"You, Marta--you are still there!" Lanstron exclaimed in alarm when he
heard her voice over the tunnel telephone. "But safe!" he added in
relief. "Thank God for that! It's a mighty load off my mind. And your
mother?"
"Safe, too."
"And Minna and little Clarissa Eileen?"
"All safe."
"Well, you're through the worst of it. There won't be any more fighting
around the house, and certainly Westerling will be courteous. But where
is Gustave?"
"Gone!"
"Gone!" he repeated dismally.
In a flash he had guessed another tragedy for poor Gustave, who must
have once more failed to stick to his purpose, thus shattering the last
hope that the thousandth chance would ever come to anything.
"Wait until you hear how he went," Marta said. With all the vividness of
her impressions, a partisan for the moment of him and Dellarme, she
sketched Feller's part with the automatic.
As he listened, Lanstron's spirit was twenty again, with the fever that
Feller's "let's set things going!" could start rollicking in his veins.
What did the thousandth chance matter? Only a wool-gatherer would ever
have had any faith in it. Victory for Gustave! Victory for the friend in
whom he believed when others had disbelieved! Victory for those gifts
that had broken a career against army routine in peace, once they had
full play in war!
"I can see him," he said. "It was a full breath of fresh air to the
lungs of a suffocating man. I--"
Marta was off in interruption in the full tide of an appeal.
"You must--I promised--you must let him have the uniform again!" she
begged. "You must let him keep his automatic. To take it away would be
like separating mother and child; like separating Minna from Clarissa
Eileen."
"Better than an automatic--a battery of guns!" replied Lanstron. "This
is where I will use any influence I have with Partow for all it is
worth. Now, let the red-tapists dare to point to his past when I ask
anything for him and I'll overwhelm them with the living present! Yes,
and he shall have the iron cross. It is for such deeds as his that the
iron cross was meant."
"Thank you," she said. "It's worth something to make a man as happy as
you will make him. Yes, you are real flesh and blood to do this, Lanny."
Her point won with surprising ease, when she had feared that military
form and law could not be circumvented, she leaned against the wall in
reaction. For twenty-four hours she had been without sleep. The interest
of her appeal for Feller had kept up her strength after the excitement
of the fight for the redoubt was over. Now there seemed nothing left to
do.
"No doctor who ever examined me for promotion has yet found that I
wasn't flesh and blood," Lanstron remarked a little plaintively.
"Then the doctor must have kept the truth from Partow," she told him
with a faint return of the teasing spirit that he knew well. "He wants
only men of steel, with nerves of copper wire run by an electric
battery, on his staff, I'm sure."
Lanstron laughed very humanly for an automaton.
"I'll suggest the battery to him. It might prove a labor saver," he
said. "Being a little old-fashioned, he has depended on clockwork, which
requires a special orderly to wind us when we fun down and nod at our
desks." Then he turned solicitous. "The Gray staff will certainly give
you an escort beyond the Gray lines, where you will find a place to
establish yourselves comfortably."
The suggestion brought her energy back with the snap of a whip.
"No!" she declared. "We stay in our home. It's ours! No one else has any
right there while our taxes are paid. Doesn't my children's oath say:
'I'll not let a burglar drive me out of my house'?"
"Isn't that coming around to my view, Marta?" he asked. "Aren't we
refusing to leave the nation's house because a burglar is trying to
enter?"
"Lanny, you, with all your intellect--when you know the oath as well as
I--you pettifog like that! The oath says to appeal to justice and reason
even after the first blow is struck. Why doesn't our premier appeal to
the people of the Grays?"
"They garbled his last despatch, as it was, to suit their purpose."
"Their government garbled it. I meant to appeal not to their premier but
to the people, as human beings to human beings. Over there they're human
beings just as much as we are. Why didn't Partow speak, too, as chief of
staff, if he is so fond of peace? He is the one--not the Fellers and the
Dellarmes and the Stranskys, who merely act up to their faith and
training as pawns--he in the security of his cabinet making war. Why
didn't he say: 'We do not want war. We will not mobilize our army. We
will do nothing to arouse the war passion?'"
"Their government would only have been convinced of an easier conquest,
and by this time they would have been up to the main line of defence.
Marta, when the diplomatic history of the war is known it will be found
that the Gray government struck as a matter of cold, deliberate
intention. Bodlapoo was only an excuse to carry out a plan of conquest."
"So Partow has taught the Browns," she answered stubbornly. "That is one
partisan view. What is theirs? What is Westerling teaching the Grays?"
"Marta--really, I--"
"What a smashing argument _really_ is! You see that you really are not
for peace, but for war. But won't you ask Partow to do one thing, if he
still insists that he is for peace? I wonder if he will chuckle or laugh
at my suggestion, or will he grin or roar? Though you know that he will
do them all, ask him to send out a flag of truce to the Grays and beg
them to stay their operations while his appeal--an appeal with a little
of the Christ spirit in it, from one Christian nation to another to stop
the murder--is read to the Gray soldiers and ours; to those who have to
suffer and die! Oh, I'd like to help write that appeal, telling the
women what I have seen! Do you think if it were given to the world that
the Grays would still come on? Ask him, Lanny, ask him to make that
simple human appeal, as brother to brother, to the court of all
humanity! Ask him, please, Lanny!"
"I shall, Marta!" he replied seriously, in respect for her seriousness
throbbing with the abandoned play of her vitality, though he knew how
fruitless the request would be. He loved her the more for this outburst.
He loved her for her quick sympathies with any one in trouble, whether
Feller or Minna; for all of her inconsistencies which were so real to
her; for her dreams, her visions, her impulses, because she tried to put
them in action, and he envied Feller for having fought in defence of her
house. How could he expect her to interest herself exclusively in him as
one human being when all human beings interested her so profoundly? If
the world were peopled with Martas and their disciples then her proposal
would be practicable.
"That's fine of you, Lanny!" she said. "You've taken it like a good
stoic, this loss of your thousandth chance. You really believed in it,
didn't you?"
"Forgotten already, like the many other thousandth chances that have
failed," he replied cheerfully. "One of the virtues of Partow's steel
automatons is that, being tearless as well as passionless, they never
cry over spilt milk. And now," he went on soberly, "we must be saying
good-by."
"Good-by, Lanny? Why, what do you mean?" She was startled.
"Till the war is over," he said, "and longer than that, perhaps, if La
Tir remains in Gray territory."
"You speak as if you thought you were going to lose!"
"Not while many of our soldiers are alive, if they continue to show the
spirit that they have shown so far; not unless two men can crush one man
in the automatic-gun-recoil age. But La Tir is in a tangent and already
in the Grays' possession, while we act on the defensive. So I should
hardly be flying over your garden again."
"But there's the telephone, Lanny, and here we are talking over it this
very minute!" she expostulated.
"You must remove it," he said. "If the Grays should discover it they
might form a suspicion that would put you in an unpleasant position."
The telephone had become almost a familiar institution in her thoughts.
Its secret had something of the fascination for her of magic.
"Nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I am going to be very lonely. I want to
learn how Feller is doing--I want to chat with you. So I decide not to
let it be taken out. And, you see, I have the tactical situation, as you
soldiers call it, all in my favor. The work of removal must be done at
my end of the line. You're quite helpless to enforce your wishes. And,
Lanny, if I ring the bell you'll answer, won't you?"
"I couldn't help it!" he replied.
"Until then! You've been fine about everything to-day!"
"Until then!"
When Marta left the tower she knew only that she was weary with the
mind-weariness, the body-weariness, the nerve-weariness of a spectator
who has shared the emotion of every actor in a drama of death and finds
the excitement that has kept her tense no longer a sustaining force.
As she went along the path, steps uncertain from sheer fatigue, her
sensibilities livened again at the sight of a picture. War, personal
war, in the form of the giant Stransky, was knocking at the kitchen
door. His two-days-old beard was matted with dust and there were dried
red spatters on his cheek. War's furnace flames seemed to have tanned
him; war seemed to be breathing from his deep chest; his big nose was
war's promontory. But the unexposed space of his forehead seemed
singularly white when he took off his cap as Minna came in answer to his
knock. Her yielding lips were parted, her eyes were bright with inquiry
and suspicion, her chin was firmly set.
"I came to see if you would let me kiss your hand again," said Stransky,
squinting through his brows wistfully.
"Would that do you any good?" Minna asked.
"A lot--a big lot!" said Stransky. "But if it is easier for you, why,
you can give me another blow in the face. I deserve it. It would show
that you weren't quite indifferent; that you took some interest in me."
"I see your nose has been broken once. You don't want it broken a second
time. I'm stronger than you think!" Minna retorted, and held out her
hand carelessly as if it pleased her to humor him.
He was rather graceful, despite his size, as he touched his lips to her
fingers. Just as he raised his head a burst of cheering rose from the
yard.
"So you've found that we have gone, you brilliant intellects!" he
shouted, and glared at the wall of the house in the direction of the
cheers.
"Quick! You have no time to lose!" Minna warned him.
"Quick! quick!" cried Marta.
Stransky paid no attention to the urgings. He had something more to say
to Minna.
"I'm going to keep thinking of you and seeing your face--the face of a
good woman--while I fight. And when the war is over, may I come to
call?" he asked.
His feet were so resolutely planted on the flags that apparently the
only way to move them was to consent.
"Yes, yes!" said Minna. "Now, hurry!"
"Say, but you make me happy! Watch me poke it into the Grays for you!"
he cried and bolted.
"It seems to me that he is the biggest, most ridiculous man I ever saw!"
said Minna, as she watched him out of sight. "I'm tired, just tired to
death, aren't you?" she added to Marta.
"Exactly!" agreed Marta. "I feel as if I had worked my way through hell
to heaven and heaven was the chance to sleep."
Within the kitchen Mrs. Galland was already slumbering soundly in her
chair. Overhead Marta heard the exclamations of male voices and the
tread of what was literally the heel of the conqueror--guests that had
come without asking! Intruders that had entered without any process of
law! Would they overrun the house, her mother's room, her own room?
Indignation brought fresh strength as she started up the stairs. The
head of the flight gave on to a dark part of the hall. There she paused,
held by the scene that a score or more of Gray soldiers, who had
riotously crowded into the dining-room, were enacting.