"I laugh at myself, at my own inconsistency," she said. "I was warlike against war. At all events, if there is anything to make a teacher of peace lose her temper it is the folly of frontiers."
"Yes?" he exclaimed. "Yes? Go on!" And he thought: "I"m really having a very good time."
"You see, I came home from my tour with an idea--an idea for a life occupation just as engrossing as yours," she went on, "and opposed to yours. I saw there was no use of working with the grown-up folks. They must be left to The Hague conferences and the peace societies. But children are quite alike the world over. You can plant thoughts in the young that will take root and grow as they grow."
"Patriotism, for instance," he observed narrowly.
"No, the follies of martial patriotism! The wickedness of war, which is the product of martial patriotism!"
The follies of patriotism! This was the red flag of anarchy to him. He started to speak, flushing angrily, but held his tongue and only emitted a "whew!" in good-humored wonder.
"I see you are not very frightened by my opposition," she rejoined in a flash of amus.e.m.e.nt not wholly untempered by exasperation.
"We got the appropriation for an additional army corps this year," he explained contentedly, his repose completely regained.
"Thus increasing the odds against us. But perhaps not; for we are dealing with the children not with recruits, as I said. We call ourselves the teachers of peace. I organized the first cla.s.s in La Tir.
I have the children come together every Sunday morning and I tell them about the children that live in other countries. I tell them that a child a thousand miles away is just as much a neighbor as the one across the street. At first I feared that they would find it uninteresting. But if you know how to talk to them they don"t."
"Naturally they don"t, when you talk to them," he interrupted.
She was so intent that she pa.s.sed over the compliment with a gesture like that of brushing away a cobweb. Her eyes were like deep, clear wells of faith and repose.
"I try to make the children of other countries so interesting that our children will like them too well ever to want to kill them when they grow up. We have a little peace prayer--they have even come to like to recite it--a prayer and an oath. But I"ll not bother you with it. Other women have taken up the idea. I have found a girl who is going to start a cla.s.s on your side in South La Tir, and I came here to meet some women who want to inaugurate the movement in your capital."
"I"ll have to see about that!" he rejoined, half-banteringly, half-threateningly.
"There is something else to come, even more irritating," she said, less intently and smiling. "So please be prepared to hold your temper."
"I shall not beat my fist on the table defending war as you did defending peace!" he retaliated with significant enjoyment.
But she used his retort for an opening.
"Oh, I"d rather you would do that than jest! It"s human. It"s going to war because one is angry. You would go to war as a matter of cold reason."
"If otherwise, I should lose," he replied.
"Exactly. You make it easy for me to approach my point. I want to prevent you from losing!" she announced cheerfully yet very seriously.
"Yes? Proceed. I brace myself against an explosion of indignation!"
"It is the duty of a teacher of peace to use all her influence with the people she knows," she went on. "So I am going to ask you not to let your country ever go to war against mine while you are chief of staff."
"Mine against yours?" he equivocated. "Why, you live almost within gunshot of the line! Your people have as much Gray as Brown blood in their veins, _Your_ country! _My_ country! Isn"t that patriotism?"
"Patriotism, but not martial patriotism," she corrected him. "My thought is to stop war for both countries as war, regardless of sides. Promise me that you will not permit it!"
"I not permit it!" He smiled with the kindly patronage of a great man who sees a charming woman floundering in an attempt at logic. "It is for the premier to say. I merely make the machine ready. The government says the word that makes it move. I able to stop war! Come, come!"
"But you can--yes, you can with a word!" she declared positively.
"How?" he asked, amazed. "How?" he repeated blandly.
Was she teasing him? he wondered. What new resources of confusion had ten years and a tour around the world developed in her? Was it possible that the Whole idea of the teachers of peace was an invention to make conversation at his expense? If so, she carried it off with a sincerity that suggested other depths yet unsounded.
"Very easily," she answered. "You can tell the premier that you cannot win. Tell him that you will break your army to pieces against the Browns" fortifications!"
He gasped. Then an inner voice prompted him that the cue was comedy.
"Excellent fooling--excellent!" he said with a laugh. "Tell the premier that I should lose when I have five million men to their three million!
What a harlequin chief of staff I should be! Excellent fooling! You almost had me!"
Again he laughed, though in the fashion of one who had hardly unbent his spine, while he was wishing for the old days when he might take tea with her one or two afternoons a week. It would be a fine tonic after his isolation at the apex of the pyramid surveying the deference of the lower levels. Then he saw that her eyes, shimmering with wonder, grew dull and her lips parted in a rigid, pale line as if she were hurt.
"You think I am joking?" she asked.
"Why, yes!"
"But I am not! No, no, not about such a ghastly subject as a war to-day!" She was leaning toward him, hands on knee and eyes burning like coals without a spark. "I"--she paused as she had before she broke out with the first prophecy--"I will quote part of our children"s oath: "I will not be a coward. It is a coward who strikes first. A brave man even after he receives a blow tries to reason with his a.s.sailant, and does not strike back until he receives a second blow. I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him, but if he then persists I shall fight for my home. If I am victorious I shall not try to take his land but to make the most of my own. I shall never cross a frontier to kill my fellowmen.""
Very impressive she made the oath. Her deliberate recital of it had the quality which justifies every word with an urgent faith.
"You see, with that teaching there can be no war," she proceeded, "and those who strike will be weak; those who defend will be strong."
"Perhaps," he said.
"You would not like to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men killed and maimed, would you?" she demanded, and her eyes held the horror of the sight in reality. "You can prevent it--you _can_!" Her heart was in the appeal.
"The old argument! No, I should not like to see that," he replied. "I only do my duty as a soldier to my country."
"The old answer! The more reason why you should tell the premier you can"t! But there is still another reason for telling him," she urged gently.
Now he saw her not at twenty-seven but at seventeen, girlish, the subject of no processes of reason but in the spell of an intuition, and he knew that something out of the blue in a flash was coming.
"For you will not win!" she declared.
This struck fire. Square jaw and st.u.r.dy body, in masculine energy, resolute and trained, were set indomitably against feminine vitality.
"Yes, we shall win! We shall win!" he said without even the physical demonstration of a gesture and in a hard, even voice which was like that of the machinery of modern war itself, a voice which the aristocratic sniff, the Louis XVI. curls, or any of the old gallery-display heroes would have thought utterly lacking in histrionics suitable to the occasion. He remained rigid after he had spoken, handsome, self-possessed.
There was no use of beating feminine fists against such a stone wall.
The force of the male was supreme. She smiled with a strange, quivering loosening of the lips. She spread out her hands with fingers apart, as if to let something run free from them into the air, and the flame of appeal that had been in her eyes broke into many lights that seemed to scatter into s.p.a.ce, yet ready to return at her command. She glanced at the clock and rose, almost abruptly.
"I was very strenuous riding my hobby against yours, wasn"t I?" she exclaimed in a flutter of distraction that made it easy for him to descend from his own steed. "I stated a feeling. I made a guess, a threat about your winning--and all in the air. That"s a woman"s privilege; one men grant, isn"t it?"
"We enjoy doing so," he replied, all urbanity.
"Thank you!" she said simply. "I must be at home in time for the children"s lesson on Sunday. My sleeper is engaged, and if I am not to miss the train I must go immediately."
With an undeniable shock of regret he realized that the interview was over. Really, he had had a very good time; not only that, but--.