Michael Part 41

She had placed a volume of Schubert on the music-stand, and opening it at random he found "Du Bist die Ruhe." She sang the first verse, but in the middle of the second she stopped.

"I can't," she said. "It's no use."

He turned round to her.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," he said. "But you know that."

She moved away from him, and walked down to the empty fireplace.

"I can't keep silence," she said, "though I know we settled not to talk of those things when necessarily we cannot feel absolutely at one. But, just before you came in, I was reading the evening paper. Michael, how can the English be so wicked as to print, and I suppose to believe, those awful things I find there? You told me you had glanced at it.

Well, did you glance at the lies they tell about German atrocities?"

"Yes, I saw them," said Michael. "But it's no use talking about them."

"But aren't you indignant?" she said. "Doesn't your blood boil to read of such infamous falsehoods? You don't know Germans, but I do, and it is impossible that such things can have happened."

Michael felt profoundly uncomfortable. Some of these stories which Sylvia called lies were vouched for, apparently, by respectable testimony.

"Why talk about them?" he said. "I'm sure we were wise when we settled not to."

She shook her head.

"Well, I can't live up to that wisdom," she said. "When I think of this war day and night and night and day, how can I prevent talking to you about it? And those lies! Germans couldn't do such things. It's a campaign of hate against us, set up by the English Press."

"I daresay the German Press is no better," said Michael.

"If that is so, I should be just as indignant about the German Press,"

said she. "But it is only your guess that it is so."

Suddenly she stopped, and came a couple of steps nearer him.

"Michael, it isn't possible that you believe those things of us?" she said.

He got up.

"Ah, do leave it alone, Sylvia," he said. "I know no more of the truth or falsity of it than you. I have seen just what you have seen in the papers."

"You don't feel the impossibility of it, then?" she asked.

"No, I don't. There seems to have been sworn testimony. War is a cruel thing; I hate it as much as you. When men are maddened with war, you can't tell what they would do. They are not the Germans you know, nor the Germans I know, who did such things--not the people I saw when I was with Hermann in Baireuth and Munich a year ago. They are no more the same than a drunken man is the same as that man when he is sober. They are two different people; drink has made them different. And war has done the same for Germany."

He held out his hand to her. She moved a step back from him.

"Then you think, I suppose, that Hermann may be concerned in those atrocities," she said.

Michael looked at her in amazement.

"You are talking sheer nonsense, Sylvia," he said.

"Not at all. It is a logical inference, just an application of the principle you have stated."

Michael's instinct was just to take her in his arms and make the final appeal, saying, "We love each other, that's all," but his reason prevented him. Sylvia had said a monstrous thing in cold blood, when she suggested that he thought Hermann might be concerned in these deeds, and in cold blood, not by appealing to her emotions, must she withdraw that.

"I'm not going to argue about it," he said. "I want you to tell me at once that I am right, that it was sheer nonsense, to put no other name to it, when you suggested that I thought that of Hermann."

"Oh, pray put another name to it," she said.

"Very well. It was a wanton falsehood," said Michael, "and you know it."

Truly this h.e.l.lish nightmare of war and hate which had arisen brought with it a brood not less terrible. A day ago, an hour ago he would have merely laughed at the possibility of such a situation between Sylvia and himself. Yet here it was: they were in the middle of it now.

She looked up at him flashing with indignation, and a retort as stinging as his rose to her lips. And then quite suddenly, all her anger went from her, as her, heart told her, in a voice that would not be silenced, the complete justice of what he had said, and the appeal that Michael refrained from making was made by her to herself. Remorse held her on its spikes for her abominable suggestion, and with it came a sense of utter desolation and misery, of hatred for herself in having thus quietly and deliberately said what she had said. She could not account for it, nor excuse herself on the plea that she had spoken in pa.s.sion, for she had spoken, as he felt, in cold blood. Hence came the misery in the knowledge that she must have wounded Michael intolerably.

Her lips so quivered that when she first tried to speak no words would come. That she was truly ashamed brought no relief, no ease to her surrender, for she knew that it was her real self who had spoken thus incredibly. But she could at least disown that part of her.

"I beg your pardon, Michael," she said. "I was atrocious. Will you forgive me? Because I am so miserable."

He had nothing but love for her, love and its kinsman pity.

"Oh, my dear, fancy you asking that!" he said.

Just for the moment of their reconciliation, it seemed to both that they came closer to each other than they had ever been before, and the chance of the need of any such another reconciliation was impossible to the verge of laughableness, so that before five minutes were past he could make the smile break through her tears at the absurdity of the moment that now seemed quite unreal. Yet that which was at the root of their temporary antagonism was not removed by the reconciliation; at most they had succeeded in cutting off the poisonous shoot that had suddenly sprouted from it. The truth of this in the days that followed was horribly demonstrated.

It was not that they ever again came to the spoken bitterness of words, for the sharpness of them, once experienced, was shunned by each of them, but times without number they had to sheer off, and not approach the ground where these poisoned tendrils trailed. And in that sense of having to take care, to be watchful lest a chance word should bring the peril close to them, the atmosphere of complete ease and confidence, in which alone love can flourish, was tainted. Love was there, but its flowers could not expand, it could not grow in the midst of this bitter air. And what made the situation more and increasingly difficult was the fact that, next to their love for each other, the emotion that most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each knew that the other had seen them, and yet neither could mention them.

For while Sylvia could not believe them, Michael could not help doing so, and thus there was no common ground on which they could speak of them. Often Mrs. Falbe, in whose blood, it would seem, no sense of race beat at all, would add to the embarra.s.sment by childlike comments, saying at one time in reference to such things that she made a point of not believing all she saw in the newspapers, or at another ejaculating, "Well, the Germans do seem to have behaved very cruelly again!" But no emotion appeared to colour these speeches, while all the emotion of the world surged and bubbled behind the silence of the other two.

Then followed the darkest days that England perhaps had ever known, when the German armies, having overcome the resistance of Belgium, suddenly swept forward again across France, pushing before them like the jetsam and flotsam on the rim of the advancing tide the allied armies. Often in these appalling weeks, Michael would hesitate as to whether he should go to see Sylvia or not, so unbearable seemed the fact that she did not and could not feel or understand what England was going through. So far from blaming her for it, he knew that it could not be otherwise, for her blood called to her, even as his to him, while somewhere in the onrush of those advancing and devouring waves was her brother, with whom, so it had often seemed to him, she was one soul. Thus, while in that his whole sympathy and whole comprehension of her love was with him, there was as well all that deep, silent English patriotism of which till now he had scarcely been conscious, praying with mute entreaty that disaster and destruction and defeat might overwhelm those advancing hordes. Once, when the anxiety and peril were at their height, he made up his mind not to see her that day, and spent the evening by himself. But later, when he was actually on his way to bed, he knew he could not keep away from her, and though it was already midnight, he drove down to Chelsea, and found her sitting up, waiting for the chance of his coming.

For a moment, as she greeted him and he kissed her silently, they escaped from the encompa.s.sing horror.

"Ah, you have come," she said. "I thought perhaps you might. I have wanted you dreadfully."

The roar of artillery, the internecine strife were still. Just for a few seconds there was nothing in the world for him but her, nor for her anything but him.

"I couldn't go to bed without just seeing you," he said. "I won't keep you up."

They stood with hands clasped.

"But if you hadn't come, Michael," she said, "I should have understood."

And then the roar and the horror began again. Her words were the simplest, the most directly spoken to him, yet could not but evoke the spectres that for the moment had vanished. She had meant to let her love for him speak; it had spoken, and instantly through the momentary sunlight of it, there loomed the fierce and enormous shadow. It could not be banished from their most secret hearts; even when the doors were shut and they were alone together thus, it made its entrance, ghost-like, terrible, and all love's bolts and bars could not keep it out. Here was the tragedy of it, that they could not stand embraced with clasped hands and look at it together and so rob it of its terrors, for, at the sight of it, their hands were loosened from each other's, and in its presence they were forced to stand apart. In his heart, as surely as he knew her love, Michael knew that this great shadow under which England lay was shot with sunlight for Sylvia, that the anxiety, the awful suspense that made his fingers cold as he opened the daily papers, brought into it to her an echo of victorious music that beat to the tramp of advancing feet that marched ever forward leaving the glittering Rhine leagues upon leagues in their rear. The Bavarian corps in which Hermann served was known to be somewhere on the Western front, for the Emperor had addressed them ten days before on their departure from Munich, and Sylvia and Michael were both aware of that. But they who loved Hermann best could not speak of it to each other, and the knowledge of it had to be hidden in silence, as if it had been some guilty secret in which they were the terrified accomplices, instead of its being a bond of love which bound them both to Hermann.

In addition to the national anxiety, there was the suspense of those whose sons and husbands and fathers were in the fighting line. Columns of casualty lists were published, and each name appearing there was a sword that pierced a home. One such list, published early in September, was seen by Michael as he drove down on Sunday morning to spend the rest of the day with Sylvia, and the first name that he read there was that of Francis. For a moment, as he remembered afterwards, the print had danced before his eyes, as if seen through the quiver of hot air. Then it settled down and he saw it clearly.

He turned and drove back to his rooms in Half Moon Street, feeling that strange craving for loneliness that shuns any companionship. He must, for a little, sit alone with the fact, face it, adjust himself to it.

Till that moment when the dancing print grew still again he had not, in all the anxiety and suspense of those days, thought of Francis's death as a possibility even. He had heard from him only two mornings before, in a letter thoroughly characteristic that saw, as Francis always saw, the pleasant and agreeable side of things. Washing, he had announced, was a delusion; after a week without it you began to wonder why you had ever made a habit of it. . . . They had had a lot of marching, always in the wrong direction, but everyone knew that would soon be over. . . .

Wasn't London very beastly in August? . . . Would Michael see if he could get some proper cigarettes out to him? Here there was nothing but little black French affairs (and not many of them) which tied a knot in the throat of the smoker. . . . And now Francis, with all his gaiety and his affection, and his light pleasant dealings with life, lay dead somewhere on the sunny plains of France, killed in action by sh.e.l.l or bullet in the midst of his youth and strength and joy in life, to gratify the d.a.m.ned dreams of the man who had been the honoured guest at Ashbridge, and those who had advised and flattered and at the end perhaps just used him as their dupe. To their insensate greed and swollen-headed l.u.s.t for world-power was this hecatomb of sweet and pleasant lives offered, and in their onward course through the vines and corn of France they waded through the blood of the slain whose only crime was that they had dared to oppose the will of Germany, as voiced by the War Lord. And as milestones along the way they had come were set the records of their infamy, in rapine and ruthless slaughter of the innocent. Just at first, as he sat alone in his room, Michael but contemplated images that seemed to form in his mind without his volition, and, emotion-numb from the shock, they seemed external to him. Sometimes he had a vision of Francis lying without mark or wound or violence on him in some vineyard on the hill-side, with face as quiet as in sleep turned towards a moonlit sky. Then came another picture, and Francis was walking across the terrace at Ashbridge with his gun over his shoulder, towards Lord Ashbridge and the Emperor, who stood together, just as Michael had seen the three of them when they came in from the shooting-party. As Francis came near, the Emperor put a cartridge into his gun and shot him. . . . Yes, that was it: that was what had happened. The marvellous peacemaker of Europe, the fire-engine who, as Hermann had said, was ready to put out all conflagrations, the fatuous mountebank who pretended to be a friend to England, who conducted his own balderdash which he called music, had changed his role and shown his black heart and was out to kill.