Sylvia & Michael Part 37

"Give my parole to murderers and torturers?" shouted Michael. "Certainly not, and I never will."

"My cousin has only just recovered from typhus," Sylvia reminded Rakoff.

"The slaughter has upset him."

In her anxiety to take advantage of the meeting she had cast aside her own horror and forgotten her own inclination to be hysterical.

"He must understand that in the Balkans we do not regard violence as you do in Europe. He should remember that the Serbians would do the same and worse to Bulgarians."

Rakoff spoke in a tone of injured sensibility, which would have been comic to Sylvia without the smell of burned flesh upon the wind, and without the foul blood-stains upon her own skirt.

"Quite so. _a la guerre comme a la guerre_," she agreed. "What will you do for us?"

"I'm really anxious to return your kindness at Nish," Rakoff said, gravely. "If you come with me and my men, we shall be riding southward, and you could perhaps find an opportunity to get over the Greek frontier. The officer commanding this train deserves to be punished for getting drunk. I'm not drunk, though I captured a French outpost a week ago and have some reason to celebrate my success. It was I who cut the line at Vrania. _Alors, c'est entendu? Vous venez avec moi?_"

"_Vous etes trop gentl, monsieur._"

"_Ren du tout. Plaisir! Plaisir!_ Go back to your carriage now, and I'll send two of my men presently to show you the way out. What's that?

The door is locked on the outside? Come with me, then."

They walked back along the train, and entered their compartment from the other side, on which the door had been broken in.

"You can't bring much luggage. Wrap up well. _Il fait tres-froid._ Is your cousin strong enough to ride?"

At this point Rakoff stumbled over the severed head on the floor, and struck a match.

"What babies my men are!" he exclaimed, with a smile.

He picked up the head and threw it out on the track. Then he told Sylvia and Michael to prepare for their escape, and left them.

"What do you think of my esthetic Bulgarian?" she asked.

"It's extraordinary how certain personalities have the power to twist one's standards," Michael answered, emphatically. "A few minutes ago I was sick with horror--the whole world seemed to be tumbling to pieces before human b.e.s.t.i.a.lity--and now, before the blood is dry on the railway sleepers, I've accepted it as a fact, and--Sylvia--do you know what I was thinking the last minute or two? I'm in a way appalled by my own callousness in being able to smile--but I really was thinking with amus.e.m.e.nt what a pity it was we couldn't hand over a few noisy stay-at-home Englishmen to the sensitive Rakoff."

"Michael," Sylvia demanded, anxiously, "do you think you are strong enough to ride? I'm not sure how far we are from the Greek frontier, but it's sure to mean at least a week in the saddle. It seems madness for you to attempt it."

"My dear, I'm not going to stay in this accursed train."

"I've a letter of introduction for a clerk in Cavalla," Sylvia reminded him, with a smile.

"Let's hope he invites us to lunch when we present it," Michael laughed.

The tension of waiting for the escape required this kind of feeble joking; any break in the conversation gave them time to think of the corpses scattered about in the darkness, which with the slow death of the fire was reconquering its territory. They followed Rakoff's advice and heaped extra clothes upon themselves, filling the pockets with victuals. Sylvia borrowed a cap from Michael and tied the golden shawl round her head; Michael did the same with an old college scarf. Then he tore the Red Cross bra.s.sard from his sleeve:

"I haven't the impudence to wear that during our pilgrimage with this gang of murderers. I've tucked away what paper money I have in my boots, and I've got twenty sovereigns sewn in my cholera belt."

Two smiling _comitadjis_ appeared from the corridor and beckoned the prisoners to follow them to where, on the other side of the train, ponies were waiting; within five minutes, the wind blowing icy cold upon their cheeks, the smell of damp earth and saddles and vinous breath, the ragged starshine high overhead, the willing motion of the horses, all combined to obliterate everything except drowsy intimations of adventure. Rakoff was not visible in the cavalcade, but Sylvia supposed that he was somewhere in front. After riding for three hours a halt was called at a deserted farm-house, and in the big living-room he was there to receive his guests with pointed courtesy.

"You are at home here," he observed, with a laugh. "This farm belonged to an Englishman before the war with Greece and Serbia. He was a great friend of Bulgaria; the Serbians knew it and left very little when their army pa.s.sed through. We shall sleep here to-night. Are you hungry?"

The _comitadjis_ had already wrapped themselves in their sheepskins and were lying in the dark corners of the room, exhausted by the long ride on top of the wine. A couple of men, however, prepared a rough meal to which Rakoff invited Sylvia and Michael. They had scarcely sat down when, to their surprise, a young woman dressed in a very short tweed skirt and Norfolk jacket and wearing a Tyrolese hat over two long plaits of flaxen hair came and joined them. She nodded curtly to Rakoff and began to eat without a word.

"Ziska disapproves of the English," Rakoff explained. "In fact, the only thing she really cares for is dynamite. But she is one of the great _comitadji_ leaders and acts as my second in command. She understands French, but declines to speak it on patriotic grounds, being half a Prussian."

The young woman looked coldly at the two strangers; then she went on eating. Her silent presence was not favorable to conversation; and a sudden jealousy of this self-satisfied and contemptuous creature overcame Sylvia. She remembered how she had told Michael's sister the secret of her love for him, and the thought of meeting her again in England became intolerable. She had a mad fancy to kill the other woman and to take her place in this wild band beside Rakoff, to seize her by those tight flaxen plaits and hold her face downward on the table, while she stabbed her and stabbed her again. Only by such a duel could she a.s.sert her own personality, rescuing it from the ignominy of the present and the greater ignominy of the future. She had actually grasped a long knife that lay in front of her, and she might have given expression to the mad notion if at that moment Michael had not collapsed.

In a moment her fantastic pa.s.sions died away; even Ziska's sidelong glance of scorn at the prostrate figure was incapable of rousing the least resentment.

"He should sleep," said Rakoff. "To-morrow he will have a long and tiring day."

Soon in the shadowy room of the deserted farm-house they were all asleep except Sylvia, who watched for a long time the dusty lantern-light flickering upon Ziska's motionless form; as her thoughts wavered in the twilight between wakefulness and dreams she once more had a longing to grip that smooth pink neck and crack it like the neck of a wax doll.

Then it was morning; the room was full of smoke and smell of coffee.

Sylvia's forecast of a week's journeying with the comitadjis was too optimistic; as a matter of fact, they were in the saddle for a month, and it was only a day or two before Christmas, new style, when they pitched their camp on the slopes of a valley sheltered from the fierce winds of Rhodope about twenty kilometers from the Bulgarian outposts beyond Xanthi.

"We are not far from the sea here," Rakoff said, significantly.

Whatever wind reached this slope had dropped at nightfall, and in the darkness Sylvia felt like a kiss upon her cheek the salt breath of the mighty mother to which her heart responded in awe as to the breath of liberty.

It had been a strange experience, this month with Rakoff and his band, and seemed already, though the sound of the riding had scarcely died away from her senses, the least credible episode of a varied life. Yet, looking back at the incidents of each day, Sylvia could not remember that her wild companions had ever been conscious of Michael and herself as intruders upon their monotonously violent behavior. Even Ziska, that riddle of flaxen womanhood, had gradually reached a kind of remote cordiality toward their company. To be sure, she had not invited Sylvia to grasp, or even faintly to guess, the reasons that might have induced her to adopt such a mode of life; she had never afforded the least hint of her relationship to Rakoff; she had never attempted to justify her cold, almost it might have been called her prim mercilessness. Yet she had sometimes advised Sylvia to withdraw from a prospective exhibition of atrocity, and this not from any motive of shame, but always obviously because she had been considering the emotions of her guest. It was in this spirit, when once a desperate Serbian peasant had flung a stone at the departing troop, that she advised Sylvia to ride on and avoid the fall of mangled limbs that was likely to occur after shutting twenty villagers in a barn and blowing them up with a charge of dynamite. She had spoken of the unpleasant sequel as simply as a meteorologist might have spoken of the weather's breaking up. Michael and Sylvia used to wonder to each other what prevented them from turning their ponies'

heads and galloping off anywhere to escape this daily exposure to the sight of unchecked barbarity; but they could never bring themselves to pa.s.s the limits of expediency and lose themselves in the uncertainties of an ideal morality; ultimately they always came back to the fundamental paradox of war and agreed that in a state of war the life of the individual increased in value in the same proportion as it deteriorated. Rakoff had taken pleasure in commenting upon their att.i.tude, and once or twice he had been at pains to convince them of the advantages they now enjoyed of an intellectual honesty from which in England, so far as he had been able to appreciate criticism of that country, they would have been eternally debarred. But perhaps no amount of intellectual honesty would have enabled them to remain quiescent before the rapine and slaughter of which they were compelled to be cognizant if not actually to see, had not the journey itself healed their wounded conscience with a charm against which they were powerless.

The air of the mountains swept away the taint of death that would otherwise have reeked in the very accoutrements of the equipage. The light of their bivouac fires stained such an infinitesimal fragment of the vaulted night above that the day's violence used to shrink into an insignificance which effected in its way their purification. However rude and savage their companions, it was impossible to eliminate the gift they offered of human companionship in these desolate tracts of mountainous country. In the stormy darkness they would listen with a kind of affection to the breathing of the ponies and to the broken murmurs of conversation between rider and rider all round them. There was always something of sympathy in the touch of a sheep-skin coat, something of a wistful consolation in the flicker of a lighted cigarette, something of tenderness in the offer of a water-flask; and when the moon shone frostily overhead so that all the company was visible, there was never far away an emotion of wonder at their very selves being a part of this hurrying silver cavalcade, a wonder that easily was merged in grat.i.tude for so much beauty after so much horror.

For Sylvia there was above everything the joy of seeing Michael growing stronger from day to day, and upon this joy her mind fed itself and forgot that she had ever imagined a greater joy beyond. Her contentment may have been of a piece with her indifference to the sacked villages and murdered Serbs; but she put away from her the certainty of the journey's end and surrendered to the entrancing motion through these winds of Thrace rattling and battling southward to the sea.

And now the journey was over. Sylvia knew by the tone of Rakoff's voice that she and Michael must soon shift for themselves. She wondered if he meant to hint his surprise at their not having made an attempt to do so already, and she tried to recall any previous occasion when they would have been justified in supposing that they were intended to escape from the escort. She could not remember that Rakoff had ever before given an impression of expecting to be rid of them, and a fancy came into her head that perhaps he did not mean them to escape at all, that he had merely taken them along with him to wile away his time until he was bored with them. So insistent was the fancy that she looked up to see if any comitadjis were being despatched toward the Bulgarian lines, and when at that moment Rakoff did give some order to four of his men she decided that her instinct had not been at fault. Some of her apprehension must have betrayed itself in her face, for she saw Rakoff looking at her curiously, and to her first fancy succeeded another more instantly alarming that he would give orders for Michael and herself to be killed now. He might have chosen this way to gratify Ziska: no doubt it would be a very gratifying spectacle, and possibly something less pa.s.sively diverting than a spectacle for that fierce doll. Sylvia was not really terrified by the prospect in her imagination; in a way, she was rather attracted to it. Her dramatic sense took hold of the scene, and she found herself composing a last duologue between Michael and herself. Presumably Rakoff would be gentleman enough to have them killed decently by a firing-party; he would not go farther toward gratifying Ziska than by allowing her to take a rifle with the rest. She decided that she should decline to let her eyes be bandaged; though she paused for a moment before the ironical pleasure of using her golden shawl to veil the approach to death. She should turn to Michael when they stood against a rock in the dawn, and when the rifles were leveled she should tell him that she had loved him since they had met at the masquerade in Redcliffe Hall and walked home through the fog of the Fulham Road to Mulberry Cottage. But had Mulberry Cottage ever existed?

At this moment Michael whispered to her a question so absurdly redolent of the problems of real life and yet so ridiculous somehow in present surroundings that all gloomy fancies floated away on laughter.

"Sylvia, it's quite obvious that he expects us to make a bolt for the Greek frontier as soon as possible. How much do you think I ought to tip each of these fellows?"

"I'm not very well versed in country-house manners," Sylvia laughed, "but I was always under the impression that one tipped the head gamekeeper and did not bother oneself about the local poachers."

"But it does seem wrong somehow to slip away in the darkness without a word of thanks," Michael said, with a smile. "I really can't help liking these ruffians."

At that moment Rakoff stepped forward into their conversation.

"I'm going to ride over to our lines presently," he announced. "You'd better come with me, and you'll not be much more than a few hundred meters from the Greek outposts. The Greek soldiers wear khaki. You won't be called upon to give any explanations."

Michael began to thank him, but the Bulgarian waved aside his words.

"You are included in the fulfilment of an obligation, _monsieur_, and being still in debt to _mademoiselle_, I should be embarra.s.sed by any expression from her of grat.i.tude. Come, it is time for supper."

Throughout the meal, which was eaten in a ruined chapel, Rakoff talked of his rose-gardens, and Sylvia fancied that he was trying to reproduce in her mind her first impression of him in order to make this last meal seem but the real conclusion of their long railway journey together. She wondered if Ziska knew that this was the last meal and if she approved of her leader's action in helping two enemies to escape. However, it was waste of time to speculate about Ziska's feelings: she had no feelings: she was nothing but a finely perfected instrument of destruction; and Sylvia nodded a casual good-night to her when supper was over, turning round to take a final glance at her bending over her rifle in the dim, tumble-down chapel as she might have looked back at some inanimate object which had momentarily caught her attention in a museum.

They rode downhill most of the way toward the Bulgarian lines, and about two hours after midnight saw the tents, like mushrooms, under the light of a hazy and decrescent moon.

"Here we bid one another farewell," said Rakoff, reining up.

In the humid stillness they sat pensive for a little while, listening to the ponies nuzzling for gra.s.s, tasting in the night the nearness of the sea, and straining for the shimmer of it upon the southern horizon.