CHAPTER V

NEITHER in Galantza nor in Bralatz did Sylvia and Queenie perceive any

indication of a fortune. They performed for a week at the Variétés High

Life in Bralatz; but the audience and the salary were equally low, the

weather was hot and misty, and the two hotels they tried were full of

bugs. In Galantza they performed for two days at the Variétés Tiptop;

but here both the audience and the salary were lower still, the weather

was hotter and more misty, and there were as many bugs in the one hotel

as in the two hotels at Bralatz put together. Sylvia thought she should

like to visit the British vice-consul who had angered Maud so much by

his indifference to her future. He was a pleasant young man, not

recognizable from her description of him except by the fact that he

certainly did smoke incessantly. He invited them both to dine and

grumbled loudly at the fate which had planted him down in this

God-forsaken corner of Rumania in war-time. He was disappointed to hear

that they could not stay in Galantza, but agreed with them about the

audience and the salary.

"I can't think who advised you to come here," he exclaimed. "Though I'm

glad you did come; it has cheered me up a bit."

"It wasn't Maud," Sylvia said, with a smile.

"Maud?" he repeated. "Who is she?"

"An English girl who took a great fancy to you. She wanted you to pay

her fare to Bucharest."

"Oh, my hat! a most fearful creature," he laughed. "A great, pink,

blowsy woman with a voice like two trains shunting. I had a terrible

time with her. Upon my word, I had actually to push her out of the

Consulate. Oh, an altogether outrageous phenomenon! What became of her

finally? In Bucharest, is she? Well, she's not a good advertisement of

our country in these times. What part of England do you come from?" he

added, turning to Queenie.

"London," Sylvia said, quickly. She always answered this kind of

question before Queenie could blush and stammer something

unintelligible. "But she's been on the Continent since she was a little

girl, and can't speak any language except with the accent of the one she

spoke last." Then she changed the subject by asking him where he advised

them to go next.

"I should advise you to go back to England. These are no times for two

girls to be roaming about Europe."

"You'd hardly describe me as a girl," Sylvia laughed. "Even I can no

longer describe myself as one. Passports have been fatal to some

cherished secrets. No, we can't get back to England, chiefly because we

haven't saved enough money for the fare, and secondly because the

passport-office in Bucharest didn't consider me a good enough voucher

for Queenie's right to a British passport."

"Wouldn't they recommend the consul to issue one?"

Sylvia shook her head.

"Too bad," said the vice-consul, in a cheerful voice. "But that's one of

the minor horrors of war, this accumulation of a new set of officials

begotten by the military upon the martial enthusiasm of non-combatants.

It's rather ridiculous, isn't it, to assume that all consuls are

incapable of their own job?... But I suppose I've no business to be

displaying professional jealousy at such a moment," he broke off.

"Would you have given her a passport?" Sylvia asked.

The vice-consul looked at Queenie with a smile. "I could hardly have

refused, eh?"

But Sylvia knew that, once inside his Consulate, he would probably be

even more pedantic than Philip, and this affectation of gallantry over

coffee rather annoyed her.

"But what _are_ you going to do?" he went on.

"Oh, I don't know," said Sylvia, curtly. "Leave things to arrange

themselves, I suppose."

"Yes, that's a very good attitude to take up when your desk is untidy,

but, seriously, I shouldn't advise you to leave things to arrange

themselves by touring round Rumania. These provincial towns are wretched

holes."

"What's Avereshti like?"

"I don't know. I've never been there. It's not likely to be any better

than Galantza or Bralatz, except for being a good deal nearer to

Bucharest. Oh dear! everything's very gloomy. That Suvla business will

keep out the Rumanians for some time. In fact, I don't think myself

they'll ever come in now, unless they come in with the Germans. Why

don't you take a week's holiday here?"

But the vice-consul, who had seemed agreeable at first, was getting on

Sylvia's nerves with his admiration for Queenie, and she told him that

they should leave next day.

"Too bad," he exclaimed. "But that's the way of the world. When a consul

would like to be thoroughly bothered by somebody, nothing will induce

that person to waste five minutes of his precious time. Your friend

Maud, on the contrary, haunted me like a bluebottle."

Avereshti turned out to be a much smaller place than Sylvia had

expected. She had heard it spoken of in Bucharest as a favorite summer

resort, and had pictured it somehow with a casino, gardens, good hotels,

and pretty scenery: the very name had appealed to her with a suggestion

of quietude. She had deliberately not gone there at once with Queenie

when they left Bucharest because, being not more than sixty kilometers

from the capital, she had had an idea that Zozo might think it a likely

place for them to visit and take it into his head to seek them out. Even

in the train coming back from Galantza she had doubts of the wisdom of

turning on their tracks so soon; but their taste of Galantza and Bralatz

had been so displeasing that Avereshti with its prefigured charm of

situation promised a haven with which the risk of being worried by their

enemy could not interfere. They would take a week's holiday before

engaging themselves to appear at the casino or whatever the home of

amusement was called in Avereshti; then after a short engagement they

might perhaps venture back to Bucharest and start saving up money again.

"For what good?" Queenie asked, sadly.

"Oh, something will turn up," Sylvia replied. "Perhaps the war will come

to a sudden end, and you'll be able to go to England without a

passport."

"You was always dreaming, Sylvia. Happy things cannot come to me so

easily as you was thinking."

Since the night of the row at the Trianon Queenie had settled down to a

steady despair about the whole of her future, and it was partly Sylvia's

powerlessness to restore her to the childish gaiety that was so

attractive in one whom she was conscious of protecting which had made

her conceive such a distaste for the two towns they had just left. She

was beginning, indeed, to doubt if her intervention between Queenie and

the life she had been leading was really worth while. She upbraided

herself with a poor spirit, with a facile discouragement, with

selfishness and want of faith; yet all the way in the train she was on

the verge of proposing that they should go back at once to Bucharest and

there definitely part company. The dreary country through which they

were traveling and the moist heat of the September afternoon created

such a desire for England that the thought of remaining five minutes

longer in Rumania was becoming intolerable. Sylvia began to make plans

to telegraph home for money, and while she pondered these she began to

think about Jack and Olive and the twins. Jack, of course, would be a

soldier by now; but Olive would be in Warwickshire. Perhaps at this

moment she was walking through a leafy path in Arden and wondering what

her lost friend was doing. Sylvia tried to conjure familiar English

scents--the smell of blue-bells and young leaves, the smell of earth in

a London window-box after being watered, and, most wistfully of all, the

smell of the seaside on a breathless day of late summer when the sun was

raining diamonds into the pale-blue water--that so poignantly English

seaside smell of salt sand and pears in paper bags, of muslin frocks and

dusty shrubs and warm asphalt. It might be such a day in England now,

such a day at Eastbourne or Hastings. The notion of enduring any longer

these flat Rumanian fields, this restless and uncertain existence upon

the fringe of reality, this pilgrimage in charge of a butterfly that

must soon or late be caught, clouded her imagination.

"In seeking to direct Queenie's course I am doing something that is

contrary to my dearest theory of behavior. When I met her again at Jassy

I was in an abnormal and hysterical condition. The sense of having

failed myself led me to seize desperately upon her salvation to justify

this long withdrawal from the activity of my own world. This world of

gipsies is no longer my world. Why, I believe that the real reason I

feel annoyed with Philip is because, having roused in me a sense of my

unsuitableness to my present conditions and actions, he does not trouble

to understand the effect that talking to him had upon me. Here I am at

thirty-two thinking like an _exaltée_ school-girl. Thirty-two! Just when

I ought to be making the most tremendous efforts to anchor myself to

some stable society that will carry me through the years to come, the

years that without intellectual and spiritual pleasures will be nothing

but a purgatory for my youth, I find myself more hopelessly adrift than

ever before. It will end in my becoming a contemplative nun in one last

desperate struggle to avoid futility. It is a tragedy for the man or

woman who realizes futility without being able to escape from it. That's

where the Middle Ages were wiser than we. Futility was impossible then.

That's where we suffer from that ponderous bog of Victorianism. When one

pauses to meditate upon the crimes of the Victorian era! And it's

impossible not to dread a revival of Victorianism after this war. It's

obvious that unless we defeat the Teuton quickly--and there's no sign of

it--we shall be Teutonized in order to do it. And then indeed, O grave

where is thy victory? Will the Keltic blood in England be enough to save

her in ten years' time from a base alliance with these infernal Germans

in order that the two stupidest nations in the world may combine to

overlay it? Will this war at last bring home to Europe the sin of

handing herself over to lawyers? Better the Middle Ages priest-ridden

than To-day lawyer-ridden. At least if we are going to pay these rascals

who exploit their country, let us have it well exploited. Don't let us

call in one political plumber after another whose only object is to

muddle the state for his successor to muddle it still more that he may

be called in again to muddle it again--and muddle--and muddle eternally!

When one reads in the papers the speeches of politicians, of what can

one be reminded but of children playing cat's-cradle over the tortured

body of their mother? Yet what business have I to be abusing lawyer and

politician when I lack the strength of mind to persevere in a task which

I set myself with my eyes open? Unless I suffer in achieving it, it will

not be worth the achievement. Surely the human soul that has suffered

deeply can never again acknowledge futility? O England, perhaps it is a

poor little pain to be away from you now, a mean little egotistical ache

at the best, but away from you I see your faults so much more clearly

and love you for them all the more."

The train entered the station, and Sylvia perceived that there was

nothing beautiful about Avereshti in the way she had fancied. Yet she

was ashamed now of the temptation to desert Queenie; therefore, though

the train was going on to Bucharest, she hurried her out on the

platform, and when they reached the Hotel Moldavia she took a room for

two weeks, paying for it in advance lest she should be tempted by her

disappointment with Avereshti to hurry back to Bucharest again, the

inevitable result of which in her present mood would be to abandon her

friend.

Avereshti, instead of being situated amid the romantic scenery that one

expected from a celebrated summer resort, was surrounded by oil-fields

which disfigured still more the flat environment. It was too large for

genuine rusticity, too small for its assumption of European

civilization, and too commercial for gaiety. Possibly during the season

the shareholders and owners of the oil-fields came here to gloat for a

week upon the sources of their prosperity; if they did, they had all of

them left by the middle of September; the Variétés Alcazar was closed

and the playbills were already beginning to peel off the walls. Whatever

life there was in Avereshti displayed itself in the Piatza Carol I, the

pavement of which was planted with trees clipped out of any capacity to

cast a pleasant shade. The Hotel Moldavia, flanked by cafés, occupied

one side of it, a row of respectable shops another, a large municipal

hall of the crudest Germanic architecture fronted the hotel, and along

the remaining side ran a row of market booths, the insult of which to

the progress of Avereshti was greatly resented by the inhabitants and

always apologized for and explained in the first few minutes of

conversation.

The appearance of Sylvia and Queenie in this square on the morning after

their arrival created an interest that soon developed into a

pertinacious and disconcerting curiosity. If they entered a shop to make

some small purchases, a crowd gathered outside and followed them to the

next shop, and finally became such a nuisance that they retired to the

balcony outside their room--a long wooded balcony of a faded tint of

green--and watched the populace gathering to stare at them from below.

When the sun became too hot for this entertainment, they took refuge in

the big bedroom which had the unusual merit of being free from bugs.

Queenie dreamed away the morning with her lithographs; Sylvia read _War

and Peace_. Late in the afternoon they went out again on the balcony

and were amused to see that the frequenters of the cafés on either side

of the hotel had moved their chairs hornwise far enough out into the

square to obtain a view of their movements. Sylvia suggested to the

waiter that they should give a musical performance from the balcony, but

he replied, quite seriously, that it was not strong enough: otherwise,

he left them to understand, there would have been no objection.

"Yet really, after all, it's not so bad here," Sylvia declared. "We'll

stay a few days, and then I'll go into Bucharest and prospect. Perhaps

Zozo will be gone by now."

Avereshti possessed, at any rate, the charm of making one feel lazy; to

feel lazy and to be able to gratify one's laziness was, after nearly a

year of ceaseless work, pleasant enough. On the third afternoon the

waiter came up with six visiting-cards from local gentlemen who desired

their acquaintance. Sylvia told him that they were not anxious to make

any friends; he smiled and indicated two names as those that would best

repay their choice.

"We wish to be left quite alone," Sylvia repeated, irritably.

"Then why do you walk about on the balcony?" the waiter asked.

"We walk about on the balcony because it's the only place where we can

walk about without being annoyed by a crowd. You don't expect us to

remain in our room day and night, do you?"

The waiter smiled and again called attention to the desirable

qualifications of the two visiting-cards he had first thrust into

prominence. He added that both the gentlemen, M. Stefan Florilor and M.

Toma Enescu, were particularly anxious to make the acquaintance of the

fair young lady; that M. Florilor was young, handsome, and the son of

the richest man in Avereshti; and that, though M. Enescu was not young,

he was very rich. Perhaps the ladies would invite them to take coffee?

It would be easy to get rid of the other four visiting-cards.

Sylvia told the waiter to get rid of all six and never again to have the

impudence to refer to the subject; but he continued to extol his

clients, until at last Sylvia in a rage knocked the card-tray out of his

hand with the volume of _War and Peace_ that he was interrupting, upon

which he retired, muttering abuse.

About ten minutes afterward the waiter came back and told Sylvia that

all the gentlemen were gone away except M. Florilor, who insisted upon

being received.

"Insists?" cried Sylvia. "But is he the crown prince of Avereshti?"

The waiter shrugged his shoulders.

"His father has a mortgage on the hotel," he explained. "And the

proprietor would be very much upset to think that any discourtesy had

been shown to the son."

"Have we paid for this room?" Sylvia demanded.

The waiter agreed with her that they had paid for it.

"Very well, when we ask for free board and lodging it will be time

enough to talk about the proprietor's annoyance at our refusal to

receive his creditors."

She indicated the direction of the door with a contemptuous inclination

of the head, and the waiter retired.

"I don't know how you can be so strong to talk like that," Queenie

marveled. "If I was being alone here I should be too frightened to speak

so to the waiter. Suppose they was all to murder us to-night?"

When Queenie spoke like this, Sylvia's old sense of guardianship flowed

again as fast as ever, and any impulse to abandon her was drowned in a

flood of rage against the arrogance of money with its sale and purchase

of human lives. There was something less distasteful about the

domination of Zozo than about the attempted domination of this young

Rumanian puppy yelping in his back yard of a town. If the juggler were

to arrive in Avereshti to-night and in a frenzy of balked passion were

to murder both herself and Queenie, there would be a kind of

completeness about the action that made the presentiment of it a sane

and feasible terror; but that Queenie should have been reduced to a

condition of semi-idiocy merely by the fact that the accidents of her

childhood had put her for sale on the market of life did seem to Sylvia

inexpressibly revolting.

"And we credit ourselves with the abolition of slavery! I am not sure

that the frank slavery of the past was not more moral than the

unadmitted slavery of the present. At any rate, it carried with it its

own penalty in the demoralization and decay of the owners; but I

perceive no prospective penalty for this sort of thing. A young

barbarian whose father has grown rich and fat upon petroleum sees a girl

that takes his fancy and sends up his card; the proprietor of the hotel

threatens us through that pimping waiter with the enmity of his father's

debtor. This happens to be a crude case because we are living

temporarily in a crude country; but less crudely the same thing goes on

in England. It is true that we shrink there from the licensed brothel,

and that we are still able to shrink from that is something to be

grateful for; yet, though we refrain from inflicting an open shame upon

womanhood, we pay very little attention to the rights of the individual

woman and child, or, for the matter of that, to the rights of the

individual man. We no longer allow the bodies of children to be slowly

murdered in factories, but we offer not the least objection to their

employment in nice healthy amusing occupations such as selling

newspapers for great monopolies or dancing in the theaters. There can be

no defense of employing child labor, and the man who defends it is the

equal of the most brutalized and hardened _souteneur_. I still think

that the greater part of humanity is so naturally inclined to be

enslaved that the bestowal of freedom will in a short time land the

world in the same state as before; but what I don't understand is the

necessity for a reformer or the philanthropist to be anything except

profoundly cynical. It always seems to be assumed that a desire to help

other people implies a belief that other people will benefit from the

help. I should like to meet an unadvertising philanthropist who was

willing to admit that his philanthropy was a vice like secret drinking.

One occasionally perceives signs of a sick conscience in some large

anonymous contribution to charity; I always suspect the donor of

expiating a monstrous crime. I can imagine being haunted by the fear of

a peerage in return for the expenditure upon a Lord Mayor's fund of the

superfluous savings of a wicked life."

"Of what are you thinking?" Queenie asked.

"I'm thinking, my dear, that visits from the _jeunesse dorée_ of

Avereshti tend to infect me with an odious feeling of self-righteousness.

The result of reading Tolstoi and arguing with a waiter about the sale

of your body to M. Florilor has reduced me to a state of morbid

indignation with the human race. But the problem that's bothering me is

my ultimate ineffectiveness. I'm like a chained-up dog, and I am

realizing that noise, to be a real weapon of defense, requires

listeners. I'm a little afraid, Queenie, that unless I can do more than

bark, I shall lose you."

"When shall you lose me?"

"When the web of my theory in which I'm sitting like a spider gets swept

away by something more powerful than you, my butterfly, whom even

without interference I can scarcely retain. You'll escape me then and be

caught finally in a net, and I shall scuttle off and hide myself in a

dark corner until I die of inanition and chagrin."

"I was not understanding one word of what you were saying," said

Queenie. "First you were being a dog. After you were being a spider. Who

was ever to understand you?"

"Who indeed?" Sylvia murmured with half a sigh, as she went out on the

balcony and looked down upon the frequenters of the cafés, whose heads,

when she appeared, were simultaneously lifted to regard her with a

curiosity that her elevated position made impersonal as the slow glances

of cattle at pasture.

That evening after dinner the first sign of the proprietor's displeasure

at the snub administered to the heir of his chief creditor was visible

in a bill for their board of three days. The sum was not large, but by

using up their small cash it involved breaking into the

five-hundred-franc note that represented the last of the money they had

saved since February. Sylvia had always kept this note in a pocket of

her valise; now when she went up to their room to fetch it it was gone.

The discovery of the loss was such a blow at this moment that she could

not speak of it to Queenie when she came down-stairs again; she paid

what was owing with the last halfpenny they had, and sat back revolving

internally in her mind how, when, and where that five-hundred-franc note

could possibly have been lost. Suddenly she had an idea that she might

have moved it to another pocket and, leaving a half-smoked cigarette

balanced against the saucer of her coffee-cup, she ran up-stairs again

to verify the conjecture. Alas! it was the emptiest of conjectures, and

in a fever of exasperation she searched wildly in all sorts of unlikely

places for the missing money. When the bedroom was scattered with her

clothes to no purpose, she went back to the dining-room, where she found

that the waiter had taken the half-smoked cigarette in clearing away the

coffee-cups.

"Didn't you keep that cigarette?" she demanded.

Queenie looked at her in surprise.

"Why to keep a cigarette?" she asked.

"Because I haven't another."

"Well, ring for the waiter. He shall bring one for you."

"No, no, it doesn't matter," Sylvia muttered; but the waste of that last

precious cigarette brought home to her more than anything else that

there was absolutely not even a halfpenny left in her purse after paying

for the food they had had, and abruptly with the transmutation of that

insignificant object to something of immense value arrived a

corresponding change in Sylvia's attitude to the whole of life.

In the first case the larger share of the money she had lost so

carelessly--with an effort she drove from her brain the revolving

problem of how, when, and where--belonged to Queenie. Hence her

responsibility toward Queenie was doubled, because if in certain moods

of disillusionment she had been able to set aside her former

responsibility as nothing but a whim, there was now a positive and

material obligation that no change of sentiment could obliterate. Any

harm that threatened Queenie now must be averted by herself, no matter

at what cost to herself; somehow money must be obtained. It was plain

that they could expect no consideration from the proprietor of the

hotel; the way in which he had demanded payment for their day's board

proved as much. Having accepted the money in advance for this room, he

could not eject them into the street; but unless it suited him he was

under no obligation to feed them. What a precipitate fool she had been

to pay for a fortnight's lodging in advance! Seventy francs flung away!

She might ask for them back, or at any rate for the fifty francs' worth

of lodging of which they would not have availed themselves if they left

to-morrow. With fifty francs they would reach Bucharest, where something

might turn up. But suppose nothing did turn up? Suppose that damned

juggler found Queenie and herself without a halfpenny? Even that was

better than starving here or surrendering to M. Stefan Florilor.

Sylvia went out to ask the proprietor if he would give her back the

money she had paid in advance for a room she and her friend found

themselves unable any longer to occupy. The proprietor shrugged his

shoulders, informed her in his vile French that he had never demanded

the sum in advance, assured her that he had refused the room twice to

important clients who had wanted it for next week, and altogether showed

by his attitude that he had been too much embittered by the reception

of M. Florilor to stand upon anything except his strict rights. It was

clear that these rights would include refusal of any food that was not

paid for at the time. Such behavior might be unjust and unreasonable,

she thought, but, after all, it was not to be expected that an empty

pocket was going to tempt the finer side of human nature. Sylvia went

back to Queenie, who was looking in bewilderment at the clothes strewn

about the bedroom. She explained what had happened, and Queenie

ejaculated:

"There, fancy! We have no money now. Never mind, I can be friends with

that gentleman who was asking to know me. He will give me the money,

because if he wants me very much he will have to give much money. Yes, I

think?"

Sylvia could have screamed aloud her rejection of such a course.

"What, after keeping you away from men for six months, to let you go

back to them on account of my carelessness? Child, you must be mad to

think of it."

"Yes, but I have been thinking, Sylvia. I have been thinking very much.

When I was going to be English and you were saying to me that I should

have a passport and be going to England and be English myself, it was

good for me to care nothing at all for men; but now what does it matter?

I am nothing. I am just being somebody lost, and if I am going with men

or not going with men I am still nothing. Why to be worried for money? I

shall show you how easy it is for me to have money. It is true what I am

speaking. You could be having no idea how much money I can have. And if

I am nothing, always nothing, why must I be worrying any more about

money? You are so sweet to me, Sylvia, so kind. No one was ever being so

kind to me before. So I must be kind to you now. Yes, I think? Are you

crying about that money? I think you are stupid to cry for such a little

thing as money."

"There are things, my rose, that must not, that shall not happen,"

Sylvia cried, clasping the child in her arms. "And that you should ever

again sell yourself to a man is one of them."

"But I am nothing."

"Ah," thought Sylvia, "here is the moment when I should be able to say

that every one to God is everything; but if I say it she will not

understand. What hope is there for this child?" Then aloud she added,

"Are you nothing to me?"

"No, to you I am something, and if my brother was here I would be

something to him."

"Very well, then, you must not think of selling yourself. I lost the

money. I shall find a way of getting more money. I have a friend in

Bucharest. I will telegraph to him to-morrow and he will send us money."

And to herself she thought: "This is indeed the ultimate irony, that I

should ask a favor of Philip. Yet perhaps I am glad, for if I did him

the least injury years ago, no priest could have imagined a more

appropriate penance. Yes, perhaps I deserve this."

The next morning, when Sylvia ordered coffee, the waiter presented the

bill for it at the same time, and when she tore it up he seemed inclined

to take away the coffee; he retreated finally with a threat that in

future nothing should be served to them that was not paid for in

advance.

"They are being nasty with us," Queenie solemnly enunciated.

"Never mind. We shall have some money to-night, or at any rate to-morrow

morning. We must put up with fasting to-day. It's Friday, appropriately

enough. Good heavens!" Sylvia exclaimed. "I haven't even got the money

to send a telegram. We must raise a few francs. Perhaps I could borrow

some money with a trinket. Good gracious! I never realized until this

moment that I haven't a single piece of jewelry! It takes the sudden

affliction of extreme poverty to discover one's abnormality and to prove

how essential it is not to be different from everybody else. Come,

Queenie, you must lend me your two brooches."

Sylvia took the daisy of brilliants set round a topaz, and the swallow

of sapphires--all that Queenie had kept after her disastrous expulsion

from Russia--and visited the chief local jeweler, who shrugged his

shoulders and refused to buy them.

"But at least you can lend me twenty francs upon them until to-morrow,"

Sylvia urged.

He shrugged his shoulders again and bent over to pick at the inside of a

watch with that maddening indifference of the unwilling purchaser.

Sylvia could not bring herself to believe in his refusal and suggested a

loan of fifteen francs. Nothing answered her except the ticking of a

dozen clocks and the scraping of a small file. There was a smell of

drought in the shop that seemed to symbolize the personality of its

owner.

"Ten francs?" Sylvia begged.

The jeweler looked up slowly from his work and regarded her with a fishy

eye, the fishiness of which was many times magnified by the glass that

occupied it. He raised his chin in a cold negative and bent over his

work more intently. Every clock in the shop told a different time and

ticked away more loudly than ever. Sylvia gathered up the trinkets and

went away. She tried two other jewelers without success, and she even

proposed the loan to a chemist who had a pleasant exterior; finally she

had to go back to the hotel without obtaining the money. The day dragged

itself along; not even _War and Peace_ could outlast it, and Sylvia

wondered why she had never grasped before how much of life radiated from

lunch, the absence of which dislocated time itself. Toward six o'clock

she came to a sudden resolution, and, going out into the square, she

began to sing outside the café. Four lean dogs came and barked; a waiter

told her that the singing was not required. Somebody threw a stone at

one of the dogs and cut open its leg; whereupon the other three set upon

it, until it broke away and fled howling across the square, leaving a

trail of blood in its wake. The drinkers outside the café looked at

Sylvia over the tops of their newspapers, until she went back to the

hotel. Such a retirement would ordinarily have made her hot with shame;

but she was already hardened by the first pangs of hunger and had only a

savage contempt for the people who had thought to humiliate her; she had

not been hungry long enough to feel the pathos of a broken spirit; after

all, she had only missed her lunch.

Dinner consisted of two stale chocolate creams that were found in a

pocket of one of Queenie's jackets; even the bits of silver paper

adhering to them seemed to possess a nutritive value.

"But we cannot be going on like this," Queenie protested.

"There must be some way of raising money enough to get to Bucharest,"

Sylvia insisted. "There must be. There must be. If we really starve, the

police will send us there to avoid a death in this cursed hole of a

town."

"We must ask that gentleman to tea with us to-morrow," Queenie declared,

as she put out the light.

Want of food prevented Sylvia from sleeping, and in her overwrought

spirit those good-night words of Queenie seemed to presage the collapse

of everything.

"It shall not be. It shall not be," she vowed to herself. "I will not be

defeated by squalid circumstances in this dreary little Rumanian town.

If thirteen years ago I could sell my body to save my soul, now I can

sell my body to save the soul of another. Surely that sacrifice will

defeat futility. I had a presentiment of this situation when I was

arguing with Philip that afternoon. I warned him that nothing should

stand in my way over this girl. And nothing shall! To-morrow I will

invite this youth who is the son of the richest man in Avereshti. He

will not refuse me twenty francs for my body. If I cannot do this I am

worth no more than those trinkets that the jeweler refused to buy for

ten francs. I will do this, and accept its accomplishment as the sign

that I have fought long enough. Then I will go to Philip and tell him

what his refusal has brought about. I will _make_ him give me the

passport. But suppose that he is no longer capable of being horrified?

Suppose that my behavior of thirteen years ago has rendered him proof

against such an emotion? Oh well, we shall see. Am I light-headed? No,

no, no. On the contrary, hunger makes one clear-sighted. It must be. It

shall be. The duty of the human soul lies in such a complete, such a

reckless, such a relentless, such a victorious self-will as can only be

assuaged by self-sacrifice. This is the great paradox of life. This is

the divine egotism."

Toward dawn Sylvia slept, and woke at sunrise from dreams that were

strangely serene in contrast with the tormenting fevers of the night, to

find that Queenie was still fast asleep. The beauty of her lying there

in this lucid and golden morn was like the beauty of a flower that

blooms at daybreak in a remote garden. It was a beauty that caught at

Sylvia's heart, a beauty that could only be expressed with tears which

were silent as the dew and which, like the dew, sparkled in the daybreak

of the soul.

"It is through such tears that people have seen the fairies," she

murmured.

Sylvia half raised herself in bed, and, leaning upon her elbow, she

watched the sleeping girl so intently that it seemed as if some of

herself was passing away to Queenie. This still and virginal hour was

indeed time transmuted to the timelessness of dreams, in which absolute

love like a note of music rose quivering upon its own shed sweetness to

such an ecstasy of sustained emotion that the barest memory of it would

secure the wakeful one forever against disillusionment.

"Call it hunger or the divine vision, the result is the same," she

murmured. "I was lifted out of myself, and I take it that is the way

martyrs died for their faith. From an outsider's point of view I may be

only worthy of a foot-note in a manual of psychology; but I 'on honeydew

have fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.' Another queer thought: the

fasting saint and the drunken sinner both achieve ecstasy by subduing

the body, the one with mortification, the other with indulgence. Those

whom the gods love die young--they drink too deep and too often of

honeydew and become intoxicated even unto death. Wine must serve the man

who would live long. Perhaps I am one of those less rare spirits that

depend too much on purely material beauty; yet even in defense of so

little I can act. Some nightingales love roses: the rest of them love

other nightingales. Which do I love? Ah, whether Queenie be rose or

nightingale, what does it matter? Nobody that would not stoop to save a

wood-louse in his path can claim to love. And I will stoop as low as

hell to save this rosebud that has already been gathered and wired and

worn in a buttonhole and dropped by the roadside, but surely not yet

trodden underfoot."

Queenie woke with a bad headache, and Sylvia went down-stairs to see if

she could persuade the waiter to let her have some coffee. He was going

to refuse, but when she asked him if he would tell M. Florilor that a

visit would be welcomed that afternoon, his manner changed, and

presently he came back from an interview with the proprietor to say that

he would serve coffee at once. At the same time he brought the bill of

fare for lunch, and seemed anxious that they should choose some special

delicacy to fortify themselves against the ill effects of the day

before. There was no talk of paying for the meal, and the best wine was

indicated with that assumption of subservient greed which is common to

all good waiters.

After lunch Sylvia told Queenie that she was going out to send off the

delayed telegram to Bucharest, and left her lying down with her

pictures. Then she consulted the waiter about a room. The waiter agreed

that it would be inconvenient to receive M. Florilor in their own, and

informed her that the best room in the hotel was ready, adding that he

had ordered plenty of cakes and put flowers in the vases.

"I'll go there now," Sylvia announced. "When he comes, bring him

straight up."

The brightness of the early morning had been dimmed by a wet mist, and

the room allotted for the reception of M. Florilor, which was on the

other side of the hotel, looked out over houses covered with sodden

creepers and down into gardens of disheveled sunflowers; it was a view

that suited the mood Sylvia was in, and for a long time she stood gazing

out of the window, trying to detect beyond the immediate surroundings of

the hotel some definition of a landscape in the distance. In the light

of the morning her resolution had not presented itself as morbidly as

now; then it had appeared essentially poetic--a demonstration really of

the creative power of the human will; now, like the dejected flowers in

the gardens below, it hung limp and colorless. She turned away from the

window and sat down in a tight new armchair, the back of which seemed to

be inclosed in corsets. Everything in this room was new, and, like all

hotel rooms, it depressed one with that indeterminate bleakness which is

the property of never having been touched by the warmth of personality.

It was bleak as an abandoned shell on the beach, and stirred by nothing

save the end of the tide's ebb and flow. The waiter's attempt to give it

the significance of human life by cramming bunches of dahlias into a

pair of fluted vases only added to the desolate effect. For want of

something to do Sylvia began to arrange the flowers with a little

consideration for their native ugliness, as one tries to smarten an

untidy woman with a bad figure; but when she poured some water into a

china bowl and saw floating upon its surface the ends of burned-out

matches and cigarettes, she gave up the task. These burned-out relics of

transitory occupants seemed typical of the room's effect upon the

pensive observer. A confused procession of personalities made up its

history, and as these had cast away their burned-out cigarettes and

matches, so had they cast behind them the room where they had lodged,

preserving no memory of its existence and leaving behind not a single

emotion to vitalize the bleak impersonal shell they had thankfully

forsaken.

Yet Sylvia, waiting here for the beginning of the heartless drama that

would be wrought of her heart's blood pulsing to reinforce her will,

rejoiced in this sterility of the setting; it helped her to achieve a

similar effect in her own attitude. Just as this room had succeeded in

preserving itself from any impression of having ever been lived in by

human beings, so she, when the drama was played through, should retain

of it no trace. That in it which was real--the lust of man--should be

left behind, an ignominious burned-out thing less than a cigarette stump

at the bottom of a china bowl.

The waiter came in with a basket of cakes, the cold and sugary forms of

which were no more capable than the dahlias of imparting life to the

merciful deadness. And how dead it all was! Those red-plush curtains

eternally tied back in symmetrical hideousness--they had never lived

since the time when some starved and withered soul had sewn those

pompons along their edges one after another, pompons as numerous and

monotonous as the days of their maker. Indeed, there was not a single

piece of furniture, not an ornament nor a drapery, that was not stamped

with the hatred of its maker. There was no trace of the craftsman's joy

in his handiwork either in thread or tile or knob. There was nothing

except the insolence of profit and the dreary labor of slaves. Yet a

world stifled by such ugliness talked with distasteful surprise of men

who profited by war. With the exploitation of the herd and the sacrifice

of the individual that was called civilization what else could be

expected? Nowadays even man's lust had to be guaranteed pure and

unadulterated like his beer. Better that the whole human race should

rot on dunghills with the diseases they merited than that they should

profit from an added shame imposed upon the meanest and most miserable

tinker's drab. People were shocked at making a hundred per cent. upon a

shell to blow a German to pieces; but they regarded with equanimity the

same profit at the expense of a child's future. Wherever one looked,

there was nothing but material comfort set as the highest aim of life at

the cost of beauty, religion, love, childhood, womanhood,

virtue--everything. Then two herds met in opposition, and there was war;

the result had made everybody uncomfortable, and everybody had declared

there must never again be war. But so long as the individual submitted

to the herd, war would go on; and the most efficient herd with the

greatest will for war would succeed because it would be able to offer

greater comfort at the time and higher profits afterward. Yet the

individual had nearly always much that was admirable; the most sordid

profiteer possessed a marvelous energy and perception that might be

turned to good, if he could but realize that virtue is the true egotism

and that vice is only a distorted altruism.

"I've always hated ants and loathed bees," Sylvia cried. "And in certain

aspects the human race makes one shudder with that sense of co-operative

effort running over one which I believe is called formication."

The waiter came in to announce M. Florilor's arrival.

"Now we get the individual at his worst just when I've been backing him

against the herd. This is formication spelled with an 'n.'"

Stefan Florilor resembled a figure in a picture by Guido Reni. A

superficial glance would have established him as a singularly handsome,

well-built, robust, and attractive young man; a closer regard showed

that his good looks owed too much to soft and feminine contours, that

the robustness of his frame was only the outward form of strength with

all the curves but nothing of the hardness of muscle, and that his eyes

flashed not as the mirrors of an inward fire, but with liquid gleams of

sensuous impressions caught from outside. He really was extremely like

one of Guido Reni's triumphant and ladylike archangels.

They talked in French, a language that Florilor spoke without

distinction, but with a pothouse fluency--no doubt much as one of Guido

Reni's archangels might have picked it up from one of Guido Reni's

devils.

"What a fatally seductive language it is!" Sylvia exclaimed at last,

when she had complimented him as he evidently expected to be

complimented upon his ease. "Whenever I hear a tea-table conversation in

French I suspect every one of being a poet or a philosopher: whenever I

read a French poet I want to ask him if he likes his tea strong or

weak."

"Your friend is English also?" Florilor inquired.

He took advantage of the ethnical turn in the conversation to express

his own interest in a problem of nationality.

"Yes, she is English."

"And no doubt she will be coming down soon?"

"She's not coming down. She has a headache."

"But perhaps she will be well enough to dine this evening with me?"

"No, I don't think she will be well enough," said Sylvia.

The young man's face clouded with the disappointment; his features

seemed to thicken, so much did their fineness owe to the vitality of

sensual anticipation.

"Perhaps to-morrow, then?"

"No, I don't think she will ever be well enough," Sylvia continued. Then

abruptly she put her will to the jump and cleared it breathlessly.

"You'll have to make the best of me as a substitute."

Afterward when the reality that stood at the back of this scene had died

away Sylvia used to laugh at the remembrance of the alarm in Florilor's

expression when she made this announcement. She must have made it in a

way so utterly different from any solicitation that he had ever known.

At the moment she was absurdly positive that she had offered herself to

him with as much freedom and as much allurement as his experience was

able to conjecture in a woman. When, therefore, he showed by his temper

that he had no wish to accept the offer, it never struck her that, even

had he felt the least desire, her manner of encouragement would have

frozen it. A secondary emotion was one of swift pride in the detachment

of her position, which was brought home to her by the complete absence

of any chagrin--such as almost every woman would have felt--at the

obvious dismay caused by her proposal to substitute herself for her

friend.

"I'm afraid I must go. I'm busy," he muttered.

"But you haven't had any cake," Sylvia protested.

"_Vous vous fichez de moi_," he growled. "_Vous m'avez posé un sale

lapin._"

He looked like a greedy boy, a plump spoiled child that has been

deprived of a promised treat.

"What did she come here for," he demanded, "if she's not prepared to

behave like any other girl? You can tell her from me that finer

girls--girls in Paris--have been glad enough to be friends with me."

"Caprice and mystery are the prerogatives of woman," Sylvia said.

"I'm glad she can afford to be capricious when she has not enough money

to pay for her food."

"I'm not going to argue with you about your behavior, though I could say

a good deal about it. At present I can't be as rude as I should like.

You see, you've just paid me the compliment of declining to accept the

offer of myself. The fact that either I am sufficiently inhuman or that

you are too bestial for the notion of any intercourse between us leaves

me with a real hope in my heart that there is a difference between you

and me. You've no idea of the lowering effect, nay more, of the absolute

despair it would cast over my view of life, had I to regard you as

belonging to the same natural order as myself. It would involve belief

in the universal depravity of man."

"_Ah, vous m'emmerdez!_" he shouted, as he ran from the room. Sylvia

cried after him to remember the fate of the Gadarene shrine and to avoid

going down-stairs too fast. Then to herself she added:

"Ecstasies and dreams of self-abnegation! What are they beside the

pleasure of conflict face to face? The pleasure would have been keener,

though, if I could have hurt him physically."

In the first elation of escaping from the fulfilment of her intention

Sylvia overlooked all the consequences involved in Florilor's

withdrawal. Soon in the stillness shed by this bleak room, in the sight

of the frozen cakes upon the table, in the creeping obscurity of the

afternoon, she was more sharply aware than before of the future, aware

of it not as a vague and faintly disturbing horizon too far away still

to affect anything except her moods of depression, but as the immediate

future in the shape of a chasm at her feet, a future so impassable that

she could scarcely think of it in other terms than those of space. It

had positively lost the nebulous outlines of time and acquired in their

stead the sharp materialism of hostile space. The future! Calculations

of how to bridge or leap this gap went whirling through Sylvia's brain,

calculations that even included projects of fantastic violence, but

never one that envisaged the surrender of a single scruple about

Queenie. The resolve she had made that morning, however its practical

effect seemed to have been nullified by Florilor's rejection of her

sacrifice, had woven each separate strand of her thought and emotion so

tightly round the steel wire of her will that nothing could have snapped

the result. There was not a bone in her body, not a nerve nor a

corpuscle, that did not thrill to the command of her will and wait upon

its fresh intention with a loyalty that must endow it with an invincible

tenacity of purpose.

The sense of an omnipotent force existing in herself was so strong that

when Sylvia saw a golden ten-franc piece lying in the very middle of the

fiddle-backed armchair on which Florilor had been sitting, she had for a

moment the illusion of having created the coin out of air by the alchemy

of her own will.

"Many miracles have deserved the name less than this," she murmured,

picking up the piece of gold. For the second time in her life she was

able to enjoy the sensation of illimitable wealth; by a curious

coincidence the sum had been the same on both occasions. She preened her

nail along the figured edge, taking delight in the faint luxurious

vibration.

"Misers may get very near to Paradise by fingering their gold," she

thought. "But the fingering of gold preparatory to spending it is

Paradise indeed."

She went back to Queenie, clasping the coin so tightly that even when

she had put it in her purse it still seemed to be resting in her palm.

"Will you be leaving me here?" Queenie exclaimed, in dismay, when she

heard of Sylvia's plan for going to Bucharest to-morrow morning and

interviewing Philip.

"There's not enough money to take us both there, but I shall come back

to-morrow evening; and then we'll flaunt our wealth in the faces of

these brutes here."

"But I shall be so hungry to-morrow," Queenie complained.

"Fool that I am," Sylvia cried. "The cakes!"

She rushed away and reached the other room a moment before the waiter

arrived with his tray.

"These cakes belong to me," she proclaimed, snatching up the china

basket and hugging it to her breast.

The waiter protested that they had not been paid for; but she swept him

and his remonstrances aside, and passed out triumphantly into the

corridor, where the proprietor of the hotel, a short, greasy man, began

to abuse her for the way she had treated Florilor.

"_Va-t-en_," she said, scornfully.

"_Quoi? Quoi ditez? Moi bâton? Non! Vous bâton! Comprenez?_"

He was in such a rage at the idea of Sylvia's threatening him with a

stick, which was the way he understood her French, that he began to

dribble; all his words were drowned in a foam of saliva, and the only

way he could express his opinion of her behavior was by rapid

expectoration. Again Sylvia tried to pass him in the narrow corridor,

instinctively holding up the cakes beyond his reach. The proprietor

evidently thought she was going to bring down the basket upon his head,

and in an access of fear and fury he managed to knock it out of her

hands.

"Those cakes are mine," Sylvia really screamed. She felt like a cat

defending her kittens when she plunged down upon the floor to pick them

up. The proprietor jumped right over her, stamping upon the cakes and

the pieces of broken china and grinding them underfoot into the carpet

until it looked like a pavement of broken mosaics. Sylvia completely

lost her temper at the sight of the destruction of her dinner; and when

the proprietor trod upon her hand in the course of his violence she

picked up the broken handle of the basket and jabbed his instep, which

made him yell so loudly that all the hidden population of the kitchens

came out like disturbed animals, holding in their hands the implements

of the tasks upon which they had been engaged.

"_Vous payez! Vous payez tout! Oui, oui, vous payez_!" the proprietor

shouted.

The intensity of his anger made his veins swell and his nose bleed, and,

not being able to find a handkerchief, he began to bellow for the

attentions of his staff. This seemed an appropriate moment for the

waiter to get himself back into his master's good graces, and with a

towel in one hand and a chamber-pot in the other he came running out of

the room where he had been hiding. At the sight of more china the

proprietor uttered a stupendous Rumanian oath and kicked the pot out of

the waiter's hand with such force that a piece of it flew up and cut his

cheek. Sylvia left a momentarily increasing concourse of servants

chattering round their master and the man, each of whom was stanching

blood with his own end of the towel they held between them: they were

all shoveling aside bits of china while they talked, so that they seemed

like noisy hens scratching in a garden.

Queenie was standing with big, frightened eyes when Sylvia got back to

their room.

"Whatever was happening?"

"An argument over our dinner," Sylvia laughed.

Then suddenly she began to cry, because at such a moment the loss of the

cakes was truly a disaster and the thought of Queenie alone without food

waiting here for her to return from Bucharest was too much after the

strain of the afternoon. She caught the child to her heart and told the

story of what had happened with Florilor.

"Now do you understand?" she asked, fiercely. "Now do you understand how

much I want you never--but never, never again--even so much as to think

of the possibility of selling yourself to a man? You must always

remember, when the temptation comes, what I was ready to do for you to

prevent such a horror. You must always believe that I am your friend and

that if the war goes on for twenty years I will never leave you. You

_shall_ come back to England with me. With the money that I'm going to

borrow in Bucharest we'll get as far as Greece, anyway. But whatever

happens, I will never leave you, child, because I bear on my heart the

stigmata of what I was ready to do for you."

"I was not understanding much of what you are talking," Queenie sighed.

"There is only one thing to understand--that I love you. You see this

golden bag? The man who gave it to me left inside it a part of his soul;

and if he has been killed, if he is lying at this moment a dreadful and

disfigured corpse, what does it matter? He lives forever with me here.

He walks beside me always, because he obeyed the instinct of pure love.

For you I was ready to do an action to account for which, when I search

deep down into myself, I can find no motive but love. You must remember

that and let the memory of that walk beside you always. Let me go on

talking to you. You need not understand anything except that I love you

and that I must not lose you. I shall be thinking of you to-morrow when

I'm in Bucharest, and I shall eat nothing all day, because I could not

eat while you are waiting here hungry. It won't be for long. I shall be

back to-morrow night with money. You don't mind my leaving you? And

promise me, promise me that you won't unlock your door for a moment.

Don't let that horrible youth have his way when I'm gone for the sake of

a lunch. You won't, will you? Promise me, promise me."

"Of course I would never do anything with him," Queenie said.

Sylvia held up the ten-franc piece.

"Isn't it a wonderful little coin?" she laughed. "It will take us so far

from here. Once when I was a very small girl I found just such another."

"You were being a small girl long ago," Queenie exclaimed. "Fancy! I was

always forgetting that anybody else except me was ever being small."

"What a lonely world she lives in," Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of

nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a

tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real

existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable

desires."

Sylvia passed away the supperless evening for Queenie by telling her

stories about her own childhood, trying to instil into her some

apprehension of the continuity of existence, trying to populate the

great voids stretching between her thoughts that so terrified her with

the idea of being lost. Queenie really had no conception of her own

actuality, so that at times she became positively a doll, dependent upon

the imagination of another for her very life. In the present stage of

her development she might be the plaything of men without suffering; but

Sylvia was afraid that if she again exposed her to the liability by

deserting her at this point, Queenie might one day suddenly wake up to a

sense of identity and find herself at the moment in a brothel. People

always urged in defense of caging birds that if they were caged from the

nest they did not suffer. Yet it was hard to imagine anything more

lamentable than the celestial dreams of a lark that never had flown.

Sylvia knew that at least she had been able to frame clearly the fear

she had for Queenie; it lent new strength to her purpose. The horror of

the brothel had become an obsession ever since earlier in the year she

had passed by a vast and gloomy building which seemed a prison, but

which she had been told was the recognized pleasure-house of soldiers.

In this building behind high walls were two hundred women, most of whom

in a Catholic country would have been cherished as penitents by nuns.

Instead of that they were doomed to expiate their first fault by serving

the state and slaking the lust of soldiers at the rate of a franc or a

franc and a half. These women were fed by the state; they were examined

daily by state doctors; everybody agreed that such forethought by the

state was laudable. People who protested against such a debasement of

womanhood were regarded as sentimentalists: so were people who believed

in hell.

"This Promethean morality that enchains the world and sets its

bureaucratic eagle to gnaw the vitals of humanity," Sylvia cried.

"Prometheus himself was surely only another personification of Satan,

and this is his infernal revenge for what he suffered in the Caucasus.

The future of the race! Or is my point of view distorted and am I wrong

in mocking at the future of the majority? No, no, it cannot be right to

secure the many by debasing the few. Am I being Promethean myself in

trying to keep hold of you, Queenie? You came back into my life at such

a moment that I feel as if you were a part of myself. Yet I can't help

divining that there's a weakness in my logic somewhere."

The next morning Sylvia went to Bucharest. She did not remember until

she was in the train that it was Sunday; but the passport-office was

open and Mr. Mathers was at work as usual. She asked if Mr. Iredale was

too busy to see her.

"Mr. Iredale?" the clerk repeated. "I'm sorry to say that Mr. Iredale's

dead."

Sylvia stared at him; for a moment the words had no more meaning than a

conventional excuse to unwelcome visitors.

"But how can he be dead?" she exclaimed.

"I'm sorry to say that he died very suddenly. In fact, he was taken ill

almost immediately after you were here last. It was a stroke. He never

recovered consciousness. Mr. Abernethy is in charge temporarily. If

you're anxious about your visa, I'm sure Mr. Abernethy will do

everything in his power--subject, of course, to the regulations. Oh,

certainly, yes, everything in his power."

Mr. Mathers tried by the tone of his voice to convey that, though his

late chief was dead, he could not forget the length of the interview he

had granted to Sylvia and that the present rulers of the office would

pay a tribute to the dead by treating her with equal condescension.

"No, I wanted to see Mr. Iredale privately."

The clerk sighed his sympathy with her position in face of the

unattainable.

"Perhaps I shall be wanting a visa presently," she added.

The clerk brightened. Sylvia fancied that in the remote and happy days

before the war he must have had experience of the counter. He had

offered her the prospect of obtaining a visa instead of seeing Philip

again much as a shop assistant might offer one shade of ribbon in the

place of another no longer in stock.

Sylvia left the passport-office and, without paying any heed in what

direction she walked, she came to the Cimisgiu Gardens and sat down upon

a seat beside the ornamental lake. It was a hot morning, and there was

enough mist in the atmosphere to blur the outlines of material objects

and to set upon the buildings of the city a charm of distance that was

as near as Bucharest ever approximated to the mellowing of time. The

shock of the news that she had just heard, coming on top of the fatigue

caused by her journey without even a cup of coffee to sustain her body,

blurred the outlines of her mental attitude and made her glad of the

fainting landscape that accorded with her mood and did not jar upon her

with the turmoil of a world insistently, almost wantonly alive.

So Philip was dead. Sylvia tried to imagine how the news of his death

would have affected her, if he had not lately re-entered her life. Poor

Philip! Death out here seemed to crown the pathos of his position, and

she wished that she had not parted from him so abruptly, that she had

not tried so hard to make him aware of his incongruity in Bucharest, and

now, most of all, that she had let him talk, as he had wanted to talk,

about their life together. If she had only known that he was near to

death she should have told him of her gratitude for much that he had

done for her; had he lived to hear the request that she had been going

to make him this morning, she was sure that he would have taken pleasure

in his ability to be of use once more. She had been wrong to blame him

for his attitude toward Queenie. After all, his experiment with herself

had not encouraged him to make other experiments in the direction of

obeying impulses that took him off the lines he had laid down for his

progress through life. She was really the last person who should have

asked him to forgo another convention in favor of a girl like Queenie.

How had he been paid for marrying a child whom he had met casually in a

London cemetery? Very ill, he might consider. Poor Philip! Early next

month it would be the fifteenth anniversary of their marriage. He had

never known how to manage her; yet how preposterous it should have been

to expect anything else. The more Sylvia meditated upon their marriage

the more she felt inclined to blame herself for its collapse; and in her

present state of weakness the thought that it was now forever too late

to tell Philip how sorry she was fretted her with the poignancy of

missed opportunity. Beneath that weight of pedagogic ashes there had

always been the glow of humanity; if only she could have fanned it to a

flame before she left Bucharest by giving him the chance of feeling that

he was helping her! Yet she had regarded the favor she was about to ask

as such a humiliation that almost she had been inclined to put it on the

same level of self-sacrifice as the offer of herself to that Rumanian

youth. Now that she had failed with both her self-imposed resolves, how

easy it was to see the difference in their degree! Her appeal to Philip

would have been the just payment she owed him for that letter she wrote

when she ran away; it would have washed out that callow piece of

cruelty. But Philip was dead, and the relation between them must remain

eternally unadjusted.

In meditating upon her married life and in conjuring scenes that had

long been tossed aside into the lumber-room of imagination, Sylvia's

spirit wandered again in the green English country and forgot its exile.

The warmth and mystery of the autumnal air drowsed all urgency with

dreams of the past; for a minute or two she actually slept. She was soon

disturbed by the voices of passing children, and she woke up with a

shiver to the imperative and tormenting facts of the present--to the

complete lack of money, to the thought of Queenie waiting hungry in

Avereshti, and to Rumania clouding with the fog of war.

"What on earth am I going to do?" she murmured. "I must sell my bag."

The decision seemed to be made from without; it was like the voice of a

wraith that had long been waiting incapable of speech, and involuntarily

she turned round as if she could catch the spirit in the act of

interfering with her affairs.

"Were I a natural liar, I should vow it was a ghost and frame the

episode of Philip's death with a supernatural decoration. How many

people who have penetrated to the ultimate confines of themselves have

preferred to perceive the supernatural and in doing so destroyed the

whole value of their discovery! Yet lying is the first qualification of

every explorer."

But setting aside considerations of the subconscious self, Sylvia was

for a while horrified at the damnable clarity with which her course of

action presented itself. There was no possible argument against selling

the bag, and yet to sell it would demand a greater sacrifice than

borrowing money from Philip or selling herself to Florilor. The fact

that during all this time of strain the idea had never suggested itself

before showed to what depths of her being it had been necessary to

pierce before she could contemplate the action. Her feeling for the bag

far transcended anything in the nature of sentiment; without blasphemy

she could affirm that she would as soon have attributed her sense of God

in the sacrifice of the Mass to sentiment. But without incurring an

imputation of idolatry by such a comparison she could at least award the

bag as much value as devout women awarded a wedding-ring; for this

golden bag positively was the outward sign that she had affirmed her

belief in human love. In whatever tirades she might indulge against the

natural depravity of man when confronted by the evidence of it so

repeatedly as lately she had been, this bag was a continual reminder of

his potential nobility. Certainly a critic of her extravagant reverence

might urge that the value of the bag was created by the man who gave it,

and that any transference of such an emotion to a natural object was

nothing but a surrender to sentiment which involved her in the common

fault of seeking to express the eternal in terms of the temporal. But

certain acts of worship lay outside the destructive logic of an unmoved

critic; the circumstances in which the gift had been made were

exceptional and her attitude toward it must remain equally exceptional.

And now it must go; its talismanic and sacramental power must rest

unappreciated in the hands of another. Yet in selling the bag was she

not giving final and practical expression to the impulse of the donor?

He had told her, when she had protested against his generosity, that

before he was lost in the war his money would be better spent in giving

some one something that was desired than in gambling it all away.

Equally now would he not say to her that the money were better spent in

helping a Queenie than in serving as a symbol rather than as an

instrument of love? Or was the intrusion of Queenie into this intimacy

of personal communion a kind of sacrilege? The soldier had never

intended the bag to acquire any redemptive signification; he had merely

chosen Sylvia by chance as the vehicle of one of those acts of sacred

egotism which illuminate the divine purpose. It was not to be supposed

that the woman with the cruse of ointment was actuated by anything

except self-expression, which was precisely what gave her impulse value

as an act of worship. The commonplace and utilitarian point of view on

that occasion was perfectly expressed by Judas.

"And my own point of view about Queenie is not in the least altruistic.

I want to give her something of which I have more than my fair share. I

am burdened with an overflowing sense of existence. I have attached

Queenie to myself and assumed a responsibility for her in exactly the

same way as if I had brought a child into the world. There is no false

redemptionism about the mother's relation to her child: there is merely

a passion to bequeath to the child the sum of her own experience. My

feeling about Queenie partakes of the passionate guardianship with

which a loose woman so often shields her child. Certainly I must sell

the bag. Who knows what chain of good may not weave itself from that

soldier's action? To me he gave an imperishable store of love at the

very moment when without the assurance of love my faith must have

withered. I, in turn, give all that I can give to balance Queenie's life

in the way I think it should be balanced. The next purchaser of the bag

may, I should like to think without superstition, inherit with it a

sacramental of love that will carry on the influence. And the one who

first gave it to me? That almond-eyed soldier swept like a grain of

chaff before the winnowing-fan of war? At this very moment perhaps the

bullet has struck him. He has fallen. His company presses forward or is

pressed back. He will lie rotting for days between earth and sky, and

when at last they come to bury him they will laugh at the poor scarecrow

that was a man. They will speculate neither whence he came nor who may

weep for him; but his reward will be in his handiwork, for he will have

shown love to a woman and he will have died for his country; such men,

like stars, may light a very little of the world's darkness, but they

proclaim the mysteries of God."

With all her conviction that she was right in selling the bag, it was

with a heavy heart that Sylvia left the Cimisgiu Gardens to seek a

jeweler's shop; when she found that all the shops were shut except those

open for the incidental amusements of the Sunday holiday, she nearly

abandoned in relief the idea of selling the bag in order to go back to

Avereshti and trust to fate for a way out of her difficulties. On

reflection, however, she admitted the levity of such behavior, if she

wished to regard her struggle as worth anything at all, and she sharply

brought herself back to the gravity of the position by reminding herself

that it was she who had lost the five hundred francs, a piece of

carelessness that was the occasion, if not the cause, of what had

happened afterward. If anything was to be left to hazard, it must be

Queenie to-night alone in that hotel; besides, if further argument were

necessary, there was not enough change from the ten francs to get back.

Sylvia had promised Queenie that she would not eat until she saw her

again, but she had not counted upon the effect of this long day, to be

followed by another long day to-morrow. How much money had she? Three

francs twenty-five. Oh, she must eat; and she must also send a telegram

to Queenie! Otherwise the child might do anything. But she _must_ eat;

and suddenly she found herself sitting at a table outside a café, with a

waiter standing by on tiptoe for her commands. The coffee tasted

incredibly delicious, but the moment she had finished it she was

overcome by a sensation of nausea and pierced by remorse for her

weakness in giving way. She left the café and went to the post-office,

where she spent all that was left of her money in a long telegram of

exhortation and encouragement to Queenie.

The problem of how to pass the rest of the day weighed upon her. She did

not want to meet any of the girls at the Trianon; she did not want to

meet anybody she knew until she could meet him with money in her pocket.

To-night she would stay at their old hotel in Bucharest; she would say

that she had missed the train back to Avereshti, if they wondered at the

absence of luggage. Oh, but what did it matter if they did wonder? It

was her sensitiveness to such trifles as these that brought home to

Sylvia how much the strain of the last week had told upon her. Walking

aimlessly along, she found herself near the little mission church and

turned aside to enter it. At such an early hour of the afternoon the

church was empty, and the incense of the morning Mass was still pungent.

There was the same sort of atmosphere that exists in a theater between a

matinée and an evening performance; the emotion of the departed

worshipers was mingled with the expectation of more worshipers to come.

Sylvia sat contemplating the images and wondering about the appeal they

could make. She tried to put herself in the position of the humble and

faithful soul that could derive consolation and help from praying before

that tawdry image of the Sacred Heart. She wished that she could be

given the mentality of a poor Italian girl whose sense of awe was so

easily satisfied and who could behold those flames of cheap gold paint

around the Heart burning like the eyes of Seraphim.

"Yet, after all," she thought, "are we superior people, who suppose that

such representations hurt the majesty of God, any nearer to Him with our

equally pretentious theories of His manifestation? What in the ultimate

sum of this world's history, when the world itself hangs in the sky like

a poor burned-out moon, will mark the difference between the great

philosopher with his words and the most degraded savage with his idols?

And am I with my perception of God's love in a golden bag less

hopelessly material than the poor Italian girl who bows before that

painted heart?"

The influence of the church began to penetrate Sylvia's mind with a

tranquilizing assurance of continuity, or rather with the assurance of

silent and universal forces undisturbed by war. The sense of the

individual's extinction in the strife of herd with herd had been bound

to affect her very deeply, coming, as it did, at a time when she had

once again challenged life as an individual by refusing any co-operation

with the past.

"The worst of feeling regenerated," she thought, "is that such an

emotion or condition of mind implies the destruction of all former

experience. Of course, former experience must still produce its effect

unconsciously; but one is too sensible of trying to bring the past into

positively the same purified state as the present. When I was thinking

about Philip this morning and reliving bygone moments, I was all the

time applying to them standards which I have only possessed for about a

year. Certainly I perceive that what I call my regeneration must be the

fruit of past experience--otherwise the description would be

meaningless--but it is the fruit of individual experience ripening at

the very moment when individual experience counts for less than it has

ever counted since the beginning of the world. Had I always been a

social and political animal the idea of the war would not have preyed on

my mind as it does; I should have been educated up to the point of

expecting it. I remember when I was first told in the Petrograd hospital

that a war had broken out, what a trifling impression the news made

compared with my own discovery of the change in myself. Gradually during

this past year I have found at every turn my new progress barred by the

war. My individual efforts perpetually shrink into insignificance before

the war, and I am beginning to perceive, unless I can in some way fall

into step with the rest of mankind, that what I considered progress is

really the retreat of my personality along a disused bypath where I am

expending my energy in cutting away briers that were better left alone,

at any rate, at such a moment in history. Certainly one of the effects

of an ordered religion is to restore the individual to the broad paths

along which mankind is marching. An ordered religion is equally opposed

either to short cuts or to cul-de-sacs, or to what by their

impenetrability to the individual are equivalent to cul-de-sacs. My

first instinct about Queenie was certainly right when I was anxious to

intrust her to religion rather than to rely upon my personal influence.

I think I must have lacked conviction in the way I approached the

subject. I must have been timid and self-conscious; and the skeptical

side of me that has just been wondering about the appeal of that image

of the Sacred Heart may have defeated my purpose without my noticing its

intrusion. I was all the time like a grown-up person who plays with

children in order to get pleasure from their enjoyment rather than from

his own.

"Yes, sitting here in this tawdry little church, I am beginning to make

a few discoveries. I must positively lose the slightest consciousness of

being superior to Queenie in any way whatsoever. Equally, I must get

over the slightest consciousness of being superior to any of the

worshipers in this church. I must get over the habit of being injured by

the monstrousness of this war until I have been personally injured by it

in the course of sharing its woes with the rest of mankind. I have got

to find an individualism that while it abates nothing of its

unwillingness to be injured by the state is simultaneously always

careful in its turn never to injure or impede the state, which from the

individual's point of view must be regarded not as a state, but as

another individual. Presumably the chief function of an ordered religion

is by acting through the individual to apply the sum of mankind's faith,

hope, and love under the guidance of the Holy Ghost to the fulfilment of

the divine purpose. In such a way the self-perfection of the individual

will create the self-perfection of the state, and, oh, what a long time

it will take! God is a great conservative; yet when He was incarnate He

was a great radical. I wonder if I had ever had a real logical training,

or indeed any formal education at all, whether I should be tossed about,

as I am, from one paradox to another. The Church was, significantly

enough, built upon Peter, not upon John nor upon Thomas; it was founded

upon the most human of the apostles. If one might admit in God what in

men would be called an afterthought, it might be permissible to look

upon Paul as an afterthought to leaven some of the ponderousness of

Peter's humanity. Anyway, the point is that the paradoxes began in the

very beginning, and it's quite obvious that I'm not going to help myself

or anybody else by exposing myself to them rather than to the mighty

moral, intellectual, and spiritual fabric into which they have all been

absorbed or by which they have all been rejected."

During Sylvia's meditation the church had gradually filled with

worshipers to receive the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Generally, that strangely wistful concession to the pathetic side of

human nature had not made a deep appeal to Sylvia's instinct for

worship; but this afternoon the bravery of self had fallen from her. For

the first time she felt in all its force--not merely apprehending it as

a vague discomfort--the utter desolation of the soul without God. In

such a state of mind faith shrank to infatuate speculation, hope swelled

to arrogance, and even love shivered in a chill and viewless futility,

until the mystical sympathy of other souls, the humblest of whom was a

secret only known to God, led her to identify herself with them and to

cry with them:

_"O salutaris Hostia,_

_Quæ coeli pandis ostium:_

_Bella premunt hostilia,_

_Da robur, fer, auxilium."_

They were very poor people, these Albanians and Italians who knelt round

her in this church; and Sylvia bowed before the thought that all over

the world in all the warring nations somewhere about this hour poor

people were crying out to God the same words in the same grave Latin.

The helplessness of humanity raged through her like a strong wind, and

her self-reliance became as the dust that was scattered before it. When

the priest held the monstrance aloft, and gave the Benediction it seemed

that the wind died away; upon her soul the company of God was shed like

a gentle rain, which left behind it faith blossoming like a flower, and

hope singing like a bird, and above them both love shining like a sun.

Sylvia went out of the church that afternoon with a sense of having been

personally comforted; she was intensely aware of having made more

spiritual progress in the last hour than in all the years that had gone

by since the first revelation of God.

"Without Him I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing," she murmured.

That evening--an evening that she had dreaded indescribably--she sat by

the window of her bedroom, happier than she could remember that she had

ever been; when the chambermaid, on her way to bed, came to ask her if

she wanted anything, Sylvia nearly kissed her in order that perhaps so

she might express a little of her love toward all those who in this

world serve.

"For such a girl, with the eyes of a nymph, to be serving you, and for

you to have presumed to consider yourself above all service that did not

gratify your egotism," she exclaimed aloud to her reflection in the

glass.

The next morning Sylvia sold her golden bag for fifteen hundred francs.

On the way to the station she felt very faint, and finding, when she

arrived, that she would have to wait an hour for the train to Avereshti,

she drank some coffee. She told herself that it was only the weakness

caused by fasting which made her regard so seriously this second breach

of her promise to Queenie; nevertheless, nothing could put out of her

head the superstitious dread that the surrender caused her. The drinking

of coffee while her friend was still hungry took on a significance quite

out of proportion to what it actually possessed; she felt like the

heroine of a fairy story who disobeys the warnings of her fairy

godmother. While she was waiting in the _salle d'attente_ and

reproaching herself for what she had done, she heard a familiar voice

behind her, and, looking round, saw Philidor in uniform. He was

traveling to Bralatz on military duty, and she was glad of his company

as far as Avereshti, for all sorts of fears about what might have

happened to Queenie during her absence were assailing her fancy.

Philidor was surprised to find her still in Rumania and spoke seriously

to her about the necessity of leaving at once if she did not want to

travel home by Russia.

"You must get away. No one knows what may happen in the Balkans

presently. You must get within sight of the sea. You English are lost

away from the sea. I assure you that Bulgaria will come in soon. There

is no doubt of it. I cannot understand the madness of your English

politicians in making speeches to deceive everybody that the

mobilization is in self-defense. It is in self-defense, but not on the

side of the Entente. You have been poisoned in England by the criminal

stupidity of the Englishmen who come out here and see reflected in the

eyes of the Bulgarian peasant their own liberal ideals. It is a

tradition inherited from your Gladstone. To us out here such density of

vision is incomprehensible. The Bulgarian is the Prussian of the

Balkans; he is a product of uncompromising materialism. One of your

chief Bulgarian propagandists was shot in the jaw the other day; it was

a good place to wound him, but it's a pity he wasn't hit there before he

did so much harm with its activities. We in Rumania were blamed by

idealistic politicians for the way we stabbed Bulgaria in the back in

1913; you might as well blame a man for shooting at a slightly injured

wild beast. You have always been too sporting in England, as you say;

and not even war with Germany seems to have cured you of it. The

Austrians are preparing to invade Serbia, and this time there will be no

mistake. Get out of Rumania and get through Bulgaria before the carnage

begins."

The conviction with which he spoke gave Sylvia a thrill; for the first

time the active side of the war seemed to be approaching her.

"And what is Rumania going to do?" she asked.

The young officer made a gesture of bewilderment.

"Who knows? Who knows? It will be a struggle between sentiment and

expediency. I wish that the cry of the rights of small nations was not

being so loudly shouted by the big nations. Battle-cries are apt to die

down when the battle is over. An idea that presents itself chiefly as a

weapon of offense has little vitality; ideas, which are abstractions of

liberty, do not like to be the slaves of other ideas. There is one idea

in the world at this moment which overshadows all the rest--the idea of

victory: the idea of the rights of small nations does not stand much

chance against that. God fights on the side of the big battalions.

Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. We shall see what happens in Serbia. But to

put aside ideas for the moment, don't waste time in following my advice.

You must leave Rumania now, if you want to leave at all. And I do not

recommend you to stay. A woman like you following your profession should

be in her own country in times of war. You are too much exposed to the

malice of any private person, and in war justice, like everything else,

is only regarded as a contribution to military efficiency."

"You mean I might be denounced as a spy?"

"Anybody without protection may be denounced as a spy. Probably nothing

would follow from it except expulsion, but expulsion would be

unpleasant."

"I wonder what is the fundamental reason for spy-mania," said Sylvia.

"Is it due to cheap romanticism or a universal sense of guilt? Or is it

the opportunity for the first time to give effect to vulgar gossip? I

think it's the last, probably. It must be very unpleasant to glorify the

meanest vice with the inspiration of a patriotic impulse."

"I said that justice was subordinated to military efficiency."

"Yes, and even slander has a temporary commission and is dressed up in a

romantic uniform and armed with anonymous letters. Bullets are not the

only things with long noses."

"I suppose you can get away? You have money?" Philidor asked.

"Oh, I'm rich," she declared.

"And your little friend, how is she?"

"She's waiting for me at Avereshti."

Sylvia gave an account of her adventures, and Philidor shook his head.

"But it has all ended satisfactorily," he said.

"I hope so."

"It only shows how right I was to warn you of the spy danger--the double

danger of being made the victim of a genuine agent and the risk of a

frivolous accusation. You may be sure that now, when you go back to the

hotel with money, you will be accused everywhere of being a spy. If you

have any trouble telegraph to me at Bralatz. Here's my address."

"And here's Avereshti," Sylvia said. "Good-by and good luck. _Et vive la

Roumanie!_"

She waved her hand to him and walked quickly from the station to the

hotel. It was good to see the waiter on the threshold and to be

conscious of being able to rule him with the prospect of a tip. How

second-rate the hotel looked, with money in one's pocket! How

obsequiously it seemed to beg one's patronage! There was not a single

window that did not have the air of cringing to the new arrival.

"Lunch for two at once," Sylvia cried, flinging him a twenty-franc note.

"For two?" the waiter repeated.

"For myself and Mademoiselle Walters--my friend up-stairs," she added,

when the waiter stared first at her and then at the money. "What's the

matter? Is she ill? _Crétin_, if she's ill you and your master shall

pay."

"The lady who was staying here with _madame_ left this morning with a

gentleman."

"_Crapule, tu mens!_"

"Madame may look for herself. The room is empty."

Sylvia caught the waiter by the throat and shook him.

"You lie! You lie! Confess that you are lying. She was starved by you.

She has died, and you are pretending that she has gone away."

She threw the waiter from her and ran up-stairs. Her own luggage was

still in the room; of Queenie's nothing remained except a few pieces of

pink tissue-paper trembling faintly in the draught. Sylvia rang the

bell, but before any one could answer her summons she had fainted.

When she came to herself her first action--an action that seemed, when

afterward she thought about it, to mark well the depths of her

disillusionment--was to feel for her money lest she might have been

robbed during her unconsciousness. The wad of notes had not shrunk; the

waiter was looking at her with all the sympathy that could be bought for

twenty francs; a blowsy chambermaid, dragged for the operation from a

coal-cellar, to judge by her appearance, was sprinkling water over her.

"What was the man like?" she murmured.

The waiter bustled forward.

"A tall gentleman. He left no name. He said he brought a message. He

paid a few little items on the bill that were not paid by _madame_. They

took the train for Bucharest. _Mademoiselle_ was looking ill."

Sylvia mustered all that will of hers, which lately had been tried

hardly enough, to obliterate Queenie and everything that concerned

Queenie from her consciousness. She fought down each superstitious

reproach for not having kept her word by drinking the coffee in

Bucharest: she drove forth from her mind every speculation about

Queenie's future: she dried up every regret for any carelessness in the

past.

"Clear away all this paper, please," she told the chambermaid; then she

asked the waiter for the menu.

He dusted the grimy card and handed it to her.

"_J'ai tellement faim_," said Sylvia, "_que je saurais manger même toi

sans beurre_."

The waiter inclined his head respectfully, as if he would intimate his

willingness to be eaten; but he tempered his assent with a smile to show

that he was sensible that the sacrifice would not be exacted.

"And the wine?" he asked.

She chose half a bottle of the best native wine; and the waiter hurried

away like a lame rook.

After lunch Sylvia carefully packed her things and put all her

professional dresses away at the bottom of her large trunk. In the

course of packing, the golden shawl that contained the records of her

ancestry was left out of the trunk by accident, and she put it in the

valise, which so far on her journeys she had always managed to keep with

her. Philidor's solemn warning about the political situation in the

Balkans had made an impression, and, thinking it was possible that she

might have to abandon her trunk at any moment, she was glad of the

oversight that had led her to making this change; though if she had been

asked to give a reason for paying any heed to the shawl now she would

have found it difficult. When she had finished her packing she sat down

and wrote a letter to Olive.

HOTEL MOLDAVIA, AVERESHTI, _September 27, 1915_.

MY DARLING OLIVE,--This is not a communication from the other

world, as you might very well think. It's Sylvia herself writing to

you from Rumania with a good deal of penitence, but still very much

the same Sylvia. I'm not going to ask you for your news, because by

the time you get this you may quite easily have got me with it. At

any rate, you can expect me almost on top. I shall telegraph when I

reach France, if telegrams haven't been made a capital offense by

that time. I've wondered dreadfully about you and Jack. I've a

feeling the dear old boy is in Flanders or likely soon to go there.

Dearest thing, I need not tell you that, though I've not written,

I've thought terribly about you both during all this ghastly time.

And the dear babies! I'm longing to see them. If I started to tell

you my adventures I shouldn't know where to stop, so I won't begin.

But I'm very well. Give my love to anybody you see who remembers

your long-lost Sylvia.

How colorless the letter was, she thought, on reading it through. It

gave as little indication of herself as an electric bell gives of the

character of a guest when he is waiting on the door-step. But it would

serve its purpose, like the bell, to secure attention.

Sylvia intended to leave Avereshti that evening, but, feeling tired, she

lay down upon her bed and fell fast asleep. She was woken up three hours

later by the waiter, who announced with an air of excitement that Mr.

Porter had arrived at the hotel and was intending to spend the night.

"What of it?" she said, coldly. "I'm leaving by the nine-o'clock train

for Bucharest."

"Oh, but Mr. Porter will invite you to dinner."

"Who is Mr. Porter?"

"He's one of the richest men in Rumania. He is the head of many big

petroleum companies. I told him that there was an English lady staying

with us, and he was delighted. You can't leave to-night. Mr. Porter will

never forgive us."

"Look here. Is this Florilor the Second?"

The waiter held up his hands in protest.

"Ah, no, _madame_! This is an Englishman. He could buy up M. Florilor

ten times over. Shall I say that _madame_ will be delighted to drink a

cockatail with him?"

"Get out," said Sylvia, pointing to the door.

But afterward she felt disinclined to make a journey that night, and,

notwithstanding Philidor's urgency, she decided to waste one more night

in Avereshti. Moreover, the notion of meeting an Englishman was not so

dull, after all. Ten minutes later she strolled down-stairs to have a

look at him.

Mr. Porter was a stout man of about sixty, who was sometimes rather like

Mr. Pickwick in appearance, but generally bore a greater resemblance to

Tweedledum. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of pepper-and-salt check

and wore a glossy collar with a full black cravat, in which a fine

diamond twinkled modestly; a clear, somewhat florid face with that

priestly glimmer of a very close shave, well-brushed boots, white spats,

and a positive impression of having clean cuffs completed a figure that

exhaled all the more prosperity and cheerfulness because the background

of the hotel was so unsuitable.

"Going to introduce myself. Ha-ha! Apsley Porter's my name. Well known

hereabouts. Ha-ha! Didn't expect to meet a compatriot in these times at

Avereshti. Ugly little hole. Business before pleasure, though, by

George! I don't see why pleasure should be left out in the cold

altogether. What are you going to have? Ordered a Martini here the other

day. 'What's that?' I said to the scoundrel who served it. 'Martini?

Pah! Almost as dangerous as a Martini-Henry,' I said. Ha-ha-ha-ha! But

of course the blackguard didn't understand me. Going to have dinner with

me, I hope. I've ordered a few special dishes. Always bring my own

champagne with me in case of accidents. I forced them to get ice here,

though. Ha-ha! By George, I did. I said that if there wasn't ice

whenever I came I should close down one of the principal wells I

control. Did I tell you my name? Ah, glad I did. I've got a deuced bad

habit of talking away without introducing myself. Here comes the villain

with your cocktail. You must gin and bear it. What? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Sylvia liked Mr. Porter and accepted his invitation to dinner. He was

distressed to hear that a friend had been staying with her in the hotel

so recently as this morning and that he had had the bad luck to miss

entertaining her.

"What, another little Englishwoman in Avereshti? By George! what a pity

I didn't turn up yesterday! I sha'n't forgive myself. Come along,

waiter. Hurry up with that champagne. Fancy! Another jolly little

Englishwoman and I missed her. Too bad!"

There was irony in meeting upon the vigil of her return to England this

Englishman redolent of the Monico. Sylvia had spent so much of her time

intimately with people at the other pole of pleasure that she had

forgotten how to talk to this type and could only respond with

monosyllables to his boisterous assaults upon the present. He was so

much like a fine afternoon in London that she sunned herself, as it

were, in his effluence, and let her senses occupy themselves with the

noise of the traffic, as if she had suddenly been transplanted to the

Strand and was finding the experience immediately on top of Avereshti

pleasant, but rather bewildering. And now he was talking about the war.

"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all. Pity about the

Dardanelles. Great pity, but we had no luck. They are making a great

fuss here over this coming Austrian attack upon Serbia. Don't believe in

it. Sha'n't believe in it until it happens. But it won't happen, and if

it does happen--waiter, where's that champagne?--if it does happen, it

won't alter the course of the war. Not a bit of it. I'm an optimist. And

in times like these I consider that optimism is of as much use to my

country at my age as a rifle would have been if I were a younger man.

Pessimism in times like these is a poison."

"But isn't optimism apt to be an intoxicant?" Sylvia suggested.

She felt inclined to impress upon Mr. Porter the difference between

facing misfortune with money and without it, and she told him a few of

her adventures in the past year, winding up with an account of the

behavior of the proprietor of this very hotel.

"You don't mean to say old Andrescu refused to serve you with anything

to eat?"

The notion seemed to shake Mr. Porter to the depths of his being.

"Why, I never heard anything like it! Waiter, go and tell M. Andrescu to

come and speak to me at once. I shall give him a piece of my mind."

The jovial curves of his face had all hardened: his bright little eyes

were like steel: even the dimple in his chin had disappeared in the

contraction of his mouth. When Andrescu came in, he began to abuse him

in rapid Rumanian, while his complexion turned from pink to crimson, and

from crimson in waves of color to a uniform purple. In the end he

stopped talking for a moment, and the proprietor begged Sylvia's

intercession.

"That's the way to deal with rascally hotelkeepers," said Mr. Porter,

fanning himself with a red-and-yellow bandana handkerchief and drinking

two glasses of champagne.

"What annoyed me most of all," he added, "was that his behavior should

have made me miss the chance of asking another jolly little English girl

to dinner. Too bad!"

Sylvia had not told him more than the bare outlines of the story; she

had not confided in him about Florilor or the sale of her bag, or the

fact that she had lost Queenie forever. Her tale could have seemed not

much more than a tale of temporary inconvenience, and she was therefore

only amused when Mr. Porter deduced from it as the most important result

his own failure to entertain Queenie.

After dinner she and her host sat talking for a while, or rather she sat

listening to his narratives of holidays spent in England, which

evidently appealed to him as a much more vital part of his career than

his success in the Rumanian oil-fields. When, about eleven o'clock, she

got up to take her leave and go to bed, he expressed his profound dismay

at the notion of thus breaking up a jolly evening.

"Tell you what we'll do," he announced. "We'll make a night of it. We

will, by George! we will! A night of it. We'll have half a dozen bottles

put on ice and take them up to my room. I can talk all night on

champagne. Now don't say no. It's a patriotic duty. By George! it's a

patriotic duty when two English people meet in a God-forsaken place like

this; it's a patriotic duty to make a night of it. Eat and drink to-day,

for to-morrow we die."

Sylvia was feeling weary enough, but the fatuous talk had cheered her by

its sheer inanity, and the thought of going to bed in that haunted

room--her will was strong, but the memory of what she had endured for

Queenie was not entirely quenched--and of perhaps not being able to

sleep was too dismal. She might just as well help this amiable old

buffoon's illusion that champagne was the elixir of eternal life and

that pleasure was nothing but laughing loudly enough.

"All right," said Sylvia. "But I'd rather we made the night of it in my

room. I'll get into a wrapper and make myself comfortable, and when dawn

breaks I can tumble into bed."

Mr. Porter hesitated a moment. "Right you are, my dear girl. Of course.

Waiter! Where's the ruffian hidden himself?"

"I'll leave you to make the arrangements. I shall be ready in about a

quarter of an hour," Sylvia said.

She left him and went up-stairs.

"I believe the silly old fool thought I was making overtures to him when

I suggested we should make merry in my room," she laughed to herself.

"Oh dear, it shows how much one can tell and how little of oneself need

be revealed in the telling of it. Stupid old ass! But rather pleasant in

a way. He's like finding an old Christmas number of the

_Graphic_--colored heartiness, conventional mirth, reality mercifully

absent, and _O mihi proeteritos_ printed in Gothic capitals on the cover.

I suppose these pre-war figures still abound in England. And I'm not

sure he isn't right in believing that his outlook on life is worth

preserving as long as possible. Timbered houses, crusted port, and

Dickens are nearer to fairyland than anything else that's left nowadays.

To what old age will this blackened, mutilated, and agonized generation

grow? Efficiency and progress have not spared the monuments of bygone

art except to imprison them in libraries, museums, and iron railings.

Will it spare the Englishman? Or will the generations of a century hence

read of him only, and murmur, 'This was a Man'? Will they praise him as

the last and noblest individual, turning with repulsion and remorse from

the sight of themselves and their fellows, the product of the

triumphant herd eternally sowing where it does not reap? Night thoughts

of the young on perceiving a relic of insular grandeur in an

exceptionally fine state of preservation--preserved in oil! And here he

comes to interrupt my sad soliloquy."

The night passed away as the evening had passed away. Mr. Porter

sustained his joviality in a fashion that would have astounded Sylvia,

if all capacity for being astounded had not been exhausted in watching

him drink champagne. It was incredible not so much that his head could

withstand the fumes as that his body, fat though it was, should be

expansive enough to contain the cubic quantity of liquor. It was four

o'clock before he had finished the last drop and was shaking Sylvia's

hand in cordial farewell.

"Haven't enjoyed an evening so much for months. By George! I haven't.

Ha-ha-ha! Well, you'll forgive an old man--always accuse myself of being

old when the wine is low, but I shall be as young as a chicken again

after three hours' sleep--you'll excuse an old man. Little present

probably damned useful in these hard times. Ha-ha-ha! Under your pillow.

Good girl. Never made me feel an old man by expecting me to make love.

I've often set out to make a night of it, and only succeeded in making a

damned fool of myself. Sixty-four next month. Youth's the time!

Ha-ha-ha! Good-by. God bless you. Sha'n't see you in the morning. By

George! I _shall_ have a busy day."

He shook her warmly by the hand, avoided the ice-stand with a grave bow,

and left her with a smell of cigar-smoke. Under the pillow she found

four five-hundred-franc notes.

"Really," Sylvia exclaimed, "I might be excused for thinking myself a

leading character in a farce by fate. I fail to make a halfpenny by

offering myself when the necessity is urgent, and make two thousand

francs by not embarrassing an old gentleman's impotence. Meanwhile,

it's too late--it's just too late. But I shall be able to buy back my

golden bag. I suppose fate thinks that's as good a curtain as I'm

entitled to in a farce."

Sylvia left Avereshti next morning with a profound conviction that,

whatever the future held, nothing should induce her to put foot in that

town again. There was some satisfaction in achieving even so much sense

of finality, negative though the achievement might be.

"I don't advise you to go to Dedeagatch," said Mr. Mathers when Sylvia

presented herself at the passport-office for the recommendation for a

visa. "I may tell you in confidence that the situation in Bulgaria is

very grave--very grave indeed. Anything may happen this week. The

feeling here is very tense, too. If you are determined to take the risk

of being held up in Bulgaria, I counsel you to travel by Rustchuk, Gorna

Orechovitza, and Sofia to Nish. From Nish you'll get down to Salonika,

and from there to the Piræus. At the same time I strongly advise you to

keep away from Bulgaria. With the mobilization, passenger traffic is

liable to be very uncertain."

"But if I go back through Russia I may find it is just as hard to get

back to England. No, no. I'll risk Bulgaria. To-day's Tuesday the 28th.

When can I have my visa?"

"Well, strictly speaking, it's already too late to-day to entertain

applications, but as you were a friend of Mr. Iredale, I'll ask Mr.

Abernethy to put it through for you. If you come in to-morrow morning at

ten, I will give you a letter for the Consulate. There will be the usual

fee to pay there. Oh dear me, you haven't brought the four photographs

that are necessary. I must have them, I'm afraid. Two for us, one for

the Consulate, and one for the French authorities. The Italians don't

insist upon a photograph at present. I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to put

it through for you to-day. The French are very strict and insist on a

minimum of four days. But in view of the Bulgarian crisis I'll get them

to relax the rule. Luckily one of the French officers is a friend of

mine--a very nice fellow."

Three days elapsed before Sylvia was finally equipped with her passport

_visé_ for Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Italy, France, and England. The

representatives of the first two nations, who seemed most immediately

concerned with her journey, made the least bother; the representative of

Italy, the nation that seemed least concerned with it, made the most.

While she was waiting for the result of the accumulated contemplation

upon her age, her sex, her lineaments, and her past history, Sylvia

bought back her gold bag for eighteen hundred francs, which left her

with just over fifteen hundred francs for the journey--none too much,

but she should no longer have any scruples in telegraphing to England

for help if she found herself stranded.

On Friday afternoon she called for the last time at the passport-office

to get a letter of introduction that Mr. Mathers had insisted on writing

for her to a friend of his in the American Tobacco Company at Cavalla.

"You're not likely to go there," he said, "but if you do, it may be

useful."

The clerk handed her the letter, and there was something magnificently

protective in the accompanying gesture; he might have been handing her a

personal letter to the Prime Minister and giving her an assurance that

the Foreign Secretary would personally meet her at Waterloo and see that

she did not get into the wrong tube.

When Sylvia was leaving the office, Maud Moffat came in, at the sight of

whom Mr. Mathers's spectacled benevolence turned to an aspect of hate

for the whole of humanity.

"It's too late, madam, to-day. Nothing can be done until further

inquiries have been made," he said, sharply.

"Too late be damned!" Maud shouted. "I'm not going to be---- about any

longer. My passport's been stolen and I want another. I'm an honest

English girl who's been earning her living on the Continent and I want

to go home and see my poor old mother. Perhaps you'll say next that I'm

not English?"

"Nobody says that you're not English," Mr. Mathers replied through set

teeth. "And please control your language."

At this moment Maud recognized Sylvia.

"Oh, you've come back, have you? I suppose you didn't have any

difficulty with your passport. Oh no, people as frequents the company of

German spies can get passports for nothing, but me who's traveled for

seven years on the Continent without ever having any one give me so much

as a funny look, me, I repeat, gets cross-examined and messed about as

if I was a murderer instead of an artiste. Yes, war's a fine thing for

some people," she went on. "Young fellows that ought to be fighting for

their country instead of bullying poor girls from the other side of a

table thoroughly enjoys _theirselves_. Nice thing when an honest English

girl--and not a German spy--can't mislay her passport without being--"

"I must repeat, madam," Mr. Mathers interrupted, "that the circumstances

have to be gone into."

"Circumstances? I'm in very good circumstances, thank you. But I sha'n't

be if you keep me mucking about in Bucharest so as I forfeit my

engagement at the White Tower, Saloniker. You'll look very funny, Mr.

Nosey Parker, when my friend the Major who I know in Egypt and still

writes to me lodges a complaint about your conduct. Why don't you ask

this young lady about me? She knows I'm English."

"I keep telling you that nobody questions your nationality."

"Well, you've asked me enough questions. You know the size of my corsets

and the color of my chemise and how many moles I've got, and whether my

grandmother was married, and if it's true my uncle Bill ran away to

Africa because he couldn't stand my aunt Jane's voice. Nationality! I

reckon you couldn't think of any more questions, unless you became a

medical student and started on my inside. Why don't you tell him you

know all about me?" she added, turning to Sylvia.

"Because I don't," Sylvia replied, coldly.

"Well, there's a brazen-faced bitch!" Miss Moffat gasped.

Sylvia said good-by hurriedly to Mr. Mathers and left him to Maud. When

she was in the train on the way to Rustchuk, it suddenly struck her that

Zozo might be able to explain the missing passport.