Sylvia & Michael Part 22

Sylvia could have screamed aloud her rejection of such a course.

"What, after keeping you away from men for six months, to let you go back to them on account of my carelessness? Child, you must be mad to think of it."

"Yes, but I have been thinking, Sylvia. I have been thinking very much.

When I was going to be English and you were saying to me that I should have a pa.s.sport and be going to England and be English myself, it was good for me to care nothing at all for men; but now what does it matter?

I am nothing. I am just being somebody lost, and if I am going with men or not going with men I am still nothing. Why to be worried for money? I shall show you how easy it is for me to have money. It is true what I am speaking. You could be having no idea how much money I can have. And if I am nothing, always nothing, why must I be worrying any more about money? You are so sweet to me, Sylvia, so kind. No one was ever being so kind to me before. So I must be kind to you now. Yes, I think? Are you crying about that money? I think you are stupid to cry for such a little thing as money."

"There are things, my rose, that must not, that shall not happen,"

Sylvia cried, clasping the child in her arms. "And that you should ever again sell yourself to a man is one of them."

"But I am nothing."

"Ah," thought Sylvia, "here is the moment when I should be able to say that every one to G.o.d is everything; but if I say it she will not understand. What hope is there for this child?" Then aloud she added, "Are you nothing to me?"

"No, to you I am something, and if my brother was here I would be something to him."

"Very well, then, you must not think of selling yourself. I lost the money. I shall find a way of getting more money. I have a friend in Bucharest. I will telegraph to him to-morrow and he will send us money."

And to herself she thought: "This is indeed the ultimate irony, that I should ask a favor of Philip. Yet perhaps I am glad, for if I did him the least injury years ago, no priest could have imagined a more appropriate penance. Yes, perhaps I deserve this."

The next morning, when Sylvia ordered coffee, the waiter presented the bill for it at the same time, and when she tore it up he seemed inclined to take away the coffee; he retreated finally with a threat that in future nothing should be served to them that was not paid for in advance.

"They are being nasty with us," Queenie solemnly enunciated.

"Never mind. We shall have some money to-night, or at any rate to-morrow morning. We must put up with fasting to-day. It's Friday, appropriately enough. Good heavens!" Sylvia exclaimed. "I haven't even got the money to send a telegram. We must raise a few francs. Perhaps I could borrow some money with a trinket. Good gracious! I never realized until this moment that I haven't a single piece of jewelry! It takes the sudden affliction of extreme poverty to discover one's abnormality and to prove how essential it is not to be different from everybody else. Come, Queenie, you must lend me your two brooches."

Sylvia took the daisy of brilliants set round a topaz, and the swallow of sapphires--all that Queenie had kept after her disastrous expulsion from Russia--and visited the chief local jeweler, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to buy them.

"But at least you can lend me twenty francs upon them until to-morrow,"

Sylvia urged.

He shrugged his shoulders again and bent over to pick at the inside of a watch with that maddening indifference of the unwilling purchaser.

Sylvia could not bring herself to believe in his refusal and suggested a loan of fifteen francs. Nothing answered her except the ticking of a dozen clocks and the sc.r.a.ping of a small file. There was a smell of drought in the shop that seemed to symbolize the personality of its owner.

"Ten francs?" Sylvia begged.

The jeweler looked up slowly from his work and regarded her with a fishy eye, the fishiness of which was many times magnified by the gla.s.s that occupied it. He raised his chin in a cold negative and bent over his work more intently. Every clock in the shop told a different time and ticked away more loudly than ever. Sylvia gathered up the trinkets and went away. She tried two other jewelers without success, and she even proposed the loan to a chemist who had a pleasant exterior; finally she had to go back to the hotel without obtaining the money. The day dragged itself along; not even _War and Peace_ could outlast it, and Sylvia wondered why she had never grasped before how much of life radiated from lunch, the absence of which dislocated time itself. Toward six o'clock she came to a sudden resolution, and, going out into the square, she began to sing outside the cafe. Four lean dogs came and barked; a waiter told her that the singing was not required. Somebody threw a stone at one of the dogs and cut open its leg; whereupon the other three set upon it, until it broke away and fled howling across the square, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. The drinkers outside the cafe looked at Sylvia over the tops of their newspapers, until she went back to the hotel. Such a retirement would ordinarily have made her hot with shame; but she was already hardened by the first pangs of hunger and had only a savage contempt for the people who had thought to humiliate her; she had not been hungry long enough to feel the pathos of a broken spirit; after all, she had only missed her lunch.

Dinner consisted of two stale chocolate creams that were found in a pocket of one of Queenie's jackets; even the bits of silver paper adhering to them seemed to possess a nutritive value.

"But we cannot be going on like this," Queenie protested.

"There must be some way of raising money enough to get to Bucharest,"

Sylvia insisted. "There must be. There must be. If we really starve, the police will send us there to avoid a death in this cursed hole of a town."

"We must ask that gentleman to tea with us to-morrow," Queenie declared, as she put out the light.

Want of food prevented Sylvia from sleeping, and in her overwrought spirit those good-night words of Queenie seemed to presage the collapse of everything.

"It shall not be. It shall not be," she vowed to herself. "I will not be defeated by squalid circ.u.mstances in this dreary little Rumanian town.

If thirteen years ago I could sell my body to save my soul, now I can sell my body to save the soul of another. Surely that sacrifice will defeat futility. I had a presentiment of this situation when I was arguing with Philip that afternoon. I warned him that nothing should stand in my way over this girl. And nothing shall! To-morrow I will invite this youth who is the son of the richest man in Avereshti. He will not refuse me twenty francs for my body. If I cannot do this I am worth no more than those trinkets that the jeweler refused to buy for ten francs. I will do this, and accept its accomplishment as the sign that I have fought long enough. Then I will go to Philip and tell him what his refusal has brought about. I will _make_ him give me the pa.s.sport. But suppose that he is no longer capable of being horrified?

Suppose that my behavior of thirteen years ago has rendered him proof against such an emotion? Oh well, we shall see. Am I light-headed? No, no, no. On the contrary, hunger makes one clear-sighted. It must be. It shall be. The duty of the human soul lies in such a complete, such a reckless, such a relentless, such a victorious self-will as can only be a.s.suaged by self-sacrifice. This is the great paradox of life. This is the divine egotism."

Toward dawn Sylvia slept, and woke at sunrise from dreams that were strangely serene in contrast with the tormenting fevers of the night, to find that Queenie was still fast asleep. The beauty of her lying there in this lucid and golden morn was like the beauty of a flower that blooms at daybreak in a remote garden. It was a beauty that caught at Sylvia's heart, a beauty that could only be expressed with tears which were silent as the dew and which, like the dew, sparkled in the daybreak of the soul.

"It is through such tears that people have seen the fairies," she murmured.

Sylvia half raised herself in bed, and, leaning upon her elbow, she watched the sleeping girl so intently that it seemed as if some of herself was pa.s.sing away to Queenie. This still and virginal hour was indeed time trans.m.u.ted to the timelessness of dreams, in which absolute love like a note of music rose quivering upon its own shed sweetness to such an ecstasy of sustained emotion that the barest memory of it would secure the wakeful one forever against disillusionment.

"Call it hunger or the divine vision, the result is the same," she murmured. "I was lifted out of myself, and I take it that is the way martyrs died for their faith. From an outsider's point of view I may be only worthy of a foot-note in a manual of psychology; but I 'on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.' Another queer thought: the fasting saint and the drunken sinner both achieve ecstasy by subduing the body, the one with mortification, the other with indulgence. Those whom the G.o.ds love die young--they drink too deep and too often of honeydew and become intoxicated even unto death. Wine must serve the man who would live long. Perhaps I am one of those less rare spirits that depend too much on purely material beauty; yet even in defense of so little I can act. Some nightingales love roses: the rest of them love other nightingales. Which do I love? Ah, whether Queenie be rose or nightingale, what does it matter? n.o.body that would not stoop to save a wood-louse in his path can claim to love. And I will stoop as low as h.e.l.l to save this rosebud that has already been gathered and wired and worn in a b.u.t.tonhole and dropped by the roadside, but surely not yet trodden underfoot."

Queenie woke with a bad headache, and Sylvia went down-stairs to see if she could persuade the waiter to let her have some coffee. He was going to refuse, but when she asked him if he would tell M. Florilor that a visit would be welcomed that afternoon, his manner changed, and presently he came back from an interview with the proprietor to say that he would serve coffee at once. At the same time he brought the bill of fare for lunch, and seemed anxious that they should choose some special delicacy to fortify themselves against the ill effects of the day before. There was no talk of paying for the meal, and the best wine was indicated with that a.s.sumption of subservient greed which is common to all good waiters.

After lunch Sylvia told Queenie that she was going out to send off the delayed telegram to Bucharest, and left her lying down with her pictures. Then she consulted the waiter about a room. The waiter agreed that it would be inconvenient to receive M. Florilor in their own, and informed her that the best room in the hotel was ready, adding that he had ordered plenty of cakes and put flowers in the vases.

"I'll go there now," Sylvia announced. "When he comes, bring him straight up."

The brightness of the early morning had been dimmed by a wet mist, and the room allotted for the reception of M. Florilor, which was on the other side of the hotel, looked out over houses covered with sodden creepers and down into gardens of disheveled sunflowers; it was a view that suited the mood Sylvia was in, and for a long time she stood gazing out of the window, trying to detect beyond the immediate surroundings of the hotel some definition of a landscape in the distance. In the light of the morning her resolution had not presented itself as morbidly as now; then it had appeared essentially poetic--a demonstration really of the creative power of the human will; now, like the dejected flowers in the gardens below, it hung limp and colorless. She turned away from the window and sat down in a tight new armchair, the back of which seemed to be inclosed in corsets. Everything in this room was new, and, like all hotel rooms, it depressed one with that indeterminate bleakness which is the property of never having been touched by the warmth of personality.

It was bleak as an abandoned sh.e.l.l on the beach, and stirred by nothing save the end of the tide's ebb and flow. The waiter's attempt to give it the significance of human life by cramming bunches of dahlias into a pair of fluted vases only added to the desolate effect. For want of something to do Sylvia began to arrange the flowers with a little consideration for their native ugliness, as one tries to smarten an untidy woman with a bad figure; but when she poured some water into a china bowl and saw floating upon its surface the ends of burned-out matches and cigarettes, she gave up the task. These burned-out relics of transitory occupants seemed typical of the room's effect upon the pensive observer. A confused procession of personalities made up its history, and as these had cast away their burned-out cigarettes and matches, so had they cast behind them the room where they had lodged, preserving no memory of its existence and leaving behind not a single emotion to vitalize the bleak impersonal sh.e.l.l they had thankfully forsaken.

Yet Sylvia, waiting here for the beginning of the heartless drama that would be wrought of her heart's blood pulsing to reinforce her will, rejoiced in this sterility of the setting; it helped her to achieve a similar effect in her own att.i.tude. Just as this room had succeeded in preserving itself from any impression of having ever been lived in by human beings, so she, when the drama was played through, should retain of it no trace. That in it which was real--the l.u.s.t of man--should be left behind, an ignominious burned-out thing less than a cigarette stump at the bottom of a china bowl.

The waiter came in with a basket of cakes, the cold and sugary forms of which were no more capable than the dahlias of imparting life to the merciful deadness. And how dead it all was! Those red-plush curtains eternally tied back in symmetrical hideousness--they had never lived since the time when some starved and withered soul had sewn those pompons along their edges one after another, pompons as numerous and monotonous as the days of their maker. Indeed, there was not a single piece of furniture, not an ornament nor a drapery, that was not stamped with the hatred of its maker. There was no trace of the craftsman's joy in his handiwork either in thread or tile or k.n.o.b. There was nothing except the insolence of profit and the dreary labor of slaves. Yet a world stifled by such ugliness talked with distasteful surprise of men who profited by war. With the exploitation of the herd and the sacrifice of the individual that was called civilization what else could be expected? Nowadays even man's l.u.s.t had to be guaranteed pure and unadulterated like his beer. Better that the whole human race should rot on dunghills with the diseases they merited than that they should profit from an added shame imposed upon the meanest and most miserable tinker's drab. People were shocked at making a hundred per cent. upon a sh.e.l.l to blow a German to pieces; but they regarded with equanimity the same profit at the expense of a child's future. Wherever one looked, there was nothing but material comfort set as the highest aim of life at the cost of beauty, religion, love, childhood, womanhood, virtue--everything. Then two herds met in opposition, and there was war; the result had made everybody uncomfortable, and everybody had declared there must never again be war. But so long as the individual submitted to the herd, war would go on; and the most efficient herd with the greatest will for war would succeed because it would be able to offer greater comfort at the time and higher profits afterward. Yet the individual had nearly always much that was admirable; the most sordid profiteer possessed a marvelous energy and perception that might be turned to good, if he could but realize that virtue is the true egotism and that vice is only a distorted altruism.

"I've always hated ants and loathed bees," Sylvia cried. "And in certain aspects the human race makes one shudder with that sense of co-operative effort running over one which I believe is called formication."

The waiter came in to announce M. Florilor's arrival.

"Now we get the individual at his worst just when I've been backing him against the herd. This is formication spelled with an 'n.'"

Stefan Florilor resembled a figure in a picture by Guido Reni. A superficial glance would have established him as a singularly handsome, well-built, robust, and attractive young man; a closer regard showed that his good looks owed too much to soft and feminine contours, that the robustness of his frame was only the outward form of strength with all the curves but nothing of the hardness of muscle, and that his eyes flashed not as the mirrors of an inward fire, but with liquid gleams of sensuous impressions caught from outside. He really was extremely like one of Guido Reni's triumphant and ladylike archangels.

They talked in French, a language that Florilor spoke without distinction, but with a pothouse fluency--no doubt much as one of Guido Reni's archangels might have picked it up from one of Guido Reni's devils.

"What a fatally seductive language it is!" Sylvia exclaimed at last, when she had complimented him as he evidently expected to be complimented upon his ease. "Whenever I hear a tea-table conversation in French I suspect every one of being a poet or a philosopher: whenever I read a French poet I want to ask him if he likes his tea strong or weak."

"Your friend is English also?" Florilor inquired.

He took advantage of the ethnical turn in the conversation to express his own interest in a problem of nationality.

"Yes, she is English."

"And no doubt she will be coming down soon?"

"She's not coming down. She has a headache."

"But perhaps she will be well enough to dine this evening with me?"

"No, I don't think she will be well enough," said Sylvia.