A prodigious brown worm, its body turning and rising and falling with the grade and throbbing with the march of its centipede feet, wound its way along a rising mountain road. In the strong, youthful figures set in the universal type of military mould it might have been a regiment of any one of many nations' but the tint of its uniform was the brown of the nine hundred regiments that prepared for war against the gray of the fifteen hundred under Hedworth Westerling.
The 53d of the Browns had started for La Tir on the same day that the 128th of the Grays had started for South La Tir. While the 128th was going to new scenes, the 53d was returning to familiar ground. It had detrained in the capital of the province from which its ranks had been recruited. After a steep incline, there was a welcome bugle note and with shouts of delight the centipede's legs broke apart! Bankers', laborers', doctors', valets', butchers', manufacturers', and judges' sons threw themselves down on the greensward of the embankment to rest. With their talk of home, of relatives whom they had met at the station, and of the changes in the town was mingled talk of the crisis.
Meanwhile, an aged man was approaching. At times he would break into a kind of trot that ended, after a few steps, in shortness of breath. He was quite withered, his bright eyes twinkling out of an area of moth patches, and he wore a frayed uniform coat with a medal on the breast.
"Is this the 53d?" he quavered to the nearest soldier
"It certainly is!" some one answered. "Come and join us, veteran!"
"Is Tom—Tom Fragini here?"
The answer came from a big soldier, who sprang to his feet and leaped toward the old man.
"It's grandfather, as I live!" he called out, kissing the veteran on both cheeks. "I saw sister in town, and she said you'd be at the gate as we marched by."
"Didn't wait at no gate! Marched right up to you!" said grandfather. "Marched up with my uniform and medal on! Stand off there, Tom, so I can see you. My word! You're bigger'n your father, but not bigger'n I was! No, sir, not bigger'n I was in my day before that wound sort o' bent me over. They say it's the lead in the blood. I've still got the bullet!"
The old man's trousers were threadbare but well darned, and the holes in the uppers of his shoes were carefully patched. He had a merry air of optimism, which his grandson had inherited.
"Well, Tom, how much longer you got to serve?" asked grandfather.
"Six months," answered Tom.
"One, two, three, four—" grandfather counted the numbers off on his fingers. "That's good. You'll be in time for the spring ploughing. My, how you have filled out! But, somehow, I can't get used to this kind of uniform. Why, I don't see how a girl'd be attracted to you fellows, at all!"
"They have to, for we're the only kind of soldiers there are nowadays. Not as gay as in your day, that's sure, when you were in the Hussars, eh?"
"Yes, I was in the Hussars—in the Hussars! I tell you, with our sabres a-gleaming, our horses' bits a-jingling, our pennons a-flying, and all the color of our uniform—I tell you, the girls used to open their eyes at us. And we went into the charge like that—yes, sir, just that gay and grand, Colonel Galland leading!"
Military history said that it had been a rather foolish charge, a fine example of the vainglory of unreasoning bravery that accomplishes nothing, but no one would suggest such scepticism of an immortal event in popular imagination in hearing of the old man as he lived over that intoxicated rush of horses and men into a battery of the Grays.
"Well, didn't you find what I said was true about the lowlanders?" asked grandfather after he had finished the charge, referring to the people of the southern frontier of the Browns, where the 53d had just been garrisoned.
"No, I kind of liked them. I made a lot of friends," admitted Tom. "They're very progressive."
"Eh? eh? You're joking!" To like the people of the southern frontier was only less conceivable than liking the people of the Grays. "That's because you didn't see deep under them. They're all on the outside—a flighty lot! Why, if they'd done their part in that last war we'd have licked the Grays until they cried for mercy! If their army corps had stood its ground at Volmer—"
"So you've always said," interrupted Tom.
"And the way they cook tripe! I couldn't stomach it, could you? And if there's anything I am partial to it's a good dish of tripe! And their light beer—like drinking froth! And their bread—why, it ain't bread! It's chips! 'Taint fit for civilized folks!"
"But I sort of got used to their ways," said Tom.
"Eh? eh?" Grandfather looked at grandson quizzically, seeking the cause of such heterodoxy in a northern man. "Say, you ain't been falling in love?" he hazarded. "You—you ain't going to bring one of them southern girls home?"
"No!" said Tom laughing.
"Well, I'm glad you ain't, for they're naturally light-minded. I remember 'em well." He wandered on with his questions and comments. "Is it a fact, Tom, or was you just joking when you wrote home that the soldiers took so many baths?"
"Yes, they do."
"Well, that beats me! It's a wonder you didn't all die of pneumonia!" He paused to absorb the phenomenon. Then his half-childish mind, prompted by a random recollection, flitted to another subject which set him to giggling. "And the little crawlers—did they bother you much, the little crawlers?"
"The little crawlers?" repeated Tom, mystified.
"Yes. Everybody used to get 'em just from living close together. Had to comb 'em out and pick 'em out of your clothes. The chase we used to call it."
"No, grandfather, crawlers have gone out of fashion. And no more epidemics of typhoid and dysentery either," said Tom.
"Times have certainly changed!" grumbled Grandfather Fragini.
Interested in their own reunion, they had paid no attention to a group of Tom's comrades near-by, sprawled around a newspaper containing the latest despatches from both capitals. It was a group as typical as that of the Grays around Hugo Mallin's cot; only the common voice was that of defence.
"Five million soldiers to our three million!"
"Eighty million people to our fifty million!"
"Because of the odds, they think we are bound to yield, no matter if we are in the right!"
"Let them come!" said the butcher's son. "If we have to go, it will be on a wave of blood."
"And they will come some time," said the judge's son. "They want our land."
"We gain nothing if we beat them back. War will be the ruin of business,"-said the banker's son.
"Yes, we are prosperous now. Let well enough alone!" said the manufacturer's son.
"Some say it makes wages higher," said the laborer's son, "but I am thinking it's a poor way of raising your pay."
"There won't be any war," said the banker's son "There can't be without credit. The banking interests will lot permit it."
"There can always be war," said the judge's son, "always when one people determines to strike at another people—even if it brings bankruptcy."
"It would be a war that would make all others in history a mere exchange of skirmishes. Every able-bodied man in line—automatics a hundred shots a minute—guns a dozen shots a minute—and aeroplanes and dirigibles!" said the manufacturer's son.
"To the death, too!"
"And not for glory! We of the 53d who live on the frontier will be fighting for our homes."
"If we lose them we'll never get them back. Better die than be beaten!"
There was no humorist Hugo Mallin in this group; no nimble fancy to send heresy skating over thin ice; but there was Herbert Stransky, with deep-set eyes, slightly squinting inward, and a heavy jaw, an enormous man who was the best shot in the company when he cared to be. He had listened in silence to the others, his rather thick but expressive lips curving with cynicism. His only speech all the morning had been in the midst of the reception in the public square of the town when he said:
"This home-coming doesn't mean much to me. Home? Hell! The hedgerows of the world are my home!"
He appeared older than his years, and hard and bitter, except when his eyes would light with a feverish sort of fire which shone now as he broke into a lull in the talk.
"Comrades," he began.
"Let us hear from the socialist!" a Tory exclaimed.
"No, the anarchist!" shouted a socialist.
"There won't be any war!" said Stransky, his voice gradually rising to the pitch of an agitator relishing the sensation of his own words. "Patriotism is the played-out trick of the ruling classes to keep down the proletariat. There won't be any war! Why? Because there are too many enlightened men on both sides who do the world's work. We of the 53d are a provincial lot, but throughout our army there are thousands upon thousands like me. They march, they drill, but when battle comes they will refuse to fight—my comrades in heart, to whom the flag of this country means no more than that of any other country!"
"Hold on! The flag is sacred!" cried the banker's son.
"Yes, that will do!"
"Shut up!"
Other voices formed a chorus of angry protest.
"I knew you thought it; now I've caught you!" This from the sergeant, who had seen hard fighting against a savage foe in Africa and therefore was particularly bitter about the Bodlapoo affair. The welt of a scar on his gaunt, fever-yellowed cheek turned a deeper red as he seized Stransky by the collar of the blouse.
Stransky raised his free hand as if to strike, but paused as he faced the company's boyish captain, slender of figure, aristocratic of feature. His indignation was as evident as the sergeant's, but he was biting his lips to keep it under control.
"You heard what he said, sir?"
"The latter part—enough!"
"It's incitation to mutiny! An example!"
"Yes, put him under arrest."
The sergeant still held fast to the collar of Stransky's blouse. Stransky could have shaken himself free, as a mastiff frees himself from a puppy, but this was resistance to arrest and he had not yet made up his mind to go that far. His muscles were weaving under the sergeant's grip, his eyes glowing as with volcanic fire waiting on the madness of impulse for eruption.
"I wonder if it is really worth while to put him under arrest?" said some one at the edge of the group in amiable inquiry.
The voice came from an officer of about thirty-five, who apparently had strolled over from a near-by aeroplane station to look at the regiment. From his shoulder hung the gold cords of the staff. His left hand thrust in the pocket of his blouse heightened the ease of his carriage, which was free of conventional military stiffness, while his eyes had the peculiar eagerness of a man who seems to find everything that comes under his observation interesting and significant.
It was Colonel Arthur Lanstron, whose plane had skimmed the Gallands' garden wall for the "easy bump" ten years ago. There was something more than mere titular respect in the way the young captain saluted—-admiration and the diffident, boyish glance of recognition which does not presume to take the lead in recalling a slight acquaintance with a man of distinction.
"Dellarme! It's all of two years since we met at Miss Galland's, isn't it?" Lanstron said, shaking hands with the captain.
"Yes, just before we were ordered south," said Dellarme, obviously pleased to be remembered.
"I overheard your speech," Lanstron continued, nodding toward Stransky. "It was very informing."
A crowd of soldiers was now pressing around Stransky, and in the front rank was Grandfather Fragini.
"Said our flag was no better'n any other flag, did he?" piped the old man. "Beat him to a pulp! That's what the Hussars would have done."
"If you don't mind telling it in public, Stransky, I should like to know your origin," said Lanstron, prepared to be as considerate of an anarchist's private feelings as of anybody's.
Stransky squinted his eyes down the bony bridge of his nose and grinned sardonically.
"That won't take long," he answered. "My father, so far as I could identify him, died in jail and my mother of drink."
"That was hardly to the purple!" observed Lanstron thoughtfully.
"No, to the red!" answered Stransky savagely.
"I mean that it was hardly inclined to make you take ft roseate view of life as a beautiful thing in a well-ordered world where favors of fortune are evenly distributed," continued Lanstron.
"Rather to make me rejoice in the hope of a new order of things—the re-creation of society!" Stransky uttered the sentiment with the triumphant pride of a pupil who knows his text-book thoroughly.
By this time the colonel commanding the regiment, who had noticed the excitement from a distance, appeared, forcing a gap for his passage through the crowd with sharp words. He, too, recognized Lanstron. After they had shaken hands, the colonel scowled as he heard the situation explained, with the old sergeant, still holding fast to Stransky's collar, a capable and insistent witness for the prosecution; while Stransky, the fire in his eyes dying to coals, stared straight ahead.
"It is only a suggestion, of course," said Lanstron, speaking quite as a spectator to avoid the least indication of interference with the colonel's authority, "but it seems possible that Stransky has clothed his wrongs in a garb that could never set well on his nature if he tried to wear it in practice. He is really an individualist. Enraged, he would fight well. I should like nothing better than a force of Stranskys if I had to defend a redoubt in a last stand."
"Yes, he might fight." The colonel looked hard at Stransky's rigid profile, with its tight lips and chin as firm as if cut out of stone. "You never know who will fight in the pinch, they say. But that's speculation. It's the example that I have to deal with."
"He is not of the insidious, plotting type. He spoke his mind openly," suggested Lanstron. "If you give him the limit of the law, why, he becomes a martyr to persecution. I should say that his remarks might pass for barrack-room gassing."
"Very well," said the colonel, taking the shortest way out of the difficulty. "We will excuse the first offence."
"Yes, sir!" said the sergeant mechanically as he released his grip of the offender. "We had two anarchists in my company in Africa," he observed in loyal agreement with orders. "They fought like devils. The only trouble was to keep them from shooting innocent natives for sport."
Stransky's collar was still crumpled on the nape of his neck. He remained stock-still, staring down the bridge of his nose. For a full minute he did not vouchsafe so much as a glance upward over the change in his fortunes. Then he looked around at Lanstron gloweringly.
"I know who you are!" he said. "You were born to the purple. You have had education, opportunity, position—everything that you and your kind want to keep for your kind. You are smarter than the others. You would hang a man with spider-webs instead of hemp. But I won't fight for you! No, I won't!"
He threw back his head with a determination in his defiance so intense that it had a certain kind of dignity that freed it of theatrical affectation.
"Yes, I was fortunate; but perhaps nature was not altogether unkind to you," said Lanstron. "In Napoleonic times, Stransky, I think you might even have carried a marshal's baton in your knapsack."
"You—what rot!" A sort of triumph played around Stransky's full lips and his jaw shot out challengingly. "No, never against my comrades on the other side of the border!" he concluded, his dogged stare returning.
Now the colonel gave the order to fall in; the bugle sounded and the centipede's legs began to assemble on the road. But Stransky remained a statue, his rifle untouched on the sward. He seemed of a mind to let the regiment go on without him.
"Stransky, fall in!" called the sergeant.
Still Stransky did not move. A comrade picked up the rifle and fairly thrust it into his hands.
"Come on, Bert, and knead dough with the rest of us!" he whispered. "Come on! Cheer up!" Evidently his comrades liked Stransky.
"No!" roared Stransky, bringing the rifle down on the ground with a heavy blow.
Then impulse broke through the restraint that seemed to characterize the Lanstron of thirty-five. The Lanstron of twenty-five, who had met catastrophe because he was "wool-gathering," asserted himself. He put his hand on Stransky's shoulder. It was a strong though slim hand that looked as if it had been trained to do the work of two hands in the process of its owner's own transformation. Thus the old sergeant had seen a general remonstrate with a brave veteran who had been guilty of bad conduct in Africa. The old colonel gasped at such a subversion of the dignity of rank. He saw the army going to the devil. But young Dellarme, watching with eager curiosity, was sensible of no familiarity in the act. It all depended on how such a thing was done, he was thinking.
"We all have minutes when we are more or less anarchists," said Lanstron in the human appeal of one man to another. "But we don't want to be judged by one of those minutes. I got a hand mashed up for a mistake that took only a second. Think this over to-night before you act. Then, if you are of the same opinion, go to the colonel and tell him so. Come, why not?"
"All right, sir, you're so decent about it!" grumbled Stransky, taking his place in the ranks.
Hep-hep-hep! the regiment started on its way, with Grandfather Fragini keeping at his grandson's side.
"Makes me feel young again, but it's darned solemn beside the Hussars, with their horses' bits a-jingling. Times have certainly changed—officers' hands in their pockets, saying 'if you don't mind' to a man that's insulted the flag! Kicking ain't good enough for that traitor! Ought to hang him—yes, sir, hang and draw him!"
Lanstron watched the marching column for a time.
"Hep-hep-hep! It's the brown of the infantry that counts in the end," he mused. "I liked that wall-eyed giant. He's all man!"
Then his livening glance swept the heavens inquiringly. A speck in the blue, far away in the realms of atmospheric infinity, kept growing in size until it took the form of the wings with which man flies. The plane volplaned down with steady swiftness, till its racing shadow lay large over the landscape for a few seconds before it rose again with beautiful ease and precision.
"Bully for you, Etzel!" Lanstron thought, as he started back to the aeroplane station. "You belong in the corps. We shall not let you return to your regiment for a while. You've a cool head and you'd charge a church tower if that were the orders."
"Has he changed much?" Mrs. Galland asked, when she learned that Marta had seen Westerling.
"Jove has reached his own—the very top of Olympus, and he likes the prospect," Marta replied.
The only home news of importance that her mother had to impart related to a tiny strip of paper with the greeting, "Hello, Marta!" that had been dropped from the pilot aeroplane as the Brown aerial squadron flew over the garden after its race with the Gray. She noted Marta's customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being deferred.
"How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture of the two men rising before her vision. "Lanny trying so hard under the pressure of his responsibility not to be human and unable to forget himself, and Westerling trying, really trying, to be human at times, but unable to forget that he is Jove! Did you wave your acknowledgments to Lanny,'?"
"Why, no! How could I?" asked Mrs. Galland. "He went over so fast I didn't know it was he—a little figure so far overhead."
"It's odd, but I think I'd know Lanny a mile away by a sort of instinct," said Marta. "You know I'd like a gun that would fire a bomb and drop a message of 'Hello, yourself!' right on his knee. Wouldn't that give him a surprise?"
"You and he are so full of nonsense that you—" But Mrs. Galland desisted. What was the use?
Sometimes she wished that Colonel Lanstron would stay away altogether and leave a free field for a newcomer. Yet if two or three weeks passed without a call from him she was apprehensive. Besides being one of the Thorbourg Lanstrons, he was a most charming, capable man, who had risen very rapidly in his profession. It had been only six months after he had bolted up from the wreck of his plane by way of self-introduction to Marta before he alighted in the field across the road from the garden to report a promise kept.
Once she knew that he was a Lanstron of Thorbourg, a fact of hardly passing interest to Marta, Mrs. Galland made him intimately welcome. By the time he had paid his third call he was Lanny to Marta and she was Marta to him, quite as if they had known each other from childhood. She had a gift for unaffected comradeship. He was the kind of man with whom she could be a comrade. There was always something to say the moment they met and they were never through talking when he had to go. They disagreed so often that Mrs. Galland thought they made a business of it. She wondered how real friendship could exist between two such controversialists. They could be seriously disputatious to the point of quarrelling; they could be light-heartedly disputatious to the bantering point, where either was uncertain which side of the argument he had originally espoused.
"The gardener did not cut the chrysanthemums," Mrs. Galland said. "That is why we had asters in the bowl at luncheon. His deafness is really a cross, I never realized before what a companion one naturally makes of a gardener."
"No, there's no purpose in having a deaf gardener," said Marta. "Nature distributes her defects unintelligently. Now, if we had dumb demagogues, deaf gossips, and steel that when it was being formed into a sword-blade or a gun would turn to putty, we should be much better off. But we couldn't let Feller go, could we? He's already made himself a fixture. So few people would put up with his deafness! He's so desirous of pleasing and he loves flowers."
"And Colonel Lanstron recommended him. Except for his deafness he is a perfect gardener. Of course he had to have some drawback, for complete perfection is impossible," Mrs. Galland agreed.
The old straw hat that shaded the fringe of white hair had been hovering within easy approaching distance of the chrysanthemum bed ever since the whistle of the train that brought Marta home had been heard from the station. Feller was watching Marta when she paused for a moment on the second terrace steps, enjoying the sweep of landscape anew with the freshness of a first glimpse and the intimacy of every familiar detail cut in the memory. It was her landscape, famed in history, where history might yet be made.
His greeting was picturesque and effective. With white head bared, he looked up from the chrysanthemums to her and back at them and up at her again, with a sort of covert comradeship in his eyes which were young, very young for such white hair, and held out his little pad and pencil. She smiled approval and slowly worked out a "perfect" in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet before she took the proffered pencil and wrote:
"I practised the deaf-and-dumb alphabet on the train. I'm learning fast. We've never had such chrysanthemums before. Next year we shall have some irises—just a few—as fine as they have in Japan. How's your rheumatism?"
He had replaced the broad-brimmed hat over his brow and his lips were visible in a lingering smile as he read the message.
"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said in his even monotone. "You are very kind and I am very fortunate to find a place like this. I already knew something about irises and I've been reading up on the subject. We'll try to hold our own with those little Japanese. As for the rheumatism, since you are good enough to inquire, Miss Galland, it's about the same. My legs are getting old. There are bound to be some kinks in them."
"You select those to cut—a great armful!" she slowly spelled out on her fingers, clapping her hands with a triumphant cry of "How's that?" at the finish.
"Your time has come! To the sacrifice!" he exclaimed to the flowers.
Very tenderly, as if he were an executioner considerate of the victims of an inexorable law, he was snipping the stems, his head bent close to the blooms, when a bumblebee appeared among the salvias a few feet away. Perhaps army staffs who neglect no detail have made a mistake in overlooking the whirring of bumblebees' wings in affecting the fate of nations. These plunderers are not dangerous from their size, but they have not yet been organized to the hep-hep-hep of partisanship. They would as soon live in a Gray as a Brown garden, as soon probe for an atom of honey on one side of the white posts as the other. This one as it drew nearer was well to one side over Feller's shoulders. With eyes and mind intent on his work, Feller turned his head absently, as one will at an interruption.
"There you are again, my dear!" he said. "You must think you're a battery of automatics."
He went on cutting chrysanthemums, apparently unconscious that he had spoken.
"Bring them up on the veranda, please," Marta wrote on the pad, her fingers moving with unusual nervous rapidity, the only sign of her inward excitement.
Coming to the head of the steps of the terrace above, she looked back. Feller's face was quite hidden under his hat and suddenly she seemed to stub her toe and fall, while she uttered a low cry of pain. The hat rose like a jack-in-the-box with the cover released. Feller bounded toward her, taking two of steps at a time. She scrambled to her feet hastily, laughed, and gestured to show that she was not hurt. He drew his shoulders together and bent over spasmodically, gripping his knee.
"I can run off if something starts me just as spry as if I were twenty," he said. "But after I've done it and the kinks come, I realize I've got old legs."
"Now I know he's not deaf!" Marta murmured, as he returned to his work. She frowned. She was angry. "Lanny, you have something to explain," she thought.
But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion.
As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the nursery floor; and he would rather read about the wonders of natural history and electricity than the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great and my lord Nelson. Left to his own choice, he would miss the parade of the garrison for inspection by an excellency in order to ask questions of a man wiping the oil off his hands with cotton-waste, who was far more entertaining to him than the most spick-and-span ramrod of a sergeant.
The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound. This was even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with his foot. His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Cæsar, self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence after his father had been transferred to another post. He was given to magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was that they were all "experts" in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.
Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed off his eyebrows. This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead languages at times, with a towel tied around his head. He complained that they were out of date; and he wanted to hear the Gauls' story, too, before he fully made up his mind about Cæsar. But for the living languages he had a natural gift which his father's service abroad as military attaché for a while enabled him to cultivate.
Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion. He had just decided, after having passed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and superintendent of the city's waterworks, to build bridges over tropical torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his construction work.
"I don't want to go into the army!" he said.
"Why?" asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.
"It's drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do," Arthur replied. "All your work waits on war and you don't know that there will ever be any war. It waits on something nobody wants to happen. Now, if you manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out an automobile. If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little. You're getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your successes. You're making something, creating something; there's something going on all the while that isn't guesswork. I think that's what I want to say. You won't order me to be a soldier will you?"
The father, loath to do this, called in the assistance of an able pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns, who was an old friend of the Lanstron family. It was not in Partow's mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old idea that made an officer's the conventional avocation of a gentleman of leisurely habits.
"No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like equal numbers," he said. "The officer who works hard in the army deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the incentive for results seems remote. But what a terrible test of results may be made in a single hour's action. There is nothing you have learned or ever will learn that may not be of service to you. There is no invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be included in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up to date in every particular. To be backward in a single particular may mean disaster—may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to you. You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean your shame and your country's suffering; while efficiency means a clear conscience and your country's security."
Thus Partow turned the balance on the side of filial affection. He kept watch of the boy, but without favoring him with influence. Young Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them. He realized in practice the truth of Partow's saying that there was nothing he had ever learned but what could be of service to him as an officer. What the acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his first flight across the range. The friendships with all sorts of people in his youth were the forerunner of his sympathy with the giant, wall-eyed Stransky who had mutinied on the march.
"Finding enough work to do?" Par tow would ask with a chuckle when they met in these days, for he had made Lanstron both chief of intelligence and chief aerostatic officer. Young Colonel Lanstron's was the duty of gaining the secrets of the Gray staff and keeping those of the Brown and organizing up-to-the-moment efficiency in the new forces of the air.
He had remarked truly enough that the injury to his left hand served as a better reminder against the folly of wool-gathering than a string, even a large red string, tied around his finger. Thanks to skilful surgery working ingeniously with splintered bone and pulpy flesh, there was nothing unpleasant to the eye in a stiffened wrist and scarred knuckles slightly misshapen. The fingers, incapable of spreading much, were yet serviceable and had a firm grip of the wheel as he rose from the aeroplane station on the Sunday morning after Marta's return home for a flight to La Tir.
He knew the pattern weaving under his feet as one knows that of his own garden from an overlooking window. Every detail of the staff map, ravines, roads, buildings, battery positions, was stitched together in the flowing reality of actual vision. No white posts were necessary to tell him where the boundary between the two nations lay. The line was drawn in his brain.
Nature was in a gracious humor, the very tree tops motionless. The rich landscape in Sunday quiet appealed to his affections. He loved his country and he loved Marta. It had been on such a day as this when there would be no danger, that he had taken her for her first flight. The glimpses, as they flew, of her profile, so alive and tense, were fresh to his eye. How serious she had been! How vivid her impressions! How tempestuous her ideas! He recalled their talk upon their return; all his questions and her answers.
"Sublime and ridiculous!" she had begun in a summing up. "It is like seeing the life of a family through a glass roof—the big, universal family! Valleys seemed no larger than sauce-dishes on a table."
"What was the sublime thing?"
"Man's toil! The cumulative result of it, on every hand, in the common aim for food, comfort, happiness, and progress! Little details of difference disappeared. Towns, villages, houses were simply towns, villages, houses of any country."
"And the supremely ridiculous thing?"
"A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same road! They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation. I imagined each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind that comes to children at Christmas time. They might better be engaged in brass-ring-snatching contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs. I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the battalions of the nursery floor. Just drilling and drilling in order to slash at one another some day. Flight! flight! It makes one's mind as big and broad as the world. Oh, what a wonderful talk I'll have for my kids next Sunday!"
Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own flights were rare. Mostly they were made to La Tir. His visits to Marta were his holidays? All the time that she was absent on her journey around the world they had corresponded. Her letters, so revealing of herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly preserved. Her mother's joking reference about her girlish resolution not to marry a soldier often recurred to him. There, he sometimes thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire.
He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last spanned the chasm and controlled the floods. Ah, there was something like romance and real accomplishment in that! What an easy time a bridge-builder had, comparatively, too! What an easy master capital must be compared to Eugene Partow! But no! If Marta loved it would not matter whether he were bridge builder or army builder. Yes, she was like that. And what right had he to think of marriage? He could not have any home. He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier—a vagabond of duty and Partow's orders.
When he alighted from the plane he thrust his left hand into his blouse pocket. He always carried it there, as if it were literally sewn in place. In moments of emotion the scarred nerves would twitch as the telltale of his sensitiveness; and this was something he would conceal from others no matter how conscious he was of it himself. He found the Galland veranda deserted. In response to his ring a maid came to the open door. Her face was sad, with a beauty that had prematurely faded. But it lighted pleasurably in recognition. Her hair was thick and tawny, lying low over the brow; her eyes were a softly luminous brown and her full lips sensitive and yielding. Lanstron, an intimate of the Galland household, knew her story well and the part that Marta had played in it.
Some four years previously, when a baby was in prospect for Minna, who wore no wedding-ring, Mrs. Galland had been inclined to send the maid to an institution, "where they will take good care of her, my dear. That's what such institutions are for. It is quite scandalous for her and for us—never happened in our family before!"
Marta arched her eyebrows.
"We don't know!" she exclaimed softly.
"How can you think such a thing, let alone saying it —you, a Galland!" her mother gasped in indignation.
"That is, if we go far back," said Marta. "At all events, we have no precedent, so let's establish one by keeping her."
"But for her own sake! She will have to live with her shame!" Mrs. Galland objected. "Let her begin afresh in the city. We shall give her a good recommendation, for she is really an excellent servant. Yes, she will readily find a place among strangers."
"Still, she doesn't want to go, and it would be cruel to send her away."
"Cruel! Why, Marta, do you think I would be cruel? Oh, very well, then we will let her stay!"
"Both are away at church. Mrs. Galland ought to be here any minute, but Miss Galland will be later because of her children's class," said Minna. "Will you wait on the veranda?"
He was saying that he would stroll in the garden when childish footsteps were heard in the hall, and after a curly head had nestled against the mother's skirts its owner, reminded of the importance of manners in the world where the stork had left her, made a curtsey. Lanstron shook a small hand which must have lately been on intimate terms with sugar or jam.
"How do you do, flying soldier man?" chirruped Clarissa Eileen. It was evident that she held Lanstron in high favor.
"Let me hear you say your name," said Lanstron.
Clarissa Eileen was triumphant. She had been waiting for days with the revelation when he should make that old request. Now she enunciated it with every vowel and consonant correctly and primly uttered; indeed, she repeated it four or five times in proof of complete mastery.
"A pretty name. I've often wondered how you came to give it to her," said Lanstron to Minna.
"You do like it!" exclaimed Minna with girlish eagerness. "I gave her the most beautiful name I could think of because"—she laid her hand caressingly on the child's head and a madonna-like radiance stole into her face—"because she might at least have a beautiful name when"—the dull blaze of a recollection now burning in her eyes—"when there wasn't much prospect of many beautiful things coming into her life; though I know, of course, that the world thinks she ought to be called Maggie."
Proceeding leisurely along the main path of the first terrace, Lanstron followed it past the rear of the house to the old tower. Long ago the moat that surrounded the castle had been filled in. The green of rows of grape-vines lay against the background of a mat of ivy on the ancient stone walls, which had been cut away from the loopholes set with window-glass. The door was open, showing a room that had been closed in by a ceiling of boards from the walls to the circular stairway that ran aloft from the dungeons. On the floor of flags were cheap rugs. A number of seed and nursery catalogues were piled on a round table covered with a brown cloth.
"Hello!" Lanstron called softly. "Hello!" he called louder and yet louder.
Receiving no answer, he retraced his steps and seated himself on the second terrace in a secluded spot in the shadow of the first terrace wall, where he could see any one coming up the main flight of steps from the road. When Marta walked she usually came from town by that way. At length the sound of a slow step from another direction broke on his car. Some one was approaching along the path that ran at his feet. Around the corner of the wall, in his workman's Sunday clothes of black, but still wearing his old straw hat, appeared Feller, the gardener. He paused to examine a rose-bush and Lanstron regarded him thoughtfully and sadly: his white hair, his stoop, his graceful hands, their narrow finger-tips turning over the leaves.
As he turned away he looked up, and a glance of definite and unfaltering recognition was exchanged between the two men. Feller's hat was promptly lowered enough to form a barrier between their eyes. His face was singularly expressionless. It seemed withered, clayish, like the walls of a furnace in which the fire has died out. After a few steps he paused before another rose-bush. Meanwhile, both had swept the surroundings in a sharp, covert survey. They had the garden to themselves.
"Gustave!" Lanstron exclaimed under his breath.
"Lanny!" exclaimed the gardener, turning over a branch of the rose-bush. He seemed unwilling to risk talking openly with Lanstron.
"You look the good workman in his Sunday best to a T!" said Lanstron.
"Being stone-deaf," returned Feller, with a trace of drollery in his voice, "I hear very well—at times. Tell me"—his whisper was quivering with eagerness—"shall we fight? Shall we fight?"
"We are nearer to it than we have ever been in our time," Lanstron replied.
The hat still shaded Feller's face, his stoop was unchanged, but the branch in his hand shook.
"Honest?" he exclaimed. "Oh, the chance of it! the chance of it!"
"Gustave!" Lanstron's voice, still low, came in a gust of sympathy, and the pocket which concealed his hand gave a nervous twitch as if it held something alive and distinct from his own being. "The trial wears on you! You feel you must break out?"
"No, I'm game—game, I tell you!" Still Feller spoke to the branch, which was steady now in a firm hand. "No, I don't grow weary of the garden and the isolation as long as there is hope. But being deaf, always deaf, and yet hearing everything! Always stooped, even when the bugles are sounding to the artillery garrison—that is somewhat tiresome!"
"The idea of being deaf was yours, you know, Gustave," said Lanstron.
"Yes, and the right plan. It was fun at first going through the streets and hearing people say, 'He's deaf as a stone!' and having everybody work their lips at me while I pretended to study them in a dumb effort to understand. Actors have two hours of it an evening, and an occasional change of parts, but I act one part all the time. I get as taciturn as a clam. If war doesn't come pretty soon I shall be ready for a monastery of perpetual silence."
"Confound it, Gustave!" exclaimed Lanstron. "It's inhuman, old boy! You shan't stay another day!" Discretion to the winds, he sprang to his feet.
An impulse of the same sort overwhelmed Feller. His hand let go of the branch. The brim of the hat shot up, revealing a face that was not old, but in mercurial quickness of expressive, uncontrollable emotion was young, handsomely and attractively young in its frame of prematurely white hair. The stoop was wholly gone. He was tall now, his eyes sparkling with wild, happy lights and the soles of the heavy workman's shoes unconsciously drawn together in a military stance. Lanstron's twitching hand flew from his pocket and with the other found Feller's hand in a strong, warm, double grip. For a second's silence they remained thus. Feller was the first to recover himself and utter a warning.
"Miss Galland—Minna—some one might be looking."
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.