The Last Shot Part 23

The men wanted to talk but did not know what to talk about, so they examined their rifles critically as if they were unfamiliar gifts which they had found in their stockings on Christmas morning. Some began to empty their magazines of cartridges for the pleasure or occupation of refilling them; but one of the lieutenants stopped this. It might mean delay when the whistle blew. Thus the hours wore on, and the church clock struck nine and ten.

"Never a movement down there!" called the sergeant from the crest to Dellarme. "Maybe this is just their final bluff before they come to terms about Bodlapoo"--that stretch of African jungle that seemed very far away to them all.

"Let us hope so!" said Dellarme seriously.

"Hope there won't be any war! Just listen to that from an army officer, with the enemy right in front of him!" gasped grandfather.

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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.s 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 c.u.mulative 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 G.o.d in cloth of gold--a G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude.

"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 ma.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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!"