Chapter 66
"Sylvia, if we go back to England, do let's be married first."
"Why?"
"Why, because it's not fair on me."
"On you?"
"Yes, on me. People will always blame me, of course."
"What has it got to do with anybody else except me?"
"My mother--"
"My dear Arthur," Sylvia interrupted, sharply, "if your mother ran away with a groom, she'll be the first person to sympathize with my point of view."
"I suppose you're trying to be cruel," said Arthur.
"And succeeding, to judge by your dolorous mouth. No, my dear, let the suggestion of marriage come from me. I sha'n't be hurt if you refuse."
"Well, are we to pretend we're married?" Arthur asked, hopelessly.
"Certainly not, if by that you mean that I'm to put 'Mrs. Arthur Madden'
on a visiting-card. Don't look so frightened. I'm not proposing to march into drawing-rooms with a big drum to proclaim my emanc.i.p.ation from the social decencies. Don't worry me, Arthur. It's all much too complicated to explain, but I'll tell you one thing, I'm not going to marry you merely to remove the world's censure of your conduct, and as long as you feel about marrying me as you might feel about letting me carry a heavy bag, I'll never marry you."
"I don't feel a bit like that about it," he protested. "If I could leave you, I'd leave you now. But the very thought of losing you makes my heart stop beating. It's like suddenly coming to the edge of a precipice. I know perfectly well that you despise me at heart. You think I'm a wretched actor with no feelings off the stage. You think I don't know my own mind, if you even admit that I've got a mind at all. But I'm thirty-one. I'm not a boy. I've had a good many women in love with me.
Now don't begin to laugh. I'm determined to say what I ought to have said long ago, and should have said if I hadn't been afraid the whole time of losing you. If I lose you now it can't be helped. I'd sooner lose you than go on being treated like a child. What I want to say is that, though I know you think it wasn't worth while being loved by the women who've loved me, I do think it was. I'm not in the least ashamed of them. Most of them, at any rate, were beautiful, though I admit that all of them put together wouldn't have made up for missing you. You're a thousand times cleverer than I. You've got much more personality. You've every right to consider you've thrown yourself away on me. But the fact remains that you've done it. We've been together now a year. That proves that there _is_ something in me. I'm prouder of this year with you than of all the rest of my life. You've developed me in the most extraordinary way."
"I have?" Sylvia burst in.
"Of course you have. But I'm not going to be treated like a mantis."
"Like a what?"
"A mantis. You can read about it in that French book on insects. The female eats the male. Well, I'm d.a.m.ned well not going to be eaten. I'm not going back to England with you unless you marry me."
"Well, I'm not going to marry you," Sylvia declared.
"Very well, then I shall try to get an engagement on tour and we'll separate."
"So much the better," she said. "I've got a good deal to occupy myself at present."
"Of course you can have the music I wrote for those poems," said Arthur.
"d.a.m.n your music," she replied.
Sylvia was so much obsessed with the conviction of having at last found a medium for expressing herself in art that, though she was vaguely aware of having a higher regard for Arthur at this moment than she had ever had, she could only behold him as a troublesome visitor that was preventing her from sitting down to work.
Arthur went off on tour. Sylvia took an apartment in New York far away up-town and settled down to test her inspiration. In six months she lived her whole life over again, and of every personality that had touched her own and left its mark she made a separate presentation. Her great anxiety was to give to each sketch the air of an improvisation, and in the course of it to make her people reveal their permanent characters rather than their transient emotions. It was really based on the art of the impersonator who comes on with a c.o.c.ked hat, sticks out his neck, puts his hands behind his back, and his legs apart, leans over to the audience, and whispers Napoleon. Sylvia thought she could extend the pleasures of recognition beyond the mere mimicry of externals to a finer mimicry of essentials. She wanted an audience to clap not because she could bark sufficiently like a real
At the end of six months Sylvia had evolved enough improvisations to make a start. She went to bed tired out with the last night's work, and woke up in the morning with a sense of blankness at the realization of there being nothing to do that day. All the time she had been working she had been content to be alone; she had even looked forward to amusing herself in New York when her work was finished. Now the happy moment had come and she could feel nothing but this empty boredom. She wondered what Arthur was doing, and she reproached herself for the way in which she had discarded him. She had been so thrilled by the notion that she was necessary to somebody; it had seemed to her the consummation of so many heedless years. Yet no sooner had she successfully imposed herself upon Arthur than she was eager to think of nothing but herself without caring a bit about his point of view. Now that she could do nothing more with her work until the test of public performance was applied to it, she was bored; in fact, she missed Arthur. The truth was that half the pleasure of being necessary to somebody else had been that he should be necessary to her. But marriage with Arthur? Marriage with a curly-headed actor? Marriage with anybody? No, that must wait, at any rate until she had given the fruit of these six months to the world. She could not be hampered by belonging to anybody before that.
"I do think I'm justified in taking myself a little seriously for a while," said Sylvia, "and in shutting my eyes to my own absurdity.
Self-mockery is dangerous beyond a certain point. I really will give this idea of mine a fair chance. If I'm a failure, Arthur will love me all the more through vanity, and if I'm a success--I suppose really he'll be vain of that, too."
Sylvia telegraphed to Arthur, and heard that he expected to be back in New York at the end of the month. He was in Buffalo this week. Nothing could keep her a moment longer in New York alone, and she went up to join him. She had a sudden fear when she arrived that she might find him occupied with a girl; in fact, really, when she came to think of the manner in which she had left him, it was most improbable that she should not. She nearly turned round and went back to New York; but her real anxiety to see Arthur and talk to him about her work made her decide to take the risk of what might be the deepest humiliation of her life. It was strange how much she wanted to talk about what she had done; the desire to do so now was as overmastering an emotion as had been in the first moment of conception the urgency of silence.
Sylvia was spared the shock of finding Arthur wrapped up in some one else.
"Sylvia, how wonderful! What a relief to see you again!" he exclaimed.
"I've been longing for you to see me in the part I'm playing now. It's certainly the most successful thing I've done. I'm so glad you kept me from wasting myself any longer on that concert work. I really believe I've made a big hit at last."
Sylvia was almost as much taken aback to find Arthur radiant with the prospect of success as she would have been to find him head over ears in love. She derived very little satisfaction from the way in which he attributed his success to her; she was not at all in the mood for being a G.o.dmother, now that she had a baby of her own.
"I'm so glad, old son. That's splendid. Now I want to talk about the work I've been doing all these six months."
Forthwith she plunged into the details of the scheme, to which Arthur listened attentively enough, though he only became really enthusiastic when she could introduce a.n.a.logies with his own successful performance.
"You will go in front to-night?" he begged. "I'm awfully keen to hear what you think of my show. Half my pleasure in the hit has been spoiled by your not having seen it. Besides, I think you'll be interested in noticing that once or twice I try to get the same effect as you're trying for in these impersonations."
"d.a.m.n your eyes, Arthur, they're not impersonations; they're improvisations."
"Did I say impersonations? I'm sorry," said Arthur, looking rather frightened.
"Yes, you'd better placate me," she threatened. "Or I'll spend my whole time looking at Niagara and never go near your show."
However, Sylvia did go to see the play that night and found that Arthur really was excellent in his part, which was that of the usual young man in musical comedy who wanders about in a well-cut flannel suit, followed by six young women with parasols ready to smother him with affection, melody, and lace. But how, even in the intoxication of success, he had managed to establish a single a.n.a.logy with what she proposed to do was beyond comprehension.
Arthur came out of the stage door, wreathed in questions.
"You were in such a hurry to get out," said Sylvia, "that you didn't take off your make-up properly. You'll get arrested if you walk about like that. I hear the sumptuary laws in Buffalo are very strict."
"No, don't rag. Did you like the hydrangea song? Do you remember the one I mean?"
He hummed the tune.
"I warn you, Arthur, there's recently been a moral up-lift in Buffalo.
You will be sewn up in a barrel and flung into Niagara if you don't take care. No, seriously. I think your show was capital. Which brings me to the point. We sail for Europe at the end of April."
"Oh, but do you think it's wise for me to leave America now that I've really got my foot in?"
"Do you still want to marry me?"
"More than ever," he a.s.sured her.
"Very well, then. Your only chance of marrying me is to leave New York without a murmur. I've thought it all out. As soon as I get back I shall spend my last s.h.i.+lling on fitting out my show. When I've produced it and when I've found out that I've not been making a fool of myself for the last six months, perhaps I'll marry you. Until then--as friends we met, as anything more than friends we part. Got me, Steve?"
"But, Sylvia--"
"But me no buts, or you'll get my goat. Understand my meaning, Mr.