"Oh, I don't know. It seems more natural, somehow. I left home over a fellow and went with a musical comedy to Paris. That's how I started touring the continong. Funny you and I should meet like this in Odessa."
"Why?"
"Well, I don't know. We're both English. Talk about the World's End, Chelsea! I wonder what they'd call this? Do you know, Sylvia, I sometimes say to myself—supposing if I was to go back to England and find it didn't really exist any more? I'm a funny girl. I think a lot when I'm by myself, which isn't often, thank God, or I should get the willies worse than what I do. I don't know: when I look round and see that I'm in Odessa, I can't somehow believe that there is such a place as London. Do you know, sometimes I'd go mad to hear a bus-driver call out to a cabby, 'You bloody ——, where the —— hell do you think you're shoving yerself!' Well, after seven years without seeing England, any one does get funny fancies."
"There aren't any cab-drivers now," Sylvia said.
"I suppose that's a fact. Taxis were only just beginning to bob up when I went away. Oh, well, I reckon the language is still just as choice. But I would love to hear it. Of course I might hear you swear in the dressing-room over your corsets or anything, but it's the tone of voice I hanker after. Oh, well, it'll all come out in the wash, and I don't suppose they notice the war much in England. Still, I hope the squareheads won't blow London to pieces. I once did a tour in Germany, and a fellow with a mustache like a flying trapeze wanted to sleep with me for ten marks. They've got nerve enough for anything. What's this word 'boche'? I suppose it's French for rubbish." She began to sing softly:
"Take me back to London Town,
London town, London town!
That's where I want to be,
Where the folks are kind to me.
Trafalgar Square, oh, ain't it grand?
Oxford Street, the dear old Strand!
Anywhere, anywhere, I don't care....
O God, it gives any one the hump to think about it. Fancy England at war. Wonders will never cease. I reckon my brother Alf's well in it. He was never happy without he was fighting somebody."
It was curious, thought Sylvia that evening, as she watched Ruby Arnold singing her four-year-old songs, how even to that cynical, rat-faced little cockney in her red-velvet baby's frock the thought of England at war should bring such a violent longing for home. She tried to become intimate with Ruby; but after that single unfolding of secret aspirations and regrets, she drew away from Sylvia, who asked the reason of her sudden reserve.
"It's not that I don't like you," Ruby explained. "I reckon no girl could want a better pal than you if she was your sort. Only I'm not. I like fellows. You don't. Besides, you're different. I won't say you're a lady, because when all's said and done we're both of us working-girls. But I don't know. Perhaps it's because you're older than me, only somehow you make me feel fidgety. That's flat, as the cook said to the pancake; but you asked me why I was a bit stand-offish and I've got to speak the truth to girls. I should go balmy otherwise with all the lies I tell to men. I reckon you'd get on better with Odette and her Fam dee mond."
Sylvia was vexed by her inability to bridge the gulf between herself and Ruby; it never occurred to her that the fault lay with any one but herself, and she felt humiliated by this failure that was so crushing to her will to love; it seemed absurd that in a few minutes she should have been able to get so much nearer the heart of that Russian soldier who accosted her in Kieff than to one of her own countrywomen.