by Edith Nesbit
His love for her had so much of the unselfish tenderness that differentiates love from mere passion that he was careful to remember how the sight of him might affect her in her dancing. He would not risk anything that might make what she had chosen to do harder for her. So he did not take a box, which he would have liked to do, and watch quite closely the pretty mazes that her pretty feet trod — the innocent alluring curves of arms and neck. He took refuge in a wig, crape hair and the gallery, and from amid these concealments watched her through an opera-glass. She could not see him — and he could see her, and it made things easier to him just to see her thus. And he could not be expected, perhaps, to know that day by day life became more and more difficult to her just because she could not see him.
“He might at least have come to the theatre once or twice,” she told herself. Because you have parted with your lover forever, and are “never going to see him anymore,” you do not therefore desire that he should accept the good-bye so literally as never even to try to see you, especially when you are to be seen, for a shilling, by any man who has the shilling to pay.
He, for his part, was at first pleased that she could look so gay and glad — that she had the courage to hide so well the agony which he felt must be torturing her. It is odd, by the way, so odd that in age people forget how natural that oddness is to youth — it is odd that a man and woman, who a fortnight ago did not know each other’s names, should, in a few short days, become so much to each other that to know that they must part, probably for ever, hurts like having a hand cut off. They call it agony — and to them it is agony, an agony so keen as to make it seem incredible that even in their old age those who have endured that pain should forget it. Yet they do: and so we see the stern father and the worldly mother. It is all very rum — the agony, and the forgetting of it. You observe that Mr. Templar did not doubt that what Sylvia endured was agony, and that her inspired dancing only just served bravely to hide a breaking heart. This was at first: presently he began to wonder whether suffering could be so bravely hidden — whether, after all, the wreck of that love-Argosy on which they had together ventured the cargo of their happiness, was less to her than it was to him. The thought stung a bit. Well, women were slighter things than men — lighter, more swayed by the world. And well for them that it was so, he told himself with the bitter generosity of the deeply hurt. But he went on straining his eyes in the gallery with strong binoculars, and she went on dancing. It was her living — and more .... His wounded vanity told him the truth, so far, that it was in her dancing alone that she was able, for a moment, to forget the man she loved. And also, to forget what she feared from the man she did not love.
She practised for hours in the looking glass-lined room, and Pan played for her, untiring, played better than he had ever done before. The great symphony on which he was spending all the hours that he could not spend with her — and all the powers of his soul that were not spent in love and sorrow — now approached completion. The symphony was to be performed by the Hilarity orchestra at his benefit — and there were new dances to think out. Besides the dances for the symphony, they invented a new dance, of War, wherein she in the brazen armour of an Amazon danced a dance of battle to the sound of trumpets and drums.
It was a fine dance, dignified, relentless. She took the stage alone. It seemed to her that for Denny, gentle, dreamy, “ afflicted,” there could be no part in a dance of war. She herself put into the dance all the fury, the resentment, the hatred that she felt for the hound who had betrayed and trapped her; and, besides, all the determination not to yield, to die fighting, with which her hatred her resentment and her fury inspired her. It was magnificent. It surpassed her other dances because it was inspired by a real, living, terrible emotion — not the vague, beautiful dreams of a child, but the heart-whole fury of a woman in love. The dance perfect, she introduced it at the Hilarity.
Templar saw it, shuddered, hated the dance, loved it, and understood.
The town saw it, and it took the town by storm. There had been no waning in the passion of the public for their darling, but had its flare dwindled this would have wakened a new blaze. As it was, her popularity, which could not rise above the high-water mark it had already attained, did as water does when it can rise no more. It spread. People who did not care for dancing came to see her, dragged by enthusiastic friends and relations, came, and thereafter did care. People who had meant to go away for their summer holidays stayed in London, that they might see her again and yet again, before the holidays, too, should begin.
The frenzy of intrigued curiosity in journalists and in men who were not journalists grew to fever point. London was mad about her.
And while the splendour of the War Dance was fresh in the eyes of men and in the columns of the newspapers, she turned all her thought and care to Denny’s symphony.
It was difficult. Denny would not allow her to hear any of the rehearsals of his symphony by the orchestra. He conveyed its meaning and measure to her by means of his pipe, his violin, his piano.
She, for her part, would not risk dancing to his music any dance which she had not tried on the public. So that all the new dances had to be invented at home to Denny’s music, and rehearsed and performed at the theatre to the music of Beethoven. On Denny’s benefit night she would for the first time dance her new dances to his symphony fully orchestrated. Her dances owed much to the inspiration that the moment gave her genius that this was possible. The programme would run somewhat like this:
The Love Symphony
By Denis
Danced by Sylvia
1. The Child.
2. The Maiden.
3. The Dance of Worship.
4. The Dance of Love and Death.
She revived an old scheme conceived long ago and abandoned for lack of the absolutely fitting music. Now she had that.
To the first movement a child danced on the sea shore wearing wreaths and garlands of knotted green-brown sea-weed, — a child half cradled in the dreams of childhood, half awake to the dreams of youth, — a child whose eyes looked forth in innocent candour on the first vague visions of the mystery of love.
She tried it on the public and her audience cheered that dance to the echo and felt young and innocent and out of doors. Old dowagers remembered the sand-castles of their childhood, the Spanish castles of their adolescence; middle-aged stockbrokers looked on, breathless, and decided to go to the sea-side next week-end instead of to the bungalow by the golf-links.
Then should come the forest dance — but a new forest dance, where her memories would not be of the New Forest, but of trees nearer home, and of the flowers that grow by a Kentish river.
In the Dance of Worship the scene was a soft-sanded space surrounded by the great rough pillars of a prehistoric temple, a purple Eastern sky holding a crescent moon, a rough altar, lines of white draped death-still figures. One man, white robed, gold haired, with rapt devotional face, playing on a stringed instrument — I think it was a zither — but the management called it on the programmes a psaltery — and between the pillars and the white-robed death-still priests a woman — dancing with stately, beautiful, slow movements, and the face, men said, of an angel; dancing because dancing was the only way in which her soul and body together could express the worship of all things good and beautiful which filled her soul and inspired it.
This was the biggest success she had had. It roped into her net most of those who were still outside it. The religious papers wrote leaders dealing with Miriam, David, Jephthah’s daughter, and other dancers lauded in the Old Testament; popular Nonconformist preachers alluded to her from their pulpits, pointing out how wrong it was to suppose that dancing was necessarily of the devil, and declaring that no earnest Christian could be other than benefited by the pure religious feeling which Sylvia had, with a courage and insight truly heavenly, introduced into that hot-bed of sensual vice — the music hall stage. High Church clergy from far and near reminded all and sundry that they had always said
so, and even Mr. Stewart Hedlam, the staunch, unswerving upholder of the old teetotum-skirted pigeon-winged premiere danseuse, clapped his hands sore from the stalls, and cheered the soul of Sylvia when she came before the curtain by the sight of his beautiful hair and his fine, kind, mellow, approving face.
For the last movement she was to dance the Salome. She danced each dance for five evenings and no more. She whetted public expectancy; she then denied it. The dances were for Denny’s music.
And as her success grew higher and higher, her lover’s heart grew heavier and heavier. What his solicitor had had to tell him had added no joy to life.
But the heart of Uncle Moses rejoiced. His solicitor had had the same hopeless tale to tell. And Uncle Moses perceived that Sylvia’s hope of happiness lay in work — in successful work — in fame and not in love.
Also his pride was engaged. He had “run” Sylvia, and she had succeeded, as adventures which he financed had a way of doing. The jewelled gifts, too, heaped high, and he swept up, every night of her dancing, a cent per cent, profit on sums not negligible. She had conquered the world, and she was fleecing Mammon. He was getting his percentage — a royal one. And besides and beyond that, he loved the girl. That was her distinguishing characteristic when all was said and done — everyone loved her.
She had yielded now to the entreaties o? the Management of the Hilarity. It was no longer four days in the week that she danced, but five, and it would have been six but for Uncle Moses and Aunt Dusa, who insisted on at least two days of rest. And the week’s holiday came once in four weeks now, instead of once in three.
As usual in August, “ London was empty,” but it was crowded all the same, crowded with people who wanted to see Sylvia dance. For a heart in the condition which we term broken there is no medicine like work — indeed, it is the best opiate in the world for all pain, except the pain of overwork itself.
Drug-taking is dangerous, as all men know, because of the hold that the drug takes upon one’s nerves and one’s will. Life without the drug soon grows to seem not worth having. Presently the only thing worth having in life appears to be the drug. Later the life is the drug — and nothing else.
Sylvia was fast nearing the point where she must either weaken and break down from overwork, or harden and crystallise into a talented professional. So far her highest, deepest, most irresistible charm had been that she was an amateur of genius.
Fate’s next move came in time to save her from both these melancholy alternatives.
The move was announced to Sylvia as a correspondence-chess move might have been, by a letter. It lay, with a heap of others, on the long broad table that ran under the mirror in her dressing-room at the theatre. It lay on the top, and it probably owed its position to the peculiarity of its envelope. It was a “business “ envelope — a large oblong, and it was black-edged, very black-edged. The blackness lay, not only in a St. Andrew’s cross upon its back, but as a border upon its face, framing the address in a sable square. Now the people who write adulation to dancers are not usually in mourning mood. Sylvia therefore decided that here was a begging letter. And being kind-hearted and already dressed in the seaweed tunic of her sea-dance, and having nothing to do till her call came, which was delayed by a triple encore to a man who sang comic songs standing on his head on the back of a pig, she opened it. And when she had read it she turned pale, and clasped her hands to her heart, just like a heroine of melodrama. Because melodrama, after all, is roughly founded on life. Then her hands dropped by her sides, and her face slowly and beautifully grew pinker and pinker under its rouge, till it became a very rose of joy.
Then her call came. She hid the letter under the cover of her table and went. And when she stood in the soft clever light smiling her acknowledgment of her reception, the applause rose to a clamour. And with reason — for she was twice as beautiful as she had ever been before. And she knew it, which instantly made her more beautiful still.
The sense of well-being which comes from doing perfectly what one always does well lapped Sylvia in a cloak of cool velvet. More, it was as though the skin that clothed her body had been changed to some close-fitting enchanted fabric whose every thread was spun of pure joy, an intimate web of wonder caressing her, all over, with a live pure delight.
“If only he ever came! If only he could see me now,” she thought — And then the magic of her dance shut out all thought, leaving nothing but that soft close delicious sense of accurate, spontaneous perfection.
As it happened he had come. He could see her. He had been unable to avoid coming, not to the gallery in the wig and crape hair disguise which now began to seem to be not only ridiculous — it had always been that — but unnecessary. She was so wrapped up in her dancing, he told himself, that she would never notice him even if he occupied the box he had always longed for.
He had, by Fate’s decree, to take that box. Fate drove him to it. Fate in the person of his aunt. She and the uncle had come to town, en route for some holiday place abroad, and being in town nothing would serve but that dear Edmund, after dining with them at Morley’s, should take them to see this new dancer.
“This Sylvia as they call her,” said the aunt expressively.
Templar fought feebly, but the only weapon that could have protected him would have been a previous appointment, and he had unfortunately admitted, earlier in the engagement, that he was free that evening. He thought of being taken suddenly ill, but he knew that that would involve the invasion and occupation of his rooms by the hostile forces, and he felt that to be nursed by his aunt, when he had nothing the matter with him except a broken heart, which he could not disclose, would be the unbearable last straw.
For a thousand reasons he dreaded and detested the occupation of that stage box in company with his relations. The chance that they would not recognise in “ Sylvia as they call her “ the poor little Alexandra Mundy of eight years ago, seemed to him of the slenderest. And how could he bear their wonder, their interest, their surmises, their conclusions? But he telephoned to engage that box — only to learn what he might have expected, that it had been booked a fortnight ago, together with every other seat in the house.
“So we can’t go after all,” he said, coming back into the hotel lounge; “every seat engaged. We must try something else — there’s a very bright little thing at the Frivolity — quite charming music, I believe.”
“Opera?” the uncle heavily queried.
“Musical comedy,” said the aunt, as heavily. “ I saw it in the papers. I can’t bear musical comedies — they’re all vulgar and they’re all silly, 7 think. Besides, I’ve set my heart on seeing this girl. I can’t believe all that about her . . . you know, what Mr. MacDonald said in his sermon last Sunday. Is she really as wonderful as they say, Edmund?”
“Really,” said Edmund, “I almost think she is. You must see her the next time you come to town. Shall I go and call up the Frivolity?”
“No,” said the aunt, “ if we can’t see this Sylvia girl we’ll go to the Shakespeare thing. Shakespeare may be a little dull sometimes, but he’s always elevating, and nowadays if you go to one of these new plays you never know that you mayn’t not know where to look. Now Shakespeare’s perfectly safe — at least when he’s acted. In the book, of course, it’s different. That’s why I never will have him read aloud in my house. You never know, you see. I’ll telephone myself. Edmund — don’t you trouble. I want to call up my dressmaker at the same time.”
She rustled off in her heavy silk.
“Anything in the paper?” said Edmund, making conversation dutifully. “I hadn’t time to look at it this morning.”
“Oh, nothing much. Another airship smashed — three or four people run over by motors — the unemployed bothering, as usual. In August, too — you’d think they’d wait till the winter, wouldn’t you?”
“I should think it’s as unpleasant to starve in August as at any other time,” said Edmund.
“Oh, but they don’t starve,” said
the uncle; “ it’s all political agitation — there’s no real starvation, you know.”
“Isn’t there, really?” said Edmund drily. He had read yesterday’s paper if not to-day’s — yesterday’s paper, and the account of the woman who drowned herself and her five children, and he knew that people don’t kill themselves and leave notes to say they’ve done it because they’re starving just to advance the interests of this or that political party. But it is seldom worthwhile to argue with one’s uncle.
“No, take my word for it — it’s all boodle, my dear boy — cheap Socialist boodle.”
“Was there any other news?”
“Old Lord Lindore’s dead — died of heart failure in a Paris gambling-hell — shocking life he led,” said the uncle with enjoyment; “and that musical chap, you know the tenor they used to rave about in the seventies — what’s his name? Olindo Ferrara — yes — Oh, and by the way, you remember that girl we were talking about when you were down in the spring — little Alexandra Mundy — or perhaps you’ve forgotten.”
No — oddly enough, Edmund had not forgotten.
“Well, you know that retriever-dog chap — the music master that all the scandal was about — well, he’s gone off the hooks — a good riddance, I should say. More than one poor girl down our way — ah, here’s your aunt. I was just telling Edmund that brute who got Alexandra Mundy into trouble’s gone home.”
“Indeed,” said Edmund quite calmly and nicely, “how sad. What did he die of?”
“Pneumonia. Queer thing to have in August. His chest must have been unusually weak.”
“Didn’t wear flannels next his skin, I expect,” said the aunt crisply. “If you don’t wear flannel next your skin you’ve only yourself to thank for whatever happens. I’m always telling your uncle so. Am I not, Henry I”