"Tell the girls about him," urged his brother, and "Fill up your glasses," he murmured as, leaning back in his chair, he seemed to fade away into clouds of smoke blown from a very long, thin and black cigar.
"This lord—I won't tell you his name——" said Jack, "he wanders about in fogs until he meets a shape that attracts him. Then he hands her a velvet mask, and takes her home. What an imagination," chuckled the narrator.
"Well, I call him a dirty rotter," said Jenny.
"Do you?" asked Jack, as if struck by the novelty of such a point of view.
The lights were being extinguished now. The quenching of the orange illumination, and the barren waste of empty tables gave the grill-room a raffish look which consorted well with the personalities of the two brothers. The party broke up in the abrupt fashion of England, and within a few minutes of sitting comfortably round a richly lighted supper-table, the two girls were seated in a dark taxi on the way to Camden Town.
"How do you like Jack Danby?" Irene inquired.
"He's all right. Only I don't know—I think if I'd met him last year I'd have thought him a swine. I think I must be turning funny. What are they—these long friends of yours?" she added, after a pause. "What do they do in Paris?"
"They bring out books," Irene informed her.
"Books?" echoed Jenny. "What sort of books?"
"Ordinary books, I suppose," said Irene, slightly huffed by Jenny's contemptuous incredulity.
"Well, what do they want to live in Paris for, if they're ordinary books?"
"That's where their business is."
"Funny place to do a business in ordinary books."
"I don't see why."
"Oh, well, it doesn't matter. ButIthink it's funny, that's all. Youaredeep, Irene."
"Oh, yes," said Irene, looking out of the window at the waves of light that broke against the window with each passing street lamp. "You always say that, but I'm not near so deep as what you are."
"Yes, you are, because I'm always catching you out in a liewhichyou don't me."
"No, because I'm not so nosy."
"Now don't be silly and get in a paddy about nothing," Jenny advised. "You can't help having funny friends. Only what I can't understand is myself. I think they're both beasts, and yet I'd like to see them again. That's where I'm funny, I think."
Irene assumed an attitude of lofty indifference.
"There's no need for you to see them again, if you don't like them. Only they give you a good time, and Arthur gave me some glorious rings."
"Whichyour mother pawned," interrupted Jenny.
"And he's going to marry me," Irene persisted.
"Yes, if you get married after dinner when he's drunk."
"Oh, well, what of it? You're not so clever as what you make out to be."
"That's quite right," said Jenny, lapsing into a gloom of introspection.
Lying awake that night in the bewilderment of a new experience, the image of Jack Danby recurred to her like the pale image of a sick dream at once repulsive and perilously attractive. Time after time she would drive him from her mind, but as fast as he was banished, his slim face would obtrude itself from another quarter. He would peep from behind the musty curtains, he would take form in the wavering gray shadow thrown upon the ceiling by the gas. He would slide round pictures and materialize from the heap of clothes on the wicker arm-chair by the bed.
One other image could have contended with him; but that image had been finally exorcised by six months of mental discipline. All that was left of Maurice was the fire he had kindled, the fire of passion that, lying dormant since his desertion, was now burning luridly in Jenny's heart.
THE supper at the Trocadero only marked the first of many such evenings spent in the company of Irene and the two brothers. However much one side of Jenny's character might despise Jack Danby, to another side he was strangely soothing. When she was beside Maurice, every moment used to be haunted by its own ghost, bitter-sweet with the dread of finality. Danby's effect was that of a sedative drug whose action, however grateful at the time, is loathed in retrospect, until deprivation renews desire. Jenny found herself longing to sit near him and was fretful in his absence because, not being in love with him, he did not occupy her meditations pleasantly. He was worth nothing to her without the sense of contact. He was a bad habit: under certain conditions of opportunity in association he might become a vice.
Evolution, in providence for the perpetuation of the species, has kept woman some thousands of years nearer to animals than man. Hence their inexplicableness to the majority of the opposite sex. Men have built up a convention of fastidious woman to flatter their own sexual rivalry. Woman is relinquished as a riddle when she fails to conform to masculine standards of behavior. Man is accustomed to protest that certain debased—or rather highly specialized—types of his own sex are unreasonably attractive. He generally fails to perceive that when a woman cannot find a man who is able to stimulate her imagination, she often looks for another who will gratify her senses.
Maurice was never the lover corresponding most nearlywith an ideal of greensick maiden dreams. Jenny's sensibility had not been stultified by these emotional ills, so that when he crossed her horizon, she loved him sanely without prejudice. She made him sovereign of her destiny because he seemed to her fit for power. He completely satisfied her imagination; and, having made a woman of her, he left a libertine to reap what he had sown.
Jack Danby possessed the sly patience of an accomplished rake. He never alarmed Jenny with suggestions of escort, with importunity of embraces. His was the stealthy wooing of inactivity and smoldering eyes. He would let slip no occasion for interpreting life to the disadvantage of virtue; he was always sensually insistent. He and his brother, offspring of a lady's maid and an old demirep, owed to their inheritance of a scabrous library the foundations of material prosperity. They owed also their corrupt breed which, through some paradox of healing, might be valuable to women in the mood for oblivion whom the ordinary anæsthetics of memory had failed.
One Saturday night early in January, Arthur suggested that the two girls should come to tea and spend the evening at the flat in Victoria. Irene looked at Jenny, and Jenny nodded her approval of the plan.
Greycoat Gardens lay between the Army and Navy Stores and Vincent Square. The windows at the back looked out over the playground of an old-fashioned charity school, and the roof made a wave in that sea of roofs visible from the studio window in Grosvenor Road. But that was ten months ago.
When Jenny and Irene reached the Gardens, the mud-splashed January darkness had already fallen; but for some reason the entrance-hall of the block containing the Danbys' flat was not yet lighted up. It seemed cavernous and chill; the stone stairs were repellent and the whole air full of hollow warnings. Half-way up, a watery exhalation filtered through the frosted glass of a flat's front door in a cold effulgencewhich added eerily to the lifelessness of all the other doors. The Danbys lived at the very top, and it took all Irene's powers of persuasion to induce Jenny to complete the ascent. At last, however, they gained their destination and immediately on the shrilling of an electric bell walked through a narrow hall misty with the fumes of Egyptian cigarettes. The sitting-room looked cosy with its deep crimson paper and fireglow and big arm-chairs heaped with downy cushions. Yet the atmosphere had the sickly oppression of an opiate, and it did not take Jenny long to pull back the purple velvet curtains and throw open the window to the raw winter night.
"It's like being in a bottle of port in this room. Phew! I shall have a most shocking headache soon," she prophesied.
"Won't you leave your coats and things in my room?" said Jack Danby.
"That's not such a dusty idea. Come on, young Ireen."
The two girls followed their host to his room which was hung with rose du Barri draperies prodigally braided with gold.
"What a glorious room," cried Jenny.
"You think so?" asked its owner.
"Rather."
The evening passed away without any development of the situation. The girls looked at books and pictures according to the custom of first visits, and drank Green Chartreuse after the supper which they had helped to lay. They also smoked many fat Egyptian cigarettes during an evening of heavy silences, broken by the crunch of subsiding coal and occasional cries that floated in from neighboring slums across the stillness of a wet Sunday night.
As Jenny paused on the step of the taxi that was to drive them home, Jack Danby held her hand very tightly.
"You'll come again?" he asked.
"Of course."
After this first visit Jenny and Irene spent almost every afternoon at the flat in Greycoat Gardens. Jenny liked thesensation of Jack Danby brushing against her, of the sudden twitches he would give her hands, nor did she resent an unexpected kiss with which he once burnt her neck as she leaned over the table looking at a portfolio of Lancret's engravings.
Arthur Danby went back to Paris in advance of his brother, and Jenny fell into the habit of visiting the flat alone. Jack still never startled her with sudden importunities, never suggested the existence of another point of view beside her own. He seemed perfectly content to watch her enjoyment of his luxury and heavy comfort.
One Sunday afternoon in the middle of February—St. Valentine's Eve, to be precise—when the snowdrops drift in myriads across the London parks, Jenny went to pay her farewell visit. Jack Danby was leaving England on the next day to rejoin his brother in Paris. Before she came away from Stacpole Terrace, Jenny had arranged for Irene to pick her up in the course of the evening, so that they could go back together. For some reason she was very particular in exacting a strict promise from Irene not to fail her.
"What a fuss about nothing," grumbled her friend.
"Oh, well, Ireen, I don't like coming back alone on a Sunday night. I hate Sunday, and you know it."
Jenny, buried in a big arm-chair, dozed away the afternoon as usual and after tea sat staring into the fire, while Danby from the hearthrug assiduously stroked the slim white hand that drooped listlessly over an arm of the chair. A steady drench of rain had set in with the dusk, and, being close under the roof, they could hear the gurgle and hiss of the flooded gutters. Neither of them made a move to turn on the electric light or stir the lowering fire to flame. Danby even denied himself three or four cigarettes so that the magnetic current of sensuousness should not be interrupted. Inch by inch he drew closer to Jenny, sliding noiselessly over the thick fur of the rug. He was now near enough to kiss slowly her bare forearm and separately each supple finger. Jenny leaned back unconscious of him, though remotely pleased by his kisses, inher dull hell of memory where repressed inclinations smoldered like the fire on which her eyes were fixed. What a fool she had been for the sake of a silly powerlessness to take the plunge. It was bound to be taken in the end—with someone. But Maurice was a rotter, and would he after all have been worthy of the ultimate sacrifice? Would he not have tired and put her under an even more severe humiliation? Toys were good enough for Maurice. It was ridiculous to make life a burden for the sake of one man. Twenty-two next October. How quickly the years were flying. So, in a maze of speculation, regret and resolution, Jenny lay back in the deep arm-chair while Jack Danby drugged her with kisses. She drew her arm away at last, feeling hungry in a vague way.
"What's the time?" she asked, yawning.
"It must be after nine."
"Good lord, and we haven't had supper yet."
"Are we going to wait for Irene?" he inquired.
"Not for supper. She is late. I won't half tell her off."
Danby had risen from the hearth-rug and turned on the light. Jenny was poking the fire vigorously.
"I've gotpâté de foie gras"he informed her.
"Ugh, what horrible-looking stuff," she said.
"Don't you like it?"
"I never tried it."
"Try now," Danby urged.
"No, thanks, it looks like bad butter."
The rain increased in volume as the evening wore on. Still Irene did not come. It struck eleven o'clock, and Jenny said she could wait no longer.
"I'll get a cab," said Danby.
"No; don't leave me here all alone," cried Jenny.
"Why should you go home at all to-night?" Danby breathed in a parched whisper.
Jenny pressed her face against the jet-black window-pane and suddenly away beyond Westminster there was a low bourdon of thunder.
"Stay with me," pleaded Danby; "it's such a night for love."
"Who cares?" murmured Jenny. "I've only myself to think about."
"What did you say?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"But you will stay?"
She nodded.
COLUMBINE, leaden-eyed, sat up in the strange room, where over an unfamiliar chair lay huddled all her clothes. Through the luminous white fog of dawn a silver sun, breasting the house-tops, gleamed very large. Wan with a thousand meditations, seeming frail as the mist of St. Valentine's morning, suddenly she flung herself deep into the pillow and, buried thus, lay motionless like a marionette whose wire has snapped.
THE silver dawn was softened to a mother-of-pearl morning that seemed less primal than autumnal. When Danby came into the sitting-room, he found Jenny, fully dressed for departure, crouched over the ashes of last night's fire. He had a pinched, unwholesome look so early in the day, and was peevish because Jenny's presence kept him from summoning the housekeeper to bring up breakfast.
"We must get something to eat," he said.
"I don't want anything," said Jenny.
"Why not?"
"I've got a headache."
Danby tried to appear sympathetic; but his hands so early were cold as fish, and his touch made Jenny shrink.
"What a nuisance packing is. I've got a fearful lot to do to get to Charing Cross in time for the boat train."
Like many other people he tried to demonstrate his sympathy by enlarging on his own trials.
"Well?" said Jenny, regarding him from eyes pinpointed with revulsion in a critical survey that was not softened by the gray morning light, for whatever silkiness clung to the outside air was lost in the stale room.
"I wish I hadn't got to go away," said Danby awkwardly.
"Why?" Jenny asked, screwing up her eyes as if she had perceived upon the wall an unpleasant insect.
"Well, it seems a pity now that we've—we've got to know each other better."
"You don't think," said Jenny, chiseling the words fromthe very bedrock of her contempt, "youdon'tthink that because I've been in your flat all a night, you know me? Why, I don't know myself even."
"Aren't you going to come and see me off?" he asked in a ludicrous attempt at sentiment.
"See you off? See you off? Oh yes, that's a game of mine seeing off clothes-props. If you can't move," she added, "I can. Let me pass, please."
Jenny walked towards the door of the contaminated flat followed by Danby in a state of weak bewilderment.
"You'll write to me, little girl?" he asked, making a motion to detain her hand.
"You seem to think I'm struck on you," she rapped out. "But I'm not."
"Well, why did you——"
"Ah, Mr. Enquire Within," she interrupted, "you're right. Why?"
"Surely," he persisted, "the first person who——"
"The first! Hark at Mr. Early Bird. If you go out with your long soppy self like that, you'll miss your train. Ching-a-ling."
So Jenny parted from Mr. Jack Danby as long ago she had parted from Mr. Terence O'Meagh of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers. It was typical of her pride that, in order to rob Danby of any satisfaction in his achievement, she should prefer to let him assume he was merely one of a crowd, a commonplace incident in her progress. Anything seemed more suitable to the fancy of such a despicable creature than the self-congratulation of the pioneer.
Yet, though she bore herself so bravely from the hated room which had witnessed the destruction of her inaccessibility, when she was seated alone in the taxi whirring back to Camden Town, Jenny was very near to an emotional collapse. This was averted by an instinct to review the several aspects of the experience. The actual event, happening in the normal course of a temperament's advance to completeness, scarcelydistressed her. On the other hand, the circumstances and actors were abhorrent. The very existence of the Danbys was an outrage, and as for Irene, her behavior was treachery incarnate. What added bitterness to her meditations was the reflection that, however contemptuous she might show herself of the two brothers, they, with Irene to voice their absence, would have the laugh on their side. From one point of view it had been a skillful seduction effected with the deliberation of use. Jenny was maddened by the thought that Irene would believe she had been unable to avoid it, that she had been bewitched by Jack Danby's dissolute accomplishments. She would never be able to impress Irene's stolidity with the fact that she had used Danby for her own purpose. Irene would be bound to consider the wretched business a justification of her own dependence on the elder brother. She would triumph with damaging retorts, pointing out the fallibility of other girls when brought beneath the Danby sway, citing Jenny in a manner that would infuriate her with the impotence of argument. All larger issues were obscured by this petty annoyance, and at first her regrets were confined to wishing she had played the inevitable drama of womanhood in some secret place with only her own soul for audience. Why had she stayed at Greycoat Gardens last night?
After the first vexation of her loss of prestige, deeper commentaries upon the act wrote themselves across her mind. She had intended, while her mother was still alive, to be rigidly unassailable. There was weakness in her failure to sustain this resolution, and Jenny loathed weakness. What had made her carry this experience through against the finest influence upon her life? Well, it was done; but the knowledge of it must be kept from her mother. Regrets were foolish; yet she would make some reparation. She would go and live at home again and, before anything, please her mother for a long time to come. She would be extra nice to May. She would be—in parental terminology—a really good girl.
Whatever agony Maurice's love had caused her to bear, thissacrifice of her youth upon a tawdry altar had finally and effectually deadened. She could meet without a tremor now the cause of all the miserable business. Things might have been different, were fidelity an imaginable virtue. But it was all over now; she had consummated the aspirations of youth. There should be an end of love henceforth. For what it was worth of bitter and sweet, she had known it. No longer was the viceroy of human destiny a riddle. He had lost his wings and lay like a foundling in the gutter. No more of such a sorry draggled god for her. Jenny's ambition now was in reconciliation with her mother to be reëstablished in the well-beloved house in Hagworth Street, and in affection for old familiar things to forget the wild adventures of passion.
The taxi swept on down the Hampstead Road until it turned off on the right to Camden Town, whose curious rococo squares mildewed and queerly ornamented seemed the abode of a fantastic depression. For all the sunlight of St. Valentine, the snowdrops looked like very foolish virgins as they shivered in the wind about the blackened grass, good sport for idle sparrows. The impression of faded wickedness made on Jenny's mind by Stacpole Terrace that morning suited her disgust. Every window in the row of houses was askew, cocking a sinister eye at her reappearance. Every house looked impure with a smear of green damp over the stucco. Stacpole Terrace wore an air of battered gayety fit only for sly entrances at twilight and furtive escapes in the dawn; while in one of the front gardens a stone Cupid with broken nose smirked perpetually at whatever shady intrigue came under his patronage.
It was nearly eleven o'clock when Jenny, entering the sitting-room, found Irene bunched sloppily over the fire. Mrs. Dale and her youngest daughter were busy in the kitchen. Winnie was not yet out of bed, and the head of the family was studying in the dust of his small apartment the bargains advertised in yesterday's paper.
"Why didn't you call for me last night?" Jenny demanded straight and swift.
"Oh, well, it was too wet," grumbled Irene, covering as well as she could her shame with nonchalance.
"Ireen, I think you're a rotter. I think you're real mean, and nothing won't ever make me believe you didn't do it for the purpose. Too wet!"
Irene declined to admit herself in the wrong.
"Well, it was too wet. You could easy have come home in a taxi if you'd wanted to."
Jenny stamped with rage.
"What I could have done hasn't got nothing to do with it all, and you know it hasn't. You said you were coming for me and you didn't, and I say you're a sneak. Because you and your massive sister behave anyhow, you'd like to make everyone else as bad."
Irene, contending even with unclasped stays, made an effort at dignity.
"You can just shut up, Jenny Pearl, because you know very well my mother wouldn't allow me todoanything. You know that."
Jenny fumed with indignation.
"Your mother? Why, when she's got half a bottle of gin to cry with over her darling Ireen or darling Winnie, she'sveryglad to pawn what her darlings get given to them."
"You've got very good," said Irene, bitterly sarcastic, "since this night out."
"Which you meant for me to spend out from the moment you introduced me to him."
"What do you take me for?" inquired Irene rashly.
"I take you for what you are—a rotter. God! and think what you will be one day—I know—a dirty old woman in a basement with a red petticoat and a halfpenny dip and a quartern of gin."
Irene's imagination was not extensive enough to cap this prophecy, so she poked the fire instead of making the attempt.
"Nobody wants you to stay here," she muttered.
"Don't you worry yourself. I'm going upstairs to pack my things up now."
Jenny was not able to make a completely effective departure with cab at the door and heaped-up baggage, because her taxi back from Victoria and the payment of a week's board at Stacpole Terrace had exhausted her ready money. However, she had the satisfaction of seeing her portmanteau, her hatbox and a small bag stacked in tapering stories upon the bedroom floor, there to await the offices of Carter Paterson.
Mrs. Dale emerged from the kitchen at the rumor of change and, as morning did not evoke sentiment, indulged in a criticism of Jenny's personal appearance.
"I don't like that hat of yours and never did," she announced. "I can't get used to these new-fangled fashions and never shall."
"What of it?" said Jenny, with marked indifference.
"Oh, nothing at all, if it pleases you. You've got to wear it and I suppose there's nothing more to be said. But I think that hat is vulgar. Vulgar it would have been called when I was a girl. And I can't think what you want to go all of a sudden for like this. It isn't often I make a beefsteak pudding."
Jenny was in a flutter to be away.
"Good-bye, Mrs. Dale," she said firmly.
"Well, good-bye, Jenny. You mustn't mind shaking hands with me all covered in suet. As I say, it's very seldom I do make a beefsteak pudding. I won't disturb my old man. He's busy this morning. Come and tell us how you get on soon."
It was a relief to be seated inside the tram and free of Stacpole Terrace. It was pleasant to change cars at the Nag's Head and behold again the well-known landscape of Highbury. A pageant of childish memories, roused by the sight of the broad pavements of Islington, was marshalled in Jenny's brain. Somehow on the visits she had paid her home duringthe last year these aspects were obscured by the consciousness of no longer owning any right to them. Now, really going home, she turned into Hagworth Street with a glow of pride at seeing again its sobriety and dignity so evident after the extravagant stucco and Chinese balconies of Camden Town's terraces and squares. There was Seventeen, looking just the same, prophetic of refuge and solid comfort to the exile. She wondered what freak of folly had ever made her fancy home was dingy and unpleasant, home that held her bright-eyed mother's laugh, her absurd father always amusing, and her little sister May. Home was an enchanted palace with more romance in each dear room than was to be found elsewhere in the world. Home was alive with the past and preserved the links which bound together all the detached episodes of Jenny's life. As she turned into the garden that once had seemed a district, as she rattled the letter-box—in the days of her estrangement she always rang the bell—remorse came welling up in tears. She remembered what good times had been recurrent through the past, tea-parties and pantomimes and learning to ride a bicycle in the warm sunsets of June. And in the house opposite nothing was altered, not a fold of the lace curtains, not a leaf of the dusty aspidistra that took all the light in the ground-floor window.
What a long time they were opening the door. She rattled the letter-box again and called out to May. It was like coming home after summer holidays by the blue sparkling sea, coming home to dolls and toys and the long, thin garden at the back which from absence had acquired an exaggerated reputation for entertainment.
Suddenly May opened the door, peeping round over the latch, much scared apparently.
"How quick you've been," she said.
"Quick?" repeated Jenny.
"Didn't you get my telegram?"
"No," said Jenny, and perceiving that May's eyes were red with weeping, her delightful anticipation was clouded withdread. "What did you want to telegraph for? Not—not about mother?"
May nodded.
"She isn't dead?" Jenny gasped.
"No, she isn't dead. But she's had to be took away. You know. To an asylum."
"Go on," said Jenny. "Oh, what a dreadful thing."
"Well, don't stand there," May commanded. "There's been crowd enough round here this morning as it is."
In the kitchen she unfolded the story. It seemed that for the last fortnight their mother had been queer.
"Oh, she was funny," said May. "She used to sit moping over the fire—never doing nothing and saying all the time how her head hurt."
"Didn't dad fetch in a doctor?" Jenny demanded.
"Not at first he wouldn't. You know what dad's like. I said she was really ill and he kept on saying: 'Nonsense, why look at me. I'm as ill as I can be, but I don't want no doctor. I've got a sort of a paralytic stroke running up and down my arm fit to drive anybody barmy. And here am I going off to work so cheerful, the chaps down at the shop say they don't know how I does it.'"
"He ought to be bumped," Jenny asserted wrathfully. "I only wish I'd been at home to tell him off. Go on about mother. And why wasn't I sent for directly?" she asked.
"Well, I did think about fetching you back. But I didn't really think myself it was anything much at first. She got worse all of a sudden like. She took a most shocking dislike to me and said I was keeping her indoors against her will, and then she carried on about you, said you was—well, I don't know what she didn't say. And when the doctor come, she said he was a detective and asked him to lock you and me both up, said she had the most wicked daughters. I was quite upset, but the doctor he said not to worry as it was often like that with mad people, hating the ones they liked best. And I said, 'She's never gone mad? Not my mother? Oh, whatevershall I do?' And he said, 'She has,' and then she started off screaming enough to make anyone go potty to hear her, and a lot of boys come and hung about the gate and people was looking out of windows and the greengrocer was ringing all the time to know if there was any orders this morning."
"When was all this?" asked Jenny, frozen by the terrible narrative.
"This morning, I keep telling you."
"Just now?"
"No, early. They come and took her away to an asylum somewhere in the country and we can go and see her once a fortnight. But she's very ill, the doctor says—some sort of abscess on her brain."
"Where's dad?"
"He went round to the 'Arms.' He said he felt quite shaky."
Jenny sat mute and hopeless. Would her mother never recognize her? Would she die in the belief that she was neither loved nor appreciated?
ASHGATE Asylum was a great gray accumulation of stone, standing at the head of a wide avenue of beech trees on a chalky ridge of the Chiltern Hills. Here in a long ward lay Mrs. Raeburn, fantasies riding day and night through the darkness of her mind.
Jenny and May used to go once a fortnight to visit her sad seclusion. In a way it was a fruitless errand of piety, for she never recognized her daughters, staring at them from viewless eyes. Nobody else in the family made the slow, dreary journey through the raw spring weather. To be sure every fortnight Charlie intended to go; but something always cropped up to prevent him, and as he was unable to realize the need for instancy, he finally made up his mind to postpone any visit to the early summer, when, as he optimistically announced, it would no doubt be time to fetch his wife home completely cured.
Jenny and May used to be met at the railway station by the Asylum brougham, which would bear them at a jogging pace up the straight melancholy avenue and set them down by the main entrance beside which hung the huge bell-chain whose clangor seemed to wake a multitude of unclean spirits. Often, as they walked nervously over the parquet of the lobby ample as a cloister, and past a succession of cheerful fire-places, Jenny would fancy she heard distant screams, horrid cries, traveling down the echoing corridors that branched off at every few paces. The nurse who was directing them would talk away pleasantly without apparent concern, without seeming to notice those patients allowed a measure of liberty. Jenny andMay, however, could hardly refrain from shrieking out in terror as they shivered by these furtive, crouching shapes whose gaze was concentrated on things not seen by them. In the long ward at whose extreme end their mother's bed was situated, these alternations of embarrassment and fear became even more acute. Nearly all the occupants of the beds had shaved heads which gave them, especially the gray-haired women, a very ghastly appearance. Many of them would mutter audible comments on the two girls as they passed along, comparing them extravagantly to angels or to long-lost friends and relatives. Some would whimper in the terrible imagination that Jenny and May had arrived to hurt them. The girls were glad when the battery of mad eyes was passed and they could stand beside their mother's bed.
"Here are your daughters come all this long way to see you, Mrs. Raeburn," the nurse would announce, and "Well, mother," or "How are you now, mother?" they would shyly inquire.
Mrs. Raeburn could not recognize them, but would regard them from wide-open eyes that betrayed neither friendliness nor dislike.
"Won't you say you're glad to see them?" the nurse would ask.
Then sometimes Mrs. Raeburn would bury herself in the bedclothes to lie motionless until they had gone, or sometimes she would count on her fingers mysterious sums and ghostly numerals comprehended in the dim mid-region where her soul sojourned. If Jenny or May looked up in embarrassment, they would see all around them reasonless heads, some smiling and bobbing and beckoning, some grimacing horribly, and every one, save the listless head they loved best, occupied with mad speculations upon the identity of the two girls. After every visit, as hopelessly they were leaving the ward, the nurse would say:
"I expect your mother will be better next time you come and able to talk a bit."
They would be shown into a stuffy little parlor while thebrougham was being brought round, a stuffy little room smelling of plum-cake and sherry. In the window hung a cage containing an old green paroquet that all the time swore softly to itself and seemed in the company of the mad to have lost its own clear bird's intelligence. Then back they would drive along the straight, wet avenue in a sound of twilight gales, back to the rain-soaked, dreary little station in whose silent waiting-room they would sit, crying softly to themselves, until the Marylebone train came in.
These visits continued for six weeks, and then, on the fourth visit, just as April had starred the Chilterns with primroses, the nurse whispered while they were walking through the ward's distraught glances:
"I think your mother will know you to-day."
"Why?" Jenny whispered back.
"I think she will, somehow."
Up the ward they went with hearts beating expectantly, while the voices of the mad folk chattered on either side. "Look at her golden hair." "That's St. Michael. Holy Michael, pray for us." One young woman with pallid, tear-washed face was moaning: "Why can't I be dead, oh, why can't I be dead?" And an old woman, gray as an ash tree, was muttering very quickly to herself: "Oh, God help me; O, dear Lord help me!" on and on without a pause in the gibbering reiteration. Some of the patients waved and bobbed as usual, mopping and mowing and imparting wild secrets from the wild land in which they lived, and others scowled and shook their twisted fists. This time, indeed, their mother did look different, as if from the unknown haunted valleys in which her soul was imprisoned she had gained some mountain peak with a view of home.
"How are you, mother?" Jenny asked.
Mrs. Raeburn stared at her perplexed but not indifferent. Nor did she try to hide herself as usual. Suddenly she spoke in a voice that to her daughters seemed like the voice of a ghost.
"Is that little May?"
May's ivory cheeks were flushed with nervous excitement as, by an effort of brave will, she drew near to the mad mother's couch.
"Yes, it is little May," said Mrs. Raeburn, fondling her affectionately. "Poor little back. Poor little thing. What a dreadful misfortune. My fault, all my fault. I shouldn't have bothered about cleaning up so much, not being so far gone as I was. Poor little May. I'm very ill—my head is hurting dreadfully."
Suddenly over the face of the tortured woman came a wonderful change, a relief not mortal by its radiance. She sank back on her pillow in a vision of consolation. Jenny leaned over her. "Mother," she whispered, "don't you know me? It's Jenny! Jenny!" she cried in agony of longing to be recognized.
"Jenny," repeated her mother, as if trying to make the name fit in with some existing fact of knowledge. "Jenny?" she murmured more faintly. "No, not Jenny, Cupid."
"What's she mean?" whispered May.
"She's thinking of the ballet. It was last time she saw me on the stage."
"Cupid," Mrs. Raeburn went on. "Yes, it's Cupid. And Cupid means love. Love! God bless all good people. It's a fine day. Yes, it is a fine day. I'm very fond of this window, Carrie; I think it's such a cheerful view. Look at those lovely clouds. What a way you can see—right beyond the 'Angel' to the country. Those aunts are coming again. Tut, tut. What dotheywant to come here for? They sha'n't have her, they sha'n't have my Jenny. Jenny!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, recognizing at last her best-loved daughter. "I meant you to be so sweet and handsome, my Jenny! Oh, be good, my pretty one, my dainty one. I wish you'd see about that knob, Charlie. Youneverremember to get a new one."
Then, though her eyes were rapturous and gay again, her mind wandered further afield in broken sentences.
"I think you'd better kiss her good-bye," the nurse said.
Softly each daughter kissed that mother who would always remain the truest, dearest figure in their lives.
Downstairs in the stuffy little parlor, Dr. Weever interviewed them.
"Whoever allowed you two girls to come here?" he asked sharply. "You've no business to visit such a place. You're too young."
"Will our mother get better?" Jenny asked.
"Your poor mother is dying and you should be glad, because she suffers great pain all the time." His voice was harsh, but, nevertheless, full of tenderness.
"Will she die soon?" Jenny whispered. May was sobbing to herself.
"Very soon."
"Then I'd better tell my father to come at once?"
"Certainly, if he wants to see his wife alive."
Jenny did not go to the Orient that night, and when her father came in, she told him how near it was to the end.
"What, dying?" said Charlie, staggered by a thought which had never entered his mind. "Dying? Go on, don't make a game of serious things like death."
"She is dying. And the doctor said if you wanted to see her alive, you must go at once."
"I'll go to-night," said Charlie, feeling helplessly for his best hat.
Just then came a double-knock at the door.
"That means she's dead already," said Jenny in a dull monotone.
MR. Raeburn determined that, if there had sometimes been a flaw in his behavior towards his wife when alive, there should be no doubt about his treatment of her in death. Her funeral should be famous for its brass-adorned oaken coffin, splendidly new in the gigantic hearse. There should be long-tailed sable horses with nodding plumes, and a line of mourning coaches. Mutes should be everywhere and as many relatives as could be routed out within the time. Black silks and satins, jet and crape and somber stuffs should oppress the air, and Death with darkling wings should overshadow Islington. Many mourners were gathered together whose personalities had never played any part in Jenny's life; but others arrived who had in the past helped her development.
Mrs. Purkiss came, escorted by Claude Purkiss representing with pale face and yellow silky mustache the smugness of himself and Percy the missionary. Claude's majority would occur in May, when he would be admitted to a partnership in the business. Already a bravery of gold paint, symbolizing his gilt-edged existence, was at work adding "And Son" to "William Purkiss." Uncle James Threadgale made the journey from Galton, bringing with him Mrs. Threadgale the second—a cheerful country body who pressed an invitation upon Jenny and May to visit them. Uncle James did not seem to have altered much, and brought up with him a roll of fine black cloth for Jenny, but was so much upset onrealizing he had omitted May from his thoughtfulness that immediately upon his arrival he slipped out to buy a similar roll for her. The two lodgers were present as a mark of respect to the dead woman who had been so admirable a landlady; and both of them, with kindly tact, announced they were going away for a few days. Alfie, of course, was there with his fiancée, whom Jenny somewhat grudgingly admitted to be very smart. Edie came with the children and her husband. His arrival caused a slight unpleasantness, because Alfie said he would rather not go at all to the funeral than ride with Edie and Bert. But in the end a compromise was effected by which he and his Amy occupied a coach alone. After these mourners came a cortège of friends and cousins, all conspicuously black, all intent to pay their homage of gloom.
Jenny, when she had made herself ready, sat on the end of the bed and laughed.
"I can't help it, May. I know it's wicked of me. But I can't keep from laughing, I can't really."
"Well, don't let any of them downstairs hear you," begged May, "becausetheywouldn't understand."
"It doesn't mean I'm not sorry about mother because I laugh. And I believe she'd be the first to understand. Oh, May, what a tale she'd have made of it, if she'd only been alive to see her own funeral. She'd have kept anyone in fits of laughter for a week."
Even during the slow progress of the pomp, Jenny, in the first coach with her father and May, was continually on the verge of laughter because, just as by a great effort she had managed to bring her emotions under control, Aunt Mabel had tripped over her skirt and dived head foremost into the carriage that was to hold Claude, Uncle James and his wife, and herself. Moreover, to make matters worse, her father's black kid gloves kept splitting in different places until, by the time the cemetery was reached, his hands merely looked as if they were plentifully patched with court-plaster. It was blue and white April weather, fit for cowslips and younglambs, when the somber people darkened the vivid, wet grass round the grave. During the solemnity and mournfulness of the burial service Jenny stood very rigid and pale, more conscious of the wind sighing through the yew trees than of finality and irremediable death. She was neither irritated nor moved by the sniffling of those around her. The fluttering of the priest's surplice and the tear-dabbled handkerchiefs occupied her attention less than the figure of a widow looking with sorrowful admiration at a tombstone two hundred yards away. She did not advance with the rest to stare uselessly down on the lowered coffin. The last words had been said: the ceremony was done. In the sudden silver wash of an April shower they all hurried to the shelter of the mourning coaches. Jenny looked back once, and under the arc of a rainbow saw men with gleaming spades: then she, too, lost in the dust and hangings of the heavy equipage, was jogged slowly back to Islington.
Funerals, like weddings, are commonly employed by families to weld broken links in the chain of association with comparisons of progress and the condolences or congratulations of a decade's chance and change. Jenny could not bear to see these relations cawing like rooks in a domestic parliament. She felt their presence outraged the humor of the dead woman and pictured to herself how, if her father had died, her mother would have sent them all flapping away. She did not want to hear her mother extolled by unappreciative people. She loathed the sight of her sleek cousin Claude, of Alfie glowering at Edie, of her future sister-in-law picking pieces of white cotton off her skirt, of Edie brushing currants from the side of Norman's mouth. Finally, when she was compelled to listen to her father's statement of his susceptibility to the knocks of a feather on receiving the news of his wife's death, she could bear it no longer, but went upstairs to her bedroom, whither Aunt Mabel presently followed in search.
"Ah, Jenny, this is a sad set out and no mistake," Mrs. Purkiss began.
Jenny did not deign to pay any attention, but looked coldly out of the window.
"You must feel quite lost without her," continued the aunt, "though to be sure you didn't trouble her much with your company this last year. Poor Florrie, she used to fret about it a lot. And your father wasn't much use—such an undependable sort of a man as he is. Let's all hope, now he's got two motherless girls to look after, he'll be a bit more strict."
"I wish you wouldn't keep on at me, Auntie," Jenny protested, "because I shall be most shocking rude to you in a minute, which I shouldn't like to be at such a time."
"Tut—tut, I wish you could control that temper of yours; but there, I make allowances for I know you must be feeling it all very much, especially as you must blame yourself a bit."
Jenny turned sharply round and faced her aunt.
"What for?" she demanded.
"Why, for everything. Nothing'll ever convince me it wasn't worry drove your poor mother into the grave. Your Uncle William said the same when he heard of it. He wasverydisappointed to think he couldn't come to the funeral; but, as he said, 'what with, Easter almost on us and one thing and another, I really haven't got the time.'"
Mrs. Purkiss had seated herself in the arm-chair and was creaking away in comfortable loquacity.
"I think it's nothing more than wicked to talk like that," Jenny declared indignantly. "And, besides, it's silly, because the doctor said it was an abscess, nothing else."
"Ah, well, doctors know best, I daresay; but we all have a right to our opinions."
"And you think my leaving home for a year killed my mother?"
"I don't go so far as that. What I said was you were a worry to her. You were a worry when you were born, for I was there. You were a worry when you would go on thestage against whatever I said. You were a worry when you dyed your hair and when you kept such disgraceful late hours and when you went gallivanting about with that young fellow. However, I don't want to be the one to rub in uncomfortable facts at such a time. What I came up to ask was if you wouldn't like to come and stay with us for a little while, you and May. You'll have to get an extra servant to look after the lodgers if your father intends keeping things on as they were, and you'll be more at home with us."
Mrs. Purkiss spoke in accents almost ghoulish, with a premonitory relish of macabre conversations.
"Stay with you?" repeated Jenny. "Stay withyou? What, and hear nothing but what I ought to have done? No, thanks; May and I'll stay on here."
"You wouldn't disturb your Uncle William," Mrs. Purkiss continued placidly, "if that's what you're thinking of. You'd be gone to the theater when he reads his paper of an evening."
"If I went to stay anywhere," said Jenny emphatically, "I should go and stay with Uncle James at Galton. But I'm not, so please don't keep on, because I don't want to talk toanybody."
Mrs. Purkiss sighed compassionately and vowed she would forgive her nieces under the circumstances, would even spend the evening in an attempt to console the sad household of Hagworth Street.
"But I want to be alone, and so does May."
"Well, I always used to say you was funny girls, and this proves my words true. Anyone would think you'd be glad to talk about your poor mother to her only sister. But, no, girls nowadays seem to have no civilized feelings. Slap-dashing around. In and out. Nothing but amuse themselves, the uncultivated things, all the time. No wonder the papers carry on about it. But I'm not going to stay where I'm not wanted and don't need any innuendives to go."
Here Mrs. Purkiss rose from the chair and, having in amajestic sweep of watered silk attained the door, paused to deliver one severe speculation.
"If you treated your poor mother as you behave to your aunt, I'm not surprised she got ill. If my Percy or my Claude behaved like you—well, there, but they don't, thank goodness."
Jenny listened quite unmoved to the swishing descent of her aunt. She was merely glad to think her rudeness had been effectual in driving her away, and followed her downstairs very soon in order to guarantee her departure.
One by one the funereal visitors went their ways. One by one they faded into the sapphire dusk of April. Some went in sable parties like dilatory homing cattle, browsing as they went on anecdotes of the dead. On the tail of the last exit, their father, somewhat anxiously, as if afraid of filial criticism, went also. He sat for a long time, as he told them afterwards, without drinking anything, the while he stared at his silk hat enmeshed in crape, and when he did drink he called for stout.
The two girls stayed alone in the parlor with little heart to light the gas, with little desire to talk over the mournful buzz which had filled the house all day. The lodgers being gone, no responsibility of general illumination rested with Jenny or May. Soon, however, they moved in accord to the kitchen, where on each side of the glowing fire they listened to the singing of a kettle and the tick of the American clock. An insistent loneliness penetrated their souls. In that hour of sorrow and twilight, they drew nearer to one another than ever before. Outside a cat was wailing, and far down the road a dog, true to superstition, howled at intervals. The kitchen was intolerably changed by Mrs. Raeburn's absence. Jenny suddenly realized how lonely May must have been during those weeks of illness and suspense. She herself had had the distractions of the theater, but May must have moped away each heavy moment.
"I wonder where Ruby is now?" said Jenny suddenly.
"Fancy! I wonder."
They sighed. The old house in Hagworth Street seemed, with the death of its laughing mistress, to have lost its history, to have become merely one of a dreary row.
"Oh, May, look," said Jenny. "There's her apron never even gone to the wash."
After that the sisters wept quietly; while Venus dogged the young moon down into the green West, and darkness shrouded the gray Islington street.
FOR all that Jenny was so contemptuous of her aunt's opinion at the time of its expression, when she came to weigh its truth she found it somewhat disturbing. Was an abscess, indeed, the sole cause of her mother's madness and death? And could Aunt Mabel have any justification for so cruelly hinting at a less obvious cause? Jenny herself possessed a disconcerting clarity of intuition which she inherited from her mother, who might have divined the progress of the Danby incident and brooded over it too profoundly in the absence of her daughter. Indeed, she might have been actually goaded into sheer madness by a terrible consciousness of that rainy St. Valentine's night; for it was strange that her sanity should fly forever on the very next morning. It was horrid to think that all night long her mother, kept awake by pain, might have been conscious of her actions. Yet the doctor had so confidently blamed the abscess for everything. Moreover, in the asylum her mother had seemed just as much distressed by the thought of May's back as anything else. Sensitiveness to her mother's feelings had led Jenny into wrecking her own happiness with Maurice, and even Fortune could scarcely be so fierce as to drive her mother mad on account of the pitiful corollary to that ruined love. Yet it might be so, and if it were, what remorse would burden her mind everlastingly. And now it was too late for explanations. Jenny, having felt all through her mother's life an inability to confide in her completely, now when she was dead developed an intense desire to pour out her soul, to acquaint her with every detailof experience and even to ascertain if her own passionate adventures had been foreshadowed in her mother's life.
Meanwhile, with all these potential horrors of culpable actions, there was the practical side of the future to consider. In a week the lodgers would return, and a servant must be found at once to help May. She herself would do as much as possible, but most of her energy was sapped by the theater. She wished her father had the smallest conception of management. The death of his wife, however, seemed to have destroyed what small equipment of resolution he possessed, and the "Masonic Arms" received him more openly, more frequently than ever.
Jenny debated the notion of leaving the Orient and applying all her mind to keeping house; but it was too late for her temperament to inure itself to domesticity without the spur of something sharper than mere pecuniary advantage. Perhaps it would be better to give up the house in Hagworth Street and take a smaller one, where, on the joint earnings of herself and her father, he and the two sisters could live in tolerable comfort. Perhaps she might even accept the risk of setting up house with May alone. But thirty shillings a week was not a large sum for two girls, one of whom must be well dressed and able to hold her own in company where dress counted for a good deal. The more she thought of it, the more impossible did it seem to give up the theater. Those few days of absence proved how intimately her existence was wrapped up in the certainty of an evening's employment. As the time had drawn on for going down to the Orient, she had become very restless in the quiet of home. However much she might scoff at it, there was wonderful comfort in the assurance of a cheerful evening of dressing-room gossip. Besides, there was always the chance of an interesting stranger in front or of suddenly being called upon to play a noticeable part, though that pleasure grew more and more insipid all the time. There was, however, still a certain agreeable reflection in the consciousness of looking pretty and knowing that a feweyes every night remarked her face and figure. And even if all these consolations of theatrical existence failed, there was a very great satisfaction in making up and leaving, as it were, one's own discontented body behind.
For a time everything went on as usual and nobody put forward any definite proposal involving a change either of residence or mode of life. Jenny began to think she was doomed to settle down into perpetual dullness and never again to be launched desperately on a passionate adventure. She was beginning to be aware how easy it was for a woman to belie the temperament of her youth with a common-place maturity. By the end of the summer their father had already advanced so far on the road to moral and financial disintegration as to make it evident to Jenny and May that they must fend for themselves. One lodger, an old clerk in a Moorgate firm of solicitors, had already left, and the other, a Cornishman working in a dairy, would soon be carrying the result of his commercial experience back to his native land. Neither of the girls liked the prospect of new lodgers and were nervous of affording shelter to possible thieves or murderers. Nor did May in particular enjoy the supervision of the servant or wrestling with the slabs of unbaked dough which heralded her culinary essays. So at last she and Jenny decided the house was altogether too large and that they must give notice to quit.
"And aren't I to give no opinion on the subject of my own house?" asked their father indignantly.
"You?" cried Jenny; "why should you? You don't do nothing but drink everything away. Why should we slave ourselves to the death keeping you?"
"There's daughters!" Charlie apostrophized. "Yes, daughters is all very nice when they're small, but when they grow up, they're worse than wives. It comes of being women, I suppose." And Charlie, as if sympathizing with his earliest ancestor, sighed for Eden. "Look here, I don't want to take my hook from this house."
"All right, stay on, then, stupid," May advised; "only Jenny and I are going to clear off."
"Stay on by yourself," Jenny continued in support of her sister, "and a fine house it'll be in a year's time. No one able to get in for empty bottles and people all around thinking you've opened a shooting-gallery, I should say."
"Now don't go on," said Charlie, "because I want to have a lay down, so you can just settle as you like."
It was Sunday afternoon and no problems of future arrangements were serious enough to interrupt a lifelong habit.
"It's no good talking to him," said Jenny scornfully; "what we've got to do is give notice sharp. I hate this house now," she added, savagely appraising the walls.
So it was settled that after so many years the Raeburns should leave Hagworth Street. Charlie made no more attempts to contest the decision, and acquiesced almost cheerfully when he suddenly reflected that public-houses were always handy wherever anyone went. "Though, for all that," he added, "I shall miss the old 'Arms.'"
"Fancy," said Jenny, "who'd have thought it?"
On the following Sunday afternoon Mr. Corin, the remaining lodger, came down to interview his hostesses.
"I hear you're leaving then, Miss Raeburn," he said. "How's that?"
"It's too hard work for my sister," Jenny answered very politely. "And besides, she don't care for it, and nor don't I."
"Well, I'm going home along myself in November month, I believe, or I should have been sorry to leave you. What I come down to ask about was whether you'd let a bedroom to a friend of mine who's coming up from Cornwall on some law business in connection with some evidence over a right of way or something. A proper old mix up, I believe it is. But I don't suppose they'll keep him more than a week, and he could use my sitting-room."
Jenny looked at May.
"Yes, of course, let him come," said the housewife. "But when will it be?"
"October month, I believe," said Mr. Corin. "That's when the witnesses are called for."
Everything seemed to happen in October, Jenny thought. In October she would be twenty-two. How time was flying, flying with age creeping on fast. In the dreariness of life's prospect, even the arrival of Mr. Corin's friend acquired the importance of an expected event, and, though neither of the sisters broke through custom so far as to discuss him beforehand, the coming of Mr. Corin's friend served as a landmark in the calendar like Whitsuntide or Easter. Meanwhile, Mr. Raeburn, as if aware of the little time left in which the "Masonic Arms" could be enjoyed, drank more and more as the weeks jogged by.
Summer gales marked the approach of autumn, and in the gusty twilights that were perceptibly earlier every day, Jenny began to realize how everything of the past was falling to pieces. There was an epidemic of matrimony at the theater, which included in the number of its victims Maudie Chapman and Elsie Crauford. Of her other companions Lilli Vergoe had left the ballet and taken up paid secretarial work for some misanthropic society, while the relations between Irene and herself had been as grimly frigid ever since the quarrel. New girls seemed to occupy old places very conspicuously, and all the stability of existence was shaken by change. Only the Orient itself remained immutably vast and austere, voracious of young life, sternly intolerant of fading beauty, antique and unscrupulous.
Jenny was becoming conscious of the wire from which she was suspended for the world's gaze, jigged hither and thither and sometimes allowed to fall with a flop when fate desired a new toy. The ennui of life was overwhelming. A gigantic futility clouded her point of view, making effort, enjoyment, sorrow, disappointment, success equally unimportant. She was not induced by that single experience of St. Valentine's nightto prosecute her curiosity. This may have been because passion full-fed was a disillusionment, or it may have been that the shock of her mother's madness appeared to her as a tangible retribution. Everything was dead. Her dancing, like her life, had become automatic, and even her clothes lasted twice as long as in the old days.
"I can't make out what's happened to everybody," she said to May. "No fellows ever seem to come round the stage door now. All the girls have either got married or booked up that way. Nobody ever wants to have larks like we used to have. You never hardly hear anybody laugh in the dressing-room now. I met someone the other day who knew me two years ago and they said I'd gone as thin as a threepenny-bit."
Jenny meditated upon the achievement of her life up to date and wrote it down a failure. Where was that Prima Ballerina Assoluta who with pitter-pat of silver shoes had danced like a will-o'-the-wisp before her imagination long ago? Where was that Prima Ballerina with double-fronted house at Ealing or Wimbledon, and meek, adoring husband? Where, indeed, were all elfin promises of fame and fairy hopes of youth? They had fled, those rainbow-winged deceivers, together with short frocks accordion-pleated and childhood's tumbled hair. Where was that love so violent and invincible that even time would flee in dismay before its progress? Where, too, was the laughter that once had seemed illimitable and immortal? Now there was nothing so gay as to keep even laughter constant to Jenny's world. For her there was no joy in lovely transcience. She knew by heart no Horatian ode which, declaiming against time, could shatter the cruelty of impermanence. Without an edifice of love or religion or art or philosophy, there seemed no refuge from decay.
When the body finds existence a mock, the mind falls back upon its intellectual defences. But Jenny had neither equipment, commissariat or strategic position. She was a dim figure on the arras of civilization, faintly mobile in the stressful windsof life. She was a complex decorative achievement and should have been cherished as such. Therefore at school she was told that William the Conqueror came to the throne in 1066, that a bay is a large gulf, a promontory a small cape. She had been a plaything for the turgid experiments by parrots in education on simple facts, facts so sublimely simple that her mind recorded them no more than would the Venus of Milo sit down on a bench before a pupil teacher. When she was still a child, plastic and wonderful, she gave her dancing and beauty to a country whose inhabitants are just as content to watch two dogs fight or a horse die in the street. When ambition withered before indifference, she set out to express herself in love. Her early failures should not have been fatal, would not have been if she had possessed any power of mental recuperation. But even if William the Conqueror had won his battle at Clacton, the bare knowledge of it would not have been very useful to Jenny. Yet she might have been useful in her beauty, could some educationalist have perceived in her youth that God as well as Velasquez can create a thing of beauty. She lived, however, in a period of enthusiastic waste, and now brooded over the realization that nothing in life seemed to recompense one for living, however merrily, however splendidly, the adventure began.
Such was Jenny's mood when, just after her twenty-second birthday, Mr. Corin announced that his friend, Mr. Z. Trewhella, would arrive in three days' time.
MR. CORIN was anxious to make his friend's visit to London as pleasant as possible, and in zeal for the enjoyment of Zachary Trewhella to impress him with the importance and knowingness of William John Corin. By way of extirpating at once any feeling of solitude, he was careful to invite Jenny and May to take tea with them on the afternoon following Trewhella's arrival. The first-floor sitting-room, once in the occupation of Mr. Vergoe, looked very different nowadays; and indeed no longer possessed much character. Corin's decorative extravagance had never carried beyond the purchase of those glassy photographs of City scenes in which from a confusion of traffic rise landmarks like St. Paul's or the Royal Exchange. These, destined ultimately to adorn the best parlor of his Cornish home, were now propped dismally against the overmantel, individually obscured according to the vagaries of the servant's dusting by a plush-bound photograph of Mr. Lloyd George. The walls of the room were handed over to wall-paper save where two prints, billowy with damp, showed Mr. Gladstone looking at the back of Mr. Spurgeon's neck over some tabulated observations on tuberculosis among cows.
Zachary Trewhella did more than share his friend's sitting-room: he occupied it, not so much actively, as by sheer inanimate force. To see him sitting in the arm-chair was to see a bowlder flung down in a flimsy drawing-room. He was a much older man than Corin, probably about thirty-eight, though Jenny fancied he could not be less than fifty. His eyes,very deep brown and closely set, had a twinkle of money, and the ragged mustache probably concealed a cruel and avaricious mouth. His hands were rough and swollen with work and weather: his neck was lean and his pointed ears were set so far back as to give his high cheek-bones over which the skin was drawn very taut a prominence of feature they would not otherwise have possessed. He belonged to a common type of Cornish farmer, a little more than fox, a little less than wolf, and judged by mere outward appearance, particularly on this occasion of ill-fitting broadcloth and celluloid collar, he would strike the casual glance as mean of form and feature. Yet he radiated force continually and though actually a small man produced an effect of size and power. It was impossible definitely to predicate the direction of this energy, to divine whether it would find concrete expression in agriculture or lust or avarice or religion. Yet so vitally did it exist that from the moment Trewhella entered Corin's insignificant apartment, the room was haunted by him, and not merely the room, but Hagworth Street itself and even Islington.
"Well, Zack," said Mr. Corin, winking at the two girls, and for effect lapsing into broadest dialect. "What du'ee thenk o' Lonnon, buoy, grand auld plaäce 'tis, I b'liv."
"I don't know as I've thought a brae lot about it," said Zack.
"He's all the time brooding about this right of way," Mr. Corin explained.
Jenny and May were frankly puzzled by Trewhella. He represented to them a new element. Jenny felt she had received an impression incommunicable by description, as if, having been flung suddenly into a room, one were to try to record the experience in terms of the underground railway.
The farmer himself did not pay any attention to either of the girls, so that Jenny was compelled to gain her impression of him as if he were an animal in a cage, funny or dull or interesting, but always remote. She was content to watch him eat with a detached curiosity that prevented her from beingirritated by his deliberation, or, after noisy drinking, by the colossal fist that smudged his lips dry.
"Ess," Trewhella announced after swallowing a large mouthful of plum-cake. "Ess, I shall be brim glad when I'm back to Trewinnard. ’Tis my belief the devil's the only one to show a Cornishman round London fittee."
Mr. Corin laughed at this sardonic witticism, but said he was going to have a jolly good try at showing Zack the sights of the town that very night.
"You ought to take him to the Orient," May advised.
"By gosh, and that's a proper notion," said Corin, slapping his thigh. "That's you and me to-night, Zack."
"What's the Orient?" inquired Trewhella.
"Haven't you never heard of the Orient?" Jenny gasped, her sense of fitness disturbed by such an abyss of ignorance.
"No, my dear, I never have," replied Trewhella, and for the first time looked Jenny full in the face.
"I dance there," she told him, "in the ballet."
The Cornishman looked round to his friend for an explanation.
"That's all right, boy," said Corin jovially. "You'll know soon enough what dancing is. You and me's going there to-night."
Trewhella grunted, looked at Jenny again and said after a pause: "Well, being in the city, I suppose we must follow city manners, but darn'ee, I never thought to go gazing at dancing like maidens at St. Peter's Tide."
Corin chuckled at the easy defeat of the farmer's prejudice, and said he meant to open old Zack's eyes before he went back to Cornwall, and no mistake.
Soon after this the two girls left the tea-party, and while Jenny dressed herself to go down to the theater, they discussed Mr. Z. Trewhella.
"Did you ever hear anyone talk so funny. Oh, May, I nearly split myself for laughing. Oh, he talks like a coon."
"I thought he talked like a gramaphone that wants winding up," said May.
"But what a dreadful thing to talk like that. Poor man, it's a shame to laugh at him, though, because he can't help it." Jenny was twisting round to see that no dust lay on the back of her coat.
"I wonder what he'll think of you dancing," May speculated. "But I don't expect he'll recognize you."
"I think he will, then," contradicted Jenny as she dabbed her nose with the powder-puff. "Perhaps you never noticed, but he looked at me very funny once or twice."