Sylvia & Michael Part 11

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

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

"You'd better go to the management of the Pet.i.t Maxim. You're a singer, aren't you? Of course Bucharest is very gay and terribly expensive.

You're English, aren't you? You are lucky. But fancy leaving England now! Still, if you don't get any work you'll be able to go to your consul and he'll send you home. I'll be able to get home, too, from Bucharest, but I don't know if I want to. All my friends used to be French and English girls. I never cared much for Austrians and Germans.

But now I get called _sale boche_ if I open my mouth. How do you explain this war? It seems very unnecessary, doesn't it?"

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

"Ah, lots of people ask that." It was evident by the way she spoke that the ability of her name to arouse the curiosity of strangers was one of the chief pleasures life had brought to this fat girl. "Well, I had an _amant de cur_ once who was English. At least his mother was English: his father was from Hamburg; in fact, I think he was more Jewish than anything. He didn't treat me very well, and he threw me over for an English dancer called Lottie, who died of consumption. It seems a funny thing to tell you, but the only way I could be revenged was to take her name when she died. You'd have been surprised to see how much my taking her name seemed to annoy him. He threatened me with a pistol once, but I stuck to the name, and then I got fond of it, because I found it created _beaucoup de reclame_. You see, I've traveled all over Europe, and people remember me as the fat girl Lottie; so I've never gone back to my own name. It's just as well, because n.o.body can p.r.o.nounce Bohemian names."

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

"But I'm an Austrian."

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

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

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

"_a la guerre comme a la guerre_," the fat girl laughed. "_Au revoir, pet.i.te chose._"

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

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

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

Sylvia wondered if she were a spy, who from some motive of charity wished to avoid compromising her; but there was no time to think about such problems, because an official was taking her pa.s.sport and waving her across to the stacked-up heaps of luggage. There was something redolent of old sensational novels in this frontier examination, something theatrically sinister about the att.i.tude of the officials when they commanded everybody to turn everything out of his trunks and bags.

The shed took on the appearance of a vast rag-heap, and the acc.u.mulated agitation of the travelers was pitiable in its subservience to these machines of the state; it seemed incredible that human beings should consent to be treated thus. Presently it became evident that the object of this relentless search was paper; every sc.r.a.p of paper, whether it was loose or used for wrapping and packing, was taken away and dropped into the stove. The sense of human ignominy became overwhelming when Sylvia saw men going down on their knees and weeping for permission to keep important doc.u.ments; yet no appeal moved the officials, and the stove burned fiercely with the mixed records of money, love, and business; with contracts and receipts and t.i.tle-deeds; even with toilet-paper and old greasy journals. Sylvia fought hard for the right to keep her music, and proclaimed her English nationality so insistently that for a minute or two the officials hesitated and went out to consult the authorities who had taken charge of her pa.s.sport; but when it was found that she was entered there as a music-hall _artiste_, the music was flung into the stove at once. Confronted with the proofs of her right to carry music, this filthy sp.a.w.n of man's will to be enslaved took from her the only tools of her craft: orang-outangs would have been more logical. And all over the world the human mind was being debauched like this by war, or would it be truer to say that war was turning ordinary stupidity into criminal stupidity? Oh, what did it matter?

Sylvia clasped her golden bag to rea.s.sure herself that n.o.bility still endured in spite of war. Now they were throwing books into the stove!

Sylvia sat down and laughed so loudly that two soldiers came across and took her arms to lead her outside: they evidently thought she was going to have hysterics, which would doubtless have been unlawful in the shed.

She waved aside their attentions and went across to pick up her luggage.

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

"O G.o.d!" Sylvia murmured. "G.o.d! G.o.d! Grant these people their revenge some day!"

The pa.s.sengers were at last free to mount another train, and Sylvia saw with relief that Lottie was taking her place with the rest. She avoided speaking to her, because she was suffering herself from the humiliation inflicted upon the fat girl, and felt awed at the idea of any intrusion upon her shame. The train steamed out of the station, crossed a long bridge, and pulled up in Rumanian Ungheny, where everybody had to alight again for the Rumanian officials to look for the old-fas.h.i.+oned contraband of the days before the war. They did this as perfunctorily as in those happy days; and the quiet of the neutral railway station was like the sudden lull that sheltering land gives to the stormiest seas.

If only she had not lost all her music, if only she had not seen the fat girl behind that curtain, Sylvia could have clapped her hands for pleasure at this unimpressive little station, which, merely because it belonged to a country at peace, had a kind of innocence and jollity that gave it a real beauty.

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

"All policemen are brutes," Sylvia declared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Concetta!"

The girl drew in her breath sharply.

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

Sylvia took her in her arms and kissed her.

"Oh, Sylvia! You see I remember your name. I can't get away from Ja.s.sy.

I was being expelled from Moscow, and I had no money to come more than here, and the man I am with here I hate. I want to go to Bucharest, but he isn't wanting to let me go and gives to me only furs, no money."

"You're not still with Zozo?"

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

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

"And let no one ever tell me again that presentiments don't exist,"

murmured Sylvia, falling asleep for the first time in forty-eight hours.

CHAPTER IV

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

When Queenie told how she was carried away by Zozo from Mrs.

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

Although Queenie had managed to break away from the man himself, she had paid in full for his direction of her life, and Sylvia rebelled against the whim of destiny which at the critical moment in this child's career had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from herself and handed her over to the possession of a Zozo. What could have been the intention of fate in pointing a way to safety and then immediately afterward barring it against her progress?

The old argument of free will could not apply in her case, because it was the lack of that, and of that alone, which had caused her ruin. What but a savage and undiscerning fate could be held accountable for this tale that had for fit background the profitable and ugly fields through which on this tristful Rumanian day the train was sweeping? Queenie seemed to have had no lovers apart from the purchasers of youth, and to be able to look back with pride and pleasure at nothing except the furs and dresses and jewelry with which she had been purchased. In the rage that Sylvia felt for this wanton corruption of a soul, she suddenly remembered how, long ago, she had watched with a hopeless equanimity and a cynical tolerance the progress of Lily along the same road as Queenie; and this memory of herself as she once was and felt revived the torments of self-reproach that had haunted her delirium in Petrograd.

Then, as Queenie's tale went on, there gradually emerged from all the purposeless confusion of it one clear ambition in the girl's mind, which was a pa.s.sion to be English--a pa.s.sion feverish, intense, absorbing.

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

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

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