The Last Shot Part 53

"Well?" said Partow, looking up at the sound of Lanstron's step. Then he half raised himself from his chair at sight of a Lanstron with eyes in a daze of brilliancy; a Lanstron with his maimed hand twitching in an outstretched gesture; a Lanstron in the dilemma of being at the same time lover and chief of intelligence. Should he let her make the sacrifice of everything that he held to be sacred to a woman's delicacy?

Should he not return to the telephone and tell her that he would not permit her to play such a part? Partow's voice cut in on his demoralization with the sharpness of a blade.

"Well, what, man, what?" he demanded. He feared that the girl might be dead. Anything that could upset Lanstron in this fas.h.i.+on struck a chord of sympathy and apprehension.

Lanstron advanced to the table, pressed his hands on the edge, and, now master of himself, began an account of Marta's offer. Partow's formless arms lay inert on the table, his soft, pudgy fingers outspread on the map and his bulk settled deep in the chair, while his eagle eyes were seeing through Lanstron, through a mountain range, into the eyes of a woman and a general on the veranda of an enemy's headquarters. The plan meant giving, giving in the hope of receiving much in return. Would he get the return?

"A woman was the ideal one for the task we intrusted to Feller," he mused, "a gentlewoman, big enough, adroit enough, with her soul in the work as no paid woman's could be! There seemed no such one in the world!"

"But to let her do it!" gasped Lanstron.

"It is her suggestion, not yours? She offers herself? She wants no persuasion?" Partow asked sharply.

"Entirely her suggestion," said Lanstron. "She offers herself for her country--for the cause for which our soldiers will give their lives by the thousands. It is a time of sacrifice."

Partow raised his arms. They were not formless as he brought them down with sledge-hammer force to the table.

"Your tendon of Achilles? My boy, she is your sword-arm!" His st.u.r.dy forefinger ran along the line of frontier under his eye with little staccato leaps. "Eh?" he chuckled significantly, finger poised.

"Let them up the Bordir road and on to redoubts 36 and 37, you mean?"

asked Lanstron.

"You have it! The position looks important, but so well do we command it that it is not really vital. Yes, the Bordir road is her bait for Westerling!" Partow waved his hand as if the affair were settled.

"But," interjected Lanstron, "we have also to decide on the point of the main defence which she is to make Westerling think is weak."

"Hm-m!" grumbled Partow. "That is not necessary to start with. We can give that to her later over the telephone, can't we, eh?"

"She asked for it now."

"Why?" demanded Partow with one of his shrewd, piercing looks.

"She did not say, but I can guess," explained Lanstron. "She must put all her cards on the table; she must tell Westerling all she knows at once. If she tells him piecemeal it might lead to the supposition that she still had some means of communication with the Browns."

"Of course, of course!" Partow spatted the flat of his hand resoundingly on the map. "As I decided the first time I met her, she has a head, and when a woman has a head for that sort of thing there is no beating her.

Well--" he was looking straight into Lanstron's eyes, "well, I think we know the point where we could draw them in on the main line, eh?"

"Up the ap.r.o.n of the approach from the Engadir valley. We yield the advance redoubts on either side."

"Meanwhile, we have ma.s.sed heavily behind the redoubt. We retake the advance redoubts in a counter-attack and--" Partow brought his fist into his palm with a smack.

"Yes, if we could do that! If we could get them to expend their attack there!" put in Lanstron very excitedly for him.

"We must! She shall help!" Partow was on his feet. He had reached across the table and seized Lanstron's shoulders in a powerful if flesh-padded grip. Then he turned Lanstron around toward the door of his bedroom and gave him a mighty slap of affection. "My boy, the brightest hope of victory we have is holding the wire for you. Tell her that a bearded old behemoth, who can kneel as gracefully as a rheumatic rhinoceros, is on both knees at her feet, kissing her hands and trying his best, in the name of mercy, to keep from breaking into verse of his own composition."

Back at the telephone, Lanstron, in the fervor of the cheer and the enthusiasm that had transported his chief, gave Marta Partow's message.

"You, Marta, are our brightest hope of victory!"

"Yes?" The monosyllable was detached, dismal, labored. "A woman can be that!" she exclaimed in an uncertain tone, which grew into the distraction of clipped words and broken sentences. "A woman play-acting--a woman acting the most revolting hypocrisy--influences the issue between two nations! Her deceit deals in the lives of sons precious to fathers and mothers, the fate of frontiers, of inst.i.tutions!

Think of it! Think of machines costing countless millions--machines of flesh and blood, with their destinies shaped by one little bit of lying information! Think of the folly of any civilization that stakes its triumphs on such a gamble! Am I not right? Isn't it true? Isn't it?"

"Yes, yes, Marta! But--I--" If she were weakening it was not his place to try to strengthen her purpose.

"I was thinking, only thinking!" she murmured reflectively. "That's not the thing now!" she added with sudden force. "Partow gave you the positions?"

He described the Bordir position. She repeated the description after him with a stoical matter-of-factness to make sure that she had it correctly.

"I must actually know in order to be convincing," she said. "Now that of the main line."

He did not include in the description of Engadir any reference to the Browns' plan of a crus.h.i.+ng counter-attack. But as she was repeating this, her calm tone broke into an outcry of horror, as the nature of what he was inadvertently concealing flashed into her mind. She was seeing another picture of imagination, with all the hideous detail of realism drawn from her week's experiences.

"That column of Grays will go forward cheering with victory, led on, tricked on--and then they will find themselves in a shambles. No going forward, no going back through the cross-fire! Is that it?"

"Yes, something like that, though not exactly a cross-fire--not unless the enemy has poorer generals than we think."

"But that will be the object and the effect--wholesale slaughter?"

"Yes!" a.s.sented Lanstron honestly.

"And a woman whose greatest happiness and pride was in teaching the righteousness and the beauty of peace to children--her lie will send them to death!" she moaned. "I shall be a party to murder!"

"No more than Westerling! No more than any general! No--" But he paused in his argument. Conviction must come to her from within, not from without. He stood graven and wordless, while she was tortured in the h.e.l.l of her mind's creation.

She was hearing the cry in the night of the Gray soldier who had fallen from the dirigible in the first day's fighting; the agonized groans of the men under the wall of the terrace when the hand-grenades spattered human flesh as if it were jelly. But there was Dellarme smiling; there was Hugo Mallin saying that he would fight for his own home; there was Stransky, who had thrown the hand-grenade, bringing in an exhausted old man on his back from under fire; there was Feller as he rallied Dellarme's men; and--and there was Lanny waiting at the other end of the wire--and a burglar should not take her home.

"Men must have the courage of their convictions!" Hugo had said. Hers were all for peace. But there was not peace. There could not be peace until the war demon had had his fill of killing and one side had to cry for mercy. Which side should that be? That was the only question.

"It will the sooner end fighting, won't it, Lanny?" she asked in a small, tense voice.

"Yes."

"And the only real end that means real peace is to prove that the weak can hold back the strong from their threshold?"

"Yes."

Even now Westerling might be on the veranda, perhaps waiting for news that would enable him to crush the weak; to prove that the law of five pounds of human flesh against three, and five bayonets against three, is the law of civilization.

"Yes, yes, yes!" The constriction was gone from her throat; there was a drum-beat in her soul. "Depend on me, Lanny!" It was Feller's favorite phrase spoken by the one who was to take his place. "Yes, I'm ready to make any sacrifice now. For what am I? What is one woman compared to such a purpose? I don't care what is said of me or what becomes of me if we can win! Good-by, Lanny, till I call you up again! And G.o.d with us!"

"G.o.d with us!" as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it in the midst of action.

x.x.xIV

THREE VOICES