"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 mediocreartistes, 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 thePension 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 thepensionwho 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 thepensionout 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 apensionnear 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 thepension. 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 rapiditythat 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 thepensionwith 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 signalsof 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 anobus," 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 freelybecause, 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 comfortablepension, 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 Ishould 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....
"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, howeven 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 famousfemme 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 anartistewho wishesto meet afemme 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 agaffeshe must forgive me.Enfin, she came to take tea with mechez 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 visitmadame.
"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.
"Andmadameis 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 mymauvais début, I can hardly believe that I am on my way to take tea with a femmedu 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 MadameCorvelis, 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 plumpbourgeoisewith 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 thatmadamewascharmante,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 dressesen 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 seemsincroyable. I should like to invite them both to tea againchez 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."
Thepensionthat 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 littlebourgeoisewith her figure like apples in a string bag thanby 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 passportviséfor 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 avisathat 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 calledsale bocheif 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 anamant de cœuronce 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 createdbeaucoup de réclame. You see, I've traveled all over Europe, and people remember me asthe 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 disappointmentof 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 fora 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-hallartiste, 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 veryexagéréefor 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 restaurantthere 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 Englishartisteon 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.
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 wasand 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-hallartistes, 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 abillet de séjourgiven 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.Achyes, 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 callingmymother, 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 inEngland 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 Sylviacuriously, 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 thepensionshere 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 myselfde tropafter 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 danceen scèneand 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 hundredlei—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 sharpat business. In the end Sylvia was offered three hundred and fiftyleiand 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 getyour 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 'llthat 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 byKultur—really I suppose the aggregate soul of the German people. I thinkKulturin 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 stationat Ungheny; but, having met him, I know that Tolstoi and DostoievskiareRussia.
"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 hadbeen 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 restored to Sylvia her sense of reality; emotion died away like a falling gale at eve, and she walked to the confessional imbued with an intention as practical as if she had been walking up-stairs to tidy her hair. The priest composed himself into a non-committal attitude and waited for Sylvia, who, now that she was kneeling, felt as if she were going to play an unrehearsed part.
"I ought to say before I begin that, though I was brought up a Catholic, I've not been inside a church for any religious duties since I was nine years old. I'm now thirty-one. I know that there is some set form of words, but I've forgotten it."
Sylvia half expected that he would tell her to go away and come back when she had learned how to behave in the confessional; now that she was here, she felt that this would be a pity, and she was relieved when he began theConfiteorin an impersonal voice, waiting for her to repeat every sentence after him. His patience seemed to her almost miraculous in the way it smoothed her difficulties.
"I shall have to give you a short history of my life," Sylvia began. "I can't just say baldly that I've done this or not done that, because nearly all the sins I've committed weren't committed in their usual classification."
As she said this, she had a moment of acute self-consciousness and wondered if the priest were smiling, but he merely said in that far-away, impersonal voice:
"I am listening, my daughter."
"I was brought up a Catholic. I was baptized and confirmed and I made my first communion. It was the only communion I ever made, because somehow or other at home there was always work to be done in the house instead of going to Mass. My mother was French and she married an Englishman much younger than herself. Of this marriage I was the only child. My mother had six other daughters, two by a lover who died, and four by her first husband, who was a Frenchman. My mother was illegitimate; her father was also an Englishman. I only knew this after she died. The man who married my grandmother always acknowledged her as his own daughter. My mother was very strict and, though she was not at all religious, she was very good. I don't want to give the idea that she was responsible for anything I did. The only thing is, perhaps, that, being passionately in love with my father, she was very demonstrative in front of me, which made the idea of passion shocking to me when I was still young. Therefore, for whatever sins of the flesh I have committed I cannot plead a natural propensity. I don't know whether this would be considered to make them worse or not. My father was a weak man; when my mother died, he robbed his employers and had to leave France, taking me with him. I was twelve at the time. I suppose if I wanted to justify myself, I could say that no child could have spent a more demoralizing childhoodfrom that moment. But though, when I look back at it now and realize some of the horrible actions that my father and a friend of his who lived with us committed, I can't think that at the time they influenced me toward evil. I suppose that any kind of moral callousnessisa bad example, and certainly I had no conception that swindling people out of money was anything but a perfectly right and normal procedure for anybody who was without money. My mother was angry with me once because by accident I spent some money of hers, but she was angry with me because it was a serious loss to the household accounts: there was no suggestion of my having spent money that did not belong to me. Other things that my father and his friend did I never understood at the time, and so I can't pretend that they set me a bad example. My father took a woman to live with him, and I was angry because it upset what had hitherto seemed a comfortable existence, but the revelation of the passionate side of it disgusted me still more with the flesh. I was a mixture of precocity and innocence. Looking back at myself as a child, I am amazed at the amount I knew and the little I understood—the amount I understood and the little I knew. I read all sorts of books and accepted everything I read as the truth; I read dozens of novels, for instance, before I understood the meaning of fiction. I should say that no child was ever exposed so naturally to the full tide of human existence, and why or how I managed to escape degradation and damnation I've never been able to explain until now. As a matter of fact, it's not true really to say that I did escape degradation, but I will come to that presently.
"Well, my father killed himself on account of this woman, and I was left with his friend when I was fifteen. Once I happened to be left altogether alone when this man was away turning a dishonest penny somewhere, and I suppose I fell mildly in love with a youth two years older than myself. This made my father's friend jealous, andone night he tried to make love to me. I was as much disgusted by this as if I had really been the innocent child I might have been. I ran away with the youth, and nothing happened. I ran away from him and lived with a young Jew, but nothing happened. I met the woman who had lived with my father, and—which shows how utterly unmoral I was—I made great friends with her and even went to live with her. She used to have all sorts of men, and I just accepted her behavior as a personal taste of her own which I could neither understand nor share. Then I met a gentleman, a man fifteen years older than myself, who was attracted by my unusualness and sent me to school with the idea of marrying me. Well, I married him, and I think that was the first sin I committed. I was seventeen at the time. I think if my husband had understood how stunted my emotional development was in proportion to my mental acquisitiveness he would have behaved differently. But he was fascinated by my capacity for cynicism and encouraged me to think as I liked, with himself for audience; at the same time he tried to make me for outsiders' eyes a conventional young miss whom he had rather apologetically married. He demanded from me the emotional wisdom to sustain this part, and of course I could see nothing in his solicitude but a sort of snobbish egotism. He was delighted by my complete indifference to any kind of religion, supernatural or natural, and when I made friends with an English priest—not a Catholic—but half a Catholic—it's impossible to explain to a foreigner—I don't think anybody would understand the Church of England out of England, and very few people can there—he was afraid of my turning religious. I don't know—perhaps I might have done; but somebody sent an anonymous letter to my husband suggesting that this priest and I were having a love-affair, and my husband forbade me to see him again. So I ran away. I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up, because whenever I had been brought face to face witha difficult situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever done. It's hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember I was only nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from understanding all my motives then as if I were trying to understand somebody who was not myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the streets. For three months I mortified my flesh by being a harlot. Can you understand that? Can you possibly understand the deliberate infliction of such a discipline, not to humiliate one's pride, but to exalt it? Can you understand that I emerged from that three months of incredible horror with a complete personality? I was defiled: I was degraded: I was embittered: I hated mankind: I vowed to revenge myself on the world: I scoffed at love: and yet now, when I feel that I have at last brushed from myself the last speck of mud that was still clinging to me, I feel that somehow all that mud has preserved me against a more destructive corruption. This does not mean that I do not repent of what I did, but can you understand how without a pride that could lead me to such depths I could not have come through humility to a sight of God?"
Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that he had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly because there seemed more important revelations of herself still to be made.
"I stayed a common harlot until I was offered by chance an opportunity to rescue myself by going on the stage. Then I sent my husband as much money as I had saved and the evidences of my infidelity, so that he might divorce me, which he did. Now comes an important event in my life. I met a girl—a very beautiful girl doomed from the creation of the universe to be a plaything of man."
The priest held up his hand to protest.
"Ah, I know you'll say that no one can possibly be soforedoomed, and indeed I know the same myself now, or rather I'm trying hard to believe it, because predestination without free will seems to me a doctrine of devils. At the time, however, I could see nothing that would save this girl, and with a perverted idealism I determined that she should step gracefully downhill. I think the hardest thing to do is to go downhill gracefully. We can climb uphill, and a certain awkwardness is immaterial, because the visible effort lends a dignity to our progress, and the air of success blows freshly at the summit. We can walk along the level road of mediocrity with an acquired gracefulness that is taught us by our masters of the golden mean—particularly in England, where it's particularly easy to walk gracefully along the flat. Very well, instead of using my influence to prevent this girl descending at all, I was entirely occupied with the esthetic aspects of her descent. I'm not going to pretend that I could have stopped her—a better person than I tried and failed—but that doesn't excuse my attitude. And there's worse to my account. When this other person wanted to marry her, I did all I could to stop the marriage at first, and it was not until the engagement between them was broken off that I discovered that my true reasons for hating it sprang entirely from my own jealousy. I felt that if this man had loved me, I could have regained myself, the self that was myself before those three months of prostitution. I should say here that I had nothing to do directly with the destruction of the other marriage, but I hold myself to blame ultimately, because, if from the beginning I had bent my whole will to its being carried through, itwouldhave been carried through. Looking back at the business now, I am convinced that what happened happened for the best, and that such a marriage would have been fatal to the happiness of the man and useless to the girl, but that does not excuse my own share in the smash.
"Well, the man left this girl in my charge, and finally she threw me over and married a foreigner, since when Ihave never heard that she even still lives. I had the good fortune to be given enough money by somebody to enable me to be independent, and for two or three years I looked at life from the outside. I had nothing to do with men, and as a result I began to be afraid that youth would pass without my ever knowing what it was to love. Friends of mine married and were happy. Only I seemed fated to be always alone.
"I wonder sometimes if when we judge the behavior of others we pay enough attention to this loneliness that haunts the lives of so many men and women. You will say that no one can be lonely with God; unfortunately, thousands of lonely souls are destitute of the sense of God from birth to death, and these lonely souls are far more exposed to temptation than the rest. Faith they have not: hope has died in their hearts: love slowly withers. All the vices of self-destruction surround their path. Pride flourishes in such soil, and jealousy and envy. I believe their only compensation is the fact that lies and self-deception find small nourishment in such spiritual wastes. I'm sure that if the pride of such people could be pierced, there would gush forth a cry of despair that ascribed everything in this life to a feeling of loneliness. In my own case, in addition to the inevitable loneliness fostered by such a childhood as mine—the natural loneliness caused by living with two men who were perpetually on the verge of imprisonment—there was the loneliness of my own temperament. I know that every human being claims for himself the right to be misunderstood and unappreciated; it's not that kind of loneliness of which I speak. Mine was the loneliness of some one who is so masculine and so feminine simultaneously that reason is sapped by emotion and emotion is sterilized by reason. The only chance for such a temperament is self-expression either in love, art, or religion. I tried vaguely to express myself in art, but without success at first; and I was too proud and not vain enough to persevere. I then fell back on love. I let myselfget into a condition of wanting to be in love, and at this moment of emotional collapse I met by accident the youth—now a man of thirty—with whom I had effected one of my childish elopements. With this man I lived for a year. I can't pretend that I did not take pleasure in the passionate relationship, though I always felt it was a temporary surrender to the most feminine side of me that I despised. I think I can best explain my emotions by saying that all the time I was with him I was like a person under the influence of a sedative drug.