Читать книгу The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 8

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SYLVIA begged Monkley not to go back and live in Fitzroy Street. She felt the flat would be haunted by memories of her father and Mabel. It was as well that she did not want to return there, for Jimmy assured her that nothing would induce him to go near Fitzroy Street. A great deal of money was owing, and he wished the landlord luck in his dispute with the furnishing people when he tried to seize the furniture for arrears of rent. It would be necessary to choose for their next abode a quarter of London to which he was a stranger, because he disliked having to make détours to avoid streets where he owed money. Finsbury Park was melancholy; Highgate was inaccessible; Hampstead was expensive and almost equally inaccessible; but they must go somewhere in the North of London, for there did not remain a suburb in the West or South the tradesmen and house-owners of which he had not swindled at one time or another. On second thoughts, there was a part of Hampstead that was neither so expensive nor so inaccessible, which was reached from Haverstock Hill; they would look for rooms there. They settled down finally in one of a row of old houses facing the southerly extremity of the Heath, the rural aspect of which was heightened by long gardens in front that now in late summer were filled with sunflowers and hollyhocks. The old-fashioned house, which resembled a large cottage both without and within, belonged to a decayed florist and nursery gardener called Samuel Gustard, whose trade was now confined to the sale of penny packets of seeds, though a weather-beaten sign-board facing the road maintained a legend of greater glories. Mr. Gustard himself made no effort to live up to his sign-board; indeed, he would not even stir himself to produce a packet of seeds, for if his wife were about he would indicate to her with the stem of his pipe which packet was wanted, and if she were not about, he would tell the customer that the variety was no longer in stock. A greenhouse kept from collapse by the sturdy vine it was supposed to protect ran along the fence on one side of the garden; the rest was a jungle of coarse herbaceous flowers, presumably the survivors of Mr. Gustard’s last horticultural effort, about ten years ago.

The money made by the tour of the Pink Pierrots did not last very long, and Jimmy was soon forced back to industry. Sylvia nowadays heard more about his successes and failures than when her father was alive, and she begged very hard to be allowed to help on some of his expeditions.

“You’re no good to me yet,” Monkley told her. “You’re too old to be really innocent and not old enough to pretend to be. Besides, people don’t take school-girls to race meetings. Later on, when you’ve learned a bit more about life, we’ll start a gambling club in the West End and work on a swell scale what I do now in a small way in railway-carriages.”

This scheme of Jimmy’s became a favorite topic; and Sylvia began to regard a flash gambling-hell as the crown of human ambition. Jimmy’s imagination used to run riot amid the splendor of it all, as he discoursed of the footmen with plush breeches; of the shaded lamps; of the sideboard loaded with hams and jellies and fruit at which the guests would always be able to refresh themselves, for it would never do to let them go away because they were hungry, and people were always hungry at three in the morning; of the smart page-boy in the entrance of the flats who would know how to reckon up a visitor and give the tip up-stairs by ringing a bell; and of the rigid exclusion of all women except Sylvia herself.

“I can see it all before me,” Jimmy used to sigh. “I can smell the cigars and whisky. I’m flinging back the curtains when every one has gone and feeling the morning air. And here we are stuck in this old cucumber-frame at Hampstead! But we’ll get it, we’ll get it. I shall have a scoop one of these days and be able to start saving, and when I’ve saved a couple of hundred I’ll bluff the rest.”

In October Jimmy came home from Newmarket and told Sylvia he had run against an old friend, who had proposed a money-making scheme which would take him away from London for a couple of months. He could not explain the details to Sylvia, but he might say that it was a confidence trick on the grand scale and that it meant his residing in a northern city. He had told his friend he would give him an answer to-morrow, and wanted to know what Sylvia thought about it.

She was surprised by Jimmy’s consulting her in this way. She had always taken it for granted that from time to time she would be left alone. Jimmy’s action made her realize more clearly than ever that to a great extent she already possessed that liberty of choice the prospect of which had dawned upon her at Swanage.

She assured Jimmy of her readiness to be left alone in Hampstead. When he expatiated on his consideration for her welfare she was bored and longed for him to be gone; his solicitude gave her a feeling of restraint; she became impatient of his continually wanting to know if she should miss him and of his commendation of her to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Gustard, from whom she desired no interference, being quite content with the prospect of sitting in her window with a book and a green view.

The next morning Monkley left Hampstead; and Sylvia inhaled freedom with the autumn air. She had been given what seemed a very large sum of money to sustain herself until Jimmy’s return. She had bought a new hat; a black kitten had adopted her; it was pearly October weather. Sylvia surveyed life with a sense of pleasure that was nevertheless most unreasonably marred by a faint breath of restlessness, an almost imperceptible discontent. Life had always offered itself to her contemplation, whether of the past or of the future, as a set of vivid impressions that formed a crudely colored panorama of action without any emotional light and shade, the intervals between which, like the intervals of a theatrical performance, were only tolerable with plenty of chocolates to eat. At the present moment she had plenty of chocolates to eat, more, in fact, than she had ever had before, but the interval was seeming most exasperatingly long.

“You ought to take a walk on the Heath,” Mr. Gustard advised. “It isn’t good to sit about all day doing nothing.”

“You don’t take walks,” Sylvia pointed out. “And you sit about all day doing nothing. I do read a book, anyway.”

“I’m different,” Mr. Gustard pronounced, very solemnly. “I’ve lived my life. If I was to take a walk round Hampstead I couldn’t hardly peep into a garden without seeing a tree as I’d planted myself. And when I’m gone, the trees ’ll still be there. That’s something to think about, that is. There was a clergyman came nosing round here the other day to ask me why I didn’t go to church. I told him I’d done without church as a lad, and I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t do without it now. ‘But you’re growing old, Mr. Gustard,’ he says to me. ‘That’s just it,’ I says to him. ‘I’m getting very near the time when, if all they say is true, I shall be in the heavenly choir for ever and ever, amen, and the less singing I hear for the rest of my time on earth the better.’ ‘That’s a very blasphemous remark,’ he says to me. ‘Is it?’ says I to him. ‘Well, here’s another. Perhaps all this talk by parsons,’ I says, ‘about this life on earth being just a choir practice for heaven won’t bear looking into. Perhaps we shall all die and go to sleep and never wake up and never dream and never do nothing at all, never. And if that’s true,’ I says, ‘I reckon I shall bust my coffin with laughing when I think of my trees growing and growing and growing and you preaching to a lot of old women and children about something you don’t know nothing about and they don’t know nothing about and nobody don’t know nothing about.’ With that I offered him a pear, and he walked off very offended with his head in the air. You get out and about, my dear. Bustle around and enjoy yourself. That’s my motto for the young.”

Sylvia felt that there was much to be said for Mr. Gustard’s attitude, and she took his advice so far as to go for a long walk on the Heath that very afternoon. Yet there was something lacking. When she got home again she found that the book of adventure which she had been reading was no longer capable of keeping her thoughts fixed. The stupid part of it was that her thoughts wandered nowhere in particular and without attaching themselves to a definite object. She would try to concentrate them upon Jimmy and speculate what he was doing, but Jimmy would turn into Claude Raglan; and when she began to speculate what Claude was doing, Claude would turn back again into Jimmy. Her own innermost restlessness made her so fidgety that she went to the window and stared at the road along the dusky Heath. The garden gate of next door swung to with a click, and Sylvia saw a young man coming toward the house. She was usually without the least interest in young men, but on this afternoon of indefinable and errant thoughts she welcomed the least excuse for bringing herself back to a material object; and this young man, though it was twilight and his face was not clearly visible, managed to interest her somehow, so that at tea she found herself asking Mr. Gustard who he might be and most unaccountably blushing at the question.

“That ’ud be young Artie, wouldn’t it?” he suggested to his wife. She nodded over the squat teapot that she so much resembled:

“That must be him come back from his uncle’s. Mrs. Madden was only saying to me this morning, when we was waiting for the grocer’s man, that she was expecting him this evening. She spoils him something shocking. If you please, his highness has been down into Hampshire to see if he would like to be a gentleman farmer. Whoever heard, I should like to know? Why he can’t be long turned seventeen. It’s a pity his father isn’t alive to keep him from idling his time away.”

“There’s no harm in giving a bit of liberty to the young,” Mr. Gustard answered, preparing to be as eloquent as the large piece of bread and butter in his mouth would let him. “I’m not in favor of pushing a young man too far.”

“No, you was never in favor of pushing anything, neither yourself nor your business,” said Mrs. Gustard, sharply. “But I think it’s a sin to let a boy like that moon away all his time with a book. Books were only intended for the gentry and people as have grown too old for anything else, and even then they’re bad for their eyes.”

Sylvia wondered whether Mrs. Gustard intended to criticize unfavorably her own manner of life, but she left the defense of books to Mr. Gustard, who was so impatient to begin that he nearly choked:

“Because I don’t read,” he said, “that’s no reason for me to try and stop others from reading. What I say is ‘liberty for all.’ If young Artie Madden wants to read, let him read. If Sylvia here wants to read, let her read. Books give employment to a lot of people—binders, printers, paper-makers, booksellers. It’s a regular trade. If people didn’t like to smell flowers and sit about under trees, there wouldn’t be no gardeners, would there? Very well, then; and if there wasn’t people who wanted to read, there wouldn’t be no printers.”

“What about the people who write all the rubbish?” Mrs. Gustard demanded, fiercely. “Nice, idle lot of good-for-nothings they are, I’m sure.”

“That’s because the only writing fellow we ever knew got that servant-girl of ours into trouble.”

“Samuel,” Mrs. Gustard interrupted, “that’ll do!”

“I don’t suppose every writing fellow’s like him,” Mr. Gustard went on. “And, anyway, the girl was a saucy hussy.”

“Samuel! That will do, I said.”

“Well, so she was,” Mr. Gustard continued, defiantly. “Didn’t she used to powder her face with your Borwick’s?”

“I’ll trouble you not to spit crumbs all over my clean cloth,” said Mrs. Gustard, “making the whole place look like a bird-cage!”

Mr. Gustard winked at Sylvia and was silent. She for her part had already begun to weave round Arthur Madden a veil of romance, when the practical side of her suddenly roused itself to a sense of what was going on and admonished her to leave off dreaming and attend to her cat.

Up-stairs in her bedroom, she opened her window and looked out at the faint drizzle of rain which was just enough to mellow the leafy autumnal scents and diffuse the golden beams of the lamps along the Heath. There was the sound of another window’s being opened on a line with hers; presently a head and shoulders scarcely definable in the darkness leaned out, whistling an old French air that was familiar to her from earliest childhood, the words of which had long ago been forgotten. She could not help whistling the air in unison; and after a moment’s silence a voice from the head and shoulders asked who it was.

“A girl,” Sylvia said.

“Anybody could tell that,” the voice commented, a little scornfully. “Because the noise is all woolly.”

“It’s not,” Sylvia contradicted, indignantly. “Perhaps you’ll say I’m out of tune? I know quite well who you are. You’re Arthur Madden, the boy next door.”

“But who are you?”

“I’m Sylvia Scarlett.”

“Are you a niece of Mrs. Gustard?” the voice inquired.

“Of course not,” Sylvia scoffed. “I’m just staying here.”

“Who with?”

“By myself.”

“By yourself?” the voice echoed, incredulously.

“Why not? I’m nearly sixteen.”

This was too much for Arthur Madden, who struck a match to illuminate the features of the strange unknown. Although he did not succeed in discerning Sylvia, he lit up his own face, which she liked well enough to suggest they should go for a walk, making the proposal a kind of test for herself of Arthur Madden’s character, and deciding that if he showed the least hesitation in accepting she would never speak to him again. The boy, however, was immediately willing; the two pairs of shoulders vanished; Sylvia put on her coat and went down-stairs.

“Going out for a blow?” Mr. Gustard asked.

Sylvia nodded. “With the boy next door,” she answered.

“You haven’t been long,” said Mr. Gustard, approvingly. “That’s the way I like to see it. When I courted Mrs. Gustard, which was forty years ago come next November, it was in the time of toolip-planting, and I hove a toolip bulb at her and caught her in the chignon. ‘Whatever are you doing of?’ she says to me. ‘It’s a proposal of marriage,’ I says, and when she started giggling I was that pleased I planted half the toolips upside down. But that’s forty years ago, that is. Mrs. Gustard’s grown more particular since, and so as she’s washing up the tea-things in the scullery, I should just slip out, and I’ll tell her you’ve gone out to get a paper to see if it’s true what somebody said about Buckingham Palace being burned to a cinder.”