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.