"You was always dreaming, Sylvia. Happy things cannot come to me so easily as you was thinking."
Since the night of the row at the Trianon Queenie had settled down to a steady despair about the whole of her future, and it was partly Sylvia's powerlessness to restore her to the childish gaiety that was so attractive in one whom she was conscious of protecting which had made her conceive such a distaste for the two towns they had just left. She was beginning, indeed, to doubt if her intervention between Queenie and the life she had been leading was really worth while. She upbraided herself with a poor spirit, with a facile discouragement, with selfishness and want of faith; yet all the way in the train she was on the verge of proposing that they should go back at once to Bucharest and there definitely part company. The dreary country through which they were traveling and the moist heat of the September afternoon created such a desire for England that the thought of remaining five minutes longer in Rumania was becoming intolerable. Sylvia began to make plans to telegraph home for money, and while she pondered these she began to think about Jack and Olive and the twins. Jack, of course, would be a soldier by now; but Olive would be in Warwickshire. Perhaps at this moment she was walking through a leafy path in Arden and wondering what her lost friend was doing. Sylvia tried to conjure familiar English scents—the smell of blue-bells and young leaves, the smell of earth in a London window-box after being watered, and, most wistfully of all, the smell of the seaside on a breathless day of late summer when the sun was raining diamonds into the pale-blue water—that so poignantly English seaside smell of salt sand and pears in paper bags, of muslin frocks and dusty shrubs and warm asphalt. It might be such a day in England now, such a day at Eastbourne or Hastings. The notion of enduring any longer these flat Rumanian fields, this restless and uncertain existence upon the fringe of reality, this pilgrimage in charge of a butterfly that must soon or late be caught, clouded her imagination.
"In seeking to direct Queenie's course I am doing something that is contrary to my dearest theory of behavior. When I met her again at Jassy I was in an abnormal and hysterical condition. The sense of having failed myself led me to seize desperately upon her salvation to justify this long withdrawal from the activity of my own world. This world of gipsies is no longer my world. Why, I believe that the real reason I feel annoyed with Philip is because, having roused in me a sense of my unsuitableness to my present conditions and actions, he does not trouble to understand the effect that talking to him had upon me. Here I am at thirty-two thinking like an exaltée school-girl. Thirty-two! Just when I ought to be making the most tremendous efforts to anchor myself to some stable society that will carry me through the years to come, the years that without intellectual and spiritual pleasures will be nothing but a purgatory for my youth, I find myself more hopelessly adrift than ever before. It will end in my becoming a contemplative nun in one last desperate struggle to avoid futility. It is a tragedy for the man or woman who realizes futility without being able to escape from it. That's where the Middle Ages were wiser than we. Futility was impossible then. That's where we suffer from that ponderous bog of Victorianism. When one pauses to meditate upon the crimes of the Victorian era! And it's impossible not to dread a revival of Victorianism after this war. It's obvious that unless we defeat the Teuton quickly—and there's no sign of it—we shall be Teutonized in order to do it. And then indeed, O grave where is thy victory? Will the Keltic blood in England be enough to save her in ten years' time from a base alliance with these infernal Germans in order that the two stupidest nations in the world may combine to overlay it? Will this war at last bring home to Europe the sin of handing herself over to lawyers? Better the Middle Ages priest-ridden than To-day lawyer-ridden. At least if we are going to pay these rascals who exploit their country, let us have it well exploited. Don't let us call in one political plumber after another whose only object is to muddle the state for his successor to muddle it still more that he may be called in again to muddle it again—and muddle—and muddle eternally! When one reads in the papers the speeches of politicians, of what can one be reminded but of children playing cat's-cradle over the tortured body of their mother? Yet what business have I to be abusing lawyer and politician when I lack the strength of mind to persevere in a task which I set myself with my eyes open? Unless I suffer in achieving it, it will not be worth the achievement. Surely the human soul that has suffered deeply can never again acknowledge futility? O England, perhaps it is a poor little pain to be away from you now, a mean little egotistical ache at the best, but away from you I see your faults so much more clearly and love you for them all the more."
The train entered the station, and Sylvia perceived that there was nothing beautiful about Avereshti in the way she had fancied. Yet she was ashamed now of the temptation to desert Queenie; therefore, though the train was going on to Bucharest, she hurried her out on the platform, and when they reached the Hotel Moldavia she took a room for two weeks, paying for it in advance lest she should be tempted by her disappointment with Avereshti to hurry back to Bucharest again, the inevitable result of which in her present mood would be to abandon her friend.
Avereshti, instead of being situated amid the romantic scenery that one expected from a celebrated summer resort, was surrounded by oil-fields which disfigured still more the flat environment. It was too large for genuine rusticity, too small for its assumption of European civilization, and too commercial for gaiety. Possibly during the season the shareholders and owners of the oil-fields came here to gloat for a week upon the sources of their prosperity; if they did, they had all of them left by the middle of September; the Variétés Alcazar was closed and the playbills were already beginning to peel off the walls. Whatever life there was in Avereshti displayed itself in the Piatza Carol I, the pavement of which was planted with trees clipped out of any capacity to cast a pleasant shade. The Hotel Moldavia, flanked by cafés, occupied one side of it, a row of respectable shops another, a large municipal hall of the crudest Germanic architecture fronted the hotel, and along the remaining side ran a row of market booths, the insult of which to the progress of Avereshti was greatly resented by the inhabitants and always apologized for and explained in the first few minutes of conversation.
The appearance of Sylvia and Queenie in this square on the morning after their arrival created an interest that soon developed into a pertinacious and disconcerting curiosity. If they entered a shop to make some small purchases, a crowd gathered outside and followed them to the next shop, and finally became such a nuisance that they retired to the balcony outside their room—a long wooded balcony of a faded tint of green—and watched the populace gathering to stare at them from below. When the sun became too hot for this entertainment, they took refuge in the big bedroom which had the unusual merit of being free from bugs. Queenie dreamed away the morning with her lithographs; Sylvia read War and Peace. Late in the afternoon they went out again on the balcony and were amused to see that the frequenters of the cafés on either side of the hotel had moved their chairs hornwise far enough out into the square to obtain a view of their movements. Sylvia suggested to the waiter that they should give a musical performance from the balcony, but he replied, quite seriously, that it was not strong enough: otherwise, he left them to understand, there would have been no objection.
"Yet really, after all, it's not so bad here," Sylvia declared. "We'll stay a few days, and then I'll go into Bucharest and prospect. Perhaps Zozo will be gone by now."
Avereshti possessed, at any rate, the charm of making one feel lazy; to feel lazy and to be able to gratify one's laziness was, after nearly a year of ceaseless work, pleasant enough. On the third afternoon the waiter came up with six visiting-cards from local gentlemen who desired their acquaintance. Sylvia told him that they were not anxious to make any friends; he smiled and indicated two names as those that would best repay their choice.
"We wish to be left quite alone," Sylvia repeated, irritably.
"Then why do you walk about on the balcony?" the waiter asked.