Chapter 21

Yet Marta, returning to the hall, had to steady herself in a dizzy moment against the wall. Complete reaction had come. She craved sleep as if it were the one true, real thing in the world. She craved sleep for the clarity of mind that comes with the morning light. In the haziness of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of horror: of Feller's smile when he went back to his automatic for good; of Dellarme's smile as he was dying; of Stransky's smile as Minna gave him hope; and of Hugo's face as he uttered his flute-like cry of protest. In her ears were the haunting calmness and contained force of Lanstron's voice over the telephone. She was pleased to think that she had not lost her temper in her talk with the staff-officer. No, she had not flared once in indignation. It was as if she had absorbed some of Lanny's own self-control. Lanny would approve of her in that scene with an officer of the Grays. And she realized that a change had come over her--a change inexplicable and telling--and she was tired--oh, so tired! It had been exhausting work, indeed, for one woman, though she had been around the world, making war on two armies.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, all too flushed with energy, the energy of movement, to think of the feud between Hugo and Pilzer, Fracasse's men had sped along the castle road. Little Peterkin easily kept pace. There was no danger in pursuit. In him was the same zest of the chase which Animated his comrades. They dropped down on a ledge without much regard to order. Before them, at close range, was a company breaking out of close order in a _sauve-qui-peut_ rout up a reverse slope. It was not Dellarme's company, but some other that had mistaken its direction and retired too late and by the wrong road.

You will throw hand-grenades, will you? thought Fracasse's men. You will mangle our fellows when they Can't strike back, will you? Now you'll pay! Now it is our turn! We have seen our blood flow and now yours will flow!

The lust of the red slipped the cartridge clips into the magazines and held a true aim in the mad delight of slaughter. No one minded, for no one heard--not even little Peterkin--the scattering bullets in return. They had reached the stage where the objective thought of revenge wholly submerged the subjective thought of personal danger, which is the mood of the hungry tiger in the hunt. They were the veritable finished products of veteran experience in purpose and marksmanship. Hugo, too, was firing, but far over the head of every target; firing like a man in a trance who needs some deciding incident to bring him out of it into the part he was to play.

Only occasional figures who had not escaped over the ridge were to be seen. The fewer the targets the greater the concentration. A whole company was firing on a dozen straggling figures. But one--that one in the pasture--seemed to have a charmed life. The ground around him was peppered with dust spots. He had only a few yards more to go to safety; yes his head--the exasperation of him!--was in line with the crest before he fell.

Where was there any more prey? With ferret quickness eyes swept the range of vision. Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown blot, a target.

"Ah!" a chorus of excited exclamations in greeting of the game flushed from cover ran along the line. Just the way you got our fellows with the hand-grenades, we will get you! This was the thought, this the prayer which they saw being fulfilled by the glad medley of their fire when Hugo Mallin sprang up and threw down his rifle as if it were something whose touch had become venomous. He threw it down with features transformed in the uplifting thought and the relief of a final resolution taken.

"I am through!" he cried. "I will not murder my fellowman who has done me no wrong! I cannot, I will not kill!"

Fracasse, who was near by, heard enough to understand the purport of the declaration, and his recollection of Hugo's heresy and all the prejudice that he had formed against Hugo and the abhorrence of Hugo's offence to the strict militarist brought a rush of anger to his brain as he leaped up and drawing his sword, struck at Hugo with the flat of it. He aimed for Hugo's back, but a bullet had hit Hugo in the calf of his leg and, his knees giving under him, he received the blow on the head and fell unconscious.

When he came to it was with a twitch of pain in his ribs. He saw the glowering faces of his comrades above him and realized that Pilzer had given him a kick which expressed the general opinion.

"Once ought to be enough of that," said the doctor, who was bandaging the leg, speaking to Pilzer.

Yet in the doctor's eyes Hugo saw no favor, only the humanity of his occupation of mercy to criminal and king alike. But Hugo expected no favor and he was glad of what he had done as he swooned again. When he came to a second time, his head aching with throbs, it was with a sense of falling. He found that he was on a litter that had just been set down. Evidently this was by order of the colonel, who was standing over Hugo in the company of some officers. All were regarding him as if he were a species of reptile.

"World anarchist ideas, which is another word for treason or white liver," observed the colonel. "To think that it happened in my regiment! But I'll not try to cover it for the regiment's good name. He will get the full measure of the law!"

"The placard is a good idea," suggested an officer.

"Yes, put on by one of his comrades!"

"The punishment of public opinion. It shows how sound the army is at heart."

Hugo, lowering his glance, was able to see a sheet of note-paper pinned to his blouse. It was lettered, but he could not make out the words. Then he heard the approach of a galloping horse, whose hoofs seemed to strike his head, and heard the horse stop and an orderly saying something about Company I having got too far forward into a mess and the need of litters.

"We can spare this one," said the colonel.

Hugo was rolled roughly onto the ground by the roadside and left alone. He managed to raise himself on his elbow and saw that the lettering of the placard was "Coward!" Officers and soldiers and hospital-corps men called attention to it as they passed. The sun was very hot and he was growing feverish. Painfully he dragged himself to the shelter of a tree, and then, looking around, saw that he was near the big house of the terraced garden.

XXX

MARTA MEETS HUGO

The general staff-officer of the Grays, who had tasted Marta's temper on his first call, when he returned the next morning did not enter unannounced. He rang the door-bell.

"I have a message for you from General Westerling," he said to her. "The general expresses his deep regret at the unavoidable damage to your house and grounds and has directed that everything possible be done immediately in the way of repairs."

In proof of this the officer called attention to a group of service-corps men who were removing the sand-bags from the first terrace. Others were at work in the garden setting uprooted plants back into the earth.

"His Excellency says," continued the officer, "that, although the house is so admirably suited for staff purposes, we will find another if you desire."

He was too polite and too considerate in his attitude for Marta not to meet him in the same spirit.

"That is what we should naturally prefer," and Marta bowed her head in indecision.

"We should have to begin installing the telegraph and telephone service on the lower floor at once," he remarked. "In fact, all arrangements must be made before the general's arrival."

"He has been a guest here before," she said reminiscently and detachedly.

Her head dropped lower, in apparent disregard of his presence, as she took counsel with herself. She was perfectly still, without even the movement of an eyelash. Other considerations than any he might suggest, he subtly understood, held her attention. They were the criterion by which she would at length assent or dissent, and nothing could hurry the Marta of to-day, who yesterday had been a creature of feverish impulse.

It seemed a long time that he was watching that wonderful profile under the very black hair, soft with the softness of flesh, yet firmly carved. She lifted her head gradually, her eyes sweeping past the spot where Dellarme had lain dying, where Feller had manned the automatic, where Stransky had thrown Pilzer over the parapet. He saw the glance arrested and focussed on the flag of the Grays, which was floating from a staff on the outskirts of the town, and slowly, glowingly, the light rippling on its folds was reflected in her face.

"She is for us! She is a Gray!" he thought triumphantly. The woman and the flag! The matter-of-fact staff-officer felt the thrill of sentiment.

"I think we can arrange it," Marta announced with a rare smile of assent.

"Then I'll go back to town and set the signal-corps men to work," he said.

"And when you come you will find the house at your disposal," she assured him.

Except that he was raising his cap instead of saluting, he was conscious of withdrawing with the deference due to a superior.

In place of the smile, after he had gone, came a frown and a look in her eyes as if at something revolting; then the smile returned, to be succeeded by the frown, which was followed by an indeterminate shaking of the head.

The roar of battle kept up its steady refrain in the direction of the range. Marta had heard it when she fell asleep and heard it when she awakened. A battery of heavy guns of the Grays broke their flashes from a knoll this side of the one where Dellarme's men had made their first stand. At the foot of the garden, where yesterday she had distributed flowers to the wounded Browns, a regiment of Gray infantry was marching past a train of siege-guns. All the figures moving on the landscape, which yesterday had been brown, had changed to gray. The Grays were masters of the town and all the neighborhood.

Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep. Rather than return directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go around the house. She stopped before a Japanese maple which had been split by a shell striking in a crotch. Was there any hope of saving it? No. She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.

Over the sward, cut by shell fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark, and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man. The rest of him was hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which bordered the estate at this point. Another step and she saw a circular red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her hero of the scene in the dining-room.

Hugo's eyes were closed, his breaths slow, in restless sleep. His face, flushed with fever, was winningly boyish and frank. He who had had the courage to speak alone against the opinion of his fellows, to voice a belief that made every sympathetic chord in her own mind sing with praise and understanding, the courage to say that invasion was wrong even when made by his own people, had been labelled coward and left to die!

The exaltation of his features when he had been the champion of her beliefs and her impulse against the barbarism of his comrades and the charm of their resignation now, the pitifulness of his condition--all had an appeal as she bent over him that called for an expression having the touch of the sublimely feminine. She took his hand in hers and pressed it gently. He awoke and brought himself jerkily to a sitting posture. The effort made a crash in his head that sent his senses swimming. She thought that he was going to swoon and slipped her arm behind him in support and, the Marta of impulse, pressed her lips to his brow. After the first racking throb of his temples he was able to steady himself, and as she drew away she saw his blue eyes starting in wonder at her act.

"I--I had to do it to thank you for what you did in the dining-room!" she stammered.

"Oh! Oh! It was very beautiful of you, but I couldn't help being surprised, for it was rather unusual--from a stranger." He smiled, and Hugo had a gift in smiles, as we know: smiles for laughter, smiles for reassurance, and smiles to cure embarrassment. "It was almost as refreshing as a drink of water," he concluded impersonally.

"You are thirsty?"

"This--this is morning, isn't it?" Hugo went on quizzically.

"Yes, yes!"

"Then it must be the next day," he pursued, still quizzically. "You see, I said I would not kill any more--and I will not--and I was shot and got tagged without even being shipped as freight. I was thirsty last night, very thirsty, and some one--I think it was Jake Pilzer--some one said to go to the fountain of hell for a drink, but I--I don't think that a very good place to get a drink, do you?"

Weak and faint as he was, he put a touch of drollery into the question which made her laugh, her eyes sparkling through a moist haze.

"You're real, aren't you?" he inquired in sudden perplexity. "I'm not dreaming?"

"As real as the water I shall bring you."

Soon Marta was back, holding a glass to his lips.

"There's no doubt about it; you are real!" said Hugo.

"I feel as if the chimney were still hot but that you had drenched the fire in the grate."

"Who put this on you?" she asked as she unpinned the placard.

"I've a vague idea, from a vague overhearing of the colonel's remarks, that it is public opinion," he replied, and seeing, that she was about to tear it up, he arrested her action. "No, I think I'd like to save it as a souvenir--the odds are so greatly against me--as a sort of souvenir to keep up my courage."

His tone, the way he drew the muscles of his face, ironed out her frown of disgust at public opinion with a smile. For he made his kind of courage no less light-hearted and free of pose than Dellarme had made his.

Directly the coachman, whom Marta had summoned when she went for the water, appeared with an improvised litter, and the two bore in at the kitchen door a guest for breakfast whose arrival gave Mrs. Galland a distinctly visible surprise. His uniform was gray, and in her heart of hearts she hated gray as the symbol of an enemy whom her husband had fought. But when Marta told the story of the part he had played in defence of the chandelier, personal partisanship abetted the motherly impulse that was already breaking down prejudice. She was busy with a dozen suggestions for his comfort, quite taking matters out of Marta's hands.

"I know more about the care of the sick than you do!" she insisted. "One lump or two in your coffee, sir? There, there, you had better let me hold the cup for you. You are sure you can sit up? Then we must have a pillow."

"I'll fetch one from the other room," put in Minna.

"Two will be better!" Marta called after her.

"It is delightful to have breakfast in your kitchen, madame," said Hugo to Mrs. Galland in a way that ought to have justified her in thinking herself the most charming and useful person in the world.

XXXI

UNTO CÆSAR

It was more irritating than ever for Mrs. Galland to keep pace with her daughter's inconsistencies. There was a Marta listening in partisan sympathy to Hugo's story of why he had refused to fight and telling the story of her school in return. There was a Marta seizing Hugo's hand in a quick, impulsive grasp as she exclaimed: "Your act personified what I taught my children!" There was a Marta planning how he should be secreted in the coachman's quarters over the stable, where he would be reasonably free from discovery until his strength was regained. Then here was another Marta, after Hugo had been carried away on the litter, saying coolly to her mother:

"'Unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's!' We have our property, our home to protect. Perhaps the Grays have come to stay for good, so graciousness is our only weapon. We cannot fight a whole army single-handed."

"You have found that out, Marta?" said Mrs. Galland.

"We have four rooms in the baron's tower and a kitchen stove," Marta proceeded. "With Minna we can make ourselves very comfortable and leave the house to the staff."

"The Gallands in their gardener's quarters! The staff of the Grays in ours! Your father will turn in his grave!" Mrs. Galland exclaimed.

"But, mother, it is not quite agreeable to think of three women living in the same house with a score of strange men!" Marta persisted.

"I had not thought of that, Marta. Of course, it would be abominable!" agreed Mrs. Galland, promptly capitulating where a point of propriety was involved.

When Marta informed the officer--the same one who had rung the door-bell on his second visit--of the family's decision he appeared shocked at the idea of eviction that was implied. But, secretly pleased at the turn of events, he hastened to apologize for war's brutal necessities, and Marta's complaisance led him to consider himself something of a diplomatist. Yes, more than ever he was convinced of the wisdom of an invader ringing door-bells.

Meanwhile, the service-corps men had continued their work until now there was no vestige of war in the grounds that labor could obliterate; and masons had come to repair the walls of the house itself and plasterers to renew the broken ceilings.

All this Marta regarded in a kind of charmed wonder that an invader could be so considerate. Her manner with the officers in charge of preparations had the simplicity and ease which a woman of twenty-seven, who is not old-maidish because she is not afraid of a single future, may employ as a serene hostess. She frequently asked if there were good news.

"Yes," was the uniform reply. An unexpected setback here or resistance there, but progress, nevertheless. But she learned, too, that the first two days' fighting along the frontier had cost the Grays fifty thousand casualties.

"In order to make an omelet you must break eggs!" she remarked.

"Spoken like a true soldier--like a member of the staff!" was the reply.

In her constraint and detachment they realized her conscious appreciation of the fact that in earlier times her people had been for the Browns; but in her flashes of interest in the progress of the war, flashes from a woman's unmilitary mind, they judged that her heart was with the Grays. And why not? Was it not natural that a woman with more than her share of intellectual perception should be on the right side? From her associations it was not to be expected that she would make an outright declaration of apostasy. This would destroy the value and the attractiveness of her conversion Reverence for the past, for a father who had fought for the Browns, against her own convictions, made her attitude appear singularly and delicately correct.

Though everything was ready for them, the staff delayed coming owing to the stubbornness of some heavy guns of the Browns, which, while they had directed no shells against the house, had shown that they had the range by unexpectedly playing havoc with infantry in close order on the pass road at the foot of the garden and with transportation on the castle road. But at last the battery was silenced and the mind of the army might establish itself in its offices on the ground floor and its quarters on the second floor without being in danger.

The war was a week old--a week which had developed other tangents and traps than La Tir--on the morning that the first instalment of junior officers came to occupy the tables and desks. Where the family portraits had hung in the dining-room were now big maps dotted with brown and gray flags. Portable field cabinets with sectional maps on a large scale were arranged around the walls of the drawing-room. In what had been the lounging room of the old days of Galland prosperity, the refrain of half a dozen telegraph instruments made medley with the clicking of typewriters. Cooks and helpers were busy in the kitchen; for the staff were to live like gentlemen; they were to have their morning baths, their comfortable beds, and regular meals. No twinge of indigestion or of rheumatism from exposure was to interfere with the working of their precious intellectual processes. No detail of assistance would be lacking to save any bureaucratic head time and labor The bedrooms were apportioned according to rank--that of the master awaited the master; the best servant's bedroom awaited François, his valet.

When Bouchard, the chief of intelligence, who fought the battle of wits and spies against Lanstron, came, two hours before Westerling was due, the last of the staff except Westerling and his personal aide had arrived Bouchard, with his iron-gray hair, bushy eyebrows, strong, aquiline nose, and hawk-like eyes, his mouth hidden by a bristly mustache, was lean and saturnine, and he was loyal. No jealous thought entered his mind at having to serve a man younger than himself. He did not serve a personality; he served a chief of staff and a profession. The score of words which escaped him as he looked over the arrangements were all of directing criticism and bitten off sharply, as if he regretted that he had to waste breath in communicating even a thought.

"I tell nothing, but you tell me everything!" said Bouchard's hawk eyes. He was old-fashioned; he looked his part, which was one of the many points of difference between him and Lanstron as a chief of intelligence.

After he had gone through the house he went for a flyspecking tour of the grounds, where he came upon a private of the Grays on crutches. With rest and good food the tiny hole in Hugo's leg from the merciful small-calibre bullet had healed rapidly. Confinement was irksome on a sunny day. He had grown strong enough in spirit to face his fate, whatever it might be, and in the absence of the watchful coachman he had risked the delight of a convalescent's adventure in the open, clad in his uniform, the only clothes he had. Bouchard saw instantly that this private did not wear the insignia of staff service.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Getting well of a wound," answered Hugo, looking frankly into the hawk eyes.

"Evidently!" said Bouchard, who was always irritated when told what he could see for himself. "Why aren't you at a hospital?"

"I was not wanted there!" said Hugo.

"What! what!" But Bouchard had wasted two words. "Your name and regiment?" he asked.

"Hugo Mallin, of the 128th," replied Hugo.

"Uh-h!" Bouchard's pigeonhole memory had retained the name. "Charge--mutiny under fire; anarchism!" he went on, chopping out the words as if they were chips from a piece of granite. "Well, you have not escaped trial by hiding."

"I did not flatter myself that with one leg against a whole army I had much chance, sir!" Hugo replied respectfully.

"Uh-h!" The hawk eyes flashed their disapproval of such controversial freedom of language from a private. Had he had his way he would have hanged Hugo to the nearest tree; for Bouchard had truly a mediæval soul.

But Hugo's case was so extraordinary that it had reached Westerling's ears, and Bouchard knew that Westerling wished to see Hugo when he was apprehended. It was not for Bouchard to consider this desire of a chief of staff to deal with the case of a private in person as singular. No request of the chief of staff was singular to him. It became a matter of natural law. He called to one of the staff guards who was pacing back and forth near by.