XVII
A SUNDAY MORNING IN TOWN
"You ought not to leave the house—not this morning," protested Mrs. Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular Sunday service of her school.
"The children expect me," Marta explained.
"Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you will not come."
But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.
"Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to come, I would not disappoint him!" she said. "Heaven knows, mother, if there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this—that is too terrible!"
"As you will!" Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.
Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but it was a different kind of peace—a peace mocked by sounds beyond its boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious anticipation of a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word. As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill! And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses, but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand practical human nature.
Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace to the main pass road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.
"It will be averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any other familiar object of the landscape.
"The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!" he was thinking.
She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the demon was a fair, beckoning god in cloth of gold—a god of hope and fortune.
"Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our preparations leaking out—Lanny's plan all alive—the guns coming," he went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action—"troops moving here and there to their places—engineers preparing the defences—automatics at critical points with the infantry—field-wires laid—field-telephones set up—the wireless spitting—the caissons full—planes and dirigibles ready—search-lights in position"
There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow passed in front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly leaving.
"Miss Galland!" he called urgently. "Firing may commence at any minute. You must not go into town!"
"But I must!" she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused. It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.
"Then I shall go with you!" he said, starting toward her with a light step, in keeping with the gallantry of a man even younger than his years. He spoke in a tone of protective masculine authority, as an officer might to a woman of whom he was fond when he saw her exposing herself to danger. He would escort her; he would see that no harm befell her. The impulse was spontaneous in an illusion free of the gardener's part. But he saw her lips tighten and a frown gather.
"It is not necessary, thank you!" she answered, more coldly than she had ever spoken to him. This had a magically quick effect on his attitude.
"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a gunner any more—I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me. And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a spy—and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"
Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.
"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."
Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice—a man approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted his feet and refused to budge.
"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better kill me and have done with it!"
"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak. We're acting under orders. No use of balking."
"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap—it—"
"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said, and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces the order.
A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and orderlies, was evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.
"Are they coming yet?"
"Do you think they will come?"
"Are you sure it's going to be war?"
"Will they shell the town?"
"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"
A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a cross street stopped to inquire:
"This way to the knitting mills?"
"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.
"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the lieutenant as he hurried on.
"Then they're going to fight in the town!"
"Blow our homes to pieces!"
"Destroy our property!"
After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was not to his soldierly taste.
"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are going to make them pay for every foot they take—the invaders!"
"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.
"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.
"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."
"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays could give him!"
"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.
Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that thoroughly centred his attention.
"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay—and they make you pay—and you make them pay—and so on!"
The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but the young woman might charge.
"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or his place of business."
"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.
"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we had to let them stay there."
"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly be missed from the flock. Others have no homes—at least, not much of a one"—here her temper rose again—"taxes being so high in order that you may organize murder and the destruction of property."
"I—" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.
But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.
"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh that helped her to recover poise.
With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a desire to please which conflicted with duty.
"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children ought—"
"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.
"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so fast you can't count 'em—and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow things up—and—" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.
"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.
"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky, round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn't sick."
"My seven disciples—seven!" exclaimed Marta as she counted them. "And you need not sit on the regular seats, but around me on the platform. It will be more intimate."
"That's grand!" came in chorus. They did not bother, about chairs, but seated themselves on the floor around Marta's skirts.
"My, Miss Galland, but your eyes are bright!"
"And your cheeks are all red!"
"With little spots in the centre!"
"You're very wonderful, Miss Galland!"
The church clock boomed out its deliberate strokes through ten, the hour set for the lesson, and all counted them—one—two—three. Marta was thinking what a dismal little effort theirs was, and yet she was very happy, tremblingly happy in her distraction and excitement, that they had not waited for her at the door of the chapel in vain.
She announced that there would be no talk this morning; they would only say their oath. Repeating in concert the pledge to the boys and girls of other lands, the childish voices peculiarly sweet and harmonious in contrast to the raucous and uneven sounds of foreboding from the street, they came in due course to the words of the concession that the oath made to militancy.
"If an enemy tries to take my land—"
"Children—I—" Marta interrupted with a sense of wonder and shock. They paused and looked at her questioningly. "I had almost forgotten that part!" she breathed confusedly.
"That's the part that makes all we're doing against the Grays right!" put in Jacky Werther promptly.
"As I wrote it for you! 'I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him—'"
Jaws dropped and eyes bulged, for above the sounds of the street rose from the distance the unmistakable crackling of rifle-fire which, as they listened, spread and increased in volume.
"Go on—on to the end of the oath! It will take only a moment," said Marta resolutely. "It isn't much, but it's the best we can do!"