“You mustn’t just kiss me,” Sylvia warned him, “because it’s easy. It’s very difficult, really, because it’s very difficult for me to let you do it. I have to wind myself up beforehand just as if I were going to pull out a loose tooth.”
Arthur gazed at her with wide-open, liquid eyes; his mouth trembled. “You say such cruel things,” he murmured.
Sylvia punched him as hard as she could. “I won’t be stared at like that. You look like a cow when you stare at me like that. Buck up and think what we’re going to do.”
“I’m ready to do anything,” Arthur declared, “as longas you’re decent to me. But you’re such an extraordinary girl. One moment you burst into tears and put your head on my shoulder, and the next moment you’re punching me.”
“And I shall punch you again,” Sylvia said, fiercely, “if you dare to remind me that I ever cried in front of you. You weren’t there when I cried.”
“But I was,” he protested.
“No, you weren’t. You were only there like a tree or a cloud.”
“Or a cow,” said Arthur, gloomily.
“I think that if we did go away together,” Sylvia said, meditatively, “I should leave you almost at once, because you will keep returning to things I said. My father used to be like that.”
“But if we go away,” Arthur asked, “how are we going to live? I shouldn’t be any use on racecourses. I’m the sort of person that gets taken in by the three-card trick.”
“You make me so angry when you talk like that,” Sylvia said. “Of course if you think you’ll always be a fool, you always will be a fool. Being in love with me must make you think that you’re not a fool. Perhaps we never shall go away together; but if we do, you’ll have to begin by stealing bicycles. Jimmy Monkley and my father did that for a time. You hire a bicycle and sell it or pawn it a long way off from the shop it came from. It’s quite easy. Only, of course, it’s best to disguise yourself. Father used to paint out his teeth, wear blue glasses, and powder his mustache gray. But once he made himself so old in a place called Lewisham that the man in the bicycle-shop thought he was too old to ride and wouldn’t let him have a machine.”
Sylvia was strengthened in her resolve to launch Arthur upon the stormy seas of an independent existence by the placid harbor in which his mother loved to see him safely at anchor. Sylvia could not understand how a woman like Mrs. Madden, who had once been willing to elope with a groom, could bear to let her son spend his time so ineffectively. Not that she wished Mrs. Madden to exert her authority by driving him into a clerkship, or indeed into any profession for which he had no inclination, but shedeplored the soft slavery which a fond woman can impose, the slavery of being waited upon that is more deadening than the slavery of waiting upon other people. She used to make a point of impressing upon Mrs. Madden the extent to which she and Arthur went shares in everything, lest she might suppose that Sylvia imitated her complaisance, and when Mrs. Madden used to smile in her tired way and make some remark about boy and girl lovers, Sylvia used to get angry and try to demonstrate the unimportance of that side of life.
“You funny child,” Mrs. Madden said. “When you’re older, how you’ll laugh at what you think now. Of course, you don’t know anything about love yet, mercifully for you. I wish I were richer; I should so like to adopt you.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t be adopted,” Sylvia quickly interposed. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I belong to nobody. And please don’t think I’m so innocent, because I’m not. I’ve seen a great deal of love, you must remember, and I’ve thought a lot about it, and made up my mind that I’ll never be a slave to that sort of thing. Arthur may be stupidly in love with me, but I’m very strict with him and it doesn’t do him any harm.”
“Come and sing your favorite song,” Mrs. Madden laughed. “I’ll play your accompaniment.”
All the discussions between them ended in music; Sylvia would sing that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies—or, stamping with her foot upon the floor of the old house until it shook and crossing her arms with such resolution that Arthur’s eyes would grow larger than ever, as if he half expected to see her act upon the words and fling herself out into the December night, regardless of all but a mad demonstration of liberty.
Sylvia would sometimes sing about the gipsies to herself while she was undressing, which generally called forth a protest from Mrs. Gustard, who likened the effect to that of a young volcano let loose.
Another person that was pained by Sylvia’s exuberance was Maria, her black cat, so called on account of his color before he was definitely established as a gentleman. He had no ear for music and he disapproved of dancing; nor did he have the least sympathy with the aspirations of thelawless song she sang. Mrs. Gustard considered that he was more artful than what any one would think, but she repudiated as “heathenish” Sylvia’s contention that she outwardly resembled Maria.
“Still I do think I’m like a cat,” Sylvia argued. “Perhaps not very like a black cat, more like a tabby. One day you’ll come up to my room and find me purring on the bed.”
Mrs. Gustard exclaimed against such an unnatural event.
Sylvia received one or two letters from Jimmy Monkley during the winter, in which he wrote with considerable optimism of the success of his venture and thought he might be back in Hampstead by February. He came back unexpectedly, however, in the middle of January, and Sylvia was only rather glad to see him; she had grown fond of her life alone and dreaded Jimmy’s habit of arranging matters over her head. He was not so amiable as formerly, because the scheme had only been partially successful and he had failed to make enough money to bring the flash gambling-hell perceptibly nearer. Sylvia had almost forgotten that project; it seemed to her now a dull project, neither worthy of herself nor of him. She did not attempt, on Jimmy’s return, to change her own way of spending the time, and she persisted in taking the long walks with Arthur as usual.
“What the devil you see to admire in that long-legged, saucer-eyed, curly-headed mother’s pet I don’t know,” Jimmy grumbled.
“I don’t admire him,” Sylvia said. “I don’t admire anybody except Joan of Arc. But I like him.”
Jimmy scowled; and later on that day Mr. Gustard warned Sylvia that her uncle (as such was Jimmy known in the lodgings) had carried on alarmingly about her friendship with young Artie.
“It’s nothing to do with him,” Sylvia affirmed, with out-thrust chin.
“Nothing whatever,” Mr. Gustard agreed. “But if I was you I wouldn’t throw young Artie in his face. I’ve never had a niece myself, but from what I can make out an uncle feels something like a father; and a father gets very worried about his rights.”
“But you’ve never had any children, and so you can’t know any more about the feelings of a father,” Sylvia objected.
“Ah, but I’ve got my own father to look back upon,” Mr. Gustard said. “He mostly took a spade to me, I remember, though he wasn’t against jabbing me in the ribs with a trowel if there wasn’t a spade handy. I reckon it was him as first put the notion of liberty for all into my head. I never set much store by uncles, though. The only uncle I ever had died of croup when he was two years old.”
“My father didn’t like his aunts,” Sylvia added to the condemnation. “He was brought up by two aunts.”
“Aunts in general is sour bodies, ’specially when they’re in charge and get all the fuss of having children with none of the fun.”
“Mr. Monkley isn’t really my uncle,” Sylvia abruptly proclaimed.
“Go on! you don’t mean it?” said Mr. Gustard. “I suppose he’s your guardian?”
“He’s nothing at all,” Sylvia answered.
“He must be something.”
“He’s absolutely nothing,” she insisted. “He used to live with my father, and when my father died he just went on living with me. If I don’t want to live with him I needn’t.”
“But you must live with somebody,” said Mr. Gustard. “There’s a law about having visible means of support. You couldn’t have a lot of kids living on their own.”
“Why not?” Sylvia asked, in contemptuous amazement.
“Why not?” Mr. Gustard repeated. “Why because every one would get pestered to death. It’s the same with stray dogs. Stray dogs have got to have a home. If they haven’t a home of their own, they’re taken to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea and cremated, which is a painless and mercenary death.”
“I don’t call that much of a home,” Sylvia scoffed. “A place where you’re killed.”
“That’s because we’re speaking of dogs. Of course, if the police started in cremating children, there’d be a regular outcry. So the law insists on children having homes.”
Sylvia tried hard to convince Mr. Gustard that she was different from other children, and in any case no longer a child; but though the discussion lasted a long time he would not admit the logic of Sylvia’s arguments; in the end she decided he did not know what he was talking about.
Monkley so much disliked Sylvia’s intimacy with Arthur that he began to talk of moving from Hampstead, whereupon she warned him that if he tried to go away without paying the rent she would make a point of letting Mr. Gustard know where they had gone.
“It strikes me,” Monkley said, and when he spoke, Sylvia was reminded of the tone he used when she had protested against his treatment of Maudie Tilt—“it strikes me that since I’ve been away you’ve taken things a bit too much into your own hands. That’s a trick you’d better drop with me, or we shall quarrel.”
Sylvia braced herself to withstand him as she had withstood him before; but she could not help feeling a little apprehensive, so cold were his green eyes, so thin his mouth.
“I don’t care if we quarrel or not,” she declared. “Because if we quarreled it would mean that I couldn’t bear you near me any longer and that I was glad to quarrel. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you may be sorry, but I shall never be sorry. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you can’t think how dreadfully much I shall hate you.”
“Don’t try to come the little actress over me,” Monkley said. “I’ve known too many women in my life to be bounced by a kid like you. But that’s enough. I can’t think why I pay so much attention to you.”
“No,” Sylvia said. “All the women you’ve known don’t seem to have been able to teach you how to manage a little girl like me. What a pity!”
She laughed and left him alone.
There was a halcyon week that February, and Sylvia spent every day and all day on the Heath with Arthur. People used to turn and stare after them as they walked arm-in-arm over the vivid green grass.
“I think it’s you they stare at,” Sylvia said. “You look interesting with your high color and dark curly hair. You look rather foreign. Perhaps people think you’re apoet. I read the other day about a poet called Keats who lived in Hampstead and loved a girl called Fanny Brawne. I wish I knew what she looked like. It’s not a very pretty name. Now I’ve got rather a pretty name, I think; though I’m not pretty myself.”
“You’re not exactly pretty,” Arthur agreed. “But I think if I saw you I should turn round to look at you. You’re like a person in a picture. You seem to stand out and to be the most important figure. In paintings that’s because the chief figure is usually so much larger than the others. Well, that’s the impression you give me.”
Speculation upon Sylvia’s personality ceased when they got home; Monkley threatened Arthur in a very abusive way, even going as far as to pick up a stone and fling it through one of the few panes of glass left in the tumble-down greenhouse in order to illustrate the violent methods he proposed to adopt.
The next day, when Sylvia went to fetch Arthur for their usual walk, he made some excuse and was obviously frightened to accompany her.
“What can he do to you?” Sylvia demanded, in scornful displeasure. “The worst he can do is to kill you, and then you’d have died because you wouldn’t surrender. Haven’t you read about martyrs?”
“Of course I’ve read about martyrs,” said Arthur, rather querulously. “But reading about martyrs is very different from being a martyr yourself. You seem to think everybody can be anything you happen to read about. You wouldn’t care to be a martyr, Sylvia.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong,” she loftily declared. “I’d much sooner be a martyr than a coward.”
Arthur winced at her plain speaking. “You don’t care what you say,” was his reproach.
“No, and I don’t care what I do,” Sylvia agreed. “Are you coming out with me? Because if you’re not, you shall never be my friend again.”
Arthur pulled himself together and braved Monkley’s threats. On a quiet green summit he demanded her impatient kisses for a recompense; she, conscious of his weakness and against her will made fonder of him by this very weakness, kissed him less impatiently than was her wont, sothat Arthur, under the inspiration of that rare caress, vowed he cared for nobody and for nothing, if she would but always treat him thus kindly.
Sylvia, who was determined to make Jimmy pay for his bad behavior, invited herself to tea with Mrs. Madden; afterward, though it was cloudy and ominous, Arthur and she walked out on the Heath once more, until it rained so hard that they were driven home. It was about seven o’clock when Sylvia reached her room, her hair all tangled with moisture, her eyes and cheeks on fire with the exhilaration of that scurry through the rain. She had not stood a moment to regard herself in the glass when Monkley, following close upon her heels, shut the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Sylvia looked round in astonishment; by a trick of candle-light his eyes gleamed for an instant, so that she felt a tremor of fear.
“You’ve come back at last, have you?” he began in a slow voice, so deliberate and gentle in its utterance that Sylvia might not have grasped the extent of his agitation, had not one of his legs, affected by a nervous twitch, drummed upon the floor a sinister accompaniment. “You shameless little b——h, I thought I forbade you to go out with him again. You’ve been careering over the Heath. You’ve been encouraging him to make love to you. Look at your hair—it’s in a regular tangle! and your cheeks—they’re like fire. Well, if you can let that nancified milksop mess you about, you can put up with me. I’ve wanted to long enough, God knows; and this is the reward I get for leaving you alone. You give yourself to the first b——y boy that comes along.”
Before Sylvia had time to reply, Monkley had leaped across the room and crushed her to him.
“Kiss me, damn you, kiss me! Put your arms round me.”
Sylvia would not scream, because she could not have endured that anybody should behold her in such an ignominious plight. Therefore she only kicked and fought, and whispered all the while, with savage intensity! “You frog! you frog! You look like a frog! Leave me alone!”
Monkley held her more closely and forced her mouth against his own, but Sylvia bit through his under lip till herteeth met. The pain caused him to start back and tread on Maria, who, searching in a panic for better cover than the bed afforded, had run between his legs. The cat, uttering one of those unimaginable wails with which only cats have power so horribly to surprise, retired to a corner, where he hissed and growled. In another corner Sylvia spat forth the unclean blood and wiped from her lips the soilure of the kisses.
Monkley had had enough for the present. The pain and sudden noise had shaken his nerves. When the blood ran down his chin, bedabbling his tie, he unlocked the door and retired, crying out almost in a whimper for something to stop a bad razor cut. Mrs. Gustard went to the wood-shed for cobwebs; but Monkley soon shouted down that he had found some cotton wool, and Sylvia heard a cork being drawn. She made up her mind to kill him that night, but she was perplexed by the absence of a suitable weapon, and gradually it was borne in upon her mind that if she killed Monkley she would have to pay the penalty, which did not seem to her a satisfactory kind of revenge. She gave up the notion of killing him and decided to run away with Arthur instead.
For a long time Sylvia sat in her bedroom, thinking over her plan; then she went next door and asked Arthur to come out and talk to her about something important. They stood whispering in the wet garden, while she bewitched him into offering to share her future. He was dazed by the rapidity with which she disposed of every objection he brought forward. She knew how to get enough money for them to start with. She knew how to escape from the house, and because the creeper beneath Arthur’s window was not strong enough to bear his weight, he must tie his sheets together. He must not bring much luggage; she would only bring a small valise, and Maria could travel in her work-basket.
“Maria?” echoed Arthur, in dismay.
“Of course! it was Maria who saved me,” said Sylvia. “I shall wait till Monkley is asleep. I expect he’ll be asleep early, because he’s drinking brandy hard now; then I shall whistle the last line of the raggle-taggle gipsies and slither down from my window by the ivy.”
She stuffed Arthur’s reeling brain with further details, and, catching him to her heart, she kissed him with as much enthusiasm as might have been mistaken for passion. In the end, between coaxing and frightening him, threatening and inspiring him, Sylvia made Arthur agree to everything, and danced back indoors.
“Anybody would think you were glad because your guardian angel’s gone and sliced a rasher off of his mouth,” Mr. Gustard observed.
By ten o’clock all was quiet in the house. Sylvia chose with the greatest care her equipment for the adventure. She had recently bought a tartan frock, which, not having yet been worn, she felt would excellently become the occasion; this she put on, and plaited her tangled hair in a long pigtail. The result was unsatisfactory, for it made her look too prim for a heroine; she therefore undid the pigtail and tied her hair loosely back with a nut-brown bow. It was still impossibly early for an escape, so Sylvia sat down on the edge of her bed and composed herself to read the escape of Fabrizio from the Sforza tower in Parma. The book in which she read this was not one that she had been able to read through without a great deal of skipping; but this escape which she had only come across a day or two before seemed a divine omen to approve her decision. Sylvia regretted the absence of the armed men at the foot of the tower, but said to herself that, after all, she was escaping with her lover, whereas Fabrizio had been compelled to leave Clelia Conti behind. The night wore away; at half past eleven Sylvia dropped her valise from the window and whistled that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies—oh. Then she waited until a ghostly snake was uncoiled from Arthur’s window.
“My dearest boy, you’re an angel,” she trilled, in an ecstasy, when she saw him slide safely down into the garden.
“Catch Maria,” she whispered. “I’m coming myself in a moment.”
Arthur caught her work-basket, and a faint protesting mew floated away on the darkness. Sylvia wrapped herself up, and then very cautiously, candle in hand, walked across to the door of Monkley’s room and listened. He wassnoring loudly. She pushed open the door and beheld him fast asleep, a red-and-white beard of cotton wool upon his chin. Then risking all in an impulse to be quick, though she was almost stifled by fear, she hurried across the room to his trunk. He kept all his money in a tin box. How she hoped there was enough to make him rue her flight. Monkley never stirred; the box was safe in her muff. She stole back to her room, blew out the candle, flung the muff down to Arthur, held her breath when the coins rattled, put one leg over the sill, and scrambled down by the ivy.
“I wish it had been higher,” she whispered, when Arthur clasped her with affectionate solicitude where she stood in the sodden vegetation.
“I’m jolly glad it wasn’t,” he said. “Now what are we going to do?”
“Why, find a ’bus, of course!” Sylvia said. “And get as far from Hampstead as possible.”
“But it’s after twelve o’clock,” Arthur objected. “There won’t be any ’buses now. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t look for rooms at this time of night.”
“We must just walk as far as we can away from Hampstead,” said Sylvia, cheerfully.
“And carry our luggage? Supposing a policeman asks us where we’re going?”
“Oh, bother policemen! Come along. You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself nearly as much as I am. I care for nobody. I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies—oh,” she lightly sang.
Maria mewed at the sound of his mistress’s voice.
“You’re as bad as Maria,” she went on, reproachfully. “Look how nice the lamp-posts look. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, I can see. Let’s bet how many lamp-posts we pass before we’re safe in our own house.”
They set out for London by the road along the Heath. At first trees overhung the path, and they passed pool after pool of checkered lamplight that quivered in the wet road. Followed a space of open country where they heard the last whispers of a slight and desultory wind. Soon they were inclosed by mute and unillumined houses on either side, until they found themselves on the top of HaverstockHill, faced by the tawny glow of the London sky, and stretching before them a double row of lamp-posts innumerable and pale that converged to a dim point in the heart of the city below.
“I think I’m rather frightened,” Sylvia said. “Or perhaps I’m a little tired.”
“Shall we go back?” Arthur suggested.
“No, no. We’ll just rest a moment or two, and I’ll be all right.” They sat down on their bags, and she stroked Maria pensively.
Sylvia was relieved when the silence was interrupted by a policeman. She felt the need of opposition to drive away the doubts that took advantage of that first fatigue to shake her purpose.
“Now then, what are you doing?” he demanded, gruffly.
“We’re sitting down,” Sylvia informed him.
“Loitering isn’t allowed here,” the policeman said.
“Where is it allowed, please?” she asked, sweetly.
“Loitering isn’t allowed nowhere,” the policeman declared.
“Well, why did you say it wasn’t allowed here?” she continued. “I thought you were going to tell us of a place where it was allowed.”
Arthur jogged Sylvia’s elbow and whispered to her not to annoy the policeman.
“Come along, now, move on,” the policeman commanded. In order to emphasize his authority he flashed his bull’s-eye in Sylvia’s face. “Where do you live?” he asked, after the scrutiny.
“Lillie Road, Fulham. We missed the last train from Hampstead, and we’re walking home. I never heard of any rule against sitting on one’s own luggage in the middle of the night. I think you’d better take us to the police station. We must rest somewhere.”
The policeman looked puzzled.
“What did you want to miss your train for?” he asked.
“We didn’t want to miss it,” Sylvia gently explained. “We were very angry when we missed it. Come on, Arthur, I don’t feel tired any longer.”
She got up and started off down Haverstock Hill, followed by Arthur.
“I’m sorry you can’t recommend any proper loitering-places on the road,” said Sylvia, turning round, “because we shall probably have to loiter about thirty-six times before we get to Lillie Road. Good night. If we meet any burglars we’ll give them your love and say there’s a nice policeman living on Haverstock Hill who’d like a chat.”
“Suppose he had run us in?” Arthur said, when they had left the policeman behind them.
“I wanted him to at first,” Sylvia replied. “But afterward I thought it might be awkward on account of Monkley’s cash-box. I wish we could open it now and see how much there is inside, but perhaps it would look funny at this time of night.”
They had nearly reached the bottom of Haverstock Hill, and there were signs of life in the squalid streets they were approaching.
“I don’t think we ought to hang about here,” Arthur said. “These are slums. We ought to be careful; I think we ought to have waited till the morning.”
“You wouldn’t have come, if we’d waited,” Sylvia maintained. “You’d have been too worried about leaving your mother.”
“I’m still worried about that,” said Arthur, gloomily.
“Why? You can send a post-card to say that you’re all right. Knowing where you are won’t make up for your being away. In any case, you’d have had to go away soon. You couldn’t have spent your whole life in that house at Hampstead.”
“Well, I think this running away will bring us bad luck.”
Sylvia made a dramatic pause and dropped her valise on the pavement.
“Go home, then. Go home and leave me alone. If you can’t enjoy yourself, I’d rather you went home. I can’t bear to be with somebody who is not enjoying himself as much as I am.”
“You can’t be enjoying this waking about all night with two bags and a cat,” Arthur insisted. “But I’m not going home without you. If you want to go on, I shall go on, too. I’m feeling rather tired. I expect I shall enjoy myself more to-morrow.”
Sylvia picked up her valise again. “I hope you will, I’m sure,” she said. “You’re spoiling the fun by grumbling all the time like this. What is there to grumble at? Just a small bag which makes your arm ache. You ought to be glad you haven’t got mine to carry as well as your own.”
After another quarter of an hour among the ill-favored streets Sylvia called a rest; this time they withdrew from the pavement into the area of an unoccupied house, where they leaned against the damp brick wall, quite exhausted, and heard without interest the footsteps of the people who went past above. Maria began to mew and Sylvia let her out of the basket. A lean and amorous tom-cat in pursuit of love considered that Maria had prejudiced his chance of success, and their recriminations ended in a noisy scuffle during which the lid of a dust-bin in the next area was upset with a loud clatter; somebody, throwing open a window, emptied a utensil partly over Arthur.
“Don’t make such a noise. It was only a jug,” Sylvia whispered. “You’ll wake up all the houses.”
“It’s your damned cat making the noise,” Arthur said. “Come here, you brute.”
Maria was at last secured and replaced in his basket, and Arthur asked Sylvia if she was sure it was only a jug.
“It’s simply beastly in this area,” he added. “Anything’s better than sitting here.”
After making sure that nobody was in sight, they went on their way, though by now their legs were so weary that from time to time the bags scraped along the pavement.
“The worst of it is,” Sylvia sighed, “we’ve come so far now that it would be just as tiring to go back to Hampstead as to go on.”
“Oh,you’rethinking now of going back!” Arthur jeered. “It’s a pity you didn’t think of that when we were on Haverstock Hill.”
“I’m not thinking at all of going back,” Sylvia snapped. “I’m not tired.”
“Oh no,” said Arthur, sarcastically. “And I’m not at all wet, really.”
They got more and more irritable with each other. The bow in Sylvia’s hair dropped off, and with all the fretfulobstinacy of fatigue she would go wandering back on their tracks to see if she could find it; but the bow was lost. At last they saw a hansom coming toward them at a walking pace, and Sylvia announced that they would ride.
“But where shall we drive to?” Arthur asked. “We can’t just get in and drive anywhere.”
“We’ll tell him to go to Waterloo,” said Sylvia. “Stations are always open; we can wait there till the morning and then look for a house.”
She hailed the cab; with sighs of relief they sank back upon the seat, exhausted. Presently an odd noise like a fishmonger’s smacking a cod could be heard beside the cab, and, leaning out over the apron to see what was the cause of it, Arthur was spattered with mud by a piece of the tire which was flogging the road with each revolution of the wheel. The driver pulled up and descended from the box to restrain it.
“I’ve been tying it up all day, but it will do it,” he complained. “There’s nothing to worry over, but it fidgets one, don’t it, flapping like that? I’ve tied it up with string and I’ve tied it up with wire, and last time I used my handkerchief. Now I suppose it’s got to be my bootlace. Well, here goes,” he said, and with many grunts he stooped over to undo his lace.
Neither Sylvia nor Arthur could ever say what occurred to irritate a horse that with equanimity had tolerated the flapping all day, but suddenly it leaped forward at a canter, while the loose piece of tire slapped the road with increasing rapidity and noise. The reins slipped down; and Sylvia, who had often been allowed to drive with Blanche, managed to gather them up and keep the horse more or less in the middle of the road. After the cab had traveled about a mile the tire that all day had been seeking freedom achieved its purpose and, lancing itself before the vehicle in a swift parabola, looped itself round the ancient ragman who was shuffling along the gutter in pursuit of wealth. The horse chose that moment to stop abruptly and an unpleasant encounter with the ragman seemed inevitable. Already he was approaching the cab, waving in angry fashion his spiked stick and swearing in a bronchial voice; he stopped his abuse, however, on perceiving the absenceof the driver, and muttering to himself: “A lucky night, so help me! A lovely long strip of india-rubber! Gor! what a find!” he turned round and walked away as fast as he could, stuffing the tire into his basket as he went.
“I wonder whether I could drive the cab properly if I climbed up on the box,” said Sylvia, thoughtfully.
“Oh no! For goodness’ sake, don’t do anything of the kind!” Arthur begged. “Let’s get down while the beast is quiet. Come along. We shall never be able to explain why we’re in this cab. It’s like a dream.”
Sylvia gave way so far as not to mount the box, but she declined to alight, and insisted they ought to stay where they were and rest as long as they could; there were still a number of dark hours before them.
“But my dear girl, this beast of a horse may start off again,” Arthur protested.
“Well, what if it does?” Sylvia said. “We can’t be any more lost than we are now. I don’t know in the least what part of London we’ve got to.”
“I’m sure there’s something the matter with this cab,” Arthur woefully exclaimed.
“There is,” she agreed. “You’ve just set fire to it with that match.”
“I’m so nervous,” said Arthur. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Phew! what a stink of burnt hair. Do let’s get out.”
He stamped on the smoldering mat.
“Shut up,” Sylvia commanded. “I’m going to try and have a sleep. Wake me up if the horse tries to walk into a shop or anything.”
But this was more than Arthur could stand, and he shook her in desperation. “You sha’n’t go to sleep. You don’t seem to mind what happens to us.”
“Not a bit,” Sylvia agreed. Then suddenly she sang at the top of her voice, “for I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies—oh!”
The horse at once trotted forward, and Arthur was in despair.
“Oh, damn!” he moaned. “Now you’ve started that horrible brute off again. Whatever made me come away with you?”
“You can go home whenever you like,” said Sylvia, coldly.
“What’s the good of telling me that when we’re tearing along in a cab without a driver?” Arthur bewailed.
“We’re not tearing along,” Sylvia contradicted. “And I’m driving. I expect the horse will go back to its stable if we don’t interfere with him too much.”
“Who wants to interfere with the brute? Oh, listen to that wheel. I’m sure it’s coming off.”
“Here’s a cab shelter,” Sylvia said, encouragingly. “I’m going to try and pull up.”
Luckily the horse was ready enough to stop, and both of them got out. Sylvia walked without hesitation into the shelter, followed by Arthur with the bags. There were three or four cabmen inside, eating voluptuously in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke, steam, and burnt grease. She explained to them about the cab’s running away, was much gratified by the attention her story secured, and learned that it was three o’clock and that she was in Somers Town.
“Where are you going, missie?” one of the cabmen asked.
“We were going to Waterloo, but we don’t mind staying here,” Sylvia said. “My brother is rather tired and my cat would like some milk.”
“What did the driver look like, missie?” one of the men asked.
Sylvia described him vaguely as rather fat, a description which would have equally suited any of the present company, with the exception of the attendant tout, who was exceptionally lean.
“I wonder if it ’ud be Bill?” said one of the cabmen.
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Wasn’t Bill grumbling about his tire this morning?”
“I don’t know if it was his tire; he was grumbling about something.”
“I reckon it’s Bill. Did you notice if the gentleman as drove you had a swelling behind his ear?” asked the man who had first propounded the theory of the missing driver’s being Bill.
“I didn’t notice,” said Sylvia.
“About the size of a largish potato?” the theorist pressed, encouragingly.
“I’m afraid I didn’t notice,” said Sylvia.
“It must be Bill,” the theorist decided. “Any one wouldn’t notice that swelling in the dark, ’specially if Bill had his collar turned up.”
“He did have his collar turned up,” Arthur put in.
“There you are,” said the theorist. “What did I tell you? Of course it’s Bill. No one wouldn’t see his swelling with his coat turned up. Poor old Bill, he won’t half swear when he has to walk home to-night. Here, Joe,” he went on, addressing the attending tout. “Give Bill’s horse a bit of a feed.”
Sylvia and Arthur were given large slices of bread and butter and large cups of coffee; Maria had a saucer of milk. Life was looking much more cheerful. Presently a burly cabman appeared in the entrance of the shelter and was greeted with shouts of merriment.
“What ho, Bill, old cock! Lost your ruddy cab, old sporty? Lor! we haven’t half laughed to think of you having to use your bacon and eggs to get here. I reckon you didn’t half swear.”
“Who are you getting at, you blinking set of mugs? Who’s lost his ruddy cab?” demanded Bill.
“That’s not the driver,” Sylvia said.
“I thought it couldn’t be Bill,” said the theorist quickly. “As soon as I heard she never noticed that lump behind his ear, I thought it wasn’t Bill.”
“Here, less of it, you and your lumps behind the ear,” said Bill, aggressively. “You’ll have a blurry lump behin’ your own blurry ear, Fred Organ, before you knows where you are.”
Sylvia could not refrain from observing the famous lump with a good deal of curiosity, and she wondered how any one could ever have supposed it might be unnoticed. She would have described it as more like a beet root than a potato, she thought.
A long discussion about the future of the driverless cab ensued; finally it was decided that Joe the tout should lead it to the police station if it were not claimed by daylight. The company then turned to the discussion of thefuture of the abandoned fares. Sylvia had by this time evolved an elaborate tale of running away from a stepfather whose conduct to Arthur, herself, and Maria had been extremely brutal.
“Knocked the cat about, did he?” said the theorist, whose name was Fred Organ. “I never could abide people as ill-treated dumb animals.”
Sylvia went on to explain that they had intended to throw themselves on the mercy of an aunt who lived at Dover, and with that intention had been bound for Waterloo when they lost their driver. When she was told that they were going to the wrong station for Dover, she began to express fears of the reception her aunt might accord them. Did any one present know where they could find lodgings, for which, of course, they would pay, because their mother had provided them with the necessary money.
“That’s a mother all over,” said Fred Organ, with enthusiastic sentiment. “Ain’t it, boys? Ah, I wish I hadn’t lost my poor old mother.”
Various suggestions about rooms were made, but finally Fred Organ was so much moved by the emotional details with which Sylvia continually supplemented her tale that he offered to give them lodgings in his own house near Finsbury Park. Sylvia would have preferred a suburb that was barred to Monkley, but she accepted the offer because, with Arthur turning out so inept at adventure, it seemed foolish to take any more risks that night.
Fred Organ had succeeded to the paternal house and hansom about two years before. He was now twenty-six, but his corpulence made him appear older; for the chubby smoothness of youth had vanished with continual exposure to the weather, leaving behind many folds and furrows in his large face. Mr. Organ, senior, had bought No. 53 Colonial Terrace by instalments, the punctual payment of which had worried him so much as probably to shorten his life, the last one having been paid just before his death. He had only a week or two for the enjoyment of possession, which was as well; for the house that had cost its owner so much effort to obtain was nearly as ripe for dissolution as himself, and the maintenance of it in repair seemed likely to cause Fred Organ as much financial stress in the futureas the original purchase had caused his father in the past.
So much of his history did Fred Organ give them while he was stabling his horse, before he could introduce them to his inheritance. It was five o’clock of a chill February morning, and the relief of finding herself safely under a roof after such a tiring and insecure night compensated Sylvia for the impression of unutterable dreariness that Colonial Terrace first made upon her mind, a dreariness quite out of accord with the romantic beginning to the life of independence of which she had dreamed. They could not go to bed when they reached the house, because Fred Organ, master though he was, doubted if it would be wise to wake up his sister to accommodate the guests.
“Not that she’d have any call to make a fuss,” he observed, “because if I says a thing in No. 53, no one hasn’t got the right to object. Still, I’d rather you got a nice first impression of my sister Edith. Well, make yourselves at home. I’ll rout round and get the kitchen fire going.”
Fred routed round with such effect that he woke his sister, who began to scream from the landing above:
“Hube! Get up, you great coward! There’s somebody breaking in at the back. Get up, Hube, and fetch a policeman before we’re both murdered.”
“It’s only me, Ede,” Fred called out. “Keep your hair on.”
When Sylvia saw Edith Organ’s curl-papers she thought the last injunction was rather funny. Explanations were soon given and Edith was so happy to find her alarm unnecessary that she was as pleasant as possible and even invited Sylvia to come and share her bed and sleep late into the morning; whereupon Fred Organ invited Arthur to share his bed, which Arthur firmly declined to do, notwithstanding Sylvia’s frown.
“Well, you can’t go to bed with the girls,” said Fred.
“Oh, Fred, you are a.... Oh, he is a.... Oh, isn’t he? Oh, I never. Fancy! What a thing to say! There! Well! Who ever did? I’m sure. What a remark to pass!” Edith exclaimed, quite incoherent from embarrassment, pleasure, and sleep.
“Where’s Hube?” Fred asked.
“Oh, Hube!” snapped Edith. “He’s well underneath the bedclothes. Trust Hube for that. Nothing’d get him out of bed except an earthquake.”
“Wouldn’t it, then?” said a sleek voice, and Hube himself, an extremely fat young man in a trailing nightgown, appeared in the doorway.
“You wouldn’t think he was only nineteen, would you?” said Fred, proudly.
“Nice noise to kick up in the middle of the night,” Hubert grumbled. “I dreamt the house was falling down on top of me.”
“And it will, too,” Fred prophesied, “if I can’t soon scrape together some money for repairs. There’s a crack as wide as the strand down the back.”
Sylvia wondered how so rickety a house was able to withstand the wear and tear of such a fat family when they all, with the exception of Arthur, who lay down on the kitchen table, went creaking up-stairs to bed.
The examination of Monkley’s cash-box produced £35; Sylvia felt ineffably rich, so rich that she offered to lend Fred Organ the money he wanted to repair his property. He accepted the offer in the spirit in which it was made, as he said, and Sylvia, whom contact with Monkley had left curiously uncynical, felt that she had endeared herself to Fred Organ for a long time to come. She was given a room of her own at No. 53, for which she was glad, because sleeping with Edith had been rather like eating scented cornflour pudding, a combination of the flabby with the stuffy that had never appeared to her taste. Arthur was given the choice of sleeping with Hubert or in the bath, and he chose the latter without a moment’s hesitation.
Relations between Arthur and Hubert had been strained ever since. Hubert offered Arthur a bite from an apple he was munching, which was refused with a too obvious disgust.
“Go on, what do you take me for? Eve?” asked Hubert, indignantly. “It won’t poison you.”
The strain was not relaxed by Hubert’s obvious fondness for Sylvia.
“I thought when I came away with you,” Arthur said,“that we were going to live by ourselves and earn our own living; instead of which you let that fat brute hang around you all day.”
“I can’t be always rude to him,” Sylvia explained. “He’s very good-natured.”
“Do you call it good-natured to turn the tap on me when I’m lying in bed?” Arthur demanded.
“I expect he only did it for fun.”
“Fun!” said Arthur, darkly. “I shall hit him one of these days.”
Arthur did hit him; but Hubert, with all his fat, hit harder than he, and Arthur never tried again. Sylvia found herself growing very tired of him; the universal censure upon his namby-pambyness was beginning to react upon her. The poetical youth of Hampstead Heath seemed no longer so poetical in Colonial Terrace. Yet she did not want to quarrel with him finally, for in a curious way he represented to her a link with what she still paradoxically spoke of as home. Sylvia had really had a great affection for Monkley, which made her hate him more for what he had tried to do. Yet, though she hated him and though the notion of being with him again made her shudder, she could not forget that he had known her father, who was bound up with the memory of her mother and of all the past that, being so irreparably over, was now strangely cherished. Sylvia felt that, were Arthur to go, she would indeed find herself alone, in that state which first she had dreaded, then desired, and now once again dreaded, notwithstanding her bold conceptions of independence and belief in her own ability to determine the manner of life she wished. There were times when she felt what almost amounted to a passionate hatred of Colonial Terrace, which had brought her freedom, indeed, but the freedom of a world too gray to make freedom worth possessing. She was fond of Fred Organ, and she fancied that he would have liked formally to adopt her; yet the idea of being adopted by him somehow repelled her. She was fond of Edith Organ too, but no fonder than she had been of Clara; Edith seemed to have less to tell her about life than Clara, perhaps because she was older now and had read so many books. As for Hubert, who claimed to be inlove with her, he existed about the house like a large over-fed dog; that was all, that and his capacity for teasing Arthur, which amused her.
Everything about this escapade was so different from what she had planned. Always in her dreams there had been a room with a green view over trees or a silver view over water, and herself encouraging some one (she supposed it must have been Arthur, though she could hardly believe this when she looked at him now) to perform the kind of fantastic deeds that people performed in books. Surely some books were true. Looking back on her old fancies, Sylvia came to the conclusion that she had always pictured herself married to Arthur; yet how ridiculous such an idea now seemed. He had always talked with regret of the adventures that were no longer possible in dull modern days; but when the very small adventure of being in a runaway cab had happened, how miserably Arthur had failed to rise to the occasion, and now here he was loafing in Colonial Terrace. Hubert had secured a position in a bookshop near Finsbury Park railway station, which he had forfeited very soon afterward, but only because he had made a habit of borrowing for Sylvia’s perusal the books which customers had bought, and of sending them on to their owners two or three days later. To be sure, they had nearly all been very dull books of a religious bent, but in such a district as Finsbury Park what else could be expected? At least Hubert had sacrificed something for her. Arthur had done nothing; even when Fred Organ, to please Sylvia, had offered to teach him to drive a hansom, he had refused to learn.
One day Edith Organ announced that there was to be a supper-party at a public house in Harringay where one of the barmaids was a friend of hers. It seemed that Mrs. Hartle, the proprietress, had recently had cause to rejoice over a victory, but whether it was domestic, political, or professional Edith was unable to remember; at any rate, a jolly evening could be counted upon.
“You must wear that new white dress, Syl; it suits you a treat,” Edith advised. “I was told only to bring one gentleman, and I think it’s Artie’s turn.”
“Why?” Hubert demanded, fiercely.
“Oh, Hube, you know you don’t like parties. You always want to go home early, and I’m out to enjoy myself and I don’t care who knows it.”
Sylvia suspected that Edith’s real reason for wishing Arthur to be the guest was his greater presentableness; she had often heard her praise Arthur’s appearance while deprecating his namby-pamby manner; however, for a party like this, of which Edith was proclaiming the extreme selectness, that might be considered an advantage. Mrs. Hartle was reputed to be a woman to whom the least vulgarity was disgusting.
“She’s highly particular, they tell me, not to say stand-offish. You know, doesn’t like to make herself cheap. Well, I don’t blame her. She’s thought a lot of round here. She had some trouble with her husband—her second husband that is—and everybody speaks very highly of the dignified way in which she made him sling his hook out of it.”
“I don’t think so much of her,” Hubert grunted. “I went into the saloon-bar once, and she said, ‘Here, my man, the public bar is the hother side.’ ‘Oh, his it?’ I said. ‘Well, I can’t round the corner for the crowd,’ I said, ‘listening to your old man singing “At Trinity Church I met my doom” on the pavement outside.’ She didn’t half color up, I can tell you. So he was singing, too, fit to give any one the earache to listen to him. I don’t want to go to her supper-party.”
“Well, if you’re not going, you needn’t be so nasty about it, Hube. I’d take you if I could.”
“I wouldn’t come,” Hubert declared. “Not if Mrs. Hartle was to go down on her knees and ask me to come. So shut your mouth.”
The chief event of the party for Sylvia was her meeting with Danny Lewis, who paid her a good deal of attention at supper and danced with her all the time afterward. Sylvia was grateful to him for his patience with her bad dancing at first, and she learned so quickly under his direction that when it was time to go she really danced rather well. Sylvia’s new friend saw them back to Colonial Terrace and invited himself to tea the following afternoon. Edith, who could never bear the suggestion of impoliteness,assured him that he would be most welcome, though she confided in Sylvia, as they went up to bed, that she could not feel quite sure about him. Sylvia insisted he was everything he should be, and praised his manners so highly that Edith humbly promised to believe in his perfection. Arthur went up-stairs and slammed his door without saying good night.
The next morning, a morning of east wind, Arthur attacked Sylvia on the subject of her behavior the night before.
“Look here,” he opened, very grandly, “if you prefer to spend the evenings waltzing with dirty little Jews, I won’t stand it.”
Sylvia regarded him disdainfully.
“Do you hear?” repeated Arthur. “I won’t stand it. It’s bad enough with that great hulking lout here, but when it comes to a greasy Jew I’ve had enough.”
“So have I,” Sylvia said. “You’d better go back to Hampstead.”
“I’m going to-day,” Arthur declared, and waited pathetically for Sylvia to protest. She was silent. Then he tried to be affectionate, and vowed he had not meant a word he said, but she brushed away his tentative caress and meek apology.
“I don’t want to talk to you any more,” she said. “There are lots of things I could tell you; but you’ll always be unhappy anyway, because you’re soft and silly, so I won’t. You’ll be home for dinner,” she added.
When Arthur was ready to start he looked so forlorn that Sylvia was sorry for him.
“Here, take Maria,” she said, impulsively. “He’ll remind you of me.”
“I don’t want anything to remind me of you,” said Arthur in a hollow voice, “but I’ll take Maria.”
That afternoon Danny Lewis, wearing a bright orange tie and a flashing ring, came to visit Sylvia. She had already told him a good deal about herself the night before, and when now she told him how she had dismissed Arthur he suggested that Monkley would probably find out where she was and come to take her back. Sylvia turned pale; the possibility of Arthur’s betrayal of her address had neverstruck her. She cried in a panic that she must leave Finsbury Park at once. Danny offered to find her a room.
“I’ve got no money. I spent all I had left on new frocks,” she bewailed.
“That’s all right, kid; bring the frocks along with you. I’ve got plenty of money.”
Sylvia packed in a frenzy of haste, expecting every moment to hear the bell ring and see Monkley waiting grimly outside; his cold eyes, when her imagination recalled them, made her shiver with fear. When they got down-stairs Hubert, who was in the passage, asked where she was going, and she told him that she was going away.
“Not with that—” said Hubert, barring the way to the front door.
Danny did not hesitate; his arm shot out, and Hubert went over, bringing down the hat-stand with a crash.
“Quick, quick!” cried Sylvia, in exultation at being with some one who could act. “Edie’s gone round to the baker’s to fetch some crumpets for tea. Let’s go before she gets back.”
They hurried out. The wind had fallen. Colonial Terrace looked very gray, very quiet, very long in the bitter March air. Danny Lewis with his orange tie promised a richer, warmer life beyond these ridiculous little houses that imitated one another.
DANNY LEWIS took Sylvia to an eating-house in Euston Road kept by a married couple called Gonner. Here everything—the meat, the pies, the butter, the streaky slabs of marble, the fly-blown face of the weary clock, the sawdust sprinkled on the floor, the cane-seated chairs—combined to create an effect of greasy pallor that extended even to Mr. and Mrs. Gonner themselves, who seemed to have acquired the nature of their environment. Sylvia shrank from their whitish arms bare to the elbow and glistering with fats, and from their faces, which seemed to her like bladders of lard, especially Mrs. Gonner’s, who wore on the top of her head a knob of dank etiolated hair. In such an atmosphere Danny Lewis with his brilliant tie and green beaver hat acquired a richness of personality that quite overpowered Sylvia’s judgment and preserved the condition of abnormal excitement set up by the rapidity and completeness with which this time she had abandoned herself to independence.
There was a brief conversation between Danny and the Gonners, after which Mr. Gonner returned to his task of cutting some very fat bacon into rashers and Mrs. Gonner held up the flap of the counter for Sylvia and Danny to pass up-stairs through the back of the shop. For one moment Sylvia hesitated when the flap dropped back into its place, for it seemed to make dangerously irrevocable her admittance to the unknown house above; Danny saw her hesitation and with a word or two of encouragement checked her impulse to go no farther. Mrs. Gonner led the way up-stairs and showed them into a bedroom prematurely darkened by coarse lace curtains that shut out the fading daylight. Sylvia had a vague impression of too much furniture, which was confirmed when Mrs. Gonner lit a gas-jet over the mantelpiece; she looked round distastefullyat the double-bed pushed against the wall, at the crimson vases painted with butterflies, at the faded oleograph of two children on the edge of a precipice with a guardian angel behind them, whose face had at some time been eaten away by mice. There was a short silence, only broken by Mrs. Gonner’s whispering breath.
“We shall be all right here, kid, eh?” exclaimed Danny, in a tone that was at once suave and boisterous.
“What’s your room like?” Sylvia asked.
He looked at her a moment, seemed about to speak, thought better of it, and turned to Mrs. Gonner, who told Danny that he could have the front room as well if he wanted it; they moved along the passage to inspect this room, which was much larger and better lighted than the other and was pleasantly filled with the noise of traffic. Sylvia immediately declared that she preferred to be here.
“So I’m to have the rabbit-hutch,” said Danny, laughing easily. “Trust a woman to have her own way! That’s right, isn’t it, Mrs. Gonner?”
Mrs. Gonner stared at Sylvia a moment, and murmured that she had long ago forgotten what she wanted, but that, anyway, for her one thing was the same as another, which Sylvia was very ready to believe.
When Mrs. Gonner had left the room, Danny told Sylvia that he must go and get a few things together from his flat in Shaftsbury Avenue, and asked if she would wait till he came back.
“Of course I’ll wait,” she told him. “Do you think I want to run away twice in one day?”
Danny still hesitated, and she wondered why he should expect her, who was so much used to being left alone, to mind waiting for him an hour or two.
“We might go to the Mo to-night,” he suggested.
She looked blank.
“The Middlesex,” he explained. “It’s a music-hall. Be a good girl while I’m out. I’ll bring you back some chocolates.”
He seemed anxious to retain her with the hint of pleasures that were in his power to confer; it made Sylvia impatient that he should rely on them rather than upon her capacity for knowing her own mind.
“I may be young,” she said, “but I do know what I want. I’m not like that woman down-stairs.”
“And you know how to make other people want, eh?” Danny muttered. He took a step forward, and Sylvia hoped he was not going to try to kiss her—she felt disinclined at this moment for a long explanation—but he went off, whistling.
For a long time Sylvia stood by the window, looking down at the traffic and the lights coming out one by one in the windows opposite. She hoped that Danny would not end like Monkley, and she determined to be prompt in checking the first signs of his doing so. Standing here in this room, that was now dark except for the faint transitory shadows upon the walls and ceiling of lighted vehicles below, Sylvia’s thoughts went back to the time she had spent with Blanche. It seemed to her that then she had been wiser than she was now, for all the books she had read since; or was it that she was growing up and becoming an actress in scenes that formerly she had regarded with the secure aloofness of a child?
“I’m not innocent,” she said to herself. “I know everything that can be known. But yet when Monkley tried to do that I was horrified. I felt sick and frightened and angry, oh, dreadfully angry! Yet when Blanche behaved as she did I did not mind at all; I used to encourage her. Oh, why am I not a boy? If I were a boy, I would show people that making love isn’t really a bit necessary. Yet sometimes I liked Arthur to make love to me. I can’t make myself out. I think I must be what people call an exceptional person. I hope Danny won’t make love to me. But I feel he will; and if he does I shall kill myself; I can’t go on living like this with everybody making love to me. I’m not like Blanche or Mabel; I don’t like it. How I used to hate Mabel! Shall I ever get like her? Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I were a boy. I don’t believe Danny will be any better than Jimmy was. Yet he doesn’t frighten me so much. He doesn’t seem so much there as Jimmy was. But if he does make love to me, it will be more dangerous. How shall I ever escape from here? I’m sure Mrs. Gonner will never lift the flap.”
Sylvia began to be obsessed by that flap, and the notionof it wrought upon her fancy to such an extent that she was impelled to go down-stairs and see if the way out was open or shut, excusing her abrupt appearance by asking for a box of matches. There were two or three people eating at the white tables, who eyed her curiously; she wondered what they would have done if she had suddenly begged their help. She was vexed with herself for giving way to her nerves like this, and she went up-stairs again with a grand resolve to be very brave. She even challenged her terrors by going into that bedroom behind and contending with its oppressiveness. So successful was she in calming her overwrought nerves that, when Danny suddenly came back and found her in his bedroom, she was no longer afraid; she looked at him there in the doorway, wearing now a large tie of pale-blue silk, as she would have looked at any brigand in an opera. When he presented her with a large box of chocolates she laughed. He wondered why; she said it was she who ought to give him chocolates, which left him blank. She tried to explain her impression of him as a brigand, and he asked her if she meant that he looked like an actor.
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” she said, impatiently, though she meant nothing of the kind.
Danny seemed gratified as by a compliment and said that he was often mistaken for an actor; he supposed it was his hair.
They dined at a restaurant in Soho, where Sylvia was conscious of arousing a good deal of attention; afterward they went to the Middlesex music-hall, but she felt very tired, and did not enjoy it so much as she expected. Moreover, Danny irritated her by sucking his teeth with an air of importance all through the evening.
For a fortnight Danny treated Sylvia with what was almost a luxurious consideration. She was never really taken in by it, but she submitted so willingly to being spoiled that, as she told herself, she could hardly blame Danny for thinking he was fast making himself indispensable to her happiness. He was very anxious for her to lead a lazy existence, encouraged her to lie in bed the whole morning, fed her with chocolates, and tried to cultivate in her a habit of supposing that it was impossible to go anywherewithout driving in a hansom; he also used to buy her brightly colored blouses and scarves, which she used to wear out of politeness, for they gave her very little pleasure. He flattered her consistently, praising her cleverness and comparing her sense of humor with that of other women always to their disadvantage. He told stories very well, particularly those against his own race; and though Sylvia was a little scornful of this truckling self-mockery, she could not help laughing at the stories. Sylvia realized by the contempt with which Danny referred to women that his victories had usually been gained very easily, and she was much on her guard. Encouraged, however, by the way in which Sylvia seemed to enjoy the superficial pleasures he provided for her, Danny soon attempted to bestow his favors as he bestowed his chocolates. Sylvia, who never feared Danny personally as she had feared Monkley, repulsed him, yet not so firmly as she would have done had not her first impression of the house still affected her imagination. Danny, who divined her malaise, but mistook it for the terror he was used to inspiring, began to play the bully. It was twilight, one of those sapphire twilights of early spring; the gas had not been lighted and the fire had died away to a glow. Sylvia had thrown off his caressing arm three times, when Danny suddenly jumped up, pulled out a clasp-knife, and, standing over Sylvia, threatened her with death if she would not immediately consent to be his. Sylvia’s heart beat a little faster at such a threat delivered with all the additional force vile language could give to it, but she saw two things quite clearly: first, that, if Danny were really to kill her, death would be far preferable to surrender; secondly, that the surest way of avoiding either would be by assuming he would turn out a coward in the face of the unexpected. She rose from the arm-chair; Danny rushed to the door, flourishing his knife and forbidding her to think of escape.
“Who wants to escape?” she asked, in so cool a tone that Danny, who had naturally anticipated a more feminine reception of his violence, failed to sustain his part by letting her see that he was puzzled. She strolled across the room to the wash-stand; then she strolled up to the brigand.
“Put that knife away,” she said. “I want to tell you something, darling Danny.”
In the gloom she could see that he threw a suspicious glance at her for the endearing epithet, but he put away the knife.
“What do you want to say?” he growled.
“Only this.” She brought her arm swiftly round and emptied the water-bottle over him. “Though I ought to smash it on your greasy head. I read in a book once that the Jews were a subject race. You’d better light the gas.”
He spluttered that he was all wet, and she turned away from him, horribly scared that in a moment his fingers would be tightening round her neck; but he had taken off his coat and was shaking it.
Sylvia poked the fire and sat down again in the arm-chair. “Listen,” she began.
He came across the room in his shirt-sleeves, his tie hanging in a cascade of amber silk over his waistcoat.
“No, don’t pull down the blinds,” she added. “I want to be quite sure you really have cooled down and aren’t going to play with that knife again. Listen. It’s no good your trying to make love to me. I don’t want to be made love to by anybody, least of all by you.”
Danny looked more cheerful when she assured him of her indifference to other men.
“It’s no use your killing me, because you’ll only be hanged. It’s no use your stabbing me, because you’ll go to prison. If you hit me, I shall hit you back. You thought I was afraid of you. I wasn’t. I’m more afraid of a bug than I am of you. I saw a bug to-day; so I’m going to leave this house. The weather’s getting warmer. You and the bugs have come out together. Come along, Danny, dry your coat and tell me a story that will make me laugh. Tell me the story of the Jew who died of grief because he bought his wife a new hat and found his best friend had bought her one that day and he might have saved his money. Do make me laugh, Danny.”
They went to the Middlesex music-hall that evening, and Danny did not suck his teeth once. The next morning he told Sylvia that he had been to visit a friend who wished very much to meet her, and that he proposed to introducehim that afternoon, if she agreed. He was a fellow in a good way of business, the son of a bootmaker in Drury Lane, quite a superior sort of fellow and one by whom she could not fail to be impressed; his name was Jay Cohen. The friend arrived toward four o’clock, and Danny on some excuse left him with Sylvia. He had big teeth and round, prominent eyes; his boots were very glossy and sharply pointed at the toes, with uppers of what looked like leopard-skin. Observing Sylvia’s glances directed to his boots, he asked with a smile if she admired the latest thing. She confessed they were rather too late for her taste, and Mr. Cohen excused them as a pair sent back to his father by a well-known music-hall comedian, who complained of their pinching him. Sylvia said it was lucky they only pinched him; she should not have been astonished if they had bitten him.
“You’re a Miss Smartie, aren’t you?” said Jay Cohen.
The conversation languished for a while, but presently he asked Sylvia why she was so unkind to his friend Danny.
“What do you mean, ‘unkind’?” she repeated. “Unkind what about?”
Mr. Cohen smiled in a deprecating way. “He’s a good boy, is Danny. Real good. He is, really. All the girls are mad about Danny. You know, smart girls, girls that get around. He’s very free, too. Money’s nothing to Danny when he’s out to spend. His father’s got a tobacconist’s shop in the Caledonian Road. A good business—a very good business. Danny told me what the turn-over was once, and I was surprised. I remember I thought what a rare good business it was. Well, Danny’s feeling a bit upset to-day, and he came round to see me early this morning. He must have been very upset, because it was very early, and he said to me that he was mad over a girl and would I speak for him? He reckoned he’d made a big mistake and he wanted to put it right, but he was afraid of being laughed at, because the young lady in question was a bit high-handed. He wants to marry you. There it is right out. He’d like to marry you at once, but he’s afraid of his father, and he thought....”
Mr. Cohen broke off suddenly in his proposal and listened: “What’s that?”
“It sounds like some one shouting down-stairs,” Sylvia said. “But you often hear rows going on down there. There was a row yesterday because a woman bit on a stone in a pie and broke her tooth.”
“That’s Jubie’s voice,” said Mr. Cohen, blinking his eyes and running his hands nervously through his sleek hair.
“Who’s Jubie?”
Before he could explain there was a sound of impassioned footsteps on the stairs. In a moment the door was flung open, and a handsome Jewess with flashing eyes and ear-rings slammed it behind her.
“Where’s Danny?” she demanded.
“Is that you, Jubie?” said Mr. Cohen. “Danny’s gone over to see his dad. He won’t be here to-day.”
“You liar, he’s here this moment. I followed him into the shop and he ran up-stairs. So you’re the kid he’s been trailing around with him,” she said, eying Sylvia. “The dirty rotter!”
Sylvia resented the notion of being trailed by such a one as Danny Lewis, but, feeling undecided how to appease this tropical creature, she took the insult without reply.
“He thinks to double cross Jubie Myers! Wait till my brother Sam knows where he is.”
Mr. Cohen had retired to the window and was studying the traffic of Euston Road; one of his large ears was twitching nervously toward the threats of the outraged Miss Myers, who after much breathless abuse of Sylvia at last retired to fetch her brother Sam. When she was gone, Mr. Cohen said he thought he would go too, because he did not feel inclined to meet Sam Myers, who was a pugilist with many victories to his credit at Wonderland; just as he reached the door, Danny entered and with a snarl accused him of trying to round on him.