"But do you think it was inevitable because it was salutary?"
"I think blood-letting is old-fashioned surgery: aren't you confusing the disease with the remedy? Surely no disease is salutary, and I think it's morally dangerous to confuse effect with cause. At the same time I'm not going to lay down positively that this war may not be extremely salutary. I think it will be, but I acquit God of any hand in its deliberate ordering. Free will must apply to nations. I don't believe that war which, while it brings out often the best of people, brings out much more often the worst is to be regarded as anything but a vile exhibition of human sin. The selflessness of those who have died is terribly stained by the selfishness of those who have let them die. Yet the younger generation, or such of it as survives, will have the compensation when it is all over of such amazing opportunities for living as were never known, and the older generation that made the war will die less lamented than any men that have ever died since the world began. And I believe that their purgatory will be the grayest and the longest of all the purgatories. But as soon as I have said that I regret my words, because I think it will be fatal for the younger generation to become precocious Pharisees; and so I reiterate that the war is in every human heart, and you're not to tempt me any more into making harsh judgments about any one."
"Not even the great Victorians?" said Sylvia.
"Well, that will be a difficult and very penitential piece of self-denial, I admit. And it is hard not to hope that Carlyle is in hell. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go to hell myself if I do, where his Teutonic borborygmi would be an added woe, gigantic genius though he was. But don't let's joke about hell. It's—infernally credible since August, 1914. What were we talking about before we began to talk about the war? Oh, I remember—the new world that one gets up to face after a bad illness."
"Perhaps my experience was peculiar," Sylvia said.
But what did it matter how he regarded the world, she thought, unless he regarded her? Already the topic was exhausted; he was tired by his vehemence; once more the ruthless and precipitate hour had gone by.
During this period of seclusion Sylvia often had to encounter in its various capacities the army of occupation, by which generally she was treated with consideration and even with positive kindness. Nish had been so completely evacuated that, after the medley which had thronged the streets and squares, it now seemed strangely empty. The uniformity of the Bulgarian characteristics added to the impression of violent change; there was never a moment in which one could delude oneself with the continuation of normal existence. At the end of the fortnight the English-speaking officer came to make a visit of inspection in order to give his advice at headquarters about the future of the prisoners. Michael was still very weak, and looked a skeleton, so much so, indeed, that the officer went off and fetched a squat little doctor to help his deliberation; the latter recommended another week, and the prisoners were once more left to themselves. Sylvia was half sorry for such considerate action; the company of Michael which had seemed to promise so much and had in fact yielded so little was beginning to fret her with the ultimate futility of such an association. She resented the emotion she had given to it in the prospect of a more definitely empty future that was now opening before her, and she gave way to the reaction against her exaggerated devotion by criticizing herself severely. The supervention of such an attitude made irksome what had been so dear a seclusion, and, going beyond self-criticism, she began to tell herself that Michael was cold, inhuman, and remote; that she felt ill at ease with him and unable to talk, and that the sooner their separation came about the better. Perhaps she should be released, in which case she should make her way back to England and become a nurse.
At the end of the third week Sylvia desperately tried to arrest the precipitate hour.
"I think I suffer from a too rapid digestion," she announced.
He looked at her with a question in his eyes.