Cynthia's Love Affairs/Chapter 2

EVER have a sister seven years older than yourself. I had, and so I know. Such sisters are patronising, but that is not the worst of them; they get somehow a kind of authority over you and lead you into doing things against which your better sense rebels. Now, Alice is a very good kind of sister as regards her heart and general groundwork, but she is seven years older than am, though she is by no means so proud of it as she was; and the stateliness of her position seemed at one time to be increased by her impending marriage with the vicar. He was then only a curate, but looked more. His Christian name, by the way, is Jimmy. Partly through Jimmy, and partly through Jimmy's episcopal people, Alice let herself get mixed up in a charitable subscription dance. That was bad enough, but she would not be content until she had brought me into it. I was only just out, but I struggled a good deal before gave way. However, you cannot fight against Alice, and I said I would go. I did go. I arrived late at some festive and forsaken hall in the neighbourhood of Olympia. It had that air of isolated gaiety about it which always seems to me to be worse than death. It was gay for that night only. There had been serious meetings there, and I felt that the harmonium had been removed, but had left an atmosphere of financially-unsound sects behind it. I am proud to say that I hardly knew any one there.

And out of that most unpromising occasion there arose an affair of the heart.

I had forgotten all about that most dear little boy, Harry Silvester. Absence makes the heart grow tender all right, but not towards the absent. And that rule applies any time between the ages of five and fifty. My engagement with Harry was by this time a forgotten childish absurdity.

Well, in the ordinary course, I danced with a young man with a very thoughtful eye and a short black moustache. He was quite good-looking and seemed to know Jimmy very well. So I supposed he was all right, and probably he was. He could not dance in any real sense of the word, so we went on to the staircase and talked. Never did I meet a man who talked so little and made his silence serve him so well; he made you feel that you were dull and uninteresting, but not that he was conversationally barren—which, I believe, was the real state of the case. And he could make a platitude into an epigram by his judicious silence; he would look straight before him with his searching, serious gaze, and then tell you after a pause that time flew, or that honesty was the best policy, or something of that sort. And it never occurred to you that he was remembering an inapposite proverb; it always seemed as if his intellect had flashed like a search-light down to the very depths of truth's well—that he had seen this precious aphorism there, dived for it, and brought it up rather exhausted. Of course, it was all manner, but then manner means a good deal. There are many wits in London who would do better if they paid a boy to say their good things for them, simply because they have not got the necessary manner. His good looks always seemed to me like a plagiarism from one of Lytton's novels, but his conversational plagiarisms always looked rather good; he had the sense to direct his best manner upon his weakest point. I fancy that he often went to subscription dances for the pleasure of looking as if he did not often go there. I talked to Jimmy about this man afterwards.

“Jimmy,” I said “who's Mr. Charles Elkinthorpe?”

“He's a twin.”

“More.”

“He's also a barrister. That's about all I know. I believe that he's considered to be rather slow.”

This was an amusing criticism, coming from Jimmy. There is not, as far as I am aware, anything much slower than the good and conscientious Jimmy himself.

“Money?”

“I don't know,” he replied rather coldly. He takes everything seriously, and he was pained by the mercenary character of the question.

“Then you ought to know. It all began with that dance that you and Alice forced me into. Now mamma likes him, and he is coming to the house, and anything may happen. If I marry him, and am reduced to a thirty-pound house in the Wandsworth neighbourhood, and learn how to make one's home look beautiful at a small cost, you're responsible, and let it be a warning to you. What's the other twin?”

“William Elkinthorpe is his name. I don't know him; he's away in Devonshire.”

“Which would you sooner be, Jimmy, a barrister, or away in Devonshire? Don't stop to think about it, because it isn't the kind of thing that stands thinking about. Thanks awfully for your information, and now you may run away and play.”

“I don't want,” said Jimmy seriously, “to say anything presumptuous, but within a few weeks I shall be your brother-in-law, and so, perhaps”

“Yes, Jimmy, quite so. You're an angel. Now presume as much as you like.”

“Well, aren't you too young to be thinking about marriage—especially in this rather flippant way?”

“Certainly, but don't be too sure that I was thinking about it. It's just possible that I mayn't marry him so very much after all; he may refuse me—anything may happen. Oh, Jimmy, don't you ever want to be purely perfectly asinine for one moment? How do you get along without it?”

He smiled faintly, hoped he could see a joke, sighed deeply, and went off to look for Alice.

It must be apparent to any one (not being Jimmy) from this conversation, that I considered Elkinthorpe to be quite beyond the range of possibilities, and had absolutely no heart-interest in him. If I had had any such interest, should I have asked Jimmy directly, in so many words, to tell me about the man? Of course not; I am a woman. And should I have been contented with the few barren details that Jimmy supplied? Of course not. I should have been much more indirect, and Jimmy would have found himself being much more explicit. When I become unable to make the Jimmies of this world tell me what I want to know believe they are volunteering the information of their own free will, and rather fear that they are boring me—all simultaneously—I will give up being a woman and set to at something else.

But, on the other hand, I had already surmised that Charles Elkinthorpe had a very distinct heart-interest in me. He had taken advantage of mamma's fatal habit of liking any one who wants to be liked, and came with clockwork regularity on her days. He dined with us once; he himself played the host, also, after a bachelor manner, and took us to the theatre and to supper at the Savoy afterwards. His pace never improved, but on the other hand he did not make mistakes —that is one of the advantages of going slowly.

Then one night I accidentally overheard part of a conversation between mamma and Alice that was not intended for me. However, I told them that I had overheard them. They were in the back drawing-room and did not observe that I had just come into the front.

I heard my dear, white-haired, fluffy mamma say:

Oh, no, Alice! I don't think it. He comes here very often, I know; but he talks to me or to you all the time—so far as he can be said to talk at all.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice answered, “but he looks only at her. I can tell you that Jimmy has noticed it.”

“And he really is such a nice young man in many ways. It would be too regrettable.”

“She is so young!” said Alice sadly.

“And so, so fair!” I observed out loud. I thought it time to interfere. “I should like myself, you good people, when you've quite finished with me.” Then we all laughed. But I went into Alice's bed-room that night, to give her a portion of my mind.

“I say, stranger,” I remarked nasally, “I heard what you were saying this afternoon, and if you'll excuse me I reckon I'd prefer to engineer this”

Alice stamped her foot. “Cynthia, you positively shall not quote that vulgar and disgusting story.”

“Very well, then,” I said, dropping the twang which went with the story. “But let me tell you one thing. If you want to stop me from getting engaged to Charles Elkinthorpe, don't try to prevent it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that—just plain that.”

“Cynthia, you would not accept this man merely because I thought him in this respect undesirable, and considered you too young to think of such things?”

“My dear child,” I said, “I can see Jimmy has been talking to you. You've long since reduced yourself to an agency for the circulation of Jimmy's opinions. Still you are by nature reasonable. So let me tell you that I would do anything to assert my independence—even sacrifice it altogether.”

I left her rather mystified because, in order to put my case strongly, I may have said a shade more than I meant. But Alice really had made a mistake. It was her opposition that first made it occur to me that Charles Elkinthorpe's romance might really become romantic. Up to this time he had been definitely outside the range of possibilities; now he came within the range. I remembered that he was tall and good-looking; I am proud to say that I did not forget that he was dull. Alice's opposition provided him with the only halo that he possessed; it was a very small one. Engaged people always back other engagements, from a desire to have the happiness to themselves; married people always encourage engagements, from a desire to make the other foxes cut their brushes off.

A less episcopal branch of Jimmy's people had a reception one night and Charles Elkinthorpe was present; I found him looking like a lost sheep, with his thoughtful eyes fixed on the doorway. He came straight towards me when I entered. I dodged him and talked to other people. In the supper-room I let him find me: he came up bleating and complaining.

“Please don't apologise,” I said. “There was no compulsion on you to talk to me, and if you didn't want to do it you were quite right to leave it alone.”

He became almost fluent in his protestations that he had only come there in order to talk to me, and that ever since my arrival he had done nothing but watch for an opportunity. “May I say,” he added, with an air of reverent interest, “that you seem rather tired of this?”

“Well, I wouldn't make it generally known, Mr. Elkinthorpe, if I were you. Because, you see, I don't. And also I amn't. But I am bad-tempered, and I am bad-tempered because I am so hungry.”

He apologised and vanished. He was back again very soon. He was quicker in action than in speech. “There are some little tables on the balcony overlooking the garden, and much cooler than this. If you wouldn't mind, I have got some supper for you there.”

“Thank you so much. How long will it have to stop out there? I didn't think soup improved by going round the balcony, like Madeira and the Cape, you know. But you understand these things better than I do. Please bring it in as soon as it's been there long enough.”

He was too sad to speak; his hair seemed to become untidy, his tie worked round to the left, and all the life died out of him. How I could pity him and be nice to him; I had been trying to get him into a state which would make that possible for me without any loss of self-respect. So I said that, after all, it was rather a good idea; and we went out on to the balcony.

Charles Elkinthorpe was invariable. He always wanted to talk to me, and he always did his best to obtain a romantic seclusion for the purpose. But, when he had managed all that, he never did talk. It was so on this occasion; he hovered about me, would not have anything to eat, and had not got anything to say. At last, when we seemed to be drowned thirty feet deep in a destroying ocean of silence, he made a struggle, a last desperate effort, and came to the surface for a moment. He breathed a platitude with reference to the nature of aspic, and then sank again like lead. He sat gazing thoughtfully into the night. His manner no longer imposed on me.

“I wonder,” I said, “if I could ask you what you were thinking about.”

He turned on me suddenly. “Of you, of course; I never think about anything else.”

This was much more direct than I had wanted. So I pretended that I had not heard him, and said that it was a lovely night, that I could make out the Great Bear distinctly, and that I would say good-night, because Alice and mamma would be wanting to get away. I had left him three seconds after his too direct statement, without encouraging him or too greatly discouraging him. I believe I could write a book on “The Lover: his Treatment in Sickness and in Health.” The best critics, you see, are those that have failed.

He went on being devoted whenever he got a chance, and confined himself strictly to indirect statements. He could not have done better for himself. And he did not see me too often—which was also in his favour. Slowly his halo grew bigger, and thicker, and brighter.

Then he made a fatal mistake. He brought his twin brother to see us.

There was no difference between those twins. They were alike in face and mental equipment. Both had thoughtful eyes, and both had nothing to say. I was sorry for the poor dumb barrister, but that settled the matter definitely. I could not go through life married to a réplica, and no one could have told which was the original. They were too absurdly alike; they looked as if they ought to have been placed on a mantelpiece, one at each end.

So I said to Alice, “Get mamma to ask that handsome set of Elkinthorpes to dinner soon. One or more of them wants to propose to me, and I want to give him an opportunity. And I should refuse either.”

As it happened, Charles Elkinthorpe sent his proposal by post. I never refused a man with more delicate kindness.

Alice told me the other day that between the ages of seventeen and eighteen I used to be slightly slangy and vulgar. That is, I believe, rather true. A great sorrow is good for the manner, and so far I had not taken one.