She grumbled to Claude about their deprivation, while they were toiling home to dinner (they were at Bournemouth now, and the weather was extremely hot), and he declared in a tragical voice that people were always jealous of him.
"It"s the curse of being an artist," he announced. "Everywhere I go I meet with nothing but jealousy. I can"t help having a good voice. I"m not conceited about it. I can"t help the girls sending me chocolates and asking me to sign the post-cards of me which they buy. I"m not conceited about that, either. There"s something about my personality that appeals to women. Perhaps it"s my delicate look. I don"t suppose I shall live very long, and I think that makes women sorry for me. They"re quicker to see these things than men. I know Harry thinks I"m as healthy as a beefsteak. I"m positive I coughed up some blood this morning, and when I told Harry he asked me with a sneer if I"d cleaned my teeth. You"re not a bit like your dad, Sylvia. There"s something awfully sympathetic about you, little girl. I"m sorry Jimmy"s cut out our number. He"s a jolly good manager and all that, but he does not like anybody else to make a hit. Have you noticed that lately he"s taken to gagging during my songs? Luckily I"m not at all easy to dry up."
Sylvia wondered why anybody like Jimmy should bother to be jealous of Claude. He was pleasant enough, of course, and he had a pretty, girlish mouth and looked very slim and attractive in his pierrot"s dress; but n.o.body could take him seriously except the stupid girls who bought his photograph and sighed over it, when they brushed their hair in the morning.
The weather grew hotter and the hard work made them all irritable; when they got home for dinner at midday it was impossible to eat, and they used to loll about in the stuffy sitting-room, which the five of them shared in common, while the flies buzzed everywhere. It was never worth while to remove the make-up; so all their faces used to get mottled with pale streaks of perspiration, the rouge on their lips would cake, and their ruffles hung limp and wet, stained round the neck with dirty carmine. Sylvia lost all enjoyment in the tour, and used to lie on the horsehair sofa that p.r.i.c.ked her cheeks, watching distastefully the cold mutton, the dull knives, and the spotted cloth, and the stewed fruit over which lay a faint silvery film of staleness. Round the room her fellow-mountebanks were still seated on the chairs into which they had first collapsed when they reached the lodgings, motionless, like great painted dolls.
The weather grew hotter. The men, particularly Henry, took to drinking brandy at every opportunity; toward the end of their stay in Bournemouth the quarrels between him and Mabel broke out again, but with a difference, because now it was Henry who was the aggressor. He had never objected to Mabel"s admirers. .h.i.therto, had, indeed, been rather proud of their existence in a fatuous way and derived from their numbers a showman"s satisfaction. When it was her turn to take round the hat, he used to smirk over the quant.i.ty of post-cards she sold of herself and call everybody"s attention to her capricious autography that was so successful with the callow following. Then suddenly one day he made an angry protest against the admiration which an older man began to accord her, a pretentious sort of man with a diamond ring and yellow c.u.mmerbund, who used to stand with his straw hat atilt and wink at Mabel, tugging at his big drooping mustache and jingling the money in his pockets.
Everybody told Henry not to be foolish; he only sulked and began to drink more brandy than ever. The day after Henry"s outbreak, the Pink Pierrots moved to Swanage, where their only rivals were a troupe of n.i.g.g.e.rs, upon whom Henry was able to loose some of his spleen in a dispute that took place over the new-comers" right to plant their pink tent where they did.
"This isn"t Africa, you know," Henry said. "This is Swanage. It"s no good your waving your banjo at me. I know it"s a banjo, all right, though I may forget, next time I hear you play it."
"We"ve been here every year for the last ten years," the chief n.i.g.g.e.r shouted.
"I thought so by your songs," Henry retorted. "If you told me you got wrecked here with Christopher Columbus I shouldn"t have contradicted you."
"This part of the beach belongs to us," the n.i.g.g.e.rs proclaimed.
"I suppose you bought it off Noah, didn"t you, when he let you out of the ark?" said Henry.
In the end, however, the two companies adjusted their differences and removed themselves out of each other"s hearing. Mabel"s voice defeated even the tambourines and bones of the n.i.g.g.e.rs. Swanage seemed likely to be an improvement upon Bournemouth, until one day Mabel"s prosperous admirer appeared on the promenade and Henry"s jealousy rose to fury.
"Don"t you tell me you didn"t tell him to follow you here," he said, "because I don"t believe you. I saw you smile at him."
Monkley remonstrated with Mabel, when Henry had gone off in a fever of rage to his room, but she seemed to be getting a certain amount of pleasure from the situation.
"You must cut it out," Monkley said. "I don"t want the party broken up on account of you and Henry. I tell you he really is upset. What the deuce do you want to drag in all this confounded love business now for? Leave that to Claude. It"ll burst up the show, and it"s making Harry drink, which his head can"t stand."
Mabel looked at herself in the gla.s.s over the fireplace and patted her hair complacently. "I"m rather glad to see Harry can get jealous. After all, it"s always a pleasure to think some one"s really fond of you."
Sylvia watched Mabel very carefully and perceived that she actually was carrying on a flirtation with the man who had followed her from Bournemouth. She hoped that it would continue and that her father would get angry enough with Mabel to get rid of her when the tour came to an end.
One Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when Mabel was collecting, Sylvia distinctly saw her admirer drop a note into the hat, which she took with her into the tent to read and tore up; during her next song Sylvia noticed that the man with the yellow c.u.mmerbund was watching her with raised eyebrows, and that, when Mabel smiled and nodded, he gently clapped his hands and went away.
Sylvia debated with herself the advisability of telling her father at once what she had seen, thus bringing things to an immediate climax and getting rid of Mabel forever, even if by doing so the show were spoilt. But when she saw his glazed eyes and realized how drunk he was, she thought she would wait. The next afternoon, when Henry was taking his Sunday rest, Mabel dressed herself and went out. Sylvia followed her and, after ascertaining that she had taken the path toward the cliffs to the east of the town, came back to the lodgings and again debated with herself a course of action. She decided in the end to wait a little longer before she denounced Mabel. Later on, when her father had wakened and was demanding Mabel"s company for a stroll in the moonlight, a letter was brought to the lodgings by a railway porter from Mabel herself to say that she had left the company and had gone away with her new friend by train. Sylvia thought how near she had been to spoiling the elopement and hugged herself with pleasure; but she could not resist telling her father now that she had seen the intrigue in progress and of her following Mabel that afternoon and seeing her take the path toward the cliffs. Henry seemed quite shattered by his loss, and could do nothing but drink brandy, while Monkley swore at Mabel for wrecking a good show and wondered where he was going to find another girl, even going so far as to suggest telegraphing on the off chance to Maudie Tilt.
It was very hot on Monday, and after the morning performance Henry announced that he did not intend to walk all the way back to the lodgings for dinner. He should go to the hotel and have a snack. What did it matter about his being in his pierrot"s rig? Swanage was a small place, and if the people were not used to his costume by now, they never would be. It was no good any one arguing; he intended to stay behind this morning. The others left him talking in his usual style of melancholy humor to the small boy who for the sum of twopence kept an eye on the portable piano and the book of songs during the hot midday hours. When they looked round he was juggling with one of the pennies, to the admiration of the owner. They never saw him alive again. He was brought back dead that evening on a stretcher, his pink costume splashed with blood. The odd thing was that the hotel carving-knife was in his pocket, though it was proved conclusively at the inquest that death was due to falling over the cliffs on the east side of the town.
Sylvia wondered if she ought to blame herself for her father"s death, and she confided in Jimmy what she had told him about Mabel"s behavior. Jimmy asked her why she could not have let things alone, and made her very miserable by his strictures upon her youthful tactlessness; so miserable, indeed, that he was fain to console her and a.s.sure her that it had all been an accident due to Henry"s fondness for brandy--that and the sun must have turned his head.
"You don"t think he took the knife to kill himself?" she asked.
"More likely he took it with some idea of killing them, and, being drunk, fell over the cliff. Poor old Harry! I shall miss him, and now you"re all alone in the world."
That was true, and the sudden realization of this fact drove out of Sylvia"s mind the remorse for her father"s death by confronting her with the instancy of the great problem that had for so long haunted her mind. She turned to Jimmy almost fearfully.
"I shall have you to look after me?"
Jimmy took her hand and gazed into her eyes.
"You want to stay with me, then?" he asked, earnestly.
"Of course I do. Who else could I stay with?"
"You wouldn"t prefer to be with Claude, for example?" he went on.
"Claude?" she repeated, in a puzzled voice. And then she grasped in all its force the great new truth that for the rest of her life the choice of her companions lay with herself alone. She had become at this moment grown up and was free, like Mabel, to choose even a man with a yellow c.u.mmerbund.
CHAPTER IV.
Sylvia begged Monkley not to go back and live in Fitzroy Street. She felt the flat would be haunted by memories of her father and Mabel. It was as well that she did not want to return there, for Jimmy a.s.sured her that nothing would induce him to go near Fitzroy Street. A great deal of money was owing, and he wished the landlord luck in his dispute with the furnishing people when he tried to seize the furniture for arrears of rent. It would be necessary to choose for their next abode a quarter of London to which he was a stranger, because he disliked having to make detours to avoid streets where he owed money. Finsbury Park was melancholy; Highgate was inaccessible; Hampstead was expensive and almost equally inaccessible; but they must go somewhere in the North of London, for there did not remain a suburb in the West or South the tradesmen and house-owners of which he had not swindled at one time or another. On second thoughts, there was a part of Hampstead that was neither so expensive nor so inaccessible, which was reached from Haverstock Hill; they would look for rooms there. They settled down finally in one of a row of old houses facing the southerly extremity of the Heath, the rural aspect of which was heightened by long gardens in front that now in late summer were filled with sunflowers and hollyhocks. The old-fashioned house, which resembled a large cottage both without and within, belonged to a decayed florist and nursery gardener called Samuel Gustard, whose trade was now confined to the sale of penny packets of seeds, though a weather-beaten sign-board facing the road maintained a legend of greater glories. Mr. Gustard himself made no effort to live up to his sign-board; indeed, he would not even stir himself to produce a packet of seeds, for if his wife were about he would indicate to her with the stem of his pipe which packet was wanted, and if she were not about, he would tell the customer that the variety was no longer in stock. A greenhouse kept from collapse by the st.u.r.dy vine it was supposed to protect ran along the fence on one side of the garden; the rest was a jungle of coa.r.s.e herbaceous flowers, presumably the survivors of Mr. Gustard"s last horticultural effort, about ten years ago.
The money made by the tour of the Pink Pierrots did not last very long, and Jimmy was soon forced back to industry. Sylvia nowadays heard more about his successes and failures than when her father was alive, and she begged very hard to be allowed to help on some of his expeditions.
"You"re no good to me yet," Monkley told her. "You"re too old to be really innocent and not old enough to pretend to be. Besides, people don"t take school-girls to race meetings. Later on, when you"ve learned a bit more about life, we"ll start a gambling club in the West End and work on a swell scale what I do now in a small way in railway-carriages."
This scheme of Jimmy"s became a favorite topic; and Sylvia began to regard a flash gambling-h.e.l.l as the crown of human ambition. Jimmy"s imagination used to run riot amid the splendor of it all, as he discoursed of the footmen with plush breeches; of the shaded lamps; of the sideboard loaded with hams and jellies and fruit at which the guests would always be able to refresh themselves, for it would never do to let them go away because they were hungry, and people were always hungry at three in the morning; of the smart page-boy in the entrance of the flats who would know how to reckon up a visitor and give the tip up-stairs by ringing a bell; and of the rigid exclusion of all women except Sylvia herself.
"I can see it all before me," Jimmy used to sigh. "I can smell the cigars and whisky. I"m flinging back the curtains when every one has gone and feeling the morning air. And here we are stuck in this old cuc.u.mber-frame at Hampstead! But we"ll get it, we"ll get it. I shall have a scoop one of these days and be able to start saving, and when I"ve saved a couple of hundred I"ll bluff the rest."
In October Jimmy came home from Newmarket and told Sylvia he had run against an old friend, who had proposed a money-making scheme which would take him away from London for a couple of months. He could not explain the details to Sylvia, but he might say that it was a confidence trick on the grand scale and that it meant his residing in a northern city. He had told his friend he would give him an answer to-morrow, and wanted to know what Sylvia thought about it.
She was surprised by Jimmy"s consulting her in this way. She had always taken it for granted that from time to time she would be left alone. Jimmy"s action made her realize more clearly than ever that to a great extent she already possessed that liberty of choice the prospect of which had dawned upon her at Swanage.
She a.s.sured Jimmy of her readiness to be left alone in Hampstead. When he expatiated on his consideration for her welfare she was bored and longed for him to be gone; his solicitude gave her a feeling of restraint; she became impatient of his continually wanting to know if she should miss him and of his commendation of her to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Gustard, from whom she desired no interference, being quite content with the prospect of sitting in her window with a book and a green view.
The next morning Monkley left Hampstead; and Sylvia inhaled freedom with the autumn air. She had been given what seemed a very large sum of money to sustain herself until Jimmy"s return. She had bought a new hat; a black kitten had adopted her; it was pearly October weather. Sylvia surveyed life with a sense of pleasure that was nevertheless most unreasonably marred by a faint breath of restlessness, an almost imperceptible discontent. Life had always offered itself to her contemplation, whether of the past or of the future, as a set of vivid impressions that formed a crudely colored panorama of action without any emotional light and shade, the intervals between which, like the intervals of a theatrical performance, were only tolerable with plenty of chocolates to eat. At the present moment she had plenty of chocolates to eat, more, in fact, than she had ever had before, but the interval was seeming most exasperatingly long.
"You ought to take a walk on the Heath," Mr. Gustard advised. "It isn"t good to sit about all day doing nothing."
"You don"t take walks," Sylvia pointed out. "And you sit about all day doing nothing. I do read a book, anyway."
"I"m different," Mr. Gustard p.r.o.nounced, very solemnly. "I"ve lived my life. If I was to take a walk round Hampstead I couldn"t hardly peep into a garden without seeing a tree as I"d planted myself. And when I"m gone, the trees "ll still be there. That"s something to think about, that is. There was a clergyman came nosing round here the other day to ask me why I didn"t go to church. I told him I"d done without church as a lad, and I couldn"t see why I shouldn"t do without it now. "But you"re growing old, Mr. Gustard," he says to me. "That"s just it," I says to him. "I"m getting very near the time when, if all they say is true, I shall be in the heavenly choir for ever and ever, amen, and the less singing I hear for the rest of my time on earth the better." "That"s a very blasphemous remark," he says to me. "Is it?" says I to him. "Well, here"s another. Perhaps all this talk by parsons," I says, "about this life on earth being just a choir practice for heaven won"t bear looking into. Perhaps we shall all die and go to sleep and never wake up and never dream and never do nothing at all, never. And if that"s true," I says, "I reckon I shall bust my coffin with laughing when I think of my trees growing and growing and growing and you preaching to a lot of old women and children about something you don"t know nothing about and they don"t know nothing about and n.o.body don"t know nothing about." With that I offered him a pear, and he walked off very offended with his head in the air. You get out and about, my dear. Bustle around and enjoy yourself. That"s my motto for the young."
Sylvia felt that there was much to be said for Mr. Gustard"s att.i.tude, and she took his advice so far as to go for a long walk on the Heath that very afternoon. Yet there was something lacking. When she got home again she found that the book of adventure which she had been reading was no longer capable of keeping her thoughts fixed. The stupid part of it was that her thoughts wandered nowhere in particular and without attaching themselves to a definite object. She would try to concentrate them upon Jimmy and speculate what he was doing, but Jimmy would turn into Claude Raglan; and when she began to speculate what Claude was doing, Claude would turn back again into Jimmy. Her own innermost restlessness made her so fidgety that she went to the window and stared at the road along the dusky Heath. The garden gate of next door swung to with a click, and Sylvia saw a young man coming toward the house. She was usually without the least interest in young men, but on this afternoon of indefinable and errant thoughts she welcomed the least excuse for bringing herself back to a material object; and this young man, though it was twilight and his face was not clearly visible, managed to interest her somehow, so that at tea she found herself asking Mr. Gustard who he might be and most unaccountably blushing at the question.
"That "ud be young Artie, wouldn"t it?" he suggested to his wife. She nodded over the squat teapot that she so much resembled: "That must be him come back from his uncle"s. Mrs. Madden was only saying to me this morning, when we was waiting for the grocer"s man, that she was expecting him this evening. She spoils him something shocking. If you please, his highness has been down into Hampshire to see if he would like to be a gentleman farmer. Whoever heard, I should like to know? Why he can"t be long turned seventeen. It"s a pity his father isn"t alive to keep him from idling his time away."
"There"s no harm in giving a bit of liberty to the young," Mr. Gustard answered, preparing to be as eloquent as the large piece of bread and b.u.t.ter in his mouth would let him. "I"m not in favor of pushing a young man too far."
"No, you was never in favor of pushing anything, neither yourself nor your business," said Mrs. Gustard, sharply. "But I think it"s a sin to let a boy like that moon away all his time with a book. Books were only intended for the gentry and people as have grown too old for anything else, and even then they"re bad for their eyes."
Sylvia wondered whether Mrs. Gustard intended to criticize unfavorably her own manner of life, but she left the defense of books to Mr. Gustard, who was so impatient to begin that he nearly choked: "Because I don"t read," he said, "that"s no reason for me to try and stop others from reading. What I say is "liberty for all." If young Artie Madden wants to read, let him read. If Sylvia here wants to read, let her read. Books give employment to a lot of people--binders, printers, paper-makers, booksellers. It"s a regular trade. If people didn"t like to smell flowers and sit about under trees, there wouldn"t be no gardeners, would there? Very well, then; and if there wasn"t people who wanted to read, there wouldn"t be no printers."
"What about the people who write all the rubbish?" Mrs. Gustard demanded, fiercely. "Nice, idle lot of good-for-nothings they are, I"m sure."
"That"s because the only writing fellow we ever knew got that servant-girl of ours into trouble."
"Samuel," Mrs. Gustard interrupted, "that"ll do!"
"I don"t suppose every writing fellow"s like him," Mr. Gustard went on. "And, anyway, the girl was a saucy hussy."
"Samuel! That will do, I said."
"Well, so she was," Mr. Gustard continued, defiantly. "Didn"t she used to powder her face with your Borwick"s?"
"I"ll trouble you not to spit crumbs all over my clean cloth," said Mrs. Gustard, "making the whole place look like a bird-cage!"
Mr. Gustard winked at Sylvia and was silent. She for her part had already begun to weave round Arthur Madden a veil of romance, when the practical side of her suddenly roused itself to a sense of what was going on and admonished her to leave off dreaming and attend to her cat.
Up-stairs in her bedroom, she opened her window and looked out at the faint drizzle of rain which was just enough to mellow the leafy autumnal scents and diffuse the golden beams of the lamps along the Heath. There was the sound of another window"s being opened on a line with hers; presently a head and shoulders scarcely definable in the darkness leaned out, whistling an old French air that was familiar to her from earliest childhood, the words of which had long ago been forgotten. She could not help whistling the air in unison; and after a moment"s silence a voice from the head and shoulders asked who it was.
"A girl," Sylvia said.
"Anybody could tell that," the voice commented, a little scornfully. "Because the noise is all woolly."
"It"s not," Sylvia contradicted, indignantly. "Perhaps you"ll say I"m out of tune? I know quite well who you are. You"re Arthur Madden, the boy next door."
"But who are you?"
"I"m Sylvia Scarlett."
"Are you a niece of Mrs. Gustard?" the voice inquired.
"Of course not," Sylvia scoffed. "I"m just staying here."
"Who with?"
"By myself."
"By yourself?" the voice echoed, incredulously.
"Why not? I"m nearly sixteen."
This was too much for Arthur Madden, who struck a match to illuminate the features of the strange unknown. Although he did not succeed in discerning Sylvia, he lit up his own face, which she liked well enough to suggest they should go for a walk, making the proposal a kind of test for herself of Arthur Madden"s character, and deciding that if he showed the least hesitation in accepting she would never speak to him again. The boy, however, was immediately willing; the two pairs of shoulders vanished; Sylvia put on her coat and went down-stairs.
"Going out for a blow?" Mr. Gustard asked.
Sylvia nodded. "With the boy next door," she answered.
"You haven"t been long," said Mr. Gustard, approvingly. "That"s the way I like to see it. When I courted Mrs. Gustard, which was forty years ago come next November, it was in the time of toolip-planting, and I hove a toolip bulb at her and caught her in the chignon. "Whatever are you doing of?" she says to me. "It"s a proposal of marriage," I says, and when she started giggling I was that pleased I planted half the toolips upside down. But that"s forty years ago, that is. Mrs. Gustard"s grown more particular since, and so as she"s washing up the tea-things in the scullery, I should just slip out, and I"ll tell her you"ve gone out to get a paper to see if it"s true what somebody said about Buckingham Palace being burned to a cinder."
Sylvia was not at all sure that she ought to recognize Mrs. Gustard"s opinion even so far as by slipping out and thereby giving her an idea that she did not possess perfect liberty of action. However, she decided that the point was too trifling to worry about, and, with a wave of her hand, she left her landlord to tell what story he chose to his wife.
Arthur Madden was waiting for her by his gate when she reached the end of the garden; while they wandered along by the Heath, indifferent to the drizzle, Sylvia felt an extraordinary release from the faint discontent of these past days, an extraordinary delight in finding herself with a companion who was young like herself and who, like herself, seemed full of speculation upon the world which he was setting out to explore, regarding it as an adventure and ready to exchange hopes and fears and fancies with her in a way that no one had ever done hitherto; moreover, he was ready to be most flatteringly impressed by her experiences, even if he still maintained she could not whistle properly. The friendship between Sylvia and Arthur begun upon that night grew daily closer. Mrs. Gustard used to say that they wasted each other"s time, but she was in the minority; she used to say also that Arthur was being more spoiled than ever by his mother; but it was this very capacity for being spoiled that endeared him to Sylvia, who had spent a completely free existence for so long now that unless Arthur had been allowed his freedom she would soon have tired of the friendship. She liked Mrs. Madden, a beautiful and unpractical woman, who unceasingly played long sonatas on a cracked piano; at least she would have played them unceasingly had she not continually been jumping up to wait on Arthur, hovering round him like a dark and iridescent b.u.t.terfly.
In the course of many talks together Arthur told Sylvia the family history. It seemed that his mother had been the daughter of a gentleman, not an ordinary kind of top-hatted gentleman, but a squire with horses and hounds and a park; his father had been a groom and she had eloped with him, but Sylvia was not to suppose that his father had been an ordinary kind of groom; he too came from good stock, though he had been rather wild. His father"s father had been a farmer in Suss.e.x, and he had just come back from staying at the farm, where his uncle had offered to give him a start in life, but he had found he did not care much for farm-work. His mother"s family would have nothing to do with her beyond allowing her enough to live upon without disturbing them.
"What are you going to do?" Sylvia asked.
Arthur replied that he did not know, but that he had thoughts of being a soldier.
"A soldier?" said Sylvia, doubtfully. Her experience of soldiers was confined to Blanche"s lovers, and the universal connotation in France of soldiery with a vile servitude that could hardly be avoided.
"But of course the worst of it is," Arthur explained, "there aren"t any wars nowadays."
They were walking over the Heath on a fine November day about Martinmas; presently, when they sat down under some pines and looked at London spread beneath them in a sparkling haze, Arthur took Sylvia"s hand and told her that he loved her.
She nearly s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away and would have told him not to be silly, but suddenly the beauty of the tranquil city below and the wind through the pines conquered her spirit; she sat closer to him, letting her head droop upon his shoulder; when his clasp tightened round her unresisting hand she burst into tears, unable to tell him that her sorrow was nothing but joy, that he had nothing to do with it nor with her, and yet that he had everything to do with it, because with no one else could she have borne this incommunicable display of life. Then she dried her tears and told Arthur she thought he had better become a highwayman.
"Highwaymen don"t exist any longer," Arthur objected. "All the jolly things have disappeared from the world--war and highwaymen and pirates and troubadours and crusaders and maypoles and the Inquisition. Everything."
Gradually Sylvia learned from Arthur how much of what she had been reading was mere invention, and in the first bitterness of disillusionment she wished to renounce books forever; but Arthur dissuaded her from doing that, and they used to read simultaneously the same books so as to be able to discuss them during their long walks. They became two romantics born out of due season, two romantics that should have lived a century ago and that now bewailed the inability of the modern world to supply what their adventurous souls demanded.
Arthur was inclined to think that Sylvia had much less cause to repine than he; the more tales she told him of her life, the more tributes of envy he paid to her good fortune. He pointed out that Monkley scarcely differed from the highwayman of romance; nor did he doubt but that if all his enterprises could be known he would rival d.i.c.k Turpin himself. Sylvia agreed with all he said, but she urged the inequality of her own share in the achievement. What she wanted was something more than to sit at home and enjoy fruits in the stealing of which she had played no part. She wanted none of Arthur"s love unless he were prepared to face the problem of living life at its fullest in company with her. She would let him kiss her sometimes, because, unhappily, it seemed that even very young men were infected with this malady, and that if deprived of this odious habit they were liable to lose determination and sink into incomprehensible despondency. At the same time Sylvia made Arthur clearly understand that she was yielding to his weakness, not to her own, and that, if he wished to retain her compa.s.sion, he must prove that the devotion of which he boasted was vital to his being.
"You mustn"t just kiss me," Sylvia warned him, "because it"s easy. It"s very difficult, really, because it"s very difficult for me to let you do it. I have to wind myself up beforehand just as if I were going to pull out a loose tooth."
Arthur gazed at her with wide-open, liquid eyes; his mouth trembled. "You say such cruel things," he murmured.
Sylvia punched him as hard as she could. "I won"t be stared at like that. You look like a cow when you stare at me like that. Buck up and think what we"re going to do."
"I"m ready to do anything," Arthur declared, "as long as you"re decent to me. But you"re such an extraordinary girl. One moment you burst into tears and put your head on my shoulder, and the next moment you"re punching me."
"And I shall punch you again," Sylvia said, fiercely, "if you dare to remind me that I ever cried in front of you. You weren"t there when I cried."
"But I was," he protested.
"No, you weren"t. You were only there like a tree or a cloud."
"Or a cow," said Arthur, gloomily.
"I think that if we did go away together," Sylvia said, meditatively, "I should leave you almost at once, because you will keep returning to things I said. My father used to be like that."
"But if we go away," Arthur asked, "how are we going to live? I shouldn"t be any use on racecourses. I"m the sort of person that gets taken in by the three-card trick."
"You make me so angry when you talk like that," Sylvia said. "Of course if you think you"ll always be a fool, you always will be a fool. Being in love with me must make you think that you"re not a fool. Perhaps we never shall go away together; but if we do, you"ll have to begin by stealing bicycles. Jimmy Monkley and my father did that for a time. You hire a bicycle and sell it or p.a.w.n it a long way off from the shop it came from. It"s quite easy. Only, of course, it"s best to disguise yourself. Father used to paint out his teeth, wear blue gla.s.ses, and powder his mustache gray. But once he made himself so old in a place called Lewisham that the man in the bicycle-shop thought he was too old to ride and wouldn"t let him have a machine."
Sylvia was strengthened in her resolve to launch Arthur upon the stormy seas of an independent existence by the placid harbor in which his mother loved to see him safely at anchor. Sylvia could not understand how a woman like Mrs. Madden, who had once been willing to elope with a groom, could bear to let her son spend his time so ineffectively. Not that she wished Mrs. Madden to exert her authority by driving him into a clerkship, or indeed into any profession for which he had no inclination, but she deplored the soft slavery which a fond woman can impose, the slavery of being waited upon that is more deadening than the slavery of waiting upon other people. She used to make a point of impressing upon Mrs. Madden the extent to which she and Arthur went shares in everything, lest she might suppose that Sylvia imitated her complaisance, and when Mrs. Madden used to smile in her tired way and make some remark about boy and girl lovers, Sylvia used to get angry and try to demonstrate the unimportance of that side of life.