“And if the show goes,” Airdale went on, “we might vary our costumes. For instance, we might be Bacchanals in pink fleshings and vine leaves.”
“Vine leaves,” Claude ejaculated. “Vine Street more likely.”
“Don’t laugh, old boy, with that lung of yours,” said Airdale, earnestly.
In the end, before the company left Eastbourne, it was decided, notwithstanding Claude’s lugubrious prophecies, to launch the enterprise; when the tour broke up in December Sylvia had made dresses both for Lily and for herself as she had first planned them with an eye only for what became Lily. Claude’s hypochondria was appeased by letting him wear a big patchwork cloak over his harlequin’s dress in which white lozenges had been substituted for silver ones, owing to lack of money. They hired a small piano very much like the one that belonged to the Pink Pierrots, and on Christmas Eve they set out from Finborough Road, where Claude and Jack had rooms near Mrs. Gowndry’s. They came into collision with a party of carol-singers who seemed to resent their profane competition, and, much to Jack Airdale’s disappointment, they were not invited into a single house; the money taken after three hours of wandering music was one shilling and fivepence in coppers.
“Never mind,” said Jack. “We aren’t known yet. It’s a pity we didn’t start singing last Christmas Eve. We should have had more engagements than we should have known what to do with this year.”
“We must build up the show for next year,” Sylvia agreed, enthusiastically.
“I shall sing the ‘Lost Chord’ next year,” Claude answered. “They may let me in, if I worry them outside heaven’s gates, to hear that last Amen.”
Jack and Sylvia were justified in their optimism, for gradually the Carnival Quartet, as they called themselves, became known in South Kensington, and they began to get engagements to appear in other parts of London. Jack taught Sylvia to vamp well enough on the guitar to accompany herself in duets with him; Claude looked handsome in his harlequin’s dress, which prosperity had at last endowed with silver lozenges; Lily danced actively enough for the drawing-rooms in which they performed; Sylvia, inspired by the romantic exterior of herself and her companions, invented a mime to the music of Schumann’s “Carnival” which Jack Airdale played, or, as Claude said, maltreated.
The Quartet showed signs of increasing vitality with the approach of spring, and there was no need to think any more of touring in musical comedy, which was a relief to Sylvia. When summer came, they agreed to keep together and work the South Coast.
However, all these plans came suddenly to nothing, because one misty night early in March Harlequin and Columbine lost Pierrot and Pierrette on the way home from a party in Chelsea; a brief note from Harlequin to Pierrot, which he found when he got home, indicated that the loss should be considered permanent.