Chapter 58
"Obligation! Obligation! Don't you dare to talk about obligations to me.
I don't believe in obligations. Am I to understand that for the sake of your unworthy--well, it can't be dignified with the word--pride, Olive is to be kept in London throughout the spring?"
Jack protested he had been talking about the loan to himself. Olive's obligation would be a different one.
"Jack, have you ever seen a respectable woman throw a sole Morny across a restaurant? Because you will in one moment. Amen to the whole discussion. Please! The only thing you've got to do is to insist on Olive's coming with me. Then while she's away you must be a good little actor and act away as hard as you know how, so that you can be married next June as a present to me on my twenty-sixth birthday."
"You're the greatest dear," said Jack, fervently.
"Of course I am. But I'm waiting."
"What for?"
"Why, for an exhortation to matrimony. Haven't you noticed that people who are going to get married always try to persuade everybody else to come in with them? I'm sure human co-operation began with paleolithic bathers."
So Olive and Sylvia left England for Sirene.
"I'd like to be coming with you," said Mrs. Gainsborough at Charing Cross. "But I'm just beginning to feel a tiddley-bit stiff, and well, there, after Morocco, I shouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a cannibal island, and it's too late for me to start in being a Robinson Crusoe, which reminds me that when I took Mrs. Beardmore to the Fulham pantomime last night it was d.i.c.k Whittington. And upon my soul, if he didn't go to Morocco with his cat. 'Well,' I said to Mrs. Beardmore, 'it's not a bit like it.' I told her that if d.i.c.k Whittington went there now he wouldn't take his cat with him. He'd take a box of Keating's.
Somebody behind said, 'Hush.' And I said, 'Hush yourself. Perhaps _you've_ been to Morocco?' Which made him look very silly, for I don't suppose he's ever been further East than Aldgate in his life. We had no more 'hushes' from him, I can tell you; and Mrs. Beardmore looked round at him in a very lady-like way which she's got from being a housekeeper, and said, 'My friend _has_ been to Morocco.' After that we la-la'd the chorus in peace and quiet. Good-by, duckies, and don't gallivant about too much."
Sylvia had brought a bagful of books about the Roman emperors, and Olive had brought a number of anthologies that made up by the taste of the binder for the lack of it in the compiler. They were mostly about love.
To satisfy Sylvia's historical pa.s.sion a week was spent in Rome and another week in Naples. She told Olive of her visit to Italy with Philip over seven years ago, and, much to her annoyance, Olive poured out a good deal of emotion over that hapless marriage.
"Don't you feel any kind of sentimental regret?" she asked while they were watching from Posilipo the vapors of Vesuvius rose-plumed in the wintry sunset. "Surely you feel softened toward it all now. Why, I think I should regret anything that had once happened in this divinely beautiful place."
"The thing I remember most distinctly is Philip's having read somewhere that the best way to get rid of an importunate guide was to use the local negative and throw the head back instead of shaking it. The result was that Philip used to walk about as if he were gargling. To annoy him I used to wink behind his back at the guides, and naturally with such encouragement his local negative was absolutely useless."
"I think you must have been rather trying, Sylvia dear."
"Oh, I was--infernally trying, but one doesn't marry a child of seventeen as a sedative."
"I think it's all
Sylvia had rather a shock, a few days after they had reached Sirene, when she saw Miss Horne and Miss Hobart drive past on the road up to Anasirene, the green rival of Sirene among the clouds to the west of the island. She made inquiries at the pension and was informed that two sisters Miss Hobart-Horne, English millionaires many times over, had lived at Sirene these five years. Sylvia decided that it would be quite easy to avoid meeting them, and warned Olive against making friends with any of the residents, on the plea that she did not wish to meet people whom she had met here seven years ago with her husband. In the earlier part of the spring they stayed at a pension, but Sylvia found that it was difficult to escape from people there, and they moved up to Anasirene, where they took a _villino_ that was cut off from all dressed-up humanity by a sea of olives. Here it was possible to roam by paths that were not frequented save by peasants whose personalities so long attuned to earth had lost the power of detaching themselves from the landscape and did not affect the onlooker more than the movement of trees or the rustle of small beasts. Life was made up of these essentially undisturbing personalities set in a few pictures that escaped from the swift southern spring: anemones splashed out like wine upon the green corn; some girl with slanting eyes that regarded coldly a dead bird in her thin brown hand; red-beaded cherry-trees that threw shadows on the tawny wheat below; wind over the olives and the sea, wind that shook the tresses of the broom and ruffled the scarlet poppies; then suddenly the first cicala and eternal noon.
It would have been hard to say how they spent these four months, Sylvia thought.
"Can you bear to leave your beloved trees, your namesakes?" she asked.
"Jack is getting impatient," said Olive.
"Then we must fade out of Anasirene just as one by one the flowers have all faded."
"I don't think I've faded much," Olive laughed. "I never felt so well in my life, thanks to you."
Jack and Olive were married at the end of June. It was necessary to go down to a small Warwicks.h.i.+re town and meet all sorts of country people that reminded Sylvia of Green Lanes. Olive's father, who was a solicitor, was very anxious for Sylvia to stay when the wedding was over. He was cheating the G.o.ds out of half their pleasure in making him a solicitor by writing a history of Warwicks.h.i.+re worthies. Sylvia had so much impressed him as an intelligent observer that he would have liked to retain her at his elbow for a while. She would not stay, however. The particular song that the sirens had sung to her during her sojourn in their territory was about writing a book. They called her back now and flattered her with a promise of inspiration. Sylvia was not much more ready to believe in sirens than in mortals, and she resisted the impulse to return. Nevertheless, with half an idea of scoring off them by writing the book somewhere else, she settled down in Mulberry Cottage to try: the form should be essays, and she drew up a list of subjects:--
1. _Obligations.
Judiac like the rest of our moral system; post obits on human grat.i.tude_.
2. _Friends.h.i.+p.
A flowery thing. Objectionable habit of keeping pressed flowers_.
3. _Marriage.
Judiac. Include this with obligations; nothing wrong with the idea of marriage. The marriage of convenience probably more honest than the English marriage of so-called affection. Levi the same as Lewis_.
4. _Gambling.
A moral occupation that brings out the worst side of everybody_.
5. _Development.
Exploiting human personality. Judiac, of course_.
6. _Acting.
A low art form; oh yes, very low; being paid for what the rest of the world does for nothing_.
7. _Prost.i.tution.
Selling one's body to keep one's soul. This is the meaning of the sins that were forgiven to the woman because she loved much. One might say of most marriages that they were selling one's soul to keep one's body_.
Sylvia found that when she started to write on these and other subjects she knew nothing about them; the consequence was that summer pa.s.sed into autumn and autumn into winter while she went on reading history and philosophy. For pastime she played baccarat at Curzon Street and lost six hundred pounds. In February she decided that, so much having been written on the subjects she had chosen, it was useless to write any more. She went to stay with Jack and Olive, who were now living in West Kensington. Olive was expecting a baby in April.
"If it's a boy, we're going to call him Sylvius. But if it's a girl, Jack says we can't call her Sylvia, because for us there can never be more than one Sylvia."
"Call her Argentina."
"No, we're going to call her Sylvia Rose."
"Well, I hope it'll be a boy," said Sylvia. "Anyway, I hope it'll be a boy, because there are too many girls."
Olive announced that she had taken a cottage in the country close to where her people lived, and that Sylvius or Sylvia Rose was to be born there; she thought it was right.
"I don't know why childbirth should be more moral in the country,"
Sylvia said.
"Oh, it's nothing to do with morals; it's on account of baby's health.
You will come and stay with me, won't you?"
In March, therefore, Sylvia went down to Warwicks.h.i.+re with Olive, much to the gratification of Mr. Fanshawe. It was a close race whether he would be a grandfather or an author first, but in the end Mr. Fanshawe had the pleasure of placing a copy of his work on Warwicks.h.i.+re worthies in the hands of the monthly nurse before she could place in his arms a grandchild. Three days later Olive brought into the world a little girl and a little boy. Jack was acting in Dundee. The problem of nomenclature was most complicated. Olive had to think it all out over again from the beginning. Jack had to be consulted by telegram about every change, and on occasions where accuracy was all-important, the post-office clerks were usually most careless. For instance, Mr. Fanshawe thought it would be charming to celebrate the forest of Arden by calling the children Orlando and Rosalind; Jack thereupon replied:
Do not like Rosebud. What will boy be called. Suggest Palestine.
First name arrived Ostend. If Oswald no.
"Palestine!" exclaimed Olive.