One of the habits that Sylvia had acquired on tour in France was
card-playing; perhaps she inherited her skill from Henry, for she was a
very good player. The game on the voyage was poker. Before they were
through the Straits of Gibraltar Sylvia had lost five hundred francs;
she borrowed five hundred francs from Lily and set herself to win them
back. The sea became very rough in the Atlantic; all the passengers were
seasick. The other four poker-players, who were theatrical folk, wanted
to stop, but Sylvia would not hear of it; she was much too anxious about
her five hundred francs to feel seasick. She lost Lily's first five
hundred francs and borrowed five hundred more. Lily began to feel less
seasick now, and she watched the struggle with a personal interest. The
other players, with the hope that Sylvia's bad luck would hold, were so
deeply concentrated upon maintaining their advantage that they too
forgot to be seasick. The ship rolled, but the poker-players only left
the card-room for meals in the deserted saloon. Sylvia began to win
again. Blue skies and calmer weather appeared; the other poker-players
had no excuse for not continuing, especially now that it was possible to
play on deck. Sylvia had won back all she had lost and two hundred
francs besides when the ship entered the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
"I think I should like gambling," Lily said, "if only one didn't have to
shuffle and cut all the time."
The place where Sylvia was engaged to sing was one of those centers of
aggregated amusement that exist all over the world without any
particular characteristic to distinguish one from another, like the
dinners in what are known as first-class hotels on the Continent.
Everything here was more expensive than in Europe; even the
roulette-boards had zero and double zero to help the bank. The tradition
of Brazil for supplying gold and diamonds to the world had bred a
familiarity with the external signs of wealth that expressed itself in
overjeweled men and women, whose display one forgave more easily on
account of the natural splendor of the scene with which they had to
compete.
Lily, with the unerring bad taste that nearly always is to be found in
sensuous and indolent women, to whom the obvious makes the quickest and
easiest appeal, admired the flashing stones and stars and fireflies with
an energy that astonished Sylvia, notwithstanding the novel glimpse she
had been given of Lily's character in the affair with Hector Ozanne. The
climate was hot, but a sea breeze freshened the city after sunset; the
enforced day-long inactivity, with the luxurious cool baths and
competent negresses who attended upon her lightest movement, satisfied
Lily's conception of existence, and when they drove along the margin of
the bay before dinner her only complaint was that she could not
coruscate like other women in the carriages they passed.
With the money they had in hand Sylvia felt justified in avoiding a
_pension d'artistes_, and they had taken a flat together. This meant
that when Sylvia went to work at the cabaret, Lily, unless she came with
her, was left alone, which did not at all suit her. Sylvia therefore
suggested that she should accept an engagement to dance at midnight,
with the stipulation that she should not be compelled to stay until 3
A.M. unless she wanted to, and that by foregoing any salary she should
not be expected to drink gooseberry wine at 8,000 reis a bottle, on
which she would receive a commission of 1,000 reis. The management knew
what a charm the tall, fair English girl would exercise over the swart
Brazilians, and was glad enough to engage her at her own terms. Sylvia
had not counted upon Lily's enjoying the cabaret life so much. The heat
was affecting her much more than Lily, and she began to complain of the
long hours of what for her was a so false gaiety. Nothing, however,
would persuade Lily to go home before three o'clock at the earliest, and
Sylvia, on whom a great lassitude and indifference had settled, used to
wait for her, sitting alone while Lily danced the _machiche_.
One night, when Sylvia had sung two of her songs with such a sense of
hopeless depression weighing her down that the applause which followed
each of them seemed to her a mockery, she had a sudden vertigo from
which she pulled herself together with a conviction that nothing would
induce her to sing the third song. She went on the scene, seated herself
at the piano, and to the astonishment and discomfort of the audience and
her fellow-players, half chanted, half recited one of the eccentric
Englishman's poems about a body in the morgue. Such a performance in
such a place created consternation, but in the silence that followed
Sylvia fainted. When she came to herself she was back in her own
bedroom, with a Brazilian doctor jabbering and mouthing over her
symptoms. Presently she was taken to a clinic and, when she was well
enough to know what had happened, she learned that she had yellow fever,
but that the crisis had passed. At first Lily came to see her every day,
but when convalescence was further advanced she gave up coming, which
worried Sylvia intensely and hampered her progress. She insisted that
something terrible had happened to Lily and worked herself up into such
a state that the doctor feared a relapse. She was too weak to walk;
realizing at last that the only way of escaping from the clinic would be
to get well, she fought against her apprehensions for Lily's safety and
after a fortnight of repressed torments was allowed out. When Sylvia
reached the flat she was met by the grinning negresses, who told her
that Lily had gone to live elsewhere and let her understand that it was
with a man.
Sylvia was not nearly well enough to reappear at the cabaret, but she
went down that evening and was told by the other girls that Lily was at
the tables. They were duly shocked at Sylvia's altered appearance,
congratulated her upon having been lucky enough to escape the necessity
of shaving her head, and expressed their regrets at not knowing in which
clinic she had been staying so that they might have brought her the news
of their world. Sylvia lacked the energy to resent their hypocrisy and
went to look for Lily, whom she found blazing with jewels at one of the
roulette-tables.
There was something so fantastic in Lily's appearance, thus bedecked,
that Sylvia thought for a moment it was a feverish vision such as had
haunted her brain at the beginning of the illness. Lily wore suspended
from a fine chain round her neck a large diamond, one of those so-called
blue diamonds of Brazil that in the moonlight seem like sapphires; her
fingers flashed fire; a large brooch of rubies in the likeness of a
butterfly winked somberly from her black corsage.
Sylvia made her way through the press of gamblers and touched Lily's
arm. So intent was she upon the tables that she brushed away the hand as
if it had been a mosquito.
"Lily! Lily!" Sylvia called, sharply. "Where have you been? Where have
you gone?"
At that moment the wheel stopped, and the croupier cried the number and
the color in all their combinations. Sylvia was sure that he exchanged
glances with Lily and that the gold piece upon the 33 on which he was
paying had not been there before the wheel had stopped.
"Lily! Lily! Where have you been?" Sylvia called, again. Lily gathered
in her winnings and turned round. It was curious how changed her eyes
were; they seemed now merely like two more rich jewels that she was
wearing.
"I'm sorry I've not been to see you," she said. "My dear, I've won
nearly four thousand pounds."
"You have, have you?" Sylvia said. "Then the sooner you leave Brazil the
better."
Lily threw a swift glance of alarm toward the croupier, a man of almost
unnatural thinness, who, while he intoned the invitation to place the
stakes, fixed his eyes upon her.
"I can't leave Brazil," she said, in a whisper. "I'm living with him."
"Living with a croupier?" Sylvia gasped.
"Hush! He belongs to quite a good family. He ruined himself. His name is
Manuel Camacho. Don't talk to me any more, Sylvia. Go away. He's madly
jealous. He wants to marry me."
"Like Hector, I suppose," Sylvia scoffed.
"Not a bit like Hector. He brings a priest every morning and says he'll
kill me and himself and the priest, too, if I don't marry him. But I
want to make more money, and then I will marry him. I must. I'm afraid
of what he'll do if I refuse. Go away from me, Sylvia, go away. There'll
be a fearful scene to-night if you will go on talking to me. Last night
a man threw a flower into our carriage when we were driving home, and
Manuel jumped out and beat him insensible with his cane. Go away."
Sylvia demanded where she was living, but Lily would not tell her,
because she was afraid of what her lover might do.
"He doesn't even let me look out of the window. If I look out of the
window he tears his clothes with rage and digs his finger-nails into the
palms of his hands. He's very violent. Sometimes he shoots at the
chandelier."
Sylvia began to laugh. There was something ridiculous in the notion of
Lily's leading this kind of lion-tamer's existence. Suddenly the
croupier with an angry movement swept a pile of money from the table.
"Go away, Sylvia, go away. I know he'll break out in a moment. That was
meant for a warning."
Sylvia understood that it was hopeless to persist for the moment, and
she made her way back to the cabaret. The girls were eager to know what
she thought of Lily's protector.
_"Elle a de la veine, tu sais, la petite Lili. Elle l'a pris comme ça,
et il l'aime à la folie. Et elle gagne! mon Dieu, comme elle gagne! Tout
va pour elle. Tu sais, elle a des brillants merveilleux. Ça fait riche,
tu sais. Y'a pas de chic, mais il est jaloux! Il se porte comme un fou.
Ça me raserait, tu sais, être collée avec un homme pareil. Pourtant,
elle est busineuse, la petite Lili! Elle ne lui donne pas un rond. Y'a
pas de dos vert. Ah, non, elle est la vraie anglaise sans blague. Et le
mec, dis, n'est-ce pas qu'il est maigre comme tout? On dirait un
squelette."_
With all their depreciation of the croupier, it seemed to Sylvia that
most of the girls would have been well pleased to change places with
Lily. But how was she herself to regard the affair? During those long
days of illness, when she had lain hour after hour with her thoughts,
to what a failure her life had seemed to be turning, and what a
haphazard, harborless course hers had seemed to be. Now she must perhaps
jettison the little cargo she carried, or would it be fairer to say that
she must decide whether she should disembark it? It was absurd to
pretend that Michael would have viewed with anything but dismay the
surrender of Lily to such a one as that croupier, and if she made that
surrender, she would be violating his trust that counted for so much in
her aimless career. Yet was she not attributing to Michael the sentiment
he felt before Lily's betrayal of him? He had only demanded of Sylvia
that she should prevent Lily from drifting downward along the dull road
of undistinguished ruin. If this fantastic Brazilian wished to marry
her, why should he not do so? Then she herself should be alone indeed
and, unless a miracle happened, should be lost in the eternal whirl of
vagabonds to and fro across the face of the earth.
"They say one must expect to be depressed after yellow fever," Sylvia
reassured herself. "Perhaps this mood won't last, but, oh, the
endlessness of it all! How even one's brush and comb seem weighed down
by an interminable melancholy. As I look round me I can see nothing that
doesn't strike me as hopelessly, drearily, appallingly superfluous. The
very soap in its china dish looks wistful. How pathetic the life of a
piece of soap is, when one stops to contemplate it. A slow and steady
diminution. Oh, I must do something to shake off this intolerable
heaviness!"
The simplest and most direct path to energy and action seemed to be an
attempt to interview Camacho, and the following evening Sylvia tried to
make Lily divulge her address; but she begged not to be disturbed, and
Sylvia, seeing that she was utterly absorbed by the play, had to leave
her.
"Either I am getting flaccid beyond belief," she said to herself, "or
Lily has acquired an equally incredible determination. I think it's the
latter. It just shows what passion will do even for a Lily. All her life
she has remained unmoved, until roulette reveals itself to her and she
finds out what she was intended for. Of course I must leave her to her
fierce skeleton; he represents the corollary to the passion. Queer
thing, the way she always wins. I'm sure they're cheating, somehow, the
two of them. There's the final link. They'll go away presently to
Europe, and Lily will enjoy the sweetest respectability that exists--the
one that is founded on early indiscretion and dishonesty--a paradise
preceded by the fall."
Sylvia waited by the entrance to the roulette-room on the next night
until play was finished, watched Lily come out with Camacho, and saw
them get into a carriage and drive away immediately. None of the
attendants or the other croupiers knew where Camacho lived, or, if they
knew, they refused to tell Sylvia. On the fourth evening, therefore, she
waited in a carriage by the entrance and ordered her driver to follow
the one in which Lily was. She found that Camacho's apartments were not
so far from her own; the next morning she waited at the corner of the
street until she saw him come out; then she rang the bell. The negress
who opened the door shook her head at the notion of letting Sylvia
enter, but the waiting in the sun had irritated her and she pushed past
and ran up-stairs. The negress had left the upper door open, and Sylvia
was able to enter the flat. Lily was in bed, playing with her jewels as
if they were toys.
"Sylvia!" she cried, in alarm. "He'll kill you if he finds you here.
He's gone to fetch the priest. They'll be back in a moment. Go away."
Sylvia said she insisted on speaking to Camacho; she had some good
advice to give him.
"But he's particularly jealous of you. The first evening you spoke to me
... look!" Lily pointed to the ceiling, which was marked like a die with
five holes. "He did that when he came home to show what he would do to
you."
"Rubbish!" said Sylvia. "He'll be like a lamb when we meet. If he hadn't
fired at the ceiling I should have felt much more alarmed for the safety
of my head."
"But, Sylvia," Lily entreated. "You don't know what he's like. Once,
when he thought a man nudged me, he came home and tore all the towels to
pieces with his teeth. The servant nearly cried when she saw the room in
the morning. It was simply covered with bits of towel, and he swallowed
one piece and nearly choked. You don't know what he's like. I can manage
him, but nobody else could."
Here was a new Lily indeed, who dared to claim that she could manage
somebody of whom Sylvia must be afraid. She challenged Lily to say when
she had ever known her to flinch from an encounter with a man.
"But, my dear, Manuel isn't English. When he's in one of those rages
he's not like a human being at all. You can't soothe him by arguing with
him. You have to calm him without talking."
"What do you use? A red-hot poker?"
Lily became agitated at Sylvia's obstinacy, and, regardless of her
jewels, which tinkled down into a heap on the floor, she jumped out of
bed and implored her not to stay.
"I want to know one or two things before I go," Sylvia said, and was
conscious of taking advantage of Lily's alarm to make her speak the
truth, owing to the lack of time for the invention of lies.
"Do you love this man?"
"Yes, in a way I do."
"You could be happy married to him?"
"Yes, when I've won five thousand pounds."
"He cheats for you?"
Lily hesitated.
"Never mind," Sylvia went on. "I know he does."
"Oh, my dear," Lily murmured, biting her lip. "Then other people might
notice. Never mind. I ought to finish to-night. The boat sails the day
after to-morrow."
"And what about me?" Sylvia asked.
Lily looked shamefaced for a moment, but the natural optimism of the
gambler quickly reasserted itself.
"I thought you wouldn't like to break your contract."
"My contract," Sylvia repeated, bitterly. "What about---- Oh, but how
foolish I am. You dear unimaginative creature!"
"I'm not at all unimaginative," Lily interposed, quickly. "One of the
reasons why I want to leave Brazil is because the black people here make
me nervous. That's why I left our flat. I didn't know what to do. I was
so frightened. I think I'm very imaginative. You got ill. What was I to
do?"
She asked this like an accusation, and Sylvia knew that it would be
impossible to make her see any other point of view.
"Besides, it was your fault I started to gamble. I watched you on the
boat."
"But you were going away without a word to me?" Sylvia could not refrain
from tormenting herself with this question.
"Oh no, I was coming to say good-by, but you don't understand how
closely he watches me."
The thought of Camacho's jealous antics recurred to Lily with the
imminence of his return; she begged Sylvia, now that all her questions
were answered, to escape. It was too late; there was a sound of
footsteps upon the stairs and the noise of angry voices above deep
gobbles of protested innocence from the black servant.
The entrance reminded Sylvia of "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," for when
Camacho came leaping into the room, as thin and active as a grasshopper,
the priest was holding his coattails with one hand and with the other
making the most operatic gestures of despair, like Don Basilio. In the
doorway the black servant continued to gobble at everybody in turn,
including the Almighty, to witness the clarity of her conscience.
"What language do you speak?" Sylvia asked, sharply, while Camacho was
struggling to free himself from the restraint of the priest.
"I speak English! Gaddam! Hell! Five hundred hells!" the croupier
shouted. "And I have sweared a swore that you will not interrupt between
me myself and my Lili."
Camacho raised his arm to shake his fist, and the priest caught hold of
it, which made Camacho turn round and open on him with Portuguese
expletives.
"When you've quite done cracking Brazil nuts with your teeth, perhaps
you'll listen to me," Sylvia began.
"No, you hear me, no, no, no, no, no, no!" Camacho shouted. "And I will
not hear you. I have heard you enough. You shall not take her away.
_Putain!_"
"If you want to be polite in French," Sylvia said. "Come along!
_"Ce marloupatte pâle et mince_
_Se nommait simplement Navet,_
_Mais il vivait ainsi qu'un prince,_
_Il aimait les femmes qu'on rince._
_Tu comprends? Mais moi, je ne suis pas une femme qu'on rince."_
It was certainly improbable, Sylvia thought, that the croupier had
understood much of Richepin's verse, but the effect of the little
recitation was excellent because it made him choke. Lily now intervened,
and when Sylvia beheld her soothing the inarticulate Camacho by stroking
his head, she abandoned the last faint inclination to break off this
match and called upon the priest to marry them at once. No doubt the
priest would have been willing to begin the ceremony if he had been able
to understand a word of what Sylvia said, but he evidently thought she
was appealing to him against Camacho's violence, and with a view to
affording the ultimate assistance of which he was capable he crossed
himself and turned up his eyes to heaven.
"What an awful noise there is!" Sylvia cried, and, looking round her
with a sudden realization of its volume, she perceived that the negress
in the doorway had been reinforced by what was presumably the
cook--another negress who was joining in her fellow-servant's
protestations. At the same time the priest was talking incessantly in
rapid Portuguese; Camacho was probably swearing in the same language;
and Lily was making a noise that was exactly half-way between a dove
cooing and an ostler grooming a horse.
"Look here, Mr. Camacho," Sylvia began.
"Oh, don't speak to him, Sylvia," Lily implored. "He can't be spoken to
when he's like this. It's a kind of illness, really."
Sylvia paid no attention to her, but continued to address the croupier.
"If you'll listen to me, Mr. Camacho, instead of behaving like an
exasperated toy terrier, you'll find that we both want the same thing."
"You shall not have her," the croupier chattered. "I will shoot
everybody before you shall have her."
"I don't want her," Sylvia screamed. "I've come here to be a bridesmaid
or a godmother or any other human accessory to a wedding you like to
mention. Take her, my dear man, she's yours."
At last Sylvia was able to persuade him that she was not to be regarded
as an enemy of his matrimonial intentions, and after a final burst of
rage directed against the negresses, whom he ejected from the room, as a
housemaid turns a mattress, he made a speech:
"I am to marry Lily. We go to Portugal, where I am not to be a croupier,
but a gentleman. I excuse my furage. You grant excusals, yes? It is a
decomprehence."
"He's apologizing," Lily explained in the kind of way one might call
attention to the tricks of an intelligent puppy.
"She's actually proud of him," Sylvia thought. "But, of course, to her
he represents gold and diamonds."
The priest, who had grasped that the strain was being relaxed, began to
exude smiles and to rub his hands; he sniffed the prospect of a fee so
richly that one seemed to hear the notes crackle like pork. Camacho
produced the wedding-ring that was even more outshone than wedding-rings
usually are by the diamonds of betrothal.
"But I can't be married in my dressing-gown," Lily protested.
Sylvia felt inclined to say it was the most suitable garment, except a
nightgown, that she could have chosen, but in the end, after another
discussion, it was decided that the ecclesiastical ceremony should be
performed to-morrow in church and that to-day should be devoted to the
civil rite. Sylvia promised not to say a word about the departure to
Europe.
Three days later Sylvia went on board the steamer to make her farewells.
She gave Lily a delicate little pistol for a wedding-present; from Lily,
in memory of her marriage, she received a box of chocolates.
It was impossible not to feel lonely, when Lily had gone: in three and
a half years they had been much together. For a while Sylvia tried to
content herself with the company of the girls in the _pension
d'artistes_, to which she had been forced to go because the flat was too
expensive for her to live in now. Her illness had swallowed up any money
she had saved, and the manager took advantage of it to lower her salary.
When she protested the manager told her he would be willing to pay the
original salary, if she would go to São Paulo. Though Sylvia understood
that the management was trying to get the best of a bargain, she was too
listless to care much and she agreed to go. The voyage there was like a
nightmare. The boat was full of gaudy negroes who sang endlessly their
mysterious songs; the smell was vile; the food was worse; cockroaches
swarmed. São Paulo was a squalid reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, and the
women who sang in the cabaret were all seamed with ten years' longer
vagabondage than those at Rio. The men of São Paulo treated them with
the insolence of the half-breeds they all seemed. On the third night a
big man with teeth like an ancient fence and a diamond in his
shirt-front like a crystal stopper leaned over from a box and shouted to
Sylvia to come up and join him when she had finished her songs; he said
other things that made her shake with anger. When she left the scene,
the grand pimp, who was politely known as the manager, congratulated
Sylvia upon her luck: she had caught the fancy of the richest patron.
"You don't suppose I'm going to see that _goujat_ in his box?" she
growled.
The grand pimp was in despair. Did she wish to drive away their richest
patron? He would probably open a dozen bottles of champagne. He might
... the grand pimp waved his arms to express mental inability to express
all the splendors within her grasp. Presently the impatient suitor came
behind the scene to know the reason of Sylvia's delay. He grasped her by
the wrist and tried to drag her up to his box. She seized the only
weapon in reach--a hand-glass--and smashed it against his face. The
suitor roared; the grand pimp squealed; Sylvia escaped to the stage,
which was almost flush with the main dancing-hall. She forced her way
through the orchestra, kicking the instruments right and left, and fell
into the arms of a man more resplendent than the rest, but a
_rastaquouère_ of more Parisian cut, who in a dago-American accent
promised to plug the first guy that tried to touch her.
Sylvia felt like Carmen on the arm of the Toreador when she and her
protector walked out of the cabaret. He was a youngish man, wearing a
blue serge suit and high-heeled shoes half buckskin, half
patent-leather, tied with white silk laces, so excessively American in
shape that one looked twice to be sure he was not wearing them on the
wrong feet. His trousers, after exhausting the ordinary number of
buttons in front, prolonged themselves into a kind of corselet that drew
attention to the slimness of his waist. He wore a frilled white shirt
sown with blue hearts and a white silk tie with a large diamond pin. The
back of his neck was shaved, which gave his curly black hair the look of
a wig. He was the Latin dandy after being operated upon in an American
barber shop, and his name was Carlos Morera.
Sylvia noted his appearance in such detail, because the appearance of
anybody after that monster in the box would have come as a relief and a
diversion. Morera had led her to a bar that opened out of the cabaret,
and after placing two automatic pistols on the counter he ordered
champagne cocktails for them both.
"He won't come after you in here. Dat stiff don't feel he would like to
meet Carlos Morera. Say, do you know why? Why, because Carlos Morera's
ready to plug any stiff dat don't happen to suit his fancy right away.
Dat's me, Carlos Morera. I'm pretty rich, I am. I'm a gentleman, I am.
But dat ain't going to stop me using those"; he indicated the pistols.
"Drink up and let's have another. Don't you want to drink? See here,
then." He poured Sylvia's cocktail on the floor. "Nothing won't stop
Carlos Morera if he wants to call another round of drinks. Two more
champagne cocktails!"
"Is this going to be my Manuel?" Sylvia asked herself. She felt at the
moment inclined to let him be anything rather than go back to the
concert and face that man in the box.
"You're looking some white," Morera commented. "I believe he scared you.
I believe I ought to have shot him. Say, you sit here and drink up. I
t'ink I'll go back and shoot him now. I sha'n't be gone long."
"Sit still, you fire-eater," cried Sylvia, catching hold of his arm.
"Say, dat's good. Fire-eater! Yes, I believe I'd eat fire if it came to
it. I believe you could make me laugh. I'm going to Buenos Aires
to-morrow. Why don't you come along of me? This São Paulo is a bum
Brazilian town. You want to see the Argentine. I'll show you lots of
life."
"Look here," said Sylvia. "I don't mind coming with you to make you
laugh and to laugh myself, but that's all. Understand?"
"Dat's all right," Carlos agreed. "I'm a funny kind of a fellow, I am.
As soon as I found I could buy any girl I wanted, I didn't seem to want
them no more. 'Sides, I've got seven already. You come along of me. I'm
good company, I am. Everybody dat goes along of me laughs and has good
fun. Hear that?"
He jingled the money in his pocket with a joyful reverence, as if he
were ringing a sanctus-bell. "Now, you come back with me into the
cabaret."
Sylvia hesitated.
"Don't you worry. Nobody won't dare to look at you when you're with me."
Morera put her arm in his, and back they walked into the cabaret again,
more than ever like Carmen with her Toreador. The grand pimp, seeing
that Sylvia was safely protected, came forward with obeisances and
apologies.
"See here. Bring two bottles of champagne," Morera commanded.
The grand pimp beckoned authoritatively to a waiter, but Morera stood up
in a fury.
"I didn't tell you to bring a waiter. I told you to bring two bottles of
champagne. Bring them yourself."
The grand pimp returned very meekly with the bottles.
"Dat's more like. Draw the cork of one."
The grand pimp asked if he should put the other on ice.
"Don't you worry about the other," said Morera. "The other's only there
so I can break it on your damned head in case I get tired of looking at
you. See what I mean?"
The grand pimp professed the most perfect comprehension.
"Well, this is a bum place," Morera declared, after they had sat for a
while. "I believe we sha'n't get no fun here. Let's quit."
He drove her back to the pension, and the next day they took ship to La
Plata for Buenos Aires.
Morera insisted on Sylvia's staying at an expensive hotel and was very
anxious for her to buy plenty of new evening frocks.
"I've got a fancy," he explained, "to show you a bit of life. You hadn't
seen life before you came to Argentina."
The change of air had made Sylvia feel much better, and when she had
fitted herself out with new clothes, to which Morera added a variety of
expensive and gaudy jewels, she felt quite ready to examine life under
his guidance.
He took her to one or two theaters, to the opera, and to the casinos;
then one evening he decided upon a special entertainment of which he
made a secret.
"I want you to dress yourself up fine to-night," he said. "We're going
to some smart ball. Put on all your jewelry. I'm going to dress up
smart, too."
Sylvia had found that overdressing was the best way of returning his
hospitality; this evening she determined to surpass all previous
efforts.
"Heavens!" she ejaculated, when she made the final survey of herself in
the looking-glass. "Do I look more like a Christmas tree or a chemist's
shop?"
When she joined Morera in the lounge, she saw that he was in evening
dress, with diamonds wherever it was possible to put them.
"You're fine," he said, contentedly. "Dat's the way I like to see a goil
look. I guess we're going to have lots of fun to-night."
They drank a good deal of champagne at dinner, and about eleven o'clock
went out to their carriage. When the coachman was given the address of
the ballroom, he looked round in surprise and was sworn at for his
insolence, so with a shrug of the shoulders he drove off. They left the
ordinary centers of amusement behind them and entered a meaner quarter
where half-breeds and negroes predominated; at last after a very long
drive they pulled up before what looked like a third-rate saloon. Sylvia
hesitated before she got out; it did not seem at all a suitable
environment for their conspicuous attire.
"We shall have lots of fun," Morera promised. "This is the toughest
dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires."
"It looks it," Sylvia agreed.
They entered a vestibule that smelt of sawdust, niggers, and raw
spirits, and went up-stairs to a crowded hall that was thick with
tobacco smoke and dust. A negro band was playing ragtime in a corner;
all along one side of the hall ran a bar. The dancers were a queer
medley. The men were mostly of the Parisian apache type, though
naturally more swarthy; the women were mostly in black dresses, with
shawls of brilliantly colored silk and tawdry combs in their black hair.
There were one or two women dancing in coat and skirt and hat, whose
lifted petticoats and pale, dissolute faces shocked even Sylvia's
masculine tolerance; there was something positively evil in their
commonplace attire and abandoned motion; they were like anemic
shop-girls possessed with unclean spirits.
"I believe we shall make these folks mad," said Morera, with a happy
chuckle. Before Sylvia could refuse he had taken her in his arms and was
dancing round the room at double time. The cracked mirrors caught their
reflections as they swept round, and Sylvia realized with a shock the
amount of diamonds they were wearing between them and the effect they
must be having in this thieves' kitchen.
"Some of these guys are looking mad already," Morera proclaimed,
enthusiastically.
The dance came to an end, and they leaned back against the wall
exhausted. Several men walked provocatively past, looking Sylvia and her
partner slowly up and down.
"Come along of me," Morera said. "We'll promenade right around the
hall."
He put her arm in his and swaggered up and down. The other dancers were
gathering in knots and eyeing them menacingly. At last an enormous
American slouched across the empty floor and stood in their path.
"Say, who the hell are you, anyway?" he asked.
"Say, what the hell's dat to you?" demanded Morera.
"Quit!" bellowed the American.
Morera fired without taking his hand from his pocket, and the American
dropped.
"Hands up! _Manos arriba!_" cried Morera, pulling out his two pistols
and covering the dancers while he backed with Sylvia toward the
entrance. When they were up-stairs in the vestibule he told her to look
if the carriage were at the door; when he heard that it was not he gave
a loud whoop of exultation.
"I said I believed we was going to have lots of fun. We got to run now
and see if any of those guys can catch us."
He seized Sylvia's arm, and they darted down the steps and out into the
street. Morera looked rapidly right and left along the narrow
thoroughfare. They could hear the noise of angry voices gathering in the
vestibule of the saloon.
"This way and round the turning," he cried, pulling Sylvia to the left.
There was only one window alight in the narrow alley up which they had
turned, a dim orange stain in the darkness. Morera hammered on the door
as their pursuers came running round the corner. Two or three shots were
fired, but before they were within easy range the door had opened and
they were inside. The old hag who had opened it protested when she saw
Sylvia, but Morera commanded her in Spanish to bolt it, and she seemed
afraid to disobey. Somewhere in a distant part of the house there was a
sound of women's crooning; outside they could hear the shuffling of
their pursuers' feet.
"Say, this is fun," Morera chuckled. "We've arrived into a _burdel_."
It was impossible for Sylvia to be angry with him, so frank was he in
his enjoyment of the situation. The old woman, however, was very angry
indeed, for the pursuers were banging upon her door and she feared a
visit from the police. Her clamor was silenced with a handful of notes.
"Champagne for the girls," Morera cried.
For Sylvia the evening had already taken on the nature of a dream, and
she accepted the immediate experience as only one of an inconsequent
procession of events. Having attained this state of mind, she saw
nothing unusual in sitting down with half a dozen women who clung to
their sofas as sea-anemones to the rocks of an aquarium. She had a
fleeting astonishment that they should have names, that beings so
utterly indistinguishable should be called Juanilla or Belita or Tula or
Lola or Maruca, but the faint shock of realizing a common humanity
passed off almost at once, and she found herself enjoying a conversation
with Belita, who spoke a few words of broken French. With the
circulation of the champagne the women achieved a kind of liveliness and
examined Sylvia's jewels with murmurs of admiration. The ancient bawd
who owned them proposed a dance, to which Morera loudly agreed. The
women whispered and giggled among themselves, looking bashfully over
their shoulders at Sylvia in a way that made the crone thump her stick
on the floor with rage. She explained in Spanish the cause of their
hesitation.
"They don't want to take off their clothes in front of you," Morera
translated to Sylvia, with apologies for such modesty from women who no
longer had the right to possess even their own emotions; nevertheless,
he suggested that they might be excused to avoid spoiling a jolly
evening.
"Good heavens! I should think so!" Sylvia agreed.
Morera gave a magnanimous wave of his arm, in which he seemed to confer
upon the women the right to keep on their clothes. They clapped their
hands and laughed like children. Soon to the sound of castanets they
wriggled their bodies in a way that was not so much suggestive of
dancing as of flea-bites. A lamp with a tin reflector jarred fretfully
upon a shelf, and the floor creaked.
Suddenly Morera held up his hand for silence. The knocking on the street
door was getting louder. He asked the old woman if there was any way of
getting out at the back.
"Dat's all right, kid," he told Sylvia. "We can crawl over the dooryards
at the back. Dat door in front ain't going to hold not more than five
minutes."
He tore the elastic from a bundle of notes and scattered them in the
air like leaves; the women pounced upon the largesse and were fighting
with one another on the floor when Sylvia and Morera followed the old
woman to the back door and out into a squalid yard.
How they ever surmounted the various walls and crossed the various yards
they encountered Sylvia could never understand. All she remembered was
being lifted on packing-cases and dust-bins, of slipping once and
crashing into a hen-coop, of tearing her dress on some broken glass, of
riding astride walls and pricking her face against plants, and of
repeating to herself all the time, "When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloomed." When at last they extricated themselves from the maze of
dooryards they wandered for a long time through a maze of narrow
streets. Sylvia had managed to stuff all her jewelry out of sight into
her corsage, where it scratched her most uncomfortably, but any
discomfort was preferable to the covetous eyes of the half-breeds that
watched her from the shadows.
"I guess you enjoyed yourself," said Morera, in a satisfied voice, when
at last they found a carriage and leaned back to breathe the gentle
night air.
"I enjoyed myself thoroughly," said Sylvia.
"Dat's the way to see a bit of life," he declared. "What's the good of
sitting in a bum theater all the night? Dat don't amuse me any. I
plugged him in the leg," he added, in a tone of almost tender
reminiscence.
Sylvia expressed surprise at his knowing where he had hit him, and
Morera was very indignant at the idea of her supposing that he should
shoot a man without knowing exactly at what part of him he was aiming
and where he should hit him.
"Why, I might have killed him dead," he added. "I didn't want to kill a
man dead just for a bit of fun. I started them guys off, see. They
thought they'd got a slob. Dat's where I was laughing. I guess I'll
sleep good to-night."
Sylvia spent a month seeing life with Carlos Morera; though she never
had another experience so exciting as the first, she passed a good deal
of her time upon the verge of melodramatic adventure. She grew fond of
this child-like creature with his spendthrift ostentation and bravado.
He never showed the least sign of wanting to make love to her, and
demanded nothing from Sylvia but overdressing and admiration of his
exploits. At the end of the month he told Sylvia that business called
him to New York and invited her to come with him. He let her understand,
however, that now he wanted her as his mistress. Even if she could have
tolerated the idea, Sylvia was sure that from the moment she accepted
such a position he would begin to despise her. She had heard too many of
his contemptuous references to the women he had bought. She refused to
accompany him, on the plea of wanting to go back to Europe. Morera
looked sullen, and she had a feeling that he was regretting the amount
he had spent upon her. Her pride found such a sensation insupportable
and she made haste to return him all his jewels.
"Say, what sort of a guy do you think I am?" He threw the jewels at her
feet and left her like a spoiled child.
An hour or two later he came back with a necklace that must have cost
five thousand dollars.
"Dat's the sort of guy I am," he said, and would take no refusal from
her to accept it.
"You can't go on spending money for nothing like this," Sylvia
protested.
"I got plenty, ha'n't I?" he asked.
She nodded.
"And I believe it's my money, ain't it?" he continued.
She nodded again.
"Well, dat finishes dat argument right away. Now I got another
proposition. You listening? I got a proposition dat we get married. I
believe I 'ain't met no girl like you. I know you've been a cabaret
girl. Dat don't matter a cent to me. You're British. Well, I've always
had a kind of notion I'd like to marry a British girl. Don't you tink
I'm always the daffy guy you've bummed around with in Buenos Aires. You
saw me in dat dancing-saloon? Well, I guess you know what I can do.
Dat's what I am in business. Say, Sylvia, will you marry me?"
She shook her head.
"My dear old son, it wouldn't work for you or for me."
"I don't see how you figure dat out."
"I've figured it out to seventy times seven. It wouldn't do. Not for
another mad month even. Come, let's say good-by. I want to go to Europe.
I'm going to have a good time. It'll be you that's going to give it to
me. My dear old Carlos, you may have spent your money badly from your
point of view, but you haven't really. You never spent any money better
in all your life."
Morera did not bother her any more. With all his exterior foolishness he
had a very deep perception of individual humanity. There was a boat
sailing for Marseilles in a day or two, and he bought a ticket for
Sylvia.
"It's a return ticket," he told her. "It's good for a year."
She assured him that even if she came back it could never be to marry
him, but he insisted upon her keeping it, and to please him she yielded.
Sylvia left the Argentine worth nearly as much as Lily when she went
away from Brazil, and as if her luck was bent upon an even longer run,
she gained heavily at poker all the way back across the Atlantic.
When she reached Marseilles, Sylvia conceived a longing to meet
Valentine again, and she telegraphed to Elène at Brussels for her
address. It was with a quite exceptional anticipation that Sylvia asked
the _concierge_ if Madame Lataille was in. While she walked up-stairs to
her sister's apartment she remembered how she had yearned to be friends
with Valentine nearly thirteen years ago, forgetting all about the
disappointment of her hope in a sudden desire to fill up a small corner
of her present loneliness.
Valentine had always lingered in Sylvia's imagination as a rather wild
figure, headstrong to such a pitch where passion was concerned that she
herself had always felt colorless and insignificant in comparison. There
was something splendidly tropical about Valentine as she appeared to
Sylvia's fancy; in all the years after she quitted France she had
cherished a memory of Valentine's fiery anger on the night of her
departure as something nobly independent.
Like other childish memories, Sylvia found Valentine much less
impressive when she met her again--much less impressive, for instance,
than Elène, who, though she had married a shopkeeper and had settled
down to a most uncompromising and ordinary respectability, retained a
ripening outward beauty that made up for any pinching of the spirit.
Here was Valentine, scarcely even pretty, who achieved by neatness any
effect of personality that she did. She had fine eyes--it seemed
impossible for any of her mother's children to avoid them, however dull
and inexpressive might have been the father's. Sylvia was thinking of
Henry's eyes, but what she had heard of M. Lataille in childhood had
never led her to picture him as more remarkable outwardly than her own
father.
"Twelve years since we met," Valentine was murmuring, and Sylvia was
agreeing and thinking to herself all the time how very much compressed
Valentine was, not uncomfortably or displeasingly, but like a new dress
before it has blossomed to the individuality of the wearer. There
recurred to Sylvia out of the past a likeness between Valentine and
Maudie Tilt when Maudie had dressed up for the supper-party with Jimmy
Monkley.
When the first reckonings of lapsed years were over there did not seem
much to talk about, but presently Sylvia described with much detail the
voyage from La Plata to Marseilles, just as, when one takes up a
long-interrupted correspondence, great attention is often devoted to the
weather at the moment.
"_Alors, vous êtes chanteuse?_" Valentine asked.
"_Oui, je suis chanteuse_," Sylvia replied.
Neither of the sisters used the second person singular: the
conversation, which was desultory, like the conversation of travelers in
a railway carriage, ended abruptly as if the train had entered a tunnel.
"_Vous êtes très-bien ici_," said Sylvia, looking round. The train had
emerged and was running through a dull cutting.
"_Oui, je suis très-bien ici_," Valentine replied.
There was no hostility between the sisters; there was merely a blank, a
sundering stretch of twelve years, that dismayed both of them with its
tracklessness. Presently Sylvia noticed a photograph upon the wall so
conspicuously framed as to justify a supposition that it represented the
man who was responsible for Valentine's well-being.
"_Oui, c'est mon amant_," said Valentine, in reply to the unspoken
question.
Sylvia was faced by the problem of commenting satisfactorily upon a
photograph. To begin with, it was one of those photographs that preserve
the individual hairs of the mustache but eradicate every line from the
face. It was impossible to comment on it, and it would have been equally
impossible to comment on the original in person. The only fact emerging
from the photograph was that in addition to a mustache the subject of it
owned a pearl tie-pin; but even of the genuineness of the pearl it was
unable to give any assurance.
"Photographs tell one nothing, do they?" Sylvia said, at last. "They're
like somebody else's dreams."
Valentine knitted her brows in perplexity.
"Or somebody else's baby," Sylvia went on, desperately.
"I don't like babies," said Valentine.
"_Vraiment on est très-bien ici_," said Sylvia.
She felt that by flinging an accentuated compliment to the room
Valentine might feel her lover was included in the approbation.
"And it's mine," said Valentine, complacently. "He bought it for me.
_C'est pour la vie_."
Passion might be quenched in the slough of habitude; love's pinions
might molt like any farm-yard hen's. What was that, when the apartment
was hers for life?
"How many rooms have you?" Sylvia asked.
"Besides this one I have a bedroom, a dining-room, a kitchen, and a
bath-room. Would you like to see the bath-room?"
When Valentine asked the last question she was transformed; a latent
exultation flamed out from her immobility.
"I should love to see the bath-room," said Sylvia. "I think bath-rooms
are often the most interesting part of a house."
"But this is an exceptional bath-room. It cost two thousand francs to
install."
Valentine led the way to the admired chamber, to which a complicated
arrangement of shining pipes gave an orchestral appearance. Valentine
flitted from tap to tap. Aretino himself could scarcely have imagined
more methods of sprinkling water upon the human body.
"And these pipes are for warming the towels," she explained. It was a
relief to find pipes that led a comparatively passive existence amid
such a convolution of fountainous activity.
"I thought while I was about it that I would have the tiles laid right
up to the ceiling," Valentine went on, pensively. "And you see, the
ceiling is made of looking-glass. When the water is very hot, _ça fait
drôle, tu sais, on ne se voit plus_."
It was the first time she had used the second person singular; the
bath-room had created in Valentine something that almost resembled
humanity.
"Yes," Sylvia agreed. "I suppose that is the best way of making the
ceiling useful."
"_C'est pour la vie_," Valentine contentedly sighed.
"But if he were to marry?" Sylvia ventured.
"It would make no difference," Valentine answered. "I have saved money
and with a bath-room like this one can always get a good rent.
Everything in the apartment is mine, and the apartment is mine, too."
"_Alors, tu es contente?_" said Sylvia.
"_Oui, je suis contente_," said Valentine.
"_Elle est jolie, ta salle de bain_."
"_Oui, elle est jolie comme un amour_," Valentine assented, with a sweet
maternal smile.
They talked of the bath-room for a while when they came back to the
boudoir; Sylvia was conscious of displaying the politeness with which
one descends from the nursery at an afternoon call.
"_Enfin_," said Sylvia, "_Je file_."
"_Tu pars tout de suite de Marseilles?_"
"_Oui, je pars ce soir_."
She had not really intended to leave Marseilles that evening, but there
seemed no reason to stay.
"_C'est dommage que tu n'as pas vu Louis_."
"_Il s'appelle Louis?_"
"_Oui, il s'appelle Louis. Il est à Lyon pour ses affaires_."
"_Alors, au revoir, Valentine_."
"_Au revoir, Sylvie_."
They hesitated, both of them, to see which would offer her cheek first;
in the end they managed to be simultaneous.
"Even the farewell was a stalemate," Sylvia said to herself on the way
down-stairs.
She wondered, while she was walking back to her hotel, what was going to
be the passion of her own life. One always started out with a dim
conception of perfect love, however one might scoff at it openly in
self-protection, but evidently it by no means followed that love for a
man, let alone perfect love, would ever arrive. Lily had succeeded in
inspiring at least one man with love for her, but she had found her own
passion in roulette with Camacho tacked to it, inherited like a
husband's servant, familiar with any caprice, but jealous and irritable.
Valentine had found her grand passion in a bath-room that satisfied even
her profoundest maternal instincts. Dorothy had loved a coronet with
such fervor that she had been able to abandon everything that could
smirch it. Sylvia's own mother had certainly found at thirty-four her
grand passion, but Sylvia felt that it would be preferable to fall in
love with a bath-room now than wait ten years for a Henry.
Sylvia reached the hotel, packed up her things, and set out to Paris
without any definite plans in her head for the future, and just because
she had no definite plans and nothing to keep her from sleeping, she
could not sleep and tossed about on the _wagon-lit_ half the night.
"It's not as if I hadn't got money. I'm amazingly lucky. It's really
fantastic luck to find somebody like poor old Carlos to set me up for
five years of luxurious independence. I suppose if I were wise I should
buy a house in London--and yet I don't want to go back to London. The
trouble with me is that, though I like to be independent, I don't like
to be alone. Yet with Michael.... But what's the use of thinking about
him? Do I actually miss him? No, certainly not. He's nothing more to me
than something I might have had, but failed to secure. I'm regretting a
missed experience. If one loses somebody like that, it leaves a sense of
incompletion. How often does one feel a quite poignant regret because
one has forgotten to finish a cup of coffee; but the regret is always
for the incomplete moment; it doesn't endure. Michael in a year will
have changed; I've changed, also. There is nothing to suggest that if we
met again now, we should meet in the same relation, with the same
possibility in the background of our intercourse. Then why won't I go
back to Mulberry Cottage? Obviously because I have out-lived Mulberry
Cottage. I don't want to stop my course by running into a backwater
that's already been explored. I want to go on and on until ... yes,
until what? I can travel now, if I want to. Well, why shouldn't I
travel? If I visit my agent in Paris--and I certainly shall visit him in
order to tell him what I think of the management of that damned Casino
at Rio--he'll offer me another contract to sing in some outlandish
corner of the globe, and if I weren't temporarily independent, I should
have to accept it with all its humiliations. Merely to travel would be a
mistake I think. I've got myself into the swirl of mountebanks, and
somehow I must continue with them. It's a poor little loyalty, but even
that is better than nothing. Really, if one isn't tied down by poverty,
one can have a very good time, traveling the world as a singer. Or I
could live in Paris for a while. I should soon meet amusing people. Oh,
I don't know what I want. I should rather like to get hold of Olive
again. She may be married by now. She probably is married. She's bound
to be married. A superfluity of romantic affection was rapidly
accumulating that must have been deposited somewhere by now. I might get
Gainsborough out from England to come with me. Come with me, where? It
seems a shame to uproot the poor old thing again. She's nearly sixty.
But I must have somebody."
When Sylvia reached Paris she visited two trunks that were in a
repository. Among other things she took out the volume of Adlington's
_Apuleius_.
"Yes, there's no doubt I'm still an ass," she said. "And since the
Argentine really a golden ass; but oh, when, when, when shall I eat the
rose-leaves and turn into Sylvia again? One might make a joke about
that, as the White Knight said, something about Golden and Silver and
Argentine."
Thinking of jokes reminded Sylvia of Mr. Pluepott, and thinking of
Alice through the looking-glass brought back the Vicar. What a long way
off they seemed.
"I can't let go of everybody," she cried. So she telegraphed and wrote
urgently to Mrs. Gainsborough, begging her to join her in Paris. While
she was waiting for a reply, she discussed projects for the future with
her agent, who, when he found that she had some money, was anxious for
her to invest a certain amount in the necessary _réclame_ and appear at
the Folies Bergères.
"But I don't want to make a success by singing French songs with an
English accent," Sylvia protested. "I'd as soon make a success by
singing without a roof to my mouth. You discouraged me from doing
something I really wanted to do. All I want now is an excuse for
roaming."
"What about a tour in Spain?" the agent suggested. "I can't get you more
than ten francs a night, though, if you only want to sing. Still,
Spain's much cheaper than America."
"_Mon cher ami, j'ai besoin du travail pour me distraire_. Ten francs is
the wage of a slave, but pocket-money, if one is not a slave."
"_Vous avez de la veine, vous_."
"_Vraiment?_"
"_Mais oui_."
"_Peut-être quelqu'un m'a plaqué_."
He tried to look grave and sympathetic.
"_Salaud_," she mocked. "_Crois-tu que je t'en dirais. Bigre! je
creverais plutôt_."
She had dropped into familiarity of speech with him, but he, still
hopeful of persuading her to intrust a profitable _réclame_ to him,
continued to treat her formally. Sylvia realized the _arrière pensée_
and laughed at him.
"_Je ne suis pas encore en grande vedette, tu sais_."
He assured her that such a triumph would ultimately come to her, and she
scoffed.
"_Mon vieux, si je n'avais pas de la galette, je pourrais crever de faim
devant ta porte. Ce que tu me dis, c'est du chic_."
"Well, will you go to Spain?"
The contract was signed.
A day or two later, when she was beginning to give up hope of getting
an answer from Mrs. Gainsborough, the old lady herself turned up at the
hotel, looking not a minute older.
"You darling and daring old plesiosaurus," cried Sylvia, seizing her by
the hand and twirling her round the vestibule.
"Yes, I am pleased to see you and no mistake," said Mrs. Gainsborough.
"But what a tyrant! Well, really, I was in me bed when your telegram
came and that boy he knocked like a tiger. Knock--knock! all the time I
was trying to slip on me petticoat, which through me being in a regular
fluster I put on wrong way up and got me feet all wound up with the
strings. Knock--knock! 'Whatever do you think you're doing?' I said when
at last I was fairly decent and went to open the door. 'Telegram,' he
says, as saucy as brass. 'Telegram?' I said. 'I thought by the row you
was making that you was building St. Paul's Cathedral.' 'Wait for the
answer?' he said. 'Answer?' I said. 'Certainly not.' Well, there was I
with your telegram in one hand and me petticoat slipping down in the
other. Then on the top of that came your letter, and I couldn't resist a
sight of you, my dearie. Fancy that Lily waltzing off like that. And
with a Portuguese. She'll get Portuguese before he's finished with her.
Portuguese is what she'll be. And the journey! Well, really, I don't
know how I managed. I kept on saying, 'France,' the same as if I was
asking a policeman the way to Oxford Circus, and they bundled me about
like ... well, really, everybody was most kind. Still when I got to
France, it wasn't much use going on shouting 'France' to everybody.
However, I met a nice young fellow in the train, and he very
thoughtfully assisted me into a cab and ... well, I am glad to see you."
"Now you're coming with me to Spain," Sylvia announced.
"Good land alive! Where?"
"Spain."
"Are you going chasing after Lily again?"
"No, we're going off on our own."
"Well, I may have started on the gad late in life, but I've certainly
started now," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Spain? That's where the Spanish
flies come from, isn't it? Well, they ought to be lively enough, so I
suppose we shall enjoy ourselves. And how do we get there?"
"By train!"
"Dear land! it's wonderful what they can do nowadays. What relation then
is Spain to Portugal exactly? You must excuse my ignorance, Sylvia, but
really I'm still all of a fluster. Fancy being bounced out of me bed
into Spain. You really are a demon. Fancy you getting yellow fever. You
haven't changed color much. Spain! Upon my word I never heard anything
like it. We'd better take plenty with us to eat. I knew it reminded me
of something. The Spanish Armada! I once heard a clergyman recite the
Spanish Armada, though what it was all about I've completely forgotten.
There was some fighting in it though. I went with the captain. Well, if
he could see me now. You may be sure he's laughing, wherever he is. The
idea of me going to Spain."
The idea materialized; that night they drove to the Gare d'Orléans.