Sylvia & Michael Part 34

"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 pa.s.sionate 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 Ba.s.sompierre's rambling statement about the circ.u.mstances 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. Do remember 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 c.o.ke 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, s.h.a.ggy 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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, she told 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 a.s.sured 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 said _ruit hora_ with her will to s.n.a.t.c.h 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 d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sa.s.sination, horror to France, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace--I should be very sorry to implicate Almighty G.o.d in any conception based upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that G.o.d 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 anything in the nature of fretful castigation. The most presumptuous att.i.tude in this war seems to me the German idea of G.o.d in a _pickelhaube_, of Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a b.l.o.o.d.y-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 G.o.d 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 piece of self-denial, I admit. And it is hard not to hope that Carlyle is in h.e.l.l. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go to h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l.

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 a.s.sociation. 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 att.i.tude 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."