Carnival Part 65

However much she might scoff at it, there was wonderful comfort in the a.s.surance of a cheerful evening of dressing-room gossip. Besides, there was always the chance of an interesting stranger in front or of suddenly being called upon to play a noticeable part, though that pleasure grew more and more insipid all the time. There was, however, still a certain agreeable reflection in the consciousness of looking pretty and knowing that a few eyes every night remarked her face and figure. And even if all these consolations of theatrical existence failed, there was a very great satisfaction in making up and leaving, as it were, one's own discontented body behind.

For a time everything went on as usual and n.o.body put forward any definite proposal involving a change either of residence or mode of life. Jenny began to think she was doomed to settle down into perpetual dullness and never again to be launched desperately on a pa.s.sionate adventure. She was beginning to be aware how easy it was for a woman to belie the temperament of her youth with a common-place maturity. By the end of the summer their father had already advanced so far on the road to moral and financial disintegration as to make it evident to Jenny and May that they must fend for themselves. One lodger, an old clerk in a Moorgate firm of solicitors, had already left, and the other, a Cornishman working in a dairy, would soon be carrying the result of his commercial experience back to his native land. Neither of the girls liked the prospect of new lodgers and were nervous of affording shelter to possible thieves or murderers. Nor did May in particular enjoy the supervision of the servant or wrestling with the slabs of unbaked dough which heralded her culinary essays. So at last she and Jenny decided the house was altogether too large and that they must give notice to quit.

"And aren't I to give no opinion on the subject of my own house?" asked their father indignantly.

"You?" cried Jenny; "why should you? You don't do nothing but drink everything away. Why should we slave ourselves to the death keeping you?"

"There's daughters!" Charlie apostrophized. "Yes, daughters is all very nice when they're small, but when they grow up, they're worse than wives. It comes of being women, I suppose." And Charlie, as if sympathizing with his earliest ancestor, sighed for Eden. "Look here, I don't want to take my hook from this house."

"All right, stay on, then, stupid," May advised; "only Jenny and I are going to clear off."

"Stay on by yourself," Jenny continued in support of her sister, "and a fine house it'll be in a year's time. No one able to get in for empty bottles and people all around thinking you've opened a shooting-gallery, I should say."

"Now don't go on," said Charlie, "because I want to have a lay down, so you can just settle as you like."

It was Sunday afternoon and no problems of future arrangements were serious enough to interrupt a lifelong habit.

"It's no good talking to him," said Jenny scornfully; "what we've got to do is give notice sharp. I hate this house now," she added, savagely appraising the walls.

So it was settled that after so many years the Raeburns should leave Hagworth Street. Charlie made no more attempts to contest the decision, and acquiesced almost cheerfully when he suddenly reflected that public-houses were always handy wherever anyone went. "Though, for all that," he added, "I shall miss the old 'Arms.'"

"Fancy," said Jenny, "who'd have thought it?"

On the following Sunday afternoon Mr. Corin, the remaining lodger, came down to interview his hostesses.

"I hear you're leaving then, Miss Raeburn," he said. "How's that?"

"It's too hard work for my sister," Jenny answered very politely. "And besides, she don't care for it, and nor don't I."

"Well, I'm going home along myself in November month, I believe, or I should have been sorry to leave you. What I come down to ask about was whether you'd let a bedroom to a friend of mine who's coming up from Cornwall on some law business in connection with some evidence over a right of way or something. A proper old mix up, I believe it is. But I don't suppose they'll keep him more than a week, and he could use my sitting-room."

Jenny looked at May.

"Yes, of course, let him come," said the housewife. "But when will it be?"

"October month, I believe," said Mr. Corin. "That's when the witnesses are called for."

Everything seemed to happen in October, Jenny thought. In October she would be twenty-two. How time was flying, flying with age creeping on fast. In the dreariness of life's prospect, even the arrival of Mr.

Corin's friend acquired the importance of an expected event, and, though neither of the sisters broke through custom so far as to discuss him beforehand, the coming of Mr. Corin's friend served as a landmark in the calendar like Whitsuntide or Easter. Meanwhile, Mr. Raeburn, as if aware of the little time left in which the "Masonic Arms" could be enjoyed, drank more and more as the weeks jogged by.

Summer gales marked the approach of autumn, and in the gusty twilights that were perceptibly earlier every day, Jenny began to realize how everything of the past was falling to pieces. There was an epidemic of matrimony at the theater, which included in the number of its victims Maudie Chapman and Elsie Crauford. Of her other companions Lilli Vergoe had left the ballet and taken up paid secretarial work for some misanthropic society, while the relations between Irene and herself had been as grimly frigid ever since the quarrel. New girls seemed to occupy old places very conspicuously, and all the stability of existence was shaken by change. Only the Orient itself remained immutably vast and austere, voracious of young life, sternly intolerant of fading beauty, antique and unscrupulous.

Jenny was becoming conscious of the wire from which she was suspended for the world's gaze, jigged hither and thither and sometimes allowed to fall with a flop when fate desired a new toy. The ennui of life was overwhelming. A gigantic futility clouded her point of view, making effort, enjoyment, sorrow, disappointment, success equally unimportant.

She was not induced by that single experience of St. Valentine's night to prosecute her curiosity. This may have been because pa.s.sion full-fed was a disillusionment, or it may have been that the shock of her mother's madness appeared to her as a tangible retribution. Everything was dead. Her dancing, like her life, had become automatic, and even her clothes lasted twice as long as in the old days.

"I can't make out what's happened to everybody," she said to May. "No fellows ever seem to come round the stage door now. All the girls have either got married or booked up that way. n.o.body ever wants to have larks like we used to have. You never hardly hear anybody laugh in the dressing-room now. I met someone the other day who knew me two years ago and they said I'd gone as thin as a threepenny-bit."

Jenny meditated upon the achievement of her life up to date and wrote it down a failure. Where was that Prima Ballerina a.s.soluta who with pitter-pat of silver shoes had danced like a will-o'-the-wisp before her imagination long ago? Where was that Prima Ballerina with double-fronted house at Ealing or Wimbledon, and meek, adoring husband? Where, indeed, were all elfin promises of fame and fairy hopes of youth? They had fled, those rainbow-winged deceivers, together with short frocks accordion-pleated and childhood's tumbled hair. Where was that love so violent and invincible that even time would flee in dismay before its progress? Where, too, was the laughter that once had seemed illimitable and immortal? Now there was nothing so gay as to keep even laughter constant to Jenny's world. For her there was no joy in lovely transcience. She knew by heart no Horatian ode which, declaiming against time, could shatter the cruelty of impermanence. Without an edifice of love or religion or art or philosophy, there seemed no refuge from decay.

When the body finds existence a mock, the mind falls back upon its intellectual defences. But Jenny had neither equipment, commissariat or strategic position. She was a dim figure on the arras of civilization, faintly mobile in the stressful winds of life. She was a complex decorative achievement and should have been cherished as such. Therefore at school she was told that William the Conqueror came to the throne in 1066, that a bay is a large gulf, a promontory a small cape. She had been a plaything for the turgid experiments by parrots in education on simple facts, facts so sublimely simple that her mind recorded them no more than would the Venus of Milo sit down on a bench before a pupil teacher. When she was still a child, plastic and wonderful, she gave her dancing and beauty to a country whose inhabitants are just as content to watch two dogs fight or a horse die in the street. When ambition withered before indifference, she set out to express herself in love.

Her early failures should not have been fatal, would not have been if she had possessed any power of mental recuperation. But even if William the Conqueror had won his battle at Clacton, the bare knowledge of it would not have been very useful to Jenny. Yet she might have been useful in her beauty, could some educationalist have perceived in her youth that G.o.d as well as Velasquez can create a thing of beauty. She lived, however, in a period of enthusiastic waste, and now brooded over the realization that nothing in life seemed to recompense one for living, however merrily, however splendidly, the adventure began.

Such was Jenny's mood when, just after her twenty-second birthday, Mr.

Corin announced that his friend, Mr. Z. Trewh.e.l.la, would arrive in three days' time.

Chapter x.x.xIV: _Mr. Z. Trewh.e.l.la_

Mr. Corin was anxious to make his friend's visit to London as pleasant as possible, and in zeal for the enjoyment of Zachary Trewh.e.l.la to impress him with the importance and knowingness of William John Corin.

By way of extirpating at once any feeling of solitude, he was careful to invite Jenny and May to take tea with them on the afternoon following Trewh.e.l.la's arrival. The first-floor sitting-room, once in the occupation of Mr. Vergoe, looked very different nowadays; and indeed no longer possessed much character. Corin's decorative extravagance had never carried beyond the purchase of those gla.s.sy photographs of City scenes in which from a confusion of traffic rise landmarks like St.

Paul's or the Royal Exchange. These, destined ultimately to adorn the best parlor of his Cornish home, were now propped dismally against the overmantel, individually obscured according to the vagaries of the servant's dusting by a plush-bound photograph of Mr. Lloyd George. The walls of the room were handed over to wall-paper save where two prints, billowy with damp, showed Mr. Gladstone looking at the back of Mr.

Spurgeon's neck over some tabulated observations on tuberculosis among cows.

Zachary Trewh.e.l.la did more than share his friend's sitting-room: he occupied it, not so much actively, as by sheer inanimate force. To see him sitting in the arm-chair was to see a bowlder flung down in a flimsy drawing-room. He was a much older man than Corin, probably about thirty-eight, though Jenny fancied he could not be less than fifty. His eyes, very deep brown and closely set, had a twinkle of money, and the ragged mustache probably concealed a cruel and avaricious mouth. His hands were rough and swollen with work and weather: his neck was lean and his pointed ears were set so far back as to give his high cheek-bones over which the skin was drawn very taut a prominence of feature they would not otherwise have possessed. He belonged to a common type of Cornish farmer, a little more than fox, a little less than wolf, and judged by mere outward appearance, particularly on this occasion of ill-fitting broadcloth and celluloid collar, he would strike the casual glance as mean of form and feature. Yet he radiated force continually and though actually a small man produced an effect of size and power. It was impossible definitely to predicate the direction of this energy, to divine whether it would find concrete expression in agriculture or l.u.s.t or avarice or religion. Yet so vitally did it exist that from the moment Trewh.e.l.la entered Corin's insignificant apartment, the room was haunted by him, and not merely the room, but Hagworth Street itself and even Islington.

"Well, Zack," said Mr. Corin, winking at the two girls, and for effect lapsing into broadest dialect. "What du'ee thenk o' Lonnon, buoy, grand auld plaace 'tis, I b'liv."

"I don't know as I've thought a brae lot about it," said Zack.

"He's all the time brooding about this right of way," Mr. Corin explained.

Jenny and May were frankly puzzled by Trewh.e.l.la. He represented to them a new element. Jenny felt she had received an impression incommunicable by description, as if, having been flung suddenly into a room, one were to try to record the experience in terms of the underground railway.

The farmer himself did not pay any attention to either of the girls, so that Jenny was compelled to gain her impression of him as if he were an animal in a cage, funny or dull or interesting, but always remote. She was content to watch him eat with a detached curiosity that prevented her from being irritated by his deliberation, or, after noisy drinking, by the colossal fist that smudged his lips dry.

"Ess," Trewh.e.l.la announced after swallowing a large mouthful of plum-cake. "Ess, I shall be brim glad when I'm back to Trewinnard. 'Tis my belief the devil's the only one to show a Cornishman round London fittee."

Mr. Corin laughed at this sardonic witticism, but said he was going to have a jolly good try at showing Zack the sights of the town that very night.

"You ought to take him to the Orient," May advised.

"By gosh, and that's a proper notion," said Corin, slapping his thigh.

"That's you and me to-night, Zack."

"What's the Orient?" inquired Trewh.e.l.la.

"Haven't you never heard of the Orient?" Jenny gasped, her sense of fitness disturbed by such an abyss of ignorance.

"No, my dear, I never have," replied Trewh.e.l.la, and for the first time looked Jenny full in the face.

"I dance there," she told him, "in the ballet."

The Cornishman looked round to his friend for an explanation.

"That's all right, boy," said Corin jovially. "You'll know soon enough what dancing is. You and me's going there to-night."