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"I never saw that huge W before " said Peter. "You don't mean Cassiopeia? Her chair isn't there, but over to the north " "No, no there. Rigel, the upper right corner, down to the left, the Dog-star; up to Betelguese, down to the left again to Procyon, and up to the brightest of all the stranger, not usually there " Spenski clutched him. "I was watching the bigger configuration, and didn't notice.
They had merely pressed the hands of their friends, something darkly melancholy about Samarc, as if his eyes were in deep shadow, and something luminous in the eyes that shone from the haggard face of Little Spenski. They looked forward to the night, as men famished and athirst in a pit listen to the toil of rescuers.
You'll come a long way before you arrive at the personal familiarity of the subject earned by this same little fat boy.... Turn it again, Peter." Samarc rushed past, speaking excitedly in French, and in the shadows behind they saw the eyes of Spenski, sympathetic and wistful. "What did he say, Peter?" Boylan asked quickly. "Samarc's French is like my Russian."
The whole east was naked to the horizon and an indescribable glory of starlight. "Aren't they amazing?" Spenski whispered. "It must be nearly morning, for those are the winter stars. I think they must have wakened me up. Do you know them?" "Just the first magnitudes. They are more brilliant than I have ever known." Orion and a great kite of suns stood out with new and flashing power.
The place dwindled and darkened to the rear, from which the head and shoulders of Samarc presently emerged, and a moment later Little Spenski, his companion, sat up and rubbed his eyes. These two, invariably together, were men of a rapid-fire battery, to meet their pieces lower in the fields, and attached for the present, as were Boylan and Mowbray, to the staff of General Kohlvihr's command.
"It seems to say," he told the lens-maker, "'I was this at one time, and now I must go." Orders came for Samarc and Spenski, but they were not to be remotely stationed, since their battery was assigned to Kohlvihr's division a different camp but the same field.
The current was turned on in his brain, thoughts revolving faster and faster: "It would all have been a mere military movement if you had not come. I would not have understood Spenski, nor the real Samarc, nor Kohlvihr as he is, nor the charges of infantry. The coming of Moritz Abel, words I have heard, the street, the singing, the field, the future why, it's all different because you came.
Was it pathological loss of sleep, or fatigue? Or was it something that Spenski and Abel, the field and hospital; more than all was it something that Berthe Wyndham had given him? In any event, it seemed as if those infantry lines marching out now to the burning front were being torn from his own breast, every moujik precious. He wanted to be with them, not with the heinous guns.
The four were much together for a few days after that, Samarc and Spenski not yet assigned to their battery. They learned each other in those few days as men often fail to learn the hearts of their immediate associates during years. There was fighting scattered, open, surprising often to one out of touch with the points and the scouting.
"It was Moritz Abel who wrote We Are Free.... "And there are others like Spenski and Abel some of them dead some to die to-morrow. Do you think the good God would let them die so easily if it wasn't all right? But we mustn't die without making our lives count." Peter's eyes were covered by slender hands. It was like passing a garden of mignonette in the night, that fleeting perfume of the hands.
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