“Oh, Mrs. Lebus, you’re wanted,Oh yes, you’re wanted, sure you’re wanted, Mrs. Lebus,You’re wanted, you’re wanted,You’re wanted—right now.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lebus, you’re wanted,Oh yes, you’re wanted, sure you’re wanted, Mrs. Lebus,You’re wanted, you’re wanted,You’re wanted—right now.”
Mrs. Lebus was one of those women whose tongues are always hunting, like eager terriers. With evident reluctance she postponed the chase of an artful morsel that had taken refuge in some difficult country at the back of her mouth, and faced the problem of admitting Sylvia to the sick man’s room.
“You a relative?” she asked.
Sylvia shook her head.
“Perhaps you’ve come about his remittance. He told me he was expecting a hundred dollars any time. You staying in Sulphurville?”
Sylvia understood that the apparent disinclination to admit her was only due to unsatisfied curiosity and that there was not necessarily any suspicion of her motives. At this moment something particularly delicious ran across the path of Mrs. Lebus’s tongue, and Sylvia took advantage of the brief pause during which it was devoured, to penetrate into the lobby, where a melancholy citizen in a frock-coat and a straw hat was testing the point of a nib upon his thumb, whether with the intention of offering it to Mrs. Lebus to pick her teeth or of writing a letter was uncertain.
“Oh, Scipio!” said Mrs. Lebus. She pronounced it “Skipio.”
“Wal?”
“She wants to see Mr. Madden.”
“Sure.”
The landlady turned to Sylvia.
“Mr. Lebus don’t have no objections. Julie, take Miss—What did you say your name was?”
Sylvia saw no reason against falling into what Mrs. Lebus evidently considered was a skilfully laid trap, and told her.
“Scarlett,” Mr. Lebus repeated. “We don’t possess that name in Sulphurville. Yes, ma’am, that name’s noo to Sulphurville.”
“Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?” his wife asked. Aware of her husband’s enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.
“Julie’ll take you up to his apartment. And don’t you forget to knock before you open the door, Julie.”
On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enterunannounced; she was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.
It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compassion for his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a kiss.
“How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?” Arthur asked.
“My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name.” Breathlessly she poured out the story of how she had found him.
“But you’d made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it was—you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me.”
She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies, restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change there was might be put down to his illness.
“Arthur, do you remember Maria?” she asked.
He smiled. “He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother after I went on the stage.”
Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He had never talked of it in the old days.
“I used always to be keen on music.”
Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he smiled again.
“My mother still plays that sometimes, and I’ve often thought of you when she does. She lives at Dulwich now.”
They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.
“You were a most extraordinary kid,” he told her. “Because, after all, I was seventeen at the time—olderthan you. Good Lord! I’m thirty now, and you must be twenty-eight!”
To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was it that she felt so much older than he?
“But how on earthdidyou get stranded in this place?” she asked.
“I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I’ve practically given up the stage proper. I don’t know why, really, for I was doing quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn’t so much at the beck and call of managers.”
Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.
“Well, we came to Sulphurville,” said Arthur. He hesitated for a moment. Obviously there had been a woman. “We came to Sulphurville,” he went on, “and played at the hotel you’re playing at now—a rotten hole,” he added, with retrospective bitterness. “I don’t know how it was, but I suppose I got keen on the gambling—anyway, I had a row with the other people in the show, and when they left I refused to go with them. I stayed behind and got keen on the gambling.”
“It was after the row that you took to roulette?” Sylvia asked.
“Well, as a matter if fact, I had a row with a girl. She treated me rather badly, and I stayed on. I lost a good deal of money. Well, it wasn’t a very large sum, as a matter of fact, but it was all I had, and then I fell ill. I caught cold and I was worried over things. I cabled to my mother for some money, but there’s been no reply. I’m afraid she’s had difficulty in raising it. She quarreled with my father’s people when I went on the stage. Damned narrow-minded set of yokels. Furious because I wouldn’t take up farming. How I hate narrow-minded people!” And with an invalid’s fretful intolerance he went on grumbling at the ineradicable characteristics of an English family four thousand miles away.
“Of course something may have happened to my mother,” he added. “You may be sure that if anything had those beasts would never take the trouble to write and tell me. It would be a pleasure to them if they could annoy me in any way.”
A swift criticism of Arthur’s attitude toward the possibility of his mother’s death rose to Sylvia’s mind, but she repressed it, pleading with herself to excuse him because he was ill and overstrained. She was positively determined to see henceforth nothing but good in people, and in her anxiety to confirm herself in this resolve she was ready not merely to exaggerate everything in Arthur’s favor, but even to twist any failure on his side into actual merit. Thus when she hastened to put her own resources at his disposal, and found him quite ready to accept without protest her help, she choked back the comparison with Jack Airdale’s attitude in similar circumstances, and was quite angry with herself, saying how much more naturally Arthur had received her good-will and how splendid it was to find such simplicity and sincerity.
“I’ll nurse you till you’re quite well, and then why shouldn’t we take an engagement together somewhere?”
Arthur became enthusiastic over this suggestion.
“You’ve not heard me sing yet. My throat’s still too weak, but you’ll be surprised, Sylvia.”
“I haven’t got anything but a very deep voice,” she told him. “But I can usually make an impression.”
“Can you? Of course, where I’ve always been held back is by lack of money. I’ve never been able to afford to buy good songs.”
Arthur began to sketch out for himself a most radiant future, and as he talked Sylvia thought again how incredible it was that he should be older than herself. Yet was not this youthful enthusiasm exactly what she required? It was just the capacity of Arthur’s for thinking he had a future that was going to make life tremendously worth while for her, tremendously interesting—oh, it was impossible not to believe in the decrees of fate, when at the very moment of her greatest longing to be needed by somebody she had met Arthur again. She could be everything to him, tend him through his illness, provide him withmoney to rid himself of the charity of Mrs. Lebus and the druggist, help him in his career, and watch over his fidelity to his ambition. She remembered how, years ago at Hampstead, his mother had watched over him; she could recall every detail of the room and see Mrs. Madden interrupt one of her long sonatas to be sure Arthur was not sitting in a draught. And it had been she who had heedlessly lured him away from that tender mother. There was poetic justice in this opportunity of reparation now accorded to her. To be sure, it had been nothing but a childish escapade—reparation was too strong a word; but there was something so neat about this encounter years afterward in a place like Sulphurville. How pale he was, which, nevertheless, made him more romantic to look at; how thin and white his hands were! She took one of them in her own boy’s hands, as so many people had called them, and clasped it with the affection that one gives to small helpless things, to children and kittens, an affection that is half gratitude because one feels good-will rising like a sweet fountain from the depth of one’s being, the freshness of which playing upon the spirit is so dear, that no words are enough to bless the wand that made the stream gush forth.
“I shall come and see you all day,” said Sylvia. “But I think I ought not to break my contract at the Plutonian.”
“Oh, you’ll come and live here,” Arthur begged. “You’ve no idea how horrible it is. There was a cockroach in the soup last night, and of course there are bugs. For goodness’ sake, Sylvia, don’t give me hope and then dash it away from me. I tell you I’ve had a hell of a time in this cursed hole. Listen to the bed; it sounds as if it would collapse at any moment. And the bugs have got on my nerves to such a pitch that I spend the whole time looking at spots on the ceiling and fancying they’ve moved. It’s so hot, too; everything’s rotted with heat. You mustn’t desert me. You must come and stay here with me.”
“Why shouldn’t you move up to the Plutonian?” Sylvia suggested. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get one of the doctors to come and look at you, and if he thinks it’s possible you shall move up there at once. Poor boy, it really is too ghastly here.”
Arthur was nearly weeping with self-pity.
“But, my dear girl, it’s much worse than you think. You know those horrible birds’ bath-tubs in which they bring your food at third-rate American hotels, loathsome saucers with squash and bits of grit in watery milk that they call cereals, and bony bits of chicken, well, imagine being fed like that when you’re ill; imagine your bed covered with those infernal saucers. One of them always used to get left behind when Julie cleared away, and it always used to fall with a crash on the floor, and I used to wonder if the mess would tempt the cockroaches into my room. And then Lebus used to come up and make noises in his throat and brag about Sulphurville, and I used to know by his wandering eye that he was looking for what he called the cuspidor, which I’d put out of sight. And Mrs. Lebus used to come up and suck her teeth at me until I felt inclined to strangle her.”
“The sooner you’re moved away the better,” Sylvia said, decidedly.
“Oh yes, if you think it can be managed. But if not, Sylvia, for God’s sake don’t leave me alone.”
“Are you really glad to see me?” she asked.
“Oh, my dear, it was like heaven opening before one’s eyes!”
“Tell me about the girl you were fond of,” she said, abruptly.
“What do you want to talk about her for? There’s nothing to tell you, really. She had red hair.”
Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of that red-haired girl.
“Look here,” said Sylvia. “I’m going to let these people suppose that I’m your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor down to see you. Arthur, I’m glad I’ve found you. Do you remember the cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?”
“I have had a pretty hard time,” Arthur said.
“Oh, but you mustn’t be sorry for yourself,” she laughed.
“No, seriously, Sylvia, I’ve always had a lot of people against me.”
“Yes, but that’s such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you’re with me. I’m not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn’t be offended with me when I tell you that really there’s something a tiny bit funny in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville.”
“I’m glad you think so,” said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.
“Don’t be cross, you foolish creature.”
“I’m not a bit cross. Only Iwouldlike you to understand that my illness isn’t a joke. You don’t suppose I should let you pay my bills and do all this for me unless it were really something serious.”
Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. “I forgive you,” she murmured, “because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur,doyou remember Hube? What fun everything is!”
Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.
“It was a relation, after all,” she told her. “The Maddens have been related to us for hundreds of years.”
“My! My! Now ain’t that real queer? Oh, Scipio!”
Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was duly impressed with the coincidence.
“Darned if I don’t tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He’s got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it’s a sermonizing cinch.”
There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of Arthur’s bill.
“Not that I wouldn’t have trusted him for another month and more,” Mrs. Lebus affirmed. “But it’s a satisfaction to be able to turn round and say to the neighbors, ‘What did I tell you?’ Folks in Sulphurville was quite sure I’d never be paid back a cent. This’ll learn them!”
Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.
The druggist’s account was settled, and though, whenSylvia first heard him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.
Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia’s discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the masseurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.
Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur’s expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature’s preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners’ avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman’s intimate hopes into a quack’s tale.
“Then you didn’t see your cousin’s spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn’t that perfectly discouraging?” complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.
“I’m afraid the story’s been added to a good deal,” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry to disappoint the faithful.”
“She’s shy about giving us her experiences,” said another lady from Iowa. “I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I’dever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room.”
“He was in his own room,” Sylvia corrected, “and I didn’t feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer.”
“Isn’t she secretive?” exclaimed the lady from Illinois. “Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society’s magazine,The Flash. We don’t print any stories that aren’t established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you.”
The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia’s hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a smut on her nose.
“Yes, I’m sure we ought to be grateful,” said the lady from Iowa. “My! Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged,” she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.
“I wish you wouldn’t elaborate everything so,” Sylvia begged of Arthur when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies. “It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself assuming a legendary shape before my own eyes. It’s as painful as being stuffed alive—stuffed alive with nonsense,” she added, with a laugh.
Arthur’s expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia’s presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness. Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely. Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared to strut—for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor—he only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense was necessary, he was an Englishman among acrowd of Americans; the conditions demanded a good deal of competitive self-assertion.
Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson. Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from wishing to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no doubt, but so closely bound up with old associations that she could not wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics, this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year’s death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage. It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies, she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It’s a little more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian forest from Kensington Gardens.
Arthur’s first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life.
At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs. Madden, and Sylvia gathered from theletter that the poor lady had been much puzzled to send the money.
“We must cable it back to her at once,” Sylvia said.
“Oh, well, now it’s come, is that wise?” Arthur objected. “She may have had some difficulty in getting it, but that’s over now.”
“No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I’ve got plenty of money to carry us on till we begin to work together.”
“But I can’t go on accepting charity like this,” Arthur protested. “It’s undignified, really. I’ve never done such a thing before.”
“You accepted it from your mother.”
“Oh, but my mother’s different.”
“Only because she’s less able to afford it than I am,” Sylvia pointed out. “Look, she’s sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself.”
Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother’s pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the accumulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur’s expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his attitude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a Blüthner.
Sylvia’s contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody’s good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.
New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They passed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplateda landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.
“I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession,” Sylvia said. “But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers’ appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer readingthemin bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible.”
“But the flaring head-lines,” Arthur protested. “You surely don’t like them?”
“Oh, but I do!” she avowed. “They’re as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?”
“Of course you’d argue black was white,” Arthur said.
“Well, that’s a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray.”
“Most things are gray.”
“Oh no, they’re not! Some things are. Old men’s beards and dirty linen and Tschaikowsky’s music and oysters and Wesleyans.”
“There you go,” he jeered.
“Where do I go?”
“Right off the point,” said Arthur, triumphantly. “No woman can argue.”
“Oh, but I’m not a woman,” Sylvia contradicted. “I’m a mythical female monster, don’t you know—one of those queer beasts with claws like hay-rakes and breasts like peg-tops and a tail like a fish.”
“Do you mean a Sphinx?” Arthur asked, in his literal way. He was always rather hostile toward her extravagant fancies, because he thought it dangerous to encouragea woman in much the same way as he would have objected to encouraging a beggar.
“No, I really meant a grinx, which is rather like a Sphinx, but the father was a griffin—the mother in both cases was a minx, of course.”
“What was the father of the Sphinx?” he asked, rather ungraciously.
Sylvia clapped her hands.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the question. A sphere—a woman’s sphere, of course, which is nearly as objectionable a beast as a lady’s man.”
“You do talk rot sometimes,” said Arthur.
“Don’t you ever have fancies?” she demanded, mockingly.
“Yes, of course, but practical fancies.”
“Practical fancies,” Sylvia echoed. “Oh, my dear, it sounds like a fairy in Jaeger combinations! You don’t know what fun it is talking rot to you, Arthur. It’s like hoaxing a chicken with marbles. You walk away from my conversation with just the same disgusted dignity.”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Arthur proclaimed. “You’re just the same as you were at fifteen.”
Sylvia, who had been teasing him with a breath of malice, was penitent at once; after all, he had once run away with her, and it would be difficult for any woman of twenty-eight not to rejoice a little at the implication of thirteen undestructive years.
“That last remark was like a cocoanut thrown by a monkey from the top of the cocoanut-palm,” she said. “You meant it to be crushing, but it was crushed instead, and quite deliciously sweet inside.”
All the time that Sylvia had been talking so lightly, while the train was getting nearer and nearer to New York, there had lain at the back of her mind the insistent problem of her relationship to Arthur. The impossibility of their going on together as friends and nothing more had been firmly fixed upon her consciousness for a long time now, and the reason of this was to be sought for less in Arthur than in herself. So far they had preserved all the outward semblances of friendship, but she knew that one look from her eyes deep into his would transform him intoher lover. She gave Arthur credit for telling himself quite sincerely that it would be “caddish” to make love to her while he remained under what he would consider a grave obligation; and because with his temperament it would be as much in the ordinary routine of the day to make love to a woman as to dress himself in the morning. She praised his decorum and was really half grateful to him for managing to keep his balance on the very small pedestal that she had provided. She might fairly presume, too, that if she let Arthur fall in love with her he would wish to marry her. Why should she not marry him? It was impossible to answer without accusing herself of a cynicism that she was far from feeling, yet without which she could not explain even to herself her quite definite repulsion from the idea of marrying him. The future, really, now, the very immediate future, must be flung to chance; it was hopeless to arrogate to her forethought the determination of it; besides, here was New York already.
“We’d better go to my old hotel,” Sylvia suggested. Was it the reflection of her own perplexity, or did she detect in Arthur’s accents a note of relief, as if he too had been watching the Palisades of the Hudson and speculating upon the far horizon they concealed?
They dined at Rector’s, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby’s toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flashing from white to red for the hour. This clock without a dial-plate was the quietest of the Gargantuan baby’s toys, for it did not strike; one was conscious of the almost pathetic protest against all those other damnably noisy toys: one felt he might become so enamoured of its pretty silence that to provide himself with a new diversion he might take to doubling the hours to keep pace with the rapidity of the life with which he played.
“It’s almost as if we were walking up Haverstock Hill again,” said Arthur.
“And we’re grown up now,” Sylvia murmured. “Oh, dreadfully grown up, really!”
They walked on for a while in silence. It was impossible to keep back the temptation to cheat time by leaping over the gulf of years and being what they were when last they walked along together like this. Sylvia kept looking over her shoulder at the bland clock hanging in the sky behind them; at this distance the fabric of the tower had melted into the night and was no longer visible, which gave to the clock a strange significance and made it a simulacrum of time itself.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.
“Do you remember when you told me I looked like a cow? It was after”—he breathed perceptibly faster—“after I kissed you.”
She would not ascribe his remembering what she had called him to an imperfectly healed scar of vanity, but with kindlier thoughts turned it to a memento of his affection for her. After all, she had loved him then; it had been a girl’s love, but did there ever come with age a better love than that first flushed gathering of youth’s opening flowers?
“Sylvia, I’ve thought about you ever since. When you drove me away from Colonial Terrace I felt like killing myself. Surely we haven’t met again for nothing.”
“Is it nothing unless I love you?” she asked, fiercely, striving to turn the words into weapons to pierce the recesses of his thoughts and blunt themselves against a true heart.
“Ah no, I won’t say that,” he cried. “Besides, I haven’t the right to talk about love. You’ve been—Sylvia, I can’t tell you what you’ve been to me since I met you again.”
“If I could only believe—oh, but believe with all of me that was and is and ever will be—that I could have been so much.”
“You have, you have.”
“Don’t take my love as a light thing,” she warned him. “It’s not that I’m wanting so very much for myself, but I want to be so much to you.”
“Sylvia, won’t you marry me? I couldn’t ever take your love lightly. Indeed. Really.”
“Ah, it’s not asking me to marry you that means you’re serious. I’m not asking you what your intentions are. I’m asking if you want me.”
“Sylvia, I want you dreadfully.”
“Now, now?” she pressed.
“Now and always.”
They had stopped without being aware of it. A trolley-car jangled by, casting transitory lights that wavered across Arthur’s face, and Sylvia could see how his eyes were shining. She dreaded lest by adding a few conventional words he should spoil what he had said so well, but he waited for her, as in the old days he had always waited.
“You’re not cultivating this love, like a convalescent patient does for his nurse?” Sylvia demanded.
She stopped herself abruptly, conscious that every question she put to him was ultimately being put to herself.
“Did I ever not love you?” he asked. “It was you that grew tired of me. It was you that sent me away.”
“Don’t pretend that all these years you’ve been waiting for me to come back,” she scoffed.
“Of course not. What I’m trying to explain is that we can start now where we left off; that is, if you will.”
He held out his hand half timidly.
“And if I won’t?”
The hand dropped again to his side, and there was so much wounded sensitiveness in the slight gesture that Sylvia caught him to her as if he were a child who had fallen and needed comforting.
“When I first put my head on your shoulder,” she murmured. “Oh, how well I can remember the day—such a sparkling day, with London spread out like life at our feet. Now we’re in the middle of New York, but it seems just as far away from us two as London was that day—and life,” she added, with a sigh.
CIRCUMSTANCES seemed to applaud almost immediately the step that Sylvia had taken. There was no long delay caused by looking for work in New York, which might have destroyed romance by its interposition of fretful hopes and disappointments. A variety company was going to leave in November for a tour in eastern Canada. At least two months would be spent in the French provinces, and Sylvia’s bilingual accomplishment was exactly what the manager wanted.
“I’m getting on,” she laughed. “I began by singing French songs with an English accent; I advanced from that to acting English words with a French accent; now I’m going to be employed in doing both. But what does it matter? The great thing is that we should be together.”
That was where Arthur made the difference to her life; he was securing her against the loneliness that at twenty-eight was beginning once more to haunt her imagination. What did art matter? It had never been anything but a refuge.
Arthur himself was engaged to sing, and though he had not such a good voice as Claude Raglan, he sang with much better taste and was really musical. Sylvia was annoyed to find herself making comparisons between Claude and Arthur. It happened at the moment that Arthur was fussing about his number on the program, and she could not help being reminded of Claude’s attitude toward his own artistic importance. She consoled herself by thinking that it should always be one of her aims to prevent the likeness growing any closer; then she laughed at herself for this resolve, which savored of developing Arthur, that process she had always so much condemned.
They opened at Toronto, and after playing a weekArthur caught a chill and was out of the program for a fortnight; this gave Sylvia a fresh opportunity of looking after him; and Toronto in wet, raw weather was so dreary that, to come back to the invalid after the performance, notwithstanding the ineffable discomfort of the hotel, was to come back home. During this time Sylvia gave Arthur a history of the years that had gone by since they parted, and it puzzled her that he should be so jealous of the past. She wondered why she could not feel the same jealousy about his past, and she found herself trying to regret that red-haired girl and many others on account of the obvious pleasure such regrets afforded Arthur. She used to wonder, too, why she always left out certain incidents and obscured certain aspects of her own past, whether, for instance, she did not tell him about Michael Fane on her own account or because she was afraid that Arthur would perceive a superficial resemblance between himself and Claude and a very real one between herself and Lily, or because she would have resented from Arthur the least expression, not so much of contempt as even of mild surprise, at Michael’s behavior. Another subject she could never discuss with Arthur was her mother’s love for her father, notwithstanding that his own mother’s elopement with a groom must have prevented the least criticism on his side. Here again she wondered if her reserve was due to loyalty or to a vague sense of temperamental repetition that was condemning her to stand in the same relation to Arthur as her mother to her father. She positively had to run away from the idea that Arthur had his prototype; she was shutting him up in a box and scarcely even looking at him, which was as good as losing him altogether, really. Even when she did look at him she handled him with such exaggerated carefulness, for fear of his getting broken, that all the pleasure of possession was lost. Perhaps she should have had an equal anxiety to preserve intact anybody else with whom she might have thrown in her lot; but when she thought over this attitude it was dismaying enough and seemed to imply an incapacity on her part to enjoy fully anything in life.
“I’ve grown out of being destructive; at least I think I have. I wonder if the normal process from Jacobinismto the intense conservatism of age is due to wisdom, jealousy, or fear.
“Arthur, what are your politics?” she asked, aloud.
He looked up from the game of patience he was playing, a game in which he was apt to attribute the pettiest personal motives to the court-cards whenever he failed to get out.
“Politics?” he echoed, vaguely. “I don’t think I ever had any. I suppose I’m a Conservative. Oh yes, certainly I’m a Conservative. That infernal knave of hearts is covered now!” he added, in an aggrieved voice.
“Well, I didn’t cover it,” said Sylvia.
“No, dear, of course you didn’t. But it really is a most extraordinary thing that I always get done by the knaves.”
“You share your misfortune with the rest of humanity, if that’s any consolation.”
The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Orlone. He was a huge Neapolitan with the countenance of a gigantic and swarthy Punch, who had been trying to get back to Naples for twenty years, but had been prevented at first by his passion for gambling and afterward by an unwilling wife and a numerous family. Orlone made even Toronto cheerful, and before he had come two paces into a room Sylvia always began to laugh. He never said anything deliberately funny except on the stage, but laughter emanated from him infectiously, as yawning might. Though he had spent twenty years in America, he still spoke the most imperfect English; and when he and Sylvia had done laughing at each other they used to laugh all over again, she at his English, he at her Italian. When they had finished laughing at that Orlone used to swear marvelously for Sylvia’s benefit whenever she should again visit Sirene; and she would teach him equally tremendous oaths in case he should ever come to London. When they had finished laughing at this, Orlone would look over Arthur’s shoulder and, after making the most ridiculous gestures of caution, would finally burst out into an absolute roar of laughter right in Arthur’s ear.
“Pazienza,” Sylvia would say, pointing to the outspread cards.
“Brava signora! Come parla bene!”
And of course this was obviously so absurd a statement that it would set them off laughing again.
“You are a pair of lunatics,” Arthur would protest; he would have liked to be annoyed at his game’s being interrupted, but he was powerless to repulse Orlone’s good humor.
When they returned to New York in the spring and Sylvia looked back at the tour, she divined how much of her pleasure in it had been owed to Orlone’s all-pervading mirth. He had really provided the robust and full-blooded contrast to Arthur that had been necessary. It was not exactly that without him their existence together would have been insipid—oh no, there was nothing insipid about Arthur, but one appreciated his delicacy after that rude and massive personality. When they had traveled over leagues of snow-covered country, Orlone had always lightened the journey with gay Neapolitan songs, and sometimes with tender ones like “Torno di Surriento.” It was then that, gazing out over the white waste, she had been able to take Arthur’s hand and sigh to be sitting with him on some Sirenian cliff, to smell again the rosemary and crumble with her fingers the sunburnt earth. But this capacity of Orlone’s for conjuring up the long Parthenopean shore was nothing more than might have been achieved by any terra-cotta Silenus in a provincial museum. After Silenus, what nymph would not turn to Hylas somewhat gratefully? It had been the greatest fun in the world to drive in tinkling sledges through Montreal, with Orlone to tease the driver until he was as sore as the head of the bear that in his fur coat he resembled; it had been fun to laugh with Orlone in Quebec and Ottawa and everywhere else; but after so much laughter it had always been particularly delightful to be alone again with Arthur, and to feel that he too was particularly enjoying being alone with her.
“I really do think we get on well together,” she said to him.
“Of course we do.”
And was there in the way he agreed with her just the least suggestion that he should have been surprised if shehad not enjoyed his company, an almost imperceptible hint of complacency, or was it condescension?
“I really must get out of this habit of poking my nose into other people’s motives,” Sylvia told herself. “I’m like a horrid little boy with a new penknife. Arthur could fairly say to me that I forced myself upon him. I did really. I went steaming into the Auburn Hotel like a salvage-tug. There’s the infernal side of obligations—I can’t really quite free myself from the notion that Arthur ought to be grateful to me. He’s in a false position through no fault of his own, and he’s behaving beautifully. It’s my own cheap cynicism that’s to blame. I wish I could discover some mental bitter aloes that would cure me of biting my mind, as I cured myself of biting my nails.”
Sylvia was very glad that Arthur succeeded in getting an engagement that spring to act, and that she did not; she was really anxious to let him feel that she should be dependent on him for a while. The result would have been entirely satisfactory but for one flaw—the increase in Arthur’s sense of his own artistic importance. Sylvia would not have minded this so much if he had possessed enough of it to make him oblivious of the world’s opinion, but it was always more of a vanity than a pride, chiefly concerned with the personal impression he made. It gave him much more real pleasure to be recognized by two shop-girls on their afternoon out than to be praised by a leading critic. Sylvia would have liked him to be equally contemptuous of either form of flattery, but that he should revel in both, and actually esteem more valuable the recognition accorded him by a shop-girl’s backward glance and a nudge from her companion seemed to be lamentable.
“I don’t see why you should despise me for being pleased,” Arthur said. “I’m only pleased because it’s a proof that I’m getting known.”
“But they’d pay the same compliment to a man with a wen on his nose.”
“No doubt, but also to any famous man,” Arthur added.
Sylvia could have screamed with irritation at his lack of any sense of proportion. Why could he not be like Jack Airdale, who had never suffered from any illusion thatwhat he was doing, so far as art was concerned, was not essentially insignificant? Yet, after all, was she not being unreasonable in paying so much attention to a childish piece of vanity that was inseparable from the true histrionic temperament?
“I’m sorry, Arthur. I think I’m being unfair to you. I only criticize you because I want you to be always the best of you. I see your point of view, but I was irritated by the giggles.”
“I wasn’t paying the least attention to the girls.”
“Oh, I wasn’t jealous,” she said, quickly. “Oh no, darling Arthur, even with the great affection that I have for you, I shall never be able to be jealous of your making eyes at shop-girls.”
When Arthur’s engagement seemed likely to come to an end in the summer, they discussed plans and decided to take a holiday in the country, somewhere in Maine or Vermont. Arthur, as usual, set the scene beforehand, but as he set it quite in accord with Sylvia’s taste she did not mind. Indeed, their holiday in Vermont on the borders of Lake Champlain was as near as she ever got to being perfectly happy with Arthur—happy, that is, to the point of feeling like a chill the prospect of separation. Sylvia was inclined to say that all Arthur’s faults were due to the theater, and that when one had him like this in simple surroundings the best side of him was uppermost and visible, like a spun coin that shows a simple head when it falls.
Sylvia found that she had brought with her by chance the manuscript of the poems given to her by the outcast Englishman in Paris, and Arthur was very anxious that she should come back to her idea of rendering these. He had already composed a certain number of unimportant songs in his career, but now the Muses smiled upon him (or perhaps it might be truer to speak of her own smiles, Sylvia thought) with such favor that he set a dozen poems to the very accompaniment they wanted, the kind of music, moreover, that suited Sylvia’s voice.
“We must get these done in New York,” he said; but that week a letter came from Olive Airdale, and Sylvia had a sudden longing for England. She did not think shewould make an effort to do anything in America. The truth was that she had supplemented the Englishman’s poems with an idea of her own to give impressions gathered from her own life. It was strange how abruptly the longing to express herself had arrived, but it had arrived, with a force and fierceness that were undeniable. It had come, too, with that authentic fever of secrecy that she divined a woman must feel in the first moment of knowing that she has conceived. She could not have imparted her sense of creation to any one else; such an intimacy of revelation was too shocking to be contemplated. Somehow she was sure that this strange shamefulness was right and that she was entitled to hug within herself the conception that would soon enough be turned to the travail of birth.
“By, Jove! Sylvia, this holidayhasdone you good!” Arthur exclaimed.
She kissed him because, ignorant though he was of the true reason, she owed him thanks for her looks.
“Sylvia, if we go back to England, do let’s be married first.”
“Why?”
“Why, because it’s not fair on me.”
“On you?”
“Yes, on me. People will always blame me, of course.”
“What has it got to do with anybody else except me?”
“My mother—”
“My dear Arthur,” Sylvia interrupted, sharply, “if your mother ran away with a groom, she’ll be the first person to sympathize with my point of view.”
“I suppose you’re trying to be cruel,” said Arthur.
“And succeeding, to judge by your dolorous mouth. No, my dear, let the suggestion of marriage come from me. I sha’n’t be hurt if you refuse.”
“Well, are we to pretend we’re married?” Arthur asked, hopelessly.
“Certainly not, if by that you mean that I’m to put ‘Mrs. Arthur Madden’ on a visiting-card. Don’t look so frightened. I’m not proposing to march into drawing-rooms with a big drum to proclaim my emancipation from the social decencies. Don’t worry me, Arthur. It’s all much too complicated to explain, but I’ll tell you onething, I’m not going to marry you merely to remove the world’s censure of your conduct, and as long as you feel about marrying me as you might feel about letting me carry a heavy bag, I’ll never marry you.”
“I don’t feel a bit like that about it,” he protested. “If I could leave you, I’d leave you now. But the very thought of losing you makes my heart stop beating. It’s like suddenly coming to the edge of a precipice. I know perfectly well that you despise me at heart. You think I’m a wretched actor with no feelings off the stage. You think I don’t know my own mind, if you even admit that I’ve got a mind at all. But I’m thirty-one. I’m not a boy. I’ve had a good many women in love with me. Now don’t begin to laugh. I’m determined to say what I ought to have said long ago, and should have said if I hadn’t been afraid the whole time of losing you. If I lose you now it can’t be helped. I’d sooner lose you than go on being treated like a child. What I want to say is that, though I know you think it wasn’t worth while being loved by the women who’ve loved me, I do think it was. I’m not in the least ashamed of them. Most of them, at any rate, were beautiful, though I admit that all of them put together wouldn’t have made up for missing you. You’re a thousand times cleverer than I. You’ve got much more personality. You’ve every right to consider you’ve thrown yourself away on me. But the fact remains that you’ve done it. We’ve been together now a year. That proves that thereissomething in me. I’m prouder of this year with you than of all the rest of my life. You’ve developed me in the most extraordinary way.”
“I have?” Sylvia burst in.
“Of course you have. But I’m not going to be treated like a mantis.”
“Like a what?”
“A mantis. You can read about it in that French book on insects. The female eats the male. Well, I’m damned well not going to be eaten. I’m not going back to England with you unless you marry me.”
“Well, I’m not going to marry you,” Sylvia declared.
“Very well, then I shall try to get an engagement on tour and we’ll separate.”
“So much the better,” she said. “I’ve got a good deal to occupy myself at present.”
“Of course you can have the music I wrote for those poems,” said Arthur.
“Damn your music,” she replied.
Sylvia was so much obsessed with the conviction of having at last found a medium for expressing herself in art that, though she was vaguely aware of having a higher regard for Arthur at this moment than she had ever had, she could only behold him as a troublesome visitor that was preventing her from sitting down to work.
Arthur went off on tour. Sylvia took an apartment in New York far away up-town and settled down to test her inspiration. In six months she lived her whole life over again, and of every personality that had touched her own and left its mark she made a separate presentation. Her great anxiety was to give to each sketch the air of an improvisation, and in the course of it to make her people reveal their permanent characters rather than their transient emotions. It was really based on the art of the impersonator who comes on with a cocked hat, sticks out his neck, puts his hands behind his back, and his legs apart, leans over to the audience, and whispers Napoleon. Sylvia thought she could extend the pleasures of recognition beyond the mere mimicry of externals to a finer mimicry of essentials. She wanted an audience to clap not because she could bark sufficiently like a real dog to avoid being mistaken for a kangaroo, but because she could be sufficiently Mrs. Gainsborough not to be recognized as Mrs. Beardmore—yet without relying upon their respective sizes in corsets to mark the difference. She did not intend to use even make-up; the entertainment was always to be an improvisation. It was also to be undramatic; that is to say, it was not to obtain its effect by working to a climax, so that, however well hidden the mechanism might have been during the course of the presentation, the machinery would reveal itself at the end. Sylvia wanted to make each member of the audience feel that he had dreamed her improvisation, or rather she hoped that he would gain from it that elusive sensation of having lived it before, and that the effect upon each person listening toher should be ultimately incommunicable, like a dream. She was sure now that she could achieve this effect with the poems, not, as she had originally supposed, through their objective truthfulness, but through their subjective truth. That outcast Englishman should be one of her improvisations, and of course the original idea of letting the poems be accompanied by music would be ruinous; one might as well illustrate them with a magic lantern. As to her own inventions, she must avoid giving them a set form, because, whatever actors might urge to the contrary, a play could never really be performed twice by the same caste. She would have a scene painted like those futurist Italian pictures; they were trying to do with color what she was trying to do with acting; they were striving to escape from the representation of mere externals, and often succeeding almost too well, she added, with a smile. She would get hold of Ronald Walker in London, who doubtless by now would be too prosperous to serve her purpose himself, but who would probably know of some newly fledged painter anxious to flap his wings.
At the end of six months Sylvia had evolved enough improvisations to make a start. She went to bed tired out with the last night’s work, and woke up in the morning with a sense of blankness at the realization of there being nothing to do that day. All the time she had been working she had been content to be alone; she had even looked forward to amusing herself in New York when her work was finished. Now the happy moment had come and she could feel nothing but this empty boredom. She wondered what Arthur was doing, and she reproached herself for the way in which she had discarded him. She had been so thrilled by the notion that she was necessary to somebody; it had seemed to her the consummation of so many heedless years. Yet no sooner had she successfully imposed herself upon Arthur than she was eager to think of nothing but herself without caring a bit about his point of view. Now that she could do nothing more with her work until the test of public performance was applied to it, she was bored; in fact, she missed Arthur. The truth was that half the pleasure of being necessary to somebody else had been that he should be necessary to her. But marriagewith Arthur? Marriage with a curly-headed actor? Marriage with anybody? No, that must wait, at any rate until she had given the fruit of these six months to the world. She could not be hampered by belonging to anybody before that.
“I do think I’m justified in taking myself a little seriously for a while,” said Sylvia, “and in shutting my eyes to my own absurdity. Self-mockery is dangerous beyond a certain point. I really will give this idea of mine a fair chance. If I’m a failure, Arthur will love me all the more through vanity, and if I’m a success—I suppose really he’ll be vain of that, too.”
Sylvia telegraphed to Arthur, and heard that he expected to be back in New York at the end of the month. He was in Buffalo this week. Nothing could keep her a moment longer in New York alone, and she went up to join him. She had a sudden fear when she arrived that she might find him occupied with a girl; in fact, really, when she came to think of the manner in which she had left him, it was most improbable that she should not. She nearly turned round and went back to New York; but her real anxiety to see Arthur and talk to him about her work made her decide to take the risk of what might be the deepest humiliation of her life. It was strange how much she wanted to talk about what she had done; the desire to do so now was as overmastering an emotion as had been in the first moment of conception the urgency of silence.
Sylvia was spared the shock of finding Arthur wrapped up in some one else.
“Sylvia, how wonderful! What a relief to see you again!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been longing for you to see me in the part I’m playing now. It’s certainly the most successful thing I’ve done. I’m so glad you kept me from wasting myself any longer on that concert work. I really believe I’ve made a big hit at last.”
Sylvia was almost as much taken aback to find Arthur radiant with the prospect of success as she would have been to find him head over ears in love. She derived very little satisfaction from the way in which he attributed his success to her; she was not at all in the moodfor being a godmother, now that she had a baby of her own.
“I’m so glad, old son. That’s splendid. Now I want to talk about the work I’ve been doing all these six months.”
Forthwith she plunged into the details of the scheme, to which Arthur listened attentively enough, though he only became really enthusiastic when she could introduce analogies with his own successful performance.
“You will go in front to-night?” he begged. “I’m awfully keen to hear what you think of my show. Half my pleasure in the hit has been spoiled by your not having seen it. Besides, I think you’ll be interested in noticing that once or twice I try to get the same effect as you’re trying for in these impersonations.”
“Damn your eyes, Arthur, they’re not impersonations; they’re improvisations.”
“Did I say impersonations? I’m sorry,” said Arthur, looking rather frightened.
“Yes, you’d better placate me,” she threatened. “Or I’ll spend my whole time looking at Niagara and never go near your show.”
However, Sylvia did go to see the play that night and found that Arthur really was excellent in his part, which was that of the usual young man in musical comedy who wanders about in a well-cut flannel suit, followed by six young women with parasols ready to smother him with affection, melody, and lace. But how, even in the intoxication of success, he had managed to establish a single analogy with what she proposed to do was beyond comprehension.
Arthur came out of the stage door, wreathed in questions.
“You were in such a hurry to get out,” said Sylvia, “that you didn’t take off your make-up properly. You’ll get arrested if you walk about like that. I hear the sumptuary laws in Buffalo are very strict.”
“No, don’t rag. Did you like the hydrangea song? Do you remember the one I mean?”
He hummed the tune.
“I warn you, Arthur, there’s recently been a moralup-lift in Buffalo. You will be sewn up in a barrel and flung into Niagara if you don’t take care. No, seriously. I think your show was capital. Which brings me to the point. We sail for Europe at the end of April.”
“Oh, but do you think it’s wise for me to leave America now that I’ve really got my foot in?”
“Do you still want to marry me?”
“More than ever,” he assured her.
“Very well, then. Your only chance of marrying me is to leave New York without a murmur. I’ve thought it all out. As soon as I get back I shall spend my last shilling on fitting out my show. When I’ve produced it and when I’ve found out that I’ve not been making a fool of myself for the last six months, perhaps I’ll marry you. Until then—as friends we met, as anything more than friends we part. Got me, Steve?”
“But, Sylvia—”
“But me no buts, or you’ll get my goat. Understand my meaning, Mr. Stevenson?”
“Yes, only—”
“The discussion’s closed.”
“Are we engaged?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see our agents about that.”
“Oh, don’t rag. Marriage is not a joke. You are a most extraordinary girl.”
“Thanks for the discount. I shall be thirty in three months, don’t forget. Talking of the advantages of rouge, you might get rid of some of yours before supper, if you don’t mind.”
“Are we engaged?” Arthur repeated, firmly.
“No, the engagement ring and the marriage-bells will be pealed simultaneously. You’re as free as Boccaccio, old son.”
“You’re in one of those moods when it’s impossible to argue with you.”
“So much the better. We shall enjoy our supper all the more. I’m so excited at the idea of going back to England. After all, I shall have been away nearly three years. I shall find godchildren who can talk. Think of that. Arthur, don’t you want to go back?”
“Yes, if I can get a shop. I think it’s madness for me to leave New York, but I daren’t let you go alone.”
The anticipation of being in England again and of putting to the test her achievement could not charm away all Sylvia’s regret at leaving America, most of all New York. She owed to New York this new stability that she discovered in her life. She owed to some action of New York upon herself the delight of inspiration, the sweet purgatory of effort, the hope of a successful end to her dreams. It was the only city of which she had ever taken a formal farewell, such as she took from the top of the Metropolitan Tower upon a lucid morning in April. The city lay beneath, with no magic of smoke to lend a meretricious romance to its checkered severity; a city encircled with silver waters and pavilioned by huge skies, expressing modern humanity, as the great monuments of ancient architecture express the mighty dead.
“We too can create our Parthenons,” thought Sylvia, as she sank to earth in the florid elevator.
They crossed the Atlantic on one of the smaller Cunard liners. The voyage was uneventful. Nearly all the passengers in turn told Sylvia why they were not traveling by one of the large ships, but nobody suggested as a reason that the smaller ships were cheaper.
When they reached England Arthur went to stay with his mother at Dulwich. Sylvia went to the Airdales; she wanted to set her scheme in motion, but she promised to come and stay at Dulwich later on.
“At last you’ve come back,” Olive said, on the verge of tears. “I’ve missed you dreadfully.”
“Great Scott! Look at Sylvius and Rose!” Sylvia exclaimed. “They’re like two pigs made of pink sugar. Pity we never thought of it at the time, or they could have been christened Scarlet and Crimson.”
“Darlings, isn’t godmamma horrid to you?” said Olive.
“Here! Here! What are you teaching them to call me?”
“Dat’s godmamma,” said Sylvius, in a thick voice.
“Dat’s godmamma,” Rose echoed.
“Not on your life, cullies,” their godmother announced, “unless you want a thick ear each.”
“Give me one,” said Sylvius, stolidly.
“Give me one,” Rose echoed.
“How can you tease the poor darlings so?” Olive exclaimed.
“Sylvius will have one,” he announced, in the same thick monotone.
“Rose will have one,” echoed his sister.
Sylvia handed her godson a large painted ball.
“Here’s your thick ear, Pork.”
Sylvius laughed fatly; the ball and the new name both pleased him.
“And here’s yours,” she said, offering another to Rose, who waited to see what her brother did with his and then proceeded to do the same with the same fat laugh. Suddenly, however, her lips puckered.
“What is it, darling?” her mother asked, anxiously.
“Rose wants to be said Pork.”
“You didn’t call her Pork,” Olive translated, reproachfully, to Sylvia.
“Give me back the ball,” said Sylvia. “Now then, here’s your thick ear, Porka.”
Rose laughed ecstatically. After two ornaments had been broken Jack came in, and the children retired with their nurse.
Sylvia found that family life had not spoiled Jack’s interest in that career of hers; indeed, he was so much excited by her news that he suggested omitting for once the ceremony of seeing the twins being given their bath in order not to lose any of the short time available before he should have to go down to the theater. Sylvia, however, would not hear of any change in the domestic order, and reminded Jack that she was proposing to quarter herself on them for some time.
“I know, it’s terrific,” he said.
The excitement of the bath was always considerable, but this evening, with Sylvia’s assistance, it became acute. Sylvius hit his nurse in the eye with the soap, and Rose, wrought up to a fever of emulation, managed to hurl the sponge into the grate.
Jack was enthusiastic about Sylvia’s scheme. She was not quite sure that he understood exactly at what she wasaiming, but he wished her so well that in any case his criticism would have had slight value; he gave instead his devoted attention, and that seemed a pledge of success. Success! Success! it sounded like a cataract in her ears, drowning every other sound. She wondered if the passion of her life was to be success. On no thoughts urged so irresistibly had she ever sailed to sleep, nor had she ever wakened in such a buoyancy, greeting the day as a swimmer greets the sea.
“Now what about the backing?” Jack asked.
“Backing? I’ll back myself. You’ll be my manager. I’ve enough to hire the Pierian Hall for a day and a night. I’ve enough to pay for one scene. Which reminds me I must get hold of Ronald Walker. You’ll sing, Jack, two songs? Oh, and there’s Arthur Madden. He’ll sing, too.”
“Who’s he?” Olive asked.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you about him?” said Sylvia, almost too nonchalantly, she feared. “He’s rather good. Quite good, really. I’ll tell you about him sometime. By the way, I’ve talked so much about myself and my plans that I’ve never asked about other people. How’s the countess?”
Olive looked grave. “We don’t ever see them, but everybody says that Clarehaven is going the pace tremendously.”
“Have they retreated to Devonshire?”
“Oh no! Didn’t you hear? I thought I’d told you in one of my letters. He had to sell the family place. Do you remember a man called Leopold Hausberg?”
“Do I not?” Sylvia exclaimed. “He took a flat once for a chimpanzee instead of Lily.”
“Well, he’s become Lionel Houston this year, and he’s talked about with Dorothy a good deal. Of course he’s very rich, but I do hope there’s nothing in what people say. Poor Dorothy!”
“She’ll survive even the divorce court,” Sylvia said. “I wish I knew what had become of Lily. She might have danced in my show. I suppose it’s too late now, though. Poor Lily! I say, we’re getting very compassionate, you and I, Olive. Are you and Jack going to have any more kids?”
“Sylvia darling,” Olive exclaimed, with a blush.
Sylvia had intended to stay a week or two with the Airdales, and, after having set in motion the preliminaries of her undertaking, to go down to Dulwich and visit Mrs. Madden, but she thought she would get hold of Ronnie Walker first, and with this object went to the Café Royal, where she should be certain of finding either him or a friend who would know where he was.
Sylvia had scarcely time to look round her in the swirl of gilt and smoke and chatter before Ronald Walker himself, wearing now a long pale beard, greeted her.
“My dear Ronald, what’s the matter? Are you tired of women? You look more like a grate than a great man,” Sylvia exclaimed. “Cut it off and give it to your landlady to stuff her fireplace this summer.”
“What shall we drink?” he asked, imperturbably.
“I’ve been absinthe for so long that really—”
“It’s a vermouth point,” added Ronald.