"I'm afraid I must go. I'm busy," he muttered.
"But you haven't had any cake," Sylvia protested.
"Vous vous fichez de moi," he growled. "Vous m'avez posé un sale lapin."
He looked like a greedy boy, a plump spoiled child that has been deprived of a promised treat.
"What did she come here for," he demanded, "if she's not prepared to behave like any other girl? You can tell her from me that finer girls—girls in Paris—have been glad enough to be friends with me."
"Caprice and mystery are the prerogatives of woman," Sylvia said.
"I'm glad she can afford to be capricious when she has not enough money to pay for her food."
"I'm not going to argue with you about your behavior, though I could say a good deal about it. At present I can't be as rude as I should like. You see, you've just paid me the compliment of declining to accept the offer of myself. The fact that either I am sufficiently inhuman or that you are too bestial for the notion of any intercourse between us leaves me with a real hope in my heart that there is a difference between you and me. You've no idea of the lowering effect, nay more, of the absolute despair it would cast over my view of life, had I to regard you asbelonging to the same natural order as myself. It would involve belief in the universal depravity of man."
"Ah, vous m'emmerdez!" he shouted, as he ran from the room. Sylvia cried after him to remember the fate of the Gadarene shrine and to avoid going down-stairs too fast. Then to herself she added:
"Ecstasies and dreams of self-abnegation! What are they beside the pleasure of conflict face to face? The pleasure would have been keener, though, if I could have hurt him physically."
In the first elation of escaping from the fulfilment of her intention Sylvia overlooked all the consequences involved in Florilor's withdrawal. Soon in the stillness shed by this bleak room, in the sight of the frozen cakes upon the table, in the creeping obscurity of the afternoon, she was more sharply aware than before of the future, aware of it not as a vague and faintly disturbing horizon too far away still to affect anything except her moods of depression, but as the immediate future in the shape of a chasm at her feet, a future so impassable that she could scarcely think of it in other terms than those of space. It had positively lost the nebulous outlines of time and acquired in their stead the sharp materialism of hostile space. The future! Calculations of how to bridge or leap this gap went whirling through Sylvia's brain, calculations that even included projects of fantastic violence, but never one that envisaged the surrender of a single scruple about Queenie. The resolve she had made that morning, however its practical effect seemed to have been nullified by Florilor's rejection of her sacrifice, had woven each separate strand of her thought and emotion so tightly round the steel wire of her will that nothing could have snapped the result. There was not a bone in her body, not a nerve nor a corpuscle, that did not thrill to the command of her will and wait upon its fresh intention with a loyalty that must endow it with an invincible tenacity of purpose.
The sense of an omnipotent force existing in herself was so strong that when Sylvia saw a golden ten-franc piece lying in the very middle of the fiddle-backed armchair on which Florilor had been sitting, she had for a moment the illusion of having created the coin out of air by the alchemy of her own will.
"Many miracles have deserved the name less than this," she murmured, picking up the piece of gold. For the second time in her life she was able to enjoy the sensation of illimitable wealth; by a curious coincidence the sum had been the same on both occasions. She preened her nail along the figured edge, taking delight in the faint luxurious vibration.
"Misers may get very near to Paradise by fingering their gold," she thought. "But the fingering of gold preparatory to spending it is Paradise indeed."
She went back to Queenie, clasping the coin so tightly that even when she had put it in her purse it still seemed to be resting in her palm.
"Will you be leaving me here?" Queenie exclaimed, in dismay, when she heard of Sylvia's plan for going to Bucharest to-morrow morning and interviewing Philip.
"There's not enough money to take us both there, but I shall come back to-morrow evening; and then we'll flaunt our wealth in the faces of these brutes here."
"But I shall be so hungry to-morrow," Queenie complained.
"Fool that I am," Sylvia cried. "The cakes!"
She rushed away and reached the other room a moment before the waiter arrived with his tray.
"These cakes belong to me," she proclaimed, snatching up the china basket and hugging it to her breast.
The waiter protested that they had not been paid for; but she swept him and his remonstrances aside, and passed out triumphantly into the corridor, where the proprietor of the hotel, a short, greasy man, began to abuse her for the way she had treated Florilor.
"Va-t-en," she said, scornfully.
"Quoi? Quoi ditez? Moi bâton? Non! Vous bâton! Comprenez?"
He was in such a rage at the idea of Sylvia's threatening him with a stick, which was the way he understood her French, that he began to dribble; all his words were drowned in a foam of saliva, and the only way he could express his opinion of her behavior was by rapid expectoration. Again Sylvia tried to pass him in the narrow corridor, instinctively holding up the cakes beyond his reach. The proprietor evidently thought she was going to bring down the basket upon his head, and in an access of fear and fury he managed to knock it out of her hands.
"Those cakes are mine," Sylvia really screamed. She felt like a cat defending her kittens when she plunged down upon the floor to pick them up. The proprietor jumped right over her, stamping upon the cakes and the pieces of broken china and grinding them underfoot into the carpet until it looked like a pavement of broken mosaics. Sylvia completely lost her temper at the sight of the destruction of her dinner; and when the proprietor trod upon her hand in the course of his violence she picked up the broken handle of the basket and jabbed his instep, which made him yell so loudly that all the hidden population of the kitchens came out like disturbed animals, holding in their hands the implements of the tasks upon which they had been engaged.
"Vous payez! Vous payez tout! Oui, oui, vous payez!" the proprietor shouted.
The intensity of his anger made his veins swell and his nose bleed, and, not being able to find a handkerchief, he began to bellow for the attentions of his staff. This seemed an appropriate moment for the waiter to get himself back into his master's good graces, and with a towel in one hand and a chamber-pot in the other he came running out of the room where he had been hiding. At the sight of more china the proprietor uttered a stupendous Rumanianoath and kicked the pot out of the waiter's hand with such force that a piece of it flew up and cut his cheek. Sylvia left a momentarily increasing concourse of servants chattering round their master and the man, each of whom was stanching blood with his own end of the towel they held between them: they were all shoveling aside bits of china while they talked, so that they seemed like noisy hens scratching in a garden.
Queenie was standing with big, frightened eyes when Sylvia got back to their room.
"Whatever was happening?"
"An argument over our dinner," Sylvia laughed.
Then suddenly she began to cry, because at such a moment the loss of the cakes was truly a disaster and the thought of Queenie alone without food waiting here for her to return from Bucharest was too much after the strain of the afternoon. She caught the child to her heart and told the story of what had happened with Florilor.
"Now do you understand?" she asked, fiercely. "Now do you understand how much I want you never—but never, never again—even so much as to think of the possibility of selling yourself to a man? You must always remember, when the temptation comes, what I was ready to do for you to prevent such a horror. You must always believe that I am your friend and that if the war goes on for twenty years I will never leave you. Youshallcome back to England with me. With the money that I'm going to borrow in Bucharest we'll get as far as Greece, anyway. But whatever happens, I will never leave you, child, because I bear on my heart the stigmata of what I was ready to do for you."
"I was not understanding much of what you are talking," Queenie sighed.
"There is only one thing to understand—that I love you. You see this golden bag? The man who gave it to me left inside it a part of his soul; and if he has been killed, if he is lying at this moment a dreadful and disfiguredcorpse, what does it matter? He lives forever with me here. He walks beside me always, because he obeyed the instinct of pure love. For you I was ready to do an action to account for which, when I search deep down into myself, I can find no motive but love. You must remember that and let the memory of that walk beside you always. Let me go on talking to you. You need not understand anything except that I love you and that I must not lose you. I shall be thinking of you to-morrow when I'm in Bucharest, and I shall eat nothing all day, because I could not eat while you are waiting here hungry. It won't be for long. I shall be back to-morrow night with money. You don't mind my leaving you? And promise me, promise me that you won't unlock your door for a moment. Don't let that horrible youth have his way when I'm gone for the sake of a lunch. You won't, will you? Promise me, promise me."
"Of course I would never do anything with him," Queenie said.
Sylvia held up the ten-franc piece.
"Isn't it a wonderful little coin?" she laughed. "It will take us so far from here. Once when I was a very small girl I found just such another."
"You were being a small girl long ago," Queenie exclaimed. "Fancy! I was always forgetting that anybody else except me was ever being small."
"What a lonely world she lives in," Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable desires."
Sylvia passed away the supperless evening for Queenie by telling her stories about her own childhood, trying to instil into her some apprehension of the continuity of existence, trying to populate the great voids stretching between her thoughts that so terrified her with the idea ofbeing lost. Queenie really had no conception of her own actuality, so that at times she became positively a doll, dependent upon the imagination of another for her very life. In the present stage of her development she might be the plaything of men without suffering; but Sylvia was afraid that if she again exposed her to the liability by deserting her at this point, Queenie might one day suddenly wake up to a sense of identity and find herself at the moment in a brothel. People always urged in defense of caging birds that if they were caged from the nest they did not suffer. Yet it was hard to imagine anything more lamentable than the celestial dreams of a lark that never had flown. Sylvia knew that at least she had been able to frame clearly the fear she had for Queenie; it lent new strength to her purpose. The horror of the brothel had become an obsession ever since earlier in the year she had passed by a vast and gloomy building which seemed a prison, but which she had been told was the recognized pleasure-house of soldiers. In this building behind high walls were two hundred women, most of whom in a Catholic country would have been cherished as penitents by nuns. Instead of that they were doomed to expiate their first fault by serving the state and slaking the lust of soldiers at the rate of a franc or a franc and a half. These women were fed by the state; they were examined daily by state doctors; everybody agreed that such forethought by the state was laudable. People who protested against such a debasement of womanhood were regarded as sentimentalists: so were people who believed in hell.
"This Promethean morality that enchains the world and sets its bureaucratic eagle to gnaw the vitals of humanity," Sylvia cried. "Prometheus himself was surely only another personification of Satan, and this is his infernal revenge for what he suffered in the Caucasus. The future of the race! Or is my point of view distorted and am I wrong in mocking at the future of the majority? No, no, it cannot be right to secure the many by debasingthe few. Am I being Promethean myself in trying to keep hold of you, Queenie? You came back into my life at such a moment that I feel as if you were a part of myself. Yet I can't help divining that there's a weakness in my logic somewhere."
The next morning Sylvia went to Bucharest. She did not remember until she was in the train that it was Sunday; but the passport-office was open and Mr. Mathers was at work as usual. She asked if Mr. Iredale was too busy to see her.
"Mr. Iredale?" the clerk repeated. "I'm sorry to say that Mr. Iredale's dead."
Sylvia stared at him; for a moment the words had no more meaning than a conventional excuse to unwelcome visitors.
"But how can he be dead?" she exclaimed.
"I'm sorry to say that he died very suddenly. In fact, he was taken ill almost immediately after you were here last. It was a stroke. He never recovered consciousness. Mr. Abernethy is in charge temporarily. If you're anxious about your visa, I'm sure Mr. Abernethy will do everything in his power—subject, of course, to the regulations. Oh, certainly, yes, everything in his power."
Mr. Mathers tried by the tone of his voice to convey that, though his late chief was dead, he could not forget the length of the interview he had granted to Sylvia and that the present rulers of the office would pay a tribute to the dead by treating her with equal condescension.
"No, I wanted to see Mr. Iredale privately."
The clerk sighed his sympathy with her position in face of the unattainable.
"Perhaps I shall be wanting a visa presently," she added.
The clerk brightened. Sylvia fancied that in the remote and happy days before the war he must have had experience of the counter. He had offered her the prospect of obtaining a visa instead of seeing Philip again much as ashop assistant might offer one shade of ribbon in the place of another no longer in stock.
Sylvia left the passport-office and, without paying any heed in what direction she walked, she came to the Cimisgiu Gardens and sat down upon a seat beside the ornamental lake. It was a hot morning, and there was enough mist in the atmosphere to blur the outlines of material objects and to set upon the buildings of the city a charm of distance that was as near as Bucharest ever approximated to the mellowing of time. The shock of the news that she had just heard, coming on top of the fatigue caused by her journey without even a cup of coffee to sustain her body, blurred the outlines of her mental attitude and made her glad of the fainting landscape that accorded with her mood and did not jar upon her with the turmoil of a world insistently, almost wantonly alive.
So Philip was dead. Sylvia tried to imagine how the news of his death would have affected her, if he had not lately re-entered her life. Poor Philip! Death out here seemed to crown the pathos of his position, and she wished that she had not parted from him so abruptly, that she had not tried so hard to make him aware of his incongruity in Bucharest, and now, most of all, that she had let him talk, as he had wanted to talk, about their life together. If she had only known that he was near to death she should have told him of her gratitude for much that he had done for her; had he lived to hear the request that she had been going to make him this morning, she was sure that he would have taken pleasure in his ability to be of use once more. She had been wrong to blame him for his attitude toward Queenie. After all, his experiment with herself had not encouraged him to make other experiments in the direction of obeying impulses that took him off the lines he had laid down for his progress through life. She was really the last person who should have asked him to forgo another convention in favor of a girl like Queenie. How had he been paid for marrying a childwhom he had met casually in a London cemetery? Very ill, he might consider. Poor Philip! Early next month it would be the fifteenth anniversary of their marriage. He had never known how to manage her; yet how preposterous it should have been to expect anything else. The more Sylvia meditated upon their marriage the more she felt inclined to blame herself for its collapse; and in her present state of weakness the thought that it was now forever too late to tell Philip how sorry she was fretted her with the poignancy of missed opportunity. Beneath that weight of pedagogic ashes there had always been the glow of humanity; if only she could have fanned it to a flame before she left Bucharest by giving him the chance of feeling that he was helping her! Yet she had regarded the favor she was about to ask as such a humiliation that almost she had been inclined to put it on the same level of self-sacrifice as the offer of herself to that Rumanian youth. Now that she had failed with both her self-imposed resolves, how easy it was to see the difference in their degree! Her appeal to Philip would have been the just payment she owed him for that letter she wrote when she ran away; it would have washed out that callow piece of cruelty. But Philip was dead, and the relation between them must remain eternally unadjusted.
In meditating upon her married life and in conjuring scenes that had long been tossed aside into the lumber-room of imagination, Sylvia's spirit wandered again in the green English country and forgot its exile. The warmth and mystery of the autumnal air drowsed all urgency with dreams of the past; for a minute or two she actually slept. She was soon disturbed by the voices of passing children, and she woke up with a shiver to the imperative and tormenting facts of the present—to the complete lack of money, to the thought of Queenie waiting hungry in Avereshti, and to Rumania clouding with the fog of war.
"What on earth am I going to do?" she murmured. "I must sell my bag."
The decision seemed to be made from without; it was like the voice of a wraith that had long been waiting incapable of speech, and involuntarily she turned round as if she could catch the spirit in the act of interfering with her affairs.
"Were I a natural liar, I should vow it was a ghost and frame the episode of Philip's death with a supernatural decoration. How many people who have penetrated to the ultimate confines of themselves have preferred to perceive the supernatural and in doing so destroyed the whole value of their discovery! Yet lying is the first qualification of every explorer."
But setting aside considerations of the subconscious self, Sylvia was for a while horrified at the damnable clarity with which her course of action presented itself. There was no possible argument against selling the bag, and yet to sell it would demand a greater sacrifice than borrowing money from Philip or selling herself to Florilor. The fact that during all this time of strain the idea had never suggested itself before showed to what depths of her being it had been necessary to pierce before she could contemplate the action. Her feeling for the bag far transcended anything in the nature of sentiment; without blasphemy she could affirm that she would as soon have attributed her sense of God in the sacrifice of the Mass to sentiment. But without incurring an imputation of idolatry by such a comparison she could at least award the bag as much value as devout women awarded a wedding-ring; for this golden bag positively was the outward sign that she had affirmed her belief in human love. In whatever tirades she might indulge against the natural depravity of man when confronted by the evidence of it so repeatedly as lately she had been, this bag was a continual reminder of his potential nobility. Certainly a critic of her extravagant reverence might urge that the value of the bag was created by the man who gave it, and that any transference of such an emotion to a naturalobject was nothing but a surrender to sentiment which involved her in the common fault of seeking to express the eternal in terms of the temporal. But certain acts of worship lay outside the destructive logic of an unmoved critic; the circumstances in which the gift had been made were exceptional and her attitude toward it must remain equally exceptional. And now it must go; its talismanic and sacramental power must rest unappreciated in the hands of another. Yet in selling the bag was she not giving final and practical expression to the impulse of the donor? He had told her, when she had protested against his generosity, that before he was lost in the war his money would be better spent in giving some one something that was desired than in gambling it all away. Equally now would he not say to her that the money were better spent in helping a Queenie than in serving as a symbol rather than as an instrument of love? Or was the intrusion of Queenie into this intimacy of personal communion a kind of sacrilege? The soldier had never intended the bag to acquire any redemptive signification; he had merely chosen Sylvia by chance as the vehicle of one of those acts of sacred egotism which illuminate the divine purpose. It was not to be supposed that the woman with the cruse of ointment was actuated by anything except self-expression, which was precisely what gave her impulse value as an act of worship. The commonplace and utilitarian point of view on that occasion was perfectly expressed by Judas.
"And my own point of view about Queenie is not in the least altruistic. I want to give her something of which I have more than my fair share. I am burdened with an overflowing sense of existence. I have attached Queenie to myself and assumed a responsibility for her in exactly the same way as if I had brought a child into the world. There is no false redemptionism about the mother's relation to her child: there is merely a passion to bequeath to the child the sum of her own experience. My feelingabout Queenie partakes of the passionate guardianship with which a loose woman so often shields her child. Certainly I must sell the bag. Who knows what chain of good may not weave itself from that soldier's action? To me he gave an imperishable store of love at the very moment when without the assurance of love my faith must have withered. I, in turn, give all that I can give to balance Queenie's life in the way I think it should be balanced. The next purchaser of the bag may, I should like to think without superstition, inherit with it a sacramental of love that will carry on the influence. And the one who first gave it to me? That almond-eyed soldier swept like a grain of chaff before the winnowing-fan of war? At this very moment perhaps the bullet has struck him. He has fallen. His company presses forward or is pressed back. He will lie rotting for days between earth and sky, and when at last they come to bury him they will laugh at the poor scarecrow that was a man. They will speculate neither whence he came nor who may weep for him; but his reward will be in his handiwork, for he will have shown love to a woman and he will have died for his country; such men, like stars, may light a very little of the world's darkness, but they proclaim the mysteries of God."
With all her conviction that she was right in selling the bag, it was with a heavy heart that Sylvia left the Cimisgiu Gardens to seek a jeweler's shop; when she found that all the shops were shut except those open for the incidental amusements of the Sunday holiday, she nearly abandoned in relief the idea of selling the bag in order to go back to Avereshti and trust to fate for a way out of her difficulties. On reflection, however, she admitted the levity of such behavior, if she wished to regard her struggle as worth anything at all, and she sharply brought herself back to the gravity of the position by reminding herself that it was she who had lost the five hundred francs, a piece of carelessness that was the occasion, if not the cause,of what had happened afterward. If anything was to be left to hazard, it must be Queenie to-night alone in that hotel; besides, if further argument were necessary, there was not enough change from the ten francs to get back. Sylvia had promised Queenie that she would not eat until she saw her again, but she had not counted upon the effect of this long day, to be followed by another long day to-morrow. How much money had she? Three francs twenty-five. Oh, she must eat; and she must also send a telegram to Queenie! Otherwise the child might do anything. But shemusteat; and suddenly she found herself sitting at a table outside a café, with a waiter standing by on tiptoe for her commands. The coffee tasted incredibly delicious, but the moment she had finished it she was overcome by a sensation of nausea and pierced by remorse for her weakness in giving way. She left the café and went to the post-office, where she spent all that was left of her money in a long telegram of exhortation and encouragement to Queenie.
The problem of how to pass the rest of the day weighed upon her. She did not want to meet any of the girls at the Trianon; she did not want to meet anybody she knew until she could meet him with money in her pocket. To-night she would stay at their old hotel in Bucharest; she would say that she had missed the train back to Avereshti, if they wondered at the absence of luggage. Oh, but what did it matter if they did wonder? It was her sensitiveness to such trifles as these that brought home to Sylvia how much the strain of the last week had told upon her. Walking aimlessly along, she found herself near the little mission church and turned aside to enter it. At such an early hour of the afternoon the church was empty, and the incense of the morning Mass was still pungent. There was the same sort of atmosphere that exists in a theater between a matinée and an evening performance; the emotion of the departed worshipers was mingled with the expectation of more worshipers to come. Sylvia satcontemplating the images and wondering about the appeal they could make. She tried to put herself in the position of the humble and faithful soul that could derive consolation and help from praying before that tawdry image of the Sacred Heart. She wished that she could be given the mentality of a poor Italian girl whose sense of awe was so easily satisfied and who could behold those flames of cheap gold paint around the Heart burning like the eyes of Seraphim.
"Yet, after all," she thought, "are we superior people, who suppose that such representations hurt the majesty of God, any nearer to Him with our equally pretentious theories of His manifestation? What in the ultimate sum of this world's history, when the world itself hangs in the sky like a poor burned-out moon, will mark the difference between the great philosopher with his words and the most degraded savage with his idols? And am I with my perception of God's love in a golden bag less hopelessly material than the poor Italian girl who bows before that painted heart?"
The influence of the church began to penetrate Sylvia's mind with a tranquilizing assurance of continuity, or rather with the assurance of silent and universal forces undisturbed by war. The sense of the individual's extinction in the strife of herd with herd had been bound to affect her very deeply, coming, as it did, at a time when she had once again challenged life as an individual by refusing any co-operation with the past.
"The worst of feeling regenerated," she thought, "is that such an emotion or condition of mind implies the destruction of all former experience. Of course, former experience must still produce its effect unconsciously; but one is too sensible of trying to bring the past into positively the same purified state as the present. When I was thinking about Philip this morning and reliving bygone moments, I was all the time applying to them standards which I have only possessed for about a year. Certainly I perceive thatwhat I call my regeneration must be the fruit of past experience—otherwise the description would be meaningless—but it is the fruit of individual experience ripening at the very moment when individual experience counts for less than it has ever counted since the beginning of the world. Had I always been a social and political animal the idea of the war would not have preyed on my mind as it does; I should have been educated up to the point of expecting it. I remember when I was first told in the Petrograd hospital that a war had broken out, what a trifling impression the news made compared with my own discovery of the change in myself. Gradually during this past year I have found at every turn my new progress barred by the war. My individual efforts perpetually shrink into insignificance before the war, and I am beginning to perceive, unless I can in some way fall into step with the rest of mankind, that what I considered progress is really the retreat of my personality along a disused bypath where I am expending my energy in cutting away briers that were better left alone, at any rate, at such a moment in history. Certainly one of the effects of an ordered religion is to restore the individual to the broad paths along which mankind is marching. An ordered religion is equally opposed either to short cuts or to cul-de-sacs, or to what by their impenetrability to the individual are equivalent to cul-de-sacs. My first instinct about Queenie was certainly right when I was anxious to intrust her to religion rather than to rely upon my personal influence. I think I must have lacked conviction in the way I approached the subject. I must have been timid and self-conscious; and the skeptical side of me that has just been wondering about the appeal of that image of the Sacred Heart may have defeated my purpose without my noticing its intrusion. I was all the time like a grown-up person who plays with children in order to get pleasure from their enjoyment rather than from his own.
"Yes, sitting here in this tawdry little church, I ambeginning to make a few discoveries. I must positively lose the slightest consciousness of being superior to Queenie in any way whatsoever. Equally, I must get over the slightest consciousness of being superior to any of the worshipers in this church. I must get over the habit of being injured by the monstrousness of this war until I have been personally injured by it in the course of sharing its woes with the rest of mankind. I have got to find an individualism that while it abates nothing of its unwillingness to be injured by the state is simultaneously always careful in its turn never to injure or impede the state, which from the individual's point of view must be regarded not as a state, but as another individual. Presumably the chief function of an ordered religion is by acting through the individual to apply the sum of mankind's faith, hope, and love under the guidance of the Holy Ghost to the fulfilment of the divine purpose. In such a way the self-perfection of the individual will create the self-perfection of the state, and, oh, what a long time it will take! God is a great conservative; yet when He was incarnate He was a great radical. I wonder if I had ever had a real logical training, or indeed any formal education at all, whether I should be tossed about, as I am, from one paradox to another. The Church was, significantly enough, built upon Peter, not upon John nor upon Thomas; it was founded upon the most human of the apostles. If one might admit in God what in men would be called an afterthought, it might be permissible to look upon Paul as an afterthought to leaven some of the ponderousness of Peter's humanity. Anyway, the point is that the paradoxes began in the very beginning, and it's quite obvious that I'm not going to help myself or anybody else by exposing myself to them rather than to the mighty moral, intellectual, and spiritual fabric into which they have all been absorbed or by which they have all been rejected."
During Sylvia's meditation the church had gradually filled with worshipers to receive the Benediction of theBlessed Sacrament. Generally, that strangely wistful concession to the pathetic side of human nature had not made a deep appeal to Sylvia's instinct for worship; but this afternoon the bravery of self had fallen from her. For the first time she felt in all its force—not merely apprehending it as a vague discomfort—the utter desolation of the soul without God. In such a state of mind faith shrank to infatuate speculation, hope swelled to arrogance, and even love shivered in a chill and viewless futility, until the mystical sympathy of other souls, the humblest of whom was a secret only known to God, led her to identify herself with them and to cry with them:
"O salutaris Hostia,Quæ cœli pandis ostium:Bella premunt hostilia,Da robur, fer, auxilium."
"O salutaris Hostia,Quæ cœli pandis ostium:Bella premunt hostilia,Da robur, fer, auxilium."
They were very poor people, these Albanians and Italians who knelt round her in this church; and Sylvia bowed before the thought that all over the world in all the warring nations somewhere about this hour poor people were crying out to God the same words in the same grave Latin. The helplessness of humanity raged through her like a strong wind, and her self-reliance became as the dust that was scattered before it. When the priest held the monstrance aloft, and gave the Benediction it seemed that the wind died away; upon her soul the company of God was shed like a gentle rain, which left behind it faith blossoming like a flower, and hope singing like a bird, and above them both love shining like a sun.
Sylvia went out of the church that afternoon with a sense of having been personally comforted; she was intensely aware of having made more spiritual progress in the last hour than in all the years that had gone by since the first revelation of God.
"Without Him I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing," she murmured.
That evening—an evening that she had dreaded indescribably—she sat by the window of her bedroom, happier than she could remember that she had ever been; when the chambermaid, on her way to bed, came to ask her if she wanted anything, Sylvia nearly kissed her in order that perhaps so she might express a little of her love toward all those who in this world serve.
"For such a girl, with the eyes of a nymph, to be serving you, and for you to have presumed to consider yourself above all service that did not gratify your egotism," she exclaimed aloud to her reflection in the glass.
The next morning Sylvia sold her golden bag for fifteen hundred francs. On the way to the station she felt very faint, and finding, when she arrived, that she would have to wait an hour for the train to Avereshti, she drank some coffee. She told herself that it was only the weakness caused by fasting which made her regard so seriously this second breach of her promise to Queenie; nevertheless, nothing could put out of her head the superstitious dread that the surrender caused her. The drinking of coffee while her friend was still hungry took on a significance quite out of proportion to what it actually possessed; she felt like the heroine of a fairy story who disobeys the warnings of her fairy godmother. While she was waiting in thesalle d'attenteand reproaching herself for what she had done, she heard a familiar voice behind her, and, looking round, saw Philidor in uniform. He was traveling to Bralatz on military duty, and she was glad of his company as far as Avereshti, for all sorts of fears about what might have happened to Queenie during her absence were assailing her fancy. Philidor was surprised to find her still in Rumania and spoke seriously to her about the necessity of leaving at once if she did not want to travel home by Russia.
"You must get away. No one knows what may happen in the Balkans presently. You must get within sight ofthe sea. You English are lost away from the sea. I assure you that Bulgaria will come in soon. There is no doubt of it. I cannot understand the madness of your English politicians in making speeches to deceive everybody that the mobilization is in self-defense. It is in self-defense, but not on the side of the Entente. You have been poisoned in England by the criminal stupidity of the Englishmen who come out here and see reflected in the eyes of the Bulgarian peasant their own liberal ideals. It is a tradition inherited from your Gladstone. To us out here such density of vision is incomprehensible. The Bulgarian is the Prussian of the Balkans; he is a product of uncompromising materialism. One of your chief Bulgarian propagandists was shot in the jaw the other day; it was a good place to wound him, but it's a pity he wasn't hit there before he did so much harm with its activities. We in Rumania were blamed by idealistic politicians for the way we stabbed Bulgaria in the back in 1913; you might as well blame a man for shooting at a slightly injured wild beast. You have always been too sporting in England, as you say; and not even war with Germany seems to have cured you of it. The Austrians are preparing to invade Serbia, and this time there will be no mistake. Get out of Rumania and get through Bulgaria before the carnage begins."
The conviction with which he spoke gave Sylvia a thrill; for the first time the active side of the war seemed to be approaching her.
"And what is Rumania going to do?" she asked.
The young officer made a gesture of bewilderment.
"Who knows? Who knows? It will be a struggle between sentiment and expediency. I wish that the cry of the rights of small nations was not being so loudly shouted by the big nations. Battle-cries are apt to die down when the battle is over. An idea that presents itself chiefly as a weapon of offense has little vitality; ideas, which are abstractions of liberty, do not like to bethe slaves of other ideas. There is one idea in the world at this moment which overshadows all the rest—the idea of victory: the idea of the rights of small nations does not stand much chance against that. God fights on the side of the big battalions. Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. We shall see what happens in Serbia. But to put aside ideas for the moment, don't waste time in following my advice. You must leave Rumania now, if you want to leave at all. And I do not recommend you to stay. A woman like you following your profession should be in her own country in times of war. You are too much exposed to the malice of any private person, and in war justice, like everything else, is only regarded as a contribution to military efficiency."
"You mean I might be denounced as a spy?"
"Anybody without protection may be denounced as a spy. Probably nothing would follow from it except expulsion, but expulsion would be unpleasant."
"I wonder what is the fundamental reason for spy-mania," said Sylvia. "Is it due to cheap romanticism or a universal sense of guilt? Or is it the opportunity for the first time to give effect to vulgar gossip? I think it's the last, probably. It must be very unpleasant to glorify the meanest vice with the inspiration of a patriotic impulse."
"I said that justice was subordinated to military efficiency."
"Yes, and even slander has a temporary commission and is dressed up in a romantic uniform and armed with anonymous letters. Bullets are not the only things with long noses."
"I suppose you can get away? You have money?" Philidor asked.
"Oh, I'm rich," she declared.
"And your little friend, how is she?"
"She's waiting for me at Avereshti."
Sylvia gave an account of her adventures, and Philidor shook his head.
"But it has all ended satisfactorily," he said.
"I hope so."
"It only shows how right I was to warn you of the spy danger—the double danger of being made the victim of a genuine agent and the risk of a frivolous accusation. You may be sure that now, when you go back to the hotel with money, you will be accused everywhere of being a spy. If you have any trouble telegraph to me at Bralatz. Here's my address."
"And here's Avereshti," Sylvia said. "Good-by and good luck.Et vive la Roumanie!"
She waved her hand to him and walked quickly from the station to the hotel. It was good to see the waiter on the threshold and to be conscious of being able to rule him with the prospect of a tip. How second-rate the hotel looked, with money in one's pocket! How obsequiously it seemed to beg one's patronage! There was not a single window that did not have the air of cringing to the new arrival.
"Lunch for two at once," Sylvia cried, flinging him a twenty-franc note.
"For two?" the waiter repeated.
"For myself and Mademoiselle Walters—my friend up-stairs," she added, when the waiter stared first at her and then at the money. "What's the matter? Is she ill?Crétin, if she's ill you and your master shall pay."
"The lady who was staying here withmadameleft this morning with a gentleman."
"Crapule, tu mens!"
"Madame may look for herself. The room is empty."
Sylvia caught the waiter by the throat and shook him.
"You lie! You lie! Confess that you are lying. She was starved by you. She has died, and you are pretending that she has gone away."
She threw the waiter from her and ran up-stairs. Her own luggage was still in the room; of Queenie's nothing remained except a few pieces of pink tissue-paper tremblingfaintly in the draught. Sylvia rang the bell, but before any one could answer her summons she had fainted.
When she came to herself her first action—an action that seemed, when afterward she thought about it, to mark well the depths of her disillusionment—was to feel for her money lest she might have been robbed during her unconsciousness. The wad of notes had not shrunk; the waiter was looking at her with all the sympathy that could be bought for twenty francs; a blowsy chambermaid, dragged for the operation from a coal-cellar, to judge by her appearance, was sprinkling water over her.
"What was the man like?" she murmured.
The waiter bustled forward.
"A tall gentleman. He left no name. He said he brought a message. He paid a few little items on the bill that were not paid bymadame. They took the train for Bucharest.Mademoisellewas looking ill."
Sylvia mustered all that will of hers, which lately had been tried hardly enough, to obliterate Queenie and everything that concerned Queenie from her consciousness. She fought down each superstitious reproach for not having kept her word by drinking the coffee in Bucharest: she drove forth from her mind every speculation about Queenie's future: she dried up every regret for any carelessness in the past.
"Clear away all this paper, please," she told the chambermaid; then she asked the waiter for the menu.
He dusted the grimy card and handed it to her.
"J'ai tellement faim," said Sylvia, "que je saurais manger même toi sans beurre."
The waiter inclined his head respectfully, as if he would intimate his willingness to be eaten; but he tempered his assent with a smile to show that he was sensible that the sacrifice would not be exacted.
"And the wine?" he asked.
She chose half a bottle of the best native wine; and the waiter hurried away like a lame rook.
After lunch Sylvia carefully packed her things and put all her professional dresses away at the bottom of her large trunk. In the course of packing, the golden shawl that contained the records of her ancestry was left out of the trunk by accident, and she put it in the valise, which so far on her journeys she had always managed to keep with her. Philidor's solemn warning about the political situation in the Balkans had made an impression, and, thinking it was possible that she might have to abandon her trunk at any moment, she was glad of the oversight that had led her to making this change; though if she had been asked to give a reason for paying any heed to the shawl now she would have found it difficult. When she had finished her packing she sat down and wrote a letter to Olive.
HOTELMOLDAVIA, AVERESHTI,September 27, 1915.MY DARLINGOLIVE,—This is not a communication from the other world, as you might very well think. It's Sylvia herself writing to you from Rumania with a good deal of penitence, but still very much the same Sylvia. I'm not going to ask you for your news, because by the time you get this you may quite easily have got me with it. At any rate, you can expect me almost on top. I shall telegraph when I reach France, if telegrams haven't been made a capital offense by that time. I've wondered dreadfully about you and Jack. I've a feeling the dear old boy is in Flanders or likely soon to go there. Dearest thing, I need not tell you that, though I've not written, I've thought terribly about you both during all this ghastly time. And the dear babies! I'm longing to see them. If I started to tell you my adventures I shouldn't know where to stop, so I won't begin. But I'm very well. Give my love to anybody you see who remembers your long-lost Sylvia.
HOTELMOLDAVIA, AVERESHTI,September 27, 1915.
MY DARLINGOLIVE,—This is not a communication from the other world, as you might very well think. It's Sylvia herself writing to you from Rumania with a good deal of penitence, but still very much the same Sylvia. I'm not going to ask you for your news, because by the time you get this you may quite easily have got me with it. At any rate, you can expect me almost on top. I shall telegraph when I reach France, if telegrams haven't been made a capital offense by that time. I've wondered dreadfully about you and Jack. I've a feeling the dear old boy is in Flanders or likely soon to go there. Dearest thing, I need not tell you that, though I've not written, I've thought terribly about you both during all this ghastly time. And the dear babies! I'm longing to see them. If I started to tell you my adventures I shouldn't know where to stop, so I won't begin. But I'm very well. Give my love to anybody you see who remembers your long-lost Sylvia.
How colorless the letter was, she thought, on reading it through. It gave as little indication of herself as an electric bell gives of the character of a guest when he is waiting on the door-step. But it would serve its purpose, like the bell, to secure attention.
Sylvia intended to leave Avereshti that evening, but, feeling tired, she lay down upon her bed and fell fast asleep. She was woken up three hours later by the waiter, who announced with an air of excitement that Mr. Porter had arrived at the hotel and was intending to spend the night.
"What of it?" she said, coldly. "I'm leaving by the nine-o'clock train for Bucharest."
"Oh, but Mr. Porter will invite you to dinner."
"Who is Mr. Porter?"
"He's one of the richest men in Rumania. He is the head of many big petroleum companies. I told him that there was an English lady staying with us, and he was delighted. You can't leave to-night. Mr. Porter will never forgive us."
"Look here. Is this Florilor the Second?"
The waiter held up his hands in protest.
"Ah, no,madame! This is an Englishman. He could buy up M. Florilor ten times over. Shall I say thatmadamewill be delighted to drink a cockatail with him?"
"Get out," said Sylvia, pointing to the door.
But afterward she felt disinclined to make a journey that night, and, notwithstanding Philidor's urgency, she decided to waste one more night in Avereshti. Moreover, the notion of meeting an Englishman was not so dull, after all. Ten minutes later she strolled down-stairs to have a look at him.
Mr. Porter was a stout man of about sixty, who was sometimes rather like Mr. Pickwick in appearance, but generally bore a greater resemblance to Tweedledum. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of pepper-and-salt check and wore a glossy collar with a full black cravat, in which a fine diamond twinkled modestly; a clear, somewhat florid face with that priestly glimmer of a very close shave, well-brushed boots, white spats, and a positive impression of having clean cuffs completed a figure that exhaled all the more prosperity and cheerfulness because the background of the hotel was so unsuitable.
"Going to introduce myself. Ha-ha! Apsley Porter's my name. Well known hereabouts. Ha-ha! Didn't expect to meet a compatriot in these times at Avereshti. Ugly little hole. Business before pleasure, though, by George! I don't see why pleasure should be left out in the cold altogether. What are you going to have? Ordered a Martini here the other day. 'What's that?' I said to the scoundrel who served it. 'Martini? Pah! Almost as dangerous as a Martini-Henry,' I said. Ha-ha-ha-ha! But of course the blackguard didn't understand me. Going to have dinner with me, I hope. I've ordered a few special dishes. Always bring my own champagne with me in case of accidents. I forced them to get ice here, though. Ha-ha! By George, I did. I said that if there wasn't ice whenever I came I should close down one of the principal wells I control. Did I tell you my name? Ah, glad I did. I've got a deuced bad habit of talking away without introducing myself. Here comes the villain with your cocktail. You must gin and bear it. What? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Sylvia liked Mr. Porter and accepted his invitation to dinner. He was distressed to hear that a friend had been staying with her in the hotel so recently as this morning and that he had had the bad luck to miss entertaining her.
"What, another little Englishwoman in Avereshti? By George! what a pity I didn't turn up yesterday! I sha'n't forgive myself. Come along, waiter. Hurry up with that champagne. Fancy! Another jolly little Englishwoman and I missed her. Too bad!"
There was irony in meeting upon the vigil of her return to England this Englishman redolent of the Monico. Sylvia had spent so much of her time intimately with people at the other pole of pleasure that she had forgotten how to talk to this type and could only respond with monosyllables to his boisterous assaults upon the present. He was so much like a fine afternoon in London that she sunned herself, as it were, in his effluence, and let hersenses occupy themselves with the noise of the traffic, as if she had suddenly been transplanted to the Strand and was finding the experience immediately on top of Avereshti pleasant, but rather bewildering. And now he was talking about the war.
"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all. Pity about the Dardanelles. Great pity, but we had no luck. They are making a great fuss here over this coming Austrian attack upon Serbia. Don't believe in it. Sha'n't believe in it until it happens. But it won't happen, and if it does happen—waiter, where's that champagne?—if it does happen, it won't alter the course of the war. Not a bit of it. I'm an optimist. And in times like these I consider that optimism is of as much use to my country at my age as a rifle would have been if I were a younger man. Pessimism in times like these is a poison."
"But isn't optimism apt to be an intoxicant?" Sylvia suggested.
She felt inclined to impress upon Mr. Porter the difference between facing misfortune with money and without it, and she told him a few of her adventures in the past year, winding up with an account of the behavior of the proprietor of this very hotel.
"You don't mean to say old Andrescu refused to serve you with anything to eat?"
The notion seemed to shake Mr. Porter to the depths of his being.
"Why, I never heard anything like it! Waiter, go and tell M. Andrescu to come and speak to me at once. I shall give him a piece of my mind."
The jovial curves of his face had all hardened: his bright little eyes were like steel: even the dimple in his chin had disappeared in the contraction of his mouth. When Andrescu came in, he began to abuse him in rapid Rumanian, while his complexion turned from pink to crimson, and from crimson in waves of color to a uniformpurple. In the end he stopped talking for a moment, and the proprietor begged Sylvia's intercession.
"That's the way to deal with rascally hotelkeepers," said Mr. Porter, fanning himself with a red-and-yellow bandana handkerchief and drinking two glasses of champagne.
"What annoyed me most of all," he added, "was that his behavior should have made me miss the chance of asking another jolly little English girl to dinner. Too bad!"
Sylvia had not told him more than the bare outlines of the story; she had not confided in him about Florilor or the sale of her bag, or the fact that she had lost Queenie forever. Her tale could have seemed not much more than a tale of temporary inconvenience, and she was therefore only amused when Mr. Porter deduced from it as the most important result his own failure to entertain Queenie.
After dinner she and her host sat talking for a while, or rather she sat listening to his narratives of holidays spent in England, which evidently appealed to him as a much more vital part of his career than his success in the Rumanian oil-fields. When, about eleven o'clock, she got up to take her leave and go to bed, he expressed his profound dismay at the notion of thus breaking up a jolly evening.
"Tell you what we'll do," he announced. "We'll make a night of it. We will, by George! we will! A night of it. We'll have half a dozen bottles put on ice and take them up to my room. I can talk all night on champagne. Now don't say no. It's a patriotic duty. By George! it's a patriotic duty when two English people meet in a God-forsaken place like this; it's a patriotic duty to make a night of it. Eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die."
Sylvia was feeling weary enough, but the fatuous talk had cheered her by its sheer inanity, and the thought of going to bed in that haunted room—her will was strong, but the memory of what she had endured for Queenie wasnot entirely quenched—and of perhaps not being able to sleep was too dismal. She might just as well help this amiable old buffoon's illusion that champagne was the elixir of eternal life and that pleasure was nothing but laughing loudly enough.
"All right," said Sylvia. "But I'd rather we made the night of it in my room. I'll get into a wrapper and make myself comfortable, and when dawn breaks I can tumble into bed."
Mr. Porter hesitated a moment. "Right you are, my dear girl. Of course. Waiter! Where's the ruffian hidden himself?"
"I'll leave you to make the arrangements. I shall be ready in about a quarter of an hour," Sylvia said.
She left him and went up-stairs.
"I believe the silly old fool thought I was making overtures to him when I suggested we should make merry in my room," she laughed to herself. "Oh dear, it shows how much one can tell and how little of oneself need be revealed in the telling of it. Stupid old ass! But rather pleasant in a way. He's like finding an old Christmas number of theGraphic—colored heartiness, conventional mirth, reality mercifully absent, andO mihi prœteritosprinted in Gothic capitals on the cover. I suppose these pre-war figures still abound in England. And I'm not sure he isn't right in believing that his outlook on life is worth preserving as long as possible. Timbered houses, crusted port, and Dickens are nearer to fairyland than anything else that's left nowadays. To what old age will this blackened, mutilated, and agonized generation grow? Efficiency and progress have not spared the monuments of bygone art except to imprison them in libraries, museums, and iron railings. Will it spare the Englishman? Or will the generations of a century hence read of him only, and murmur, 'This was a Man'? Will they praise him as the last and noblest individual, turning with repulsion and remorse from the sight of themselves and their fellows, theproduct of the triumphant herd eternally sowing where it does not reap? Night thoughts of the young on perceiving a relic of insular grandeur in an exceptionally fine state of preservation—preserved in oil! And here he comes to interrupt my sad soliloquy."
The night passed away as the evening had passed away. Mr. Porter sustained his joviality in a fashion that would have astounded Sylvia, if all capacity for being astounded had not been exhausted in watching him drink champagne. It was incredible not so much that his head could withstand the fumes as that his body, fat though it was, should be expansive enough to contain the cubic quantity of liquor. It was four o'clock before he had finished the last drop and was shaking Sylvia's hand in cordial farewell.
"Haven't enjoyed an evening so much for months. By George! I haven't. Ha-ha-ha! Well, you'll forgive an old man—always accuse myself of being old when the wine is low, but I shall be as young as a chicken again after three hours' sleep—you'll excuse an old man. Little present probably damned useful in these hard times. Ha-ha-ha! Under your pillow. Good girl. Never made me feel an old man by expecting me to make love. I've often set out to make a night of it, and only succeeded in making a damned fool of myself. Sixty-four next month. Youth's the time! Ha-ha-ha! Good-by. God bless you. Sha'n't see you in the morning. By George! Ishallhave a busy day."
He shook her warmly by the hand, avoided the ice-stand with a grave bow, and left her with a smell of cigar-smoke. Under the pillow she found four five-hundred-franc notes.
"Really," Sylvia exclaimed, "I might be excused for thinking myself a leading character in a farce by fate. I fail to make a halfpenny by offering myself when the necessity is urgent, and make two thousand francs by not embarrassing an old gentleman's impotence. Meanwhile,it's too late—it's just too late. But I shall be able to buy back my golden bag. I suppose fate thinks that's as good a curtain as I'm entitled to in a farce."
Sylvia left Avereshti next morning with a profound conviction that, whatever the future held, nothing should induce her to put foot in that town again. There was some satisfaction in achieving even so much sense of finality, negative though the achievement might be.
"I don't advise you to go to Dedeagatch," said Mr. Mathers when Sylvia presented herself at the passport-office for the recommendation for a visa. "I may tell you in confidence that the situation in Bulgaria is very grave—very grave indeed. Anything may happen this week. The feeling here is very tense, too. If you are determined to take the risk of being held up in Bulgaria, I counsel you to travel by Rustchuk, Gorna Orechovitza, and Sofia to Nish. From Nish you'll get down to Salonika, and from there to the Piræus. At the same time I strongly advise you to keep away from Bulgaria. With the mobilization, passenger traffic is liable to be very uncertain."
"But if I go back through Russia I may find it is just as hard to get back to England. No, no. I'll risk Bulgaria. To-day's Tuesday the 28th. When can I have my visa?"
"Well, strictly speaking, it's already too late to-day to entertain applications, but as you were a friend of Mr. Iredale, I'll ask Mr. Abernethy to put it through for you. If you come in to-morrow morning at ten, I will give you a letter for the Consulate. There will be the usual fee to pay there. Oh dear me, you haven't brought the four photographs that are necessary. I must have them, I'm afraid. Two for us, one for the Consulate, and one for the French authorities. The Italians don't insist upon a photograph at present. I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to put it through for you to-day. The French are very strict and insist on a minimum of four days. But in view of the Bulgarian crisis I'll get them to relax the rule. Luckilyone of the French officers is a friend of mine—a very nice fellow."
Three days elapsed before Sylvia was finally equipped with her passportviséfor Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Italy, France, and England. The representatives of the first two nations, who seemed most immediately concerned with her journey, made the least bother; the representative of Italy, the nation that seemed least concerned with it, made the most.
While she was waiting for the result of the accumulated contemplation upon her age, her sex, her lineaments, and her past history, Sylvia bought back her gold bag for eighteen hundred francs, which left her with just over fifteen hundred francs for the journey—none too much, but she should no longer have any scruples in telegraphing to England for help if she found herself stranded.
On Friday afternoon she called for the last time at the passport-office to get a letter of introduction that Mr. Mathers had insisted on writing for her to a friend of his in the American Tobacco Company at Cavalla.
"You're not likely to go there," he said, "but if you do, it may be useful."
The clerk handed her the letter, and there was something magnificently protective in the accompanying gesture; he might have been handing her a personal letter to the Prime Minister and giving her an assurance that the Foreign Secretary would personally meet her at Waterloo and see that she did not get into the wrong tube.
When Sylvia was leaving the office, Maud Moffat came in, at the sight of whom Mr. Mathers's spectacled benevolence turned to an aspect of hate for the whole of humanity.
"It's too late, madam, to-day. Nothing can be done until further inquiries have been made," he said, sharply.
"Too late be damned!" Maud shouted. "I'm not going to be —— about any longer. My passport's been stolen and I want another. I'm an honest English girl who's been earning her living on the Continent and I want to gohome and see my poor old mother. Perhaps you'll say next that I'm not English?"
"Nobody says that you're not English," Mr. Mathers replied through set teeth. "And please control your language."
At this moment Maud recognized Sylvia.
"Oh, you've come back, have you? I suppose you didn't have any difficulty with your passport. Oh no, people as frequents the company of German spies can get passports for nothing, but me who's traveled for seven years on the Continent without ever having any one give me so much as a funny look, me, I repeat, gets cross-examined and messed about as if I was a murderer instead of an artiste. Yes, war's a fine thing for some people," she went on. "Young fellows that ought to be fighting for their country instead of bullying poor girls from the other side of a table thoroughly enjoystheirselves. Nice thing when an honest English girl—and not a German spy—can't mislay her passport without being—"
"I must repeat, madam," Mr. Mathers interrupted, "that the circumstances have to be gone into."
"Circumstances? I'm in very good circumstances, thank you. But I sha'n't be if you keep me mucking about in Bucharest so as I forfeit my engagement at the White Tower, Saloniker. You'll look very funny, Mr. Nosey Parker, when my friend the Major who I know in Egypt and still writes to me lodges a complaint about your conduct. Why don't you ask this young lady about me? She knows I'm English."
"I keep telling you that nobody questions your nationality."
"Well, you've asked me enough questions. You know the size of my corsets and the color of my chemise and how many moles I've got, and whether my grandmother was married, and if it's true my uncle Bill ran away to Africa because he couldn't stand my aunt Jane's voice. Nationality! I reckon you couldn't think of any more questions,unless you became a medical student and started on my inside. Why don't you tell him you know all about me?" she added, turning to Sylvia.
"Because I don't," Sylvia replied, coldly.
"Well, there's a brazen-faced bitch!" Miss Moffat gasped.
Sylvia said good-by hurriedly to Mr. Mathers and left him to Maud. When she was in the train on the way to Rustchuk, it suddenly struck her that Zozo might be able to explain the missing passport.