Chapter 44
"Or has.h.i.+sh."
"Ashes? Well, I had a fox-terrier once that died in convulsions from eating c.o.ke, so perhaps it is ashes."
"We must meet him again," said Sylvia. "These queer people outside ordinary life interest me."
"Well, it's interesting to visit a hospital," Mrs. Gainsborough agreed.
"But that doesn't say you want to go twice. Once is enough for that fellow, to my thinking. He's interesting, but uncomfortable, like the top of a 'bus."
Sylvia, however, was determined to pursue her acquaintance with the outcast Englishman. She soon discovered that for years he had been taking drugs and that nothing but drugs had brought him to his present state of abject buffoonery. Shortly before he became friends with Sylvia he had been taken up as a week's amus.e.m.e.nt by some young men who were under the impression that they were seeing Parisian life in his company.
They had been generous to him, and latterly he had been able to drug himself as much as he wanted. The result had been to hasten his supreme collapse. Even in his last illness he would not talk to Sylvia about his youth before he came to Paris, and in the end she was inclined to accept him at his own estimate, a pose that was become a reality.
One evening he seemed more haggard than usual and talked much less; by the twitching of his nostrils, he had been dosing himself hard with cocaine. Suddenly, he stretched his thin hand across the marble table and seized hers feverishly:
"Tell me," he asked. "Are you sorry for me?"
"I think it's an impertinence to be sorry for anybody," she answered.
"But if you mean do I wish you well, why, yes, old son, I wish you very well."
"What I told you once about my coming to Paris to work at art was all lies. I came here because I had to leave nothing else behind, not even a name. You said, one evening when we were arguing about ambition, that if you could only find your line you might do something on the stage. Why don't you recite my poems? Read them through. One or two are in English, but most of them are in French. They are really more sighs than poems.
They require no acting. They want just a voice."
He undid the leather strap that supported his satchel and handed it to Sylvia.
"To-morrow," he said, "if I'm still alive, I'll come here and find out what you think of them. But you've no idea how threatening that 'if' is.
It gets longer and longer. I can't see the end if it anywhere. It was very long last night. The dot of the 'i' was already out of sight. It's the longest 'if' that was ever imagined."
He rose hurriedly and left the cafe; Sylvia never saw him again.
The poems of this strange and unhappy creature formed a record of many years' slow debas.e.m.e.nt. Many of them seemed to her too personal and too poignant to be repeated aloud, almost even to be read to oneself. There was nothing, indeed, to do but burn them, that no one else might comprehend a man's degradation. Some of the poems, however, were objective, and in their complete absence of any effort to impress or rend or horrify they seemed not so much poems as actual glimpses into human hearts. Nor was that a satisfactory definition, for there was no attempt to explain any of the people described in these poems; they were ordinary people of the streets that lived in a few lines. This could only be said of the poems written in French; those in English seemed to her not very remarkable. She wondered if perhaps the less familiar tongue had exacted from him an achievement that was largely fortuitous.
"I've got an idea for a show," Sylvia said to Mrs. Gainsborough. "One or two old folk-songs, and then one of these poems half sung, half recited to an improvised accompaniment. Not more than one each evening."
Sylvia was convinced of her ability to make a success, and spent a couple of weeks in searching for the folk-songs she required.
Lily and Hector came back in the middle of this new idea, and Hector was sure that Sylvia would be successful. She felt that he was too well pleased with himself at the moment not to be uncritically content with the rest of the world, but he was useful to Sylvia in securing an _audition_ for her. The agent was convinced of the inevitable failure of Sylvia's performance with the public, and said he thought it was a pity to waste such real talent on antique rubbish like the songs she had chosen. As for the poems, they were no doubt all very well in their way; he was not going to say he had not been able to listen to them, but the public did not expect that kind of thing. He did not wish to discourage a friend of M. Ozanne; he had by him the rights for what would be three of the most popular songs in Europe, if they were well sung. Sylvia read them through and then sang them. The agent was delighted. She knew he was really pleased because he gave up referring to her as a friend of M.
Ozanne and addressed her directly. Hector advised her to begin with the ordinary stuff, and when she was well known enough to experiment upon the public with her own ideas. Sylvia, who was feeling the need to do something at once, decided to risk an audition at one of the outlying music-halls. She herself declared that the songs were so good in their own way that she could not help making a hit, but the others insisted that the triumph belonged to her.
_"Vous avez vraiment
"You really were awfully jolly," said Lily.
"I didn't understand a word, of course," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "But you looked that wicked--well, really--I thoroughly enjoyed myself."
During the autumn Sylvia had secured engagements in music-halls of the _quartier_, but the agent advised her to take a tour before she ventured to attack the real Paris. It seemed to her a good way of pa.s.sing the winter. Lily and Hector were very much together, and though Hector was always anxious for Sylvia to make a third, she found that the kind of amus.e.m.e.nt that appealed to him was much the same as that which had appealed to the young men who frequented Half Moon Street. It was a life of going to races, at which Hector would pa.s.s ladies without saluting or being saluted, who, he informed Sylvia and Lily afterward, were his aunts or his cousins, and actually on one occasion his mother. Sylvia began to feel the strain of being in the demi-monde but not of it; it was an existence that suited Lily perfectly, who could not understand why Sylvia should rail at their seclusion from the world. Mrs.
Gainsborough began to grow restless for the peace of Mulberry Cottage and the safety of her furniture.
"You never know what will happen. I had a friend once--a Mrs. Beardmore.
She was housekeeper to two maiden ladies in Portman Square--well, housekeeper, she was more of a companion because one of them was stone deaf. One summer they went away to Scarborough, and when they came back some burglars had brought a furniture-van three days running and emptied the whole house, all but the bell-pulls. Drove back, they did, from King's Cross in a four-wheeler, and the first thing they saw was a large board up--TO BE LET OR SOLD. A fine how-de-do there was in Portman Square, I can tell you; and the sister that was deaf had left her ear-trumpet in the train and n.o.body couldn't explain to her what had happened."
So Mrs. Gainsborough, whose fears had been heightened by the repet.i.tion of this tale, went back to London with what she described as a collection of vulgarities for Mrs. Marsham. Sylvia went away on tour.
Sylvia found the life of a music-hall singer on tour very solitary. Her fellow-vagabonds were so much more essentially mountebanks than in England, and so far away from normal existence, that even when she traveled in company because her next town coincided with the next town of other players, she was never able to identify herself with them, as in England she had managed to identify herself with the other members of the chorus. She found that it paid her best to be English, and to affect in her songs an almost excessive English accent. She rather resented the exploitation of her nationality, because it seemed to her the same kind of appeal that would have been made by a double-headed woman or a performing seal. n.o.body wanted her songs to be well rendered so much as unusually rendered; everybody wanted to be surprised by her ability to sing at all in French. But if the audiences wished her to be English, she found that being English off the stage was a disadvantage among these continental mountebanks. Sylvia discovered the existence of a universal prejudice against English actresses, partly on account of their alleged personal uncleanliness, partly on account of their alleged insincerity. On several occasions astonishment was expressed at the trouble she took with her hair and at her capacity for being a good _copaine_; when, later on, it would transpire that she was half French, everybody would find almost with relief an explanation of her apparent unconformity to rule.
Sylvia grew very weary of the monotonous life in which everybody's interest was bounded by the psychology of an audience. Interest in the individual never extended beyond the question of whether she would or would not, if she were a woman; of whether he desired or did not desire, if he were a man. When either of these questions was answered the interest reverted to the audience. It seemed maddeningly unimportant to Sylvia that the audience on Monday night should have failed to appreciate a point which the audience of Tuesday night would probably hail with enthusiasm; yet often she had to admit to herself that it was just her own inability or unwillingness to treat an audience as an individual that prevented her from gaining real success. She decided that every interpretative artist must pander his emotion, his humor, his wit, his movements nightly, and that somehow he must charm each audience into the complacency with which a sophisticated libertine seeks an admission of enduring love from the woman he has paid to satisfy a momentary desire. a.s.suredly the most successful performers in the grand style were those who could conceal even from the most intelligent audiences their professional relation to them. A performer of acknowledged reputation would not play to the gallery with battered wiles and manifest allurements, but it was unquestionable that the foundation of success was playing to the gallery, and that the third-rate performer who flattered these provincial audiences with the personal relation could gain louder applause than Sylvia, who wanted no audience but herself. It was significant how a word of _argot_ that meant a fraud of apparent brilliancy executed by an artist upon the public had extended itself into daily use. Everything was _chic_. It was _chic_ to wear a hat of the latest fas.h.i.+on; it was _chic_ to impress one's lover by a jealous outburst; it was _chic_ to refuse a man one's favors. Everything was chic: it was impossible to think or act or speak in this world of vagabonds without _chic_.
The individualistic life that Sylvia had always led both in private and in public seemed to her, notwithstanding the various disasters of her career, infinitely worthier than this dependency upon the herd that found its most obvious expression in the theater. It was revolting to witness human nature's l.u.s.t for the unexceptionable or its cruel pleasure in the exception. Yet now, looking back at her past, she could see that it had always been her unwillingness to conform that had kept her apart from so much human enjoyment and human gain, though equally she might claim apart from human sorrow and human loss.
"The struggle, of course, would be terrible for a long while," Sylvia said to herself, "if everybody renounced entirely any kind of co-operation or interference with or imitation of or help from anybody else, but out of that struggle might arise the true immortals. A cat with a complete personality is surely higher than a man with an incomplete personality. Anyway, it's quite certain that this _cabotinage_ is for me impossible. I believe that if I p.r.i.c.ked a vein sawdust would trickle out of me now."
In such a mood of cheated hope did Sylvia return to Paris in the early spring; she was about to comment on Lily's usual state of molluscry, by yielding to which in abandoning the will she had lost the power to develop, when Lily herself proceeded to surprise her.
The affection between Hector and Lily had apparently made a steady growth and had floated in an undisturbed and equable depth of water for so long that Lily, like an ambitious water-lily, began to be ambitious of becoming a terrestrial plant. While for nearly a year she had been blossoming apparently without regard for anything but the beauty of the moment, she had all the time been sending out long roots beneath the water, long roots that were growing more and more deeply into the warm and respectable mud.
"You mean you'd like to marry Hector?" Sylvia asked.
"Why, yes, I think I should, rather. I'm getting tired of never being settled."
"But does he want to marry you?"
"We've talked about it often. He hates the idea of not marrying me."
"He'd like to go away with you and live on the top of a mountain remote from mankind, or upon a coral island in the Pacific with nothing but the sound of the surf and the cocoanuts dropping idly one by one, wouldn't he?"
"Well, he did say he wished we could go away somewhere all alone. How did you guess? How clever you are, Sylvia!" Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes.
"My dear girl, when a man knows that it's impossible to be married either because he's married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He's in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons.
I suppose he has also talked of a dream-child--a fairy miniature of his Lily?" Sylvia went on.
"We have talked about a baby," Lily admitted.
"The man with serious intentions talks about the aspect of the nursery and makes reluctant plans to yield, if compelled to, the room he had chosen for his study."
"You make fun of everything," Lily murmured, rather sulkily.
"But, my dear," Sylvia argued, "for me to be able to reproduce Hector's dream so accurately proves that I'm building to the type. I'll speculate further. I'm sure he has regretted the irregular union and vowed that, had he but known at first what an angel of purity you were, he would have died rather than propose it."
Lily sat silent, frowning. Presently she jumped up, and the sudden activity of movement brought home to Sylvia more than anything else the change in her.
"If you promise not to laugh, here are his letters," Lily said, flinging into Sylvia's lap a bundle tied up with ribbon.
"Letters!" Sylvia snapped. "Who cares about letters? The love-letters of a successful lover have no value. When he has something to write that he cannot say to your face, then I'll read his letter. All public blandishments shock me."
Hector was called away from Paris to go and stay with his mother at Aix-les-Bains; for a fortnight two letters arrived every day.
"The snow in Savoy will melt early this year," Sylvia mocked. "It's lucky he's not staying at St.-Moritz. Winter sports could never survive such a furnace."
Then followed a week's silence.