Sylvia & Michael Part 29

"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, pa.s.sionately. "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 of bugs, 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 Ant.i.tch. 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 d.i.c.kens 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 her Remain 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.s that I am," she thought. "What is Michael to me and what am I to Michael? Not so easily is 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 a.s.suage 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.surance 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 trespa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstances out of attraction? Being in love is merely the best way of ill.u.s.trating 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-three experience 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 G.o.d?" she demanded, pa.s.sionately.

Sylvia did not dine with Hazlewood or Ant.i.tch 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 acc.u.mulation 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sured 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 d.a.m.n 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 new military 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."