Chapter IV (1)

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."

Sylvia was not at all sure that she ought to recognize Mrs. Gustard's opinion even so far as by slipping out and thereby giving her an idea that she did not possess perfect liberty of action. However, she decided that the point was too trifling to worry about, and, with a wave of her hand, she left her landlord to tell what story he chose to his wife.

Arthur Madden was waiting for her by his gate when she reached the end of the garden; while they wandered along by the Heath, indifferent to the drizzle, Sylvia felt an extraordinary release from the faint discontent of these past days, an extraordinary delight in finding herself with a companion who was young like herself and who, like herself, seemed full of speculation upon the world which he was setting out to explore, regarding it as an adventure and ready to exchange hopes and fears and fancies with her in a way that no one had ever done hitherto; moreover, he was ready to be most flatteringly impressed by her experiences, even if he still maintained she could not whistle properly. The friendship between Sylvia and Arthur begun upon that night grew daily closer. Mrs. Gustard used to say that they wasted each other's time, but she was in the minority; she used to say also that Arthur was being more spoiled than ever by his mother; but it was this very capacity for being spoiled that endeared him to Sylvia, who had spent a completely free existence for so long now that unless Arthur had been allowed his freedom she would soon have tired of the friendship. She liked Mrs. Madden, a beautiful and unpractical woman, who unceasingly played long sonatas on a cracked piano; at least she would have played them unceasingly had she not continually been jumping up to wait on Arthur, hovering round him like a dark and iridescent butterfly.

In the course of many talks together Arthur told Sylvia the family history. It seemed that his mother had been the daughter of a gentleman, not an ordinary kind of top-hatted gentleman, but a squire with horses and hounds and a park; his father had been a groom and she had eloped with him, but Sylvia was not to suppose that his father had been an ordinary kind of groom; he too came from good stock, though he had been rather wild. His father's father had been a farmer in Sussex, and he had just come back from staying at the farm, where his uncle had offered to give him a start in life, but he had found he did not care much for farm-work. His mother's family would have nothing to do with her beyond allowing her enough to live upon without disturbing them.

"What are you going to do?" Sylvia asked.

Arthur replied that he did not know, but that he had thoughts of being a soldier.

"A soldier?" said Sylvia, doubtfully. Her experience of soldiers was confined to Blanche's lovers, and the universal connotation in France of soldiery with a vile servitude that could hardly be avoided.

"But of course the worst of it is," Arthur explained, "there aren't any wars nowadays."

They were walking over the Heath on a fine November day about Martinmas; presently, when they sat down under some pines and looked at London spread beneath them in a sparkling haze, Arthur took Sylvia's hand and told her that he loved her.

She nearly snatched her hand away and would have told him not to be silly, but suddenly the beauty of the tranquil city below and the wind through the pines conquered her spirit; she sat closer to him, letting her head droop upon his shoulder; when his clasp tightened round her unresisting hand she burst into tears, unable to tell him that her sorrow was nothing but joy, that he had nothing to do with it nor with her, and yet that he had everything to do with it, because with no one else could she have borne this incommunicable display of life. Then she dried her tears and told Arthur she thought he had better become a highwayman.

"Highwaymen don't exist any longer," Arthur objected. "All the jolly things have disappeared from the world--war and highwaymen and pirates and troubadours and crusaders and maypoles and the Inquisition. Everything."

Gradually Sylvia learned from Arthur how much of what she had been reading was mere invention, and in the first bitterness of disillusionment she wished to renounce books forever; but Arthur dissuaded her from doing that, and they used to read simultaneously the same books so as to be able to discuss them during their long walks. They became two romantics born out of due season, two romantics that should have lived a century ago and that now bewailed the inability of the modern world to supply what their adventurous souls demanded.

Arthur was inclined to think that Sylvia had much less cause to repine than he; the more tales she told him of her life, the more tributes of envy he paid to her good fortune. He pointed out that Monkley scarcely differed from the highwayman of romance; nor did he doubt but that if all his enterprises could be known he would rival Dick Turpin himself. Sylvia agreed with all he said, but she urged the inequality of her own share in the achievement. What she wanted was something more than to sit at home and enjoy fruits in the stealing of which she had played no part. She wanted none of Arthur's love unless he were prepared to face the problem of living life at its fullest in company with her. She would let him kiss her sometimes, because, unhappily, it seemed that even very young men were infected with this malady, and that if deprived of this odious habit they were liable to lose determination and sink into incomprehensible despondency. At the same time Sylvia made Arthur clearly understand that she was yielding to his weakness, not to her own, and that, if he wished to retain her compassion, he must prove that the devotion of which he boasted was vital to his being.

"You mustn't just kiss me," Sylvia warned him, "because it's easy. It's very difficult, really, because it's very difficult for me to let you do it. I have to wind myself up beforehand just as if I were going to pull out a loose tooth."

Arthur gazed at her with wide-open, liquid eyes; his mouth trembled. "You say such cruel things," he murmured.

Sylvia punched him as hard as she could. "I won't be stared at like that. You look like a cow when you stare at me like that. Buck up and think what we're going to do."

"I'm ready to do anything," Arthur declared, "as long as you're decent to me. But you're such an extraordinary girl. One moment you burst into tears and put your head on my shoulder, and the next moment you're punching me."

"And I shall punch you again," Sylvia said, fiercely, "if you dare to remind me that I ever cried in front of you. You weren't there when I cried."

"But I was," he protested.

"No, you weren't. You were only there like a tree or a cloud."

"Or a cow," said Arthur, gloomily.

"I think that if we did go away together," Sylvia said, meditatively, "I should leave you almost at once, because you will keep returning to things I said. My father used to be like that."

"But if we go away," Arthur asked, "how are we going to live? I shouldn't be any use on racecourses. I'm the sort of person that gets taken in by the three-card trick."

"You make me so angry when you talk like that," Sylvia said. "Of course if you think you'll always be a fool, you always will be a fool. Being in love with me must make you think that you're not a fool. Perhaps we never shall go away together; but if we do, you'll have to begin by stealing bicycles. Jimmy Monkley and my father did that for a time. You hire a bicycle and sell it or pawn it a long way off from the shop it came from. It's quite easy. Only, of course, it's best to disguise yourself. Father used to paint out his teeth, wear blue glasses, and powder his mustache gray. But once he made himself so old in a place called Lewisham that the man in the bicycle-shop thought he was too old to ride and wouldn't let him have a machine."

Sylvia was strengthened in her resolve to launch Arthur upon the stormy seas of an independent existence by the placid harbor in which his mother loved to see him safely at anchor. Sylvia could not understand how a woman like Mrs. Madden, who had once been willing to elope with a groom, could bear to let her son spend his time so ineffectively. Not that she wished Mrs. Madden to exert her authority by driving him into a clerkship, or indeed into any profession for which he had no inclination, but she deplored the soft slavery which a fond woman can impose, the slavery of being waited upon that is more deadening than the slavery of waiting upon other people. She used to make a point of impressing upon Mrs. Madden the extent to which she and Arthur went shares in everything, lest she might suppose that Sylvia imitated her complaisance, and when Mrs. Madden used to smile in her tired way and make some remark about boy and girl lovers, Sylvia used to get angry and try to demonstrate the unimportance of that side of life.

"You funny child," Mrs. Madden said. "When you're older, how you'll laugh at what you think now. Of course, you don't know anything about love yet, mercifully for you. I wish I were richer; I should so like to adopt you."

"Oh, but I wouldn't be adopted," Sylvia quickly interposed. "I can't tell you how glad I am that I belong to nobody. And please don't think I'm so innocent, because I'm not. I've seen a great deal of love, you must remember, and I've thought a lot about it, and made up my mind that I'll never be a slave to that sort of thing. Arthur may be stupidly in love with me, but I'm very strict with him and it doesn't do him any harm."

"Come and sing your favorite song," Mrs. Madden laughed. "I'll play your accompaniment."

All the discussions between them ended in music; Sylvia would sing that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--or, stamping with her foot upon the floor of the old house until it shook and crossing her arms with such resolution that Arthur's eyes would grow larger than ever, as if he half expected to see her act upon the words and fling herself out into the December night, regardless of all but a mad demonstration of liberty.

Sylvia would sometimes sing about the gipsies to herself while she was undressing, which generally called forth a protest from Mrs. Gustard, who likened the effect to that of a young volcano let loose.

Another person that was pained by Sylvia's exuberance was Maria, her black cat, so called on account of his color before he was definitely established as a gentleman. He had no ear for music and he disapproved of dancing; nor did he have the least sympathy with the aspirations of the lawless song she sang. Mrs. Gustard considered that he was more artful than what any one would think, but she repudiated as "heathenish" Sylvia's contention that she outwardly resembled Maria.

"Still I do think I'm like a cat," Sylvia argued. "Perhaps not very like a black cat, more like a tabby. One day you'll come up to my room and find me purring on the bed."

Mrs. Gustard exclaimed against such an unnatural event.

Sylvia received one or two letters from Jimmy Monkley during the winter, in which he wrote with considerable optimism of the success of his venture and thought he might be back in Hampstead by February. He came back unexpectedly, however, in the middle of January, and Sylvia was only rather glad to see him; she had grown fond of her life alone and dreaded Jimmy's habit of arranging matters over her head. He was not so amiable as formerly, because the scheme had only been partially successful and he had failed to make enough money to bring the flash gambling-hell perceptibly nearer. Sylvia had almost forgotten that project; it seemed to her now a dull project, neither worthy of herself nor of him. She did not attempt, on Jimmy's return, to change her own way of spending the time, and she persisted in taking the long walks with Arthur as usual.

"What the devil you see to admire in that long-legged, saucer-eyed, curly-headed mother's pet I don't know," Jimmy grumbled.

"I don't admire him," Sylvia said. "I don't admire anybody except Joan of Arc. But I like him."

Jimmy scowled; and later on that day Mr. Gustard warned Sylvia that her uncle (as such was Jimmy known in the lodgings) had carried on alarmingly about her friendship with young Artie.

"It's nothing to do with him," Sylvia affirmed, with out-thrust chin.

"Nothing whatever," Mr. Gustard agreed. "But if I was you I wouldn't throw young Artie in his face. I've never had a niece myself, but from what I can make out an uncle feels something like a father; and a father gets very worried about his rights."

"But you've never had any children, and so you can't know any more about the feelings of a father," Sylvia objected.

"Ah, but I've got my own father to look back upon," Mr. Gustard said. "He mostly took a spade to me, I remember, though he wasn't against jabbing me in the ribs with a trowel if there wasn't a spade handy. I reckon it was him as first put the notion of liberty for all into my head. I never set much store by uncles, though. The only uncle I ever had died of croup when he was two years old."

"My father didn't like his aunts," Sylvia added to the condemnation. "He was brought up by two aunts."

"Aunts in general is sour bodies, 'specially when they're in charge and get all the fuss of having children with none of the fun."

"Mr. Monkley isn't really my uncle," Sylvia abruptly proclaimed.

"Go on! you don't mean it?" said Mr. Gustard. "I suppose he's your guardian?"

"He's nothing at all," Sylvia answered.

"He must be something."

"He's absolutely nothing," she insisted. "He used to live with my father, and when my father died he just went on living with me. If I don't want to live with him I needn't."

"But you must live with somebody," said Mr. Gustard. "There's a law about having visible means of support. You couldn't have a lot of kids living on their own."

"Why not?" Sylvia asked, in contemptuous amazement.

"Why not?" Mr. Gustard repeated. "Why because every one would get pestered to death. It's the same with stray dogs. Stray dogs have got to have a home. If they haven't a home of their own, they're taken to the Dogs' Home at Battersea and cremated, which is a painless and mercenary death."

"I don't call that much of a home," Sylvia scoffed. "A place where you're killed."

"That's because we're speaking of dogs. Of course, if the police started in cremating children, there'd be a regular outcry. So the law insists on children having homes."

Sylvia tried hard to convince Mr. Gustard that she was different from other children, and in any case no longer a child; but though the discussion lasted a long time he would not admit the logic of Sylvia's arguments; in the end she decided he did not know what he was talking about.

Monkley so much disliked Sylvia's intimacy with Arthur that he began to talk of moving from Hampstead, whereupon she warned him that if he tried to go away without paying the rent she would make a point of letting Mr. Gustard know where they had gone.

"It strikes me," Monkley said, and when he spoke, Sylvia was reminded of the tone he used when she had protested against his treatment of Maudie Tilt--"it strikes me that since I've been away you've taken things a bit too much into your own hands. That's a trick you'd better drop with me, or we shall quarrel."

Sylvia braced herself to withstand him as she had withstood him before; but she could not help feeling a little apprehensive, so cold were his green eyes, so thin his mouth.

"I don't care if we quarrel or not," she declared. "Because if we quarreled it would mean that I couldn't bear you near me any longer and that I was glad to quarrel. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you may be sorry, but I shall never be sorry. If you make me hate you, Jimmy, you can't think how dreadfully much I shall hate you."

"Don't try to come the little actress over me," Monkley said. "I've known too many women in my life to be bounced by a kid like you. But that's enough. I can't think why I pay so much attention to you."

"No," Sylvia said. "All the women you've known don't seem to have been able to teach you how to manage a little girl like me. What a pity!"

She laughed and left him alone.

There was a halcyon week that February, and Sylvia spent every day and all day on the Heath with Arthur. People used to turn and stare after them as they walked arm-in-arm over the vivid green grass.

"I think it's you they stare at," Sylvia said. "You look interesting with your high color and dark curly hair. You look rather foreign. Perhaps people think you're a poet. I read the other day about a poet called Keats who lived in Hampstead and loved a girl called Fanny Brawne. I wish I knew what she looked like. It's not a very pretty name. Now I've got rather a pretty name, I think; though I'm not pretty myself."

"You're not exactly pretty," Arthur agreed. "But I think if I saw you I should turn round to look at you. You're like a person in a picture. You seem to stand out and to be the most important figure. In paintings that's because the chief figure is usually so much larger than the others. Well, that's the impression you give me."

Speculation upon Sylvia's personality ceased when they got home; Monkley threatened Arthur in a very abusive way, even going as far as to pick up a stone and fling it through one of the few panes of glass left in the tumble-down greenhouse in order to illustrate the violent methods he proposed to adopt.

The next day, when Sylvia went to fetch Arthur for their usual walk, he made some excuse and was obviously frightened to accompany her.

"What can he do to you?" Sylvia demanded, in scornful displeasure. "The worst he can do is to kill you, and then you'd have died because you wouldn't surrender. Haven't you read about martyrs?"

"Of course I've read about martyrs," said Arthur, rather querulously. "But reading about martyrs is very different from being a martyr yourself. You seem to think everybody can be anything you happen to read about. You wouldn't care to be a martyr, Sylvia."

"That's just where you're wrong," she loftily declared. "I'd much sooner be a martyr than a coward."

Arthur winced at her plain speaking. "You don't care what you say," was his reproach.

"No, and I don't care what I do," Sylvia agreed. "Are you coming out with me? Because if you're not, you shall never be my friend again."

Arthur pulled himself together and braved Monkley's threats. On a quiet green summit he demanded her impatient kisses for a recompense; she, conscious of his weakness and against her will made fonder of him by this very weakness, kissed him less impatiently than was her wont, so that Arthur, under the inspiration of that rare caress, vowed he cared for nobody and for nothing, if she would but always treat him thus kindly.

Sylvia, who was determined to make Jimmy pay for his bad behavior, invited herself to tea with Mrs. Madden; afterward, though it was cloudy and ominous, Arthur and she walked out on the Heath once more, until it rained so hard that they were driven home. It was about seven o'clock when Sylvia reached her room, her hair all tangled with moisture, her eyes and cheeks on fire with the exhilaration of that scurry through the rain. She had not stood a moment to regard herself in the glass when Monkley, following close upon her heels, shut the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Sylvia looked round in astonishment; by a trick of candle-light his eyes gleamed for an instant, so that she felt a tremor of fear.

"You've come back at last, have you?" he began in a slow voice, so deliberate and gentle in its utterance that Sylvia might not have grasped the extent of his agitation, had not one of his legs, affected by a nervous twitch, drummed upon the floor a sinister accompaniment. "You shameless little b----h, I thought I forbade you to go out with him again. You've been careering over the Heath. You've been encouraging him to make love to you. Look at your hair--it's in a regular tangle! and your cheeks--they're like fire. Well, if you can let that nancified milksop mess you about, you can put up with me. I've wanted to long enough, God knows; and this is the reward I get for leaving you alone. You give yourself to the first b----y boy that comes along."

Before Sylvia had time to reply, Monkley had leaped across the room and crushed her to him.

"Kiss me, damn you, kiss me! Put your arms round me."

Sylvia would not scream, because she could not have endured that anybody should behold her in such an ignominious plight. Therefore she only kicked and fought, and whispered all the while, with savage intensity! "You frog! you frog! You look like a frog! Leave me alone!"

Monkley held her more closely and forced her mouth against his own, but Sylvia bit through his under lip till her teeth met. The pain caused him to start back and tread on Maria, who, searching in a panic for better cover than the bed afforded, had run between his legs. The cat, uttering one of those unimaginable wails with which only cats have power so horribly to surprise, retired to a corner, where he hissed and growled. In another corner Sylvia spat forth the unclean blood and wiped from her lips the soilure of the kisses.

Monkley had had enough for the present. The pain and sudden noise had shaken his nerves. When the blood ran down his chin, bedabbling his tie, he unlocked the door and retired, crying out almost in a whimper for something to stop a bad razor cut. Mrs. Gustard went to the wood-shed for cobwebs; but Monkley soon shouted down that he had found some cotton wool, and Sylvia heard a cork being drawn. She made up her mind to kill him that night, but she was perplexed by the absence of a suitable weapon, and gradually it was borne in upon her mind that if she killed Monkley she would have to pay the penalty, which did not seem to her a satisfactory kind of revenge. She gave up the notion of killing him and decided to run away with Arthur instead.

For a long time Sylvia sat in her bedroom, thinking over her plan; then she went next door and asked Arthur to come out and talk to her about something important. They stood whispering in the wet garden, while she bewitched him into offering to share her future. He was dazed by the rapidity with which she disposed of every objection he brought forward. She knew how to get enough money for them to start with. She knew how to escape from the house, and because the creeper beneath Arthur's window was not strong enough to bear his weight, he must tie his sheets together. He must not bring much luggage; she would only bring a small valise, and Maria could travel in her work-basket.

"Maria?" echoed Arthur, in dismay.

"Of course! it was Maria who saved me," said Sylvia. "I shall wait till Monkley is asleep. I expect he'll be asleep early, because he's drinking brandy hard now; then I shall whistle the last line of the raggle-taggle gipsies and slither down from my window by the ivy."

She stuffed Arthur's reeling brain with further details, and, catching him to her heart, she kissed him with as much enthusiasm as might have been mistaken for passion. In the end, between coaxing and frightening him, threatening and inspiring him, Sylvia made Arthur agree to everything, and danced back indoors.

"Anybody would think you were glad because your guardian angel's gone and sliced a rasher off of his mouth," Mr. Gustard observed.

By ten o'clock all was quiet in the house. Sylvia chose with the greatest care her equipment for the adventure. She had recently bought a tartan frock, which, not having yet been worn, she felt would excellently become the occasion; this she put on, and plaited her tangled hair in a long pigtail. The result was unsatisfactory, for it made her look too prim for a heroine; she therefore undid the pigtail and tied her hair loosely back with a nut-brown bow. It was still impossibly early for an escape, so Sylvia sat down on the edge of her bed and composed herself to read the escape of Fabrizio from the Sforza tower in Parma. The book in which she read this was not one that she had been able to read through without a great deal of skipping; but this escape which she had only come across a day or two before seemed a divine omen to approve her decision. Sylvia regretted the absence of the armed men at the foot of the tower, but said to herself that, after all, she was escaping with her lover, whereas Fabrizio had been compelled to leave Clelia Conti behind. The night wore away; at half past eleven Sylvia dropped her valise from the window and whistled that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--oh. Then she waited until a ghostly snake was uncoiled from Arthur's window.

"My dearest boy, you're an angel," she trilled, in an ecstasy, when she saw him slide safely down into the garden.

"Catch Maria," she whispered. "I'm coming myself in a moment."

Arthur caught her work-basket, and a faint protesting mew floated away on the darkness. Sylvia wrapped herself up, and then very cautiously, candle in hand, walked across to the door of Monkley's room and listened. He was snoring loudly. She pushed open the door and beheld him fast asleep, a red-and-white beard of cotton wool upon his chin. Then risking all in an impulse to be quick, though she was almost stifled by fear, she hurried across the room to his trunk. He kept all his money in a tin box. How she hoped there was enough to make him rue her flight. Monkley never stirred; the box was safe in her muff. She stole back to her room, blew out the candle, flung the muff down to Arthur, held her breath when the coins rattled, put one leg over the sill, and scrambled down by the ivy.

"I wish it had been higher," she whispered, when Arthur clasped her with affectionate solicitude where she stood in the sodden vegetation.

"I'm jolly glad it wasn't," he said. "Now what are we going to do?"

"Why, find a 'bus, of course!" Sylvia said. "And get as far from Hampstead as possible."

"But it's after twelve o'clock," Arthur objected. "There won't be any 'buses now. I don't know what we're going to do. We can't look for rooms at this time of night."

"We must just walk as far as we can away from Hampstead," said Sylvia, cheerfully.

"And carry our luggage? Supposing a policeman asks us where we're going?"

"Oh, bother policemen! Come along. You don't seem to be enjoying yourself nearly as much as I am. I care for nobody. I'm off with the raggle-taggle gipsies--oh," she lightly sang.

Maria mewed at the sound of his mistress's voice.

"You're as bad as Maria," she went on, reproachfully. "Look how nice the lamp-posts look. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, I can see. Let's bet how many lamp-posts we pass before we're safe in our own house."

They set out for London by the road along the Heath. At first trees overhung the path, and they passed pool after pool of checkered lamplight that quivered in the wet road. Followed a space of open country where they heard the last whispers of a slight and desultory wind. Soon they were inclosed by mute and unillumined houses on either side, until they found themselves on the top of Haverstock Hill, faced by the tawny glow of the London sky, and stretching before them a double row of lamp-posts innumerable and pale that converged to a dim point in the heart of the city below.

"I think I'm rather frightened," Sylvia said. "Or perhaps I'm a little tired."

"Shall we go back?" Arthur suggested.

"No, no. We'll just rest a moment or two, and I'll be all right." They sat down on their bags, and she stroked Maria pensively.

Sylvia was relieved when the silence was interrupted by a policeman. She felt the need of opposition to drive away the doubts that took advantage of that first fatigue to shake her purpose.

"Now then, what are you doing?" he demanded, gruffly.

"We're sitting down," Sylvia informed him.

"Loitering isn't allowed here," the policeman said.

"Where is it allowed, please?" she asked, sweetly.

"Loitering isn't allowed nowhere," the policeman declared.

"Well, why did you say it wasn't allowed here?" she continued. "I thought you were going to tell us of a place where it was allowed."

Arthur jogged Sylvia's elbow and whispered to her not to annoy the policeman.

"Come along, now, move on," the policeman commanded. In order to emphasize his authority he flashed his bull's-eye in Sylvia's face. "Where do you live?" he asked, after the scrutiny.

"Lillie Road, Fulham. We missed the last train from Hampstead, and we're walking home. I never heard of any rule against sitting on one's own luggage in the middle of the night. I think you'd better take us to the police station. We must rest somewhere."

The policeman looked puzzled.

"What did you want to miss your train for?" he asked.

"We didn't want to miss it," Sylvia gently explained. "We were very angry when we missed it. Come on, Arthur, I don't feel tired any longer."

She got up and started off down Haverstock Hill, followed by Arthur.

"I'm sorry you can't recommend any proper loitering-places on the road," said Sylvia, turning round, "because we shall probably have to loiter about thirty-six times before we get to Lillie Road. Good night. If we meet any burglars we'll give them your love and say there's a nice policeman living on Haverstock Hill who'd like a chat."

"Suppose he had run us in?" Arthur said, when they had left the policeman behind them.

"I wanted him to at first," Sylvia replied. "But afterward I thought it might be awkward on account of Monkley's cash-box. I wish we could open it now and see how much there is inside, but perhaps it would look funny at this time of night."

They had nearly reached the bottom of Haverstock Hill, and there were signs of life in the squalid streets they were approaching.

"I don't think we ought to hang about here," Arthur said. "These are slums. We ought to be careful; I think we ought to have waited till the morning."

"You wouldn't have come, if we'd waited," Sylvia maintained. "You'd have been too worried about leaving your mother."

"I'm still worried about that," said Arthur, gloomily.

"Why? You can send a post-card to say that you're all right. Knowing where you are won't make up for your being away. In any case, you'd have had to go away soon. You couldn't have spent your whole life in that house at Hampstead."

"Well, I think this running away will bring us bad luck."

Sylvia made a dramatic pause and dropped her valise on the pavement.

"Go home, then. Go home and leave me alone. If you can't enjoy yourself, I'd rather you went home. I can't bear to be with somebody who is not enjoying himself as much as I am."

"You can't be enjoying this waking about all night with two bags and a cat," Arthur insisted. "But I'm not going home without you. If you want to go on, I shall go on, too. I'm feeling rather tired. I expect I shall enjoy myself more to-morrow."

Sylvia picked up her valise again. "I hope you will, I'm sure," she said. "You're spoiling the fun by grumbling all the time like this. What is there to grumble at? Just a small bag which makes your arm ache. You ought to be glad you haven't got mine to carry as well as your own."

After another quarter of an hour among the ill-favored streets Sylvia called a rest; this time they withdrew from the pavement into the area of an unoccupied house, where they leaned against the damp brick wall, quite exhausted, and heard without interest the footsteps of the people who went past above. Maria began to mew and Sylvia let her out of the basket. A lean and amorous tom-cat in pursuit of love considered that Maria had prejudiced his chance of success, and their recriminations ended in a noisy scuffle during which the lid of a dust-bin in the next area was upset with a loud clatter; somebody, throwing open a window, emptied a utensil partly over Arthur.

"Don't make such a noise. It was only a jug," Sylvia whispered. "You'll wake up all the houses."

"It's your damned cat making the noise," Arthur said. "Come here, you brute."

Maria was at last secured and replaced in his basket, and Arthur asked Sylvia if she was sure it was only a jug.

"It's simply beastly in this area," he added. "Anything's better than sitting here."

After making sure that nobody was in sight, they went on their way, though by now their legs were so weary that from time to time the bags scraped along the pavement.

"The worst of it is," Sylvia sighed, "we've come so far now that it would be just as tiring to go back to Hampstead as to go on."

"Oh, _you're_ thinking now of going back!" Arthur jeered. "It's a pity you didn't think of that when we were on Haverstock Hill."

"I'm not thinking at all of going back," Sylvia snapped. "I'm not tired."

"Oh no," said Arthur, sarcastically. "And I'm not at all wet, really."

They got more and more irritable with each other. The bow in Sylvia's hair dropped off, and with all the fretful obstinacy of fatigue she would go wandering back on their tracks to see if she could find it; but the bow was lost. At last they saw a hansom coming toward them at a walking pace, and Sylvia announced that they would ride.

"But where shall we drive to?" Arthur asked. "We can't just get in and drive anywhere."

"We'll tell him to go to Waterloo," said Sylvia. "Stations are always open; we can wait there till the morning and then look for a house."

She hailed the cab; with sighs of relief they sank back upon the seat, exhausted. Presently an odd noise like a fishmonger's smacking a cod could be heard beside the cab, and, leaning out over the apron to see what was the cause of it, Arthur was spattered with mud by a piece of the tire which was flogging the road with each revolution of the wheel. The driver pulled up and descended from the box to restrain it.

"I've been tying it up all day, but it will do it," he complained. "There's nothing to worry over, but it fidgets one, don't it, flapping like that? I've tied it up with string and I've tied it up with wire, and last time I used my handkerchief. Now I suppose it's got to be my bootlace. Well, here goes," he said, and with many grunts he stooped over to undo his lace.