Compton MacKenzie

“ Olive argued.
“Not a single illusion left, my dear,” Sylvia assured her. “Besides, I should never compare Lily with Dorothy. Dorothy is more beautiful, more ambitious, more mercenary. She’ll probably marry a lord. She’s acquired the art of getting a lot for nothing to a perfection that could only be matched by a politician or a girl with the same brown eyes in the same glory of light-brown hair. And when it suits her she’ll go back on her word just as gracefully, and sell her best friend as readily as a politician will sell his country.” ”

“ No kind of communion after marriage would compensate for the loss of Lily’s presence; it was like the fading of a flower in the completeness of its death. Even if she had been able to achieve the selflessness of Olive and take delight in Lily’s good fortune, how impossible it was to believe in the triumph of this marriage. Lily would either be bored or she would become actively miserable—Sylvia snorted at the adverb—and run away or rather slowly melt to damnation. It would not even be necessary for her to be miserable; any unscrupulous friend of her husband’s would have his way with her. ”

“ Sylvia, listening to Blanche’s tirade, wondered if all the English were like that. She thought of her father’s books, and decided that life in France must have changed him somehow. Then she called to mind with a shiver the solemn light-blue eyes of the little girls. England must be a cold sort of a place where nobody ever laughed; perhaps that was why her father had come away. Sylvia decided to remain in France, always in a caravan if possible, where no English miss could poke about with bony fingers in one’s bread and butter. ”

“ To hell with Gwendyr, thought Sylvia. Why shouldn’t their mother have been an actress?
“Oh, but they’re so conceited!” said Dorothy. “Enid Worsley never can pass a glass, and their frocks are most frightfully short. Don’t you remember when they danced at last breaking-up?”
“This is getting unbearable,” Sylvia thought.
“I think they’re rather dears,” Phyllis drawled. “They’re jolly pretty, anyway.”
Sylvia looked at Phyllis and decided that she was jolly pretty, too, with her golden hair and smocked linen frock of old rose; she would like to be friends with Phyllis. ”

“ It would seem so unkind for her to come like this for the first time with strangers, as if the church which she knew he deeply loved was nothing but a tea-time entertainment. There was no trace of reproachfulness in his manner, as he showed Miss Horne and Miss Hobart the vestments and a little image of the Virgin in peach-blow glaze that he moved caressingly into the sunlight, as a child might fondle reverently a favorite doll. He spoke of his plans for restoration and unrolled the design of a famous architect, adding with a smile for Sylvia that the lay rector disapproved of it thoroughly. ”

“ Within a week or two Henry stood for no more in the Fitzroy Street house than a dog that is alternately patted and scolded, that licks the hand of its mistress more abjectly for each new brutality, and that asks as its supreme reward permission to fawn upon her lap. Sylvia hated Mabel Bannerman; she hated her peroxide hair, she hated her full, moist lips, she hated her rounded back and her shining finger-nails spotted with white, she hated with a hatred so deep as to be forever incommunicable each blowsy charm that went to make up what was called “a fine woman” ”

“ That evening Sylvia had made up her mind to return to England at once, but after she had gone to bed she was awakened by Mrs. Gainsborough’s coming into her room and in a choked voice asking for help. When the light was turned on, Sylvia saw that she was enmeshed in a mosquito-net and looking in her nightgown like a large turbot.
“I knew it would happen,” Mrs. Gainsborough panted. “Every night I’ve said to myself, ‘It’s bound to happen,’ and it has. I was dreaming how that Shoushou was chasing me with a butterfly-net, and look at me! Don’t tell me dreams don’t sometimes come true. ”

“ Who would not adore Miss Lee?
“Oh, Miss Lee, did you notice Gladys and Enid Worstley?” Muriel ejaculated, accentuating some of her words like the notes of an unevenly blown harmonium, and explaining to Sylvia in a sustained tremolo that these twins, whose real name was Worsley, were always called Worstley because it was impossible to decide which was more wicked. “Oh, Miss Lee, they’ve got the most lovely dresses,” she went on, releasing every stop in a diapason of envy. “Simply gorgeously beautiful. I do think it’s a shame to dress them up like that. I do, really.” ”

“ Sylvia was shocked to find how much Olive had suffered from Dorothy’s treatment of her. For the first time in her life she was unable to dispose of emotion as mere romantic or sentimental rubbish; there was indeed something deeper than the luxury of grief that could thus ennoble even a Vanity girl.
“I do try, Sylvia, not to mope all the time. I keep on telling myself that, if I really loved Dorothy, I should be glad for her to be Countess of Clarehaven, with everything that she wants. She was always a good girl. I lived with her more than two years and she was frightfully strict about men. ”

“ Sylvia said to herself. “I expect I really am common, because apparently common people are always looking out for slights. I don’t look out for them now, but if I were to tell Phyllis all about myself, I’m sure I should begin to look out for them. No, I’ll just be friends with her up to a point, for so long as I stay at Hornton House; then we’ll separate forever. I’m really an absolute fraud. I’m just as much of a fraud now as when I was dressed up as a boy. I’m not real in this life. I haven’t been real since I came down to breakfast with Miss Ashley that first morning. ”

“ They dined at Rector’s, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby’s toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flashing from white to red for the hour. ”

“ I know everything that can be known. But yet when Monkley tried to do that I was horrified. I felt sick and frightened and angry, oh, dreadfully angry! Yet when Blanche behaved as she did I did not mind at all; I used to encourage her. Oh, why am I not a boy? If I were a boy, I would show people that making love isn’t really a bit necessary. Yet sometimes I liked Arthur to make love to me. I can’t make myself out. I think I must be what people call an exceptional person. ”

“ Lily wore suspended from a fine chain round her neck a large diamond, one of those so-called blue diamonds of Brazil that in the moonlight seem like sapphires; her fingers flashed fire; a large brooch of rubies in the likeness of a butterfly winked somberly from her black corsage.
Sylvia made her way through the press of gamblers and touched Lily’s arm. So intent was she upon the tables that she brushed away the hand as if it had been a mosquito.
“Lily! Lily!” Sylvia called, sharply. “Where have you been? Where have you gone?” ”

“ One always started out with a dim conception of perfect love, however one might scoff at it openly in self-protection, but evidently it by no means followed that love for a man, let alone perfect love, would ever arrive. Lily had succeeded in inspiring at least one man with love for her, but she had found her own passion in roulette with Camacho tacked to it, inherited like a husband’s servant, familiar with any caprice, but jealous and irritable. Valentine had found her grand passion in a bath-room that satisfied even her profoundest maternal instincts. ”

“ She had allowed herself to become the prey of emotion by leading this indeterminate life in which sensation was cultivated at the expense of incident. It was a pity that Michael had intrusted her with Lily, for at this moment she would have liked to be away out of it at once; any adventure embarked upon with Lily would always be bounded by her ability to pack in time. Sylvia could imagine how those two dresses she had left behind must have been the most insuperable difficulty of the elopement. ”

“ My sense of humor isn’t a watch that you can take out and tap and regulate and wind up and shake your head over. I hate people who talk about a sense of humor as you do. Are you so sure you have one yourself?”
“Perhaps I haven’t,” Philip agreed, but by the way in which he spoke Sylvia knew that he would maintain he had a sense of humor, and that the rest of humanity had none if it combined to contradict him. “I always distrust people who are too confidently the possessors of one,” he added. ”

“ I could cry just at the mere notion of being wanted, and surely this young Englishman, whoever he is, will want me. Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, you’re deliberately working yourself up to an adventure! And who has a better right? Tell me that. That’s exactly why I praised the drunkard; he knows how to dodge self-consciousness. Why shouldn’t you set out to have an adventure? You shall, my dear. ”

“ Sylvia wished she had gone to Lillie Road with Arthur Madden when she had some money and could have paid Mrs. Meares what was owing to her. Now she had not a penny in the world; she had not even any clothes. The omnibus jogged on, and Sylvia’s thoughts jogged with it.
“I wonder if I shall always have adventures,” she said to herself, “but I wish I could sometimes have adventures that have nothing to do with love. It’s such a nuisance to be always running away for the same reason. It’s such a stupid reason. But it’s rather jolly to run away. It’s more fun than being like that girl in front.” ”

“ How clever you are, Sylvia!” Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes.
“My dear girl, when a man knows that it’s impossible to be married either because he’s married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He’s in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons. ”

“ Sylvia never pretended to herself that she would be at all influenced by advice. Listening to advice from Mrs. Worsley would be like looking into a shop-window with money in one’s pocket, but with no intention of entering the shop to make a purchase; listening to her advice before Miss Ashley’s offer would have been like looking at a shop-window without a penny in the world, a luxury of fancy to which Sylvia had never given way. ”

“ That evening Airdale and she went out as usual; but the loss of the other two seemed somehow to have robbed the entertainment of its romantic distinction, and Sylvia was dismayed to find with what a shameful timidity she now took herself and her guitar into saloon-bars; she felt like a beggar and was humiliated by Jack’s apologetic manner, and still more by her own instinctive support of such cringing to the benevolence of potmen and barmaids. ”

“ Sylvia thought she could extend the pleasures of recognition beyond the mere mimicry of externals to a finer mimicry of essentials. She wanted an audience to clap not because she could bark sufficiently like a real dog to avoid being mistaken for a kangaroo, but because she could be sufficiently Mrs. Gainsborough not to be recognized as Mrs. Beardmore—yet without relying upon their respective sizes in corsets to mark the difference. She did not intend to use even make-up; the entertainment was always to be an improvisation. ”

“ Arthur’s first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life. ”

“ 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. ”