Sylvia & Michael Part 24

"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 debasing the 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 pa.s.sport-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 a shop a.s.sistant might offer one shade of ribbon in the place of another no longer in stock.

Sylvia left the pa.s.sport-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 att.i.tude 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 grat.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 child whom 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 pa.s.sing children, and she woke up with a s.h.i.+ver 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 d.a.m.nable 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 G.o.d in the sacrifice of the Ma.s.s 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 n.o.bility. 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 natural object 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 wors.h.i.+p lay outside the destructive logic of an unmoved critic; the circ.u.mstances in which the gift had been made were exceptional and her att.i.tude 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion to bequeath to the child the sum of her own experience. My feeling about Queenie partakes of the pa.s.sionate guardians.h.i.+p with which a loose woman so often s.h.i.+elds 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 a.s.surance 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 superst.i.tion, 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 G.o.d."

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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 she _must_ eat; and suddenly she found herself sitting at a table outside a cafe, 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 cafe 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 pa.s.s 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 Ma.s.s was still pungent.

There was the same sort of atmosphere that exists in a theater between a matinee and an evening performance; the emotion of the departed wors.h.i.+pers was mingled with the expectation of more wors.h.i.+pers to come.

Sylvia sat contemplating 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 a.s.surance of continuity, or rather with the a.s.surance 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 that what 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 am beginning 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 wors.h.i.+pers 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! G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+pers to receive the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Generally, that strangely wistful concession to the pathetic side of human nature had not made a deep appeal to Sylvia's instinct for wors.h.i.+p; 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 G.o.d. In such a state of mind faith shrank to infatuate speculation, hope swelled to arrogance, and even love s.h.i.+vered in a chill and viewless futility, until the mystical sympathy of other souls, the humblest of whom was a secret only known to G.o.d, led her to identify herself with them and to cry with them:

_"O salutaris Hostia,_ _Quae cli 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 G.o.d.

"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 gla.s.s.

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 superst.i.tious 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 G.o.dmother. While she was waiting in the _salle d'attente_ and 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 a.s.sailing 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 of the sea. You English are lost away from the sea. I a.s.sure 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 be the 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. G.o.d 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."