Peter walked ahead unbound. He could not keep his mind on the journey with the sentry. His thoughts winged from Lonegan at Warsaw, to The States'' office and home, as if carrying the message of his own end.... Boylan might finally break out with the details.... The personal part ended suddenly, like an essential formality, leaving him a sorrow for Boylan and his mother especially. His full faculties now opened to Berthe Wyndham.
He was ordered to turn twice to the left. They had left the little stone court, entering the main street, and back again into the first side street for a short distance to a narrow stairway, between low mercantile houses now used for hospitals. Up the creaking way; the sentry within answered the sentry without and opened the door. A long narrow room with a single square of light from the roof, and Moritz Abel came forward.
“I'm sorry,” the poet said. “I had hoped—”
“Yes, we had hoped,” Peter replied with a smile.
Duke Fallows appeared from the shadows and hastily pressed his hand. Abel had turned toward the square of light, as if there were still another.
She came forward like a wraith—into the light—and still toward him, her lips parted, her eyes intent upon him. The sentry who had brought him turned, clattered down the stairs. The door was shut by the other sentry. Her lips moved, but there was nothing that he heard. With one hand still in his, she turned and led him back under the daylight to the shadows.... He heard Moritz Abel's voice repeating that he had been a poor protector. Fallows spoke....
There was much to it, hardly like a human episode—the silence so far as words between them, the tragedy in each soul that the other must go; the tearing readjustments to the end of all work in the world, and the swift reversion of the mind to its innumerable broken ends of activity; and above all, the deep joy of their being together in this last intense weariness.... She wore her white veiled cap and apron; having followed the summons from her work. There was a chair in the shadows, and she pressed him down in her old way, and took her own place before him (as in her own house) half-sitting, half-kneeling.
“Peter, I could not believe—until I touched you. I was praying just here, that you would not come—”
“I am very grateful to be here,” he said.
“I was so lonely. I was afraid of death. Fallows talked to me and Moritz Abel—but it did not do. I was thinking of you at the battle, as if you were a thousand miles away—as if I were waiting, as a mother for you, waiting for tidings with a babe in her arms—”
She paused and he said, “Tell me,” knowing that she must speak on.
“...It was just like that. I prayed that you would live—that you would not be brought here—that the time would pass swiftly. We have been here hours. They came for us soon after you went. We were all together in that place—all at our work. They led us here through the streets. It seemed very far. Something caught in the throat when the soldiers looked at me. I know what my father felt when he kept saying, 'It's all right. Yes, this is all right.' I know just how the surprise and the amazement affected him from time to time, and made him say that.... Then we were here. I wanted this darker chair. They came—I mean our good friends—Fallows came and talked to me, and Moritz Abel, but it wasn't what I seemed to need. Ah, Peter, I'm talking in circles—”
Something warned him that she was going to break, but he could not speak quickly enough. The human frightened little girl that he had never seen before in Berthe Wyndham, was so utterly revealing to his heart that he was held in enchantment. She seemed so frail and tender, as she said plaintively:
“We must be very dear to each other—”
There were tears in her eyes now, and her breast rose and fell with emotion, as poignant to Mowbray as if it were his own.
“I did pray for them not to bring you here,” she added. “If I had not left Warsaw, you would not be here now—”
“Listen—oh, Berthe, don't say that. Please, listen—”
The current was turned on in his brain, thoughts revolving faster and faster:
“It would all have been a mere military movement if you had not come. I would not have understood Spenski, nor the real Samarc, nor Kohlvihr as he is, nor the charges of infantry. The coming of Moritz Abel, words I have heard, the street, the singing, the field, the future—why, it's all different because you came. I am not dismayed by this. I have had a great life here. If this is our last day—the matter is lifted out of our hands. And dear Berthe, what do you think it means to me—this last hour together?”
“What does it mean, Peter?'
“I look into your face, and know that I've found something the world tried to make me believe wasn't here. Everything I did as a boy and man tried to show me that there isn't anything uncommon in a man finding a woman. My mother knew differently, but every time she wanted to tell me something happened. Another voice broke in, or perhaps she saw I wasn't attentive or ready. But I know now—and it didn't come to me until here in Judenbach—”
“She must have known,” Berthe whispered.
Fallows drew near. He seemed calm but very weary. “May I bring up my chair for a little while?” he asked as an old nurse might.
“Please do,” they said.
“Thank you,” Fallows answered, and returned with his wooden chair. “If you change the subject I shall have to go.”
“I was just saying that I had found something in the world that my mother knew all the time,” Peter explained.
“Oh, I say, this is important. Moritz must come in,” Fallows told them.
They nodded laughingly.
“Moritz,” he called. “Here's a little boy and girl telling stories—very important stories. You must hear.... We're all one, Peter Mowbray.”
They drew closer together. Berthe was watching Peter intensely, knowing that it was his test, very far from his way. Then she remembered the death-room, and that all things are changed by that. She sat very still, trying to give him strength to go on. “I've always used my head,” he said, “always explained why, and made diagrams. The one time I didn't use my head—well, the best thing happened in my experience.”
Peter was in for it, and weathered gracefully.
“You'll forgive me,” he said, when they asked to know. “I was thinking of meeting Berthe Wyndham. I saw her one day passing through the Square in Warsaw near the river corner. Well, it all came about, because I went there again the next day at the same time—”
He was a little breathless, but the glad and eager sincerity of his listeners helped him, and he wanted more than all to lift Berthe if he could.
“I could not help thinking of that when I recalled another little matter yesterday—in Judenbach. Once when we were little, my brother Paul and I quarreled. My mother and I were alone afterward. I told her of the tragedy. Everything seemed lost since I had lost Paul. She said, 'Some time you will find your real playmate, if you are good and search very hard.' I suppose she has forgotten. I forgot for years. But it came to me here.... You see I never suffered before, never was tested, everything came smoothly, everything covered up—”
“You are good to let us listen,” Fallows said quietly. He was staring at the ceiling.
“Here in Judenbach the relations of all other days began to match up. It was as if the whole war was to show me, each department carried on clearly. I didn't know a man could stand so much. Day before yesterday morning, I wanted to quit. I had a kind of madness from it all—an ache that wouldn't break or bleed, and was driving the life out of me. I found the way out by going into the hospital. I had to forget myself or go under.... When it seemed all over to-day, and the sentry was marching me here (you see I had gone back to the house of amputations and couldn't find any of you, and then to the Court of Execution, and you were not there), it was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described, when I found you here—”
Fallows straightened his head and blinked.
“'It was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described,'” he repeated. “We know that. This is too fine.”
Peter laughed. He was thinking of what Lonegan had said on the night he came back from Berthe's door, after she had asked him not to come in.... “Peter, you're lying. I don't believe you'd let anybody see your fires—not even how well you bank 'em.”
They seemed to require further talk from him. He did not want the two men, sorry they had drawn up their chairs. His heart was very tender to them—Fallows and Abel, and the woman who had changed him. They were before him now as messengers from the benignant empire of the future—strange strong souls gathered together now in waiting at the end of a road.... He told them of the bomb-proof pit, the naked animalism of Kohlvihr, the infantry advances and of Samarc. Presently his heart was light again, the pent forces of expression springing gladly into use.
“...The laughable thing about it,” he finished, “—the thing that held me speechless as Samarc left my side there in the dark corner of the pit—was that just a few minutes before Kohlvihr had promised to see that the Little Father decorated him. He had almost reached the General when my throat worked, and I called, 'Samarc.' It was as if he didn't hear me. Nothing would have stopped him. It was his idea, yet I think he meant only to stop the order of another infantry advance. He had ceased to kill, you know....”
Peter ended it hastily. They were all interested to know why Samarc was to have been decorated. This opened the earlier part of the day, and his strange wandering with Samarc among the hills—the magic of the hospital steward's coat, the scent of the cedars, and Peter's persistent sense of Berthe's nearness.
“Actually, I had to stop and think,” he explained. “Each time I fell into an abstraction, it struck me that she was there. It seems yesterday, too—”
“I was just here,” Berthe said. “It was soon after we came. We were all quiet at first—in different corners—”
“Slipping away in that loneliness,” Fallows suggested.
“As for me,” said Moritz Abel, “I had to make peace with myself. We have been very busy the last few days. I have discovered that I am a bit of a coward at heart—and I missed having something to do—”
They smiled at him. “Perhaps I was out there,” Berthe said. “Perhaps I was only sitting here—”
It was a queer matter that the three men, each of whom would have given his life to save the woman's, to all appearances accepted the fact of her as one of them in courage and control. It was Abel who mentioned the singer, Poltneck, whom Peter had not met. He had been left in the hospital when the others were taken; yet he had been one in all their interests and the most reckless and outspoken of all in his hatred of slaughter. They did not understand, but hoped he would be saved.
“He's a magician,” Abel said. “He sang to them yesterday—as they bore the knife. He seemed to hold them in the everlasting arms. It was worth living to witness that, but I'm afraid Poltneck will come to us. He's got the fury. Hearing that we are gone, he will start something—if only to join us. Then there will be no one to escape with the story. It troubles me.... If Mr. Mowbray were only free. Doesn't it seem that our brothers should hear the story?”
His voice broke a little. His brow was wet.
Fallows came back from the ceiling, and said:
“Moritz, my boy, all is well with us. That which is true is immortal.”
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