Sylvia & Michael Part 21

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sport."

"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 b.u.t.terfly 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 Ja.s.sy 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 _exaltee_ 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 a.s.sumption 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 Varietes 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 cafes, occupied one side of it, a row of respectable shops another, a large munic.i.p.al 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 cafes 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumed 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 doree_ 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 b.u.t.terfly, 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 cafes, 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 trans.m.u.tation of that insignificant object to something of immense value arrived a corresponding change in Sylvia's att.i.tude 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 d.a.m.ned 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, a.s.sured her that he had refused the room twice to important clients who had wanted it for next week, and altogether showed by his att.i.tude 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed:

"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?"