The Last Shot Part 11

"Your time has come! To the sacrifice!" he exclaimed to the flowers.

Very tenderly, as if he were an executioner considerate of the victims of an inexorable law, he was snipping the stems, his head bent close to the blooms, when a b.u.mblebee appeared among the salvias a few feet away.

Perhaps army staffs who neglect no detail have made a mistake in overlooking the whirring of b.u.mblebees' wings in affecting the fate of nations. These plunderers are not dangerous from their size, but they have not yet been organized to the hep-hep-hep of partisanship. They would as soon live in a Gray as a Brown garden, as soon probe for an atom of honey on one side of the white posts as the other. This one as it drew nearer was well to one side over Feller's shoulders. With eyes and mind intent on his work, Feller turned his head absently, as one will at an interruption.

"There you are again, my dear!" he said. "You must think you're a battery of automatics."

He went on cutting chrysanthemums, apparently unconscious that he had spoken.

"Bring them up on the veranda, please," Marta wrote on the pad, her fingers moving with unusual nervous rapidity, the only sign of her inward excitement.

Coming to the head of the steps of the terrace above, she looked back.

Feller's face was quite hidden under his hat and suddenly she seemed to stub her toe and fall, while she uttered a low cry of pain. The hat rose like a jack-in-the-box with the cover released. Feller bounded toward her, taking two of steps at a time. She scrambled to her feet hastily, laughed, and gestured to show that she was not hurt. He drew his shoulders together and bent over spasmodically, gripping his knee.

"I can run off if something starts me just as spry as if I were twenty,"

he said. "But after I've done it and the kinks come, I realize I've got old legs."

"Now I know he's not deaf!" Marta murmured, as he returned to his work.

She frowned. She was angry. "Lanny, you have something to explain," she thought.

But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion.

IX

A SUNDAY MORNING CALL

As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the nursery floor; and he would rather read about the wonders of natural history and electricity than the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great and my lord Nelson. Left to his own choice, he would miss the parade of the garrison for inspection by an excellency in order to ask questions of a man wiping the oil off his hands with cotton-waste, who was far more entertaining to him than the most spick-and-span ramrod of a sergeant.

The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound. This was even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with his foot. His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Caesar, self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence after his father had been transferred to another post. He was given to magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was that they were all "experts" in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.

Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed off his eyebrows. This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead languages at times, with a towel tied around his head. He complained that they were out of date; and he wanted to hear the Gauls' story, too, before he fully made up his mind about Caesar. But for the living languages he had a natural gift which his father's service abroad as military attache for a while enabled him to cultivate.

Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion. He had just decided, after having pa.s.sed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and superintendent of the city's waterworks, to build bridges over tropical torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his construction work.

"I don't want to go into the army!" he said.

"Why?" asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.

"It's drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do," Arthur replied.

"All your work waits on war and you don't know that there will ever be any war. It waits on something n.o.body wants to happen. Now, if you manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out an automobile. If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little.

You're getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your successes. You're making something, creating something; there's something going on all the while that isn't guesswork. I think that's what I want to say. You won't order me to be a soldier will you?"

The father, loath to do this, called in the a.s.sistance of an able pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns, who was an old friend of the Lanstron family. It was not in Partow's mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old idea that made an officer's the conventional avocation of a gentleman of leisurely habits.

"No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like equal numbers," he said. "The officer who works hard in the army deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the incentive for results seems remote. But what a terrible test of results may be made in a single hour's action. There is nothing you have learned or ever will learn that may not be of service to you. There is no invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be included in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up to date in every particular. To be backward in a single particular may mean disaster--may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to you. You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean your shame and your country's suffering; while efficiency means a clear conscience and your country's security."

Thus Partow turned the balance on the side of filial affection. He kept watch of the boy, but without favoring him with influence. Young Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them. He realized in practice the truth of Partow's saying that there was nothing he had ever learned but what could be of service to him as an officer. What the acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his first flight across the range. The friendships with all sorts of people in his youth were the forerunner of his sympathy with the giant, wall-eyed Stransky who had mutinied on the march.

"Finding enough work to do?" Par tow would ask with a chuckle when they met in these days, for he had made Lanstron both chief of intelligence and chief aerostatic officer. Young Colonel Lanstron's was the duty of gaining the secrets of the Gray staff and keeping those of the Brown and organizing up-to-the-moment efficiency in the new forces of the air.

He had remarked truly enough that the injury to his left hand served as a better reminder against the folly of wool-gathering than a string, even a large red string, tied around his finger. Thanks to skilful surgery working ingeniously with splintered bone and pulpy flesh, there was nothing unpleasant to the eye in a stiffened wrist and scarred knuckles slightly misshapen. The fingers, incapable of spreading much, were yet serviceable and had a firm grip of the wheel as he rose from the aeroplane station on the Sunday morning after Marta's return home for a flight to La Tir.

He knew the pattern weaving under his feet as one knows that of his own garden from an overlooking window. Every detail of the staff map, ravines, roads, buildings, battery positions, was st.i.tched together in the flowing reality of actual vision. No white posts were necessary to tell him where the boundary between the two nations lay. The line was drawn in his brain.

Nature was in a gracious humor, the very tree tops motionless. The rich landscape in Sunday quiet appealed to his affections. He loved his country and he loved Marta. It had been on such a day as this when there would be no danger, that he had taken her for her first flight. The glimpses, as they flew, of her profile, so alive and tense, were fresh to his eye. How serious she had been! How vivid her impressions! How tempestuous her ideas! He recalled their talk upon their return; all his questions and her answers.

"Sublime and ridiculous!" she had begun in a summing up. "It is like seeing the life of a family through a gla.s.s roof--the big, universal family! Valleys seemed no larger than sauce-dishes on a table."

"What was the sublime thing?"

"Man's toil! The c.u.mulative result of it, on every hand, in the common aim for food, comfort, happiness, and progress! Little details of difference disappeared. Towns, villages, houses were simply towns, villages, houses of any country."

"And the supremely ridiculous thing?"

"A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same road! They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation. I imagined each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind that comes to children at Christmas time. They might better be engaged in bra.s.s-ring-s.n.a.t.c.hing contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs.

I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the battalions of the nursery floor. Just drilling and drilling in order to slash at one another some day. Flight! flight! It makes one's mind as big and broad as the world. Oh, what a wonderful talk I'll have for my kids next Sunday!"

Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own flights were rare. Mostly they were made to La Tir. His visits to Marta were his holidays? All the time that she was absent on her journey around the world they had corresponded. Her letters, so revealing of herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly preserved. Her mother's joking reference about her girlish resolution not to marry a soldier often recurred to him. There, he sometimes thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire.

He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last spanned the chasm and controlled the floods. Ah, there was something like romance and real accomplishment in that! What an easy time a bridge-builder had, comparatively, too! What an easy master capital must be compared to Eugene Partow! But no! If Marta loved it would not matter whether he were bridge builder or army builder. Yes, she was like that.

And what right had he to think of marriage? He could not have any home.

He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier--a vagabond of duty and Partow's orders.

When he alighted from the plane he thrust his left hand into his blouse pocket. He always carried it there, as if it were literally sewn in place. In moments of emotion the scarred nerves would twitch as the telltale of his sensitiveness; and this was something he would conceal from others no matter how conscious he was of it himself. He found the Galland veranda deserted. In response to his ring a maid came to the open door. Her face was sad, with a beauty that had prematurely faded.

But it lighted pleasurably in recognition. Her hair was thick and tawny, lying low over the brow; her eyes were a softly luminous brown and her full lips sensitive and yielding. Lanstron, an intimate of the Galland household, knew her story well and the part that Marta had played in it.

Some four years previously, when a baby was in prospect for Minna, who wore no wedding-ring, Mrs. Galland had been inclined to send the maid to an inst.i.tution, "where they will take good care of her, my dear. That's what such inst.i.tutions are for. It is quite scandalous for her and for us--never happened in our family before!"

Marta arched her eyebrows.

"We don't know!" she exclaimed softly.

"How can you think such a thing, let alone saying it--you, a Galland!"

her mother gasped in indignation.

"That is, if we go far back," said Marta. "At all events, we have no precedent, so let's establish one by keeping her."

"But for her own sake! She will have to live with her shame!" Mrs.

Galland objected. "Let her begin afresh in the city. We shall give her a good recommendation, for she is really an excellent servant. Yes, she will readily find a place among strangers."