Chapter 7

He drew away abruptly, his face becoming suddenly old, his stoop returning, and began to study the branch as before. Lanstron dropped back to his seat and gazed at the brown roofs of the town. Thus they might continue their conversation as guest and gardener.

"I didn't think you'd stick it out, but you wanted to try--you chose," said Lanstron. "Come--this afternoon--now!"

"This is best for me--this to the end of the chapter!" Feller replied doggedly. "Because you say you didn't think I'd stick it out--ah, how well you know me. Lanny!--is the one reason that I should."

"True!" Lanstron agreed. "A victory over yourself!"

"How often I have heard in imagination the outbreak of rifle-fire down there by the white posts! How often I have longed for that day--for war! I live for war!"

"It may never come," Lanstron said in frank protest. "And, for God's sake, don't pray for it in that way!"

"Then I shall be patient--patient under all irritations. The worst is," and Feller raised his head heavily, in a way that seemed to emphasize both his stoop and his age, "the worst is Miss Galland."

"Miss Galland! How?"

"She is learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet in order the better to communicate with me. She likes to talk of the flowers--gardening is a passion with her, too--and all the while, in face of the honesty of those big eyes of hers and of her gentle old mother's confidence, I am living a lie! Oh, the satire of it! And I have not been used to lying. That is my only virtue; at any rate, I was never a liar!"

"Then, why stay, Gustave? I will find something else for you."

"No!" Feller shot back irritably. "No!" he repeated resolutely. "I don't want to go! I mean to be game--I--" He shifted his gaze dismally from the bush which he still pretended to examine and suddenly broke off with: "Miss Galland is coming!"

He started to move away with a gardener's shuffling steps, looking from right to left for weeds. Then pausing, he glanced back, his face in another transformation--that of a comedian.

"La, la, la!" he clucked, tossing his head gayly. "Depend on me, Lanny! They'll never know I'm not deaf. I get my blue fits only on Sundays! And deafness has its compensations. Think if I had to listen to all the stories of my table companion, Peter, the coachman! La, la, la!" he clucked again, before disappearing around a bend in the path. "La, la, la! I'm the man for this part!"

Lanstron started toward the steps that Marta was ascending. She moved leisurely, yet with a certain springy energy that suggested that she might have come on the run without being out of breath or seeming to have made an effort. Without seeing him, she paused before one of the urns of hydrangeas in full bloom that flanked the third terrace wall, and, as if she would encompass and plunge her spirit into their abundant beauty, she spread out her arms and drew the blossoms together in a mass in which she half buried her face. The act was delightful in its grace and spontaneity. It was like having a page out of her secret self. It brought the glow of his great desire into Lanstron's eyes.

"Hello, stranger!" she called as she saw him, and quickened her pace.

"Hello, pedagogue!" he responded.

As they shook hands they swung their arms back and forth like a pair of romping children for a moment.

"We had a grand session of the school this morning, the largest class ever!" she said. "And the points we scored off you soldiers! You'll find disarmament already in progress when you return to headquarters. We're irresistible, or at least," she added, with a flash of intensity, "we're going to be some day."

"So you put on your war-paint!"

"It must be the pollen from the hydrangeas!" She flicked her handkerchief from her belt and passed it to him. "Show that you know how to be useful!"

He performed the task with deliberate care.

"Heavens! You even have some on your ear and some on your hair; but I'll leave it on your hair; it's rather becoming. There you are!" he concluded.

"Off my hair, too!"

"Very well. I always obey orders."

"I oughtn't to have asked you to do it at all!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of manner as they started up to the house. "But a habit of friendship, a habit of liking to believe in one's friends, was uppermost. I forgot. I oughtn't even to have shaken hands with you!"

"Marta! What now, Marta?" he asked.

He had known her in reproach, in anger, in laughing mockery, in militant seriousness, but never before like this. The pain and indignation in her eyes came not from the sheer hurt of a wound but from the hurt of its source. It was as if he had learned by the signal of its loss that he had a deeper hold on her than he had realized.

"Yes, I have a bone to pick with you," she said, recovering a grim sort of fellowship. "A big bone! If you're half a friend you'll give me the very marrow of it."

"I am ready!" he answered more pathetically than philosophically.

"There's not time now; after luncheon, when mother is taking her nap," she concluded as they came to the last step and saw Mrs. Galland on the veranda.

X

A LUNCHEON AT THE GALLANDS'

Seated at the head of the table at luncheon, Mrs. Galland, with her round cheeks, her rather becoming double chin, and her nicely dressed hair, almost snow-white now, suggested a girlhood in the Bulwer Lytton and Octave Feuillet age, when darkened rooms were favored for the complexion and it was the fashion for gentlewomen to faint on occasion. She lived in the past; the present interested her only when it aroused some memory. To-day all her memories were of the war of forty years ago.

"I remember how Mrs. Karly collapsed when they brought word of the death of her son, and never recovered her mind. And I remember Eunice Steiner when they brought Charles home looking so white--and it was the very day set for their wedding! And I remember all the wounded gathered at the foot of the terrace and being carried in here, while the guns were roaring out on the plain--and now it's all coming again!"

"Why, mother, you're very blue to-day!" said Marta.

"We have had these crises before. We--" Lanstron began, rallying her.

"Oh, yes, you have reason and argument," she parried gently. "I have only my feelings. But it's in the air--yes, war is in the air, as it was that other time. And I remember that young private, only a boy, who lay crumpled up on the steps where he fell. I bandaged him myself and helped to make his position easier. Yes, I almost lifted him in my arms" She was looking at the flowers on the table but not seeing them. She was seeing the face of the young private forty years ago.

"He asked me to bring him a rose. He said the smell of roses was so sweet and he felt so faint. I brought him the rose--and he was dead!"

"Yes, yes!" Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.

"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But that was, long, long ago--long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. Yes, all over again; still more horrible--and it was horrible enough then! I used to get giddy easily. I do yet. But I didn't faint--no, not once through the days of nursing, the weeks of suspense. I wondered afterward how I could have endured so much."

"Are we of the septicized-serum age equal to it?" Marta exclaimed.

"Yes, we of the matter-of-fact, automatic gun-recoil age!" put in Lanstron.

"Oh, mother," Marta went on, "I wish you would go with me to the class some morning, you who have seen and felt war, and tell it all as you saw it to the children!"

"But," remonstrated Mrs. Galland, "I'm an old-fashioned woman; and, Marta, your father was an officer, as your grandfather was, too. I am sure he would not approve of your school, and I could do nothing against his wishes."

She looked up with moistening eyes to a portrait on the opposite wall over the seat which her husband had occupied at table. Lanstron saw there a florid, jaunty gentleman in riding-habit, gloves on knee, crop in hand. The spirit of the first Galland or of the stern grandfather on the side wall--with Blücher tufts in front of his ears sturdy defiance of that parvenu Bonaparte and of his own younger brother who had fallen fighting for Bonaparte--would have frowned on the descendant who had filled the house with many guests and paid the bills with mortgages in the ebbing tide of the family fortunes. But Mrs. Galland saw only a hero. She shared his prejudices against the manufacturers of the town; she saw the sale of land to be cut up into dwelling sites, which had saved the Gallands from bankruptcy, as the working of the adverse fate of modern tendencies. Even as she had left all details of business to her husband, so she had of late left them to Marta's managing.

"Edward and I were just engaged before the outbreak of the war," she proceeded. "How handsome he was in his Hussars' uniform! How frightened I was and hew proud of his fine bravado when I heard him and a number of fellow officers drinking here in this room to quick death and speedy promotion! Do they still have that toast, Colonel?"

"Yes, in some regiments," Lanstron answered. He would not say that what was good form in the days of the _beau sabreur_ was considered a little theatrical in the days of the automatic gun-recoil.

"And when he came--oh, when you came home," breathed Mrs. Galland to the portrait, "with the scar on your cheek, how tanned and strong your hands were and how white mine as you held them so fast! And then"--she smiled in peaceful content--"then I did faint. I am not ashamed of it--I did!"

"Without any danger of falling far!" said Lanstron happily.

"Or with much of a jar!" added Marta.

"You prattling children!" gasped Mrs. Galland, her cheeks flushing. "Do you think that I fainted purposely? I would have been ashamed to my dying day if I had feigned it!"

"And you did not faint in the presence of the dead and dying!" said Marta thoughtfully, wonderingly, leaning nearer to her mother, her eyes athirst and drinking.

"But I believe it is only a wispy-waspy sort of girl that faints at all these days. They're all so businesslike," said Mrs. Galland--"so businesslike that they are ceasing to marry."

How many girls she had known to wait a little too long! If anything could awaken Marta to action it ought to be war, which was a great match-maker forty years ago. The thought of a lover in danger had precipitated wavering hearts into engagements. Marta's mood was such that she received the hint openly and playfully to-day.

"Oh, I don't despair!" she exclaimed, straightening her shoulders and drawing in her chin with a mock display of bravery. "I believe it was in an English novel that I read that any woman without a hump can get any man she sets out for. It is a matter of determination and concentration and a wise choice of vulnerable objects."

"Marta, Marta!" gasped Mrs. Galland. In her tone was a volume of lamentation.

"Now that I'm twenty-seven mother is ready to take any risk on my behalf, if it is masculine. By the time I'm thirty she will be ready to give me to a peddler with a harelip!" she said mischievously.

"A peddler with a harelip! Marta, will you never be serious?"

"Some day, mother," Marta went on, "when we find the right man, you hold him while I propose, and together we'll surely--"

Mrs. Galland could not resist laughing, which was one way to stop further absurdities--absurdities concealing a nervous strain they happened to be this time--while Colonel Lanstron was a little flushed and ill at ease. She had a truly silvery laugh--the kind no longer in fashion among the gentry since golden laughs came in,--that went well with the dimples dipping into her pink cheeks.

Contrary to custom, she did not excuse herself immediately after luncheon for her afternoon nap, but kept battling with her nods until nature was victorious and the fell fast asleep. Marta, grown restless with impatience, suggested to Lanstron that they stroll in the garden, and they took the path past the house toward the castle tower, stopping in an arbor with high hedges on either side around a statue of Mercury.

"Now!" exclaimed Marta narrowly. "It was you, Lanny, who recommended Feller to us as a gardener, competent though deaf!" With literal brevity she told how she had proved him to be a man of most sensitive hearing. "I didn't let him know that he was discovered. I felt too much pity for him to do that. You brought him here--you, Lanny, you are the one to explain."

"True, he is not deaf!" Lanstron replied.

"You knew he was not deaf, while we wrote our messages to him and I have been learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet! It was pretty fun, wasn't it?"

"Not fun--no, Marta!" he parried.

"He is a spy?" she asked.

"Yes, a spy. You can put things in a bright light, Marta!" He found words coming with difficulty in face of the pain and disillusion of her set look.

"Using some broken man as a pawn; setting him as a spy in the garden where you have been the welcome friend!" she exclaimed. "A spy on what--on my mother, on Minna, on me, on the flowers, as a part of this monstrous game of trickery and lies that you are playing?"

There was no trace of anger in her tone. It was that of one mortally hurt. Anger would have been easier to bear than the measuring, penetrating wonder that found him guilty of such a horrible part. Those eyes would have confused Partow himself with the steady, welling intensity of their gaze. She did not see how his left hand was twitching and how he stilled its movement by pressing it against the bench.

"You will take Feller with you when you go!" she said, rising.

Lanstron dropped his head in a kind of shaking throb of his whole body and raised a face white with appeal.

"Marta!" He was speaking to a profile, very sensitive and yet like ivory. "I've no excuse for such an abuse of hospitality except the obesssion of a loathsome work that some man must do and I was set to do. My God, Marta! I cease to be natural and human. I am a machine. I keep thinking, what if war comes and some error of mine let the enemy know where to strike the blow of victory; or if there were information I might have gained and failed to gain that would have given us the victory--if, because I had not done my part, thousands of lives of our soldiers were sacrificed needlessly!"

At that she turned on him quickly, her face softening.

"You do think of that--the lives?"

"Yes, why shouldn't I?"

"Of those on your side!" she exclaimed, turning away.

"Yes, of those first," he replied. "And, Marta, I did not tell you why Feller was here because he did not want me to, and I was curious to see if he had sustained power enough to keep you from discovering his simulation. I did not think he would remain. I thought that in a week he would tire of the part. But now you must have the whole story. You will listen?"

"I should not be fair if I did not, should I?" she replied, with a weary shadow of a smile.

XI

MARTA HEARS FELLER'S STORY

To tell the story as Lanstron told it is to have it from the partisan lips of a man speaking for a man out of the depths of a friendship grown into the fibre of youth. It is better written by the detached narrator.

Gustave Feller's father had died when Gustave was twelve and his mother found it easy to spoil an only son who was handsome and popular. He suffered the misfortune of a mental brilliancy that learns too readily and of a personal charm that wins its way too easily. He danced well; he was facile at the piano; and he had so pronounced a gift as an amateur actor that a celebrated professional had advised him to go on the stage.

The two entering the cadet officers' school at the same time, chance made them roommates and choice soon made them chums. They had in common cleverness and the abundant energy that must continually express itself in action, and a mutual attraction in the very complexity of dissimilar traits that wove well in companionship.

While they were together Lanstron was a brake on his friend's impulses of frivolity which carried him to extremes; but they separated after receiving their commissions, Feller being assigned to the horse-artillery and Lanstron to the infantry and later to the staff. In charge of a field-battery at manoeuvres Feller was at his best. But in the comparative idleness of his profession he had much spare time for amusement, which led to gambling. Soon many debts hung over his head, awaiting liquidation at high rates of interest when he should come into the family property.

To the last his mother, having ever in mind a picture of him as a fine figure riding at the head of his guns, was kept in ignorance of this side of his life. With her death, when he had just turned thirty, a fortune was at his disposal. He made an oath of his resolution to pay his debts, marry and settle down and maintain his inheritance unimpaired. This endured for a year before it began to waver; and the wavering was soon followed by headlong obsession which fed on itself. As his passion for gambling grew it seemed to consume the better elements of his nature. Lanstron reasoned with him, then implored, then stormed; and Feller, regularly promising to reform, regularly fell each time into greater excesses. Twice Lanstron saved him from court-martial, but the third time no intercession or influence would induce his superiors to overlook the offence. Feller was permitted to resign to avoid a scandal, and at thirty-three, penniless, disgraced, he faced the world and sought the new land which has been the refuge for numbers of his kind. Only one friend bade him farewell as he boarded a steamer for New York, and this was Lanstron.

"Keep away from cities! Seek the open country! And write me, Gustave--don't fail!" said Lanstron.

Letters full of hope came from a Wyoming ranch; letters that told how Feller had learned to rope a steer and had won favor with his fellows and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet's healthy appetite for the fare of the chuck wagon. Lanstron, reading more between the lines than in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old passion was dying and in its place was coming something equally dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some excess for the sake of oblivion. Finally, Feller broke out with the truth.

"My hair is white now, Lanny," he wrote. "I have aged ten years in these two. With every month of this new life the horror of my career has become clear to me. I lie awake thinking of it. I feel unworthy to associate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions. Remorse is literally burning up my brain. It is better to have my mind diseased, my moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy, industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

"'Pay back! Pay back in some way!' a voice keeps saying. 'Pay back! Have an object in mind. Get to work on something that will help you to pay back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet sounded.'

"It is not the gambling, not the drinking--no! The thing that I cannot forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul--as foul as a priest who has broken his vows. I have disgraced the uniform--my country's uniform. I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with shame. While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to do something to right myself with my conscience. I should like to see a battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned--feeling so for my own peace of mind--atoned by some real deed of service.

"I have been reading how Japanese volunteers made a bridge of their bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge. That was a sufficient reward in life for death. So I come again to you for help. Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents within the inner circle of the army's activities. In the midst of peace and the commonplaces of drill and manoeuvres there must be dangerous and trying work where the only distinction is service for the cause--our cause of three million against five. Find a task for me, no matter how mean, thankless, or dangerous, Lanny. The more exacting it is the more welcome, for the better will be my chance to get right with myself."

"Come!" was Lanstron's cable in answer.

At the time he had not chosen any employment for Feller. He was thinking only that something must be found. When he heard of the death of the Gallands' gardener he recollected that before the passion for gambling overtook Feller he had still another passion besides his guns. The garden of the Feller estate had been famous in its neighborhood. Young Lanstron had not been more fond of the society of an engine-driver than young Feller of a gardener's. On a holiday in the capital with his fellow cadets he would separate from them to spend hours in the botanical gardens. Once, after his downfall began, at a riotous dinner party he had broken into a temper with a man who had torn a rose to pieces in order to toss the petals over the table.

"Flowers have souls!" he had cried in one of his tumultuous, abandoned reversions to his better self which his companions found eccentric and diverting. "That rose is the only thing in the room that is not foul --and I am the foulest of all!"

The next minute, perhaps after another glass of champagne, he would be winning a burst of laughter by his mimicry of a gouty old colonel reprimanding him for his erring career.

Naturally, in the instinct of friendship, Lanstron's own account left out the unpleasant and dwelt on the pleasant facts of Feller's career.

"His colonel did not understand him," he said. "But I knew the depths of his fine spirit and generous heart. I knew his talent. I knew that he was a victim of unsympathetic surroundings, of wealth, of love of excitement, and his own talent. Where he was, something must happen. He bubbled with energy. The routine of drill, the same old chaff of the mess, the garrison gossip, the long hours of idleness while the busy world throbs outside, which form a privileged life to most officers, were stifling to him. 'Let's set things going!' he would say in the old days, and we'd set them. Most of our demerits were for some kind of deviltry. And how he loved the guns! I can see the sparkle of his men's eyes at sight of him. Nobody could get out of them what he could. If he had not been put in the army as a matter of family custom, if he had been an actor, or if he and I had gone to build bridges, then he might have a line of capital letters and periods after his name, and he would not be a spy or I an employer of spies, doing the work of a detective agency in an officer's uniform because nobody but an officer may do it."

At first Marta listened rigidly, but as the narrative proceeded her interest grew. When Lanstron quoted Feller's appeal for any task, however mean and thankless, she nodded sympathetically and understandingly; when he related the incident of the rose, its appeal was irresistible. She gave a start of delight and broke silence.