Part 79 (1/2)
”The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!”
”What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good old way, right at the front!”
”Heavens! I hope they do it!”
”The flag's down!”
”Another man has it--it's up!”
”Now--now--splendid! They're in!”
”So they are! And the flag, too!”
”Yes, what's left are in!”
”And Lanstron was there--in that!”
”What if--”
”Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!”
”The mind of the army--the mind that was to direct our advance!”
”When all the honors of the world are his!”
Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the slope? Was he? Was he?
”Telephone and--and see if Lanny is--is killed!” she begged.
She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole.
She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed. What mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to them? The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one--one of the millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the millions. Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death. Had she sent _him_ to death? The agony of waiting, waiting there among these strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.
”I'll go--I'll go out there where he is!” she said incoherently, still looking toward the knoll with glazed eyes. She thought she was walking fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going slowly, stumblingly.
”I think you had better stop her if you can,” said the general to his aide.
The aide overtook her at the gate.
”We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for yourself,” he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of youth with romance into his tone. ”You might miss the road, even miss him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance,” he explained. ”In a few minutes we ought to have word.”
Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the garden wall in the melee of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the wheel for support.
”If the women of the Grays waited four weeks,” she said with an effort at stoicism, ”then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes.”
”Depend on me. I'll bring news as soon as there is any,” the aide concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.
For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courts.h.i.+p, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, pa.s.sed in review under the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time.
Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame--perhaps too late.