Concetta's history--or rather Queenie's, for it was by this name that
she begged Sylvia to call her now--had been a mixture of splendor,
misery, and violence during the six years that, almost to a day, had
elapsed since they met for the first time at Granada. She told it in the
creeping light of a wet dawn while the train was passing through a flat,
colorless country, and while in a corner of the compartment Lottie's
snores rose above the noise, told it in the breathless, disjointed style
that was so poignantly familiar to the one who listened. There was
something ghostly for Sylvia in this experience; it was as if she sat
opposite a Galatea of her own creation, a doubleganger from her own
brain, a dream prolonged into the cold reality of the morning. All the
time that she was listening she had a sensation of being told about
events that she ought to know already, as if in a trance she herself had
lived this history through before; and so vivid was the sensation that
when there were unexplained gaps in Queenie's narrative she found
herself puzzling her own brain to fill them in from experience of her
own, the recollection of which had been clouded by some accident.
When Queenie told how she was carried away by Zozo from Mrs.
Gainsborough at the railway station of Granada, she gave the impression
of having yielded to a magical and irresistible influence, and it was
evident that for a long while the personality of the juggler had swayed
her destiny by a hypnotic power that was only broken when he wounded her
with the pistol-shot. Even now, after three years of freedom, his
influence, when she began to talk of him, seemed to regather its volume
and to be about to pour itself once more over her mind. Sylvia perceived
this danger, and forbade her to talk any more about Zozo. This
injunction was evidently a relief to the child--she must be twenty-one
by now, though she seemed still a child--but it was tantalizing to
Sylvia, who could not penetrate beyond her own impression of the juggler
as an incredible figure, incredible because only drawn with a kind of
immature or tired fancy. He passed into the category of the Svengalis,
and became one of a long line of romantic impossibilities with whom
their creators had failed to do much more than can be done by a
practical joker with a turnip, a sheet, and some phosphorus. Zozo had
always been the weakest part of Sylvia's improvisation of Concetta, a
melodramatic climax that for her had spoiled the more simple horror of
the childhood; she determined that later on she would try to extract
from Queenie, bit by bit, enough to complete her performance.
Although Queenie had managed to break away from the man himself, she had
paid in full for his direction of her life, and Sylvia rebelled against
the whim of destiny which at the critical moment in this child's career
had snatched her from herself and handed her over to the possession of a
Zozo. What could have been the intention of fate in pointing a way to
safety and then immediately afterward barring it against her progress?
The old argument of free will could not apply in her case, because it
was the lack of that, and of that alone, which had caused her ruin. What
but a savage and undiscerning fate could be held accountable for this
tale that had for fit background the profitable and ugly fields through
which on this tristful Rumanian day the train was sweeping? Queenie
seemed to have had no lovers apart from the purchasers of youth, and to
be able to look back with pride and pleasure at nothing except the furs
and dresses and jewelry with which she had been purchased. In the rage
that Sylvia felt for this wanton corruption of a soul, she suddenly
remembered how, long ago, she had watched with a hopeless equanimity and
a cynical tolerance the progress of Lily along the same road as Queenie;
and this memory of herself as she once was and felt revived the
torments of self-reproach that had haunted her delirium in Petrograd.
Then, as Queenie's tale went on, there gradually emerged from all the
purposeless confusion of it one clear ambition in the girl's mind, which
was a passion to be English--a passion feverish, intense, absorbing.
When in France Sylvia had first encountered continental music-hall
_artistes_, she had found among them a universal prejudice against
English girls; later on, when she met in cabarets the expatriated and
cosmopolitan mountebanks that were the slaves rather than the servants
of the public, she had often been envied for her English nationality:
Lottie sleeping over there in the corner was an instance in point. But
she had never found this fleeting envy crystallized to such a passionate
ambition as it was become for Queenie. The circumstances of her birth in
Germany from an Italian father of a Flemish mother, her flight from a
cruel stepmother, her life with the juggler whose nationality seemed as
indeterminate as her own, her speech compounded of English, French,
German, and Italian each spoken with a foreign accent, her absence of
any kind of papers, her lack of any sort of home, had all combined to
give her a positive belief that she was without nationality, which she
coveted as some Undine might covet a soul.
"But why do you want to be English so particularly?" Sylvia asked.
"Don't you know? Why, yes, of course you know. It was you was first
making me to want. You were so sweet, the sweetest person I was ever
meeting, and when I lost you I was always wanting to be English."
So, after all, her own swift passage through Queenie's life had not been
without consequence.
"People were always saying that I looked like an English girl," Queenie
went on. "And I was always talking English. I will never speak other
languages again. I will not know other languages. Until this war came it
was easy; but when they asked me for my passport I had only a _billet
de séjour_ given to me by the Russian police, and after six months I was
expelled. When I was coming to Rumania, there was a merchant on the
train who was kind to me, but he made me promise that if he helped me I
was never to leave him until he was wanting. He was very kind. He gave
me these furs. They are so nice, yes. But I was always going to the
station at Jassy to see if some English girl would be my sister. There
was once in Constantinople an English girl who would be my sister--but
Zozo was jealous. If I was becoming her sister, I would be having a
passport now, and England is so sweet!"
"But you've never been in England," Sylvia observed.
"Oh yes, I was going there with another English girl, and we lived there
three months. I was dancing into a club--a nice club, all the men was
wearing smokings--but she was ill and I wanted to be giving her money,
so I was going to Russia, and then came the war. And now you must be my
sister, because that other sister will be perhaps dead, so ill she was.
_Ach_ yes, so ill, so very ill! When I will have my English passport we
will go to England together and never come away again. Then for the
first time I will be happy."
Sylvia promised that she would do all she could to achieve Queenie's
purpose.
"Tell me, why did you call yourself Queenie Walters?" she asked.
"Because the girl who was my sister in England had once a real little
baby sister who was called Queenie. Oh, dead long ago, long ago! Her
mother, who I was calling _my_ mother, told me about this baby Queenie.
So I was Queenie Walters and my sister was Elsie Walters."
"And your real brother Francesco?" Sylvia asked. "Did you ever see him
again?"
That dreamlike and inexplicable meeting between the brother and the
sister in the streets of Milan had always remained in Sylvia's memory.
"No, never yet again. But I am so sure he is being in England and that
when we go there we will find him. And if he is English, too, what fun
we will have."
Sylvia looked at these two companions who had both assumed English
names. Not even the cold and merciless gray light of the Rumanian
morning could destroy Queenie's unearthly charm, and the longer she
looked at her the more like an Undine she thought her. Her eyes were
ageless, limpid as a child's; and that her experience of evil should
have left no sign of its habitation Sylvia was tempted to ascribe to the
absence of a soul for evil to mar. The only indication that she was six
years older than when they met in Granada was her added gracefulness of
movement, the impulsive gracefulness of a gazelle rather than that
serene gracefulness of a cat which had been Lily's beauty. Her hair, of
a natural pale gold, had not been dimmed by the fumes of cabarets, and
even now, all tangled after a night in the train, it had a look of
hovering in this railway carriage like a wintry sunbeam. In the other
corner sat Lottie, snoring with wide-open mouth, whose body, relaxed in
sleep, seemed fatter than ever. She, too, had suffered, perhaps more
deeply than Queenie, certainly more markedly; and now in dreams what
fierce Bohemian passions were aroused in the vast airs of sleep, what
dark revenges of the spirit for the insults that grotesque body must
always endure?
At this point in Sylvia's contemplation Lottie woke up and prepared for
the arrival of the train at Bucharest by making her toilet.
"Where's the best place to stay?" Sylvia inquired.
"Well, the best place to stay is in some hotel," Lottie replied. "But
the hotels are so horribly expensive. Of course, there are plenty of
pensions d'artistes_, and--" she broke off and looked at Sylvia_
curiously, who asked her why she did so.
"I was thinking that it's a pity you can't share a room together," she
said after a momentary hesitation.
"So we can," Sylvia answered, sharply.
"Well, in that case I should go to a small hotel," Lottie advised.
"Because all the _pensions_ here are run by old thieves. There's Mère
Valérie--she's French and almost the worst of the lot--and there's one
kept by a Greek who's not so bad, but they say most of her bedrooms have
bugs."
"We'll go to a hotel," Sylvia decided. "Where are you going yourself?"
"Oh, I shall find myself a room somewhere. I don't stand a chance of
being engaged at any first-rate cabaret and I sha'n't have much money to
spend on rooms. _Entre nous, je ne dis plus rien aux hommes. Je suis
trop grasse. À quoi sert une jolie chambre?_"
Sylvia had a feeling that she ought to ask Lottie to share a room with
Queenie and herself, and after a struggle against the notion of this fat
girl's ungainly presence she keyed herself to the pitch of inviting her.
"No, no," said Lottie. "It wouldn't do for two English girls to live
with an Austrian."
Sylvia could not help being relieved at her refusal; perhaps she showed
it, for Lottie smiled cynically.
"I think you'll feel a little less charitable to everybody," she said,
"before much longer. You've kept out of this war so far, but you won't
be able to keep out of it forever. I've often noticed about English
girls that they begin by thinking such a lot of themselves that they
have quite a store of pity for the poor people who aren't like them; and
then all of a sudden they turn round and become very unpleasant; because
they discover that other people think themselves as good as they are.
Mind you, I'm not saying you'll do that, but I don't want to find myself
_de trop_ after being with you a week. Let's part as friends."
Sylvia, in the flurry of arrival, did not pay much attention to Lottie's
prophecies, and she was glad to be alone again with Queenie. They
discovered a small hotel kept by Italians, which seemed clean and, if
they obtained a reasonable salary at the Petit Maxim, not too
expensive. When they had dressed themselves up to impress the manager
of the cabaret and were starting out to seek an engagement, the wife of
the proprietor called Sylvia aside.
"You mustn't bring gentlemen back to the hotel except in the afternoon."
"We don't want to bring anybody back at any time," said Sylvia,
indignantly.
The woman shrugged her shoulders and muttered a skeptical apology.
The interview with the manager of the cabaret was rather humiliating for
Sylvia, though she laughed at it when it was all over. He was quite
ready to engage Queenie both to dance _en scène_ and afterward, but he
declared he had nothing to offer Sylvia; she proposed to sing him one of
her songs, but he scarcely listened to her, and when she had finished
repeated that he had nothing to offer her. Whereupon Queenie announced
that unless her sister was engaged the Petit Maxim would have to forgo
her own performance. The manager argued for a time, but he was evidently
much impressed by Queenie's attraction as a typical English girl, and
finally, rather than lose her, he agreed to engage Sylvia as well.
"It's a pity you look so unlike an English girl," he said to Sylvia in
an aggrieved voice. "The public will be disappointed. They expect an
English girl to look English. You'll have to sing at the beginning of
the evening, and I can't pay you more than three hundred _lei_--three
hundred francs, that is."
"I was getting eight hundred in Russia," Sylvia objected.
"I dare say you were, but girls are scarcer there. We've got thousands
of them in Bucharest."
Sylvia was furious at being offered so little, but Queenie promptly
asked six hundred, and when the manager objected, suggested that he
might engage them both for twelve hundred: it was strange to find
Queenie so sharp at business. In the end Sylvia was offered three
hundred and fifty _lei_ and Queenie seven hundred and fifty, which they
accepted.
"You can have a band rehearsal to-morrow," he said, "and open on Monday
week."
Sylvia explained about the loss of her music; and the manager began to
curse, demanding how she expected an orchestra to accompany her without
band parts.
"I'll accompany myself," she answered.
"Oh, well," he agreed, "being the first item on the program, it doesn't
really matter what you do."
It was impossible for the moment not feel the sting of this when Sylvia
remembered herself a year ago, fresh from her success at the Pierian and
inclined to wonder if she were not dimming her effulgence as a
moderately large star by appearing at English music-halls. Now here she
was being engaged for the sake of another girl and allowed on sufferance
to entertain the meager, listless audience at the beginning of a cabaret
performance--for the sake of another girl who owed to her the fare to
Bucharest and whom all the way in the train she had been pitying while
she made plans to rescue her from a degrading existence. There was a
brief moment of bitterness and jealousy; but it passed almost at once,
and she began to laugh at herself.
"There's no doubt you'll have to establish your English nationality,"
she told Queenie, as they left the manager's office. "I really believe
he thought it was I who was pretending."
"It's what I was saying you," Queenie answered. "They was all thinking
that I was English."
"Well, now we must decide about our relationship. Of course, you don't
look the least like my sister, but I think the best way will be for you
to pass as my sister. My name isn't really Sylvia Scarlett, but Sylvia
Snow; so what I suggest is that you shall go on calling yourself Queenie
Walters on the stage, though when we try to get your passport you must
be Queenie Snow. Trust me to get round the English authorities here, if
it's necessary. We can always go back to England through Bulgaria and
Greece, but we must save up enough money, and it 'll that might befall
her more acutely than she would have feared for herself.
"Which must she be given first?" Sylvia asked herself. "A soul or a
nationality? The ultimate reason of nationality is civilization, and the
object of civilization is the progress and safety of the state. The more
progressive and secure is the state the more utterly is the individual
soul destroyed, because the state compels the individual to commit
crimes for which as an individual he would be execrated. Hence the crime
of war, to which the individual is lured by a virtue created by
appealing to mankind's sense of property, a virtue called patriotism
that somehow or other I'm perfectly sure must be anti-divine, though
it's a virtue for which I have a great respect. _What shall it profit a
man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?_ That's
surely the answer to civilization, which, after all, has no object
except the physical comfort of humanity. I suppose one might call the
civilization that is of the spirit and not of the flesh 'salvation.' I
wonder what the Germans mean by _Kultur_--really I suppose the aggregate
soul of the German people. I think _Kultur_ in their sense must be a
hybrid virtue like patriotism. I think it's their own ascription of a
divine origin to a civilization which has been as rapid and as poisonous
and as ugly as a toadstool. We other civilized nations revile the
Germans as barbarians, particularly we English, because in England,
thank Heaven, we've always had an uncomfortable feeling that man is a
greater thing than men, and we perceive in war a sacrifice of the
individual that no state has the right to demand. I wonder why the
Russians went to war. I can't understand a country that has produced
Tolstoi and Dostoievski going to war. If I had not met that soldier in
Kieff I might have been skeptical about Russian idealism after my
adventures in Petrograd, after that filthy cinema, and the scene in the
station at Ungheny; but, having met him, I know that Tolstoi and
Dostoievski _are_ Russia.
"All of which has taken me a long way from Queenie, who is neither ready
for civilization nor for salvation. It's a most extraordinary thing, but
I've suddenly got an idea that she has never been baptized. If she has
not, I shall persuade her to be baptized. Baptism--the key to salvation!
A passport--the key to civilization! The antithesis is not so ludicrous
nor so extravagant as it sounds at first. Without a passport Queenie has
no nationality and does not possess elementary civic rights. She is
liable to be expelled from any country at any moment, and there is no
certainty that any other country will receive her. In that case she will
spend the rest of her life on earth in a kind of Limbo comparable to the
Limbo which I believe is reserved for the souls of those unbaptized
through no fault of their own. I shall be able to procure her a passport
and introduce her to the glories of nationality by perjuring myself, but
I can't give her a soul by perjuring myself, and I've got so strongly
this intuition that she was never baptized that I shall dig out a priest
and talk to him about it. And yet why am I bothering whether she was
baptized or not? What have I to do with churches and their ceremonies?
No doubt I was baptized, confirmed, and made my communion; yet for more
than twenty years I have never entered a church except as an onlooker.
Is this anxiety about Queenie's soul only another way of expressing an
anxiety about my own soul? Yes, I believe it is. I believe that by a
process of sheer intellectual exhaustion I am being driven into
Christianity. Oh, I wish I could talk it all out! It's a damned
dishonest way of satisfying my own conscience, to go to a priest and ask
questions about Queenie. Why can't I go and ask him straight out about
myself? But she is just as important as I am. I think that was brought
home to me rather well, when the manager engaged me because he wanted
her. There was I in a condition of odious pride because I had been
given the chance of helping her by paying the beggarly fare to
Bucharest, and, boomph! as dear Gainsborough used to say, there was she
given the chance of paying me back a hundredfold within twenty-four
hours."
Queenie was out, and Sylvia was lying down with a headache which was not
improved by the procession of these vagrant speculations round and round
her brain. She got up presently to look for some aspirin, and, opening
the drawer of the table between the two beds, she found a bundle of
pictures--little colored lithographs of old masters. She was turning
them over idly when Queenie came back.
"_Ach_, you was looking at my pictures. They are so nice, yes? See, this
is the one I love the best."
It was the "Primavera," and Sylvia was astonished for a moment that
Queenie's childlike and undeveloped taste should care for something so
remote from the crudities that usually appealed to such a mind. Then she
remembered that Botticelli as a painter must have appealed to
contemporaries who by modern standards were equally childlike and
undeveloped; and also that Queenie, whose nationality by the standards
of civilization did not exist, had an Italian father, the inheritor
perhaps of Botticelli's blood. Queenie sat on the bed and looked at her
pictures with the rapt expression of a child poring over her simple
treasures. From time to time she would hold one up for Sylvia's
admiration.
"See how sweet," she would say, kissing the grave little Madonna or
diminished landscape that was drawing her out of Bucharest into another
world.
"I've got a book somewhere about pictures," Sylvia said. "You must read
it."
Queenie hid her face in her arms; when she looked up again she was
crimson as a carnation.
"I can't read," she whispered.
"Not read?" Sylvia echoed.
"I can't read or write," she went on. "_Ach!_ Now you hate me, yes?
Because I was being so stupid."
"But when you went to the school in Dantzig, didn't they teach you
anything?"
"They taught me ballet dancing and acrobatic dancing and step dancing.
Now I must go to have my hair washed, yes?"
Queenie got off the bed and hurried away, leaving Sylvia in a state of
bewilderment before the magnitude of the responsibility that she
represented.
"It's like giving birth to a grown-up baby," she said to herself; on a
sudden irresistible impulse, she knelt down upon the floor and began to
pray, with that most intense prayer of which a human being is capable,
that prayer which transcends all words, all space, all time, all
thought, that prayer which substitutes itself for the poor creature who
makes it. The moment of prayer passed, and Sylvia, rising from her
knees, dressed herself and went in search of a priest.
When she reached the door of the little Catholic mission church to which
the proprietor of the hotel had directed her, she paused upon the inner
threshold before a baize door and asked herself if she were not acting
in a dream. She had not been long enough in Bucharest for the city to be
reassuringly familiar; by letting her fancy play around the unreality of
her present state of mind she was easily able to transform Bucharest to
a city dimly apprehended in a tranced voyage of the spirit and to
imagine all the passers-by as the fantastic denizens of another world.
She stood upon the threshold and yielded a moment to what seemed like a
fainting of reason, while all natural existence swayed round her mind
and while the baize door stuck thick with pious notices, funereal
objurgations, and the petty gossip, as it were, of a new habitation at
which she was looking with strange eyes, seemed to attend her next step
with a conscious expectancy. She pushed it open and entered the church;
a bearded priest, escaping the importunities of an aged parishioner
with a voluble grievance, was coming toward her; perceiving that Sylvia
was looking round in bewilderment, he took the occasion to get rid of
the old woman by asking her in French if he could do anything to help.
"I want to see a priest," she replied.
Although she knew that he was a priest, in an attempt to cheat the force
that was impelling her she snatched at his lack of resemblance to the
conventional priestly figure of her memory and deluded herself with vain
hesitations.
"Do you want to make your confession?" he asked.
Sylvia nodded, and looked over her shoulder in affright; it seemed that
the voice of a wraith had whispered "Yes." The priest pointed to the
confessional, and Sylvia, with a final effort to postpone her surrender,
asked, with a glance at the old woman, if he were not too busy now. He
shook his head quickly and spoke sharply in Italian to the parishioner,
who retired, grumbling; Sylvia smiled to see with what an ostentation of
injured dignity she took the holy water and crossed herself before
passing out through the baize door. The old woman's challenging humanity
restored to Sylvia her sense of reality; emotion died away like a
falling gale at eve, and she walked to the confessional imbued with an
intention as practical as if she had been walking up-stairs to tidy her
hair. The priest composed himself into a non-committal attitude and
waited for Sylvia, who, now that she was kneeling, felt as if she were
going to play an unrehearsed part.
"I ought to say before I begin that, though I was brought up a Catholic,
I've not been inside a church for any religious duties since I was nine
years old. I'm now thirty-one. I know that there is some set form of
words, but I've forgotten it."
Sylvia half expected that he would tell her to go away and come back
when she had learned how to behave in the confessional; now that she was
here, she felt that this would be a pity, and she was relieved when he
began the _Confiteor_ in an impersonal voice, waiting for her to repeat
every sentence after him. His patience seemed to her almost miraculous
in the way it smoothed her difficulties.
"I shall have to give you a short history of my life," Sylvia began. "I
can't just say baldly that I've done this or not done that, because
nearly all the sins I've committed weren't committed in their usual
classification."
As she said this, she had a moment of acute self-consciousness and
wondered if the priest were smiling, but he merely said in that
far-away, impersonal voice:
"I am listening, my daughter."
"I was brought up a Catholic. I was baptized and confirmed and I made my
first communion. It was the only communion I ever made, because somehow
or other at home there was always work to be done in the house instead
of going to Mass. My mother was French and she married an Englishman
much younger than herself. Of this marriage I was the only child. My
mother had six other daughters, two by a lover who died, and four by her
first husband, who was a Frenchman. My mother was illegitimate; her
father was also an Englishman. I only knew this after she died. The man
who married my grandmother always acknowledged her as his own daughter.
My mother was very strict and, though she was not at all religious, she
was very good. I don't want to give the idea that she was responsible
for anything I did. The only thing is, perhaps, that, being passionately
in love with my father, she was very demonstrative in front of me, which
made the idea of passion shocking to me when I was still young.
Therefore, for whatever sins of the flesh I have committed I cannot
plead a natural propensity. I don't know whether this would be
considered to make them worse or not. My father was a weak man; when my
mother died, he robbed his employers and had to leave France, taking me
with him. I was twelve at the time. I suppose if I wanted to justify
myself, I could say that no child could have spent a more demoralizing
childhood from that moment. But though, when I look back at it now and
realize some of the horrible actions that my father and a friend of his
who lived with us committed, I can't think that at the time they
influenced me toward evil. I suppose that any kind of moral callousness
_is_ a bad example, and certainly I had no conception that swindling
people out of money was anything but a perfectly right and normal
procedure for anybody who was without money. My mother was angry with me
once because by accident I spent some money of hers, but she was angry
with me because it was a serious loss to the household accounts: there
was no suggestion of my having spent money that did not belong to me.
Other things that my father and his friend did I never understood at the
time, and so I can't pretend that they set me a bad example. My father
took a woman to live with him, and I was angry because it upset what had
hitherto seemed a comfortable existence, but the revelation of the
passionate side of it disgusted me still more with the flesh. I was a
mixture of precocity and innocence. Looking back at myself as a child, I
am amazed at the amount I knew and the little I understood--the amount I
understood and the little I knew. I read all sorts of books and accepted
everything I read as the truth; I read dozens of novels, for instance,
before I understood the meaning of fiction. I should say that no child
was ever exposed so naturally to the full tide of human existence, and
why or how I managed to escape degradation and damnation I've never been
able to explain until now. As a matter of fact, it's not true really to
say that I did escape degradation, but I will come to that presently.
"Well, my father killed himself on account of this woman, and I was left
with his friend when I was fifteen. Once I happened to be left
altogether alone when this man was away turning a dishonest penny
somewhere, and I suppose I fell mildly in love with a youth two years
older than myself. This made my father's friend jealous, and one night
he tried to make love to me. I was as much disgusted by this as if I had
really been the innocent child I might have been. I ran away with the
youth, and nothing happened. I ran away from him and lived with a young
Jew, but nothing happened. I met the woman who had lived with my father,
and--which shows how utterly unmoral I was--I made great friends with
her and even went to live with her. She used to have all sorts of men,
and I just accepted her behavior as a personal taste of her own which I
could neither understand nor share. Then I met a gentleman, a man
fifteen years older than myself, who was attracted by my unusualness and
sent me to school with the idea of marrying me. Well, I married him, and
I think that was the first sin I committed. I was seventeen at the time.
I think if my husband had understood how stunted my emotional
development was in proportion to my mental acquisitiveness he would have
behaved differently. But he was fascinated by my capacity for cynicism
and encouraged me to think as I liked, with himself for audience; at the
same time he tried to make me for outsiders' eyes a conventional young
miss whom he had rather apologetically married. He demanded from me the
emotional wisdom to sustain this part, and of course I could see nothing
in his solicitude but a sort of snobbish egotism. He was delighted by my
complete indifference to any kind of religion, supernatural or natural,
and when I made friends with an English priest--not a Catholic--but half
a Catholic--it's impossible to explain to a foreigner--I don't think
anybody would understand the Church of England out of England, and very
few people can there--he was afraid of my turning religious. I don't
know--perhaps I might have done; but somebody sent an anonymous letter
to my husband suggesting that this priest and I were having a
love-affair, and my husband forbade me to see him again. So I ran away.
I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up,
because whenever I had been brought face to face with a difficult
situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some
perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever done.
It's hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember I was only
nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from understanding all
my motives then as if I were trying to understand somebody who was not
myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the streets. For three months I
mortified my flesh by being a harlot. Can you understand that? Can you
possibly understand the deliberate infliction of such a discipline, not
to humiliate one's pride, but to exalt it? Can you understand that I
emerged from that three months of incredible horror with a complete
personality? I was defiled: I was degraded: I was embittered: I hated
mankind: I vowed to revenge myself on the world: I scoffed at love: and
yet now, when I feel that I have at last brushed from myself the last
speck of mud that was still clinging to me, I feel that somehow all that
mud has preserved me against a more destructive corruption. This does
not mean that I do not repent of what I did, but can you understand how
without a pride that could lead me to such depths I could not have come
through humility to a sight of God?"
Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly
because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that he
had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly because
there seemed more important revelations of herself still to be made.
"I stayed a common harlot until I was offered by chance an opportunity
to rescue myself by going on the stage. Then I sent my husband as much
money as I had saved and the evidences of my infidelity, so that he
might divorce me, which he did. Now comes an important event in my life.
I met a girl--a very beautiful girl doomed from the creation of the
universe to be a plaything of man."
The priest held up his hand to protest.
"Ah, I know you'll say that no one can possibly be so foredoomed, and
indeed I know the same myself now, or rather I'm trying hard to believe
it, because predestination without free will seems to me a doctrine of
devils. At the time, however, I could see nothing that would save this
girl, and with a perverted idealism I determined that she should step
gracefully downhill. I think the hardest thing to do is to go downhill
gracefully. We can climb uphill, and a certain awkwardness is
immaterial, because the visible effort lends a dignity to our progress,
and the air of success blows freshly at the summit. We can walk along
the level road of mediocrity with an acquired gracefulness that is
taught us by our masters of the golden mean--particularly in England,
where it's particularly easy to walk gracefully along the flat. Very
well, instead of using my influence to prevent this girl descending at
all, I was entirely occupied with the esthetic aspects of her descent.
I'm not going to pretend that I could have stopped her--a better person
than I tried and failed--but that doesn't excuse my attitude. And
there's worse to my account. When this other person wanted to marry her,
I did all I could to stop the marriage at first, and it was not until
the engagement between them was broken off that I discovered that my
true reasons for hating it sprang entirely from my own jealousy. I felt
that if this man had loved me, I could have regained myself, the self
that was myself before those three months of prostitution. I should say
here that I had nothing to do directly with the destruction of the other
marriage, but I hold myself to blame ultimately, because, if from the
beginning I had bent my whole will to its being carried through, it
_would_ have been carried through. Looking back at the business now, I
am convinced that what happened happened for the best, and that such a
marriage would have been fatal to the happiness of the man and useless
to the girl, but that does not excuse my own share in the smash.
"Well, the man left this girl in my charge, and finally she threw me
over and married a foreigner, since when I have never heard that she
even still lives. I had the good fortune to be given enough money by
somebody to enable me to be independent, and for two or three years I
looked at life from the outside. I had nothing to do with men, and as a
result I began to be afraid that youth would pass without my ever
knowing what it was to love. Friends of mine married and were happy.
Only I seemed fated to be always alone.
"I wonder sometimes if when we judge the behavior of others we pay
enough attention to this loneliness that haunts the lives of so many men
and women. You will say that no one can be lonely with God;
unfortunately, thousands of lonely souls are destitute of the sense of
God from birth to death, and these lonely souls are far more exposed to
temptation than the rest. Faith they have not: hope has died in their
hearts: love slowly withers. All the vices of self-destruction surround
their path. Pride flourishes in such soil, and jealousy and envy. I
believe their only compensation is the fact that lies and self-deception
find small nourishment in such spiritual wastes. I'm sure that if the
pride of such people could be pierced, there would gush forth a cry of
despair that ascribed everything in this life to a feeling of
loneliness. In my own case, in addition to the inevitable loneliness
fostered by such a childhood as mine--the natural loneliness caused by
living with two men who were perpetually on the verge of
imprisonment--there was the loneliness of my own temperament. I know
that every human being claims for himself the right to be misunderstood
and unappreciated; it's not that kind of loneliness of which I speak.
Mine was the loneliness of some one who is so masculine and so feminine
simultaneously that reason is sapped by emotion and emotion is
sterilized by reason. The only chance for such a temperament is
self-expression either in love, art, or religion. I tried vaguely to
express myself in art, but without success at first; and I was too proud
and not vain enough to persevere. I then fell back on love. I let
myself get into a condition of wanting to be in love, and at this
moment of emotional collapse I met by accident the youth--now a man of
thirty--with whom I had effected one of my childish elopements. With
this man I lived for a year. I can't pretend that I did not take
pleasure in the passionate relationship, though I always felt it was a
temporary surrender to the most feminine side of me that I despised. I
think I can best explain my emotions by saying that all the time I was
with him I was like a person under the influence of a sedative drug.
"Now there are people who pass from drug to drug with increase of
pleasure, but there are others to whom the notion of being drugged
becomes suddenly obnoxious and in whom the reaction creates an abnormal
activity. Quite suddenly I abandoned my pleasure and became ambitious to
express myself in art. I succeeded. I was, for one who begins so late in
life, exceptionally successful, and then behold, my very success took on
the aspect of yielding to another sedative drug. It never seemed
anything but a temporary expedient to defeat the claims of existence.
Just as love had seemed a surrender to the exclusively feminine side of
me, so art seemed a surrender to the exclusively masculine side. There
was always an unsatisfied, unexpressed part of me that girded at the
satisfied part. As a result of this, I made up my mind that a happy
marriage with children and a household to look after was a better thing
than artistic success. Here was obviously another experiment for the
benefit of the feminine side. I knew perfectly well that if I had
carried out my intention I should not have remained content when the
sedative action of the new drug began to cease, and I am grateful now
that circumstances interfered. I was jilted by the man who was going to
marry me, and the fact that I had already lived with him and refused to
marry him dozens of times made the injury to my pride intolerable. In a
fit of rage I flung behind me everything--success, love, marriage,
friends--and left England to take up again at the age of thirty-one a
life I had forsaken for several years. And now I found that even the
mere externals of such a life were horrible. I could not bear the idea
of being for sale; while I had no intention of ever giving myself to a
man again, I had to drink for my living and dance with drunkards for my
cab fare, which, though it may not be a technical prostitution, differs
only in degree from the complete sale of the body.
"Scarcely a month had passed when I became seriously ill, and in the
dreadful delirium of my fever I imagined that I was damned. I do not
think that anybody has the right to accept seriously the mental
revelations that are made to a mind beside itself; I think, indeed, it
would be a blasphemy to accuse God of taking such a method to rouse a
soul to a sense of its being, its duties, and its dangers; and I dread
to claim for myself any supernatural intervention at such a time, partly
because my reason shies at such a thought and partly because I think it
is presumptuous to suppose that God should interest Himself so
peculiarly in an individual. It seems to me almost vulgarly
anthropomorphic."
"Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is
forgotten before God?" the priest murmured.
"Yes, yes," Sylvia agreed. "I have expressed myself badly, and of course
when I think of it I have been driven ever since the delirium really to
accept just that. You can understand, can't you, the dread of
presumption in my revolt against pride?
"But by insisting upon what seemed to happen in my delirium I am giving
you a wrong impression. It was when I came to myself again in the
hospital that I felt changed. I longed then for knowledge of God, but I
was afraid that my feeling was simply the natural result of weakness
after a severe illness. I almost rejected God in my fear of supposing
myself hysterical and egotistical. However, I did try hard to put myself
into a state of resignation, and when I came out of the hospital I felt
curiously awake to the sense of God and simultaneously an utter
indifference to anything in my old life that might interrupt my quest by
restoring me to what I was before this illness. While I was ill war had
broken out, and I found myself utterly alone. Ordinarily I am sure that
such a discovery would have terrified me; now I rejoiced in such
loneliness. I deliberately turned my back on England and waited for
something from my new life to fill this loneliness. I felt like some one
who has swept and garnished a room that he may receive guests. My chief
emotion was a tremendous love of the whole world and an illimitable
desire to make up for all my cynicism in the past by the depth of this
love. I went back to the _pension_ where I had lived before I was ill,
and it seemed to me a coincidence that the woman who kept it should be a
spiritualist and that for two months my mind should be continuously
occupied by what I might call the magic side of things. The result was
that, though I was often puzzled by inexplicable happenings, I conceived
a distaste for all this meddling with the unknowable, this kind of
keyhole peeping at infinity: it seemed to me vulgar and unpleasant.
Nevertheless, I was driven back all the time in my meditations on the
only satisfactory revelation of God, the only rational manifestation,
which was Jesus Christ. Every other explanation crumbled away in my
brain except that one fact. Then, although I believe it was only some
fortune-telling with cards that first put the notion into my head, I was
obsessed with the idea that I must go south. On my way I met a soldier
at Kieff who bought me a golden bag for no other reason than because it
seemed to him that to give pleasure to somebody else was a better way of
spending his money than in gambling or self-indulgence. In the state of
mind I was in I accepted this as a sign that I was right to go south. So
you see that I had really arrived at the point of view of accepting the
theory of a divine intervention in my favor.
"After three months at Odessa--where I read Tolstoi and Dostoievski and
found in them, ah, such profundities of the human soul lighted
up--against my instinct I went north again; the Germans were advancing
upon Warsaw, and circumstances brought me here. On the way, at Jassy, an
extraordinary thing happened. I met a girl whom I had tried to adopt six
years ago at Granada, but who was taken from me by a blackguard and who
since then has what people call sunk very low. It seemed to me that in
finding this child again, for she is still really a child, I was being
given an opportunity of doing what I had failed to do for that first
girl of whom I told you. Then suddenly I conceived the idea that she had
never been baptized; when I began to think about her soul, I was driven
by an unknown force to this church. When I came in I did not know what
to do, and when you asked me if I wanted to make my confession the force
seemed to say 'Yes.'"
Sylvia was silent, and the priest finished the _Confiteor_, which she
repeated after him.
"My daughter," he said, "it is the grace of God. I do not feel that in
this solemn moment--a moment that fills me as a priest with humility at
being allowed to regard such a wonderful manifestation of God's infinite
mercy--any poor words of mine can add anything. It is the grace of God:
let that suffice. But, wonderful as has been God's mercy to a soul that
was deaf so long to His voice, do not forget that your greatest danger,
your greatest temptation, may be to rely too much upon yourself. Do not
forget at this solemn moment that you can only enjoy this divine grace
through the Sacraments. Do not forget that only in the Church can you
preserve the new sense of security that you now feel. One who has been
granted such mercy must expect harder struggles than less fortunate
souls. Do not, by falling back into indifference and neglect of your
religious duties, succumb to the sin of pride. By the height of your
uplifting will be measured the depth of your fall, if in your pride you
think to stand alone."
When the priest had given her absolution, Sylvia asked him about
Queenie; and when he seemed a little doubtful of Queenie's willingness
to be a catechumen, she wondered if he were deliberately trying to
discourage her in order to mortify that pride he had seemed to fear so
much.
"But if she wants to be baptized?" Sylvia persisted.
"Of course I will baptize her."
"You think that I'm too much occupied with her when I have still so much
to learn myself?" she challenged.
They were walking down the church toward the door, and Sylvia felt
rather like the importunate parishioner whom she had interrupted by her
entrance.
"No, no, I think you are quite right. But I fear that you will expect
miracles of God's grace all round you," said the priest. "What has
happened to you may not happen to her."
"But it must," Sylvia declared. "It shall."
The priest shook his head, and there was a smile at the back of his
eyes.
"If you fail?"
"I sha'n't fail."
"Is God already put on one side?"
"I shall pray," said Sylvia.
"Yes, I think that is almost better than relying too much upon the human
will."
Two things struck Sylvia when she had left the church and was walking
back to the hotel: the first was that the priest had really said very
little in response to that long outpouring of her history, and the
second was that here in this street it did not seem nearly as easy to
solve the problem of Queenie's soul as it had seemed in the church. Yet,
when she came to think over the priest's words, she could not imagine
how he could have spoken differently.
"I suppose I expected to be congratulated as one is congratulated upon
a successful performance," she said to herself. "That's the worst of a
histrionic career like mine: one can't get rid of the footlights even in
the confessional. As a matter of fact, I ought to be grateful that he
accepted the spirit of my confession without haggling over the form, as
from his point of view he might have done most justifiably. Perhaps he
was tired and didn't want to start an argument. And yet no, I don't
think it was that. He came down like a hammer on the main objection to
me--my pride. He was really wonderfully unecclesiastical. It's a funny
thing, but I seem to be much less spiritually exalted than I ought to be
after such a reconciliation. I seem to have lost for the moment that
first fine careless rapture of conversion. Does that mean that the whole
business was an emotional blunder and that I'm feeling disappointed? No,
I don't feel disappointed: I feel practical. I suppose my friend the
priest wouldn't accept the comparison, but it reminds me of how I felt
when, after I had first conceived the idea of my Improvisations, I had
to set about doing them. Everything has its drudgery: love produces
household cares; art, endless work; religion, religious duties. The
moment of attraction, the moment of inspiration, the moment of
conversion--if they could only endure! Perhaps heaven is the infinite
prolongation of such moments.
"And then there's Queenie. It's not much use my leading her to the font
as one leads a horse to water, because, though I should regard it as
Infant Baptism, the priest would not. Yet I don't see why he shouldn't
instruct her like a child. Poor priest! He could hardly have expected
such problems as myself and Queenie when he was so anxious to get rid of
that old woman who was pestering him. I think I won't bother about
Queenie for a bit, until I have practised a little subordination of
myself first. She's got to acquire a soul of her own; it's no use my
presenting her with a piece of mine."
Queenie had been back from the hairdresser's for a long time when
Sylvia reached the hotel, and was wondering what had become of her
friend.
"You've been out alone," she said, reproachfully. "Your headache is
better, I think. Yes?"
"My headache?" Sylvia repeated. "Yes, it's much better. I've been
indulging in spiritual aspirin."
"I'm glad it's better, because it is our first night at the Petit Maxim
to-night. I wonder if I will be having much applause."
"So it is," Sylvia said. "I'd forgotten my approaching triumph with the
waiters; it's not likely that there'll be any audience when I appear. At
nine P.M. sharp the program of the Petit Maxim opened with Miss Sylvia
Scarlett's three songs. The gifted young lady--I've reached the age when
it's a greater compliment to be called young than beautiful--played and
sang with much _verve_. Several waiters ceased from dusting the empty
tables to listen, and at the close her exit was hailed by a loud
flourish of _serviettes_. The solitary visitor who clapped his hands
explained afterward that he was trying to secure some attention to
himself, and that thirst, not enthusiasm, had dictated his action."
"How you were always going on, Sylvia," said Queenie. "Nobody was ever
going to understand you when you talk so quick as that."
"Miss Sylvia Scarlett's first song was an old English ballad set to the
music of Handel's 'Dead March.'"
"If we were ever going to have any dinner, we must go and eat now,"
Queenie interrupted.
"Yes, I don't want to miss the sunset with my last song."
"But what does it matter, if you are paid to sing, if you sing first or
last?"
"The brightest star, my dear, cannot shine by daylight."
"But you are stupid, Sylvia. It is no more daylight at nine o'clock."
"Yes, I am very stupid," Sylvia agreed, and, catching hold of Queenie's
arms, she looked deep into her eyes. "Believe me, you little fairy
thing, that I should be much more angry if you were put first on a
program than because I am."
The cabaret Petit Maxim aimed at expressing in miniature the essence of
all the best cabarets in Paris, just as Bucharest aimed at expressing in
miniature the essence of Paris. The result, though pleasant and
comfortable enough, was in either case as little like Paris as a scene
from one of its own light operas is like Vienna. What Bucharest and the
Petit Maxim did both manage to effect, however, was an excellent
resemblance to one of those light operas. Sylvia in the course of her
wanderings had once classified the capitals she had visited as
metropolitan, cosmopolitan, and neapolitan. Bucharest belonged very
definitely to the last group; it stood up like a substantially built
exhibition in the middle of a ring of industrial suburbs which by their
real squalor heightened the illusion of its unreality. The cupolas of
shining bronze and the tiled domes shimmering in the sun like peacocks'
tails dazzled the onlooker with an illusion of barbaric splendor; but
the city never escaped from the self-consciousness of an exhibition,
which was heightened by the pale blue and silver uniforms of the
officers, the splendid equipages for hire, and the policemen dressed in
chocolate like _commissionnaires_, and accentuated by the inhabitants'
pride in the expensiveness and "naughtiness" of their side-shows, of
which not the least expensive and "naughty" were the hotels. One might
conceive the promoter of the exhibition taking one aside and asking if
one did not think he had been successful in giving Paris to the Balkans,
and one might conceive his disappointment on being told that,
magnificent though it all looked, it was no more Paris than Offenbach
was Molière.
At the time when Sylvia visited Bucharest the sense of being one of the
chorus in a light opera was intensified by the dramatic plot that was
provided by the European war. Factions always grew more picturesque with
every mile away from England, the mother of parliaments, where they
ceased to be picturesque three hundred years ago when the chief
Punchinello's head tumbled into the basket at Whitehall. The comedy of
kingship had been prolonged for another century and a half in France,
and in France they were a century and a half nearer to the picturesque
and already two or three hundred miles away from England. In Italy the
picturesqueness grew still more striking with such anachronisms as the
Camorra and the Mafia. But it was not until the Balkans that factions
could be said to be vital in the good old way. Serbia had shown not so
long ago what could still be done with a thoroughly theatrical regal
murder; and now here was Rumania jigging to the manipulation of the
French faction and the German faction, with just enough possibility of
all the plots and counterplots ending seriously by plunging the country
into war on one side or the other to give a background of real drama to
the operatic form.
At the Petit Maxim the Montagues and Capulets came to blows nightly.
Everything here was either Ententophile or Germanophile: there were
pro-German waiters, pro-German tables, pro-German tunes, for the benefit
of the Germans and pro-Germans who occupied one half of the cabaret and
applauded the Austrian performers. Equally there was the Ententist
complement. If the first violin was pro-French and played sharp for an
Austrian singer, the cornet was pro-German ready to break time to
disconcert a French dancer. On the whole, as was natural in what is
called "a center of amusement," the pro-French element predominated,
and, though it was possible to sing the "_Marseillaise_" at the cost of
a few broken glasses, the solitary occasion when "_Deutschland über
Alles_" was attempted ended in several broken heads, a smashed
chandelier, and six weeks in bed for an Austrian contralto whose face
was scratched with a comb by a French _artiste_ under the influence of
ether and patriotism.
Nor was this atmosphere of plot and faction confined to general
demonstrations of friendliness or hostility. Bucharest was too small a
city to allow deep ramifications to either party; the gossip of the
court on the day before became the gossip of the cabaret on the evening
after; scarcely one successful conveyance of war material from Germany
to Turkey but was openly discussed at the Petit Maxim. Intrigues and
flirtations with the great powers increased the self-esteem of Rumania,
who took on the air of a coquettish school-girl that finds herself
surrounded by the admiration of half a dozen elderly rakes. Her dowry
and good looks seemed both so secure that any little looseness of
behavior would always be overlooked by the man she chose to marry in the
end.
Sylvia could not help teasing some of the young officers that frequented
the Petit Maxim. They changed their exquisite operatic uniforms so many
times in the day: they accepted with such sublime effrontery the salute
of the goose step from a squad of magnificent peasants dressed up as
soldiers; they painted and powdered their faces, wore pink velvet bands
round their _képis_ under nodding _panaches_; and not one but could
display upon his breast the ribbon of the bloodless campaign against
Bulgaria of two years before. When they came jangling into the cabaret,
one felt that the destinies of Europe were attached to their
sword-belts, as comfort hangs upon the tinkling of a housekeeper's
_châtelaine_.
"If Italy declares war, we shall declare war; for we are more Roman than
they are. If Italy remains neutral, we shall remain neutral, because the
Latin races must hold together," the patrons of the Entente avowed.
"Italy will not declare war, and we shall have to fight the Russians. We
won Plevna for them and lost Bessarabia as a reward. As soon as Austria
realizes that she must give us Transylvania we shall declare war," said
the patrons of the Central Powers.
"We shall remain neutral. Our neutrality is precious to both sides,"
murmured a third set.
And, after all, Sylvia thought, the last was probably the wisest view,
for it would be a shame to spoil the pretty uniforms of the officers and
a crime to maim the bodies of the nobler peasants they commanded.
In such an atmosphere Sylvia had to postpone any solution of the
spiritual side of Queenie's problem and concentrate upon keeping her out
of immediate mischief. The manager of the Petit Maxim had judged the
tastes of his clients accurately, and Queenie had not been dancing at
the cabaret for a fortnight when one read on the programs, QUEENIE, LA
JEUNE DANSEUSE ANGLAISE ET L'ENFANT GÂTÉE DE BUCURESTI. Chocolates and
flowers were showered upon her, and her faintest smile would uncork a
bottle of champagne. But every morning at three o'clock, when the
cabaret closed, Sylvia snatched her away from all the suitors and took
her home as quickly as possible to their hotel. She used to dread
nightly the arrival of the moment when Queenie would refuse to go with
her, but the moment did not come; and the child never once grumbled at
Sylvia's sigh of relief to find themselves back in their own bedroom. In
order as much as possible to distract her from the importunities of
hopeful lovers, Sylvia would always aim at surrounding herself and
Queenie with the political schemers, so that the evening might pass away
in speculation upon the future of the war and the imminence of Rumanian
intervention. She impressed upon Queenie the necessity of seeming
interested in the fate of the country of which she was supposed to be a
native. They were the only English girls in the cabaret; in fact, the
only English actresses apparently anywhere in Bucharest. Sylvia, finding
that man is much more of a political animal in the Balkans than
elsewhere, took advantage of the general curiosity about England's
personality to get as many bottles of champagne opened for information
from her own lips as out of admiration and desire for Queenie's.
From general political discussions it was a short way to the more
intimate discussions of faction's intrigue; and Sylvia became an expert
on the ways and means of the swarm of German agents who corrupted
Bucharest as blue-bottles taint fresh meat. She sometimes wondered if
she ought not to convey some of the knowledge thus acquired to the
British Legation; but she supposed, on second thoughts, that she was
unlikely to know anything that the authorities therein did not already
know much better, and, being averse from seeming to put herself forward
for personal advantage, she did not move in the matter.
One of the chief frequenters of their company was a young lieutenant of
the cavalry, called Philidor, with whom Sylvia made friends. He was an
enthusiast for the cause of the Entente, and she learned from him a
great deal about the point of view of a Balkan state, so that when she
had known him for a time she was able to judge both Rumania as a whole
and the individual extravagances and vanities of Rumanians more
generously.
"I don't think you quite understand," he once said to her, "the fearful
responsibility that will rest upon the Balkan statesman who decides the
policy of his country in this crisis. Whatever happens, England will
remain England, France will remain France, Germany will remain Germany;
but in Rumania, although our sympathies are with you, our geographical
position makes us the natural allies of the Germans. Suppose we march
with you and something goes wrong. Nothing can prevent us from being
Germanized for the rest of our history. You mustn't pay too much
attention to the talk you hear about the great power of Rumania and the
influence we shall have upon the course of the war. Such talk springs
from a half-expressed nervousness at the position in which we find
ourselves. We are trying to bolster ourselves up with the sense of our
own importance in the hope that we shall have the wisdom to direct our
policy rightly. We are not a great power; we are a little power; and our
only chance of becoming a great power would be that Austria should break
up, that Russia should crumble away, and that the whole vile country of
Bulgaria should be obliterated from the surface of the earth. It is
certain that Bulgaria will march with Germany; nothing can stop that
except the defeat of Germany this year. Possibly Italy may come in on
your side this spring, but tied as we are to her by blood, we are
separated from her by miles of alien populations, and Italy cannot help
us. Greece is in the same plight as we are--not quite, perhaps, because
she can depend for succor upon the sea: we can't. Ah, if you could only
open the Dardanelles! If you only had a statesman to see that there lies
the key to certain victory in this war. But statesmen no longer exist
among you great powers. You've become too big for statesmen and can only
produce politicians. The only statesmen in Europe nowadays are to be
found in the Balkans, because since every man here is a politician it
requires a statesman to rise above the ruck. Paradox though it may seem,
statesmen create states; they are not created by them. We have all our
history before us in the Balkans, if we can only survive being swallowed
up in this cataclysm; but I doubt if we can. To you this country of mine
is like a comic opera, but to me, one of the players, it is as tragic as
'Pagliacci.'
"You are right in a way to mock at our aristocracy, though much of that
aristocracy is not truly Rumanian, but bastard Greek; yet we have such a
wonderful peasantry, and an idealist like myself dreads the effect of
this war. All our plans of emancipation, all our schemes for destroying
the power of the great landowners," and in a whisper he added, "all our
hopes of a republic are doomed to failure. I tell you, my dear, it's
tragic opera, not comic opera."
"But if you are a republican, why do you wear the uniform of a crack
cavalry regiment?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, I've thought that out," Philidor replied. "I belong to a good
family. If I proclaimed my opinions openly, I should merely be put on
one side. Aristocratic rule is more powerful in Rumania than anywhere in
Europe except Prussia. The aristocrats have literally all the capital of
the country in their hands; our peasants are serfs. As an avowed
republican I could do nothing to spread the opinions that I believe to
be the salvation of my country and the preservation of her true
independence; we are a young state--not a state at all, in fact, but a
limited liability company with a director imported from the chief
European firm of king-exporters--and we have still to realize our soul
as by fire."
"The soul of a country," Sylvia murmured. "It's only the aggregate of
the human souls that make it, but each soul could be the microcosm of
the universe."
"True, true," Philidor agreed. "And the soul of Rumania is the soul of a
girl who's just out, or of a boy in his first year at college. Hence all
the prettiness and all the complacent naughtiness and all the imitation
of older and more worldly people and all the tyranny and contempt for
the rights of the poor, the want of consideration for servants really.
Though I must be young like the rest and dress myself up and lead the
life of my friends, I am always hoping to influence them gradually, very
gradually. Perhaps if I were truly a great soul I should fling over all
this pretense; but I know my own limitations, and all I pray is that
when the man arises who is worthy to lead Rumania toward liberty and
justice I shall have the wit to recognize him and the courage to follow
his lead."
"But you said just now," Sylvia reminded him, "that all the European
statesmen were to be found in the Balkans."
"I still say that, but our statesmen--we have only two--dare not in the
presence of this war think of anything except the safety of the
country. Republicanism would be of little use to a Rumania absorbed
either into the Dual Monarchy or into the Czardom of Russia or ravaged
by the hellish Bulgarians. I tell you that we see precipices before our
steps whichever way we turn for the path; but because we are young we
dress ourselves up and gamble and sing and dance and swagger and boast;
we are young, my dear girl--very, very young, perhaps not old enough for
our death to be anything but pathetic."
"You're in a very pessimistic mood to-night," Sylvia said.
"Who could be anything but gloomy when he looks round a room like this?
A crowd of French, Rumanian, and Austrian cocottes dancing to
'Tipperary' in this infernal tinkling din--forgive my frankness, but you
know I don't include _you_ in the _galère_--while over there I see a
cousin of my own, a member of one of our greatest families, haggling
with a dirty German agent over the price of sending another six
aeroplanes to Turkey disguised as agricultural implements; and over
there I see a man, who I had always hoped was an honest editor, selling
his pen to the fat little German baron that will substitute poison for
ink and bank-notes for honest opinions; and over there are three brother
officers with three girls on their knees singing the words of
'Tipperary' with as much intelligence as apes, while they brag to their
companions of how in six weeks they will be marching to save France."
"They don't miss much by not understanding the words," Sylvia said, with
a smile.
"I don't understand how a woman like you can tolerate or endure this
life," Philidor exclaimed, fanatically. "Why don't you take that pretty
little sister of yours out of it and back to England? I don't understand
how you can stay here with your country at war."
"That's too long a story to tell you now," Sylvia said. "But between
ourselves she's not really my sister."
"I never supposed she was," Philidor answered. "She's not English,
either, is she?"
Sylvia looked at him sharply.
"Have you heard any one else say that?" she asked.
"Nobody else here knows English as well as I do."
The dance stopped, and Queenie, leaving her partner, came up to their
table with a smile.
"You're happy, anyway," said Philidor.
"Oh yes. I'm so happy. She is so sweet to me," Queenie cried, embracing
Sylvia impulsively.
A French girl sitting at the next table laughed and murmured an epithet
in argot. Sylvia's cheeks flamed; she was about to spring up and make a
quarrel, but Philidor restrained her.
"Do you wonder that I protest against your exposing yourself to that
sort of thing?" he said. "What are you going to do? It wouldn't be quite
you, would it, to hit her over the head with a champagne-bottle? Let the
vile tongue say what it pleases."
"Yes, but it's so outrageous, it's so--ah, I've no words for the
beastliness of people," Sylvia exclaimed.
"May I dance this dance?" Queenie interrupted, timidly.
"Good heavens! Why do you ask me, girl? What has it to do with me? Dance
with the devil if you like."
Queenie looked bewildered by Sylvia's emphasis and went off again in
silence.
"And now you see the only person that's really hurt is your little
friend," Philidor observed. "You're much too sure of yourself to care
about a sneer like that, and she didn't hear what the woman called you,
or perhaps understand it if she heard."
Sylvia was silent; she was thinking of once long ago when Lily had asked
her if she could dance with Michael; now she blushed after nine years
lest he might have thought for a moment what that woman had said.
"You're quite right," she agreed with Philidor. "This is a damnable
life. Would you like to hear Queenie's story?"
"There's no need for you to defend yourself to me," he laughed.
"Ah, don't laugh about it. You mustn't laugh about certain things.
You'll make me think less of you."
"I was only being _gauche_," he apologized. "Yes, tell me her story."
So Sylvia told him the sad history, and when she had finished asked his
advice about Queenie.
"You were talking just now about your country as if she were a child,"
she said, eagerly. "You were imagining her individuality and
independence destroyed. I feel the same about this girl. I want to make
her really English. Do you think that I shall be able to get her a
passport? We're saving up our money now to go to England."
Philidor said he did not know much about English regulations, but that
he could not imagine that any consul would refuse to help when he heard
the story.
"And the sooner you leave Rumania the better. Look here. I'll lend you
the money to get home."
Sylvia shook her head.
"No, because that would interfere with my part of the story. I've got to
get back without help. I have a strong belief that if I accept help I
shall miss my destiny. It's no good trying to argue me out of a
superstition, for I've tried to argue myself out of it a dozen times and
failed. No, if you want to help me, come and talk to me every night and
open a bottle or two of champagne to keep the manager in a good temper;
and stand by me if there's ever a row. I won't answer for myself if I'm
alone and I hear things said like what was said to-night."
Philidor promised he would do that for her as long as he was quartered
in Bucharest, and presently Queenie came back.
"Don't look so frightened. I'm sorry I was cross to you just now."
"You were being so savage," said Queenie, with wide-open, wondering
eyes. "What was happening?"
"Something stung me."
"Where?"
"Over the heart," Sylvia answered.
When they were back in their room Queenie returned to the subject of
Sylvia's ill-temper.
"I could not be thinking it was you," she murmured. "I could not be
thinking it."