Sylvia & Michael Part 27

Nosey Parker, when my friend the Major who I know in Egypt and still writes to me lodges a complaint about your conduct. Why don't you ask this young lady about me? She knows I'm English."

"I keep telling you that n.o.body questions your nationality."

"Well, you've asked me enough questions. You know the size of my corsets and the color of my chemise and how many moles I've got, and whether my grandmother was married, and if it's true my uncle Bill ran away to Africa because he couldn't stand my aunt Jane's voice. Nationality! I reckon you couldn't think of any more questions, unless you became a medical student and started on my inside. Why don't you tell him you know all about me?" she added, turning to Sylvia.

"Because I don't," Sylvia replied, coldly.

"Well, there's a brazen-faced b.i.t.c.h!" Miss Moffat gasped.

Sylvia said good-by hurriedly to Mr. Mathers and left him to Maud. When she was in the train on the way to Rustchuk, it suddenly struck her that Zozo might be able to explain the missing pa.s.sport.

CHAPTER VI

The more Sylvia pondered the coincidence of Queenie's flight with the loss of Maud's pa.s.sport the more positive she became that Zozo had committed the theft. And with what object? It seemed unlikely that the pa.s.sport could be altered plausibly enough to be accepted as Queenie's own property in these days when so much attention was being given to pa.s.sports and their reputed owners. Probably he had only used it as a bait with which to lure her in the first instance; he would have known that she could not read and might have counted upon the lion and the unicorn to impress her with his ability to do something for her that Sylvia had failed to do. Queenie must have been in a state of discouragement through her not having come back to Avereshti on the Sunday evening, as she had promised. The telegram she sent had really been a mistake, because Queenie would never have asked any one in the hotel to read it for her, and Zozo would a.s.suredly have pretended whatever suited his purpose if by chance it had been shown to him.

At first Sylvia had been regretting that she had not divined sooner the explanation of Maud's missing pa.s.sport, so that she could have warned Mr. Mathers; but now she was glad, because whatever Queenie did, the blame must be shared by herself and the British regulations. She reproached herself for the att.i.tude she had taken toward Queenie's disappearance; she had done nothing in these days at Bucharest to help the poor child, not even so much as to find out where she had gone. If Zozo were indeed a German agent, what might not be the result of that callousness? Yet, after all, he might not be anything of the kind; he might merely have been roused by her own opposition to regain possession of Queenie. Really it was difficult to say which explanation was more galling to her own conscience. However, it was useless to do anything now; there was as little probability of Queenie's being still in Bucharest as of her being anywhere else. If Zozo were in German pay he would find it easy enough to secure Queenie's entrance into a neutral country; and if he were once more enamoured of his power over her, he would certainly have taken precautions against any new intervention by herself.

Late in the afternoon of Sat.u.r.day, the 3d of October, Sylvia arrived at Giurgiu, the last station in Rumania before crossing the Danube to enter Bulgaria. It had been a slow journey, owing to the congestion of traffic caused by the concentration of Rumanian troops upon the frontier. When she was leaving the station to take the ferry she caught sight of Philidor upon the platform.

"You here? I thought you were at Bralatz," she cried.

She was thinking that Philidor's presence was of good omen to her journey; and as they walked together down to the quay she was glad that her last memory of Rumania should be of this tall figure in his light-blue cloak appearing indeed of heroic mold in the transuming fog of the Danube that enmeshed them.

"You've left it very late," he said. "We expect every hour the Bulgarian declaration of war upon the Entente. Ah, this disastrous summer! The failure at the Dardanelles! The failure of the Russians! And now I doubt if we shall do anything but cl.u.s.ter here upon the frontier like birds gathering to go south."

"I am going south," Sylvia murmured.

"I wish that I were," he sighed. "Now is the moment to strike. When I think of the Bulgarians on the other side of the river, and of my troop--such splendid fellows--waiting and waiting! Sylvia, I am filled with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is fighting with you, do not remember the tawdry side of her, but think of us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If--and G.o.d forbid that you should read this--if you read that Rumania is fighting against you, think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall very early upon a Russian bayonet."

He held her for a moment in the folds of his bedewed cloak, while they listened to the slow lapping of the river; then she mounted the gangway, and the ferry glided into the fog.

There was a very long wait at Rustchuk; but Sylvia did not find the Bulgarian officials discourteous; in fact, for the representatives of a country upon the verge of going to war with her own, they were pleasant and obliging. It was after midnight before the train left Rustchuk, and some time before dawn that it reached Gorna Orechovitza, where it seemed likely to wait forever. A chill wind was blowing down from the Balkans, which had swept the junction clear of everybody except a squat Bulgarian soldier who marched up and down in his dark-green overcoat, stamping his feet; so little prospect was there of the train starting again, that all the station officials were dozing round a stove in the buffet, and the pa.s.sengers had gone back to their _couchettes_. To Sylvia the desolation was exhilarating with a sense of adventure. Rumania had already receded far away--at any rate, the tawdry side of it--and the only picture that remained was of Philidor upon the bank of that misty river. It seemed to her now that the whole of the past eighteen months had been a morbid night, such a new and biting sense of reality was blown down from the mountains upon this windy October dawn, such magical horizons were being written across this crimson sky.

The train did not reach Sofia until the afternoon; the station was murmurous with excitement on account of the rumor of an ultimatum presented that morning by the Russian Minister; Sylvia, as an Englishwoman, became the object of a contemplative stare of curiosity, in which was nothing insolent or hostile, but which gave her the sensation of being just a material aid to dim unskilful meditations, like a rosary in the hands of a converted savage. There was not such a long wait at Sofia as she had expected, and toward dusk, after changing trains, they reached Plevna; but at Zaribrod, the last station before crossing the Serbian frontier, the train pulled up and showed no sign of proceeding. The platform was thronged with Bulgarian troops, the sound of whom, all talking excitedly, was like a prolonged sneeze.

At Plevna a tall, fair man had got into Sylvia's compartment. In excellent French he told her that his name was Rakoff and that he was a rose-grower. Sylvia expressed her astonishment that a Bulgarian rose-grower should travel to Serbia at such a time, but he laughed at the notion of war between Bulgaria and the Entente, avowed that the agrarian party to which he belonged was unanimously against such a disastrous step, and spoke cheerfully of doing good business in Salonika. At Zaribrod he went off to make inquiries about the chance of getting on that night, but he could obtain no information, and invited Sylvia to dine with him at the station buffet. He also helped her to change her _lei_ and _lewa_ into Serbian money and generally made himself useful in matters of detail, such as putting her clock back an hour to mid-European time. Upon these slight courtesies Sylvia and he built up, as travelers are wont, one of those brief and violent friendships that color the memory of a voyage like brilliant fugacious blooms. Rakoff expressed loudly his disgust at seeing the soldiers swarming upon the frontier; they had quite enough of war in Bulgaria two years ago, and it was madness to think of losing the advantages of neutrality, especially on behalf of the Germans. He talked of his acres of roses, of the scent of them in the early morning, of the color of them at noon, and gave Sylvia a small bottle of attar that drenched with its stored-up sweetness even the smell of the ma.s.sed soldiery. Sylvia, in her turn, talked to him of her life on the stage, described her success in London, and even confided in him her reason for abandoning it all.

"One has these impulses," he agreed. "But it is better not to give way to them. That is the advantage of my life as a rose-grower. There is always something to do. It is a tranquil and beautiful existence. One becomes almost a rose oneself. I hate to leave my fields, but my brother was killed in the last war, and I have to travel occasionally since his death. Ah, war! It is the sport of kings; yet our King Ferdinand is a great gardener. He is only happy with his plants. It is terrible that a small group of _arrivistes_ should deflect the whole course of our national life, for I'm sure that a gardener must loathe war."

Sylvia thought of Philidor's denunciations of Englishmen who had found that the Bulgarians were idealists, and sympathized with their partiality when she listened to this gentle rose-grower.

At last, about two o'clock in the morning, the train was allowed to proceed to Serbia. As it left the station the Bulgarian soldiers shouted: "Hourrah! Hourrah! Hourrah!" in accents between menace and triumph. She turned to her companion, with lifted eyebrows.

"They don't sound very pastoral," she said.

"Some Serbians in the train must have annoyed them," Rakoff explained.

"Well, I hope for the sake of the Serbians that we're not merely shunting," Sylvia laughed.

The train went more slowly than ever after they left Pirot, the first station in Serbia, where there had been an endless searching of half the pa.s.sengers, of which, apparently, everybody had suddenly got tired, because the pa.s.sengers in their portion of the train were not examined at all.

"I doubt if this train will go beyond Nish," said Rakoff. "The Austrians are advancing more rapidly than was expected. There is a great feeling in Serbia against us. I shall travel back by sea from Salonika."

They reached Nish at about seven o'clock in the morning. When Rakoff was standing outside the window of the compartment to help Sylvia with her luggage he was touched on the shoulder by a Serbian officer, who said something to him at which he started perceptibly. A moment later, however, he called out to Sylvia that he should be back in a moment and he would see her to the hotel. He waved his hand and pa.s.sed on with the officer.

Sylvia turned round to go out by the corridor, but was met in the entrance by another Serbian officer who asked her to keep her seat.

"_Mais je suis Anglaise_," she protested.

"No doubt there's some mistake," he answered, politely, in excellent English. "But I must request you to stay in the compartment."

He seated himself and asked her permission to smoke. The pa.s.sengers had all alighted and the train seemed very still. Presently another officer came and demanded her papers, which he took away with him. Half an hour went by and Sylvia began to feel hungry. She asked the officer in the compartment if it would be possible to get some coffee.

"Of course," he answered, with a smile, calling to some one in the corridor. A soldier with fixed bayonet came along and took his commands; presently two cups of black coffee and a packet of cigarettes arrived.

The officer was young and had a pleasant face, but he declined to be drawn into conversation beyond offering Sylvia her coffee and the cigarettes. An hour pa.s.sed in this way.

"How long am I likely to be kept here?" she asked, irritably.

The young officer looked uncomfortable and invited her to have another cup of coffee, but he did not answer her question. At last, when Sylvia was beginning to feel thoroughly miserable, there was a sound of voices in the corridor, and an English captain in much-stained khaki appeared in the entrance to the compartment.

"Good morning," he said. "Sorry you've been kept waiting like this. My fault, I'm afraid. Fact is, I won a bath at piquet last night, and not even the detention of a compatriot would make me forgo one exquisite moment of it."

He was a tall, thin man in the early thirties, with a languid manner of speech and movement that, though it seemed at first out of keeping with the substance of his conversation, nevertheless oddly enhanced it somehow. Sylvia had an impression that his point of view about everything was worn and stained like his uniform, but that, like his uniform, it preserved a fundamentally good quality of cloth and cut. His arrival smoothed away much of her annoyance because she discerned in him a capacity for approaching a case upon its own merits and a complete indifference to any professionalism real or a.s.sumed for the duration of the war. In a word, she found his personality sympathetic, and long experience had given her the a.s.surance that wherever this was so she could count upon rousing a reciprocal confidence.

"Good morning, Ant.i.tch," he was saying to the young Serbian officer who had been keeping guard over her. And to Sylvia he added: "Ant.i.tch was at Oxford and speaks English like an Englishman."

"I've had very little chance of knowing if he could even speak his own language," she said, sharply.

Her pleasure in finding an English officer at Nish was now being marred, as so many pleasures are marred for women, by consciousness of the sight she must present at this moderately early hour of the morning after thirty-six hours in the train.

The Englishman laughed.

"Ant.i.tch takes an occasion like this very seriously," he said.

"It's the only way to treat half past eight in the morning," Sylvia answered. "Even after a bath."

"I know. I must apologize for my effervescence at such an hour. We try to a.s.sume this kind of att.i.tude toward life when we a.s.sume temporary commissions. I'm a parvenu to such an hour and don't really know how to behave myself. Now at dawn you would have found my manner as easy as a doctor's by a bedside. Well, what have you been doing?"

"Really, I think that's for you to tell me," Sylvia replied.

"Where did you meet your fellow-traveler--the Bulgarian?"

"The rose-grower?"