The Last Shot. Frederick Palmer
own."
"O-oh!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, oh, oh!" she repeated after him. "Oh, what, please?"
"Oh, nothing!" he said. It was quite comprehensible to him how well equipped she was to take care of herself on such an adventure.
"Precisely, when you come to think it over!" she concluded.
"What interested you most? What was the big lesson of all your journeying?" he asked, ready to play the listener.
"Being born and bred on a frontier, of an ancestry that was born and bred on a frontier, why, frontiers interested me most," she said. "I collected impressions of frontiers as some people collect pictures. I found them all alike—stupid, just stupid! Oh, so stupid!" Her frown grew with the repetition of the word; her fingers closed in on her palm in vexation. He recollected that he had seen her like this two or three times at La Tir, when he had found the outbursts most entertaining. He imagined that the small fist pressed against the table edge could deliver a stinging blow. "As stupid as it is for neighbors to quarrel! It put me at war with all frontiers."
"Apparently," he said.
She withdrew her fist from the table, dropped the opened hand over the other on her knee, her body relaxing, her wrath passing into a kind of shamefacedness and then into a soft, prolonged laugh.
"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 amusement 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 class 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 passed 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 class 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 assailant, 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,