Chapter XIV (2)

"I'm sure you'll admit that Arthur has given quite a wrong idea of me when I tell you that we lived together for a year; and you must remember that I've been married already and know what it means. Arthur has no right to complain of me."

"Oh, Sylvia, I'm sorry!" Mrs. Madden almost whispered. "Oh dear! how could Arthur do such a thing?"

"Because I made him, of course. Now you must forgive _me_ if I say something that hurts your feelings, but I must say it. When you ran away with your husband, you must have made him do it. You _must_ have done."

"Good gracious me!" Mrs. Madden exclaimed. "I suppose I did. I never looked at it in that light before. You've made me feel quite ashamed of my behavior. Quite embarrassed. And I suppose everybody has always blamed me entirely; but because my husband was one of my father's servants I always used to be defending him. I never thought of defending myself."

Sylvia was sorry for stirring up in Mrs. Madden's placid mind old storms. It was painful to see this faded gentlewoman in the little suburban bedroom, blushing nervously at the unlady-like behavior of long ago. Presently Mrs. Madden pulled herself up and said, with a certain decision:

"Yes, but I did marry him."

"Yes, but you hadn't been married already. You hadn't knocked round half the globe for twenty-eight years. It's no good my pretending to be shocked at myself. I don't care a bit what anybody thinks about me, and, anyway, it's done now."

"Surely you'd be happier if you married Arthur after--after that," Mrs. Madden suggested.

"But I'm not in the least unhappy. I can't say whether I shall marry Arthur until I've given my performance. I can't say what effect either success or failure will have on me. My whole mind is concentrated in the Pierian Hall next October."

"I'm afraid I cant understand this modern way of looking at things."

"But there's nothing modern about my point of view, Mrs. Madden. There's nothing modern about the egotism of an artist. Arthur is as free as I am. He has his own career to think about. He does think about it a great deal. He's radically much more interested in that than in marrying me. The main point is that he's free at present. From the moment I promise to marry him and he accepts that promise he won't be free. Nor shall I. It wouldn't be fair on either of us to make that promise now, because I must know what October is going to bring forth."

"Well, I call it very modern. When I was young we looked at marriage as the most important event in a girl's life."

"But you didn't, dear Mrs. Madden. You, or rather your contemporaries, regarded marriage as a path to freedom--social freedom, that is. Your case was exceptional. You fell passionately in love with a man beneath you, as the world counts it. You married him, and what was the result? You were cut off by your relations as utterly as if you had become the concubine of a Hottentot."

"Oh, Sylvia dear, what an uncomfortable comparison!"

"Marriage to your contemporaries was a social observance. I'm not religious, but I regard marriage as so sacred that, because I've been divorced and because, so far as I know, my husband is still alive, I have something like religious qualms about marrying again. It takes a cynic to be an idealist; the sentimentalist gets left at the first fence. It's just because I'm fond of Arthur in a perfectly normal way when I'm not immersed in my ambition that I even contemplate the _notion_ of marrying him. I've got a perfectly normal wish to have children and a funny little house of my own. So far as I know at present, I should like Arthur to be the father of my children. But it's got to be an equal business. Personally I think that the Turks are wiser about women than we are; I think the majority of women are only fit for the harem and I'm not sure that the majority wouldn't be much happier under such conditions. The incurable vanity of man, however, has removed us from our seclusion to admire his antics, and it's too late to start shutting us up in a box now. Woman never thought of equality with man until he put the notion into her head."

"I think perhaps supper may be ready," Mrs. Madden said. "It all sounds very convincing as you speak, but I can't help feeling that you'd be happier if you wouldn't take everything to pieces to look at the works. Things hardly ever go so well again afterward. Oh dear, I wish you hadn't lived together first."

"It breaks the ice of the wedding-cake, doesn't it?" said Sylvia.

"And I wish you wouldn't make such bitter remarks. You don't really mean what you say. I'm sure supper must be ready."

"Oh, but I do," Sylvia insisted, as they passed out into the narrow little passage and down the narrow stairs into the little dining-room. Nevertheless, in Sylvia's mind there was a kindliness toward this little house, almost a tenderness, and far away at the back of her imagination was the vision of herself established in just such another little house.

"But even the Albert Memorial would look all right from the wrong end of a telescope," she said to herself.

One thing was brought home very vividly during her stay in Dulwich, which was the difference between what she had deceived herself into thinking was that first maternal affection she had felt for Arthur and the true maternal love of his mother. Whenever she had helped Arthur in any way, she had always been aware of enjoying the sensation of her indispensableness; it had been an emotion altogether different from this natural selfishness of the mother; it was really one that had always reflected a kind of self-conscious credit upon herself. Here in Dulwich, with this aspect of her affection for Arthur completely overshadowed, Sylvia was able to ask herself more directly if she loved him in the immemorial way of love; and though she could not arrive at a finally positive conclusion, she was strengthened in her resolve not to let him go. Arthur himself was more in love with her than he had ever been, and she thought that perhaps this was due to that sudden and disquieting withdrawal of herself; in the midst of possession he had been dispossessed, and until he could pierce her secret reasons he would inevitably remain deeply in love, even to the point of being jealous of a boy like Lucian Hope. Sylvia understood Arthur's having refused an engagement to tour as juvenile lead in a successful musical piece and his unwillingness to leave her alone in town; he was rewarded, too, for his action, because shortly afterward he obtained a good engagement in London to take the place of a singer who had retired from the cast of the Frivolity Theater. At that rate he would soon find himself at the Vanity Theater itself.

In June Sylvia went back to the Airdales', and soon afterward took rooms near them in West Kensington. It was impossible to continue indefinitely to pretend that Arthur and herself were mere theatrical acquaintances, and one day Olive asked Sylvia if she intended to marry him.

"What do you advise?" Sylvia asked. "There's a triumph, dearest Olive. Have I ever asked your advice before?"

"I like him; Jack likes him, too, and says that he ought to get on fast now; but I don't know. Well, he's not the sort of man I expected you to marry."

"You've had an ideal for me all the time," Sylvia exclaimed. "And you've never told me."

"Oh no, I've never had anybody definite in my mind, but I think I should be able to say at once if the man you had chosen was the right one. Don't ask me to describe him, because I couldn't do it. You used to tease me about marrying a curly-headed actor, but Arthur Madden seems to me much more of a curly-headed actor than Jack is."

"In fact, you thoroughly disapprove of poor Arthur?" Sylvia pressed.

"Oh dear, no! Oh, not at all! Please don't think that. I'm only anxious that you shouldn't throw yourself away."

"Remnants always go cheap," said Sylvia. "However, don't worry. I'll be quite sure of myself before I marry anybody again."

The summer passed away quickly in a complexity of arrangements for the opening performance at the Pierian Hall. Sylvia stayed three or four times at Dulwich and grew very fond of Mrs. Madden, who never referred again to the subject of marriage. She also went up to Warwickshire with Olive and the children, much to the pleasure of Mr. Fanshawe, who was now writing a supplementary volume called _More Warwickshire Worthies_. In London she scarcely met any old friends; indeed, she went out of her way to avoid people like the Clarehavens, because they would not have been interested in what she was doing. By this time Sylvia had reached the point of considering everybody either for the interest and belief he evinced in her success or by the use he could be to her in securing it. The first rapturous egoism of Arthur's own success in London had worn off with time, and he was able to devote himself entirely to running about for Sylvia, which gradually made her regard him more and more as a fixture. As for Lucian Hope, he thought of nothing but the great occasion, and would have fought anybody who had ventured to cast a breath of doubt upon the triumph at hand. The set that he had painted was exactly what Sylvia required, and though both Arthur and Jack thought it would distract the audience's attention by puzzling them, they neither of them on Sylvia's account criticized it at all harshly.

At last in mid-October the very morning of the day arrived, so long anticipated with every kind of discussion that its superficial resemblance to other mornings seemed heartless and unnatural. It was absurd that a milkman's note should be the same as yesterday, that servants should shake mats on front-door steps as usual, and that the maid who knocked at Sylvia's door should not break down beneath the weightiness of her summons. Nor, when Sylvia looked out of the window, were Jack and Arthur and Ronald and Lucian pacing with agitated steps the pavement below, an absence of enthusiasm, at any rate on the part of Arthur and Lucian, that hurt her feelings, until she thought for a moment how foolishly unreasonable she was being.

As soon as Sylvia was dressed she went round to the Airdales'; everybody she met on the way inspired her with a longing to confide in him the portentousness of the day, and she found herself speculating whether several business men, who were hurrying to catch the nine-o'clock train, had possibly an intention of visiting the Pierian Hall that afternoon. She was extremely annoyed to find, when she reached the Airdales' house, that neither Jack nor Olive was up.

"Do they know the time?" she demanded of the maid, in a scandalized voice. "Their clock must have stopped."

"Oh no, miss, I don't think so. Breakfast is at ten, as usual. There's Mr. Airdale's dressing-room bell going now, miss. That 'll be for his shaving-water. Shall I say you're waiting to see him?"

What a ridiculous time to begin shaving, Sylvia thought.

"Yes, please," she added, aloud. "Or no, don't bother him; I'll come back at ten o'clock."

Sylvia saw more of the streets of West Kensington in that hour than she had ever seen of them before, and decided that the neighborhood was impossible. Nothing so intolerably monotonous as these rows of stupid and meaningless houses had ever been designed. One after another of them blinked at her in the autumnal sunshine with a fatuous complacency that made her long to ring all the bells in the street. Presently she found herself by the play-fields of St. James's School, where the last boys were hurrying across the grass like belated ants. She looked at the golden clock in the school-buildings--half past nine. In five hours and a half she would be waiting for the curtain to go up; in seven hours and a half the audience would be wondering if it should have tea in Bond Street or cross Piccadilly and walk down St. James's Street to Rumpelmayer's. This problem of the audience began to worry Sylvia. She examined the alternatives with a really anxious gravity. If it went to Rumpelmayer's it would have to walk back to the Dover Street Tube, which would mean recrossing Piccadilly; on the other hand, it would be on the right side for the omnibuses. On the other hand, it would find Rumpelmayer's full, because other audiences would have arrived before it, invading the tea-shop from Pall Mall. Sylvia grew angry at the thought of these other audiences robbing her audience of its tea--her audience, some members of which would have read in the paper this morning:

PIERIAN HALL.

This afternoon at 3 p. m.

SYLVIA SCARLETT

IN

IMPROVISATIONS

and would actually have paid, some of them, as much as seven shillings and sixpence to see Sylvia Scarlett. Seven hours and a half: seven shillings and sixpence: 7-1/2 plus 7-1/2 made fifteen. When she was fifteen she had met Arthur. Sylvia's mind rambled among the omens of numbers, and left her audience still undecided between Bond Street and Rumpelmayer's, left it upon the steps of the Pierian Hall, the sport of passing traffic, hungry, thirsty, homesick. In seven and a half hours she would know the answer to that breathless question asked a year ago in Vermont. To think that the exact spot on which she had stood when she asked was existing at this moment in Vermont! In seven and a half hours, no, in seven hours and twenty-five minutes; the hands were moving on. It was really terrible how little people regarded the flight of time; the very world might come to an end in seven hours and twenty-five minutes.

"Have you seen Sylvia Scarlett yet?"

"No, we intended to go yesterday, but there were no seats left. They say she's wonderful."

"Oh, my dear, she's perfectly amazing! Of course it's something quite new. You really must go."

"Who is she like?"

"Oh, she's not like anybody else. I'm told she's half French."

"Oh, really! How interesting."

"Good morning! Have you used Pear's soap?"

"V-vi-vin-vino-vinol-vinoli-vinolia."

Sylvia pealed the Airdales' bell, and found Jack in the queer mixed costume which a person wears on the morning of an afternoon that will be celebrated by his best tail-coat.

"My dear girl, you really mustn't get so excited," he protested, when he saw Sylvia's manner.

"Oh, Jack, do you think I shall be a success?"

"Of course you will. Now, do, for goodness' sake, drink a cup of coffee or something."

Sylvia found that she was hungry enough to eat even an egg, which created a domestic crisis, because Sylvius and Rose quarreled over which of them was to have the top. Finally it was adjusted by awarding the top to Sylvius, but by allowing Rose to turn the empty egg upside down for the exquisite pleasure of watching Sylvia tap it with ostentatious greed, only to find that there was nothing inside, after all, an operation that Sylvius watched with critical jealousy and Rose saluted with ecstatic joy. Sylvia's disappointment was so beautifully violent that Sylvius regretted the material choice he had made, and wanted Sylvia to eat another egg, of which Rose might eat the top and he offer the empty shell; but it was too late, and Sylvius learned that often the shadow is better than the substance.

It had been decided in the end that Jack should confine himself to the cares of general management, and Arthur was left without a rival. Sylvia had insisted that he should only sing old English folk-songs, a decision which he had challenged at first on the ground that he required the advertisement of more modern songs, and that Sylvia's choice was not going to help him.

"You're not singing to help yourself," she had told him. "You're singing to help me."

In addition to Arthur there was a girl whom Lucian Hope had discovered, a delicate creature with red hair, whose chief claim to employment was that she was starving, though incidentally she had a very sweet and pure soprano voice. Finally there was an Irish pianist whose technique and good humor were alike unassailable.

Before the curtain went up, Sylvia could think of nothing but the improvisations that she ought to have invented instead of the ones that she had. It was a strain upon her common sense to prevent her from canceling the whole performance and returning its money to the audience. The more she contemplated what she was going to do the more she viewed the undertaking as a fraud upon the public. There had never been any _chicane_ like the _chicane_ she was presently going to commit. What was that noise? Who had given the signal to O'Hea? What in hell's name did he think he was doing at the piano? The sound of the music was like water running into one's bath while one was lying in bed--nothing could stop it from overflowing presently. Nothing could stop the curtain from rising. At what a pace he was playing that Debussy! He was showing off, the fool! A ridiculous joke came into her mind that she kept on repeating while the music flowed: "Many a minim makes a maxim. Many a minim makes a maxim." How cold it was in the dressing-room, and the music was getting quicker and quicker. There was a knock at the door. It was Arthur. How nice he looked with that red carnation in his buttonhole.

"How nice you look, Arthur, in that buttonhole."

The flower became tremendously important; it seemed to Sylvia that, if she could go on flattering the flower, O'Hea would somehow be kept at the piano.

"Well, don't pull it to pieces," said Arthur, ruthfully. But it was too late; the petals were scattered on the floor like drops of blood.

"Oh, I'm sorry! Come along back to my dressing-room. I'll give you another flower."

"No, no; there isn't time now. Wait till you come off after your first set."

Now it was seeming the most urgent thing in the world to find another flower for Arthur's buttonhole. At all cost the rise of that curtain must be delayed. But Arthur had brought her on the stage and the notes were racing toward the death of the piece. It was absurd of O'Hea to have chosen Debussy; the atmosphere required a ballade of Chopin, or, better still, Schumann's Noveletten. He could have played all the Noveletten. Oh dear, what a pity she had not thought of making that suggestion. The piano would have been scarcely half-way through by now.

Suddenly there was silence. Then there followed the languid applause of an afternoon audience for an unimportant part of the program.

"He's stopped," Sylvia exclaimed, in horror. "What _has_ happened?"

She turned to Arthur in despair, but he had hurried off the stage. Lucian Hope's painted city seemed to press forward and stifle her; she moved down-stage to escape it. The curtain went up and she recoiled as from a chasm at her feet. Why on earth was O'Hea sitting in that idiotic attitude, as if he were going to listen to a sermon, looking down like that, with his right arm supporting his left elbow and his left hand propping up his chin? How hot the footlights were! She hoped nothing had happened, and looked round in alarm; but the fireman was standing quite calmly in the wings. Just as Sylvia was deciding that her voice could not possibly escape from her throat, which had closed upon it like a pair of pincers, the voice tore itself free and went traveling out toward that darkness in front, that nebulous darkness scattered with hands and faces and programs. Like Concetta in a great city, Sylvia was lost in that darkness; she _was_ Concetta. It seemed to her that the applause at the end was not so much approval of Concetta as a welcome to Mrs. Gainsborough; when isolated laughs and volleys of laughter came out of the darkness and were followed sometimes by the darkness itself laughing everywhere, so that O'Hea looked up very personally and winked at her, then Sylvia fell in love with her audience. The laughter increased, and suddenly she recognized at the end of each volley that Sylvius and Rose were supplementing its echoes with rapturous echoes of their own. She could not see them, but their gurgles in the darkness were like a song of nightingales to Sylvia. She ceased to be Mrs. Gainsborough, and began to say three or four of the poems. Then the curtain fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again.

Jack was standing beside her and saying:

"Splendid, splendid, splendid, splendid!"

"Delighted, delighted, delighted, delighted!"

"Very good audience! Splendid audience! Delighted audience! Success! Success! Success!"

Really, how wonderfully O'Hea was playing, Sylvia thought, and how good that Debussy was!

The rest of the performance was as much of a success as the beginning. Perhaps the audience liked best Mrs. Gowndry and the woman who smuggled lace from Belgium into France. Sylvius and Rose laughed so much at the audience's laughter at Mrs. Gowndry that Sylvius announced in the ensuing lull that he wanted to go somewhere, a desire which was naturally indorsed by Rose. The audience was much amused, because it supposed that Sylvius's wish was a tribute to the profession of Mrs. Gowndry's husband, and whatever faint doubts existed about the propriety of alluding in the Pierian Hall to a lavatory-attendant were dispersed.

Sylvia forgot altogether about the audience's tea when the curtain fell finally. It was difficult to think about anything with so many smiling people pressing round her on the stage. Several old friends came and reminded her of their existence, but there was no one who had quite such a radiant smile as Arthur Lonsdale.

"Lonnie! How nice of you to come!"

"I say, topping, I mean. What? I say, that's a most extraordinary back-cloth you've got. What on earth is it supposed to be? It reminds me of what you feel like when you're driving a car through a strange town after meeting a man you haven't seen for some time and who's just found out a good brand of fizz at the hotel where he's staying. I was afraid you'd get bitten in the back before you'd finished. I say, Mrs. Gowndry was devilish good. Some of the other lads and lasses were a bit beyond me."

"And how's business?"

"Oh, very good. We've just put the neatest little ninety h. p. torpedo-body two-seater on the market. I'll tootle you down to Brighton in it one Sunday morning. Upon my word, you'll scarcely have time to wrap yourself up before you'll have to unwrap yourself to shake hands with dear old Harry Burnly coming out to welcome you from the Britannia."

"Not married yet, Lonnie?"

"No, not yet. Braced myself up to do it the other day, dived in, and was seized with cramp at the deep end. She offered to be a sister to me and I sank like a stone. My mother's making rather a nuisance of herself about it. She keeps producing girls out of her muff like a conjurer, whenever she comes to see me. And what girls! Heather mixture most of them, like Guggenheim's Twelfth of August. I shall come to it at last, I suppose. Mr. Arthur Lonsdale and his bride leaving St. Margaret's, Westminster, under an arch of spanners formed by grateful chauffeurs whom the brilliant and handsome young bride-groom has recommended to many titled readers of this paper. Well, so long, Sylvia; there's a delirious crowd of admirers waiting for you. Send me a line where you're living and we'll have a little dinner somewhere--"

Sylvia's success was not quite so huge as in the first intoxication of her friends' enthusiasm she had begun to fancy. However, it was unmistakably a success, and she was able to give two recitals a week through the autumn, with certainly the prospect of a good music-hall engagement for the following spring, if she cared to accept it. Most of the critics discovered that she was not as good as Yvette Guilbert. In view of Yvette Guilbert's genius, of which they were much more firmly convinced now than they would have been when Yvette Guilbert first appeared, this struck them as a fairly safe comparison; moreover, it gave their readers an impression that they understood French, which enhanced the literary value of their criticism. To strengthen this belief most of them were inclined to think that the French poems were the best part of Miss Sylvia Scarlett's performance. One or two of the latter definitely recalled some of Yvette Guilbert's early work, no doubt by the number of words they had not understood, because somebody had crackled a program or had shuffled his feet or had coughed. As for the English character studies, or, as some of them carried away by reminiscences of Yvette Guilbert into oblivion of their own language preferred to call them, _études_, they had a certain distinction, and in many cases betrayed signs of an almost meticulous observation, though at the same time, like everybody else doing anything at the present moment except in France, they did not have as much distinction or meticulousness as the work of forerunners in England or contemporaries abroad. Still, that was not to say that the work of Miss Sylvia Scarlett was not highly promising and of the greatest possible interest. The _timbre_ of her voice was specially worthy of notice and justified the italics in which it was printed. Finally, two critics, who were probably sitting next to each other, found a misprint in the program, no doubt in searching for a translation of the poems.

If Sylvia fancied a lack of appreciation in the critics, all her friends were positive that they were wonderful notices for a beginner.

"Why, I think that's a splendid notice in the _Telegraph_," said Olive. "I found it almost at once. Why, one often has to read right through the paper before one can find the notice."

"Do you mean to tell me that the most self-inebriated egotist on earth ever read right through the _Daily Telegraph_? I don't believe it. He'd have been drowned like Narcissus."

Arthur pressed for a decision about their marriage, now that Sylvia knew what she had so long wanted to know; but she was wrapped up in ideas for improving her performance and forbade Arthur to mention the subject until she raised it herself; for the present she was on with a new love twice a week. Indeed, they were fascinating to Sylvia, these audiences each with a definite personality of its own. She remembered how she had scoffed in old days at the slavish flattery of them by her fellow-actors and actresses; equally in the old days she had scoffed at love. She wished that she could feel toward Arthur as she felt now toward her audiences, which were as absorbing as children with their little clevernesses and precocities. The difference between what she was doing now and what she had done formerly when she sang French songs with an English accent was the difference between the realism of an old knotted towel that is a baby and an expensive doll that may be a baby but never ceases to be a doll. Formerly she had been a mechanical thing and had never given herself because she had possessed neither art nor truth, but merely craft and accuracy. She had thought that the personality was degraded by depending on the favor of an audience. All that old self-consciousness and false shame were gone. She and her audience communed through art as spirits may commune after death. In the absorption of studying the audience as a separate entity, Sylvia forgot that it was made up of men and women. When she knew that any friends of hers were in front, they always remained entirely separate in her mind from the audience. Gradually, however, as the autumn advanced, several people from long ago re-entered her life and she began to lose that feeling of seclusion from the world and to realize the gradual setting up of barriers to her complete liberty of action. The first of these visitants was Miss Ashley, who in her peacock-blue gown looked much as she had looked when Sylvia last saw her.

"I could not resist coming round to tell you how greatly I enjoyed your performance," she said. "I've been so sorry that you never came to see me all these years."

Sylvia felt embarrassed, because she dreaded presently an allusion to her marriage with Philip, but Miss Ashley was too wise.

"How's Hornton House!" asked Sylvia, rather timidly. It was like inquiring after the near relation of an old friend who might have died.

"Just the same. Miss Primer is still with me. Miss Hossack now has a school of her own. Miss Pinck became very ill with gouty rheumatism and had to retire. I won't ask you about yourself; you told me so much from the stage. Now that we've been able to meet again, won't you come and visit your old school sometime?"

Sylvia hesitated.

"Please," Miss Ashley insisted. "I'm not inviting you out of politeness. It would really give me pleasure. I have never ceased to think about you all these years. Well, I won't keep you, for I'm sure you must be tired. Do come. Tell me, Sylvia. I should so like to bring the girls one afternoon. What would be a good afternoon to come?"

"You mean, when will there be nothing in the program that--"

"We poor schoolmistresses," said Miss Ashley, with a whimsical look of deprecation.

"Come on Saturday fortnight, and afterward I'll go back with you all to Hornton House. I'd love that."

So it was arranged.

On Wednesday of the following week it happened that there was a particularly appreciative audience, and Sylvia became so much enamoured of the laughter that she excelled herself. It was an afternoon of perfect accord, and she traced the source of it to a group somewhere in the middle of the stalls, too far back for her to recognize its composition. After the performance a pack of visiting-cards was brought to the door of her dressing-room. She read: "Mrs. Ian Campbell, Mrs. Ralph Dennison." Who on earth were they? "Mr. Leonard Worsley"--

Sylvia flung open the door, and there they all were, Mr. and Mrs. Worsley, Gladys and Enid, two good-looking men in the background, two children in the foreground.

"Gladys! Enid!"

"Sylvia!"

"Oh, Sylvia, you were priceless! Oh, we enjoyed ourselves no end! You don't know my husband. Ian, come and bow nicely to the pretty lady," cried Gladys.

"Sylvia, it was simply ripping. We laughed and laughed. Ralph, come and be introduced, and this is Stumpy, my boy," Enid cried, simultaneously.

"Fancy, he's a grandfather," the daughters exclaimed, dragging Mr. Worsley forward. He looked younger than ever.

"Hercules is at Oxford, or of course he'd have come, too. This is Proodles," said Gladys, pointing to the little girl.

"Sylvia, why did you desert us like that?" Mrs. Worsley reproachfully asked. "When are you coming down to stay with us at Arbor End? Of course the children are married...." She broke off with half a sigh.

"Oh, but we can all squash in," Gladys shouted.

"Oh, rather," Enid agreed. "The kids can sleep in the coal-scuttles. We sha'n't notice any difference."

"Dears, it's so wonderful to see you," Sylvia gasped. "But do tell me who you all are over again. I'm so muddled."

"I'm Mrs. Ian Campbell," Gladys explained. "And this is Ian. And this is Proodles, and at home there's Groggles, who's too small for anything except pantomimes. And that's Mrs. Ralph Dennison, and that's Ralph, and that's Stumpy, and at home Enid's got a girlie called Barbara. Mother hates being a grandmother four times over, so she's called Aunt Victoria, and of course father's still one of the children. We've both been married seven years."

Nothing had so much brought home to Sylvia the flight of time as this meeting with Gladys and Enid, who when she last saw them were only sixteen. It was incredible. And they had not forgotten her; in what seemed now a century they had not forgotten her! Sylvia told them about Miss Ashley's visit and suggested that they should come and join the party of girls from Hornton House. It would be fun, would it not? Miss Primer was still at the school.

Gladys and Enid were delighted with the plan, and on the day fixed about twenty girls invaded Sylvia's dressing-room, shepherded by Miss Primer, who was still melting with tears for Rodrigo's death in the scene. Miss Ashley had brought the carriage to drive Sylvia back, but she insisted upon going in a motor-'bus with the others and was well rewarded by Miss Primer's ecstasies of apprehension. Sylvia wandered with Gladys and Enid down well-remembered corridors, in and out of bedrooms and class-rooms; she listened to resolutions to send Prudence and Barbara to Hornton House in a few years. For Sylvia it was almost too poignant, the thought of these families growing up all round her, while she, after so many years, was still really as much alone as she had always been. The company of all these girls with their slim black legs, their pigtails and fluffy hair tied back with big bows, the absurdly exaggerated speech and the enlaced loves of girlhood--the accumulation of it all was scarcely to be borne.

When Sylvia visited Arbor End and talked once again to Mrs. Worsley, sitting at the foot of her bed, about the wonderful lives of that so closely self-contained family, the desolation of the future came visibly nearer; it seemed imperative at whatever cost to drive it back.

Shortly before Christmas a card was brought round to Sylvia--"Mrs. Prescott-Merivale, Hardingham Hall, Hunts."

"Who is it?" she asked her maid.

"It's a lady, miss."

"Well of course I didn't suppose a cassowary had sent up his card. What's she like?"

The maid strove to think of some phrase that would describe the visitor, but she fell back hopelessly upon her original statement.

"She's a lady, miss." Then, with a sudden radiancy lighting her eyes, she added, "And there's a little boy with her."

"My entertainment seems to be turning into a children's treat," Sylvia muttered to herself. "_Sic itur ad astra._"

"I beg your pardon, miss, did you say to show her in?"

Sylvia nodded.

Presently a tall young woman in the late twenties, with large and brilliant gray eyes, rose-flushed and deep in furs, came in, accompanied by an extraordinarily handsome boy of seven or eight.

"How awfully good of you to let me waste a few minutes of your time," she said, and as she spoke, Sylvia had a fleeting illusion that it was herself who was speaking, a sensation infinitely rapid, but yet sufficiently clear to make her ask herself the meaning of it, and to find in the stranger's hair the exact replica of her own. The swift illusion and the equally swift comparison were fled before she had finished inviting her visitor to sit down.

"I must explain who I am. I've heard about you, oh, of course, publicly, but also from my brother."

"Your brother?" repeated Sylvia.

"Yes, Michael Fane."

"He's not with you?"

"No. I wish he had been. Alas! he's gone off to look for a friend who, by the way, I expect you know also. Maurice Avery? All sorts of horrid rumors about what had happened to him in Morocco were being brought back to us, so Michael went off last spring, and has been with him ever since."

"But I thought he was a monk," Sylvia said.

Mrs. Merivale laughed with what seemed rather like relief. "No, he's neither priest nor monk, thank goodness, though the prospect still hangs over us."

"After all these years?" Sylvia asked, in astonishment.

"Oh, my dear Miss Scarlett, don't forget the narrow way is also long. But I didn't come to talk to you about Michael. I simply most shamelessly availed myself of his having met you a long time ago to give myself an excuse for talking to you about your performance. Of course it's absolutely great. How lucky you are!"

"Lucky?" Sylvia could not help glancing at the handsome boy beside her.

"He's rather a lamb, isn't he?" Mrs. Merivale agreed. "But you started all sorts of old, forgotten, hidden-away, burned-out fancies of mine this afternoon, and--you see, I intended to be a professional pianist once, but I got married instead. Much better, really, because, unless--Oh, I don't know. Yes, I _am_ jealous of you. You've picked me up and put me down again where I was once. Now the conversation's backed into me, and I really do want to talk about you. Your performance is the kind about which one wonders why nobody ever did it before. That's the greatest compliment one can pay an artist, I think. All great art is the great expression of a great commonplace; that's why it always looks so easy. I do hope you're having the practical success you deserve."

"Yes, I think I shall be all right," Sylvia said. "Only, I expect that after the New-Year I shall have to cut my show considerably and take a music-hall engagement. I'm not making a fortune at the Pierian."

"How horrid for you! How I should love to play with you! Oh dear! It's heartrending to say it, but it's much too late. Well, I mustn't keep you. You've given me such tremendous pleasure and just as much pain with it as makes the pleasure all the sharper.... I'll write and tell Michael about you."

"I expect he's forgotten my name by now," Sylvia said.

"Oh no, he never forgets anybody, even in the throes of theological speculation. Good-by. I see that this is your last performance for the present. I shall come and hear you again when you reopen. How odious about music-halls. You ought to have called yourself Silvia Scarletti, told your press agent that you were the direct descendant of the composer, vowed that when you came to England six months ago you could speak nothing but Polish, and you could have filled the Pierian night and day for a year. We're queer people, we English. I think, you know, it's a kind of shyness, the way we treat native artists. You get the same thing in families. It's not really that the prophet has no honor, etc.; it really is, I believe, a fear of boasting, which would be such bad form, wouldn't it? Of course we've ruined ourselves as a nation by our good manners and our sense of humor. Why, we've even insisted that what native artists we do support shall be gentlemen first and artists second. In what other country could an actor be knighted for his trousers or an author for his wife's dowry? Good-by. I do wish you great, great success."

"Anyway, I can't be knighted," Sylvia laughed.

"Oh, don't be too sure. A nation that has managed to turn its artists into gentlemen will soon insist on turning its women into gentlemen, too, or at any rate on securing their good manners in some way."

"Women will never really have good manners," Sylvia said.

"No, thank God. There you're right. Well, good-by. It's been so jolly to talk to you, and again I've loved every moment of this afternoon. Charles," she added to the handsome boy, "after bragging about your country's good manners, let's see you make a decent bow."

He inclined his head with a grave courtesy, opened the door for his mother, and followed her out.

The visit of Michael's sister, notwithstanding that she had envied Sylvia's luck, left her with very little opinion of it herself. What was her success, after all? A temporary elation dependent upon good health and the public taste, financially uncertain, emotionally wearing, radically unsatisfying and insecure, for, however good her performance was, it was always mummery, really, as near as mummery could get to creative work, perhaps, but mortal like its maker.

"Sad to think this is the last performance here," said her maid.

Sylvia agreed with her. It was a relief to find a peg on which to hang the unreasonable depression that was weighing her down. She passed out of her dressing-room. As the stage door swung to behind her a figure stepped into the lamplight of the narrow court; it was Jimmy Monkley. The spruceness had left him; all the color, too, had gone from his face, which was now sickly white--an evil face with its sandy mustache streaked with gray and its lusterless green eyes. Sylvia was afraid that from the way she started back from him he would think that she scorned him for having been in prison, and with an effort she tried to be cordial.

"You've done damned well for yourself," he said, paying no attention to what she was saying. She found this meeting overwhelmingly repulsive and moved toward her taxi. It was seeming to her that Monkley had the power to snatch her away and plunge her back into that life of theirs. She would really rather have met Philip than him.

"Damned well for yourself," he repeated.

"I'm sorry I can't stay. I'm in a hurry. I'm in a hurry."

She reached the taxi and slammed the door in his face.

This unexpected meeting convinced Sylvia of the necessity of attaching herself finally to a life that would make the resurrection of a Monkley nothing more influential than a nightmare. She knew that she was giving way to purely nervous fears in being thus affected by what, had she stopped to think, was the natural result of her name's becoming known. But the liability to nervous fears was in itself an argument that something was wrong. When had she ever been a prey to such hysteria before? When had she allowed herself to be haunted by a face, as now she was being haunted by Monkley's face? Suppose he had seated himself behind the taxi and that when she reached the Airdales' house he should once more be standing on the pavement in the lamplight?

In Brompton Road Sylvia told the driver to stop. She wanted to do some Christmas shopping. After an hour or more spent among toys she came out with a porter loaded with packages, and looked round her quickly; but of course he was not upon the pavement. How absurd she had been! In any case, what could Monkley do? She would forget all about him. To-morrow was Christmas Eve. There was going to be such a jolly party at the Airdales'. The taxi hummed toward West Kensington. Sylvia leaned back, huddled up with her thoughts, until they reached Lillie Road. She had passed Mrs. Meares's house so many times without giving it a second look. Now she found herself peering out into the thickening fog in case Monkley should be standing upon the door-step. She was glad when she reached the Airdales' house, warm and bright, festooned with holly and mistletoe. There were pleasant little household noises everywhere, comfortable little noises, and a rosy glow from the silken shades of the lamps; the carpet was so quiet and the parlor-maid in a clean cap and apron so efficient, so quick to get in all the parcels and shut out the foggy night.

Olive was already in the drawing-room, and because this was to be a specially unceremonious evening in preparation for the party to-morrow, Olive was in a pink tea-gown that blended with the prettiness of her cozy house and made her more essentially a part of it all. How bleak was her own background in comparison with this, Sylvia thought. Jack was dining out most unwillingly and had left a great many pleas to be forgiven by Sylvia on the first night of her Christmas visit. After dinner they sat in the drawing-room, and Sylvia told Olive about her meeting with Monkley. She said nothing about Michael Fane's sister; that meeting did not seem to have any bearing upon the subject she wanted to discuss.

"Can you understand," Sylvia asked, "being almost frightened into marriage?"

"Yes, I think so," Olive replied, as judicially as the comfort of her surroundings would allow. It was impossible to preserve a critical attitude in this room; in such a suave and genial atmosphere one accepted anything.

"Well, do you still object to my marrying Arthur?" Sylvia demanded.

"But, my dear, I never objected to your marrying him. I may have suggested, when I first saw him, that he seemed rather too much the type of the ordinary actor for you, but that was only because you yourself had always scoffed at actors so haughtily. Since I've known him I've grown to like him. Please don't think I ever objected to your marrying him. I never felt more sure about anybody's knowing her own mind than I do about you."

"Well, I am going to marry him," Sylvia said.

"Darling Sylvia, why do you say it so defiantly? Everybody will be delighted. Jack was talking only the other day about his perpetual dread that you'd never give yourself a chance of establishing your position finally, because you were so restless."

Sylvia contemplated an admission to Olive of having lived with Arthur for a year in America, but in this room the fact had an ugly look and seemed to belong rather to that evil face of the past that had confronted her with such ill omen this evening, rather than to anything so homely as marriage.

"Arthur may not be anything more than an actor," she went on. "But in my profession what else do I want? He has loved me for a long time; I'm very fond of him. It's essential that I should have a background so that I shall never be shaken out of my self-possession by anything like this evening's encounter. I've lived a life of feverish energy, and it's only since the improvisations that I can begin to believe it wasn't all wasted. I made a great mistake when I was seventeen, and when I was nineteen I tried to repair it with a still greater mistake. Then came Lily; she was a mistake. Oh, when I look back at it all, it's nothing but mistake after mistake. I long for such funny ordinary little pleasures. Olive darling, I've tried, I've tried to think I can do without love, without children, without family, without friends. I can't."

The tears were running swiftly, and all the time more swiftly, down Sylvia's cheeks while she was speaking. Olive jumped up from her soft and quilted chair and knelt beside her friend.

"My darling Sylvia, you have friends, you have, indeed you have."

"I know," Sylvia went on. "It's ungrateful of me. Why, if it hadn't been for you and Jack I should have gone mad. But just because you're so happy together, and because you have Sylvius and Rose, and because I flit about on the outskirts of it all like a timid, friendly, solitary ghost, I must have some one to love me. I've really treated Arthur very badly. I've kept him waiting now for a year. I wasn't brave enough to let him go, and I wasn't brave enough to marry him. I've never been undecided in my life. It must be that the gipsy in me has gone forever, I think. This success of mine has been leading all the time to settling down properly. Most of the people who came back to me out of the past were the nice people, like my old mistress and the grown-up twins, and I want to be like them. Oh, Olive, I'm so tired of being different, of people thinking that I'm hard and brutal and cynical. I'm not. Indeed I'm not. I couldn't have felt that truly appalling horror of Monkley this evening if I were really bad."

"Sylvia dear, you're working yourself up needlessly. How can you say that you're bad? How can you say such things about yourself? You're not religious, perhaps."

"Listen, Olive, if I marry Arthur I swear I'll make it a success. You know that I have a strong will. I'm not going to criticize him. I'm simply determined to make him and myself happy. It's very easy to love him, really. He's like a boy--very weak, you know--but with all sorts of charming qualities, and his mother would be so glad if it were all settled. Olive, I meant to tell you a whole heap of things about myself, about what I've done, but I won't. I'm going to forget it all and be happy. I'm glad it's Christmas-time. I've bought such ripping things for the kids. When I was buying them to-night there came into my head almost my first adventure when I was a very little girl and thought I'd found a ten-franc piece which was really the money I'd been given for the marketing. I had just such an orgy of buying to-night. Did you know that a giraffe could make a noise? Well, it can, or at any rate the giraffe I bought for Sylvius can. You twist its neck and it protests like a bronchial calf."

The party on Christmas Eve was a great success. Lucian Hope burnt a hole in the table-cloth with what was called a drawing-room firework. Jack split his coat trying to hide inside his bureau. Arthur, sitting on a bottle with his legs crossed, lit a candle, twice running. The little red-haired singer found the ring in the pudding. Sylvia found the sixpence. Nobody found the button, so it must have been swallowed. It was a splendid party. Sylvius and Rose did not begin to cry steadily until after ten o'clock.

When the guests were getting ready to leave, about two o'clock on Christmas morning, and while Lucian Hope was telling everybody in turn that somebody must have swallowed the button inadvertently, to prove that he was quite able to pronounce "inadvertently," Sylvia took Arthur down the front-door steps and walked with him a little way along the foggy street.

"Arthur, I'll marry you when you like," she said, laying a hand upon his arm.

"Sylvia, what a wonderful Christmas present!"

"To us both," she whispered.

Then on an impulse she dragged him back to the house and proclaimed their engagement, which meant the opening of new bottles of champagne and the drinking of so many healths that it was three o'clock before the party broke up. Nor was there any likelihood of anybody's being able to say "inadvertently" by the time he had reached the corner of the street.

Arthur had begged Sylvia to come down to Dulwich on Christmas day, and Mrs. Madden rejoiced over the decision they had reached at last. There were one or two things to be considered, the most important of which was the question of money. Sylvia had spent the last penny of what was left of Morera's money in launching herself, and she owed nearly two hundred pounds besides. Arthur had saved nothing. Both of them, however, had been offered good engagements for the spring, Arthur to tour as lead in one of the Vanity productions, which might mean an engagement at the Vanity itself in the autumn; Sylvia to play a twenty minutes' turn at all the music-halls of a big circuit. It seemed unsatisfactory to marry and immediately afterward to separate, and they decided each to take the work that had been offered, to save all the money possible, and to aim at both playing in London next autumn, but in any case to be married in early June when the tours would end. They should then have a couple of months to themselves. Mrs. Madden wanted them to be married at once; but the other way seemed more prudent, and Sylvia, having once made up her mind, was determined to be practical and not to run the risk of spoiling by financial worries the beginning of their real life together. Her marriage in its orderliness and forethought and simplicity of intention was to compensate for everything that had gone before. Mrs. Madden thought they were both of them being too deliberate, but then she had run away once with her father's groom and must have had a fundamentally impulsive, even a reckless temperament.

The engagement was announced with an eye to the most advantageous publicity that is the privilege of being servants of the public. One was able to read everywhere of a theatrical romance or more coldly of a forthcoming theatrical marriage; nearly all the illustrated weeklies had two little oval photographs underneath which ran the legend:

INTERESTING ENGAGEMENT