CHAPTER III
When Archie Harmon disappeared and left the colonel and his mother
together, she supposed that he had gone to his room to sleep, for he
slept a great deal, or to amuse himself after his fashion, and she did
not ask him where he was going. She knew what his favourite amusement
was, though he did his best to keep it a secret from her.
There was a certain mysterious box, which he had always owned, and took
everywhere with him, and of which he always had the key in his pocket.
It took up a good deal of space, but he could never be persuaded to
leave it behind when they went abroad.
To-day he went to his room, as usual, locked the door, took off his
coat, and got the box out of a corner. Then he sat down on the floor
and opened it. He took out some child's building-blocks, some tin
soldiers, much the worse for wear, for he was ashamed to buy new ones,
and a small and gaudily painted tin cart, in which an impossible lady
and gentleman of papier-mache, dressed in blue, grey, and yellow, sat
leaning back with folded arms and staring, painted eyes. There were a
few other toys besides, all packed away with considerable neatness, for
Archie was not slovenly.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, a strong grown man of nearly twenty
years, and began to play with his blocks. His eyes fixed themselves on
his occupation, as he built up a little gateway with an arch and set
red-legged French soldiers on each side of it for sentinels. He had
played the same game a thousand times already, but the satisfaction had
not diminished. One day in a hotel he had forgotten to lock the door,
and his mother had opened it by mistake, thinking it was that of her own
room. Before he could look round she had shut it again, but she had
seen, and it had been like a knife-thrust. She kept his secret, but she
lost heart from that day. He was still a child, and was always to be
one.
Yet there was perhaps something more of intelligence in the childish
play than she had guessed. He was lacking in mind, but not an idiot; he
sometimes said and did things which were certainly far beyond the age of
toys. Possibly the attraction lay in a sort of companionship which he
felt in the society of the blocks, and the tin soldiers, and the little
papier-mache lady and gentleman. He felt that they understood what he
meant and would answer him if they could speak, and would expect no more
of him than he could give. Grown people always seemed to expect a great
deal more, and looked at him strangely when he called Berlin the capital
of Austria and asked why Brutus and Cassius murdered Alexander the
Great. The toy lady and gentleman were quite satisfied if their necks
were not broken in the cunningly devised earthquake which always brought
the block house down into a heap when he had looked at it long enough
and was already planning another.
Besides, he did all his best thinking among his toys, and had invented
ways of working out results at which he could not possibly have arrived
by a purely mental process. He could add and subtract, for instance,
with the bits of wood, and, by a laborious method, he could even do
simple multiplication, quite beyond him with paper and pencil. Above
all, he could name the tin soldiers after people he had met, and make
them do anything he pleased, by a sort of rudimentary theatrical
instinct that was not altogether childish.
To-day he built a house as usual, and, as usual, after some reflexion as
to the best means of ruining it by taking out a single block, he pulled
it down with a crash. But he did not at once begin another. On the
contrary, he sat looking at the ruins for a long time in a rather
disconsolate way, and then all at once began to pack all the toys into
the box again.
"I don't suppose it matters," he said aloud. "But of course Sylvia would
think me a baby if she saw me playing with blocks."
And he made haste to pack them all away, locking the box and putting the
key into his pocket. Then he went and looked through the half-closed
blinds into the sunny street, and he could see the new bridge not far
away.
"I don't care what mother thinks!" he exclaimed. "I'm going to find her
again."
He opened his door softly, and a moment later he was in the street,
walking rapidly towards the bridge. At a distance he looked well. It
was only when quite near to him that one was aware of an undefinable
ungainliness in his face and figure--something blank and meaningless
about him, that suggested a heavy wooden doll dressed in good clothes.
In military countries one often receives that impression. A
fine-looking infantry soldier, erect, broad shouldered, bright eyed,
spotless, and scrupulously neat, comes marching along and excites one's
admiration for a moment. Then, when close to him, one misses something
which ought to go with such manly bearing. The fellow is only a country
lout, perhaps, hardly able to read or write, and possessed of an
intelligence not much beyond the highest development of instinct.
Drill, exercise, and the fear of black bread and water under arrest,
have produced a fine piece of military machinery, but they could not
create a mind, nor even the appearance of intelligence, in the wooden
face. In a year or two the man will lay aside his smart uniform and go
back to the class whence he came. One may give iron the shape and
general look of steel, but not the temper and the springing quality.
Archie Harmon looked straight ahead of him as he crossed the bridge and
followed the long street that runs beside the water, past the big hotels
and the gaudy awnings of the provincially smart shops. At first he only
looked along the pavement, searching among the many people who passed.
Then as he remembered how Colonel Wimpole had seen him through a shop
window, he stopped before each of the big plate glass ones and peered
curiously into the shadows within.
At last, in a milliner's, he saw Sylvia and Miss Wimpole, and his heavy
face grew red, and his eyes glared oddly as he stood motionless outside,
under the awning, looking in. His lips went out a little, as he
pronounced his own especial word very softly.
"Jukes!"
He stood first on one foot and then on the other, like a boy at a pastry
cook's, hesitating, while devouring with his eyes. He could see that
Sylvia was buying a hat. She turned a little each way as she tried it
on before a big mirror, putting up her hands and moving her arms in a
way that showed all the lines of her perfect figure.
Archie went in. He had been brought up by his mother, and chiefly by
women, and he had none of that shyness about entering a women's
establishment, like a milliner's, which most boys and many men feel so
strongly. He walked in boldly and spoke as soon as he was within
hearing.
"Miss Sylvia! I say! Miss Sylvia--don't you know me?"
The question was a little premature, for Sylvia had barely caught sight
of him when he asked it. When she had recognized him, she did not look
particularly pleased.
"It's poor Archie Harmon, my dear," said Miss Wimpole, in a low voice,
but quite audibly.
"Oh, I have not forgotten you!" said Sylvia, trying to speak pleasantly
as she gave her hand. "But where in the world did you come from? And
what are you doing in a milliner's shop?"
"I happened to see you through the window, so I just came in to say how
do you do. There's no harm in my coming in, is there? You look all
right. You're perfectly lovely."
His eyes were so bright that Sylvia felt oddly uncomfortable.
"Oh no," she answered, with an indifference she did not feel. "It's all
right--I mean--I wish you would go away now, and come and see us at the
hotel, if you like, by and by."
"Can't I stay and talk to you? Why can't I stay and talk to her, Miss
Wimpole?" he asked, appealing to the latter. "I want to stay and talk
to her. We are awfully old friends, you know; aren't we, Sylvia? You
don't mind my calling you Sylvia, instead of Miss Sylvia, do you?"
"Oh no! I don't mind that!" Sylvia laughed a little. "But do please
go away now!"
"Well--if I must--" he broke off, evidently reluctant to do as she
wished. "I say," he began again with a sudden thought, "you like that
hat you're trying on, don't you?"
Instantly Sylvia, who was a woman, though a very young one, turned to
the glass again, settled the hat on her head and looked at herself
critically.
"The ribbons stick up too much, don't they?" she asked, speaking to Miss
Wimpole, and quite forgetting Archie Harmon's presence. "Yes, of course
they do! The ribbons stick up too much," she repeated to the milliner
in French.
A brilliant idea had struck Archie Harmon. He was already at the desk,
where a young woman in black received the payments of passing customers
with a grieved manner.
"She says the ribbons stick up too much," he said to the person at the
desk. "You get them to stick up just right, will you? The way she
wants them. How much did you say the hat was? Eighty francs? There it
is. Just say that it's paid for, when she asks for the bill."
The young woman in black raked in the note and the bits of gold he gave
her, catching them under her hard, thin thumb on the edge of the desk,
and counting them as she slipped them into her little drawer. She
looked rather curiously at Archie, and there was still some surprise in
her sour face when he was already on the pavement outside. He stopped
under the awning again, and peered through the window for a last look at
the grey figure before the mirror, but he fled precipitately when Sylvia
turned as though she were going to look at him. He was thoroughly
delighted with himself. It was just what Colonel Wimpole had done about
the miniature, he thought; and then, a hat was so much more useful than
a piece of painted ivory.
In a quarter of an hour he was in his own room again, sitting quite
quietly on a chair by the window, and thinking how happy he was, and how
pleased Sylvia must be by that time.
But Sylvia's behaviour when she found out what he had done would have
damped his innocent joy, if he had been looking through the windows of
the shop, instead of sitting in his own room. Her father, the admiral,
had a hot temper, and she had inherited some of it.
"Impertinent young idiot!" she exclaimed, when she realized that he had
actually paid for the hat, and the angry blood rushed to her face. "What
in the world--" She could not find words.
"He is half-witted, poor boy," interrupted Miss Wimpole. "Take the hat,
and I will manage to give his mother the money."
"Betty Foy and her idiot boy over again!" said Sylvia, with all the
brutal cruelty of extreme youth. "'That all who view the idiot in his
glory'--" As the rest of the quotation was not applicable, she stopped
and stamped her little foot in speechless indignation.
"The young gentleman doubtless thought to give Mademoiselle pleasure,"
suggested the milliner, suavely. "He is doubtless a relation--"
"He is not a relation at all!" exclaimed Sylvia in English, to Miss
Wimpole. "My relations are not idiots, thank Heaven! And it's the only
one of all those hats that I could wear! Oh, Aunt Rachel, what shall I
do? I can't possibly take the thing, you know! And I must have a hat.
I've come all the way from Japan with this old one, and it isn't fit to
be seen."
"There is no reason why you should not take this one," said Miss
Wimpole, philosophically. "I promise you that Mrs. Harmon shall have the
money by to-night, since she is here. Your Uncle Richard will go and
see her at once, of course, and he can manage it. They are on terms of
intimacy," she added rather primly, for Helen Harmon was the only person
in the world of whom she had ever been jealous.
"You always use such dreadfully correct language, Aunt Rachel," answered
the young girl. "Why don't you say that they are old friends? 'Terms of
intimacy' sounds so severe, somehow."
"You seem impatient, my dear," observed Miss Wimpole, as though stating
a fact about nature.
"I am," answered Sylvia. "I know I am. You would be impatient if an
escaped lunatic rushed into a shop and paid for your gloves, or your
shoes, or your hat, and then rushed off again, goodness knows where.
Wouldn't you? Don't you think I am right?"
"You had better tell them to send the hat to the hotel," suggested Aunt
Rachel, not paying the least attention to Sylvia's appeal for
justification.
"If I must take it, I may as well wear it at once, and look like a human
being," said Sylvia. "That is, if you will really promise to send Mrs.
Harmon the eighty francs at once."
"I promise," answered Miss Wimpole, solemnly, and as she had never
broken her word in her life, Sylvia felt that the difficulty was at an
end.
The milliner smiled sweetly, and bowed them out.
"All the same," said Sylvia, as she walked up the street with the pretty
hat on her head, "it is an outrageous piece of impertinence. Idiots
ought not to be allowed to go about alone."
"I should think you would pity the poor fellow," said Miss Wimpole, with
a sort of severe kindliness, that was genuine but irritating.
"Oh yes! I will pity him by and by, when I'm not angry," answered the
young girl. "Of course--it's all right, Aunt Rachel, and I'm not
depraved nor heartless, really. Only, it was very irritating."
"You had better not say anything about it to your Uncle Richard, my
dear. He is so fond of Archie's mother that he will feel very badly
about it. I will break it to him gently."
"Would he?" asked Sylvia, in surprise. "About herself, I should
understand--but about that boy! I can't see why he should mind."
"He 'minds,' as you call it, everything that has to do with Mrs.
Harmon."
Sylvia glanced at her companion, but said nothing, and they walked on in
silence for some time. It was still hot, for the sun had not sunk
behind the mountains; but the street was full of people, who walked
about indifferent to the temperature, because Switzerland is supposed to
be a cold country, and they therefore thought that it was their own
fault if they felt warm. This is the principle upon which nine people
out of ten see the world when they go abroad. And there was a fine crop
of European and American varieties of the tourist taking the air on that
afternoon, men, women, and children. The men who had huge field-glasses
slung over their shoulders by straps predominated, and one, by whom
Sylvia was particularly struck, was arrayed in blue serge
knickerbockers, patent-leather walking-boots, and a very shiny high hat.
But there were also occasional specimens of what she called the human
being--men in the ordinary garments of civilization, and not provided
with opera-glasses. There were, moreover, young and middle-aged women
in short skirts, boots with soles half an inch thick, complexions in
which the hue of the boiled lobster vied with the deeper tone of the
stewed cherry, bearing alpenstocks that rang and clattered on the
pavement; women who, in the state of life to which Heaven had called
them, would have gone to Margate or Staten Island for a Sunday outing,
but who had rebelled against providence, and forced the men of their
families to bring them abroad. And the men generally walked a little
behind them and had no alpenstocks, but carried shawls and paper
bundles, badges of servitude, and hoped that they might not meet
acquaintances in Lucerne, because their women looked like angry cooks
and had no particular luggage. Now and then a smart old gentleman with
an eyeglass, in immaculate grey or white, threaded his way along the
pavement, with an air of excessive boredom; or a young couple passed by,
in the recognizable newness of honeymoon clothes, the young wife talking
perpetually, and evidently laughing at the ill-dressed women, while the
equally young husband answered in monosyllables, and was visibly nervous
lest his bride's remarks should be overheard and give offence.
Then there were children, obtrusively English children, taken abroad to
be shown the miserable inferiority of the non-British world, and to
learn that every one who had not yellow hair and blue eyes was a 'nasty
foreigner,'--unless, of course, the individual happened to be English,
in which case nothing was said about hair and complexion. And also
there were the vulgar little children of the not long rich, repulsively
disagreeable to the world in general, but pathetic in the eyes of
thinking men and women. They are the sprouting shoots of the gold-tree,
beings predestined never to enjoy, because they will be always able to
buy what strong men fight for, and will never learn to enjoy what is
really to be had only for money; and the measure of value will not be in
their hands and heads, but in bank-books, out of which their manners
have been bought with mingled affection and vanity. Surely, if anything
is more intolerable than a vulgar woman, it is a vulgar child. The poor
little thing is produced by all nations and races, from the Anglo-Saxon
to the Slav. Its father was happy in the struggle that ended in
success. When it grows old, its own children will perhaps be happy in
the sort of refined existence which wealth can bring in the third
generation. But the child of the man grown suddenly rich is a living
misfortune between two happinesses: neither a worker nor an enjoyer;
having neither the satisfaction of the one, nor the pleasures of the
other; hated by its inferiors in fortune, and a source of amusement to
its ethic and aesthetic betters.
Sylvia had never thought much about the people she passed in a crowd.
Thought is generally the result of suffering of some kind, bodily or
intellectual, and she had but little acquaintance with either. She had
travelled much, and had been very happy until the present time, having
been shown the world on bright days and by pleasant paths. But to-day
she was not happy, and she began to wonder how many of the men and women
in the street had what she had heard called a 'secret care.' Her eyes
had been red when she had at last yielded to Miss Wimpole's entreaties
to open the door, but the redness was gone already, and when she had
tried on the hat before the glass she had seen with a little vanity,
mingled with a little disappointment, that she looked very much as
usual, after all. Indeed, there had been more than one moment when she
had forgotten her troubles because the ribbons on the new hat stuck up
too much. Yet she was really unhappy, and sad at heart. Perhaps some
of the people she passed, even the women with red faces, dusty skirts,
and clattering alpenstocks, were unhappy too.
She was not a foolish girl, nor absurdly romantic, nor full of silly
sentimentalities, any more than she was in love with Colonel Wimpole in
the true sense of the word. For she knew nothing of its real meaning,
and, apart from that meaning, what she felt for him filled all the
conditions proposed by her imagination. If one could classify the ways
by which young people pass from childhood to young maturity, one might
say that they are brought up by the head, by the imagination, or by the
heart, and one might infer that their subsequent lives are chiefly
determined by that one of the three which has been the leading-string.
Sylvia's imagination had generally had the upper hand, and it had been
largely fed and cultivated by her guardian, though quite unintentionally
on his part. His love of artistic things led him to talk of them, and
his chivalric nature found sources of enthusiasm in lofty ideals, while
his own life, directed and moved as it was by a secret, unchanging and
self-sacrificing devotion to one good woman, might have served as a
model for any man. Modest, and not much inclined to think of himself,
he did not realize that although the highest is quite beyond any one's
reach, the search after it is always upward, and may lead a good man
very far.
Sylvia saw the result, and loved it for its own sake with an attachment
so strong that it made her blind to the more natural sort of humanity
which the colonel seemed to have outgrown, and which, after all, is the
world as we inherit it, to love it, or hate it, or be indifferent to it,
but to live with it, whether we will or not. He fulfilled her ideal,
because it was an ideal which he himself had created in her mind, and to
which he himself nearly approached. Logically speaking, she was in a
vicious circle, and she liked what he had taught her to like, but liked
it more than he knew she did.
Sylvia glanced at Miss Wimpole sideways. She knew her simple story, and
wondered whether she herself was to live the same sort of life. The
idea rather frightened her, to tell the truth, for she knew the aridity
of the elderly maiden lady's existence, and dreaded anything like it.
But it was very simple and logical and actual. Miss Wimpole had loved a
man who had been killed. Of course she had never married, nor ever
thought of loving any one else. It was perfectly simple. And Sylvia
loved, and was not loved, as she told herself, and she also must look
forward to a perpetually grey life.
Then, suddenly, she felt how young she was, and she knew that the
colonel was almost an old man, and her heart rebelled. But this seemed
disloyal, and she blushed at the word 'unfaithful,' which spoke itself
in her sensitive conscience with the cruel power to hurt which such
words have against perfect innocence. Besides, it was as if she were
quarrelling with what she liked, because she could not have it, and she
felt as though she were thinking childishly, which is a shame in youth's
eyes.
Also, she was nervous about meeting him again, for she had not seen him
since she had fled from the room in tears, though he had seen her on the
bridge. She wished that she might not see him at all for a whole day,
at least, and that seemed a very long time.
Altogether, when she went into the hotel again, she was in a very
confused state of mind and heart, and was beginning to wish that she had
never been born. But that was childish, too.
CHAPTER IV