Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett. Compton Mackenzie

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СКАЧАТЬ in at once—at once!"

      Willie entered in purple silk pajamas, rubbing his eyes.

      "Whatever is it, Sylvia?"

      "Take this drunken brute out of my room."

      "Bobbie! Bobbie!" he called. "Come here, Bobbie! Bobbie! Will you come? You are mean. Oh, there's such a nasty man in Sylvia's room! Oh, he's something dreadful to look at!"

      The drunken officer stared at Willie in amazement, trying to make up his mind if he were an alcoholic vision; his judgment was still further shaken by the appearance of Bobbie in pajamas of emerald-green silk.

      "Oh, Willie, he's got a sword!" said Bobbie. "Oh, doesn't he look fierce? Oh, he does look fierce! Most alarming I'm sure."

      The intruder staggered to his feet.

      "Foutez-moi le camp," he bellowed, making a grab for his sword.

      "For Heaven's sake get rid of the brute," Sylvia moaned. "I'm too weak to move."

      The two young men pirouetted into the middle of the room, as they were wont to pirouette upon the stage, with arms stretched out in a curve from the shoulder and fingers raised mincingly above an imaginary teacup held between the first finger and thumb. When they reached the giant they stopped short to sustain the preliminary pose of a female acrobat; then turning round, they ran back a few steps, turned round again, and with a scream flung themselves upon their adversary; he went down with a crash, and they danced upon his prostrate form like two butterflies over a cabbage.

      The noise had wakened the other inhabitants of the pension, who came crowding into Sylvia's room; with the rest was Carrier and they managed to extract from her a vague account of what had happened. The aviator, in a rage, demanded an explanation of his conduct from the officer, who called him a maquereau. Carrier was strong; with help from the acrobats he had pushed the officer half-way through the window when Mère Gontran, who, notwithstanding her bedroom being two hundred yards away from the pension, had an uncanny faculty for divining when anything had gone wrong, appeared on the scene. Thirty-five years in Russia had made her very fearful of offending the military, and she implored Carrier and the acrobats to think what they were doing: in her red dressing-gown she looked like an insane cardinal.

      "They'll confiscate my property. They'll send me to Siberia. Treat his Excellency more gently, I beg. Sylvia, tell them to stop. Sylvia, he's going—he's going—he's gone!"

      He was gone indeed, head first into a clump of lilacs underneath the window, whither his tunic and sword followed him.

      The adventure with the drunken officer had exhausted the last forces of Sylvia; she lay back on the bed in a semi-trance, soothed by the unending bibble-babble all round. She was faintly aware of somebody's taking her hand and feeling her pulse, of somebody's saying that her eyes were like a dead woman's, of somebody's throwing a coverlet over her. Then the bibble-babble became much louder; there was a sound of crackling and a smell of smoke, and she heard shouts of "Fire!" "Fire!" "He has set fire to the outhouse!" There was a noise of splashing water, a rushing sound of water, a roar as of a thousand torrents in her head; the people in the room became animated surfaces, cardboard figures without substance and without reality; the devils began once more to sprout from the floor; she felt that she was dying, and in the throes of dissolution she struggled to explain that she must travel back to England, that she must not be buried in Russia. It seemed to her in a new access of semi-consciousness that Carrier and the two acrobats were kneeling by her bed and trying to comfort her, that they were patting her hands kindly and gently. She tried to warn them that they would blister themselves if they touched her, but her tongue seemed to have separated itself from her body. She tried to tell them that her tongue was already dead, and the effort to explain racked her whole body. Then, suddenly, dark and gigantic figures came marching into the room: they must be demons, and it was true about hell. She tried to scream her belief in immortality and to beg a merciful God to show mercy and save her from the Fiend. The somber forms drew near her bed. From an unimaginably distant past she saw framed in fire the picture of The Impenitent Sinner's Deathbed that used to hang in the kitchen at Lille; and again from the past came suddenly back the text of a sermon preached by Dorward at Green Lanes—Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. It seemed to her that if only she could explain to God that her name was really Snow and that Scarlett was only the name assumed for her by her father, all might even now be well. The somber forms had seized her, and she beat against them with unavailing hands; they snatched her from the bed and wrapped her round and round with something that stifled her cries; with her last breath she tried to shriek a warning to Carrier of the existence of hell, to beg him to put away his little red devils lest he, when he should ultimately fall from the sky, should fall as deep as hell.

      Sylvia came out of her delirium to find herself in the ward of a hospital kept by French nuns; she asked what had been the matter with her, and, smiling compassionately, they said it was a bad fever. She lay for a fortnight in a state of utter lassitude, watching the nuns going about their work as she would have watched birds in the cool deeps of a forest. The lassitude was not unpleasant; it was a fatigue so intense that her spirit seemed able to leave her tired body and float about among the shadows of this long room. She knew that there were other patients in the ward, but she had no inclination to know who they were or what they looked like; she had no desire to communicate with the outside world, nor any anxiety about the future. She could not imagine that she should ever wish to do anything except lie here watching the nuns at their work like birds in the cool deeps of a forest. When the doctor visited her and spoke cheerfully, she wondered vaguely how he managed to keep his very long black beard so frizzy, but she was not sufficiently interested to ask him. To his questions about her bodily welfare she let her tired body answer automatically, and often, when the doctor was bending over to listen to her heart or lungs, her spirit would have mounted up to float upon the shadows of sunlight rippling over the ceiling, that he and her body might commune without disturbing herself. At last there came a morning when the body grew impatient at being left behind and when it trembled with a faint desire to follow the spirit. Sylvia raised herself up on her elbow and asked a nun to bring her a looking-glass.

      "But all my hair has been cut!" she exclaimed. She looked at her eyes: there was not much life in them, yet they were larger than she had ever seen them, and she liked them better than before, because they were now very kind eyes: this new Sylvia appealed to her.

      She put the glass down and asked if she had been very ill.

      "Very ill indeed," said the nun.

      Sylvia longed to tell the nun that she must not believe all she had said when she was delirious: and then she wondered what she had said.

      "Was I very violent in my delirium?" she asked.

      The nun smiled.

      "I thought I was in hell," said Sylvia, seriously. "When are my friends coming to see me?"

      The nun looked grave.

      "Your friends have all gone away," she said at last. "They used to come every day to inquire after you, but they went away when war was declared."

      "War?" Sylvia repeated. "Did you say war?"

      The nun nodded.

      "War?" she went on. "This isn't part of my delirium? You're not teasing me? War between whom?"

      "Russia, France, and England are at war with Germany and Austria."

      "Then Carrier has left Petersburg?"

      "Hush," said the nun. "It's no СКАЧАТЬ