"I must."
"But you don't want to?"
"I wouldn't—not if I hadn't got to. I wouldn't marry anybody for a bit."
"I wouldn't anyhow," said Jenny decidedly.
"Don't talk silly. I've got to."
"Oh, I do think it's a shame. A pretty girl like you, Edie. Men! Can he keep you?—comfortable and all that?"
"He's got enough, and he expects to make a bit more soon, and then there's my dressmaking."
"Men!" declared Jenny. "No men for me. I wouldn't trust any man."
"Don't say nothing to mother about it."
"As if I should."
The two sisters went downstairs.
"I'll bring him over soon," said Edie.
"And I'll properly tell him off," said Jenny.
A month went by, and Mr. Albert Harding had many important engagements. Another month went by and Edie began to fret.
Jenny went over to Brixton to see her sister.
"Looks as if this marriage was only a rumor," she said.
"He hasn't got the time, not for a week or two."
"What?" exclaimed Jenny.
"He's going to take me to the Canterbury to-morrow. He's all right, Jenny. Only he's busy. He is, really."
Jenny, jolting homewards in the omnibus that night, wondered what ought to be done. Although she felt to the full the pity of a nice girl like Edie being driven into a hasty marriage, no alternative presented itself clearly. She thought with quickening heart, so terrible was the fancy, how she would act in Edie's place. She would run away out of the world's eyes, out of London.
Yet Edie did not seem to mind so much.
The malignity of men enraged her. The selfishness and grossness sickened her. Boys were different; but men, with their conceit and lies, were beasts. They should never make a fool of her. Never. Never. Then she wondered if her mother had been compelled to marry. On no other basis could her father be explained. Men were all alike.
Bert Harding, greasy, dark-eyed, like a dirty foreigner. He was nice-looking, after a fashion, yes, but even more conceited than most men. And Edie hadgotto marry him.
Alfie was on the doorstep when she reached home.
"You?" she said.
"Come over for the night. Got some business in Islington to-morrow morning."
"Alfie, you know Bert Harding?"
"Yes."
"You've got to make him marry Edie."
"I'll smash his face in if he don't."
"They'll be at the Canterbury to-morrow night."
It was a poor fight in the opinion of the Westminster Bridge Road. Bert was overmatched. He was perfectly willing to marry Edie at once, as it happened, but Jenny enjoyed seeing one of his dark eyes closed up by her brother. Alfie, having done his duty, never spoke to Bert or Edie again.
"However could she have been so mad," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Soft! Soft! That's you," she went on, turning on her husband.
"Oh, of course it's me. Everything's me," said Charlie.
"Yes, it is you. You can't say no to a glass of beer and Edie can't say no to a man."
"What would you have done, mother," asked Jenny, "if Edie's Bert had gone away and left her?"
"She'd never have come inside my house again—not ever again."
"You're funny."
"Funny?" said Mrs. Raeburn. "You try and be funny, and see what happens."
"Who cares?" said Jenny. "It wouldn't trouble me. I'm sick of this dog's island. But men. Whatever next? Don't you imagine I'll let any man—— Not much."
"Don't you be too sure, Mrs. Clever," said the mother.
"But I am. I'm positive. Love! There's nothing in it."
"Hark at her," jeered Charlie.
Jenny lay awake in a fury that night. One after another, man in his various types passed across the screen of her mind. She saw them all. The crimson-jointed, fishy-eyed Glasgow youths winked at her once more. The complacent subalterns of Dublin dangled their presents and waited to be given her thanks and kisses. Old men, from the recess of childish memories, rose up again and leered at her. Her own father, small and weak and contemptible, pottered across the line of her mental vision. Bert Harding was there, his black boot-button eyes glittering. And to that her sister had surrendered herself,to be pawed and mauled about and boasted of. Ugh! Suddenly in the middle of her disgust Jenny thought she heard a sound under the bed.
"Oo—er, May!" she called out. "May!"
"Whatever is it, you noisy thing?"
"Oo—er, there's a man under the bed! Oh, May, wake up, else we shall all be murdered!"
"Who cares?" said May. "Go to sleep."
And just then the Raeburns' big cat, tired of his mouse-hole, came out from underneath the bed and walked slowly across the room.
TO compensate Jenny for her disappointment over Covent Garden, Madame Aldavini secured a place for her in the Drury Lane pantomime. She was no longer to be the most attractive member of an attractive quartette, but one of innumerable girls who changed several times during the evening into amazingly complicated dresses, designed not to display individual figures, but to achieve broad effects of color and ingenuity.
Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of Frenchmen or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of Tortoise-shell Butterflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Procession of Insects. Jenny's gay deep eyes were obscured by tricolor flags or the spout of a teapot or the disproportionate antennæ of a butterfly. There was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid color, no more enthusiastically than they would have clapped an elaborate arrangement of limelight. Everything was sacrificed to the cleverness of a merely inventive mind. More than ever Jenny felt the waste of academic instruction in her art. She had been learning to dance for so many years, and there she was beside girls who could neither dance nor move, girls who had large features and showy legs and so much cubic space for spangles.
But if her personality did not carry over the footlights and reach the mighty audience of Drury Lane, behind the scenes it gradually detached itself from the huge crowd of girls. Great comedians with great salaries condescended to find out her name. Great principal boys with great expanses of chest nodded at her over furs. Dainty principal girls with dainty tiers of petticoats smiled and said good evening in their mincing, genteel, principal girl voices. Even the stage doorkeeper never asked her name more than once. Everybody knew Jenny Pearl, except the public. So many people told her she was sure to get on that she began to be ambitious again, and used to go, without being pressed, to Madame Aldavini's for practice. The latter was delighted and prophesied a career—a career that should date from her engagement (a real engagement this time) at Covent Garden in the spring.
Jenny's popularity at the theater made her more impatient than ever of home. She bore less and less easily her mother's attempts to steer her course.
"You'll come to grief," Mrs. Raeburn warned her.
"I don't think so."
"A nice mess Edie made of things."
"I'm not Edie. I'm not so soft."
"Why you can't meet some nice young chap, and settle down comfortable with a home of your own, I can't think."
"Like Edie, I suppose, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this little girl."
Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not oneof whom was vouchsafed the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.
Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings.
The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married life did not make her regard more kindly the circumstance-impelled conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs. Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love, the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board, should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium.
May was often told of her sister's crusade, of the slain suitors too slow to race with Atalanta.
"Menarefools," Jenny proclaimed.
"Did you see Fred to-night?"
"Yes; he saw me home."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing much. I told him not to talk because he got on my nerves, and I wanted to think about my new costume for the spring."
"Didn't he mind?"
"I can't help his troubles. He asked if he might kiss me."
"What did you say?"
"I told him after the next turning, and every time we come to the next turning I told him the next, till we got to our gate. I said good night, and he said, 'What about my kiss?' I said, 'There's a cheek; you don't want much'; and he said, 'I give you a brooch last week, Jenny'; and I said, 'There's your brooch,' and I threw it down."
"What did he do?"
"He couldn't do much. I trod on it and ran in."
"Somebody'll shoot you one day," prophesied May.
"Who cares? Besides, they haven't got no pluck. Men are walking cigarettes, that's what men are."
Drury Lane pantomime came to an end.
"And a good job," said Jenny, "for it isn't a pantomime at all; it's more of a Lord Mayor's show."
Jenny now had to rehearse hard for the ballet at Covent Garden, but there was still plenty of time in the lengthening spring dusks with their silver stars and luminous horizons, to fool plenty of men. There was a quarrelsome interlude with Alfie on this account. The latter had rashly presented one of his own friends for Jenny's sport. The friend had spent most of his income on chocolates and pit-stalls, and at one swoop a whole week's salary on a garnet bracelet.
"Look here," said Alfie, "don't you get playing your tricks on any of my friends, because I won't have it."
"Hark at him. Hark at Alfred Proud. As if your friends were better than anyone else's."
"Well, I'm not going to have fellows say my sister's hot stuff."
"Who did?"
"Never mind who did. Somebody said it."
"Arthur?"
Arthur was the melancholy Romeo introduced by Alfie.
"Somebody said you was to Arthur."
"And what did he do?"
"He was quite disgusted. He walked away."
"Didn't he have a fight over it?"
"No. He said he would have done, only you treated him so off-hand."
"Well, he needn't come whistling outside for me no more."
"You're not going to chuck him?"
"Chuck him? I never had him. He worried me to go out with him. I didn't want to go."
"You'll get a bullet in your chest one of these days. You'll get shot."
"Not by one of your massive friends."
"Why not?"
"Why, there isn't hardly one of 'em as would have the pluck to hold a pistol, and not one as would have the money to buy one."
"Well, don't say I never told you."
"You and your friends' pistols!"
With the pride and insolence of maiden youth, Jenny took the London streets. Through the transient April rains she came from Islington to Covent Garden every day. From King's Cross she rode on the green omnibus that jogged by the budding elms of Brunswick Square. Down Guilford Street she rode and watched its frail inhabitants coming home with their parcels of ribbons and laces. Through Great Queen Street into Long Acre she came, sitting along on the front seat of the green omnibus more like a rosy lily now than a La France rose—down Long Acre till she came to Bow Street, through which she would run to the theater past the groups of porters who nodded and smiled at her, for they soon recognized the swift one running through the April rains.
Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for "Tannhäuser," thinking the Venusberg ballet verypoor and Venus herself a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence, but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight. To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a classical feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.
The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultation to the heart of the wearied listener. Moreover, she had a very real sense of being a square peg in a round hole when she and the other minions of Venus tripped round the frequent rocks of Venusberg. It was as if a confectioner had stuck a shepherdess of pink icing on the top of a plum-pudding. Jenny felt, in her own words, that it was all unnatural. There was nothing of Walpurgis in their stereotyped allurement. It was Bobbing Joan in Canterbury Close. The violins might wail through the darkened opera house, but an obese Tannhäuser caught by the wiles of an adipose Venus during the inexpressive seductions of an Italian ballet was silly; the poses to be sustained were fatiguing and ineffective. More fatiguing still was Jenny's almost unendurablewaiting as page while the competitors sang to Elizabeth. There were four pages in purple velvet tunics. Jenny looked her part, but the other three looked like Victoria plums. The one scene in German opera that she really enjoyed was the Valkyries' ride, when she and a few selected girls were strapped high up to the enchanted horses and rocked exhaustingly through the terrific clamor.
But these excursions into Gothic steeps among the distraught populations of the north were not the main feature of the opera season. They were atour de forceof rocks in a dulcet enclosure. Over Covent Garden hung the magic of an easy and opulent decoration. It sparkled from the tiaras in the grand circle. It flashed from the tie-pins of the basses, from the rings of the tenors. It breathed on the oceanic bosoms of the contraltos. It trembled round the pleated hips of the sopranos. Everything was fat—a pasha's comfortable dream.
Jenny, being little and svelte, was distressed by the prevalent sumptuousness. A fine figure began to seem a fine ambition.
"My dear child, you are thin," some gracious prima donna would murmur richly just before she tripped on to the stage to play consumptive Mimi.
Jenny could not see that she was advancing to fame at Covent Garden. Nor was she, indeed, but Madame Aldavini tried to console her by insisting upon the valuable experience and pointing out the products of success that surrounded her. Covent Garden was only a stepping-stone, Madame reminded her.
Here she was at seventeen without a chance to display her accomplishments. It was more acting than dancing at Covent Garden. Jenny, too, was always chosen for such voiceless parts as were important. Some of these she did not like. In Rigoletto, for instance, Previtale, the great singer, expressed a wish that she should play the girl in the sack whom he was to fondle. Jenny did not like being fondled. Other girlswould have loved the conspicuous attractions of Previtale, but Jenny thought his breath was awful, as indeed it was.
Her principal friend at Covent Garden was a girl called Irene, or rather spelled Irene, for she was always called Ireen. Irene Dale was a mixture of the odd and the ordinary in her appearance. At first glance she seemed the commonplace type produced in hundreds by Englishcoulisses. Perhaps the expression of her face in repose first suggested a possibility of distinction. The intensely blue eyes in that circumstance had a strange, listless ardor, as if she were dreaming of fiery moments fled long ago. The blue eyes were enhanced by hair, richly brown as drifted leaves under the sunlight. Her mouth was prettiest when she was being pleasantly teased. Her nose came to an end, and then began again. Her chin was deeply cleft and her complexion full of real roses. In the company of Jenny, Irene gave an impression of slowness; not that Jenny, except when late for rehearsal, ever seemed in a hurry, but with her there was always the suggestion of a tremulous agility. Irene had been at Madame Aldavini's school, where she and Jenny in their childhood had wasted a considerable amount of time in romping, but, since they never happened to go on tour together, they never achieved a girlish friendship until at Covent Garden they found themselves dressing next to each other.
Jenny tried to inspire Irene with the hostility to men felt by herself. But Irene, although she enjoyed the lark, had a respect for men at the bottom of it all, and would not always support Jenny in the latter's freely expressed contempt. While she was at Covent Garden, Irene met a young man, unhealthily tall, who made much of her and gave her expensive rings, and for a fancy of his own took her to a fashionable milliner's and dressed her in short skirts. Jenny had heard something of Irene's Danby and was greatly annoyed by the latter's unsympathetic influence.
"Your Danby," she would protest. "Whatever can you see in him? Long idiot!"
"My Danby's a gentleman," said Irene.
"Well, I think he looks terrible. Why, he wears his teeth outside."
Then Jenny, meeting Irene and her Danby in Leicester Square, beheld her friend in the childish costume.
"Oh, sight!" she called out.
"You are rude," said Irene.
"You're a very rude little girl," said Danby; "but will you come and have a drink with us?"
"No, thanks," said Jenny, and passed on coldly. That evening she attacked Irene in the dressing-room.
"To let a man make such a shocking sight of you!"
"He likes to see me in short skirts."
"Whatever for? And those boots!"
"He wants me to marry him," declared Irene.
"Marry you? That's only a rumor, young Irene. I've properly rumbled your Danby. Marry you! I don't think."
"He is when he comes back from Paris, and he said you were a very bad example for me."
"Crushed!" said Jenny in mock humility. Then she went on, "Yes, you and your Parises. Any old way, you can tell Tin Ribs from me I should be ashamed to make a girl I was fond of look such a terrible sight."
"His brother said he'd like to be introduced to you."
"Yes; I daresay. Tin Ribs the Second, I suppose. No, thanks, not this little girl."
London deepened into summer, and the golden people coming out of Covent Garden seemed scattered with star dust from the prodigal June stars, while the high moon made of Jenny a moonbeam as, in white piqué, she sat in the front of the green omnibus going home.
These were happy days at Covent Garden, and when the season ended Jenny was sorry. She did not enjoy Yarmouth with its swarming sands and goat-carriages and dust and fleas and switchback flung down on the barren coast like a monstrous skeleton. She was glad to come back to London in theeffulgence of a fine September; glad to rehearse again for the autumn opera season, and pleased, when that was over, to return to Drury Lane for the Christmas pantomime.
After her second spring season of opera was over she and Irene discussed the future. Danby had retired to Paris on his business. His rings sparkled unseen in the safe of a Camden Town pawnbroker, although the whisky and soda which they served to buy had long ceased to sparkle for Mrs. Dale. Irene said she was tired of being in three months and out three months.
"I think we ought to go to the Orient, Jenny."
"I don't care where we go," said Jenny.
"Well, let's."
"All right. I'll meet you Camden Town station to-morrow. Don't you be late."
"No fear."
"Oh, no, Mrs. Punctual, you're never late!" scoffed Jenny.
"Well, I won't be to-morrow."
On the following morning Jenny dressed herself up to impress the ballet-master of the Orient, and arrived in good time at Camden Town station. Irene was nowhere in sight. Jenny waited half an hour. People began to stare at the sprays of lilac in her large round hat. Really, they were looking at the blue facets of her eyes and her delicate, frowning eyebrows. But Jenny, feeling herself a-blush, thought it was the lilac, thought her placket was undone, thought there was a hole in her stocking, became thoroughly hot and self-conscious.
She waited another blushful quarter of an hour. Then, thinking that Irene must surely have mistaken the meeting-place, she called at the shop in Kentish Town where her father worked and asked him if he'd seen Irene.
"Irene Dale?" said Charlie.
"Yes, you know."
"Haven't you seen her?"
"No."
"Why, she was in here asking for you. She's been waiting outside Kentish Town Station."
"That's Mrs. Brains all over. Ta-ta!"
Jenny dashed off to Kentish Town, where she caught Irene on the verge of departure. Most of the way to the Orient they argued which was right.
When they reached the famous theater of varieties, Irene said she was afraid to go in.
"Who cares?" said Jenny. "If they don't want us, they won't eat us, any way."
Monsieur Corontin, the Maître de Ballet, interviewed them in his little room that was hidden away at the end of one of the innumerable passages. He looked at Jenny curiously.
"Dance, please, miss."
Jenny danced as well as she could in the diminutive room.
"Now, please, miss," he said to Irene, who also danced.
"You are engaged," said Mr. Corontin.
"Both?" asked Jenny.
"Both of you."
They lost themselves several times in the course of their descent.
"What an unnatural place," said Jenny. "Gee! How many more stairs? I suppose we're ballet girls now."
At home that evening Charlie remonstrated with his daughter for intruding upon him at Kentish Town.
"Don't come asking me for your flash friends," he said. "Why, the men wondered who you were."
"Didn't they know I was your daughter?"
"I tried to pretend you wasn't, but one of 'em heard you calling me dad."
"What did he say?"
"What did he say? He said, 'Charlie, is your daughter a—— princess?'"
"Well, you ought to have been very proud," said Jenny.
"Proud, with all the men in the shop laughing at me? Why, they'll think I've no business to be working."
"Oh!"
"And don't you never recognize me in the street," went on Charlie.
"Why ever not?"
"Well, look at you; look at your hat. People, I know, wonders whatever on earth you are."
"Oh, my own father's ashamed of me now; and what about you? Beer and bed's all you think about."
Jenny thought she would go and see Lilli Vergoe, in Cranbourne Street, and tell her of the engagement.
Lilli sat with her feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette.
"I've joined the ballet," said Jenny.
"Where?"
"At the Orient."
"You won't like it."
"Who cares? I sha'n't stay if I don't."
"Yes, you will. You'll stay. Everybody stays in the Orient. I've stayed there twelve years, and I'm still a second-line girl. You'll stay twelve years and, if you don't get fat, you'll still be a second-line boy."
"What about if I get married?"
"You'll still stay."
"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."
Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street baking in the July heat.
"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.
"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.
THE Orient Palace of Varieties rose like a cliff from the drapery shops of Piccadilly. On fine summer dusks, in a mist of golden light, it possessed a certain magic of gayety; seemed to capture something of the torch-lit merriment of a country fair. As one loitered on the island, lonely and meditative, the Orient was alluring, blazed upon the vision like an enchanted cave, or offered to the London wanderer a fancy of the scents and glossy fruits and warblers of the garden where Camaralzaman lost Badoura; and in autumn, stained by rosy sunsets, the theater expressed the delicate melancholy of the season. But when the rain dripped monotonously, when fogs transformed the town, when London was London vast and gray, the Orient became unreal like the bedraggled palaces of an exhibition built to endure for a little while. After all, it was an exotic piece of architecture, and evoked an atmosphere of falseness, the falseness of an Indian gong in a Streatham hall. Yet fifty years it had stood without being rebuilt. In addition to having seen two generations pass away, something in the character of its entertainment, in the lavishness of its decoration, lent it the sacred permanence of a mausoleum, the mausoleum of mid-Victorian amusement.
The Orient did not march with the times, rising from insignificance. It never owned a chairman who announced the willingness of each successive comedian to oblige with a song.Old men never said they remembered the Orient in the jolly old days, for they could not have forgotten it. In essentials it remained the same as ever. Dancers had gone; beauties had shrivelled; but their ghosts haunted the shadowy interior. The silver-footedcoryphéesnow kept lodging-houses; the swan-like Ballerinas wore elastic stockings; but their absence was filled by others: they were as little missed as the wave that has broken. The lean old vanities quizzed and ogled the frail ladies of the Promenade and sniffed the smoke-wreathed air with a thought of pleasures once worth enjoyment. They spent now an evening of merely sentimental dissipation, but because it was spent at the Orient, not entirely wasted; for the unchanged theater testified to the reality of their youth. It may not have been able to rejuvenate them, but, as by a handkerchief that survives the departure of its owner, their senses were faintly stimulated.
The Orient was proud because it did not enter into competition with any other house of varieties; preened itself upon a cosmopolitan programme. With the snobbishness of an old city firm, it declined to advertise its ware with eye-arresting posters, and congratulated itself on the inability to secure new clients. Foreigners made up a large proportion of the audience, and were apparently contented by equestrian mistresses of thehaute école, by bewildering assemblages of jugglers, even by continental mediocrities for the sake of hearing their native tongue. They did not object to interminable wire-acts, and put up with divination feats of the most exhausting dullness. After all, these incidental turns must occur; but the ballets were the feature of the evening. For many who visited the Orient, the stream of prostitutes ebbing and flowing upon the Promenade was enough. Yet the women of the Orient Promenade would strike a cynic with uneasiness.
Under the stars, the Piccadilly courtesans affect the onlooker less atrociously. Night lends a magic of softness to their fretful beauty. The sequins lose their garishness; the painted faces preserve an illusion of reality. Moonlight falls gentlyon the hollow cheek; kindles a spark of youth in the leaden eye. The Piccadilly courtesans move like tigers in a tropic gloom with velvet blazonries and a stealthy splendor that masks the hunger driving them out to seek their prey. On the Orient Promenade, the finer animalism has vanished; it was never more than superficially æsthetic. The daughters of pleasure may still be tigers, but they are naphtha-lit, pacing backwards and forwards in a cage. They all appear alike. Their hats are all too large, their figures are too brutal, their cheeks too lifeless. They are automatic machines of lust waiting to be stirred into action by pennies.
Under the stars they achieve a pictorial romance; but on the carpet of the Promenade, they are hard and heartless and vile. Their eyes are coins; their hands are purses. At their heels patter old men like unhealthy lap-dogs; beefy provincials stare at them, their foreheads glistening. Above all the frangipani and patchouli and opoponax and trèfle incarnat steals the rank odor of goats. The orchestra thunders and crashes down below; the comfortable audience lean back in the stalls; the foreigners jabber in the gallery; the Orient claque interrupts its euchre with hired applause. The corks pop; the soda splashes; money chinks; lechery murmurs; drunkards laugh; and down on the stage Jenny Pearl dances.
The night wears on. The women come in continually from the wet streets. They surge in the cloak-room, quarrel over carrion game, blaspheme, fight and scratch. A door in the cloak-room (locked of course) leads into the passage outside the dressing-room, where Jenny changes five or six times each night. Every foul oath and every vile experience and every detestable adventure is plainly heard by twenty ladies of the ballet.
Dressing-room number forty-five was a long, low room, with walls of whitewashed brick. There was one window, seldom opened. There was no electric light, and the gas-jets gave a very feeble illumination, so feeble that everybody always put on too much grease paint in their fear of losing an effect.The girls dressed on each side of the room at a wide deal board with forms to sit upon. There was a large wardrobe in one corner, and next to Jenny's place an open sink. The room was always dark and always hot. There were about eighty stone stairs leading up to it from the stage, and at least half a dozen ascents in the course of the evening. The dresser was a blowsy old Irish woman, more obviously dirty than the room, and there were two ventilators, which gave a perpetual draught of unpleasant air. The inspectors of the London County Council presumably never penetrated as far as Room 45, a fact which seems to show that the extent of municipal interference has been much exaggerated.
The dressing-rooms were half on one side of the stage, half on the other. Those on the side nearer to the stage-door were less unpleasant. The architect evidently believed in the value of first impressions. Anybody venturing into either warren without previous acquaintanceship would have been bewildered by the innumerable rooms and passages, tucked away in every corner and branching off in every direction. Some of the former seemed to have been inhabited for years. One in particular contained an ancient piano, two daguerrotypes and a heap of mouldering stuffs. It might have been the cell where years ago a Ballerina was immured for a wrong step. It existed like a monument to the despair of ambition.
The Orient stifled young life. TheCorps de Ballethad the engulfing character of conventual vows. When a girl joined it, she cut herself off from the world. She went there fresh, her face a mist of roses, hope burning in her heart, fame flickering before her eyes. In a few years she would inevitably be pale with the atmosphere, with grinding work and late hours. She would find it easy to buy spirits cheaply in the canteen underneath the stage. She would stay in one line, it seemed, forever. She would not dance for joy again.
When Jenny went to the Orient first, she did not intend to stay long. She told the girls this, and they laughed at her. She did not know how soon the heavy theater would becomea habit; she did not realize what comfort exists in the knowledge of being permanently employed. But not even the Orient could throttle Jenny. She was not the daughter and granddaughter of a ballet girl. She had inherited no traditions of obedience. She never became a marionette to be dressed and undressed and jigged, horribly and impersonally. She yielded up her ambition, but she never lost her personality. When, soon after her arrival, the Maître de Ballet took her in his dark little corner and pinched her arm, she struck him across the mouth, vowed she would tell the manager, and burnt up his conceit with her spitfire eyes. He tried again later on, and Jenny told his wife, a yellow-faced, fat Frenchwoman. Then he gave her up, and, being an artist, bore her no malice, but kept her in the first line of boys.
It is not to be supposed that the eighty or ninety ladies of the ballet were unhappy. On the contrary, they were very happy, and, so far as it accorded with the selfishness of a limited company, they were well looked after. The managing director called them "Children," and was firmly convinced that he treated them as children. Actually, he treated them as dolls, and in the case of girls well into the thirties, with some of the sentimental indulgence lavished on old broken dolls. Perhaps it was the crowd of men who waited every night at the end of the long, narrow court that led from Jermyn Street down to the Orient stage door, which has helped to preserve the vulgar and baseless tradition of frailty still sedulously propagated. Every night, about half-past eleven, the strange mixture of men waited for the gradual exodus of the ladies of the ballet. A group of men, inherently the same, had stood thus on six nights of the week for more than fifty years.
They had stood there with Dundreary whiskers, in rakish full capes and strapped overalls. They had waited there with the mutton-chop whiskers and ample trousers of the 'seventies. Down the court years ago had come the beauties, with their striped stockings and swaying crinolines and velvety chignons. Down the court they had tripped in close-fitting pleated skirtsa little later, and later still with the protruding bustles and skin-tight sleeves of the 'eighties. They had taken the London starlight with the balloon sleeves of the mid-'nineties. They took the starlight now, as sweet and tender as the fairs of long ago. They came out in couples, in laughing companies, and sometimes singly with eager, searching glances. They came out throwing their wraps around them in the sudden coolness of the air. They lingered at the end of the court in groups delicate as porcelain, enjoying the freedom and reunion with life. Their talk was hushed and melodious as the conversation of people moving slowly across dusky lawns. They were dear to the imaginative observer. He watched them with pride and affection as he would have watched fishing-boats steal home to their haven about sunset. Every night they danced and smiled and decked themselves for the pleasure of the world. They rehearsed so hard that sometimes they would fall down after a dance, crying on the stage where they had fallen from sheer exhaustion. They were not rich. Most of them were married, with children and little houses in teeming suburbs. Many, of course, were free to accept the escort of loiterers by the stage-door. The latter often regarded the ladies of the ballet as easy prey, but the ladies were shy as antelopes aware of the hunter crawling through the grasses. They were independent of masculine patronage; laughed at the fools with their easy manners and genial condescension. They might desire applause over the footlights, but under the moon they were free from the necessity for favor. They had, with all its incidental humiliations, the self-respect which a great art confers. They were children of Apollo.
The difference between the gorgeousness of the ballet and the dim air of the court was unimaginable to the blockheads outside. They had seen the girls in crimson and gold, in purple and emerald, in white and silver; they had seen them spangled and glittering with armor; they had heard the tinkle of jewelry. They had watched their limbs; gloated upon their poses. They had caught their burning glances; brooded ontheir lips and eyes and exquisite motion. Inflamed by the wanton atmosphere of the Orient, they had thought the ladies of the ballet slaves for the delight of fools, but round the stage-door all their self esteem was blown away like a fragment of paper by a London night wind. Their complacent selves by most of the girls were brushed aside like boughs in a wood. Some, Jenny and Irene amongst them, would ponder awhile the silly group and gravely choose a partner for half an hour's conversation in a café. But somewhere close to twelve o'clock Jenny would fly, leaving not so much as a glass slipper to console her sanguine admirer. Home she would fly on the top of a tram and watch in winter the scudding moon whipped by bare blown branches, in summer see it slung like a golden bowl between the chimney stacks. The jolly adventures of youth were many, and the partnership of Jenny and Irene caused great laughter in the dressing-room when the former related each diverting enterprise.
The tale of their conquests would be a long one. Most of the victims were anonymous or veiled in the pseudonym of a personal idiosyncrasy. There was Tangerine Willy, who first met them carrying a bag of oranges. There was Bill Hair and Bill Shortcoat and Sop and Jack Spot and Willie Eyebrows and Bill Fur. They all of them served as episodes mirthful and fugitive. They were mulcted in chocolates and hansoms and cigarettes. They danced attendance, vainly dreaming all the time of conquest. Jenny held them in fee with her mocking eyes, bewitched them with musical derision, and fooled them as Hera fooled the passionate Titan.
In winter-time the balls at Covent Garden gave Jenny some of the happiest hours of her life. Every Tuesday fortnight, tickets were sent round to the stage-door of the Orient, and it was very seldom indeed that she did not manage to secure one. On the first occasion she went dressed as a little girl in muslin, with a white baby hat and white shoes and socks, and, wherever they might attract a glance, bows of pink silk. When the janitors saw her first, they nearly refused to admit suchyouthfulness; could not believe she was really grown up; consulted anxiously together while Jenny's slanting eyes glittered up to their majesties. They were convinced at last, and she enjoyed herself very much indeed. She was chased up the stairs and round the lobby. She was chased down the stairs, through the supper-room, in and out of half a dozen boxes, laughing and chattering and shrieking all the while. She danced nearly every dance. She won the second prize. Three old men tried to persuade her to live with them. Seven young men vowed they had never met so sweet a girl.
To the three former Jenny murmured demurely:
"But I'm a good little girl; I don't do those things."
And of course they pointed out that she was much too young to come to so wicked a place as Covent Garden. And of course, with every good intention, they offered to escort her home at once.
With the seven young men's admiration Jenny agreed.
"I am sweet, aren't I? Oh, I'm a young dream, if you only knew."
And as a dream was she elusive. She gloried in her freedom. She was glad she was not in love. She had no wish to do anything but enjoy herself to the top of her bent. And she succeeded. Then at half-past six o'clock of a raw November morning, she rumbled home to Hagworth Street in a four-wheel cab with five other girls—a heap of tangled lace. She went upstairs on tiptoe. She undressed herself somehow, and in the morning she woke up to find on each wrist, as testimony of the night's masquerade, a little pink bow, soiled and crumpled.
She went often after that first visit and had many adventures. On one occasion she fell in with the handsome wife of a Surrey publican, and drove back after breakfast beside her to whatever Surrey village Mrs. Argles astonished with her figure and finery. Irene came, too, and the girls went to bed in a dimity-hung bedroom and were taken for a drive in the afternoon and sat so long in the cosy bar-parlor watching thedusk stealing through the misted trees that they decided to send a telegram to the theater announcing their illness. Then they stayed another night and went for another drive, laughing and chatting down the deep Surrey lanes. After dinner Jenny went back to Hagworth Street, and had a flaming quarrel with her mother, who accused her of "going gay"; demanded to know how she dared put in an appearance dressed in another woman's clothes; insisted that she was to come home immediately after the theater; forbade a hundred things, and had the door slammed in her face for the advice. There were mad days as well as spangled nights. There were days at the Zoo with Bill Fur, a schoolmaster always full of information until he found his hat in the middle of the giraffes' enclosure, or perceived his gloves viewed with dislike by a cassowary. Bill Fur, however, would gladly have lost more than gloves or hat to be free for a while from the Margate school where he taught delicate boys the elements of Latin. To himself he was Don Juan in bravery of black satin slashed with purple. To the girls he was, as Jenny put in, a scream. To the world, he was a rather foolish middle-aged schoolmaster.
Perhaps it was Colonel Walpole who first suggested to Jenny that all men were not merely ridiculous. From his seat in the front row of stalls, he perceived her charm; sent round a note to the stage door; took her out to supper and champagne. When he found she was a good girl, he seemed to like her more than ever, and gave her tea in the flat whose windows looked over the sunlit tree-tops of Green Park. He also gave her some pretty dresses and hats. The other girls whispered and giggled when Jenny's back was turned. Her mother was sharply inquisitive and extremely suspicious.
"Who cares?" said Jenny. "There'snothingin it."
Colonel Walpole took her for long motor drives, gave her salmon mayonnaise at Weybridge, chicken mayonnaise at Barnet, salmon mayonnaise at Henley, chicken mayonnaise at Cobham, and lobsterau gratinat Brighton. Colonel Walpole was very paternal, and Jenny liked him. He had a cool, cleanappearance and a pleasant voice. Whatever may have been his ultimate intentions, he behaved very well, and she was sorry when he went away on a Tibetan shooting expedition.
"My friend, the Prince, has gone away," she told the girls; and "don't laugh," she added, "because Idon'tlike it."
Jenny was nineteen. The mark of the Orient was not yet visible. A few roses had withered, but eighteen months of the fusty old theater had been balanced by laughter outside. There seemed to be no end of her enjoyment of life. In essentials she was younger than ever. Mrs. Raeburn worried ceaselessly; but her daughter was perfectly well able to look after herself. Indeed, the mistakes she made were due to wisdom rather than folly. She knew too much about men. She had "properly rumbled" men. She was too much of a cynic to be taken in. Her only ambition was excitement; and love, in her opinion, did not provide it. She was always depressed by the sight of lovers. She hated the permanency of emotion that their perpetual association implied. She and Irene liked to choose a pair from the group of men who waited by the stage door, as one picks out two horses for a race. The next evening the pair of last night would be contemptuously ignored, and a fresh couple dangled at the end of a string as long as their antics were novel enough to divert.
Jenny still vowed she had no intention of remaining at the Orient, and if people asked her about her dancing, she mocked.
"What's the good of working? You don't get nothing for it. Icouldhave danced. Yes, once. But now. Well, I can now, only I don't want to. See? Besides, what's the good?"
If anyone had foretold a career, she would have mocked louder.
"You don't know the Orient; I reckon they don'twantto see a girl get on at the Orient. If you make a success in one ballet, you're crushed in the next."
One morning Jenny looked at herself in the glass.
"May," she called out, "I think if I was to get old, I'ddrown myself. I would really. Thirty! What a shocking idea!"
"Why, you're only nineteen."
"Yes, I know, but Ishallbe thirty. Thirty! What an unnatural age! Who cares? Perhaps I sha'n't never be thirty."
IN her twentieth year, when the Covent Garden season of balls was over, the dread of growing old sometimes affected Jenny. It came upon her in gusts of premonition and, like a phantom, intruded upon the emptiness of her mind. The nervous strain of perpetual pleasure had made her restless and insecure. Day by day she was forced into a still greater dependence on trivial amusement, notwithstanding that every gratified whim added the lean ghost of another dread hour to haunt her memory. Headaches overtook her more easily now, and fits of depression were more frequent. She was vaguely aware that something could cure her discontent, and once or twice in moments of extreme weakness caught herself envying the girls who seemed so happy with their mild lovers. She began to contemplate the prospect of mating with one of the swains who inhabited, awkwardly enough, the desolation of Sunday evenings. She even went so far as to award the most persistent an afternoon at the Hackney Furnishing Company; but when, blushful and stammering, he discussed with the shopman the comparative merits of brass and iron bedsteads, Jenny, suddenly realizing the futility of the idea, fled from the jungle of furniture.
These negotiations with domesticity drove her headlong into a more passionate pursuit of folly, so that, with the colorless shadow of mere matrimony filling her soul, her clutch upon the sweet present became more feverish. She watched the adventures of girlhood fall prettily about her; saw them like unsubstantialsnowflakes that are effective only in accumulation. Yet the transitory lovers of the stage door were beginning also to become intolerable. She could not brook, so slim and proud was she, their immediate assumption of proprietorship. She hated the cheapening of her kisses and their imperviousness to her womanhood.
Where among these eager-handed wooers was the prince of destiny? Not he with box-pleats underneath his eyes, nor he with the cold, slick fingers, nor he peppered with blackheads. Love was a myth, a snare, a delusion of women, who sacrificed their freedom in marriage. She remembered how in old days Santa Claus had turned into her mother on tiptoe. Love was another legend. The emotion that begot the fancy of armed boyhood mischievous to man was as incredible to her as the dimpled personification is to a Hyde Park materialist.
Jenny asked Irene if the love of Danby had brought her satisfaction. When her friend said she rather liked him, she inquired what was the good of it all.
"I think he's making a proper fool of you. Why don'tIfall in love? Because I'm not so soft. Besides, you're not in love. You're just walking round yourselves having a game with each other."
"Oh, well, what of it?" said Irene sulkily.
"Don't be silly. I never knew such a girl as you. You can't talk sensible for a minute. I want to know what this love is."
"You'll find out one day."
"Ah, one day.Oneday I shall go and drown myself. Irene Dale, I think I'm funny. I do really. Sometimes I can dance all over the place and kick up a shocking row, laughing and that. And then I cry. Now what about? I ask you. What have I got to cry about? Nothing. I just sit and cry my eyes out over nothing."
Jenny was beginning to take an interest in herself. Introspection was dawning on her mind. She did not practice the meditation of age, infirmity and death; when these spectresconfronted her, she dismissed them as too impalpable to count. Nor did she examine her conscience arduously like a Catholic neophyte. Unreasonable fits of weeping and long headaches were, nevertheless, very disconcerting; and she was bound to search her mind for the cause.
The first explanation that presented itself was age; but she was unwilling to admit the probability of growing old at twenty, and turned to health for the reason. She could not honestly assert that she was ill. Then she asked herself if disappointment was the cause, and wondered whether, if she were suddenly invited to head the Orient playbill, she would be exhilarated out of tears forever. Finally she decided, breathless in the solitude of a warm May dusk, that she wanted to fall in love. Desire, winged with the scent of lilac blossom, stole in through the sapphire window. Desire flooded her soul with ineffable aspirations. Desire wounded her heart as she whispered, timidly, faintly, "darling, my darling." From that moment she began to seek the unknown lover in the casual acquaintance. She began to imagine the electric light shining in the blue eyes of some newly-met fellow was not electric light at all. She would meet him on the next day, and, beholding him starkly dull, would declare again that men were "awful." The readiness with which they all capitulated puzzled her. Why was she attractive? Irene told her she made eyes; but this was false, or, if she did make eyes, they were made unconsciously. Men told her she led them on. There must be some lure in her personality fatal long before she attempted to exercise it; for, though latterly she had been deliberately charming to most men at first, she was so very ungracious the following day that anybody else but a man would have left her alone. The poor fools, however, seemed actually to rejoice in her hardness of heart. Moreover, why had this fascination never helped her to renown? She could dance better than many of the girls who were givenpas seuls; but she had never escaped from the front line of boys. What was the good of working? Nothing came of it. She remainedobscure and undefined to the public. It was not hers to trip from a rostrum into the affection of an audience. It was not hers to acknowledge the favor of applause by taking a call. There was no shower of carnations or rain of violets round her farewell curtseys. If she never danced again, it would not matter. Half bitterly she recalled the spangled dreams of childhood, and revived the splendor of a silver and pink ballet-skirt that now would seem such tawdry, trumpery apparel.
"Fancy," she said to May; "I used to want to be a Columbine and dance about Islington. Think of it. What an unnatural child!"
Columbine appeared fitfully in the Ballet-divertissements that opened the Orient's entertainment, but Jenny never portrayed that elusive personage. Certainly she played Harlequin once, when a girl was ill; and very gay and sweet she looked in the trim suit checkered with black and gold.
Jenny wondered why she had longed to grow up.
"I used to think that it was glorious to be grown up. But there's nothing in it. There might be, but there isn't. I wish I could be what I thought I would be as a kid."
"Oh, Jenny, don't talk so much, and get dressed," said Irene. "Aren't you coming out to-night?"
"I suppose so," Jenny answered. "I wish I couldn't. I wish I'dgotto meet somebody. There, now I've told you."
"Hark at her. Hark at Jenny Pearl."
"Oh, well, I'm sick of going out withyou."
Irene sulked awhile; then asked:
"Have you seen the peroxide they've sent up for our arms?"
"Oo-er! Why?"
"Mr. Walters said all the girls was to use it."
"Oh, aren't they shocking, Irene? I do think they're awful."
"Somebody said the Hesperides didn't look nice from the front."
Jenny examined the purple bottle which would idealize their forms to an Hellenic convention. After the first indignation had worn itself out, she began to be amused by the transformationsof the drug. Lying in bed next morning, she began to play with the notion of dyeing her hair. The tradition of youthful fairness from the midst of which glowed her deep blue eyes, was still vital in Hagworth Street. Other girls dyed their hair, and already once or twice Jenny had considered the step; but the exertion of buying the peroxide had hitherto stifled the impulse. Here, however, was the opportunity, and surely the experiment was worth the trial. She jumped out of bed and examined herself critically in the toilet-glass; tried to picture the effect of fairness. It would be a change, anyhow it would be something to vary the monotony of existence. It would be interesting to learn if her new appearance provoked admiration greater than ever. It would be interesting to see if the change impressed the authorities of the Orient. Best of all, perhaps, would be the exclamations of surprise when the dressing-room first beheld the alteration.
Having conceived the plan, she began to hate her present appearance, to ascribe to her present shade all the boredom that was clinging round her like a fog. Her own hair, paradoxically enough, came to be considered an unnatural color. After all, she was really fair, and had been cheated of her natural hue merely by the freak of time. It was not as if she were truly dark. She could herself remember the glories of her complexion before they paled in the gloomy airs of the Orient. For a moment, however, the birth of artifice dismayed her. She wondered if, in addition to going fair, she would also go magenta, like some of the girls who always made up. Again the phantom of age laughed over her shoulder; but the contemplation of futurity was fleeting, and she decided that if she was going fair, the sooner she went the better it would be; if she waited till thirty the world might laugh with reason. She would chance it. Jenny appropriated a bottle of the management's peroxide that very night, and excited by the prospect of entertainment, came home immediately after the performance, alarming Mrs. Raeburn so much by her arrival that the latter exclaimed:
"Youareearly. Is anything the matter?"
"Anything the matter? Whatever should be the matter?"
"Well, it's only a quarter to twelve."
"Who cares?"
"Don't say that to me."
"I shall saywhatI like, and I'm going to bed."
May, however, was wide awake when Jenny reached their room; so the deed had to be postponed. May, elated by her sister's unaccustomed earliness, chattered profusely, and it was two o'clock in the morning before she fell asleep. Then Jenny crept out of bed and by the faintest glimmer of gaslight achieved the transformation.
She woke up in the morning to May's cries of disgust.
"Oh, you sight! Whatever have you done?"
"Don'tmake such a shocking noise. I've gone fair."
"Gone fair!" exclaimed her sister. "Gone white, you mean. Get up and look at yourself. You look terrible."
"What do you mean?" asked Jenny. "Here, give me hold of the hand-glass."
Her reflection upset her. She must have put on too much in the uncertain light.
"It's like milk," cried May.
"Don't annoy me."
"Oh, Jenny, it's awful. It's like that canary of Alfie's who died so sudden. It's shocking. Whatwillall my friends say?"
"Who cares about your friends?They'renobody. Besides, it'll be quite all right soon. It's bound to sink in."
"What will Alfie say?"
"Oh, damn Alfie!"
"There's a lady. Now swear."
"Well, you annoy me. It's my own hair, isn't it?"
"Oh, it's your own hair right enough. Nobody else wouldn't own it."
"I don't think I'll come down to breakfast this morning. Say I've got a most shocking headache, and fetch me up a cup of tea, there's a little love."
"Mother'll only come up and see what's the matter, sodon'tbe silly. You've got to go downstairs some time."
"Oo-er, May, I wish I hadn't done it now. It's going whiter all the time. Look at it. Oh, what unnatural stuff. It can't go lighter than white, can it?"
Mrs. Raeburn, in the act of pouring out tea, held the pot suspended, and, shaking with laughter, looked at her daughter. Charlie, too, happened to be at home.
"Good gracious alive!" cried the mother.
"I thought I'd see how it looked," Jenny explained, with apologetic notes in her voice.
"You'll think your head right off next time," said Charlie profoundly.
Jenny was seized with an idea.
"I had to do it for the theater. At least, I thought—oh, well—don'tall stare as if you'd never seen a girl with fair hair. You'll get used to it."
"I sha'n't," said Charlie hopelessly. "I shouldn't never get used to that, not if I lived till I was a hundred. Not if I never died at all."
"Depend upon it," said Mrs. Raeburn, "her Aunt Mabel will come and see us this very day and ask what I've been doing."
"What about it?" said Jenny defiantly. "Who's she? Surely I can do what I like with my own hair without askingher."
"Now, what 'ud you say if I went and dyed my hair?" asked Charlie, "and come down with it the color of an acid drop. That's what I'd like to know."
A silence of pent-up laughter held the breakfast party, while, under the mirthful glances of her mother and sister, Jenny began to regret the change. At last she volunteered:
"Oh, well, it's done now."
"Done in, I should say," corrected Charlie.
It was a gusty morning of clouds in early June, and the Hagworth Street kitchen was dark. The sun, however,streamed in for a moment in the wake of Charlie's correction, and Jenny's new hair was lighted up.
"Why, it's worse than I thought," said Mrs. Raeburn.
"You look like a funny turn."
"It looks like that ginger-beer we had on Whit-Monday," said her father.
"Oh, who cares?" cried Jenny, flouncing upstairs out of the room. When she came down again, she was dressed to go out.
"You're never going out in broad daylight?" asked May.
"Let her go," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Her hat covers it up abit. I only hope if we have company, she'll have the goodness to keep her hat on all the time."
"Oh, yes, that would be a game of mine. I don't think!" protested Jenny.
The latter's belief in herself was restored by the attitude of the dressing-room. The girls all vowed the change improved her. There was an epidemic of peroxide, and Irene actually tarnished her own rich copper with the dye, so that for a while her hair seemed streaked with verdigris. Moreover, the unnatural fairness wore off as the weeks went by, and at last even the family was compelled to admit that she had not made a mistake. Only Alfie remained unconvinced, declaring she deserved a hiding for messing herself about. As for the suitors, they ran faster than before, but never swiftly enough to catch Jenny.
"I'm bound to get off with a nice young chap, now," she told the girls. "I wish I could fall in love."
"How would you like my Willie?" asked Elsie Crauford proudly.
"Your Willie? I don't think he's anything to tear oilcloth over."
"Didn't you think he looked nice in his evening dress?"
"Your Willie's never bought himself an evening dress!What!Girls, listen. The Great Millionaire's bought himself an evening dress."
"You are rude, Jenny Pearl."
"Well, I call it silly. Swanking round in evening dress with a bent halfpenny and his latchkey. And you needn't give me those perishing looks, young Elsie."
"You are a hateful thing."
"YourWilliein evening dress. Oh, no, it can't be done."
"Shut up, Jenny Pearl," cried Elsie, stamping her foot.
"Now get in a paddy. I suppose it was you edged him on to go without his dinner for a week to buy it."
"I hope you'll fall in love, and I hope he'll go away to New Zealand the same as Nelly Marlowe's Jack did."
"Oh! There's an unnatural girl!Don'tyou worry yourself. Not this little girl. Not Jenny Pearl. I wouldn't let anymanmake a fool of me."
That night a thunderstorm ruined Jenny's hat.
Next day she bought another, pale green with rosy cherries bobbing at each side. "I think this hat's going to bring me luck," she announced.
"The cherries is all right, but green isn't lucky," said Irene.
"Oh, well," said Jenny, "I'll chance it, any old way."
THE thunderstorm which ruined Jenny's hat destroyed summer. Blowy August twilights began to harass the leaves: darkness came earlier, and people, going home, hurried through the streets where lately they had lingered. Jenny's new green hat with bobbing cherries seemed to have strayed from the heart of a fresher season, and passers-by often turned to regard her as she strolled along Coventry Street toward the Orient. September brought louder winds and skies swollen with rain; but Jenny, rehearsing hard for a new ballet on the verge of production, had no leisure to grumble at chilly dusks and moonless journeys home to Hagworth Street.
The Orient was in a condition of excitement, for the new ballet, like a hundred before it, was expected to eclipse entirely the reputation of its predecessors. Two Ballerinas had arrived from Rome, winter migrants who in their lightness and warmth, would bring to London a thought of Italy. A Premier Danseur, more agile than a Picador, had traveled over from Madrid, and a fiery Maître de Ballet had been persuaded to forsake Milan. Yet the first night of Cupid was hard upon the heels of a theater apparently utterly unprepared for any such date. The master carpenter was wrangling with the electrician. The electrician was insulting the wardrobe-mistress. The wig-maker was talking very rapidly in French to the costumier's draftsman, who was replying equally rapidly in Italian. From time to time the managing director shouted from the back of the Promenade to know the reason for some delay. Thenew Maître de Ballet, having reduced most of the girls to hysteria by his alarming rages, abused his interpreter for misrepresenting his meaning. The Ballerinas from Rome were quarreling over precedence, and the Spanish Danseur was weeping because the letters of his name were smaller by four inches than those which announced on the playbills the advent of his feminine rivals. The call-boy was losing his youth. Everybody was talking at once, and the musical director was always severely punctual.
When the dress rehearsal lasted eleven hours, everybody connected with the Orient prophesied the doom of Cupid; and yet, on the twenty-first of September, the ballet was produced with truly conspicuous success. The theme was Love triumphant through the ages, from the saffron veils and hymeneal torches and flickering airs of Psyche's chamber, through Arthur's rose-wreathed court and the mimic passions of Versailles, down to modern London transformed by the boy god to a hanging garden of Babylon.
The third scene was a Fête Champêtre after Watteau at sunset. Parterres of lavender and carnations bloomed at the base of statues that gradually disappeared in shadow as the sunset yielded to crimson lanterns. The scene was a harmony of gray and rose and tarnished silver. Love himself wore a vizard, and the dances were very slow and stately. The leisured progress of the scene gave Jenny her first opportunity to scan the audience. She saw a clear-cut face, dead white in the blue haze that hung over the stalls. She was conscious of an interest suddenly aroused, of an interest more profound than anything within her experience. For the first time the width of the orchestra seemed no barrier to intercourse. She felt she had only to lean gently forward from her place in the line to touch that unknown personality. She checked the impulse of greeting, but danced the rest of the movement as she had not danced for many months, with a joyful grace. When thetempo di minuettohad quickened to thepas seulof a Ballerina and the stage was still, Jenny stood far down in the corner nearestto the audience. Here, very close to the blaze of the footlights, the auditorium loomed almost impenetrable to eyes on the stage, but the man in the stalls, as if aware that she had lost him, struck a match. She saw his face flickering and, guided by the orange point of a cigar, whispered to Elsie Crauford, who was standing next to her:
"See that fellow in evening dress in the stalls?"
"Which one?"
"The one with the cigar—now—next to the fat man fanning himself. See? I bet you I get off with him to-night."
"You think everybody's gazing at you," murmured Elsie.
"No, I don't. But he is."
"Only because he can see you're making eyes at him."
"Oh, I'm not."
"Besides, how do you know? He isn't waving his programme nor nothing."
"No; but he'll be waiting by the stage-door."
"I thought you didn't care for fellows in evening dress," said Elsie.
"Well, can't you see any difference between that fellow and your Willie?"
"No, I can't."
"Fancy," said Jenny mockingly.
The Ballerina's final pose was being sustained amid loud applause. The ballet-master began to count the steps for the final movement. The stage manager's warning had sounded. The curtain fell, and eighty girls hurried helter-skelter to their rooms in order to change for the last scene.