally to encounter a war," he remarked and added smilingly, "The fact is, I hadn't thought of meeting 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 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.

* * *