Cynthia's Love Affairs

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Cynthia's Love Affairs

By

Barry Pain

I. Henry Silvester

No 1.—Henry Silvester

I HAD been lunching with my married sister, Alice; and, as usual, she had made me rather angry. At last, in order to clear up one of her misapprehensions about me, I said:

“My dear Alice, I know that I am unmarried, but I cannot see why on that account I am less a woman than you are. I fully believe and hold that all cats are feminine, all dogs masculine, and that cows in the road, if they stare at one, are ipso facto bulls. Could anything less than a woman do that? I take a fashion paper, look better at dinner than at breakfast, like chocolate, shy things with a wrist action, and ignore all questions of physiology. What more do you want? I utterly refuse to consider myself undeveloped, defective, microcephalous, or anything of the kind, and it's of no use to ask me to do it. I'm quite a real woman.”

Alice sighed. She and the vicar, her husband, both sigh a good deal.

“Ah, Cynthia, how you misunderstand me! I never intended to imply anything of the kind; I only meant that womanliness was made perfect by love—by marriage.”

I observed that you could have a very nice fire without burning the house down. This distressed her.

“I do wish,” she said, “that you would not speak of marriage as a—a disaster. Every affair of the heart ought to end in marriage.”

“You take,” I answered, “a very large size in generalisations. I suppose you mean that if any man and woman love each other, they ought to marry if they are free to marry. Sometimes they are not free; sometimes there's not enough money; sometimes the love's one-sided; very often it is temporary—the result of inexperience. Besides, no affair of the heart ought to end in marriage; it ought to go on after marriage. That's a quibble, of course. However, it doesn't matter; you're all wrong, because you've only had your one little engagement and marriage to judge by. I've never been married, but as for affairs of the heart2”

“Well!” she said, a little eagerly. I put her off.

Yet for a woman of thirty-two, who has played her last card, and found the game go against her, there is a certain amount of consolation in reminiscences. I have had affairs of the heart—although it was not always my heart; my first reminiscence takes me back to my childhood.

In order to make liquorice-water, to serve as a casual beverage, it is, I should say, above all things necessary that one should be very young. I was very young when I made it. The method is as follows. Take any bottle that is partially filled with medicine prescribed for someone else; empty out the medicine, and rinse the bottle once, hastily and perfunctorily. Procure for the sum of one penny from the village grocer or chemist a piece of black, hard, stick-liquorice. Take it home, and wrap it up securely in the daily paper that your uncle has not yet seen and is certain to want after luncheon. Place the parcel thus formed on the dining-room table—or on any polished table where dents show easily—and then smite it patiently for some time with the handle of the poker. When the liquorice is broken in small pieces, place it in the bottle, fill up with water, cork, and shake vehemently. The water will gradually assume the colour of a sepia drawing-copy. When this tint is secured, add as much brown sugar as you can take without any risk of its being missed. The mixture will then be ready and not at all nice to drink, but if you are very young, you can carry it with you when you go for long walks, and sip it occasionally by way of refreshment. If, owing to the previous career of the bottle, the mixture has a flavour of carbolic or rhubarb, too strong to be conquered or ignored, sell it to the uncle as a remedy for sore-throats at-a profit of three hundred per cent on the original outlay.

Whenever I was a visitor at the house of my bachelor uncle in the country, I used to amuse myself with this awful manufacture. I did so, partly because there were so many conveniences for it. The servants at my father's house did not like me at all; when I asked them for a disused medicine bottle, they either told me that there was not one or gave me a bottle without a cork. Of course, you can make a sort of substitute cork out of a wad of clean note-paper, but it is an untidy-looking mockery. Now at my uncle's house the servants were always too glad to get me medicine bottles or anything else that I wanted. Besides in the country I always went much longer walks than when I was living in London; on a long walk a child naturally wants to feel adventurous, quite new, and traveller-like; and it is much easier to do this if you are carrying supplies with you. On the strength of three mixed biscuits and a bottle of liquorice-water I have felt like a Polar Expedition. Lastly, I used to make this curious mixture at my uncle's house because there were no other children in the house, and—until I happened upon Henry Silvester—there was not much else to do. By the way, it was chiefly through the liquorice-water that I overcame Harry's very natural dislike to me.

I had paid many visits to my uncle before I ever met Harry at all. He had just gone to a private school and took his holidays at fixed intervals. I, on the other hand, generally took my holidays when the decease of one of my governess's near relations necessitated her temporary absence. As far as I remember, her near relations deceased freely, but at quite irregular intervals. It was some time before my holidays coincided with Harry's, but the time came at last. My governess's uncle (who had been more like a father to her than anything else) happened to pass away at the end of August. So she went off to one of those suburbs where one's governess's relations mostly leave their families unprovided for; and I, accompanied by a maid, went on a visit to my uncle. The Silvesters and my uncle were great friends, and consequently I saw a good deal of Harry.

I saw him, for the first time, in church One morning. He struck me as being singularly well-behaved for a boy. Just before the sermon he started up and walked out, with his handkerchief to his nose. I know now—which I did not know then—that his nose was not really bleeding. His dislike to me, which was not occasioned by any fault of mine, happened in this way. I must mention that Harry at that time had, exclusive of flannel things, three suits—a best suit, which he wore on Sundays and when he came down in the evening; a second-best suit; and a shockingly bad suit, which he wore whenever he got the chance. Now on those occasions when I arrived unexpectedly—as I often did—at the Silvesters' house, Harry was always wearing the shockingly bad suit; and he was always compelled to change it, in my honour, for the second-best suit. He hated the trouble, and, naturally, hated me for being the cause of it. I always dressed very well, and the contrast made the shockingly bad suit impossible.

However, one day Harry and I met in the chemist's shop. He was buying some rat-poison, and I asked him what he wanted it for. He said, rather mysteriously: “Oh—nothing in particular.” I bought my liquorice, and he asked me if I was going to eat it. I told him that I was not, and I described to him the manufacture of liquorice-water as we walked out of the shop and up the village street together. “That isn't a bad idea,” he said, reflectively, “I'll make some of that and take it with me when I go back next term, and I promise never to tell anyone how to make it.”

I had not asked or even desired any such promise. But I accepted it with gravity, and it certainly marked an advance in the intimacy between us.

“And look here, Cynthia,” he added, “I don't mind telling you now about that rat-poison. I was getting it for our gardener, and what he really wants it for is to poison rats.”

His motive for giving the explanation was quite chivalrous, but the explanation itself was so appallingly and maddeningly obvious that, from sheer regard for our self-respect, we had to change the subject at once.

“Don't let's go in yet, Harry,” I said. “If you go up to your house with me, your aunts will make you change your things, and that must be a bore.”

“It is a bore,” he said seriously. “I always thought you were rather stuck-up and liked chaps to wear their swaggerest clothes.”

“No, I don't, I should hate any boy who was particular about his clothes.”

“But you're wearing your swaggerest things yourself.”

“I'm not though. This isn't my best frock or anything like it.”

“Besides,” he added, with an air of impartiality, “it's more right for girls to care about such things, because some girls are pretty.”

“Do you think so?”

“I didn't use to, I do now,” he said with, emphasis. For three moments we walked in embarrassed silence, staring down at our toes.

Then at his suggestion we went down a lane to the left, to see if we could cross Polney Brook by the stepping-stones. There was also a bridge across the brook, but we felt that bridges were safe, easy, unromantic, and generally contemptible. When we reached the stepping-stones we found that some of them were two or three inches under water—there was a flood on at the time—and the tops of the others were wet and slippery.

“The only way to do it,” Harry observed, “would be to cross barefoot.”

“Then I don't think I will, if you don't mind very much,” I said, hesitatingly.

“You'd much better not,” said Harry. “But I'll have a shot at it myself, because I should like to say I did it. You just wait here.”

He took off his boots, stockings, and straw hat, and gave them into my charge; he crossed the brook, and then recrossed it back to me. He was very splashed, rather hot, and bright-eyed.

I thought that he was intrepid and looked quite a splendid boy. He took me to several other places. He knew of a cushat's nest, and we went to look at it. We never found it; perhaps the cushat had heard that we were coming.

In church on the following Sunday Harry sat immediately in front of me. I watched him as he came up the aisle. He looked thoughtful, dignified, and religious; and he was wearing his best suit. At the very commencement of the service I noticed that he held his prayer-book very much to the right instead of straight before him; another glance showed me why he had done it. On a slip of note-paper inside the book was written in a large round hand the following unpunctuated message:—

“I have made mine with double as much lickerice as you do and if you would like to taste it afterwards give a cough.”

The worst of an artificial cough in the hands—perhaps I should say, in the mouth—of a beginner is that it may come out with a hideous and unnatural loudness, when the cougher only intends it to be a mere whisper. My cough on this occasion surprised and horrified me. It seemed to ring through the church like the crack of a pistol. I felt that all the human eyes within a radius of twelve pews were staring the stare of pained surprise full at me, When I looked up I saw that Harry's back was shaking gently. But no sound came. He told me afterwards that he had learnt at school the secret of noiseless laughter; it consists in closing the nostrils firmly with one hand, and shutting the mouth. As Harry remarked, “You may blow up, but you simply can't laugh out loud.”

I saw a good deal of Harry during the next week. There were several cases of stuffed birds in his father's study, and Harry showed me two or three of the birds there which he himself had killed with his catapult. By this time I must have found great favour in his eyes, for he said to me one day, “Look here, Cynthia, I'm going out to-morrow with my catty, and you can come too and see me shoot. There isn't any other girl I'd take out when I'd got my catty with me.”

I remember that day well, and I remember the catapult—its double elastic, the scrap of dirty kid-glove where the shot was placed, and the forked wood that had been partially baked early in its career in order to make it tough and hard. I thought I was going to enjoy myself in a peculiarly exciting and thrilling way. Just at first I did so, but that was because Harry did not happen to hit anything. At last he took a shot at a robin, and hit it without killing it. The poor thing fell and fluttered. Now I had not imagined that it was going to be at all like that; the stuffed birds in the glass case had looked quite happy. Harry ran towards the bird, and I put my hands over my eyes. When he came back I was crying.

“It's all right, Cynnie,” he said, “I've killed it; it doesn't feel any more.”

The emotions are, unfortunately, not provided with an instantaneous break. I could never stop a fit of crying in less than half its own length. Harry looked at me with anxious, troubled eyes.

He produced one or two scraps of natural history, inspired by tact and a desire to console. The robin, I was given to understand, was a cruel, voracious, and spiteful bird. If it had been a wild beast, instead of a bird, it would have been wilder and beastlier than other wild beasts. It was because of its red breast that people made so much of it, and because it came into Christmas cards.

This did console me to some extent, but I was still crying a little.

Then Harry did a very heroic action.

He drew from his pocket a knife of his which contained many more implements than he could ever by any possible chance want to use. He opened the large blade, and, before I could stop him, he had cut his catapult to chips—his much-loved catapult that he had made himself, that caused him to be envied in his form at school, that constituted his chief treasure.

“There, Cynnie,” he said, “I've smashed it up and I won't go cattying any more, so you needn't keep on now—need you?”

I did not answer in words, but I acted on a sudden spontaneous and unmaidenly impulse; I kissed him.

I do not think he minded it much, but he was evidently not prepared for it, and it caused him a momentary fit of great shyness. He stared straight in front of him, and made an unnecessary remark about the weather.

One day Harry and I had gone up to the Lily Pond, which was a long walk. As usual, there were no lilies near the bank, and there was no boat to take us to the white buds in the centre of the pond. I made some remark, I suppose, on the irritating character of the situation.

“Look here,” said Harry, “would you like to have some of those lilies?”

“Of course I should.”

“Very well, then, you just run across the field down into the road, and wait for me there. I may be some little time.”

“All right,” I said obediently. I mostly acted under Harry's directions.

In about twenty minutes Harry came to me with a good bunch of water-lilies. “How did you get them?” I asked. Then I noticed his hair, which was much deranged and exceedingly damp. “Why, you must have been in the water!”

“Yes; I swam out for them.” His eyes were triumphant.

“Was it hard?”

“Oh, no; of course you have to know how to swim. I don't say that I'd have done it for just anybody.”

“How did you dry yourself?”

“Partly, I didn't, and partly I happened to have two handkerchiefs. I forgot to take the old one out of my pocket when I put a fresh one in this morning. They came in pretty handy.”

I believe it was this which finally decided me to give Harry a small silver pig to wear as an ornament on his watch-chain. It seemed to impress him; indeed, I should have been very disappointed it it had not impressed him; for it cost three-and-six, and although I borrowed half-a-crown from my uncle the other shilling was my own actual valuable money.

I was to leave for home at the end of the week. On the day before I went I called at the Silvesters' to say good-bye; they had all been very kind to me. Harry was dignified almost to frigidity, but as he shook hands with me he pressed upon me a scrap of paper and a look of warning. As I walked home I read the paper; it bade me be in the home-close at eight o'clock that night, and take all possible precautions against discovery. I do not suppose that discovery would have mattered in the least, but every boy has a sort of longing to feel criminal, I suppose.

So at eight o'clock I went through the orchard into the home-close, and met Harry there,

“Well?” I said.

“I say, it's awfully good of you to have come.”

“I didn't mind—I rather wanted to.”

“Look here, Cynnie, I wish you weren't going away.”

“I wish I wasn't, too.”

“Why?” There was a pause, and I did not answer. “Do you remember that day when I smashed up my catty, and you2”

“Y—yes.”

He looked at me very hard, and I lifted my eyes to look at him once. Then we took each other's meaning, and he kissed me.

We said good-bye at last. But before that happened I knew that I was very pretty indeed, because he had told me so. And we were to be married—as soon as we were grown up. And he had mentioned that there was no possible pitch of destitution which could cause him to part from the silver pig that he wore on his watch-chain. And I had learnt from experience that it hurts you rather to cut a small piece of your hair off with a pocket-knife.

So I went back through the orchard, feeling very happy and very sorry, with my boots very wet, owing to the long grass.

The thing faded out, of course, with time, as such things do. My uncle left that neighbourhood, and I saw no more of Harry Silvester. I learnt long afterwards that he had gone into the tea-trade, married, and was living at Clapham; and I still fail to understand how the Harry Silvester that I knew could in his manhood do such things. However, we most of us outlive our romantic side—sooner or later.

Sometimes I almost wish that this affair had not faded out, but it left room for further experiences.

II. The Twins

II.—The Twins

NEVER have a sister seven years older than yourself. I had, and so I know. Such sisters are patronising, but that is not the worst of them; they get somehow a kind of authority over you and lead you into doing things against which your better sense rebels. Now, Alice is a very good kind of sister as regards her heart and general groundwork, but she is seven years older than am, though she is by no means so proud of it as she was; and the stateliness of her position seemed at one time to be increased by her impending marriage with the vicar. He was then only a curate, but looked more. His Christian name, by the way, is Jimmy. Partly through Jimmy, and partly through Jimmy's episcopal people, Alice let herself get mixed up in a charitable subscription dance. That was bad enough, but she would not be content until she had brought me into it. I was only just out, but I struggled a good deal before gave way. However, you cannot fight against Alice, and I said I would go. I did go. I arrived late at some festive and forsaken hall in the neighbourhood of Olympia. It had that air of isolated gaiety about it which always seems to me to be worse than death. It was gay for that night only. There had been serious meetings there, and I felt that the harmonium had been removed, but had left an atmosphere of financially-unsound sects behind it. I am proud to say that I hardly knew any one there.

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

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

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

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

“He's a twin.”

“More.”

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

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

“Money?”

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

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

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

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

“I don't want,” said Jimmy seriously, “to say anything presumptuous, but within a few weeks I shall be your brother-in-law, and so, perhaps2”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She is so young!” said Alice sadly.

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

“I say, stranger,” I remarked nasally, “I heard what you were saying this afternoon, and if you'll excuse me I reckon I'd prefer to engineer this2”

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

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

“What do you mean?”

“Just that—just plain that.”

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

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

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

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