XXVII
HAND TO HAND
With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of irony.
An hour or more of intermittent firing passed in the suspense of listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of shell fire broke and continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.
"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.
At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms. Abruptly as the inferno of the guns had commenced, it ceased, and the steady, passionate, desperate blasts of the rifles, now uninterrupted, were more deadly and venomous if less shocking to the ear.
The movement of the minute-hand on the clock-face became uncanny and merciless to her eye in its deliberate regularity. Dellarme had been told to hold on until noon, she knew. Was he still smiling? Was Feller still happy in playing a stream of lead from the automatic? Was the second charge of the Grays, which must have come to close quarters when the guns went silent, going to succeed?
The rifle-fire died down suddenly and she heard a cheer like that of the morning, only wilder and fiercer and even less human. Could it be from the Browns celebrating a repulse? Or from the Grays after taking the position? What did it matter? If the Grays had won there was an end to the agony so far as her mother and herself were concerned—an end to murder on the lawn and devastation of their property. But, at length, the rifle-fire beginning again in a slow, irregular pulse told her that the Browns had held.
Now another long intermission. The demon was wiping his brow and recovering his breath, Marta thought; he was repairing damaged joints in his armor and removing the flesh of victims from his claws. But he would not rest long, for the war was young—exactly one day old—and many battalions of victims remained unslain.
How slowly the big hand of the clock kept hitching on from minute-mark to minute-mark! Yet no more slowly than the hands of clocks in distant provinces of the Browns or of the Grays, where this day was as quiet and peaceful as any other day.
Mrs. Galland had settled down conscientiously to play solitaire, a favorite pastime of hers; but she failed to win, as she complained to Marta, because of her stupid way this morning of missing the combination cards.
"I really believe I need new glasses," she declared.
"Let me help you," said Marta. Welcome idea! Why hadn't she thought of it before? It was something to do.
"But, Marta—there you are, covering up the jack of spades, the very card I need—though it will not help now. I've lost again!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland at length. "Why, Marta, you miss worse than I do!"
"Do I? Do I?" asked Marta in blank surprise and irritation. "Please let me try once alone. I'll not miss this time. Correct me if I do."
She played with the deliberation and accuracy of Feller should he have to make a little ammunition for his automatic go a long way, and Mrs. Galland did not observe a single error.
"Hurrah! I won!" Marta cried triumphantly, with some of her old vivacity.
Then she drew away from the table wearily. The strain of concentrating her mind had been worse than that of the battle; or, rather, it had merely added another strain to a tortured brain after a sleepless night. For her ears had been constantly alert. The demon had moved one of his claws to fresh ground; the inferno on the La Tir side of the frontier had shifted to a valley beyond the Galland estate, where the firing appeared to come from the Brown side. Breaking from the leash of silence, guns, automatics, rifles—each one straining for a speed record—roared and crashed and rattled in greedy chorus, while the clock ticked perhaps a hundred times. Thus famished savages might boll their food in a time limit. Thereafter, for a while, the battle was desultory.
Then came another outburst from Dellarme's men, which she interpreted as the response to another rush by the Grays; and this yelping of the demon was not that of the hound after the hare, as in the valley, but of the hare with his back to the wall. When it was over there was no cheer. What did this mean? Oh, that slow minute-hand, resting so calmly between hitches of destiny, now pointing to a quarter after eleven! For half a century, it seemed to her, Marta had endured watching its snail pace. Now inaction was no longer bearable. Without warning to her mother she bolted out of the kitchen. Mrs. Galland sprang up to follow, but Minna barred the way.
"One is enough!" she said firmly, and Mrs. Galland dropped back into her chair.
In the front rooms Marta found havoc beyond her imagination. A portion of the ceiling had been blown out by a shell entering at an up-stairs window; the hardwood floors were littered with plaster and window-glass and ripped into splinters in places.
"How can we ever afford repairs!" she thought.
But she hurried on, impelled by she knew not what, through the dining-room, and, coming to the veranda, stopped short, with dilating eyes and a cry of grievous shock. Two of his men were carrying Dellarme back from the breastwork where they had caught him in their arms as he fell. They laid him gently on the sward with a knapsack under his head. His face grew whiter with the flow of blood from the red hole in the right breast of his blouse. Then he opened his lips and whispered to the doctor: "How is it?" Something in his eyes, in the tone of that faint question, required the grace of a soldier's truth in answer.
"Bad!" said the doctor.
"Then, good-by!" And his head fell to one side, his lips set in his cheery smile.
Had ever any martyr shown a finer spirit dying for any cause? Marta wondered. She felt the sublimity of a great moment, an inexorable sadness. She knew that she should never forget that cheery smile or that white face. What was danger to anybody? What was death if you had seen how he had died?
His company was a company with his smile out of its heart and in its place blank despair. Many of the men had stopped firing. Some had even run back to look at him and stood, caps off, backs to the enemy, miserable in their grief. Others leaned against the parapet, rifles out of hand, staring and dazed.
"They have killed our captain!"
"They've killed our captain!"—still a captain to them. A general's stars could not have raised him a cubit in their estimation.
"And once we called him 'Baby Dellarme,' he was so young and bashful! Him a baby? He was a king!"
"Men, get to your places!" cried the surviving lieutenant rather hopelessly, with no Dellarme to show him what to do; and Marta saw that few paid any attention to him.
In that minute of demoralization the Grays had their chance, but only for a minute. A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue blouse and crownless straw hat.
"Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning to fight!"
And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's:
"Avenge his death! They've got to kill the last man of us for killing him! Revenge! revenge!"
That cry brought back to the company all the fighting spirit of the cheery smile and with it another spirit—for Dellarme's sake!—which he had never taught them.
"Make them pay!"
"He was told to stay till noon!"
"They'll find us here at noon, alive or dead!"
Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at his feet.
"He wouldn't use this—he was too soft-hearted—but I will!" he cried, and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the lower side of the terrace. For this they had crawled across the road in the night—to find themselves unable to move either way and directly under the flashes of the Browns' rifles.
Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first exchange of glances.
"You engineers, make ready!"
"Hand-grenades to the men under the tree! That's where they're going to try for it—no wall to climb over there!"
"You engineers, take your rifles—and bayonet into anything that wears gray!"
"Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades! Form up behind them, everybody!"
"No matter if they do get in at first! Back, you men, from under the tree!"
There was not a single rifle-shot. In a silence like that before the word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily obeyed because Dellarme's foresight had impressed their sense upon the men in his quiet way.
The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays. Then, before the dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through the breach by the pressure of the mass behind. In that final struggle of one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or automatics or long-range bullets played no part. It was the grapple of cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing, twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive desperation, to kill in order not to be killed. The cloud of rocking, writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward. Its movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray lake on the other side of the breastwork.
Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled, feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men. What a place for her to be! But she did not think of that. She was there. The dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself. She was mad; they were mad; all the world was mad!
One minute—two, perhaps—not three—and the thing was over. She saw the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with the weapons nature gave them.
Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young god on an escarpment of rock on Olympus. His great nose showed in silhouette at intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war's savagery. At last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork. Unlucky Pilzer! That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the weaving muscles of his powerful arm.
"I thought so!" cried Feller. "Attacks on frontal positions by daylight are going out of fashion!"
It was he who mercifully arrested the shower of hand-grenades that followed the exit of the enemy. Two of the guns of the castle batteries, having changed their position, were making havoc enough at pointblank range, with a choice of targets between the Grays huddled on the other side of the breastwork and those in retreat.
"We'll have peace for a few hours now," said Stransky, squinting down his nose. "And we'll have something to eat. I ought to have got that fellow with the beauty-spot on his physiognomy, but, confound him, he was an eel!"
By this time the men had recovered their breath. It occurred to them by common impulse that a cheer was due, and for the first time they broke into a hurrah with wide-open throats.
"Another—for Dellarme!" called Stransky, who seemed to think that he and not the callow lieutenant was in command.
This they gave, standing instinctively at attention, with heads bared, for the leader whose spirit survived in them; a cheer with triumph in its roar, but a different sort of triumph from the first cheer.
Listening to it were the wounded among the Grays who had fallen within the breastwork to be trampled by the Browns as they had pressed forward. The doctor, but a moment ago a fiend himself with features of rage, now, in the second nature of his calling, with a look of tender sympathy, was ministering without distinction of friend or foe. One of the Grays, his cheek bearing the mark of a boot heel, raised himself, and, in defiance and the satisfaction of the thought to his bruises and humiliation, pointing his finger at Feller, Marta heard him say:
"You there, in your straw hat and blue blouse, they've seen you—a man fighting and not in uniform! If they catch you it will be a drumhead and a firing squad at dawn!"
"That's so!" replied Feller gravely. "But they'll have to make a better job of it than you fellows did if they're going to——"
He turned away abruptly but did not move far. His shoulders relaxed into the gardener's stoop, and he pulled his hat down over his eyes and lowered his head as if to hide his face. He was thus standing, inert, when a division staff-officer galloped into the grounds.
"Splendid! Splendid! There's some iron crosses in this for you!" he was shouting before he brought his horse to a standstill. "The way you held on gained the day for Lanstron's plan. They tried to flank in the valley after their second attack on your position failed We drew them on and had them—a battalion in close order—under the guns for a couple of minutes. It was ghastly! Our losses have been heavy enough, but nothing to theirs—and how they are driving their men in! But where is Major Dellarme?"
When he saw Dellarme's still body he dismounted and in a tide of feeling which, for the moment, submerged all thought of the machine, stood, head bowed and cap off, looking down at Dellarme's face.
"I was very fond of him! He was at the school when I was teaching there. But a good death—a soldier's death!" he said. "I'll write to his mother myself." Then the voice of the machine spoke. "Who is in command?"
"I am, sir!" said the callow lieutenant, coming up.
Feller's fingers moved in a restless beat on his trousers' seam, his lips half parted as if he must speak, but the men of the company spoke for him.
"Bert Stransky!" they roared.
It was not according to military etiquette, but military etiquette meant nothing to them now. They were above it in veteran superiority.
"And—" Stransky had started to point to Feller, whose name he did not know, when a forbidding gleam under the hat brim arrested him.
"Where's Stransky?" demanded the staff-officer.
"You're looking at him!" replied Stransky with a benign grin.
Seeing that Stransky was only a private, the officer frowned at the anomaly when a lieutenant was present, then smiled in a way that accorded the company parliamentary rights, which he thought that they had fully earned.
"Yes, and he gets one of those iron crosses!" put in Tom Fragini.
"What for?" demanded Stransky in surprise. They were making a lot of fuss about him when he had not done anything except to work out his individual destiny.
"Yes—the first cross for Bert of the Reds!"
"And we'll let him make a dozen anarchist speeches a day!"
"Yes, yes!" roared the company.
"By all means—but not for this; for trying to save an old man's life!" put in Marta.
After his survey of that amazing company the officer was the more amazed to hear a woman's voice in such surroundings.
"The ays have it!" he announced cheerfully. He lifted his cap to Marta. With tender regard and grave reverence for that company, he took extreme care with his next remark lest a set of men of such dynamic spirit might repulse him as an invader. "The lieutenant is in command for the present, according to regulations," he proceeded. "You will retire immediately to positions 48 to 49 A-J by the castle road. You have done your part. To-night you sleep and to-morrow you rest."
Sleep! Rest! Where had they heard those words before? Oh, yes, in a distant day before they went to war! Sleep and rest! Better far than an iron cross for every man in the company! They could go now with something warmer in their hearts than consciousness of duty well done; but this time they need not go until their dead as well as their wounded were removed.
"You're not coming with us?" Stransky whispered to Feller.
"Eh? eh?" Feller put his hand to his ear. "Quite deaf!" he quavered. "But I judge you ask if I am coming with you. No. I have to stay to look after my garden. It has been sadly damaged, I fear."
"That's right—of course you're deaf!" agreed Stransky, well knowing the contrary. "I'll be lonely without you, pal. It was love at first sight with me!"
"And with me!" Feller whispered. "You and I, with a brigade of infantry and guns—" he began, but remembering his part, as he often would in the middle of a sentence since the distraction of war was in his mind, he turned to go.
"A cheer for the old gardener! We don't know who he is or was, and it's none of our business. He saved the day!" called Stransky.
Feller started; he paused and looked back as he heard that stentorian chorus in his honor; and, irresistibly, he made a snappy officer's salute before starting on.
"That was very sweet to me," he was thinking, and then: "A mistake! a mistake! One thought! One duty!"
Making to pass around the corner of the house, he was confronted by Marta, who had come to the end of the veranda. There, within hearing of the soldiers, the dialogue that followed was low-toned, and it was swift and palpitant with repressed emotion.
"Mr. Feller, I saw you at the automatic. I heard what the wounded private of the Grays said to you and realized how true it was."
"He is a prisoner. He cannot tell."
"Does he need to? You have been seen—the conspicuous figure of a man in gardener's garb fighting on the very terrace of his own garden! The Gray staff is bound to hear of such an extraordinary occurrence. It is one of those stories that travel of themselves. And Westerling will find that same gardener here when he comes! What hope have you for your ruse, then?"
"I—I—no matter! I forgot myself, when Lanny had warned me not to go near the guns. My promise to him! My duty! I accept what I have prepared for myself—that is a soldier's code."
"But I shall not let you risk your life in this fashion."
"You—" A searching look—a look of fire—from his eyes into hers, which were bright with appeal.
"I feel that I have no right to let you go to your death by a firing squad," she interrupted hurriedly, "and I shall not! For I decide now not to allow the telephone to remain!"
"But my chance—my one chance to—"
"You have it there—happiness in the work you like, the work for which you seem to have been born—at least, a better work than spying and deceit—the right that you have won this morning there with the gun!"
"I"—he looked around at the automatic ravenously and fearsomely—"I—"
"It is all simply arranged. There is time for me to use the telephone before the Grays arrive. I shall tell Lanny why you took charge of the gun and how you handled it, and I know he will want you to keep it."
"And the uniform—the uniform again! Yes, the uniform—if only a gunner private's uniform!" he exclaimed in short, pulsating breaths of ecstasy.
"Yes, count on that, too! And good-by!"
"Good-by! I—" But she had already turned away. "I've changed my mind! Exit gardener! Enter gunner! I'm going with you! I'm going with you!" he cried in a jubilant voice that arrested the attention of every one on the grounds. They saw him throw his arms around Stransky and then rush to the automatic. "One thought! One duty! Oh, that is easy now!" he breathed, caressing the breech with a flutter of pats from both hands.