Part 47 (2/2)

”At least we need not speak of it!” she replied.

Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible b.u.mpers. The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty. p.r.o.ne to avoid recollections that made him feel old--to feel old was to be out of date in his profession---he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two and gratifying as youth's dreams become reality. Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff. This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty. His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate.

”There's work--always work for a chief!” he declared. ”I--”

Marta was quick to act on the hint. Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke.

”There's always the garden for me! But first--” Yes, first there was poor Hugo.

Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion. The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes--his calculating gray eyes--glinted a youthful entreaty.

”Please! I didn't finish my sentence!” he begged. ”You remember that often I used to wait after tea until the sunset--”

”And reached your quarters late for dinner, I also remember!” she put in. But she remained in the same position, his finger-tips on her arm, her hands holding her body free of the chair. ”That is, when you did not stay to dinner!” she added.

”I am staying to-night. I was going to ask if you wouldn't remain on the veranda while I go over these papers. It--it would be very cosey and pleasant.”

One of these papers, she knew, must be the evidence against Hugo Mallin.

She preferred not to make a direct appeal but to have Westerling bring up the subject himself. His smile and the look with which he regarded her spoke his appreciation of the picture she made and his fear of losing it. Very cosey and pleasant, yes, the company of a prophetess, with a ray of sunlight making her hair an aurora of flas.h.i.+ng bronze overtopping a brown face, the eyes holding answers to an increasing number of unasked questions about the new forces that he had found in her.

”Why, yes,” she agreed with evident pleasure, for she was thinking of Hugo.

Turcas now came, in answer to Westerling's ring. The orders and suggestions on the table seemed to be the product of this lath of a man, the vice-chief, but a lath of steel, not wood, who appeared a runner trained for a race of intellects in the scratch cla.s.s. One by one, almost perfunctorily, Westerling gave his a.s.sent as he pa.s.sed the papers to Turcas; while Turcas's dry voice, coming from between a narrow opening of the thin lips, gave his reasons with a rapid-firer's precision in answer to his chief's inquiries.

With each order somewhere along that frontier some unit of a great organism would respond. The reserves from this position would be transferred to that; such a position would be felt out before dark by a reconnaissance in force, however costly; the rapid-firers of the 19th Division would be transferred to the 20th; despite the 37th Brigade's losses, it would still form the advance; General So-and-So would be superseded after his failure of yesterday; Colonel So-and-So would take his place as acting major-general; more care must be exercised in recommendations for bronze crosses, lest their value so depreciate that officers and men would lack incentive to win them.

Marta was having a look behind the scenes at the fountainhead of great events. Power! power! The absolute power of the soldier in the saddle, with premier and government and all the inst.i.tutions of peace only a dim background for the processes of war! Opposite her was a man who could make and unmake not only generals but even the destinies of peoples. By every sign he enjoyed his power for its own sake. There must be a chief of the five millions, which were as a moving forest of destruction, and here was the chief, his strength reflected in the strong muscles of his short neck as he turned his head to listen to Turcas. Marta recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago: the iron invincibility of the elder's st.u.r.dy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure of the younger man.

”The evidence you asked for in that Mallin mutiny case,” said Turcas, indicating the only remaining paper.

”Yes, I want to go into that--it's a question of policy,” said Westerling.

He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair. She had bent forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in a kind of wondering admiration. But she dropped her eyelids instantly and said deliberately, less to him than to herself:

”You have the gift!”

No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose existence had been borne in on her by observation.

”The gift? How?” he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half hid her lowered face.

She looked up, smiling brightly.

”You don't know what gift! Not the pianist's! Not the poet's!” (Oh, to save Hugo! The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her impulses, born of the war's stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in view of her knowledge of the man before her) ”Why, of course, the supreme gift of command! The thing that made you chief of staff! And the war goes well for you, doesn't it?”

Delicious morsel, this, to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the impression he had made on her.

”Yes, as you foresaw--as I planned!” he said. ”Yes, I planned all, step by step, till I was chief of staff and ready. I convinced the premier that it was time to strike and I chose the hour to strike; for Bodlapoo was only a convenient excuse for the last of all the steps”

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