Chapter 8

"Yes. I recall just how he looked as he stood on the porch, his head bent, his shoulders stooped, twirling his hat in his hands, while mother and I examined him as to his qualifications," she said. "I remember his words. He said that he knew flowers and that, like him, flowers could not hear; but perhaps he would be all the better gardener because he could not hear. He was so ingratiating; yet his deafness seemed such a drawback that I hesitated."

Following the path to the tower leisurely, they had reached the tower. Feller's door was open. Marta looked into the room, finding in the neat arrangement of its furniture a new significance. He was absent, for it was the dinner hour.

"And on my recommendation you took him," Lanstron continued.

"Yes, on yours, Lanny, on a friend's! You"--she put a cold emphasis on the word--"you wanted him here for your plans! And why? You haven't answered that yet. What purpose of the war game does he serve in our garden?"

His look pleaded for patience, while he tried to smile, which was rather difficult in face of her attitude.

"Not altogether in the garden; partly in the tower," he replied. "You are to be in the whole secret and in such a way as to make my temptation clear, I hope. First, I think you ought to see the setting. Let us go in"

Impelled by the fascination of Feller's romantic story and by a curiosity that Lanstron's manner accentuated, she entered the room. Apparently Lanstron was familiar with the premises. Passing through the sitting-room into the room adjoining, where Feller stored his tools, he opened a door that gave onto the circular stone steps leading down into the dungeon tunnel.

"I think we had better have a light," he said, and when he had fetched one from the bedchamber he descended the steps, asking her to follow.

They were in a passage six feet in height and about three feet broad, which seemed to lead on indefinitely into clammy darkness. The dewy stone walls sparkled in fantastic and ghostly iridescence under the rays from the lantern. The dank air lay moist against their faces.

"It's a long time since I've been here," said Marta, glad to break the uncanny sound of their footsteps in the weird silence with her voice. "Not since I was a youngster. Then I came on a dare to see if there were goblins. There weren't any; at least, none that cared to manifest himself to me."

"We have a goblin here now that we are nursing for the Grays--an up-to-date one that is quite visible," said Lanstron. "This is far enough." He paused and raised the lantern. With its light full in her face, she blinked. "There, at the height of your chin!"

She noted a metal button painted gray, set at the side of one of the stones of the wall, which looked unreal. She struck the stone with her knuckles and it gave out the sound of hollow wood, which was followed, as an echo, by a little laugh from Lanstron. Pressing the button, a panel door flew open, revealing a telephone mouthpiece and receiver set in the recess. Without giving him time to refuse permission, her thought all submissive to the prompting spirit of adventure, she took down the receiver and called: "Hello!"

"The wire isn't connected," explained Lanstron.

Marta hung up the receiver and closed the door abruptly in a spasm of reaction.

"Like a detective play!" were the first words that sprang to her lips. "Well?" As she faced around her eyes glittered in the lantern's rays. "Well, have you any other little tricks to show me? Are you a sleight-of-hand artist, too, Lanny? Are you going to take a machine gun out of your hat?"

"That is the whole bag," he answered. "I thought you'd rather see it than have it described to you."

"Having seen it, let us go!" she said, in a manner that implied further reckoning to come.

"If out of a thousand possible sources one source succeeds, then the cost and pains of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine are more than repaid," he was saying urgently, the soldier uppermost in him. "Some of the best service we have had has been absurd in its simplicity and its audacity. In time of war more than one battle has been decided by a thing that was a trifle in itself. No matter what your preparation, you can never remove the element of chance. An hour gained in information about your enemy's plans may turn the tide in your favor. A Chinese peasant spy, because he happened to be intoxicated, was able to give the Japanese warning in time for Kuroki to make full dispositions for receiving the Russian attack in force at the Sha-ho. There are many other incidents of like nature in history. So it is my duty to neglect no possible method, however absurd."

By this time he was at the head of the steps. Standing to one side, he offered his hand to assist Marta. But she seemed not to see it. Her aspect was that of downright antagonism.

"However absurd! yes, it is absurd to think that you can make me a party to any of your plans, for--" She broke off abruptly with starting eyes, as if she had seen an apparition.

Lanstron turned and through the door of the tool-room saw Feller entering the sitting-room. He was not the bent, deferential old gardener, nor was he the Feller changed to youth as he thought of himself at the head of a battery. His features were hard-set, a fighting rage burning in his eyes, his sinews taut as if about to spring upon an adversary. When he recognized the intruders he turned limp, his head dropped, hiding his face with his hat brim, and he steadied himself by resting a hand on the table edge.

"Oh, it's you, Lanny--Colonel Lanstron!" he exclaimed thickly. "I saw that some one had come in here and naturally I was alarmed, as nobody but myself ever enters. And Miss Galland!" He removed his hat deferentially and bowed; his stoop returned and the lines of his face drooped. "I was so stupid; it did not occur to me that you might be showing the tower to Colonel Lanstron."

"We are sorry to have given you a fright!" said Marta very gently.

"Eh? eh?" queried Feller, again deaf. "Fright? Oh, no, no fright. It might have been some boys from the town marauding."

He was about to withdraw, in keeping with his circumspect adherence to his part, which he played with a sincerity that half-convinced even himself at times that he was really deaf, when the fire flickered back suddenly to his eyes and he glanced from Lanstron to the stairway in desperate inquiry.

"Wait, Feller! Three of us share the secret now. These are Miss Galland's premises. I thought best that she should know everything," said Lanstron.

"Everything!" exclaimed Feller. "Everything--" the word caught in his throat. "You mean my story, too?" He was neither young nor old now. He seemed nondescript and miserable. "She knows who I am?" he asked.

"Yes!" Lanstron answered.

"Lanny!" This almost reproachfully, as if the ethics of friendship had been abused.

"Yes. I'm sorry, Gustave. I--" Lanstron began miserably.

"But why not?" said Feller, with a wan attempt at a smile. "You see--I mean--it does not matter!" he concluded in a hopeless effort at philosophy.

"My thoughtlessness, my callousness, my obsession with my work! I should not have told your story," said Lanstron.

"His story!" exclaimed Marta, with a puzzled look to Lanstron before she turned to Feller with a look of warm sympathy. "Why, there is no story! You came with excellent recommendations. You are our very efficient gardener. That is all we need to know. Isn't that the way you wish it, Mr. Feller?"

"Yes, just that!" he said softly, raising his eyes to her in gratitude. "Thank you, Miss Galland!"

He was going after another "Thank you!" and a bow; going with the slow step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized his hands in a firm caress.

"Forgive me, Gustave!" he begged. "Forgive the most brutal of all injuries--that which wounds a friend's sensibilities."

"Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his attitude changed to one of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"

"Yes"

"Had you suspected me before that?"

"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him. There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he smiled as he had at the bumblebee.

"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.

"No, I don't think so."

He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.

"You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland," he said with a charming bow, "and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a fair test. That little thunderer will not get me again. I'll fool the ones I want to fool. And I'm learning, Lanny, learning all the time--getting a little deafer all the time. Miss Galland," he added, struck in visible contrition by a new thought, "I am sorry"--he paused with head down for an instant--"very sorry to have deceived you."

"But you are still a deaf gardener to me," said Marta, finding consolation in pleasing him.

"Eh? eh?" He put his hand to his ear as he resumed his stoop. "Yes, yes," he added, as a deaf man will when understanding of a remark which he failed at first to catch comes to him in an echo. "Yes, the gardener has no past," he declared in the gentle old gardener's voice, "when all the flowers die every year and he thinks only of next year's blossoms--of the future!"

Now the air of the room seemed to be stifling him, that of the roofless world of the garden calling him. His face spoke pitifully a desire for escape as he withdrew. The bent figure disappeared around a turn in the path and they listened without moving until the sound of his slow, dragging footfalls had died away.

"When he is serving those of his own social station I can see how it would be easier for him not to have me know," said Marta. "Sensitive, proud, and intense--" and a look of horror appeared in her eyes. "As he came across the room his face was transformed. I imagine it was like that of a man giving no quarter in a bayonet charge!"

"His secret was at stake!" Lanstron said in ready championship.

She put up her hand as if to shut out a picture.

"Don't let us think of it!" she exclaimed with a shudder. "He did not know what he was doing. His is one of the natures that have moments when an impulse throws them off their balance and ruins the work of years. No, we must think only of his sacrifice, his enforced humiliation, in order to try to make amends for the past according to his light. No one could refuse him sympathy and respect."

Feller had won the day for himself where a friend's pleas might have failed. This was as it should be, Lanstron thought; and he smiled happily over the rare thing in Marta that felt the appeal which Feller had for him.

"The right view--the view that you were bound to take!" he said.

"And yet, I don't know your plans for him, Lanny. Pity is one thing; there is another thing to consider," she replied, with an abrupt change of tone. "But first let us leave Feller's quarters. We are intruders here."

XII

A CRISIS WITHIN A CRISIS

"A broken-hearted man playing deaf; a secret telephone installed on our premises without our consent--this is all I know so far," said Marta, who was opposite Lanstron at one end of the circular seat in the arbor of Mercury, leaning back, with her weight partly resting on her hand spread out on the edge of the bench, head down, lashes lowered so that they formed a curtain for her glance. "I listen!" she added.

"Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here. The Browns will fall back step by step, and we mean, with relatively small cost to ourselves, to make the Grays pay a heavy price for each step--just as heavy as we can!"

They had often argued before with all the weapons known to controversy; but now the realization that his soldierly precision was bringing the forces of war into their personal relations struck her cold, with a logic as cold as his own seemed to her.

"You need not use euphonious terms," she said without lifting her lashes or any movement except a quick, nervous gesture of her free hand that fell back into place on her lap. "What you mean is that you will kill as many as possible of the Grays, isn't it? And if you could kill five for every man you lost, that would be splendid, wouldn't it?"

"I don't think of it as splendid. There is nothing splendid about war," he objected; "not to me, Marta."

"Still you would like to kill five to one, even ten to one, wouldn't you?" she persisted.

"Marta, you are merciless!"

"So is war. It should be treated mercilessly."

"Yes, twenty to one if they try to take our land!" he declared. "If we could keep up that ratio the war would not last more than a week. It would mean a great saving of lives in the end. We should win."

"Exactly. Thank you. Westerling could not have said it better as a reason for another army-corps. For the love of humanity--the humanity of our side--please give us more weapons for murder! And after you have made them pay five to one or ten to one in human lives for the tangent, what then? Go on! I want to look at war face to face, free of the will-o'-the-wisp glamour that draws on soldiers!"

"We fall back to our first line of defence, fighting all the time. The Grays occupy La Tir, which will be out of the reach of our guns. Your house will no longer be in danger, and we happen to know that Westerling means to make it his headquarters."

"Our house Westerling's headquarters!" she repeated. With a start that brought her up erect, alert, challenging, her lashes flickering, she recalled that Westerling had said at parting that he should see her if war came. This corroborated Lanstron's information. One side wanted a spy in the garden; the other a general in the house. Was she expected to make a choice? He had ceased to be Lanny. He personified war. Westerling personified war. "I suppose you have spies under his very nose--in his very staff offices?" she asked.

"And probably he has in ours," said Lanstron, "though we do our best to prevent it."

"What a pretty example of trust among civilized nations!" she exclaimed. "And you say that Westerling, who commands the killing on his side, will be in no danger?"

"Naturally not. As you know, a chief of staff must be at the wire head where all information centres, free of interruption or confusion or any possibility of broken lines of communication with his corps and divisions."

"Then Partow will not be in any danger?"

"For the same reasons, no."

"How comfortable! In perfect safety themselves, they will order other men to death!"

"Marta, you are unjust!" exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as disciple reveres master. "Partow has the iron cross!"--the prized iron cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional courage in action and for that alone. "He won it leading a second charge with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his regiment. The second charge succeeded."

"Yes, I understand," she went on a little wildly. "And perhaps the colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he failed. Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military cult. You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to win either iron or bronze crosses. And, Lanny, are you a person of such distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of danger?"

She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane. If his work were to make war, her work was against war--the mission of her life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he replied:

"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious efficiency which means victory."

"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!" she put in.

"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy business, that would be to my taste."

"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs, that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him, her eyes flaming demand and satire.

"No! War--necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of euphonious terms.

"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"

"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand. If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed and theirs on the table."

"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"

"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."

She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on her side.

"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac; screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up among soldiers! I know!"

"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff, whether elated or depressed, pick up scraps of conversation, and, as a trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the 'phone to Partow's headquarters."

"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to depend on them for scouting."

"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they were even in the first steps of execution. This"--playing the thought happily--"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta, that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."

"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to talk."

"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.

"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be shot as a spy?" she asked.

"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He refused the assignments I first suggested to him. He objected that they did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience--what a conscience old Gustave has!--by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the chance--the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in a crisis."

"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make use of them."

"You put it bluntly, Marta. You--"

"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips, which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in sympathy.

"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair, his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter dejection--and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the devil's company!"

"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"

"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.

"If there is no war, I hope--after a year or so, I hope and believe that I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had atoned."