Sylvia & Michael Part 12

So, after all, her own swift pa.s.sage through Queenie's life had not been without consequence.

"People were always saying that I looked like an English girl," Queenie went on. "And I was always talking English. I will never speak other languages again. I will not know other languages. Until this war came it was easy; but when they asked me for my pa.s.sport I had only a _billet de sejour_ given to me by the Russian police, and after six months I was expelled. When I was coming to Rumania, there was a merchant on the train who was kind to me, but he made me promise that if he helped me I was never to leave him until he was wanting. He was very kind. He gave me these furs. They are so nice, yes. But I was always going to the station at Ja.s.sy to see if some English girl would be my sister. There was once in Constantinople an English girl who would be my sister--but Zozo was jealous. If I was becoming her sister, I would be having a pa.s.sport now, and England is so sweet!"

"But you've never been in England," Sylvia observed.

"Oh yes, I was going there with another English girl, and we lived there three months. I was dancing into a club--a nice club, all the men was wearing smokings--but she was ill and I wanted to be giving her money, so I was going to Russia, and then came the war. And now you must be my sister, because that other sister will be perhaps dead, so ill she was.

_Ach_ yes, so ill, so very ill! When I will have my English pa.s.sport we will go to England together and never come away again. Then for the first time I will be happy."

Sylvia promised that she would do all she could to achieve Queenie's purpose.

"Tell me, why did you call yourself Queenie Walters?" she asked.

"Because the girl who was my sister in England had once a real little baby sister who was called Queenie. Oh, dead long ago, long ago! Her mother, who I was calling _my_ mother, told me about this baby Queenie.

So I was Queenie Walters and my sister was Elsie Walters."

"And your real brother Francesco?" Sylvia asked. "Did you ever see him again?"

That dreamlike and inexplicable meeting between the brother and the sister in the streets of Milan had always remained in Sylvia's memory.

"No, never yet again. But I am so sure he is being in England and that when we go there we will find him. And if he is English, too, what fun we will have."

Sylvia looked at these two companions who had both a.s.sumed English names. Not even the cold and merciless gray light of the Rumanian morning could destroy Queenie's unearthly charm, and the longer she looked at her the more like an Undine she thought her. Her eyes were ageless, limpid as a child's; and that her experience of evil should have left no sign of its habitation Sylvia was tempted to ascribe to the absence of a soul for evil to mar. The only indication that she was six years older than when they met in Granada was her added gracefulness of movement, the impulsive gracefulness of a gazelle rather than that serene gracefulness of a cat which had been Lily's beauty. Her hair, of a natural pale gold, had not been dimmed by the fumes of cabarets, and even now, all tangled after a night in the train, it had a look of hovering in this railway carriage like a wintry sunbeam. In the other corner sat Lottie, snoring with wide-open mouth, whose body, relaxed in sleep, seemed fatter than ever. She, too, had suffered, perhaps more deeply than Queenie, certainly more markedly; and now in dreams what fierce Bohemian pa.s.sions were aroused in the vast airs of sleep, what dark revenges of the spirit for the insults that grotesque body must always endure?

At this point in Sylvia's contemplation Lottie woke up and prepared for the arrival of the train at Bucharest by making her toilet.

"Where's the best place to stay?" Sylvia inquired.

"Well, the best place to stay is in some hotel," Lottie replied. "But the hotels are so horribly expensive. Of course, there are plenty of pensions d'artistes_, and--" she broke off and looked at Sylvia_ curiously, who asked her why she did so.

"I was thinking that it's a pity you can't share a room together," she said after a momentary hesitation.

"So we can," Sylvia answered, sharply.

"Well, in that case I should go to a small hotel," Lottie advised.

"Because all the _pensions_ here are run by old thieves. There's Mere Valerie--she's French and almost the worst of the lot--and there's one kept by a Greek who's not so bad, but they say most of her bedrooms have bugs."

"We'll go to a hotel," Sylvia decided. "Where are you going yourself?"

"Oh, I shall find myself a room somewhere. I don't stand a chance of being engaged at any first-rate cabaret and I sha'n't have much money to spend on rooms. _Entre nous, je ne dis plus rien aux hommes. Je suis trop gra.s.se. a quoi sert une jolie chambre?_"

Sylvia had a feeling that she ought to ask Lottie to share a room with Queenie and herself, and after a struggle against the notion of this fat girl's ungainly presence she keyed herself to the pitch of inviting her.

"No, no," said Lottie. "It wouldn't do for two English girls to live with an Austrian."

Sylvia could not help being relieved at her refusal; perhaps she showed it, for Lottie smiled cynically.

"I think you'll feel a little less charitable to everybody," she said, "before much longer. You've kept out of this war so far, but you won't be able to keep out of it forever. I've often noticed about English girls that they begin by thinking such a lot of themselves that they have quite a store of pity for the poor people who aren't like them; and then all of a sudden they turn round and become very unpleasant; because they discover that other people think themselves as good as they are.

Mind you, I'm not saying you'll do that, but I don't want to find myself _de trop_ after being with you a week. Let's part as friends."

Sylvia, in the flurry of arrival, did not pay much attention to Lottie's prophecies, and she was glad to be alone again with Queenie. They discovered a small hotel kept by Italians, which seemed clean and, if they obtained a reasonable salary at the Pet.i.t Maxim, not too expensive. When they had dressed themselves up to impress the manager of the cabaret and were starting out to seek an engagement, the wife of the proprietor called Sylvia aside.

"You mustn't bring gentlemen back to the hotel except in the afternoon."

"We don't want to bring anybody back at any time," said Sylvia, indignantly.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and muttered a skeptical apology.

The interview with the manager of the cabaret was rather humiliating for Sylvia, though she laughed at it when it was all over. He was quite ready to engage Queenie both to dance _en scene_ and afterward, but he declared he had nothing to offer Sylvia; she proposed to sing him one of her songs, but he scarcely listened to her, and when she had finished repeated that he had nothing to offer her. Whereupon Queenie announced that unless her sister was engaged the Pet.i.t Maxim would have to forgo her own performance. The manager argued for a time, but he was evidently much impressed by Queenie's attraction as a typical English girl, and finally, rather than lose her, he agreed to engage Sylvia as well.

"It's a pity you look so unlike an English girl," he said to Sylvia in an aggrieved voice. "The public will be disappointed. They expect an English girl to look English. You'll have to sing at the beginning of the evening, and I can't pay you more than three hundred _lei_--three hundred francs, that is."

"I was getting eight hundred in Russia," Sylvia objected.

"I dare say you were, but girls are scarcer there. We've got thousands of them in Bucharest."

Sylvia was furious at being offered so little, but Queenie promptly asked six hundred, and when the manager objected, suggested that he might engage them both for twelve hundred: it was strange to find Queenie so sharp at business. In the end Sylvia was offered three hundred and fifty _lei_ and Queenie seven hundred and fifty, which they accepted.

"You can have a band rehearsal to-morrow," he said, "and open on Monday week."

Sylvia explained about the loss of her music; and the manager began to curse, demanding how she expected an orchestra to accompany her without band parts.

"I'll accompany myself," she answered.

"Oh, well," he agreed, "being the first item on the program, it doesn't really matter what you do."

It was impossible for the moment not feel the sting of this when Sylvia remembered herself a year ago, fresh from her success at the Pierian and inclined to wonder if she were not dimming her effulgence as a moderately large star by appearing at English music-halls. Now here she was being engaged for the sake of another girl and allowed on sufferance to entertain the meager, listless audience at the beginning of a cabaret performance--for the sake of another girl who owed to her the fare to Bucharest and whom all the way in the train she had been pitying while she made plans to rescue her from a degrading existence. There was a brief moment of bitterness and jealousy; but it pa.s.sed almost at once, and she began to laugh at herself.

"There's no doubt you'll have to establish your English nationality,"

she told Queenie, as they left the manager's office. "I really believe he thought it was I who was pretending."

"It's what I was saying you," Queenie answered. "They was all thinking that I was English."

"Well, now we must decide about our relationship. Of course, you don't look the least like my sister, but I think the best way will be for you to pa.s.s as my sister. My name isn't really Sylvia Scarlett, but Sylvia Snow; so what I suggest is that you shall go on calling yourself Queenie Walters on the stage, though when we try to get your pa.s.sport you must be Queenie Snow. Trust me to get round the English authorities here, if it's necessary. We can always go back to England through Bulgaria and Greece, but we must save up enough money, and it 'll that might befall her more acutely than she would have feared for herself.

"Which must she be given first?" Sylvia asked herself. "A soul or a nationality? The ultimate reason of nationality is civilization, and the object of civilization is the progress and safety of the state. The more progressive and secure is the state the more utterly is the individual soul destroyed, because the state compels the individual to commit crimes for which as an individual he would be execrated. Hence the crime of war, to which the individual is lured by a virtue created by appealing to mankind's sense of property, a virtue called patriotism that somehow or other I'm perfectly sure must be anti-divine, though it's a virtue for which I have a great respect. _What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?_ That's surely the answer to civilization, which, after all, has no object except the physical comfort of humanity. I suppose one might call the civilization that is of the spirit and not of the flesh 'salvation.' I wonder what the Germans mean by _Kultur_--really I suppose the aggregate soul of the German people. I think _Kultur_ in their sense must be a hybrid virtue like patriotism. I think it's their own ascription of a divine origin to a civilization which has been as rapid and as poisonous and as ugly as a toadstool. We other civilized nations revile the Germans as barbarians, particularly we English, because in England, thank Heaven, we've always had an uncomfortable feeling that man is a greater thing than men, and we perceive in war a sacrifice of the individual that no state has the right to demand. I wonder why the Russians went to war. I can't understand a country that has produced Tolstoi and Dostoievski going to war. If I had not met that soldier in Kieff I might have been skeptical about Russian idealism after my adventures in Petrograd, after that filthy cinema, and the scene in the station at Ungheny; but, having met him, I know that Tolstoi and Dostoievski _are_ Russia.

"All of which has taken me a long way from Queenie, who is neither ready for civilization nor for salvation. It's a most extraordinary thing, but I've suddenly got an idea that she has never been baptized. If she has not, I shall persuade her to be baptized. Baptism--the key to salvation!

A pa.s.sport--the key to civilization! The ant.i.thesis is not so ludicrous nor so extravagant as it sounds at first. Without a pa.s.sport Queenie has no nationality and does not possess elementary civic rights. She is liable to be expelled from any country at any moment, and there is no certainty that any other country will receive her. In that case she will spend the rest of her life on earth in a kind of Limbo comparable to the Limbo which I believe is reserved for the souls of those unbaptized through no fault of their own. I shall be able to procure her a pa.s.sport and introduce her to the glories of nationality by perjuring myself, but I can't give her a soul by perjuring myself, and I've got so strongly this intuition that she was never baptized that I shall dig out a priest and talk to him about it. And yet why am I bothering whether she was baptized or not? What have I to do with churches and their ceremonies?

No doubt I was baptized, confirmed, and made my communion; yet for more than twenty years I have never entered a church except as an onlooker.

Is this anxiety about Queenie's soul only another way of expressing an anxiety about my own soul? Yes, I believe it is. I believe that by a process of sheer intellectual exhaustion I am being driven into Christianity. Oh, I wish I could talk it all out! It's a d.a.m.ned dishonest way of satisfying my own conscience, to go to a priest and ask questions about Queenie. Why can't I go and ask him straight out about myself? But she is just as important as I am. I think that was brought home to me rather well, when the manager engaged me because he wanted her. There was I in a condition of odious pride because I had been given the chance of helping her by paying the beggarly fare to Bucharest, and, boomph! as dear Gainsborough used to say, there was she given the chance of paying me back a hundredfold within twenty-four hours."

Queenie was out, and Sylvia was lying down with a headache which was not improved by the procession of these vagrant speculations round and round her brain. She got up presently to look for some aspirin, and, opening the drawer of the table between the two beds, she found a bundle of pictures--little colored lithographs of old masters. She was turning them over idly when Queenie came back.

"_Ach_, you was looking at my pictures. They are so nice, yes? See, this is the one I love the best."

It was the "Primavera," and Sylvia was astonished for a moment that Queenie's childlike and undeveloped taste should care for something so remote from the crudities that usually appealed to such a mind. Then she remembered that Botticelli as a painter must have appealed to contemporaries who by modern standards were equally childlike and undeveloped; and also that Queenie, whose nationality by the standards of civilization did not exist, had an Italian father, the inheritor perhaps of Botticelli's blood. Queenie sat on the bed and looked at her pictures with the rapt expression of a child poring over her simple treasures. From time to time she would hold one up for Sylvia's admiration.

"See how sweet," she would say, kissing the grave little Madonna or diminished landscape that was drawing her out of Bucharest into another world.