Part 11 (1/2)

”Your time has come! To the sacrifice!” he exclaimed to the flowers.

Very tenderly, as if he were an executioner considerate of the victims of an inexorable law, he was snipping the stems, his head bent close to the blooms, when a b.u.mblebee appeared among the salvias a few feet away.

Perhaps army staffs who neglect no detail have made a mistake in overlooking the whirring of b.u.mblebees' wings in affecting the fate of nations. These plunderers are not dangerous from their size, but they have not yet been organized to the hep-hep-hep of partisans.h.i.+p. They would as soon live in a Gray as a Brown garden, as soon probe for an atom of honey on one side of the white posts as the other. This one as it drew nearer was well to one side over Feller's shoulders. With eyes and mind intent on his work, Feller turned his head absently, as one will at an interruption.

”There you are again, my dear!” he said. ”You must think you're a battery of automatics.”

He went on cutting chrysanthemums, apparently unconscious that he had spoken.

”Bring them up on the veranda, please,” Marta wrote on the pad, her fingers moving with unusual nervous rapidity, the only sign of her inward excitement.

Coming to the head of the steps of the terrace above, she looked back.

Feller's face was quite hidden under his hat and suddenly she seemed to stub her toe and fall, while she uttered a low cry of pain. The hat rose like a jack-in-the-box with the cover released. Feller bounded toward her, taking two of steps at a time. She scrambled to her feet hastily, laughed, and gestured to show that she was not hurt. He drew his shoulders together and bent over spasmodically, gripping his knee.

”I can run off if something starts me just as spry as if I were twenty,”

he said. ”But after I've done it and the kinks come, I realize I've got old legs.”

”Now I know he's not deaf!” Marta murmured, as he returned to his work.

She frowned. She was angry. ”Lanny, you have something to explain,” she thought.

But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fas.h.i.+on.

IX

A SUNDAY MORNING CALL

As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the nursery floor; and he would rather read about the wonders of natural history and electricity than the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great and my lord Nelson. Left to his own choice, he would miss the parade of the garrison for inspection by an excellency in order to ask questions of a man wiping the oil off his hands with cotton-waste, who was far more entertaining to him than the most spick-and-span ramrod of a sergeant.

The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound. This was even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with his foot. His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Caesar, self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence after his father had been transferred to another post. He was given to magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was that they were all ”experts” in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.

Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed off his eyebrows. This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead languages at times, with a towel tied around his head. He complained that they were out of date; and he wanted to hear the Gauls' story, too, before he fully made up his mind about Caesar. But for the living languages he had a natural gift which his father's service abroad as military attache for a while enabled him to cultivate.

Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion. He had just decided, after having pa.s.sed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and superintendent of the city's waterworks, to build bridges over tropical torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his construction work.

”I don't want to go into the army!” he said.

”Why?” asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.

”It's drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do,” Arthur replied.

”All your work waits on war and you don't know that there will ever be any war. It waits on something n.o.body wants to happen. Now, if you manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out an automobile. If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little.

You're getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your successes. You're making something, creating something; there's something going on all the while that isn't guesswork. I think that's what I want to say. You won't order me to be a soldier will you?”

The father, loath to do this, called in the a.s.sistance of an able pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns, who was an old friend of the Lanstron family. It was not in Partow's mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old idea that made an officer's the conventional avocation of a gentleman of leisurely habits.

”No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like equal numbers,” he said. ”The officer who works hard in the army deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the incentive for results seems remote. But what a terrible test of results may be made in a single hour's action. There is nothing you have learned or ever will learn that may not be of service to you. There is no invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be included in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up to date in every particular. To be backward in a single particular may mean disaster--may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to you. You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean your shame and your country's suffering; while efficiency means a clear conscience and your country's security.”