As it lacked one minute to four when Hedworth Westerling, chief of staff in name as well as power now, alighted from the gray automobile that turned in at the Galland drive, the chauffeur thought well enough of himself to forget the crush of supplies and ambulances that had delayed His Excellency's car for at least ninety seconds in the main street of the town. Though His Excellency had not occupied his new headquarters as soon as he expected, this could have no influence on results. If he had lost fifty thousand men on the first two days and two hundred thousand since the war had begun, should he allow this to disturb his well-being of body or mind? His well-being of body and mind meant the ultimate saving of lives.
The Grays were winning; this alone counted in the present. They would continue to win; this alone counted in the future. They had won by crowding in reserves till the positions attacked yielded to superior strength. Thus they would continue to win until the last positions had yielded.
Five million mothers' sons against three million mothers' sons! Five to three pounds of flesh! Five to three ounces of blood! With equal skill, superior strength must always tell. Westerling and his staff were responsible for the skill. If their minds would work better for it, the nation could well afford to feed them on nightingales' tongues.
Confidence is the handmaiden of skill. Confidence is the edge on the sword; confidence brings the final charge that wins the redoubt. Confidence was reflected in Westerling's bearing and in his smile of command as he passed through the staff rooms, Turcas and Bouchard in his train, with tacit approval of the arrangements. Finally, Turcas, now vice-chief of staff, and the other chiefs awaited his pleasure in the library, which was to be his sanctum. On the massive seventeenth-century desk lay a number of reports and suggestions. Westerling ran through them with accustomed swiftness of sifting and then turned to his personal aide.
"Tell François that I will have tea on the veranda."
From the fact that he took with him the papers that he had laid aside, subordinate generals, with the gift of unspoken directions which is a part of their profession, understood that he meant to go over the subjects requiring special attention while he had tea.
"Everything is going well—well!" he added in a way that said that everything must be if he said so and that he knew how to make everything go well. "And we shall be up pretty late to-night. Any one who feels the need had better take a nap"—the implication being that he did not.
"Well!" ran the unspoken communication of confidence through the staff. So well that His Excellency was calmly taking tea on the veranda! For the indefatigable Turcas the detail; for Westerling the front of Jove.
"Well!" The thrill of the word was with him in a flight of sentiment as he stood on that veranda where a certain prophecy had been made to a young colonel. Sight of the rippling folds of the flag of his country on the outskirts of the town prolonged the thrill. His eyes swept the pale horizon of the distances of plain and Mountain and lowered to the garden. Above the second terrace he saw a crown of woman's hair—hair of a jet abundance, radiant in the sunlight and shading a face that brought familiar completeness to the scene.
He had told Marta only two weeks ago that he should see her again if war came; and war had come. With the inviting prospect of a few holiday moments in which to continue the interview that had been abruptly concluded in a hotel reception-room, he started down the terrace steps. Their glances met where the second terrace path ended at the second terrace flight; hers shot with a beam of restrained and questioning good humor that spoke at least a truce to the invader.
"You called sooner than I expected," she said in a note of equivocal pleasantry.
"Or I," he rejoined with a shade of triumph, the politest of triumph. He was a step above her, her head on a level with the pocket of his blouse. His square shoulders, commanding height, and military erectness were thus emphasized, as was her own feminine slightness.
"I want to thank you," she said. "As becomes a soldier, your forethought was expressed in action. It was the promptness of the men you sent to look after the garden which saved the uprooted plants before they were past recovery."
"I wished it for your sake and somewhat for my own sake to be the same that it was in the days when I used to call," he said graciously. "Tea was from four to five, do you remember? Will you join me? I have just ordered it."
A generous, pleasant conqueror, this! No one knew better than Westerling how to be one when he chose. He was something of an actor. Leaders of men of his type usually are.
"Why, yes. Very gladly!" she assented with no undue cordiality and no undue constraint, quite as if there were no war.
"It was the Browns who cut the lindens?" he suggested significantly.
"They said that it was necessary as part of the defence," she replied. "We shall plant new ones and have the pleasure of watching them grow."
Neutrality could not be better impersonated he thought, than in the even cleaving of her lips over the words. They seemed to say that a storm had come and gone and a new set of masters had taken the place of the old. As they approached the veranda François was placing the tea things.
"Quite the same! That was your chair, as I remember," said Westerling after indicating to François that he might go, "and this was mine."
But the teapot was not Mrs. Galland's—it belonged to the staff.
"This is different," observed Marta, touching her finger-tip to the coat of arms of the Grays on the side of a cup.
"Yes, my own field kit," he answered, thinking that the novelty of tea from a soldier's service had appealed to her; for she was smiling.
"So, you being the host and I the guest now, why, you pour!" she said. There was a touch of brittleness in her tone—of half-teasing, half-serious brittleness.
"Oh, no, no!" he protested laughingly, and found her glance flashing through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.
"I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener's quarters in the tower," she said.
"No, no!" he objected. "The tea conditions are the same as before."
He was earnest for his point. It would please his masculine fancy to watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.
"Conditions the same as before?" She laughed softly. "How can they be in my thoughts or yours?" she asked with a sudden show of seriousness.
"We did turn you out of house and home—I understand!" he exclaimed apologetically. "And that is the symbol of it to you!" He indicated the coat of arms.
"The symbol of the conqueror, isn't it?" he asked playfully, for in the company of women it pleased him to be playful.
"Conqueror? It's a big word!" she mused. "I hadn't thought of it in connection with pouring tea"—which might be another way of saying that she had just been thinking of it very hard and might be trying to find whether it had a pleasant or an unpleasant side. Clearly, here was a Marta different from any yet precipitated by the alchemy of war.
The resourceful variety of her! Oh, it was like the old days! It made him feel young, as young as when he had been a colonel commanding the garrison on the other side of the white posts. She had intelligence, yet was at the same time distinctly feminine, with the gift of as much talk about who should pour tea as about how to storm a redoubt. She did not carry her mental wares on her sleeve. She flashed them in a way that prompted curiosity as to the next exhibit. He had sought primarily, selfishly, to be entertained at tea, and he was being entertained. To want to win was his nature. He understood, too, that she wanted to win. He liked that quality in her the more because it heightened the valve of victory for him.
"Then, if you don't think of it in connection with pouring tea, let me tell you what I think of when I sit on this veranda. I think of you as hostess. You refuse to play the part!" he exclaimed with that persistence, softened a little, perhaps, yet suggestive of the quality characterized by the firm jaw and still eyes, which won his point at staff councils. Again he was conscious of one of her sweeping glances of appraisal, with just a glint of admiration and even approval tucked away in the recesses of her smile.
"Suppose we compromise," she suggested thoughtfully, with the gravity of one making a great concession. "Suppose you do the heavy work, and pour, and I drop the sugar in the cups."
But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full concession.
"I'd really better do it all—act out the host and the conqueror!" he declared. "One can't compromise principles."
"Oh! Why?" She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.
"Anything except your doing all the honors leaves me in the same invidious position," he answered. "It compounds my felony. It shows that you do think that we failed by our conduct to show respect for your property. It leaves me feeling that you think that I do not regard this as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of war—by an old friendship!"
He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic eloquence that went well with his handsome face and sturdy bearing had been his most successful asset in making him chief of staff.
The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final, serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a sudden new angle of light.
"You put it very well. In that case—" she said, and his glance and hers dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into the cup. "With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their side-arms?" she asked.
"Yes; oh, yes!" he answered happily.
She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has overcome no mean opponent—the highest form of compliment known to the guild of courtiers.
He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.
"Just like the old days, isn't it?" he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the field.
"Yes, for the moment—if we forget the war!" she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.
If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid.
"We do forget it at tea, don't we?" he asked.
"At least we need not speak of it!" she replied.
Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible bumpers. The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty. Prone to avoid recollections that made him feel old—to feel old was to be out of date in his profession—-he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two and gratifying as youth's dreams become reality. Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff. This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty. His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate.
"There's work—always work for a chief!" he declared. "I—"
Marta was quick to act on the hint. Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke.
"There's always the garden for me! But first—" Yes, first there was poor Hugo.
Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion. The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes—his calculating gray eyes—glinted a youthful entreaty.
"Please! I didn't finish my sentence!" he begged. "You remember that often I used to wait after tea until the sunset—"
"And reached your quarters late for dinner, I also remember!" she put in. But she remained in the same position, his finger-tips on her arm, her hands holding her body free of the chair. "That is, when you did not stay to dinner!" she added.
"I am staying to-night. I was going to ask if you wouldn't remain on the veranda while I go over these papers. It—it would be very cosey and pleasant."
One of these papers, she knew, must be the evidence against Hugo Mallin. She preferred not to make a direct appeal but to have Westerling bring up the subject himself. His smile and the look with which he regarded her spoke his appreciation of the picture she made and his fear of losing it. Very cosey and pleasant, yes, the company of a prophetess, with a ray of sunlight making her hair an aurora of flashing bronze overtopping a brown face, the eyes holding answers to an increasing number of unasked questions about the new forces that he had found in her.
"Why, yes," she agreed with evident pleasure, for she was thinking of Hugo.
Turcas now came, in answer to Westerling's ring. The orders and suggestions on the table seemed to be the product of this lath of a man, the vice-chief, but a lath of steel, not wood, who appeared a runner trained for a race of intellects in the scratch class. One by one, almost perfunctorily, Westerling gave his assent as he passed the papers to Turcas; while Turcas's dry voice, coming from between a narrow opening of the thin lips, gave his reasons with a rapid-firer's precision in answer to his chief's inquiries.
With each order somewhere along that frontier some unit of a great organism would respond. The reserves from this position would be transferred to that; such a position would be felt out before dark by a reconnaissance in force, however costly; the rapid-firers of the 19th Division would be transferred to the 20th; despite the 37th Brigade's losses, it would still form the advance; General So-and-So would be superseded after his failure of yesterday; Colonel So-and-So would take his place as acting major-general; more care must be exercised in recommendations for bronze crosses, lest their value so depreciate that officers and men would lack incentive to win them.
Marta was having a look behind the scenes at the fountainhead of great events. Power! power! The absolute power of the soldier in the saddle, with premier and government and all the institutions of peace only a dim background for the processes of war! Opposite her was a man who could make and unmake not only generals but even the destinies of peoples. By every sign he enjoyed his power for its own sake. There must be a chief of the five millions, which were as a moving forest of destruction, and here was the chief, his strength reflected in the strong muscles of his short neck as he turned his head to listen to Turcas. Marta recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago: the iron invincibility of the elder's sturdy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure of the younger man.
"The evidence you asked for in that Mallin mutiny case," said Turcas, indicating the only remaining paper.
"Yes, I want to go into that—it's a question of policy," said Westerling.
He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair. She had bent forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in a kind of wondering admiration. But she dropped her eyelids instantly and said deliberately, less to him than to herself:
"You have the gift!"
No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose existence had been borne in on her by observation.
"The gift? How?" he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half hid her lowered face.
She looked up, smiling brightly.
"You don't know what gift! Not the pianist's! Not the poet's!" (Oh, to save Hugo! The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her impulses, born of the war's stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in view of her knowledge of the man before her) "Why, of course, the supreme gift of command! The thing that made you chief of staff! And the war goes well for you, doesn't it?"
Delicious morsel, this, to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the impression he had made on her.
"Yes, as you foresaw—as I planned!" he said. "Yes, I planned all, step by step, till I was chief of staff and ready. I convinced the premier that it was time to strike and I chose the hour to strike; for Bodlapoo was only a convenient excuse for the last of all the steps"
The subjective enjoyment of the declaration kept him from any keen notice of the effect of his words. Lanny was right. It had been a war of deliberate conquest; a war to gratify personal ambition. All her life Marta would be able to live over again the feelings of this moment. It was as if she were frozen, all except brain and nerves, which were on fire, while the rigidity of ice kept her from springing from her chair in contempt and horror. She would always wonder how the bonds of her purpose to save Hugo held her tongue But still another purpose came on the wings of diabolical temptation which would pit the art of woman against the power of a man who set millions against millions in slaughter to gratify personal ambition. She was thankful that she was looking down as she spoke, for she could not bring herself to another compliment. Her throat was too chilled for that yet.
"The one way to end the feud between the two nations was a war that would mean permanent peace," he explained, seeing how quiet she was and realizing, with a recollection of her children's oath, that he had gone a little too far. He wanted to retain her admiration. It had become as precious to him as a new delicacy to Lucullus.
"Yes, I understand," she managed to murmur; then she was able to look up. "It's all so immense!" she added. "And you have yet another paper there?" she said with a little gesture that might have been taken as the expression of a hope that she was not overstaying her welcome.
"This is very interesting," he said, watching her narrowly now, "the case of a private, one Hugo Mallin, who refused to fight because he was against war on principle. Four charges: assault on a fellow soldier, cowardice, treason, and insubordination under fire."
"Enough, I should say!" said Marta in a low tone.
"A question of which one to press—of an example," continued Westerling, reading the full official statement for the first time.
"What is the punishment?" she asked.
"Why, of course, death!" he replied, somewhat absently, in preoccupation. "Extraordinary! And they have located him, it seems He is here at headquarters!"
"Yes; certainly," Marta said. "We found him under a tree, deserted and wounded, labelled coward, and we cared for him."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Westerling. "He must have appealed strongly to your sympathies."
There was no sharpness in the words, but he had lapsed from the personal to the official manner.
"To my sense of humanity!" Her reply was made in much the same tone as his remark, where he had expected emotion, even passion. More than ever was he certain that she had undergone some revealing experience since he had seen her in the capital. "Yes, to any one's sense of humanity—a wounded, thirsty man in a fever!" There came, with a swift and mellowing charm, the look of a fervent and exalted tenderness and the pulse-arresting quiver of intensity that had swept over her at her first sight of Hugo under the tree. "I know that he was not a coward in one sense," she added, "for I saw him make the assault named in the first charge."
She proceeded with the story of what she had witnessed in the dining-room. There was no appeal on Hugo's account. Appraising the qualities of the Marta of the moment in contrast with the Marta of seventeen and the Marta of three weeks ago, Westerling was significantly conscious of her attitude of impartiality, free of any attempt at feminine influence, and of her evident desire to help him with the facts that she knew.
"The charge of assault is only incidental," said Westerling. "But Mallin was in the right about his comrades entering the house; right about the destruction of property. It is our business to protect property, not only as a principle but as a matter of policy. We do not desire to make the population of the country we occupy unnecessarily hostile."
"I judged that from your kindness in repairing the damage done to ours," she assured him, and added happily: "Though I don't suppose that you go so far in most cases as to set uprooted plants back in their beds."
"No; that is a refinement, perhaps," he answered, laughing. She was not only more agreeable but also more sane than at the hotel. He liked the idea of continuing to despatch his work while retaining her company. "I must have a talk with Mallin," he said. "I must settle his case so that if similar cases arise subordinates will know what to do without consulting me. Would you mind if I sent for him?" He reached for the bell to call an orderly.
"Yes, I should like to hear what he says to you and what you say to him," she confessed with unfeigned interest, which brought a suggestion that he was to be put on trial before her at the same time as Mallin was on trial before Westerling. His fingers paused on the bell head without pressure. "I told him that you were a just man," she remarked, "that any one would be certain of justice from you."
He rang the bell; and after he had sent for Mallin, warming under the compliment of her last remark, he dared a reconnaissance along the line of inquiry which he had wanted to undertake from the first.
"Mallin's ideas about war seem to be a great deal like your own," he hinted casually.
"As I expressed them at the hotel, you mean!" she exclaimed. "That seems ages ago—ages!" The perplexity and indecision that, in a space of silence, brooded in the depths of her eyes came to the surface in wavering lights. "Yes, ages! ages!" The wavering lights grew dim with a kind of horror and she looked away fixedly at a given point.
He was conscious of a thrill; the thrill that always presaged victory for him. He realized her evident distress; he guessed that terrible pictures were moving before her vision, and he changed the subject.
"I know how revolting it must have been to have seen those soldiers wantonly smashing your chandelier and gloating over their mischief," he said. "Really, the Captain was to blame for letting his men get out of hand. He seems not to have been a competent man. We can train and train an officer, but when war comes—well, no amount of training will supply a certain quality that must be inborn—the quality of command."
"Such as Dellarme had!" she exclaimed absently, under her breath.
She had forgotten her part and Westerling's presence. The given point of her gaze was exactly where Dellarme lay when he died. She was unconsciously smiling in the way that he had smiled. But to Westerling it seemed that she was smiling at space. He was puzzled; his perception piqued.
"Who was Dellarme?" he was bound to ask.
"The officer in command of the company of infantry posted behind the sand-bags in the yard—he was killed!" she answered, turning her face toward Westerling without the smile, singularly expressionless.
"Yes, he must have had the quality from the defence he made," agreed Westerling, in the hearty tribute of a taxable soldier to a capable soldier. So very well had that one small position been held that every detail was graven on the mind of a chief of staff who was supposed to leave details to his brigade commanders. It was he himself who had ordered the final charge after the brigade commander had advised delaying another attack until the redoubt could be hammered to pieces by heavy guns brought up from the rear. "But he had to go!" Westerling exclaimed doggedly; for he could not resist this tribute, in turn, to his own success in making an example for timid brigade commanders in the future by driving in more reserves until the enemy yielded.
"Yes!" she agreed without any change in the set face and moody eyes.
"You saw something of the defence?"
"Yes!" Marta replied in a way that aroused his imagination.
This, he recalled, had always been her gift. The slow-drawn monosyllable was pregnant with revelations which his knowing mind could readily supply. She had been in the midst of the fury of the most tenacious fighting within a small space that the war had yet to chronicle. She had been an intimate of the splendid desperation of the Browns; known their thoughts and feelings. What a multitude of impressions were stored in her sensitive mind, impressions which, for the moment, seemed to benumb her! How she could make them speak from her eyes and quiver from her very finger-tips when she chose! He would yet hear her vivid account of all that she had seen. It would be informatory—a reflection of the spirit of the Browns. Her quietness itself was compelling in its latent strength, and strength was the thing he most admired. More and more questions winged themselves into his thoughts, while his next one served the purpose of passing the time until Hugo came.
"There was a man out of uniform, in a gardener's garb, in charge of the automatic," he remarked. "It was so puzzling that I heard of it. You see, there is no limit to what a chief of staff may know."
"Yes, our gardener," she replied.
"Your gardener! Why, how was that? Wasn't he in the reserves if he were a Brown? Wasn't he called to the colors at the outbreak of the war?"
In spite of himself the questions were somewhat sharp. They seemed to take Marta by surprise, which, however, was evanescent.
"I wonder!" she said, as interested as Westerling in the suggestion. "Something a soldier would think of immediately and a woman wouldn't. I know that we lost our gardener."
That was all. She did not attempt any further explanation or enlarge on the subject, but let it go as an inquiry unexplained in the course of conversation.
Had Westerling been inclined to pursue it further he would have been interrupted by the arrival of a figure with a bandaged leg and head which came hobbling cheerfully around the corner of the house on crutches, escorted by an infantryman. The guard saluted and withdrew into the background. Hugo saluted and removed his cap and looked at Westerling with the faintest turn of a smile on his lips, which plainly spoke his quizzical appreciation of the fact that he was in the presence of dazzling heights for a private.
Marta had a single glance from him—a glance of peculiar inquiry and astonishment, sweeping over the tea things fairly into her eyes. Then it was gone. He might have been the most dutiful and respectful soldier of the five millions as he waited on the head of the five millions to speak.
Westerling read the four charges. Then he asked the stereotyped question:
"What have you to say to them?"
When he looked up from the paper he saw a face that was a mask, a gentle, pleasant mask, and blue eyes looking quite steadily into his own with a sort of well-established and dreamy fatalism.
"Nothing, sir," said Hugo respectfully.
Westerling frowned. Though a confession of guilt simplified everything, perhaps he frowned to find no embarrassment in his presence in the private; perhaps he apprehended impertinence in the soft blue eyes.
"You know what that means—the charges sustained?"
"Yes, sir!"
"And you have nothing to say?" Westerling's frown deepened. There was an undercurrent of urgency in his tone. This mild culprit, waiting for the wheels of justice to roll over him without a protest, gave him no light as to a policy that should apply to other cases. He resented, too, any suggestion of readiness for martyrdom No man of power who is anything of a politician and not a fool likes to make martyrs. "Nothing?" he repeated. "Nothing at all in your own behalf?"
A faint expression appeared on the mask. So insistently could Hugo's mask hold attention that Westerling noted even a slight, thoughtful drawing down of the brow and one corner of the mouth. He could not conceive that the laws of gravity could be upset or that a private would undertake to have fun at the expense of a chief of staff.
"Nothing, sir, unless I should make a long speech," he said. "Do you want me to do that, sir?"
Westerling held his irritation in control and looked around at Marta. He saw only wonder in her eyes as she intently regarded Hugo, which was his own feeling, he suddenly realized.
"I have hardly time to listen to long speeches," he remarked.
"I thought not, sir," replied Hugo, unmoved. "That is why I said I had nothing to say. And in want of a long speech the best that I could do to explain would be to ask you to read certain books."
An explosion of his breath in astonishment saved Westerling from harsh expletives. For one thing, he was piqued. Though he would not admit it even to himself, he had, perhaps, fancied the idea of playing the gentle and patient dispenser of justice before Marta A private on trial for the greatest of military crimes seraphically advising a chief of staff to read books! There were not enough words in the dictionary to rebuke the insubordination of such conceit! The only way to look at the thing was as a kind of grim jest. He retrieved his vexation with a laugh as he turned to Marta.
She was smiling irresistibly, in concert with his own mood, as she continued to regard Hugo. Hugo's mask was entirely for Westerling. He did not seem to see Marta now, and through his mask radiated the considerate understanding of one who can put himself in another's place—which was Hugo's besetting fault or virtue, as you choose. In short, the chief of staff had a feeling that this private knew exactly what he, the chief of staff, was thinking.
"Yes, I was certain, sir," said Hugo, "that you were too busy either to listen to speeches or to read books. You have months of hard work before you, sir."
His respectful "sirs" had the deference of youth to an elder; otherwise, he was an equal in conversation with an equal. Westerling still kept his temper, but the way that his under jaw closed indicated that he had made up his mind.
"One charge is enough," he said in a businesslike fashion. "On the firing-line you threw down your rifle. You refused to fight any more. You said: 'Damn patriotism! I'm through!' Is that so?"
A slight flush shot into Hugo's cheeks; he twisted his shoulder on his crutch as if he had a twinge of pain, but his face did not change its expression.
"No, sir. I did not say: 'Damn patriotism!' I'm afraid Captain Fracasse was out of temper when he reported that. I didn't say, 'Damn patriotism!' because I did not think that then and do not now. Would you care to have my recollection of what I said?"
"Yes!" breathed Marta with so intent an emphasis that Westerling turned sharply, only to find her smiling at him. Her smile said that she thought that Hugo's story would be interesting.
"Yes; go ahead!" said Westerling.
"I think that I can recall my words very accurately, sir," Hugo proceeded. "They were important to me. I was the individual most affected in the matter. I said: 'I am through. I will not murder my fellowmen who have done me no wrong. I cannot, I will not kill!'"
"That is all?" queried Westerling, again looking at Marta, this time covertly, while he played with a teaspoon.
Brooding uncertainty had flooded the sparkle out of her eyes. She was statue-like in her stillness, her breaths impalpable in their softness. But the points of her knuckles were ghostly, sharp spots on her tightly clenched hands. All that Westerling could tell was that she was thinking, and thinking hard. There was a space of silence broken only by the movement of the teaspoon. Hugo was the first to speak.
"I believe in patriotism, sir. That means love of country. I love my country," he said slowly.
A preachment of patriotism from this nonchalant private was a straw too much for Westerling's patience. He made a nervous gesture—a distinctly nervous one as he dropped the teaspoon. He would have an end of nonsense.
"You will answer questions!" he said. "First, you dropped your rifle?"
"Yes, sir."
"You refused to fight?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know the penalty for this?"
Hugo inclined his head. He was silent.
"Shot for treason—and immediately!" Westerling went on, irritated at the man's complaisance. Then he bit his lip. This was harsh talk before Marta. He expected to hear her utter some sort of protest against such cruelty, and instead saw that her face remained calm and that there was nothing but wonder in her eyes. She knew how to wait.
"Then, sir," said Hugo, speaking, evidently, because he was expected to say something, "I suppose, of course, that I shall be shot. But"—he was smiling in the way that he would when he brought a "good one" to the head in the barracks—"but it will not be necessary to do it more than once, will it? To tell you the truth, I had not counted on being shot more than once."
Westerling was like a man who had lunged a blow at an object and struck only air.
"I said that he was not a coward," Marta remarked quietly. There was nothing in her manner to imply that she was defending Hugo. She seemed to be incidentally justifying a previous observation of her own.
A smile in face of death! Westerling's prayer was for countless masses of infantry who would smile in face of death and do his bidding. He could not resist a soldier's admiration, which, however, he would not permit to take the form of words. The form which it took was a sharp thrust of his fist into the hollow of his hand. He had, too, a sense of defeat which was uppermost as he spoke—a defeat that he was bound to retrieve.
"You have a home, a father, and a mother?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"And perhaps a sweetheart?" Westerling proceeded.
Hugo unmistakably flushed.
"I don't think sir, that official statistics require an answer to that question. I"—and again that confounded smile, as Westerling was beginning to regard it—"I trust, sir, that I shall not have to be shot more than once if we do not bring any one not yet officially of my family into the affair."
"You do not seem to like life," Westerling observed.
"I love life!" answered Hugo earnestly. "I try to get something out of every minute of it; if nothing particular, at least the miracle of living and breathing and thinking and seeing—seeing such beautiful scenes as this." He looked away toward the glorious landscape. It was the first time that he had lifted the steady gaze of those studious blue eyes from Westerling, but directly they were back on duty. "It is because I love life," he continued, "and think that everybody else must love life, that I do not want to kill. Because I love my country I know that others love their country, and I want them to keep their country."
Marta's glance had followed Hugo's into the distance. It still rested there intently. To Westerling she showed only a profile, with the shadow of the porch between them and the golden light of receding day in the background: a golden light on a silhouette of ivory, a silhouette that you might find without meaning or so full of meaning as to hold an observer in a quandary as to what she was thinking or whether or not she was thinking at all.
Westerling had the baffled consciousness of fencing with a culprit at the bar who had turned adversary. It was the visionary's white logic of the blue dome against the soldier's material logic ofxequals initial velocity. Here was an incomprehensible mortal who loved life and yet was ready to die for love of life. Here was love of country that refused to serve country.
All a pose, a clever bit of acting to play on his feelings through the presence of a woman, Westerling concluded. And Marta was still looking at the landscape. Her mind seemed withdrawn from the veranda. Only her body remained. All the impulse of Westerling's military instinct and training, rebelling at an abstract ethical controversy with a private about book heresies that belonged under the censor's ban, called for the word of authority from the apex of the pyramid to put an end to talk with an atom at the base. But that profile—that serene ivory in the golden light, so unlike the Marta of the hotel reception-room—was compellingly present though her mind were absent. It suggested loss of temper as the supreme weakness. He had permitted a controversy. He must argue his man down; he must find his adversary's weak point.
"Your province is one of the most patriotic," he said. "Its people are of the purest blood of our race. They have always been loyal. They have always fought determinedly. To no people would a traitor be so abhorrent. Do you want the distinction of being a traitor—one lone traitor in your loyal province?"
Hugo was visibly affected. The twisted corner of his mouth quivered.
"I had thought of that, too, sir," he said.
"Suppose your father and mother knew that your comrades had labelled you a coward before the whole army; that they had thought you worthy only of kicks and to be left to die by the roadside. Suppose that your father and mother knew that the story of Hugo Mallin, coward and traitor, who threw down his rifle under fire is being told throughout the land—as I shall have it told—until your name is a symbol for cowardice and treason. How would your father and mother feel?"
There was an unsteady movement of Hugo's body on his crutches. He swallowed hard, moistening dry lips; and the mobility of feature that could change the mask into the illumination of varied emotions spoke horror and asked for pity.
"I—I—as a matter of mercy, when I have admitted the charge, I ask you not to bear on that, sir!" he stammered. Then the crutches creaked with a stronger grip of his hands and a stiffening of his body as he mastered his feelings. The mask recovered its own, even to the drawing down of the corner of the mouth. "I have reasoned that all out, sir," he went on. "It was the thing which kept me from throwing down my rifle before we made our first charge. I have written a letter to my father and mother."
Marta had been so engrossed in the landscape that she seemed not to have been listening. It was her voice, come out of the distance, that asked, without any inflection except that of tense curiosity:
"May we see the letter?"
As she turned her eyes looked directly into Hugo's, their gaze locked, as it were: hers that of a simple request, his that of puzzled, unsatisfied scrutiny.
"May we?" she repeated to Westerling, looking now frankly at him, "though I don't know as it is in keeping with the situation or with your wishes to grant the whim of a woman. But you see," she added smiling, "that is what comes of having a woman present."
If she had any double meaning Westerling could not find it in her eyes.
"I am willing," said Hugo. "Indeed, I shall be very glad to have my side heard."
"Yes, let us see the letter," assented Westerling; for he, too, was curious.
When Hugo had given it to Westerling and he saw that it was not very long, he began reading aloud:
"'I've kept very well and cheerful and I'm cheerful now,'" the letter began. "'Please always think of me as cheerful. Everybody in our company has fought well; just as bravely as our forefathers did in the wars of their day.'"
"Which hardly agrees with your ideas," observed Westerling.
"Exactly, sir. Men should be brave for their convictions," answered Hugo. "And, as you said, the men of our province are loyal to the old ideas. They believe they ought to fight the Browns."
Then followed a brief, intimate, appealing story of how each of his dead comrades had fallen.
"'You can read these to their folks at home, if you want to. They might like to know.'"
Irresistibly there crept into Westerling's face at these recitals of soldierly courage the satisfaction of the commander with the spirit of his men. Here was proof of the valor of the units of his army.
"'Now I have something to tell you which will hurt you very much,'" Westerling read on, "'but you must recollect that I was always regarded as a little queer. And I don't think people will hold you to blame on my account. I hope they will sympathize with you for having such a son. You will have heard the story from the men of the company, but I also want to tell it to you....'"
After it was told the letter proceeded:
"'I feel that I was a coward up to the moment that everybody else was calling me a coward. Then I felt free and happy, as if I had been true to myself. I felt that I had been just as much in the wrong as if we should break into our neighbor's house and take his property because we were stronger than he. How would you feel if a neighbor entered your house and made it his own? You would call in the police. But what if there were no police? Would that make it right?'"
Marta's own opinions! The spirit of her children's prayer! Head bent, hands clasped, she was simply listening.
"'Would it be cowardice if one of the neighbor's family said, "I will not take any further part in this robbery!" when he saw you, mother, weeping over you, father, as you lay dead after trying to defend your house? When I was asked to fire at those running men it was like standing on a neighbor's door-step and firing down the street at my neighbors in flight. I could not do it. I could not do it though twenty million men were doing the same thing. No, I could not do it any more than you could commit murder, father. That is all. Perhaps when those who survive from my company come home, after they have been beaten as they will be—'"
"What!" Westerling exploded.
All the force of his being had to take umbrage at this. Beaten! Marta saw the rigid, unyielding Westerling who had cried, "We shall win!" when she made her second prophecy. But the comparison did not occur to him. Nothing occurred to him but red anger, until the first dart of reason warned him, a chief of staff, that a private had made him completely lose his temper. He recovered his poise with a laugh and without even glancing at Marta.
"Well, we might as well hear the reasons for your expert opinion," he said, his satire a trifle hoarse after the strain of his emotion.
"Because the Browns fight for their homes!" answered Hugo "When the great crisis comes they have a reserve strength that we have not: conscience, the intelligent conscience of this age that cannot fool itself with false enthusiasm continually. They are fighting as I should pray that I might fight if the Browns invaded our country; as I might fight against a murderous burglar. For I will fight, sir, I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them! The Browns have no more right to cross our frontier than we have to cross theirs!"
There was a perceptible shudder on Marta's part, an abrupt, tossing elevation of her head. She stared at the spot where Dellarme had lain in the garden. Dellarme's smile was back on her lips; it seemed graven there. Her eyes, which Westerling could not see, were leaping flames.
"I'm afraid you will not have the chance," Westerling observed, as he returned the letter to Hugo, its reading unfinished. "What if every man held your views? What would become of the army and the nation?" he demanded.
"Why, I think I have made that plain," replied Hugo. He appeared no less weary than Westerling over continual beating of the air to no purpose. "We should retreat to our own soil, where we belong."
"And you are ready to be shot for that principle?"
The question was sharp and final.
"Yes, if being shot for what I did is dying for it—though I prefer to live for it!" said Hugo, still without any pose. He refused to play for a chapter in the future book of martyrs to peace. This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips.
"Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly. His eyes sought Marta.
The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also. There was a distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she turned her head. The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.
"It is extraordinary!" she breathed. "Don't you think that the blow on his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?"
Hugo answered for himself.
"My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that brought the blow!" he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the principles which she had professed to him previously.
She shuddered as if hurt, but only momentarily.
"Psychological, I suppose—psychological and irresponsible abnormality!" she murmured, avoiding Hugo's look and bending her own on Westerling persistently.
"Long words!" said Hugo. "Insanity is shorter."
But Westerling did not seem to hear. His thought was shaped by the superb misery and sensitiveness in Marta's face. He had done wrong to ask her to remain. Of course the scene had been painful to her. She would not be herself if she wanted to see a man tried for his life. He knew that views not unlike Hugo's were latent in many minds lacking Hugo's initiative that would respond to the right impulse. A way out occurred to him as inspiration, which pleased his sense of craft. The press, which the premier reported was irritated by his censorship—the press which must have sensation, the traffic of its trade—should have a detailed account of how one of our indomitable regiments placarded a private as coward, proving thereby that the army was a unit of aggressive zeal.
"You are alone—one man in a million in your ideas!" he declared, with judicial gravity. "We shall postpone your trial and leave public opinion to punish you. Your story will be given to the press in full; your name will be a byword throughout the land, an example, and while you are convalescing you will remain a prisoner. When you are well we shall have another talk I may give you a chance, for the sake of your father and mother and your sweetheart and the good opinion of your neighbors, to redeem yourself."
"I had to tell you what I felt, sir," said Hugo. "Thank you for letting me live, after you knew."
He saluted and turned away. Marta and Westerling watched him as he hobbled around the corner of the house and in a heavy silence listened to the crunch of his crutch tips on the gravel growing fainter. Her lashes, those convenient curtains for hiding thought, dropped as Westerling looked around; but he saw that her lips had reddened and that she was drawing a long, deep, energizing breath. When the lashes lifted, there was still wonder in her eyes—wonder which had become definite tribute to him. The assurance he wanted was that he had borne himself well, and he had it.
"You kept your patience beautifully," she told him. "It seems to me that you were both kind and wise."
"How I was to be merciful against the facts puzzled me," he replied, "until you saved the day with your suggestion of psychological irresponsibility."
"Then I helped? I really helped?"
"You did, decidedly! You—" There he broke off, for he found himself speaking to her profile.
She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away, where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills toward the white posts. Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow there in the distance! Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze! The dark shade of the house's mass over the yard!
It was time for him to be at his desk. But she seemed far from any suggestion of going. She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence. Yet were he to rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it. Though she did not change her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.
He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile in the glory of the sunset. The superb thing about her was that she always called for study. Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold. In time measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent. When she spoke she' did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into her eyes.
"It was another experience of war," she said moodily, returning to the subject of Hugo. "Yes, something like the final chapter of experience, the trial of this dreamer." Then a wave of restless impatience with her abstraction swept over her. Speaking of dreamers, she herself would stop dreaming. "For experience does make a great difference, doesn't it?" she exclaimed with a sad, knowing smile. After a perceptible pause her eyes suddenly glowed into his. All the commotion of her thought was galvanized into purpose in the look. "I have had a heart full and a mind full of experiences!" she said. "I have been close to war—closer than you! I have looked on while others fought!"
The thing was coming! He should hear the story of the change that war had wrought in her. She appeared to regard him as the one listener whom she had sought; as a confidant who alone could understand her. His gift for listening was in full play as he relaxed and settled back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand lest he should seem to stare. For in his eagerness he would not miss any one of her varied signals of emotion.
She was as vivid as he knew that she would be, her narration flashes of impression in clear detail. Her being seemed transparent to its depths and her moods through the last week to run past him in review. He marvelled at times at her military knowledge; again at her impartiality. She was neither for the Browns nor the Grays; she was simply telling what she had seen. She passed by some horrors; on others she dwelt with fearless emphasis.
"Then the hand-grenades were thrown!" She put her hands over her eyes. "As they fell"—she put her hands over her ears—"oh, the groans!"
"It was the Browns who started it!" he interjected in defence. "I had hoped that we should escape that kind of warfare." He was too intent to recall what he had said to the premier about using every known method of destruction.
"And this is only the beginning, isn't it?" she asked piteously, exhausted with her story.
"Only the beginning!" he agreed.
Again brooding wonder appeared in her eyes, while there was wonder in his eyes—wonder at her.
"And you remain with your property!" he exclaimed in a burst of admiration.
Once more she was looking away into the distance; once more he was studying her profile. He knew that she had gone through her experience without tears and without a scream. She had been subjected to his final test of all merit—war. Courage she had, feminine courage. And he had often asked himself what would happen if he, a great man, should ever meet a great woman. He was baffled by the resources of a mind that was held in detachment under her charm; baffled as to what she was thinking at that moment, only to find her smiling at him, the wonder in her eyes resolving itself into purpose.
"You see, I have been very much stirred up," she said half apologetically. "There are some questions I want to ask—quite practical, selfish questions. You might call them questions of property and mercy. The longer the war lasts the greater will be the loss of life and the misery?"
"Yes, for both sides; and the heavier the expense and the taxes."
"If you win, then we shall be under your flag and pay taxes to you?"
"Yes, naturally."
"The Browns do not increase in population; the Grays do rapidly. They are a great, powerful, civilized race. They stand for civilization!"
"Yes, facts and the world's opinion agree," he replied. Puzzled he might well be by this peculiar catechism. He could only continue to reply until he should see where she was leading.
"And your victory will mean a new frontier, a new order of international relations and a long peace, you think? Peace—a long peace!"
Was there ever a soldier who did not fight for peace? Was there ever a call for more army-corps or guns that was not made in the name of peace? He had his ready argument, spoken with the forcible conviction of an expert.
"This war was made for peace—the only kind of peace that there can be," he said. "My ambition, if any glory comes to me out of this war, is to have later generations say: 'He brought peace!'"
Though the premier, could he have heard this, might have smiled, even grinned, he would have understood Westerling's unconsciousness of inconsistency. The chief of staff had set himself a task in victory which had no military connection. Without knowing why, he wanted to win ascendancy over her mind.
"The man of action!" exclaimed Marta, her eyes opening very wide, as they would to let in the light when she heard something new that pleased her or gave food for thought. "The man of action, who thinks of an ideal as a thing not of words but as the end of action!"
"Exactly!" said Westerling, sensible of another of her gifts. She could get the essence of a thing in a few words. "When we have won and set another frontier, the power of our nation will be such in the world that the Browns can never afford to attack us," he went on. "Indeed, no two of the big nations of Europe can afford to make war without our consent. We shall be the arbiters of international dissensions. We shall command peace—yes, the peace of force, of fact! If it could be won in any other way I should not be here on this veranda in command of an army of invasion. That was my idea—for that I planned." He was making up for having overshot himself in his confession that he had brought on the war as a final step for his ambition.
"You mean that you can gain peace by propaganda and education only when human nature has so changed that we can have law and order and houses are safe from burglary and pedestrians from pickpockets without policemen? Is that it?" she asked.
"Yes, yes! You have it! You have found the wheat in the chaff."
"Perhaps because I have been seeing something of human nature—the human nature of both the Browns and the Grays at war. I have seen the Browns throwing hand-grenades and the Grays in wanton disorder in our dining-room directly they were out of touch with their officers!" she said sadly, as one who hates to accept disillusionment but must in the face of logic.
Westerling made no reply except to nod, for a movement on her part preoccupied him. She leaned forward, as she had when she had told him he would become chief of staff, her hands clasped over her knee, her eyes burning with a question. It was the attitude of the prophecy. But with the prophecy she had been a little mystical; the fire in her eyes had precipitated an idea. Now it forged another question.
"And you think that you will win?" she asked. "You think that you will win?" she repeated with the slow emphasis which demands a careful answer.
The deliberateness of his reply was in keeping with her mood. He was detached; he was a referee.
"Yes, I know that we shall. Numbers make it so, though there be no choice of skill between the two sides."
His tone had the confidence of the flow of a mighty river in its destination on its way to the sea. There was nothing in it of prayer, of hope, of desperation, as there had been in Lanstron's "We shall win!" spoken to her in the arbor at their last interview. She drew forward slightly in her chair. Her eyes seemed much larger and nearer to him. They were sweeping him up and down as if she were seeing the slim figure of Lanstron in contrast to Westerling's sturdiness; as if she were measuring the might of the five millions behind him and the three millions behind Lanstron. She let go a half-whispered "Yes!" which seemed to reflect the conclusion gained from the power of his presence.
"Then my mother's and my own interests are with you—the interests of peace are with you!" she declared.
She did not appear to see the sudden, uncontrolled gleam of victory in his eyes; for now she was looking fixedly at the point where Hugo had stood. By this time it had become a habit for Westerling to wait silently for her to come out of her abstractions. To disturb one might make it unproductive.
"Then if I want to help the cause of peace I should help the Grays!"
The exclamation was more to herself than to him. He was silent. This girl in a veranda chair desiring to aid him and his five million bayonets and four thousand guns! Quixote and the windmills—but it was amazing; it was fine! The golden glow of the sunset was running in his veins in a paean of personal triumph. The profile turned ever so little. Now it was looking at the point where Dellarme had lain dying. Westerling noted the smile playing on the lips. It had the quality of a smile over a task completed—Dellarme's smile. She started; she was trembling all over in the resistance of some impulse—some impulse that gradually gained headway and at last broke its bonds.
"For I can help—I can help!" she cried out, turning to him in wild indecision which seemed to plead for guidance. "It's so terrible—yet if it would hasten peace—I—I know much of the Browns' plan of defence! I know where they are strong in the first line and—and one place where they are weak there—and a place where they are weak in the main line!"
"You do!" Westerling exploded. The plans of the enemy! The plans that neither Bouchard's saturnine cunning, nor bribes, nor spies could ascertain! It was like the bugle-call to the hunter. But he controlled himself. "Yes, yes!" He was thoughtful and guarded.
"Do you think it is right to tell?" Marta gasped half inarticulately.
"Right? Yes, to hasten the inevitable—to save lives!" declared Westerling with deliberate assurance.
"I—I want to see an end of the killing! I—" She sprang to her feet as if about to break away tumultuously, but paused, swaying unsteadily, and passed her hand across her eyes.
"We intend a general attack on the first line of defence to-night!" he exclaimed, his supreme thought leaping into words.
"And you would want the information about the first line to-night if—if it is to be of service?"
"Yes, to-night!"
Marta brought her hands together in a tight clasp. Her gaze fluttered for a minute over the tea-table. When she looked up her eyes were calm.
"It is a big thing, isn't it?" she said. "A thing not to be done in an impulse. I try never to do big things in an impulse. When I see that I am in danger of it I always say: 'Go by yourself and think for half an hour!' So I must now. In a little while I will let you know my decision."
Without further formality she started across the lawn to the terrace steps. Westerling watched her sharply, passing along the path of the second terrace, pacing slowly, head bent, until she was out of sight. Then he stood for a time getting a grip on his own emotions before he went into the house.