Chapter 24

There was a perceptible shudder on Marta's part, an abrupt, tossing elevation of her head. She stared at the spot where Dellarme had lain in the garden. Dellarme's smile was back on her lips; it seemed graven there. Her eyes, which Westerling could not see, were leaping flames.

"I'm afraid you will not have the chance," Westerling observed, as he returned the letter to Hugo, its reading unfinished. "What if every man held your views? What would become of the army and the nation?" he demanded.

"Why, I think I have made that plain," replied Hugo. He appeared no less weary than Westerling over continual beating of the air to no purpose. "We should retreat to our own soil, where we belong."

"And you are ready to be shot for that principle?"

The question was sharp and final.

"Yes, if being shot for what I did is dying for it--though I prefer to live for it!" said Hugo, still without any pose. He refused to play for a chapter in the future book of martyrs to peace. This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips.

"Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly. His eyes sought Marta.

The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also. There was a distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she turned her head. The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.

"It is extraordinary!" she breathed. "Don't you think that the blow on his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?"

Hugo answered for himself.

"My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that brought the blow!" he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the principles which she had professed to him previously.

She shuddered as if hurt, but only momentarily.

"Psychological, I suppose--psychological and irresponsible abnormality!" she murmured, avoiding Hugo's look and bending her own on Westerling persistently.

"Long words!" said Hugo. "Insanity is shorter."

But Westerling did not seem to hear. His thought was shaped by the superb misery and sensitiveness in Marta's face. He had done wrong to ask her to remain. Of course the scene had been painful to her. She would not be herself if she wanted to see a man tried for his life. He knew that views not unlike Hugo's were latent in many minds lacking Hugo's initiative that would respond to the right impulse. A way out occurred to him as inspiration, which pleased his sense of craft. The press, which the premier reported was irritated by his censorship--the press which must have sensation, the traffic of its trade--should have a detailed account of how one of our indomitable regiments placarded a private as coward, proving thereby that the army was a unit of aggressive zeal.

"You are alone--one man in a million in your ideas!" he declared, with judicial gravity. "We shall postpone your trial and leave public opinion to punish you. Your story will be given to the press in full; your name will be a byword throughout the land, an example, and while you are convalescing you will remain a prisoner. When you are well we shall have another talk I may give you a chance, for the sake of your father and mother and your sweetheart and the good opinion of your neighbors, to redeem yourself."

"I had to tell you what I felt, sir," said Hugo. "Thank you for letting me live, after you knew."

He saluted and turned away. Marta and Westerling watched him as he hobbled around the corner of the house and in a heavy silence listened to the crunch of his crutch tips on the gravel growing fainter. Her lashes, those convenient curtains for hiding thought, dropped as Westerling looked around; but he saw that her lips had reddened and that she was drawing a long, deep, energizing breath. When the lashes lifted, there was still wonder in her eyes--wonder which had become definite tribute to him. The assurance he wanted was that he had borne himself well, and he had it.

"You kept your patience beautifully," she told him. "It seems to me that you were both kind and wise."

"How I was to be merciful against the facts puzzled me," he replied, "until you saved the day with your suggestion of psychological irresponsibility."

"Then I helped? I really helped?"

"You did, decidedly! You--" There he broke off, for he found himself speaking to her profile.

She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away, where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills toward the white posts. Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow there in the distance! Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze! The dark shade of the house's mass over the yard!

It was time for him to be at his desk. But she seemed far from any suggestion of going. She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence. Yet were he to rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it. Though she did not change her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.

He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile in the glory of the sunset. The superb thing about her was that she always called for study. Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold. In time measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent. When she spoke she' did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into her eyes.

"It was another experience of war," she said moodily, returning to the subject of Hugo. "Yes, something like the final chapter of experience, the trial of this dreamer." Then a wave of restless impatience with her abstraction swept over her. Speaking of dreamers, she herself would stop dreaming. "For experience does make a great difference, doesn't it?" she exclaimed with a sad, knowing smile. After a perceptible pause her eyes suddenly glowed into his. All the commotion of her thought was galvanized into purpose in the look. "I have had a heart full and a mind full of experiences!" she said. "I have been close to war--closer than you! I have looked on while others fought!"

The thing was coming! He should hear the story of the change that war had wrought in her. She appeared to regard him as the one listener whom she had sought; as a confidant who alone could understand her. His gift for listening was in full play as he relaxed and settled back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand lest he should seem to stare. For in his eagerness he would not miss any one of her varied signals of emotion.

She was as vivid as he knew that she would be, her narration flashes of impression in clear detail. Her being seemed transparent to its depths and her moods through the last week to run past him in review. He marvelled at times at her military knowledge; again at her impartiality. She was neither for the Browns nor the Grays; she was simply telling what she had seen. She passed by some horrors; on others she dwelt with fearless emphasis.

"Then the hand-grenades were thrown!" She put her hands over her eyes. "As they fell"--she put her hands over her ears--"oh, the groans!"

"It was the Browns who started it!" he interjected in defence. "I had hoped that we should escape that kind of warfare." He was too intent to recall what he had said to the premier about using every known method of destruction.

"And this is only the beginning, isn't it?" she asked piteously, exhausted with her story.

"Only the beginning!" he agreed.

Again brooding wonder appeared in her eyes, while there was wonder in his eyes--wonder at her.

"And you remain with your property!" he exclaimed in a burst of admiration.

Once more she was looking away into the distance; once more he was studying her profile. He knew that she had gone through her experience without tears and without a scream. She had been subjected to his final test of all merit--war. Courage she had, feminine courage. And he had often asked himself what would happen if he, a great man, should ever meet a great woman. He was baffled by the resources of a mind that was held in detachment under her charm; baffled as to what she was thinking at that moment, only to find her smiling at him, the wonder in her eyes resolving itself into purpose.

"You see, I have been very much stirred up," she said half apologetically. "There are some questions I want to ask--quite practical, selfish questions. You might call them questions of property and mercy. The longer the war lasts the greater will be the loss of life and the misery?"

"Yes, for both sides; and the heavier the expense and the taxes."

"If you win, then we shall be under your flag and pay taxes to you?"

"Yes, naturally."

"The Browns do not increase in population; the Grays do rapidly. They are a great, powerful, civilized race. They stand for civilization!"

"Yes, facts and the world's opinion agree," he replied. Puzzled he might well be by this peculiar catechism. He could only continue to reply until he should see where she was leading.

"And your victory will mean a new frontier, a new order of international relations and a long peace, you think? Peace--a long peace!"

Was there ever a soldier who did not fight for peace? Was there ever a call for more army-corps or guns that was not made in the name of peace? He had his ready argument, spoken with the forcible conviction of an expert.

"This war was made for peace--the only kind of peace that there can be," he said. "My ambition, if any glory comes to me out of this war, is to have later generations say: 'He brought peace!'"

Though the premier, could he have heard this, might have smiled, even grinned, he would have understood Westerling's unconsciousness of inconsistency. The chief of staff had set himself a task in victory which had no military connection. Without knowing why, he wanted to win ascendancy over her mind.

"The man of action!" exclaimed Marta, her eyes opening very wide, as they would to let in the light when she heard something new that pleased her or gave food for thought. "The man of action, who thinks of an ideal as a thing not of words but as the end of action!"

"Exactly!" said Westerling, sensible of another of her gifts. She could get the essence of a thing in a few words. "When we have won and set another frontier, the power of our nation will be such in the world that the Browns can never afford to attack us," he went on. "Indeed, no two of the big nations of Europe can afford to make war without our consent. We shall be the arbiters of international dissensions. We shall command peace--yes, the peace of force, of fact! If it could be won in any other way I should not be here on this veranda in command of an army of invasion. That was my idea--for that I planned." He was making up for having overshot himself in his confession that he had brought on the war as a final step for his ambition.

"You mean that you can gain peace by propaganda and education only when human nature has so changed that we can have law and order and houses are safe from burglary and pedestrians from pickpockets without policemen? Is that it?" she asked.

"Yes, yes! You have it! You have found the wheat in the chaff."

"Perhaps because I have been seeing something of human nature--the human nature of both the Browns and the Grays at war. I have seen the Browns throwing hand-grenades and the Grays in wanton disorder in our dining-room directly they were out of touch with their officers!" she said sadly, as one who hates to accept disillusionment but must in the face of logic.

Westerling made no reply except to nod, for a movement on her part preoccupied him. She leaned forward, as she had when she had told him he would become chief of staff, her hands clasped over her knee, her eyes burning with a question. It was the attitude of the prophecy. But with the prophecy she had been a little mystical; the fire in her eyes had precipitated an idea. Now it forged another question.

"And you think that you will win?" she asked. "You think that you will win?" she repeated with the slow emphasis which demands a careful answer.

The deliberateness of his reply was in keeping with her mood. He was detached; he was a referee.

"Yes, I know that we shall. Numbers make it so, though there be no choice of skill between the two sides."

His tone had the confidence of the flow of a mighty river in its destination on its way to the sea. There was nothing in it of prayer, of hope, of desperation, as there had been in Lanstron's "We shall win!" spoken to her in the arbor at their last interview. She drew forward slightly in her chair. Her eyes seemed much larger and nearer to him. They were sweeping him up and down as if she were seeing the slim figure of Lanstron in contrast to Westerling's sturdiness; as if she were measuring the might of the five millions behind him and the three millions behind Lanstron. She let go a half-whispered "Yes!" which seemed to reflect the conclusion gained from the power of his presence.

"Then my mother's and my own interests are with you--the interests of peace are with you!" she declared.

She did not appear to see the sudden, uncontrolled gleam of victory in his eyes; for now she was looking fixedly at the point where Hugo had stood. By this time it had become a habit for Westerling to wait silently for her to come out of her abstractions. To disturb one might make it unproductive.

"Then if I want to help the cause of peace I should help the Grays!"

The exclamation was more to herself than to him. He was silent. This girl in a veranda chair desiring to aid him and his five million bayonets and four thousand guns! Quixote and the windmills--but it was amazing; it was fine! The golden glow of the sunset was running in his veins in a paean of personal triumph. The profile turned ever so little. Now it was looking at the point where Dellarme had lain dying. Westerling noted the smile playing on the lips. It had the quality of a smile over a task completed--Dellarme's smile. She started; she was trembling all over in the resistance of some impulse--some impulse that gradually gained headway and at last broke its bonds.

"For I can help--I can help!" she cried out, turning to him in wild indecision which seemed to plead for guidance. "It's so terrible--yet if it would hasten peace--I--I know much of the Browns' plan of defence! I know where they are strong in the first line and--and one place where they are weak there--and a place where they are weak in the main line!"

"You do!" Westerling exploded. The plans of the enemy! The plans that neither Bouchard's saturnine cunning, nor bribes, nor spies could ascertain! It was like the bugle-call to the hunter. But he controlled himself. "Yes, yes!" He was thoughtful and guarded.

"Do you think it is right to tell?" Marta gasped half inarticulately.

"Right? Yes, to hasten the inevitable--to save lives!" declared Westerling with deliberate assurance.

"I--I want to see an end of the killing! I--" She sprang to her feet as if about to break away tumultuously, but paused, swaying unsteadily, and passed her hand across her eyes.

"We intend a general attack on the first line of defence to-night!" he exclaimed, his supreme thought leaping into words.

"And you would want the information about the first line to-night if--if it is to be of service?"

"Yes, to-night!"

Marta brought her hands together in a tight clasp. Her gaze fluttered for a minute over the tea-table. When she looked up her eyes were calm.

"It is a big thing, isn't it?" she said. "A thing not to be done in an impulse. I try never to do big things in an impulse. When I see that I am in danger of it I always say: 'Go by yourself and think for half an hour!' So I must now. In a little while I will let you know my decision."

Without further formality she started across the lawn to the terrace steps. Westerling watched her sharply, passing along the path of the second terrace, pacing slowly, head bent, until she was out of sight. Then he stood for a time getting a grip on his own emotions before he went into the house.

XXXIII

IN FELLER'S PLACE

What am I? What have I done? What am I about to do? shot as forked shadows over the hot lava-flow of Malta's impulse. The vitality that Westerling had felt by suggestion from a still profile rejoiced in a quickening of pace directly she was out of sight of the veranda. All the thinking she had done that afternoon had been in pictures; some saying, some cry, some groan, or some smile went with every picture.

Coming to the arbor she slowed down for a step or two, arrested by the recollection of her last meeting with Lanstron. There it was that she had scored him for making her an accomplice of trickery. She saw his twitching hand, and the misery in his eyes and the cadence of his words came as clearly as notes from a violin in a silent chamber to her ears. She nodded in affirmation; she shook her head in negation; she frowned; she laughed strangely, and hurried on.

The sitting-room of the tower was empty to other eyes but not to hers. In imagination she saw Feller standing by the table in the dejection of his heart-break when he faced her and Lanstron, his secret disclosed; and the appeal was more potent in memory than it had been at the time. She went on into the bedroom, which had been formerly the tool-room. On the threshold of the steps into the darkness she glanced back, to see Feller's face transfixed as it had been when he discovered the presence of interlopers--transfixed in fighting rage.

The lantern was in the corner at hand. Only yesterday, in want of occupation, as she thought, she had cleaned the chimney and trimmed the wick. It seemed as if Lanny's fingers were lighting it now; as if he were leading the way as he had on her first visit to the telephone. After her hastening steps had carried her along the tunnel to the telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish light of the lantern.

Conscious mind had torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had resented Feller's part--what a part she had been playing! Every word, every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after Westerling confessed that he had made war for his own ends had been subtly prompted by a purpose whose actuality terrified her.

Her hypocrisy, she realized, was as black as the wall of darkness beyond the lantern's gleam. All her pictures became a whirling involution of extravaganza and all the speeches of the characters of the scenes a kind of wail. Then this demoralization passed, as a nightmare passes, with Westerling's boast again in her ears. She was seeing Hugo Mallin; hearing him announce his principles in sight of the spot where Dellarme had died:

"I love my country.... But I know that other men love theirs.... Men should be brave for their convictions.... The Browns are fighting for their homes.... They are fighting, as I should want to fight, against murder and burglary.... I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them."

She was seeing the faces of her children; she was hearing them repeat:

"But I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him; but if he then persists I shall fight for my home."

When war's principles, enacted by men, were based on sinister trickery called strategy and tactics, should not women, using such weapons as they had, also fight for their homes? Marta's hands swept down from her eyes; she was on fire with resolution.

Forty miles away a bell in Lanstron's bedroom and at his desk rang simultaneously. At the time he and Partow were seated facing each other across a map on the table of the room where they worked together. No persuasion of the young vice-chief, no edict of the doctors, could make the old chief take exercise or shorten his hours.

"I know. I know myself!" he said. "I know my duty. And you are learning, my boy, learning!"

Every day the flabby cheeks grew pastier and the pouches under the eyebrows heavier. But there was no dimming of the eagle flashes of the eyes, no weakening of the will. Last night Lanstron had turned as white as chalk when Partow staggered on rising from the table, the veins on his temples knotted blue whip-cords. Yet after a few hours' sleep he reappeared with firm step, fresh for the fray.

The paraphernalia around these two was the same as that around Westerling. Only the atmosphere of the staff was different. It had a quality of sober and buoyant alertness and fatality of determination rather than rigid confidence. Otherwise, there was the same medley of typewriters and telegraph instruments, the same types of busy officers and clerks that occupied the Galland house. To them, at least, war had brought no surprises. Its routine was as they had anticipated it there in the big division headquarters building, dissociated from the actual experience of the intimate emotions of the front. Each man was performing the part set for him. No man knew much of any other man's part. Partow alone knew all, and Lanstron was trying to grasp all and praying that Partow's old body should still feed his mind with energy. Lanstron was thinner and paler, a new and glittering intensity in his eyes.

A messenger had just brought in two despatches from the telegraph room. One was from the taciturn press bureau of the Grays which flashed into the Browns' headquarters from a neutral country at the same time that it flashed around the world to illumine bulletin-boards in every language of civilization. Day after day the Grays had announced the occupation of fresh positions. This was the only news that they had permitted egress--the news which read like the march of victory to the eager world of the press, hastening to quick conclusions. To-day came the official word that Westerling had established his headquarters on conquered territory. Proof, this, that five could drive back three; that the weak could not resist the strong!

"Hm-m--indeed!" exclaimed Partow, lifting his brow into massive, corrugated wrinkles. "It may affect the stock market, but not the result."

The other despatch was also out of the land of the Grays, but not by Westerling's consent or knowledge. By devious ways it had broken through the censorship of the frontier in cunning cipher. It told of artillery concentrations three days old; it told only what the aeroplanes had already seen; it told what the Grays had done but nothing of what they intended to do.

When word of Feller's defection came, Lanstron realized for the first time by Partow's manner that the old chief of staff, with all his deprecation of the telephone scheme as chimerical, had grounded a hope on it.

"There was the chance that we might know--so vital to the defence--what they were going to do before and not after the attack," he said.