Chapter 22

"Take this man in charge and watch him sharply until General Westerling sends for him!"

"And you will get justice from General Westerling!" It was Marta's voice. In approaching she had unavoidably overheard part of the conversation. "Justice is his first characteristic!" she added as the hawk eyes turned their scrutiny into hers, which were calm and smiling.

Hugo had not seen Marta since he had been carried to the coachman's quarters. Minna had visited him frequently, bearing inquiries from her mistress as well as custards. He had looked forward to a talk with Marta as a kindred spirit, yet it was difficult for him to reconcile the woman speaking now with the woman who had kissed him on the forehead. But he said nothing as he was marched away.

"Miss Galland!" exclaimed Bouchard in a way that said he knew her story. "Yes, that little monkey can depend on more justice than he deserves. The unanswerable evidence is on the chief of staff's desk awaiting his arrival."

Bouchard's hawk eyes probed hers for an instant longer and seemed to find nothing to call further curiosity; then he lifted his cap and proceeded with his tour of inspection.

Marta smiled thoughtfully as she watched his receding figure, while her eyelashes narrowed and she inclined her head with a nod before she moved away in the direction of the tower. There was almost complete silence along the front. Since yesterday's action, which had checked the guns commanding the range of the house, there had been little firing. She guessed that the lull was only a recess of preparation for the grand attack on the first line of permanent defence, and that probably this would follow Westerling's arrival. He was due at four o'clock and he would be characteristically prompt to the minute.

"It must not be! Hugo Mallin is too fine a spirit to be sacrificed. I'll go on my knees, if need be, to Westerling," Marta was thinking as she paced back and forth in her room. On her knees to him! She stopped short, struck in revolt with a memory of the way he had looked at her once as she sat across the tea-table from him in the hotel reception-room. "No, I could not endure that except as a last resort. If ever there were a time to use all my wits it is now--to save Hugo Mallin, the one soldier who acted out the principles which I taught my children!"

XXXII

TEA ON THE VERANDA AGAIN

As it lacked one minute to four when Hedworth Westerling, chief of staff in name as well as power now, alighted from the gray automobile that turned in at the Galland drive, the chauffeur thought well enough of himself to forget the crush of supplies and ambulances that had delayed His Excellency's car for at least ninety seconds in the main street of the town. Though His Excellency had not occupied his new headquarters as soon as he expected, this could have no influence on results. If he had lost fifty thousand men on the first two days and two hundred thousand since the war had begun, should he allow this to disturb his well-being of body or mind? His well-being of body and mind meant the ultimate saving of lives.

The Grays were winning; this alone counted in the present. They would continue to win; this alone counted in the future. They had won by crowding in reserves till the positions attacked yielded to superior strength. Thus they would continue to win until the last positions had yielded.

Five million mothers' sons against three million mothers' sons! Five to three pounds of flesh! Five to three ounces of blood! With equal skill, superior strength must always tell. Westerling and his staff were responsible for the skill. If their minds would work better for it, the nation could well afford to feed them on nightingales' tongues.

Confidence is the handmaiden of skill. Confidence is the edge on the sword; confidence brings the final charge that wins the redoubt. Confidence was reflected in Westerling's bearing and in his smile of command as he passed through the staff rooms, Turcas and Bouchard in his train, with tacit approval of the arrangements. Finally, Turcas, now vice-chief of staff, and the other chiefs awaited his pleasure in the library, which was to be his sanctum. On the massive seventeenth-century desk lay a number of reports and suggestions. Westerling ran through them with accustomed swiftness of sifting and then turned to his personal aide.

"Tell François that I will have tea on the veranda."

From the fact that he took with him the papers that he had laid aside, subordinate generals, with the gift of unspoken directions which is a part of their profession, understood that he meant to go over the subjects requiring special attention while he had tea.

"Everything is going well--well!" he added in a way that said that everything must be if he said so and that he knew how to make everything go well. "And we shall be up pretty late to-night. Any one who feels the need had better take a nap"--the implication being that he did not.

"Well!" ran the unspoken communication of confidence through the staff. So well that His Excellency was calmly taking tea on the veranda! For the indefatigable Turcas the detail; for Westerling the front of Jove.

"Well!" The thrill of the word was with him in a flight of sentiment as he stood on that veranda where a certain prophecy had been made to a young colonel. Sight of the rippling folds of the flag of his country on the outskirts of the town prolonged the thrill. His eyes swept the pale horizon of the distances of plain and Mountain and lowered to the garden. Above the second terrace he saw a crown of woman's hair--hair of a jet abundance, radiant in the sunlight and shading a face that brought familiar completeness to the scene.

He had told Marta only two weeks ago that he should see her again if war came; and war had come. With the inviting prospect of a few holiday moments in which to continue the interview that had been abruptly concluded in a hotel reception-room, he started down the terrace steps. Their glances met where the second terrace path ended at the second terrace flight; hers shot with a beam of restrained and questioning good humor that spoke at least a truce to the invader.

"You called sooner than I expected," she said in a note of equivocal pleasantry.

"Or I," he rejoined with a shade of triumph, the politest of triumph. He was a step above her, her head on a level with the pocket of his blouse. His square shoulders, commanding height, and military erectness were thus emphasized, as was her own feminine slightness.

"I want to thank you," she said. "As becomes a soldier, your forethought was expressed in action. It was the promptness of the men you sent to look after the garden which saved the uprooted plants before they were past recovery."

"I wished it for your sake and somewhat for my own sake to be the same that it was in the days when I used to call," he said graciously. "Tea was from four to five, do you remember? Will you join me? I have just ordered it."

A generous, pleasant conqueror, this! No one knew better than Westerling how to be one when he chose. He was something of an actor. Leaders of men of his type usually are.

"Why, yes. Very gladly!" she assented with no undue cordiality and no undue constraint, quite as if there were no war.

"It was the Browns who cut the lindens?" he suggested significantly.

"They said that it was necessary as part of the defence," she replied. "We shall plant new ones and have the pleasure of watching them grow."

Neutrality could not be better impersonated he thought, than in the even cleaving of her lips over the words. They seemed to say that a storm had come and gone and a new set of masters had taken the place of the old. As they approached the veranda François was placing the tea things.

"Quite the same! That was your chair, as I remember," said Westerling after indicating to François that he might go, "and this was mine."

But the teapot was not Mrs. Galland's--it belonged to the staff.

"This is different," observed Marta, touching her finger-tip to the coat of arms of the Grays on the side of a cup.

"Yes, my own field kit," he answered, thinking that the novelty of tea from a soldier's service had appealed to her; for she was smiling.

"So, you being the host and I the guest now, why, you pour!" she said. There was a touch of brittleness in her tone--of half-teasing, half-serious brittleness.

"Oh, no, no!" he protested laughingly, and found her glance flashing through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.

"I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener's quarters in the tower," she said.

"No, no!" he objected. "The tea conditions are the same as before."

He was earnest for his point. It would please his masculine fancy to watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.

"Conditions the same as before?" She laughed softly. "How can they be in my thoughts or yours?" she asked with a sudden show of seriousness.

"We did turn you out of house and home--I understand!" he exclaimed apologetically. "And that is the symbol of it to you!" He indicated the coat of arms.

"The symbol of the conqueror, isn't it?" he asked playfully, for in the company of women it pleased him to be playful.

"Conqueror? It's a big word!" she mused. "I hadn't thought of it in connection with pouring tea"--which might be another way of saying that she had just been thinking of it very hard and might be trying to find whether it had a pleasant or an unpleasant side. Clearly, here was a Marta different from any yet precipitated by the alchemy of war.

The resourceful variety of her! Oh, it was like the old days! It made him feel young, as young as when he had been a colonel commanding the garrison on the other side of the white posts. She had intelligence, yet was at the same time distinctly feminine, with the gift of as much talk about who should pour tea as about how to storm a redoubt. She did not carry her mental wares on her sleeve. She flashed them in a way that prompted curiosity as to the next exhibit. He had sought primarily, selfishly, to be entertained at tea, and he was being entertained. To want to win was his nature. He understood, too, that she wanted to win. He liked that quality in her the more because it heightened the valve of victory for him.

"Then, if you don't think of it in connection with pouring tea, let me tell you what I think of when I sit on this veranda. I think of you as hostess. You refuse to play the part!" he exclaimed with that persistence, softened a little, perhaps, yet suggestive of the quality characterized by the firm jaw and still eyes, which won his point at staff councils. Again he was conscious of one of her sweeping glances of appraisal, with just a glint of admiration and even approval tucked away in the recesses of her smile.

"Suppose we compromise," she suggested thoughtfully, with the gravity of one making a great concession. "Suppose you do the heavy work, and pour, and I drop the sugar in the cups."

But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full concession.

"I'd really better do it all--act out the host and the conqueror!" he declared. "One can't compromise principles."

"Oh! Why?" She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.

"Anything except your doing all the honors leaves me in the same invidious position," he answered. "It compounds my felony. It shows that you do think that we failed by our conduct to show respect for your property. It leaves me feeling that you think that I do not regard this as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of war--by an old friendship!"

He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic eloquence that went well with his handsome face and sturdy bearing had been his most successful asset in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final, serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a sudden new angle of light.

"You put it very well. In that case--" she said, and his glance and hers dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into the cup. "With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their side-arms?" she asked.

"Yes; oh, yes!" he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has overcome no mean opponent--the highest form of compliment known to the guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.

"Just like the old days, isn't it?" he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the field.

"Yes, for the moment--if we forget the war!" she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.

If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid.

"We do forget it at tea, don't we?" he asked.

"At least we need not speak of it!" she replied.

Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible bumpers. The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty. Prone to avoid recollections that made him feel old--to feel old was to be out of date in his profession---he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two and gratifying as youth's dreams become reality. Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff. This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty. His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate.

"There's work--always work for a chief!" he declared. "I--"

Marta was quick to act on the hint. Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke.

"There's always the garden for me! But first--" Yes, first there was poor Hugo.

Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion. The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes--his calculating gray eyes--glinted a youthful entreaty.

"Please! I didn't finish my sentence!" he begged. "You remember that often I used to wait after tea until the sunset--"

"And reached your quarters late for dinner, I also remember!" she put in. But she remained in the same position, his finger-tips on her arm, her hands holding her body free of the chair. "That is, when you did not stay to dinner!" she added.

"I am staying to-night. I was going to ask if you wouldn't remain on the veranda while I go over these papers. It--it would be very cosey and pleasant."

One of these papers, she knew, must be the evidence against Hugo Mallin. She preferred not to make a direct appeal but to have Westerling bring up the subject himself. His smile and the look with which he regarded her spoke his appreciation of the picture she made and his fear of losing it. Very cosey and pleasant, yes, the company of a prophetess, with a ray of sunlight making her hair an aurora of flashing bronze overtopping a brown face, the eyes holding answers to an increasing number of unasked questions about the new forces that he had found in her.

"Why, yes," she agreed with evident pleasure, for she was thinking of Hugo.

Turcas now came, in answer to Westerling's ring. The orders and suggestions on the table seemed to be the product of this lath of a man, the vice-chief, but a lath of steel, not wood, who appeared a runner trained for a race of intellects in the scratch class. One by one, almost perfunctorily, Westerling gave his assent as he passed the papers to Turcas; while Turcas's dry voice, coming from between a narrow opening of the thin lips, gave his reasons with a rapid-firer's precision in answer to his chief's inquiries.

With each order somewhere along that frontier some unit of a great organism would respond. The reserves from this position would be transferred to that; such a position would be felt out before dark by a reconnaissance in force, however costly; the rapid-firers of the 19th Division would be transferred to the 20th; despite the 37th Brigade's losses, it would still form the advance; General So-and-So would be superseded after his failure of yesterday; Colonel So-and-So would take his place as acting major-general; more care must be exercised in recommendations for bronze crosses, lest their value so depreciate that officers and men would lack incentive to win them.

Marta was having a look behind the scenes at the fountainhead of great events. Power! power! The absolute power of the soldier in the saddle, with premier and government and all the institutions of peace only a dim background for the processes of war! Opposite her was a man who could make and unmake not only generals but even the destinies of peoples. By every sign he enjoyed his power for its own sake. There must be a chief of the five millions, which were as a moving forest of destruction, and here was the chief, his strength reflected in the strong muscles of his short neck as he turned his head to listen to Turcas. Marta recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago: the iron invincibility of the elder's sturdy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure of the younger man.

"The evidence you asked for in that Mallin mutiny case," said Turcas, indicating the only remaining paper.

"Yes, I want to go into that--it's a question of policy," said Westerling.

He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair. She had bent forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in a kind of wondering admiration. But she dropped her eyelids instantly and said deliberately, less to him than to herself:

"You have the gift!"

No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose existence had been borne in on her by observation.

"The gift? How?" he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half hid her lowered face.

She looked up, smiling brightly.

"You don't know what gift! Not the pianist's! Not the poet's!" (Oh, to save Hugo! The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her impulses, born of the war's stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in view of her knowledge of the man before her) "Why, of course, the supreme gift of command! The thing that made you chief of staff! And the war goes well for you, doesn't it?"

Delicious morsel, this, to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the impression he had made on her.

"Yes, as you foresaw--as I planned!" he said. "Yes, I planned all, step by step, till I was chief of staff and ready. I convinced the premier that it was time to strike and I chose the hour to strike; for Bodlapoo was only a convenient excuse for the last of all the steps"

The subjective enjoyment of the declaration kept him from any keen notice of the effect of his words. Lanny was right. It had been a war of deliberate conquest; a war to gratify personal ambition. All her life Marta would be able to live over again the feelings of this moment. It was as if she were frozen, all except brain and nerves, which were on fire, while the rigidity of ice kept her from springing from her chair in contempt and horror. She would always wonder how the bonds of her purpose to save Hugo held her tongue But still another purpose came on the wings of diabolical temptation which would pit the art of woman against the power of a man who set millions against millions in slaughter to gratify personal ambition. She was thankful that she was looking down as she spoke, for she could not bring herself to another compliment. Her throat was too chilled for that yet.

"The one way to end the feud between the two nations was a war that would mean permanent peace," he explained, seeing how quiet she was and realizing, with a recollection of her children's oath, that he had gone a little too far. He wanted to retain her admiration. It had become as precious to him as a new delicacy to Lucullus.

"Yes, I understand," she managed to murmur; then she was able to look up. "It's all so immense!" she added. "And you have yet another paper there?" she said with a little gesture that might have been taken as the expression of a hope that she was not overstaying her welcome.

"This is very interesting," he said, watching her narrowly now, "the case of a private, one Hugo Mallin, who refused to fight because he was against war on principle. Four charges: assault on a fellow soldier, cowardice, treason, and insubordination under fire."

"Enough, I should say!" said Marta in a low tone.

"A question of which one to press--of an example," continued Westerling, reading the full official statement for the first time.

"What is the punishment?" she asked.

"Why, of course, death!" he replied, somewhat absently, in preoccupation. "Extraordinary! And they have located him, it seems He is here at headquarters!"

"Yes; certainly," Marta said. "We found him under a tree, deserted and wounded, labelled coward, and we cared for him."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Westerling. "He must have appealed strongly to your sympathies."

There was no sharpness in the words, but he had lapsed from the personal to the official manner.