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Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #39660 · 628,520 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett

Author: Compton MacKenzie


        
Release date: May 9, 2012 [eBook #39660]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SYLVIA & MICHAEL: THE LATER ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)








SYLVIA & MICHAEL

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

SYLVIA & MICHAEL
PLASHERS MEAD
SYLVIA SCARLETT

Harper & Brothers
_Publishers_

     AUTHOR'S NOTE

     I need scarcely say that in 1915 there was no Passport Office in
     Bucharest, and that so far as I am aware there are no portraits in
     this book. If any of the characters achieve the effect of
     portraits, it may be due to their wearing uniform, which makes
     every one look alike. Further I should like to emphasise that this
     volume is really Book Three of _Sylvia Scarlett_, and is only
     published separately on account of the difficulties of production.




SYLVIA &
MICHAEL

THE LATER ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT

_By COMPTON MACKENZIE_

_Author of_ "SYLVIA SCARLETT" "PLASHERS MEAD" ETC.

[Illustration: colophon]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON




SYLVIA & MICHAEL

Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published July, 1919

TO THE MEMORY OF MY
FATHER AND IN DEEP
AFFECTION TO MY MOTHER




SYLVIA &
MICHAEL




_Sylvia & Michael_




CHAPTER I


By the time that Sylvia reached Paris she no longer blamed anybody but
herself for what had happened. Everything had come about through her own
greed in trying simultaneously to snatch from life artistic success and
domestic bliss: she had never made a serious attempt to choose between
them, and now she had lost both; for she could not expect to run away
like this and succeed elsewhere to the same degree or even in the same
way as in London. No doubt all her friends would deplore the step she
had taken and think it madness to ruin her career; but after so much
advertisement of her marriage, after the way she had revealed her most
intimate thoughts to Olive, after the confidence she had shown in
Arthur's devotion, there was nothing else but to run away. Yet now that
the engagement had been definitely broken she felt no bitterness toward
Arthur: the surprising factor was that he should have waited so long.
Moreover, behind all her outraged pride, behind her regret for losing so
much, deep in her mind burned a flickering intuition that she had really
lost very little, and that out of this new adventure would spring a new
self worthier to demand success, and more finely tempered to withstand
life's onset. Even when she was sitting beneath the mulberry-tree in the
first turmoil of the shock, she had felt a faint gladness that she was
not going to live in Mulberry Cottage with Arthur. Already on this May
morning of Paris with the chestnuts in their flowery prime she could
fling behind her all the sneers and all the pity for her jilting; and
though she had scarcely any money she was almost glad of her poverty,
glad to be plunged once again into the vortex of existence with all the
strength and all the buoyancy that time had given her. She thought of
the months after she left Philip. This was a different Sylvia now, and
not even yet come to what Sylvia might be. It was splendid to hear
already the noise of waters round her, from which she should emerge
stronger and more buoyant than she had ever imagined herself before.

Immediately upon her arrival--for with the little money she had there
was not a day to be lost--Sylvia went in this mood to visit her old
agent; like all parasites, he seemed to know in advance that there was
little blood to suck. She told him briefly what she had been doing, let
him suppose that there was a man in the case, and asked what work he
could find for her.

The agent shook his head; without money it was difficult, nay,
impossible to attempt in Paris anything like she had been doing in
London. No doubt she had made a great success, but a success in London
was no guaranty of a success in Paris, indeed rather the contrary. It
was a pity she had not listened to him when she had the money to spend
on a proper _réclame_.

"_Bref, il n'y a rien à faire, chère madame._"

There was surely the chance of an engagement for cabaret work? The agent
looked at Sylvia; and she could have struck him for the way he was so
evidently pondering her age and measuring it against her looks. In the
end he decided that she was still attractive enough and he examined his
books. She still sang, of course, and no doubt still enjoyed dancing?
Well, they wanted French girls in Petersburg at the Trocadero cabaret.
It would work out at four hundred and fifty francs a month, to which, of
course, the commission on champagne would add considerably. She would
have to remain on duty till 3 A.M., and the management reserved the
right to dispense with her services if she was not a success.

"_Comme artiste ou comme grue?_" Sylvia demanded.

The agent laughed and shrugged his shoulders; he was afraid that there
was nothing else remotely suitable. Sylvia signed the contract, and so
little money was left in her purse that from Paris to Petersburg she
traveled third class, an unpleasant experience.

The change from the Pierian Hall to the place where she was now singing
could scarcely have been greater. For an audience individual, quiet,
attentive, was substituted a noisy gathering of people that was not an
audience at all. It had been difficult enough in old days to sing to
parties drinking round a number of tables; but here to the noise of
drinking was added the noise of eating, the clatter of plates, and the
shouting of waiters. In a way Sylvia was glad, because she did not want
anybody to listen to the song she was singing; she preferred to come on
the small stage as impersonally as an instrument in the music of the
restaurant orchestra, and retire to give way to another singer without
the least attention being paid either to her exit or her successor's
entrance.

Sylvia wished that the rest of the evening could have passed away as
impersonally; she found it terribly hard to endure again, after so long,
the sensation of being for sale, of being pulled into a seat beside
drunken officers, of being ogled by elderly German Jews, of being
treated as an equal by waiters, of feeling upon her the eyes of the
manager as he reckoned her net value in champagne. There were moments
when she despaired of her ability to hold out and when she was on the
verge of cabling to England for money to come home. But pride kept her
back and sustained her; luckily she had to do nothing at present except
talk in order to induce her patrons to buy champagne by the dozen. She
knew that it could not last, that sooner or later she should acquire the
general reputation of being no good for anything except to sit and
chatter at a table and make a man spend money on wine for nothing, and
that then she should have to go because nobody would invite her to his
table. She was grateful that it was Russia and not America or France or
England, where a quicker return for money spent would have been
expected.

When Sylvia first arrived at Petersburg, she had stayed in solitary
misery at a small German hotel that lacked even the merit of being
clean. After she had been performing a week, one of her fellow-artistes
recommended her to a _pension_ kept by an Englishwoman, the widow of a
_chancelier_ at the French Embassy; it was a long way from the cabaret,
beyond the racecourse, but there was the tram, and one would always find
somebody to pay for the droshky home.

Sylvia visited the _pension_, which was a tumble-down house in a very
large garden of the rankest vegetation, a queer embrangled place; but
the first impression of the guests appealed to her, and she moved into
it the same afternoon. Mère Gontran, the owner, was one of those
expatriated women that lose their own nationality and acquire instead a
new nationality compounded of their own, their husband's, and the
country they inhabit. She was about fifty-five years old, nearly six
feet in height, excessively lean, with a neck like a turkey's, a
weather-beaten veinous complexion, very square shoulders, and thin,
colorless hair done up in a kind of starfish at the back. Her eyes were
very bright, of an intense blue, and she had a habit of wearing odd
stockings, which, like her hair, were always coming down, chiefly
because she used her garters to keep her sleeves above her elbows. One
of the twin passions of her life was animals; but she also had three
sons, loutish young men who ate or smoked cigarettes all day and could
hardly speak a word of English or French. Their mother, on the contrary,
though she had come to Petersburg as a governess thirty-five years ago,
and had lived there ever since, could speak hardly any Russian and only
very bad French. Mère Gontran's animals were really more accomplished
linguists than she, if it was true, as she asserted, that a collie she
possessed could say "good-by," "adieu," and "proschai." Sylvia suggested
that the Russian salute had really been a sneeze, but Mère Gontran
defied her to explain away the English or the French, and was angry at
any doubts being cast on what she had heard with her own ears. In
addition to Samuel, the talking collie, there was a senile bulldog
called James, who on a pillow of his own slept beside Mère Gontran in
her bed, which was in a hut two hundred yards away from the house, at
the other end of the garden. High up round the walls were hung boxes for
nine cats; into these they ascended by ladders, and none of them ever
attempted to sleep anywhere but in his own box, an example to the rest
of the _pension_. There were numerous other animals about the place, the
most conspicuous of which were a pony and a goat that spent most of
their time in the kitchen with the only servant, a stunted Tartar who
went muttering about the house and slept in a cupboard under the stairs.
Mère Gontran's other great passion was spiritualism; but Sylvia did not
have much opportunity to test her truthfulness in this direction,
because at first she was more interested in the guests at the _pension_,
accepting Mère Gontran as one accepts a queer fact for future
investigation at the right moment.

The outstanding boarder in Sylvia's eyes was a French aviator called
Carrier, who had come to give lessons and exhibitions of his skill in
Petersburg. He was a great bluff creature with a loud voice and what at
first seemed a boastful manner, until one realized that his brag was a
kind of game which he was playing with fate. Underneath it all there lay
a deep melancholy and a sense of always being very near to death; but
since he would have considered the least hint of this a disgraceful play
of cowardice, he was careful to cover what he might do with what he had
done, which was, even allowing for brag, a great deal. It was only when
Sylvia took the trouble to make friends with him that he revealed to
her his fierce ambition to finish with flying as soon as possible, and
with the money he had made to buy a little farm in the country.

"_Tu sais, la terre vaut mieux que le ciel_," he told her.

He was superstitious, and boasted loudly of his materialism; venturing
upon what was still largely an unknown element, he relied upon mascots,
while preserving a profound contempt for God.

"I've not ever seen him yet," he used to say, "though I've flown higher
than anybody."

His chest of drawers was covered with small talismans, some the pledges
of fortune given him by ladies, others picked up in significant
surroundings or conditions of mind. He wore half a dozen rings, not one
of which was worth fifty francs, but all of which were endowed with
protective qualities. By the scapulars and medals he carried round his
neck he should have been the most pietistic of men, but however sacred
their inscriptions, they counted with him as merely more portable
guaranties than the hideous little monkeys and mandarins that littered
his room.

"When I've finished," he told Sylvia, "I shall throw all this away. When
I'm digging in the good earth, my mascot will be my spade, nothing else,
_je t'assure_."

Sylvia asked him why he had ever taken up flying.

"When I was small I adored my _bécane_; afterward I adored my
automobile. _On arrive comme ça._ Ah, if the fools hadn't invented
biplanes, how happy I should be."

Then perhaps a few moments later he would find himself in the presence
of an audience, and one heard him at his boasting:

"_Bigre!_ I am sorry for the man who cannot fly. One has not lived if
one has not flown. The clouds! One would say a feather-bed beneath.
To-morrow I shall loop the loop at five thousand _mètres_. One might say
that all Petersburg will be regarding me."

There were two young acrobatic jugglers staying at the _pension_, who
performed some extremely dangerous acts, but who performed them with
such ease that they seemed like nothing, especially as the acrobats
themselves were ladylike to a ludicrous degree.

"Oh, Bobbie, say, wouldn't it be fine to fly? Would you be terribly
frightened? I should. Oh, I should be frightened."

"Don't you ever feel s-sick?" Bobbie asked the aviator.

For these two young men Carrier reserved his most hair-raising tales,
which always ended in Willie's saying to Bobbie:

"Oh, Bobbie, I s-s-imply can't listen to any more. So now! Oh, it does
make me feel so funny! Doesn't it you, Bobbie?"

Then arm in arm, giggling like two girls, they used to trip out of
hearing, and Carrier would spit in bewilderment. Once he invited Bobbie
to accompany him on a flight, at which Willie screamed, flung his arms
round Bobbie's neck and created a scene. Yet that same evening they both
balanced themselves with lamps on a high ladder, until the audience
actually stopped eating for a moment and held its breath.

Sylvia found the long hours of the cabaret very fatiguing; even in old
days she had never thought the life anything but the most cruel exaction
made by the rich man for his pleasure. She was determined to survive the
strain that was being put upon her, but she had moments of depression
during which she saw herself going under with the female slaves round
her. Her fatigue was increased by having to take the long tram-ride to
the cabaret, when the smell of her fellow-passengers was a torture; she
could not afford, however, to pay the fare of a droshky twice in one
day, and she did not always find somebody to pay for her drive home. The
contract with the management stipulated that she should be released from
her nightly task at three o'clock; but she was very often kept until
five o'clock when the champagne was flowing and when it would have been
criminal in the eyes of the management to break up a profitable party.
She found that the four hundred and fifty francs a month was not enough
to keep her in Petersburg; it had sounded a reasonably large salary in
Paris, but it barely paid the board at Mère Gontran's; she was,
therefore, dependent for everything above this on the commission of
about five francs she received on each bottle of champagne opened under
her patronage. Fortunately it seemed to give pleasure to the wild
frequenters of this cabaret when a bottle was knocked over on the floor;
yet with every device it was not always possible to escape drinking too
much.

One day at the beginning of July, Sylvia discussed the future with
Carrier, and he advised her to surrender and return to England; he even
offered to lend her the money for the fare. It was a hot day, and she
had a bad headache; she called it a headache, but it was less local than
that: her whole body ached beneath a weight of despair. Sylvia had taken
Carrier into her confidence about her broken marriage and explained why
it was impossible to return to England yet awhile; he contested all her
arguments, and in the mood that she was in she gave way to him. They
spoke in French, and arguments always seemed more incontestable in a
language that refused to allow anything in the nature of a vague
explanation; besides, her own body was responding against her will to
the logic of surrender.

"Pride is all very well," said Carrier. "I am proud of being the
greatest aviator of the moment, but if I fall and smash myself to pulp,
what becomes of my pride? It's impossible for you to lead the life you
are leading now without debasing yourself, and then where will your
pride be? Listen to me. You have been at the cabaret very little over a
month, and already it is telling upon you. It is very good that you are
able even for so long to keep men at a distance, but are you keeping
them at a distance? For me it is the same thing logically if you drink
with men or--" He shrugged his shoulders. "You sell your freedom in
either case. _N'est pas que j'ai raison, ma petite Sylvie?_ For me it
would be a greater pride to return to England and walk with my head in
the air and laugh at the world. Besides, you have a _je ne sais quoi_
that will prevent the world from laughing, but if you continue you will
have nothing. When I fall and smash myself to pulp, I sha'n't care about
the world's laughter. Nor will you."

Indeed he was right, Sylvia thought. That first impulse of defiance
seemed already like a piece of petulance, the gesture of a spoiled
child.

"And you will let me, as a good _copain_, lend you the money for your
fare back?"

"No," Sylvia said. "I think I can just manage to earn it by going once
more to-night to the cabaret. I've arranged to meet some count with an
unpronounceable name, who will probably open at least twenty-four
bottles. I get my week's salary to-night also. I shall have, with what I
have saved, enough to travel back as I came, third class. It has been a
thoroughly third-class adventure, _mon vieux_. A thousand thanks for
your kindness, but I must pay my pride the little solace of earning
enough to get me home again."

Carrier shrugged his shoulders.

"It must be as you feel. That I understand. But it gives me much
pleasure that you are going to be wise. I wish you _de la veine_
to-night."

He pressed upon her a mascot to charm fortune into attendance; it was a
little red devil with his tongue sticking out.

Sylvia went down to the cabaret that evening with the firm intention of
its being the last occasion; her headache had grown worse all the
afternoon and the gloom upon her spirit was deepening. What a fool she
had been to run away with so much assurance of having the courage to
endure this life, what a fool she had been! For the first time the
thought of suicide presented itself to her as a practical solution of
everything. In her present state she could perceive not one valid
argument against it. Who had attacked existence with less caution than
she, and who had deserved more from it in consequence? Had she once
flinched? Had she once taken the easier path? Yes, there had been
Arthur; that was the first time she had given way to indecision, and how
swiftly the punishment had followed. Was it really worth while to seek
now to repair that mistake? Was anything worth while? Except to go
suddenly out of it all, passing as abruptly from life to death as she
had passed from one society to another, one tour to another, one country
to another. She would abide by to-night's decision; if fortune put it
into the head of the count with the unpronounceable name to buy enough
bottles of champagne to make up what was still wanting to her fare, she
would return to England, devote herself to her work, turn again to
books, watch over her godchildren, and live at Mulberry Cottage. If, on
the other hand, the fare should not be made up on this night, why, then
she should kill herself. To-night should be a night of hell. How her
body was burning; how vile the people smelled in this tram; how
wearisome was this garish sunset. She took from her velvet bag the red
devil that Carrier had given her; in this feverish atmosphere it had a
certain fitness, a portentousness even; one could almost believe it
really was a tribute to fate.

The cabaret was crowded that evening; never before had there been such a
hurly-burly of greed and thirst. Sylvia, by good luck, was feeling
thirsty; for the dust from the tram had parched her mouth, and her
tongue was like cork; so much the better, because if she was going to
win that champagne she must be able herself to drink. The tintamarre of
plates, knives, and forks; the chickerchack as of multitudinous apes;
the blare and glare would have prevented the loudest soprano in the
world from sounding more than the squeak of a slate-pencil; and Sylvia
sang with gestures alone, forming with her lips mute words. "I'm paid
for my body, not for my voice; so let my body play the antic," she
muttered, angrily.

When her turn was over, Sylvia came down and joined the two young
Russians, who were waiting for her with another girl at a table on which
already the bottles of champagne were standing like giant pawns.

"_Ils ont la cuite_," the girl whispered to Sylvia. "_Alors, il faut
briffer, chérie; autrement ils seront trop soûlés._"

This seemed good advice, because if their hosts were too drunk too soon
they might get tired of the entertainment; and Sylvia proposed an
adjournment to eat, though she had little enough appetite. As a matter
of fact, the men wanted to drink vodka when supper was proposed, and not
merely to drink it themselves, but to make Sylvia and the other girl
keep them company glass by glass. In Sylvia's condition to drink vodka
would have been to drink liquid fire, and she managed to plead thirst
with such effect that the count benevolently ordered twenty-four bottles
of champagne to be brought immediately for her to quench it. The other
girl was full of admiration for Sylvia's strategy; if the worst came to
the worst, they would have earned seventy-five francs each and could
boast of a successful evening. Sylvia, however, wanted a hundred and
fifty francs for herself, and invoking the little red devil she showed a
way of breaking a bottle in half by filling it with hot water,
saturating a string in methylated spirits, tying the string round the
bottle, setting light to it, and afterward tapping the bottle gently
with a knife until it broke. The count was delighted with this trick,
but thought, as Sylvia hoped he would think, that the trick would be
much better if practised on an unopened bottle of champagne. In this way
twenty-six bottles were broken in childish rage by the count, because
the trick only worked with the help of hot water. He was by now in a
state of drunken obstinacy, and, being determined to show the
superiority of the human mind over matter, he ordered twenty-four more
bottles of champagne, as a Roman emperor might have ordered two dozen
slaves to test an empirical method of execution. By a fluke he managed
to succeed with the twenty-fourth bottle, and having by now gathered
round him an audience, he challenged the onlookers to repeat the trick.
Other women were anxious for their hosts to excel, particularly with
such profit to themselves; soon at every table in the cabaret
champagne-bottles were being cracked like eggs. The count was afraid
that there might not be enough wine left to carry them through the
evening, and ordered another two dozen bottles to be held in reserve for
his table.

Sylvia, though she was feeling horribly ill by now, was nevertheless at
peace, for she had earned her fare back to England. Unluckily, she could
not quit the table and go home, because, unless she waited until three,
she would not be paid her commission on the champagne. She felt herself
receding from the noise of breaking glass all round her, and thought she
was going to faint, but with an effort she gathered the noise round her
again and tried to believe that the room still existed. She seemed to be
catching hold of the great chandelier that hung from the middle of the
ceiling, and fancied that it was only her will and courage to maintain
her hold that was keeping the cabaret and everybody in it from
destruction.

"_Tu es malade, chérie?_" the other girl was asking.

"_Rien, rien_," she was whispering. "_Le chaleur._"

"_Oui, il fait très-chaud._"

The laughter and shouts of triumph rose higher; the noise of breaking
glass was like the waves upon a beach of shingle.

"_Pourquoi il te regarde?_" she found herself asking.

"_Personne ne me regarde, chérie_," the other girl replied.

But somebody was looking at her, somebody seated in one of the boxes for
private supper-parties that were fixed all round the hall, somebody tall
with short fair hair sticking up like a brush, somebody in uniform. He
was beckoning to her now and inviting her to join him in the box. He had
slanting eyes, cruel eyes that glittered and glittered.

"_Il te regarde. Il te regarde_," said Sylvia, hopelessly. "_Il te veut.
Oh, mon Dieu, il te veut! Quoi faire? Il n'y a rien à faire. Il n'y a
rien à faire. Il t'aura. Tu seras perdue. Perdue!_" she moaned.

"_Dis, Sylvie, dis, qu'est-ce que tu as? Tu me fais peur. Tes yeux sont
comme les yeux d'une folle. Est-ce que tu as pris de l'ethère ce soir?_"

It seemed to Sylvia that her companion was being dragged to damnation
before her eyes, and she implored her to flee while there was still
time.

Somebody stood up on a table and shouted at the top of his voice:

"_Il n'y a plus de champagne!_"

The count was much excited by this and demanded immediately how they
were going to spend the money they had brought with them. If there was
no more champagne, they should have to drink vodka, but first they must
play skittles with the empty bottles that were not already broken to
pieces. He picked a circular cheese from the table and bowled it across
the room.

"_Encore du fromage! Encore du fromage!_" everybody was shouting, and
soon everywhere crimson cheeses were rolling along the floor.

"The cheeses belong to me," the count cried. "Nobody else is to order
cheeses. _Garçon! garçon!_ bring me all the cheeses you have. The
cheeses are mine. Mine! Mine!"

His voice rose to a scream.

"_Mon Dieu! ils vont se battre à cause du fromage_" cried the other
girl, holding her hand to her eyes and cowering in her chair.

By this time the management thought it would soon lose what it had made
that evening and ordered the cabaret to be closed. The girls, who were
anxious to escape, ran to be paid for their champagne. Sylvia swayed
and nearly fell in the rush; her companion kept her head and exacted
from the management every copeck. Then she dragged Sylvia with her to a
droshky, put her in, and said good night.

"_Tu ne viens pas avec moi?_" Sylvia cried.

"_Non, non, il faut que j'aille avec lui._"

"_Avec l'homme qui te regardait du loge?_"

"_Non, non, avec mon ami._"

She gave the address of the _pension_ to the driver and vanished in the
confusion. Sylvia fancied that this girl was lost forever, and wept to
herself all the way home, but without shedding a single tear; her body
was like fire. There was nobody about in the _pension_ when she arrived
back; she dragged herself up to her room and lay down on the bed fully
dressed. It seemed that all reality was collapsing fast, and she
clutched the notes stuffed into her corsage as the only solid fact left
to her, the only link between herself and home. Once or twice she
vaguely wondered if she were really ill, but her mental state was so
much worse than the physical pain that she struggled feebly to quieten
her nerves and kept on trying to assure herself that her own unnatural
excitement was nothing except the result of the unnatural excitement at
the cabaret. She found herself wondering if she were going mad, and
trying to piece together the links of the chain that would lead her to
the explanation of this madness.

"What could have made me go mad suddenly like this?" she kept moaning.

It seemed that if she could only discover the cause of her madness she
should be able to cure it. All her attention was soon taken up in
watching little round red devils that kept rising out of the floor
beside the bed, little round red devils that swelled and ripened like
tomatoes, burst, and vanished. Her faculties concentrated upon
discovering a reasonable explanation for such a queer occurrence; many
explanations presented themselves, hovered upon the outskirts of her
brain, and escaped before they could be stated. There was no doubt in
Sylvia's mind that a reasonable explanation existed, and it was
tantalizing never to be able to catch it, because it was quite certain
that such an explanation would have been very interesting; at any rate,
it was a relief to know that there was an explanation and that these
devils were not figments of the imagination. As soon as she had settled
that they had an objective existence, it became rather amusing to watch
them; there was a new variety now that floated about the floor like
bubbles before they burst.

Suddenly Sylvia sat up on the bed and listened; the stairs were creaking
under the footsteps of some heavy person who was ascending. It must be
Carrier. She should go out and call to him; she should like him to see
those devils. She went out into the passage dove-gray with the dawn, and
called. Ah, it was not Carrier; it was that man who had stared from the
box at her friend! She closed the door hurriedly and bolted it; every
sensation of being ill had departed from her; she could feel nothing but
an unspeakable fear. She put her hand to her forehead; it was dripping
wet, and she shivered. The devils were nowhere to be seen; dawn was
creeping about the room in a gray mist. The door opened, and the bolt
fell with a clatter upon the floor; she shrank back upon the bed,
burying her face in the pillow. The intruder clanked up and down the
room with his sword, but never spoke a word; at last, Sylvia, finding
that it was impossible to shut him out by closing her eyes and ears to
his presence, sat up and asked him in French what he wanted and why he
had broken into her room like this. All her unnatural mental excitement
had died away before this drunken giant who was staring at her from
glazed eyes and leaning unsteadily with both hands upon his sword; she
felt nothing but an intense physical weariness and a savage desire to
sleep.

"Why didn't you wait for me at the cabaret?" the giant demanded, in a
thick voice.

Sylvia estimated the distance between herself and the door, and wondered
if her aching legs would carry her there quickly enough to escape those
huge freckled hands that were silky with golden hairs. Her heart was
beating so loudly that she was afraid he would hear it and be angry.
"You didn't ask me to wait," she said. "It was my friend whom you
wanted. She's still there. You've made a mistake. Why don't you go back
and look for her?"

He banged his sword upon the floor angrily.

"A trick! A trick to get rid of me," he muttered. Then he unbuckled his
sword, flung it against a chair, and began to unbutton his tunic.

"But you can't stay here," Sylvia cried. "Don't you understand that
you've made a mistake? You don't want _me_. Go away from here."

"Money?" the giant muttered. "Take it."

He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a bundle of notes, and threw
them on the bed, after which he took off his tunic.

"You're drunk or mad," Sylvia cried, now more exasperated than
frightened. "Go out of my room before I wake up the house."

The giant paid not the least attention, and, seating himself on a chair,
bent over to unlace his boots. Sylvia again tried to muster enough
strength to rise, but her limbs were growing weaker every moment.

"And if you're not the girl I wanted," said the giant, looking up from
his boots, "you're a _girl_, aren't you? I've paid you, haven't I? A
splendid state the world's coming to when a cocotte takes it into her
head to argue with a Russian officer who pays her the honor of his
attentions. The world's turning upside down. The people must have a
lesson. Come, get off that bed and help me undo these boots."

"Do you know that I'm English?" Sylvia said. "You'll find that even
Russian officers cannot insult Englishwomen."

"A cocotte has no nationality," the giant contradicted, solemnly. "She
is common property. Come, if you had wished to talk, you should have
joined my table earlier in the evening. One does not wish to talk when
one is sleepy."

The English acrobats slept next door to Sylvia, and she hammered on the
partition.

"Are you killing bugs?" the giant asked. "You need not bother. They
never disturb me."

Sylvia went on hammering; her arms were getting weaker, and unless help
came soon she should faint. There was a tap on the door.

"Come in," she cried. "Come in at once--at once!"

Willie entered in purple silk pajamas, rubbing his eyes.

"Whatever is it, Sylvia?"

"Take this drunken brute out of my room."

"Bobbie! Bobbie!" he called. "Come here, Bobbie! Bobbie! Will you come?
You are mean. Oh, there's such a nasty man in Sylvia's room! Oh, he's
something dreadful to look at!"

The drunken officer stared at Willie in amazement, trying to make up his
mind if he were an alcoholic vision; his judgment was still further
shaken by the appearance of Bobbie in pajamas of emerald-green silk.

"Oh, Willie, he's got a sword!" said Bobbie. "Oh, doesn't he look
fierce? Oh, he does look fierce! Most alarming I'm sure."

The intruder staggered to his feet.

"_Foutez-moi le camp_," he bellowed, making a grab for his sword.

"For Heaven's sake get rid of the brute," Sylvia moaned. "I'm too weak
to move."

The two young men pirouetted into the middle of the room, as they were
wont to pirouette upon the stage, with arms stretched out in a curve
from the shoulder and fingers raised mincingly above an imaginary teacup
held between the first finger and thumb. When they reached the giant
they stopped short to sustain the preliminary pose of a female acrobat;
then turning round, they ran back a few steps, turned round again, and
with a scream flung themselves upon their adversary; he went down with a
crash, and they danced upon his prostrate form like two butterflies over
a cabbage.

The noise had wakened the other inhabitants of the _pension_, who came
crowding into Sylvia's room; with the rest was Carrier and they managed
to extract from her a vague account of what had happened. The aviator,
in a rage, demanded an explanation of his conduct from the officer, who
called him a _maquereau_. Carrier was strong; with help from the
acrobats he had pushed the officer half-way through the window when Mère
Gontran, who, notwithstanding her bedroom being two hundred yards away
from the _pension_, had an uncanny faculty for divining when anything
had gone wrong, appeared on the scene. Thirty-five years in Russia had
made her very fearful of offending the military, and she implored
Carrier and the acrobats to think what they were doing: in her red
dressing-gown she looked like an insane cardinal.

"They'll confiscate my property. They'll send me to Siberia. Treat his
Excellency more gently, I beg. Sylvia, tell them to stop. Sylvia, he's
going--he's going--he's gone!"

He was gone indeed, head first into a clump of lilacs underneath the
window, whither his tunic and sword followed him.

The adventure with the drunken officer had exhausted the last forces of
Sylvia; she lay back on the bed in a semi-trance, soothed by the
unending bibble-babble all round. She was faintly aware of somebody's
taking her hand and feeling her pulse, of somebody's saying that her
eyes were like a dead woman's, of somebody's throwing a coverlet over
her. Then the bibble-babble became much louder; there was a sound of
crackling and a smell of smoke, and she heard shouts of "Fire!" "Fire!"
"He has set fire to the outhouse!" There was a noise of splashing water,
a rushing sound of water, a roar as of a thousand torrents in her head;
the people in the room became animated surfaces, cardboard figures
without substance and without reality; the devils began once more to
sprout from the floor; she felt that she was dying, and in the throes of
dissolution she struggled to explain that she must travel back to
England, that she must not be buried in Russia. It seemed to her in a
new access of semi-consciousness that Carrier and the two acrobats were
kneeling by her bed and trying to comfort her, that they were patting
her hands kindly and gently. She tried to warn them that they would
blister themselves if they touched her, but her tongue seemed to have
separated itself from her body. She tried to tell them that her tongue
was already dead, and the effort to explain racked her whole body. Then,
suddenly, dark and gigantic figures came marching into the room: they
must be demons, and it was true about hell. She tried to scream her
belief in immortality and to beg a merciful God to show mercy and save
her from the Fiend. The somber forms drew near her bed. From an
unimaginably distant past she saw framed in fire the picture of The
Impenitent Sinner's Deathbed that used to hang in the kitchen at Lille;
and again from the past came suddenly back the text of a sermon preached
by Dorward at Green Lanes--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be as white as snow_. It seemed to her that if only she could explain to
God that her name was really Snow and that Scarlett was only the name
assumed for her by her father, all might even now be well. The somber
forms had seized her, and she beat against them with unavailing hands;
they snatched her from the bed and wrapped her round and round with
something that stifled her cries; with her last breath she tried to
shriek a warning to Carrier of the existence of hell, to beg him to put
away his little red devils lest he, when he should ultimately fall from
the sky, should fall as deep as hell.

Sylvia came out of her delirium to find herself in the ward of a
hospital kept by French nuns; she asked what had been the matter with
her, and, smiling compassionately, they said it was a bad fever. She lay
for a fortnight in a state of utter lassitude, watching the nuns going
about their work as she would have watched birds in the cool deeps of a
forest. The lassitude was not unpleasant; it was a fatigue so intense
that her spirit seemed able to leave her tired body and float about
among the shadows of this long room. She knew that there were other
patients in the ward, but she had no inclination to know who they were
or what they looked like; she had no desire to communicate with the
outside world, nor any anxiety about the future. She could not imagine
that she should ever wish to do anything except lie here watching the
nuns at their work like birds in the cool deeps of a forest. When the
doctor visited her and spoke cheerfully, she wondered vaguely how he
managed to keep his very long black beard so frizzy, but she was not
sufficiently interested to ask him. To his questions about her bodily
welfare she let her tired body answer automatically, and often, when the
doctor was bending over to listen to her heart or lungs, her spirit
would have mounted up to float upon the shadows of sunlight rippling
over the ceiling, that he and her body might commune without disturbing
herself. At last there came a morning when the body grew impatient at
being left behind and when it trembled with a faint desire to follow the
spirit. Sylvia raised herself up on her elbow and asked a nun to bring
her a looking-glass.

"But all my hair has been cut!" she exclaimed. She looked at her eyes:
there was not much life in them, yet they were larger than she had ever
seen them, and she liked them better than before, because they were now
very kind eyes: this new Sylvia appealed to her.

She put the glass down and asked if she had been very ill.

"Very ill indeed," said the nun.

Sylvia longed to tell the nun that she must not believe all she had said
when she was delirious: and then she wondered what she had said.

"Was I very violent in my delirium?" she asked.

The nun smiled.

"I thought I was in hell," said Sylvia, seriously. "When are my friends
coming to see me?"

The nun looked grave.

"Your friends have all gone away," she said at last. "They used to come
every day to inquire after you, but they went away when war was
declared."

"War?" Sylvia repeated. "Did you say war?"

The nun nodded.

"War?" she went on. "This isn't part of my delirium? You're not teasing
me? War between whom?"

"Russia, France, and England are at war with Germany and Austria."

"Then Carrier has left Petersburg?"

"Hush," said the nun. "It's no longer Petersburg. It's Petrograd now."

"But I don't understand. Do you mean to tell me that everybody has
changed his name? I've changed my name back to my real name. My name is
Sylvia Snow now. I changed it when I was delirious, but I shall always
be Sylvia Snow. I've been thinking about it all these days while I've
been lying so quiet. Did Carrier leave any message for me? He was the
aviator, you know."

"He has gone back to fight for France," the nun said, crossing herself.
"He was very sorry about your being so ill. You must pray for him."

"Yes, I will pray for him," Sylvia said. "And there is nobody left?
Those two funny little English acrobats with fair curly hair. Have they
gone?"

"They've gone, too," said the nun. "They came every day to inquire for
you, and they brought you flowers, which were put beside your bed, but
you were unconscious."

"I think I smelled a sweetness in the air sometimes," Sylvia said.

"They were always put outside the window at night," the nun explained.

The faintest flicker of an inclination to be amused at the nun's point
of view about flowers came over Sylvia; but it scarcely endured for an
instant, because it was so obviously the right point of view in this
hospital, where even flowers, not to seem out of place, must acquire
orderly habits. The nun asked her if she wanted anything and passed on
down the ward when she shook her head.

Sylvia lay back to consider her situation and to pick up the threads of
normal existence, which seemed so inextricably tangled at present that
she felt like a princess in a fairy tale who had been set an impossible
task by an envious witch.

In the first place, putting on one side all the extravagance of
delirium, Sylvia was conscious of a change in her personality so
profound and so violent, that now with the return of reason and with the
impulse to renewed activity, she was convinced of her rightness in
deciding to go back to her real name of Sylvia Snow. The anxiety that
she had experienced during her delirium to make the change positively
remained from that condition as something of value that bore no relation
to the grosser terrors of hell she had experienced. The sense of
regeneration that she was feeling at this moment could not entirely be
explained by her mind's reaction to the peace of the hospital, in the
absence of pain, and to her bodily well-being. She was able to set in
its proportion each of these factors, and when she had done so there
still remained this emotion that was indefinable unless she accepted
for it the definition of regeneration.

"The fact is I've eaten rose leaves and I'm no longer a golden ass," she
murmured. "But what I want to arrive at is when exactly I was turned
into an ass and when I ate the rose leaves."

For a time her mind, unused since her fever to concentrated thinking,
wandered off into the tale of Apuleius. She wished vaguely that she had
the volume so inscribed by Michael Fane with her in Petersburg, but she
had left it behind at Mulberry Cottage. It was some time before she
brought herself back to the realization that the details of the Roman
story had not the least bearing upon her meditation, and that the
symbolism of the enchanted transformation and the recovery of human
shape by eating rose leaves had been an essentially modern and romantic
gloss upon the old author. This gloss, however, had served
extraordinarily well to symbolize her state of mind before she had been
ill, and she was not going to abandon it now.

"I must have had an experience once that fitted in with the idea, or it
would not recur to me like this with such an imputation of
significance."

Sylvia thought hard for a while; the nun on day duty was pecking away at
a medicine-bottle, and the busy little noise competed with her thoughts,
so that she was determined before the nun could achieve her purpose with
the medicine-bottle to discover when she became a golden ass. Suddenly
the answer flashed across her mind; at the same moment the nun triumphed
over her bottle and the ward was absolutely still again.

"I became a golden ass when I married Philip and I ate the rose leaves
when Arthur refused to marry me."

This solution of the problem, though she knew that it was not radically
more satisfying than the defeat of a toy puzzle, was nevertheless
wonderfully comforting, so comforting that she fell asleep and woke up
late in the afternoon, refreshingly alert and eager to resume her
unraveling of the tangled skein.

"I became a golden ass when I married Philip," she repeated to herself.

For a while she tried to reconstruct the motives that fourteen years ago
had induced her toward that step. If she had really begun her life all
over again, it should be easy to do this. But the more she pondered
herself at the age of seventeen the more impossibly remote that Sylvia
seemed. Certain results, however, could even at this distance of time be
ascribed to that unfortunate marriage: among others the three months
after she left Philip. When Sylvia came to survey all her life since,
she saw how those three months had lurked at the back of everything, how
really they had spoiled everything.

"Have I fallen a prey to remorse?" she asked herself. "Must I forever be
haunted by the memory of what was, after all, a necessary incident to my
assumption of assishness? Did I not pay for them that day at Mulberry
Cottage when I could not be myself to Michael, but could only bray at
him the unrealities of my outward shape?"

Lying here in the cool hospital, Sylvia began to conjure against her
will the incidents of those three fatal months, and so weak was she
still from the typhus that she could not shake off their obsession. Her
mind clutched at other memories; but no sooner did she think that she
was safely wrapped up in their protecting fragrance than like Furies
those three months drove her mind forth from its sanctuary and scourged
it with cruel images.

"This is the sort of madness that makes a woman kill her seducer," said
Sylvia, "this insurgent rage at feeling that the men who crossed my path
during those three months still live without remorse for what they did."

Gradually, however, her rage died down before the pleadings of
reasonableness; she recalled that somewhere she had read how the human
body changes entirely every seven years: this reflection consoled her,
and though she admitted that it was a trivial and superficial
consolation, since remorse was conceived with the spirit rather than
with the body, nevertheless the thought that not one corpuscle of her
present blood existed fourteen years ago restored her sense of
proportion and enabled her to shake off the obsession of those three
months, at any rate so far as to allow her to proceed with her
contemplation of the new Sylvia lying here in this hospital.

"Then of course there was Lily," she said to herself. "How can I
possibly excuse my treatment of Lily, or not so much my treatment of her
as my attitude toward her? I suppose all this introspection is morbid,
but having been brought up sharp like this and having been planked down
on this bed of interminable sickness, who wouldn't be morbid? It's
better to have it out with myself now, lest when I emerge from here--for
incredible as it seems just at present I certainly shall emerge one fine
morning--I start being introspective instead of getting down to the hard
facts of earning a living and finding my way back to England. Lily!" she
went on. "I believe really when I look back at it that I took a cruel
delight in watching Lily's fading. It seemed jolly and cynical to
predestine her to maculation, to regard her as a flower, an almost
inanimate thing that could only be displayed by somebody else and was
incapable of developing herself. Yet in the end she did develop herself.
I was very ill then; but when I was in the clinic at Rio I had none of
the sensations that I have now. What sensations did I have, then?
Mostly, I believe, they were worries about Lily because she did not come
to see me. Strange that something so essentially insignificant as Lily
could have created such a catastrophe for Michael, and that I, when she
went her own way, let her drop as easily as a piece of paper from a
carriage. The fact was that, having smirched myself and survived the
smirching, I was unable to fret myself very much over Lily's smirching.
And yet I did fret myself in a queer, irrational way. But what use to
continue? I behaved badly to Lily, and I can't excuse my attitude
toward her by saying that I behaved badly to myself also."

The longer Sylvia went on with the reconstruction of the past the more
deeply did she feel that she was to blame for everything in it.

"I'm so sorry, Sister; I was talking to myself. I think I must really be
very much better to-day."

The nun hastened to her bedside and asked her what she wanted.

"And yet I had the impudence to resent Arthur's treatment of me," she
cried.

The nun shook her forefinger at Sylvia and retired again to her table at
the end of the ward.

"Why, I deserved a much worse humiliation," Sylvia went on. "And I got
it, too. The fact was that when I ate those rose leaves and became a
woman again I was so elated really that I thought everything I had done
in the shape of an ass had been obliterated by the disenchantment. Ah,
how much, how tremendously I deserve the humiliation which that Russian
officer inflicted. And then mercifully came this fever on top of it, and
I have got to rise from this bed and confront life from an entirely
different point of view. I'm going to start from where I was that
afternoon in Brompton Cemetery, when I was speculating about the human
soul. Obviously, now I look back at it, I was just then beginning to
apprehend that I might, after all, possess a soul with obligations to
something more permanent than the body it inhabited. What a fool Philip
was! If he'd only nurtured my soul instead of my body. If he'd only not
bit by bit dried it up to something so small that it became powerless to
compete with the arrogant body that held it. I wonder if he's still
alive. But of course he's still alive. He's only forty-six now. Really
I'd like to write and explain what happened. However, he'd only
laugh--he was always so very contemptuous of souls. Anyway, nothing will
ever induce me to believe that my soul hasn't grown in the most
extraordinary way during this fever. What a triumph she has had over her
poor body. Where's that looking-glass?"

She called to the nun and begged her to bring the looking-glass again.
The nun brought it and tried to console Sylvia for the loss of her hair.

"But I'm rejoicing in it," Sylvia declared. "I'm rejoicing in the sight
I present to the world. Look here, can't you sit down beside me and tell
me something about your religion? I'm absolutely bursting for a
revelation. You fast, don't you, and spend long nights and days in
prayer? Well, I am in the sort of condition in which you find yourself
at the end of a long bout of fasting and prayer. I'm as light as a
feather. I could achieve levitation with very little difficulty."

The nun regarded Sylvia in perplexity.

"Have you thanked Almighty God for your recovery?" she asked.

"No, of course I haven't. I can't thank somebody I know nothing about,"
said Sylvia impatiently. "Besides, it's no good thanking God for my
recovery unless I am sure I ought to be grateful. Mere living for the
sake of living seems to me as sensual as any other appetite. Sister,
can't you give me the key to life?"

The nun sheltered herself beneath an array of pious phrases; she was
like a person who has been surprised naked and hurriedly flings on all
the clothes in reach.

"All that you're saying means nothing to me," said Sylvia, sadly. "And
the reason of it is that you've never lived. You've only looked at evil
from the outside; you've only heard of unbelief."

"I'll make a Novena for you," said the nun, hopelessly. She said it in
the same way as she would have offered to knit a woolen vest. "To-day is
the Assumption." It was as if she justified the woolen vest by a change
in the weather.

Sylvia thanked her for the Novena just as she would have thanked her for
the woolen vest.

"Or perhaps you'd like a priest?" the nun suggested.

Sylvia shook her head.

"I don't feel I require professional treatment yet," she said. "Don't
look so sad, little Sister. I expect your Novena will help me to what
I'm trying to find--if I'm trying to find anything," she added,
pensively. "I think really I'm waiting to be found."

The nun retired disconsolate; the next day Sylvia's spiritual problems
vanished before the problem of getting up for the first time, of
wavering across the ward and collapsing into a wicker chair among three
other convalescent patients who were talking and sewing in the sunlight.

The uniformity of their gray shawls and gray dressing-gowns made Sylvia
pay more attention to the faces of her fellow-sufferers than she might
otherwise have done; she sat in silence for a while, exhausted by her
progress across the ward, and listened to their conversation, which was
carried on in French, though as far as she could make out none of them
was of French nationality. Presently a young woman with a complexion
like a slightly shriveled apple turned to Sylvia and asked in her own
language if she were not English.

Sylvia nodded.

"I'm English, too. It's pleasant to meet a fellow-countrywoman here.
What are you going to do about the war?"

"I don't suppose much action on my part will make any difference," said
Sylvia, with a laugh. "I don't suppose I could stop it, however hard I
tried."

The Englishwoman laughed because she evidently wanted to be polite; but
it was mirthless laughter, like an actor's at rehearsal, a mere sound
that was required to fill in a gap in the dialogue.

"Of course not," she agreed. "I was wondering if you would go back to
England as soon as you got out of hospital."

"I shall if I can rake together the money for my fare," Sylvia said.

"Oh, won't your family pay your fare back? Didn't you get that in the
agreement?"

"I don't possess a family," Sylvia said.

"Oh, aren't you a governess? How funny!"

"It would be very much funnier if I was," said Sylvia.

"My name is Eva Savage. What's yours?"

Sylvia hesitated a moment and then plunged.

"Sylvia Snow."

Immediately afterward, with an access of timidity, she supplemented this
by explaining that on the stage she called herself Sylvia Scarlett.

"On the stage," repeated the little governess. "Are you on the stage?
You are lucky."

Sylvia looked at her in surprise, and realized how much younger she was
than a first glance at her led one to suppose.

"I came out to Russia when I was nineteen," Miss Savage went on. "And of
course that's better than staying in England to teach, though I hate
teaching."

Sylvia asked how old she was now, and when she heard that she was only
twenty-four she decided that illness must be the cause of that shriveled
rosy skin that made her look like an old maid of fifty.

They talked for a while of their illness and compared notes, but it
seemed that Miss Savage must have had a mild attack, for she had been
brought into the hospital some time after Sylvia and had already been up
a week.

"I'm going to ask the Sister in charge to let me sleep in the bed next
to yours," said Miss Savage. "After all, we're the only two English
girls here."

Sylvia did not feel at all sure that she liked this plan, but she did
not want to hurt her companion's feelings and agreed without enthusiasm.
Presently she asked if the other two women spoke English, and Miss
Savage told her that one was a German-Swiss, the wife of a pastry-cook
called Benzer, and that the other was a Swedish masseuse; she did not
think that either of them spoke English, but added in a low voice that
they were both very common.

"Interesting?"

"No, common, awfully common," Miss Savage insisted.

Sylvia made a gesture of impatience: her countrywomen always summed up
humanity with such complacent facility. At this moment a little girl of
about thirteen, habited like the rest in a gray shawl, came tripping
down the ward, clapping her hands with glee.

"How lovely war is!" she cried in French. "I am longing to be out of
hospital. I've been in the other ward, and through the window I saw
thousands and thousands of soldiers marching past. _Maman_ cried
yesterday when I asked her why _papa_ hated soldiers. He hates them.
Whenever he sees them marching past he shakes his fist and spits. But I
love them."

This child had endeared herself to the invalids of the hospital; she was
a token of returning health, the boon of which she seemed to pledge to
every one in the company. Even the grim Swedish masseuse smiled and
spoke gently to her in barbaric French. Moreover, here in this quiet
hospital the war had not yet penetrated; it was like a far-distant
thunder-storm which had driven a number of people who were out of doors
to take shelter at home; as Miss Savage said to Sylvia:

"I expect everybody got excited and afraid; yet it all seems very quiet,
really, and I shall stay here with my family. There's no point in
_making_ oneself uncomfortable."

Sylvia agreed with Miss Savage and decided not to worry about her fare
back to England, but rather to stay on for a while in Russia and get up
her strength after leaving the hospital; then when she had spent her
money she should work again, and when this war was over she could
return to Mulberry Cottage with one or two Improvisations added to her
repertory. Now that she was out of bed, life seemed already simple
again, and perhaps she had exaggerated the change in herself; she wished
she had not spoken to the nun so intimately; one of the disadvantages of
being ill was this begetting of an intimacy between the nurse and the
patient, which grows out of bodily dependence into mental servitude; it
was easy to understand why men so often married their nurses.

"I am not sure," said Sylvia to herself, "that the right attitude is not
the contempt of the healthy animal for one of its kind who is sick.
There's a sort of sterile sensuality about nursing and being nursed."

Sylvia's feelings about the war were confirmed by the views of the
doctor who attended her. He had felt a little nervous until England had
taken her place beside Russia and France, but once she had done so, the
war would be over at the latest by the middle of October.

"It's easy to see how frightened the Germans are by the way they are
behaving in Belgium."

"Why, what are they doing?" Sylvia asked.

"They've overrun it like a pack of wolves."

"I have a sister in Brussels," she said, suddenly.

The doctor shook his head compassionately.

"But of course nothing will happen to her," she added.

The doctor hastened to support this theory; Sylvia was still very weak
and he did not want a relapse brought on by anxiety. He changed the
conversation by calling to Claudinette, the little girl who thought war
was so lovely.

"Seen any more soldiers to-day?" he asked, jovially.

"Thousands," Claudinette declared. "Oh, _monsieur_, when shall I be able
to leave the hospital? It's terrible to be missing everything. Besides,
I want to make _papa_ understand how lovely it is to march along, with
everybody thinking how fine and brave it is to be a soldier. Fancy,
_maman_ told me he has been invited to go back to France and that he has
actually refused the invitation."

The doctor raised his eyebrows and flashed a glance at Sylvia from his
bright brown eyes to express his pity for the child's innocence.

At this point Madame Benzer intervened.

"The only thing that worries me about this war is the food: it's bound
to upset custom. People don't order so many tarts when they're thinking
of something else. And the price of everything will go up. Luckily I've
told my husband to lay in stores of flour and sugar. It's a comfort to
be a neutral."

The Swedish masseuse echoed Madame Benzer's self-congratulation:

"Of course one doesn't want to seem an egoist," she said, "but I can't
help knowing that I shall benefit. As a neutral I sha'n't be able to go
and nurse at the front, but I shall be useful in Petersburg."

"Petrograd," the doctor corrected her, with marked irritation.

"I shall never get used to the change," said the masseuse. "When do you
think I shall be strong enough to begin my work again?"

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"November, perhaps."

"Why, the war will be over by then!" said the masseuse, indignantly.

"They're calling for volunteers in England," Miss Savage observed to
Sylvia. "I'm sure my two brothers have gone. They've always been mad
about soldiering. They're like you, Claudinette."

"If only I could be a _vivandière_!" cried the child. She was unable to
contain her romantic exultation at the idea, and, snatching the doctor's
stethoscope, she marched up and down the ward, pursing her lips to a
shrill "Marseillaise."

"Children are children," said Madame Benzer, fatly.

"It's true," sighed the doctor.

"_She's_ quite well again," said the masseuse, enviously.

"I love children," Sylvia exclaimed.

"Do you?" said Miss Savage. "Wait till you've had to teach them. You'll
hate them then!"

Claudinette's march was interrupted by the nun on duty, who was
horrified at the ward's being used so noisily: though there were no
fresh patients, the rule of stillness could not be broken like this.
Claudinette having been deprived of her bugle, went and drummed out her
martial soul upon a window-pane; the doctor, who felt a little guilty,
stroked his beard and passed on.

The governess carried out her intention of having her bed moved next to
Sylvia; on the first night of the change she whispered across to her in
the darkness, which seemed the more intense round their beds because at
the far end of the ward a lamp burned before an image of the Virgin,
and, inclosed by two screens, the nun on night-duty sat in a dim, golden
mist.

"Are you awake?"

Sylvia answered her in a low voice in order not to disturb the other
patients; she could not bring herself to answer in a whisper, because it
would have made this conversation seem surreptitious.

"Hush! Don't talk so loud. Are you a Catholic?"

"I'm nothing," said Sylvia.

"Do tell me about your life."

"We can talk about that in the morning."

"Oh no, one can't talk secrets in the morning. I want to ask you
something. Do you think that everybody in Russia will go and fight? You
see, Prince Paul isn't a soldier. You remember I told you that Prince
George and Prince Paul, the two elder sons of the family, were both very
handsome? Well, Prince George is in the army, but Prince Paul isn't.
They both made love to me," she added, with a stifled giggle.

Sylvia lay silent.

"Are you shocked?"

"Neither shocked nor surprised," said Sylvia, coldly. "The nobility of
Russia seem to think of nothing else but making love."

"Paul gave me a book once. I've got it here with me in my box. It's
called The _Memories of a German Singer_. Would you like to read it?"

"That book!" Sylvia exclaimed, scornfully. "Why, it's the filthiest book
I ever read."

"You are shocked, then," the governess whispered. "I thought you'd be
more broad-minded. I sha'n't tell you now about Prince Paul. He makes
love divinely. He said it was so thrilling to make love to somebody like
me who looked so proper. I'm dreadfully afraid that when I get back I
shall find he's gone to fight. It's awful to think how dull it will be
without George or Paul. Haven't you had any interesting love-affairs?"

"Good God!" exclaimed Sylvia, angrily. "Do you think there's anything to
be proud of in having love-affairs like yours? Do you think there's
anything fine in letting yourself be treated like a servant by a
lascivious boy? You make me feel sick. How dare you assume that I should
be interested in your--oh, I have no word to call it that can be even
spoken in a whisper."

"You _are_ proper," the governess murmured, resentfully. "I thought
girls on the stage were more broad-minded."

"Is this muttering going to continue all night?" an angry voice
demanded. Farther along the ward could be heard the sound of a bed
rattling with indignation.

The nun pushed back her screen, and the candle-light illumined Madame
Benzer sitting up on her ample haunches.

"One must not talk," said the nun, reproachfully. "One disturbs the
patients. Besides, it is against the rules to talk after the lights are
put out."

"Well, please move me away from here," Sylvia asked, "because if
_mademoiselle_ stays here I shall have to talk."

"I'm sure I'd much rather not stay in this bed," declared Miss Savage in
an injured voice. "And I was only whispering. There was no noise until
_mademoiselle_ began to talk quite loudly."

"Is this discussion worth while?" Sylvia asked, wearily.

"Am I ever to be allowed to get to sleep?" Madame Benzer demanded.

"I should like to sleep, too," protested the masseuse. "If I'm to get
strong enough to resume work in November, I need all the sleep I can
get. I'm not like a child that can sleep through anything."

"_I'm_ not asleep," cried Claudinette, shrilly. "And I'm very content
that I'm not asleep. I adore to hear people talking in the night."

The nun begged for general silence, and the ward was stilled. Sylvia lay
awake in a rage, listening to Madame Benzer and the masseuse while they
turned over and over with sighs and groans and much creaking of their
beds. At last, however, all except herself fell asleep; their united
breathing seemed like the breathing of a large and placid beast. Behind
the screens in that dim golden mist the pages of the nun's breviary
whispered now instead of Miss Savage; the lamp before the image of the
Virgin sometimes flickered and cast upon the insipid face subtle shadows
that gave humanity to what by daylight looked like a large pale-blue
fondant.

"Or should I say 'divinity'?" Sylvia asked herself.

She lay on her side staring at the image, which was the conventional
representation of Our Lady of Lourdes with eyes upraised and hands
clasped to heaven. Contemplated thus, the tawdry figure really acquired
a supplicatory grace, and in the night, the imagination, dwelling upon
this form, began to identify itself with the attitude and to follow
those upraised eyes toward an unearthly quest. Sylvia turned over on her
other side with a perfectly conscious will not to be influenced
externally by what she felt was an unworthy appeal. But when she had
turned over she could not stay averted from the image; a restless
curiosity to know if it was still upon its bracket seized her, and she
turned back to her contemplation.

"How ridiculous all those stories are of supernatural winkings and
blinkings!" she thought. "Why, I could very easily imagine the most
acrobatic behavior by that pathetic little blue figure. And yet it has
expressed the aspirations of millions of wounded hearts."

The thought was overwhelming: the imagination of what this figure
reduplicated innumerably all over the earth had stood for descended upon
Sylvia from the heart of the darkness about her, and she shuddered with
awe.

"If I scoff at that," she thought, "I scoff at human tears. And why
shouldn't I scoff at human tears? Because I should be scoffing at my own
tears. And why not at my own?"

"You dare not," the darkness sighed.

Sylvia crept out of bed and, bending over the governess, waked her with
soft reassurances, as one wakes a child.

"Forgive me," she whispered, "for the way I spoke. But, oh, do believe
me when I tell you that love like that is terrible. I understand the
dullness of your profession, and if you like I will take you with me on
my gipsy life when we leave the hospital. You can amuse yourself with
seeing the world; but if you want love, you must demand it with your
head high. Every little governess who behaves like you creates another
harlot."

"Did you wake me up to insult me?" demanded Miss Savage.

"No, my dear, you don't understand me. I'm not thinking of what you make
yourself. _You_ will pay for that. I'm thinking of some baby now at its
mother's breast, for whose damnation you will be responsible by giving
another proof to man of woman's weakness, by having kindled in him
another lust."

"I think you'd do better to bother about your own soul instead of mine,"
said Miss Savage. "Please let me go to sleep again. When I wanted to
talk, you pretended to be shocked. I asked you if you were a Catholic,
and you told me you were nothing. I particularly avoided hurting your
susceptibilities. The least you can do is to be polite in return."

Sylvia went back to bed, and, thinking over what the governess had said,
decided that, after all, she was right: she ought to bother with her own
soul first.

Three weeks later Sylvia was told that she was now fit to leave the
hospital. The nuns charged her very little for their care; but when she
walked out of the door she had only about eighty rubles in the world.
With rather a heavy heart she drove to Mère Gontran's _pension_.




CHAPTER II


The _pension_ was strangely silent when Sylvia returned to it; the panic
of war had stripped it bare of guests. Although she had known that
Carrier and the English acrobats were gone and had more or less made up
her mind that most of the girls would also be gone, this complete
abandonment was tristful. Mère Gontran's influence had always pervaded
the _pension_; even before her illness Sylvia had been affected by that
odd personality and had often been haunted by the unusualness of the
whole place; but the disconcerting atmosphere had always been quickly
and easily neutralized by the jolly mountebanks and Bohemians with whose
point of view and jokes and noise she had been familiar all her life.
Sylvia and the other guests had so often laughed together at Mère
Gontran's eccentricity, at the tumble-down house, at the tangled garden,
at the muttering handmaid, and at the animals in the kitchen, that
through their careless merriment the _pension_ had come to be no more
than one of the incidents of the career they followed, something to talk
of when they swirled on and lodged in another corner of the earth's
surface. There would be no city in Europe at which in some cabaret one
would not find a _copain_ with whom to laugh over the remembrance of
Mère Gontran's talking collie. But how many of these gay mountebanks
dispersed by the panic of war would not have been affected by the
_Pension Gontran_, had they returned to it like this, alone?

The garden, with its rank autumnal growth, was more like a jungle than
ever; the unpopulous house reasserted its very self, and there was not a
crack in the stucco nor a broken tile nor a warped plank that did not
now maintain a haunting significance. The Tartar servant with her
unintelligible mutterings, her head and face muffled in a stained green
scarf, her bent form, her feet in pattens clapping like hoofs, the
animals that sniffed at her heels, and her sleeping-cupboard beneath the
stairs heaped with faded rags, seemed an incarnation of the house's
reality. For a moment, when Sylvia was making signs to her that she
should fetch her mistress from where, buried in docks and nettles, she
was performing one of her queer, solitary operations of horticulture,
she was inclined to turn round and search anywhere else in Petrograd for
a lodging rather than expose herself to the nighttime here. But the
consciousness of her uncertain position soon scattered such fancies, and
she decided that the worst of them would not be so unpleasant as to find
herself at the mercy of the material horrors of a fourth-rate hotel
while she was waiting for vigor to resume work: at any rate, Mère
Gontran was kind-hearted and English. As Sylvia reached this conclusion,
the mistress of the _pension_, followed by two cats, a hen, two pigeons,
a goat, and a dog, came to greet her; putting the table-fork with which
she had been gardening into the pocket of her overall, she warmly
embraced Sylvia, which was like being flicked on the cheek by a bramble
when driving.

"Why, Sylvia, I _am_ glad to see you again. Everybody's gone.
Everything's closed. No more vodka allowed to be sold in public, though,
of course, it can always be got. The war's upon us, and I'm sowing
turnips under Jupiter in case we starve. All your things are quite safe.
Your room hasn't been touched since you left it. I'll tell Anna to make
your bed."

Anna was not the maid-servant's real name; but one of Mère Gontran's
peculiarities was, that though she could provide an individual name for
every bird or beast in the place without using the same one twice, all
her servants had to be called Anna in memory of her first cook of thirty
years ago--a repetition that could hardly have been due to sentiment,
because the first Anna, when she ran away to be married, took with her
as much of her mistress's plate as she could carry.

"Hasn't my bed been made all these weeks?" Sylvia asked, with a smile.

"Why should it have been made?" Mère Gontran replied. "There hasn't been
a single new-comer since you were taken off in the ambulance."

Sylvia asked if the drunken officer had done much damage.

"Oh no; it was quite easy to extinguish the fire. He burned half the
tool-shed and frightened the guinea-pigs; that was all. I was quite
relieved when war was declared, because otherwise the police would
probably have taken away my license; but there again, if they had taken
it away, it wouldn't have mattered much, for I haven't had any lodgers
since; but there again I've been able to use Carrier's room for the
owls, and they're much happier in a nice room than they were nailed up
to the side of the house in a packing-case. If you hear them hooting in
the night, don't be frightened: you must remember that owls, being night
birds, can't be expected to keep quiet in the night, and when they hoot
it shows they're feeling at home."

"There's nothing in the acrobats' room?" Sylvia asked, anxiously; the
partition between her and them had been thin.

"Such a reek of scent," Mère Gontran exclaimed. "Phewff! Benjamin went
in after they'd gone, and he regularly shuddered. Cats are very
sensitive to perfumes, as no doubt you've observed."

"Mère Gontran," Sylvia began. "I want to explain my position."

"Don't do that," she interrupted. "Wait till the evening and you shall
throw the cards. What's the good of anticipating trouble? If the cards
are unfavorable to any immediate enterprise, settle down and help me
with the garden until they're favorable again. When favorable, make the
journey."

Sylvia, however, insisted on anticipating the opinion of the cards and
explained to Mère Gontran that it would be impossible for her to attempt
any work for at least another six weeks on account of her weakness, and
also because of her short hair, which, though it was growing rapidly
with close, chestnut curls, was still remarkably short.

Mère Gontran asked what day it had been cut, and Sylvia said she did not
know, because it had been cut when she was unconscious.

"Depend upon it they cut it when the moon was waning."

"I hope not," said Sylvia.

"I hope not, too. I sincerely hope not," said Mère Gontran, fervently.

"It would be serious?" Sylvia suggested.

"Anything might happen. Anything!"

Mère Gontran's vivid blue eyes fixed a far horizon lowering with
misfortune, and Sylvia took the opportunity of her temporary abstraction
to go on with the tale of present woes.

"Money?" Mère Gontran exclaimed. "Put it in your pocket. You were
overcharged all the weeks you were with me when you were well. Deducting
overcharges, I can give you six weeks' board and lodging now."

Sylvia protested, but she would take no denial.

"At any rate," said Sylvia, finally, "I'll avail myself of your goodness
until I can communicate with people in England and get some money sent
out to me."

"Useless to communicate with anybody anywhere," said Mère Gontran. "No
posts. No telegraphs. Everything stopped by the war. And that's where
modern inventions have brought us. If you want to communicate with your
friends in England, you'll have to communicate through the spirits."

"Isn't that rather an uncertain method, too?" Sylvia asked.

"Everything's uncertain," Mère Gontran proclaimed, triumphantly. "Life's
uncertain. Death's uncertain. But never mind, we'll talk to Gontran
about it to-night. I was talking to him last night, and I told him to be
ready for another communication to-night. Now it's time to eat."

In old days at the _Pension Gontran_ the meals had always been
irregular, though a dozen clamorous and hungry boarders had by the force
of their united wills evoked the semblance of a set repast. With the
departure of her guests, Mère Gontran had copied her animals in eating
whenever inclination and opportunity coincided. One method of satisfying
herself was to sit down at the kitchen table and rattle an empty plate
at the servant, who would either grunt and shake her head (in which case
Mère Gontran would produce biscuits from the pocket of her apron) or
would empty some of the contents of a saucepan into the empty plate. On
one occasion when they visited the kitchen there was something to eat, a
fact which was appreciated not only by the dogs and cats, but also by
Mère Gontran's three sons, who lounged in and sat down in a corner,
talking to one another in Russian.

"They don't know what to do," said their mother. "It hasn't been decided
yet whether they're French or Russian. They went to the Embassy to see
about going to France, but they were told that they were Russian; and
when they went to the military authorities here, they were told that
they were French. The work they were doing has stopped, and they've
nothing to do except smoke cigarettes and borrow money from me for their
trams. I spoke to their father about it again last night, but his answer
was very irrelevant, very irrelevant indeed."

"What did he say?"

"Well, he was talking with one of his fellow-spirits called Dick, at the
time, and he kept on saying, _'Dick's picked a daisy,'_ till I got so
annoyed that I threw the planchette board across the room. He was just
the same about his sons when he was alive. If ever I asked him a
question about their education or anything, he'd slip out of it by
talking about his work at the Embassy. He was one of the most irrelevant
men I ever knew. Well, I shall have to ask him again to-night, that's
all, because I can't have them hanging about here doing nothing forever.
It isn't as if I could understand them or they me. Bless my soul, it's
not surprising that I come to rely more and more on so-called dumb
animals. Yesterday they smoked one hundred and forty-six cigarettes
between them. I shall have to go and see the ambassador myself about
their nationality. He knows it's not my fault that Gontran muddled it
up. In my opinion, they're Russian. Anyway, they can't say 'bo' to a
goose in any other language, and it's not much good their fighting the
Germans in what French _they_ know."

The three young men ate stolidly throughout this monologue, oblivious of
its bearing upon their future, indifferent to anything but the food
before them.

After the neatness and regularity of the hospital, the contrast of
living at the _Pension Gontran_ made an exceptionally strong impression
of disorder on Sylvia. It vaguely recalled her life at Lillie Road with
Mrs. Meares, as if she had dreamed that life over again in a nightmare:
there was not even wanting to complete the comparison her short hair.
Yet with all the grubbiness and discomfort of it she was glad to be with
Mère Gontran, whose mind, long attuned to communion with animals, had
gained thereby a simplicity and sincerity that communion with mankind
could never have given to her. Like the body after long fasting, the
mind after a long illness was peculiarly receptive, and Sylvia rejoiced
at the opportunity to pause for a while before re-entering ordinary
existence in order to contemplate the life of another lonely soul.

The evening meal at the _Pension Gontran_ was positively formal in
comparison with the haphazard midday meal; Mère Gontran's three sons
rarely put in an appearance, and the maid used to come in with set
dishes and lay them on the table in such a close imitation of civilized
behavior that Sylvia used to watch her movements with a fascinated
admiration, as she might have watched the performance of an animal
trained to wait at table. The table itself was never entirely covered
with a white cloth, but that even half of it should be covered seemed
miraculous after the kitchen table. The black-and-red checkered cloth
that covered the dining-room table for the rest of the day was pushed
back to form an undulating range of foothills, beyond which the relics
of Mère Gontran's incomplete undertakings piled themselves in a
mountainous disarray; stockings that ought to be mended, seedlings that
ought to be planted out, garden tools that ought to be put away, packs
of cards, almanacs, balls of wool, knitting-needles, flower-pots,
photograph-frames, everything that had been momentarily picked up by
Mère Gontran in the course of her restless day had taken refuge here.
The dining-room itself was long, low, and dark, with a smell of
bird-cages and withering geraniums; sometimes when Mère Gontran had
managed to concentrate her mind long enough upon the trimming of a lamp,
there would be a lamp with a shade like a draggled petticoat; more
frequently the evening meal (dinner was too stringent a definition) was
lighted by two candles, the wicks of which every five minutes assumed
the form of large fiery flies' heads and danced up and down with delight
like children who have dressed themselves up, until Mère Gontran
attacked them with a weapon that was used indifferently as a nutcracker
and a snuffer, but which had been designed by its maker to extract
nails. Under these repeated assaults the candles themselves deliquesced
and formed stalagmites and stalactites of grease, which she used to
break off, roll up into balls, and drop on the floor, where they
perplexed the greed of the various cats, whose tails, upright with an
expectation of food, could dimly be seen waving in the shadows like
seaweed.

On the first night of Sylvia's arrival she had been too tired to sit up
with Mère Gontran and attend the conversation with her deceased husband,
nor did the widow overpersuade her, because it was important to settle
the future of her three sons by threatening Gontran with a visit to the
Embassy, a threat that might disturb even his astral liberty. Sylvia
gathered from Mère Gontran's account of the interview, next morning,
that it had led to words, if the phrase might be used of communication
by raps, and it seemed that the spirit had retired to sulk in some
celestial nook as yet unvexed by earthly communications; his behavior as
narrated by his wife reminded Sylvia of an irritated telephone
subscriber.

"But he'll be sorry for it now," said Mère Gontran. "I'm expecting him
to come and say so every moment."

Gontran, however, must have spent the day walking off his wife's
ill-temper in a paradisal excursion with a kindred spirit, for nothing
was heard of him, and she was left to her solitary gardening, as maybe
often in life she had been left.

"I hope nothing's happened to Gontran," she said, gravely, when Sylvia
and she sat down to the evening meal.

"Isn't the liability to accident rather reduced by getting rid of
matter?" Sylvia suggested.

"Oh, I'm not worrying about a broken leg or anything like that," Mère
Gontran explained. "But supposing he's reached another plane?"

"Ah, I hadn't thought of that."

"The communications get more difficult ever year since he died," the
widow complained. "The first few months after his death, hardly five
minutes used to pass without a word from him, and all night long he used
to rap on the head of my bed, until James used to get quite fidgety."
James was the bulldog who slept with Mère Gontran.

"And now he raps no longer?"

"Oh yes, he still raps," Mère Gontran replied, "but much more faintly.
But there again, he's already moved to three different planes since his
death. Hush! What's that?"

She stared into the darkest corner of the dining-room.

"Is that you, Gontran?"

"I think it was one of the birds," Sylvia said.

Mère Gontran waved her hand for silence.

"Gontran! Is that you? Where have you been all day? This is a friend of
mine who's staying here. You'll like her very much when you know her.
Gontran! I want to talk to you after dinner. Now mind, don't forget. I'm
glad you've got back. I want you to make some inquiries in England
to-morrow."

Sylvia was distinctly aware of a deep-seated amusement all the time at
Mère Gontran's matter-of-fact way of dealing with her husband's spirit,
and she could never make up her mind how with her sense of amusement
could exist simultaneously a credulity that led her to hear at the
conclusion of Mère Gontran's last speech three loud raps upon the air of
the room.

"He's got over last night," said Mère Gontran in a satisfied voice. "But
there again, he always had a kind nature at bottom. Three nice cheerful
raps like that always mean he's going to give up his evening to me."

Sylvia's first instinct was to find in what way Mère Gontran had tricked
her into hearing those three raps; something in the seer's true gaze
forbade the notion of trickery, and a shiver roused by the inexplicable,
the shiver that makes a dog run away from an open umbrella blown across
a lawn, slipped through her being.

Although Mère Gontran was puffing at her soup as if nothing had
happened, the house had changed, or rather it had not changed so much as
revealed itself in a brief instant. All that there was of queerness in
this tumble-down _pension_ became endowed with deliberate meaning, and
it was no longer possible to ascribe the atmosphere to the effect of
weakened nerves upon a weakened body. Sylvia began to wonder if the form
her delirium had taken had not been directly due to this atmosphere;
more than ever she was inclined to attach a profound significance to her
delirium and perceive in it the diabolic revelation with which it had
originally been fraught.

When after dinner Mère Gontran took a pack of cards and began to tell
her fortune, Sylvia had a new impulse to dread; but she shook it off
almost irritably and listened to the tale.

"A long journey by land. A long journey by sea. A dark man. A fair
woman. A fair man. A dark woman. A letter."

The familiar rigmarole of a hundred such tellings droned its course,
accompanied by the flip-flap, flip-flap of the cards. The information
was general enough for any human being on earth to have extracted from
it something applicable to himself; yet, against her will, and as it
were bewitched by the teller's solemnity, Sylvia began to endow the
cards with the personalities that might affect her life. The King of
Hearts lost his rubicund complacency and took on the lineaments of
Arthur: the King of Clubs parted with his fierceness and assumed the
graceful severity of Michael Fane: with a kind of impassioned egotism
Sylvia watched the journeyings of the Queen of Hearts, noting the
contacts and biting her lips when she found her prototype associated
with unfavorable cards.

"Come, I don't think the outlook's so bad," said Mère Gontran at the end
of the final disposition. "If your bed's a bit doubtful, your street and
your house are both very good, and your road lies south. But there
again, this blessed war upsets everything, and even the cards must be
read with half an eye on the war."

When the cards had been put away, Mère Gontran produced the _planchette_
and set it upon a small table covered in red baize round the binding of
which hung numerous little woolen pompons.

"Now we shall find out something about your friends in England," she
announced, cheerfully.

Sylvia had not the heart to disappoint Mère Gontran, and she placed her
hands upon the heart-shaped board, which trembled so much under Mère
Gontran's eager touch that the pencil affixed made small squiggles upon
the paper beneath. The _planchette_ went on fidgeting more and more
under their four hands like a restless animal trying to escape, and from
time to time it would skate right across the paper, leaving a long
penciled trail in its path, which Mère Gontran would examine with great
intentness.

"It looks a little bit like a Y," she would say.

"A very little bit," Sylvia would think.

"Or it may be an A. Never mind. It always begins rather doubtfully. I
_won't_ lose my temper with it to-night."

The _planchette_ might have been a tenderly loved child learning to
write for the first time, by the way Mère Gontran encouraged it and
tried to award a shape and purpose to its most amorphous tracks. When it
had covered the sheet of paper with an impossibly complicated
river-system, Mère Gontran fetched a clean sheet and told Sylvia
severely that she must try not to urge the _planchette_. Any attempt at
urging had a very bad effect on its willingness.

"I didn't think I was urging it," said Sylvia, humbly.

"Try and sit more still, dear. If you like, I'll put my feet on your
toes and then you won't be so tempted to jig. We may have to sit all
night, if we aren't careful."

Sylvia strained every nerve to sit as still as possible in order to
avoid having her toes imprisoned all night by Mère Gontran's feet, which
were particularly large, even for so tall a woman. She concentrated upon
preventing her hands from leading _planchette_ to trace the course of
any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting for twenty
minutes like this she felt that all the rest of her body had gone into
her hands. She had never thought that her hands were small, but she had
certainly never realized that they were as large and as ugly as they
were; as for Mère Gontran's, they had for some time lost any likeness to
hands and lay upon the _planchette_ like two uncooked chops. At last
when Sylvia had reached the state of feeling like a large pincushion
that was being rapidly pricked by thousands of pins, Mère Gontran
murmured:

"It's going to start."

Immediately afterward the _planchette_ careered across the paper and
wrote a sentence.

"_Dick's picked a daisy,_" Mère Gontran read out. "Drat the thing! Never
mind, we'll have one more try."

Again a sentence was written, and again it repeated that Dick had picked
a daisy.

Suddenly Samuel the collie made an odd noise.

"He's going to speak through Samuel," Mère Gontran declared. "What is
it, dear? Tell me what it is?"

The dog, who had probably been stung by a gnat, got up and, putting his
head upon his mistress's knee, gazed forth ineffable sorrows.

"You heard him trying to talk?" she asked.

"He certainly made a noise," Sylvia admitted.

There was a loud rap on the air--an unmistakable rap, for the five cats
which had remained in the room all twitched their ears toward the sound.

"Gone for the night," said Mère Gontran. "And he's very angry about
something. I suppose this daisy that Dick picked means something
important to him, though we can't understand. Perhaps he'll come back
later on when I've gone to bed and tell me more about it."

"Mère Gontran," said Sylvia, earnestly, "do you really believe in
spirits? Do you really think we can talk with the dead?"

"Of course I do. Listen! They're all round us. If you want to feel the
dead, walk up the garden with me now. You'll feel the spirits whizzing
round you like moths."

"Oh, I wonder, I wonder if it's true," Sylvia cried. "I can't believe
it, and yet...."

"Listen to me," said Mère Gontran, solemnly. "Thirty-five years ago I
left England to come to Petersburg. I was twenty years old and very
beautiful. You can imagine how I was run after by men. You've seen
something of the way men run after women here. Well, one summer I went
with my family to Finland, and I foolishly arranged to meet Prince Paul
in the forest after supper. He was a fine, handsome young man, as bold
and as wicked as the devil himself. But there again, I haven't got to
give details. Anyway, he said to me: 'What are you afraid of? Your
parents?' I can hear his laugh now after all these years, and I remember
the bough of a tree was just waving very slightly and the moonlight kept
glinting in and out of his eyes. I thought of my parents in England when
he said this, and I remember challenging them in a sort of defiant way
to interfere. You see, I'd never got on well at home. I was a very
wayward girl and they were exceptionally old-fashioned. And when Prince
Paul held me in his arms I reproached them. It's difficult to explain,
but I was trying to conjure them up before me to see if the thought of
home would have any effect. And then Prince Paul laughed and said, 'Or
another lover?' Now with the exception of flirting with Prince Paul and
Prince George, the two eldest sons, I'd never thought much about lovers.
Even in those days I was more interested in animals, really, and of
course I was very fond of children. But when Prince Paul said, 'Or
another lover?' I saw Gontran leaning against a tree in the forest. He
was looking at me, and I pushed Prince Paul away and ran back toward the
house.

"Now when this happened I'd never seen my husband. He was working at the
Embassy even in those days, and never went to Finland in his life. The
next day the family was called back to Petersburg on account of the
death of the grandmother, and I met Gontran at some friends'! We were
married about six months afterward.

"So there again, if I could see Gontran when he was alive before I'd
ever met him, you don't suppose I'm not going to believe that I've seen
him any number of times since he was dead? Until quite recently when he
reached this new plane, we talked together as comfortably as when he was
still alive and sitting in that chair."

Sylvia looked at the chair uneasily.

"It's only since he's met this Dick that the communications are so
unsatisfactory. Why, of course I know what's happened," cried Mère
Gontran, in a rapture of discovery. "Why didn't I think of it sooner?
It's the war!"

"The war?" Sylvia echoed.

"Aren't there thousands of spirits being set free every day? Just as all
the communications on earth have broken down, in the same way they must
have broken down with the spirits. Fancy my not having understood that
before! Well, aren't I dense?"

Five raps of surpassing loudness signaled upon the air.

"Gontran's delighted," she exclaimed. "He was always delighted when I
found out something for myself."

Soon after this Mère Gontran, having gathered up from the crowded table
a variety of implements that could not possibly serve any purpose that
night, wandered out into the garden, followed by Samuel and the five
cats; Sylvia thought of her haunted passage through the dark autumnal
growth of leaves toward that strange room she occupied, and went
up-stairs to bed rather tremulously. Yet on the whole she was glad that
Mère Gontran left her like this every night at the _pension_ with the
Tartar servant in her cupboard under the stairs, and with the three
ungainly sons, who used to sleep in a barrack at the end of the long
passage on the ground floor. Sylvia had peeped into this room when the
young men were out and had been surprised by its want of resemblance to
a sleeping-chamber. There were, to be sure, three beds, but they had the
appearance of beds that had been long stowed away in a remote part of a
warehouse for disused furniture: the whole room was like that, with
nothing human appertaining to it save the smell of stale tobacco-smoke.
Yet, really, now that the migratory guests had gone on their way, it
would have been even more surprising to find in the _pension_ signs of
humanity, so much had its permanent inhabitants, both animals and human
beings, approximated to one another. The animals were a little more like
human beings; the human beings were a little more like animals: the
margin between men and animals was narrow enough in the most
distinguishing circumstances, and at the _pension_ these circumstances
were lacking.

Before Sylvia undressed she opened the window of her bedroom and looked
down into the moonlit garden. Mère Gontran's light was already lit, but
she was still wandering about outside with her cats. Eccentric though
she was, Sylvia thought, she was nevertheless typical. Looking back at
the people who had crossed her path, she could remember several
adumbrations of Mère Gontran--superstitious women with a love of
animals. Of such a kind had been Mrs. Meares; and attached to every
cabaret and theater there had always been an elderly woman who had
served as commission agent to the careless _artistes_, whether it was a
question of selling themselves to a new lover or buying somebody else's
old dress. These elderly women had invariably had the knack of telling
fortunes with the cards, had been able to interpret dreams and omens,
and had always been the slaves of dogs and birds. The superficial
ascription of their passion for animals would have been to a stifled or
sterile maternity; but as with Mère Gontran and her three sons, Sylvia
could recall that many of these elderly women had been the prey of their
children. If one went back beyond one's actual experience of this type,
it was significant that the witches of olden times were always credited
with the possession of familiar spirits in the shape of animals; she
could recollect no history of a witch that did not include her black
cat. Was that, too, a stifled maternal instinct, or would it not be
truer to find in the magic arts they practised nothing but a descent
from human methods of intelligence to those of animals, a descent (if
indeed it could be called a descent) from reason to instinct?

Here was Mère Gontran fulfilling in every particular the old
conventional idea of a witch, and might not all this communion with
spirits be nothing but the communion of an animal with scents and sounds
imperceptible to civilized man? It could be a kind of atavism, really, a
return to disused senses, so long obsolete that their revival had a
supernatural effect. Sylvia thought of the unusual success that Mère
Gontran always had with her gardening; no matter where she sowed in the
great dark jungle, she gathered better vegetables than a gardener, who
would have wasted his energy in wrestling with the weeds that seemed to
forbid any growth but their own. Mère Gontran always paid greater
attention to the aspects of the moon and the planets than to the laws of
horticulture, and her gardening gave the impression of being nothing but
a meaningless ritual: yet it was fruitful. Might there not be some laws
of attraction of which in the course of dependence upon his own
inventions man had lost sight, some laws of which animals were cognizant
and by which many of the marvels of instinct might be explained? Beyond
witches and their familiar spirits were fauns and centaurs, more
primitive manifestations of this communion between men and animals, with
whom even the outward shape was still a hybrid. Had scientists in
pursuing the antics of molecules and atoms beneath the microscope become
blind to the application of their theories? Might not astronomy have
displaced astrology unjustly? Sylvia wished she had read more widely and
more deeply, that she might know if her speculations were, after all,
nothing but the commonplaces of empirical thought. So much could be
explained by this theory of attraction, not least of all the mystery of
love and the inscrutable caprices of fortune.

Behold Mère Gontran out there in the garden, bobbing to the moon. Were
all these gestures meaningless like an idiot's mutterings? And was even
an idiot's muttering really meaningless? Behold Mère Gontran in the
moonlit garden with cats: it would be hard to say that her behavior was
more futile than theirs: they were certainly all enjoying themselves.

Sylvia was conscious of trying to arrive at an explanation of Mère
Gontran that, while it allowed her behavior a certain amount of
reasonableness, would prevent herself from accepting Mère Gontran's own
explanation of it. There was something distasteful, something cheap and
vulgar, in the conception of Gontran's spiritual existence as an
infinite prolongation of his life upon earth; there was something
radically fatuous in the imagination of him at the end of a ghostly
telephone-wire still at the beck and call of human curiosity. If,
indeed, in some mysterious way the essential Gontran was communicating
with his wife, the translation of his will to communicate must be a
subjective creation of hers; it was somehow ludicrous, and even
unpleasant, to accept Dick's gathering of a daisy as a demonstration of
the activity of mankind in another world; it was too much a finite
conception altogether. Without hesitation Sylvia rejected spiritualism
as a useful adventure for human intelligence. It was impossible to
accept its more elaborate manifestations with bells and tambourines and
materializing mediums, when one knew the universal instinct of mankind
to lie; and in its simpler manifestations, as with Mère Gontran, where
conscious or deliberate deceit was out of the question, it was merely a
waste of time, being bound by the limitations of an individual soul that
would always be abnormal and probably in most cases idiotic.

Sylvia pulled down the blind, and, leaving Mère Gontran to her nocturnal
contemplation, went to bed.

Notwithstanding her abrupt rejection of spiritualism, Sylvia found, when
she was in bed, that the incidents of the evening and the accessories of
the house were affecting her to sleeplessness. That succession of raps
declined to come within the natural explanation that she had attempted.
Were they due to some action of overcharged atmosphere, a kind of
miniature thunderclap from the meeting of two so-called electrical
currents generated by herself and Mère Gontran? Were they merely
coincidental creakings of furniture in response to the warmth of the
stove? Or had Mère Gontran mesmerized her into hearing raps that were
never made? The cats had also heard them; but Mère Gontran's intimacy
with her animals might well have established such a mental domination,
even over them.

Naturally, with so much of her attention fixed upon the raps
down-stairs, Sylvia began to fancy renewed rappings all round her in the
darkness, and not merely rappings, but all sorts of nocturnal shufflings
and scrapings and whisperings and scratchings, until she had to relight
her candle. The noises became less, but optical delusions were
substituted for tricks of hearing, and there was not a piece of
furniture in the room that did not project from its outward form the
sense of its independent reality. The wardrobe, for instance, seemed to
challenge her with the thought that it was no longer the receptacle of
her skirts and petticoats: it seemed to be asserting its essential
"wardrobishness" for being the receptacle for anything it liked. Sylvia
set aside as too obviously and particularly silly the fancy that some
one might be hidden in the wardrobe, but she could not get rid of the
fancy that the piece of furniture had an existence outside her own
consciousness. It was a mere Hans Andersen kind of fancy, but it took
her back to remote childish apprehensions of inanimate objects, and
after her meditation upon instinct she began to wonder whether, after
all, the child was not quite right to be afraid of everything, which
grown-ups called being afraid of nothing; and whether that escape from
childish terrors which was called knowledge was nothing but a drug that
blunted the perceptions and impeded the capacity for esteeming whatever
approximated to truth. Yet why should a child be afraid of a wardrobe?
Why should a child be afraid of everything? Because in everything there
was evil. Sylvia recalled--and in this room it was impossible to rid
herself of that diabolic obsession--that the devil was known as the
Father of Lies. Was not all evil anti-truth, and did not man, with his
preference for anti-truth, create the material evil that was used as an
argument against the divine ordering of matter? Paradoxical as it might
seem, the worse ordered the world appeared the more did such an
appearance of pessimism involve the existence of God. Whither led all
this theosophistry? Toward the only perfect revelation of God in man:
toward Jesus Christ.

How foolish it was to prefer to such divine speech the stammering of
spiritualists. For the first time in her life Sylvia prayed deliberately
that what she saw as in a glass darkly might be revealed to her more
clearly; and while she prayed, there recurred from the hospital that
whispered confession of the little English governess. It was impossible
not to compare it with the story of Mère Gontran: the coincidence of the
names and the similarity of the situation were too remarkable. Then why
had Mère Gontran been granted what, if her story were accepted, was a
supernatural intervention to save her soul? By her own admission she had
practically surrendered to Prince Paul when she had the vision of her
future husband. It seemed very unjust that Miss Savage should have been
utterly corrupted and that Mère Gontran should have escaped corruption.
Sylvia went back in her thoughts to the time when she left Philip and
abandoned herself to evil. Yet she had never really abandoned herself
to evil, for she had never had any will to sin; the impulse had been to
save her soul, not to lose it. It had been a humiliation of her body
like pain, and a degradation of her personality like death. Pride which
had cast her out had been her undoing. Looking back now, she could see
that everything evil in her life had come from her pride: pride, by the
way, was another attribute of the devil.

Sylvia had a longing to go back to England and talk to the Vicar of
Green Lanes. From the past kept recurring isolated fragments of his
sermons, texts mostly, which had lain all this while dormant within her
consciousness, until the first one had sprung up to flower amid her
delirium. In all her reading she had never paid proper attention to the
doctrines of Christianity, and she longed to know if some of these dim
facts after which she was now groping were not there set forth with
transparent brightness and undeniable clarity. Good and evil must
present themselves to every soul in a different way, and it was surely
improbable that the accumulated experience of the human mind gathered
together in Christian writings would not contain a parallel by which she
might be led toward the truth, or at least be granted the vision of
another lonely soul seeking for itself salvation.

The sense of her loneliness--physical, spiritual, and
intellectual--overwhelmed Sylvia's aspirations. How could truth or faith
or hope or love concern her until she could escape from this isolation?
She had always been lonely, even before she came to Russia; yet it had
always been possible up to a point to cheat herself with the illusion of
company, because the loneliness had been spiritual and intellectual, a
loneliness that would be immanent in any woman whose life was ordered on
her lines and who had failed to find what was vulgarly called the "right
man." Now there was added to this the positive physical loneliness of
her present position. It would have been bad enough to recover from an
illness and wake in a familiar world; but to wake like this in a world
transformed by war was indeed like waking in hell. The remembrance of
England, of people like Jack and Olive, was scarcely more distinct now
than the remembrance of Lille; everything in her past had receded to the
same immeasurable distance. News of England in any familiar form now
reached Russia by such devious ways that in a period of violent daily
events the papers had, when they did arrive, the air of some ancient,
bloody, and fantastic chronicle. No letters came, because nobody could
know where she was; her friends must think that she was dead, and must
have accepted her death as the death of a sparrow amid the slaughter
that was now proceeding. To-morrow she should send a cablegram, which
might some day arrive, to say that she was alive and well. And then she
had a revulsion from such a piece of egotism in the midst of a world's
catastrophe. Who could wish to be reminded of Sylvia Scarlett at such a
moment? Besides, if this determination of hers to begin her life over
again was to be made effective, Sylvia Scarlett must preserve this
isolation and accept it as the grace of God. How what had once been
phrases were now endowed with life! Any communication between her and
the people she had known would be like communication between Gontran and
his wife; it would be the stammering of spiritualism comparable with
that absurd Dick gathering his daisies in the Elysian Fields. Unless all
these "soul-spasms," as once she would have called them, were the
weakness of a woman who had been sick unto death, meaningless babblings
without significance, her way would be indicated. Whatever the logicians
might say, it was useless to expect faith, hope, or love unless one went
to meet them: the will to receive them must outweigh the suspicion of
receiving. Faith, like any other gift-horse, must not be looked in the
mouth; pride had robbed her long enough, and for a change she would try
humility.

When she made this decision, it seemed to Sylvia that what had formerly
been evil and terrifying in the inanimate objects of her candle-lit
room now lost their menacing aspect and wished her well. Suddenly she
accused herself of the most outrageous pride in having all this time
thought of nothing but herself, whose misery amid the universal havoc
was indeed only the twittering of a sparrow. An apocalypse of the
world's despair blazed upon her. This was not the time to lament her
position, but rather to be glad very humbly that at the moment when she
had been given this revelation of her pride, this return of herself, she
was given also the moment to put the restored self to the test of
action.

When Sylvia woke in the morning, her ideas that during the night had
stated themselves with such convincing logic seemed less convincing; the
first elation had been succeeded by the discouragement of the artist at
seeing how ill his execution supports his intention. Riddles had solved
themselves one after another with such ease in the darkness that when
she had fallen asleep she had been musing with astonishment at the
failure of human nature to appreciate the simplicity of life's
intention; now all those darkling raptures burned like a sickly fire in
the sunlight. Yet it was consoling to remember that the sun did not
really put out the fire, and therefore that the fire kindled within
herself last night might burn not less brightly and warmly for all its
appearance of being extinguished by the sun of action.

These fiery metaphors were ill suited to the new day, which was wet
enough to make Sylvia wonder if there had ever been so completely wet a
day. The view from her window included a large piece of sky which lacked
even thunder-clouds or wind to break its leaden monotony. The vegetation
of the garden had assumed a universal hue of dull green, the depressing
effect of which was intensified by the absence of any large trees to
mark autumnal decay with their more precocious dissolution. Weather did
not seem to affect Mère Gontran, whose clothes even upon the finest days
had the appearance of a bundle of drenched rags; and if the dogs and
cats preferred to remain indoors, she was able to paddle about the
garden with her ducks and devote to their triumphant quacking a
sympathetic attention.

"I'm going to see the ambassador this morning," she called up to Sylvia.
"Something must be decided about the boys' nationality and it's bound to
be decided more quickly if they see me dripping all over the marble
entrance of the Embassy."

Not even the sight of that elderly Naiad haunting the desks of
overworked _chanceliers_ could secure a determination to which country
her sons' military service was owed; it seemed as if they would remain
unclassified to the end of the war, borrowing money for tram-tickets and
smoking cigarettes while husbands were torn from the arms of wives,
while lovers and parents mourned eternal partings.

Autumn drew on, and here in Russia hard upon its heels was winter;
already early in October there was talk at the _pension_ of the snow's
coming soon, and Sylvia did not feel inclined to stay here in the
solitude that snow would create. Moreover, she was anxious not to let
Mère Gontran wish for her going on account of the expense, and she would
not have stayed as long as she had if her hostess had not been so
obviously distressed at the idea of her leaving before she could be
accounted perfectly well again. In order to repay her hospitality,
Sylvia assisted gravely--and one might say reverently--at all her
follies of magic. Nor, under the influence of Mère Gontran's
earnestness, was it always possible to be sure about the foolish side.
There were often moments when Sylvia was frightened in these
fast-closing daylights and long wintry eves by the unending provocation
of the dead that was as near as Mère Gontran got to evocation, although
she claimed to be always seeing apparitions, of which Sylvia,
fortunately for her nerves, was never granted a vision.

The climax was reached on the night of the first snowfall, soon after
the middle of October, when Mère Gontran came to Sylvia's bedroom, her
crimson dressing-gown dusted with dry flakes of snow, and begged her to
come out in the garden to hear Gontran communicating with her from a
lilac-bush. It was in vain that Sylvia protested against being dragged
out of bed on such a cold night; Mère Gontran, candle in hand, towered
up above her with such a dominating excitement that Sylvia let herself
be over-persuaded and followed her out into the garden. From what had
formerly been Carrier's room the owls hooted at the moon; Samuel, the
talking collie, was baying dolefully; the snowfall, too light to give to
the nocturnal landscape a pure and crystalline beauty, was enough to
destroy the familiar aspect of the scene and to infect it with a
withered papery look, turning house and garden to the color of dry
bones.

"He's in the lilac-bush by the outhouse," Mère Gontran whispered. "When
I went past, one of the boughs caught hold of my hand, and he spoke in a
queer, crackling voice, as of course somebody would speak if he were
speaking through a bush."

Sylvia could not bear it any longer; she suddenly turned back and ran up
to her bedroom, vowing that to-morrow she would make a serious effort to
leave Petrograd.

"However short my hair," she laughed, "there's no reason why it should
be made to stand on end like that."

She supposed that Petrograd had not yet sufficiently recovered from the
shock of war to make an engagement there pleasant or profitable;
besides, after her experience at the cabaret she was disinclined to face
another humiliation of the same kind. The Jewish agent whom she
consulted suggested Kieff, Odessa, and Constantinople as a good tour;
from Constantinople she would be able to return home more easily and
comfortably if she wished to return. He held up his hands at the idea of
traveling to England by Archangel at this season. She could sing for a
week at Kieff just to break the journey, take two months at Odessa, and
be almost sure of at least four months at Constantinople: it was a
great nuisance this war, but he was expecting every day to hear that the
English fleet had blown Pola to pieces, and perhaps after Christmas
there would be an opportunity of an engagement at Vienna. With so many
troops in the city such an engagement would be highly remunerative; and
he winked at Sylvia. She was surprised to find that it was so easy to
secure an engagement in war-time, and still more surprised to learn that
she would be better paid than before the war. Indeed, if she had been
willing to remain in Petrograd, she could have earned as much as a
thousand francs a month for singing, so many of the French girls had
fled to France and so rare now were foreign _artistes_. As it was, she
would be paid eight hundred francs a month at Kieff and Odessa. For the
amount of her salary in Constantinople the agent would not answer,
because on second thoughts he might observe that there was just a chance
of war between Russia and Turkey, a very small chance; but in the
circumstances it would be impossible to arrange a contract.

Sylvia returned to the _pension_ to announce her success.

"Well, if you get ill," said Mère Gontran, "mind you come back here at
once. You're _not_ a good medium; in fact, I believe you're a deterrent;
but I like to see you about the place, and of course I _do_ like to talk
English, but there again, when shall I ever see England?"

When Sylvia had heard Mère Gontran speak of her native country formerly,
it had always been as the place where an unhappy childhood had been
spent, and she had seemed to glory in her expatriation. Mère Gontran
answered her unspoken astonishment:

"I think it's the war," she explained. "It's seeing so much about
England in the newspapers; I've got a feeling I'd like to go back, and I
will go back after the war," she proclaimed. "Some kind of nationality
my three sons shall have, if it's only their mother's. Which reminds me.
Poor Carrier has been killed."

"Killed," Sylvia repeated. "Already?"

In the clutch of apprehension she realized that other and dearer friends
than he might already be dead.

"I thought we could celebrate your last night by trying to get into
communication with him," said Mère Gontran.

It was as if she had replied to Sylvia's unvoiced fear.

"No, no," she cried. "If they are dead, I don't want to know."

So Carrier with all his mascots had fallen at last, and he would never
cultivate that little farm in the Lyonnais; she remembered how he had
boasted of the view across the valley of the Saône to the long line of
the Alps: far wider now was his view, and his room at the _pension_ was
the abode of owls. She read the paragraph in the French paper: he had
been killed early in September very gloriously. If Paradise might be the
eternal present of a well-beloved dream, he would have found his farm;
if human wishes were not vanity, he was at peace.

The brief snow had melted, and through a drenching afternoon of rain
Sylvia packed up; it was pleasant to think that at any rate she should
travel southward, for the _pension_ was unbearable on these winter days
and long nights filled with a sound of shadows. Again Sylvia was minded
to brave the journey north and return to England, but again an
overmastering impulse forbade her. Her destiny was written otherwise,
and if she fought against the impulse not to go back, she felt that she
should be cast up and rejected by the sea of life.

Mère Gontran, having caught a slight chill, went to bed immediately
after dinner, and invited Sylvia to come and talk to her on her last
evening. It was an odd place, this bedroom that she had chosen; and very
odd she looked lying in the old four-poster, her head tied up in a
bandana scarf and beside her, with his wrinkled head on the pillow,
James the bulldog. The four-poster seemed out of place against the
match-boarding with which the room was lined, and the rest of the
furniture gave one the impression of having been ransacked by burglars
in a great hurry. On the wall opposite the bed was a portrait of
Gontran, which by sheer bad painting possessed a sinister power like
that of some black Byzantine Virgin; on either side of him were hung the
cats' boxes, from which they surveyed their mistress with the same fixed
stare as her painted husband.

"Of course I should go mad if I slept in this room all by myself, and
two hundred yards away from any habitation," Sylvia exclaimed.

"Oh, I'm very fond of my room," said Mère Gontran. "But there again, I
like to be alone with one foot in the grave."

"I want to thank you for all your kindness," Sylvia began.

"If you start thanking me, you'll make me fidget; and if I fidget, it
worries James."

"Still, even at the risk of upsetting James, I must tell you that I
don't know what I should have done without you these six weeks. Perhaps
one day when the war is over you'll come to England and then you'll have
to stay with me in my cottage."

"Ah, I shall never be able to leave the cats, not to mention the pony. I
just happened to have a fancy for England to-day, but it's too late; I'm
established here; I'm known. People in England might stare, and I should
dislike that very much."

Sylvia wanted rather to talk again about spiritualism in order to find
out if Mère Gontran's speculations coincided at any point with her own;
but a discussion of spiritual experience with her was like a discussion
of the liver; she was almost grossly insistent upon the organic
machinery, almost brutal in her zest for the practical, one might almost
say the technical details. The mysteries of human conduct on earth left
her utterly uninterested except when she could obtain a commentary upon
them from the spirits for a practical purpose; the spirits took the
place for her of the solicitor and the doctor rather than of the priest.
Systems of philosophy and religion had no meaning for Mère Gontran; her
spiritual advice never concerned itself with them; and the ultimate
intention of immortality was as well concealed from her as the
justification of life on earth. It was this very absence of the
highfalutin which impressed Sylvia with the genuineness of the
manifestations that she procured, but which at the time discouraged her
with the sense that death merely substituted one irrational form of
being for another.

"What's it all for?" Sylvia had once asked.

"For?" Mère Gontran had repeated in perplexity: she had never considered
the utility of this question hitherto.

"Yes, why, for instance, did you marry Gontran? Did you love him? Are
your children destined to fulfil any part in the world? And _their_
children after them?"

"Why do you want to worry your head with such questions?" Mère Gontran
had asked, compassionately.

"But you deny me the consolation of oblivion. You accept this endless
existence after death with its apparently meaningless prolongation of
human vapidity and pettiness, and you're surprised that I resent it."

But it was impossible to carry on the discussion with somebody who was
as contented with what is as an animal and whose only prayer was _Give
us this day our daily bread_. It was a disappointing contribution to the
problem of life from one who had spent so long on the borderland of the
grave. Yet it was Mère Gontran's devotion to this aspiration that had
made her lodge Sylvia all these weeks.

"How can you, who are so kind, want to see your sons go to the war, not
for any motives of honor or patriotism, but apparently just to keep them
away from cigarettes and idleness? What does their nationality really
matter?"

"They must do something for themselves," Mère Gontran replied. "Just at
the moment the war offers a good opening."

"But suppose they are killed?"

"I hope they will be. I shall be on much better terms with them then
than I am now. Gontran talks to me in English nowadays; so would they,
and we might get to know one another. Cats don't worry about their
kittens, after they're grown up; in fact, they're anxious to get rid of
them. And kingfishers chase their young ones away, or so I was informed
by an English ventriloquist who was interested in natural history."

"Well, I always congratulated myself on being free from sentimentality,"
Sylvia said. "But beside you I'm like a keepsake-album."

"If you'd get out of the habit of thinking that death is of any more
importance than going to sleep, you wouldn't bother about anything,"
Mère Gontran declared.

"Oh, it isn't death that worries me," Sylvia answered. "It's life."

Very early in the twilight of a wet dawn Sylvia started for Kieff. All
day she watched the raindrops trickling down the windows of the railway
carriage and wondered if her impulse to travel south was inspired by any
profounder reason.




CHAPTER III


On the day after she reached Kieff Sylvia went for a walk by herself.
Since she was going to stay only a week in this city and since she still
felt somewhat remote from the world after her long seclusion, she had
not bothered to make friends with any of her fellow-_artistes_.

Presently she grew tired of walking alone and, looking about her, she
saw on the other side of the road a cinema theater, where she decided to
spend the rest of a dreary afternoon. She was surprised to find that the
lowest charge for entrance was two rubles; but when she went inside and
saw the film, she understood the reason. The theater was full of men,
and she could hear them whispering to one another their astonishment at
seeing a woman enter the place; she was thankful that the dim red light
concealed her blushes, and she escaped as quickly as possible, quenching
the impulse to abuse the doorkeeper for not warning her what kind of an
entertainment was taking place inside.

This abrupt and violent reminder of human beastliness shocked Sylvia
very deeply at a moment when she was trying to induce in herself an
attitude of humility; it was impossible not to feel angrily superior to
those swine groveling in their mess. Ordinarily she might have
obliterated the incident with disdain, or at any rate have seen its
proportion to the whole of human life. But now with war closing in upon
the world, and with all the will she had to idealize the abnegation of
the individual that was begotten from the monstrous crime of the mass,
it was terrible to be brought up sharply like this by the unending and
apparently unassailable rampart of human vileness. It seemed to her that
the shame she had felt on finding herself inside that place must even
now be marked upon her countenance, and there was not a passer-by whose
criticism and curiosity she could keep from fancying intently directed
toward herself. Anxious to elude the sensation of this commentary upon
her action, she turned aside from the pavement to stare into the first
shop-window that presented itself, until her blushes had burned
themselves out. The shop she chose happened to be a jeweler's, and
Sylvia, who never cared much for precious stones, was now less than ever
moved by any interest in the barbaric display that winked and glittered
under the artificial stimulus of shaded electric lamps. She tried to see
if she could somehow catch the reflection of her cheeks and ascertain if
indeed they were flaming as high as she supposed. Presently a voice
addressed her from behind, and, looking round, she saw a slim young
soldier well over six feet tall, with slanting almond eyes and wide
nostrils. He pointed to a row of golden hand-bags set with various
arrangements of precious stones and asked her in very bad French if she
admired them. Sylvia's first impulse, when her attention was drawn to
these bags for the first time, was to say that she thought them hideous;
but a sympathetic intuition that the soldier admired them very much and
would be hurt by her disapproval tempted her to agree with him in
praising their beauty. He asked her which of them all she liked the
best; and in order not to spoil this childish game of standing outside a
shop-window and making imaginary purchases, she considered the row for a
while and at last fixed upon one that was set with emeralds, the gold of
which had a greenish tint. The soldier said that he preferred the one in
the middle that was set with rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds,
which was obviously the most expensive and certainly the most barbaric
of the whole collection. Was Sylvia sure that she had chosen the one she
liked the best? She assured him that her choice was unalterable, and the
soldier, taking her by the arm, bade her enter the shop with him.

"I can't afford to buy a bag," Sylvia protested.

"I can," he replied. "I want to buy you the bag you want."

"But it's impossible," Sylvia argued. "Even if I could give you anything
in return, it would still be impossible. That bag would cost two
thousand rubles at least."

"I have three thousand rubles," said the soldier. "Of what use are they
to me? To-night I go to the front. You like the bag. I like to give it
to you. Come. Do not let us argue in the street like this. We will buy
the bag, and afterward we will have tea together, and then I shall go my
way and you will go your way. It is better that I spend two thousand
rubles on buying you a bag that you want than to gamble them away. You
are French. It is necessary that I do something for you."

"I'm English," Sylvia corrected. "Half English--half French."

"So much the better," the soldier said. "I have never met an
Englishwoman. None of the soldiers in my company have ever met an
Englishwoman. When I tell them that in Kieff I met an Englishwoman and
gave her a golden bag, they will envy me my good fortune. Are we not
suffering all of us together? And is that not a reason why I should give
you something that you very much want?"

"Why do you think I am suffering?" she asked.

"There is sorrow in your eyes," the soldier answered, gravely.

The simplicity of the man overcame her scruples; she felt that her
acceptance of his gift would give him a profound pleasure of which for a
motive of petty pride she had no right to rob him. As for herself, the
meeting with this young soldier had washed away like purest water every
stain with which Russia had marked her--from the brutality of the
drunken officer to the vileness of that cinema theater. Sylvia hesitated
no longer; she accompanied him into the shop and came out again with the
golden bag upon her wrist. Then they went to a confectioner's shop and
ate cakes together; outside in the darkness sleet was falling, but in
her mood of elation Sylvia thought that everything was beautiful.

"It is time for me to go back to the barracks," the soldier announced at
last.

While they were having tea, Sylvia had told him of many events in her
life, and he had listened very seriously, though she doubted if he was
able to understand half of what she told him. He in his turn had not
told her much; but he was still very young, only twenty-one, and he
explained that in his village not much could have happened to him. Soon
after war was declared, his father had died, and, having no brothers or
sisters or mother, he had sold all he had and quitted his village with
thirty-five hundred rubles in his pocket. Five hundred rubles he had
spent riotously and without satisfaction; and he still rejoiced in the
money he had spent on the bag and was even anxious to give Sylvia the
thousand rubles that were left, but she begged him to keep them.

"And so you must really go?" she said.

She walked with him through the darkness and sleet toward the barracks;
soon there was a sound of bugles, and he exclaimed that he must hurry.

"Good-by," Sylvia said. "I shall never forget this meeting." She stood
on tiptoe and, putting her arm round his neck, pulled him toward her and
kissed him.

"Good-by. May you be fortunate and happy," she repeated.

"It rests with God," said the soldier; and he vanished into the noise of
bugles and the confusion of a regimental muster.

The memory of this casual encounter rested in Sylvia's heart with all
the warmth it had originally kindled; nay, rather, it rested there with
a warmth that increased as time went on, and the golden bag came to be
regarded with that most essential and sacred affection which may be
bestowed upon a relic of childhood, an affection that is not sentimental
or comparable in any way to the emotions aroused by the souvenirs of an
old love. The bag possessed, indeed, the recreative quality of art; it
was emotion remembered in tranquillity, and as such fiercely cherished
by its owner. It was a true mascot, a monstrance of human love; for
Sylvia it had a sacramental, almost a divine significance.

From Kieff, much heartened by the omen of fortune's favor, Sylvia
traveled gladly toward Odessa through leagues of monotonous country
shrouded in mist and rain, which, seen thus by an unfamiliar visitant,
was of such surpassing gloom that the notion of war acquired in contrast
an adventurous cheerfulness. Often at railway stations that appeared to
exist along the track without any human reason for existence Sylvia used
to alight with the rest of the passengers and drink glasses of tea
sweetened by spoonfuls of raspberry jam; in a luxury of despair she
would imagine herself left behind by the train and be sometimes half
tempted to make the experiment in order to see how life would adapt
itself to such eccentricity. The only diversion upon this endless
journey was when the train stopped before crossing a bridge to let
soldiers with fixed bayonets mount it and stand in the corridors that
they might prevent any traveler from leaving his seat or even from
looking out of the window. These precautions against outrages with
dynamite affected her at first with a sense of great events happening
beyond these mournful steppes; but when she saw that the bayonets were
so long that in any scuffle they would have been unmanageable, she had a
revulsion from romantic fancies and told herself a little scornfully
what children men were and how much playing at war went on behind the
bloody scenes of action.

Sylvia reached Odessa on October 28th, and the long front looking toward
a leaden sea held a thought of England in its salt rain. The cabaret at
which she was going to work was like all other cabarets, but, being
situated in some gardens that opened on the sea, it had now a sad and
wintry appearance of disuse. A few draggled shrubs, a few chairs not
worth the trouble of putting into shelter, a deserted band-stand and
open-air theater, served to forbid rather than invite gaiety. However,
since the cabaret itself could be reached from a street behind the
sea-front and visitors were not compelled to pass through the ghosts of
a dead summer, this melancholy atmosphere was obviated. The _pension
d'artistes_ at which Sylvia stayed was kept by a certain Madame Eliane,
a woman of personality and charm, with a clear-cut, rosy face and
snow-white hair, who limped slightly and supported herself upon two
ebony canes. Madame Eliane objected to being called _Mère_, which would
have been the usual prefix of ironical affection awarded to the owner of
such a _pension_; although she must have been nearly sixty, she had an
intense hatred of age and a remarkable faculty for remaining young
without losing her dignity. For all the girls under her roof she felt a
genuine affection that demanded nothing in return except the acceptance
of herself as a contemporary, the first token of which was to call her
Eliane; from the men she always exacted _Madame_. Her nationality was
believed to have originally been Austrian, but she had become
naturalized as a Russian many years before the war, when she was the
mistress of an official who had endowed her with the _pension_ before he
departed to a remote Baltic province and the respectability of marriage.
Sylvia found that Eliane was regarded by all the girls as an
illustration of the most perfect success to which any one of their
profession might aspire.

"She's lucky," said a small cockney called Ruby Arnold, who sang in
English popular songs of four years ago that when Sylvia first heard
them shocked her with their violent resuscitation of the past. "Yes, I
reckon she's lucky," Ruby went on. "There isn't no one that doesn't
respect her, as you might say. Isn't she cunning, too, to let her hair
go white instead of keeping it gold like what it was once? Anybody can't
help taking to anybody with white hair. I reckon with white hair and a
house of my own I'd chuck up this life to-morrow, _I_ would. _N'est-ce
pas que j'ai raison?_" she added, in French, with a more brutal
disregard of pronunciation than Sylvia had ever heard.

"_Oui, petite, tu as raison_," agreed Odette, a vast French blonde with
brilliant, prominent eyes, those bulging myopic eyes that are generally
the mirrors of vanity and hysteria. "I have a friend here," she
continued in French, "_une femme du monde avec des idées très-larges_,
who assured me that if she did not know what Eliane was, she might
easily have mistaken her for a _femme du monde_ like herself."

"She and her lady friends," Ruby muttered, contemptuously to Sylvia. "If
you ask me, these French girls don't know a lady when they see one. She
had the nerve to bring her in here to tea one day, an old crow with a
bonnet that looked as if a dog had worried it. She's bound to ask you to
meet her. She can't talk of anything else since she met her in a tram."

"Well, how's the war getting on? What do they say about it now?" asked a
dancer called Flora, flashing a malicious glance at her partner, a young
Belgian of about twenty-five with a pale and unpleasantly debauched
face, who glared angrily in response. "Armand cannot suffer us to talk
about the war," she explained to Sylvia.

"She hates him," Ruby whispered. "And whenever she can she gets in a dig
because he hasn't tried to fight for his country. Funny thing for two
people to live together for three years and hate each other like they
do."

Sylvia said that she had no more information about the war than they had
in Odessa, and there followed groans from all the _artistes_ gathered
together over coffee for the havoc which the war had brought in their
profession.

"I was always _anti-militariste_," Armand proclaimed, "even before the
war. Why, once in France I was arrested for singing a song that made fun
of the army. It's a fine thing to talk about valor and glory and _la
patrie_ when you're _du premier grade_, but when you're not--" He shook
his fist at a world of generals. "_Enfin_, Belgium no longer exists. And
who first thought of stopping the Germans? The king! Does he have to
dance for a living? _Ah, non alors!_ She is always talking about the
war," he went on, looking at Flora. "But if I applied for a passport to
go back, she'd be the first to make a row."

"_Menteur!_" Flora snapped. "_Je m'en fiche._"

"_Alors, ce soir je n'irai pas au cabaret._"

"_Tant mieux! Qu'est-ce que ça peut me ficher? Bon Dieu!_"

"_Alors, nous verrons, ma gosse._"

"_Insoumis!_" she spat forth. "_Comme t'es lâche._"

"They always carry on like that," Ruby whispered. "But they'll be
dancing together to-night just the same as usual."

When Sylvia came down from the dressing-room for her turn she found that
Ruby had prophesied truly. Armand and Flora were dancing together on the
stage, but, though their lips were smiling, the eyes of both were sullen
and hateful. The performance at the Cabaret de l'Aube could not be said
to differ in any particular from that of any other cabaret. Sylvia, when
she was brought face to face with such evidences of international bad
taste, wondered how the world had ever gone to war. All over Europe
people slept in the same kind of wagon-lits (though here in Russia with
a broad gauge they slept more comfortably), ate the same kind of food in
the same kind of hotel, clapped the same mediocre _artistes_, and drank
the same sweet champagne: yet they could talk about the individuality of
nations. How remote war seemed here in Odessa: it was perhaps wrong of
her to escape from it like this, and she pondered the detached point of
view of Armand. Had she the right to despise his point of view? Did she
not herself merit equal contempt?

"I'm too comfortable," she decided, "while there is so much misery in
the distance."

However comfortable Sylvia felt when at a quarter past three she let
herself into the _Pension Eliane_, she felt extremely uncomfortable
about an hour later, when the sound of an explosion and the crash of
falling glass made those inmates of the _pension_ who were still
gossiping down-stairs in the dining-room drop their cigarettes and stare
at one another in astonishment.

"Whatever's that?" Ruby cried.

"It must be the gas," said Armand, who could not turn paler than he was,
but whose lips trembled.

Another crash followed; outside in the street rose a moan of frightened
voices and the clatter of frightened feet.

Two more explosions still nearer drove everybody that was in the
_pension_ out of doors, and when it became certain that war-ships were
bombarding Odessa there was a rush to join the inhabitants who were
fleeing to what they supposed was greater safety in the heart of the
town. In vain Sylvia protested that if the town was really being
bombarded, they were just as safe in a _pension_ near the sea-front as
anywhere else; the mere idea of propinquity to the sea set everybody
running faster than ever away from it. She could hear now the shells
whinnying like nervous horses, and with every crash she kept saying to
herself in a foolish way:

"Well, at any rate, there's no more danger from that one."

At first in the rush of panic she had not observed any particular
incident; but now, as shell after shell exploded without any visible
sign of damage, she began to look with interest at non-combatant
humanity in the presence of danger. She did not know whether to be glad
or sorry that, on the whole, the men behaved worse than the women; she
put this observation on one side to be argued out later with Armand, who
had certainly run faster than any one else in the _pension_. The number
of the shells was already getting less, yet there were no signs of the
populace's recovery. Fear was begetting fear with such rapidity that to
stand still and listen to the moans and groans of the uninjured was
awe-inspiring. In one doorway a distraught man with nothing on but a
shirt and slippers was dancing about with a lighted candle, evidently in
a quandary of terror whether to join the onflowing mob or to stay where
he was. An explosion quite close made up his mind, and he dived down the
steps into the street, where the candle was immediately extinguished;
nevertheless, he continued to hold it as if it were still alight while
he ran with the crowd. In another doorway stood a woman confronted with
a triple problem. Wearing nothing but a wrapper and carrying in her arms
a pet dog, she was trying at the same time to keep her wrapper fastened,
to avoid letting the dog drop, and to shut the door behind her. The
problem was a nice one: she could either keep her wrapper fastened,
maintain the dog, and leave the door open, in which case she would lose
her silver; or she could keep her wrapper close, shut the door, and drop
the dog, in which case she would lose the dog; or she could keep the
dog, shut the door, and let go of her wrapper, in which case she would
lose her modesty. Sylvia's anxiety to see how she would solve the
problem made her forget all about the shells; and it was only when the
perplexed lady in a last desperate attempt slammed the door, so that her
wrapper came flying open and the dog went bolting down the street, that
Sylvia realized the bombardment was over. She turned back toward the
_pension_ with a last look over her shoulder at the lady, who was
vanishing into the darkness, gathering the wrapper round her nakedness
as she ran, and calling wildly to her pet.

Next day the military and civil population set out to find who could
possibly have told the Turkish destroyers that such a place as Odessa
existed. Armand, the Belgian dancer, was particularly loud on the
subject of spies; Sylvia suspected it was he who had suggested to the
police that Madame Eliane, as a reputed Austrian, should be severely
examined with a view to finding out if the signals of which all were
talking could be traced to her windows. If he did inform the police, his
meanness recoiled upon his own head, for the examination of Madame
Eliane was succeeded by an examination of all her guests, in the course
of which Armand's passport was found to be slightly irregular, and he
was nearly expelled to Rumania in consequence. The authorities made up
their minds that no Turkish destroyer should ever again discover the
whereabouts of their town, and the most stringent ordinances against
showing lights were promulgated; but a more important result of the
declaration of war by Turkey than the lighting of Odessa was its
interference with the future plans of the mountebanks at the Cabaret de
l'Aube. There was not one of them who had not intended to proceed from
here to Constantinople, a much more profitable winter engagement than
this Black Sea port.

"_C'est assommant_," Armand declared. "_Zut! On ne peut pas rester ici
tout l'hiver. On crevera._"

"But at any rate one should be thankful that one was not hit by an
_obus_," said Odette. "I nearly died of fright."

"It wasn't the fault of the Turks that we weren't hit," Armand grumbled.
"They did their best."

"Luckily the shells didn't travel so fast as you," Sylvia put in.

Flora laughed at this; but when everybody began to tease Armand about
his cowardice she got angry, and invited any girl present to produce a
man that would have behaved differently.

At last the flotsam that had been stirred up by the alarm of the
bombardment drifted together again and stayed idly in what was, after
all, still a backwater to the general European unrest. The manager of
the cabaret was glad enough to keep his company together for as long as
they would stay. It was getting more difficult all the time to import
new attractions; and since as much money was being made out of human
misery in Odessa as everywhere else, the champagne flowed not much less
freely because, since the Imperial edict, some bribery of the police
was required in order to procure it. Sylvia was puzzled to find what was
fate's intention in thus keeping her from moving farther south: it
seemed a tame end to all her expectation to be stranded here, lost to
everything except the petty life of her fellow-players. However, she
sang her songs every night; somehow her personality attracted the
frequenters of the cabaret, and when after a month she informed the
manager that she must leave and go north again, he begged her to stay at
any rate for another two months--after that he would arrange for her to
travel north and sing at Kieff, Warsaw, and Petrograd, whence she could
make her way back to England.

"Or you might go to Siberia," he suggested.

"Siberia?" she echoed.

That any one should propose a tour in Siberia seemed a joke at first;
when Sylvia found the suggestion was serious, she plunged back with a
shiver into the warmer backwater of Odessa. Deciding that with a
comfortable _pension_, a friendly management, and an appreciative
audience, it would be foolish to risk her health by moving about too
much, she settled down to read Russian novels and study the characters
of her associates.

"You are a funny girl," Ruby said. "Don't you care about fellows?"

"Why should I?" Sylvia countered.

"Oh, I don't know. It seems more natural, somehow. I left home over a
fellow and went with a musical comedy to Paris. That's how I started
touring the continong. Funny you and I should meet like this in Odessa."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't know. We're both English. Talk about the World's End,
Chelsea! I wonder what they'd call this? Do you know, Sylvia, I
sometimes say to myself--supposing if I was to go back to England and
find it didn't really exist any more? I'm a funny girl. I think a lot
when I'm by myself, which isn't often, thank God, or I should get the
willies worse than what I do. I don't know: when I look round and see
that I'm in Odessa, I can't somehow believe that there is such a place
as London. Do you know, sometimes I'd go mad to hear a bus-driver call
out to a cabby, 'You bloody----, where the---- hell do you think you're
shoving yerself!' Well, after seven years without seeing England, any
one does get funny fancies."

"There aren't any cab-drivers now," Sylvia said.

"I suppose that's a fact. Taxis were only just beginning to bob up when
I went away. Oh, well, I reckon the language is still just as choice.
But I would love to hear it. Of course I might hear you swear in the
dressing-room over your corsets or anything, but it's the tone of voice
I hanker after. Oh, well, it'll all come out in the wash, and I don't
suppose they notice the war much in England. Still, I hope the
squareheads won't blow London to pieces. I once did a tour in Germany,
and a fellow with a mustache like a flying trapeze wanted to sleep with
me for ten marks. They've got nerve enough for anything. What's this
word 'boche'? I suppose it's French for rubbish." She began to sing
softly:

    "Take me back to London Town,
     London town, London town!
     That's where I want to be,
     Where the folks are kind to me.
     Trafalgar Square, oh, ain't it grand?
     Oxford Street, the dear old Strand!
     Anywhere, anywhere, I don't care....

O God, it gives any one the hump to think about it. Fancy England at
war. Wonders will never cease. I reckon my brother Alf's well in it. He
was never happy without he was fighting somebody."

It was curious, thought Sylvia that evening, as she watched Ruby Arnold
singing her four-year-old songs, how even to that cynical, rat-faced
little cockney in her red-velvet baby's frock the thought of England at
war should bring such a violent longing for home. She tried to become
intimate with Ruby; but after that single unfolding of secret
aspirations and regrets, she drew away from Sylvia, who asked the reason
of her sudden reserve.

"It's not that I don't like you," Ruby explained. "I reckon no girl
could want a better pal than you if she was your sort. Only I'm not. I
like fellows. You don't. Besides, you're different. I won't say you're a
lady, because when all's said and done we're both of us working-girls.
But I don't know. Perhaps it's because you're older than me, only
somehow you make me feel fidgety. That's flat, as the cook said to the
pancake; but you asked me why I was a bit stand-offish and I've got to
speak the truth to girls. I should go balmy otherwise with all the lies
I tell to men. I reckon you'd get on better with Odette and her Fam dee
mond."

Sylvia was vexed by her inability to bridge the gulf between herself and
Ruby; it never occurred to her that the fault lay with any one but
herself, and she felt humiliated by this failure that was so crushing to
her will to love; it seemed absurd that in a few minutes she should have
been able to get so much nearer the heart of that Russian soldier who
accosted her in Kieff than to one of her own countrywomen.

"Perhaps I've learned how to receive good-will," she told herself, "but
not yet how to offer it."

It was merely to amuse herself that Sylvia approached Odette for an
introduction to her famous _femme du monde_. The suggestion, while it
gratified Odette's sense of importance, caused her, nevertheless,
several qualms about Sylvia's fitness for presentation to Madame
Corvelis.

"_Elle a des idées très-larges, tu sais, mais--_" Odette paused. She
could not bring herself to believe that Madame Corvelis's
broad-mindedness was broad enough to include Sylvia. "_Pourtant_, I will
ask her quite frankly. I will say to her, '_Madame_, there is an
_artiste_ who wishes to meet a _femme du monde_.' _Ses idées sont
tellement larges que peut-être elle sera enchantée de faire ta
connaissance._ She has been so charming to me that if I make a _gaffe_
she must forgive me. _Enfin_, she came to take tea with me _chez
Eliane_, and though of course I was careful not to introduce anybody
else to her, she assured me afterward that she had enjoyed herself.
_Alors, nous verrons._"

Madame Corvelis was a little French Levantine who had married a Greek of
Constantinople. Odette had made her acquaintance one afternoon by
helping to unhitch her petticoats, which had managed to get caught up
while she was alighting from a tram. Her gratitude to Odette for
rescuing her from such a blushful situation was profuse and had
culminated in an invitation to take tea with her "in the wretched little
house she and her husband temporarily occupied in Odessa," owing to
their flight from Constantinople at the rumor of war.

"What was M. Corvelis?" Sylvia asked, when she and Odette were making
their way to visit _madame_.

"Oh, he was a man of business. I believe he was secretary to some large
company. You must not judge them by the house they live in here; they
left everything behind in Constantinople. But don't be frightened of M.
Corvelis. I assure you that for a man in his position he is very
simple."

"I'll try not to be very frightened," Sylvia promised.

"And _madame_ is charming. She has the perfect manners of a woman of
forty accustomed to the best society. When I think that eight years
ago--don't tell anybody else this--but eight years ago, _chérie_,"
Odette exclaimed, dramatically, "_je faisais le miché autour des
boulevards extérieurs! Ma chérie_, when I think of my _mauvais début_, I
can hardly believe that I am on my way to take tea with a femme _du
monde_. _Enfin, on arrive!_"

Odette flung proud glances all round her; Sylvia marveled at her
satisfied achievement of a life's ambition, nor did she marvel less when
she was presented to Madame Corvelis, surely the most insignificant
piece of respectability that had ever adorned a cocotte's dream. It was
pathetic to see the way in which the great, flaunting creature worshiped
this plump _bourgeoise_ with her metallic Levantine accent: anxious lest
Odette's deference should seem too effusive, Sylvia found herself
affecting an equally exaggerated demeanor to keep her friend in
countenance, though when she looked at their hostess she nearly laughed
aloud, so much did she resemble a little squat idol receiving the
complimentary adoration of some splendid savage.

"I am really ashamed to receive you in this miserable little house,"
Madame Corvelis protested. "_Mais que voulez-vous?_ Everything is in
Constantinople. Carpets, mirrors, china, silver. We came away like
beggars. _Mais que voulez-vous?_ My husband is so nervous. He feared the
worst. But of course he's nervous. _Que voulez-vous?_ The manager of one
of the largest companies in the East! Well, I say manager, but of course
when a company is as large as his, one ought to say secretary. 'Let us
go to Odessa, Alceste,' he begged. My name is Alceste, but I've no Greek
blood myself. Oh no, my father and mother were both Parisian. _Enfin_,
my father came under the glamour of the East and called me Alceste. _Que
voulez-vous?_"

All the time that Madame Corvelis was talking, Odette was asking Sylvia
in an unbroken whisper if she did not think that _madame_ was
_charmante_, _aimable_, _gentille_, and every other gracious thing she
could be.

"Have you ever been to Constantinople? Have you ever seen the
Bosphorus?" Madame Corvelis went on, turning to Sylvia. "What, you've
never seen the most enchanting city in the world? Oh, but you must! Not
now, of course. The war! It robs us all of something. Don't, please
don't think that Odessa resembles Constantinople."

Sylvia promised she would not.

"_Mais non_, Odessa is nothing. Look at this house! Ah, when I think of
what we've left behind in Constantinople. But M. Corvelis insisted, and
he was right. At any rate, we've brought a few clothes with us, though
of course when we came to this dreadful place we never thought that we
shouldn't be back home in a month. It was merely a precaution. But he
was right to be nervous, you see: the Turks have declared war. When I
think of the poor ambassador. You never saw the ambassador?"

Sylvia shook her head.

"I remember he trod on my toe--by accident, of course--oh yes, it was
entirely an accident. But he was so apologetic. What manners! But then I
always say, if you want to see good manners you must frequent good
society. What a pity you never saw the ambassador!"

"_N'est-ce pas que c'est merveilleux?_" Odette demanded.

"_Merveilleux_," Sylvia agreed, fervently.

"_Encore, madame!_" Odette begged. "_Vos histoires sont tellement
intéressantes._"

"Ah, well, one can't live all one's life in Constantinople without
picking up a few stories."

"Adhesive as burs," Sylvia thought.

"But really the best story of all," Madame Corvelis went on, "is to find
myself here in this miserable little house. That's a pretty bag you
have," she added to Sylvia. "A very pretty bag. Ah, _mon Dieu_, when I
think of the jewelry I've left behind."

At this moment M. Corvelis came in with the cunningly detached
expression of a husband who has been hustled out of the room by his wife
at the sound of a bell in order to convey an impression, when he has had
time to change his clothes, that he habitually dresses _en grande
tenue_. It was thus that Odette described her own preparatory toilet,
and she was ravished by M. Corvelis's reciprocity, whispering to Sylvia
her sense of the compliment to his humble visitors.

"_Homme chic! homme du monde! homme élégant! Mais ça se voit. Dis, t'es
contente?_"

Sylvia smiled and nodded.

The mold of form who had drawn such an ecstasy of self-congratulatory
admiration from Odette treated the two actresses as politely as his wife
had done, and asked Sylvia the same questions. When his reduplication of
the first catechism was practically complete, Odette gave the signal for
departure, and in a cyclone of farewells and compliments they left.

"_Elle est vraiment une femme du monde?_" Odette demanded.

"_De pied en cap_," Sylvia replied.

"_Ton sac en or lui plaisait beaucoup_," said Odette, a little
enviously. "Ah, when I think of myself eight years ago," she went on,
"it seems _incroyable_. I should like to invite them both to tea again
_chez Eliane_. If only the other girls were like you! And last time I
put too much sugar in her tea! _Non, je n'ose pas!_ One sees the
opportunity to raise oneself, but one does not dare grasp it. _C'est la
vie_," she sighed.

Moved by the vision of herself thwarted from advancing any higher,
Odette poured out to Sylvia the story of her life--a sad, squalid story,
lit up here and there by the flashes of melodramatic events and
culminating in the revelation of this paradise that was denied her.

"What would you have done if you had been invited to her house in
Constantinople where the carpets and the mirrors are?"

"She would never have invited me there," Odette sighed. "Here she is not
known. However broad her ideas, she could not defy public opinion at
home. _À la guerre comme à la guerre! Enfin, je suis fille du peuple,
mais on me regarde; c'est déjà quelque chose._"

The _pension_ that to Odette appeared so mean after the glories of
Madame Corvelis's little house had never been so welcome to Sylvia, and
it was strange to think that any one could be more impressed by that
pretentious little _bourgeoise_ with her figure like apples in a string
bag than by Madame Eliane, who resembled a mysterious lady in the
background of a picture by Watteau.

It was in meditation upon such queer contrasts that Sylvia passed away
her time in Odessa, thus and in pondering the more terrifying
profundities of the human soul in the novels of Dostoievski and Tolstoi.
She was not sorry, however, when the time came to leave; she could never
exclude from her imagination the hope of some amazing event immemorially
predestinate that should decide the course of the years still to come.
It would have been difficult for her to explain or justify her
conviction, but it would have been impossible to reject it, and it was
with an oddly superstitious misgiving that she found herself traveling
north again, so strong had been her original impulse to go south. If
anything had been wanting to confirm this belief, her arrival in Warsaw
at the beginning of February would have been enough.

Sylvia left Kieff on the return visit without any new revelation of
human vileness or human virtue, and reached Warsaw to find a mad
populace streaming forth at the sound of the German guns. She had
positively the sensation of meeting a great dark wave that drove her
back, and her interview with the distracted Jew who managed the cabaret
for which she had been engaged was like one of those scenes played in a
front set of a provincial drama to the sounds of feverish preparation
behind the cloth.

"Don't talk to me about songs," the manager cried. "Get out! Can't you
hear the guns? Everything's closed. Oh, my God! My God! Where have I put
it? I had it in my hands a moment ago. Get out, I say."

"Where to?" Sylvia demanded.

"Anywhere. Listen. Don't you think they sound a little nearer even in
these few minutes? Oh, the Germans! They're too strong. What are you
waiting for? Can't you understand me when I say that everything's
closed?"

He wiped the perspiration from his big nose with a duster that left long
black streaks in its wake.

"But where shall I go?" Sylvia persisted.

"Why don't you go to Bucharest? Why in the devil's name does any one
want to be anywhere but in a neutral country in these times? Go to the
Rumanian consul and get your passport _visé_ for Bucharest, and for the
love of God leave me in peace! Can't you see I'm busy this evening?"

Sylvia accepted the manager's suggestion and set out to find the consul:
by this time it was too late to obtain a _visa_ that night, and she was
forced to sleep in Warsaw--a grim experience that remained as a memory
of distant guns booming through a penetrating reek of onions. In the
morning the guns were quieter, and there was a rumor that for the third
time the German thrust for Warsaw had been definitely foiled. Sylvia,
however, could not get over the impression of the evening before, and
what the manager had suggested to rid himself of an importunate woman
she accepted as a clear indication of the direction she ought to follow.

In the waiting-room of the Rumanian Consulate there was an excessively
fat girl who told Sylvia that she was an accompanist anxious, like
herself, to get to Bucharest. Sylvia took the occasion to ask her if she
thought there was a certainty of being engaged in Bucharest, and the fat
girl was fairly encouraging. She told Sylvia that she was a Bohemian
from Prague who had been warned by the Russian police that she would do
well to seek another country.

"And will you get an engagement?" Sylvia asked.

"Oh, well, if I don't, I may as well starve in Bucharest as in Warsaw,"
she replied.

There seemed something ludicrous in the notion of any one so fat as this
starving; the accompanist seemed to divine Sylvia's thoughts, for she
laughed bitterly.

"I dare say you think I'm pretending, but ever since I was warned, I've
been scraping together the money to reach Bucharest somehow; I haven't
eaten a proper meal for a month. But the less I eat the fatter I seem to
get."

Sylvia was vexed that the poor girl should have guessed what she was
thinking, and she went out of her way to ask her advice on the smallest
details of the proposed journey; she knew that there was nothing that
restored a person's self-respect like a request for advice. The fat
girl, whose name inappropriately for a Bohemian appeared to be Lottie,
cheered up, as Sylvia had anticipated, and brimmed over with
recommendations about work in Bucharest.

"You'd better go to the management of the Petit Maxim. You're a singer,
aren't you? Of course Bucharest is very gay and terribly expensive.
You're English, aren't you? You are lucky. But fancy leaving England
now! Still, if you don't get any work you'll be able to go to your
consul and he'll send you home. I'll be able to get home, too, from
Bucharest, but I don't know if I want to. All my friends used to be
French and English girls. I never cared much for Austrians and Germans.
But now I get called _sale boche_ if I open my mouth. How do you explain
this war? It seems very unnecessary, doesn't it?"

"I don't want to be inquisitive," said Sylvia. "But I wish you'd tell me
why you're called Lottie."

"Ah, lots of people ask that." It was evident by the way she spoke that
the ability of her name to arouse the curiosity of strangers was one of
the chief pleasures life had brought to this fat girl. "Well, I had an
_amant de coeur_ once who was English. At least his mother was English:
his father was from Hamburg; in fact, I think he was more Jewish than
anything. He didn't treat me very well, and he threw me over for an
English dancer called Lottie, who died of consumption. It seems a funny
thing to tell you, but the only way I could be revenged was to take her
name when she died. You'd have been surprised to see how much my taking
her name seemed to annoy him. He threatened me with a pistol once, but I
stuck to the name, and then I got fond of it, because I found it created
_beaucoup de réclame_. You see, I've traveled all over Europe, and
people remember me as the fat girl Lottie; so I've never gone back to
my own name. It's just as well, because nobody can pronounce Bohemian
names."

The long formalities at the Consulate were finished at last, and as they
came out Sylvia suggested to the fat girl that they should travel
together. She looked at Sylvia in astonishment.

"But I'm an Austrian."

"Yes, I know. I dare say it's very reprehensible, but, unfortunately, I
can't feel at war with you."

"Thank you for your kindness," said Lottie, "which I'm not going to
repay by traveling with you. After we get out of Russia, yes. But till
we're over the frontier, I sha'n't know you for your own sake. You'd
only have trouble with the Russian police."

"Even police could surely not be so stupid as that?" Sylvia argued.

"_À la guerre comme à la guerre_," the fat girl laughed. "_Au revoir,
petite chose._"

Sylvia left Warsaw that night. Having only just enough money to pay her
fare second-class, she found the journey down through Russia almost
unendurable, especially the first part when the train was swarmed with
fugitives from Warsaw, notwithstanding the news of the German failure to
pierce the line of the Bzura, which was now confirmed. Yet with all the
discomfort she was sustained by an exultant relief at turning south
again; and her faculties were positively strained to attention for the
disclosure of her fate. She was squeezed so tightly into her seat, and
the atmosphere of the compartment was so heavy with the smell of
disturbed humanity that it was lucky she had this inner assurance over
which she could brood hour after hour. She was without sleep for two
nights, and when toward dusk of a dreary February afternoon the frontier
station of Ungheny was reached and she alighted from the third train in
which she had traveled during this journey, she felt dazed for a moment
with the disappointment of somebody who arrives at a journey's end
without being met.

However, there was now the frontier examination by the Russian
authorities of passengers leaving the country to occupy Sylvia's mind,
and she passed with an agitated herd toward a tin-roofed shed in the
middle of which a very large stove was burning. She had noticed Lottie
several times in the course of the journey, and now, finding herself
next her in the crowd, she greeted her cheerfully; but the fat girl
frowned and whispered:

"I'm not going to speak to you for your own sake. Can't you understand?"

Sylvia wondered if she were a spy, who from some motive of charity
wished to avoid compromising her; but there was no time to think about
such problems, because an official was taking her passport and waving
her across to the stacked-up heaps of luggage. There was something
redolent of old sensational novels in this frontier examination,
something theatrically sinister about the attitude of the officials when
they commanded everybody to turn everything out of his trunks and bags.
The shed took on the appearance of a vast rag-heap, and the accumulated
agitation of the travelers was pitiable in its subservience to these
machines of the state; it seemed incredible that human beings should
consent to be treated thus. Presently it became evident that the object
of this relentless search was paper; every scrap of paper, whether it
was loose or used for wrapping and packing, was taken away and dropped
into the stove. The sense of human ignominy became overwhelming when
Sylvia saw men going down on their knees and weeping for permission to
keep important documents; yet no appeal moved the officials, and the
stove burned fiercely with the mixed records of money, love, and
business; with contracts and receipts and title-deeds; even with
toilet-paper and old greasy journals. Sylvia fought hard for the right
to keep her music, and proclaimed her English nationality so insistently
that for a minute or two the officials hesitated and went out to
consult the authorities who had taken charge of her passport; but when
it was found that she was entered there as a music-hall _artiste_, the
music was flung into the stove at once. Confronted with the proofs of
her right to carry music, this filthy spawn of man's will to be enslaved
took from her the only tools of her craft: orang-outangs would have been
more logical. And all over the world the human mind was being debauched
like this by war, or would it be truer to say that war was turning
ordinary stupidity into criminal stupidity? Oh, what did it matter?
Sylvia clasped her golden bag to reassure herself that nobility still
endured in spite of war. Now they were throwing books into the stove!
Sylvia sat down and laughed so loudly that two soldiers came across and
took her arms to lead her outside: they evidently thought she was going
to have hysterics, which would doubtless have been unlawful in the shed.
She waved aside their attentions and went across to pick up her luggage.

When Sylvia had finished and was passing out to find the office where
she had to receive back her passport inscribed with illegible permits to
leave Russia, she saw Lottie being led through a curtained door on the
far side of the shed. The sight made her feel sick: it brought back with
horrible vividness her emotion when, years ago, she had seen on the
French frontier the woman with the lace being led away for smuggling
contraband. What were they going to do? She paused, expecting to hear a
scream issue from that curtained doorway. She could not bring herself to
go away, and, with an excuse of having left something behind in the
shed, she went back. The curtain was pulled aside a moment for some one
within to call the assistance of some one without, and Sylvia had a
brief vision of the fat girl, half undressed, with her arms held, high
above her head while two police officers prodded her like a sheep in a
fair.

"O God!" Sylvia murmured. "God! God! Grant these people their revenge
some day!"

The passengers were at last free to mount another train, and Sylvia saw
with relief that Lottie was taking her place with the rest. She avoided
speaking to her, because she was suffering herself from the humiliation
inflicted upon the fat girl, and felt awed at the idea of any intrusion
upon her shame. The train steamed out of the station, crossed a long
bridge, and pulled up in Rumanian Ungheny, where everybody had to alight
again for the Rumanian officials to look for the old-fashioned
contraband of the days before the war. They did this as perfunctorily as
in those happy days; and the quiet of the neutral railway station was
like the sudden lull that sheltering land gives to the stormiest seas.
If only she had not lost all her music, if only she had not seen the fat
girl behind that curtain, Sylvia could have clapped her hands for
pleasure at this unimpressive little station, which, merely because it
belonged to a country at peace, had a kind of innocence and jollity that
gave it a real beauty.

"Well, aren't you glad I wouldn't have anything to do with you?" said
Lottie, coming up to her with a smile. "You'd have had to go through the
same, probably. The Russian police are brutes."

"All policemen are brutes," Sylvia declared.

"I suppose they have their orders, but I think they might have a woman
searcher."

"Oh, don't talk about it!" Sylvia cried. "Such things crucify the soul."

"You're very _exagérée_ for an English girl," said Lottie. "Aou yes! Aou
yes! I never met an English girl who talked like you."

The train arrived at Jassy about nine o'clock; here they had to change
again, and, since the train for Bucharest did not leave till about
eleven and she was feeling hungry, Sylvia invited Lottie to have dinner
with her. While they were walking along the platform toward the
restaurant there was a sound of hurried footsteps behind them, and a
moment later a breathless voice called out in English:

"Excuse me, please! Excuse me, please! They told me there was being an
English _artiste_ on the train."

That voice reproduced so many times by Sylvia at the Pierian Hall was
the voice of Concetta and, turning round, she saw her.

"Concetta!"

The girl drew in her breath sharply.

"How was you knowing me? My name is Queenie Walters. How was you calling
me Concetta? Ah, the English girl! Oh, my dear, I am so content to see
you."

Sylvia took her in her arms and kissed her.

"Oh, Sylvia! You see I remember your name. I can't get away from Jassy.
I was being expelled from Moscow, and I had no money to come more than
here, and the man I am with here I hate. I want to go to Bucharest, but
he isn't wanting to let me go and gives to me only furs, no money."

"You're not still with Zozo?"

"_Ach_, no! He--how do you say--he shooted me in the leg three years
from now and afterward we were no more friends. The man I am with here
was of Jassy. I had no money. What else must I do?"

Sylvia had not much money, either; but she had just enough to pay
Concetta's fare to Bucharest, whither at midnight they set out.

"And let no one ever tell me again that presentiments don't exist,"
murmured Sylvia, falling asleep for the first time in forty-eight
hours.




CHAPTER IV


Concetta's history--or rather Queenie's, for it was by this name that
she begged Sylvia to call her now--had been a mixture of splendor,
misery, and violence during the six years that, almost to a day, had
elapsed since they met for the first time at Granada. She told it in the
creeping light of a wet dawn while the train was passing through a flat,
colorless country, and while in a corner of the compartment Lottie's
snores rose above the noise, told it in the breathless, disjointed style
that was so poignantly familiar to the one who listened. There was
something ghostly for Sylvia in this experience; it was as if she sat
opposite a Galatea of her own creation, a doubleganger from her own
brain, a dream prolonged into the cold reality of the morning. All the
time that she was listening she had a sensation of being told about
events that she ought to know already, as if in a trance she herself had
lived this history through before; and so vivid was the sensation that
when there were unexplained gaps in Queenie's narrative she found
herself puzzling her own brain to fill them in from experience of her
own, the recollection of which had been clouded by some accident.

When Queenie told how she was carried away by Zozo from Mrs.
Gainsborough at the railway station of Granada, she gave the impression
of having yielded to a magical and irresistible influence, and it was
evident that for a long while the personality of the juggler had swayed
her destiny by a hypnotic power that was only broken when he wounded her
with the pistol-shot. Even now, after three years of freedom, his
influence, when she began to talk of him, seemed to regather its volume
and to be about to pour itself once more over her mind. Sylvia perceived
this danger, and forbade her to talk any more about Zozo. This
injunction was evidently a relief to the child--she must be twenty-one
by now, though she seemed still a child--but it was tantalizing to
Sylvia, who could not penetrate beyond her own impression of the juggler
as an incredible figure, incredible because only drawn with a kind of
immature or tired fancy. He passed into the category of the Svengalis,
and became one of a long line of romantic impossibilities with whom
their creators had failed to do much more than can be done by a
practical joker with a turnip, a sheet, and some phosphorus. Zozo had
always been the weakest part of Sylvia's improvisation of Concetta, a
melodramatic climax that for her had spoiled the more simple horror of
the childhood; she determined that later on she would try to extract
from Queenie, bit by bit, enough to complete her performance.

Although Queenie had managed to break away from the man himself, she had
paid in full for his direction of her life, and Sylvia rebelled against
the whim of destiny which at the critical moment in this child's career
had snatched her from herself and handed her over to the possession of a
Zozo. What could have been the intention of fate in pointing a way to
safety and then immediately afterward barring it against her progress?
The old argument of free will could not apply in her case, because it
was the lack of that, and of that alone, which had caused her ruin. What
but a savage and undiscerning fate could be held accountable for this
tale that had for fit background the profitable and ugly fields through
which on this tristful Rumanian day the train was sweeping? Queenie
seemed to have had no lovers apart from the purchasers of youth, and to
be able to look back with pride and pleasure at nothing except the furs
and dresses and jewelry with which she had been purchased. In the rage
that Sylvia felt for this wanton corruption of a soul, she suddenly
remembered how, long ago, she had watched with a hopeless equanimity and
a cynical tolerance the progress of Lily along the same road as Queenie;
and this memory of herself as she once was and felt revived the
torments of self-reproach that had haunted her delirium in Petrograd.
Then, as Queenie's tale went on, there gradually emerged from all the
purposeless confusion of it one clear ambition in the girl's mind, which
was a passion to be English--a passion feverish, intense, absorbing.

When in France Sylvia had first encountered continental music-hall
_artistes_, she had found among them a universal prejudice against
English girls; later on, when she met in cabarets the expatriated and
cosmopolitan mountebanks that were the slaves rather than the servants
of the public, she had often been envied for her English nationality:
Lottie sleeping over there in the corner was an instance in point. But
she had never found this fleeting envy crystallized to such a passionate
ambition as it was become for Queenie. The circumstances of her birth in
Germany from an Italian father of a Flemish mother, her flight from a
cruel stepmother, her life with the juggler whose nationality seemed as
indeterminate as her own, her speech compounded of English, French,
German, and Italian each spoken with a foreign accent, her absence of
any kind of papers, her lack of any sort of home, had all combined to
give her a positive belief that she was without nationality, which she
coveted as some Undine might covet a soul.

"But why do you want to be English so particularly?" Sylvia asked.

"Don't you know? Why, yes, of course you know. It was you was first
making me to want. You were so sweet, the sweetest person I was ever
meeting, and when I lost you I was always wanting to be English."

So, after all, her own swift passage through Queenie's life had not been
without consequence.

"People were always saying that I looked like an English girl," Queenie
went on. "And I was always talking English. I will never speak other
languages again. I will not know other languages. Until this war came it
was easy; but when they asked me for my passport I had only a _billet
de séjour_ given to me by the Russian police, and after six months I was
expelled. When I was coming to Rumania, there was a merchant on the
train who was kind to me, but he made me promise that if he helped me I
was never to leave him until he was wanting. He was very kind. He gave
me these furs. They are so nice, yes. But I was always going to the
station at Jassy to see if some English girl would be my sister. There
was once in Constantinople an English girl who would be my sister--but
Zozo was jealous. If I was becoming her sister, I would be having a
passport now, and England is so sweet!"

"But you've never been in England," Sylvia observed.

"Oh yes, I was going there with another English girl, and we lived there
three months. I was dancing into a club--a nice club, all the men was
wearing smokings--but she was ill and I wanted to be giving her money,
so I was going to Russia, and then came the war. And now you must be my
sister, because that other sister will be perhaps dead, so ill she was.
_Ach_ yes, so ill, so very ill! When I will have my English passport we
will go to England together and never come away again. Then for the
first time I will be happy."

Sylvia promised that she would do all she could to achieve Queenie's
purpose.

"Tell me, why did you call yourself Queenie Walters?" she asked.

"Because the girl who was my sister in England had once a real little
baby sister who was called Queenie. Oh, dead long ago, long ago! Her
mother, who I was calling _my_ mother, told me about this baby Queenie.
So I was Queenie Walters and my sister was Elsie Walters."

"And your real brother Francesco?" Sylvia asked. "Did you ever see him
again?"

That dreamlike and inexplicable meeting between the brother and the
sister in the streets of Milan had always remained in Sylvia's memory.

"No, never yet again. But I am so sure he is being in England and that
when we go there we will find him. And if he is English, too, what fun
we will have."

Sylvia looked at these two companions who had both assumed English
names. Not even the cold and merciless gray light of the Rumanian
morning could destroy Queenie's unearthly charm, and the longer she
looked at her the more like an Undine she thought her. Her eyes were
ageless, limpid as a child's; and that her experience of evil should
have left no sign of its habitation Sylvia was tempted to ascribe to the
absence of a soul for evil to mar. The only indication that she was six
years older than when they met in Granada was her added gracefulness of
movement, the impulsive gracefulness of a gazelle rather than that
serene gracefulness of a cat which had been Lily's beauty. Her hair, of
a natural pale gold, had not been dimmed by the fumes of cabarets, and
even now, all tangled after a night in the train, it had a look of
hovering in this railway carriage like a wintry sunbeam. In the other
corner sat Lottie, snoring with wide-open mouth, whose body, relaxed in
sleep, seemed fatter than ever. She, too, had suffered, perhaps more
deeply than Queenie, certainly more markedly; and now in dreams what
fierce Bohemian passions were aroused in the vast airs of sleep, what
dark revenges of the spirit for the insults that grotesque body must
always endure?

At this point in Sylvia's contemplation Lottie woke up and prepared for
the arrival of the train at Bucharest by making her toilet.

"Where's the best place to stay?" Sylvia inquired.

"Well, the best place to stay is in some hotel," Lottie replied. "But
the hotels are so horribly expensive. Of course, there are plenty of
pensions d'artistes_, and--" she broke off and looked at Sylvia_
curiously, who asked her why she did so.

"I was thinking that it's a pity you can't share a room together," she
said after a momentary hesitation.

"So we can," Sylvia answered, sharply.

"Well, in that case I should go to a small hotel," Lottie advised.
"Because all the _pensions_ here are run by old thieves. There's Mère
Valérie--she's French and almost the worst of the lot--and there's one
kept by a Greek who's not so bad, but they say most of her bedrooms have
bugs."

"We'll go to a hotel," Sylvia decided. "Where are you going yourself?"

"Oh, I shall find myself a room somewhere. I don't stand a chance of
being engaged at any first-rate cabaret and I sha'n't have much money to
spend on rooms. _Entre nous, je ne dis plus rien aux hommes. Je suis
trop grasse. À quoi sert une jolie chambre?_"

Sylvia had a feeling that she ought to ask Lottie to share a room with
Queenie and herself, and after a struggle against the notion of this fat
girl's ungainly presence she keyed herself to the pitch of inviting her.

"No, no," said Lottie. "It wouldn't do for two English girls to live
with an Austrian."

Sylvia could not help being relieved at her refusal; perhaps she showed
it, for Lottie smiled cynically.

"I think you'll feel a little less charitable to everybody," she said,
"before much longer. You've kept out of this war so far, but you won't
be able to keep out of it forever. I've often noticed about English
girls that they begin by thinking such a lot of themselves that they
have quite a store of pity for the poor people who aren't like them; and
then all of a sudden they turn round and become very unpleasant; because
they discover that other people think themselves as good as they are.
Mind you, I'm not saying you'll do that, but I don't want to find myself
_de trop_ after being with you a week. Let's part as friends."

Sylvia, in the flurry of arrival, did not pay much attention to Lottie's
prophecies, and she was glad to be alone again with Queenie. They
discovered a small hotel kept by Italians, which seemed clean and, if
they obtained a reasonable salary at the Petit Maxim, not too
expensive. When they had dressed themselves up to impress the manager
of the cabaret and were starting out to seek an engagement, the wife of
the proprietor called Sylvia aside.

"You mustn't bring gentlemen back to the hotel except in the afternoon."

"We don't want to bring anybody back at any time," said Sylvia,
indignantly.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and muttered a skeptical apology.

The interview with the manager of the cabaret was rather humiliating for
Sylvia, though she laughed at it when it was all over. He was quite
ready to engage Queenie both to dance _en scène_ and afterward, but he
declared he had nothing to offer Sylvia; she proposed to sing him one of
her songs, but he scarcely listened to her, and when she had finished
repeated that he had nothing to offer her. Whereupon Queenie announced
that unless her sister was engaged the Petit Maxim would have to forgo
her own performance. The manager argued for a time, but he was evidently
much impressed by Queenie's attraction as a typical English girl, and
finally, rather than lose her, he agreed to engage Sylvia as well.

"It's a pity you look so unlike an English girl," he said to Sylvia in
an aggrieved voice. "The public will be disappointed. They expect an
English girl to look English. You'll have to sing at the beginning of
the evening, and I can't pay you more than three hundred _lei_--three
hundred francs, that is."

"I was getting eight hundred in Russia," Sylvia objected.

"I dare say you were, but girls are scarcer there. We've got thousands
of them in Bucharest."

Sylvia was furious at being offered so little, but Queenie promptly
asked six hundred, and when the manager objected, suggested that he
might engage them both for twelve hundred: it was strange to find
Queenie so sharp at business. In the end Sylvia was offered three
hundred and fifty _lei_ and Queenie seven hundred and fifty, which they
accepted.

"You can have a band rehearsal to-morrow," he said, "and open on Monday
week."

Sylvia explained about the loss of her music; and the manager began to
curse, demanding how she expected an orchestra to accompany her without
band parts.

"I'll accompany myself," she answered.

"Oh, well," he agreed, "being the first item on the program, it doesn't
really matter what you do."

It was impossible for the moment not feel the sting of this when Sylvia
remembered herself a year ago, fresh from her success at the Pierian and
inclined to wonder if she were not dimming her effulgence as a
moderately large star by appearing at English music-halls. Now here she
was being engaged for the sake of another girl and allowed on sufferance
to entertain the meager, listless audience at the beginning of a cabaret
performance--for the sake of another girl who owed to her the fare to
Bucharest and whom all the way in the train she had been pitying while
she made plans to rescue her from a degrading existence. There was a
brief moment of bitterness and jealousy; but it passed almost at once,
and she began to laugh at herself.

"There's no doubt you'll have to establish your English nationality,"
she told Queenie, as they left the manager's office. "I really believe
he thought it was I who was pretending."

"It's what I was saying you," Queenie answered. "They was all thinking
that I was English."

"Well, now we must decide about our relationship. Of course, you don't
look the least like my sister, but I think the best way will be for you
to pass as my sister. My name isn't really Sylvia Scarlett, but Sylvia
Snow; so what I suggest is that you shall go on calling yourself Queenie
Walters on the stage, though when we try to get your passport you must
be Queenie Snow. Trust me to get round the English authorities here, if
it's necessary. We can always go back to England through Bulgaria and
Greece, but we must save up enough money, and it 'll that might befall
her more acutely than she would have feared for herself.

"Which must she be given first?" Sylvia asked herself. "A soul or a
nationality? The ultimate reason of nationality is civilization, and the
object of civilization is the progress and safety of the state. The more
progressive and secure is the state the more utterly is the individual
soul destroyed, because the state compels the individual to commit
crimes for which as an individual he would be execrated. Hence the crime
of war, to which the individual is lured by a virtue created by
appealing to mankind's sense of property, a virtue called patriotism
that somehow or other I'm perfectly sure must be anti-divine, though
it's a virtue for which I have a great respect. _What shall it profit a
man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?_ That's
surely the answer to civilization, which, after all, has no object
except the physical comfort of humanity. I suppose one might call the
civilization that is of the spirit and not of the flesh 'salvation.' I
wonder what the Germans mean by _Kultur_--really I suppose the aggregate
soul of the German people. I think _Kultur_ in their sense must be a
hybrid virtue like patriotism. I think it's their own ascription of a
divine origin to a civilization which has been as rapid and as poisonous
and as ugly as a toadstool. We other civilized nations revile the
Germans as barbarians, particularly we English, because in England,
thank Heaven, we've always had an uncomfortable feeling that man is a
greater thing than men, and we perceive in war a sacrifice of the
individual that no state has the right to demand. I wonder why the
Russians went to war. I can't understand a country that has produced
Tolstoi and Dostoievski going to war. If I had not met that soldier in
Kieff I might have been skeptical about Russian idealism after my
adventures in Petrograd, after that filthy cinema, and the scene in the
station at Ungheny; but, having met him, I know that Tolstoi and
Dostoievski _are_ Russia.

"All of which has taken me a long way from Queenie, who is neither ready
for civilization nor for salvation. It's a most extraordinary thing, but
I've suddenly got an idea that she has never been baptized. If she has
not, I shall persuade her to be baptized. Baptism--the key to salvation!
A passport--the key to civilization! The antithesis is not so ludicrous
nor so extravagant as it sounds at first. Without a passport Queenie has
no nationality and does not possess elementary civic rights. She is
liable to be expelled from any country at any moment, and there is no
certainty that any other country will receive her. In that case she will
spend the rest of her life on earth in a kind of Limbo comparable to the
Limbo which I believe is reserved for the souls of those unbaptized
through no fault of their own. I shall be able to procure her a passport
and introduce her to the glories of nationality by perjuring myself, but
I can't give her a soul by perjuring myself, and I've got so strongly
this intuition that she was never baptized that I shall dig out a priest
and talk to him about it. And yet why am I bothering whether she was
baptized or not? What have I to do with churches and their ceremonies?
No doubt I was baptized, confirmed, and made my communion; yet for more
than twenty years I have never entered a church except as an onlooker.
Is this anxiety about Queenie's soul only another way of expressing an
anxiety about my own soul? Yes, I believe it is. I believe that by a
process of sheer intellectual exhaustion I am being driven into
Christianity. Oh, I wish I could talk it all out! It's a damned
dishonest way of satisfying my own conscience, to go to a priest and ask
questions about Queenie. Why can't I go and ask him straight out about
myself? But she is just as important as I am. I think that was brought
home to me rather well, when the manager engaged me because he wanted
her. There was I in a condition of odious pride because I had been
given the chance of helping her by paying the beggarly fare to
Bucharest, and, boomph! as dear Gainsborough used to say, there was she
given the chance of paying me back a hundredfold within twenty-four
hours."

Queenie was out, and Sylvia was lying down with a headache which was not
improved by the procession of these vagrant speculations round and round
her brain. She got up presently to look for some aspirin, and, opening
the drawer of the table between the two beds, she found a bundle of
pictures--little colored lithographs of old masters. She was turning
them over idly when Queenie came back.

"_Ach_, you was looking at my pictures. They are so nice, yes? See, this
is the one I love the best."

It was the "Primavera," and Sylvia was astonished for a moment that
Queenie's childlike and undeveloped taste should care for something so
remote from the crudities that usually appealed to such a mind. Then she
remembered that Botticelli as a painter must have appealed to
contemporaries who by modern standards were equally childlike and
undeveloped; and also that Queenie, whose nationality by the standards
of civilization did not exist, had an Italian father, the inheritor
perhaps of Botticelli's blood. Queenie sat on the bed and looked at her
pictures with the rapt expression of a child poring over her simple
treasures. From time to time she would hold one up for Sylvia's
admiration.

"See how sweet," she would say, kissing the grave little Madonna or
diminished landscape that was drawing her out of Bucharest into another
world.

"I've got a book somewhere about pictures," Sylvia said. "You must read
it."

Queenie hid her face in her arms; when she looked up again she was
crimson as a carnation.

"I can't read," she whispered.

"Not read?" Sylvia echoed.

"I can't read or write," she went on. "_Ach!_ Now you hate me, yes?
Because I was being so stupid."

"But when you went to the school in Dantzig, didn't they teach you
anything?"

"They taught me ballet dancing and acrobatic dancing and step dancing.
Now I must go to have my hair washed, yes?"

Queenie got off the bed and hurried away, leaving Sylvia in a state of
bewilderment before the magnitude of the responsibility that she
represented.

"It's like giving birth to a grown-up baby," she said to herself; on a
sudden irresistible impulse, she knelt down upon the floor and began to
pray, with that most intense prayer of which a human being is capable,
that prayer which transcends all words, all space, all time, all
thought, that prayer which substitutes itself for the poor creature who
makes it. The moment of prayer passed, and Sylvia, rising from her
knees, dressed herself and went in search of a priest.

When she reached the door of the little Catholic mission church to which
the proprietor of the hotel had directed her, she paused upon the inner
threshold before a baize door and asked herself if she were not acting
in a dream. She had not been long enough in Bucharest for the city to be
reassuringly familiar; by letting her fancy play around the unreality of
her present state of mind she was easily able to transform Bucharest to
a city dimly apprehended in a tranced voyage of the spirit and to
imagine all the passers-by as the fantastic denizens of another world.
She stood upon the threshold and yielded a moment to what seemed like a
fainting of reason, while all natural existence swayed round her mind
and while the baize door stuck thick with pious notices, funereal
objurgations, and the petty gossip, as it were, of a new habitation at
which she was looking with strange eyes, seemed to attend her next step
with a conscious expectancy. She pushed it open and entered the church;
a bearded priest, escaping the importunities of an aged parishioner
with a voluble grievance, was coming toward her; perceiving that Sylvia
was looking round in bewilderment, he took the occasion to get rid of
the old woman by asking her in French if he could do anything to help.

"I want to see a priest," she replied.

Although she knew that he was a priest, in an attempt to cheat the force
that was impelling her she snatched at his lack of resemblance to the
conventional priestly figure of her memory and deluded herself with vain
hesitations.

"Do you want to make your confession?" he asked.

Sylvia nodded, and looked over her shoulder in affright; it seemed that
the voice of a wraith had whispered "Yes." The priest pointed to the
confessional, and Sylvia, with a final effort to postpone her surrender,
asked, with a glance at the old woman, if he were not too busy now. He
shook his head quickly and spoke sharply in Italian to the parishioner,
who retired, grumbling; Sylvia smiled to see with what an ostentation of
injured dignity she took the holy water and crossed herself before
passing out through the baize door. The old woman's challenging humanity
restore

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