Salome and the Head/Chapter 3

Mr. Templar could have had his wish and could have gone home with Sylvia he would have gone to a house that had no address. He would have entered it, following Sylvia and two others, by a very odd and unusual way, and he would have found himself in a series of rooms opening one from the other by draped arches, and forming together three sides of a rather large square.

The rooms were furnished with an almost savage simplicity. The floors were bare and scrubbed. In the first of the rooms there were rugs and carpets—the uncostly Japanese kind—some comfortable square chairs and couches, useful tables, bookshelves, books. But the effect of severity was at once marred and emphasised by a number of more or less ornamental objects, such as one finds in the houses of people who are rich and not newly rich—the carved, embroidered, lacquered and inlaid adornments of a well-ordered, middle-class home, surviving from the mid-Victorian period: a set of carved ivory chessmen, a banner screen, a good deal of fine old silver, and Sheffield plate; cushions covered in Berlin wool-work; Chinese lacquer the like of which you shall never find at Liberty’s; an Empire clock with cupids and a half-impudent Venus half-decorously draped in flowing lines of gilt and ormolu; work-boxes, desks and a blotting book of pâpier maché inlaid with mother of pearl and sheathed with discoloured gilding; a Buhl cabinet; in it and on it old china set out with an obvious pride; there were little footstools of the kind that only linger in families where the house has not been disturbed for at least two generations; portraits on the walls—some half-dozen in heavy scrolly gilt frames; no other pictures; a low Eugénie chair of carved walnut and Aubusson; portfolios of engravings, bronzes, lustres. These were all in the first room. In the second were grey oak armchairs with rush seats and a large deal table smooth with scrubbing. There was only matting on this floor, and on the green walls no pictures. The third and by far the largest room held nothing but a grand piano and a stand for music, a music-stool, and, on shelves, violin cases. The floor of this room was carpeted with the softest, thickest velvet carpet of the colour of dark green moss: its walls were entirely of looking-glass. Electric lights hung high against the ceiling cornice, and in front of one mirror-lined wall—the longest unbroken wall space in the room—was a row of foot-lights. Dark curtains hung to each window.

It was into the first of these rooms that the three came. Sylvia, a shapeless bundle, fumbled at her wraps and dropping them, stood up from the fallen heap of them like a beautiful flower from its rough calyx. She wore a plain white linen frock, close-belted to her straight clean-cut shape; her hair hung in a thick plaited tail to her waist; and by the candid innocent eyes of her she might have been a sixteen-year-old pensionnaire just home from her convent for the holidays.

“How much for the bouquets to-night, Denny?” she said.

He told her, and she shrugged her shoulders in the white frock.

“Three pounds! And I know they cost twenty-five,” she said. “Ah well! it’s a good thing we don’t have to live on flowers. Undo the bundles quickly, Aunt Dusa, darling. Uncle Moses will be here directly. Never mind the letters. We’ll attend to them tomorrow.”

She led the way to the dining-room.

A black cloth, unfolded, showed letters on letters in uneven strata. Sylvia shot them skillfully into a deep square basket that stood ready.

The lame boy who had been Pan set a chair for her, and himself climbed into one of a different height and shape—his own chair, one could see, and be sad in the seeing.

The three sat down at the table. Had Mr. Edmund Templar had his wish he would have wondered, because he had not realised how completely Sylvia was, for the moment, the idol of London; nor, even knowing that, would he have guessed the number and richness of the gifts that London can, and will, lay on its idols’ altars.

The floor round the table was presently a sea of brown paper, blue paper, tissue paper—pink, white, mauve—and the heaps of shapeless parcels on the table lessened, as, on the table’s other end, the array grew of naked gifts.

If you have not lived in the world which sends, or the world which receives such offerings, you would have wondered, even as Mr. Templar would have done, that there should be so much money in the world—money unearned, money just flowing, like an exhaustless stream, into the pockets of those whose utmost efforts could not spend it all—so that in the exuberance of their unearned affluence men willingly spend hundreds of pounds on an offering to an unknown goddess—a popular dancer or actress, on the mere chance of getting for it someday some reward to their low liking; just as they stake their hundreds on a race, for the excitement of “having something on” and for the chance of winning what they do not need. For of all the men who had sent these things, as earnest of what they were prepared to give for value received, if so be that Sylvia were for sale—not one of them had spoken to her, heard her voice, or seen her face except through the disguise of pearl and rose that the stage lights exact.

“That’s a pretty necklace,” said Sylvia carelessly—“no—not the emerald one—that’s just barbaric and I like it, too. I mean the diamonds and opals.”

“I expect that’s Uncle Moses again,” said the middle-aged woman with smooth drab hair, whose quick fingers were casting off string and paper with the ease bred by constant practice. “There’s no letter with them.”

“I like the pearls,” said Sylvia, holding up a slender string that glowed with a faint pinkness—“very much I like the pearls. The pearls want me to go to supper at Verrey’s. That pendant is nice, too. It is going to Ostend at the end of the season. What’s that?”

“A photograph frame.”

Sylvia laughed, picked up the letter that came across the table, bit her lip.

“Keep that,” she said, reaching for the frame, craftlessly carved in a design of oak-leaves and acorns. “The photograph frame’s a dear. My dancing made it think of the Black Forest, where its father and mother live and where in youth it so happy was, so it made itself for me. A card, please.” A pile of printed cards yielded one that said in plain block letters:

“Sylvia thanks you very much.”

There were only four more of such cards needed—and these were claimed by an olive-wood paper-knife from a school-girl, a box of chocolates from a school-boy, and two books of verse by quite dull authors.

All the rest of it—furs, jewels, gloves, fans, bonbons, lace—were laid out on the big table as the work of the faithful is laid out at church bazaars. Sylvia feasted her eyes.

“It’s a very good haul to-night,” she said greedily. “I hope Uncle Moses will think so, too. Oh! it’s a fine thing to have one talent, Aunt Dusa, dear. If I hadn’t, you’d have been looking out for a situation, Aunt Dusa, dear, and dropping your precious sixpences one by one like salt tears in novels.”

“I’ll put on the milk for the chocolate,” said the mature woman, and went.

“And where would you have been, Denny,”—she leaned towards him caressingly— “if I hadn’t had my little talent?”

“In hell, I expect,” said Denny. “I shouldn’t have been anywhere on earth if I couldn’t have been near you, Princess.” It was the voice of the boy who, in the woo, had had hidden his face at her bidding, but it had the timbre of manhood, and the accent which we term cultivated. “But I wish it was all over.” He leaned his hands against the table and pushed his chair back from it. “I’m sick of the whole beastly show——”

“The beastly show? Playing for me?”

“Playing for all these apes and goats. Seeing you dance for all these goats and geese. There ought to have been some other way. There would have been some other way if I’d been like other men. . . . if I hadn’t been a crooked idiot that can do nothing for you except worship you. And worship’s cheap nowadays, isn’t it, Princess?”

“Not real. . . whatever you call it. That’s not cheap. And you’ve got your music.”

“Oh, it’s a sweet destiny,” he said grimly, “to feel inside you that you could conquer the world, and to have a body that will only let you play the flute and the fiddle and live on charity.”

“There’s your symphony,” she said.

“I’m sick of my symphony,” he said. “I shall never do any good with it. And if I do nobody will want to hear it. And if they want to hear it they won’t pay me for it—not till I’m dead anyway. And I’m alive now—alive all over. And all those people’s eyes on you every night!”

“There are worse ways of earning a living than mine, Den. Suppose I had to sew rabbit-skins for fourteen hours a day, and die of consumption? or get phossy-jaw making matches? Or have my pretty teeth drop out, and my pretty nails drop off, with lead-poisoning at the potteries?”

He refused to consider these alternatives.

“You ought,” he said, “to be in a glass case, and no one allowed inside except the people who love you—the people at home. If I’d only been straight I could have done something really amusing and profitable for you—cut purses on the high-road—or gone in for the burgling—or been a company-promoter. As it is——”

“As it is you’re writing the symphony of the century; and you play like no one else in the world. I’ve told you a thousand times that I couldn’t dance to any playing but yours.”

“Take care,” he said, smiling, “that’s dangerous. If you tell me these things, one of these days I shall cut my hand off, so that you can’t ever dance anymore.” He laughed. “And talking of cutting—sometimes I’m like the old Roman Johnny—I wish that your audience had only one throat so that I might cut it. I’m like a bear with a sore head to-night, Princess. I’m sorry. There was another of them in the stalls tonight—a real one. He went out after the Forest dance. I suppose he couldn’t stand the Salome. I expect he thought it was like all the others.”

“Don’t,” she said, and getting up, came behind him and touched his hair lightly. “Don’t you begin. You know I hate the Salome, too. It’s not so easy for me, either. You know I have to ask two things from you Den—courage and music——”

“And love. . . ? That doesn’t count?”

“Oh,” she said lightly, “that doesn’t count. I don’t have to ask for that, do I? But sometimes. . . you think I’m as hard as nails, don’t you? Sometimes I’m as weak as a kitten: it only needs a strong push to make me chuck dancing—to send me toppling over the edge into the hopeless hell where the typewriters and shop-girls live. Don’t push me over, Den.”

“It isn’t hell to them,” said the young man. “Sometimes I wonder—”

An electric bell thrilled.

“There’s Uncle Moses,” she said, ran to the door, and opened it. A man, large and Jewish, in a fur coat and crush hat, stood in the doorway.

“Well, well, my pretty pigeon,” he stood there and said, “and how goes the nest? More gold and silver linings, eh? More little stones for Uncle Moses to turn into downy feathers and straws and sticks in the building so useful, eh—eh?”

With that he took off his hat, and having bowed very deliberately and profoundly, shut it up with a bang, put it under his arm and entered the room on feet noiseless as a cat’s, closing the door behind him as an accomplished nurse closes the door of a sick room. He came forward rubbing his hands.

“You’re late, uncle, aren’t you?” she said.

“Better late than never, my dear,” he answered. “I stay a little to hear the world clap its hands and say, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ as Schubert in his song. Or Shakespeare to be just. And now—how many little fishes in Sylvia’s pretty net?”

“There’s the whole silly lot!” said the girl, pointing to the table.

The Jew stood by it, leaning lightly on the points of his podgy fingers, his little eyes bright, mobile, keenly appraising.

“Good—very good! Lord, what fools these mortals be! I would not have believed it. No—never would I it have believed. All this for nothing, nothing, nothing!”

“It isn’t nothing,” said Denis.

“Eh?” said the Jew.

“It’s the chance of thinking that perhaps they’re not giving it for nothing,” he said very low, picked up his crutch and limped away. The crutch made dots of sound in a dejected silence.

“Uncouraged, my girl?” said the Jew.

“No,” said Sylvia, “but——”

“They tell you, you do wrong? I know. This fool-boy who adores you—oh, I think only of him for it the better. Or my sister-in-law—she think it not quite nice, eh? Pah! What know they? Of the world what know they?” He snapped his fingers. “Not that. So hear what they say, and give it that of value. But me, old Moses, who knows the world, I say you are right. I say you do well. You are a brave maiden, like Deborah—like Miriam. Spoil the Egyptians, my maiden—spoil the Egyptians! Take all and give nothing. Take from these that only wish you ill, and presently you shall give to those who need it. Thus says old Moses to you. And he knows.”

“Yes,” said the girl, but her tone was flat.

“Courage, courage, courage!” he went on, “de l’audace et de l’audace, et puis encore de l’audace. Never a girl has had the courage of you—never a girl has had the luck of you. The Fates are for you. I am myself one who can read the stars, my child, and I say to you, ‘All goes well if you love not.’ Once you love, the misfortune begins to remember you. Earnest-working to one end, that is not the love-goal: you pass unnoticed in your work-dress. But if you shall put on the red love-roses, then Fate say: ‘Ha, ha! here is a beautiful one that I have overlooked,’ and straightway down come the thumb—so!”

He ended a semi-circular movement of widespread fingers by the planting of a thumb heavily downward on the table.

“I’m not likely to have anything to do with that sort of silliness,” the girl said rather bitterly. “For one thing, I never see anyone.”

“Ah! and that is so good,” said the German simply. “Keep so, my child—keep so. And now, business. The emeralds I myself send—to encourage the others. The jewellers, they tell these things. And I like it to keep to look at. It is old, and good. See, here is the bill. For the rest—the pearls are good—also the opals. It will be three hundred at the least, my pigeon. Now I go to make the inventory. You write? Good! So!”

She kneeled at the table and wrote, at his dictation, a list of the gay uselessness lying heaped there, the Jew touching and replacing them with deft fingers, at home among such costly trifles.

“At the least three hundred,” he said: “it may be more. The diamonds and the pearls I take—so, also, the emeralds—and the pendant—the bangle, too—with the garnet heart, so bloody-full of Schwärmerei. The rest the good Denis bring in the morning to Miss Steinhart’s, the useful Gertrude. And now—business is far. To the familie joy!”

The family joy was a white spread table, where the dancer, Pan, the aunt and the Jew made merry over white bread, grapes, chocolate, little French cakes, and a sloping-shouldered bottle of Rhein-wine.

“To the achievement!” Mr. Mosenthal cried, raising the glass topaz-shiny with wine; and the others, echoing the toast, raised blue Chinese basins of chocolate.

he went on. “There is no princess like our princess, and we three are her prophets, and if there was in this world a prophet to play the violin like the Archangel Gabriel his trumpet, thou art that prophet, my Denis.”

“I want to drink to Uncle Moses,” said Sylvia, turning her eyes on the eyes of three adorers in turn. “To Uncle Moses, who has done everything for us! And to Aunt Dusa, who has done all the rest. And to Denis, who has done everything they couldn’t do.”

“And then she says she’s not Irish!” Aunt Dusa laughed.

“And you think it’s all safe? No one knows?” Sylvia asked softly of Uncle Moses, as she opened the door for his departure.

“Not a soul in all this great foolish world,” he answered; “not a soul but us four—and Forrester, who is close as a door shut. And Agar, who tells nothing. Never was a secret so kept. And never was such a secret to keep. In the Märchen the princess in her tower was not better guarded than thou. The Dragon—that is Dusa; the Eagle—that is Denis; and the Lion, that is the old Uncle Moses. God bless thee, thou dear child!”

The three that were left sat yet a little while over the white disordered table. Sylvia was very merry. She laughed a great deal, and made the others laugh more. When Sylvia laughs you have to laugh with her. It is a glorious compulsion.

Yet when Dusa was alone with the girl, brushing out her long hair, straight as lengths of black silk, she paused, brush in hand, to say, “You are sad tonight, dear. Why?”

“Am I?” the girl asked, pleating the lace of her dressing-gown. “Well, you know best, dear Dragon.”

“Tell old nurse, dearie,” said the Dragon, just as she would have said ten years before when some childish adventure had ended in tears, bruises, and hands bramble-torn.

“It’s nothing. I mean it’s everything,” said Sylvia. “I mean I wish I knew where he was. What’s the good of anything if I don’t know that?”

“He’s dead long ago, you may depend,” said the Dragon comfortably, “else he’d ’a’ come pestering you as soon as you’d got two penny pieces to rub one against the other. He’s dead and buried and gone where he ought to go—you may be sure of that, my dear.”

“I wish I might be sure,” said Sylvia, in her blue dressing-gown.

“Well, I’m sure,” said the woman, “and good riddance is what I say. But why do you want to be so sure just now?”

“I don’t know,” said Sylvia. “That’ll do: don’t brush any more”; and as she quickly plaited the black hair she said: “I’m glad I’m not likely to fall in love. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”

“When you think you’re going to fall in love you tell old nurse, and we’ll look him up in the registry,” was the comforting answer. “I lay we find him dead and buried at Somerset House for a shilling.”

“I wish we could,” said Sylvia. “Oh, what a beast I am! But the worst of it is we can’t know and we don’t know. Good night, Dusa darling!—No, I’ll do all the rest for myself. Do go! Good night. Oh! there are so many things we don’t know!”

Dusa darling slept in the adjoining room, and Sylvia locked the door between them. She lay awake a long time, but the Dragon did not know it.

Another of the things that neither of them knew was that Denis slept on the other side of Sylvia’s door—lying across it as some faithful dog might have lain. A crutch makes a noise on stairs and passage-floors, but a crippled man can quite quietly creep up and along them, in the dark, with no one to see how funny he looks pulling himself along on hands and one knee, with the helpless, misshapen, useless foot dragging noiselessly behind him. In the dark, even, it is not difficult; and in the early morning light it is ridiculously easy for the crippled man to get back to the comfortable room where people think he spends his nights.

Decidedly, if Mr. Templar could have gone home with Sylvia, and could have had the run of the stairs and passages when she was asleep, he would have found much to interest and intrigue him.

But then, he did not go home with Sylvia. Nor did anyone else, man, woman or child, save only the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion, who was Moses Mosenthal.