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."