Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett. Compton Mackenzie
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 God," said the soldier; and he vanished into the noise of bugles and the confusion of a regimental muster.
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 surpassing 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 passengers and drink glasses 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 bloody 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 pass 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 Mère, 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 illustration of the most perfect success to which any one of their profession might aspire.
"She's lucky," said a small cockney 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 pronunciation than Sylvia had ever heard.
"Oui, petite, 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 idées très-larges, who assured me that if she did not know what Eliane was, she might easily have mistaken her for a femme du monde like herself."
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