Carnival Part 23

And of course they pointed out that she was much too young to come to so wicked a place as Covent Garden. And of course, with every good intention, they offered to escort her home at once.

With the seven young men's admiration Jenny agreed.

"I am sweet, aren't I? Oh, I'm a young dream, if you only knew."

And as a dream was she elusive. She gloried in her freedom. She was glad she was not in love. She had no wish to do anything but enjoy herself to the top of her bent. And she succeeded. Then at half-past six o'clock of a raw November morning, she rumbled home to Hagworth Street in a four-wheel cab with five other girls--a heap of tangled lace. She went upstairs on tiptoe. She undressed herself somehow, and in the morning she woke up to find on each wrist, as testimony of the night's masquerade, a little pink bow, soiled and crumpled.

She went often after that first visit and had many adventures. On one occasion she fell in with the handsome wife of a Surrey publican, and drove back after breakfast beside her to whatever Surrey village Mrs.

Argles astonished with her figure and finery. Irene came, too, and the girls went to bed in a dimity-hung bedroom and were taken for a drive in the afternoon and sat so long in the cosy bar-parlor watching the dusk stealing through the misted trees that they decided to send a telegram to the theater announcing their illness. Then they stayed another night and went for another drive, laughing and chatting down the deep Surrey lanes. After dinner Jenny went back to Hagworth Street, and had a flaming quarrel with her mother, who accused her of "going gay"; demanded to know how she dared put in an appearance dressed in another woman's clothes; insisted that she was to come home immediately after the theater; forbade a hundred things, and had the door slammed in her face for the advice. There were mad days as well as spangled nights.

There were days at the Zoo with Bill Fur, a schoolmaster always full of information until he found his hat in the middle of the giraffes'

enclosure, or perceived his gloves viewed with dislike by a ca.s.sowary.

Bill Fur, however, would gladly have lost more than gloves or hat to be free for a while from the Margate school where he taught delicate boys the elements of Latin. To himself he was Don Juan in bravery of black satin slashed with purple. To the girls he was, as Jenny put in, a scream. To the world, he was a rather foolish middle-aged schoolmaster.

Perhaps it was Colonel Walpole who first suggested to Jenny that all men were not merely ridiculous. From his seat in the front row of stalls, he perceived her charm; sent round a note to the stage door; took her out to supper and champagne. When he found she was a good girl, he seemed to like her more than ever, and gave her tea in the flat whose windows looked over the sunlit tree-tops of Green Park. He also gave her some pretty dresses and hats. The other girls whispered and giggled when Jenny's back was turned. Her mother was sharply inquisitive and extremely suspicious.

"Who cares?" said Jenny. "There's _nothing_ in it."

Colonel Walpole took her for long motor drives, gave her salmon mayonnaise at Weybridge, chicken mayonnaise at Barnet, salmon mayonnaise at Henley, chicken mayonnaise at Cobham, and lobster _au gratin_ at Brighton. Colonel Walpole was very paternal, and Jenny liked him. He had a cool, clean appearance and a pleasant voice. Whatever may have been his ultimate intentions, he behaved very well, and she was sorry when he went away on a Tibetan shooting expedition.

"My friend, the Prince, has gone away," she told the girls; and "don't laugh," she added, "because I _don't_ like it."

Jenny was nineteen. The mark of the Orient was not yet visible. A few roses had withered, but eighteen months of the fusty old theater had been balanced by laughter outside. There seemed to be no end of her enjoyment of life. In essentials she was younger than ever. Mrs. Raeburn worried ceaselessly; but her daughter was perfectly well able to look after herself. Indeed, the mistakes she made were due to wisdom rather than folly. She knew too much about men. She had "properly rumbled" men.

She was too much of a cynic to be taken in. Her only ambition was excitement; and love, in her opinion, did not provide it. She was always depressed by the sight of lovers. She hated the permanency of emotion that their perpetual a.s.sociation implied. She and Irene liked to choose a pair from the group of men who waited by the stage door, as one picks out two horses for a race. The next evening the pair of last night would be contemptuously ignored, and a fresh couple dangled at the end of a string as long as their antics were novel enough to divert.

Jenny still vowed she had no intention of remaining at the Orient, and if people asked her about her dancing, she mocked.

"What's the good of working? You don't get nothing for it. I _could_ have danced. Yes, once. But now. Well, I can now, only I don't want to.

See? Besides, what's the good?"

If anyone had foretold a career, she would have mocked louder.

"You don't know the Orient; I reckon they don't _want_ to see a girl get on at the Orient. If you make a success in one ballet, you're crushed in the next."

One morning Jenny looked at herself in the gla.s.s.

"May," she called out, "I think if I was to get old, I'd drown myself.

I would really. Thirty! What a shocking idea!"

"Why, you're only nineteen."

"Yes, I know, but I _shall_ be thirty. Thirty! What an unnatural age!

Who cares? Perhaps I sha'n't never be thirty."

Chapter XII: _Growing Old_

In her twentieth year, when the Covent Garden season of b.a.l.l.s was over, the dread of growing old sometimes affected Jenny. It came upon her in gusts of premonition and, like a phantom, intruded upon the emptiness of her mind. The nervous strain of perpetual pleasure had made her restless and insecure. Day by day she was forced into a still greater dependence on trivial amus.e.m.e.nt, notwithstanding that every gratified whim added the lean ghost of another dread hour to haunt her memory. Headaches overtook her more easily now, and fits of depression were more frequent.

She was vaguely aware that something could cure her discontent, and once or twice in moments of extreme weakness caught herself envying the girls who seemed so happy with their mild lovers. She began to contemplate the prospect of mating with one of the swains who inhabited, awkwardly enough, the desolation of Sunday evenings. She even went so far as to award the most persistent an afternoon at the Hackney Furnishing Company; but when, blushful and stammering, he discussed with the shopman the comparative merits of bra.s.s and iron bedsteads, Jenny, suddenly realizing the futility of the idea, fled from the jungle of furniture.

These negotiations with domesticity drove her headlong into a more pa.s.sionate pursuit of folly, so that, with the colorless shadow of mere matrimony filling her soul, her clutch upon the sweet present became more feverish. She watched the adventures of girlhood fall prettily about her; saw them like unsubstantial snowflakes that are effective only in acc.u.mulation. Yet the transitory lovers of the stage door were beginning also to become intolerable. She could not brook, so slim and proud was she, their immediate a.s.sumption of proprietorship. She hated the cheapening of her kisses and their imperviousness to her womanhood.

Where among these eager-handed wooers was the prince of destiny? Not he with box-pleats underneath his eyes, nor he with the cold, slick fingers, nor he peppered with blackheads. Love was a myth, a snare, a delusion of women, who sacrificed their freedom in marriage. She remembered how in old days Santa Claus had turned into her mother on tiptoe. Love was another legend. The emotion that begot the fancy of armed boyhood mischievous to man was as incredible to her as the dimpled personification is to a Hyde Park materialist.

Jenny asked Irene if the love of Danby had brought her satisfaction.

When her friend said she rather liked him, she inquired what was the good of it all.

"I think he's making a proper fool of you. Why don't _I_ fall in love?

Because I'm not so soft. Besides, you're not in love. You're just walking round yourselves having a game with each other."

"Oh, well, what of it?" said Irene sulkily.

"Don't be silly. I never knew such a girl as you. You can't talk sensible for a minute. I want to know what this love is."

"You'll find out one day."

"Ah, one day. _One_ day I shall go and drown myself. Irene Dale, I think I'm funny. I do really. Sometimes I can dance all over the place and kick up a shocking row, laughing and that. And then I cry. Now what about? I ask you. What have I got to cry about? Nothing. I just sit and cry my eyes out over nothing."

Jenny was beginning to take an interest in herself. Introspection was dawning on her mind. She did not practice the meditation of age, infirmity and death; when these spectres confronted her, she dismissed them as too impalpable to count. Nor did she examine her conscience arduously like a Catholic neophyte. Unreasonable fits of weeping and long headaches were, nevertheless, very disconcerting; and she was bound to search her mind for the cause.

The first explanation that presented itself was age; but she was unwilling to admit the probability of growing old at twenty, and turned to health for the reason. She could not honestly a.s.sert that she was ill. Then she asked herself if disappointment was the cause, and wondered whether, if she were suddenly invited to head the Orient playbill, she would be exhilarated out of tears forever. Finally she decided, breathless in the solitude of a warm May dusk, that she wanted to fall in love. Desire, winged with the scent of lilac blossom, stole in through the sapphire window. Desire flooded her soul with ineffable aspirations. Desire wounded her heart as she whispered, timidly, faintly, "darling, my darling." From that moment she began to seek the unknown lover in the casual acquaintance. She began to imagine the electric light shining in the blue eyes of some newly-met fellow was not electric light at all. She would meet him on the next day, and, beholding him starkly dull, would declare again that men were "awful."

The readiness with which they all capitulated puzzled her. Why was she attractive? Irene told her she made eyes; but this was false, or, if she did make eyes, they were made unconsciously. Men told her she led them on. There must be some lure in her personality fatal long before she attempted to exercise it; for, though latterly she had been deliberately charming to most men at first, she was so very ungracious the following day that anybody else but a man would have left her alone. The poor fools, however, seemed actually to rejoice in her hardness of heart.

Moreover, why had this fascination never helped her to renown? She could dance better than many of the girls who were given _pas seuls_; but she had never escaped from the front line of boys. What was the good of working? Nothing came of it. She remained obscure and undefined to the public. It was not hers to trip from a rostrum into the affection of an audience. It was not hers to acknowledge the favor of applause by taking a call. There was no shower of carnations or rain of violets round her farewell curtseys. If she never danced again, it would not matter. Half bitterly she recalled the spangled dreams of childhood, and revived the splendor of a silver and pink ballet-skirt that now would seem such tawdry, trumpery apparel.

"Fancy," she said to May; "I used to want to be a Columbine and dance about Islington. Think of it. What an unnatural child!"

Columbine appeared fitfully in the Ballet-divertiss.e.m.e.nts that opened the Orient's entertainment, but Jenny never portrayed that elusive personage. Certainly she played Harlequin once, when a girl was ill; and very gay and sweet she looked in the trim suit checkered with black and gold.

Jenny wondered why she had longed to grow up.

"I used to think that it was glorious to be grown up. But there's nothing in it. There might be, but there isn't. I wish I could be what I thought I would be as a kid."

"Oh, Jenny, don't talk so much, and get dressed," said Irene. "Aren't you coming out to-night?"

"I suppose so," Jenny answered. "I wish I couldn't. I wish I'd _got_ to meet somebody. There, now I've told you."

"Hark at her. Hark at Jenny Pearl."

"Oh, well, I'm sick of going out with _you_."

Irene sulked awhile; then asked:

"Have you seen the peroxide they've sent up for our arms?"

"Oo-er! Why?"

"Mr. Walters said all the girls was to use it."