The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 4

"He's a Venetian. That's the costume of a gondolier, my dear boy. My friend who is giving the reception dresses all his servants like gondoliers. So much more picturesque than a horrible housemaid."

Sylvia regarded this exotic Clara with considerable interest; the only other Venetian product of which she had hitherto been aware was blinds.

The house, which smelt strongly of incense and watered flowers, awed Sylvia with its luxury, and she began to regret having put foot in a place where it was so difficult to know on what she was intended to tread. However, since Mr. Corydon seemed to walk everywhere without regard for the softness of the carpets, Sylvia made up her mind to brave the silent criticism of the gondolier and follow up-stairs in his footsteps. Mr. Corydon took her arm and introduced her to a large room where a fume of cigarette smoke and incense blurred the outlines of the numerous guests that sat about in listening groups, while some one played the grand piano. There were many low divans round the room, to one of which Mr. Corydon guided Sylvia, and while the music continued she had an opportunity of studying her fellow-guests. They were mostly young men of about eighteen, rather like the young men at the Emperor's reception; but there were also several middle-aged men of the same type as Mr. Corydon, one of whom came across and shook hands with them both when the music stopped.

"So glad you've come to see me," he said in a voice that sounded as if each word were being delicately fried upon his tongue. "Aren't you going to smoke a cigarette? These are Russian. Aren't they beautiful to look at?"

He proffered a green cigarette-case. Sylvia, who felt that she must take advantage of this opportunity to learn something about a sphere of life which was new to her, asked him what it was made of.

"Jade, my dear. I brought such heaps of beautiful jade back with me from China. I've even got a jade toilet-set. My dear, it was dreadfully expensive."

He giggled. Sylvia, blowing clouds of smoke from her cigarette, thought dreamily what funny things her father would have said about him.

"Raymond's going to dance for us," he said, turning to Corydon. "Isn't it too sweet of him?"

At that moment somebody leaped into the middle of the room with a wild scream and began to throw himself into all sorts of extraordinary att.i.tudes.

"Oh, Raymond, you're too wonderful!" the host e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "You make me feel quite Bacchic."

Sylvia was not surprised that anybody should feel "backache" (she had thus understood her host) in the presence of such contortions. The screaming Raymond was followed into the arena by another lightly clad and equally shrill youth called Sydney, and both of them flung themselves into a choric frenzy, chasing each other round and round, sawing the air with their legs, and tearing roses from their hair to fling at the guests, who flung them back at the dancers. Suddenly Raymond collapsed upon the carpet and began to moan.

"What's the matter, my dear?" cried the host, rushing forward and kneeling to support the apparently agonized youth in his arms.

"Oh, my foot!" Raymond wailed. "I've trodden on something."

"He's trodden on a thorn. He's trodden on a thorn," everybody said at once.

Raymond was borne tenderly to a divan, and was so much petted that Sydney became jealous and began to dance again, this time on the top of the piano. Presently everybody else began to dance, and Mr. Corydon would have liked to dance with Sylvia; but she declined. Gondoliers entered with trays of liqueurs, and Sylvia, tasting creme de menthe for the first time, found it so good that she drank four gla.s.ses, which made her feel rather drowsy. New guests were continually arriving, to whom she did not pay much attention until suddenly she recognized the baron with G.o.dfrey Hurndale, who at the same moment recognized her. The baron rushed forward and seized Sylvia's arm. She thought he was going to drag her back by force to Mrs. Meares to answer for the missing rent, but he began to arch his unoccupied arm like an excited swan, and call out in his high, mincing voice: "Blackmailers-s-s! blackmailers-s-s!"

"They blackmailed me out of four hundred pounds," said Hurndale.

"Who brought him here?" the baron cried. "It's-s-s true. G.o.dfrey has been persecuted by these horrid people. Blackmailers-s-s!"

All the other guests gathered round Sylvia and behaved like angry women trying to mount an omnibus. Mr. Corydon had turned very pale and was counting his visiting-cards. Sylvia could not understand the reason for all this noise; but vaguely through a green mist of creme de menthe she understood that she was being attacked on all sides and began to get annoyed. Somebody pinched her arm, and without waiting to see who it was she hit the nearest person within reach, who happened to be Mr. Corydon. His visiting-cards fell on the floor, and he groveled on the carpet trying to sweep them together. Sylvia followed her attack on Mr. Corydon by treading hard on Sydney's bare toes, who thereupon slapped her face; presently everybody was pushing her and pinching her and hustling her, until she got in such a rage and kicked so furiously that her enemies retired.

"Who brought him here?" G.o.dfrey Hurndale was demanding. "I tell you he belongs to a gang of blackmailers."

"Most dreadful people," the baron echoed.

"Antonio! Domenico!" the host cried.

Two gondoliers entered the room, and at a word from their master they seized Sylvia and pushed her out into the street, flinging her coat and cap after her. By this time she was in a blind fury, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing the bag of chestnuts from her pocket, she flung it with all her force at the nearest window and knew the divine relief of starring the pane.

An old lady that was pa.s.sing stopped and held up her hands.

"You wicked young rascal, I shall tell the policeman of you," she gasped, and began to belabor Sylvia with her umbrella.

Such unwarrantable interference was not to be tolerated; Sylvia pushed the old lady so hard that she sat down heavily in the gutter. n.o.body else was in sight, and she ran as fast as she could until she found an omnibus, in which she traveled to Waterloo Bridge. There she bought fifty more chestnuts and walked slowly back to Kennington Park Road, vainly trying to find an explanation of the afternoon's adventure.

Her father and Monkley were not back when Sylvia reached home, and she sat by the fire in the twilight, munching her chestnuts and pondering the whole extraordinary business. When the others came in she told her story, and Jimmy looked meaningly at her father.

"Shows how careful you ought to be," he said. Then turning to Sylvia, he asked her what on earth she thought she was doing when she broke the window.

"Suppose you'd been collared by the police, you little fool. We should have got into a nice mess, thanks to you. Look here, in future you're not to speak to people in the street. Do you hear?"

Sylvia had no chestnuts left to throw at Jimmy, so in her rage she took an ornament from the mantelpiece and smashed it on the fender.

"You've got the breaking mania," said Henry. "You'd better spend the next money you've got on cocoanuts instead of chestnuts."

"Oh, ta gueule! I'm not going to be a boy any longer."

CHAPTER III.

While her hair was growing long again Sylvia developed a taste for reading. She had nothing else to do, for it was not to be supposed that with her head cropped close she could show herself to the world in petticoats. Her refusal any longer to wear male attire gave Monkley and her father an excuse to make one of their hurried moves from Kennington Park Road, where by this time they owed enough money to justify the trouble of evading payment. Henry had for some time expressed a desire to be more central; and a partially furnished top floor was found in Fitzroy Street, or, as the landlord preferred to call it, a self-contained and well-appointed flat. The top floor had certainly been separated from the rest of the house by a wooden part.i.tion and a door of its own, which possibly justified the first half of the description, but the good appointments were limited to a bath that looked like an old palette, and a geyser that was not always safe according to Mrs. Bullwinkle, a decrepit charwoman, left behind by the last tenants, together with some under-linen and two jars containing a morbid growth that may formerly have been pickles.

"How d'ye mean, not safe?" Henry asked. "Is it liable to blow up?"

"It went off with a big bang last April and hasn't been lit since," the charwoman said. "But perhaps it 'll be all right now. The worst of it is I never can remember which tap you put the match to."

"You leave it alone, old lady," Henry advised. "n.o.body's likely to do much bathing in here; from what I can see of it that bath gives more than it gets. What did the last people use it for--growing watercress or keeping chickens?"

"It was a very nice bath once," the charwoman said.

"Do you mean to say you've ever tried it? Go on! You're mixing it up with the font in which you were baptized. There's never been any water in this bath since the flood."

Nevertheless, however inadequately appointed, the new abode had one great advantage over any other they had known, which was a large raftered garret with windows at either end that ran the whole depth of the house. The windows at the back opened on a limitless expanse of roofs and chimneys, those in front looked across to a dancing-academy on the top floor but one of the house opposite, a view that gave perpetual pleasure to Sylvia during the long period of her seclusion.

Now that Sylvia had become herself again, her father and Monkley insisted upon her doing the housework, which, as Henry reminded her, she was perfectly able to do on account of the excellent training she had received in that respect from her mother. Sylvia perceived the logic of this and made no attempt to contest it; though she stipulated that Mrs. Bullwinkle should not be considered to be helping her.

"We don't want her," Henry protested, indignantly.

"Well, tell her not to come any more," Sylvia said.

"I've shoved her away once or twice," said Henry. "But I expect the people here before us used to give her a saucer of milk sometimes. The best way would be to go out one afternoon and tell her to light the geyser. Then perhaps when we came back she'd be gone for good."

Nevertheless, Mrs. Bullwinkle was of some service to Sylvia, for one day, when she was sadly washing down the main staircase of the house, she looked up from her handiwork and asked Sylvia, who was pa.s.sing at the moment, if she would like some books to read, inviting her down-stairs to take her choice.

"Mr. Bullwinkle used to be a big reader," the charwoman said. "A very big reader. A very big reader indeed he used to be, did Mr. Bullwinkle. In those days he was caretaker at a Congregational chapel in Gospel Oak, and he used to say that reading took his mind off of religion a bit. Otherwise he'd have gone mad before he did, which was shortly after he left the chapel through an argument he had with Pastor Phillips, who wrote his name in the dust on the reading-desk, which upset my old man, because he thought it wasn't all a straightforward way of telling him that his services wasn't considered satisfactory. Yes," said Mrs. Bullwinkle, with a stertorous sniff, "he died in Bedlam, did my old man. He had a very queer mania; he thought he was inside out, and it preyed on his mind. He wouldn't never have been shut up at all if he hadn't of always been undressing himself in the street and putting on his trousers inside out to suit his complaint. They had to feed him with a chube in the end, because he would have it his mouth couldn't be got at through him being inside out. Queer fancies some people has, don't they? Oh, well, if we was all the same, it would be a dull world I suppose."

Sylvia sat up in the big garret and read through one after another of the late Mr. Bullwinkle's tattered and heterogeneous collection. She did not understand all she read; but there were few books that did not give her on one page a vivid impression, which she used to elaborate with her imagination into something that was really a more substantial experience than the book itself. The days grew longer and more sunny, and Sylvia dreamed them away, reading and thinking and watching from her window the little girls pirouette in the shadowy room opposite. Her hair was quite long now, a warm brown with many glinting strands.

In the summer Jimmy and Henry made a good deal of money by selling a number of tickets for a non-existent stand in one of the best positions on the route of the Diamond Jubilee procession; indeed they felt prosperous enough to buy for themselves and Sylvia seats in a genuine stand. Sylvia enjoyed the pageant, which seemed more like something out of a book than anything in real life. She took advantage of the temporary prosperity to ask for money to buy herself new clothes.

"Can't you see other people dressed up without wanting to go and do the same yourself?" Henry asked. "What's the matter with the frock you've got on?"

However, she talked to Monkley about it and had her own way. When she had new clothes, she used to walk about the streets again, but, though she was often accosted, she would never talk to anybody. Yet it was a dull life, really, and once she brought up the subject of getting work.

"Work!" her father exclaimed, in horror. "Good heavens! what will you think of next? First it's clothes. Now it's work. Ah, my dear girl, you ought to have had to slave for your living as I had; you wouldn't talk about work."

"Well, can I have a piano and learn to play?" Sylvia asked.

"Perhaps you'd like the band of the Grenadier Guards to come and serenade you in your bedroom while you're dressing?" Henry suggested.

"Why shouldn't she have a piano?" Monkley asked. "I'll teach her to play. Besides, I'd like a piano myself."

So the piano was obtained. Sylvia learned to play, and even to sing a little with her deep voice; and another regular caller for money was added to the already long list.

In the autumn Sylvia's father fell in love, and brought a woman to live in what was henceforth always called the flat, even by Henry, who had hitherto generally referred to it as The Hammam.

In Sylvia's opinion the advent of Mabel Bannerman had a most vitiating effect upon life in Fitzroy Street. Her father began to deteriorate immediately. His return to England and the unsurveyed life he had been leading for nearly two years had produced an expansion of his personality in every direction. He had lost the shiftless insignificance that had been his chief characteristic in France, and though he was still weak and lacking in any kind of initiative, he had acquired a quaintness of outlook and faculty for expressing it which disguised his radical futility under a veil of humor. He was always dominated by Monkley in practical matters where subordination was reasonable and beneficial, but he had been allowed to preserve his own point of view, that with the progress of time had even come to be regarded as important. When Sylvia was much younger she had always criticized her father's behavior; but, like everybody else, she had accepted her mother's leadership of the house and family as natural and inevitable, and had regarded her father as a kind of spoiled elder brother whose character was fundamentally worthless and whose relation to her mother was the only one imaginable. Now that Sylvia was older, she did not merely despise her father's weakness; she resented the shameful position which he occupied in relation to this intruder. Mabel Bannerman belonged to that full-blown intensely feminine type that by sheer excess of femininity imposes itself upon a weak man, smothering him, as it were, with her emotions and her lace, and destroying by sensuality every trait of manhood that does not directly contribute to the justification of herself. Within a week or two Henry stood for no more in the Fitzroy Street house than a dog that is alternately patted and scolded, that licks the hand of its mistress more abjectly for each new brutality, and that asks as its supreme reward permission to fawn upon her lap. Sylvia hated Mabel Bannerman; she hated her peroxide hair, she hated her full, moist lips, she hated her rounded back and her shining finger-nails spotted with white, she hated with a hatred so deep as to be forever incommunicable each blowsy charm that went to make up what was called "a fine woman"; she hated her inability ever to speak the truth; she hated the way she looked at Monkley, who should have been nothing to her; she hated the sight of her drinking tea in the morning; she hated the smell of her wardrobe and the pink ribbons which she tied to every projection in her bedroom; she hated her affectation of babyishness; she hated the way she would make Henry give money to beggars for the gratification of an impulsive and merely sensual generosity of her own; she hated her embedded garters and smooth legs.

"O G.o.d," Sylvia cried aloud to herself once, when she was leaning out of the window and looking down into Fitzroy Street, "O G.o.d, if I could only throw her into the street and see her eaten by dogs."

Monkley hated her too; that was some consolation. Now often, when he was ready for an expedition, Henry would be unable to accompany him, because Mabel was rather seedy that morning; or because Mabel wanted him to go out with her; or because Mabel complained of being left alone so much. Monkley used to look at him with a savage contempt; and Sylvia used to pray sometimes that he would get angry enough to rush into Mabel's room and pound her, where she lay so softly in her soft bed.

Mabel used to bring her friends to the flat to cheer her up, as she used to say, and when she had filled the room she had chosen as her sitting-room (the garret was not cozy enough for Mabel) with a scented mob of chattering women, she would fix upon one of them as the object of her jealousy, accusing Henry of having looked at her all the evening. There would sometimes be a scene at the moment when half the mob would cl.u.s.ter around Mabel to console her outraged feelings and the rest of it would hover about her rival to a.s.sure her she was guiltless. Sylvia, standing sullenly apart, would ponder the result of throwing a lighted lamp into the middle of the sickly sobbing pandemonium. The quarrel was not so bad as the inevitable reconciliation afterward, with its profuse kissing and interminable explanations that seemed like an orchestra from which Mabel emerged with a plaintive solo that was the signal for the whole scene to be lived over again in maddeningly reiterated accounts from all the women talking at once. Worse even than such evenings were those when Mabel restrained, or rather luxuriously h.o.a.rded up, her jealousy until the last visitor had departed; for then through half the night Sylvia must listen to her pouring over Henry a stream of reproaches which he would weakly try to divert by arguments or more weakly try to dam with caresses. Such methods of treatment usually ended in Mabel's dressing herself and rushing from the bedroom to leave the flat forever. Unfortunately she never carried out her threat.

"Why don't you go?" Sylvia once asked, when Mabel was standing by the door, fully dressed, with heaving breast, making no effort to turn the handle.

"These shoes hurt me," said Mabel. "He knows I can't go out in these shoes. The heartless brute!"

"If you knew those shoes hurt, why did you put them on?" Sylvia asked, scornfully.

"I was too much upset by Harry's treatment of me. Oh, whatever shall I do? I'm so miserable."

Whereupon Mabel collapsed upon the mat and wept black tears, until Henry came and tried to lift her up, begging her not to stay where she might catch cold.

"You know when a jelly won't set?" Sylvia said, when she was recounting the scene to Monkley afterward. "Well, she was just like a jelly and father simply couldn't make her stand up on the plate."

Jimmy laughed sardonically.

These continued altercations between Mabel and Henry led to altercations with their neighbors underneath, who complained of being kept awake at night. The landlord, a fiery little Jew, told them that what between the arrears of rent and the nuisance they were causing to his other tenants he would have to give them notice. Sylvia could never get any money for the purposes of housekeeping except from Jimmy, and when she wanted clothes it was always Jimmy whom she must ask.

"Let's go away," she said to him one day. "Let's leave them here together."

Monkley looked at her in surprise.

"Do you mean that?"

"Of course I mean it."

"But if we left Harry with her he'd starve and she'd leave him in a week."

"Let him starve," Sylvia cried. "He deserves to starve."

"You hard-hearted little devil," Monkley said. "After all, he is your father."

"That's what makes me hate him," Sylvia declared. "He's no right to be my father. He's no right to make me think like that of him. He must be wrong to make me feel as I do about him."

Monkley came close and took her hand. "Do you mean what you said about leaving them and going away with me?"

Sylvia looked at him, and, meeting his eyes, she shook her head. "No, of course I don't really mean it, but why can't you think of some way to stop all this? Why should we put up with it any longer? Make him turn her out into the street."

Monkley laughed. "You are very young, aren't you? Though I've thought once or twice lately that you seemed to be growing up."

Again Sylvia caught his eyes and felt a little afraid, not really afraid, she said to herself, but uneasy, as if somebody she could not see had suddenly opened a door behind her.

"Don't let's talk about me, anyway," she said. "Think of something to change things here."

"I'd thought of a concert-party this summer. Pierrots, you know. How d'ye think your father would do as a pierrot? He might be very funny if she'd let him be funny."

Sylvia clapped her hands. "Oh, Jimmy, it would be such fun!"

"You wouldn't mind if she came too?"

"I'd rather she didn't," Sylvia said. "But it would be different, somehow. We shouldn't be shut up with her as we are here. I'll be able to sing, won't I?"

"That was my idea."

Before Henry met Mabel he would have had a great deal to say about this concert-party; now he accepted Monkley's announcement with a dull equanimity that settled Sylvia. He received the news that he would become a pierrot just as he had received the news that, his nightgown not having been sent back that week by the laundress, he would have to continue with the one he was wearing.

Early summer pa.s.sed away quickly enough in constant rehearsals. Sylvia was pleased to find that she had been right in supposing that the state of domestic affairs would be improved by Jimmy's plan. Mabel turned out to be a good singer for the kind of performance they were going to give, and the amount of emotion she put into her songs left her with less to work off on Henry, who recovered some of his old self and was often really funny, especially in his duologues with Monkley. Sylvia picked out for herself and learned a few songs, most of which were condemned as unsuitable by Jimmy. The one that she liked best and in her own opinion sang best was the "Raggle Taggle Gipsies," though the others all prophesied for it certain failure. Monkley himself played all the accompaniments and by his personality kept the whole show together; he also sang a few songs, which, although he had practically no voice, were given with such point that Sylvia felt convinced that his share in the performance would be the most popular of the lot. Shortly before they were to start on tour, which was fixed for the beginning of July, Monkley decided that they wanted another man who could really sing, and a young tenor known as Claude Raglan was invited to join the party. He was a good-looking youth, much in earnest, and with a tendency toward consumption, of which he was very proud.

"Though what there is to be proud of in losing one of your lungs I don't know. I might as well be proud because I lost a glove the other day."

Henry was severe upon Claude Raglan from the beginning. Perhaps he suspected him of admiring Mabel. There was often much tension at rehearsals on account of Henry's att.i.tude; once, for instance, when Claude Raglan had sung "Little Dolly Daydreams" with his usual romantic fervor, Henry took a new song from his pocket and, having planted it down with a defiant snap on the music-stand, proceeded to sing: "I'll give him Dolly Daydreams Down where the poppies grow; I'll give him Dolly Daydreams, The pride of Idaho. And if I catch him kissing her There's sure to be some strife, Because if he's got anything he wants to give away, Let him come and give it to his wife."

The tenor declared that Henry's song, which was in the nature of a derogatory comment upon his own, could only have the effect of spoiling the more serious contribution.

"What of it?" Henry asked, truculently.

"It seems to me perfectly obvious," Claude said, with an effort to restrain his annoyance.

"I consider that it won't hurt your song at all," Henry declared. "In fact, I think it will improve it. In my opinion it will have a much greater success than yours. In fact, I may as well say straight out that if it weren't for my song I don't believe the audience would let you sing yours more than once. "Cos no one's gwine ter kiss dat gal but me!'" he went on, mimicking the indignant Claude. "No wonder you've got consumption coming on! And the audience will notice there's something wrong with you, and start clearing out to avoid infection. That's where my song will come in. My song will be a tonic. Now don't start breathing at me, or you'll puncture the other lung. Let's try that last verse over again, Jimmy."

In the end, after a long discussion, during which Mabel introduced the most irrelevant arguments, Monkley decided that both songs should be sung, but with a long enough interval between them to secure Claude against the least impression that he was being laughed at.

At last the company, which called itself The Pink Pierrots, was ready to start for the South Coast. It took Monkley all his ingenuity to get out of London without paying for the dresses or the properties, but it was managed somehow; and at the beginning of July they pitched a small tent on the beach at Hastings. There were many rival companies, some of which possessed the most elaborate equipment, almost a small theater with railed-off seats and a large piano; but Sylvia envied none of these its grandeur. She thought that none was so tastefully dressed as themselves, that there was no leader so sure of keeping the attention of an audience as Jimmy was, that no tenor could bring tears to the eyes of the young women on the Marina as Claude could, that no voice could be heard farther off than Mabel's, and that no comedian could so quickly gain the sympathy of that large but unprofitable portion of an audience--the small boys--as her father could.

Sylvia enjoyed every moment of the day from the time they left their lodgings, pushing before them the portable piano in the morning sunshine, to the journey home after the last performance, which was given in a circle of rosy lantern-light within sound of the sea. They worked so hard that there was no time for quarreling except with compet.i.tors upon whose preserves they had trespa.s.sed. Mabel was so bent upon fascinating the various patrons, and Henry was so obviously a success only with the unsentimental small boys, that she never once accused him of making eyes even at a nursemaid. Sylvia was given a duet with Claude Raglan, and, whether it was that she was conscious of being envied by many of the girls in the audience or whether the sentimental tune influenced her imagination, she was certainly aware of a faint thrill of pleasure--a hardly perceptible quickening of the heart--every time that Claude took her in his arms to sing the last verse. After they had sung together for a week, Jimmy said the number was a failure and abolished it, which Sylvia thought was very unfair, because it had always been well applauded.