"A broken-hearted man playing deaf; a secret telephone installed on our
premises without our consent--this is all I know so far," said Marta,
who was opposite Lanstron at one end of the circular seat in the arbor
of Mercury, leaning back, with her weight partly resting on her hand
spread out on the edge of the bench, head down, lashes lowered so that
they formed a curtain for her glance. "I listen!" she added.
"Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will
take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an
angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our
defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here. The Browns
will fall back step by step, and we mean, with relatively small cost to
ourselves, to make the Grays pay a heavy price for each step--just as
heavy as we can!"
They had often argued before with all the weapons known to controversy;
but now the realization that his soldierly precision was bringing the
forces of war into their personal relations struck her cold, with a
logic as cold as his own seemed to her.
"You need not use euphonious terms," she said without lifting her lashes
or any movement except a quick, nervous gesture of her free hand that
fell back into place on her lap. "What you mean is that you will kill as
many as possible of the Grays, isn't it? And if you could kill five for
every man you lost, that would be splendid, wouldn't it?"
"I don't think of it as splendid. There is nothing splendid about war,"
he objected; "not to me, Marta."
"Still you would like to kill five to one, even ten to one, wouldn't
you?" she persisted.
"Marta, you are merciless!"
"So is war. It should be treated mercilessly."
"Yes, twenty to one if they try to take our land!" he declared. "If we
could keep up that ratio the war would not last more than a week. It
would mean a great saving of lives in the end. We should win."
"Exactly. Thank you. Westerling could not have said it better as a
reason for another army-corps. For the love of humanity--the humanity of
our side--please give us more weapons for murder! And after you have
made them pay five to one or ten to one in human lives for the tangent,
what then? Go on! I want to look at war face to face, free of the
will-o'-the-wisp glamour that draws on soldiers!"
"We fall back to our first line of defence, fighting all the time. The
Grays occupy La Tir, which will be out of the reach of our guns. Your
house will no longer be in danger, and we happen to know that Westerling
means to make it his headquarters."
"Our house Westerling's headquarters!" she repeated. With a start that
brought her up erect, alert, challenging, her lashes flickering, she
recalled that Westerling had said at parting that he should see her if
war came. This corroborated Lanstron's information. One side wanted a
spy in the garden; the other a general in the house. Was she expected to
make a choice? He had ceased to be Lanny. He personified war. Westerling
personified war. "I suppose you have spies under his very nose--in his
very staff offices?" she asked.
"And probably he has in ours," said Lanstron, "though we do our best to
prevent it."
"What a pretty example of trust among civilized nations!" she exclaimed.
"And you say that Westerling, who commands the killing on his side, will
be in no danger?"
"Naturally not. As you know, a chief of staff must be at the wire head
where all information centres, free of interruption or confusion or any
possibility of broken lines of communication with his corps and
divisions."
"Then Partow will not be in any danger?"
"For the same reasons, no."
"How comfortable! In perfect safety themselves, they will order other
men to death!"
"Marta, you are unjust!" exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as
disciple reveres master. "Partow has the iron cross!"--the prized iron
cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional
courage in action and for that alone. "He won it leading a second charge
with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his
regiment. The second charge succeeded."
"Yes, I understand," she went on a little wildly. "And perhaps the
colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even
heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he
failed. Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military
cult. You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to
win either iron or bronze crosses. And, Lanny, are you a person of such
distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of
danger?"
She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of
dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane. If
his work were to make war, her work was against war--the mission of her
life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new
absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any
argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She
did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his
maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he
replied:
"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of
staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious
efficiency which means victory."
"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in
countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!" she
put in.
"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that
used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet
days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy
business, that would be to my taste."
"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs,
that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him,
her eyes flaming demand and satire.
"No! War--necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her
seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of
euphonious terms.
"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at
home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and
shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well
and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my
mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty
that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded
and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy
whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to
tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights
of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"
"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire
had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which
will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The
purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was
necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw
the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand.
If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed
and theirs on the table."
"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the
rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to
keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"
"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of
war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be
uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of
enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This
is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why
the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."
She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on
her side.
"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern
science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac;
screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till
the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up
among soldiers! I know!"
"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You
can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a
Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to
send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his
quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff,
whether elated or depressed, pick up scraps of conversation, and, as a
trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the
'phone to Partow's headquarters."
"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to
depend on them for scouting."
"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new
resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down
before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may
descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is
actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they
were even in the first steps of execution. This"--playing the thought
happily--"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and
dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta,
that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."
"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to
talk."
"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.
"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke
into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut
colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If
there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be
shot as a spy?" she asked.
"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He
refused the assignments I first suggested to him. He objected that they
did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous
enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience--what a conscience
old Gustave has!--by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was
instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He
wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not
let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing
it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the
chance--the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's
fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in
a crisis."
"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered
steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make
use of them."
"You put it bluntly, Marta. You--"
"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of
Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips,
which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in
sympathy.
"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair,
his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter
dejection--and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the
devil's company!"
"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is
that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled
purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"
"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win
out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.
"If there is no war, I hope--after a year or so, I hope and believe that
I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had
atoned."
"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed.
The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief,
swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which
gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does
come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental
strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise
at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until
war comes."
"And then?"
"Lanny, you yourself, with all your information, you don't think--"
"No; though we are nearer it than ever before, it seems to me," he said,
choosing his words carefully. "But it is likely that diplomacy will find
its way out of this crisis as it has out of many others."
"Then we'll leave that question till the evil day," she replied. "We
have had a terrific argument, Lanny, haven't we? And you have won!"
Her fingers flew out to his arm and rested lightly there after an
instant's firm pressure, as was her wont after an argument and they
sheathed their blades. Their comradeship seemed to be restored in all
its old glory of freedom from petty restraint. He was sure of one thing:
that she would let her fingers remain on no other man's sleeve in this
fashion; and he hoped that she would let them remain there a long time.
Very foolish he was about her, very foolish for a piece of human
machinery driven by the dynamo of a human will.
"I have an impression that your goodness of heart has won," he suggested
gently.
"Or rather let us say that Feller has won."
"Better still, yes, Feller has won!" he agreed. "Oh, it is good, good,
good to be here with you, Marta, away from the grind for a little
while," he was saying, in the fulness of his anticipation of the hours
they should have together before he had to go, when they heard the sound
of steps. He looked around to see an orderly from the nearest military
wireless station.
"I was told it was urgent, sir," said the orderly, in excuse for his
intrusion, as he passed a telegram to Lanstron.
Immediately Lanstron felt the touch of the paper his features seemed to
take on a mask that concealed his thought as he read:
"Take night express. Come direct from station to me. Partow."
This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the
next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a
rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes
some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and
set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends
before he tossed the charred remains away. Marta imagined what he would
be like with the havoc of war raging around him--all self-possession and
mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought
not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.
"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war
very soon--within a week or two weeks--what would be your attitude about
Feller's remaining?"
"To carry out his plan, you mean?"
"Yes."
There was a perceptible pause on her part.
"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after
war begins."
"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.
"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have
never deserted the Galland house!"
"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of
the fighting."
"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a
gesture of impatience.
"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other
wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent
because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance
we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the
material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to
intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing
action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource
at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as
cover or protection and will be subject to attack."
Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he
dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and
dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a
smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his
were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.
"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell
you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over
glare ice.
"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map
before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in
defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point!
So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."
"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without
softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse
than Westerling!"
"No, he would use his own premises, his brother's, his father's if it
would help. Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with
the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an
inferno."
"How Christian!" breathed Marta. "I suppose he loves his grandchildren
and that they are taught the Lord's prayer!"
"I believe his only pastime is playing with them," admitted Lanstron,
stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no
longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash. "He tells
them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war."
"Worse yet--a hypocrite!"
"But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere. He is working to the same
end as you--peace. If the Grays would play with fire he would give them
such a burning that they will never try again. He would make war too
horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it
belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible
hereafter. Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science
of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers
cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!"
"My children's prayer and Partow in the same gallery!" she laughed
stonily. "The peace of armament, not of man's superiority to the tiger
and the tarantula! And you say it all so calmly. You picture the hell of
your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"
"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an
old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without
illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory--and then chaos!"
"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion
versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I
see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of
spirit that calls for the end of an interview.
"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" he urged.
"Isn't that my affair?" she asked. "Aren't you willing to leave even
that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt
of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?"
What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the
conviction of its logic? Only call up from the depths the two passions
of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.
"I love this soil, my country's soil, ours by right---and I love you! I
would be true to both!"
"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's
monstrous!"
"I--I--" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.
This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he
swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling,
injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the
movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.
"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.
"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was
smiling as when, half stunned and in agony--and ashamed of the fact--he
had risen from the débris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all
right," he concluded.
She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if
she would bare her heart.
"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your
arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to
every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go
it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"
"You mean--I--."
But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the
spark.
"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been
cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and
next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and--oh, this
is enough for to-day!"
She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At
the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up
and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let
it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up
the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a
versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a
downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet
her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of
destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!
"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a
chariot of fire bearing my flame--I am that bold, that brazen, that
reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up
to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into
armies--no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"
For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had
disappeared.
"If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought;
"anything except this beastly--"
But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started
at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the
table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of
sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a
tattoo on the casing; no answer.
"Gustave!" he called; no answer.
Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.
"Hello, Lanny!" exclaimed Feller, rising and setting a chair and
breaking into a stream of talk. "That's the way they all have to do when
they want to attract my attention. I heard your voice and Miss
Galland's--having an argument in the garden, I should say. Then I heard
your step. Since I became deaf my sense of hearing has really grown
keener, just as the blind develop a keener sense of feeling. Eh? eh?" He
cupped his hand over his ear in the unctuous enjoyment of his gift of
acting. "Yes, Colonel Lanstron, would you like to know what a perfect
triumph we're going to pull off in irises next season--but, Lanny, you
seem in a hurry!"
"Gustave, I am ordered to headquarters by the night express and I came
to tell you that I think it means war."
"War! war!" Feller shouted. "Ye gods and little fishes!" In riotous glee
he seized a chair and flung it across the room. "Ye salty, whiskery gods
and ye shiny-eyed little fishes! War, do you hear that, you plebeian
trousers of the deaf gardener? War!" Flinging the trousers after the
chair, he executed a few steps. When he had thus tempered his elation,
he grasped Lanstron's arm and, looking into his eyes with feverish
resolution and hope, said: "Oh, don't fear! I'll pull it off. And then I
shall have paid back--yes, paid back! I shall be a man who can look men
in the face again. I need not slink to the other side of the street when
I see an old friend coming for fear that he will recognize me. Yes, I
could even dare to love a woman of my own world! And--and perhaps the
uniform and the guns once more!"
"You may be sure of that. Partow cannot refuse," said Lanstron, deeply
affected. After a pause he added: "But I must tell you, Gustave, that
Miss Galland, though she is willing that you remain as a gardener, has
not yet consented to our plan. She will make no decision until war
comes. Perhaps she will refuse. It is only fair that you should know
this."
For an instant Feller was downcast; then confidence returned at high
pitch.
"Trust me!" he said. "I shall persuade her!"
"I hope you can. It is a chance that might turn the scales of victory--a
chance that hangs in my mind stubbornly, as if there were some fate in
it. Luck, old boy!"
"Luck to you, Lanny! Luck and promotion!"
They threw their arms about each other in a vigorous embrace.
"And you will keep watch that Mrs. Galland and Marta are in no danger?"
"Trust me for that, too!"
"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see
you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away.