The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 29

"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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 encourage a 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 into her 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 d.a.m.nably 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.

CHAPTER XIV.

Circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude 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 week Arthur 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 repet.i.tion 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 att.i.tude 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 Jacobinism to 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 pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.sive 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 sh.o.r.e 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 she had 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 that what 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 ma.n.u.script 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 she would 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 ent.i.tled to hug within herself the conception that would soon enough be turned to the travail of birth.

"By, Jove! Sylvia, this holiday has done 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 emanc.i.p.ation from the social decencies. Don't worry me, Arthur. It's all much too complicated to explain, but I'll tell you one thing, 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 there is something 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."