Chapter 64
"Oh, but my mother's different."
"Only because she's less able to afford it than I am," Sylvia pointed out. "Look, she's sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself."
Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother's pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the acc.u.mulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur's expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his att.i.tude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a Bluthner.
Sylvia's contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody's good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.
New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They pa.s.sed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplated a landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.
"I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession," Sylvia said.
"But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers' appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer reading _them_ in bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible."
"But the flaring head-lines," Arthur protested. "You surely don't like them?"
"Oh, but I do!" she avowed. "They're as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?"
"Of course you'd argue black was white," Arthur said.
"Well, that's a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray."
"Most things are gray."
"Oh no, they're not! Some things are. Old men's beards and dirty linen and Tschaikowsky's music and oysters and Wesleyans."
"There you go," he jeered.
"Where do I go?"
"Right off the point," said Arthur, triumphantly. "No woman can argue."
"Oh, but I'm not a woman," Sylvia contradicted. "I'm a mythical female monster, don't you know--one of those queer beasts with claws like hay-rakes and b.r.e.a.s.t.s like peg-tops and a tail like a fish."
"Do you mean a Sphinx?" Arthur asked, in his literal way. He was always rather hostile toward her extravagant fancies, because he thought it dangerous to encourage a woman in much the same way as he would have objected to encouraging a beggar.
"No, I really meant a grinx, which is rather like a Sphinx, but the father was a griffin--the mother in both cases was a minx, of course."
"What was the father of the Sphinx?" he asked, rather ungraciously.
Sylvia clapped her hands.
"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist the question. A sphere--a woman's sphere, of course, which is nearly as objectionable a beast as a lady's man."
"You
"Don't you ever have fancies?" she demanded, mockingly.
"Yes, of course, but practical fancies."
"Practical fancies," Sylvia echoed. "Oh, my dear, it sounds like a fairy in Jaeger combinations! You don't know what fun it is talking rot to you, Arthur. It's like hoaxing a chicken with marbles. You walk away from my conversation with just the same disgusted dignity."
"You haven't changed a bit," Arthur proclaimed. "You're just the same as you were at fifteen."
Sylvia, who had been teasing him with a breath of malice, was penitent at once; after all, he had once run away with her, and it would be difficult for any woman of twenty-eight not to rejoice a little at the implication of thirteen undestructive years.
"That last remark was like a cocoanut thrown by a monkey from the top of the cocoanut-palm," she said. "You meant it to be crus.h.i.+ng, but it was crushed instead, and quite deliciously sweet inside."
All the time that Sylvia had been talking so lightly, while the train was getting nearer and nearer to New York, there had lain at the back of her mind the insistent problem of her relations.h.i.+p to Arthur. The impossibility of their going on together as friends and nothing more had been firmly fixed upon her consciousness for a long time now, and the reason of this was to be sought for less in Arthur than in herself. So far they had preserved all the outward semblances of friends.h.i.+p, but she knew that one look from her eyes deep into his would transform him into her lover. She gave Arthur credit for telling himself quite sincerely that it would be "caddish" to make love to her while he remained under what he would consider a grave obligation; and because with his temperament it would be as much in the ordinary routine of the day to make love to a woman as to dress himself in the morning. She praised his decorum and was really half grateful to him for managing to keep his balance on the very small pedestal that she had provided. She might fairly presume, too, that if she let Arthur fall in love with her he would wish to marry her. Why should she not marry him? It was impossible to answer without accusing herself of a cynicism that she was far from feeling, yet without which she could not explain even to herself her quite definite repulsion from the idea of marrying him. The future, really, now, the very immediate future, must be flung to chance; it was hopeless to arrogate to her forethought the determination of it; besides, here was New York already.
"We'd better go to my old hotel," Sylvia suggested. Was it the reflection of her own perplexity, or did she detect in Arthur's accents a note of relief, as if he too had been watching the Palisades of the Hudson and speculating upon the far horizon they concealed?
They dined at Rector's, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby's toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flas.h.i.+ng from white to red for the hour. This clock without a dial-plate was the quietest of the Gargantuan baby's toys, for it did not strike; one was conscious of the almost pathetic protest against all those other d.a.m.nably noisy toys: one felt he might become so enamoured of its pretty silence that to provide himself with a new diversion he might take to doubling the hours to keep pace with the rapidity of the life with which he played.
"It's almost as if we were walking up Haverstock Hill again," said Arthur.
"And we're grown up now," Sylvia murmured. "Oh, dreadfully grown up, really!"
They walked on for a while in silence. It was impossible to keep back the temptation to cheat time by leaping over the gulf of years and being what they were when last they walked along together like this. Sylvia kept looking over her shoulder at the bland clock hanging in the sky behind them; at this distance the fabric of the tower had melted into the night and was no longer visible, which gave to the clock a strange significance and made it a simulacrum of time itself.
"You haven't changed a bit," she said.
"Do you remember when you told me I looked like a cow? It was after"--he breathed perceptibly faster--"after I kissed you."
She would not ascribe his remembering what she had called him to an imperfectly healed scar of vanity, but with kindlier thoughts turned it to a memento of his affection for her. After all, she had loved him then; it had been a girl's love, but did there ever come with age a better love than that first flushed gathering of youth's opening flowers?
"Sylvia, I've thought about you ever since. When you drove me away from Colonial Terrace I felt like killing myself. Surely we haven't met again for nothing."
"Is it nothing unless I love you?" she asked, fiercely, striving to turn the words into weapons to pierce the recesses of his thoughts and blunt themselves against a true heart.
"Ah no, I won't say that," he cried. "Besides, I haven't the right to talk about love. You've been--Sylvia, I can't tell you what you've been to me since I met you again."
"If I could only believe--oh, but believe with all of me that was and is and ever will be--that I could have been so much."
"You have, you have."
"Don't take my love as a light thing," she warned him. "It's not that I'm wanting so very much for myself, but I want to be so much to you."
"Sylvia, won't you marry me? I couldn't ever take your love lightly.
Indeed. Really."
"Ah, it's not asking me to marry you that means you're serious. I'm not asking you what your intentions are. I'm asking if you want me."
"Sylvia, I want you dreadfully."
"Now, now?" she pressed.
"Now and always."
They had stopped without being aware of it. A trolley-car jangled by, casting transitory lights that wavered across Arthur's face, and Sylvia could see how his eyes were s.h.i.+ning. She dreaded lest by adding a few conventional words he should spoil what he had said so well, but he waited for her, as in the old days he had always waited.