Miss Ashley paused in her discourse and fixed Sylvia with her gray eyes in pained interrogation; Miss Pinck’s chin shot out; Miss Lee bit her under lip and tenderly shook her head; the other girls stared at their laps and tried to look at one another without moving their heads. Phyllis quickly explained that it was she who had made Sylvia laugh.
“I’m awfully sorry, Miss Ashley,” she drawled.
“I’m glad to hear that you areverysorry,” said Miss Ashley, “but Sylvia must realize when it is permissible and when it is not permissible to laugh. I’m afraid I must ask her to leave the room.”
“I ought to go, too,” Phyllis declared. “I made her laugh.”
“I’m sure, Phyllis, that to yourself your wit seems irresistible. Pray let us have an opportunity of judging.”
“Well, I said that Miss Primer looked like a dying duck in a thunder-storm.”
The horrified amazement of everybody in the room expressed itself in a gasp that sounded like a ghostly, an infinitely attenuated scream of dismay. Sylvia, partly from nervousness, partly because the simile even on repetition appealed to her sense of the ridiculous, laughed aloud for a second time—laughed, indeed, with a kind of guffaw the sacrilegious echoes of which were stifled in an appalled silence.
“Sylvia Scarlett and Phyllis Markham will both leave the room immediately,” said Miss Ashley. “I will speak to them later.”
Outside the study of the head-mistress, Sylvia and Phyllis looked at each other like people who have jointly managed to break a mirror.
“What will she do?”
“Sylvia, I simply couldn’t help it. I simply couldn’t bear them all any longer.”
“My dear, I know. Oh, I think it was wonderful of you.”
Sylvia laughed heartily for the third time, and just at this moment the twins, who were the original cause of all the commotion, came sidling up to know what everybody had said.
“You little beasts with your bull’s-eye lamps and your naughtiness,” Phyllis cried. “I expect we shall all be expelled. What fun! I shall get some hunting. Oh, three cheers, I say!”
“Of course you know why Miss Primer was really in such a wax?” Gladys asked, with the eyes of an angel and the laugh of a fairy.
“No, let me tell, Gladys,” Enid burst in. “You know I won the toss. We tossed up which should tell and I won. Youarea chiseler. You see, when Miss Primer came tearing up into our room we turned the lamps onto her, and she was simply furious because she thought everybody in the street could see her in that blue-flannel wrapper.”
“Which, of course, they could,” Sylvia observed.
“Of course!” the twins shrieked together. “And the boys opposite clapped, and she heard them and tried to pull down the blind, and her wrapper came open and she was wearing a chest-protector!”
The interview with Miss Ashley was rather distressing, because she took from the start the altogether unexpected line of blaming Phyllis and Sylvia not for the breach of discipline, but for the wound they had inflicted upon Miss Primer. All that had seemed fine and honest and brave and noble collapsed immediately; it was impossible after Miss Ashley’s words not to feel ashamed, and both the girls offered to beg Miss Primer’s pardon. Miss Ashley said no more about the incident after this, though she took rather an unfair advantage of their chastened spirits by exacting a promise that they would in common with the rest of the school leaders set their faces against the encouragement of such behavior as that of the twins last night.
The news from South Africa was so bad that Miss Primer’s luxury of grief could scarcely have been heightened by Phyllis’s and Sylvia’s rudeness; however, she wept a few tears, patted their hands, and forgave them. A few days afterward she was granted the boon of another woe, which she shared with the whole school, in the news of Miss Lee’s approaching marriage. Any wedding would have upset Miss Primer, but in this case the sorrow was rendered three times as poignant by the fact that Miss Lee was going to marry a soldier under orders for the front. This romantic accessory could not fail to thrill the girls, though it was not enough to compensate for the loss of their beloved Miss Lee. Rivalries between the Cecilias and Annabels were forever finished; several girls had been learning Beethoven’s Pathetic Sonata and the amount of expression put into it would, they hoped, show Miss Lee the depth of their emotion when for the last time these frail fingers so lightly corrected their touch, when for the last time that delicate pencil inscribed her directions upon their music.
“Of course the school willneverbe the same without her,” said Muriel.
“I shall write home and ask if I can’t take up Italian instead of music,” said Dorothy.
“Fancy playing duets with any one but Miss Lee,” said Gwendyr. “The very idea makes me shudder.”
“Perhaps we shall have a music-master now,” said Gladys.
Whereupon everybody told her she was a heartless thing. Poor Gladys, who really loved Miss Lee as much as anybody, retired to her room and cried for the rest of the evening, until she was consoled by Enid, who pointed out that now shemustuse her powder-puff.
For Sylvia the idea of Miss Lee’s departure and marriage was desolating; it was an abrupt rending of half the ties that bound her to Hornton House. Phyllis, Miss Ashley, and the twins were all that really remained, and Phyllis was always threatening to persuade her people to take her away when the weather was tolerably warm, so deeply did she resent the loss of hunting. It was curious how much more Phyllis meant to her than Philip, so much, indeed, that she had never confided in her that she was going to marry Philip. How absurd that two names so nearly alike could be in the one case so beautiful, in the other so ugly. Yet she was still very fond of Philip and she still enjoyed going out with him on Sundays, even though it meant being deprived of pleasant times with Phyllis. She had warned Philip that she might get too fond of school, and he had smiled in that superior way of his. Ought she to marry him at all? He had been so kind to her that if she refused to marry him she would have to run away, for she could not continue under an obligation. Why did people want to marry? Why must she marry? Worst of all, why must Miss Lee marry? But these were questions that not even Miss Hossack would be able to answer. Ah, if it had only been Miss Hossack who had been going to marry. Sylvia began to make up a rhyme about Miss Hossack marrying a Cossack and going for her honeymoon to the Trossachs, where Helen Macdonald lived.
All the girls had subscribed to buy Miss Lee a dressing-case, which they presented to her one evening after tea with a kind of dismal beneficence, as if they were laying a wreath upon her tomb. Next morning she went away byan early train to the north of England, and after lunch every girl retired with the secret sorrow that now had more than fashion to commend it. Sylvia’s sorrow was an aching regret that she had not told Miss Lee more about herself and her life and Philip; now it was too late. She met the twins wandering disconsolately enlaced along the corridor outside her room.
“Oh, Sylvia, dearest Sylvia!” they moaned. “We’ve lost our duet with Miss Lee’s fingering.”
“I’ll help you to look for it.”
“Oh, but we lost it on purpose, because we didn’t like it, and the next day Miss Lee said she was going to be married.”
Sylvia asked where they lost it.
“Oh, we put it in an envelope and posted it to the Bishop of London.”
Sylvia suggested they should write to the Bishop and explain the circumstances in which the duet was sent to him; he would no doubt return it.
“Oh no,” said the twins, mournfully. “We never put a stamp on and we wrote inside, ‘A token of esteem and regard from two sinners who you confirmed.’ How can we ask for it back?”
Sylvia embraced the twins, and the three of them wandered in the sad and wintry garden until it was time for afternoon school.
The next day happened to be Sunday, and Philip came as usual to take Sylvia out. He had sent her the evening before an overcoat trimmed with gray squirrel, which, if it had not arrived after Miss Lee’s departure, would have been so much more joyfully welcomed. Philip asked her why she was so sad and if the coat did not please her. She told him about its coming after Miss Lee had gone, and, as usual, he had a lot to say:
“You strange child, how quickly you have adopted the outlook and manners of the English school-girl. One would say that you had never been anything else. How absurd I was to be afraid that you were a wild bird whom I had caught too late. I’m quite positive now that you’ll be happy with me down in Hampshire. I’m sorry you’ve lost Miss Lee. A charming woman, I thought, and very cultivated.Miss Ashley will miss her greatly, but she herself will be glad to get away from music-teaching. It must be an atrocious existence.”
Here was a new point of view altogether. Could it really be possible that those delicious hours with Miss Lee were a penance to the mistress? Sylvia looked at Philip angrily, for she found it unforgivable in him to destroy her illusions like this. He did not observe her expression and continued his monologue:
“Really atrocious. Exercises! Scales! Other people’s chilblains! A creaking piano-stool! What a purgatory! And all to teach a number of young women to inflict an objectionable noise upon their friends and relations.”
“Thanks,” Sylvia broke in. “You won’t catch me playing again.”
“I’m not talking about you,” Philip said. “You have temperament. You’re different from the ordinary school-girl.” He took her arm affectionately. “You’re you, dear Sylvia.”
“And yours,” she added, sullenly. “I thought you said just now that I was just like any other English school-girl and that you were so happy about it.”
“I said you’d wonderfully adopted the outlook,” Philip corrected. “Not quite the same thing.”
“Oh, well, take your horrible coat, because I don’t want it,” Sylvia exclaimed, and, rapidly unbuttoning her new overcoat, she flung it on the pavement at his feet.
Nobody was in sight at the moment, so Philip did not get angry.
“Now don’t tell me it’s illogical to throw away only the coat and not undress myself completely. I know quite well that everything I’ve got on is yours.”
“Oh no, it’s not,” Philip said, gently. “It’s yours.”
“But you paid for everything.”
“No, you paid yourself,” he insisted.
“How?”
“By being Sylvia. Come along, don’t trample on your poor coat. There’s a most detestable wind blowing.”
He picked up the offending overcoat and helped her into it again with so much sympathy half humorous, half gravein his demeanor that she could not help being sorry for her outburst.
Nevertheless, the fact of her complete dependence upon Philip for everything, even before marriage, was always an oppression to Sylvia’s mind, which was increased by the continual reminders of her loneliness that intercourse with other girls forced upon her. They, when they should marry, should be married from a background; the lovers, when they came for them, would have to fight for their love by breaking down the barriers of old associations, old friendships, and old affections; in a word, they would have to win the brides. What was her own background? Nothing but a panorama of streets which offered no opposition to Philip’s choice except in so far as it was an ugly background for a possession of his own and therefore fit to be destroyed. It was all very well for Philip to tell her that she was herself and that he loved her accordingly. If that were true, why was he taking so much trouble to turn her into something different? Other girls at Hornton House, when they married, would not begin with ugly backgrounds to be obliterated; their pasts would merge beautifully with the pasts of their husbands; they were not being transformed by Miss Pinck and Miss Primer; they were merely being supplied by them with value for their parents’ money. It was a visit to Phyllis Markham’s home in Leicestershire during the Easter holidays that had branded with the iron of jealousy these facts upon her meditation. Phyllis used to lament that she had no brothers; and Sylvia used to wonder what she would have said if she had been like herself, without mother, without father, without brothers, without sisters, without relations, without friends, without letters, without photographs, with nothing in the whole world between herself and the shifting panorama from which she had been snatched but the love of a timid man inspired by an unusual encounter in Brompton Cemetery. This visit to Phyllis Markham was the doom upon their friendship; however sweet, however sympathetic, however loyal Phyllis might be, she must ultimately despise her friend’s past; every word Sylvia listened to during those Easter holidays seemed to cry out the certain fulfilment of this conjecture.
“I expect I’m too sensitive,” Sylvia said to herself. “I expect I really am common, because apparently common people are always looking out for slights. I don’t look out for them now, but if I were to tell Phyllis all about myself, I’m sure I should begin to look out for them. No, I’ll just be friends with her up to a point, for so long as I stay at Hornton House; then we’ll separate forever. I’m really an absolute fraud. I’m just as much of a fraud now as when I was dressed up as a boy. I’m not real in this life. I haven’t been real since I came down to breakfast with Miss Ashley that first morning. I’m simply a very good impostor. I must inherit the talent from father. Another reason against telling Phyllis about myself is that, if I do, I shall become her property. Miss Ashley knows all about me, but I’m not her property, because it’s part of her profession to be told secrets. Phyllis would love me more than ever, so long as she was the only person that owned the secret, but if anybody else ever knew, even if it were only Philip, she would be jealous and she would have to make a secret of it with some one else. Then she would be ashamed of herself and would begin to hate and despise me in self-defense. No, I must never tell any of the girls.”
Apart from these morbid fits, which were not very frequent, Sylvia enjoyed her stay at Markham Grange. In a way it encouraged the idea of marrying Philip; for the country life appealed to her not as to a cockney by the strangeness of its inhabitants and the mere quantity of grass in sight, but more deeply with those old ineffable longings of Hampstead.
At the end of the summer term the twins invited Sylvia to stay with them in Hertfordshire. She refused at first, because she felt that she could not bear the idea of being jealously disturbed by a second home. The twins were inconsolable at her refusal and sent a telegram to their mother, who had already written one charming letter of invitation, and who now wrote another in which she told Sylvia of her children’s bitter disappointment and begged her to come. Miss Ashley, also, was anxious that Sylvia should go, and told her frankly that it seemed an excellent chance to think over seriously her marriage with Philip in the autumn. Philip, now that the date of her final decisionwas drawing near, wished her to remain with Miss Ashley in London. His opposition was enough to make Sylvia insist upon going; so, when at the end of July the school was swept by a tornado of relations and friends, Sylvia was swept away with the twins to Hertfordshire, and Philip was left to wait till the end of September to know whether she would marry him or not in October.
The Worsleys’ home at Arbour End made an altogether different impression upon Sylvia from Markham Grange. She divined in some way that the background here was not immemorial, but that the Worsleys had created it themselves. And a perfect background it was—a very comfortable red brick house with a garden full of flowers, an orchard loaded with fruit, fields promenaded by neat cows, pigsties inhabited by clean pigs, a shining dog-cart and a shining horse, all put together with the satisfying completeness of a picture-puzzle. Mr. Worsley was a handsome man, tall and fair with a boyish face and a quantity of clothes; Mrs. Worsley was slim and fair, with a rose-leaf complexion and as many clothes as her husband. The twins were even naughtier and more charming than they were at Hornton House; there was a small brother called Hercules, aged six, who was as charming as his sisters and surpassed them in wickedness. The maids were trim and tolerant; the gardener was never grumpy; Hercules’s governess disapproved of holiday tasks; the dogs wagged their tails at the least sound.
“I love these people,” Sylvia said to herself, when she was undressing on the first night of her stay. “I love them, I love them. I feel at home—at home—at home!” She leaped into bed and hugged the pillow in a triumph of good-fellowship.
At Arbour End Sylvia banished the future and gave herself to the present. One seemed to have nothing to do but to amuse oneself then, and it was so easy to amuse oneself that one never grew tired of doing so. As the twins pointed out, their father was so much nicer than any other father, because whatever was suggested he always enjoyed. If it was a question of learning golf, Mr. Worsley took the keenest interest in teaching it. When Gladys drove a ball through the drawing-room window, no one was moredelighted than Mr. Worsley himself; he infected everybody with his pleasure, so that the gardener beamed at the notion of going to fetch the glazier from the village, and the glazier beamed when he mended the window, and the maids beamed while they watched him at work, and the dogs sat down in a loose semicircle, thumping the lawn with appreciative tails. The next day, when Hercules, who, standing solemnly apart from the rest, had observed all that happened, threw a large stone through the mended window, there was the same scene of pleasure slightly intensified.
Mrs. Worsley flitted through the house, making every room she entered more beautiful and more gay for her presence. She had only one regret, which was that the twins were getting so big, and this not as with other mothers because it made her feel old, but because she would no more see their black legs and their tumbled hair. Sylvia once asked her how she could bear to let them go to school, and Mrs. Worsley’s eyes filled with tears.
“I had to send them to school,” she whispered, sadly. “Because theywouldfall in love with the village boys and they were getting Hertfordshire accents. Perhaps you’ve noticed that I myself speak with a slight cockney accent. Do you understand, dear?”
The August days fled past and in the last week came a letter from Miss Ashley.
MURREN,August 26, 1900.MY DEARSYLVIA,—I shall be back from Switzerland by September 3d, and I shall be delighted to see you at Hornton House again. Philip nearly followed me here in order to talk about you, but I declined his company. I want you to think very seriously about your future, as no doubt you have been doing all this month. If you have the least hesitation about marrying Philip, let me advise you not to do it. I shall be glad to offer you a place at Hornton House, not as a schoolmistress, but as a kind of director of the girls’ leisure time. I have grown very fond of you during this year and have admired the way in which you settled down here more than I can express. We will talk this over more fully when we meet, but I want you to know that, if you feel you ought not to marry, you have a certain amount of security for the future while you are deciding what you will ultimately do. Give my love to the twins. I shall be glad to see you again.Your affectionateCAROLINEASHLEY.
MURREN,August 26, 1900.
MY DEARSYLVIA,—I shall be back from Switzerland by September 3d, and I shall be delighted to see you at Hornton House again. Philip nearly followed me here in order to talk about you, but I declined his company. I want you to think very seriously about your future, as no doubt you have been doing all this month. If you have the least hesitation about marrying Philip, let me advise you not to do it. I shall be glad to offer you a place at Hornton House, not as a schoolmistress, but as a kind of director of the girls’ leisure time. I have grown very fond of you during this year and have admired the way in which you settled down here more than I can express. We will talk this over more fully when we meet, but I want you to know that, if you feel you ought not to marry, you have a certain amount of security for the future while you are deciding what you will ultimately do. Give my love to the twins. I shall be glad to see you again.
Your affectionateCAROLINEASHLEY.
The effect of Miss Ashley’s letter was the exact contrary of what she had probably intended; it made Sylvia feel that she was not bound to marry Philip, and, from the moment she was not bound, that she was willing, even anxious, to marry him. The aspects of his character which she had criticized to herself vanished and left only the first impression of him, when she was absolutely free and was finding his company such a relief from the Exhibition. Another result of the letter was that by removing the shame of dependence and by providing an alternative it opened a way to discussion, for which Sylvia fixed upon Mrs. Worsley, divining that she certainly would look at her case unprejudiced by anything but her own experience.
Sylvia never pretended to herself that she would be at all influenced by advice. Listening to advice from Mrs. Worsley would be like looking into a shop-window with money in one’s pocket, but with no intention of entering the shop to make a purchase; listening to her advice before Miss Ashley’s offer would have been like looking at a shop-window without a penny in the world, a luxury of fancy to which Sylvia had never given way. So at the first opportunity Sylvia talked to Mrs. Worsley about Philip, going back for her opinion of him and feeling toward him to those first days together, and thereby giving her listener an impression that she liked him a very great deal, which was true, as Sylvia assured herself, yet not without some misgivings about her presentation of the state of affairs.
“He sounds most fascinating,” said Mrs. Worsley. “Of course Lennie was never at all clever. I don’t think he ever read a book in his life. When I met him first I was acting in burlesque, and I had to make up my mind between him and my profession; I’m so glad I chose him. But at first I was rather miserable. His parents were still alive, and though they were very kind to me, I was always an intruder, and of course Lennie was dependent on them, for he was much too stupid an old darling to earn his own living. He really has nothing but his niceness. Then his parents died and, being an only son, Lennie had all the money. We lived for a time in his father’s house, but it became impossible. We had my poor old mother down to stay with us, and the neighbors called, as if she were acuriosity. When she didn’t appear at tea, you could feel they were staying on, hoping against hope to get a glimpse of her. I expect I was sensitive and rather silly, but I was miserable. And then Lennie, who is not clever, but so nice that it always leads him to do exactly the right thing, went away suddenly and bought this house, where life has been one long dream of happiness. You’ve seen how utterly self-contained we are. Nobody comes to visit us very much, because when we first came here we used to hide when people called. And then the twins have always been such a joy—oh, dear, I wish they would never grow up; but there’s still Hercules, and you never know, there might be another baby. Oh, my dear Sylvia, I’m sure you ought to get married. And you say his parents are dead?”
“But he has a sister.”
“Oh, a sister doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter his being clever and fond of books, because you’re fond of books yourself. The twins tell me you’ve read everything in the world and that there’s nothing you don’t know. I’m sure you’d soon get tired of Hornton House—oh, yes, I strongly advise you to get married.”
When Sylvia got back to London the memory of Arbour End rested in her thoughts like a pleasant dream of the night that one ponders in a summer dawn. She assured Miss Ashley that she was longing to marry Philip; and when she seemed to express in her reception of the announcement a kind of puzzled approval, Sylvia spoke with real enthusiasm of her marriage. Miss Ashley never knew that the real inspiration of such enthusiasm was Arbour End and not at all Philip himself. As for Sylvia, because she would by no means admit even to herself that she had taken Mrs. Worsley’s advice, she passed over the advice and remarked only the signs of happiness at Arbour End.
Sylvia and Philip were married at a registry-office early in October. The honeymoon was spent in the Italian lakes, where Philip denounced the theatrical scenery, but crowned Sylvia with vine-leaves and wrote Latin poetry to her, which he translated aloud in the evenings as well as the mosquitoes would let him.
GREEN LANES lay midway between the market town of Galton and the large village of Newton Candover. It is a small, tumble-down hamlet remote from any highroad, the confluence of four deserted by-ways leading to other hamlets upon the wooded downland of which Green Lanes was the highest point. Hare Hall, the family mansion of the Iredales, was quite two miles away in the direction of Newton Candover and was let for a long term of years to a rich stockbroker. Philip himself lived at The Old Farm, an Elizabethan farm-house which he had filled with books. The only other “gentleman” in Green Lanes was the vicar, Mr. Dorward, with whom Philip had quarreled. The squire as lay rector drew a yearly revenue of £300, but he refused to allow the living more than £90 until the vicar gave up his ritualistic fads, to which, though he never went inside the church, he strongly objected.
Sylvia’s first quarrel with Philip was over the vicar, whom she met through her puppy’s wandering into his cottage while he was at tea and refusing to come out. She might never have visited him again if Philip had not objected, for he was very shy and eccentric; but after two more visits to annoy Philip, she began to like Mr. Dorward, and her friendship with him became a standing source of irritation to her husband and a pleasure to herself which she declined to give up. Her second quarrel with Philip was over his sister Gertrude, who came down for a visit soon after they got back from Como. Gertrude, having until her brother’s marriage always lived at The Old Farm, could not refrain from making Sylvia very much aware of this; her conversation was one long, supercilious narrative of what she used to do at Green Lanes, with which were mingled fears for what might be done there inthe future. Philip was quite ready to admit that his sister could be very irritating, but he thought Sylvia’s demand for her complete exclusion from The Old Farm for at least a year was unreasonable.
“Well, if she comes, I shall go,” Sylvia said, sullenly.
“My dear child, do remember that you’re married and that you can’t go and come as you like,” Philip answered. “However, I quite see your point of view about poor Gertrude and I quite agree with you that for a time it will be wiser to keep ourselves rather strictly to ourselves.”
Why could he not have said that at first, Sylvia thought. She would have been so quickly generous if he had, but the preface about her being married had spoiled his concession. He was a curious creature, this husband of hers. When they were alone he would encourage her to be as she used to be; he would laugh with her, show the keenest interest in what she was reading, search for a morning to find some book that would please her, listen with delight to her stories of Jimmy Monkley or of her father or of Blanche, and be always, in fact, the sympathetic friend, never obtruding himself, as lover or monitor, two aspects of him equally repugnant to Sylvia. Yet when there was the least likelihood not alone of a third person’s presence, but even of a third person’s hearing any roundabout gossip of her real self, Philip would shrivel her up with interminable corrections, and what was far worse, try to sweeten the process by what she considered fatuous demonstrations of affection. For a time there was no great tension between them, because Sylvia’s adventurous spirit was occupied by her passion for knowledge; she felt vaguely that at any time the moment might arrive when mere knowledge without experience would not be enough; at present the freedom of Philip’s library was adventure enough. He was most eager to assist her progress, and almost reckless in the way he spurred her into every liberty of thought, maintaining the stupidity of all conventional beliefs—moral, religious, or political. He warned her that the expression of such opinions, or, still worse, action under the influence of them, would be for her or for any one else in the present state of society quite impossible;Sylvia used to think at the time that it was only herself as his wife whom he wished to keep in check, and resented his reasons accordingly; afterward looking back to this period she came to the conclusion that Philip was literally a theorist, and that his fierce denunciations of all conventional opinions could never in any circumstances have gone further than quarreling with the vicar and getting married in a registry-office. Once when she attacked him for his cowardice he retorted by citing his marriage with her, and immediately afterward apologized for what he characterized as “caddishness.”
“If you had married me and been content to let me remain myself,” Sylvia said, “you might have used that argument. But you showed you were frightened of what you’d done when you sent me to Hornton House.”
“My dear child, I wanted you to go there for your own comfort, not for mine. After all, it was only like reading a book; it gave you a certain amount of academic theory that you could prove or disprove by experience.”
“A devil of a lot of experience I get here,” Sylvia exclaimed.
“You’re still only seventeen,” Philip answered. “The time will come.”
“It will come,” Sylvia murmured, darkly.
“You’re not threatening to run away from me already?” Philip asked, with a smile.
“I might do anything,” she owned. “I might poison you.”
Philip laughed heartily at this; just then Mr. Dorward passed over the village green, which gave him an opportunity to rail at his cassock.
“It’s ridiculous for a man to go about dressed up like that. Of course, nobody attends his church. I can’t think why my father gave him the living. He’s a ritualist, and his manners are abominable.”
“But he looks like a Roman Emperor,” said Sylvia.
Philip spluttered with indignation. “Oh, he’s Roman enough, my dear child; but an Emperor! Which Emperor?”
“I’m not sure which it is, but I think it’s Nero.”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Philip assented, after apause. “You’re amazingly observant. Yes, there is that kind of mixture of sensual strength and fineness about his face. But it’s not surprising. The line between degeneracy and the ‘twopence colored’ type of religion is not very clearly drawn.”
It was after this conversation that, in searching for a picture of Nero’s head to compare with Mr. Dorward’s, Sylvia came across the Satyricon of Petronius in a French translation. She read it through without skipping a word, applied it to the test of recognition, and decided that she found more satisfactorily than in any book she had yet read a distorting mirror of her life from the time she left France until she met Philip, a mirror, however, that never distorted so wildly as to preclude recognition. Having made this discovery, she announced it to him, who applauded her sense of humor and of literature, but begged her to keep it to herself; people might get a wrong idea of her; he knew what she meant and appreciated the reflection, but it was a book that, generally speaking, no woman would read, still less talk about, and least of all claim kinship with. It was of course an immortal work of art, humorous, witty, fantastic.
“And true,” Sylvia added.
“And no doubt true to its period and its place, which was southern Italy in the time of Nero.”
“And true to southern England in the time of Victoria,” Sylvia insisted. “I don’t mean that it’s exactly the same,” she went on, striving almost painfully to express her thoughts. “The same, though. Ifeelit’s true. I don’tknowit’s true. Oh, can’t you understand?”
“I fancy you’re trying to voice your esthetic consciousness of great art that, however time may change its accessories, remains inherently changeless. Realism in fact as opposed to what is wrongly called realism. Lots of critics, Sylvia, have tried to define what is worrying you, and lots of long words have been enlisted on their behalf. A better and more ancient word for realism was ‘poetry’; but the word has been debased by the versifiers who call themselves poets just as painters call themselves artists—both are titles that only posterity can award. Great art is something that is made and that lives in itself;like that stuff, radium, which was discovered the year before last, it eternally gives out energy without consuming itself. Radium, however, does not solve the riddle of life, and until we solve that, great art will remain undefinable. Which reminds me of a mistake that so-called believers make. I’ve often heard Christians maintain the truth of Christianity, because it is still alive. What nonsense! The words of Christ are still alive, because Christ Himself was a great poet, and therefore expressed humanity as perhaps no one else ever expressed humanity before. But the lying romantic, the bad poet, in fact, who tickles the vain and credulous mob with miracles and theogonies, expresses nothing. It is a proof of nothing but the vitality of great art that the words of Christ can exist and can continue to affect humanity notwithstanding the mountebank behavior attributed to Him, out of which priests have manufactured a religion. It is equally surprising that Cervantes could hold his own against the romances of chivalry he tried to kill. He may have killed one mode of expression, but he did not preventEast Lynnefrom being written; he yet endures because Don Quixote, whom he made, has life. By the way, you never got on with Don Quixote, did you?”
Sylvia shook her head.
“I think it’s a failure on your part, dear Sylvia.”
“He is so stupid,” she said.
“But he realized how stupid he was before he died.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help my bad taste, as you call it. He annoys me.”
“You think the Yanguseian carriers dealt with him in the proper way?”
“I don’t remember them.”
“They beat him.”
“I think I could beat a person who annoyed me very much,” Sylvia said. “I don’t mean with sticks, of course, but with my behavior.”
“Is that another warning?” Philip asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Anyway, you think Petronius is good?”
She nodded her head emphatically.
“Come, you shall give a judgment on Aristophanes.I commend him to you in the same series of French translations.”
“I think Lysistrata is simply splendid,” Sylvia said, a week or so later. “And I like the Thesmos-something and the Eck-something.”
“I thought you might,” Philip laughed. “But don’t quote from them when my millionaire tenant comes to tea.”
“Don’t be always harping upon the dangers of my conversation,” she exhorted.
“Mayn’t I even tease you?” Philip asked, in mock humility.
“I don’t mind being teased, but it isn’t teasing. It’s serious.”
“Your sense of humor plays you tricks sometimes,” he said.
“Oh, don’t talk about my sense of humor like that. My sense of humor isn’t a watch that you can take out and tap and regulate and wind up and shake your head over. I hate people who talk about a sense of humor as you do. Are you so sure you have one yourself?”
“Perhaps I haven’t,” Philip agreed, but by the way in which he spoke Sylvia knew that he would maintain he had a sense of humor, and that the rest of humanity had none if it combined to contradict him. “I always distrust people who are too confidently the possessors of one,” he added.
“You don’t understand in the least what I mean,” Sylvia cried out, in exasperation. “You couldn’t distrust anybody else’s sense of humor if you had one yourself.”
“That’s what I said,” Philip pointed out, in an aggrieved voice.
“Don’t go on; you’ll make me scream,” she adjured him. “I won’t talk about a sense of humor, because if there is such a thing it obviously can’t be talked about.”
Lest Philip should pursue the argument, she left him and went for a long muddy walk by herself half-way to Galton. She had never before walked beyond the village of Medworth, but she was still in such a state of nervous exasperation that she continued down the hill beyond it without noticing how far it was taking her. The countryon either side of the road ascended in uncultivated fields toward dense oak woods. In many of these fields were habitations with grandiose names, mostly built of corrugated iron. Sylvia thought at first that she was approaching the outskirts of Galton and pressed on to explore the town, the name of which was familiar from the rickety tradesmen’s carts that jogged through Green Lanes. There was no sign of a town, however, and after walking about two miles through a landscape that recalled the pictures she had seen of primitive settlements in the Far West, she began to feel tired and turned round upon her tracks, wishing she had not come quite so far. Suddenly a rustic gate that was almost buried in the unclipped hazel hedge on one side of the road was flung open, and an elderly lady with a hooked nose and fierce bright eyes, dressed in what looked at a first glance like a pair of soiled lace window-curtains, asked Sylvia with some abruptness if she had met a turkey going in her direction. Sylvia shook her head, and the elderly lady (Sylvia would have called her an old lady from her wrinkled countenance, had she not been so astonishingly vivacious in her movements) called in a high harsh voice:
“Emmie! There’s a girl here coming from Galton way, andshehasn’t seen Major Kettlewell.”
In the distance a female voice answered, shrilly, “Perhaps he’s crossed over to the Pluepotts’!”
Sylvia explained that she had misunderstood the first inquiry, but that nobody had passed her since she turned back five minutes ago.
“We call the turkey Major Kettlewell because he looks like Major Kettlewell, but Major Kettlewell himself lives over there.”
The elderly lady indicated the other side of the road with a vague gesture, and went on:
“Where can that dratted bird have got to? Major! Major! Major! Chuch—chick—chilly—chilly—chuck—chuck,” she called.
Sylvia hoped that the real major lived far enough away to be out of hearing.
“Never keep a turkey,” the elderly lady went on, addressing Sylvia. “We didn’t kill it for Christmas,because we’d grown fond of it, even though he is like that old ruffian of a major. And ever since he’s gone on the wander. It’s the springtime coming, I suppose.”
The elderly lady’s companion had by this time reached the gate, and Sylvia saw that she was considerably younger, but with the same hall-mark of old-maidishness.
“Don’t worry any more about the bird, Adelaide,” said the new-comer. “It’s tea-time. Depend upon it, he’s crossed over to the Pluepotts’. This time I really will wring his neck.”
Sylvia prepared to move along, but the first lady asked her where she was going, and, when she heard Green Lanes, exclaimed:
“Gemini! That’s beyond Medworth, isn’t it? You’d better come in and have a cup of tea with us. I’m Miss Horne, and my friend here is Miss Hobart.”
Sunny Bank, as this particular tin house was named, not altogether inappropriately, although it happened to be on the less sunny side of the road, was built half-way up a steepish slope of very rough ground from which enough flints had been extracted to pave a zigzag of ascending paths, and to vary the contour of the slope with a miniature mountain range of unused material without apparently smoothing the areas of proposed cultivation.
“These paths are something dreadful, Emmie,” said Miss Horne, as the three of them scrambled up through the garden. “Never mind, we’ll get the roller out of the hedge when Mr. Pluepott comes in on Wednesday. Miss Hobart nearly got carried away by the roller yesterday,” she explained to Sylvia.
A trellised porch outside the bungalow—such apparently was the correct name for these habitations—afforded a view of the opposite slope, which was sprinkled with bungalows surrounded like Sunny Bank by heaps of stones; there were also one or two more pretentious buildings of red brick and one or two stony gardens without a dwelling-place as yet.
“I suppose you’re wondering why the name over the door isn’t the same as the one on the gate? Mr. Pluepott is always going to take it out, but he never remembers to bring the paint. It’s the name the man from whom webought it gave the bungalow,” said Miss Hobart, crossly. Sylvia read in gothic characters over the door Floral Nook, and agreed with the two ladies that Sunny Bank was much more suitable.
“For whatever else it may be, it certainly isn’t damp,” Miss Horne declared. “But, dear me, talking of names, you haven’t told us yours.”
Sylvia felt shy. It was actually the first time she had been called upon to announce herself since she was married. The two ladies exclaimed on hearing she was Mrs. Iredale, and Sylvia felt that there was a kind of impropriety in her being married, when Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, who were so very much older than she, were still spinsters.
The four small rooms of which the bungalow consisted were lined with varnished match-boarding; everything was tied up with brightly colored bows of silk, and most of the pictures were draped with small curtains; the bungalow was full of knickknacks and shivery furniture, but not full enough to satisfy the owners’ passion for prettiness, so that wherever there was a little space on the walls silk bows had been nailed about like political favors. Sylvia thought it would have been simpler to tie a wide sash of pink silk round the house and call it The Chocolate Box. Tea, though even the spoons were tied up with silk, was a varied and satisfying meal. The conversation of the two ladies was remarkably entertaining when it touched upon their neighbors, and when twilight warned Sylvia that she must hurry away she was sorry to leave them. While she was making her farewells there was a loud tap at the door, followed immediately by the entrance of a small bullet-headed man with quick black eyes.
“I’ve brought back your turkey, Miss Horne.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Pluepott. There you are, Emmie. You were right.”
At this moment the bird began to flap its wings as violently as its position head downward would allow; nor, not being a horse, did it pay any attention to Mr. Pluepott’s repeated shouts of “Woa! Woa back, will you!”
“I think you’d better let him flap outside, Mr. Pluepott,” Miss Hobart advised.
Sylvia thought so too when she looked at the floor.
“Shall I wring its neck now or would you rather I waited till I come in on Wednesday?”
“Oh, I think we’ll wait, thank you, Mr. Pluepott,” Miss Horne said. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind shutting him up in the coop. He does wander so. Are you going into Galton?”
Mr. Pluepott replied, as he confined Major Kettlewell to his barracks, that, on the contrary, he was driving up to Medworth to see about some beehives for sale there, whereupon Miss Horne and Miss Hobart asked if he would mind taking Mrs. Iredale that far upon her way.
A few minutes later Sylvia, on a very splintery seat, was jolting along beside Mr. Pluepott toward Medworth.
“Rum lot of people hereabouts,” he said, by way of opening the conversation, “Some of the rummest people it’s ever been my luck to meet. I came here because my wife had to leave the Midlands. Chest was bad. I used to be a cobbler at Bedford. Since I’ve been here I’ve become everything—carpenter, painter, decorator, gardener, mason, bee expert, poultry-keeper, blacksmith, livery-stables, furniture-remover, house agent, common carrier, bricklayer, dairyman, horse-breaker. The only thing I don’t do now is make boots. Funny thing, and you won’t believe it, but last week I had to buy myself the first pair of boots I ever bought since I was a lad of fifteen. Oh, well, I like the latest better than the last, as I jokingly told my missus the other night. It made her laugh,” said Mr. Pluepott, looking at Sylvia rather anxiously; she managed to laugh too, and he seemed relieved.
“I often make jokes for my missus. She’s apt to get very melancholy with her chest. But, as I was saying, the folk round here they beat the band. It just shows what advertisement will do.”
Sylvia asked why.
“Well, when I first came here, and I was one of the three first, I came because I read an advertisement in the paper: ‘Land for the Million in lots from a quarter of an acre.’ Some fellow had bought an old farm that was no use to nobody and had the idea of splitting it up into lots. Originally this was the Oak Farm Estate and belonged toSt. Mary’s College, Oxford. Now we call it Oaktown—the residents, that is—but when we applied the other day to the Galton Rural District Council, so as we could have the name properly recognized, went in we did with the major, half a dozen of us, as smart as a funeral, one of the wise men of Gotham, which is what I jokingly calls Galton nowadays, said he thought Tintown would be a better name. The major got rare and angry, but his teeth slipped just as he was giving it ’em hot and strong, which is a trick they have. He nearly swallowed ’em last November, when he was taking the chair at a Conservative meeting, in an argument with a Radical about the war. They had to lead him outside and pat his back. It’s a pity the old ladies can’t get on with him. They fell out over blackberrying in his copse last Michaelmas. Well, the fact is the major’s a bit close, and I think he meant to sell the blackberries. He’s put up a notice now ‘Beware of Dangerous Explosives,’ though there’s nothing more dangerous than a broken air-gun in the whole house. Miss Horne was very bitter about it; oh, very bitter she was. Said she always knew the major was a guy, and he only wanted to stuff himself with gunpowder to give the boys a rare set out on the Fifth.”
“How did Miss Horne and Miss Hobart come here?” Sylvia asked.
“Advertisement. They lived somewhere near London, I believe; came into a bit of money, I’ve heard, and thought they’d settle in the country. I give them a morning a week on Wednesdays. The man they bought it off had been a tax-collector somewhere in the West Indies. He swindled them properly, but they were sorry for him because he had a floating kidney—floating in alcohol, I should think, by the amount he drank. But they won’t hear a word against him even now. He’s living in Galton and they send him cabbages every week, which he gives to his rabbits when he’s sober and throws at his housekeeper when he’s drunk. Sunny Bank! I’m glad it’s not my Bank. As I jokingly said to my missus, I should soon be stony-broke. Ah, well, there’s all sorts here and that’s a fact,” Mr. Pluepott continued, with a pensive flick at his pony. “That man over there, for instance.” He pointedwith his whip through the gathering darkness to a particularly small tin cottage. “He used to play the trombone in a theater till he played his inside out; now he thinks he’s going to make a fortune growing early tomatoes for Covent Garden market. You get him with a pencil in his hand of an evening and you’d think about borrowing money from him next year; but when you see him next morning trying to cover a five-by-four packing-case with a broken sash-light, you’d be more afraid of his trying to borrow from you.”
With such conversation did Mr. Pluepott beguile the way to Medworth; and when he heard that Sylvia intended to walk in the dusk to Green Lanes he insisted on driving her the extra two miles.
“The hives won’t fly away,” he said, cheerfully, “and I like to make a good job of a thing. Well, now you’ve found your way to Oaktown, I hope you’ll visit us again. Mrs. Pluepott will be very glad to see you drop in for a cup of tea any day, and if you’ve got any comical reading-matter, she’d be glad to borrow from you; for her chest does make her very melancholy, and, being accustomed to having me always about the house when I was cobbling, she doesn’t seem to get used to being alone. Only the other day she said if she’d known I was going to turn into a Buffalo Bill she’d rather have stayed in Bedford. ‘Land for the Millions!’ she said, ‘I reckon you’d call it Land for the Million, if you had to sweep the house clean of the mud you bring into it.’ Well, good night to you. Very glad I was able to oblige, I’m sure.”
Philip was relieved when Sylvia got back. She had never been out for so long before, and she teased him about the running away, that he had evidently imagined. She felt in a good humor after her expedition, and was glad to be back in this dignified and ancient house with its books and lamplight and not a silken bow anywhere to be seen.
“So you’ve been down to that abomination of tin houses? It’s an absolute blot on the countryside. I don’t recommend too close an acquaintanceship. I’m told it’s inhabited by an appalling set of rascals. Poor Melville, who owns the land all ’round, says he can’t keep a hare.”
Sylvia said the people seemed rather amusing, and was not at all inclined to accept Philip’s condemnation of them; he surely did not suggest that Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, for instance, were poachers?
“My dear child, people who come and live in a place like the Oak Farm Estate—Oaktown, as they have the impudence to call it—are there for no good. They’ve either done something discreditable in town or they hope to do something discreditable in the country. Oh yes, I’ve heard all about our neighbors. There’s a ridiculous fellow who calls himself a major—I believe he used to be in the volunteers—and can’t understand why he’s not made a magistrate. I’m told he’s the little tin god of Tintown. No, no, I prefer even your friendship with our vicar. Don’t be cross with me, Sylvia, for laughing at your new friends, but you mustn’t take them too seriously. I shall have finished the text I’m writing this month, and we’ll go up to London for a bit. Shall we? I’m afraid you’re getting dull down here.”
The spring wore away, but the text showed no signs of being finished. Sylvia suggested that she should invite Gladys and Enid Worsley to stay with her, but Philip begged her to postpone the invitation while he was working, and thought in any case it would be better to have them down in summer. Sylvia went to Oaktown once or twice, but said nothing about it to Philip, because from a sort of charitableness she did not want him to diminish himself further in her eyes by airing his prejudices with the complacency that seemed to increase all the time they stayed in the country.
One day at the end of April Miss Horne and Miss Hobart announced they had bought a governess-car and a pony, built a stable, and intended to celebrate their first drive by calling on Sylvia at Green Lanes. Mr. Pluepott had promised, even if it should not be on a Wednesday, to superintend the first expedition and gave his opinion of the boy whom it was proposed to employ as coachman. The boy in question, whom Mr. Pluepott called Jehuselah, whether from an attempt to combine a satirical expression of his driving and his age, or too slight acquaintance with Biblical personalities, was uncertain, was known as Ernieto Miss Horne and Miss Hobart when he was quick and good, but as Ernest when he was slow and bad; his real name all the time was Herbert.
“Good heavens!” Philip ejaculated, when he beheld the governess-car from his window. “Who on earth is this?”
“Friends of mine,” said Sylvia. “Miss Horne and Miss Hobart. I told you about them.”
“But they’re getting out,” Philip gasped, in horror. “They’re coming here.”
“I know,” Sylvia said. “I hope there’s plenty for tea. They always give me the most enormous teas.” And without waiting for any more of Philip’s protests she hurried down-stairs and out into the road to welcome the two ladies. They were both of them dressed in pigeon’s-throat silk under more lace even than usual, and arrived in a state of enthusiasm over Ernie’s driving and thankfulness for the company of Mr. Pluepott, who was also extremely pleased with the whole turn-out.
“A baby in arms couldn’t have handled that pony more carefully,” he declared, looking at Ernie with as much pride as if he had begotten him.
“We’re so looking forward to meeting Mr. Iredale,” said Miss Horne.
“We hear he’s a great scholar,” said Miss Hobart.
Sylvia took them into the dining-room, where she was glad to see that a gigantic tea had been prepared—a match even for the most profuse of Sunny Bank’s.
Then she went up-stairs to fetch Philip, who flatly refused to come down.
“You must come,” Sylvia urged. “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.”
“My dearest Sylvia, I really cannot entertain the eccentricities of Tintown here. You invited them. You must look after them. I’m busy.”
“Are you coming?” Sylvia asked, biting her lips.
“No, I really can’t. It’s absurd. I don’t want this kind of people here. Besides, I must work.”
“You sha’n’t work,” Sylvia cried, in a fury, and she swept all his books and papers on the floor.
“I certainly sha’n’t come now,” he said, in the prim voice that was so maddening.
“Did you mean to come before I upset your books?”
“Yes, I probably should have come,” he answered.
“All right. I’m so sorry. I’ll pick everything up,” and she plunged down on the floor. “There you are,” she said when everything was put back in its place. “Now will you come?”
“No, my dear. I told you I wouldn’t after you upset my things.”
“Philip,” she cried, her eyes bright with rage, “you’re making me begin to hate you sometimes.”
Then she left him and went back to her guests, to whom she explained that her husband had a headache and was lying down. The ladies were disappointed, but consoled themselves by recommending a number of remedies which Miss Horne insisted that Sylvia should write down. When tea was finished, Miss Hobart said that their first visit to Green Lanes had been most enjoyable and that there was only one thing they would like to do before going home, which would be to visit the church. Sylvia jumped at an excuse for not showing them over the house, and they set out immediately through the garden to walk to the little church that stood in a graveyard grass-grown like the green lanes of the hamlet whose dead were buried there. The sun was westering, and in the golden air they lowered their voices for a thrush that was singing his vespers upon a moldering wooden cross.
“Nobody ever comes here,” Sylvia said. “Hardly anybody comes to church ever. The people don’t like Mr. Dorward’s services. They say he can’t be heard.”
Suddenly the vicar himself appeared, and seemed greatly pleased to see Sylvia and her visitors; she felt a little guilty, because, though she was great friends with Mr. Dorward, she had never been inside the church, nor had he ever hinted he would like her to come. It would seem so unkind for her to come like this for the first time with strangers, as if the church which she knew he deeply loved was nothing but a tea-time entertainment. There was no trace of reproachfulness in his manner, as he showed Miss Horne and Miss Hobart the vestments and a little image of the Virgin in peach-blow glaze that he moved caressingly into the sunlight, as a child mightfondle reverently a favorite doll. He spoke of his plans for restoration and unrolled the design of a famous architect, adding with a smile for Sylvia that the lay rector disapproved of it thoroughly. They left him arranging the candlesticks on the altar, a half-pathetic, half-humorous figure that seemed to be playing a solitary game.
“And you say nobody goes to his church!” Miss Horne exclaimed. “But he’s most polite and charming.”
“Scarcely anybody goes,” Sylvia said.
“Emmie,” said Miss Horne, standing upright and flashing forth an eagle’s glance. “Wewill attend his service.”
“That is a very good idea of yours, Adelaide,” Miss Hobart replied.
Then they got into the governess-car with much determination, and with friendly waves of the hand to Sylvia set out back to Oaktown.
When Miss Horne and Miss Hobart had left, Sylvia went up-stairs to have it out with Philip. At this rate there would very soon be a crisis in their married life. She was a little disconcerted by his getting up the moment she entered his room and coming to meet her with an apology.
“Dearest Sylvia, you can call me what you will; I shall deserve the worst. I can’t understand my behavior this afternoon. I think I must have been working so hard that my nerves are hopelessly jangled. I very nearly followed you into the churchyard to make myself most humbly pleasant, but I saw Dorward go ’round almost immediately afterward, and I could not have met him in the mood I was in without being unpardonably rude.”
He waited for her with an arm stretched out in reconciliation, but Sylvia hesitated.
“It’s all very well to hurt my feelings like that because you happened to be feeling in a bad temper,” she said, “and then think you’ve only got to make a pleasant little speech to put everything right again. Besides, it isn’t only to-day; it’s day after day since we’ve been married. I feel like Gulliver when he was being tied up by the Lilliputians. I can’t find any one big rope that’s destroying my freedom, but somehow or other my freedom is being destroyed. Did you marry me casually, as people buy birds, to put me in a cage?”
“My dear, I married you because I loved you. You know I fought against the idea of marrying you for a long time, but I loved you too much.”
“Are you afraid of my loyalty?” she demanded. “Do you think I go to Oaktown to be made love to?”
“Sylvia!” he protested.
“I go there because I’m bored, bored, endlessly, hopelessly, paralyzingly bored. It’s my own fault. I never ought to have married you. I can’t think why I did, but at least it wasn’t for any mercenary reason. You’re not to believe that. Philip, I do like you, but why will you always upset me?”
He thought for a moment and asked her presently what greater freedom she wanted, what kind of freedom.
“That’s it,” she went on. “I told you I couldn’t find any one big rope that bound me. There isn’t a single thread I can’t snap with perfect ease, but it’s the multitude of insignificant little threads that almost choke me.”
“You told me you thought you would like to live in the country,” he reminded her.
“I do, but, Philip, do remember that I really am still a child. I’ve got a deep voice and I can talk like a professor, but I’m still a hopeless kid. I oughtn’t to have to tell you this. You ought to see it for yourself if you love me.”
“Dearest Sylvia, I’m always telling you how young you are, and there’s nothing that annoys you more,” he said.
“Oh, Philip, Philip, you really are pathetic! When did you ever meet a young person who liked to have her youth called attention to? You’re so remote from beginning to understand how to manage me, and I’m still manageable. Very soon I sha’n’t be, though; and there’ll be such a dismal smash-up.”
“If you’d only explain exactly,” he began; but she interrupted him at once.
“My dear man, if I explain and you take notes and consult them for your future behavior to me, do you think that’s going to please me? It can all be said in two words. I’m human. For the love of God be human yourself.”
“Look here, let’s go away for a spell,” said Philip, brightly.
“The cat’s miaowing. Let’s open the door. No, seriously, I think I should like to go away from here for a while.”
“By yourself?” he asked, in a frightened voice.
“Oh no, not by myself. I’m perfectly content with you. Only don’t suggest the Italian lakes and try to revive the early sweets of our eight months of married life. Don’t let’s have a sentimental rebuilding. It will be so much more practical to build up something quite new.”
Philip really seemed to have been shaken by this conversation. Sylvia knew he had not finished his text, but he put everything aside in order not to keep her waiting; and before May was half-way through they had reached the island of Sirene. Here they stayed two months in a crumbling pension upon the cliff’s edge until Sylvia was sun-dried without and within; she was enthralled by the evidences of imperial Rome, and her only regret was that she did not meet an eccentric Englishman who was reputed to have found, when digging a cistern, at least one of the lost books of Elephantis, which he read in olive-groves by the light of the moon. However, she met several other eccentrics of different nationalities and was pleased to find that Philip’s humanism was, with Sirene as a background, strong enough to lend him an appearance of humanity. They planned, like all other visitors to Sirene, to build a big villa there; they listened like all other visitors to the Italian and foreign inhabitants’ depreciation of every villa but the one in which they lived, either because they liked it or because they wanted to let it or because they wished new-comers to fall into snares laid for themselves when they were new-comers.
At last they tore themselves from Sirenean dreams and schemes, chiefly because Sylvia had accepted an invitation to stay at Arbour End. They lingered for a while at Naples on the way home, where Sylvia looked about her with Petronian eyes, so much so, indeed, that a guide mistook what was merely academic curiosity for something more practical. It cost Philip fifty liras and nearly all the Italian he knew to get rid of the pertinacious and ingenious fellow.
Arbour End had not changed at all in a year. Sylvia,when she thought of Green Lanes, laughed a little bitterly at herself (but not so bitterly as she would have laughed before the benevolent sunshine of Sirene) for ever supposing that she and Philip could create anything like it. Gladys and Enid, though they were now fifteen, had not yet lengthened their frocks; their mother could not yet bring herself to contemplate the disappearance of those slim black legs.
“But we shall have to next term,” Gladys said, “because Miss Ashley’s written home about them.”
“And that stuck-up thing Gwendyr Jones said they were positively disgusting,” Enid went on.
“Yes,” added Gladys, “and I told her they weren’t half as disgusting as her ankles. And they aren’t, are they, Sylvia?”
“Some of the girls call her marrow-bones,” said Enid.
Sylvia would have preferred to avoid any intimate talks with Mrs. Worsley, but it was scarcely to be expected that she would succeed, and one night, looking ridiculously young with her fair hair hanging down her back, she came to Sylvia’s bedroom, and sitting down at the end of her bed, began:
“Well, are you glad you got married?”
At any rate, Sylvia thought, she had the tact not to ask if she was glad she had taken her advice.
“I’m not so sorry as I was,” Sylvia told her.
“Ah, didn’t I warn you against the first year? You’ll see that I was right.”
“But I was not sorry in the way you prophesied. I’ve never had any bothers with the country. Philip’s sister was rather a bore, always wondering about his clothes for the year after next; but we made a treaty, and she’s been excluded from The Old Farm—wait a bit, only till next October. By Jove! I say, the treaty’ll have to be renewed. I don’t believe even memories of Sirene would enable me to deal with Gertrude this winter. No, what worries me most in marriage is not other people, but our two selves. I hate writing Sylvia Iredale instead of Sylvia Scarlett. Quite unreasonable of me, but most worries are unreasonable. I don’t want to be owned. I’m a book to Philip; he bought me for my binding and never intended to readme, even if he could. I don’t mean to say I was beautiful, but I was what an American girl at Hornton House used to call cunning; the pattern was unusual, and he couldn’t resist it. But now that he’s bought me, he expects me to stay quite happily on a shelf in a glass case; one day he may perhaps try to read me, but at present, so long as I’m taken out and dusted—our holiday at Sirene was a dusting—he thinks that’s enough. But the worm that flies in the heart of the storm has got in, Victoria, and is making a much more unusual pattern across my inside—I say, I think it’s about time to drop this metaphor, don’t you?”
“I don’t think I quite understand all you’re saying,” said Victoria Worsley.
Sylvia brought her hand from beneath the bedclothes and took her friend’s.
“Does it matter?”
“Oh, but I like to understand what people are saying,” Mrs. Worsley insisted. “That’s why we never go abroad for our holidays. But, Sylvia, about being owned, which is where I stopped understanding. Lennie doesn’t own me.”
“No, you ownhim, but I don’t own Philip.”
“I expect you will, my dear, after you’ve been married a little longer.”
“You think I shall acquire him in monthly instalments. I should find at the end the cost too much in repairs, like Fred Organ.”
“Who’s he?”
“Hube’s brother, the cabman. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, of course, how silly of me! I thought it might be an Italian you met at Sirene. You’ve made me feel quite sad, Sylvia. I always want everybody to be happy,” she sighed. “I am happy—perfectly happy—in spite of being married.”
“Nobody’s happy because of being married,” Sylvia enunciated, rather sententiously.
“What nonsense you talk, and you’re only just eighteen!”
“That’s why I talk nonsense,” Sylvia said, “but all the same it’s very true nonsense. You and Lennie couldn’t have ever been anything but happy.”
“Darling Lennie, I think it must be because he’s so stupid. I wonder if he’s smoking in bed. He always does if I leave him to go and talk to anybody. Good night, dear.”
Sylvia returned to her book, wondering more than ever how she could have supposed a year ago that she could follow Victoria Worsley along the pathway of her simple and happy life.
The whole family from Arbour End came to London for the ten days before term began, and Sylvia stayed with them at a hotel. Gladys and Enid had to get their new frocks, and certain gaps in Hercules’s education had to be filled up, such as visiting the Zoo and the Tower of London and the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court. Sylvia and the twins searched in vain for the Hall of a Thousand and One Marvels, but they found Mabel selling Turkish Delight by herself at a small stall in another part of the Exhibition. Sylvia thought the best way of showing her penitence for the heartless way she had treated her was to buy as much Turkish Delight as could possibly be carried away, since she probably received a percentage on the takings. Mabel seemed to bear no resentment, but she was rather shy, because she mistook the twins for Sylvia’s sisters-in-law and therefore avoided the only topic upon which she could talk freely, which was men. They left the florid and accommodating creature with a callow youth who was leaning familiarly across the counter and smacking with a cane his banana-colored boots; then they ate as much Turkish Delight as they could and divided the rest among some ducks and the Kaffirs in the kraal.
Sylvia also visited Hornton House and explained to Miss Ashley why she had demanded the banishment of Gertrude from Green Lanes.
“Poor Gertrude, she was very much upset,” Miss Ashley said.
Sylvia, softened by the memories of a so happy year that her old school evoked, made up her mind not to carry on the war against Gertrude. She felt, too, a greater charity toward Philip, who, after all, had been the cause of her being given that so happy year, and she went back to Hampshire with the firm intention of encouraging thisnew mood that the last four months had created in her. Philip was waiting on the platform and was so glad to see her again that he drove even more absent-mindedly than usual, until she took the reins from him and whipped up the horse with a quite positive anticipation of home.
Sylvia learned from Philip that the visit of Miss Horne and Miss Hobart had influenced other lives than their own, for it seemed that Miss Horne’s announcement of their attendance in future at Mr. Dorward’s empty church had been fully carried out. Not a Sunday passed but that they drove up in the governess-car to Mass, so Philip said with a wry face for the word; what was more, they stayed to lunch with the vicar, presided at the Sunday-school, and attended the evening service, which had been put forward half an hour to suit their supper.
“They absolutely rule Green Lanes ecclesiastically,” Philip said. “And some of the mercenary bumpkins and boobies ’round here have taken to going to church for what they can get out of the two old ladies. I’m glad to say, however, that the farmers and their families haven’t come ’round yet.”
Sylvia said she was glad for Mr. Dorward’s sake, and she wondered why Philip made such a fuss about the form of a service in the reality of which, whatever way it was presented, he had no belief.
“I suppose you’re right,” he agreed. “Perhaps what I’m really afraid of is that our fanatical vicar will really convert the parish to his childish religion. Upon my soul, I believe Miss Horne has her eye upon me. I know she’s been holding forth upon my iniquitous position as lay rector, and these confounded Radicals will snatch hold of anything to create prejudice against landowners.”