The Last Shot Part 3

"This is a personal call," Westerling explained; "so you are at liberty to make one yourself, if you like," he added, with that magnetic smile of a genial power which he used to draw men to him and hold them.

III

OURS AND THEIRS

On the second terrace, Feller, the Gallands' gardener, a patch of blue blouse and a patch of broad-brimmed straw hat over a fringe of white hair, was planting bulbs. Mrs. Galland came down the path from the veranda loiteringly, pausing to look at the flowers and again at the sweep of hills and plain. The air was singularly still, so still that she heard the cries of the children at play in the yards of the factory-workers' houses which had been steadily creeping up the hill from the town. She breathed in the peace and beauty of the surroundings with that deliberate appreciation of age which holds to the happiness in hand. To-morrow it might rain; to-day it is pleasant. She was getting old. Serenely she made the most of to-day.

The gardener did not look up when she reached his side. She watched his fingers firmly pressing the moist earth around the bulbs that he had sunk in their new beds. There were only three more to set out, and her inclination, in keeping with her leisureliness, was to wait on the completion of his task before speaking. Again she let her glance wander away to the distances. It was arrested and held this time by two groups of far-away points in the sky along the frontier, in the same bright light of that other afternoon when Captain Arthur Lanstron had made his first night over the range.

"Look!" she cried. "Look, look!" she repeated, a girlish excitement rippling her placidity.

Aeroplanes and dirigibles had become a familiar sight. They were always going and coming and manoeuvring, the Browns over their territory and the Grays over theirs. But here was something new: two squadrons of dirigibles and planes in company, one on either side of the white posts.

For the fraction of a second the dirigibles seemed prisms and the planes still-winged dragon-flies hung on a blue wall. With the next fraction the prisms were seen to be growing and the stretch of the plane wings broadening.

"They are racing--ours against theirs!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland. "Look, look!"

Still the gardener bent to his work, unconcerned.

"I forgot! I always forget that you are deaf!" she murmured.

She touched his shoulder. The effect was magical on the stoop-shouldered figure, which rose with the spring of muscles that are elastic and joints that are limber. His hat was removed with prompt and rather graceful deference, revealing eyebrows that were still dark in contrast to the white hair. For only an instant did he remain erect, but long enough to suggest how supple and well-formed he must have been in youth.

Then he made a grimace and dropped his hand demonstratively over his knee.

"Pardon, Mrs. Galland, I have old bones. They always remind me if I try to play any youthful tricks on them. Pardon! I did not see that you were here. I," he said, in the monotonous voice of the deaf, which, however, had a certain attractive wistfulness--"I--" and from the same throat as he saw the object of her gaze came a vibration of pa.s.sionate interest.

"Yes, neck and neck! Coming right for the baron's tower, neck and neck!"

he cried, in the zest of a contest understood and enjoyed.

His hand rose in a vigorous, pulsating gesture; his eyes were snapping; his lips parted in an ecstasy that made him seem twenty years younger; his shoulders broadened and his chest expanded with the indrawing of a deep breath. This let go, the stoop returned in a sudden reaction, the briefly kindled flame died out of his eyes, his lips took on the droop of age, and he thrust his hat back on his head, pulling the brim low over his brow.

"Wonderful, but terrible--terrible!" said Mrs. Galland. "Another horror is added to war, as if there were not already enough. Oh, I know what war is! I've seen this garden all spattered with blood and dead bodies in a row here at our feet, and heard the groans and the cheers--the groans of the wounded here in the garden and the cheers of the men who had taken the castle hill!"

Feller, with the lids of shaded eyes half closed, watched the oncoming squadrons in a staring mesmerism. His only movement was a tattoo of the fingers on his trousers' legs.

"War!" he exclaimed with motionless lips. "War!" he repeated softly, coaxingly. One would easily have mistaken the thought of war as something delightful to him if he had not appeared so gentle and detached. It seemed doubtful if he realized what he was saying or even that he was speaking aloud.

As the Gray squadron started to turn in order to keep on their side of the white posts which circled around the spur of La Tir, one of the dirigibles failed to respond to its rudder and lost speed; that in the rear, responding too readily, had its leader on the thwart. An aeroplane, sheering too abruptly to make room, tipped at a dangerous angle and a tragedy seemed due within another wink of the eye.

"Huh-huh-huh!" came from Feller in quick breaths, like the panting of a dog on a hot day.

"Oh!" gasped Mrs. Galland in one long breath of suspense.

The envelope of the second dirigible grazed the envelope of its leader; the groggy plane righted itself and volplaned underneath a dirigible; and, though scattered, the Gray squadron drew away safely from the Brown, which, slowing down, came on as straight as an arrow in unchanged formation in a line over the castle tower. From the forward Brown aeroplane, as its shadow shot over the garden, pursued by the great, oblong shadows of the dirigibles, a white ball was dropped. It made a plummet streak until about fifty feet above the earth, when it exploded into a fine shower of powder, leaving intact a pirouetting bit of white.

"I think that was Colonel Lanstron leading when he ought to leave such work to his a.s.sistants," said Mrs. Galland. "You remember him--why, it was the colonel who recommended you! There, now, I've forgotten again that you are deaf!"

The slip of paper glided back and forth on slight currents of air and finally fell among the rose-bushes a few yards from where the two were standing. Feller brought it to Mrs. Galland.

"Yes, it was Colonel Lanstron," she said, after reading the message.

"The message says: 'h.e.l.lo, Marta!' Any other officer would have said: 'How do you do, Miss Galland!' He could not have known that she was away. I've just had a telegram from her that she will be home in the morning, and that takes me back to my idea that I came to speak about to you," she babbled on, while Feller regarded her with a gentle, uncomprehending smile. "You know how she likes chrysanthemums and they are in full bloom. We'll cut them and fill all the vases in the living-room and her room and--oh, how I do forget! You're not hearing a word!" she exclaimed as she noted the helpless eagerness of his eyes.

"It is a great nuisance, deafness in a gardener. But I love my work. I try to do it well," he said in his monotone.

"You do wonderfully, wonderfully!" she a.s.sented; "and you deserve great credit. Many deaf people are irritable--and you are so cheerful!"

He smiled as pleasantly as if he had heard the compliment and pa.s.sed her a small pad from his blouse pocket. With the pencil attached to it by a string she wrote her instructions slowly, in an old-fashioned hand, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's.

"Pardon me, madam, but Miss Galland"--he paused, dwelling with a slight inflection on his mention of the daughter as the talisman that warranted his presuming to disagree with the mother--"Miss Galland, when she took her last look around before going, said: 'Please don't cut any yet. I want to see them all abloom in their beds first.'"

"She has taken such an interest in them, and my idea was to please her.

Of course, leave them," said Mrs. Galland. She made repeated vigorous nods of a.s.sent to save herself the trouble of writing. Starting back up the steps, she murmured: "I suppose cut flowers are out of fashion--I know I am--and deaf gardeners are in." She sighed. "And you are twenty-seven, Marta, twenty-seven!" She drew another, a very long sigh, and then her serenity returned.

"Ours did not pa.s.s theirs," observed the gardener, with a musing smile when he was alone; "but theirs nearly had a jolly spill there at the turn!"

As he bent once more to his work a b.u.mblebee approached on its glad, piratical errand from flower to flower in the rapt stillness, and Feller looked around with a slight courtesy of his hat brim.

"You and your fussily thunderous wings!" he said, half aloud. "I wonder if you think you're an aeroplane. Surely, they'd never train you to evolute in squadrons. You are an anarchist, you are, and an epicurean into the bargain!"

He went with his barrow for more bulbs. Meanwhile, the sun sank behind the range. The plain lay bathed in soft, golden light; the ravines were tongues of black shadow. As the evening gun boomed out from a fortress on the Brown side of the frontier, Feller glanced around to see if any one were watching. a.s.sured that he was alone, he removed his hat, and, though he wiped the brim and wiped his brow, in his att.i.tude was the suggestion of the military stance of attention at colors. A minute later, when the evening gun of the Grays across the white posts reverberated over the plain, he jammed his hat back on his head rather abruptly and started to the tool house with his barrow.

"War! war!" he repeated softly. "Yes, war!" he added in eager desire.

IV

THE DIVIDENDS OF POWER

Westerling realized that the question of marriage as a social requirement might arise when he should become officially chief of staff with the retirement of His Excellency the field-marshal. For the present he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of fondness for women; rather the contrary. He liked sitting next to a beautiful neck and shoulders and having a pair of feminine eyes sparkle into his at dinner; though, with rare exceptions, not the same neck and shoulders on succeeding nights. His natural sense of organization divided women into two cla.s.ses: those of family and wealth, whom he met at great houses, and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influence in making him vice-chief of staff; an affair to which gossip gave the breath of scandal had been an argument against him.

It was a little surprising that the bell that the girl of seventeen had rung in his secret mind when he was on one of the first rounds of the ladder, now lost in the mists of a lower stratum of existence, should ever tinkle again.... Yet he had heard its note in the tone of her prophecy with each step in his promotion; and while the other people whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities, her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She was still unmarried, which was strange; for she had not been bad-looking and she was of a fine old family. What was she like now? Commonplace and provincial, most likely. Many of the people he had known in his early days appeared so when he met them again. But, at the worst, he looked for an interesting half-hour.

The throbbing activity of the streets of the capital, as his car proceeded on the way to her hotel, formed an energetic accompaniment to his gratifying backward survey of how all his plans had worked out from the very day of the prophecy. Had he heard the remark of a great manufacturer to the banker at his side in a pa.s.sing limousine, "There goes the greatest captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only have thought: "Certainly. I am chief of staff. I am at the head of all your workmen at one time or another!" Had he heard the banker's answer, "But pretty poor pay, pretty small dividends!" he would have thought: "Splendid dividends--the dividends of power!"

He had a caste contempt for the men of commerce, with their mercenary talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists, doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults of Turcas, his a.s.sistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the civil world, taking distinction away from the military, even when, as a man of parts, he had to court their influence. His was the profession that was and ever should be the elect. A penniless subaltern was a gentleman, while he could never think of a man hi business as one.

All the faces in the street belonged to a strange, busy world outside his interest and thoughts. They formed what was known as the public, often making a clatter About things which they did not understand, when they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter had been about the extra taxes for the recent increase of the standing forces by another corps. The public was bovine with a parrot's head. Yet it did not admire the toiling ox, but the eagle and the lion.

As his car came to the park his eyes lighted at sight of one of the dividends--one feature of urban life that ever gave him a thrill. A battalion of the 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching through the main avenue. Youths all, of twenty-one or two, they were in a muddy-grayish uniform which was the color of the plain as seen from the veranda of the Galland house.

Around them, in a mighty, pervasive monotone, was the roar of city traffic, broken by the nearer sounds of the cries of children playing in the sand piles, the bark of motor horns, the screech of small boys'

velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent, except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of identical pattern, as was every article of their clothing and equipment from head to foot, whose character had been the subject of the weightiest deliberation of the staff.