CHAPTER X
LOVERS MEETING
That was how it happened that when Sylvia stood that night before her audience, she stood before her lover, and among the hands that applauded the radiant appearance his hands were.
The Aunt, looking really very nice in her black satin and old Honiton, sat in the front of the box with the Uncle.
Templar, true to his understanding with the Management, kept well back among the shadows.
And Sylvia danced. Pan was a Triton now. A glittering, scaly fish-tail showed instead of the poor lame foot, and the other foot that did not match. His golden hair was crowned with brown, glistening, wet sea-weed, and from a collar of sea-weed, trails of it drooped above his chest and arms. The music he made came from his pipe, but it seemed as though it came from a long seashell that he held to his lips.
And Sylvia danced. How pretty she was—how dear! How fresh and sweet, how lovely and beloved! Mr. Templar, lurking behind his Aunt, longed to cry out in the face of the crowded house: “She is mine. She belongs to me!”—to catch her in his arms then and there, and to carry her away to that island which glowed in faint amber and opal and gold far away across the painted sea of the scene behind her.
All the jealous irritation that he had felt in gazing on her face, gay in spite of what lay between them, had vanished now. Now he had eyes to see that she had been brave, not heartless; for as he watched her, the conviction grew in him that she also knew that now nothing lay between them—nothing but love. He knew that she knew it, because the unclouded sunlight of joy in her eyes showed him for the first time that the light that had been there in the dances of these long weeks had been only the light of a candle carefully lit and guarded. And the delicate, joyous abandon of her every movement was new—new as his own new joy.
The dance ended.
“It is pretty,” said the Aunt. “Do you remember Miss Clara Vaughan, Henry. She reminds me of her a little. How did you like it, Henry?”
“It’s remarkable—remarkable,” he said. “She is certainly a very talented young woman. She doesn’t look a day over eighteen. And yet I suppose she must be?”
“Oh! you may depend she’s over thirty,” said the Aunt confidently. “All these actresses are. But they always make up young. I’m sure it’s wonderful how they do it.”
“She is only twenty-one,” said Edmund shortly.
“Come out and take a turn,” said the Uncle. “There’s an interval, I suppose.”
“Only a minute or two while they change the scene,” said Edmund, but he rose and followed his Uncle.
Outside, “My boy,” the Uncle said, “I’m sorry to see this. I don’t want to preach, dear lad—young men will be young men, but I’m sorry to see it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” lied Edmund.
“You shouldn’t look at her like that, you know,” the Uncle went on. “Lord! I’ve been young myself, and no one saw it but me. But you should be careful. There’s many a young man has had reason to wish he’d never entered such walls as these and——”
“I ought to tell you,” said Templar carefully, “that that lady and I are engaged to be married.”
“Lord!” said the Uncle, “there—the lights are down—not a word to your Aunt. It’s lucky she won’t own to needing glasses. She can’t see half of it.”
Edmund had this to think of through the next, the Dance of War.
“She is rather clever,” was the Aunt’s verdict. “Really, Henry, she made me want to get up and go and fight somebody—didn’t she you?”
Edmund got his uncle out again.
“What did you mean by what you said just now?—that my Aunt didn’t see half of it. You can’t mean that you think it’s a thing she ought not to see?”
“Bless my soul, no,” said the Uncle, full of a raging conflict between hurt family pride and “gentlemanly feeling,” “of course not. I never saw a more modest dancer—never, upon my word. It’s quite amazing. I assure you if you’d asked me what was the first thing that had struck me about her I should have said her modesty. I should, indeed.”
“Then, what did you mean?”
“Well—the fact is. . . I’d rather have broken it to you gently, my boy, but if you will have it——”
“I will have it, please.”
“Then, what I mean to say. . . this young lady is the young lady—that poor neglected young thing we were talking about only to-day. I recognised her at once, and so would your Aunt if she’d got her spectacles on. It’s no use beating about the bush, my boy. That young lady’s real name is Sandra Mundy.”
“Is that all?” said Edmund with a laugh of relief. “Why, I knew that all along!”
“Oh, well—ah!—then there’s no more to be said. . . at present, Edmund. We must talk it all over quietly tomorrow—eh, my boy?—and see what can be done.”
Edmund in sharp surprise blessed the Uncle for his intelligent sympathy. The Uncle was saying to himself:
“I must humour him, humour him—anything to gain time. And then we can look about us and see if she can’t be bought off. I wouldn’t stand out against anything reasonable. Poor lad—poor young fool. But I was just like it. Poor little Carlotta! Well, well.”
The curtain was rising for the last dance. It was the dance of Salome. This only, of all her dances, her lover had never seen. The idea of it repelled him—and he knew from her that it had at first repelled her also.
“But I had to do it,” she had said: “everyone does it now. Your repertoire’s not complete without a Salome dance with that horrible head. But I’ve made it something different from any of the others. For one thing, I don’t take the head off the sideboard as if it were the cold joint of beef. It just comes to me. Maskelyne and Devant fixed that up for me—and Denny works it. He’s not on in that scene.”
But now Templar had to see it. There was no way out of it, short of closing his eyes, and that he could not do. The curtain was up.
The Court of an Eastern King: attendants with fans and torches, and fire in braziers on tall iron pillars. On the throne Herod, sick unto death; beside him a white-faced, shrinking Herodias. Courtiers, slaves. And the eyes of all fixed on Salome.
Straight drapery covered her from breast to ankle. A half transparent veil was drawn about her in folds that, across neck and face, showed opaque and heavy where the light stuff was crushed and held in folds by the hand beneath her chin. Through it the jewels on neck and arms gleamed fitfully. A golden fillet confined her long hair, a heavy red gem glowed on her brow, and between veil and jewel her eyes shone like sombre stars.
The King, the Queen, the courtiers and slaves were immobile; they were only the living background to the moving picture of Salome’s dance.
She moved slowly, with little steps and the patent consciousness that she was in the presence of the King. She danced to please him. To him, with obeisance and gestures of deferent humility, she dedicated her dance.
And, unperceived by any save those who knew what to look for, a veil of almost invisible gauze fell between her and her living background. A few more steps, a few more gestures of the veiled arms, and another curtain fell—another, as the slow steps traced circles on the marble floor, slid out from one side across the stage—now, from the opposite side, another—grey veils falling, falling, gliding across, produced to the utmost the illusion of a gathering dusk, a deepening twilight through which the figures of King and Queen and deferent courtiers showed dim and vague as shadows, and the lights of torch and brazier shone like marsh-lights in a marsh mist. The grey veils thickened to darkness—the lights were gone—Salome was alone in a twilight that slowly lightened to moonlight, in which she stood, arms reached out, her veil round her feet.
Then the dance began—all before had been but posturing—the wild dance of a passionate unreal longing that ate the flesh as if it were fire. It was not joy and love that gave wings to her feet; it was fear—it was desire. Salome whirled like a leaf in the wind, as pricked and driven by the seven devils that had caught her unawares.
At the wildest of the dance—her arms empty, yearning, reaching out to her desire—suddenly a swift turn, and she held in her arms the Head—the head of him for whom Salome’s longings were. A moment before the head was not there. Now it was. Maskelyne & Devant had been adequate.
A movement shivered through the audience as the wind shivers through a field of ripe corn.
Mad delight, achievement, the attainment of the uttermost desire, these were on arms and neck and swaying shape, adorning them like malign jewels, and on her brow her triumph poised like a crown. Then, through the flame of the pit came an air as from a dewy garden. Passion flickered, waned, and, on a pause of doubt and misgiving, tenderness dawned—tenderness, pity, remorse, regret, a growing horror and anguish, a growing knowledge of Heaven forfeited, of Hell made sure, a crescent terror, and dismay unspeakable, and under it all tenderness deepening, deepening, deepening, like a flood pressing against a barrier that it must at last break down.
Then, in the moveless hush of the two thousand people who, hardly breathing, hung upon her least pace or gesture, she gathered the horrible head to her bosom as a mother gathers the head of her sleeping child, and with a cry of love and agony that thrilled the silence as pain thrills a bared nerve, she turned on her audience the full fire of eyes where madness shone, and——
She should have sunk to the ground, the lights should have gone up and discovered Herod and his Queen and his slaves, the braziers and the torches, and Salome in the midst—senseless from the drug of a dream, of the head of a man still alive in the King’s prison.
Instead, as the white lights intensified to show that last awful look, they fell on the face of the man in the stage box.
For Edmund had forgotten aunts and uncles and his promise to the management—his own name, his own identity, with other unimportant things—and had pressed forward to the front of the box between those forgotten relatives, and, hands on the velvet ledge, had leaned his body forward towards her who had, with the magic of her dancing, absorbed his whole being. And when she raised her eyes in that last look, that ended all things, she met full in her eyes the eyes of her lover—saw the love, the terror, the bewitchment in his face.
“Ah!” she breathed with a white smile that shook her audience with a deeper thrill than that laid on them by her eyes, “ah!”
The waxen head dropped to the ground with a dull crash, rebounded, struck the corner of Herod’s throne and split horribly in two. A long breath indrawn to a thousand lungs sighed through the theatre.
From the dress circle came the shrill cackle of a school-girl, afraid.
“It’s only wax,” it said; and an answering titter bore witness that the gallery and the dress-circle were of one brotherhood.
The waxen head—split from brow to chin—lay there plain in the yellow torch-light.
The lights went up in the house.
Then everyone remembered that this was only play-acting, and clapped. Clapped and shouted to lift the roof.
Only a few perceived with comprehension that the lifeless Herodias had become alive and was stooping over Salome, lifting her, holding her in her arms, and that Herod was coming down from his throne. To most it was just part of the play.
Then the curtain came down. And the audience yelled for their darling—yelled, and yelled again.
But when the stiff curtain swerved aside and the applause doubled itself, it was not Salome who stood there, as of old, drooping and sweet, with hands too tired to hold the flowers they threw her, and with lips nearly, but not quite, too tired to smile.
It was the Management, almost too definitely in evening dress.
It craved the indulgence of the audience. This tribute of their admiration would delight Madame Sylvia when it was able to report it. But it must ask them to excuse her from reappearing to receive their kind approval.
“Our beautiful Sylvia,” it said, “is overcome by her exertions. She has surpassed herself to-night. And she pays the penalty. She is quite knocked up,” it added, with an inspiration of colloquial appeal. “I’m sure you’ll understand, and not expect her to appear. It’s really only because she was so splendid to-night. She was good—wasn’t she?” it added, following the star of colloquial inspiration. It paused, bowed, and withdrew to a thunder of sympathetic noise.
“Well!” said the Aunt, “I never saw anything like it—never! The young woman’s quite out of her mind, I should think. Don’t you, Henry? Don’t you, Edmund?”
“Edmund’s gone,” said her husband; “he asked me to say good-night for him. He suddenly remembered that he’d asked a man to look in about eleven. And it’s long past that. Come along, my dear; you must be tired out.”
Men are loyal to each other, and respond to the appeal of sex-loyalty even when they are uncles.
Templar was only one of a crowd—the crowd was inquiring at the stage-door—insisting, among a hundred others, on knowing how she was, whether she was better, what was the matter with her, whether a doctor had been sent for, what he said, whether they could fetch anything, do anything——
The police had to move them on at last. Sympathetic admiration or drunken pugnacity—neither can be tolerated in its fuller manifestation on a London pavement.
Templar had detached himself from the crowd, and taken up a place on the other side of the road. Therefore he was not moved on, and when her motor drew up he was there.
When she came out, hideously muffled, on the arm of the Management itself, and followed by quite half a dozen sympathisers, he was lighting a cigarette close by the other door of her motor.
“No, I’m perfectly all right, I don’t want seeing home—I’m as well as ever. No, thank you—I’ll see after the new head myself. Or Mr. Denis will. You see, I know exactly what I want. Oh, dear Mr. Management, please don’t bother. I’ve got everything and everyone I want at home. Thank you; yes—yes—quite comfortable—everything I want, thank you. Yes—of course I shall be all right next week. Oh, do please tell him to drive on. Yes, of course he knows where to go. Say home. Thank you all so much. Good night.”
In the next street a block of carriages delayed the motor.
“Sandra,” said a voice at the window. “Sandra, darling.” The motor was already moving.
“Get in,” she whispered. “Quick, quick—oh, be careful!”
He had opened the door, entered the motor, and shut its door gently.
“My own—my treasure!” he breathed, with other follies, as he sank to the seat beside her, and on the instant found her arms round his neck. “Don’t agitate yourself. You’ll be ill again. It’s all right. Oh, my love!”
The motor swirled round two corners into an empty street.
“Pardon, madam,” said the voice of the chauffeur, and the car slackened to a snail’s pace to give his voice leave to penetrate the scented darkness of the brougham. The two sprang apart. “Pardon; but is it all right?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sandra in the scented darkness. “Oh, yes, it’s all right. Drive on, please. Drive home. Yes, the usual way.”
“It’s all right,” Templar said, and took his world into his arms, “it’s all right. Oh, my dear!” He strove for words, but silence served best, and among her disguising and disfiguring shawls and wraps they clung to each other as people cling who have escaped shipwreck, and come to land on some wonderful island of tropic green and sands iridescent, where soft streams flow and the thicket is ablaze with blossoms and the air alight with smooth, coloured birds.
The chauffeur always made a four-mile drive of the five minutes that lay between the Hilarity and Home.
To-night this round included Hampstead and Haverstock Hill. He need not have troubled. When he drew up at last in Portland Place and asked, “Where would the gentleman like to be set down?” he got for answer:
“He is coming home with me. Yes, the usual way—I told you that before.”
The motor devoured a street and half a street, and glided into its garage.
“Put out the lights,” said Sylvia through the speaking tube, “and be careful that there’s no one about. Yes, I know you always are careful, but be extra careful tonight, please, Forrester.”
“Yes, madam,” said Forrester—got down and put out the lamps.
“Now,” said Sandra, holding her lover’s hands in the dark, “don’t say ‘oh’ to anything. It’s all right!”