Chapter 26

"Nothing!" admitted Bouchard wryly. He lowered his head under Westerling's penetrating look in the consciousness of failure.

"I am going on a conviction--on putting two and two together!" Westerling announced. "I am going on my experience as a soldier, as a chief of staff. If I am wrong, I take the responsibility. If I am right, Bordir will be ours before morning. It is settled!"

"If you are right, then," exclaimed Turcas--"well, then it's genius or--" He did not finish the sentence. He had been about to say coincidence; while Westerling knew that if he were right all the rising scepticism in certain quarters, owing to the delay in his programme, would be silenced. His prestige would be unassailable.

XXXV

MRS. GALLAND INSISTS

"You have been in the tunnel again!" said Mrs. Galland with an emphasis on "again," when Marta came up the stairs, lantern in hand, after telling Lanstron of her interview with Westerling.

"Again--yes!" Marta replied mechanically. Her mind was empty, burned out. She had thought herself through with deceit for the day.

"What interests you so much down there?" Mrs. Galland pursued softly.

Marta realized that she had to deal with a fresh dilemma. She could not be making frequent visits to the telephone without her mother's knowledge; and, as yet, Mrs. Galland knew nothing of the part originally planned for Feller, let alone any inkling of her daughter's part.

"I didn't know but it would be a good place to hide our plate and other treasures," said Marta, offering rather methodically the first invention that came to mind as she threw open-the reflector of the lantern and turned down the wick. She was ashamed of the excuse. It warned her how easy it was becoming for her to lie--yes, lie was the word.

"Don't blow out the light, please," said Mrs. Galland. "I should like to see for myself if the tunnel is a good hiding-place for the plate."

"It's too damp for you down there--it's--" Marta blew out the flame with a sudden gust of breath and bolted across the room and into her chamber, closing the door and taking the lantern with her. In utter fatigue she dropped on the bed. Then came a gentle, prolonged knocking on the door.

"You forgot to leave the lantern," called Mrs. Galland. "I have come to get it, if you please."

Marta did not answer. Her head had sunk forward; her hands, bearing the weight of her body, were resting on her knees. All she could think was that one more lie would break the camel's back.

"Marta, please mayn't I come in?" rose the gentle voice on the other side of the door. "Marta, don't you hear me? I asked if I might come in."

"It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action. "Yes, certainly, mother--yes, do!" she said in a forced, metallic tone.

Mrs. Galland entered to find her daughter before the mirror brushing her hair with hectic vigor. She did not take up the lantern, which Marta had left in the middle of the floor, but seated herself. Her nice deliberation in smoothing out a wrinkle of her skirt over her knees indicated that she meant to stay a while. She folded her plump, white hands; a faint touch of color came into her round, pink cheeks; a trace of a smile knitted itself into the corners of her mouth. She was as she had been--_J'y suis! J'y reste_!--when the captain of engineers had pleaded with her at the outset of the war to leave the house. In the reflection of the mirror Marta's glance caught hers, which was without reproach or complaint, but very resolute.

"Do you like best to keep it all to yourself, Marta?" Mrs. Galland inquired solicitously.

"What? Keep what?" asked Marta crossly.

"Even if you have been all the way around the world, it might be easier if you allowed me to help you a little," pursued Mrs. Galland.

"Help! Help about what?" said Marta.

That reply, as Marta knew now as an expert in deceit, was a mistake. She was hedging and petulant when she ought to have whirled around gayly and kissed her mother on the cheek, while laughing at such solemnity over a trip of exploration through the tunnel. Mrs. Galland had caught her prevaricating. Not since Marta was a little girl of seven had she "fibbed" to her mother; and on that memorable and ethically instructive occasion her mother had regarded her in this same calm fashion.

"At all events," said Mrs. Galland, "I could help you a little if you would let me comb your hair. You are combing in a most unsystematic way, I must say. Systematic, gentle combing is very good for headaches and--"

There was a twinkle in Mrs. Galland's eye that was not exactly humor; a persistent twinkle that seemed to shine out of every part of the mirror. Her curiosity had come to stay; there was no escaping it. Marta brought her brush down with a bang on the bureau, only to be disgusted with this show of temper which the persistent twinkle had not missed. Her next impulse, unanalyzed because it was one of the oldest and simplest of impulses, made her spin round and drop on her knees at her mother's feet, which was just what had happened when she had started to brave out the last lie--the childhood lie.

Her head buried in her mother's lap, she was sobbing. It was many years since Mrs. Galland had known Marta to sob and she was glad that Marta had not forgotten how. She believed in the value of the law of overflow. When Marta looked up with eyes still moist, it was with the joyous satisfaction that begins a confession. Not once during the recital did the smile fade from Mrs. Galland's lips. She was too well fortified for any kind of a shock to exhibit surprise.

"You see, I could not tell you--I--" Marta concluded, still uncertain what conclusion lay behind her mother's attitude.

"Of course you could not," said Mrs. Galland. "As grandfather--my father, the premier--said; a man action cannot stop to explain everything he does. He must strike while the iron is hot. If you had stopped to discuss every step you would not have gone far--Yes, I should have argued and protested. It was best that I, being as I am--that I should not have been told--not until now."

"And I must go on!" added Marta.

"Of course you must!" replied Mrs. Galland. "You must for the sake of the Browns--the flag your father and grandfather served. They would not have approved of petty deceit, but anything for the cause, any sacrifices, any immolation of self and personal sensibilities. Yes, your father would have been happy, though he had no son, to know that his daughter might do such a service. And we must tell Minna," she added.

"Minna! You think so? Every added link may mean weakness."

"But Minna will see you going and coming from the tunnel, too. She is for the Browns with all her heart. They are her people and, besides," Mrs. Galland smiled rather broadly, "that giant Stransky is with the Browns!" So Minna was told.

"I'd like to kiss your skirt, Miss Galland!" exclaimed Minna in admiration.

"Better kiss me!" said Marta, throwing her arms around the girl. "We must stand together and think together in any emergency."

Soon after dark the attack began. Flashes of bursting shells and flashes from gun mouths and glowing sheets of flame from rifles made ugly revelry, while the beams of search-lights swept hither and thither. This kept up till shortly after midnight, when it died down and, where hell's concert had raged, silent darkness shrouded the hills. Marta knew that Bordir was taken without having to ask Lanstron or wait for confirmation from Westerling.

She was seated in the recess of the arbor the next morning, when she heard the approach of those regular, powerful steps whose character had become as distinct to her as those of a member of her own family. Five Against three! five against three! they were saying to her; while down the pass road and the castle road ran the stream of wounded from last night's slaughter.

Posted in the drawing-room of the Galland house were the congratulations of the premier to Westerling, who had come from the atmosphere of a staff that accorded to him a military insight far above the analysis of ordinary standards. But he was too clever a man to vaunt his triumph. He knew how to carry his honors. He accepted success as his due, in a matter-of-course manner that must inspire confidence in further success.

"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it--we did it--we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"

_Only_ twenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio, she was thinking.

"Then the end--then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.

"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.

He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.

"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.

She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.

"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on. "I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.

"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.

"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.

"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.

"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded. "They passed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted something in mind: a memory of real companionship."

"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.

"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat. "You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has passed in the last twenty-four hours."

She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror, crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and appealing in the full tide of another purpose.

"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish--not for army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."

"In a cause!" she interrupted hurriedly, wildly, to stop him from going further, only to find that her intonation was such that it was drawing him on.

"That fatality seemed to be working itself out to the soldier so much older than yourself in renewed youth, in another form of ambition. I hoped that there was more than the cause that led you to trust me. I hoped--"

Was he testing her? Was he playing a part of his own to make certain that she was not playing one? She looked up swiftly for answer. There was no gainsaying what she saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers with the power of an overwhelming masculine passion and a maturity of intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But who could know better the craft of courtship than one of Westerling's experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify a desire.

"I did not expect this--I--" The words escaped tumultuously and chokingly.

She heard all the voices in chorus: "Look out! Look out!" And then the voice of Feller alone, insinuating, with a sinister mischievousness: "What more could you ask? Now that you have him, hold him! For God and country--for our dear Brown land!"

Hold a man who was making love to her by the tricks of the courtesan! But what kind of love? He was bending so close to her that she felt his breath on her cheek burning hot, and she was sickeningly conscious that he was looking her over in that point-by-point manner which she had felt across the tea-table at the hotel. This horrible thing in his glance she had sometimes seen in strangers on her travels, and it had made her think that she was wise to carry a little revolver. She wanted to strike him.

"Confess! Confess!" called all her own self-respect. "Make an end to your abasement!"

"Confession, after the Browns have given up Bordir! Confession that makes Lanny, not Westerling, your dupe!" came the reply, which might have been telegraphed into her mind from the high, white forehead of Partow bending over his maps. "Confession, betraying the cause of the right against the wrong; the three to the conquering five! No! You are in the things. You may not retreat now."

For a few seconds only the duel of argument thundered in her temples--seconds in which her lips were parted and quivering and her eyes dilated with an agitation which the man at her side could interpret as he pleased. A prompting devil--a devil roused by that thing in his eyes--urging a finesse in double-dealing which only devils understand, made her lips hypnotically turn in a smile, her eyes soften, and sent her hand out to Westerling in a trance-like gesture. For an instant it rested on his arm with telling pressure, though she felt it burn with shame at the point of contact.

"We must not think of that now," she said. "We must think of nothing personal; of nothing but your work until your work is done!"

The prompting devil had not permitted a false note in her voice. Her very pallor, in fixity of idea, served her purpose. Westerling drew a deep breath that seemed to expand his whole being with greater appreciation of her. Yet that harried hunger, the hunger of a beast, was still in his glance.

"This is like you--like what I want you to be!" he said. "You are right." He caught her hand, enclosing it entirely in his grip, and she was sensible, in a kind of dazed horror, of the thrill of his strength. "Nothing can stop us! Numbers will win! Hard fighting in the mercy of a quick end!" he declared with his old rigidity of five against three which was welcome to her. "Then," he added--"and then--"

"Then!" she repeated, averting her glance. "Then--" There the devil ended the sentence and she withdrew her hand and felt the relief of one escaping suffocation, to find that he had realized that anything further during that interview would be banality and was rising to go.

"I don't feel decent!" she thought. "Society turned on Minna for a human weakness--but I--I'm not a human being! I am one of the pawns of the machine of war!"

Walking slowly with lowered head as she left the arbor, she almost ran into Bouchard, who apologized with the single word "Pardon!" as he lifted his cap in overdone courtesy, which his stolid brevity made the more conspicuous.

"Miss Galland, you seem lost in abstraction," he said in sudden loquacity. "I am almost on the point of accusing you of being a poet."

"Accusing!" she replied. "Then you must think that I would write bad poetry."

"On the contrary, I should say excellent--using the sonnet form," he returned.

"I might make a counter accusation, only that yours would be the epic form," answered Marta. "For you, too, seem fond of rambling."

There was a veiled challenge in the hawk eyes, which she met with commonplace politeness in hers, before he again lifted his cap and proceeded on his way.

XXXVI

MARKING TIME

For the next two weeks Marta's rôle resolved itself into a kind of routine. Their cramped quarters became spacious to the three women in the intimacy of the common secret shared by them under the very nose of the staff. With little Clarissa Eileen, they formed the only feminine society in the neighborhood. On sunshiny days Mrs. Galland was usually to be found in her favorite chair outside the tower door; and here Minna set the urn on a table at four-thirty as in the old days.

No member of the staff was more frequently present at Marta's teas than Bouchard, who was developing his social instinct late in life by sitting in the background and allowing others to do the talking while he watched and listened. In his hearing, Marta's attitude toward the progress of the war was sympathetic but never interrogatory, while she shared attention with Clarissa Eileen, who was in danger of becoming spoiled by officers who had children of their own at home. After the reports of killed and wounded, which came with such appalling regularity, it was a relief to hear of the day's casualties among Clarissa's dolls. The chief of transportation and supply rode her on his shoulder; the chief of tactics played hide-and-seek with her; the chief engineer built her a doll house of stones with his own hands; and the chief medical officer was as concerned when she caught a cold as if the health of the army were at stake.

"We mustn't get too set up over all this attention, Clarissa Eileen, my rival," said Marta to the child. "You are the only little girl and I am the only big girl within reach. If there were lots of others it would be different."

She had occasional glimpses of Hugo Mallin on his crutches, keeping in the vicinity of the shrubbery that screened the stable from the house. How Marta longed to talk with him! But he was always attended by a soldier, and under the rigorous discipline that held all her impulses subservient to her purpose she passed by him without a word lest she compromise her position.

Bouchard was losing flesh; his eyes were sinking deeper under a heavier frown. His duty being to get information, he was gaining none. His duty being to keep the Grays' secrets, there was a leak somewhere in his own department. He quizzed subordinates; he made abrupt transfers, to no avail.

Meanwhile, the Grays were taking the approaches to the main line of defence, which had been thought relatively immaterial but had been found shrewdly placed and their vulnerability overestimated. The thunders of batteries hammering them became a routine of existence, like the passing of trains to one living near a railroad. The guns went on while tea was being served; they ushered in dawn and darkness; they were going when sleep came to those whom they later awakened with a start. Fights as desperate as the one around the house became features of this period, which was only a warming-up practice for the war demon before the orgy of the impending assault on the main line.

Marta began to realize the immensity of the chess-board and of the forces engaged in more than the bare statement of numbers and distances. If a first attack on a position failed, the wires from the Galland house repeated their orders to concentrate more guns and attack again. In the end the Browns always yielded, but grudgingly, calculatingly, never being taken by surprise. The few of them who fell prisoners said, "God with us! We shall win in the end!" and answered no questions. Gradually the Gray army began to feel that it was battling with a mystery which was fighting under cover, falling back under cover--a tenacious, watchful mystery that sent sprays of death into every finger of flesh that the Grays thrust forward in assault.

"Another position taken. Our advance continues," was the only news that Westerling gave to the army, his people, and the world, which forgot its sports and murders and divorce cases in following the progress of the first great European war for two generations. He made no mention of the costs; his casualty lists were secret. The Gray hosts were sweeping forward as a slow, irresistible tide; this by Partow's own admission. He announced the loss of a position as promptly as the Grays its taking. He published a daily list of casualties so meagre in contrast to their own that the Grays thought it false; he made known the names of the killed and wounded to their relatives. Yet the seeming candor of his press bureau included no straw of information of military value to the enemy.

Westerling never went to tea at the Gallands' with the other officers, for it was part of his cultivation of greatness to keep aloof from his subordinates. His meetings with Marta happened casually when he went out into the garden. Only once had he made any reference to the "And then" of their interview in the arbor.

"I am winning battles for _you_!" he had exclaimed with that thing in his eyes which she loathed.

To her it was equivalent to saying that she had tricked him into sending men to be killed in order to please her. She despised herself for the way he confided in her; yet she had to go on keeping his confidence, returning a tender glance with one that held out hope. She learned not to shudder when he spoke of a loss of "only ten thousand." In order to rally herself when she grew faint-hearted to her task, she learned to picture the lines of his face hard-set with five-against-three brutality, while in comfort he ordered multitudes to death, and, in contrast, to recall the smile of Dellarme, who asked his soldiers to undergo no risk that he would not share. And after every success he would remark that he was so much nearer Engadir, that position of the main line of defence whose weakness she had revealed.

"Your Engadir!" he came to say. "Then we shall again profit by your information; that is, unless they have fortified since you received it."

"They haven't. They had already fortified!" she thought. She was always seeing the mockery of his words in the light of her own knowledge and her own part, which never quite escaped her consciousness. One chamber of her mind was acting for him; a second chamber was perfectly aware that the other was acting.

"One position more--the Twin Boulder Redoubt, it is called," he announced at last. "We shall not press hard in front. We shall drive in masses on either side and storm the flanks."

This she was telephoning to Lanstron a few minutes later and having, in return, all the news of the Browns. The sheer fascination of knowing what both sides were doing exerted its spell in keeping her to her part.

"They've lost four hundred thousand men now, Lanny," she said.

"And we only a hundred thousand. We're whittling them down," answered Lanstron.