Carnival Part 52

"I don't know why we quarrel. I hate quarreling."

"We won't any more."

As the horse strained up through the echoing cavern of Waterloo, they kissed each other good-bye, a long, long kiss.

There were still ten minutes before the train left, and among the sweep of hurrying pa.s.sengers and noise of shouting porters to an accompaniment of whistling, rumbling trains, Maurice tried to voice the immortality of his love.

"Great Scott, I've only a minute," he said suddenly. "Look, meet me on Monday week, the twenty-third, here, at three-thirty. Three-thirty from Claybridge. Don't forget."

"Take your seats, please," a ticket inspector shouted in their ears.

Maurice jumped into his compartment and wrote quickly on an envelope: "3.30. Waterloo. Ap. 23. Claybridge."

"Good-bye, darling, darling girl. I'll bring you back some castanets and a Spanish frock."

"Good-bye. See you soon."

"Very, very soon. Think of me."

"Rather."

The train went curling out of the station.

"I shall be early in the theater to-night," Jenny thought.

Chapter XXIII: _Two Letters_

HoTEL DE PARIS, SEVILLA, SPAIN.

April 17.

My dear and lovely one,

I've not had time to write before. I meant to send you a letter from the train, but I left all my notepaper and pencils in the station restaurant at a place called Miranda, and went to sleep instead.

I find that my uncle has left me more than I expected--five thousand pounds, in fact. So I want to buy you a delightful little house somewhere quite close to London. You could have a maid and you could go on dancing if you liked. Only I do want you to say "yes" at once. I want you to write by return and tell me you're going to give up all doubts and worries and scruples. Will you, my precious?

I've got another splendid plan. I want you to come and join me in Spain in about a week. I shall be able to meet you in Paris, because I am going to escort my aunt so far on the way home. Fuz will look out your trains. You must come. He can arrange to give you any money you want. We need not stay away very long--about a month. Sevilla is perfect. The weather is divine. Get yourself some cool frocks. We'll sit in the Alcazar garden all day. It's full of lemon trees and fountains. In the evening we'll sit on a balcony and smoke and listen to guitars.

My darling, I do so adore you. Please, please, come out to Spain and give up not knowing your own mind. I miss you tremendously. I feel this beautiful city is wasted without you. I'm sure if you determined not to bother about anything but love, you'd never regret it. You wouldn't really. Dearest, sweetest Jenny, do come.

I'm longing for my treasure. It's wonderfully romantic sitting here in the patio of the hotel--a sort of indoor garden--and thinking so hard of my gay and sweet one away in London. Darling, I'm sending you kisses thick as stars, all the way from Spain. All my heart,

Your lover,

Maurice.

Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life, she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.

The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust, surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a pa.s.sion for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which the one most often aired was her missing of the _Clacton Belle_ one Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger--some prosperous libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods, at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short frocks because her intelligence had not kept pace with her age.

"The poor little thing talks like a child," Mrs. Dale would explain. "So I dresses her like a child. It's less noticeable."

"_Which_ is silly," Jenny used to comment. "Because she's as tall as a house and _everybody_ turns round to look after her."

Jenny would scarcely have tolerated this family for a week, if she had been brought at all closely or frequently in contact with them; but so much of the day was spent with Maurice and all the evening at the theater that Stacpole Terrace implied little beyond breakfast in bed and bed itself. Sometimes, indeed, when she went home to tea at Hagworth Street and saw the brightness of the gla.s.s and shimmer of clean crockery, she was on the verge of sinking her pride in a practical reconciliation. Nine weeks pa.s.sed, however, making it more difficult every day to admit herself in the wrong; although, during the absence of Maurice, it became a great temptation. Therefore, when this letter arrived from Spain, inviting her to widen the breach with her family, she was half inclined to play with the idea of absolute severance.

Flight, swift and sudden, appealed to her until the difficulty of making arrangements began to obscure other considerations. The thought of packing, of catching trains and steamers, of not knowing exactly what frocks to buy, oppressed her; then a fear took hold of her fancy lest, something happening to Maurice, she might find herself alone in a foreign city; and at the end of it all there was her childhood in a vista of time, her childhood with the presence of her mother brooding over it, her mother dearly loved whatever old-fashioned notions she preserved of obedience and strictness of behavior. It would be mean to outrage, as she knew she would, her mother's pride, and to hand her over to the criticisms of a mob of relatives. It would be mean to desert May, who even now might be crying on a solitary pillow. But when she went downstairs dressed and saw the Dale family in morning deshabille, uncorseted, flabby and heavy-eyed, crouching over the parlor fire, and when she thought of Maurice and the empty studio, Jenny's resolution was shaken and she was inclined to renounce every duty, face every difficulty and leave her world behind.

"You do look a sulky thing," said Irene. "Coming to sit round the fire?"

"No, thanks," said Jenny. "I haven't got the time."

"Your young chap's away, isn't he?" asked Winnie.

"What's it got to do with you where he is?"

Jenny was in a turmoil of nervous indecision, and felt that whatever else she did, she must be quit of Stacpole Terrace for that day at least. She debated the notion of going home, of telling her mother everything; but the imagination of such an exposure of her most intimate thoughts dried her up. It would be like taking off her clothes in front of a crowd of people. Then she thought of going home without reference to the past; but she was prevented by the expectation of her mother's readiness to believe the worst, and the inevitably stricter supervision to which her submission would render her liable. In the end, she compromised with her inclination by deciding to visit Edie and find out what sort of st.u.r.dy rogue her nephew was by now.

Edie lived at Camberwell in a small house covered with Virginia creeper not yet in leaf, still a brownish red mat which depressed Jenny as she rattled the flap of the letterbox and called her sister's name through the aperture. Presently Edie opened the door.

"Why, if it isn't Jenny. Well I never, you are a stranger."

Edie was shorter than Jenny and more round. Yet for all her plumpness she looked worn, and her slanting eyes, never so bright as Jenny's, were ringed with purple cavities.

"How are you, Edie, all this long time?"

"Oh, I'm grand; how's yourself?"

"I'm all right."

The two sisters were sitting in the parlor, which smelt unused, although it was covered with lengths of material and brown-paper patterns. By the window was a dressmaker's bust, mournfully buxom. Jenny compared it with the lay figure in the studio and smiled, thinking how funny they would look together.

"I wish Bert was in," said Edie. "But he's away on business."

Just then a sound of tears was audible, and the mother had to run out of the room.

"The children gets a nuisance," she said, as she came back comforting Eunice, a little girl of two.

"Isn't she growing up a little love?" said Jenny. "Oh, I do think she's pretty. What glorious eyes she's got."

"They're like her father's, people say; but young Norman, he's the walking life-like of you, Jenny."

"Where is the rogue?" his aunt inquired.

"Where's Norman, Eunice?"