Mrs. Raeburn could not make up her mind.
"If any daughter of yours goes play-acting," went on Mrs. Purkiss, "I can't allow her to come to tea with my Percy and my Claude any more, and that's all about it."
"Jenny doesn't think going to tea with her cousins anything to wave flags over."
"Pig-headed, that's what you are, Florence. All the years you've been a sister of mine, I've known you for a pig-headed woman. It doesn't matter whether you're ill or well, right or wrong, no one mustn't advise you. That's how you come to marry Charlie."
The opposition of Mrs. Purkiss inclined her sister to give way before Jenny's desire. It only needed a little more family interference, and the child would be taken straight off to Madame Aldavini's School for Dancing.
Miss Horner supplied it; for, two or three days after, aletter came from Clapton, written in a quavering hand crossed and recrossed on thin, crackling paper, deeply edged in black.
Carminia House,February 20th.Dear Florence,My niece Mabel writes to tell us you intend to make your little girl an actress. This news has been a great shock to me. You must not forget that she is a granddaughter of Frederick Horner, the Chymist. She must not be a harlot given over to paint and powder. God is jealous of the safety of His lambs. This plan of dancing is a snare of Satan. You should read the Word, my dear niece. You will read of young maidens who danced before the Ark of the Covenant in the joy of the Lord, but that is not to say your little girl should dance for lewdness and gold when she might be singing the sweet songs of Salvation and joining in the holy mirth of the Children of Israel. If you had let us adopt her, this desire would not have come. We do not let the Devil into our house. You will be the cause of my death, niece, with your wicked intentions. I am an old woman very near to Emmanuel. This great sin must not be.Your loving aunt,Alice Horner.P. S.—I am in bed, but with the warmer weather I shall come to see you, my dear niece, and warn you again.—A. H.
Carminia House,February 20th.
Dear Florence,
My niece Mabel writes to tell us you intend to make your little girl an actress. This news has been a great shock to me. You must not forget that she is a granddaughter of Frederick Horner, the Chymist. She must not be a harlot given over to paint and powder. God is jealous of the safety of His lambs. This plan of dancing is a snare of Satan. You should read the Word, my dear niece. You will read of young maidens who danced before the Ark of the Covenant in the joy of the Lord, but that is not to say your little girl should dance for lewdness and gold when she might be singing the sweet songs of Salvation and joining in the holy mirth of the Children of Israel. If you had let us adopt her, this desire would not have come. We do not let the Devil into our house. You will be the cause of my death, niece, with your wicked intentions. I am an old woman very near to Emmanuel. This great sin must not be.
Your loving aunt,Alice Horner.
P. S.—I am in bed, but with the warmer weather I shall come to see you, my dear niece, and warn you again.—A. H.
"Good thing she is in bed," commented Mrs. Raeburn, as she finished reading her aunt's letter.
"What's all this about Jenny going for a dancer?" asked Charlie that evening.
"Whatever has it got to do with you, I should like to know?" said his wife.
"Well, I am her father, when all's said and done. Aren't I?"
"And a nice example to a child. I suppose somebody's got to look after you when I die."
"I expect the old man will die first. I've been feeling very poorly this year."
"First I've heard of it."
"Why, only last night my finger was hurting something chronic."
"Show me."
"Be careful." Mr. Raeburn offered the sick finger for his wife's inspection.
"I can't see nothing."
"There, blessed if I'm not showing of you the wrong hand."
"You must have been shocking bad."
"Well, it's better now."
"That's enough of you and your fingers. Why shouldn't Jenny be a dancer?" persisted Mrs. Raeburn.
"Don't go blaring it all over the neighborhood, anyhow, and don't give me the blame for it if anything goes wrong."
"Look here, Charlie, when I married you, I hadn't got nothing better to do, had I?"
Charlie shook his head in sarcastic astonishment.
"Yes," went on Mrs. Raeburn. "You can wag your great, silly head, but I'm not going to have my Jenny marryinganybody. She's going to be able to say, 'No, thank you,' to a sight of young chaps. And if I can't look after her sharp when she's at the theater, I can't look after her anywhere else, that's very certain."
"Well, I call it rank nonsense—rank nonsense, that's what I call it, and don't you turn round on me and say I put it into her head. What theater's she going to?"
"You silly man, she's got to learn first."
"Learn what?"
"Learn dancing—at a school."
"Learn dancing? If she's got to learn dancing, what's the sense in her going for an actress?"
"You had to learn carpentering, didn't you?"
"Of course, but that's very different to dancing. Anybody can dance—some better than others; butlearndancing—well, there, the ideas some women gets in their heads, it's against all nature."
"Have you finished? Because I got my washing to see to. You go and talk it over at the 'Arms.' I reckon they've got more patience than me."
Jenny was in bed when her mother told her she should become a pupil of Madame Aldavini.
"Aren't you glad?" she asked, as her daughter made no observation.
"Yes; it's all right," said Jenny, coldly it seemed.
"You are a comical child."
"Shall I go to-morrow?"
"We'll see."
Mrs. Raeburn thought to herself, as she left the room, how strange children were; and, having settled Jenny's future, she began to worry about May, who was just then showing symptoms of a weak spine, and lay awake thinking of her children half the night.
ON Mr. Vergoe's recommendation, Madame Aldavini granted an interview to Mrs. Raeburn and her daughter, and the old clown was to accompany them on the difficult occasion.
It was a warm April day when they set out, with a sky like the matrix of turquoise. The jagged purple clouds were so high that all felt the outside of an omnibus was the only place on such a day. Mrs. Raeburn and Jenny sat in front, and Mr. Vergoe sat immediately behind them, pointing out every object of interest on the route. At least, he pointed out everything until they reached Sadlers Wells Theater, after which reminiscences of Sadlers Wells occupied the rest of the journey. They swung along Rosebery Avenue and into Theobald's Road and pulled up at last by Southampton Row. Then they walked through a maze of narrow streets to Madame Aldavini's school, in Great Queen Street. No longer can it be found; whatever ghosts of deadcoryphéeshaunt the portals must spend a draughty purgatory in the very middle of Kingsway.
It was a tall, gray Georgian house, with flat windows and narrow sills and a suitable cornice of dancing Loves and Graces over the door, which had a large brass plate engraved with "School of Dancing," and more bells beside it than Jenny had ever seen beside one door in her life. She thought what games could be played with Great Queen Street and its inhabitants,if it were in Islington and all the houses had as many bells. Mr. Vergoe pressed a button labeled "Aldavini," and presently they were walking along a dark, dusty passage into a little paneled room with a large desk and pictures of dancers in every imaginable kind of costume. At the desk sat Madame Aldavini herself in a dress of tawny satin. Jenny thought she looked like an organ-woman, with her dark, wrinkled face and glittering black eyes.
"And how is Mr. Vergoe?" she inquired.
"How areyou, Madame?" he replied, with great deference.
"I am very well, thank you."
Mrs. Raeburn was presented and dropped her umbrella in embarrassment, making Jenny feel very much ashamed of her mother and wish she were alone with Mr. Vergoe. Then she was introduced herself, and as Madame Aldavini fixed her with a piercing eye, Jenny felt so shy that she was only able to murmur incoherent politeness to the floor.
The dancing-mistress got up from her desk and looked critically at the proposed pupil.
"You think the child will make a dancer?" she said, turning sharply to Mrs. Raeburn.
"Oh, well, really I—well, she's always jigging about, if that's anything to go by."
Madame Aldavini gave a contemptuous sniff.
"I think she will make a very good dancer," Mr. Vergoe put in.
"You've seen her?"
"Many times," he said. "In fact, this visit is due to me—in a manner of speaking."
"Come, we'll see what she can do," said the mistress, and led the way out of the little room along a glass-covered arcade into the dancing-room.
The latter was probably a Georgian ballroom with fine proportions and Italian ceiling. A portion of it was curtained off for the pupils to change into practice dress, and all the way round the walls was a rail for toe-dancing. At the far endwas a dais with a big arm-chair and a piano, over which hung a large oil painting of some bygone ballet at the Théâtre de l'Opéra in Paris, and also an engraving of Taglioni signed affectionately by that great Prima Ballerina Assoluta.
Madame Aldavini rang a bell, and presently Miss Carron, her pianist and assistant teacher, came in. Miss Carron was a Frenchwoman, who had lived so long in London that she spoke English better than French, except in moments of great anger, when her native tongue returned to her with an added force of expression from such long periods of quiescence.
"What tune do you like, miss?" inquired Madame. "What is her name? Jenny?Si, I have no Jenny at present."
But the would-be dancer had no tune by name.
"Play the what's it called from what's its name," suggested Mr. Vergoe, to help matters along.
"Hein?" said Miss Carron sharply.
"The—you know—the—the—well, anyway, it goes like this," and he hummed the opening bars of the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria."
"Ah!" said Miss Carron. "But that's no tune to dance to. You want something to show off the twiddly-bits."
"Play the Intermezzo," commanded Madame Aldavini.
Miss Carron began, but Jenny could only wriggle in a shamefaced way, and was too shy to start.
"You great stupid," said her mother.
"One, two, three, off," said Mr. Vergoe.
"You are frightened, yes? Timid? Come, I shall not eat you," declared Madame.
At last the novice produced a few steps.
"Enough," said Madame. "I take her. She will come once a week for the first year, twice a week for the second year, three times a week the third year and every day—how old is she?"
"Ten."
"Every day when she is thirteen."
The further details of Jenny's apprenticeship were settled inthe little paneled room, while Jenny listened to wonderful instructions about stockings and shoes and skirts. When it was all over the three visitors walked out of the gray house, where Jenny was to spend so many hours of childhood, into Great Queen Street and an April shower sprinkling the pavement with large preliminary drops. Mr. Vergoe insisted on standing tea at a shop in Holborn for the luck of the adventure. Jenny's first chocolateéclairprobably made a more abiding impression on her mind than the first meeting with Madame Aldavini.
So Jenny became a dancer and went, under her mother's escort, to Great Queen Street once a week for a year.
The pupils of Madame Aldavini all wore pink tarlatan skirts, black stockings clocked with pink, and black jerseys with a large pink A worked on the front. There were about twenty girls in Jenny's class, who all had lockers and pegs of their own in the anteroom curtained off by black velvet draperies. Fat theatrical managers with diamond rings and buttonholes sometimes used to sit beside Madame and watch the pupils. She sat on the dais, whence her glittering black eyes and keen face could follow the dancers everywhere. Jenny used to think the mistress was like a black note of the piano come to life. There was something so clean and polished and clear-cut about Madame. Her eyes, she used to think, were like black currants. Madame's feet in black satin shoes were restless all the while beneath her petticoats; but she never let them appear, so that the children should have no assistance beyond the long pole with which she used to mark the beat on the floor and sometimes on the shoulders of a refractory dancer.
Two years rolled by, and Jenny was able to go alone now. She was considered one of Madame Aldavini's best pupils, and several managers wanted her for fairy parts, but Mrs. Raeburn always refused, and Madame Aldavini, because she thought that Jenny might be spoilt by too premature a first appearance, did not try persuasion.
As might have been expected, the instant that Jenny had her own way and was fairly set on the road to the gratification ofher wishes, she began to be lazy. She was so far a natural dancer that nearly every step came very easily to her. This facility was fatal, for unless she learned at once, she would not take the trouble to learn at all. Madame used to write home to Hagworth Street complaints of her indolence, and Mrs. Raeburn used to threaten to take her away from the school. Then for a very short time Jenny would work really hard.
At thirteen she went every day to the dancing school, and at thirteen Jenny had deliciously slim legs and a figure as lithe as a hazel wand. Her almond eyes were of some fantastic shade of sapphire-blue with deep gray twilights in them and sea-green laughters. They were extraordinary eyes whose under-lids always closed first. Her curls never won back the silver they lost in the country; but her complexion had the bloom and delicate texture of a La France rose, although in summer her straight little nose was freckled like a bird's egg. Her hands were long and white; her lips very crimson and translucent, but the under-lip protruded slightly, and bad temper gave it a vicious look. Her teeth were small, white, and glossy as a cat's. She cast a powerful enchantment over all the other girls, so that when, from tomboy loiterings and mischievous escorts, she arrived late for class, they would all run round for her with shoes and petticoats and stockings, like little slaves. Laughingly, she would let them wait upon her and wonder very seldom why she was the only girl so highly favored. She had a sharp tongue and no patience for the giggles and enlaced arms of girlhood. She had no whispered secrets to communicate. She never put out a finger to help her companions, although sometimes she would prompt the next girl through a difficult step. She was entirely indifferent to their adoration. As if the blood of queens ran in her veins, she accepted homage naturally. Perhaps it was some boyish quality of debonair assurance in Jenny that made the rest of them disinclined to find any fault in her. She seemed as though she ought to be spoilt, and if, like most spoilt children, she was unpleasant athome, she was very charming abroad. Her main idea of amusement was to be "off with the boys," by whom she was treated as an equal. There was no sentiment about her, and an attempted kiss would have provoked spitfire rage. There was something of Atalanta about her, and in Hellas Artemis would have claimed her, running by the thyme-scented borders of Calydon.
Madame Aldavini, with some disapproval, watched her progress. She was not satisfied with her pupil and determined to bring her down to the hard facts of the future. Jenny was called up for a solo lesson. These solo lessons, when Madame used to show the steps by making her fingers dance on her knees, were dreaded by everybody.
"Come along now," she said, and hummed an old ballet melody, tapping her fingers the while.
Jenny started off well enough, but lost herself presently in trying to follow those quick fingers.
"Again, foolish one," cried the mistress. "Again, I say. Well can you do it, if you like."
"I can't," declared Jenny sulkily. "It's too difficult."
Madame Aldavini seized her long pole and brandished it fiercely.
"Again, self-willed baby, again."
Jenny, with half a screwed-up eye on the pole, made a second attempt; the pole promptly swung round and caught her on the right shoulder. She began to cry and stamp.
"I can't do it; I can't do it."
"You will do it. You shall do it."
Once more Jenny started, and this time succeeded so well that it was only at the very end of the new step that Madame angrily pushed the pole between her pretty ankles, rattling it from side to side to show her contempt for Jenny's obstinacy.
"For it is obstinacy," she declared. "It is not stupidity. Bah! well can you do it, if you like."
So Madame conquered in the end with her long pole andher sharp tongue, and Jenny learned the new and difficult step.
"Listen to me," said the former. "Do you not wish to become a Prima Ballerina?"
"Yes," murmured Jenny, the sooner to be out of Madame's reach, and back with the boys in Islington.
"You have not the banal smile of thedanseusewho takes her strength from her teeth. You have not the fat forearm or dreadful wrist of those idiots who take their strength from them, and, thanks to me, you might even become a Prima Ballerina Assoluta."
The words of an old comic song about a girl called Di who hailed from Utah and became a Prima Ballerina Assoluta returned, with its jingling tune, to Jenny's head, while Madame was talking.
"Whistle not while I talk, inattentive one," cried her mistress, banging the pole down with a thump.
"Have you dreams of success, of bouquets and sables and your own carriage? Look around you, lazy one. Look at the great Taglioni whom emperors and kings applauded. Yet you, miserable child, you can only now make one 'cut.' Why do you come here unless you have ambition to succeed, to bemaîtresseof your art, to sweep through the stage door with silk dresses? Do I choose you from the others to dance to me, unless I wish your fortune—eh? If, after this, you work not, I finish with you. I let you go your own pig-headed way."
Jenny did work for a while, and even persevered and practiced so diligently as to be able to do a double cut and a fairly high beat, sweeping all the cups and saucers off the kitchen table as she did so. But when she had achieved this accomplishment, how much nearer was she to a public appearance, a triumphant success? What was the use of practicing difficult steps for the eyes of Ruby? What was the use of holding on to the handle of the kitchen door and putting one leg straight up till her toes twinkled over the top of it? Ruby only said, "You unnatural thing," or drew her breath in through ridgedteeth in horrified amazement. What was the good of slaving all day? It was better to enjoy one's self by standing on the step of young Willie Hopkins' new bicycle and floating round Highbury Barn with curls and petticoats flying, and peals of wild laughter. It was much more pleasant to shock old ladies by puffing the smoke of cigarettes before them, or to play Follow my Leader over the corrugated-iron roof of an omnibus depot.
Sometimes she took to playing truant for wind-blown afternoons by Highgate Ponds in the company of boys, and always made the same excuse to Madame of being wanted at home, until Madame grew suspicious and wrote to Mrs. Raeburn.
Her mother asked why Jenny had not gone to her dancing-lesson, and where she had been.
"Iwasthere," vowed Jenny. "Madame can't have noticed me."
So Mrs. Raeburn wrote and explained the mistake, and Jenny managed with great anxiety to obtain possession of the letter, ostensibly in order to post it, but really in order to tear it to a hundred pieces round the corner.
She was naturally a truthful child, but the long restraint of childhood had to be mitigated somehow, and lying to those in authority was no sacrifice of her egotism, the basis of all essential truthfulness. With her contemporaries she was always proudly, indeed painfully, frank.
This waiting to grow up was unendurable. Everybody else was emancipated except herself. Ruby went away to be married—a source of much speculation to Jenny, who could not understand anybody desiring to live in a state of such corporeal intimacy with Ruby.
"I'm positive he don't know she snores," said Jenny to her mother.
"Well, what's it got to do with you?"
What, indeed, had anything to do with her? It was shocking how utterly unimportant she was to Hagworth Street.
Edie had gone away to learn dressmaking, and Alfie had vanished into some Midland town to learn something else, and occupying his room there was another lodger whom she liked. Then one day he came into the kitchen in a queer brown suit and said he was "off to the Front."
"Gone for a soldier?" said her father, when he heard of it. "Good Lord! some people don't know when they're well off, and that's a fact."
There was nobody to inflame Jenny with the burning splendors of patriotism. It became merely a matter of clothes, like everything else. She gathered it was the correct thing to wear khaki ties, sometimes with scarlet for the soldiers or blue for the sailors. It was also not outrageous to wear a Union Jack waistcoat. But any conception of a small nation fighting inch by inch for their sun-parched country, of a great nation sacrificing even its sense of humor to consolidate an empire and avenge a disgrace, was entirely outside her imaginative experience.
What had it got to do with her?
There was nobody to implant ideals of citizenship or try to show her relation to the rest of mankind. Her education at the board school was mechanical; the mistresses were like mental coffee-grinders, who, having absorbed a certain number of hard facts roasted by somebody else, distributed them in a more easily assimilated form. They tried to give children the primary technique of knowledge, but without any suggestions as to the manner of application. She had enough common sense to grasp the ultimate value of drearily reiterated practice steps in dancing. She perceived that they were laying the foundation of something better. It was only her own impatience which nullified some of the practical results of much academic instruction. But of her intellectual education the foundations were not visible at all. The teachers were building on sand a house which would topple over as soon as she was released from attendance at school. Jenny was a sufferer from the period of transition through which educational theories were passing, and might have been better off under the oldsystem of picturesque misapprehensions of truth, or even with no deliberate education at all. It is important to understand the stark emptiness of Jenny's mind now and for a long while afterwards. Life was a dragging, weary affair unless she was being amused. There had been no mental adventures since, flashing and glorious, the idea of dancing came furiously through the night as she lay awake thinking of the pantomime. The fault was not hers. She was the victim of sterile imaginations. Her soul was bleak and cold as the life of man in the days before Prometheus stole fire from heaven.
If it had not been for May, Jenny would have been even less satisfactory than she was. But May, with her bird-like gayety—not obstreperous like a blackbird's, but sweet and inconspicuous as the song of a goldfinch dipping through the air above apple-orchards—May, with her easy acceptance of physical deformity, shamed her out of mere idle discontent. Jenny would talk to her of the dancing-school till May knew every girl's peculiarity.
"She's funny, my sister. She's a caution, is young May. Poor kid, a shame about her back."
They quarreled, of course, over trifles, but May was the only person to whom Jenny would behave as if she were sorry for anything she had done or said. She never admitted her penitence in word to anybody on earth. It was a pleasure to Mrs. Raeburn, this fondness of Jenny for May, and once in a rare moment of confidence, she told the elder child that she depended on her to look after May when she herself was gone.
"With her poor little back she won't ever be able to earn her living—not properly, and when you're on the stage and getting good money, you mustn't leave May out in the cold."
Here was something vital, a tangible appeal, not a sentiment broadly expressed without obvious application like the culminating line of a hymn. Here was a reason, and Jenny clung fast to it as a drowning seafarer will clutch at samphire, unconsciousof anything save greenery and blessed land. People were not accustomed to give Jenny reasons. When she had one, usually self-evolved, she held fast to it, nor cared a jot about its possible insecurity. Reasons were infrequent bits of greenery to one battered by a monotonous and empty ocean; for Jenny's mind was indeed sea-water with the flotsam of wrecked information, with wonderful hues evanescent, with the sparkle and ripple of momentary joys, with the perpetual booming of discontent, sterile and unharvested.
One breezy June day, much the same sort of day as that when Jenny danced under the plane-tree, Madame Aldavini told her she could give her a place as one of the quartette of dancers in a Glasgow pantomime.
"But, listen," said Madame, "what they want is acrobatic dancing. If you join this quartette, it does not mean you give up dancing—ballet-dancing, you understand; you will come back to me when the pantomime is over until you are able to join the Ballet at Covent Garden. You will not degrade your talent by sprawling over shoulders, by handsprings and splits and the tricks which an English audience likes. You understand?"
Jenny did not really understand anything beyond the glorious fact that in December she would be away from Hagworth Street and free at last to do just as she liked.
Mrs. Raeburn, when she heard of the proposal, declined to entertain its possibility. It was useless for Jenny to sulk and slam doors, and demand furiously why she had been allowed to learn dancing if she was not to be allowed ever to make a public appearance.
"Time enough for that in the future," said her mother. "There'll always be plenty of theaters."
Jenny became desperate. Her dreams of a glorious freedom were fading. That night she took to bed with her a knife.
"What are you doing with that knife?" said May.
"I'm going to kill myself," said Jenny.
Pale as a witch, she sat on the edge of the bed. White washer face as a countenance seen in a looking-glass at dawn. Her lips were closed; her eyes burned.
May shrieked.
"Mother—dad—come quick: Jenny's going to kill herself with the carving-knife."
Mrs. Raeburn rushed into the room and saw the child with the blade against her throat. She snatched away the knife.
"Whatever was you going to do?"
"I want to go to Glasgow," said Jenny; "and I'll kill myself if I don't."
"I'll give you 'kill yourself,'" cried Mrs. Raeburn, slapping her daughter's cheeks so that a crimson mark burned on its dead paleness.
"Well, I will," said Jenny.
"We'll see about it," said Mrs. Raeburn. Jenny knew she had won; and deserved victory, for she had meant what she said. Her mother was greatly perplexed. Who would look after Jenny?
Madame Aldavini explained that there would be three other girls, that they would all live together, that she herself would see them all established, as she had to go north herself to give the final touches to the ballet which she was producing; that no harm would come to Jenny; that she would really be more strictly looked after than she was at home.
"That's quite impossible," said Mrs. Raeburn.
Madame smiled sardonically.
"However," Mrs. Raeburn went on, "I suppose she's got to make a start some time. So let her go."
Now followed an interlude from toe-dancing—an interlude which Jenny enjoyed, although once she nearly strained herself doing the "strides." But acrobatic dancing came very easily to her, and progress was much more easily discernible than in the long and tiresome education for the ballet.
Of the other three girls who were to make up the Aldavini Quartette, only one was still at the school. She was a plump girl called Eileen Vaughan, three years older than Jenny, primand, in the latter's opinion, "very stuck up." Jenny hoped that the other two would be more fun than Eileen. Eileen was a pig, although she liked her name.
Great problems arose in Hagworth Street out of Jenny's embarkation upon the ship of life. So long as she had been merely a pupil of Madame Aldavini's, family opposition to her choice of a profession had slumbered; but with the prospect of her speedy debut, it broke out again very fiercely.
Old Miss Horner had died soon after her letter of protest against the dancing notion, and Miss Mary was left alone in Carminia House—in isolated survival, a pathetic more than a severe figure. However, she ventured to pay a visit to her niece in order to present a final remonstrance, but she lacked the power of her two elder sisters. What they commanded, she besought. What they declared, she hinted. Mrs. Raeburn felt quite sorry for the poor old thing, as she nodded on about salvation and temptation and the wages of sin. Old Miss Horner used to be able to wing her platitudes with the flame of God's wrath, but Miss Mary let them appear as the leaden things they really were. She made no impression but that of her own loneliness, went back to Carminia House after declining a slice of cherry cake, and died shortly afterwards, to the great comfort of the Primitive Methodists of Sion Chapel, who gained velvet cushions for the pews in consequence, and became less primitive than ever.
Mrs. Raeburn could not help speculating for an hour or two upon the course of Jenny's life if she had accepted her aunts' offer, but went to sleep at the end of it thinking, anyway, it would be all the same a hundred years hence.
Mrs. Purkiss came and registered a vow never to come again if Jenny really went; but she had registered so many vows in her sister's hearing that Mrs. Raeburn had come to regard them with something of that familiarity which must ultimately dull the surprise of a Commissioner for Oaths, and treated them as a matter of course.
Uncle James Threadgale, with face as pale and square asever, but with hair slightly damper and thinner, suggested that Jenny should come down to Galton for a bit and think it over. This offer being pleasantly declined, he gave her a roll of blue serge and asked a blessing on the undertaking.
Charlie, having found that he was easily able to keep all knowledge of his daughter's lapse into publicity from his fellow-workmen at the shop in Kentish Town, decided to celebrate her imminent departure to the boreal pole (Glasgow soon achieved a glacial topography in Hagworth Street), by giving a grand supper-party.
"We'll have old Vergoe and Madame Neverseenher"—his witty periphrasis for Aldavini—"and a brother of mine you've none of you never seen either, a rare comic, or he used to be, though where he is now, well, that wants knowing."
"What's the good of saying he's to come to supper, then?" inquired Mrs. Raeburn.
"Only if he's about," explained Charlie. "If he's about, I'd like Jenny here to meet him, because he was always a big hand at club concerts twenty years ago, before he went to Africa. Arthur his namewas."
"Oh, for goodness sake, stop your talking," said Mrs. Raeburn.
"And you can't ask Madame," announced Jenny, who was horrified by the contemplation of a meeting between her father and the dancing-mistress.
"Andwhy not?Andwhy not? Will anybody here kindly tell me why not?"
"Because you can't," said Jenny decidedly.
"Of course not. The child's quite right," Mrs. Raeburn corroborated.
"Well, of course, you all know better than the old man. But I daresay she'd like to talk about Paris with your poor old dad."
However, notwithstanding the elision of all Mr. Raeburn's proposed guests from the list of invitations, the supper did happen, and the master of the house derived some consolationfrom being allowed to preside at the head of his own table, if not sufficiently far removed from his wife to enjoy himself absolutely. Mr. Vergoe, getting a very old man now, came with Miss Lilli Vergoe, still a second-line girl at the Orient Theater of Varieties, and Edie arrived from Brixton, where she was learning to make dresses. Eileen Vaughan came, at Mrs. Raeburn's instigation and much to Jenny's disgust, and Mr. Smithers, the new lodger, a curly-headed young draper's assistant, tripped down from his room upstairs. May, of course, was present, and Alfie sent a picture postcard from Northampton, showing the after-effects of a party. This was put upon the mantelpiece and greatly diverted the company. Mrs. Purkiss was invited, and pasty-faced Percy and Claude and Mr. Purkiss were also invited, but Mrs. Purkiss signalized her disapproval by taking no notice of the invitation, thereby throwing Mrs. Raeburn into a regular flutter of uncertainty. Nevertheless, she turned up ten minutes late with both her offspring, to everybody's great disappointment and Mrs. Raeburn's great anxiety, when she saw with what a will her nephews settled down to the tinned tongue.
The supper passed off splendidly, and nearly everything was eaten and praised. Mrs. Purkiss talked graciously to Mr. Smithers about the prospects of haberdashery and the principles of window-dressing and, somewhat tactlessly, about the advantage of cash registers. Charlie gave a wonderfully humorous description of his first crossing of the English Channel. Percy and Claude ate enormously, and Percy was sick, to his uncle's immense entertainment and profound satisfaction, as it gave him an excuse to tell the whole story of the Channel crossing over again, ending up with: "It's all right, Perce. Cheer up, sonny, Dover's in sight."
Eileen ate self-consciously and gazed with considerable respectfulness at Miss Lilli Vergoe, who related pleasantly her many triumphs over the snares and duplicity of the new stage manager at the Orient. Mr. Vergoe chatted amiably with everybody in turn and made a great feature of helping thestewed tripe. May went into fits of laughter at everything and everybody, and Jenny discussed with Edie what style of dress should be made from the roll of blue serge presented to her by Uncle James.
After supper everybody settled down to make the evening a complete success.
Mr. Vergoe sang "Champagne Charlie" and "In Her Hair She Wore a White Camelia," and Mr. Raeburn joined in the chorus of the former with a note of personal satisfaction, while Mrs. Raeburn always said:
Neither Miss Vergoe nor Miss Vaughan would oblige with a dance, to the great disappointment of Mr. Smithers, who had hoped for a solution of many sartorial puzzles from such close proximity to two actresses. Jenny, however, was set on the table when the plates had been cleared away, and danced a breakdown to the great embarrassment of Mrs. Purkiss, who feared for pasty-faced Percy and Claude's sense of the shocking.
Percy recited Casabianca, and Claude, though he did not recite himself, prompted his brother in so many of the lines that it became, to all purposes, a duet. Edie giggled in a corner with Mr. Smithers, and told the latter once or twice that he was a sauce-box and no mistake. Mr. Smithers himself sang "Queen of My Heart," in a mildly pleasant tenor voice, and, being encored, sang "Maid of Athens," and told Miss Vergoe, in confidence, that several persons had passed the remark that he was very like Lord Byron. To which Miss Vergoe, with great want of appreciation, replied, "Who cares?" and sent Mr. Smithers headlong back to the readier admiration of Edie.
It was a very delightful evening, indeed, whose most delightful moment, perhaps, was Mrs. Purkiss's retirement with Percy and Claude, leaving the rest of the party to settle themselves round the kitchen fire, roast chestnuts, eat oranges andapples, smoke, and drink the various drinks that became their ages and tastes.
"And what's Jenny going to call herself on the stage?" asked Mr. Vergoe.
"Whatdoesthe man mean?" said Mrs. Raeburn.
"Well, she must have a stage name. Raeburn is too long."
"It's no longer than Vergoe," argued Mrs. Raeburn, looking at Lilli.
"Oh, but she already had a stage name—so to speak," explained the old man proudly. "What's Jenny's second name?"
"Pearl," said Mrs. Raeburn.
"Oh, mother, you needn't go telling everybody."
"There you are," said Charlie, who had waited for this moment fourteen years. "There you are; I told you she wouldn't thank you for it when you would give it her. Pearl! Whoever heard? Tut-tut!"
"Why shouldn't she call herself Jenny Pearl—Miss Jenny Pearl?" said Mr. Vergoe. "If it isn't a good Christian name, it's a very showy stage name, as it were—or wait a bit—what about Jenny Vere? There was a queen or something called Jennivere—no now, I come to think of it, that was Guinevere."
"I can't think whatever on earth she wants to call herself anything different from what she is," persisted the mother.
"Well, I don't know either, but it's done. Even Lilli here, she spells her first name differently—L-i-double l-i, and Miss Vaughan here, I'll bet Vaughan ain't her own name—in a manner of speaking."
"Yes it is," said Miss Vaughan, pursing up her mouth so that it looked like a red flannel button.
But Mr. Vergoe was right—Miss Eileen Vaughan in Camberwell was Nellie Jaggs. Jenny soon found that out when they lived together, and wrote a postcard to Mr. Vergoe to tell him so.
"But why must she be Jenny Pearl?" asked Mrs. Raeburn."Although, mind, I don't say it isn't a very good name," she added, remembering it was her own conjunction.
"It's done," Mr. Vergoe insisted. "More flowery—I suppose—so to speak."
So Jenny Raeburn became Jenny Pearl, and her health was drunk and her success wished.
A few weeks afterward she stood on Euston platform, with a queer feeling, half-way between sickness and breathlessness, and was met by Madame Aldavini with Eileen and two older girls, and bundled into a reserved compartment. Very soon she was waving a handkerchief to her mother and May, already scarcely visible in the murk of a London fog. Life had begun.
EILEEN VAUGHAN was, of course, perfectly familiar to Jenny, but the two other girls who were to be her companions for several weeks had to be much observed during the first half-hour of the journey north.
Madame Aldavini was in a first-class compartment, as she wanted to be alone in order to work out on innumerable sheets of paper the arrangement of a new ballet. So the Aldavini Quartette shared between them the four corners of a third-class compartment. Jenny felt important to the world, when she read on the slip pasted to the window: "Reserved for Aldavini's Quartette, Euston to Glasgow." It was written in looking-glass writing, to be sure, but that only made the slow deciphering of it the more delightful.
However, it was read clearly at last, and Jenny turned round once more to look at her companions. Immediately opposite was Valérie Duval—a French girl with black fountains of hair, with full red lips and a complexion that darkened from ivory to warm Southern roses when the blood coursed to her cheeks. Her eyes glowed under heavy brown lids as she talked very sweetly in a contralto French accent. Soon she took Jenny on her knees and said:
"You will tell me all your secrets—yes?"
To which Jenny scoffingly answered:
"Secrets? I'm not one for secrets."
"But you will confide to me all yourpassions, your loves,—yes?"
"Love?" said Jenny, looking round over her shoulder at Valérie. "Love's silly."
Valérie smiled.
The other new friend was Winnie Ambrose—raspberries and cream and flaxen hair and dimpled chin and upper lip curling and a snub nose. She was one of those girls who never suggest the presence of stays, who always wear white blouses of crêpe de chine, cut low round a plump neck. They have bangles strung on their arms, and each one possesses a locket containing the inadequate portrait of an inadequate young man. But Winnie wasverynice, always ready for a joke.
The train swept them on northwards. Once, as it slowed to make a sharp curve, Jenny looked out of the window and saw the great express, like a line of dominoes with its black and white carriages. There was not much to look at, however, as they cleft the gray December airs, as they roared through echoing stations into tunnels and out again into the dreary light. They ate lunch, and Jenny drank Bass out of a bottle and spluttered and made queer faces and wrinkled up her gay, deep eyes in laughter unquenchable. They swept on through Lancashire with its chimneys and furnaces and barren heaps of refuse. They swung clear of these huddled populations and, through the gathering twilight, cut a way across the rolling dales of Cumberland. Jenny thought what horrible places they were, these sweeping moorland wastes with gray cottages no bigger than sheep, with switchback stone walls whence the crows flew as the train surged by. She was glad to be in the powdered, scented, untidy compartment in warmth and light. The child grew tired and, leaning her head on Valérie's breast, went to sleep; she was drowsily glad when Valérie kissed her, murmuring in a whisper melodious as the splash of the Saône against the warm piers of her native Lyons:
"Comme elle est gentille, la gosse."
Pillowed thus, Jenny spent the last hours of the journey with the dark crossing of the border, waking in the raw station air, waking to bundles being pulled down and papersgathered together and porters peering in through the door. Madame Aldavini said before she left them:
"To-morrow, girls, eleven o'clock at the theater."
And all the girls said, "Yes, Madame," and packed themselves into a cab with velvet cushions of faded peacock-blue and a smell of damp straps. There they sat with bundles heaped on their knees, and were jolted through the cold Glasgow streets. It was Saturday night, and all the curbstones were occupied by rocking drunkards, except in one wide street very golden and beautiful, from which they turned off to climb laboriously up the cobbles of a steep hill and pull up at last before a tall house in a tall, dark, quiet road.
They walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The big door swung open, to Jenny's great surprise, apparently without human agency. They stood in the well of a great winding stone staircase, while a husky voice called from somewhere high above them to come up.
They had a large sitting-room, too full of hangings and overburdened with photographs of rigid groups; but the fire was blazing up the chimney and the lamp was throwing a warm and comfortable halo on the ceiling. Jenny peeped out of the window and could see the black roofs of Glasgow in the starlight. They had tea when they arrived, with porridge, which Jenny disliked extremely, and oatcakes which made her cough; and after tea they unpacked. It was settled that Jenny should sleep with Valérie. The bedroom was cosy with slanting bits of ceiling flung anywhere, like a box of toy bricks put carelessly away. The bed, to Jenny's enormous diversion, was buried in a deep alcove.
"Whoever heard?" she asked.
"We'll be all to ourselves," said Valérie in her deep voice; and Jenny felt a thrill at the idea of lying snug in the alcove with Valérie's warm arm about her.
The sitting-room looked a very different place when the four girls had scattered over it their various belongings, when they had flung all the antimacassars into the corner in a coldwhite heap, when they had stuck a fan-shaped line of photographs round the mirror over the mantelpiece—photographs of fluffy-haired girls in gay dancing attitudes, usually inscribed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge, or Violet."
When she had pulled off most of the blobs on the valance of the mantelpiece and examined all the photographs, Jenny sat down on the white rabbit-skin rug with her back to the high iron fender and looked at her companions—at Winnie sprawling over a shining leather arm-chair, twisting one of the buttons that starred its round back, while she read "Will He Remember?"; at Eileen, writing home to Camberwell; at Valérie, as deep in a horse-hair sofa as the shape of it allowed, smoking a cigarette. She thought, while she sat there in the warmth and quiet, how jolly it was to be quit of the eternal sameness of Hagworth Street. She almost felt that Islington no longer existed, as if up here in this Glasgow flat she were in a new world.
"This is nice," she said. "Give us a cigarette, Val, there's a duck."
Bedtime came not at any fixed boring moment, but suddenly, with all the rapture of an inspiration. Bedtime came with Valérie taking, it seemed, hours to undress as she wandered round the room in a maze of white lace and pink ribbons. Jenny lay buried in the deep feather bed, watching her shadow on the crooked ceiling, following with drowsy glances the shadowy combing of what, in reflection, seemed an absolute waterfall of hair.
Then suddenly Valérie blew out the candlelight.
"Oo-er!" cried Jenny. "We aren't going to sleep in the dark?"
"Of course we are, kiddie," said Valérie; and somehow darkness did not matter when Jenny could sail off into sleep clasping Valérie's soft hot hand.
Gray morning came with the stillness of Sunday in Glasgow, with raindrops pattering against the window in gusts of wind, with Mrs. McMeikan and breakfast on a tray.
"This is grand, isn't it?" said Jenny, and "Oo-er!" she cried, as she upset the teapot all over the bed.
Then the bell had to be rung.
"Whoever heard of a bell-rope in such a place?" said Jenny, and pulled it so hard that it broke. Then, of course, there was loud laughter, and when Mrs. McMeikan came in again Jenny buried herself in the bedclothes and Valérie had to explain what had happened.
"Eh, the wild wee lassie," said the landlady, and the high spirits of the child, hidden by the patchwork quilt in the deep alcove, won the old Scotswoman's heart, so that whatever mischief Jenny conceived and executed under her roof was forgiven because she was a "bonnie wean, and awfu' sma', she was thenkin', to be sent awa' oot tae airn her ain living."
There was a rehearsal on Sunday because Madame Aldavini had to go back on Sunday night to London. The four girls walked along the gray Glasgow streets in the sound of the many footsteps of pious Presbyterian worshipers, until they arrived at the stage door of the Court Theater. Jenny asked, "Any letters for me?" in imitation of Valérie and Winnie.
"Any letters for Raeburn—for Pearl, I should say?"
Of course there was not so much as a postcard, but Jenny felt the prouder for asking.
The rehearsal of "Jack and the Beanstalk" went off with the usual air of incompleteness that characterizes the rehearsal of a pantomime. Jenny found that the Aldavini Quartette were to be Jumping Beans; and Winnie and Jenny and Valérie and Eileen jumped with a will and danced until they shook the boards of the Court Theater's stage. Madame Aldavini went back to London, having left many strict injunctions with the three older girls never to let Jenny out of their keeping. But Jenny was not ambitious to avoid their vigilance. It was necessary, indeed, occasionally, to slap Eileen's face and teach her, but Winnie and Valérie were darlings. Jenny had no desire to talk to men, and if lanky youths with large tie-pins saluted her by the stage door, she passed on with hernose as high as a church tower. And when, lured on by Jenny's long brown legs and high-brown boots and trim blue sailor dress, they ventured to remove the paper from their cuffs and follow in long-nosed, fishy-eyed pursuit, Jenny would catch hold of Valérie's hand and swing along in front of them as serenely cold as the Huntress Moon sailing over the heads of Bœotian swineherds.
Those were jolly days in Glasgow, sweet secluded days of virginal pastimes and young enjoyment. They danced at night in their green dresses and scarlet bean-blossom caps. They were encored by the shrewd Glasgow audience, who recognized the beauty and freshness and spirit of the four Jumping Beans. They walked through the gray Glasgow weather down Sauchiehall Street and stared at the gay shopwindows. They walked through wind-swept Kelvin Grove. They laughed at nothing, and gossiped about nothing, and ate large teas and smoked cigarettes and lolled in arm-chairs and read absurd stories and listened to Mrs. McMeikan's anecdotes with hardly concealed mirth. Nor did Mrs. McMeikan care a jot how much they laughed at her, "sae bonny was their laughter."
Everybody in the pantomime was very kind and very pleasant to Jenny. Everybody gave her chocolates and ribbons and photographs signed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge, or Violet." Everybody wanted her to be as happy and jolly as possible. She was a great favorite with the gallery boys, who whistled very loudly whenever she came on. She was contented and merry. She did not feel that Winnie or Valérie or even Eileen was trying to keep her down. She knew they were loyal and was fond of them, but not so fond of them as they of her. Eileen, however, thought she should be snubbed now and then.
Jenny was at a critical age when she went to Glasgow. It was the time of fluttering virgin dreams, of quickening pulses and heartbeats unaccountable. If Jenny had been at a high school, it would have been the age of girlish adorations formistresses. She might have depended on the sanctifying touch of some older woman with sympathy. She might have adopted the cloistral view of human intercourse, that light-hearted world of little intimate jokes and sentimental readings and pretty jealousies for the small advantage of sitting next some reverend mother or calm and gentle sister.
However, it is not to be supposed that the transition from childhood to womanhood was altogether unmarked. There were bound to be moments of indestructible languor when she was content to be adored herself. Had she met Abelard, Abelard could have made her an Heloise. They existed truly enough, the passionate fevers and deep ardors of adolescence. They flowed up in momentary caresses and died as soon in profound shynesses. Now was the time to feed the sensuous imagination with poetry and lull the frightened soul with music. She should have been taken to enchanted lands.
But there was nothing.
Here was a child worthy of a Naiad's maternity, if grace of limb counted immortally, and when for the first time she was given the world to look at, her finite vision and infinite aspirations were never set in relation to each other. She was given a telescope, and nobody had taken off the shutter. Her soul was a singing bird in a cage. Freedom was the only ideal. She might have been moved by Catholicism, but nobody gave it to her. It may be idle to speculate on the effect of incense-haunted chapels, of blazing windows and the dim accoutrements of Mass. Perhaps, after all, they would merely have struck her comically. Perhaps she was a true product of London generations, yet maybe her Cockney wit would have glittered more wonderfully in a richer setting—haply in Lacedæmon, with sea-green tunic blown to the outline of slim beauty by each wind coming southward from Thessaly.
Anyway, it was impossible to think of her enticed by the ready-made gallantries of raw-boned Sawnies by the stage door of the Court Theater. Her temperament found greater satisfaction in Valérie's more beautifully expressed adoration. Thelatter may not have roused her to encounter life, may not have supplied a purpose, a hope or a determination, but at least it kept her contented in the shy season of maidenhood. It helped to steer her course between incidental viciousness and eventful passion. She went back to Hagworth Street with no red thorns of impure associations to fester and gather. The days went by very quickly without any great adventures except the dance on the occasion of the pantomime's last night. Jenny was not invited to this entertainment. She was supposed to be too young, and her mouth went dry with disappointment and a lump of unshed tears came into her throat, and it almost seemed as if her heart must stop.
"I ought to go; oh, it is a shame; I ought to go."
Jenny went up of her own accord to the stage-manager himself and said:
"Please, Mr. Courtenay-Champion, why aren't I asked to the dance?"
"Good Lord!" said Mr. Courtenay-Champion. "A kid like you? No, my dear, you're too young. It goes on too late. After the show, some hours."
But Jenny sobbed and cried, and was so clearly heart-broken by the idea of being left out that Mr. Courtenay-Champion changed his mind and told her she could come. She was instantly transfigured as by dazzling sunlight after days of mist. It was to be a splendid dance, with jellies and claret-cup, and Jenny went with Valérie to buy the widest pink sash that ever was known, and tied it in the largest pink bow that ever was seen. She danced every single dance and even waltzed twice with the great comedian, Jimmy James, and, what is more, told him he couldn't dance, to his great delight, which seems to show that Mr. James had a sense of humor in addition to being a great comedian.
It really was a splendid evening, and perhaps the most splendid part of it was lying in bed with Valérie and talking over with her all the partners and taking them off with such excited demonstration of their methods that the bed becameall untucked and had to be made over again before they could finally settle themselves down to sleep.
In February Jenny was back again in Hagworth Street, with memories of "Jack and the Beanstalk" fading slowly like the colors of a sunset. She had enjoyed her personal success in Glasgow, but already success was beginning to prove itself an empty prize—a rainbow bubble easily burst. The reason is obvious. Jenny had never been taught to concentrate her mind. She had no power of retrospective analysis. The applause endured a little while in her meditations, but gradually died away in the occupations of the present. She could not secure it as the basis of a wider success on the next occasion. She began to ask: "What's the good of anything?" Within a few weeks of the resumption of ordinary life, the Glasgow theater had become like a piece of cake that one eats unconsciously, then turns to find and discovers not. She was no farther forward on the road to independence. She became oppressed by the dead weight of futurity.
At home, too, there was a very real repression, which she grew to hate more and more deeply on each occasion of its exercise. A breath of maternal interference and she would fly into a temper—a scowling, chair-tilting, door-slamming rage. She would fling herself out of the house with threats never to return. One day when she was reproached with staying out longer than she was allowed, she rushed out again and disappeared. Her mother, in despair, went off to invoke the aid of Madame Aldavini, who wisely guessed that Jenny would be found with Valérie Duval. There she was, indeed, in Valérie's rooms in Soho, not at all penitent for her misbehavior, but sufficiently frightened by Madame's threat of expulsion to come back home without argument.
Freedom was still Jenny's religion. She was much about with boys, but still merely for the life and entertainment of their company, for no sentimental adventures. It would have been wiser to let her alone, but nobody with whom she was brought into contact could realize the sexlessness of the child.The truest safeguard of a girl's virtue is familiarity with the aggregated follies of masculine adolescence.
Jenny fought her way desperately into her seventeenth year, winning freedom in jots. She liked most of anything to go to Collin's Music-hall with a noisy gang of attendant boys, not one of whom was as much a separate realized entity to her as even an individual sheep is to a shepherd. Alfie came home in the summer before her seventeenth birthday and abetted cordially her declarations of independence. May, too, was implicated in every plot for the subversion of parental authority.
Mrs. Raeburn worried terribly about her daughter's future. She ascribed her hoyden behavior to the influence of the stage.
"We don't want your theatrical manners here," she would say.
"Well, who put me on the stage?" Jenny would retort.
In the Christmastide after Alfie came home Jenny went to Dublin in a second Aldavini Quartette, and enjoyed herself more than ever. She had now none of the desire for seclusion that marked her Glasgow period, no contempt of man in the abstract, and was soon good friends with a certain number of young officers whom she regarded much as she regarded the boys of Islington.
One of them, Terence O'Meagh, of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers, made her his own special property; he was a charming good-looking, conceited young Irishman, as susceptible to women as most of his nation, and endowing the practice of love with as little humor as most Celts. He used to wait at the stage door and drive her back to her lodgings in his own jaunting car. He used to give her small trinkets so innocently devoid of beauty as almost to attract by their artlessness. He was a very young officer who had borne the blushing honors of a scarlet tunic for a very short while, so that, in addition to the Irishman's naïve assumption of universal popularity, he suffered from the sentiment that a soldier's red coat appeals to every woman.
Jenny, with her splendid Cockney irreverence, thought littleof Mr. O'Meagh, less of his red coat, but a very great deal of the balmy February drives past the vivid green meadows of Liffey.
"You know," Terence would say, leaning gracefully over the division of the car, "you know, Jenny, our regiment—the 127th of the Line, as we call ours—was absolutely cut to pieces at Drieufontein; and at Riviersdorp they held the position against two thousand Boers."
"Who cares?" said Jenny.
"You might take a little interest in it."
"Well," said Jenny, "how can I?"
"But you might be interested because, after all, it is my regiment, and I'm awfully fond of you, little girl."
"Don't be soppy," Jenny advised him.
"You're so cursedly matter-of-fact."
"Eh?"
"So—oh, well, damn it, Jenny, you don't seem to care whether I'm with you or not."
"Why should I?"
"Any other girl would be fond of me."
"Ah—any other girl would."
"Then why aren't you?"
"Oh, you'll pass in a crowd."
"Dash it, I'm frightfully in love with you," vowed Terence.
"What's the good of spoiling a fine day by being silly?"
"Damn it, nobody else but me would stick your rudeness."
And Terence would sulk, and Jenny would hum, and the jaunting car would go jaunting on.
On the last night of the pantomime Mr. O'Meagh called for her as usual, and, as they drove off, said:
"Look here, Miss Jenny, you're coming back to my rooms with me to-night."
"Am I?" said Jenny. "That's news."
"By Jove, you are!"
"No fear."
"You shall!"
Terence caught hold of her hand.
"Let me go," Jenny said.
"I'm damned if I will. Look here, you know, you can't make a fool of an Irishman."
"That's quite right," Jenny agreed.
"When an Irishman says he'll have a thing, he'll have it."
"Well, you won't have Jenny Pearl."
"Look here, I've been jolly good to you. I gave you——"
"What?" interrupted Jenny in dangerous tones. "Look!"
She unbuckled a wrist-watch and flung it into the road.
"There's your watch, anyway. Going to get down and pick it up?"
Terence whipped up the horse.
"You little devil, you shall come with me."
Jenny caught hold of the reins.
"Shut up!" said O'Meagh. "Shut up! Don't you know better than that?"
"Well, stop," said Jenny.
The subaltern, in order to avoid a scene, stopped.
"Look here," Jenny told him. "You think yourself a lad, I know, and you think girls can't say 'no' to you; but I can, see? You and your little cottages for two! Not much!" and Jenny slipped down from the car and vanished.
"Men," she said to Winnie Ambrose, the only one left of the Glasgow Quartette. "Men! I think men are awful. I do. Really. Conceited! Oh, no; it's only a rumor."
It had been arranged by Madame Aldavini that Jenny, on her return from Dublin, should join the ballet of the opera at Covent Garden. Unfortunately her first appearance in London had to be postponed for a year owing to the fact of there being no vacancy. Jenny was disheartened. It was useless for Madame Aldavini to assure her that the extra year's practice would greatly benefit her dancing. Jenny felt she had been practicing since the world was made. She continued to practice because there was nothing else to do, but time had quenched the fire of inspiration. She was tired of hearing thatone day she might, with diligence and application, become a Prima Ballerina. She knew she was a natural dancer, but Terpischore having endowed her with grace and lightness and twinkling feet, left the spirit that could ripen these gifts to some other divinity. She had, it is true, escaped the doom of an infant prodigy, but it might have been better to blossom as a prodigy than to lie fallow when the warmth and glory of the footlights were burning without her.
Meanwhile Hagworth Street had not changed much in seventeen years. The tall plane-tree at the end was taller. The London County Council, not considering it possessed any capacity for decoration, had neglected to lop off its head, and, as there was no other tree in sight, did not think it worth the trouble of clipping to an urban pattern. Year by year it shed its bark and, purged of London vileness, broke in May fresh and green and beautiful. In October more leaves pattered down, more leaves raced along the gutters than on the night of Jenny's birth. The gas-jets burned more steadily in a mantle of incandescent light. This method of illumination prevailed indoors as well as outside, shedding arid and sickly gleams over the front-parlor of Number Seventeen, shining, livid and garish, in the narrow hall. The knob was still missing from the bedstead, and for seventeen years Charlie had promised to get a new one. Charlie himself had changed very slightly. He still worked for the same firm in Kentish Town. He still frequented the "Masonic Arms." He cared less for red neckties and seemed smaller than of old. Yet he could drink more. If his hair was thinner, his eyebrows, on the other hand, were more bushy, because he blew off his old ones in the course of an illustrated lecture on the management of gas-stoves. For the constant fingering of his ragged moustache, he substituted a pensive manipulation of his exceptional eyebrows.
Mr. Vergoe was dead, and most of his property adorned his granddaughter's room in Cranbourne Street. She was still a second-line girl in theCorps de Balletof the Orient Palaceof Varieties. Jenny, however, possessed the picture of the famous dead Columbine. It hung above the bed she shared with May, beside a memorial card of the donor set in a shining black Oxford frame. The room itself grew smaller every year. Jenny could not imagine that once to Edie and herself it had been illimitable. Nowadays it seemed to be all mahogany wardrobe, and semicircular marble-topped washstand and toilet-table and iron bedstead. On the door were many skirts and petticoats. On the walls were shrivelled fans with pockets that held curl-papers mostly. There was also a clouded photograph of Alfie, Edie, Jenny and May, of which the most conspicuous feature was the starched frills of Jenny, those historic frills that once, free of petticoats, had seemed a talisman to masculinity. The toilet-table was inhabited by a collection of articles that presented the most sudden and amazing contrasts. Next to a comb that might easily have been rescued from a dustbin was a brush backed with silver repoussé. Beside seven broken pairs of nail-scissors was a scent-bottle with golden stopper. Jenny's nightgown was daintily ribboned and laced, and looked queerly out of place on the pock-marked quilt.
Mrs. Purkiss still visited her sister, but Jenny was not allowed to associate with Percy or Claude, both more pasty-faced than ever, because Percy was going to be a missionary and Claude was suspected of premature dissipation, having been discovered kissing the servant in the bathroom.
Mrs. Raeburn, in the jubilee of her age, was still a handsome woman, and was admired even by Jenny for her smartness. She still worried about the future of her children. She was more than ever conscious of her husband's inferiority and laughed over most of the facts of her life. May's back, however, and Jenny's perpetual riotousness caused her many misgivings. But Alfie was doing well, and Edie seemed happy, making dresses over at Brixton. There had been no recurrence of Mr. Timpany, and she now viewed that episode much as she would have regarded a trifling piece of domestic negligence.As for the Miss Horners, their visit had long faded absolutely from her mind. It would have taken a very great emotional crisis to inspire such another speech as she made to them seventeen years ago. Charlie still snored beside her, as he had snored in sequel to seven or eight thousand nightly undressings. She still saw to the washing, added up the accounts, bought a new dress in the spring and a new bonnet in the autumn. She still meant to read the paper this week, but never had time, and every night she hoped that all would go smooth. This habit of hope was to her what the candle-lit chapter of a Bible with flower-stained pages or counterpane prayers or dreams of greatness are to minds differently constituted. Her life was by no means drab, for she went often to the theater, and occasionally to the saloon bar of a discreet public-house, where, in an atmosphere of whisky and Morocco leather, she would sometimes listen to Mrs. Purkiss's doubts of Jenny's behavior, but more often tell diverting tales of Charlie.
Such was Hagworth Street, when, on a cold Sunday in the front of May, Edie came over from Brixton. She looked pale and anxious as she sat for a while in the kitchen twisting black kid gloves round her fingers.
"How's Brixton, Edie?" asked her mother.
"Grand."
"You've not been up to see us for a long time."
"No-o-o," agreed the eldest daughter.
"Busy?"
"Not so very. Only you never know when you will be. I'll go upstairs and take my things off. Come with us Jenny," she said, turning to her sister.
"There's a cheek. Whatever next?"
"Oh, you are hateful! Come on up."
Jenny, with every appearance of unwillingness, followed Edie upstairs, and flung herself down on the bed they had once shared.
"Don't be all night," she protested, as she watched Edie staring aimlessly at herself in the glass.
"Jenny," said the latter suddenly, "I done it."
"Done what?"
"Myself, I suppose."
"What d'ye mean?"
"You know," said Edie.
"Oh, yes, I know, that's why I'm asking."
"You remember that fellow I was going about with?"
"Bert Harding?"
"Yes, Bert."
"You're never going to marry him, Edie?"
"I got to—if I can."
Jenny sat up on the bed.
"You don't mean——"
"That's right," said Edie.
"Whatever made you?"
"I am a fool," said Edie helplessly.
"Whatever will Alfie say?" Jenny wondered.
"What's it got to do with Alfie?"
"I don't know, only he's very particular. But this Bert of yours, I suppose he will marry you?"
"He says so. He says nothing wouldn't stop him."
"Are you mad to marry him?"