Part 23 (1/2)
The men wanted to talk but did not know what to talk about, so they examined their rifles critically as if they were unfamiliar gifts which they had found in their stockings on Christmas morning. Some began to empty their magazines of cartridges for the pleasure or occupation of refilling them; but one of the lieutenants stopped this. It might mean delay when the whistle blew. Thus the hours wore on, and the church clock struck nine and ten.
”Never a movement down there!” called the sergeant from the crest to Dellarme. ”Maybe this is just their final bluff before they come to terms about Bodlapoo”--that stretch of African jungle that seemed very far away to them all.
”Let us hope so!” said Dellarme seriously.
”Hope there won't be any war! Just listen to that from an army officer, with the enemy right in front of him!” gasped grandfather.
XVII
A SUNDAY MORNING IN TOWN
”You ought not to leave the house--not this morning,” protested Mrs.
Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular Sunday service of her school.
”The children expect me,” Marta explained.
”Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you will not come.”
But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.
”Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to come, I would not disappoint him!” she said. ”Heaven knows, mother, if there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this--that is too terrible!”
”As you will!” Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.
Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but it was a different kind of peace--a peace mocked by sounds beyond its boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious antic.i.p.ation of a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word.
As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill!
And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses, but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand practical human nature.
Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace to the main pa.s.s road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some field-batteries. In the week of distracting and c.u.mulative suspense that had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.
”It will be averted! It cannot be!” she was thinking. Her glimpse of him had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any other familiar object of the landscape.
”The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!” he was thinking.
She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the demon was a fair, beckoning G.o.d in cloth of gold--a G.o.d of hope and fortune.
”Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our preparations leaking out--Lanny's plan all alive--the guns coming,” he went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action--”troops moving here and there to their places--engineers preparing the defences--automatics at critical points with the infantry--field-wires laid--field-telephones set up--the wireless spitting--the caissons full--planes and dirigibles ready--search-lights in position”
There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow pa.s.sed in front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly leaving.
”Miss Galland!” he called urgently. ”Firing may commence at any minute.
You must not go into town!”
”But I must!” she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused.
It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.