Salome and the Head/Chapter 2

“ what,” asked Mr. Edmund Templar on his return from Africa, “has become of that girl—what was her name?—Alexandra Something or other.”

It was not the first thing he said, of course; there were enquiries about the health and happiness of relations—and answers to their enquiries. He told them many things about South Africa and the war, and what he had been doing all those eight years. He was an engineer, by the way, and he had been making railways in desert places. He had had all sorts of adventures, which the Aunt and Uncle found quite enthralling, so that it was not till quite the end of the first evening that he was able to say the first thing, of all the things he said, in which we have any interest or concern.

“Oh!” said the Aunt, stretching her fat, kid-slippered feet to the fire, for these May evenings were still chilly; “you mean that dreadful Mundy girl! Of course I’m sorry for her and all that, but really!”

“Why—what’s become of her?”

“Ah!” said the Aunt impressively, “that’s just it. What has become of her? That’s what everybody’s been asking—And nobody knows. He lost all his money, you know—or nearly all—and when he was dead—it was most painful. He took an overdose of chloral, and of course if you’re charitable you can say it was an accident. But you have a right to your own opinion.”

“Nonsense, my dear,” said the Uncle: “accident, not a doubt of it. Hard-headed man of business.”

“That’s just why,” said the Aunt—“Do throw your cigar end into the fire, Henry, if you’ve quite done smoking it. You know how it makes the curtains smell in the morning if you leave them in the ash-trays.”

“All right, my dear, all right,” said the Uncle testily. “I don’t know what you think, Edmund, but I think I shall turn in.”

Edmund put it that the return of a really respectable prodigal should be celebrated with yet another cigar, and sitting up a little longer, and the fire so jolly, too—applewood, wasn’t it?

“Yes—I never let them waste the orchard thinnings. There’s no wood like it.—Thanks—no, I never use a match.” When the cigar had been lighted from a glowing flake of red-hot wood, Edmund tried again.

“What makes you think that Mundy man did it on purpose?”

“Well, you see the money was all gone. It went in some bank or other.”

“Unified Westrallan,” said the Uncle.

“And the girl?”

“How you do go on about the girl! Well, that was what I was telling you when your Uncle interrupted. After the death—whether it was suicide or not—I have my own opinion about that—and anyone can think anything else——”

“After the death,” Templar permitted himself to interrupt, with patient impatience. The years that rob us of so much are in some things generous, and the old gain in words where they lose in ideas. Templar saw this—and said:

“After the death?”

“Well, as I was telling you—after the death it was most painful. She never waited even for the funeral, or to see her guardian, a very worthy man—our own family solicitor as it happened. She never waited to see what was left out of the wreck, or from the sale, or anything. Just took all her clothes as well as other things, and went.”

“Where to?”

The Aunt’s shoulders shrugged nearly to her ears in the expression of her complete dissociation from such “goings on.”

“Ah!—where, indeed? She and her old nurse—and that lame fiddling youth who was not quite right—they all went, like the folded Arabs in the hymn: only, of course, they went by train. Two fly-loads of boxes and things, besides a cart, and no one at the station had the sense to stop them.”

“No one had any right to stop them,” said the Uncle, “except Wigram and Bucks, and they weren’t there.”

“Well, anyhow they went. But that’s not the worst. That heartless girl sent all the servants away, and of course everyone thought she wanted to be alone with her sorrow. But not she. My dear, that abandoned girl just wanted to be alone, to take things. She stole everything valuable she could lay her hands on—books, silver, linen, curios—all the jewellery. . .”

“Well, come,” said the Uncle, “that was her mother’s, anyway.”

“Well,” said the Aunt, not influenced, “whether or no, she took it, and she and the housekeeper packed it all up, in dozens of boxes and packages—regular bales some of them were, the stationmaster told your Uncle. Deliberate robbery of the creditors, as Mr. Wigram most properly put it.”

“But there was enough to satisfy the creditors, and a little bit over, you must remember that, Louise.”

“Ah! but she didn’t know that. It’s the principle I think of. Well, of course Mr. Wigram set detectives onto her track, and they found her. She set him at defiance, said the things were hers, and she was of age and wouldn’t have a guardian. And he said he was trustee for the little that was left. And she told him to keep it, and have a with it. He looked as if he needed one, she said. But the odd thing was that she got round him somehow in the end—made him promise not to tell where she’d gone, or what she was doing, and to let her keep her stolen goods.”

“Louise!”

“Well, the principle’s the thing, Henry. And some very nice people have taken the Mount—retired Indian people; she goes in for archery, and he’s a great gardener—most desirable neighbours. . . .”

When the Aunt had talked herself into sleepiness and retirement, the Uncle said:

“That girl, you know, I’m sorry for her myself. She never had a chance. The old boy left her to herself till she got into mischief, as she was bound to do—bound to do; it’s only human nature, and after that he never let her alone for a minute. Strict school—like a convent—bars to the windows and no holidays—‘Difficult or backward girls,’ you know. I’m not sure they didn’t flog the girls. Anyhow everyone thought he’d broken her spirit. She came home about three months before the end. They say he never spoke to her, though he was living at home then.”

Templar saw the free grace of the dancing girl in the forest glade, and he saw the school for difficult and backward girls, with the bars, and the rest of it. He felt a pang of the soul so keen as to be also a pang of the body—the kind of fine thrill of physical sympathy that pierces you when you see a child cut its hand or squeeze its finger in a door.

“I don’t wonder she bolted,” he said. “What was it she’d done?—The mischief she got into, I mean?”

“Well, no one knew exactly. Your Aunt has her own opinion. I expect she thought it was too shocking to talk to you about. . . . Contaminate the young, what? The man was her music-master—a black, curly, oily, fat-nosed little beast, like a half-bred wet retriever. Deuced clever at his beastly music. No other good points. He lodged at the baker’s. Old Mundy came back just in time, or just too late. Some people think one and some the other. Anyhow there was a blazing row. He’d only himself to thank for it all. Unforgiving old ass!”

“It’s jolly hard lines on the girl,” said Edmund, and experienced a sense of guilt. Quite unreasonably, for how could he have helped? He had never even spoken to her. He might have spoken something—might have written something. “You have made a friend today.”—“If ever you are in trouble count on me!” No! One does not do such things except in books.

“And no one knows where she’s gone?” he asked.

“To the demnition bow-wows, your Aunt thinks—but I don’t know. If she went she went with her eyes open. The girl was no fool. And I thought her not bad-looking. In fact, there was a sort of a something. And she had a way with her—I’m not sure that she isn’t the sort of girl a man loses his head over—perfectly straight, what? It seems a waste of good material. If she’d had a decent home!”

“If you and Auntie had adopted her,” said Edmund, and wondered.

“As a matter of fact,” said the Uncle, looking disparagingly at his cigar, “I did suggest something of the kind when she was quite small. She was an engaging little thing. Old Mundy cut me for two years after that.

Templar’s heart warmed to his Uncle.

“And Auntie?” he asked.

“Oh, she’d have liked it. You know we only had one child, little Louie that died. Your Aunt wanted it more than I did—I think perhaps that’s the reason why she’s so bitter about the girl—feels what one could have made of her, and all that. Let’s toddle now, shall we?”

Next noon Templar made a little pilgrimage to that glade in the forest that had seen the child dancing. At least he set out on that pilgrimage. But he could not find the shrine. Eight years loosen the outline of undergrowths, as well as the tongues of aunts. There are many glades which might have been the glade, but none that indubitably was it. He went down towards Ringwood with mixed emotions such as—he was hungry; it was nearly luncheon time; eight years was a good long while; and “what a damn shame. Poor, pretty, brave little thing!”

He thought of her again in the train later in the day, looking out through vistas of forest. It was annoying to remember a person after nearly forgetting her for eight years—or seven, was it?—and then to find that there would be nothing more to remember than there was seven years ago—or eight. And he was sorry for the girl.

The discerning reader will not waste any pity on him. The discerning reader knows perfectly that I am only dwelling on his slight disappointment in order to emphasise the slight pleasure he will feel when he does meet her. Of course he will have to meet her. It is not likely that anyone, outside of a lunatic asylum, would take the trouble to describe the first meeting between a man and a girl unless there were to be a second meeting. And quite soon, too. You can tell that by the masterly way in which I have dealt with all that happened to the two of them during that eight years. I might have made chapters and chapters out of that, and it wouldn’t have been exactly padding either. It would have been quite legitimate. But this story is not a problem novel, nor a study in realism. It is just the story of the way things happened—the most curious and unlikely things, some of them.

He would have liked to see her again then and there—but things like that don’t happen. Of course there had been girls—but the thin bare-armed nymph of the forest hadn’t been girls, nor come at all into that province of a young man’s fancy over which “girls” reign. She had been a child, a witch, a wonder.

“Well, it’s a pity,” said Mr. Templar, and leaned back in his corner.

Perhaps I have been too reticent; perhaps you would have liked to know more about what happened in those eight years and I, who thought to spare you, have really only irritated your curiosity. In case this should be so, I will tell you more than Mr. Templar’s Aunt knew—much more. Indeed, if she could have lived to read these pages she would not have felt that she had lived in vain.

Well then—it really was true about the music-master who was like a wet retriever. There had certainly been a something. The retriever had taught the lame youth music, and then Alexandra had wanted to learn. And the retriever, nosing about in the forest had sniffed out the sylvan theatre, and seen the dance. Quite a number of people in the neighbourhood knew that little Miss Mundy went for a walk on Sunday with the music-master. And one of these people wrote an anonymous letter to the grandfather which brought him back from his vague Venetian haunts—just in time—or just too late. Anyhow, the retriever was kicked, and retired growling. But the village post-mistress could have told you that Mr. Mundy, to the time of his death, every Christmas—a feast which he always celebrated at home—did send a letter addressed to the retriever at his kennel, which was somewhere in Highbury New Park. It was, by the way, at the railway station that Mr. Mundy had come face to face with the retriever—and there is no doubt that Sandra was with him. Quite half-a-dozen people knew that. Some people said they had first-class tickets to London, but this could not have been because the retriever always travelled third-class instead of in the dog-box where he belonged.

“It is a pity,” Mr. Templar, in his railway carriage corner, told himself. But the pity of it did not distress him acutely. After all, as the late Robert Louis Stevenson so aptly puts it, “the world is so full of a number of things”—and it is not empty of them just because you saw someone once when she was a child, and feel that you are not likely to see her again now that she is a woman. But Mr. Templar had a life of leisure before him—his godfather had just left him a very handsome competence, so that he need not go on making railways in desert places unless he wanted to—and he could quite well afford to spend one or two of his leisure hours in thinking about the child who had danced in the wood.

So, in due time, he reached London. And he found London vibrant with the resonant insistent echo of his thought.

You know how oddly these things happen. A fresh idea strikes you—or a Latin tag is happily quoted—and from that moment every book you take up, every newspaper you throw down will present your idea—misquote and misapply your tag. It was thus with Templar.

In the train, he thought of dancing, and when he got to London he found London talking of nothing else. He dined with the Browns—and the talk was of Miss Matilda Solitaire and dancing. He lunched with the Joneses—and dancing and Miss Peggy Pirouette were served with all the courses. He had tea with the Robinsons—and their talk was of dancing and Dorothea Duncan. Whatever the talk began with it drifted to the dance—and whoever was talked of as a dancer, the tribute to that dancer’s gifts and graces always ended in one way:

“But you should see Sylvia—that’s all!”

His friends did not take him to see Sylvia because tickets had to be booked far ahead. But they took him to see the other ladies, and he found their dancing quite charming, but—well—quite charming; that was all. He felt a secret pleasure in remaining calm amid the transports of his friends. London was quite mad about these dancers, bare behind their veils, or with no veils at all, who strove to reproduce the spirit of the old classic dances. London was quite mad. He, proudly, was sane. For he had seen a dancer to whom these others were as wooden puppets jerked by strings almost visible. He knew, better than anyone in the world, what dancing should be. He alone, in all London, knew it. For he alone had seen a little brown dancer in a forest glade. So he remained critical and aloof, wondering at the enthusiasm of the town and not sharing it.

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 onto 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—dewdrops 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 seashore.

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 jewellery, 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 misshapen 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 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?”