"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."
"She and her lady friends," Ruby muttered, contemptuously to Sylvia. "If you ask me, these French girls don't know a lady when they see one. She had the nerve to bring her in here to tea one day, an old crow with a bonnet that looked as if a dog had worried it. She's bound to ask you to meet her. She can't talk of anything else since she met her in a tram."
"Well, how's the war getting on? What do they say about it now?" asked a dancer called Flora, flashing a malicious glance at her partner, a young Belgian of about twenty-five with a pale and unpleasantly debauched face, who glared angrily in response. "Armand cannot suffer us to talk about the war," she explained to Sylvia.