Chapter 32
Sylvia was sorry for stirring up in Mrs. Madden's placid mind old storms. It was painful to see this faded gentlewoman in the little suburban bedroom, blus.h.i.+ng nervously at the unlady-like behavior of long ago. Presently Mrs. Madden pulled herself up and said, with a certain decision: "Yes, but I did marry him."
"Yes, but you hadn't been married already. You hadn't knocked round half the globe for twenty-eight years. It's no good my pretending to be shocked at myself. I don't care a bit what anybody thinks about me, and, anyway, it's done now."
"Surely you'd be happier if you married Arthur after--after that," Mrs. Madden suggested.
"But I'm not in the least unhappy. I can't say whether I shall marry Arthur until I've given my performance. I can't say what effect either success or failure will have on me. My whole mind is concentrated in the Pierian Hall next October."
"I'm afraid I cant understand this modern way of looking at things."
"But there's nothing modern about my point of view, Mrs. Madden. There's nothing modern about the egotism of an artist. Arthur is as free as I am. He has his own career to think about. He does think about it a great deal. He's radically much more interested in that than in marrying me. The main point is that he's free at present. From the moment I promise to marry him and he accepts that promise he won't be free. Nor shall I. It wouldn't be fair on either of us to make that promise now, because I must know what October is going to bring forth."
"Well, I call it very modern. When I was young we looked at marriage as the most important event in a girl's life."
"But you didn't, dear Mrs. Madden. You, or rather your contemporaries, regarded marriage as a path to freedom--social freedom, that is. Your case was exceptional. You fell pa.s.sionately in love with a man beneath you, as the world counts it. You married him, and what was the result? You were cut off by your relations as utterly as if you had become the concubine of a Hottentot."
"Oh, Sylvia dear, what an uncomfortable comparison!"
"Marriage to your contemporaries was a social observance. I'm not religious, but I regard marriage as so sacred that, because I've been divorced and because, so far as I know, my husband is still alive, I have something like religious qualms about marrying again. It takes a cynic to be an idealist; the sentimentalist gets left at the first fence. It's just because I'm fond of Arthur in a perfectly normal way when I'm not immersed in my ambition that I even contemplate the notion of marrying him. I've got a perfectly normal wish to have children and a funny little house of my own. So far as I know at present, I should like Arthur to be the father of my children. But it's got to be an equal business. Personally I think that the Turks are wiser about women than we are; I think the majority of women are only fit for the harem and I'm not sure that the majority wouldn't be much happier under such conditions. The incurable vanity of man, however, has removed us from our seclusion to admire his antics, and it's too late to start shutting us up in a box now. Woman never thought of equality with man until he put the notion into her head."
"I think perhaps supper may be ready," Mrs. Madden said. "It all sounds very convincing as you speak, but I can't help feeling that you'd be happier if you wouldn't take everything to pieces to look at the works. Things hardly ever go so well again afterward. Oh dear, I wish you hadn't lived together first."
"It breaks the ice of the wedding-cake, doesn't it?" said Sylvia.
"And I wish you wouldn't make such bitter remarks. You don't really mean what you say. I'm sure supper must be ready."
"Oh, but I do," Sylvia insisted, as they pa.s.sed out into the narrow little pa.s.sage and down the narrow stairs into the little dining-room. Nevertheless, in Sylvia's mind there was a kindliness toward this little house, almost a tenderness, and far away at the back of her imagination was the vision of herself established in just such another little house.
"But even the Albert Memorial would look all right from the wrong end of a telescope," she said to herself.
One thing was brought home very vividly during her stay in Dulwich, which was the difference between what she had deceived herself into thinking was that first maternal affection she had felt for Arthur and the true maternal love of his mother. Whenever she had helped Arthur in any way, she had always been aware of enjoying the sensation of her indispensableness; it had been an emotion altogether different from this natural selfishness of the mother; it was really one that had always reflected a kind of self-conscious credit upon herself. Here in Dulwich, with this aspect of her affection for Arthur completely overshadowed, Sylvia was able to ask herself more directly if she loved him in the immemorial way of love; and though she could not arrive at a finally positive conclusion, she was strengthened in her resolve not to let him go. Arthur himself was more in love with her than he had ever been, and she thought that perhaps this was due to that sudden and disquieting withdrawal of herself; in the midst of possession he had been dispossessed, and until he could pierce her secret reasons he would inevitably remain deeply in love, even to the point of being jealous of a boy like Lucian Hope. Sylvia understood Arthur's having refused an engagement to tour as juvenile lead in a successful musical piece and his unwillingness to leave her alone in town; he was rewarded, too, for his action, because shortly afterward he obtained a good engagement in London to take the place of a singer who had retired from the cast of the Frivolity Theater. At that rate he would soon find himself at the Vanity Theater itself.
In June Sylvia went back to the Airdales', and soon afterward took rooms near them in West Kensington. It was impossible to continue indefinitely to pretend that Arthur and herself were mere theatrical acquaintances, and one day Olive asked Sylvia if she intended to marry him.
"What do you advise?" Sylvia asked. "There's a triumph, dearest Olive. Have I ever asked your advice before?"
"I like him; Jack likes him, too, and says that he ought to get on fast now; but I don't know. Well, he's not the sort of man I expected you to marry."
"You've had an ideal for me all the time," Sylvia exclaimed. "And you've never told me."
"Oh no, I've never had anybody definite in my mind, but I think I should be able to say at once if the man you had chosen was the right one. Don't ask me to describe him, because I couldn't do it. You used to tease me about marrying a curly-headed actor, but Arthur Madden seems to me much more of a curly-headed actor than Jack is."
"In fact, you thoroughly disapprove of poor Arthur?" Sylvia pressed.
"Oh dear, no! Oh, not at all! Please don't think that. I'm only anxious that you shouldn't throw yourself away."
"Remnants always go cheap," said Sylvia. "However, don't worry. I'll be quite sure of myself before I marry anybody again."
The summer pa.s.sed away quickly in a complexity of arrangements for the opening performance at the Pierian Hall. Sylvia stayed three or four times at Dulwich and grew very fond of Mrs. Madden, who never referred again to the subject of marriage. She also went up to Warwicks.h.i.+re with Olive and the children, much to the pleasure of Mr. Fanshawe, who was now writing a supplementary volume called More Warwicks.h.i.+re Worthies. In London she scarcely met any old friends; indeed, she went out of her way to avoid people like the Clarehavens, because they would not have been interested in what she was doing. By this time Sylvia had reached the point of considering everybody either for the interest and belief he evinced in her success or by the use he could be to her in securing it. The first rapturous egoism of Arthur's own success in London had worn off with time, and he was able to devote himself entirely to running about for Sylvia, which gradually made her regard him more and more as a fixture. As for Lucian Hope, he thought of nothing but the great occasion, and would have fought anybody who had ventured to cast a breath of doubt upon the triumph at hand. The set that he had painted was exactly what Sylvia required, and though both Arthur and Jack thought it would distract the audience's attention by puzzling them, they neither of them on Sylvia's account criticized it at all harshly.
At last in mid-October the very morning of the day arrived, so long antic.i.p.ated with every kind of discussion that its superficial resemblance to other mornings seemed heartless and unnatural. It was absurd that a milkman's note should be the same as yesterday, that servants should shake mats on front-door steps as usual, and that the maid who knocked at Sylvia's door should not break down beneath the weightiness of her summons. Nor, when Sylvia looked out of the window, were Jack and Arthur and Ronald and Lucian pacing with agitated steps the pavement below, an absence of enthusiasm, at any rate on the part of Arthur and Lucian, that hurt her feelings, until she thought for a moment how foolishly unreasonable she was being.
As soon as Sylvia was dressed she went round to the Airdales'; everybody she met on the way inspired her with a longing to confide in him the portentousness of the day, and she found herself speculating whether several business men, who were hurrying to catch the nine-o'clock train, had possibly an intention of visiting the Pierian Hall that afternoon. She was extremely annoyed to find, when she reached the Airdales' house, that neither Jack nor Olive was up.
"Do they know the time?" she demanded of the maid, in a scandalized voice. "Their clock must have stopped."
"Oh no, miss, I don't think so. Breakfast is at ten, as usual. There's Mr. Airdale's dressing-room bell going now, miss. That 'll be for his shaving-water. Shall I say you're waiting to see him?"
What a ridiculous time to begin shaving, Sylvia thought.
"Yes, please," she added, aloud. "Or no, don't bother him; I'll come back at ten o'clock."
Sylvia saw more of the streets of West Kensington in that hour than she had ever seen of them before, and decided that the neighborhood was impossible. Nothing so intolerably monotonous as these rows of stupid and meaningless houses had ever been designed. One after another of them blinked at her in the autumnal suns.h.i.+ne with a fatuous complacency that made her long to ring all the bells in the street. Presently she found herself by the play-fields of St. James's School, where the last boys were hurrying across the gra.s.s like belated ants. She looked
This afternoon at 3 p. m.
SYLVIA SCARLETT IN IMPROVISATIONS.
and would actually have paid, some of them, as much as seven s.h.i.+llings and sixpence to see Sylvia Scarlett. Seven hours and a half: seven s.h.i.+llings and sixpence: 7-1/2 plus 7-1/2 made fifteen. When she was fifteen she had met Arthur. Sylvia's mind rambled among the omens of numbers, and left her audience still undecided between Bond Street and Rumpelmayer's, left it upon the steps of the Pierian Hall, the sport of pa.s.sing traffic, hungry, thirsty, homesick. In seven and a half hours she would know the answer to that breathless question asked a year ago in Vermont. To think that the exact spot on which she had stood when she asked was existing at this moment in Vermont! In seven and a half hours, no, in seven hours and twenty-five minutes; the hands were moving on. It was really terrible how little people regarded the flight of time; the very world might come to an end in seven hours and twenty-five minutes.
"Have you seen Sylvia Scarlett yet?"
"No, we intended to go yesterday, but there were no seats left. They say she's wonderful."
"Oh, my dear, she's perfectly amazing! Of course it's something quite new. You really must go."
"Who is she like?"
"Oh, she's not like anybody else. I'm told she's half French."
"Oh, really! How interesting."
"Good morning! Have you used Pear's soap?"
"V-vi-vin-vino-vinol-vinoli-vinolia."
Sylvia pealed the Airdales' bell, and found Jack in the queer mixed costume which a person wears on the morning of an afternoon that will be celebrated by his best tail-coat.
"My dear girl, you really mustn't get so excited," he protested, when he saw Sylvia's manner.
"Oh, Jack, do you think I shall be a success?"
"Of course you will. Now, do, for goodness' sake, drink a cup of coffee or something."
Sylvia found that she was hungry enough to eat even an egg, which created a domestic crisis, because Sylvius and Rose quarreled over which of them was to have the top. Finally it was adjusted by awarding the top to Sylvius, but by allowing Rose to turn the empty egg upside down for the exquisite pleasure of watching Sylvia tap it with ostentatious greed, only to find that there was nothing inside, after all, an operation that Sylvius watched with critical jealousy and Rose saluted with ecstatic joy. Sylvia's disappointment was so beautifully violent that Sylvius regretted the material choice he had made, and wanted Sylvia to eat another egg, of which Rose might eat the top and he offer the empty sh.e.l.l; but it was too late, and Sylvius learned that often the shadow is better than the substance.
It had been decided in the end that Jack should confine himself to the cares of general management, and Arthur was left without a rival. Sylvia had insisted that he should only sing old English folk-songs, a decision which he had challenged at first on the ground that he required the advertis.e.m.e.nt of more modern songs, and that Sylvia's choice was not going to help him.
"You're not singing to help yourself," she had told him. "You're singing to help me."
In addition to Arthur there was a girl whom Lucian Hope had discovered, a delicate creature with red hair, whose chief claim to employment was that she was starving, though incidentally she had a very sweet and pure soprano voice. Finally there was an Irish pianist whose technique and good humor were alike una.s.sailable.
Before the curtain went up, Sylvia could think of nothing but the improvisations that she ought to have invented instead of the ones that she had. It was a strain upon her common sense to prevent her from canceling the whole performance and returning its money to the audience. The more she contemplated what she was going to do the more she viewed the undertaking as a fraud upon the public. There had never been any chicane like the chicane she was presently going to commit. What was that noise? Who had given the signal to O'Hea? What in h.e.l.l's name did he think he was doing at the piano? The sound of the music was like water running into one's bath while one was lying in bed--nothing could stop it from overflowing presently. Nothing could stop the curtain from rising. At what a pace he was playing that Debussy! He was showing off, the fool! A ridiculous joke came into her mind that she kept on repeating while the music flowed: "Many a minim makes a maxim. Many a minim makes a maxim." How cold it was in the dressing-room, and the music was getting quicker and quicker. There was a knock at the door. It was Arthur. How nice he looked with that red carnation in his b.u.t.tonhole.
"How nice you look, Arthur, in that b.u.t.tonhole."
The flower became tremendously important; it seemed to Sylvia that, if she could go on flattering the flower, O'Hea would somehow be kept at the piano.
"Well, don't pull it to pieces," said Arthur, ruthfully. But it was too late; the petals were scattered on the floor like drops of blood.
"Oh, I'm sorry! Come along back to my dressing-room. I'll give you another flower."
"No, no; there isn't time now. Wait till you come off after your first set."
Now it was seeming the most urgent thing in the world to find another flower for Arthur's b.u.t.tonhole. At all cost the rise of that curtain must be delayed. But Arthur had brought her on the stage and the notes were racing toward the death of the piece. It was absurd of O'Hea to have chosen Debussy; the atmosphere required a ballade of Chopin, or, better still, Schumann's Noveletten. He could have played all the Noveletten. Oh dear, what a pity she had not thought of making that suggestion. The piano would have been scarcely half-way through by now.
Suddenly there was silence. Then there followed the languid applause of an afternoon audience for an unimportant part of the program.
"He's stopped," Sylvia exclaimed, in horror. "What has happened?"
She turned to Arthur in despair, but he had hurried off the stage. Lucian Hope's painted city seemed to press forward and stifle her; she moved down-stage to escape it. The curtain went up and she recoiled as from a chasm at her feet. Why on earth was O'Hea sitting in that idiotic att.i.tude, as if he were going to listen to a sermon, looking down like that, with his right arm supporting his left elbow and his left hand propping up his chin? How hot the footlights were! She hoped nothing had happened, and looked round in alarm; but the fireman was standing quite calmly in the wings. Just as Sylvia was deciding that her voice could not possibly escape from her throat, which had closed upon it like a pair of pincers, the voice tore itself free and went traveling out toward that darkness in front, that nebulous darkness scattered with hands and faces and programs. Like Concetta in a great city, Sylvia was lost in that darkness; she was Concetta. It seemed to her that the applause at the end was not so much approval of Concetta as a welcome to Mrs. Gainsborough; when isolated laughs and volleys of laughter came out of the darkness and were followed sometimes by the darkness itself laughing everywhere, so that O'Hea looked up very personally and winked at her, then Sylvia fell in love with her audience. The laughter increased, and suddenly she recognized at the end of each volley that Sylvius and Rose were supplementing its echoes with rapturous echoes of their own. She could not see them, but their gurgles in the darkness were like a song of nightingales to Sylvia. She ceased to be Mrs. Gainsborough, and began to say three or four of the poems. Then the curtain fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again.
Jack was standing beside her and saying: "Splendid, splendid, splendid, splendid!"
"Delighted, delighted, delighted, delighted!"
"Very good audience! Splendid audience! Delighted audience! Success! Success! Success!"
Really, how wonderfully O'Hea was playing, Sylvia thought, and how good that Debussy was!
The rest of the performance was as much of a success as the beginning. Perhaps the audience liked best Mrs. Gowndry and the woman who smuggled lace from Belgium into France. Sylvius and Rose laughed so much at the audience's laughter at Mrs. Gowndry that Sylvius announced in the ensuing lull that he wanted to go somewhere, a desire which was naturally indorsed by Rose. The audience was much amused, because it supposed that Sylvius's wish was a tribute to the profession of Mrs. Gowndry's husband, and whatever faint doubts existed about the propriety of alluding in the Pierian Hall to a lavatory-attendant were dispersed.
Sylvia forgot altogether about the audience's tea when the curtain fell finally. It was difficult to think about anything with so many smiling people pressing round her on the stage. Several old friends came and reminded her of their existence, but there was no one who had quite such a radiant smile as Arthur Lonsdale.
"Lonnie! How nice of you to come!"
"I say, topping, I mean. What? I say, that's a most extraordinary back-cloth you've got. What on earth is it supposed to be? It reminds me of what you feel like when you're driving a car through a strange town after meeting a man you haven't seen for some time and who's just found out a good brand of fizz at the hotel where he's staying. I was afraid you'd get bitten in the back before you'd finished. I say, Mrs. Gowndry was devilish good. Some of the other lads and la.s.ses were a bit beyond me."
"And how's business?"
"Oh, very good. We've just put the neatest little ninety h. p. torpedo-body two-seater on the market. I'll tootle you down to Brighton in it one Sunday morning. Upon my word, you'll scarcely have time to wrap yourself up before you'll have to unwrap yourself to shake hands with dear old Harry Burnly coming out to welcome you from the Britannia."
"Not married yet, Lonnie?"
"No, not yet. Braced myself up to do it the other day, dived in, and was seized with cramp at the deep end. She offered to be a sister to me and I sank like a stone. My mother's making rather a nuisance of herself about it. She keeps producing girls out of her m.u.f.f like a conjurer, whenever she comes to see me. And what girls! Heather mixture most of them, like Guggenheim's Twelfth of August. I shall come to it at last, I suppose. Mr. Arthur Lonsdale and his bride leaving St. Margaret's, Westminster, under an arch of spanners formed by grateful chauffeurs whom the brilliant and handsome young bride-groom has recommended to many t.i.tled readers of this paper. Well, so long, Sylvia; there's a delirious crowd of admirers waiting for you. Send me a line where you're living and we'll have a little dinner somewhere--"
Sylvia's success was not quite so huge as in the first intoxication of her friends' enthusiasm she had begun to fancy. However, it was unmistakably a success, and she was able to give two recitals a week through the autumn, with certainly the prospect of a good music-hall engagement for the following spring, if she cared to accept it. Most of the critics discovered that she was not as good as Yvette Guilbert. In view of Yvette Guilbert's genius, of which they were much more firmly convinced now than they would have been when Yvette Guilbert first appeared, this struck them as a fairly safe comparison; moreover, it gave their readers an impression that they understood French, which enhanced the literary value of their criticism. To strengthen this belief most of them were inclined to think that the French poems were the best part of Miss Sylvia Scarlett's performance. One or two of the latter definitely recalled some of Yvette Guilbert's early work, no doubt by the number of words they had not understood, because somebody had crackled a program or had shuffled his feet or had coughed. As for the English character studies, or, as some of them carried away by reminiscences of Yvette Guilbert into oblivion of their own language preferred to call them, etudes, they had a certain distinction, and in many cases betrayed signs of an almost meticulous observation, though at the same time, like everybody else doing anything at the present moment except in France, they did not have as much distinction or meticulousness as the work of forerunners in England or contemporaries abroad. Still, that was not to say that the work of Miss Sylvia Scarlett was not highly promising and of the greatest possible interest. The timbre of her voice was specially worthy of notice and justified the italics in which it was printed. Finally, two critics, who were probably sitting next to each other, found a misprint in the program, no doubt in searching for a translation of the poems.
If Sylvia fancied a lack of appreciation in the critics, all her friends were positive that they were wonderful notices for a beginner.
"Why, I think that's a splendid notice in the Telegraph," said Olive. "I found it almost at once. Why, one often has to read right through the paper before one can find the notice."
"Do you mean to tell me that the most self-inebriated egotist on earth ever read right through the Daily Telegraph? I don't believe it. He'd have been drowned like Narcissus."
Arthur pressed for a decision about their marriage, now that Sylvia knew what she had so long wanted to know; but she was wrapped up in ideas for improving her performance and forbade Arthur to mention the subject until she raised it herself; for the present she was on with a new love twice a week. Indeed, they were fascinating to Sylvia, these audiences each with a definite personality of its own. She remembered how she had scoffed in old days at the slavish flattery of them by her fellow-actors and actresses; equally in the old days she had scoffed at love. She wished that she could feel toward Arthur as she felt now toward her audiences, which were as absorbing as children with their little clevernesses and precocities. The difference between what she was doing now and what she had done formerly when she sang French songs with an English accent was the difference between the realism of an old knotted towel that is a baby and an expensive doll that may be a baby but never ceases to be a doll. Formerly she had been a mechanical thing and had never given herself because she had possessed neither art nor truth, but merely craft and accuracy. She had thought that the personality was degraded by depending on the favor of an audience. All that old self-consciousness and false shame were gone. She and her audience communed through art as spirits may commune after death. In the absorption of studying the audience as a separate ent.i.ty, Sylvia forgot that it was made up of men and women. When she knew that any friends of hers were in front, they always remained entirely separate in her mind from the audience. Gradually, however, as the autumn advanced, several people from long ago re-entered her life and she began to lose that feeling of seclusion from the world and to realize the gradual setting up of barriers to her complete liberty of action. The first of these visitants was Miss Ashley, who in her peac.o.c.k-blue gown looked much as she had looked when Sylvia last saw her.
"I could not resist coming round to tell you how greatly I enjoyed your performance," she said. "I've been so sorry that you never came to see me all these years."
Sylvia felt embarra.s.sed, because she dreaded presently an allusion to her marriage with Philip, but Miss Ashley was too wise.
"How's Hornton House!" asked Sylvia, rather timidly. It was like inquiring after the near relation of an old friend who might have died.
"Just the same. Miss Primer is still with me. Miss Hossack now has a school of her own. Miss Pinck became very ill with gouty rheumatism and had to retire. I won't ask you about yourself; you told me so much from the stage. Now that we've been able to meet again, won't you come and visit your old school sometime?"
Sylvia hesitated.
"Please," Miss Ashley insisted. "I'm not inviting you out of politeness. It would really give me pleasure. I have never ceased to think about you all these years. Well, I won't keep you, for I'm sure you must be tired. Do come. Tell me, Sylvia. I should so like to bring the girls one afternoon. What would be a good afternoon to come?"
"You mean, when will there be nothing in the program that--"
"We poor schoolmistresses," said Miss Ashley, with a whimsical look of deprecation.
"Come on Sat.u.r.day fortnight, and afterward I'll go back with you all to Hornton House. I'd love that."
So it was arranged.
On Wednesday of the following week it happened that there was a particularly appreciative audience, and Sylvia became so much enamoured of the laughter that she excelled herself. It was an afternoon of perfect accord, and she traced the source of it to a group somewhere in the middle of the stalls, too far back for her to recognize its composition. After the performance a pack of visiting-cards was brought to the door of her dressing-room. She read: "Mrs. Ian Campbell, Mrs. Ralph Dennison." Who on earth were they? "Mr. Leonard Worsley"-- Sylvia flung open the door, and there they all were, Mr. and Mrs. Worsley, Gladys and Enid, two good-looking men in the background, two children in the foreground.
"Gladys! Enid!"
"Sylvia!"
"Oh, Sylvia, you were priceless! Oh, we enjoyed ourselves no end! You don't know my husband. Ian, come and bow nicely to the pretty lady," cried Gladys.
"Sylvia, it was simply ripping. We laughed and laughed. Ralph, come and be introduced, and this is Stumpy, my boy," Enid cried, simultaneously.
"Fancy, he's a grandfather," the daughters exclaimed, dragging Mr. Worsley forward. He looked younger than ever.
"Hercules is at Oxford, or of course he'd have come, too. This is Proodles," said Gladys, pointing to the little girl.
"Sylvia, why did you desert us like that?" Mrs. Worsley reproachfully asked. "When are you coming down to stay with us at Arbor End? Of course the children are married...." She broke off with half a sigh.
"Oh, but we can all squash in," Gladys shouted.
"Oh, rather," Enid agreed. "The kids can sleep in the coal-scuttles. We sha'n't notice any difference."
"Dears, it's so wonderful to see you," Sylvia gasped. "But do tell me who you all are over again. I'm so muddled."
"I'm Mrs. Ian Campbell," Gladys explained. "And this is Ian. And this is Proodles, and at home there's Groggles, who's too small for anything except pantomimes. And that's Mrs. Ralph Dennison, and that's Ralph, and that's Stumpy, and at home Enid's got a girlie called Barbara. Mother hates being a grandmother four times over, so she's called Aunt Victoria, and of course father's still one of the children. We've both been married seven years."