Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  He was quite prepared to find Sylvia just like the others, only more so — and his friends in vain assured him that she was quite different. She was, — and when at last he was dragged to see her, the difference struck him in the face like a blow. For when the curtain went up, the scene was a forest glade, painted with all the tender brilliant genius of Mascarille, the prince of scene-painters, delicately tinted, lighted faultlessly. The leaves moved as in a gentle breeze — moved and rustled. A bird twittered, trilled, uttered one long sweet note, to be answered by a pipe, clear and piercing, sweet in the first note of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song.

  On a tree trunk at the side of the stage Pan sat, goat thighs tucked under him — no, not Pan, or if Pan, Pan when he and the world were very young. A beautiful fair-haired youth, with the reed to his lips and his eyes on that enchanted opening in the leaves which fronted the audience.

  The leaves shimmered and shivered, parted to the touch of hands, and Sylvia stepped delicately through the leafy screen on to the smooth velvet carpet that lay spread in place of the moss of the forest.

  Her dress was of some sort of vague gossamer stuff, light yet clinging. It hung its delicate films about shoulders and knees, and where it hung loosely it was diaphanous as a spider’s web. But where it clung about her figure it was grey-opaque as spider’s webs are if you crush them close in your hands. Little points of light, dew drops of paste, gemmed the spider’s web. Her hair hung lank and limp, in black hanks on each side of a narrow face that broadened where the eyes were, a face to haunt the thoughts of a man — eyes to haunt his dreams. The reed notes wooed her feet, the orchestra only contributed a background of muffled undertones to the vivid notes of the reed. — It sounded as the sea might sound at the end of some Tropical glade that reached down to the very sea-shore.

  She paused, her slight arms hanging by her sides, while her public clapped and shouted, a little half-contemptuous smile on her lips, a little waiting droop stooping her slender shoulders as though beneath a light burden. She stood so, waiting, till the applause died down — died away, and the notes of the pipe leaped up as a flame leaps that has been for a little time checked by ashes.

  Then she danced; and it was the spirit of the woods in Spring. Amid the applause that came at the dance’s end Templar got up and stumbled out.

  “Hold on,” said the friend; “you haven’t seen her Salome yet.”

  “Some other time,” said Templar, and pushed on against resentful knees, over martyred feet. He did not want to see Sylvia dance Salome. He had seen her dance in the wildwood. For Sylvia was Sandra, who had been a brown witch-child, and was now a white witch-girl crowned with beauty as with a diadem — a girl with the eyes that you never forget.

  The friend shrugged his shoulders and, following, caught up with him on the stairs.

  “Who is she?” said Templar abruptly.

  “That’s just it. Nobody knows. The charming Sylvia knows the value of a mystery. I say — come back and see the Salome. You’re not seedy, are you?”

  “No,” said Templar, “ I’ve just remembered an important letter. See it some other day.”

  She doesn’t dance every day, you know,” said the friend. “ Only four days a week, and only two weeks in every three.”

  “What did you mean about mystery?” Templar asked, arrived at the lounge.

  “Why, no one knows where she lives, or what her real name is, or anything about her. She’s just Sylvia. She won’t be interviewed, won’t give her autograph. No one’s ever seen her to speak to, that I know of.”

  “She’s straight then?”

  “I hope so, I’m sure. Everybody’s most awfully gone on her. Some of the fellows are quite silly. She gets heaps of flowers, and lots of other things — chocolates and jewelry, and fur coats and things. One old chap sent a motor for her — a present. But she’d got one already, so she sent it back. She takes all the rest of it home though.”

  “I suppose she sends them all back — sooner or later?”

  “They say she sticks to everything. A journalist chap I know got all that out of the box-office man — one night late, don’t you know? But he couldn’t get anything else. There’s the music — So long. I’m not going to miss the Salome. Not if I know it.”

  Templar walked up and down the street where the stage door was. He was rewarded. In about half an hour a shrouded figure came out, beside an elderly woman with her arms full of parcels. A man in livery followed. He also was laden. Then came a figure pitifully hanging a helpless misshappen leg — from the support of a crutch. The uniformed man put the three, with the many bundles, into an electric brougham that slid away down the lighted street.

  Templar went home alone. He would have liked to go to her home. He would have liked to see her face with the powder and rouge washed off — to see if it was like the face of the brown witch child — to hear her voice, whether it was like the voice that had told his fortune.

  He assured himself at the end of an hour’s unprofitable reflection that sooner or later he should go to her home with her and see and hear these things. It was, he assured himself, only a matter of time.

  The legacy that had set him free to leave engineering and come home was big enough for luxuries.

  Detectives were luxurious. Well — he could afford them.

  “One must have some object in life,” he told himself, all alive with joyous excitement and interest: “what better object can I have than to investigate, in a purely scientific spirit, the mystery of Sylvia?”

  CHAPTER III. THE HOUSE WITH NO ADDRESS.

  If Mr. Templar could have had his wish and could have gone home with Sylvia he would have gone to a house that had no address. He would have entered it, following Sylvia and two others, by a very odd and unusual way, and he would have found himself in a series of rooms opening one from the other by draped arches, and forming together three sides of a rather large square.

  The rooms were furnished with an almost savage simplicity; the floors were bare and scrubbed — In the first of the rooms there were rugs and carpets — the uncostly Japanese kind, some comfortable square chairs and couches, useful tables, bookshelves, books. But the effect of severity was at once marred and emphasised by a number of more or less ornamental objects, such as one finds in the houses of people who are rich and not newly rich — the carved, embroidered, lacquered and inlaid adornments of a well-ordered, middle-class home, surviving from the mid-Victorian period. A set of carved ivory chessmen, a banner screen, a good deal of fine old silver, and Sheffield plate — cushions covered in Berlin wool-work, Chinese lacquer the like of which you shall never find at Liberty’s, an Empire clock with cupids and a half-impudent Venus half-decorously draped in flowing lines of gilt and ormolu. Work-boxes, desks and a blotting book of pâpier maché inlaid with mother of pearl and sheathed with discoloured gilding. A Buhl cabinet: in it and on it old china set out with an obvious pride. There were little footstools of the kind that only linger in families where the house has not been disturbed for at least two generations, portraits on the walls — some half-dozen in heavy scrolly gilt frames. No other pictures. A low Eugenie chair of carved walnut and Aubusson. Portfolios of engravings, bronzes, lustres. These were all in the first room. In the second were gray wooden arm chairs with rush seats and a large deal table smooth with scrubbing. There was only matting on this floor, and on the green walls no pictures. The third and by far the largest room held nothing but a grand piano and a stand for music, a music-stool, and, on shelves, violin cases. The floor of this room was carpeted with the softest, thickest velvet carpet of the colour of dark green moss: its walls were entirely of looking-glass. Electric lights hung high against the ceiling cornice, and in front of one mirror-lined wall — the longest unbroken wall space in the room — was a row of foot-lights. Dark curtains hung to each window.

  It was into the first of these rooms that the three came. Sylvia, a shapeless bundle, fumbled at her wraps and dropping them stood up from the fallen heap of the
m like a beautiful flower from its rough calyx. She wore a plain white linen frock, close-belted to her straight clean-cut shape, her hair hung in a thick plaited tail to her waist, and by the candid innocent eyes of her she might have been a sixteen year old pensionnaire just from her convent for the holidays.

  “How much for the bouquets to-night, Denny?” she said.

  He told her, and she shrugged her shoulders in the white frock.

  “Three pounds! And I know they cost twenty-five,” she said. “Ah well, it’s a good thing we don’t have to live on flowers. Undo the bundles quickly, Aunt Dusa, darling. Uncle Moses will be here directly. Never mind the letters. We’ll attend to them to-morrow.”

  She led the way to the dining-room.

  A black cloth, unfolded, shewed letters on letters in uneven strata. Sylvia shot them skilfully into a deep square basket that stood ready.

  The lame boy who had been Pan set a chair for her, and himself climbed into one of a different height and shape. His own chair, one could see, and be sad in the seeing.

  The three sat down at the table. Had Mr. Edmund Templar had his wish he would have wondered, because he had not realised how completely Sylvia was, for the moment, the idol of London; nor, even knowing that, would he have guessed the number and richness of the gifts that London can, and will, lay on its idols’ altars.

  The floor round the table was presently a sea of brown paper, blue paper, tissue paper, pink, white, mauve, — and the heaps of shapeless parcels on the table lessened, as, on the table’s other end, the array grew of naked gifts.

  If you have not lived in the world which sends, or the world which receives such offerings, you would have wondered, even as Mr. Templar would have done, that there should be so much money in the world, money unearned, money just flowing, like an exhaustless stream, into the pockets of those whose utmost efforts could not spend it all — so that in the exuberance of their unearned affluence men willingly spend hundreds of pounds on an offering to an unknown goddess — a popular dancer or actress — just on the chance of getting for it someday some reward to their low liking. Just as they stake their hundreds on a race, for the excitement of “ having something on “ and for the chance of winning what they do not need. For of all the men who had sent these things, as earnest of what they were prepared to give for value received, if so be that Sylvia were for sale, — not one of them had spoken to her, heard her voice, or seen her face except through the disguise of pearl and rose that the stage lights exact.

  “That’s a pretty necklace,” said Sylvia carelessly,—” no — not the emerald one — that’s just barbaric and I like it, too. I mean the diamonds and opals.”

  “I expect that’s Uncle Moses again,” said the middle-aged woman with smooth drab hair whose quick fingers were casting off string and paper with the ease bred by constant practice, “there’s no letter with them.”

  “I like the pearls,” said Sylvia, holding up a slender string that glowed with a faint pinkness, “ very much I like the pearls. The pearls want me to go to supper at Verrey’s. That pendant is nice, too. It is going to Ostend at the end of the season. What’s that?”

  “A photograph frame.”

  Sylvia laughed, picked up the letter that came across the table, — bit her lip.

  “Keep that,” she said, reaching for the frame, craftlessly carved in a design of oak leaves and acorns. “ The photograph frame’s a dear. My dancing made it think of the Black Forest, where its father and mother live and where in youth it so happy was, so it made itself for me. A card please.” — A pile of printed cards yielded one that said in plain block letters:

  “Sylvia thanks you very much.”

  There were only four more of such cards needed, — and these were claimed by an olivewood paper knife from a school girl, a box of chocolates from a schoolboy, and two books of verse by quite dull authors.

  All the rest of it — furs, jewels, gloves, fans, bonbons, lace — laid out on the big table as the work of the faithful is laid out at church bazaars. Sylvia feasted her eyes.

  “It’s a very good haul to-night,” she said greedily. “ I hope Uncle Moses will think so, too. Oh, it’s a fine thing to have one talent, Aunt Dusa, dear. If I hadn’t you’d have been looking out for a situation, Aunt Dusa, dear, and dropping your precious sixpences one by one like salt tears in novels.”

  “I’ll put on the milk for the chocolate,” said the mature woman. And went.

  “And where would you have been, Denny,” she leaned towards him caressingly,—”if I hadn’t had my little talent?”

  “In hell, I expect,” said Denny. “I shouldn’t have been anywhere on earth if I couldn’t have been near you, Princess.” It was the voice of the boy who in the wood had hidden his face at her bidding, but it had the timbre of manhood, and the accent which we term cultivated. “ But I wish it was all over.” He leaned his hands against the table and pushed his chair back from it. “ I’m sick of the whole beastly show”

  “The beastly show? Playing for me?”

  “Playing for all these apes and goats. Seeing you dance for all these goats and geese. There ought to have been some other way. There would have been some other way if I’d been like other men — if I hadn’t been a crooked idiot that can do nothing for you except worship you. And worship’s cheap nowadays, isn’t it, Princess?”

  “Not real — whatever you call it. That’s not cheap. And you’ve got your music.”

  “Oh, it’s a sweet destiny,” he said grimly. “ To feel inside you that you could conquer the world. And to have a body that will only let you play the flute and the fiddle and live on charity.”

  “There’s your symphony,” she said.

  “I’m sick of my symphony,” he said. “ I shall never do any good with it. And if I do nobody will want to hear it. And if they want to hear it they won’t pay me for it. Not till I’m dead anyway. And I’m alive now — alive all over — and all those people’s eyes on you every night.”

  “There are worse ways of earning a living than mine, Den — Suppose I had to sew rabbit-skins for fourteen hours a day, and die of consumption? Or get phossy jaw, making matches? Or have my pretty teeth drop out, and my pretty nails drop off, with lead poisoning at the potteries?”

  He refused to consider these alternatives.

  “You ought,” he said, “ to be in a glass case, and no one allowed inside except the people who love you — the people at home. If I’d only been straight I could have done something really amusing and profitable for you — cut purses on the high-road — or gone in for the burgling — or been a company-promoter.

  “As it is you’re writing the symphony of the century: and you play like no one else in the world. I’ve told you a thousand times that I couldn’t dance to any playing but yours.”

  “Take care” he said, smiling, “ that’s dangerous. If you tell me these things, one of these days I shall cut my hand off, so that you can’t ever dance anymore.” He laughed. “ And talking of cutting — sometimes I’m like the old Roman Johnny. I wish that your audience had only one throat so that I might cut it. I’m like a bear with a sore head tonight, Princess. I’m sorry. There was another of them in the stalls to-night. A real one. He went out after the Forest dance. I suppose he couldn’t stand the Salome. I expect he thought it was like all the others.”

  “Don’t,” she said, and getting up came behind him and touched his hair lightly, “don’t you begin. You know I hate the Salome, too. It’s not so easy for me, either. You know I have to ask two things from you Den — courage and music”

  “And love — ? That doesn’t count?”

  “Oh,” she said lightly, “ that doesn’t count. I don’t have to ask for that, do I? But sometimes — you think I’m as hard as nails, don’t you? Sometimes I’m as weak as a kitten: it only needs a strong push to make me chuck dancing — to send me toppling over the edge into the hopeless hell where the typewriters and shop-girls live. Don’t push me over, Den.”

 
“It isn’t hell to them,” said the young man. “Sometimes I wonder”

  An electric bell thrilled.

  “There’s Uncle Moses,” she said, ran to the door, and opened it. A man, large and Jewish, in a fur coat and crush hat stood in the doorway.

  “Well, well, my pretty pigeon,” he stood there and said, “and how goes the nest? More gold and silver linings, eh? More little stones for Uncle Moses to turn into downy feathers and straws and sticks in the building so useful, eh — eh?”

  With that he took off his hat and having bowed very deliberately and profoundly, shut it up with a bang, put it under his arm and entered the room on feet noiseless as a cat’s, closing the door behind him as an accomplished nurse closes the door of a sick room. He came forward rubbing his hands.

  “You’re late, uncle, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Better late than never, my dear,” he answered. “I stay a little to hear the world clap its hands and say, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ as Schubert in his song. Or Shakespeare to be just. And now — how many little fishes in Sylvia’s pretty net?”

  “There’s the whole silly lot!” said the girl, pointing to the table.

  The Jew stood by it, leaning lightly on the points of his podgy fingers, his little eyes bright, mobile, keenly appraising.

  “Good — very good! ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’ 1 I would not have believed it. No — never would I it have believed. All this for nothing, nothing, nothing!”