THE more Sylvia pondered the coincidence of Queenie's flight with the loss of Maud's passport the more positive she became that Zozo had committed the theft. And with what object? It seemed unlikely that the passport could be altered plausibly enough to be accepted as Queenie's own property in these days when so much attention was being given to passports and their reputed owners. Probably he had only used it as a bait with which to lure her in the first instance; he would have known that she could not read and might have counted upon the lion and the unicorn to impress her with his ability to do something for her that Sylvia had failed to do. Queenie must have been in a state of discouragement through her not having come back to Avereshti on the Sunday evening, as she had promised. The telegram she sent had really been a mistake, because Queenie would never have asked any one in the hotel to read it for her, and Zozo would assuredly have pretended whatever suited his purpose if by chance it had been shown to him.
At first Sylvia had been regretting that she had not divined sooner the explanation of Maud's missing passport, so that she could have warned Mr. Mathers; but now she was glad, because whatever Queenie did, the blame must be shared by herself and the British regulations. She reproached herself for the attitude she had taken toward Queenie's disappearance; she had done nothing in these days at Bucharest to help the poor child, not even so much as to find out where she had gone. If Zozo were indeed a German agent, what might not be the result of that callousness? Yet, after all, he might not be anything of the kind; he might merely have been roused by her own opposition to regain possession of Queenie. Really it wasdifficult to say which explanation was more galling to her own conscience. However, it was useless to do anything now; there was as little probability of Queenie's being still in Bucharest as of her being anywhere else. If Zozo were in German pay he would find it easy enough to secure Queenie's entrance into a neutral country; and if he were once more enamoured of his power over her, he would certainly have taken precautions against any new intervention by herself.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, the 3d of October, Sylvia arrived at Giurgiu, the last station in Rumania before crossing the Danube to enter Bulgaria. It had been a slow journey, owing to the congestion of traffic caused by the concentration of Rumanian troops upon the frontier. When she was leaving the station to take the ferry she caught sight of Philidor upon the platform.
"You here? I thought you were at Bralatz," she cried.
She was thinking that Philidor's presence was of good omen to her journey; and as they walked together down to the quay she was glad that her last memory of Rumania should be of this tall figure in his light-blue cloak appearing indeed of heroic mold in the transuming fog of the Danube that enmeshed them.
"You've left it very late," he said. "We expect every hour the Bulgarian declaration of war upon the Entente. Ah, this disastrous summer! The failure at the Dardanelles! The failure of the Russians! And now I doubt if we shall do anything but cluster here upon the frontier like birds gathering to go south."
"I am going south," Sylvia murmured.
"I wish that I were," he sighed. "Now is the moment to strike. When I think of the Bulgarians on the other side of the river, and of my troop—such splendid fellows—waiting and waiting! Sylvia, I am filled with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is fighting with you, do not rememberthe tawdry side of her, but think of us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If—and God forbid that you should read this—if you read that Rumania is fighting against you, think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall very early upon a Russian bayonet."
He held her for a moment in the folds of his bedewed cloak, while they listened to the slow lapping of the river; then she mounted the gangway, and the ferry glided into the fog.
There was a very long wait at Rustchuk; but Sylvia did not find the Bulgarian officials discourteous; in fact, for the representatives of a country upon the verge of going to war with her own, they were pleasant and obliging. It was after midnight before the train left Rustchuk, and some time before dawn that it reached Gorna Orechovitza, where it seemed likely to wait forever. A chill wind was blowing down from the Balkans, which had swept the junction clear of everybody except a squat Bulgarian soldier who marched up and down in his dark-green overcoat, stamping his feet; so little prospect was there of the train starting again, that all the station officials were dozing round a stove in the buffet, and the passengers had gone back to theircouchettes. To Sylvia the desolation was exhilarating with a sense of adventure. Rumania had already receded far away—at any rate, the tawdry side of it—and the only picture that remained was of Philidor upon the bank of that misty river. It seemed to her now that the whole of the past eighteen months had been a morbid night, such a new and biting sense of reality was blown down from the mountains upon this windy October dawn, such magical horizons were being written across this crimson sky.
The train did not reach Sofia until the afternoon; the station was murmurous with excitement on account of the rumor of an ultimatum presented that morning by the Russian Minister; Sylvia, as an Englishwoman, becamethe object of a contemplative stare of curiosity, in which was nothing insolent or hostile, but which gave her the sensation of being just a material aid to dim unskilful meditations, like a rosary in the hands of a converted savage. There was not such a long wait at Sofia as she had expected, and toward dusk, after changing trains, they reached Plevna; but at Zaribrod, the last station before crossing the Serbian frontier, the train pulled up and showed no sign of proceeding. The platform was thronged with Bulgarian troops, the sound of whom, all talking excitedly, was like a prolonged sneeze.
At Plevna a tall, fair man had got into Sylvia's compartment. In excellent French he told her that his name was Rakoff and that he was a rose-grower. Sylvia expressed her astonishment that a Bulgarian rose-grower should travel to Serbia at such a time, but he laughed at the notion of war between Bulgaria and the Entente, avowed that the agrarian party to which he belonged was unanimously against such a disastrous step, and spoke cheerfully of doing good business in Salonika. At Zaribrod he went off to make inquiries about the chance of getting on that night, but he could obtain no information, and invited Sylvia to dine with him at the station buffet. He also helped her to change herleiandlewainto Serbian money and generally made himself useful in matters of detail, such as putting her clock back an hour to mid-European time. Upon these slight courtesies Sylvia and he built up, as travelers are wont, one of those brief and violent friendships that color the memory of a voyage like brilliant fugacious blooms. Rakoff expressed loudly his disgust at seeing the soldiers swarming upon the frontier; they had quite enough of war in Bulgaria two years ago, and it was madness to think of losing the advantages of neutrality, especially on behalf of the Germans. He talked of his acres of roses, of the scent of them in the early morning, of the color of them at noon, and gave Sylvia a small bottle of attar that drenched with itsstored-up sweetness even the smell of the massed soldiery. Sylvia, in her turn, talked to him of her life on the stage, described her success in London, and even confided in him her reason for abandoning it all.
"One has these impulses," he agreed. "But it is better not to give way to them. That is the advantage of my life as a rose-grower. There is always something to do. It is a tranquil and beautiful existence. One becomes almost a rose oneself. I hate to leave my fields, but my brother was killed in the last war, and I have to travel occasionally since his death. Ah, war! It is the sport of kings; yet our King Ferdinand is a great gardener. He is only happy with his plants. It is terrible that a small group ofarrivistesshould deflect the whole course of our national life, for I'm sure that a gardener must loathe war."
Sylvia thought of Philidor's denunciations of Englishmen who had found that the Bulgarians were idealists, and sympathized with their partiality when she listened to this gentle rose-grower.
At last, about two o'clock in the morning, the train was allowed to proceed to Serbia. As it left the station the Bulgarian soldiers shouted: "Hourrah! Hourrah! Hourrah!" in accents between menace and triumph. She turned to her companion, with lifted eyebrows.
"They don't sound very pastoral," she said.
"Some Serbians in the train must have annoyed them," Rakoff explained.
"Well, I hope for the sake of the Serbians that we're not merely shunting," Sylvia laughed.
The train went more slowly than ever after they left Pirot, the first station in Serbia, where there had been an endless searching of half the passengers, of which, apparently, everybody had suddenly got tired, because the passengers in their portion of the train were not examined at all.
"I doubt if this train will go beyond Nish," said Rakoff. "The Austrians are advancing more rapidly than wasexpected. There is a great feeling in Serbia against us. I shall travel back by sea from Salonika."
They reached Nish at about seven o'clock in the morning. When Rakoff was standing outside the window of the compartment to help Sylvia with her luggage he was touched on the shoulder by a Serbian officer, who said something to him at which he started perceptibly. A moment later, however, he called out to Sylvia that he should be back in a moment and he would see her to the hotel. He waved his hand and passed on with the officer.
Sylvia turned round to go out by the corridor, but was met in the entrance by another Serbian officer who asked her to keep her seat.
"Mais je suis Anglaise," she protested.
"No doubt there's some mistake," he answered, politely, in excellent English. "But I must request you to stay in the compartment."
He seated himself and asked her permission to smoke. The passengers had all alighted and the train seemed very still. Presently another officer came and demanded her papers, which he took away with him. Half an hour went by and Sylvia began to feel hungry. She asked the officer in the compartment if it would be possible to get some coffee.
"Of course," he answered, with a smile, calling to some one in the corridor. A soldier with fixed bayonet came along and took his commands; presently two cups of black coffee and a packet of cigarettes arrived.
The officer was young and had a pleasant face, but he declined to be drawn into conversation beyond offering Sylvia her coffee and the cigarettes. An hour passed in this way.
"How long am I likely to be kept here?" she asked, irritably.
The young officer looked uncomfortable and invited her to have another cup of coffee, but he did not answer her question. At last, when Sylvia was beginning to feelthoroughly miserable, there was a sound of voices in the corridor, and an English captain in much-stained khaki appeared in the entrance to the compartment.
"Good morning," he said. "Sorry you've been kept waiting like this. My fault, I'm afraid. Fact is, I won a bath at piquet last night, and not even the detention of a compatriot would make me forgo one exquisite moment of it."
He was a tall, thin man in the early thirties, with a languid manner of speech and movement that, though it seemed at first out of keeping with the substance of his conversation, nevertheless oddly enhanced it somehow. Sylvia had an impression that his point of view about everything was worn and stained like his uniform, but that, like his uniform, it preserved a fundamentally good quality of cloth and cut. His arrival smoothed away much of her annoyance because she discerned in him a capacity for approaching a case upon its own merits and a complete indifference to any professionalism real or assumed for the duration of the war. In a word, she found his personality sympathetic, and long experience had given her the assurance that wherever this was so she could count upon rousing a reciprocal confidence.
"Good morning, Antitch," he was saying to the young Serbian officer who had been keeping guard over her. And to Sylvia he added: "Antitch was at Oxford and speaks English like an Englishman."
"I've had very little chance of knowing if he could even speak his own language," she said, sharply.
Her pleasure in finding an English officer at Nish was now being marred, as so many pleasures are marred for women, by consciousness of the sight she must present at this moderately early hour of the morning after thirty-six hours in the train.
The Englishman laughed.
"Antitch takes an occasion like this very seriously," he said.
"It's the only way to treat half past eight in the morning," Sylvia answered. "Even after a bath."
"I know. I must apologize for my effervescence at such an hour. We try to assume this kind of attitude toward life when we assume temporary commissions. I'm a parvenu to such an hour and don't really know how to behave myself. Now at dawn you would have found my manner as easy as a doctor's by a bedside. Well, what have you been doing?"
"Really, I think that's for you to tell me," Sylvia replied.
"Where did you meet your fellow-traveler—the Bulgarian?"
"The rose-grower?"
"Oh, you think heisa rose-grower?"
"I didn't speculate upon the problem. He got into the train at Plevna and did all he could to make himself useful and agreeable," Sylvia said.
"That's one for you, Antitch," the Englishman laughed. "Another Bulgarophile. We're hopeless, aren't we? Upon my soul, people like Prussians and Bulgarians are justified in thinking that we're traitors to our convictions when they witness the immediate affinity between most of them and most of us. I say, you must forgive me for being so full of voluble buck this morning," he went on to Sylvia. "It really is the effect of the bath. I feel like a general who's been made a knight commander of that most honorable order for losing an impregnable position and keeping his temper. Well, I'm sorry to bother you, but I think you'd better be confronted by your accomplice. We have reason to doubt his bona fides, and Colonel Michailovitch, our criminal expert, would like to have your testimony. You'll intrust this lady to me?" he asked Antitch, who saluted ceremoniously. "All right, old thing, you'll bark your knuckles if you try to be too polite in a railway carriage. Come along, then, and we'll tackle the colonel."
"I think I will come as well," said Antitch.
"Of course, of course. I don't know if it's etiquette to introduce a suspected spy to her temporary jailer, but this is Lieutenant Antitch, and my name's Hazlewood. You've come from Rumania, haven't you? Here, let me carry your valise. Even if you are condemned by the court, you won't be condemned to travel any more in this train. What an atrocious sentence!Voyages forcésfor twenty years!"
"Rumania was very well," said Sylvia, as they passed along the corridor to the platform.
"Still flirting with intervention, I suppose?" Hazlewood went on. "Odd effect this war has of making one think of countries as acquaintances. All Europe has been reduced to a suburb. I was sent up here from Gallipoli, and I find Nish—which with deep respect to Antitch I had always regarded as an unknown town consisting of mud and pigs, or as one of the stations where it was possible to eat between Vienna and Constantinople—as crowded and cosmopolitan as Monte Carlo. The whole world and his future wife is here."
Sylvia was trying to remember how the name Hazlewood was faintly familiar to her, but the recollection was elusive, and she asked about her big trunk.
"If you're going on to Salonika," he advised, "you'd better get on as soon as possible after the stain of suspicion has been erased from your passport. Nish is full up now, but presently—" He broke off, and looked across at Antitch with an expression of tenderness.
The young Serbian shrugged his shoulders; and they passed into the office of Colonel Michailovitch, who was examining Sylvia's passport with the rapt concentration of gaze that could only be achieved by some one who was incapable of understanding a single word of what he was apparently reading. The colonel bowed to Sylvia when she entered, and invited her to sit down. Hazlewood asked him if he might look at the passport.
"It's quite in order, I think, mon colonel," he said in French. The colonel agreed with him.
"You have no objection to its being returned?"
"Pas du tout, pas du tout! Plaisir, plaisir!" exclaimed the colonel.
"And I think you would like to hear from—" Hazlewood glanced at the passport—"from Miss Scarlett? Sylvia Scarlett?" he repeated, looking at her. "Why, I believe we have a friend in common. Aren't you a friend of Michael Fane?"
Sylvia realized how familiar his name should be to her; and she felt that her eyes brightened in assent.
"He's in Serbia, you know," said Hazlewood.
"Now?" she asked.
"Yes. I'll tell you about him.Je demande pardon, mon colonel, mais je connais cette dame."
"Enchanté, enchanté," said the colonel, getting up and shaking hands cordially. "Le Capitaine Antonivitch. Le Lieutenant Lazarevitch," he added, indicating the other officers, who saluted and shook hands with her.
"They're awful dears, aren't they?" murmured Hazlewood. Then he went on in French, "But, mon colonel, I beg you will ask Miss Scarlett any questions you want to ask about this man Rakoff."
"Vous me permittez, madame?" the colonel inquired. "Desolé, mais vous comprenez, la guerre c'est comme ça, n'est-ce pas? Ah oui, la guerre."
Everybody in the office sighed in echo, "Ah oui, la guerre!"
"Where did this man get into the train?"
"At Plevna, I believe."
"Did he talk about anything in particular?"
"About roses mostly. He said he did not believe there could be war with Serbia. He spoke very bitterly against Germany."
Sylvia answered many more questions in favor of her fellow-traveler. The colonel talked for a few momentsin Serbian to his assistants; presently a grubby-looking peasant was brought in, at whom the colonel shouted a number of questions, the answers to which seemed to reduce him to a state of nervous despair. One of the officers retired and came back with the Bulgarian rose-grower; after a great deal of talking the peasant was sent away and Rakoff's passport was handed back to him.
"Je suis libre?" asked the Bulgarian, looking round him.
The colonel bowed stiffly.
"This lady has spoken of your horticultural passion," said Hazlewood, looking at Rakoff straight in the eyes.
"Je suis infiniment reconnaissant," the Bulgarian murmured, with a bow. Then he saluted the company and went out.
"I daren't precipitate the situation," the colonel told Hazlewood. "He must leave Nish at once, but if he tries to alight before the Greek frontier, he can always be arrested."
Renewed apologies from the colonel and much cordial saluting from his staff ushered Sylvia out of the office, whence she was followed by Hazlewood and Antitch, the latter of whom begged her to show her forgiveness by dining with him that night.
"My dear fellow," Hazlewood protested, "Miss Scarlett has promised to dine with me."
In the end she agreed to dine with both, and begged them not to bother about her any more, lest work should suffer.
"No, I'll see you into the town," Hazlewood said, "because I don't know if there's a room in any hotel. You ought really to go on to Salonika at once, but I suppose you want to see Nish on the eve of its calvary."
She looked at him in surprise: there was such a depth of bitterness in his tone.
"I should hate to be a mere sightseer."
"No, forgive me for talking like that. I'm sure you'renot, and to show my penitence for the imputation let me help you about your room."
Sylvia and Hazlewood bowed to Antitch and walked out of the station.
"They've started to commandeer every vehicle and every animal," Hazlewood explained, "so we shall have to walk. It's not far. This youth will carry your bag. Your heavy luggage had better remain in theconsigne. I suppose you more or less guessed what was Michailovitch's difficulty about your friend the Bulgarian rose-grower?"
"No, I don't think I did really."
Sylvia did not care anything about the Bulgarian or the colonel; she was only anxious to hear something about Michael Fane; but because she was so anxious, she could not bring herself to start the topic and must wait for Hazlewood.
"Well, this fellow Rakoff was identified by that peasant chap who was brought in—or at any rate so almost certainly recognized as to amount to identification—as one of the most bloodthirstycomitadjileaders."
"What do they do?"
She felt that she must appear to take some interest in what Hazlewood was telling her, after the way he had helped and was helping her and perhaps would help her.
"Their chief mission in life," he explained, "is the Bulgarization of Macedonia, which they effect in the simplest way possible by murdering everybody who is not Bulgarian. They're also rather fond of Bulgarizing towns and churches by means of dynamite. Altogether the most unpleasant ruffians left in Europe, and in yielding them the superlative I'm not forgetting Orangemen and Junkers. The colonel did not believe that he was a rose-grower, but he was afraid to arrest him, because at this moment it is essential not to give the least excuse for precipitating the situation. We expect to hear at any moment that Bulgaria has declared war on Serbia; but all sorts of negotiations are still in progress. One of the characteristicsof our policy during this war is to give a frenzied attention to the molding of a situation after it has hopelessly hardened. This Austrian advance is bad enough, but there's probably worse to follow, and we don't want the worst yet. The people here are counting on French and English help, and they are frightened to death of doing anything that will upset us. As a matter of fact, your evidence was a godsend to the colonel, because it gave him an excuse to let Rakoff go without losing his dignity. And of course there's always a chance that the fellow is what he claims to be—a peaceful rose-grower, though I doubt it: I can't imagine any one of that trade traveling through Serbia at such a moment. I believe myself that the Germans furnish condemned criminals with sufficiently suspicious accessories to occupy the Allied Intelligence, while they get away with the real goods. Do you ever read spy-novels? Our spy-novels and spy-plays must have been of priceless assistance to the Germans in letting them know how to coach their condemned criminals for the part. There's only one thing on earth that bears less resemblance to its original than the English novelist's spy, and that is his detective."
"Where is Michael Fane?" Sylvia asked; she could bear it no longer.
"He's out here with Lady What's-her-name's Red Cross unit. I don't really know where he is at the moment—probably being jolted by a mule on a tract leading south from Belgrade. His sister's out here, too. Her husband—an awfully jolly fellow—was killed at Ypres. When did you see Michael last?"
"Oh, not for—not for nearly nine years," she answered.
There was a silence; Sylvia wished now that she had let Hazlewood lead up to the subject of Michael; he must be thinking of the time when his friend was engaged to Lily; he must be wondering about herself, for that he had remembered her name after so many years showed that Michael's account of her had impressed itself upon him.
"If he's on his way south, he'll be in Nish soon," Hazlewood said, breaking the silence abruptly. "You'd better wait and see him. Nine years last month: September, nineteen-six."
"No, it was June," Sylvia said. "Early June."
"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking of Michael in relation to myself."
He sighed, and at that moment coming down the squalid street appeared a band of children shepherded by a fussy schoolmaster and carrying bouquets of flowers, who, at the sight of Hazlewood, cheered shrilly.
"You seem to be very popular here already," Sylvia observed.
"Do you know what those flowers are for?" he asked, gravely.
She shook her head.
"They're for the British and French troops that these poor dears are expecting to arrive by every train to help them against the Austrians. I tell you it makes me feel the greatest humbug on earth. They are going to decorate the station to-morrow. It's like putting flowers on their country's tomb. Ah, don't let's talk about it—don't let's think about it," he broke out, passionately. "Serbia has been one of my refuges during the last nine years, and I stand here now like a mute at a funeral."
He walked on, tugging savagely at his mustache, until he could turn round to Sylvia with a laugh again.
"My mustache represents the badge of my servitude. I tug at it as in the old Greek days slaves must have tugged at their leaden collars. The day I shave it off I shall be free again. Here's the hotel where I hang out—almost literally, for my room is so small and so dirty that I generally put my pillow on the window-sill. The hotel is full of bugs and diplomats, but the coffee is good. However, it's no good raising your hopes, because I know that there isn't a spare room. Never mind," he added, "I've got another room at another hotel which is equally full ofbugs, but unfrequented by diplomats. It is being reserved for my lady secretary, but she hasn't turned up yet, and so I make you a present of it till she does."
"Why are you being so kind?" Sylvia asked.
"I don't know," Hazlewood replied. "You amused me, I think, sitting there in that railway carriage with Antitch. It's such a relief to arrest somebody who doesn't instantly begin to shriek 'Consul! Consul!' Most women regard consuls as Gieve waistcoats, that is to say, something which is easily inflated by a woman's breath, has a flask of brandy in one pocket, and affords endless support. No, seriously, it happens that Michael Fane talked a great deal about you on a memorable occasion in my life, and since he's a friend of mine I'd like to do all I can for you. For the moment—here's the other hotel, nothing is far apart in Nish, not even life and death—for the moment I must leave you, or rather for the whole day, I'm afraid, because I've got the dickens of a lot to do. However, it's just as well the lady secretary hasn't turned up, because it's really impossible to feel very securely established in Nish. I expect, as a matter of fact, she's been kidnapped by some white slavery of the staff en route. Miss Potberry is her name. It's a depressing name for a secretary, but true romance knows no laws of nomenclature, so I still have hope. Poor lady.
"Miss Potberry muttered, 'Oh, squish!I don't want to go on to Nish.I like Malta better!'The general said, 'Let herRemain here, if that is her wish,
"Miss Potberry muttered, 'Oh, squish!I don't want to go on to Nish.I like Malta better!'The general said, 'Let herRemain here, if that is her wish,
and send a telegram to London to say that she has been taken ill and is unable to proceed farther, but that her services can be usefully employed here.' I say, I must run! I'll come and fetch you for dinner about half past seven."
He handed her over to the care of the hotel porter and vanished.
The room that Hazlewood had lent to Sylvia possessed a basin, a bed, five hooks, a chair, the remains of a table, an oleograph of a battle between Serbians and Bulgarians that resembled a fire at a circus, and a balcony. At such a time in Nish a balcony made up for any absence of comfort, so much was there to look at in the square full of stunted trees and mud, surrounded by stunted houses, and crammed with carts, bullocks, donkeys, horses, diplomats, soldiers, princes, refugees, peasants, poultry, newspaper correspondents, and children, the whole mass flushed by a spray of English nurses, as a pigsty by a Dorothy Perkins rambler.
Sylvia searched the crowd for a glimpse of Michael Fane, though she knew that he was almost certainly not yet arrived. Yet if the Serbians were evacuating Belgrade and if Michael had been in Belgrade, he was bound to arrive ultimately in Nish. She wondered how long she could keep this room and prayed that Miss Potberry would not appear. The notion of traveling all the way here from Petrograd, only to miss him at the end, was not to be contemplated; his sister was in Serbia, too, that charming sister who had flashed through her dressing-room at the Pierian like a lovely view seen from a train. After the last eighteen months she was surely justified in leaving nothing undone that might bring about another meeting. Hazlewood had spoken of being overworked. Could she not offer her services in place of Miss Potberry? Anything, anything to have an excuse to linger in Nish, an excuse that would absolve her from the charge of a frivolous egotism in occupying space that would soon be more than ever badly needed. She had thought that destiny had driven her south from Petrograd to Kieff, from Kieff to Odessa, from Odessa to Bucharest, from Bucharest to Nish for Queenie and for Philip, but surely it was for more than was represented by either of them.
"Incredible ass that I am," she thought. "What is Michael to me and what am I to Michael? Not so easilyis time's slow ruin repaired. If we meet, we shall meet for perhaps a dinner together; that will be all. What romances must this war have woven and what romances must it not have shattered as swiftly! Romances! Yet, how dare I use such a word about myself? Nine years, nine remorseless deadening years, lie on top of what was never more than a stillborn fancy, and I am expecting to see it burst forth to bloom in Nish. It's the effect of isolation. Time goes by more slowly when one only looks at oneself, and one forgets the countless influences in other people's lives. But I should like to see him again. Oh yes, quite ordinarily and unemotionally I should like to shake hands with him and perhaps talk for a little while. There is nothing extravagantly sentimental in thinking so much."
Sylvia had often enough been conscious of her isolation from the world and often enough she had tried to assuage this sense of loneliness by indulging it to the utmost—to such an extent indeed that she had reached the point of hating not merely anything that interfered with her own isolation, but even anything that interfered with the isolation of other people. She had turned the armor of self-defense into a means of aggression, although by doing so she had destroyed the strength of her position. Her loneliness that during these last months seemed to have acquired the more positive qualities of independence was now only too miserably evident as loneliness; and unless she could apply the vital suffering she had undergone recently, so that the years of her prime might bear manifest fruit, she knew that the sense of futility in another nine years would be irreparable indeed. At present the treasure of eighteen months of continuous and deliberate effort to avoid futility was still rich with potentiality; but the human heart was a deceptive treasure-house never very strong against the corruption of time, which, when unlocked, might at any moment display nothing except coffers filled with dust.
"But why do I invite disillusionment by counting upon this meeting with Michael Fane? Why should he cure this loneliness and how will he cure it? Why, in two words, do I want to meet him again? Partly, I think, it's due to the haunting incompleteness of our first intercourse, to which is added the knowledge that now I am qualified to complete that intercourse, at any rate, so far as my attitude toward him is concerned. And the way I want to show my comprehension of him is to explain about myself. I am really desperately anxious that he should hear what happened to me after we parted. For one thing, he is bound to be sympathetic with this craving for an assurance of the value of faith. I want to find how far he has traveled in the same direction as myself by a different road. I divine somehow that his experience will be the complement to my own, that it will illumine the wretched cross-country path which I've taken through life. If I find that he, relying almost entirely upon the adventures of thought, has arrived at a point of which I am also in sight, notwithstanding that I have taken the worst and roughest road, a road, moreover, that was almost all the time trespassing upon forbidden territory, then I shall be able to throw off this oppression of loneliness. But why should I rely more upon his judgment than anybody else's?"
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.
"What is attraction?" she asked herself. "It exists, and there's an end of it. I had the same sense of intimacy with his sister in a conversation of five minutes. Then am I in love with him? But isn't being in love a condition that is brought about by circumstances out of attraction? Being in love is merely the best way of illustrating affinity. Ah, that word! When a woman of thirty-two begins to talk about affinities, she has performed half her emotional voyage; the sunken rocks and eddies of the dangerous age may no longer be disregarded. Thirty-two, and yet I feel younger than I did at twenty-three. At twenty-threeexperience mostly bitter was weighing me down; at thirty-two I know that experience must not be regarded as anything more important than food or drink or traveling in a train or any of the incidental aids to material existence. Then what is important? I should be rash to hazard a statement while I am looking at this heterogeneous mob below. One cannot help supposing that the war will bring about a readjustment of values."
The feeling of unrest and insecurity in the square at Nish on that Monday morning was almost frightful in its emotional actuality; it gave Sylvia an envy to fling herself into the middle of it, as when one sits upon a rock lashed by angry seas and longs to glut an insane curiosity about the extent of one's helplessness. This squalid Serbian town gave her the illusion of having for the moment concentrated upon itself the great forces that were agitating the world.
"I don't believe anybody realizes yet how much was let slip with the dogs of war," she said to herself. "People are always talking about the vastness of this war, but they are always thinking in terms of avoirdupois; they have never doubted that the decimal system will express their most grandiose calculations. The biggest casualty list that was ever known, the longest battle, the heaviest gun, all these flatter poor humanity with a sense of its importance: but when all the records have been broken and when all the congratulations upon outdoing the past have been worn thin, to what will humanity turn from the new chaos it has created? And this is one of the fruits of the great nineteenth century, this miserable square packed with the evidence of civilization. Perhaps I'm too parochial: at the other end of the universe planets may be warring upon planets. If that be so, we lose even the consolation of a universal record and must fall back upon a mere world record; in eternity our greatest war will have sunk to a brawl in a slum. How can mankind believe in man? How can mankind reject God?" she demanded, passionately.
Sylvia did not dine with Hazlewood or Antitch that evening, because they were both too busy. Hazlewood begged her to stay on in the room and promised that he would try to make use of her, though he was too busy at present to find time to explain how she could be useful. Sylvia did not like to worry him with inquiries about Michael, and she spent the next few days watching from her balcony the concourse of distracted human beings in the square. On Saturday when news had arrived that the Austrians had entered Belgrade, and when every hour was bringing convoys of refugees from the north, a rumor suddenly sprang up that thousands of British and French troops were on their way from Salonika, that the Greeks had invaded Bulgaria, and that Turkey had made peace. Such an accumulation of good news meant that the miseries of Serbia would soon be over. The railway station was hung with more flags and scattered with more flowers than ever; and an enterprising coffee-house keeper anticipated the arrival of British troops by hanging out a sign inscribed,GUD BIIR IS FOR SEL PLIS TO COM OLD ENGLAND BIRHOUS.
Sylvia was reading this notice when Hazlewood came up and asked her to dine with him that evening.
"I'm so sorry I've had to leave you entirely to yourself, but I've not had a moment, and I hate dining when I can't talk. To-night there seems a lull in the stream of telegraphic questions to which I've been subjected all this week."
"But please don't apologize. I feel guilty in staying here at all, especially when I'm doing nothing but stare."
"Well, I was going to talk to you about that. You ought to leave to-morrow or the next day. The Bulgarians are sure to move, now that the Austrians have got Belgrade, and that means fresh swarms of fugitives from the east; it may also mean that communications with Greece will be cut."
"But the British advance?"
Hazlewood looked at her.
"Ah yes, the British advance," he murmured.
"And you promised that you'd find me some work," Sylvia said.
"Frankly, it's no good your beginning to learn now."
She must have shown as much disappointment as she felt, for he added:
"Well, after dinner to-night you shall take down the figures of one or two long telegrams."
"Anything," offered Sylvia, eagerly.
"It's all that Miss Potberry could have done at present. I'm not writing any reports, so her expert shorthand of which I was assured would have been wasted. Reports! One of the revelations of this war to me was the extraordinary value that professional soldiers attach to the typewritten word. I suppose it's a minor manifestation of the impulse that made Wolfe say he would rather have written Gray's 'Elegy' than take Quebec. If typewriters had been invented in his time he might have said, 'I would rather be in the War Office and be able to read my report of the capture of Quebec than take it.' I'm sure that the chief reason of a knowledge of Latin being still demanded for admission to Sandhurst is the hope universally cherished in the army that every cadet's haversack contains a new long Latin intransitive verb which can be used transitively to supplant one of the short Saxon verbs that still disfigure military correspondence. I can imagine such a cadet saying, 'Sir, I would sooner have been the first man that wrote of evacuating wounded than take Berlin.' The trouble with men of action is that something written means for them something done. The labor of writing is so tremendous and the consequent mental fatigue so overwhelming that they cannot bring themselves to believe otherwise. The general public, even after fifteen months of war, has the same kind of respect for the printed word. How long does it take you to read a letter? I imagine that two readings would give you the gist of it? Well,it takes a British general at least five readings, and even then he only understands a word here and there, unless it's written in his own barbaric departmental English. If I had a general over me here—which, thank Heaven, I've not—and I were to make a simple suggestion, he would invite me to put it on paper. This he would do because he would presume that life would be too short for me to succeed, and that, therefore, he should be forever spared having to make up his mind in response to any prompting on my side. If, on the other hand, I did by chance embody my suggestion in typescript, he would be amazed at the result, and by some alchemy of thought, if he could write on the top 'Concur,' he would feel that he had created the suggestion himself. The effort even to write 'Concur' represents for the average British general the amount of labor involved by a woman in producing a child, and ... but look here—to-night at half past seven. So long!"
Hazlewood hurried away; at dinner that night he went on with his discourse.
"You know that among savages certain words are taboo and that in the Middle Ages certain words possessed magic properties? The same thing applies to the army and to the navy. For instance, the navy has a word of power that will open anything. That word is 'submit'. If you wrote 'submitted' at the top of a communication I believe you could tell an admiral that he was a damn fool, but if you wrote 'suggested' you'd be shot at dawn. In the same way a naval officer indorses your 'submission' by writing 'approved' whereas a soldier writes 'concur.' I've often wondered what would happen to a general who wrote 'agree'. Certainly any junior officer who wrote 'begin' for 'commence' or 'allow' for 'permit' would be cashiered. I was rather lucky because, after being suspected for the simplicity of my reports, I managed to use the word 'connote' once. My dear woman, my reputation was made. Generals came up and congratulated me personally, and I'm credibly informed that all the newmilitary ciphers will include the word, which was just what was wanted to supplant 'mean,' a monosyllable that had been a blot on military correspondence for years."
"Are you talking seriously?" Sylvia asked. "You can't really connote what you say."
Hazlewood indicated the room where they were dining.
"Which are the English diplomats?" he demanded.
"That's perfectly easy to tell," she replied.
"And why?" he went on. "Simply because they've made no concession to being in Nish at a moment of crisis. I invite you to regard my friend Harry Vereker. See how he defies any Horatian regret for lapsed years. Positively he is still at Oxford. Can't you hear above all this clatter of cosmopolitanism in a pigsty the suave insistency of his voice impressing upon you by its quality of immutable self-assurance that, whatever happens to the rest of the world, nothing vitally deformative ever happens to England?"
"But what has the voice of a secretary to do with the military abuse of Latin derivations?"
"Not much, I admit, except in its serene ruthlessness. An English officer compels a Latin verb to fit in with his notion of what a Latin verb ought to do just in the same way as he expects a Spaniard to regard with pleasure his occupation of Gibraltar: any protest by a grammarian or an idealistic politician would strike him as impertinent. Harry Vereker's voice is a still more ineradicable manifestation of the spirit. Listen! He is asking the waiter in Serbian for salt, but he does so in a way that reminds one of mankind's concession to animals in using forms of communication that the latter can understand. It is not to be supposed that the dog invented patting: Harry's Serbian is his way of patting the waiter: it is his language, not the waiter's. Personally I can't help confessing that I admire this attitude to the world, and I only wish that it could be eternally preserved. The great historical tragedy of this war—I'm putting on one side for themoment the countless personal tragedies that are included in it, and trying to regard the war as Mr. Buckle regarded civilization—the great historical tragedy will be the Englishman's loss of his personality. When we look back at the historical tragedy of the fall of the Roman Empire, we think less of thecivis Romanus sumthan of the monuments of architecture, law, political craft, and the rest that remain imperishably part of human progress. In the same way a thousand years hence I assume that the British Empire will be considered to have played a part only second to the Roman Empire in the manifest results of its domination. But what has been lost and what will be lost is the individual Roman's attitude and the individual Englishman's. Not all the remains of the Roman Empire have been enough really to preserve for us the indefinable flavor of being a Roman, and with much more material at his disposal I defy the perfect cosmopolitan of mixed Aryan, Mongol, and Semitic blood to realize a thousand years from now Harry Vereker's tone of voice in asking that waiter for the salt. No, no, the cosmopolitan of the future will turn aside from the records of the past and in Esperanto murmur sadly to himself that something is missing from his appreciation. Perhaps I can illustrate my meaning better if I compare the Athenians with the French. I feel that the art of both enduring through time to come will be enough. I have no regret for the personal attitude of the Athenian, and in the same way I don't feel that the cosmopolitan of a thousand years hence will lose anything by not meeting the Frenchman of to-day. It is Athens and France rather than the Athenian or the Frenchman of which the world is enamoured. How often have I heard a foreigner say: 'The politics of England do not please me: I find it a brigand policy, but the individual Englishman is always a gentleman.' An individual Englishman like Byron is worth more to England than twenty Chamberlains or Greys, who yet have more right to represent their country: he comes as such a romantic surprise.A Frenchman like Lafayette is taken for granted. The word of an Englishman is proverbial; the perfidy of Albion equally so."
"And the Germans?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, they have never been thought worthy of a generalization. We have apprehended them vaguely as one apprehends pigs—as a nation of gross feeders and badly dressed women drinking a mixture of treacle and onions they call beer, with a reputation for guttural peregrination and philosophy."
"Their music," Sylvia protested.
"Yes, that is difficult to explain. Yes, I think we must give them that; but when we remember Bach and Schumann, we must not forget Wagner and the German band."
"I think your characterization is rather crude," Sylvia said.
"It is crude. But there is no bygone civilization with which GermanicKulturcan be compared. So as with any novelty one depends upon a sneer to hide one's own ignorance."
"The Italians interest me more," Sylvia said.
"The Italians seem to me rather to resemble the English, and naturally, because they are the most direct heirs of Rome. I'm bound to say that I don't believe in an imperial future for them now. It's surely impossible to revive Rome. They still preserve an immense capacity for political craft, but it is an egotism that lacks the sublime unconsciousness of English egotism. The Italians have never recovered fromIl Principeof Machiavelli. It's an eclectic statecraft; like their painting from Raphael onward, it's toosoigné. Moreover, Italy suffers from the perpetual sacrifice of the southern Italian to the northern. The real Italians belong to the south, and for me therisorgimentohas always been a phenix rising from the ashes of the south; the bird is most efficient, but I distrust its aquiline appearance. One of the most remarkable surprises of this war has been the superior fighting quality—the morequickly beating heart—of the Neapolitans and Sicilians. I found the same surprising quality in the Greeks during the last Balkan war. To me, who regard the Mediterranean as stillthecivilized sea of the world, the triumph of Naples has been a delight."
"And the Russians?" Sylvia went on.
"Ah, the future of Russia is as much an unknown quantity as the future of womanhood. Personally I am convinced that the next great civilization will be Slavonic, and my chief grudge against mortality is that I must die long before it even begins to draw near, for it is still as far away as Johannine Christianity will be from the Petrine Christianity to which we have been too long devoted. But when it does come, I am sure that it will easily surpass all previous civilizations, because I believe it will resolve the eternal dualism in humanity that hitherto we have expressed roughly by Empire and Papacy or by Church and State. I envisage Russia as containing the civilization of the soul, though God knows through what agony of blood and tears it may have to pass before it can express what it contains. In Russia there still exists a genuine worship of the Czar as a superior being, and a nation that respects the divinity about a king is still as deep in the mire of fetichism as the most debased Melanesians. We worship kings in England, I admit, but only snobbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our most exalted snobs dream of paying divine honors to kingship; we are too much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to an inherited consciousness of Cæsarian excesses."
"And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia.
"Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers—a cocotte with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment. Austria! rouged and raddled, plumped and corseted, asuitable mistress for that licentious but still tragic old buffoon who rules her."
"What a wonderful sermon on so slight a text as a friend's asking a Serbian waiter for salt," Sylvia said.
"Ah, you led me away from the main thread by asking me direct questions. I meant to confine myself to England."
"On peut toujours revenir aux moutons" Sylvia said.
"New Zealand mutton, eh?" Hazlewood laughed. "Wasn't it a New Zealander who was to meditate upon the British Empire a thousand years hence amid the ruins of St. Paul's?"
"Well, go on," she urged.
"You're one of those listening sirens so much more fatal than the singing variety," he laughed.
"Oh, but I'm very rarely a good listener," she protested.
Hazlewood bowed.
"And don't forget that sirens have always anarrière-pensée," she went on. "However well you talk, you'll find that I shall demand something in return for my attention. Don't look alarmed; it won't involve you personally."
Sylvia was getting a good deal of pleasure out of his monologue; it was just what her nerves needed, this sense of being entertained while all the time she preserved, so far as any reality of personal intercourse was concerned, a complete detachment. She was quite definitely aware of wanting Hazlewood to exhaust himself that she might either bring her part of the conversation round to Michael or, at any rate, exact from him an excuse for lingering in Nish until Michael should come there. Now her host was off again:
"Have you ever thought," he was asking her, "about the appropriateness of our national animal—the British lion? We are rather apt to regard the lion as a bluff, hearty sort of beast with a loud roar and a consciousness of being the finest beast anywhere about. But, after all, the lion is one of the great cats. He's something muchfiner than the British bulldog, which, with most unnecessary self-depreciation, we have elected as our secondary pattern or prototype among the animals. There are few animals so profoundly, so densely, so hopelessly stupid as the bulldog. Its chief virtue is alleged to be its never knowing when it is beaten, but this is only an incidental ignorance merged in its ignorance of everything. Why a dog that approximates in character to a mule and in appearance to a hippopotamus should be accepted as the representative of English character I don't know. The attribution takes its place with some of the great fundamental mysteries of human conduct; it is comparable with those other riddles of why a chauffeur always waits till you get into the car again before he turns round, or why kidneys are so rare in beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, or why every man in the course of his life has either wanted to buy or has bought a rustic summer-house. The lion, however, really is typical of the Englishman: somewhat blond and very agile, physically courageous, morally timid, fierce, full of domestic virtues, tolerant of jackals, generous, cunning, graceful, arrogant, and acquisitive: he seems to me a perfect symbol of the British race."
"Is your friend at the diplomats' table so very leonine?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh no, Harry is the individual Englishman; the lion represents the race."
"But the race is an accumulation of individuals."
"I say, don't listen too intelligently," Hazlewood begged. "It's not fair either to my babbling or to your own dinner."
"Well, I want to bring you back to the point you made when you talked about the historical tragedy of this war."
Hazlewood looked serious.
"I meant what I said. I've just come from the grave of what was England, and already the deeds at Gallipoli have taken on the aspect of a heroic frieze. We might have repeated Gallipoli here in Serbia, but we sha'n't;we've learned our lesson; I do not think that on such a scale such decorative heroism can ever happen again. Gallipoli saw the death of the amateur; and a conservative like myself feels the historical tragedy of such a death. I suppose there are few people who would be prepared to argue that such a spirit ought to be purchased at such a price, and yet I don't know—I believe I would. I wasn't in Flanders at the beginning; but I imagine the same spirit existed there. Don't you remember the childlike, amateurish pleasure that all the soldiers took in being ferried across the Channel without anybody's knowing they had gone? The successful secrecy compensated them for all that hell of Mons. You'll never again hear of that childlike enjoyment. Very soon we shall have conscription, and from that moment the amateur in a position of responsibility who sacrifices any man's life to his own sense of exterior form will become a criminal. Surely it is an appalling tragedy that we sha'n't be able to carry on such a war as this without conscription? England, our England, disappears with conscription: nothing will ever be the same again. They accused us of decadence, but had you seen that landing last April—had you seen that immortal division of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, and Welshmen literally dyeing the sea with their blood, you could never have thought of decadence again. And yet, mark my words, so much of England was lost upon that day that already the unthinking herd led by the newspapers, which are always waiting to hail the new king, talks of the landing as famous chiefly for the Australian share in it. My God, it enrages me to read about the Australians when I think of that deathless dead division. Whatever else may happen in this war, whatever our fate at the hands of intriguing politicians and backbiting generals, England was herself upon that day: it stands with Trafalgar and Agincourt in a trinity of imperishable glory."
"But why do you say that so much of England waslost? You don't think we shall disgrace ourselves henceforth in this war?"
"We have already done so morally in failing to come to the help of the Serbians. Gallipoli turned us into professionals, and though I'm not saying that there is a single good professional argument in favor of helping Serbia, I still believe against all professionals that we shall pay for our failure in bitter years of prolonged war. The Dardanelles could have been forced. What stopped it? Professional jealousy at home."
"It's a hard thing of which to accuse the people at home."
"It was a hard thing to land that day at Sedd-el-bahr, but it was done. No, we've fallen a prey to the glamour of Teutonism, and of being expedient and Hunnish. By the time the war is over I don't doubt we shall be a very pretty imitation of the real article that we're setting out to destroy. But, thank Heaven, we shall always be able to point to Mons and to Antwerp and to Gallipoli: though we are fast forgetting to be gentlemen, we've already forgotten more than the Germans ever dreamed of in that direction. Mind you, I'm not attempting to say that we haven't got to hit below the belt: we have, because we are fighting with foul fighters; but that is what I conceive to be the historical tragedy of this war—the debasement of our ideals in order that we may compete with the Germans, and with the old men in morocco-chairs at home, and with the guttural press. I remember how the waning moon of dawn came up out of Asia while we were still waiting for news of the Suvla landing. There was a tattoo of musketry over the sea, a lisp of wind in the sandy grass; and in a moment of apprehensive chill I divined that with a failure at Suvla this waning moon was the last moon that would rise upon the old way of thinking, the rare old way of acting, the old, old merry England built in a thousand years."
"But a greater England may arise from that failure."
"Yes, but it won't be our England. The grave of our England was dug by the Victorians; this generation has planted the flowers upon it; the monument will be raised by the new generation. Oh yes, I know, it's an egotistical regret, a superficial and sentimental regret, if you will, but you must allow some of us to cherish it; otherwise we could not go on. And in the end I believe history will indorse the school of thought I follow. In the end I'm convinced that it will blame the men who failed to see that England was great by the measure of her greatness, and that the real way to win this war was by what were sneeringly called side-shows. All our history has been the alternate failure and triumph of our side-shows; we made ourselves what we are by side-shows."
Hazlewood swept from the table the pile of crumbs he had been building while he was talking, and smiled at Sylvia.
"It's your turn now," he said.
"You've deprived me of any capacity for generalization. I think perhaps you may have got things out of focus. I know it's a platitude, but isn't one always inevitably out of focus nowadays? When I was still at a distance from the war the whole perspective was blurred to my vision by the intrusion of individual humiliations and sufferings. Now I'm nearer to it I feel that my vision is equally faulty from an indifference to them," Sylvia said, earnestly.
Then she told Hazlewood the story of Queenie and the passport, and asked for his opinion.
"Well, of course, there's an instance to hand of sterile professionalism. Naturally, had I been the official in Bucharest, I should have given the girl her passport. At such a moment I should have been too much moved by her desire of England to have done otherwise. Moreover, if her desire of England was not mere lust, I should have been right to do so."
Sylvia finished her story by telling him of Queenie'sescape with the juggler after the probable theft of Maud's passport.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "I'll bet they've gone to Salonika. We'll send a telegram to our people there and warn them to keep a lookout."
"What a paradox human sympathy is," Sylvia murmured. "Ever since I got to Nish it's been on my conscience that I didn't tell you about this girl before, and yet in Bucharest the notion of doing anything like that was positively disgusting to my sense of decency. And look at you! A moment ago you were abusing the official in Bucharest for his red tape, and now your eyes are flashing with the prospect of hunting her down."
"Not even Heraclitus divined quite the rapidity with which everything dissolves in flux," said Hazlewood. "That's another thing that will be brought home to people before the war's over—the intensity and rapidity of change, of course considerably strengthened and accelerated by the impulse that war has given to pure destruction. You can see it even in broad ideas. We began by fighting for a scrap of paper; we shall go on fighting for different ideas until we realize we are fighting for our existence. Then suddenly we shall think we are fighting about nothing, and the war will be over."
Hazlewood sat silent; most of the diners had finished and left the room, which accentuated his silence with an answering stillness.
"Well, what is to be your reward for listening?" he asked at length.
"To stay on in Nish for the present," she answered, firmly.
"No, no," he objected, with a sudden fretfulness that was the more conspicuous after his late exuberance. "No, no, we don't want more women than are necessary. You'd better get down to Salonika on Monday. Look here, I must send a telegram about that friend of yours. Come round to my office and give me the details."
Sylvia accompanied him in a state of considerable depression; she could not bear the idea of revealing so much of herself as to ask him directly to give her an excuse to remain in Nish because she wanted to see Michael; it was seeming impossible to introduce the personal element in this war-cursed town, and particularly now when she was quenching so utterly the personal element by thus allying herself with Hazlewood against Queenie. She waited while he deciphered a short telegram which had arrived during his absence and while he occupied himself with writing another.
"How will this do for their description?" he read: