The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  For a moment, as she greeted him and he kissed her silently, they escaped from the encompassing horror.

  “Ah, you have come,” she said. “I thought perhaps you might. I have wanted you dreadfully.”

  The roar of artillery, the internecine strife were still. Just for a few seconds there was nothing in the world for him but her, nor for her anything but him.

  “I couldn’t go to bed without just seeing you,” he said. “I won’t keep you up.”

  They stood with hands clasped.

  “But if you hadn’t come, Michael,” she said, “I should have understood.”

  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 today 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.

  “I did not expect you to come, Michael,” she said, “when I saw the news. I did not mean to come here myself. But—but I had to. I had just to find out whether you wouldn’t see me, and let me tell you how sorry I am.”

  He smiled at her as they stood facing each other.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said; “I’m so glad you came. But I had to be alone just a little.”

  “I didn’t do wrong?” she asked.

  “Indeed you didn’t. I did wrong not to come to you. I loved Francis, you see.”

  Already the shadow threatened again. It was just the fact that he loved Francis that had made it impossible for him to go to her, and he could not explain that. And as the shadow began to fall she gave a little shudder.

  “Oh, Michael, I know you did,” she said. “It’s just that which concerns us, that and my sympathy for you. He was such a dear. I only saw him, I know, once or twice, but from that I can guess what he was to you. He was a brother to you—a—a—Hermann.”

  Michael felt, with Sylvia’s hand in his, they were both running desperately away from the shadow that pursued them. Desperately he tried with her to evade it. But every word spoken between them seemed but to bring it nearer to them.

  “I only came to say that,” she said. “I had to tell you myself, to see you as I told you, so that you could know how sincere, how heartfelt—”

  She stopped suddenly.

  “That’s all, my dearest,” she added. “I will go away again now.”

  Across that shadow that had again fallen between them they looked and yearned for each other.

  “No, don’t go—don’t go,” he said. “I want you more than ever. We are here, here and now, you and I, and what else matters in comparison of that? I loved Francis, as you know, and I love Hermann, but there is our love, the greatest thing of all. We’ve got it—it’s here. Oh, Sylvia, we must be wise and simple, we must separate things, sort them out, not let them get mixed with one another. We can do it; I know we can. There’s nothing outside us; nothing matters—nothing matters.”

  There was just that ray of sun peering over the black cloud that illumined their faces to each other, while already the sharp peaked shadow of it had come between them. For that second, while he spoke, it seemed possible that, in the middle of welter and chaos and death and enmity, these two souls could stand apart, in the passionate serene of love, and the moment lasted for just as long as she flung herself into his arms. And then, even while her face was pressed to his, and while the riotous blood of their pressed lips sang to them, the shadow fell across them. Even as he asserted the inviolability of the sanctuary in which they stood, he knew it to be an impossible Utopia—that he should find with her the peace that should secure them from the raging storm, the cold shadow—and the loosening of her arms about his neck but endorsed the message of his own heart. For such heavenly security cannot come except to those who have been through the ultimate bitterness that the world can bring; it is not arrived at but through complete surrender to the trial of fire, and as yet, in spite of their opposed patriotism, in spite of her sincerest sympathy with Michael’s loss, the assault on the most intimate lines of the fortress had not yet been delivered. Before they could reach the peace that passed understanding, a fiercer attack had to be repulsed, they had to stand and look at each other unembittered across waves and billows of a salter Marah than this.

  But still they clung, while in their eyes there passed backwards and forwards the message that said, “It is not yet; it is not thus!” They had been like two children springing together at the report of some thunder-clap, not knowing in the presence of what elemental outpouring of force they hid their faces together. As yet it but boomed on the horizon, though messages of its havoc reached them, and the test would come when it roared and lightened overhead. Already the tension of the approaching tempest had so wrought on them that for a month past they had been unreal to each other, wanting ease, wanting confidence; and now, when the first real shock had come, though for a moment it threw them into each other’s arms, this was not, as they knew, the real, the final reconciliation, the touchstone that proved the gold. Francis’s death, the cousin whom Michael loved, at the hands of one of the nation to whom Sylvia belonged, had momentarily made them feel that all else but their love was but external circumstance; and, even in the moment of their feeling this, the shadow fell again, and left them chilly and shivering.

  For a moment they still held each other round the neck and shoulder, then the hold slipped to the elbow, and soon their hands parted. As yet no word had been said since Michael asserted that nothing else mattered, and in the silence of their gradual estrangement the sanguine falsity of that grew and grew and grew.

  “I know what you feel,” she said at length, “and I feel it also.”

  Her voice broke, and her hands felt for his again.

  “Michael, where are you?” she cried. “No, don’t touch me; I didn’t mean that. Let’s face it. For all we know, Hermann might have killed Francis.… Whether he did or not, doesn’t matter. It might have been. It’s like that.”

  A minute before Michael, in soul and blood and mind and bones, had said that nothing but Sylvia and himself had any real existence. He had clung to her, even as she to him, hoping that this individual love would prove itself capable of overriding all else that existed. But it had not needed that she should speak to show him how pathetically he had erred. Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than the brutality there was a plain, unvarnished truth.

  There was no question now of her going away at once, as she had proposed, any more than a boat in the rapids, roared round by breakers, can propose to start again. They were in the middle of it, and so short a way ahead was the cataract that ran with blood. On each side at present were fine, green landing-places; he at the oar, she at the tiller, could, if they were of one mind, still put ashore, could run their boat in, declining the passage of the cataract with all its risks, its river of blood. There was but a stroke of the oar to be made, a pull on a rope of the rudder, and a step ashore. Here was a way out of the storm and the rapids.

  A moment before, when, by their physical parting they had realised the strength of the bonds that held them apart this solution had not occurred to Sylvia. Now, critically and forlornly hopeful, it flashed on her. She felt, she almost felt—for the ultimate decision rested with him—that with him she would throw everything else aside, and escape, just escape, if so he willed it, into some haven of neutrality, where he and she would be together, leaving the rest of the world, her country and his, to fight over these irreconcilable quarrels. It did not seem to matter what happened to anybody else, provided only she and Michael were together, out of risk, out of harm. Other lives might be precious, other ideals and patriotisms might be at stake, but she wanted to be with him and nothing else at all. No tie counted compared to that; there was but one life given to man and woman, and now that her individual happiness, the individual joy of her love, was at stake, she felt, even as Michael had said, that nothing else mattered, that they would be right to realise themselves at any cost.

  She took his hands again.

  “Listen to me, Michael,” she said. “I can’t bear any longer that these horrors should keep rising up between us, and, while we are here in the middle of it all, it can’t be otherwise. I ask you, then, to come away with me, to l
eave it all behind. It is not our quarrel. Already Hermann has gone; I can’t lose you too.”

  She looked up at him for a moment, and then quickly away again, for she felt her case, which seemed to her just now so imperative, slipping away from her in that glance she got of his eyes, that, for all the love that burned there, were blank with astonishment. She must convince him; but her own convictions were weak when she looked at him.

  “Don’t answer me yet,” she said. “Hear what I have to say. Don’t you see that while we are like this we are lost to each other? And as you yourself said just now, nothing matters in comparison to our love. I want you to take me away, out of it all, so that we can find each other again. These horrors thwart and warp us; they spoil the best thing that the world holds for us. My patriotism is just as sound as yours, but I throw it away to get you. Do the same, then. You can get out of your service somehow.…”

  And then her voice began to falter.

  “If you loved me, you would do it,” she said. “If—”

  And then suddenly she found she could say no more at all. She had hoped that when she stated these things she would convince him, and, behold, all she had done was to shake her own convictions so that they fell clattering round her like an unstable card-house. Desperately she looked again at him, wondering if she had convinced him at all, and then again she looked, wondering if she should see contempt in his eyes. After that she stood still and silent, and her face flamed.