Sylvia & Michael Part 15

"I never supposed she was," Philidor answered. "She's not English, either, is she?"

Sylvia looked at him sharply.

"Have you heard any one else say that?" she asked.

"n.o.body else here knows English as well as I do."

The dance stopped, and Queenie, leaving her partner, came up to their table with a smile.

"You're happy, anyway," said Philidor.

"Oh yes. I'm so happy. She is so sweet to me," Queenie cried, embracing Sylvia impulsively.

A French girl sitting at the next table laughed and murmured an epithet in argot. Sylvia's cheeks flamed; she was about to spring up and make a quarrel, but Philidor restrained her.

"Do you wonder that I protest against your exposing yourself to that sort of thing?" he said. "What are you going to do? It wouldn't be quite you, would it, to hit her over the head with a champagne-bottle? Let the vile tongue say what it pleases."

"Yes, but it's so outrageous, it's so--ah, I've no words for the beastliness of people," Sylvia exclaimed.

"May I dance this dance?" Queenie interrupted, timidly.

"Good heavens! Why do you ask me, girl? What has it to do with me? Dance with the devil if you like."

Queenie looked bewildered by Sylvia's emphasis and went off again in silence.

"And now you see the only person that's really hurt is your little friend," Philidor observed. "You're much too sure of yourself to care about a sneer like that, and she didn't hear what the woman called you, or perhaps understand it if she heard."

Sylvia was silent; she was thinking of once long ago when Lily had asked her if she could dance with Michael; now she blushed after nine years lest he might have thought for a moment what that woman had said.

"You're quite right," she agreed with Philidor. "This is a d.a.m.nable life. Would you like to hear Queenie's story?"

"There's no need for you to defend yourself to me," he laughed.

"Ah, don't laugh about it. You mustn't laugh about certain things.

You'll make me think less of you."

"I was only being _gauche_," he apologized. "Yes, tell me her story."

So Sylvia told him the sad history, and when she had finished asked his advice about Queenie.

"You were talking just now about your country as if she were a child,"

she said, eagerly. "You were imagining her individuality and independence destroyed. I feel the same about this girl. I want to make her really English. Do you think that I shall be able to get her a pa.s.sport? We're saving up our money now to go to England."

Philidor said he did not know much about English regulations, but that he could not imagine that any consul would refuse to help when he heard the story.

"And the sooner you leave Rumania the better. Look here. I'll lend you the money to get home."

Sylvia shook her head.

"No, because that would interfere with my part of the story. I've got to get back without help. I have a strong belief that if I accept help I shall miss my destiny. It's no good trying to argue me out of a superst.i.tion, for I've tried to argue myself out of it a dozen times and failed. No, if you want to help me, come and talk to me every night and open a bottle or two of champagne to keep the manager in a good temper; and stand by me if there's ever a row. I won't answer for myself if I'm alone and I hear things said like what was said to-night."

Philidor promised he would do that for her as long as he was quartered in Bucharest, and presently Queenie came back.

"Don't look so frightened. I'm sorry I was cross to you just now."

"You were being so savage," said Queenie, with wide-open, wondering eyes. "What was happening?"

"Something stung me."

"Where?"

"Over the heart," Sylvia answered.

When they were back in their room Queenie returned to the subject of Sylvia's ill-temper.

"I could not be thinking it was you," she murmured. "I could not be thinking it."

"It was something that pa.s.sed as quickly as it came," Sylvia said.

"Forget about it, child."

"Were you angry because I was being too much with that boy? If you like, I shall say to him to-morrow that I cannot dance with him longer."

"Please, Queenie, forget about it. Somebody said something that made me angry, and I vented my anger on you. It was of no importance."

Queenie looked only half convinced, and when she was in bed she turned for consolation to the little chromolithographs that were always at hand. She had the custom of wearing a lace nightcap, and, sitting up thus in bed while her rapt gaze sought in those fairy landscapes the reflection of her own visions, she was remote and impersonal as a painted figure in some adoring angelic company. Sylvia felt that the moment was come to raise the question of the spiritual mood with which Queenie's outward appearance seemed in harmony, and that it was her duty to suggest a way of positively capturing and forever enshrining the half-revealed wonders of which these pictures spoke to her. Sylvia fancied that Queenie's development had now only reached as far as her own at about fifteen, and, looking back to herself at that age, she thought how much it might have meant to her if somebody could have given expression to her capacity for wonder then. Moreover, it was improbable that Queenie would grow much older mentally, and it was impossible for Queenie to reach her own present point of view by her own long process of rejecting every other point of view in turn. Queenie would never reject anything of her own accord, and it seemed urgent to fortify her with the simple and in some eyes childish externals of religion, which precisely, on account of such souls, have managed to endure.

"The great argument in favor of the Church seems to me," Sylvia thought, "that it measures humanity by the weakest and not by the strongest link, which of course means that it never overestimates its power and survives a.s.saults that shatter more ambitious and progressive organizations of human belief. Well, Queenie is a weak enough link, and I sha'n't feel happy until I have secured her incorporation first into the Church, and, secondly--I suppose into the state. Yet why should I want to give her nationality? What is the aim of a state? Material comfort, really--nothing else. I'm tempted to give her to the Church, but deny her to the state. Alas! it's a material world, and it's not going to be spiritualized by me. The devil was sick, etc. No doubt at present everything promises well for a spiritual revival after this orgy of insane destructiveness. But history with its mania for repet.i.tion isn't encouraging about the results of war. As a matter of fact, I've got no right to talk about the war at present. I choked and spluttered for a while in some of its vile back-wash, and Bucharest hasn't managed to get the taste out of my mouth. Queenie," she said, aloud, "you know that during these last weeks I've been going to church regularly?"

Queenie extricated herself from whatever path she was following in her pictures and looked at Sylvia with blue eyes that were intensely willing to believe anything her friend told her.

"I knew you were always going out," she said. "But I thought it was to see a boy."

"Great heavens! child, do you seriously think that I should so much object to men's getting hold of you if I were doing the same thing myself in secret? Haven't you yet realized that I can't do things in secret?"

"Don't be cross with me again. I think you are cross, yes?"

Sylvia shook her head. "What I want to know is: did you ever go to church in your life, and if you did do you ever think about wanting to go again?"

"I was going to church with my mother when I was four; my stepmother was never going to church, and so I was never going myself until two years ago at Christmas. There was a girl who asked me to go with her, and it was so sweet. We looked at all the dolls, and there was a cow, but some woman said, quite loudly: 'Well, if this is the sort of women we was meeting on Christmas night, I'm glad Christmas only comes once in the year.' My friend with me was very _maquillee_. Too much paint she was having, really, and she said to this woman such rude things, and a man came and was asking us to move along farther. And then outside my friend sat down on the steps and cried and cried. _Ach_, it was dreadful! She was making a scene. So I was not going more to church, because I was always remembering this and being unhappy."

On the next day Sylvia took Queenie to the mission church and introduced her to the priest; afterward they often went to Ma.s.s together. It was like taking a child; Queenie asked the reason of every ceremony, and Sylvia, who had never bothered her head with ceremonies, began to wish she had never exposed herself to so many unanswerable questions. It seemed to her that she had given Queenie nothing except another shadowy land in which her vague mind would wander without direction; but the priest was more hopeful, and undertook to give her instruction so that she might be confirmed presently. When the question was gone into, there was no doubt that she had been baptized, for by some freak of memory she was able to show that she understood the reason of her being called Concetta from being born on the 8th of December. However, the revelation of her true name to the priest gave Queenie a horror of his company, and nothing would induce her to go near him again, or even to enter the church.

"This was going to bring me bad luck," she told Sylvia. "That name! that name! How was you so unkind to tell him that name?"

Sylvia was distressed by the thought of the fear she had roused and explained the circ.u.mstances to the priest, who, rather to her irritation, seemed inclined to resort placidly to prayer.

"But I can only pray when I am in the mood to pray," she protested; and though she was aware of the weakness of such a habit of mind, she was anxious to shake the priest out of what she considered his undue resignation to her failure with Queenie.