"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.