It was as if she had replied to Sylvia"s unvoiced fear.
"No, no," she cried. "If they are dead, I don"t want to know."
So Carrier with all his mascots had fallen at last, and he would never cultivate that little farm in the Lyonnais; she remembered how he had boasted of the view across the valley of the Saone to the long line of the Alps: far wider now was his view, and his room at the _pension_ was the abode of owls. She read the paragraph in the French paper: he had been killed early in September very gloriously. If Paradise might be the eternal present of a well-beloved dream, he would have found his farm; if human wishes were not vanity, he was at peace.
The brief snow had melted, and through a drenching afternoon of rain Sylvia packed up; it was pleasant to think that at any rate she should travel southward, for the _pension_ was unbearable on these winter days and long nights filled with a sound of shadows. Again Sylvia was minded to brave the journey north and return to England, but again an overmastering impulse forbade her. Her destiny was written otherwise, and if she fought against the impulse not to go back, she felt that she should be cast up and rejected by the sea of life.
Mere Gontran, having caught a slight chill, went to bed immediately after dinner, and invited Sylvia to come and talk to her on her last evening. It was an odd place, this bedroom that she had chosen; and very odd she looked lying in the old four-poster, her head tied up in a bandana scarf and beside her, with his wrinkled head on the pillow, James the bulldog. The four-poster seemed out of place against the match-boarding with which the room was lined, and the rest of the furniture gave one the impression of having been ransacked by burglars in a great hurry. On the wall opposite the bed was a portrait of Gontran, which by sheer bad painting possessed a sinister power like that of some black Byzantine Virgin; on either side of him were hung the cats" boxes, from which they surveyed their mistress with the same fixed stare as her painted husband.
"Of course I should go mad if I slept in this room all by myself, and two hundred yards away from any habitation," Sylvia exclaimed.
"Oh, I"m very fond of my room," said Mere Gontran. "But there again, I like to be alone with one foot in the grave."
"I want to thank you for all your kindness," Sylvia began.
"If you start thanking me, you"ll make me fidget; and if I fidget, it worries James."
"Still, even at the risk of upsetting James, I must tell you that I don"t know what I should have done without you these six weeks. Perhaps one day when the war is over you"ll come to England and then you"ll have to stay with me in my cottage."
"Ah, I shall never be able to leave the cats, not to mention the pony. I just happened to have a fancy for England to-day, but it"s too late; I"m established here; I"m known. People in England might stare, and I should dislike that very much."
Sylvia wanted rather to talk again about spiritualism in order to find out if Mere Gontran"s speculations coincided at any point with her own; but a discussion of spiritual experience with her was like a discussion of the liver; she was almost grossly insistent upon the organic machinery, almost brutal in her zest for the practical, one might almost say the technical details. The mysteries of human conduct on earth left her utterly uninterested except when she could obtain a commentary upon them from the spirits for a practical purpose; the spirits took the place for her of the solicitor and the doctor rather than of the priest.
Systems of philosophy and religion had no meaning for Mere Gontran; her spiritual advice never concerned itself with them; and the ultimate intention of immortality was as well concealed from her as the justification of life on earth. It was this very absence of the highfalutin which impressed Sylvia with the genuineness of the manifestations that she procured, but which at the time discouraged her with the sense that death merely subst.i.tuted one irrational form of being for another.
"What"s it all for?" Sylvia had once asked.
"For?" Mere Gontran had repeated in perplexity: she had never considered the utility of this question hitherto.
"Yes, why, for instance, did you marry Gontran? Did you love him? Are your children destined to fulfil any part in the world? And _their_ children after them?"
"Why do you want to worry your head with such questions?" Mere Gontran had asked, compa.s.sionately.
"But you deny me the consolation of oblivion. You accept this endless existence after death with its apparently meaningless prolongation of human vapidity and pettiness, and you"re surprised that I resent it."
But it was impossible to carry on the discussion with somebody who was as contented with what is as an animal and whose only prayer was _Give us this day our daily bread_. It was a disappointing contribution to the problem of life from one who had spent so long on the borderland of the grave. Yet it was Mere Gontran"s devotion to this aspiration that had made her lodge Sylvia all these weeks.
"How can you, who are so kind, want to see your sons go to the war, not for any motives of honor or patriotism, but apparently just to keep them away from cigarettes and idleness? What does their nationality really matter?"
"They must do something for themselves," Mere Gontran replied. "Just at the moment the war offers a good opening."
"But suppose they are killed?"
"I hope they will be. I shall be on much better terms with them then than I am now. Gontran talks to me in English nowadays; so would they, and we might get to know one another. Cats don"t worry about their kittens, after they"re grown up; in fact, they"re anxious to get rid of them. And kingfishers chase their young ones away, or so I was informed by an English ventriloquist who was interested in natural history."
"Well, I always congratulated myself on being free from sentimentality,"
Sylvia said. "But beside you I"m like a keepsake-alb.u.m."
"If you"d get out of the habit of thinking that death is of any more importance than going to sleep, you wouldn"t bother about anything,"
Mere Gontran declared.
"Oh, it isn"t death that worries me," Sylvia answered. "It"s life."
Very early in the twilight of a wet dawn Sylvia started for Kieff. All day she watched the raindrops trickling down the windows of the railway carriage and wondered if her impulse to travel south was inspired by any profounder reason.
CHAPTER III
On the day after she reached Kieff Sylvia went for a walk by herself.
Since she was going to stay only a week in this city and since she still felt somewhat remote from the world after her long seclusion, she had not bothered to make friends with any of her fellow-_artistes_.
Presently she grew tired of walking alone and, looking about her, she saw on the other side of the road a cinema theater, where she decided to spend the rest of a dreary afternoon. She was surprised to find that the lowest charge for entrance was two rubles; but when she went inside and saw the film, she understood the reason. The theater was full of men, and she could hear them whispering to one another their astonishment at seeing a woman enter the place; she was thankful that the dim red light concealed her blushes, and she escaped as quickly as possible, quenching the impulse to abuse the doorkeeper for not warning her what kind of an entertainment was taking place inside.
This abrupt and violent reminder of human beastliness shocked Sylvia very deeply at a moment when she was trying to induce in herself an att.i.tude of humility; it was impossible not to feel angrily superior to those swine groveling in their mess. Ordinarily she might have obliterated the incident with disdain, or at any rate have seen its proportion to the whole of human life. But now with war closing in upon the world, and with all the will she had to idealize the abnegation of the individual that was begotten from the monstrous crime of the ma.s.s, it was terrible to be brought up sharply like this by the unending and apparently una.s.sailable rampart of human vileness. It seemed to her that the shame she had felt on finding herself inside that place must even now be marked upon her countenance, and there was not a pa.s.ser-by whose criticism and curiosity she could keep from fancying intently directed toward herself. Anxious to elude the sensation of this commentary upon her action, she turned aside from the pavement to stare into the first shop-window that presented itself, until her blushes had burned themselves out. The shop she chose happened to be a jeweler"s, and Sylvia, who never cared much for precious stones, was now less than ever moved by any interest in the barbaric display that winked and glittered under the artificial stimulus of shaded electric lamps. She tried to see if she could somehow catch the reflection of her cheeks and ascertain if indeed they were flaming as high as she supposed. Presently a voice addressed her from behind, and, looking round, she saw a slim young soldier well over six feet tall, with slanting almond eyes and wide nostrils. He pointed to a row of golden hand-bags set with various arrangements of precious stones and asked her in very bad French if she admired them. Sylvia"s first impulse, when her attention was drawn to these bags for the first time, was to say that she thought them hideous; but a sympathetic intuition that the soldier admired them very much and would be hurt by her disapproval tempted her to agree with him in praising their beauty. He asked her which of them all she liked the best; and in order not to spoil this childish game of standing outside a shop-window and making imaginary purchases, she considered the row for a while and at last fixed upon one that was set with emeralds, the gold of which had a greenish tint. The soldier said that he preferred the one in the middle that was set with rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds, which was obviously the most expensive and certainly the most barbaric of the whole collection. Was Sylvia sure that she had chosen the one she liked the best? She a.s.sured him that her choice was unalterable, and the soldier, taking her by the arm, bade her enter the shop with him.
"I can"t afford to buy a bag," Sylvia protested.
"I can," he replied. "I want to buy you the bag you want."
"But it"s impossible," Sylvia argued. "Even if I could give you anything in return, it would still be impossible. That bag would cost two thousand rubles at least."
"I have three thousand rubles," said the soldier. "Of what use are they to me? To-night I go to the front. You like the bag. I like to give it to you. Come. Do not let us argue in the street like this. We will buy the bag, and afterward we will have tea together, and then I shall go my way and you will go your way. It is better that I spend two thousand rubles on buying you a bag that you want than to gamble them away. You are French. It is necessary that I do something for you."
"I"m English," Sylvia corrected. "Half English--half French."
"So much the better," the soldier said. "I have never met an Englishwoman. None of the soldiers in my company have ever met an Englishwoman. When I tell them that in Kieff I met an Englishwoman and gave her a golden bag, they will envy me my good fortune. Are we not suffering all of us together? And is that not a reason why I should give you something that you very much want?"
"Why do you think I am suffering?" she asked.
"There is sorrow in your eyes," the soldier answered, gravely.
The simplicity of the man overcame her scruples; she felt that her acceptance of his gift would give him a profound pleasure of which for a motive of petty pride she had no right to rob him. As for herself, the meeting with this young soldier had washed away like purest water every stain with which Russia had marked her--from the brutality of the drunken officer to the vileness of that cinema theater. Sylvia hesitated no longer; she accompanied him into the shop and came out again with the golden bag upon her wrist. Then they went to a confectioner"s shop and ate cakes together; outside in the darkness sleet was falling, but in her mood of elation Sylvia thought that everything was beautiful.
"It is time for me to go back to the barracks," the soldier announced at last.
While they were having tea, Sylvia had told him of many events in her life, and he had listened very seriously, though she doubted if he was able to understand half of what she told him. He in his turn had not told her much; but he was still very young, only twenty-one, and he explained that in his village not much could have happened to him. Soon after war was declared, his father had died, and, having no brothers or sisters or mother, he had sold all he had and quitted his village with thirty-five hundred rubles in his pocket. Five hundred rubles he had spent riotously and without satisfaction; and he still rejoiced in the money he had spent on the bag and was even anxious to give Sylvia the thousand rubles that were left, but she begged him to keep them.
"And so you must really go?" she said.
She walked with him through the darkness and sleet toward the barracks; soon there was a sound of bugles, and he exclaimed that he must hurry.
"Good-by," Sylvia said. "I shall never forget this meeting." She stood on tiptoe and, putting her arm round his neck, pulled him toward her and kissed him.
"Good-by. May you be fortunate and happy," she repeated.
"It rests with G.o.d," said the soldier; and he vanished into the noise of bugles and the confusion of a regimental muster.