Chapter 35

But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful dead--they had no nightmares--as she aided the doctors in separating the bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a shell burst near her and a doctor cried out:

"She's hit!"

But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all.

The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her mother and Minna.

"I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered.

"But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland.

Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was bandaged.

"A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "Not deep," he added.

"Do I get an iron cross?" she asked, smiling faintly. It was rather pleasant to be alive.

"All the crosses--iron and bronze and silver and gold!" he replied.

"You forgot platinum," she said almost playfully, as she found nerves, muscles, and bones intact after that drop over a precipice into a black chasm. It was like the Marta of the days before she had undertaken to reform all creation, her mother was thinking. "Did I help any?" she asked seriously.

"Well, I should say so!" declared the doctor. "I should say so!" he repeated. "You did the whole business down there by the gate."

"Yes, the whole business! I brought it all on--all! I--" She flung a wild gesture at the landscape and then buried her face in her hands. "Yes, I did the whole business I--I played, smiled, lied! That awful sight--and he might not have been writing 'kill me' if I--"

The doctor grasped her shoulders to keep her from rising. He spoke the first soothing words that came to mind. There was another shudder, an effort at control, and her hands dropped and she was looking up with a dull steadiness.

"I'm not going mad!" she exclaimed. "What happened to--to that man who was pleading for death? Did any one who had been engaged in killing men who wanted to live kill the one who wanted to die?"

"The shell burst that wounded you finished him," said the doctor.

"Which, of course, was quite according to the tenets of civilization, which wouldn't have allowed it to be done as an open act of mercy!" said Marta. "But that is only satire. It is of no service," she added, rising to a sitting posture to look around.

The struggle by the gate was over. All the uninjured had made good their escape. A Red Cross flag floated above the wounded and the débris of overturned wagons. Brown skirmishers were descending the near-by slopes and crossing the path of the cavalry charge. Signal-corps men were spinning out their wires. A regiment of guns were being emplaced behind a foot-hill. A returning Brown dirigible swept over the town. All firing except occasional scattered shots had ceased in the immediate vicinity, though in the distance could be heard the snarl of the firmer resistance that the Grays were making at some other point. The Galland house, for the time being, was isolated--in possession of neither side.

"Isn't there something else I can do to help with the wounded?" Marta asked. She longed for action in order to escape her thoughts.

"You've had a terrible shock--when you are stronger," said the doctor.

"When you have had something to eat and drink," observed the practical Minna authoritatively.

Marta would not have the food brought to her. She insisted that she was strong enough to accompany Minna to the tower. While Minna urged mouthfuls down Marta's dry throat as she sat outside the door of the sitting-room with her mother a number of weary, dust-streaked faces, with feverish energy in their eyes, peered over the hedge that bounded the garden on the side toward the pass. These scout skirmishers of Stransky's men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly, watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their comrades. Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front.

"Look, Minna!" exclaimed Marta. "The giant who carried the old man in pickaback the first night of the war!"

"Yes, the bold impudence of him!" said Minna. "As if there was nothing that could stand in his way and what he wanted he would have!"

But Minna was flushing as she spoke. The flush dissipated and she drew up her chin when Stransky, looking around, recognized her with a merry, confident wave of his hand.

"See, he's a captain and he wears an iron cross!" said Marta as Stransky hastened toward them.

"He acts like it!" assented Minna grudgingly.

Eager, leviathan, his cap doffed with a sweeping gesture as he made a low bow, Stransky was the very spirit of retributive victory returning to claim the ground that he had lost.

"Well, this is like getting home again!" he cried.

"So I see!" said Minna equivocally.

Stransky drew his eyes together, sighting them on the bridge of his nose thoughtfully at this dubious reception.

"I came back for the chance to kiss a good woman's hand," he observed with a profound awkwardness and looking at Minna's hand. "Your hand!" he added, the cast in his eyes straightening as he looked directly at her appealingly.

She extended her finger-tips and he pressed his lips to them. Then she drew back a step, a trifle pale, her eyes sad and questioning, more than ever Madonna-like, and curled her arm around little Clarissa Eileen, who had stolen to her mother's side.

"What is that?" asked Clarissa Eileen, pointing to the cross on Stransky's breast.

"That," observed Stransky deliberately, "is a little piece of metal that I got for an inspiration of manhood. It doesn't cost the price of a day's rations, but it's one of the things which money can't buy--not yet--in this commercial age. One of those institutions of barbarism that we anarchists call government gave it to me, and I'll never part with it!"

"Because he was a brave soldier, Clarissa," explained Marta in simpler terms. "Because he was ready to die for his country."

"And for your mother!" put in Stransky, seizing Clarissa in his great hands and lifting her lightly to the level of his face. "Oh, I've got stories," he said to her, "a soldier-man's stories, to tell you, young lady, one of these days--and such stories!"

He crossed his eyes over his big nose in a fashion that made Clarissa clap her hands and burst into a peal of laughter.

"You're an awfully funny man!" she declared as Stransky set her down.

"So your mother thinks," said Stransky, blinking at Minna, who had indulged in a smile which his remark promptly ironed out.

This irrepressible soldier, given so much as an inch, would be demanding a province. But erasing a smile is not destroying the fact of it. Stransky took heart for the charge on seeing a breach in the enemy's lines.

"Yes, I was fighting for you!" he burst out to Minna. "When the other fellows were reading letters from their sweethearts I was imagining letters from you. I even wrote out some and posted them from one pocket to another, in place of the regular mails."

"What did you say in those letters?" asked Marta.

"Why, you're big and awkward and cross-eyed, Stransky, but you've a way with you, and maybe--"

"Humph!" sniffed Minna.

"I kept seeing the way you looked when you belted me one in the face," he went on unabashed to Minna, "and knocked any anarchism out of me that was left after the shell burst. I kept seeing your face in my last glimpse when the Grays made me run for it from your kitchen door before I had half a chance for the oration crying for voice. You were in my dreams! You were in battle with me!"

"This sounds like a disordered mind," observed Minna. "I've heard men talk that way before."

"Oh, I have talked that way to other women myself!" said Stransky.

"Yes," said Minna bitterly. His candor was rather unexpected.

"I have talked to others in passing on the high road," he continued. "But never after a woman had struck me in the face. That blow sank deep--deep--deep as what Lanstron said when I revolted on the march. I say it to you with this"--he touched the cross--"on my breast. And I'm not going to give you up. It's a big world. There's room in it for a place for you after the war is over and I'm going to make the place. Yes, I've found myself. I've found how to lead men. My home isn't to be in the hedgerows any more. It's to be where you are. You and I, whom society gave a kick, will make society give us a place!" He was eloquent in his strength; eloquent in the fire of resolution blazing from his eyes. "And I'll be back again," he concluded. "You can't shake me. I'll camp on your door-step. But now I've got to look after my company. Good-by till I'm back--back to stay! Good-by, little daughter!" he added with a wave of his hand to Clarissa as he turned to go. "Maybe we shall have our own automobile some day. It's no stranger than what's been happening to me since the war began."

"If you don't marry him, Minna, I'll--I'll--" Mrs. Galland could not find words for the fearful thing that she would do.

"Marry him! I have only met him three times for about three minutes each time!" protested Minna. She was as rosy as a girl and in her confusion she busied herself retying the ribbon on Clarissa Eileen's hair. "He called you little daughter!" she said softly to the child as she withdrew into the tower.

"I am glad we didn't send Minna away when misfortune befell her," said Mrs. Galland. "You were right about that, Marta, with your new ideas. What a treasure she has been!"

Marta was scarcely hearing her mother; certainly not finding any credit for herself in the remark. She was thinking what a simple, what a glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere, primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his own undoing.

The skirmishers having halted beyond the linden stumps, the reserves were stacking their rifles and dropping to rest in the garden. The sight of the uniforms of the deliverers, of her own people, stirred Mrs. Galland to unwonted activity. She moved here and there among them with smiles of mothering pride. She told them how brave they were; how her husband had been a colonel of Hussars in the last war. They must be tired and hungry. She hurried in to Minna, and together they emptied the larder of everything, even to the lumps of sugar, which were impartially bestowed.

But Marta remained in the chair by the doorway of the tower, weak and listless. She was weary of the sight of uniforms and bayonets. In the dreary opaqueness of her mind flickered one tiny, bright light as through a blanket; that she herself had been in danger. She had been under fire. She had not merely sent men to death; she had been in death's company.

Now her lashes were closed; again they opened slightly as her gaze roved the semicircle of the horizon. A mounted officer and his orderly galloping across the fields to the pass road caught her desultory attention and held it, for they formed the most impetuous object on the landscape. When the officer alighted at the foot of the garden and tossed his reins to the orderly, she detected something familiar about him. He leaped the garden wall at a bound and, half running, came toward the tower. Not until he lifted his cap and waved it did she associate this lithe, dapper artillerist with a stooped old gardener in blue blouse and torn straw hat who had once shuffled among the flowers at her service.

"Hello! Hello!" he shouted in clarion greeting at sight of her. "Hello, my successor!"

Only in the whiteness of his hair was he like the old Feller. His tone, the boyish sparkle of his black eyes, those full, expressive lips playing over the brilliant teeth, his easy grace, his quick and telling gestures--they were of the Feller of cadet days. Something in his look as he stopped in front of her startled Marta. Suddenly he bent over and drew down his face, with dropping underlip.

"I'm deaf--stone deaf, if you please!" he wheezed in senile fashion.

She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth that made him seem younger than his years.

"Not a gardener--a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag again, thanks to you!" he cried. "An officer once more!"

"I'm glad!" she exclaimed. Here was one thing more to the credit of war.

"Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy--thanks to you!" More than the emotion of the brimming gratitude of his heart shone through his mobile features.

"It was your choice; you improved it. You fulfilled a faith that I had in you," she said.

"Faith in me! That is the finest tribute of all--better than this, better than this!" He touched the iron cross on his coat as Stransky had to Minna.

"And I took your place," said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.

Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking. In his place she had lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt, could ever expiate it. The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan of war in wicked cunning.

He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words. He had forgotten her children's school.

"And did my work better than I could! You are wonderful, wonderful!" He was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.

She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.

"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this--of what you have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I would be worthy--worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns play--bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell you; did he?"

"Yes, and also of the iron cross."

"A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass," he went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on itself. And where the shells struck on the hard road--phew! They lifted the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns meant in defence. The guns--they are back to their old place of glory! They rule!"

"Was it your guns that fired into the mêlée there by the gate?" Marta asked.

"Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at the house, though if it had not been your house I'd have sent a shell or two on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there. Then, after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent shells till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified."

"The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me," said Marta.

So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm. His impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death.

"You--you were down by the road?" he gasped. "My guns were firing at you? Why--how?"

"Helping with the wounded."

"The Gray wounded?"

"Yes."

"Of course, you would--with any wounded!" he cried. "Splendid! Like you! It is not bad? It does not pain you?"

He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds.

"Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she assured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.

Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that darted as a shooting star across his mind.

"Wonderful--wounded! Wonderful! Was there ever such a woman?" he cried. "No, I knew from the first there never was. The minute the way was clear and I could be spared from my guns I came to you--to you! This time I come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener"--for an instant he was the gardener--"but as one of your world, to which I was bred," and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the commander of men in action. "Destiny has played with us. It sent a spy to your garden. It put you in my place. A strange service, ours--yes, destiny is in it!"

"Yes," she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.

She was staring at the ground, her face very still. Yes, it was he who had started the train of circumstances that had left her with a memory more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair. His memory was already erased. What could ever erase hers? He had begun anew. How could she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny--of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny--was the worst mockery of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came to the end.

"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I love you!"

Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed, but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope? Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.

"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love be to me?"

He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.

"Act! Act!" he murmured.

"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder. "Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world, with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would look back on this moment as another part that you had acted--and so beautifully acted."

"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.

For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored comprehension.

"You know me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked, after a pause.

"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing in relief.

"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect. "Yes, I act--act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best yet--on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. God bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of you! You and Lanny--two fixed stars for me!"

"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.

"Yes, yes--a yes as real as the guns!"

"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.

"Good-by! God bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays' capital of my guns parked in the palace square."

She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war, counting death and wounds and hardship as the delights of the gamble. Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing shells in the irresponsible joy of tossing confetti in a carnival. Pursuit! Was Feller's the sentiment of the army? Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier? Were they to change their song to, "Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs"? The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under the ashes.

A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge. Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant exclamations:

"A hundred thousand prisoners!"

"And five hundred guns!"

"We're closing in on their frontier all along the line!"

"It's incredible!"

"But the word is official--it's right!"

From mouth to mouth--a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred guns--the news was passed in the garden. Eyes dull with fatigue began flashing as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer unlike any Marta had heard before. It had the high notes of men who were weary, of a terrible exultation, of spirit stronger than tired legs and as yet unsatisfied. Other exclamations from both officers and men expressed a hunger whetted by the taste of one day's victory.

"We'll go on!"

"We'll make peace in their capital!"

"And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!"