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. Mère 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 Mère
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
Mère 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 reasserted 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 muffled 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, Mère
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 Mère 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 repetition 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?" Mère 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
partition between her and them had been thin.
"Such a reek of scent," Mère 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."
"Mère 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 anticipating 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 anticipating the opinion of the cards and
explained to Mère 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.
Mère 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 Mère Gontran, fervently.
"It would be serious?" Sylvia suggested.
"Anything might happen. Anything!"
Mère 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?" Mère 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 Mère 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," Mère 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."
In old days at the _Pension Gontran_ the meals had always been
irregular, though a dozen clamorous and hungry boarders had by the force
of their united wills evoked the semblance of a set repast. With the
departure of her guests, Mère Gontran had copied her animals in eating
whenever inclination and opportunity coincided. One method of satisfying
herself was to sit down at the kitchen table and rattle an empty plate
at the servant, who would either grunt and shake her head (in which case
Mère Gontran would produce biscuits from the pocket of her apron) or
would empty some of the contents of a saucepan into the empty plate. On
one occasion when they visited the kitchen there was something to eat, a
fact which was appreciated not only by the dogs and cats, but also by
Mère Gontran's three sons, who lounged in and sat down in a corner,
talking to one another in Russian.
"They don't know what to do," said their mother. "It hasn't been decided
yet whether they're French or Russian. They went to the Embassy to see
about going to France, but they were told that they were Russian; and
when they went to the military authorities here, they were told that
they were French. The work they were doing has stopped, and they've
nothing to do except smoke cigarettes and borrow money from me for their
trams. I spoke to their father about it again last night, but his answer
was very irrelevant, very irrelevant indeed."
"What did he say?"
"Well, he was talking with one of his fellow-spirits called Dick, at the
time, and he kept on saying, _'Dick's picked a daisy,'_ till I got so
annoyed that I threw the planchette board across the room. He was just
the same about his sons when he was alive. If ever I asked him a
question about their education or anything, he'd slip out of it by
talking about his work at the Embassy. He was one of the most irrelevant
men I ever knew. Well, I shall have to ask him again to-night, that's
all, because I can't have them hanging about here doing nothing forever.
It isn't as if I could understand them or they me. Bless my soul, it's
not surprising that I come to rely more and more on so-called dumb
animals. Yesterday they smoked one hundred and forty-six cigarettes
between them. I shall have to go and see the ambassador myself about
their nationality. He knows it's not my fault that Gontran muddled it
up. In my opinion, they're Russian. Anyway, they can't say 'bo' to a
goose in any other language, and it's not much good their fighting the
Germans in what French _they_ know."
The three young men ate stolidly throughout this monologue, oblivious of
its bearing upon their future, indifferent to anything but the food
before them.
After the neatness and regularity of the hospital, the contrast of
living at the _Pension Gontran_ made an exceptionally strong impression
of disorder on Sylvia. It vaguely recalled her life at Lillie Road with
Mrs. Meares, as if she had dreamed that life over again in a nightmare:
there was not even wanting to complete the comparison her short hair.
Yet with all the grubbiness and discomfort of it she was glad to be with
Mère Gontran, whose mind, long attuned to communion with animals, had
gained thereby a simplicity and sincerity that communion with mankind
could never have given to her. Like the body after long fasting, the
mind after a long illness was peculiarly receptive, and Sylvia rejoiced
at the opportunity to pause for a while before re-entering ordinary
existence in order to contemplate the life of another lonely soul.
The evening meal at the _Pension Gontran_ was positively formal in
comparison with the haphazard midday meal; Mère Gontran's three sons
rarely put in an appearance, and the maid used to come in with set
dishes and lay them on the table in such a close imitation of civilized
behavior that Sylvia used to watch her movements with a fascinated
admiration, as she might have watched the performance of an animal
trained to wait at table. The table itself was never entirely covered
with a white cloth, but that even half of it should be covered seemed
miraculous after the kitchen table. The black-and-red checkered cloth
that covered the dining-room table for the rest of the day was pushed
back to form an undulating range of foothills, beyond which the relics
of Mère Gontran's incomplete undertakings piled themselves in a
mountainous disarray; stockings that ought to be mended, seedlings that
ought to be planted out, garden tools that ought to be put away, packs
of cards, almanacs, balls of wool, knitting-needles, flower-pots,
photograph-frames, everything that had been momentarily picked up by
Mère Gontran in the course of her restless day had taken refuge here.
The dining-room itself was long, low, and dark, with a smell of
bird-cages and withering geraniums; sometimes when Mère Gontran had
managed to concentrate her mind long enough upon the trimming of a lamp,
there would be a lamp with a shade like a draggled petticoat; more
frequently the evening meal (dinner was too stringent a definition) was
lighted by two candles, the wicks of which every five minutes assumed
the form of large fiery flies' heads and danced up and down with delight
like children who have dressed themselves up, until Mère Gontran
attacked them with a weapon that was used indifferently as a nutcracker
and a snuffer, but which had been designed by its maker to extract
nails. Under these repeated assaults the candles themselves deliquesced
and formed stalagmites and stalactites of grease, which she used to
break off, roll up into balls, and drop on the floor, where they
perplexed the greed of the various cats, whose tails, upright with an
expectation of food, could dimly be seen waving in the shadows like
seaweed.
On the first night of Sylvia's arrival she had been too tired to sit up
with Mère Gontran and attend the conversation with her deceased husband,
nor did the widow overpersuade her, because it was important to settle
the future of her three sons by threatening Gontran with a visit to the
Embassy, a threat that might disturb even his astral liberty. Sylvia
gathered from Mère Gontran's account of the interview, next morning,
that it had led to words, if the phrase might be used of communication
by raps, and it seemed that the spirit had retired to sulk in some
celestial nook as yet unvexed by earthly communications; his behavior as
narrated by his wife reminded Sylvia of an irritated telephone
subscriber.
"But he'll be sorry for it now," said Mère Gontran. "I'm expecting him
to come and say so every moment."
Gontran, however, must have spent the day walking off his wife's
ill-temper in a paradisal excursion with a kindred spirit, for nothing
was heard of him, and she was left to her solitary gardening, as maybe
often in life she had been left.
"I hope nothing's happened to Gontran," she said, gravely, when Sylvia
and she sat down to the evening meal.
"Isn't the liability to accident rather reduced by getting rid of
matter?" Sylvia suggested.
"Oh, I'm not worrying about a broken leg or anything like that," Mère
Gontran explained. "But supposing he's reached another plane?"
"Ah, I hadn't thought of that."
"The communications get more difficult ever year since he died," the
widow complained. "The first few months after his death, hardly five
minutes used to pass without a word from him, and all night long he used
to rap on the head of my bed, until James used to get quite fidgety."
James was the bulldog who slept with Mère Gontran.
"And now he raps no longer?"
"Oh yes, he still raps," Mère Gontran replied, "but much more faintly.
But there again, he's already moved to three different planes since his
death. Hush! What's that?"
She stared into the darkest corner of the dining-room.
"Is that you, Gontran?"
"I think it was one of the birds," Sylvia said.
Mère Gontran waved her hand for silence.
"Gontran! Is that you? Where have you been all day? This is a friend of
mine who's staying here. You'll like her very much when you know her.
Gontran! I want to talk to you after dinner. Now mind, don't forget. I'm
glad you've got back. I want you to make some inquiries in England
to-morrow."
Sylvia was distinctly aware of a deep-seated amusement all the time at
Mère Gontran's matter-of-fact way of dealing with her husband's spirit,
and she could never make up her mind how with her sense of amusement
could exist simultaneously a credulity that led her to hear at the
conclusion of Mère Gontran's last speech three loud raps upon the air of
the room.
"He's got over last night," said Mère Gontran in a satisfied voice. "But
there again, he always had a kind nature at bottom. Three nice cheerful
raps like that always mean he's going to give up his evening to me."
Sylvia's first instinct was to find in what way Mère Gontran had tricked
her into hearing those three raps; something in the seer's true gaze
forbade the notion of trickery, and a shiver roused by the inexplicable,
the shiver that makes a dog run away from an open umbrella blown across
a lawn, slipped through her being.
Although Mère Gontran was puffing at her soup as if nothing had
happened, the house had changed, or rather it had not changed so much as
revealed itself in a brief instant. All that there was of queerness in
this tumble-down _pension_ became endowed with deliberate meaning, and
it was no longer possible to ascribe the atmosphere to the effect of
weakened nerves upon a weakened body. Sylvia began to wonder if the form
her delirium had taken had not been directly due to this atmosphere;
more than ever she was inclined to attach a profound significance to her
delirium and perceive in it the diabolic revelation with which it had
originally been fraught.
When after dinner Mère Gontran took a pack of cards and began to tell
her fortune, Sylvia had a new impulse to dread; but she shook it off
almost irritably and listened to the tale.
"A long journey by land. A long journey by sea. A dark man. A fair
woman. A fair man. A dark woman. A letter."
The familiar rigmarole of a hundred such tellings droned its course,
accompanied by the flip-flap, flip-flap of the cards. The information
was general enough for any human being on earth to have extracted from
it something applicable to himself; yet, against her will, and as it
were bewitched by the teller's solemnity, Sylvia began to endow the
cards with the personalities that might affect her life. The King of
Hearts lost his rubicund complacency and took on the lineaments of
Arthur: the King of Clubs parted with his fierceness and assumed the
graceful severity of Michael Fane: with a kind of impassioned egotism
Sylvia watched the journeyings of the Queen of Hearts, noting the
contacts and biting her lips when she found her prototype associated
with unfavorable cards.
"Come, I don't think the outlook's so bad," said Mère Gontran at the end
of the final disposition. "If your bed's a bit doubtful, your street and
your house are both very good, and your road lies south. But there
again, this blessed war upsets everything, and even the cards must be
read with half an eye on the war."
When the cards had been put away, Mère Gontran produced the _planchette_
and set it upon a small table covered in red baize round the binding of
which hung numerous little woolen pompons.
"Now we shall find out something about your friends in England," she
announced, cheerfully.
Sylvia had not the heart to disappoint Mère Gontran, and she placed her
hands upon the heart-shaped board, which trembled so much under Mère
Gontran's eager touch that the pencil affixed made small squiggles upon
the paper beneath. The _planchette_ went on fidgeting more and more
under their four hands like a restless animal trying to escape, and from
time to time it would skate right across the paper, leaving a long
penciled trail in its path, which Mère Gontran would examine with great
intentness.
"It looks a little bit like a Y," she would say.
"A very little bit," Sylvia would think.
"Or it may be an A. Never mind. It always begins rather doubtfully. I
_won't_ lose my temper with it to-night."
The _planchette_ might have been a tenderly loved child learning to
write for the first time, by the way Mère Gontran encouraged it and
tried to award a shape and purpose to its most amorphous tracks. When it
had covered the sheet of paper with an impossibly complicated
river-system, Mère Gontran fetched a clean sheet and told Sylvia
severely that she must try not to urge the _planchette_. Any attempt at
urging had a very bad effect on its willingness.
"I didn't think I was urging it," said Sylvia, humbly.
"Try and sit more still, dear. If you like, I'll put my feet on your
toes and then you won't be so tempted to jig. We may have to sit all
night, if we aren't careful."
Sylvia strained every nerve to sit as still as possible in order to
avoid having her toes imprisoned all night by Mère Gontran's feet, which
were particularly large, even for so tall a woman. She concentrated upon
preventing her hands from leading _planchette_ to trace the course of
any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting for twenty
minutes like this she felt that all the rest of her body had gone into
her hands. She had never thought that her hands were small, but she had
certainly never realized that they were as large and as ugly as they
were; as for Mère Gontran's, they had for some time lost any likeness to
hands and lay upon the _planchette_ like two uncooked chops. At last
when Sylvia had reached the state of feeling like a large pincushion
that was being rapidly pricked by thousands of pins, Mère Gontran
murmured:
"It's going to start."
Immediately afterward the _planchette_ careered across the paper and
wrote a sentence.
"_Dick's picked a daisy,_" Mère Gontran read out. "Drat the thing! Never
mind, we'll have one more try."
Again a sentence was written, and again it repeated that Dick had picked
a daisy.
Suddenly Samuel the collie made an odd noise.
"He's going to speak through Samuel," Mère Gontran declared. "What is
it, dear? Tell me what it is?"
The dog, who had probably been stung by a gnat, got up and, putting his
head upon his mistress's knee, gazed forth ineffable sorrows.
"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 Mère Gontran. "And he's very angry about
something. I suppose this daisy that Dick 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."
"Mère 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 Mère 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-fashioned. 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
Embassy 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 Dick that the communications are so
unsatisfactory. Why, of course I know what's happened," cried Mère
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 surpassing loudness signaled upon the air.
"Gontran's delighted," she exclaimed. "He was always delighted when I
found out something for myself."
Soon after this Mère 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 passage 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
Mère 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
passage 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
distinguishing circumstances, and at the _pension_ these circumstances
were lacking.
Before Sylvia undressed she opened the window of her bedroom and looked
down into the moonlit garden. Mère 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 Mère Gontran--superstitious 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 passion for animals would have been to a stifled or
sterile maternity; but as with Mère 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 Mère 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 Mère
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. Mère 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 Mère 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 Mère 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 Mère
Gontran that, while it allowed her behavior a certain amount of
reasonableness, would prevent herself from accepting Mère 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 Dick'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 Mère 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 Mère 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 Mère Gontran? Were they merely
coincidental creakings of furniture in response to the warmth of the
stove? Or had Mère Gontran mesmerized her into hearing raps that were
never made? The cats had also heard them; but Mère 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 scrapings and whisperings and scratchings, until she had to relight
her candle. The noises became less, but optical delusions were
substituted 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 asserting 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 God. Whither led all
this theosophistry? Toward the only perfect revelation of God 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 glass 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 Mère Gontran: the coincidence of the
names and the similarity of the situation were too remarkable. Then why
had Mère 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 Mère 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 accumulated 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 hell. 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,
bloody, and fantastic chronicle. No letters came, because nobody 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 God. 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 Dick 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 assumed 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 Mère 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 ambassador 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 Embassy."
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
unclassified 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
Mère 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 assisted gravely--and one might say reverently--at all her
follies of magic. Nor, under the influence of Mère 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 Mère 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 Mère 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; Mère 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," Mère 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
circumstances it would be impossible to arrange a contract.
Sylvia returned to the _pension_ to announce her success.
"Well, if you get ill," said Mère 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 Mère 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. Mère 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 Mère Gontran.
It was as if she had replied to Sylvia's unvoiced fear.
"No, no," she cried. "If they are dead, I don't want to know."
So Carrier with all his mascots had fallen at last, and he would never
cultivate that little farm in the Lyonnais; she remembered how he had
boasted of the view across the valley of the Saône to the long line of
the Alps: far wider now was his view, and his room at the _pension_ was
the abode of owls. She read the paragraph in the French paper: he had
been killed early in September very gloriously. If Paradise might be the
eternal present of a well-beloved dream, he would have found his farm;
if human wishes were not vanity, he was at peace.
The brief snow had melted, and through a drenching afternoon of rain
Sylvia packed up; it was pleasant to think that at any rate she should
travel southward, for the _pension_ was unbearable on these winter days
and long nights filled with a sound of shadows. Again Sylvia was minded
to brave the journey north and return to England, but again an
overmastering impulse forbade her. Her destiny was written otherwise,
and if she fought against the impulse not to go back, she felt that she
should be cast up and rejected by the sea of life.
Mère Gontran, having caught a slight chill, went to bed immediately
after dinner, and invited Sylvia to come and talk to her on her last
evening. It was an odd place, this bedroom that she had chosen; and very
odd she looked lying in the old four-poster, her head tied up in a
bandana scarf and beside her, with his wrinkled head on the pillow,
James the bulldog. The four-poster seemed out of place against the
match-boarding with which the room was lined, and the rest of the
furniture gave one the impression of having been ransacked by burglars
in a great hurry. On the wall opposite the bed was a portrait of
Gontran, which by sheer bad painting possessed a sinister power like
that of some black Byzantine Virgin; on either side of him were hung the
cats' boxes, from which they surveyed their mistress with the same fixed
stare as her painted husband.
"Of course I should go mad if I slept in this room all by myself, and
two hundred yards away from any habitation," Sylvia exclaimed.
"Oh, I'm very fond of my room," said Mère Gontran. "But there again, I
like to be alone with one foot in the grave."
"I want to thank you for all your kindness," Sylvia began.
"If you start thanking me, you'll make me fidget; and if I fidget, it
worries James."
"Still, even at the risk of upsetting James, I must tell you that I
don't know what I should have done without you these six weeks. Perhaps
one day when the war is over you'll come to England and then you'll have
to stay with me in my cottage."
"Ah, I shall never be able to leave the cats, not to mention the pony. I
just happened to have a fancy for England to-day, but it's too late; I'm
established here; I'm known. People in England might stare, and I should
dislike that very much."
Sylvia wanted rather to talk again about spiritualism in order to find
out if Mère Gontran's speculations coincided at any point with her own;
but a discussion of spiritual experience with her was like a discussion
of the liver; she was almost grossly insistent upon the organic
machinery, almost brutal in her zest for the practical, one might almost
say the technical details. The mysteries of human conduct on earth left
her utterly uninterested except when she could obtain a commentary upon
them from the spirits for a practical purpose; the spirits took the
place for her of the solicitor and the doctor rather than of the priest.
Systems of philosophy and religion had no meaning for Mère Gontran; her
spiritual advice never concerned itself with them; and the ultimate
intention of immortality was as well concealed from her as the
justification of life on earth. It was this very absence of the
highfalutin which impressed Sylvia with the genuineness of the
manifestations that she procured, but which at the time discouraged her
with the sense that death merely substituted one irrational form of
being for another.
"What's it all for?" Sylvia had once asked.
"For?" Mère Gontran had repeated in perplexity: she had never considered
the utility of this question hitherto.
"Yes, why, for instance, did you marry Gontran? Did you love him? Are
your children destined to fulfil any part in the world? And _their_
children after them?"
"Why do you want to worry your head with such questions?" Mère Gontran
had asked, compassionately.
"But you deny me the consolation of oblivion. You accept this endless
existence after death with its apparently meaningless prolongation of
human vapidity and pettiness, and you're surprised that I resent it."
But it was impossible to carry on the discussion with somebody who was
as contented with what is as an animal and whose only prayer was _Give
us this day our daily bread_. It was a disappointing contribution to the
problem of life from one who had spent so long on the borderland of the
grave. Yet it was Mère Gontran's devotion to this aspiration that had
made her lodge Sylvia all these weeks.
"How can you, who are so kind, want to see your sons go to the war, not
for any motives of honor or patriotism, but apparently just to keep them
away from cigarettes and idleness? What does their nationality really
matter?"
"They must do something for themselves," Mère Gontran replied. "Just at
the moment the war offers a good opening."
"But suppose they are killed?"
"I hope they will be. I shall be on much better terms with them then
than I am now. Gontran talks to me in English nowadays; so would they,
and we might get to know one another. Cats don't worry about their
kittens, after they're grown up; in fact, they're anxious to get rid of
them. And kingfishers chase their young ones away, or so I was informed
by an English ventriloquist who was interested in natural history."
"Well, I always congratulated myself on being free from sentimentality,"
Sylvia said. "But beside you I'm like a keepsake-album."
"If you'd get out of the habit of thinking that death is of any more
importance than going to sleep, you wouldn't bother about anything,"
Mère Gontran declared.
"Oh, it isn't death that worries me," Sylvia answered. "It's life."
Very early in the twilight of a wet dawn Sylvia started for Kieff. All
day she watched the raindrops trickling down the windows of the railway
carriage and wondered if her impulse to travel south was inspired by any
profounder reason.