Sylvia & Michael Part 9

The memory of this casual encounter rested in Sylvia's heart with all the warmth it had originally kindled; nay, rather, it rested there with a warmth that increased as time went on, and the golden bag came to be regarded with that most essential and sacred affection which may be bestowed upon a relic of childhood, an affection that is not sentimental or comparable in any way to the emotions aroused by the souvenirs of an old love. The bag possessed, indeed, the recreative quality of art; it was emotion remembered in tranquillity, and as such fiercely cherished by its owner. It was a true mascot, a monstrance of human love; for Sylvia it had a sacramental, almost a divine significance.

From Kieff, much heartened by the omen of fortune's favor, Sylvia traveled gladly toward Odessa through leagues of monotonous country shrouded in mist and rain, which, seen thus by an unfamiliar visitant, was of such surpa.s.sing gloom that the notion of war acquired in contrast an adventurous cheerfulness. Often at railway stations that appeared to exist along the track without any human reason for existence Sylvia used to alight with the rest of the pa.s.sengers and drink gla.s.ses of tea sweetened by spoonfuls of raspberry jam; in a luxury of despair she would imagine herself left behind by the train and be sometimes half tempted to make the experiment in order to see how life would adapt itself to such eccentricity. The only diversion upon this endless journey was when the train stopped before crossing a bridge to let soldiers with fixed bayonets mount it and stand in the corridors that they might prevent any traveler from leaving his seat or even from looking out of the window. These precautions against outrages with dynamite affected her at first with a sense of great events happening beyond these mournful steppes; but when she saw that the bayonets were so long that in any scuffle they would have been unmanageable, she had a revulsion from romantic fancies and told herself a little scornfully what children men were and how much playing at war went on behind the b.l.o.o.d.y scenes of action.

Sylvia reached Odessa on October 28th, and the long front looking toward a leaden sea held a thought of England in its salt rain. The cabaret at which she was going to work was like all other cabarets, but, being situated in some gardens that opened on the sea, it had now a sad and wintry appearance of disuse. A few draggled shrubs, a few chairs not worth the trouble of putting into shelter, a deserted band-stand and open-air theater, served to forbid rather than invite gaiety. However, since the cabaret itself could be reached from a street behind the sea-front and visitors were not compelled to pa.s.s through the ghosts of a dead summer, this melancholy atmosphere was obviated. The _pension d'artistes_ at which Sylvia stayed was kept by a certain Madame Eliane, a woman of personality and charm, with a clear-cut, rosy face and snow-white hair, who limped slightly and supported herself upon two ebony canes. Madame Eliane objected to being called _Mere_, which would have been the usual prefix of ironical affection awarded to the owner of such a _pension_; although she must have been nearly sixty, she had an intense hatred of age and a remarkable faculty for remaining young without losing her dignity. For all the girls under her roof she felt a genuine affection that demanded nothing in return except the acceptance of herself as a contemporary, the first token of which was to call her Eliane; from the men she always exacted _Madame_. Her nationality was believed to have originally been Austrian, but she had become naturalized as a Russian many years before the war, when she was the mistress of an official who had endowed her with the _pension_ before he departed to a remote Baltic province and the respectability of marriage.

Sylvia found that Eliane was regarded by all the girls as an ill.u.s.tration of the most perfect success to which any one of their profession might aspire.

"She's lucky," said a small c.o.c.kney called Ruby Arnold, who sang in English popular songs of four years ago that when Sylvia first heard them shocked her with their violent resuscitation of the past. "Yes, I reckon she's lucky," Ruby went on. "There isn't no one that doesn't respect her, as you might say. Isn't she cunning, too, to let her hair go white instead of keeping it gold like what it was once? Anybody can't help taking to anybody with white hair. I reckon with white hair and a house of my own I'd chuck up this life to-morrow, _I_ would. _N'est-ce pas que j'ai raison?_" she added, in French, with a more brutal disregard of p.r.o.nunciation than Sylvia had ever heard.

"_Oui, pet.i.te, tu as raison_," agreed Odette, a vast French blonde with brilliant, prominent eyes, those bulging myopic eyes that are generally the mirrors of vanity and hysteria. "I have a friend here," she continued in French, "_une femme du monde avec des idees tres-larges_, who a.s.sured me that if she did not know what Eliane was, she might easily have mistaken her for a _femme du monde_ like herself."

"She and her lady friends," Ruby muttered, contemptuously to Sylvia. "If you ask me, these French girls don't know a lady when they see one. She had the nerve to bring her in here to tea one day, an old crow with a bonnet that looked as if a dog had worried it. She's bound to ask you to meet her. She can't talk of anything else since she met her in a tram."

"Well, how's the war getting on? What do they say about it now?" asked a dancer called Flora, flas.h.i.+ng a malicious glance at her partner, a young Belgian of about twenty-five with a pale and unpleasantly debauched face, who glared angrily in response. "Armand cannot suffer us to talk about the war," she explained to Sylvia.

"She hates him," Ruby whispered. "And whenever she can she gets in a dig because he hasn't tried to fight for his country. Funny thing for two people to live together for three years and hate each other like they do."

Sylvia said that she had no more information about the war than they had in Odessa, and there followed groans from all the _artistes_ gathered together over coffee for the havoc which the war had brought in their profession.

"I was always _anti-militariste_," Armand proclaimed, "even before the war. Why, once in France I was arrested for singing a song that made fun of the army. It's a fine thing to talk about valor and glory and _la patrie_ when you're _du premier grade_, but when you're not--" He shook his fist at a world of generals. "_Enfin_, Belgium no longer exists. And who first thought of stopping the Germans? The king! Does he have to dance for a living? _Ah, non alors!_ She is always talking about the war," he went on, looking at Flora. "But if I applied for a pa.s.sport to go back, she'd be the first to make a row."

"_Menteur!_" Flora snapped. "_Je m'en fiche._"

"_Alors, ce soir je n'irai pas au cabaret._"

"_Tant mieux! Qu'est-ce que ca peut me ficher? Bon Dieu!_"

"_Alors, nous verrons, ma gosse._"

"_Insoumis!_" she spat forth. "_Comme t'es lache._"

"They always carry on like that," Ruby whispered. "But they'll be dancing together to-night just the same as usual."

When Sylvia came down from the dressing-room for her turn she found that Ruby had prophesied truly. Armand and Flora were dancing together on the stage, but, though their lips were smiling, the eyes of both were sullen and hateful. The performance at the Cabaret de l'Aube could not be said to differ in any particular from that of any other cabaret. Sylvia, when she was brought face to face with such evidences of international bad taste, wondered how the world had ever gone to war. All over Europe people slept in the same kind of wagon-lits (though here in Russia with a broad gauge they slept more comfortably), ate the same kind of food in the same kind of hotel, clapped the same mediocre _artistes_, and drank the same sweet champagne: yet they could talk about the individuality of nations. How remote war seemed here in Odessa: it was perhaps wrong of her to escape from it like this, and she pondered the detached point of view of Armand. Had she the right to despise his point of view? Did she not herself merit equal contempt?

"I'm too comfortable," she decided, "while there is so much misery in the distance."

However comfortable Sylvia felt when at a quarter past three she let herself into the _Pension Eliane_, she felt extremely uncomfortable about an hour later, when the sound of an explosion and the crash of falling gla.s.s made those inmates of the _pension_ who were still gossiping down-stairs in the dining-room drop their cigarettes and stare at one another in astonishment.

"Whatever's that?" Ruby cried.

"It must be the gas," said Armand, who could not turn paler than he was, but whose lips trembled.

Another crash followed; outside in the street rose a moan of frightened voices and the clatter of frightened feet.

Two more explosions still nearer drove everybody that was in the _pension_ out of doors, and when it became certain that war-s.h.i.+ps were bombarding Odessa there was a rush to join the inhabitants who were fleeing to what they supposed was greater safety in the heart of the town. In vain Sylvia protested that if the town was really being bombarded, they were just as safe in a _pension_ near the sea-front as anywhere else; the mere idea of propinquity to the sea set everybody running faster than ever away from it. She could hear now the sh.e.l.ls whinnying like nervous horses, and with every crash she kept saying to herself in a foolish way:

"Well, at any rate, there's no more danger from that one."

At first in the rush of panic she had not observed any particular incident; but now, as sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l exploded without any visible sign of damage, she began to look with interest at non-combatant humanity in the presence of danger. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that, on the whole, the men behaved worse than the women; she put this observation on one side to be argued out later with Armand, who had certainly run faster than any one else in the _pension_. The number of the sh.e.l.ls was already getting less, yet there were no signs of the populace's recovery. Fear was begetting fear with such rapidity that to stand still and listen to the moans and groans of the uninjured was awe-inspiring. In one doorway a distraught man with nothing on but a s.h.i.+rt and slippers was dancing about with a lighted candle, evidently in a quandary of terror whether to join the onflowing mob or to stay where he was. An explosion quite close made up his mind, and he dived down the steps into the street, where the candle was immediately extinguished; nevertheless, he continued to hold it as if it were still alight while he ran with the crowd. In another doorway stood a woman confronted with a triple problem. Wearing nothing but a wrapper and carrying in her arms a pet dog, she was trying at the same time to keep her wrapper fastened, to avoid letting the dog drop, and to shut the door behind her. The problem was a nice one: she could either keep her wrapper fastened, maintain the dog, and leave the door open, in which case she would lose her silver; or she could keep her wrapper close, shut the door, and drop the dog, in which case she would lose the dog; or she could keep the dog, shut the door, and let go of her wrapper, in which case she would lose her modesty. Sylvia's anxiety to see how she would solve the problem made her forget all about the sh.e.l.ls; and it was only when the perplexed lady in a last desperate attempt slammed the door, so that her wrapper came flying open and the dog went bolting down the street, that Sylvia realized the bombardment was over. She turned back toward the _pension_ with a last look over her shoulder at the lady, who was vanis.h.i.+ng into the darkness, gathering the wrapper round her nakedness as she ran, and calling wildly to her pet.

Next day the military and civil population set out to find who could possibly have told the Turkish destroyers that such a place as Odessa existed. Armand, the Belgian dancer, was particularly loud on the subject of spies; Sylvia suspected it was he who had suggested to the police that Madame Eliane, as a reputed Austrian, should be severely examined with a view to finding out if the signals of which all were talking could be traced to her windows. If he did inform the police, his meanness recoiled upon his own head, for the examination of Madame Eliane was succeeded by an examination of all her guests, in the course of which Armand's pa.s.sport was found to be slightly irregular, and he was nearly expelled to Rumania in consequence. The authorities made up their minds that no Turkish destroyer should ever again discover the whereabouts of their town, and the most stringent ordinances against showing lights were promulgated; but a more important result of the declaration of war by Turkey than the lighting of Odessa was its interference with the future plans of the mountebanks at the Cabaret de l'Aube. There was not one of them who had not intended to proceed from here to Constantinople, a much more profitable winter engagement than this Black Sea port.

"_C'est a.s.sommant_," Armand declared. "_Zut! On ne peut pas rester ici tout l'hiver. On crevera._"

"But at any rate one should be thankful that one was not hit by an _obus_," said Odette. "I nearly died of fright."

"It wasn't the fault of the Turks that we weren't hit," Armand grumbled.

"They did their best."

"Luckily the sh.e.l.ls didn't travel so fast as you," Sylvia put in.

Flora laughed at this; but when everybody began to tease Armand about his cowardice she got angry, and invited any girl present to produce a man that would have behaved differently.

At last the flotsam that had been stirred up by the alarm of the bombardment drifted together again and stayed idly in what was, after all, still a backwater to the general European unrest. The manager of the cabaret was glad enough to keep his company together for as long as they would stay. It was getting more difficult all the time to import new attractions; and since as much money was being made out of human misery in Odessa as everywhere else, the champagne flowed not much less freely because, since the Imperial edict, some bribery of the police was required in order to procure it. Sylvia was puzzled to find what was fate's intention in thus keeping her from moving farther south: it seemed a tame end to all her expectation to be stranded here, lost to everything except the petty life of her fellow-players. However, she sang her songs every night; somehow her personality attracted the frequenters of the cabaret, and when after a month she informed the manager that she must leave and go north again, he begged her to stay at any rate for another two months--after that he would arrange for her to travel north and sing at Kieff, Warsaw, and Petrograd, whence she could make her way back to England.

"Or you might go to Siberia," he suggested.

"Siberia?" she echoed.

That any one should propose a tour in Siberia seemed a joke at first; when Sylvia found the suggestion was serious, she plunged back with a s.h.i.+ver into the warmer backwater of Odessa. Deciding that with a comfortable _pension_, a friendly management, and an appreciative audience, it would be foolish to risk her health by moving about too much, she settled down to read Russian novels and study the characters of her a.s.sociates.

"You are a funny girl," Ruby said. "Don't you care about fellows?"

"Why should I?" Sylvia countered.

"Oh, I don't know. It seems more natural, somehow. I left home over a fellow and went with a musical comedy to Paris. That's how I started touring the continong. Funny you and I should meet like this in Odessa."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't know. We're both English. Talk about the World's End, Chelsea! I wonder what they'd call this? Do you know, Sylvia, I sometimes say to myself--supposing if I was to go back to England and find it didn't really exist any more? I'm a funny girl. I think a lot when I'm by myself, which isn't often, thank G.o.d, or I should get the w.i.l.l.i.e.s worse than what I do. I don't know: when I look round and see that I'm in Odessa, I can't somehow believe that there is such a place as London. Do you know, sometimes I'd go mad to hear a bus-driver call out to a cabby, 'You b.l.o.o.d.y----, where the---- h.e.l.l do you think you're shoving yerself!' Well, after seven years without seeing England, any one does get funny fancies."

"There aren't any cab-drivers now," Sylvia said.

"I suppose that's a fact. Taxis were only just beginning to bob up when I went away. Oh, well, I reckon the language is still just as choice.

But I would love to hear it. Of course I might hear you swear in the dressing-room over your corsets or anything, but it's the tone of voice I hanker after. Oh, well, it'll all come out in the wash, and I don't suppose they notice the war much in England. Still, I hope the squareheads won't blow London to pieces. I once did a tour in Germany, and a fellow with a mustache like a flying trapeze wanted to sleep with me for ten marks. They've got nerve enough for anything. What's this word 'boche'? I suppose it's French for rubbish." She began to sing softly:

"Take me back to London Town, London town, London town!

That's where I want to be, Where the folks are kind to me.

Trafalgar Square, oh, ain't it grand?

Oxford Street, the dear old Strand!

Anywhere, anywhere, I don't care....

O G.o.d, it gives any one the hump to think about it. Fancy England at war. Wonders will never cease. I reckon my brother Alf's well in it. He was never happy without he was fighting somebody."

It was curious, thought Sylvia that evening, as she watched Ruby Arnold singing her four-year-old songs, how even to that cynical, rat-faced little c.o.c.kney in her red-velvet baby's frock the thought of England at war should bring such a violent longing for home. She tried to become intimate with Ruby; but after that single unfolding of secret aspirations and regrets, she drew away from Sylvia, who asked the reason of her sudden reserve.

"It's not that I don't like you," Ruby explained. "I reckon no girl could want a better pal than you if she was your sort. Only I'm not. I like fellows. You don't. Besides, you're different. I won't say you're a lady, because when all's said and done we're both of us working-girls.

But I don't know. Perhaps it's because you're older than me, only somehow you make me feel fidgety. That's flat, as the cook said to the pancake; but you asked me why I was a bit stand-offish and I've got to speak the truth to girls. I should go balmy otherwise with all the lies I tell to men. I reckon you'd get on better with Odette and her Fam dee mond."