Sylvia & Michael Part 7

"You heard him trying to talk?" she asked.

"He certainly made a noise," Sylvia admitted.

There was a loud rap on the air--an unmistakable rap, for the five cats which had remained in the room all twitched their ears toward the sound.

"Gone for the night," said Mere Gontran. "And he's very angry about something. I suppose this daisy that d.i.c.k picked means something important to him, though we can't understand. Perhaps he'll come back later on when I've gone to bed and tell me more about it."

"Mere Gontran," said Sylvia, earnestly, "do you really believe in spirits? Do you really think we can talk with the dead?"

"Of course I do. Listen! They're all round us. If you want to feel the dead, walk up the garden with me now. You'll feel the spirits whizzing round you like moths."

"Oh, I wonder, I wonder if it's true," Sylvia cried. "I can't believe it, and yet...."

"Listen to me," said Mere Gontran, solemnly. "Thirty-five years ago I left England to come to Petersburg. I was twenty years old and very beautiful. You can imagine how I was run after by men. You've seen something of the way men run after women here. Well, one summer I went with my family to Finland, and I foolishly arranged to meet Prince Paul in the forest after supper. He was a fine, handsome young man, as bold and as wicked as the devil himself. But there again, I haven't got to give details. Anyway, he said to me: 'What are you afraid of? Your parents?' I can hear his laugh now after all these years, and I remember the bough of a tree was just waving very slightly and the moonlight kept glinting in and out of his eyes. I thought of my parents in England when he said this, and I remember challenging them in a sort of defiant way to interfere. You see, I'd never got on well at home. I was a very wayward girl and they were exceptionally old-fas.h.i.+oned. And when Prince Paul held me in his arms I reproached them. It's difficult to explain, but I was trying to conjure them up before me to see if the thought of home would have any effect. And then Prince Paul laughed and said, 'Or another lover?' Now with the exception of flirting with Prince Paul and Prince George, the two eldest sons, I'd never thought much about lovers.

Even in those days I was more interested in animals, really, and of course I was very fond of children. But when Prince Paul said, 'Or another lover?' I saw Gontran leaning against a tree in the forest. He was looking at me, and I pushed Prince Paul away and ran back toward the house.

"Now when this happened I'd never seen my husband. He was working at the Emba.s.sy even in those days, and never went to Finland in his life. The next day the family was called back to Petersburg on account of the death of the grandmother, and I met Gontran at some friends'! We were married about six months afterward.

"So there again, if I could see Gontran when he was alive before I'd ever met him, you don't suppose I'm not going to believe that I've seen him any number of times since he was dead? Until quite recently when he reached this new plane, we talked together as comfortably as when he was still alive and sitting in that chair."

Sylvia looked at the chair uneasily.

"It's only since he's met this d.i.c.k that the communications are so unsatisfactory. Why, of course I know what's happened," cried Mere Gontran, in a rapture of discovery. "Why didn't I think of it sooner?

It's the war!"

"The war?" Sylvia echoed.

"Aren't there thousands of spirits being set free every day? Just as all the communications on earth have broken down, in the same way they must have broken down with the spirits. Fancy my not having understood that before! Well, aren't I dense?"

Five raps of surpa.s.sing loudness signaled upon the air.

"Gontran's delighted," she exclaimed. "He was always delighted when I found out something for myself."

Soon after this Mere Gontran, having gathered up from the crowded table a variety of implements that could not possibly serve any purpose that night, wandered out into the garden, followed by Samuel and the five cats; Sylvia thought of her haunted pa.s.sage through the dark autumnal growth of leaves toward that strange room she occupied, and went up-stairs to bed rather tremulously. Yet on the whole she was glad that Mere Gontran left her like this every night at the _pension_ with the Tartar servant in her cupboard under the stairs, and with the three ungainly sons, who used to sleep in a barrack at the end of the long pa.s.sage on the ground floor. Sylvia had peeped into this room when the young men were out and had been surprised by its want of resemblance to a sleeping-chamber. There were, to be sure, three beds, but they had the appearance of beds that had been long stowed away in a remote part of a warehouse for disused furniture: the whole room was like that, with nothing human appertaining to it save the smell of stale tobacco-smoke.

Yet, really, now that the migratory guests had gone on their way, it would have been even more surprising to find in the _pension_ signs of humanity, so much had its permanent inhabitants, both animals and human beings, approximated to one another. The animals were a little more like human beings; the human beings were a little more like animals: the margin between men and animals was narrow enough in the most distinguis.h.i.+ng circ.u.mstances, and at the _pension_ these circ.u.mstances were lacking.

Before Sylvia undressed she opened the window of her bedroom and looked down into the moonlit garden. Mere Gontran's light was already lit, but she was still wandering about outside with her cats. Eccentric though she was, Sylvia thought, she was nevertheless typical. Looking back at the people who had crossed her path, she could remember several adumbrations of Mere Gontran--superst.i.tious women with a love of animals. Of such a kind had been Mrs. Meares; and attached to every cabaret and theater there had always been an elderly woman who had served as commission agent to the careless _artistes_, whether it was a question of selling themselves to a new lover or buying somebody else's old dress. These elderly women had invariably had the knack of telling fortunes with the cards, had been able to interpret dreams and omens, and had always been the slaves of dogs and birds. The superficial ascription of their pa.s.sion for animals would have been to a stifled or sterile maternity; but as with Mere Gontran and her three sons, Sylvia could recall that many of these elderly women had been the prey of their children. If one went back beyond one's actual experience of this type, it was significant that the witches of olden times were always credited with the possession of familiar spirits in the shape of animals; she could recollect no history of a witch that did not include her black cat. Was that, too, a stifled maternal instinct, or would it not be truer to find in the magic arts they practised nothing but a descent from human methods of intelligence to those of animals, a descent (if indeed it could be called a descent) from reason to instinct?

Here was Mere Gontran fulfilling in every particular the old conventional idea of a witch, and might not all this communion with spirits be nothing but the communion of an animal with scents and sounds imperceptible to civilized man? It could be a kind of atavism, really, a return to disused senses, so long obsolete that their revival had a supernatural effect. Sylvia thought of the unusual success that Mere Gontran always had with her gardening; no matter where she sowed in the great dark jungle, she gathered better vegetables than a gardener, who would have wasted his energy in wrestling with the weeds that seemed to forbid any growth but their own. Mere Gontran always paid greater attention to the aspects of the moon and the planets than to the laws of horticulture, and her gardening gave the impression of being nothing but a meaningless ritual: yet it was fruitful. Might there not be some laws of attraction of which in the course of dependence upon his own inventions man had lost sight, some laws of which animals were cognizant and by which many of the marvels of instinct might be explained? Beyond witches and their familiar spirits were fauns and centaurs, more primitive manifestations of this communion between men and animals, with whom even the outward shape was still a hybrid. Had scientists in pursuing the antics of molecules and atoms beneath the microscope become blind to the application of their theories? Might not astronomy have displaced astrology unjustly? Sylvia wished she had read more widely and more deeply, that she might know if her speculations were, after all, nothing but the commonplaces of empirical thought. So much could be explained by this theory of attraction, not least of all the mystery of love and the inscrutable caprices of fortune.

Behold Mere Gontran out there in the garden, bobbing to the moon. Were all these gestures meaningless like an idiot's mutterings? And was even an idiot's muttering really meaningless? Behold Mere Gontran in the moonlit garden with cats: it would be hard to say that her behavior was more futile than theirs: they were certainly all enjoying themselves.

Sylvia was conscious of trying to arrive at an explanation of Mere Gontran that, while it allowed her behavior a certain amount of reasonableness, would prevent herself from accepting Mere Gontran's own explanation of it. There was something distasteful, something cheap and vulgar, in the conception of Gontran's spiritual existence as an infinite prolongation of his life upon earth; there was something radically fatuous in the imagination of him at the end of a ghostly telephone-wire still at the beck and call of human curiosity. If, indeed, in some mysterious way the essential Gontran was communicating with his wife, the translation of his will to communicate must be a subjective creation of hers; it was somehow ludicrous, and even unpleasant, to accept d.i.c.k's gathering of a daisy as a demonstration of the activity of mankind in another world; it was too much a finite conception altogether. Without hesitation Sylvia rejected spiritualism as a useful adventure for human intelligence. It was impossible to accept its more elaborate manifestations with bells and tambourines and materializing mediums, when one knew the universal instinct of mankind to lie; and in its simpler manifestations, as with Mere Gontran, where conscious or deliberate deceit was out of the question, it was merely a waste of time, being bound by the limitations of an individual soul that would always be abnormal and probably in most cases idiotic.

Sylvia pulled down the blind, and, leaving Mere Gontran to her nocturnal contemplation, went to bed.

Notwithstanding her abrupt rejection of spiritualism, Sylvia found, when she was in bed, that the incidents of the evening and the accessories of the house were affecting her to sleeplessness. That succession of raps declined to come within the natural explanation that she had attempted.

Were they due to some action of overcharged atmosphere, a kind of miniature thunderclap from the meeting of two so-called electrical currents generated by herself and Mere Gontran? Were they merely coincidental creakings of furniture in response to the warmth of the stove? Or had Mere Gontran mesmerized her into hearing raps that were never made? The cats had also heard them; but Mere Gontran's intimacy with her animals might well have established such a mental domination, even over them.

Naturally, with so much of her attention fixed upon the raps down-stairs, Sylvia began to fancy renewed rappings all round her in the darkness, and not merely rappings, but all sorts of nocturnal shufflings and sc.r.a.pings and whisperings and scratchings, until she had to relight her candle. The noises became less, but optical delusions were subst.i.tuted for tricks of hearing, and there was not a piece of furniture in the room that did not project from its outward form the sense of its independent reality. The wardrobe, for instance, seemed to challenge her with the thought that it was no longer the receptacle of her skirts and petticoats: it seemed to be a.s.serting its essential "wardrobishness" for being the receptacle for anything it liked. Sylvia set aside as too obviously and particularly silly the fancy that some one might be hidden in the wardrobe, but she could not get rid of the fancy that the piece of furniture had an existence outside her own consciousness. It was a mere Hans Andersen kind of fancy, but it took her back to remote childish apprehensions of inanimate objects, and after her meditation upon instinct she began to wonder whether, after all, the child was not quite right to be afraid of everything, which grown-ups called being afraid of nothing; and whether that escape from childish terrors which was called knowledge was nothing but a drug that blunted the perceptions and impeded the capacity for esteeming whatever approximated to truth. Yet why should a child be afraid of a wardrobe?

Why should a child be afraid of everything? Because in everything there was evil. Sylvia recalled--and in this room it was impossible to rid herself of that diabolic obsession--that the devil was known as the Father of Lies. Was not all evil anti-truth, and did not man, with his preference for anti-truth, create the material evil that was used as an argument against the divine ordering of matter? Paradoxical as it might seem, the worse ordered the world appeared the more did such an appearance of pessimism involve the existence of G.o.d. Whither led all this theosophistry? Toward the only perfect revelation of G.o.d in man: toward Jesus Christ.

How foolish it was to prefer to such divine speech the stammering of spiritualists. For the first time in her life Sylvia prayed deliberately that what she saw as in a gla.s.s darkly might be revealed to her more clearly; and while she prayed, there recurred from the hospital that whispered confession of the little English governess. It was impossible not to compare it with the story of Mere Gontran: the coincidence of the names and the similarity of the situation were too remarkable. Then why had Mere Gontran been granted what, if her story were accepted, was a supernatural intervention to save her soul? By her own admission she had practically surrendered to Prince Paul when she had the vision of her future husband. It seemed very unjust that Miss Savage should have been utterly corrupted and that Mere Gontran should have escaped corruption.

Sylvia went back in her thoughts to the time when she left Philip and abandoned herself to evil. Yet she had never really abandoned herself to evil, for she had never had any will to sin; the impulse had been to save her soul, not to lose it. It had been a humiliation of her body like pain, and a degradation of her personality like death. Pride which had cast her out had been her undoing. Looking back now, she could see that everything evil in her life had come from her pride: pride, by the way, was another attribute of the devil.

Sylvia had a longing to go back to England and talk to the Vicar of Green Lanes. From the past kept recurring isolated fragments of his sermons, texts mostly, which had lain all this while dormant within her consciousness, until the first one had sprung up to flower amid her delirium. In all her reading she had never paid proper attention to the doctrines of Christianity, and she longed to know if some of these dim facts after which she was now groping were not there set forth with transparent brightness and undeniable clarity. Good and evil must present themselves to every soul in a different way, and it was surely improbable that the acc.u.mulated experience of the human mind gathered together in Christian writings would not contain a parallel by which she might be led toward the truth, or at least be granted the vision of another lonely soul seeking for itself salvation.

The sense of her loneliness--physical, spiritual, and intellectual--overwhelmed Sylvia's aspirations. How could truth or faith or hope or love concern her until she could escape from this isolation?

She had always been lonely, even before she came to Russia; yet it had always been possible up to a point to cheat herself with the illusion of company, because the loneliness had been spiritual and intellectual, a loneliness that would be immanent in any woman whose life was ordered on her lines and who had failed to find what was vulgarly called the "right man." Now there was added to this the positive physical loneliness of her present position. It would have been bad enough to recover from an illness and wake in a familiar world; but to wake like this in a world transformed by war was indeed like waking in h.e.l.l. The remembrance of England, of people like Jack and Olive, was scarcely more distinct now than the remembrance of Lille; everything in her past had receded to the same immeasurable distance. News of England in any familiar form now reached Russia by such devious ways that in a period of violent daily events the papers had, when they did arrive, the air of some ancient, b.l.o.o.d.y, and fantastic chronicle. No letters came, because n.o.body could know where she was; her friends must think that she was dead, and must have accepted her death as the death of a sparrow amid the slaughter that was now proceeding. To-morrow she should send a cablegram, which might some day arrive, to say that she was alive and well. And then she had a revulsion from such a piece of egotism in the midst of a world's catastrophe. Who could wish to be reminded of Sylvia Scarlett at such a moment? Besides, if this determination of hers to begin her life over again was to be made effective, Sylvia Scarlett must preserve this isolation and accept it as the grace of G.o.d. How what had once been phrases were now endowed with life! Any communication between her and the people she had known would be like communication between Gontran and his wife; it would be the stammering of spiritualism comparable with that absurd d.i.c.k gathering his daisies in the Elysian Fields. Unless all these "soul-spasms," as once she would have called them, were the weakness of a woman who had been sick unto death, meaningless babblings without significance, her way would be indicated. Whatever the logicians might say, it was useless to expect faith, hope, or love unless one went to meet them: the will to receive them must outweigh the suspicion of receiving. Faith, like any other gift-horse, must not be looked in the mouth; pride had robbed her long enough, and for a change she would try humility.

When she made this decision, it seemed to Sylvia that what had formerly been evil and terrifying in the inanimate objects of her candle-lit room now lost their menacing aspect and wished her well. Suddenly she accused herself of the most outrageous pride in having all this time thought of nothing but herself, whose misery amid the universal havoc was indeed only the twittering of a sparrow. An apocalypse of the world's despair blazed upon her. This was not the time to lament her position, but rather to be glad very humbly that at the moment when she had been given this revelation of her pride, this return of herself, she was given also the moment to put the restored self to the test of action.

When Sylvia woke in the morning, her ideas that during the night had stated themselves with such convincing logic seemed less convincing; the first elation had been succeeded by the discouragement of the artist at seeing how ill his execution supports his intention. Riddles had solved themselves one after another with such ease in the darkness that when she had fallen asleep she had been musing with astonishment at the failure of human nature to appreciate the simplicity of life's intention; now all those darkling raptures burned like a sickly fire in the sunlight. Yet it was consoling to remember that the sun did not really put out the fire, and therefore that the fire kindled within herself last night might burn not less brightly and warmly for all its appearance of being extinguished by the sun of action.

These fiery metaphors were ill suited to the new day, which was wet enough to make Sylvia wonder if there had ever been so completely wet a day. The view from her window included a large piece of sky which lacked even thunder-clouds or wind to break its leaden monotony. The vegetation of the garden had a.s.sumed a universal hue of dull green, the depressing effect of which was intensified by the absence of any large trees to mark autumnal decay with their more precocious dissolution. Weather did not seem to affect Mere Gontran, whose clothes even upon the finest days had the appearance of a bundle of drenched rags; and if the dogs and cats preferred to remain indoors, she was able to paddle about the garden with her ducks and devote to their triumphant quacking a sympathetic attention.

"I'm going to see the amba.s.sador this morning," she called up to Sylvia.

"Something must be decided about the boys' nationality and it's bound to be decided more quickly if they see me dripping all over the marble entrance of the Emba.s.sy."

Not even the sight of that elderly Naiad haunting the desks of overworked _chanceliers_ could secure a determination to which country her sons' military service was owed; it seemed as if they would remain uncla.s.sified to the end of the war, borrowing money for tram-tickets and smoking cigarettes while husbands were torn from the arms of wives, while lovers and parents mourned eternal partings.

Autumn drew on, and here in Russia hard upon its heels was winter; already early in October there was talk at the _pension_ of the snow's coming soon, and Sylvia did not feel inclined to stay here in the solitude that snow would create. Moreover, she was anxious not to let Mere Gontran wish for her going on account of the expense, and she would not have stayed as long as she had if her hostess had not been so obviously distressed at the idea of her leaving before she could be accounted perfectly well again. In order to repay her hospitality, Sylvia a.s.sisted gravely--and one might say reverently--at all her follies of magic. Nor, under the influence of Mere Gontran's earnestness, was it always possible to be sure about the foolish side.

There were often moments when Sylvia was frightened in these fast-closing daylights and long wintry eves by the unending provocation of the dead that was as near as Mere Gontran got to evocation, although she claimed to be always seeing apparitions, of which Sylvia, fortunately for her nerves, was never granted a vision.

The climax was reached on the night of the first snowfall, soon after the middle of October, when Mere Gontran came to Sylvia's bedroom, her crimson dressing-gown dusted with dry flakes of snow, and begged her to come out in the garden to hear Gontran communicating with her from a lilac-bush. It was in vain that Sylvia protested against being dragged out of bed on such a cold night; Mere Gontran, candle in hand, towered up above her with such a dominating excitement that Sylvia let herself be over-persuaded and followed her out into the garden. From what had formerly been Carrier's room the owls hooted at the moon; Samuel, the talking collie, was baying dolefully; the snowfall, too light to give to the nocturnal landscape a pure and crystalline beauty, was enough to destroy the familiar aspect of the scene and to infect it with a withered papery look, turning house and garden to the color of dry bones.

"He's in the lilac-bush by the outhouse," Mere Gontran whispered. "When I went past, one of the boughs caught hold of my hand, and he spoke in a queer, crackling voice, as of course somebody would speak if he were speaking through a bush."

Sylvia could not bear it any longer; she suddenly turned back and ran up to her bedroom, vowing that to-morrow she would make a serious effort to leave Petrograd.

"However short my hair," she laughed, "there's no reason why it should be made to stand on end like that."

She supposed that Petrograd had not yet sufficiently recovered from the shock of war to make an engagement there pleasant or profitable; besides, after her experience at the cabaret she was disinclined to face another humiliation of the same kind. The Jewish agent whom she consulted suggested Kieff, Odessa, and Constantinople as a good tour; from Constantinople she would be able to return home more easily and comfortably if she wished to return. He held up his hands at the idea of traveling to England by Archangel at this season. She could sing for a week at Kieff just to break the journey, take two months at Odessa, and be almost sure of at least four months at Constantinople: it was a great nuisance this war, but he was expecting every day to hear that the English fleet had blown Pola to pieces, and perhaps after Christmas there would be an opportunity of an engagement at Vienna. With so many troops in the city such an engagement would be highly remunerative; and he winked at Sylvia. She was surprised to find that it was so easy to secure an engagement in war-time, and still more surprised to learn that she would be better paid than before the war. Indeed, if she had been willing to remain in Petrograd, she could have earned as much as a thousand francs a month for singing, so many of the French girls had fled to France and so rare now were foreign _artistes_. As it was, she would be paid eight hundred francs a month at Kieff and Odessa. For the amount of her salary in Constantinople the agent would not answer, because on second thoughts he might observe that there was just a chance of war between Russia and Turkey, a very small chance; but in the circ.u.mstances it would be impossible to arrange a contract.

Sylvia returned to the _pension_ to announce her success.

"Well, if you get ill," said Mere Gontran, "mind you come back here at once. You're _not_ a good medium; in fact, I believe you're a deterrent; but I like to see you about the place, and of course I _do_ like to talk English, but there again, when shall I ever see England?"

When Sylvia had heard Mere Gontran speak of her native country formerly, it had always been as the place where an unhappy childhood had been spent, and she had seemed to glory in her expatriation. Mere Gontran answered her unspoken astonishment:

"I think it's the war," she explained. "It's seeing so much about England in the newspapers; I've got a feeling I'd like to go back, and I will go back after the war," she proclaimed. "Some kind of nationality my three sons shall have, if it's only their mother's. Which reminds me.

Poor Carrier has been killed."

"Killed," Sylvia repeated. "Already?"

In the clutch of apprehension she realized that other and dearer friends than he might already be dead.

"I thought we could celebrate your last night by trying to get into communication with him," said Mere Gontran.