“But we’ve just settled that artists have no nationality, so I suppose art hasn’t either,” he said.
Sylvia pulled herself together, conscious of a want of control, and laid her hand on Michael’s shoulder.
“Oh, Michael, what should I do without you?” she said. “And yet--well, let me sing.”
She had placed a volume of Schubert on the music-stand, and opening it at random he found “Du Bist die Ruhe.” She sang the first verse, but in the middle of the second she stopped.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “But you know that.”
She moved away from him, and walked down to the empty fireplace.
“I can’t keep silence,” she said, “though I know we settled not to talk of those things when necessarily we cannot feel absolutely at one. But, just before you came in, I was reading the evening paper. Michael, how can the English be so wicked as to print, and I suppose to believe, those awful things I find there? You told me you had glanced at it. Well, did you glance at the lies they tell about German atrocities?”
“Yes, I saw them,” said Michael. “But it’s no use talking about them.”
“But aren’t you indignant?” she said. “Doesn’t your blood boil to read of such infamous falsehoods? You don’t know Germans, but I do, and it is impossible that such things can have happened.”
Michael felt profoundly uncomfortable. Some of these stories which Sylvia called lies were vouched for, apparently, by respectable testimony.
“Why talk about them?” he said. “I’m sure we were wise when we settled not to.”
“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.
“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.”