"Well, I can't live up to that wisdom," she said. "When I think of this war day and night and night and day, how can I prevent talking to you about it? And those lies! Germans couldn't do such things.
It's a campaign of hate against us, set up by the English Press.""I daresay the German Press is no better," said Michael.
"If that is so, I should be just as indignant about the German Press," said she. "But it is only your guess that it is so."Suddenly she stopped, and came a couple of steps nearer him.
"Michael, it isn't possible that you believe those things of us?"she said.
He got up.
"Ah, do leave it alone, Sylvia," he said. "I know no more of the truth or falsity of it than you. I have seen just what you have seen in the papers.""You don't feel the impossibility of it, then?" she asked.
"No, I don't. There seems to have been sworn testimony. War is a cruel thing; I hate it as much as you. When men are maddened with war, you can't tell what they would do. They are not the Germans you know, nor the Germans I know, who did such things--not the people I saw when I was with Hermann in Baireuth and Munich a year ago. They are no more the same than a drunken man is the same as that man when he is sober. They are two different people; drink has made them different. And war has done the same for Germany."He held out his hand to her. She moved a step back from him.
"Then you think, I suppose, that Hermann may be concerned in those atrocities," she said.
Michael looked at her in amazement.
"You are talking sheer nonsense, Sylvia," he said.
"Not at all. It is a logical inference, just an application of the principle you have stated."Michael's instinct was just to take her in his arms and make the final appeal, saying, "We love each other, that's all," but his reason prevented him. Sylvia had said a monstrous thing in cold blood, when she suggested that he thought Hermann might be concerned in these deeds, and in cold blood, not by appealing to her emotions, must she withdraw that.
"I'm not going to argue about it," he said. "I want you to tell me at once that I am right, that it was sheer nonsense, to put no other name to it, when you suggested that I thought that of Hermann.""Oh, pray put another name to it," she said.
"Very well. It was a wanton falsehood," said Michael, "and you know it."Truly this hellish nightmare of war and hate which had arisen brought with it a brood not less terrible. A day ago, an hour ago he would have merely laughed at the possibility of such a situation between Sylvia and himself. Yet here it was: they were in the middle of it now.
She looked up at him flashing with indignation, and a retort as stinging as his rose to her lips. And then quite suddenly, all her anger went from her, as her, heart told her, in a voice that would not be silenced, the complete justice of what he had said, and the appeal that Michael refrained from making was made by her to herself. Remorse held her on its spikes for her abominable suggestion, and with it came a sense of utter desolation and misery, of hatred for herself in having thus quietly and deliberately said what she had said. She could not account for it, nor excuse herself on the plea that she had spoken in passion, for she had spoken, as he felt, in cold blood. Hence came the misery in the knowledge that she must have wounded Michael intolerably.
Her lips so quivered that when she first tried to speak no words would come. That she was truly ashamed brought no relief, no ease to her surrender, for she knew that it was her real self who had spoken thus incredibly. But she could at least disown that part of her.
"I beg your pardon, Michael," she said. "I was atrocious. Will you forgive me? Because I am so miserable."He had nothing but love for her, love and its kinsman pity.
"Oh, my dear, fancy you asking that!" he said.
Just for the moment of their reconciliation, it seemed to both that they came closer to each other than they had ever been before, and the chance of the need of any such another reconciliation was impossible to the verge of laughableness, so that before five minutes were past he could make the smile break through her tears at the absurdity of the moment that now seemed quite unreal. Yet that which was at the root of their temporary antagonism was not removed by the reconciliation; at most they had succeeded in cutting off the poisonous shoot that had suddenly sprouted from it.
The truth of this in the days that followed was horribly demonstrated.
