The Last Shot Part 52

Coming to the arbor she slowed down for a step or two, arrested by the recollection of her last meeting with Lanstron. There it was that she had scored him for making her an accomplice of trickery. She saw his twitching hand, and the misery in his eyes and the cadence of his words came as clearly as notes from a violin in a silent chamber to her ears.

She nodded in affirmation; she shook her head in negation; she frowned; she laughed strangely, and hurried on.

The sitting-room of the tower was empty to other eyes but not to hers.

In imagination she saw Feller standing by the table in the dejection of his heart-break when he faced her and Lanstron, his secret disclosed; and the appeal was more potent in memory than it had been at the time.

She went on into the bedroom, which had been formerly the tool-room. On the threshold of the steps into the darkness she glanced back, to see Feller's face transfixed as it had been when he discovered the presence of interlopers--transfixed in fighting rage.

The lantern was in the corner at hand. Only yesterday, in want of occupation, as she thought, she had cleaned the chimney and trimmed the wick. It seemed as if Lanny's fingers were lighting it now; as if he were leading the way as he had on her first visit to the telephone.

After her hastening steps had carried her along the tunnel to the telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish light of the lantern.

Conscious mind had torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had resented Feller's part--what a part she had been playing! Every word, every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after Westerling confessed that he had made war for his own ends had been subtly prompted by a purpose whose actuality terrified her.

Her hypocrisy, she realized, was as black as the wall of darkness beyond the lantern's gleam. All her pictures became a whirling involution of extravaganza and all the speeches of the characters of the scenes a kind of wail. Then this demoralization pa.s.sed, as a nightmare pa.s.ses, with Westerling's boast again in her ears. She was seeing Hugo Mallin; hearing him announce his principles in sight of the spot where Dellarme had died:

"I love my country.... But I know that other men love theirs.... Men should be brave for their convictions.... The Browns are fighting for their homes.... They are fighting, as I should want to fight, against murder and burglary.... I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them."

She was seeing the faces of her children; she was hearing them repeat:

"But I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him; but if he then persists I shall fight for my home."

When war's principles, enacted by men, were based on sinister trickery called strategy and tactics, should not women, using such weapons as they had, also fight for their homes? Marta's hands swept down from her eyes; she was on fire with resolution.

Forty miles away a bell in Lanstron's bedroom and at his desk rang simultaneously. At the time he and Partow were seated facing each other across a map on the table of the room where they worked together. No persuasion of the young vice-chief, no edict of the doctors, could make the old chief take exercise or shorten his hours.

"I know. I know myself!" he said. "I know my duty. And you are learning, my boy, learning!"

Every day the flabby cheeks grew pastier and the pouches under the eyebrows heavier. But there was no dimming of the eagle flashes of the eyes, no weakening of the will. Last night Lanstron had turned as white as chalk when Partow staggered on rising from the table, the veins on his temples knotted blue whip-cords. Yet after a few hours' sleep he reappeared with firm step, fresh for the fray.

The paraphernalia around these two was the same as that around Westerling. Only the atmosphere of the staff was different. It had a quality of sober and buoyant alertness and fatality of determination rather than rigid confidence. Otherwise, there was the same medley of typewriters and telegraph instruments, the same types of busy officers and clerks that occupied the Galland house. To them, at least, war had brought no surprises. Its routine was as they had antic.i.p.ated it there in the big division headquarters building, dissociated from the actual experience of the intimate emotions of the front. Each man was performing the part set for him. No man knew much of any other man's part. Partow alone knew all, and Lanstron was trying to grasp all and praying that Partow's old body should still feed his mind with energy.

Lanstron was thinner and paler, a new and glittering intensity in his eyes.

A messenger had just brought in two despatches from the telegraph room.

One was from the taciturn press bureau of the Grays which flashed into the Browns' headquarters from a neutral country at the same time that it flashed around the world to illumine bulletin-boards in every language of civilization. Day after day the Grays had announced the occupation of fresh positions. This was the only news that they had permitted egress--the news which read like the march of victory to the eager world of the press, hastening to quick conclusions. To-day came the official word that Westerling had established his headquarters on conquered territory. Proof, this, that five could drive back three; that the weak could not resist the strong!

"Hm-m--indeed!" exclaimed Partow, lifting his brow into ma.s.sive, corrugated wrinkles. "It may affect the stock market, but not the result."

The other despatch was also out of the land of the Grays, but not by Westerling's consent or knowledge. By devious ways it had broken through the censorship of the frontier in cunning cipher. It told of artillery concentrations three days old; it told only what the aeroplanes had already seen; it told what the Grays had done but nothing of what they intended to do.

When word of Feller's defection came, Lanstron realized for the first time by Partow's manner that the old chief of staff, with all his deprecation of the telephone scheme as chimerical, had grounded a hope on it.

"There was the chance that we might know--so vital to the defence--what they were going to do before and not after the attack," he said.

Yet the story of how Feller yielded to the temptation of the automatic had made the nostrils of the old war-horse quiver with a dramatic breath, and instead of the command of a battery of guns, which Lanstron had promised, the chief made it a battalion. He had drawn down his brows when he heard that Marta had asked that the wire be left intact; he had shot a shrewd, questioning glance at Lanstron and then beat a tattoo on the table and half grinned as he grumbled under his breath:

"She is afraid of being lonesome! No harm done!" A week had pa.s.sed since the Grays had taken the Galland house, and still no word from Marta. The ring of the bell brought Lanstron to his feet with a startled, boyish bound.

"Very springy, that tendon of Achilles!" muttered Partow. "And, my boy, take care, take care!" he called suddenly in his sonorous voice, as vast and billowy as his body. "Take care! She might unwittingly repeat something you said--and hold on!" He was amazingly light and vigorous on his feet as he rose and hurried after Lanstron with the quick, short steps of active adiposity. "She may have seen or heard something.

Ask--ask what is the spirit of the staff, of the soldiers who have fought? What is the truth about their losses? What--" He broke off at the door of Lanstron's bedroom. Lanstron had flung aside a bathrobe that covered a panel door in the closet and already had the receiver in his hand. "But you know what to ask!" concluded Partow. A flush of embarra.s.sment crept into the pasty cheeks and a sparkle into his fine old eyes as he withdrew to acquit himself of being an eavesdropper.

It was Marta's voice and yet not Marta's, this voice that beat in nervous waves over the wire.

"Lanny--yes, I, Lanny! You were right. Westerling planned to make war deliberately to satisfy his ambition. He told me so. The first general attack on the first line of defence is to-night. Westerling says so!"

She had to pause for breath. "And, Lanny, I want to know some position of the Browns which is weak--not actually weak, maybe, but some position where the Grays expect terrible resistance and will not find it--where you will let them in!"

"In the name of--Marta! Marta, what--"

"I am going to fight for the Browns--for my home!"

In the sheer satisfaction of explaining herself to herself, of voicing her sentiments, she sent the pictures which had wrought the change moving across the screen before Lanstron's amazed vision. There was no room for interruption on his part, no question or need of one. The wire seemed to quiver with the militant tension of her spirit. It was Marta aflame who was talking at the other end; not aflame for him, but with a purpose that revealed all the latent strength of her personality and daring.

"Yes, the only way is to fight for your home," she concluded.

"Otherwise, the world would be to the bully and the heads of saints and philosophers and teachers would be egg-sh.e.l.ls under his bludgeon."

"It seems," said Lanstron, "that this is almost like my own view."

He was sorry before the words were fairly out of his mouth that he had taken that tack. It was asking her to back down abruptly from her old principles, which only the weak proselyte will do readily; and she was not a proselyte at all, to her conception.

"No, no!" She etched her reply into his mind with acid, "My profession is peace; it is not war. I am caught with my back to the wall. If the Browns lose, the Gray flag floats over my home. As Westerling says, everybody must take orders from the Grays then. Oh, the mockery of his repairing the damage done to our house and grounds! Let him repair the damage done to fathers and mothers by bringing their sons sacrificed to the ambition for conquest back to life! Oh, I got the whole of him reflected in the mirror of himself this afternoon when he was comfortably taking tea, and in no danger, and sending men to death!"

There Lanstron winced over a characterization that might apply to him.

He could think of only one thing that would ever heal the wound. Perhaps the chance for it would come some day.

"Yes," she went on, "sitting there so comfortably and serenely and deciding that a man who was ready to die for his convictions must be shot for cowardice! My views are like Hugo Mallin's and my back is against the wall. But to the work, Lanny! I have a half-hour in which to make up my mind"--she laughed curiously as she repeated the phrase--"in which to make up my mind." Briefly she recounted what about: "I want to give him positive information of a weak point that can be taken easily."

"But, Marta--Marta--have you considered what a terrible risk--what--" he protested, the chief of intelligence now submerged in the man.

"No more than for Feller. I sent Feller away and I am taking his place.

How is he? Did he get his guns?"

"Yes, not a battery, but a battalion--a major's command--and the iron cross, too!"

"Splendid! Oh, I'd like to see him in uniform directing their fire! How happy he must be! But, are you going to do your part? Are you going to give me the information?"

"I shall have to ask Partow. It's a pretty big thing."

"Yes--only that is not all my plan, my little plan. After they have taken the first line of defence--and they will get it, won't they?"

"Yes, we shall yield in the end, yield rather than suffer too great losses there that will weaken the defence on the main line."

"Then I want to know where it is that you want Westerling to attack on the main line, so that we can get him to attack there. That--that will help, won't it?"

"Yes."

"Of course, all the while I shall be getting news from him--when I have proven my loyalty and have his complete confidence--and I'll telephone it to you. I am sure I can get something worth while with you to direct me; don't you think so, Lanny?"

She put the question as simply as if she were asking if she might sew on a b.u.t.ton for him. It had the charm of an intimate fellowship of purpose.

It appeared free of the least realization of the magnitude of her undertaking. Didn't Mrs. Galland believe that blood would tell? And hadn't the old premier, her grandfather, said: "You can afford to be fussed about little things but never about big things"?

"I'll hold the wire, Lanny. Ask Partow!" she concluded. Of the two she was the steadier.