XII
A CRISIS WITHIN A CRISIS
"A broken-hearted man playing deaf; a secret telephone installed on our premises without our consent—this is all I know so far," said Marta, who was opposite Lanstron at one end of the circular seat in the arbor of Mercury, leaning back, with her weight partly resting on her hand spread out on the edge of the bench, head down, lashes lowered so that they formed a curtain for her glance. "I listen!" she added.
"Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here. The Browns will fall back step by step, and we mean, with relatively small cost to ourselves, to make the Grays pay a heavy price for each step—just as heavy as we can!"
They had often argued before with all the weapons known to controversy; but now the realization that his soldierly precision was bringing the forces of war into their personal relations struck her cold, with a logic as cold as his own seemed to her.
"You need not use euphonious terms," she said without lifting her lashes or any movement except a quick, nervous gesture of her free hand that fell back into place on her lap. "What you mean is that you will kill as many as possible of the Grays, isn't it? And if you could kill five for every man you lost, that would be splendid, wouldn't it?"
"I don't think of it as splendid. There is nothing splendid about war," he objected; "not to me, Marta."
"Still you would like to kill five to one, even ten to one, wouldn't you?" she persisted.
"Marta, you are merciless!"
"So is war. It should be treated mercilessly."
"Yes, twenty to one if they try to take our land!" he declared. "If we could keep up that ratio the war would not last more than a week. It would mean a great saving of lives in the end. We should win."
"Exactly. Thank you. Westerling could not have said it better as a reason for another army-corps. For the love of humanity—the humanity of our side—please give us more weapons for murder! And after you have made them pay five to one or ten to one in human lives for the tangent, what then? Go on! I want to look at war face to face, free of the will-o'-the-wisp glamour that draws on soldiers!"
"We fall back to our first line of defence, fighting all the time. The Grays occupy La Tir, which will be out of the reach of our guns. Your house will no longer be in danger, and we happen to know that Westerling means to make it his headquarters."
"Our house Westerling's headquarters!" she repeated. With a start that brought her up erect, alert, challenging, her lashes flickering, she recalled that Westerling had said at parting that he should see her if war came. This corroborated Lanstron's information. One side wanted a spy in the garden; the other a general in the house. Was she expected to make a choice? He had ceased to be Lanny. He personified war. Westerling personified war. "I suppose you have spies under his very nose—in his very staff offices?" she asked.
"And probably he has in ours," said Lanstron, "though we do our best to prevent it."
"What a pretty example of trust among civilized nations!" she exclaimed. "And you say that Westerling, who commands the killing on his side, will be in no danger?"
"Naturally not. As you know, a chief of staff must be at the wire head where all information centres, free of interruption or confusion or any possibility of broken lines of communication with his corps and divisions."
"Then Partow will not be in any danger?"
"For the same reasons, no."
"How comfortable! In perfect safety themselves, they will order other men to death!"
"Marta, you are unjust!" exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as disciple reveres master. "Partow has the iron cross!"—the prized iron cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional courage in action and for that alone. "He won it leading a second charge with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his regiment. The second charge succeeded."
"Yes, I understand," she went on a little wildly. "And perhaps the colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he failed. Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military cult. You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to win either iron or bronze crosses. And, Lanny, are you a person of such distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of danger?"
She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane. If his work were to make war, her work was against war—the mission of her life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he replied:
"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious efficiency which means victory."
"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!" she put in.
"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy business, that would be to my taste."
"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs, that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him, her eyes flaming demand and satire.
"No! War—necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of euphonious terms.
"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at home—but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon—of her certainty that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded and the dying—an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"
"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance—the one out of a thousand. If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed and theirs on the table."
"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"
"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."
She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on her side.
"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac; screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up among soldiers! I know!"
"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff, whether elated or depressed, pick up scraps of conversation, and, as a trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the 'phone to Partow's headquarters."
"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to depend on them for scouting."
"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they were even in the first steps of execution. This"—playing the thought happily—"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta, that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."
"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to talk."
"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.
"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be shot as a spy?" she asked.
"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He refused the assignments I first suggested to him. He objected that they did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience—what a conscience old Gustave has!—by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the chance—the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in a crisis."
"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make use of them."
"You put it bluntly, Marta. You—"
"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips, which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in sympathy.
"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair, his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter dejection—and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the devil's company!"
"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"
"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.
"If there is no war, I hope—after a year or so, I hope and believe that I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had atoned."
"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed. The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief, swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until war comes."
"And then?"
"Lanny, you yourself, with all your information, you don't think—"
"No; though we are nearer it than ever before, it seems to me," he said, choosing his words carefully. "But it is likely that diplomacy will find its way out of this crisis as it has out of many others."
"Then we'll leave that question till the evil day," she replied. "We have had a terrific argument, Lanny, haven't we? And you have won!"
Her fingers flew out to his arm and rested lightly there after an instant's firm pressure, as was her wont after an argument and they sheathed their blades. Their comradeship seemed to be restored in all its old glory of freedom from petty restraint. He was sure of one thing: that she would let her fingers remain on no other man's sleeve in this fashion; and he hoped that she would let them remain there a long time. Very foolish he was about her, very foolish for a piece of human machinery driven by the dynamo of a human will.
"I have an impression that your goodness of heart has won," he suggested gently.
"Or rather let us say that Feller has won."
"Better still, yes, Feller has won!" he agreed. "Oh, it is good, good, good to be here with you, Marta, away from the grind for a little while," he was saying, in the fulness of his anticipation of the hours they should have together before he had to go, when they heard the sound of steps. He looked around to see an orderly from the nearest military wireless station.
"I was told it was urgent, sir," said the orderly, in excuse for his intrusion, as he passed a telegram to Lanstron.
Immediately Lanstron felt the touch of the paper his features seemed to take on a mask that concealed his thought as he read:
"Take night express. Come direct from station to me. Partow."
This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends before he tossed the charred remains away. Marta imagined what he would be like with the havoc of war raging around him—all self-possession and mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.
"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war very soon—within a week or two weeks—what would be your attitude about Feller's remaining?"
"To carry out his plan, you mean?"
"Yes."
There was a perceptible pause on her part.
"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after war begins."
"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.
"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have never deserted the Galland house!"
"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of the fighting."
"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a gesture of impatience.
"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as cover or protection and will be subject to attack."
Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.
"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over glare ice.
"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point! So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."
"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse than Westerling!"
"No, he would use his own premises, his brother's, his father's if it would help. Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an inferno."
"How Christian!" breathed Marta. "I suppose he loves his grandchildren and that they are taught the Lord's prayer!"
"I believe his only pastime is playing with them," admitted Lanstron, stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash. "He tells them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war."
"Worse yet—a hypocrite!"
"But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere. He is working to the same end as you—peace. If the Grays would play with fire he would give them such a burning that they will never try again. He would make war too horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible hereafter. Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!"
"My children's prayer and Partow in the same gallery!" she laughed stonily. "The peace of armament, not of man's superiority to the tiger and the tarantula! And you say it all so calmly. You picture the hell of your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"
"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory—and then chaos!"
"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of spirit that calls for the end of an interview.
"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" he urged.
"Isn't that my affair?" she asked. "Aren't you willing to leave even that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?"
What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the conviction of its logic? Only call up from the depths the two passions of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.
"I love this soil, my country's soil, ours by right—-and I love you! I would be true to both!"
"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's monstrous!"
"I—I—" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.
This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling, injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.
"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.
"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was smiling as when, half stunned and in agony—and ashamed of the fact—he had risen from the débris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all right," he concluded.
She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if she would bare her heart.
"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"
"You mean—I—."
But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the spark.
"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and—oh, this is enough for to-day!"
She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!
"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a chariot of fire bearing my flame—I am that bold, that brazen, that reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into armies—no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"
For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had disappeared.
"If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought; "anything except this beastly—"
But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a tattoo on the casing; no answer.
"Gustave!" he called; no answer.
Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.
"Hello, Lanny!" exclaimed Feller, rising and setting a chair and breaking into a stream of talk. "That's the way they all have to do when they want to attract my attention. I heard your voice and Miss Galland's—having an argument in the garden, I should say. Then I heard your step. Since I became deaf my sense of hearing has really grown keener, just as the blind develop a keener sense of feeling. Eh? eh?" He cupped his hand over his ear in the unctuous enjoyment of his gift of acting. "Yes, Colonel Lanstron, would you like to know what a perfect triumph we're going to pull off in irises next season—but, Lanny, you seem in a hurry!"
"Gustave, I am ordered to headquarters by the night express and I came to tell you that I think it means war."
"War! war!" Feller shouted. "Ye gods and little fishes!" In riotous glee he seized a chair and flung it across the room. "Ye salty, whiskery gods and ye shiny-eyed little fishes! War, do you hear that, you plebeian trousers of the deaf gardener? War!" Flinging the trousers after the chair, he executed a few steps. When he had thus tempered his elation, he grasped Lanstron's arm and, looking into his eyes with feverish resolution and hope, said: "Oh, don't fear! I'll pull it off. And then I shall have paid back—yes, paid back! I shall be a man who can look men in the face again. I need not slink to the other side of the street when I see an old friend coming for fear that he will recognize me. Yes, I could even dare to love a woman of my own world! And—and perhaps the uniform and the guns once more!"
"You may be sure of that. Partow cannot refuse," said Lanstron, deeply affected. After a pause he added: "But I must tell you, Gustave, that Miss Galland, though she is willing that you remain as a gardener, has not yet consented to our plan. She will make no decision until war comes. Perhaps she will refuse. It is only fair that you should know this."
For an instant Feller was downcast; then confidence returned at high pitch.
"Trust me!" he said. "I shall persuade her!"
"I hope you can. It is a chance that might turn the scales of victory—a chance that hangs in my mind stubbornly, as if there were some fate in it. Luck, old boy!"
"Luck to you, Lanny! Luck and promotion!"
They threw their arms about each other in a vigorous embrace.
"And you will keep watch that Mrs. Galland and Marta are in no danger?"
"Trust me for that, too!"
"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away.