"Yes, I suppose logically you've scored," Sylvia said, slowly.
"But please don't think I want to score," Philip went on in a distressed voice. "Please understand that for me to refuse is torture. I've often wondered about a judge's emotions when he puts on the black cap; but since I've faded out of real life into this paper world I've worn myself out with worrying over private griefs and miseries. It's only because I feel that, if every one on our side does not martyr himself for a year or so, the future of the world will be handed over to this kind of thing; and that is an unbearable thought."
"You're very optimistic about the effect upon your own side," Sylvia said. "Have you such faith in humanity as to suppose that this war will cure it more radically than all the wars that have gone before? I doubt it. When I listened to our arguments this afternoon, I began to wonder if either side is fighting for anything but a sterilenominalism. I can't argue any more. It's not your fault, Philip. You lack the creative instinct. I'll fight out this Queenie business by myself without invoking state aid. I am rather ashamed of myself, really. I feel as if I'd been compelled to ask a policeman the way. Perhaps I've got everything out of proportion. Women usually manage to do that, somehow. There must be something very satisfying about personal conflict—bayonet to bayonet, I mean: but even in the trenches I suppose men get taken out and shot for cowardice. Even there you wouldn't escape from the grim abstract heartlessness that hangs like a fog over a generalized humanity—generalized is doubly appropriate in this connection. What a wretched thing man is in the mass and how rare and wonderful in the individual! The mass creates that arch-bureaucrat, God, and the individual seeks the heart of Christ. Good-by, Philip, I'm sorry you look so ill. I'm afraid I've tired you. No, no," she added, seeing that he was bracing himself up to talk about themselves. "This wasn't really the personal intrusion you accuse me of making. We were never very near to one another, and we are more remote than ever now."
"But what about your own visa?" he asked.
"It's no use to me at present. When I want it, I'll apply in the morning to Mr. Mathers and come for it in the afternoon, most correctly. I promise to attempt no more breaches in the formality of your office. By the way, one favor I would ask: please don't come to the Trianon. You wouldn't understand the argot in my songs, and if you did you wouldn't understand my being able to sing them. Get better."
"Yes, I'm taking Sanatogen," Philip said, hopefully. At this moment Miss Johnstone entered with a cup on a small tray, which, just escaping being lassoed by one of her chains, was set down on his desk.
"I'm afraid I haven't got it quite so smooth as Miss Henson does," said Miss Johnstone.
"Oh, never mind, please. It was so kind of you to remember."
"Well, I didn't think you ought to miss it on Miss Henson's day off."
Sylvia waved her hand and left him with Miss Johnstone; he seemed to be hesitating between the injury to her feelings if he did not take the lumpy mixture and the harm to his digestion if he did.
"Even offices are subject to the clash of temperament on temperament," said Sylvia to herself. "A curious thing really that Philip should be prepared to choke himself over a cup of badly mixed Sanatogen rather than wound that young woman's feelings, and yet that he should be able to refuse me what I asked him to do this afternoon."
She nodded to Mr. Mathers as she passed through the outer office, who jumped up and opened the door for her. He had evidently been impressed by the length of her interview with the O.C.P.T.N.C. in Bucharest.
"I believe I've had the pleasure of hearing you sing," he murmured. "Are you staying long at the Trianon?"
"I hope not," she answered.
"Quite, quite," he murmured, nodding his head with an air of deep comprehension, while he bowed her forth with marked courtesy.
The fog had cleared away when Sylvia started to walk back to her hotel, and though it was still very hot, there was a sparkle in the air that made it seem fresher than it really was. The argument with Philip had braced her point of view to accord with the lightening of the weather; it had thrown her so entirely back upon her own resources that the notion of ever having supposed for an instant that he could help her in the fight for Queenie now appeared ludicrous. Although her arguments had been unavailing, and although at the end Philip had actually defeated her by the very logic on which she prided herself, she nevertheless felt wonderfully elated at the prospectof a struggle with Zozo and no longer in the least sensible of that foreboding dejection which was lying so heavily upon her heart when she left Lottie's house three hours ago.
Poor Philip! He had spoken of his own sufferings in a minor degree from the war. Yet to be rooted up at his age—he was nearly fifty, after all—and to be set down in Rumania to dig for human motives, he who had no instinct to dig for anything but dry bones and ancient pottery, it was surely for him suffering in a major degree. He had been so pathetically proud of being a captain, and at the same time so obviously conscious of the radical absurdity of himself in such a position; it was like a prematurely old child playing with soldiers to gratify his parents. And here in a neutral country he was even debarred from dressing up in uniform. When she first saw him she had been surprised to find that he did not appear much older than thirteen years ago; now, looking back at him in his office, he seemed to her a very old man. Poor Philip, he did not belong to the type that is rejuvenated in war-time by a sense of his official importance. Sylvia had seen illustrations in English newspapers of beaming old gentlemen "doing," as it was called, "their bit," proud of the nuisance they must be making of themselves, incorrigible optimists about the tonic effects of war because they had succeeded in making their belts meet round their fat paunches, pantaloons that should have buried themselves out of sight instead of pirouetting while young men were being killed in a war for which they and their accursed Victorianism were responsible by licking the boots of Prussia for fifty years.
Sylvia found Queenie in a state of agitation at her long absence; she did not tell her anything about Zozo at once, in the hope that he would not come to the Trianon on the first night of his arrival. She did think it advisable, however, to tell Queenie of her failure to secure the passport.
"Then we can't be going to England?" Queenie asked.
"Well, not directly from here," Sylvia answered. "But we'll move on as soon as we can into Bulgaria. We can get down to the Piræus from Dedeagatch. I don't think these neutral countries are very strict about passports. We'll manage somehow to get away from here."
"But if we cannot be going to England why must we be going from Bucharest? Better to stay, I think. Yes?"
"We might want to go," Sylvia said. "We might get tired of the Trianon. It wouldn't be difficult."
"I shall never be going to England now," said Queenie, in a toneless voice. "Never shall I be going! I shall learn a new song and a new dance, yes?"
Sylvia felt tired after her long afternoon and thought she would rest for an hour before getting ready for the evening's work. The mist gathered again at sunset, and the gardens of the theater, though they were unusually full, lacked any kind of gaiety. When they were walking down the narrow laurel-bordered path that screened the actors from the people sitting at their tables under the trees, Sylvia was sure that Zozo would be standing by the stage door at the end of it; but he was nowhere to be seen. After the performance, however, when they came out, as the custom was, to take their seats in the audience, the juggler made a dramatic appearance from behind a tree; Queenie seemed to lose all her fairy charm and become a terrified little animal.
"I don't think there's room at our table for you," Sylvia said.
"There are plenty of chairs," Maud insisted, stridently; she had followed the juggler into the lamplight round the table.
"I'm quite sure there's no room for you," said Sylvia, sharply; and, taking advantage of Queenie's complete limpness, she dragged her away by the wrist and explained quickly to the manager, who was walking up and down bythe entrance gate, that Queenie was ill and must go home at once.
"Ill!" he exclaimed, skeptically. "Well, I shall have to fine you both your evening's salary. Why, it's only half past eleven!"
Sylvia did not wait to argue with him, but hurried Queenie to a carriage, in which they drove back immediately to their hotel.
"I said to you that it was going to bring me bad luck when you said to that priest my real name.Ach!what shall I be doing? What shall I be doing now?" Queenie wailed.
"You must pay no attention to him," Sylvia told her; but she found that Queenie did not recover herself as she usually did at the tone of command. "What can he do to you while you're with me?" she continued.
"You don't know him," Queenie moaned. "He's very strong. Look at the mark on my leg where he was shooting me.Ach, if we could be going to England, but we cannot. We are here and he is here. You are not strong like he was, Sylvia."
"If you're going to give way like this before he has touched you and frighten yourself to death in advance, of course he'll do what he likes, because I can do nothing without support from you. But if you'll try to be a little bit brave and remember that I can protect you, everything will be all right and we'll get away from Rumania at the first opportunity."
"Ach, you have papers. You are English. Nobody will protect me. Any one was being able to do what they was liking to do with me."
Sylvia tried to argue courage into her until early morning; but Queenie adopted an attitude of despair, and it was impossible to convince her that Zozo could not at whatever moment he chose take her away, and, if he wished, murder her without any one's interfering or being able to interfere. In the end Sylvia fell asleep exhausted,resolving that if Queenie was not in a more courageous frame of mind next day she should not move from the hotel. When Sylvia woke up she found that Queenie was already dressed to go out, and for an instant she feared that the juggler's power over her was strong enough to will her to go back to him by the mere sense of his being near at hand. She asked her almost angrily why she had dressed herself so quietly and where she was going.
"To the hairdresser's," Queenie answered, in a normal voice.
Sylvia was puzzled what to do. She did not like to put the idea into Queenie's head of the juggler's being able to mesmerize her into following him apparently of her own accord, and if she really intended to go to the hairdresser's, it might imply that the terror of the night before had burned itself out. Certainly she did not seem very nervous this morning. It was taking a risk, but probably the only way out of the situation was by taking risks, and in the end she decided not to oppose her going out by herself.
Two hours passed; when Queenie had not returned to the hotel Sylvia went out and made inquiries at the hairdresser's. Yes, she had been there earlier that morning and had bought several bottles of scent. Sylvia made a gesture of disapproval; scent was an extravagance of Queenie's, and she was strictly rationed in this regard on account of the urgency of saving all the money they could for their journey. She returned to the hotel; Queenie was still absent, and she opened her bag to look for the address of a girl whom Queenie occasionally visited; she found the card, but the thousand-franc note that she was guarding for her had vanished. Queenie must have joined that infernal Swiss, after all, and the old instinct of propitiating him with money had been too strong for her.
"Fool that I was to let her go this morning," Sylvia cried. As she spoke, Queenie came in, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her arms full of packages.
"Where have you been and what have you been doing?" she demanded.
"Oh, you must pardon me for taking the money from your bag," Queenie cried. "I was taking it to buy presents for all the girls."
"Presents for the girls?" Sylvia echoed, in amazement.
"Yes, yes, it was the only way to make them on my side against him. To-night in the dressing-room I shall give these beautiful presents. I was spending all of my thousand francs. It was no use any longer, because we cannot be going to England. Better that I was buying these presents to make all the girls be on my side."
Sylvia was between laughter and tears, but she could not bring herself to be angry with the child; at least her action showed that she was taking her own part against the juggler. Queenie spent the rest of the day quite happily, arranging how the presents were to be allotted. Those that were small enough she put into chocolate-boxes that she had bought for this purpose; the larger ones were tied up with additional pink and blue silk ribbons to compensate for the lack of a box. To each present—there were fifteen of them—a picture post-card was tied, on which Sylvia had to write the name of the girl for whom it was intendedwith heaps of love and kisses from Queenie; it was like a child preparing for her Christmas party.
They went down to the Trianon earlier than usual in order that Queenie might get ready in time to sit at the entrance of the dressing-room and hand each girl her present as she came in. Sylvia tried to look as cheerful as possible under the ordeal, for she did not want to confirm the tale that she was living on Queenie's earnings by seeming to grudge her display of generosity. The girls were naturally eager to know the reason of the unexpected entertainment. When Queenie took each of them aside in turn and whispered a long confidence in her ear, Sylvia supposed that she was explaining about the advent of Zozo; but it turned out Queenie was explaining that, havingno longer any need for the money since she could not get a passport for England, she was doing now what she had wanted to do before, but had been unable to do on account of saving up for the journey. Sylvia remonstrated with her for this indiscretion, and she said:
"I think it was you that was being silly, not me, yes? If I say to these girls, 'Here is a silver brush, help me against Zozo,' they was thinking that I was buying them to help me. But when he tries to take me, I shall call out to them and they will be loving me for these presents and will be fighting against him, I think, yes?"
Sylvia had her doubts, but she had not the heart to discourage such trust in the grateful appreciation of her companions.
Neither Zozo nor Maud came to the Trianon that evening; nevertheless, outside on the playbill was an announcement that next Sunday would appear Zozo:LE MEILLEUR PRESTIDIGITATEUR DU MONDE.
"It was always so that he was writing himself," said Queenie, when Sylvia read her the announcement; she spoke in a voice of awe as if the playbill had been inscribed by a warning fate. In due course the juggler made a successful first appearance, dressed in green, with a snake of shimmering tinsel wound round him. They watched the performance from the wings; when he came off he asked Queenie with a laugh if she would stand for his dagger act, as in the old days she had stood.
"You've got Maud for that," Sylvia interposed quickly.
"Maud!" he scoffed.
Earlier in the evening she had thundered about the stage in what was described as the world-famous step-dance of the world-famous American cowgirl Maud Moffat, to the authentic and original native melody, which happened this year to be "On the Mississippi," and might just as easily have been "A Life on the Ocean Wave."
Sylvia was puzzled by the relationship between Zozo and Maud, for there was evidently nothing even in thenature of affection between them, and as far as she could make out they had never met until the day he paid her fare from Galantza to Bucharest. Her first idea had been that he was a German agent and intended to use Maud in that capacity, her patriotism, judging by her loud denunciations of England and everything English, not being very deep. But Sylvia had already outlived the habit of explaining as a spy every one in war-time that is not immediately and blatantly obvious. She could imagine nobody less fitted to be a spy than Maud, who was attractive neither to her compatriots nor to foreigners, and who, even had she possessed attraction, would have had no brains to take advantage of it. Yet she came back to the theory that Zozo was a German agent when she saw with whom he consorted in Bucharest, and she decided that when he had brought Maud here he had done so in the hope of having found a useful recruit, but that on discovering her dull coarseness he had come to the conclusion that her hostility to England was counterbalanced by England's hostility to her. Sylvia decided that if her surmises were at all near to being correct she must be particularly on her guard against any attempt on the part of the Swiss to corrupt Queenie. She had supposed at first that she should only have to contend with his lust or with his desire of personal domination; now it seemed that the argument she had used with Philip to procure Queenie a passport had really been a sound argument. Superficially Queenie might not strike anybody as a valuable agent; knowing her charm for men, her complete malleableness, and her almost painful simplicity, Sylvia could imagine that she might be a practical weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer like the Swiss, who was finding, like so many other rascals of his type, that in war natural dishonesty is a lucrative asset. She wondered to what extent her ideas about his intentions were based upon his behavior at Granada, and whether, after all, she was not attributing to him all sorts of schemes ofwhich he was entirely innocent. Really he had always been for her a symbol of evil that she was inclined to turn into a crude personification. It was strange the way that one was apt, in changing one's mode of life, to abandon simultaneously the experience one had gathered formerly. Most probably she was giving this juggler with an absurd name an importance quite beyond his power, simply because she herself was giving her present surroundings a permanence far more durable and extensive than they actually possessed. After all, could one but realize it, the way from the Petit Trianon to Mulberry Cottage did exist as a material fact: there was no impassable gulf of space or time between them.
After Zozo had been juggling for about a fortnight in Bucharest without having given the least sign of wanting to interfere with Queenie, Sylvia began to think that she had worked herself up for nothing, though the problem of his relationship to Maud, with whom he remained on terms of contemptuous intimacy, still puzzled her. She thought of making a report on the queer association to Philip, but she was afraid he might think it was an excuse to meet him again; and since Philip himself had made no effort to follow up their interview, she gave up speculating upon Zozo and Maud and took to speculating instead upon Philip's want of curiosity, as she called it. Unreasonable as she admitted to herself that the emotion was, she could not help being piqued by his indifference, and she resented now the compassion she had felt for him when she left the office that afternoon. She could not understand any man, however badly a woman had treated him—and she had not treated Philip badly—being able to contemplate so calmly that woman's existence as a cabaret singer without wanting to know what had brought her to it so short a time after her success. No, certainly she should not trouble Philip with her suspicions of Zozo and Maud; it was inviting a rebuff.
Just when Sylvia was beginning to feel reassured aboutQueenie and not to worry about anything except the waste of that thousand francs and the continuous difficulties in the way of saving any money, the girls at the Trianon began to whisper among themselves. Queenie's presents had given her a brief popularity that began to fade when it was evident that no more presents were coming; her attempt to secure the friendship of her companions, inasmuch as it seemed a token of weakness, reacted against her and made her in the end less popular than before. The story about the refusal of a passport by the British authorities was soon magnified into a demand for her expulsion from Rumania as a German agent masquerading as an English girl. Hence the whispers. The French girls were naturally the most venomous; but the Austrian girls were nearly as bad, because, having lived for months under the perpetual taunt of being spies, they were anxious to re-establish their own virtue at Queenie's expense. Zozo commiserated with her on the unfairness of the whispers, and one evening, to Sylvia's dismay, Queenie told her that he had offered to secure her a passport and take her with him when he left Bucharest.
"He was really being very nice to me," Queenie said. "Oh, Sylvia, what shall I do? I cannot be staying here with these girls who are so unkind to me."
The following evening Sylvia asked Zozo straight out about the kind of passport he proposed to find for Queenie and where he proposed to take her.
The juggler sneered.
"That's my business, I think. What can you do for her? If the kid's anything, she's German. What the hell's the good of you trying to make her English? Why don't you let her alone instead of stopping her from earning good money?"
Sylvia kept her temper with a great effort and contented herself with denying that Queenie was German and with asking who had first made the assertion. The juggler spat on the floor and walked away without replying.
After the performance that night, a hot, thunderous night in August, Zozo, with Maud and two well-known pro-German natives, took the next table to Sylvia and Queenie. Maud was drinking heavily and presently she began to talk in a loud voice:
"Well, I may have spoken against England once or twice, but, thank Gawd, I'm not a bloody little yellow-haired German pretending to be English. I never went and tried to pass off a dirty little German as my sister the same as what some people who's proud of being English does. Yes, I earn my living honestly. I've never heard any one call me a spy, and any —— as did wouldn't do it twice. My name's Maud Moffat, born and bred a cockney, and proud I am when I see some people who think theirselves superior and all the time is dirty German spies betraying their country. Does any one presume to say I'm not English?" she shouted, rising unsteadily to her feet. "And if he does, where is he so as I can show him he's a bloody liar by breaking his head open?"
Her companions made a pretense of restraining her, but it was plain that they were enjoying the scene, and Maud continued to hold forth.
"German! And calls herself English. Goes round giving presents to honest working-girls so as she can carry on her dirty work of spying. Goes round trying to get a girl's boy away from her by low, dirty, mean tricks as she's learnt from the bloody Germans who she belongs to. Yes, it's you I'm talking to," she shrieked at Queenie.
White as paper, she sprang up from her seat and began to answer Maud, notwithstanding Sylvia's efforts to silence her.
"You was being a bad wicked girl," she panted. "You dare to say I was being German! I hate the Germans! IamEnglish. IamEnglish. You dare to say I was being German!"
Upon this an Austrian girl at another table began to revile Queenie from her point of view for abusing theGermans; before ten seconds had passed the gardens were in an uproar.
A fat French Jewess stood on a table and shouted:
"Oh, les sales boches! Oh, les sales boches!"
Whereupon an Austrian girl pushed her from behind, and she crashed down into a party of Francophile young Rumanians who instantly began to throw everything within reach at a party of Germanophile young Rumanians. Glasses were shivered; fairy lamps were pulled out of the trees and hurtled through the air like Roman candles; somebody snatched a violin from the orchestra and broke it on the head of his assailant; somebody else climbed on the stage and made a speech in Rumanian, calling upon the country to intervene on behalf of the Entente, until two pro-Germans seized him and flung him down on top of the melancholy dotard who played the double-bass; the manager and the waiters rushed into the street to find the police; everybody argued with everybody else.
"Tu dis que je suis boche, moi? M—e pour toi!"
"La ferme! La ferme! Espionne! Type infecte!"
"Moi, je suis roumaine. Si tu dis que je suis hongroise, je dis que t'es une salope. Tu m'entends?"
"Oh, la vache! Elle m'a piquée!"
"Elle a bien fait! Elle a bien fait!"
Some French girls began to sing:
"Les voyez-vous?Les hussards! Les dragons! La gar-rrde!Glorieux fous...."
"Les voyez-vous?Les hussards! Les dragons! La gar-rrde!Glorieux fous...."
and a very shrill little soprano who was probably a German, but declared she was a Dane, sang:
"It's a larway to Tipperary,It's a larway to go,It's a larway to Tipperary,It's a la-a-way to go!Gooba, Piccadilli,Farwa lar-sa sca-aa!It's a lar-lar-way to TipperaryBa-ma-ha's ra-tha."
"It's a larway to Tipperary,It's a larway to go,It's a larway to Tipperary,It's a la-a-way to go!Gooba, Piccadilli,Farwa lar-sa sca-aa!It's a lar-lar-way to TipperaryBa-ma-ha's ra-tha."
After which somebody hit her on the nose with a vanilla ice: then the police came in and quieted the uproar by arresting several people on the outskirts of the riot.
The next evening, when Sylvia and Queenie presented themselves for the performance, the manager told them that they were dismissed: he could not afford to let the Petit Trianon gain a disorderly reputation. Sylvia was glad that the decision of taking a definite step had been settled over her head. As they were passing out, they met Lottie looking very happy.
"I've been engaged for three hundred francs to play the piano in the orchestra. The accompanist broke his wrist last night in the row," she told them. "So they sent for me in a hurry."
"We've been sacked," Sylvia said.
"Oh, I am sorry!" the fat girl exclaimed, trying to curb her own pleasure. "What will you do?"
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.
"Why don't you go to Galantza and Bralatz and Avereshti? You ought to be able to get engagements there in the summer-time—especially at Avereshti."
Sylvia nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, that's rather an idea. But, Lottie, don't tell Zozo where we've gone. Good-by! Good luck! I'm glad you've got an engagement."
"Yes, I shall leave that room now. It smells, rather, as the summer gets on."
The next morning Sylvia and Queenie left Bucharest for Galantza.
NEITHER in Galantza nor in Bralatz did Sylvia and Queenie perceive any indication of a fortune. They performed for a week at the Variétés High Life in Bralatz; but the audience and the salary were equally low, the weather was hot and misty, and the two hotels they tried were full of bugs. In Galantza they performed for two days at the Variétés Tiptop; but here both the audience and the salary were lower still, the weather was hotter and more misty, and there were as many bugs in the one hotel as in the two hotels at Bralatz put together. Sylvia thought she should like to visit the British vice-consul who had angered Maud so much by his indifference to her future. He was a pleasant young man, not recognizable from her description of him except by the fact that he certainly did smoke incessantly. He invited them both to dine and grumbled loudly at the fate which had planted him down in this God-forsaken corner of Rumania in war-time. He was disappointed to hear that they could not stay in Galantza, but agreed with them about the audience and the salary.
"I can't think who advised you to come here," he exclaimed. "Though I'm glad you did come; it has cheered me up a bit."
"It wasn't Maud," Sylvia said, with a smile.
"Maud?" he repeated. "Who is she?"
"An English girl who took a great fancy to you. She wanted you to pay her fare to Bucharest."
"Oh, my hat! a most fearful creature," he laughed. "A great, pink, blowsy woman with a voice like two trains shunting. I had a terrible time with her. Upon my word, I had actually to push her out of the Consulate. Oh, an altogether outrageous phenomenon! What became of herfinally? In Bucharest, is she? Well, she's not a good advertisement of our country in these times. What part of England do you come from?" he added, turning to Queenie.
"London," Sylvia said, quickly. She always answered this kind of question before Queenie could blush and stammer something unintelligible. "But she's been on the Continent since she was a little girl, and can't speak any language except with the accent of the one she spoke last." Then she changed the subject by asking him where he advised them to go next.
"I should advise you to go back to England. These are no times for two girls to be roaming about Europe."
"You'd hardly describe me as a girl," Sylvia laughed. "Even I can no longer describe myself as one. Passports have been fatal to some cherished secrets. No, we can't get back to England, chiefly because we haven't saved enough money for the fare, and secondly because the passport-office in Bucharest didn't consider me a good enough voucher for Queenie's right to a British passport."
"Wouldn't they recommend the consul to issue one?"
Sylvia shook her head.
"Too bad," said the vice-consul, in a cheerful voice. "But that's one of the minor horrors of war, this accumulation of a new set of officials begotten by the military upon the martial enthusiasm of non-combatants. It's rather ridiculous, isn't it, to assume that all consuls are incapable of their own job?... But I suppose I've no business to be displaying professional jealousy at such a moment," he broke off.
"Would you have given her a passport?" Sylvia asked.
The vice-consul looked at Queenie with a smile. "I could hardly have refused, eh?"
But Sylvia knew that, once inside his Consulate, he would probably be even more pedantic than Philip, and this affectation of gallantry over coffee rather annoyed her.
"But whatareyou going to do?" he went on.
"Oh, I don't know," said Sylvia, curtly. "Leave things to arrange themselves, I suppose."
"Yes, that's a very good attitude to take up when your desk is untidy, but, seriously, I shouldn't advise you to leave things to arrange themselves by touring round Rumania. These provincial towns are wretched holes."
"What's Avereshti like?"
"I don't know. I've never been there. It's not likely to be any better than Galantza or Bralatz, except for being a good deal nearer to Bucharest. Oh dear! everything's very gloomy. That Suvla business will keep out the Rumanians for some time. In fact, I don't think myself they'll ever come in now, unless they come in with the Germans. Why don't you take a week's holiday here?"
But the vice-consul, who had seemed agreeable at first, was getting on Sylvia's nerves with his admiration for Queenie, and she told him that they should leave next day.
"Too bad," he exclaimed. "But that's the way of the world. When a consul would like to be thoroughly bothered by somebody, nothing will induce that person to waste five minutes of his precious time. Your friend Maud, on the contrary, haunted me like a bluebottle."
Avereshti turned out to be a much smaller place than Sylvia had expected. She had heard it spoken of in Bucharest as a favorite summer resort, and had pictured it somehow with a casino, gardens, good hotels, and pretty scenery: the very name had appealed to her with a suggestion of quietude. She had deliberately not gone there at once with Queenie when they left Bucharest because, being not more than sixty kilometers from the capital, she had had an idea that Zozo might think it a likely place for them to visit and take it into his head to seek them out. Even in the train coming back from Galantza she had doubts of the wisdom of turning on their tracks so soon; but their taste of Galantza and Bralatz had been so displeasing that Avereshti with its prefigured charm ofsituation promised a haven with which the risk of being worried by their enemy could not interfere. They would take a week's holiday before engaging themselves to appear at the casino or whatever the home of amusement was called in Avereshti; then after a short engagement they might perhaps venture back to Bucharest and start saving up money again.
"For what good?" Queenie asked, sadly.
"Oh, something will turn up," Sylvia replied. "Perhaps the war will come to a sudden end, and you'll be able to go to England without a passport."
"You was always dreaming, Sylvia. Happy things cannot come to me so easily as you was thinking."
Since the night of the row at the Trianon Queenie had settled down to a steady despair about the whole of her future, and it was partly Sylvia's powerlessness to restore her to the childish gaiety that was so attractive in one whom she was conscious of protecting which had made her conceive such a distaste for the two towns they had just left. She was beginning, indeed, to doubt if her intervention between Queenie and the life she had been leading was really worth while. She upbraided herself with a poor spirit, with a facile discouragement, with selfishness and want of faith; yet all the way in the train she was on the verge of proposing that they should go back at once to Bucharest and there definitely part company. The dreary country through which they were traveling and the moist heat of the September afternoon created such a desire for England that the thought of remaining five minutes longer in Rumania was becoming intolerable. Sylvia began to make plans to telegraph home for money, and while she pondered these she began to think about Jack and Olive and the twins. Jack, of course, would be a soldier by now; but Olive would be in Warwickshire. Perhaps at this moment she was walking through a leafy path in Arden and wondering what her lost friend was doing. Sylviatried to conjure familiar English scents—the smell of blue-bells and young leaves, the smell of earth in a London window-box after being watered, and, most wistfully of all, the smell of the seaside on a breathless day of late summer when the sun was raining diamonds into the pale-blue water—that so poignantly English seaside smell of salt sand and pears in paper bags, of muslin frocks and dusty shrubs and warm asphalt. It might be such a day in England now, such a day at Eastbourne or Hastings. The notion of enduring any longer these flat Rumanian fields, this restless and uncertain existence upon the fringe of reality, this pilgrimage in charge of a butterfly that must soon or late be caught, clouded her imagination.
"In seeking to direct Queenie's course I am doing something that is contrary to my dearest theory of behavior. When I met her again at Jassy I was in an abnormal and hysterical condition. The sense of having failed myself led me to seize desperately upon her salvation to justify this long withdrawal from the activity of my own world. This world of gipsies is no longer my world. Why, I believe that the real reason I feel annoyed with Philip is because, having roused in me a sense of my unsuitableness to my present conditions and actions, he does not trouble to understand the effect that talking to him had upon me. Here I am at thirty-two thinking like anexaltéeschool-girl. Thirty-two! Just when I ought to be making the most tremendous efforts to anchor myself to some stable society that will carry me through the years to come, the years that without intellectual and spiritual pleasures will be nothing but a purgatory for my youth, I find myself more hopelessly adrift than ever before. It will end in my becoming a contemplative nun in one last desperate struggle to avoid futility. It is a tragedy for the man or woman who realizes futility without being able to escape from it. That's where the Middle Ages were wiser than we. Futility was impossible then. That's where we suffer from that ponderous bog of Victorianism. When one pauses to meditate upon the crimes of the Victorian era! And it's impossiblenot to dread a revival of Victorianism after this war. It's obvious that unless we defeat the Teuton quickly—and there's no sign of it—we shall be Teutonized in order to do it. And then indeed, O grave where is thy victory? Will the Keltic blood in England be enough to save her in ten years' time from a base alliance with these infernal Germans in order that the two stupidest nations in the world may combine to overlay it? Will this war at last bring home to Europe the sin of handing herself over to lawyers? Better the Middle Ages priest-ridden than To-day lawyer-ridden. At least if we are going to pay these rascals who exploit their country, let us have it well exploited. Don't let us call in one political plumber after another whose only object is to muddle the state for his successor to muddle it still more that he may be called in again to muddle it again—and muddle—and muddle eternally! When one reads in the papers the speeches of politicians, of what can one be reminded but of children playing cat's-cradle over the tortured body of their mother? Yet what business have I to be abusing lawyer and politician when I lack the strength of mind to persevere in a task which I set myself with my eyes open? Unless I suffer in achieving it, it will not be worth the achievement. Surely the human soul that has suffered deeply can never again acknowledge futility? O England, perhaps it is a poor little pain to be away from you now, a mean little egotistical ache at the best, but away from you I see your faults so much more clearly and love you for them all the more."
The train entered the station, and Sylvia perceived that there was nothing beautiful about Avereshti in the way she had fancied. Yet she was ashamed now of the temptation to desert Queenie; therefore, though the train was going on to Bucharest, she hurried her out on the platform, and when they reached the Hotel Moldavia she took a room for two weeks, paying for it in advance lest she should be tempted by her disappointment with Avereshtito hurry back to Bucharest again, the inevitable result of which in her present mood would be to abandon her friend.
Avereshti, instead of being situated amid the romantic scenery that one expected from a celebrated summer resort, was surrounded by oil-fields which disfigured still more the flat environment. It was too large for genuine rusticity, too small for its assumption of European civilization, and too commercial for gaiety. Possibly during the season the shareholders and owners of the oil-fields came here to gloat for a week upon the sources of their prosperity; if they did, they had all of them left by the middle of September; the Variétés Alcazar was closed and the playbills were already beginning to peel off the walls. Whatever life there was in Avereshti displayed itself in the Piatza Carol I, the pavement of which was planted with trees clipped out of any capacity to cast a pleasant shade. The Hotel Moldavia, flanked by cafés, occupied one side of it, a row of respectable shops another, a large municipal hall of the crudest Germanic architecture fronted the hotel, and along the remaining side ran a row of market booths, the insult of which to the progress of Avereshti was greatly resented by the inhabitants and always apologized for and explained in the first few minutes of conversation.
The appearance of Sylvia and Queenie in this square on the morning after their arrival created an interest that soon developed into a pertinacious and disconcerting curiosity. If they entered a shop to make some small purchases, a crowd gathered outside and followed them to the next shop, and finally became such a nuisance that they retired to the balcony outside their room—a long wooded balcony of a faded tint of green—and watched the populace gathering to stare at them from below. When the sun became too hot for this entertainment, they took refuge in the big bedroom which had the unusual merit of being free from bugs. Queenie dreamed away the morning with her lithographs; Sylvia readWar and Peace. Latein the afternoon they went out again on the balcony and were amused to see that the frequenters of the cafés on either side of the hotel had moved their chairs hornwise far enough out into the square to obtain a view of their movements. Sylvia suggested to the waiter that they should give a musical performance from the balcony, but he replied, quite seriously, that it was not strong enough: otherwise, he left them to understand, there would have been no objection.
"Yet really, after all, it's not so bad here," Sylvia declared. "We'll stay a few days, and then I'll go into Bucharest and prospect. Perhaps Zozo will be gone by now."
Avereshti possessed, at any rate, the charm of making one feel lazy; to feel lazy and to be able to gratify one's laziness was, after nearly a year of ceaseless work, pleasant enough. On the third afternoon the waiter came up with six visiting-cards from local gentlemen who desired their acquaintance. Sylvia told him that they were not anxious to make any friends; he smiled and indicated two names as those that would best repay their choice.
"We wish to be left quite alone," Sylvia repeated, irritably.
"Then why do you walk about on the balcony?" the waiter asked.
"We walk about on the balcony because it's the only place where we can walk about without being annoyed by a crowd. You don't expect us to remain in our room day and night, do you?"
The waiter smiled and again called attention to the desirable qualifications of the two visiting-cards he had first thrust into prominence. He added that both the gentlemen, M. Stefan Florilor and M. Toma Enescu, were particularly anxious to make the acquaintance of the fair young lady; that M. Florilor was young, handsome, and the son of the richest man in Avereshti; and that, though M. Enescu was not young, he was very rich. Perhaps theladies would invite them to take coffee? It would be easy to get rid of the other four visiting-cards.
Sylvia told the waiter to get rid of all six and never again to have the impudence to refer to the subject; but he continued to extol his clients, until at last Sylvia in a rage knocked the card-tray out of his hand with the volume ofWar and Peacethat he was interrupting, upon which he retired, muttering abuse.
About ten minutes afterward the waiter came back and told Sylvia that all the gentlemen were gone away except M. Florilor, who insisted upon being received.
"Insists?" cried Sylvia. "But is he the crown prince of Avereshti?"
The waiter shrugged his shoulders.
"His father has a mortgage on the hotel," he explained. "And the proprietor would be very much upset to think that any discourtesy had been shown to the son."
"Have we paid for this room?" Sylvia demanded.
The waiter agreed with her that they had paid for it.
"Very well, when we ask for free board and lodging it will be time enough to talk about the proprietor's annoyance at our refusal to receive his creditors."
She indicated the direction of the door with a contemptuous inclination of the head, and the waiter retired.
"I don't know how you can be so strong to talk like that," Queenie marveled. "If I was being alone here I should be too frightened to speak so to the waiter. Suppose they was all to murder us to-night?"
When Queenie spoke like this, Sylvia's old sense of guardianship flowed again as fast as ever, and any impulse to abandon her was drowned in a flood of rage against the arrogance of money with its sale and purchase of human lives. There was something less distasteful about the domination of Zozo than about the attempted domination of this young Rumanian puppy yelping in his back yard of a town. If the juggler were to arrive in Avereshti to-night and in a frenzy of balked passion were to murderboth herself and Queenie, there would be a kind of completeness about the action that made the presentiment of it a sane and feasible terror; but that Queenie should have been reduced to a condition of semi-idiocy merely by the fact that the accidents of her childhood had put her for sale on the market of life did seem to Sylvia inexpressibly revolting.
"And we credit ourselves with the abolition of slavery! I am not sure that the frank slavery of the past was not more moral than the unadmitted slavery of the present. At any rate, it carried with it its own penalty in the demoralization and decay of the owners; but I perceive no prospective penalty for this sort of thing. A young barbarian whose father has grown rich and fat upon petroleum sees a girl that takes his fancy and sends up his card; the proprietor of the hotel threatens us through that pimping waiter with the enmity of his father's debtor. This happens to be a crude case because we are living temporarily in a crude country; but less crudely the same thing goes on in England. It is true that we shrink there from the licensed brothel, and that we are still able to shrink from that is something to be grateful for; yet, though we refrain from inflicting an open shame upon womanhood, we pay very little attention to the rights of the individual woman and child, or, for the matter of that, to the rights of the individual man. We no longer allow the bodies of children to be slowly murdered in factories, but we offer not the least objection to their employment in nice healthy amusing occupations such as selling newspapers for great monopolies or dancing in the theaters. There can be no defense of employing child labor, and the man who defends it is the equal of the most brutalized and hardenedsouteneur. I still think that the greater part of humanity is so naturally inclined to be enslaved that the bestowal of freedom will in a short time land the world in the same state as before; but what I don't understand is the necessity for a reformer or the philanthropist to beanything except profoundly cynical. It always seems to be assumed that a desire to help other people implies a belief that other people will benefit from the help. I should like to meet an unadvertising philanthropist who was willing to admit that his philanthropy was a vice like secret drinking. One occasionally perceives signs of a sick conscience in some large anonymous contribution to charity; I always suspect the donor of expiating a monstrous crime. I can imagine being haunted by the fear of a peerage in return for the expenditure upon a Lord Mayor's fund of the superfluous savings of a wicked life."
"Of what are you thinking?" Queenie asked.
"I'm thinking, my dear, that visits from thejeunesse doréeof Avereshti tend to infect me with an odious feeling of self-righteousness. The result of reading Tolstoi and arguing with a waiter about the sale of your body to M. Florilor has reduced me to a state of morbid indignation with the human race. But the problem that's bothering me is my ultimate ineffectiveness. I'm like a chained-up dog, and I am realizing that noise, to be a real weapon of defense, requires listeners. I'm a little afraid, Queenie, that unless I can do more than bark, I shall lose you."
"When shall you lose me?"
"When the web of my theory in which I'm sitting like a spider gets swept away by something more powerful than you, my butterfly, whom even without interference I can scarcely retain. You'll escape me then and be caught finally in a net, and I shall scuttle off and hide myself in a dark corner until I die of inanition and chagrin."
"I was not understanding one word of what you were saying," said Queenie. "First you were being a dog. After you were being a spider. Who was ever to understand you?"
"Who indeed?" Sylvia murmured with half a sigh, as she went out on the balcony and looked down upon the frequenters of the cafés, whose heads, when she appeared,were simultaneously lifted to regard her with a curiosity that her elevated position made impersonal as the slow glances of cattle at pasture.
That evening after dinner the first sign of the proprietor's displeasure at the snub administered to the heir of his chief creditor was visible in a bill for their board of three days. The sum was not large, but by using up their small cash it involved breaking into the five-hundred-franc note that represented the last of the money they had saved since February. Sylvia had always kept this note in a pocket of her valise; now when she went up to their room to fetch it it was gone. The discovery of the loss was such a blow at this moment that she could not speak of it to Queenie when she came down-stairs again; she paid what was owing with the last halfpenny they had, and sat back revolving internally in her mind how, when, and where that five-hundred-franc note could possibly have been lost. Suddenly she had an idea that she might have moved it to another pocket and, leaving a half-smoked cigarette balanced against the saucer of her coffee-cup, she ran up-stairs again to verify the conjecture. Alas! it was the emptiest of conjectures, and in a fever of exasperation she searched wildly in all sorts of unlikely places for the missing money. When the bedroom was scattered with her clothes to no purpose, she went back to the dining-room, where she found that the waiter had taken the half-smoked cigarette in clearing away the coffee-cups.
"Didn't you keep that cigarette?" she demanded.
Queenie looked at her in surprise.
"Why to keep a cigarette?" she asked.
"Because I haven't another."
"Well, ring for the waiter. He shall bring one for you."
"No, no, it doesn't matter," Sylvia muttered; but the waste of that last precious cigarette brought home to her more than anything else that there was absolutely not even a halfpenny left in her purse after paying for the food they had had, and abruptly with the transmutationof that insignificant object to something of immense value arrived a corresponding change in Sylvia's attitude to the whole of life.
In the first case the larger share of the money she had lost so carelessly—with an effort she drove from her brain the revolving problem of how, when, and where—belonged to Queenie. Hence her responsibility toward Queenie was doubled, because if in certain moods of disillusionment she had been able to set aside her former responsibility as nothing but a whim, there was now a positive and material obligation that no change of sentiment could obliterate. Any harm that threatened Queenie now must be averted by herself, no matter at what cost to herself; somehow money must be obtained. It was plain that they could expect no consideration from the proprietor of the hotel; the way in which he had demanded payment for their day's board proved as much. Having accepted the money in advance for this room, he could not eject them into the street; but unless it suited him he was under no obligation to feed them. What a precipitate fool she had been to pay for a fortnight's lodging in advance! Seventy francs flung away! She might ask for them back, or at any rate for the fifty francs' worth of lodging of which they would not have availed themselves if they left to-morrow. With fifty francs they would reach Bucharest, where something might turn up. But suppose nothing did turn up? Suppose that damned juggler found Queenie and herself without a halfpenny? Even that was better than starving here or surrendering to M. Stefan Florilor.
Sylvia went out to ask the proprietor if he would give her back the money she had paid in advance for a room she and her friend found themselves unable any longer to occupy. The proprietor shrugged his shoulders, informed her in his vile French that he had never demanded the sum in advance, assured her that he had refused the room twice to important clients who had wanted it for next week, and altogether showed by his attitude that he hadbeen too much embittered by the reception of M. Florilor to stand upon anything except his strict rights. It was clear that these rights would include refusal of any food that was not paid for at the time. Such behavior might be unjust and unreasonable, she thought, but, after all, it was not to be expected that an empty pocket was going to tempt the finer side of human nature. Sylvia went back to Queenie, who was looking in bewilderment at the clothes strewn about the bedroom. She explained what had happened, and Queenie ejaculated:
"There, fancy! We have no money now. Never mind, I can be friends with that gentleman who was asking to know me. He will give me the money, because if he wants me very much he will have to give much money. Yes, I think?"
Sylvia could have screamed aloud her rejection of such a course.
"What, after keeping you away from men for six months, to let you go back to them on account of my carelessness? Child, you must be mad to think of it."
"Yes, but I have been thinking, Sylvia. I have been thinking very much. When I was going to be English and you were saying to me that I should have a passport and be going to England and be English myself, it was good for me to care nothing at all for men; but now what does it matter? I am nothing. I am just being somebody lost, and if I am going with men or not going with men I am still nothing. Why to be worried for money? I shall show you how easy it is for me to have money. It is true what I am speaking. You could be having no idea how much money I can have. And if I am nothing, always nothing, why must I be worrying any more about money? You are so sweet to me, Sylvia, so kind. No one was ever being so kind to me before. So I must be kind to you now. Yes, I think? Are you crying about that money? I think you are stupid to cry for such a little thing as money."
"There are things, my rose, that must not, that shallnot happen," Sylvia cried, clasping the child in her arms. "And that you should ever again sell yourself to a man is one of them."
"But I am nothing."
"Ah," thought Sylvia, "here is the moment when I should be able to say that every one to God is everything; but if I say it she will not understand. What hope is there for this child?" Then aloud she added, "Are you nothing to me?"
"No, to you I am something, and if my brother was here I would be something to him."
"Very well, then, you must not think of selling yourself. I lost the money. I shall find a way of getting more money. I have a friend in Bucharest. I will telegraph to him to-morrow and he will send us money." And to herself she thought: "This is indeed the ultimate irony, that I should ask a favor of Philip. Yet perhaps I am glad, for if I did him the least injury years ago, no priest could have imagined a more appropriate penance. Yes, perhaps I deserve this."
The next morning, when Sylvia ordered coffee, the waiter presented the bill for it at the same time, and when she tore it up he seemed inclined to take away the coffee; he retreated finally with a threat that in future nothing should be served to them that was not paid for in advance.
"They are being nasty with us," Queenie solemnly enunciated.
"Never mind. We shall have some money to-night, or at any rate to-morrow morning. We must put up with fasting to-day. It's Friday, appropriately enough. Good heavens!" Sylvia exclaimed. "I haven't even got the money to send a telegram. We must raise a few francs. Perhaps I could borrow some money with a trinket. Good gracious! I never realized until this moment that I haven't a single piece of jewelry! It takes the sudden affliction of extreme poverty to discover one's abnormality and to prove how essential it is not to be different from everybodyelse. Come, Queenie, you must lend me your two brooches."
Sylvia took the daisy of brilliants set round a topaz, and the swallow of sapphires—all that Queenie had kept after her disastrous expulsion from Russia—and visited the chief local jeweler, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to buy them.
"But at least you can lend me twenty francs upon them until to-morrow," Sylvia urged.
He shrugged his shoulders again and bent over to pick at the inside of a watch with that maddening indifference of the unwilling purchaser. Sylvia could not bring herself to believe in his refusal and suggested a loan of fifteen francs. Nothing answered her except the ticking of a dozen clocks and the scraping of a small file. There was a smell of drought in the shop that seemed to symbolize the personality of its owner.
"Ten francs?" Sylvia begged.
The jeweler looked up slowly from his work and regarded her with a fishy eye, the fishiness of which was many times magnified by the glass that occupied it. He raised his chin in a cold negative and bent over his work more intently. Every clock in the shop told a different time and ticked away more loudly than ever. Sylvia gathered up the trinkets and went away. She tried two other jewelers without success, and she even proposed the loan to a chemist who had a pleasant exterior; finally she had to go back to the hotel without obtaining the money. The day dragged itself along; not evenWar and Peacecould outlast it, and Sylvia wondered why she had never grasped before how much of life radiated from lunch, the absence of which dislocated time itself. Toward six o'clock she came to a sudden resolution, and, going out into the square, she began to sing outside the café. Four lean dogs came and barked; a waiter told her that the singing was not required. Somebody threw a stone at one of the dogs and cut open its leg; whereupon the other three set upon it, until itbroke away and fled howling across the square, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. The drinkers outside the café looked at Sylvia over the tops of their newspapers, until she went back to the hotel. Such a retirement would ordinarily have made her hot with shame; but she was already hardened by the first pangs of hunger and had only a savage contempt for the people who had thought to humiliate her; she had not been hungry long enough to feel the pathos of a broken spirit; after all, she had only missed her lunch.
Dinner consisted of two stale chocolate creams that were found in a pocket of one of Queenie's jackets; even the bits of silver paper adhering to them seemed to possess a nutritive value.
"But we cannot be going on like this," Queenie protested.
"There must be some way of raising money enough to get to Bucharest," Sylvia insisted. "There must be. There must be. If we really starve, the police will send us there to avoid a death in this cursed hole of a town."
"We must ask that gentleman to tea with us to-morrow," Queenie declared, as she put out the light.
Want of food prevented Sylvia from sleeping, and in her overwrought spirit those good-night words of Queenie seemed to presage the collapse of everything.
"It shall not be. It shall not be," she vowed to herself. "I will not be defeated by squalid circumstances in this dreary little Rumanian town. If thirteen years ago I could sell my body to save my soul, now I can sell my body to save the soul of another. Surely that sacrifice will defeat futility. I had a presentiment of this situation when I was arguing with Philip that afternoon. I warned him that nothing should stand in my way over this girl. And nothing shall! To-morrow I will invite this youth who is the son of the richest man in Avereshti. He will not refuse me twenty francs for my body. If I cannot do this I am worth no more than those trinkets that thejeweler refused to buy for ten francs. I will do this, and accept its accomplishment as the sign that I have fought long enough. Then I will go to Philip and tell him what his refusal has brought about. I willmakehim give me the passport. But suppose that he is no longer capable of being horrified? Suppose that my behavior of thirteen years ago has rendered him proof against such an emotion? Oh well, we shall see. Am I light-headed? No, no, no. On the contrary, hunger makes one clear-sighted. It must be. It shall be. The duty of the human soul lies in such a complete, such a reckless, such a relentless, such a victorious self-will as can only be assuaged by self-sacrifice. This is the great paradox of life. This is the divine egotism."
Toward dawn Sylvia slept, and woke at sunrise from dreams that were strangely serene in contrast with the tormenting fevers of the night, to find that Queenie was still fast asleep. The beauty of her lying there in this lucid and golden morn was like the beauty of a flower that blooms at daybreak in a remote garden. It was a beauty that caught at Sylvia's heart, a beauty that could only be expressed with tears which were silent as the dew and which, like the dew, sparkled in the daybreak of the soul.
"It is through such tears that people have seen the fairies," she murmured.
Sylvia half raised herself in bed, and, leaning upon her elbow, she watched the sleeping girl so intently that it seemed as if some of herself was passing away to Queenie. This still and virginal hour was indeed time transmuted to the timelessness of dreams, in which absolute love like a note of music rose quivering upon its own shed sweetness to such an ecstasy of sustained emotion that the barest memory of it would secure the wakeful one forever against disillusionment.
"Call it hunger or the divine vision, the result is the same," she murmured. "I was lifted out of myself, andI take it that is the way martyrs died for their faith. From an outsider's point of view I may be only worthy of a foot-note in a manual of psychology; but I 'on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.' Another queer thought: the fasting saint and the drunken sinner both achieve ecstasy by subduing the body, the one with mortification, the other with indulgence. Those whom the gods love die young—they drink too deep and too often of honeydew and become intoxicated even unto death. Wine must serve the man who would live long. Perhaps I am one of those less rare spirits that depend too much on purely material beauty; yet even in defense of so little I can act. Some nightingales love roses: the rest of them love other nightingales. Which do I love? Ah, whether Queenie be rose or nightingale, what does it matter? Nobody that would not stoop to save a wood-louse in his path can claim to love. And I will stoop as low as hell to save this rosebud that has already been gathered and wired and worn in a buttonhole and dropped by the roadside, but surely not yet trodden underfoot."
Queenie woke with a bad headache, and Sylvia went down-stairs to see if she could persuade the waiter to let her have some coffee. He was going to refuse, but when she asked him if he would tell M. Florilor that a visit would be welcomed that afternoon, his manner changed, and presently he came back from an interview with the proprietor to say that he would serve coffee at once. At the same time he brought the bill of fare for lunch, and seemed anxious that they should choose some special delicacy to fortify themselves against the ill effects of the day before. There was no talk of paying for the meal, and the best wine was indicated with that assumption of subservient greed which is common to all good waiters.
After lunch Sylvia told Queenie that she was going out to send off the delayed telegram to Bucharest, and left her lying down with her pictures. Then she consulted the waiter about a room. The waiter agreed that it wouldbe inconvenient to receive M. Florilor in their own, and informed her that the best room in the hotel was ready, adding that he had ordered plenty of cakes and put flowers in the vases.
"I'll go there now," Sylvia announced. "When he comes, bring him straight up."
The brightness of the early morning had been dimmed by a wet mist, and the room allotted for the reception of M. Florilor, which was on the other side of the hotel, looked out over houses covered with sodden creepers and down into gardens of disheveled sunflowers; it was a view that suited the mood Sylvia was in, and for a long time she stood gazing out of the window, trying to detect beyond the immediate surroundings of the hotel some definition of a landscape in the distance. In the light of the morning her resolution had not presented itself as morbidly as now; then it had appeared essentially poetic—a demonstration really of the creative power of the human will; now, like the dejected flowers in the gardens below, it hung limp and colorless. She turned away from the window and sat down in a tight new armchair, the back of which seemed to be inclosed in corsets. Everything in this room was new, and, like all hotel rooms, it depressed one with that indeterminate bleakness which is the property of never having been touched by the warmth of personality. It was bleak as an abandoned shell on the beach, and stirred by nothing save the end of the tide's ebb and flow. The waiter's attempt to give it the significance of human life by cramming bunches of dahlias into a pair of fluted vases only added to the desolate effect. For want of something to do Sylvia began to arrange the flowers with a little consideration for their native ugliness, as one tries to smarten an untidy woman with a bad figure; but when she poured some water into a china bowl and saw floating upon its surface the ends of burned-out matches and cigarettes, she gave up the task. These burned-out relics of transitory occupants seemed typical of the room'seffect upon the pensive observer. A confused procession of personalities made up its history, and as these had cast away their burned-out cigarettes and matches, so had they cast behind them the room where they had lodged, preserving no memory of its existence and leaving behind not a single emotion to vitalize the bleak impersonal shell they had thankfully forsaken.
Yet Sylvia, waiting here for the beginning of the heartless drama that would be wrought of her heart's blood pulsing to reinforce her will, rejoiced in this sterility of the setting; it helped her to achieve a similar effect in her own attitude. Just as this room had succeeded in preserving itself from any impression of having ever been lived in by human beings, so she, when the drama was played through, should retain of it no trace. That in it which was real—the lust of man—should be left behind, an ignominious burned-out thing less than a cigarette stump at the bottom of a china bowl.
The waiter came in with a basket of cakes, the cold and sugary forms of which were no more capable than the dahlias of imparting life to the merciful deadness. And how dead it all was! Those red-plush curtains eternally tied back in symmetrical hideousness—they had never lived since the time when some starved and withered soul had sewn those pompons along their edges one after another, pompons as numerous and monotonous as the days of their maker. Indeed, there was not a single piece of furniture, not an ornament nor a drapery, that was not stamped with the hatred of its maker. There was no trace of the craftsman's joy in his handiwork either in thread or tile or knob. There was nothing except the insolence of profit and the dreary labor of slaves. Yet a world stifled by such ugliness talked with distasteful surprise of men who profited by war. With the exploitation of the herd and the sacrifice of the individual that was called civilization what else could be expected? Nowadays even man's lust had to be guaranteed pure and unadulterated like hisbeer. Better that the whole human race should rot on dunghills with the diseases they merited than that they should profit from an added shame imposed upon the meanest and most miserable tinker's drab. People were shocked at making a hundred per cent. upon a shell to blow a German to pieces; but they regarded with equanimity the same profit at the expense of a child's future. Wherever one looked, there was nothing but material comfort set as the highest aim of life at the cost of beauty, religion, love, childhood, womanhood, virtue—everything. Then two herds met in opposition, and there was war; the result had made everybody uncomfortable, and everybody had declared there must never again be war. But so long as the individual submitted to the herd, war would go on; and the most efficient herd with the greatest will for war would succeed because it would be able to offer greater comfort at the time and higher profits afterward. Yet the individual had nearly always much that was admirable; the most sordid profiteer possessed a marvelous energy and perception that might be turned to good, if he could but realize that virtue is the true egotism and that vice is only a distorted altruism.
"I've always hated ants and loathed bees," Sylvia cried. "And in certain aspects the human race makes one shudder with that sense of co-operative effort running over one which I believe is called formication."
The waiter came in to announce M. Florilor's arrival.
"Now we get the individual at his worst just when I've been backing him against the herd. This is formication spelled with an 'n.'"
Stefan Florilor resembled a figure in a picture by Guido Reni. A superficial glance would have established him as a singularly handsome, well-built, robust, and attractive young man; a closer regard showed that his good looks owed too much to soft and feminine contours, that the robustness of his frame was only the outward form of strength with all the curves but nothing of the hardness ofmuscle, and that his eyes flashed not as the mirrors of an inward fire, but with liquid gleams of sensuous impressions caught from outside. He really was extremely like one of Guido Reni's triumphant and ladylike archangels.
They talked in French, a language that Florilor spoke without distinction, but with a pothouse fluency—no doubt much as one of Guido Reni's archangels might have picked it up from one of Guido Reni's devils.
"What a fatally seductive language it is!" Sylvia exclaimed at last, when she had complimented him as he evidently expected to be complimented upon his ease. "Whenever I hear a tea-table conversation in French I suspect every one of being a poet or a philosopher: whenever I read a French poet I want to ask him if he likes his tea strong or weak."
"Your friend is English also?" Florilor inquired.
He took advantage of the ethnical turn in the conversation to express his own interest in a problem of nationality.
"Yes, she is English."
"And no doubt she will be coming down soon?"
"She's not coming down. She has a headache."
"But perhaps she will be well enough to dine this evening with me?"
"No, I don't think she will be well enough," said Sylvia.
The young man's face clouded with the disappointment; his features seemed to thicken, so much did their fineness owe to the vitality of sensual anticipation.
"Perhaps to-morrow, then?"
"No, I don't think she will ever be well enough," Sylvia continued. Then abruptly she put her will to the jump and cleared it breathlessly. "You'll have to make the best of me as a substitute."
Afterward when the reality that stood at the back of this scene had died away Sylvia used to laugh at the remembrance of the alarm in Florilor's expression when she made this announcement. She must have made it in a way so utterly different from any solicitation that he hadever known. At the moment she was absurdly positive that she had offered herself to him with as much freedom and as much allurement as his experience was able to conjecture in a woman. When, therefore, he showed by his temper that he had no wish to accept the offer, it never struck her that, even had he felt the least desire, her manner of encouragement would have frozen it. A secondary emotion was one of swift pride in the detachment of her position, which was brought home to her by the complete absence of any chagrin—such as almost every woman would have felt—at the obvious dismay caused by her proposal to substitute herself for her friend.