Читать книгу The Last Shot - Frederick Palmer - Страница 23

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To tell the story as Lanstron told it is to have it from the partisan lips of a man speaking for a man out of the depths of a friendship grown into the fibre of youth. It is better written by the detached narrator.

Gustave Feller's father had died when Gustave was twelve and his mother found it easy to spoil an only son who was handsome and popular. He suffered the misfortune of a mental brilliancy that learns too readily and of a personal charm that wins its way too easily. He danced well; he was facile at the piano; and he had so pronounced a gift as an amateur actor that a celebrated professional had advised him to go on the stage.

The two entering the cadet officers' school at the same time, chance made them roommates and choice soon made them chums. They had in common cleverness and the abundant energy that must continually express itself in action, and a mutual attraction in the very complexity of dissimilar traits that wove well in companionship.

While they were together Lanstron was a brake on his friend's impulses of frivolity which carried him to extremes; but they separated after receiving their commissions, Feller being assigned to the horse-artillery and Lanstron to the infantry and later to the staff. In charge of a field-battery at man[oe]uvres Feller was at his best. But in the comparative idleness of his profession he had much spare time for amusement, which led to gambling. Soon many debts hung over his head, awaiting liquidation at high rates of interest when he should come into the family property.

To the last his mother, having ever in mind a picture of him as a fine figure riding at the head of his guns, was kept in ignorance of this side of his life. With her death, when he had just turned thirty, a fortune was at his disposal. He made an oath of his resolution to pay his debts, marry and settle down and maintain his inheritance unimpaired. This endured for a year before it began to waver; and the wavering was soon followed by headlong obsession which fed on itself. As his passion for gambling grew it seemed to consume the better elements of his nature. Lanstron reasoned with him, then implored, then stormed; and Feller, regularly promising to reform, regularly fell each time into greater excesses. Twice Lanstron saved him from court-martial, but the third time no intercession or influence would induce his superiors to overlook the offence. Feller was permitted to resign to avoid a scandal, and at thirty-three, penniless, disgraced, he faced the world and sought the new land which has been the refuge for numbers of his kind. Only one friend bade him farewell as he boarded a steamer for New York, and this was Lanstron.

"Keep away from cities! Seek the open country! And write me, Gustave—don't fail!" said Lanstron.

Letters full of hope came from a Wyoming ranch; letters that told how Feller had learned to rope a steer and had won favor with his fellows and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet's healthy appetite for the fare of the chuck wagon. Lanstron, reading more between the lines than in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old passion was dying and in its place was coming something equally dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some excess for the sake of oblivion. Finally, Feller broke out with the truth.

"My hair is white now, Lanny," he wrote. "I have aged ten years in these two. With every month of this new life the horror of my career has become clear to me. I lie awake thinking of it. I feel unworthy to associate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions. Remorse is literally burning up my brain. It is better to have my mind diseased, my moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy, industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

"'Pay back! Pay back in some way!' a voice keeps saying. 'Pay back! Have an object in mind. Get to work on something that will help you to pay back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet sounded.'

"It is not the gambling, not the drinking—no! The thing that I cannot forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul—as foul as a priest who has broken his vows. I have disgraced the uniform—my country's uniform. I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with shame. While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to do something to right myself with my conscience. I should like to see a battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned—feeling so for my own peace of mind—atoned by some real deed of service.

"I have been reading how Japanese volunteers made a bridge of their bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge. That was a sufficient reward in life for death. So I come again to you for help. Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents within the inner circle of the army's activities. In the midst of peace and the commonplaces of drill and man[oe]uvres there must be dangerous and trying work where the only distinction is service for the cause—our cause of three million against five. Find a task for me, no matter how mean, thankless, or dangerous, Lanny. The more exacting it is the more welcome, for the better will be my chance to get right with myself."

"Come!" was Lanstron's cable in answer.

At the time he had not chosen any employment for Feller. He was thinking only that something must be found. When he heard of the death of the Gallands' gardener he recollected that before the passion for gambling overtook Feller he had still another passion besides his guns. The garden of the Feller estate had been famous in its neighborhood. Young Lanstron had not been more fond of the society of an engine-driver than young Feller of a gardener's. On a holiday in the capital with his fellow cadets he would separate from them to spend hours in the botanical gardens. Once, after his downfall began, at a riotous dinner party he had broken into a temper with a man who had torn a rose to pieces in order to toss the petals over the table.

"Flowers have souls!" he had cried in one of his tumultuous, abandoned reversions to his better self which his companions found eccentric and diverting. "That rose is the only thing in the room that is not foul—and I am the foulest of all!"

The next minute, perhaps after another glass of champagne, he would be winning a burst of laughter by his mimicry of a gouty old colonel reprimanding him for his erring career.

Naturally, in the instinct of friendship, Lanstron's own account left out the unpleasant and dwelt on the pleasant facts of Feller's career.

"His colonel did not understand him," he said. "But I knew the depths of his fine spirit and generous heart. I knew his talent. I knew that he was a victim of unsympathetic surroundings, of wealth, of love of excitement, and his own talent. Where he was, something must happen. He bubbled with energy. The routine of drill, the same old chaff of the mess, the garrison gossip, the long hours of idleness while the busy world throbs outside, which form a privileged life to most officers, were stifling to him. 'Let's set things going!' he would say in the old days, and we'd set them. Most of our demerits were for some kind of deviltry. And how he loved the guns! I can see the sparkle of his men's eyes at sight of him. Nobody could get out of them what he could. If he had not been put in the army as a matter of family custom, if he had been an actor, or if he and I had gone to build bridges, then he might have a line of capital letters and periods after his name, and he would not be a spy or I an employer of spies, doing the work of a detective agency in an officer's uniform because nobody but an officer may do it."

At first Marta listened rigidly, but as the narrative proceeded her interest grew. When Lanstron quoted Feller's appeal for any task, however mean and thankless, she nodded sympathetically and understandingly; when he related the incident of the rose, its appeal was irresistible. She gave a start of delight and broke silence.

"Yes. I recall just how he looked as he stood on the porch, his head bent, his shoulders stooped, twirling his hat in his hands, while mother and I examined him as to his qualifications," she said. "I remember his words. He said that he knew flowers and that, like him, flowers could not hear; but perhaps he would be all the better gardener because he could not hear. He was so ingratiating; yet his deafness seemed such a drawback that I hesitated."

Following the path to the tower leisurely, they had reached the tower. Feller's door was open. Marta looked into the room, finding in the neat arrangement of its furniture a new significance. He was absent, for it was the dinner hour.

"And on my recommendation you took him," Lanstron continued.

"Yes, on yours, Lanny, on a friend's! You"—she put a cold emphasis on the word—"you wanted him here for your plans! And why? You haven't answered that yet. What purpose of the war game does he serve in our garden?"

His look pleaded for patience, while he tried to smile, which was rather difficult in face of her attitude.

"Not altogether in the garden; partly in the tower," he replied. "You are to be in the whole secret and in such a way as to make my temptation clear, I hope. First, I think you ought to see the setting. Let us go in"

Impelled by the fascination of Feller's romantic story and by a curiosity that Lanstron's manner accentuated, she entered the room. Apparently Lanstron was familiar with the premises. Passing through the sitting-room into the room adjoining, where Feller stored his tools, he opened a door that gave onto the circular stone steps leading down into the dungeon tunnel.

"I think we had better have a light," he said, and when he had fetched one from the bedchamber he descended the steps, asking her to follow.

They were in a passage six feet in height and about three feet broad, which seemed to lead on indefinitely into clammy darkness. The dewy stone walls sparkled in fantastic and ghostly iridescence under the rays from the lantern. The dank air lay moist against their faces.

"It's a long time since I've been here," said Marta, glad to break the uncanny sound of their footsteps in the weird silence with her voice. "Not since I was a youngster. Then I came on a dare to see if there were goblins. There weren't any; at least, none that cared to manifest himself to me."

"We have a goblin here now that we are nursing for the Grays—an up-to-date one that is quite visible," said Lanstron. "This is far enough." He paused and raised the lantern. With its light full in her face, she blinked. "There, at the height of your chin!"

She noted a metal button painted gray, set at the side of one of the stones of the wall, which looked unreal. She struck the stone with her knuckles and it gave out the sound of hollow wood, which was followed, as an echo, by a little laugh from Lanstron. Pressing the button, a panel door flew open, revealing a telephone mouthpiece and receiver set in the recess. Without giving him time to refuse permission, her thought all submissive to the prompting spirit of adventure, she took down the receiver and called: "Hello!"

"The wire isn't connected," explained Lanstron.

Marta hung up the receiver and closed the door abruptly in a spasm of reaction.

"Like a detective play!" were the first words that sprang to her lips. "Well?" As she faced around her eyes glittered in the lantern's rays. "Well, have you any other little tricks to show me? Are you a sleight-of-hand artist, too, Lanny? Are you going to take a machine gun out of your hat?"

"That is the whole bag," he answered. "I thought you'd rather see it than have it described to you."

"Having seen it, let us go!" she said, in a manner that implied further reckoning to come.

"If out of a thousand possible sources one source succeeds, then the cost and pains of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine are more than repaid," he was saying urgently, the soldier uppermost in him. "Some of the best service we have had has been absurd in its simplicity and its audacity. In time of war more than one battle has been decided by a thing that was a trifle in itself. No matter what your preparation, you can never remove the element of chance. An hour gained in information about your enemy's plans may turn the tide in your favor. A Chinese peasant spy, because he happened to be intoxicated, was able to give the Japanese warning in time for Kuroki to make full dispositions for receiving the Russian attack in force at the Sha-ho. There are many other incidents of like nature in history. So it is my duty to neglect no possible method, however absurd."

By this time he was at the head of the steps. Standing to one side, he offered his hand to assist Marta. But she seemed not to see it. Her aspect was that of downright antagonism.

"However absurd! yes, it is absurd to think that you can make me a party to any of your plans, for—" She broke off abruptly with starting eyes, as if she had seen an apparition.

Lanstron turned and through the door of the tool-room saw Feller entering the sitting-room. He was not the bent, deferential old gardener, nor was he the Feller changed to youth as he thought of himself at the head of a battery. His features were hard-set, a fighting rage burning in his eyes, his sinews taut as if about to spring upon an adversary. When he recognized the intruders he turned limp, his head dropped, hiding his face with his hat brim, and he steadied himself by resting a hand on the table edge.

"Oh, it's you, Lanny—Colonel Lanstron!" he exclaimed thickly. "I saw that some one had come in here and naturally I was alarmed, as nobody but myself ever enters. And Miss Galland!" He removed his hat deferentially and bowed; his stoop returned and the lines of his face drooped. "I was so stupid; it did not occur to me that you might be showing the tower to Colonel Lanstron."

"We are sorry to have given you a fright!" said Marta very gently.

"Eh? eh?" queried Feller, again deaf. "Fright? Oh, no, no fright. It might have been some boys from the town marauding."

He was about to withdraw, in keeping with his circumspect adherence to his part, which he played with a sincerity that half-convinced even himself at times that he was really deaf, when the fire flickered back suddenly to his eyes and he glanced from Lanstron to the stairway in desperate inquiry.

"Wait, Feller! Three of us share the secret now. These are Miss Galland's premises. I thought best that she should know everything," said Lanstron.

"Everything!" exclaimed Feller. "Everything—" the word caught in his throat. "You mean my story, too?" He was neither young nor old now. He seemed nondescript and miserable. "She knows who I am?" he asked.

"Yes!" Lanstron answered.

"Lanny!" This almost reproachfully, as if the ethics of friendship had been abused.

"Yes. I'm sorry, Gustave. I—" Lanstron began miserably.

"But why not?" said Feller, with a wan attempt at a smile. "You see—I mean—it does not matter!" he concluded in a hopeless effort at philosophy.

"My thoughtlessness, my callousness, my obsession with my work! I should not have told your story," said Lanstron.

"His story!" exclaimed Marta, with a puzzled look to Lanstron before she turned to Feller with a look of warm sympathy. "Why, there is no story! You came with excellent recommendations. You are our very efficient gardener. That is all we need to know. Isn't that the way you wish it, Mr. Feller?"

"Yes, just that!" he said softly, raising his eyes to her in gratitude. "Thank you, Miss Galland!"

He was going after another "Thank you!" and a bow; going with the slow step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized his hands in a firm caress.

"Forgive me, Gustave!" he begged. "Forgive the most brutal of all injuries—that which wounds a friend's sensibilities."

"Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his attitude changed to one of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"

"Yes"

"Had you suspected me before that?"

"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him. There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he smiled as he had at the bumblebee.

"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.

"No, I don't think so."

He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.

"You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland," he said with a charming bow, "and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a fair test. That little thunderer will not get me again. I'll fool the ones I want to fool. And I'm learning, Lanny, learning all the time—getting a little deafer all the time. Miss Galland," he added, struck in visible contrition by a new thought, "I am sorry"—he paused with head down for an instant—"very sorry to have deceived you."

"But you are still a deaf gardener to me," said Marta, finding consolation in pleasing him.

"Eh? eh?" He put his hand to his ear as he resumed his stoop. "Yes, yes," he added, as a deaf man will when understanding of a remark which he failed at first to catch comes to him in an echo. "Yes, the gardener has no past," he declared in the gentle old gardener's voice, "when all the flowers die every year and he thinks only of next year's blossoms—of the future!"

Now the air of the room seemed to be stifling him, that of the roofless world of the garden calling him. His face spoke pitifully a desire for escape as he withdrew. The bent figure disappeared around a turn in the path and they listened without moving until the sound of his slow, dragging footfalls had died away.

"When he is serving those of his own social station I can see how it would be easier for him not to have me know," said Marta. "Sensitive, proud, and intense—" and a look of horror appeared in her eyes. "As he came across the room his face was transformed. I imagine it was like that of a man giving no quarter in a bayonet charge!"

"His secret was at stake!" Lanstron said in ready championship.

She put up her hand as if to shut out a picture.

"Don't let us think of it!" she exclaimed with a shudder. "He did not know what he was doing. His is one of the natures that have moments when an impulse throws them off their balance and ruins the work of years. No, we must think only of his sacrifice, his enforced humiliation, in order to try to make amends for the past according to his light. No one could refuse him sympathy and respect."

Feller had won the day for himself where a friend's pleas might have failed. This was as it should be, Lanstron thought; and he smiled happily over the rare thing in Marta that felt the appeal which Feller had for him.

"The right view—the view that you were bound to take!" he said.

"And yet, I don't know your plans for him, Lanny. Pity is one thing; there is another thing to consider," she replied, with an abrupt change of tone. "But first let us leave Feller's quarters. We are intruders here."