Part 36 (1/2)
”I might have guessed beforehand what you would say,” she replied. ”You sent for me?”
”Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any sh.e.l.l that may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go through the second wall.”
”Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms,” she replied indifferently.
The fatalism of her att.i.tude and his alarm lest she had gone a little out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:
”Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--”
He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.
”Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?”
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.
”Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--” he was stammering.
”Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!” she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. ”Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder.”
”Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I--”
She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.
”Don't I look it--hysterical?” she exclaimed. ”How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!”
With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.
”That is not your way,” he managed to say. He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last weapon in his armory--which the captain of engineers had already used--his att.i.tude changed to a soldierly sternness. ”Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that--”
She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes. He understood that she had again antic.i.p.ated what he was going to say.
”There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And the time has come for you to be firm!” The color in his cheeks deepened.
He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the present situation. ”This is our home; our home is our country. Here we remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets,” she continued. ”Even your soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags.
They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their illusions that they bare their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to bullets. We have already arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!”
She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to call back happily:
”You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!”
”Oh, Miss Galland!” he exclaimed. ”Miss Galland, you are beyond me!”
”What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!” she thought angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the corridor. ”To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose!
Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish--”
She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator of the story faced the barbarous Gauls--neither disputing the power of their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single candle--she still favored candles--revealed her features calm and philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at once more tender and vital.
”Marta, I see that you are all on wires!”
”Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune,”
Marta acquiesced.