What am I? What have I done? What am I about to do? shot as forked shadows over the hot lava-flow of Malta's impulse. The vitality that Westerling had felt by suggestion from a still profile rejoiced in a quickening of pace directly she was out of sight of the veranda. All the thinking she had done that afternoon had been in pictures; some saying, some cry, some groan, or some smile went with every picture.
Coming to the arbor she slowed down for a step or two, arrested by the recollection of her last meeting with Lanstron. There it was that she had scored him for making her an accomplice of trickery. She saw his twitching hand, and the misery in his eyes and the cadence of his words came as clearly as notes from a violin in a silent chamber to her ears. She nodded in affirmation; she shook her head in negation; she frowned; she laughed strangely, and hurried on.
The sitting-room of the tower was empty to other eyes but not to hers. In imagination she saw Feller standing by the table in the dejection of his heart-break when he faced her and Lanstron, his secret disclosed; and the appeal was more potent in memory than it had been at the time. She went on into the bedroom, which had been formerly the tool-room. On the threshold of the steps into the darkness she glanced back, to see Feller's face transfixed as it had been when he discovered the presence of interlopers—transfixed in fighting rage.
The lantern was in the corner at hand. Only yesterday, in want of occupation, as she thought, she had cleaned the chimney and trimmed the wick. It seemed as if Lanny's fingers were lighting it now; as if he were leading the way as he had on her first visit to the telephone. After her hastening steps had carried her along the tunnel to the telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish light of the lantern.
Conscious mind had torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had resented Feller's part—what a part she had been playing! Every word, every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after Westerling confessed that he had made war for his own ends had been subtly prompted by a purpose whose actuality terrified her.
Her hypocrisy, she realized, was as black as the wall of darkness beyond the lantern's gleam. All her pictures became a whirling involution of extravaganza and all the speeches of the characters of the scenes a kind of wail. Then this demoralization passed, as a nightmare passes, with Westerling's boast again in her ears. She was seeing Hugo Mallin; hearing him announce his principles in sight of the spot where Dellarme had died:
"I love my country.... But I know that other men love theirs.... Men should be brave for their convictions.... The Browns are fighting for their homes.... They are fighting, as I should want to fight, against murder and burglary.... I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them."
She was seeing the faces of her children; she was hearing them repeat:
"But I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him; but if he then persists I shall fight for my home."
When war's principles, enacted by men, were based on sinister trickery called strategy and tactics, should not women, using such weapons as they had, also fight for their homes? Marta's hands swept down from her eyes; she was on fire with resolution.
Forty miles away a bell in Lanstron's bedroom and at his desk rang simultaneously. At the time he and Partow were seated facing each other across a map on the table of the room where they worked together. No persuasion of the young vice-chief, no edict of the doctors, could make the old chief take exercise or shorten his hours.
"I know. I know myself!" he said. "I know my duty. And you are learning, my boy, learning!"
Every day the flabby cheeks grew pastier and the pouches under the eyebrows heavier. But there was no dimming of the eagle flashes of the eyes, no weakening of the will. Last night Lanstron had turned as white as chalk when Partow staggered on rising from the table, the veins on his temples knotted blue whip-cords. Yet after a few hours' sleep he reappeared with firm step, fresh for the fray.
The paraphernalia around these two was the same as that around Westerling. Only the atmosphere of the staff was different. It had a quality of sober and buoyant alertness and fatality of determination rather than rigid confidence. Otherwise, there was the same medley of typewriters and telegraph instruments, the same types of busy officers and clerks that occupied the Galland house. To them, at least, war had brought no surprises. Its routine was as they had anticipated it there in the big division headquarters building, dissociated from the actual experience of the intimate emotions of the front. Each man was performing the part set for him. No man knew much of any other man's part. Partow alone knew all, and Lanstron was trying to grasp all and praying that Partow's old body should still feed his mind with energy. Lanstron was thinner and paler, a new and glittering intensity in his eyes.
A messenger had just brought in two despatches from the telegraph room. One was from the taciturn press bureau of the Grays which flashed into the Browns' headquarters from a neutral country at the same time that it flashed around the world to illumine bulletin-boards in every language of civilization. Day after day the Grays had announced the occupation of fresh positions. This was the only news that they had permitted egress—the news which read like the march of victory to the eager world of the press, hastening to quick conclusions. To-day came the official word that Westerling had established his headquarters on conquered territory. Proof, this, that five could drive back three; that the weak could not resist the strong!
"Hm-m—indeed!" exclaimed Partow, lifting his brow into massive, corrugated wrinkles. "It may affect the stock market, but not the result."
The other despatch was also out of the land of the Grays, but not by Westerling's consent or knowledge. By devious ways it had broken through the censorship of the frontier in cunning cipher. It told of artillery concentrations three days old; it told only what the aeroplanes had already seen; it told what the Grays had done but nothing of what they intended to do.
When word of Feller's defection came, Lanstron realized for the first time by Partow's manner that the old chief of staff, with all his deprecation of the telephone scheme as chimerical, had grounded a hope on it.
"There was the chance that we might know—so vital to the defence—what they were going to do before and not after the attack," he said.
Yet the story of how Feller yielded to the temptation of the automatic had made the nostrils of the old war-horse quiver with a dramatic breath, and instead of the command of a battery of guns, which Lanstron had promised, the chief made it a battalion. He had drawn down his brows when he heard that Marta had asked that the wire be left intact; he had shot a shrewd, questioning glance at Lanstron and then beat a tattoo on the table and half grinned as he grumbled under his breath:
"She is afraid of being lonesome! No harm done!" A week had passed since the Grays had taken the Galland house, and still no word from Marta. The ring of the bell brought Lanstron to his feet with a startled, boyish bound.
"Very springy, that tendon of Achilles!" muttered Partow. "And, my boy, take care, take care!" he called suddenly in his sonorous voice, as vast and billowy as his body. "Take care! She might unwittingly repeat something you said—and hold on!" He was amazingly light and vigorous on his feet as he rose and hurried after Lanstron with the quick, short steps of active adiposity. "She may have seen or heard something. Ask—ask what is the spirit of the staff, of the soldiers who have fought? What is the truth about their losses? What—" He broke off at the door of Lanstron's bedroom. Lanstron had flung aside a bathrobe that covered a panel door in the closet and already had the receiver in his hand. "But you know what to ask!" concluded Partow. A flush of embarrassment crept into the pasty cheeks and a sparkle into his fine old eyes as he withdrew to acquit himself of being an eavesdropper.
It was Marta's voice and yet not Marta's, this voice that beat in nervous waves over the wire.
"Lanny—yes, I, Lanny! You were right. Westerling planned to make war deliberately to satisfy his ambition. He told me so. The first general attack on the first line of defence is to-night. Westerling says so!" She had to pause for breath. "And, Lanny, I want to know some position of the Browns which is weak—not actually weak, maybe, but some position where the Grays expect terrible resistance and will not find it—where you will let them in!"
"In the name of—Marta! Marta, what—"
"I am going to fight for the Browns—for my home!"
In the sheer satisfaction of explaining herself to herself, of voicing her sentiments, she sent the pictures which had wrought the change moving across the screen before Lanstron's amazed vision. There was no room for interruption on his part, no question or need of one. The wire seemed to quiver with the militant tension of her spirit. It was Marta aflame who was talking at the other end; not aflame for him, but with a purpose that revealed all the latent strength of her personality and daring.
"Yes, the only way is to fight for your home," she concluded. "Otherwise, the world would be to the bully and the heads of saints and philosophers and teachers would be egg-shells under his bludgeon."
"It seems," said Lanstron, "that this is almost like my own view."
He was sorry before the words were fairly out of his mouth that he had taken that tack. It was asking her to back down abruptly from her old principles, which only the weak proselyte will do readily; and she was not a proselyte at all, to her conception.
"No, no!" She etched her reply into his mind with acid, "My profession is peace; it is not war. I am caught with my back to the wall. If the Browns lose, the Gray flag floats over my home. As Westerling says, everybody must take orders from the Grays then. Oh, the mockery of his repairing the damage done to our house and grounds! Let him repair the damage done to fathers and mothers by bringing their sons sacrificed to the ambition for conquest back to life! Oh, I got the whole of him reflected in the mirror of himself this afternoon when he was comfortably taking tea, and in no danger, and sending men to death!"
There Lanstron winced over a characterization that might apply to him. He could think of only one thing that would ever heal the wound. Perhaps the chance for it would come some day.
"Yes," she went on, "sitting there so comfortably and serenely and deciding that a man who was ready to die for his convictions must be shot for cowardice! My views are like Hugo Mallin's and my back is against the wall. But to the work, Lanny! I have a half-hour in which to make up my mind"—she laughed curiously as she repeated the phrase—"in which to make up my mind." Briefly she recounted what about: "I want to give him positive information of a weak point that can be taken easily."
"But, Marta—Marta—have you considered what a terrible risk—what—" he protested, the chief of intelligence now submerged in the man.
"No more than for Feller. I sent Feller away and I am taking his place. How is he? Did he get his guns?"
"Yes, not a battery, but a battalion—a major's command—and the iron cross, too!"
"Splendid! Oh, I'd like to see him in uniform directing their fire! How happy he must be! But, are you going to do your part? Are you going to give me the information?"
"I shall have to ask Partow. It's a pretty big thing."
"Yes—only that is not all my plan, my little plan. After they have taken the first line of defence—and they will get it, won't they?"
"Yes, we shall yield in the end, yield rather than suffer too great losses there that will weaken the defence on the main line."
"Then I want to know where it is that you want Westerling to attack on the main line, so that we can get him to attack there. That—that will help, won't it?"
"Yes."
"Of course, all the while I shall be getting news from him—when I have proven my loyalty and have his complete confidence—and I'll telephone it to you. I am sure I can get something worth while with you to direct me; don't you think so, Lanny?"
She put the question as simply as if she were asking if she might sew on a button for him. It had the charm of an intimate fellowship of purpose. It appeared free of the least realization of the magnitude of her undertaking. Didn't Mrs. Galland believe that blood would tell? And hadn't the old premier, her grandfather, said: "You can afford to be fussed about little things but never about big things"?
"I'll hold the wire, Lanny. Ask Partow!" she concluded. Of the two she was the steadier.
"Well?" said Partow, looking up at the sound of Lanstron's step. Then he half raised himself from his chair at sight of a Lanstron with eyes in a daze of brilliancy; a Lanstron with his maimed hand twitching in an outstretched gesture; a Lanstron in the dilemma of being at the same time lover and chief of intelligence. Should he let her make the sacrifice of everything that he held to be sacred to a woman's delicacy? Should he not return to the telephone and tell her that he would not permit her to play such a part? Partow's voice cut in on his demoralization with the sharpness of a blade.
"Well, what, man, what?" he demanded. He feared that the girl might be dead. Anything that could upset Lanstron in this fashion struck a chord of sympathy and apprehension.
Lanstron advanced to the table, pressed his hands on the edge, and, now master of himself, began an account of Marta's offer. Partow's formless arms lay inert on the table, his soft, pudgy fingers outspread on the map and his bulk settled deep in the chair, while his eagle eyes were seeing through Lanstron, through a mountain range, into the eyes of a woman and a general on the veranda of an enemy's headquarters. The plan meant giving, giving in the hope of receiving much in return. Would he get the return?
"A woman was the ideal one for the task we intrusted to Feller," he mused, "a gentlewoman, big enough, adroit enough, with her soul in the work as no paid woman's could be! There seemed no such one in the world!"
"But to let her do it!" gasped Lanstron.
"It is her suggestion, not yours? She offers herself? She wants no persuasion?" Partow asked sharply.
"Entirely her suggestion," said Lanstron. "She offers herself for her country—for the cause for which our soldiers will give their lives by the thousands. It is a time of sacrifice."
Partow raised his arms. They were not formless as he brought them down with sledge-hammer force to the table.
"Your tendon of Achilles? My boy, she is your sword-arm!" His sturdy forefinger ran along the line of frontier under his eye with little staccato leaps. "Eh?" he chuckled significantly, finger poised.
"Let them up the Bordir road and on to redoubts 36 and 37, you mean?" asked Lanstron.
"You have it! The position looks important, but so well do we command it that it is not really vital. Yes, the Bordir road is her bait for Westerling!" Partow waved his hand as if the affair were settled.
"But," interjected Lanstron, "we have also to decide on the point of the main defence which she is to make Westerling think is weak."
"Hm-m!" grumbled Partow. "That is not necessary to start with. We can give that to her later over the telephone, can't we, eh?"
"She asked for it now."
"Why?" demanded Partow with one of his shrewd, piercing looks.
"She did not say, but I can guess," explained Lanstron. "She must put all her cards on the table; she must tell Westerling all she knows at once. If she tells him piecemeal it might lead to the supposition that she still had some means of communication with the Browns."
"Of course, of course!" Partow spatted the flat of his hand resoundingly on the map. "As I decided the first time I met her, she has a head, and when a woman has a head for that sort of thing there is no beating her. Well—" he was looking straight into Lanstron's eyes, "well, I think we know the point where we could draw them in on the main line, eh?"
"Up the apron of the approach from the Engadir valley. We yield the advance redoubts on either side."
"Meanwhile, we have massed heavily behind the redoubt. We retake the advance redoubts in a counter-attack and—" Partow brought his fist into his palm with a smack.
"Yes, if we could do that! If we could get them to expend their attack there!" put in Lanstron very excitedly for him.
"We must! She shall help!" Partow was on his feet. He had reached across the table and seized Lanstron's shoulders in a powerful if flesh-padded grip. Then he turned Lanstron around toward the door of his bedroom and gave him a mighty slap of affection. "My boy, the brightest hope of victory we have is holding the wire for you. Tell her that a bearded old behemoth, who can kneel as gracefully as a rheumatic rhinoceros, is on both knees at her feet, kissing her hands and trying his best, in the name of mercy, to keep from breaking into verse of his own composition."
Back at the telephone, Lanstron, in the fervor of the cheer and the enthusiasm that had transported his chief, gave Marta Partow's message.
"You, Marta, are our brightest hope of victory!"
"Yes?" The monosyllable was detached, dismal, labored. "A woman can be that!" she exclaimed in an uncertain tone, which grew into the distraction of clipped words and broken sentences. "A woman play-acting—a woman acting the most revolting hypocrisy—influences the issue between two nations! Her deceit deals in the lives of sons precious to fathers and mothers, the fate of frontiers, of institutions! Think of it! Think of machines costing countless millions—machines of flesh and blood, with their destinies shaped by one little bit of lying information! Think of the folly of any civilization that stakes its triumphs on such a gamble! Am I not right? Isn't it true? Isn't it?"
"Yes, yes, Marta! But—I—" If she were weakening it was not his place to try to strengthen her purpose.
"I was thinking, only thinking!" she murmured reflectively. "That's not the thing now!" she added with sudden force. "Partow gave you the positions?"
He described the Bordir position. She repeated the description after him with a stoical matter-of-factness to make sure that she had it correctly.
"I must actually know in order to be convincing," she said. "Now that of the main line."
He did not include in the description of Engadir any reference to the Browns' plan of a crushing counter-attack. But as she was repeating this, her calm tone broke into an outcry of horror, as the nature of what he was inadvertently concealing flashed into her mind. She was seeing another picture of imagination, with all the hideous detail of realism drawn from her week's experiences.
"That column of Grays will go forward cheering with victory, led on, tricked on—and then they will find themselves in a shambles. No going forward, no going back through the cross-fire! Is that it?"
"Yes, something like that, though not exactly a cross-fire—not unless the enemy has poorer generals than we think."
"But that will be the object and the effect—wholesale slaughter?"
"Yes!" assented Lanstron honestly.
"And a woman whose greatest happiness and pride was in teaching the righteousness and the beauty of peace to children—her lie will send them to death!" she moaned. "I shall be a party to murder!"
"No more than Westerling! No more than any general! No—" But he paused in his argument. Conviction must come to her from within, not from without. He stood graven and wordless, while she was tortured in the hell of her mind's creation.
She was hearing the cry in the night of the Gray soldier who had fallen from the dirigible in the first day's fighting; the agonized groans of the men under the wall of the terrace when the hand-grenades spattered human flesh as if it were jelly. But there was Dellarme smiling; there was Hugo Mallin saying that he would fight for his own home; there was Stransky, who had thrown the hand-grenade, bringing in an exhausted old man on his back from under fire; there was Feller as he rallied Dellarme's men; and—and there was Lanny waiting at the other end of the wire—and a burglar should not take her home.
"Men must have the courage of their convictions!" Hugo had said. Hers were all for peace. But there was not peace. There could not be peace until the war demon had had his fill of killing and one side had to cry for mercy. Which side should that be? That was the only question.
"It will the sooner end fighting, won't it, Lanny?" she asked in a small, tense voice.
"Yes."
"And the only real end that means real peace is to prove that the weak can hold back the strong from their threshold?"
"Yes."
Even now Westerling might be on the veranda, perhaps waiting for news that would enable him to crush the weak; to prove that the law of five pounds of human flesh against three, and five bayonets against three, is the law of civilization.
"Yes, yes, yes!" The constriction was gone from her throat; there was a drum-beat in her soul. "Depend on me, Lanny!" It was Feller's favorite phrase spoken by the one who was to take his place. "Yes, I'm ready to make any sacrifice now. For what am I? What is one woman compared to such a purpose? I don't care what is said of me or what becomes of me if we can win! Good-by, Lanny, till I call you up again! And God with us!"
"God with us!" as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it in the midst of action.
Waiting on the path of the second terrace for Westerling to come, Marta realized the full meaning of her task. Day in and day out she was to have suspense at her elbow and the horror of hypocrisy on her conscience, the while keeping her wits nicely balanced. She must feel her part and at the same time she must be sufficiently conscious that she was placing a part not to let any impulse of aversion betray her. The tea-table scene had been a rehearsal; coming was apremièrebefore the ghostly, still faces across the bent glare of the footlights. No ready-made lines, hers She must create them. Every word must be the right word and spoken in the right way, all for the deception of one man.
When she saw Westerling appear on the veranda and start over the lawn she felt dizzy and uncertain of her capabilities. In the gathering dusk he seemed of giant stature, too masterful to be outwitted by any trickery she might devise. She wondered if she would be able to articulate a word; if she would not turn and flee.
"I have considered all that you said for my guidance and I have decided," she began.
Marta heard her own voice with the relief of a singer in a début who, with knees shaking, finds that her notes are true. She was looking directly at Westerling in profound seriousness. Though knees shook, lips and chin could aid eyes in revealing the painful fatigue of a battle that had raged in the mind of a woman who went away for half an hour to think for herself.
"I have concluded," she went on, "that it is an occasion for the sacrifice of private ethics to a great purpose, the sooner to end the slaughter."
"All true!" whispered an inner voice. Its tone was Lanny's, in the old days of their comradeship. It gave her strength. All true!
"Yes, an end—a speedy end!" said Westerling with a fine, inflexible emphasis. "That is your prayer and mine and the prayer of all lovers of humanity."
"He is not thinking of humanity, but of individual victory!" whispered another voice, which had the mellow tone of Hugo Mallin's deliberate wisdom.
"It is little that I know, but such as it is you shall have it," she began, conscious of his guarded scrutiny. When she told him of Bordir, the weak point in the first line of the Browns' defence, she noted no change in his steady look; but with the mention of Engadir in the main line she detected a gleam in his eyes that had the merciless delight of a cutting edge of steel. "I have made my sacrifice to some purpose? The information is worth something to you?" she asked wistfully.
"Yes, yes! Yes, it promises that way," he replied thoughtfully.
Quietly he began a considerate catechism. Soon she was subtly understanding that her answers lacked the convincing details that he sought. She longed to avert her eyes from his for an instant, but she knew that this would be fatal. She felt the force of him directed in professional channels, free of all personal relations, beating as a strong light on her bare statements. How could a woman ever have learned two such vital secrets? How could it happen that two such critical points as Bordir and Engadir should go undefended? No tactician, no engineer but would have realized their strategic importance. Did she know what she was saying? How did she get her knowledge? These, she understood, were the real questions that underlay Westerling's polite indirection.
"Invention! Quick, quick! How did you find out? Quick and naturally and obviously—pure invention; no half-way business!" whispered still another voice, the voice of that most facile of story-builders, Feller, this time.
"But I have not told you the sources of my information! Isn't that like a woman!" she exclaimed. "You see, it did not concern me at all at the time I heard it. I didn't even realize its importance and I didn't hear much," she proceeded, her introduction giving time for improvisation. "You see, Partow was inspecting the premises with Colonel Lanstron. My mother had known Partow in her younger days when my grandfather was premier. We had them both to luncheon."
"Yes?" put in Westerling, betraying his eagerness. Partow and Lanstron! Then her source was one of authority, not the gossip of subalterns!
"And it occurs to me now that, even while he was our guest," she interjected in sudden indignation—"that even while he was our guest Partow was planning to make our grounds a redoubt!"
"Bully! Very feminine and convincing!" whispered the voice of Feller.
"After luncheon I remember Partow saying, 'We are going to have a look at the crops,' and they went for a walk out to the knoll where the fighting began."
"Yes! When was this?" Westerling asked keenly.
"Only about six weeks ago," answered Marta.
"That's it! That's splendid! If you'd said a year ago there would have been time enough in the meanwhile to fortify!" whispered the voice of Feller encouragingly. "You're going fine! Keep it up!"
"Later, I came upon them unexpectedly after they had returned," Marta went on. "They were sitting there on that seat concealed by the shrubbery. I was on the terrace steps unobserved and I couldn't help overhearing them. Their voices grew louder with the interest of their discussion. I caught something about appropriations and aeroplanes and Bordir and Engadir, and saw that Lanstron was pleading with his chief. He wanted a sum appropriated for fortifications to be applied to building planes and dirigibles. Finally, Partow consented, and I recall his exact words: 'They're shockingly archaically defended, especially Engadir,' he said, 'but they can wait until we get further appropriations in the fall.'" She was so far under the spell of her own invention that she believed the reality of her words, reflected in her wide-open eyes which seemed to have nothing to hide.
"That is all," she exclaimed with a shudder—"all my eavesdropping, all my breach of confidence! If—if it—" and her voice trembled with the intensity of the one purpose that was shining with the light of truth through the murk of her deception—"it will only help to end the slaughter!" She held out her hand convulsively in parting as if she would leave the rest with him.
"I think it will," he said soberly. "I think it will prove that you have done a great service," he repeated as he caught both her hands, which were cold from her ordeal. His own were warm with the strong beating of his heart stirred by the promise of what he had just heard. But he did not prolong the grasp. He was as eager to be away to his work as she to be alone. "I think it will. You will know in the morning," he added.
His steps were sturdier than ever in the power of five against three as he started back to the house. When he reached the veranda, Bouchard, the saturnine chief of intelligence, appeared in the doorway of the dining-room: or, rather, reappeared, for he had been standing there throughout the interview of Westerling and Marta, whose heads were just visible, above the terrace wall, to his hawk eyes.
"A little promenade in the open and my mind made up," said Westerling, clapping Bouchard on the shoulder.
"Something about an attack to-night?" asked Bouchard.
"You guess right. Call the others."
Five minutes later he was seated at the head of the dining-room table with his chiefs around him waiting for their chairman to speak. He asked some categorical questions almost perfunctorily, and the answer to each was, "Ready!" with, in some instances, a qualification—the qualification made by regimental and brigade commanders that, though they could take the position in front of them, the cost would be heavy. Yes, all were willing and ready for the first general assault of the war, but they wanted to state the costs as a matter of professional self-defence.
Westerling could pose when it served his purpose. Now he rose and, going to one of the wall maps, indicated a point with his forefinger.
"If we get that we have the most vital position, haven't we?"
Some uttered a word of assent; some only nodded. A glance or two of curiosity was exchanged. Why should the chief of staff ask so elementary a question? Westerling was not unconscious of the glances or of their meaning. They gave dramatic value to his next remark.
"We are going to mass for our main attack in front at Bordir!"
"But," exclaimed four or five officers at once, "that is the heart of the position! That is—"
"I believe it is weak—that it will fall, and to-night!"
"You have information, then, information that I have not?" asked Bouchard.
"No more than you," replied Westerling. "Not as much if you have anything new."
"Nothing!" admitted Bouchard wryly. He lowered his head under Westerling's penetrating look in the consciousness of failure.
"I am going on a conviction—on putting two and two together!" Westerling announced. "I am going on my experience as a soldier, as a chief of staff. If I am wrong, I take the responsibility. If I am right, Bordir will be ours before morning. It is settled!"
"If you are right, then," exclaimed Turcas—"well, then it's genius or—" He did not finish the sentence. He had been about to say coincidence; while Westerling knew that if he were right all the rising scepticism in certain quarters, owing to the delay in his programme, would be silenced. His prestige would be unassailable.
"You have been in the tunnel again!" said Mrs. Galland with an emphasis on "again," when Marta came up the stairs, lantern in hand, after telling Lanstron of her interview with Westerling.
"Again—yes!" Marta replied mechanically. Her mind was empty, burned out. She had thought herself through with deceit for the day.
"What interests you so much down there?" Mrs. Galland pursued softly.
Marta realized that she had to deal with a fresh dilemma. She could not be making frequent visits to the telephone without her mother's knowledge; and, as yet, Mrs. Galland knew nothing of the part originally planned for Feller, let alone any inkling of her daughter's part.
"I didn't know but it would be a good place to hide our plate and other treasures," said Marta, offering rather methodically the first invention that came to mind as she threw open-the reflector of the lantern and turned down the wick. She was ashamed of the excuse. It warned her how easy it was becoming for her to lie—yes, lie was the word.
"Don't blow out the light, please," said Mrs. Galland. "I should like to see for myself if the tunnel is a good hiding-place for the plate."
"It's too damp for you down there—it's—" Marta blew out the flame with a sudden gust of breath and bolted across the room and into her chamber, closing the door and taking the lantern with her. In utter fatigue she dropped on the bed. Then came a gentle, prolonged knocking on the door.
"You forgot to leave the lantern," called Mrs. Galland. "I have come to get it, if you please."
Marta did not answer. Her head had sunk forward; her hands, bearing the weight of her body, were resting on her knees. All she could think was that one more lie would break the camel's back.
"Marta, please mayn't I come in?" rose the gentle voice on the other side of the door. "Marta, don't you hear me? I asked if I might come in."
"It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action. "Yes, certainly, mother—yes, do!" she said in a forced, metallic tone.
Mrs. Galland entered to find her daughter before the mirror brushing her hair with hectic vigor. She did not take up the lantern, which Marta had left in the middle of the floor, but seated herself. Her nice deliberation in smoothing out a wrinkle of her skirt over her knees indicated that she meant to stay a while. She folded her plump, white hands; a faint touch of color came into her round, pink cheeks; a trace of a smile knitted itself into the corners of her mouth. She was as she had been—J'y suis! J'y reste!—when the captain of engineers had pleaded with her at the outset of the war to leave the house. In the reflection of the mirror Marta's glance caught hers, which was without reproach or complaint, but very resolute.
"Do you like best to keep it all to yourself, Marta?" Mrs. Galland inquired solicitously.
"What? Keep what?" asked Marta crossly.
"Even if you have been all the way around the world, it might be easier if you allowed me to help you a little," pursued Mrs. Galland.
"Help! Help about what?" said Marta.
That reply, as Marta knew now as an expert in deceit, was a mistake. She was hedging and petulant when she ought to have whirled around gayly and kissed her mother on the cheek, while laughing at such solemnity over a trip of exploration through the tunnel. Mrs. Galland had caught her prevaricating. Not since Marta was a little girl of seven had she "fibbed" to her mother; and on that memorable and ethically instructive occasion her mother had regarded her in this same calm fashion.
"At all events," said Mrs. Galland, "I could help you a little if you would let me comb your hair. You are combing in a most unsystematic way, I must say. Systematic, gentle combing is very good for headaches and—"
There was a twinkle in Mrs. Galland's eye that was not exactly humor; a persistent twinkle that seemed to shine out of every part of the mirror. Her curiosity had come to stay; there was no escaping it. Marta brought her brush down with a bang on the bureau, only to be disgusted with this show of temper which the persistent twinkle had not missed. Her next impulse, unanalyzed because it was one of the oldest and simplest of impulses, made her spin round and drop on her knees at her mother's feet, which was just what had happened when she had started to brave out the last lie—the childhood lie.
Her head buried in her mother's lap, she was sobbing. It was many years since Mrs. Galland had known Marta to sob and she was glad that Marta had not forgotten how. She believed in the value of the law of overflow. When Marta looked up with eyes still moist, it was with the joyous satisfaction that begins a confession. Not once during the recital did the smile fade from Mrs. Galland's lips. She was too well fortified for any kind of a shock to exhibit surprise.
"You see, I could not tell you—I—" Marta concluded, still uncertain what conclusion lay behind her mother's attitude.
"Of course you could not," said Mrs. Galland. "As grandfather—my father, the premier—said; a man action cannot stop to explain everything he does. He must strike while the iron is hot. If you had stopped to discuss every step you would not have gone far—Yes, I should have argued and protested. It was best that I, being as I am—that I should not have been told—not until now."
"And I must go on!" added Marta.
"Of course you must!" replied Mrs. Galland. "You must for the sake of the Browns—the flag your father and grandfather served. They would not have approved of petty deceit, but anything for the cause, any sacrifices, any immolation of self and personal sensibilities. Yes, your father would have been happy, though he had no son, to know that his daughter might do such a service. And we must tell Minna," she added.
"Minna! You think so? Every added link may mean weakness."
"But Minna will see you going and coming from the tunnel, too. She is for the Browns with all her heart. They are her people and, besides," Mrs. Galland smiled rather broadly, "that giant Stransky is with the Browns!" So Minna was told.
"I'd like to kiss your skirt, Miss Galland!" exclaimed Minna in admiration.
"Better kiss me!" said Marta, throwing her arms around the girl. "We must stand together and think together in any emergency."
Soon after dark the attack began. Flashes of bursting shells and flashes from gun mouths and glowing sheets of flame from rifles made ugly revelry, while the beams of search-lights swept hither and thither. This kept up till shortly after midnight, when it died down and, where hell's concert had raged, silent darkness shrouded the hills. Marta knew that Bordir was taken without having to ask Lanstron or wait for confirmation from Westerling.
She was seated in the recess of the arbor the next morning, when she heard the approach of those regular, powerful steps whose character had become as distinct to her as those of a member of her own family. Five Against three! five against three! they were saying to her; while down the pass road and the castle road ran the stream of wounded from last night's slaughter.
Posted in the drawing-room of the Galland house were the congratulations of the premier to Westerling, who had come from the atmosphere of a staff that accorded to him a military insight far above the analysis of ordinary standards. But he was too clever a man to vaunt his triumph. He knew how to carry his honors. He accepted success as his due, in a matter-of-course manner that must inspire confidence in further success.
"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it—we did it—we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"
Onlytwenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio, she was thinking.
"Then the end—then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.
"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.
He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.
"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.
She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.
"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on. "I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.
"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.
"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.
"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.
"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded. "They passed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted something in mind: a memory of real companionship."
"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.
"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat. "You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has passed in the last twenty-four hours."
She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror, crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and appealing in the full tide of another purpose.
"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish—not for army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."
"In a cause!" she interrupted hurriedly, wildly, to stop him from going further, only to find that her intonation was such that it was drawing him on.
"That fatality seemed to be working itself out to the soldier so much older than yourself in renewed youth, in another form of ambition. I hoped that there was more than the cause that led you to trust me. I hoped—"
Was he testing her? Was he playing a part of his own to make certain that she was not playing one? She looked up swiftly for answer. There was no gainsaying what she saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers with the power of an overwhelming masculine passion and a maturity of intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But who could know better the craft of courtship than one of Westerling's experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify a desire.
"I did not expect this—I—" The words escaped tumultuously and chokingly.
She heard all the voices in chorus: "Look out! Look out!" And then the voice of Feller alone, insinuating, with a sinister mischievousness: "What more could you ask? Now that you have him, hold him! For God and country—for our dear Brown land!"
Hold a man who was making love to her by the tricks of the courtesan! But what kind of love? He was bending so close to her that she felt his breath on her cheek burning hot, and she was sickeningly conscious that he was looking her over in that point-by-point manner which she had felt across the tea-table at the hotel. This horrible thing in his glance she had sometimes seen in strangers on her travels, and it had made her think that she was wise to carry a little revolver. She wanted to strike him.
"Confess! Confess!" called all her own self-respect. "Make an end to your abasement!"
"Confession, after the Browns have given up Bordir! Confession that makes Lanny, not Westerling, your dupe!" came the reply, which might have been telegraphed into her mind from the high, white forehead of Partow bending over his maps. "Confession, betraying the cause of the right against the wrong; the three to the conquering five! No! You are in the things. You may not retreat now."
For a few seconds only the duel of argument thundered in her temples—seconds in which her lips were parted and quivering and her eyes dilated with an agitation which the man at her side could interpret as he pleased. A prompting devil—a devil roused by that thing in his eyes—urging a finesse in double-dealing which only devils understand, made her lips hypnotically turn in a smile, her eyes soften, and sent her hand out to Westerling in a trance-like gesture. For an instant it rested on his arm with telling pressure, though she felt it burn with shame at the point of contact.
"We must not think of that now," she said. "We must think of nothing personal; of nothing but your work until your work is done!"
The prompting devil had not permitted a false note in her voice. Her very pallor, in fixity of idea, served her purpose. Westerling drew a deep breath that seemed to expand his whole being with greater appreciation of her. Yet that harried hunger, the hunger of a beast, was still in his glance.
"This is like you—like what I want you to be!" he said. "You are right." He caught her hand, enclosing it entirely in his grip, and she was sensible, in a kind of dazed horror, of the thrill of his strength. "Nothing can stop us! Numbers will win! Hard fighting in the mercy of a quick end!" he declared with his old rigidity of five against three which was welcome to her. "Then," he added—"and then—"
"Then!" she repeated, averting her glance. "Then—" There the devil ended the sentence and she withdrew her hand and felt the relief of one escaping suffocation, to find that he had realized that anything further during that interview would be banality and was rising to go.
"I don't feel decent!" she thought. "Society turned on Minna for a human weakness—but I—I'm not a human being! I am one of the pawns of the machine of war!"
Walking slowly with lowered head as she left the arbor, she almost ran into Bouchard, who apologized with the single word "Pardon!" as he lifted his cap in overdone courtesy, which his stolid brevity made the more conspicuous.
"Miss Galland, you seem lost in abstraction," he said in sudden loquacity. "I am almost on the point of accusing you of being a poet."
"Accusing!" she replied. "Then you must think that I would write bad poetry."
"On the contrary, I should say excellent—using the sonnet form," he returned.
"I might make a counter accusation, only that yours would be the epic form," answered Marta. "For you, too, seem fond of rambling."
There was a veiled challenge in the hawk eyes, which she met with commonplace politeness in hers, before he again lifted his cap and proceeded on his way.