The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 26

"Probably Buggins, really. I say, Cousin Dorothy," he went on, in a louder voice. "What about bridge to-morrow night after the Empire?"

Lady Clarehaven flashed a look at Sylvia, who could not resist shaking her head and earning thereby another sharper flash. When Sylvia talked over the Clarehavens with Olive, she found that Olive had been quite oblivious of anything unusual in the sudden move to town.

"Of course, Dorothy and I can never be what we were to each other; but I thought they seemed so happy together. I'm so glad it's been such a success."

"Well, has it?" said Sylvia, doubtfully.

"Oh yes, my dear! How can you imagine anything else?"

With the deepening of winter Olive fell ill and the doctors prescribed the Mediterranean for her. The malady was nothing to worry about; it was nothing more than fatigue; and if she were to rest now and if possible not work before the following autumn, there was every reason to expect that she would be perfectly cured.

Sylvia jumped at an excuse to go abroad again and suggested a visit to Sirene. The doctor, on being a.s.sured that Sirene was in the Mediterranean, decided that it was exactly the place best suited to Olive's state of health. Like most English doctors, he regarded the Mediterranean as a little larger than the Serpentine, with a characteristic climate throughout. Olive, however, was much opposed to leaving London, and when Sylvia began to get annoyed with her obstinacy, she confessed that the real reason for wishing to stay was Jack.

"Naturally, I wanted to tell you at once, my dear. But Jack wouldn't let me, until he could see his way clear to our being married. He was quite odd about you, for you know how fond he is of you--he thinks there's n.o.body like you--but he particularly asked me not to tell you just yet."

"Of course I know the reason," Sylvia proclaimed, instantly. "The silly, scrupulous, proud a.s.s. I'll have it out with him to-morrow at lunch. Dearest Olive, I'm so happy that I like your curly-headed actor."

"Oh, but, darling Sylvia, his hair's quite straight!"

"Yes, but it's very long and gets into his eyes. It's odd hair, anyway. And when did the flaming arrow pin your two hearts together?"

"It was that evening you played baccarat at Curzon Street--about ten days ago. You didn't think we'd known long, did you? Oh, my dear, I couldn't have kept the secret any longer."

Next day Sylvia lunched with Jack Airdale and came to the point at once.

"Look here, you detestably true-to-type, impossibly sensitive a.s.s, because I to please me lent you fifty pounds, is that any excuse for you to keep me out in the cold over you and Olive? Seriously, Jack, I do think it was mean of you."

Jack was abashed and mumbled many excuses. He had been afraid Sylvia would despise him for talking about marriage when he owed her money. He felt, anyway, that he wasn't good enough for Olive. Before Olive had known anything about it, he had been rather ashamed of himself for being in love with her; he felt he was taking advantage of Sylvia's friendship.

"All which excuses are utterly feeble," Sylvia p.r.o.nounced. "Now listen. Olive's ill. She ought to go abroad. I very selfishly want a companion. You've got to insist on her going. The fifty pounds I lent you will pay her expenses, so that debt's wiped out, and you're standing her a holiday in the Mediterranean."

Jack thought for a moment with a puzzled air.

"Don't be absurd, Sylvia. Really for the moment you took me in with your confounded arithmetic. Why, you're doubling the obligation."

"Obligation! Obligation! Don't you dare to talk about obligations to me. I don't believe in obligations. Am I to understand that for the sake of your unworthy--well, it can't be dignified with the word--pride, Olive is to be kept in London throughout the spring?"

Jack protested he had been talking about the loan to himself. Olive's obligation would be a different one.

"Jack, have you ever seen a respectable woman throw a sole Morny across a restaurant? Because you will in one moment. Amen to the whole discussion. Please! The only thing you've got to do is to insist on Olive's coming with me. Then while she's away you must be a good little actor and act away as hard as you know how, so that you can be married next June as a present to me on my twenty-sixth birthday."

"You're the greatest dear," said Jack, fervently.

"Of course I am. But I'm waiting."

"What for?"

"Why, for an exhortation to matrimony. Haven't you noticed that people who are going to get married always try to persuade everybody else to come in with them? I'm sure human co-operation began with paleolithic bathers."

So Olive and Sylvia left England for Sirene.

"I'd like to be coming with you," said Mrs. Gainsborough at Charing Cross. "But I'm just beginning to feel a tiddley-bit stiff, and well, there, after Morocco, I shouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a cannibal island, and it's too late for me to start in being a Robinson Crusoe, which reminds me that when I took Mrs. Beardmore to the Fulham pantomime last night it was d.i.c.k Whittington. And upon my soul, if he didn't go to Morocco with his cat. 'Well,' I said to Mrs. Beardmore, 'it's not a bit like it.' I told her that if d.i.c.k Whittington went there now he wouldn't take his cat with him. He'd take a box of Keating's. Somebody behind said, 'Hush.' And I said, 'Hush yourself. Perhaps you've been to Morocco?' Which made him look very silly, for I don't suppose he's ever been further East than Aldgate in his life. We had no more 'hushes' from him, I can tell you; and Mrs. Beardmore looked round at him in a very lady-like way which she's got from being a housekeeper, and said, 'My friend has been to Morocco.' After that we la-la'd the chorus in peace and quiet. Good-by, duckies, and don't gallivant about too much."

Sylvia had brought a bagful of books about the Roman emperors, and Olive had brought a number of anthologies that made up by the taste of the binder for the lack of it in the compiler. They were mostly about love. To satisfy Sylvia's historical pa.s.sion a week was spent in Rome and another week in Naples. She told Olive of her visit to Italy with Philip over seven years ago, and, much to her annoyance, Olive poured out a good deal of emotion over that hapless marriage.

"Don't you feel any kind of sentimental regret?" she asked while they were watching from Posilipo the vapors of Vesuvius rose-plumed in the wintry sunset. "Surely you feel softened toward it all now. Why, I think I should regret anything that had once happened in this divinely beautiful place."

"The thing I remember most distinctly is Philip's having read somewhere that the best way to get rid of an importunate guide was to use the local negative and throw the head back instead of shaking it. The result was that Philip used to walk about as if he were gargling. To annoy him I used to wink behind his back at the guides, and naturally with such encouragement his local negative was absolutely useless."

"I think you must have been rather trying, Sylvia dear."

"Oh, I was--infernally trying, but one doesn't marry a child of seventeen as a sedative."

"I think it's all awfully sad," Olive sighed.

Sylvia had rather a shock, a few days after they had reached Sirene, when she saw Miss Horne and Miss Hobart drive past on the road up to Anasirene, the green rival of Sirene among the clouds to the west of the island. She made inquiries at the pension and was informed that two sisters Miss Hobart-Horne, English millionaires many times over, had lived at Sirene these five years. Sylvia decided that it would be quite easy to avoid meeting them, and warned Olive against making friends with any of the residents, on the plea that she did not wish to meet people whom she had met here seven years ago with her husband. In the earlier part of the spring they stayed at a pension, but Sylvia found that it was difficult to escape from people there, and they moved up to Anasirene, where they took a villino that was cut off from all dressed-up humanity by a sea of olives. Here it was possible to roam by paths that were not frequented save by peasants whose personalities so long attuned to earth had lost the power of detaching themselves from the landscape and did not affect the onlooker more than the movement of trees or the rustle of small beasts. Life was made up of these essentially undisturbing personalities set in a few pictures that escaped from the swift southern spring: anemones splashed out like wine upon the green corn; some girl with slanting eyes that regarded coldly a dead bird in her thin brown hand; red-beaded cherry-trees that threw shadows on the tawny wheat below; wind over the olives and the sea, wind that shook the tresses of the broom and ruffled the scarlet poppies; then suddenly the first cicala and eternal noon.

It would have been hard to say how they spent these four months, Sylvia thought.

"Can you bear to leave your beloved trees, your namesakes?" she asked.

"Jack is getting impatient," said Olive.

"Then we must fade out of Anasirene just as one by one the flowers have all faded."

"I don't think I've faded much," Olive laughed. "I never felt so well in my life, thanks to you."

Jack and Olive were married at the end of June. It was necessary to go down to a small Warwickshire town and meet all sorts of country people that reminded Sylvia of Green Lanes. Olive's father, who was a solicitor, was very anxious for Sylvia to stay when the wedding was over. He was cheating the G.o.ds out of half their pleasure in making him a solicitor by writing a history of Warwickshire worthies. Sylvia had so much impressed him as an intelligent observer that he would have liked to retain her at his elbow for a while. She would not stay, however. The particular song that the sirens had sung to her during her sojourn in their territory was about writing a book. They called her back now and flattered her with a promise of inspiration. Sylvia was not much more ready to believe in sirens than in mortals, and she resisted the impulse to return. Nevertheless, with half an idea of scoring off them by writing the book somewhere else, she settled down in Mulberry Cottage to try: the form should be essays, and she drew up a list of subjects:-- 1. Obligations.

Judiac like the rest of our moral system; post obits on human grat.i.tude.

2. Friendship.

A flowery thing. Objectionable habit of keeping pressed flowers.

3. Marriage.

Judiac. Include this with obligations; nothing wrong with the idea of marriage. The marriage of convenience probably more honest than the English marriage of so-called affection. Levi the same as Lewis.

4. Gambling.

A moral occupation that brings out the worst side of everybody.

5. Development.

Exploiting human personality. Judiac, of course.

6. Acting.

A low art form; oh yes, very low; being paid for what the rest of the world does for nothing.

7. Prost.i.tution.

Selling one's body to keep one's soul. This is the meaning of the sins that were forgiven to the woman because she loved much. One might say of most marriages that they were selling one's soul to keep one's body.

Sylvia found that when she started to write on these and other subjects she knew nothing about them; the consequence was that summer pa.s.sed into autumn and autumn into winter while she went on reading history and philosophy. For pastime she played baccarat at Curzon Street and lost six hundred pounds. In February she decided that, so much having been written on the subjects she had chosen, it was useless to write any more. She went to stay with Jack and Olive, who were now living in West Kensington. Olive was expecting a baby in April.

"If it's a boy, we're going to call him Sylvius. But if it's a girl, Jack says we can't call her Sylvia, because for us there can never be more than one Sylvia."

"Call her Argentina."

"No, we're going to call her Sylvia Rose."

"Well, I hope it'll be a boy," said Sylvia. "Anyway, I hope it'll be a boy, because there are too many girls."

Olive announced that she had taken a cottage in the country close to where her people lived, and that Sylvius or Sylvia Rose was to be born there; she thought it was right.

"I don't know why childbirth should be more moral in the country," Sylvia said.

"Oh, it's nothing to do with morals; it's on account of baby's health. You will come and stay with me, won't you?"

In March, therefore, Sylvia went down to Warwickshire with Olive, much to the gratification of Mr. Fanshawe. It was a close race whether he would be a grandfather or an author first, but in the end Mr. Fanshawe had the pleasure of placing a copy of his work on Warwickshire worthies in the hands of the monthly nurse before she could place in his arms a grandchild. Three days later Olive brought into the world a little girl and a little boy. Jack was acting in Dundee. The problem of nomenclature was most complicated. Olive had to think it all out over again from the beginning. Jack had to be consulted by telegram about every change, and on occasions where accuracy was all-important, the post-office clerks were usually most careless. For instance, Mr. Fanshawe thought it would be charming to celebrate the forest of Arden by calling the children Orlando and Rosalind; Jack thereupon replied: Do not like Rosebud. What will boy be called. Suggest Palestine. First name arrived Ostend. If Oswald no.

"Palestine!" exclaimed Olive.

"Obviously Valentine," said Sylvia. "But look here, why not Sylvius for the boy and Rose for the girl? 'Rose Airdale, all were thine!'"

When several more telegrams had been exchanged to enable Olive, in Warwickshire, to be quite sure that Jack, by this time in Aberdeen, had got the names right, Sylvius and Rose were decided upon, though Mr. Fanshawe advocated Audrey for the girl with such pertinacity that he even went as far as to argue with his daughter on the steps of the font. Indeed, as Sylvia said afterward, if the clergyman had not been so deaf, Rose would probably be Audrey at this moment.

On the afternoon of the christening Sylvia received a telegram.

"Too late," she said, with a laugh, as she tore it open. "He can't change his mind now."

But the telegram was signed "Beardmore" and asked Sylvia to come at once to London because Mrs. Gainsborough was very ill.

When she arrived at Mulberry Cottage, on a fine morning in early June, Mrs. Beardmore, whom Sylvia had never seen, was gravely accompanying two other elderly women to the garden door.

"She's not dead?" Sylvia cried.

The three friends shook their heads and sighed.

"Not yet, poor soul," said the thinnest, bursting into tears.

This must be Mrs. Ewings.

"I'm just going to send another doctor," said the most majestic, which must be Mrs. Marsham.

Mrs. Beardmore said nothing, but she sniffed and led the way toward the house. Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Ewings went off together.

Inside the darkened room, but not so dark in the June sunshine as to obscure entirely the picture of Captain Dashwood in whiskers that hung upon the wall by her bed, Mrs. Gainsborough lay breathing heavily. The nurse made a gesture of silence and came out tiptoe from the room. Down-stairs in the parlor Sylvia listened to Mrs. Beardmore's story of the illness.

"I heard nothing till three days ago, when the woman who comes in of a morning ascertained from Mrs. Gainsborough the wish she had for me to visit her. The Misses Hargreaves, with who I reside, was exceptionally kind and insisted upon me taking the tram from Kew that very moment. I communicated with Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Ewings, but they, both having lodgers, was unable to evacuate their business, and Mrs. Gainsborough was excessively anxious as you should be communicated with on the telegraph, which I did accordingly. We have two nurses night and day, and the doctor is all that can be desired, all that can be desired, notwithstanding whatever Mrs. Marsham may say to the contrary; Mrs. Marsham, who I've known for some years, has that habit of contradicting everybody else something outrageous. Mrs. Ewings and me was both entirely satisfied with Doctor Barker. I'm very glad you've come, Miss Scarlett, and Mrs. Gainsborough will be very glad you've come. If you'll permit the liberty of the observation, Mrs. Gainsborough is very fond of you. As soon as she wakes up I shall have to get back to Kew, not wishing to trespa.s.s too much on the kindness of the two Misses Hargreaves to who I act as housekeeper. It's her heart that's the trouble. Double pneumonia through pottering in the garden. That's what the doctor diag--yes, that's what the doctor says, and though Mrs. Marsham contradicted him, taking the words out of his mouth and throwing them back in his face, and saying it was nothing of the kind but going to the King's funeral, I believe he's right."

Mrs. Beardmore went back to Kew. Mrs. Gainsborough, who had been in a comatose state all the afternoon, began to wander in her mind about an hour before sunset.

"It's very dark. High time the curtain went up. The house will be getting impatient in a minute. It's not to be supposed they'll wait all night. Certainly not."

Sylvia drew the curtains back, and the room was flooded with gold.

"That's better. Much better. The country smells beautiful, don't it, this morning? The glory die-johns are a treat this year, but the captain he always likes a camellia or a gardenia. Well, if they start in building over your nursery, pa.... Certainly not, certainly not. They'll build over everything. Now don't talk about dying, Bob. Don't let's be dismal on our anniversary. Certainly not."

She suddenly recognized Sylvia and her mind cleared.

"Oh, I am glad you've come. Really, you know, I hate to make a fuss, but I'm not feeling at all meself. I'm just a tiddley-bit ill, it's my belief. Sylvia, give me your hand. Sylvia, I'm joking. I really am remarkably ill. Oh, there's no doubt I'm going to die. What a beautiful evening! Yes, it's not to be supposed I'm going to live forever, and there, after all, I'm not sorry. As soon as I began to get that stiffness I thought it meant I was not meself. And what's the good of hanging about if you're not yourself?"

The nurse came forward and begged her not to talk too much.

"You can't stop me talking. There was a clergyman came through Mrs. Ewings's getting in a state about me, and he talked till I was sick and tired of the sound of his voice. Talked away, he did, about the death of Our Lord and being nailed to the cross. It made me very dismal. 'Here, when did all this occur?' I asked. 'Nineteen hundred and ten years ago,' he said. 'Oh well,' I said, 'it all occurred such a long time ago and it's all so sad, let's hope it never occurred at all.'"

The nurse said firmly that if Mrs. Gainsborough would not stop talking she should have to make Sylvia go out of the room.

"There's a tyrant," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Well, just sit by me quietly and hold my hand."

The sun set behind the housetops. Mrs. Gainsborough's hand was cold when twilight came.

Sylvia felt that it was out of the question to stay longer at Mulberry Cottage, though Miss Dashwood, to whom the little property reverted, was very anxious for her to do so. After the funeral Sylvia joined Olive and Jack in Warwickshire.

They realized that she was feeling very deeply the death of Mrs. Gainsborough, and were anxious that she should arrange to live with them in West Kensington.

Sylvia, however, said that she wished to remain friends with them, and declined the proposal.

"Do you remember what I told you once," she said to Jack, "about going back to the stage in some form or another when I was tired of things?"

Jack, who had not yet renounced his ambition for Sylvia's theatrical career, jumped at the opportunity of finding her an engagement, and when they all went back to London with the babies he rushed about the Strand to see what was going. Sylvia moved all her things from Mulberry Cottage to the Airdales' house, refusing once more Miss Dashwood's almost tearful offer to make over the cottage to her. She was sorry to withstand the old lady, who was very frail by now, but she knew that if she accepted, it would mean more dreaming about writing books and gambling at Curzon Street, and ultimately doing nothing until it was too late.

"I'm reaching the boring idle thirties. I'm twenty-seven," she told Jack and Olive. "I must sow a few more wild oats before my face is plowed with wrinkles to receive the respectable seeds of a flourishing old age. By the way, as demon-G.o.dmother I've placed one thousand pounds to the credit of Rose and Sylvius."

The parents protested, but Sylvia would take no denial.

"I've kept lots for myself," she a.s.sured them. As a matter of fact, she had nearly another 1,000 in the bank.

At the end of July Jack came in radiant to say that a piece with an English company was being sent over to New York the following month. There was a small part for which the author required somebody whose personality seemed to recall Sylvia's. Would she read it? Sylvia said she would.

"The author was pleased, eh?" Jack asked, enthusiastically, when Sylvia came back from the trial.

"I don't really know. Whenever he tried to speak, the manager said, 'One moment, please'; it was like a boxing-match. However, as the important thing seemed to be that I should speak English with a French accent, I was engaged."

Sylvia could not help being amused at herself when she found that her first essay with legitimate drama was to be the exact converse of her first essay with the variety stage, dependent, as before, upon a kind of infirmity. Really, the only time she had been able to express herself naturally in public had been when she sang "The Raggle-taggle Gipsies" with the Pink Pierrots, and that had been a failure. However, a tour in the States would give her a new glimpse of life, which at twenty-seven was the important consideration; and perhaps New York, more generous than other capitals, would give her life itself, or one of the only two things in life that mattered, success and love.