The Last Shot Part 31

"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta--I plead with you--please, please leave the house!" he begged pa.s.sionately.

Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again that a.s.sumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and una.s.sailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!

"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking other lives every minute?"

"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life of all to me--because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a pin-p.r.i.c.k of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate sentences:

"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"

He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands, and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.

"My one chance--my last chance--gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he proceeded dismally.

"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.

"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of a spy--I who was honor man at the military school--I who had a conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to atone--when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to die if not to live----"

He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence.

"--in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.

His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel with his nerves.

"Please," he pleaded faintly--"please leave me to myself. I will tear out the telephone--trust me--only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain--I see only dark!"

He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and he looked for a pa.s.sionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A l.u.s.trous veil was over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of "I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable att.i.tude she was silent for a time.

"Let it remain--it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried past him still clasping her wrist.

He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La, la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.

"Why not tear out the telephone--why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once?

I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I have skill! G.o.d knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining, but bang-bang-bang on the target!"

In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.

"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's another--but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a soldier now--a soldier a.s.signed to a definite duty for my flag. I should break my word of honor--a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in the ascendant.

"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss Galland consents!"

"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"

"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I--"

"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't think of the guns!"

"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty!

I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But, trust me, Lanny! Trust me--for my flag and my country against the invader!"

"Against the invader--that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"

"Trust me!"

"Bless you, and G.o.d with you!"

"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguis.h.i.+ng the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh, this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.

XXII

FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED

Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field.

She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge, surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to speak.

"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them some hot soup."

He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fraca.s.se or Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of wounding them.

"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly.

It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to eat."

"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.

"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."

Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.

"Then water?"

The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.

"We have sterilized water--we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprentices.h.i.+p in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."

Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.

"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"

"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."

The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.

She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.