"You ought not to leave the house--not this morning," protested Mrs.
Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular
Sunday service of her school.
"The children expect me," Marta explained.
"Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you
will not come."
But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.
"Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to
come, I would not disappoint him!" she said. "Heaven knows, mother, if
there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't
remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this--that is
too terrible!"
"As you will!" Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.
Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but
it was a different kind of peace--a peace mocked by sounds beyond its
boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a
demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious anticipation of
a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them
into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word.
As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy
of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill!
And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who
risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses,
but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received
the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a
sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand
practical human nature.
Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace
to the main pass road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw
Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of
his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some
field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that
had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations
had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his
deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to
undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind
under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to
remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that
war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.
"It will be averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him
had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any
other familiar object of the landscape.
"The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!" he was thinking.
She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he
acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off
his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as
he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with
the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that
he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for
words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the
machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the
demon was a fair, beckoning god in cloth of gold--a god of hope and
fortune.
"Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our
preparations leaking out--Lanny's plan all alive--the guns coming," he
went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features
resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action--"troops moving
here and there to their places--engineers preparing the
defences--automatics at critical points with the infantry--field-wires
laid--field-telephones set up--the wireless spitting--the caissons
full--planes and dirigibles ready--search-lights in position"
There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow passed in
front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so
vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly
leaving.
"Miss Galland!" he called urgently. "Firing may commence at any minute.
You must not go into town!"
"But I must!" she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused.
It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.
"Then I shall go with you!" he said, starting toward her with a light
step, in keeping with the gallantry of a man even younger than his
years. He spoke in a tone of protective masculine authority, as an
officer might to a woman of whom he was fond when he saw her exposing
herself to danger. He would escort her; he would see that no harm befell
her. The impulse was spontaneous in an illusion free of the gardener's
part. But he saw her lips tighten and a frown gather.
"It is not necessary, thank you!" she answered, more coldly than she had
ever spoken to him. This had a magically quick effect on his attitude.
"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head
sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who
recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a
gunner any more--I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without
looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs
was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me.
And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a
spy--and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"
Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic
figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of
personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.
"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she
was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might
have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."
Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice--a man
approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted
his feet and refused to budge.
"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I
was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the
first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my
village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better
kill me and have done with it!"
"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak.
We're acting under orders. No use of balking."
"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a
little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to
say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my
folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap--it--"
"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there
isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist
arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said,
and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces
the order.
A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the
color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the
brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of
the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and orderlies, was
evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular
intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time
to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors
and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.
"Are they coming yet?"
"Do you think they will come?"
"Are you sure it's going to be war?"
"Will they shell the town?"
"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All
we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them
when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"
A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a
cross street stopped to inquire:
"This way to the knitting mills?"
"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.
"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the
lieutenant as he hurried on.
"Then they're going to fight in the town!"
"Blow our homes to pieces!"
"Destroy our property!"
After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating
back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn
to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was
not to his soldierly taste.
"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are
going to make them pay for every foot they take--the invaders!"
"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.
"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.
"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our
property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the
Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."
"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the
army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other
side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays
could give him!"
"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.
Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong
direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were
parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him
in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that
thoroughly centred his attention.
"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay--and
they make you pay--and you make them pay--and so on!"
The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but
the young woman might charge.
"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he
said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other
orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or
his place of business."
"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already
opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half
dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine
importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.
"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had
an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your
children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we
had to let them stay there."
"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful
with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly
be missed from the flock. Others have no homes--at least, not much of a
one"--here her temper rose again--"taxes being so high in order that you
may organize murder and the destruction of property."
"I--" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.
But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as
she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.
"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh
that helped her to recover poise.
With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a
desire to please which conflicted with duty.
"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been
assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children
ought--"
"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta
interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.
"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the
aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so
fast you can't count 'em--and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow
things up--and--" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions
as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.
"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.
"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky,
round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we
said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn't sick."
"My seven disciples--seven!" exclaimed Marta as she counted them. "And
you need not sit on the regular seats, but around me on the platform. It
will be more intimate."
"That's grand!" came in chorus. They did not bother, about chairs, but
seated themselves on the floor around Marta's skirts.
"My, Miss Galland, but your eyes are bright!"
"And your cheeks are all red!"
"With little spots in the centre!"
"You're very wonderful, Miss Galland!"
The church clock boomed out its deliberate strokes through ten, the hour
set for the lesson, and all counted them--one--two--three. Marta was
thinking what a dismal little effort theirs was, and yet she was very
happy, tremblingly happy in her distraction and excitement, that they
had not waited for her at the door of the chapel in vain.
She announced that there would be no talk this morning; they would only
say their oath. Repeating in concert the pledge to the boys and girls of
other lands, the childish voices peculiarly sweet and harmonious in
contrast to the raucous and uneven sounds of foreboding from the street,
they came in due course to the words of the concession that the oath
made to militancy.
"If an enemy tries to take my land--"
"Children--I--" Marta interrupted with a sense of wonder and shock. They
paused and looked at her questioningly. "I had almost forgotten that
part!" she breathed confusedly.
"That's the part that makes all we're doing against the Grays right!"
put in Jacky Werther promptly.
"As I wrote it for you! 'I shall appeal to his sense of justice and
reason with him--'"
Jaws dropped and eyes bulged, for above the sounds of the street rose
from the distance the unmistakable crackling of rifle-fire which, as
they listened, spread and increased in volume.
"Go on--on to the end of the oath! It will take only a moment," said
Marta resolutely. "It isn't much, but it's the best we can do!"