Sylvia & Michael Part 5

"Is this discussion worth while?" Sylvia asked, wearily.

"Am I ever to be allowed to get to sleep?" Madame Benzer demanded.

"I should like to sleep, too," protested the ma.s.seuse. "If I'm to get strong enough to resume work in November, I need all the sleep I can get. I'm not like a child that can sleep through anything."

"_I'm_ not asleep," cried Claudinette, shrilly. "And I'm very content that I'm not asleep. I adore to hear people talking in the night."

The nun begged for general silence, and the ward was stilled. Sylvia lay awake in a rage, listening to Madame Benzer and the ma.s.seuse while they turned over and over with sighs and groans and much creaking of their beds. At last, however, all except herself fell asleep; their united breathing seemed like the breathing of a large and placid beast. Behind the screens in that dim golden mist the pages of the nun's breviary whispered now instead of Miss Savage; the lamp before the image of the Virgin sometimes flickered and cast upon the insipid face subtle shadows that gave humanity to what by daylight looked like a large pale-blue fondant.

"Or should I say 'divinity'?" Sylvia asked herself.

She lay on her side staring at the image, which was the conventional representation of Our Lady of Lourdes with eyes upraised and hands clasped to heaven. Contemplated thus, the tawdry figure really acquired a supplicatory grace, and in the night, the imagination, dwelling upon this form, began to identify itself with the att.i.tude and to follow those upraised eyes toward an unearthly quest. Sylvia turned over on her other side with a perfectly conscious will not to be influenced externally by what she felt was an unworthy appeal. But when she had turned over she could not stay averted from the image; a restless curiosity to know if it was still upon its bracket seized her, and she turned back to her contemplation.

"How ridiculous all those stories are of supernatural winkings and blinkings!" she thought. "Why, I could very easily imagine the most acrobatic behavior by that pathetic little blue figure. And yet it has expressed the aspirations of millions of wounded hearts."

The thought was overwhelming: the imagination of what this figure reduplicated innumerably all over the earth had stood for descended upon Sylvia from the heart of the darkness about her, and she shuddered with awe.

"If I scoff at that," she thought, "I scoff at human tears. And why shouldn't I scoff at human tears? Because I should be scoffing at my own tears. And why not at my own?"

"You dare not," the darkness sighed.

Sylvia crept out of bed and, bending over the governess, waked her with soft rea.s.surances, as one wakes a child.

"Forgive me," she whispered, "for the way I spoke. But, oh, do believe me when I tell you that love like that is terrible. I understand the dullness of your profession, and if you like I will take you with me on my gipsy life when we leave the hospital. You can amuse yourself with seeing the world; but if you want love, you must demand it with your head high. Every little governess who behaves like you creates another harlot."

"Did you wake me up to insult me?" demanded Miss Savage.

"No, my dear, you don't understand me. I'm not thinking of what you make yourself. _You_ will pay for that. I'm thinking of some baby now at its mother's breast, for whose d.a.m.nation you will be responsible by giving another proof to man of woman's weakness, by having kindled in him another l.u.s.t."

"I think you'd do better to bother about your own soul instead of mine,"

said Miss Savage. "Please let me go to sleep again. When I wanted to talk, you pretended to be shocked. I asked you if you were a Catholic, and you told me you were nothing. I particularly avoided hurting your susceptibilities. The least you can do is to be polite in return."

Sylvia went back to bed, and, thinking over what the governess had said, decided that, after all, she was right: she ought to bother with her own soul first.

Three weeks later Sylvia was told that she was now fit to leave the hospital. The nuns charged her very little for their care; but when she walked out of the door she had only about eighty rubles in the world.

With rather a heavy heart she drove to Mere Gontran's _pension_.

CHAPTER II

The _pension_ was strangely silent when Sylvia returned to it; the panic of war had stripped it bare of guests. Although she had known that Carrier and the English acrobats were gone and had more or less made up her mind that most of the girls would also be gone, this complete abandonment was tristful. Mere Gontran's influence had always pervaded the _pension_; even before her illness Sylvia had been affected by that odd personality and had often been haunted by the unusualness of the whole place; but the disconcerting atmosphere had always been quickly and easily neutralized by the jolly mountebanks and Bohemians with whose point of view and jokes and noise she had been familiar all her life.

Sylvia and the other guests had so often laughed together at Mere Gontran's eccentricity, at the tumble-down house, at the tangled garden, at the muttering handmaid, and at the animals in the kitchen, that through their careless merriment the _pension_ had come to be no more than one of the incidents of the career they followed, something to talk of when they swirled on and lodged in another corner of the earth's surface. There would be no city in Europe at which in some cabaret one would not find a _copain_ with whom to laugh over the remembrance of Mere Gontran's talking collie. But how many of these gay mountebanks dispersed by the panic of war would not have been affected by the _Pension Gontran_, had they returned to it like this, alone?

The garden, with its rank autumnal growth, was more like a jungle than ever; the unpopulous house rea.s.serted its very self, and there was not a crack in the stucco nor a broken tile nor a warped plank that did not now maintain a haunting significance. The Tartar servant with her unintelligible mutterings, her head and face m.u.f.fled in a stained green scarf, her bent form, her feet in pattens clapping like hoofs, the animals that sniffed at her heels, and her sleeping-cupboard beneath the stairs heaped with faded rags, seemed an incarnation of the house's reality. For a moment, when Sylvia was making signs to her that she should fetch her mistress from where, buried in docks and nettles, she was performing one of her queer, solitary operations of horticulture, she was inclined to turn round and search anywhere else in Petrograd for a lodging rather than expose herself to the nighttime here. But the consciousness of her uncertain position soon scattered such fancies, and she decided that the worst of them would not be so unpleasant as to find herself at the mercy of the material horrors of a fourth-rate hotel while she was waiting for vigor to resume work: at any rate, Mere Gontran was kind-hearted and English. As Sylvia reached this conclusion, the mistress of the _pension_, followed by two cats, a hen, two pigeons, a goat, and a dog, came to greet her; putting the table-fork with which she had been gardening into the pocket of her overall, she warmly embraced Sylvia, which was like being flicked on the cheek by a bramble when driving.

"Why, Sylvia, I _am_ glad to see you again. Everybody's gone.

Everything's closed. No more vodka allowed to be sold in public, though, of course, it can always be got. The war's upon us, and I'm sowing turnips under Jupiter in case we starve. All your things are quite safe.

Your room hasn't been touched since you left it. I'll tell Anna to make your bed."

Anna was not the maid-servant's real name; but one of Mere Gontran's peculiarities was, that though she could provide an individual name for every bird or beast in the place without using the same one twice, all her servants had to be called Anna in memory of her first cook of thirty years ago--a repet.i.tion that could hardly have been due to sentiment, because the first Anna, when she ran away to be married, took with her as much of her mistress's plate as she could carry.

"Hasn't my bed been made all these weeks?" Sylvia asked, with a smile.

"Why should it have been made?" Mere Gontran replied. "There hasn't been a single new-comer since you were taken off in the ambulance."

Sylvia asked if the drunken officer had done much damage.

"Oh no; it was quite easy to extinguish the fire. He burned half the tool-shed and frightened the guinea-pigs; that was all. I was quite relieved when war was declared, because otherwise the police would probably have taken away my license; but there again, if they had taken it away, it wouldn't have mattered much, for I haven't had any lodgers since; but there again I've been able to use Carrier's room for the owls, and they're much happier in a nice room than they were nailed up to the side of the house in a packing-case. If you hear them hooting in the night, don't be frightened: you must remember that owls, being night birds, can't be expected to keep quiet in the night, and when they hoot it shows they're feeling at home."

"There's nothing in the acrobats' room?" Sylvia asked, anxiously; the part.i.tion between her and them had been thin.

"Such a reek of scent," Mere Gontran exclaimed. "Phewff! Benjamin went in after they'd gone, and he regularly shuddered. Cats are very sensitive to perfumes, as no doubt you've observed."

"Mere Gontran," Sylvia began. "I want to explain my position."

"Don't do that," she interrupted. "Wait till the evening and you shall throw the cards. What's the good of antic.i.p.ating trouble? If the cards are unfavorable to any immediate enterprise, settle down and help me with the garden until they're favorable again. When favorable, make the journey."

Sylvia, however, insisted on antic.i.p.ating the opinion of the cards and explained to Mere Gontran that it would be impossible for her to attempt any work for at least another six weeks on account of her weakness, and also because of her short hair, which, though it was growing rapidly with close, chestnut curls, was still remarkably short.

Mere Gontran asked what day it had been cut, and Sylvia said she did not know, because it had been cut when she was unconscious.

"Depend upon it they cut it when the moon was waning."

"I hope not," said Sylvia.

"I hope not, too. I sincerely hope not," said Mere Gontran, fervently.

"It would be serious?" Sylvia suggested.

"Anything might happen. Anything!"

Mere Gontran's vivid blue eyes fixed a far horizon lowering with misfortune, and Sylvia took the opportunity of her temporary abstraction to go on with the tale of present woes.

"Money?" Mere Gontran exclaimed. "Put it in your pocket. You were overcharged all the weeks you were with me when you were well. Deducting overcharges, I can give you six weeks' board and lodging now."

Sylvia protested, but she would take no denial.

"At any rate," said Sylvia, finally, "I'll avail myself of your goodness until I can communicate with people in England and get some money sent out to me."

"Useless to communicate with anybody anywhere," said Mere Gontran. "No posts. No telegraphs. Everything stopped by the war. And that's where modern inventions have brought us. If you want to communicate with your friends in England, you'll have to communicate through the spirits."

"Isn't that rather an uncertain method, too?" Sylvia asked.

"Everything's uncertain," Mere Gontran proclaimed, triumphantly. "Life's uncertain. Death's uncertain. But never mind, we'll talk to Gontran about it to-night. I was talking to him last night, and I told him to be ready for another communication to-night. Now it's time to eat."