Sylvia & Michael Part 16

The fact was that the atmosphere of the Pet.i.t Maxim was getting on Sylvia's nerves. Apart from the physical revolt that it was impossible not to feel against the fumes of tobacco and wine, the scent of Eau de Chypre and Quelques Fleurs, the raucous chatter of conversation and the jangle of fidgety tunes, there was the perpetual inner resentment against the gossip about herself and Queenie. Sylvia did not lose any of her own joy at being able to rest in the high airs of Christian thought away from all this by reading the books of doctrine and ecclesiastical history that the priest lent her; but she was disappointed at her inability to provide any alternative for Queenie except absolute dependence upon herself. She was quite prepared to accept the final responsibility of guardians.h.i.+p, and she made it clear to the child that her ambition to have a permanent sister might be considered achieved.

What she was not prepared to do was to invoke exterior aid to get them both back to England. She reproached herself sometimes with an unreasonable egotism; yet when it came to the point of accepting Philidor's offer to lend her enough money to return home, she always drew back. Life with Queenie at Mulberry Cottage shone steadily upon the horizon of her hopes, but she had no belief in the value of that life unless she could reach it unaided and offer its freedom as the fruit of her own perseverance and indomitableness. She was annoyed by Queenie's forebodings over the revelation of her name, and her annoyance was not any the less because she had to admit that her own behavior in holding out against accepting the means of escape from Rumania was based upon nothing more secure than a superst.i.tious fancy.

The Pet.i.t Maxim closed at Easter; at the beginning of May the whole company was re-engaged for an open-air theater called the Pet.i.t Trianon.

Sylvia and Queenie were still many francs short of their fares to England and were forced to re-engage themselves for the summer. The new place was an improvement on the cabaret because, at any rate during the first half of May, it was too cold for the public to enjoy sitting about in a garden and drinking sweet champagne. After a month, however, all Sylvia's friends went away, some to Sinaia, whither the court had moved; others, and among them Philidor, were sent to the Austrian frontier; the expedition to the Dardanelles and the intervention of Italy had brought Rumania much nearer to the prospect of entering the war. Meanwhile in Bucharest the German agents worked more a.s.siduously than ever to promote neutrality and secure the pa.s.sage of arms and munitions to Turkey.

At the end of May the manager of the Pet.i.t Trianon, observing that Sylvia had for some time failed to take advantage of the warmer weather by gathering to her table a proper number of champagne-drinkers, and having received complaints from some of his clients that she made it impossible to cultivate Queenie's company to the extent they would have liked, announced to her that she was no longer wanted. Her songs at the beginning of the evening were no attraction to the thin audience scattered about under the trees, and he could get a cheaper first number. This happened to be Lottie, who was engaged to thump on the piano for half an hour at two hundred francs a month.

"I never knew that I was cutting you out," Lottie explained. "But I've been playing for nearly four months at a dancing-hall in a low part of the town and I only asked two hundred in desperation. He'll probably engage you again if you'll take less."

Sylvia forced herself to ask the manager if he would not change his mind. She hinted as a final threat that she would make Queenie leave if he did not, and he agreed at last to engage her again at three hundred francs instead of three hundred and fifty, which meant that she could not save a sou toward her going home. At the same time the manager dismissed Lottie, and everybody said that Sylvia had played a mean trick. She would not have minded so much if she had not felt really sad about the fat girl, who was driven back to play in a low dancing-saloon at less than she had earned before; but she felt that there was no time to be lost in getting Queenie away from this life, and if it were a question of sacrificing Queenie or Lottie, it was certainly the fat girl who must go under.

Since the manager's complaint of the way she kept admirers away from her friend, Sylvia had for both their sakes to relax some of her discouraging stiffness of demeanor. One young man was hopeful enough of ultimate success to send Queenie a bunch of carnations wrapped up in a thousand-franc note. Normally, Sylvia would have compelled her to refuse such a large earnest of future liberality; but these months upon the verge of penury had hardened her, and she bade Queenie keep the money, or rather she kept it for her to prevent its being frittered away in petty extravagance. Queenie could not hold her tongue about the offering; and the young man, when he found that the thousand francs had brought him no nearer to his goal than a bottle of champagne would have done, was loud in his advertis.e.m.e.nt of the way Sylvia had let Queenie take the money and give nothing in return. Everybody at the Pet.i.t Trianon was positive that Sylvia was living upon her friend, and much unpleasant gossip was brought back to them by people who of course did not believe it themselves, but thought it right that they should know what all the world was saying.

This malicious talk had no effect upon Queenie's devotion, but it added greatly to Sylvia's disgust for the tawdry existence they were both leading, and she began to play with the idea of using the thousand francs to escape from it and get back to England. She was still some way from bringing herself to the point of such a surrender as would be involved by temporarily using this money, but each time that she argued out the point with herself the necessity of doing so presented itself more insistently. In the middle of July something occurred which swept on one side every consideration but immediate flight.

All day long a warm and melancholy fog had suffused the suburbs of Bucharest, from which occasional scarves of mist detached themselves to float through the high center of the town, disl.u.s.tering the air as they went, like steam upon a s.h.i.+ning metal. Sylvia had been intending for some time to visit Lottie and explain to her the circ.u.mstances in which she had been supplanted by herself; such a day as this accorded well with such an errand. As with all cities of its cla.s.s, a few minutes after one left the main streets of Bucharest to go downhill one was aware of the artificiality of its metropolitan claims. Within five hundred yards of the sumptuous Calea Victoriei the side-turnings were full of children playing in the gutter, of untidy women gossiping to one another from untidy windows, and of small rubbish heaps along the pavement: and a little farther on were signs of the unquiet newness of the city in the number of half-constructed streets and half-built houses.

Lottie lived in one of these unfinished streets in a tumble-down house that had survived the fields by which not long ago it had been surrounded. A creeper-covered doorway opened into a paved triangular courtyard shaded by an unwieldy tree, along one side of which, at an elevation of about two feet, ran Lottie's room. As Sylvia crossed the courtyard she could see indistinct forms moving about within, and she stopped for a moment listening to the drip of the fog above the murmur of human voices. She did not wish to talk to Lottie in front of strangers and turned to go back; but the fat girl had already observed her approach and was standing on the rotten threshold to receive her.

"You're busy," Sylvia suggested.

"No, no. Come in. One of my friends is an English girl."

"But I wanted to talk to you alone. I wanted to explain that I couldn't refuse to sing again at the Trianon; I've been worrying about you all this time."

"Oh, that's all right," Lottie said, cheerfully. "I never expected anything else."

"But the other girls--"

"Oh, the other girls," she repeated, with a contemptuous laugh. "Don't worry about the other girls. People can always afford to be generous in this world if it doesn't hurt themselves and does hurt somebody else.

One or two of them came here to condole with me, and I'm sure they got more pleasure out of seeing my wretched lodging than I got out of their sympathy. Come in and forget all about them."

Sylvia squeezed her pudgy hand gratefully; it was a relief to find that the object of so much commiseration had grasped the shallowness of it.

"Who are your friends?" she whispered.

"The man's a juggler who wants an engagement at the Trianon. He's a Swiss called Krebs. The girl's an English dancer and singer called Maud.

You'll see them both up there to-night for certain. You may as well come in. What a dreary day, isn't it?"

Sylvia agreed and was aware of ascribing to the weather the faint malaise that she experienced on following Lottie into her room, which smelled of stale wall-paper and musty wood, and which, on account of the overhanging tree and the dirty French windows, was dark and miserable enough.

"Excuse me getting up to shake hands," said Krebs, in excellent English.

"But this furniture is too luxurious."

He was lying back, smoking a cigarette in an armchair all the legs of which were missing and the rest of it covered with exudations of flocculence that resembled dingy cauliflowers. Sylvia saw that he was a large man with a large undefined face of dark complexion. He offered a huge hand, brutal and clumsy in appearance, an inappropriate hand for a juggler, she thought, vaguely. His companion, crudely colored and shapeless as a quilt, sprawled on another chair. Everything about this woman was defiant; her harsh accent, the feathers in her hat, her loose mouth, her magenta cheeks, her white boa, and her white boots affronted the world like an angry housemaid.

"This is a fine hole, this Rumania," she shrilled. "Gawd! I went to the English consul at Galantza, expecting to be treated with a little consideration, and the---- pushed me out of his office. Yes, we read a great deal about England nowadays, but I've been better treated by everybody than what I have by the English. Stuck-up la-di-da set of----, that's what they are, and anybody as likes can hear me say so."

She raised her voice for the benefit of the listeners without that might be waiting anxiously upon her words.

"Don't kick up such a row," Krebs commanded; but Maud paid no attention to him and went on.

"England! Yes, I left England ten years ago, and if it wasn't for my poor old mother I'd never go back. Treat you as dirt, that's what the English do. That consul threw me out of his office the same as a _commissionnaire_ might throw any old two-and-four out of the Empire.

Yes, they talk a lot about patriotism and all pulling one way, but when you ask a consul to lend you the price of your fare to Bucharest, you don't hear no more about patriotism. As I said to him, 'I suppose you don't think I'm English?' and he sat there grinning for answer. Yes, I reckon when they christened that talking chimpanzee at the Hippodrome 'Consul' it was done by somebody who'd had a bit of consul in his time.

What's a consul for? That's what I'm asking. As I said to him, 'What are you for? Are you paid,' I said, 'to sit there smoking cigarettes for the good of your country?' 'This ain't a workhouse,' he answered, very snotty. 'You're right,' I said. 'No fear about any one ever making that mistake. Why, I reckon it's a b.l.o.o.d.y sleeping-car, I do.' And with that I slung my hook out of it. Yes, I could have been very rude to him; only it was beneath me, the uneducated la-di-da savage! Well, all he's done is to put me against my own country. That's _his_ war work."

The tirade exhausted itself, and Sylvia, unwilling to be Maud's sponsor at the Pet.i.t Trianon that evening, made some excuse to leave. While she was walking across the courtyard with Lottie, she heard:

"And who's she? I'll have to tell _her_ off, that's very plain. Did you see the way she looked down her nose at me? Nice thing if any one can't say what they think of a consul without being stared at like a mummy by _her_."

Sylvia asked Lottie if she had known this couple long.

"I've known him a year or two, but she's new. I met them coming up from the railway station this morning. The girl was stranded without any money at Galantza, and Krebs brought her on here. He's a fine juggler and conjurer. Zozo he calls himself on the stage."

Sylvia's heart throbbed as she climbed the streets that led toward the high center of the city away from the hot mists below: it was imperative to get Queenie out of Rumania at once, and while she walked along she began to wonder if she could not procure an English pa.s.sport, the delight of possessing which would counterbalance for Queenie the shock of hearing that the dreaded Zozo was in Bucharest.

"It's such a ridiculous name for a bogy," Sylvia thought. "And the man himself was not a bit as I pictured him. I'd always imagined some one lithe and subtle. I wonder what his object was in helping that painted hussy he was with. Queer, rather."

She reached the British Consulate, but was told rather severely to direct herself to the special office that occupied itself with pa.s.sports.

"Do you want a visa for England?" the clerk inquired.

"Yes, and I also want to inquire about a new pa.s.sport for my sister, who's lost hers."

"Lost her pa.s.sport?" the clerk echoed; he shuddered at the information.

"It seems to upset you," Sylvia said.

"Well, it's a pretty serious matter in war-time," he explained.

"However, we have nothing to do with pa.s.sports at the Consulate."

The clerk washed his hands of Sylvia's past and future, and she left the Consulate to discover the other office. By the time she arrived it was nearly five o'clock, and the clerk looked hurt at receiving a visitor so late.

"Do you want a visa for England?" he asked.

She nodded, and he pointed to a printed notice that hung above his desk.

"The morning is the time to make such applications," he told her, fretfully.

"Then why are you open in the afternoon?" Sylvia asked.

"If the application is favorably entertained, the recommendation is granted in the afternoon. You must then take your pa.s.sport to the Consulate for the consular visa, which can only be done in the morning between twelve and one."

It was like the eternal compet.i.tion between the tube-lifts and the tube-trains, she thought.

"But they told me at the Consulate that they have nothing to do with pa.s.sports."

"The Consulate _has_ nothing to do with pa.s.sports until the applicant for a visa has been approved here."