Carnival Part 19

Yet Edie did not seem to mind so much.

The malignity of men enraged her. The selfishness and grossness sickened her. Boys were different; but men, with their conceit and lies, were beasts. They should never make a fool of her. Never. Never. Then she wondered if her mother had been compelled to marry. On no other basis could her father be explained. Men were all alike.

Bert Harding, greasy, dark-eyed, like a dirty foreigner. He was nice-looking, after a fas.h.i.+on, yes, but even more conceited than most men. And Edie had _got_ to marry him.

Alfie was on the doorstep when she reached home.

"You?" she said.

"Come over for the night. Got some business in Islington to-morrow morning."

"Alfie, you know Bert Harding?"

"Yes."

"You've got to make him marry Edie."

"I'll smash his face in if he don't."

"They'll be at the Canterbury to-morrow night."

It was a poor fight in the opinion of the Westminster Bridge Road. Bert was overmatched. He was perfectly willing to marry Edie at once, as it happened, but Jenny enjoyed seeing one of his dark eyes closed up by her brother. Alfie, having done his duty, never spoke to Bert or Edie again.

"However could she have been so mad," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Soft! Soft!

That's you," she went on, turning on her husband.

"Oh, of course it's me. Everything's me," said Charlie.

"Yes, it is you. You can't say no to a gla.s.s of beer and Edie can't say no to a man."

"What would you have done, mother," asked Jenny, "if Edie's Bert had gone away and left her?"

"She'd never have come inside my house again--not ever again."

"You're funny."

"Funny?" said Mrs. Raeburn. "You try and be funny, and see what happens."

"Who cares?" said Jenny. "It wouldn't trouble me. I'm sick of this dog's island. But men. Whatever next? Don't you imagine I'll let any man---- Not much."

"Don't you be too sure, Mrs. Clever," said the mother.

"But I am. I'm positive. Love! There's nothing in it."

"Hark at her," jeered Charlie.

Jenny lay awake in a fury that night. One after another, man in his various types pa.s.sed across the screen of her mind. She saw them all.

The crimson-jointed, fishy-eyed Glasgow youths winked at her once more.

The complacent subalterns of Dublin dangled their presents and waited to be given her thanks and kisses. Old men, from the recess of childish memories, rose up again and leered at her. Her own father, small and weak and contemptible, pottered across the line of her mental vision.

Bert Harding was there, his black boot-b.u.t.ton eyes glittering. And to that her sister had surrendered herself, to be pawed and mauled about and boasted of. Ugh! Suddenly in the middle of her disgust Jenny thought she heard a sound under the bed.

"Oo--er, May!" she called out. "May!"

"Whatever is it, you noisy thing?"

"Oo--er, there's a man under the bed! Oh, May, wake up, else we shall all be murdered!"

"Who cares?" said May. "Go to sleep."

And just then the Raeburns' big cat, tired of his mouse-hole, came out from underneath the bed and walked slowly across the room.

Chapter X: _Drury Lane and Covent Garden_

To compensate Jenny for her disappointment over Covent Garden, Madame Aldavini secured a place for her in the Drury Lane pantomime. She was no longer to be the most attractive member of an attractive quartette, but one of innumerable girls who changed several times during the evening into amazingly complicated dresses, designed not to display individual figures, but to achieve broad effects of color and ingenuity.

Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of Frenchmen or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of Tortoise-sh.e.l.l b.u.t.terflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Procession of Insects. Jenny's gay deep eyes were obscured by tricolor flags or the spout of a teapot or the disproportionate antennae of a b.u.t.terfly. There was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid color, no more enthusiastically than they would have clapped an elaborate arrangement of limelight. Everything was sacrificed to the cleverness of a merely inventive mind. More than ever Jenny felt the waste of academic instruction in her art. She had been learning to dance for so many years, and there she was beside girls who could neither dance nor move, girls who had large features and showy legs and so much cubic s.p.a.ce for spangles.

But if her personality did not carry over the footlights and reach the mighty audience of Drury Lane, behind the scenes it gradually detached itself from the huge crowd of girls. Great comedians with great salaries condescended to find out her name. Great princ.i.p.al boys with great expanses of chest nodded at her over furs. Dainty princ.i.p.al girls with dainty tiers of petticoats smiled and said good evening in their mincing, genteel, princ.i.p.al girl voices. Even the stage doorkeeper never asked her name more than once. Everybody knew Jenny Pearl, except the public. So many people told her she was sure to get on that she began to be ambitious again, and used to go, without being pressed, to Madame Aldavini's for practice. The latter was delighted and prophesied a career--a career that should date from her engagement (a real engagement this time) at Covent Garden in the spring.

Jenny's popularity at the theater made her more impatient than ever of home. She bore less and less easily her mother's attempts to steer her course.

"You'll come to grief," Mrs. Raeburn warned her.

"I don't think so."

"A nice mess Edie made of things."

"I'm not Edie. I'm not so soft."

"Why you can't meet some nice young chap, and settle down comfortable with a home of your own, I can't think."

"Like Edie, I suppose, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this little girl."

Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness from pa.s.sionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.

Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings.

The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married life did not make her regard more kindly the circ.u.mstance-impelled conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs.

Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love, the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board, should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium.

May was often told of her sister's crusade, of the slain suitors too slow to race with Atalanta.

"Men _are_ fools," Jenny proclaimed.

"Did you see Fred to-night?"