The Last Shot Part 50

"I am willing," said Hugo. "Indeed, I shall be very glad to have my side heard."

"Yes, let us see the letter," a.s.sented Westerling; for he, too, was curious.

When Hugo had given it to Westerling and he saw that it was not very long, he began reading aloud:

"'I've kept very well and cheerful and I'm cheerful now,'" the letter began. "'Please always think of me as cheerful. Everybody in our company has fought well; just as bravely as our forefathers did in the wars of their day.'"

"Which hardly agrees with your ideas," observed Westerling.

"Exactly, sir. Men should be brave for their convictions," answered Hugo. "And, as you said, the men of our province are loyal to the old ideas. They believe they ought to fight the Browns."

Then followed a brief, intimate, appealing story of how each of his dead comrades had fallen.

"'You can read these to their folks at home, if you want to. They might like to know.'"

Irresistibly there crept into Westerling's face at these recitals of soldierly courage the satisfaction of the commander with the spirit of his men. Here was proof of the valor of the units of his army.

"'Now I have something to tell you which will hurt you very much,'"

Westerling read on, "'but you must recollect that I was always regarded as a little queer. And I don't think people will hold you to blame on my account. I hope they will sympathize with you for having such a son. You will have heard the story from the men of the company, but I also want to tell it to you....'"

After it was told the letter proceeded:

"'I feel that I was a coward up to the moment that everybody else was calling me a coward. Then I felt free and happy, as if I had been true to myself. I felt that I had been just as much in the wrong as if we should break into our neighbor's house and take his property because we were stronger than he. How would you feel if a neighbor entered your house and made it his own? You would call in the police. But what if there were no police? Would that make it right?'"

Marta's own opinions! The spirit of her children's prayer! Head bent, hands clasped, she was simply listening.

"'Would it be cowardice if one of the neighbor's family said, "I will not take any further part in this robbery!" when he saw you, mother, weeping over you, father, as you lay dead after trying to defend your house? When I was asked to fire at those running men it was like standing on a neighbor's door-step and firing down the street at my neighbors in flight. I could not do it. I could not do it though twenty million men were doing the same thing. No, I could not do it any more than you could commit murder, father. That is all. Perhaps when those who survive from my company come home, after they have been beaten as they will be--'"

"What!" Westerling exploded.

All the force of his being had to take umbrage at this. Beaten! Marta saw the rigid, unyielding Westerling who had cried, "We shall win!" when she made her second prophecy. But the comparison did not occur to him.

Nothing occurred to him but red anger, until the first dart of reason warned him, a chief of staff, that a private had made him completely lose his temper. He recovered his poise with a laugh and without even glancing at Marta.

"Well, we might as well hear the reasons for your expert opinion," he said, his satire a trifle hoa.r.s.e after the strain of his emotion.

"Because the Browns fight for their homes!" answered Hugo "When the great crisis comes they have a reserve strength that we have not: conscience, the intelligent conscience of this age that cannot fool itself with false enthusiasm continually. They are fighting as I should pray that I might fight if the Browns invaded our country; as I might fight against a murderous burglar. For I will fight, sir, I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them! The Browns have no more right to cross our frontier than we have to cross theirs!"

There was a perceptible shudder on Marta's part, an abrupt, tossing elevation of her head. She stared at the spot where Dellarme had lain in the garden. Dellarme's smile was back on her lips; it seemed graven there. Her eyes, which Westerling could not see, were leaping flames.

"I'm afraid you will not have the chance," Westerling observed, as he returned the letter to Hugo, its reading unfinished. "What if every man held your views? What would become of the army and the nation?" he demanded.

"Why, I think I have made that plain," replied Hugo. He appeared no less weary than Westerling over continual beating of the air to no purpose.

"We should retreat to our own soil, where we belong."

"And you are ready to be shot for that principle?"

The question was sharp and final.

"Yes, if being shot for what I did is dying for it--though I prefer to live for it!" said Hugo, still without any pose. He refused to play for a chapter in the future book of martyrs to peace. This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips.

"Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly. His eyes sought Marta.

The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also. There was a distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she turned her head. The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.

"It is extraordinary!" she breathed. "Don't you think that the blow on his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?"

Hugo answered for himself.

"My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that brought the blow!" he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the principles which she had professed to him previously.

She shuddered as if hurt, but only momentarily.

"Psychological, I suppose--psychological and irresponsible abnormality!"

she murmured, avoiding Hugo's look and bending her own on Westerling persistently.

"Long words!" said Hugo. "Insanity is shorter."

But Westerling did not seem to hear. His thought was shaped by the superb misery and sensitiveness in Marta's face. He had done wrong to ask her to remain. Of course the scene had been painful to her. She would not be herself if she wanted to see a man tried for his life. He knew that views not unlike Hugo's were latent in many minds lacking Hugo's initiative that would respond to the right impulse. A way out occurred to him as inspiration, which pleased his sense of craft. The press, which the premier reported was irritated by his censors.h.i.+p--the press which must have sensation, the traffic of its trade--should have a detailed account of how one of our indomitable regiments placarded a private as coward, proving thereby that the army was a unit of aggressive zeal.

"You are alone--one man in a million in your ideas!" he declared, with judicial gravity. "We shall postpone your trial and leave public opinion to punish you. Your story will be given to the press in full; your name will be a byword throughout the land, an example, and while you are convalescing you will remain a prisoner. When you are well we shall have another talk I may give you a chance, for the sake of your father and mother and your sweetheart and the good opinion of your neighbors, to redeem yourself."

"I had to tell you what I felt, sir," said Hugo. "Thank you for letting me live, after you knew."

He saluted and turned away. Marta and Westerling watched him as he hobbled around the corner of the house and in a heavy silence listened to the crunch of his crutch tips on the gravel growing fainter. Her lashes, those convenient curtains for hiding thought, dropped as Westerling looked around; but he saw that her lips had reddened and that she was drawing a long, deep, energizing breath. When the lashes lifted, there was still wonder in her eyes--wonder which had become definite tribute to him. The a.s.surance he wanted was that he had borne himself well, and he had it.

"You kept your patience beautifully," she told him. "It seems to me that you were both kind and wise."

"How I was to be merciful against the facts puzzled me," he replied, "until you saved the day with your suggestion of psychological irresponsibility."

"Then I helped? I really helped?"

"You did, decidedly! You--" There he broke off, for he found himself speaking to her profile.

She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away, where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills toward the white posts. Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow there in the distance! Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze! The dark shade of the house's ma.s.s over the yard!

It was time for him to be at his desk. But she seemed far from any suggestion of going. She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence. Yet were he to rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it. Though she did not change her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.

He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile in the glory of the sunset. The superb thing about her was that she always called for study. Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold. In time measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent. When she spoke she' did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into her eyes.

"It was another experience of war," she said moodily, returning to the subject of Hugo. "Yes, something like the final chapter of experience, the trial of this dreamer." Then a wave of restless impatience with her abstraction swept over her. Speaking of dreamers, she herself would stop dreaming. "For experience does make a great difference, doesn't it?" she exclaimed with a sad, knowing smile. After a perceptible pause her eyes suddenly glowed into his. All the commotion of her thought was galvanized into purpose in the look. "I have had a heart full and a mind full of experiences!" she said. "I have been close to war--closer than you! I have looked on while others fought!"

The thing was coming! He should hear the story of the change that war had wrought in her. She appeared to regard him as the one listener whom she had sought; as a confidant who alone could understand her. His gift for listening was in full play as he relaxed and settled back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand lest he should seem to stare. For in his eagerness he would not miss any one of her varied signals of emotion.

She was as vivid as he knew that she would be, her narration flashes of impression in clear detail. Her being seemed transparent to its depths and her moods through the last week to run past him in review. He marvelled at times at her military knowledge; again at her impartiality.

She was neither for the Browns nor the Grays; she was simply telling what she had seen. She pa.s.sed by some horrors; on others she dwelt with fearless emphasis.

"Then the hand-grenades were thrown!" She put her hands over her eyes.

"As they fell"--she put her hands over her ears--"oh, the groans!"