Part 42 (1/2)

”It seems to me that he is the biggest, most ridiculous man I ever saw!”

said Minna, as she watched him out of sight. ”I'm tired, just tired to death, aren't you?” she added to Marta.

”Exactly!” agreed Marta. ”I feel as if I had worked my way through h.e.l.l to heaven and heaven was the chance to sleep.”

Within the kitchen Mrs. Galland was already slumbering soundly in her chair. Overhead Marta heard the exclamations of male voices and the tread of what was literally the heel of the conqueror--guests that had come without asking! Intruders that had entered without any process of law! Would they overrun the house, her mother's room, her own room?

Indignation brought fresh strength as she started up the stairs. The head of the flight gave on to a dark part of the hall. There she paused, held by the scene that a score or more of Gray soldiers, who had riotously crowded into the dining-room, were enacting.

XXIX

THROUGH THE VENEER

These men in the dining-room were members of Fraca.s.se's company of the Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rus.h.i.+ng across the road into the garden. It is time for their story--the story of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at manoeuvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident.

If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son on his left would have felt a spasm of horror.

This is death, they would have thought; death that barely missed us; death that lays a man in the full tide of youth, as we are, silent and still forever.

Twelve hours after the war had begun, when the judge's son missed the doctor's son from the ranks, he remarked:

”Then they must have got him!”

”Yes, I Saw him roll over on his side,” said the laborer's son.

There was no further comment. The lottery had drawn the doctor's son this time; it would get some one else with the next rush. Existence had resolved itself into a hazard; all perspective was merged into a brimstone-gray background. The men did not think of home and parents, as they had on the previous night while they waited for the war to begin, or of patriotism. Relatives were still dear and country was still dear, but the threads of these affections were no longer taut. They hung loose. Fatalism had taken the place of suspense. There is no occurrence that frequency will not make familiar, and they were already familiar with death.

A man might even get used to falling from a great height. At first, in lightning rapidity of thought, all his life would pa.s.s in review before him and all his hopes for the future would crowd thick. But what if he were to go on descending for hours; yes, for days? Would not his sensations finally wear themselves down to a raw, quivering brain and the brain at length grow callous? Suppose, further, that a number of men had been thrown over a precipice at the same time as he and that the bottom of the abyss was the distance from star to star! Suppose that they fell at the same rate of speed! The first to be dashed against a shelf of rock would be a ghastly reminder to each man of his own approaching end. But, proceeding on horror's journey, he would become accustomed to such pictures. He would feel hunger and cold. Physical discomfort would overwhelm mental agony. If a biscuit shot out from the pocket of a corpse, wouldn't the living hand grab for it in brute greediness?

The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal, always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.

Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone of Fraca.s.se's company were not utterly fatigued.

The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo ”White Liver.” When Hugo stumbled over a stone he whispered:

”White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!”

Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:

”Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time will come. You will die of fright.”

They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip their packs ”and sleep--sleep!”

Fraca.s.se pa.s.sed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of a mult.i.tude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. s.p.a.ces of consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day.

Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to h.e.l.l in order to know what h.e.l.l was like.

He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.

His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations since he had crossed the frontier. Definitely he knew that he was not afraid of bullets or sh.e.l.l fire, and in this fact he found no credit whatever. The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South America who will charge a railroad train are brave. But it took some courage to bear Pilzer's abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of mult.i.tudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.

The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and manoeuvres. He loved them; he thought, student fas.h.i.+on, that he understood them. He liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection.