Chapter 65
"You're not cultivating this love, like a convalescent patient does for his nurse?" Sylvia demanded.
She stopped herself abruptly, conscious that every question she put to him was ultimately being put to herself.
"Did I ever not love you?" he asked. "It was you that grew tired of me.
It was you that sent me away."
"Don't pretend that all these years you've been waiting for me to come back," she scoffed.
"Of course not. What I'm trying to explain is that we can start now where we left off; that is, if you will."
He held out his hand half timidly.
"And if I won't?"
The hand dropped again to his side, and there was so much wounded sensitiveness in the slight gesture that Sylvia caught him to her as if he were a child who had fallen and needed comforting.
"When I first put my head on your shoulder," she murmured. "Oh, how well I can remember the day--such a sparkling day, with London spread out like life at our feet. Now we're in the middle of New York, but it seems just as far away from us two as London was that day--and life," she added, with a sigh.
CHAPTER XIV
Circ.u.mstances seemed to applaud almost immediately the step that Sylvia had taken. There was no long delay caused by looking for work in New York, which might have destroyed romance by its interposition of fretful hopes and disappointments. A variety company was going to leave in November for a tour in eastern Canada. At least two months would be spent in the French provinces, and Sylvia's bilingual accomplishment was exactly what the manager wanted.
"I'm getting on," she laughed. "I began by singing French songs with an English accent; I advanced from that to acting English words with a French accent; now I'm going to be employed in doing both. But what does it matter? The great thing is that we should be together."
That was where Arthur made the difference to her life; he was securing her against the loneliness that at twenty-eight was beginning once more to haunt her imagination. What did art matter? It had never been anything but a refuge.
Arthur himself was engaged to sing, and though he had not such a good voice as Claude Raglan, he sang with much better taste and was really musical. Sylvia was annoyed to find herself making comparisons between Claude and Arthur. It happened at the moment that Arthur was fussing about his number on the program, and she could not help being reminded of Claude's att.i.tude toward his own artistic importance. She consoled herself by thinking that it should always be one of her aims to prevent the likeness growing any closer; then she laughed at herself for this resolve, which savored of developing Arthur, that process she had always so much condemned.
They opened at Toronto, and after playing a week Arthur caught a chill and was out of the program for a fortnight; this gave Sylvia a fresh opportunity of looking after him; and Toronto in wet, raw weather was so dreary that, to come back to the invalid after the performance, notwithstanding the ineffable discomfort of the hotel, was to come back home. During this time Sylvia gave Arthur a history of the years that had gone by since they parted, and it puzzled her that he should be so jealous of the past. She wondered why she could not feel the same jealousy about his past, and she found herself trying to regret that red-haired girl and many others on account of the obvious pleasure such regrets afforded Arthur. She used to wonder, too, why she always left out certain incidents and obscured certain aspects of her own past, whether, for instance, she did not tell him about Michael Fane on her own account or because she was afraid that Arthur would perceive a superficial resemblance between himself and Claude and a very real one between herself and Lily, or because she would have resented from Arthur the least expression, not so much of contempt as even of mild surprise, at Michael's behavior. Another subject she could never discuss with Arthur was her mother's love for her father, notwithstanding that his own mother's elopement with a groom must have prevented the least criticism on his side. Here again she wondered if her reserve was due to loyalty or to a vague sense of temperamental repet.i.tion that was condemning her to stand in the same relation to Arthur as her mother to her father. She positively had to run away from the idea that Arthur had his prototype; she was shutting him up in a box and scarcely even looking at him, which was as good as losing him altogether, really. Even when she did look at him she handled him with such exaggerated carefulness, for fear of his getting broken, that all the pleasure of possession was lost. Perhaps she should have had an equal anxiety to preserve intact anybody else with whom she might have thrown in her lot; but when she thought over this att.i.tude it was dismaying enough and seemed to imply an incapacity on her part to enjoy fully anything in life.
"I've grown out of being destructive; at least I think I have. I wonder if the normal process from Jacobinism to the intense conservatism of age is due to wisdom, jealousy,
"Arthur, what are your politics?" she asked, aloud.
He looked up from the game of patience he was playing, a game in which he was apt to attribute the pettiest personal motives to the court-cards whenever he failed to get out.
"Politics?" he echoed, vaguely. "I don't think I ever had any. I suppose I'm a Conservative. Oh yes, certainly I'm a Conservative. That infernal knave of hearts is covered now!" he added, in an aggrieved voice.
"Well, I didn't cover it," said Sylvia.
"No, dear, of course you didn't. But it really is a most extraordinary thing that I always get done by the knaves."
"You share your misfortune with the rest of humanity, if that's any consolation."
The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Orlone. He was a huge Neapolitan with the countenance of a gigantic and swarthy Punch, who had been trying to get back to Naples for twenty years, but had been prevented at first by his pa.s.sion for gambling and afterward by an unwilling wife and a numerous family. Orlone made even Toronto cheerful, and before he had come two paces into a room Sylvia always began to laugh. He never said anything deliberately funny except on the stage, but laughter emanated from him infectiously, as yawning might. Though he had spent twenty years in America, he still spoke the most imperfect English; and when he and Sylvia had done laughing at each other they used to laugh all over again, she at his English, he at her Italian.
When they had finished laughing at that Orlone used to swear marvelously for Sylvia's benefit whenever she should again visit Sirene; and she would teach him equally tremendous oaths in case he should ever come to London. When they had finished laughing at this, Orlone would look over Arthur's shoulder and, after making the most ridiculous gestures of caution, would finally burst out into an absolute roar of laughter right in Arthur's ear.
"_Pazienza_," Sylvia would say, pointing to the outspread cards.
"_Brava signora! Come parla bene!_"
And of course this was obviously so absurd a statement that it would set them off laughing again.
"You are a pair of lunatics," Arthur would protest; he would have liked to be annoyed at his game's being interrupted, but he was powerless to repulse Orlone's good humor.
When they returned to New York in the spring and Sylvia looked back at the tour, she divined how much of her pleasure in it had been owed to Orlone's all-pervading mirth. He had really provided the robust and full-blooded contrast to Arthur that had been necessary. It was not exactly that without him their existence together would have been insipid--oh no, there was nothing insipid about Arthur, but one appreciated his delicacy after that rude and ma.s.sive personality. When they had traveled over leagues of snow-covered country, Orlone had always lightened the journey with gay Neapolitan songs, and sometimes with tender ones like "Torno di Surriento." It was then that, gazing out over the white waste, she had been able to take Arthur's hand and sigh to be sitting with him on some Sirenian cliff, to smell again the rosemary and crumble with her fingers the sunburnt earth. But this capacity of Orlone's for conjuring up the long Parthenopean sh.o.r.e was nothing more than might have been achieved by any terra-cotta Silenus in a provincial museum. After Silenus, what nymph would not turn to Hylas somewhat gratefully? It had been the greatest fun in the world to drive in tinkling sledges through Montreal, with Orlone to tease the driver until he was as sore as the head of the bear that in his fur coat he resembled; it had been fun to laugh with Orlone in Quebec and Ottawa and everywhere else; but after so much laughter it had always been particularly delightful to be alone again with Arthur, and to feel that he too was particularly enjoying being alone with her.
"I really do think we get on well together," she said to him.
"Of course we do."
And was there in the way he agreed with her just the least suggestion that he should have been surprised if she had not enjoyed his company, an almost imperceptible hint of complacency, or was it condescension?
"I really must get out of this habit of poking my nose into other people's motives," Sylvia told herself. "I'm like a horrid little boy with a new penknife. Arthur could fairly say to me that I forced myself upon him. I did really. I went steaming into the Auburn Hotel like a salvage-tug. There's the infernal side of obligations--I can't really quite free myself from the notion that Arthur ought to be grateful to me. He's in a false position through no fault of his own, and he's behaving beautifully. It's my own cheap cynicism that's to blame. I wish I could discover some mental bitter aloes that would cure me of biting my mind, as I cured myself of biting my nails."
Sylvia was very glad that Arthur succeeded in getting an engagement that spring to act, and that she did not; she was really anxious to let him feel that she should be dependent on him for a while. The result would have been entirely satisfactory but for one flaw--the increase in Arthur's sense of his own artistic importance. Sylvia would not have minded this so much if he had possessed enough of it to make him oblivious of the world's opinion, but it was always more of a vanity than a pride, chiefly concerned with the personal impression he made. It gave him much more real pleasure to be recognized by two shop-girls on their afternoon out than to be praised by a leading critic. Sylvia would have liked him to be equally contemptuous of either form of flattery, but that he should revel in both, and actually esteem more valuable the recognition accorded him by a shop-girl's backward glance and a nudge from her companion seemed to be lamentable.
"I don't see why you should despise me for being pleased," Arthur said.
"I'm only pleased because it's a proof that I'm getting known."
"But they'd pay the same compliment to a man with a wen on his nose."
"No doubt, but also to any famous man," Arthur added.
Sylvia could have screamed with irritation at his lack of any sense of proportion. Why could he not be like Jack Airdale, who had never suffered from any illusion that what he was doing, so far as art was concerned, was not essentially insignificant? Yet, after all, was she not being unreasonable in paying so much attention to a childish piece of vanity that was inseparable from the true histrionic temperament?
"I'm sorry, Arthur. I think I'm being unfair to you. I only criticize you because I want you to be always the best of you. I see your point of view, but I was irritated by the giggles."
"I wasn't paying the least attention to the girls."
"Oh, I wasn't jealous," she said, quickly. "Oh no, darling Arthur, even with the great affection that I have for you, I shall never be able to be jealous of your making eyes at shop-girls."
When Arthur's engagement seemed likely to come to an end in the summer, they discussed plans and decided to take a holiday in the country, somewhere in Maine or Vermont. Arthur, as usual, set the scene beforehand, but as he set it quite in accord with Sylvia's taste she did not mind. Indeed, their holiday in Vermont on the borders of Lake Champlain was as near as she ever got to being perfectly happy with Arthur--happy, that is, to the point of feeling like a chill the prospect of separation. Sylvia was inclined to say that all Arthur's faults were due to the theater, and that when one had him like this in simple surroundings the best side of him was uppermost and visible, like a spun coin that shows a simple head when it falls.
Sylvia found that she had brought with her by chance the ma.n.u.script of the poems given to her by the outcast Englishman in Paris, and Arthur was very anxious that she should come back to her idea of rendering these. He had already composed a certain number of unimportant songs in his career, but now the Muses smiled upon him (or perhaps it might be truer to speak of her own smiles, Sylvia thought) with such favor that he set a dozen poems to the very accompaniment they wanted, the kind of music, moreover, that suited Sylvia's voice.
"We must get these done in New York," he said; but that week a letter came from Olive Airdale, and Sylvia had a sudden longing for England.
She did not think she would make an effort to do anything in America.
The truth was that she had supplemented the Englishman's poems with an idea of her own to give impressions gathered from her own life. It was strange how abruptly the longing to express herself had arrived, but it had arrived, with a force and fierceness that were undeniable. It had come, too, with that authentic fever of secrecy that she divined a woman must feel in the first moment of knowing that she has conceived. She could not have imparted her sense of creation to any one else; such an intimacy of revelation was too shocking to be contemplated. Somehow she was sure that this strange shamefulness was right and that she was ent.i.tled to hug within herself the conception that would soon enough be turned to the travail of birth.
"By, Jove! Sylvia, this holiday _has_ done you good!" Arthur exclaimed.
She kissed him because, ignorant though he was of the true reason, she owed him thanks for her looks.