CHAPTER VI

The more Sylvia pondered the coincidence of Queenie's flight with the

loss of Maud's passport the more positive she became that Zozo had

committed the theft. And with what object? It seemed unlikely that the

passport could be altered plausibly enough to be accepted as Queenie's

own property in these days when so much attention was being given to

passports and their reputed owners. Probably he had only used it as a

bait with which to lure her in the first instance; he would have known

that she could not read and might have counted upon the lion and the

unicorn to impress her with his ability to do something for her that

Sylvia had failed to do. Queenie must have been in a state of

discouragement through her not having come back to Avereshti on the

Sunday evening, as she had promised. The telegram she sent had really

been a mistake, because Queenie would never have asked any one in the

hotel to read it for her, and Zozo would assuredly have pretended

whatever suited his purpose if by chance it had been shown to him.

At first Sylvia had been regretting that she had not divined sooner the

explanation of Maud's missing passport, so that she could have warned

Mr. Mathers; but now she was glad, because whatever Queenie did, the

blame must be shared by herself and the British regulations. She

reproached herself for the attitude she had taken toward Queenie's

disappearance; she had done nothing in these days at Bucharest to help

the poor child, not even so much as to find out where she had gone. If

Zozo were indeed a German agent, what might not be the result of that

callousness? Yet, after all, he might not be anything of the kind; he

might merely have been roused by her own opposition to regain possession

of Queenie. Really it was difficult to say which explanation was more

galling to her own conscience. However, it was useless to do anything

now; there was as little probability of Queenie's being still in

Bucharest as of her being anywhere else. If Zozo were in German pay he

would find it easy enough to secure Queenie's entrance into a neutral

country; and if he were once more enamoured of his power over her, he

would certainly have taken precautions against any new intervention by

herself.

Late in the afternoon of Saturday, the 3d of October, Sylvia arrived at

Giurgiu, the last station in Rumania before crossing the Danube to enter

Bulgaria. It had been a slow journey, owing to the congestion of traffic

caused by the concentration of Rumanian troops upon the frontier. When

she was leaving the station to take the ferry she caught sight of

Philidor upon the platform.

"You here? I thought you were at Bralatz," she cried.

She was thinking that Philidor's presence was of good omen to her

journey; and as they walked together down to the quay she was glad that

her last memory of Rumania should be of this tall figure in his

light-blue cloak appearing indeed of heroic mold in the transuming fog

of the Danube that enmeshed them.

"You've left it very late," he said. "We expect every hour the Bulgarian

declaration of war upon the Entente. Ah, this disastrous summer! The

failure at the Dardanelles! The failure of the Russians! And now I doubt

if we shall do anything but cluster here upon the frontier like birds

gathering to go south."

"I am going south," Sylvia murmured.

"I wish that I were," he sighed. "Now is the moment to strike. When I

think of the Bulgarians on the other side of the river, and of my

troop--such splendid fellows--waiting and waiting! Sylvia, I am filled

with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are

black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is

fighting with you, do not remember the tawdry side of her, but think of

us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If--and God forbid that

you should read this--if you read that Rumania is fighting against you,

think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall

very early upon a Russian bayonet."

He held her for a moment in the folds of his bedewed cloak, while they

listened to the slow lapping of the river; then she mounted the gangway,

and the ferry glided into the fog.

There was a very long wait at Rustchuk; but Sylvia did not find the

Bulgarian officials discourteous; in fact, for the representatives of a

country upon the verge of going to war with her own, they were pleasant

and obliging. It was after midnight before the train left Rustchuk, and

some time before dawn that it reached Gorna Orechovitza, where it seemed

likely to wait forever. A chill wind was blowing down from the Balkans,

which had swept the junction clear of everybody except a squat Bulgarian

soldier who marched up and down in his dark-green overcoat, stamping his

feet; so little prospect was there of the train starting again, that all

the station officials were dozing round a stove in the buffet, and the

passengers had gone back to their _couchettes_. To Sylvia the desolation

was exhilarating with a sense of adventure. Rumania had already receded

far away--at any rate, the tawdry side of it--and the only picture that

remained was of Philidor upon the bank of that misty river. It seemed to

her now that the whole of the past eighteen months had been a morbid

night, such a new and biting sense of reality was blown down from the

mountains upon this windy October dawn, such magical horizons were being

written across this crimson sky.

The train did not reach Sofia until the afternoon; the station was

murmurous with excitement on account of the rumor of an ultimatum

presented that morning by the Russian Minister; Sylvia, as an

Englishwoman, became the object of a contemplative stare of curiosity,

in which was nothing insolent or hostile, but which gave her the

sensation of being just a material aid to dim unskilful meditations,

like a rosary in the hands of a converted savage. There was not such a

long wait at Sofia as she had expected, and toward dusk, after changing

trains, they reached Plevna; but at Zaribrod, the last station before

crossing the Serbian frontier, the train pulled up and showed no sign of

proceeding. The platform was thronged with Bulgarian troops, the sound

of whom, all talking excitedly, was like a prolonged sneeze.

At Plevna a tall, fair man had got into Sylvia's compartment. In

excellent French he told her that his name was Rakoff and that he was a

rose-grower. Sylvia expressed her astonishment that a Bulgarian

rose-grower should travel to Serbia at such a time, but he laughed at

the notion of war between Bulgaria and the Entente, avowed that the

agrarian party to which he belonged was unanimously against such a

disastrous step, and spoke cheerfully of doing good business in

Salonika. At Zaribrod he went off to make inquiries about the chance of

getting on that night, but he could obtain no information, and invited

Sylvia to dine with him at the station buffet. He also helped her to

change her _lei_ and _lewa_ into Serbian money and generally made

himself useful in matters of detail, such as putting her clock back an

hour to mid-European time. Upon these slight courtesies Sylvia and he

built up, as travelers are wont, one of those brief and violent

friendships that color the memory of a voyage like brilliant fugacious

blooms. Rakoff expressed loudly his disgust at seeing the soldiers

swarming upon the frontier; they had quite enough of war in Bulgaria two

years ago, and it was madness to think of losing the advantages of

neutrality, especially on behalf of the Germans. He talked of his acres

of roses, of the scent of them in the early morning, of the color of

them at noon, and gave Sylvia a small bottle of attar that drenched with

its stored-up sweetness even the smell of the massed soldiery. Sylvia,

in her turn, talked to him of her life on the stage, described her

success in London, and even confided in him her reason for abandoning it

all.

"One has these impulses," he agreed. "But it is better not to give way

to them. That is the advantage of my life as a rose-grower. There is

always something to do. It is a tranquil and beautiful existence. One

becomes almost a rose oneself. I hate to leave my fields, but my brother

was killed in the last war, and I have to travel occasionally since his

death. Ah, war! It is the sport of kings; yet our King Ferdinand is a

great gardener. He is only happy with his plants. It is terrible that a

small group of _arrivistes_ should deflect the whole course of our

national life, for I'm sure that a gardener must loathe war."

Sylvia thought of Philidor's denunciations of Englishmen who had found

that the Bulgarians were idealists, and sympathized with their

partiality when she listened to this gentle rose-grower.

At last, about two o'clock in the morning, the train was allowed to

proceed to Serbia. As it left the station the Bulgarian soldiers

shouted: "Hourrah! Hourrah! Hourrah!" in accents between menace and

triumph. She turned to her companion, with lifted eyebrows.

"They don't sound very pastoral," she said.

"Some Serbians in the train must have annoyed them," Rakoff explained.

"Well, I hope for the sake of the Serbians that we're not merely

shunting," Sylvia laughed.

The train went more slowly than ever after they left Pirot, the first

station in Serbia, where there had been an endless searching of half the

passengers, of which, apparently, everybody had suddenly got tired,

because the passengers in their portion of the train were not examined

at all.

"I doubt if this train will go beyond Nish," said Rakoff. "The Austrians

are advancing more rapidly than was expected. There is a great feeling

in Serbia against us. I shall travel back by sea from Salonika."

They reached Nish at about seven o'clock in the morning. When Rakoff was

standing outside the window of the compartment to help Sylvia with her

luggage he was touched on the shoulder by a Serbian officer, who said

something to him at which he started perceptibly. A moment later,

however, he called out to Sylvia that he should be back in a moment and

he would see her to the hotel. He waved his hand and passed on with the

officer.

Sylvia turned round to go out by the corridor, but was met in the

entrance by another Serbian officer who asked her to keep her seat.

"_Mais je suis Anglaise_," she protested.

"No doubt there's some mistake," he answered, politely, in excellent

English. "But I must request you to stay in the compartment."

He seated himself and asked her permission to smoke. The passengers had

all alighted and the train seemed very still. Presently another officer

came and demanded her papers, which he took away with him. Half an hour

went by and Sylvia began to feel hungry. She asked the officer in the

compartment if it would be possible to get some coffee.

"Of course," he answered, with a smile, calling to some one in the

corridor. A soldier with fixed bayonet came along and took his commands;

presently two cups of black coffee and a packet of cigarettes arrived.

The officer was young and had a pleasant face, but he declined to be

drawn into conversation beyond offering Sylvia her coffee and the

cigarettes. An hour passed in this way.

"How long am I likely to be kept here?" she asked, irritably.

The young officer looked uncomfortable and invited her to have another

cup of coffee, but he did not answer her question. At last, when Sylvia

was beginning to feel thoroughly miserable, there was a sound of voices

in the corridor, and an English captain in much-stained khaki appeared

in the entrance to the compartment.

"Good morning," he said. "Sorry you've been kept waiting like this. My

fault, I'm afraid. Fact is, I won a bath at piquet last night, and not

even the detention of a compatriot would make me forgo one exquisite

moment of it."

He was a tall, thin man in the early thirties, with a languid manner of

speech and movement that, though it seemed at first out of keeping with

the substance of his conversation, nevertheless oddly enhanced it

somehow. Sylvia had an impression that his point of view about

everything was worn and stained like his uniform, but that, like his

uniform, it preserved a fundamentally good quality of cloth and cut. His

arrival smoothed away much of her annoyance because she discerned in him

a capacity for approaching a case upon its own merits and a complete

indifference to any professionalism real or assumed for the duration of

the war. In a word, she found his personality sympathetic, and long

experience had given her the assurance that wherever this was so she

could count upon rousing a reciprocal confidence.

"Good morning, Antitch," he was saying to the young Serbian officer who

had been keeping guard over her. And to Sylvia he added: "Antitch was at

Oxford and speaks English like an Englishman."

"I've had very little chance of knowing if he could even speak his own

language," she said, sharply.

Her pleasure in finding an English officer at Nish was now being marred,

as so many pleasures are marred for women, by consciousness of the sight

she must present at this moderately early hour of the morning after

thirty-six hours in the train.

The Englishman laughed.

"Antitch takes an occasion like this very seriously," he said.

"It's the only way to treat half past eight in the morning," Sylvia

answered. "Even after a bath."

"I know. I must apologize for my effervescence at such an hour. We try

to assume this kind of attitude toward life when we assume temporary

commissions. I'm a parvenu to such an hour and don't really know how to

behave myself. Now at dawn you would have found my manner as easy as a

doctor's by a bedside. Well, what have you been doing?"

"Really, I think that's for you to tell me," Sylvia replied.

"Where did you meet your fellow-traveler--the Bulgarian?"

"The rose-grower?"

"Oh, you think he _is_ a rose-grower?"

"I didn't speculate upon the problem. He got into the train at Plevna

and did all he could to make himself useful and agreeable," Sylvia said.

"That's one for you, Antitch," the Englishman laughed. "Another

Bulgarophile. We're hopeless, aren't we? Upon my soul, people like

Prussians and Bulgarians are justified in thinking that we're traitors

to our convictions when they witness the immediate affinity between most

of them and most of us. I say, you must forgive me for being so full of

voluble buck this morning," he went on to Sylvia. "It really is the

effect of the bath. I feel like a general who's been made a knight

commander of that most honorable order for losing an impregnable

position and keeping his temper. Well, I'm sorry to bother you, but I

think you'd better be confronted by your accomplice. We have reason to

doubt his bona fides, and Colonel Michailovitch, our criminal expert,

would like to have your testimony. You'll intrust this lady to me?" he

asked Antitch, who saluted ceremoniously. "All right, old thing, you'll

bark your knuckles if you try to be too polite in a railway carriage.

Come along, then, and we'll tackle the colonel."

"I think I will come as well," said Antitch.

"Of course, of course. I don't know if it's etiquette to introduce a

suspected spy to her temporary jailer, but this is Lieutenant Antitch,

and my name's Hazlewood. You've come from Rumania, haven't you? Here,

let me carry your valise. Even if you are condemned by the court, you

won't be condemned to travel any more in this train. What an atrocious

sentence! _Voyages forcés_ for twenty years!"

"Rumania was very well," said Sylvia, as they passed along the corridor

to the platform.

"Still flirting with intervention, I suppose?" Hazlewood went on. "Odd

effect this war has of making one think of countries as acquaintances.

All Europe has been reduced to a suburb. I was sent up here from

Gallipoli, and I find Nish--which with deep respect to Antitch I had

always regarded as an unknown town consisting of mud and pigs, or as one

of the stations where it was possible to eat between Vienna and

Constantinople--as crowded and cosmopolitan as Monte Carlo. The whole

world and his future wife is here."

Sylvia was trying to remember how the name Hazlewood was faintly

familiar to her, but the recollection was elusive, and she asked about

her big trunk.

"If you're going on to Salonika," he advised, "you'd better get on as

soon as possible after the stain of suspicion has been erased from your

passport. Nish is full up now, but presently--" He broke off, and looked

across at Antitch with an expression of tenderness.

The young Serbian shrugged his shoulders; and they passed into the

office of Colonel Michailovitch, who was examining Sylvia's passport

with the rapt concentration of gaze that could only be achieved by some

one who was incapable of understanding a single word of what he was

apparently reading. The colonel bowed to Sylvia when she entered, and

invited her to sit down. Hazlewood asked him if he might look at the

passport.

"It's quite in order, I think, mon colonel," he said in French. The

colonel agreed with him.

"You have no objection to its being returned?"

"_Pas du tout, pas du tout! Plaisir, plaisir!_" exclaimed the colonel.

"And I think you would like to hear from--" Hazlewood glanced at the

passport--"from Miss Scarlett? Sylvia Scarlett?" he repeated, looking at

her. "Why, I believe we have a friend in common. Aren't you a friend of

Michael Fane?"

Sylvia realized how familiar his name should be to her; and she felt

that her eyes brightened in assent.

"He's in Serbia, you know," said Hazlewood.

"Now?" she asked.

"Yes. I'll tell you about him. _Je demande pardon, mon colonel, mais je

connais cette dame._"

"_Enchanté, enchanté_," said the colonel, getting up and shaking hands

cordially. "_Le Capitaine Antonivitch. Le Lieutenant Lazarevitch_," he

added, indicating the other officers, who saluted and shook hands with

her.

"They're awful dears, aren't they?" murmured Hazlewood. Then he went on

in French, "But, mon colonel, I beg you will ask Miss Scarlett any

questions you want to ask about this man Rakoff."

"_Vous me permittez, madame?_" the colonel inquired. "_Desolé, mais vous

comprenez, la guerre c'est comme ça, n'est-ce pas? Ah oui, la guerre._"

Everybody in the office sighed in echo, "_Ah oui, la guerre!_"

"Where did this man get into the train?"

"At Plevna, I believe."

"Did he talk about anything in particular?"

"About roses mostly. He said he did not believe there could be war with

Serbia. He spoke very bitterly against Germany."

Sylvia answered many more questions in favor of her fellow-traveler. The

colonel talked for a few moments in Serbian to his assistants;

presently a grubby-looking peasant was brought in, at whom the colonel

shouted a number of questions, the answers to which seemed to reduce him

to a state of nervous despair. One of the officers retired and came back

with the Bulgarian rose-grower; after a great deal of talking the

peasant was sent away and Rakoff's passport was handed back to him.

"_Je suis libre?_" asked the Bulgarian, looking round him.

The colonel bowed stiffly.

"This lady has spoken of your horticultural passion," said Hazlewood,

looking at Rakoff straight in the eyes.

"_Je suis infiniment reconnaissant_," the Bulgarian murmured, with a

bow. Then he saluted the company and went out.

"I daren't precipitate the situation," the colonel told Hazlewood. "He

must leave Nish at once, but if he tries to alight before the Greek

frontier, he can always be arrested."

Renewed apologies from the colonel and much cordial saluting from his

staff ushered Sylvia out of the office, whence she was followed by

Hazlewood and Antitch, the latter of whom begged her to show her

forgiveness by dining with him that night.

"My dear fellow," Hazlewood protested, "Miss Scarlett has promised to

dine with me."

In the end she agreed to dine with both, and begged them not to bother

about her any more, lest work should suffer.

"No, I'll see you into the town," Hazlewood said, "because I don't know

if there's a room in any hotel. You ought really to go on to Salonika at

once, but I suppose you want to see Nish on the eve of its calvary."

She looked at him in surprise: there was such a depth of bitterness in

his tone.

"I should hate to be a mere sightseer."

"No, forgive me for talking like that. I'm sure you're not, and to show

my penitence for the imputation let me help you about your room."

Sylvia and Hazlewood bowed to Antitch and walked out of the station.

"They've started to commandeer every vehicle and every animal,"

Hazlewood explained, "so we shall have to walk. It's not far. This youth

will carry your bag. Your heavy luggage had better remain in the

_consigne_. I suppose you more or less guessed what was Michailovitch's

difficulty about your friend the Bulgarian rose-grower?"

"No, I don't think I did really."

Sylvia did not care anything about the Bulgarian or the colonel; she was

only anxious to hear something about Michael Fane; but because she was

so anxious, she could not bring herself to start the topic and must wait

for Hazlewood.

"Well, this fellow Rakoff was identified by that peasant chap who was

brought in--or at any rate so almost certainly recognized as to amount

to identification--as one of the most bloodthirsty _comitadji_ leaders."

"What do they do?"

She felt that she must appear to take some interest in what Hazlewood

was telling her, after the way he had helped and was helping her and

perhaps would help her.

"Their chief mission in life," he explained, "is the Bulgarization of

Macedonia, which they effect in the simplest way possible by murdering

everybody who is not Bulgarian. They're also rather fond of Bulgarizing

towns and churches by means of dynamite. Altogether the most unpleasant

ruffians left in Europe, and in yielding them the superlative I'm not

forgetting Orangemen and Junkers. The colonel did not believe that he

was a rose-grower, but he was afraid to arrest him, because at this

moment it is essential not to give the least excuse for precipitating

the situation. We expect to hear at any moment that Bulgaria has

declared war on Serbia; but all sorts of negotiations are still in

progress. One of the characteristics of our policy during this war is

to give a frenzied attention to the molding of a situation after it has

hopelessly hardened. This Austrian advance is bad enough, but there's

probably worse to follow, and we don't want the worst yet. The people

here are counting on French and English help, and they are frightened to

death of doing anything that will upset us. As a matter of fact, your

evidence was a godsend to the colonel, because it gave him an excuse to

let Rakoff go without losing his dignity. And of course there's always a

chance that the fellow is what he claims to be--a peaceful rose-grower,

though I doubt it: I can't imagine any one of that trade traveling

through Serbia at such a moment. I believe myself that the Germans

furnish condemned criminals with sufficiently suspicious accessories to

occupy the Allied Intelligence, while they get away with the real goods.

Do you ever read spy-novels? Our spy-novels and spy-plays must have been

of priceless assistance to the Germans in letting them know how to coach

their condemned criminals for the part. There's only one thing on earth

that bears less resemblance to its original than the English novelist's

spy, and that is his detective."

"Where is Michael Fane?" Sylvia asked; she could bear it no longer.

"He's out here with Lady What's-her-name's Red Cross unit. I don't

really know where he is at the moment--probably being jolted by a mule

on a tract leading south from Belgrade. His sister's out here, too. Her

husband--an awfully jolly fellow--was killed at Ypres. When did you see

Michael last?"

"Oh, not for--not for nearly nine years," she answered.

There was a silence; Sylvia wished now that she had let Hazlewood lead

up to the subject of Michael; he must be thinking of the time when his

friend was engaged to Lily; he must be wondering about herself, for that

he had remembered her name after so many years showed that Michael's

account of her had impressed itself upon him.

"If he's on his way south, he'll be in Nish soon," Hazlewood said,

breaking the silence abruptly. "You'd better wait and see him. Nine

years last month: September, nineteen-six."

"No, it was June," Sylvia said. "Early June."

"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking of Michael in relation to myself."

He sighed, and at that moment coming down the squalid street appeared a

band of children shepherded by a fussy schoolmaster and carrying

bouquets of flowers, who, at the sight of Hazlewood, cheered shrilly.

"You seem to be very popular here already," Sylvia observed.

"Do you know what those flowers are for?" he asked, gravely.

She shook her head.

"They're for the British and French troops that these poor dears are

expecting to arrive by every train to help them against the Austrians. I

tell you it makes me feel the greatest humbug on earth. They are going

to decorate the station to-morrow. It's like putting flowers on their

country's tomb. Ah, don't let's talk about it--don't let's think about

it," he broke out, passionately. "Serbia has been one of my refuges

during the last nine years, and I stand here now like a mute at a

funeral."

He walked on, tugging savagely at his mustache, until he could turn

round to Sylvia with a laugh again.

"My mustache represents the badge of my servitude. I tug at it as in the

old Greek days slaves must have tugged at their leaden collars. The day

I shave it off I shall be free again. Here's the hotel where I hang

out--almost literally, for my room is so small and so dirty that I

generally put my pillow on the window-sill. The hotel is full of bugs

and diplomats, but the coffee is good. However, it's no good raising

your hopes, because I know that there isn't a spare room. Never mind,"

he added, "I've got another room at another hotel which is equally full

of bugs, but unfrequented by diplomats. It is being reserved for my

lady secretary, but she hasn't turned up yet, and so I make you a

present of it till she does."

"Why are you being so kind?" Sylvia asked.

"I don't know," Hazlewood replied. "You amused me, I think, sitting

there in that railway carriage with Antitch. It's such a relief to

arrest somebody who doesn't instantly begin to shriek 'Consul! Consul!'

Most women regard consuls as Gieve waistcoats, that is to say, something

which is easily inflated by a woman's breath, has a flask of brandy in

one pocket, and affords endless support. No, seriously, it happens that

Michael Fane talked a great deal about you on a memorable occasion in my

life, and since he's a friend of mine I'd like to do all I can for you.

For the moment--here's the other hotel, nothing is far apart in Nish,

not even life and death--for the moment I must leave you, or rather for

the whole day, I'm afraid, because I've got the dickens of a lot to do.

However, it's just as well the lady secretary hasn't turned up, because

it's really impossible to feel very securely established in Nish. I

expect, as a matter of fact, she's been kidnapped by some white slavery

of the staff en route. Miss Potberry is her name. It's a depressing name

for a secretary, but true romance knows no laws of nomenclature, so I

still have hope. Poor lady.

"Miss Potberry muttered, 'Oh, squish!

I don't want to go on to Nish.

I like Malta better!'

The general said, 'Let her

Remain here, if that is her wish,

and send a telegram to London to say that she has been taken ill and is

unable to proceed farther, but that her services can be usefully

employed here.' I say, I must run! I'll come and fetch you for dinner

about half past seven."

He handed her over to the care of the hotel porter and vanished.

The room that Hazlewood had lent to Sylvia possessed a basin, a bed,

five hooks, a chair, the remains of a table, an oleograph of a battle

between Serbians and Bulgarians that resembled a fire at a circus, and a

balcony. At such a time in Nish a balcony made up for any absence of

comfort, so much was there to look at in the square full of stunted

trees and mud, surrounded by stunted houses, and crammed with carts,

bullocks, donkeys, horses, diplomats, soldiers, princes, refugees,

peasants, poultry, newspaper correspondents, and children, the whole

mass flushed by a spray of English nurses, as a pigsty by a Dorothy

Perkins rambler.

Sylvia searched the crowd for a glimpse of Michael Fane, though she knew

that he was almost certainly not yet arrived. Yet if the Serbians were

evacuating Belgrade and if Michael had been in Belgrade, he was bound to

arrive ultimately in Nish. She wondered how long she could keep this

room and prayed that Miss Potberry would not appear. The notion of

traveling all the way here from Petrograd, only to miss him at the end,

was not to be contemplated; his sister was in Serbia, too, that charming

sister who had flashed through her dressing-room at the Pierian like a

lovely view seen from a train. After the last eighteen months she was

surely justified in leaving nothing undone that might bring about

another meeting. Hazlewood had spoken of being overworked. Could she not

offer her services in place of Miss Potberry? Anything, anything to have

an excuse to linger in Nish, an excuse that would absolve her from the

charge of a frivolous egotism in occupying space that would soon be more

than ever badly needed. She had thought that destiny had driven her

south from Petrograd to Kieff, from Kieff to Odessa, from Odessa to

Bucharest, from Bucharest to Nish for Queenie and for Philip, but surely

it was for more than was represented by either of them.

"Incredible ass that I am," she thought. "What is Michael to me and what

am I to Michael? Not so easily is time's slow ruin repaired. If we

meet, we shall meet for perhaps a dinner together; that will be all.

What romances must this war have woven and what romances must it not

have shattered as swiftly! Romances! Yet, how dare I use such a word

about myself? Nine years, nine remorseless deadening years, lie on top

of what was never more than a stillborn fancy, and I am expecting to see

it burst forth to bloom in Nish. It's the effect of isolation. Time goes

by more slowly when one only looks at oneself, and one forgets the

countless influences in other people's lives. But I should like to see

him again. Oh yes, quite ordinarily and unemotionally I should like to

shake hands with him and perhaps talk for a little while. There is

nothing extravagantly sentimental in thinking so much."

Sylvia had often enough been conscious of her isolation from the world

and often enough she had tried to assuage this sense of loneliness by

indulging it to the utmost--to such an extent indeed that she had

reached the point of hating not merely anything that interfered with her

own isolation, but even anything that interfered with the isolation of

other people. She had turned the armor of self-defense into a means of

aggression, although by doing so she had destroyed the strength of her

position. Her loneliness that during these last months seemed to have

acquired the more positive qualities of independence was now only too

miserably evident as loneliness; and unless she could apply the vital

suffering she had undergone recently, so that the years of her prime

might bear manifest fruit, she knew that the sense of futility in

another nine years would be irreparable indeed. At present the treasure

of eighteen months of continuous and deliberate effort to avoid futility

was still rich with potentiality; but the human heart was a deceptive

treasure-house never very strong against the corruption of time, which,

when unlocked, might at any moment display nothing except coffers filled

with dust.

"But why do I invite disillusionment by counting upon this meeting with

Michael Fane? Why should he cure this loneliness and how will he cure

it? Why, in two words, do I want to meet him again? Partly, I think,

it's due to the haunting incompleteness of our first intercourse, to

which is added the knowledge that now I am qualified to complete that

intercourse, at any rate, so far as my attitude toward him is concerned.

And the way I want to show my comprehension of him is to explain about

myself. I am really desperately anxious that he should hear what

happened to me after we parted. For one thing, he is bound to be

sympathetic with this craving for an assurance of the value of faith. I

want to find how far he has traveled in the same direction as myself by

a different road. I divine somehow that his experience will be the

complement to my own, that it will illumine the wretched cross-country

path which I've taken through life. If I find that he, relying almost

entirely upon the adventures of thought, has arrived at a point of which

I am also in sight, notwithstanding that I have taken the worst and

roughest road, a road, moreover, that was almost all the time

trespassing upon forbidden territory, then I shall be able to throw off

this oppression of loneliness. But why should I rely more upon his

judgment than anybody else's?"

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

"What is attraction?" she asked herself. "It exists, and there's an end

of it. I had the same sense of intimacy with his sister in a

conversation of five minutes. Then am I in love with him? But isn't

being in love a condition that is brought about by circumstances out of

attraction? Being in love is merely the best way of illustrating

affinity. Ah, that word! When a woman of thirty-two begins to talk about

affinities, she has performed half her emotional voyage; the sunken

rocks and eddies of the dangerous age may no longer be disregarded.

Thirty-two, and yet I feel younger than I did at twenty-three. At

twenty-three experience mostly bitter was weighing me down; at

thirty-two I know that experience must not be regarded as anything more

important than food or drink or traveling in a train or any of the

incidental aids to material existence. Then what is important? I should

be rash to hazard a statement while I am looking at this heterogeneous

mob below. One cannot help supposing that the war will bring about a

readjustment of values."

The feeling of unrest and insecurity in the square at Nish on that

Monday morning was almost frightful in its emotional actuality; it gave

Sylvia an envy to fling herself into the middle of it, as when one sits

upon a rock lashed by angry seas and longs to glut an insane curiosity

about the extent of one's helplessness. This squalid Serbian town gave

her the illusion of having for the moment concentrated upon itself the

great forces that were agitating the world.

"I don't believe anybody realizes yet how much was let slip with the

dogs of war," she said to herself. "People are always talking about the

vastness of this war, but they are always thinking in terms of

avoirdupois; they have never doubted that the decimal system will

express their most grandiose calculations. The biggest casualty list

that was ever known, the longest battle, the heaviest gun, all these

flatter poor humanity with a sense of its importance: but when all the

records have been broken and when all the congratulations upon outdoing

the past have been worn thin, to what will humanity turn from the new

chaos it has created? And this is one of the fruits of the great

nineteenth century, this miserable square packed with the evidence of

civilization. Perhaps I'm too parochial: at the other end of the

universe planets may be warring upon planets. If that be so, we lose

even the consolation of a universal record and must fall back upon a

mere world record; in eternity our greatest war will have sunk to a

brawl in a slum. How can mankind believe in man? How can mankind reject

God?" she demanded, passionately.

Sylvia did not dine with Hazlewood or Antitch that evening, because they

were both too busy. Hazlewood begged her to stay on in the room and

promised that he would try to make use of her, though he was too busy at

present to find time to explain how she could be useful. Sylvia did not

like to worry him with inquiries about Michael, and she spent the next

few days watching from her balcony the concourse of distracted human

beings in the square. On Saturday when news had arrived that the

Austrians had entered Belgrade, and when every hour was bringing convoys

of refugees from the north, a rumor suddenly sprang up that thousands of

British and French troops were on their way from Salonika, that the

Greeks had invaded Bulgaria, and that Turkey had made peace. Such an

accumulation of good news meant that the miseries of Serbia would soon

be over. The railway station was hung with more flags and scattered with

more flowers than ever; and an enterprising coffee-house keeper

anticipated the arrival of British troops by hanging out a sign

inscribed, GUD BIIR IS FOR SEL PLIS TO COM OLD ENGLAND BIRHOUS.

Sylvia was reading this notice when Hazlewood came up and asked her to

dine with him that evening.

"I'm so sorry I've had to leave you entirely to yourself, but I've not

had a moment, and I hate dining when I can't talk. To-night there seems

a lull in the stream of telegraphic questions to which I've been

subjected all this week."

"But please don't apologize. I feel guilty in staying here at all,

especially when I'm doing nothing but stare."

"Well, I was going to talk to you about that. You ought to leave

to-morrow or the next day. The Bulgarians are sure to move, now that the

Austrians have got Belgrade, and that means fresh swarms of fugitives

from the east; it may also mean that communications with Greece will be

cut."

"But the British advance?"

Hazlewood looked at her.

"Ah yes, the British advance," he murmured.

"And you promised that you'd find me some work," Sylvia said.

"Frankly, it's no good your beginning to learn now."

She must have shown as much disappointment as she felt, for he added:

"Well, after dinner to-night you shall take down the figures of one or

two long telegrams."

"Anything," offered Sylvia, eagerly.

"It's all that Miss Potberry could have done at present. I'm not writing

any reports, so her expert shorthand of which I was assured would have

been wasted. Reports! One of the revelations of this war to me was the

extraordinary value that professional soldiers attach to the typewritten

word. I suppose it's a minor manifestation of the impulse that made

Wolfe say he would rather have written Gray's 'Elegy' than take Quebec.

If typewriters had been invented in his time he might have said, 'I

would rather be in the War Office and be able to read my report of the

capture of Quebec than take it.' I'm sure that the chief reason of a

knowledge of Latin being still demanded for admission to Sandhurst is

the hope universally cherished in the army that every cadet's haversack

contains a new long Latin intransitive verb which can be used

transitively to supplant one of the short Saxon verbs that still

disfigure military correspondence. I can imagine such a cadet saying,

'Sir, I would sooner have been the first man that wrote of evacuating

wounded than take Berlin.' The trouble with men of action is that

something written means for them something done. The labor of writing is

so tremendous and the consequent mental fatigue so overwhelming that

they cannot bring themselves to believe otherwise. The general public,

even after fifteen months of war, has the same kind of respect for the

printed word. How long does it take you to read a letter? I imagine that

two readings would give you the gist of it? Well, it takes a British

general at least five readings, and even then he only understands a word

here and there, unless it's written in his own barbaric departmental

English. If I had a general over me here--which, thank Heaven, I've

not--and I were to make a simple suggestion, he would invite me to put

it on paper. This he would do because he would presume that life would

be too short for me to succeed, and that, therefore, he should be

forever spared having to make up his mind in response to any prompting

on my side. If, on the other hand, I did by chance embody my suggestion

in typescript, he would be amazed at the result, and by some alchemy of

thought, if he could write on the top 'Concur,' he would feel that he

had created the suggestion himself. The effort even to write 'Concur'

represents for the average British general the amount of labor involved

by a woman in producing a child, and ... but look here--to-night at half

past seven. So long!"

Hazlewood hurried away; at dinner that night he went on with his

discourse.

"You know that among savages certain words are taboo and that in the

Middle Ages certain words possessed magic properties? The same thing

applies to the army and to the navy. For instance, the navy has a word

of power that will open anything. That word is 'submit'. If you wrote

'submitted' at the top of a communication I believe you could tell an

admiral that he was a damn fool, but if you wrote 'suggested' you'd be

shot at dawn. In the same way a naval officer indorses your 'submission'

by writing 'approved' whereas a soldier writes 'concur.' I've often

wondered what would happen to a general who wrote 'agree'. Certainly any

junior officer who wrote 'begin' for 'commence' or 'allow' for 'permit'

would be cashiered. I was rather lucky because, after being suspected

for the simplicity of my reports, I managed to use the word 'connote'

once. My dear woman, my reputation was made. Generals came up and

congratulated me personally, and I'm credibly informed that all the new

military ciphers will include the word, which was just what was wanted

to supplant 'mean,' a monosyllable that had been a blot on military

correspondence for years."

"Are you talking seriously?" Sylvia asked. "You can't really connote

what you say."

Hazlewood indicated the room where they were dining.

"Which are the English diplomats?" he demanded.

"That's perfectly easy to tell," she replied.

"And why?" he went on. "Simply because they've made no concession to

being in Nish at a moment of crisis. I invite you to regard my friend

Harry Vereker. See how he defies any Horatian regret for lapsed years.

Positively he is still at Oxford. Can't you hear above all this clatter

of cosmopolitanism in a pigsty the suave insistency of his voice

impressing upon you by its quality of immutable self-assurance that,

whatever happens to the rest of the world, nothing vitally deformative

ever happens to England?"

"But what has the voice of a secretary to do with the military abuse of

Latin derivations?"

"Not much, I admit, except in its serene ruthlessness. An English

officer compels a Latin verb to fit in with his notion of what a Latin

verb ought to do just in the same way as he expects a Spaniard to regard

with pleasure his occupation of Gibraltar: any protest by a grammarian

or an idealistic politician would strike him as impertinent. Harry

Vereker's voice is a still more ineradicable manifestation of the

spirit. Listen! He is asking the waiter in Serbian for salt, but he does

so in a way that reminds one of mankind's concession to animals in using

forms of communication that the latter can understand. It is not to be

supposed that the dog invented patting: Harry's Serbian is his way of

patting the waiter: it is his language, not the waiter's. Personally I

can't help confessing that I admire this attitude to the world, and I

only wish that it could be eternally preserved. The great historical

tragedy of this war--I'm putting on one side for the moment the

countless personal tragedies that are included in it, and trying to

regard the war as Mr. Buckle regarded civilization--the great historical

tragedy will be the Englishman's loss of his personality. When we look

back at the historical tragedy of the fall of the Roman Empire, we think

less of the _civis Romanus sum_ than of the monuments of architecture,

law, political craft, and the rest that remain imperishably part of

human progress. In the same way a thousand years hence I assume that the

British Empire will be considered to have played a part only second to

the Roman Empire in the manifest results of its domination. But what has

been lost and what will be lost is the individual Roman's attitude and

the individual Englishman's. Not all the remains of the Roman Empire

have been enough really to preserve for us the indefinable flavor of

being a Roman, and with much more material at his disposal I defy the

perfect cosmopolitan of mixed Aryan, Mongol, and Semitic blood to

realize a thousand years from now Harry Vereker's tone of voice in

asking that waiter for the salt. No, no, the cosmopolitan of the future

will turn aside from the records of the past and in Esperanto murmur

sadly to himself that something is missing from his appreciation.

Perhaps I can illustrate my meaning better if I compare the Athenians

with the French. I feel that the art of both enduring through time to

come will be enough. I have no regret for the personal attitude of the

Athenian, and in the same way I don't feel that the cosmopolitan of a

thousand years hence will lose anything by not meeting the Frenchman of

to-day. It is Athens and France rather than the Athenian or the

Frenchman of which the world is enamoured. How often have I heard a

foreigner say: 'The politics of England do not please me: I find it a

brigand policy, but the individual Englishman is always a gentleman.' An

individual Englishman like Byron is worth more to England than twenty

Chamberlains or Greys, who yet have more right to represent their

country: he comes as such a romantic surprise. A Frenchman like

Lafayette is taken for granted. The word of an Englishman is proverbial;

the perfidy of Albion equally so."

"And the Germans?" Sylvia asked.

"Oh, they have never been thought worthy of a generalization. We have

apprehended them vaguely as one apprehends pigs--as a nation of gross

feeders and badly dressed women drinking a mixture of treacle and onions

they call beer, with a reputation for guttural peregrination and

philosophy."

"Their music," Sylvia protested.

"Yes, that is difficult to explain. Yes, I think we must give them that;

but when we remember Bach and Schumann, we must not forget Wagner and

the German band."

"I think your characterization is rather crude," Sylvia said.

"It is crude. But there is no bygone civilization with which Germanic

_Kultur_ can be compared. So as with any novelty one depends upon a

sneer to hide one's own ignorance."

"The Italians interest me more," Sylvia said.

"The Italians seem to me rather to resemble the English, and naturally,

because they are the most direct heirs of Rome. I'm bound to say that I

don't believe in an imperial future for them now. It's surely impossible

to revive Rome. They still preserve an immense capacity for political

craft, but it is an egotism that lacks the sublime unconsciousness of

English egotism. The Italians have never recovered from _Il Principe_ of

Machiavelli. It's an eclectic statecraft; like their painting from

Raphael onward, it's too _soigné_. Moreover, Italy suffers from the

perpetual sacrifice of the southern Italian to the northern. The real

Italians belong to the south, and for me the _risorgimento_ has always

been a phenix rising from the ashes of the south; the bird is most

efficient, but I distrust its aquiline appearance. One of the most

remarkable surprises of this war has been the superior fighting

quality--the more quickly beating heart--of the Neapolitans and

Sicilians. I found the same surprising quality in the Greeks during the

last Balkan war. To me, who regard the Mediterranean as still _the_

civilized sea of the world, the triumph of Naples has been a delight."

"And the Russians?" Sylvia went on.

"Ah, the future of Russia is as much an unknown quantity as the future

of womanhood. Personally I am convinced that the next great civilization

will be Slavonic, and my chief grudge against mortality is that I must

die long before it even begins to draw near, for it is still as far away

as Johannine Christianity will be from the Petrine Christianity to which

we have been too long devoted. But when it does come, I am sure that it

will easily surpass all previous civilizations, because I believe it

will resolve the eternal dualism in humanity that hitherto we have

expressed roughly by Empire and Papacy or by Church and State. I

envisage Russia as containing the civilization of the soul, though God

knows through what agony of blood and tears it may have to pass before

it can express what it contains. In Russia there still exists a genuine

worship of the Czar as a superior being, and a nation that respects the

divinity about a king is still as deep in the mire of fetichism as the

most debased Melanesians. We worship kings in England, I admit, but only

snobbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our

most exalted snobs dream of paying divine honors to kingship; we are too

much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to

an inherited consciousness of Cæsarian excesses."

"And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia.

"Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself

by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers--a cocotte

with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment.

Austria! rouged and raddled, plumped and corseted, a suitable mistress

for that licentious but still tragic old buffoon who rules her."

"What a wonderful sermon on so slight a text as a friend's asking a

Serbian waiter for salt," Sylvia said.

"Ah, you led me away from the main thread by asking me direct questions.

I meant to confine myself to England."

"_On peut toujours revenir aux moutons_" Sylvia said.

"New Zealand mutton, eh?" Hazlewood laughed. "Wasn't it a New Zealander

who was to meditate upon the British Empire a thousand years hence amid

the ruins of St. Paul's?"

"Well, go on," she urged.

"You're one of those listening sirens so much more fatal than the

singing variety," he laughed.

"Oh, but I'm very rarely a good listener," she protested.

Hazlewood bowed.

"And don't forget that sirens have always an _arrière-pensée_," she went

on. "However well you talk, you'll find that I shall demand something in

return for my attention. Don't look alarmed; it won't involve you

personally."

Sylvia was getting a good deal of pleasure out of his monologue; it was

just what her nerves needed, this sense of being entertained while all

the time she preserved, so far as any reality of personal intercourse

was concerned, a complete detachment. She was quite definitely aware of

wanting Hazlewood to exhaust himself that she might either bring her

part of the conversation round to Michael or, at any rate, exact from

him an excuse for lingering in Nish until Michael should come there. Now

her host was off again:

"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.