Sylvia & Michael Part 18

"Hasn't she got a pa.s.sport? Does she want hers renewed?"

"I'd better tell you the whole story. I expect that since you've become the U.V.W.X.Y.Z. of Bucharest you've listened to plenty of sad stories, but you must pay special attention to this one for my sake. I don't know why I say 'for my sake'--it's rather an improper remark for a divorced wife. Philip, do you remember in my show at the Pierian an Improvisation about a girl who had been horribly ill treated as a child and was supposed to be lost in a great city?"

"Yes, I think I do; in fact, I'm sure I do. I remember that at the time I was reminded of our first meeting in Brompton Cemetery." He blinked once or twice very quickly, and coughed in his old embarra.s.sed way.

"Well, that's the girl for whom I want a pa.s.sport."

Sylvia told him Queenie's story in detail from the time she met her first in Granada to the present moment under the shadow of Zozo's return.

"But, my dear Sylvia, I can't possibly procure an English pa.s.sport for her. She's not English."

"I want her to be my sister," Sylvia pursued. "I'm prepared to adopt her and to be responsible for her. Any difference in the name she has been generally known by can easily be put down to the needs of the stage. I myself want to take once more my own name, Sylvia Snow, and I thought you could issue two pa.s.sports, one to Sylvia Snow, professionally known as Sylvia Scarlett, and the other to Queenie Snow, known professionally as Queenie Walters. Surely you won't let mere pedantry interfere with a deed of charity?"

"It's not a question of pedantry. This is war-time. I should render myself liable to--to--a court martial for doing a thing like that.

Besides, the principle of the thing is all wrong."

"But you don't seem to understand."

"Indeed I understand perfectly," Philip interrupted. "This girl was born in Germany."

"Of an Italian father."

"What papers has she?" he asked.

"None at all. That's the whole point. She couldn't get even a German pa.s.sport if she wanted to. But she doesn't want one. She longs to be English. It's the solitary clear ambition that she has. She was living in England before war broke out, and she only came away to help this girl who was kind to her. Surely the most rigid rule can be unbent to fit a special case?"

"I could not possibly a.s.sume the responsibility," Philip declared.

"Then you mean to say you'll condemn this child to d.a.m.nation--for that's what you're doing with your infernal rules and regulations? You're afraid of what will happen to you."

"Excuse me, even if I were certain that nothing could possibly be known about the circ.u.mstances in which this pa.s.sport was issued, I should still refuse the application. Everybody suffers in this war; I suffer myself in a minor degree by having to abandon my own work and masquerade in this country as what you well call a U.V.W.X.Y.Z."

"But even if we grant that in some cases suffering is inevitable,"

Sylvia urged, eagerly, "here's a case where it is not. Here's a case where, by applying a touch of humanity, you can save a soul. But I won't put it that way, because I know you have no use for souls. Here's a case where you can save a body for civilization, for that fetish on whose account you find yourself in Bucharest and half Europe is slaughtering the other half. You are not appealing to any divine law when you refuse to grant this pa.s.sport: you are appealing to a human law. Very well, then. You are in your own way at this moment fighting for England; yet when somebody longs to be English you refuse her. If there is any reality behind your patriotism, if it is not merely the basest truckling to a name, a low and cowardly imitation of your next-door neighbor whose opinion of yourself you fear as much as he fears your opinion of him, if your patriotism is not just this, you'll be glad to give this child the freedom of your country. Philip, you and I made a mess of things. I was to blame for half the mess; but when you married me, though you married me primarily to please yourself, there was another motive behind--the desire to give a lonely little girl a chance to deal with the life that was surging round her more and more dangerously every day. Now you have another opportunity of doing the same thing, and this time without any personal gratification. It isn't as if I were asking you to do something that could possibly hurt England. I tell you I will be responsible for her. If the worst came to the worst and anything were found out, I could always take the blame and you could never be even censured for accepting my word in such a case."

Sylvia could see by Philip's face that her arguments were doing nothing to convince him, yet she went on, desperately:

"And if you refuse this, you don't merely condemn her, you condemn me, too. Nothing will induce me to abandon her to that man. By your bowing down to the letter of the regulation you expose me for the second time to the life that you drove me to before."

Philip made a gesture of protest.

"Very well, then I won't accuse you of being responsible on the first occasion, certainly not wantonly. But this time, if I'm driven to the same life, it _will_ be your fault and your fault alone. I'm not going to bother about my body if I think that by destroying it I can save a soul. I shall stick at nothing to preserve Queenie--at nothing, do you hear? You have the chance to send us both safely back to England.

Philip, you won't refuse!"

"I'm sorry. It's terribly painful for me to say 'no.' But it's impossible. Only quite recently the Foreign Office sent round a warning that we were to be specially careful in this part of the world. No papers of naturalization are issued in time of war. Why, I'm sent here to Bucharest for the express purpose of preventing people like your friend obtaining fraudulent pa.s.sports."

"The Foreign Office!" Sylvia scoffed. "How can you expect people not to be Christians? It was just to redeem mankind from the sin that creates Foreign Offices and War Offices and bureaucrats and shoddy kings and lawyers and politicians that Christ died. Oh, you can sneer! but your belief is condemned out of your own mouth. You puny little U.V.W.X.Y.Z.

with your nose buried in your own waste-paper basket, with a red tapeworm gnawing at your vitals, with some d.a.m.ned fool of a narrow-headed general for an idol, you have the impertinence to sneer at Christianity. Do you think that after this war people are going to be content with the kind of criminal state that you represent? Life is not a series of rules, but a set of exceptions. Philip, forgive me if I have been rude, and let this girl have a pa.s.sport, please, please!"

"You must not think," Philip answered, "that because I plead the necessities of war in defense of what strikes you as mere bureaucratic obscurantism that therefore I am defending war itself; I loathe war from the bottom of my heart. But just as painful operations are often necessary in accidents which might easily have been avoided, yet which having happened must be cured in the swiftest way, so in war-time for the good of the majority the wrongs of the nation must take precedence over the wrongs of the individual. I sympathize profoundly with the indignation that you feel on account of this girl, but the authorities in England, after due consideration of the danger likely to accrue to the state from the abuse of British nationality by aliens, have decided to enforce with the greatest strictness the rules about the granting of pa.s.sports."

"Oh, don't explain the reasons to me as if I were a baby," Sylvia burst in. "The proposition of the Foreign Office is self-evident in its general application. My point is with you personally. You are not a professional bureaucrat who depends for his living on his capacity for dehumanizing himself. In this case you have a special reason to exercise your rights and your duties as an amateur. You are as positive as you can ever hope to be positive about anything, even your absurd positivist creed, that while no harm can result to your country, a great mercy will be conferred upon an individual as the result of enlightened action."

"It is precisely this introduction of the personal element," Philip said, "that confirms me in refusing your request. You are taking advantage of--our--of knowing me to gain your point. As a stranger you would not stand the least chance of doing this, and you have no business to make the matter a personal one. You don't seem to realize what such a proceeding would involve. It is not merely a question of issuing a pa.s.sport as pa.s.sports used to be issued before the war on the applicant's bare word. A whole set of searching questions has to be answered in writing, and you ask me to put my name to a tissue of lies.

Go back to England yourself. You have done your best for this girl, and you must bow before circ.u.mstances. She has reached Rumania, and if she does not try to leave it, she will be perfectly all right."

"But have you appreciated what I told you about this man who has just arrived? He's a German-Swiss, and if he's not a spy, he has all the makings of one. Suppose he gets hold of Queenie again? Can't you see that on the lowest ground of material advantage you are justified--more than justified, you owe it to your country to avoid the risk of creating another enemy?"

"My dear Sylvia," said Philip, more impatiently than he had spoken yet, "it is none of my business to interfere with potential agents of the enemy. I have quite enough to do to keep pace with the complete article. If your little friend is in danger of being turned into a spy, it seems to me that you have stated the final argument against granting your request."

"If she were with me, she could never become a spy; but if I were to leave her helpless here, anything might happen. I am struggling for this child's soul, Philip, more bitterly than I ever struggled for my own.

Your mind is occupied with the murder of human bodies: my mind is obsessed with the destruction of human souls."

"Well, if I accept your own definition of your att.i.tude," Philip answered, "perhaps you will admit that logically a pa.s.sport occupies itself with the body, and that Christians do not consider nationality necessary to salvation. I can't make out your exalted frame of mind. You used to be rather sensible on this subject. But if, as I gather, you have taken refuge in that common weakness of humanity--religion--let me recommend you to find therein the remedy for your friend's future."

"Yes, I suppose logically you've scored," Sylvia said, slowly.

"But please don't think I want to score," Philip went on in a distressed voice. "Please understand that for me to refuse is torture. I've often wondered about a judge's emotions when he puts on the black cap; but since I've faded out of real life into this paper world I've worn myself out with worrying over private griefs and miseries. It's only because I feel that, if every one on our side does not martyr himself for a year or so, the future of the world will be handed over to this kind of thing; and that is an unbearable thought."

"You're very optimistic about the effect upon your own side," Sylvia said. "Have you such faith in humanity as to suppose that this war will cure it more radically than all the wars that have gone before? I doubt it. When I listened to our arguments this afternoon, I began to wonder if either side is fighting for anything but a sterile nominalism. I can't argue any more. It's not your fault, Philip. You lack the creative instinct. I'll fight out this Queenie business by myself without invoking state aid. I am rather ashamed of myself, really. I feel as if I'd been compelled to ask a policeman the way. Perhaps I've got everything out of proportion. Women usually manage to do that, somehow.

There must be something very satisfying about personal conflict--bayonet to bayonet, I mean: but even in the trenches I suppose men get taken out and shot for cowardice. Even there you wouldn't escape from the grim abstract heartlessness that hangs like a fog over a generalized humanity--generalized is doubly appropriate in this connection. What a wretched thing man is in the ma.s.s and how rare and wonderful in the individual! The ma.s.s creates that arch-bureaucrat, G.o.d, and the individual seeks the heart of Christ. Good-by, Philip, I'm sorry you look so ill. I'm afraid I've tired you. No, no," she added, seeing that he was bracing himself up to talk about themselves. "This wasn't really the personal intrusion you accuse me of making. We were never very near to one another, and we are more remote than ever now."

"But what about your own visa?" he asked.

"It's no use to me at present. When I want it, I'll apply in the morning to Mr. Mathers and come for it in the afternoon, most correctly. I promise to attempt no more breaches in the formality of your office. By the way, one favor I would ask: please don't come to the Trianon. You wouldn't understand the argot in my songs, and if you did you wouldn't understand my being able to sing them. Get better."

"Yes, I'm taking Sanatogen," Philip said, hopefully. At this moment Miss Johnstone entered with a cup on a small tray, which, just escaping being la.s.soed by one of her chains, was set down on his desk.

"I'm afraid I haven't got it quite so smooth as Miss Henson does," said Miss Johnstone.

"Oh, never mind, please. It was so kind of you to remember."

"Well, I didn't think you ought to miss it on Miss Henson's day off."

Sylvia waved her hand and left him with Miss Johnstone; he seemed to be hesitating between the injury to her feelings if he did not take the lumpy mixture and the harm to his digestion if he did.

"Even offices are subject to the clash of temperament on temperament,"

said Sylvia to herself. "A curious thing really that Philip should be prepared to choke himself over a cup of badly mixed Sanatogen rather than wound that young woman's feelings, and yet that he should be able to refuse me what I asked him to do this afternoon."

She nodded to Mr. Mathers as she pa.s.sed through the outer office, who jumped up and opened the door for her. He had evidently been impressed by the length of her interview with the O.C.P.T.N.C. in Bucharest.

"I believe I've had the pleasure of hearing you sing," he murmured. "Are you staying long at the Trianon?"

"I hope not," she answered.

"Quite, quite," he murmured, nodding his head with an air of deep comprehension, while he bowed her forth with marked courtesy.

The fog had cleared away when Sylvia started to walk back to her hotel, and though it was still very hot, there was a sparkle in the air that made it seem fresher than it really was. The argument with Philip had braced her point of view to accord with the lightening of the weather; it had thrown her so entirely back upon her own resources that the notion of ever having supposed for an instant that he could help her in the fight for Queenie now appeared ludicrous. Although her arguments had been unavailing, and although at the end Philip had actually defeated her by the very logic on which she prided herself, she nevertheless felt wonderfully elated at the prospect of a struggle with Zozo and no longer in the least sensible of that foreboding dejection which was lying so heavily upon her heart when she left Lottie's house three hours ago.