Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia ScarlettMacKenzie, Compton
General
Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett
MacKenzie, Compton
Fiction
Sylvia promised that she would do all she could to achieve Queenie's
purpose.
"Tell me, why did you call yourself Queenie Walters?" she asked.
"Because the girl who was my sister in England had once a real little
baby sister who was called Queenie. Oh, dead long ago, long ago! Her
mother, who I was calling _my_ mother, told me about this baby Queenie.
So I was Queenie Walters and my sister was Elsie Walters."
"And your real brother Francesco?" Sylvia asked. "Did you ever see him
again?"
That dreamlike and inexplicable meeting between the brother and the
sister in the streets of Milan had always remained in Sylvia's memory.
"No, never yet again. But I am so sure he is being in England and that
when we go there we will find him. And if he is English, too, what fun
we will have."
Sylvia looked at these two companions who had both assumed English
names. Not even the cold and merciless gray light of the Rumanian
morning could destroy Queenie's unearthly charm, and the longer she
looked at her the more like an Undine she thought her. Her eyes were
ageless, limpid as a child's; and that her experience of evil should
have left no sign of its habitation Sylvia was tempted to ascribe to the
absence of a soul for evil to mar. The only indication that she was six
years older than when they met in Granada was her added gracefulness of
movement, the impulsive gracefulness of a gazelle rather than that
serene gracefulness of a cat which had been Lily's beauty. Her hair, of
a natural pale gold, had not been dimmed by the fumes of cabarets, and
even now, all tangled after a night in the train, it had a look of
hovering in this railway carriage like a wintry sunbeam. In the other
corner sat Lottie, snoring with wide-open mouth, whose body, relaxed in
sleep, seemed fatter than ever. She, too, had suffered, perhaps more
deeply than Queenie, certainly more markedly; and now in dreams what
fierce Bohemian passions were aroused in the vast airs of sleep, what
dark revenges of the spirit for the insults that grotesque body must
always endure?
At this point in Sylvia's contemplation Lottie woke up and prepared for
the arrival of the train at Bucharest by making her toilet.
"Where's the best place to stay?" Sylvia inquired.
"Well, the best place to stay is in some hotel," Lottie replied. "But
the hotels are so horribly expensive. Of course, there are plenty of
pensions d'artistes_, and--" she broke off and looked at Sylvia_
curiously, who asked her why she did so.
"I was thinking that it's a pity you can't share a room together," she
said after a momentary hesitation.
"So we can," Sylvia answered, sharply.
"Well, in that case I should go to a small hotel," Lottie advised.
"Because all the _pensions_ here are run by old thieves. There's Mère
Valérie--she's French and almost the worst of the lot--and there's one
kept by a Greek who's not so bad, but they say most of her bedrooms have
bugs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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