43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town.Friday.My darling Maurice,I can't come to Spain—I can't leave my mother like that—I should feel a sneak—hurry up and come home because I miss you very much all the time—It's no use to wish I could come—But I will tell you about it when you come home—I wish you was here now. With heaps of love from your darling Jenny.Irene sends her love and hopes you're having a good time.
43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town.Friday.
My darling Maurice,
I can't come to Spain—I can't leave my mother like that—I should feel a sneak—hurry up and come home because I miss you very much all the time—It's no use to wish I could come—But I will tell you about it when you come home—I wish you was here now. With heaps of love from your darling Jenny.
Irene sends her love and hopes you're having a good time.
JENNY received a post card from Maurice in answer to her letter. She was glad he made no attempt to argue a point of view which his absence had already modified more persuasively than any pleading. During the summer, perhaps on one of those expeditions long talked of, she would make him her own with one word; having sacrificed much on account of her mother, she was not prepared to sacrifice all; and when Maurice came back, when she saw his blue eyes quick with love's fires, and knew again the sorcery of hands and breathless enfolding of arms, it would be easy upon his heart to swoon out of everything except compliance. Aglow with tenderness, she wrote a second letter hinting that no chain was wanting but the sight of him to bind her finally and completely. Yet, with whatever periphrasis she wrapped it round, the resolve was not to be expressed with a pen. Recorded so, it seemed to lose something vital to its beauty of purpose. However thoughtfully she wrote and obliterated and wrote again, at the end it always gave the impression of a bargain. She tore the letter up. No sentence she knew how to write would be heavy with the velvet glooms of summer nights, prophetic of that supreme moment now at hand when girlhood should go in a rapture.
A week went by, and Jenny received another post card, postponing the date of his return to May 1. She was much disappointed, but took the envelope he had given her at Waterloo, and altered, half in fun, half seriously, April 23 to May 1.
The night before she was to meet Maurice, there was aheavy fall of rain reminding her of the night they first drove home together. She lay awake listening to the pervading sound of the water and thinking how happy she was. There was no little sister to cuddle now; but with the thought of Maurice on his way home to her kisses, her imagination was full of company. It was a morning of gold and silver when she was first conscious of the spent night. The room was steeped in rich illuminations. Sparrows twittered very noisily, and their shadows would sometimes slip across the dingy walls and ceiling. "To-day," thought Jenny, as, turning over in a radiancy of dreams and blushes and murmurous awakenings, she fell asleep for two more slow hours of a lover's absence. The later morning was passed in unpicking and re-shaping the lucky green hat which had lain hidden since the autumn. There was no time, however, to perfect its restoration; and Jenny had to be content with a new saxe-blue dress in which she looked very trim and eager under a black mushroom hat a-blow with rosebuds.
It was about two o'clock when she went down the steps of 43 Stacpole Terrace in weather fit for a lovers' meeting. Great swan-white clouds breasted the deepening azure of May skies. The streets were dazzlingly wet with the night's rain, and every puddle was as blue as a river. In front gardens tulips burned with their fiery jets of color and the lime tree buds were breaking into vivid green fans through every paling, while in the baskets of flower-women cowslips fresh from chalky pastures lay close as woven wool. Every blade of grass in the dingy squares of Camden Town was of emerald, and gardeners were strewing the paths with bright orange gravel. Children were running against the wind, pink balloons floating in their wake. Children solemnly holding paper windmills to catch the breeze were wheeled along in mail-carts and perambulators. Surely of all the lovers that went to keep a May-day tryst, none ever went more sweet and gay than Jenny.
She left the Tube at Charing Cross and, being early,walked along the Embankment to Westminster Bridge. As she crossed the river, she looked over the splash and glitter of the stream towards Grosvenor Road and up at Big Ben, thinking, with a sigh of content, how she and Maurice would be sitting in the studio by four o'clock. At Waterloo there was half an hour to wait for the train; but it was not worth while to buy a stupid paper when she could actually count the minutes that were ticking on with Maurice behind them. It was 3.25. Her heart began to beat as the enormous clock hand jerked its way to the time of reunion. Not because she wanted to know, but because she felt she must do something during that last five minutes, Jenny asked a porter whether this were the right platform for the 3.30 from Claybridge.
"Just signaled, miss," he said.
Would Maurice be looking out of the window? Would he be brown with three weeks of Spanish weather? Would he be waving, or would he be....
The train was curling into the station. How much happier it looked than the one which curled out of it three weeks ago. Almost before she was aware of its noise, it had pulled up, blackening the platforms with passengers that tumbled like chessmen from a box. Maurice was not immediately apparent, and Jenny in search of him worked her way against the stream of people to the farther end of the train. She felt an increasing chill upon her as the contrary movement grew weaker and the knots of people became more sparse; so that when beyond the farthest coach she stood desolate under the station roof and looked back upon the now almost empty line of platform, she was frozen by disappointment.
"Luggage, miss?" a porter asked.
Jenny shook her head and retraced her steps regretfully, watching the satisfied hansoms drive off one by one. It was impossible that Maurice could have failed her: she must have made a mistake over the time. She took the envelope from her bag and read the directions again. Could he have comeon the 23rd after all? No, the post card was plain enough. The platform was absolutely empty now, and already the train was backing out of the station.
With an effort she turned from the prospect and walked slowly towards the exit. Then she had an idea. Maurice must have missed the 3.30 and was coming by the next. There was another in half an hour, she found out from a porter, but it came in to a platform on the opposite side of the station. So she walked across and sat down to wait, less happily than before, but, as the great hand climbed up towards the hour, with increasing hopefulness.
Again the platform was blackened by emerging crowds. This time she took up a position by the engine. A cold wave of unfamiliar faces swept past her. Maurice had not arrived. It was useless to wait any longer. Reluctantly she began to walk away, stopping sometimes to look back. Maurice had not arrived. With throbbing nerves and sick heart Jenny reached York Road and stood in a gray dream by the edge of the pavement. A taxi drew up alongside, and she got in, telling the man to drive to 422 Grosvenor Road.
The river still sparkled, but Big Ben had struck four o'clock without them sitting together in the studio. The taxi had a narrow escape from a bad accident. Ordinarily Jenny would have been terrified; but now, bitterly and profoundly careless, she accepted the jar of the brakes, the volley of recriminations and the gaping of foot passengers with remote equanimity. Notwithstanding her presentiment of the worst, as the taxi reached the familiar line of houses by which she had so often driven passionate, sleepy, mirthful, sometimes one of a jolly party, sometimes alone with Maurice in ecstasies unparagoned, Jenny began to tell herself that nothing was the matter, that when she arrived at the studio he would be there. Perhaps, after all, he thought he had mentioned another train: his post card in alteration of the date had not confirmed the time. Already she was beginning to rail at herself for being upset so easily, when the taxi stopped and Jenny alighted. Shelet the man drive off before she rang. When he was out of sight she pressed the studio bell three times so that Maurice should not think it was "kids"; and ran down the steps and across the road looking up to the top floor for the heartening wave. The windows were closed: they seemed steely and ominous. She rang again, knowing it was useless; yet the bell was often out of order. She peered over at the basement for a glimpse of Mrs. Wadman. Hysterical by now, she rang the bells of other floors. Nobody answered; not even Fuz was in. Wings of fire, alternating with icy fans, beat against her brain. The damnable stolidity of the door enraged her, and, when she knocked its impassiveness made her numb and sick. Her heart was wilting in a frost, and, as the last cold ache died away in oblivion, arrows of flame would horribly restore it to life and agony. She rang the bells again, one after another; she rang them slowly in studied permutations; quickly and savagely she pressed them all together with the length of her forearm. The cherubs on the carved porch turned to demons, and from demons vanished into nothing. The palings on either side of the steps became invalid, unsubstantial, deliquescent like material objects in a nightmare. A catastrophe of all emotion collapsed about her mind, and when gladly she seemed to be fainting, Jenny heard the voice of Castleton a long way off.
"Oh, Fuz, where is he? Where's Maurice?"
"Why, I thought you were meeting him. I've been out all day."
Then Jenny realized the door was still shut.
"He wasn't there. Not at Waterloo."
She was walking slowly upstairs now beside Castleton. The fever of disappointment had left her, and outwardly tranquil, she was able to explain her reeling agitation. The studio looked cavernously empty; already on the well-remembered objects lay a web of dust. The jars still held faded pink tulips. The fragments of The Tired Dancer still littered the grate.
"Wait a minute," Castleton said; "I'll see if there's a letter for me downstairs."
Presently he came back with a sheet of crackling paper.
"Shall I read you what he says?"
Jenny nodded, and, while he read, wrote with her finger, "3.30 Claybridge," many times in the dust that lay thick on the closed lid of the piano.
This was the letter:
Dear Castleton,I've settled not to come back to England for a while. One makes plans and the plans don't come off. I can't work in England and am better out of it. Let me hear that Jenny is all right. I think she will be. I didn't write to her. I just sent a post card saying I should not be at Waterloo on the first of May. I expect you'll think I'm heartless, but something has gone snap inside me and I don't honestly care what you think. I'm going to Morocco in two or three days. I want adventures. I'll send you a check for my share of the rent in June. If you write, write to me at the English Post Office, Tangiers.Yours,Maurice Avery.
Dear Castleton,
I've settled not to come back to England for a while. One makes plans and the plans don't come off. I can't work in England and am better out of it. Let me hear that Jenny is all right. I think she will be. I didn't write to her. I just sent a post card saying I should not be at Waterloo on the first of May. I expect you'll think I'm heartless, but something has gone snap inside me and I don't honestly care what you think. I'm going to Morocco in two or three days. I want adventures. I'll send you a check for my share of the rent in June. If you write, write to me at the English Post Office, Tangiers.
Yours,Maurice Avery.
"Is that what he says?" Jenny asked.
"That's all."
"And he wants to hear I'm all right?"
"He says so."
"Tell him from me this little girl's all right," said Jenny. "There's plenty more mothers got sons. Plenty. Tell him that when you write."
Her sentences rattled like musketry.
Castleton stared vaguely in the direction of the river as if a friendship were going out on the tide.
"But I don't want to write," he said. "I couldn't. Still, there's one thing. I don't believe it's another woman."
"Who cares if it is?" There was a wistfulness about her brave indifference. "Men are funny. It might be."
"I don't somehow think it is. I'd rather not. I was very fond of him."
"So was I," said Jenny simply. "Only he's a rotter like all men."
It was strange how neither of them seemed able to mention his name. Already he had lost his individuality and was merged in a type.
"What will you do?" Castleton asked.
"There's a question. How should I know?"
Before her mind life like a prairie rolled away into distance infinitely dull.
"It was a foolish question. I'm sorry. I wish you'd marry me."
Jenny looked at him with sad eyes screwed up in perplexity.
"I believe you would, Fuz."
"I would. I would."
"But I couldn't. I don't want to see any of you ever again."
Castleton seemed to shrink.
"I'm not being rude, Fuz, really. Only I don't want to."
"I perfectly understand."
"You mustn't be cross with me."
"Cross! Oh, Jane, do I sound cross?"
"Because," Jenny went on, "if I saw you or any of his friends, I should only hate you. Good-bye, I must run."
"You're all right for money?" Castleton stammered awkwardly. "I mean—there's—oh, damn it, Jenny!"
He pounded over to the window, huge and disconsolate.
"Why ever on earth should I want money? What's the matter with next Friday's Treasury?"
"Perhaps, Jenny, you would come out with me once, if I waited for you one night?"
"Please don't. I should only stare you out. Iwouldn'tknow you. I don't ever ever want to see any of you again."
She ran from the studio, vanishing like a flame into smoke.
That night when Jenny went back alone to Stacpole Terrace, she saw on the table in the cheerless parlor the post card from Maurice, and close beside it the green hat bought in September still waiting to be re-shaped for the spring. She threw it into a corner of the room.
JENNY's first thought was an impulse of revenge upon the opposite sex comparable with, but more drastic than, the resolution she had made on hearing of Edie's disaster. She would devote her youth to "doing men down." It was as if from the desert of the soul seared by Maurice, the powers of the body were to sweep like a wild tribe maiming the creators of her solitude. Maurice had stood for her as the epitome of man, and it was to be expected that when he fell, he would involve all men in the ruin. This hostility extended so widely that even her father was included, and Jenny found herself brooding upon the humiliation of his share in her origin.
This violent enmity finding its expression in physical repulsion defeated itself, and Jenny could no longer attract victims. Moreover, the primal instincts of sex perished in the drought of emotion; and soon she wished for oblivion, dreading any activity of disturbance. The desert was made, and was vast enough to circumscribe the range of her vision with its expanse of monotony. Educated in Catholic ideals, she would have fled to a nunnery, there coldly to languish until the fires of divine adorations should burst from the ashes of earthly love. Nunneries, however, were outside Jenny's set of conceptions. Death alone would endow her with painless indifference in a perpetual serenity; but the fear of death in one who lacked ability to regard herself from outside was not mitigated by pictorial consolations. She could never separateherself into audience and actor. Extinction appalled one profoundly conscious of herself as an entity. By such a stroke she would obliterate not merely herself, but her world as well. Suicides generally possess the power of mental dichotomy. They kill themselves, paradoxically, to see the effect. They are sorry for themselves, or angry, or contemptuous: madness disintegrates their sense of personality so that the various components run together. In a madman's huggermugger of motives, impulses and reasons, one predominant butchers the rest for its own gratification. Whatever abnormal conditions the shock of sorrow had produced in Jenny's mental life, through them all she remained fully conscious of her completeness and preserved unbroken the importance of her personality. She could not kill herself.
The days were very long now, nor would she try to quicken them by returning to the old life before she met Maurice. She would not with two or three girls pass in review of the shops of Oxford Street or gossip by the open windows of her club. In the dressing-room she would sit silent, impatient of intrusion upon the waste with which she had surrounded herself. The ballets used to drag intolerably. She found no refuge from her heart in dancing, no consolation in the music and color. She danced listlessly, glad when the task was over, glad when she came out of the theater, and equally glad to leave Stacpole Terrace on the next day. In bed she would lie awake meditating upon nothing; and when she slept, her sleep was parched.
"Buck up, old girl, whatever's the matter?" Irene would ask, and Jenny, resentful, would scowl at thegaucherie. She longed to be with her mother again, and would visit Hagworth Street more often, hoping some word would be uttered that would make it easy for her to subdue that pride which, however deeply wounded by Maurice, still battled invincibly, frightening every other instinct and emotion. But when the words of welcome came, Jenny, shy of softness, would carry off existence with an air, tears and reconciliation set aside. Itwas not long before the rumor of her love's disaster was carried in whispers round the many dressing-rooms of the Orient. Soon enough Jenny found the girls staring at her when they thought her attention was occupied. She had always seemed to them so invulnerable that her jilting excited a more than usually diffused curiosity; but for a long time, though many rejoiced, no girl was brave enough to ask malicious questions, intruding upon her solitude.
June came in with the best that June can give of cloudless weather, weather that is born in skies of peach-blossom, whose richness is never lost in wine-dark nights pressed from the day's sweetness. What weather it would have been for the country! Jenny used to sit for hours together in St. James's Park, scratching aimlessly upon the gravel with the ferule of her parasol. Men would stop and sit beside her, looking round the corners of their eyes like actors taking a call. But she was scarcely aware of their presence, and, when they spoke, would look up vaguely perplexed so that they muttered apologies and moved along. Her thoughts were always traveling through the desert of her soul. Unblessed by mirage, they traveled steadily through a monotone towards an horizon of brass. Her heart beat dryly and regularly like the tick of a clock, and her memory merely recorded time. No relic of the past could bring a tear; even the opal brooch was worn every day because it happened to be useful. Once a letter from Maurice fell from her bag into the lake, and she cared no more for it than the swan's feather beside which it floated.
July came in hot and metallic. Every sunset was a foundry, and the nights were like smoke. One day towards the end of the month Jenny, walking down Cranbourn Street, thought she would pay a visit to Lilli Vergoe. The room had not changed much since the day Jenny joined the ballet. Lilli, in a soiled muslin dress, was smoking the same brand of cigarettes in the same wicker-chair. The same photographs clung to the mirror, or were stacked on the mantelshelf in palisades. The walls were covered with Mr. Vergoe's relics.
"Hullo, Jenny! So you've found your way here at last. What's been wrong with you lately? You're looking thin."
"It's this shocking hot weather."
"Why, when you came here before and I said it was hot, you said it was lovely."
"Did I?" asked Jenny indifferently.
"How's your mother? And dad? And young May?"
"All right. I'm living along with Ireen Dale now."
"I know. Whatever made you do that?"
"Why shouldn't I?"
"I shouldn't call them your style," said Lilli positively.
"Ireen's nice."
"Yes, she's all right. But Winnie Dale's dreadful. And look at her mother. She's like an old charwoman. And that youngest sister."
"Oh, them, I never seethem."
"You've heard about me, I suppose?"
"No, what?" asked Jenny, politely inquisitive.
"I've turned suffragette."
"You never haven't? Oh, Lil, what a dreadful thing!"
"It's not. It's great. I used to think so myself, but I've changed my mind."
"Oh, Lilli, I think it's terrible. A suffragette? But what an unnatural lot of women you must go around with."
"They're not," said Lilli, loud in defense of her associates.
"A lot of Plain Janes and No Nonsense with their hair all screwed back. I know. And all walking on one another's petticoats. Suffragette Sallies! What are they for? Tell me that."
"Hasn't it never struck you there's a whole heap of girls in this world that's got nothing to do?"
Lilli spoke sadly. There was a life's disillusionment in the question.
"Yes; but that doesn't say they should go making sights of themselves, shouting and hollering. Get out! Besides, what's the Salvation Army done?"
"You don't understand."
"No, and I don't want to understand."
"Why don't you come round to our club? I'll introduce you to Miss Bailey."
"Who's she?"
"She's the president."
Jenny considered the offer a moment. Soon she decided that, dreary as the world was, it would not be brightened by an introduction to Miss Bailey. In the dressing-room that night, during the wait between the two ballets, Elsie Crauford, who had long been waiting for an opportunity to avenge Jenny's slighting references to Willie's evening dress, thought she would risk an encounter.
"I didn't know your Maurice had gone quite sudden," she said. "Aren't you going to do anything about it?"
"You've blacked your nose, Elsie Crauford."
"Have I? Where?" Elsie had seized a hand-glass.
"Yes, you have, poking it into other people's business. You curious thing! What am I going to do about it? Punch into you, if you're not sharp."
"He seemed so fond of you, too."
"You never saw him but once, when you blew in with the draught in that flash hat of yours."
"No, but Madge Wilson told me you was absolutely mad about one another. It seems so funny he should leave you. But Madge said it wouldn't last. She said you weren't getting a jolly fine time for nothing. Funny thing, you always knew such a lot before you got struck on a fellow yourself. What you weren't going to do! You aren't so much cleverer than us after all."
"Whotold you?" demanded Jenny.
"Madge Wilson did."
"Don't take any notice ofher,"Maudie Chapman advised at this point. "You jest shut up, Elsie Crauford. Always making mischief."
"I'm tired of Jenny Pearl's always knowing better than anyone without being told off."
"Told off! Who by?You?" gasped Jenny.
Then Madge Wilson herself came into the dressing-room.
"Hullo, duck," she said, surprised by Jenny's apparent reëntry into society.
"Are you speaking to me, Madge Wilson? Because I don't want to talk to you. A nice friend. Hark at your fine friends, girls. They're the rotters that take you off behind your back."
"Whatever's the matter?" Madge asked.
"Yes, you don't know, do you? But I wouldn't be a sneak like you! I'd say out what I thought and not care for anyone. I wasn't getting a jolly fine time for nothing? And what about you, Mrs. Straightcut? But that's the way. Girls you think are your friends, girlsyoutake out and give a good time, they're the first to turn round on you. I wonder you haven't all gone hoarse with the way you've talked me to pieces these last weeks. I can hear you mumbling and whispering in corners. 'Have you heard about Jenny Pearl? Isn't it shocking? Oh, I do think it's a dreadful thing. What a terrible girl.' God, and look atyou. Married women! Yes, and what have you married? Why, there isn't a girl in this dressing-room whose husband can afford to keep her. Husbands! Why, they're no better than—"
"She's been going out with Lilli Vergoe," interrupted Elsie sneeringly. "Jenny Pearl's turned into a suffragette."
"What of it? You and your six pairs of gloves that your Willie bought you. Well, if he did,whichI don't think, he must have broke open the till to do it."
Madge Wilson's disloyalty effected for Jenny what nothing else had done. It made the blood course fast, the heart beat: it kindled her eyes again. That night in bed, she thought of falseness and treachery and cried herself to sleep.
THE outburst against feminine treachery had an effect upon Jenny's state of mind beyond the mere evoking of tears. These were followed by a general agitation of her point of view necessitating an outlet for her revived susceptibleness to emotion. A less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound; but she and men were still mutually unattractive. The consequence of this renewed activity of spirit, in the aspect of its immediate cause, was paradoxical enough; for when Jenny thought she would try the pretensions of suffragism, no clear process of reasoning helped her to such a resolve, no formulated hostility to man. Whatever logic existed in the decision was fortuitous; nor did she at all perceive any absence of logic in throwing in her lot with treacherous woman.
Lilli Vergoe was proud of such a catechumen, and made haste to introduce her to the tall house in Mecklenburg Square, whose elm-shadowed rooms displayed the sober glories of the Women's Political, Social and Economic League. Something about the house reminded Jenny of her first visit to Madame Aldavini's School; but she found Miss Bailey less alarming than the dancing mistress as, rising from masses of letters and scarlet gladioli, she welcomed the candidate. Miss Bailey, the president of the League, was a tall, handsome woman, very unlike Jenny's conception of a suffragette. She had a regular profile, a thin, high-bridged nose, and clearly cut, determined lips. Her complexion was pale, her hair very brown and rich. Best of all Jenny liked her slim hands and the voice which,though marred by a slight huskiness due to public speaking, was full of quality and resonance. She was one of those women who, carrying in their presence a fine tranquillity at once kindly and ascetic, imbue the onlooker with their long and perceptive experience of humanity. She was in no sense homely or motherly; indeed, she wore about her the remoteness of the great. Yet whatever in her general appearance seemed of marble was vivified by clear hazel eyes into the reality of womanhood.
"And so you're going to join our club?" inquired Miss Bailey.
Jenny, although she had intended this first visit to be merely empirical, felt bound to commit herself to the affirmative.
"You'll soon know all about our objects."
"Oh, I've told her a lot already, Miss Bailey," declared Lilli with the eagerness of the trusted school-girl.
"That's right," said Miss Bailey, smiling. "Come along then, and I will enroll you, Miss——"
"Pearl," murmured Jenny, feeling as if her name had somehow slipped down and escaped sideways through her neck. Then with an effort clearing her throat, she added, "Jenny Pearl," blushing furiously at the confession of identity.
"Your address?"
"Better say 17 Hagworth Street, Islington. Only I'm not living there just now. Now I'm living 43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town."
"Have you a profession?"
"I'm on the stage."
"What a splendid profession, too—for a woman. Don't you think so?"
Jenny stared at this commendation of a state of life she had always imagined was distasteful to people like Miss Bailey.
"I don't know much about splendid, but I suppose it's all right," she agreed at last.
"Indeed it is. Are you at the Orient also?"
"Yes, you know, in the ballet," said Jenny very quickly, sothat the president might not think she was trying to push herself unduly.
"I don't believe there's anything that gives more pleasure than good dancing. Dancing ought to be the expression of life's joy," said the older woman, gazing at the pigeon-holes full of docketed files, at the bookshelves stuffed with dry volumes of Ethics and Politics and Economics, as if half regretting she, too, was not in the Orient Ballet. "Dancing is the oldest art," she continued. "I like to think they danced the spring in long before calendars were made. Your subscription is half a crown a year."
Jenny produced the coin from her bag; and it said much for Miss Bailey's personality that the new member to adorn the action did not wink over her shoulder at Lilli.
"Thank you. Here's the badge. It's copied from an old Athenian medal. This is Pallas Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom."
"She isn't much to look at, is she?" commented Jenny.
"My dear child, that's the owl."
Jenny turned the medal over and contemplated the armed head. Then she put it carefully away in her purse, wondering if the badge would bring her luck.
"Now, I shall let Lilli show you round the club rooms, for I'm very busy this afternoon," said Miss Bailey in gentle dismissal.
The two girls left the study and set out to explore the rest of the house. Over the mantlepiece of the principal room Jenny saw Mona Lisa and drew back so quickly that she trod on Lilli's foot.
"I'm not going in there," she said.
"Why not? It's a nice room."
"I'm not going in. I don't want to," she repeated, without any explanation of her whim.
"All right. Let's go downstairs. We can have tea."
It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the picturesbut none of them conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of workmanship was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and the literary propaganda of the feminine movement. The general atmosphere of the room was permeated by an odor of damp toast and the stale fumes of asthma cigarettes.
"What an unnatural smell," murmured Jenny.
"It's those asthma cigarettes," Lilli explained. "One of the members has got it very bad."
Jenny was glad to escape very soon after tea, and told her friend a second visit to Mecklenburg Square was not to be done.
"I used to think they was nice houses when I passed by the other side in that green 'bus going to Covent Garden, but I think they'reverystuffy, and what wall-paper! More like blotting-paper."
However, one Saturday evening in August, as Jenny was leaving the theater, Lilli begged her to come and hear Miss Ragstead speak on the general aims of the movement, with particular attention to a proposed demonstration on the occasion of the re-opening of Parliament.
"When's the old crow going to speak?" Jenny inquired.
"To-morrow evening."
"On a Sunday?"
"Yes."
So, because there was nothing else to do and because nowadays Sunday was a long grim moping, a procession of pretty hours irrevocable, Jenny promised to accompany her friend.
It was a wet evening, and Bloomsbury seemed the wettest place in London as the two girls turned into the sparse lamplight of Mecklenburg Square and hurried along under the dank, fast-fading planes and elms. Inside the house, however, there was an air of energetic jollity owing to the arrival of several girl students from Oxford and Cambridge, who stumped in and out of the rooms, greeting each other with tales of Swiss mountains and comparisons of industry. In their strong, low-heeled boots they stumped about consumed by holiday sunshine and the acquisition of facts. With friendly smiles and fresh complexions, they talked enthusiastically to several young men, whose Adam's apples raced up and down their long necks, giving them the appearance of chickens swallowing maize very quickly.
"Talk about funny turns," whispered Jenny.
"They're all very clever," Miss Vergoe apologized, as she steered her intolerant friend past the group.
"Yes, I should say they ought to be clever, too. Theylookas though they were pecking each other's brains out."
Miss Bailey encountered them here.
"Why, this is capital," she said. "Miss Ragstead won't be long now. Let me introduce a dear young friend of mine, Miss Worrill."
"How are you?" Miss Worrill asked heartily.
She was a pleasant girl dressed in Harris tweed strongly odorous from the rain. Her hair might have been arranged to set off her features to greater advantage, and it was a pity her complexion was spoilt by a network of tiny purple veins which always attracted the concentration of those who talked to her. Jenny began to count them at once.
"Come to hear Connie Ragstead?" asked Miss Worrill. "Jolly good crowd for August," she went on, throwing a satisfied glance round the room. "Have you ever heard her?"
"No," Jenny replied, wondering why something in this girl's way of speaking reminded her of Maurice.
"You'll like her most awfully. I met her once at the Lady Maggie 'Gaudy.'"
"At the what?"
"Our Gaude at Lady Margaret's. Festive occasion and all that. I say, do you play hockey? I'm getting up a team to play at Wembley this winter."
"My friend and I are too busy," Miss Vergoe explained, looking nervously round at Jenny to see how she took the suggestion.
"But one can always find time for 'ecker.'"
"Icouldfind time to fly kites. Only I don't want to," said Jenny dangerously. "You see, I'm on the stage."
"I'm frightfully keen on the stage," Miss Worrill volunteered. "I believe it could be such a force. I thought of acting myself once—you know, in real plays, not musical comedy, of course. A friend of mine was in the 'Ecclesiasuzæ' at the Afternoon Theater. She wore aratherjolly vermilion tunic and had bare legs. Absolutely realistic."
Jenny now began to giggle, and whispered "Cocoanut knees" to Lilli, who, notwithstanding the importance of the occasion, also began to giggle. So Miss Worrill, presumably shy of their want of sensibility, retired.
Soon, when the rumor of the speaker's arrival ran round the assemblage, a general move was made in the direction of the large room on the first floor. Jenny, as she entered withthe stream, saw Leonardo's sinister portrait and tried to retreat; but there were too many eager listeners in the way, and she had to sit down and prepare to endure the damnable smile of La Gioconda that seemed directed to the very corner where she was sitting.
During the earlier part of Miss Ragstead's address, Jenny's attention was chiefly occupied by her neighbors. She thought that never before was such a collection of freaks gathered together. Close beside her, dressed in a green djibbeh embroidered with daisies of terra-cotta silk, was a tallowy woman who from time to time let several books slide from her lap on to the floor—a piece of carelessness which always provoked the audience to a lullaby of protest. In front of this lady were two Hindu students with flowing orange ties; and just beyond her, in black velvet, was a tall woman with a flat, pallid face, who gnawed alternately her nails and the extinguished end of a cigarette. Then came a group of girl students, all very much alike, all full of cocoa and the binomial theorem; while the rest of the audience was made up of typists, clerks, civil servants, copper-workers, palmists, nurses, Americans and poets, all lending their ears to the speaker's words as in the Zoological Gardens elephants, swaying gently, offer their trunks for buns. Gradually, however, from this hotchpotch of types, the personality of the speaker detached itself and was able to impress Jenny's attention. Gradually, as she grew tired of watching the audience, she began to watch Miss Ragstead and, after a critical appreciation of her countenance, to make an attempt to comprehend the intention of the discourse.
Miss Constance Ragstead was a woman of about forty, possessing much of the remote and chastened beauty that was evident in Miss Bailey. She, too, was pale, not unhealthily, but with the impression of having lived long in a rarefied atmosphere. Virginity has its fires, and Miss Ragstead was an inheritor of the spirit which animated Saint Theresa and Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Her social schemes were crowned with aureoles, her plans were lapped by tenuous gold flames. Shewas a mystic of humanity, one who from the contemplation of mortality in its individual aspirations, had arrived at the acknowledgment of man as a perfect idea and was able from his virtues to create her theogony. This woman's presence implied the purification of ceaseless effort. Activity as expressed by her was a sacrament. It conveyed the isolated solemnity of a force that does not depend for its reality on human conceptions or practical altruism. Her activity was a moral radium never consumed by the expenditure of its energy; it was dynamic whether it effected little or much. When she recalled the factory in which for a year she had worked as a hand, the enterprise was hallowed with the romance of a saint's pilgrimage. When she spoke of her green garden, where June had healed the hearts of many young women, she seemed like an eremite in whose consolation was absolute peace. Her voice was modulated with those half-tones that thrushes ring upon the evening air; and since they were produced suddenly with no hint of premeditation, the feeblest listener was at some time inevitably waylaid.
It was not astonishing Jenny should find herself caught in the melodious twilight of the oration, should find that the craning audience was less important than the speaker. She came to believe that Mona Lisa's smile was kindlier. She began to take in some of the rhetoric of the peroration:
"I wish I could persuade you that, if our cause is a worthy cause, it must exist and endure through the sanity of its adherents. It must never depend upon the trivial eccentricities of a few. I want to see the average woman fired with zeal to make the best of herself. I do not want us to be contemptuously put aside as exceptions. Nor am I anxious to recruit our strength from the discontented, the disappointed and the disillusioned. Let us do away with the reproach that we voice a minority's opinion. Let us preserve the grace and magic of womanhood, so that with the spiritual power of virginity, the physical grandeur of motherhood, ina devoted phalanx huge as the army of Darius, we may achieve our purpose."
Here the speaker paused and, as if afraid she might be deemed to offer counsels of pusillanimity, broke forth more passionately:
"But because I wish to see our ambition succeed through the aggregate of dignified opinion, I do not want to discredit or seek to dishearten the advance-guard. Let us who represent the van of an army so mighty as to be mute and inexpressive, let us, not thinking ourselves martyrs nor displaying like Amazons our severed breasts, let us resolve to endure ignominy and contempt, slander, disgrace and imprisonment. Some day men will speak well of us; some day the shrieking sisterhood will be forgotten, and those leaders of women whom to-day we alone venerate, will be venerated by all. Pay no heed to that subtle propaganda of passivity. Reject the lily-white counsels of moderation. Remember that without visible audible agitation this phlegmatic people cannot be roused. Therefore I call on you who murmur your agreement to join the great march on Westminster. I implore you to be brave, to despise calumny, to be careless of abuse and, because you believe you are in the right, to alarm once more this blind and stolid mass of public opinion with the contingency of your ultimate triumph."
The speaker sat down, lost in the haze which shrouds a room full of people deeply wrought by eloquence and emotion. There was a moment's silence and then, after prolonged applause, the audience began to babble.
Jenny sat still. She had not listened to the reasoned arguments and statistical illustrations of the main portion of the speech, nor had she properly comprehended the peroration. Yet she was charged with resolves, primed with determination and surgingly impelled to some sort of action. She was the microcosm of a mob's awakening to the clarion of an orator. A cataract of formless actions was thundering through her mind; the dam of indifference had been burst by mere weightof rhetoric, that powerful dam proof against the tampering of logic. Perhaps she was passing through the psychical crisis of conversion. Perhaps, in her dead emotional state, anything that aroused her slightly would have aroused her violently. No doubt a deep-voiced bishop could have secured a similar result, had she been leaning against the cold stone of a cathedral rather than the gray flock wall-paper of Mecklenburg Square.
"I'd like to talk to her," she told Lilli.
"She doesn't half stir you up, eh?"
"I don't know so much about stirring up, Mrs. Pudding," said Jenny, unwilling to admit any renascence of sensibility. "But I think she's nice. I'd like to see what sort she'd be to talk to quiet."
No opportunity for a conversation with Miss Ragstead presented itself that evening; but Lilli, somewhat elated by the capture of Jenny, told Miss Bailey of her admiration; and the president, who had been attracted to the neophyte, promised to arrange a meeting. Lilli knew better than to breathe a word to Jenny of any plan, and merely threw out a casual suggestion to take tea at the club.
So without any premonitory shyness Jenny found herself talking quite easily in a corner of the tea-room to Miss Ragstead, who was not merely persuasive with assemblages, but also acutely sympathetic with individuals.
"But I don't want a vote," Jenny was saying. "I shouldn't know what to do with it. I don't see any use in it. My father's got one and it's a regular nuisance. It keeps him out late every night."
"My dear, you may not want a vote," said Miss Ragstead, "but I do, and I want the help of girls like you to get it. I want to represent you. As things are now, you have no say in the government of yourself. Tell me, now, Jenny—I'm going to call you Jenny straight away—you wouldn't like to be at the mercy of one man, would you?"
"But I wouldn't. Not me," said Jenny. Yet somehow she spoke not quite so bravely as once, and even as the assertionwas made, her heart throbbed to a memory of Maurice. After all, she had been at the mercy of one man.
"Of course you wouldn't," Miss Ragstead went on. "Well, we women who want the vote have the same feeling. We don't like to be at the mercy of men. I suppose you'd be horrified if I asked you to join our demonstration in October?"
"What, walk in procession?" Jenny gasped.
"Yes, it's not so very dreadful. Who would object? Your mother?"
"She'd make fun of it, but that wouldn't matter. She'd make everyone laugh to hear her telling about me in a procession."
Jenny remembered how her mother had teased her father when she saw him supporting a banner of the Order of Foresters on the occasion of a beanfeast at Clacton.
"Well, your lover?"
Jenny looked sharply at Miss Ragstead to ascertain if she were laughing. The word sent such a pang through her. It was a favorite word of Maurice.
"I haven't got one," she coldly answered.
"No?" said Miss Ragstead, gently skeptical. "I can hardly believe that, you know, for you surely must be a most attractive girl."
"I did have one," said Jenny, surprised out of her reserve. "Only we just ended it all of a sudden."
"My dear," said Miss Ragstead softly, "I don't think you're a very happy little girl. I'm sure you're not. Won't you tell me about it?"
"There's nothing to tell. Men are rotters, that's all. If I thought I could pay them out by being a suffragette, I'd be a suffragette."
Jenny spoke with decision, pointing the avowal by flinging her cigarette into the grate.
"Yes, I know that's a reason with some. But I don't think that revenge is the best of reasons, somehow. I would rather you were convinced that the movement is right."
"If it annoys men, it must be right," Jenny argued. "Only I don't think it does. I think they just laugh."
"I see you're in a turbulent state of mind," Miss Ragstead observed. "And I'm glad in a way, because it proves that you have temperament and character. You ought to resent a wrong. Of course, I know you'll disagree with me when I tell you that you're too young to be permanently injured by any man—and, I think I might add, too proud."
"Yes, I am most shocking proud," Jenny admitted, looking down on the floor and, as it were, regarding her character incarnate before her.
"But it's just these problems of behavior under difficulties that our club wants to solve. I'd like to put you on the road to express yourself and your ambitions without the necessity of—say marriage for convenience. You're a dancer, aren't you?"
"Um, a ballet girl," said Jenny as usual, careful not to presume the false grandeur of an isolated stellar existence.
"Are you keen on your dancing?"
"I was once. When I began. Only they crush you at the Orient. Girls there hate to see you get on. I'm sick of it."
"I wonder," said Miss Ragstead half to herself; "I wonder if active work for the cause would give you a new zest for life. It might. You feel all upside down just now, don't you?"
"I feel as if nothing didn't matter. Notanything," replied Jenny decidedly.
"That's terrible for a girl of your age. You can't be more than eighteen or nineteen."
"Twenty-one in October."
"So much as that? Yes"—the older woman continued after a reflective pause—"yes, I believe you want some spur, some excitement quite outside your ordinary experience. You know I am a doctor, so without impertinence I can fairly prescribe for you."
"Well, what have I got to do?" Jenny asked. She wasalmost fascinated by this lady with her cool hands and deep-set, passionate eyes.
"I wish I could invite you to spend some time with me in Somerset, but I'm too busy now for a holiday. I feel rather uncertain whether, after all, to advise you to plunge into the excitement of this demonstration. And yet I'm sure it would be good for you. Dear child, I hope I'm not giving bad advice," said Miss Ragstead earnestly as she leaned forward and took hold of Jenny's hand.
So it came about that Jenny was enrolled in the ranks of the great demonstration that was to impress the autumnal session of Parliament. She kept very quiet about her intention and no one, except Lilli, knew anything about it. The worst preliminary was the purple, green and white sash which contained her unlucky color. Indeed, at first she could hardly be persuaded to put it across her shoulders. But when the booming of the big drum marked the beat, she felt aflame with nervous expectation and never bothered about the sash or the chance of casual recognition.
The rhythm of the march, the crashing of the band, the lilting motion, the unreality of the crowds gaping on the pavements intoxicated her, and she went swinging on to the tune in a dream of excitement. In the narrower streets the music blazed with sound and fury of determination, urging them on, inspiring them with indomitable energy, inexorable progress. The tops of the houses here seemed to converge, blotting out the sky; and Jenny felt that she was stationary, while they moved on like the landscape of a cinematograph. As the procession swept into Trafalgar Square with its great open space of London sky, the music unconfined achieved a more poignant appeal and infected the mass of arduous women with sentiment, making their temper the more dangerous. The procession became a pilgrimage to some abstract nobility, to no set place. Jenny was now bewitched by the steady motion into an almost complete unconsciousness of the gaping sightseers, thought of them, if she thought of them at all, as figuresin a fair-booth to be knocked carelessly backwards as she passed, more vital than they were with their painted grins.
In Whitehall the air was again charged with anger. The tall banners far ahead floated on airs of victory. The mounted women rode like conquerors. Then for an instant as Jenny heard from one of the pavement-watchers a coarse and mocking comment on the demonstration, she thought the whole business mere matter for ridicule and recalled the circus processions that flaunted through towns on sunny seaside holiday mornings long ago. Soon, however, the tune reëstablished itself in her brain, and once more she swept on to the noble achievement. The houses grew taller than ever; faded into remote mists; quaked and shimmered as if to a fall. Far down the line above the brass and drums was a sound of screaming, a dull mutter of revolution, a wave of execration and encouragement. The procession stopped dead: the music ceased in discords. Two or three of the women fainted. The crowd on either side suddenly came to life and pressed forward with hot, inquisitive breath. Somewhere, a long way off, a leader shrieked, "Forward." Policemen were conjured from the quivering throng. Somebody tore off Jenny's sash. Somebody trod on her foot. The confusion increased. Nothing was left of any procession: everyone was pushing, yelling, groaning, scratching, struggling in a wreck of passions. Jenny was cut off from the disorganized main body, was helpless in a mob of men. The police were behaving with that magnificent want of discrimination which characterizes their behavior in a crisis of disorder. Their tactics were justified by success, and as they would rely on mutual support in the official account of the riot, individual idiocy would escape censure.
In so far as Jenny was pushing her way out of the mob, was seeking desperately to gain the sanctuary of a side street and forever escape from feminine demonstrations, she was acting in a way likely to cause a breach of the peace. So it was not surprising that a young plough-boy lately invested with an uniform should feel impelled to arrest her.
"Now then, you come along of me," commanded the yokel as a blush ebbed and flowed upon his cheeks glistening with down and perspiration.
"Who are you pushing, you?" cried Jenny, enraged to find her arm in the tight grasp of a podgy, freckled hand.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared.
"Don't you speak to me, you. Why, whatareyou? Invisible blue when you're wanted. Let go of me. I won't be held. I wasn't doing anything. I was going home. Let go."
The young policeman, disinclined to risk the adventure single-handed, looked around for a fellow-constable to assist at the conveyance of Jenny to the station. All his companions, however, seemed busily engaged tugging at recalcitrant women; and instead of being congratulated on his first arrest, a well-groomed man, white with rage, shouted: "Look here, you blackguard, I've got your number and I'll have your coat off for this. This lady was doing absolutely nothing but trying to escape from the crowd."
The young policeman looked about him once more with watery, unintelligent eyes. He was hoping that someone would arrest the well-groomed man; but as nobody did, and as the latter was not unlike the Captain of the Volunteer Company from whose ranks he had climbed into the force, the novice released his grip of Jenny and said:
"Now, you be off. You won't get another chance."
"No, you turnip-headed bumpkin," shouted the well-groomed man, "nor will you, when I've had five minutes at Scotland Yard. I'm going to watch you, my friend. You're not fit for a position of responsibility."
Jenny, free of the crowd, walked through the peace of Whitehall Court and promised herself that never again would she have anything to do with suffragettes.
"Soppy fools," she thought, "they can't do nothing. They can only jabber, jabber." She reproached herself for imagining it was possible to consummate a revenge on man by suchmeans. She had effected nothing but the exposure of her person to the freckled paws of a policeman.
"Not again," said Jenny to herself, "not ever again will I be such a silly, soppy idiot."
In the distance she could still hear the shouting of the riot; but as she drew nearer to Charing Cross railway station, the noise of trains took its place.
SUFFRAGISM viewed in retrospect was shoddy embroidery for thevie intérieureof Jenny. There was no physical exhilaration for her in wrestling with policemen, and the intellectual excitement of controversy would never be likely to appeal to a mind naturally unfitted for argument. There was, too, about her view of the whole business something of Myrrhine's contempt. She may have been in an abnormal condition of acute hostility to the opposite sex; but as soon as she found herself in a society whose antipathy towards men seemed to be founded on inability to attract the hated male, all her common sense cried out against committing herself to such a devil-driven attitude. She felt that something must be wrong with so obviously an ineffective aggregation of Plain Janes. She was not concerned with that unprovided-for surplus of feminine population. She had no acquaintance with that asceticism produced by devotion to the intellect. She perceived, though not consciously, the inherent weakness of the whole movement in its failure to supply an emotional substitute for more elemental passions.
Jenny was shrewd enough to understand that leaders like Miss Bailey and Miss Ragstead were logically justified in demanding a vote. She could understand that they would be able to use it to some purpose; but at the same time she realized that to the majority of women a vote would be merely an encumbrance. Jenny also saw through the folly of agitation that must depend for success on equality of physique, and half divined that the prime cause of such extravagance layin the needs of feminine self-expression. Nuns are wedded to Christ; suffragists, with the notable exceptions of those capable of sustaining an intellectual predominance, must remain spiritual old maids. As Jenny asked, "What do they all want?" Very soon the inhabitants of Mecklenburg Square became as unreal as unicorns, and the whole episode acquired the reputation of an interlude of unaccountable madness from the memory of which the figure of Miss Ragstead stood out cool and tranquil and profoundly sane. Jenny would in a way have been glad to meet her again; but she was too shy to suggest meeting outside the domain of the Women's Political, Social and Economic League, and their auspices were now unimaginable. In order to avoid the whole subject, Jenny began to avoid Lilli Vergoe; and very soon, partly owing to the opportunities of propinquity, partly owing to a renewed desire for it, her friendship with Irene Dale was reconstituted on a firmer basis than before.
Six months had now elapsed since that desolate first of May. The ballet of Cupid was taken off about the same time, and the occupation of rehearsing for a new one had steered Jenny through the weeks immediately following Maurice's defection. She was now dancing in a third ballet in which she took so little interest that no account of it is necessary. The pangs of outraged love were drugged to painlessness by time. From a superficial standpoint the wounds were healed, that is, if a dull insensibility to the original cause of the evil be a cure. Jenny no longer missed Maurice on particular occasions, and, having grown used to his absence, was not aware she missed him in a wider sense. Love so impassioned as theirs, love lived through in moments of individual ecstasy, was in the verdict of average comment a disease; but average comment failed to realize that, like the scarlet fever of her youth, its malignant influence would be extended in complications of abnormal emotional states. Average comment did not perceive that the worst tragedies of unhappy love are not those which end with death or separation. Nor did Jennyherself foresee the train of ills that in the wake of such a shock to her feelings would be liable to twist her whole life awry.
With Maurice she had embarked on the restless ocean of an existence lived at unusually high pressure. She had conjured for her soul dreams of adventure, fiery-hearted dreams which would not be satisfied by the awakening of common-place dawns. Time had certainly assuaged with his heavy anodyne the intimate desire for her lover; but time would rather aggravate than heal the universal need of her womanhood. These six months of seared emotions and withered hopes were a trance from which she would awake on the very flashing heels of the last mental and physical excitement.
It was said in the last chapter that a less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound. Those hearts are dragged but a little way down into the depths of misery; for such have not fallen from great heights. Jenny on the first of May fell straight and deep as a plummet to the bed of the ocean of despair, there to lie long submerged. But to one who had rejected death, life would not hold out oblivion. Life with all its cold insistence called her once more to the surface; thence to make for whatever beach chance should offer. Jenny, scarcely conscious of any responsibleness for her first struggles, clutched at suffragism—a support for which life never intended her. However, it served to help her ashore; and now, with some of the cynicism that creeps into the adventurer's life, she looked around for new adventures. Her desire to revenge herself on men was superseded by anxiety to rediscover the savor of living. Her instinct was now less to hurt others than to indulge herself. A year's abstention from the episodic existence spent by Irene and her before Maurice had created an illusion of permanence, had given that earlier time a romantic charm; and a revival of it seemed fraught with many possibilities of a more widely extended wonder. One evening late in October she asked Irene casually, as if there had been no interval of desuetude, whether she were coming out. To this inquiry her friend, without any manifestation of surprise, answeredin the affirmative. It was characteristic of both girls, this manner of resuming a friendship.
Now began a period not worth a detailed chronicle, since it was merely a repetition of a period already discussed—a repetition, moreover, that like most anachronisms seemed after other events jejune and somewhat tawdry. The young men were just as young as those of earlier years; but Irene and Jenny were older and, if before they had found it hard to tolerate these ephemeral encounters, they found it harder still now. The result of this was that, where once a single whisky and soda was enough, now three or four scarcely availed to pass away the time. Neither of the girls drank too much in more than a general sense, but it was an omen of flying youth when whiskies were invoked to give an edge to existence.
One evening they sat in the Café d'Afrique, laughing to each other over the physical and social oddities of two Norwegians who had constituted themselves their hosts on the strength of a daring stage-door introduction. As Jenny paused in her laughter to catch some phrase of melody in the orchestra, she saw Castleton drawing near their table. He stopped in doubt, and looked at her from wide, gray eyes very eager under eyebrows arched in a question. She returned his gaze without a flicker of recognition, and, bowing imperceptibly, he passed out into the night. The doors swung together behind him, and Jenny, striking a match from the stand on the table, set the whole box alight to distract Irene's attention from what she feared in the blush of a memory.
"Come on; let's go," she said to her friend.
So the girls left the two Norwegians desolate and volubly unintelligible.
One morning in November Irene came into Jenny's room at Stacpole Terrace.
"My Danby's coming home this week," she announced. "And his brother, too."
Jenny often thought to herself that Danby was a riddle. It was four years now since he and Irene had been reputed inlove; yet nothing seemed to have happened since the day when for a fancy he dressed his sweetheart in short frocks. Here he was coming back from France as he had come back time after time in company with his brother, at the notion of meeting whom Jenny had always scoffed.
"What of it?" she said.
"Now don't be nasty, young Jenny. I shall be glad to see him."
"I suppose this means every minute you can get together for a fortnight, and then he'll be off again for six months. Why doesn't he marry you?"
"He's going to," Irene asserted, twisting the knob on the corner of the bed round and round until it squeaked. "But I don't want to get married, not yet."
"Oh, no, it's only a rumor. Why ever not? If I loved a fellow as you think you love Danby, I'd get married quick enough."
"Well, you didn't——"
"That's enough of you," said Jenny, sitting up in bed. "No, I know I didn't. But that was different."
"Why was it different? My Danby's a gentleman."
"Yes, when he's asleep. Hecan'tbe much or he wouldn't have dressed you up such a sight. I'd like to see a man make such a poppy-show of me," cried Jenny, indignant at the recollection of the incident.
"Oh, well, he doesn't do it now," said Irene pacifically. "Aren't you coming out with us?"
"You're very free all of a sudden with your Danby," Jenny continued mockingly. "I remember when you was afraid for your life some girl would carry him off under your nose. Yet you let him go all the time to France. I think you're silly."
Jenny could not refrain from teasing Irene. The habit was firmly established and, although she had not now the sense of outraged independence which prompted her attitude in old days, she kept it up because such rallying was easier than sympathetic attention.
"His brother Jack says he'd like to meet you."
Jenny laughed derisively.
"I thought you weren't giving your Danby away with a pound of nothing. Do you remember when I used to call Jack Danby 'Tin Ribs the Second,' and you used to get so ratty?"
"Well, what a liberty," said Irene, laughing at the now almost forgotten insult.
Towards the dripping fog-stained close of November Arthur and Jack Danby arrived from Paris and, tall as lamp-posts, waited for the two girls at the top of the court in Jermyn Street. It did not strike Jenny at the time that the appointment seemed girt with intrigue, as if whispers had gone to the making of it, whispers that voiced a deceitful purpose in her friend. Jenny had often arraigned the methods of Mrs. Dale and denounced the encouragement of Winnie and Irene in any association whose profit transcended its morality. But she never really understood Irene, and her teasing was a sign of this. Under the circumstances of lovers reunited, she accepted her place at Jack Danby's side without suspicion; and was only dimly aware of the atmosphere of satisfaction which clung to the two brothers and her friend.
In the bronzed glow of the Trocadero grill-room she had an opportunity of studying the two men, and because the result of this was a decided preference for Jack, she lost any suspicion of a plot, and appeared almost to enjoy his company.
All Arthur Danby's features, even his ears, seemed excessively pointed, while his thinness and length of limb accentuated this peaked effect of countenance. His complexion had preserved the clearness of youth, but had become waxy from dissipation, and in certain lights was feathered with fine lines that looked like scratches on a smooth surface. His eyelids were puffy and tinged slightly round the rims with a redness which was the more obvious from the vivid light blue eyes it surrounded. A certain diabolic strangeness redeemed the whole effect from mere unpleasantness. Jack Danby was not so tallas his brother, and his features were less sharply pointed, although they were as clearly defined. He had similar eyes of almost cobalt blue when contrasted with the dead whiteness of a skin that gave the impression of being powdered. The younger brother's eyes preserved more fire and seemed under the influence of a suggestive conversation to be lighted up from behind in a way that sent a sudden breathlessness through many women. Jenny, when she looked at him full, was aware less of his eyes than of her own, which seemed to her to be kindling in the dry sparks that were radiated by his; and even as she felt scorched by the brain which was thus expressed, her own eyes would melt, as it were, to meet appropriately the liquid softness that succeeded. His lips were never remarkably red, and as the evening advanced they adopted the exact shade of his complexion, which from paleness took on the lifeless monotone of color that is seen in the rain-soaked petal of a pink rose. Danby's mouth curved upwards, and when he smiled, he only smiled on one side of his face. The immediate expression he conveyed was that of profound lassitude changed by any topic of sly licentiousness to a startling concentration.
A pictorial representation of the party would have some decorative value. The two brothers had ordered red mullet, which lay scattered about their plates in mingled hues of cornelian, rose and tarnished copper. Their wine was Lacrima Christi of the precise tint to carry on the scheme of color. Jenny and Irene were drinking champagne whose pale amber sparkled against the prevailing luster, contrasting and lightening the arrangement of metallic tints, just as Jenny's fair hair set off and was at the same time enhanced by Irene's copper-brown. As a group of revellers the four of them composed into a rich enough study ingenre, and the fanciful observer would extract from the position of the two men a certain potentiality for romantic events as, somewhat hunched and looking up from down-turned heads, they both sat with legs outstretched to the extent of their length. The more imaginativeobserver would perceive in the group something unhealthy, somethingfaisandé, an air of too deliberate enjoyment that seemed to imply a perfect knowledge of the limitations of human pleasure. These men and girls aimed no arrow of fleeting gayety to pierce in a straight, sharp course the heart of the present. Sophistication clung to them, and weariness. That senescent October moon which a year ago marked the end of love's halcyon would have been a suitable light for such a party. Jenny herself had gone back to that condition of cynicism which before the days of Maurice was due to ignorance, but was now a profounder cynicism based on experience. Irene had always been skeptical of emotional heights, had always accepted life sensually without much enthusiasm either for the gratification or the denial of her ambitions. As for the two men, they had grown thin on self-indulgence.
"Fill up your glasses, girls," said Arthur.
"Fill up," echoed Jack. "Is there time for another bottle?" he added anxiously.
"This cheese is very good," commented Arthur.
"Delicious," the other agreed.
"You two seem to think of nothing but eating and drinking," said Jenny distastefully.
"Oh, no, we think of other things, don't we, Jack?" contradicted the older brother, with a sort of frigid relish.
"Rather," the younger one corroborated, looking sideways at Jenny.
"We must have a good time this winter," Arthur announced. "We needn't go back to Paris for a month or two. We must have a good time at our flat in Victoria."
"London's a much wickeder city than Paris," said Jack, addressing the air like some pontiff of vice. "I like these November nights with shapes of women looming up through the fog. A friend of mine——" As Jack Danby descended to personal reminiscence, he lost his sinister power and became mean and common. "When I say friend—I should say business friend, eh, Arthur?" he asked, smiling on the side of hisface nearer to his brother. "Well, he's a lord as a matter of fact," he continued in accents of studied indifference.