“Why don’t you make friends with Mr. Dorward?” Sylvia suggested. “You could surely put aside your religious differences and talk about the classics.”
“I dare say I’m bigoted in my own way,” Philip answered. “But I can’t stand a priest, just as some people can’t stand cats or snakes. It’s a positively physical repulsion that I can’t get over. No, I’m afraid I must leave Dorward to you, Sylvia. I don’t think there’s much danger of your falling a victim to man-millinery. It’ll takeall your strength of mind, however, to resist the malice of these two old witches, and I wager you’ll be excommunicated from the society of Tintown in next to no time.”
Sylvia found that Philip had by no means magnified the activities of Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, and for the first time on a Sunday morning at Green Lanes a thin black stream of worshipers flowed past the windows of The Old Farm after service. It was more than curiosity could bear; without saying a word to anybody Sylvia attended the evening service herself. The church was very small, and her entrance would have attracted much more attention than it did if Ernie, who was holding the thurible for Mr. Dorward to put in the incense, had not given at that moment a mighty sneeze, scattering incense and charcoal upon the altar steps and frightening the woman at the harmonium into a violent discord, from which the choir was rescued by Miss Horne’s unmoved and harsh soprano that positively twisted back the craning necks of the congregation into their accustomed apathy. Sylvia wondered whether fear, conversion, or extra wages had induced Ernie to put on that romantic costume which gave him the appearance of a rustic table covered with a tea-cloth, as he waited while the priest tried to evoke a few threads of smoke from the ruin caused by his sneeze. Sylvia was so much occupied in watching Ernie that she did not notice the rest of the congregation had sat down. Mr. Dorward must have seen her, for he had thrown off the heavy vestment he was wearing and was advancing apparently to say how d’ye do. No, he seemed to think better of it, and had turned aside to read from a large book, but what he read neither Sylvia nor the congregation had any idea. She decided that all this standing up and kneeling and sitting down again was too confusing for a novice, and during the rest of the service she remained seated, which was at once the most comfortable and the least conspicuous attitude. Sylvia had intended to slip out before the service was over, as she did not want Miss Horne and Miss Hobart to exult over her imaginary conversion, but the finale came sooner than she expected in a fierce hymnal outburst during which Mr. Dorward hurriedly divested himself and reached the vestianel. Miss Horne had scarcely thumpedthe last beat on the choir-boy’s head in front of her, the echoes of the last amen had scarcely died away, before the female sexton, an old woman called Cassandra Batt, was turning out the oil-lamps and the little congregation had gathered ’round the vicar in the west door to hear Miss Horne’s estimate of its behavior. There was no chance for Sylvia to escape.
“Ernest,” said Miss Horne, “what did you sneeze for during the Magnificat? Father Dorward never got through with censing the altar, you bad boy.”
“The stoff got all up me nose,” said Ernie. “Oi couldn’t help meself.”
“Next time you want to sneeze,” said Miss Hobart, kindly, “press your top lip below the nose, and you’ll keep it back.”
“I got too much to do,” Ernie muttered, “and too much to think on.”
“Jane Frost,” said Miss Horne, quickly turning the direction of her attack, “you must practise all this week. Suppose Father Dorward gets a new organ? You wouldn’t like not to be allowed to play on it. Some of your notes to-night weren’t like a musical instrument at all. The Nunc Dimittis was more like water running out of a bath. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,’ are the words, not in pieces, which was what it sounded like the way you played it.”
Miss Jane Frost, a daughter of the woman who kept the Green Lanes shop, blushed as deeply as her anemia would let her, and promised she would do better next week.
“That’s right, Jane,” said Miss Hobart, whose part seemed to be the consolation of Miss Horne’s victims. “I dare say the pedal is a bit obstinate.”
“Oh, it’s turble obstinate,” said Cassandra, the sexton, who, having extinguished all the lamps, now elbowed her way through the clustered congregation, a lighted taper in her hand. “I jumped on un once or twice this morning to make um a bit easier like, but a groaned at me like a wicked old toad. It’s ile that a wants.”
The congregation, on which a good deal of grease was being scattered by Cassandra’s taper in her excitement, hastened to support her diagnosis.
“Oh yass, yass, ’tis ile that a wants.”
“I will bring a bottle of oil up during the week,” Miss Horne proclaimed. “Good night, everybody, and remember to be punctual next Sunday.”
The congregation murmured its good night, and Sylvia, to whom it probably owed such a speedy dismissal, was warmly greeted by Miss Horne.
“So glad you’ve come, Mrs. Iredale, though I wish you’d brought the lay rector. Lay rector, indeed! Sakes alive, what will they invent next?”
“Yes, we’re so glad you’ve come, dear,” Miss Hobart added. Mr. Dorward came up in his funny quick way. When they were all walking across the churchyard, he whispered to Sylvia, in his funny quick voice:
“Church fowls, church fowls, you know! Mustn’t discourage them. Pious fowls! Godly fowls! An example for the parish. Better attendance lately.”
Then he caught up the two ladies and helped them into the vehicle, wishing them a pleasant drive and promising a nearly full moon shortly, after Medworth, very much as if the moon was really made of cheese and would be eaten for supper by Miss Horne and Miss Hobart.
When Sylvia got back to The Old Farm she amused Philip so much with her account of the service that he forgot to be angry with her for doing what at first he maintained put him in a false position.
All that autumn and winter Miss Horne and Miss Hobart wrestled with Satan for the souls of the hamlet; incidentally they wrestled with him for Sylvia’s soul, but she scratched the event by ceasing to appear at all in church, and intercourse between them became less frequent; the friends of Miss Horne and Miss Hobart had to be all or nothing, and not the least divergence of belief or opinion, manners or policy, was tolerated by these two bigoted old ladies. The congregation, notwithstanding their efforts, remained stationary, much to Philip’s satisfaction.
“The truth is,” he said, “that the measure of their power is the pocket. Every scamp in the parish who thinks it will pay him to go to church is going to church. The others don’t go at all or walk over to Medworth.”
Her contemplation of the progress of religion in Green Lanes, which, however much she affected to laugh at it, could not help interesting Sylvia on account of her eccentric friend the vicar, was temporarily interrupted by a visit from Gertrude Iredale. Remembering what Miss Ashley had told her, Sylvia had insisted upon Philip’s asking his sister to stay, and he had obviously been touched by her suggestion. Gertrude perhaps had also taken some advice from Miss Ashley, for she was certainly less inclined to wonder what her brother would do about his clothes the year after next. She could not, however, altogether keep to herself her criticism of the housewifery at The Old Farm, a simple business in Sylvia’s eyes, which consisted of letting the cook do exactly as she liked, with what she decided were very satisfactory results.
“But it’s so extravagant,” Gertrude objected.
“Well, Philip doesn’t grumble. We can afford to pay a little extra every week to have the house comfortably run.”
“But the principle is so bad,” Gertrude insisted.
“Oh, principle,” said Sylvia in an airy way, which must have been galling to her sister-in-law. “I don’t believe in principles. Principles are only excuses for what we want to think or what we want to do.”
“Don’t you believe in abstract morality?” Gertrude asked, taking off her glasses and gazing with weak and earnest eyes at Sylvia.
“I don’t believe in anything abstract,” Sylvia replied.
“How strange!” the other murmured. “Goodness me! if I didn’t believe in abstract morality I don’t know where I should be—or what I should do.”
Sylvia regarded the potential sinner with amused curiosity.
“Do tell me what you might do,” she begged. “Would you live with a man without marrying him?”
“Please don’t be coarse,” said Gertrude. “I don’t like it.”
“I could put it much more coarsely,” Sylvia said, with a laugh. “Would you—”
“Sylvia!” Gertrude whistled through her teeth in an agony of apprehensive modesty. “I entreat you not to continue.”
“There you are,” said Sylvia. “That shows what rubbish all your scruples are. You’re shocked at what you thought I was going to say. Therefore you ought to be shocked at yourself. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask if you would marry a man without loving him.”
“If I were to marry,” Gertrude said, primly, “I should certainly want to love my husband.”
“Yes, but what do you understand by love? Do you mean by love the emotion that makes people go mad to possess—”
Gertrude rose from her chair. “Sylvia, the whole conversation is becoming extremely unpleasant. I must ask you either to stop or let me go out of the room.”
“You needn’t be afraid of any personal revelations,” Sylvia assured her. “I’ve never been in love that way. I only wanted to find out if you had been and ask you about it.”
“Never,” said Gertrude, decidedly. “I’ve certainly never been in love like that, and I hope I never shall.”
“I think you’re quite safe. And I’m beginning to think I’m quite safe, too,” Sylvia added. “However, if you won’t discuss abstract morality in an abstract way, you mustn’t expect me to do so, and the problem of housekeeping returns to the domain of practical morality, where principles don’t count.”
Sylvia decided after this conversation to accept Gertrude as a joke, and she ceased to be irritated by her any longer, though her sister-in-law stayed from Christmas till the end of February. In one way her presence was of positive utility, because Philip, who was very much on the lookout for criticism of his married life, was careful not to find fault with Sylvia while she remained at Green Lanes; it also acted as a stimulus to Sylvia herself, who used her like a grindstone on which to sharpen her wits. Another advantage from Gertrude’s visit was that Philip was able to finish his text, thanks to her industrious docketing and indexing and generally fussing about in his study. Therefore, when Sylvia proposed that the twins should spend their Easter holidays at The Old Farm, he had no objection to offer.
The prospect of the twins’ visit kept Sylvia at the peakof pleasurable expectation throughout the month of March, and when at last, on a budding morn in early April, she drove through sky-enchanted puddles to meet them, she sang for the first time in months the raggle-taggle gipsies, and reached the railway station fully half an hour before the train was due. Nobody got out but the twins; yet they laughed and talked so much, the three of them, in the first triumph of meeting, that several passengers thought the wayside station must be more important than it was, and asked anxiously if this was Galton.
Gladys and Enid had grown a good deal in six months, and now with their lengthened frocks and tied-back hair they looked perhaps older than sixteen. Their faces, however, had not grown longer with their frocks; they were as full of spirits as ever, and Sylvia found that while they still charmed her as of old with that quality of demanding to be loved for the sheer grace of their youth, they were now capable of giving her the intimate friendship she so greatly desired.
“You darlings,” she cried. “You’re like champagne-cup in two beautiful crystal glasses with rose-leaves floating about on top.”
The twins, who with all that zest in their own beauty which is the prerogative of a youth unhampered by parental jealousy, frankly loved to be admired; Sylvia’s admiration never made them self-conscious, because it seemed a natural expression of affection. Their attitude toward Philip was entirely free from any conventional respect; as Sylvia’s husband he was candidate for all the love they had for her, but when they found that Philip treated them as Sylvia’s toys they withheld the honor of election and began to criticize him. When he seemed shocked at their criticism they began to tease him, explaining to Sylvia that he had obviously never been teased in his life. Philip, for his part, found them precocious and vain, which annoyed Sylvia and led to her seeking diversions and entertainment for the twins’ holidays outside The Old Farm. As a matter of fact, she had no need to search far, because they both took a great fancy to Mr. Dorward, who turned out to have an altogether unusual gift for drawing nonsensical pictures, which were almostas funny as his own behavior, that behavior which irritated so many more people than it amused.
The twins teased Mr. Dorward a good deal about his love-affair with Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, and though this teasing may only have coincided with Mr. Dorward’s previous conviction that the two ladies were managing him and his parish rather too much for his dignity and certainly too much for his independence, there was no doubt that the quarrel between them was prepared during the time that Gladys and Enid were staying at Green Lanes; indeed, Sylvia thought she could name the actual afternoon.
Sylvia’s intercourse with Miss Horne and Miss Hobart was still friendly enough to necessitate an early visit to Sunny Bank to present the twins. The two ladies were very fond of what they called “young people,” and at first they were enraptured by Gladys and Enid, particularly when they played some absurd school-girl’s trick upon Major Kettlewell. Sylvia, too, had by her tales of the island of Sirene inspired them with a longing to go there; they liked nothing better than to make her describe the various houses and villas that were for sale or to let, in every one of which in turn Miss Horne and Miss Hobart saw themselves installed.
On the particular afternoon from which Sylvia dated the preparation of the quarrel, they were all at tea with Mr. Dorward in his cottage. The conversation came round to Sirene, and Sylvia told how she had always thought that the vicar resembled a Roman Emperor. Was it Nero? He was perhaps flattered by the comparison, notwithstanding the ladies’ loud exclamations of dissent, and was anxious to test the likeness from a volume of engraved heads which he produced. With Gladys sitting on one arm of his chair and Enid on the other, the pages were turned over slowly to allow time for a careful examination of each head, which involved a good deal of attention to Mr. Dorward’s own. In the end Nero was ruled out and a more obscure Emperor was hailed as his prototype, after which the twins rushed out into the garden and gathered strands of ivy to encircle his imperial brow; Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, who had taken no part in the discussion,left immediately after the coronation, and though it was a perfectly fine evening, they announced, as they got into their vehicle, that it looked very much like rain.
Next Sunday the ladies came to church as usual, but Mr. Dorward kept them waiting half an hour for lunch while he showed the twins his ornaments and vestments, which they looked at solemnly as a penance for having spent most of the service with their handkerchiefs in their mouths. What Miss Horne and Miss Hobart said at lunch Sylvia never found out, but they drove away before Sunday-school and never came back to Green Lanes, either on that Sunday or on any Sunday afterward.
All that Mr. Dorward would say about the incident was:
“Church fowls! Chaste fowls! Chaste and holy, but tiresome. The vicar mustn’t be managed. Doesn’t like it. Gets frightened. Felt remote at lunch. That was all. Would keep on talking. Got bored and more remote. Vicar got so remote that he had to finish his lunch under the table.”
“Oh no, you didn’t really?” cried the twins, in an ecstasy of pleasure. “You didn’t really get under the table, Mr. Dorward?”
“Of course, of course, of course. Vicar always speaks the truth. Delicious lunch.”
Sylvia had to tell Philip about this absurd incident, but he would only say that the man was evidently a buffoon in private as well as in public.
“But, Philip, don’t you think it’s a glorious picture? We laughed till we were tired.”
“Gladys and Enid laugh very easily,” he answered. “Personally I see nothing funny in a man, especially a clergyman, behaving like a clown.”
“Oh, Philip, you’re impossible!” Sylvia cried.
“Thanks,” he said, dryly. “I’ve noticed that ever since the arrival of our young guests you’ve found more to complain of in my personality even than formerly.”
“Young guests!” Sylvia echoed, scornfully. “Who would think, to hear you talk now, that you married a child? Really you’re incomprehensible.”
“Impossible! Incomprehensible! In fact thoroughly negative,” Philip said.
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders and left him.
The twins went back to school at the beginning of May, and Sylvia, who missed them very much, had to fall back on Mr. Dorward to remind her of their jolly company. Their intercourse, which the twins had established upon a certain plane, continued now upon the same plane. Life had to be regarded as Alice saw it in Wonderland or through the looking-glass. Sylvia remembered with irony that it was Philip who first introduced her to those two books; she decided he had only liked them because it was correct to like them. Mr. Dorward, however, actually was somebody in that fantastic world, not like anybody Alice met there, but another inhabitant whom she just happened to miss.
To whom else but Mr. Dorward could have occurred that ludicrous adventure when he was staying with a brother priest in a remote part of Devonshire?
“I always heard he was a little odd. However, we had dinner together in the kitchen. He only dined in the drawing-room on Thursdays.”
“When did he dine in the dining-room?” Sylvia asked.
“Never. There wasn’t a dining-room. There were a lot of rooms that were going to be the dining-room, but it was never decided which. And that cast a gloom over the whole house. My host behaved in the most evangelical way at dinner and only once threw the salad at the cook. After dinner we sat comfortably before the kitchen fire and discussed the Mozarabic rite and why yellow was no longer a liturgical color for confessors. At half past eleven my host suggested it was time to go to bed. He showed me up-stairs to a very nice bedroom and said good night, advising me to lock the door. I locked the door, undressed, said my prayers, and got into bed. I was just dozing off when I heard a loud tap at the door. I felt rather frightened. Rather frightened I felt. But I went to the door and opened it. Outside in the passage was my host in his nightgown with a candlestick.
“‘Past twelve o’clock,’ he shouted. ‘Time to change beds!’ and before I knew where I was he had rushed past me and shut me out into the passage.”
“Did you change beds?”
“There wasn’t another bed in the house. I had to sleep in one of the rooms that might one day be a dining-room, and the next morning a rural dean arrived, which drove me away.”
Gradually from underneath what Philip called “a mass of affectation,” but what Sylvia divined as an armor assumed against the unsympathetic majority by a shy, sensitive, and lovable spirit, there emerged for her the reality of Mr. Dorward. She began to comprehend his faith, which was as simple as a little child’s; she began to realize also that he was impelled to guard what he held to be most holy against the jeers of unbelievers by diverting toward his own eccentricity the world’s mockery. He was a man of the deepest humility who considered himself incapable of proselytizing. Sylvia used to put before him sometimes the point of view of the outside world and try to show how he could avoid criticism and gain adherents. He used always to reply that if God had intended him to be a missionary he would not have been placed in this lowly parish, that here he was unable to do much harm, and that any who found faith in his church must find it through the grace of God, since it was impossible to suppose they would ever find it through his own ministrations. He insisted that people who stayed away from church because he read the service badly or burned too many candles or wore vestments were only ostentatious worshipers who looked upon the church as wax-works must regard Madame Tussaud’s. He explained that he had been driven to discourage the work of Miss Horne and Miss Hobart because he had detected in himself a tendency toward spiritual pride in the growth of a congregation that did not belong either to him or to God; if he had tolerated Miss Horne’s methods for a time it was because he feared to oppose the Divine intention. However, as soon as he found that he was thinking complacently of a congregation of twenty-four, nearly every one of which was a pensioner of Miss Horne, he realized that they were instruments of the devil, particularly when at lunch they began to suggest....
“What?” Sylvia asked, when he paused.
“The only thing to do was to finish my lunch under thetable,” he snapped; nor would he be persuaded to discuss the quarrel further.
Sylvia, who felt that the poor ladies had, after all, been treated in rather a cavalier fashion and was reproaching herself for having deserted them, went down to Oaktown shortly after this to call at Sunny Bank. They received her with freezing coldness, particularly Miss Hobart, whose eyes under lowering eyelids were sullen with hate. She said much less than Miss Horne, who walked in and out of the shivery furniture, fanning herself in her agitation and declaiming against Mr. Dorward at the top of her voice.
“And your little friends?” Miss Hobart put in with a smile that was not a smile. “We thought them just a little badly brought up.”
“You liked them very much at first,” Sylvia said.
“Yes, one often likes people at first.”
And as Sylvia looked at her she realized that Miss Hobart was not nearly so old as she had thought her, perhaps not yet fifty. Still, at fifty one had no right to be jealous.
“In fact,” said Sylvia, brutally, “you liked them very much till you thought Mr. Dorward liked them too.”
Miss Hobart’s eyelids almost closed over her eyes and her thin lips disappeared. Miss Horne stopped in her restless parade and, pointing with her fan to the door, bade Sylvia be gone and never come to Sunny Bank again.
“The old witch,” thought Sylvia, when she was toiling up the hill to Medworth in the midsummer heat. “I believe he’s right and that she is the devil.”
She did not tell Philip about her quarrel, because she knew that he would have reminded her one by one of every occasion he had taken to warn Sylvia against being friendly with any inhabitant of Tintown. A week or two later, Philip announced with an air of satisfaction that a van of Treacherites had arrived in Newton Candover and might be expected at Green Lanes next Sunday.
Sylvia asked what on earth Treacherites were, and he explained that they were the followers of a certain Mr. John Treacher, who regarded himself as chosen by God to purify the Church of England of popish abuses.
“A dreadful little cad, I believe,” he added. “But it will be fun to see what they make of Dorward. It’s a pity the old ladies have been kept away by the heat, or we might have a free fight.”
Sylvia warned Mr. Dorward of the Treacherites’ advent, and he seemed rather worried by the news; she had a notion he was afraid of them, which made her impatient, as she frankly told him.
“Not many of us. Not many of us,” said Mr. Dorward. “Hope they won’t try to break up the church.”
The Treacherites arrived on Saturday evening and addressed a meeting by The Old Farm, which fetched Philip out into the road with threats of having them put in jail for creating a disturbance.
“If you want to annoy people, go to church to-morrow and annoy the vicar,” he said, grimly.
Sylvia, who had heard Philip’s last remark, turned on him in a rage: “What a mean and cowardly thing to say when you know Mr. Dorward can’t defend himself as you can. Let them come to church to-morrow and annoy the vicar. You see what they’ll get.”
“Come, come, Sylvia,” Philip said, with an attempt at pacification and evidently ashamed of himself. “Let these Christians fight it out among themselves. It’s nothing to do with us, as long as they don’t....”
“Thank you, it’s everything to do with me,” she said. He looked at her in surprise.
Next morning Sylvia took up her position in the front of the church and threatened with her eye the larger congregation that had gathered in the hope of a row as fiercely as Miss Horne and Miss Hobart might have done. The Treacherites were two young men with pimply faces who swaggered into church and talked to one another loudly before the service began, commenting upon the ornaments with cockney facetiousness. Cassandra Batt came over to Sylvia and whispered hoarsely in her ear that she was afraid there would be trouble, because some of the village lads had looked in for a bit of fun. The service was carried through with constant interruptions, and Sylvia felt her heart beating faster and faster with suppressed rage. When it was over, the congregation dispersedinto the churchyard, where the yokels hung about waiting for the vicar to come out. As he appeared in the west door a loud booing was set up, and one of the Treacherites shouted:
“Follow me, loyal members of the Protestant Established Church, and destroy the idols of the Pope.” Whereupon the iconoclast tried to push past Mr. Dorward, who was fumbling in his vague way with the lock of the door. He turned white with rage and, seizing the Treacherite by the scruff of his neck, he flung him head over heels across two mounds. At this the yokels began to boo more vehemently, but Mr. Dorward managed to shut the door and lock it, after which he walked across to the discomfited Treacherite and, holding out his hand, apologized for his violence. The yokels, who mistook generosity for weakness, began to throw stones at the vicar, one of which cut his face. Sylvia, who had been standing motionless in a trance of fury, was roused by the blood to action. With a bound she sprang at the first Treacherite and pushed him into a half-dug grave; then turning swiftly, she advanced against his companion with upraised stick.
The youth just had time to gasp a notification to the surrounding witnesses that Sylvia assaulted him first, before he ran; but the yokels, seeing that the squire’s wife was on the side of the parson, and fearing for the renewal of their leases and the repairs to their cottages, turned round upon the Treacherites and dragged them off toward the village pond.
“Come on, Cassandra,” Sylvia cried. “Let’s go and break up the van.”
Cassandra seized her pickax and followed Sylvia, who with hair streaming over her shoulders and elation in her aspect charged past The Old Farm just when Philip was coming out of the gate.
“Come on, Philip!” she cried. “Come on and help me break up their damned van.”
By this time the attack had brought most of the village out of doors. Dogs were barking; geese and ducks were flapping in all directions; Sylvia kept turning round to urge the sexton, whose progress was hampered by a petticoat’s slipping down, not to bother about her clothes, butto come on. A grandnephew of the old woman picked up the crimson garment and, as he pursued his grandaunt to restore it to her, waved it in the air like a standard. The yokels, who saw the squire watching from his gate, assumed his complete approval of what was passing (as a matter of fact he was petrified with dismay), and paid no attention to the vicar’s efforts to rescue the Treacherites from their doom in the fast-nearing pond. The van of the iconoclasts was named Ridley: “By God’s grace we have to-day lit such a candle as will never be put out” was printed on one side. On the other was inscribed, “John Treacher’s Poor Preachers. Supported by Voluntary Contributions.” By the time Sylvia, Cassandra, and the rest had finished with the van it was neither legible without nor habitable within.
Naturally there was a violent quarrel between Sylvia and Philip over her behavior, a quarrel that was not mended by her being summoned later on by the outraged Treacherites, together with Mr. Dorward and several yokels.
“You’ve made a fool of me from one end of the county to the other,” Philip told her. “Understand once and for all that I don’t intend to put up with this sort of thing.”
“It was your fault,” she replied. “You began it by egging on these brutes to attack Mr. Dorward. You could easily have averted any trouble if you’d wanted to. It serves you jolly well right.”
“There’s no excuse for your conduct,” Philip insisted. “A stranger passing through the village would have thought a lunatic asylum had broken loose.”
“Oh, well, it’s a jolly good thing to break loose sometimes—even for lunatics,” Sylvia retorted. “If you could break loose yourself sometimes you’d be much easier to live with.”
“The next time you feel repressed,” he said, “all I ask is that you’ll choose a place where we’re not quite so well known in which to give vent to your feelings.”
The argument went on endlessly, for neither Sylvia nor Philip would yield an inch; it became, indeed, one of the eternal disputes that reassert themselves at the least excuse. If Philip’s egg were not cooked long enough, the causewould finally be referred back to that Sunday morning; if Sylvia were late for lunch, her unpunctuality would ultimately be dated from the arrival of the Treacherites.
Luckily the vicar, with whom the events of that Sunday had grown into a comic myth that was continually being added to, was able to give Sylvia relief from Philip’s exaggerated disapproval. Moreover, the Treacherites had done him a service by advertising his church and bringing a certain number of strangers there every Sunday out of curiosity; these pilgrims inflated the natives of Green Lanes with a sense of their own importance, and they now filled the church, taking pride and pleasure in the ownership of an attraction and boasting to the natives of the villages round about the size of the offertory. Mr. Dorward’s popery and ritualism were admired now as commercial smartness, and if he had chosen to ride into church on Palm Sunday or any other Sunday on a donkey (a legendary ceremony invariably attributed to High Church vicars), there was not a man, woman, or child in the parish of Green Lanes that would not have given a prod of encouragement to the sacred animal.
One hot September afternoon Sylvia was walking back from Medworth when she was overtaken by Mr. Pluepott in his cart. They stopped to exchange the usual country greetings, at which by now Sylvia was an adept. When presently Mr. Pluepott invited her to take advantage of a lift home she climbed up beside him. For a while they jogged along in silence; suddenly Mr. Pluepott delivered himself of what was evidently much upon his mind:
“Mrs. Iredale,” he began, “you and me has known each other the best part of two years, and your coming and having a cup of tea with Mrs. Pluepott once or twice and Mrs. Pluepott having a big opinion of you makes me so bold.”
He paused and reined in his pony to a walk that would suit the gravity of his communication.
“I’d like to give you a bit of a warning as from a friend and, with all due respect, an admirer. Being a married man myself and you a young lady, you won’t go for to mistake my meaning when I says to you right out that women is worse than the devil. Miss Horne! As I jokinglysaid to Mrs. Pluepott, though, being a sacred subject, she wouldn’t laugh, ‘Miss Horne!’ I said. ‘Miss Horns! That’s what she ought to be called.’ Mrs. Iredale,” he went on, pulling up the pony to a dead, stop and turning round with a very serious countenance to Sylvia—“Mrs. Iredale, you’ve got a wicked, bad enemy in that old woman.”
“I know,” she agreed. “We quarreled over something.”
“If you quarreled, and whether it was your fault or whether it was hers, isn’t nothing to do with me, but the lies she’s spreading around about you and the Reverend Dorward beat the band. I’m not speaking gossip. I’m not going by hearsay. I’ve heard her myself, and Miss Hobart’s as bad, if not worse. There, now I’ve told you and I hope you’ll pardon the liberty, but I couldn’t help it.”
With which Mr. Pluepott whipped up his pony to a frantic gallop, and very soon they reached the outskirts of Green Lanes, where Sylvia got down.
“Thanks,” she said, offering her hand. “I don’t think I need bother about Miss Horne, but it was very kind of you to tell me. Thanks very much,” and with a wave of her stick Sylvia walked pensively along into the village. As she passed Mr. Dorward’s cottage she rattled her stick on his gate till he looked out from a window in the thatch, like a bird disturbed on its nest.
“Hullo, old owl!” Sylvia cried. “Come down a minute. I want to say something to you.”
The vicar presently came blinking out into the sunlight of the garden.
“Look here,” she said, “do you know that those two old villains in Oaktown are spreading it about that you and I are having a love-affair? Haven’t you got a prescription for that sort of thing in your church business? Can’t you curse them with bell, book, and candle, or something? I’ll supply the bell, if you’ll supply the rest of the paraphernalia.”
Dorward shook his head. “Can’t be done. Cursing is the prerogative of bishops. Not on the best terms with my bishop, I’m afraid. Last time he sent for me I had tospend the night and I left a rosary under my pillow. He was much pained, my spies at the Palace tell me.”
“Well, ifyoudon’t mind, I don’t mind,” she said. “All right. So long.”
Three days later, an anonymous post-card was sent to Sylvia, a vulgar Temptation of St. Anthony; and a week afterward Philip suddenly flung a letter down before her which he told her to read. It was an ill-spelled ungrammatical screed, which purported to warn Philip of his wife’s behavior, enumerated the hours she had spent alone with Dorward either in his cottage or in the church, and wound up with the old proverb of there being none so blind as those who won’t see. Sylvia blushed while she read it, not for what it said about herself, but for the vile impulse that launched this smudged and scrabbled impurity.
“That’s a jolly thing to get at breakfast,” Philip said.
“Beastly,” she agreed. “And your showing it to me puts you on a level with the sender.”
“I thought it would be a good lesson for you,” he said.
“A lesson?” she repeated.
“Yes, a lesson that one can’t behave exactly as one likes, particularly in the country among a lot of uneducated peasants.”
“But I don’t understand,” Sylvia went on. “Did you show me this filthy piece of paper with the idea of asking me to change my manner of life?”
“I showed it to you in order to impress upon you that people talk, and that you owe it to me to keep their tongues quiet.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Something perfectly simple,” Philip said. “I want you to give up visiting Dorward in his cottage and, as you have no religious inclinations, I should like you to avoid his church.”
“And that’s why you showed me this anonymous letter?”
He nodded.
“In fact you’re going to give it your serious attention?” she continued.
“Not at all,” he contradicted. “For a long time I’ve objected to your friendship with Dorward, but, knowingyou were too headstrong to listen to my advice, I said nothing. This letter makes it impossible to keep silent any longer about my wishes.”
“But you don’t really believe that Dorward and I are having an affair?” she gasped.
Philip made an impatient gesture.
“What a foolish question! Do you suppose that if I had for one moment thought such a thing I shouldn’t have spoken before? No, no, my dear, it’s all very unpleasant, but you must see that as soon as I am made aware, however crude the method of bringing it to my knowledge, that people are talking about you and my vicar, I have no alternative but to forbid you to do anything that will make these tongues go on wagging.”
“To forbid me?” she repeated.
Philip bowed ironically, Sylvia thought; the gesture, infinitely slight and unimportant as it was, cut the last knot.
“I shall have to tell Mr. Dorward about this letter and explain to him,” she said.
Philip hesitated for a moment. “Yes, I think that would be the best thing to do,” he agreed.
Sylvia regarded him curiously.
“You don’t mind his knowing that you showed it to me?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said Philip.
She laughed, and he took alarm at the tone.
“I thought you were going to be sensible,” he began, but she cut him short.
“Oh, I am, my dear man. Don’t worry.”
Now that the unpleasant scene was over, he seemed anxious for her sympathy.
“I’m sorry this miserable business has occurred, but you understand, don’t you, that it’s been just as bad for me as for you?”
“Do you want me to apologize?” Sylvia demanded, in her brutal way.
“No, of course not. Only I thought perhaps you might have shown a little more appreciation of my feelings.”
“Ah, Philip, if you want that, you’ll have to let me really go wrong with Dorward.”
“Personally I consider that last remark of yours in very bad taste; but I know we have different standards of humor.”
Sylvia found Dorward in the church, engaged in an argument with Cassandra about the arrangement of the chrysanthemums for Michaelmas.
“I will not have them like this,” he was saying.
“But we always putts them fan-shaped like that.”
“Take them away,” he shouted, and, since Cassandra still hesitated, he flung the flowers all over the church.
The short conversation that followed always remained associated in Sylvia’s mind with Cassandra’s grunts and her large base elevated above the pews, while she browsed hither and thither, bending over to pick up the scattered chrysanthemums.
“Mr. Dorward, I want to ask you something very serious.”
He looked at her sharply, almost suspiciously.
“Does it make you very much happier to have faith?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he said, brushing petals from his cassock.
“But would it make me?”
“I expect so—I expect so,” he said, still brushing and trying with that shy curtness to avoid the contact of reality.
“Well, how can I get faith?”
“You must pray, dear lady, you must pray.”
“You’ll have to pray for me,” Sylvia said.
“Always do. Always pray for you. Never less than three prayers every day. Mass once a week.”
Sylvia felt a lump in her throat; it seemed to her that this friend, accounted mad by the world, had paid her the tenderest and most exquisite courtesy she had ever known.
“Come along now, Cassandra,” cried the vicar, clapping his hands impatiently to cover his embarrassment. “Where are the flowers? Where are the flowers, you miserable old woman?”
Cassandra came up to him, breathing heavily with exertion. “You know, Mr. Dorward, you’re enough to try the patience of an angel on a tomb; you are indeed.”
Sylvia left them arguing all over again about the chrysanthemums.That afternoon she went away from Green Lanes to London.
Three months later, she obtained an engagement in a musical comedy company on tour and sent back to Philip the last shred of clothing that she had had through him, with a letter and ten pounds in bank-notes:
Youmustdivorce me now. I’ve not been able to earn enough to pay you back more than this for your bad bargain. I don’t think I’ve given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for me than you did, if that’s any consolation.SYLVIASCARLETT.
Youmustdivorce me now. I’ve not been able to earn enough to pay you back more than this for your bad bargain. I don’t think I’ve given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for me than you did, if that’s any consolation.
SYLVIASCARLETT.
SYLVIA stood before the looking-glass in the Birmingham lodgings and made a speech to herself:
“Humph! You look older, my dear. You look more than nineteen and a half. You’re rather glad, though, aren’t you, to have finished with the last three months? You feel degraded, don’t you? What’s that you say? You don’t feel degraded any more by what you’ve done now than by what you did when you were married? You consider the net result of the last three months has simply been to prove what you’d suspected for a long time—the wrong you did yourself in marrying Philip Iredale? Wait a minute; don’t go so fast; there’s something wrong with your moral sense. You know perfectly well your contention is impossible; or do you accuse every woman who marries to have a position and a home of being a prostitute? Ah, but you didn’t marry Philip for either of those reasons, you say? Yes, you did—you married him to make something like Arbour End.”
Tears welled up in Sylvia’s eyes. She thought she had driven Arbour End from her mind forever.
“Come, come, we don’t want any tears. What are you crying for? You knew when you left Green Lanes that everything which had come into your life through Philip Iredale must be given up. You were rather proud of your ruthlessness. Don’t spoil it now. That’s right, no more tears. You’re feeling a bitabrutie, aren’t you? My advice to you is to obliterate the last three months from your imagination. I quite understand that you suffered a good deal, but novices must be prepared to suffer. In my opinion you can congratulate yourself on having come through so easily. Here you are, a jolly littlecabetinewith a complete contempt for men. You’re not yet twenty; you’re not likely to fall in love, for you must admit thatafter those three months the word sounds more than usually idiotic. From what I’ve seen of you I should say that for the future you’ll be very well able to look after yourself; you might even become a famous actress. Ah, that makes you smile, eh?”
Sylvia dabbed her face with the powder-puff and went down-stairs to dinner. Her two companions had not yet begun; for this was the first meal at which they would all sit down together, and an atmosphere of politeness hung over life at present. Lily Haden and Dorothy Lonsdale had joined the “Miss Elsie of Chelsea” company at the same time as Sylvia, and were making their first appearance on any stage, having known each other in the dullness of West Kensington. For a fortnight they had clung together, but, having been given an address for rooms in Birmingham that required a third person’s contribution, they had invited Sylvia to join them. Lily was a tall, slim girl with very fair, golden hair, who had an air of romantic mystery that was due to indolence of mind and body. Dorothy also was fair, with a mass of light-brown hair, a perfect complexion, profile, and figure, and, what finally gave her a really distinguished beauty in such a setting, brown eyes instead of blue. Lily’s languorous grace of manner and body was so remarkable that in a room it was difficult to choose between her and Dorothy, but behind the footlights there was no comparison; there Dorothy had everybody’s glances, and Lily’s less definite features went for nothing.
Each girl was prompt to take Sylvia into her confidence about the other. Thus from Lily she learned that Dorothy’s real name was Norah Caffyn; that she was the eldest of a very large family; that Lily had known her at school; that she had been engaged to a journalist who was disapproved of by her family; that she had offered to break with Wilfred Curlew, if she were allowed to go on the stage; and that she had taken the name of Lonsdale from the road where she lived, and Dorothy from the sister next to her.
“I suppose in the same way as she used to take her dolls?” Sylvia suggested.
Lily looked embarrassed. She was evidently not sure whether a joke was intended, and when Sylvia encouraged her to suppose it was, she laughed a little timidly, being rather doubtful if it were not a pun.
“Her sister was awfully annoyed about it, because she hasn’t got a second name. She’s the only one in the family who hasn’t.”
Lily also told Sylvia something about herself, how her mother had lately died and how she could not get on with her sister, who had married an actor and was called Doris. Her mother had been a reciter, and there had always been lots of theatrical people at their house, so it had been easy for her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal, who had the touring rights of all John Richards’s great Vanity Theater productions.
From Dorothy Sylvia learned that she had known Lily at school, but not for long, as Mrs. Haden never paid her daughters’ fees; that Mr. Haden had always been supposed to live in Burmah, but that people who knew Mrs. Haden declared he had never existed; and finally that Lily had been “awfully nice” to herself and helped her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal.
The association of Sylvia with the two girls begun at Birmingham was not interrupted until the end of the tour. Lily and Dorothy depended upon it, Lily because Sylvia saved her the trouble of thinking for herself, Dorothy because she found in Sylvia some one who could deflect all the difficulties of life on tour and leave her free to occupy herself with her own prosperity and her own comforts. Dorothy possessed a selfishness that almost attained to the dignity of ambition, though never quite, as her conceit would not allow her to state an object in her career, for fear of failure; her method was invariably to seize the best of any situation that came along, whether it was a bed, a chair, a potato, or a man; this method with ordinary good luck would insure success through life. Lily was too lazy to minister to Dorothy’s selfishness; moreover, she often managed in taking the nearest and easiest to rob Dorothy of the best.
Sylvia was perfectly aware of their respective characters, but she was always willing to give herself any amount of trouble to preserve beauty around her; Lily and Dorothywere not really more troublesome than two cats would have been; in fact, rather less, because at any rate they could carry themselves, if not their bags.
Life on tour went its course with the world divided into three categories—the members of the company, the public expressing its personality in different audiences, and for the actors saloon-bars and the drinks they were stood, for the actresses admirers and the presents they were worth. Sometimes when the saloon-bars and the admirers were alike unprofitable, the members of the company mixed among themselves whether in a walk round a new town or at tea in rooms where a landlady possessed hospitable virtues. Sylvia had a special gift for getting the best out of landladies, and the men of the company came more often to tea with herself and her friends than with the other ladies. They came, indeed, too often to please Dorothy, who disapproved of Lily’s easy-going acceptance of the sort of love that is made because at the moment there is nothing else to do. She spoke to Sylvia about this, who agreed with her, but thought that with Lily it was inevitable.
“But not with boys in the company,” Dorothy urged, disdainfully. “It makes us all so cheap. I don’t want to put on side, but, after all, we are a little different from the other girls.”
Sylvia found this belief universal in the chorus. She could not think of any girl who had not at one time or another taken her aside and claimed for herself, and by the politeness owed to present company for Sylvia, this “little difference.”
“Personally,” Sylvia said, “I think we’re all much the same. Some of us drop our aitches, others our p’s and q’s; some of us sing flat, the rest sing sharp; and we all look just alike when we’re waiting for the train on Sunday morning.”
Nevertheless, with all her prevision of a fate upon Lily’s conduct, Sylvia did speak to her about the way in which she tolerated the familiarity of the men in the company.
“I suppose you’re thinking of Tom,” Lily said.
“Tom, Dick, and Harry,” Sylvia put in.
“Well. I don’t like to seem stuck up,” Lily explained.“Tom’s always very nice about carrying my bag and getting me tea when we’re traveling.”
“If I promise to look after the bag,” Sylvia asked, “will you promise to discourage Tom?”
“But, my dear, why should you carry my bag when I can get Tom to do it?”
“It bores me to see you and him together,” Sylvia explained. “These boys in the company are all very well, but they aren’t really men at all.”
“I know,” Lily said, eagerly. “That’s what I feel. They don’t seem real to me. Of course, I shouldn’t let anybody make love to me seriously.”
“What do you call serious love-making?”
“Oh, Sylvia, how you do go on asking questions. You know perfectly well what I mean. You only ask questions to make me feel uncomfortable.”
“Just as I might disarrange the cushions of your chair?”
“I know quite well who’s been at you to worry me,” Lily went on. “I know it’s Dorothy. She’s always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn’t really mind Tom’s kissing me—she’s perfectly ready to make use of him herself—but she’s always thinking about other people and she’s so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I’m used to actors; she isn’t. I never bother about her. I don’t complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can’t she let me alone? Nobody ever lets me alone. It’s all I’ve ever asked all my life.”
The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension. Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular.
“Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I’ve often wonderedyou’ve kept your little family together for so long. I’ve been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I’m not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity.”
“Do you remember Victoria Deane?” Sylvia asked.
“Of course I do. She made a big hit and then got married and left the stage. A sweetly pretty little thing, she was. But, as I was saying, dear, in all my experience I never knew two fair girls get through a tour together without falling out, two girls naturally fair, that is, and you mark my words, Lily Haden and Dolly Lonsdale will have a row.”
Sylvia was anxious to avert this, because she would have found it hard to choose between their rival claims upon her. She was fonder of Lily, but she was very fond of Dorothy, and she believed that Dorothy might attain real success in her profession. It seemed more worth while to take trouble over Dorothy; yet something warned her that an expense of devotion in that direction would ultimately be, from a selfish point of view, wasted. Dorothy would never consider affection where advancement was concerned; yet was it not just this quality in her that she admired? There would certainly be an unusual exhilaration in standing behind Dorothy and helping her to rise and rise, whereas with Lily the best that could be expected was to prevent her falling infinitely low.
“How I’ve changed since I left Philip,” she said to herself. “I seem to have lost myself somehow and to have transferred all my interest in life to other people. I suppose it won’t last. God forbid I should become a problem to myself like a woman in a damned novel. Down with introspection, though, Heaven knows, observation in ‘Miss Elsie of Chelsea’ is not a profitable pastime.”
Sylvia bought an eye-glass next day, and though all agreed with one another in private that it was an affectation, everybody assured her that she was a girl who could wear an eye-glass with advantage. Lily thought the cord must be rather a bore.
“It’s symbolic,” Sylvia declared to the dressing-room.
“I think I’ll have my eyes looked at in Sheffield,” said Onzie. “There’s a doctor there who’s very good to pros.I often feel my eyes are getting a bit funny. It may be the same as Sylvia’s got.”
The tour was coming to an end; the last three nights would be played at Oxford, to which everybody looked forward. All the girls who had been to Oxford before told wonderful tales of the pleasures that might be anticipated. Even some of the men were heard to speculate if such or such a friend were still there, which annoyed those who could not even boast of having had a friend there two years ago. The jealous ones revenged themselves by criticizing the theatrical manners of the undergraduate, especially upon the last night of a musical comedy. One heard a great deal of talk, they said, about a college career, but personally and without offense to anybody present who had friends at college, they considered that a college career in nine cases out of ten meant rowdiness and a habit of thinking oneself better than other people.
Sylvia, Lily, and Dorothy had rooms in Eden Square, which was the recognized domain of theatrical companies playing in Oxford. Numerous invitations to lunch and tea were received, and Sylvia, who had formed a preconceived idea of Oxford based upon Philip, was astonished how little the undergraduates she met resembled him. Dorothy managed with her usual instinct for the best to secure as an admirer Lord Clarehaven, or, as the other girls preferred to call him with a nicer formality, the Earl of Clarehaven. He invited her with a friend to lunch at Christ Church on the last day. Dorothy naturally chose Sylvia, and, as Lily was already engaged elsewhere, Sylvia accepted. Later in the afternoon Dorothy proposed that the young men should come back and have tea in Eden Square, and Sylvia divined Dorothy’s intention of proving to these young men that the actress in her own home would be as capable of maintaining propriety as she had been at lunch.
“We’ll buy the cakes on the way,” said Dorothy, which was another example of her infallible instinct for the best and the most economical.
Loaded with éclairs, meringues, and chocolates, Dorothy, Sylvia, and their four guests reached Eden Square.
“You’ll have to excuse the general untidiness,” Dorothysaid, with an affected little laugh, flinging open the door of the sitting-room. She would probably have chosen another word for the picture of Lily sitting on Tom’s knee in the worn leather-backed arm-chair if she had entered first: unfortunately, Lord Clarehaven was accorded that privilege, and the damage was done. Sylvia quickly introduced everybody, and nobody could have complained of the way in which the undergraduates sailed over an awkward situation, nor could much have been urged against Tom, for he left immediately. As for Lily, she was a great success with the young men and seemed quite undisturbed by the turn of events.
As soon as the three girls were alone together, Dorothy broke out:
“I hope you don’t think I’ll ever live with you again after that disgusting exhibition. I suppose you think just because you gave me an introduction that you can do what you like. I don’t know what Sylvia thinks of you, but I can tell you what I think. You make me feel absolutely sick. That beastly chorus-boy! The idea of letting anybody like that even look at you. Thank Heaven, the tour’s over. I’m going down to the theater. I can’t stay in this room. It makes me blush to think of it. I’ll take jolly good care who I live with in future.”
Then suddenly, to Sylvia’s immense astonishment, Dorothy slapped Lily’s face. What torments of mortification must be raging in that small soul to provoke such an unlady-like outburst!
“I should hit her back if I were you, my lass,” Sylvia advised, putting up her eye-glass for the fray; but Lily began to cry and Dorothy flounced out of the room.
Sylvia bent over her in consolation, though her sense of justice made her partly excuse Dorothy’s rage.
“How did I know she would bring her beastly men back to tea? She only did it to brag about having a lord to our digs. After all, they’re just as much mine as hers. I was sorry for Tom. He doesn’t know anybody in Oxford, and he felt out of it with all the other boys going out. He asked me if I was going to turn him down because I’d got such fine friends. I was sorry for him, Sylvia, and so I asked him to tea. I don’t see why Dorothy should turnround and say nasty things to me. I’ve always been decent to her. Oh, Sylvia, you don’t know how lonely I feel sometimes.”
This appeal was too much for Sylvia, who clasped Lily to her and let her sob forth her griefs upon her shoulder.
“Sylvia, I’ve got nobody. I hate my sister Doris. Mother’s dead. Everybody ran her down, but she had a terrible life. Father used to take drugs, and then he stole and was put in prison. People used to say mother wasn’t married, but she was. Only the truth was so terrible, she could never explain. You don’t know how she worked. She brought up Doris and me entirely. She used to recite, and she used to be always hard up. She died of heart failure, and that comes from worry. Nobody understands me. I don’t know what will become of me.”
“My dear,” Sylvia said, “you know I’m your pal.”
“Oh, Sylvia, you’re a darling! I’d do anything for you.”
“Even carry your own bag at the station to-morrow?”
“No, don’t tease me,” Lily begged. “If you won’t tease me, I’ll do anything.”
That evening Mr. Keal, with the mighty Mr. Richards himself, came up from London to see the show. The members of the chorus were much agitated. It could only mean that girls were to be chosen for the Vanity production in the autumn. Every one of them put on rather more make-up than usual, acted hard all the time she was on the stage, and tried to study Mr. Richards’s face from the wings.
“You and I are one of the ‘also rans,’” Sylvia told Lily. “The great man eyed me with positive dislike.”
In the end it was Dorothy Lonsdale who was engaged for the Vanity: she was so much elated that she was reconciled with Lily and told everybody in the dressing-room that she had met a cousin at Oxford, Arthur Lonsdale, Lord Cleveden’s son.
“Which side of the road are you related to him?” Sylvia asked. Dorothy blushed, but she pretended not to understand what Sylvia meant, and said quite calmly that it was on her mother’s side. She parted with Sylvia andLily very cordially at Paddington, but she did not invite either of them to come and see her at Lonsdale Road.
Sylvia and Lily stayed together at Mrs. Gowndry’s in Finborough Road, for it happened that the final negotiations for Sylvia’s divorce from Philip were being concluded and she took pleasure in addressing her communications from the house where she had been living when he first met her. Philip was very anxious to make her an allowance, but she declined it; her case was undefended. Lily and she managed to get an engagement in another touring company, which opened in August somewhere on the south coast. About this time Sylvia read in a paper that Jimmy Monkley had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for fraud, and by an odd coincidence in the same paper she read of the decree nisi made absolute that set Philip and herself free. Old associations seemed to be getting wound up. Unfortunately, the new ones were not promising; no duller collection of people had surely ever been gathered together than the company in which she was working at present. Not only was the company tiresome, but Sylvia and Lily failed to meet anywhere on the tour one amusing person. To be sure, Lily thought that Sylvia was too critical, and therefore so alarming that several “nice boys” were discouraged too early in their acquaintanceship for a final judgment to be passed upon them.
“The trouble is,” said Sylvia, “that at this rate we shall never make our fortunes. I stipulate that, if we adopt a gay life, it really will be a gay life. I don’t want to have soul-spasms and internal wrestles merely for the sake of being bored.”
Sylvia tried to produce Lily as a dancer; for a week or two they worked hard at imitations of the classical school, but very soon they both grew tired of it.
“The nearest we shall ever get to jingling our money at this game,” Sylvia said, “is jingling our landlady’s ornaments on the mantelpiece. Lily, I think we’re not meant for the stage. And yet, if I could only find my line, I believe.... I believe.... Oh, well, I can’t, and so there’s an end of it. But look here, winter’s coming on. We’ve got nothing to wear. We haven’t saved a penny.Ruin stares us in the face. Say something, Lily; do say something, or I shall scream.”
“I don’t think we ought to have eaten those plums at dinner. They weren’t really ripe,” Lily said.
“Well, anyhow, that solves the problem of the moment. Put your things on. You’d better come out and walk them off.”
They were playing in Eastbourne that week, where a sudden hot spell had prolonged the season farther into September than usual; a new company of entertainers known as “The Highwaymen” was attracting audiences almost as large as in the prime of summer. Sylvia and Lily paused to watch them from the tamarisks below the Marina.
Suddenly Sylvia gave an exclamation.
“I do believe that’s Claude Raglan who’s singing now. Do you remember, Lily, I told you about the Pink Pierrots? I’m sure it is.”
Presently the singer came round with the bag and a packet of his picture post-cards. Sylvia asked if he had a photograph of Claude Raglan. When he produced one she dug him in the ribs, and cried:
“Claudie, you consumptive ass, don’t you recognize me? Sylvia.”
He was delighted to see her again, and willingly accepted an invitation to supper after the show, if he might bring a friend with him.
“Jack Airdale—an awfully decent fellow. Quite a good voice, too, though I think from the point of view of the show it’s a mistake to have a high barytone when they’ve already got a tenor. However, he does a good deal of accompanying. In fact, he’s a much better accompanist than he is singer.”
“I suppose you’ve got more girls than ever in love with you, now you wear a mask?” said Sylvia.
Claude seemed doubtful whether to take this remark as a compliment to his voice or as an insult to his face. Finally he took it as a joke and laughed.
“Just the same, I see,” he said. “Always chaffing a fellow.”
Claude Raglan and Jack Airdale came to supper in duecourse. Sylvia liked Jack; he was a round-faced young man in the early twenties, with longish light hair that flopped all over his face when he became excited. Sylvia and he were good friends immediately and made a great deal of noise over supper, while Claude and Lily looked at each other.
“How’s the consumption, Claudie?” Sylvia asked.
Claude sighed with a soulful glance at Lily’s delicate form.
“Don’t imagine she’s sympathizing with you,” Sylvia cried. “She’s only thinking about plums.”
“He’s grown out of it,” Airdale said. “Look at the length of his neck.”
“I have to wear these high collars. My throat....” Claude began.
“Oh, shut up with your ailments,” Sylvia interrupted.
“Hear, hear,” Airdale shouted. “Down with ailments,” and he threw a cushion at Claude.
“I wish you wouldn’t behave like a clown,” said Claude, smoothing his ruffled hair and looking to see if Lily was joining in the laugh against him.
Presently the conversation turned upon the prospects of the two girls for next winter, about which Sylvia was very pessimistic.
“Why don’t we join together and run a street show—Pierrot, Pierrette, Harlequin, and Columbine?” Airdale suggested. “I’ll swear there’s money in it.”
“About enough to pay for our coffins,” said Claude. “Sing out of doors in the winter? My dear Jack, you’re mad.”
Sylvia thought the idea was splendid, and had sketched out Lily’s Columbine dress before Lily herself had realized that the conversation had taken a twist.
“Light-blue crêpe de Chine with bunches of cornflowers for Columbine. Pierrette in dark blue with bunches of forget-me-nots, Pierrot in light blue. Silver and dark-blue lozenges for Harlequin.”
“Paregoric lozenges would suit Claude better,” said Airdale. “O Pagliacci! Can’t you hear him? No, joking apart, I think it would be a great effort. We sha’n’t have to sing much outside. We shall get invited into people’s houses.”
“Shall we?” Claude muttered.
“And if the show goes,” Airdale went on, “we might vary our costumes. For instance, we might be Bacchanals in pink fleshings and vine leaves.”
“Vine leaves,” Claude ejaculated. “Vine Street more likely.”
“Don’t laugh, old boy, with that lung of yours,” said Airdale, earnestly.
In the end, before the company left Eastbourne, it was decided, notwithstanding Claude’s lugubrious prophecies, to launch the enterprise; when the tour broke up in December Sylvia had made dresses both for Lily and for herself as she had first planned them with an eye only for what became Lily. Claude’s hypochondria was appeased by letting him wear a big patchwork cloak over his harlequin’s dress in which white lozenges had been substituted for silver ones, owing to lack of money. They hired a small piano very much like the one that belonged to the Pink Pierrots, and on Christmas Eve they set out from Finborough Road, where Claude and Jack had rooms near Mrs. Gowndry’s. They came into collision with a party of carol-singers who seemed to resent their profane competition, and, much to Jack Airdale’s disappointment, they were not invited into a single house; the money taken after three hours of wandering music was one shilling and fivepence in coppers.
“Never mind,” said Jack. “We aren’t known yet. It’s a pity we didn’t start singing last Christmas Eve. We should have had more engagements than we should have known what to do with this year.”
“We must build up the show for next year,” Sylvia agreed, enthusiastically.
“I shall sing the ‘Lost Chord’ next year,” Claude answered. “They may let me in, if I worry them outside heaven’s gates, to hear that last Amen.”
Jack and Sylvia were justified in their optimism, for gradually the Carnival Quartet, as they called themselves, became known in South Kensington, and they began to get engagements to appear in other parts of London. Jack taught Sylvia to vamp well enough on the guitar to accompany herself in duets with him; Claude looked handsomein his harlequin’s dress, which prosperity had at last endowed with silver lozenges; Lily danced actively enough for the drawing-rooms in which they performed; Sylvia, inspired by the romantic exterior of herself and her companions, invented a mime to the music of Schumann’s “Carnival” which Jack Airdale played, or, as Claude said, maltreated.
The Quartet showed signs of increasing vitality with the approach of spring, and there was no need to think any more of touring in musical comedy, which was a relief to Sylvia. When summer came, they agreed to keep together and work the South Coast.
However, all these plans came suddenly to nothing, because one misty night early in March Harlequin and Columbine lost Pierrot and Pierrette on the way home from a party in Chelsea; a brief note from Harlequin to Pierrot, which he found when he got home, indicated that the loss should be considered permanent.