"A certain Krebs known professionally as Zozo, acrobatic juggler and conjurer, alleged Swiss nationality, tall, large face, clean shaven, very large hands, speaking English well, accompanied by Queenie Walters of German origin possibly carrying stolen passport of Maud Moffat, English variety artiste. Description, slim, very fair, blue eyes, pale, delicate, speaks German, Italian, French, and English, left Bucharest at end of September. Probably traveled via Dedeagatch and Salonika. Nothing definite known against them, but man frequented company of notorious enemy agents in Bucharest and is known to be bad character. Suggest he is likely to use woman to get in touch with British officers."
"A certain Krebs known professionally as Zozo, acrobatic juggler and conjurer, alleged Swiss nationality, tall, large face, clean shaven, very large hands, speaking English well, accompanied by Queenie Walters of German origin possibly carrying stolen passport of Maud Moffat, English variety artiste. Description, slim, very fair, blue eyes, pale, delicate, speaks German, Italian, French, and English, left Bucharest at end of September. Probably traveled via Dedeagatch and Salonika. Nothing definite known against them, but man frequented company of notorious enemy agents in Bucharest and is known to be bad character. Suggest he is likely to use woman to get in touch with British officers."
"But what will they do to her?" Sylvia asked, dismayed by this metamorphosis of Queenie into a police-court case.
"Oh, they won't do anything," Hazlewood replied, irritably. "She'll be added to the great army of suspects whose histories in all their discrepancies are building up the Golden Legend of this war. She'll exist in card indexes for the rest of her life; and her reputation will circulate only a little more freely than herself. In fact, really I'm doing her a favor by putting her down for the observation of our military psychologists and criminologists; her life will become much easier henceforth. Thewar has not cured human nature of a passion for bric-à-brac, and as a catalogued articlede virtu—or should I sayde vice?—she will be well looked after."
"Then, if that's all, why do you send the telegram?" Sylvia asked.
"I really don't know—probably because I've joined in the May-pole dance for ribbons with the rest of the departmental warriors. Card indexes are the casualty lists of officers commandingembusqués; the longer the list of names the longer the row of ribbons."
"You've become very bitter," Sylvia said. "It's like a sudden change of wind. I feel quite chilled."
"Well, you shall warm yourself by taking down a few hundred groups. Come along."
Sylvia listened for an hour to the endless groups of five figures that Hazlewood dictated to her, during which time his voice that began calmly and murmurously reached a level of rasping and lacerating boredom before he had done.
"Thank Heaven that's over and we can go to bed," he said.
He seemed to be anxious to be rid of her, and she went away in some disconsolation at his abrupt change of manner. Nothing that she could think of occurred to cause it, and ultimately she could only ascribe it to nerves.
"And, after all, why not nerves?" she said to herself. "Who will ever again be able to blame people for having nerves?"
The next morning a note came from Hazlewood apologizing for his rudeness and thanking her for her help.
I was in a vile humor [he wrote], because when I got back to my room I found a refusal to let me leave Nish and join the Serbian Headquarters on the eastern frontier. This morning they've changed their minds and I'm off at once. Keep the room, if you insist upon staying in Nish. If Miss Potberry by any unlucky chance turns up, say I've been killed and that she had better report in Salonika as soon as possible. If I see Michael Fane, which is very unlikely, I'll tell him you want to see him.
I was in a vile humor [he wrote], because when I got back to my room I found a refusal to let me leave Nish and join the Serbian Headquarters on the eastern frontier. This morning they've changed their minds and I'm off at once. Keep the room, if you insist upon staying in Nish. If Miss Potberry by any unlucky chance turns up, say I've been killed and that she had better report in Salonika as soon as possible. If I see Michael Fane, which is very unlikely, I'll tell him you want to see him.
With all his talk Hazlewood had plumbed her desire; with all his talk about nations he had not lost his capacity for divining the individual. Sylvia wished now that he was not upon his way to the Bulgarian frontier; she should like to watch herself precipitated by his acid. Did acids precipitate? It did not matter; there was no second person's comprehension to be considered at the moment. Sylvia stayed on in the room, watching from the balcony the now unceasing press of refugees.
Three days after she had dined with Hazlewood there was a murmur in the square, a heightened agitation that made a positive impact upon the atmosphere: Bulgaria had declared war. She had the sense of a curtain's rising upon the last and crucial act, the sense of an audience strung to such a pitch of expectancy, dread, and woe that it was become a part of the drama. During the next three days the influx of pale fugitives was like a scene upon the banks of the Styx. The odor of persecuted humanity hung upon the air in a positively visible miasma; white exhausted women suckled their babies in the mud; withered crones dragged from bed sat nursing their ulcers; broken-hearted old men bowed their heads between their knees, seeming actually to have been trampled underfoot in the confused terror that had brought them here; the wailing of tired and hungry children never ceased for a single instant. The only thing that seemed to keep this dejected multitude from rotting in death where they lay was the assurance that every one gave his neighbor of the British and French advance to save them. Two French officers sent up on some business from Salonika walked through the square in their celestial uniforms like angels of God, for the people fell down before them and gave thanks; faded flowers were flung in their path, and women caught at their hands to kiss them as they went by. Once there was a sound of cavalry's approach, and the despairing mob shouted for joy and pressed forward to greet the vanguard of rescue; but it was a Serbian patrol coveredwith blood and dust which had been ordered back to guard the railway line. The troopers rode through sullenly and the people did not even whisper about them, so deep was their disillusion, so bitter their resentment. And through all this fetid and pitiful mob the English nurses wound their way like a Dorothy Perkins rambler.
A week after Hazlewood had left Nish Sylvia saw from her balcony a fair young Englishwoman followed by a ragged boy carrying a typewriter in a tin case. It struck her as the largest typewriter that she had ever seen, and she was thinking vaguely what a ridiculous weapon it was to carry about at such a moment when it suddenly flashed upon her that this might be the long-expected Miss Potberry. She hurried down-stairs and heard her asking in the hall if any one knew where Captain Hazlewood could be found. Sylvia came forward and explained his absence.
"He did not really expect you, but he told me to tell you that if you did come you ought to go back immediately to Salonika."
"I don't think I can go back to Salonika," said Miss Potberry. "Somebody was firing at the train I came in, and they told me at the station that there would be no more trains to Salonika, because the line had been cut."
The boy had put her typewriter upon a table in the hall; she stood by, embracing it with a kind of serene determination that reminded Sylvia of the images of patron saints that hold in their arms the cathedral they protect.
"I'm surprised they let you come up from Salonika," Sylvia said. "Didn't they know the line was likely to be cut?"
"I had to report to Captain Hazlewood," Miss Potberry replied, firmly. "And as I had already been rather delayed upon my journey, I was anxious to get on as soon as possible."
The consciousness of being needed by England radiated from her eyes; it was evident that nothing would makeher budge from Nish until she had reported herself to her unknown chief.
"You'd better share my room," Sylvia said. She nearly blushed at her own impudence when Miss Potberry gratefully accepted the offer. However, she could no longer reproach herself for staying on in Nish without justification, for now it was impossible to go away in ordinary fashion.
"It seems funny that Captain Hazlewood shouldn't have left any written instructions for me," said Miss Potberry, when she had waited three days in Nish without any news except the rumored fall of Veles. "I'm not sure if I oughtn't to try and join him wherever he is."
"But he's at the front," Sylvia objected.
"I had instructions to report to him," said Miss Potberry, seriously. "I think I'm wasting time and drawing my salary for nothing here.Thatisn't patriotism. If he'd left something for me to type—but to wait here like this, doing nothing, seems almost wicked at such a time."
Two more days went by; Uskub had fallen; everybody gave up the idea of Anglo-French troops arriving to relieve Nish, and everybody began to talk about evacuation. About six o'clock of a stormy dusk, four days after the fall of Uskub, a Serbian soldier came to the hotel to ask Sylvia to come at once to a hospital. She wondered if something had happened to Michael, if somehow he had heard she was in Nish, and that he had sent for her. But when she reached the school-room that was serving as an improvised ward she found Hazlewood lying back upon a heap of straw that was called a bed.
"Done a damned stupid thing," he murmured. "Got hit, and they insisted on my being sent back to Nish. Think I'm rather bad. Why haven't you left?"
"The line is cut."
"I know. You ought to have been gone by now. You can take my horse. Every one will evacuate Nish. No chance. The Austrians have joined up with the Bulgarians.Bound to fall. I want you to take the keys of my safe and burn all my papers. Don't forget the cipher. Go and do it now and let me know it's done. Quick, it's worrying me. Nothing important, but it's worrying me."
Sylvia decided to say nothing to him about Miss Potberry's arrival in order not to worry him any more. Miss Potberry should have his horse: Nish might be empty as a tomb, but she herself should stay on for news of Michael Fane.
"What are you waiting for?" he asked, fretfully. "Damn it! I sha'n't last forever. That's Antitch you're staring at in the next bed."
Sylvia looked at the figure muffled in bandages. Apparently all the lower part of his face had been shot away, and she could see nothing but a pair of dark and troubled eyes wandering restlessly in the candle-light.
"We took our finals together," said Hazlewood.
Sylvia went away quickly; if she had paused to compare this meeting with the first meeting in the railway carriage not yet three weeks ago, she should have broken down.
When Miss Potberry heard of her chief's arrival in Nish she insisted upon going to see him.
"But, my dear woman, he may be dying. What's the good of bothering him now? I'll find out whatever he can tell me. You must get ready to leave Nish. Pack up your things."
"He may be glad to dictate something," Miss Potberry argued. "Please let me come. I am anxious to report to Captain Hazlewood. I'm sure if you had told him that I was here he would have wished to see me."
Sylvia did not feel that she could contest anything; with Miss Potberry's help she burned the few papers that remained in the safe, together with the cipher, which glowed and smoldered in the basin for what seemed an interminable time. When not a single record of Hazlewood's presence in Serbia remained, Sylvia and Miss Potberry went back to the hospital.
"You've burned everything?" he asked.
Sylvia nodded.
"Is that a nurse? I can't see in this infernal candle-light, and I'm chockful of morphia, which makes my eye-lids twitch."
"It's I, Captain Hazlewood—Miss Potberry. I had instructions from the War Office to report to you. I was unfortunately delayed upon my journey, and when I arrived from Salonika you had left. Is there anything you would like done?"
"Oh, my God!" he half groaned, half laughed. "I see that even my death-bed is going to be haunted by departmental imbecility. Who on earth sent you to Nish from Salonika?"
"Colonel Bullingham-Jones, to whom I reported in Salonika, knew nothing about me and advised me to come on here as soon as possible."
"Officious ass!" Hazlewood muttered. "Why didn't you go back when you found I wasn't here?" he added to his secretary.
"There was no way of getting back, Captain Hazlewood. I believe that the enemy has cut the line."
"I'm sorry you've had all this trouble for nothing," he said. "However, you and Miss Scarlett must settle between you how to get away. You'd better hang on to one of the Red Cross units."
"I'm afraid I may have to leave my typewriter behind," said Miss Potberry. "Have I your permission?"
"You have," he said, smiling with his eyes through the glaze of the drug.
"You couldn't give me a written authorization?" asked Miss Potberry. "Being government property—"
"No, I can only give you verbal instructions. Both my arms have been shot away, or as nearly shot away as doesn't make it possible to write."
"Oh, I beg your pardon. Then to whom should I report next?"
"I don't know. It might be St. Peter, with winter coming on and Albania to be crossed. No, no, don't you bother about reporting. Just follow the crowd and you'll be all right. Good-by, Miss Potberry. Sorry you've had such a long journey for nothing. Sorry about everything."
He beckoned Sylvia close to him with his eyes.
"For Christ's sake get rid of her or I shall have another hemorrhage."
Sylvia asked Miss Potberry to go back to the hotel and get packed. When the secretary had gone, she knelt by Hazlewood.
"Michael Fane arrived yet?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"I had something to give him."
The wounded man's face became more definitely lined with pain in the new worry of Fane's non-appearance.
"I want you to give him a letter. It's under my pillow. If by chance he doesn't come, perhaps you'd be good enough to post it when you get an opportunity. Miss Pauline Grey, Wychford Rectory, Oxfordshire."
Sylvia found the letter, which was still unaddressed.
"If Michael comes, I'd like him to take it to her himself when he gets to England. Thanks awfully. Give him my love. He was a great friend of mine. Yes, a great friend. Thanks awfully for helping me. I don't like to worry the poor devils here. They've got such a lot to worry them. Antitch died while you were burning my papers."
Sylvia looked at the muffled figure whose eyes no longer stared with troubled imperception.
"Of course I may last for two or three days," he went on. "And in that case I may see Michael. Mind you bring him if he comes in time. Great friend of mine, and I'd like him to explain something to somebody. By the way, don't take all my talk the other night too seriously. I often talk like that. I don't mean half I say. England's all right, really. Perhaps you'll look me up in the morningif I'm still here? Good-by. Thanks very much. I'm sorry I can't shake hands."
"Would you like a priest?" Sylvia asked.
"A priest?" he repeated, in a puzzled voice. "Oh no, thanks very much; priests have always bored me. I'm going to lie here and think. The annoying thing is, you know, that I've not the slightest desire to die. Some people say that you have at the end, but I feel as if I was missing a train. Perhaps I'll see you in the morning. So long."
But she did not see him in the morning, because he died in the night, and his bed was wanted immediately for another wounded man.
"What a dreadful thing war is!" sighed Miss Potberry. "I've lost two first cousins and four second cousins, and my brother is soon going to France."
The evacuation of Nish was desperately hastened by the news of the swift advance of the enemy on three sides. Sylvia, with the help of Colonel Michailovitch, managed to establish her rights over Hazlewood's horse, and Miss Potberry, fired with the urgency of reporting to somebody else and of explaining why she had abandoned her typewriter, was persuaded to attach herself to a particularly efflorescent branch of Dorothy Perkins that had wound itself round Harry Vereker to be trained into safety on the other side of the mountains. The last that Sylvia saw of her was when she drove out of Nish in a bullock-cart, still pink and prim, because the jolting had not yet really begun. The last Sylvia heard of Harry Vereker was his unruffled voice leaving instructions that if some white corduroy riding-breeches which he had been expecting by special courier from Athens should by chance arrive before the Bulgarians, they were to follow him. One had the impression of his messenger and his breeches as equally important entities marching arm in arm toward the Black Drin in obedience to his instructions. The next day came news of the fall of Kragujevatz, followingupon that of Pirot, and the fever of flight was aggravated to panic.
In the evening when Sylvia was watching the tormented square, listening to the abuse and blasphemy that was roused by the scarcity of transport, and trying to accept in spite of the disappointment the irremediable fact of Michael's failure to arrive, she suddenly caught sight of his sister pushing her way through the mob below. Her appearance alone like this could only mean that Michael had been killed; Sylvia cursed the flattering lamp of fortune, which had lighted her to Nish only to extinguish itself in this moment of confusion and horror. How pale that sister looked, how deeply ringed her eyes, how torn and splashed her dress: she must have heard the news of her brother and fled in despair before the memory. All Sylvia's late indifference to suffering in the actual presence of war was rekindled to a fury of resentment against the unreasonable forces that the world had let loose upon itself; even the envelope that Hazlewood had given to her now burned her heart with what it inclosed of eternally unquenched regret, of eternal unfulfilment. She hurried down-stairs and out into the mad, screaming, weeping mob and bathed herself in the stench of wet and filthy rags and in the miasma of sick, starved, and verminous bodies. A child was sucking the raw head of a hen; it happened that Sylvia knocked against it in her hurry, whereupon the child grabbed the morsel of blood and mud, snarling at her like a famished hound. Wherever she looked there were children searching on all-fours among the filth lodged in the cracks of the rough paving-stones; it was an existence where nothing counted except the ability to trample over one's neighbor to reach food or safety; and she herself was searching for Michael's sister in the fetid swarm, just as these children were shrieking and scratching for the cabbage-stalks they found among the dung. At last the two women met, and Sylvia caught hold of Mrs. Merivale's arm.
"What do you want? What do you want?" she cried. "Can I help you?"
The other turned and looked at Sylvia without recognizing her.
"You're Mrs. Merivale—Michael's sister," Sylvia went on. "Don't you remember me? Sylvia Scarlett. What has happened to him?"
"Can't we get out of this crowd?" Mrs. Merivale replied. "I'm trying to find an English officer—Captain Hazlewood."
Before Sylvia could tell her what had happened a cart drawn by a donkey covered with sores interposed between them; it was impossible for either woman to ask or answer anything in this abomination of humanity that oozed and writhed like a bunch of earthworms on a spade. Somehow they emerged from it all, and Sylvia brought her up-stairs to her room.
"Is Michael dead?" she asked.
"No, but he's practically dying. I've got him into a deserted house. He fell ill with typhus in Kragujevatz. The enemy was advancing terribly fast, and I got him here, Heaven knows how, in a bullock-cart—I've probably killed him in doing so; he certainly can't be moved again. I must find this friend of ours—Guy Hazlewood. He'll be able to tell me how long we can stay in Nish."
Sylvia broke the news of Hazlewood's death and was momentarily astonished to see how casually she took it. Then she remembered that she had already lost her husband, that her brother was dying, and that probably she had heard such tidings of many friends. This was a woman who was beholding the society in which she had lived falling to pieces round her every day; she was not, like herself, cloistered in vagrancy, one for whom life and death had waved at each other from every platform and every quay in partings that were not less final. There occurred to Sylvia the last utterance of Hazlewood about missing a train; he perhaps had found existence to be a destructivebusiness; but, even so, she could not think that he had loved it more charily.
"Everybody is dying," said Mrs. Merivale. "Those who survive this war will really have been granted a second life and will have to begin all over again like children—or lunatics," she added to herself.
"Could I come with you to see him?" Sylvia asked. "I had typhus myself last year in Petrograd and I could nurse him."
"I don't think it's any longer a matter for nursing," the other answered, hopelessly. "It's just leaving him alone and not worrying him any more. Oh, I wonder how long we can count on Nish not being attacked."
"Not very long, I'm afraid," said Sylvia. "Hardly any time at all, in fact."
They left the hotel with that sense of mechanical action which sometimes relieves a strain of accumulated emotion. Sylvia had the notion of finding a Serbian doctor whom she knew slightly, and was successful in bringing him along to the house where Michael was lying. It was dark when they arrived in the deserted side-street now strewn with the rubbish of many families' flight.
Michael was lying on a camp bed in the middle of the room. On the floor a Serbian peasant wearing a Red Cross brassard was squatting by his head and from time to time moistening his forehead with a damp sponge. In a corner two other Serbians armed with fantastic weapons sat cross-legged upon the floor, a winking candle and strewn playing-cards between them. Sylvia felt a sudden awe of looking at him directly, and she waited in the doorway while the doctor went forward with his sister to make his examination. After a short time the doctor turned away with a shrug; he and Mrs. Merivale rejoined Sylvia in the doorway and together they went in another room, where the doctor in sibilant French confirmed the impossibility of moving him if his life was to be saved. He added that the Bulgarians would be in Nish within a few daysand that the town would be empty long before that. Then, after giving a few conventional directions for the care of the patient, he saluted the two women and went away.
Sylvia and Mrs. Merivale looked at each other across a bare table on which was set a lantern covered with cobwebs; it was the only piece of furniture left, and Sylvia had a sense of dramatic unreality about their conversation: standing up in this dim room, she was conscious of a make-believe intensity that tore the emotions more completely into rags than any normal procedure or expression of passionate feeling. Yet it was only because she divined an approach to the climax of her life that she felt thus; it was so important that she should have her way in what she intended to do that it was impossible for her to avoid regarding Michael's sister not merely as a partner in the scene, but also as the audience on whose approval success ultimately depended. The bareness of the room was like a stage, and the standing up like this was like a scene; it seemed right to exaggerate the gestures to keep pace with the emotional will to achieve her desire.
"Mrs. Merivale," she began, "I beg you to let me stay behind in Nish and look after Michael so far as anything can be done—and of course it will be better for him that a woman should oversee the devotion of his orderly. Nothing will induce me to leave Nish. Nothing. You must understand that now. There is nothing to prevent me from staying here; you must take Captain Hazlewood's horse and go to-morrow."
"Leave my brother? Why, the idea is absurd. I tell you I almost dragged that cart through the mud from Kragujevatz. Besides, I'm a more or less qualified nurse. You're not."
"I'm qualified to nurse him through this fever because I know exactly what is wanted. If any new complication arose, you could do no more than I could do until the Bulgarian doctors arrived. If you stay here, you will be taken to Bulgaria."
"And why not?" demanded the other. "I'd much rather be taken prisoner with Michael than go riding off on my own and leave him here. No, no, the idea's impossible."
"You have your mother—his mother—to think of. You have your son," Sylvia argued.
"Neither mother nor son could be any excuse for leaving Michael at such a moment."
"Certainly not, if you could not find a substitute. But I shall stay here in any case, and you've no right to desert other obligations," Sylvia affirmed.
"You're talking to me in a ridiculous way. There is only one obligation, which is to him."
"Do you think you can do more for him than I can do?" Sylvia challenged. "You can do less. You have already had the fearful strain of getting him here from the north. You are worn out. You are not fit to nurse him as he must be nursed. You are not fit to deal with the Bulgarians when they come. You are already breaking down. Why, there is no force in your arguments! They are as tame and conventional as if you were inventing an excuse to break a social engagement."
"But by what right do you make this—this violent demand?" asked the other.
There suddenly came over Sylvia the futility of discussing the question in this fashion: this flickering room, echoing faintly to the shouts of the affrighted fugitives in the distance, lacked any atmosphere to hide the truth, for which in its bareness and misery it seemed to cry aloud. The question that his sister had put demanded an answer that would evade nothing in the explanation of her request; and if that answer should leave her soul stripped and desolate for the contemptuous regard of a woman who could not comprehend, why then thus was her destiny written and she should stand humiliated while the life that she had not been great enough to seize passed out of her reach.
"If my demand is violent, my need is violent," she cried. "Once, in my dressing-room—the only time we met—you told me that you half regretted your rejection of art; you envied me my happiness in success. Your envy seemed to me then the bitterest irony, for I could not find in art that which I demanded. I have never found it until now in the chance to save your brother's life. That is exaggerating, you'll say. Yet I do believe—and if you could know my history you would believe it, too—I do believe that my will can save him now not merely from death, but from the captivity that will follow. I know what it feels like to recover from this fever; and I know that he will not wish to see you and himself prisoners. He will fret himself ill again about your position. I am nothing to him. He will never know that we changed places deliberately. He will accept me as a companion in misfortune, and I will give all that love can give, love that feeds upon and inflames itself without demanding fuel except from the heart of the one who loves. You cannot refuse me now, my dear—so dear to me because you are his sister. You cannot refuse me when I ask you to let me stay because I love him."
"Do you love Michael?" asked the other, wonderingly.
"I love him, I love him, and one does not speak lightly of love at a moment like this. Do you remember when you asked me to come and stay with you in the country to meet him? It was eighteen months ago. Your letter arrived when I had just been jilted by the man I was going to marry in a desperate effort to persuade myself that domesticity was the cure for my discontent. My discontent was love for your brother. It has never been anything else since the moment we met, though I cried out 'Never' when I read your invitation. I abandoned everything. I have lived ever since as a mountebank, driven always by a single instinct that sustained me. That instinct was merely a superstition to travel south. Whenever I traveled on, I had always the sense of an object. Ihave found that object at last, and I know absolutely that fate stood at your elbow and dragged with you at those weary bullocks in the mud to bring Michael here in time. I know that fate chained me to my balcony at Nish, where for nearly a month I have been watching for your arrival. You are wise; you have suffered; you have loved: I beseech you that, just for the sake of your pride, you will not rob me of this moment to which my whole life has been the mad overture."
"What you say about my being a worry to him when he recovers consciousness is true," said the sister. "It's the only good argument you've brought forward. Ah, but I won't be so ungenerous. Stay then. To-night I will wait here and to-morrow you shall take my place."
The flickering bareness of the room flashed upon Sylvia with unimaginable glory; the dark night of her soul was become day.
"I think you can hear the joy in my heart," she whispered. "I can't say any more."
Sylvia fell upon her knees; bowing her head upon the table, she wept tears that seemed to gush like melodious fountains in a new world.
"You have made me believe that he will not die," the sister murmured. "I did not think that I should be able to believe that; but I do now, Sylvia."
An assurance that positively seemed to contain life came over both of them. Sylvia rose from her knees and abruptly they began to talk practically of what should be done that night and of what it would be wise to provide to-morrow. Presently Sylvia left the house, and slept in her hotel one of those rare sleeps whence waking is a descent upon airy plumes from heights where action and aspiration are fused in a ravishing, unutterable affirmative, of which, somehow, a remembered consciousness is accorded to the favored soul.
The next morning Michael's sister mounted her horse. The guns of the desperate army of Stephanovitch confrontingthe Bulgarian advance were now audible; their booming gave power of flight to the weakest that remained in Nish; and the coil of fugitives writhed over the muddy plain toward the mountains.
"I think he seemed a little better this morning," she said, wistfully.
"Don't be jealous of leaving me," Sylvia begged. "You shall never regret that impulse. Will you take this golden bag with you? I don't want it to adorn a Bulgarian; it was a token to me of love, and it has been a true token. At the end of your journey sell it and give the money to poor Serbians. Will you? And this letter for Captain Hazlewood. Please post it in England. Good-by, my dear, my dear."
Michael's sister took the bag and the letter. In the light of this gray morning her gray eyes were profound lakes of grief.
"I am envying you for the second time," she said. Then she waved her crop and rode quickly away. Sylvia watched her out of sight, thinking what it must have cost that proud sister to make this sacrifice. Her heart ached with a weight of unexpressed gratitude, and yet she could not keep it from beating with a fierce and triumphant gladness when she went up to where Michael was lying and found him alone. The orderly and servants had fled from the fear that clung to Nish like the clouds of this heavy day, and Sylvia, taking his hand, bathed his forehead with a tenderness that she half dreaded to use, so much did it seem a flame that would fan the fever in whose embrace he tossed unconscious of all but a world of shadows.
For a week she stayed beside him, sleeping sometimes with her head against his arm, listening to the somber colloquies of delirium, striving to keep the soul that often in the long trances seemed to flutter disconsolately away from the exhausted body. There was no longer any sound of people in Nish: there was nothing but the guns comingnearer and nearer every hour. Then suddenly the firing ceased: there was a clatter and a splash of cavalry upon the muddy paving-stones. The noise passed. Michael sat up and said:
"Listen!"
She thought he was away upon some adventure of delirium and told him not to worry, but to lie still. He was so emaciated that she asked herself if he could really be living: it was like brushing a cobweb from one's path to make him lie down again. A woman's scream, the thin scream of an old woman, shuddered upon the silence outside; but the noise did not disturb him, and he lay perfectly still with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. A few minutes later he again sat up in bed.
"Am I mad, or is it Sylvia Scarlett?" he asked.
"Yes, it's Sylvia. You're very ill. You must keep still."
"What an extraordinary thing!" he murmured, seriously, to himself. "I suppose I shall hear all about it to-morrow."
He lay back again without seeming to worry about the problem of her presence; nor did he ask where his sister was. Sylvia remembered her own divine content in the hospital when the fever left her, and she wanted him to lie as long as possible thus. Presently, however, he sat up again and said:
"Listen, Sylvia, I thought I wasn't wrong. Do you hear a kind of whisper in the air?"
She listened to please him, and then upon the silence she heard the sound. From a whisper it grew to a sigh, from a sigh it rose to a rustling of many leaves: it was the Bulgarian army marching into Nish, a procession of silent-footed devils, mysterious, remorseless, innumerable.
TO Sylvia's surprise and relief, the conquerors paid no attention to the house that night. Michael, after he had listened for a while to the dampered progress of that soft-shod army, fell back upon his pillow without comment and slept very tranquilly. Sylvia, who had now not the least doubt of his recovery, busied herself with choosing what she conceived to be absolute necessities for the immediate future and packing them into her valise. In the course of her preparations she put on one side for destruction or abandonment the contents of the golden shawl. Daguerreotypes and photographs; a rambling declaration of the circumstances in which her alleged grandfather had married that ghostly Adèle her grandmother, and a variety of letters that illustrated her mother's early life: all these might as well be burned. She lay down upon her bed of overcoats and skirts piled upon the floor and found the shawl a pleasant addition to the rubber hot-water-bottle she had been using as a pillow. Michael was still sleeping; it seemed wise to blow out the candle and, although it was scarcely seven o'clock, to try to sleep herself. It was the first time for a week that she had been able to feel the delicious and inviting freedom of untrammeled sleep. What did the occupation of a Bulgarian army signify in comparison with the assurance she felt of her patient's convalescence? The brazier glowed before her path toward a divine oblivion.
When Sylvia woke up and heard Michael's voice calling to her, it was six o'clock in the morning. She blew up the dull brazier to renewed warmth, set water to boil, and in a real exultation lighted four candles to celebrate with as much gaiety as possible the new atmosphere of joy and hope in the stark room.
"It's all very mysterious," Michael was saying. "It's all so delightfully mysterious that I can hardly bear to ask any questions lest I destroy the mystery. I've been lying awake, exquisitely and self-admiringly awake for an hour, trying to work out where I am, why I'm where I am, why you're where you are, and where Stella is."
Sylvia told him of the immediate occasion of his sister's departure, and when she had done so had a moment of dismay lest his affection or his pride should be hurt by her willingness to leave him in the care of one who was practically a stranger.
"How very kind of you!" he said. "My mother would have been distracted by having to look after her grandson in the whirlpool of war-work upon which she is engaged. So you had typhus, too? It's a rotten business, isn't it? Did you feel very weak after it?"
"Of course."
"And we're prisoners?"
"I suppose so."
The water did not seem to be getting on, and Sylvia picked up her family papers to throw into the brazier.
"Oh, I say, don't destroy without due consideration," Michael protested. "The war has developed in me a passionate conservatism for little things."
"I am destroying nothing of any importance," Sylvia said.
"Love-letters?" he murmured, with a smile.
She flushed angrily and discovered in herself a ridiculous readiness to prove his speculation beside the mark.
"If I ever had any love-letters I certainly never kept them," she avowed. "These are only musty records of a past the influence of which has already exhausted itself."
"But photographs?" he persisted. "Let me look. Old photographs always thrill me."
She showed him one or two of her mother.
"Odd," he commented. "She rather reminds me of my sister. Something about the way the eyes are set."
"You're worrying about her?" Sylvia put in, quickly.
"No, no. Of course I shall be glad to hear she's safely by the sea on the other side, but I'm not worrying about her to the extent of fancying a non-existent likeness. There really is one; and if it comes to that, you're not unlike her yourself."
"My father and my grandfather were both English," Sylvia said. "My mother was French and my grandmother was Polish. My grandfather's name was Cunningham."
"What?" Michael asked, sharply. "That's odd."
"Quite a distinguished person according to the old Frenchman whom the world regarded as my grandfather."
She handed him Bassompierre's rambling statement about the circumstances of her mother's birth, which he read and put down with an exclamation.
"Well, this is really extraordinary! Do you know that we're second cousins? This Charles Cunningham became the twelfth Lord Saxby. My father was the thirteenth and last earl. What a trick for fate to play upon us both! No wonder there's a likeness between you and Stella. How strange it makes that time at Mulberry Cottage seem. But you know, I always felt that underneath our open and violent hostility there was a radical sympathy quite inexplicable. This explains it."
Sylvia was not at all sure that she felt grateful toward the explanation; mere kinship had never stood for much in her life.
"You must try to sleep again now," she said, sternly.
"But you don't seem at all amazed at this coincidence," Michael protested. "You accept it as if it was a perfectly ordinary occurrence."
"I want you to sleep. Take this milk. We are sure to have a nerve-racking day with these Bulgarians."
"Sylvia, what's the matter?" he persisted. "Why should my discovery of our relationship annoy you?"
"It doesn't annoy me, but I want you to sleep. Doremember that you've only just returned to yourself and that you'll soon want all your strength."
"You've not lost your baffling quality in all these years," he said, and lay silent when he had drunk the warm milk she gave him and while she tidied the floor of the coats that served her for a bed. The letters and the photographs she threw into the brazier and drove them deep into the coke with a stick, looking round defiantly at Michael when they were ashes. He shook his head with a smile, but he did not say anything.
Sylvia was really glad when the sound of loud knocking upon the door down-stairs prevented any further discussion of the accident of their relationship; nevertheless, she found a pleasure in announcing to the Bulgarian officer her right to be found here with the sick Englishman, her cousin: it seemed to launch her once more upon the flow of ordinary existence, this kinship with one who without doubt belonged to the world actively at war. The interview with the Bulgarian officer took place in that stark and dusty room where she had argued with Stella for the right to stay behind with her brother. Now, in the light of early morning, it still preserved its scenic quality, and Sylvia was absurdly aware of her resemblance to the pleading heroine of a melodrama, when she begged this grimy, shaggy creature, whose slate-gray overcoat was marbled by time and weather, to let her patient stay here for the present, and, furthermore, to accord her facilities to procure for him whatever was necessary and obtainable. In the end the officer went away without giving a more decisive answer than was implied by the soldier he left behind. Sylvia did not think he could have understood much of her French, so little had she understood of his, and the presence of this soldier with fixed bayonet and squashed Mongolian countenance oppressed her. She wondered what opinion of them the officer had reached, and ached at the thought of how, perhaps, in a few minutes, she and Michael should be separated, intolerably separated forever.She made a sign to the guard for leave to go up-stairs again; but he forbade her with a gesture, and she stood leaning against the table, while he stared before him with an expression of such unutterable nothingness as by sheer nebulosity acquired a sinister and menacing force. He was as incomprehensible as a savage beast encountered in a forest, and the fancy that he had ever existed with his own little ambitions in a human society refused to state itself. Sylvia could make of him nothing but a symbol of the blind, mad forces that were in opposition throughout the old familiar world, the blindness and madness of which were fitly expressed by such an instrument.
Half an hour of strained indifference passed, and then the officer came back with another who spoke English. Perhaps the consciousness of speaking English well and fluently made the new-comer anxious to be pleasant; one felt that he would have regarded it as a slight upon his own proficiency to be rude or intransigent. Apart from his English there was nothing remarkable in his appearance or his personality. He went up-stairs and saw for himself Michael's condition, came down again with Sylvia, and promised her that, if she would observe the rules imposed upon the captured city, nothing within the extent of his influence should be done to imperil the sick man's convalescence. Then, after signing a number of forms that would enable her to move about in certain areas to obtain provisions and to call upon medical help, he asked her if she knew Sunbury-on-Thames. She replied in the negative, which seemed to disappoint him. Whereupon she asked him if he knew Maidenhead, and he brightened up again.
"I have had good days in the Thames," he said, and departed in a bright cloud of riverside memories.
The next fortnight passed in a seclusion that was very dear to Sylvia. The hours rolled along on the easy wheels of reminiscent conversations, and Michael was gradually made aware of all her history. Yet at the end of it, shetold herself that he was aware of nothing except the voyages of the body; of her soul's pilgrimage he was as ignorant as if they had never met. She reproached herself for this and wanted to begin over again the real history; but her own feelings toward him stood in the way of frankness, and she feared to betray herself by the emotion that any deliberate sincerity must have revealed. Yet, as she assured herself rather bitterly, he was so obviously blind to anything but the coincidence of their relationship that she might with impunity have stripped her soul bare. It was unreasonable for her to resent his showing himself more moved by the news of Hazlewood's death than by anything in her own history, because anything in her own history that might have moved him she had omitted, and his impression of her now must be what his impression of her had been nine years ago—that of a hard and cynical woman with a baffling capacity for practical kindliness. She had often before been dismayed by a sense of life slipping out of her reach, but she had never before been dismayed by the urgent escape of hours and minutes. She had never before saidruit horawith her will to snatch the opportunity palsied, as if she stood panting in the stifling impotence of a dream. Already he was able to walk about the room, and, like all those who are recovering from a serious illness, was performing little feats of agility with the objective self-absorption of a child.
"Do people—or rather," she corrected herself, quickly, "does existence seem something utterly different from what it was before you saw it fade out from your consciousness at Kragujevatz?"
"Well, the only person I've really seen is yourself," he answered. "And I can't help staring at you in some bewilderment, due less to fever than to the concatenations of fortune. What seems to me so amusing and odd is that, if you had known we were cousins, you couldn't have behaved in a more cousinly way than you did over Lily."
"When I found myself in that hospital at Petrograd,"Sylvia declared, "I felt like the Sleeping Beauty being waked by the magic kiss—" she broke off, blushing hotly and cursing inwardly her damned self-consciousness; and then blushed again because she had stopped to wonder if he had noticed her blush.
"I don't think anything that happened during this war to me personally," Michael said, "could ever make any impression now. The war itself always presents itself to me as a mighty fever, caught, if you will, by taking foolish risks or ignoring simple precautions, but ultimately and profoundly inevitable in the way that one feels all illness to be inevitable. Anything particular that happens to the individual must lose its significance in the change that he must suffer from the general calamity. I think perhaps that as a Catholic I am tempted to be less hopeful of men and more hopeful of God, but yet I firmly believe that I am more hopeful of men than the average—shall we call him humanitarian, who perceives in this war nothing but a crime against human brotherhood committed by a few ambitious knaves helped by a crowd of ambitious fools? I'm perfectly sure, for instance, that there is no one alive and no one dead that does not partake of the responsibility. However little it may be realized in the case of individuals, nothing will ever persuade me that one of the chief motive forces that maintain this state of destruction to which the world is being devoted is not a sense of guilt and a determination to expiate it. Mark you, I'm not trying to urge that God has judicially sentenced the world to war, dealing out horror to Belgium for the horror of the Congo, horror to Serbia for the horror of the royal assassination, horror to France, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace—I should be very sorry to implicate Almighty God in any conception based upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that God ever interfered with humanity was when He was incarnate among us, and the story of that seems to forbid us our attribution to Him of anythingin the nature of fretful castigation. The most presumptuous attitude in this war seems to me the German idea of God in apickelhaube, of Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a bloody-minded Eagle; but the Allies' notion of the Pope as a kind of diplomat with a license to excommunicate seems to me only less presumptuous."
"Then you think the war is in every human heart?" Sylvia asked.
"When I look at my own I'm positive it is."
"But do you think it was inevitable because it was salutary?"
"I think blood-letting is old-fashioned surgery: aren't you confusing the disease with the remedy? Surely no disease is salutary, and I think it's morally dangerous to confuse effect with cause. At the same time I'm not going to lay down positively that this war may not be extremely salutary. I think it will be, but I acquit God of any hand in its deliberate ordering. Free will must apply to nations. I don't believe that war which, while it brings out often the best of people, brings out much more often the worst is to be regarded as anything but a vile exhibition of human sin. The selflessness of those who have died is terribly stained by the selfishness of those who have let them die. Yet the younger generation, or such of it as survives, will have the compensation when it is all over of such amazing opportunities for living as were never known, and the older generation that made the war will die less lamented than any men that have ever died since the world began. And I believe that their purgatory will be the grayest and the longest of all the purgatories. But as soon as I have said that I regret my words, because I think it will be fatal for the younger generation to become precocious Pharisees; and so I reiterate that the war is in every human heart, and you're not to tempt me any more into making harsh judgments about any one."
"Not even the great Victorians?" said Sylvia.
"Well, that will be a difficult and very penitential pieceof self-denial, I admit. And it is hard not to hope that Carlyle is in hell. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go to hell myself if I do, where his Teutonic borborygmi would be an added woe, gigantic genius though he was. But don't let's joke about hell. It's—infernally credible since August, 1914. What were we talking about before we began to talk about the war? Oh, I remember—the new world that one gets up to face after a bad illness."
"Perhaps my experience was peculiar," Sylvia said.
But what did it matter how he regarded the world, she thought, unless he regarded her? Already the topic was exhausted; he was tired by his vehemence; once more the ruthless and precipitate hour had gone by.
During this period of seclusion Sylvia often had to encounter in its various capacities the army of occupation, by which generally she was treated with consideration and even with positive kindness. Nish had been so completely evacuated that, after the medley which had thronged the streets and squares, it now seemed strangely empty. The uniformity of the Bulgarian characteristics added to the impression of violent change; there was never a moment in which one could delude oneself with the continuation of normal existence. At the end of the fortnight the English-speaking officer came to make a visit of inspection in order to give his advice at headquarters about the future of the prisoners. Michael was still very weak, and looked a skeleton, so much so, indeed, that the officer went off and fetched a squat little doctor to help his deliberation; the latter recommended another week, and the prisoners were once more left to themselves. Sylvia was half sorry for such considerate action; the company of Michael which had seemed to promise so much and had in fact yielded so little was beginning to fret her with the ultimate futility of such an association. She resented the emotion she had given to it in the prospect of a more definitely empty future that was now opening before her,and she gave way to the reaction against her exaggerated devotion by criticizing herself severely. The supervention of such an attitude made irksome what had been so dear a seclusion, and, going beyond self-criticism, she began to tell herself that Michael was cold, inhuman, and remote; that she felt ill at ease with him and unable to talk, and that the sooner their separation came about the better. Perhaps she should be released, in which case she should make her way back to England and become a nurse.
At the end of the third week Sylvia desperately tried to arrest the precipitate hour.
"I think I suffer from a too rapid digestion," she announced.
He looked at her with a question in his eyes.
"You were talking to me the other day," she went on, "about your contemplative experiences, and you were saying how entirely your purely intellectual and spiritual progress conformed to the well-trodden mystical way. You added, of course, that you did not wish to suggest any comparison with the path of greater men, but, allowing for conventional self-depreciation, you left me to suppose that you were content with your achievement. At the moment war broke out you felt that you were ripe for action, and instead of becoming a priest after those nine years of contemplative preparation, you joined a hospital unit for Serbia. You feel quite secure about the war; you accept your fever, your possible internment for years in Bulgaria, and indeed anything that affects you personally without the least regret. In fact, you're what an American might call in tune with the infinite. I'm not! And it's all a matter of digestion."
"My illness has clouded my brain," Michael murmured. "I'm a long way from understanding what you're driving at."
"Well, keep quiet and listen to my problems. We're on the verge of separation, but you're still my patient and you owe me your attention."
"I owe you more than that," he put in.
"How feeble," she scoffed. "You might have spared me such a pretty-pretty sentence."
"I surrender unconditionally," he protested. "Your fierceness is superfluous."
"I suppose you've often labeled humanity in bulk? I mean, for instance, you must have often said and certainly thought that all men are either knaves or fools."
"I must have thought so at some time or another," Michael agreed.
"Well, I've got a new division. I think that all men have either normal digestions, slow digestions, rapid digestions, or no digestions at all. Extend the physical fact into a metaphor and apply it to the human mind."
"Dear Sylvia, I feel as if I were being poulticed. How admirably you maintain the nursing manner. I've made the application. What do I do now?"
"Listen without interrupting, or I shall lose the thread of my argument. I suppose that you'll admit that the optimists outnumber the pessimists? Obviously they must, or the world would come to an end. Very well, then, we'll say that the pessimists are the people with no digestions at all: on top of them will be the people with slow digestions, the great unthinking herd that is optimistic because the optimists shout most loudly. The people with good normal digestions are of course the shouting optimists. Finally come the people whose digestions are too rapid. I belong to that class."
"Are they optimists?"
"They're optimists until they've finished digesting, but between meals they're outrageously pessimistic. The only way to illustrate my theory is to talk about myself. Imagine you're a lady palmist and prepare for a debauch of egotism from one of your clients. All through my life, Michael, I've been a martyr to quick digestion. Your friend Guy Hazlewood suffered from that complaint, judging by the way he talked about the war. I canimagine that his life has been made of brief, exquisite illusions followed by long vacuums. Am I right?"
Michael nodded.
"Cassandra, to take a more remote instance, suffered from rapid digestion—in fact, all prophets have the malady. Isn't it physiologically true to say that the unborn child performs in its mother's womb the drama of man's evolution? I'm sure it's equally true that the life of the individual after birth and until death is a microcosm of man's later history, or rather I ought to say that it might be, for only exceptional individuals reproduce the history of humanity up to contemporary development. A genius—a great creative genius—seems to me a man whose active absorption can keep pace with the rapidity of his digestion. How often do we hear of people who were in advance of their time! This figure of speech is literally true, but only great creative geniuses have the consolation of projecting themselves beyond their ambient in time. There remain a number of sterile geniuses, whom Nature, with her usual prodigality, has put on the market in reserve, but for whom later on she finds she has no use on account of the economy that always succeeds extravagance. These sterile geniuses are left to fend for themselves and somehow to extract from a hostile and suspicious environment food to maintain them during the long, dreary emptiness that succeeds their too optimistic absorption. Do you agree with me?"
"At one end of the pole you would put Shakespeare, at the other the Jubilee Juggins?" Michael suggested.
"That's it," she agreed. "Although a less conspicuous wastrel would serve for the other end."
"And I suppose if you're searching for the eternal rhythm of the universe, you'd have to apply to nations the same classification as to individuals?" he went on.
"Of course."
"So that England would have a good normal digestion and Ireland a too rapid digestion? Or better, let us saythat all Teutons eat heartily and digest slowly, and that all Kelts are too rapid. But come back to yourself."
Sylvia paused for a moment, and then continued, with swift gestures of self-agreement:
"I certainly ascribe every mistake in my own life to a rapid digestion. Why, I've even digested this war that, if we think on a large scale, was evidently designed to stir up the sluggish liver of a world. I'm sick to death of the damned war already, and it hasn't begun yet really. And to come down to my own little particular woes, I've labored toward religion, digested it with horrible rapidity, and see nothing in it now but a half-truth for myself. In art the same, in human associations the same, in everything the same. Ah, don't let's talk any more about anything."
In the silence that followed she thought to herself about the inspiration of her late theories; and looking at Michael, pale and hollow-eyed in the grim November dusk, she railed at herself because with all her will to make use of the quality she had attributed to herself she could not shake off this love that was growing every day.
"Why in God's name," she almost groaned aloud, "can't it go the way of everything else? But it won't. It won't. It never will. And I shall never be happy again."
A rainy nightfall symbolized for her the darkness of the future, and when, in the middle of their evening meal, while they were hacking at a tin of sardines, a message came from headquarters that to-morrow they must be ready to leave Nish, she was glad. However, the sympathy of the English-speaking officer had exercised itself so much on behalf of the two prisoners that the separation which Sylvia had regarded as immediate was likely to be postponed for some time. The officer explained that it was inconvenient for them to remain any longer in Nish, but that arrangements had been made by which they were to be moved to Sofia and therefore that Michael'sconvalescence would be safe against any premature strain. They would realize that Bulgaria was not unmindful of the many links, now unfortunately broken, which had formerly bound her to England, and they would admit in the face of their courteous treatment how far advanced his country was upon the road of civilization.
"Splendid," Michael exclaimed. "So we sha'n't be separated yet for a while and we shall be able to prosecute our philosophical discoveries. The riddle of life finally solved in 1915 by two prisoners of the Bulgarian army! It would almost make the war worth while. Sylvia, I'm so excited at our journey."
"You're tired of being cooped up here," she said, sharply. And then to mask whatever emotion might have escaped, she added: "I'm certainly sick to death of it myself."
"I know," he agreed, "it must have been a great bore for you. The invalid is always blissfully unconscious of time, and forgets that the pleasant little services which encourage him to go on being ill are not natural events like sunrise and sunset. You do well to keep me up to the mark; I'm not really forgetful."
"You seem to have forgotten that we may have months, even years of imprisonment in Bulgaria," Sylvia said.
He looked so frail in his khaki overcoat that she was seized with penitence for the harsh thoughts of him she had indulged, and with a fondling gesture tried to atone.
"You really feel that you can make this journey? If you don't, I'll go out and rout out our officer and beg him for another week."
Michael shook his head.
"I'm rather a fraud. Really, you know, I feel perfectly well. Quite excited about this journey, as I told you."
She was chilled by his so impersonally cordial manner and looked at him regretfully.
"Every day he gets farther away," she thought. "In nine years he has been doing nothing but place layer afterlayer over his sensitiveness. He's a kind of mental coral island. I know that there must still exist a capacity for suffering, but he'll never again let me see it. He wants to convince me of his eternal serenity."
She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in embarrassment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness.
"It was just the reverse of embarrassment, really," he said. "But I don't want to spoil things."
"By doing what?" she demanded.
"Well, if I told you—" He stopped abruptly.
"I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you've begun you must finish."
"Nothing will induce me to. I'll say what I thought of saying before we separate. I promise that."
"Perhaps we never shall separate."
"Then I shall have no need to finish my sentence."
Sylvia lay awake for a long time that last night in Nish, wondering, with supreme futility as she continually reminded herself, what Michael could have nearly said. Somewhere about two o'clock she decided that he had been going to suggest adopting her into his family.
"Damned fool," she muttered, pulling and shaking her improvised bed as if it were a naughty child. "Nevertheless, he had the wit to understand how much it would annoy me. It shows the lagoon is not quite encircled yet."
The soldiers who arrived to escort them to the railway station were like grotesques of hotel porters; they were so ready to help with the luggage that it seemed absurd for their movements to be hampered by rifles with fixed bayonets. The English-speaking officer accompanied them to the station and expressed his regrets that he could not travel to Sofia; he had no doubt that later on he should see them again, and, in any case, when the war was over he hoped to revisit England. Sylvia suddenly remembered her big trunk, which she had left in the consigne when she first reached Nish nearly two monthsago. The English-speaking officer shrugged his shoulders at her proposal to take it with her to Sofia.
"The station was looted by the Serbs before we arrived," he explained. "They are a barbarous nation, many years behind us in civilization. We never plunder. And of course you understand that Nish is really Bulgarian? That makes us particularly gentle here. You heard, perhaps, that when the Entente Legations left we gave them a champagne lunch for the farewell at Dedeagatch? We are far in front of the Germans, who are a very strong but primitive nation. They are not much liked in Bulgaria: we prefer the English. But, alas, poor England!" he sighed.
"Why poor?" Sylvia demanded, indignantly.
He smiled compassionately for answer, and soon afterward, in a first-class compartment to themselves, Michael and she left Nish.
"Really," Michael observed, "when the conditions are favorable, traveling as a prisoner of war is the most luxurious traveling of all. I've never experienced the servility of a private courier, but it's wonderful to feel that other people are under an obligation to look after you. However, at present we have the advantages of being new toys. Our friend from Sunbury-on-Thames may be as compassionate as he likes about England, but there's no doubt it confers on the possessor a quite peculiar thrill to own English people—even two such non-combatant creatures as ourselves. It's typical of the Germans' newness to European society that they should have thought the right way to treat English prisoners was to spit at them. I remember once seeing a grandee of Spain who'd been hired as secretary by a Barcelona Jew, and by Jove! he wasn't allowed to forget it. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, have a superficial air of breeding, which they've either copied from the Turks or inherited from the Chinese. Didn't you love the touch about the champagne lunch at Dedeagatch? There's aluxurious hospitality about that which you won't find outside theArabian Nightsor Chicago. Really the English nation should give thanks every Sunday, murmuring with all eyes on the east window and Germany: 'There, but for the grace of God blowing in the west wind, goes John Bull.' Yet I wonder if the hearts would be humble enough to keep the Pharisee out of the thanksgiving."
The train went slowly, with frequent stoppages, often in wild country far from any railway station, where in such surroundings its existence seemed utterly improbable. Occasionally small bands ofcomitadjiswould ride up and menace theatrically the dejected Serbian prisoners who were being moved into Bulgaria. There was a cold wind, and snow was lying thinly on the hills.
In the rapid dusk Michael fell asleep; soon after, the train seemed to have stopped for the night. Sylvia did not wake him up, but sat for two hours by the light of one candle stuck upon her valise and pored upon the moonless night that pressed against the window-panes of the compartment with scarcely endurable desolation. There was no sound of those murmurous voices that make mysterious even suburban tunnels when trains wait in them on foggy nights. The windows were screwed up; the door into the corridor was locked; in the darkness and silence Sylvia felt for the first time in all its force the meaning of imprisonment. Suddenly a flaring torch carried swiftly along the permanent way threw shadowy grotesques upon the ceiling of the compartment, and Michael, waking up with a start, asked their whereabouts.
"Somewhere near Zaribrod, as far as I can make out, but it's impossible to tell for certain. I can't think what they're doing. We've been here for two hours without moving, and I can't hear a sound except the wind. It was somebody's carrying a torch past the window that woke you up."
They speculated idly for a while on the cause of the delay, and then gradually under the depression of thesilence their voices died away into occasional sighs of impatience.
"What about eating?" Sylvia suggested at last. "I'm not hungry, but it will give us something to do."
So they struggled with tinned foods, glad of the life that the fussy movement gave to the compartment.
"One feels that moments such as these should be devoted to the most intimate confidences," Michael said, when they had finished their dinner and were once more enmeshed by the silence.
"There's a sort of portentousness about them, you mean?"
"Yes, but as a matter of fact, one can't even talk about commonplace things, because one is all the time fidgeting with the silence."
"I know," Sylvia agreed. "One gets a hint of madness in the way one's personality seems to shrink to nothing. I suppose there really is somebody left alive in the world? I'm beginning to feel as if it were just you and I against the universe."
"Death must come like that sometimes," he murmured.
"Like what?"
"Like that thick darkness outside and oneself against the universe."
"I'd give anything for a guitar," Sylvia exclaimed.
"What would you play first?" he inquired, gravely.
She sang gently: