Chapter VI (2)

"Have you ever thought," he was asking her, "about the appropriateness of our national animal--the British lion? We are rather apt to regard the lion as a bluff, hearty sort of beast with a loud roar and a consciousness of being the finest beast anywhere about. But, after all, the lion is one of the great cats. He's something much finer than the British bulldog, which, with most unnecessary self-depreciation, we have elected as our secondary pattern or prototype among the animals. There are few animals so profoundly, so densely, so hopelessly stupid as the bulldog. Its chief virtue is alleged to be its never knowing when it is beaten, but this is only an incidental ignorance merged in its ignorance of everything. Why a dog that approximates in character to a mule and in appearance to a hippopotamus should be accepted as the representative of English character I don't know. The attribution takes its place with some of the great fundamental mysteries of human conduct; it is comparable with those other riddles of why a chauffeur always waits till you get into the car again before he turns round, or why kidneys are so rare in beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, or why every man in the course of his life has either wanted to buy or has bought a rustic summer-house. The lion, however, really is typical of the Englishman: somewhat blond and very agile, physically courageous, morally timid, fierce, full of domestic virtues, tolerant of jackals, generous, cunning, graceful, arrogant, and acquisitive: he seems to me a perfect symbol of the British race."

"Is your friend at the diplomats' table so very leonine?" Sylvia asked.

"Oh no, Harry is the individual Englishman; the lion represents the race."

"But the race is an accumulation of individuals."

"I say, don't listen too intelligently," Hazlewood begged. "It's not fair either to my babbling or to your own dinner."

"Well, I want to bring you back to the point you made when you talked about the historical tragedy of this war."

Hazlewood looked serious.

"I meant what I said. I've just come from the grave of what was England, and already the deeds at Gallipoli have taken on the aspect of a heroic frieze. We might have repeated Gallipoli here in Serbia, but we sha'n't; we've learned our lesson; I do not think that on such a scale such decorative heroism can ever happen again. Gallipoli saw the death of the amateur; and a conservative like myself feels the historical tragedy of such a death. I suppose there are few people who would be prepared to argue that such a spirit ought to be purchased at such a price, and yet I don't know--I believe I would. I wasn't in Flanders at the beginning; but I imagine the same spirit existed there. Don't you remember the childlike, amateurish pleasure that all the soldiers took in being ferried across the Channel without anybody's knowing they had gone? The successful secrecy compensated them for all that hell of Mons. You'll never again hear of that childlike enjoyment. Very soon we shall have conscription, and from that moment the amateur in a position of responsibility who sacrifices any man's life to his own sense of exterior form will become a criminal. Surely it is an appalling tragedy that we sha'n't be able to carry on such a war as this without conscription? England, our England, disappears with conscription: nothing will ever be the same again. They accused us of decadence, but had you seen that landing last April--had you seen that immortal division of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, and Welshmen literally dyeing the sea with their blood, you could never have thought of decadence again. And yet, mark my words, so much of England was lost upon that day that already the unthinking herd led by the newspapers, which are always waiting to hail the new king, talks of the landing as famous chiefly for the Australian share in it. My God, it enrages me to read about the Australians when I think of that deathless dead division. Whatever else may happen in this war, whatever our fate at the hands of intriguing politicians and backbiting generals, England was herself upon that day: it stands with Trafalgar and Agincourt in a trinity of imperishable glory."

"But why do you say that so much of England was lost? You don't think we shall disgrace ourselves henceforth in this war?"

"We have already done so morally in failing to come to the help of the Serbians. Gallipoli turned us into professionals, and though I'm not saying that there is a single good professional argument in favor of helping Serbia, I still believe against all professionals that we shall pay for our failure in bitter years of prolonged war. The Dardanelles could have been forced. What stopped it? Professional jealousy at home."

"It's a hard thing of which to accuse the people at home."

"It was a hard thing to land that day at Sedd-el-bahr, but it was done. No, we've fallen a prey to the glamour of Teutonism, and of being expedient and Hunnish. By the time the war is over I don't doubt we shall be a very pretty imitation of the real article that we're setting out to destroy. But, thank Heaven, we shall always be able to point to Mons and to Antwerp and to Gallipoli: though we are fast forgetting to be gentlemen, we've already forgotten more than the Germans ever dreamed of in that direction. Mind you, I'm not attempting to say that we haven't got to hit below the belt: we have, because we are fighting with foul fighters; but that is what I conceive to be the historical tragedy of this war--the debasement of our ideals in order that we may compete with the Germans, and with the old men in morocco-chairs at home, and with the guttural press. I remember how the waning moon of dawn came up out of Asia while we were still waiting for news of the Suvla landing. There was a tattoo of musketry over the sea, a lisp of wind in the sandy grass; and in a moment of apprehensive chill I divined that with a failure at Suvla this waning moon was the last moon that would rise upon the old way of thinking, the rare old way of acting, the old, old merry England built in a thousand years."

"But a greater England may arise from that failure."

"Yes, but it won't be our England. The grave of our England was dug by the Victorians; this generation has planted the flowers upon it; the monument will be raised by the new generation. Oh yes, I know, it's an egotistical regret, a superficial and sentimental regret, if you will, but you must allow some of us to cherish it; otherwise we could not go on. And in the end I believe history will indorse the school of thought I follow. In the end I'm convinced that it will blame the men who failed to see that England was great by the measure of her greatness, and that the real way to win this war was by what were sneeringly called side-shows. All our history has been the alternate failure and triumph of our side-shows; we made ourselves what we are by side-shows."

Hazlewood swept from the table the pile of crumbs he had been building while he was talking, and smiled at Sylvia.

"It's your turn now," he said.

"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 platitude, 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 passport, 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 passport. 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 lust, 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 passport.

"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 Heraclitus 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 scrap 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 passport
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 passion for bric-à-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 _embusqués_; 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 multitude from rotting in death where they lay was the assurance 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 God, 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 damned 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. "Damn it! I sha'n't last forever. That's Antitch you're staring at in the next bed."

Sylvia looked at the figure muffled 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.

When Miss Potberry heard of her chief's arrival in Nish she insisted upon going to see him.

"But, my dear woman, he may be dying. What's the good of bothering him now? I'll find out whatever he can tell me. You must get ready to leave Nish. Pack up your things."

"He may be glad to dictate something," Miss Potberry argued. "Please let me come. I am anxious to report to Captain Hazlewood. I'm sure if you had told him that I was here he would have wished to see me."

Sylvia did not feel that she could contest anything; with Miss Potberry's help she burned the few papers that remained in the safe, together with the cipher, which glowed and smoldered in the basin for what seemed an interminable time. When not a single record of Hazlewood's presence in Serbia remained, Sylvia and Miss Potberry went back to the hospital.

"You've burned everything?" he asked.

Sylvia nodded.

"Is that a nurse? I can't see in this infernal candle-light, and I'm chockful of morphia, which makes my eye-lids twitch."

"It's I, Captain Hazlewood--Miss Potberry. I had instructions from the War Office to report to you. I was unfortunately delayed upon my journey, and when I arrived from Salonika you had left. Is there anything you would like done?"

"Oh, my God!" he half groaned, half laughed. "I see that even my death-bed is going to be haunted by departmental imbecility. Who on earth sent you to Nish from Salonika?"

"Colonel Bullingham-Jones, to whom I reported in Salonika, knew nothing about me and advised me to come on here as soon as possible."

"Officious ass!" Hazlewood muttered. "Why didn't you go back when you found I wasn't here?" he added to his secretary.

"There was no way of getting back, Captain Hazlewood. I believe that the enemy has cut the line."

"I'm sorry you've had all this trouble for nothing," he said. "However, you and Miss Scarlett must settle between you how to get away. You'd better hang on to one of the Red Cross units."

"I'm afraid I may have to leave my typewriter behind," said Miss Potberry. "Have I your permission?"

"You have," he said, smiling with his eyes through the glaze of the drug.

"You couldn't give me a written authorization?" asked Miss Potberry. "Being government property--"

"No, I can only give you verbal instructions. Both my arms have been shot away, or as nearly shot away as doesn't make it possible to write."

"Oh, I beg your pardon. Then to whom should I report next?"

"I don't know. It might be St. Peter, with winter coming on and Albania to be crossed. No, no, don't you bother about reporting. Just follow the crowd and you'll be all right. Good-by, Miss Potberry. Sorry you've had such a long journey for nothing. Sorry about everything."

He beckoned Sylvia close to him with his eyes.

"For Christ's sake get rid of her or I shall have another hemorrhage."

Sylvia asked Miss Potberry to go back to the hotel and get packed. When the secretary had gone, she knelt by Hazlewood.

"Michael Fane arrived yet?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"I had something to give him."

The wounded man's face became more definitely lined with pain in the new worry of Fane's non-appearance.

"I want you to give him a letter. It's under my pillow. If by chance he doesn't come, perhaps you'd be good enough to post it when you get an opportunity. Miss Pauline Grey, Wychford Rectory, Oxfordshire."

Sylvia found the letter, which was still unaddressed.

"If Michael comes, I'd like him to take it to her himself when he gets to England. Thanks awfully. Give him my love. He was a great friend of mine. Yes, a great friend. Thanks awfully for helping me. I don't like to worry the poor devils here. They've got such a lot to worry them. Antitch died while you were burning my papers."

Sylvia looked at the muffled figure whose eyes no longer stared with troubled imperception.

"Of course I may last for two or three days," he went on. "And in that case I may see Michael. Mind you bring him if he comes in time. Great friend of mine, and I'd like him to explain something to somebody. By the way, don't take all my talk the other night too seriously. I often talk like that. I don't mean half I say. England's all right, really. Perhaps you'll look me up in the morning if I'm still here? Good-by. Thanks very much. I'm sorry I can't shake hands."

"Would you like a priest?" Sylvia asked.

"A priest?" he repeated, in a puzzled voice. "Oh no, thanks very much; priests have always bored me. I'm going to lie here and think. The annoying thing is, you know, that I've not the slightest desire to die. Some people say that you have at the end, but I feel as if I was missing a train. Perhaps I'll see you in the morning. So long."

But she did not see him in the morning, because he died in the night, and his bed was wanted immediately for another wounded man.

"What a dreadful thing war is!" sighed Miss Potberry. "I've lost two first cousins and four second cousins, and my brother is soon going to France."

The evacuation of Nish was desperately hastened by the news of the swift advance of the enemy on three sides. Sylvia, with the help of Colonel Michailovitch, managed to establish her rights over Hazlewood's horse, and Miss Potberry, fired with the urgency of reporting to somebody else and of explaining why she had abandoned her typewriter, was persuaded to attach herself to a particularly efflorescent branch of Dorothy Perkins that had wound itself round Harry Vereker to be trained into safety on the other side of the mountains. The last that Sylvia saw of her was when she drove out of Nish in a bullock-cart, still pink and prim, because the jolting had not yet really begun. The last Sylvia heard of Harry Vereker was his unruffled voice leaving instructions that if some white corduroy riding-breeches which he had been expecting by special courier from Athens should by chance arrive before the Bulgarians, they were to follow him. One had the impression of his messenger and his breeches as equally important entities marching arm in arm toward the Black Drin in obedience to his instructions. The next day came news of the fall of Kragujevatz, following upon that of Pirot, and the fever of flight was aggravated to panic.

In the evening when Sylvia was watching the tormented square, listening to the abuse and blasphemy that was roused by the scarcity of transport, and trying to accept in spite of the disappointment the irremediable fact of Michael's failure to arrive, she suddenly caught sight of his sister pushing her way through the mob below. Her appearance alone like this could only mean that Michael had been killed; Sylvia cursed the flattering lamp of fortune, which had lighted her to Nish only to extinguish itself in this moment of confusion and horror. How pale that sister looked, how deeply ringed her eyes, how torn and splashed her dress: she must have heard the news of her brother and fled in despair before the memory. All Sylvia's late indifference to suffering in the actual presence of war was rekindled to a fury of resentment against the unreasonable forces that the world had let loose upon itself; even the envelope that Hazlewood had given to her now burned her heart with what it inclosed of eternally unquenched regret, of eternal unfulfilment. She hurried down-stairs and out into the mad, screaming, weeping mob and bathed herself in the stench of wet and filthy rags and in the miasma of sick, starved, and verminous bodies. A child was sucking the raw head of a hen; it happened that Sylvia knocked against it in her hurry, whereupon the child grabbed the morsel of blood and mud, snarling at her like a famished hound. Wherever she looked there were children searching on all-fours among the filth lodged in the cracks of the rough paving-stones; it was an existence where nothing counted except the ability to trample over one's neighbor to reach food or safety; and she herself was searching for Michael's sister in the fetid swarm, just as these children were shrieking and scratching for the cabbage-stalks they found among the dung. At last the two women met, and Sylvia caught hold of Mrs. Merivale's arm.

"What do you want? What do you want?" she cried. "Can I help you?"

The other turned and looked at Sylvia without recognizing her.

"You're Mrs. Merivale--Michael's sister," Sylvia went on. "Don't you remember me? Sylvia Scarlett. What has happened to him?"

"Can't we get out of this crowd?" Mrs. Merivale replied. "I'm trying to find an English officer--Captain Hazlewood."

Before Sylvia could tell her what had happened a cart drawn by a donkey covered with sores interposed between them; it was impossible for either woman to ask or answer anything in this abomination of humanity that oozed and writhed like a bunch of earthworms on a spade. Somehow they emerged from it all, and Sylvia brought her up-stairs to her room.

"Is Michael dead?" she asked.

"No, but he's practically dying. I've got him into a deserted house. He fell ill with typhus in Kragujevatz. The enemy was advancing terribly fast, and I got him here, Heaven knows how, in a bullock-cart--I've probably killed him in doing so; he certainly can't be moved again. I must find this friend of ours--Guy Hazlewood. He'll be able to tell me how long we can stay in Nish."

Sylvia broke the news of Hazlewood's death and was momentarily astonished to see how casually she took it. Then she remembered that she had already lost her husband, that her brother was dying, and that probably she had heard such tidings of many friends. This was a woman who was beholding the society in which she had lived falling to pieces round her every day; she was not, like herself, cloistered in vagrancy, one for whom life and death had waved at each other from every platform and every quay in partings that were not less final. There occurred to Sylvia the last utterance of Hazlewood about missing a train; he perhaps had found existence to be a destructive business; but, even so, she could not think that he had loved it more charily.

"Everybody is dying," said Mrs. Merivale. "Those who survive this war will really have been granted a second life and will have to begin all over again like children--or lunatics," she added to herself.

"Could I come with you to see him?" Sylvia asked. "I had typhus myself last year in Petrograd and I could nurse him."

"I don't think it's any longer a matter for nursing," the other answered, hopelessly. "It's just leaving him alone and not worrying him any more. Oh, I wonder how long we can count on Nish not being attacked."

"Not very long, I'm afraid," said Sylvia. "Hardly any time at all, in fact."

They left the hotel with that sense of mechanical action which sometimes relieves a strain of accumulated emotion. Sylvia had the notion of finding a Serbian doctor whom she knew slightly, and was successful in bringing him along to the house where Michael was lying. It was dark when they arrived in the deserted side-street now strewn with the rubbish of many families' flight.

Michael was lying on a camp bed in the middle of the room. On the floor a Serbian peasant wearing a Red Cross brassard was squatting by his head and from time to time moistening his forehead with a damp sponge. In a corner two other Serbians armed with fantastic weapons sat cross-legged upon the floor, a winking candle and strewn playing-cards between them. Sylvia felt a sudden awe of looking at him directly, and she waited in the doorway while the doctor went forward with his sister to make his examination. After a short time the doctor turned away with a shrug; he and Mrs. Merivale rejoined Sylvia in the doorway and together they went in another room, where the doctor in sibilant French confirmed the impossibility of moving him if his life was to be saved. He added that the Bulgarians would be in Nish within a few days and that the town would be empty long before that. Then, after giving a few conventional directions for the care of the patient, he saluted the two women and went away.

Sylvia and Mrs. Merivale looked at each other across a bare table on which was set a lantern covered with cobwebs; it was the only piece of furniture left, and Sylvia had a sense of dramatic unreality about their conversation: standing up in this dim room, she was conscious of a make-believe intensity that tore the emotions more completely into rags than any normal procedure or expression of passionate feeling. Yet it was only because she divined an approach to the climax of her life that she felt thus; it was so important that she should have her way in what she intended to do that it was impossible for her to avoid regarding Michael's sister not merely as a partner in the scene, but also as the audience on whose approval success ultimately depended. The bareness of the room was like a stage, and the standing up like this was like a scene; it seemed right to exaggerate the gestures to keep pace with the emotional will to achieve her desire.

"Mrs. Merivale," she began, "I beg you to let me stay behind in Nish and look after Michael so far as anything can be done--and of course it will be better for him that a woman should oversee the devotion of his orderly. Nothing will induce me to leave Nish. Nothing. You must understand that now. There is nothing to prevent me from staying here; you must take Captain Hazlewood's horse and go to-morrow."

"Leave my brother? Why, the idea is absurd. I tell you I almost dragged that cart through the mud from Kragujevatz. Besides, I'm a more or less qualified nurse. You're not."

"I'm qualified to nurse him through this fever because I know exactly what is wanted. If any new complication arose, you could do no more than I could do until the Bulgarian doctors arrived. If you stay here, you will be taken to Bulgaria."

"And why not?" demanded the other. "I'd much rather be taken prisoner with Michael than go riding off on my own and leave him here. No, no, the idea's impossible."

"You have your mother--his mother--to think of. You have your son," Sylvia argued.

"Neither mother nor son could be any excuse for leaving Michael at such a moment."

"Certainly not, if you could not find a substitute. But I shall stay here in any case, and you've no right to desert other obligations," Sylvia affirmed.

"You're talking to me in a ridiculous way. There is only one obligation, which is to him."

"Do you think you can do more for him than I can do?" Sylvia challenged. "You can do less. You have already had the fearful strain of getting him here from the north. You are worn out. You are not fit to nurse him as he must be nursed. You are not fit to deal with the Bulgarians when they come. You are already breaking down. Why, there is no force in your arguments! They are as tame and conventional as if you were inventing an excuse to break a social engagement."

"But by what right do you make this--this violent demand?" asked the other.

There suddenly came over Sylvia the futility of discussing the question in this fashion: this flickering room, echoing faintly to the shouts of the affrighted fugitives in the distance, lacked any atmosphere to hide the truth, for which in its bareness and misery it seemed to cry aloud. The question that his sister had put demanded an answer that would evade nothing in the explanation of her request; and if that answer should leave her soul stripped and desolate for the contemptuous regard of a woman who could not comprehend, why then thus was her destiny written and she should stand humiliated while the life that she had not been great enough to seize passed out of her reach.

"If my demand is violent, my need is violent," she cried. "Once, in my dressing-room--the only time we met--you told me that you half regretted your rejection of art; you envied me my happiness in success. Your envy seemed to me then the bitterest irony, for I could not find in art that which I demanded. I have never found it until now in the chance to save your brother's life. That is exaggerating, you'll say. Yet I do believe--and if you could know my history you would believe it, too--I do believe that my will can save him now not merely from death, but from the captivity that will follow. I know what it feels like to recover from this fever; and I know that he will not wish to see you and himself prisoners. He will fret himself ill again about your position. I am nothing to him. He will never know that we changed places deliberately. He will accept me as a companion in misfortune, and I will give all that love can give, love that feeds upon and inflames itself without demanding fuel except from the heart of the one who loves. You cannot refuse me now, my dear--so dear to me because you are his sister. You cannot refuse me when I ask you to let me stay because I love him."

"Do you love Michael?" asked the other, wonderingly.

"I love him, I love him, and one does not speak lightly of love at a moment like this. Do you remember when you asked me to come and stay with you in the country to meet him? It was eighteen months ago. Your letter arrived when I had just been jilted by the man I was going to marry in a desperate effort to persuade myself that domesticity was the cure for my discontent. My discontent was love for your brother. It has never been anything else since the moment we met, though I cried out 'Never' when I read your invitation. I abandoned everything. I have lived ever since as a mountebank, driven always by a single instinct that sustained me. That instinct was merely a superstition to travel south. Whenever I traveled on, I had always the sense of an object. I have found that object at last, and I know absolutely that fate stood at your elbow and dragged with you at those weary bullocks in the mud to bring Michael here in time. I know that fate chained me to my balcony at Nish, where for nearly a month I have been watching for your arrival. You are wise; you have suffered; you have loved: I beseech you that, just for the sake of your pride, you will not rob me of this moment to which my whole life has been the mad overture."

"What you say about my being a worry to him when he recovers consciousness is true," said the sister. "It's the only good argument you've brought forward. Ah, but I won't be so ungenerous. Stay then. To-night I will wait here and to-morrow you shall take my place."

The flickering bareness of the room flashed upon Sylvia with unimaginable glory; the dark night of her soul was become day.

"I think you can hear the joy in my heart," she whispered. "I can't say any more."

Sylvia fell upon her knees; bowing her head upon the table, she wept tears that seemed to gush like melodious fountains in a new world.

"You have made me believe that he will not die," the sister murmured. "I did not think that I should be able to believe that; but I do now, Sylvia."

An assurance that positively seemed to contain life came over both of them. Sylvia rose from her knees and abruptly they began to talk practically of what should be done that night and of what it would be wise to provide to-morrow. Presently Sylvia left the house, and slept in her hotel one of those rare sleeps whence waking is a descent upon airy plumes from heights where action and aspiration are fused in a ravishing, unutterable affirmative, of which, somehow, a remembered consciousness is accorded to the favored soul.

The next morning Michael's sister mounted her horse. The guns of the desperate army of Stephanovitch confronting the Bulgarian advance were now audible; their booming gave power of flight to the weakest that remained in Nish; and the coil of fugitives writhed over the muddy plain toward the mountains.

"I think he seemed a little better this morning," she said, wistfully.

"Don't be jealous of leaving me," Sylvia begged. "You shall never regret that impulse. Will you take this golden bag with you? I don't want it to adorn a Bulgarian; it was a token to me of love, and it has been a true token. At the end of your journey sell it and give the money to poor Serbians. Will you? And this letter for Captain Hazlewood. Please post it in England. Good-by, my dear, my dear."

Michael's sister took the bag and the letter. In the light of this gray morning her gray eyes were profound lakes of grief.

"I am envying you for the second time," she said. Then she waved her crop and rode quickly away. Sylvia watched her out of sight, thinking what it must have cost that proud sister to make this sacrifice. Her heart ached with a weight of unexpressed gratitude, and yet she could not keep it from beating with a fierce and triumphant gladness when she went up to where Michael was lying and found him alone. The orderly and servants had fled from the fear that clung to Nish like the clouds of this heavy day, and Sylvia, taking his hand, bathed his forehead with a tenderness that she half dreaded to use, so much did it seem a flame that would fan the fever in whose embrace he tossed unconscious of all but a world of shadows.

For a week she stayed beside him, sleeping sometimes with her head against his arm, listening to the somber colloquies of delirium, striving to keep the soul that often in the long trances seemed to flutter disconsolately away from the exhausted body. There was no longer any sound of people in Nish: there was nothing but the guns coming nearer and nearer every hour. Then suddenly the firing ceased: there was a clatter and a splash of cavalry upon the muddy paving-stones. The noise passed. Michael sat up and said:

"Listen!"

She thought he was away upon some adventure of delirium and told him not to worry, but to lie still. He was so emaciated that she asked herself if he could really be living: it was like brushing a cobweb from one's path to make him lie down again. A woman's scream, the thin scream of an old woman, shuddered upon the silence outside; but the noise did not disturb him, and he lay perfectly still with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. A few minutes later he again sat up in bed.

"Am I mad, or is it Sylvia Scarlett?" he asked.

"Yes, it's Sylvia. You're very ill. You must keep still."

"What an extraordinary thing!" he murmured, seriously, to himself. "I suppose I shall hear all about it to-morrow."

He lay back again without seeming to worry about the problem of her presence; nor did he ask where his sister was. Sylvia remembered her own divine content in the hospital when the fever left her, and she wanted him to lie as long as possible thus. Presently, however, he sat up again and said:

"Listen, Sylvia, I thought I wasn't wrong. Do you hear a kind of whisper in the air?"

She listened to please him, and then upon the silence she heard the sound. From a whisper it grew to a sigh, from a sigh it rose to a rustling of many leaves: it was the Bulgarian army marching into Nish, a procession of silent-footed devils, mysterious, remorseless, innumerable.