The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 19

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. She thinks she'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 asked in English if he could be of any help. When Sylvia replied to him in French, he was much surprised: "Mais vous etes francaise!"

"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 fl.u.s.tered and dropped her bag. Ozanne and she both plunged for it simultaneously and b.u.mped 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 a.s.sist you in a research for an apartment I shall be very elated."

Sylvia decided in favor of rooms on the rive 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 a.s.sure you."

"We should have to pay rent," said Sylvia, quickly.

"The rent will be one thousand a year."

"G.o.d have mercy upon us!" Mrs. Gainsborough gasped. "A thousand a year? Why, the man must think that we're the 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 etes 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 pa.s.sion 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 the plages, 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 he admired 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 some plage or amuse themselves in Paris.

"Paris I think, you uncommendable mammoth, you phosphor-eyed hippopotamus, Paris I think."

"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 pa.s.sion 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 annoyed him very 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 Cafe de la Chouette, which was frequented 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 impa.s.sivity 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, I was going 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 cuira.s.sier," Sylvia suggested.

"Whatever's that?"

"It's the same relation to a curacao 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 too much, 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 I do have 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 pa.s.sed!"

"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 embarra.s.sment.

"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 surpa.s.ses 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 woman with you? A procuress? Last night I had a dream in which I proved the non-existence of G.o.d 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 c.o.ke, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 cafe; Sylvia never saw him again.

The poems of this strange and unhappy creature formed a record of many years' slow debas.e.m.e.nt. 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 an audition for her. The agent was convinced of the inevitable failure of Sylvia's performance with the public, and said he thought 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'espieglerie," 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 the quartier, 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 pa.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.s 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 restless for 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 n.o.body couldn't explain to her what had happened."

So Mrs. Gainsborough, whose fears had been heightened by the repet.i.tion 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. n.o.body 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 on account 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 good copaine; 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. a.s.suredly 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 of argot that meant a fraud of apparent brilliancy executed by an artist upon the public had extended itself into daily use. Everything was chic. It was chic to wear a hat of the latest fashion; it was chic to impress one's lover by a jealous outburst; it was chic to refuse a man one's favors. Everything was chic: it was impossible to think or act or speak in this world of vagabonds without chic.

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 l.u.s.t 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 this cabotinage is for me impossible. I believe that if I p.r.i.c.ked 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?"