Carnival Part 14

"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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body to implant ideals of citizens.h.i.+p 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 a.s.similated 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 pa.s.sing, 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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-gla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.h.i.+p 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 plat.i.tudes with the flame of G.o.d'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 cus.h.i.+ons 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.