"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 perfectlyconscious 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.Youwill 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'spension.
THEpensionwas 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 thepension; 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 thepensionhad 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 acopainwith 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 thePension 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 herunintelligible 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 thepension, 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, Iamglad 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 tobe 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 thePension Gontranthe 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 theplanchette 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 Frenchtheyknow."
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 thePension Gontranmade 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 thePension Gontranwas positivelyformal 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-downpensionbecame 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 theplanchetteand set it upon a small tablecovered 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. Theplanchettewent 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. Iwon'tlose my temper with it to-night."
Theplanchettemight 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 theplanchette. 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 leadingplanchetteto trace the course of any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting fortwenty 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 theplanchettelike 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 theplanchettecareered 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 youwant 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 thefamily 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 thepensionwith 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 surprisedby 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 thepensionsigns 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 thepensionthese 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 carelessartistes, 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 witchesof 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, nothingbut 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 instinctshe 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 toevil, 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 bywar 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 inanimateobjects 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 abundle 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 overworkedchancelierscould 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 thepensionof 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 Gontrancame 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 atConstantinople: 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 foreignartistes. 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 thepensionto announce her success.
"Well, if you get ill," said Mère Gontran, "mind you come back here at once. You'renota good medium; in fact, I believe you're a deterrent; but I like to see you about the place, and of course Idolike 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 thepensionwas 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 thepensionwas 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. Onthe 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 forMère 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? Andtheirchildren 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 wasGive 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 inEnglish 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.
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 uponher 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 darknesssleet 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 emotionsaroused 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 sadand 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. Thepension d'artistesat 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 calledMère, which would have been the usual prefix of ironical affection awarded to the owner of such apension; 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 exactedMadame. 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 thepensionbefore 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 withwhite hair. I reckon with white hair and a house of my own I'd chuck up this life to-morrow,Iwould.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 afemme du mondelike 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 theartistesgathered together over coffee for the havoc which the war had brought in their profession.
"I was alwaysanti-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 andla patriewhenyou'redu 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."