'So bad as that?'
'Oh yes. They are afraid he will die.'
'Poor Count Dionys. I liked him. He was a bit like a monkey, but
he had his points. He gave me a thimble on my seventeenth
birthday. Such an amusing thimble.'
'I remember, dear.'
'Unpleasant wife, though. Wonder if he minds dying far away from
her. Wonder if she knows.'
'I think not. They didn't even know his name properly. Only that
he was a colonel of such and such a regiment.'
'Fourth Cavalry,' said Daphne. 'Poor Count Dionys. Such a lovely
name, I always thought: Count Johann Dionys Psanek. Extraordinary
dandy he was. And an amazingly good dancer, small, yet electric.
Wonder if he minds dying.'
'He was so full of life, in his own little animal way. They say
small people are always conceited. But he doesn't look conceited
now, dear. Something ages old in his face--and, yes, a certain
beauty, Daphne.'
'You mean long lashes.'
'No. So still, so solitary--and ages old, in his race. I suppose
he must belong to one of those curious little aboriginal races of
Central Europe. I felt quite new beside him.'
'How nice of you,' said Daphne.
Nevertheless, next day Daphne telephoned to Hurst Place to ask for
news of him. He was about the same. She telephoned every day.
Then she was told he was a little stronger. The day she received
the message that her husband was wounded and a prisoner in Turkey,
and that his wounds were healing, she forgot to telephone for news
of the little enemy Count. And the following day she telephoned
that she was coming to the hospital to see him.
He was awake, more restless, more in physical excitement. They
could see the nausea of pain round his nose. His face seemed to
Daphne curiously hidden behind the black beard, which nevertheless
was thin, each hair coming thin and fine, singly, from the sallow,
slightly translucent skin. In the same way his moustache made a
thin black line round his mouth. His eyes were wide open, very
black, and of no legible expression. He watched the two women
coming down the crowded, dreary room, as if he did not see them.
His eyes seemed too wide.
It was a cold day, and Daphne was huddled in a black sealskin coat
with a skunk collar pulled up to her ears, and a dull gold cap with
wings pulled down on her brow. Lady Beveridge wore her sable coat,
and had that odd, untidy elegance which was natural to her, rather
like a ruffled chicken.
Daphne was upset by the hospital. She looked from right to left in
spite of herself, and everything gave her a dull feeling of horror:
the terror of these sick, wounded enemy men. She loomed tall and
obtrusive in her furs by the bed, her little mother at her side.
'I hope you don't mind my coming!' she said in German to the sick
man. Her tongue felt rusty, speaking the language.
'Who is it then?' he asked.
'It is my daughter, Lady Daphne. You remembered ME, Lady
Beveridge! This is my daughter, whom you knew in Saxony. She was
so sorry to hear you were wounded.'
The black eyes rested on the little lady. Then they returned to
the looming figure of Daphne. And a certain fear grew on the low,
sick brow. It was evident the presence loomed and frightened him.
He turned his face aside. Daphne noticed how his fine black hair
grew uncut over his small, animal ears.
'You don't remember me, Count Dionys?' she said dully.
'Yes,' he said. But he kept his face averted.
She stood there feeling confused and miserable, as if she had made
a faux pas in coming.
'Would you rather be left alone?' she said. 'I'm sorry.'
Her voice was monotonous. She felt suddenly stifled in her closed
furs, and threw her coat open, showing her thin white throat and
plain black slip dress on her flat breast. He turned again
unwillingly to look at her. He looked at her as if she were some
strange creature standing near him.
'Good-bye,' she said. 'Do get better.'
She was looking at him with a queer, slanting, downward look of her
heavy eyes as she turned away. She was still a little red round
the eyes, with nervous exhaustion.
'You are so tall,' he said, still frightened.
'I was always tall,' she replied, turning half to him again.
'And I, small,' he said.
'I am so glad you are getting better,' she said.
'I am not glad,' he said.
'Why? I'm sure you are. Just as we are glad because we want you
to get better.'
'Thank you,' he said. 'I have wished to die.'
'Don't do that, Count Dionys. Do get better,' she said, in the
rather deep, laconic manner of her girlhood. He looked at her with
a farther look of recognition. But his short, rather pointed nose
was lifted with the disgust and weariness of pain, his brows were
tense. He watched her with that curious flame of suffering which
is forced to give a little outside attention, but which speaks only
to itself.
'Why did they not let me die?' he said. 'I wanted death now.'
'No,' she said. 'You mustn't. You must live. If we CAN live we
must.'
'I wanted death,' he said.
'Ah, well,' she said, 'even death we can't have when we want it, or
when we think we want it.'
'That is true,' he said, watching her with the same wide black
eyes. 'Please to sit down. You are too tall as you stand.'
It was evident he was a little frightened still by her looming,
overhanging figure.
'I am sorry I am too tall,' she said, taking a chair which a man-
nurse had brought her. Lady Beveridge had gone away to speak with
the men. Daphne sat down, not knowing what to say further. The
pitch-black look in the Count's wide eyes puzzled her.
'Why do you come here? Why does your lady mother come?' he said.
'To see if we can do anything,' she answered.
'When I am well, I will thank your ladyship.'
'All right,' she replied. 'When you are well I will let my lord
the Count thank me. Please do get well.'
'We are enemies,' he said.
'Who? You and I and my mother?'
'Are we not? The most difficult thing is to be sure of anything.
If they had let me die!'
'That is at least ungrateful, Count Dionys.'
'Lady Daphne! Yes. Lady Daphne! Beautiful, the name is. You are
always called Lady Daphne? I remember you were so bright a
maiden.'
'More or less,' she said, answering his question.
'Ach! We should all have new names now. I thought of a name for
myself, but I have forgotten it. No longer Johann Dionys. That is
shot away. I am Karl or Wilhelm or Ernst or Georg. Those are
names I hate. Do you hate them?'
'I don't like them--but I don't hate them. And you mustn't leave
off being Count Johann Dionys. If you do I shall have to leave off
being Daphne. I like your name so much.'
'Lady Daphne! Lady Daphne!' he repeated. 'Yes, it rings well, it
sounds beautiful to me. I think I talk foolishly. I hear myself
talking foolishly to you.' He looked at her anxiously.
'Not at all,' she said.
'Ach! I have a head on my shoulders that is like a child's
windmill, and I can't prevent its making foolish words. Please to
go away, not to hear me. I can hear myself.'
'Can't I do anything for you?' she asked.
'No, no! No, no! If I could be buried deep, very deep down, where
everything is forgotten! But they draw me up, back to the surface.
I would not mind if they buried me alive, if it were very deep, and
dark, and the earth heavy above.'
'Don't say that,' she replied, rising.
'No, I am saying it when I don't wish to say it. Why am I here?
Why am I here? Why have I survived into this? Why can I not stop
talking?'
He turned his face aside. The black, fine, elfish hair was so
long, and pushed up in tufts from the smooth brown nape of his
neck. Daphne looked at him in sorrow. He could not turn his body.
He could only move his head. And he lay with his face hard
averted, the fine hair of his beard coming up strange from under
his chin and from his throat, up to the socket of his ear. He lay
quite still in this position. And she turned away, looking for her
mother. She had suddenly realized that the bonds, the connexions
between him and his life in the world had broken, and he lay there,
a bit of loose, palpitating humanity, shot away from the body of
humanity.
It was ten days before she went to the hospital again. She had
wanted never to go again, to forget him, as one tries to forget
incurable things. But she could not forget him. He came again and
again into her mind. She had to go back. She had heard that he
was recovering very slowly.
He looked really better. His eyes were not so wide open, they had
lost that black, inky exposure which had given him such an
unnatural look, unpleasant. He watched her guardedly. She had
taken off her furs, and wore only her dress and a dark, soft
feather toque.
'How are you?' she said, keeping her face averted, unwilling to
meet his eyes.
'Thank you, I am better. The nights are not so long.'
She shuddered, knowing what long nights meant. He saw the worn
look in her face too, the reddened rims of her eyes.
'Are you not well? Have you some trouble?' he asked her.
'No, no,' she answered.
She had brought a handful of pinky, daisy-shaped flowers.
'Do you care for flowers?' she asked.
He looked at them. Then he slowly shook his head.
'No,' he said. 'If I am on horseback, riding through the marshes
or through the hills, I like to see them below me. But not here.
Not now. Please do not bring flowers into this grave. Even in
gardens, I do not like them. When they are upholstery to human
life.'
'I will take them away again,' she said.
'Please do. Please give them to the nurse.'
Daphne paused.
'Perhaps,' she said, 'you wish I would not come to disturb you.'
He looked into her face.
'No,' he said. 'You are like a flower behind a rock, near an icy
water. No, you do not live too much. I am afraid I cannot talk
sensibly. I wish to hold my mouth shut. If I open it, I talk this
absurdity. It escapes from my mouth.'
'It is not so very absurd,' she said.
But he was silent--looking away from her.
'I want you to tell me if there is really nothing I can do for
you,' she said.
'Nothing,' he answered.
'If I can write any letter for you.'
'None,' he answered.
'But your wife and your two children. Do they know where you are?'
'I should think not.'
'And where are they?'
'I do not know. Probably they are in Hungary.'
'Not at your home?'
'My castle was burnt down in a riot. My wife went to Hungary with
the children. She has her relatives there. She went away from me.
I wished it too. Alas for her, I wished to be dead. Pardon me the
personal tone.'
Daphne looked down at him--the queer, obstinate little fellow.
'But you have somebody you wish to tell--somebody you want to hear
from?'
'Nobody. Nobody. I wish the bullet had gone through my heart. I
wish to be dead. It is only I have a devil in my body that will
not die.'
She looked at him as he lay with closed, averted face.
'Surely it is not a devil which keeps you alive,' she said. 'It is
something good.'
'No, a devil,' he said.
She sat looking at him with a long, slow, wondering look.
'Must one hate a devil that makes one live?' she asked.
He turned his eyes to her with a touch of a satiric smile.
'If one lives, no,' he said.
She looked away from him the moment he looked at her. For her life
she could not have met his dark eyes direct.
She left him, and he lay still. He neither read nor talked
throughout the long winter nights and the short winter days. He
only lay for hours with black, open eyes, seeing everything around
with a touch of disgust, and heeding nothing.
Daphne went to see him now and then. She never forgot him for
long. He seemed to come into her mind suddenly, as if by sorcery.
One day he said to her:
'I see you are married. May I ask you who is your husband?'
She told him. She had had a letter also from Basil. The Count
smiled slowly.
'You can look forward,' he said, 'to a happy reunion and new,
lovely children, Lady Daphne. Is it not so?'
'Yes, of course,' she said.
'But you are ill,' he said to her.
'Yes--rather ill.'
'Of what?'
'Oh!' she answered fretfully, turning her face aside. 'They talk
about lungs.' She hated speaking of it. 'Why, how do you know I
am ill?' she added quickly.
Again he smiled slowly.
'I see it in your face, and hear it in your voice. One would say
the Evil One had cast a spell on you.'
'Oh no,' she said hastily. 'But do I look ill?'
'Yes. You look as if something had struck you across the face, and
you could not forget it.'
'Nothing has,' she said. 'Unless it's the war.'
'The war!' he repeated.
'Oh, well, don't let us talk of it,' she said.
Another time he said to her:
'The year has turned--the sun must shine at last, even in England.
I am afraid of getting well too soon. I am a prisoner, am I not?
But I wish the sun would shine. I wish the sun would shine on my
face.'
'You won't always be a prisoner. The war will end. And the sun
DOES shine even in the winter in England,' she said.
'I wish it would shine on my face,' he said.
So that when in February there came a blue, bright morning, the
morning that suggests yellow crocuses and the smell of a mezereon
tree and the smell of damp, warm earth, Daphne hastily got a taxi
and drove out to the hospital.
'You have
come to put me in the sun,' he said the moment he saw
her.
'Yes, that's what I came for,' she said.
She spoke to the matron, and had his bed carried out where there
was a big window that came low. There he was put full in the sun.
Turning, he could see the blue sky and the twinkling tops of
purplish, bare trees.
'The world! The world!' he murmured.
He lay with his eyes shut, and the sun on his swarthy, transparent,
immobile face. The breath came and went through his nostrils
invisibly. Daphne wondered how he could lie so still, how he could
look so immobile. It was true as her mother had said: he looked as
if he had been cast in the mould when the metal was white hot, all
his lines were so clean. So small, he was, and in his way perfect.
Suddenly his dark eyes opened and caught her looking.
'The sun makes even anger open like a flower,' he said.
'Whose anger?' she said.
'I don't know. But I can make flowers, looking through my
eyelashes. Do you know how?'
'You mean rainbows?'
'Yes, flowers.'
And she saw him, with a curious smile on his lips, looking through
his almost closed eyelids at the sun.
'The sun is neither English nor German nor Bohemian,' he said. 'I
am a subject of the sun. I belong to the fire-worshippers.'
'Do you?' she replied.
'Yes, truly, by tradition.' He looked at her smiling. 'You stand
there like a flower that will melt,' he added.
She smiled slowly at him with a slow, cautious look of her eyes, as
if she feared something.
'I am much more solid than you imagine,' she said.
Still he watched her.
'One day,' he said, 'before I go, let me wrap your hair round my
hands, will you?' He lifted his thin, short, dark hands. 'Let me
wrap your hair round my hands, like a bandage. They hurt me. I
don't know what it is. I think it is all the gun explosions. But
if you let me wrap your hair round my hands. You know, it is the
hermetic gold--but so much of water in it, of the moon. That will
soothe my hands. One day, will you?'
'Let us wait till the day comes,' she said.
'Yes,' he answered, and was still again.
'It troubles me,' he said after a while, 'that I complain like a
child, and ask for things. I feel I have lost my manhood for the
time being. The continual explosions of guns and shells! It seems
to have driven my soul out of me like a bird frightened away at
last. But it will come back, you know. And I am so grateful to
you; you are good to me when I am soulless, and you don't take
advantage of me. Your soul is quiet and heroic.'
'Don't,' she said. 'Don't talk!'
The expression of shame and anguish and disgust crossed his face.
'It is because I can't help it,' he said. 'I have lost my soul,
and I can't stop talking to you. I can't stop. But I don't talk
to anyone else. I try not to talk, but I can't prevent it. Do you
draw the words out of me?'
Her wide, green-blue eyes seemed like the heart of some curious,
full-open flower, some Christmas rose with its petals of snow and
flush. Her hair glinted heavy, like water-gold. She stood there
passive and indomitable with the wide-eyed persistence of her
wintry, blond nature.
Another day when she came to see him, he watched her for a time,
then he said:
'Do they all tell you you are lovely, you are beautiful?'
'Not quite all,' she replied.
'But your husband?'
'He has said so.'