Sylvia & Michael Part 2

"_Foutez-moi le camp_," he bellowed, making a grab for his sword.

"For Heaven's sake get rid of the brute," Sylvia moaned. "I'm too weak to move."

The two young men pirouetted into the middle of the room, as they were wont to pirouette upon the stage, with arms stretched out in a curve from the shoulder and fingers raised mincingly above an imaginary teacup held between the first finger and thumb. When they reached the giant they stopped short to sustain the preliminary pose of a female acrobat; then turning round, they ran back a few steps, turned round again, and with a scream flung themselves upon their adversary; he went down with a crash, and they danced upon his prostrate form like two b.u.t.terflies over a cabbage.

The noise had wakened the other inhabitants of the _pension_, who came crowding into Sylvia's room; with the rest was Carrier and they managed to extract from her a vague account of what had happened. The aviator, in a rage, demanded an explanation of his conduct from the officer, who called him a _maquereau_. Carrier was strong; with help from the acrobats he had pushed the officer half-way through the window when Mere Gontran, who, notwithstanding her bedroom being two hundred yards away from the _pension_, had an uncanny faculty for divining when anything had gone wrong, appeared on the scene. Thirty-five years in Russia had made her very fearful of offending the military, and she implored Carrier and the acrobats to think what they were doing: in her red dressing-gown she looked like an insane cardinal.

"They'll confiscate my property. They'll send me to Siberia. Treat his Excellency more gently, I beg. Sylvia, tell them to stop. Sylvia, he's going--he's going--he's gone!"

He was gone indeed, head first into a clump of lilacs underneath the window, whither his tunic and sword followed him.

The adventure with the drunken officer had exhausted the last forces of Sylvia; she lay back on the bed in a semi-trance, soothed by the unending bibble-babble all round. She was faintly aware of somebody's taking her hand and feeling her pulse, of somebody's saying that her eyes were like a dead woman's, of somebody's throwing a coverlet over her. Then the bibble-babble became much louder; there was a sound of crackling and a smell of smoke, and she heard shouts of "Fire!" "Fire!"

"He has set fire to the outhouse!" There was a noise of splashing water, a rushing sound of water, a roar as of a thousand torrents in her head; the people in the room became animated surfaces, cardboard figures without substance and without reality; the devils began once more to sprout from the floor; she felt that she was dying, and in the throes of dissolution she struggled to explain that she must travel back to England, that she must not be buried in Russia. It seemed to her in a new access of semi-consciousness that Carrier and the two acrobats were kneeling by her bed and trying to comfort her, that they were patting her hands kindly and gently. She tried to warn them that they would blister themselves if they touched her, but her tongue seemed to have separated itself from her body. She tried to tell them that her tongue was already dead, and the effort to explain racked her whole body. Then, suddenly, dark and gigantic figures came marching into the room: they must be demons, and it was true about h.e.l.l. She tried to scream her belief in immortality and to beg a merciful G.o.d to show mercy and save her from the Fiend. The somber forms drew near her bed. From an unimaginably distant past she saw framed in fire the picture of The Impenitent Sinner's Deathbed that used to hang in the kitchen at Lille; and again from the past came suddenly back the text of a sermon preached by Dorward at Green Lanes--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow_. It seemed to her that if only she could explain to G.o.d that her name was really Snow and that Scarlett was only the name a.s.sumed for her by her father, all might even now be well. The somber forms had seized her, and she beat against them with unavailing hands; they s.n.a.t.c.hed her from the bed and wrapped her round and round with something that stifled her cries; with her last breath she tried to shriek a warning to Carrier of the existence of h.e.l.l, to beg him to put away his little red devils lest he, when he should ultimately fall from the sky, should fall as deep as h.e.l.l.

Sylvia came out of her delirium to find herself in the ward of a hospital kept by French nuns; she asked what had been the matter with her, and, smiling compa.s.sionately, they said it was a bad fever. She lay for a fortnight in a state of utter la.s.situde, watching the nuns going about their work as she would have watched birds in the cool deeps of a forest. The la.s.situde was not unpleasant; it was a fatigue so intense that her spirit seemed able to leave her tired body and float about among the shadows of this long room. She knew that there were other patients in the ward, but she had no inclination to know who they were or what they looked like; she had no desire to communicate with the outside world, nor any anxiety about the future. She could not imagine that she should ever wish to do anything except lie here watching the nuns at their work like birds in the cool deeps of a forest. When the doctor visited her and spoke cheerfully, she wondered vaguely how he managed to keep his very long black beard so frizzy, but she was not sufficiently interested to ask him. To his questions about her bodily welfare she let her tired body answer automatically, and often, when the doctor was bending over to listen to her heart or lungs, her spirit would have mounted up to float upon the shadows of sunlight rippling over the ceiling, that he and her body might commune without disturbing herself. At last there came a morning when the body grew impatient at being left behind and when it trembled with a faint desire to follow the spirit. Sylvia raised herself up on her elbow and asked a nun to bring her a looking-gla.s.s.

"But all my hair has been cut!" she exclaimed. She looked at her eyes: there was not much life in them, yet they were larger than she had ever seen them, and she liked them better than before, because they were now very kind eyes: this new Sylvia appealed to her.

She put the gla.s.s down and asked if she had been very ill.

"Very ill indeed," said the nun.

Sylvia longed to tell the nun that she must not believe all she had said when she was delirious: and then she wondered what she had said.

"Was I very violent in my delirium?" she asked.

The nun smiled.

"I thought I was in h.e.l.l," said Sylvia, seriously. "When are my friends coming to see me?"

The nun looked grave.

"Your friends have all gone away," she said at last. "They used to come every day to inquire after you, but they went away when war was declared."

"War?" Sylvia repeated. "Did you say war?"

The nun nodded.

"War?" she went on. "This isn't part of my delirium? You're not teasing me? War between whom?"

"Russia, France, and England are at war with Germany and Austria."

"Then Carrier has left Petersburg?"

"Hush," said the nun. "It's no longer Petersburg. It's Petrograd now."

"But I don't understand. Do you mean to tell me that everybody has changed his name? I've changed my name back to my real name. My name is Sylvia Snow now. I changed it when I was delirious, but I shall always be Sylvia Snow. I've been thinking about it all these days while I've been lying so quiet. Did Carrier leave any message for me? He was the aviator, you know."

"He has gone back to fight for France," the nun said, crossing herself.

"He was very sorry about your being so ill. You must pray for him."

"Yes, I will pray for him," Sylvia said. "And there is n.o.body left?

Those two funny little English acrobats with fair curly hair. Have they gone?"

"They've gone, too," said the nun. "They came every day to inquire for you, and they brought you flowers, which were put beside your bed, but you were unconscious."

"I think I smelled a sweetness in the air sometimes," Sylvia said.

"They were always put outside the window at night," the nun explained.

The faintest flicker of an inclination to be amused at the nun's point of view about flowers came over Sylvia; but it scarcely endured for an instant, because it was so obviously the right point of view in this hospital, where even flowers, not to seem out of place, must acquire orderly habits. The nun asked her if she wanted anything and pa.s.sed on down the ward when she shook her head.

Sylvia lay back to consider her situation and to pick up the threads of normal existence, which seemed so inextricably tangled at present that she felt like a princess in a fairy tale who had been set an impossible task by an envious witch.

In the first place, putting on one side all the extravagance of delirium, Sylvia was conscious of a change in her personality so profound and so violent, that now with the return of reason and with the impulse to renewed activity, she was convinced of her rightness in deciding to go back to her real name of Sylvia Snow. The anxiety that she had experienced during her delirium to make the change positively remained from that condition as something of value that bore no relation to the grosser terrors of h.e.l.l she had experienced. The sense of regeneration that she was feeling at this moment could not entirely be explained by her mind's reaction to the peace of the hospital, in the absence of pain, and to her bodily well-being. She was able to set in its proportion each of these factors, and when she had done so there still remained this emotion that was indefinable unless she accepted for it the definition of regeneration.

"The fact is I've eaten rose leaves and I'm no longer a golden a.s.s," she murmured. "But what I want to arrive at is when exactly I was turned into an a.s.s and when I ate the rose leaves."

For a time her mind, unused since her fever to concentrated thinking, wandered off into the tale of Apuleius. She wished vaguely that she had the volume so inscribed by Michael Fane with her in Petersburg, but she had left it behind at Mulberry Cottage. It was some time before she brought herself back to the realization that the details of the Roman story had not the least bearing upon her meditation, and that the symbolism of the enchanted transformation and the recovery of human shape by eating rose leaves had been an essentially modern and romantic gloss upon the old author. This gloss, however, had served extraordinarily well to symbolize her state of mind before she had been ill, and she was not going to abandon it now.

"I must have had an experience once that fitted in with the idea, or it would not recur to me like this with such an imputation of significance."

Sylvia thought hard for a while; the nun on day duty was pecking away at a medicine-bottle, and the busy little noise competed with her thoughts, so that she was determined before the nun could achieve her purpose with the medicine-bottle to discover when she became a golden a.s.s. Suddenly the answer flashed across her mind; at the same moment the nun triumphed over her bottle and the ward was absolutely still again.

"I became a golden a.s.s when I married Philip and I ate the rose leaves when Arthur refused to marry me."

This solution of the problem, though she knew that it was not radically more satisfying than the defeat of a toy puzzle, was nevertheless wonderfully comforting, so comforting that she fell asleep and woke up late in the afternoon, refreshingly alert and eager to resume her unraveling of the tangled skein.

"I became a golden a.s.s when I married Philip," she repeated to herself.

For a while she tried to reconstruct the motives that fourteen years ago had induced her toward that step. If she had really begun her life all over again, it should be easy to do this. But the more she pondered herself at the age of seventeen the more impossibly remote that Sylvia seemed. Certain results, however, could even at this distance of time be ascribed to that unfortunate marriage: among others the three months after she left Philip. When Sylvia came to survey all her life since, she saw how those three months had lurked at the back of everything, how really they had spoiled everything.

"Have I fallen a prey to remorse?" she asked herself. "Must I forever be haunted by the memory of what was, after all, a necessary incident to my a.s.sumption of a.s.sishness? Did I not pay for them that day at Mulberry Cottage when I could not be myself to Michael, but could only bray at him the unrealities of my outward shape?"

Lying here in the cool hospital, Sylvia began to conjure against her will the incidents of those three fatal months, and so weak was she still from the typhus that she could not shake off their obsession. Her mind clutched at other memories; but no sooner did she think that she was safely wrapped up in their protecting fragrance than like Furies those three months drove her mind forth from its sanctuary and scourged it with cruel images.

"This is the sort of madness that makes a woman kill her seducer," said Sylvia, "this insurgent rage at feeling that the men who crossed my path during those three months still live without remorse for what they did."

Gradually, however, her rage died down before the pleadings of reasonableness; she recalled that somewhere she had read how the human body changes entirely every seven years: this reflection consoled her, and though she admitted that it was a trivial and superficial consolation, since remorse was conceived with the spirit rather than with the body, nevertheless the thought that not one corpuscle of her present blood existed fourteen years ago restored her sense of proportion and enabled her to shake off the obsession of those three months, at any rate so far as to allow her to proceed with her contemplation of the new Sylvia lying here in this hospital.

"Then of course there was Lily," she said to herself. "How can I possibly excuse my treatment of Lily, or not so much my treatment of her as my att.i.tude toward her? I suppose all this introspection is morbid, but having been brought up sharp like this and having been planked down on this bed of interminable sickness, who wouldn't be morbid? It's better to have it out with myself now, lest when I emerge from here--for incredible as it seems just at present I certainly shall emerge one fine morning--I start being introspective instead of getting down to the hard facts of earning a living and finding my way back to England. Lily!" she went on. "I believe really when I look back at it that I took a cruel delight in watching Lily's fading. It seemed jolly and cynical to predestine her to maculation, to regard her as a flower, an almost inanimate thing that could only be displayed by somebody else and was incapable of developing herself. Yet in the end she did develop herself.

I was very ill then; but when I was in the clinic at Rio I had none of the sensations that I have now. What sensations did I have, then?

Mostly, I believe, they were worries about Lily because she did not come to see me. Strange that something so essentially insignificant as Lily could have created such a catastrophe for Michael, and that I, when she went her own way, let her drop as easily as a piece of paper from a carriage. The fact was that, having smirched myself and survived the smirching, I was unable to fret myself very much over Lily's smirching.

And yet I did fret myself in a queer, irrational way. But what use to continue? I behaved badly to Lily, and I can't excuse my att.i.tude toward her by saying that I behaved badly to myself also."

The longer Sylvia went on with the reconstruction of the past the more deeply did she feel that she was to blame for everything in it.

"I'm so sorry, Sister; I was talking to myself. I think I must really be very much better to-day."