Sylvia was really glad when the sound of loud knocking upon the door down-stairs prevented any further discussion of the accident of their relationship; nevertheless, she found a pleasure in announcing to the Bulgarian officer her right to be found here with the sick Englishman, her cousin: it seemed to launch her once more upon the flow of ordinary existence, this kinship with one who without doubt belonged to the world actively at war. The interview with the Bulgarian officer took place in that stark and dusty room where she had argued with Stella for the right to stay behind with her brother. Now, in the light of early morning, it still preserved its scenic quality, and Sylvia was absurdly aware of her resemblance to the pleading heroine of a melodrama, when she begged this grimy, shaggy creature, whose slate-gray overcoat was marbled by time and weather, to let her patient stay here for the present, and, furthermore, to accord her facilities to procure for him whatever was necessary and obtainable. In the end the officer went away without giving a more decisive answer than was implied by the soldier he left behind. Sylvia did not think he could have understood much of her French, so little had she understood of his, and the presence of this soldier with fixed bayonet and squashed Mongolian countenance oppressed her. She wondered what opinion of them the officer had reached, and ached at the thought of how, perhaps, in a few minutes, she and Michael should be separated, intolerably separated forever. She made a sign to the guard for leave to go up-stairs again; but he forbade her with a gesture, and she stood leaning against the table, while he stared before him with an expression of such unutterable nothingness as by sheer nebulosity acquired a sinister and menacing force. He was as incomprehensible as a savage beast encountered in a forest, and the fancy that he had ever existed with his own little ambitions in a human society refused to state itself. Sylvia could make of him nothing but a symbol of the blind, mad forces that were in opposition throughout the old familiar world, the blindness and madness of which were fitly expressed by such an instrument.
Half an hour of strained indifference passed, and then the officer came back with another who spoke English. Perhaps the consciousness of speaking English well and fluently made the new-comer anxious to be pleasant; one felt that he would have regarded it as a slight upon his own proficiency to be rude or intransigent. Apart from his English there was nothing remarkable in his appearance or his personality. He went up-stairs and saw for himself Michael's condition, came down again with Sylvia, and promised her that, if she would observe the rules imposed upon the captured city, nothing within the extent of his influence should be done to imperil the sick man's convalescence. Then, after signing a number of forms that would enable her to move about in certain areas to obtain provisions and to call upon medical help, he asked her if she knew Sunbury-on-Thames. She replied in the negative, which seemed to disappoint him. Whereupon she asked him if he knew Maidenhead, and he brightened up again.
"I have had good days in the Thames," he said, and departed in a bright cloud of riverside memories.
The next fortnight passed in a seclusion that was very dear to Sylvia. The hours rolled along on the easy wheels of reminiscent conversations, and Michael was gradually made aware of all her history. Yet at the end of it, she told herself that he was aware of nothing except the voyages of the body; of her soul's pilgrimage he was as ignorant as if they had never met. She reproached herself for this and wanted to begin over again the real history; but her own feelings toward him stood in the way of frankness, and she feared to betray herself by the emotion that any deliberate sincerity must have revealed. Yet, as she assured herself rather bitterly, he was so obviously blind to anything but the coincidence of their relationship that she might with impunity have stripped her soul bare. It was unreasonable for her to resent his showing himself more moved by the news of Hazlewood's death than by anything in her own history, because anything in her own history that might have moved him she had omitted, and his impression of her now must be what his impression of her had been nine years ago—that of a hard and cynical woman with a baffling capacity for practical kindliness. She had often before been dismayed by a sense of life slipping out of her reach, but she had never before been dismayed by the urgent escape of hours and minutes. She had never before said ruit hora with her will to snatch the opportunity palsied, as if she stood panting in the stifling impotence of a dream. Already he was able to walk about the room, and, like all those who are recovering from a serious illness, was performing little feats of agility with the objective self-absorption of a child.
"Do people—or rather," she corrected herself, quickly, "does existence seem something utterly different from what it was before you saw it fade out from your consciousness at Kragujevatz?"
"Well, the only person I've really seen is yourself," he answered. "And I can't help staring at you in some bewilderment, due less to fever than to the concatenations of fortune. What seems to me so amusing and odd is that, if you had known we were cousins, you couldn't have behaved in a more cousinly way than you did over Lily."
"When I found myself in that hospital at Petrograd," Sylvia declared, "I felt like the Sleeping Beauty being waked by the magic kiss—" she broke off, blushing hotly and cursing inwardly her damned self-consciousness; and then blushed again because she had stopped to wonder if he had noticed her blush.
"I don't think anything that happened during this war to me personally," Michael said, "could ever make any impression now. The war itself always presents itself to me as a mighty fever, caught, if you will, by taking foolish risks or ignoring simple precautions, but ultimately and profoundly inevitable in the way that one feels all illness to be inevitable. Anything particular that happens to the individual must lose its significance in the change that he must suffer from the general calamity. I think perhaps that as a Catholic I am tempted to be less hopeful of men and more hopeful of God, but yet I firmly believe that I am more hopeful of men than the average—shall we call him humanitarian, who perceives in this war nothing but a crime against human brotherhood committed by a few ambitious knaves helped by a crowd of ambitious fools? I'm perfectly sure, for instance, that there is no one alive and no one dead that does not partake of the responsibility. However little it may be realized in the case of individuals, nothing will ever persuade me that one of the chief motive forces that maintain this state of destruction to which the world is being devoted is not a sense of guilt and a determination to expiate it. Mark you, I'm not trying to urge that God has judicially sentenced the world to war, dealing out horror to Belgium for the horror of the Congo, horror to Serbia for the horror of the royal assassination, horror to France, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace—I should be very sorry to implicate Almighty God in any conception based upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that God ever interfered with humanity was when He was incarnate among us, and the story of that seems to forbid us our attribution to Him of anything in the nature of fretful castigation. The most presumptuous attitude in this war seems to me the German idea of God in a pickelhaube, of Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a bloody-minded Eagle; but the Allies' notion of the Pope as a kind of diplomat with a license to excommunicate seems to me only less presumptuous."
"Then you think the war is in every human heart?" Sylvia asked.
"When I look at my own I'm positive it is."