When I was a lad I remember hearing some one say he had read a story of love and war. I thought of it just now, as I lay panting a bit in a queer nest for the night in the Galbraudin Foothills—in the midst of an army that had no country yet—a tragic document unfolding in my heart.... A story of love and war—yes, I had seen one. It was written upon the cells of my brain, the deeper parts engraved upon the heart—the old red war with a new dream hovering above it, and the old true love, white as ever, yet a touch of the rose and gold of the new race in its folds. It seems almost my story. Like Job's servant, only I am spared to tell it. Such a little while ago, I thought the tales of love and war all told.

I saw Varsieff first at school, and went to him at once. Literally, I went to him. It was at recess, and I followed at his heels to his room instead of my own. He was not surprised. I was always at my best beside him. He accepted this gift from me. One who learns to give greatly as Varsieff did, learns also to accept the best things with grace. I only left his room long enough to get my bag. Gladly would I have slept at his door, but he asked me in. We were to be mates. Often he assured me that we were men, face to face; that I was not his Boswell, not his disciple, but a man-to-man friend. Yet I knew that my power was not the power of Varsieff, also that I was most powerful when I realised his splendid superiority.

I followed him during all the vacations. He loved the North Country—snow on the mountains, cold night rains, the filled fields and shrunken rivers of summer, the sound and natural things. He said he would find his tropical island when his work was done, but that work meant Russia to him. He was genius. Every one loved him. One vacation time we undertook to walk together over the Torqueval Peaks. He borrowed a guitar at a peasant house there in the mountains, and played for an hour as I have never heard any one play. I had been with him for almost three years and had not known he touched the instrument.

In one of those days of our walking-tour in the mountains an instance occurred of Varsieff's immeasurable tenderness of heart. One golden morning as we walked through a little village, past a vined wicker fence—a huge yellow cat sprang forth from the leaves and caught a bird on the wing. A kind of sob came from my friend at the swift little tragedy enacted in the wonderful morning light. I turned—Varsieff's face was back to its childhood—a depiction of childish horror—all finished manhood erased.

Many times in our talk his sentences formed a poem, which I would rush away to put down. He learned to do this alone afterward. Once I went to his room in Moscow after I had been away several months, and found scattered among clothing, papers, books and tea-things, a set of recent lyrical gems of his. These I gathered together in the little book, now marching around the world.

I smile to remember when I came to learn that Varsieff had other friends as devoted as I. It hurt at first; I could not understand. His big magic then was that he wanted nothing. He used to say that a man is at his worst when he wants anything for himself. The fact is Varsieff in wanting the letter of nothing, really wanted the spirit of all; in wanting nothing for himself in those days, he wanted everything for the world, a new heaven and a new earth, first and especially a new Russia. Then the day came when he wanted a woman. This was altogether unexpected. I thought that Varsieff absolutely had given himself to the revolution—that humanity was his bride.

I was with him when he first saw Paula Mantone—that is but part of her name. It was in Moscow. His voice, as he spoke to me, watching her, had a different and deeper inflection than I ever heard before. She was just a girl—poorly dressed, who had paused to speak laughingly to an old flower-woman.

"Wait, Lange," he said to me, and crossed to her.

It was in the Spring of the year. The morning was very bright. She turned from the tray of flowers and looked up at him. His hands went out to her shoulders. He was searching her face with a queer and tense smile—as one who finds a woman after a few months' separation in one whom he has left a child. Of course, my thought was that he had known her before. She, too, would have slept at his door....

I heard their voices. He asked her name, where she lived, and how he could reach her again. It all seemed trifling to me. Varsieff had never been like this before. The rest of the day he was silent. We walked and dined together, but his thoughts were not for me. For once, they were not for Russia. There was a smile in his eyes, and often he turned back the way we had come. Once he said:

"I had to leave her. It was quite all I could stand. I do not think the world is a place for two such people to be happy in. Possibly, we may be allowed to meet from time to time——"

I was inclined to call this nonsense. A little later he added strangely:

"Yes, it would be dangerous to let go and become merely human in a case like this."

The next three years Varsieff and I were much apart. I do not profess quite to understand the obstacles between him and Paula Mantone. They had loved each other instantly and torrentially. They were much together, yet there was some super-human torture about it. Even if I have a glimpse of the mystery, I'm afraid few will understand. There is something back of each one of us greater than our actions. We are all greater than we seem. It was as if Varsieff and Paula Mantone were only intended to meet here—to meet and quicken each other for a greater giving to the world. I wonder if it is quite true, what he said toward the last: That really splendid lovers may consecrate themselves to each other, but they must also learn to give each other to the world.... In the beginning they tried to lose themselves in each other, and they encountered untellable pain.

At length came the night when Varsieff returned to my lodgings, saying that it was only a question of time when they should find peace. He said he knew they would find peace, for he had already touched it momentarily. I wondered if she were dead, and he caught my thought.

"No, Lange," he said. "I am still to see her from time to time."

Before that first meeting with Paula Mantone in the street, Varsieff had loved Russia and the world, a friend and comrade to me and to many others. All his love had suddenly been called in and directed upon the woman. After the three years, he gave himself to all of us again—but a quickened illuminated man. He had been brilliant to me before that, but the brilliance of phosphorous compared to sunlight now. Varsieff was making some strange spiritual initiation out of his love story. His presence glorified me on the night of his coming—the summer before the war.

"There are four layers to Russia," I remember him saying. "The royalty on top, then the dreamers, then the middlemen, then the peasants. Kings and middlemen go together; dreamers and peasants go together.... Yes, time will come when the dreamers and the peasants truly shall belong to each other. They have been lovers a long time."

I asked him about the other pair.

"The kings and the middlemen will cancel each other," he answered.

Varsieff was the most active man I ever knew, and yet he moved easily as one in a sort of spiritual drift. He was an intellectualist with those who used their heads, a devotionalist with those who used their hearts, a mystic among dreamers, a child among children. Though never known much publicly, he was to my mind the biggest occult force of the new Russia. I doubt if there was another man, unless it was Christonal, who gave more impulse and direction to the revolutionary movement.

The heads of many departments drew inspiration from Varsieff. I have seen him carry himself lightly through a day of decisions and improvements and conceptions, which do not come to the ordinary master of democracy in a year. I have seen him encounter, worked out by others, suggestions and innovations which he himself had made—Varsieff not realising that the thought was his own. He would innocently praise his own work, as carried out by another. The last few months preceding the revolution were the busiest I ever knew. We became new men. We did not leave Petrograd, but prepared secretly for the big unburdening of the soul of a people. The last few days, before the government changed hands, were charged with a wrecking silence.

Christonal's nerve broke. For twelve hours he was in and out of a system of baths and manhandlings, and I was one who stood by. Varsieff smiled it through, his voice calm, his eyes often looking away as he spoke. The leaders of the younger party saw who was the real chief that day, though Christonal is a strong leader.

I was always a good desk man, and was trying to get some order in a bundle of cipher messages in the heat of the night, when Varsieff came and lifted me laughingly by the shoulders, thrusting the messages into one of my deep inner pockets. I thought he was dragging me off to bed, but when we were alone, he said:

"She is near. I can't leave. Will you go to her for me?" ...

He told me many things to say.

I found Paula Mantone after many hours in one of the Registmonten hospitals. She was frail and feverish from much labour, not regularly attached to any nursing staff. The instant I saw her, I realised more clearly what Varsieff had been doing—trying to kill himself with work for the Cause. Clearly, she had lost interest in all but death and service. I had been too much with Varsieff to notice his arrival at the same point, but I saw their joint endeavour through her. It seemed to me like a death-pact.

A new mystery for me. Evidently they had realised they must wait for release in death, but serve meanwhile. The marvel of Varsieff's sending me when he might have come himself, gave me just an inkling of the tremendous power and patience which had come to him. Two years, or even a year ago, he would have endangered new Russia for an hour with Paula Mantone.

I could not breathe this rare atmosphere. So far as I knew, there was no woman for me in earth or heaven, but certainly I would not have been able to look over a living woman's shoulder for her mystic counterpart, and long for death to consummate the real mating. But war teaches lovers many wonderful things.

Paula Mantone was a kind of white silence. You had to listen keenly for her step and give your attention to her voice. She was utterly feminine—malleable like gold. Even to me, she was the meaning of love. I had no thought of her being my woman, and yet she seemed spiritually to contain some sister who would answer for me. Soldiers worshipped her. I think each saw his own in her presence. It was the finished magic of the Trojan Helen again—every man's desire, as gold contains potentially all the metals, and the rose the essence of all the flowers....

She was the quietest woman I ever saw. She seemed formed of white cloud—the sun on the other side. That was it—Varsieff was shining on the other side. She answered him, light for light—gold for gold. For the rest of us, she had that white, saintly lustre. And even in that, we found much to make us brave and keep us pure.

Deep within, there was some wonder about Varsieff and Paula Mantone which my brain could not interpret exactly. But the world had suddenly become to me, in her presence, a place of divided hearts—millions of divided lovers around the world. I had only known the shock and misery of war before, and the thrilling roar of comrades, the crash of the wreckers and the songs of the builders ever nearer. Now I heard the still voices of lovers everywhere. In the pressures of air—callings, cryings, yearnings made audible.

It was a new door of the heart that she opened—her particular gift to me. That moment, though I had loved and served Varsieff for years, I knew more thrillingly than ever his greatness, because this woman loved him. To me, to all soldiers, she gave a reflection of that superb bounty. To him she gave its incandescence. Perhaps together they found it too terrible a light for earth, or perhaps they were unwilling to find their fulness of days in a world so charged with agony as these years.

She left me a moment, answering some voice which I had not heard, and stood for several seconds beside the cot of a bearded soldier, her fingers upon his grey-white brow. I did not realise until after she moved, that she was there at the moment of his passing. I thought of it again: She was the white silence. I think the soldier died, believing that his woman was there.

Twenty cots in the place—a low, cold room lit with a handful of candles. The smell of blood and sickness and soiled clothing mingled with the bitterness of iodoform as the chill draught swept through. The peasant soldiers knew only the meagrest care. Their wounds were dressed as often as possible, but there were five times too many cases for the service, and the whole corps was impoverished.

She stood still in the dim distance a moment longer, her fingers touching the brow already cold. Then she seemed to remember that I was waiting at the far door. I was not twenty feet away, and yet in the few seconds required for her to reach me, a sort of vision filled my mind—a vision of the peace that soon would come to the world—the song of fruitful labour sung again, peaceful lands, soft dusks, lit cabins, filled barns, peaceful flocks and up-reaching baby fingers—all with such a queer shock to a male consciousness like mine. And when she stood before me, I felt that the best part of Varsieff was also there. I even fancied his look in her eyes, such as you see exchanged in an old pair who have lived long together. I think that a great love always seeks to make one of two—in different ways than we dream.

"You came from him?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"How does he look?" she asked.

"He looks like you," I said, for the moment inspired. "He looks like a sun-god, too. He looks with your love into the eyes of soldiers and statesmen and revolutionists, and they find him irresistible."

"Dear Lange," she said. "He loves you, too. You are changed. You have come into the big magic of the revolution——"

"I am Varsieff's friend, first and last—his comrade."

"And mine," she whispered.

"The magic comes from standing between, Mlle. Mantone."

She smiled and bent toward me. She had been like a tall, white flower, but now for a second as she bent closer, it seemed to me that I saw a hint of Varsieff's gold flame on the other side—because we talked of him.

"What did he say?" she continued in a low whisper.

"He said to tell you that he and all your friends were busy, day and night, weaving and binding the Cause into one great fabric. He told me to tell you this—that the work of the Weavers will be given to the world in a day or two—possibly the day after to-morrow. I wish you could have seen Varsieff's face as he spoke to me this last. I remember his words exactly: 'Tell Paula all that I do is for her. That I read and write and dream and breathe through her heart—that she has taught me well to love and wait—that I love the world through her heart.'"

"Anything more?" she asked in a kind of agony.

"He told me to say that only you knew his weaknesses, so far——"

"I love them best," she answered. "A woman always holds a little tighter to the sweet human things of her child.... But he is a teacher, a leader. He must be clean and flawless.... If it were only for us—I should have him, weaknesses and all.... But he is to lead the clean peasants to their promised land——"

---

Varsieff listened as a desert listens for rain. He caught me by the shoulders when I ceased to speak—as if to shake something more from my mind and heart.

"A man must be half-divine to keep step with that woman," he said.

Then he changed the subject by remarking that Christonal was not half-divine—quite.

"Christonal is ambitious," he added.

"What has he done now?" I asked.

"He has ordered me to take the field——"

That turned on a red light in my brain. Varsieff was not a soldier. I knew instantly that Christonal was not pure—that he wanted personal power more than the good of the Cause. No one knew Varsieff's place better than he did. My friend could only have been ordered to the field for the same reason that David sent the husband of Bathsheba.

After the revolutionary signal went through, Varsieff and I found ourselves in the Galbraudin Foothills with thirty thousand men, and every man of them wanted to go home. Somehow the peasants thought that if they changed leaders, they would march home at once. They were willing to fight their way home; they had felt their own power. Varsieff loved them with a white passion.

"They won't miss, if we are true! They're clean. God love them—they're clean!"

He saw in the peasants the soil for the new earth and the soul of the new heaven.

Germans and Austrians were to the south of our nest in the Galbraudin Foothills, while to the east and north were the big lines of Russian troops as yet unawakened to the principles that moved our ranks. Our weakness was that the peasants thought the war was over.... The cold mountains were in the distance—winter still upon them—a late spring in the Foothills.... In this dramatic lull, our men talked of their ploughing, of their women.

Some one said, "They're enlisting the women and girls——"

It went through the lines like a taint of gas. The men were difficult then even for Varsieff to hold.

You must get the picture. We revolutionists were cut off from the world. The Germans and Austrians sent us messages—some friendly, some derisive. They thought us fools or gods, but waited to see what we would do. The old line of Russian troops all about—just as clean peasantry as our forces—but officered by the straight military class, impervious so far as a body to any shaft of the propagandist.

Varsieff whispered to me that those regular forces were honeycombed with our comrades, but that they were being put to death under the slightest suspicion—that two or three hundred were martyred each day.

The strangeness and horror of it all dawned upon me—the sense of the whole world against us, even America from whom we had drawn the spirit of our courage—a kind of holding of our army for slaughter. Listen, I have seen tens of thousands of troops go down to the pits of white and red, seen their opened veins colour the snows, seen the spots of red on the brown earth turn black. I have seen the boys lean over the trenches and the pools from each throat widen and deepen from one man to another. I have seen a man grab his mate as he fell and say some absurd whimsical thing that the soldier next didn't understand until his moment of death—a little sentence that folded them, not in extinction, but in a new life. All the horrors of death—quantity and quality—yellow and red and white—pure white passings that made a man think of the lilies—all manner of death I had seen, and still it had all been impersonal compared to now.

This was my own heart business. I shared leadership with Varsieff. These lives were in my hands. I wanted to go down among the boys—one by one and say that I was pure, that I loved them—that if they died they were at least loved and not wasted.

I always wondered what those young peasant souls thought about death. Once in a lot of pain when I was just a boy, I wanted badly to die and was deterred from taking my life, because of a counter-desire to get home and see my mother. I think it must be like that with the peasants.

Varsieff saw them in a strange mystic light. No man loved them as he did. They looked like sons of God to him. That's what he saw when they went down to death.

"There are no dreams too fine for them to answer," he whispered. "They are pure—they come from the North like all invaders—glacially pure! We'll warm their hearts—lead them home to God—teach them how to live!"

He was silent suddenly. I asked him to go on and then saw the queerest look instead. Varsieff was torn by the thought, that now as a leader of revolutionists he must teach his peasants how to die as well.... A civilian, I repeat, does not realise this quite the same. In the Capitol, we had worked for a Cause that meant the death of men, but now we were the officers called upon to charge live troops to the fork and the grill. I knew Varsieff to be more imaginative and tender than I, yet I would not have mentioned my qualms, had I known how terribly he was suffering. He caught my hands, whispering:

"You have it, too?"

It was the single hour of weakness that Varsieff had ever revealed to me. I studied his face without speaking.

"I brought them to this," he muttered. "I have always thought of the spirit of things. I was always pure enough, following that dream.... But, Lange, we're a little mad—we who dream.... I had to come here. I had to see this fighting end. Perhaps Christonal knew what he was doing."

I put my arm around his shoulder. We Russians are allowed that.

"I have always thought of the spirit of things," he added, "until I met Paula Mantone. I would have forgotten everything for her beauty, but she remembered our souls.... And now, because I would have forgotten the bodies of these men Christonal sent me here to learn that. We are spirits and bodies, too, Lange. It takes a crowned head to hold to the two ends at once—God, hear 'em sing——"

The ruffians always hushed and choked us when they sang. Something new about it this time, for Varsieff was seeing them across a red stream of their own blood.

"I can't drive 'em into the fire-pits," he muttered. "Why, I'd rather wash and dress 'em. They've got the idea that I am to lead them home. I can't betray that—not even for the Cause!... I never saw it before. They are not herds, not groups—but monads—each a man——"

"We've got to put through the big story," I said quietly. "Thirty thousand is cheap—our little planting out here is cheap, if we can give Russia the new heaven and the new earth—Russia—then America—then the world——"

I was giving him back his own words.

"Thirty thousand lives," he repeated. "Yes, the price is cheap—thirty thousand every day for awhile—your life and mine, Lange—a cheap price to pay for the glory we see in the days to come. But I can't kill these—I think Christonal knew it all the time——"

"You aren't ready for work in the constructive end, if you falter here among the wreckers——" I said.

I knew that no Cause had ever uncovered a more valuable servant than this same Varsieff, though badly out of hand just now. I wasn't making any effect upon him. He looked at me strangely.

"That sounds true—exactly and unerringly true," he said wearily.

There was no quarter possible now.

"I remember your words in clubs and cabinets and in the ante-rooms of the dumas.... You weren't afraid of blood there, Varsieff."

He winced.

"They called you the 'Fire-eater,'" I added, never knowing when to stop. "It's just as straight to-day as it was when you talked there: 'The old civilisation must be washed clean with the blood of the new——'"

His hand came up piteously.

"But their hearts are turned homeward, Lange," he said. "Their eyes are building their homes all over again—eyes turned homeward over the mountains——"

"Turned to God," I said reverently.

"Yes, but taking my word—the word of Varsieff—that God is there——"

"He is there."

"But will He come to them at the last, Lange?... Will He show His face—so they will believe?... When they feel their death-wounds—the blood sliding out, warm and silent—the cold coming in—will they hold to what I said? Will He be there for them?"

"You're shot up, old man, only a bit bewildered to-day. No one knows better than you how great emotional giving of one's self to Cause or Country makes death easy—and quickens the Soul."

Varsieff was ashen.

"I've got to eat all my words! Even you, bring back my words to me. I've talked too much.... Suppose I am a madman——?"

"Then you have no responsibility for what you said," I smiled.

He stared at the tent-wall.

"Varsieff," I said at last.

His hand came out.

"You were pure in all you undertook."

Silence.

"You wanted nothing for yourself."

"I wanted nothing for me—nothing but——"

"But what?"

"Paula Man——"

"She's a part of you—now. You look like her!"

"I think I'll have to die to see her—Oh, Lange—I'm sick—I'm impoverished, cell by cell, with loneliness——" Varsieff laughed unsteadily and added:

"I remember asking you to say to her—that she alone knew my weaknesses. Now you know them, too."

"She said she loved them.... Varsieff, I have known you a long time," I added after a moment. "I have shaped my manhood, such as it is, after you. I am proud of this—to the end. I, too, care more for you, because of this day—for understanding. To understand—that is everything. I who always listened before, tell you to-day: The dream does hold. The dream is good. Thirty thousand men—even our singing, growling, big-footed, red-hearted thirty thousand—is a cheap price to pay for the new Russia!"

"Do you think Paula would say that?" he asked.

"Yes," I answered, "from the mother-heart of her."

I had spoken, and now I tried to make myself believe that she would have ordered him on. I had to change him, at any cost. A rather questionable way now appeared—to lift him out of himself.

"Listen, Friend," I added. "You are lonely—but you have the heart of a woman pulsing with yours—every beat.... You'd have to be me to know what loneliness means. I'd take all the pain to have a woman like that. There are times when you are half a man, because you are apart from her, but there are other times, Varsieff, when you are twice a man—double dynamics——"

He caught me in his arms. I knew he was healed, but I felt the cad and the cur for bringing his sympathy on myself.... He was looking back toward the cold mountains when I left him, and the look of the woman was in his eyes. That night I dreamed that Paula Mantone came to me with a message for Varsieff, and that she told me some beautiful thing about the child of a king—but I could not quite get it down to brain.

---

Sedgwick, a brigadier, and technically in command of the thirty thousand, was a straight militarist in training. He looked to Varsieff, the political head, for orders. The day came when Varsieff had no one to look to, for we were cut off from Christonal and Petrograd. We were not long kept in doubt after that as to who were our immediate enemies—not German, not Austrian, but the old line Russian troops hung up to the east of us, the same that had recently occupied themselves making martyrs of the revolutionists in their ranks—two or three hundred a day.

It was a red morning when two of our fliers blew down with the word that our brothers were closing in—that it looked like extermination for our thirty thousand, unless we strode out and crippled them with the first shock. Ten miles to the west the Bundalino Marshes began. We had the secret paths, but it was a wretched fugitive outlook to seek shelter there. As I looked at it, it would never occur to leaders who had brought Russia to the moment of parturition, to break up for a miserable safety in the swamps of Bundalino.

I recall the distant firing of that red morning. My eardrums had not healed from recent months more or less in touch with the artillery. I remember brushing the edge of the lines, as I crossed from Sedgwick's headquarters back to the hut I shared with Varsieff and a servant or two. The peasants were listening queerly and quietly to the far firing.

I passed through the sprawl of pup-shelters, and certain ideas occurred to me: first, that the arrangement of camp was abominable, a pitiful lack of technique shown in this bit of military handling; second, the slow cold conviction that we, as revolutionists, must have all the virtues of the old-line troops to begin with, and to build our real greatness on top of that; finally I drew from the queer attitudes of the men toward me, an intuitional flash that to them the distant firing meant a signal that they were about to fight their way home.

Varsieff was sitting dejected upon a camp-chest when I rejoined him.

"Sedgwick is ready when you are," I said. "He suggests that the men be not kept waiting too long."

Varsieff looked up. His face was livid. His soul had no chance that morning. I thought of the old story of Arjuna standing between the battle-lines, reluctant to join action against his own kindred.

"It's the same here that it was in Petrograd," I announced finally. "The dream holds——"

He shook his head.... "They are just boys—white-haired boys. They want to go home——"

That instant I seemed to see the world laughing at this great man; I saw the end of Varsieff politically.... Superb genius broken down by an intrinsic weakness—as a man who, trying to lead the world, falls for the lure of an actress maid.... I saw all his work of early years—straight, clean, unerring, selfless labour of a man to a Cause—the inspired labour of the past two years when he gave the whole fruit of his quickened heart to the new Russia—the magic of a man loved by a woman great enough to be his divine sculptor and priestess.... It was the thought of Paula Mantone that helped me that instant. Sedgwick was on the path outside. I hurried out and whispered:

"Don't come now. Come back in ten minutes——"

The General paused to let me hear the firing. "But the troops——" he said.

"Give me ten minutes more with Varsieff——"

"The attack may be called——"

"I know, but I need that time."

The old soldier turned back, hating me....

---

"Varsieff," I said a moment later.

"Yes——"

"I've got to tell you something——"

He turned quickly.

"Paula Mantone is near——"

"No!"

"I saw her last night."

"Will she see me?"

I laughed at him. "Do you think she would want to see you now?... You're a sick man, Varsieff—morally sick. Any decision is better than your present incapacity.... I think she must have sensed your weakness—that she came to bring you strength, for she is your strength."

"Does she love me?" he asked.

"That's a slap in her face to ask that—a woman who gives you her soul's strength—the love of her life. That's lack of faith, my friend——"

"I am whipped. The white-haired boys—they want to go home——"

"You can't wash your hands. You can't say, 'Go home, boys.' They have to fight their way home. First, they have to fight their way to the east out of this valley—against old Russia!... It's the first great battle of the Old and New—first time in the history of the world. We hold the New for better or worse—this little Theban band. You would let us fail and dribble away and slink into the Marshes—you, her lover, whom she calls Boy and Strongheart——"

---

"What did she say?" he asked fiercely.

"——that I need not speak of her coming unless you needed help. She said you would not need help on account of your own lack of courage—rather that it would be your great tenderness that might defeat our Cause now. She said this was but a last ordeal, hardest of all for Builders, who have ceased to kill...."

"Where did you see her?"

It was all a lie, of course, except I had dreamed of her coming. I invented a place of meeting and added to his question that Sedgwick did not know of her presence.

"I agreed that we were not killers, but I told her that we dared to be cruel to ourselves," I added.

"What did she say to that?" Varsieff asked hoarsely. He had suddenly become like a child—one who dared not go to her, who scarcely trusted himself to speak.

"She said that was the key to the whole matter—that we dare to sacrifice ourselves—dare to inflict pain upon each other because one's true love is the self—"

I was startled and awed at my own words. The idea was unlike anything of mine. It was exactly as if she had told me something of the kind in the dream. Varsieff groaned:

"The glory of her," he whispered. "Was there more?"

"Only that you must not falter now ... and that she would be waiting for you at the end of the day——"

"'In the cool of the evening,' she would say," he muttered.

"Perhaps that was it," I said.

"Nothing more?"

"Yes—but only if you needed it——"

"I do."

"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....

---