The garden, with its rank autumnal growth, was more like a jungle than ever; the unpopulous house reasserted its very self, and there was not a crack in the stucco nor a broken tile nor a warped plank that did not now maintain a haunting significance. The Tartar servant with her unintelligible mutterings, her head and face muffled in a stained green scarf, her bent form, her feet in pattens clapping like hoofs, the animals that sniffed at her heels, and her sleeping-cupboard beneath the stairs heaped with faded rags, seemed an incarnation of the house's reality. For a moment, when Sylvia was making signs to her that she should fetch her mistress from where, buried in docks and nettles, she was performing one of her queer, solitary operations of horticulture, she was inclined to turn round and search anywhere else in Petrograd for a lodging rather than expose herself to the nighttime here. But the consciousness of her uncertain position soon scattered such fancies, and she decided that the worst of them would not be so unpleasant as to find herself at the mercy of the material horrors of a fourth-rate hotel while she was waiting for vigor to resume work: at any rate, Mère Gontran was kind-hearted and English. As Sylvia reached this conclusion, the mistress of the pension, followed by two cats, a hen, two pigeons, a goat, and a dog, came to greet her; putting the table-fork with which she had been gardening into the pocket of her overall, she warmly embraced Sylvia, which was like being flicked on the cheek by a bramble when driving.
"Why, Sylvia, I am glad to see you again. Everybody's gone. Everything's closed. No more vodka allowed to be sold in public, though, of course, it can always be got. The war's upon us, and I'm sowing turnips under Jupiter in case we starve. All your things are quite safe. Your room hasn't been touched since you left it. I'll tell Anna to make your bed."
Anna was not the maid-servant's real name; but one of Mère Gontran's peculiarities was, that though she could provide an individual name for every bird or beast in the place without using the same one twice, all her servants had to be called Anna in memory of her first cook of thirty years ago—a repetition that could hardly have been due to sentiment, because the first Anna, when she ran away to be married, took with her as much of her mistress's plate as she could carry.
"Hasn't my bed been made all these weeks?" Sylvia asked, with a smile.
"Why should it have been made?" Mère Gontran replied. "There hasn't been a single new-comer since you were taken off in the ambulance."
Sylvia asked if the drunken officer had done much damage.
"Oh no; it was quite easy to extinguish the fire. He burned half the tool-shed and frightened the guinea-pigs; that was all. I was quite relieved when war was declared, because otherwise the police would probably have taken away my license; but there again, if they had taken it away, it wouldn't have mattered much, for I haven't had any lodgers since; but there again I've been able to use Carrier's room for the owls, and they're much happier in a nice room than they were nailed up to the side of the house in a packing-case. If you hear them hooting in the night, don't be frightened: you must remember that owls, being night birds, can't be expected to keep quiet in the night, and when they hoot it shows they're feeling at home."
"There's nothing in the acrobats' room?" Sylvia asked, anxiously; the partition between her and them had been thin.
"Such a reek of scent," Mère Gontran exclaimed. "Phewff! Benjamin went in after they'd gone, and he regularly shuddered. Cats are very sensitive to perfumes, as no doubt you've observed."
"Mère Gontran," Sylvia began. "I want to explain my position."