Chapter 9

"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed. The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief, swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until war comes."

"And then?"

"Lanny, you yourself, with all your information, you don't think--"

"No; though we are nearer it than ever before, it seems to me," he said, choosing his words carefully. "But it is likely that diplomacy will find its way out of this crisis as it has out of many others."

"Then we'll leave that question till the evil day," she replied. "We have had a terrific argument, Lanny, haven't we? And you have won!"

Her fingers flew out to his arm and rested lightly there after an instant's firm pressure, as was her wont after an argument and they sheathed their blades. Their comradeship seemed to be restored in all its old glory of freedom from petty restraint. He was sure of one thing: that she would let her fingers remain on no other man's sleeve in this fashion; and he hoped that she would let them remain there a long time. Very foolish he was about her, very foolish for a piece of human machinery driven by the dynamo of a human will.

"I have an impression that your goodness of heart has won," he suggested gently.

"Or rather let us say that Feller has won."

"Better still, yes, Feller has won!" he agreed. "Oh, it is good, good, good to be here with you, Marta, away from the grind for a little while," he was saying, in the fulness of his anticipation of the hours they should have together before he had to go, when they heard the sound of steps. He looked around to see an orderly from the nearest military wireless station.

"I was told it was urgent, sir," said the orderly, in excuse for his intrusion, as he passed a telegram to Lanstron.

Immediately Lanstron felt the touch of the paper his features seemed to take on a mask that concealed his thought as he read:

"Take night express. Come direct from station to me. Partow."

This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends before he tossed the charred remains away. Marta imagined what he would be like with the havoc of war raging around him--all self-possession and mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.

"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war very soon--within a week or two weeks--what would be your attitude about Feller's remaining?"

"To carry out his plan, you mean?"

"Yes."

There was a perceptible pause on her part.

"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after war begins."

"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.

"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have never deserted the Galland house!"

"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of the fighting."

"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a gesture of impatience.

"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as cover or protection and will be subject to attack."

Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.

"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over glare ice.

"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point! So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."

"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse than Westerling!"

"No, he would use his own premises, his brother's, his father's if it would help. Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an inferno."

"How Christian!" breathed Marta. "I suppose he loves his grandchildren and that they are taught the Lord's prayer!"

"I believe his only pastime is playing with them," admitted Lanstron, stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash. "He tells them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war."

"Worse yet--a hypocrite!"

"But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere. He is working to the same end as you--peace. If the Grays would play with fire he would give them such a burning that they will never try again. He would make war too horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible hereafter. Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!"

"My children's prayer and Partow in the same gallery!" she laughed stonily. "The peace of armament, not of man's superiority to the tiger and the tarantula! And you say it all so calmly. You picture the hell of your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"

"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory--and then chaos!"

"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of spirit that calls for the end of an interview.

"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" he urged.

"Isn't that my affair?" she asked. "Aren't you willing to leave even that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?"

What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the conviction of its logic? Only call up from the depths the two passions of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.

"I love this soil, my country's soil, ours by right---and I love you! I would be true to both!"

"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's monstrous!"

"I--I--" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.

This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling, injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.

"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.

"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was smiling as when, half stunned and in agony--and ashamed of the fact--he had risen from the débris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all right," he concluded.

She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if she would bare her heart.

"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"

"You mean--I--."

But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the spark.

"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and--oh, this is enough for to-day!"

She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!

"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a chariot of fire bearing my flame--I am that bold, that brazen, that reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into armies--no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"

For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had disappeared.

"If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought; "anything except this beastly--"

But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a tattoo on the casing; no answer.

"Gustave!" he called; no answer.

Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.

"Hello, Lanny!" exclaimed Feller, rising and setting a chair and breaking into a stream of talk. "That's the way they all have to do when they want to attract my attention. I heard your voice and Miss Galland's--having an argument in the garden, I should say. Then I heard your step. Since I became deaf my sense of hearing has really grown keener, just as the blind develop a keener sense of feeling. Eh? eh?" He cupped his hand over his ear in the unctuous enjoyment of his gift of acting. "Yes, Colonel Lanstron, would you like to know what a perfect triumph we're going to pull off in irises next season--but, Lanny, you seem in a hurry!"

"Gustave, I am ordered to headquarters by the night express and I came to tell you that I think it means war."

"War! war!" Feller shouted. "Ye gods and little fishes!" In riotous glee he seized a chair and flung it across the room. "Ye salty, whiskery gods and ye shiny-eyed little fishes! War, do you hear that, you plebeian trousers of the deaf gardener? War!" Flinging the trousers after the chair, he executed a few steps. When he had thus tempered his elation, he grasped Lanstron's arm and, looking into his eyes with feverish resolution and hope, said: "Oh, don't fear! I'll pull it off. And then I shall have paid back--yes, paid back! I shall be a man who can look men in the face again. I need not slink to the other side of the street when I see an old friend coming for fear that he will recognize me. Yes, I could even dare to love a woman of my own world! And--and perhaps the uniform and the guns once more!"

"You may be sure of that. Partow cannot refuse," said Lanstron, deeply affected. After a pause he added: "But I must tell you, Gustave, that Miss Galland, though she is willing that you remain as a gardener, has not yet consented to our plan. She will make no decision until war comes. Perhaps she will refuse. It is only fair that you should know this."

For an instant Feller was downcast; then confidence returned at high pitch.

"Trust me!" he said. "I shall persuade her!"

"I hope you can. It is a chance that might turn the scales of victory--a chance that hangs in my mind stubbornly, as if there were some fate in it. Luck, old boy!"

"Luck to you, Lanny! Luck and promotion!"

They threw their arms about each other in a vigorous embrace.

"And you will keep watch that Mrs. Galland and Marta are in no danger?"

"Trust me for that, too!"

"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away.

XIII

BREAKING A PAPER-KNIFE

Hedworth Westerling would have said twenty to one if he had been asked the odds against war when he was parting from Marta Galland in the hotel reception-room. Before he reached home he would have changed them to ten to one. A scare bulletin about the Bodlapoo affair compelling attention as his car halted to let the traffic of a cross street pass, he bought a newspaper thrust in at the car window that contained the answer of the government of the Browns to a despatch of the Grays about the dispute that had arisen in the distant African jungle. This he had already read two days previously, by courtesy of the premier. It was moderate in tone, as became a power that had three million soldiers against its opponent's five; nevertheless, it firmly pointed out that the territory of the Browns had been overtly invaded, on the pretext of securing a deserter who had escaped across the line, by Gray colonial troops who had raised the Gray flag in place of the Brown flag and remained defiantly in occupation of the outpost they had taken.

As yet, the Browns had not attempted to repel the aggressor by arms for fear of complications, but were relying on the Gray government to order a withdrawal of the Gray force and the repudiation of a commander who had been guilty of so grave an international affront. The surprising and illuminating thing to Westerling was the inspired statement to the press from the Gray Foreign Office, adroitly appealing to Gray chauvinism and justifying the "intrepidity" of the Gray commander in response to so-called "pin-pricking" exasperations.

At the door of his apartment, François, his valet and factotum, gave Westerling a letter.

"Important, sir," said François.

Westerling knew by a glance that it was, for it was addressed and marked "Personal" in the premier's own handwriting. A conference for ten that evening was requested in a manner that left no doubt of its urgency.

"Let me see, do I dine at the Countess Zalinski's to-night?" asked Westerling. Both François and his personal aide kept a list of his appointments.

"Not to-night, sir. To-night you--" said François.

"Good!" thought Westerling. "No excuses will be necessary to Marie in order to be at the premier's by ten."

Curiosity made him a little ahead of time, but he found the premier awaiting him in his study, free from interruption or eavesdropping.

In the shadow of the table lamp the old premier looked his years. His definite features were easy material for the caricaturist, who does not deal in halftones. A near view of them was not attractive. They had the largeness which impresses the gallery from the floor of a parliamentary chamber, where delicate lines of sensibility and character lack the quality which the actor supplies with his make-up. As is often the case with elderly statesmen, his face seemed like that of the crowd done boldly as a single face, while his shrewd eyes in a bed of crow's-feet, when they lighted to their purpose in confidence, expressed his understanding of the crowd and its thoughts and how it may be led.

From youth he had been in politics, ever a bold figure and a daring player, but now beginning to feel the pressure of younger men's elbows. Fonder even of power, which had become a habit, than in his twenties, he saw it slipping from his grasp at an age when the 'downfall of his government meant that he should never hold the reins again. He had been called an ambitious demagogue and a makeshift opportunist by his enemies, but the crowd liked him for his ready strategy, his genius for appealing phrases, and for the gambler's virtue which hitherto had made him a good loser.

"You saw our _communiqué_ to-night that went with the publication of the Browns' despatch?" he remarked.

"Yes, and I was glad that I had been careful to send a spirited commander to that region," Westerling replied.

"So you guess my intention, I see." The premier smiled. He picked up a long, thin ivory paper-knife and softly patted the palm of his hand with it. "We have had many discussions, you and I, Westerling," he said. "But to-night I'm going to ask categorical questions. They may take us over old ground, but they are the questions of the nation to the army."

"Certainly!" Westerling replied in his ready, confident manner.

"We hear a great deal about the precision and power of modern arms as favoring the defensive," said the premier. "I have read somewhere that it will enable the Browns to hold us back, despite our advantage of numbers. Also, that they can completely man every part of their frontier and that their ability to move their reserves rapidly, thanks to modern facilities, makes a powerful flanking attack in surprise out of the question."

"Some half-truths in that," answered Westerling. "One axiom, that must hold good through all time, is that the aggressive which keeps at it always wins. We take the aggressive. In the space where Napoleon deployed a division, we deploy a battalion to-day. The precision and power of modern arms require this. With such immense forces and present-day tactics, the line of battle will practically cover the length of the frontier. Along their range the Browns have a series of fortresses commanding natural openings for our attack. These are almost impregnable. But there are pregnable points between them. Here, our method will be the same that the Japanese followed and that they learned from European armies. We shall concentrate in masses and throw in wave after wave of attack until we have gained the positions we desire. Once we have a tenable foothold on the crest of the range the Brown army must fall back and the rest will be a matter of skilful pursuit."

The premier, as he listened, rolled the paper-knife over and over, regarding its polished sides, which were like Westerling's manner of facile statement of a programme certain of fulfilment.

"We can win, then? We can go to their capital, or far enough to force a great indemnity, the annexation of one of their provinces, perhaps, and the taking over of their African colonies, which we can develop so much better than they?"

Westerling took care to show none of the eagerness which had set his pulses humming.

"To their capital!" he declared decisively. "Nothing less. For that I have planned."

"And the cost in lives?"

"Five or six hundred thousand casualties, which means about a hundred thousand killed."

"Ghastly! The population of a good-sized city!" exclaimed the premier.

"A small percentage out of five million soldiers; a smaller out of eighty million population," Westerling returned.

"And how long do you think the war would last? How long the strain on our finances, the suspense to the markets?"

"About a month. We shall go swiftly. The completeness of modern preparation must make a war of to-day brief between two great powers. We must win with a rush, giving the defenders no breathing spell, pouring masses after masses upon the critical positions."

"How long will it take to mobilize?"

"Less than a week after the railroads are put entirely at our service, with three preceding days of scattered movements," answered Westerling. "Deliberate mobilizations are all right for a diplomatic threat that creates a furore in the newspapers and a depression in the stock-market, but which is not to be carried out. When you mean war, all speed and the war fever at white heat."

"Therefore, there would be little time for the public to hoard money or to provoke a panic. The government, knowing precisely what was before it, could take severe preventive measures."

"But I may say that we should strike before mobilization is complete. A day will be required to take the La Tir tangent and other outlying positions. The 128th and other regiments who will do this work are already at the front. They were chosen because they came from distant provinces and we can count on their patriotic fervor for brilliant and speedy action, with resulting general enthusiasm for the whole army, which will be up in time for the assault on the Browns' permanent defences."

"You would have made a good politician, Westerling," the premier remarked, with a twitching uplift of the brows and a knowing gleam in his shrewd old eyes.

"Thank you," replied Westerling, appearing flattered, though secretly annoyed that any one should think that a chief of staff could care to change places with any man in the world. Governments might come and go, but the army was the rock in the midst of the play of minor forces, the ultimate head of order and power. "A man who is able to lead in anything must be something of a politician," he said suavely.

"Very true, indeed. Perhaps I had that partly in mind in making you vice-chief of staff," responded the premier enjoyably. "You spoke of the war fever at white heat," he went on, returning to his muttons, "and of the army's enthusiasm for its work. There we come to the kernel in the nut, eh?" he asked, as he prodded the paper-knife into the palm of his hand.

"Drill, organization, discipline, and centralized authority and a high-spirited aristocracy of officers are most important," said Westerling. "But after that come morale and the psychology of the soldier." There he shrugged slightly, in indication of a resentment at the handicap of human nature in his work. "The business of a soldier is to risk death in the way he is told. The keener he is for his cause the better. An ideal soldier is he who does not think for himself, but observes every detail of training and will not stop until halted by orders or a bullet. Therefore we want the army hot with desire. The officers of a company cannot force their men forward. Without insubordination or mutiny the men may stop from lack of interest after only a very small percentage of loss."