During her second year at Mulberry Cottage Sylvia achieved an existence
that, save for the absence of any one great motive like art or love, was
complete. She had also one real friend in Jack Airdale, who had returned
from his tour. Apart from the pleasant security of knowing that he would
always be content with good-fellowship only, he encouraged her to
suppose that somewhere, could she but find the first step, a career lay
before her. Sylvia did not in her heart believe in this career, but in
moments of depression Jack's confidence was of the greatest comfort, and
she was always ready to play with the notion, particularly as it seemed
to provide a background for her present existence and to cover the
futility of its perfection. Jack was anxious that she should try to get
on the proper stage, but Sylvia feared to destroy by premature failure a
part of the illusion of ultimate success she continued to allow herself
by finally ruling out the theater as one of the possible channels to
that career. In the summer Lily became friendly with one or two men whom
Sylvia could not endure, but a lassitude had descended upon her and she
lacked any energy to stop the association. As a matter of fact she was
sickening for diphtheria at the time, and while she was in the hospital
Lily took to frequenting the Orient promenade with these new friends. As
soon as Sylvia came out they were banished; but each time that she
intervened on Lily's behalf it seemed to her a little less worth while.
Nevertheless, finding that Lily was bored by her own habit of staying in
at night, she used much against her will to accompany her very often to
various places of amusement without a definite invitation from a man to
escort them.
One day at the end of December Mrs. Gainsborough came home from
shopping with two tickets for a fancy-dress dance at the Redcliffe Hall
in Fulham Road. When the evening arrived Sylvia did not want to go, for
the weather was raw and foggy; but Mrs. Gainsborough was so much
disappointed at her tickets not being used that to please her Sylvia
agreed to go. It seemed unlikely to be an amusing affair, so she and
Lily went in the most ordinary of their fancy dresses as masked
Pierrettes. The company, as they had anticipated, was quite
exceptionally dull.
"My dear, it's like a skating-rink on Saturday afternoon," Sylvia said.
"We'll have one more dance together and then go home."
They were standing at the far end of the hall near the orchestra, and
Sylvia was making disdainful comments upon the various couples that were
passing out to refresh themselves or flirt in the draughty corridors.
Suddenly Sylvia saw a man in evening dress pushing his way in their
direction, regardless of what ribbons he tore or toes he outraged in his
transit. He was a young man of about twenty-three or twenty-four, with a
countenance in which eagerness was curiously mixed with impassivity.
Sylvia saw him as one sees a picture on first entering a gallery, which
one postpones visiting with a scarcely conscious and yet perfectly
deliberate anticipation of pleasure later on. She continued talking to
Lily, who had her back to the new-comer; while she talked she was aware
that all her own attention was fixed upon this new-comer and that she
was asking herself the cause of the contradictions in his face and
deciding that it was due to the finely carved immobile mouth beneath
such eager eyes. Were they brown or blue? The young man had reached
them, and from that immobile mouth came in accents that were almost like
despair a salutation to Lily. Sylvia felt for a moment as if she had
been wounded; she saw that Lily was looking at her with that expression
she always put on when she thought Sylvia was angry with her; then after
what seemed an age turned round slowly to the young man and, lifting her
mask, engaged in conversation with him. Sylvia felt that she was
trespassing upon the borders of great emotion and withdrew out of
hearing, until Lily beckoned her forward to introduce the young man as
Mr. Michael Fane. Sylvia did not raise her mask, and after nodding to
him again retired from the conversation.
"But this is absurd," she said to herself, after a while; and abruptly
raising her mask she broke in upon the duologue. The music had begun. He
was asking Lily to dance, and she, waiting for Sylvia's leave in a way
that made Sylvia want to slap her, was hesitating.
"What rot, Lily!" she exclaimed, impatiently. "Of course you may dance."
The young man turned toward Sylvia and smiled. A moment later he and
Lily had waltzed away.
"Good God!" said Sylvia to herself. "Am I going mad? A youth smiles at
me and I feel inclined to cry. What is this waltz they're playing?"
She looked at one of the sheets of music, but the name was nowhere
legible, and she nearly snatched it away from the player in
exasperation. Nothing seemed to matter in the world except that she
should know the name of this waltz. Without thinking what she was doing
she thumped the clarinet-player on the shoulder, who stopped indignantly
and asked if she was trying to knock his teeth out.
"What waltz are you playing? What waltz are you playing?"
"'Waltz Amarousse.' Perhaps you'll punch one of the strings next time,
miss?"
"Happy New-Year," Sylvia laughed, and the clarinet-player with a
disgusted glance turned round to his music again.
By the time the dance was over and the other two had rejoined her,
Sylvia was laughing at herself; but they thought she was laughing at
them. Fane and Lily danced several more dances together, and gradually
Sylvia made up her mind that she disapproved of this new intimacy, this
sudden invasion of Lily's life from the past from which she should have
cut herself off as completely as Sylvia had done from her own. What
right had Lily to complicate their existence in this fashion? How
unutterably dull this masquerade was! She whispered to Lily in the next
interval that she was tired and wanted to go home.
The fog outside was very dense. Fane took their arms to cross the road,
and Sylvia, though he caught her arm close to him, felt drearily how
mechanical its gesture was toward her, how vital toward Lily. Neither of
her companions spoke to each other, and she asked them questions about
their former friendship, which Lily did not answer because she was
evidently afraid of her annoyance, and which he did not answer because
he did not hear. Sylvia had made up her mind that Fane should not enter
Mulberry Cottage, when Lily whispered to her that she should ask him,
but at the last moment she remembered his smile and invited him to
supper. A strange shyness took possession of her, which she tried to
cover by exaggeration, almost, she thought, hysterical fooling with Mrs.
Gainsborough that lasted until two o'clock in the morning of New-Year's
day, when Michael Fane went home after exacting a promise from the two
girls to lunch with him at Kettner's that afternoon. Lily was so sleepy
that she did not rise to see him out. Sylvia was glad of the
indifference.
Next morning Sylvia found out that Michael was a "nice boy" whom Lily
had known in West Kensington when she was seventeen. He had been awfully
in love with her, and her mother had been annoyed because he wanted to
marry her. He had only been seventeen himself, and like many other
school-boy loves of those days this one had just ended somehow, but
exactly how Lily could not recall. She wished that Sylvia would not go
on asking so many questions; she really could not remember anything more
about it. They had gone once for a long drive in a cab, and there had
been a row about that at home.
"Are you in love with him now?" Sylvia demanded.
"No, of course not. How could I be?"
Sylvia was determined that she never should be, either: there should be
no more Claude Raglans to interfere with their well-devised existence.
During the next fortnight Sylvia took care that Lily and Michael should
never be alone together, and she tried very often, after she discovered
that Michael was sensitive, to shock him by references to their life,
and with an odd perverseness to try particularly to shock him about
herself by making brutally coarse remarks in front of Lily, taking
pleasure in his embarrassment. Yet there was in the end little pleasure
in shocking him, for he had no conventional niceness; yet there was a
pleasure in hurting him, a fierce pleasure.
"Though why on earth I bother about his feelings, I can't imagine,"
Sylvia said to herself. "All I know is that he's an awful bore and makes
us break all sorts of engagements with other people. You liar! You know
he's not a bore, and you know that you don't care a damn how many
engagements you break. Don't pose to yourself. You're jealous of him
because you think that Lily may get really fond of him. You don't want
her to get fond of him, because you don't think she's good enough for
him. You don't want him to get fond of _her_."
The boldness of this thought, the way in which it had attacked the
secret recesses of her being, startled Sylvia. It was almost a sensation
of turning pale at herself, of fearing to understand herself, that made
her positively stifle the mood and flee from these thoughts, which might
violate her personality.
Down-stairs, there was a telegram from Olive Fanshawe at Brighton,
begging Sylvia to come at once; she was terribly unhappy; Sylvia could
scarcely tear herself away from Mulberry Cottage at such a moment even
for Olive, but, knowing that if she did not go she would be sorry, she
went.
Sylvia found Olive in a state of collapse. Dorothy Lonsdale and she had
been staying in Brighton for a week's holiday, and yesterday Dorothy had
married Clarehaven. Sylvia laughed.
"Oh, Sylvia, don't laugh!" Olive begged. "It was perfectly dreadful. Of
course it was a great shock to me, but I did not show it. I told her she
could count on me as a pal to help her in every way. And what do you
think she said? Sylvia, you'll never guess. It was too cruel. She said
to me in a voice of ice, dear--really, a voice of ice--she said the best
way I could help her was by not seeing her any more. She did not intend
to go near the stage door of a theater again. She did not want to know
any of her stage friends any more. She didn't even say she was sorry;
she was quite calm. She was like ice, Sylvia dear. Clarehaven came in
and she asked if he'd telegraphed to his mother, and when he said he
had she got up as if she'd been calling on me quite formally and shook
hands, and said: 'Good-by, Olive. We're going down to Clare Court
to-morrow, and I don't expect we shall see each other again for a long
time.' Clarehaven said what rot and that I must come down to Devonshire
and stay with them, and Dolly froze him, my dear; she froze him with a
look. I never slept all night, and the book I was reading began to
repeat itself, and I thought I was going mad; but this morning I found
the printers had made some mistake and put sixteen pages twice over. But
I really thought I was going mad, so I wired for you. Oh, Sylvia,
Sylvia, say something to console me! She was like ice, dear, really like
a block of ice."
"If she'd only waited till you had found the curly-headed actor it
wouldn't have mattered so much," Sylvia said.
Poor Olive really was on the verge of a nervous collapse, and Sylvia
stayed with her three days, though it was agony to leave Lily in London
with Michael Fane. Nor could she talk of her own case to Olive. It would
seem like a competitive sorrow, a vulgar bit of egotistic assumption to
suit the occasion.
When Sylvia got back to Mulberry Cottage she found an invitation from
Jack Airdale to dine at Richmond and go to a dance with him afterward.
Conscious from something in Michael's watchful demeanor of a development
in the situation, she was pleased to be able to disquiet him by
insisting that Lily should go with her.
On the way, Sylvia extracted from Lily that Michael had asked her to
marry him. It took all Jack Airdale's good nature not to be angry with
Sylvia that night--as she tore the world to shreds. At the moment when
Lily had told her she had felt with a despair that was not communicable,
as Olive's despair had been, how urgent it was to stop Michael from
marrying Lily. She was not good enough for him. The knowledge rang in
her brain like a discordant clangor of bells, and Sylvia knew in that
moment that the real reason of her thinking this was jealousy of Lily.
The admission tortured her pride, and after a terrible night in which
the memory of Olive's grief interminably dwelt upon and absorbed helped
her to substitute the pretense, so passionately invoked that it almost
ceased to be a pretense, that she was opposing the marriage partly
because Michael would never keep Lily faithful, partly because she could
not bear the idea of losing her friend.
When, the next day, Sylvia faced Michael for the discussion of the
marriage, she was quite sure not merely that he had never attracted her,
but even that she hated him and, what was more deadly, despised him. She
taunted him with wishing to marry Lily for purely sentimental reasons,
for the gratification of a morbid desire to save her. She remembered
Philip, and all the hatred she had felt for Philip's superiority was
transferred to Michael. She called him a prig and made him wince by
speaking of Lily and herself as "tarts," exacting from the word the
uttermost tribute of its vulgarity. She dwelt on Lily's character and
evolved a theory of woman's ownership by man that drove her into such
illogical arguments and exaggerated pretensions that Michael had some
excuse for calling her hysterical. The dispute left Lily on one side for
a time and became personal to herself and him. He told her she was
jealous. In an access of outraged pride she forgot that he was referring
to her jealousy about Lily, and to any one less obsessed by an idea than
he was she would have revealed her secret. Suddenly he seemed to give
way. When he was going he told her that she hated him because he loved
Lily and hated him twice as much because his love was returned.
Sylvia felt she would go mad when Michael said that he loved Lily; but
he was thinking it was because Lily loved him that she was biting her
nails and glaring at him. Then he asked her what college at Oxford her
husband had been at. She had spoken of Philip during their quarrel. This
abrupt linking of himself with Philip restored her balance, and coolly
she began to arrange in her mind for Lily's withdrawal from London for a
while. Of passion and fury there was nothing left except a calm
determination to disappoint Master Michael. She remembered Olive
Fanshawe's, "Like ice, dear, she was like a block of ice." She, too, was
like a block of ice as she watched him walking away down the long
garden.
When Michael had gone Sylvia told Lily that marriage with him was
impossible.
"Why do you want to be married?" she demanded. "Was your mother so happy
in her marriage? I tell you, child, that marriage is almost
inconceivably dull. What have you got in common with him? Nothing,
absolutely nothing."
"I'm not a bit anxious to be married," Lily protested. "But when
somebody goes on and on asking, it's so difficult to refuse. I liked
Claude better than I like Michael. But Claude had to think about his
future."
"And what about your future?" Sylvia exclaimed.
"Oh, I expect it'll be all right. Michael has money."
"I say you shall not marry him," Sylvia almost shouted.
"Oh, don't keep on so," Lily fretfully implored. "It gives me a
headache. I won't marry him if it's going to upset you so much. But you
mustn't leave me alone with him again, because he worries me just as
much as you do."
"We'll go away to-morrow," Sylvia announced, abruptly. It flashed upon
her that she would like to go to Sirene with Lily, but, alas! there was
not enough money for such a long journey, and Bournemouth or Brighton
must be the colorless substitute.
Lily cheered up at the idea of going away, and Sylvia was half resentful
that she could accept parting from Michael so easily. Lily's frocks were
not ready the next day, and in the morning Michael's ring was heard.
"Oh, now I suppose we shall have more scenes," Lily complained.
Sylvia ran after Mrs. Gainsborough, who was waddling down the garden
path to open the door.
"Come back, come back at once!" she cried. "You're not to open the
door."
"Well, there's a nice thing. But it may be the butcher."
"We don't want any meat. It's not the butcher. It's Fane. You're not to
open the door. We've all gone away."
"Well, don't snap my head off," said Mrs. Gainsborough, turning back
unwillingly to the house.
All day long at intervals the bell rang.
"The neighbors 'll think the house is on fire," Mrs. Gainsborough
bewailed.
"Nobody hears it except ourselves, you silly old thing," Sylvia said.
"And what 'll the passers-by think?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked. "It looks
so funny to see any one standing outside a door, ringing all day long
like a chimney-sweep who's come on Monday instead of Tuesday. Let me go
out and tell him you've gone away. I'll hold the door on the jar, the
same as if I was arguing with a hawker. Now be sensible, Sylvia. I'll
just pop out, pop my head round the door, and pop back in again."
"You're not to go. Sit down."
"You do order any one about so. I might be a serviette, the way you
crumple me up. Sylvia, don't keep prodding into me. I may be fat, but I
have got some feelings left. You're a regular young spiteful. A porter
wouldn't treat luggage so rough. Give over, Sylvia."
"What a fuss you make about nothing!" Sylvia said.
"Well, that ping-ping-pinging gets on my nerves. I feel as if I were
coming out in black spots like a domino. Why don't the young fellow give
over? It's a wonder his fingers aren't worn out."
The ringing continued until nearly midnight in bursts of half an hour at
a stretch. Next morning Sylvia received a note from Fane in which he
invited her to be sporting and let him see Lily.
"How I hate that kind of gentlemanly attitude!" she scoffed to herself.
Sylvia wrote as unpleasant a letter as she could invent, which she left
with Mrs. Gainsborough to be given to Michael when he should call in
answer to an invitation she had posted for the following day at twelve
o'clock. Then Lily and she left for Brighton. All the way down in the
train she kept wondering why she had ended her letter to Michael by
calling him "my little Vandyck." Suddenly she flew into a rage with
herself, because she knew that she was making such speculation an excuse
to conjure his image to her mind.
Toward the end of February Sylvia and Lily came back to Mulberry
Cottage. Sylvia had awakened one morning with the conviction that it
was beneath her dignity to interfere further between Lily and Michael.
She determined to leave everything to fate. She would go and stay with
Olive for a while, and if Lily went away with Michael, so much the
better. To hell with both of them. This resolution once taken, Sylvia,
who had been rather charming to Lily all the time at Brighton, began now
to treat her with a contempt that was really an expression of the
contempt she felt for Michael. A week after their return to London she
spent the whole of one day in ridiculing him so cruelly that even Mrs.
Gainsborough protested. Then she was seized with an access of penitence,
and, clasping Lily to her, she almost entreated her to vow that she
loved her better than any one else in the world. Lily, however, was by
this time thoroughly sulky and would have nothing to do with Sylvia's
tardy sweetness. The petulant way in which she shook herself free from
the embrace at last brought Sylvia up to the point of leaving Lily to
herself. She should go and stay with Olive Fanshawe, and if, when she
came back, Lily were still at Mulberry Cottage, she would atone for the
way she had treated her lately; if she were gone, it would be only one
more person ruthlessly cut out of her life. It was curious to think of
everybody--Monkley, Philip, the Organs, Mabel, the twins, Miss Ashley,
Dorward, all going on with their lives at this moment regardless of her.
"I might just as well be dead," she told herself. "What a fuss people
make about death!"
Sylvia was shocked to find how much Olive had suffered from Dorothy's
treatment of her. For the first time in her life she was unable to
dispose of emotion as mere romantic or sentimental rubbish; there was
indeed something deeper than the luxury of grief that could thus ennoble
even a Vanity girl.
"I do try, Sylvia, not to mope all the time. I keep on telling myself
that, if I really loved Dorothy, I should be glad for her to be Countess
of Clarehaven, with everything that she wants. She was always a good
girl. I lived with her more than two years and she was _frightfully_
strict about men. She deserved to be a countess. And I'm sure she's
quite right in wanting to cut herself off altogether from the theater.
I think, you know, she may have meant to be kind in telling me at once
like that, instead of gradually dropping me, which would have been
worse, wouldn't it? Only I do miss her so. She was such a lovely thing
to look at."
"So are you," Sylvia said.
"Ah, but I'm dark, dear, and a dark girl never has that almost unearthly
beauty that Dolly had."
"Dark girls have often something better than unearthly and seraphic
beauty," Sylvia said. "They often have a gloriously earthly and human
faithfulness."
"Ah, you need to tease me about being romantic, but I think it's you
that's being romantic now. You were quite right, dear; I used to be
stupidly romantic over foolish little things without any importance, and
now it all seems such a waste of time. That's really what I feel most of
all, now that I've lost my friend. It seems to me that every time I
patted a dog I was wasting time."
Sylvia had a fleeting thought that perhaps Gladys and Enid Worsley might
have felt like that about her, but in a moment she quenched the fire it
kindled in her heart. She was not going to bask in the warmth of
self-pity like a spoiled little girl that hopes she may die to punish
her brother for teasing her.
"I think, you know," Olive went on, "that girls like us aren't prepared
to stand sorrow. We've absolutely nothing to fall back upon. I've been
thinking all these days what an utterly unsatisfactory thing lunch at
Romano's really is. The only thing in my life that I can look back to
for comfort is summer at the convent in Belgium. Of course we giggled
all the time; but all the noise of talking has died away, and I can only
see a most extraordinary peacefulness. I wonder if the nuns would have
me as a boarder for a little while this summer. I feel I absolutely must
go there. It isn't being sentimental, because I never knew Dorothy in
those days."
Perhaps Olive's regret for her lost friend affected Sylvia. When she
went back to Mulberry Cottage and found that Lily had gone away,
notwithstanding her own deliberate provocation of the elopement, she was
dismayed. There was nothing left of Lily but two old frocks in the
wardrobe, two old frocks the color of dead leaves; and this poignant
reminder of a physical loss drove out all the other emotions. She told
herself that it was ridiculous to be moved like this and she jeered at
herself for imitating Olive's grief. But it was no use; those two frocks
affrighted her courage with their deadness. No kind of communion after
marriage would compensate for the loss of Lily's presence; it was like
the fading of a flower in the completeness of its death. Even if she had
been able to achieve the selflessness of Olive and take delight in
Lily's good fortune, how impossible it was to believe in the triumph of
this marriage. Lily would either be bored or she would become actively
miserable--Sylvia snorted at the adverb--and run away or rather slowly
melt to damnation. It would not even be necessary for her to be
miserable; any unscrupulous friend of her husband's would have his way
with her. For an instant Sylvia had a tremor of compassion for Michael,
but it died in the thought of how such a disillusion would serve him
right. He had built up this passion out of sentimentality; he was like
Don Quixote; he was stupid. No doubt he had managed by now to fall in
love with Lily, but it had never been an inevitable passion, and no pity
should be shown to lovers that did not love wildly at first sight. They
alone could plead fate's decrees.
Jack Airdale came to see Sylvia, and he took advantage of her despair to
press his desire for her to go upon the stage. He was positive that she
had in her the makings of a great actress. He did not want to talk about
himself, but he must tell Sylvia that there was a wonderful joy in
getting on. He would never, of course, do anything very great, but he
was understudy to some one or other at some theater or other, and there
was always a chance of really showing what he could do one night or at
any rate one afternoon. Even Claude was getting on; he had met him the
other day in a tail coat and a top-hat. Since there had been such an
outcry against tubercular infection, he had been definitely cured of his
tendency toward consumption; he had nothing but neurasthenia to contend
with now.
But Sylvia would not let Jack "speak about her" to the managers he knew.
She had no intention of continuing as she was at present, but she should
wait till she was twenty-three before she took any step that would
involve anything more energetic than turning over the pages of a book;
she intended to dream away the three months that were left to
twenty-two. Jack Airdale went away discouraged.
Sylvia met Ronald Walker, who had painted Lily. From him she learned
that Fane had taken a house for her somewhere near Regent's Park. By a
curious coincidence, a great friend of his who was also a friend of
Fane's had helped to acquire the house. Ronald understood that there was
considerable feeling against the marriage among Fane's friends. What was
Fane like? He knew several men who knew him, and he seemed to be one of
those people about whose affairs everybody talked.
"Thank Heaven, nobody bothers about me," said Ronald. "This man Fane
seems to have money to throw about. I wish he'd buy my picture of Lily.
You're looking rather down, Sylvia. I suppose you miss her? By Jove!
what an amazing sitter! She wasn't really beautiful, you know--I mean to
say with the kind of beauty that lives outside its setting. I don't
quite mean that, but in my picture of her, which most people consider
the best thing I've done, she never gave me what I ought to have had
from such a model. I felt cheated, somehow, as if I'd cut a bough from a
tree and in doing so destroyed all its grace. It was her gracefulness
really; and dancing's the only art for that. I can't think why I didn't
paint you."
"You're not going to begin now," Sylvia assured him.
"Well, of course, now you challenge me," he laughed. "The fact is,
Sylvia, I've never really seen you in repose till this moment. You were
always tearing around and talking. Look here, I do want to paint you. I
say, let me paint you in this room with Mrs. Gainsborough. By Jove! I
see exactly what I want."
"It sounds as if you wanted an illustration for the Old and New Year,"
Sylvia said.
In the end, however, she gave way; and really, it passed the time,
sitting for Ronald Walker with Mrs. Gainsborough in that room where
nothing of Lily remained.
"Well," Mrs. Gainsborough declared, when the painter had finished. "I
knew I was fat, but really it's enough to make any one get out of breath
just to look at any one so fat as you've made me. He hasn't been stingy
with his paint, I'll say that. But really, you know, it looks like a
picture of the fat woman in a fair. Now Sylvia's very good. Just the way
she looks at you with her chin stuck out like a step-ladder. Your eyes
are very good, too. He's just got that nasty glitter you get into them
sometimes."
One day in early June, without any warning, Michael Fane revisited
Mulberry Cottage. Sylvia had often declaimed against him to Mrs.
Gainsborough, and now while they walked up the garden she could see that
Mrs. Gainsborough was nervous, and by the way that Michael walked either
that he was nervous or that something had happened. Sylvia came down the
steps from the balcony to meet them, and, reading in his countenance
that he had come to ask her help, she was aware of an immense relief,
which she hid under an attitude of cold hostility. They sat on the
garden seat under the budding mulberry-tree, and without any
preliminaries of conversation Michael told her that he and Lily had
parted. Sylvia resented an implication in his tone that she would
somehow be awed by this announcement; she felt bitterly anxious to
disappoint and humiliate him by her indifference, hoping that he would
beg her to get Lily back for him. Instead of this he spoke of putting
her out of his life, and Sylvia perceived that it was not at all to get
Lily back that he had come to her. She was angry at missing her
opportunity and she jeered at the stately way in which he confessed his
failure and his loss; nor would he wince when she mocked his romantic
manner of speech. At last she was almost driven into the brutality of
picturing in unforgivable words the details of Lily's infidelity, but
from this he flinched, stopping her with a gesture. He went on to give
Sylvia full credit for her victory, to grant that she had been right
from the first, and gradually by dwelling on the one aspect of Lily that
was common to both of them, her beauty, he asked her very gently to take
Lily back to live with her again. Sylvia could not refrain from sneers,
and he was stung into another allusion to her jealousy, which Sylvia set
out to disprove almost mathematically, though all the time she was
afraid of what clear perception he might not have attained through
sorrow. But he was still obsessed by the salvation of Lily; and Sylvia,
because she could forgive him for his indifference to her own future
except so far as it might help Lily, began to mock at herself, to accuse
herself for those three months after she left Philip, to rake up that
corpse from its burial-place so that this youth who troubled her very
soul might turn his face from her in irremediable disgust and set her
free from the spell he was unaware of casting.
When she had worn herself out with the force of her denunciation both of
herself and of mankind, he came back to his original request; Sylvia,
incapable of struggling further, yielded to his perseverance, but with a
final flicker of self-assertion she begged him not to suppose that she
was agreeing to take Lily back for any other reason than because she
wanted to please herself.
Michael began to ask her about Lily's relation to certain men with whom
he had heard her name linked--with Ronald Walker, and with Lonsdale,
whom he had known at Oxford. Sylvia told him the facts quite simply; and
then because she could not bear this kind of self-torture he was
inflicting on himself, she tried to put out of its agony his last
sentimental regret for Lily by denying to her and by implication to
herself also the justification even of a free choice.
"Money is necessary sometimes, you know," she said.
Sylvia expected he would recoil from this, but he accepted it as the
statement of a natural fact, agreed with its truth, and begged that in
the future if ever money should be necessary he should be given the
privilege of helping. So long as it was apparently only Lily whom he
desired to help thus, Michael had put forward his claims easily enough.
Then in a flash Sylvia felt that now he was transferring half his
interest in Lily to her. He was stumbling hopelessly over that; he was
speaking in a shy way of sending her books that she would enjoy; then
abruptly he had turned from her and the garden door had slammed behind
him. It was with a positive exultation that Sylvia realized that he had
forgotten to give her Lily's address and that it was the dread of
seeming to intrude upon her which had driven him away like that. She ran
after him and called him back. He gave her a visiting-card on which his
name was printed above the address; it was like a little tombstone of
his dead love. He was talking now about selling the furniture and
sending the money to Lily. Sylvia all the time was wondering why the
first man that had ever appealed to her in the least should be like the
famous hero of literature that had always bored her. With an impulse to
avenge Michael she asked the name of the man for whom Lily had betrayed
him. But he had never known; he had only seen his hat.
Sylvia pulled Michael to her and kissed him with the first kiss she had
given to any man that was not contemptuous either of him or of herself.
"How many women have kissed you suddenly like that?" she asked.
"One--well, perhaps two!" he answered.
Even this kiss of hers was not hers alone, but because she might never
see him again Sylvia broke the barrier of jealousy and in a sudden
longing to be prodigal of herself for once she gave him all she could,
her pride, by letting him know that she for her part had never kissed
any man like that before.
Sylvia went back to the seat under the mulberry-tree and made up her
mind that the time was ripe for activity again. She had allowed herself
to become the prey of emotion by leading this indeterminate life in
which sensation was cultivated at the expense of incident. It was a pity
that Michael had intrusted her with Lily, for at this moment she would
have liked to be away out of it at once; any adventure embarked upon
with Lily would always be bounded by her ability to pack in time. Sylvia
could imagine how those two dresses she had left behind must have been
the most insuperable difficulty of the elopement. Another objection to
Lily's company now was the way in which it would repeatedly remind her
of Michael.
"Of course it won't remind me sentimentally," Sylvia assured herself.
"I'm not such a fool as to suppose that I'm going to suffer from a sense
of personal loss. On the other hand, I sha'n't ever be able to forget
what an exaggerated impression I gave him. It's really perfectly
damnable to divine one's sympathy with a person, to know that one could
laugh together through life, and by circumstances to have been placed
in an utterly abnormal relation to him. It really is damnable. He'll
think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the great
multitude of wronged women. I shall think of him--though as a matter of
fact I shall avoid thinking of him--either as what might have been, a
false concept, for of course what might have been is fundamentally
inconceivable, or as what he was, a sentimental fool. However, the mere
fact that I'm sitting here bothering my head about what either of us
thinks shows that I need a change of air."
That afternoon a parcel of books arrived for Sylvia from Michael Fane;
among them was Skelton's Don Quixote and Adlington's _Apuleius_, on the
fly-leaf of which he had written:
I've eaten rose leaves and I am no longer a golden ass.
"No, damn his eyes!" said Sylvia, "I'm the ass now. And how odd that he
should send me _Don Quixote_."
At twilight Sylvia went to see Lily at Ararat House. She found her in a
strange rococo room that opened on a garden bordered by the Regent's
Canal; here amid candles and mirrors she was sitting in conversation
with her housekeeper. Each of them existed from every point of view and
infinitely reduplicated in the mirrors, which was not favorable to
toleration of the housekeeper's figure, that was like an hour-glass.
Sylvia waited coldly for her withdrawal before she acknowledged Lily's
greeting. At last the objectionable creature rose and, accompanied by a
crowd of reflections, left the room.
"Don't lecture me," Lily begged. "I had the most awful time yesterday."
"But Michael said he had not seen you."
"Oh, not with Michael," Lily exclaimed. "With Claude."
"With Claude?" Sylvia echoed.
"Yes, he came to see me and left his hat in the hall and Michael took it
away with him in his rage. It was the only top-hat he'd got, and he had
an engagement for an 'at home,' and he couldn't go out in the sun, and,
oh dear, you never heard such a fuss, and when Mabel--"
"Mabel?"
"--Miss Harper, my housekeeper, offered to go out and buy him another,
he was livid with fury. He asked if I thought he was made of money and
could buy top-hats like matches. I'm glad you've come. Michael has
broken off the engagement, and I expected you rather. A friend of
his--rather a nice boy called Maurice Avery--is coming round this
evening to arrange about selling everything. I shall have quite a lot of
money. Let's go away and be quiet after all this bother and fuss."
"Look here," Sylvia said. "Before we go any further I want to know one
thing. Is Claude going to drop in and out of your life at critical
moments for the rest of time?"
"Oh no! We've quarreled now. He'll never forgive me over the hat.
Besides, he puts some stuff on his hair now that I don't like. Sylvia,
do come and look at my frocks. I've got some really lovely frocks."
Maurice Avery, to whom Sylvia took an instant dislike, came in
presently. He seemed to attribute the ruin of his friend's hopes
entirely to a failure to take his advice:
"Of course this was the wrong house to start with. I advised him to take
one at Hampstead, but he wouldn't listen to me. The fact is Michael
doesn't understand women."
"Do you?" Sylvia snapped.
Avery looked at her a moment, and said he understood them better than
Michael.
"Of course nobody can ever really understand a woman," he added, with an
instinct of self-protection. "But I advised him not to leave Lily alone.
I told him it wasn't fair to her or to himself."
"Did you give him any advice about disposing of the furniture?" Sylvia
asked.
"Well, I'm arranging about that now."
"Sorry," said Sylvia. "I thought you were paving Michael's past with
your own good intentions."
"You mustn't take any notice of her," Lily told Avery, who was looking
rather mortified. "She's rude to everybody."
"Well, shall I tell you my scheme for clearing up here?" he asked.
"If it will bring us any nearer to business," Sylvia answered, "we'll
manage to support the preliminary speech."
A week or two later Avery handed Lily £270, which she immediately
transferred to Sylvia's keeping.
"I kept the Venetian mirror for myself," Avery said. "You know the one
with the jolly little cupids in pink and blue glass. I shall always
think of you and Ararat House when I look at myself in it."
"I suppose all your friends wear their hearts on your sleeve," Sylvia
said. "That must add a spice to vanity."
Mrs. Gainsborough was very much upset at the prospect of the girls'
going away.
"That comes of having me picture painted. I felt it was unlucky when he
was doing it. Oh, dearie me! whatever shall I do?"
"Come with us," Sylvia suggested. "We're going to France. Lock up your
house, give the key to the copper on the beat, put on your gingham gown,
and come with us, you old sea-elephant."
"Come with you?" Mrs. Gainsborough gasped. "But there, why shouldn't I?"
"No reason at all."
"Why, then I will. I believe the captain would have liked me to get a
bit of a blow."
"Anything to declare?" the customs official asked at Boulogne.
"I declare I'm enjoying myself," said Mrs. Gainsborough, looking round
her and beaming at France.