Carnival Part 54

Jenny nodded, and, while he read, wrote with her finger, "3.30 Claybridge," many times in the dust that lay thick on the closed lid of the piano.

This was the letter:

Dear Castleton,

I've settled not to come back to England for a while. One makes plans and the plans don't come off. I can't work in England and am better out of it. Let me hear that Jenny is all right. I think she will be. I didn't write to her. I just sent a post card saying I should not be at Waterloo on the first of May. I expect you'll think I'm heartless, but something has gone snap inside me and I don't honestly care what you think. I'm going to Morocco in two or three days. I want adventures. I'll send you a check for my share of the rent in June. If you write, write to me at the English Post Office, Tangiers.

Yours,

Maurice Avery.

"Is that what he says?" Jenny asked.

"That's all."

"And he wants to hear I'm all right?"

"He says so."

"Tell him from me this little girl's all right," said Jenny. "There's plenty more mothers got sons. Plenty. Tell him that when you write."

Her sentences rattled like musketry.

Castleton stared vaguely in the direction of the river as if a friendship were going out on the tide.

"But I don't want to write," he said. "I couldn't. Still, there's one thing. I don't believe it's another woman."

"Who cares if it is?" There was a wistfulness about her brave indifference. "Men are funny. It might be."

"I don't somehow think it is. I'd rather not. I was very fond of him."

"So was I," said Jenny simply. "Only he's a rotter like all men."

It was strange how neither of them seemed able to mention his name.

Already he had lost his individuality and was merged in a type.

"What will you do?" Castleton asked.

"There's a question. How should I know?"

Before her mind life like a prairie rolled away into distance infinitely dull.

"It was a foolish question. I'm sorry. I wish you'd marry me."

Jenny looked at him with sad eyes screwed up in perplexity.

"I believe you would, Fuz."

"I would. I would."

"But I couldn't. I don't want to see any of you ever again."

Castleton seemed to shrink.

"I'm not being rude, Fuz, really. Only I don't want to."

"I perfectly understand."

"You mustn't be cross with me."

"Cross! Oh, Jane, do I sound cross?"

"Because," Jenny went on, "if I saw you or any of his friends, I should only hate you. Good-bye, I must run."

"You're all right for money?" Castleton stammered awkwardly. "I mean--there's--oh, d.a.m.n it, Jenny!"

He pounded over to the window, huge and disconsolate.

"Why ever on earth should I want money? What's the matter with next Friday's Treasury?"

"Perhaps, Jenny, you would come out with me once, if I waited for you one night?"

"Please don't. I should only stare you out. I _wouldn't_ know you. I don't ever ever want to see any of you again."

She ran from the studio, vanishing like a flame into smoke.

That night when Jenny went back alone to Stacpole Terrace, she saw on the table in the cheerless parlor the post card from Maurice, and close beside it the green hat bought in September still waiting to be re-shaped for the spring. She threw it into a corner of the room.

Chapter XXV: _Monotone_

Jenny's first thought was an impulse of revenge upon the opposite s.e.x comparable with, but more drastic than, the resolution she had made on hearing of Edie's disaster. She would devote her youth to "doing men down." It was as if from the desert of the soul seared by Maurice, the powers of the body were to sweep like a wild tribe maiming the creators of her solitude. Maurice had stood for her as the epitome of man, and it was to be expected that when he fell, he would involve all men in the ruin. This hostility extended so widely that even her father was included, and Jenny found herself brooding upon the humiliation of his share in her origin.

This violent enmity finding its expression in physical repulsion defeated itself, and Jenny could no longer attract victims. Moreover, the primal instincts of s.e.x perished in the drought of emotion; and soon she wished for oblivion, dreading any activity of disturbance. The desert was made, and was vast enough to circ.u.mscribe the range of her vision with its expanse of monotony. Educated in Catholic ideals, she would have fled to a nunnery, there coldly to languish until the fires of divine adorations should burst from the ashes of earthly love.

Nunneries, however, were outside Jenny's set of conceptions. Death alone would endow her with painless indifference in a perpetual serenity; but the fear of death in one who lacked ability to regard herself from outside was not mitigated by pictorial consolations. She could never separate herself into audience and actor. Extinction appalled one profoundly conscious of herself as an ent.i.ty. By such a stroke she would obliterate not merely herself, but her world as well. Suicides generally possess the power of mental dichotomy. They kill themselves, paradoxically, to see the effect. They are sorry for themselves, or angry, or contemptuous: madness disintegrates their sense of personality so that the various components run together. In a madman's huggermugger of motives, impulses and reasons, one predominant butchers the rest for its own gratification. Whatever abnormal conditions the shock of sorrow had produced in Jenny's mental life, through them all she remained fully conscious of her completeness and preserved unbroken the importance of her personality. She could not kill herself.

The days were very long now, nor would she try to quicken them by returning to the old life before she met Maurice. She would not with two or three girls pa.s.s in review of the shops of Oxford Street or gossip by the open windows of her club. In the dressing-room she would sit silent, impatient of intrusion upon the waste with which she had surrounded herself. The ballets used to drag intolerably. She found no refuge from her heart in dancing, no consolation in the music and color. She danced listlessly, glad when the task was over, glad when she came out of the theater, and equally glad to leave Stacpole Terrace on the next day. In bed she would lie awake meditating upon nothing; and when she slept, her sleep was parched.

"Buck up, old girl, whatever's the matter?" Irene would ask, and Jenny, resentful, would scowl at the _gaucherie_. She longed to be with her mother again, and would visit Hagworth Street more often, hoping some word would be uttered that would make it easy for her to subdue that pride which, however deeply wounded by Maurice, still battled invincibly, frightening every other instinct and emotion. But when the words of welcome came, Jenny, shy of softness, would carry off existence with an air, tears and reconciliation set aside. It was not long before the rumor of her love's disaster was carried in whispers round the many dressing-rooms of the Orient. Soon enough Jenny found the girls staring at her when they thought her attention was occupied. She had always seemed to them so invulnerable that her jilting excited a more than usually diffused curiosity; but for a long time, though many rejoiced, no girl was brave enough to ask malicious questions, intruding upon her solitude.

June came in with the best that June can give of cloudless weather, weather that is born in skies of peach-blossom, whose richness is never lost in wine-dark nights pressed from the day's sweetness. What weather it would have been for the country! Jenny used to sit for hours together in St. James's Park, scratching aimlessly upon the gravel with the ferule of her parasol. Men would stop and sit beside her, looking round the corners of their eyes like actors taking a call. But she was scarcely aware of their presence, and, when they spoke, would look up vaguely perplexed so that they muttered apologies and moved along. Her thoughts were always traveling through the desert of her soul. Unblessed by mirage, they traveled steadily through a monotone towards an horizon of bra.s.s. Her heart beat dryly and regularly like the tick of a clock, and her memory merely recorded time. No relic of the past could bring a tear; even the opal brooch was worn every day because it happened to be useful. Once a letter from Maurice fell from her bag into the lake, and she cared no more for it than the swan's feather beside which it floated.

July came in hot and metallic. Every sunset was a foundry, and the nights were like smoke. One day towards the end of the month Jenny, walking down Cranbourn Street, thought she would pay a visit to Lilli Vergoe. The room had not changed much since the day Jenny joined the ballet. Lilli, in a soiled muslin dress, was smoking the same brand of cigarettes in the same wicker-chair. The same photographs clung to the mirror, or were stacked on the mantelshelf in palisades. The walls were covered with Mr. Vergoe's relics.

"Hullo, Jenny! So you've found your way here at last. What's been wrong with you lately? You're looking thin."