But far from flinching, Marta seemed to be greeting the blow, as if she admitted his right to strike. She was without any sign of triumph and with every sign of relief. Lying was at an end. She could be truthful.
"Do you recall what I said in the reception-room at the hotel?" she asked.
The question sent a flash into a hidden chamber of his mind. Now the only thing he could remember of that interview was the one remark which hitherto he had never included in his recollection of it.
"You said I could not win." He drew out the words painfully.
"And I pleaded with your selfishness—the only appeal to be made to you," she continued, "to prevent war, which you could have done. When you said that you brought on this war to gratify your ambition, I chose to be one of the weapons of war; I chose, when driven to the wall, to be true to that part of my children's oath that made an exception of the burglar, the highwayman, and the invader. In war you use deceit and treachery, under the pleasanter names of tactics and strategy, to draw men to their death in traps, in order to increase the amount of your killing. It was strategy, tactics, man[oe]uvres—give it any fine word you please—that hideous and shameless part which I played. With fire I fought fire. I fought for civilization, for my home, with the only means I had against the wickedness of a victory of conquest—the precedent of it in this age—a victory which should glorify such trickery as you practised on your people."
"I should like to shoot you dead!" cried Bellini.
"No doubt. I like your honesty in saying so," said Marta. "Why not? The business of war is murder; and as I have engaged in it I can claim no exception. And why shouldn't women engage in it? Why should they be excepted from the sport when they pay so many of the costs? It's easy to die and easy to kill. The part you force on women is much harder. By killing me you admit me to full equality."
"You—you—" But Bellini had no adequate word for her, and his anger softened into a kind of admiration of her, of envy, perhaps, that he had had no such adjutant. It hardened again as he looked Westerling up and down, before turning to leave without a salute or even a direct word.
"And you let me make love to you!" Westerling said in a dazed, groping monotone to Marta.
Such a wreck was he of his former self that she found it amazing that she could not pity him. Yet she might have pitied him had he plunged into the fight; had he tried to rally one of the broken regiments; had he been able to forget himself.
"Rather, you made love to yourself through me," she answered, not harshly, not even emphatically, but merely as a statement of passionless fact. "If you dared to endure what you ordered others to endure for the sake of your ambition; if—"
She was interrupted by a sharp zip in the air. Westerling dodged and looked about wildly.
"What is that?" he asked. "What?"
Five or six zips followed like a charge of wasps flying at a speed that made them invisible. Marta felt a brush of air past her cheek and Westerling went chalky white. It was the first time he had been under fire. But these bullets were only strays. No more came.
"Come, general, let us be going!" urged the aide, touching his chief on the arm.
"Yes, yes!" said Westerling hurriedly.
François, who had picked up the coat that had fallen from Westerling's shoulders with his start at the buzzing, held it while his master thrust his hands through the sleeves.
"And this is wiser," said the aide, unfastening the detachable insignia of rank from the shoulders of the greatcoat. "It's wiser, too, that we walk," he added.
"Walk? But my car!" exclaimed Westerling petulantly.
"I'm afraid that the car could not get through the press in the town," was the reply. "Walking is safer."
The absence in him of that quality which is the soldier's real glory, the picture of this deserted leader, this god of a machine who had been crushed by his machine, his very lack of stoicism or courage—all this suddenly appealed to Marta's quick sympathies. They had once drunk tea together.
"Oh, it was not personal! I did not think of myself as a person or of you as one—only of principles and of thousands of others—to end the killing—to save our country to its people! Oh, I'm sorry and, personally, I'm horrible—horrible!" she called after him in a broken, quavering gust of words which he heard confusedly in tragic mockery.
He made no answer; he did not even look around. Head bowed and hardly seeing the path, he permitted the aide to choose the way, which lay across the boundary of the Galland estate.
They had passed the stumps of the linden-trees and were in the vacant lot on the other side, when something white fluttered toward him, rustled by the breeze that carried it, and lay still almost at his feet. He saw his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the caption, "His Excellency, Field-Marshal Hedworth Westerling, Chief of Staff of Our Victorious Army." He stared at the picture and the picture stared at him as if they knew not each other. A racking shudder swept through him. He turned his face with a kind of resolution, appealing in its starkness, toward the battle and his glance rested on the battery and the shattered regiment of infantry in the fields opposite the Galland gate, under a canopy of shrapnel smoke, bravely holding their ground.
"I should be there. That is the place for me!" he exclaimed with a trace of his old forcefulness.
The aide's lips parted as if to speak in protest, but they closed in silence, while a glance of deep human understanding, dissolving the barriers of caste, passed between him and the valet, eloquent of their approval and their loyal readiness to share the fate of their fallen chief.
The canopy of shrapnel smoke grew thicker; the infantry began to break.
"But, no!" said Westerling. "The place for a chief of staff is at his headquarters."
Marta remained where Westerling had left her, rooted to the ground by the monstrous spell of the developing panorama of seemingly limitless movement. With each passing minute there must be a hundred acts of heroism which, if isolated in the glare of a day's news, would make the public thrill. At the outset of the war she had seen the Browns, as part of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose. Now she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself, all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization. That was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the machine was broken; the warning of it to those who undertake war lightly.
The Browns' rifle flashes kept on steadily weaving their way down the slopes, their reserves pressing close on the heels of the skirmishers in greedy swarms. A heavy column of Brown infantry was swinging in toward the myriad-legged, writhing gray caterpillar on the pass road and many field-batteries were trotting along a parallel road. Their plan developed suddenly when a swath of gun-fire was laid across the pass road at the mouth of the defile, as much as to say: "Here we make a gate of death!" At the same time the head of the Brown infantry column flashed its bayonets over the crest of a hill toward the point where the shells were bursting. These men minded not the desperate, scattered rifle-fire into their ranks. Before their eyes was the prize of a panic that grew with their approach. Kinks were out of legs stiffened by long watches. The hot breath of pursuit was in their nostrils, the fever of victory in their blood.
In the defile, the impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became the impulse of all. Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were blossoming. As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of the mighty huzzas of the hunters over the size of their bag.
In the area visible to Marta was the strife of forces larger than the largest that Napoleon ever led in battle; as large as fought the decisive battle in the last war of the Grays. But here was only a section of the raging whole from frontier end to frontier end. The immensity of it! All the young manhood of a nation employed! Marta ceased to see any particular incident of the scene. All was confused in a red mist—red as blood. She, the one being in that landscape who was a detached observer, felt herself condemned to watch the war go on forever.
An edge of the curtain of mist lifted. Sight and mind and soul concentrated on the nearest horror. She saw the whirlpool at the foot of the garden, horses and men in a straggle among dead and wounded, which had grown fiercer now that the portion of the retreat that had not been cut off in the defile pressed forward the more madly. She had thought of herself as ashes; as an immovable creature of flayed nerves, incapable of raising her hand to change the march of events. But the misery that she saw intimately, almost within stone's throw of her door, broke the spell with its appeal. The hectic energy of battle speeded her steps in the blessed oblivion of action.
Some doctors of different regiments thrown together in the havoc of remnants of many organizations, with the help of hospital-corps men, were trying to extricate the wounded from among the dead. They heard a woman's voice and saw a woman's face. They did not wonder at her presence, for there was nothing left in the world for them to wonder at. Had an imp from hell or an angel from heaven appeared, or a shower of diamonds fallen from the sky, they would not have been surprised. Their duty was clear; there was work of their kind to do, endless work. Units of the broken machine, in the instinct of their calling they struggled with the duty nearest at hand.
"What do you need? What can I do?" Marta asked.
"Rest, shelter, safety for these poor fellows," answered one of the doctors.
"There is the house—our house!" said Marta.
"My God! Aren't you men?" bellowed an officer. "Get away from the road! Come out here! Form line! You—you; I mean you!"
"You who can walk—you who aren't hurt, you cowards, give us a hand with the wounded!" shouted another doctor.
The soldiers were deaf to commands, but they heard a feminine voice above the oaths and groans and heavy breathing and rustle of pressing bodies and thrusting arms; a feminine voice, clear and steadying in that orgy of male ferocity. It was like a chemical precipitate clearing muddy water. Their wild glances saw a woman's features in exaltation and in her eyes something as definite as the fire of command. She was shaming them for their unmanliness; shaming their panic—the foolish panic at a theatre exit—and giving orders as if that were her part and theirs was to obey; a woman to soldiers, the weak sex to the strong. They did obey, under the spell of the amazing fact of her presence, in the relief of having some simple human purpose to cling to.
After the work was begun they needed no urging to carry the wounded up the terrace steps; and men who had knocked down and trampled on the wounded were gentle with them now, under the guidance of better impulses. How could they falter directed by a woman unmindful of occasional shells and bullet whistles? They begged her to go back to the house; this was no place for her.
But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful dead—they had no nightmares—as she aided the doctors in separating the bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a shell burst near her and a doctor cried out:
"She's hit!"
But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all.
The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her mother and Minna.
"I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered.
"But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland.
Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was bandaged.
"A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "Not deep," he added.
"Do I get an iron cross?" she asked, smiling faintly. It was rather pleasant to be alive.
"All the crosses—iron and bronze and silver and gold!" he replied.
"You forgot platinum," she said almost playfully, as she found nerves, muscles, and bones intact after that drop over a precipice into a black chasm. It was like the Marta of the days before she had undertaken to reform all creation, her mother was thinking. "Did I help any?" she asked seriously.
"Well, I should say so!" declared the doctor. "I should say so!" he repeated. "You did the whole business down there by the gate."
"Yes, the whole business! I brought it all on—all! I—" She flung a wild gesture at the landscape and then buried her face in her hands. "Yes, I did the whole business I—I played, smiled, lied! That awful sight—and he might not have been writing 'kill me' if I—"
The doctor grasped her shoulders to keep her from rising. He spoke the first soothing words that came to mind. There was another shudder, an effort at control, and her hands dropped and she was looking up with a dull steadiness.
"I'm not going mad!" she exclaimed. "What happened to—to that man who was pleading for death? Did any one who had been engaged in killing men who wanted to live kill the one who wanted to die?"
"The shell burst that wounded you finished him," said the doctor.
"Which, of course, was quite according to the tenets of civilization, which wouldn't have allowed it to be done as an open act of mercy!" said Marta. "But that is only satire. It is of no service," she added, rising to a sitting posture to look around.
The struggle by the gate was over. All the uninjured had made good their escape. A Red Cross flag floated above the wounded and the débris of overturned wagons. Brown skirmishers were descending the near-by slopes and crossing the path of the cavalry charge. Signal-corps men were spinning out their wires. A regiment of guns were being emplaced behind a foot-hill. A returning Brown dirigible swept over the town. All firing except occasional scattered shots had ceased in the immediate vicinity, though in the distance could be heard the snarl of the firmer resistance that the Grays were making at some other point. The Galland house, for the time being, was isolated—in possession of neither side.
"Isn't there something else I can do to help with the wounded?" Marta asked. She longed for action in order to escape her thoughts.
"You've had a terrible shock—when you are stronger," said the doctor.
"When you have had something to eat and drink," observed the practical Minna authoritatively.
Marta would not have the food brought to her. She insisted that she was strong enough to accompany Minna to the tower. While Minna urged mouthfuls down Marta's dry throat as she sat outside the door of the sitting-room with her mother a number of weary, dust-streaked faces, with feverish energy in their eyes, peered over the hedge that bounded the garden on the side toward the pass. These scout skirmishers of Stransky's men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly, watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their comrades. Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front.
"Look, Minna!" exclaimed Marta. "The giant who carried the old man in pickaback the first night of the war!"
"Yes, the bold impudence of him!" said Minna. "As if there was nothing that could stand in his way and what he wanted he would have!"
But Minna was flushing as she spoke. The flush dissipated and she drew up her chin when Stransky, looking around, recognized her with a merry, confident wave of his hand.
"See, he's a captain and he wears an iron cross!" said Marta as Stransky hastened toward them.
"He acts like it!" assented Minna grudgingly.
Eager, leviathan, his cap doffed with a sweeping gesture as he made a low bow, Stransky was the very spirit of retributive victory returning to claim the ground that he had lost.
"Well, this is like getting home again!" he cried.
"So I see!" said Minna equivocally.
Stransky drew his eyes together, sighting them on the bridge of his nose thoughtfully at this dubious reception.
"I came back for the chance to kiss a good woman's hand," he observed with a profound awkwardness and looking at Minna's hand. "Your hand!" he added, the cast in his eyes straightening as he looked directly at her appealingly.
She extended her finger-tips and he pressed his lips to them. Then she drew back a step, a trifle pale, her eyes sad and questioning, more than ever Madonna-like, and curled her arm around little Clarissa Eileen, who had stolen to her mother's side.
"What is that?" asked Clarissa Eileen, pointing to the cross on Stransky's breast.
"That," observed Stransky deliberately, "is a little piece of metal that I got for an inspiration of manhood. It doesn't cost the price of a day's rations, but it's one of the things which money can't buy—not yet—in this commercial age. One of those institutions of barbarism that we anarchists call government gave it to me, and I'll never part with it!"
"Because he was a brave soldier, Clarissa," explained Marta in simpler terms. "Because he was ready to die for his country."
"And for your mother!" put in Stransky, seizing Clarissa in his great hands and lifting her lightly to the level of his face. "Oh, I've got stories," he said to her, "a soldier-man's stories, to tell you, young lady, one of these days—and such stories!"
He crossed his eyes over his big nose in a fashion that made Clarissa clap her hands and burst into a peal of laughter.
"You're an awfully funny man!" she declared as Stransky set her down.
"So your mother thinks," said Stransky, blinking at Minna, who had indulged in a smile which his remark promptly ironed out.
This irrepressible soldier, given so much as an inch, would be demanding a province. But erasing a smile is not destroying the fact of it. Stransky took heart for the charge on seeing a breach in the enemy's lines.
"Yes, I was fighting for you!" he burst out to Minna. "When the other fellows were reading letters from their sweethearts I was imagining letters from you. I even wrote out some and posted them from one pocket to another, in place of the regular mails."
"What did you say in those letters?" asked Marta.
"Why, you're big and awkward and cross-eyed, Stransky, but you've a way with you, and maybe—"
"Humph!" sniffed Minna.
"I kept seeing the way you looked when you belted me one in the face," he went on unabashed to Minna, "and knocked any anarchism out of me that was left after the shell burst. I kept seeing your face in my last glimpse when the Grays made me run for it from your kitchen door before I had half a chance for the oration crying for voice. You were in my dreams! You were in battle with me!"
"This sounds like a disordered mind," observed Minna. "I've heard men talk that way before."
"Oh, I have talked that way to other women myself!" said Stransky.
"Yes," said Minna bitterly. His candor was rather unexpected.
"I have talked to others in passing on the high road," he continued. "But never after a woman had struck me in the face. That blow sank deep—deep—deep as what Lanstron said when I revolted on the march. I say it to you with this"—he touched the cross—"on my breast. And I'm not going to give you up. It's a big world. There's room in it for a place for you after the war is over and I'm going to make the place. Yes, I've found myself. I've found how to lead men. My home isn't to be in the hedgerows any more. It's to be where you are. You and I, whom society gave a kick, will make society give us a place!" He was eloquent in his strength; eloquent in the fire of resolution blazing from his eyes. "And I'll be back again," he concluded. "You can't shake me. I'll camp on your door-step. But now I've got to look after my company. Good-by till I'm back—back to stay! Good-by, little daughter!" he added with a wave of his hand to Clarissa as he turned to go. "Maybe we shall have our own automobile some day. It's no stranger than what's been happening to me since the war began."
"If you don't marry him, Minna, I'll—I'll—" Mrs. Galland could not find words for the fearful thing that she would do.
"Marry him! I have only met him three times for about three minutes each time!" protested Minna. She was as rosy as a girl and in her confusion she busied herself retying the ribbon on Clarissa Eileen's hair. "He called you little daughter!" she said softly to the child as she withdrew into the tower.
"I am glad we didn't send Minna away when misfortune befell her," said Mrs. Galland. "You were right about that, Marta, with your new ideas. What a treasure she has been!"
Marta was scarcely hearing her mother; certainly not finding any credit for herself in the remark. She was thinking what a simple, what a glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere, primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his own undoing.
The skirmishers having halted beyond the linden stumps, the reserves were stacking their rifles and dropping to rest in the garden. The sight of the uniforms of the deliverers, of her own people, stirred Mrs. Galland to unwonted activity. She moved here and there among them with smiles of mothering pride. She told them how brave they were; how her husband had been a colonel of Hussars in the last war. They must be tired and hungry. She hurried in to Minna, and together they emptied the larder of everything, even to the lumps of sugar, which were impartially bestowed.
But Marta remained in the chair by the doorway of the tower, weak and listless. She was weary of the sight of uniforms and bayonets. In the dreary opaqueness of her mind flickered one tiny, bright light as through a blanket; that she herself had been in danger. She had been under fire. She had not merely sent men to death; she had been in death's company.
Now her lashes were closed; again they opened slightly as her gaze roved the semicircle of the horizon. A mounted officer and his orderly galloping across the fields to the pass road caught her desultory attention and held it, for they formed the most impetuous object on the landscape. When the officer alighted at the foot of the garden and tossed his reins to the orderly, she detected something familiar about him. He leaped the garden wall at a bound and, half running, came toward the tower. Not until he lifted his cap and waved it did she associate this lithe, dapper artillerist with a stooped old gardener in blue blouse and torn straw hat who had once shuffled among the flowers at her service.
"Hello! Hello!" he shouted in clarion greeting at sight of her. "Hello, my successor!"
Only in the whiteness of his hair was he like the old Feller. His tone, the boyish sparkle of his black eyes, those full, expressive lips playing over the brilliant teeth, his easy grace, his quick and telling gestures—they were of the Feller of cadet days. Something in his look as he stopped in front of her startled Marta. Suddenly he bent over and drew down his face, with dropping underlip.
"I'm deaf—stone deaf, if you please!" he wheezed in senile fashion.
She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth that made him seem younger than his years.
"Not a gardener—a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag again, thanks to you!" he cried. "An officer once more!"
"I'm glad!" she exclaimed. Here was one thing more to the credit of war.
"Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy—thanks to you!" More than the emotion of the brimming gratitude of his heart shone through his mobile features.
"It was your choice; you improved it. You fulfilled a faith that I had in you," she said.
"Faith in me! That is the finest tribute of all—better than this, better than this!" He touched the iron cross on his coat as Stransky had to Minna.
"And I took your place," said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.
Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking. In his place she had lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt, could ever expiate it. The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan of war in wicked cunning.
He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words. He had forgotten her children's school.
"And did my work better than I could! You are wonderful, wonderful!" He was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.
She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.
"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this—of what you have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I would be worthy—worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns play—bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell you; did he?"
"Yes, and also of the iron cross."
"A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass," he went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on itself. And where the shells struck on the hard road—phew! They lifted the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns meant in defence. The guns—they are back to their old place of glory! They rule!"
"Was it your guns that fired into the mêlée there by the gate?" Marta asked.
"Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at the house, though if it had not been your house I'd have sent a shell or two on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there. Then, after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent shells till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified."
"The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me," said Marta.
So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm. His impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death.
"You—you were down by the road?" he gasped. "My guns were firing at you? Why—how?"
"Helping with the wounded."
"The Gray wounded?"
"Yes."
"Of course, you would—with any wounded!" he cried. "Splendid! Like you! It is not bad? It does not pain you?"
He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds.
"Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she assured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.
Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that darted as a shooting star across his mind.
"Wonderful—wounded! Wonderful! Was there ever such a woman?" he cried. "No, I knew from the first there never was. The minute the way was clear and I could be spared from my guns I came to you—to you! This time I come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener"—for an instant he was the gardener—"but as one of your world, to which I was bred," and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the commander of men in action. "Destiny has played with us. It sent a spy to your garden. It put you in my place. A strange service, ours—yes, destiny is in it!"
"Yes," she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.
She was staring at the ground, her face very still. Yes, it was he who had started the train of circumstances that had left her with a memory more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair. His memory was already erased. What could ever erase hers? He had begun anew. How could she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny—of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny—was the worst mockery of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came to the end.
"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I love you!"
Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed, but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope? Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.
"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love be to me?"
He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.
"Act! Act!" he murmured.
"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder. "Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world, with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would look back on this moment as another part that you had acted—and so beautifully acted."
"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.
For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored comprehension.
"You know me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked, after a pause.
"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing in relief.
"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect. "Yes, I act—act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best yet—on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. God bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of you! You and Lanny—two fixed stars for me!"
"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.
"Yes, yes—a yes as real as the guns!"
"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.
"Good-by! God bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays' capital of my guns parked in the palace square."
She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war, counting death and wounds and hardship as the delights of the gamble. Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing shells in the irresponsible joy of tossing confetti in a carnival. Pursuit! Was Feller's the sentiment of the army? Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier? Were they to change their song to, "Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs"? The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under the ashes.
A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge. Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant exclamations:
"A hundred thousand prisoners!"
"And five hundred guns!"
"We're closing in on their frontier all along the line!"
"It's incredible!"
"But the word is official—it's right!"
From mouth to mouth—a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred guns—the news was passed in the garden. Eyes dull with fatigue began flashing as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer unlike any Marta had heard before. It had the high notes of men who were weary, of a terrible exultation, of spirit stronger than tired legs and as yet unsatisfied. Other exclamations from both officers and men expressed a hunger whetted by the taste of one day's victory.
"We'll go on!"
"We'll make peace in their capital!"
"And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!"
"Nothing is impossible with Lanstron. How he has worked it out—baited them to their own destruction!"
"A frontier of our own choosing!"
"On the next range. We will keep all that stretch of plain there!"
"And the river, too!"
"They shall pay—pay for attacking us!"
Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the wounded—for our dead and wounded! No matter about theirs! The officers were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some dissentient, some partisan of the right. She was seeing the truth now; the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took Feller's place. There could be no choice of sides in war unless you believed in war. One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame: the desertion of her principles.
Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house. Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight. His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to be conventionally military—the same Lanny.
She was dimly conscious of surprise not to find him changed, perhaps because he was unaccompanied by a retinue or any other symbol of his power. He might have been coming to call on a Sunday afternoon. In that first glimpse it was difficult to think of him as the commander of an army. But that he was, she must not forget. She was shaken and trembling; and a mist rose before her, so that she did not see him clearly when, with a gesture of relief, he saw her.
"Lanstron!" exclaimed an officer in the first explosive breath of amazement on recognizing him; then added: "His Excellency, the chief of staff!"
But the one word, Lanstron, had been enough to thrill all the officers into silence and ramrod salutes. Marta noted the deference of their glances as they covertly looked him over. On what meat had our Cæsar fed that he had grown so great? This was the man who had pleaded with her to allow a spy in her garden; for whom she herself had turned spy. To-morrow his name would be in the head-lines of every newspaper in the world. His portrait would become as familiar to the eyes of the world as that of the best-advertised of kings. He was the conqueror whose commonplace sayings would be the sparks of genius because the gamble of war had gone his way. He had grown so great by sending shells into the stricken eddy at the foot of the garden and driving punishing columns against the retreating masses in the defile. The god in the car and of the machine, with his quiet manner, his intellectual features; this one-time friend, more subtle in pursuit of the same ambitions than the blind egoism of Westerling! These officers and men and all officers and men and herself were pawns of his plans and his will. Yes, even herself. Had he stopped with the repulse of the enemy? No. Would he stop now? No. Her disillusion was complete. She knew the truth; she felt it as steel stiffening against him and against every softer impulse of her own.
"I wanted a glimpse of the front as well as the rear," Lanstron remarked in explanation of his presence to the general of brigade as he passed on toward Marta, who was thinking that she, at least, was not in awe of him; she, at least, saw clearly and truly his part.
"Marta! Marta!"
Lanstron's voice was tremulous, as if he were in awe of her, while he drank in the fact that she was there before him at arms' length, safe, alive. She did not offer her hand in greeting. She was incapable of any movement, such was her emotion; and he, too, was held in a spell, as the reality of her, after all that had passed, filled his eyes. He waited for her to speak, but she was silent.
"Marta—that bandage! You have been hurt?" he exclaimed.
Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind to externals. Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him. This was his kind of strength—the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine, intellectual process. He could act, too. In the tone of the question, "You've been hurt?" without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his blouse quivering. Why care if she were hurt? Why not think about the hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded. Why not care for that poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote "Kill me!" on the wagon body?
"It's the fashion to be wounded," she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes lowered, with a nervous smile. "I played Florence Nightingale, the natural woman's part, I believe. We should never protest; only nurse the victims of war. After helping to send men to death I went under fire myself, and—and that helped."
She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron. He was not a child. He was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by calculation.
"Yes, that would help," he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.
Her old taunt: sending men to death and taking no risk himself! She saw that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about to come in a flood. Then she seemed to see him through new lenses. He appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes; anything but the conqueror. Her feelings grew contradictory. Why all this fencing? How weak, how silly! She had much to say to him—a last appeal to make. Her throat held a dry lump. She was marshalling her thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.
"Lanstron! Lanstron! Hurrah for Lanstron!"
The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any "Your Excellency, the chief of staff" formula when word had been passed of his presence. Marta looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of their lungs. Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.
Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute. He always looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare. It completed the ensemble of his sensitive features. She saw that he was blinking almost boyishly at the compliment and noted the little deprecatory shake of his head, as much as to say that they were making a mistake.
"Thank you!" he called, and the cheeriness of his voice, she thought, expressed his real self; the delight of victory and the glowing anticipation of further victories.
"Thankyou!" called a private with a big voice.
"Yes, thankyou!" repeated some of the officers in quick appreciation of a compliment as real as human courage.
"We're going to put your headquarters in the Grays' capital!" cried the soldier with the big voice.
Another cheer rose at the suggestion.
"You will follow the staff?" Lanstron called in sudden intensity.
"Yes, yes, yes!" they shouted. "Yes, yes; follow you!"
"You think our staff led you wisely?" he continued distinctly, slowly, and very soberly. "You think we can continue to do so? You trust us? You trust our judgment?"
"Yes, yes, yes!"
"Thank you!" he said with a long-drawn, happy breath.
"Thankyou!" they shouted.
He stood smiling for a moment in reply to their smiles; then, still smiling, but in a different way, he said to Marta:
"As you say, that helps!" with a nod toward the bandage on her forearm and hurriedly turned away.
She saw him involuntarily clutch the wrist above the pocket of his blouse to still the twitching; but beyond that there was no further sign of emotion as he went to the telephone. She had been about to cry out her protest against the continuance of the war in the name of humanity, of justice, of every bit of regard he had ever had for her. When he was through talking she should go to him in appeal—yes, on her knees, if need be, before all the officers and soldiers—to stop the killing; but instantly he was through he started toward the pass road, not by the path to the steps, but by leaping from terrace to terrace and waving his hand gayly to the soldiers as he went. The officers stared at the sight of a chief of staff breaking away from his communications in this unceremonious fashion. They saw him secure a horse from a group of cavalry officers on the road and gallop away.
Marta having been the object of Lanstron's attention now became the object of theirs. It was good to see a woman, a woman of the Browns, after their period of separation from feminine society. She found herself holding an impromptu reception. She heard some other self answering their polite questions; while a fear, a new kind of fear, was taking hold of her real self; a fear inexplicable, insidiously growing. Lanstron was still in the officers' minds after his strange appearance and stranger departure. They began to talk of him, and Marta listened.
"He said something about being a free man now!"
"Yes, he looked as eager as a terrier after rats."
"He knows what he is doing. He sees so far ahead of what we are thinking that it's useless to guess his object. We'll understand when it's done."
"How little side he has! So perfectly simple. He hardly seems to realize the immensity of his success. In fact, none of us realizes it; it's too enormous, overwhelming, sudden!"
"And no nerves!"
"No nerves, did you say? There you are wrong. Did you see that hand twitching in his pocket? Of course, you've heard about the hand? Why, he's a bundle of nerve-wires held in control; a man of the age; master of his own machine, therefore, able to master the machine of an army."
Of course, they guessed nothing of Marta's part in his success. The very things they were saying about him built up a figure of the type whose character she had keenly resented a few minutes before.
"But, Miss Galland, you seem to know him far better than we. This is not news to you," remarked the brigade commander.
"Yes, I saw the accident of his first flight when his hand was injured," she said, and winced with horror. Never had the picture of him as he rose from the wreck appeared so distinct. She could see every detail of his looks; feel his twinges of pain while he smiled. Was the revelation the more vivid because it had not once occurred to her since the war began? It shut out the presence of the officers; she no longer heard what they were saying. Black fear was enveloping her. Vaguely she understood that they were looking away at something. She heard the roar of artillery not far distant and followed their gaze toward the knoll where Dellarme's men had received their baptism of fire, now under a canopy of shrapnel smoke.
"That's about their last stand in the tangent, their last snarl on our soil," remarked the brigade commander.
"And we're raining shells on it!" said his aide. "With our glasses we'll be able to watch the infantry go in."
"Yes, very well."
"We're all used to how it feels, now we'll see how it looks at a distance," piped one of the soldiers.
Not until he had shouted to them did they notice a division staff-officer who had come up from the road. He had a piece of astounding news to impart before he mentioned official business.
"What do you think of this?" he cried. "Nothing could stop him! Lanstron—yes, Lanstron has gone into that charge with the African Braves!"
In these days, when units of a vast army in the same uniform, drilled in the same way, had become interchangeable parts of a machine, the African Braves still kept regimental fame. They had guarded the stretches of hot sand in one of the desert African colonies of the Browns; and they had served in the jungle in the region of Bodlapoo, which, by the way, was nominally the cause of the war. They had fought Mohammedan fanatics and black savages. It did not matter much to them when they died; now as well as ever. If they had mothers or sisters they were the secrets of each man's heart. The scapegrace youth, the stranded man of thirty who would forget his past, the born adventurer, the renegade come a cropper, the gentleman who had gambled, the remittance man whose remittance had stopped, the peasant's son who had run away from home, criminals and dreamers, some minor poets, some fairly good actors, scholarly fellows who chanted the "Odyssey," and both oath-ripping and taciturn, quiet-mannered fellows who could neither read nor write found a home in the African Braves' muster-roll. Their spirit of corps had a dervish fatalism. They had begged to have a share in the war and Partow had consented. In the night after their long journey, while Westerling's ram was getting its death-blow, they had detrained and started for the front. But the Grays were going as fast as the Braves, and they had been unable to get into action.
"Wait for us! We want to be in it!" cried their impatience. "We'll show you how they fight in Africa! Way for us!"
"Give them a chance!" said Lanstron.
This order a general of corps repeated to a general of division, who repeated it to a general of brigade.
"Give them a chance! Give them a chance!"
Reserves along the route of their advance knew them at a glance by their uniform, their Indian tan, and their jaunty swagger and gave a cheer as they passed. They touched the chord of romance in the hearts of officers, who regarded them as an archaic survival which sentiment permitted in an isolated instance in Africa, where it excellently served. And officers looked at one another and shook their heads knowingly, out of the drear, hard experience in spade approaches, when they thought of that brilliant uniform as a target and of frontier tactics against massed infantry and gun-fire.
"Once will be enough," said the cynical. "There won't be many left to tell the tale!"
And the African Braves knew how the army felt. They had a reputation out of Africa to sustain, this band of exotics among the millions of home-trained comrades. They didn't quite believe in all this machine business. Down the slopes with their veteran stride, loose-limbed and rhythmic, they went, past the line of the Galland house, with no fighting in sight. What if they had to return to Africa without firing a shot? The lugubrious prospect saddened them. They felt that a battle should be ordered on their account.
"You will take that regiment's place and it will fall back for support, while you storm the knoll beyond!" said the brigade commander, a twinkle in his eye.
"Is it much of a job, do you think?" asked the colonel of the Braves.
He had two fingers' length of service colors on his blouse. Lean he was and bony-jawed, with deep-set eyes. He loved every mother's son of the Braves, from illiterate to the chanter of the "Odyssey"; from peasant's son to penniless nobleman, and thought any one of his privates rather superior to a home brigade commander.
"A pretty good deal. I think the Grays'll make a snappy resistance," said the brigade commander honestly. "The way we feel them out, they're getting back their wind, and for the first time we'll be fighting them up-hill. Yes, there's a sting in a retreating army's tail when it gets over its demoralization."
"Good!" observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.
"And if you find it too stiff," the brigade commander went on, "why, I've seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support."
"Veterans, you say, and seasoned? I have some of my own, too! Thank you! Thank you most kindly!" said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist to the corner of his mouth. "When we need their help it will be to bury our dead," he added. "Can we do it alone? Will we?"
He passed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles. The scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks' phalanx to the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil's "Æneid." He always made the change when action was near. "The Greeks for poetry and the Romans for war!" he declared, and could argue his company to sleep if anybody disputed him.
"I want to be in one fight. I haven't been under fire in the whole war," Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.
"Lanstron is with us! The chief of staff is watching us!" ran the whisper from flank to flank of the Braves. It was not wonderful to them that he should be there. This complicated business of running a war over a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations. The colonel was with them, so all the generals ought to be. "We'll show Lanstron!" determined the Braves. "We'll show him how we fight in Africa!"
"With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the second, take the knoll!" Such were the colonel's simple tactics. "But stop on the top of the knoll. Though we'd like to take the capital this afternoon, it's against orders."
Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to renew his youth. He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when he was likely to be hung on a church steeple. Now he was not sending men to death; he was having his personal fling. It was all very simple beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance. He dodged at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.
"Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times they've been under fire," said the comrade. "But if they do it with the second one—" He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a soldier.
"I shan't!" said Lanstron; and he kept his word.
"I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn't!" observed the Brave, speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man. What were chiefs of staff to him? Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.
Lanstron liked the compliment. It pleased him better than those endowing him with military genius. It was free of rank and etiquette and selfishness.
Of such stuff were the Braves as Cæsar's veterans who walloped the Belgæ, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of the American Indian campaigns. When they rose to the charge with a yell, in a wave of scarlet and blue, flashing with brass buttons, their silken flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the romantic taste. Here on the brown background of the commonplace three millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as the theme of real military glory.
Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerves, with the mesmerism of movement and burning desire which calls the imagination of youth to arms! The supreme moment of fury and splendid rush, which becomes the recollection to the survivor to be told from the knee to future generations in a way to make small boys love to play with soldiers! These men knew nothing except that they had legs and that ahead was a goal. Oaths and laughter were mingled in their souls; the energy of a delirium sped their steps. They were so many human missiles fired by an impulse, with too much initial velocity to stop at the bottom of the valley as the colonel had directed. Lord, no! Let's have the thing over with, bit in teeth! The common instinct of the living, who neither saw nor thought of those who fell, swept them up the slope. Every man who survived was the whole regiment in himself; its pride, its gallantry, its inheritance in his keeping.
"Fiends of hell and angels of heaven! We're here and we did it alone!" gasped the winded, ragged line that reached the crest.
"I thought they would!" said the brigade commander, who had watched the charge through his glasses from an eminence. "But at what a cost! It was lucky for them that it was only a rear-guard resistance. However, it certainly thrills the imagination and it will be a good thing for Brown prestige in Africa."
"Why?" Marta heard the officers around her asking after their exclamations of amazement at the news that Lanstron was going in the charge. "Why should the chief of staff risk his life in this fashion?"
Marta knew. All her taunts about sending others to death from his office chair, uttered as the fugitive sarcasm of a mood, recurred in the merciless hammer-beat of recollection. For a moment she was aghast, speechless. Then the officers, occupied with the startling news, heard a voice, wrenched from a dry throat in anguish, saying:
"The telephone! Try to reach him! Tell him he must not!"
"We can hardly say 'must not' to a chief of staff," said the general automatically.
"Tell him I ask him not to! Try to reach him—try—you can try!"
"Yes, yes! Certainly!" exclaimed the general, turning to the telephone operator.
He had seen now what the younger men had seen at a glance. They were recalling Lanstron's relief at seeing her; how he had passed them by to speak to her; the intensity of the two in their almost wordless meeting. Her bloodless lips, the imploring passion in her eyes, her quivering impatience told the rest.
"Division headquarters!" called the operator. "They're getting brigade headquarters," he added while he waited in silence. "Brigade headquarters says the Braves have no wire. It's too late. The charge is starting."
"So it is!" cried one of the subalterns. "Look! Look!"
Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as they descended the slope.
"There! They're up on the other slope without stopping!" exclaimed the general. "Quick! Don't you want to see?" He offered his glasses to Marta.
"No, I can see well enough," she murmured, though the landscape was moving before her eyes in giddy waves.
"The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!"
"What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good old way, right at the front!"
"Heavens! I hope they do it!"
"The flag's down!"
"Another man has it—it's up!"
"Now—now—splendid! They're in!"
"So they are! And the flag, too!"
"Yes, what's left are in!"
"And Lanstron was there—in that!"
"What if—"
"Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!"
"The mind of the army—the mind that was to direct our advance!"
"When all the honors of the world are his!"
Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the slope? Was he? Was he?
"Telephone and—and see if Lanny is—is killed!" she begged.
She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole. She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed. What mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to them? The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one—one of the millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the millions. Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death. Had she senthimto death? The agony of waiting, waiting there among these strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.
"I'll go—I'll go out there where he is!" she said incoherently, still looking toward the knoll with glazed eyes. She thought she was walking fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going slowly, stumblingly.
"I think you had better stop her if you can," said the general to his aide.
The aide overtook her at the gate.
"We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for yourself," he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of youth with romance into his tone. "You might miss the road, even miss him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance," he explained. "In a few minutes we ought to have word."
Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the garden wall in the mêlée of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the wheel for support.
"If the women of the Grays waited four weeks," she said with an effort at stoicism, "then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes."
"Depend on me. I'll bring news as soon as there is any," the aide concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.
For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, passed in review under the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time. Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame—perhaps too late.
Her thought, her feeling was as if he were not chief of staff, but a private soldier, and she were not a woman who had girdled the world and puckered her brow over the solution of problems, but a provincial girl who had never been outside her village—his sweetheart. All questions of the army following up its victory, of his responsibilities and her fears that he would go on with conquest, faded into the fact of life—his life, as the most precious thing in the world to her. For him, yes, for him she had played the spy, as that village girl would for her lover, thinking of warm embraces; for him she had kept steady under the strain.
Without him—what then? It seemed that the fatality that had let him escape miraculously from the aeroplane accident, made him chief of staff, and brought him victory, might well choose to ring down the curtain of destiny for him in the charge that drove the last foot of the invader off the soil of the Browns.... A voice was calling.... She heard it hazily, with a sudden access of giddy fear, before it became a cheerful, clarion cry that seemed to be repeating a message that had already been spoken without her understanding it.
"He's safe, safe, safe, Miss Galland! He was not hit! He is on his way back and ought to be here very soon!"
She heard herself saying "Thank you!" But that was not for some time. The aide was already gone. He had had his thanks in the effect of the news, which made him think that a chief of staff should not receive congratulations for victory alone.
Lanny would return through the garden. She remained leaning against the wagon body, still faint from happiness, waiting for him. She was drawing deeper and longer breaths that were velvety with the glow of sunshine. A flame, the flame that Lanny had desired, of many gentle yet passionate tongues, leaping hither and thither in glad freedom, was in possession of her being. When his figure appeared out of the darkness the flame swept her to her feet and toward him. Though he might reject her he should know that she loved him; this glad thing, after all the shame she had endured, she could confess triumphantly.
But she stopped short under the whip of conscience. Where was her courage? Where her sense of duty? What right had she, who had played such a horrible part, to think of self? There were other sweethearts with lovers alive who might be dead on the morrow if war continued. The flame sank to a live coal in her secret heart. Another passion possessed her as she seized Lanstron's hand in both her own.
"Lanny, listen! Not the sound of a shot—for the first time since the war began! Oh, the blessed silence! It's peace, peace—isn't it to be peace?" As they ascended the steps she was pouring out a flood of broken, feverish sentences which permitted of no interruption. "You kept on fighting to-day, but you won't to-morrow, will you? It isn't I who plead—it's the women, more women than there are men in the army, who want you to stop now! Can't you hear them? Can't you see them?"
In the fervor of appeal, before she realized his purpose, they were on the veranda and at the door of the dining-room, where the Brown staff was gathered around the table.
"I still rely on you to help me, Marta!" he whispered as he stood to one side for her to enter.