Chapter 35
"Personally," Sylvia said, "I think we're all much the same. Some of us drop our aitches, others our p's and q's; some of us sing flat, the rest sing sharp; and we all look just alike when we're waiting for the train on Sunday morning."
Nevertheless, with all her prevision of a fate upon Lily's conduct, Sylvia did speak to her about the way in which she tolerated the familiarity of the men in the company.
"I suppose you're thinking of Tom," Lily said.
"Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry," Sylvia put in.
"Well. I don't like to seem stuck up," Lily explained. "Tom's always very nice about carrying my bag and getting me tea when we're traveling."
"If I promise to look after the bag," Sylvia asked, "will you promise to discourage Tom?"
"But, my dear, why should you carry my bag when I can get Tom to do it?"
"It bores me to see you and him together," Sylvia explained. "These boys in the company are all very well, but they aren't really men at all."
"I know," Lily said, eagerly. "That's what I feel. They don't seem real to me. Of course, I shouldn't let anybody make love to me seriously."
"What do you call serious love-making?"
"Oh, Sylvia, how you do go on asking questions. You know perfectly well what I mean. You only ask questions to make me feel uncomfortable."
"Just as I might disarrange the cus.h.i.+ons of your chair?"
"I know quite well who's been at you to worry me," Lily went on. "I know it's Dorothy. She's always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn't really mind Tom's kissing me--she's perfectly ready to make use of him herself--but she's always thinking about other people and she's so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I'm used to actors; she isn't. I never bother about her. I don't complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can't she let me alone?
n.o.body ever lets me alone. It's all I've ever asked all my life."
The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension.
Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular.
"Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I've often wondered you've kept your little family together for so long. I've been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I'm not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity."
"Do you remember Victoria Deane?" Sylvia asked.
"Of course I do. She made a big hit and then got married and left the stage. A sweetly pretty little thing, she was. But, as I was saying, dear, in all my experience I never knew two fair girls get through a tour together without falling out, two girls naturally fair, that is, and you mark my words, Lily Haden and Dolly Lonsdale will have a row."
Sylvia was anxious to avert this, because she would have found it hard to choose between their rival claims upon her. She was fonder of Lily, but she was very fond of Dorothy, and she believed that Dorothy might attain real success in her profession. It seemed more worth while to take trouble over Dorothy; yet something warned her that an expense of devotion in that direction would ultimately be, from a selfish point of view, wasted. Dorothy would never consider affection where advancement was concerned; yet was it not just this quality in her that she admired?
There would certainly be an unusual exhilaration in standing behind Dorothy and helping her to rise and rise, whereas with Lily the best that could be expected was to prevent her falling infinitely low.
"How I've changed since I left Philip," she said to herself. "I seem to have lost myself somehow and to have transferred all my interest in life to other people. I suppose it won't last. G.o.d forbid I should become a problem to myself like a woman in a d.a.m.ned novel. Down with introspection, though, Heaven knows, observation in 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea' is not a profitable pastime."
Sylvia bought an eye-gla.s.s next day, and though all agreed with one another in private that it was an affectation, everybody a.s.sured her that she was a girl who could wear an eye-gla.s.s with advantage. Lily thought the cord must be rather a bore.
"It's symbolic," Sylvia declared to the dressing-room.
"I think I'll have my eyes looked at in Sheffield," said Onzie. "There's a doctor there who's very good to pros. I often feel my eyes are getting a bit funny. It may be the same as Sylvia's got."
The
Sylvia, Lily, and Dorothy had rooms in Eden Square, which was the recognized domain of theatrical companies playing in Oxford. Numerous invitations to lunch and tea were received, and Sylvia, who had formed a preconceived idea of Oxford based upon Philip, was astonished how little the undergraduates she met resembled him. Dorothy managed with her usual instinct for the best to secure as an admirer Lord Clarehaven, or, as the other girls preferred to call him with a nicer formality, the Earl of Clarehaven. He invited her with a friend to lunch at Christ Church on the last day. Dorothy naturally chose Sylvia, and, as Lily was already engaged elsewhere, Sylvia accepted. Later in the afternoon Dorothy proposed that the young men should come back and have tea in Eden Square, and Sylvia divined Dorothy's intention of proving to these young men that the actress in her own home would be as capable of maintaining propriety as she had been at lunch.
"We'll buy the cakes on the way," said Dorothy, which was another example of her infallible instinct for the best and the most economical.
Loaded with eclairs, meringues, and chocolates, Dorothy, Sylvia, and their four guests reached Eden Square.
"You'll have to excuse the general untidiness," Dorothy said, with an affected little laugh, flinging open the door of the sitting-room. She would probably have chosen another word for the picture of Lily sitting on Tom's knee in the worn leather-backed arm-chair if she had entered first: unfortunately, Lord Clarehaven was accorded that privilege, and the damage was done. Sylvia quickly introduced everybody, and n.o.body could have complained of the way in which the undergraduates sailed over an awkward situation, nor could much have been urged against Tom, for he left immediately. As for Lily, she was a great success with the young men and seemed quite undisturbed by the turn of events.
As soon as the three girls were alone together, Dorothy broke out:
"I hope you don't think I'll ever live with you again after that disgusting exhibition. I suppose you think just because you gave me an introduction that you can do what you like. I don't know what Sylvia thinks of you, but I can tell you what I think. You make me feel absolutely sick. That beastly chorus-boy! The idea of letting anybody like that even look at you. Thank Heaven, the tour's over. I'm going down to the theater. I can't stay in this room. It makes me blush to think of it. I'll take jolly good care who I live with in future."
Then suddenly, to Sylvia's immense astonishment, Dorothy slapped Lily's face. What torments of mortification must be raging in that small soul to provoke such an unlady-like outburst!
"I should hit her back if I were you, my la.s.s," Sylvia advised, putting up her eye-gla.s.s for the fray; but Lily began to cry and Dorothy flounced out of the room.
Sylvia bent over her in consolation, though her sense of justice made her partly excuse Dorothy's rage.
"How did I know she would bring her beastly men back to tea? She only did it to brag about having a lord to our digs. After all, they're just as much mine as hers. I was sorry for Tom. He doesn't know anybody in Oxford, and he felt out of it with all the other boys going out. He asked me if I was going to turn him down because I'd got such fine friends. I was sorry for him, Sylvia, and so I asked him to tea. I don't see why Dorothy should turn round and say nasty things to me. I've always been decent to her. Oh, Sylvia, you don't know how lonely I feel sometimes."
This appeal was too much for Sylvia, who clasped Lily to her and let her sob forth her griefs upon her shoulder.
"Sylvia, I've got n.o.body. I hate my sister Doris. Mother's dead.
Everybody ran her down, but she had a terrible life. Father used to take drugs, and then he stole and was put in prison. People used to say mother wasn't married, but she was. Only the truth was so terrible, she could never explain. You don't know how she worked. She brought up Doris and me entirely. She used to recite, and she used to be always hard up.
She died of heart failure, and that comes from worry. n.o.body understands me. I don't know what will become of me."
"My dear," Sylvia said, "you know I'm your pal."
"Oh, Sylvia, you're a darling! I'd do anything for you."
"Even carry your own bag at the station to-morrow?"
"No, don't tease me," Lily begged. "If you won't tease me, I'll do anything."
That evening Mr. Keal, with the mighty Mr. Richards himself, came up from London to see the show. The members of the chorus were much agitated. It could only mean that girls were to be chosen for the Vanity production in the autumn. Every one of them put on rather more make-up than usual, acted hard all the time she was on the stage, and tried to study Mr. Richards's face from the wings.
"You and I are one of the 'also rans,'" Sylvia told Lily. "The great man eyed me with positive dislike."
In the end it was Dorothy Lonsdale who was engaged for the Vanity: she was so much elated that she was reconciled with Lily and told everybody in the dressing-room that she had met a cousin at Oxford, Arthur Lonsdale, Lord Cleveden's son.
"Which side of the road are you related to him?" Sylvia asked. Dorothy blushed, but she pretended not to understand what Sylvia meant, and said quite calmly that it was on her mother's side. She parted with Sylvia and Lily very cordially at Paddington, but she did not invite either of them to come and see her at Lonsdale Road.
Sylvia and Lily stayed together at Mrs. Gowndry's in Finborough Road, for it happened that the final negotiations for Sylvia's divorce from Philip were being concluded and she took pleasure in addressing her communications from the house where she had been living when he first met her. Philip was very anxious to make her an allowance, but she declined it; her case was undefended. Lily and she managed to get an engagement in another touring company, which opened in August somewhere on the south coast. About this time Sylvia read in a paper that Jimmy Monkley had been sentenced to three years' penal servitude for fraud, and by an odd coincidence in the same paper she read of the decree nisi made absolute that set Philip and herself free. Old a.s.sociations seemed to be getting wound up. Unfortunately, the new ones were not promising; no duller collection of people had surely ever been gathered together than the company in which she was working at present. Not only was the company tiresome, but Sylvia and Lily failed to meet anywhere on the tour one amusing person. To be sure, Lily thought that Sylvia was too critical, and therefore so alarming that several "nice boys" were discouraged too early in their acquaintances.h.i.+p for a final judgment to be pa.s.sed upon them.
"The trouble is," said Sylvia, "that at this rate we shall never make our fortunes. I stipulate that, if we adopt a gay life, it really will be a gay life. I don't want to have soul-spasms and internal wrestles merely for the sake of being bored."
Sylvia tried to produce Lily as a dancer; for a week or two they worked hard at imitations of the cla.s.sical school, but very soon they both grew tired of it.
"The nearest we shall ever get to jingling our money at this game,"
Sylvia said, "is jingling our landlady's ornaments on the mantelpiece.
Lily, I think we're not meant for the stage. And yet, if I could only find my line, I believe.... I believe.... Oh, well, I can't, and so there's an end of it. But look here, winter's coming on. We've got nothing to wear. We haven't saved a penny. Ruin stares us in the face.