I’ve eaten rose leaves and I am no longer a golden ass.
I’ve eaten rose leaves and I am no longer a golden ass.
“No, damn his eyes!” said Sylvia, “I’m the ass now. And how odd that he should send meDon Quixote.”
At twilight Sylvia went to see Lily at Ararat House. She found her in a strange rococo room that opened on a garden bordered by the Regent’s Canal; here amid candles and mirrors she was sitting in conversation with her housekeeper. Each of them existed from every point of view and infinitely reduplicated in the mirrors, which was not favorable to toleration of the housekeeper’s figure, that was like an hour-glass. Sylvia waited coldly for her withdrawal before she acknowledged Lily’s greeting. At last the objectionable creature rose and, accompanied by a crowd of reflections, left the room.
“Don’t lecture me,” Lily begged. “I had the most awful time yesterday.”
“But Michael said he had not seen you.”
“Oh, not with Michael,” Lily exclaimed. “With Claude.”
“With Claude?” Sylvia echoed.
“Yes, he came to see me and left his hat in the hall and Michael took it away with him in his rage. It was the only top-hat he’d got, and he had an engagement for an ‘at home,’ and he couldn’t go out in the sun, and, oh dear, you never heard such a fuss, and when Mabel—”
“Mabel?”
“—Miss Harper, my housekeeper, offered to go out and buy him another, he was livid with fury. He asked if I thought he was made of money and could buy top-hats like matches. I’m glad you’ve come. Michael has broken off the engagement, and I expected you rather. A friend of his—rather a nice boy called Maurice Avery—is coming round this evening to arrange about selling everything. I shall have quite a lot of money. Let’s go away and be quiet after all this bother and fuss.”
“Look here,” Sylvia said. “Before we go any further I want to know one thing. Is Claude going to drop in and out of your life at critical moments for the rest of time?”
“Oh no! We’ve quarreled now. He’ll never forgive me over the hat. Besides, he puts some stuff on his hair now that I don’t like. Sylvia, do come and look at my frocks. I’ve got some really lovely frocks.”
Maurice Avery, to whom Sylvia took an instant dislike, came in presently. He seemed to attribute the ruin of his friend’s hopes entirely to a failure to take his advice:
“Of course this was the wrong house to start with. I advised him to take one at Hampstead, but he wouldn’t listen to me. The fact is Michael doesn’t understand women.”
“Do you?” Sylvia snapped.
Avery looked at her a moment, and said he understood them better than Michael.
“Of course nobody can ever really understand a woman,” he added, with an instinct of self-protection. “But I advised him not to leave Lily alone. I told him it wasn’t fair to her or to himself.”
“Did you give him any advice about disposing of the furniture?” Sylvia asked.
“Well, I’m arranging about that now.”
“Sorry,” said Sylvia. “I thought you were paving Michael’s past with your own good intentions.”
“You mustn’t take any notice of her,” Lily told Avery, who was looking rather mortified. “She’s rude to everybody.”
“Well, shall I tell you my scheme for clearing up here?” he asked.
“If it will bring us any nearer to business,” Sylvia answered, “we’ll manage to support the preliminary speech.”
A week or two later Avery handed Lily £270, which she immediately transferred to Sylvia’s keeping.
“I kept the Venetian mirror for myself,” Avery said. “You know the one with the jolly little cupids in pink and blue glass. I shall always think of you and Ararat House when I look at myself in it.”
“I suppose all your friends wear their hearts on your sleeve,” Sylvia said. “That must add a spice to vanity.”
Mrs. Gainsborough was very much upset at the prospect of the girls’ going away.
“That comes of having me picture painted. I felt it was unlucky when he was doing it. Oh, dearie me! whatever shall I do?”
“Come with us,” Sylvia suggested. “We’re going to France. Lock up your house, give the key to the copper on the beat, put on your gingham gown, and come with us, you old sea-elephant.”
“Come with you?” Mrs. Gainsborough gasped. “But there, why shouldn’t I?”
“No reason at all.”
“Why, then I will. I believe the captain would have liked me to get a bit of a blow.”
“Anything to declare?” the customs official asked at Boulogne.
“I declare I’m enjoying myself,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, looking round her and beaming at France.
WHEN she once more landed on French soil, Sylvia, actuated by a classic piety, desired to visit her mother’s grave. She would have preferred to go to Lille by herself, for she lacked the showman’s instinct; but her companions were so horrified at the notion of being left to themselves in Paris until she rejoined them, that in the end she had to take them with her.
The sight of the old house and the faces of some of the older women in thequartierconjured up the past so vividly for Sylvia that she could not bring herself to make any inquiries about the rest of her family. It seemed as if she must once more look at Lille from her mother’s point of view and maintain the sanctity of private life against the curiosity or criticism of neighbors. She did not wish to hear the details of her father’s misdoing or perhaps be condoled with over Valentine. The simplest procedure would have been to lay a wreath upon the grave and depart again. This she might have done if Mrs. Gainsborough’s genial inquisitiveness about her relatives had not roused in herself a wish to learn something about them. She decided to visit her eldest sister in Brussels, leaving it to chance if she still lived where Sylvia had visited her twelve years ago.
“Brussels,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Well, that sounds familiar, anyway. Though I suppose the sprout-gardens are all built over nowadays. Ah dear!”
The building over of her father’s nursery-garden and of many other green spots she had known in London always drew a tear from Mrs. Gainsborough, who was inclined to attribute most of human sorrow to the utilitarian schemes of builders.
“Yes, they found the Belgian hares ate up all the sprouts,” Sylvia said. “And talking of hair,” she went on, “what’s the matter with yours?”
“Ah, well, there! Now I meant to say nothing about it. But I’ve left me mahogany wash at home. There’s a calamity!”
“You’d better come out with me and buy another bottle,” Sylvia advised.
“You’ll never get one here,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “This is a wash, not a dye, you must remember. It doesn’t tint the hair; it just brings up the color and gives it a nice gloss.”
“If that’s all it does, I’ll lend you my shoe-polish. Go along, you wicked old fraud, and don’t talk to me about washes. I can see the white hairs coming out like stars.”
Sylvia found Elène in Brussels, and was amazed to see how much she resembled her mother nowadays. M. Durand, her husband, had prospered and he now owned a large confectioner’s shop in the heart of the city, above which Madame Durand had started a pension for economical tourists. Mrs. Gainsborough could not get over the fact that her hostess did not speak English; it struck her as unnatural that Sylvia should have a sister who could only speak French. The little Durands were a more difficult problem. She did not so much mind feeling awkward with grown-up people through having to sit dumb, but children stared at her so, if she said nothing; and if she talked, they stared at her still more; she kept feeling that she ought to stroke them or pat them, which might offend their mother. She found ultimately that they were best amused by her taking out two false teeth she had, one of which once was lost, because the eldest boy would play dice with them.
Elène gave Sylvia news of the rest of the family, though, since all the four married sisters were in different towns in France and she had seen none of them for ten years, it was not very fresh news. Valentine, in whose career Sylvia was most interested, was being very wellentretenueby amarseillaiswho had bought her an apartment that included a porcelain-tiled bath-room; she might be considered lucky, for the man with whom she had left Lille had been a rascal. It happened that her news of Valentine was fresh and authentic, because alilleoisewho lived in Bruxelles had recently been obliged to go to Marseilles over some legaldispute and, meeting Valentine, had been invited to see her apartment. It was a pity that she was not married, but her position was the next best thing to marriage. Of the Bassompierres Elène had heard nothing for years, but what would interest Sylvia were some family papers and photographs that Sylvia’s father had sent to her as the eldest daughter when their mother died, together with an old-fashioned photograph of their grandmother. From these papers it seemed that an Englishmilordand not Bassompierre had really been their grandfather. Sylvia being half English already, it might not interest her so much, but for herself to know she had English bloodl’avait beaucoup impressioné, so many English tourists came to her pension.
Sylvia looked at the daguerreotype of her grandmother, a glass faintly bloomed, the likeness of a ghost indeed. She then had loved an Englishman; her mother, too; herself.... Sylvia packed the daguerreotype out of sight and turned to look at a golden shawl of a material rather like crêpe de Chine, which had been used to wrap up their mother when she was a baby. Would Sylvia like it? It was no use to Elène, too old and frail and faded. Sylvia stayed in Brussels for a week and left with many promises to return soon. She was glad she had paid the visit; for it had given back to her the sense of continuity which in the shifting panorama of her life she had lost, so that she had come to regard herself as an unreal person, an exception in humanity, an emotional freak; this separation from the rest of the world had been irksome to Sylvia since she had discovered the possibility of her falling in love, because it was seeming the cause of her not being loved. Henceforth she would meet man otherwise than with defiance or accusation in her eyes; she, too, perhaps would meet a lover thus.
Sylvia folded up the golden shawl to put it at the bottom of her trunk; figuratively, she wrapped up in it her memories, tender, gay, sorrowful, vile all together.
“Soon be in Paris, shall we?” said Mrs. Gainsborough, when the train reached the eastern suburbs. “It makes one feel quite naughty, doesn’t it? The captain was always going to take me, but we never went, somehow.What’s that? There’s the Eiffel Tower? So it is, upon my word, and just what it looks like in pictures. Not a bit different. I hope it won’t fall down while we’re still in Paris. Nice set-out that would be. I’ve always been afraid of sky accidents since a friend of mine, a Mrs. Ewings, got stuck in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court with a man who started undressing himself. It was all right, as it happened, because he only wanted to wave his shirt to his wife, who was waiting for him down below, so as she shouldn’t get anxious, but it gave Mrs. Ewings a nasty turn. Two hours she was stuck with nothing in her bag but a box of little liver pills, which made her mouth water, she said, she was that hungry. Shethinksshe’d have eaten them if she’d have been alone; but the man, who was an undertaker from Wandsworth, told her a lot of interesting stories about corpses, and that kept her mind occupied till the wheel started going round again, and the Exhibition gave her soup and ten shillings compensation, which made a lot of people go up in it on the chance of being stuck.”
It was strange, Sylvia thought, that she should be as ignorant of Paris as Mrs. Gainsborough, but somehow the three of them would manage to enjoy themselves. Lily was more nearly vivacious than she had ever known her.
“Quite saucy,” Mrs. Gainsborough vowed. “But there, we’re all young, and you soon get used to the funny people you see in France. After all, they’re foreigners. We ought to feel sorry for them.”
“I say steady, Mrs. Gainsborough,” Lily murmured, with a frown. “Some of these people in the carriage may speak English.”
“Speak English?” Mrs. Gainsborough repeated. “You don’t mean to tell me they’d go on jabbering to one another in French if they could speak English! What an idea!”
A young man who had got into the compartment at Chantilly had been casting glances of admiration at Lily ever since, and it was on account of him that she had warned Mrs. Gainsborough. He was a slim, dark young man dressed by an English tailor, very diffident for a Frenchman, but when Sylvia began to speculate upon the choice of a hotel he could no longer keep silence and askedin English if he could be of any help. When Sylvia replied to him in French, he was much surprised:
“Mais vous êtes française!”
“Je suis du pays de la lune,”Sylvia said.
“Now don’t encourage the young fellow to gabble in French,” Mrs. Gainsborough protested. “It gives me the pins and needles to hear you. You ought to encourage people to speak English, if they want to, I’m sure.”
The young Frenchman smiled at this and offered his card to Sylvia, whom he evidently accepted as the head of the party. She read, “Hector Ozanne,” and smiled for the heroic first name; somehow he did not look like Hector and because he was so modest she presented him to Lily to make him happy.
“I am enchanted to meet a type of English beauty,” he said. “You must forgive my sincerity, which arises only from admiration. Madame,” he went on, turning to Mrs. Gainsborough, “I am honored to meet you.”
Mrs. Gainsborough, who was not quite sure how to deal with such politeness, became flustered and dropped her bag. Ozanne and she both plunged for it simultaneously and bumped their heads; upon this painful salute a general friendliness was established.
“I am a bachelor,” said Ozanne. “I have nothing to occupy myself, and if I might be permitted to assist you in a research for an apartment I shall be very elated.”
Sylvia decided in favor of rooms on therive gauche. She felt it was a conventional taste, but held to her opinion against Ozanne’s objections.
“But I have an apartment in the Rue Montpensier, with a view of the Palais Royal. I do not live there now myself. I beseech you to make me the pleasure to occupy it. It is so very good, the view of the garden. And if you like an ancient house, it is very ancient. Do you concur?”
“And where will you go?” Sylvia asked.
“I live always in my club. For me it would be a big advantage, I assure you.”
“We should have to pay rent,” said Sylvia, quickly.
“The rent will be one thousand a year.”
“God have mercy upon us!” Mrs. Gainsborough gasped. “A thousand a year? Why, the man must think that we’rethe royal family broken out from Windsor Castle on the randan.”
“Shut up, you silly old thing,” said Sylvia. “He’s asking nothing at all. Francs, not pounds.Vous êtes trop gentil pour nous, Monsieur.”
“Alors, c’est entendu?”
“Mais oui.”
“Bon! Nous y irons ensemble tout de suite, n’est-ce pas?”
The apartment was really charming. From the windows one could see the priests with their breviaries muttering up and down the old garden of the Palais Royal; and, as in all gardens in the heart of a great city, many sorts of men and women were resting there in the sunlight. Ozanne invited them to dine with him that night and left them to unpack.
“Well, I’m bound to say we seem to have fallen on our feet right off,” Mrs. Gainsborough said. “I shall quite enjoy myself here; I can see that already.”
The acquaintance with Hector Ozanne ripened into friendship, and from friendship his passion for Lily became obvious, not that really it had ever been anything else, Sylvia thought; the question was whether it should be allowed to continue. Sylvia asked Ozanne his intentions. He declared his desperate affection, exclaimed against the iniquity of not being able to marry on account of a mother from whom he derived his entire income, stammered, and was silent.
“I suppose you’d like me and Mrs. Gainsborough to clear out of this?” Sylvia suggested.
No, he would like nothing of the kind; he greatly preferred that they should all stay where they were as they were, save only that of course they must pay no rent in future and that he must be allowed to maintain entirely the upkeep of the apartment. He wished it to be essentially their own and he had no intention of intruding there except as a guest. From time to time no doubt Lily would like to see something of the French countryside and of theplages, and no doubt equally Sylvia would not be lonely in Paris with Mrs. Gainsborough. He believed that Lily loved him. She was, of course, like all English girls, cold, but for his part he admired such coldness, in fact headmired everything English. He knew that his happiness depended upon Sylvia, and he begged her to be kind.
Hector Ozanne was the only son of a rich manufacturer who had died about five years ago. The business had for some time been a limited company of which Madame Ozanne held the greater number of shares. Hector himself was now twenty-five and would within a year be found a wife by his mother; until then he would be allowed to choose a mistress by himself. He was kind-hearted, simple, and immensely devoted to Lily. She liked lunching and dining with him, and would like still better dressing herself at his expense; she certainly cared for him as much now as his future wife would care for him on the wedding-day. There seemed no reason to oppose the intimacy. If it should happen that Hector should fail to treat Lily properly, Sylvia would know how to deal with him, or rather with his mother. Amen.
July was burning fiercely and Hector was unwilling to lose delightful days with Lily; they drove away together one morning in a big motor-car, which Mrs. Gainsborough blessed with as much fervor as she would have blessed a hired brougham at a suburban wedding. She and Sylvia were left together either to visit someplageor amuse themselves in Paris.
“Paris I think, you uncommendable mammoth, you phosphor-eyed hippopotamus, Paris Ithink.”
“Well, I should like to see a bit of life, I must say. We’ve led a very quiet existence so far. I don’t want to go back to England and tell my friend Mrs. Marsham that I’ve seen nothing. She’s a most enterprising woman herself. I don’t think you ever saw her, did you? Before she was going to have her youngest she had a regular passion to ride on a camel. She used to dream of camels all night long, and at last, being as I said a very enterprising woman and being afraid when her youngest was born he might be a humpback through her dreaming of camels all the time, she couldn’t stand it no longer and one Monday morning, which is a sixpenny day, she went off to the Zoo by herself, being seven months gone at the time, and took six rides on the camel right off the reel, as they say.”
“That must have been the last straw,” Sylvia said.
“Have I told you this story before, then?”
Sylvia shook her head.
“Well, that’s a queer thing. I was just about to say that when she’d finished her rides she went to look at the giraffes, and one of them got hold of her straw hat in his mouth and nearly tore it off her head. She hollered out, and the keeper asked her if she couldn’t read the notice that visitors was requested not to feed these animals. This annoyed Mrs. Marsham very much, and she told the keeper he wasn’t fit to manage performing fleas, let alone giraffes, which annoyedhimvery much. It’s a pity you never met her. I sent her a post-card the other day, as vulgar a one as I could find, but you can buy them just as vulgar in London.”
Sylvia did so far gratify Mrs. Gainsborough’s desire to impress Mrs. Marsham as to take her to one or two Montmartre ballrooms; but she declared they did not come up to her expectations, and decided that she should have to fall back on her own imagination to thrill Mrs. Marsham.
“As most travelers do,” Sylvia added.
They also went together to several plays, at which Sylvia laughed very heartily, much to Mrs. Gainsborough’s chagrin.
“I’m bothered if I know what you’re laughing at,” she said, finally. “I can’t understand a word of what they’re saying.”
“Just as well you can’t,” Sylvia told her.
“Now there’s a tantalizing hussy for you. But I can guess, you great tomboy.”
Whereupon Mrs. Gainsborough laughed as heartily as anybody in the audience at her own particular thoughts. She attracted a good deal of attention by this, because she often laughed at them without reference to what was happening on the stage. When Sylvia dug her in the ribs to make her keep quiet, she protested that, if she could only tell the audience what she was thinking, they would not bother any more about the stage.
“A penny for your thoughts, they say. I reckon mine are worth the price of a seat in the circle, anyway.”
It was after this performance that Sylvia and Mrs. Gainsborough went to the Café de la Chouette, which wasfrequented mostly by the performers, poets, and composers of the music-hall world. The place was crowded, and they were forced to sit at a table already occupied by one of those figures that only in Paris seem to have the right to live on an equality with the rest of mankind, merely on account of their eccentric appearance. He was probably not more than forty years old, but his gauntness made him look older. He wore blue-and-white checked trousers, a tail coat from which he or somebody else had clipped off the tails, a red velvet waistcoat, and a yachting-cap. His eyes were cavernous, his cheeks were rouged rather than flushed with fever. He carried a leather bag slung round his middle filled with waste paper, from which he occasionally took out a piece and wrote upon it a few words. He was drinking an unrecognizable liqueur.
Mrs. Gainsborough was rather nervous of sitting down beside so strange a creature, but Sylvia insisted. The man made no gesture at their approach, but turned his eyes upon them with the impassivity of a cat.
“Look here, Sylvia, in two twos he’s going to give me an attack of the horrors,” Mrs. Gainsborough whispered. “He’s staring at me and twitching his nose like a hungry child at a jam roll. It’s no good you telling me to give over. I can’t help it. Look at his eyes. More like coal-cellars than eyes. I’ve never been able to abide being stared at since I sat down beside a wax-work at Louis Tussaud’s and asked it where the ladies’ cloak-room was.”
“He amuses me,” Sylvia said. “What are you going to have?”
“Well, Iwasgoing to have a grenadier, but really if that skelington opposite is going to look at me all night, I think I’ll take something stronger.”
“Try a cuirassier,” Sylvia suggested.
“Whatever’s that?”
“It’s the same relation to a curaçao that a grenadier is to a grenadine.”
“What I should really like is a nice little drop of whisky with a little tiddley bit of lemon; but there, I’ve noticed if you ask for whisky in Paris it causes a regular commotion. The waiter holds the bottle as if it was going to bite him, and the proprietor winks at him he’s pouring out toomuch, and I can’t abide those blue siphons. Sells they call them, and sells they are.”
“I shall order you a bock in a moment,” Sylvia threatened.
“Now don’t be unkind just because I made a slight complaint about being stared at. Perhaps they won’t make such a bother if Idohave a little whisky. But there, I can’t resist it. It’s got a regular taste of London, whisky has.”
The man at the table leaned over suddenly and asked, in a tense voice:
“Scotch or Irish?”
“Oh, good land! what a turn you gave me! I couldn’t have jumped more,” Mrs. Gainsborough exclaimed, “not if one of the lions in Trafalgar Square had said pip-ip as I passed!”
“You didn’t think I was English, did you?” said the stranger. “I forget it myself sometimes. I’m a terrible warning to the world. I’m a pose that’s become a reality.”
“Pose?” Mrs. Gainsborough echoed. “Oh, I didn’t understand you for the moment. You mean you’re an artist’s model?”
The stranger turned his eyes upon Sylvia, and, whether from sympathy or curiosity, she made friends with him, so that when they were ready to go home the eccentric Englishman, whom every one called Milord and who did not offer any alternative name to his new friends, said he would walk with them a bit of the way, much to Mrs. Gainsborough’s embarrassment.
“I’m the first of the English decadents,” he proclaimed to Sylvia. “Twenty years ago I came to Paris to study art. I hadn’t a penny to spend on drugs. I hadn’t enough money to lead a life of sin. There’s a tragedy! For five years I starved myself instead. I thought I should make myself interesting. I did. I became a figure. I learned the raptures of hunger. Nothing surpasses them—opium, morphine, ether, cocaine, hemp. What are they beside hunger? Have you got any coco with you? Just a little pinch? No? Never mind. I don’t really like it. Not really. Some people like it, though. Who’s the old womanwith you? A procuress? Last night I had a dream in which I proved the non-existence of God by the least common multiple. I can’t exactly remember how I did it now. That’s why I was so worried this evening; I can’t remember if the figures were two, four, sixteen, and thirty-eight. I worked it out last night in my dream. I obtained a view of the universe as a geometrical abstraction. It’s perfectly simple, but I cannot get it right now. There’s a crack in my ceiling which indicates the way. Unless I can walk along that crack I can’t reach the center of the universe, and of course it’s hopeless to try to obtain a view of the universe as a geometrical abstraction if one can’t reach the center. I take it you agree with me on that point. That point! Wait a minute. I’m almost there. That point. Don’t let me forget. That point. That is the point. Ah!”
The abstraction eluded him and he groaned aloud.
“The more I listen to him,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “the more certain sure I am he ought to see a doctor.”
“I must say good night,” the stranger murmured, sadly. “I see that I must start again at the beginning of that crack in my ceiling. I was lucky to find the room that had such a crack, though in a way it’s rather a nuisance. It branches off so, and I very often lose the direction. There’s one particular branch that always leads away from the point. I’m afraid to do anything about it in the morning. Of course, I might put up a notice to say,this is the wrong way; but supposing it were really the right way? It’s a great responsibility to own such a crack. Sometimes I almost go mad with the burden of responsibility. Why, by playing about with that ceiling when my brain isn’t perfectly clear I might upset the whole universe! We’ll meet again one night at the Chouette. I think I’ll cross the boulevard now. There’s no traffic, and I have to take a certain course not to confuse my line of thought.”
The eccentric stranger left them and, crossing the road in a series of diagonal tacks, disappeared.
“Coco,” said Sylvia.
“Cocoa?” echoed Mrs. Gainsborough. “Brandy, more like.”
“Or hashish.”
“Ashes? Well, I had a fox-terrier once that died in convulsions from eating coke, so perhaps it is ashes.”
“We must meet him again,” said Sylvia. “These queer people outside ordinary life interest me.”
“Well, it’s interesting to visit a hospital,” Mrs. Gainsborough agreed. “But that doesn’t say you want to go twice. Once is enough for that fellow, to my thinking. He’s interesting, but uncomfortable, like the top of a ’bus.”
Sylvia, however, was determined to pursue her acquaintance with the outcast Englishman. She soon discovered that for years he had been taking drugs and that nothing but drugs had brought him to his present state of abject buffoonery. Shortly before he became friends with Sylvia he had been taken up as a week’s amusement by some young men who were under the impression that they were seeing Parisian life in his company. They had been generous to him, and latterly he had been able to drug himself as much as he wanted. The result had been to hasten his supreme collapse. Even in his last illness he would not talk to Sylvia about his youth before he came to Paris, and in the end she was inclined to accept him at his own estimate, a pose that was become a reality.
One evening he seemed more haggard than usual and talked much less; by the twitching of his nostrils, he had been dosing himself hard with cocaine. Suddenly, he stretched his thin hand across the marble table and seized hers feverishly:
“Tell me,” he asked. “Are you sorry for me?”
“I think it’s an impertinence to be sorry for anybody,” she answered. “But if you mean do I wish you well, why, yes, old son, I wish you very well.”
“What I told you once about my coming to Paris to work at art was all lies. I came here because I had to leave nothing else behind, not even a name. You said, one evening when we were arguing about ambition, that if you could only find your line you might do something on the stage. Why don’t you recite my poems? Read them through. One or two are in English, but most of them are in French. They are really more sighs than poems. They require no acting. They want just a voice.”
He undid the leather strap that supported his satchel and handed it to Sylvia.
“To-morrow,” he said, “if I’m still alive, I’ll come here and find out what you think of them. But you’ve no idea how threatening that ‘if’ is. It gets longer and longer. I can’t see the end if it anywhere. It was very long last night. The dot of the ‘i’ was already out of sight. It’s the longest ‘if’ that was ever imagined.”
He rose hurriedly and left the café; Sylvia never saw him again.
The poems of this strange and unhappy creature formed a record of many years’ slow debasement. Many of them seemed to her too personal and too poignant to be repeated aloud, almost even to be read to oneself. There was nothing, indeed, to do but burn them, that no one else might comprehend a man’s degradation. Some of the poems, however, were objective, and in their complete absence of any effort to impress or rend or horrify they seemed not so much poems as actual glimpses into human hearts. Nor was that a satisfactory definition, for there was no attempt to explain any of the people described in these poems; they were ordinary people of the streets that lived in a few lines. This could only be said of the poems written in French; those in English seemed to her not very remarkable. She wondered if perhaps the less familiar tongue had exacted from him an achievement that was largely fortuitous.
“I’ve got an idea for a show,” Sylvia said to Mrs. Gainsborough. “One or two old folk-songs, and then one of these poems half sung, half recited to an improvised accompaniment. Not more than one each evening.”
Sylvia was convinced of her ability to make a success, and spent a couple of weeks in searching for the folk-songs she required.
Lily and Hector came back in the middle of this new idea, and Hector was sure that Sylvia would be successful. She felt that he was too well pleased with himself at the moment not to be uncritically content with the rest of the world, but he was useful to Sylvia in securing anauditionfor her. The agent was convinced of the inevitable failure of Sylvia’s performance with the public, and said hethought it was a pity to waste such real talent on antique rubbish like the songs she had chosen. As for the poems, they were no doubt all very well in their way; he was not going to say he had not been able to listen to them, but the public did not expect that kind of thing. He did not wish to discourage a friend of M. Ozanne; he had by him the rights for what would be three of the most popular songs in Europe, if they were well sung. Sylvia read them through and then sang them. The agent was delighted. She knew he was really pleased because he gave up referring to her as a friend of M. Ozanne and addressed her directly. Hector advised her to begin with the ordinary stuff, and when she was well known enough to experiment upon the public with her own ideas. Sylvia, who was feeling the need to do something at once, decided to risk an audition at one of the outlying music-halls. She herself declared that the songs were so good in their own way that she could not help making a hit, but the others insisted that the triumph belonged to her.
“Vous avez vraiment de l’espièglerie,”said Hector.
“You really were awfully jolly,” said Lily.
“I didn’t understand a word, of course,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “But you looked that wicked—well, really—I thoroughly enjoyed myself.”
During the autumn Sylvia had secured engagements in music-halls of thequartier, but the agent advised her to take a tour before she ventured to attack the real Paris. It seemed to her a good way of passing the winter. Lily and Hector were very much together, and though Hector was always anxious for Sylvia to make a third, she found that the kind of amusement that appealed to him was much the same as that which had appealed to the young men who frequented Half Moon Street. It was a life of going to races, at which Hector would pass ladies without saluting or being saluted, who, he informed Sylvia and Lily afterward, were his aunts or his cousins, and actually on one occasion his mother. Sylvia began to feel the strain of being in the demi-monde but not of it; it was an existence that suited Lily perfectly, who could not understand why Sylvia should rail at their seclusion from the world. Mrs. Gainsborough began to grow restlessfor the peace of Mulberry Cottage and the safety of her furniture.
“You never know what will happen. I had a friend once—a Mrs. Beardmore. She was housekeeper to two maiden ladies in Portman Square—well, housekeeper, she was more of a companion because one of them was stone deaf. One summer they went away to Scarborough, and when they came back some burglars had brought a furniture-van three days running and emptied the whole house, all but the bell-pulls. Drove back, they did, from King’s Cross in a four-wheeler, and the first thing they saw was a large board up—TO BE LET OR SOLD. A fine how-de-do there was in Portman Square, I can tell you; and the sister that was deaf had left her ear-trumpet in the train and nobody couldn’t explain to her what had happened.”
So Mrs. Gainsborough, whose fears had been heightened by the repetition of this tale, went back to London with what she described as a collection of vulgarities for Mrs. Marsham. Sylvia went away on tour.
Sylvia found the life of a music-hall singer on tour very solitary. Her fellow-vagabonds were so much more essentially mountebanks than in England, and so far away from normal existence, that even when she traveled in company because her next town coincided with the next town of other players, she was never able to identify herself with them, as in England she had managed to identify herself with the other members of the chorus. She found that it paid her best to be English, and to affect in her songs an almost excessive English accent. She rather resented the exploitation of her nationality, because it seemed to her the same kind of appeal that would have been made by a double-headed woman or a performing seal. Nobody wanted her songs to be well rendered so much as unusually rendered; everybody wanted to be surprised by her ability to sing at all in French. But if the audiences wished her to be English, she found that being English off the stage was a disadvantage among these continental mountebanks. Sylvia discovered the existence of a universal prejudice against English actresses, partly on account of their alleged personal uncleanliness, partly onaccount of their alleged insincerity. On several occasions astonishment was expressed at the trouble she took with her hair and at her capacity for being a goodcopaine; when, later on, it would transpire that she was half French, everybody would find almost with relief an explanation of her apparent unconformity to rule.
Sylvia grew very weary of the monotonous life in which everybody’s interest was bounded by the psychology of an audience. Interest in the individual never extended beyond the question of whether she would or would not, if she were a woman; of whether he desired or did not desire, if he were a man. When either of these questions was answered the interest reverted to the audience. It seemed maddeningly unimportant to Sylvia that the audience on Monday night should have failed to appreciate a point which the audience of Tuesday night would probably hail with enthusiasm; yet often she had to admit to herself that it was just her own inability or unwillingness to treat an audience as an individual that prevented her from gaining real success. She decided that every interpretative artist must pander his emotion, his humor, his wit, his movements nightly, and that somehow he must charm each audience into the complacency with which a sophisticated libertine seeks an admission of enduring love from the woman he has paid to satisfy a momentary desire. Assuredly the most successful performers in the grand style were those who could conceal even from the most intelligent audiences their professional relation to them. A performer of acknowledged reputation would not play to the gallery with battered wiles and manifest allurements, but it was unquestionable that the foundation of success was playing to the gallery, and that the third-rate performer who flattered these provincial audiences with the personal relation could gain louder applause than Sylvia, who wanted no audience but herself. It was significant how a word ofargotthat meant a fraud of apparent brilliancy executed by an artist upon the public had extended itself into daily use. Everything waschic. It waschicto wear a hat of the latest fashion; it waschicto impress one’s lover by a jealous outburst; it waschicto refuse a man one’s favors. Everything waschic: it was impossible to think or act or speak in this world of vagabonds withoutchic.
The individualistic life that Sylvia had always led both in private and in public seemed to her, notwithstanding the various disasters of her career, infinitely worthier than this dependency upon the herd that found its most obvious expression in the theater. It was revolting to witness human nature’s lust for the unexceptionable or its cruel pleasure in the exception. Yet now, looking back at her past, she could see that it had always been her unwillingness to conform that had kept her apart from so much human enjoyment and human gain, though equally she might claim apart from human sorrow and human loss.
“The struggle, of course, would be terrible for a long while,” Sylvia said to herself, “if everybody renounced entirely any kind of co-operation or interference with or imitation of or help from anybody else, but out of that struggle might arise the true immortals. A cat with a complete personality is surely higher than a man with an incomplete personality. Anyway, it’s quite certain that thiscabotinageis for me impossible. I believe that if I pricked a vein sawdust would trickle out of me now.”
In such a mood of cheated hope did Sylvia return to Paris in the early spring; she was about to comment on Lily’s usual state of molluscry, by yielding to which in abandoning the will she had lost the power to develop, when Lily herself proceeded to surprise her.
The affection between Hector and Lily had apparently made a steady growth and had floated in an undisturbed and equable depth of water for so long that Lily, like an ambitious water-lily, began to be ambitious of becoming a terrestrial plant. While for nearly a year she had been blossoming apparently without regard for anything but the beauty of the moment, she had all the time been sending out long roots beneath the water, long roots that were growing more and more deeply into the warm and respectable mud.
“You mean you’d like to marry Hector?” Sylvia asked.
“Why, yes, I think I should, rather. I’m getting tired of never being settled.”
“But does he want to marry you?”
“We’ve talked about it often. He hates the idea of not marrying me.”
“He’d like to go away with you and live on the top of a mountain remote from mankind, or upon a coral island in the Pacific with nothing but the sound of the surf and the cocoanuts dropping idly one by one, wouldn’t he?”
“Well, he did say he wished we could go away somewhere all alone. How did you guess? How clever you are, Sylvia!” Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes.
“My dear girl, when a man knows that it’s impossible to be married either because he’s married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He’s in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons. I suppose he has also talked of a dream-child—a fairy miniature of his Lily?” Sylvia went on.
“We have talked about a baby,” Lily admitted.
“The man with serious intentions talks about the aspect of the nursery and makes reluctant plans to yield, if compelled to, the room he had chosen for his study.”
“You make fun of everything,” Lily murmured, rather sulkily.
“But, my dear,” Sylvia argued, “for me to be able to reproduce Hector’s dream so accurately proves that I’m building to the type. I’ll speculate further. I’m sure he has regretted the irregular union and vowed that, had he but known at first what an angel of purity you were, he would have died rather than propose it.”
Lily sat silent, frowning. Presently she jumped up, and the sudden activity of movement brought home to Sylvia more than anything else the change in her.
“If you promise not to laugh, here are his letters,” Lily said, flinging into Sylvia’s lap a bundle tied up with ribbon.
“Letters!” Sylvia snapped. “Who cares about letters? The love-letters of a successful lover have no value. When he has something to write that he cannot say to your face,then I’ll read his letter. All public blandishments shock me.”
Hector was called away from Paris to go and stay with his mother at Aix-les-Bains; for a fortnight two letters arrived every day.
“The snow in Savoy will melt early this year,” Sylvia mocked. “It’s lucky he’s not staying at St.-Moritz. Winter sports could never survive such a furnace.”
Then followed a week’s silence.
“The Alpine Club must have protested,” Sylvia mocked. “Avalanches are not expected in March.”
“He’s probably motoring with his mother,” Lily explained.
The next day a letter arrived from Hector.