So it was arranged; and, having paid the bill and politely assented to the waiter's suggestion that they should come over in the summer-time to a whitebait dinner, they left behind them the Sloop Hotel, Greenwich.
On the way back to London, Maurice attempted to point out to Jenny the foolishness of her present style of living.
"All this fuss about whether you go home before or after the milk. I can't understand why you let yourself be a slave to a family. I really can't."
"But I'm not," said Jenny indignantly. "Only that doesn't say I'm going to live with you, if that's what you mean."
Somehow the wet and dreary morning gave a certain crudity of outline to the situation, destroying romantic enchantments and accentuating the plain and ugly facts.
"You'd be ever so much happier if you did."
"Oh, well, who cares?"
"I wish you wouldn't say that."
"Well, what an unnatural time to talk about where I'm going to live and what I'm going to do."
"It's extraordinary," said Maurice, "how much you're influenced by the unimportant little things of life. I'm as much in love with you now as I was last night when we were waltzing. You're not."
"I don't love anything now except bed."
"Yet I'm just as tired as you are."
"Who cares?"
"Damn it. Don't go on saying that. I can't think where you got hold of that infernal expression."
"You are in a nasty mood," said Jenny sullenly.
"So are you."
"Well, why did you drag me out all this way in the early morning?"
"I wanted you to enjoy yourself. I wanted to round off a glorious evening."
"I think a jolly good sleep rounds off a glorious evening, or anything else, best of all."
"I think you sleep too much," argued Maurice, who was so tired himself that he felt bound to contest futilely every point of the discussion.
"Well, I don't. That's where you and me don't agree."
"You're always sleeping."
"Well, if I like it, it needn't trouble you."
"Nothing troubles me," Maurice answered with much austerity. "Only I wish to goodness you'd behave reasonably. Look here, you're an artistic person. You earn your living by dancing. You don't want to take up with a lot of old women's notions of morality. If you reject an experience, you'll suffer for it. Chance only offers you Life—I mean Life only offers you Chance——" But it did not matter much what he meant, for by now Jenny was fast asleep.
JENNY went to bed at Irene's house in Camden Town and slept soundly till four o'clock in the afternoon. Then she got up, dressed herself, and prepared to face the storms of 17 Hagworth Street.
When she walked into the kitchen, the family was assembled in conclave round the tea-table. The addition of her brother to the usual party of three made her exclaim in surprise from the doorway:
"Oo—er, there's Alfie."
"So you've come back?" said Mrs. Raeburn.
"Yes, I went to Covent Garden Ball."
"I wonder you dare show your face."
"Why not?" asked Jenny, advancing towards the table.
"Oh, leave her alone, mother," said May. "She's tired."
"You dare tell me what I'm to do," Mrs. Raeburn threatened, turning sharply to her youngest daughter.
Jenny began to unbutton her gloves, loftily unconscious of her mother's gaze, which was now again directed upon her.
"How's yourself, young Alf?" she lightly inquired.
"Better than you, I hope," came the morose reply muffled by a teacup.
"Perhaps you'd like us to help you off with your things?" Mrs. Raeburn suggested sarcastically.
"Eh?" Jenny retorted, pointing a cold insolence of manner with arched contemptuous eyebrows.
"Don't you try and defy me, miss," Mrs. Raeburn warned her. "Because you know I won't have it."
"Who cares? I haven't done nothing."
Alfie guffawed ironically.
"I wonder you aren't afraid to make a noise like that with such long ears as you've got," said Jenny. "I should be."
Alfie muttered something about sauce under his breath, but ventured no audible retort.
"Well, what's the matter?" Jenny asked. "Get it over and done with."
"Where were you last night?"
"I told you. At Covent Garden Ball."
"And afterwards?"
"I went home with Ireen."
"And that's a —— lie," shouted Alfie. "Because I saw you go off with a fellah."
"What of it, Mr. Nosy Parker? And don't use your navvy's language to me, because I don't like it."
"That's quite right," May agreed. "He ought to be ashamed of himself."
"You shut up, you silly kid," Alfie commanded.
Here Charlie entered the dispute.
"There's no call to swear, Alf. I can argue without swearing and so can you."
"It was you that learned him to swear. He's heard you often enough," Mrs. Raeburn pointed out. "But that's no reason why Alfie should."
Jenny, more insolently contemptuous than ever, interrupted the side-issue.
"When you've finished arguing which is the biggest lady and gentleman in this room, perhaps you'll let me finish what I was going to say."
"I'd hold my tongue if I was you," her brother advised. "You're as bad as Edie."
"Don't you talk to me. You!" said Jenny, stamping with rage. Then, with head thrown back and defiant underlip, she continued:
"That's quite right about my driving off with a gentleman." In the tail of the "g" was whipcord for Alfie's self-esteem.
"Gentleman," he sneered.
"Whichis more thanyoucould ever be, any old way."
"Or want to," Alfie growled. "Thanks, I'm quite content with what I am."
"You can't have many looking-glasses down at your workshop then. Look at Mr. Quite Content. How much do they pay you a week to be all the time spying after your sister?"
"Well, anyway, I caught you out, my girl."
"No, you didn't. I say Ididdrive off with a gentleman, but there was a crowd of us. We went to have breakfast at Greenwich."
"Now that's a place I've often meant to go to and never did," said Charlie. "What's it like?"
"You keep quiet, you silly old man," his wife commanded. "As if she went near Greenwich. What a tale!"
"It isn't a tale," Jenny declared. "I did. Ask Maudie Chapman and Madge Wilson and Ireen. They was all there."
"Oh, I don't doubt they're just as quick with their tongues as what you are," said Mrs. Raeburn. "A nice lot you meet at that theater."
"Jest leave the theater alone," her daughter answered. "It's better than this dog's island where no one can't let you alone for a minute because they're so ignorant that they don't know nothing. I say I did go to Greenwich."
"I don't see why the girl shouldn't have gone to Greenwich," Charlie interposed. "I keep telling you I've often thought of going there myself."
"Jenny never speaks only what's the truth," May asserted.
"Yes, and a lot of good it does me," said Jenny indignantly. "I'd better by half tell a pack of lies, the same as other girls do."
"What she wants," said Alfie sententiously, "is a jolly good hiding. Look at her. There's a fine sister for a chap to have—nothing but paint and powder and hair-dye."
Jenny stood silent under this; but the upper lip was no longer visible. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes mere points of light. May was the first to speak in defense of the silent one.
"Brothers!" she scoffed. "Some girls would be a sight better without brothers. Hateful things!"
Jenny's feelings had been so overwrought by the fatigue of the dance followed by this domestic scene that May's gallant sally should have turned contempt to tears. But Alfie had enraged her too profoundly for weeping, and though tear-drops stood in her eyes, they were hard as diamonds.
"You oughtn't to talk to her like that, my boy," Charlie protested. "You're talking like a clergyman I once did some work for. He said, 'I'm not satisfied with this here box, Mr. Raeburn'—well, he said more than that—and I said, 'I'm not satisfied with your tone of voice,' and——"
"For goodness' sake, Charlie, keep your tongue quiet," his wife begged. "Look here, Jenny," she went on, "I won't have these hours kept, and that's all about it. Wherever you were last night, you weren't at home where you ought to be, and where you shall be as long as you live with me. Now that's all about it, and don't give me any back answers, because I know what's right and I'm your mother."
"I think you're a bit hard on the girl, Florrie, I do really," said the father. "She takes after her dad. I was always one for seeing a bit of life. What I says is, 'Let the young enjoy themselves.'"
"What you say is neither here nor there," replied Mrs. Raeburn. "You never did have any sense, you haven't got any sense now, and you never will have any sense."
"When you've done nagging at one another, all ofyou, I'm off," said Jenny deliberately.
"Off?" Mrs. Raeburn echoed.
"I'm going to live at Ireen Dale's for the future. This!" She looked round the kitchen. "Pooh!"
"You're not going to leave home?" Mrs. Raeburn asked.
"Aren't I? Who says so? I'm going now. You!" shesaid bitterly to her brother. "You've done a lot, Mr. Interfering Idiot. It's time you looked about for some girl to marry you, so as you can poke your nose into her business. Good-bye, all. I'll come over to tea soon, that is if you aren't all ashamed to have tea with me."
As she turned abruptly to go, Alfie asked his mother why she didn't lock her in a bedroom.
"It wouldn't be any good," said the latter.
"No, it wouldn't," Jenny vowed. "I'd kill myself sooner than sleep here another night."
"You're a dreadful worry to me," said Mrs. Raeburn slowly and earnestly.
"Send on my things to 43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town," replied the daughter. "You needn't think you'll get me back by keeping them, because you won't."
"You'll come and see us?" asked Mrs. Raeburn, who seemed now to accept defeat meekly.
"Yes, as long as you keep Mr. Nosy Parker Puppy dog outside. Brother! Why if you only knew, he wears that jam-pot round his neck to hide where his head's come off."
Presently the front door slammed.
MAURICE, on being informed of the decisive step which Jenny had taken, asked her why she had not taken the more decisive step of avowing his protection.
"Because I don't want to. Not yet. I can't explain why. But I don't. Oh, Maurice, don't go on asking me any more."
"It's nothing to do with your people. Because you evidently don't mind hurting their feelings in another way."
"Going to live at Ireen's isn't the same as living with you."
"You needn't live with me openly. Nobody wants you to do that. Only——"
"It's not a bit of good your going on," she interrupted. "I've told you I will one day."
"One day," he sighed.
It was a fine February that year, coming in with a stir of spring. Maurice felt in accord with the season's impulse, and became possessed with the ambition to create a work of art. He suggested that Jenny should come daily to the studio and sit for his statue of The Tired Dancer.
"I'm sure my real vocation is plastic," he declared. "I can write and I can play, but neither better than a lot of other people. With sculpture it's different. To begin with, there isn't such competition. It's the least general of the arts, although in another sense it's the most universal. Again, it's an art that we seem to have lost. Yet by every rule of social history, it is the art with which the present stage of evolution should be most occupied. In this era of noise and tear thesplendid quiescence of great sculpture should provoke every creative mind. I have the plastic impulse, but so far I've been content to fritter it away in bits and pieces of heads and arms and hands. I must finish something; make something."
Jenny was content to sit watching him through blue wreaths of cigarette smoke. She found a sensuous delight in seeing him happy and hearing the flow of his excited talk.
"Now I must mold you, Jenny," he went on, pacing up and down in the midst of the retinue of resolutions and intentions. "By gad! I'm thrilled by the thought of it. To possess you in virgin wax, to mold your delicious shape with my own hands, to see you taking form at my compelling touch. By gad! I'm thrilled by it. What's a lyric after that? I could pour my heart out in every meter imaginable, but I should never give anything more than myself to the world. But if I make a glorious statue of you, I give you—you forever and ever for men to gaze at and love and desire. By gad! I'm thrilled by the thought of it. There's objective art. Ha! Poor old poets with their words. Where are they? You can't dig your nails into a word. By Jove, the Nereids in the British Museum. You remember those Nereids, darling?"
Jenny looked blank.
"Yes, you do. You said how much you liked them. You must remember them, so light and airy that they seem more like clouds or blowballs than solid marble."
"I thinkallthe statues we saw was very light and airy, if it comes to that," said Jenny.
Maurice gave up pacing round the room and flung himself into a chair to discuss details of the conception.
"Of course, I'd like you to be dressed as a Columbine: and yet, I don't know, it's rather obvious."
"I could wear my practice dress."
"What's that like?"
"I've got two or three. Only the nicest is my gray tarlington."
"Eh?"
"You know, very frilly musling. Just like a ballet skirt, only you needn't wear tights."
"I didn't hear what you said. I know, tarlatan. Nice frizzy stuff. That sounds good. And it won't matter crumpling it?"
"Of course not."
"Because you see I want you to be lying on a pile of rugs and cushions just as if you'd been dancing hard and had fallen asleep where you sank down."
So, in the time of celandines and snowdrops, Jenny would come to the studio every day; and when they had lunched together intimately and delightfully, she would go downstairs to change her frock, while Maurice arranged her resting-place.
The dove-gray tarlatan skirt, resilient like the hair-spring of a watch, suited the poise of Jenny's figure. She wore gray silk stockings clocked with vivid pink, acrêpe de Chineblouse the color of mist, and round her head a fillet of rosy velvet. Altogether, she looked an Ariel woven magically from the smoke of London. Once or twice she actually fell fast asleep among the rugs; but generally she lay in a dream, just conscious of the flow of Maurice's comments and rhapsodies.
"It's an extraordinary thing," he began on one occasion. "But as I sit here fashioning your body out of wax, you yourself become every moment more and more of a spirit. I've a queer fancy working in my brain all the time that this is really you, here under my hands. I suppose it's the perpetual concentration on one object that puts everything else out of proportion. One thing, however, I do realize: you're making yourself every day more necessary to my life. Honestly, when you're not here, this studio is infernal. You seem to endow it with your presence, to infuse it with your personality. It's so romantic, you and I all alone on the tops of the houses, more alone than if we were on a beach in winter. I wish I could tell you the glorious satisfaction I feel all the time."
"Darling," she murmured drowsily.
"Sleepy girl, are you?"
"A bit."
Just then came a knock at the door, and Ronnie Walker looked in.
"Hullo, Ronnie," said Maurice, with a hint of ungraciousness in his tone.
"I say, old chap, would you think me an intrusive scoundrel if I made some drawings of Jenny?"
Maurice's annoyance at interruption was mollified by the pride of ownership.
"Rather not. Any time. Why not now?"
So Ronnie sat there, making littlecroquisof Jenny with soft outlines elusive as herself. After a while, with his sketch-book under his arm, he stole quietly from the room. The next day he came back with two water-colors, of which the first showed a room shadowy with dawn and Jenny fast asleep before a silver mirror, wrapped in a cloak of clouded blue satin. The second represented a bedroom darkened by jalousies faintly luminous with the morning light, when through one chink, glittering with motes, a narrow sunbeam made vivid her crimson lips.
The painter showed his pictures to Maurice.
"Oh, Ronnie," said the latter. "You put me out of temper with my own work."
"My dear chap, I'm awfully sorry," apologized Ronnie, and, without waiting, hurried from the studio.
"Whatever's the matter?" asked Jenny, awakened by this brief interview.
"I wish people wouldn't come in and interrupt me when I'm at work," Maurice grumbled. "It's frightfully inconsiderate. You don't want to look at damned paintings when you're working in another medium."
"Who were they of?"
"You, of course."
"Why didn't he show them to me?"
"Because I jumped down his throat, I suppose."
"Whatever for?"
"Can't you understand how annoying it must be to have to look at another person's treatment of your subject?"
"I think it was very nasty of you not to let him show me the pictures."
"You seem more interested in Ronnie's work than in mine."
"Well, you never let me look at what you've done."
"It isn't finished yet."
"You can be horrid."
"Look here, Jenny, for goodness' sake don't start criticising me. I can't stand it. I never could. I've noticed lately you've taken to it."
"Oh, I've not."
"Well, you give me that impression."
Jenny rose from the cushions and, running her hands down the tarlatan till it regained its buoyancy, she moved slowly across to Maurice's side.
"Kiss me, you silly old thing, and don't say any more unkind things, because they make me unhappy."
Maurice could not be disdainful of her as, leaning over him, she clasped cool hands beneath his chin and with tender kisses uprooted from his forehead a maze of petulant lines.
"You little enchanting thing," he murmured. "You disarm me with your witcheries."
"And he's not going to be cross any more?"
"He can't be. Alas, my sweet one is too sweet."
"If you only knew what it meant for Jenny Pearl to be the soppy one."
"That's love," Maurice explained.
"Is it? I suppose it is."
The sunshine of February was extinguished by a drench of rain. March came in with storms of sleet followed by a long stretch of dry easterly gales, when the studio, full of firelight and daffodils, was a pleasant refuge from the gray winds. After Ronnie's visit the statue had been put aside for a while; the lovers spent most of their time in hearth-rug conversations, when Jenny would prattle inconsequently of youthful days and Maurice would build up a wonderful future. Vexatious riddles of conduct were ignored like the acrostics of oldnewspapers, and Jenny was happier than she had ever been. Her nature had always demanded a great deal from the present. Occurrences the most trivial impressed themselves deeply upon her mind, and it was this zest for the ephemeral which made her recollections of the past so lively. As a natural corollary to this habit of mind, she was profoundly deficient in speculation or foresight. The future exhausted her imagination at once: her intellect gasped long before she reached the prospect of eternity. A month made her brain reel.
Having succeeded in postponing all discussion of their natural attitude, Jenny set out to enjoy the present which endowed her with Maurice's company, with fragrant intimacies, and long, contented hours. He himself was most charming when responsibilities, whether of art or life, were laid aside. Jenny, a butterfly herself, wanted nothing better than to play in the air with another butterfly.
Then Maurice suddenly woke up to the fact that, summer being imminent, no more time must be wasted. Work on the statue was resumed in a fever of industry. April came in more like a beldame than a maid. In the studio, now full of rose-pink tulips, the statue rapidly progressed. One morning April threw off her disguises and danced like a fairy.
"I shall finish the model to-day," Maurice announced.
The sun went in and out all the afternoon. Now the windows were a-wash with showers; in a moment they were sparkling in a radiancy.
"Finished," the artist cried, and dragged Jenny to look and admire.
"Jolly fine," she declared. "Only it isn't very like me. Never mind, position in life's everything," she added, as she contemplated her sleeping form.
"Not like you," said Maurice slowly. "You're right. It's not. Not a bit! Damn art!" he cried, and, picking up the wax model, flung it with a crash into the fire-place.
Jenny looked at Maurice, perplexity and compassion striving in her countenance with disapproval; then she knelt to rescue acurved arm, letting it fall back listlessly among other fragments.
"Youaremad. Whatever did you want to do that for?"
"You're right. It's not you. Oh, why did I ever try? Ronnie could do it with a box of damned paints. Why couldn't I? I know you better than Ronnie does. I love you. I adore every muscle and vein in your body. I dream day and night of the line of your nose. Why couldn't I have given that in stone, when Ronnie could show the world your mouth with two dabs of carmine? What a box of trickery life is. Here am I burning with ambition to create a masterpiece. I fall in love with a masterpiece. I have every opportunity, a flaming inspiration, and nothing comes of it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, by Jove, something must. Do you hear, Jenny? I won't be put off any longer. If I can't possess your counterpart, I must possess you."
During this speech a storm of hail was drumming on the windows; but while Maurice strained her to his heart in a long silence, the storm passed, and the sun streamed into the warm, quiet room. On the window-sill a solitary sparrow cheeped at regular intervals, and down in the street children were bowling iron hoops that fell very often.
"Jenny, Jenny," pleaded Maurice, relaxing the closeness of his embrace. "Don't play at love any more. Think what a mistake, what a wicked mistake it is to let so much of our time go by. Don't drive me mad with impatience. You foolish little girl, can't you understand what a muddle you're making of life?"
"I want to wait till I'm twenty-one," she said.
It meant nothing to her, this date; but Maurice, accepting it as an actual pledge of surrender, could only rail against her unreasonableness.
"Good heavens! What for? You are without exception the most amazing creature. Twenty-one! Why twenty-one? Why not fifty-one? Most of all, why not now?"
"I can't. Not now. Not when I've just left home. I should feel a sneak. Don't ask me to, Maurice. If you loveme, as you say you do, you'll wait a little while quite happy."
"But don't you want to give yourself to me?"
"I do, and then again I don't. Sometimes I think I will, and then sometimes I think I don't want to give myself to any man."
"You don't love me."
"Yes, I do. I do. Only I hate men. I always have. I can't explain more than what I've told you. If you can't understand, you can't. It's because you don't know girls."
"Don't know girls," he repeated, staggered by the assertion. "Of course I understand your point of view, but I think it's stupid and irrational and dangerous—yes—dangerous.... Don't know girls? I wish I didn't."
"You don't," Jenny persisted.
"My dear child, I know girls too well. I know their wretched stammering temperaments, their inability to face facts, their lust for sentiment, their fondness for going half-way and turning back."
"I wish you wouldn't keep on walking up and down. It makes me want to giggle. And when I laugh, you get angry."
"Laugh! It is a laughing matter to you. To me it's something so serious, so sacred, that laughter no longer exists."
Jenny thought for a moment.
"I believe," she began, "I should laugh whatever happened. I don't believe anything would stop my laughing."
Just then, away downstairs, the double knock of a telegraph boy was heard, too far away to shake the nerves of Jenny and Maurice, but still sufficiently a reminder of another life outside their own to interrupt the argument.
"I wonder if that's for me," said Maurice.
"You'd better go down and see, if you think it is."
"Wait a minute. Old Mother Wadman may answer the door."
Again, far below, they heard the summons of humanity.
"Damn Mrs. Wadman! I wish she wouldn't go fooling out in the afternoon."
"Why don't you go down, Maurice? He'll go away in a minute."
Once more, very sharply, the herald demanded an entrance for events and emotions independent of their love, and Maurice unwillingly departed to admit them.
Left alone in a tumult of desires and repressions, Jenny felt she would like to fling herself down upon the rugs and cry. Sentiment, for an instant, helped the cause of tears, when she thought of the many hours spent on that pile, drowsily happy. Then backwards and forwards went the image of her lover in ludicrous movement, and the whole situation seemed such a fuss about nothing. There was a merciless clarity about Jenny's comprehension when, urged by scenes of passion, she called upon her mind for a judgment. Perhaps it was the fatalism of an untrained reason which taught her to grasp the futility of emotional strife. Or it may have been what is called a sense of humor, which always from one point of view must imply a lack of imagination.
Maurice came back and handed her the telegram.
Uncle Stephen died suddenly in Seville come home at once please dear you must go out and look after aunt EllaMother
Uncle Stephen died suddenly in Seville come home at once please dear you must go out and look after aunt Ella
Mother
"She's fond of you, isn't she?"
Maurice looked puzzled.
"Your mother, I mean."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I think she's written very nice, that's all. I wish you hadn't got to go away though."
"Yes, and to Spain of all places. This is the uncle I was telling you about. I come into two thousand pounds. I must go."
"I wish you hadn't got to go away," she repeated sorrowfully. "Just when the weather's getting fine, too. But you must go, of course," she added.
Jenny wrung this bidding out of herself very hardly, but Maurice accepted it casually enough. Suddenly he was seized with an idea:
"Jenny, this two thousand pounds is the key to the situation."
"What?"
"Of course I can," he assured the air. "I can settle this on you. I can provide for you, whatever happens to me. Now there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't give way."
"I don't see that two thousand pounds makesanydifference. What do you think I am?"
"I'm not buying you, my dear girl. I'm not such a fool as to suppose I could do that."
"No, you couldn't. No man could buy me."
"I'm very glad of it," he said. "What I mean is that now I've no scruples of my own to get over. This is certain. I know that if anything happens to me, you would be all right. Jenny, you must say 'yes.'"
"I've told you I will one day. Don't keep on asking. Besides, you're going away. You'll have other things to think about besides your little Jenny. Only come back soon, Maurice, because I do love you so."
"Love me!" he scoffed. "Love me! Rot! A woman without the pluck to trust herself to the lover talks of love. It means nothing, this love of yours. It's just a silly fancy. Love hasn't widened your horizon. Love hasn't given your life any great impetus. Look at me—absolutely possessed by my love for you. That's passion."
"I don't think it's much else, I don't," said Jenny.
"How like a girl! How exactly like every other girl! Good Lord, and I thought you were different. I thought you wouldn't be so blind as to separate love from passion."
"I don't. I do love you. I do want you," she whispered. "Just as much as you want me, but not now. Oh, Maurice, I wish you could understand."
"Well, I can't," he said coldly. "Look here, you've quarreled with your mother. That's one obstacle out of the way."
"But it isn't. She's still alive."
"You've known me long enough to be sure I'm not likely to turn out a rotter. You needn't worry about money, and—you love me or pretend to. Now why in the name of fortune can't you be sensible?"
"But there'll come a moment, Maurice darling, and I think it will come soon, when I shall say 'yes' of my own accord. And whatever you said or done before that moment couldn't make me say 'yes' now."
"And meanwhile I'm to go on wearing myself out with asking?"
"No," she murmured, afire with blushes at such revelation of himself. "No, I'll say 'Maurice' and then you'll know."
"And I'm to go off to Spain with nothing to hope for but 'one day, one day'?"
"You'll have other things to think about there."
"You're rather amusing with your proposed diversions for my imagination. But, seriously, will it be 'yes' when I come back, say, in a fortnight?"
"No, not yet. Not for a little while. Oh, don't ask me any more; you are unkind."
Maurice seemed to give up the pursuit suddenly.
"I sha'n't see you for some time," he said.
"Never mind," Jenny consoled him. "Think how lovely it will be when we do see each other."
"Good-bye," said Maurice bluntly.
"Oh, what an unnatural way to say good-bye."
"Well, I've got to pack up and catch the 6.30 down to Claybridge. I'll write to you."
"You needn't trouble," she told him, chilled by his manner.
"Don't be foolish, I must write. Good-bye, Jenny."
He seemed to offer his embrace more from habit than desire.
"I've got to change first," she said, making no movementtowards the enclosure of his arms. It struck them both that they had passed through a thousand emotions, he in the sculptor's blouse of his affectation, she in her tarlatan skirt.
"It's like a short story by de Maupassant," said Maurice.
"Is it? You and your likes! I'm like a soppy girl."
"You are," said Maurice with intention. To Jenny, for the first time, he seemed to be criticising her.
"Thanks," she said, as, with a shrug of the shoulder and curl of the lip, she walked out of the studio, coldly hostile.
The rage was too deep to prevent her from arranging her hair with deliberation. Nor did she fumble over a single hook in securing the skirt of ordinary life. Soon Maurice was tapping at the door, but she could not answer him.
"Jenny," he called, "I've come to say I'm a pig."
Still she did not answer; but, when she was perfectly ready, flung open the door and said tonelessly:
"Please let me pass."
Her eyes, resentful, their luster fled, were dull as lapis lazuli. Her lips were no longer visible.
"You mustn't go away like this. Jenny, we sha'n't see one another for a fortnight or more. Don't let's part bad friends."
"Please let me pass."
He stood aside, outfaced by such determination, and Jenny, with downcast eyes intent upon the buttoning of her glove, passed him carelessly.
"Jenny!" he called desperately over the banisters. "Jenny! Don't go like that. Darling, don't; I can't bear it." Then he ran to catch her by the arm.
"Kiss me good-bye and be friends. Do, Jenny. Jenny. Do! Please! I can't bear to see your practice dress lying there on the floor."
Sentiment had its way this time, and Jenny began to cry.
"Oh, Maurice," she wept, "why are you so unkind to me?I hate myself for spoiling you so, but I must. I don't care about anything excepting you. I do love you, Maurice."
In the dusty passage they were friends again.
"And now my eyes is all red," she lamented.
"Never mind, darling girl. Come back while I get some things together, and see me off at Waterloo, will you?"
She assented, as enlaced they went up again to the studio.
"It's all the fault of that rotten statue," he explained. "I was furious with myself and vented it on you. Never mind. I'll begin again when I come back. Look, we'll put the tarlatan away in the drawer I take my things out of. Shall we?"
Soon they were driving in a hansom cab towards the railway station.
"We always seem to wind up our quarrels in cabs," Maurice observed.
"I don't know why we quarrel. I hate quarreling."
"We won't any more."
As the horse strained up through the echoing cavern of Waterloo, they kissed each other good-bye, a long, long kiss.
There were still ten minutes before the train left, and among the sweep of hurrying passengers and noise of shouting porters to an accompaniment of whistling, rumbling trains, Maurice tried to voice the immortality of his love.
"Great Scott, I've only a minute," he said suddenly. "Look, meet me on Monday week, the twenty-third, here, at three-thirty. Three-thirty from Claybridge. Don't forget."
"Take your seats, please," a ticket inspector shouted in their ears. Maurice jumped into his compartment and wrote quickly on an envelope: "3.30. Waterloo. Ap. 23. Claybridge."
"Good-bye, darling, darling girl. I'll bring you back some castanets and a Spanish frock."
"Good-bye. See you soon."
"Very, very soon. Think of me."
"Rather."
The train went curling out of the station.
"I shall be early in the theater to-night," Jenny thought.
Hôtel de Paris, Sevilla, Spain.April 17.
My dear and lovely one,
I've not had time to write before. I meant to send you a letter from the train, but I left all my notepaper and pencils in the station restaurant at a place called Miranda, and went to sleep instead.
I find that my uncle has left me more than I expected—five thousand pounds, in fact. So I want to buy you a delightful little house somewhere quite close to London. You could have a maid and you could go on dancing if you liked. Only I do want you to say "yes" at once. I want you to write by return and tell me you're going to give up all doubts and worries and scruples. Will you, my precious?
I've got another splendid plan. I want you to come and join me in Spain in about a week. I shall be able to meet you in Paris, because I am going to escort my aunt so far on the way home. Fuz will look out your trains. You must come. He can arrange to give you any money you want. We need not stay away very long—about a month. Sevilla is perfect. The weather is divine. Get yourself some cool frocks. We'll sit in the Alcazar garden all day. It's full of lemon trees and fountains. In the evening we'll sit on a balcony and smoke and listen to guitars.
My darling, I do so adore you. Please, please, come out to Spain and give up not knowing your own mind. I miss you tremendously. I feel this beautiful city is wasted without you. I'm sure if you determined not to bother about anything but love, you'd never regret it. You wouldn't really. Dearest,sweetest Jenny, do come. I'm longing for my treasure. It's wonderfully romantic sitting here in the patio of the hotel—a sort of indoor garden—and thinking so hard of my gay and sweet one away in London. Darling, I'm sending you kisses thick as stars, all the way from Spain. All my heart,
Your lover,Maurice.
Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life, she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.
The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust, surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a passion for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which the one most often aired was her missing of theClacton Belleone Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger—some prosperous libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods, at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short frocks because her intelligence had not kept pace with her age.
"The poor little thing talks like a child," Mrs. Dale would explain. "So I dresses her like a child. It's less noticeable."
"Whichis silly," Jenny used to comment. "Because she's as tall as a house andeverybodyturns round to look after her."
Jenny would scarcely have tolerated this family for a week, if she had been brought at all closely or frequently in contact with them; but so much of the day was spent with Maurice and all the evening at the theater that Stacpole Terrace implied little beyond breakfast in bed and bed itself. Sometimes, indeed, when she went home to tea at Hagworth Street and saw the brightness of the glass and shimmer of clean crockery, she was on the verge of sinking her pride in a practical reconciliation. Nine weeks passed, however, making it more difficult every day to admit herself in the wrong; although, during the absence of Maurice, it became a great temptation. Therefore, when this letter arrived from Spain, inviting her to widen the breach with her family, she was half inclined to play with the idea of absolute severance. Flight, swift and sudden, appealed to her until the difficulty of making arrangements began to obscure other considerations. The thought of packing, of catching trains and steamers, of not knowing exactly what frocks to buy, oppressed her; then a fear took hold of her fancy lest, something happening to Maurice, she might find herself alone in a foreign city; and at the end of it all there was her childhood in a vista of time, her childhood with the presence of her mother brooding over it, her mother dearly loved whatever old-fashioned notions she preserved of obedience and strictness of behavior. It would be mean to outrage, as she knew she would, her mother's pride, and to hand her over to the criticisms of a mob of relatives. It would be mean to desert May, who even now might be crying on a solitarypillow. But when she went downstairs dressed and saw the Dale family in morning deshabille, uncorseted, flabby and heavy-eyed, crouching over the parlor fire, and when she thought of Maurice and the empty studio, Jenny's resolution was shaken and she was inclined to renounce every duty, face every difficulty and leave her world behind.
"You do look a sulky thing," said Irene. "Coming to sit round the fire?"
"No, thanks," said Jenny. "I haven't got the time."
"Your young chap's away, isn't he?" asked Winnie.
"What's it got to do with you where he is?"
Jenny was in a turmoil of nervous indecision, and felt that whatever else she did, she must be quit of Stacpole Terrace for that day at least. She debated the notion of going home, of telling her mother everything; but the imagination of such an exposure of her most intimate thoughts dried her up. It would be like taking off her clothes in front of a crowd of people. Then she thought of going home without reference to the past; but she was prevented by the expectation of her mother's readiness to believe the worst, and the inevitably stricter supervision to which her submission would render her liable. In the end, she compromised with her inclination by deciding to visit Edie and find out what sort of sturdy rogue her nephew was by now.
Edie lived at Camberwell in a small house covered with Virginia creeper not yet in leaf, still a brownish red mat which depressed Jenny as she rattled the flap of the letterbox and called her sister's name through the aperture. Presently Edie opened the door.
"Why, if it isn't Jenny. Well I never, you are a stranger."
Edie was shorter than Jenny and more round. Yet for all her plumpness she looked worn, and her slanting eyes, never so bright as Jenny's, were ringed with purple cavities.
"How are you, Edie, all this long time?"
"Oh, I'm grand; how's yourself?"
"I'm all right."
The two sisters were sitting in the parlor, which smelt unused, although it was covered with lengths of material and brown-paper patterns. By the window was a dressmaker's bust, mournfully buxom. Jenny compared it with the lay figure in the studio and smiled, thinking how funny they would look together.
"I wish Bert was in," said Edie. "But he's away on business."
Just then a sound of tears was audible, and the mother had to run out of the room.
"The children gets a nuisance," she said, as she came back comforting Eunice, a little girl of two.
"Isn't she growing up a little love?" said Jenny. "Oh, I do think she's pretty. What glorious eyes she's got."
"They're like her father's, people say; but young Norman, he's the walking life-like of you, Jenny."
"Where is the rogue?" his aunt inquired.
"Where's Norman, Eunice?"
"Out in the garding, digging gwaves," said Eunice in a fat voice.
Jenny had a sudden longing to have a child of her own and live in a little house quite close to London.
"Why, I don't believe you've ever seen Baby," said Edie.
"Of course I have, but not for some months."
They went upstairs to look at Baby, who was lying asleep in his cot. Jenny felt oppressed by the smallness of the bedroom and the many enlargements of Bert's likeness in youth which dwarfed every other ornament. They recurred everywhere in extravagantly gilt frames; and the original photograph was on the chest of drawers opposite one of Edie wearing a fringe and balloon sleeves.
"There's another coming in five months," said Edie.
"Go on. How many more?"
"I don't know—plenty yet, I expect."
The magic of home that for a few moments had enchanted the little house was dispelled. Moreover, at tea Normansmeared his face with jam, and snatched, and kicked his mother because she slapped his wrist.
"Why do you let him behave so bad?" asked Jenny, unconscious that she was already emulating her own hated Aunt Mabel.
"I don't, only he's such a handful; and his dad spoils him. Besides, anything for a bit of peace and quiet. Bert never thinks what a worry children is, and as if I hadn't got enough to look after, he brought back a dog last week."
"Why don't you tell him off?"
"Oh, it's easier to humor him. You'll find that out quick enough when you're married yourself."
"Me married? I don't think."
On the way to the theater that evening Jenny almost made up her mind to join Maurice, and would probably have been constant to her resolve, had it not been for one of those trivial incidents which more often than great events change the whole course of a life.
Because she did not like the idea of sitting in meditation opposite a row of inquisitive faces, she took a seat outside the tramcar that came swaying and clanging down the Camberwell New Road. It was twilight by now, and, as the tramcar swung round into Kennington Gate, there was a wide view of the sky full of purple cloudbanks, islands in a pale blue luminous sea where the lights of ships could easily be conjured from the uncertain stars contending with the afterglow of an April sunset. Jenny sat on the back seat and watched along the Kennington Road the incandescent gas suffuse room after room with a sickly phosphorescence in which the inhabitants seemed to swim like fish in an aquarium. All the rooms thus illuminated looked alike. All the windows had a fretwork of lace curtains; all the tables were covered with black and red checkered cloths on which was superimposed half a white cloth covered with the remains of tea; all the flower vases wore crimped paper petticoats; all the people inside the cheerless rooms looked tired.
Jenny pulled out the foreign letter and read of sunlight and love. She began to dream of kisses amid surroundings something like the principal scene of an Orient ballet, and, as London became more and more intolerably dreary, over her senses stole the odor of a cigar that carried her mind racing back to the past. Somewhere long ago her mother, wanting to go away with someone, had stayed behind; and for the first time Jenny comprehended mistily that now forgotten renunciation. She fell to thinking of her mother tenderly, began to be oblivious of interference, to remember only her merry tales and laughter and kindness. The strength which long ago enabled Mrs. Raeburn to refuse the nice little house and the Ralli car seemed to find a renewed power of expression in her daughter. At present, Jenny thought, kisses in Spain must still be dreams. That night, in the cheerless parlor of the Dales, she wrote in watery ink to Maurice that she could not meet him in Paris.