Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett. Compton Mackenzie
the bough of a tree was just waving very slightly and the moonlight kept glinting in and out of his eyes. I thought of my parents in England when he said this, and I remember challenging them in a sort of defiant way to interfere. You see, I'd never got on well at home. I was a very wayward girl and they were exceptionally old-fashioned. And when Prince Paul held me in his arms I reproached them. It's difficult to explain, but I was trying to conjure them up before me to see if the thought of home would have any effect. And then Prince Paul laughed and said, 'Or another lover?' Now with the exception of flirting with Prince Paul and Prince George, the two eldest sons, I'd never thought much about lovers. Even in those days I was more interested in animals, really, and of course I was very fond of children. But when Prince Paul said, 'Or another lover?' I saw Gontran leaning against a tree in the forest. He was looking at me, and I pushed Prince Paul away and ran back toward the house.
"Now when this happened I'd never seen my husband. He was working at the Embassy even in those days, and never went to Finland in his life. The next day the family was called back to Petersburg on account of the death of the grandmother, and I met Gontran at some friends'! We were married about six months afterward.
"So there again, if I could see Gontran when he was alive before I'd ever met him, you don't suppose I'm not going to believe that I've seen him any number of times since he was dead? Until quite recently when he reached this new plane, we talked together as comfortably as when he was still alive and sitting in that chair."
Sylvia looked at the chair uneasily.
"It's only since he's met this Dick that the communications are so unsatisfactory. Why, of course I know what's happened," cried Mère Gontran, in a rapture of discovery. "Why didn't I think of it sooner? It's the war!"
"The war?" Sylvia echoed.
"Aren't there thousands of spirits being set free every day? Just as all the communications on earth have broken down, in the same way they must have broken down with the spirits. Fancy my not having understood that before! Well, aren't I dense?"
Five raps of surpassing loudness signaled upon the air.
"Gontran's delighted," she exclaimed. "He was always delighted when I found out something for myself."
Soon after this Mère Gontran, having gathered up from the crowded table a variety of implements that could not possibly serve any purpose that night, wandered out into the garden, followed by Samuel and the five cats; Sylvia thought of her haunted passage through the dark autumnal growth of leaves toward that strange room she occupied, and went up-stairs to bed rather tremulously. Yet on the whole she was glad that Mère Gontran left her like this every night at the pension with the Tartar servant in her cupboard under the stairs, and with the three ungainly sons, who used to sleep in a barrack at the end of the long passage on the ground floor. Sylvia had peeped into this room when the young men were out and had been surprised by its want of resemblance to a sleeping-chamber. There were, to be sure, three beds, but they had the appearance of beds that had been long stowed away in a remote part of a warehouse for disused furniture: the whole room was like that, with nothing human appertaining to it save the smell of stale tobacco-smoke. Yet, really, now that the migratory guests had gone on their way, it would have been even more surprising to find in the pension signs of humanity, so much had its permanent inhabitants, both animals and human beings, approximated to one another. The animals were a little more like human beings; the human beings were a little more like animals: the margin between men and animals was narrow enough in the most distinguishing circumstances, and at the pension these circumstances were lacking.
Before Sylvia undressed she opened the window of her bedroom and looked down into the moonlit garden. Mère Gontran's light was already lit, but she was still wandering about outside with her cats. Eccentric though she was, Sylvia thought, she was nevertheless typical. Looking back at the people who had crossed her path, she could remember several adumbrations of Mère Gontran—superstitious women with a love of animals. Of such a kind had been Mrs. Meares; and attached to every cabaret and theater there had always been an elderly woman who had served as commission agent to the careless artistes, whether it was a question of selling themselves to a new lover or buying somebody else's old dress. These elderly women had invariably had the knack of telling fortunes with the cards, had been able to interpret dreams and omens, and had always been the slaves of dogs and birds. The superficial ascription of their passion for animals would have been to a stifled or sterile maternity; but as with Mère Gontran and her three sons, Sylvia could recall that many of these elderly women had been the prey of their children. If one went back beyond one's actual experience of this type, it was significant that the witches of olden times were always credited with the possession of familiar spirits in the shape of animals; she could recollect no history of a witch that did not include her black cat. Was that, too, a stifled maternal instinct, or would it not be truer to find in the magic arts they practised nothing but a descent from human methods of intelligence to those of animals, a descent (if indeed it could be called a descent) from reason to instinct?
Here was Mère Gontran fulfilling in every particular the old conventional idea of a witch, and might not all this communion with spirits be nothing but the communion of an animal with scents and sounds imperceptible to civilized man? It could be a kind of atavism, really, a return to disused senses, so long obsolete that their revival had a supernatural effect. Sylvia thought of the unusual success that Mère Gontran always had with her gardening; no matter where she sowed in the great dark jungle, she gathered better vegetables than a gardener, who would have wasted his energy in wrestling with the weeds that seemed to forbid any growth but their own. Mère Gontran always paid greater attention to the aspects of the moon and the planets than to the laws of horticulture, and her gardening gave the impression of being nothing but a meaningless ritual: yet it was fruitful. Might there not be some laws of attraction of which in the course of dependence upon his own inventions man had lost sight, some laws of which animals were cognizant and by which many of the marvels of instinct might be explained? Beyond witches and their familiar spirits were fauns and centaurs, more primitive manifestations of this communion between men and animals, with whom even the outward shape was still a hybrid. Had scientists in pursuing the antics of molecules and atoms beneath the microscope become blind to the application of their theories? Might not astronomy have displaced astrology unjustly? Sylvia wished she had read more widely and more deeply, that she might know if her speculations were, after all, nothing but the commonplaces of empirical thought. So much could be explained by this theory of attraction, not least of all the mystery of love and the inscrutable caprices of fortune.
Behold Mère Gontran out there in the garden, bobbing to the moon. Were all these gestures meaningless like an idiot's mutterings? And was even an idiot's muttering really meaningless? Behold Mère Gontran in the moonlit garden with cats: it would be hard to say that her behavior was more futile than theirs: they were certainly all enjoying themselves.
Sylvia was conscious of trying to arrive at an explanation of Mère Gontran that, while it allowed her behavior a certain amount of reasonableness, would prevent herself from accepting Mère Gontran's own explanation of it. There was something distasteful, something cheap and vulgar, in the conception of Gontran's spiritual existence as an infinite prolongation of his life upon earth; there was something radically fatuous in the imagination of him at the end of a ghostly telephone-wire still at the beck and call of human curiosity. If, indeed, in some mysterious way the essential Gontran was communicating with his wife, the translation of his will to communicate must be a subjective creation of hers; it was somehow ludicrous, and even unpleasant, to accept Dick's gathering of a daisy as a demonstration of the activity of mankind in another world; it was too much a finite conception altogether. Without hesitation Sylvia rejected spiritualism as a useful adventure for human intelligence. It was impossible to accept its more elaborate manifestations with bells and tambourines and materializing mediums, when one knew the universal instinct of mankind to lie; and in its simpler manifestations, as with Mère Gontran, where conscious or deliberate deceit was out of the question, it was merely a waste of time, being bound by the limitations of an individual soul that would always be abnormal and probably in most cases idiotic.
Sylvia pulled down the blind, and, leaving Mère Gontran to her nocturnal contemplation, went to bed.
Notwithstanding