It was but a day or two after the outbreak of the war that it was
believed that an expeditionary force was to be sent to France, to help
in arresting the Teutonic tide that was now breaking over Belgium; but
no public and authoritative news came till after the first draft of the
force had actually set foot on French soil. From the regiment of the
Guards which Michael had rejoined, Francis was among the first batch of
officers to go, and that evening Michael took down the news to Sylvia.
Already stories of German barbarity were rife, of women violated, of
defenceless civilians being shot down for no object except to terrorise,
and to bring home to the Belgians the unwisdom of presuming to cross the
will of the sovereign people. To-night, in the evening papers, there had
been a fresh batch of these revolting stories, and when Michael entered
the studio where Sylvia and her mother were sitting, he saw the girl let
drop behind the sofa the paper she had been reading. He guessed what she
must have found there, for he had already seen the paper himself, and
her silence, her distraction, and the misery of her face confirmed his
conjecture.
“I’ve brought you a little news to-night,” he said. “The first draft
from the regiment went off to-day.”
Mrs. Falbe put down her book, marking the place.
“Well, that does look like business, then,” she said, “though I must say
I should feel safer if they didn’t send our soldiers away. Where have
they gone to?”
“Destination unknown,” said Michael. “But it’s France. My cousin has
gone.”
“Francis?” asked Sylvia. “Oh, how wicked to send boys like that.”
Michael saw that her nerves were sharply on edge. She had given him no
greeting, and now as he sat down she moved a little away from him. She
seemed utterly unlike herself.
“Mother has been told that every Englishman is as brave as two Germans,”
she said. “She likes that.”
“Yes, dear,” observed Mrs. Falbe placidly. “It makes one feel safer. I
saw it in the paper, though; I read it.”
Sylvia turned on Michael.
“Have you seen the evening paper?” she asked.
Michael knew what was in her mind.
“I just looked at it,” he said. “There didn’t seem to be much news.”
“No, only reports, rumours, lies,” said Sylvia.
Mrs. Falbe got up. It was her habit to leave the two alone together,
since she was sure they preferred that; incidentally, also, she got on
better with her book, for she found conversation rather distracting. But
to-night Sylvia stopped her.
“Oh, don’t go yet, mother,” she said. “It is very early.”
It was clear that for some reason she did not want to be left alone with
Michael, for never had she done this before. Nor did it avail anything
now, for Mrs. Falbe, who was quite determined to pursue her reading
without delay, moved towards the door.
“But I am sure Michael wants to talk to you, dear,” she said, “and you
have not seen him all day. I think I shall go up to bed.”
Sylvia made no further effort to detain her, but when she had gone, the
silence in which they had so often sat together had taken on a perfectly
different quality.
“And what have you been doing?” she said. “Tell me about your day. No,
don’t. I know it has all been concerned with war, and I don’t want to
hear about it.”
“I dined with Aunt Barbara,” said Michael. “She sent you her love. She
also wondered why you hadn’t been to see her for so long.”
Sylvia gave a short laugh, which had no touch of merriment in it.
“Did she really?” she asked. “I should have thought she could have
guessed. She set every nerve in my body jangling last time I saw her by
the way she talked about Germans. And then suddenly she pulled herself
up and apologised, saying she had forgotten. That made it worse!
Michael, when you are unhappy, kindness is even more intolerable than
unkindness. I would sooner have Lady Barbara abusing my people than
saying how sorry she is for me. Don’t let’s talk about it! Let’s do
something. Will you play, or shall I sing? Let’s employ ourselves.”
Michael followed her lead.
“Ah, do sing,” he said. “It’s weeks since I have heard you sing.”
She went quickly over to the bookcase of music by the piano.
“Come, then, let’s sing and forget,” she said. “Hermann always said the
artist was of no nationality. Let’s begin quick. These are all German
songs: don’t let’s have those. Ah, and these, too! What’s to be done?
All our songs seem to be German.”
Michael laughed.
“But we’ve just settled that artists have no nationality, so I suppose
art hasn’t either,” he said.
Sylvia pulled herself together, conscious of a want of control, and laid
her hand on Michael’s shoulder.
“Oh, Michael, what should I do without you?” she said. “And yet--well,
let me sing.”
She had placed a volume of Schubert on the music-stand, and opening it
at random he found “Du Bist die Ruhe.” She sang the first verse, but in
the middle of the second she stopped.
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s no use.”
He turned round to her.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “But you know that.”
She moved away from him, and walked down to the empty fireplace.
“I can’t keep silence,” she said, “though I know we settled not to talk
of those things when necessarily we cannot feel absolutely at one. But,
just before you came in, I was reading the evening paper. Michael, how
can the English be so wicked as to print, and I suppose to believe,
those awful things I find there? You told me you had glanced at it.
Well, did you glance at the lies they tell about German atrocities?”
“Yes, I saw them,” said Michael. “But it’s no use talking about them.”
“But aren’t you indignant?” she said. “Doesn’t your blood boil to read
of such infamous falsehoods? You don’t know Germans, but I do, and it is
impossible that such things can have happened.”
Michael felt profoundly uncomfortable. Some of these stories which
Sylvia called lies were vouched for, apparently, by respectable
testimony.
“Why talk about them?” he said. “I’m sure we were wise when we settled
not to.”
She shook her head.
“Well, I can’t live up to that wisdom,” she said. “When I think of this
war day and night and night and day, how can I prevent talking to
you about it? And those lies! Germans couldn’t do such things. It’s a
campaign of hate against us, set up by the English Press.”
“I daresay the German Press is no better,” said Michael.
“If that is so, I should be just as indignant about the German Press,”
said she. “But it is only your guess that it is so.”
Suddenly she stopped, and came a couple of steps nearer him.
“Michael, it isn’t possible that you believe those things of us?” she
said.
He got up.
“Ah, do leave it alone, Sylvia,” he said. “I know no more of the truth
or falsity of it than you. I have seen just what you have seen in the
papers.”
“You don’t feel the impossibility of it, then?” she asked.
“No, I don’t. There seems to have been sworn testimony. War is a cruel
thing; I hate it as much as you. When men are maddened with war, you
can’t tell what they would do. They are not the Germans you know, nor
the Germans I know, who did such things--not the people I saw when I
was with Hermann in Baireuth and Munich a year ago. They are no more the
same than a drunken man is the same as that man when he is sober. They
are two different people; drink has made them different. And war has
done the same for Germany.”
He held out his hand to her. She moved a step back from him.
“Then you think, I suppose, that Hermann may be concerned in those
atrocities,” she said.
Michael looked at her in amazement.
“You are talking sheer nonsense, Sylvia,” he said.
“Not at all. It is a logical inference, just an application of the
principle you have stated.”
Michael’s instinct was just to take her in his arms and make the
final appeal, saying, “We love each other, that’s all,” but his reason
prevented him. Sylvia had said a monstrous thing in cold blood, when she
suggested that he thought Hermann might be concerned in these deeds, and
in cold blood, not by appealing to her emotions, must she withdraw that.
“I’m not going to argue about it,” he said. “I want you to tell me at
once that I am right, that it was sheer nonsense, to put no other name
to it, when you suggested that I thought that of Hermann.”
“Oh, pray put another name to it,” she said.
“Very well. It was a wanton falsehood,” said Michael, “and you know it.”
Truly this hellish nightmare of war and hate which had arisen brought
with it a brood not less terrible. A day ago, an hour ago he would have
merely laughed at the possibility of such a situation between Sylvia and
himself. Yet here it was: they were in the middle of it now.
She looked up at him flashing with indignation, and a retort as stinging
as his rose to her lips. And then quite suddenly, all her anger went
from her, as her, heart told her, in a voice that would not be silenced,
the complete justice of what he had said, and the appeal that Michael
refrained from making was made by her to herself. Remorse held her on
its spikes for her abominable suggestion, and with it came a sense
of utter desolation and misery, of hatred for herself in having thus
quietly and deliberately said what she had said. She could not account
for it, nor excuse herself on the plea that she had spoken in passion,
for she had spoken, as he felt, in cold blood. Hence came the misery in
the knowledge that she must have wounded Michael intolerably.
Her lips so quivered that when she first tried to speak no words would
come. That she was truly ashamed brought no relief, no ease to her
surrender, for she knew that it was her real self who had spoken thus
incredibly. But she could at least disown that part of her.
“I beg your pardon, Michael,” she said. “I was atrocious. Will you
forgive me? Because I am so miserable.”
He had nothing but love for her, love and its kinsman pity.
“Oh, my dear, fancy you asking that!” he said.
Just for the moment of their reconciliation, it seemed to both that they
came closer to each other than they had ever been before, and the chance
of the need of any such another reconciliation was impossible to the
verge of laughableness, so that before five minutes were past he could
make the smile break through her tears at the absurdity of the moment
that now seemed quite unreal. Yet that which was at the root of their
temporary antagonism was not removed by the reconciliation; at most
they had succeeded in cutting off the poisonous shoot that had suddenly
sprouted from it. The truth of this in the days that followed was
horribly demonstrated.
It was not that they ever again came to the spoken bitterness of words,
for the sharpness of them, once experienced, was shunned by each of
them, but times without number they had to sheer off, and not approach
the ground where these poisoned tendrils trailed. And in that sense of
having to take care, to be watchful lest a chance word should bring the
peril close to them, the atmosphere of complete ease and confidence,
in which alone love can flourish, was tainted. Love was there, but its
flowers could not expand, it could not grow in the midst of this bitter
air. And what made the situation more and increasingly difficult was
the fact that, next to their love for each other, the emotion that
most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was
impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that
would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their
power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the
feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came
fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each
knew that the other had seen them, and yet neither could mention them.
For while Sylvia could not believe them, Michael could not help doing
so, and thus there was no common ground on which they could speak of
them. Often Mrs. Falbe, in whose blood, it would seem, no sense of
race beat at all, would add to the embarrassment by childlike comments,
saying at one time in reference to such things that she made a point of
not believing all she saw in the newspapers, or at another ejaculating,
“Well, the Germans do seem to have behaved very cruelly again!” But no
emotion appeared to colour these speeches, while all the emotion of the
world surged and bubbled behind the silence of the other two.
Then followed the darkest days that England perhaps had ever known, when
the German armies, having overcome the resistance of Belgium, suddenly
swept forward again across France, pushing before them like the jetsam
and flotsam on the rim of the advancing tide the allied armies. Often in
these appalling weeks, Michael would hesitate as to whether he should go
to see Sylvia or not, so unbearable seemed the fact that she did not and
could not feel or understand what England was going through. So far
from blaming her for it, he knew that it could not be otherwise, for her
blood called to her, even as his to him, while somewhere in the onrush
of those advancing and devouring waves was her brother, with whom, so it
had often seemed to him, she was one soul. Thus, while in that his whole
sympathy and whole comprehension of her love was with him, there was as
well all that deep, silent English patriotism of which till now he had
scarcely been conscious, praying with mute entreaty that disaster and
destruction and defeat might overwhelm those advancing hordes. Once,
when the anxiety and peril were at their height, he made up his mind not
to see her that day, and spent the evening by himself. But later, when
he was actually on his way to bed, he knew he could not keep away from
her, and though it was already midnight, he drove down to Chelsea, and
found her sitting up, waiting for the chance of his coming.
For a moment, as she greeted him and he kissed her silently, they
escaped from the encompassing horror.
“Ah, you have come,” she said. “I thought perhaps you might. I have
wanted you dreadfully.”
The roar of artillery, the internecine strife were still. Just for a
few seconds there was nothing in the world for him but her, nor for her
anything but him.
“I couldn’t go to bed without just seeing you,” he said. “I won’t keep
you up.”
They stood with hands clasped.
“But if you hadn’t come, Michael,” she said, “I should have understood.”
And then the roar and the horror began again. Her words were the
simplest, the most directly spoken to him, yet could not but evoke the
spectres that for the moment had vanished. She had meant to let her
love for him speak; it had spoken, and instantly through the momentary
sunlight of it, there loomed the fierce and enormous shadow. It could
not be banished from their most secret hearts; even when the doors
were shut and they were alone together thus, it made its entrance,
ghost-like, terrible, and all love’s bolts and bars could not keep it
out. Here was the tragedy of it, that they could not stand embraced with
clasped hands and look at it together and so rob it of its terrors, for,
at the sight of it, their hands were loosened from each other’s, and in
its presence they were forced to stand apart. In his heart, as surely
as he knew her love, Michael knew that this great shadow under which
England lay was shot with sunlight for Sylvia, that the anxiety, the
awful suspense that made his fingers cold as he opened the daily papers,
brought into it to her an echo of victorious music that beat to the
tramp of advancing feet that marched ever forward leaving the glittering
Rhine leagues upon leagues in their rear. The Bavarian corps in which
Hermann served was known to be somewhere on the Western front, for
the Emperor had addressed them ten days before on their departure from
Munich, and Sylvia and Michael were both aware of that. But they
who loved Hermann best could not speak of it to each other, and the
knowledge of it had to be hidden in silence, as if it had been some
guilty secret in which they were the terrified accomplices, instead of
its being a bond of love which bound them both to Hermann.
In addition to the national anxiety, there was the suspense of those
whose sons and husbands and fathers were in the fighting line. Columns
of casualty lists were published, and each name appearing there was a
sword that pierced a home. One such list, published early in September,
was seen by Michael as he drove down on Sunday morning to spend the rest
of the day with Sylvia, and the first name that he read there was that
of Francis. For a moment, as he remembered afterwards, the print had
danced before his eyes, as if seen through the quiver of hot air. Then
it settled down and he saw it clearly.
He turned and drove back to his rooms in Half Moon Street, feeling that
strange craving for loneliness that shuns any companionship. He must,
for a little, sit alone with the fact, face it, adjust himself to it.
Till that moment when the dancing print grew still again he had not, in
all the anxiety and suspense of those days, thought of Francis’s death
as a possibility even. He had heard from him only two mornings before,
in a letter thoroughly characteristic that saw, as Francis always saw,
the pleasant and agreeable side of things. Washing, he had announced,
was a delusion; after a week without it you began to wonder why you had
ever made a habit of it. . . . They had had a lot of marching, always
in the wrong direction, but everyone knew that would soon be over. . . .
Wasn’t London very beastly in August? . . . Would Michael see if he
could get some proper cigarettes out to him? Here there was nothing but
little black French affairs (and not many of them) which tied a knot in
the throat of the smoker. . . . And now Francis, with all his gaiety
and his affection, and his light pleasant dealings with life, lay dead
somewhere on the sunny plains of France, killed in action by shell
or bullet in the midst of his youth and strength and joy in life, to
gratify the damned dreams of the man who had been the honoured guest
at Ashbridge, and those who had advised and flattered and at the end
perhaps just used him as their dupe. To their insensate greed and
swollen-headed lust for world-power was this hecatomb of sweet and
pleasant lives offered, and in their onward course through the vines
and corn of France they waded through the blood of the slain whose only
crime was that they had dared to oppose the will of Germany, as voiced
by the War Lord. And as milestones along the way they had come were set
the records of their infamy, in rapine and ruthless slaughter of the
innocent. Just at first, as he sat alone in his room, Michael but
contemplated images that seemed to form in his mind without his
volition, and, emotion-numb from the shock, they seemed external to
him. Sometimes he had a vision of Francis lying without mark or wound or
violence on him in some vineyard on the hill-side, with face as quiet
as in sleep turned towards a moonlit sky. Then came another picture, and
Francis was walking across the terrace at Ashbridge with his gun
over his shoulder, towards Lord Ashbridge and the Emperor, who stood
together, just as Michael had seen the three of them when they came
in from the shooting-party. As Francis came near, the Emperor put a
cartridge into his gun and shot him. . . . Yes, that was it: that was
what had happened. The marvellous peacemaker of Europe, the fire-engine
who, as Hermann had said, was ready to put out all conflagrations,
the fatuous mountebank who pretended to be a friend to England, who
conducted his own balderdash which he called music, had changed his role
and shown his black heart and was out to kill.
Wild panoramas like these streamed through Michael’s head, as if
projected there by some magic lantern, and while they lasted he was
conscious of no grief at all, but only of a devouring hate for the mad,
lawless butchers who had caused Francis’s death, and willingly at that
moment if he could have gone out into the night and killed a German, and
met his death himself in the doing of it, he would have gone to his
doom as to a bridal-bed. But by degrees, as the stress of these unsought
imaginings abated, his thoughts turned to Francis himself again, who,
through all his boyhood and early manhood, had been to him a sort of
ideal and inspiration. How he had loved and admired him, yet never with
a touch of jealousy! And Francis, whose letter lay open by him on the
table, lay dead on the battlefields of France. There was the envelope,
with the red square mark of the censor upon it, and the sheet with its
gay scrawl in pencil, asking for proper cigarettes. And, with a pang
of remorse, all the more vivid because it concerned so trivial a thing,
Michael recollected that he had not sent them. He had meant to do so
yesterday afternoon but something had put it out of his head. Never
again would Francis ask him to send out cigarettes. Michael laid his
head on his arms, so that his face was close to that pencilled note, and
the relief of tears came to him.
Soon he raised himself again, not ashamed of his sorrow, but somehow
ashamed of the black hate that before had filled him. That was gone for
the present, anyhow, and Michael was glad to find it vanished. Instead
there was an aching pity, not for Francis alone nor for himself, but for
all those concerned in this hideous business. A hundred and a thousand
homes, thrown suddenly to-day into mourning, were there: no doubt there
were houses in that Bavarian village in the pine woods above which he
and Hermann had spent the day when there was no opera at Baireuth where
a son or a brother or a father were mourned, and in the kinship of
sorrow he found himself at peace with all who had suffered loss, with
all who were living through days of deadly suspense. There was nothing
effeminate or sentimental about it; he had never been manlier than in
this moment when he claimed his right to be one with them. It was right
to pause like this, with his hand clasped in the hands of friends and
foes alike. But without disowning that, he knew that Francis’s death,
which had brought that home to him, had made him eager also for his own
turn to come, when he would go out to help in the grim work that lay in
front of him. He was perfectly ready to die if necessary, and if not, to
kill as many Germans as possible. And somehow the two aspects of it
all, the pity and the desire to kill, existed side by side, neither
overlapping nor contradicting one another.
His servant came into the room with a pencilled note, which he opened.
It was from Sylvia.
“Oh, Michael, I have just called and am waiting to know if you will see
me. I have seen the news, and I want to tell you how sorry I am. But if
you don’t care to see me I know you will say so, won’t you?”
Though an hour before he had turned back on his way to go to Sylvia, he
did not hesitate now.
“Yes, ask Miss Falbe to come up,” he said.
She came up immediately, and once again as they met, the world and the
war stood apart from them.
“I did not expect you to come, Michael,” she said, “when I saw the news.
I did not mean to come here myself. But--but I had to. I had just to
find out whether you wouldn’t see me, and let me tell you how sorry I
am.”
He smiled at her as they stood facing each other.
“Thank you for coming,” he said; “I’m so glad you came. But I had to be
alone just a little.”
“I didn’t do wrong?” she asked.
“Indeed you didn’t. I did wrong not to come to you. I loved Francis, you
see.”
Already the shadow threatened again. It was just the fact that he loved
Francis that had made it impossible for him to go to her, and he could
not explain that. And as the shadow began to fall she gave a little
shudder.
“Oh, Michael, I know you did,” she said. “It’s just that which concerns
us, that and my sympathy for you. He was such a dear. I only saw him,
I know, once or twice, but from that I can guess what he was to you. He
was a brother to you--a--a--Hermann.”
Michael felt, with Sylvia’s hand in his, they were both running
desperately away from the shadow that pursued them. Desperately he tried
with her to evade it. But every word spoken between them seemed but to
bring it nearer to them.
“I only came to say that,” she said. “I had to tell you myself, to see
you as I told you, so that you could know how sincere, how heartfelt--”
She stopped suddenly.
“That’s all, my dearest,” she added. “I will go away again now.”
Across that shadow that had again fallen between them they looked and
yearned for each other.
“No, don’t go--don’t go,” he said. “I want you more than ever. We are
here, here and now, you and I, and what else matters in comparison of
that? I loved Francis, as you know, and I love Hermann, but there is our
love, the greatest thing of all. We’ve got it--it’s here. Oh, Sylvia, we
must be wise and simple, we must separate things, sort them out, not let
them get mixed with one another. We can do it; I know we can. There’s
nothing outside us; nothing matters--nothing matters.”
There was just that ray of sun peering over the black cloud that
illumined their faces to each other, while already the sharp peaked
shadow of it had come between them. For that second, while he spoke, it
seemed possible that, in the middle of welter and chaos and death and
enmity, these two souls could stand apart, in the passionate serene of
love, and the moment lasted for just as long as she flung herself into
his arms. And then, even while her face was pressed to his, and while
the riotous blood of their pressed lips sang to them, the shadow fell
across them. Even as he asserted the inviolability of the sanctuary in
which they stood, he knew it to be an impossible Utopia--that he should
find with her the peace that should secure them from the raging storm,
the cold shadow--and the loosening of her arms about his neck but
endorsed the message of his own heart. For such heavenly security cannot
come except to those who have been through the ultimate bitterness that
the world can bring; it is not arrived at but through complete surrender
to the trial of fire, and as yet, in spite of their opposed patriotism,
in spite of her sincerest sympathy with Michael’s loss, the assault
on the most intimate lines of the fortress had not yet been delivered.
Before they could reach the peace that passed understanding, a fiercer
attack had to be repulsed, they had to stand and look at each other
unembittered across waves and billows of a salter Marah than this.
But still they clung, while in their eyes there passed backwards and
forwards the message that said, “It is not yet; it is not thus!” They
had been like two children springing together at the report of some
thunder-clap, not knowing in the presence of what elemental outpouring
of force they hid their faces together. As yet it but boomed on the
horizon, though messages of its havoc reached them, and the test would
come when it roared and lightened overhead. Already the tension of the
approaching tempest had so wrought on them that for a month past they
had been unreal to each other, wanting ease, wanting confidence; and
now, when the first real shock had come, though for a moment it threw
them into each other’s arms, this was not, as they knew, the real, the
final reconciliation, the touchstone that proved the gold. Francis’s
death, the cousin whom Michael loved, at the hands of one of the nation
to whom Sylvia belonged, had momentarily made them feel that all else
but their love was but external circumstance; and, even in the moment
of their feeling this, the shadow fell again, and left them chilly and
shivering.
For a moment they still held each other round the neck and shoulder,
then the hold slipped to the elbow, and soon their hands parted. As yet
no word had been said since Michael asserted that nothing else mattered,
and in the silence of their gradual estrangement the sanguine falsity of
that grew and grew and grew.
“I know what you feel,” she said at length, “and I feel it also.”
Her voice broke, and her hands felt for his again.
“Michael, where are you?” she cried. “No, don’t touch me; I didn’t mean
that. Let’s face it. For all we know, Hermann might have killed Francis.
. . . Whether he did or not, doesn’t matter. It might have been. It’s
like that.”
A minute before Michael, in soul and blood and mind and bones, had said
that nothing but Sylvia and himself had any real existence. He had clung
to her, even as she to him, hoping that this individual love would
prove itself capable of overriding all else that existed. But it had not
needed that she should speak to show him how pathetically he had erred.
Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish
had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And
when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than
the brutality there was a plain, unvarnished truth.
There was no question now of her going away at once, as she had
proposed, any more than a boat in the rapids, roared round by breakers,
can propose to start again. They were in the middle of it, and so
short a way ahead was the cataract that ran with blood. On each side
at present were fine, green landing-places; he at the oar, she at the
tiller, could, if they were of one mind, still put ashore, could run
their boat in, declining the passage of the cataract with all its risks,
its river of blood. There was but a stroke of the oar to be made, a pull
on a rope of the rudder, and a step ashore. Here was a way out of the
storm and the rapids.
A moment before, when, by their physical parting they had realised
the strength of the bonds that held them apart this solution had not
occurred to Sylvia. Now, critically and forlornly hopeful, it flashed
on her. She felt, she almost felt--for the ultimate decision rested with
him--that with him she would throw everything else aside, and escape,
just escape, if so he willed it, into some haven of neutrality, where
he and she would be together, leaving the rest of the world, her country
and his, to fight over these irreconcilable quarrels. It did not seem to
matter what happened to anybody else, provided only she and Michael were
together, out of risk, out of harm. Other lives might be precious, other
ideals and patriotisms might be at stake, but she wanted to be with him
and nothing else at all. No tie counted compared to that; there was but
one life given to man and woman, and now that her individual happiness,
the individual joy of her love, was at stake, she felt, even as Michael
had said, that nothing else mattered, that they would be right to
realise themselves at any cost.
She took his hands again.
“Listen to me, Michael,” she said. “I can’t bear any longer that these
horrors should keep rising up between us, and, while we are here in the
middle of it all, it can’t be otherwise. I ask you, then, to come away
with me, to leave it all behind. It is not our quarrel. Already Hermann
has gone; I can’t lose you too.”
She looked up at him for a moment, and then quickly away again, for she
felt her case, which seemed to her just now so imperative, slipping away
from her in that glance she got of his eyes, that, for all the love that
burned there, were blank with astonishment. She must convince him; but
her own convictions were weak when she looked at him.
“Don’t answer me yet,” she said. “Hear what I have to say. Don’t you
see that while we are like this we are lost to each other? And as you
yourself said just now, nothing matters in comparison to our love. I
want you to take me away, out of it all, so that we can find each other
again. These horrors thwart and warp us; they spoil the best thing that
the world holds for us. My patriotism is just as sound as yours, but
I throw it away to get you. Do the same, then. You can get out of your
service somehow. . . .”
And then her voice began to falter.
“If you loved me, you would do it,” she said. “If--”
And then suddenly she found she could say no more at all. She had hoped
that when she stated these things she would convince him, and, behold,
all she had done was to shake her own convictions so that they fell
clattering round her like an unstable card-house. Desperately she looked
again at him, wondering if she had convinced him at all, and then again
she looked, wondering if she should see contempt in his eyes. After that
she stood still and silent, and her face flamed.
“Do you despise me, Michael?” she said.
He gave a little sigh of utter content.
“Oh, my dear, how I love you for suggesting such a sweet impossibility,”
he said. “But how you would despise me if I consented.”
She did not answer.
“Wouldn’t you?” he repeated.
She gave a sorrowful semblance of a laugh.
“I suppose I should,” she said.
“And I know you would. You would contrast me in your mind, whether
you wished to or not, with Hermann, with poor Francis, sorely to my
disadvantage.”
They sat silent a little, but there was another question Sylvia had to
ask for which she had to collect her courage. At last it came.
“Have they told you yet when you are going?” she said.
“Not for certain. But--it will be before many days are passed. And the
question arises--will you marry me before I go?”
She hid her face on his shoulder.
“I will do what you wish,” she said.
“But I want to know your wish.”
She clung closer to him.
“Michael, I don’t think I could bear to part with you if we were
married,” she said. “It would be worse, I think, than it’s going to be.
But I intend to do exactly what you wish. You must tell me. I’m going to
obey you before I am your wife as well as after.”
Michael had long debated this in his mind. It seemed to him that if
he came back, as might easily happen, hopelessly crippled, incurably
invalid, it would be placing Sylvia in an unfairly difficult position,
if she was already his wife. He might be hideously disfigured; she would
be bound to but a wreck of a man; he might be utterly unfit to be her
husband, and yet she would be tied to him. He had already talked the
question over with his father, who, with that curious posthumous anxiety
to have a further direct heir, had urged that the marriage should take
place at once; but with his own feeling on the subject, as well as
Sylvia’s, he at once made up his mind.
“I agree with you,” he said. “We will settle it so, then.”
She smiled at him.
“How dreadfully business-like,” she said, with an attempt at lightness.
“I know. It’s rather a good thing one has got to be business-like,
when--”
That failed also, and he drew her to him and kissed her.