"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.