Sylvia & Michael Part 19

Poor Philip! He had spoken of his own sufferings in a minor degree from the war. Yet to be rooted up at his age--he was nearly fifty, after all--and to be set down in Rumania to dig for human motives, he who had no instinct to dig for anything but dry bones and ancient pottery, it was surely for him suffering in a major degree. He had been so pathetically proud of being a captain, and at the same time so obviously conscious of the radical absurdity of himself in such a position; it was like a prematurely old child playing with soldiers to gratify his parents. And here in a neutral country he was even debarred from dressing up in uniform. When she first saw him she had been surprised to find that he did not appear much older than thirteen years ago; now, looking back at him in his office, he seemed to her a very old man. Poor Philip, he did not belong to the type that is rejuvenated in war-time by a sense of his official importance. Sylvia had seen ill.u.s.trations in English newspapers of beaming old gentlemen "doing," as it was called, "their bit," proud of the nuisance they must be making of themselves, incorrigible optimists about the tonic effects of war because they had succeeded in making their belts meet round their fat paunches, pantaloons that should have buried themselves out of sight instead of pirouetting while young men were being killed in a war for which they and their accursed Victorianism were responsible by licking the boots of Prussia for fifty years.

Sylvia found Queenie in a state of agitation at her long absence; she did not tell her anything about Zozo at once, in the hope that he would not come to the Trianon on the first night of his arrival. She did think it advisable, however, to tell Queenie of her failure to secure the pa.s.sport.

"Then we can't be going to England?" Queenie asked.

"Well, not directly from here," Sylvia answered. "But we'll move on as soon as we can into Bulgaria. We can get down to the Piraeus from Dedeagatch. I don't think these neutral countries are very strict about pa.s.sports. We'll manage somehow to get away from here."

"But if we cannot be going to England why must we be going from Bucharest? Better to stay, I think. Yes?"

"We might want to go," Sylvia said. "We might get tired of the Trianon.

It wouldn't be difficult."

"I shall never be going to England now," said Queenie, in a toneless voice. "Never shall I be going! I shall learn a new song and a new dance, yes?"

Sylvia felt tired after her long afternoon and thought she would rest for an hour before getting ready for the evening's work. The mist gathered again at sunset, and the gardens of the theater, though they were unusually full, lacked any kind of gaiety. When they were walking down the narrow laurel-bordered path that screened the actors from the people sitting at their tables under the trees, Sylvia was sure that Zozo would be standing by the stage door at the end of it; but he was nowhere to be seen. After the performance, however, when they came out, as the custom was, to take their seats in the audience, the juggler made a dramatic appearance from behind a tree; Queenie seemed to lose all her fairy charm and become a terrified little animal.

"I don't think there's room at our table for you," Sylvia said.

"There are plenty of chairs," Maud insisted, stridently; she had followed the juggler into the lamplight round the table.

"I'm quite sure there's no room for you," said Sylvia, sharply; and, taking advantage of Queenie's complete limpness, she dragged her away by the wrist and explained quickly to the manager, who was walking up and down by the entrance gate, that Queenie was ill and must go home at once.

"Ill!" he exclaimed, skeptically. "Well, I shall have to fine you both your evening's salary. Why, it's only half past eleven!"

Sylvia did not wait to argue with him, but hurried Queenie to a carriage, in which they drove back immediately to their hotel.

"I said to you that it was going to bring me bad luck when you said to that priest my real name. _Ach!_ what shall I be doing? What shall I be doing now?" Queenie wailed.

"You must pay no attention to him," Sylvia told her; but she found that Queenie did not recover herself as she usually did at the tone of command. "What can he do to you while you're with me?" she continued.

"You don't know him," Queenie moaned. "He's very strong. Look at the mark on my leg where he was shooting me. _Ach_, if we could be going to England, but we cannot. We are here and he is here. You are not strong like he was, Sylvia."

"If you're going to give way like this before he has touched you and frighten yourself to death in advance, of course he'll do what he likes, because I can do nothing without support from you. But if you'll try to be a little bit brave and remember that I can protect you, everything will be all right and we'll get away from Rumania at the first opportunity."

"_Ach_, you have papers. You are English. n.o.body will protect me. Any one was being able to do what they was liking to do with me."

Sylvia tried to argue courage into her until early morning; but Queenie adopted an att.i.tude of despair, and it was impossible to convince her that Zozo could not at whatever moment he chose take her away, and, if he wished, murder her without any one's interfering or being able to interfere. In the end Sylvia fell asleep exhausted, resolving that if Queenie was not in a more courageous frame of mind next day she should not move from the hotel. When Sylvia woke up she found that Queenie was already dressed to go out, and for an instant she feared that the juggler's power over her was strong enough to will her to go back to him by the mere sense of his being near at hand. She asked her almost angrily why she had dressed herself so quietly and where she was going.

"To the hairdresser's," Queenie answered, in a normal voice.

Sylvia was puzzled what to do. She did not like to put the idea into Queenie's head of the juggler's being able to mesmerize her into following him apparently of her own accord, and if she really intended to go to the hairdresser's, it might imply that the terror of the night before had burned itself out. Certainly she did not seem very nervous this morning. It was taking a risk, but probably the only way out of the situation was by taking risks, and in the end she decided not to oppose her going out by herself.

Two hours pa.s.sed; when Queenie had not returned to the hotel Sylvia went out and made inquiries at the hairdresser's. Yes, she had been there earlier that morning and had bought several bottles of scent. Sylvia made a gesture of disapproval; scent was an extravagance of Queenie's, and she was strictly rationed in this regard on account of the urgency of saving all the money they could for their journey. She returned to the hotel; Queenie was still absent, and she opened her bag to look for the address of a girl whom Queenie occasionally visited; she found the card, but the thousand-franc note that she was guarding for her had vanished. Queenie must have joined that infernal Swiss, after all, and the old instinct of propitiating him with money had been too strong for her.

"Fool that I was to let her go this morning," Sylvia cried. As she spoke, Queenie came in, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her arms full of packages.

"Where have you been and what have you been doing?" she demanded.

"Oh, you must pardon me for taking the money from your bag," Queenie cried. "I was taking it to buy presents for all the girls."

"Presents for the girls?" Sylvia echoed, in amazement.

"Yes, yes, it was the only way to make them on my side against him.

To-night in the dressing-room I shall give these beautiful presents. I was spending all of my thousand francs. It was no use any longer, because we cannot be going to England. Better that I was buying these presents to make all the girls be on my side."

Sylvia was between laughter and tears, but she could not bring herself to be angry with the child; at least her action showed that she was taking her own part against the juggler. Queenie spent the rest of the day quite happily, arranging how the presents were to be allotted. Those that were small enough she put into chocolate-boxes that she had bought for this purpose; the larger ones were tied up with additional pink and blue silk ribbons to compensate for the lack of a box. To each present--there were fifteen of them--a picture post-card was tied, on which Sylvia had to write the name of the girl for whom it was intended _with heaps of love and kisses from Queenie_; it was like a child preparing for her Christmas party.

They went down to the Trianon earlier than usual in order that Queenie might get ready in time to sit at the entrance of the dressing-room and hand each girl her present as she came in. Sylvia tried to look as cheerful as possible under the ordeal, for she did not want to confirm the tale that she was living on Queenie's earnings by seeming to grudge her display of generosity. The girls were naturally eager to know the reason of the unexpected entertainment. When Queenie took each of them aside in turn and whispered a long confidence in her ear, Sylvia supposed that she was explaining about the advent of Zozo; but it turned out Queenie was explaining that, having no longer any need for the money since she could not get a pa.s.sport for England, she was doing now what she had wanted to do before, but had been unable to do on account of saving up for the journey. Sylvia remonstrated with her for this indiscretion, and she said:

"I think it was you that was being silly, not me, yes? If I say to these girls, 'Here is a silver brush, help me against Zozo,' they was thinking that I was buying them to help me. But when he tries to take me, I shall call out to them and they will be loving me for these presents and will be fighting against him, I think, yes?"

Sylvia had her doubts, but she had not the heart to discourage such trust in the grateful appreciation of her companions.

Neither Zozo nor Maud came to the Trianon that evening; nevertheless, outside on the playbill was an announcement that next Sunday would appear Zozo: LE MEILLEUR PRESTIDIGITATEUR DU MONDE.

"It was always so that he was writing himself," said Queenie, when Sylvia read her the announcement; she spoke in a voice of awe as if the playbill had been inscribed by a warning fate. In due course the juggler made a successful first appearance, dressed in green, with a snake of shimmering tinsel wound round him. They watched the performance from the wings; when he came off he asked Queenie with a laugh if she would stand for his dagger act, as in the old days she had stood.

"You've got Maud for that," Sylvia interposed quickly.

"Maud!" he scoffed.

Earlier in the evening she had thundered about the stage in what was described as the world-famous step-dance of the world-famous American cowgirl Maud Moffat, to the authentic and original native melody, which happened this year to be "On the Mississippi," and might just as easily have been "A Life on the Ocean Wave."

Sylvia was puzzled by the relationship between Zozo and Maud, for there was evidently nothing even in the nature of affection between them, and as far as she could make out they had never met until the day he paid her fare from Galantza to Bucharest. Her first idea had been that he was a German agent and intended to use Maud in that capacity, her patriotism, judging by her loud denunciations of England and everything English, not being very deep. But Sylvia had already outlived the habit of explaining as a spy every one in war-time that is not immediately and blatantly obvious. She could imagine n.o.body less fitted to be a spy than Maud, who was attractive neither to her compatriots nor to foreigners, and who, even had she possessed attraction, would have had no brains to take advantage of it. Yet she came back to the theory that Zozo was a German agent when she saw with whom he consorted in Bucharest, and she decided that when he had brought Maud here he had done so in the hope of having found a useful recruit, but that on discovering her dull coa.r.s.eness he had come to the conclusion that her hostility to England was counterbalanced by England's hostility to her. Sylvia decided that if her surmises were at all near to being correct she must be particularly on her guard against any attempt on the part of the Swiss to corrupt Queenie. She had supposed at first that she should only have to contend with his l.u.s.t or with his desire of personal domination; now it seemed that the argument she had used with Philip to procure Queenie a pa.s.sport had really been a sound argument. Superficially Queenie might not strike anybody as a valuable agent; knowing her charm for men, her complete malleableness, and her almost painful simplicity, Sylvia could imagine that she might be a practical weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer like the Swiss, who was finding, like so many other rascals of his type, that in war natural dishonesty is a lucrative a.s.set. She wondered to what extent her ideas about his intentions were based upon his behavior at Granada, and whether, after all, she was not attributing to him all sorts of schemes of which he was entirely innocent. Really he had always been for her a symbol of evil that she was inclined to turn into a crude personification. It was strange the way that one was apt, in changing one's mode of life, to abandon simultaneously the experience one had gathered formerly. Most probably she was giving this juggler with an absurd name an importance quite beyond his power, simply because she herself was giving her present surroundings a permanence far more durable and extensive than they actually possessed. After all, could one but realize it, the way from the Pet.i.t Trianon to Mulberry Cottage did exist as a material fact: there was no impa.s.sable gulf of s.p.a.ce or time between them.

After Zozo had been juggling for about a fortnight in Bucharest without having given the least sign of wanting to interfere with Queenie, Sylvia began to think that she had worked herself up for nothing, though the problem of his relationship to Maud, with whom he remained on terms of contemptuous intimacy, still puzzled her. She thought of making a report on the queer a.s.sociation to Philip, but she was afraid he might think it was an excuse to meet him again; and since Philip himself had made no effort to follow up their interview, she gave up speculating upon Zozo and Maud and took to speculating instead upon Philip's want of curiosity, as she called it. Unreasonable as she admitted to herself that the emotion was, she could not help being piqued by his indifference, and she resented now the compa.s.sion she had felt for him when she left the office that afternoon. She could not understand any man, however badly a woman had treated him--and she had not treated Philip badly--being able to contemplate so calmly that woman's existence as a cabaret singer without wanting to know what had brought her to it so short a time after her success. No, certainly she should not trouble Philip with her suspicions of Zozo and Maud; it was inviting a rebuff.

Just when Sylvia was beginning to feel rea.s.sured about Queenie and not to worry about anything except the waste of that thousand francs and the continuous difficulties in the way of saving any money, the girls at the Trianon began to whisper among themselves. Queenie's presents had given her a brief popularity that began to fade when it was evident that no more presents were coming; her attempt to secure the friendship of her companions, inasmuch as it seemed a token of weakness, reacted against her and made her in the end less popular than before. The story about the refusal of a pa.s.sport by the British authorities was soon magnified into a demand for her expulsion from Rumania as a German agent masquerading as an English girl. Hence the whispers. The French girls were naturally the most venomous; but the Austrian girls were nearly as bad, because, having lived for months under the perpetual taunt of being spies, they were anxious to re-establish their own virtue at Queenie's expense. Zozo commiserated with her on the unfairness of the whispers, and one evening, to Sylvia's dismay, Queenie told her that he had offered to secure her a pa.s.sport and take her with him when he left Bucharest.

"He was really being very nice to me," Queenie said. "Oh, Sylvia, what shall I do? I cannot be staying here with these girls who are so unkind to me."

The following evening Sylvia asked Zozo straight out about the kind of pa.s.sport he proposed to find for Queenie and where he proposed to take her.

The juggler sneered.

"That's my business, I think. What can you do for her? If the kid's anything, she's German. What the h.e.l.l's the good of you trying to make her English? Why don't you let her alone instead of stopping her from earning good money?"

Sylvia kept her temper with a great effort and contented herself with denying that Queenie was German and with asking who had first made the a.s.sertion. The juggler spat on the floor and walked away without replying.

After the performance that night, a hot, thunderous night in August, Zozo, with Maud and two well-known pro-German natives, took the next table to Sylvia and Queenie. Maud was drinking heavily and presently she began to talk in a loud voice:

"Well, I may have spoken against England once or twice, but, thank Gawd, I'm not a b.l.o.o.d.y little yellow-haired German pretending to be English. I never went and tried to pa.s.s off a dirty little German as my sister the same as what some people who's proud of being English does. Yes, I earn my living honestly. I've never heard any one call me a spy, and any---- as did wouldn't do it twice. My name's Maud Moffat, born and bred a c.o.c.kney, and proud I am when I see some people who think theirselves superior and all the time is dirty German spies betraying their country.

Does any one presume to say I'm not English?" she shouted, rising unsteadily to her feet. "And if he does, where is he so as I can show him he's a b.l.o.o.d.y liar by breaking his head open?"

Her companions made a pretense of restraining her, but it was plain that they were enjoying the scene, and Maud continued to hold forth.

"German! And calls herself English. Goes round giving presents to honest working-girls so as she can carry on her dirty work of spying. Goes round trying to get a girl's boy away from her by low, dirty, mean tricks as she's learnt from the b.l.o.o.d.y Germans who she belongs to. Yes, it's you I'm talking to," she shrieked at Queenie.

White as paper, she sprang up from her seat and began to answer Maud, notwithstanding Sylvia's efforts to silence her.