With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went
she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the
time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the
kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in
the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn
breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of
irony.
An hour or more of intermittent firing passed in the suspense of
listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar
of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of shell fire broke and
continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.
"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.
At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash
within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms.
Abruptly as the inferno of the guns had commenced, it ceased, and the
steady, passionate, desperate blasts of the rifles, now uninterrupted,
were more deadly and venomous if less shocking to the ear.
The movement of the minute-hand on the clock-face became uncanny and
merciless to her eye in its deliberate regularity. Dellarme had been
told to hold on until noon, she knew. Was he still smiling? Was Feller
still happy in playing a stream of lead from the automatic? Was the
second charge of the Grays, which must have come to close quarters when
the guns went silent, going to succeed?
The rifle-fire died down suddenly and she heard a cheer like that of
the morning, only wilder and fiercer and even less human. Could it be
from the Browns celebrating a repulse? Or from the Grays after taking
the position? What did it matter? If the Grays had won there was an end
to the agony so far as her mother and herself were concerned--an end to
murder on the lawn and devastation of their property. But, at length,
the rifle-fire beginning again in a slow, irregular pulse told her that
the Browns had held.
Now another long intermission. The demon was wiping his brow and
recovering his breath, Marta thought; he was repairing damaged joints in
his armor and removing the flesh of victims from his claws. But he would
not rest long, for the war was young--exactly one day old--and many
battalions of victims remained unslain.
How slowly the big hand of the clock kept hitching on from minute-mark
to minute-mark! Yet no more slowly than the hands of clocks in distant
provinces of the Browns or of the Grays, where this day was as quiet and
peaceful as any other day.
Mrs. Galland had settled down conscientiously to play solitaire, a
favorite pastime of hers; but she failed to win, as she complained to
Marta, because of her stupid way this morning of missing the combination
cards.
"I really believe I need new glasses," she declared.
"Let me help you," said Marta. Welcome idea! Why hadn't she thought of
it before? It was something to do.
"But, Marta--there you are, covering up the jack of spades, the very
card I need--though it will not help now. I've lost again!" exclaimed
Mrs. Galland at length. "Why, Marta, you miss worse than I do!"
"Do I? Do I?" asked Marta in blank surprise and irritation. "Please let
me try once alone. I'll not miss this time. Correct me if I do."
She played with the deliberation and accuracy of Feller should he have
to make a little ammunition for his automatic go a long way, and Mrs.
Galland did not observe a single error.
"Hurrah! I won!" Marta cried triumphantly, with some of her old
vivacity.
Then she drew away from the table wearily. The strain of concentrating
her mind had been worse than that of the battle; or, rather, it had
merely added another strain to a tortured brain after a sleepless night.
For her ears had been constantly alert. The demon had moved one of his
claws to fresh ground; the inferno on the La Tir side of the frontier
had shifted to a valley beyond the Galland estate, where the firing
appeared to come from the Brown side. Breaking from the leash of
silence, guns, automatics, rifles--each one straining for a speed
record--roared and crashed and rattled in greedy chorus, while the clock
ticked perhaps a hundred times. Thus famished savages might boll their
food in a time limit. Thereafter, for a while, the battle was desultory.
Then came another outburst from Dellarme's men, which she interpreted as
the response to another rush by the Grays; and this yelping of the demon
was not that of the hound after the hare, as in the valley, but of the
hare with his back to the wall. When it was over there was no cheer.
What did this mean? Oh, that slow minute-hand, resting so calmly between
hitches of destiny, now pointing to a quarter after eleven! For half a
century, it seemed to her, Marta had endured watching its snail pace.
Now inaction was no longer bearable. Without warning to her mother she
bolted out of the kitchen. Mrs. Galland sprang up to follow, but Minna
barred the way.
"One is enough!" she said firmly, and Mrs. Galland dropped back into her
chair.
In the front rooms Marta found havoc beyond her imagination. A portion
of the ceiling had been blown out by a shell entering at an up-stairs
window; the hardwood floors were littered with plaster and window-glass
and ripped into splinters in places.
"How can we ever afford repairs!" she thought.
But she hurried on, impelled by she knew not what, through the
dining-room, and, coming to the veranda, stopped short, with dilating
eyes and a cry of grievous shock. Two of his men were carrying Dellarme
back from the breastwork where they had caught him in their arms as he
fell. They laid him gently on the sward with a knapsack under his head.
His face grew whiter with the flow of blood from the red hole in the
right breast of his blouse. Then he opened his lips and whispered to the
doctor: "How is it?" Something in his eyes, in the tone of that faint
question, required the grace of a soldier's truth in answer.
"Bad!" said the doctor.
"Then, good-by!" And his head fell to one side, his lips set in his
cheery smile.
Had ever any martyr shown a finer spirit dying for any cause? Marta
wondered. She felt the sublimity of a great moment, an inexorable
sadness. She knew that she should never forget that cheery smile or that
white face. What was danger to anybody? What was death if you had seen
how he had died?
His company was a company with his smile out of its heart and in its
place blank despair. Many of the men had stopped firing. Some had even
run back to look at him and stood, caps off, backs to the enemy,
miserable in their grief. Others leaned against the parapet, rifles out
of hand, staring and dazed.
"They have killed our captain!"
"They've killed our captain!"--still a captain to them. A general's
stars could not have raised him a cubit in their estimation.
"And once we called him 'Baby Dellarme,' he was so young and bashful!
Him a baby? He was a king!"
"Men, get to your places!" cried the surviving lieutenant rather
hopelessly, with no Dellarme to show him what to do; and Marta saw that
few paid any attention to him.
In that minute of demoralization the Grays had their chance, but only
for a minute. A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought
of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a
mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue
blouse and crownless straw hat.
"Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning
to fight!"
And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's:
"Avenge his death! They've got to kill the last man of us for killing
him! Revenge! revenge!"
That cry brought back to the company all the fighting spirit of the
cheery smile and with it another spirit--for Dellarme's sake!--which he
had never taught them.
"Make them pay!"
"He was told to stay till noon!"
"They'll find us here at noon, alive or dead!"
Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at
his feet.
"He wouldn't use this--he was too soft-hearted--but I will!" he cried,
and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The
explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the
lower side of the terrace. For this they had crawled across the road in
the night--to find themselves unable to move either way and directly
under the flashes of the Browns' rifles.
Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of
direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first
exchange of glances.
"You engineers, make ready!"
"Hand-grenades to the men under the tree! That's where they're going to
try for it--no wall to climb over there!"
"You engineers, take your rifles--and bayonet into anything that wears
gray!"
"Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades! Form up
behind them, everybody!"
"No matter if they do get in at first! Back, you men, from under the
tree!"
There was not a single rifle-shot. In a silence like that before the
word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily
obeyed because Dellarme's foresight had impressed their sense upon the
men in his quiet way.
The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays. Then, before the
dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by
the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through
the breach by the pressure of the mass behind. In that final struggle of
one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or
automatics or long-range bullets played no part. It was the grapple of
cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing,
twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining
breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes
and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive
desperation, to kill in order not to be killed. The cloud of rocking,
writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward. Its
movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring
through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray
lake on the other side of the breastwork.
Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled,
feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and
herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men. What a
place for her to be! But she did not think of that. She was there. The
dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself. She was mad;
they were mad; all the world was mad!
One minute--two, perhaps--not three--and the thing was over. She saw
the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when
a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its
gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with
the weapons nature gave them.
Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant
who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young god on
an escarpment of rock on Olympus. His great nose showed in silhouette at
intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle
of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that
made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war's savagery. At
last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork. Unlucky Pilzer!
That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky
shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the
weaving muscles of his powerful arm.
"I thought so!" cried Feller. "Attacks on frontal positions by daylight
are going out of fashion!"
It was he who mercifully arrested the shower of hand-grenades that
followed the exit of the enemy. Two of the guns of the castle batteries,
having changed their position, were making havoc enough at pointblank
range, with a choice of targets between the Grays huddled on the other
side of the breastwork and those in retreat.
"We'll have peace for a few hours now," said Stransky, squinting down
his nose. "And we'll have something to eat. I ought to have got that
fellow with the beauty-spot on his physiognomy, but, confound him, he
was an eel!"
By this time the men had recovered their breath. It occurred to them by
common impulse that a cheer was due, and for the first time they broke
into a hurrah with wide-open throats.
"Another--for Dellarme!" called Stransky, who seemed to think that he
and not the callow lieutenant was in command.
This they gave, standing instinctively at attention, with heads bared,
for the leader whose spirit survived in them; a cheer with triumph in
its roar, but a different sort of triumph from the first cheer.
Listening to it were the wounded among the Grays who had fallen within
the breastwork to be trampled by the Browns as they had pressed forward.
The doctor, but a moment ago a fiend himself with features of rage, now,
in the second nature of his calling, with a look of tender sympathy, was
ministering without distinction of friend or foe. One of the Grays, his
cheek bearing the mark of a boot heel, raised himself, and, in defiance
and the satisfaction of the thought to his bruises and humiliation,
pointing his finger at Feller, Marta heard him say:
"You there, in your straw hat and blue blouse, they've seen you--a man
fighting and not in uniform! If they catch you it will be a drumhead and
a firing squad at dawn!"
"That's so!" replied Feller gravely. "But they'll have to make a better
job of it than you fellows did if they're going to----"
He turned away abruptly but did not move far. His shoulders relaxed into
the gardener's stoop, and he pulled his hat down over his eyes and
lowered his head as if to hide his face. He was thus standing, inert,
when a division staff-officer galloped into the grounds.
"Splendid! Splendid! There's some iron crosses in this for you!" he was
shouting before he brought his horse to a standstill. "The way you held
on gained the day for Lanstron's plan. They tried to flank in the valley
after their second attack on your position failed We drew them on and
had them--a battalion in close order--under the guns for a couple of
minutes. It was ghastly! Our losses have been heavy enough, but nothing
to theirs--and how they are driving their men in! But where is Major
Dellarme?"
When he saw Dellarme's still body he dismounted and in a tide of
feeling which, for the moment, submerged all thought of the machine,
stood, head bowed and cap off, looking down at Dellarme's face.
"I was very fond of him! He was at the school when I was teaching there.
But a good death--a soldier's death!" he said. "I'll write to his mother
myself." Then the voice of the machine spoke. "Who is in command?"
"I am, sir!" said the callow lieutenant, coming up.
Feller's fingers moved in a restless beat on his trousers' seam, his
lips half parted as if he must speak, but the men of the company spoke
for him.
"Bert Stransky!" they roared.
It was not according to military etiquette, but military etiquette meant
nothing to them now. They were above it in veteran superiority.
"And--" Stransky had started to point to Feller, whose name he did not
know, when a forbidding gleam under the hat brim arrested him.
"Where's Stransky?" demanded the staff-officer.
"You're looking at him!" replied Stransky with a benign grin.
Seeing that Stransky was only a private, the officer frowned at the
anomaly when a lieutenant was present, then smiled in a way that
accorded the company parliamentary rights, which he thought that they
had fully earned.
"Yes, and he gets one of those iron crosses!" put in Tom Fragini.
"What for?" demanded Stransky in surprise. They were making a lot of
fuss about him when he had not done anything except to work out his
individual destiny.
"Yes--the first cross for Bert of the Reds!"
"And we'll let him make a dozen anarchist speeches a day!"
"Yes, yes!" roared the company.
"By all means--but not for this; for trying to save an old man's life!"
put in Marta.
After his survey of that amazing company the officer was the more amazed
to hear a woman's voice in such surroundings.
"The ays have it!" he announced cheerfully. He lifted his cap to Marta.
With tender regard and grave reverence for that company, he took extreme
care with his next remark lest a set of men of such dynamic spirit might
repulse him as an invader. "The lieutenant is in command for the
present, according to regulations," he proceeded. "You will retire
immediately to positions 48 to 49 A-J by the castle road. You have done
your part. To-night you sleep and to-morrow you rest."
Sleep! Rest! Where had they heard those words before? Oh, yes, in a
distant day before they went to war! Sleep and rest! Better far than an
iron cross for every man in the company! They could go now with
something warmer in their hearts than consciousness of duty well done;
but this time they need not go until their dead as well as their wounded
were removed.
"You're not coming with us?" Stransky whispered to Feller.
"Eh? eh?" Feller put his hand to his ear. "Quite deaf!" he quavered.
"But I judge you ask if I am coming with you. No. I have to stay to look
after my garden. It has been sadly damaged, I fear."
"That's right--of course you're deaf!" agreed Stransky, well knowing the
contrary. "I'll be lonely without you, pal. It was love at first sight
with me!"
"And with me!" Feller whispered. "You and I, with a brigade of infantry
and guns--" he began, but remembering his part, as he often would in the
middle of a sentence since the distraction of war was in his mind, he
turned to go.
"A cheer for the old gardener! We don't know who he is or was, and it's
none of our business. He saved the day!" called Stransky.
Feller started; he paused and looked back as he heard that stentorian
chorus in his honor; and, irresistibly, he made a snappy officer's
salute before starting on.
"That was very sweet to me," he was thinking, and then: "A mistake! a
mistake! One thought! One duty!"
Making to pass around the corner of the house, he was confronted by
Marta, who had come to the end of the veranda. There, within hearing of
the soldiers, the dialogue that followed was low-toned, and it was swift
and palpitant with repressed emotion.
"Mr. Feller, I saw you at the automatic. I heard what the wounded
private of the Grays said to you and realized how true it was."
"He is a prisoner. He cannot tell."
"Does he need to? You have been seen--the conspicuous figure of a man in
gardener's garb fighting on the very terrace of his own garden! The Gray
staff is bound to hear of such an extraordinary occurrence. It is one of
those stories that travel of themselves. And Westerling will find that
same gardener here when he comes! What hope have you for your ruse,
then?"
"I--I--no matter! I forgot myself, when Lanny had warned me not to go
near the guns. My promise to him! My duty! I accept what I have prepared
for myself--that is a soldier's code."
"But I shall not let you risk your life in this fashion."
"You--" A searching look--a look of fire--from his eyes into hers, which
were bright with appeal.
"I feel that I have no right to let you go to your death by a firing
squad," she interrupted hurriedly, "and I shall not! For I decide now
not to allow the telephone to remain!"
"But my chance--my one chance to--"
"You have it there--happiness in the work you like, the work for which
you seem to have been born--at least, a better work than spying and
deceit--the right that you have won this morning there with the gun!"
"I"--he looked around at the automatic ravenously and fearsomely--"I--"
"It is all simply arranged. There is time for me to use the telephone
before the Grays arrive. I shall tell Lanny why you took charge of the
gun and how you handled it, and I know he will want you to keep it."
"And the uniform--the uniform again! Yes, the uniform--if only a gunner
private's uniform!" he exclaimed in short, pulsating breaths of ecstasy.
"Yes, count on that, too! And good-by!"
"Good-by! I--" But she had already turned away. "I've changed my mind!
Exit gardener! Enter gunner! I'm going with you! I'm going with you!" he
cried in a jubilant voice that arrested the attention of every one on
the grounds. They saw him throw his arms around Stransky and then rush
to the automatic. "One thought! One duty! Oh, that is easy now!" he
breathed, caressing the breech with a flutter of pats from both hands.