They chatted for a while together. Sylvia liked the simple good-fellowship of the young American, his inquisitiveness about her reasons for coming to sing at the Plutonian Hotel, and his frank anticipation of any curiosity on her side by telling her all about himself and his career since he left West Point. He was amused by her account of the excitement over the passage of the troops through the villages, and seized the occasion to moralize on the vastness of a country through one state of which a regiment could march and surprise half the inhabitants with their first view of an American soldier.
“Seems kind of queer,” he said.
“But very Arcadian,” Sylvia added.
When Sylvia went to bed her mind reverted to the young Englishman; at the time she had scarcely taken in the significance of what the officer had told her. Now suddenly the sense of his loneliness and suffering overwhelmed her fancy. She thought of the desolation of that railway junction where she had waited for the train to Sulphurville, of the heat and the grasshoppers and the flat, endless greenery. Even that brief experience of being alone in the heart of America had frightened her. She had not taken heed of the vastness of it while she was traveling with the company, and here at the hotel definitely placed as an entertainer she had a certain security. But to be alone and penniless in Sulphurville, to be ill, moreover, and dependent on the charity of foreigners, so much the more foreign because, though they spoke the same language, they spoke it with strange differences like the people in a dream. The words were the same, but they expressed foreign ideas. Sylvia began to speculate upon the causes that had led to this young Englishman’s being stranded in Sulphurville. There seemed no explanation, unless he were perhaps an actor who had been abandoned because he was too ill to travel with the company. At this idea she almost got out of bed to walk through the warm frog-haunted night to his rescue. She became sentimental about him in the dark. It seemed to her that nothing in the world was so pitiable as a sick artist; always the servant of the public’s curiosity, he was now the helpless prey of it. He would be treated with the contempt that is accorded to sick animals whose utility is at an end. She visualized him in the care of a woman like the one who had leaned out of that railway shed in a spotted green-and-yellow wrapper. Yet, after all, he might not be a mountebank; there was really no reason to suppose he was anything but poor and lonely, though that was enough indeed.
“I must be getting very old,” Sylvia said to herself. “Only approaching senility could excuse this prodigal effusion of what is really almost maternal lust. I’ve grown out of any inclination to ask myself why I think things or why I do things. I’ve nothing now but an immense desire to do—do—do. I was beginning to think this desperate determination to be impressed, like a child whose father is hiding conspicuously behind the door, was due to America. It’s nothing to do with America; it’s myself. It’s a kind of moral and mental drunkenness. I know what I’m doing. I’m entirely responsible for my actions. That’s the way a drunken man argues. Nobody is so utterly convinced of his rightness and reasonableness and judgment as a drunken man. I might argue with myself till morning that it’s ridiculous to excite myself over the prospect of helping an Englishman stranded in Sulphurville, but when, worn out with self-conviction, I fall asleep, I shall wake on tiptoe, as it were. I shall be quite violently awake at once. The fact is I’m absolutely tired of observing human nature. I just want to tumble right into the middle of its confusion and forget how to criticize anybody or anything. What’s the good of meeting a drunken man with generalizations about human conduct or direction or progression? He won’t listen to generalizations, because drunkenness is the apotheosis of the individual. That’s why drunken people are always so earnestly persuasive, so anxious to convince the unintoxicated observer that it is better to walk on all-fours than upright. Eccentricity becomes a moral passion; every drunken man is a missionary of the peculiar. At the present moment I’m in the mental state that, did I possess an honest taste for liquor, would make me get up and uncork the brandy-bottle. It’s a kind of defiant self-expression. Oh, that poor young Englishman lying alone in Sulphurville! To-morrow, to-morrow! Who knows? Perhaps I really shall find that I am necessary to somebody. Even as a child I conceived the notion of being indispensable. I want somebody to say to me: ‘You! You! What should I have done without you?’ I suppose every woman feels that; I suppose that is the maternal instinct. But I don’t believe many women can feel it so sharply as I do, because very few women have ever been compelled by circumstances to develop their personalities so early and so fully, and then find that nobody wants that personality. 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. And if you’re disappointed? You’ve been disappointed before. Damn those tree-frogs! Like all croakers, they disturb oblivion. I wonder if he’d like my new trunk. And I wonder how old he is. I’m assuming that he’s young, but he may be a matted old tramp.”
Sylvia woke next morning, as she had prefigured herself, on tiptoe; at breakfast she was sorry for all the noisy people round her, so important to her was life seeming. She set out immediately afterward to walk along the hot, dusty road to the town, elated by the notion of leaving behind her the restlessness and stark cleanliness of the big hotel. The main street of Sulphurville smelled of straw and dry grain; and if it had not been for the flies she would have found the air sweet enough after the damp exhalations of brimstone that permeated the atmosphere of the Plutonian and its surroundings. The flies, however, tainted everything; not even the drug-store was free from them. Sylvia inquired for the address of the Englishman, and the druggist looked at her sharply. She wondered if he was hoping for the settlement of his account.
“Madden’s the name, ain’t it?” the druggist asked.
“Madden,” she repeated, mechanically. A wave of emotion flooded her mind, receded, and left it strewn with the jetsam of the past. The druggist and the drug-store faded out of her consciousness; she was in Colonial Terrace again, insisting upon Arthur’s immediate departure.
“What a little beast I was!” she thought, and a desire came over her to atone for former heartlessness by her present behavior. Then abruptly she realized that the Madden of Sulphurville was not necessarily, or even probably, the Arthur Madden of Hampstead. Yet behind this half-disappointment lay the conviction that it was he. “Which accounts for my unusual excitement,” Sylvia murmured. She heard herself calmly asking the storekeeper for his address.
“The Auburn Hotel,” she repeated. “Thank you.”