Sylvia did not think that any of them would feel half as shy as she felt at the present moment in being plunged into the company of girls of whose thoughts and habits and sensations and manners she was utterly ignorant. She felt more at ease when she had put on her mauve dress and had veiled her face. When they were all ready, they paraded before Mr. Woolfe.
“Very good. Very good,” he said. “Quite a lot of atmosphere. Here you, my dear, Emruld, put your yashmak up a bit higher. You look as if you’d got mumps like that. Now then, here’s the henna to paint your finger-nails, and the kohl for your eyes.”
“Coal for our eyes,” echoed all the girls. “Why can’t we use liquid black the same as we always do? Coal! What a liberty! Whatever next?”
“That shows you don’t know anything about the East. K-O-H-L, not C-O-A-L, you silly girls. And don’t you get hennering your hair. It’s only to be used for the nails.”
When the Exhibition opened on the 1st of May the Hall of a Thousand and One Marvels was the only sideshow that was in full working order. The negro eunuch stood outside and somewhat inappropriately bellowed his invitation to the passing crowds to visit Sesame, where all the glamour of the East was to be had for sixpence, including a cup of delicious Turkish coffee specially made by the Sultan’s own coffee-maker. Once inside, visitors could for a further sum of threepence view an exact reproduction of a Turkish harem, where real Turkish ladies in all the abandonment of languorous poses offered a spectacle of luxury that could only be surpassed by paying another threepence to see a faithless wife tied up in a sack and flung into the Bosphorus once every hour. Other threepennies secured admission to Aladdin’s Cave, where the Genie of the Lamp told fortunes, or to the Cave of the Forty Thieves, where a lucky ticket entitled the owner to draw a souvenir from Ali Baba’s sack of treasure, and see Morgiana dance a voluptuous pas seul once every hour. Visitors to the Hall could also buy attar of roses, cigarettes, seraglio pastilles, and Turkish Delight. It was very Oriental—even Mr. Woolfe wore a fez.
Either because Sylvia moved in a way that seemed to Mr. Woolfe more Oriental than the others or because she got on very well with him personally, she was soon promoted to a small inner room more richly draped and lighted by a jeweled lamp hanging from the ceiling of gilded arabesques. Here Mr. Woolfe as a mark of his esteem introduced regular customers who could appreciate the softer carpet and deeper divans. At one end was a lattice, beyond which might be seen two favorites of the harem, who, slowly fanning themselves, reclined eternally amid perfumed airs—that is, except during the intervals for dinner and tea, which lasted half an hour and exposed them to the unrest of European civilization. One of these favorites was Mabel, whom Mr. Woolfe had been heard to describe as his beau ideel of a sultana, and whom he had taken from the sale of Turkish Delight to illustrate his conception. Mabel was paid a higher salary in consequence, because, inclosed in the harem, she was no longer able to profit by the male admirers who had bought Turkish Delight at her plump hands. The life was well suited to her natural laziness; though she dreaded getting fat, she was glad to be relieved of the menace from her varicose vein. Sylvia was the only odalisque that waited in this inner room, but her salary was not raised, since she now had the sole right to all the extras; she certainly preferred this darkened chamber to the other, and when there were no intruders from the world outside she could gossip through the lattice with the two favorites.
Mrs. Gowndry had let Sylvia a small room at the very top of the house; notwithstanding Mabel’s good nature, she might have grown tired of being always at close quarters with her. Sylvia’s imagination was captured by the life she led at Earl’s Court; she made up her mind that one day she would somehow visit the real East. When Mr. Woolfe found out her deep interest in the part she was playing and her fondness for reading, he lent her various books that had inspired his creation at Earl’s Court; she had long ago read the Arabian Nights, but there were several volumes of travels which fed her ambition to leave this dull Western world. On Sunday mornings she used to lean out of her window and fancy the innumerable tombs of Brompton Cemetery were the minarets of an Eastern town; and later on, when June made every hour in the open air desirable after being shut up so long at Earl’s Court, Sylvia used to spend her Sunday afternoons in wandering about the cemetery, in reading upon the tombs the exalted claims they put forward for poor mortality, and in puzzling over the broken columns, the urns and anchors and weeping angels that commemorated the wealthy dead. Every one buried here had lived on earth a life of perfect virtue, it seemed; every one buried here had been confident of another life after the grave. Long ago at Lille she had been taught something about the future these dead people seemed to have counted upon; but there had been so much to do on Sunday mornings, and she could not remember that she had ever gone to church after she was nine. Perhaps she had made a mistake in abandoning so early the chance of finding out more about religion; it was difficult not to be impressed by the universal testimony of these countless tombs. Religion had evidently a great influence upon humanity, though in her reading she had never been struck by the importance of it. People in books attended church just as they wore fine clothes, or fought duels, or went to dinner-parties; the habit belonged to the observances of polite society and if she ever found herself in such society she would doubtless behave like her peers. She had not belonged to a society with leisure for church-going. Yet in none of the books that she had read had religion seemed anything like so important as love or money. She herself thought that the pleasures of both these were much exaggerated, though in her own actual experience their power of seriously disturbing some people was undeniable. But who was ever disturbed by religion? Probably all these tombs were a luxury of the rich, rather like visiting-cards, which, as every one knew, must be properly inscribed and follow a certain pattern. She remembered that old Mr. Gustard, who was not rich, had been very doubtful of another life, and she was consoled by this reflection, for she had been rendered faintly anxious by the pious repetitions of faith in a future life, practical comfort in which could apparently only be secured by the strictest behavior on earth. She had the fancy to invent her own epitaph: “Here lies Sylvia Scarlett, who was always running away. If she has to live all over again and be the same girl, she accepts no responsibility for anything that may occur.” She printed this on a piece of paper, fastened it to a twig, and stuck it into the earth to judge the effect. Sylvia was so deeply engrossed in her task that she did not see that somebody was watching her until she had stepped back to admire her handiwork.
“You extraordinary girl!” said a pleasant voice.
Looking round, Sylvia saw a thin clean-shaven man of about thirty, who was leaning on a cane with an ivory crook and looking at her epitaph through gold-rimmed glasses. She blushed, to her annoyance, and snatched up the twig.
“What are you always running away from?” the stranger asked. “Or is that an indiscreet question?”