Sylvia & Michael Part 26

Mr. Porter was a stout man of about sixty, who was sometimes rather like Mr. Pickwick in appearance, but generally bore a greater resemblance to Tweedledum. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of pepper-and-salt check and wore a glossy collar with a full black cravat, in which a fine diamond twinkled modestly; a clear, somewhat florid face with that priestly glimmer of a very close shave, well-brushed boots, white spats, and a positive impression of having clean cuffs completed a figure that exhaled all the more prosperity and cheerfulness because the background of the hotel was so unsuitable.

"Going to introduce myself. Ha-ha! Apsley Porter's my name. Well known hereabouts. Ha-ha! Didn't expect to meet a compatriot in these times at Avereshti. Ugly little hole. Business before pleasure, though, by George! I don't see why pleasure should be left out in the cold altogether. What are you going to have? Ordered a Martini here the other day. 'What's that?' I said to the scoundrel who served it. 'Martini?

Pah! Almost as dangerous as a Martini-Henry,' I said. Ha-ha-ha-ha! But of course the blackguard didn't understand me. Going to have dinner with me, I hope. I've ordered a few special dishes. Always bring my own champagne with me in case of accidents. I forced them to get ice here, though. Ha-ha! By George, I did. I said that if there wasn't ice whenever I came I should close down one of the princ.i.p.al wells I control. Did I tell you my name? Ah, glad I did. I've got a deuced bad habit of talking away without introducing myself. Here comes the villain with your c.o.c.ktail. You must gin and bear it. What? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Sylvia liked Mr. Porter and accepted his invitation to dinner. He was distressed to hear that a friend had been staying with her in the hotel so recently as this morning and that he had had the bad luck to miss entertaining her.

"What, another little Englishwoman in Avereshti? By George! what a pity I didn't turn up yesterday! I sha'n't forgive myself. Come along, waiter. Hurry up with that champagne. Fancy! Another jolly little Englishwoman and I missed her. Too bad!"

There was irony in meeting upon the vigil of her return to England this Englishman redolent of the Monico. Sylvia had spent so much of her time intimately with people at the other pole of pleasure that she had forgotten how to talk to this type and could only respond with monosyllables to his boisterous a.s.saults upon the present. He was so much like a fine afternoon in London that she sunned herself, as it were, in his effluence, and let her senses occupy themselves with the noise of the traffic, as if she had suddenly been transplanted to the Strand and was finding the experience immediately on top of Avereshti pleasant, but rather bewildering. And now he was talking about the war.

"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all. Pity about the Dardanelles. Great pity, but we had no luck. They are making a great fuss here over this coming Austrian attack upon Serbia. Don't believe in it. Sha'n't believe in it until it happens. But it won't happen, and if it does happen--waiter, where's that champagne?--if it does happen, it won't alter the course of the war. Not a bit of it. I'm an optimist. And in times like these I consider that optimism is of as much use to my country at my age as a rifle would have been if I were a younger man.

Pessimism in times like these is a poison."

"But isn't optimism apt to be an intoxicant?" Sylvia suggested.

She felt inclined to impress upon Mr. Porter the difference between facing misfortune with money and without it, and she told him a few of her adventures in the past year, winding up with an account of the behavior of the proprietor of this very hotel.

"You don't mean to say old Andrescu refused to serve you with anything to eat?"

The notion seemed to shake Mr. Porter to the depths of his being.

"Why, I never heard anything like it! Waiter, go and tell M. Andrescu to come and speak to me at once. I shall give him a piece of my mind."

The jovial curves of his face had all hardened: his bright little eyes were like steel: even the dimple in his chin had disappeared in the contraction of his mouth. When Andrescu came in, he began to abuse him in rapid Rumanian, while his complexion turned from pink to crimson, and from crimson in waves of color to a uniform purple. In the end he stopped talking for a moment, and the proprietor begged Sylvia's intercession.

"That's the way to deal with rascally hotelkeepers," said Mr. Porter, fanning himself with a red-and-yellow bandana handkerchief and drinking two gla.s.ses of champagne.

"What annoyed me most of all," he added, "was that his behavior should have made me miss the chance of asking another jolly little English girl to dinner. Too bad!"

Sylvia had not told him more than the bare outlines of the story; she had not confided in him about Florilor or the sale of her bag, or the fact that she had lost Queenie forever. Her tale could have seemed not much more than a tale of temporary inconvenience, and she was therefore only amused when Mr. Porter deduced from it as the most important result his own failure to entertain Queenie.

After dinner she and her host sat talking for a while, or rather she sat listening to his narratives of holidays spent in England, which evidently appealed to him as a much more vital part of his career than his success in the Rumanian oil-fields. When, about eleven o'clock, she got up to take her leave and go to bed, he expressed his profound dismay at the notion of thus breaking up a jolly evening.

"Tell you what we'll do," he announced. "We'll make a night of it. We will, by George! we will! A night of it. We'll have half a dozen bottles put on ice and take them up to my room. I can talk all night on champagne. Now don't say no. It's a patriotic duty. By George! it's a patriotic duty when two English people meet in a G.o.d-forsaken place like this; it's a patriotic duty to make a night of it. Eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die."

Sylvia was feeling weary enough, but the fatuous talk had cheered her by its sheer inanity, and the thought of going to bed in that haunted room--her will was strong, but the memory of what she had endured for Queenie was not entirely quenched--and of perhaps not being able to sleep was too dismal. She might just as well help this amiable old buffoon's illusion that champagne was the elixir of eternal life and that pleasure was nothing but laughing loudly enough.

"All right," said Sylvia. "But I'd rather we made the night of it in my room. I'll get into a wrapper and make myself comfortable, and when dawn breaks I can tumble into bed."

Mr. Porter hesitated a moment. "Right you are, my dear girl. Of course.

Waiter! Where's the ruffian hidden himself?"

"I'll leave you to make the arrangements. I shall be ready in about a quarter of an hour," Sylvia said.

She left him and went up-stairs.

"I believe the silly old fool thought I was making overtures to him when I suggested we should make merry in my room," she laughed to herself.

"Oh dear, it shows how much one can tell and how little of oneself need be revealed in the telling of it. Stupid old a.s.s! But rather pleasant in a way. He's like finding an old Christmas number of the _Graphic_--colored heartiness, conventional mirth, reality mercifully absent, and _O mihi prteritos_ printed in Gothic capitals on the cover.

I suppose these pre-war figures still abound in England. And I'm not sure he isn't right in believing that his outlook on life is worth preserving as long as possible. Timbered houses, crusted port, and d.i.c.kens are nearer to fairyland than anything else that's left nowadays.

To what old age will this blackened, mutilated, and agonized generation grow? Efficiency and progress have not spared the monuments of bygone art except to imprison them in libraries, museums, and iron railings.

Will it spare the Englishman? Or will the generations of a century hence read of him only, and murmur, 'This was a Man'? Will they praise him as the last and n.o.blest individual, turning with repulsion and remorse from the sight of themselves and their fellows, the product of the triumphant herd eternally sowing where it does not reap? Night thoughts of the young on perceiving a relic of insular grandeur in an exceptionally fine state of preservation--preserved in oil! And here he comes to interrupt my sad soliloquy."

The night pa.s.sed away as the evening had pa.s.sed away. Mr. Porter sustained his joviality in a fas.h.i.+on that would have astounded Sylvia, if all capacity for being astounded had not been exhausted in watching him drink champagne. It was incredible not so much that his head could withstand the fumes as that his body, fat though it was, should be expansive enough to contain the cubic quant.i.ty of liquor. It was four o'clock before he had finished the last drop and was shaking Sylvia's hand in cordial farewell.

"Haven't enjoyed an evening so much for months. By George! I haven't.

Ha-ha-ha! Well, you'll forgive an old man--always accuse myself of being old when the wine is low, but I shall be as young as a chicken again after three hours' sleep--you'll excuse an old man. Little present probably d.a.m.ned useful in these hard times. Ha-ha-ha! Under your pillow.

Good girl. Never made me feel an old man by expecting me to make love.

I've often set out to make a night of it, and only succeeded in making a d.a.m.ned fool of myself. Sixty-four next month. Youth's the time!

Ha-ha-ha! Good-by. G.o.d bless you. Sha'n't see you in the morning. By George! I _shall_ have a busy day."

He shook her warmly by the hand, avoided the ice-stand with a grave bow, and left her with a smell of cigar-smoke. Under the pillow she found four five-hundred-franc notes.

"Really," Sylvia exclaimed, "I might be excused for thinking myself a leading character in a farce by fate. I fail to make a halfpenny by offering myself when the necessity is urgent, and make two thousand francs by not embarra.s.sing an old gentleman's impotence. Meanwhile, it's too late--it's just too late. But I shall be able to buy back my golden bag. I suppose fate thinks that's as good a curtain as I'm ent.i.tled to in a farce."

Sylvia left Avereshti next morning with a profound conviction that, whatever the future held, nothing should induce her to put foot in that town again. There was some satisfaction in achieving even so much sense of finality, negative though the achievement might be.

"I don't advise you to go to Dedeagatch," said Mr. Mathers when Sylvia presented herself at the pa.s.sport-office for the recommendation for a visa. "I may tell you in confidence that the situation in Bulgaria is very grave--very grave indeed. Anything may happen this week. The feeling here is very tense, too. If you are determined to take the risk of being held up in Bulgaria, I counsel you to travel by Rustchuk, Gorna Orechovitza, and Sofia to Nish. From Nish you'll get down to Salonika, and from there to the Piraeus. At the same time I strongly advise you to keep away from Bulgaria. With the mobilization, pa.s.senger traffic is liable to be very uncertain."

"But if I go back through Russia I may find it is just as hard to get back to England. No, no. I'll risk Bulgaria. To-day's Tuesday the 28th.

When can I have my visa?"

"Well, strictly speaking, it's already too late to-day to entertain applications, but as you were a friend of Mr. Iredale, I'll ask Mr.

Abernethy to put it through for you. If you come in to-morrow morning at ten, I will give you a letter for the Consulate. There will be the usual fee to pay there. Oh dear me, you haven't brought the four photographs that are necessary. I must have them, I'm afraid. Two for us, one for the Consulate, and one for the French authorities. The Italians don't insist upon a photograph at present. I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to put it through for you to-day. The French are very strict and insist on a minimum of four days. But in view of the Bulgarian crisis I'll get them to relax the rule. Luckily one of the French officers is a friend of mine--a very nice fellow."

Three days elapsed before Sylvia was finally equipped with her pa.s.sport _vise_ for Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Italy, France, and England. The representatives of the first two nations, who seemed most immediately concerned with her journey, made the least bother; the representative of Italy, the nation that seemed least concerned with it, made the most.

While she was waiting for the result of the acc.u.mulated contemplation upon her age, her s.e.x, her lineaments, and her past history, Sylvia bought back her gold bag for eighteen hundred francs, which left her with just over fifteen hundred francs for the journey--none too much, but she should no longer have any scruples in telegraphing to England for help if she found herself stranded.

On Friday afternoon she called for the last time at the pa.s.sport-office to get a letter of introduction that Mr. Mathers had insisted on writing for her to a friend of his in the American Tobacco Company at Cavalla.

"You're not likely to go there," he said, "but if you do, it may be useful."

The clerk handed her the letter, and there was something magnificently protective in the accompanying gesture; he might have been handing her a personal letter to the Prime Minister and giving her an a.s.surance that the Foreign Secretary would personally meet her at Waterloo and see that she did not get into the wrong tube.

When Sylvia was leaving the office, Maud Moffat came in, at the sight of whom Mr. Mathers's spectacled benevolence turned to an aspect of hate for the whole of humanity.

"It's too late, madam, to-day. Nothing can be done until further inquiries have been made," he said, sharply.

"Too late be d.a.m.ned!" Maud shouted. "I'm not going to be---- about any longer. My pa.s.sport's been stolen and I want another. I'm an honest English girl who's been earning her living on the Continent and I want to go home and see my poor old mother. Perhaps you'll say next that I'm not English?"

"n.o.body says that you're not English," Mr. Mathers replied through set teeth. "And please control your language."

At this moment Maud recognized Sylvia.

"Oh, you've come back, have you? I suppose you didn't have any difficulty with your pa.s.sport. Oh no, people as frequents the company of German spies can get pa.s.sports for nothing, but me who's traveled for seven years on the Continent without ever having any one give me so much as a funny look, me, I repeat, gets cross-examined and messed about as if I was a murderer instead of an artiste. Yes, war's a fine thing for some people," she went on. "Young fellows that ought to be fighting for their country instead of bullying poor girls from the other side of a table thoroughly enjoys _theirselves_. Nice thing when an honest English girl--and not a German spy--can't mislay her pa.s.sport without being--"

"I must repeat, madam," Mr. Mathers interrupted, "that the circ.u.mstances have to be gone into."

"Circ.u.mstances? I'm in very good circ.u.mstances, thank you. But I sha'n't be if you keep me mucking about in Bucharest so as I forfeit my engagement at the White Tower, Saloniker. You'll look very funny, Mr.