“What do you think the jolly old chimpanzee will do? Probably bite his ear off—what? Topping. Good engine this. We’re doing fifty-nine or an unripe sixty. Why does a chicken cross the road? No answer, thank you, this time. Must slow down a bit. There’s a trap somewhere here. I say, you know, I’ve got a sister called Sylvia. Hullo! hullo! Mind your hoop, Tommy! Too late. Funeral on Friday. Colonial papers please copy. I wonder how they’ll get the chimpanzee out again. I told the hall porter, when he cast a cold and glassy eye on the crate, it was a marble Venus that Mr. Hausberg was going to use as a hat-stand. My word! I expect the jolly old flat looks like the last days of Pompeii by now. When I undid the door of the crate the brute was making a noise like a discontented cistern. I rapidly scattered Brazil nuts and bananas on the floor to occupy his mind and melted away like a strawberry ice on a grill. Hullo! We’re getting into Brighton.”
Clarehaven did not enjoy his week-end, for it consisted entirely of a lecture by Sylvia on his behavior. This caused him to drink many more whisky-and-sodas than usual, and he came back to London on Monday with a bad headache, which he attributed to Sylvia’s talking.
“My dear man, I haven’t got a mouth. You have,” she said.
This week-end caused a quarrel between Sylvia and Dorothy, for which she was not sorry. She had recently met a young painter, Ronald Walker, who wanted Lily to sit for him; he had taken them once or twice to the Café Royal, which Sylvia had found a pleasant change from the society of Half Moon Street. Soon after this Lonsdale began a liaison with Queenie Molyneux, of the Frivolity Theater. The only member of the Half Moon Street set with whom Sylvia kept up a friendship was Olive Fanshawe.
CHAPTER IX
DURING her second year at Mulberry Cottage Sylvia achieved an existence that, save for the absence of any one great motive like art or love, was complete. She had also one real friend in Jack Airdale, who had returned from his tour. Apart from the pleasant security of knowing that he would always be content with good-fellowship only, he encouraged her to suppose that somewhere, could she but find the first step, a career lay before her. Sylvia did not in her heart believe in this career, but in moments of depression Jack’s confidence was of the greatest comfort, and she was always ready to play with the notion, particularly as it seemed to provide a background for her present existence and to cover the futility of its perfection. Jack was anxious that she should try to get on the proper stage, but Sylvia feared to destroy by premature failure a part of the illusion of ultimate success she continued to allow herself by finally ruling out the theater as one of the possible channels to that career. In the summer Lily became friendly with one or two men whom Sylvia could not endure, but a lassitude had descended upon her and she lacked any energy to stop the association. As a matter of fact she was sickening for diphtheria at the time, and while she was in the hospital Lily took to frequenting the Orient promenade with these new friends. As soon as Sylvia came out they were banished; but each time that she intervened on Lily’s behalf it seemed to her a little less worth while. Nevertheless, finding that Lily was bored by her own habit of staying in at night, she used much against her will to accompany her very often to various places of amusement without a definite invitation from a man to escort them.
One day at the end of December Mrs. Gainsborough came home from shopping with two tickets for a fancy-dress dance at the Redcliffe Hall in Fulham Road. When the evening arrived Sylvia did not want to go, for the weather was raw and foggy; but Mrs. Gainsborough was so much disappointed at her tickets not being used that to please her Sylvia agreed to go. It seemed unlikely to be an amusing affair, so she and Lily went in the most ordinary of their fancy dresses as masked Pierrettes. The company, as they had anticipated, was quite exceptionally dull.
“My dear, it’s like a skating-rink on Saturday afternoon,” Sylvia said. “We’ll have one more dance together and then go home.”
They were standing at the far end of the hall near the orchestra, and Sylvia was making disdainful comments upon the various couples that were passing out to refresh themselves or flirt in the draughty corridors.
Suddenly Sylvia saw a man in evening dress pushing his way in their direction, regardless of what ribbons he tore or toes he outraged in his transit. He was a young man of about twenty-three or twenty-four, with a countenance in which eagerness was curiously mixed with impassivity. Sylvia saw him as one sees a picture on first entering a gallery, which one postpones visiting with a scarcely conscious and yet perfectly deliberate anticipation of pleasure later on. She continued talking to Lily, who had her back to the new-comer; while she talked she was aware that all her own attention was fixed upon this new-comer and that she was asking herself the cause of the contradictions in his face and deciding that it was due to the finely carved immobile mouth beneath such eager eyes. Were they brown or blue? The young man had reached them, and from that immobile mouth came in accents that were almost like despair a salutation to Lily. Sylvia felt for a moment as if she had been wounded; she saw that Lily was looking at her with that expression she always put on when she thought Sylvia was angry with her; then after what seemed an age turned round slowly to the young man and, lifting her mask, engaged in conversation with him. Sylvia felt that she was trespassing upon the borders of great emotion and withdrew out of hearing, until Lily beckoned her forward to introduce the young man as Mr. Michael Fane. Sylvia did not raise her mask, and after nodding to him again retired from the conversation.