The Firing Line by Robert W. Chambers

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[Illustration: "She faced him, white as death, looking at him
blindly."]

THE

FIRING LINE

BY

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

AUTHOR OF "THE FIGHTING CHANCE," "THE YOUNGER SET," ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK, 1908

TO

MARGERY CHAMBERS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.--A SKIRMISH

CHAPTER II.--A LANDING

CHAPTER III.--AN ADVANCE

CHAPTER IV.--RECONNAISSANCE

CHAPTER V.--A FLANK MOVEMENT

CHAPTER VI.--ARMISTICE

CHAPTER VII.--A CHANGE OF BASE

CHAPTER VIII.--MANOEUVERING

CHAPTER IX.--THE INVASION

CHAPTER X.--TERRA INCOGNITA

CHAPTER XI.--PATHFINDERS

CHAPTER XII.--THE ALLIED FORCES

CHAPTER XIII.--THE SILENT PARTNERS

CHAPTER XIV.--STRATEGY

CHAPTER XV.--UNDER FIRE

CHAPTER XVI.--AN ULTIMATUM

CHAPTER XVII.--ECHOES

CHAPTER XVIII.--PERIL

CHAPTER XIX.--THE LINE OF BATTLE

CHAPTER XX.--A NEW ENEMY

CHAPTER XXI.--REINFORCEMENTS

CHAPTER XXII.--THE ROLL CALL

CHAPTER XXIII.--A CAPITULATION

CHAPTER XXIV.--THE SCHOOL OF THE RECRUIT

CHAPTER XXV.--A CONFERENCE

CHAPTER XXVI.--SEALED INSTRUCTIONS

CHAPTER XXVII.--MALCOURT LISTENS

CHAPTER XXVIII.--HAMIL IS SILENT

CHAPTER XXIX.--CALYPSO'S GIFT

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"She faced him, white as death, looking at him blindly"

"So he sat there and told her all about his commission"

"Never had he tasted such a heavenly banquet"

"Examining the pile of plans, reports, and blue-prints"

"She walked a few paces toward the house, halted, and looked
back audaciously"

"Then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair"

"'You can't go!' he said"

"And locked in his embrace, she lifted her lips to his"

CHAPTER I

A SKIRMISH

As the wind veered and grew cooler a ribbon of haze appeared above the
Gulf-stream.

Young Hamil, resting on his oars, gazed absently into the creeping mist.
Under it the ocean sparkled with subdued brilliancy; through it,
shoreward, green palms and palmettos turned silvery; and, as the fog
spread, the sea-pier, the vast white hotel, bathing-house, cottage,
pavilion, faded to phantoms tinted with rose and pearl.

Leaning there on his oars, he could still make out the distant sands
flecked with the colours of sunshades and bathing-skirts; the breeze
dried his hair and limbs, but his swimming-shirt and trunks still
dripped salt water.

Inshore a dory of the beach guard drifted along the outer line of
breakers beyond which the more adventurous bathers were diving from an
anchored raft. Still farther out moving dots indicated the progress of
hardier swimmers; one in particular, a girl capped with a brilliant red
kerchief, seemed to be already nearer to Hamil than to the shore.

It was all very new and interesting to him--the shore with its spectral
palms and giant caravansary, the misty, opalescent sea where a white
steam-yacht lay anchored north of him--the _Ariani_--from which he had
come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless
asleep--Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward. And at thought of the others he
yawned and moistened his lips, still feverish from last night's
unwisdom; and leaning forward on his oars, sat brooding, cradled by the
flowing motion of the sea.

The wind was still drawing into the north; he felt it, never strong, but
always a little cooler, in his hair and on his wet swimming-shirt. The
flat cloud along the Gulf-stream spread thickly coastward, and after a
little while the ghosts of things terrestrial disappeared.

All around him, now, blankness--save for the gray silhouette of the
_Ariani_. A colourless canopy surrounded him, centred by a tiny pool of
ocean. Overhead through the vanishing blue, hundreds of wild duck were
stringing out to sea; under his tent of fog the tarnished silver of the
water formed a floor smoothly unquiet.

Sounds from the land, hitherto unheard, now came strangely distinct; the
cries of bathers, laughter, the muffled shock of the surf, doubled and
redoubled along the sands; the barking of a dog at the water's edge.
Clear and near sounded the ship's bell on the _Ariani_; a moment's
rattle of block and tackle, a dull call, answered; and silence. Through
which, without a sound, swept a great bird with scarce a beat of its
spread wings; and behind it, another, and, at exact intervals another
and another in impressive processional, sailing majestically through the
fog; white pelicans winging inland to the lagoons.

A few minutes later the wind, which had become fitful, suddenly grew
warm. All around him now the mist was dissolving into a thin golden
rain; the land-breeze freshened, blowing through distant jasmine
thickets and orange groves, and a soft fragrance stole out over the sea.

As the sun broke through in misty splendour, the young man, brooding on
his oars, closed his eyes; and at the same instant his boat careened
violently, almost capsizing as a slender wet shape clambered aboard and
dropped into the bows. As the boat heeled under the shock Hamil had
instinctively flung his whole weight against the starboard gunwale. Now
he recovered his oars and his balance at the same time, and, as he swung
half around, his unceremonious visitor struggled to sit upright, still
fighting for breath.

"I beg your pardon," she managed to say; "may I rest here? I am--" She
stopped short; a flash of sudden recognition came into her
eyes--flickered, and faded. It was evident to him that, for a moment,
she thought she had met him before.

"Of course you may stay here," he said, inclined to laugh.

She settled down, stretching slightly backward as though to give her
lungs fuller play. In a little while her breathing grew more regular;
her eyes closed for a moment, then opened thoughtfully, skyward.

Hamil's curious and half-amused gaze rested on her as he resumed the
oars. But when he turned his back and headed the boat shoreward a quick
protest checked him, and oars at rest, he turned again, looking
inquiringly at her over his shoulder.

"I am only rowing you back to the beach," he said.

"Don't row me in; I am perfectly able to swim back."

"No doubt," he returned drily, "but haven't you played tag with Death
sufficiently for one day?"

"Death?" She dismissed the grotesque suggestion with a shrug, then
straightened up, breathing freely and deeply. "It is an easy swim," she
remarked, occupied with her wet hair under the knotted scarlet; "the fog
confused me; that was all."

"And how long could you have kept afloat if the fog had not lifted?" he
inquired with gentle sarcasm. To which, adroitly adjusting hair and
kerchief, she made no answer. So he added: "There is supposed to be a
difference between mature courage and the fool-hardiness of the
unfledged--"

"What?"

The quick close-clipped question cutting his own words silenced him.
And, as he made no reply, she continued to twist the red kerchief around
her hair, and to knot it securely, her doubtful glance returning once or
twice to his amused face.

When all had been made fast and secure she rested one arm on the gunwale
and dropped the other across her knees, relaxing in every muscle a
moment before departure. And, somehow, to Hamil, the unconscious grace
of the attitude suggested the "Resting Hermes"--that sculptured
concentration of suspended motion.

"You had better not go just yet," he said, pointing seaward.

She also had been watching the same thing that he was now looking at, a
thin haze which again became apparent over the Gulf-stream.

"Do you think it will thicken?" she asked.

"I don't know; you had a close call last time--"

"There was no danger."

"I think there was danger enough; you were apparently headed straight
out to sea--"

"I heard a ship's bell and swam toward it, and when the fog lifted I
found you."

"Why didn't you swim toward the shore? You could hear the surf--and a
dog barking."

"I"--she turned pink with annoyance--"I suppose I was a trifle tired--if
you insist. I realised that I had lost my bearings; that was all. Then I
heard a ship's bell.... Then the mist lifted and I saw you--but I've
explained all that before. _Look_ at that exasperating fog!"

Vexation silenced her; she sat restless for a few seconds, then:

"What do you think I had better do?"

"I think you had better try to endure me for a few minutes longer. I'm
safer than the fog."

But his amusement left her unresponsive, plainly occupied with her own
ideas.

Again the tent of vapour stretched its magic folds above the boat and
around it; again the shoreward shapes faded to phantoms and disappeared.

He spoke again once or twice, but her brief replies did not encourage
him. At first, he concluded that her inattention and indifference must
be due to self-consciousness; then, slightly annoyed, he decided they
were not. And, very gradually, he began to realise that the
unconventional, always so attractive to the casual young man, did not
interest her at all, even enough to be aware of it or of him.

This cool unconsciousness of self, of him, of a situation which to any
wholesome masculine mind contained the germs of humour, romance, and all
sorts of amusing possibilities, began to be a little irksome to him. And
still her aloofness amused him, too.

"Do you know of any decorous reason why we should not talk to each
other occasionally during this fog?" he asked.

She turned her head, considered him inattentively, then turned it away
again.

"No," she said indifferently; "what did you desire to say?"

Resting on his oars, the unrequited smile still forlornly edging his
lips, he looked at his visitor, who was staring into the fog, lost in
her own reflections; and never a glimmer in her eyes, never a quiver of
lid or lash betrayed any consciousness of his gaze or even of his
presence. And he continued to inspect her with increasing annoyance.

The smooth skin, the vivid lips slightly upcurled, the straight delicate
nose, the cheeks so smoothly rounded where the dark thick lashes swept
their bloom as she looked downward at the water--all this was abstractly
beautiful; very lovely, too, the full column of the neck, and the
rounded arms guiltless of sunburn or tan.

So unusually white were both neck and arms that Hamil ventured to speak
of it, politely, asking her if this was not her first swim that season.

Voice and question roused her from abstraction; she turned toward him,
then glanced down at her unstained skin.

"My first swim?" she repeated; "oh, you mean my arms? No, I never burn;
they change very little." Straightening up she sat looking across the
boat at him without visible interest at first, then doubtfully, as
though in an effort to say something polite.

"I am really very grateful to you for letting me sit here. Please don't
feel obliged to amuse me during this annoying fog."

"Thank you; you _are_ rather difficult to talk to. But I don't mind
trying at judicious intervals," he said, laughing.

She considered him askance. "If you wish to row in, do so. I did not
mean to keep you here at sea--"

"Oh, I belong out here; I'm from the _Ariani_ yonder; you heard her bell
in the fog. We came from Nassau last night.... Have you ever been to
Nassau?"

The girl nodded listlessly and glanced at the white yacht, now becoming
visible through the thinning mist. Somewhere above in the viewless void
an aura grew and spread into a blinding glory; and all around, once
more, the fog turned into floating golden vapour shot with rain.

The girl placed both hands on the gunwales as though preparing to rise.

"Not yet!" said Hamil sharply.

"I beg your pardon?"--looking up surprised, still poised lightly on both
palms as though checked at the instant of rising into swift aerial
flight--so light, so buoyant she appeared.

"Don't go overboard," he repeated.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm going to row you in."

"I wish to swim; I prefer it."

"I am only going to take you to the float--"

"But I don't care to have you. I am perfectly able to swim in--"

"I know you are," he said, swinging clear around in his seat to face
her, "but I put it in the form of a request; will you be kind enough to
let me row you part way to the float? This fog is not ended."

She opened her lips to protest; indeed, for a moment it looked as if she
were going overboard without further argument; then perhaps some
belated idea of civility due him for the hospitality of his boat
restrained her.

"You understand, of course, that I am quite able to swim in," she said.

"Yes; may I now row you part way? The fog is closing in again."

She yielded with a pretty indifference, none the less charming because
there was no flattery in it for him. He now sat facing her, pushing his
oars through the water; and she stole a curious glance at his
features--slightly sullen for the moment--noticing his well-set,
well-shaped head and good shoulders.

That fugitive glance confirmed the impression of recognition in her
mind. He was what she had expected in breeding and physique--the type
usually to be met with where the world can afford to take its leisure.

As he was not looking at her she ventured to continue her inspection,
leaning back, and dropping her bare arm alongside, to trail her fingers
through the sunlit water.

"Have we not rowed far enough?" she asked presently. "This fog is
apparently going to last forever."

"Like your silence," he said gaily.

Raising her eyes in displeasure she met his own frankly amused.

"Shall I tell you," he asked, "exactly why I insisted on rowing you in?
I'm afraid"--he glanced at her with the quick smile breaking again on
his lips--"I'm afraid you don't care whether I tell you or not. Do you?"

"If you ask me--I really don't," she said. "And, by the way, do you know
that if you turned around properly and faced the stern you could make
better progress with your oars?"

"By 'better' do you mean _quicker_ progress?" he asked, so naively that
she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were usually
stupid.

"Yes, of course," she said, impatient. "It's all very well to push a
punt across a mill-pond that way, but it's not treating the Atlantic
with very much respect."

"_You_ were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when
you started to swim across it."

But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her
unsmiling silence.

He thought to himself: "Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of
it!--with her eyes of a thinking goddess!--and no ideas behind them!
What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the obvious."

And, aloud, fatuously: "This is a rarely beautiful scene--"

"What?" crisply.

And feeling mildly wicked he continued:

--"Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a
triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden
fleece. This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don't you think
so?"

Her reply was the slightest possible nod.

He looked at her meanly amused:

"It's really very classical," he said, "like the voyage of Ulysses; I,
Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of
Romance--"

"Calypso was a _land_ nymph," she observed, absently, "if accuracy
interests you as much as your monologue."

Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and
she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him with
an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his amusement
and left him awkward in the silence.

"I've tried my very best to be civil and agreeable," he said after a
moment. "Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?"

"Not if I am interested," she said quietly.

He felt that his ears were growing red; she noticed it, too, and added:
"I do not mean to be _too_ rude; and I am quite sure you do not either."

"Of course not," he said; "only I couldn't help seeing the humour of
romance in our ocean encounter. I think anybody would--except you--"

"What?"

The crisp, quick question which, with her, usually seemed like an
exclamation, always startled him into temporary silence; then he began
more carefully:

"There was one chance in a million of your finding my boat in the fog.
If you hadn't found it--" He shook his head. "And so I wish you might
recognise in our encounter something amusing, humourous"--he looked
cautiously at her--"even mildly romantic--ah--enough to--to--"

"To what?"

"Why--to say--to do something characteristically--ah--"

"What?"

"--Human!" he ventured--quite prepared to see her rise wrathfully and go
overboard.

Instead she remained motionless, those clear, disconcerting eyes fixed
steadily on him. Once or twice he thought that her upper lip quivered;
that some delicate demon of laughter was trying to look out at him under
the lashes; but not a lid twitched; the vivid lips rested gravely upon
each other. After a silence she said:

"What is it, _human_, that you expect me to do? Flirt with you?"

"Good Lord, no!" he said, stampeded.

She was now paying him the compliment of her full attention; he felt the
dubious flattery, although it slightly scared him.

"Why is it," she asked, "that a man is eternally occupied in thinking
about the effect he produces on woman--whether or not he knows her--that
seems to make no difference at all? Why is it?"

He turned redder; she sat curled up, nursing both ankles, and
contemplating him with impersonal and searching curiosity.

"Tell me," she said; "is there any earthly reason why you and I should
be interested in each other--enough, I mean, to make any effort toward
civility beyond the bounds of ordinary convention?"

He did not answer.

"Because," she added, "if there is not, any such effort on your part
borders rather closely on the offensive. And I am quite sure you do not
intend that."

He was indignant now, but utterly incapable of retort.

"Is there anything romantic in it because a chance swimmer rests a few
moments in somebody's boat?" she asked. "Is that chance swimmer
superhuman or inhuman or ultra-human because she is not consciously,
and simperingly, preoccupied with the fact that there happens to be a
man in her vicinity?"

"Good heavens!" he broke out, "do you think I'm that sort of noodle--"

"But I _don't_ think about you at all," she interrupted; "there is not a
thought that I have which concerns you as an individual. My homily is
delivered in the abstract. Can't you--in the abstract--understand
_that_?--even if you are a bit doubtful concerning the seven deadly
conventions?"

He rested on his oars, tingling all over with wrath and surprise.

"And now," she said quietly, "I think it time to go. The sun is almost
shining, you see, and the beauty of the scene is too obvious for even
you to miss."

"May I express an opinion before you depart?"

"If it is not a very long or very dissenting opinion."

"Then it's this: two normal and wholesome people--man and a woman, can
_not_ meet, either conventionally or unconventionally, without
expressing some atom of interest in one another as individuals. I say
two--perfectly--normal--people--"

"But it has just happened!" she insisted, preparing to rise.

"No, it has not happened."

"Really. You speak for yourself of course--"

"Yes, I do. I _am_ interested; I'd be stupid if I were not. Besides, I
understand conventions as well as you do--"

"You don't observe them--"

"I don't worship them!"

She said coolly: "Women should be ritualists. It is safer."

"It is not necessary in this case. I haven't the slightest hope of
making this incident a foundation for another; I haven't the least idea
that I shall ever see you again. But for me to pretend an imbecile
indifference to you or to the situation would be a more absurd example
of self-consciousness than even you have charged me with."

Wrath and surprise in her turn widened her eyes; he held up his hand:
"One moment; I have not finished. May I go on?"

And, as she said nothing, he resumed: "During the few minutes we have
been accidentally thrown together, I have not seen a quiver of human
humour in you. _There_ is the self-consciousness--the absorbed
preoccupation with appearances."

"What is there humourous in the situation?" she demanded, very pink.

"Good Lord! What is there humourous in any situation if you don't make
it so?"

"I am not a humourist," she said.

She sat in the bows, one closed hand propping her chin; and sometimes
her clear eyes, harboring lightning, wandered toward him, sometimes
toward the shore.

"Suppose you continue to row," she said at last. "I'm doing you the
honour of thinking about what you've said."

He resumed the oars, still sitting facing her, and pushed the boat
slowly forward; and, as they continued their progress in silence, her
brooding glance wavered, at intervals, between him and the coast.

"Haven't you _any_ normal human curiosity concerning me?" he asked so
boyishly that, for a second, again from her eyes, two gay little demons
seemed to peer out and laugh at him.

But her lips were expressionless, and she only said: "I have no
curiosity. Is that criminally abnormal?"

"Yes; if it is true. Is it?"

"I suppose it is too unflattering a truth for you to believe." She
checked herself, looked up at him, hesitated. "It is _not_ absolutely
true. It was at first. I am normally interested now. If you knew more
about me you would very easily understand my lack of interest in people
I pass; the habit of not permitting myself to be interested--the
necessity of it. The art of indifference is far more easily acquired
than the art of forgetting."

"But surely," he said, "it can cost you no effort to forget me."

"No, of course not." She looked at him, unsmiling: "It was the acquired
habit of indifference in me which you mistook for--I think you mistook
it for stupidity. Many do. Did you?"

But the guilty amusement on his face answered her; she watched him
silently for a while.

"You are quite right in one way," she said; "an unconventional encounter
like this has no significance--not enough to dignify it with any effort
toward indifference. But until I began to reprove man in the abstract, I
really had not very much interest in you as an individual."

And, as he said nothing: "I might better have been in the beginning what
you call 'human'--found the situation mildly amusing--and it
_is_--though you don't know it! But"--she hesitated--"the acquired
instinct operated automatically. I wish I had been more--human; I can
be." She raised her eyes; and in them glimmered her first smile, faint,
yet so charming a revelation that the surprise of it held him
motionless at his oars.

"Have I paid the tribute you claim?" she asked. "If I have, may I not go
overboard at my convenience?"

He did not answer. She laid both arms along the gunwales once more,
balancing herself to rise.

"We are near enough now," she said, "and the fog is quite gone. May I
thank you and depart without further arousing you to psychological
philosophy?"

"If you must," he said; "but I'd rather row you in."

"If I must? Do you expect to paddle me around Cape Horn?" And she rose
and stepped lightly onto the bow, maintaining her balance without effort
while the boat pitched, fearless, confident, swaying there between sky
and sea.

"Good-bye," she said, gravely nodding at him.

"Good-bye, Calypso!"

She joined her finger tips above her head, preliminary to a plunge. Then
she looked down at him over her shoulder.

"I _told_ you that Calypso was a _land_ nymph."

"I can't help it; fabled Calypso you must remain to me."

"Oh; am I to remain--anything--to you--for the next five minutes?"

"Do you think I could forget you?"

"I don't think so--for five minutes. Your satisfied vanity will retain
me for so long--until it becomes hungry again. And--but read the history
of Ulysses--carefully. However, it _was_ nice of you--not to name
yourself and expect a response from me. I'm afraid--I'm afraid it is
going to take me almost five minutes to forget you--I mean your boat of
course. Good-bye!"

Before he could speak again she went overboard, rose swimming with
effortless grace. After a dozen strokes or so she turned on one side,
glancing back at him. Later, almost among the breakers, she raised one
arm in airy signal, but whether to him or to somebody on the raft he did
not know.

For five minutes--the allotted five--he lay on his oars watching the
sands. At moments he fancied he could still distinguish her, but the
distance was great, and there were many scarlet head-dresses among the
bathers ashore and afloat.

And after a while he settled back on his oars, cast a last glance
astern, and pulled for the _Ariani_, aboard of which Portlaw was already
bellowing at him through an enormous megaphone.

Malcourt, who looked much younger than he really was, appeared on the
after deck, strolling about with a telescope tucked up under one arm,
both hands in his trousers pockets; and, as Hamil pulled under the
stern, he leaned over the rail: "Hello, Hamil! Any trade with the
natives in prospect? How far will a pint of beads go with the lady
aborigines?"

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