“WHO IS SYLVIA?”
The winter session had commenced at the hospital, but at Hampstead
the month of October had set in with something like a return to
summer. It is true that the trees had lost something of their leafy
opulence, and that here and there, amidst the sober green, patches of
russet and gold had made their appearance, as if Nature’s
colour-orchestra were tuning up for the final symphony. But,
meanwhile, the sun shone brightly and with a genial heat, and if, day
by day, he fell farther from the zenith, there was nothing to show it
but the lengthening noonday shadows, the warmer blue of the sky and
the more rosy tint of the clouds that sailed across it.
Other and more capable pens than mine have set forth the charm of
autumn and the beauties of Hampstead--queen of suburbs of the world’s
metropolis; therefore will I refrain, and only note, as relevant to
the subject, the fact that on many a day, when the work of the
hospital was in full swing, I might have been seen playing truant very
agreeably on the inexhaustible Heath or in the lanes and fields
adjacent thereto. In truth, I was taking the final stage of my
curriculum rather lazily, having worked hard enough in the earlier
years, and being still too young by several months to be admitted to
the fellowship of the College of Surgeons; promising myself that when
the weather broke I would settle down in earnest to the winter’s work.
I have mentioned that Millfield Lane was one of my favourite haunts;
indeed, from my lodgings, it was the most direct route to the Heath,
and I passed along it almost daily; and never, now, without my
thoughts turning back to that rainy night when I had found the
dead--or unconscious--man lying across the narrow footway. One
morning, as I passed the spot, it occurred to me to make a drawing of
the place in my sketch-book, that I might have some memorial of that
strange adventure. The pictorial possibilities of the lane just here
were not great, but by taking my stand at the turn, on the very spot
where I had seen the body lying, I was able to arrange a simple
composition which was satisfactory enough.
I am no artist. A neat and intelligible drawing is the utmost that I
can produce. But even this modest degree of achievement may be very
useful, as I had discovered many a time in the wards or
laboratories--indeed, I have often been surprised that the instructors
of our youth attach such small value to the power of graphic
expression; and it came in usefully now, though in a way that was
unforeseen and not fully appreciated at the moment. I had dealt
adequately with the fence, the posts, the tree-trunks and other
well-defined forms and was beginning a less successful attack on the
foliage, when I heard a light, quick step approaching from Hampstead
Lane. Intuition--if there is such a thing--fitted the foot-step with a
personality, and, for once in a way, was right; as the new-comer
reached the sharp bend of the path, I saw a girl of about my own age,
simply and serviceably dressed and carrying a pochade box and a small
camp-stool. She was not an entire stranger to me. I had met her often
in the lane and on the Heath--so often in fact that we had developed
that profound unconsciousness of one another’s existence that almost
amounts to recognition--and had wondered vaguely who she was and what
sort of work she did on the panels in that mysterious box.
As I drew back to make way for her, she brushed past, with a single,
quick, inquisitive glance at my sketch-book, and went on her way,
looking very much alive and full of business. I watched her as she
tripped down the lane and passed between the posts out into the
sunlight beyond, to vanish behind the trunks of the elms; then I
returned to my sketch and my struggles to express foliage with a touch
somewhat less suggestive of a birch-broom.
When I had finished my drawing, I sauntered on rather aimlessly,
speculating for the hundredth time on the meaning of those discoveries
of mine in this very lane. Was it possible that the man whom I had
seen was not dead, but merely insensible? I could not believe it. The
whole set of circumstances--the aspect of the body, the blood-stain on
the fence, the tracks through the high grass and the mysterious gold
trinket--were opposed to any such belief. Yet, on the other hand, one
would think that a man could not disappear unnoticed. This was no
tramp or nameless vagrant. He was a clergyman or a priest, a man who
would be known to a great number of persons and whose disappearance
must surely be observed at once and be the occasion of very stringent
enquiries. But no enquiries had apparently been made. I had seen no
notice in the papers of any missing cleric, and clearly the police had
heard nothing or they would have looked me up. The whole affair was
enveloped in the profoundest mystery. Dead or alive, the man had
vanished utterly; and whether he was dead or alive, the mystery was
equally beyond solution.
These reflections brought me, almost unconsciously, to another of my
favourite walks; the pretty footpath from the Heath to Temple Fortune.
I had crossed the stile and stepped off the path to survey the
pleasant scene, when my eye was attracted by a number of streaks of
alien colour on the leaves of a burdock. Stooping down, I perceived
that they were smears of oil-paint, and inferred that someone had
cleaned a palette on the herbage; an inference that was confirmed a
moment later by what looked like the handle of a brush projecting from
a clump of nettles. When I drew it out, however, it proved to be not a
brush, but a very curious knife with a blade shaped like a diminutive
and attenuated trowel; evidently a painting-knife and also evidently
home-made, at least in part, for the tang had been thrust into a
short, stout brush-handle and secured with a whipping of waxed thread.
I dropped it into my outside breast pocket and went on my way,
wondering if by chance it might have been dropped by my fair
acquaintance; and the thought was still in my mind when its object
hove in sight. Turning a bend in the path, I came on her quite
suddenly, perched on her little camp-stool in the shadow of the hedge,
with the open sketching-box on her knees, working away with an
industry and concentration that seemed to rebuke my own idleness.
Indeed, she was so much engrossed with her occupation that she did not
notice me until I stepped off the path and approached with the knife
in my hand.
“I wonder,” said I, holding it out and raising my cap, “if this
happens to be your property. I picked it up just now among the nettles
near the barn.”
She took the knife from me and looked at it inquisitively. “No,” she
replied, “it isn’t mine, but I think I know whose it is. I suspect it
belongs to an artist who has been doing a good deal of work about the
Heath. You may have seen him.”
“I have seen several artists working about here during the summer.
What was this one like?”
“Well,” she answered with a smile, “he was like an artist. Very much
like. Quite the orthodox get-up. Wide brimmed hat, rather long hair
and a ragged beard. And he wore sketching spectacles--half-moon-shaped
things, you know--and kid gloves--which were not quite so orthodox.”
“Very inconvenient, I should think.”
“Not so very. I work in gloves myself in the cold weather or if the
midges are very troublesome. You soon get used to the feel of them;
and the man I am speaking of wouldn’t find them in the way at all
because he works almost entirely with painting-knives. That is what
made me think that this knife was probably his. He had several, I
know, and very skillfully he used them, too.”
“You have seen his work, then?”
“Well,” she admitted, “I’m afraid I descended once or twice to play
the ‘snooper.’ You see, his method of handling interested me.”
“May I ask what a ‘snooper’ is?” I enquired.
“Don’t you know? It’s a student’s slang name for the kind of person
who makes some transparent pretext for coming off the path and passing
behind you to get a look at your picture by false pretences.”
For an instant there flashed into my mind the suspicion that she was
administering a quiet “back-hander,” and I rejoined hastily:
“I hope you are not including me in the genus ‘snooper.’”
She laughed softly. “It did sound rather like it. But I’ll give you
the benefit of the doubt in consideration of your finding the
knife--which you had better keep in trust for the owner.”
“Won’t you keep it? You know the probable owner by sight and I don’t;
and meanwhile you might experiment with it yourself.”
“Very well,” she replied, dropping it into her brush-tray, “I’ll keep
it for the present at any rate.”
There was a brief pause, and then I ventured to remark, “That looks a
very promising sketch of yours. And how well the subject comes.”
“I’m glad you like it,” she replied, quite simply, viewing her work
with her head on one side. “I want it to turn out well, because it’s a
commission, and commissions for small oil paintings are rare and
precious.”
“Do you find small oil pictures very difficult to dispose of?” I
asked.
“Not difficult. Impossible, as a rule. But I don’t try now. I copy my
oil sketches in water-colour, with modifications to suit the market.”
Again there was a pause; and, as her brush wandered towards the
palette, it occurred to me that I had stayed as long as good manners
permitted. Accordingly, I raised my cap, and, having expressed the
hope that I had not greatly hindered her, prepared to move away.
“Oh, not at all,” she answered; “and thank you for the knife, though
it isn’t mine--or, at any rate, wasn’t. Good-morning.”
With this and a pleasant smile and a little nod, she dismissed me; and
once more I went my idle and meditative way.
It had been quite a pleasant little adventure. There is always
something rather interesting in making the acquaintance of a person
whom one has known some time by sight but who is otherwise an unknown
quantity. The voice, the manner, and the little revelations of
character, which confirm or contradict previous impressions, are
watched with interest as they develop themselves and fill in, one by
one, the blank spaces of the total personality. I had, as I have said,
often met this industrious maiden in my walks and had formed the
opinion that she looked a rather nice girl; an opinion that was
probably influenced by her unusual good looks and graceful carriage.
And a rather nice girl she had turned out to be; very dignified and
self-possessed, but quite simple and frank--though, to be sure, her
gracious reception of me had probably been due to my sketch-book; she
had taken me for a kindred spirit. She had a pleasant voice and a
faultless accent, with just a hint of the fine lady in her manner; but
I liked her none the less for that. And her name was a pretty name,
too, if I had guessed it correctly; for, on the inside of the lid of
her box, which was partly uncovered by the upright panel, I had read
the letters “Syl.” The panel hid the rest, but the name could hardly
be other than Sylvia; and what more charming and appropriate name
could be bestowed upon a comely young lady who spent her days amidst
the woods and fields of my beloved Hampstead?
Regaling myself with this somewhat small beer, I sauntered on along
the grassy lane, between hedgerows that in the summer had been
spangled with wild roses and that were now gay with the big, oval
berries, sleek and glossy and scarlet, like overgrown beads of red
coral; away, across the fields to Golder’s Green and thence by
Millfield Lane, back to my lodgings at Gospel Oak, and to my landlady,
Mrs. Blunt, who had a few plaintive words to say respecting the
disastrous effects of unpunctuality--and the resulting prolonged
heat--on mutton cutlets and fried potatoes.
It had been an idle morning and apparently void of significant events;
but yet, when I look back on it, I see a definite thread of causation
running through its simple happenings, and I realize that, all
unthinking, I had strung on one more bead to the chaplet of my
destiny.