The play in which Sylvia was to appear in New York was called "A
Honeymoon in Europe," and if it might be judged from the first few
rehearsals, at which the performers had read their parts like
half-witted board-school children, it was thin stuff. Still, it was not
fair to pass a final opinion without the two American stars who were
awaiting the English company in their native land.
The author, Mr. Marchmont Hearne, was a timid little man who between the
business manager and producer looked and behaved very much like the
Dormouse at the Mad Tea-party. The manager did not resemble the Hatter
except in the broad brim of his top-hat, which in mid-Atlantic he
reluctantly exchanged for a cloth cap. The company declared he was
famous for his tact; certainly he managed to suppress the Dormouse at
every point by shouting, "One minute, Mr. Stern, _please_," or, "Please,
Mr. Burns, one minute," and apologizing at once so effusively for not
calling him by his right name that the poor little Dormouse had no
courage to contest the real point at issue, which had nothing to do with
his name. When the manager had to exercise a finer tactfulness, as with
obdurate actresses, he was wont to soften his remarks by adding that
nothing "derogatory" had been intended; this seemed to mollify
everybody, probably, Sylvia thought, because it was such a long word.
The Hatter's name was Charles Fitzherbert. The producer, Mr. Wade
Fortescue, by the length of his ears, by the way in which his electrical
hair propelled itself into a peak on either side of his head, and by his
wild, artistic eye, was really rather like the March Hare outwardly; his
behavior was not less like. Mr. Fortescue's attitude toward "A Honeymoon
in Europe" was one that Beethoven might have taken up on being invited
to orchestrate "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay." The author did not go so far as
to resent this attitude, but on many occasions he was evidently pained
by it, notwithstanding Mr. Fitzherbert's assurances that Mr. Fortescue
had intended nothing "derogatory."
Sylvia's part was that of a French chambermaid. The author had drawn it
faithfully to his experience of Paris in the course of several
week-ends. As his conception coincided with that of the general public
in supposing a French chambermaid to be a cross between a street-walker
and a tight-rope walker, it seemed probable that the part would be a
success; although Mr. Fortescue wanted to mix the strain still further
by introducing the blood of a comic ventriloquist.
"You must roll your 'r's' more, Miss Scarlett," he assured her. "That
line will go for nothing as you said it."
"I said it as a French chambermaid would say it," Sylvia insisted.
"If I might venture--" the Dormouse began.
"One minute, please, Mr. Treherne," interrupted the Mad Hatter. "What
Mr. Fortescue wants, Miss Scarlett, is exaggeration--a leetle
exaggeration. I believe that is what you want, Mr. Fortescue?"
"I don't want a caricature," snapped the March Hare. "The play is
farcical enough as it is. What I want to impart is realism. I want Miss
Scarlett to say the line as a French girl would say it."
"Precisely," said the Hatter. "That's precisely what I was trying to
explain to Miss Scarlett. You're a bit hasty, old chap, you know, and I
think you frightened her a little. That's all right, Miss Scarlett,
there's nothing to be frightened about. Mr. Fortescue intended nothing
derogatory."
"I'm not in the least frightened," said Sylvia, indignantly.
"If I might make a suggestion, I think that--" the Dormouse began.
"One minute please, please, Mr. Burns, one minute--Ah, dear me, Mr.
Hearne, I was confusing you with the poet. Nothing derogatory in that,
eh?" he laughed jovially.
"May I ask a question?" said Sylvia, and asked it before Mr.
Fitzherbert could interrupt again. "Why do all English authors draw all
Frenchwomen as cocottes and all French authors draw all English women as
governesses? The answer's obvious."
The Mad Hatter and the March Hare were so much taken aback by this
attack from Alice that the Dormouse was able to emit an entire sentence.
"I should like to say that Miss Scarlett's rendering of the accent gives
me great satisfaction. I have no fault to find. I shall be much obliged,
Miss Scarlett, if you will correct my French whenever necessary. I am
fully sensible of its deficiencies."
Mr. Marchmont Hearne blinked after this challenge and breathed rather
heavily.
"I've had a good deal of experience," said Mr. Fortescue, grimly, "but I
never yet found that it improved a play to allow the performers of minor
rôles, essentially minor rôles, to write their parts in at rehearsal."
Mr. Fitzherbert was in a quandary for a moment whether he should smoothe
the rufflings of the author or of the actress or of the producer, but
deciding that the author could be more profitable to his career in the
end, he took him up-stage and tried to whisper away Mr. Fortescue's bad
temper. In the end Sylvia was allowed to roll her "r's" at her own pace.
"I'm glad you stood up to him, dear," said an elderly actress like a
pink cabbage rose fading at the tips of the petals, who had been sitting
throughout the rehearsal so nearly on the scene that she was continually
being addressed in mistake by people who really were "on." The author,
who had once or twice smiled at her pleasantly, was evidently under the
delusion that she was interested in his play.
"Yes, I was delighted with the way you stood up to them," continued Miss
Nancy Tremayne. "My part's wretched, dear. All feeding! Still, if I'm
allowed to slam the door when I go off in the third act, I may get a
hand. Have you ever been to New York before? I like it myself, and you
can live quite cheaply if you know the ropes. Of course, I'm drawing a
very good salary, because they wanted me. I said I couldn't come for a
penny under one hundred dollars, and I really didn't want to come at
all. However, he _would_ have me, and between you and me, I'm really
rather glad to have the chance of saving a little money. The managers
are getting very stingy in England. Don't tell anybody what I'm getting,
will you, dear? One doesn't like to create jealousy at the commencement
of a tour. It seems to be quite a nice crowd, though the girls look a
little old, don't you think? Amy Melhuish, who's playing the ingénue,
must be at least thirty. It's wonderful how some women have the nerve to
go on. I gave up playing ingénues as soon as I was over twenty-eight,
and that's four years ago now, or very nearly. Oh dear, how time flies!"
Sylvia thought that, if Miss Tremayne was only twenty-eight four years
ago, time must have crawled.
"They're sending us out in the _Minneworra_. The usual economy, but
really in a way it's nicer, because it's all one class. Yes, I'm glad
you stood up to them, dear. Fortescue's been impossible ever since he
produced one of those filthy Strindberg plays last summer for the
Unknown Plays Committee. I hate this continental muck. Degenerate, I say
it is. In my opinion Ibsen has spoiled the drama in England. What do you
think of Charlie Fitzherbert? He's such a nice man. Always ready to
smooth over any little difficulties. When Mr. Vernon said to me that
Charlie would be coming with us, I felt quite safe."
"Morally?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, go on! You know what I mean. Comfortable, and not likely to be
stranded. Well, I'm always a little doubtful about American productions.
I suppose I'm conservative. I like old-fashioned ways."
Which was not surprising, Sylvia thought.
"Miss Tremayne, I can't hear myself speak. Are you on in this scene?"
demanded the producer.
"I really don't know. My next cue is--"
"I don't think Miss Tremayne comes on till Act Three," said the author.
"We sha'n't get there for another two hours," the producer growled.
Miss Tremayne moved her chair back three feet, and turned to finish her
conversation with Sylvia.
"What I was going to say when I was interrupted, dear, was that, if
you're a bad sailor, you ought to make a point of making friends with
the purser. Unfortunately I don't know the purser on the _Minneworra_,
but the purser on the _Minnetoota_ was quite a friend of mine, and gave
me a beautiful deck-cabin. The other girls were very jealous."
"Damn it, Miss Tremayne, didn't I ask you not to go on talking?" the
producer shouted.
"Nice gentlemanly way of asking anybody not to whisper a few words of
advice, isn't it?" said Miss Tremayne, with a scathing glance at Mr.
Fortescue as she moved her chair quite six feet farther away from the
scene.
"Now, of course, we're in a draught," she grumbled to Sylvia. "But I
always say that producers never have any consideration for anybody but
themselves."
By the time the S.S. _Minneworra_ reached New York Sylvia had come to
the conclusion that the representatives of the legitimate drama differed
only from the chorus of a musical comedy in taking their temperaments
and exits more seriously. Sylvia's earlier experience had led her to
suppose that the quantity of make-up and proximity to the footlights
were the most important things in art.
Whatever hopes of individual ability to shine the company might have
cherished before it reached New York were quickly dispelled by the two
American stars, up to whom and not with whom they were expected to
twinkle. Mr. Diomed Olver and Miss Marcia Neville regarded the rest of
the company as Jupiter and Venus might regard the Milky Way. Miss
Tremayne's exit upon a slammed door was forbidden the first time she
tried it, because it would distract the attention of the audience from
Miss Neville, who at that moment would be sustaining a dimple, which she
called holding a situation. This dimple, which was famous from Boston to
San Francisco, from Buffalo to New Orleans, had, when Miss Neville first
swam into the ken of a manager's telescope, been easy enough to sustain.
Of late years a slight tendency toward stoutness had made it necessary
to assist the dimple with the forefinger and internal suction; the
slamming of a door might disturb so nice an operation, and an appeal,
which came oddly from Miss Neville, was made to Miss Tremayne's sense
of natural acting.
Mr. Olver did not bother to conceal his intention of never moving from
the center of the stage, where he maintained himself with the noisy
skill of a gyroscope.
"See here," he explained to members of the company who tried to compete
with his stellar supremacy. "The public pays to see Diomed Olver and
Marcia Neville; they don't care a damned cent for anything else in
creation. Got me? That's good. Now we'll go along together fine."
Mr. Charles Fitzherbert assisted no more at rehearsals, but occupied
himself entirely with the box-office. Mr. Wade Fortescue was very fierce
about 2 A.M. in the bar of his hotel, but very mild at rehearsals. Mr.
Marchmont Hearne hibernated during this period, and when he appeared
very shyly at the opening performance in Brooklyn the company greeted
him with the surprised cordiality that is displayed to some one who has
broken his leg and emerges weeks later from hospital without a limp.
New York made a deep and instant impression on Sylvia. No city that she
had seen was so uncompromising; so sure of its flamboyant personality;
so completely an ingenious, spoiled, and precocious child; so lovable
for its extravagance and mischief. To her the impression was of some
Gargantuan boy in his nursery building up tall towers to knock them
down, running his clockwork-engines for fun through the streets of his
toy city, scattering in corners quantities of toy bricks in readiness
for a new fit of destructive construction, scooping up his tin
inhabitants at the end of a day's play to put them helter-skelter into
their box, eking out the most novel electrical toys of that Christmas
with the battered old trams of the Christmas before, cherishing old
houses with a child's queer conservatism, devoting a large stretch of
bright carpet to a park, and robbing his grandmother's mantelpiece of
her treasures to put inside his more permanent structures. After seeing
New York she sympathized very much with the remark she had heard made by
a young New-Yorker on board the _Minneworra_, which at the time she had
thought a mere callow piece of rudeness.
A grave doctor from Toledo, Ohio, almost as grave as if he were from the
original Toledo, had expressed a hope to Sylvia that she would not
accept New York as representative of the United States. She must travel
to the West. New York had no family life. If Miss Scarlett wished to see
family life, he should be glad to show it to her in Toledo. For
confirmation of his criticism he had appealed to a young man standing at
his elbow.
"Well," the young man had replied, "I've never been fifty miles west of
New York in my life, and I hope I never shall. When I want to travel I
cross over to Europe for a month."
The Toledo doctor had afterward spoken severely to Sylvia on the subject
of this young New-Yorker, citing him as a dangerous element in the
national welfare. Now, after seeing the Gargantuan boy's nursery, she
understood the spirit that wanted to enjoy his nursery and not be
bothered to go for polite walks with maiden aunts in the country;
equally, no doubt, in Toledo she should appreciate the point of view of
the doctor and recognize the need for the bone that would support the
vast bulk of the growing child.
Sylvia had noticed that as she grew older impressions became less vivid;
her later and wider experience of London was already dim beside those
first years with her father and Monkley. It had been the same during her
travels. Already even the Alhambra was no longer quite clearly imprinted
upon her mind, and each year it had been growing less and less easy to
be astonished. But this arrival in New York had been like an arrival in
childhood, as surprising, as exciting, as terrifying, as stimulating.
New York was like a rejuvenating potion in the magic influence of which
the memories of past years dissolved. Partly, no doubt, this effect
might be ascribed to the invigorating air, and partly, Sylvia thought,
to the anxiously receptive condition of herself now within sight of
thirty; but neither of these explanations was wide enough to include all
that New York gave of regenerative emotion, of willingness to be alive
and unwillingness to go to bed, and of zest in being amused. Sylvia had
supposed that she had long ago outgrown the pleasure of wandering about
streets for no other reason than to be wandering about streets, of
staring into shops, of staring after people, of staring at
advertisements, of staring in company with a crowd of starers as well
entertained as herself at a bat that was flying about in daylight
outside the Plaza Hotel; but here in New York all that old youthful
attitude of assuming that the world existed for one's diversion, mixed
with a sharp, though always essentially contemptuous, curiosity about
the method it was taking to amuse one, was hers again. Sylvia had always
regarded England as the frivolous nation that thought of nothing but
amusement, England that took its pleasure so earnestly and its business
so lightly. In New York there was no question of qualifying adverbs;
everything was a game. It was a game, and apparently, by the enthusiasm
with which it was played, a novel game, to control the traffic in Fifth
Avenue--a rather dangerous game like American football, in which at
first the casualties to the policemen who played it were considerable.
Street-mending was another game, rather an elementary game that
contained a large admixture of practical joking. Getting a carriage
after the theater was a game played with counters. Eating, even, could
be made into a game either mechanical like the automatic dime lunch, or
intellectual like the free lunch, or imaginative like the quick lunch.
Sylvia had already made acquaintance with the crude material of America
in Carlos Morera. New York was Carlos Morera much more refined and more
matured, sweetened by its own civilization, which, having severed itself
from other civilizations like the Anglo-Saxon or Latin, was already most
convincingly a civilization of its own, bearing the veritable stamp of
greatness. Sometimes Sylvia would be faced even in New York by a
childishness that scarcely differed from the childishness of Carlos
Morera. One evening, for instance, two of the men in the company who
knew her tastes invited her to come with them to Murden's all-night
saloon off Sixth Avenue. They had been told it was a sight worth seeing.
Sylvia, with visions of something like the dancing-saloon in Buenos
Aires, was anxious to make the experiment. It sounded exciting when she
heard that the place was kept going by "graft." After the performance
she and her companions went to Jack's for supper; thence they walked
along Sixth Avenue to Murden's. It was only about two o'clock when they
entered by a side door into a room exactly like the bar parlor of an
English public house, where they sat rather drearily drinking some
inferior beer, until one of Sylvia's companions suggested that they had
arrived too near the hours of legal closing. They left Murden's and
visited a Chinese restaurant in Broadway with a cabaret attached. The
prices, the entertainment, the food, and the company were in a
descending scale; the prices were much the highest. Two hours later they
went back to Murden's; the parlor was not less dreary; the beer was
still abominable. However, just as they had decided that this could not
be the right place, an enormous man slightly drunk entered under the
escort of two ladies of the town. Perceiving that Sylvia and her
companions had risen, the new-comer waved them back into their chairs
and called for drinks all round.
"British?" he asked.
They nodded.
"Yes, I thought you were Britishers. I'm Under-Sheriff McMorris." With
this he seated himself, hugging the two nymphs on either side of him
like a Dionysius in his chariot.
"Actor folk?" he asked.
They nodded.
"Yes, I thought you were actor folk. Ever read Shakespeare? Some boy,
eh? Gee! I used to be able to spout Parsha without taking breath."
Forthwith he delivered the speech about the quality of mercy.
"Wal?" he demanded at the end.
The English actors congratulated him and called for another round. Mr.
McMorris turned to one of the nymphs:
"Wal, honey?"
"Cut it out, you fat old slob; you're tanked!" said honey.
Mr. McMorris recited several other speeches, including the vision of the
dagger from "Macbeth." From Shakespeare he passed to Longfellow, and
from Longfellow to Byron. After an hour of recitations he was persuaded
by the bartender to give some of his reminiscences of criminals in New
York, which he did so vividly that Sylvia began to suppose that at one
time or another he really had been connected with the law. Finally about
six o'clock he became pathetic and wept away most of what he had drunk.
"I'm feeling bad this morning. I gart to go and arrest a man for whom I
have a considerable admiration. I gart to go down-town to Washington
Square and arrest a prominent citizen at eight o'clock sharp. I guess
they're waiting right now for me to come along and make that arrest.
Where's my black-jack?"
He fumbled in his pocket for a leather-covered life-preserver, which he
flourished truculently. Leaning upon the shoulders of the nymphs, he
waved a farewell and staggered out.
Sylvia asked the bartender what he really was.
"He's Under-Sheriff McMorris. At eight o'clock he's going to arrest a
prominent New York citizen for misappropriation of some fund."
That evening in the papers Sylvia read that Under-Sheriff McMorris had
burst into tears when ex-Governor Somebody or other had walked down the
steps of his house in Washington Square and offered himself to the
custody of the law.
"I don't like to have to do this, Mr. Governor," Under-Sheriff McMorris
had protested.
"You must do your duty, Mr. Under-Sheriff."
The crowd had thereupon cheered loudly, and the wife of the ex-Governor,
dissolved in tears, had waved the Stars and Stripes from an upper
window.
"Jug for the ex-Governor and a jag for the under-sheriff," said Sylvia.
"If only the same spirit could be applied to minor arrests. That may
come. It's wonderful, really, how in this mighty republic they manage to
preserve any vestige of personality, but they do."
The play ran through the autumn and went on tour in January. Sylvia did
not add much to her appreciation of America in the course of it,
because, as was inevitable in the short visits they paid to various
towns, she had to depend for intercourse upon the members of the
company. She reached New York again shortly before her twenty-eighth
birthday. When nearly all her fellow-players returned to England, she
decided to stay behind. The first impression she had received of
entering upon a new phase of life when she landed in New York had not
yet deserted her, and having received an offer from the owner of what
sounded, from his description, like a kind of hydropathic establishment
to entertain the visitors there during the late summer and fall, she
accepted. In August, therefore, she left New York and went to
Sulphurville, Indiana.
Sylvia had had glimpses of rural America in Vermont and New Hampshire
during the tour; in such a cursory view it had not seemed to differ much
from rural England. Now she was going to see rustic America, if a
distinction between the two adjectives might be made. At Indianapolis
she changed from the great express into a smaller train that deposited
her at a railway station consisting of a tumble-down shed. Nobody came
out to welcome the train, but the colored porter insisted that this was
the junction from which she would ultimately reach Sulphurville and
denied firmly Sylvia's suggestion that the engine-driver had stopped
here for breath. She was the only passenger who alighted, and she saw
the train continue on its way with something near despair. The sun was
blazing down. All around was a grasshopper-haunted wilderness of Indian
corn. It was the hottest, greenest, flattest, most God-forsaken spot she
had ever seen. The heat was so tremendous that she ventured inside the
hut for shade. The only sign of life was a bug proceeding slowly across
a greasy table. Sylvia went out and wandered round to the other side.
Here, fast asleep, was a man dressed in a pair of blue trousers, a
neckerchief, and an enormous straw hat. As the trousers reached to his
armpits, he was really fully dressed, and Sylvia was able to recognize
him as a human being from an illustrated edition she possessed of
_Huckleberry Finn_; at the same time, she thought it wiser to let him
sleep and returned to the front of the shed. To her surprise, for it
seemed scarcely possible that anybody could inhabit the second floor,
she perceived a woman with curl-papers, in a spotted green-and-yellow
bed-wrapper, looking out of what until now she had supposed to be a gap
in the roof caused by decay. Sylvia asked the woman if this was the
junction for Sulphurville. She nodded, but vanished from the window
before there was time to ask her when the train would arrive.
Sylvia waited for an hour in the heat, and had almost given up hope of
ever reaching Sulphurville when suddenly a train arrived, even smaller
than the one into which she had changed at Indianapolis, but still
considerably larger than any European train. The hot afternoon wore away
while this new train puffed slowly deeper and deeper into rustic America
until it reached Bagdad. Hitherto Sylvia had traveled in what was called
a parlor-car, but at Bagdad she had to enter a fourth train that did not
possess a parlor-car and that really resembled a local train in England,
with oil-lamps and semi-detached compartments. At every station between
Bagdad and Sulphurville crowds of country folk got in, all of whom were
wearing flags and flowers in their buttonholes and were in a state of
perspiring festivity. At the last station before Sulphurville the train
was invaded by the members of a local band, whose instruments fought for
a place as hard as their masters. Sylvia was nearly elbowed out of her
seat by an aggressive ophicleide, but an old gentleman opposite with a
saxhorn behind him and a euphonium on his knees told her by way of
encouragement that the soldiers didn't pass through Indiana every day.
"The last time I saw soldiers like that was during the war," he said,
"and I don't allow any of us here will ever see so many soldiers again."
He looked round the company defiantly, but nobody seemed inclined to
contradict him, and he grunted with disappointment. It seemed hard that
the old gentleman's day should end so tamely, but fortunately a young
man in the far corner proclaimed it not merely as his opinion, but
supported it from inside information, that the regiment was being
marched through Indiana like this in order to get it nearer to the
Mexican border.
"Shucks!" said the old gentleman, and blew his nose so violently that
every one looked involuntarily at one of the brass instruments.
"Shucks!" he repeated. Then he smiled at Sylvia, who, sympathizing with
the happy close of his day, smiled back just as the train entered the
station of Sulphurville.
The Plutonian Hotel, Sulphurville, had presumably been built to appease
the same kind of human credulity that created the pump-rooms at Bath or
Wiesbaden or Aix-les-Bains. Sylvia had observed that one of the great
elemental beliefs of the human race, a belief lost in primeval fog, was
that if water with an odd taste bubbled out of the earth, it must
necessarily possess curative qualities; if it bubbled forth without a
nasty enough taste to justify the foundation of a spa, it was analyzed
by prominent chemists, bottled, and sold as a panacea to the great
encouragement of lonely dyspeptics with nothing else to read at dinner.
In the Middle Ages, and possibly in the classic times of Æsculapius,
these natural springs had fortified the spiritual side of man; in late
days they served to dilute his spirits. The natural springs at
Sulphurville fully justified the erection of the Plutonian Hotel and the
lowest depths of mortal credulity, for they had a revolting smell, an
exceptionally unpleasant taste, and a high temperature. Everything that
balneal ingenuity could suggest had been done, and in case the internal
cure was not nasty enough as it was, the first glass of water was
prescribed for six o'clock in the morning. Though it was necessary to
test human faith by the most arduous and vexatious ordinances for human
conduct, lest it might grow contemptuous of the cure, it was equally
necessary to prevent boredom, if not of the devotees themselves, at any
rate of their families. Accordingly, there was an annex of the ascetic
hotel where everybody was driven to bed at eleven by the uncomfortable
behavior of the servants, and where breakfast was served not later than
seven; this annex possessed a concert-hall, a small theater, a
gaming-saloon with not merely roulette, but many apparently childish
games of chance that nevertheless richly rewarded the management. Sylvia
wondered if there was any moral intention on the part of the proprietors
in the way they encouraged gambling, if they wished to accentuate the
chances and changes of human life and thereby secure for their clients
a religious attitude toward their bodily safety. Certainly at the
Plutonian Hotel it was impossible to obtain anything except meals
without gambling. In order to buy a cigar or a box of chocolates it was
necessary to play dice with the young woman who sold them, with more or
less profit to the hotel, according to one's luck. Every morning some
new object was on view in the lobby to be raffled that evening. Thus on
the fourth night of her stay Sylvia became the owner of a large trunk,
the emptiness of which was continuous temptation.
The Plutonian was not merely a resort for gouty Easterners; it catered
equally for the uric acid of the West. Sylvia liked the families from
the West, particularly the girls with their flowing hair and big felt
hats who rode on Kentucky ponies to see smugglers' caves in the hills,
conforming invariably to the traditional aspect of the Western belle in
the cinema. The boys were not so picturesque; in fact, they scarcely
differed from European boys of the same age. The East supplied the
exotic note among the children; candy-fed, shrill, and precocious with a
queer gnomelike charm, they resembled expensive toys. These visitors to
Sulphurville were much more affable with one another than their fellows
in Europe would have been in similar circumstances. Sylvia had already
noticed that in America stomachic subjects could inspire the dullest
conversation; here at the Plutonian the stomach had taken the place of
the soul, and it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that in the lounges
people rose up to testify in public about their insides.
The morning after Sylvia's arrival the guests were much excited by the
visit of the soldiers, who were to camp for a week on the hotel grounds
and perform various maneuvers. Sylvia observed that everybody talked as
if a troupe of acrobats was going to visit the hotel; nobody seemed to
have any idea that the American army served any purpose but the
entertainment of the public with gymnastic displays. That afternoon the
regiment marched past the hotel to its camping-ground; the band played
the "Star-spangled Banner"; all the visitors grouped upon the steps in
front clapped their hands; the colonel took off his hat, waved it at the
audience, and bowed like a successful author. At first Sylvia
considered his behavior undignified and absurd; afterward she rather
approved of its friendliness, its absence of pomp and arrogance, its
essentially democratic inspiration--in a word, its familiarity.
The proprietor of the Plutonian, a leading political "boss," was so much
moved by the strains of the music, the martial bearing of the men, and
the opportunity of self-advertisement, that he invited the officers of
the regiment to mess free in the hotel during their visit. Everybody
praised Mr. O'Halloran's generosity and patriotism, the more warmly
because it gave everybody an occasion to commiserate with the officers
upon their absurdly small pay. Such commiseration gratified the
individual's sense of superiority and made it easy for him to brag about
his own success in life. Sylvia resented the business man's point of
view about his national army; it was almost as patronizing as an
Englishman's attitude to an artist or a German's to a woman or a
Frenchman's to anybody but a Frenchman. Snobbishness was only tolerable
about the past. Perhaps that was the reason why the Italians were the
only really democratic nation she had met so far. The Italians were
aristocrats trying to become tradesmen; the rest of mankind were
tradesmen striving to appear aristocrats.
Sylvia had sung her songs and was watching the roulette, when a young
lieutenant who had been playing with great seriousness turned to her and
asked if she was not British.
"We got to know some British officers out in China," he told her. "We
couldn't seem to understand them at first, but afterward we found out
they were good boys, really. Only the trouble was we were never properly
introduced at first, and that worried them some. Say, there's a
fellow-countryman of yours sick in Sulphurville. I kind of found out by
accident this morning, because I went into a drug-store and the
storekeeper was handing out some medicine to a colored girl who was
arguing with him whether she should pay for it. Seems this young
Britisher's expecting his remittance. That's a God-awful place to be
stranded, Sulphurville."
They chatted for a while together. Sylvia liked the simple
good-fellowship of the young American, his inquisitiveness about her
reasons for coming to sing at the Plutonian Hotel, and his frank
anticipation of any curiosity on her side by telling her all about
himself and his career since he left West Point. He was amused by her
account of the excitement over the passage of the troops through the
villages, and seized the occasion to moralize on the vastness of a
country through one state of which a regiment could march and surprise
half the inhabitants with their first view of an American soldier.
"Seems kind of queer," he said.
"But very Arcadian," Sylvia added.
When Sylvia went to bed her mind reverted to the young Englishman; at
the time she had scarcely taken in the significance of what the officer
had told her. Now suddenly the sense of his loneliness and suffering
overwhelmed her fancy. She thought of the desolation of that railway
junction where she had waited for the train to Sulphurville, of the heat
and the grasshoppers and the flat, endless greenery. Even that brief
experience of being alone in the heart of America had frightened her.
She had not taken heed of the vastness of it while she was traveling
with the company, and here at the hotel definitely placed as an
entertainer she had a certain security. But to be alone and penniless in
Sulphurville, to be ill, moreover, and dependent on the charity of
foreigners, so much the more foreign because, though they spoke the same
language, they spoke it with strange differences like the people in a
dream. The words were the same, but they expressed foreign ideas. Sylvia
began to speculate upon the causes that had led to this young
Englishman's being stranded in Sulphurville. There seemed no
explanation, unless he were perhaps an actor who had been abandoned
because he was too ill to travel with the company. At this idea she
almost got out of bed to walk through the warm frog-haunted night to his
rescue. She became sentimental about him in the dark. It seemed to her
that nothing in the world was so pitiable as a sick artist; always the
servant of the public's curiosity, he was now the helpless prey of it.
He would be treated with the contempt that is accorded to sick animals
whose utility is at an end. She visualized him in the care of a woman
like the one who had leaned out of that railway shed in a spotted
green-and-yellow wrapper. Yet, after all, he might not be a mountebank;
there was really no reason to suppose he was anything but poor and
lonely, though that was enough indeed.
"I must be getting very old," Sylvia said to herself. "Only approaching
senility could excuse this prodigal effusion of what is really almost
maternal lust. I've grown out of any inclination to ask myself why I
think things or why I do things. I've nothing now but an immense desire
to do--do--do. I was beginning to think this desperate determination to
be impressed, like a child whose father is hiding conspicuously behind
the door, was due to America. It's nothing to do with America; it's
myself. It's a kind of moral and mental drunkenness. I know what I'm
doing. I'm entirely responsible for my actions. That's the way a drunken
man argues. Nobody is so utterly convinced of his rightness and
reasonableness and judgment as a drunken man. I might argue with myself
till morning that it's ridiculous to excite myself over the prospect of
helping an Englishman stranded in Sulphurville, but when, worn out with
self-conviction, I fall asleep, I shall wake on tiptoe, as it were. I
shall be quite violently awake at once. The fact is I'm absolutely tired
of observing human nature. I just want to tumble right into the middle
of its confusion and forget how to criticize anybody or anything. What's
the good of meeting a drunken man with generalizations about human
conduct or direction or progression? He won't listen to generalizations,
because drunkenness is the apotheosis of the individual. That's why
drunken people are always so earnestly persuasive, so anxious to
convince the unintoxicated observer that it is better to walk on
all-fours than upright. Eccentricity becomes a moral passion; every
drunken man is a missionary of the peculiar. At the present moment I'm
in the mental state that, did I possess an honest taste for liquor,
would make me get up and uncork the brandy-bottle. It's a kind of
defiant self-expression. Oh, that poor young Englishman lying alone in
Sulphurville! To-morrow, to-morrow! Who knows? Perhaps I really shall
find that I am necessary to somebody. Even as a child I conceived the
notion of being indispensable. I want somebody to say to me: 'You! You!
What should I have done without you?' I suppose every woman feels that;
I suppose that is the maternal instinct. But I don't believe many women
can feel it so sharply as I do, because very few women have ever been
compelled by circumstances to develop their personalities so early and
so fully, and then find that nobody wants that personality. I could cry
just at the mere notion of being wanted, and surely this young
Englishman, whoever he is, will want me. Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, you're
deliberately working yourself up to an adventure! And who has a better
right? Tell me that. That's exactly why I praised the drunkard; he knows
how to dodge self-consciousness. Why shouldn't you set out to have an
adventure? You shall, my dear. And if you're disappointed? You've been
disappointed before. Damn those tree-frogs! Like all croakers, they
disturb oblivion. I wonder if he'd like my new trunk. And I wonder how
old he is. I'm assuming that he's young, but he may be a matted old
tramp."
Sylvia woke next morning, as she had prefigured herself, on tiptoe; at
breakfast she was sorry for all the noisy people round her, so important
to her was life seeming. She set out immediately afterward to walk along
the hot, dusty road to the town, elated by the notion of leaving behind
her the restlessness and stark cleanliness of the big hotel. The main
street of Sulphurville smelled of straw and dry grain; and if it had not
been for the flies she would have found the air sweet enough after the
damp exhalations of brimstone that permeated the atmosphere of the
Plutonian and its surroundings. The flies, however, tainted everything;
not even the drug-store was free from them. Sylvia inquired for the
address of the Englishman, and the druggist looked at her sharply. She
wondered if he was hoping for the settlement of his account.
"Madden's the name, ain't it?" the druggist asked.
"Madden," she repeated, mechanically. A wave of emotion flooded her
mind, receded, and left it strewn with the jetsam of the past. The
druggist and the drug-store faded out of her consciousness; she was in
Colonial Terrace again, insisting upon Arthur's immediate departure.
"What a little beast I was!" she thought, and a desire came over her to
atone for former heartlessness by her present behavior. Then abruptly
she realized that the Madden of Sulphurville was not necessarily, or
even probably, the Arthur Madden of Hampstead. Yet behind this
half-disappointment lay the conviction that it was he. "Which accounts
for my unusual excitement," Sylvia murmured. She heard herself calmly
asking the storekeeper for his address.
"The Auburn Hotel," she repeated. "Thank you."
The storekeeper seemed inclined to question her further; no doubt he
wished to be able to count upon his bill's being paid; but Sylvia
hurried from the shop before he could speak.
The Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville, was perhaps not worse than a hotel of
the same class would have been in England, but the colored servant added
just enough to the prevailing squalor to make it seem worse. When Sylvia
asked to see Mr. Madden the colored servant stared at her, wiped her
mouth with her apron, and called:
"Mrs. Lebus!"
"Oh, Julie, is that you? What is it you want?" twanged a voice from
within that sounded like a cat caught in a guitar.
"You're wanted right now, Mrs. Lebus," the servant called back.
The duet was like a parody of a 'coon song, and Sylvia found herself
humming to ragtime:
"Oh, Mrs. Lebus, you're wanted,
Oh yes, you're wanted, sure you're wanted, Mrs. Lebus,
You're wanted, you're wanted,
You're wanted--right now."
Mrs. Lebus was one of those women whose tongues are always hunting, like
eager terriers. With evident reluctance she postponed the chase of an
artful morsel that had taken refuge in some difficult country at the
back of her mouth, and faced the problem of admitting Sylvia to the sick
man's room.
"You a relative?" she asked.
Sylvia shook her head.
"Perhaps you've come about his remittance. He told me he was expecting a
hundred dollars any time. You staying in Sulphurville?"
Sylvia understood that the apparent disinclination to admit her was only
due to unsatisfied curiosity and that there was not necessarily any
suspicion of her motives. At this moment something particularly
delicious ran across the path of Mrs. Lebus's tongue, and Sylvia took
advantage of the brief pause during which it was devoured, to penetrate
into the lobby, where a melancholy citizen in a frock-coat and a straw
hat was testing the point of a nib upon his thumb, whether with the
intention of offering it to Mrs. Lebus to pick her teeth or of writing a
letter was uncertain.
"Oh, Scipio!" said Mrs. Lebus. She pronounced it "Skipio."
"Wal?"
"She wants to see Mr. Madden."
"Sure."
The landlady turned to Sylvia.
"Mr. Lebus don't have no objections. Julie, take Miss--What did you say
your name was?"
Sylvia saw no reason against falling into what Mrs. Lebus evidently
considered was a skilfully laid trap, and told her.
"Scarlett," Mr. Lebus repeated. "We don't possess that name in
Sulphurville. Yes, ma'am, that name's noo to Sulphurville."
"Sakes alive, Scipio, are you going to keep Miss Scarlett hanging around
all day whiles you gossip about Sulphurville?" his wife asked. Aware of
her husband's enthusiasm for his native place, she may have foreseen a
dissertation upon its wonders unless she were ruthless.
"Julie'll take you up to his apartment. And don't you forget to knock
before you open the door, Julie."
On the way up-stairs in the wake of the servant, Sylvia wondered how she
should explain her intrusion to a stranger, even though he were an
Englishman. She had so firmly decided to herself it was Arthur that she
could not make any plans for meeting anybody else. Julie was quite ready
to open the door of the bedroom and let Sylvia enter unannounced; she
was surprised by being requested to go in first and ask the gentleman if
he could receive Miss Scarlett. However, she yielded to foreign
eccentricity, and a moment later ushered Sylvia in.
It was Arthur Madden; and Sylvia, from a mixture of penitence for the
way she treated him at Colonial Terrace, of self-congratulation for
being so sure beforehand that it was he, and from swift compassion for
his illness and loneliness, ran across the room and greeted him with a
kiss.
"How on earth did you get into this horrible hole?" Arthur asked.
"My dear, I knew it was you when I heard your name." Breathlessly she
poured out the story of how she had found him.
"But you'd made up your mind to play the Good Samaritan to whoever it
was--you never guessed for a moment at first that it was me."
She forgave him the faint petulance because he was ill, and also because
it brought back to her with a new vividness long bygone jealousies,
restoring a little more of herself as she once was, nearly thirteen
years ago. How little he had changed outwardly, and much of what change
there was might be put down to his illness.
"Arthur, do you remember Maria?" she asked.
He smiled. "He died only about two years ago. He lived with my mother
after I went on the stage."
Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had
known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a
good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He
had never talked of it in the old days.
"I used always to be keen on music."
Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he
smiled again.
"My mother still plays that sometimes, and I've often thought of you
when she does. She lives at Dulwich now."
They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.
"You were a most extraordinary kid," he told her. "Because, after all, I
was seventeen at the time--older than you. Good Lord! I'm thirty now,
and you must be twenty-eight!"
To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he
seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was
it that she felt so much older than he?
"But how on earth _did_ you get stranded in this place?" she asked.
"I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I've practically
given up the stage proper. I don't know why, really, for I was doing
quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn't
so much at the beck and call of managers."
Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for
abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It
might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.
"Well, we came to Sulphurville," said Arthur. He hesitated for a moment.
Obviously there had been a woman. "We came to Sulphurville," he went on,
"and played at the hotel you're playing at now--a rotten hole," he
added, with retrospective bitterness. "I don't know how it was, but I
suppose I got keen on the gambling--anyway, I had a row with the other
people in the show, and when they left I refused to go with them. I
stayed behind and got keen on the gambling."
"It was after the row that you took to roulette?" Sylvia asked.
"Well, as a matter if fact, I had a row with a girl. She treated me
rather badly, and I stayed on. I lost a good deal of money. Well, it
wasn't a very large sum, as a matter of fact, but it was all I had, and
then I fell ill. I caught cold and I was worried over things. I cabled
to my mother for some money, but there's been no reply. I'm afraid she's
had difficulty in raising it. She quarreled with my father's people when
I went on the stage. Damned narrow-minded set of yokels. Furious because
I wouldn't take up farming. How I hate narrow-minded people!" And with
an invalid's fretful intolerance he went on grumbling at the
ineradicable characteristics of an English family four thousand miles
away.
"Of course something may have happened to my mother," he added. "You may
be sure that if anything had those beasts would never take the trouble
to write and tell me. It would be a pleasure to them if they could annoy
me in any way."
A swift criticism of Arthur's attitude toward the possibility of his
mother's death rose to Sylvia's mind, but she repressed it, pleading
with herself to excuse him because he was ill and overstrained. She was
positively determined to see henceforth nothing but good in people, and
in her anxiety to confirm herself in this resolve she was ready not
merely to exaggerate everything in Arthur's favor, but even to twist any
failure on his side into actual merit. Thus when she hastened to put her
own resources at his disposal, and found him quite ready to accept
without protest her help, she choked back the comparison with Jack
Airdale's attitude in similar circumstances, and was quite angry with
herself, saying how much more naturally Arthur had received her
good-will and how splendid it was to find such simplicity and sincerity.
"I'll nurse you till you're quite well, and then why shouldn't we take
an engagement together somewhere?"
Arthur became enthusiastic over this suggestion.
"You've not heard me sing yet. My throat's still too weak, but you'll be
surprised, Sylvia."
"I haven't got anything but a very deep voice," she told him. "But I can
usually make an impression."
"Can you? Of course, where I've always been held back is by lack of
money. I've never been able to afford to buy good songs."
Arthur began to sketch out for himself a most radiant future, and as he
talked Sylvia thought again how incredible it was that he should be
older than herself. Yet was not this youthful enthusiasm exactly what
she required? It was just the capacity of Arthur's for thinking he had a
future that was going to make life tremendously worth while for her,
tremendously interesting--oh, it was impossible not to believe in the
decrees of fate, when at the very moment of her greatest longing to be
needed by somebody she had met Arthur again. She could be everything to
him, tend him through his illness, provide him with money to rid
himself of the charity of Mrs. Lebus and the druggist, help him in his
career, and watch over his fidelity to his ambition. She remembered how,
years ago at Hampstead, his mother had watched over him; she could
recall every detail of the room and see Mrs. Madden interrupt one of her
long sonatas to be sure Arthur was not sitting in a draught. And it had
been she who had heedlessly lured him away from that tender mother.
There was poetic justice in this opportunity of reparation now accorded
to her. To be sure, it had been nothing but a childish
escapade--reparation was too strong a word; but there was something so
neat about this encounter years afterward in a place like Sulphurville.
How pale he was, which, nevertheless, made him more romantic to look at;
how thin and white his hands were! She took one of them in her own boy's
hands, as so many people had called them, and clasped it with the
affection that one gives to small helpless things, to children and
kittens, an affection that is half gratitude because one feels good-will
rising like a sweet fountain from the depth of one's being, the
freshness of which playing upon the spirit is so dear, that no words are
enough to bless the wand that made the stream gush forth.
"I shall come and see you all day," said Sylvia. "But I think I ought
not to break my contract at the Plutonian."
"Oh, you'll come and live here," Arthur begged. "You've no idea how
horrible it is. There was a cockroach in the soup last night, and of
course there are bugs. For goodness' sake, Sylvia, don't give me hope
and then dash it away from me. I tell you I've had a hell of a time in
this cursed hole. Listen to the bed; it sounds as if it would collapse
at any moment. And the bugs have got on my nerves to such a pitch that I
spend the whole time looking at spots on the ceiling and fancying
they've moved. It's so hot, too; everything's rotted with heat. You
mustn't desert me. You must come and stay here with me."
"Why shouldn't you move up to the Plutonian?" Sylvia suggested. "I'll
tell you what I'll do. I'll get one of the doctors to come and look at
you, and if he thinks it's possible you shall move up there at once.
Poor boy, it really is too ghastly here."
Arthur was nearly weeping with self-pity.
"But, my dear girl, it's much worse than you think. You know those
horrible birds' bath-tubs in which they bring your food at third-rate
American hotels, loathsome saucers with squash and bits of grit in
watery milk that they call cereals, and bony bits of chicken, well,
imagine being fed like that when you're ill; imagine your bed covered
with those infernal saucers. One of them always used to get left behind
when Julie cleared away, and it always used to fall with a crash on the
floor, and I used to wonder if the mess would tempt the cockroaches into
my room. And then Lebus used to come up and make noises in his throat
and brag about Sulphurville, and I used to know by his wandering eye
that he was looking for what he called the cuspidor, which I'd put out
of sight. And Mrs. Lebus used to come up and suck her teeth at me until
I felt inclined to strangle her."
"The sooner you're moved away the better," Sylvia said, decidedly.
"Oh yes, if you think it can be managed. But if not, Sylvia, for God's
sake don't leave me alone."
"Are you really glad to see me?" she asked.
"Oh, my dear, it was like heaven opening before one's eyes!"
"Tell me about the girl you were fond of," she said, abruptly.
"What do you want to talk about her for? There's nothing to tell you,
really. She had red hair."
Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it
certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of
that red-haired girl.
"Look here," said Sylvia. "I'm going to let these people suppose that
I'm your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor
down to see you. Arthur, I'm glad I've found you. Do you remember the
cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of
water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you
were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?"
"I have had a pretty hard time," Arthur said.
"Oh, but you mustn't be sorry for yourself," she laughed.
"No, seriously, Sylvia, I've always had a lot of people against me."
"Yes, but that's such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you're
with me. I'm not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn't be offended
with me when I tell you that really there's something a tiny bit funny
in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville."
"I'm glad you think so," said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.
"Don't be cross, you foolish creature."
"I'm not a bit cross. Only I _would_ like you to understand that my
illness isn't a joke. You don't suppose I should let you pay my bills
and do all this for me unless it were really something serious."
Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. "I forgive you," she murmured,
"because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur, _do_ you remember Hube? What
fun everything is!"
Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.
"It was a relation, after all," she told her. "The Maddens have been
related to us for hundreds of years."
"My! My! Now ain't that real queer? Oh, Scipio!"
Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was
duly impressed with the coincidence.
"Darned if I don't tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He's
got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it's a
sermonizing cinch."
There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of
Arthur's bill.
"Not that I wouldn't have trusted him for another month and more," Mrs.
Lebus affirmed. "But it's a satisfaction to be able to turn round and
say to the neighbors, 'What did I tell you?' Folks in Sulphurville was
quite sure I'd never be paid back a cent. This'll learn them!"
Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to
offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.
The druggist's account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard
him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any
good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the
prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the
Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.
Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable
squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia's discovery of her
unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the
Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for
their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the
masseurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath
below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently
absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.
Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much
discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which
his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their
former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept
pace with Arthur's expansion. She confided to him how very personally
the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up
her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward,
when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was
Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an
incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature's preference for what is
not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners' avid
and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman's intimate hopes into a
quack's tale.
"Then you didn't see your cousin's spirit go up in the elevator when you
were standing in the lobby? Now isn't that perfectly discouraging?"
complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.
"I'm afraid the story's been added to a good deal," Sylvia said. "I'm
sorry to disappoint the faithful."
"She's shy about giving us her experiences," said another lady from
Iowa. "I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the
most wonderful story I'd ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer
when you saw him lying on a bed in your room."
"He was in his own room," Sylvia corrected, "and I didn't feel at all
queer. It was he who felt queer."
"Isn't she secretive?" exclaimed the lady from Illinois. "Why, I was
going to ask you to write it up in our society's magazine, _The Flash_.
We don't print any stories that aren't established as true. Well, your
experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you."
The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia's hand and gazed at her as
earnestly as if she had noticed a smut on her nose.
"Yes, I'm sure we ought to be grateful," said the lady from Iowa. "My!
Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You
certainly are privileged," she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of
benign fatuity.
"I wish you wouldn't elaborate everything so," Sylvia begged of Arthur
when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies.
"It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself assuming a legendary
shape before my own eyes. It's as painful as being stuffed
alive--stuffed alive with nonsense," she added, with a laugh.
Arthur's expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia's
presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own
stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in
the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness.
Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very
real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the
knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely.
Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of
interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched
solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held
culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible
recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared
to strut--for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor--he
only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense
was necessary, he was an Englishman among a crowd of Americans; the
conditions demanded a good deal of competitive self-assertion.
Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson.
Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in
the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from
wishing to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed
for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no
doubt, but so closely bound up with old associations that she could not
wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics,
this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year's
death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion
of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was
something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage.
It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been
redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from
the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which
superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia
could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to
these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies,
she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and
pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It's a little
more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing
similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian
forest from Kensington Gardens.
Arthur's first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural
splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening
charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and
in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His
complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride
that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and
prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself
hoped from life.
At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs.
Madden, and Sylvia gathered from the letter that the poor lady had been
much puzzled to send the money.
"We must cable it back to her at once," Sylvia said.
"Oh, well, now it's come, is that wise?" Arthur objected. "She may have
had some difficulty in getting it, but that's over now."
"No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I've got plenty of money to
carry us on till we begin to work together."
"But I can't go on accepting charity like this," Arthur protested. "It's
undignified, really. I've never done such a thing before."
"You accepted it from your mother."
"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
accumulation 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 attitude 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
Blüthner.
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 passed 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 breasts 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 do talk rot sometimes," said Arthur.
"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 crushing, 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 relationship 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 friendship, 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 flashing
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
damnably 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 shining. 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.
"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.