This treachery was a shock to Sylvia, and she was horrified at herself for feeling it so deeply. Ever since that day in Oxford when Lily had sobbed out her griefs, Sylvia had concentrated upon her all the capacity for affection which had begun to blossom during the time she was with Philip and which had been cut off ruthlessly with everything else that belonged to life with him. She knew that she should have foreseen the possibility, nay the probability, of this happening, but she had charmed herself with the romantic setting of their musical adventure and let all else go.
“I’m awfully sorry, Sylvia,” said Jack; “I ought to have kept a better lookout on Claude.”
“It’s not your fault, old son. But, O God! why can’t four people stay friends without muddling everything up with this accursed love?”
Jack was sympathetic, but it was useless to confide in him her feeling for Lily; he would never understand. She would seem to him so little worth while; for him the behavior of such a one meant less than the breaking of a porcelain figure.
“It did seem worth while,” Sylvia said to herself, that night, “to keep that frail and lovely thing from this. It was my fault, of course, for I knew both Lily and Claudethrough and through. Yet what does it matter? What a fool I am. It was absurd of me to imagine we could go on forever as we were. I don’t really mind about Lily; I’m angry because my conceit has been wounded. It serves me right. But that dirty little actor won’t appreciate her. He’s probably sick of her easiness already. Oh, why the hell am I not a man?”
Presently, however, Sylvia’s mood of indignation burned itself out; she began to attribute the elopement of Claude and Lily to the characters they had assumed of Harlequin and Columbine, and to regard the whole affair as a scene from a play which must not be taken more deeply to heart than with the pensive melancholy that succeeds the fall of the curtain on mimic emotions. After all, what had Lily been to her more than a puppet whose actions she had always controlled for her pleasure until she was stolen from her? Without Lily she was once more at a loose end; there was the whole history of her sorrow.
“I can’t think what they wanted to run away for,” said Jack. Sylvia fancied the flight was the compliment both Harlequin and Columbine had paid to her authority.
“I don’t find you so alarming,” he said.
“No, old son, because you and I have always regarded the Quartet from a strictly professional point of view, and consequently each other. Meanwhile the poor old Quartet is done in. We two can’t sustain a program alone.”
Airdale gloomily assented, but thought it would be well to continue for a week or so, in case Claude and Lily came back.
“I notice you take it for granted that I’ll be willing to continue busking with them,” Sylvia said.
That evening Airdale and she went out as usual; but the loss of the other two seemed somehow to have robbed the entertainment of its romantic distinction, and Sylvia was dismayed to find with what a shameful timidity she now took herself and her guitar into saloon-bars; she felt like a beggar and was humiliated by Jack’s apologetic manner, and still more by her own instinctive support of such cringing to the benevolence of potmen and barmaids.
One evening, after about a week of these distasteful peregrinations, the two mountebanks came out of a publichouse in Fulham Road where they had been forced to endure a more than usually intolerable patronage. Sylvia vowed she would not perform again under such conditions, and they turned up Tinderbox Lane to wander home. This thoroughfare, only used by pedestrians, was very still, and trees planted down the middle of the pavement gave to the mild March evening an effluence of spring. Sylvia began to strum upon her guitar the tune that Arthur Madden and she sang together from the windows at Hampstead on the night she met him first; her companion soon caught hold of the air, and they strolled slowly along, dreaming, she looking downward of the past, he of the future with his eyes fixed on the chimneys of the high flats that encircled the little houses and long gardens of Tinderbox Lane. They were passing a wall on their right in which numbered doors were set at intervals. From one of these a tall figure emerged and stopped a moment to say good-by to somebody standing in the entrance. The two musicians with a simultaneous instinct for an audience that might appreciate them stopped and addressed their song to the parting pair, a tall old gentleman with drooping gray whiskers, very much muffled up, and an exceedingly stout woman of ripe middle age.
“Bravo!” said the old gentleman, in a tremulous voice, as he tapped his cane on the pavement. “Polly, this is devilish appropriate. By gad! it makes me feel inclined to dance again, Polly,” and the old gentleman forthwith postured with his thin legs like a cardboard antic at the end of a string. The fat woman standing in the doorway came out into the lamplight, and clasping her hands in alarm, begged him not to take cold, but the old gentleman would not stop until Polly had made a pretense of dancing a few steps with him, after which he again piped, “Bravo,” vowed he must have a whisky, and invited Sylvia and Jack to come inside and join them.
“Dashwood is my name, Major-General Dashwood, and this is Mrs. Gainsborough.”
“Come along,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “The captain—”
“She will call me Captain,” said the general, with a chuckle. “Obstinate gal! Knew me first when I was acaptain, thirty-six years ago, and has never called me anything since. What a woman, though!”
“He’s very gay to-night. We’ve been celebrating our anniversary,” Mrs. Gainsborough explained, while the four of them walked along a gravel path toward a small square creeper-covered house at the end of a very long garden.
“We met first at the Argyll Rooms in March, 1867, and in September, 1869, Mulberry Cottage was finished. I planted those mulberry-trees myself, and they’ll outlive us both,” said the general.
“Now don’t let’s have any more dismals,” Mrs. Gainsborough begged. “We’ve had quite enough to-night, talking over old times.”
Mulberry Cottage was very comfortable inside, full of mid-Victorian furniture and ornaments that suited its owner, who, Sylvia now perceived by the orange lamplight, was even fatter than she had seemed at first. Her hair, worn in a chignon, was black, her face was rosy and large, almost monumental, with a plinth of chins.
The general so much enjoyed having a fresh audience for his tales, and sat so long over the whisky, that Mrs. Gainsborough became worried.
“Bob, you ought to go. You know I don’t like to argue before strangers, but your sister will be getting anxious. Miss Dashwood’s quite alone,” she explained to her guests. “I wonder if you’d mind walking back with him?” she whispered to Sylvia. “He lives in Redcliffe Gardens. That’s close to you, isn’t it?”
“If we can have music all the way, by gad! of course,” said the general, standing up so straight that Sylvia was afraid he would bump his head on the ceiling.
“Now, Bob dear, don’t get too excited and do keep your muffler well wrapped round your throat.”
The general insisted on having one more glass for the sake of old times, and there was a short delay in the garden, because he stuck his cane fast in the ground to show the size of the mulberry-trees when he planted them, but ultimately they said good night to Mrs. Gainsborough, upon whom Sylvia promised to call next day, and set out for Redcliffe Gardens to the sound of guitars.
General Dashwood turned round from time to time toshake his cane at passers-by that presumed to stare at the unusual sight of an old gentleman, respectable in his dress and demeanor, escorted down Fulham Road by two musicians.
“Do you see anything so damned odd in our appearance?” he asked Sylvia.
“Nothing at all,” she assured him.
“Sensible gal! I’ve a very good mind to knock down the next scoundrel who stares at us.”
Presently the general, on whom the fresh air was having an effect, took Sylvia’s arm and grew confidential.
“Go on playing,” he commanded Jack Airdale. “I’m only talking business. The fact is,” he said to Sylvia, “I’m worried about Polly. Hope I shall live another twenty years, but fact is, my dear, I’ve never really got over that wound of mine at Balaclava. Damme! I’ve never been the same man since.”
Sylvia wondered what he could have been before.
“Naturally she’s well provided for. Bob Dashwood always knew how to treat a woman. No wife, no children, you understand me? But it’s the loneliness. She ought to have somebody with her. She’s a wonderful woman, and she was a handsome gal. Damme! she’s still handsome—what? Fifty-five you know. By gad, yes. And I’m seventy. But it’s the loneliness. Ah, dear, if the gods had been kind; but then she’d have probably been married by now.”
The general blew his nose, sighed, and shook his head. Sylvia asked tenderly how long the daughter had lived.
“Never lived at all,” said the general, stopping dead and opening his eyes very wide, as he looked at Sylvia. “Never was born. Never was going to be born. Hale and hearty, but too late now, damme! I’ve taken a fancy to you. Sensible gal! Damned sensible. Why don’t you go and live with Polly?”
In order to give Sylvia time to reflect upon her answer, the general skipped along for a moment to the tune that Jack was playing.
“Nothing between you and him?” he asked, presently, indicating Jack with his cane.
Sylvia shook her head.
“Thought not. Very well, then, why don’t you go and live with Polly? Give you time to look round a bit. Understand what you feel about playing for your bread and butter like this. Finest thing in the world music, if you haven’t got to do it. Go and see Polly to-morrow. I spoke to her about it to-night. She’ll be delighted. So shall I. Here we are in Redcliffe Gardens. Damned big house and only myself and my sister to live in it. Live there like two needles in a haystack. Won’t ask you in. Damned inhospitable, but no good because I shall have to go to bed at once. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind pressing the bell? Left my latch-key in me sister’s work-basket.”
The door opened, and the general, after bidding Sylvia and Jack a courteous good night, marched up his front-door steps with as much martial rigidity as he could command.
On the way back to Finborough Road, Sylvia, who had been attracted to the general’s suggestion, postponed raising the question with Jack by telling him about her adventure in Redcliffe Gardens when she threw the bag of chestnuts through the window. She did not think it fair, however, to make any other arrangement without letting him know, and before she went to see Mrs. Gainsborough the next day she announced her idea and asked him if he would be much hurt by her backing out of the busking.
“My dear girl, of course not,” said Jack. “As a matter of fact, I’ve had rather a decent offer to tour in a show through the East. I should rather like to see India and all that. I didn’t say anything about it, because I didn’t want to let you down. However, if you’re all right, I’m all right.”
Mrs. Gainsborough by daylight appealed to Sylvia as much as ever. She told her what the general had said, and Mrs. Gainsborough begged her to come that very afternoon.
“The only thing is,” Sylvia objected, “I’ve got a friend, a girl, who’s away at present, and she might want to go on living with me.”
“Let her come too,” Mrs. Gainsborough cried. “The more the merrier. Good Land! What a set-out we shall have. The captain won’t know himself. He’s very fondof me, you know. But it would be more jolly for him to have some youngsters about. He’s that young. Upon my word, you’d think he was a boy. And he’s always the same. Oh, dearie me! the times we’ve had, you’d hardly believe. Life with him was a regular circus.”
So it was arranged that Sylvia should come at once to live with Mrs. Gainsborough in Tinderbox Lane, and Jack went off to the East.
The general used to visit them nearly every afternoon, but never in the evening.
“Depend upon it, Sylvia,” Mrs. Gainsborough said, “he got into rare hot water with his sister the other night. Of course it was an exception, being our anniversary, and I dare say next March, if we’re all spared, he’ll be allowed another evening. It’s a great pity, though, that we didn’t meet first in June. So much more seasonable for jollifications. But there, he was young and never looked forward to being old.”
The general was not spared for another anniversary. Scarcely a month after Sylvia had gone to live with Mrs. Gainsborough, he died very quietly in the night. His sister came herself to break the news, a frail old lady who seemed very near to joining her brother upon the longest journey.
“She’ll never be able to keep away from him,” Mrs. Gainsborough sobbed. “She’ll worry and fret herself for fear he might catch cold in his coffin. And look at me! As healthy and rosy as a great radish!”
The etiquette of the funeral caused Mrs. Gainsborough considerable perplexity.
“Now tell me, Sylvia, ought I or ought I not to wear a widow’s veil? Miss Dashwood inviting me in that friendly way, I do want to show that I appreciate her kindness. I know that strictly we weren’t married. I dare say nowadays it would be different, but people was much more old-fashioned about marrying ballet-girls when I was young. Still, it doesn’t seem hardly decent for me to go gallivanting to his funeral in me black watered silk, the same as if I were going to the upper boxes of a theater with Mrs. Marsham or Mrs. Beardmore.”
Sylvia told Mrs. Gainsborough that in her opinion awidow’s cap at the general’s funeral would be like the dash of mauve at the wedding in the story. She suggested the proper thing to do would be to buy a new black dress unprofaned by visits to the upper boxes.
“If I can get such an out size in the time,” Mrs. Gainsborough sighed, “which is highly doubtful.”
However, the new dress was obtained, and Mrs. Gainsborough went off to the funeral at Brompton.
“On, it was a beautiful ceremony,” she sobbed, when she got home. “And really Miss Dashwood, well, she couldn’t have been nicer. Oh, my poor dear captain, if only all the clergyman said was true. And yet I should feel more comfortable somehow if it wasn’t. Though I suppose if it was true there’d be no objection to our meeting in heaven as friends only. Dear me, it all sounded so real when I heard the clergyman talking about it. Just as if he was going up in a lift, as you might say. So natural it sounded. ‘A gallant soldier,’ he said, ‘a veteran of the Crimea.’ So he was gallant, the dear captain. You should have seen him lay out two roughs who tried to snatch me watch and chain once at the Epsom Derby. He was a gentleman, too. I’m sure nobody ever treated any woman kinder than he treated me. Seventy years old he was. Captain Bob Dashwood of the Seventeenth Hussars. I can see him now as he used to be. He liked to come stamping up the garden. Oh, he was a stamper, and ‘Polly,’ he hollered out, ‘get on your frills. Here’s Dick Avon—the Markiss of Avonthatwas’ (oh, he was a wild thing) ‘and Jenny Ward’ (you know, she threw herself off Westminster Bridge and caused such a stir in Jubilee year). People talked a lot about it at the time. I remember we drove to the Star and Garter at Richmond that day—a lovely June day it was—and caused quite a sensation, because we all looked so smart. Oh, my Bob, my Bob, it only seems yesterday.”
Sylvia consoled Mrs. Gainsborough and rejoiced in her assurance that she did not know what she should have done.
“Fancy him thinking about me being so lonely and wanting you to come and live with me. Depend upon it he knew he was going to die all of a sudden,” said Mrs.Gainsborough. “Oh, there’s no doubt he was clever enough to have been a doctor. Only of course with his family he had to be a soldier.”
Sylvia mostly spent these spring days in the garden with Mrs. Gainsborough, listening to her tales about the past and helping her to overlook the labors of the jobbing gardener who came in twice a week. Her landlady or hostess (for the exact relation was not yet determined) was very strict in this regard, because her father had been a nursery gardener and she insisted upon a peculiar knowledge of the various ways in which horticultural obligations could be avoided. When Sylvia raised the question of her status at Mulberry Cottage, Mrs. Gainsborough always begged her not to be in a hurry to settle anything; later on, when Sylvia was able to earn some money, she should pay for her board, but payment for her lodging, so long as Mrs. Gainsborough was alive and the house was not burned to the ground, was never to be mentioned. That was certainly the captain’s intention and it must be respected.
Sylvia often went to see Mrs. Gowndry in Finborough Road in case there should be news of Lily. Her old landlady was always good enough to say that she missed her, and in her broken-up existence the affection even of Mrs. Gowndry was very grateful.
“I’ve told me old man to keep a good lookout for her,” said Mrs. Gowndry.
“He’s hardly likely to meet her at his work,” Sylvia said.
“Certainly not. No. But he often goes up to get a breath of air—well—it isn’t to be expected that he wouldn’t. I often say to him when he comes home a bit grumblified that his profession is as bad as a miner’s, andtheyonly does eight hours, whereas in his lavatory they does twelve. Too long, too long, and it must be fidgety work, with people bobbing in and out all the time and always in a hurry, as you might say. Of course now and again you get a lodger who makes himself unpleasant, but, year in year out, looking after lodgers is a more peaceful sort of a life than looking after a lavatory. Don’t you be afraid, Miss Scarlett. If ever a letter comes for you our Tommy shall bring it straight round, and he’s aboy as can be trusted not to lose anything he’s given. You wouldn’t lose the pretty lady’s letter, would you, Tommy? You never lose nothing, do you?”
“I lost a acid-drop once.”
“There, fancy him remembering. That’s a hit for his ma, that is. He’d only half sucked this here acid-drop and laid it aside to finish sucking it when he went up to bed, and I must have swept it up, not thinking what it was. Fancy him remembering. He don’t talk much, but he’s a artful one.”
Tommy had a bagful of acid-drops soon after this, for he brought a letter to Sylvia from Lily:
DEARSYLVIA,—I suppose you’re awfully angry with me, but Claude went on tour a month ago, and I hate being alone. I wonder if this will find you. I’m staying in rotten rooms in Camden Town. 14 Winchester Terrace. Send me a card if you’re in London.Loving,LILY.
DEARSYLVIA,—I suppose you’re awfully angry with me, but Claude went on tour a month ago, and I hate being alone. I wonder if this will find you. I’m staying in rotten rooms in Camden Town. 14 Winchester Terrace. Send me a card if you’re in London.
Loving,LILY.
Sylvia immediately went over to Camden Town and brought Lily away from the rooms, which were indeed “rotten.” When she had installed her at Mulberry Cottage she worked herself up to having a clear understanding with Lily, but when it came to the point she felt it was useless to scold her except in fun, as a child scolds her doll. She did, however, treat her henceforth in what Mrs. Gainsborough called a “highly dictatorial way.” Sylvia thought she could give Lily the appearance of moral or immoral energy, however impossible it might be to give her the reality. With this end in view she made Lily’s will entirely subordinate to her own, which was not difficult. The affection that Sylvia now had for her was not so much tender as careful, the affection one might feel for a bicycle rather than for a horse. She was always brutally frank with herself about their relation to each other, and because she never congratulated herself upon her kindness she was able to sustain her affection.
“There is nothing so fickle as a virtuous impulse,” Sylvia declared to herself. “It’s a kind of moral usury which is always looking for a return on the investment. The moment the object fails to pay an exorbitant interest in gratitude, the impulse to speculate withers up. Thelowest circle in hell should be reserved for people who try to help others and cannot understand why their kindness is not appreciated. Really that was Philip’s trouble. He never got over being hurt that I didn’t perpetually remind him of his splendid behavior toward me. I suppose I’m damned inhuman. Well, well, I couldn’t have stood those three months after I left him if I hadn’t been.”
The affair between Lily and Claude Raglan was not much discussed. He had, it seemed, only left her because his career was at stake; he had received a good offer and she had not wished to detain him.
“But is it over between you?” Sylvia demanded.
“Yes, of course, it’s over—at any rate, for a long time to come,” Lily answered. “He cried when he left me. He really was a nice boy. If he lives, he thinks he will be a success—a real success. He introduced me to a lot of nice boys.”
“That was rash of him,” Sylvia laughed. “Were they as nice as the lodgings he introduced you to?”
“No, don’t laugh at him. He couldn’t afford anything else.”
“But why in Heaven’s name, if you wanted to play around together, had you got to leave Finborough Road?”
Lily blushed faintly. “You won’t be angry if I tell you?”
Sylvia shook her head.
“Claude said he couldn’t bear the idea that you were looking at us. He said it spoiled everything.”
“What did he think I was going to do?” Sylvia snapped. “Put pepper on the hymeneal pillow?”
“You said you wouldn’t be angry.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, don’t use long words, because it makes me think you are.”
Soon after Lily came to Tinderbox Lane, Sylvia met Dorothy Lonsdale with a very lovely dark girl called Olive Fanshawe, a fellow-member of the Vanity chorus. Dorothy was glad to see her, principally, Sylvia thought, because she was able to talk about lunch at Romano’s and supper at the Savoy.
“Look here,” Sylvia said. “A little less of the Queen ofSheba, if you don’t mind. Don’t forget I’m one of the blokes as is glad to smell the gratings outside a baker’s.”
Miss Fanshawe laughed, and Sylvia looked at her quickly, wondering if she were worth while.
Dorothy was concerned to hear she was still with Lily. “That dreadful girl,” she simpered.
“Oh, go to hell,” said Sylvia, sharply, and walked off.
Next day a note came from Dorothy to invite her and Lily to tea at the flat she shared with Olive.
“Wonderful how attractive rudeness is,” Sylvia commented.
“Oh, do let’s go. Look, she lives in Half Moon Street,” Lily said.
“And a damned good address for the demi-monde,” Sylvia added.
However, the tea-party was definitely a success, and for the rest of the summer Sylvia and Lily spent a lot of time on the river with what Sylvia called the semicircle of intimate friends they had brought away from Half Moon Street. She grew very fond of Olive Fanshawe and warned her against her romantic adoration of Dorothy.
“But you’re just as romantic over Lily,” Olive argued.
“Not a single illusion left, my dear,” Sylvia assured her. “Besides, I should never compare Lily with Dorothy. Dorothy is more beautiful, more ambitious, more mercenary. She’ll probably marry a lord. She’s acquired the art of getting a lot for nothing to a perfection that could only be matched by a politician or a girl with the same brown eyes in the same glory of light-brown hair. And when it suits her she’ll go back on her word just as gracefully, and sell her best friend as readily as a politician will sell his country.”
“You’re very down on politicians. I think there’s something so romantic about them,” Olive declared. “Young politicians, of course.”
“My dear, you’d think a Bradshaw romantic.”
“It is sometimes,” said Olive.
“Well, I know two young politicians,” Sylvia continued. “A Liberal and a Conservative. They both spend their whole time in hoping I sha’n’t suggest walking down Bond Street with them, the Liberal because I may see a frockand the Conservative because he may meet a friend. They both make love to me as if they were addressing their future constituents, with a mixture of flattery, condescension, and best clothes; but they reserve all their affection for the constituency. As I tell them, if they’d fondle the constituency and nurse me, I should endure their company more easily. Unhappily, they both think I’m intelligent, and a man who admires a woman’s intelligence is like a woman who admires her friend’s looking-glass—each one is granting an audience to himself.”
“At any rate,” said Olive, “you’ve managed to make yourself quite a mystery. All the men we know are puzzled by you.”
“Tell them, my dear, I’m quite simple. I represent the original conception of the Hetæra, a companion. I don’t want to be made love to, and every man who makes love to me I dislike. If I ever do fall in love, I’ll be a man’s slave. Of that I’m sure. So don’t utter dark warnings, for I’ve warned myself already. I do want a certain number of things—nice dresses, because I owe them to myself, good books, and—well, really, I think that’s all. In return for the dresses and the books—I suppose one ought to add an occasional fiver just to show there’s no ill feeling about preferring to sleep in my own room—in return for very little. I’m ready to talk, walk, laugh, sing, dance, tell incomparably bawdy stories, and, what is after all the most valuable return of all, I’m ready to sit perfectly still and let myself be bored to death while giving him an idea that I’m listening intelligently. Of course, sometimes I do listen intelligently without being bored. In that case I let him off with books only.”
“You really are an extraordinary girl,” said Olive.
“You, on the other hand, my dear,” Sylvia went on, “always give every man the hope that if he’s wise and tender, and of course lavish—ultimately all men believe in the pocket—he will be able to cry Open Sesame to the mysterious treasure of romantic love that he discerns in your dark eyes, in your caressing voice, and in your fervid aspirations. In the end you’ll give it all to a curly-headed actor and live happily ever afterward at Ravenscourt Park. Farewell to Coriolanus in his smart waistcoat;farewell to Julius Cæsar and his amber cigarette-holder; farewell to every nincompoop with a top-hat as bright as a halo; farewell incidentally to Dolly Lonsdale, who’ll discover that Ravenscourt Park is too difficult for the chauffeur to find.”
“Oh, Sylvia, shut up!” Olive said. “I believe you drank too much champagne at lunch.”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” Sylvia cried. “By Jove! I’d forgotten the fizz. That’s where we all meet on common ground—or rather, I should say in common liquid. It sounds like mixed bathing. It is a kind of mixed bathing, after all. You’re quite right, Olive, whatever our different tastes in men, clothes, and behavior, we all must have champagne. Champagne is a bloody sight thicker than water, as the prodigal said when his father uncorked a magnum to wash down the fatted calf.”
Gradually Sylvia did succeed in sorting out from the various men a few who were content to accept the terms of friendship she offered. She had to admit that most of them fell soon or late, and with each new man she gave less and took more. As regards Lily, she tried to keep her as unapproachable as herself, but it was not always possible. Sometimes with a shrug of the shoulders she let Lily go her own way, though she was always hard as steel with the fortunate suitor. Once a rich young financier called Hausberg, who had found Lily somewhat expensive, started a theory that Sylvia was living on her friend; she heard of the slander and dealt with it very directly. The young man in question was anxious to set Lily up in a flat of her own. Sylvia let Lily appear to view the plan with favor. The flat was taken and furnished; a date was fixed for Lily’s entrance; the young man was given the latch-key and told to come at midnight. When he arrived, there was nobody in the flat but a chimpanzee that Sylvia had bought at Jamrack’s. She and Lily were at Brighton with Arthur Lonsdale and Tony Clarehaven, whom they had recently met again at a Covent Garden ball.
They were both just down from Oxford, and Lonsdale had taken a great fancy to Lily. He was a jolly youth, whose father, Lord Cleveden, had consented after a struggle to let him go into partnership with a distinguished professionalmotorist. It was with him that Dorothy Lonsdale claimed distant kinship. Clarehaven’s admiration for Dorothy had not diminished; somebody had told him that the best way to get hold of her would be to make her jealous. This was his object in inviting Sylvia to Brighton. Sylvia agreed to go, partly to tease Dorothy, partly to disappoint Clarehaven. Lonsdale had helped her to get the chimpanzee into the flat, and all the way down to Brighton they laughed.
“My word, you know!” Lonsdale chuckled, “the jolly old chimpanzee will probably eat the wall-paper. What do you think Hausberg will say when he opens the door?”
“I expect he’ll say, ‘Are you there, Lily?’” Sylvia suggested.
“What do you think the jolly old chimpanzee will do? Probably bite his ear off—what? Topping. Good engine this. We’re doing fifty-nine or an unripe sixty. Why does a chicken cross the road? No answer, thank you, this time. Must slow down a bit. There’s a trap somewhere here. I say, you know, I’ve got a sister called Sylvia. Hullo! hullo! Mind your hoop, Tommy! Too late. Funeral on Friday. Colonial papers please copy. I wonder how they’ll get the chimpanzee out again. I told the hall porter, when he cast a cold and glassy eye on the crate, it was a marble Venus that Mr. Hausberg was going to use as a hat-stand. My word! I expect the jolly old flat looks like the last days of Pompeii by now. When I undid the door of the crate the brute was making a noise like a discontented cistern. I rapidly scattered Brazil nuts and bananas on the floor to occupy his mind and melted away like a strawberry ice on a grill. Hullo! We’re getting into Brighton.”
Clarehaven did not enjoy his week-end, for it consisted entirely of a lecture by Sylvia on his behavior. This caused him to drink many more whisky-and-sodas than usual, and he came back to London on Monday with a bad headache, which he attributed to Sylvia’s talking.
“My dear man,Ihaven’t got a mouth. You have,” she said.
This week-end caused a quarrel between Sylvia and Dorothy, for which she was not sorry. She had recentlymet a young painter, Ronald Walker, who wanted Lily to sit for him; he had taken them once or twice to the Café Royal, which Sylvia had found a pleasant change from the society of Half Moon Street. Soon after this Lonsdale began a liaison with Queenie Molyneux, of the Frivolity Theater. The only member of the Half Moon Street set with whom Sylvia kept up a friendship was Olive Fanshawe.
DURING her second year at Mulberry Cottage Sylvia achieved an existence that, save for the absence of any one great motive like art or love, was complete. She had also one real friend in Jack Airdale, who had returned from his tour. Apart from the pleasant security of knowing that he would always be content with good-fellowship only, he encouraged her to suppose that somewhere, could she but find the first step, a career lay before her. Sylvia did not in her heart believe in this career, but in moments of depression Jack’s confidence was of the greatest comfort, and she was always ready to play with the notion, particularly as it seemed to provide a background for her present existence and to cover the futility of its perfection. Jack was anxious that she should try to get on the proper stage, but Sylvia feared to destroy by premature failure a part of the illusion of ultimate success she continued to allow herself by finally ruling out the theater as one of the possible channels to that career. In the summer Lily became friendly with one or two men whom Sylvia could not endure, but a lassitude had descended upon her and she lacked any energy to stop the association. As a matter of fact she was sickening for diphtheria at the time, and while she was in the hospital Lily took to frequenting the Orient promenade with these new friends. As soon as Sylvia came out they were banished; but each time that she intervened on Lily’s behalf it seemed to her a little less worth while. Nevertheless, finding that Lily was bored by her own habit of staying in at night, she used much against her will to accompany her very often to various places of amusement without a definite invitation from a man to escort them.
One day at the end of December Mrs. Gainsboroughcame home from shopping with two tickets for a fancy-dress dance at the Redcliffe Hall in Fulham Road. When the evening arrived Sylvia did not want to go, for the weather was raw and foggy; but Mrs. Gainsborough was so much disappointed at her tickets not being used that to please her Sylvia agreed to go. It seemed unlikely to be an amusing affair, so she and Lily went in the most ordinary of their fancy dresses as masked Pierrettes. The company, as they had anticipated, was quite exceptionally dull.
“My dear, it’s like a skating-rink on Saturday afternoon,” Sylvia said. “We’ll have one more dance together and then go home.”
They were standing at the far end of the hall near the orchestra, and Sylvia was making disdainful comments upon the various couples that were passing out to refresh themselves or flirt in the draughty corridors.
Suddenly Sylvia saw a man in evening dress pushing his way in their direction, regardless of what ribbons he tore or toes he outraged in his transit. He was a young man of about twenty-three or twenty-four, with a countenance in which eagerness was curiously mixed with impassivity. Sylvia saw him as one sees a picture on first entering a gallery, which one postpones visiting with a scarcely conscious and yet perfectly deliberate anticipation of pleasure later on. She continued talking to Lily, who had her back to the new-comer; while she talked she was aware that all her own attention was fixed upon this new-comer and that she was asking herself the cause of the contradictions in his face and deciding that it was due to the finely carved immobile mouth beneath such eager eyes. Were they brown or blue? The young man had reached them, and from that immobile mouth came in accents that were almost like despair a salutation to Lily. Sylvia felt for a moment as if she had been wounded; she saw that Lily was looking at her with that expression she always put on when she thought Sylvia was angry with her; then after what seemed an age turned round slowly to the young man and, lifting her mask, engaged in conversation with him. Sylvia felt that she was trespassing upon the borders of great emotion and withdrew out of hearing, until Lily beckoned her forward to introduce the young man as Mr.Michael Fane. Sylvia did not raise her mask, and after nodding to him again retired from the conversation.
“But this is absurd,” she said to herself, after a while; and abruptly raising her mask she broke in upon the duologue. The music had begun. He was asking Lily to dance, and she, waiting for Sylvia’s leave in a way that made Sylvia want to slap her, was hesitating.
“What rot, Lily!” she exclaimed, impatiently. “Of course you may dance.”
The young man turned toward Sylvia and smiled. A moment later he and Lily had waltzed away.
“Good God!” said Sylvia to herself. “Am I going mad? A youth smiles at me and I feel inclined to cry. What is this waltz they’re playing?”
She looked at one of the sheets of music, but the name was nowhere legible, and she nearly snatched it away from the player in exasperation. Nothing seemed to matter in the world except that she should know the name of this waltz. Without thinking what she was doing she thumped the clarinet-player on the shoulder, who stopped indignantly and asked if she was trying to knock his teeth out.
“What waltz are you playing? What waltz are you playing?”
“‘Waltz Amarousse.’ Perhaps you’ll punch one of the strings next time, miss?”
“Happy New-Year,” Sylvia laughed, and the clarinet-player with a disgusted glance turned round to his music again.
By the time the dance was over and the other two had rejoined her, Sylvia was laughing at herself; but they thought she was laughing at them. Fane and Lily danced several more dances together, and gradually Sylvia made up her mind that she disapproved of this new intimacy, this sudden invasion of Lily’s life from the past from which she should have cut herself off as completely as Sylvia had done from her own. What right had Lily to complicate their existence in this fashion? How unutterably dull this masquerade was! She whispered to Lily in the next interval that she was tired and wanted to go home.
The fog outside was very dense. Fane took their arms to cross the road, and Sylvia, though he caught her armclose to him, felt drearily how mechanical its gesture was toward her, how vital toward Lily. Neither of her companions spoke to each other, and she asked them questions about their former friendship, which Lily did not answer because she was evidently afraid of her annoyance, and which he did not answer because he did not hear. Sylvia had made up her mind that Fane should not enter Mulberry Cottage, when Lily whispered to her that she should ask him, but at the last moment she remembered his smile and invited him to supper. A strange shyness took possession of her, which she tried to cover by exaggeration, almost, she thought, hysterical fooling with Mrs. Gainsborough that lasted until two o’clock in the morning of New-Year’s day, when Michael Fane went home after exacting a promise from the two girls to lunch with him at Kettner’s that afternoon. Lily was so sleepy that she did not rise to see him out. Sylvia was glad of the indifference.
Next morning Sylvia found out that Michael was a “nice boy” whom Lily had known in West Kensington when she was seventeen. He had been awfully in love with her, and her mother had been annoyed because he wanted to marry her. He had only been seventeen himself, and like many other school-boy loves of those days this one had just ended somehow, but exactly how Lily could not recall. She wished that Sylvia would not go on asking so many questions; she really could not remember anything more about it. They had gone once for a long drive in a cab, and there had been a row about that at home.
“Are you in love with him now?” Sylvia demanded.
“No, of course not. How could I be?”
Sylvia was determined that she never should be, either: there should be no more Claude Raglans to interfere with their well-devised existence.
During the next fortnight Sylvia took care that Lily and Michael should never be alone together, and she tried very often, after she discovered that Michael was sensitive, to shock him by references to their life, and with an odd perverseness to try particularly to shock him about herself by making brutally coarse remarks in front of Lily, taking pleasure in his embarrassment. Yet there was in the endlittle pleasure in shocking him, for he had no conventional niceness; yet there was a pleasure in hurting him, a fierce pleasure.
“Though why on earth I bother about his feelings, I can’t imagine,” Sylvia said to herself. “All I know is that he’s an awful bore and makes us break all sorts of engagements with other people. You liar! You know he’s not a bore, and you know that you don’t care a damn how many engagements you break. Don’t pose to yourself. You’re jealous of him because you think that Lily may get really fond of him. You don’t want her to get fond of him, because you don’t think she’s good enough for him. You don’t want him to get fond ofher.”
The boldness of this thought, the way in which it had attacked the secret recesses of her being, startled Sylvia. It was almost a sensation of turning pale at herself, of fearing to understand herself, that made her positively stifle the mood and flee from these thoughts, which might violate her personality.
Down-stairs, there was a telegram from Olive Fanshawe at Brighton, begging Sylvia to come at once; she was terribly unhappy; Sylvia could scarcely tear herself away from Mulberry Cottage at such a moment even for Olive, but, knowing that if she did not go she would be sorry, she went.
Sylvia found Olive in a state of collapse. Dorothy Lonsdale and she had been staying in Brighton for a week’s holiday, and yesterday Dorothy had married Clarehaven. Sylvia laughed.
“Oh, Sylvia, don’t laugh!” Olive begged. “It was perfectly dreadful. Of course it was a great shock to me, but I did not show it. I told her she could count on me as a pal to help her in every way. And what do you think she said? Sylvia, you’ll never guess. It was too cruel. She said to me in a voice of ice, dear—really, a voice of ice—she said the best way I could help her was by not seeing her any more. She did not intend to go near the stage door of a theater again. She did not want to know any of her stage friends any more. She didn’t even say she was sorry; she was quite calm. She was like ice, Sylvia dear. Clarehaven came in and she asked if he’d telegraphed to his mother,and when he said he had she got up as if she’d been calling on me quite formally and shook hands, and said: ‘Good-by, Olive. We’re going down to Clare Court to-morrow, and I don’t expect we shall see each other again for a long time.’ Clarehaven said what rot and that I must come down to Devonshire and stay with them, and Dolly froze him, my dear; she froze him with a look. I never slept all night, and the book I was reading began to repeat itself, and I thought I was going mad; but this morning I found the printers had made some mistake and put sixteen pages twice over. But I really thought I was going mad, so I wired for you. Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, say something to console me! She was like ice, dear, really like a block of ice.”
“If she’d only waited till you had found the curly-headed actor it wouldn’t have mattered so much,” Sylvia said.
Poor Olive really was on the verge of a nervous collapse, and Sylvia stayed with her three days, though it was agony to leave Lily in London with Michael Fane. Nor could she talk of her own case to Olive. It would seem like a competitive sorrow, a vulgar bit of egotistic assumption to suit the occasion.
When Sylvia got back to Mulberry Cottage she found an invitation from Jack Airdale to dine at Richmond and go to a dance with him afterward. Conscious from something in Michael’s watchful demeanor of a development in the situation, she was pleased to be able to disquiet him by insisting that Lily should go with her.
On the way, Sylvia extracted from Lily that Michael had asked her to marry him. It took all Jack Airdale’s good nature not to be angry with Sylvia that night—as she tore the world to shreds. At the moment when Lily had told her she had felt with a despair that was not communicable, as Olive’s despair had been, how urgent it was to stop Michael from marrying Lily. She was not good enough for him. The knowledge rang in her brain like a discordant clangor of bells, and Sylvia knew in that moment that the real reason of her thinking this was jealousy of Lily. The admission tortured her pride, and after a terrible night in which the memory of Olive’s grief interminably dwelt upon and absorbed helped her tosubstitute the pretense, so passionately invoked that it almost ceased to be a pretense, that she was opposing the marriage partly because Michael would never keep Lily faithful, partly because she could not bear the idea of losing her friend.
When, the next day, Sylvia faced Michael for the discussion of the marriage, she was quite sure not merely that he had never attracted her, but even that she hated him and, what was more deadly, despised him. She taunted him with wishing to marry Lily for purely sentimental reasons, for the gratification of a morbid desire to save her. She remembered Philip, and all the hatred she had felt for Philip’s superiority was transferred to Michael. She called him a prig and made him wince by speaking of Lily and herself as “tarts,” exacting from the word the uttermost tribute of its vulgarity. She dwelt on Lily’s character and evolved a theory of woman’s ownership by man that drove her into such illogical arguments and exaggerated pretensions that Michael had some excuse for calling her hysterical. The dispute left Lily on one side for a time and became personal to herself and him. He told her she was jealous. In an access of outraged pride she forgot that he was referring to her jealousy about Lily, and to any one less obsessed by an idea than he was she would have revealed her secret. Suddenly he seemed to give way. When he was going he told her that she hated him because he loved Lily and hated him twice as much because his love was returned.
Sylvia felt she would go mad when Michael said that he loved Lily; but he was thinking it was because Lily loved him that she was biting her nails and glaring at him. Then he asked her what college at Oxford her husband had been at. She had spoken of Philip during their quarrel. This abrupt linking of himself with Philip restored her balance, and coolly she began to arrange in her mind for Lily’s withdrawal from London for a while. Of passion and fury there was nothing left except a calm determination to disappoint Master Michael. She remembered Olive Fanshawe’s, “Like ice, dear, she was like a block of ice.” She, too, was like a block of ice as she watched him walking away down the long garden.
When Michael had gone Sylvia told Lily that marriage with him was impossible.
“Why do you want to be married?” she demanded. “Was your mother so happy in her marriage? I tell you, child, that marriage is almost inconceivably dull. What have you got in common with him? Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“I’m not a bit anxious to be married,” Lily protested. “But when somebody goes on and on asking, it’s so difficult to refuse. I liked Claude better than I like Michael. But Claude had to think about his future.”
“And what about your future?” Sylvia exclaimed.
“Oh, I expect it’ll be all right. Michael has money.”
“I say you shall not marry him,” Sylvia almost shouted.
“Oh, don’t keep on so,” Lily fretfully implored. “It gives me a headache. I won’t marry him if it’s going to upset you so much. But you mustn’t leave me alone with him again, because he worries me just as much as you do.”
“We’ll go away to-morrow,” Sylvia announced, abruptly. It flashed upon her that she would like to go to Sirene with Lily, but, alas! there was not enough money for such a long journey, and Bournemouth or Brighton must be the colorless substitute.
Lily cheered up at the idea of going away, and Sylvia was half resentful that she could accept parting from Michael so easily. Lily’s frocks were not ready the next day, and in the morning Michael’s ring was heard.
“Oh, now I suppose we shall have more scenes,” Lily complained.
Sylvia ran after Mrs. Gainsborough, who was waddling down the garden path to open the door.
“Come back, come back at once!” she cried. “You’re not to open the door.”
“Well, there’s a nice thing. But it may be the butcher.”
“We don’t want any meat. It’s not the butcher. It’s Fane. You’re not to open the door. We’ve all gone away.”
“Well, don’t snap my head off,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, turning back unwillingly to the house.
All day long at intervals the bell rang.
“The neighbors ’ll think the house is on fire,” Mrs. Gainsborough bewailed.
“Nobody hears it except ourselves, you silly old thing,” Sylvia said.
“And what ’ll the passers-by think?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked. “It looks so funny to see any one standing outside a door, ringing all day long like a chimney-sweep who’s come on Monday instead of Tuesday. Let me go out and tell him you’ve gone away. I’ll hold the door on the jar, the same as if I was arguing with a hawker. Now be sensible, Sylvia. I’ll just pop out, pop my head round the door, and pop back in again.”
“You’re not to go. Sit down.”
“You do order any one about so. I might be a serviette, the way you crumple me up. Sylvia, don’t keep prodding into me. I may be fat, but I have got some feelings left. You’re a regular young spiteful. A porter wouldn’t treat luggage so rough. Give over, Sylvia.”
“What a fuss you make about nothing!” Sylvia said.
“Well, that ping-ping-pinging gets on my nerves. I feel as if I were coming out in black spots like a domino. Why don’t the young fellow give over? It’s a wonder his fingers aren’t worn out.”
The ringing continued until nearly midnight in bursts of half an hour at a stretch. Next morning Sylvia received a note from Fane in which he invited her to be sporting and let him see Lily.
“How I hate that kind of gentlemanly attitude!” she scoffed to herself.
Sylvia wrote as unpleasant a letter as she could invent, which she left with Mrs. Gainsborough to be given to Michael when he should call in answer to an invitation she had posted for the following day at twelve o’clock. Then Lily and she left for Brighton. All the way down in the train she kept wondering why she had ended her letter to Michael by calling him “my little Vandyck.” Suddenly she flew into a rage with herself, because she knew that she was making such speculation an excuse to conjure his image to her mind.
Toward the end of February Sylvia and Lily came back to Mulberry Cottage. Sylvia had awakened one morningwith the conviction that it was beneath her dignity to interfere further between Lily and Michael. She determined to leave everything to fate. She would go and stay with Olive for a while, and if Lily went away with Michael, so much the better. To hell with both of them. This resolution once taken, Sylvia, who had been rather charming to Lily all the time at Brighton, began now to treat her with a contempt that was really an expression of the contempt she felt for Michael. A week after their return to London she spent the whole of one day in ridiculing him so cruelly that even Mrs. Gainsborough protested. Then she was seized with an access of penitence, and, clasping Lily to her, she almost entreated her to vow that she loved her better than any one else in the world. Lily, however, was by this time thoroughly sulky and would have nothing to do with Sylvia’s tardy sweetness. The petulant way in which she shook herself free from the embrace at last brought Sylvia up to the point of leaving Lily to herself. She should go and stay with Olive Fanshawe, and if, when she came back, Lily were still at Mulberry Cottage, she would atone for the way she had treated her lately; if she were gone, it would be only one more person ruthlessly cut out of her life. It was curious to think of everybody—Monkley, Philip, the Organs, Mabel, the twins, Miss Ashley, Dorward, all going on with their lives at this moment regardless of her.
“I might just as well be dead,” she told herself. “What a fuss people make about death!”
Sylvia was shocked to find how much Olive had suffered from Dorothy’s treatment of her. For the first time in her life she was unable to dispose of emotion as mere romantic or sentimental rubbish; there was indeed something deeper than the luxury of grief that could thus ennoble even a Vanity girl.
“I do try, Sylvia, not to mope all the time. I keep on telling myself that, if I really loved Dorothy, I should be glad for her to be Countess of Clarehaven, with everything that she wants. She was always a good girl. I lived with her more than two years and she wasfrightfullystrict about men. She deserved to be a countess. And I’m sure she’s quite right in wanting to cut herself off altogetherfrom the theater. I think, you know, she may have meant to be kind in telling me at once like that, instead of gradually dropping me, which would have been worse, wouldn’t it? Only I do miss her so. She was such a lovely thing to look at.”
“So are you,” Sylvia said.
“Ah, but I’m dark, dear, and a dark girl never has that almost unearthly beauty that Dolly had.”
“Dark girls have often something better than unearthly and seraphic beauty,” Sylvia said. “They often have a gloriously earthly and human faithfulness.”
“Ah, you need to tease me about being romantic, but I think it’s you that’s being romantic now. You were quite right, dear; I used to be stupidly romantic over foolish little things without any importance, and now it all seems such a waste of time. That’s really what I feel most of all, now that I’ve lost my friend. It seems to me that every time I patted a dog I was wasting time.”
Sylvia had a fleeting thought that perhaps Gladys and Enid Worsley might have felt like that about her, but in a moment she quenched the fire it kindled in her heart. She was not going to bask in the warmth of self-pity like a spoiled little girl that hopes she may die to punish her brother for teasing her.
“I think, you know,” Olive went on, “that girls like us aren’t prepared to stand sorrow. We’ve absolutely nothing to fall back upon. I’ve been thinking all these days what an utterly unsatisfactory thing lunch at Romano’s really is. The only thing in my life that I can look back to for comfort is summer at the convent in Belgium. Of course we giggled all the time; but all the noise of talking has died away, and I can only see a most extraordinary peacefulness. I wonder if the nuns would have me as a boarder for a little while this summer. I feel I absolutely must go there. It isn’t being sentimental, because I never knew Dorothy in those days.”
Perhaps Olive’s regret for her lost friend affected Sylvia. When she went back to Mulberry Cottage and found that Lily had gone away, notwithstanding her own deliberate provocation of the elopement, she was dismayed. There was nothing left of Lily but two old frocks in the wardrobe,two old frocks the color of dead leaves; and this poignant reminder of a physical loss drove out all the other emotions. She told herself that it was ridiculous to be moved like this and she jeered at herself for imitating Olive’s grief. But it was no use; those two frocks affrighted her courage with their deadness. No kind of communion after marriage would compensate for the loss of Lily’s presence; it was like the fading of a flower in the completeness of its death. Even if she had been able to achieve the selflessness of Olive and take delight in Lily’s good fortune, how impossible it was to believe in the triumph of this marriage. Lily would either be bored or she would become actively miserable—Sylvia snorted at the adverb—and run away or rather slowly melt to damnation. It would not even be necessary for her to be miserable; any unscrupulous friend of her husband’s would have his way with her. For an instant Sylvia had a tremor of compassion for Michael, but it died in the thought of how such a disillusion would serve him right. He had built up this passion out of sentimentality; he was like Don Quixote; he was stupid. No doubt he had managed by now to fall in love with Lily, but it had never been an inevitable passion, and no pity should be shown to lovers that did not love wildly at first sight. They alone could plead fate’s decrees.
Jack Airdale came to see Sylvia, and he took advantage of her despair to press his desire for her to go upon the stage. He was positive that she had in her the makings of a great actress. He did not want to talk about himself, but he must tell Sylvia that there was a wonderful joy in getting on. He would never, of course, do anything very great, but he was understudy to some one or other at some theater or other, and there was always a chance of really showing what he could do one night or at any rate one afternoon. Even Claude was getting on; he had met him the other day in a tail coat and a top-hat. Since there had been such an outcry against tubercular infection, he had been definitely cured of his tendency toward consumption; he had nothing but neurasthenia to contend with now.
But Sylvia would not let Jack “speak about her” to the managers he knew. She had no intention of continuing as she was at present, but she should wait till she was twenty-threebefore she took any step that would involve anything more energetic than turning over the pages of a book; she intended to dream away the three months that were left to twenty-two. Jack Airdale went away discouraged.
Sylvia met Ronald Walker, who had painted Lily. From him she learned that Fane had taken a house for her somewhere near Regent’s Park. By a curious coincidence, a great friend of his who was also a friend of Fane’s had helped to acquire the house. Ronald understood that there was considerable feeling against the marriage among Fane’s friends. What was Fane like? He knew several men who knew him, and he seemed to be one of those people about whose affairs everybody talked.
“Thank Heaven, nobody bothers about me,” said Ronald. “This man Fane seems to have money to throw about. I wish he’d buy my picture of Lily. You’re looking rather down, Sylvia. I suppose you miss her? By Jove! what an amazing sitter! She wasn’t really beautiful, you know—I mean to say with the kind of beauty that lives outside its setting. I don’t quite mean that, but in my picture of her, which most people consider the best thing I’ve done, she never gave me what I ought to have had from such a model. I felt cheated, somehow, as if I’d cut a bough from a tree and in doing so destroyed all its grace. It was her gracefulness really; and dancing’s the only art for that. I can’t think why I didn’t paint you.”
“You’re not going to begin now,” Sylvia assured him.
“Well, of course, now you challenge me,” he laughed. “The fact is, Sylvia, I’ve never really seen you in repose till this moment. You were always tearing around and talking. Look here, I do want to paint you. I say, let me paint you in this room with Mrs. Gainsborough. By Jove! I see exactly what I want.”
“It sounds as if you wanted an illustration for the Old and New Year,” Sylvia said.
In the end, however, she gave way; and really, it passed the time, sitting for Ronald Walker with Mrs. Gainsborough in that room where nothing of Lily remained.
“Well,” Mrs. Gainsborough declared, when the painter had finished. “I knew I was fat, but really it’s enough to make any one get out of breath just to look at any one sofat as you’ve made me. He hasn’t been stingy with his paint, I’ll say that. But really, you know, it looks like a picture of the fat woman in a fair. Now Sylvia’s very good. Just the way she looks at you with her chin stuck out like a step-ladder. Your eyes are very good, too. He’s just got that nasty glitter you get into them sometimes.”
One day in early June, without any warning, Michael Fane revisited Mulberry Cottage. Sylvia had often declaimed against him to Mrs. Gainsborough, and now while they walked up the garden she could see that Mrs. Gainsborough was nervous, and by the way that Michael walked either that he was nervous or that something had happened. Sylvia came down the steps from the balcony to meet them, and, reading in his countenance that he had come to ask her help, she was aware of an immense relief, which she hid under an attitude of cold hostility. They sat on the garden seat under the budding mulberry-tree, and without any preliminaries of conversation Michael told her that he and Lily had parted. Sylvia resented an implication in his tone that she would somehow be awed by this announcement; she felt bitterly anxious to disappoint and humiliate him by her indifference, hoping that he would beg her to get Lily back for him. Instead of this he spoke of putting her out of his life, and Sylvia perceived that it was not at all to get Lily back that he had come to her. She was angry at missing her opportunity and she jeered at the stately way in which he confessed his failure and his loss; nor would he wince when she mocked his romantic manner of speech. At last she was almost driven into the brutality of picturing in unforgivable words the details of Lily’s infidelity, but from this he flinched, stopping her with a gesture. He went on to give Sylvia full credit for her victory, to grant that she had been right from the first, and gradually by dwelling on the one aspect of Lily that was common to both of them, her beauty, he asked her very gently to take Lily back to live with her again. Sylvia could not refrain from sneers, and he was stung into another allusion to her jealousy, which Sylvia set out to disprove almost mathematically, though all the time she was afraid of what clear perception he might not have attained through sorrow. But he was still obsessed by thesalvation of Lily; and Sylvia, because she could forgive him for his indifference to her own future except so far as it might help Lily, began to mock at herself, to accuse herself for those three months after she left Philip, to rake up that corpse from its burial-place so that this youth who troubled her very soul might turn his face from her in irremediable disgust and set her free from the spell he was unaware of casting.
When she had worn herself out with the force of her denunciation both of herself and of mankind, he came back to his original request; Sylvia, incapable of struggling further, yielded to his perseverance, but with a final flicker of self-assertion she begged him not to suppose that she was agreeing to take Lily back for any other reason than because she wanted to please herself.
Michael began to ask her about Lily’s relation to certain men with whom he had heard her name linked—with Ronald Walker, and with Lonsdale, whom he had known at Oxford. Sylvia told him the facts quite simply; and then because she could not bear this kind of self-torture he was inflicting on himself, she tried to put out of its agony his last sentimental regret for Lily by denying to her and by implication to herself also the justification even of a free choice.
“Money is necessary sometimes, you know,” she said.
Sylvia expected he would recoil from this, but he accepted it as the statement of a natural fact, agreed with its truth, and begged that in the future if ever money should be necessary he should be given the privilege of helping. So long as it was apparently only Lily whom he desired to help thus, Michael had put forward his claims easily enough. Then in a flash Sylvia felt that now he was transferring half his interest in Lily to her. He was stumbling hopelessly over that; he was speaking in a shy way of sending her books that she would enjoy; then abruptly he had turned from her and the garden door had slammed behind him. It was with a positive exultation that Sylvia realized that he had forgotten to give her Lily’s address and that it was the dread of seeming to intrude upon her which had driven him away like that. She ran after him and called him back. He gave her a visiting-cardon which his name was printed above the address; it was like a little tombstone of his dead love. He was talking now about selling the furniture and sending the money to Lily. Sylvia all the time was wondering why the first man that had ever appealed to her in the least should be like the famous hero of literature that had always bored her. With an impulse to avenge Michael she asked the name of the man for whom Lily had betrayed him. But he had never known; he had only seen his hat.
Sylvia pulled Michael to her and kissed him with the first kiss she had given to any man that was not contemptuous either of him or of herself.
“How many women have kissed you suddenly like that?” she asked.
“One—well, perhaps two!” he answered.
Even this kiss of hers was not hers alone, but because she might never see him again Sylvia broke the barrier of jealousy and in a sudden longing to be prodigal of herself for once she gave him all she could, her pride, by letting him know that she for her part had never kissed any man like that before.
Sylvia went back to the seat under the mulberry-tree and made up her mind that the time was ripe for activity again. She had allowed herself to become the prey of emotion by leading this indeterminate life in which sensation was cultivated at the expense of incident. It was a pity that Michael had intrusted her with Lily, for at this moment she would have liked to be away out of it at once; any adventure embarked upon with Lily would always be bounded by her ability to pack in time. Sylvia could imagine how those two dresses she had left behind must have been the most insuperable difficulty of the elopement. Another objection to Lily’s company now was the way in which it would repeatedly remind her of Michael.
“Of course it won’t remind me sentimentally,” Sylvia assured herself. “I’m not such a fool as to suppose that I’m going to suffer from a sense of personal loss. On the other hand, I sha’n’t ever be able to forget what an exaggerated impression I gave him. It’s really perfectly damnable to divine one’s sympathy with a person, to know that one could laugh together through life, and by circumstancesto have been placed in an utterly abnormal relation to him. It really is damnable. He’ll think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the great multitude of wronged women. I shall think of him—though as a matter of fact I shall avoid thinking of him—either as what might have been, a false concept, for of course what might have been is fundamentally inconceivable, or as what he was, a sentimental fool. However, the mere fact that I’m sitting here bothering my head about what either of us thinks shows that I need a change of air.”
That afternoon a parcel of books arrived for Sylvia from Michael Fane; among them was Skelton’s Don Quixote and Adlington’sApuleius, on the fly-leaf of which he had written: