Carnival Part 13

"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 apprentices.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s, 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 b.u.t.tonholes 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 a.s.sistance 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.surance 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 h.e.l.las 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 ba.n.a.l 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 a.s.soluta."

The words of an old comic song about a girl called Di who hailed from Utah and became a Prima Ballerina a.s.soluta 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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.