The Last Shot Part 77

"Nothing is impossible with Lanstron. How he has worked it out--baited them to their own destruction!"

"A frontier of our own choosing!"

"On the next range. We will keep all that stretch of plain there!"

"And the river, too!"

"They shall pay--pay for attacking us!"

Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the wounded--for our dead and wounded! No matter about theirs! The officers were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some dissentient, some partisan of the right. She was seeing the truth now; the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took Feller's place. There could be no choice of sides in war unless you believed in war. One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame: the desertion of her principles.

Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house.

Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight.

His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to be conventionally military--the same Lanny.

She was dimly conscious of surprise not to find him changed, perhaps because he was unaccompanied by a retinue or any other symbol of his power. He might have been coming to call on a Sunday afternoon. In that first glimpse it was difficult to think of him as the commander of an army. But that he was, she must not forget. She was shaken and trembling; and a mist rose before her, so that she did not see him clearly when, with a gesture of relief, he saw her.

"Lanstron!" exclaimed an officer in the first explosive breath of amazement on recognizing him; then added: "His Excellency, the chief of staff!"

But the one word, Lanstron, had been enough to thrill all the officers into silence and ramrod salutes. Marta noted the deference of their glances as they covertly looked him over. On what meat had our Caesar fed that he had grown so great? This was the man who had pleaded with her to allow a spy in her garden; for whom she herself had turned spy.

To-morrow his name would be in the head-lines of every newspaper in the world. His portrait would become as familiar to the eyes of the world as that of the best-advertised of kings. He was the conqueror whose commonplace sayings would be the sparks of genius because the gamble of war had gone his way. He had grown so great by sending sh.e.l.ls into the stricken eddy at the foot of the garden and driving punis.h.i.+ng columns against the retreating ma.s.ses in the defile. The G.o.d in the car and of the machine, with his quiet manner, his intellectual features; this one-time friend, more subtle in pursuit of the same ambitions than the blind egoism of Westerling! These officers and men and all officers and men and herself were p.a.w.ns of his plans and his will. Yes, even herself.

Had he stopped with the repulse of the enemy? No. Would he stop now? No.

Her disillusion was complete. She knew the truth; she felt it as steel stiffening against him and against every softer impulse of her own.

"I wanted a glimpse of the front as well as the rear," Lanstron remarked in explanation of his presence to the general of brigade as he pa.s.sed on toward Marta, who was thinking that she, at least, was not in awe of him; she, at least, saw clearly and truly his part.

"Marta! Marta!"

Lanstron's voice was tremulous, as if he were in awe of her, while he drank in the fact that she was there before him at arms' length, safe, alive. She did not offer her hand in greeting. She was incapable of any movement, such was her emotion; and he, too, was held in a spell, as the reality of her, after all that had pa.s.sed, filled his eyes. He waited for her to speak, but she was silent.

"Marta--that bandage! You have been hurt?" he exclaimed.

Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind to externals. Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him. This was his kind of strength--the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine, intellectual process. He could act, too. In the tone of the question, "You've been hurt?" without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his blouse quivering. Why care if she were hurt? Why not think about the hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded. Why not care for that poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote "Kill me!" on the wagon body?

"It's the fas.h.i.+on to be wounded," she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes lowered, with a nervous smile. "I played Florence Nightingale, the natural woman's part, I believe. We should never protest; only nurse the victims of war. After helping to send men to death I went under fire myself, and--and that helped."

She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron. He was not a child. He was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by calculation.

"Yes, that would help," he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.

Her old taunt: sending men to death and taking no risk himself! She saw that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about to come in a flood. Then she seemed to see him through new lenses. He appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes; anything but the conqueror. Her feelings grew contradictory. Why all this fencing? How weak, how silly! She had much to say to him--a last appeal to make. Her throat held a dry lump. She was marshalling her thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.

"Lanstron! Lanstron! Hurrah for Lanstron!"

The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any "Your Excellency, the chief of staff" formula when word had been pa.s.sed of his presence. Marta looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of their lungs. Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.

Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute. He always looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare. It completed the ensemble of his sensitive features. She saw that he was blinking almost boyishly at the compliment and noted the little deprecatory shake of his head, as much as to say that they were making a mistake.

"Thank you!" he called, and the cheeriness of his voice, she thought, expressed his real self; the delight of victory and the glowing antic.i.p.ation of further victories.

"Thank _you_!" called a private with a big voice.

"Yes, thank _you_!" repeated some of the officers in quick appreciation of a compliment as real as human courage.

"We're going to put your headquarters in the Grays' capital!" cried the soldier with the big voice.

Another cheer rose at the suggestion.

"You will follow the staff?" Lanstron called in sudden intensity.

"Yes, yes, yes!" they shouted. "Yes, yes; follow you!"

"You think our staff led you wisely?" he continued distinctly, slowly, and very soberly. "You think we can continue to do so? You trust us? You trust our judgment?"

"Yes, yes, yes!"

"Thank you!" he said with a long-drawn, happy breath.

"Thank _you_!" they shouted.

He stood smiling for a moment in reply to their smiles; then, still smiling, but in a different way, he said to Marta:

"As you say, that helps!" with a nod toward the bandage on her forearm and hurriedly turned away.

She saw him involuntarily clutch the wrist above the pocket of his blouse to still the twitching; but beyond that there was no further sign of emotion as he went to the telephone. She had been about to cry out her protest against the continuance of the war in the name of humanity, of justice, of every bit of regard he had ever had for her. When he was through talking she should go to him in appeal--yes, on her knees, if need be, before all the officers and soldiers--to stop the killing; but instantly he was through he started toward the pa.s.s road, not by the path to the steps, but by leaping from terrace to terrace and waving his hand gayly to the soldiers as he went. The officers stared at the sight of a chief of staff breaking away from his communications in this unceremonious fas.h.i.+on. They saw him secure a horse from a group of cavalry officers on the road and gallop away.

Marta having been the object of Lanstron's attention now became the object of theirs. It was good to see a woman, a woman of the Browns, after their period of separation from feminine society. She found herself holding an impromptu reception. She heard some other self answering their polite questions; while a fear, a new kind of fear, was taking hold of her real self; a fear inexplicable, insidiously growing.

Lanstron was still in the officers' minds after his strange appearance and stranger departure. They began to talk of him, and Marta listened.

"He said something about being a free man now!"

"Yes, he looked as eager as a terrier after rats."

"He knows what he is doing. He sees so far ahead of what we are thinking that it's useless to guess his object. We'll understand when it's done."

"How little side he has! So perfectly simple. He hardly seems to realize the immensity of his success. In fact, none of us realizes it; it's too enormous, overwhelming, sudden!"

"And no nerves!"

"No nerves, did you say? There you are wrong. Did you see that hand twitching in his pocket? Of course, you've heard about the hand? Why, he's a bundle of nerve-wires held in control; a man of the age; master of his own machine, therefore, able to master the machine of an army."

Of course, they guessed nothing of Marta's part in his success. The very things they were saying about him built up a figure of the type whose character she had keenly resented a few minutes before.

"But, Miss Galland, you seem to know him far better than we. This is not news to you," remarked the brigade commander.

"Yes, I saw the accident of his first flight when his hand was injured,"

she said, and winced with horror. Never had the picture of him as he rose from the wreck appeared so distinct. She could see every detail of his looks; feel his twinges of pain while he smiled. Was the revelation the more vivid because it had not once occurred to her since the war began? It shut out the presence of the officers; she no longer heard what they were saying. Black fear was enveloping her. Vaguely she understood that they were looking away at something. She heard the roar of artillery not far distant and followed their gaze toward the knoll where Dellarme's men had received their baptism of fire, now under a canopy of shrapnel smoke.