The Last Shot Part 60

"I've no doubt you have," said Westerling. "You are my choice!"

x.x.xIX

A CHANGE OF PLAN

That day and the next Westerling had no time fix strolling in the garden. His only exercise was a few periods of pacing on the veranda.

Turcas, as tirelessly industrious as ever, developed an increasingly quiet insistence to leave the responsibility of decisions about everything of importance to a chief who was becoming increasingly arbitrary. The attack on Engadir being the jewel of Westerling's own planning, he was disinclined to risk success by delegating authority, which also meant sharing the glory of victory.

Bouchard's note, though officially dismissed as a matter of pathology, would not accept dismissal privately. In flashes of distinctness it recurred to him between reports of the progress of preparations and directions as to dispositions. At dusk of the second day, when all the guns and troops had their places for the final movement under cover of darkness and he rose from his desk, the thing that had edged its way into a crowded mind took possession of the premises that strategy and tactics had vacated. It pa.s.sed under the same a.n.a.lysis as his work. His overweening pride, so sensitive to the suspicion of a conviction that he had been fooled, put his relations with Marta in logical review.

He had fallen in love in the midst of war. This fact was something that his egoism must resent. Any woman who had struck such a response in him as she had must have great depths. Had she depths that he had not fathomed? He recalled her sudden change of att.i.tude toward war, her conversion to the cause of the Grays, and her charm in this as in all their relations.

Was it conceivable that the change was not due to a personal feeling for him? Was her charm a charm with a purpose? Had he, the chief of staff, been beguiled into making a woman his confidant in military secrets?

Just what had he told her? He could not recollect anything definite and recollection was the more difficult because he could not call to mind a single pertinent military question that she had ever asked him. Such information as he might have imparted had been incidental to their talks.

He had enveloped her in glamour; his most preciously trained mental qualities lapsed in her presence. It was time that she was regarded impersonally, as a woman, by the critical eye of the chief of staff. A cool and intense impatience possessed him to study her in the light Of his new scepticism, when, turning the path of the first terrace, he saw her watching the sunset over the crest of the range.

She was standing quite still, a slim, soft shadow between him and the light, which gilded her figure and quarter profile. Did she expect him?

he wondered. Was she posing at that instant for his benefit? And the answer, could he have searched her secret brain, was, Yes--yes, if the conscious and the subconscious mind are to be considered as one responsible intelligence. He usually came at that hour. But he had not come last night. They had not met since Bouchard's ghost hunt.

There was no firing near by; only desultory artillery practice in the distance. She heard the familiar crunch of five against three on the gravel. She knew that he had stopped at the turn of the path, and she was certain that he was looking at her! But she did not make the slightest movement. The golden light continued to caress her profile.

Then, crunch, crunch, rather slowly, the five against three drew nearer.

The delay had been welcome; it had been to her a moment's respite to get her breath before entering the lists. When she turned, her face in the shadow, the glow of the sunset seemed to remain in her eyes, otherwise without expression, yet able to detect something unusual under externals as they exchanged commonplaces of greeting.

"Well, there's a change in our official family. We have lost Bouchard--transferred to another post!" said Westerling.

Marta noted that, though he gave the news a casual turn, his scrutiny sharpened.

"Is that so? I can't say that my mother and I shall be sorry," she remarked. "He was always glaring at us as if he wished us out of his sight. Indeed, if he had his way, I think he would have made us prisoners of war. Wasn't he a woman-hater?" she concluded, half in irritation, half in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"He had that reputation," said Westerling. "What do you think led to his departure?" he continued.

"I confess I cannot guess!" said Marta, with a look at the sunset glow as if she resented the loss of a minute of it.

"There has been a leak of information to the Browns!" he announced.

"There has! And he was intelligence officer, wasn't he?" she asked, turning to Westerling, her curiosity apparently roused as a matter of courtesy to his own interest in the subject.

"Who do you think he accused? Why, _you_," he added, with a peculiar laugh.

She noted the peculiarity of the laugh discriminatingly.

"Oh!" Her eyes opened wide in wonder--only wonder, at first. Then, as comprehension took the place of wonder, they grew sympathetic. "That explains!" she exclaimed. "His hateful glances were those of delusion.

He was going mad, you mean?"

"Yes," said Westerling, "that--that would explain it!"

"I have been told that when people go mad they always ascribe every injury done to them to the person who happens to have excited their dislike," she mused.

"Which seems to have been the case here," Westerling a.s.sented. He did not know what else to say.

"It was the strain of war, wasn't it?" Marta proceeded thoughtfully. "I notice that all the staff-officers are showing it; that is," she added on second thought, quite literally, as she regarded him for an instant of silence, "all except you. You remain the same, calm and decisive."

There she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him.

"Look! The last effulgence of rose!" she went on hurriedly about the sunset. "Why shouldn't we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana? What better immortality than to be absorbed into that?"

"None!" he agreed, but he was looking at her rather than at the sky. His pride was recovering its natural confidence in the infallibility of his judgment of human beings. He was seeing his suspicions as ridiculous enough to convict him of a brain as disordered as Bouchard's.

Marta was thinking that she had been skating on very thin ice and that she must go on skating till she broke through. There was an exhilaration about it that she could not resist: the exhilaration of risk and the control of her faculties, prompted by a purpose hypnotically compelling.

Both were silent, she watching the sky, he in antic.i.p.ation and suspense.

The rose went violet and the shadows over the range deepened.

"The guns and the troops wait. With darkness the music begins!" he said slowly, with a sort of stern fervor.

"The music--the music! He calls it music!" ran through Marta's mind mockingly, but she did not open her lips.

"According to my plan--and your plan!" he added.

"My plan--my plan!" she thought. Her plan that was to send men into a shambles!

"They wait, ready, every detail arranged," he continued proudly.

The violet melted into an inky blue; silence, vast, heavy, prevailed--silence where the millions lay on their arms. Even the guns in the distance had ceased their echoing rumble. He felt the power of her presence and of the moment. It was she who had given the information that had enabled him to confound the scepticism of the staff by the easy taking of Bordir. Through her he might repeat Bordir in a larger way at Engadir, proving his theories of frontal attack. His courage of initiative would s.h.i.+ne out against the background of his staff's scepticism as a light to the world's imagination. The first great man in forty years; the genius of the new system of tactics to meet the demands of a new age as Napoleon had met those of his, Grant of his, and Von Moltke of his! Engadir taken, and his place on Valhalla would be secure.

The very silence with its taut expectancy was of his planning. Alone with her he waited for the thunders of his planning that were to break it. The sky merged into the shadows of the landscape that spread and thickened into blackness. Out of the drawn curtains of night broke an ugly flash and farther up the slope spread the explosive circle of light of a bursting sh.e.l.l.

"The signal!" he exclaimed.

Right and left the blasts spread along the Gray lines and right and left, on the instant, the Browns sent their blasts in reply. Countless tongues of flame seemed to burst from countless craters, and the range to rock in a torment of crashes. In the intervening s.p.a.ce between the ugly, savage gusts from the Gray gun mouths, which sent their sh.e.l.ls from the midst of exploding Brown sh.e.l.ls, swept the beams of the Brown search-lights, their rays lost like sunlight in the vortex of an open furnace door.

"Splendid! splendid!" exclaimed Westerling, in a sweep of emotion at the sight that had been born of his command. "Five thousand guns on our side alone! The world has never seen the equal of this!"

"Five thousand guns!" Marta was thinking. What wouldn't their cost have bought in books, in gardens, and in playgrounds! Every shot the price of a year's schooling for a child!

"You see, we are pounding them along the whole frontier quite impartially, so they shall not know where we are going to press home the attack!" he continued.

"But they do know! I've told them!" shot the burning arrow of mockery through Marta's brain.

"Their search-lights are watching for the infantry--and we shall press the infantry forward, too," he added; "everywhere we make a show of fight!"

Then it occurred vividly to her, as a sudden discovery in the midst of the blinding display, that this was not a kind of chaos like that of the beginning of the world, not nature's own elemental debauch, but men firing guns and men waiting for the charge under that spray of death-dealing missiles.

"Splendid! splendid!" he repeated.

Marta looked away from the range to his face, very distinct in the garish illumination. It was the face of a maestro of war seeing all his rehearsals and all his labors come true in symphonic gratification to the eye and ear; the face of a man of trained mind, the product of civilization, with the elation of a party leader on the floor of a parliament in a crisis.