SIR,—I have the honor to ask if, in the probable event of a great dynastic change taking place in one of the chief countries of Europe, you would welcome the post of court painter, naturally at a suitable remuneration. If you read the daily papers, as no doubt you do, you will certainly have come to the conclusion that neither the present ruling house nor what is known as the Carlist party had any real hold upon the affections of the Spanish people. Verb. sap. Interesting changes may be foreshadowed, of which I am not yet at liberty to write more fully. Should you entertain the proposal I shall be happy to wait upon you with further particulars.I have the honor to be, sir,Your obedient servant,JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,PRINCE DECONDÉ.
SIR,—I have the honor to ask if, in the probable event of a great dynastic change taking place in one of the chief countries of Europe, you would welcome the post of court painter, naturally at a suitable remuneration. If you read the daily papers, as no doubt you do, you will certainly have come to the conclusion that neither the present ruling house nor what is known as the Carlist party had any real hold upon the affections of the Spanish people. Verb. sap. Interesting changes may be foreshadowed, of which I am not yet at liberty to write more fully. Should you entertain the proposal I shall be happy to wait upon you with further particulars.
I have the honor to be, sir,Your obedient servant,JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,PRINCE DECONDÉ.
“Do you know what it sounds like?” said Henry. “Mind I’m not saying this because I didn’t write the letter myself. It sounds to me like a cross between a prophecy in Old Moore’s Almanack and somebody trying to sell a patent knife-cleaner.”
“There’s a good deal in what you say,” Monkley agreed, in rather a dissatisfied tone.
Henry was so much flattered by the reception of his criticism that he became compassionate to the faults of the letter and tried hard to point out some of its merits.
“After all,” said Jimmy, “the great thing is that the prince has signed it. If his name doesn’t draw Master Godfrey, no letters are going to. We’ll send it off as it is.”
So the letter was sent. Two days afterward the prince arrived with the news that Godfrey Hurndale had called upon him and that he had been inexpressibly happy at the prospect of meeting thede jureKing of France and Spain.
“Bring him round to-morrow afternoon about tea-time,” said Monkley. “You haven’t forgotten the family history, Henry?”
Henry said that he had not forgotten a single relation, and that he damned them severally each morning in all their titles while he was dressing.
The next afternoon Sylvia sat in an arm-chair in the presence-room, which Henry supposed was so called because none of the furniture had been paid for, and waited for Godfrey Hurndale’s coming. Her father put on the rusty black evening-dress of the family retainer, and Jimmy wore a most conspicuous check suit and talked so loudly and nasally that Henry was driven to a final protest:
“Look here, Jimmy, I’ve dressed up to help this show in a suit that’s as old as one of those infernal ancestors of Sil’s, but if you don’t get less American it’ll fall to pieces. Every time you guess I can hear a seam give.”
“Remember to talk nothing but French,” Monkley warned Sylvia, when the bell rang. “Go on, Harry. You’ve got to open the door. And don’t forget thatyoucan only speak French.”
Monkley followed him out of the room, and his voice could be heard clanking about the hall as he invited young Hurndale into the dining-room first. Henry came back and took up his position behind Sylvia’s chair; she felt very solemn and excited, and asked her father rather irritably why he was muttering. The reason, however,remained a mystery, for the dining-room door opened again and, heralded by Monkley’s twanging invitation, Mr. Hurndale stood shyly in the entrance to the presence-room.
“Go right in, Mr. Hurndale,” Monkley said. “I guess his Majesty’s just about ready to meet you.”
Sylvia, when she saw the young man bowing before her, really felt a kind of royal exaltation and held out her hand to be kissed.
Hurndale reverently bent over it and touched it with his lips; so did the prince, an action for which Sylvia was unprepared and which she rather resented, thinking to herself that he really did not shave and that it had not only been his grubby appearance. Then Hurndale offered her a large bunch of white carnations and she became kingly again.
“François,” she commanded her father, “mets ces œillets dans ma chambre.”
And when her father passed out with a bow Sylvia was indeed a king. The audience did not last long. There were practical matters to discuss, for which his Majesty was begged to excuse their withdrawal. Sylvia would have liked a longer ceremony. When the visitor had gone they all sat down to a big tea in the presence-room, and she was told that the young man had been so completely conquered by her gracious reception of him that he had promised to raise five hundred pounds for her cause. His reward in addition to royal favors was to be a high class of the Order of Isabella the Catholic. Everybody, even Henry, was in high good humor. The prince did not come to Streatham again; but a week later Monkley got a letter from him with the Paris postmark.
DEAR MR. MONKLEY,—Our young friend handed me a check for £200 the day before yesterday. As he seemed uncertain about the remainder of the sum promised, I took the liberty of drawing my share at once. My great work requires immediate assistance, and I am now busily occupied in Paris. My next address will be a castle in Spain, where perhaps we shall meet when you are looking for your next site.Most truly yours,JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,PRINCE DECONDÉ.
DEAR MR. MONKLEY,—Our young friend handed me a check for £200 the day before yesterday. As he seemed uncertain about the remainder of the sum promised, I took the liberty of drawing my share at once. My great work requires immediate assistance, and I am now busily occupied in Paris. My next address will be a castle in Spain, where perhaps we shall meet when you are looking for your next site.
Most truly yours,JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,PRINCE DECONDÉ.
Jimmy and Henry stared at each other.
“I knew it,” said Henry. “I’m always wrong; but I knew it. Still, if I could catch him, it would take more than Condy’s Fluid to disinfect that pea-green welsher after I’d done with him.”
Monkley sat biting his lips in silence; and Sylvia, recognizing the expression in his eyes that she dreaded formerly, notwithstanding that he was now her best friend, felt sharply her old repugnance for him. Henry was still abusing the defaulter when Monkley cut him short.
“Shut up. I rather admire him.”
“Admire him?” Henry gasped. “I suppose you’d admire the hangman and shake hands with him on the scaffold. It’s all very fine for you. You didn’t have to learn how Ferdinand the Fifty-eighth married Isabella the Innocent, daughter of Alphonso the Eighth, commonly called Alphonso the Anxious. Condy’s Fluid! I swallowed enough of it, I can tell you.”
Monkley told him gruffly to keep quiet; then he sat down and began to write, still with that expression in his eyes. Presently he tore up the letter and paced the room.
“Damn that swine,” he suddenly shouted, kicking the spindle-legged table into the fireplace. “We wanted the money, you know. We wanted the money badly.”
Shortly before dawn the three of them abandoned the new house in Streatham and occupied rooms in the Kennington Park Road. Monkley and Sylvia’s father resumed the racing that had temporarily been interrupted by ambition. Sylvia wandered about the streets in a suit of Etons that was rapidly showing signs of wear.
One day early in the new year Sylvia was leaning over the parapet of Waterloo Bridge and munching hot chestnuts. The warmth of them in her pockets was grateful. Her pastime of dropping the shells into the river did not lack interest; she was vaguely conscious in the frosty sunshine of life’s bounty, and she offered to the future a welcome from the depths of her being; meanwhile there still remained forty chestnuts to be eaten.
Her meditation was interrupted by a voice from a passerby who had detached himself from the stream of trafficthat she had been disregarding in her pensive greed; she looked up and met the glance of a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in a dark-gray coat with collar and cuffs of chinchilla, who was evidently anxious to begin a conversation.
“You’re out of school early,” he observed.
Sylvia replied that she did not go to school.
“Private tutor?” he asked; and, partly to save further questions about her education, partly because she was not quite sure what a private tutor was, she answered in the affirmative.
The stranger looked along the parapet inquisitively.
“I’m out alone this afternoon,” Sylvia said, quickly.
The stranger asked her what amused her most, museums or theaters or listening to bands, and whether she preferred games or country walks. Sylvia would have liked to tell him that she preferred eating chestnuts to anything else on earth at that moment; but, being unwilling to create an impression of trying to snub such a benevolent person, she replied vaguely that she did not know what she liked best. Then because such an answer seemed to imply a lack of intelligence that she did not wish to impute to herself, she informed him that she liked looking at people, which was strictly true, for if she had not been eating chestnuts she would certainly have still been contemplating the traffic across the bridge.
“I’ll show you some interesting people, if you care to come with me,” the stranger proposed. “Have you anything to do this afternoon?”
Sylvia admitted that her time was unoccupied.
“Come along, then,” said the middle-aged gentleman, a little fussily, she thought, and forthwith he hailed a passing hansom. Sylvia had for a long time been ambitious to travel in a hansom. She had already eaten thirty-five chestnuts, only seven of which had been bad; she decided to accept the stranger’s invitation. He asked her where she lived and promised to send her home by cab when the entertainment was over.
Sylvia asked if it was a reception to which he was taking her. The middle-aged gentleman laughed, squeezed her hand, and said that it might be called a reception, adding,with a chuckle, “a very warm reception, in fact.” Sylvia did not understand the joke, but laughed out of politeness.
There followed an exchange of names, and Sylvia learnt that her new acquaintance was called Corydon.
“You’ll excuse me from offering you one of my cards,” he said. “I haven’t one with me this afternoon.”
They drove along for some time, during which the conversation of Mr. Corydon always pursued the subject of her likes and dislikes. They drew clear of the press of traffic and bowled westward toward Sloane Street; Sylvia, recognizing one of the blue West Kensington omnibuses, began to wonder if the cab would take her past Lillie Road where Jimmy had specially forbidden her to go, because both he and her father owed several weeks’ rent to Mrs. Meares and he did not want to remind her of their existence. When they drew nearer and nearer to Sylvia’s former lodging she began to feel rather uneasy and wish that the cab would turn down a side-street. The landmarks were becoming more and more familiar, and Sylvia was asking herself if Mrs. Meares had employed the stranger to kidnap her as a hostage for the unpaid rent, when the cab turned off into Redcliffe Gardens and soon afterward pulled up at a house.
“Here we are,” said Mr. Corydon. “You’ll enjoy yourself most tremendously, Sylvester.”
The door was opened by a servant, who was apparently dressed as a brigand, which puzzled Sylvia so much that she asked the reason in a whisper. Mr. Corydon laughed.
“He’s a Venetian. That’s the costume of a gondolier, my dear boy. My friend who is giving the reception dresses all his servants like gondoliers. So much more picturesque than a horrible housemaid.”
Sylvia regarded this exotic Clara with considerable interest; the only other Venetian product of which she had hitherto been aware was blinds.
The house, which smelt strongly of incense and watered flowers, awed Sylvia with its luxury, and she began to regret having put foot in a place where it was so difficult to know on what she was intended to tread. However, since Mr. Corydon seemed to walk everywhere without regardfor the softness of the carpets, Sylvia made up her mind to brave the silent criticism of the gondolier and follow up-stairs in his footsteps. Mr. Corydon took her arm and introduced her to a large room where a fume of cigarette smoke and incense blurred the outlines of the numerous guests that sat about in listening groups, while some one played the grand piano. There were many low divans round the room, to one of which Mr. Corydon guided Sylvia, and while the music continued she had an opportunity of studying her fellow-guests. They were mostly young men of about eighteen, rather like the young men at the Emperor’s reception; but there were also several middle-aged men of the same type as Mr. Corydon, one of whom came across and shook hands with them both when the music stopped.
“So glad you’ve come to see me,” he said in a voice that sounded as if each word were being delicately fried upon his tongue. “Aren’t you going to smoke a cigarette? These are Russian. Aren’t they beautiful to look at?”
He proffered a green cigarette-case. Sylvia, who felt that she must take advantage of this opportunity to learn something about a sphere of life which was new to her, asked him what it was made of.
“Jade, my dear. I brought such heaps of beautiful jade back with me from China. I’ve even got a jade toilet-set. My dear, it was dreadfully expensive.”
He giggled. Sylvia, blowing clouds of smoke from her cigarette, thought dreamily what funny things her father would have said about him.
“Raymond’s going to dance for us,” he said, turning to Corydon. “Isn’t it too sweet of him?”
At that moment somebody leaped into the middle of the room with a wild scream and began to throw himself into all sorts of extraordinary attitudes.
“Oh, Raymond, you’re too wonderful!” the host ejaculated. “You make me feel quite Bacchic.”
Sylvia was not surprised that anybody should feel “backache” (she had thus understood her host) in the presence of such contortions. The screaming Raymond was followed into the arena by another lightly clad and equally shrill youth called Sydney, and both of them flungthemselves into a choric frenzy, chasing each other round and round, sawing the air with their legs, and tearing roses from their hair to fling at the guests, who flung them back at the dancers. Suddenly Raymond collapsed upon the carpet and began to moan.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” cried the host, rushing forward and kneeling to support the apparently agonized youth in his arms.
“Oh, my foot!” Raymond wailed. “I’ve trodden on something.”
“He’s trodden on a thorn. He’s trodden on a thorn,” everybody said at once.
Raymond was borne tenderly to a divan, and was so much petted that Sydney became jealous and began to dance again, this time on the top of the piano. Presently everybody else began to dance, and Mr. Corydon would have liked to dance with Sylvia; but she declined. Gondoliers entered with trays of liqueurs, and Sylvia, tasting crème de menthe for the first time, found it so good that she drank four glasses, which made her feel rather drowsy. New guests were continually arriving, to whom she did not pay much attention until suddenly she recognized the baron with Godfrey Hurndale, who at the same moment recognized her. The baron rushed forward and seized Sylvia’s arm. She thought he was going to drag her back by force to Mrs. Meares to answer for the missing rent, but he began to arch his unoccupied arm like an excited swan, and call out in his high, mincing voice:
“Blackmailers-s-s! blackmailers-s-s!”
“They blackmailed me out of four hundred pounds,” said Hurndale.
“Who brought him here?” the baron cried. “It’s-s-s true. Godfrey has been persecuted by these horrid people. Blackmailers-s-s!”
All the other guests gathered round Sylvia and behaved like angry women trying to mount an omnibus. Mr. Corydon had turned very pale and was counting his visiting-cards. Sylvia could not understand the reason for all this noise; but vaguely through a green mist of crème de menthe she understood that she was being attacked on all sides and began to get annoyed. Somebody pinched herarm, and without waiting to see who it was she hit the nearest person within reach, who happened to be Mr. Corydon. His visiting-cards fell on the floor, and he groveled on the carpet trying to sweep them together. Sylvia followed her attack on Mr. Corydon by treading hard on Sydney’s bare toes, who thereupon slapped her face; presently everybody was pushing her and pinching her and hustling her, until she got in such a rage and kicked so furiously that her enemies retired.
“Who brought him here?” Godfrey Hurndale was demanding. “I tell you he belongs to a gang of blackmailers.”
“Most dreadful people,” the baron echoed.
“Antonio! Domenico!” the host cried.
Two gondoliers entered the room, and at a word from their master they seized Sylvia and pushed her out into the street, flinging her coat and cap after her. By this time she was in a blind fury, and, snatching the bag of chestnuts from her pocket, she flung it with all her force at the nearest window and knew the divine relief of starring the pane.
An old lady that was passing stopped and held up her hands.
“You wicked young rascal, I shall tell the policeman of you,” she gasped, and began to belabor Sylvia with her umbrella.
Such unwarrantable interference was not to be tolerated; Sylvia pushed the old lady so hard that she sat down heavily in the gutter. Nobody else was in sight, and she ran as fast as she could until she found an omnibus, in which she traveled to Waterloo Bridge. There she bought fifty more chestnuts and walked slowly back to Kennington Park Road, vainly trying to find an explanation of the afternoon’s adventure.
Her father and Monkley were not back when Sylvia reached home, and she sat by the fire in the twilight, munching her chestnuts and pondering the whole extraordinary business. When the others came in she told her story, and Jimmy looked meaningly at her father.
“Shows how careful you ought to be,” he said. Thenturning to Sylvia, he asked her what on earth she thought she was doing when she broke the window.
“Suppose you’d been collared by the police, you little fool. We should have got into a nice mess, thanks to you. Look here, in future you’re not to speak to people in the street. Do you hear?”
Sylvia had no chestnuts left to throw at Jimmy, so in her rage she took an ornament from the mantelpiece and smashed it on the fender.
“You’ve got the breaking mania,” said Henry. “You’d better spend the next money you’ve got on cocoanuts instead of chestnuts.”
“Oh, ta gueule!I’m not going to be a boy any longer.”
WHILE her hair was growing long again Sylvia developed a taste for reading. She had nothing else to do, for it was not to be supposed that with her head cropped close she could show herself to the world in petticoats. Her refusal any longer to wear male attire gave Monkley and her father an excuse to make one of their hurried moves from Kennington Park Road, where by this time they owed enough money to justify the trouble of evading payment. Henry had for some time expressed a desire to be more central; and a partially furnished top floor was found in Fitzroy Street, or, as the landlord preferred to call it, a self-contained and well-appointed flat. The top floor had certainly been separated from the rest of the house by a wooden partition and a door of its own, which possibly justified the first half of the description, but the good appointments were limited to a bath that looked like an old palette, and a geyser that was not always safe according to Mrs. Bullwinkle, a decrepit charwoman, left behind by the last tenants, together with some under-linen and two jars containing a morbid growth that may formerly have been pickles.
“How d’ye mean, not safe?” Henry asked. “Is it liable to blow up?”
“It went off with a big bang last April and hasn’t been lit since,” the charwoman said. “But perhaps it ’ll be all right now. The worst of it is I never can remember which tap you put the match to.”
“You leave it alone, old lady,” Henry advised. “Nobody’s likely to do much bathing in here; from what I can see of it that bath gives more than it gets. What did the last people use it for—growing watercress or keeping chickens?”
“It was a very nice bath once,” the charwoman said.
“Do you mean to say you’ve ever tried it? Go on! You’re mixing it up with the font in which you were baptized. There’s never been any water in this bath since the flood.”
Nevertheless, however inadequately appointed, the new abode had one great advantage over any other they had known, which was a large raftered garret with windows at either end that ran the whole depth of the house. The windows at the back opened on a limitless expanse of roofs and chimneys, those in front looked across to a dancing-academy on the top floor but one of the house opposite, a view that gave perpetual pleasure to Sylvia during the long period of her seclusion.
Now that Sylvia had become herself again, her father and Monkley insisted upon her doing the housework, which, as Henry reminded her, she was perfectly able to do on account of the excellent training she had received in that respect from her mother. Sylvia perceived the logic of this and made no attempt to contest it; though she stipulated that Mrs. Bullwinkle should not be considered to be helping her.
“We don’t want her,” Henry protested, indignantly.
“Well, tell her not to come any more,” Sylvia said.
“I’ve shoved her away once or twice,” said Henry. “But I expect the people here before us used to give her a saucer of milk sometimes. The best way would be to go out one afternoon and tell her to light the geyser. Then perhaps when we came back she’d be gone for good.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Bullwinkle was of some service to Sylvia, for one day, when she was sadly washing down the main staircase of the house, she looked up from her handiwork and asked Sylvia, who was passing at the moment, if she would like some books to read, inviting her down-stairs to take her choice.
“Mr. Bullwinkle used to be a big reader,” the charwoman said. “A very big reader. A very big reader indeed he used to be, did Mr. Bullwinkle. In those days he was caretaker at a Congregational chapel in Gospel Oak, and he used to say that reading took his mind off of religion a bit. Otherwise he’d have gone mad before he did, which was shortly after he left the chapel through an argumenthe had with Pastor Phillips, who wrote his name in the dust on the reading-desk, which upset my old man, because he thought it wasn’t all a straightforward way of telling him that his services wasn’t considered satisfactory. Yes,” said Mrs. Bullwinkle, with a stertorous sniff, “he died in Bedlam, did my old man. He had a very queer mania; he thought he was inside out, and it preyed on his mind. He wouldn’t never have been shut up at all if he hadn’t of always been undressing himself in the street and putting on his trousers inside out to suit his complaint. They had to feed him with a chube in the end, because he would have it his mouth couldn’t be got at through him being inside out. Queer fancies some people has, don’t they? Oh, well, if we was all the same, it would be a dull world I suppose.”
Sylvia sat up in the big garret and read through one after another of the late Mr. Bullwinkle’s tattered and heterogeneous collection. She did not understand all she read; but there were few books that did not give her on one page a vivid impression, which she used to elaborate with her imagination into something that was really a more substantial experience than the book itself. The days grew longer and more sunny, and Sylvia dreamed them away, reading and thinking and watching from her window the little girls pirouette in the shadowy room opposite. Her hair was quite long now, a warm brown with many glinting strands.
In the summer Jimmy and Henry made a good deal of money by selling a number of tickets for a non-existent stand in one of the best positions on the route of the Diamond Jubilee procession; indeed they felt prosperous enough to buy for themselves and Sylvia seats in a genuine stand. Sylvia enjoyed the pageant, which seemed more like something out of a book than anything in real life. She took advantage of the temporary prosperity to ask for money to buy herself new clothes.
“Can’t you see other people dressed up without wanting to go and do the same yourself?” Henry asked. “What’s the matter with the frock you’ve got on?”
However, she talked to Monkley about it and had her own way. When she had new clothes, she used to walkabout the streets again, but, though she was often accosted, she would never talk to anybody. Yet it was a dull life, really, and once she brought up the subject of getting work.
“Work!” her father exclaimed, in horror. “Good heavens! what will you think of next? First it’s clothes. Now it’s work. Ah, my dear girl, you ought to have had to slave for your living as I had; you wouldn’t talk about work.”
“Well, can I have a piano and learn to play?” Sylvia asked.
“Perhaps you’d like the band of the Grenadier Guards to come and serenade you in your bedroom while you’re dressing?” Henry suggested.
“Why shouldn’t she have a piano?” Monkley asked. “I’ll teach her to play. Besides, I’d like a piano myself.”
So the piano was obtained. Sylvia learned to play, and even to sing a little with her deep voice; and another regular caller for money was added to the already long list.
In the autumn Sylvia’s father fell in love, and brought a woman to live in what was henceforth always called the flat, even by Henry, who had hitherto generally referred to it as The Hammam.
In Sylvia’s opinion the advent of Mabel Bannerman had a most vitiating effect upon life in Fitzroy Street. Her father began to deteriorate immediately. His return to England and the unsurveyed life he had been leading for nearly two years had produced an expansion of his personality in every direction. He had lost the shiftless insignificance that had been his chief characteristic in France, and though he was still weak and lacking in any kind of initiative, he had acquired a quaintness of outlook and faculty for expressing it which disguised his radical futility under a veil of humor. He was always dominated by Monkley in practical matters where subordination was reasonable and beneficial, but he had been allowed to preserve his own point of view, that with the progress of time had even come to be regarded as important. When Sylvia was much younger she had always criticized her father’s behavior; but, like everybody else, she had accepted hermother’s leadership of the house and family as natural and inevitable, and had regarded her father as a kind of spoiled elder brother whose character was fundamentally worthless and whose relation to her mother was the only one imaginable. Now that Sylvia was older, she did not merely despise her father’s weakness; she resented the shameful position which he occupied in relation to this intruder. Mabel Bannerman belonged to that full-blown intensely feminine type that by sheer excess of femininity imposes itself upon a weak man, smothering him, as it were, with her emotions and her lace, and destroying by sensuality every trait of manhood that does not directly contribute to the justification of herself. Within a week or two Henry stood for no more in the Fitzroy Street house than a dog that is alternately patted and scolded, that licks the hand of its mistress more abjectly for each new brutality, and that asks as its supreme reward permission to fawn upon her lap. Sylvia hated Mabel Bannerman; she hated her peroxide hair, she hated her full, moist lips, she hated her rounded back and her shining finger-nails spotted with white, she hated with a hatred so deep as to be forever incommunicable each blowsy charm that went to make up what was called “a fine woman”; she hated her inability ever to speak the truth; she hated the way she looked at Monkley, who should have been nothing to her; she hated the sight of her drinking tea in the morning; she hated the smell of her wardrobe and the pink ribbons which she tied to every projection in her bedroom; she hated her affectation of babyishness; she hated the way she would make Henry give money to beggars for the gratification of an impulsive and merely sensual generosity of her own; she hated her embedded garters and smooth legs.
“O God,” Sylvia cried aloud to herself once, when she was leaning out of the window and looking down into Fitzroy Street, “O God, if I could only throw her into the street and see her eaten by dogs.”
Monkley hated her too; that was some consolation. Now often, when he was ready for an expedition, Henry would be unable to accompany him, because Mabel was rather seedy that morning; or because Mabel wanted him to go out with her; or because Mabel complained of beingleft alone so much. Monkley used to look at him with a savage contempt; and Sylvia used to pray sometimes that he would get angry enough to rush into Mabel’s room and pound her, where she lay so softly in her soft bed.
Mabel used to bring her friends to the flat to cheer her up, as she used to say, and when she had filled the room she had chosen as her sitting-room (the garret was not cozy enough for Mabel) with a scented mob of chattering women, she would fix upon one of them as the object of her jealousy, accusing Henry of having looked at her all the evening. There would sometimes be a scene at the moment when half the mob would cluster around Mabel to console her outraged feelings and the rest of it would hover about her rival to assure her she was guiltless. Sylvia, standing sullenly apart, would ponder the result of throwing a lighted lamp into the middle of the sickly sobbing pandemonium. The quarrel was not so bad as the inevitable reconciliation afterward, with its profuse kissing and interminable explanations that seemed like an orchestra from which Mabel emerged with a plaintive solo that was the signal for the whole scene to be lived over again in maddeningly reiterated accounts from all the women talking at once. Worse even than such evenings were those when Mabel restrained, or rather luxuriously hoarded up, her jealousy until the last visitor had departed; for then through half the night Sylvia must listen to her pouring over Henry a stream of reproaches which he would weakly try to divert by arguments or more weakly try to dam with caresses. Such methods of treatment usually ended in Mabel’s dressing herself and rushing from the bedroom to leave the flat forever. Unfortunately she never carried out her threat.
“Why don’t you go?” Sylvia once asked, when Mabel was standing by the door, fully dressed, with heaving breast, making no effort to turn the handle.
“These shoes hurt me,” said Mabel. “He knows I can’t go out in these shoes. The heartless brute!”
“If you knew those shoes hurt, why did you put them on?” Sylvia asked, scornfully.
“I was too much upset by Harry’s treatment of me. Oh, whatever shall I do? I’m so miserable.”
Whereupon Mabel collapsed upon the mat and wept black tears, until Henry came and tried to lift her up, begging her not to stay where she might catch cold.
“You know when a jelly won’t set?” Sylvia said, when she was recounting the scene to Monkley afterward. “Well, she was just like a jelly and father simply couldn’t make her stand up on the plate.”
Jimmy laughed sardonically.
These continued altercations between Mabel and Henry led to altercations with their neighbors underneath, who complained of being kept awake at night. The landlord, a fiery little Jew, told them that what between the arrears of rent and the nuisance they were causing to his other tenants he would have to give them notice. Sylvia could never get any money for the purposes of housekeeping except from Jimmy, and when she wanted clothes it was always Jimmy whom she must ask.
“Let’s go away,” she said to him one day. “Let’s leave them here together.”
Monkley looked at her in surprise.
“Do you mean that?”
“Of course I mean it.”
“But if we left Harry with her he’d starve and she’d leave him in a week.”
“Let him starve,” Sylvia cried. “He deserves to starve.”
“You hard-hearted little devil,” Monkley said. “After all, he is your father.”
“That’s what makes me hate him,” Sylvia declared. “He’s no right to be my father. He’s no right to make me think like that of him. He must be wrong to make me feel as I do about him.”
Monkley came close and took her hand. “Do you mean what you said about leaving them and going away with me?”
Sylvia looked at him, and, meeting his eyes, she shook her head. “No, of course I don’t really mean it, but why can’t you think of some way to stop all this? Why should we put up with it any longer? Make him turn her out into the street.”
Monkley laughed. “Youarevery young, aren’t you?Though I’ve thought once or twice lately that you seemed to be growing up.”
Again Sylvia caught his eyes and felt a little afraid, not really afraid, she said to herself, but uneasy, as if somebody she could not see had suddenly opened a door behind her.
“Don’t let’s talk about me, anyway,” she said. “Think of something to change things here.”
“I’d thought of a concert-party this summer. Pierrots, you know. How d’ye think your father would do as a pierrot? He might be very funny if she’d let him be funny.”
Sylvia clapped her hands. “Oh, Jimmy, it would be such fun!”
“You wouldn’t mind if she came too?”
“I’d rather she didn’t,” Sylvia said. “But it would be different, somehow. We shouldn’t be shut up with her as we are here. I’ll be able to sing, won’t I?”
“That was my idea.”
Before Henry met Mabel he would have had a great deal to say about this concert-party; now he accepted Monkley’s announcement with a dull equanimity that settled Sylvia. He received the news that he would become a pierrot just as he had received the news that, his nightgown not having been sent back that week by the laundress, he would have to continue with the one he was wearing.
Early summer passed away quickly enough in constant rehearsals. Sylvia was pleased to find that she had been right in supposing that the state of domestic affairs would be improved by Jimmy’s plan. Mabel turned out to be a good singer for the kind of performance they were going to give, and the amount of emotion she put into her songs left her with less to work off on Henry, who recovered some of his old self and was often really funny, especially in his duologues with Monkley. Sylvia picked out for herself and learned a few songs, most of which were condemned as unsuitable by Jimmy. The one that she liked best and in her own opinion sang best was the “Raggle Taggle Gipsies,” though the others all prophesied for it certain failure. Monkley himself played all the accompaniments and by his personality kept the whole show together; he also sang afew songs, which, although he had practically no voice, were given with such point that Sylvia felt convinced that his share in the performance would be the most popular of the lot. Shortly before they were to start on tour, which was fixed for the beginning of July, Monkley decided that they wanted another man who could really sing, and a young tenor known as Claude Raglan was invited to join the party. He was a good-looking youth, much in earnest, and with a tendency toward consumption, of which he was very proud.
“Though what there is to be proud of in losing one of your lungs I don’t know. I might as well be proud because I lost a glove the other day.”
Henry was severe upon Claude Raglan from the beginning. Perhaps he suspected him of admiring Mabel. There was often much tension at rehearsals on account of Henry’s attitude; once, for instance, when Claude Raglan had sung “Little Dolly Daydreams” with his usual romantic fervor, Henry took a new song from his pocket and, having planted it down with a defiant snap on the music-stand, proceeded to sing:
“I’ll give him Dolly DaydreamsDown where the poppies grow;I’ll give him Dolly Daydreams,The pride of Idaho.And if I catch him kissing herThere’s sure to be some strife,Because if he’s got anything he wants to give away,Let him come and give it to his wife.”
“I’ll give him Dolly DaydreamsDown where the poppies grow;I’ll give him Dolly Daydreams,The pride of Idaho.And if I catch him kissing herThere’s sure to be some strife,Because if he’s got anything he wants to give away,Let him come and give it to his wife.”
The tenor declared that Henry’s song, which was in the nature of a derogatory comment upon his own, could only have the effect of spoiling the more serious contribution.
“What of it?” Henry asked, truculently.
“It seems to me perfectly obvious,” Claude said, with an effort to restrain his annoyance.
“I consider that it won’t hurt your song at all,” Henry declared. “In fact, I think it will improve it. In my opinion it will have a much greater success than yours. In fact, I may as well say straight out that if it weren’t for my song I don’t believe the audience would let you sing yoursmore than once. ‘’Cos no one’s gwine ter kiss dat gal but me!’” he went on, mimicking the indignant Claude. “No wonder you’ve got consumption coming on! And the audience will notice there’s something wrong with you, and start clearing out to avoid infection. That’s where my song will come in. My song will be a tonic. Now don’t start breathing at me, or you’ll puncture the other lung. Let’s try that last verse over again, Jimmy.”
In the end, after a long discussion, during which Mabel introduced the most irrelevant arguments, Monkley decided that both songs should be sung, but with a long enough interval between them to secure Claude against the least impression that he was being laughed at.
At last the company, which called itself The Pink Pierrots, was ready to start for the South Coast. It took Monkley all his ingenuity to get out of London without paying for the dresses or the properties, but it was managed somehow; and at the beginning of July they pitched a small tent on the beach at Hastings. There were many rival companies, some of which possessed the most elaborate equipment, almost a small theater with railed-off seats and a large piano; but Sylvia envied none of these its grandeur. She thought that none was so tastefully dressed as themselves, that there was no leader so sure of keeping the attention of an audience as Jimmy was, that no tenor could bring tears to the eyes of the young women on the Marina as Claude could, that no voice could be heard farther off than Mabel’s, and that no comedian could so quickly gain the sympathy of that large but unprofitable portion of an audience—the small boys—as her father could.
Sylvia enjoyed every moment of the day from the time they left their lodgings, pushing before them the portable piano in the morning sunshine, to the journey home after the last performance, which was given in a circle of rosy lantern-light within sound of the sea. They worked so hard that there was no time for quarreling except with competitors upon whose preserves they had trespassed. Mabel was so bent upon fascinating the various patrons, and Henry was so obviously a success only with the unsentimental small boys, that she never once accused him of making eyes even at a nursemaid. Sylvia was given a duetwith Claude Raglan, and, whether it was that she was conscious of being envied by many of the girls in the audience or whether the sentimental tune influenced her imagination, she was certainly aware of a faint thrill of pleasure—a hardly perceptible quickening of the heart—every time that Claude took her in his arms to sing the last verse. After they had sung together for a week, Jimmy said the number was a failure and abolished it, which Sylvia thought was very unfair, because it had always been well applauded.
She grumbled to Claude about their deprivation, while they were toiling home to dinner (they were at Bournemouth now, and the weather was extremely hot), and he declared in a tragical voice that people were always jealous of him.
“It’s the curse of being an artist,” he announced. “Everywhere I go I meet with nothing but jealousy. I can’t help having a good voice. I’m not conceited about it. I can’t help the girls sending me chocolates and asking me to sign the post-cards of me which they buy. I’m not conceited about that, either. There’s something about my personality that appeals to women. Perhaps it’s my delicate look. I don’t suppose I shall live very long, and I think that makes women sorry for me. They’re quicker to see these things than men. I know Harry thinks I’m as healthy as a beefsteak. I’m positive I coughed up some blood this morning, and when I told Harry he asked me with a sneer if I’d cleaned my teeth. You’re not a bit like your dad, Sylvia. There’s something awfully sympathetic about you, little girl. I’m sorry Jimmy’s cut out our number. He’s a jolly good manager and all that, but he does not like anybody else to make a hit. Have you noticed that lately he’s taken to gagging during my songs? Luckily I’m not at all easy to dry up.”
Sylvia wondered why anybody like Jimmy should bother to be jealous of Claude. He was pleasant enough, of course, and he had a pretty, girlish mouth and looked very slim and attractive in his pierrot’s dress; but nobody could take him seriously except the stupid girls who bought his photograph and sighed over it, when they brushed their hair in the morning.
The weather grew hotter and the hard work made them all irritable; when they got home for dinner at midday it was impossible to eat, and they used to loll about in the stuffy sitting-room, which the five of them shared in common, while the flies buzzed everywhere. It was never worth while to remove the make-up; so all their faces used to get mottled with pale streaks of perspiration, the rouge on their lips would cake, and their ruffles hung limp and wet, stained round the neck with dirty carmine. Sylvia lost all enjoyment in the tour, and used to lie on the horsehair sofa that pricked her cheeks, watching distastefully the cold mutton, the dull knives, and the spotted cloth, and the stewed fruit over which lay a faint silvery film of staleness. Round the room her fellow-mountebanks were still seated on the chairs into which they had first collapsed when they reached the lodgings, motionless, like great painted dolls.
The weather grew hotter. The men, particularly Henry, took to drinking brandy at every opportunity; toward the end of their stay in Bournemouth the quarrels between him and Mabel broke out again, but with a difference, because now it was Henry who was the aggressor. He had never objected to Mabel’s admirers hitherto, had, indeed, been rather proud of their existence in a fatuous way and derived from their numbers a showman’s satisfaction. When it was her turn to take round the hat, he used to smirk over the quantity of post-cards she sold of herself and call everybody’s attention to her capricious autography that was so successful with the callow following. Then suddenly one day he made an angry protest against the admiration which an older man began to accord her, a pretentious sort of man with a diamond ring and yellow cummerbund, who used to stand with his straw hat atilt and wink at Mabel, tugging at his big drooping mustache and jingling the money in his pockets.
Everybody told Henry not to be foolish; he only sulked and began to drink more brandy than ever. The day after Henry’s outbreak, the Pink Pierrots moved to Swanage, where their only rivals were a troupe of niggers, upon whom Henry was able to loose some of his spleen in a dispute that took place over the new-comers’ right to plant their pink tent where they did.
“This isn’t Africa, you know,” Henry said. “This is Swanage. It’s no good your waving your banjo at me. I know it’s a banjo, all right, though I may forget, next time I hear you play it.”
“We’ve been here every year for the last ten years,” the chief nigger shouted.
“I thought so by your songs,” Henry retorted. “If you told me you got wrecked here with Christopher Columbus I shouldn’t have contradicted you.”
“This part of the beach belongs to us,” the niggers proclaimed.
“I suppose you bought it off Noah, didn’t you, when he let you out of the ark?” said Henry.
In the end, however, the two companies adjusted their differences and removed themselves out of each other’s hearing. Mabel’s voice defeated even the tambourines and bones of the niggers. Swanage seemed likely to be an improvement upon Bournemouth, until one day Mabel’s prosperous admirer appeared on the promenade and Henry’s jealousy rose to fury.
“Don’t you tell me you didn’t tell him to follow you here,” he said, “because I don’t believe you. I saw you smile at him.”
Monkley remonstrated with Mabel, when Henry had gone off in a fever of rage to his room, but she seemed to be getting a certain amount of pleasure from the situation.
“You must cut it out,” Monkley said. “I don’t want the party broken up on account of you and Henry. I tell you he really is upset. What the deuce do you want to drag in all this confounded love business now for? Leave that to Claude. It’ll burst up the show, and it’s making Harry drink, which his head can’t stand.”
Mabel looked at herself in the glass over the fireplace and patted her hair complacently. “I’m rather glad to see Harry can get jealous. After all, it’s always a pleasure to think some one’s really fond of you.”
Sylvia watched Mabel very carefully and perceived that she actually was carrying on a flirtation with the man who had followed her from Bournemouth. She hoped that it would continue and that her father would get angryenough with Mabel to get rid of her when the tour came to an end.
One Saturday afternoon, when Mabel was collecting, Sylvia distinctly saw her admirer drop a note into the hat, which she took with her into the tent to read and tore up; during her next song Sylvia noticed that the man with the yellow cummerbund was watching her with raised eyebrows, and that, when Mabel smiled and nodded, he gently clapped his hands and went away.
Sylvia debated with herself the advisability of telling her father at once what she had seen, thus bringing things to an immediate climax and getting rid of Mabel forever, even if by doing so the show were spoilt. But when she saw his glazed eyes and realized how drunk he was, she thought she would wait. The next afternoon, when Henry was taking his Sunday rest, Mabel dressed herself and went out. Sylvia followed her and, after ascertaining that she had taken the path toward the cliffs to the east of the town, came back to the lodgings and again debated with herself a course of action. She decided in the end to wait a little longer before she denounced Mabel. Later on, when her father had wakened and was demanding Mabel’s company for a stroll in the moonlight, a letter was brought to the lodgings by a railway porter from Mabel herself to say that she had left the company and had gone away with her new friend by train. Sylvia thought how near she had been to spoiling the elopement and hugged herself with pleasure; but she could not resist telling her father now that she had seen the intrigue in progress and of her following Mabel that afternoon and seeing her take the path toward the cliffs. Henry seemed quite shattered by his loss, and could do nothing but drink brandy, while Monkley swore at Mabel for wrecking a good show and wondered where he was going to find another girl, even going so far as to suggest telegraphing on the off chance to Maudie Tilt.
It was very hot on Monday, and after the morning performance Henry announced that he did not intend to walk all the way back to the lodgings for dinner. He should go to the hotel and have a snack. What did it matter about his being in his pierrot’s rig? Swanage was a small place, and if the people were not used to his costumeby now, they never would be. It was no good any one arguing; he intended to stay behind this morning. The others left him talking in his usual style of melancholy humor to the small boy who for the sum of twopence kept an eye on the portable piano and the book of songs during the hot midday hours. When they looked round he was juggling with one of the pennies, to the admiration of the owner. They never saw him alive again. He was brought back dead that evening on a stretcher, his pink costume splashed with blood. The odd thing was that the hotel carving-knife was in his pocket, though it was proved conclusively at the inquest that death was due to falling over the cliffs on the east side of the town.
Sylvia wondered if she ought to blame herself for her father’s death, and she confided in Jimmy what she had told him about Mabel’s behavior. Jimmy asked her why she could not have let things alone, and made her very miserable by his strictures upon her youthful tactlessness; so miserable, indeed, that he was fain to console her and assure her that it had all been an accident due to Henry’s fondness for brandy—that and the sun must have turned his head.
“You don’t think he took the knife to kill himself?” she asked.
“More likely he took it with some idea of killing them, and, being drunk, fell over the cliff. Poor old Harry! I shall miss him, and now you’re all alone in the world.”
That was true, and the sudden realization of this fact drove out of Sylvia’s mind the remorse for her father’s death by confronting her with the instancy of the great problem that had for so long haunted her mind. She turned to Jimmy almost fearfully.
“I shall have you to look after me?”
Jimmy took her hand and gazed into her eyes.
“You want to stay with me, then?” he asked, earnestly.
“Of course I do. Who else could I stay with?”
“You wouldn’t prefer to be with Claude, for example?” he went on.
“Claude?” she repeated, in a puzzled voice. And thenshe grasped in all its force the great new truth that for the rest of her life the choice of her companions lay with herself alone. She had become at this moment grown up and was free, like Mabel, to choose even a man with a yellow cummerbund.
SYLVIA begged Monkley not to go back and live in Fitzroy Street. She felt the flat would be haunted by memories of her father and Mabel. It was as well that she did not want to return there, for Jimmy assured her that nothing would induce him to go near Fitzroy Street. A great deal of money was owing, and he wished the landlord luck in his dispute with the furnishing people when he tried to seize the furniture for arrears of rent. It would be necessary to choose for their next abode a quarter of London to which he was a stranger, because he disliked having to make détours to avoid streets where he owed money. Finsbury Park was melancholy; Highgate was inaccessible; Hampstead was expensive and almost equally inaccessible; but they must go somewhere in the North of London, for there did not remain a suburb in the West or South the tradesmen and house-owners of which he had not swindled at one time or another. On second thoughts, there was a part of Hampstead that was neither so expensive nor so inaccessible, which was reached from Haverstock Hill; they would look for rooms there. They settled down finally in one of a row of old houses facing the southerly extremity of the Heath, the rural aspect of which was heightened by long gardens in front that now in late summer were filled with sunflowers and hollyhocks. The old-fashioned house, which resembled a large cottage both without and within, belonged to a decayed florist and nursery gardener called Samuel Gustard, whose trade was now confined to the sale of penny packets of seeds, though a weather-beaten sign-board facing the road maintained a legend of greater glories. Mr. Gustard himself made no effort to live up to his sign-board; indeed, he would not even stir himself to produce a packet of seeds, for if his wife were about he would indicateto her with the stem of his pipe which packet was wanted, and if she were not about, he would tell the customer that the variety was no longer in stock. A greenhouse kept from collapse by the sturdy vine it was supposed to protect ran along the fence on one side of the garden; the rest was a jungle of coarse herbaceous flowers, presumably the survivors of Mr. Gustard’s last horticultural effort, about ten years ago.
The money made by the tour of the Pink Pierrots did not last very long, and Jimmy was soon forced back to industry. Sylvia nowadays heard more about his successes and failures than when her father was alive, and she begged very hard to be allowed to help on some of his expeditions.
“You’re no good to me yet,” Monkley told her. “You’re too old to be really innocent and not old enough to pretend to be. Besides, people don’t take school-girls to race meetings. Later on, when you’ve learned a bit more about life, we’ll start a gambling club in the West End and work on a swell scale what I do now in a small way in railway-carriages.”
This scheme of Jimmy’s became a favorite topic; and Sylvia began to regard a flash gambling-hell as the crown of human ambition. Jimmy’s imagination used to run riot amid the splendor of it all, as he discoursed of the footmen with plush breeches; of the shaded lamps; of the sideboard loaded with hams and jellies and fruit at which the guests would always be able to refresh themselves, for it would never do to let them go away because they were hungry, and people were always hungry at three in the morning; of the smart page-boy in the entrance of the flats who would know how to reckon up a visitor and give the tip up-stairs by ringing a bell; and of the rigid exclusion of all women except Sylvia herself.
“I can see it all before me,” Jimmy used to sigh. “I can smell the cigars and whisky. I’m flinging back the curtains when every one has gone and feeling the morning air. And here we are stuck in this old cucumber-frame at Hampstead! But we’ll get it, we’ll get it. I shall have a scoop one of these days and be able to start saving, and when I’ve saved a couple of hundred I’ll bluff the rest.”
In October Jimmy came home from Newmarket and told Sylvia he had run against an old friend, who had proposed a money-making scheme which would take him away from London for a couple of months. He could not explain the details to Sylvia, but he might say that it was a confidence trick on the grand scale and that it meant his residing in a northern city. He had told his friend he would give him an answer to-morrow, and wanted to know what Sylvia thought about it.
She was surprised by Jimmy’s consulting her in this way. She had always taken it for granted that from time to time she would be left alone. Jimmy’s action made her realize more clearly than ever that to a great extent she already possessed that liberty of choice the prospect of which had dawned upon her at Swanage.
She assured Jimmy of her readiness to be left alone in Hampstead. When he expatiated on his consideration for her welfare she was bored and longed for him to be gone; his solicitude gave her a feeling of restraint; she became impatient of his continually wanting to know if she should miss him and of his commendation of her to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Gustard, from whom she desired no interference, being quite content with the prospect of sitting in her window with a book and a green view.
The next morning Monkley left Hampstead; and Sylvia inhaled freedom with the autumn air. She had been given what seemed a very large sum of money to sustain herself until Jimmy’s return. She had bought a new hat; a black kitten had adopted her; it was pearly October weather. Sylvia surveyed life with a sense of pleasure that was nevertheless most unreasonably marred by a faint breath of restlessness, an almost imperceptible discontent. Life had always offered itself to her contemplation, whether of the past or of the future, as a set of vivid impressions that formed a crudely colored panorama of action without any emotional light and shade, the intervals between which, like the intervals of a theatrical performance, were only tolerable with plenty of chocolates to eat. At the present moment she had plenty of chocolates to eat, more, in fact, than she had ever had before, but the interval was seeming most exasperatingly long.
“You ought to take a walk on the Heath,” Mr. Gustard advised. “It isn’t good to sit about all day doing nothing.”
“You don’t take walks,” Sylvia pointed out. “And you sit about all day doing nothing. I do read a book, anyway.”
“I’m different,” Mr. Gustard pronounced, very solemnly. “I’ve lived my life. If I was to take a walk round Hampstead I couldn’t hardly peep into a garden without seeing a tree as I’d planted myself. And when I’m gone, the trees ’ll still be there. That’s something tothinkabout, that is. There was a clergyman came nosing round here the other day to ask me why I didn’t go to church. I told him I’d done without church as a lad, and I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t do without it now. ‘But you’re growing old, Mr. Gustard,’ he says to me. ‘That’s just it,’ I says to him. ‘I’m getting very near the time when, if all they say is true, I shall be in the heavenly choir for ever and ever, amen, and the less singing I hear for the rest of my time on earth the better.’ ‘That’s a very blasphemous remark,’ he says to me. ‘Is it?’ says I to him. ‘Well, here’s another. Perhaps all this talk by parsons,’ I says, ‘about this life on earth being just a choir practice for heaven won’t bear looking into. Perhaps we shall all die and go to sleep and never wake up and never dream and never do nothing at all, never. And if that’s true,’ I says, ‘I reckon I shall bust my coffin with laughing when I think of my trees growing and growing and growing and you preaching to a lot of old women and children about something you don’t know nothing about and they don’t know nothing about and nobody don’t know nothing about.’ With that I offered him a pear, and he walked off very offended with his head in the air. You get out and about, my dear. Bustle around and enjoy yourself. That’s my motto for the young.”
Sylvia felt that there was much to be said for Mr. Gustard’s attitude, and she took his advice so far as to go for a long walk on the Heath that very afternoon. Yet there was something lacking. When she got home again she found that the book of adventure which she had been reading was no longer capable of keeping her thoughts fixed. The stupid part of it was that her thoughts wanderednowhere in particular and without attaching themselves to a definite object. She would try to concentrate them upon Jimmy and speculate what he was doing, but Jimmy would turn into Claude Raglan; and when she began to speculate what Claude was doing, Claude would turn back again into Jimmy. Her own innermost restlessness made her so fidgety that she went to the window and stared at the road along the dusky Heath. The garden gate of next door swung to with a click, and Sylvia saw a young man coming toward the house. She was usually without the least interest in young men, but on this afternoon of indefinable and errant thoughts she welcomed the least excuse for bringing herself back to a material object; and this young man, though it was twilight and his face was not clearly visible, managed to interest her somehow, so that at tea she found herself asking Mr. Gustard who he might be and most unaccountably blushing at the question.
“That ’ud be young Artie, wouldn’t it?” he suggested to his wife. She nodded over the squat teapot that she so much resembled:
“That must be him come back from his uncle’s. Mrs. Madden was only saying to me this morning, when we was waiting for the grocer’s man, that she was expecting him this evening. She spoils him something shocking. If you please, his highness has been down into Hampshire to see if he would like to be a gentleman farmer. Whoever heard, I should like to know? Why he can’t be long turned seventeen. It’s a pity his father isn’t alive to keep him from idling his time away.”
“There’s no harm in giving a bit of liberty to the young,” Mr. Gustard answered, preparing to be as eloquent as the large piece of bread and butter in his mouth would let him. “I’m not in favor of pushing a young man too far.”
“No, you was never in favor of pushing anything, neither yourself nor your business,” said Mrs. Gustard, sharply. “But I think it’s a sin to let a boy like that moon away all his time with a book. Books were only intended for the gentry and people as have grown too old for anything else, and even then they’re bad for their eyes.”
Sylvia wondered whether Mrs. Gustard intended to criticize unfavorably her own manner of life, but she leftthe defense of books to Mr. Gustard, who was so impatient to begin that he nearly choked:
“Because I don’t read,” he said, “that’s no reason for me to try and stop others from reading. What I say is ‘liberty for all.’ If young Artie Madden wants to read, let him read. If Sylvia here wants to read, let her read. Books give employment to a lot of people—binders, printers, paper-makers, booksellers. It’s a regular trade. If people didn’t like to smell flowers and sit about under trees, there wouldn’t be no gardeners, would there? Very well, then; and if there wasn’t people who wanted to read, there wouldn’t be no printers.”
“What about the people who write all the rubbish?” Mrs. Gustard demanded, fiercely. “Nice, idle lot of good-for-nothings they are, I’m sure.”
“That’s because the only writing fellow we ever knew got that servant-girl of ours into trouble.”
“Samuel,” Mrs. Gustard interrupted, “that’ll do!”
“I don’t suppose every writing fellow’s like him,” Mr. Gustard went on. “And, anyway, the girl was a saucy hussy.”
“Samuel! That will do, I said.”
“Well, so she was,” Mr. Gustard continued, defiantly. “Didn’t she used to powder her face with your Borwick’s?”
“I’ll trouble you not to spit crumbs all over my clean cloth,” said Mrs. Gustard, “making the whole place look like a bird-cage!”
Mr. Gustard winked at Sylvia and was silent. She for her part had already begun to weave round Arthur Madden a veil of romance, when the practical side of her suddenly roused itself to a sense of what was going on and admonished her to leave off dreaming and attend to her cat.
Up-stairs in her bedroom, she opened her window and looked out at the faint drizzle of rain which was just enough to mellow the leafy autumnal scents and diffuse the golden beams of the lamps along the Heath. There was the sound of another window’s being opened on a line with hers; presently a head and shoulders scarcely definable in the darkness leaned out, whistling an old French air that was familiar to her from earliest childhood, the words of which had long ago been forgotten. She could not help whistlingthe air in unison; and after a moment’s silence a voice from the head and shoulders asked who it was.
“A girl,” Sylvia said.
“Anybody could tell that,” the voice commented, a little scornfully. “Because the noise is all woolly.”
“It’s not,” Sylvia contradicted, indignantly. “Perhaps you’ll say I’m out of tune? I know quite well who you are. You’re Arthur Madden, the boy next door.”
“But who are you?”
“I’m Sylvia Scarlett.”
“Are you a niece of Mrs. Gustard?” the voice inquired.
“Of course not,” Sylvia scoffed. “I’m just staying here.”
“Who with?”
“By myself.”
“By yourself?” the voice echoed, incredulously.
“Why not? I’m nearly sixteen.”
This was too much for Arthur Madden, who struck a match to illuminate the features of the strange unknown. Although he did not succeed in discerning Sylvia, he lit up his own face, which she liked well enough to suggest they should go for a walk, making the proposal a kind of test for herself of Arthur Madden’s character, and deciding that if he showed the least hesitation in accepting she would never speak to him again. The boy, however, was immediately willing; the two pairs of shoulders vanished; Sylvia put on her coat and went down-stairs.
“Going out for a blow?” Mr. Gustard asked.
Sylvia nodded. “With the boy next door,” she answered.
“You haven’t been long,” said Mr. Gustard, approvingly. “That’s the way I like to see it. When I courted Mrs. Gustard, which was forty years ago come next November, it was in the time of toolip-planting, and I hove a toolip bulb at her and caught her in the chignon. ‘Whatever are you doing of?’ she says to me. ‘It’s a proposal of marriage,’ I says, and when she started giggling I was that pleased I planted half the toolips upside down. But that’s forty years ago, that is. Mrs. Gustard’s grown more particular since, and so as she’s washing up the tea-things in the scullery, I should just slip out, and I’ll tell her you’vegone out to get a paper to see if it’s true what somebody said about Buckingham Palace being burned to a cinder.”
Sylvia was not at all sure that she ought to recognize Mrs. Gustard’s opinion even so far as by slipping out and thereby giving her an idea that she did not possess perfect liberty of action. However, she decided that the point was too trifling to worry about, and, with a wave of her hand, she left her landlord to tell what story he chose to his wife.
Arthur Madden was waiting for her by his gate when she reached the end of the garden; while they wandered along by the Heath, indifferent to the drizzle, Sylvia felt an extraordinary release from the faint discontent of these past days, an extraordinary delight in finding herself with a companion who was young like herself and who, like herself, seemed full of speculation upon the world which he was setting out to explore, regarding it as an adventure and ready to exchange hopes and fears and fancies with her in a way that no one had ever done hitherto; moreover, he was ready to be most flatteringly impressed by her experiences, even if he still maintained she could not whistle properly. The friendship between Sylvia and Arthur begun upon that night grew daily closer. Mrs. Gustard used to say that they wasted each other’s time, but she was in the minority; she used to say also that Arthur was being more spoiled than ever by his mother; but it was this very capacity for being spoiled that endeared him to Sylvia, who had spent a completely free existence for so long now that unless Arthur had been allowed his freedom she would soon have tired of the friendship. She liked Mrs. Madden, a beautiful and unpractical woman, who unceasingly played long sonatas on a cracked piano; at least she would have played them unceasingly had she not continually been jumping up to wait on Arthur, hovering round him like a dark and iridescent butterfly.
In the course of many talks together Arthur told Sylvia the family history. It seemed that his mother had been the daughter of a gentleman, not an ordinary kind of top-hatted gentleman, but a squire with horses and hounds and a park; his father had been a groom and she had eloped with him, but Sylvia was not to suppose that hisfather had been an ordinary kind of groom; he too came from good stock, though he had been rather wild. His father’s father had been a farmer in Sussex, and he had just come back from staying at the farm, where his uncle had offered to give him a start in life, but he had found he did not care much for farm-work. His mother’s family would have nothing to do with her beyond allowing her enough to live upon without disturbing them.
“What are you going to do?” Sylvia asked.
Arthur replied that he did not know, but that he had thoughts of being a soldier.
“A soldier?” said Sylvia, doubtfully. Her experience of soldiers was confined to Blanche’s lovers, and the universal connotation in France of soldiery with a vile servitude that could hardly be avoided.
“But of course the worst of it is,” Arthur explained, “there aren’t any wars nowadays.”
They were walking over the Heath on a fine November day about Martinmas; presently, when they sat down under some pines and looked at London spread beneath them in a sparkling haze, Arthur took Sylvia’s hand and told her that he loved her.
She nearly snatched her hand away and would have told him not to be silly, but suddenly the beauty of the tranquil city below and the wind through the pines conquered her spirit; she sat closer to him, letting her head droop upon his shoulder; when his clasp tightened round her unresisting hand she burst into tears, unable to tell him that her sorrow was nothing but joy, that he had nothing to do with it nor with her, and yet that he had everything to do with it, because with no one else could she have borne this incommunicable display of life. Then she dried her tears and told Arthur she thought he had better become a highwayman.
“Highwaymen don’t exist any longer,” Arthur objected. “All the jolly things have disappeared from the world—war and highwaymen and pirates and troubadours and crusaders and maypoles and the Inquisition. Everything.”
Gradually Sylvia learned from Arthur how much of what she had been reading was mere invention, and in the first bitterness of disillusionment she wished to renounce booksforever; but Arthur dissuaded her from doing that, and they used to read simultaneously the same books so as to be able to discuss them during their long walks. They became two romantics born out of due season, two romantics that should have lived a century ago and that now bewailed the inability of the modern world to supply what their adventurous souls demanded.
Arthur was inclined to think that Sylvia had much less cause to repine than he; the more tales she told him of her life, the more tributes of envy he paid to her good fortune. He pointed out that Monkley scarcely differed from the highwayman of romance; nor did he doubt but that if all his enterprises could be known he would rival Dick Turpin himself. Sylvia agreed with all he said, but she urged the inequality of her own share in the achievement. What she wanted was something more than to sit at home and enjoy fruits in the stealing of which she had played no part. She wanted none of Arthur’s love unless he were prepared to face the problem of living life at its fullest in company with her. She would let him kiss her sometimes, because, unhappily, it seemed that even very young men were infected with this malady, and that if deprived of this odious habit they were liable to lose determination and sink into incomprehensible despondency. At the same time Sylvia made Arthur clearly understand that she was yielding to his weakness, not to her own, and that, if he wished to retain her compassion, he must prove that the devotion of which he boasted was vital to his being.