Chapter VII (1)

TO Sylvia's surprise and relief, the conquerors paid no attention to the house that night. Michael, after he had listened for a while to the dampered progress of that soft-shod army, fell back upon his pillow without comment and slept very tranquilly. Sylvia, who had now not the least doubt of his recovery, busied herself with choosing what she conceived to be absolute necessities for the immediate future and packing them into her valise. In the course of her preparations she put on one side for destruction or abandonment the contents of the golden shawl. Daguerreotypes and photographs; a rambling declaration of the circumstances in which her alleged grandfather had married that ghostly Adèle her grandmother, and a variety of letters that illustrated her mother's early life: all these might as well be burned. She lay down upon her bed of overcoats and skirts piled upon the floor and found the shawl a pleasant addition to the rubber hot-water-bottle she had been using as a pillow. Michael was still sleeping; it seemed wise to blow out the candle and, although it was scarcely seven o'clock, to try to sleep herself. It was the first time for a week that she had been able to feel the delicious and inviting freedom of untrammeled sleep. What did the occupation of a Bulgarian army signify in comparison with the assurance she felt of her patient's convalescence? The brazier glowed before her path toward a divine oblivion.

When Sylvia woke up and heard Michael's voice calling to her, it was six o'clock in the morning. She blew up the dull brazier to renewed warmth, set water to boil, and in a real exultation lighted four candles to celebrate with as much gaiety as possible the new atmosphere of joy and hope in the stark room.

"It's all very mysterious," Michael was saying. "It's all so delightfully mysterious that I can hardly bear to ask any questions lest I destroy the mystery. I've been lying awake, exquisitely and self-admiringly awake for an hour, trying to work out where I am, why I'm where I am, why you're where you are, and where Stella is."

Sylvia told him of the immediate occasion of his sister's departure, and when she had done so had a moment of dismay lest his affection or his pride should be hurt by her willingness to leave him in the care of one who was practically a stranger.

"How very kind of you!" he said. "My mother would have been distracted by having to look after her grandson in the whirlpool of war-work upon which she is engaged. So you had typhus, too? It's a rotten business, isn't it? Did you feel very weak after it?"

"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 passionate 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 Bassompierre's rambling statement about the circumstances 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 coke 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, shaggy 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 passed, 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 passed 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 assured 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 snatch 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 damned 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 God, 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 God 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 assassination, horror to France, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace--I should be very sorry to implicate Almighty God in any conception based upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that God 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 attitude in this war seems to me the German idea of God in a _pickelhaube_, of Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a bloody-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 God 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 hell. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go to hell 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 hell. 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 association. 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 attitude 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."

"My illness has clouded my brain," Michael murmured. "I'm a long way from understanding what you're driving at."

"Well, keep quiet and listen to my problems. We're on the verge of separation, but you're still my patient and you owe me your attention."

"I owe you more than that," he put in.

"How feeble," she scoffed. "You might have spared me such a pretty-pretty sentence."

"I surrender unconditionally," he protested. "Your fierceness is superfluous."

"I suppose you've often labeled humanity in bulk? I mean, for instance, you must have often said and certainly thought that all men are either knaves or fools."

"I must have thought so at some time or another," Michael agreed.

"Well, I've got a new division. I think that all men have either normal digestions, slow digestions, rapid digestions, or no digestions at all. Extend the physical fact into a metaphor and apply it to the human mind."

"Dear Sylvia, I feel as if I were being poulticed. How admirably you maintain the nursing manner. I've made the application. What do I do now?"

"Listen without interrupting, or I shall lose the thread of my argument. I suppose that you'll admit that the optimists outnumber the pessimists? Obviously they must, or the world would come to an end. Very well, then, we'll say that the pessimists are the people with no digestions at all: on top of them will be the people with slow digestions, the great unthinking herd that is optimistic because the optimists shout most loudly. The people with good normal digestions are of course the shouting optimists. Finally come the people whose digestions are too rapid. I belong to that class."

"Are they optimists?"

"They're optimists until they've finished digesting, but between meals they're outrageously pessimistic. The only way to illustrate my theory is to talk about myself. Imagine you're a lady palmist and prepare for a debauch of egotism from one of your clients. All through my life, Michael, I've been a martyr to quick digestion. Your friend Guy Hazlewood suffered from that complaint, judging by the way he talked about the war. I can imagine that his life has been made of brief, exquisite illusions followed by long vacuums. Am I right?"

Michael nodded.

"Cassandra, to take a more remote instance, suffered from rapid digestion--in fact, all prophets have the malady. Isn't it physiologically true to say that the unborn child performs in its mother's womb the drama of man's evolution? I'm sure it's equally true that the life of the individual after birth and until death is a microcosm of man's later history, or rather I ought to say that it might be, for only exceptional individuals reproduce the history of humanity up to contemporary development. A genius--a great creative genius--seems to me a man whose active absorption can keep pace with the rapidity of his digestion. How often do we hear of people who were in advance of their time! This figure of speech is literally true, but only great creative geniuses have the consolation of projecting themselves beyond their ambient in time. There remain a number of sterile geniuses, whom Nature, with her usual prodigality, has put on the market in reserve, but for whom later on she finds she has no use on account of the economy that always succeeds extravagance. These sterile geniuses are left to fend for themselves and somehow to extract from a hostile and suspicious environment food to maintain them during the long, dreary emptiness that succeeds their too optimistic absorption. Do you agree with me?"

"At one end of the pole you would put Shakespeare, at the other the Jubilee Juggins?" Michael suggested.

"That's it," she agreed. "Although a less conspicuous wastrel would serve for the other end."

"And I suppose if you're searching for the eternal rhythm of the universe, you'd have to apply to nations the same classification as to individuals?" he went on.

"Of course."

"So that England would have a good normal digestion and Ireland a too rapid digestion? Or better, let us say that all Teutons eat heartily and digest slowly, and that all Kelts are too rapid. But come back to yourself."

Sylvia paused for a moment, and then continued, with swift gestures of self-agreement:

"I certainly ascribe every mistake in my own life to a rapid digestion. Why, I've even digested this war that, if we think on a large scale, was evidently designed to stir up the sluggish liver of a world. I'm sick to death of the damned war already, and it hasn't begun yet really. And to come down to my own little particular woes, I've labored toward religion, digested it with horrible rapidity, and see nothing in it now but a half-truth for myself. In art the same, in human associations the same, in everything the same. Ah, don't let's talk any more about anything."

In the silence that followed she thought to herself about the inspiration of her late theories; and looking at Michael, pale and hollow-eyed in the grim November dusk, she railed at herself because with all her will to make use of the quality she had attributed to herself she could not shake off this love that was growing every day.

"Why in God's name," she almost groaned aloud, "can't it go the way of everything else? But it won't. It won't. It never will. And I shall never be happy again."

A rainy nightfall symbolized for her the darkness of the future, and when, in the middle of their evening meal, while they were hacking at a tin of sardines, a message came from headquarters that to-morrow they must be ready to leave Nish, she was glad. However, the sympathy of the English-speaking officer had exercised itself so much on behalf of the two prisoners that the separation which Sylvia had regarded as immediate was likely to be postponed for some time. The officer explained that it was inconvenient for them to remain any longer in Nish, but that arrangements had been made by which they were to be moved to Sofia and therefore that Michael's convalescence would be safe against any premature strain. They would realize that Bulgaria was not unmindful of the many links, now unfortunately broken, which had formerly bound her to England, and they would admit in the face of their courteous treatment how far advanced his country was upon the road of civilization.

"Splendid," Michael exclaimed. "So we sha'n't be separated yet for a while and we shall be able to prosecute our philosophical discoveries. The riddle of life finally solved in 1915 by two prisoners of the Bulgarian army! It would almost make the war worth while. Sylvia, I'm so excited at our journey."

"You're tired of being cooped up here," she said, sharply. And then to mask whatever emotion might have escaped, she added: "I'm certainly sick to death of it myself."

"I know," he agreed, "it must have been a great bore for you. The invalid is always blissfully unconscious of time, and forgets that the pleasant little services which encourage him to go on being ill are not natural events like sunrise and sunset. You do well to keep me up to the mark; I'm not really forgetful."

"You seem to have forgotten that we may have months, even years of imprisonment in Bulgaria," Sylvia said.

He looked so frail in his khaki overcoat that she was seized with penitence for the harsh thoughts of him she had indulged, and with a fondling gesture tried to atone.

"You really feel that you can make this journey? If you don't, I'll go out and rout out our officer and beg him for another week."

Michael shook his head.

"I'm rather a fraud. Really, you know, I feel perfectly well. Quite excited about this journey, as I told you."

She was chilled by his so impersonally cordial manner and looked at him regretfully.

"Every day he gets farther away," she thought. "In nine years he has been doing nothing but place layer after layer over his sensitiveness. He's a kind of mental coral island. I know that there must still exist a capacity for suffering, but he'll never again let me see it. He wants to convince me of his eternal serenity."

She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in embarrassment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness.

"It was just the reverse of embarrassment, really," he said. "But I don't want to spoil things."

"By doing what?" she demanded.

"Well, if I told you--" He stopped abruptly.

"I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you've begun you must finish."

"Nothing will induce me to. I'll say what I thought of saying before we separate. I promise that."

"Perhaps we never shall separate."

"Then I shall have no need to finish my sentence."

Sylvia lay awake for a long time that last night in Nish, wondering, with supreme futility as she continually reminded herself, what Michael could have nearly said. Somewhere about two o'clock she decided that he had been going to suggest adopting her into his family.

"Damned fool," she muttered, pulling and shaking her improvised bed as if it were a naughty child. "Nevertheless, he had the wit to understand how much it would annoy me. It shows the lagoon is not quite encircled yet."

The soldiers who arrived to escort them to the railway station were like grotesques of hotel porters; they were so ready to help with the luggage that it seemed absurd for their movements to be hampered by rifles with fixed bayonets. The English-speaking officer accompanied them to the station and expressed his regrets that he could not travel to Sofia; he had no doubt that later on he should see them again, and, in any case, when the war was over he hoped to revisit England. Sylvia suddenly remembered her big trunk, which she had left in the consigne when she first reached Nish nearly two months ago. The English-speaking officer shrugged his shoulders at her proposal to take it with her to Sofia.

"The station was looted by the Serbs before we arrived," he explained. "They are a barbarous nation, many years behind us in civilization. We never plunder. And of course you understand that Nish is really Bulgarian? That makes us particularly gentle here. You heard, perhaps, that when the Entente Legations left we gave them a champagne lunch for the farewell at Dedeagatch? We are far in front of the Germans, who are a very strong but primitive nation. They are not much liked in Bulgaria: we prefer the English. But, alas, poor England!" he sighed.

"Why poor?" Sylvia demanded, indignantly.

He smiled compassionately for answer, and soon afterward, in a first-class compartment to themselves, Michael and she left Nish.

"Really," Michael observed, "when the conditions are favorable, traveling as a prisoner of war is the most luxurious traveling of all. I've never experienced the servility of a private courier, but it's wonderful to feel that other people are under an obligation to look after you. However, at present we have the advantages of being new toys. Our friend from Sunbury-on-Thames may be as compassionate as he likes about England, but there's no doubt it confers on the possessor a quite peculiar thrill to own English people--even two such non-combatant creatures as ourselves. It's typical of the Germans' newness to European society that they should have thought the right way to treat English prisoners was to spit at them. I remember once seeing a grandee of Spain who'd been hired as secretary by a Barcelona Jew, and by Jove! he wasn't allowed to forget it. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, have a superficial air of breeding, which they've either copied from the Turks or inherited from the Chinese. Didn't you love the touch about the champagne lunch at Dedeagatch? There's a luxurious hospitality about that which you won't find outside the _Arabian Nights_ or Chicago. Really the English nation should give thanks every Sunday, murmuring with all eyes on the east window and Germany: 'There, but for the grace of God blowing in the west wind, goes John Bull.' Yet I wonder if the hearts would be humble enough to keep the Pharisee out of the thanksgiving."

The train went slowly, with frequent stoppages, often in wild country far from any railway station, where in such surroundings its existence seemed utterly improbable. Occasionally small bands of _comitadjis_ would ride up and menace theatrically the dejected Serbian prisoners who were being moved into Bulgaria. There was a cold wind, and snow was lying thinly on the hills.

In the rapid dusk Michael fell asleep; soon after, the train seemed to have stopped for the night. Sylvia did not wake him up, but sat for two hours by the light of one candle stuck upon her valise and pored upon the moonless night that pressed against the window-panes of the compartment with scarcely endurable desolation. There was no sound of those murmurous voices that make mysterious even suburban tunnels when trains wait in them on foggy nights. The windows were screwed up; the door into the corridor was locked; in the darkness and silence Sylvia felt for the first time in all its force the meaning of imprisonment. Suddenly a flaring torch carried swiftly along the permanent way threw shadowy grotesques upon the ceiling of the compartment, and Michael, waking up with a start, asked their whereabouts.

"Somewhere near Zaribrod, as far as I can make out, but it's impossible to tell for certain. I can't think what they're doing. We've been here for two hours without moving, and I can't hear a sound except the wind. It was somebody's carrying a torch past the window that woke you up."

They speculated idly for a while on the cause of the delay, and then gradually under the depression of the silence their voices died away into occasional sighs of impatience.

"What about eating?" Sylvia suggested at last. "I'm not hungry, but it will give us something to do."

So they struggled with tinned foods, glad of the life that the fussy movement gave to the compartment.

"One feels that moments such as these should be devoted to the most intimate confidences," Michael said, when they had finished their dinner and were once more enmeshed by the silence.

"There's a sort of portentousness about them, you mean?"

"Yes, but as a matter of fact, one can't even talk about commonplace things, because one is all the time fidgeting with the silence."

"I know," Sylvia agreed. "One gets a hint of madness in the way one's personality seems to shrink to nothing. I suppose there really is somebody left alive in the world? I'm beginning to feel as if it were just you and I against the universe."

"Death must come like that sometimes," he murmured.

"Like what?"

"Like that thick darkness outside and oneself against the universe."

"I'd give anything for a guitar," Sylvia exclaimed.

"What would you play first?" he inquired, gravely.

She sang gently:

_"La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento,_
_Muta d'accento e di pensiero,_
_Sempre un amabile leggiadro viso,_
_In pianto o in riso, è menzognero--_

and that's all I can remember of it," she said, breaking off.

"I wonder why you chose to sing that."

"It reminds me of my father," she answered. "When he was drunk, fair cousin, he always used to sing that. What a charming son-in-law he would have made for our grandfather! Oh, are we ever going to move again?" she cried, jumping up and pressing her face against the viewless pane. "Hark! I hear horses."

Michael rose and joined her. Presently flames leaped up into the darkness, and armed men were visible in silhouette against the bonfire they had kindled, so large a bonfire, indeed, that, in the shadows beyond, the stony outcrop of a rough, steep country seemed in contrast to be the threshold of titanic chasms. A noise of shouting reached the train, and presently Bulgarian regulars, the escort of the prisoners, joined the merrymakers round the fire. Slow music rumbled upon the air, and a circle of men shoulder to shoulder with interwoven arms performed a stately, swaying dance.

"Or are they just holding one another up because they're drunk?" Sylvia asked.

"No, it's really a dance, though they may be drunk, too. I wish we could get this window open. It looks as if all the soldiers had joined the party."

The dance came to an end with shouts of applause, and one or two rifles were fired at the stars. Then the company squatted round the fire, and the wine circulated again.

"But where are the officers in charge?" Michael asked.

"Playing cards, probably. Or perhaps they're drinking with the rest. Anyway, if we're going to stay here all night, it's just as well to have the entertainment of this _al fresco_ supper-party. Anything is better than that intolerable silence."

Sylvia blew out the stump of candle, and they sat in darkness, watching the fire-flecked revel. The shouting grew louder with the frequent passing of the wine-skins; after an hour groups of _comitadjis_ and regulars left the bonfire and wandered along the permanent way, singing drunken choruses. What happened presently at the far end of the train they could not see, but there was a sound of smashed glass followed by a man's scream. Those who were still sitting round the fire snatched up their weapons and stumbled in loud excitement toward the center of the disturbance. There were about a dozen shots, the rasp of torn woodwork, and a continuous crash of broken glass, with curses, cries, and all the sounds of quarrelsome confusion.

"The drunken brutes are breaking up the train," Michael exclaimed. "We'd better sit back from the window for a while."

Sylvia cried out to him that it was worse and that they were dragging along by the heels the bodies of men and kicking them as they went.

"Good God!" he declared, standing up now in horror. "They're murdering the wretched Serbian prisoners. Here, we must get out and protest."

"Sit down, fool," Sylvia commanded. "What good will your protesting do?"

But as she spoke she gave a shuddering shriek and held her hands up to her eyes: they had thrown a writhing, mutilated shape into the fire.

"The brutes! The filthy brutes!" Michael shouted, and, jumping upon the seat of the compartment, he kicked at the window-panes until there was not a fragment of glass left. "Shout, Sylvia, shout! Oh, hell! I can't remember a word of their bloody language. We must stop them. Stop, I tell you. Stop!"

One of the prisoners had broken away from his tormentors and was running along the permanent way, but the blood from a gash in the forehead blinded him and he fell on his face just outside the compartment. Two _comitadjis_ banged out his brains on the railway line; with clasp-knives they hacked the head from the corpse and merrily tossed it in at the window, where it fell on the floor between Sylvia and Michael.

"My God!" Michael muttered. "It's better to be killed ourselves than to stay here and endure this."

He began to scramble out of the window, and she, seeing that he was nearly mad with horror at his powerlessness, followed him in the hope of deflecting any rash action. Strangely enough, nobody interfered with their antics, and they had run nearly the whole length of the train, in order to find the officers in charge, before a tall man descending from one of the carriages barred their progress.

"Why, it's you!" Sylvia laughed, hysterically. "It's my rose-grower! Michael, do you hear? My rose-grower."

It really was Rakoff, decked out with barbaric trappings of silver and bristling with weapons, but his manners had not changed with his profession, and as soon as he recognized her he bowed politely and asked if he could be of any help.

"Can't you stop this massacre?" she begged. "Keep quiet, Michael; it's no good talking about the Red Cross."

"It was the fault of the Serbians," Rakoff explained. "They insulted my men. But what are you doing here?"

The violence of the drunken soldiers and comitadjis had soon worn itself out, and most of them were back again round the fire, drinking and singing as if nothing had happened. Sylvia perceived that Rakoff was sincerely anxious to make himself agreeable, and, treading on Michael's foot (he was in a fume of threats), she explained their position.

Rakoff looked up at the carriage from which he had just descended.

"The officers in command are drunk and insensible," he murmured. "I'm under an obligation to you. Do you want to stay in Bulgaria? Have you given your parole?" he asked Michael.

"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. _À la guerre comme à 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 êtes trop gentìl, monsieur._"

"_Rìen 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 très-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 bestiality--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 amusement 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 brassard 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 passed 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 assert 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 passions 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 pass 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 attitude, 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 gratitude 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.