Carnival Part 58

"Yes, I am most shocking proud," Jenny admitted, looking down on the floor and, as it were, regarding her character incarnate before her.

"But it's just these problems of behavior under difficulties that our club wants to solve. I'd like to put you on the road to express yourself and your ambitions without the necessity of--say marriage for convenience. You're a dancer, aren't you?"

"Um, a ballet girl," said Jenny as usual, careful not to presume the false grandeur of an isolated stellar existence.

"Are you keen on your dancing?"

"I was once. When I began. Only they crush you at the Orient. Girls there hate to see you get on. I'm sick of it."

"I wonder," said Miss Ragstead half to herself; "I wonder if active work for the cause would give you a new zest for life. It might. You feel all upside down just now, don't you?"

"I feel as if nothing didn't matter. Not _any_thing," replied Jenny decidedly.

"That's terrible for a girl of your age. You can't be more than eighteen or nineteen."

"Twenty-one in October."

"So much as that? Yes"--the older woman continued after a reflective pause--"yes, I believe you want some spur, some excitement quite outside your ordinary experience. You know I am a doctor, so without impertinence I can fairly prescribe for you."

"Well, what have I got to do?" Jenny asked. She was almost fascinated by this lady with her cool hands and deep-set, pa.s.sionate eyes.

"I wish I could invite you to spend some time with me in Somerset, but I'm too busy now for a holiday. I feel rather uncertain whether, after all, to advise you to plunge into the excitement of this demonstration.

And yet I'm sure it would be good for you. Dear child, I hope I'm not giving bad advice," said Miss Ragstead earnestly as she leaned forward and took hold of Jenny's hand.

So it came about that Jenny was enrolled in the ranks of the great demonstration that was to impress the autumnal session of Parliament.

She kept very quiet about her intention and no one, except Lilli, knew anything about it. The worst preliminary was the purple, green and white sash which contained her unlucky color. Indeed, at first she could hardly be persuaded to put it across her shoulders. But when the booming of the big drum marked the beat, she felt aflame with nervous expectation and never bothered about the sash or the chance of casual recognition.

The rhythm of the march, the crashing of the band, the lilting motion, the unreality of the crowds gaping on the pavements intoxicated her, and she went swinging on to the tune in a dream of excitement. In the narrower streets the music blazed with sound and fury of determination, urging them on, inspiring them with indomitable energy, inexorable progress. The tops of the houses here seemed to converge, blotting out the sky; and Jenny felt that she was stationary, while they moved on like the landscape of a cinematograph. As the procession swept into Trafalgar Square with its great open s.p.a.ce of London sky, the music unconfined achieved a more poignant appeal and infected the ma.s.s of arduous women with sentiment, making their temper the more dangerous.

The procession became a pilgrimage to some abstract n.o.bility, to no set place. Jenny was now bewitched by the steady motion into an almost complete unconsciousness of the gaping sightseers, thought of them, if she thought of them at all, as figures in a fair-booth to be knocked carelessly backwards as she pa.s.sed, more vital than they were with their painted grins.

In Whitehall the air was again charged with anger. The tall banners far ahead floated on airs of victory. The mounted women rode like conquerors. Then for an instant as Jenny heard from one of the pavement-watchers a coa.r.s.e and mocking comment on the demonstration, she thought the whole business mere matter for ridicule and recalled the circus processions that flaunted through towns on sunny seaside holiday mornings long ago. Soon, however, the tune reestablished itself in her brain, and once more she swept on to the n.o.ble achievement. The houses grew taller than ever; faded into remote mists; quaked and shimmered as if to a fall. Far down the line above the bra.s.s and drums was a sound of screaming, a dull mutter of revolution, a wave of execration and encouragement. The procession stopped dead: the music ceased in discords. Two or three of the women fainted. The crowd on either side suddenly came to life and pressed forward with hot, inquisitive breath.

Somewhere, a long way off, a leader shrieked, "Forward." Policemen were conjured from the quivering throng. Somebody tore off Jenny's sash.

Somebody trod on her foot. The confusion increased. Nothing was left of any procession: everyone was pushing, yelling, groaning, scratching, struggling in a wreck of pa.s.sions. Jenny was cut off from the disorganized main body, was helpless in a mob of men. The police were behaving with that magnificent want of discrimination which characterizes their behavior in a crisis of disorder. Their tactics were justified by success, and as they would rely on mutual support in the official account of the riot, individual idiocy would escape censure.

In so far as Jenny was pushing her way out of the mob, was seeking desperately to gain the sanctuary of a side street and forever escape from feminine demonstrations, she was acting in a way likely to cause a breach of the peace. So it was not surprising that a young plough-boy lately invested with an uniform should feel impelled to arrest her.

"Now then, you come along of me," commanded the yokel as a blush ebbed and flowed upon his cheeks glistening with down and perspiration.

"Who are you pushing, you?" cried Jenny, enraged to find her arm in the tight grasp of a podgy, freckled hand.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared.

"Don't you speak to me, you. Why, what _are_ you? Invisible blue when you're wanted. Let go of me. I won't be held. I wasn't doing anything. I was going home. Let go."

The young policeman, disinclined to risk the adventure single-handed, looked around for a fellow-constable to a.s.sist at the conveyance of Jenny to the station. All his companions, however, seemed busily engaged tugging at recalcitrant women; and instead of being congratulated on his first arrest, a well-groomed man, white with rage, shouted: "Look here, you blackguard, I've got your number and I'll have your coat off for this. This lady was doing absolutely nothing but trying to escape from the crowd."

The young policeman looked about him once more with watery, unintelligent eyes. He was hoping that someone would arrest the well-groomed man; but as n.o.body did, and as the latter was not unlike the Captain of the Volunteer Company from whose ranks he had climbed into the force, the novice released his grip of Jenny and said:

"Now, you be off. You won't get another chance."

"No, you turnip-headed b.u.mpkin," shouted the well-groomed man, "nor will you, when I've had five minutes at Scotland Yard. I'm going to watch you, my friend. You're not fit for a position of responsibility."

Jenny, free of the crowd, walked through the peace of Whitehall Court and promised herself that never again would she have anything to do with suffragettes.

"Soppy fools," she thought, "they can't do nothing. They can only jabber, jabber." She reproached herself for imagining it was possible to consummate a revenge on man by such means. She had effected nothing but the exposure of her person to the freckled paws of a policeman.

"Not again," said Jenny to herself, "not ever again will I be such a silly, soppy idiot."

In the distance she could still hear the shouting of the riot; but as she drew nearer to Charing Cross railway station, the noise of trains took its place.

Chapter XXVII: _Quartette_

Suffragism viewed in retrospect was shoddy embroidery for the _vie interieure_ of Jenny. There was no physical exhilaration for her in wrestling with policemen, and the intellectual excitement of controversy would never be likely to appeal to a mind naturally unfitted for argument. There was, too, about her view of the whole business something of Myrrhine's contempt. She may have been in an abnormal condition of acute hostility to the opposite s.e.x; but as soon as she found herself in a society whose antipathy towards men seemed to be founded on inability to attract the hated male, all her common sense cried out against committing herself to such a devil-driven att.i.tude. She felt that something must be wrong with so obviously an ineffective aggregation of Plain Janes. She was not concerned with that unprovided-for surplus of feminine population. She had no acquaintance with that asceticism produced by devotion to the intellect. She perceived, though not consciously, the inherent weakness of the whole movement in its failure to supply an emotional subst.i.tute for more elemental pa.s.sions.

Jenny was shrewd enough to understand that leaders like Miss Bailey and Miss Ragstead were logically justified in demanding a vote. She could understand that they would be able to use it to some purpose; but at the same time she realized that to the majority of women a vote would be merely an enc.u.mbrance. Jenny also saw through the folly of agitation that must depend for success on equality of physique, and half divined that the prime cause of such extravagance lay in the needs of feminine self-expression. Nuns are wedded to Christ; suffragists, with the notable exceptions of those capable of sustaining an intellectual predominance, must remain spiritual old maids. As Jenny asked, "What do they all want?" Very soon the inhabitants of Mecklenburg Square became as unreal as unicorns, and the whole episode acquired the reputation of an interlude of unaccountable madness from the memory of which the figure of Miss Ragstead stood out cool and tranquil and profoundly sane.

Jenny would in a way have been glad to meet her again; but she was too shy to suggest meeting outside the domain of the Women's Political, Social and Economic League, and their auspices were now unimaginable. In order to avoid the whole subject, Jenny began to avoid Lilli Vergoe; and very soon, partly owing to the opportunities of propinquity, partly owing to a renewed desire for it, her friendship with Irene Dale was reconst.i.tuted on a firmer basis than before.

Six months had now elapsed since that desolate first of May. The ballet of Cupid was taken off about the same time, and the occupation of rehearsing for a new one had steered Jenny through the weeks immediately following Maurice's defection. She was now dancing in a third ballet in which she took so little interest that no account of it is necessary.

The pangs of outraged love were drugged to painlessness by time. From a superficial standpoint the wounds were healed, that is, if a dull insensibility to the original cause of the evil be a cure. Jenny no longer missed Maurice on particular occasions, and, having grown used to his absence, was not aware she missed him in a wider sense. Love so impa.s.sioned as theirs, love lived through in moments of individual ecstasy, was in the verdict of average comment a disease; but average comment failed to realize that, like the scarlet fever of her youth, its malignant influence would be extended in complications of abnormal emotional states. Average comment did not perceive that the worst tragedies of unhappy love are not those which end with death or separation. Nor did Jenny herself foresee the train of ills that in the wake of such a shock to her feelings would be liable to twist her whole life awry.

With Maurice she had embarked on the restless ocean of an existence lived at unusually high pressure. She had conjured for her soul dreams of adventure, fiery-hearted dreams which would not be satisfied by the awakening of common-place dawns. Time had certainly a.s.suaged with his heavy anodyne the intimate desire for her lover; but time would rather aggravate than heal the universal need of her womanhood. These six months of seared emotions and withered hopes were a trance from which she would awake on the very flashing heels of the last mental and physical excitement.

It was said in the last chapter that a less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound. Those hearts are dragged but a little way down into the depths of misery; for such have not fallen from great heights. Jenny on the first of May fell straight and deep as a plummet to the bed of the ocean of despair, there to lie long submerged. But to one who had rejected death, life would not hold out oblivion. Life with all its cold insistence called her once more to the surface; thence to make for whatever beach chance should offer. Jenny, scarcely conscious of any responsibleness for her first struggles, clutched at suffragism--a support for which life never intended her. However, it served to help her ash.o.r.e; and now, with some of the cynicism that creeps into the adventurer's life, she looked around for new adventures.

Her desire to revenge herself on men was superseded by anxiety to rediscover the savor of living. Her instinct was now less to hurt others than to indulge herself. A year's abstention from the episodic existence spent by Irene and her before Maurice had created an illusion of permanence, had given that earlier time a romantic charm; and a revival of it seemed fraught with many possibilities of a more widely extended wonder. One evening late in October she asked Irene casually, as if there had been no interval of desuetude, whether she were coming out. To this inquiry her friend, without any manifestation of surprise, answered in the affirmative. It was characteristic of both girls, this manner of resuming a friendship.

Now began a period not worth a detailed chronicle, since it was merely a repet.i.tion of a period already discussed--a repet.i.tion, moreover, that like most anachronisms seemed after other events jejune and somewhat tawdry. The young men were just as young as those of earlier years; but Irene and Jenny were older and, if before they had found it hard to tolerate these ephemeral encounters, they found it harder still now. The result of this was that, where once a single whisky and soda was enough, now three or four scarcely availed to pa.s.s away the time. Neither of the girls drank too much in more than a general sense, but it was an omen of flying youth when whiskies were invoked to give an edge to existence.

One evening they sat in the Cafe d'Afrique, laughing to each other over the physical and social oddities of two Norwegians who had const.i.tuted themselves their hosts on the strength of a daring stage-door introduction. As Jenny paused in her laughter to catch some phrase of melody in the orchestra, she saw Castleton drawing near their table. He stopped in doubt, and looked at her from wide, gray eyes very eager under eyebrows arched in a question. She returned his gaze without a flicker of recognition, and, bowing imperceptibly, he pa.s.sed out into the night. The doors swung together behind him, and Jenny, striking a match from the stand on the table, set the whole box alight to distract Irene's attention from what she feared in the blush of a memory.

"Come on; let's go," she said to her friend.

So the girls left the two Norwegians desolate and volubly unintelligible.

One morning in November Irene came into Jenny's room at Stacpole Terrace.

"My Danby's coming home this week," she announced. "And his brother, too."

Jenny often thought to herself that Danby was a riddle. It was four years now since he and Irene had been reputed in love; yet nothing seemed to have happened since the day when for a fancy he dressed his sweetheart in short frocks. Here he was coming back from France as he had come back time after time in company with his brother, at the notion of meeting whom Jenny had always scoffed.

"What of it?" she said.

"Now don't be nasty, young Jenny. I shall be glad to see him."

"I suppose this means every minute you can get together for a fortnight, and then he'll be off again for six months. Why doesn't he marry you?"