The Last Shot Part 36

"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You sent for me?"

"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any sh.e.l.l that may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go through the second wall."

"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she replied indifferently.

The fatalism of her att.i.tude and his alarm lest she had gone a little out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:

"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--"

He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.

"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"

Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.

"Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--" he was stammering.

"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."

"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I--"

She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.

"Don't I look it--hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"

With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.

"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last weapon in his armory--which the captain of engineers had already used--his att.i.tude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that--"

She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes. He understood that she had again antic.i.p.ated what he was going to say.

"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened.

He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the present situation. "This is our home; our home is our country. Here we remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets," she continued. "Even your soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags.

They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their illusions that they bare their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to bullets. We have already arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!"

She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to call back happily:

"You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!"

"Oh, Miss Galland!" he exclaimed. "Miss Galland, you are beyond me!"

"What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!" she thought angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the corridor. "To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose!

Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish--"

She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator of the story faced the barbarous Gauls--neither disputing the power of their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single candle--she still favored candles--revealed her features calm and philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at once more tender and vital.

"Marta, I see that you are all on wires!"

"Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune,"

Marta acquiesced.

"Marta, my father"--her father had been a premier of the Browns--"always said that you may enjoy the luxury of fussing over little things, for they don't count much one way or another; but about big things you must never fuss or you will not be worthy of big things. Marta, you cannot stop a railroad train with your hands. This is not the first war on earth and we are not the first women who ever thought that war was wrong. Each of us has his work to do and you will have yours. It does no good to tire yourself out and fly to pieces, even if you do know so much and have been around the world."

She smiled as a woman of sixty, who has a secret heart-break that she had never given her husband a son, may smile at a daughter who is both son and daughter to her, and her plump hand, all curves like her plump face and her plump body, spread open in appeal.

Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.

"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"

"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your grandfather was great--a very great man. He never quite got his deserts; no good man does in politics."

"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you have--what shall I call it?--the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too."

She ran a tattoo of kisses along the velvety skin of Mrs. Galland's arm.

Mrs. Galland was blushing, and out of the depths of her eyes bubbled a little fountain of stars.

"Marta, you have kissed me often before," she said, "but you have been a little patronizing from your hilltop of youth and knowledge. Sometimes you have looked to me lonely up there on your hilltop and I know that I have been lonely sometimes in my valley of the years where knees are not good at climbing hills."

"It was not my intention," Marta said rather miserably.

"No, it is a businesslike age," answered Mrs. Galland.

"I--you mean I was too detached? I was not human?"

"You are now. You make me very happy," her mother replied. "But you must sleep," she insisted.

After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.

On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills--the batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth, demarked infantry lines of the Browns a.s.sisting the automatics.

There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy, throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly the groans of a wounded man--one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.

Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.

The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.

"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"

Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man.

There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at getting a company in close order in a street for the s.p.a.ce of a minute, before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of steel files.

From the line of defence, that included the first terrace of the Galland grounds as the angle of a redoubt, not a shot, not a sound; silence on the part of officers and men as profound as Mrs. Galland's slumber, while one of the Browns' search-lights, like some great witch's slow-turning eye in a narrow radius, covered the lower terraces and the road.

Marta gave intermittent glances at the garden; the glances of a guardian. She happened to be looking in that direction when figures sprang across the road, crouching, running with the short, quick steps of no body movement accompanying that of the legs. The search-light caught them in merciless silhouette and the automatic and the rifles from behind the sand-bags on the first terrace let go. Some of the figures dropped and lay in the road and she knew that she had seen men hit for the first time. Others, she thought, got safely to the cover of the gutter on the garden side. Of those on the road, some were still and some she saw were moving slowly back on their stomachs to safety. Now the search-light laid its beam steadily on the road. Again silence. From the upper terrace came a great voice, like that of the guns, from a human throat:

"Why didn't we level those terraces? They'll creep up from one to the other!" It was Stransky.

In answer was another voice--Dellarme's.

"Perhaps there wasn't time to do everything. And if this position is taken before we are ready to go, it will not be from that side, but from the side of the town."