The Last Shot Part 17

"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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sure 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 att.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce. '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 s.p.a.ce 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 dispa.s.sionate, 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sion 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 pa.s.sions 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 debris 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!