Chapter IV (2)

"That she never loved you so well as now--that you mean new Russia to her--that she will come running to you in the cool of the evening--either here or _on the other side_--and something about the child of a king."

His back stiffened. He arose. I saw him splendid again. I drew back in the shadow, afraid that he would see the sweat that had broken out upon me, though the place was cold.

Of course the idea, as I saw it, was to give the old-line troops the fight of their lives--to show the whole of Russia a martyrdom if necessary, thus revealing the temper of the revolutionists. Varsieff had been tempted to let them slip back into the Marshes to save their lives.

* * * * *

We were in the saddle side by side an hour later, and close to the front--the two big lines moving slowly and craftily together. Varsieff looked back at his precious boys, following willingly enough so far.

"It's their white heads that kill me," he muttered. "They are like children, and that I should----"

"They are all our children," I answered, sweeping my hand in a circle ahead where the troops of old Russia had filled in, waiting to deliver us to death.

"Dear old Lange," he muttered, "I'm glad you know her----"

I wondered what that had to do with his peasant children. Her spirit seemed a blend of his every thought and emotion.... We galloped along the fronts, talking to the different commanders. Some were students, in their teens, faces of boys who loved Varsieff with a love that yearned to die for him immediately, without words, a readiness to leap under his horse's feet.... In a kind of madness, all the mysteries of life seemed to unfold for me that morning, the spirit of Paula Mantone always near because I was so close to her lover.

He talked to the different leaders quite careless if the peasant ranks listened. He told them that the outer world was watching--that new Russia, Poland, Finland, the new Europe, the new World--all depended upon _them_ now. He said they were chosen men--that he would never leave the field except in victory--that he was brother and father and lover to them--that the world would be better for this day. He talked like a man at a bar, or standing among the river-boats, or a father to his sons in the fields.

We rode along the lines as they marched. Our horses lathered and dried and lathered again in the morning sun. I saw my comrade, Varsieff, giving up his soul to the peasants:

"... I, too, have my farm that waits for me--my woman who waits for me--my country, my dream!... I build with you. I stand or fall with you!... We shall be better for this day, my children. This is a day for living men and comrades----"

He filled me with a kind of white flame.

Then the crash. After that, was a moment of silence and gloom like a cloud passing over the sun. Then our eyes began to reap.... A blizzard of hot, stinking metal had broken in front of us--in the midst of our marching and listening battalion. If you have ever felt the mockery and cruelty of raging seas, you can know something of the shock that twisted the core of me that instant. That which had been the white-haired peasants with open laughing mouths and lifted hands, their souls answering the leader who loved them, a song forming on their lips ... now it was as if a carcass had been moved--one that had lain long in the sun, the devastation long continued underneath....

These were my boys. Next to Varsieff and Paula Mantone, I loved them. Now they were down, dismembered, shaking--the air a whir of white to my tortured ears, like a shriek of bewildered ghosts. And here and there, like Varsieff and myself--men standing unhurt in the midst of human fragments, like maggots, shaking themselves to cover.

I wonder if you can understand? It seemed that I still could see the welter of our boys in the leader's face. Also I saw the death of my good friend--the death-stroke of that superb mind--the face of a man, whose soul had vanished.

Both our horses were down, though we were unhurt so far.... A distance of fifteen feet separated us. I called to him. I tried to tell him that he had not failed. I thought I should die before I moved, before I could get started toward him. The staring failure in his face paralysed me. For the time, he was cut off even from the spirit of Paula Mantone.

I had to look down and watch my steps as I made my way to him. I knew some hideous fear that he would fall in that blackness--if I looked away.... There were voices from the ground. None of the parts of men could be still. Lips writhed before my eyes--and words were spoken like little claps of force in thin air.... I caught his opened collar....

"It's all right, Varsieff," I whispered.

"You lie!" said he.

It was like a blow from a man's mother. I had to look into his face before my brain accepted his words. Then I remembered _my_ lie.... The evil of it had not come to me until now, with him breaking down before my eyes.... I saw the look again--that I had seen by the peasant's yard long ago as we crossed the Torqueval Peaks--the look of a frightened child in that face of finished manhood.

I pulled him to me, and led him back toward Sedgwick's staff. I heard myself talking and laughing, jockeying with words.... His head was twisted to the side--his draggled remnant of a mind pulled back to the scene of that havoc. And now, if you please, we were catching the real thing. The old-line Russians were breaking upon us with machines and shrapnel--the old combing and carding that seldom fails.... I saw the cold mountains all about.

Did you ever see a slaughter of drones? Perfect economy it is, from the standpoint of the hive. The work of providing for the future is accomplished--no mistake in the plan. The workers gather from all sides. One by one the big clumsy drones are put to death--wrestling, tugging, stinging, many workers giving themselves to death to carry out the spirit of the hive.... The officers ahead who ordered our brother Russians upon us, thought they were right--those great grey lines ahead, honeycombed with our own precious comrades, all of whom were not yet martyred, as was proved. But they had not found their voice. It looked like straight death they brought to us.

... Ages. I would turn from Varsieff's face to the cold mountains. Something of the changelessness of the beyond and above came to me out of the hideous fluctuation of the near and below. I could not keep Varsieff back. He wouldn't resist so long as I held him, but the moment my hands released, his body would rise like some automatic thing and blindly stagger forward into the pale smoke-charged sunlight. The men who saw him--many who knew what he had been and had heard him speak but a few moments ago--lost their concentration on the battle. He became everywhere the centre of a rotting line. Clearly they had been fighting on his spirit--that, and the thought of going home....

Sedgwick rode up and saw my struggle--beckoned me back, as one in authority would bully a guard in a madhouse.... I obeyed, thinking of the lie I had told. Here were human fragments; the air filled with the shrieks of the fallen--the face of my friend beside me, the face of a blasted mind--all because of that lie of mine.

Then, as I trundled him to the rear, sometimes swinging him from one elbow to the other, I saw a line, as one would draw a bloody finger across his cheek. Then--it was like a monkey-bite in the bone and hair of his eye-brow.... We were in a hail from the machines and the men were falling back.

* * * * *

I think we are half-mad in such moments, or else touched with a divine sanity. In the midst of utter loss, the lines breaking back, the men beginning to stampede--the plan flashed into my mind that I could only save the first lie by a second. If the remnant fell back to starve in the Marshes--Varsieff forever was put from me. Such was my thought. The personal issue was greater than the Cause. I was beside myself--never so little, never so formidable.

My arm slipped from Varsieff who sank to his knees and flopped back at the wheels of a four-inch _Sanguinary_, bursting hot. I ran back to Sedgwick's staff, leaped into an empty saddle--then rode along the cracking fronts.

"Halt----" I yelled to the faces of the slipping lines.... "Halt--and don't you see you're running from your own Comrades?... They're taking over the Imperialists yonder. Our men have risen in the ranks of the enemy!..."

All along the lines, I yelled it--and it came forth like an inspired message--lie that it was from my angle. For to me, death was better than retreat, with the eyes of the world on our little nucleus of the new order.... My shouts were checking them.

"Our Comrades are coming to us--hold for them!... Don't run away ... they are coming! They are coming to join us, when they clean themselves up over yonder--only a little clean-up first, my children. Hear the noise?"

I don't know how long I rode. I only knew that the fighting death was victory--that there is no propaganda like martyrdom....

They answered at first with a kind of half-hearted halt. I was struck with the silence. A queer thing happened. I saw that I had spoken the truth.... There was firing ahead, but it had no meaning of death to our ranks. They were firing in the air, and some threw down their guns and were running toward us. Presently we saw the tent-cloths hoisted in truce. It was like seeing my mother again--shaking the table-cloth to the birds.

Then I saw their lines and ours running together--yes, Varsieff's new heaven and new earth--saw them running together bare-headed, white-haired peasant boys, hands outstretched, mouths open.... Freedom was an aureola of different sunlight around their heads. On they came like glorious ruffians, seizing their brothers in their arms--the lines folding together like good mates before the Lord.

Then it was like a blast--that Varsieff must see this! A cold blast in the heart--that he must not miss this glory--that my eyes must not dwell upon this great consummation alone! Deep within, I knew my pain was because his head was not lifted to the picture of his conquest. Deep within, I knew that for some inexplicable reason of fate, he was held back like the old Master on the other side of the Jordan--not allowed to enter and witness the beauty of the promised land.

In the midst of that radiant tumult, I ran back to the place that I had left him. It was trampled; the mud was deeper, but Varsieff was not there.... In the midst of the shouting and the glory, I searched for him.... Hours passed, the fighting ceased ... we were a hundred thousand strong, armed, provisioned, hearts turned homeward.... Scores of us were looking for the Varsieff now.

And then I heard my name called, and two young student-officers caught me, one to each elbow and carried me forward, running to where the woman stood ... Paula Mantone. She was standing in the midst of her own people--the sun on her face. And I saw, too, the white look of one who has conquered fear, but the weariness of her eyes was like the presence of death....

"Where is he?" she whispered.

"Oh, God, I do not know----"

"Poor dear Lange--all is well with us.... The boys of two armies rushing together--yes, Lange, this is a good day for us----"

She spoke rapidly, like lines committed--the same death-like weariness in her tones.... She had taken my hand:

"Come, we must find him ... take me to the place where you left him--come quickly----"

It was some distance. We walked at first in silence. It seemed as if I could not live if I did not find out what she would have done this morning in my place. Presently she said:

"I thought he would fail when it came to ordering a charge. He was very brave, they say."

I loved the students who told her that, but I had known too much torture to keep the perfect silence.

"... It was hard for him.... He isn't a killer--he saw only the white-haired boys----"

"My beloved----" she whispered.

"I told him that it was the same in Petrograd as here--that the dream held here--that you would have told him to be strong at the death part----"

She was not listening. She did not answer.

* * * * *

"It was just here. He was wounded a trifle. I left him to stop the troops. They were breaking a bit," I explained.

I had passed the place a dozen times. I remembered by the big _Sanguinary_--hot when I had let go of Varsieff's arm. The dead had been covered. The big gun was a wreck now--even the caisson with a broken wheel.

Then I realised it had been moved. There was a queer mound under the wreckage. I reached down; my hand felt warmth in the mud. The woman was with me.... I think we moved that mammoth caisson together.... There was no white on him--a coating of mud but warm. We lifted him and the woman's breast covered him from my eyes.... I heard him say her name. I heard him speak of the tropical island they would go to together....

I stood apart--I who had stood at his side so long.... There were seconds when I heard her low passionate whispers--when I watched the arch of her shoulder, the beauty of her bended brow.... I did not see his face again. She held it fast to her and talked somehow out of the world. Then I saw her raise her eyes as she had done that night in the tent. For the first time I realised that he had only kept alive for her coming.... But still I felt he must know the whole story. I did not go closer, but called in half a whisper:

"Tell him how the boys came together--arms out and laughing like brothers. Don't let him go without knowing that--tell him how they threw their guns away and then sat down on the ground together--singing of home and the rivers and the ploughed lands and the women waiting for us----"

"I told him--I told him!" she answered. "You may come to him ... but he--he only waited to see me.... Ah, Lange, you had him so much----"

I looked away. Dusk was falling, the white peaks like spirits.... I had not seen his face again, but it suddenly came to me how it had looked when I saw it before--that which was the bravest and most beautiful face that I knew in manhood--how it had been beaten and bruised under the boots of running peasants--crushed into the mire by the feet of the men he loved so well. For a moment, I was in the red world of rage that this should be, but then the mighty drama of it came nearer, the supreme laughing art of it all--that only the saviours call to them. And I smiled, looking away to the dusk falling on the cold mountains--and I knew that my friend's spirit was as close to us as the body she held against her breast....

Then back in the bivouacs a song began--the men of two armies roaring out a song of the great white democracy of the future....

* * * * *

27

RÉSUMÉ

The end of Varsieff is satisfying to us, and yet I wonder if I can make this sort of romance clear. Martyrdom--they call it a short cut. There is a saying that the soul of a man who dies for something, goes marching on. The Irish become hopeless of their cause, if some one dies for the opposition. All revolutionists have reckoned with this subtlety--no propaganda like martyrdom; all the sacred writings refer to it, our Bible several times, once in the sentence, "Greater love hath no man----"

A deluge of phenomena from "the other side" has come in during the present war, all the old martyrs of nationalism said to be called to the cause of their empires....

What is the romantic haunt that lifts a man to such a pitch of exaltation that he transcends pain, and goes singing down to die?

These are matters much better known among the young dreamers and workers of Russia and the Orient than of America.... Varsieff reveals the child under the man of action; the lover above the intellectualist. His love story unfolds certain passages which we are making a point of in these chapters. The woman, Paula Mantone, represents a loved type in our sort of story-making. She brings, vaguely, at least, into terms the romantic ideal so calling to us in these days. She means more than three-score and ten. Her love goes on and on. She becomes a priestess, in a sense, and conducts her lover through the critical passage of finding his own Soul. External battles then take his body, but she is not altogether bereft. An intuitional woman does not always know what she is doing in her heart story, even when she does greatly. If the physical action had broken different, if the body of Varsieff had not been required in martyrdom, for instance, he might have emerged from the final stress of action in a state of spiritual exaltation, from which, I can imagine Paula Mantone calling him back to the gardens of the senses.... Martyr, priestess, revoltee, but always a woman. Every year of devotion to the feminine in fiction, compels a more fluid, yet more mystic handling.

We have been very close to the young students and poets and players of Russia. In the Fall of 1914 we published the following paragraph:

There[19] are men in Russia who have heard the mighty music of humanity. They will sing their dream and grave their message upon the peasant soul.... Not the Russia of Nicholas Romanoff. His passing and all the princes of his tainted blood will prove but an incident of the Great War. Very low in the west among the red blinking points of the falling constellation, is Nicholas and that Russia. In the east is the Russian _novi_ before the dawn, commanding the dark before the sun.

[19] _Fatherland._ George H. Doran Company, New York.

* * * * *

The young men of India, the young men of China, the young men of Russia, the young men of America--I see them working together in the wondrous story of life, as it reels off in the years to come--mating of the East and West, the planet seen in one piece, the communal spirit of the Hive around the globe.

* * * * *

... I find myself getting up a rather serious intensity over what _Romance_ means, a signal to tame down.... _Not to stay_--to drain nothing, to leave all cleaner, more orderly and richer for one's tarrying, to glance but lightly, yet with a deep smile of understanding at the torrent of detached and unmatched things which apparently makes the world--to love it all better than those caught in detachment can possibly love one another--to belong to the many by remaining apart from separate movements--at last to be the Spectator....

One may deal lightly with crowds, but never with _man_ or _woman_.... One may say he has all that civilisation has for any human creature; he may reasonably be bored by all departments of life, but there is enough for an eternity of reverent study and adoration in the nearest human face. The lovelier the human face, the more easily we can discern the divine in it.... You get nowhere without loving something. This is the hardest kind of material gospel.... We are all incognito--the greater we are, the less perfectly disguised.

* * * * *

First and last our dream of Romance means Motherhood--mysterious enactments that the mere male can never know, no longer the motherhood of the mammal, but the coming of the Guest, the Shining One--the giving of body and mind and soul, no fear, no stipulation, no impeding form of thought--more than that, it means a giving of the child to the world.... The Valley Road Girl expresses it in this sharp, short picture:

Once a woman lived in a dense forest, and had a man-child alone
there. As it grew, the woman impressed upon it the greatness of God
and the wonder of all things. Then one day, she led him by the
forest-paths to the Highway, and left him there.

It means the Madonna who looks up, rather than down, at the head upon her breast.

The creative force is never wasted. Man and woman, in love or lust, are never alone--rather startling, but sooner or later to be accepted. The point of the triangle is either turned downward or upward. The creative force feeds either the abominations of the underworld, or is used in its designed order and loveliness as a point of inception for soul into form.... The mother-nature of the New Race must be quickened by the ideal of the coming of a World-teacher, of development a cycle ahead of this race. Women must partake of this dream in their maternities. It is the light of such an advent, shining upon the upturned face of the mother, that touches the brow of the child with light.

Absolutely the concept of the new Democracy demands the coming of a great Unifier--a focal point for all world movements and interests and aspirations. The story of a Master's coming is the ultimate Romance--the finest story in the world--for that in itself is the story of Regeneration.

The work of this particular volume seems to be ended. Much that is prepared need not be used. Right here is the breathing-space that always comes in a life or a book.... _Not to stay_.... Some of our boys are off to the trenches; others may go. Part of the original group has been unable yet to follow the centre to the West. Our good Gobind[20] who belonged to the pith of things, arose from one breakfast and went off to join the cavalry. There's a group in Chicago that we see all too little of--a diffusion time truly, but only to make more certain the time of integration again.

[20] Ben Poteat.

* * * * *

There is one who came, changing all. We thought we knew much about the world. We thought mainly that things were settled for us. It was not words she brought, but a subtler quickening. I cannot tell it exactly. There was a day in which I was bored, not satisfied, and another when I was a child again--breathless, questing, listening for some one to tell me stories of another and better country. All that I had done and been and lived was diminished; more, all behind was utterly done, leaving scarcely any criteria for that which was to be.... No inland lake would do after that; we wanted a continental headland, the sweep of the earth and sky--sidereal time, sidereal space. We could only tolerate the quest of the Impossible after she came.

... She came and wrote her book through the summer days and then she went away.... Somehow after that we knew what rains and sunlight meant--what all nature was saying and doing. At least, we knew better.... _Not to stay._ We could not follow continually, but at last out of loneliness, the big new laughing wonder of life came to us ... and when we told her, she seemed to have known all the time....

We teach by making pictures. She brought new pigments and freshened all the oils. We loved the tints and half-tones before she came, but she restored us to the virgin beauty of the primal rays. We liked the blends before she came--the blend of rose and gold, but she brought us length of vision and redemption of taste to know the meaning of the Ultimate Red, the red of the Pomegranate, the red of the Inspired Mary, to whose knees at the last all artists and little children find their way--the passionate red of the Quest and the Cross and the Son. She was not surprised when we told her what her gifts mean to us.

* * * * *

An artist gives himself full-heartedly to the emotions. Keen and poignant afterward, is the battle to straighten them out, to comb them down. The mind holds the truth about it all, the spirit sings all around, but the heart holds fast to its agonising play of passion settings.

Desire is like an old King, sitting in the midst of his dogs, a King by the fire in his tower. The Shining Heir is born, but the old King is slow to die. He sits thinking of his old hunts, his rides to kill, old wars and faces at the window.... He rode well; he thought he loved very well; a great name, he was, in the hunts, and in all the games of getting. He meditates now upon his one-time conquests, and forgets his pain. It is his memories that hold him fast to life a little while. But at last the head of old King Desire sinks to his breast, the fire fades from his last memory. The door of the tower room opens, the Shining Prince is standing there, and the criers run through the palace crying aloud, "The King is dead. Long live the King!" Desire has ended; the Bestower takes the throne.

When we told her of this new breath of life which she had brought, our Mary seemed to know all about that, too. She smiled and looked away when we showed her this book (and the inscription to her), so many pages of which she had read before--our dreams for the New Race unfolded in letters to her.

* * * * *

The instant one perceives the inner meaning of _Equality_, glimpsing the great Seamless Robe of humanity as one;--he realises that what is best for him is best for all others--what is best for the many is his own highest behest.... One must grasp this to know what Democracy means, to know what is behind the word, a meaning which those who use it most haven't dreamed of. You must grasp the spirit of the hive--that winged myriads of golden atoms never stray so far as to break the spirit-cord that binds them into one--that the one knows all, contains potentially all goodness and beauty and truth, that all action, art and thought, come from the spirit of the one--that the fruits of these go back. I love to tell it again and again. I saw it all afresh to-day.

The sun plays tricks with the earth at high noon. One feels superbly well--a kind of seething in the veins. It pulls him away from the great quest for the Father's House, in gusts of Mother Nature's magic. All the fragrance of fallow fields is in the hot light and blowing hay and deathless azure and high noon. Glorious swarms of bees were breaking out from the Spirit of the hive, all one in Spirit at the top--the Spirit brooding at all times over all the workings of the hive.... It was the same with the millions of men who walk the earth, one at the top--all one, coming and going in the Spirit, replenished and replenishing always, learning the fusions here in friends and lovers, each finding his one, and then the new quest together for the Great Companions.

Then it came to me that we are only sick and blind and lame and evil--in the sense of detachment. We must kill that out. Hate spoils everything. Hate binds us to the object. We mustn't despise another's coat. It may have been ours yesterday--may be ours to-morrow. We must kill out the sense of separateness from any creature, for we are destined to become one spirit with him and all others. Something like a cloud--all one, as a cloud is one.

Every morning on the grass--on millions of blades of grass--a globe of dew at the tip of each.... The Lord Sun arises. The dew warms a little and slips down the track of the blade into the root. There it breaks up into infinite fragments. The sun rising higher weaves his warm magic over the fields; invisibly, like prayers ascending, the drops of dew, all diffused into a thousand fragments each, thin as steam, and carrying the perfumes of roses and lilacs and honeysuckles and meadow lands and fallow lands and lake and ocean shores,--like prayers ascending, the dewdrops of yesterday return as one to the cloud. Broken into the farthest diffusion, but not an atom lost. All the richness of earth in essence returning to the Spirit....

The same with bee and dewdrop and man--the same with swarm and cloud and tribe--each fragment and division lifting to a greater, unto the Shining Source at last.... The point of it all is that man is spiritually woven to his brother and to the race; giving himself and his service to his brother and to the race he glorifies the texture and stature of his own soul.

Christmas, 1917.

* * * * * *

Transcriber's note:

The book contains many words spelt to reflect the accent of the speaker. The spelling has not been changed.

There are two instances of unmatched ending quotation marks. The missing opening quotation marks were not added because their locations were uncertain.

The following changes to printing errors have been made.

ouselves is now ourselves
though is now through
unlifted is now uplifted