Carnival Part 17

"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, d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.s 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?"

"d.a.m.n it, n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sure 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 Terpisch.o.r.e 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, s.h.i.+ning, livid and garish, in the narrow hall. The k.n.o.b 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 ill.u.s.trated lecture on the management of gas-stoves. For the constant fingering of his ragged moustache, he subst.i.tuted 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.sociate 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 was.h.i.+ng, 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 const.i.tuted. 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."