He entered the gate of the Kloster after dark. Grandfather had lighted the brass lamp and sat by the stove asleep. On the stove were several pots with a fragrant steam escaping from under their lids. As Amos laid down his books on the sill outside, his conscience reproached him. But his motive was, he reminded himself, excellent.
Grandfather went early to bed on his hard cot in the next room, leaving Amos bending over the manuscript from which he had been separated for a day, and charging him not to work too late. When the old man's light breathing could be heard, Amos opened the door, brought in his precious parcel and with shaking, thrifty hands untied the hard knot with which it was fastened. He selected the book which was uppermost and laid the others in the drawer of his table. In the silence of the night he began to study the world into which he was to launch Ellen. Surely none of these authors had hitherto been read in a stranger spot! Close to the little cottage on one side crowded the graves of the dead, above it on the other rose the grim old buildings. All spoke, not of love, either good or evil, nor of the present, nor of life, but of the past and of the peace of death.
The book he had selected was the volume of Russian stories. He read an introductory paragraph which stated that the author gave a description of his impressions of the Russian-Japanese War, an event as dim to Amos as though it had taken place in 1904 B.C. instead of 1904 A.D. He was disappointed—he was not interested in war! But having begun he kept on. He had thought himself a slow reader, but he had read hitherto only the subtle abstractions of mystic writers, pondering as he went; he had never had before him such texts as these.
"Horror and madness!" The opening words were not reassuring. But he read on.
"I felt it for the first time as we were marching along the road—marching incessantly for ten hours without stopping, never diminishing our step, never waiting to pick up those who had fallen, but leaving them to the enemy that was moving behind us in a compact mass."
He blinked as though to clear his vision; then his pupils moved back and forth, back and forth.
"An hour passed, but the multitude still moved on, and the air and the distant, phantom-like ranks trembled as before. Again the burning heat pierced my body ... I was surrounded by a group of gray people; some lying motionless, perhaps dead; others sitting up and staring vacantly. Some had guns and resembled soldiers; others were stripped almost naked, and the skin on their bodies was so livid that one did not care to look at it. Not far from me some one was lying with his bared back upturned. One could see by the unconcerned manner in which he had buried his face in the sharp, burning sand, by the whiteness of the palm of his upturned hand, that he was dead, but his back was as red as if he were alive. And I saw—"
"What is this?" whispered Amos. But he read on and on until headless men surrounded him and a sea of blood seemed rising to engulf him.
He finished with a dying light and a body aching cruelly with cold. The fire had gone out; there echoed about him the mysterious crackling sounds of a bitter night. He rose and stood in the darkness, appalled by the things he had read. Was this the world into which he had thought to send pure and lovely Ellen?