Sylvia & Michael Part 31

"You've deprived me of any capacity for generalization. I think perhaps you may have got things out of focus. I know it's a plat.i.tude, but isn't one always inevitably out of focus nowadays? When I was still at a distance from the war the whole perspective was blurred to my vision by the intrusion of individual humiliations and sufferings. Now I'm nearer to it I feel that my vision is equally faulty from an indifference to them," Sylvia said, earnestly.

Then she told Hazlewood the story of Queenie and the pa.s.sport, and asked for his opinion.

"Well, of course, there's an instance to hand of sterile professionalism. Naturally, had I been the official in Bucharest, I should have given the girl her pa.s.sport. At such a moment I should have been too much moved by her desire of England to have done otherwise.

Moreover, if her desire of England was not mere l.u.s.t, I should have been right to do so."

Sylvia finished her story by telling him of Queenie's escape with the juggler after the probable theft of Maud's pa.s.sport.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "I'll bet they've gone to Salonika. We'll send a telegram to our people there and warn them to keep a lookout."

"What a paradox human sympathy is," Sylvia murmured. "Ever since I got to Nish it's been on my conscience that I didn't tell you about this girl before, and yet in Bucharest the notion of doing anything like that was positively disgusting to my sense of decency. And look at you! A moment ago you were abusing the official in Bucharest for his red tape, and now your eyes are flashing with the prospect of hunting her down."

"Not even Herac.l.i.tus divined quite the rapidity with which everything dissolves in flux," said Hazlewood. "That's another thing that will be brought home to people before the war's over--the intensity and rapidity of change, of course considerably strengthened and accelerated by the impulse that war has given to pure destruction. You can see it even in broad ideas. We began by fighting for a sc.r.a.p of paper; we shall go on fighting for different ideas until we realize we are fighting for our existence. Then suddenly we shall think we are fighting about nothing, and the war will be over."

Hazlewood sat silent; most of the diners had finished and left the room, which accentuated his silence with an answering stillness.

"Well, what is to be your reward for listening?" he asked at length.

"To stay on in Nish for the present," she answered, firmly.

"No, no," he objected, with a sudden fretfulness that was the more conspicuous after his late exuberance. "No, no, we don't want more women than are necessary. You'd better get down to Salonika on Monday. Look here, I must send a telegram about that friend of yours. Come round to my office and give me the details."

Sylvia accompanied him in a state of considerable depression; she could not bear the idea of revealing so much of herself as to ask him directly to give her an excuse to remain in Nish because she wanted to see Michael; it was seeming impossible to introduce the personal element in this war-cursed town, and particularly now when she was quenching so utterly the personal element by thus allying herself with Hazlewood against Queenie. She waited while he deciphered a short telegram which had arrived during his absence and while he occupied himself with writing another.

"How will this do for their description?" he read:

"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 pa.s.sport 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. The war has not cured human nature of a pa.s.sion for bric-a-brac, and as a catalogued article _de virtu_--or should I say _de 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 commanding _embusques_; 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.

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 mult.i.tude from rotting in death where they lay was the a.s.surance 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 G.o.d, 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 covered with 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 make her 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. _That_ isn'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 d.a.m.ned 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. "d.a.m.n it! I sha'n't last forever. That's Ant.i.tch you're staring at in the next bed."

Sylvia looked at the figure m.u.f.fled 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.