The Last Shot Part 75

But Minna was flus.h.i.+ng as she spoke. The flush dissipated and she drew up her chin when Stransky, looking around, recognized her with a merry, confident wave of his hand.

"See, he's a captain and he wears an iron cross!" said Marta as Stransky hastened toward them.

"He acts like it!" a.s.sented Minna grudgingly.

Eager, leviathan, his cap doffed with a sweeping gesture as he made a low bow, Stransky was the very spirit of retributive victory returning to claim the ground that he had lost.

"Well, this is like getting home again!" he cried.

"So I see!" said Minna equivocally.

Stransky drew his eyes together, sighting them on the bridge of his nose thoughtfully at this dubious reception.

"I came back for the chance to kiss a good woman's hand," he observed with a profound awkwardness and looking at Minna's hand. "Your hand!" he added, the cast in his eyes straightening as he looked directly at her appealingly.

She extended her finger-tips and he pressed his lips to them. Then she drew back a step, a trifle pale, her eyes sad and questioning, more than ever Madonna-like, and curled her arm around little Clarissa Eileen, who had stolen to her mother's side.

"What is that?" asked Clarissa Eileen, pointing to the cross on Stransky's breast.

"That," observed Stransky deliberately, "is a little piece of metal that I got for an inspiration of manhood. It doesn't cost the price of a day's rations, but it's one of the things which money can't buy--not yet--in this commercial age. One of those inst.i.tutions of barbarism that we anarchists call government gave it to me, and I'll never part with it!"

"Because he was a brave soldier, Clarissa," explained Marta in simpler terms. "Because he was ready to die for his country."

"And for your mother!" put in Stransky, seizing Clarissa in his great hands and lifting her lightly to the level of his face. "Oh, I've got stories," he said to her, "a soldier-man's stories, to tell you, young lady, one of these days--and such stories!"

He crossed his eyes over his big nose in a fas.h.i.+on that made Clarissa clap her hands and burst into a peal of laughter.

"You're an awfully funny man!" she declared as Stransky set her down.

"So your mother thinks," said Stransky, blinking at Minna, who had indulged in a smile which his remark promptly ironed out.

This irrepressible soldier, given so much as an inch, would be demanding a province. But erasing a smile is not destroying the fact of it.

Stransky took heart for the charge on seeing a breach in the enemy's lines.

"Yes, I was fighting for you!" he burst out to Minna. "When the other fellows were reading letters from their sweethearts I was imagining letters from you. I even wrote out some and posted them from one pocket to another, in place of the regular mails."

"What did you say in those letters?" asked Marta.

"Why, you're big and awkward and cross-eyed, Stransky, but you've a way with you, and maybe--"

"Humph!" sniffed Minna.

"I kept seeing the way you looked when you belted me one in the face,"

he went on unabashed to Minna, "and knocked any anarchism out of me that was left after the sh.e.l.l burst. I kept seeing your face in my last glimpse when the Grays made me run for it from your kitchen door before I had half a chance for the oration crying for voice. You were in my dreams! You were in battle with me!"

"This sounds like a disordered mind," observed Minna. "I've heard men talk that way before."

"Oh, I have talked that way to other women myself!" said Stransky.

"Yes," said Minna bitterly. His candor was rather unexpected.

"I have talked to others in pa.s.sing on the high road," he continued.

"But never after a woman had struck me in the face. That blow sank deep--deep--deep as what Lanstron said when I revolted on the march. I say it to you with this"--he touched the cross--"on my breast. And I'm not going to give you up. It's a big world. There's room in it for a place for you after the war is over and I'm going to make the place.

Yes, I've found myself. I've found how to lead men. My home isn't to be in the hedgerows any more. It's to be where you are. You and I, whom society gave a kick, will make society give us a place!" He was eloquent in his strength; eloquent in the fire of resolution blazing from his eyes. "And I'll be back again," he concluded. "You can't shake me. I'll camp on your door-step. But now I've got to look after my company.

Good-by till I'm back--back to stay! Good-by, little daughter!" he added with a wave of his hand to Clarissa as he turned to go. "Maybe we shall have our own automobile some day. It's no stranger than what's been happening to me since the war began."

"If you don't marry him, Minna, I'll--I'll--" Mrs. Galland could not find words for the fearful thing that she would do.

"Marry him! I have only met him three times for about three minutes each time!" protested Minna. She was as rosy as a girl and in her confusion she busied herself retying the ribbon on Clarissa Eileen's hair. "He called you little daughter!" she said softly to the child as she withdrew into the tower.

"I am glad we didn't send Minna away when misfortune befell her," said Mrs. Galland. "You were right about that, Marta, with your new ideas.

What a treasure she has been!"

Marta was scarcely hearing her mother; certainly not finding any credit for herself in the remark. She was thinking what a simple, what a glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere, primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his own undoing.

The skirmishers having halted beyond the linden stumps, the reserves were stacking their rifles and dropping to rest in the garden. The sight of the uniforms of the deliverers, of her own people, stirred Mrs.

Galland to unwonted activity. She moved here and there among them with smiles of mothering pride. She told them how brave they were; how her husband had been a colonel of Hussars in the last war. They must be tired and hungry. She hurried in to Minna, and together they emptied the larder of everything, even to the lumps of sugar, which were impartially bestowed.

But Marta remained in the chair by the doorway of the tower, weak and listless. She was weary of the sight of uniforms and bayonets. In the dreary opaqueness of her mind flickered one tiny, bright light as through a blanket; that she herself had been in danger. She had been under fire. She had not merely sent men to death; she had been in death's company.

Now her lashes were closed; again they opened slightly as her gaze roved the semicircle of the horizon. A mounted officer and his orderly galloping across the fields to the pa.s.s road caught her desultory attention and held it, for they formed the most impetuous object on the landscape. When the officer alighted at the foot of the garden and tossed his reins to the orderly, she detected something familiar about him. He leaped the garden wall at a bound and, half running, came toward the tower. Not until he lifted his cap and waved it did she a.s.sociate this lithe, dapper artillerist with a stooped old gardener in blue blouse and torn straw hat who had once shuffled among the flowers at her service.

"h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo!" he shouted in clarion greeting at sight of her. "h.e.l.lo, my successor!"

Only in the whiteness of his hair was he like the old Feller. His tone, the boyish sparkle of his black eyes, those full, expressive lips playing over the brilliant teeth, his easy grace, his quick and telling gestures--they were of the Feller of cadet days. Something in his look as he stopped in front of her startled Marta. Suddenly he bent over and drew down his face, with dropping underlip.

"I'm deaf--stone deaf, if you please!" he wheezed in senile fas.h.i.+on.

She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth that made him seem younger than his years.

"Not a gardener--a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag again, thanks to you!" he cried. "An officer once more!"

"I'm glad!" she exclaimed. Here was one thing more to the credit of war.

"Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy--thanks to you!" More than the emotion of the br.i.m.m.i.n.g grat.i.tude of his heart shone through his mobile features.

"It was your choice; you improved it. You fulfilled a faith that I had in you," she said.

"Faith in me! That is the finest tribute of all--better than this, better than this!" He touched the iron cross on his coat as Stransky had to Minna.

"And I took your place," said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.

Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking. In his place she had lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt, could ever expiate it. The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan of war in wicked cunning.

He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words. He had forgotten her children's school.

"And did my work better than I could! You are wonderful, wonderful!" He was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.