Читать книгу The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 6

At last Henry’s facts were considered firmly enough implanted to justify a move; and in September the prince and Monkley sat down to compose their preliminary letter to Sir Francis Hurndale. Sylvia by now was so much accustomed to the behavior of her companions that she never thought seriously about the fantastic side of the affair. Her own masquerade as a boy had been passed off so successfully even upon such an acute observer as Jimmy, until her father had let out the secret by a slip of the tongue, that she had no qualms about being accepted as a king. She realized that money was to be made out of it; but the absence of money had already come to seem a temporary discomfort, to relieve which people in a position like her own and her father’s had no reason to be scrupulous. Not that she really ever bothered her head with the morality of financial ways and means. When she spent the ten-franc piece that she thought she had found, the wrong had lain in unwittingly depriving her mother whom she loved; if she had not loved her mother she might have still had scruples about stealing from her; but stealing from people who had plenty of money and with whom there was no binding link of affection would have been quite incomprehensible to her. Therefore the sight of Jimmy Monkley and her father and the Prince de Condé sitting round a spindle-legged tea-table in this new house that smelled pleasantly of varnish was merely something in a day’s work of the life they were leading, like a game of cards. It was a much jollier life than any she had yet known; her alliance with Jimmy had been a very good move; her father was treated as he ought to be treated by being kept under; she was shortly going to have some more clothes.

Sylvia sat watching the trio, thinking how much more vividly present Jimmy seemed to be than either of the other two—the prince with his greenish complexion never really well shaved, and his turn-down collars that made his black suit more melancholy, or her father with his light, plaintive eyes and big ears. She was glad that she was not going to resemble her father except perhaps in being short and in the shape of her wide nose; yet she was not really very short; it was only that her mother had been so tall; perhaps, too, when her hair grew long again her nose would not seem so wide.

The letter was finished and Jimmy was reading it aloud:

SIR—I have the honor to ask if, in the probable event of a great dynastic change taking place in one of the chief countries of Europe, you would welcome the post of court painter, naturally at a suitable remuneration. If you read the daily papers, as no doubt you do, you will certainly have come to the conclusion that neither the present ruling house nor what is known as the Carlist party had any real hold upon the affections of the Spanish people. Verb. sap. Interesting changes may be foreshadowed, of which I am not yet at liberty to write more fully. Should you entertain the proposal I shall be happy to wait upon you with further particulars.

I have the honor to be, sir,

Your obedient servant,

JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,

PRINCE DE CONDÉ.

“Do you know what it sounds like?” said Henry. “Mind I’m not saying this because I didn’t write the letter myself. It sounds to me like a cross between a prophecy in Old Moore’s Almanack and somebody trying to sell a patent knife-cleaner.”

“There’s a good deal in what you say,” Monkley agreed, in rather a dissatisfied tone.

Henry was so much flattered by the reception of his criticism that he became compassionate to the faults of the letter and tried hard to point out some of its merits.

“After all,” said Jimmy, “the great thing is that the prince has signed it. If his name doesn’t draw Master Godfrey, no letters are going to. We’ll send it off as it is.”

So the letter was sent. Two days afterward the prince arrived with the news that Godfrey Hurndale had called upon him and that he had been inexpressibly happy at the prospect of meeting the de jure King of France and Spain.

“Bring him round to-morrow afternoon about tea-time,” said Monkley. “You haven’t forgotten the family history, Henry?”

Henry said that he had not forgotten a single relation, and that he damned them severally each morning in all their titles while he was dressing.

The next afternoon Sylvia sat in an arm-chair in the presence-room, which Henry supposed was so called because none of the furniture had been paid for, and waited for Godfrey Hurndale’s coming. Her father put on the rusty black evening-dress of the family retainer, and Jimmy wore a most conspicuous check suit and talked so loudly and nasally that Henry was driven to a final protest:

“Look here, Jimmy, I’ve dressed up to help this show in a suit that’s as old as one of those infernal ancestors of Sil’s, but if you don’t get less American it’ll fall to pieces. Every time you guess I can hear a seam give.”

“Remember to talk nothing but French,” Monkley warned Sylvia, when the bell rang. “Go on, Harry. You’ve got to open the door. And don’t forget that you can only speak French.”

Monkley followed him out of the room, and his voice could be heard clanking about the hall as he invited young Hurndale into the dining-room first. Henry came back and took up his position behind Sylvia’s chair; she felt very solemn and excited, and asked her father rather irritably why he was muttering. The reason, however, remained a mystery, for the dining-room door opened again and, heralded by Monkley’s twanging invitation, Mr. Hurndale stood shyly in the entrance to the presence-room.

“Go right in, Mr. Hurndale,” Monkley said. “I guess his Majesty’s just about ready to meet you.”

Sylvia, when she saw the young man bowing before her, really felt a kind of royal exaltation and held out her hand to be kissed.

Hurndale reverently bent over it and touched it with his lips; so did the prince, an action for which Sylvia was unprepared and which she rather resented, thinking to herself that he really did not shave and that it had not only been his grubby appearance. Then Hurndale offered her a large bunch of white carnations and she became kingly again.

“François,” she commanded her father, “mets ces œillets dans ma chambre.”

And when her father passed out with a bow Sylvia was indeed a king. The audience did not last long. There were practical matters to discuss, for which his Majesty was begged to excuse their withdrawal. Sylvia would have liked a longer ceremony. When the visitor had gone they all sat down to a big tea in the presence-room, and she was told that the young man had been so completely conquered by her gracious reception of him that he had promised to raise five hundred pounds for her cause. His reward in addition to royal favors was to be a high class of the Order of Isabella the Catholic. Everybody, even Henry, was in high good humor. The prince did not come to Streatham again; but a week later Monkley got a letter from him with the Paris postmark.

DEAR MR. MONKLEY—Our young friend handed me a check for £200 the day before yesterday. As he seemed uncertain about the remainder of the sum promised, I took the liberty of drawing my share at once. My great work requires immediate assistance, and I am now busily occupied in Paris. My next address will be a castle in Spain, where perhaps we shall meet when you are looking for your next site.

Most truly yours,

JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,

PRINCE DE CONDÉ.

Jimmy and Henry stared at each other.

“I knew it,” said Henry. “I’m always wrong; but I knew it. Still, if I could catch him, it would take more than Condy’s Fluid to disinfect that pea-green welsher after I’d done with him.”

Monkley sat biting his lips in silence; and Sylvia, recognizing the expression in his eyes that she dreaded formerly, notwithstanding that he was now her best friend, felt sharply her old repugnance for him. Henry was still abusing the defaulter when Monkley cut him short.

“Shut up. I rather admire him.”

“Admire him?” Henry gasped. “I suppose you’d admire the hangman and shake hands with him on the scaffold. It’s all very fine for you. You didn’t have to learn how Ferdinand the Fifty-eighth married Isabella the Innocent, daughter of Alphonso the Eighth, commonly called Alphonso the Anxious. Condy’s Fluid! I swallowed enough of it, I can tell you.”

Monkley told him gruffly to keep quiet; then he sat down and began to write, still with that expression in his eyes. Presently he tore up the letter and paced the room.

“Damn that swine,” he suddenly shouted, kicking the spindle-legged table into the fireplace. “We wanted the money, you know. We wanted the money badly.”

Shortly before dawn the three of them abandoned the new house in Streatham and occupied rooms in the Kennington Park Road. Monkley and Sylvia’s father resumed the racing that had temporarily been interrupted by ambition. Sylvia wandered about the streets in a suit of Etons that was rapidly showing signs of wear.

One day early in the new year Sylvia was leaning over the parapet of Waterloo Bridge and munching hot chestnuts. The warmth of them in her pockets was grateful. Her pastime of dropping the shells into the river did not lack interest; she was vaguely conscious in the frosty sunshine of life’s bounty, and she offered to the future a welcome from the depths of her being; meanwhile there still remained forty chestnuts to be eaten.

Her meditation was interrupted by a voice from a passerby who had detached himself from the stream of traffic that she had been disregarding in her pensive greed; she looked up and met the glance of a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in a dark-gray coat with collar and cuffs of chinchilla, who was evidently anxious to begin a conversation.

“You’re out of school early,” he observed.

Sylvia replied that she did not go to school.

“Private tutor?” he asked; and, partly to save further questions about her education, partly because she was not quite sure what a private tutor was, she answered in the affirmative.

The stranger looked along the parapet inquisitively.

“I’m out alone this afternoon,” Sylvia said, quickly.

The stranger asked her what amused her most, museums or theaters or listening to bands, and whether she preferred games or country walks. Sylvia would have liked to tell him that she preferred eating chestnuts to anything else on earth at that moment; but, being unwilling to create an impression of trying to snub such a benevolent person, she replied vaguely that she did not know what she liked best. Then because such an answer seemed to imply a lack of intelligence that she did not wish to impute to herself, she informed him that she liked looking at people, which was strictly true, for if she had not been eating chestnuts she would certainly have still been contemplating the traffic across the bridge.

“I’ll show you some interesting people, if you care to come with me,” the stranger proposed. “Have you anything to do this afternoon?”

Sylvia admitted that her time was unoccupied.

“Come along, then,” said the middle-aged gentleman, a little fussily, she thought, and forthwith he hailed a passing hansom. Sylvia had for a long time been ambitious to travel in a hansom. She had already eaten thirty-five chestnuts, only seven of which had been bad; she decided to accept the stranger’s invitation. He asked her where she lived and promised to send her home by cab when the entertainment was over.

Sylvia asked if it was a reception to which he was taking her. The middle-aged gentleman laughed, squeezed her hand, and said that it might be called a reception, adding, with a chuckle, “a very warm reception, in fact.” Sylvia did not understand the joke, but laughed out of politeness.

There followed an exchange of names, and Sylvia learnt that her new acquaintance was called Corydon.

“You’ll excuse me from offering you one of my cards,” he said. “I haven’t one with me this afternoon.”

They drove along for some time, during which the conversation of Mr. Corydon always pursued the subject of her likes and dislikes. They drew clear of the press of traffic and bowled westward toward Sloane Street; Sylvia, recognizing one of the blue West Kensington omnibuses, began to wonder if the cab would take her past Lillie Road where Jimmy had specially forbidden her to go, because both he and her father owed several weeks’ rent to Mrs. Meares and he did not want to remind her of their existence. When they drew nearer and nearer to Sylvia’s former lodging she began to feel rather uneasy and wish that the cab would turn down a side-street. The landmarks were becoming more and more familiar, and Sylvia was asking herself if Mrs. Meares had employed the stranger to kidnap her as a hostage for the unpaid rent, when the cab turned off into Redcliffe Gardens and soon afterward pulled up at a house.

“Here we are,” said Mr. Corydon. “You’ll enjoy yourself most tremendously, Sylvester.”

The door was opened by a servant, who was apparently dressed as a brigand, which puzzled Sylvia so much that she asked the reason in a whisper. Mr. Corydon laughed.

“He’s a Venetian. That’s the costume of a gondolier, my dear boy. My friend who is giving the reception dresses all his servants like gondoliers. So much more picturesque than a horrible housemaid.”

Sylvia regarded this exotic Clara with considerable interest; the only other Venetian product of which she had hitherto been aware was blinds.

The house, which smelt strongly of incense and watered flowers, awed Sylvia with its luxury, and she began to regret having put foot in a place where it was so difficult to know on what she was intended to tread. However, since Mr. Corydon seemed to walk everywhere without regard for the softness of the carpets, Sylvia made up her mind to brave the silent criticism of the gondolier and follow up-stairs in his footsteps. Mr. Corydon took her arm and introduced her to a large room where a fume of cigarette smoke and incense blurred the outlines of the numerous guests that sat about in listening groups, while some one played the grand piano. There were many low divans round the room, to one of which Mr. Corydon guided Sylvia, and while the music continued she had an opportunity of studying her fellow-guests. They were mostly young men of about eighteen, rather like the young men at the Emperor’s reception; but there were also several middle-aged men of the same type as Mr. Corydon, one of whom came across and shook hands with them both when the music stopped.

“So glad you’ve come to see me,” he said in a voice that sounded as if each word were being delicately fried upon his tongue. “Aren’t you going to smoke a cigarette? These are Russian. Aren’t they beautiful to look at?”

He proffered a green cigarette-case. Sylvia, who felt that she must take advantage of this opportunity to learn something about a sphere of life which was new to her, asked him what it was made of.

“Jade, my dear. I brought such heaps of beautiful jade back with me from China. I’ve even got a jade toilet-set. My dear, it was dreadfully expensive.”

He giggled. Sylvia, blowing clouds of smoke from her cigarette, thought dreamily what funny things her father would have said about him.

“Raymond’s going to dance for us,” he said, turning to Corydon. “Isn’t it too sweet of him?”

At that moment somebody leaped into the middle of the room with a wild scream and began to throw himself into all sorts of extraordinary attitudes.

“Oh, Raymond, you’re too wonderful!” the host ejaculated. “You make me feel quite Bacchic.”

Sylvia was not surprised that anybody should feel “backache” (she had thus understood her host) in the presence of such contortions. The screaming Raymond was followed into the arena by another lightly clad and equally shrill youth called Sydney, and both of them flung themselves into a choric frenzy, chasing each other round and round, sawing the air with their legs, and tearing roses from their hair to fling at the guests, who flung them back at the dancers. Suddenly Raymond collapsed upon the carpet and began to moan.

“What’s the matter, my dear?” cried the host, rushing forward and kneeling to support the apparently agonized youth in his arms.

“Oh, my foot!” Raymond wailed. “I’ve trodden on something.”

“He’s trodden on a thorn. He’s trodden on a thorn,” everybody said at once.

Raymond was borne tenderly to a divan, and was so much petted that Sydney became jealous and began to dance again, this time on the top of the piano. Presently everybody else began to dance, and Mr. Corydon would have liked to dance with Sylvia; but she declined. Gondoliers entered with trays of liqueurs, and Sylvia, tasting crème de menthe for the first time, found it so good that she drank four glasses, which made her feel rather drowsy. New guests were continually arriving, to whom she did not pay much attention until suddenly she recognized the baron with Godfrey Hurndale, who at the same moment recognized her. The baron rushed forward and seized Sylvia’s arm. She thought he was going to drag her back by force to Mrs. Meares to answer for the missing rent, but he began to arch his unoccupied arm like an excited swan, and call out in his high, mincing voice:

“Blackmailers-s-s! blackmailers-s-s!”

“They blackmailed me out of four hundred pounds,” said Hurndale.

“Who brought him here?” the baron cried. “It’s-s-s true. Godfrey has been persecuted by these horrid people. Blackmailers-s-s!”

All the other guests gathered round Sylvia and behaved like angry women trying to mount an omnibus. Mr. Corydon had turned very pale and was counting his visiting-cards. Sylvia could not understand the reason for all this noise; but vaguely through a green mist of crème de menthe she understood that she was being attacked on all sides and began to get annoyed. Somebody pinched her arm, and without waiting to see who it was she hit the nearest person within reach, who happened to be Mr. Corydon. His visiting-cards fell on the floor, and he groveled on the carpet trying to sweep them together. Sylvia followed her attack on Mr. Corydon by treading hard on Sydney’s bare toes, who thereupon slapped her face; presently everybody was pushing her and pinching her and hustling her, until she got in such a rage and kicked so furiously that her enemies retired.

“Who brought him here?” Godfrey Hurndale was demanding. “I tell you he belongs to a gang of blackmailers.”

“Most dreadful people,” the baron echoed.

“Antonio! Domenico!” the host cried.

Two gondoliers entered the room, and at a word from their master they seized Sylvia and pushed her out into the street, flinging her coat and cap after her. By this time she was in a blind fury, and, snatching the bag of chestnuts from her pocket, she flung it with all her force at the nearest window and knew the divine relief of starring the pane.

An old lady that was passing stopped and held up her hands.

“You wicked young rascal, I shall tell the policeman of you,” she gasped, and began to belabor Sylvia with her umbrella.

Such unwarrantable interference was not to be tolerated; Sylvia pushed the old lady so hard that she sat down heavily in the gutter. Nobody else was in sight, and she ran as fast as she could until she found an omnibus, in which she traveled to Waterloo Bridge. There she bought fifty more chestnuts and walked slowly back to Kennington Park Road, vainly trying to find an explanation of the afternoon’s adventure.

Her father and Monkley were not back when Sylvia reached home, and she sat by the fire in the twilight, munching her chestnuts and pondering the whole extraordinary business. When the others came in she told her story, and Jimmy looked meaningly at her father.

“Shows how careful you ought to be,” he said. Then turning to Sylvia, he asked her what on earth she thought she was doing when she broke the window.

“Suppose you’d been collared by the police, you little fool. We should have got into a nice mess, thanks to you. Look here, in future you’re not to speak to people in the street. Do you hear?”

Sylvia had no chestnuts left to throw at Jimmy, so in her rage she took an ornament from the mantelpiece and smashed it on the fender.

“You’ve got the breaking mania,” said Henry. “You’d better spend the next money you’ve got on cocoanuts instead of chestnuts.”

“Oh, ta gueule! I’m not going to be a boy any longer.”