Carnival Part 20

"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 rehea.r.s.e hard for the ballet at Covent Garden, but there was still plenty of time in the lengthening spring dusks with their silver stars and luminous horizons, to fool plenty of men. There was a quarrelsome interlude with Alfie on this account. The latter had rashly presented one of his own friends for Jenny's sport. The friend had spent most of his income on chocolates and pit-stalls, and at one swoop a whole week's salary on a garnet bracelet.

"Look here," said Alfie, "don't you get playing your tricks on any of my friends, because I won't have it."

"Hark at him. Hark at Alfred Proud. As if your friends were better than anyone else's."

"Well, I'm not going to have fellows say my sister's hot stuff."

"Who did?"

"Never mind who did. Somebody said it."

"Arthur?"

Arthur was the melancholy Romeo introduced by Alfie.

"Somebody said you was to Arthur."

"And what did he do?"

"He was quite disgusted. He walked away."

"Didn't he have a fight over it?"

"No. He said he would have done, only you treated him so off-hand."

"Well, he needn't come whistling outside for me no more."

"You're not going to chuck him?"

"Chuck him? I never had him. He worried me to go out with him. I didn't want to go."

"You'll get a bullet in your chest one of these days. You'll get shot."

"Not by one of your ma.s.sive friends."

"Why not?"

"Why, there isn't hardly one of 'em as would have the pluck to hold a pistol, and not one as would have the money to buy one."

"Well, don't say I never told you."

"You and your friends' pistols!"

With the pride and insolence of maiden youth, Jenny took the London streets. Through the transient April rains she came from Islington to Covent Garden every day. From King's Cross she rode on the green omnibus that jogged by the budding elms of Brunswick Square. Down Guilford Street she rode and watched its frail inhabitants coming home with their parcels of ribbons and laces. Through Great Queen Street into Long Acre she came, sitting along on the front seat of the green omnibus more like a rosy lily now than a La France rose--down Long Acre till she came to Bow Street, through which she would run to the theater past the groups of porters who nodded and smiled at her, for they soon recognized the swift one running through the April rains.

Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for "Tannhauser," thinking the Venusberg ballet very poor and Venus herself a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence, but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight.

To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a cla.s.sical feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.

The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultation to the heart of the wearied listener. Moreover, she had a very real sense of being a square peg in a round hole when she and the other minions of Venus tripped round the frequent rocks of Venusberg. It was as if a confectioner had stuck a shepherdess of pink icing on the top of a plum-pudding. Jenny felt, in her own words, that it was all unnatural. There was nothing of Walpurgis in their stereotyped allurement. It was Bobbing Joan in Canterbury Close. The violins might wail through the darkened opera house, but an obese Tannhauser caught by the wiles of an adipose Venus during the inexpressive seductions of an Italian ballet was silly; the poses to be sustained were fatiguing and ineffective. More fatiguing still was Jenny's almost unendurable waiting as page while the compet.i.tors sang to Elizabeth. There were four pages in purple velvet tunics. Jenny looked her part, but the other three looked like Victoria plums. The one scene in German opera that she really enjoyed was the Valkyries' ride, when she and a few selected girls were strapped high up to the enchanted horses and rocked exhaustingly through the terrific clamor.

But these excursions into Gothic steeps among the distraught populations of the north were not the main feature of the opera season. They were a _tour de force_ of rocks in a dulcet enclosure. Over Covent Garden hung the magic of an easy and opulent decoration. It sparkled from the tiaras in the grand circle. It flashed from the tie-pins of the ba.s.ses, from the rings of the tenors. It breathed on the oceanic bosoms of the contraltos. It trembled round the pleated hips of the sopranos.

Everything was fat--a pasha's comfortable dream.

Jenny, being little and svelte, was distressed by the prevalent sumptuousness. A fine figure began to seem a fine ambition.

"My dear child, you are thin," some gracious prima donna would murmur richly just before she tripped on to the stage to play consumptive Mimi.

Jenny could not see that she was advancing to fame at Covent Garden. Nor was she, indeed, but Madame Aldavini tried to console her by insisting upon the valuable experience and pointing out the products of success that surrounded her. Covent Garden was only a stepping-stone, Madame reminded her.

Here she was at seventeen without a chance to display her accomplishments. It was more acting than dancing at Covent Garden.

Jenny, too, was always chosen for such voiceless parts as were important. Some of these she did not like. In Rigoletto, for instance, Previtale, the great singer, expressed a wish that she should play the girl in the sack whom he was to fondle. Jenny did not like being fondled. Other girls would have loved the conspicuous attractions of Previtale, but Jenny thought his breath was awful, as indeed it was.

Her princ.i.p.al friend at Covent Garden was a girl called Irene, or rather spelled Irene, for she was always called Ireen. Irene Dale was a mixture of the odd and the ordinary in her appearance. At first glance she seemed the commonplace type produced in hundreds by English _coulisses_.

Perhaps the expression of her face in repose first suggested a possibility of distinction. The intensely blue eyes in that circ.u.mstance had a strange, listless ardor, as if she were dreaming of fiery moments fled long ago. The blue eyes were enhanced by hair, richly brown as drifted leaves under the sunlight. Her mouth was prettiest when she was being pleasantly teased. Her nose came to an end, and then began again.

Her chin was deeply cleft and her complexion full of real roses. In the company of Jenny, Irene gave an impression of slowness; not that Jenny, except when late for rehearsal, ever seemed in a hurry, but with her there was always the suggestion of a tremulous agility. Irene had been at Madame Aldavini's school, where she and Jenny in their childhood had wasted a considerable amount of time in romping, but, since they never happened to go on tour together, they never achieved a girlish friendship until at Covent Garden they found themselves dressing next to each other.

Jenny tried to inspire Irene with the hostility to men felt by herself.

But Irene, although she enjoyed the lark, had a respect for men at the bottom of it all, and would not always support Jenny in the latter's freely expressed contempt. While she was at Covent Garden, Irene met a young man, unhealthily tall, who made much of her and gave her expensive rings, and for a fancy of his own took her to a fashionable milliner's and dressed her in short skirts. Jenny had heard something of Irene's Danby and was greatly annoyed by the latter's unsympathetic influence.

"Your Danby," she would protest. "Whatever can you see in him? Long idiot!"

"My Danby's a gentleman," said Irene.