SYLVIA & MICHAEL
BY THE SAME AUTHOR SYLVIA & MICHAEL PLASHERS MEAD SYLVIA SCARLETT ———— Harper & Brothers Publishers
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I need scarcely say that in 1915 there was no Passport Office in Bucharest, and that so far as I am aware there are no portraits in this book. If any of the characters achieve the effect of portraits, it may be due to their wearing uniform, which makes every one look alike. Further I should like to emphasise that this volume is really Book Three of Sylvia Scarlett, and is only published separately on account of the difficulties of production.
SYLVIA & MICHAEL
THE LATER ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT
By COMPTON MACKENZIE Author of "SYLVIA SCARLETT" "PLASHERS MEAD" ETC.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON
SYLVIA & MICHAEL Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published July, 1919
SYLVIA & MICHAEL
Sylvia & Michael
CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII
CHAPTER I
BY the time that Sylvia reached Paris she no longer blamed anybody but herself for what had happened. Everything had come about through her own greed in trying simultaneously to snatch from life artistic success and domestic bliss: she had never made a serious attempt to choose between them, and now she had lost both; for she could not expect to run away like this and succeed elsewhere to the same degree or even in the same way as in London. No doubt all her friends would deplore the step she had taken and think it madness to ruin her career; but after so much advertisement of her marriage, after the way she had revealed her most intimate thoughts to Olive, after the confidence she had shown in Arthur's devotion, there was nothing else but to run away. Yet now that the engagement had been definitely broken she felt no bitterness toward Arthur: the surprising factor was that he should have waited so long. Moreover, behind all her outraged pride, behind her regret for losing so much, deep in her mind burned a flickering intuition that she had really lost very little, and that out of this new adventure would spring a new self worthier to demand success, and more finely tempered to withstand life's onset. Even when she was sitting beneath the mulberry-tree in the first turmoil of the shock, she had felt a faint gladness that she was not going to live in Mulberry Cottage with Arthur. Already on this May morning of Paris with the chestnuts in their flowery prime she could fling behind her all the sneers and all the pity for her jilting; and though she had scarcely any money she was almost glad of her poverty, glad to be plunged once again into the vortex of existence with all the strength and all the buoyancy that time had given her. She thought of the months after she left Philip. This was a different Sylvia now, and not even yet come to what Sylvia might be. It was splendid to hear already the noise of waters round her, from which she should emerge stronger and more buoyant than she had ever imagined herself before.
Immediately upon her arrival—for with the little money she had there was not a day to be lost—Sylvia went in this mood to visit her old agent; like all parasites, he seemed to know in advance that there was little blood to suck. She told him briefly what she had been doing, let him suppose that there was a man in the case, and asked what work he could find for her.
The agent shook his head; without money it was difficult, nay, impossible to attempt in Paris anything like she had been doing in London. No doubt she had made a great success, but a success in London was no guaranty of a success in Paris, indeed rather the contrary. It was a pity she had not listened to him when she had the money to spend on a proper réclame.
"Bref, il n'y a rien à faire, chère madame."
There was surely the chance of an engagement for cabaret work? The agent looked at Sylvia; and she could have struck him for the way he was so evidently pondering her age and measuring it against her looks. In the end he decided that she was still attractive enough and he examined his books. She still sang, of course, and no doubt still enjoyed dancing? Well, they wanted French girls in Petersburg at the Trocadero cabaret. It would work out at four hundred and fifty francs a month, to which, of course, the commission on champagne would add considerably. She would have to remain on duty till 3 A.M., and the management reserved the right to dispense with her services if she was not a success.
"Comme artiste ou comme grue?" Sylvia demanded.
The agent laughed and shrugged his shoulders; he was afraid that there was nothing else remotely suitable. Sylvia signed the contract, and so little money was left in her purse that from Paris to Petersburg she traveled third class, an unpleasant experience.
The change from the Pierian Hall to the place where she was now singing could scarcely have been greater. For an audience individual, quiet, attentive, was substituted a noisy gathering of people that was not an audience at all. It had been difficult enough in old days to sing to parties drinking round a number of tables; but here to the noise of drinking was added the noise of eating, the clatter of plates, and the shouting of waiters. In a way Sylvia was glad, because she did not want anybody to listen to the song she was singing; she preferred to come on the small stage as impersonally as an instrument in the music of the restaurant orchestra, and retire to give way to another singer without the least attention being paid either to her exit or her successor's entrance.
Sylvia wished that the rest of the evening could have passed away as impersonally; she found it terribly hard to endure again, after so long, the sensation of being for sale, of being pulled into a seat beside drunken officers, of being ogled by elderly German Jews, of being treated as an equal by waiters, of feeling upon her the eyes of the manager as he reckoned her net value in champagne. There were moments when she despaired of her ability to hold out and when she was on the verge of cabling to England for money to come home. But pride kept her back and sustained her; luckily she had to do nothing at present except talk in order to induce her patrons to buy champagne by the dozen. She knew that it could not last, that sooner or later she should acquire the general reputation of being no good for anything except to sit and chatter at a table and make a man spend money on wine for nothing, and that then she should have to go because nobody would invite her to his table. She was grateful that it was Russia and not America or France or England, where a quicker return for money spent would have been expected.
When Sylvia first arrived at Petersburg, she had stayed in solitary misery at a small German hotel that lacked even the merit of being clean. After she had been performing a week, one of her fellow-artistes recommended her to a pension kept by an Englishwoman, the widow of a chancelier at the French Embassy; it was a long way from the cabaret, beyond the racecourse, but there was the tram, and one would always find somebody to pay for the droshky home.
Sylvia visited the pension, which was a tumble-down house in a very large garden of the rankest vegetation, a queer embrangled place; but the first impression of the guests appealed to her, and she moved into it the same afternoon. Mère Gontran, the owner, was one of those expatriated women that lose their own nationality and acquire instead a new nationality compounded of their own, their husband's, and the country they inhabit. She was about fifty-five years old, nearly six feet in height, excessively lean, with a neck like a turkey's, a weather-beaten veinous complexion, very square shoulders, and thin, colorless hair done up in a kind of starfish at the back. Her eyes were very bright, of an intense blue, and she had a habit of wearing odd stockings, which, like her hair, were always coming down, chiefly because she used her garters to keep her sleeves above her elbows. One of the twin passions of her life was animals; but she also had three sons, loutish young men who ate or smoked cigarettes all day and could hardly speak a word of English or French. Their mother, on the contrary, though she had come to Petersburg as a governess thirty-five years ago, and had lived there ever since, could speak hardly any Russian and only very bad French. Mère Gontran's animals were really more accomplished linguists than she, if it was true, as she asserted, that a collie she possessed could say "good-by," "adieu," and "proschai." Sylvia suggested that the Russian salute had really been a sneeze, but Mère Gontran defied her to explain away the English or the French, and was angry at any doubts being cast on what she had heard with her own ears. In addition to Samuel, the talking collie, there was a senile bulldog called James, who on a pillow of his own slept beside Mère Gontran in her bed, which was in a hut two hundred yards away from the house, at the other end of the garden. High up round the walls were hung boxes for nine cats; into these they ascended by ladders, and none of them ever attempted to sleep anywhere but in his own box, an example to the rest of the pension. There were numerous other animals about the place, the most conspicuous of which were a pony and a goat that spent most of their time in the kitchen with the only servant, a stunted Tartar who went muttering about the house and slept in a cupboard under the stairs. Mère Gontran's other great passion was spiritualism; but Sylvia did not have much opportunity to test her truthfulness in this direction, because at first she was more interested in the guests at the pension, accepting Mère Gontran as one accepts a queer fact for future investigation at the right moment.
The outstanding boarder in Sylvia's eyes was a French aviator called Carrier, who had come to give lessons and exhibitions of his skill in Petersburg. He was a great bluff creature with a loud voice and what at first seemed a boastful manner, until one realized that his brag was a kind of game which he was playing with fate. Underneath it all there lay a deep melancholy and a sense of always being very near to death; but since he would have considered the least hint of this a disgraceful play of cowardice, he was careful to cover what he might do with what he had done, which was, even allowing for brag, a great deal. It was only when Sylvia took the trouble to make friends with him that he revealed to her his fierce ambition to finish with flying as soon as possible, and with the money he had made to buy a little farm in the country.
"Tu sais, la terre vaut mieux que le ciel," he told her.
He was superstitious, and boasted loudly of his materialism; venturing upon what was still largely an unknown element, he relied upon mascots, while preserving a profound contempt for God.
"I've not ever seen him yet," he used to say, "though I've flown higher than anybody."
His chest of drawers was covered with small talismans, some the pledges of fortune given him by ladies, others picked up in significant surroundings or conditions of mind. He wore half a dozen rings, not one of which was worth fifty francs, but all of which were endowed with protective qualities. By the scapulars and medals he carried round his neck he should have been the most pietistic of men, but however sacred their inscriptions, they counted with him as merely more portable guaranties than the hideous little monkeys and mandarins that littered his room.
"When I've finished," he told Sylvia, "I shall throw all this away. When I'm digging in the good earth, my mascot will be my spade, nothing else, je t'assure."
