As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.
"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff. "Pass the word—no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown up overnight. No danger—keep moving!"
He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were audible from the church tower.
Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back unexpectedly.
Marta pressed her fingers to her ears, but not soon enough to keep out the sound of a thud on the roof of the building across the street from the chapel.
"I was a coward to do that! I shall see worse things!" she thought, and went to the major, who had turned to the affairs of the living directly he saw that neither the corpse of the aviator nor the wreck of the plane was to strike in the street. "I will look after these children," she said, "and we will care for as many of the old and sick as we can in our house."
"The children will find their relatives or guardians in the procession there," he answered methodically. "If they do not, the government will look after them. It will not do for you to take them to your house. That would only complicate the matter of their safety." Here he was interrupted by a precipitate question from one of his lieutenants, who had come running up. "No! No matter what the excuse, no one can remain!" he answered. "The nation is not going to take the risk of letting spies get information to the enemy for the sake of gratifying individual interests. Every one must go!" Then he called to an able-bodied citizen of thirty years or so in the procession: "Here, you, if you're not in the reserve I have work for you!"
"But I was excused from army service on account of heart trouble!" explained the able-bodied citizen.
"We all have heart trouble to-day," remarked the major pithily. "Men are giving up their lives in defence of you and your property. Every man of your age must do his share when required. Go with this orderly!" was the final and tart conclusion of the argument. "And see that he is made useful," he added to the orderly.
An explosion in the factory district made windows rattle and brought an hysterical outcry from some of the women.
"It's nothing!" the major called, in the assurance of a shepherd to his sheep. "Blowing up some building that furnish cover for the enemy's approach in front of our infantry positions! You will hear more of it. Don't worry! Do as you're told! Keep moving! Keep moving!"
Now he had time to conclude what he had to say to Marta.
"As your house will soon be under fire, it will be not refuge for the children; and, in any event, we should net want to leave them to the care of the Grays with the parents on our side," he explained in a manner none the less final because of its politeness. "Every detail has been systematically arranged under government supervision. Private efforts will only bring confusion and hardship where we would have order and all possible mercy. As for the old, the sick, and the infirm—those who cannot bear being carried far are being moved to the hospital and barracks outside the town."
In proof of his words, ambulances and requisitioned carriages filled with the sick and infirm were already proceeding up one of the side streets.
"It's not human, though!" Marta exclaimed in the desperation of helplessness.
"No, it is war, which has a habit of being inhuman," replied the major, turning to call to a woman: "Now, madame, if you leave that pillow behind you will not be dropping your other things and having to stop all the time to pick them up!"
"But it's the finest goose feathers and last year's crop!" said the woman; and then gasped: "Oh, Lord! I left my silver jug on the mantel!"
"As I've told you before—as the printed slips we distributed when we woke you at dawn told you," said the major with some asperity, "you were to take only light things easily portable, and after you had gone, wagons would get what you had packed and left ready at the door of your houses, with your names clearly marked, up to two hundred pounds. The rest we trust to the mercy of the Grays."
There was nothing for Marta to do but start homeward. The thought that her mother was alone made her hasten at a pace much more rapid than the procession of people, whose talk and exclamations formed a monotone audible in its nearness, despite the continuous rifle-fire, now broken by the pounding of the guns.
"I wish I had brought the clock—it was my great-grandfather's."
"Johnny, you keep close to me!"
"And they've taken my wife off to the hospital—separated us!"
Some were excruciatingly alive to the situation; others were in a daze. But one cry always roused them from their complaints; always brought a flash to the dullest eye: Retribution! retribution! Taken from their peaceful pursuits arbitrarily by the final authority of physical force, which they could not dispute, their minds turned in primitive passion to revenge through physical force.
"I hope our army makes them pay!"
"Yes, make them pay! Make them pay!"
"It's all done to beat the Grays, isn't it, Miss Galland? They are trying to take our land," said Jacky Werther as Marta parted from him.
"Yes, it is done to beat the Grays," she answered. "Good luck, Jacky!"
Yes, yes, to beat the Grays! The same, idea—the fighting nature, the brute nature of man—animated both sides. Had the Browns really tried for peace? Had they, in the spirit of her oath, appealed to justice and reason? Why hadn't their premier before all the world said to the premier of the Grays, as one honest, friendly neighbor to another over a matter of dispute:
"We do not want war. We know you outnumber us, but we know you would not take advantage of that. If we are wrong we will make amends; if you are wrong we know that you will. Let us not play tricks in secret to gain points, we civilized nations, but be frank with each other. Let us not try to irritate each other or to influence our people, but to realize how much we have in common and that our only purpose is common progress and happiness."
But no. This was against the precedent of Cain, who probably got Abel into a cul-de-sac, handed down to the keeping of the Roman aristocrat, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man. It would deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naïve to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual suspicion and chicanery.
She was overwrought in the fervor of her principles; she was in an anguish of protest. Her spirit, in arms against an overwhelming fact that was wrong, sinful, ridiculous, demanded some expression in action. Now she was half running, both running away from horror and toward horror; in a shuttle of resolutions and emotions: a being at war with war. Passing the head of the procession, she soon had the castle road to herself, except for orderlies on motor-cycles and horseback, until a train of automobile wagons loaded with household goods roared by. The full orchestra of war was playing right and left: crashing, high-pitched gun-booms near at hand; low-pitched, reverberating gun-booms in the distance. At the turn of the road in front of the castle she saw the gunners of the batteries that Feller had watched approaching making an emplacement for their guns in a field of carrots that had not yet been harvested. The roots of golden yellow were mixed with the tossing spadefuls of earth.
A shadow like a great cloud in mad flight shot over the earth, and with the gunners she looked up to see a Gray dirigible. Already it was turning homeward; already it had gained its object as a scout. On the fragile platform of the gondola was a man, seemingly a human mite aiming a tiny toy gun. His target was one of the Brown aeroplanes.
"They're in danger of cutting their own envelope! They can't get the angle! The plane is too high!" exclaimed the artillery commander. Both he and his men forgot their work in watching the spectacle of aerial David against aerial Goliath. "If our man lands with his little bomb, oh, my!" he grinned. "That's why he is so high. He's been waiting up there."
"Pray God he will!" exclaimed one of the gunners.
"Look at him volplane—motor at full speed, too!"
The pilot was young Etzel, who, as Lanstron had observed, would charge a church tower if he were bidden. He was taking no risks in missing. His ego had no cosmos except that huge, oblong gas-bag. He drove for it as a hawk goes for its prey. One life for a number of lives—the sacrifice of a single aeroplane for a costly dirigible—that was an exchange in favor of the Browns. And Etzel had taken an oath in his heart—not standing on a café table—that he would never let any dirigible that he attacked escape.
"Into it! Making sure! Oh, splen—O!" cried the artillery commander.
A ball of lightning shot forth sheets of flame. Dirigible and plane were hidden in an ugly swirl of yellowish smoke, rolling out into a purple cloud that spread into prismatic mist over the descent of cavorting human bodies and broken machinery and twisted braces, flying pieces of tattered or burning cloth. David has taken Goliath down with him in a death grip.
An aeroplane following the dirigible as a screen, hoping to get home with information if the dirigible were lost, had escaped the sharpshooters in the church tower by flying around the town. However, it ran within range of the automatic and the sharpshooters on top of the castle tower. They failed of the bull's-eye, but their bullets, rimming the target, crippling the motor, and cutting braces, brought the crumpling wings about the helpless pilot. The watching gunners uttered "Ahs!" of horror and triumph as they saw him fall, gliding this way and that, in the agony of slow descent.
"Come, now!" called the artillery commander. "We are wasting precious time."
Entering the grounds of the Galland house, Marta had to pass to one side of the path, now blocked by army wagons and engineers' materials and tools. Soldiers carrying sand-bags were taking the shortest cut, trampling the flowers on their way.
"Do you know whose property this is?" she demanded in a burst of anger.
"Ours—the nation's!" answered one, perspiring freely at his work. "Sorry!" he added on second thought.
Already parts of the first terrace were shoulder-high with sand-bags and one automatic had been set in place, Marta observed as she turned to the veranda. There her mother sat in her favorite chair, hands relaxed as they rested on its arms, while she looked out over the valley in the supertranquillity that comes to some women under a strain—as soldiers who have been on sieges can tell you—that some psychologists interpret one way and some another, none knowing even their own wives.
"Marta, did any of the children come?" Mrs. Galland asked in her usual pleasant tone. So far as she was concerned, the activity on the terrace did not exist. She seemed oblivious of the fact of war.
"Yes, seven."
"And did you hold your session?"
"Yes."
Marta's monosyllables absently answering the questions were expressive of her wonder at her mother. Most girls do not know their mothers much better than psychologists know their wives.
"I am glad of that, Marta. I am glad you went and sorry that I opposed your going, because, Marta, whatever happens one should go regularly about what he considers his duty," said Mrs. Galland. "They have been as considerate as they could, evidently by Colonel Lanstron's orders," she proceeded, nodding toward the industrious engineers. "And they've packed all the paintings and works of art and put them in the cellar, where they will be safe."
The captain of engineers in command, seeing Marta, hurried toward her.
"Miss Galland, isn't it?" he asked. "I have been waiting for you. I—I—well, I found that I could not make the situation clear to your mother."
"He thinks me in my second childhood or out of my head," Mrs. Galland explained with a shade of tartness. "And he has been so polite in trying to conceal his opinion, too," she added with a comprehending smile.
The captain flushed in embarrassment.
"I—I can't speak too strongly," he declared when he had regained his composure. "Though everything seems safe here now, it may not be in an hour. You must go, all of you. This house will be in an inferno as soon as the 53d falls back, and I can't possibly get your mother to appreciate the fact, Miss Galland."
"But I said that I did appreciate it and that the Gallands have been in infernos before—perhaps not as bad as the one that is coming—but, then, the Gallands must keep abreast of the times," replied Mrs. Galland. "I have asked Minna and she prefers to remain. I am glad of that. I am glad now that we kept her, Marta. She is as loyal as my old maid and the butler and the cook were to your grandmother in the last war. Ah, the Gallands had many servants then!"
"This isn't like the old war. This place will be shelled, enfiladed! And you two—" the captain protested desperately.
"I became a Galland when I married," said Mrs. Galland, "and the Galland women have always remained with their property in time of war. Naturally, I shall remain!"
"Miss Galland, it was you—your influence I was counting on to—" The captain turned to Marta in a final appeal.
Mrs. Galland was watching her daughter's face intently.
"We stay!" replied Marta, and the captain saw in the depths of her eyes, a cold blue-black, that further argument was useless.
With a shrug of his shoulders he was turning to go when his lieutenant, hurrying up and pointing to the row of lindens at the edge of the estate, exclaimed:
"If we only had those trees out of the way! They cut the line of our fire! They form cover and protection for the enemy."
"The orders are against it," replied the captain.
"Lanstron may be a great soldier, but—" declared the lieutenant petulantly.
"Cut the lindens if it will help the Browns!" called Mrs. Galland.
"Cut the lindens, mother! Is everything to be destroyed—everything to satisfy the appetite of savagery?" exclaimed Marta. Then, in an abrupt change of mood, inexplicable to the captain and even to herself, she added: "My mother says to cut the lindens. And you will tell us when to go into the house?" Marta asked the captain.
"Yes. There is no danger yet—none until we see the 53d falling back."
What mockery, what uncanny staginess for either her mother or herself to be so calm! Yet, what else were they to do? Were they to scream? Or fall into each other's arms and sob? Marta found a strange pleasure in looking at her garden before it was spattered with blood, as it had been in the last war. It had never seemed more beautiful. There was a sublimity in nature's obliviousness to the thrashing of the air with shells in a gentle breeze that fluttered the petals of the hydrangeas.
The sight of Feller coming along the path of the second terrace brought in sudden vividness to her mind that question which must soon be decided: whether or not she would allow him to remain to carry out his plan. He still had the garden-shears in hand. He was walking with the slow and soft step which was in keeping with the serenity of his occupation. Pausing before the chrysanthemum bed, he touched his hat, and as he awaited her approach he lifted one of the largest blooms that was drooping from its weight on the slender stem.
"They look well, don't you think?" he asked cautiously; and he was very cool, while his eyes had a singular limpidity, speaking better than any words the sadness of his story and the dependence of his hope of regeneration upon her.
"Yes, quite the best they ever have," she replied, inclined to look away from him, conscious of her sensitiveness to his appeal, and yet still looking at him, while she marvelled at him, at herself, at everything.
"Thank you," he said. "You don't know how much that means, how pleased I am."
Now came the sweep of a rising roar from the sky with the command to attention of the rush of a fast express-train past a country railway station. Two Gray dirigibles with their escort of aeroplanes—in formation like that which Mrs. Galland and Feller had seen race along the frontier—were bearing toward the pass over the pass road. One glimpse of the squadron was as a match to Feller's military passion. He swept off his old straw hat and with it all of the gardener's chrysalis. Feller the artillerist gazed aloft in feverish excitement.
"Lanny has them guessing! They're bound to know his plans if it takes all the air craft in the shop!" he exclaimed. "And what are we doing? Yes, what are we doing?" he cried in alarm as his glance swept the sky in front of the squadron, already even with the terrace in its terrific speed.
The automatic and the riflemen in the tower banged away to no purpose, for the aerostatic officers of the Grays had been apprised of the danger in that direction.
"Minutes, seconds count! Where are our high-angle guns?" Feller went on. He was unconsciously gesticulating with all the fervor of hurrying a battery into place to cover an infantry retreat in a crisis. "And they're turning! What's the matter? What are high-angle guns for, anyway, with such targets naked over our lines? Ah-h! Beautiful!"
The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was pointing toward the plain.
"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising now—evidently already out of reach of our guns—and nothing against them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What? What—" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed, he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan, Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little aviators gets back, he has the story!"
From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes descending across the track of the Grays.
"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home—between the badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is war—war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage, pray-and-swear courage—what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret! Now—now for it!"
The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course. But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.
Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before she withdrew them in vexation—hadn't she promised herself not to be cowardly?—to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of the Grays.
"We've got them all! No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!" exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the sunlight. "As I thought," he continued in professional enthusiasm and discrimination. "We are getting the theory of one feature of the new warfare in practice. It isn't like the popular dream of wiping out armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead. The force of gravity is against the fliers. You have only to bring them to earth to put them out of action. Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end of bomb-dropping and scouting! War will still be won by the infantry and the guns. Yes, the guns—the new guns! They—"
Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he was a gardener, a gentle old gardener. He put his hat back on a head already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together in the accustomed stoop. His slim fingers slipped under the largest chrysanthemum blossom, his attitude the same as when he had held it up for Marta's inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron's motors.
"I think that we might cut them all now and fill the vases," he suggested, a musical, ingratiating note in his voice. "To-morrow we may not have a chance."
"Yes," she agreed mechanically, her thoughts still dwelling on the collision of the squadrons.
"And some of the finest ones for you to take now," he added, plying the shears as he made his selections. "I'll bring the rest," he concluded when he had gathered a dozen choice blossoms.
His fingers touched hers as the stems changed hands. In his eyes, showing just below the rim of his hat, was the light which she had seen first during the dramatic scene in his sitting-room and the appeal of deference, of suffering, and of the boyish hope of a cadet.
The indefatigable captain of engineers had turned spectator. With high-power binoculars glued to his eyes, he was watching to see if the faint brown line of Dellarme's men were going to hold or break. If it held, he might have hours in which to complete his task; if it broke, he had only minutes.
Marta came up the terrace path from the chrysanthemum bed in time to watch the shroud of shrapnel smoke billowing over the knoll, to visualise another scene in place of the collision of the squadrons, and to note the captain's exultation over Fracasse's repulse.
"How we must have punished them!" he exclaimed to his lieutenant. "How we must have mowed them down! Lanstron certainly knew what he was doing."
"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.
Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.
"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said; and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."
"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he would gain his point.
"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.
This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.
"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession? Why, I ask?"
The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a shell fire of questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine fury.
"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.
"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan—mow them down! mow them down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.
In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.
"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.
"No, not yet," he answered.
"Then please come with me to the tower!"
Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a passion running so strong.
"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were nothing unusual in her attitude. No word passed between them as he kept pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached and riotous tendrils.
"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way that left no excuse for refusal.
When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the way into the tunnel.
"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she instructed him after she had pressed the button and the panel door of the telephone recess flew open.
For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two wire ends.
"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?
As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the other end of the line, but no "Hello!"
"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.
Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of pressing duties.
"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with Westerling yet?"
"It is I—Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear answer—I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"
"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"
"So that you can mow them down?"
"That is one way of putting it—yes."
"If I keep your secret—if I let the telephone remain, I am an accomplice! I shall not be that—not to any kind of murder! I shall not let the telephone remain!"
"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its main line of defence."
"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.
"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta—I plead with you—please, please leave the house!" he begged passionately.
Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!
"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking other lives every minute?"
"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life of all to me—because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate sentences:
"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"
He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands, and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.
"My one chance—my last chance—gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he proceeded dismally.
"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.
"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of a spy—I who was honor man at the military school—I who had a conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to atone—when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to die if not to live——"
He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence.
"—in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.
His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel with his nerves.
"Please," he pleaded faintly—"please leave me to myself. I will tear out the telephone—trust me—only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain—I see only dark!"
He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and he looked for a passionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A lustrous veil was over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of "I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable attitude she was silent for a time.
"Let it remain—it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried past him still clasping her wrist.
He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La, la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.
"Why not tear out the telephone—why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once? I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I have skill! God knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining, but bang-bang-bang on the target!"
In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.
"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's another—but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a soldier now—a soldier assigned to a definite duty for my flag. I should break my word of honor—a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"
He snatched down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in the ascendant.
"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss Galland consents!"
"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"
"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I—"
"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't think of the guns!"
"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty! I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But, trust me, Lanny! Trust me—for my flag and my country against the invader!"
"Against the invader—that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"
"Trust me!"
"Bless you, and God with you!"
"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguishing the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh, this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.
Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field. She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge, surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to speak.
"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them some hot soup."
He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of wounding them.
"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly. It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to eat."
"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.
"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."
Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.
"Then water?"
The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.
"We have sterilized water—we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."
Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.
"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"
"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."
The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.
She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.
Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness of their condition. Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near. The single word "Shrapnel!" by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head with body uninjured.
Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell bursts, saw what Marta was doing. With the same feeling of relief at opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her, bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute them—watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.
"The guns—the guns are going to play a great part!" he thought. "These rapid-firers will recover all the artillery's prestige of Napoleon's time!"
Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the flowers. It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that brought smiles in response to hers. For she was no solemn ministering angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men. Every remark of the victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the gelatine of her mind.
"I like my blue aster better than that yellow weed of yours, Tom!"
"You didn't know Ed Schmidt got it? Yes, he was right next me in the line."
"Say, did you notice Dellarme's smile? It was wonderful."
"And old Bert Stransky! I heard him whistling the wedding march as he fired."
"Miss, I'll keep this flower forever!"
"They say Billy Lister will live—his cheek was shot away!"
"Once we got going I didn't mind. It seemed as if I'd been fighting for years!"
"Hole no bigger than a lead-pencil. I'll be back in a week!"
"Yes; don't these little bullets make neat little holes?"
"We certainly gave them a surprise when they came up the hill! I wonder if we missed the fellow that jumped into the shell crater!"
"Our company got it worst!"
"Not any worse than ours, I'll wager!"
"Oh—oh—can't you go easier? Oh-h-h—" the groan ending in a clenching of the teeth.
"Hello, Jake! You here, too, and going in my automobile? And we've both got lower berths!"
"Sh-h! That poor chap's dying!"
Worst of all to Marta was the case of a shrapnel fracture of the cranium, with the resulting delirium, in which the sufferer's incoherence included memories of childhood scenes, moments on the firing-line, calls for his mother, and prayers to be put out of misery. A prod of the hypodermic from the major surgeon, and "On the operating-table in fifteen minutes" was the answer to Marta's question if the poor fellow would live.
Until dark, in groups, at intervals, and again singly, the wounded were coming in from a brigade front in the region where the rifles were crackling and the shrapnel clouds were hanging prettily over the hills; and stretchers were being slipped into place in the ambulances, while Marta kept at her post.
"We shan't have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon when a plodding section of infantry in retreat arrived.