The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 15

"Not at all," he contradicted. "For a long time I've objected to your friends.h.i.+p with Dorward, but, knowing you were too headstrong to listen to my advice, I said nothing. This letter makes it impossible to keep silent any longer about my wishes."

"But you don't really believe that Dorward and I are having an affair?" she gasped.

Philip made an impatient gesture.

"What a foolish question! Do you suppose that if I had for one moment thought such a thing I shouldn't have spoken before? No, no, my dear, it's all very unpleasant, but you must see that as soon as I am made aware, however crude the method of bringing it to my knowledge, that people are talking about you and my vicar, I have no alternative but to forbid you to do anything that will make these tongues go on wagging."

"To forbid me?" she repeated.

Philip bowed ironically, Sylvia thought; the gesture, infinitely slight and unimportant as it was, cut the last knot.

"I shall have to tell Mr. Dorward about this letter and explain to him," she said.

Philip hesitated for a moment. "Yes, I think that would be the best thing to do," he agreed.

Sylvia regarded him curiously.

"You don't mind his knowing that you showed it to me?" she asked.

"Not at all," said Philip.

She laughed, and he took alarm at the tone.

"I thought you were going to be sensible," he began, but she cut him short.

"Oh, I am, my dear man. Don't worry."

Now that the unpleasant scene was over, he seemed anxious for her sympathy.

"I'm sorry this miserable business has occurred, but you understand, don't you, that it's been just as bad for me as for you?"

"Do you want me to apologize?" Sylvia demanded, in her brutal way.

"No, of course not. Only I thought perhaps you might have shown a little more appreciation of my feelings."

"Ah, Philip, if you want that, you'll have to let me really go wrong with Dorward."

"Personally I consider that last remark of yours in very bad taste; but I know we have different standards of humor."

Sylvia found Dorward in the church, engaged in an argument with Ca.s.sandra about the arrangement of the chrysanthemums for Michaelmas.

"I will not have them like this," he was saying.

"But we always putts them fan-shaped like that."

"Take them away," he shouted, and, since Ca.s.sandra still hesitated, he flung the flowers all over the church.

The short conversation that followed always remained a.s.sociated in Sylvia's mind with Ca.s.sandra's grunts and her large base elevated above the pews, while she browsed hither and thither, bending over to pick up the scattered chrysanthemums.

"Mr. Dorward, I want to ask you something very serious."

He looked at her sharply, almost suspiciously.

"Does it make you very much happier to have faith?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," he said, brus.h.i.+ng petals from his ca.s.sock.

"But would it make me?"

"I expect so--I expect so," he said, still brus.h.i.+ng and trying with that shy curtness to avoid the contact of reality.

"Well, how can I get faith?"

"You must pray, dear lady, you must pray."

"You'll have to pray for me," Sylvia said.

"Always do. Always pray for you. Never less than three prayers every day. Ma.s.s once a week."

Sylvia felt a lump in her throat; it seemed to her that this friend, accounted mad by the world, had paid her the tenderest and most exquisite courtesy she had ever known.

"Come along now, Ca.s.sandra," cried the vicar, clapping his hands impatiently to cover his embarra.s.sment. "Where are the flowers? Where are the flowers, you miserable old woman?"

Ca.s.sandra came up to him, breathing heavily with exertion. "You know, Mr. Dorward, you're enough to try the patience of an angel on a tomb; you are indeed."

Sylvia left them arguing all over again about the chrysanthemums. That afternoon she went away from Green Lanes to London.

Three months later, she obtained an engagement in a musical comedy company on tour and sent back to Philip the last shred of clothing that she had had through him, with a letter and ten pounds in bank-notes: You must divorce me now. I've not been able to earn enough to pay you back more than this for your bad bargain. I don't think I've given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for me than you did, if that's any consolation.

SYLVIA SCARLETT.

CHAPTER VIII.

Sylvia stood before the looking-gla.s.s in the Birmingham lodgings and made a speech to herself: "Humph! You look older, my dear. You look more than nineteen and a half. You're rather glad, though, aren't you, to have finished with the last three months? You feel degraded, don't you? What's that you say? You don't feel degraded any more by what you've done now than by what you did when you were married? You consider the net result of the last three months has simply been to prove what you'd suspected for a long time--the wrong you did yourself in marrying Philip Iredale? Wait a minute; don't go so fast; there's something wrong with your moral sense. You know perfectly well your contention is impossible; or do you accuse every woman who marries to have a position and a home of being a prost.i.tute? Ah, but you didn't marry Philip for either of those reasons, you say? Yes, you did--you married him to make something like Arbour End."

Tears welled up in Sylvia's eyes. She thought she had driven Arbour End from her mind forever.

"Come, come, we don't want any tears. What are you crying for? You knew when you left Green Lanes that everything which had come into your life through Philip Iredale must be given up. You were rather proud of your ruthlessness. Don't spoil it now. That's right, no more tears. You're feeling a bit abrutie, aren't you? My advice to you is to obliterate the last three months from your imagination. I quite understand that you suffered a good deal, but novices must be prepared to suffer. In my opinion you can congratulate yourself on having come through so easily. Here you are, a jolly little cabetine with a complete contempt for men. You're not yet twenty; you're not likely to fall in love, for you must admit that after those three months the word sounds more than usually idiotic. From what I've seen of you I should say that for the future you'll be very well able to look after yourself; you might even become a famous actress. Ah, that makes you smile, eh?"

Sylvia dabbed her face with the powder-puff and went down-stairs to dinner. Her two companions had not yet begun; for this was the first meal at which they would all sit down together, and an atmosphere of politeness hung over life at present. Lily Haden and Dorothy Lonsdale had joined the "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" company at the same time as Sylvia, and were making their first appearance on any stage, having known each other in the dullness of West Kensington. For a fortnight they had clung together, but, having been given an address for rooms in Birmingham that required a third person's contribution, they had invited Sylvia to join them. Lily was a tall, slim girl with very fair, golden hair, who had an air of romantic mystery that was due to indolence of mind and body. Dorothy also was fair, with a ma.s.s of light-brown hair, a perfect complexion, profile, and figure, and, what finally gave her a really distinguished beauty in such a setting, brown eyes instead of blue. Lily's languorous grace of manner and body was so remarkable that in a room it was difficult to choose between her and Dorothy, but behind the footlights there was no comparison; there Dorothy had everybody's glances, and Lily's less definite features went for nothing.

Each girl was prompt to take Sylvia into her confidence about the other. Thus from Lily she learned that Dorothy's real name was Norah Caffyn; that she was the eldest of a very large family; that Lily had known her at school; that she had been engaged to a journalist who was disapproved of by her family; that she had offered to break with Wilfred Curlew, if she were allowed to go on the stage; and that she had taken the name of Lonsdale from the road where she lived, and Dorothy from the sister next to her.

"I suppose in the same way as she used to take her dolls?" Sylvia suggested.

Lily looked embarra.s.sed. She was evidently not sure whether a joke was intended, and when Sylvia encouraged her to suppose it was, she laughed a little timidly, being rather doubtful if it were not a pun.

"Her sister was awfully annoyed about it, because she hasn't got a second name. She's the only one in the family who hasn't."

Lily also told Sylvia something about herself, how her mother had lately died and how she could not get on with her sister, who had married an actor and was called Doris. Her mother had been a reciter, and there had always been lots of theatrical people at their house, so it had been easy for her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal, who had the touring rights of all John Richards's great Vanity Theater productions.

From Dorothy Sylvia learned that she had known Lily at school, but not for long, as Mrs. Haden never paid her daughters' fees; that Mr. Haden had always been supposed to live in Burmah, but that people who knew Mrs. Haden declared he had never existed; and finally that Lily had been "awfully nice" to herself and helped her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal.

The a.s.sociation of Sylvia with the two girls begun at Birmingham was not interrupted until the end of the tour. Lily and Dorothy depended upon it, Lily because Sylvia saved her the trouble of thinking for herself, Dorothy because she found in Sylvia some one who could deflect all the difficulties of life on tour and leave her free to occupy herself with her own prosperity and her own comforts. Dorothy possessed a selfishness that almost attained to the dignity of ambition, though never quite, as her conceit would not allow her to state an object in her career, for fear of failure; her method was invariably to seize the best of any situation that came along, whether it was a bed, a chair, a potato, or a man; this method with ordinary good luck would insure success through life. Lily was too lazy to minister to Dorothy's selfishness; moreover, she often managed in taking the nearest and easiest to rob Dorothy of the best.

Sylvia was perfectly aware of their respective characters, but she was always willing to give herself any amount of trouble to preserve beauty around her; Lily and Dorothy were not really more troublesome than two cats would have been; in fact, rather less, because at any rate they could carry themselves, if not their bags.

Life on tour went its course with the world divided into three categories--the members of the company, the public expressing its personality in different audiences, and for the actors saloon-bars and the drinks they were stood, for the actresses admirers and the presents they were worth. Sometimes when the saloon-bars and the admirers were alike unprofitable, the members of the company mixed among themselves whether in a walk round a new town or at tea in rooms where a landlady possessed hospitable virtues. Sylvia had a special gift for getting the best out of landladies, and the men of the company came more often to tea with herself and her friends than with the other ladies. They came, indeed, too often to please Dorothy, who disapproved of Lily's easy-going acceptance of the sort of love that is made because at the moment there is nothing else to do. She spoke to Sylvia about this, who agreed with her, but thought that with Lily it was inevitable.

"But not with boys in the company," Dorothy urged, disdainfully. "It makes us all so cheap. I don't want to put on side, but, after all, we are a little different from the other girls."

Sylvia found this belief universal in the chorus. She could not think of any girl who had not at one time or another taken her aside and claimed for herself, and by the politeness owed to present company for Sylvia, this "little difference."

"Personally," Sylvia said, "I think we're all much the same. Some of us drop our aitches, others our p's and q's; some of us sing flat, the rest sing sharp; and we all look just alike when we're waiting for the train on Sunday morning."

Nevertheless, with all her prevision of a fate upon Lily's conduct, Sylvia did speak to her about the way in which she tolerated the familiarity of the men in the company.

"I suppose you're thinking of Tom," Lily said.

"Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry," Sylvia put in.

"Well. I don't like to seem stuck up," Lily explained. "Tom's always very nice about carrying my bag and getting me tea when we're traveling."

"If I promise to look after the bag," Sylvia asked, "will you promise to discourage Tom?"

"But, my dear, why should you carry my bag when I can get Tom to do it?"

"It bores me to see you and him together," Sylvia explained. "These boys in the company are all very well, but they aren't really men at all."

"I know," Lily said, eagerly. "That's what I feel. They don't seem real to me. Of course, I shouldn't let anybody make love to me seriously."

"What do you call serious love-making?"

"Oh, Sylvia, how you do go on asking questions. You know perfectly well what I mean. You only ask questions to make me feel uncomfortable."

"Just as I might disarrange the cus.h.i.+ons of your chair?"

"I know quite well who's been at you to worry me," Lily went on. "I know it's Dorothy. She's always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn't really mind Tom's kissing me--she's perfectly ready to make use of him herself--but she's always thinking about other people and she's so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I'm used to actors; she isn't. I never bother about her. I don't complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can't she let me alone? n.o.body ever lets me alone. It's all I've ever asked all my life."

The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension. Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular.

"Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I've often wondered you've kept your little family together for so long. I've been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I'm not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity."

"Do you remember Victoria Deane?" Sylvia asked.

"Of course I do. She made a big hit and then got married and left the stage. A sweetly pretty little thing, she was. But, as I was saying, dear, in all my experience I never knew two fair girls get through a tour together without falling out, two girls naturally fair, that is, and you mark my words, Lily Haden and Dolly Lonsdale will have a row."

Sylvia was anxious to avert this, because she would have found it hard to choose between their rival claims upon her. She was fonder of Lily, but she was very fond of Dorothy, and she believed that Dorothy might attain real success in her profession. It seemed more worth while to take trouble over Dorothy; yet something warned her that an expense of devotion in that direction would ultimately be, from a selfish point of view, wasted. Dorothy would never consider affection where advancement was concerned; yet was it not just this quality in her that she admired? There would certainly be an unusual exhilaration in standing behind Dorothy and helping her to rise and rise, whereas with Lily the best that could be expected was to prevent her falling infinitely low.

"How I've changed since I left Philip," she said to herself. "I seem to have lost myself somehow and to have transferred all my interest in life to other people. I suppose it won't last. G.o.d forbid I should become a problem to myself like a woman in a d.a.m.ned novel. Down with introspection, though, Heaven knows, observation in 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea' is not a profitable pastime."

Sylvia bought an eye-gla.s.s next day, and though all agreed with one another in private that it was an affectation, everybody a.s.sured her that she was a girl who could wear an eye-gla.s.s with advantage. Lily thought the cord must be rather a bore.

"It's symbolic," Sylvia declared to the dressing-room.

"I think I'll have my eyes looked at in Sheffield," said Onzie. "There's a doctor there who's very good to pros. I often feel my eyes are getting a bit funny. It may be the same as Sylvia's got."

The tour was coming to an end; the last three nights would be played at Oxford, to which everybody looked forward. All the girls who had been to Oxford before told wonderful tales of the pleasures that might be antic.i.p.ated. Even some of the men were heard to speculate if such or such a friend were still there, which annoyed those who could not even boast of having had a friend there two years ago. The jealous ones revenged themselves by criticizing the theatrical manners of the undergraduate, especially upon the last night of a musical comedy. One heard a great deal of talk, they said, about a college career, but personally and without offense to anybody present who had friends at college, they considered that a college career in nine cases out of ten meant rowdiness and a habit of thinking oneself better than other people.

Sylvia, Lily, and Dorothy had rooms in Eden Square, which was the recognized domain of theatrical companies playing in Oxford. Numerous invitations to lunch and tea were received, and Sylvia, who had formed a preconceived idea of Oxford based upon Philip, was astonished how little the undergraduates she met resembled him. Dorothy managed with her usual instinct for the best to secure as an admirer Lord Clarehaven, or, as the other girls preferred to call him with a nicer formality, the Earl of Clarehaven. He invited her with a friend to lunch at Christ Church on the last day. Dorothy naturally chose Sylvia, and, as Lily was already engaged elsewhere, Sylvia accepted. Later in the afternoon Dorothy proposed that the young men should come back and have tea in Eden Square, and Sylvia divined Dorothy's intention of proving to these young men that the actress in her own home would be as capable of maintaining propriety as she had been at lunch.

"We'll buy the cakes on the way," said Dorothy, which was another example of her infallible instinct for the best and the most economical.

Loaded with eclairs, meringues, and chocolates, Dorothy, Sylvia, and their four guests reached Eden Square.

"You'll have to excuse the general untidiness," Dorothy said, with an affected little laugh, flinging open the door of the sitting-room. She would probably have chosen another word for the picture of Lily sitting on Tom's knee in the worn leather-backed arm-chair if she had entered first: unfortunately, Lord Clarehaven was accorded that privilege, and the damage was done. Sylvia quickly introduced everybody, and n.o.body could have complained of the way in which the undergraduates sailed over an awkward situation, nor could much have been urged against Tom, for he left immediately. As for Lily, she was a great success with the young men and seemed quite undisturbed by the turn of events.

As soon as the three girls were alone together, Dorothy broke out: "I hope you don't think I'll ever live with you again after that disgusting exhibition. I suppose you think just because you gave me an introduction that you can do what you like. I don't know what Sylvia thinks of you, but I can tell you what I think. You make me feel absolutely sick. That beastly chorus-boy! The idea of letting anybody like that even look at you. Thank Heaven, the tour's over. I'm going down to the theater. I can't stay in this room. It makes me blush to think of it. I'll take jolly good care who I live with in future."

Then suddenly, to Sylvia's immense astonishment, Dorothy slapped Lily's face. What torments of mortification must be raging in that small soul to provoke such an unlady-like outburst!

"I should hit her back if I were you, my la.s.s," Sylvia advised, putting up her eye-gla.s.s for the fray; but Lily began to cry and Dorothy flounced out of the room.

Sylvia bent over her in consolation, though her sense of justice made her partly excuse Dorothy's rage.

"How did I know she would bring her beastly men back to tea? She only did it to brag about having a lord to our digs. After all, they're just as much mine as hers. I was sorry for Tom. He doesn't know anybody in Oxford, and he felt out of it with all the other boys going out. He asked me if I was going to turn him down because I'd got such fine friends. I was sorry for him, Sylvia, and so I asked him to tea. I don't see why Dorothy should turn round and say nasty things to me. I've always been decent to her. Oh, Sylvia, you don't know how lonely I feel sometimes."

This appeal was too much for Sylvia, who clasped Lily to her and let her sob forth her griefs upon her shoulder.

"Sylvia, I've got n.o.body. I hate my sister Doris. Mother's dead. Everybody ran her down, but she had a terrible life. Father used to take drugs, and then he stole and was put in prison. People used to say mother wasn't married, but she was. Only the truth was so terrible, she could never explain. You don't know how she worked. She brought up Doris and me entirely. She used to recite, and she used to be always hard up. She died of heart failure, and that comes from worry. n.o.body understands me. I don't know what will become of me."

"My dear," Sylvia said, "you know I'm your pal."

"Oh, Sylvia, you're a darling! I'd do anything for you."

"Even carry your own bag at the station to-morrow?"

"No, don't tease me," Lily begged. "If you won't tease me, I'll do anything."

That evening Mr. Keal, with the mighty Mr. Richards himself, came up from London to see the show. The members of the chorus were much agitated. It could only mean that girls were to be chosen for the Vanity production in the autumn. Every one of them put on rather more make-up than usual, acted hard all the time she was on the stage, and tried to study Mr. Richards's face from the wings.