Compton MacKenzie

“ Sylvia, I am filled with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is fighting with you, do not remember the tawdry side of her, but think of us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If—and God forbid that you should read this—if you read that Rumania is fighting against you, think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall very early upon a Russian bayonet. ”

“ The nun regarded Sylvia in perplexity.
"Have you thanked Almighty God for your recovery?" she asked.
"No, of course I haven't. I can't thank somebody I know nothing about," said Sylvia impatiently. "Besides, it's no good thanking God for my recovery unless I am sure I ought to be grateful. Mere living for the sake of living seems to me as sensual as any other appetite. Sister, can't you give me the key to life?"
The nun sheltered herself beneath an array of pious phrases; she was like a person who has been surprised naked and hurriedly flings on all the clothes in reach. ”

“ Mère Gontran, candle in hand, towered up above her with such a dominating excitement that Sylvia let herself be over-persuaded and followed her out into the garden. From what had formerly been Carrier's room the owls hooted at the moon; Samuel, the talking collie, was baying dolefully; the snowfall, too light to give to the nocturnal landscape a pure and crystalline beauty, was enough to destroy the familiar aspect of the scene and to infect it with a withered papery look, turning house and garden to the color of dry bones. ”

“ The dark, blue wavy line of Imbros and the dove-gray bulk of Lemnos were the only islands in sight, though, like lines of cloud upon the horizon, they could fancy the cliffs of Gallipoli and hear, so breathless was the calm, the faint grumbling of the guns.
"It was in Samothrace they set up the Winged Victory," Michael said. Then suddenly he turned to Sylvia and took her hand. "My dear, when I dragged you up the beach yesterday I thought you were dead, and I cursed myself for a coward because I had let you die without telling you. Sylvia, this adventure of ours, need it ever stop?" ”

“ Queenie got off the bed and hurried away, leaving Sylvia in a state of bewilderment before the magnitude of the responsibility that she represented.
"It's like giving birth to a grown-up baby," she said to herself; on a sudden irresistible impulse, she knelt down upon the floor and began to pray, with that most intense prayer of which a human being is capable, that prayer which transcends all words, all space, all time, all thought, that prayer which substitutes itself for the poor creature who makes it. ”

“ Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.
"What is attraction?" she asked herself. "It exists, and there's an end of it. I had the same sense of intimacy with his sister in a conversation of five minutes. Then am I in love with him? But isn't being in love a condition that is brought about by circumstances out of attraction? Being in love is merely the best way of illustrating affinity. Ah, that word! When a woman of thirty-two begins to talk about affinities, she has performed half her emotional voyage; the sunken rocks and eddies of the dangerous age may no longer be disregarded. ”

“ Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable desires."
Sylvia passed away the supperless evening for Queenie by telling her stories about her own childhood, trying to instil into her some apprehension of the continuity of existence, trying to populate the great voids stretching between her thoughts that so terrified her with the idea of being lost. ”

“ All the time that Madame Corvelis was talking, Odette was asking Sylvia in an unbroken whisper if she did not think that madame was charmante, aimable, gentille, and every other gracious thing she could be.
"Have you ever been to Constantinople? Have you ever seen the Bosphorus?" Madame Corvelis went on, turning to Sylvia. "What, you've never seen the most enchanting city in the world? Oh, but you must! Not now, of course. The war! It robs us all of something. Don't, please don't think that Odessa resembles Constantinople." ”

“ Faith, like any other gift-horse, must not be looked in the mouth; pride had robbed her long enough, and for a change she would try humility.
When she made this decision, it seemed to Sylvia that what had formerly been evil and terrifying in the inanimate objects of her candle-lit room now lost their menacing aspect and wished her well. Suddenly she accused herself of the most outrageous pride in having all this time thought of nothing but herself, whose misery amid the universal havoc was indeed only the twittering of a sparrow. An apocalypse of the world's despair blazed upon her. ”

“ She remembered how she had told Michael's sister the secret of her love for him, and the thought of meeting her again in England became intolerable. She had a mad fancy to kill the other woman and to take her place in this wild band beside Rakoff, to seize her by those tight flaxen plaits and hold her face downward on the table, while she stabbed her and stabbed her again. Only by such a duel could she assert her own personality, rescuing it from the ignominy of the present and the greater ignominy of the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He talked of his acres of roses, of the scent of them in the early morning, of the color of them at noon, and gave Sylvia a small bottle of attar that drenched with its stored-up sweetness even the smell of the massed soldiery. Sylvia, in her turn, talked to him of her life on the stage, described her success in London, and even confided in him her reason for abandoning it all.
"One has these impulses," he agreed. "But it is better not to give way to them. That is the advantage of my life as a rose-grower. There is always something to do. It is a tranquil and beautiful existence. ”

“ I should like to invite them both to tea again chez Eliane. If only the other girls were like you! And last time I put too much sugar in her tea! Non, je n'ose pas! One sees the opportunity to raise oneself, but one does not dare grasp it. C'est la vie," she sighed.
Moved by the vision of herself thwarted from advancing any higher, Odette poured out to Sylvia the story of her life—a sad, squalid story, lit up here and there by the flashes of melodramatic events and culminating in the revelation of this paradise that was denied her. ”

“ We worship kings in England, I admit, but only snobbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our most exalted snobs dream of paying divine honors to kingship; we are too much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to an inherited consciousness of Cæsarian excesses."
"And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia.
"Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers—a cocotte with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment. Austria! ”

“ To what old age will this blackened, mutilated, and agonized generation grow? Efficiency and progress have not spared the monuments of bygone art except to imprison them in libraries, museums, and iron railings. Will it spare the Englishman? Or will the generations of a century hence read of him only, and murmur, 'This was a Man'? Will they praise him as the last and noblest individual, turning with repulsion and remorse from the sight of themselves and their fellows, the product of the triumphant herd eternally sowing where it does not reap? ”

“ Who could wish to be reminded of Sylvia Scarlett at such a moment? Besides, if this determination of hers to begin her life over again was to be made effective, Sylvia Scarlett must preserve this isolation and accept it as the grace of God. How what had once been phrases were now endowed with life! Any communication between her and the people she had known would be like communication between Gontran and his wife; it would be the stammering of spiritualism comparable with that absurd Dick gathering his daisies in the Elysian Fields. ”