Sylvia & Michael Part 23

The young man's face clouded with the disappointment; his features seemed to thicken, so much did their fineness owe to the vitality of sensual antic.i.p.ation.

"Perhaps to-morrow, then?"

"No, I don't think she will ever be well enough," Sylvia continued. Then abruptly she put her will to the jump and cleared it breathlessly.

"You'll have to make the best of me as a subst.i.tute."

Afterward when the reality that stood at the back of this scene had died away Sylvia used to laugh at the remembrance of the alarm in Florilor's expression when she made this announcement. She must have made it in a way so utterly different from any solicitation that he had ever known.

At the moment she was absurdly positive that she had offered herself to him with as much freedom and as much allurement as his experience was able to conjecture in a woman. When, therefore, he showed by his temper that he had no wish to accept the offer, it never struck her that, even had he felt the least desire, her manner of encouragement would have frozen it. A secondary emotion was one of swift pride in the detachment of her position, which was brought home to her by the complete absence of any chagrin--such as almost every woman would have felt--at the obvious dismay caused by her proposal to subst.i.tute herself for her friend.

"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 pose 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 as belonging 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 impa.s.sable that she could scarcely think of it in other terms than those of s.p.a.ce. It had positively lost the nebulous outlines of time and acquired in their stead the sharp materialism of hostile s.p.a.ce. 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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 pa.s.sed 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 baton? Non! Vous baton! 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 pa.s.s 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 Rumanian oath 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. You _shall_ come 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 disfigured corpse, 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 pa.s.sed 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 of being 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 ident.i.ty 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 pa.s.sed 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 l.u.s.t 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 debas.e.m.e.nt of womanhood were regarded as sentimentalists: so were people who believed in h.e.l.l.