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Carnival

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #33012 · 730,551 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Carnival

Author: Compton MacKenzie


        
Release date: June 28, 2010 [eBook #33012]
                Most recently updated: February 29, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CARNIVAL ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available by The Internet Archive.)









CARNIVAL

BY

COMPTON MACKENZIE

AUTHOR OF "THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT"

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

_Published March, 1912_

Printed in the United States of America


TO
MARTIN SECKER


_"Put out the light; and then--put out the light."_




Contents


CHAPTER                                    PAGE

I. THE BIRTH OF COLUMBINE                     1

II. FAIRIES AT THE CHRISTENING                8

III. DAWN SHADOWS                            18

IV. THE ANCIENT MISCHIEF                     30

V. PRETTY APPLES IN EDEN                     40

VI. SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR                      51

VII. AMBITION WAKES                          61

VIII. AMBITION LOOKS IN THE GLASS            71

IX. LIFE, ART, AND LOVE                      89

X. DRURY LANE AND COVENT GARDEN             108

XI. THE ORIENT PALACE OF VARIETIES          120

XII. GROWING OLD                            131

XIII. THE BALLET OF CUPID                   140

XIV. RAIN ON THE ROOF                       152

XV. CRAS AMET                               153

XVI. LOVE'S HALCYON                         165

XVII. COLUMBINE ASLEEP                      175

XVIII. SWEET AND TWENTY                     176

XIX. THE GIFT OF OPALS                      186

XX. FETE GALANTE                            199

XXI. EPILOGUE                               216

XXII. THE UNFINISHED STATUE                 221

XXIII. TWO LETTERS                          234

XXIV. JOURNEY'S END                         241

XXV. MONOTONE                               249

XXVI. IN SCYROS                             255

XXVII. QUARTETTE                            271

XXVIII. ST. VALENTINE'S EVE                 282

XXIX. COLUMBINE AT DAWN                     288

XXX. LUGETE, O VENERES                      289

XXXI. A DOCUMENT IN MADNESS                 298

XXXII. PAGEANTRY OF DEATH                   303

XXXIII. LOOSE ENDS                          310

XXXIV. MR. Z. TREWHELLA                     317

XXXV. MARRIAGE OF COLUMBINE                 332

XXXVI. THE TRAGIC LOADING                   341

XXXVII. COLUMBINE IN THE DARK               349

XXXVIII. THE ALIEN CORN                     350

XXXIX. INTERMEZZO                           359

XL. HARVEST HOME                            367

XLI. COLUMBINE HAPPY                        370

XLII. SHADED SUNLIGHT                       371

XLIII. BOW BELLS                            377

XLIV. PICKING UP THREADS                    382

XLV. LONDON PRIDE                           389

XLVI. MAY MORNING                           394

XLVII. NIGHTLIGHT TIME                      399

XLVIII. CARNI VALE                          404




Chapter I: _The Birth of Columbine_


All day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly
mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation
whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and
translucent as in a lake's tranquillity.

The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it
seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain
echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a muffin-man,
abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a
pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked
the imagination of distant armor. The houses seemed to acquire from the
gray and silver web of October enchantment a mysterious immensity. There
was no feeling of stressful humanity even in the myriad sounds that, in
a sheen of beauty, floated about the day. The sun went down behind roofs
and left the sky plumed with rosy feathers. There was a cold gray minute
before dusk came stealing in, richly and profoundly blue: then night
sprang upon the street, and through the darkness an equinoctial wind
swept, moaning.

Along the gutters the brown leaves danced: the tall plane tree at the
end of the street would not be motionless until December should freeze
the black branches in diapery against a somber sky. Along the gutters
the leaves whispered and ran and shivered and leaped, while the gas-jets
flapped in pale lamps.

There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a
perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going
home.

Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day's calm beauty. Her
travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two
elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was
inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie.
There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable.
The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meager consolation for
the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains,
tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all.
Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry
annoyed her.

With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension, which
the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had
inquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he
could do.

"Those curtains," she had murmured.

"Don't you get worrying yourself about curtains," he had replied.
"You've got something better to do than aggravate yourself with
curtains. The curtains is all right."

Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-colored wallpaper. Wearily
she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small
brass knobs at the foot of the bed.

"And that knob. You never remember to get a new one."

"Now it's knobs!" he had exclaimed, wondering at the foolishness of a
woman's mind in the shadows of coming events. "Don't you bother your
head about knobs, either. Try and get a bit of sleep or something, do."

With this exhortation, he had retired from the darkening room, to wander
round the house lighting various jets of gas, turning them down to the
faintest blue glimmer, and hoping all the while that one of his wife's
sisters would not emerge from the country at the rumor of the baby's
arrival, in order to force her advice upon a powerless household.

Edith and Alfred, his two elder children, had been carried off by the
other aunt to her residence in Barnsbury, whence in three weeks they
would be brought back to home and twilight speculations upon the arrival
of a little brother or sister. In parenthesis, he hoped it would not be
twins. They would be so difficult to explain, and the chaps in the shop
would laugh. The midwife came down to boil some milk and make final
arrangements. The presence of this ample lady disturbed him. The gale
rattling the windows of the kitchen did not provide any feeling of
firelight snugness, but rather made his thoughts more restless, was even
so insistent as to carry them on its wings, weak, formless thoughts, to
the end of Hagworth Street, where the bar of the "Masonic Arms" spread a
wider and more cheerful illumination than was to be found in the harried
kitchen of Number Seventeen. So Charlie Raeburn went out to spend time
and money in piloting several friends across the shallows of Mr.
Gladstone's mind.

Upstairs Mrs. Raeburn, left alone, again contemplated the annoying
curtains; though by now they were scarcely visible against the gloom
outside. She dragged herself off the bed and, moving across to the
window, stood there, rubbing the muslin between her fingers. She
remained for a while thus, peering at the backs of the houses opposite
that, small though they really were, loomed with menace in the lonely
dusk. Shadows of women at work, always at work, went to and fro upon the
blinds. They were muffled sounds of children crying, the occasional
splash of emptied pails, and against the last glimmer of sunset the
smoke of chimneys blown furiously outwards. To complete the air of
sadness and desolation, the faded leaf of a dried-up geranium was
lisping against the window-pane. She gave up fingering the muslin
curtains and came back to the middle of the room, wondering vaguely when
the next bout of pain was due and why the "woman" didn't come upstairs
and make her comfortable. There were matches on the toilet-table; so she
lit a candle, whose light gave every piece of ugly furniture a shadow
and made the room ghostly and unfamiliar. Presently she held the light
beside her face and stared at herself in the glass, and thought how
pretty she still looked, and, flushed by the fever, how young.

She experienced a sensation of fading personality. She seemed actually
to be losing herself. Eyes, bright with excitement, glittered back from
the mirror, and suddenly there came upon her overwhelmingly the fear of
death.

And if she died, would anybody pity her, or would she lie forgotten
always after the momentary tribute of white chrysanthemums? Death,
death, she found herself saying over to the tune of a clock ticking in
the passage. But she had no desire to die. Christmas was near, with its
shoplit excursions and mistletoe and merriment. Why should she die? No,
she would fight hard. A girl or a boy? What did it matter? Nothing
mattered. Perhaps a girl would be nicer, and she should be called Rose.
And yet, on second thoughts, when you came to think of it, Rose was a
cold sort of a name, and Rosie was common. Why not call her Jenny? That
was better--with, perhaps, Pearl or Ruby to follow, when its
extravagance would pass unnoticed. A girl should always have two names.
But Jenny was the sweeter. Nevertheless, it would be as well to support
so homely a name with a really lady-like one--something out of the
ordinary.

Why had she married Charlie? All her relatives said she had married
beneath her. Father had been a butcher--a prosperous man--and even he,
in the family tradition, had not been considered good enough for her
mother, who was a chemist's daughter. Yet, she, Florence Unwin, had
married a joiner. Why _had_ she married Charlie? Looking back over the
seven years of their married life, she could not remember a time when
she had loved him as she had dreamed of love in the airy room over the
busy shop, as she had dreamed of love staring through the sunny window
away beyond the Angel, beyond the great London skies. Charlie was so
stupid, so dull; moreover, though not a drunkard, he was fond of
half-pints and smelt of sawdust and furniture polish. Her sisters never
liked, never would like him. She had smirched the great tradition of
respectability. What would her grandfather, the chemist, have said, that
dignified old man in brown velvet coat, treated always with deference,
even by her father, the jolly, handsome butcher? Florence Unwin married
to a joiner--a man unable to afford to keep his house free from the
inevitable lodger who owned the best bedroom--the bedroom that by right
should have been hers. She had disgraced the family and for no high
motive of passion--and once she was young and pretty. And still young,
after all, and still pretty. She was only thirty-three now. Why had she
married at all? But then her sisters did give themselves airs, and the
jolly, handsome butcher had enjoyed too well and too often those drives
to Jack Straw's Castle on fine Sunday afternoons under the rolling
Hampstead clouds, had left little enough when he died, and Charlie came
along, and perhaps even marriage with him had been less intolerable than
existence among the frozen sitting-rooms of her two sisters, drapers
wives though they both were.

And the aunts, those three severe women? She might, perhaps, have lived
with them when the jolly, handsome butcher died, with them in their
house at Clapton, with them eternally dusting innumerable china
ornaments and correcting elusive mats. The invitation had been extended,
but was forbidding as a mourning-card or the melancholy visit of an
insurance agent with his gossip of death. Death? Was she going to die?

It did not matter. The pain was growing more acute. She dragged herself
to the door and called down to the midwife; called two or three times.

There was no answer except from the clock, with its whisper of Death and
Death. Where was the woman? Where was Charlie? She called again. Then
she remembered, through what seemed years of grinding agony, that the
street door was slammed some time ago. Charlie must have gone out. With
the woman? Had he run away with her? Was she, the wife, forever
abandoned? Was there no life in all the world to reach her solitude? The
house was fearfully, unnaturally silent. She reached up to the cold gas
bracket, and the light flared up without adding a ray of cheerfulness to
the creaking passage. Higher still she turned it, until it sang towards
the ceiling, a thin geyser of flame. The chequers upon the oil-cloth
became blurred, as tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She was
deserted, and in pain.

Her mind sailed off along morbid channels to the grim populations of
hysteria. She experienced the merely nervous sensation of many black
beetles running at liberty around the empty kitchen. It was a
visualization of tingling nerves, and, fostered by the weakening
influence of labor pains, it extended beyond the mere thought to the
endowment of a mental picture with powerful and malign purpose, so that,
after a moment or two, she came to imagining that between her and the
world outside black beetles were creating an impassable barrier.

Could Charlie and the woman really have run away? She called again and
peered over the flimsy balustrade down to the ground floor. Or was the
woman lying in the kitchen drunk? Lying there, incapable of action,
among the black beetles? She called again:

"Mrs. Nightman! Mrs. Nightman!"

How dry her hands were, how parched her tongue; and her eyes, how they
burned.

Was she actually dying? Was this engulfing silence the beginning of
death? What was death?

And what was that? What were those three tall, black figures, moving
along the narrow passage downstairs? What were they, so solemn and tall
and silent, moving with inexorable steps, higher and higher?

"Mrs. Nightman, Mrs. Nightman!" she shrieked, and stumbled in agony of
body and horror of mind back to the flickering bedroom, back to the
bed.

And then there was light and a murmur of voices, saying: "We have come
to see how you are feeling, Florence," and sitting by her bed she
recognized the three aunts from Clapton, in their bugles and cameos and
glittering bonnets.

There was a man, too, whom she had only just time to realize was the
doctor, not the undertaker, before she was aware that the final effort
of her tortured body was being made without assistance from her own will
or courage.

She waved away the sympathizers. She was glad to see the doctor and Mrs.
Nightman herding them from the room, like gaunt, black sheep; but they
came back again as inquisitive animals will when, after what seemed a
thousand thousand years of pain, she could hear something crying and the
trickle of water and the singing of a kettle.

Perhaps it was Aunt Fanny who said: "It's a dear little girl."

The doctor nodded, and Mrs. Raeburn stirred, and with wide eyes gazed at
her baby.

"It is Jenny, after all," she murmured; then wished for the warmth of a
new-born child against her breast.




Chapter II: _Fairies at the Christening_


A fortnight after the birth of Jenny, her three great-aunts, black and
stately as ever, paid a second visit to the mother.

"And how is Florrie?" inquired Aunt Alice.

"Going on fine," said Florrie.

"And what is the baby to be called?" asked Aunt Fanny.

"Jenny, and perhaps Pearl as well."

"Jenny?"

"Pearl?"

"Jenny Pearl?"

The three aunts disapproved the choice with combined interrogation.

"We were thinking," announced Aunt Alice; "your aunts were thinking,
Florrie, that since we have a good deal of room at Carminia House----"

"It would be a capital plan for the baby to live with us," went on Aunt
Mary.

"For since our father died" (old Frederick Horner, the chemist, had been
under a laudatory stone slab at Kensal Green for a quarter of a
century), "there has been room and to spare at Carminia House," said
Aunt Fanny.

"The baby would be well brought up," Aunt Alice declared.

"Very well brought up, and sent to a genteel academy for young--ladies."
The break before the last word was due to Miss Horner's momentary but
distinctly perceptible criticism of the unladylike bedroom, where her
niece lay suckling her baby girl.

"We should not want her at once, of course," Aunt Fanny explained. "We
should not expect to be able to look after her properly--though I
believe there are now many infant foods very highly recommended even by
doctors."

Perhaps it was the pride of chemical ancestry that sustained Miss
Frances Horner through the indelicacy of the last announcement. But old
maids' flesh was weak, and the carmine suffusing her waxen cheeks drove
the eldest sister into an attempt to cover her confusion by adding that
she, for one, was glad in these days of neglected duties to see a mother
nursing her own child.

"We feel," she went on, "that the arrival of a little girl shows very
clearly that the Almighty intended us to adopt her. Had it--had she
proved to be a boy, we should have made no suggestions about her,
except, perhaps, that her name should be Frederick after our father, the
chemist."

"With possibly Philip as a second name," Miss Mary Horner put in.

"Philip?" her sisters asked.

And now Miss Mary blushed, whether on account of a breach of sisterly
etiquette, or whether for some guilty memory of a long-withered
affection, was never discovered by her elders or any one else, either.

"Philip?" her sisters repeated.

"It is a very respectable name," said Miss Mary apologetically, and for
the life of her could only recall Philip of Spain, whose admirable
qualities were not enough marked to justify her in breaking in upon Miss
Horner's continuation of the discussion.

"Feeling as we do," the latter said, "that a divine providence has given
a girl-child to the world on account of our earnest prayers, we think we
have a certain right to give our advice, to urge that you, my dear
Florence, should allow us the opportunity of regulating her education
and securing her future. We enjoy between us a comfortable little sum of
money, half of which we propose to set aside for the child. The rest
has already been promised to the Reverend Williams, to be applied as he
shall think fit."

"Like an ointment, I suppose," said Florrie.

"Like an ointment? Like what ointment?"

"You seem to think that money will cure everything--if it's applied. But
who's going to look after Jenny if you die? Because," she went on,
before they had time to answer, "Jenny isn't going to be applied to the
Reverend Williams. She isn't going to mope all day with Bibles as big as
tramcars on her knees. No, thank you, Aunt Alice, Jenny'll stay with her
mother."

"Then you won't allow us to adopt her?" snapped Miss Horner, sitting up
so straight in the cane-bottomed chair that it creaked again and again.

"I don't think," Aunt Fanny put in, "that you are quite old enough to
understand the temptations of a young girl."

"Aren't I?" said Florence. "I think I know a sight more about 'em than
you do, Aunt Fanny. I am a mother, when all's said and done."

"But have you got salvation?" asked Miss Horner.

"I don't see what salvation and that all's got to do with my Jenny,"
Mrs. Raeburn argued.

"But you would like her to be sure of everlasting happiness?" inquired
Miss Fanny mildly, amazed at her niece's obstinacy.

"I'd like her to be a good girl, yes."

"But how can she be good till she has found the Lord? We're none of us
good," declared Miss Mary, "till we have been washed in the blood of the
Lamb."

"I quite believe you're in earnest, Aunt Alice," declared Mrs. Raeburn,
"in earnest, and anxious to do well by Jenny, but I don't hold and never
did hold with cooping children up. Poor little things!"

"There wouldn't be any cooping up. As a child of grace, she would often
go out walking with her aunts, and sometimes, perhaps often, be allowed
to carry the tracts."

Mrs. Raeburn looked down in the round blue eyes of Jenny.

"Perhaps you'd like her to jump to glory with a tambourine?" she said.

"Jump to glory with a tambourine?" echoed Miss Horner.

"Or bang the ears off of Satan with a blaring drum? Or go squalling up
aloft with them saucy salvation hussies?"

The austere old ladies were deeply shocked by the levity of their
niece's inquiries.

Sincerely happy, sincerely good, they were unable to understand any one
not burning to feel at home in the whitewashed chapel which to them was
an abode of murmurous peace. They wanted everybody to recognize with
glad familiarity every text that decorated the bleak walls with an
assurance of heavenly joys. Their quiet encounters with spiritual facts
had nothing in common with those misguided folk who were escorted by
brass bands along the shining road to God. They were happy in the
exclusiveness of their religion, not from any conscious want of charity,
but from the exaltation aroused by the privilege of divine intimacy and
the joyful sense of being favorites in heavenly places. The Rev. Josiah
Williams, for all his liver-colored complexion and clayey nose, was to
them a celestial ambassador. His profuse outpourings of prayer took them
higher than any skylark with its quivering wings. His turgid discourses,
where every metaphor seemed to have escaped from a store's price-list,
were to them more fruitful of imaginative results than any poet's song.
His grave visits, when he seemed always to be either washing his hands
or wiping his boots, left in the hearts of the three old maids memories
more roseate than any sunset of the Apennines. Therefore, when Mrs.
Raeburn demanded to know if they were anxious for Jenny to jump to glory
with a tambourine, the religious economy of the three Miss Horners was
upset. On consideration, even jumping to glory without a tambourine
struck them as an indelicate method of reaching Paradise.

"And wherever did you get the notion of adopting Jenny?" continued the
niece. "For I'm sure I never suggested any such thing."

"We got the notion from above, Florence," explained Miss Fanny. "It was
a direct command from our Heavenly Father. I had a vision."

"Your Aunt Fanny," proclaimed the elder sister, "dreamed she was nursing
a white rabbit. Now, we have not eaten rabbits since, on an occasion
when the Reverend Williams was taking a little supper with us, we
unfortunately had a bad one--a high one. There had been nothing to
suggest rabbits, let alone white rabbits, to your Aunt Fanny. So I said:
'Florence is going to have a baby. It must be a warning.' We consulted
the Reverend Williams, who said it was very remarkable, and must mean
the Almighty was calling upon us as he called upon the infant Samuel. We
inquired first if either of your sisters was going to have a baby, also.
Caroline Threadgale wrote an extremely rude letter, and Mabel Purkiss
was even ruder. So, evidently, it is the will of God that we should
adopt your baby girl. We prayed to Him to make it a little girl, because
we are more familiar with little girls, never having had a brother and
our father having died a good while ago now. Well, it is a girl. So
plainly--oh, my dear niece, can't you see how plainly--God commands you
to obey Him?"

Then Miss Horner stood up and looked so tall and severe that her niece
was frightened for a moment, and half expected to see the flutter of an
angel's wing over the foot of the bedstead. She nerved herself, however,
to resist the will of Heaven.

"Dreaming of rabbits hasn't got nothing to do with babies. I forget what
it does mean--burglars, or something, but not babies, and you sha'n't
have Jenny."

"Think, my dear niece, before you refuse," Miss Horner remonstrated.
"Think before you condemn your child to everlasting damnation, for
nothing but the gates of Hell can come from denying the Heavenly Will.
Think of your child growing up in wickedness and idle places, growing
old in ignorance and contempt of God. Think of her dancing along the
broad ways of Beelzebub, eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree,
kissing and waltzing and making love and theater-going and riding
outside omnibuses. Think of her journeying from vanity unto vanity and
becoming a prey to evil and lascivious men. Remember the wily serpent
who is waiting for her. Give her to us, that she may be washed in the
blood of the Lamb, and crying Hallelujah, may have a harp in the Kingdom
of Heaven.

"If you reject us," the old lady went on, her marble face taking on the
lively hues of passion, her eyes on fire with the greatness of her
message, "you reject God. Your daughter will go by ways you know not of;
she will be lost in the mazes of destruction, she will fall in the pit
of sin. She will be trampled under foot on the Day of Judgment, and be
flung forever into wailing and gnashing of teeth. Her going out and
coming in will be perilous. Her path will be set with snares of the
giant of Iniquity. Listen to us, my dear niece, lest your child become a
daughter of pleasure, a perpetual desire to the evil-minded. Give her us
that we may keep her where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and no
thieves break in and steal."

The old lady, exhausted by the force of her prophecy, sank down into the
chair, and, elated by the splendors of the divine wrath, seemed indeed
to be a noble and fervid messenger from God.

In Mrs. Raeburn, however, these denunciations wakened a feeling of
resentment.

"Here," she cried, "are you cursing my Jenny?"

"We are warning you."

"Well, don't sit nodding there like three crows; your cursing will come
to nothing, because you don't know nothing about London, nor about life,
nor about nothing. What's the good of joring about the way to Heaven,
when you don't know the way to Liverpool Street without asking a
policeman? I say Jenny shall be happy. I say she shall be jolly and
merry and laugh when she's a mind to, bless her, and never come to no
harm with her mother to look after her. She sha'n't be a Plain Jane and
No Nonsense, with her hair screwed back like a broom, but she shall be
Jenny, sweet and handsome, with lips made for kissing and eyes that will
sparkle and shine like six o'clock of a summer morning."

Mrs. Raeburn was sitting up in bed, holding high the unconscious infant.

"And she _shall_ be happy, d'ye hear? And you sha'n't have her, so get
out, and don't wag your bonnets at my Jenny."

The three aunts looked at each other.

"I see the footprints of Satan in this room," said Miss Horner.

"Not a bit of it," contradicted her niece. "It's your own muddy feet."

Outside, a German band, seduced from hibernation by St. Luke's summer,
played the "March of the Priests" from "Athalie," leaving out the more
important notes, and soon a jaded omnibus, with the nodding bonnets of
the three Miss Horners, jogged slowly back to Clapton.

When the Miss Horners withdrew from the dingy bedroom the swish and
rustle of their occupation, Mrs. Raeburn was at first relieved,
afterwards indignant, finally anxious.

Could this strawberry-colored piece of womanhood beside her really be
liable to such a life of danger and temptation and destruction? Could
this wide-eyed stolidity ever become a spark to set men's hearts afire?
Would those soft, uncrumpling hands know some day love's fever? No, no,
her Jenny should be a home-bird--always a home-bird, and marry some nice
young chap who could afford to give her a comfortable house where she
could smile at children of her own, when the three old aunts had
moldered away like dry sticks of lavender. All that babble of flames and
hell was due to religion gone mad, to extravagant perusal of
brass-bound Bibles, to sour virginity. With some perception of human
weakness, Mrs. Raeburn began to realize that her aunts' heads were full
of heated imaginations because they had never possessed an outlet in
youth. The fierce adventures of passion had been withheld from them, and
now, in old age, they were playing with fires that should have been
extinguished long ago. Fancy living with those terrible old women at
Clapton, hearing nothing but whispers of hell-fire. All that talk of
looking after Jenny's soul was just telling the tale. There must be some
scheme behind it all. Perhaps they wanted to save money in a servant,
and thought to bring on Jenny by degrees to a condition of undignified
utility.

Mrs. Raeburn was by no means a harsh judge of human nature, but her
aunts having arrived at an unpropitious moment, she could not see their
offer from a reasonable standpoint. Moreover, she had the proud woman's
invariable suspicion of a gift; withal, there was a certain cynicism
which made her say "presents weren't given for nothing in this world."
Anyway, she decided, they were gone, and a good riddance, and she
wouldn't ask them to Hagworth Street again in a hurry. The problem of
getting in a woman to help now arose. Mrs. Nightman was off to-morrow;
Alf and Ede would be back in a week, and Charlie's breakfast must be
attended to. Mrs. Nightman informed her she knew where a likely girl of
fifteen was to be found--a child warranted to be willing and clean and
truthful. To-morrow, Mrs. Raeburn settled, this paragon must be
interviewed.

To-morrow dawned, and in the wake of sunrise came the paragon. She still
wore the dresses of childhood, but paid toll to responsibleness by
screwing up her mouse-colored hair to the likeness of a cockle-shell,
adding thereby, in her mother's estimation, eighteen months, in her own,
ten years, to her age. She was a plum-faced child, with glazed cheeks.
Her nose, Mrs. Raeburn observed with pleasure, did not drip like palings
on a wet day. The paragon was just an ordinary old little girl, pitched
into life with a pair of ill-fitting boots, a pinafore, and half a dozen
hairpins. But she would do. Wait a minute. Was she inclined to loll or
mouch? No. Was she bound to tilt a perambulator? No. Must she read light
fiction when crossing a road? She didn't like reading.

Mrs. Raeburn decided more than ever that she would do.

Was she good at washing unwilling children? She washed many brothers and
sisters with yellow soap and dried them thoroughly every Saturday night.
Did she want the place? Mother would be glad if she got it. What was her
name? Ruby. Mrs. Raeburn thanked goodness she had abandoned Ruby as a
possible suffix to Jenny. Her surname? O'Connor. Irish? She didn't know.
Yes, she should have a week's trial.

So the paragon became a part of the household as integral as the
furniture and almost as ugly, and, as she grew older, almost as
unnecessarily decorated. Alfie, the young Tartar, tried to break her in
by severe usage, but succumbed to the paragon's complete imperviousness.
Edie was too young to regard her as anything but an audience for long
and baseless fits of weeping.

The two children were brought back by Aunt Mabel from her house at
Barnsbury, where they had sojourned during the birth of their sister.

Mrs. Raeburn was softer and plumper and shorter than her sister. She had
a rosy complexion, and eyes as bright as a bird's. She had, too, the
merriest laugh in the world till Jenny grew older and made it sound
almost mirthless beside her own. It was this capacity for laughter which
made her resent the aunts' attempt to capture Jenny for melancholy.

Although, before the child's birth, she had not been particularly
enthusiastic about its arrival, the baby already possessed a personality
so compelling that the mother esteemed her above both the elder
children, not because she was the last born, but because she genuinely
felt the world was the richer by her baby. If she had been asked to
express this conviction in words, she would have been at a loss. She
would have been embarrassed and self-conscious, sure that you were
laughing at her. She did venture once to ask Mabel if she thought Jenny
prettier than the other two; but Mabel laughed indulgently, and Mrs.
Raeburn could not bring herself to enlarge upon the point.

She wished somehow that her mother could have lived to see Jenny, and
her father, too. Of this desire she was not aware when Alfie and Edie
arrived. She felt positive her father would have considered Jenny full
of life. Paradoxically enough for a butcher, Mr. Unwin had admired life
more than anything else. Perhaps Mrs. Raeburn experienced an elation
akin to that felt of old by wayside nymphs who bore children to Apollo
and other divine philanderers. She knew that, however uneventful the
rest of her life might be, in achieving Jenny she had done something
comparable to her dreams as a girl in the sunny Islington window that
looked away down to the Angel. She could not help feeling a subtle pity
for her elder sister, whose first-born was due in May. Boy or girl, it
would be a putty statuette beside her Jenny. The latter was alive. How
amazingly she was conscious of that vitality in the darkness, when she
felt the baby against her breast.

Her own eyes were bright, but Jenny's eyes were stars that made her own
look like pennies beside them. Such fancies she found herself weaving,
lying awake in the night-time.




Chapter III: _Dawn Shadows_


Jenny reached the age of two years and a few months without surprising
her relatives by any prodigious feats of intelligence or wickedness. But
in Hagworth Street there was not much leisure to regard the progress of
babyhood. There was no time for more than physical comparisons with
other children. It would be pleasant to pretend that Jenny gazed at the
stars, clapping a welcome to Caesiopea and singing to the Pleiades; but,
as a matter of fact, it was not very easy to regard the heavens from the
kitchen window of Number Seventeen. I should be happy to say that
flowers were a joy to her from the beginning, but very few flowers came
to Hagworth Street--groundsel for the canary sometimes, and plantains,
but not much else. The main interest of Jenny's earliest days lay rather
with her mother than herself.

The visit of the three old aunts roused Mrs. Raeburn to express her
imagination at first, but gradually assumed a commonplace character as
the months rolled by without another visit and as Jenny, with a chair
pushed before her, learned to walk rather earlier than most children,
but showed no other sign of suffering or benefiting by that grim
intervention. Perhaps, when she pushed her wooden guide so quickly along
the landing that chair and child bumped together down every stair, her
mother was inclined to think she was lucky not to be killed. Anyway, she
said so to the child, who was shrieking on the mat in the hall; and in
after years Jenny could remember the painful incident. Indeed, that and
a backward splash into the washtub on the first occasion of wearing a
frock of damson velveteen, were the only events of her earliest life
that impressed themselves at all sharply or completely upon her mind.
Through time's distorted haze she could also vaguely recall an adventure
with treacle when, egged on by Alfie, she had explored the darkness of
an inset cupboard and wedged the stolen tin of golden syrup so tightly
round her silvery curls that Alfie had shouted for help. The sensation
of the sticky substance trickling down her face in numerous thin streams
remained with her always.

People were only realized in portions. For example, Ruby O'Connor
existed as a rough, red hand, descending upon her suddenly in the midst
of baby enjoyments. Alfie and Edie were two noises, acquiring with
greater nearness the character of predatory birds. That is to say, in
Jenny's mind the intimate approach of either always announced loss or
interruption of a pleasure. Her father she first apprehended as a pair
of legs forming a gigantic archway, vast as the Colossus of Rhodes must
have loomed to the triremes of the Confederacy. Better than kisses or
admonitions, she remembered her mother's skirt, whether as support or
sanctuary. The rest of mankind she did not at all distinguish from trees
walking. She was better able to conceive a smile than a face, but the
realization of either largely depended upon its association with the
handkerchief of "peep-bo."

Seventeen Hagworth Street was familiar, first of all, through the step
of the front door, which she invariably was commanded to beware. She did
not grasp its propinquity from the perambulator, for, when lifted out of
the latter and told to run in to mother, it was only the step which
assured her of the vast shadowy place of warmth and familiar smells in
which she spent most of her existence. Of the smells, the best
remembered in after-life was that of warm blankets before the kitchen
fire. Her only approach to an idea of property rested in the security of
a slice of bread and butter, which could be devoured slowly without
wakening Alfie's cupidity. On the other hand, when jam was added, the
slice must be gobbled, not from greediness, but for fear of losing it.
This applied also to the incidental booty of stray chocolates or paints.
Her notion of territory was confined to places where she could sit or
lie at ease. The patchwork hearthrug, which provided warmth, softness,
something to tug at, and, sometimes, pieces of coal to chew, was
probably her earliest conception of home, and perhaps her first
disillusionment was due to a volatile spark burning her cheek. Bed
struck her less as a prelude to the oblivion of sleep than as a spot
where she was not worried about sucking her thumb. Perhaps her first
emotion of mere sensuousness was the delicious anticipation of
thumb-sucking as Ruby O'Connor propelled her upstairs with the knee, a
sensuousness that was only very slightly ruffled by the thought of soap
and flannelette. Suspicion was born when once she was given a spoonful
of jam, whose melting sweetness disclosed a clammy sediment of gray
powder, so that ever afterwards the offer of a spoon meant kicks and
yells, dribbles and clenched resistance. Her first deception lay in
pretending to be asleep when she was actually awake, as animals
counterfeit death to avoid disturbance. Whether, however, she had any
idea of being what she was not, is unlikely, as she did not yet possess
a notion of being. Probably "peep-bo," when first practiced by herself,
helped to formulate an embryonic egotism.

The birth of light on summer mornings kindled a sense of wonder when she
realized that light did not depend on human agency. Later on, dawn was
connected in her mind with the suddenly jerky movement of the
night-light's luminous reflection upon the ceiling, at which she would
stare for hours in meditative content. This movement was always followed
by the splutter and hiss of the drowning wick, and her first feeling of
nocturnal terror was experienced when once these symptoms occurred and
were followed, not by morning light, but by darkness. Then she shrieked,
not because she feared anything in the darkness yet, but because she
could not understand it.

The sensations of this Islington baby may have resembled those of a
full-grown Carib or Hottentot in their simple acceptance of primary
facts, in a desire for synthetic representation which distinguishes an
unsophisticated audience of plays, in that odd passion for accuracy
whose breach upsets a habit, whose observance confirms dogs, children
and savages in their hold upon life.

As was natural for one more usually occupied with effects than causes,
Jenny took delight in colored chalks and beads, and probably a vivid
scarlet _pelisse_ first awoke her dormant sense of beauty. The
appearance of this vestment was more important than its purpose, but the
tying on of her "ta-ta"--at first a frilled bonnet, later on a rakish
Tam o' Shanter--was clapped as the herald of drowsy glidings in cool
airs. She would sit in the perambulator staring solemnly at Ruby, and
only opening her eyes a little wider when she was bumped down to take a
crossing and up to regain the pavement. Passers-by, who leaned over to
admire her, gained no more appreciation than a puzzled blink, less than
was vouchsafed to the sudden shadow of a bird's flight across her
vision.

Then came hot summer days and a sailor hat which enrolled her in the
crew of the H.M.S. _Goliath_. This hat she disliked on account of the
elastic, which Alfie loved to catch hold of and let go with a smacking
sound that hurt her chin dreadfully; and sometimes in tugging at it, she
would herself let it slip so that it caught her nose like a whip.

These slow promenades up and down the shady side of Hagworth Street were
very pleasant; although the inevitable buckling of the strap began to
impede her ideas of freedom, so much so in time that it became a duty to
herself to wriggle as much as possible before she let Ruby fasten it
round her waist. Perhaps the first real struggle for self-expression
happened on a muddy day, when she discovered that, by letting her podgy
hand droop over the edge of the perambulator, the palm of it could be
exquisitely tickled by the slow and moist revolutions of the wheel. Ruby
instantly forbade this. Jenny declined to obey the command. Ruby leaned
over and slapped the offending hand. Jenny shrieked and kicked. Edie
fell down and became involved with the wheels of the perambulator. Alfie
knelt by a drain to pretend he was fishing. Jenny screamed louder and
louder. An errand-boy looked on. An old lady rebuked the flustered Ruby.
The rabbit-skin rug palpitated with angry little feet, Ruby put up the
hood and tightened the strap round Jenny, making her more furious than
ever. It came on to rain. It came on to blow. It was altogether a
thoroughly unsatisfactory morning.

"I'll learn you, Miss Artful, when I gets you home. You will have your
own way, will you? Young Alfie, come out of the gutter, you naughty boy.
I'll tell your father. Get up, do, Edie."

At last they reached Number Seventeen. Summoned by yells, Mrs. Raeburn
came to the door.

"Whatever have you been doing to the children, Ruby?"

"Lor', mum, they've been that naughty, I haven't known if I was on my
head or my heels."

The interfering old lady came up at this moment.

"That girl of yours was beating your baby disgracefully."

"No, I never," declared Ruby.

"I shall report you to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children."

"That's right, Mother Longnose, you'll do a lot," said Ruby, whose Irish
ancestry was flooding her cheeks.

"Were you whipping Jenny?" inquired Mrs. Raeburn.

"I slapped her wrist."

"What for?"

"Because she wouldn't keep her hands off of the wheel. I told her not
to, but she would go on."

"I shall report you all," announced the old lady.

This irritated Mrs. Raeburn, who replied that she would report the old
lady as a wandering lunatic. Jenny's right to act as she wished was in
the balance. The old lady, like many another before, ruined freedom's
cause by untimely propaganda. Mrs. Raeburn plucked her daughter from the
perambulator, shook her severely, and said: "You bad, naughty girl,"
several times in succession. Jenny paused for a moment in surprise, then
burst into yells louder by far than she had ever achieved before, and
was carried into the house out of reach of sympathy.

From that moment she was alert to combat authority. From that moment to
the end of her days, life could offer her nothing more hateful than
attempted repression. That this struggle over the wheel of a
perambulator endowed her with a consciousness of her own personality, it
would be hard to assert positively, but it is significant that about
this age (two years and eight months) she no longer always spoke of
herself as Jenny, but sometimes took the first personal pronoun. Also,
about this age, she began to imagine that people were laughing at her,
and, being taken by her mother into a shop on one occasion, set up a
commotion of tears, because, she insisted, the ladies behind the counter
were laughing at her, when really the poor ladies were trying to be
particularly pleasant. When Jenny was three, another baby came to
Hagworth Street--dark-eyed, puny, and wan-looking. Jenny was put on the
bed beside her.

"This is May," said her mother.

"I love May," said Jenny.

"Very much, do you love her?"

"Jenny loves May. I love May. May is Jenny's dolly."

And from that moment, notwithstanding the temporary interruptions of
many passionate quarrels, Jenny made that dark-eyed little sister one of
the great facts in her life. This was well for May, because, as she grew
older, she grew into a hunchback.

Two more years went by of daily walks and insignificant adventures.
Jenny was five. Alfie and Edie were now stalwart scholars, who rushed
off in the mornings, the former armed, according to the season, with
chestnuts, pegtops or bags of marbles, the latter full of whispers and
giggles, always one of a bunch of other little girls distinguishable
only by dress. About this time Jenny came to the conclusion she did not
want to be a girl any longer. But the bedrock of sexual differences
puzzled her: obviously one vital quality of boyishness was the right to
wear breeches. Jenny took off her petticoats and stalked about the
kitchen.

"You rude thing!" said Ruby, shocked by the exhibition.

"I'm not a rude thing," Jenny declared; "I'm being a boy."

"And wherever is your petticoats?"

"I frowed 'em away," said Jenny. "I'm a boy."

"You're rude little girl."

"I'm not a girl. I won't be a girl. I want to be a boy." Jenny darted
for the street, encountering by the gate the outraged blushes of Edie
and her bunch of secretive companions.

"Did you ever?" said the ripest. "Look at Edie's sister."

Boys opposite began to "holler." Alfie appeared bent double in an effort
to secure a blood ally. He lost at once the marble and the respect of
his schoolfellows. His confusion was terrible. His sister skirtless
before the public eye! Young Jenny making him look like a fool!

"Go on in, you little devil," he shouted. He ground his teeth.

"Go on in!"

Ruby was by this time in pursuit of the rebel. Mrs. Raeburn had been
warned and was already at the gate. Alfie, haunted by a thousand mocking
eyes, fled to his room and wept tears of shame. Edie broke away from her
friends, and stood, breathing very fast, in petrified anticipation.
Jenny was led indoors and up to bed.

"Why can't I be a boy?" she moaned.

"Well, there's a sauce!" said Ruby. "However on earth can you be a boy
when you've been made a girl?"

"But I don't want to be a girl."

"Well, you've got to be, and that's all about it. You'll be fidgeting
for the moon next. Besides, if you go trapesing round half-dressed, the
policeman'll have you."

Jenny had heard of the powers of the policeman for a long time. Those
guardians of order stood for her as sinister, inhuman figures, always
ready to spring on little girls and carry them off to unknown places.
She was never taught to regard them as kindly defenders on whom one
could rely in emergencies, but looked upon them with all the suspicion
of a dog for a uniform. Their large quiescence and their habit of
looming unexpectedly round corners shed a cloud upon the sunniest
moment. They were images of vengeance at whose approach even boys
huddled together, shamefaced.

Mrs. Raeburn came upstairs to interview her discontented daughter.

"Don't you ever do any such thing again. Behaving like a tomboy!"

"Why mayn't I be a boy?"

"Because you're a girl."

"Who said so?"

"God."

"Who's God?"

"That's neither here nor there."

God was another shadow upon enjoyment. He was not to be found by pillar
boxes. He did not lurk in archways, it is true. He was apparently not a
policeman, but something bigger, even, than a policeman. She had seen
His picture--old and irritable, among the clouds.

"Why did God say so?"

"Because He knows best."

"But I want to be a boy."

"Would you like me to cut off all your curls?"

"No--o--o."

"Well, if you want to be a boy, off they'll have to come. Don't make any
mistake about that--every one, and I'll give them to May. Then you'll be
a sight."

"Am I a girl because I'm pretty?"

"Yes."

"Is that what girls are for?"

"Yes."

This adventure made Jenny much older because it set her imagination
working, or rather it made her imagination concentrate. Reasons and
causes began to float nebulously before her mind. She began to ask
questions. Gone was the placid acceptance of facts. Gone was the stolid
life of babyhood. Darkness no longer terrified her because it was not
light, but because it was populated with inhabitants both dismal and
ill-minded. At first these shapes were undefined, mere cloudy
visualizations of Ruby's vague threats. Bogymen existed in cupboards and
other places of secluded darkness, but without any appearance capable of
making a pictorial impression. It was a Punch and Judy show that first
endowed the night with visible and malicious shadows.

The sound of the drum boomed from the far end of Hagworth Street. The
continual reiteration of the pipes' short phrase of melody summoned boys
and girls from every area. The miniature theater stood up tall in a
mystery of curtains. Row after row of children was formed, row upon row
waited patiently till the showman left off his two instruments and gave
the word to begin. Down below, ineffably magical, sounded the squeaking
voice of Punch. Up he came, swinging his little legs across the sill; up
he came in a glory of red and yellow, and a jingle of bells. Jenny gazed
spell-bound from her place in the very front row. She laughed gayly at
this world of long noses and squeaking merriment, of awkward, yet
incredibly agile movement. She turned round to see how the bigger
children behind enjoyed it all, and fidgeted from one foot to the other
in an ecstasy of appreciation. She laughed when Punch hit Judy; she
laughed louder still when he threw the baby into the street. She
gloried in his discomfiture of the melancholy showman with squeaky wit.
He was a wonderful fellow, this Punch; always victorious with stick and
tongue. His defeat of the beadle was magnificent; his treatment of Jim
Crow a triumph of strategy. To be sure, he was no match for Joey, the
clown. But lived there the mortal who could have contended successfully
with such a jovial and active and indefatigable assailant?

Jenny was beginning to see the world with new eyes. The kitchen of
Number Seventeen became a dull place; the street meant more to her than
ever now, with the possibility of meeting in reality this enchanted
company, to whom obedience, repression, good-behavior were just so many
jokes to be laughed out of existence. How much superior to Jenny's house
was Punch's house. How delicious it would be to bury dogs in coffins.
But the clown! After all, he could have turned even Jenny's house into
one long surprise. He summed up all Jenny's ideas of enjoyment. She
heard Ruby behind her commenting upon his action as "owdacious." The
same unsympathetic tyrant had often called her "owdacious," and here,
before her dancing deep eyes, was audacity made manifest. How she longed
to be actually of this merriment, not merely a spectator at the back of
whose mind bed loomed as the dull but inevitable climax of all delight.

Then came the episode of the hangman, and the quavering note of fear in
Punch's voice found a responsive echo in her own.

"He's going to be hanged," said Ruby gloatingly.

Jenny began to feel uneasy. Even in this irresponsible world, there was
unpleasantness in the background.

Then came the ghost--a terrifying figure. And then came a green dragon,
with cruel, snapping jaws--even more terrifying--but most terrifying of
all was Ruby's answer to her whispered inquiry:

"Why was all that?"

"Because Punch was a bad, wicked man."

The street so crudely painted on the back of the puppet-show took on
suddenly a strange and uninviting emptiness, seemed to stand out behind
the figures with a horrid likeness to Hagworth Street, to Hagworth
Street in a bad dream devoid of friendly faces. Was a green dragon the
end of pleasure? It was all very disconcerting.

The play was over; the halfpennies had been gathered in. The lamplighter
was coming round, and through the dusk the noise of pipe and drums
slowly grew faint in the distance with a melancholy foreboding of
finality.

Jenny's brain was buzzing with a multitude of self-contradictory
impressions. For once, in a way, she was glad to hold tightly on to
Ruby's rough, red hand. But the conversation between Ruby and another
big girl on the way home was not encouraging.

"And she was found in an area with her throat cut open in a stream of
blood, and the man as did it got away and ain't been caught yet."

"There's been a lot of these murders lately," said Ruby.

"Hundreds," corroborated her friend.

"Every night," added Ruby, "sometimes two."

"I've been afraid to sleep alone. You can hear the paper boys calling of
'em out."

True enough, that very night, Jenny, lying awake, heard down the street
cries gradually coming nearer in colloquial announcement of sudden
death, in hoarse revelations of blood and disaster.

"Could I be murdered?" she asked next day.

"Of course you could," was Ruby's cheerful reply. "Especially if you
isn't a good girl."

Jenny went over in her mind the drama of Punch and Judy. Murder meant
being knocked on the head with a stick and thrown out of the window.

That night again the cries went surging up and down the street. Details
of mutilation floated in through the foggy air till the flickering
night-light showed peeping hangmen in every dim corner. Jenny covered
herself with the blankets and pressed hot, sleepless eyelids close to
her eyes, hoping to distract herself from the contemplation of horror by
the gay wheels of dazzling colors which such an action always produces.
The wheels appeared, but presently turned to the similitude of blood-red
spots. She opened her eyes again. The room seemed monstrously large.
Edie was beside her. She shook her sleeping sister.

"Wake up; oh, Edie, do wake up!"

"Whatever is it, you great nuisance?"

In the far distance, "Another Horrible Murder in Whitechapel," answered
Edie's question, and Jenny began to scream.




Chapter IV: _The Ancient Mischief_


There was nothing to counterbalance the terrors of childhood in Hagworth
Street. Outside the hope of one day being able to do as she liked, Jenny
had no ideals. Worse, she had no fairyland. Soon she would be given at
school a bald narrative of Cinderella or Red Riding Hood, where every
word above a monosyllable would be divided in such a way that hyphens
would always seem of greater importance than elves.

About this time Jenny's greatest joy was music, and in connection with
this an incident occurred which, though she never remembered it herself,
had yet such a tremendous importance in some of its side-issues as to
deserve record.

It was a fine day in early summer. All the morning, Jenny, on account of
household duties, had been kept indoors, and, some impulse of freedom
stirring in her young heart, she slipped out alone into the sunlit
street. Somewhere close at hand a piano-organ was playing the intermezzo
from "Cavalleria," and the child tripped towards the sound. Soon she
came upon the player, and stood, finger in mouth, abashed for a moment,
but the Italian beamed at her--an honest smile of welcome, for she was
obviously no bringer of pence. Wooed by his friendliness, Jenny began to
dance in perfect time, marking with little feet the slow rhythm of the
tune.

In scarlet serge dress and cap of scarlet stockinette, she danced to the
tinsel melody. Unhampered by anything save the need for self-expression,
she expressed the joyousness of a London morning as her feet took the
paving-stones all dappled and flecked with shadows of the tall plane
tree at the end of Hagworth Street. She was a dainty child, with
silvery curls and almond eyes where laughter rippled in a blue so deep
you would have vowed they were brown. The scarlet of her dress, through
long use, had taken on the soft texture of a pastel.

Picture her, then, dancing alone in the quiet Islington street to this
faded tune of Italy, as presently down the street that seemed stained
with the warmth of alien suns shuffled an old man. He stopped to regard
the dancing child over the crook of his ebony walking-stick.

"Aren't you Mrs. Raeburn's little girl?" he asked.

Jenny melted into shyness, lost nearly all her beauty, and became
bunched and ordinary for a moment.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Humph!" grunted the old man, and solemnly presented the organ grinder
with a halfpenny.

Ruby O'Connor's voice rang out down the street.

"Come back directly, you limb!" she called. Jenny looked irresolute, but
presently decided to obey.

That same evening the old man tapped at the kitchen door.

"Come in," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Is that you, Mr. Vergoe? Something gone
wrong with your gas again? I do wish Charlie would remember to mend it."

"No, there's nothing the matter with the gas," explained the lodger.
(For Mr. Vergoe was the lodger of Number Seventeen.) "Only I think that
child of yours'll make a dancer some day."

"Make a what?" said the mother.

"A dancer. I was watching her this morning. Wonderful notion of time.
You ought to have her trained, so to speak."

"My good gracious, whatever for?"

"The stage, of course."

"No, thank _you_. I don't want none of my children gadding round
theaters."

"But you like a good play yourself?"

"That's quite another kettle of fish. Thank you all the same, Mr.
Vergoe, Jenny'll not go on to the stage."

"You're making a great mistake," he insisted. "And I suppose I know
something about dancing, or ought to, as it were."

"I have my own ideas what's good for Jenny."

"But ain't she going to have a say in the matter, so to speak?"

"My dear man, she isn't seven yet."

"None too early to start dancing."

"I'd rather not, thank you, and please don't start putting fancies in
the child's head."

"Of course, I shouldn't. Of course not. That ain't to be thought of."

But the very next day Mr. Walter Vergoe invited Jenny to come and see
some pretty picture-books, and Jenny, with much finger and pinafore
sucking and buried cheeks, followed him through the door near which she
had always been commanded not to loiter.

"Come in, my dear, and look at Mr. Vergoe's pretty pictures. Don't be
shy. Here's a bag of lollipops," he said, holding up a pennyworth of
bull's-eyes.

On the jolly June morning the room where the old clown had elected to
spend his frequently postponed retirement was exceedingly pleasant. The
sun streamed in through the big bay-window: the sparrows cheeped and
twittered outside, and on the window-sill a box of round-faced pansies
danced in the merry June breeze. The walls were hung with silhouettes of
the great dead and tinsel pictures of bygone dramas and harlequinades
and tragedies. There were daguerreotypes of beauties in crinolines, of
ruddy-cheeked actors and apple-faced old actresses. There was a
pinchbeck crown and scepter hung below a small sword with guard of cut
steel. There were framed letters and testimonials on paper gradually
rusting, written with ink that was every day losing more and more of its
ancient blackness. There were steel engravings of this or that pillared
Theatre Royal, stuck round with _menus_ of long-digested suppers; and on
the mantlepiece was a row of champagne corks whose glad explosions
happened years ago. There was a rosewood piano, whose ivory keys were
the color of coffee, whose fretwork displayed a pleated silk that once
was crimson as wine. But the most remarkable thing in the room was a
clown's dress hanging below a wreath of sausages from a hook on the
door. It used, in the days of the clown's activity, to hang thus in his
dressing-room, and when he came out of the stage door for the last time
and went home to stewed tripe and cockles with two old friends, he took
the dress with him in a brown-paper parcel and hung it up after supper.
It confronted him now like a disembodied joy whose race was over.
Rheumatic were the knees that once upon a time were bent in the wide
laugh of welcome, while in the corner a red-hot poker's vermilion fire
was harmless forevermore. Dreaming on winter eves near Christmas time,
Mr. Vergoe would think of those ample pockets that once held
inexhaustible supplies of crackers. Dreaming on winter eves by the
fireside, he would hear out of the past the laughter of children and the
flutter of the footlights, and would murmur to himself in whistling
accents: "Here we are again."

There he was again, indeed, an old man by a dying fire, sitting among
the ashes of burnt-out jollities.

But on the morning of Jenny's visit the clown was very much awake. For
all Mrs. Raeburn's exhortations not to put fancies in the child's head,
Mr. Vergoe was very sure in his own mind of Jenny's ultimate destiny. He
was not concerned with the propriety of Clapton aunts, with the
respectability of drapers' wives. He was not haunted by the severe ghost
of Frederick Horner, the chemist. As he watched Jenny dancing to the
sugared melodies of "Cavalleria," he beheld an artist in the making:
that was enough for Mr. Vergoe. He owed no obligations to anything
except Art, and no responsibleness to anybody except the public.

"Here's a lot of pretty things, ain't there, my dear?"

"Yes," Jenny agreed, with eyes buried deep in a scarlet sleeve.

"Come along now and sit on this chair, which belonged, so they say, so
they told me in Red Lion Court where I bought it, to the great Joseph
Grimaldi. But then, you never heard of Grimaldi. Ah, well, he must have
been a very wonderful clown, by all accounts, though I never saw him
myself. Perhaps you don't even know what a clown is? Do you? What's a
clown, my dear?"

"I dunno."

"Well, he's a figure of fun, so to speak, a clown is. He's a cove
dressed all in white with a white face."

"Was it a clown in Punch and Judy?"

"That's right. That's it. My stars and garters, if you ain't a knowing
one. Well, I was a clown once."

"When you was a little boy?"

"No, when I was a man, as you might say."

"Are clowns good?" inquired Jenny.

"Good as gold--so to speak--good as gold, clowns are. A bit
high-spirited when they come on in the harlequinade, but all in good
part. I suppose, taking him all round, you wouldn't find a better fellow
than a clown. Only a bit high-spirited, I'd have you understand. 'Oh,
what a lark,' that's their motto, as it were."

Ensconced in the great Grimaldi's chair, Jenny regarded the ancient
Mischief with wondering glances and, as she sucked one of his lollipops,
thoroughly approved of him.

"Look at this pretty lady," he said, placing before her a colored print
of some famous Columbine of the past.

"Why is she on her toes?" asked Jenny.

"Light as a fairy, she was," commented Mr. Vergoe, with a bouquet of
admiration in his voice.

"Is she trying to reach on to the mantlepiece?" Jenny wanted to know.

"My stars and garters, not she! She's dancing--toe-dancing, as they call
it."

"I don't dance like that," said Jenny.

"Of course you don't, but you could with practice. With practice, I
wouldn't say as you mightn't be as light as a pancake, so to speak."

"I can stand on my toes," declared Jenny proudly.

"Can you now?" said Mr. Vergoe admiringly.

"To reach fings off of the table."

"Ah, but then you'd be holding on to it, eh? Tight as wax, you'd be
holding on to it. That won't do, that won't. You must be able to dance
all over the room on your toes."

"Can you?"

"Not now, my dear, not now. I could once, though. But I never cared for
playing Harlequin."

"Eh?"

"That's a fellow you haven't met yet."

"Is he good?"

"Good--in a manner of speaking--but an awkward sort of a laddie with his
saber and all. But no malice at bottom, I'm sure of that."

"Can I be a C'mbine?"

"Why not?" exclaimed the old man. "Why not?" And he thumped the table to
mark the question's emphasis.

Jenny became very thoughtful and wished she had a petticoat all silver
and pink, like the pretty lady on her toes.

"Would I be pretty?" she asked at length.

"Wonderfully pretty, I should say."

"Would all the people say--'pretty Jenny'?"

"No more wouldn't that surprise me," declared Mr. Vergoe.

"Would I be good?"

The old man looked puzzled.

"There's nothing against it," he affirmed. "Nothing, in a manner of
speaking; but there, what some call good, others don't, and I can't say
as I've troubled much which way it was, so to speak, as long as they was
good pals and jolly companions everyone."

"What's pals?"

"Ah, there you've put your finger on it--as it were--what's a pal? Well,
I should say he was a hearty fellow--in a manner of speaking--a fellow
as would come down handsome on Treasury night when you hadn't paid your
landlady the week before. A pal wouldn't ever crab your business,
wouldn't stare too hard if you happened to use his grease. A pal
wouldn't let you sleep over the train-call on a Sunday morning. A pal
wouldn't make love to your girl on a wet, foggy afternoon in Blackburn
or Warrington. What's pals? Pals are fellows who stand on the prompt
side of life--so to speak--and stick there to the Ring Down."

All of which may or may not be an excellent definition of "paliness,"
but left Jenny, if possible, more completely ignorant of the meaning of
a pal than she was when Mr. Vergoe set out to answer her inquiry.

"What's pals?" she reiterated therefore.

"Not quite clear in your little head yet--as it were--well, I should
say, we're pals, me and you."

"Are pals good?"

"The best. The very, very best. Now you just listen to me for a minute.
My granddaughter, Miss Lilli Vergoe, that is, she's wonderfully fond of
the old man, that is your humble. Now next time she comes round to see
him, I'll send up the call-boy--as it might be."

Hereupon Mr. Vergoe closed his left eye, put his forefinger very close
to the other eye, and shook it knowingly several times.

"Now you'd better go on or there'll be a stage wait, and get back to ma
as quick as you like."

Jenny prepared to obey.

"Wait a minute, though, wait a minute," and the old man fumbled in a
drawer from which at last he extracted a cracker. "See that? That's a
cracker, that is. Sometimes one or two used to get hidden in my pockets
on last nights, and--well, I used to keep 'em as a recollection of good
times, so to speak. This one was Exeter, not so very long ago neither.
Now you hook on to that end and I'll hook on to this, and, when I say
'three,' pull as hard as you like." The antagonists faced each other.
The cracker came in half with the larger portion in Jenny's hand, but
the powder had long ago lost all power of report. Age and damp had
subdued its ferocity.

"A wrong 'un," muttered the old man regretfully. "Too bad, too bad!
Well, accidents will happen--as it were. Come along, open your half."

Jenny produced a compact cylinder of mauve paper.

"Is it a sweet?" she wondered.

"No, it's a cap. By gum, it's a cap. Don't tear it. Steady! Careful does
it."

Mr. Vergoe was tremendously excited by the prospect. At last between
them they unrolled a gilded paper crown, which he placed round Jenny's
curls.

"There you are," he observed proudly. "Fairy Queen as large as life and
twice as natural. Now all you want is a wand with a gold star on the end
of it, and there's nothing you couldn't do, in a manner of speaking. Now
pop off to ma and show her your crown." He held her for a moment up to
the glass, in which Jenny regarded herself with a new interest, and when
he set her down again she went out of the room with the careful step of
one who has imagined greatness.

Downstairs she was greeted by her mother with exclamations of
astonishment.

"Whatever have you got on your head?"

"A crown."

"Who gave it you, for Heaven's sake?"

"The lodger."

"Mr. Vergoe?"

Jenny nodded.

"I may wear it, mayn't I, mother?"

"Yes, I suppose so," said Mrs. Raeburn grudgingly. "But don't get
putting it in your mouth."

"There's a Miss Vain," said Ruby.

"I'm not."

"Peacocks like looking-glasses," nagged Ruby.

"I isn't a peacock. I's a queen."

"There's a sauce! Whoever heard?" commented Ruby.

The clown's sentimental and pleasantly rhetorical descriptions had no
direct influence on the child's mind. But when his granddaughter, Miss
Lilli Vergoe, all chiffon and ostrich plumes, took her upon a _peau de
soie_ lap, and clasped her rosy cheeks to a frangipani breast, Jenny
thought she had never experienced any sensation half so delicious.

Amid the heavy glooms and fusty smells of the old house in Hagworth
Street, Miss Lilli Vergoe blossomed like an exotic flower, or rather, in
Jenny's own simile, like lather. Her china-blue eyes were amazingly
attractive. Her honey-colored hair and Dresden cheeks fascinated the
impressionable child with all the wonder of an expensive doll. There was
no part of her that was not soft and beautiful to stroke. She woke in
Jenny a cooing affection such as had never been by her bestowed upon a
living soul.

Moreover, what Mr. Vergoe talked about, Lilli showed her how to achieve;
so that, unknown to Mrs. Raeburn, Jenny slowly acquired that ambition
for public appreciation which makes the actress. Terpischore herself,
carrying credentials from Apollo, would not have been a more powerful
mistress than Lilli Vergoe, a second line girl in the _Corps de Ballet_
of the Orient Palace of Varieties. Under her tuition Jenny learned a
hundred airs and graces, which, when re-enacted in the kitchen of Number
Seventeen, either caused a command to cease fidgeting or an invitation
to look at the comical child.

She learned, too, more than mere airs and graces. She was grounded very
thoroughly in primary technique, so that, as time went on, she could
step passably well upon her toes and achieve the "splits" and "strides"
and "handsprings" of a more acrobatic mode.

Therefore, though in the September just before her seventh birthday
Mrs. Raeburn decided it was time to begin Jenny's education, it is very
obvious that Jenny's education was really begun on the sunlit morning
when Mr. Vergoe saw her dancing to a sugared melody from "Cavalleria."

School, however, meant for Jenny not so much the acquirement of
elementary knowledge, the ability to distinguish a cow from a sheep, as
an opportunity to exhibit more satisfactory attainments she had
developed from the instigation of Miss Lilli Vergoe. Neither her mother
nor Ruby nor Alfie nor Edie nor anyone in the household had been a
perfect audience. Her schoolfellows, on the other hand, marveled with
delighted respect at her _pas seuls_ upon the asphalt playground of the
board school and clapped and jumped their praise.

Jenny had no idea of the stage at present. She had never yet been inside
a theater; and was still far from any conception of art as a profession.
It merely happened that she could dance, that dancing pleased her, and,
less important, that it made her popular with innumerable little girls
of her own age, and even older.

By some instinct of advisable concealment, she kept this habit of
publicity a secret from her family. Edie, to be sure, was aware of it,
and warned her once or twice of the immorality of showing off; but Edie
was too indolent to go into the matter more deeply and too conscious of
her own comparative greatness through seniority to spend much time in
the guardianship of a younger sister.

So for a year Jenny practiced and became daily more proficient, and
danced every morning to school.




Chapter V: _Pretty Apples in Eden_


Shortly after her eighth birthday Jenny was puzzled by an incident
which, with its uneasy suggestions, led her to postulate to herself for
the first time that mere escape from childhood did not finally solve the
problem of existence.

She had long been aware of the incomplete affection between her parents;
that is to say, she always regarded her father as something that seemed
like herself or a chair to be perpetually in her mother's way.

She had no feeling of awe towards Mr. Charles Raeburn, but rather looked
upon him as a more extensive counterpart of Alfie, both prone to many
deeds of mischief. She had no conception of her father as a
bread-winner; her mother was so plainly the head of the house.

In the early morning her father vanished to work and only came back just
before bedtime to eat a large tea, like Alfie, in the course of which he
was reprimanded and pushed about and ordered, like Alfie, to behave
himself. To be sure, he had liberty of egress at a later hour, for once,
when in the midst of nightly fears she had rushed in the last breath of
a dream along the landing to her mother's room, she saw him coming
rosily up the stairs. He made no attempts to justify his late arrival
with tales of goblin accidents as Alfie was wont to do. He did not
ascribe the cracked egg appearance of his bowler hat to the onset of a
baker's barrow. He seemed so far indifferent to the unfinished look of
his clothes as not to bother to lay the blame on the butcher's boy. Her
mother merely said:

"Oh, it's you?"

To which Mr. Raeburn replied: "Yes, Flo, it's me," and began to sing
"Ta-ra-ra--boom--de--ay."

Even Ruby O'Connor, who, in earlier days at Hagworth Street, used to
quell Alfie with terrible threats of a father's vengeance, gave them up
as ineffective; for the bland and cheerful Charlie, losing the while not
a morsel of blandness or cheerfulness, was fast becoming an object of
contemptuous toleration in his own house. He was a weak and unsuccessful
man, fond of half-pints and tales of his own prowess, with little to
recommend him to his family except an undeniable gift of humorous
description. Yet, even with this, he possessed no imagination. He was
accustomed to treat the world as he would have treated a spaniel. "Poor
old world," he would say in pitying intention; "poor old world." He
would pat the universe on its august head as a pedagogue slaps a
miniature globe in the schoolroom. He never expected anything from the
world, which was just as well, for he certainly never received very
much. To his wife's occasional inquiry of amazed indignation, "Why ever
did I come to marry you?" he would answer:

"I don't know, Floss. Because you wanted to, I reckon."

"I never wanted to," she would protest.

"Well, you didn't," he would say. "Some people acts funny."

"That's quite right."

Hers was the last word: his, however, the pint of four ale that drowned
it.

Jenny at this stage in her life was naturally incapable of grasping the
fact of her mother throwing herself away in matrimony; but she was able
to ponder the queer result that, however much her mother might be
annoyed by Charlie, she did not seem able to get rid of him.

Alfie, with his noise and clumping boots, was an equally unpleasant
appendage to her life, but for Alfie she was responsible. In whatever
way children came about, it was not to be supposed they happened
involuntarily like bedtime or showers of rain. Moreover, mystery hung
heavy over their arrival. Edie and Alfie would giggle in corners, look
at each other with oddly lighted eyes, and blush when certain subjects
arose in conversation. Human agency was implied, and all that talk of
strawberry-beds and cabbage leaves so much trickery. Alfie, bad habits
and all, was due to her father and mother being married.

But why be married when Alfies were the result? Why not close the door
against her father and be rid of him? And take somebody else in
exchange? Who was there? Nobody.

One foggy afternoon early in January, Jenny came back from school to the
smell of a good cigar. She did not know it was a good cigar, but the
perfume hung about the dark hall of Number Seventeen with a strange
richness never associated in her mind with the smell of her father's
smoke. She was conscious, too, from the carefully closed doors both of
the parlor and the kitchen, that company was present. The voice of a
polite conscience warned her not to bang about, not to shout "Is tea
ready, mother?" but rather to tread discreetly the little distance to
the kitchen and there to await developments. If Alfie and Edie were
already arrived by a punctual chance, she would learn from them the
manner and kind of the company hid in the parlor.

The kitchen was empty. No tea was laid. Over her stole an extraordinary
sensation of misgiving. She felt as if she were standing at the foot of
a ladder watching Alfie about some mischievous business.

Presently Ruby returned from the scullery, like a sudden draught.

"However did you get in so quiet?" asked the newcomer. Then Jenny
remembered the street door had been open.

"Who's in along of mother?"

"That's right. Be nosey."

"Tell us, Rube."

"I can't tell what I don't know."

"But you do know," persisted Jenny; "so tell us."

"D'you think we all wants to poke in where we isn't wanted, like you,
Miss Meddlesome? How should I know?"

"Well, I told you yesterday what teacher called Edie, so tell us, Rube;
you might tell us."

"There isn't nothing to tell, you great inquisitive monkey," Ruby
declared.

Then there was a sound in the hall of a man's voice, a rich voice that
suited somehow the odor of the cigar. Jenny longed to peep round the
kitchen door at the visitor, but she was afraid that Ruby would carry on
about it. A moment or two's conversation, and the street door slammed,
and when her mother came back from the kitchen, Jenny was afraid to ask
bluntly:

"Who was that?"

Instead she announced:

"We did sewing this afternoon. Teacher said I sewed well."

"You sew on with your tea," said Mrs. Raeburn. "And wherever can Edie
and Alfie have got to?"

A week or two afterwards Jenny returned to the same smell of cigar, the
same impression of a rich and unusual visitor, but this time the parlor
door gaped to a dark and cold interior, and when Jenny followed Ruby
into the kitchen, he was there, a large florid man, with a big cigar and
heavy mustache and a fur coat open to a snowy collar and shining
tie-pin.

"And this is Jenny, is it?" he said in the cigar voice.

Jenny kissed him much as she would have kissed the walrus he slightly
resembled; then she retreated, finger in mouth, backwards until she
bumped against the table by which she leaned to look at the stranger,
much as she would have looked at a walrus.

Her father came in after a while, and his wife said:

"Mr. Timpany."

"Eh?" said Charlie.

"Mr. Timpany, a friend of father's."

"Oh," said Charlie. "Pleased to meet you," with which he retired to a
chair in a dusky corner and was silent for a long time. At last he
asked:

"Have you been to Paris, Mr.... Tippery? Thrippenny, I should say."

"Timpany, Charlie. I wish you'd listen. Have you got cloth ears? Of
course he's been to Paris, and, for gracious, don't you start your
stories. One would think to hear you talk as you were the only man on
earth as had ever been further than Islington."

"I was in Paris once some years back--on business," Charlie remarked. "I
think Paris is a knockout, as towns go. Not but what I like London
better. Only you see more life in Paris," and he relapsed into silence,
until finally Mr. Timpany said he must be going.

"Who's he?" demanded Mr. Raeburn, when his wife came back from escorting
her visitor to the door.

"I told you once--a friend of father's."

"Ikey sort of a bloke. He hasn't made a mistake coming here, has he? I
thought it was the Duke of Devonshire when I see him sitting there."

"You are an ignorant man," declared Mrs. Raeburn. "Don't you know a
gentleman when you see one? Even if you have lost your own shop and got
to go to work every morning like a common navvy, you can tell a
gentleman still."

"Are you bringing in any more dukes or markisses home to tea?" asked
Charlie. "Because let me know next time and I'll put on a clean pair of
socks."

Mrs. Raeburn did not bring any more dukes or marquises home to tea; but
Mr. Timpany came very often, and Charlie took to returning from work
very punctually, and, though he was always very polite to Mr. Timpany
when he was there, he was very rude indeed about him when he was gone,
and Jenny used to think how funny it was to wait for Mr. Timpany's
departure before he began to make a fuss.

Vaguely she felt her father was afraid to say much. She could understand
his fear, because Mr. Timpany was very large and strong, so large and
strong that even her mother spoke gently and always seemed anxious to
please him. And looking at the pair side by side, her father appeared
quite small--her father whom she had long regarded as largeness
personified.

One day Jenny came home late from school and found her parents in the
middle of a furious argument.

"I ar'n't going to have him here," Charlie was saying, "not no more, not
again, the dirty hound!"

"You dare say that, you vulgar beast."

"I shall say just whatever I please. You're struck on him, that's what
you are, you soft idiot."

"I'm no such thing," declared Mrs. Raeburn. "Nice thing that a friend of
father's can't come and have a cup of tea without your carrying on like
a mad thing."

"Not so much 'cup of tea,' Mrs. Raeburn. It's not the tea I minds. It's
while the kettle's boiling as I objects to."

"You're drunk," said the wife scornfully.

"And it's ---- lucky I am drunk. You're enough to make a fellow drunk
with your la-di-da behavior. Why, God help me, Florrie, you've been
powdering your face. Let me get hold of the----. I'll learn him to come
mucking round another man's wife."

On the very next day Mr. Timpany came to tea for the last time. Possibly
Mrs. Raeburn had told her husband it was to be the last time, for he did
not put in an appearance. Ruby had gone out by permission. May was
secured by a fortified nursing-chair. Alfie was away on some twilight
adventure of bells and string. Edie was immerged in a neighboring
basement with two friends, a plate of jam, and the cordial teasing of
the friends' brother, young Bert; and Jenny, urged on by a passionate
inquisitiveness, crept along the passage and listened to the following
conversation:

"You're wasted here, Flo, wasted--a fine woman like you is absolutely
wasted. Why won't you come away with me? Come away to-night, I'll always
be good to you."

"The children," said their mother.

"They'll get on all right by themselves. Bring the little one--what's
her name, with fair hair and dark eyes?"

"Jenny."

"Yes, Jenny. Bring her with you. I don't mind."

"It wouldn't be fair to her. She'd never have a chance."

"Rubbish! She'd have more chance in a cosy little house of your own than
stuck in this rat's hole. You'd have a slap-up time, Flo. A nice little
Ralli cart, if you're fond of horses, and--oh, come along, come now. I
want you."

"No; I've fixed myself up. I was done with life when I married Charlie,
and I'm fixed up."

"You're in a cage here," he argued.

"Yes; but I've got my nest in it," she said.

"Then it's good-bye?"

"Good-bye."

"I'm damned if I can understand why you won't come. I'd be jolly good to
you."

"Good-bye."

"You're a cold woman, aren't you?"

"Am I?"

"I think you are."

"It doesn't always do to show one's feelings."

"You're a regular icicle."

"Perhaps," whispered Mrs. Raeburn.

Jenny stole back to the kitchen greatly puzzled. Whether the florid Mr.
Timpany kissed Mrs. Raeburn before he went out to look for the hansom
cab that was to jingle him out of her life, I do not know; but she waved
to him once as she saw him look round under a lamp post, for Jenny had
crept back and was standing beside her when she did so.

"You come on in, you naughty girl," said Mrs. Raeburn, drowning love in
a copper bubbling with clothes.

"Would you like that man better than father?" Jenny inquired presently,
pausing in the erection of a tower of bricks for the benefit of May, who
watched with somber eyes the quivering feat of architecture.

"What do you mean?" said Mrs. Raeburn sharply.

"Would you like father to go away and never, never come back here along
of us ever again and always have that man?"

"Of course, I shouldn't, you silly child."

"I would."

"You would?"

"Yes," said Jenny; "he smelt nice."

"Ah, miss, when one's married, one's married."

"Could I be married?"

"When you grow up. Of course."

"Could I have little boys and girls?"

"Of course you could if you were married."

"Could I have lots and lots?"

"More than you bargain for, I daresay," declared her mother.

"Did you marry to have a little girl like me?"

"Perhaps."

Encouraged by her mother's unusual amenity to questions, Jenny went on:

"Did you really, though?"

"For that and other reasons."

"Were you glad when you saw me first?"

"Very glad."

"Did I come in by the door?"

"Yes."

"Who brought me?"

"The doctor."

"Did he ring the bell?"

"Yes."

"Did father know I was coming?"

"Yes."

"Was I a present from father?"

"Yes."

"Would you like that gentleman to give you a present?"

"What do you mean?"

"Would you like him to give you a li'l' girl like me?"

"Not at all; and you stop asking questions, Mrs. Chatter."

Her mother was suddenly aware of Jenny's cross-examinations, which she
had been answering mechanically with thoughts far away with a florid man
in a jingling hansom cab. Jenny was conscious of her dreaming and knew
in her sly baby heart that her mother was in a weak mood. But it was too
good to last long enough for Jenny to find out all she wanted to know.

"Why don't you send father away and have that gentleman as a lodger?"

"I told you once; don't keep on."

"But why don't you?"

"Because I don't want to."

In bed that night Jenny lay awake and tried to understand the
conversation in the parlor. At present her intelligence could only grasp
effect. Analysis had not yet entered her mind.

She saw, in pictures on the ceiling, her mother and the rich strange
gentleman. She saw her father watching. She saw them all three as
primitive folks see tragedies, dimly aware of great events, but
powerless to extract any logical sequence. Lying awake, she planned
pleasant surprises, planned to bring back Mr. Timpany and banish her
father. It was like the dreams of Christmas time, when one lay awake and
thought of presents. She remembered how pleased her mother had professed
herself by the gift of a thimble achieved on Jenny's side by a great
parsimony in sweets. The gentleman had offered a cosy house. At once she
visualized it with lights in every window and the delicious smell that
is wafted up from the gratings of bakers' shops. But what was a Ralli
cart? Something to do with riding? And Jenny was to come, too, and share
in all this. He had said so distinctly. If he gave mother a house, why
should he not give her a doll's house such as Edie boasted of in the
house of a friend, such as Edie had promised to show her some day. She
began to feel a budding resentment against her mother for saying "No" to
all these delights, a resentment comparable with her emotions not so
long ago when her mother refused to let her go for a ride on an omnibus
with Mr. Vergoe.

Good things came along very seldom, and when they did come, grown-up
people always spoiled them. Life, as Jenny lay awake, seemed made up of
small repressions. Life was a series of hopes held out and baffled
desires, of unjust disappointments and aspirations unreasonably
neglected. She lay there, a mite in flowing time, sensible only of
having no free will.

Why couldn't she grow up all of a sudden and do as she liked? But then
grown-up people, whom she always regarded as entirely at liberty, did
not seem to be able to do as they liked. Her mother had said, "No, thank
you," to a cosy house, just as she was taught to say, "No, thank you,"
to old gentlemen who offered her pennies to turn somersaults over
railings--surely a harmless way of getting money. But her mother had not
wanted to say "No, thank you." That Jenny recognized as a fact,
although, if she had been asked why, she would have had nothing
approaching a reason.

"I will do as I like," Jenny vowed to herself. "I will, I will. I won't
be told." Here she bit the sheet in rage at her powerlessness. Desire
for action was stirring strongly in her now. "Why can't I grow up all at
once? Why must I be a little girl? Why can't I be like a kitten?"
Kittens had become cats within Jenny's experience.

"I will be disobedient. I will be disobedient. I won't be stopped."
Suddenly a curious sensation seized her of not being there at all. She
bit the bedclothes again. Then she sat up in bed and looked at her
petticoats hanging over the chair. She was there, after all, and she
fell asleep with wilful ambitions dancing lightly through the gay
simplicities of her child's brain, and, as she lay there with tightly
closed, determined lips, her mother with shaded candle looked down at
her and wondered whether, after all, she and Jenny would not have been
better off under the rich-voiced, cigar-haunted protection of Mr.
Timpany.

And then Mrs. Raeburn went to bed and fell asleep to the snoring of
Charlie, just as truly unsatisfied as most of the women in this world.

Only Charlie was all right. He had spent a royal evening in bragging to
a circle of pipe-armed friends of his firmness and virility at a moment
of conjugal stress.

And outside the cold January stars were reflected in the puddles of
Hagworth Street.




Chapter VI: _Shepherd's Calendar_


It was unlikely that Jenny's dancing could always be kept a secret. The
day came at last when her mother, in passing the playground of the
school, looked over the railings and saw her daughter's legs above a
semicircle of applauding children. Mrs. Raeburn was more than shocked:
she was profoundly alarmed. The visit of the aunts rose up before her
like a ghost from the heart of forgotten years. They had faded into a
gradual and secure insignificance, only momentarily displaced by the
death of Aunt Fanny. But the other two lived on in Carminia House like
skeletons of an outraged morality.

Something must be done about this dancing craze. Something must be done
to check the first signs of a prophecy fulfilled. She thought of
Barnsbury; but Mrs. Purkiss had now two pasty-faced boys of her own, and
was no longer willing to act as deputy-mother to the children of her
sister. Something must certainly be done about Jenny's wilfulness.

"How dare you go making such an exhibition of yourself?" she demanded,
when Jenny came home. "How dare you, you naughty girl?"

Jenny made no reply but an obstinate frown.

"You dare sulk and I'll give you a good whipping."

The teacher was written to; was warned of Jenny's wild inclinations. The
teacher, a fish-like woman in a plaid skirt, remonstrated with her
pupil.

"Nice little girls," she asserted "don't kick their legs up in the
air."

The class was forbidden to encourage the dancer; a mountain was made of
a molehill; Jenny was raised to the giddy pinnacle of heroism. She wore
about her the blazing glories of a martyr; she began to be conscious of
possessing an exceptional personality, for there had never been such a
fuss over any other girl's misdemeanor. She began to feel more acutely
the injustice of grown-up repression. She tried defiance and danced
again in the playground, but learned that humanity's prime
characteristic is cowardice; perceived, with Aristotle, that man is a
political animal, a hunter in packs. She thought the school would
support her justifiable rebellion, but, alas, the school deserted her.
Heroine she might be in corner conferences. Heroine she might be in
linked promenades; but when her feelings were crystallized in action,
the other girls thought of themselves. They applauded her intentions,
but shrank from the prominence of the visible result. Jenny abandoned
society. The germ of cynicism was planted in her soul. She came to
despise her fellows. In scarlet cloak she traveled solitary to school,
and hated everybody.

The immediate and obvious result of this self-imposed isolation was her
heightened importance in the eyes of boys. One by one they approached
her with offers of escort, with tribute from sticky pockets. Little by
little she became attached to their top-spinning, marble-flicking
journeys to and from school; gradually she was admitted to the more
intimate fellowship of outlawry. She found that, in association with
boys, she could prosecute her quarrel with the world. With them she
wandered far afield from Hagworth Street; with them she tripped along on
many a marauding expedition. For them she acted as decoy, as scout
against policemen. With them she rang the bells of half a street at a
run. With them she broke the windows of empty houses; climbed ladders
and explored roofs and manipulated halfpennies stuck with wax to the
paving-stones. She was queen of the robbers' camp on a tin-sprinkled
waste of building-land. She acquired a fine contempt of girls, and
wished more than ever she had been fortunate enough to be born a boy.
Even Alfie condescended not merely to take notice of her, but also
sometimes to make use of her activity. She looked back with wonder to
the time when she had regarded her brother with a shrinking distaste. He
became her standard of behavior. She saw his point of view when nobody
else could, as on the occasion when he asked Edie if she dared him to
hit her on the head with the bar of iron he was swinging, and when Edie,
having in duty bound dared, found herself with a large cut on the
forehead. Alfie, finding other boys admired it, encouraged her dancing;
and they used to flock round the organs while Jenny learned step-dancing
from big, rough girls who were always to be found in the middle of the
music.

One day, however, Mrs. Raeburn and Mrs. Purkiss, coming back together
from a spring hat foray, walked right into one of Jenny's performances.
Mrs. Raeburn might have endured the shame of it alone, but the company
of her sister upset her power of dealing with an awkward situation. If
in the past she had been inclined to compare Percy and Claude, her
pasty-faced nephews, unfavorably with her own children, on the present
occasion their mother drained the cup of revenge to the dregs.

With Jenny between them, the two sisters walked back to Hagworth Street.

"It isn't as if it was just showing her legs," said Mrs. Purkiss.
"That's bad enough, but I happened to notice she had a hole in her
stocking....

"And those great, common girls she was hollering with. Wherever on earth
can she have picked up with them? Some of Charlie's friends, I
suppose....

"It seems funny that Alfie shouldn't have more shame than go letting his
sister make such a sight of herself, but there, I suppose Alfie takes
after his father....

"All I'm thankful for is that Bill wasn't with us, he being a man as
anything like that upsets for a week. He never did have what you might
call a good liver, and anything unpleasant turns his bile all the wrong
way. Only last week, when Miss Knibbs, our first assistant, sent an
outsize in combinations to a customer who's _very_ particular about any
remark being passed about her stoutness, Bill was sick half of the
night....

"I can't think why you don't send her away to Carrie's. The country
would do her good, and Carrie's got no children of her own. I'd like to
have her myself, only I'm afraid she'd be such a bad example to Percy
and Claude."

Mrs. Raeburn was silent. Vulnerable through Jenny's lapse from modesty,
she had no sting for her nephews.

Finally it was settled that Jenny should spend a year with Mrs.
Threadgale at Galton. It was laid on the shoulders of Hampshire to curb
her naughtiness. It remained to be seen how far country sights and
sounds would civilize her rudeness.

Having made up her mind to banish the child, Mrs. Raeburn began at once
to regret the decision. With all her disobedience, Jenny was still the
favorite. "She was such a character," in her mother's words; and her
gay, dark eyes and silvery curls would be missed from Hagworth Street.
But the day of departure came along. A four-wheeler threw a shadow on
the door. There were kisses and handkerchiefs and last injunctions and
all the paraphernalia of separation. Jenny was bundled in. Mrs. Raeburn
followed.

"Now mind, Ruby," cried the latter from the window, "don't you let May
get putting nothing in her mouth, and see Mr. Raeburn has his tea
comfortable, and, Alfie, you dare misbehave while I'm away. Good-bye,
all."

       *       *       *       *       *

At last the train drew up at Galton along a gray gravel platform that
smelt fresh and flowery after the railway carriage. There was lilac in
bloom and red hawthorn, and a pile of tin trunks, and when the train had
puffed on, Jenny could hear birdsong everywhere.

While the two sisters embraced, the little girl surveyed her new aunt.
She was more like her mother than Aunt Mabel. Nicer altogether than Aunt
Mabel, though she disliked the flavor of veil that was mingled with the
kisses of welcome.

"They'll wheel the luggage along on a barrow," said Aunt Caroline. "It's
not far where we live."

They turned into the wide country street with its amber sunlight and
sound of footsteps, and very soon arrived before the shop of James
Threadgale, Draper and Haberdasher. Jenny hoped they would go in through
the shop itself, but Mrs. Threadgale opened a door at the side and took
them upstairs to a big airy parlor that seemed to Jenny's first glance
all sunbeams and lace. Having been afforded a glimpse of Paradise, they
were taken downstairs again into the back parlor, which would have been
very dull had it not looked out on to a green garden sloping down to a
small stream.

Uncle James, with pale, square face and quiet voice, came in from the
shop to greet them. Jenny thought he talked funny with his broad
Hampshire vowels. Ethel, the maid, came in, too, with her peach-bloom
cheeks and creamy neck and dewy crimson mouth. Jenny compared her with
"our Rube," greatly to our Rube's disadvantage.

Mrs. Raeburn stayed a week, and Jenny said good-bye without any feeling
of home-sickness. She liked her new uncle and aunt. There were no
pasty-faced cousins, and Ethel was very nice. She was not sent to the
National School. Such a course would have been derogatory to Mr. and
Mrs. Threadgale's social position. So she went to a funny old school at
the top of the town kept by an old lady called Miss Wilberforce--a dear
old lady with white caps and pale blue ribbons and a big pair of
tortoise-shell spectacles. The school was a little gray house with three
gables and diamond lattices and a door studded with great nails over
which was an inscription that said, "Mrs. Wilberforce's School, 1828."

In the class-room on one side was heard a perpetual humming of bees
among the wallflowers in the front garden, and through the windows on
the far side, which looked away over the open country, floated the
distant tinkle of sheep-bells. All along one side hung rows of cloaks
and hats, and all over the other walls hung pictures of sheep and cows
and dogs and angels and turnips and wheat and barley and Negroes and Red
Indians: there were also bunches of dried grasses and glass cases full
of butterflies and birds' eggs and fossils, and along the window-sills
were pots of geraniums. On her desk Miss Wilberforce had an enormous
cane, which she never used, and a bowl of bluebells or wild flowers of
the season and a big ink-horn and quill pens and books and papers which
fluttered about the room on a windy day. There was a dunce's stool with
a fool's-cap beside it, and a blackboard full of the simplest little
addition sums. All the children's desks were chipped and carved and
inked with the initials of bygone scholars, and all the forms were
slippery with the fidgetings of innumerable little girls. About the air
of the warm, murmurous schoolroom hung the traditions of a dead system
of education.

Jenny learned to darn and sew; to recite Cowper's "Winter Walk" after
Miss Wilberforce, who was never called "teacher," but always "ma'am"; to
deliver trite observations upon the nature of common animals, such as
"The dog is a sagacious beast," "The sheep is the friend of man," and to
acquire a slight acquaintance with uncommon animals such as the quagga,
the yak, and the ichneumon, because they won through their initials an
undeserved prominence in the alphabet. She learned that Roman Catholics
worshiped images and, incidentally, the toe of the Pope, and wondered
vaguely if the latter were a dancer. She was told homely tales about
Samuel and Elijah. She was given a glazed Bible which smelt of
oil-cloth, and advised to read it every morning and every evening
without any selection of suitable passages. She learned a hymn called
"Now the day is over," which always produced an emotion of exquisite
melancholy. She was awarded a diminutive plot of ground and given a
penny packet of nasturtium seeds to sow, but, being told by another
girl that they were good to eat, she ate them instead, and her garden
was a failure.

There were delightful half-holiday rambles over the countryside, when
she, still in her scarlet serge, and half a dozen girls and boys danced
along the lanes picking flowers and playing games with chanted refrains
like "Green Gravel" and "Queen of Barbary." She made friends with
farmers' lads, and learned to climb trees and call poultry and find
ducks' eggs. Hay-making time came on, when she was allowed to ride on
the great swinging loads right into the setting sun, it seemed. She used
to lie on her back, lulled by the sounds of eventide, and watch the
midges glinting on the air of a golden world.

She slept in a funny little flowery room next to her uncle and aunt, and
she used to lie awake in the slow summer twilights sniffing in the
delicious odor of pinks in full bloom below her window. Sometimes she
would lean out of the window and weave fancies round the bubbling stream
beyond the grass till the moon came up from behind a hop-garden and
threw tree-shadows all over the room. Below her sill she could pick
great crimson roses that looked like bunches of black velvet in the
moonlight, and in the morning she used to suck the honey from the sweet,
starry flowers of the jasmine that flung its green fountains over the
kitchen porch.

Summer went on; the hay was cut, and in the swimming July heat she used
to play in the meadows till her face grew freckled as the inside of a
cowslip. Now was the time when she could wear foxglove blooms on every
finger. Now was the time to watch the rabbits scampering by the wood's
edge in the warm dusk. The corn turned golden, and there were
expeditions for wild raspberries. The corn was cut, and blackberry time
arrived, bringing her mother, who was pleased to see how well Jenny
looked and went back to Hagworth Street with a great bunch of fat purple
dahlias.

In October there was nutting--best of all the new delights,
perhaps--when she wandered through the hazel coppices and shook the
smooth boughs until the ripe nuts pattered down on the damp, woodland
earth. Nutting was no roadside adventure. She really penetrated into the
heart of the woods and with her companions would peep out
half-affrighted by the lips of the October leaves along the glades,
half-afraid of the giant beeches with their bare gray branches twisted
to the likeness of faces and figures. She and her playmates would peep
out from the hazel coppice and dart across the mossy way out of the
keeper's eye, and lose themselves in the dense covert and point with
breathless whisper to a squirrel or scurrying dormouse. Home again in
the silvery mists or moaning winds, home again with bags of nuts slung
across shoulders, to await the long winter evenings and fireside
pleasures.

Jenny was allowed to celebrate her ninth birthday by a glorious
tea-party in the kitchen, when little girls in clean pinafores and
little boys in clean collars stumped along the flagged passage and sat
down to tea and munched buns and presented Jenny with dolls'
tea-services and pop-guns and Michaelmas daisies with stalks warm from
the tight clasp of warm hands.

She grew to love her Aunt Carrie and Uncle James with the quiet voice
and thin, damp hair.

Winter went by to the ticking of clocks and patter of rain. But there
was snow after Christmas and uproarious snow-balling and slides in
Galton High Street. There was always a fine crackling fire in the
kitchen, and a sleek tabby cat, and copper kettles singing on the hob.
There was Ethel's love affair with the grocer's assistant to talk and
giggle over amid the tinkle and clatter of washing up the tea-things.

And then in March Mrs. Threadgale caught cold and died quite suddenly;
and Jenny put some white violets on her grave and wore a black dress and
went home to Islington.

The effect of this wonderful visit was not much more permanent than the
surprise of a new picture-book. Galton had meant not so much a
succession of revelations as a volley of sensations. She was sad at
leaving the country; she missed the affection of her uncle and aunt. She
missed the easy sway she had wielded over everybody at Galton. But she
had very little experience to carry back to Hagworth Street. One would
like to say she carried the memory of that childish wondertime right
through her restless life, but, actually, she never remembered much
about it. It very soon became merely a vague interval between two long
similarities of existence, like a break in a row of houses that does not
admit one to anything more than an added space of sky. She never
communed with elves, or, like young Blake, saw God's forehead pressed
against the window-pane. Jenny was no mystic of nature, and the roar of
humanity would always move her more than the singing of waves and forest
leaves.

Her great hold upon life was the desire of dancing. This she had
fostered on many a level stretch of sward, with daisy chains hung all
about her. She had danced with damson-stained mouth like a young
Bacchante. She had danced while her companions made arches and hoops of
slender willow-stems. She had danced the moon up and the sun down; and
once, when the summer dusk was like wine cooled by woodland airs, when a
nightingale throbbed in every roadside tree and glow-worms spangled the
grass, she had taken a spray of eglantine and led an inspired band of
childish revelers down into the twinkling lamplight of Galton.

Yet this wonderful year became a date in her chronicle chiefly because
age or sunlight or wind tarnished her silver curls to that uncertain
tint which is, unjustly to mice, always called mouse-colored; so that
her arrival at Number Seventeen was greeted by a chorus of disapproval.

"Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, when she saw her. "Will you only
look at her hair?"

"What's gone with it?" asked Jenny.

"Why, what a terrible color. No color at all, you might say. I feel
quite disgusted."

"Perhaps she won't be quite such a Miss Vain now," Ruby put in.

Jenny was discouraged. The London spring was trying after Galton, and
one day, a month or two after she came back, she felt horribly ill, and
her face was flushed.

"The child's ill," said Mrs. Raeburn.

"Ill? Nonsense!" argued Charlie. "Why, look at her color. Ill? Whoever
heard? Never saw no one look better in my life. Look how bright her eyes
is."

"You ignorant man!" said his wife, and sent for the doctor.

The doctor said it was scarlet fever, and Jenny was taken away in
blankets to the hospital. She felt afraid at first in the long, quiet
ward with all the rows of nurses and palms and thin beds from which
heads suddenly popped up.

"Do you think you'll go to heaven when you die?" the charge-nurse
whispered to Jenny as she tucked her in.

"I don't care where I go," said Jenny; "as long as there isn't no
castor-oil."

As she lay waiting to get better and watched the lilac buds breaking
into flower outside the big windows, she could not help wishing she were
in Galton again, although in a way she liked the peace and regularity of
hospital life. It amused her to have breakfast at half-past five and
lunch at nine. The latter she laughed at all the time she was in the
hospital. Her convalescence was an exceptionally long one, but she had
two jolly weeks before she left, when she could run about and help to
carry the meals to the other patients. She danced once or twice then for
the benefit of the ward and was glad that everybody clapped her so
loudly. She cried when she left in August to go home to her family.




Chapter VII: _Ambition Wakes_


The great event came about because Mrs. Raeburn, in return for similar
favors in the past, went to superintend the behavior of pasty-faced
Claude and Percy so that her sister could spend a fortnight with a
brother-in-law lately elected to the Urban Council of an unimportant
town in Suffolk. So, with some misgivings on the side of his wife,
Charlie was left in charge of 17 Hagworth Street.

One day Mr. Vergoe came downstairs to ask his landlord if he would let
Jenny and Alfie and Edie accompany him to the pantomime of "Aladdin" at
the Grand Theater. Charlie saw no harm in it, and the party was
arranged. It appeared that Miss Lilli Vergoe had been temporarily
released from the second line of girls at the Orient Theater of
Varieties in order to make one of a quartette of acrobatic dancers in
the pantomime. Under the circumstances, her grandfather considered
himself bound to attend at least one performance, although he felt
rather like a mute at his own obsequies.

It was a clear winter's evening when they set out, a rosy-cheeked,
chattering, skipping party. Mr. Vergoe, wrapped in a muffler almost as
wide as a curtain, walked in the middle. Jenny held his hand. Edie
jigged on the inside, and Alfie, to whom had been intrusted the great
responsibility of the tickets, walked along the extreme edge of the
curb, occasionally jolting down with excitement into the frozen gutter.
They hurried along the wide raised pavement that led up to the theater.
They hurried past the golden windows of shops still gay with the
aftermath of Christmas. They hurried faster and faster till presently
the great front of the theater appeared in sight, when they all huddled
together for a wild dash across the crowded thoroughfare. Ragged boys
accosted them, trying to sell old programmes. Knowing men inquired if
they wanted the shortest way to the pit.

"No, thank you," said Mr. Vergoe proudly. "We have seats in the dress
circle."

The knowing men looked very respectful and moved aside from the welded
plutocracy of Edie, Alfie, Jenny and Mr. Vergoe. Fat women with baskets
of fat oranges tried to tempt them by offering three at once, but Mr.
Vergoe declined. Oranges would not be polite in the dress circle.

In the vestibule Alfie was commanded to produce the tickets. There was a
terrible moment of suspense while Alfie, nearly as crimson as the plush
all around him, dug down into one pocket after another. Were the tickets
lost? Edie and Jenny looked daggers. No; there they were: Row A, numbers
7, 8, 9, and 10. "Upstairs, please," said a magnificent gentleman in
black and gold. "This way, please," said a fuzzy-haired attendant. The
children walked over the thick carpet in awed silence. A glass door
swung open. They were in the auditorium of the Grand Theater, Islington,
in the very front row, by all that was fortunate; and, having bestowed
their hats and coats beneath the elegant and comfortable tip-up chairs,
they hung over the red-plush ledge of the circle and gazed down into
what seemed the whole of the population of London. The orchestra had not
yet come in. Down in the pit the people were laughing and talking. Up in
the gallery they were laughing and talking. Babies were crying; mothers
were comforting them. Everybody down below seemed to be eating oranges
or buns or chocolate. Alfie let his programme flutter down, and Jenny
nearly burst into tears because she thought they would all be turned out
of the theater.

The whole of the vast audience was there for enjoyment. Enjoyment was in
the air like a great thrill of electricity. What could be more
magnificent than the huge drop curtain, with its rich landscape and
lightly clothed inhabitants? What could be more exciting than the
entrance, one by one, of the amazingly self-possessed musicians?

The orchestra was tuning up. The conductor appeared to the welcoming
taps of fiddle-bows. One breathless moment he held aloft his baton and
looked round at his attentive company, then altogether the fiddles and
the drums and the flutes and the cornets, the groaning double-bass and
the 'cello and the clarinets and the funny little piccolo and the big
bassoon and the complicated French horns and the trombones and the
triangle (perhaps the best-enjoyed instrument of all) and the stupendous
cymbals started off with the overture of the Christmas pantomime of the
Grand Theater, Islington.

Could it be borne, this enthusiastic overture? Was it not almost too
much for children, this lilting announcement of mirth and beauty? Would
not Jenny presently fall head-foremost into the pit? Would not Alfie be
bound to break the seat by his perpetual leaps into the air? Would not
Edie explode in her anxiety to correct Jenny, devour bull's-eyes and see
more of a mysterious figure that kept peering through a little square
hole in the corner of the proscenium?

The orchestra stopped for a moment. A bell had rung, shrill and pregnant
with great events. Green lights appeared, and red lights: there was
hardly a sound in the house. Was anything the matter?

"They're just ringing up," said Mr. Vergoe.

Slowly the rich landscape and lightly clothed inhabitants vanished into
the roof.

"Oh!" exclaimed Jenny.

"Hush!" whispered Edie.

"My Gosh!" said Alfie.

A weird melody began. Demons leaped maliciously round a caldron. Green
demons and red demons danced with pitchforks. The caldron bubbled and
steamed. There was a crash from the cymbals. A figure sprang from the
caldron, alighting on the board with a loud "ha-ha." Evil deeds were
afoot, and desperate dialogue of good and ill.

The scene changed to a Chinese market-place. There were comic policemen,
comic laundrywomen. There was the Princess Balroubadour in a palanquin
more beautiful than the very best lampshade of the Hagworth Street
parlor. There was the splendidly debonair Aladdin. There was the
excruciatingly funny Widow Twankey. There was the Emperor with bass
voice and mustaches trailing to the ground to be continually trodden on
by humorists of every size and sort.

It would be impossible to relate every scene. It was like existence in a
precious stone, so much sparkle and color was everywhere. The cave was
wonderful. The journey to the Enchanted Palace through Cloudland was
amazing. Then there were gilded tables, heaped with gigantic fruits,
that rose from the very ground itself. There was the devilishly cunning
Abanazar. There were songs and dances and tinsel and movement and
jingles and processions and laughter and gongs and lanterns and painted
umbrellas and magic doors and an exhaustingly funny bathing scene with
real water. There was the active and slippery Genius of the Lamp, the
lithe and agile Genius of the Ring, who ran right round the ledge of the
circle and slid down a golden pillar back on to the stage amid thunders
of applause.

To Jenny, perhaps the most real excitement of all was the appearance of
her darling Lilli, first in gold and blue, and then in white, and then
in black, and finally in a dress that must have been stolen from the
very heart of a rainbow, such scintillating streams of color flickered
and gleamed and radiated from its silken folds.

How gloriously golden looked her hair, how splendidly crimson her lips,
how nobly brilliant were her eyes. And how she danced, first on one leg,
then on the other; then upside down and inside out, and over one girl
and under another. How the people clapped her and how pleased she
looked, and how Jenny waved to her till Alfie and Edie simultaneously
suppressed such an uncontrolled and conspicuous display of feelings.
Then there was the transformation scene, which actually surpassed all
that had gone before, with its bouquets of giant roses turning into
fairies, with its clouds and lace and golden rocks and jewels and silver
trees and view of magic oceans and snowy mountains and gaudy birds.

Suddenly crimson lights flared. There was a jovial shout from somewhere,
and "Here we are again!" cried Joey, as round and round to "Ring a ring
o' roses" galloped Clown and Pantaloon and Harlequin and Columbine.
Jenny looked shyly up into Mr. Vergoe's face and could just see tears
glittering in his eyes.

Down came the front cloth of the harlequinade with shops and mischievous
boys and everlastingly mocked policemen and absent-minded nursemaids and
swaggering soldiers. Inspiring were the feats achieved by the Clown,
wild were the transformations and substitutions effected by the trim and
ubiquitous Harlequin. But what Jenny loved most were the fairy entrances
of Columbine, as, like a pink feather, she danced before the footlights
and in and out of the shops. Oh, to be a Columbine, she thought, to
dance in silver and pink down Hagworth Street with a thousand eyes to
admire her, a thousand hands to acclaim the beautiful vision.

It came to an end, the pantomime of Aladdin. It came to an end with the
Clown's shower of crackers. Triumph of triumphs, Jenny actually caught
one.

"You and me will pull it," she whispered to Mr. Vergoe, clasping his
hand in childish love.

But it came to an end, the pantomime of Aladdin; and home they went
again to Hagworth Street. Home they went, all three children's hearts
afire with the potential magic of every street corner. Home they went,
talking and laughing and interrupting and imitating and recalling, while
Mr. Vergoe thought of old days. How quiet and dark Hagworth Street
seemed when they reached it.

But it was very delightful to rush in past Ruby and turn somersaults
all the way to the kitchen. It was very delightful to stand in a knot
round their father and tell him the whole story and recount each
separate splendor, while he and Mr. Vergoe sipped a glass of Mr.
Vergoe's warm whisky with a slice of lemon added. It was good fun to
disconcert Ruby by tripping her up. It was fine to seize the poker and
chase her all round the kitchen.

The bedtime of this never-to-be-forgotten evening came at last. Jenny
and Edie lay awake and traced in the ceiling shadows startling
similarities to the action of the harlequinade. Edie fell asleep, but
Jenny still lay awake, her heart going pitter-pat with a big resolve,
her breath coming in little gasps with the birth of a new ambition. She
must go on the stage. She must dance for all the world to gaze at her.
She would. She would. She must. What a world it was, this wonderful
world of the stage--an existence of color and scent and movement and
admiration.

The oilcloth of Hagworth Street seemed more than usually cold and dreary
on the following day. Alfie, too, was in a very despondent mood, having
fallen deeply in love with Miss Letty Lightbody, who had played the part
of Pekoe, Aladdin's friend and confidant. An air of staleness permeated
everything for a week. Then Mrs. Raeburn came back from Barnsbury, and
Jenny raised the question of going on the stage.

The former was very angry with her husband for allowing the visit to the
pantomime. Mr. Vergoe tried to take the blame, but Mrs. Raeburn was
determined the brunt of the storm should fall on Charlie. Jenny was
ordered to give up all ideas of the stage. Schooltime came round again,
and the would-be dancer behaved more atrociously than ever. She was the
despair of her mistresses, and at home she would sit by the fire
sulking. She began to grow thin, and her mother began to wonder whether,
after all, it would not be wiser to let her have her own way. She went
upstairs to consult Mr. Vergoe.

"You'll make a big mistake," he assured her, "if you keep her from what
she's set her heart on, so to speak. She has it in her, too. A proper
little dancer she'll make."

Mrs. Raeburn was still loath to give in. She had a dread of putting
temptation in the child's path. She did not know how to decide, while
Jenny continued to sulk, to be more and more unmanageable, to fret and
pine and grow thinner and thinner.

"Where could she go and learn this dancing?" the bewildered mother
asked.

"Madame Aldavini's," said the old clown. "That's where my granddaughter
learned."

It was a profession, after all, thought Mrs. Raeburn. What else would
Jenny do? Go into service? Somehow she could not picture her in a
parlormaid's cap and apron. Well, why not the stage, if it had got to
be? She discussed the project with her sister Mabel, who was horrified.

"A ballet-girl? Are you mad, Florence? Why, what a disgrace. Whatever
would Bill say? An actress? Better put her on the streets at once."

Mrs. Raeburn could not make up her mind.

"If any daughter of yours goes play-acting," went on Mrs. Purkiss, "I
can't allow her to come to tea with my Percy and my Claude any more, and
that's all about it."

"Jenny doesn't think going to tea with her cousins anything to wave
flags over."

"Pig-headed, that's what you are, Florence. All the years you've been a
sister of mine, I've known you for a pig-headed woman. It doesn't matter
whether you're ill or well, right or wrong, no one mustn't advise you.
That's how you come to marry Charlie."

The opposition of Mrs. Purkiss inclined her sister to give way before
Jenny's desire. It only needed a little more family interference, and
the child would be taken straight off to Madame Aldavini's School for
Dancing.

Miss Horner supplied it; for, two or three days after, a letter came
from Clapton, written in a quavering hand crossed and recrossed on thin,
crackling paper, deeply edged in black.

     CARMINIA HOUSE,

     February 20th.

     DEAR FLORENCE,

     My niece Mabel writes to tell us you intend to make your little
     girl an actress. This news has been a great shock to me. You must
     not forget that she is a granddaughter of Frederick Horner, the
     Chymist. She must not be a harlot given over to paint and powder.
     God is jealous of the safety of His lambs. This plan of dancing is
     a snare of Satan. You should read the Word, my dear niece. You will
     read of young maidens who danced before the Ark of the Covenant in
     the joy of the Lord, but that is not to say your little girl should
     dance for lewdness and gold when she might be singing the sweet
     songs of Salvation and joining in the holy mirth of the Children of
     Israel. If you had let us adopt her, this desire would not have
     come. We do not let the Devil into our house. You will be the cause
     of my death, niece, with your wicked intentions. I am an old woman
     very near to Emmanuel. This great sin must not be.

     Your loving aunt,

     ALICE HORNER.

     P. S.--I am in bed, but with the warmer weather I shall come to see
     you, my dear niece, and warn you again.--A. H.

"Good thing she is in bed," commented Mrs. Raeburn, as she finished
reading her aunt's letter.

"What's all this about Jenny going for a dancer?" asked Charlie that
evening.

"Whatever has it got to do with you, I should like to know?" said his
wife.

"Well, I am her father, when all's said and done. Aren't I?"

"And a nice example to a child. I suppose somebody's got to look after
you when I die."

"I expect the old man will die first. I've been feeling very poorly this
year."

"First I've heard of it."

"Why, only last night my finger was hurting something chronic."

"Show me."

"Be careful." Mr. Raeburn offered the sick finger for his wife's
inspection.

"I can't see nothing."

"There, blessed if I'm not showing of you the wrong hand."

"You must have been shocking bad."

"Well, it's better now."

"That's enough of you and your fingers. Why shouldn't Jenny be a
dancer?" persisted Mrs. Raeburn.

"Don't go blaring it all over the neighborhood, anyhow, and don't give
me the blame for it if anything goes wrong."

"Look here, Charlie, when I married you, I hadn't got nothing better to
do, had I?"

Charlie shook his head in sarcastic astonishment.

"Yes," went on Mrs. Raeburn. "You can wag your great, silly head, but
I'm not going to have my Jenny marrying _any_body. She's going to be
able to say, 'No, thank you,' to a sight of young chaps. And if I can't
look after her sharp when she's at the theater, I can't look after her
anywhere else, that's very certain."

"Well, I call it rank nonsense--rank nonsense, that's what I call it,
and don't you turn round on me and say I put it into her head. What
theater's she going to?"

"You silly man, she's got to learn first."

"Learn what?"

"Learn dancing--at a school."

"Learn dancing? If she's got to learn dancing, what's the sense in her
going for an actress?"

"You had to learn carpentering, didn't you?"

"Of course, but that's very different to dancing. Anybody can
dance--some better than others; but _learn_ dancing--well, there, the
ideas some women gets in their heads, it's against all nature."

"Have you finished? Because I got my washing to see to. You go and talk
it over at the 'Arms.' I reckon they've got more patience than me."

Jenny was in bed when her mother told her she should become a pupil of
Madame Aldavini.

"Aren't you glad?" she asked, as her daughter made no observation.

"Yes; it's all right," said Jenny, coldly it seemed.

"You are a comical child."

"Shall I go to-morrow?"

"We'll see."

Mrs. Raeburn thought to herself, as she left the room, how strange
children were; and, having settled Jenny's future, she began to worry
about May, who was just then showing symptoms of a weak spine, and lay
awake thinking of her children half the night.




Chapter VIII: _Ambition Looks in the Glass_


On Mr. Vergoe's recommendation, Madame Aldavini granted an interview to
Mrs. Raeburn and her daughter, and the old clown was to accompany them
on the difficult occasion.

It was a warm April day when they set out, with a sky like the matrix of
turquoise. The jagged purple clouds were so high that all felt the
outside of an omnibus was the only place on such a day. Mrs. Raeburn and
Jenny sat in front, and Mr. Vergoe sat immediately behind them, pointing
out every object of interest on the route. At least, he pointed out
everything until they reached Sadlers Wells Theater, after which
reminiscences of Sadlers Wells occupied the rest of the journey. They
swung along Rosebery Avenue and into Theobald's Road and pulled up at
last by Southampton Row. Then they walked through a maze of narrow
streets to Madame Aldavini's school, in Great Queen Street. No longer
can it be found; whatever ghosts of dead _coryphees_ haunt the portals
must spend a draughty purgatory in the very middle of Kingsway.

It was a tall, gray Georgian house, with flat windows and narrow sills
and a suitable cornice of dancing Loves and Graces over the door, which
had a large brass plate engraved with "School of Dancing," and more
bells beside it than Jenny had ever seen beside one door in her life.
She thought what games could be played with Great Queen Street and its
inhabitants, if it were in Islington and all the houses had as many
bells. Mr. Vergoe pressed a button labeled "Aldavini," and presently
they were walking along a dark, dusty passage into a little paneled room
with a large desk and pictures of dancers in every imaginable kind of
costume. At the desk sat Madame Aldavini herself in a dress of tawny
satin. Jenny thought she looked like an organ-woman, with her dark,
wrinkled face and glittering black eyes.

"And how is Mr. Vergoe?" she inquired.

"How are _you_, Madame?" he replied, with great deference.

"I am very well, thank you."

Mrs. Raeburn was presented and dropped her umbrella in embarrassment,
making Jenny feel very much ashamed of her mother and wish she were
alone with Mr. Vergoe. Then she was introduced herself, and as Madame
Aldavini fixed her with a piercing eye, Jenny felt so shy that she was
only able to murmur incoherent politeness to the floor.

The dancing-mistress got up from her desk and looked critically at the
proposed pupil.

"You think the child will make a dancer?" she said, turning sharply to
Mrs. Raeburn.

"Oh, well, really I--well, she's always jigging about, if that's
anything to go by."

Madame Aldavini gave a contemptuous sniff.

"I think she will make a very good dancer," Mr. Vergoe put in.

"You've seen her?"

"Many times," he said. "In fact, this visit is due to me--in a manner of
speaking."

"Come, we'll see what she can do," said the mistress, and led the way
out of the little room along a glass-covered arcade into the
dancing-room.

The latter was probably a Georgian ballroom with fine proportions and
Italian ceiling. A portion of it was curtained off for the pupils to
change into practice dress, and all the way round the walls was a rail
for toe-dancing. At the far end was a dais with a big arm-chair and a
piano, over which hung a large oil painting of some bygone ballet at the
Theatre de l'Opera in Paris, and also an engraving of Taglioni signed
affectionately by that great Prima Ballerina Assoluta.

Madame Aldavini rang a bell, and presently Miss Carron, her pianist and
assistant teacher, came in. Miss Carron was a Frenchwoman, who had lived
so long in London that she spoke English better than French, except in
moments of great anger, when her native tongue returned to her with an
added force of expression from such long periods of quiescence.

"What tune do you like, miss?" inquired Madame. "What is her name?
Jenny? _Si_, I have no Jenny at present."

But the would-be dancer had no tune by name.

"Play the what's it called from what's its name," suggested Mr. Vergoe,
to help matters along.

"_Hein?_" said Miss Carron sharply.

"The--you know--the--the--well, anyway, it goes like this," and he
hummed the opening bars of the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria."

"Ah!" said Miss Carron. "But that's no tune to dance to. You want
something to show off the twiddly-bits."

"Play the Intermezzo," commanded Madame Aldavini.

Miss Carron began, but Jenny could only wriggle in a shamefaced way, and
was too shy to start.

"You great stupid," said her mother.

"One, two, three, off," said Mr. Vergoe.

"You are frightened, yes? Timid? Come, I shall not eat you," declared
Madame.

At last the novice produced a few steps.

"Enough," said Madame. "I take her. She will come once a week for the
first year, twice a week for the second year, three times a week the
third year and every day--how old is she?"

"Ten."

"Every day when she is thirteen."

The further details of Jenny's apprenticeship were settled in the
little paneled room, while Jenny listened to wonderful instructions
about stockings and shoes and skirts. When it was all over the three
visitors walked out of the gray house, where Jenny was to spend so many
hours of childhood, into Great Queen Street and an April shower
sprinkling the pavement with large preliminary drops. Mr. Vergoe
insisted on standing tea at a shop in Holborn for the luck of the
adventure. Jenny's first chocolate _eclair_ probably made a more abiding
impression on her mind than the first meeting with Madame Aldavini.

So Jenny became a dancer and went, under her mother's escort, to Great
Queen Street once a week for a year.

The pupils of Madame Aldavini all wore pink tarlatan skirts, black
stockings clocked with pink, and black jerseys with a large pink A
worked on the front. There were about twenty girls in Jenny's class, who
all had lockers and pegs of their own in the anteroom curtained off by
black velvet draperies. Fat theatrical managers with diamond rings and
buttonholes sometimes used to sit beside Madame and watch the pupils.
She sat on the dais, whence her glittering black eyes and keen face
could follow the dancers everywhere. Jenny used to think the mistress
was like a black note of the piano come to life. There was something so
clean and polished and clear-cut about Madame. Her eyes, she used to
think, were like black currants. Madame's feet in black satin shoes were
restless all the while beneath her petticoats; but she never let them
appear, so that the children should have no assistance beyond the long
pole with which she used to mark the beat on the floor and sometimes on
the shoulders of a refractory dancer.

Two years rolled by, and Jenny was able to go alone now. She was
considered one of Madame Aldavini's best pupils, and several managers
wanted her for fairy parts, but Mrs. Raeburn always refused, and Madame
Aldavini, because she thought that Jenny might be spoilt by too
premature a first appearance, did not try persuasion.

As might have been expected, the instant that Jenny had her own way and
was fairly set on the road to the gratification of her wishes, she
began to be lazy. She was so far a natural dancer that nearly every step
came very easily to her. This facility was fatal, for unless she learned
at once, she would not take the trouble to learn at all. Madame used to
write home to Hagworth Street complaints of her indolence, and Mrs.
Raeburn used to threaten to take her away from the school. Then for a
very short time Jenny would work really hard.

At thirteen she went every day to the dancing school, and at thirteen
Jenny had deliciously slim legs and a figure as lithe as a hazel wand.
Her almond eyes were of some fantastic shade of sapphire-blue with deep
gray twilights in them and sea-green laughters. They were extraordinary
eyes whose under-lids always closed first. Her curls never won back the
silver they lost in the country; but her complexion had the bloom and
delicate texture of a La France rose, although in summer her straight
little nose was freckled like a bird's egg. Her hands were long and
white; her lips very crimson and translucent, but the under-lip
protruded slightly, and bad temper gave it a vicious look. Her teeth
were small, white, and glossy as a cat's. She cast a powerful
enchantment over all the other girls, so that when, from tomboy
loiterings and mischievous escorts, she arrived late for class, they
would all run round for her with shoes and petticoats and stockings,
like little slaves. Laughingly, she would let them wait upon her and
wonder very seldom why she was the only girl so highly favored. She had
a sharp tongue and no patience for the giggles and enlaced arms of
girlhood. She had no whispered secrets to communicate. She never put out
a finger to help her companions, although sometimes she would prompt the
next girl through a difficult step. She was entirely indifferent to
their adoration. As if the blood of queens ran in her veins, she
accepted homage naturally. Perhaps it was some boyish quality of
debonair assurance in Jenny that made the rest of them disinclined to
find any fault in her. She seemed as though she ought to be spoilt, and
if, like most spoilt children, she was unpleasant at home, she was very
charming abroad. Her main idea of amusement was to be "off with the
boys," by whom she was treated as an equal. There was no sentiment about
her, and an attempted kiss would have provoked spitfire rage. There was
something of Atalanta about her, and in Hellas Artemis would have
claimed her, running by the thyme-scented borders of Calydon.

Madame Aldavini, with some disapproval, watched her progress. She was
not satisfied with her pupil and determined to bring her down to the
hard facts of the future. Jenny was called up for a solo lesson. These
solo lessons, when Madame used to show the steps by making her fingers
dance on her knees, were dreaded by everybody.

"Come along now," she said, and hummed an old ballet melody, tapping her
fingers the while.

Jenny started off well enough, but lost herself presently in trying to
follow those quick fingers.

"Again, foolish one," cried the mistress. "Again, I say. Well can you do
it, if you like."

"I can't," declared Jenny sulkily. "It's too difficult."

Madame Aldavini seized her long pole and brandished it fiercely.

"Again, self-willed baby, again."

Jenny, with half a screwed-up eye on the pole, made a second attempt;
the pole promptly swung round and caught her on the right shoulder. She
began to cry and stamp.

"I can't do it; I can't do it."

"You will do it. You shall do it."

Once more Jenny started, and this time succeeded so well that it was
only at the very end of the new step that Madame angrily pushed the pole
between her pretty ankles, rattling it from side to side to show her
contempt for Jenny's obstinacy.

"For it is obstinacy," she declared. "It is not stupidity. Bah! well can
you do it, if you like."

So Madame conquered in the end with her long pole and her sharp tongue,
and Jenny learned the new and difficult step.

"Listen to me," said the former. "Do you not wish to become a Prima
Ballerina?"

"Yes," murmured Jenny, the sooner to be out of Madame's reach, and back
with the boys in Islington.

"You have not the banal smile of the _danseuse_ who takes her strength
from her teeth. You have not the fat forearm or dreadful wrist of those
idiots who take their strength from them, and, thanks to me, you might
even become a Prima Ballerina Assoluta."

The words of an old comic song about a girl called Di who hailed from
Utah and became a Prima Ballerina Assoluta returned, with its jingling
tune, to Jenny's head, while Madame was talking.

"Whistle not while I talk, inattentive one," cried her mistress, banging
the pole down with a thump.

"Have you dreams of success, of bouquets and sables and your own
carriage? Look around you, lazy one. Look at the great Taglioni whom
emperors and kings applauded. Yet you, miserable child, you can only now
make one 'cut.' Why do you come here unless you have ambition to
succeed, to be _maitresse_ of your art, to sweep through the stage door
with silk dresses? Do I choose you from the others to dance to me,
unless I wish your fortune--eh? If, after this, you work not, I finish
with you. I let you go your own pig-headed way."

Jenny did work for a while, and even persevered and practiced so
diligently as to be able to do a double cut and a fairly high beat,
sweeping all the cups and saucers off the kitchen table as she did so.
But when she had achieved this accomplishment, how much nearer was she
to a public appearance, a triumphant success? What was the use of
practicing difficult steps for the eyes of Ruby? What was the use of
holding on to the handle of the kitchen door and putting one leg
straight up till her toes twinkled over the top of it? Ruby only said,
"You unnatural thing," or drew her breath in through ridged teeth in
horrified amazement. What was the good of slaving all day? It was better
to enjoy one's self by standing on the step of young Willie Hopkins' new
bicycle and floating round Highbury Barn with curls and petticoats
flying, and peals of wild laughter. It was much more pleasant to shock
old ladies by puffing the smoke of cigarettes before them, or to play
Follow my Leader over the corrugated-iron roof of an omnibus depot.

Sometimes she took to playing truant for wind-blown afternoons by
Highgate Ponds in the company of boys, and always made the same excuse
to Madame of being wanted at home, until Madame grew suspicious and
wrote to Mrs. Raeburn.

Her mother asked why Jenny had not gone to her dancing-lesson, and where
she had been.

"I _was_ there," vowed Jenny. "Madame can't have noticed me."

So Mrs. Raeburn wrote and explained the mistake, and Jenny managed with
great anxiety to obtain possession of the letter, ostensibly in order to
post it, but really in order to tear it to a hundred pieces round the
corner.

She was naturally a truthful child, but the long restraint of childhood
had to be mitigated somehow, and lying to those in authority was no
sacrifice of her egotism, the basis of all essential truthfulness. With
her contemporaries she was always proudly, indeed painfully, frank.

This waiting to grow up was unendurable. Everybody else was emancipated
except herself. Ruby went away to be married--a source of much
speculation to Jenny, who could not understand anybody desiring to live
in a state of such corporeal intimacy with Ruby.

"I'm positive he don't know she snores," said Jenny to her mother.

"Well, what's it got to do with you?"

What, indeed, had anything to do with her? It was shocking how utterly
unimportant she was to Hagworth Street.

Edie had gone away to learn dressmaking, and Alfie had vanished into
some Midland town to learn something else, and occupying his room there
was another lodger whom she liked. Then one day he came into the kitchen
in a queer brown suit and said he was "off to the Front."

"Gone for a soldier?" said her father, when he heard of it. "Good Lord!
some people don't know when they're well off, and that's a fact."

There was nobody to inflame Jenny with the burning splendors of
patriotism. It became merely a matter of clothes, like everything else.
She gathered it was the correct thing to wear khaki ties, sometimes with
scarlet for the soldiers or blue for the sailors. It was also not
outrageous to wear a Union Jack waistcoat. But any conception of a small
nation fighting inch by inch for their sun-parched country, of a great
nation sacrificing even its sense of humor to consolidate an empire and
avenge a disgrace, was entirely outside her imaginative experience.

What had it got to do with her?

There was nobody to implant ideals of citizenship or try to show her
relation to the rest of mankind. Her education at the board school was
mechanical; the mistresses were like mental coffee-grinders, who, having
absorbed a certain number of hard facts roasted by somebody else,
distributed them in a more easily assimilated form. They tried to give
children the primary technique of knowledge, but without any suggestions
as to the manner of application. She had enough common sense to grasp
the ultimate value of drearily reiterated practice steps in dancing. She
perceived that they were laying the foundation of something better. It
was only her own impatience which nullified some of the practical
results of much academic instruction. But of her intellectual education
the foundations were not visible at all. The teachers were building on
sand a house which would topple over as soon as she was released from
attendance at school. Jenny was a sufferer from the period of transition
through which educational theories were passing, and might have been
better off under the old system of picturesque misapprehensions of
truth, or even with no deliberate education at all. It is important to
understand the stark emptiness of Jenny's mind now and for a long while
afterwards. Life was a dragging, weary affair unless she was being
amused. There had been no mental adventures since, flashing and
glorious, the idea of dancing came furiously through the night as she
lay awake thinking of the pantomime. The fault was not hers. She was the
victim of sterile imaginations. Her soul was bleak and cold as the life
of man in the days before Prometheus stole fire from heaven.

If it had not been for May, Jenny would have been even less satisfactory
than she was. But May, with her bird-like gayety--not obstreperous like
a blackbird's, but sweet and inconspicuous as the song of a goldfinch
dipping through the air above apple-orchards--May, with her easy
acceptance of physical deformity, shamed her out of mere idle
discontent. Jenny would talk to her of the dancing-school till May knew
every girl's peculiarity.

"She's funny, my sister. She's a caution, is young May. Poor kid, a
shame about her back."

They quarreled, of course, over trifles, but May was the only person to
whom Jenny would behave as if she were sorry for anything she had done
or said. She never admitted her penitence in word to anybody on earth.
It was a pleasure to Mrs. Raeburn, this fondness of Jenny for May, and
once in a rare moment of confidence, she told the elder child that she
depended on her to look after May when she herself was gone.

"With her poor little back she won't ever be able to earn her
living--not properly, and when you're on the stage and getting good
money, you mustn't leave May out in the cold."

Here was something vital, a tangible appeal, not a sentiment broadly
expressed without obvious application like the culminating line of a
hymn. Here was a reason, and Jenny clung fast to it as a drowning
seafarer will clutch at samphire, unconscious of anything save greenery
and blessed land. People were not accustomed to give Jenny reasons. When
she had one, usually self-evolved, she held fast to it, nor cared a jot
about its possible insecurity. Reasons were infrequent bits of greenery
to one battered by a monotonous and empty ocean; for Jenny's mind was
indeed sea-water with the flotsam of wrecked information, with wonderful
hues evanescent, with the sparkle and ripple of momentary joys, with the
perpetual booming of discontent, sterile and unharvested.

One breezy June day, much the same sort of day as that when Jenny danced
under the plane-tree, Madame Aldavini told her she could give her a
place as one of the quartette of dancers in a Glasgow pantomime.

"But, listen," said Madame, "what they want is acrobatic dancing. If you
join this quartette, it does not mean you give up dancing--ballet-dancing,
you understand; you will come back to me when the pantomime is over
until you are able to join the Ballet at Covent Garden. You will not
degrade your talent by sprawling over shoulders, by handsprings and
splits and the tricks which an English audience likes. You understand?"

Jenny did not really understand anything beyond the glorious fact that
in December she would be away from Hagworth Street and free at last to
do just as she liked.

Mrs. Raeburn, when she heard of the proposal, declined to entertain its
possibility. It was useless for Jenny to sulk and slam doors, and demand
furiously why she had been allowed to learn dancing if she was not to be
allowed ever to make a public appearance.

"Time enough for that in the future," said her mother. "There'll always
be plenty of theaters."

Jenny became desperate. Her dreams of a glorious freedom were fading.
That night she took to bed with her a knife.

"What are you doing with that knife?" said May.

"I'm going to kill myself," said Jenny.

Pale as a witch, she sat on the edge of the bed. White was her face as
a countenance seen in a looking-glass at dawn. Her lips were closed; her
eyes burned.

May shrieked.

"Mother--dad--come quick: Jenny's going to kill herself with the
carving-knife."

Mrs. Raeburn rushed into the room and saw the child with the blade
against her throat. She snatched away the knife.

"Whatever was you going to do?"

"I want to go to Glasgow," said Jenny; "and I'll kill myself if I
don't."

"I'll give you 'kill yourself,'" cried Mrs. Raeburn, slapping her
daughter's cheeks so that a crimson mark burned on its dead paleness.

"Well, I will," said Jenny.

"We'll see about it," said Mrs. Raeburn. Jenny knew she had won; and
deserved victory, for she had meant what she said. Her mother was
greatly perplexed. Who would look after Jenny?

Madame Aldavini explained that there would be three other girls, that
they would all live together, that she herself would see them all
established, as she had to go north herself to give the final touches to
the ballet which she was producing; that no harm would come to Jenny;
that she would really be more strictly looked after than she was at
home.

"That's quite impossible," said Mrs. Raeburn.

Madame smiled sardonically.

"However," Mrs. Raeburn went on, "I suppose she's got to make a start
some time. So let her go."

Now followed an interlude from toe-dancing--an interlude which Jenny
enjoyed, although once she nearly strained herself doing the "strides."
But acrobatic dancing came very easily to her, and progress was much
more easily discernible than in the long and tiresome education for the
ballet.

Of the other three girls who were to make up the Aldavini Quartette,
only one was still at the school. She was a plump girl called Eileen
Vaughan, three years older than Jenny, prim and, in the latter's
opinion, "very stuck up." Jenny hoped that the other two would be more
fun than Eileen. Eileen was a pig, although she liked her name.

Great problems arose in Hagworth Street out of Jenny's embarkation upon
the ship of life. So long as she had been merely a pupil of Madame
Aldavini's, family opposition to her choice of a profession had
slumbered; but with the prospect of her speedy debut, it broke out again
very fiercely.

Old Miss Horner had died soon after her letter of protest against the
dancing notion, and Miss Mary was left alone in Carminia House--in
isolated survival, a pathetic more than a severe figure. However, she
ventured to pay a visit to her niece in order to present a final
remonstrance, but she lacked the power of her two elder sisters. What
they commanded, she besought. What they declared, she hinted. Mrs.
Raeburn felt quite sorry for the poor old thing, as she nodded on about
salvation and temptation and the wages of sin. Old Miss Horner used to
be able to wing her platitudes with the flame of God's wrath, but Miss
Mary let them appear as the leaden things they really were. She made no
impression but that of her own loneliness, went back to Carminia House
after declining a slice of cherry cake, and died shortly afterwards, to
the great comfort of the Primitive Methodists of Sion Chapel, who gained
velvet cushions for the pews in consequence, and became less primitive
than ever.

Mrs. Raeburn could not help speculating for an hour or two upon the
course of Jenny's life if she had accepted her aunts' offer, but went to
sleep at the end of it thinking, anyway, it would be all the same a
hundred years hence.

Mrs. Purkiss came and registered a vow never to come again if Jenny
really went; but she had registered so many vows in her sister's hearing
that Mrs. Raeburn had come to regard them with something of that
familiarity which must ultimately dull the surprise of a Commissioner
for Oaths, and treated them as a matter of course.

Uncle James Threadgale, with face as pale and square as ever, but with
hair slightly damper and thinner, suggested that Jenny should come down
to Galton for a bit and think it over. This offer being pleasantly
declined, he gave her a roll of blue serge and asked a blessing on the
undertaking.

Charlie, having found that he was easily able to keep all knowledge of
his daughter's lapse into publicity from his fellow-workmen at the shop
in Kentish Town, decided to celebrate her imminent departure to the
boreal pole (Glasgow soon achieved a glacial topography in Hagworth
Street), by giving a grand supper-party.

"We'll have old Vergoe and Madame Neverseenher"--his witty periphrasis
for Aldavini--"and a brother of mine you've none of you never seen
either, a rare comic, or he used to be, though where he is now, well,
that wants knowing."

"What's the good of saying he's to come to supper, then?" inquired Mrs.
Raeburn.

"Only if he's about," explained Charlie. "If he's about, I'd like Jenny
here to meet him, because he was always a big hand at club concerts
twenty years ago, before he went to Africa. Arthur his name _was_."

"Oh, for goodness sake, stop your talking," said Mrs. Raeburn.

"And you can't ask Madame," announced Jenny, who was horrified by the
contemplation of a meeting between her father and the dancing-mistress.

"_And_ why not? _And_ why not? Will anybody here kindly tell me why
not?"

"Because you can't," said Jenny decidedly.

"Of course not. The child's quite right," Mrs. Raeburn corroborated.

"Well, of course, you all know better than the old man. But I daresay
she'd like to talk about Paris with your poor old dad."

However, notwithstanding the elision of all Mr. Raeburn's proposed
guests from the list of invitations, the supper did happen, and the
master of the house derived some consolation from being allowed to
preside at the head of his own table, if not sufficiently far removed
from his wife to enjoy himself absolutely. Mr. Vergoe, getting a very
old man now, came with Miss Lilli Vergoe, still a second-line girl at
the Orient Theater of Varieties, and Edie arrived from Brixton, where
she was learning to make dresses. Eileen Vaughan came, at Mrs. Raeburn's
instigation and much to Jenny's disgust, and Mr. Smithers, the new
lodger, a curly-headed young draper's assistant, tripped down from his
room upstairs. May, of course, was present, and Alfie sent a picture
postcard from Northampton, showing the after-effects of a party. This
was put upon the mantelpiece and greatly diverted the company. Mrs.
Purkiss was invited, and pasty-faced Percy and Claude and Mr. Purkiss
were also invited, but Mrs. Purkiss signalized her disapproval by taking
no notice of the invitation, thereby throwing Mrs. Raeburn into a
regular flutter of uncertainty. Nevertheless, she turned up ten minutes
late with both her offspring, to everybody's great disappointment and
Mrs. Raeburn's great anxiety, when she saw with what a will her nephews
settled down to the tinned tongue.

The supper passed off splendidly, and nearly everything was eaten and
praised. Mrs. Purkiss talked graciously to Mr. Smithers about the
prospects of haberdashery and the principles of window-dressing and,
somewhat tactlessly, about the advantage of cash registers. Charlie gave
a wonderfully humorous description of his first crossing of the English
Channel. Percy and Claude ate enormously, and Percy was sick, to his
uncle's immense entertainment and profound satisfaction, as it gave him
an excuse to tell the whole story of the Channel crossing over again,
ending up with: "It's all right, Perce. Cheer up, sonny, Dover's in
sight."

Eileen ate self-consciously and gazed with considerable respectfulness
at Miss Lilli Vergoe, who related pleasantly her many triumphs over the
snares and duplicity of the new stage manager at the Orient. Mr. Vergoe
chatted amiably with everybody in turn and made a great feature of
helping the stewed tripe. May went into fits of laughter at everything
and everybody, and Jenny discussed with Edie what style of dress should
be made from the roll of blue serge presented to her by Uncle James.

After supper everybody settled down to make the evening a complete
success.

Mr. Vergoe sang "Champagne Charlie" and "In Her Hair She Wore a White
Camelia," and Mr. Raeburn joined in the chorus of the former with a note
of personal satisfaction, while Mrs. Raeburn always said:

    "Champagne Charlie _is_ his name,
     Half a pint of porter _is_ his game."

Neither Miss Vergoe nor Miss Vaughan would oblige with a dance, to the
great disappointment of Mr. Smithers, who had hoped for a solution of
many sartorial puzzles from such close proximity to two actresses.
Jenny, however, was set on the table when the plates had been cleared
away, and danced a breakdown to the great embarrassment of Mrs. Purkiss,
who feared for pasty-faced Percy and Claude's sense of the shocking.

Percy recited Casabianca, and Claude, though he did not recite himself,
prompted his brother in so many of the lines that it became, to all
purposes, a duet. Edie giggled in a corner with Mr. Smithers, and told
the latter once or twice that he was a sauce-box and no mistake. Mr.
Smithers himself sang "Queen of My Heart," in a mildly pleasant tenor
voice, and, being encored, sang "Maid of Athens," and told Miss Vergoe,
in confidence, that several persons had passed the remark that he was
very like Lord Byron. To which Miss Vergoe, with great want of
appreciation, replied, "Who cares?" and sent Mr. Smithers headlong back
to the readier admiration of Edie.

It was a very delightful evening, indeed, whose most delightful moment,
perhaps, was Mrs. Purkiss's retirement with Percy and Claude, leaving
the rest of the party to settle themselves round the kitchen fire, roast
chestnuts, eat oranges and apples, smoke, and drink the various drinks
that became their ages and tastes.

"And what's Jenny going to call herself on the stage?" asked Mr. Vergoe.

"What _does_ the man mean?" said Mrs. Raeburn.

"Well, she must have a stage name. Raeburn is too long."

"It's no longer than Vergoe," argued Mrs. Raeburn, looking at Lilli.

"Oh, but she already had a stage name--so to speak," explained the old
man proudly. "What's Jenny's second name?"

"Pearl," said Mrs. Raeburn.

"Oh, mother, you needn't go telling everybody."

"There you are," said Charlie, who had waited for this moment fourteen
years. "There you are; I told you she wouldn't thank you for it when you
would give it her. Pearl! Whoever heard? Tut-tut!"

"Why shouldn't she call herself Jenny Pearl--Miss Jenny Pearl?" said Mr.
Vergoe. "If it isn't a good Christian name, it's a very showy stage
name, as it were--or wait a bit--what about Jenny Vere? There was a
queen or something called Jennivere--no now, I come to think of it, that
was Guinevere."

"I can't think whatever on earth she wants to call herself anything
different from what she is," persisted the mother.

"Well, I don't know either, but it's done. Even Lilli here, she spells
her first name differently--L-i-double l-i, and Miss Vaughan here, I'll
bet Vaughan ain't her own name--in a manner of speaking."

"Yes it is," said Miss Vaughan, pursing up her mouth so that it looked
like a red flannel button.

But Mr. Vergoe was right--Miss Eileen Vaughan in Camberwell was Nellie
Jaggs. Jenny soon found that out when they lived together, and wrote a
postcard to Mr. Vergoe to tell him so.

"But why must she be Jenny Pearl?" asked Mrs. Raeburn. "Although, mind,
I don't say it isn't a very good name," she added, remembering it was
her own conjunction.

"It's done," Mr. Vergoe insisted. "More flowery--I suppose--so to
speak."

So Jenny Raeburn became Jenny Pearl, and her health was drunk and her
success wished.

A few weeks afterward she stood on Euston platform, with a queer
feeling, half-way between sickness and breathlessness, and was met by
Madame Aldavini with Eileen and two older girls, and bundled into a
reserved compartment. Very soon she was waving a handkerchief to her
mother and May, already scarcely visible in the murk of a London fog.
Life had begun.




Chapter IX: _Life, Art and Love_


Eileen Vaughan was, of course, perfectly familiar to Jenny, but the two
other girls who were to be her companions for several weeks had to be
much observed during the first half-hour of the journey north.

Madame Aldavini was in a first-class compartment, as she wanted to be
alone in order to work out on innumerable sheets of paper the
arrangement of a new ballet. So the Aldavini Quartette shared between
them the four corners of a third-class compartment. Jenny felt important
to the world, when she read on the slip pasted to the window: "Reserved
for Aldavini's Quartette, Euston to Glasgow." It was written in
looking-glass writing, to be sure, but that only made the slow
deciphering of it the more delightful.

However, it was read clearly at last, and Jenny turned round once more
to look at her companions. Immediately opposite was Valerie Duval--a
French girl with black fountains of hair, with full red lips and a
complexion that darkened from ivory to warm Southern roses when the
blood coursed to her cheeks. Her eyes glowed under heavy brown lids as
she talked very sweetly in a contralto French accent. Soon she took
Jenny on her knees and said:

"You will tell me all your secrets--yes?"

To which Jenny scoffingly answered:

"Secrets? I'm not one for secrets."

"But you will confide to me all your _passions_, your loves,--yes?"

"Love?" said Jenny, looking round over her shoulder at Valerie. "Love's
silly."

Valerie smiled.

The other new friend was Winnie Ambrose--raspberries and cream and
flaxen hair and dimpled chin and upper lip curling and a snub nose. She
was one of those girls who never suggest the presence of stays, who
always wear white blouses of crepe de chine, cut low round a plump neck.
They have bangles strung on their arms, and each one possesses a locket
containing the inadequate portrait of an inadequate young man. But
Winnie was _very_ nice, always ready for a joke.

The train swept them on northwards. Once, as it slowed to make a sharp
curve, Jenny looked out of the window and saw the great express, like a
line of dominoes with its black and white carriages. There was not much
to look at, however, as they cleft the gray December airs, as they
roared through echoing stations into tunnels and out again into the
dreary light. They ate lunch, and Jenny drank Bass out of a bottle and
spluttered and made queer faces and wrinkled up her gay, deep eyes in
laughter unquenchable. They swept on through Lancashire with its
chimneys and furnaces and barren heaps of refuse. They swung clear of
these huddled populations and, through the gathering twilight, cut a way
across the rolling dales of Cumberland. Jenny thought what horrible
places they were, these sweeping moorland wastes with gray cottages no
bigger than sheep, with switchback stone walls whence the crows flew as
the train surged by. She was glad to be in the powdered, scented, untidy
compartment in warmth and light. The child grew tired and, leaning her
head on Valerie's breast, went to sleep; she was drowsily glad when
Valerie kissed her, murmuring in a whisper melodious as the splash of
the Saone against the warm piers of her native Lyons:

"Comme elle est gentille, la gosse."

Pillowed thus, Jenny spent the last hours of the journey with the dark
crossing of the border, waking in the raw station air, waking to bundles
being pulled down and papers gathered together and porters peering in
through the door. Madame Aldavini said before she left them:

"To-morrow, girls, eleven o'clock at the theater."

And all the girls said, "Yes, Madame," and packed themselves into a cab
with velvet cushions of faded peacock-blue and a smell of damp straps.
There they sat with bundles heaped on their knees, and were jolted
through the cold Glasgow streets. It was Saturday night, and all the
curbstones were occupied by rocking drunkards, except in one wide street
very golden and beautiful, from which they turned off to climb
laboriously up the cobbles of a steep hill and pull up at last before a
tall house in a tall, dark, quiet road.

They walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The big door swung open, to
Jenny's great surprise, apparently without human agency. They stood in
the well of a great winding stone staircase, while a husky voice called
from somewhere high above them to come up.

They had a large sitting-room, too full of hangings and overburdened
with photographs of rigid groups; but the fire was blazing up the
chimney and the lamp was throwing a warm and comfortable halo on the
ceiling. Jenny peeped out of the window and could see the black roofs of
Glasgow in the starlight. They had tea when they arrived, with porridge,
which Jenny disliked extremely, and oatcakes which made her cough; and
after tea they unpacked. It was settled that Jenny should sleep with
Valerie. The bedroom was cosy with slanting bits of ceiling flung
anywhere, like a box of toy bricks put carelessly away. The bed, to
Jenny's enormous diversion, was buried in a deep alcove.

"Whoever heard?" she asked.

"We'll be all to ourselves," said Valerie in her deep voice; and Jenny
felt a thrill at the idea of lying snug in the alcove with Valerie's
warm arm about her.

The sitting-room looked a very different place when the four girls had
scattered over it their various belongings, when they had flung all the
antimacassars into the corner in a cold white heap, when they had stuck
a fan-shaped line of photographs round the mirror over the
mantelpiece--photographs of fluffy-haired girls in gay dancing
attitudes, usually inscribed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge,
or Violet."

When she had pulled off most of the blobs on the valance of the
mantelpiece and examined all the photographs, Jenny sat down on the
white rabbit-skin rug with her back to the high iron fender and looked
at her companions--at Winnie sprawling over a shining leather arm-chair,
twisting one of the buttons that starred its round back, while she read
"Will He Remember?"; at Eileen, writing home to Camberwell; at Valerie,
as deep in a horse-hair sofa as the shape of it allowed, smoking a
cigarette. She thought, while she sat there in the warmth and quiet, how
jolly it was to be quit of the eternal sameness of Hagworth Street. She
almost felt that Islington no longer existed, as if up here in this
Glasgow flat she were in a new world.

"This is nice," she said. "Give us a cigarette, Val, there's a duck."

Bedtime came not at any fixed boring moment, but suddenly, with all the
rapture of an inspiration. Bedtime came with Valerie taking, it seemed,
hours to undress as she wandered round the room in a maze of white lace
and pink ribbons. Jenny lay buried in the deep feather bed, watching her
shadow on the crooked ceiling, following with drowsy glances the shadowy
combing of what, in reflection, seemed an absolute waterfall of hair.

Then suddenly Valerie blew out the candlelight.

"Oo-er!" cried Jenny. "We aren't going to sleep in the dark?"

"Of course we are, kiddie," said Valerie; and somehow darkness did not
matter when Jenny could sail off into sleep clasping Valerie's soft hot
hand.

Gray morning came with the stillness of Sunday in Glasgow, with
raindrops pattering against the window in gusts of wind, with Mrs.
McMeikan and breakfast on a tray.

"This is grand, isn't it?" said Jenny, and "Oo-er!" she cried, as she
upset the teapot all over the bed.

Then the bell had to be rung.

"Whoever heard of a bell-rope in such a place?" said Jenny, and pulled
it so hard that it broke. Then, of course, there was loud laughter, and
when Mrs. McMeikan came in again Jenny buried herself in the bedclothes
and Valerie had to explain what had happened.

"Eh, the wild wee lassie," said the landlady, and the high spirits of
the child, hidden by the patchwork quilt in the deep alcove, won the old
Scotswoman's heart, so that whatever mischief Jenny conceived and
executed under her roof was forgiven because she was a "bonnie wean, and
awfu' sma', she was thenkin', to be sent awa' oot tae airn her ain
living."

There was a rehearsal on Sunday because Madame Aldavini had to go back
on Sunday night to London. The four girls walked along the gray Glasgow
streets in the sound of the many footsteps of pious Presbyterian
worshipers, until they arrived at the stage door of the Court Theater.
Jenny asked, "Any letters for me?" in imitation of Valerie and Winnie.

"Any letters for Raeburn--for Pearl, I should say?"

Of course there was not so much as a postcard, but Jenny felt the
prouder for asking.

The rehearsal of "Jack and the Beanstalk" went off with the usual air of
incompleteness that characterizes the rehearsal of a pantomime. Jenny
found that the Aldavini Quartette were to be Jumping Beans; and Winnie
and Jenny and Valerie and Eileen jumped with a will and danced until
they shook the boards of the Court Theater's stage. Madame Aldavini went
back to London, having left many strict injunctions with the three older
girls never to let Jenny out of their keeping. But Jenny was not
ambitious to avoid their vigilance. It was necessary, indeed,
occasionally, to slap Eileen's face and teach her, but Winnie and
Valerie were darlings. Jenny had no desire to talk to men, and if lanky
youths with large tie-pins saluted her by the stage door, she passed on
with her nose as high as a church tower. And when, lured on by Jenny's
long brown legs and high-brown boots and trim blue sailor dress, they
ventured to remove the paper from their cuffs and follow in long-nosed,
fishy-eyed pursuit, Jenny would catch hold of Valerie's hand and swing
along in front of them as serenely cold as the Huntress Moon sailing
over the heads of Boeotian swineherds.

Those were jolly days in Glasgow, sweet secluded days of virginal
pastimes and young enjoyment. They danced at night in their green
dresses and scarlet bean-blossom caps. They were encored by the shrewd
Glasgow audience, who recognized the beauty and freshness and spirit of
the four Jumping Beans. They walked through the gray Glasgow weather
down Sauchiehall Street and stared at the gay shopwindows. They walked
through wind-swept Kelvin Grove. They laughed at nothing, and gossiped
about nothing, and ate large teas and smoked cigarettes and lolled in
arm-chairs and read absurd stories and listened to Mrs. McMeikan's
anecdotes with hardly concealed mirth. Nor did Mrs. McMeikan care a jot
how much they laughed at her, "sae bonny was their laughter."

Everybody in the pantomime was very kind and very pleasant to Jenny.
Everybody gave her chocolates and ribbons and photographs signed "Yours
sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge, or Violet." Everybody wanted her to
be as happy and jolly as possible. She was a great favorite with the
gallery boys, who whistled very loudly whenever she came on. She was
contented and merry. She did not feel that Winnie or Valerie or even
Eileen was trying to keep her down. She knew they were loyal and was
fond of them, but not so fond of them as they of her. Eileen, however,
thought she should be snubbed now and then.

Jenny was at a critical age when she went to Glasgow. It was the time of
fluttering virgin dreams, of quickening pulses and heartbeats
unaccountable. If Jenny had been at a high school, it would have been
the age of girlish adorations for mistresses. She might have depended
on the sanctifying touch of some older woman with sympathy. She might
have adopted the cloistral view of human intercourse, that light-hearted
world of little intimate jokes and sentimental readings and pretty
jealousies for the small advantage of sitting next some reverend mother
or calm and gentle sister.

However, it is not to be supposed that the transition from childhood to
womanhood was altogether unmarked. There were bound to be moments of
indestructible languor when she was content to be adored herself. Had
she met Abelard, Abelard could have made her an Heloise. They existed
truly enough, the passionate fevers and deep ardors of adolescence. They
flowed up in momentary caresses and died as soon in profound shynesses.
Now was the time to feed the sensuous imagination with poetry and lull
the frightened soul with music. She should have been taken to enchanted
lands.

But there was nothing.

Here was a child worthy of a Naiad's maternity, if grace of limb counted
immortally, and when for the first time she was given the world to look
at, her finite vision and infinite aspirations were never set in
relation to each other. She was given a telescope, and nobody had taken
off the shutter. Her soul was a singing bird in a cage. Freedom was the
only ideal. She might have been moved by Catholicism, but nobody gave it
to her. It may be idle to speculate on the effect of incense-haunted
chapels, of blazing windows and the dim accoutrements of Mass. Perhaps,
after all, they would merely have struck her comically. Perhaps she was
a true product of London generations, yet maybe her Cockney wit would
have glittered more wonderfully in a richer setting--haply in Lacedaemon,
with sea-green tunic blown to the outline of slim beauty by each wind
coming southward from Thessaly.

Anyway, it was impossible to think of her enticed by the ready-made
gallantries of raw-boned Sawnies by the stage door of the Court Theater.
Her temperament found greater satisfaction in Valerie's more beautifully
expressed adoration. The latter may not have roused her to encounter
life, may not have supplied a purpose, a hope or a determination, but at
least it kept her contented in the shy season of maidenhood. It helped
to steer her course between incidental viciousness and eventful passion.
She went back to Hagworth Street with no red thorns of impure
associations to fester and gather. The days went by very quickly without
any great adventures except the dance on the occasion of the pantomime's
last night. Jenny was not invited to this entertainment. She was
supposed to be too young, and her mouth went dry with disappointment and
a lump of unshed tears came into her throat, and it almost seemed as if
her heart must stop.

"I ought to go; oh, it is a shame; I ought to go."

Jenny went up of her own accord to the stage-manager himself and said:

"Please, Mr. Courtenay-Champion, why aren't I asked to the dance?"

"Good Lord!" said Mr. Courtenay-Champion. "A kid like you? No, my dear,
you're too young. It goes on too late. After the show, some hours."

But Jenny sobbed and cried, and was so clearly heart-broken by the idea
of being left out that Mr. Courtenay-Champion changed his mind and told
her she could come. She was instantly transfigured as by dazzling
sunlight after days of mist. It was to be a splendid dance, with jellies
and claret-cup, and Jenny went with Valerie to buy the widest pink sash
that ever was known, and tied it in the largest pink bow that ever was
seen. She danced every single dance and even waltzed twice with the
great comedian, Jimmy James, and, what is more, told him he couldn't
dance, to his great delight, which seems to show that Mr. James had a
sense of humor in addition to being a great comedian.

It really was a splendid evening, and perhaps the most splendid part of
it was lying in bed with Valerie and talking over with her all the
partners and taking them off with such excited demonstration of their
methods that the bed became all untucked and had to be made over again
before they could finally settle themselves down to sleep.

In February Jenny was back again in Hagworth Street, with memories of
"Jack and the Beanstalk" fading slowly like the colors of a sunset. She
had enjoyed her personal success in Glasgow, but already success was
beginning to prove itself an empty prize--a rainbow bubble easily burst.
The reason is obvious. Jenny had never been taught to concentrate her
mind. She had no power of retrospective analysis. The applause endured a
little while in her meditations, but gradually died away in the
occupations of the present. She could not secure it as the basis of a
wider success on the next occasion. She began to ask: "What's the good
of anything?" Within a few weeks of the resumption of ordinary life, the
Glasgow theater had become like a piece of cake that one eats
unconsciously, then turns to find and discovers not. She was no farther
forward on the road to independence. She became oppressed by the dead
weight of futurity.

At home, too, there was a very real repression, which she grew to hate
more and more deeply on each occasion of its exercise. A breath of
maternal interference and she would fly into a temper--a scowling,
chair-tilting, door-slamming rage. She would fling herself out of the
house with threats never to return. One day when she was reproached with
staying out longer than she was allowed, she rushed out again and
disappeared. Her mother, in despair, went off to invoke the aid of
Madame Aldavini, who wisely guessed that Jenny would be found with
Valerie Duval. There she was, indeed, in Valerie's rooms in Soho, not at
all penitent for her misbehavior, but sufficiently frightened by
Madame's threat of expulsion to come back home without argument.

Freedom was still Jenny's religion. She was much about with boys, but
still merely for the life and entertainment of their company, for no
sentimental adventures. It would have been wiser to let her alone, but
nobody with whom she was brought into contact could realize the
sexlessness of the child. The truest safeguard of a girl's virtue is
familiarity with the aggregated follies of masculine adolescence.

Jenny fought her way desperately into her seventeenth year, winning
freedom in jots. She liked most of anything to go to Collin's Music-hall
with a noisy gang of attendant boys, not one of whom was as much a
separate realized entity to her as even an individual sheep is to a
shepherd. Alfie came home in the summer before her seventeenth birthday
and abetted cordially her declarations of independence. May, too, was
implicated in every plot for the subversion of parental authority.

Mrs. Raeburn worried terribly about her daughter's future. She ascribed
her hoyden behavior to the influence of the stage.

"We don't want your theatrical manners here," she would say.

"Well, who put me on the stage?" Jenny would retort.

In the Christmastide after Alfie came home Jenny went to Dublin in a
second Aldavini Quartette, and enjoyed herself more than ever. She had
now none of the desire for seclusion that marked her Glasgow period, no
contempt of man in the abstract, and was soon good friends with a
certain number of young officers whom she regarded much as she regarded
the boys of Islington.

One of them, Terence O'Meagh, of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers, made her
his own special property; he was a charming good-looking, conceited
young Irishman, as susceptible to women as most of his nation, and
endowing the practice of love with as little humor as most Celts. He
used to wait at the stage door and drive her back to her lodgings in his
own jaunting car. He used to give her small trinkets so innocently
devoid of beauty as almost to attract by their artlessness. He was a
very young officer who had borne the blushing honors of a scarlet tunic
for a very short while, so that, in addition to the Irishman's naive
assumption of universal popularity, he suffered from the sentiment that
a soldier's red coat appeals to every woman.

Jenny, with her splendid Cockney irreverence, thought little of Mr.
O'Meagh, less of his red coat, but a very great deal of the balmy
February drives past the vivid green meadows of Liffey.

"You know," Terence would say, leaning gracefully over the division of
the car, "you know, Jenny, our regiment--the 127th of the Line, as we
call ours--was absolutely cut to pieces at Drieufontein; and at
Riviersdorp they held the position against two thousand Boers."

"Who cares?" said Jenny.

"You might take a little interest in it."

"Well," said Jenny, "how can I?"

"But you might be interested because, after all, it is my regiment, and
I'm awfully fond of you, little girl."

"Don't be soppy," Jenny advised him.

"You're so cursedly matter-of-fact."

"Eh?"

"So--oh, well, damn it, Jenny, you don't seem to care whether I'm with
you or not."

"Why should I?"

"Any other girl would be fond of me."

"Ah--any other girl would."

"Then why aren't you?"

"Oh, you'll pass in a crowd."

"Dash it, I'm frightfully in love with you," vowed Terence.

"What's the good of spoiling a fine day by being silly?"

"Damn it, nobody else but me would stick your rudeness."

And Terence would sulk, and Jenny would hum, and the jaunting car would
go jaunting on.

On the last night of the pantomime Mr. O'Meagh called for her as usual,
and, as they drove off, said:

"Look here, Miss Jenny, you're coming back to my rooms with me
to-night."

"Am I?" said Jenny. "That's news."

"By Jove, you are!"

"No fear."

"You shall!"

Terence caught hold of her hand.

"Let me go," Jenny said.

"I'm damned if I will. Look here, you know, you can't make a fool of an
Irishman."

"That's quite right," Jenny agreed.

"When an Irishman says he'll have a thing, he'll have it."

"Well, you won't have Jenny Pearl."

"Look here, I've been jolly good to you. I gave you----"

"What?" interrupted Jenny in dangerous tones. "Look!"

She unbuckled a wrist-watch and flung it into the road.

"There's your watch, anyway. Going to get down and pick it up?"

Terence whipped up the horse.

"You little devil, you shall come with me."

Jenny caught hold of the reins.

"Shut up!" said O'Meagh. "Shut up! Don't you know better than that?"

"Well, stop," said Jenny.

The subaltern, in order to avoid a scene, stopped.

"Look here," Jenny told him. "You think yourself a lad, I know, and you
think girls can't say 'no' to you; but I can, see? You and your little
cottages for two! Not much!" and Jenny slipped down from the car and
vanished.

"Men," she said to Winnie Ambrose, the only one left of the Glasgow
Quartette. "Men! I think men are awful. I do. Really. Conceited! Oh, no;
it's only a rumor."

It had been arranged by Madame Aldavini that Jenny, on her return from
Dublin, should join the ballet of the opera at Covent Garden.
Unfortunately her first appearance in London had to be postponed for a
year owing to the fact of there being no vacancy. Jenny was
disheartened. It was useless for Madame Aldavini to assure her that the
extra year's practice would greatly benefit her dancing. Jenny felt she
had been practicing since the world was made. She continued to practice
because there was nothing else to do, but time had quenched the fire of
inspiration. She was tired of hearing that one day she might, with
diligence and application, become a Prima Ballerina. She knew she was a
natural dancer, but Terpischore having endowed her with grace and
lightness and twinkling feet, left the spirit that could ripen these
gifts to some other divinity. She had, it is true, escaped the doom of
an infant prodigy, but it might have been better to blossom as a prodigy
than to lie fallow when the warmth and glory of the footlights were
burning without her.

Meanwhile Hagworth Street had not changed much in seventeen years. The
tall plane-tree at the end was taller. The London County Council, not
considering it possessed any capacity for decoration, had neglected to
lop off its head, and, as there was no other tree in sight, did not
think it worth the trouble of clipping to an urban pattern. Year by year
it shed its bark and, purged of London vileness, broke in May fresh and
green and beautiful. In October more leaves pattered down, more leaves
raced along the gutters than on the night of Jenny's birth. The gas-jets
burned more steadily in a mantle of incandescent light. This method of
illumination prevailed indoors as well as outside, shedding arid and
sickly gleams over the front-parlor of Number Seventeen, shining, livid
and garish, in the narrow hall. The knob was still missing from the
bedstead, and for seventeen years Charlie had promised to get a new one.
Charlie himself had changed very slightly. He still worked for the same
firm in Kentish Town. He still frequented the "Masonic Arms." He cared
less for red neckties and seemed smaller than of old. Yet he could drink
more. If his hair was thinner, his eyebrows, on the other hand, were
more bushy, because he blew off his old ones in the course of an
illustrated lecture on the management of gas-stoves. For the constant
fingering of his ragged moustache, he substituted a pensive manipulation
of his exceptional eyebrows.

Mr. Vergoe was dead, and most of his property adorned his
granddaughter's room in Cranbourne Street. She was still a second-line
girl in the _Corps de Ballet_ of the Orient Palace of Varieties. Jenny,
however, possessed the picture of the famous dead Columbine. It hung
above the bed she shared with May, beside a memorial card of the donor
set in a shining black Oxford frame. The room itself grew smaller every
year. Jenny could not imagine that once to Edie and herself it had been
illimitable. Nowadays it seemed to be all mahogany wardrobe, and
semicircular marble-topped washstand and toilet-table and iron bedstead.
On the door were many skirts and petticoats. On the walls were
shrivelled fans with pockets that held curl-papers mostly. There was
also a clouded photograph of Alfie, Edie, Jenny and May, of which the
most conspicuous feature was the starched frills of Jenny, those
historic frills that once, free of petticoats, had seemed a talisman to
masculinity. The toilet-table was inhabited by a collection of articles
that presented the most sudden and amazing contrasts. Next to a comb
that might easily have been rescued from a dustbin was a brush backed
with silver repousse. Beside seven broken pairs of nail-scissors was a
scent-bottle with golden stopper. Jenny's nightgown was daintily
ribboned and laced, and looked queerly out of place on the pock-marked
quilt.

Mrs. Purkiss still visited her sister, but Jenny was not allowed to
associate with Percy or Claude, both more pasty-faced than ever, because
Percy was going to be a missionary and Claude was suspected of premature
dissipation, having been discovered kissing the servant in the bathroom.

Mrs. Raeburn, in the jubilee of her age, was still a handsome woman, and
was admired even by Jenny for her smartness. She still worried about the
future of her children. She was more than ever conscious of her
husband's inferiority and laughed over most of the facts of her life.
May's back, however, and Jenny's perpetual riotousness caused her many
misgivings. But Alfie was doing well, and Edie seemed happy, making
dresses over at Brixton. There had been no recurrence of Mr. Timpany,
and she now viewed that episode much as she would have regarded a
trifling piece of domestic negligence. As for the Miss Horners, their
visit had long faded absolutely from her mind. It would have taken a
very great emotional crisis to inspire such another speech as she made
to them seventeen years ago. Charlie still snored beside her, as he had
snored in sequel to seven or eight thousand nightly undressings. She
still saw to the washing, added up the accounts, bought a new dress in
the spring and a new bonnet in the autumn. She still meant to read the
paper this week, but never had time, and every night she hoped that all
would go smooth. This habit of hope was to her what the candle-lit
chapter of a Bible with flower-stained pages or counterpane prayers or
dreams of greatness are to minds differently constituted. Her life was
by no means drab, for she went often to the theater, and occasionally to
the saloon bar of a discreet public-house, where, in an atmosphere of
whisky and Morocco leather, she would sometimes listen to Mrs. Purkiss's
doubts of Jenny's behavior, but more often tell diverting tales of
Charlie.

Such was Hagworth Street, when, on a cold Sunday in the front of May,
Edie came over from Brixton. She looked pale and anxious as she sat for
a while in the kitchen twisting black kid gloves round her fingers.

"How's Brixton, Edie?" asked her mother.

"Grand."

"You've not been up to see us for a long time."

"No-o-o," agreed the eldest daughter.

"Busy?"

"Not so very. Only you never know when you will be. I'll go upstairs and
take my things off. Come with us Jenny," she said, turning to her
sister.

"There's a cheek. Whatever next?"

"Oh, you are hateful! Come on up."

Jenny, with every appearance of unwillingness, followed Edie upstairs,
and flung herself down on the bed they had once shared.

"Don't be all night," she protested, as she watched Edie staring
aimlessly at herself in the glass.

"Jenny," said the latter suddenly, "I done it."

"Done what?"

"Myself, I suppose."

"What d'ye mean?"

"You know," said Edie.

"Oh, yes, I know, that's why I'm asking."

"You remember that fellow I was going about with?"

"Bert Harding?"

"Yes, Bert."

"You're never going to marry him, Edie?"

"I got to--if I can."

Jenny sat up on the bed.

"You don't mean----"

"That's right," said Edie.

"Whatever made you?"

"I am a fool," said Edie helplessly.

"Whatever will Alfie say?" Jenny wondered.

"What's it got to do with Alfie?"

"I don't know, only he's very particular. But this Bert of yours, I
suppose he will marry you?"

"He says so. He says nothing wouldn't stop him."

"Are you mad to marry him?"

"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 had _got_ to 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.




Chapter X: _Drury Lane and Covent Garden_


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 antennae 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 one of 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.

"Men _are_ fools," 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 on

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