Carnival Part 43

"Like we used to wear in Boheme in the Opera?"

"That's it. You must see about your dresses at once. Good ones will cost about ten pounds to hire, and that ought to include some decent paste."

"We sha'n't have to pay for _our_ tickets."

"Good. Four guineas saved. Dresses? Say twenty pounds for the eight of us. Supper with fizz another ten quid. Four salmon-colored taxis with tips, ten pounds."

"How much?" Jenny exclaimed. "Ten pounds just to take us to Covent Garden Ball and back?"

"Ah, but I've a plan. These salmon-colored taxis are going to be the _chef d'oeuvre_ as well as the _hors d'oeuvre_ of the entertainment.

Hush, it's a secret. Let me see, our tickets--four guineas--forty-four pounds four shillings. Well, say fifty quid to include all tips and breakfast."

"Well, I think it's too much," Jenny declared.

"Not too much for an evening that shall be famous over all evenings--an evening that you, my Jenny, will remember when you're an ancient old woman--an evening that we'll talk over for the rest of our lives."

While Maurice was speaking, the shadow of a gigantic doubt pa.s.sed over Jenny's mind. She endured one of those moments when only the profound uselessness of everything has any power to impress the reason. She suffered a complete loss of faith and hope. The moment was one of those black abysses before which the mind is aghast at effort and conceives annihilation. In the Middle Ages such an experience would have been ascribed to the direct and personal influence of Satan.

"What's the matter?" Maurice asked. "You look as if you didn't believe me."

But, while the question was still on his lips, the shadow pa.s.sed, and Jenny laughed.

The famous evening was finally a.s.signed to the twenty-seventh of January. The four girls took their places in the ballet as usual and, meeting from time to time in evolutions, would murmur as they danced by, "To-night, what, what?" or "Don't you wish it was eleven?" They would look at each other, too, from opposite sides of the stage, smiling in the sympathy of antic.i.p.ated pleasure. When the curtains fell they hurried to their dressing-rooms to exchange tights and spangles for mid-Victorian frocks, whose dainty lace made all the other girls very envious indeed. Some were so envious as to suggest to Jenny that another color would have suited her better than pink or that her hair would be more becoming _en chignon_ than curled. But Jenny was not deceived by such professions of amiable advice.

"Yes, some of you would like to see me with my hair done different. Some of you wouldn't be half pleased if I went out looking a sight. Oh, no, it's only a rumor. Thanks, I'm not taking any. I know what suits me better than _any_one, _which_ pink does."

"Don't take any notice of them," Maudie whispered to her friend.

"Take notice of them. What! Why, I should be all the time looking. My eyes would get as big as moons. They've been opened wide enough since I came to the Orient, as it is."

At last, having survived every criticism, the four girls were ready. The hall-porter's boy carried their luggage out to the salmon-colored taxis, whose drivers looked embarra.s.sed by the salmon-colored carnations which Maurice insisted they should wear. The latter, with Fuz, Ronnie and Cunningham, stood in the entrance of the court, wrapped in full cloaks and wearing tall hats of a bygone fashion. They were leaning gracefully on their ta.s.seled canes as the girls came along the court towards them.

It was romantic to think that other girls in similar frocks had trod the same path and met men dressed like them fifty years ago. This sweet fancy was very vividly brought home to them when an old cleaner, grimed with half a century of Orient dust, pa.s.sed by the laughing, chattering group, and, as she shuffled off towards Seven Dials, looked back over her shoulder with an expression of fear.

"Marie thinks we're ghosts," laughed Madge.

"Isn't it dreadful to think she was once in the ballet?" said Jenny.

"Poor old crow, I do think it's dreadful."

The eight of them shivered at the thought.

"Really?" said Maurice. "How horrible."

The episode was a gaunt intrusion upon gayety; but it was soon forgotten in the noise and sheen of Piccadilly.

The taxis with much hooting hummed through the dazzling thoroughfares into the gloom and comparative stillness of Long Acre. As usual they tried to cut through Floral Street, only to be turned back by a policeman; but without much delay they swept at last under the great portico of the Opera House. Here many girls, blown into Covent Garden by the raw January winds, gave the effect of thistledown, so filmy were their dresses; and the rigid young men, stopping behind to pay their fares, looked stiff and awkward as groups of Pre-Raphaelite courtiers.

Commissionaires decorated the steps without utility. In the vestibule merry people were greeting each other and nodding as they pa.s.sed up and down the wide staircase. Here and there an isolated individual, b.u.t.toning and unb.u.t.toning his gloves with unconscionable industry, gazed anxiously at every swing of the door. Presently Jenny and Madge and Maudie and Irene were ready and, as on the arms of their escort they took the floor of the ballroom, might have stepped from a notebook of Gavarni.

Covent Garden b.a.l.l.s are distinguished by the atmosphere of a spectacle which pervades them. The floor itself has the character of an arena encircled by tiers of red boxes, many of which display marionettes, an un.o.btrusive audience, given over to fans and the tinkle of distant laughter; while the curtained glooms of others are haunted by invisible eyes. Here are no chaperons struggling with palms and hair-nets through a wearisome evening, creaking in wicker chairs and discussing draughts with neighbors. The old men, searching for bridge-players, are absent.

There is neither host nor hostess; and not one anaemic young debutante is distressed by the bleakness of her unembarra.s.sed programme.

Maurice announced that he had taken a box for the evening, so that his guests would be able, when tired of dancing, to cheat fatigue. Then he caught Jenny round the waist, and, regardless of their companions, the two of them were lost in the tide of dancers. They were only vaguely conscious of the swirl of petticoats and lisp of feet around their course. In the irresistible sweep of melodious violins all that really existed for Maurice and Jenny was nearness to each other, and eyes ablaze with rapture; and for him there was the silken coolness of her curls, for her the fever of his hand upon her waist.

During the interval between the sixth and seventh waltzes, Maurice, breathless at the memory of their perfect accord, said:

"I wonder if Paolo and Francesca enjoy swooning together on the winds of h.e.l.l. Great Scott! as if one wouldn't prefer the seventh circle to bathing in pools of light with a blessed damosel. I'm surprised at Rosetti."

"Who's she?"

"The blessed damosel?"

"No--Rose Etty."

"Oh, Jenny, don't make me laugh."

"Well, I don't know what you're talking about."

"I was speculating. Hark! They're playing the Eton Boating Song. Come along. We mustn't miss a bar of it."

In the scent of frangipani and jicky and phulnana the familiar tune became queerly exotic. The melody, charged with regret for summer elms and the sounds of playing-fields, full of the vanished laughter of boyhood, held now the heart of romantic pa.s.sion. It spoke of regret for the present rather than the past and, as it reveled in the lapse of moments, gave expression to the dazzling swiftness of such a night in a complaint for flying glances, sighs and happy words lost in their very utterance.

"Heart of hearts," whispered Maurice in the swirl of the dance.

"Oh, Maurice, I do love you," she sighed.

Now the moments fled faster as the beat quickened for the climax of the dance. Maurice held Jenny closer than before, sweeping her on through a mist of blurred lights in which her eyes stood out clear as jewels from the pallor of her face. Round the room they went, round and round, faster and faster. Jenny was now dead white. Her lips were parted slightly, her fingers strained at Maurice's sleeve. He, with flushed cheeks, wore elation all about him. No dream could have held the mult.i.tude of imaginations that thronged their minds; and when it seemed that life must end in the sharpness of an ecstasy that could never be recorded in mortality, the music stopped. There was a sound of many footsteps leaving the ballroom. Jenny leaned on Maurice's arm.

"You're tired," he said. "Jolly good dance that?"

"Wasn't it glorious? Oh, Maurice, it was lovely."

"Come and sit in the box when you've had some champagne, and I'll dance with the girls while you're resting. Shall I?"

She nodded.

Presently Maurice was tearing round the room with Maudie, both of them laughing very loudly, while Jenny sat back in a faded arm-chair thinking of the old Covent Garden days and nights, and wondering how she could ever have fancied she was happy before she met Maurice. In a few minutes Fuz came into the box to ask if she wanted to dance.

"No, I'm tired," she told him.

"It's just as well, perhaps," he said gravely. "For I am what you would describe as a very unnatural dancer."

"Oh, Fuz," she laughed; "are you? Oh, you must dance once round the room with me before it's over. Oh, you must. It tickles my fancy, the idea of Fuz dancing."

"At last I've earned a genuine laugh."

"Oh, Fuz, doesn't anyone else ever laugh at you, only me?"

"Very rarely."