"My illness has clouded my brain," Michael murmured. "I"m a long way from understanding what you"re driving at."
"Well, keep quiet and listen to my problems. We"re on the verge of separation, but you"re still my patient and you owe me your attention."
"I owe you more than that," he put in.
"How feeble," she scoffed. "You might have spared me such a pretty-pretty sentence."
"I surrender unconditionally," he protested. "Your fierceness is superfluous."
"I suppose you"ve often labeled humanity in bulk? I mean, for instance, you must have often said and certainly thought that all men are either knaves or fools."
"I must have thought so at some time or another," Michael agreed.
"Well, I"ve got a new division. I think that all men have either normal digestions, slow digestions, rapid digestions, or no digestions at all.
Extend the physical fact into a metaphor and apply it to the human mind."
"Dear Sylvia, I feel as if I were being poulticed. How admirably you maintain the nursing manner. I"ve made the application. What do I do now?"
"Listen without interrupting, or I shall lose the thread of my argument.
I suppose that you"ll admit that the optimists outnumber the pessimists?
Obviously they must, or the world would come to an end. Very well, then, we"ll say that the pessimists are the people with no digestions at all: on top of them will be the people with slow digestions, the great unthinking herd that is optimistic because the optimists shout most loudly. The people with good normal digestions are of course the shouting optimists. Finally come the people whose digestions are too rapid. I belong to that cla.s.s."
"Are they optimists?"
"They"re optimists until they"ve finished digesting, but between meals they"re outrageously pessimistic. The only way to ill.u.s.trate my theory is to talk about myself. Imagine you"re a lady palmist and prepare for a debauch of egotism from one of your clients. All through my life, Michael, I"ve been a martyr to quick digestion. Your friend Guy Hazlewood suffered from that complaint, judging by the way he talked about the war. I can imagine that his life has been made of brief, exquisite illusions followed by long vacuums. Am I right?"
Michael nodded.
"Ca.s.sandra, to take a more remote instance, suffered from rapid digestion--in fact, all prophets have the malady. Isn"t it physiologically true to say that the unborn child performs in its mother"s womb the drama of man"s evolution? I"m sure it"s equally true that the life of the individual after birth and until death is a microcosm of man"s later history, or rather I ought to say that it might be, for only exceptional individuals reproduce the history of humanity up to contemporary development. A genius--a great creative genius--seems to me a man whose active absorption can keep pace with the rapidity of his digestion. How often do we hear of people who were in advance of their time! This figure of speech is literally true, but only great creative geniuses have the consolation of projecting themselves beyond their ambient in time. There remain a number of sterile geniuses, whom Nature, with her usual prodigality, has put on the market in reserve, but for whom later on she finds she has no use on account of the economy that always succeeds extravagance. These sterile geniuses are left to fend for themselves and somehow to extract from a hostile and suspicious environment food to maintain them during the long, dreary emptiness that succeeds their too optimistic absorption. Do you agree with me?"
"At one end of the pole you would put Shakespeare, at the other the Jubilee Juggins?" Michael suggested.
"That"s it," she agreed. "Although a less conspicuous wastrel would serve for the other end."
"And I suppose if you"re searching for the eternal rhythm of the universe, you"d have to apply to nations the same cla.s.sification as to individuals?" he went on.
"Of course."
"So that England would have a good normal digestion and Ireland a too rapid digestion? Or better, let us say that all Teutons eat heartily and digest slowly, and that all Kelts are too rapid. But come back to yourself."
Sylvia paused for a moment, and then continued, with swift gestures of self-agreement:
"I certainly ascribe every mistake in my own life to a rapid digestion.
Why, I"ve even digested this war that, if we think on a large scale, was evidently designed to stir up the sluggish liver of a world. I"m sick to death of the d.a.m.ned war already, and it hasn"t begun yet really. And to come down to my own little particular woes, I"ve labored toward religion, digested it with horrible rapidity, and see nothing in it now but a half-truth for myself. In art the same, in human a.s.sociations the same, in everything the same. Ah, don"t let"s talk any more about anything."
In the silence that followed she thought to herself about the inspiration of her late theories; and looking at Michael, pale and hollow-eyed in the grim November dusk, she railed at herself because with all her will to make use of the quality she had attributed to herself she could not shake off this love that was growing every day.
"Why in G.o.d"s name," she almost groaned aloud, "can"t it go the way of everything else? But it won"t. It won"t. It never will. And I shall never be happy again."
A rainy nightfall symbolized for her the darkness of the future, and when, in the middle of their evening meal, while they were hacking at a tin of sardines, a message came from headquarters that to-morrow they must be ready to leave Nish, she was glad. However, the sympathy of the English-speaking officer had exercised itself so much on behalf of the two prisoners that the separation which Sylvia had regarded as immediate was likely to be postponed for some time. The officer explained that it was inconvenient for them to remain any longer in Nish, but that arrangements had been made by which they were to be moved to Sofia and therefore that Michael"s convalescence would be safe against any premature strain. They would realize that Bulgaria was not unmindful of the many links, now unfortunately broken, which had formerly bound her to England, and they would admit in the face of their courteous treatment how far advanced his country was upon the road of civilization.
"Splendid," Michael exclaimed. "So we sha"n"t be separated yet for a while and we shall be able to prosecute our philosophical discoveries.
The riddle of life finally solved in 1915 by two prisoners of the Bulgarian army! It would almost make the war worth while. Sylvia, I"m so excited at our journey."
"You"re tired of being cooped up here," she said, sharply. And then to mask whatever emotion might have escaped, she added: "I"m certainly sick to death of it myself."
"I know," he agreed, "it must have been a great bore for you. The invalid is always blissfully unconscious of time, and forgets that the pleasant little services which encourage him to go on being ill are not natural events like sunrise and sunset. You do well to keep me up to the mark; I"m not really forgetful."
"You seem to have forgotten that we may have months, even years of imprisonment in Bulgaria," Sylvia said.
He looked so frail in his khaki overcoat that she was seized with penitence for the harsh thoughts of him she had indulged, and with a fondling gesture tried to atone.
"You really feel that you can make this journey? If you don"t, I"ll go out and rout out our officer and beg him for another week."
Michael shook his head.
"I"m rather a fraud. Really, you know, I feel perfectly well. Quite excited about this journey, as I told you."
She was chilled by his so impersonally cordial manner and looked at him regretfully.
"Every day he gets farther away," she thought. "In nine years he has been doing nothing but place layer after layer over his sensitiveness.
He"s a kind of mental coral island. I know that there must still exist a capacity for suffering, but he"ll never again let me see it. He wants to convince me of his eternal serenity."
She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in embarra.s.sment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness.
"It was just the reverse of embarra.s.sment, really," he said. "But I don"t want to spoil things."
"By doing what?" she demanded.
"Well, if I told you--" He stopped abruptly.
"I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you"ve begun you must finish."
"Nothing will induce me to. I"ll say what I thought of saying before we separate. I promise that."
"Perhaps we never shall separate."
"Then I shall have no need to finish my sentence."
Sylvia lay awake for a long time that last night in Nish, wondering, with supreme futility as she continually reminded herself, what Michael could have nearly said. Somewhere about two o"clock she decided that he had been going to suggest adopting her into his family.
"d.a.m.ned fool," she muttered, pulling and shaking her improvised bed as if it were a naughty child. "Nevertheless, he had the wit to understand how much it would annoy me. It shows the lagoon is not quite encircled yet."
The soldiers who arrived to escort them to the railway station were like grotesques of hotel porters; they were so ready to help with the luggage that it seemed absurd for their movements to be hampered by rifles with fixed bayonets. The English-speaking officer accompanied them to the station and expressed his regrets that he could not travel to Sofia; he had no doubt that later on he should see them again, and, in any case, when the war was over he hoped to revisit England. Sylvia suddenly remembered her big trunk, which she had left in the consigne when she first reached Nish nearly two months ago. The English-speaking officer shrugged his shoulders at her proposal to take it with her to Sofia.
"The station was looted by the Serbs before we arrived," he explained.
"They are a barbarous nation, many years behind us in civilization. We never plunder. And of course you understand that Nish is really Bulgarian? That makes us particularly gentle here. You heard, perhaps, that when the Entente Legations left we gave them a champagne lunch for the farewell at Dedeagatch? We are far in front of the Germans, who are a very strong but primitive nation. They are not much liked in Bulgaria: we prefer the English. But, alas, poor England!" he sighed.
"Why poor?" Sylvia demanded, indignantly.