The indefatigable captain of engineers had turned spectator. With
high-power binoculars glued to his eyes, he was watching to see if the
faint brown line of Dellarme's men were going to hold or break. If it
held, he might have hours in which to complete his task; if it broke, he
had only minutes.
Marta came up the terrace path from the chrysanthemum bed in time to
watch the shroud of shrapnel smoke billowing over the knoll, to
visualise another scene in place of the collision of the squadrons, and
to note the captain's exultation over Fracasse's repulse.
"How we must have punished them!" he exclaimed to his lieutenant. "How
we must have mowed them down! Lanstron certainly knew what he was
doing."
"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.
Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.
"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have
failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said;
and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know
what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."
"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip
convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he
would gain his point.
"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.
This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He
was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes
aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.
"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save
the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them
to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession?
Why, I ask?"
The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a shell fire of
questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's
curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the
official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed
to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine
fury.
"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.
"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan--mow them down! mow them
down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she
dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.
In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The
Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she
must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed
taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.
"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.
"No, not yet," he answered.
"Then please come with me to the tower!"
Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the
gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him
against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a passion running so
strong.
"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were
nothing unusual in her attitude. No word passed between them as he kept
pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his
eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line
of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached
and riotous tendrils.
"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way
that left no excuse for refusal.
When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the
way into the tunnel.
"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she
instructed him after she had pressed the button and the panel door of
the telephone recess flew open.
For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting
authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his
fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two
wire ends.
"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she
was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?
As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the
other end of the line, but no "Hello!"
"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except
him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.
Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with
a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of
pressing duties.
"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with
Westerling yet?"
"It is I--Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation
that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear
answer--I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that
you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"
"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"
"So that you can mow them down?"
"That is one way of putting it--yes."
"If I keep your secret--if I let the telephone remain, I am an
accomplice! I shall not be that--not to any kind of murder! I shall not
let the telephone remain!"
"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory
means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough
to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its
main line of defence."
"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.
"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta--I plead with you--please, please leave
the house!" he begged passionately.
Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again
that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited
guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and
unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!
"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the
wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking
other lives every minute?"
"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life
of all to me--because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the
talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her
face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a
quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric
quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a
pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a
white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate
sentences:
"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst
of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and
blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"
He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands,
and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.
"My one chance--my last chance--gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance
for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without
shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring
victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he
proceeded dismally.
"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from
a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face
as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with
only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.
"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of
a spy--I who was honor man at the military school--I who had a
conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to
atone--when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to
die if not to live----"
He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming
odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he
seemed to strive for coherence.
"--in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have
been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.
His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered
out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face
he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There
was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel
with his nerves.
"Please," he pleaded faintly--"please leave me to myself. I will tear
out the telephone--trust me--only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain--I
see only dark!"
He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far
but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at
the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and
he looked for a passionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in
some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A lustrous veil was
over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of
her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her
right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of
"I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable attitude she was silent for a
time.
"Let it remain--it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried
past him still clasping her wrist.
He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound
of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial
vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La,
la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and
still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.
"Why not tear out the telephone--why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree
to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once?
I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I
have skill! God knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both
are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an
artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without
further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining,
but bang-bang-bang on the target!"
In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of
manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.
"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's
another--but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his
nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a
soldier now--a soldier assigned to a definite duty for my flag. I should
break my word of honor--a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"
He snatched down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not
reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in
the ascendant.
"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss
Galland consents!"
"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"
"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in
boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was
bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I
ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the
house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I--"
"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and
perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't
think of the guns!"
"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty!
I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me
again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But,
trust me, Lanny! Trust me--for my flag and my country against the
invader!"
"Against the invader--that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of
it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"
"Trust me!"
"Bless you, and God with you!"
"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk
trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the
stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguishing
the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh,
this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little
clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.