Part 15

Romance--I have walked up and down streets and open highways for days and found no man's work challenging, nothing to keep alive my interest. I wanted absolutely nothing that any one else in the world had, nothing that any one could gain. All worldly activities looked diminished and pathetic to me--but under it all--the endless iteration of the Soul: "Here is a _man_--as much me as myself!" A call in that--always a call in that. One longs to die for that, once and for all.

I crossed the Yellow Sea with a wound long ago. I had missed a battle and was suffering, without the satisfaction of suffering with a bullet wound.... I lay three deep in Chinese coolies in deck passage. I wanted to see some one at home, or I should have dropped overside. In the fag of pain, on the border of delirium, I lay with the deep down men of the world, Chinese coolies in their filth and vomit. I looked into the eyes of the nearest, and saw a brother, not a stranger.... It was ten years afterward before I caught the big meaning of that moment--and that's why I say so often that the time comes when we find the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. That is _Romance_.

There is more of death and less of days in my dream of Romance now.... I can see a man giving up his woman because she is dearer than his own life to him. I can see a man going to the scaffold for a country that is taking his life and hers. (Always I see him loving his country more dearly than the sober ones of regnancy and war.) ... I see him taking his woman in his hands--half laughing, half crying, their faces upturned--one creature in that moment of parting, as they had never been in street or church, or state.... Romance in that.

I have a line here from the Valley Road Girl:

... Lastly, it came like a commandment to me--to give all to the Coming Generation--to acknowledge the New Race as one's God--remembering always that all Gods are jealous Gods."

It's all in that, our dream of Romance--Democracy, the Planetary Hive.

* * * * *

I am using a short story as the next chapter, because it brings nearer to the centre of the picture certain ideals of romance, workmanship, martyrdom, love and death, than many essays could do. A tale may be a master-synthesis. Perhaps it is just the thing to show you what we mean, as a group,--what we mean about many things. This is not a marketable tale; in fact, it was done with the idea of making a place for itself just here in this book.

* * * * *

26

THE COSMIC PEASANT

A SHORT STORY

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.